THE NEXT VICTIM (1976)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

SPOILERS

A lot of the hour-long progarmmers on Brian Clemens' THRILLER emphasized mundane naturalistic psycho-killers. My only real reason for labeling this psycho as "uncanny" is because Clemens' script models him strongly after Norman Bates, with a "Lodger" touch or two worked in.

Rich lady Sandy Marshall (Carroll Baker) returns to the apartment she shares with her not-so-rich husband Derek. Sandy has been in the hospital recovering from a car crash, and she's still occupying a wheelchair, though her prognosis is that she will regain full mobility. Sandy's expecting just to pass the day quietly while Derek's gone on business. However, it's a hot summer day in London, and most of the locals have gone to the beach for the weekend. Unfortunately there's also a serial killer who's been preying on London women lately. The cops have one clue: a single prospective victim escaped the murderer, and she heard him refer to her as "mother."

A couple of cops get on the psycho's trail, and though they ferret out the correct suspect, they have no impact on Sandy's apartment ordeal. The killer gains entrance to the gated complex by pretending to be a delivery driver, and the camera's careful not to show his face at first-- though there's no mystery because there's only one suspect, aside from a briefly seen, creepy maintenance guy (Ronald Lacey).

Sandy doesn't hear from a neighbor when she expects to, which causes her to start worrying. Then in the near-deserted complex, Sandy encounters a handsome young guy named Tom (Max Mason). She appreciates his company at first, since he claims to be a resident. But eventually Tom seems "off" to Sandy, especially when he speaks of her car accident as highly improbable-- as if someone might have arranged it. And he also mentions that he served his wheelchair-bound mother for ten years, which seems to be his reason for wanting to hang out with Sandy.   

Clemens almost seems to be setting up Tom to be some amateur detective who (correctly) suspects Derek of being a wife-killer. So when Sandy knocks Tom over the head and tries to wheel away for her very life, Clemens seems to be leading the viewer to believe Tom's a good guy. But no, Tom's the Oedipal assailant, though Clemens, to keep his precious ambiguity, barely explicates Tom's psycho-profile. The beleaguered viewer can only presume that Tom targeted Sandy and meant to kill her but started seeing her as "good non-sexual mother" rather than the "bad sexual mothers" he believed his other victims to be. But as Sandy flees, she needs a new antagonist--so Deadly Derek comes back that same night to knock off Sandy and blame it on the psycho. He and Tom end up fighting over Sandy, and after both men die, the movie just ends, unceremoniously. Usually Clemens' THRILLER dramas are solid if unambitious melodramas-- but this one is just a jumbled botch.  

X-MEN: THE ANIMATED SERIES, VOLUME TWO (1993-94)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

Volume One of this series didn't confine itself to the show's Season One but added on three episodes from Season Two. Volume Two shows even greater impatience, adding a full seven Season Three episodes to the mix. This does allow the collection to conclude with an adaptation of a major comics storyline, The Phoenix Saga. 

Narratively speaking, Two features the same game, mixing old and new material to make the cartoons resemble the then-current comic books. But though there's no evident change in creative personnel, Season Two looks better. Perhaps succeeding in the ratings gave the second season a bigger budget, resulting in better animation for both drama and fight-scenes,

Notable moments include:

--The finish of a long plotline with Magneto and the Professor stuck in the Savage Land, beleaguered by a bunch of mutants Magneto created. Marvel heroes Ka-Zar and Shanna guest star.

--Wolverine gets a quickie origin and encounters the Canadian hero-team with whom he trained, Alpha Flight. So many heroes are jammed into one episode that what appeal the Alphans had in the comics is nullified here.

-- Though in my Season One review I doubted that the showrunners would delve into the intricacies of Rogue getting her powers from Ms. Marvel, they actually did a decent job with the conceit, though the plot is necessarily simplified and Ms. Marvel does not have an active role in the main story. Rogue's involved relationship with Mystique gets attention as well.

