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.                   

RESIDENT EVIL: DEGENERATION (2008)

 

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

DEGENERATION was the first motion-capture animated film based directly on the popular video game, and the first time an adaptation linked up the game's protagonists, soldier Leon S. Kennedy and scientist Claire Redfield. That means that viewers like me-- who only knew the series that starred original movie-character Alice (Milla Jovavich)-- had to go Alice-less.

While the character design of Claire Redfield has a stronger vibe than I've seen in a lot of motion-capture animation, the story is a fairly dull setup of all the basics of the franchise. The viewer learns how an evil corporation designed the insidious T-virus, which has the unfortunate side effect of turning its victims into killer zombies. If one doesn't want to hear that much about the mechanics of who did what to whom, DEGENERATION fails to provide much in the way of dynamic characters or situations.

Its most positive aspect is that this film got all the exposition out of the way, so that the next in the series, DAMNATION, offered a lot more of the kickass action integral to the live-action movie franchise.      

THE BATMAN, SEASON TWO (2005)

 

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

The first season was too busy putting new wine in old bottles to trouble with crossovers, but Season Two makes up for lost time in that department.

THE CAT, THE BAT AND THE VERY UGLY (F)-- Catwoman and Penguin go after the same priceless gems and then decide to team up to take out Batman. However, while Catwoman wants the gems for reasons of mere avarice, Penguin plays a grander game, hoping to use the gems to mount an attack on Gotham. It's a very straightforward "villain teamup" story, though it's amusing that Catwoman is offended when Penguin betrays her before she can betray him. 

RIDDLED (G)-- One reason it's hard to do better-than-average Riddler stories, even in comics, is that he started out as being just as antic a villain as The Joker. BTAS tried to make Riddler over into a more intellectual type of Bat-foe, but that iteration had only mixed success. The producers of BATMAN '04 decided to cut out all the wackiness of earlier Riddlers, re-designing the malcontent to look utterly serious, his face painted so as to give him a gloomy appearance. This Riddler announces his war on Gotham with a bomb-threat, and he wants just one cop, Ellen Yin, to try to solve his riddles. In truth, this Riddler fully expects Batman to work covertly with Yin, and this grimdark Prince of Puzzlers seems more imposing due to his less humorous attitude. For a bonus, Yin gets to stomp a bunch of Riddler-goons with martial arts.

FIRE AND ICE (P)-- The script never bothers to articulate how two such unlikely partners in crime, Mister Freeze and Firefly, come to team up. Some OK action-scenes but nothing more.

THE LAUGHING BAT (G)-- This episode presents one of Joker's loonier schemes, as he dresses up in a Bat-suit and starts doling out extreme punishments to people who commit minor infractions. For good measure, he infects the Bat with a venom that causes the hero, in both his identities, to be assailed by bouts of consuming laughter, laughter that will eventually kill him. For good measure Joker-Bat crosses paths with Penguin, who's "creeped out" by the role reversals of the two enemies, and Gotham's mayor is voiced by none other than Adam West. But the episode's greatest strength is the conflation of grotesqueries in both the hero and his nemesis.

SWAMPED (G)-- In BTAS as in many comics, the reptilian rogue Killer Croc is usually just a big strong guy, able to give Batman a really tough hand-to-hand fight. But the writer of "Swamped" apparently remembered that the original Croc was a ruthless gang-boss, and in addition this Croc-iteration also imperils Gotham through his hijacking of Gotham's canal system. Croc gives Batman a good tussle, and voice-artist Ron Perlman gives Croc's dialogue an excellent Bayou flavor.     

PETS (F)-- Penguin invents a sonic device with which to control birds and make them commit crimes, but the same device allows the villain to control the monstrous Man-Bat. Again, a few decent fights, but nothing special.

MELTDOWN (F)-- When Joker launches another crime-spree, Clayface attacks the clown for having created the putty-mutagen that made Detective Bennett into a shapechanger. Batman intervenes and captures Clayface, though not Joker. Over the ensuing weeks, Bennett goes on trial and receives positive testimony from none other than Arkham Asylum's chief psychiatrist, Hugo Strange (a villain in the comics, though in Season Two he seems benign). Bruce Wayne gets Bennett released on probation, as long as Bennett refrains from becoming Clayface. However, Bennett's resentments over his hard luck, as well as his desire to kill Joker, prove his undoing. The sense of tragedy from the first-season reinvention of Clayface is entirely lost.

JTV (P)-- Joker starts his own broadcast channel. It sounds like it ought to yield a lot of lunatic fun, but it's fairly dull. Yin gets a new partner, a comically egotistical cop.

RAGDOLLS TO RICHES (F)-- I give the writers credit for revamping a DC villain not associated with Batman: Ragdoll, an unpredictable athlete with an incredibly limber, seemingly boneless body. He and Catwoman contend for a museum prize, and Batman seeks to capture them both. There's a nice sequence with Selina Kyle having a meet-cute with Bruce Wayne, followed by bat and cat teaming up to play with the doll. 

THE BUTLER DID IT (F)-- The little-used Bat-villain Spellbinder might not be a foe anyone wanted to see again, but he still turns out better than Season One's ersatz Cluemaster. And this villain has a novel plan: brainwashing the butlers of wealthy men-- including Alfred-- to commit crimes. 

GRUNDY'S NIGHT (F)-- Solomon Grundy, undead foe of Green Lantern, has only occasionally taken the role of a Bat-enemy. But "Night" does present Grundy as a Halloween legend, and in keeping with the All-Hallows tradition, the being that appears to be Solomon Grundy is not what he appears to be.

STRANGE MINDS (G)-- Joker kidnaps Detective Yin and tells everyone that he alone knows where she is, and he alone can prevent her being blown up by a time bomb. With the help of Hugo Strange, Batman is able to interface with Joker's warped mentality, seeking to make the villain reveal Yin's location. But this time the game of bat and jester takes place on the crime clown's turf.

NIGHT AND THE CITY (F)-- I have no idea why someone bestowed the name of a well-regarded film noir upon a routine villain-teamup, in which Riddler, Joker and Penguin vie for the death of Batman and the control of Gotham City. The best part is when Joker, meeting Riddler for the first time, demands to know if the newer villain is "stealing my schtick," and the Riddler haughtily replies, "I don't do jokes. I tell riddles." Yin, accused of collaborating with the Bat-vigilante, is vindicated partly because Batman captures all three super-crooks, and partly because there's a new commissioner in town, name of Gordon, who concludes the season with the first display of the Bat-signal.