BRIDE OF THE MONSTER (1955)

 

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

Though BRIDE OF THE MONSTER is surely the second best-known Ed Wood movie to general audiences, it can't hold a candle to the lunacy of the champion, PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, or other runners-up for the Weird-Wood Awards. like GLEN OR GLENDA and even NIGHT OF THE GHOULS. A possible reason for this lack of terminal bizarreness is that Wood collaborated on the script with Alex Gordon, who may have kept the narrative a little more linear than most solo Wood scripts. In many ways, BRIDE feels like an update of a 1942 programmer like THE MAD MONSTER, which also involved a mad scientist seeking to create superhumans to win armed conflicts between nations.

That doesn't mean that the Gordon-Wood script doesn't have some glaring goof-ups. Mad scientist Doctor Eric Vornoff (Bela Lugosi) has set up his monster-making shop in an old house near a swamp, and he apparently mutates an octopus that hangs out in the swamp and helps Vornoff clean up the leftovers of his failed experiments. Two hunters, fleeing a violent storm, try to take shelter in Vornoff's house, only to have the scientist turn them away, with the aid of Vornoff's huge bald henchman Lobo (wrestler Tor Johnson). The hunters flee, but one is seized and killed by the octopus. Lobo apprehends the other hunter and drags him back to Vornoff's laboratory, where Vornoff tries to transform the guy into an "atomic superman," but only succeeds in killing his subject-- whom he also feeds to the octopus.

This provides the first absurdity of the script: if Vornoff's perpetually on the lookout for people on whom to experiment, why wouldn't he invite the hunters into his house, and then let Lobo subdue the men, so that Vornoff would have two subjects for experimentation? I don't plan to go looking for the original Gordon script, so I'm okay with not knowing if Gordon or Wood jumped the gun by introducing the octopus before he was needed. True, the first failed experiment is all the viewer needs to see to get Vornoff's modus operandi, so the underwhelming "death by octopus" (in which footage of a real octopus is loosely juxtaposed with the hunter's underwater struggles) was clearly just a means of first providing the exposition and then getting rid of both interlocutors. 

Soon the audience learns, from police captain Robbins, that there have been ten previous victims, but it's only now that the captain decides to assign a cop to the case, young Dick Craig (Tony McCoy, whose father helped Wood finance the film). In addition, Dick's fiancee, reporter Janet (Loretta King), plans to launch her own investigation, starting with the house of Vornoff. Robbins also tells Craig to talk to a visiting scientist, Strowski, who has some observations about Famous Monsters He Has Known. But after the scientist dispenses some double-talk about Loch Ness for some reason, Strowski like Janet heads out to the Vornoff house on his own.

Janet's car goes off the road and Lobo finds her, taking her back to the lab while falling in love with her basic cuteness. Vornoff decides Janet will be his next experiment and he hypnotizes her into compliance. Strowski shows up and reveals to the audience that he's an agent from the country of Vornoff's origin. Vornoff was exiled because his government thought he was crazy, but evidently Strowski pursued Vornoff's course as he went around to various places (including Loch Ness) breeding some sort of monsters. Strowski is willing to take Vornoff back home by force-- probably a signal that it's a Communist-bloc country-- but Lobo intervenes and Strowski ends up as octo-pie.

Robbins, Craig and comical Kelton the Cop converge on the house, but for some reason I forget, only Craig breaks into Vornoff's lab just as the scientist's seeking to transform Janet into an atomic superwoman. This imo might have been more entertaining than what does transpire. Lobo kayos Craig, but decides that he doesn't want Janet to become "the bride of the atom." He frees her, Vornoff shoots the hulking henchman, and despite his wound Lobo subjects the mad scientist to his own process. Vornoff (played by a stunt man) arises, for some reason becoming a superman despite the earlier failures. Super-Vornoff flees the lab, while Lobo perishes in a fire (supposedly). Craig and Janet escape, and when the other cops arrive but can't harm Vornoff with gunfire, Craig rolls a boulder down on the scientist, casting him into the swamp. The octopus attacks Vornoff and I think they both blow up either from an atomic explosion or from a lightning-strike, depending on who you ask.