--Lady Deathstrike's origin is revised to make her an old Wolverine girlfriend, which adds nothing to this iteration of the character.

--And finally, the Phoenix Saga comes across well enough, though it skimps on Jean Grey's reaction to becoming a powerhouse and implies that her empowerment was part of some entity's scheme to protect a cosmic gateway. Cyclops' lost father Corsair appears but his paternity is not discussed.  

THE BATMAN, SEASON FIVE (2007-08)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological, sociological*

I suppose someone in authority decided to use the last BATMAN season to spotlight a handful of DC heroes on the theory that a few kids would get hooked on the comics or other secondary materials. The only result I see is that this stratagem did not play to the strengths of the showrunners, because what they produced were thirteen fairly pedestrian episodes. There's none of the passion for re-creating Bat-myths seen in the other four seasons, and even the episodes without guest-stars seem desultory. 

THE BATMAN/SUPERMAN STORY, PT2. 1-2 (F)-- This one is the best of the crossover episodes. Batman, newly inducted into the Justice League, has his first encounter with Superman in Metropolis, interfering in Luthor's attempt to kill the Man of Steel. Despite this collegial encounter, the two alpha males become testy with one another, albeit for better reasons that those of BATMAN V. SUPERMAN. Luthor gets peeved at the Caped Crusader and recruits five Bat-villains to defeat the two Leaguers (and Robin) -- Bane, Black Mask, Mr. Freeze, Poison Ivy, and Clayface II (who, unfortunately, gets neither character development or any good lines). Technically, Ivy alone makes the biggest contribution, turning Superman into Luthor's slave-- at least until the Dynamic Duo free him and all the good guys stomp a squad of Luthor-robots. Best of all, the guardians of Gotham and Metropolis mend fences.

VERTIGO (F)-- Count Vertigo, who's nearly the only memorable Green Arrow villain, belatedly becomes responsible for stranding Oliver Queen on an island, where the millionaire masters archery and decides to become a costumed vigilante. Sometime later, Arrow trails Vertigo to Gotham, to foil the evildoer's plans to unleash city-wide chaos.

WHITE HEAT (P)-- If the writers wanted to use Doctor Phosphorus, why not use him, instead of mutating Firefly into him?  Small points for the depiction of Firefly's girlfriend.

A MIRROR DARKLY (F)-- A few clever tropes redeem what is a Flash-Mirror Master battle, shoehorned into a Batman story.

JOKER EXPRESS (F)-- Batgirl finally shows her cowl in time for the Terrific Trio to trade blows with Joker, who becomes nutty for trains.

RING TOSS (P)-- Even the title sucks when Sinestro comes to Gotham, seeking to steal the power ring of her perennial foe Green Lantern. Penguin gets hold of said ring. Hijinks ensue.

THE METAL FACE OF COMEDY (F)-- The idea of Joker's mind getting downloaded, so as to create the cyber-entity Joker 2.0, is at least livelier than Joker-Bane. Harley Quinn has a few funny moments trying to decide where her allegiance lies.

ATTACK OF THE TERRIBLE TRIO (P)-- The Silver Age Trio were simple but slightly clever pattern criminals: the Fox committed land crimes, the Shark, sea crimes, and the Vulture, air crimes. BTAS couldn't work any good changes on the original and neither could THE BATMAN. There's one good joke where Batgirl guilts Batman for not realizing she's in college

THE END OF THE BATMAN (P) -- Apart from the puzzling title, this is a workmanlike take on a minor Bat-villain, The Wrath. This Wrath acquires a kid sidekick, Scorn, and the two seek to become crime-enhancers, protecting Gotham's crooks from the Duo. Villains Joker, Harley, Ventriloquist, Penguin and Croc are duly ungrateful. At least the action is decent.

WHAT GOES UP (F)-- Though it's another so-so superhero tale, I give it points for returning Hawkman and his recurring foe Shadow Thief to prominence. In JUSTICE LEAGUE UNLIMITED, both were placed under the shadow of Hawkgirl, but she's not around this time. Shadow Thief teams with Black Mask to take on the two heroes (and Robin).

