THE PHANTOM EMPIRE (1988)

 

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

In my review of Fred Olen Ray's HOLLYWOOD CHAINSAW HOOKERS I mentioned the same director's PHANTOM EMPIRE as a bad example of his having squirted out a terrible movie made in a few days with a bunch of favorite actors. I know nothing about the circumstances of EMPIRE's genesis, though I doubt it was anything more than a movie in which he had enough funding to send his players tromping around Bronson Canyon for a few days of shooting.

In one of the "city" scenes, a monster attacks some picnickers and is shot down. Girl archeologist Denea (Susan Stokey) thinks that certain clues about the creature might lead her to the legendary city R'yleh, an obsession of her late archeologist father. (The city's name is cheerfully swiped from H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos.) Denea gathers together a bunch of fellow explorers, whose identities are less significant than the actors' previous labors on Ray's behalf. There's so little to say about the characters that I'll just reel off the actors' names for whatever name-game pleasure readers might get from Ross Hagen, Dawn Wildsmith, Jeffrey Combs, Robert Quarry and Russ Tamblyn. Tamblyn alone doesn't accompany the others on their trek into a series of subterranean caves.

After walking for a day or so, the stalwart seekers come across various human-sized monsters like the one from the picnic, a fur-clad cave-babe, and Robby the Robot-- or rather, a replica of the famed automaton from FORBIDDEN PLANET. There's at least a minor explanation for the robot's presence, for the explorers also encounter an alien space-babe (Sybil Danning, playing a character billed as "Alien Queen"). The Queen, who crashed in the uncharted territory (not city) of R'yleh eons ago, has spent all that time trying to repair her ship with the help of the robot. As soon as she sees the newbies, she decides to enslave them to her service. This leads to the film's only somewhat memorable scene, for Hagen's character objects to this high-handed treatment, and Alien Queen handily beats his ass down with but a few skillful moves. (Did Ray have some dim memory of Hagen's earlier near-beatdown by a kung-fu lady assassin in 1973's WONDER WOMEN?)

The movie doesn't so much come to a conclusion as peter out. There's a little entertainment in the credits sequence, where Ray references the help of "the City and Country of Caprona." Caprona is one of Edgar Rice Burroughs' many fictional terrains, which was also something of a grab-bag of fantasy-tropes, though not as incoherent as those of EMPIRE. The film's title riffs on the 1935 Mascot serial of the same name, but even that is by comparison relatively well conceived for a simple pulp-fantasy adventure.