BRIDE is one of those films that's pretty much used-up the first time you see it. Like PLAN 9, BRIIDE has loads of directing mistakes, plot inconsistencies, and daffy, poorly defined characters. But once I'd seen them-- they had nothing more to offer. That's why I say Gordon may have kept the project a little too conventional, though there's no way to be sure.

And of course, one can like BRIDE sentimentally, as the last feature-film to give Bela Lugosi a substantial role before his passing. It's not a great Lugosi performance because of the limitations of the role, but he gives it his all, something that can't be said of the other, mostly undertalented performers. The script might have had some fun with the "atom-mania" prevailing in the fifties, but all one gets on that score is a brief though weird correlation between atomic fallout and juvenile delinquency. BRIDE is required viewing for anyone interested in Ed Wood. But I haven't found that it rewards repeat viewings.    

ADDENDUM: I'll modify my opening statement about the script's use of the octopus somewhat. It's true that there's no good reason, internally, for Vornoff to send away the two hunters, when he could use both of them as experiment fodder. But in terms of the overall scheme of the narrative, it is important for the audience to know that the octopus isn't confined to Vornoff's basement, and that the creature has access to the swamp outside-- because it has to be in the swamp at the climax, where both Vornoff and the octopus are mutually destroyed by something or other. So the scene in which one of the hunters is crossing a bridge in the swamp when he's killed by the menacing mollusc does serve to set up the film's conclusion.   

           

                                 

DOUBLE CROSSBONES (1951)

 

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

My justification for reviewing this pleasant if lightweight pirate spoof is similar to the one I gave for including the nominally serious CAPTAIN KIDD AND THE SLAVE GIRL: because the story touches on the unusual idea of a "pirate brotherhood." Oddly, though both movies cite assorted famous pirates who belong to the organization, both name the same three pirates that I find to be "legendary" due to their frequent use in fictional iterations: Captain Kidd, Blackbeard, and Anne Bonney (played respectively in CROSSBONES by Alan Napier, Louis Bacigalupi, and the rather bulky Hope Emerson). As a very small film-fan bonus, Glenn Strange of ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN is reunited with the director of that film, Charles Barton, though Strange only has one line-- the same as when he played the Monster.

CROSSBONES' plot is tighter than some of the other genre-spoofs of the period, possibly borrowing elements from the 1942 BLACK SWAN. Davey Crandall (Donald O'Connor) is a shopkeeper's assistant in Charleston of the 1700s, a harbor city often plagued by the pirates of the Caribbean. Davey's in love with Sylvia (Helena Carter), ward of the well-heeled governor of South Carolina, and she seems to return his feelings. But Governor Elden is a traitor, who sends the pirate brotherhood information about treasure-laden ships bound for Charleston and then fences the pirates' stolen goods for them. Elden first reveals himself as a rotter by proposing marriage to Sylvia, who emphatically rejects the older man. He suspects that she nurtures affection for the age-appropriate Davey, and when Elden stands in danger of having his treason revealed, he frames Davey and his buddy Tom (Will Geer) for the crime of fencing stolen goods.

Davey and Tom go on the run, shipping out on a vessel whose captain is another pirate. By some clever shenanigans, Davey and Tom trick the whole crew into deserting the ship. The guys encounter a sailing-ship on which Elden is traveling with Sylvia. To keep themselves from being taken prisoner, Tom and Davey first create the illusion of a full crew aboard ship and then tell everyone aboard that Davey is actually a pirate captain, "Bloodthirsty Dave," who only masqueraded as a shopkeeper's boy to suss out the defenses of Charleston. Davey and Tom pull off the deception, but Sylvia, outraged by her betrayal, swears to marry her guardian at the earliest opportunity.