LOST HEROES PTS 1-2 (F)-- Hugo Strange summons the alien Joining for a second shot at world conquest and facilitates the invasion by disappearing the super-powered crusaders. Why Strange overlooks his Bat-bane, as well as Robin, Batgirl and Green Arrow, the script does not explain. The other heroes eventually are released and get a little action, but it's a rather underwhelming conclusion to an inventive series.

  

         

THE SCREAMING SKULL (1958)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*

The Wikipedia essay on SCREAMING SKULL mentions that when director Alex Nicol was trying to persuade his lead actress to take the part, he faked her out by claiming he intended to do a remake of Hitchcock's REBECCA. This was not a coincidence. The SKULL screenplay from John Kneubuhl has almost nothing in common with the F. Marion Crawford short story, which contributed the title and (maybe) the name of one of the characters, which happens to be "Marion." For the most part SKULL is a reprise of REBECCA, being about a second wife's anxieties as to her new husband's feelings about his deceased first wife-- though Kneubuhl also seems to have injected a fair amount of the pop-Freudianism found in the Hitchcock oeuvre.

The film starts with Eric Whitlock (John Hudson) bringing his timid second wife Jenni (Peggy Webber) to the estate Eric once shared with his first wife Marion. The estate seems lavish, with extensive gardens, live peacocks, and the grave of Marion, topped by a monument with her image. Curiously, the interior of the main house is largely bereft of furnishings. Eric explains that though the mansion was bequeathed to Marion by her late parents, she, upon marrying Eric, had all the furniture put in storage, intending to re-decorate, so that Marion could put her own stamp on the dwelling of her dead parents. This loosely implies that only a few months ensued between Marion's marriage and her accidental death, caused when she slipped near the swimming pool, cracked her skull and drowned in the pool. Eric inherited the property only, which circumstance will probably set off warning bells for detectives in the audience.

Jenni also comes from money, and both of her parents are dead-- though under more psycho-dramatic events. She tells her husband's pastor Reverend Snow-- one of only three other characters in the film-- that she Jenni at some point experienced an Electra complex. She became aware of loving her father and hating her mother, not least because she thought her mother disliked Jenni for not being "gay" like the mother. Jenni's fantasy of wishing her mother dead comes to ironic fruition when both parents drown at sea and she's unable to save either of them, despite her best (conscious) efforts. She enters a sanitarium to recover from a breakdown, and after being released she meets and marries Eric. To her horror, one of the few furnishings in the mansion is a portrait of Marion, which reminds Jenni of her dead mother. The other three characters are also living reminders of Marion-- Reverend Snow and his wife to a lesser extent, and to a greater extent, the retarded-seeming gardener Mickey (director Nicol). Mickey was raised on the estate alongside Marion, as if the two were siblings.

Then strange things start happening to Jenni as she sleeps by herself in the mansion. She hears screams in the night, but Eric tells her she heard the cries of the peacocks. She starts seeing disembodied skulls, and Eric tells her that crazy Mickey's gaslighting her. But as soon as the viewer sees ceramic skulls rolling around, he'll guess he's left the domain of Hitchcock for that of William Castle. Eric's hoaxing Jenni to get her money, just as he most probably killed Marion for the same reason. Unfortunately for Eric, his return to the scene of the first crime brings Marion back to undead life-- and she avenges herself by emulating the skull-motif of Eric's plot.

SKULL wasn't meant to grab the audience with anything more than penny-ante Gothicisms, so I can't claim the lousy second half of the movie was any sort of surprise. The first half does at least create some potential for Jenni to overcome her rather random complex, and it's for that unrealized potential that I grade the film's mythicity as "fair." 

ADDENDUM: One improvement might have been to suggest that Eric played into Jenni's father-fantasies. By casting Eric as more of a "bad dad," that would have made the mother-imago Marion at least benign and thus suggesting that Jenni's maternal resentments were overblown.    