Back on the pirate ship, Davey and Tom gain allies by releasing from captivity some men being transported to serve prison sentences abroad, but all aboard are still wanted men with no safe place to go. "Bloodthirsty Dave" decides to seek out Tortuga, haven of the pirate brotherhood, purely to find a sanctuary. Once there, Davey has to swordfight Blackbeard to prove his mettle, after which he arouses the interest of Anne Bonney. (As if to mirror the transgression of Elden, one pirate accuses Bonney of cradle-robbing, but she never makes a sexual pass at Davey. and ends up marrying Tom in the end.) Davey figures out that Elden is the anonymous benefactor of the pirates and tries to convince them to assault Charleston with their fleet to bring down Elden for continually cheating them. However, only Bonney votes to follow Captain Davey's plan, so he and Tom are back to square one.

In one of CROSSBONES' most amusing scenes, Davey sneaks into Charleston and crashes Sylvia's wedding party to dissuade her from marrying Elden. O'Connor is almost unrecognizable made up as an effete English lord, but he's able to convince Sylvia of his innocence, though he's captured anyway. Despite all the setbacks, Davey's pirate buddies come to his rescue after all, resulting in a big sword-battle between them and Elden's henchmen (though Bonny only uses her fists, not a cutlass), and Davey battling Elden for the hand of lovely Sylvia. An amusing end-scene has all of the pirates get pardons for exposing the crooked governor, but they just can't resist pirating and go back to their sinful ways-- except for Davey, who's guided to domesticity by Sylvia. 

O'Connor is extremely likable but only does one dance-routine, aside from various comic duels. He and Helena Carter have good chemistry, and Barton keeps the action rolling along. much more ably than most of the pirate-movies of the fifties. There is one "fallacious figment" that the audience isn't meant to take seriously: when Davey looks through a telescope, it comically elongates to mirror his surprise.

                                                

RESIDENT EVIL: DEATH ISLAND (2023)

 

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

Though DEATH ISLAND appeared six years after VENDETTA, the filmmakers did their level best to present this film as a rough sequel. Villains Arias and Diego from VENDETTA are referenced, while Diego's daughter Maria follows up on her quest for vengeance, established in the closing moments of the earlier film.

ISLAND is still pretty good kickass, zombie-smashing action, but it's a little disappointing in that the new Big Bad is not nearly as good as Arias. That said, Dylan Blake has clearly been designed to have a trauma-arc like that of Arias. Several years before the main action of ISLAND, he's a mercenary soldier hired by the Umbrella Corporation, creators of the T-virus, to quell the rampaging zombies. Blake, forced to kill his best friend when he's infected, decides to unleash an ultimate bio-terror upon mankind to exterminate the depredations of human beings, as well as to expunge his sense of personal guilt. The script proposes a weighty theme but doesn't manage to sell it adequately.

However, one element where ISLAND excels is the one in which VENDETTA was deficient: fighting femmes. The RESIDENT EVIL franchise became well-known in narrative cinema for spotlighting the tough-girl character of Alice-- but she was an original creation for the live-action movies. At some point, the filmmakers intended to emphasize the game-character of Jill Valentine, and though that character made one or two live-action appearances, ISLAND seems to be the first time the game-character gets a worthy adaptation. Valentine and her soldier-partner Leon Kennedy are essentially the stars of this outing, with other regulars-- Rebecca Chambers, the Redfield siblings-- in secondary roles. Valentine arguably gets more narrative attention, given that she's being "introduced" to the motion-capture series, and if she's not as superhuman as Alice usually is, she's still a formidable femme. And although Maria Gomez takes the hard fall this time, the filmmakers gave her an excellent hand-to-hand battle with Kennedy to go out on.           

RESIDENT EVIL: VENDETTA (2017)

 

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

This RESIDENT EVIL motion-capture movie came out long enough after the last in the series, 2012's DAMNATION, that someone in production termed VENDETTA a "reboot." In terms of content, it's indistinguishable from the previous two in the series, but in terms of style, VENDETTA is as impressive as the best of the live-action EVILS.

The main hero here is Chris Redfield, primarily a character known from the RPG. In the EVIL world, illicit experiments have given rise to the T-virus and its variants, which are capable of instantly mutating human beings into ravening zombies. Redfield and his counter-terrorism unit attack the domicile of a known dealer in T-virus bioweapons, Glenn Arias, who has taken captive a female undercover agent. The soldiers are attacked by zombies created by Arias, and then Redfield suffers the sort of trauma that never happened to Chuck Norris. Redfield squares off hand-to-hand with Arias, who looks like a well-dressed day-trader, and the less muscular Arias trounces the bulky warrior. Then Arias leaves his zombies-- including the transformed female agent-- to finish off Redfield, while departing in the company of hottie Maria Gomez and her father Diego, who for some reason has been transformed into one of the bulky virus-mutants called a "Tyrant." Once the villains have escaped, air support flies in and bombs the zombies, saving Redfield.

Four months later, scientist and former agent Rebecca Chambers (also a game character) has succeeded in formulating a vaccine that can keep the virus from spreading. Arias learns about this somehow, and he unleashes his virus on the research facility. Though the other scientists are zombiefied, Chambers saves herself from that fate with her vaccine, after which Redfield and his team extract her. Chambers and Redfield then seek the help of another agent with considerable counter-bioweapons experience, Leon S. Kennedy. Kennedy has some previous trauma bugging him, but he finally agrees to join another assault on Arias after Maria and Diego Gomez attack first, kidnapping Chambers.

Ostensibly Arias wants to nullify Chambers before she can make his bioweapons obsolete. However, unlike the standard Chuck Norris evildoer, Arias also has a trauma in his past, and it's actually more emotionally resonant than Kennedy's. Years ago his estate was carpet-bombed by someone who didn't like his munitions-profession, but as it was the day of Arias' wedding, his bride perished in the holocaust. Now Arias gets the nutty idea that Chambers is going to become his new bride, though he also has some demented idea of somehow transplanting part of the dead bride into the scientist's body. Fortunately, Kennedy, Redfield and a few allies storm Arias' base, resulting in the destruction of his plans and most of the villains (though Maria survives, possibly for later use). 

This is a good kick-ass film, without any great complexity but with a fair amount of emotional resonance. Oddly, though Chambers and Maria are positioned as action-girls, and there's one unnamed female ally in the big climax, this time the guys get all the good scenes (including Redfield's rematch with Arias, which has a more salutary outcome).        

                   

SHE BEAST (1966)

 

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

"Hey, we can only afford Barbara Steele for a few days' shooting on this picture!"

"Not to worry: we'll shoot her few scenes so that they bookend the main story, and audiences will be satisfied as long as they see her at the beginning and the end."

That's of course a made-up idea of what might have prompted Michael Reeves to invest his own money into this mediocrity in order to launch his directing career. Other considerations could have been simply finding out that the bankable actress was only available to Reeves for a limited amount of time, or any number of other contingencies. Nevertheless, SHE BEAST is not a Barbara Steele film just because Steele is in the movie for maybe 20 minutes, and I as a viewer resent that what Reeves and company gave viewers was the menace of an ugly old witch in place of Steel's imperial beauty. "Subverting expectations" was as much of a cop-out then as it is now.         

A prologue shows us a town of aggrieved Transylvanians lynching an ugly witch, one Vardella, back in the 1700s, by drowning her in a local lake.  a honeymooning couple named Veronica and Philip (Steele, Ian Ogilvy) trek through Transylvania and get lost. They check into the only hotel available, run by slovenly owner Ladislav (Mel Welles). The couple meets a local eccentric, Count Von Helsing, who claims to be descended from the same (non-aristocratic) doctor from the DRACULA story, which he intimates was real life. At night Ladislav peeps through a window at Veronica, and Philip responds by beating the tar out of the innkeeper.