RED SONJA (2025)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

"[Hyrkania] was a place of breathtaking beauty and pristine nature, where people lived as one with the Goddess of the Earth ... it was a time of peace and harmony, until the rise of the barbarian king Anzus, who swept across the land, bringing terror and destruction wherever he went."-- Initial voiceover to RED SONJA.    

"It's knowledge that brings civilization to the barbarians."-- Draygan, haranguing a defeated ruler about the foolishness of theism.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

My first reaction to the voiceover was that writer Tasha Huo was putting some heavy symbolic baggage upon Hyrkania, the native land of heroine Red Sonja. The "Red Sonya" created by Robert E. Howard was a denizen of 16th-century Poland, so Marvel comics editor Roy Thomas probably decided that Marvel's version, "Red Sonja," would hail from Howard's quasi-Russian realm of Hyrkania. Since Marvel writers never made much of Sonja's national origins, it's likely Huo conceived the movie's opposition between a prelapsarian, paradisical Hyrkania, violated by barbarians, and evil Draygan's vision of a grand future that eliminates both gods and barbarians. 

The comics-Sonja became a woman warrior after losing just her immediate family, but this Sonja (Matilda Lutz) loses her whole village when it's ravaged by Anzus the Barbarian. She and a few others escape death in the forests, but the other refugees perish. Sonja spends the next decade or so looking for any other survivors in the vast Hyrkanian forests, accompanied only by her loyal steed Vihur. Aside from her fruitless searches, Sonja does little but worship her people's goddess Asherah (modeled on one of the fertility deities of the ancient Near East) and hone her swordfighting skills, like a blade-wielding Sheena of the Jungle. Meanwhile, her fated enemy Emperor Draygan (Robert Sheehan) has tapped the powers of strange science to conquer many realms including that of Anzus. Then Draygan decides to extend his empire into the Hyrkanian forests, along with a retinue of soldiers and some key henchpeople. The most notable of these is Annisia (Wallis Day), a swordswoman who was given her freedom after killing dozens of opponents in Draygan's gladiatorial games, but who is now haunted by the voices of those slain in the arena. Once Draygan starts clear-cutting trees and caging wild creatures, Sonja utters the classic line, "Now we have a quarrel." (Just kidding, that was from SWORD AND THE SORCERER.)   

Later Huo's script will get confused about whether Sonja should be termed a Hyrkanian or not, despite the voiceover's clear implication that she belonged to that realm. And here's where I unleash my only major "spoiler:" Huo allows this confusion because she wants to sell a "big reveal" at picture's end: that Draygan was also a survivor from Sonja's village. However, though young Draygan was enslaved by the ravagers, the boy somehow kept hold of an incomplete "Book of Secrets, taken from the village temple. While Sonja grew up in the forest, venerating the Earth Goddess, Draygan reviled all deities and used the proto-science from his Book to become a new Emperor. When Sonja gets in Draygan's path of conquest, he gets the idea that she, being a Hyrkanian, can lead him to the missing parts of his Book of Secrets, which supposedly will give him even greater power.

Since Draygan wants Sonja's supposed knowledge, the Emperor tries to break her by sentencing her to the arena. This backfires, for Sonja gathers her fellow gladiators into a fighting-force, and after a nice (albeit short) battle with a giant Cyclops, she and her allies escape. As a further touch of irony, one of the other gladiators, name of Daix, really is one of the "special Hyrkanians" both Draygan and Sonja have been looking for. This development leads to an equally ironic resolution of the Book-subplot, which I'll pass over. Annisia and Sonja duel just twice before both Draygan and his forces are defeated by Sonja and her warriors. After much carnage, I'll state that the concluding face-off between the three opponents isn't like any other sword-and-sorcery film I've ever seen.