Morning comes and the couple get in their car and drive away. They don't get far, for when they near the lake where Vardella died, an occult force seizes the car, causing it to plunge into the lake. A truck driver pulls two bodies out of the waters, a still-living Philip and what looks like the corpse of a raddled old woman. What happened to Veronica? Philip doesn't have a clue, but Von Helsing knows that if he and Philip don't complete an exorcism ritual, Vardella will come back to life in Veronica's usurped body. And then most of the movie is devoted to Philip and Von Helsing trying to overcome Vardella's curse, and the ambivalent results of their endeavors.

This is largely a paint-by-the-numbers horror flick, which was probably sufficient for a lot of viewers back in the day, though it's pretty scant of strong horror moments. Only two elements stand out from the routine. One is Mel Welles, who played his lascivious, Commie-maxim-spouting innkeeper for all he's worth, and almost certainly contributed his own lines to the script. The other-- as if to make up for the absence of the regal Steele beauty-- is a scene in which Ladislav's niece (Lucretia Love) tries to take shelter with her uncle to avoid the weirdness, and the slob tries to rape her. He doesn't succeed but the incident does serve to inject into the film some nubile flesh, thus slightly offsetting the repellent image of Vardella, who's equally ghastly both dead and alive.

                   

DEADLY SWEET (1967)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

First off, I've long heard the name of erotic filmmaker Tinto Brass, but have only seen a G-rated 1964 film he directed, THE FLYING SAUCER, which is probably not representative of his work. DEADLY SWEET, which also used the title I AM WHAT I AM, may not be any more so.  

Second, SWEET is a hard film to classify. The poster above calls SWEET "a sexy giallo thriller," but aside from the director/co-writer's use of garish color, there's not much here to tie the movie in with the giallos as they later developed. SWEET might be deemed to prefigure the way some later giallos combined psycho-horror with crime thrillers, and indeed this film frequently seems like a sendup of a crime thriller. The only metaphenomenal element is that of a perilous psycho, but Brass approaches the genre-element of "find the killer" with a studied indifference, underscored by two separate references either to director Michelangelo Antonioni or to that director's BLOW-UP from the previous year. Since that movie also concerned a crime that almost gets lost in the protagonist's experiences in the world of Swinging Sixties London, there can't be much doubt that Brass wanted attentive viewers to pick up on his emulations-- for all that BLOW-UP became an international sensation while SWEET was essentially forgotten.

POV character Bernard (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is an out-of-work actor in London, and he's not painted as the brightest bulb, given that he's given to dropping random quotes of persons as different as Lao Tsu and Mao Tse-tung. While in a disco-- where he's been cut off for failure to pay his bar tab-- he spies four well-known upper-class celebrities: blonde heiress Jane Burroughs (Ewa Aulin), her brother Jerome, her stepmother Martha, and an older man, Leris, rumored to be keeping company with Martha since her husband passed away. This sounds a lot like the sort of nuclear family constellation that makes for dramatic explosions, but unlike most giallos, family conflicts get lost in the shuffle.

Bernard drops in on the club's owner and finds the man dead, while in the same room is Jane, who immediately claims, "I didn't do it." Does Bernard do the sane thing and call the cops? No, he decides he's going to play detective (he even wears a trenchcoat during most of the film) and try to exonerate the waifish Jane. When she introduces herself, he responds to the name "Jane Burroughs" with "Me Tarzan," making clear that Bernard nurtures delusions of being a rescuing hero. And Jane seems content to let him squire her around the sights of Swinging London-- at least, until she's seized by kidnappers (one played by a very young David Prowse). Then Bernard has to start playing detective for real, eventually linking up with Brother Jerome to save Jane.

Though in many giallos the kidnappers would be related to the murder, here they seem to be nothing but mundane extortionists. Along the way Leris, the supposed lover of Martha, is also murdered, and toward the movie's conclusion-- amid lots of psychedelia, jump cuts, pop art imagery, and brief shifts from color to black-and-white-- Bernard finally gets around to interviewing Stepmother Martha. She promptly reveals that she wasn't the one Leris was dating on the sly, and Bernard learns that a hero should never trust a blonde waif, even after she lets said hero jump her bones.