It's fair to argue that Huo and director W.J. Bassett may have cadged their dialectic from a lot of earlier, non-Howardian sources, particularly the 2009 AVATAR, with its opposition between nature-worshipping primitives and materialistic, acquisitive invaders from Earth. Yet in one respect RED SONJA plays fair with its dialectic more than AVATAR does, in that SONJA addresses (to revise Ingmar Bergman) "the Silence of Goddess." Comics-Sonja lives in a world of demonstrable gods and sorcery. But there's no real magic in the SONJA world-- only scientific devices and some nonhuman species. Both theist Sonja and atheist Draygan complain that Asherah does not answer their appeals, and the Goddess only speaks to Sonja once, when the wounded heroine hovers between life and death. So is Asherah real, or is Draygan right, that all gods are just conjured from the imagination?

Now I've written so much about SONJA's plot and theme that one might think it's some feminist lecture against toxic masculinity, like the execrable 2020 BIRDS OF PREY, to name another adventure-flick with both a writer and director from the XX side of the gene pool. SONJA might not be a great adventure-movie like the classic 1982 CONAN, but it shows the same excellent bloody-mindedness seen in the early Kathryn Bigelow films. Star Matilda Lutz, despite standing only a little over 5'6", displays a tigerish quality foreign to other Sonja-actresses (all two of them). If all one wants from a barbarian fantasy is throats slashed and guts stabbed, SONJA ought to fulfill those needs. I've avoided looking at other reviews, but if it's true that most of SONJA's reviews have been negative, they must have all come from people who never saw a really bad S&S film.      

ACES GO PLACES (1982)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

Though I'm far from being a great fan of Chinese comedy films, I enjoyed the zany slapstick of the ACES GO PLACES series, and the first film in the series did a good job of setting up the three principals, who I believe remained together for all five entries. The basic idea seems to be "what would have happened if the "Phantom" thief of PINK PANTHER joined forces with two eccentric HK cops in fighting crime.

Hong Kong super-thief King Kong (Sam Hui) rips off a diamond shipment and then finds out he's robbed the Mafia. The aggrieved crime-lords send various assassins to HK to avenge their honor, particularly a master burglar named "White Gloves." To apprehend Kong, the HK government calls in an American cop of Asian extraction, Albert Au (Karl Maka). He more or less takes the place of the wacky Inspector Clouseau of the PANTHER films, though his main physical characteristic is his total baldness, a testimony to the popularity of the KOJAK teleseries in Hong Kong. Albert's HK liaison is lady cop Nancy Ho (Sylvia Chang), who's constantly accused of being "mannish," and who does get the movie's best fight-scene.         

There are a number of nice comic stunts, though nothing particularly stands out, but the film has too many car chases and crash-ups. The finale contains the only metaphenomenal element, when King Kong counters a fleet of Mafia automobiles with a collection of tiny, remote-controlled toy cars, each loaded with explosives. I tend to doubt anyone in 1982 could actually create such vehicular weapons, but since the script believes that, I'll treat the little cars as uncanny devices.  

VAN HELSING (2023)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

There's at least three other franchises named Van Helsing, and this one, by CGI-director BC Fourteen, may be the least of them.

I decided to sample this VH, though, because while researching XTERMINATOR for my review, I learned that the villainous robot made an appearance in VH, as well as (very briefly) the BC version of Bigfoot. But the great-grandson of Abraham Van Helsing, astronaut Jack Van Helsing, is the star here-- though he doesn't directly contend with either X or two other evil presences in the muddled story.

I made fun of the fact XTERMINATOR obviously swiped its basic plot from ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, but VH might have been better with more story-theft. There's sort of an arc in that the script tells viewers that the Earth was turned into a wasteland in 2022, and by the end of VH, the hero returns to humankind's homeworld and sees that life has begun to thrive again. But this does not happen because of anything done by the hero or anyone else. VH is just a jumble of separate scenes that BC wanted to execute. Only in one way is VH better than its predecessor: VH has one decently executed fight-scene, where Jack in his spacesuit duels a similarly garbed  enemy while both are floating in space. But BC partly undermines his own scene by capriciously naming Jack's opponent after the Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau for no good reason I can see.