Euro-comics master Guido Crepax is credited with having story-boarded SWEET, and most of the time the movie looks like an attempt to apply the sixties' pop art aesthetic to a whole motion picture. Pop art appears in many location backgrounds, including one Batman painting not known to me and one of Lichtenstein's famous "blow-ups" of a single romance-comics panel. In two different scenes violence is punctuated with quick "sound-effects" like "SLAM," a clear shout-out to '66 BATMAN, and Bernard also has a close encounter with Alfred E. Neumann. Even Jane's enigmatic line-- "I am what I am"-- might be derived from a certain salty sailor. I don't think Brass had any particular point to make with these citations, though, any more than his conjurations with the sixties music scene. Swinging London does at times seem to dissolve into a Dionysian chaos far from anything that Humphrey Bogart, or even Jean-Paul Belmondo, ever had to cope with. Thus I classify SWEET as an irony, in that the film depicts a world where even the story's Big Reveal doesn't make things any less chaotic.

                        

 

X-MEN: THE ANIMATED SERIES, VOLUME ONE (1992-93)

 

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

Oddly, the collection I'm reviewing isn't really confined to the 13 episodes of Season One; it adds on the first three episodes of Season 2 for good measure. This does have the minor advantage of giving me more of the "Morph arc"-- that is, the disposition of the original-to-the-series shape-changer of that name. He was introduced in the first two-part of Season One with the intention of his being an "instant casualty," but though he's not a compelling character, it was interesting to see how the writers brought him back and then exiled him again, at least for the near future. This doesn't mean, however, that the faux Season One-- which I'll henceforth call "Volume One--ends without other dangling plotlines.

X-MEN '92 was a fan-favorite in its day, simply because it was the first major attempt to adapt the popular franchise to any other narrative medium. For me personally, though, the success of the adaptation is compromised at best. "My" X-MEN was the classic run from the 1970s through the early 1980s, and I lost interest for the most part in the 1990s and thereafter. But X-MEN '92 was devoted to spotlighting a number of characters and creations that were getting heavy play in the late 1980s and early 1990s and melding them with stories from the classic run.

For instance, in the comics the arc DAYS OF FUTURE PAST was an intense time-travel tale in which the future-era character of Shadowcat journeyed back to the 1980s to inhabit the body of her teenaged self, with the end of forestalling a major crisis in the past. The cartoon keeps some of the same beats as the comics-tale, but the time-traveler becomes 1990s character Bishop, whose appeal as a character I find baffling. The arc still sets up the usual anti-mutant paranoia, as in the comic, but there's no emotional kick to the plot-events. 

The "classic run" characters-- Cyclops, Jean Grey, Storm, and Wolverine-- usually receive less interesting character-moments, while another classic character, Colossus, is confined to a guest shot. The scripts instead emphasize later characters Gambit, Jubilee, and Rogue, and of those three, only Rogue is executed with a degree of charm. (Her involved history with Ms. Marvel is naturally not referenced here, but it did occur to me, as a result of viewing the first season, that there was a good reason Rogue became more popular than the Carol Danvers character.) 

The animation is very limited in the first season, and that takes away from any pleasure I might get from seeing the merry mutants kick ass against evil. I was amused by the episode "Slave Island" simply because it worked in a half-dozen mutant-cameos, many of whom had no lines, though later I had to wonder why said mutants-- all of whom were kidnapped to be slaves on the island of Genosha-- were all performing their slave-duties in their gaudy costumes. Still, given that Genosha is made into the source of the mutant-hunting Sentinel robots, this did give rise to a good line in which someone observes that the mutants are being forced to labor for the same people making the automatons who hunt their kind.

Since it's not that much fun to watch the first season, I'd rather just read the comics rather than see the classic run crossbred with the stuff I never cared much about.