PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* MYTHICITY: *poor* FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure* CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological* I've thought of the perfect term for limited-location serials like this one and others in the oeuvre of producer Sam Katzman: "shuttle serials." Basically, because the producer of such serials doesn't want to film on more than two or three locations, the actors are forced to keep "shuttling" back and forth between roughly the same locations. JUNGLE RAIDERS, for instance, really just has two functional locations for its fifteen chapters: a jungle trading-post and a camp, surrounded by mountains, where a tribe of Caucasian Africans make their home. The back-and-forth shutting isn't quite as dull as it is in Katzman's LOST PLANET, but I was ready for the serial to be over long before it ended.
The initiating action is provided by two middle-aged scientists who seek the secret of the Arzec tribe: a root reputed to have great curative powers. The root is never important to the story, however. Doctor Reed comes to the jungle first and manages to befriend the Arzecs and learn the hidden location of their camp. When seedy trader Jake (Charles King) learns of Reed's accomplishment, he holds Reed prisoner in the cellar of the trading-post, trying to learn the natives' location in order to plunder their famed secret treasure. While Reed is being held, his colleague Doctor Moore shows up and manages to befriend the Arzecs as well, again motivated by an altruistic cause. Both Reed and Moore have grown children-- daughter Ann for Reed, son Bob (Kane Richmond) for Moore-- who come to Africa to rendezvous with their respective dads. Ann arrives first by boat, and Jake sends his feminine aide Cora (Veda Ann Borg) to intercept Ann, the better to use her as a club over her old man. Just slightly later, Bob drives to the trading-post area with his war-buddy Joe (Eddie Quillan), looking to find Doctor Moore.
What follows is just one twist and turn after another, as Jake and his allies seek to find their way to the treasure, while Bob, Joe and Ann only slowly suss out the danger to themselves and the two scientists. (Reed, BTW, remains in captivity throughout most of the serial's early chapters and only becomes significant after being rescued.) Things are further complicated by the power-plays of an Arzec female priestess named Zara (Carol Hughes), who wants to displace the priest in charge of the tribe's religion. Some narrative tension is provided by the way both villains and heroes are obliged to enter into temporary alliances, which usually end in some sort of betrayal.
Nice location shots and attractive performers keep things moving moderately well in RAIDERS. Richmond provides a strong lead as always, while King is welcome here as a scuzzy schemer, as opposed to the more standard mystery mastermind. Quillan is similarly distinctive, providing comedy relief that's actually funny, a rarity in serials. The serial's most noteworthy aspect-- not including the lack of backstory for the Caucasian tribe in a part of Africa with no Negro residents-- is the presence of two formidable female villains in one serial. In fact, toward the end of the serial the two nasty ladies have a brief catfight. It's nothing compared to the spirited bouts of PERILS OF NYOKA, but it qualifies the film for my "fighting femmes" category.
PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* MYTHICITY: *poor* FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure* CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological* Like the three-film "Mummy" series that began in 1999, this reboot of that franchise emphasizes adventure over drama in its finished form. However, some writeups indicate that director/co-writer Alex Kurtzman meant to place more emphasis upon the titular monster (now changed to the female character Princes Ahmanet) than on the hero who defeats her. This may have been due to the casting of Tom Cruise in the role of Nick Morton, a contemporary reworking of Brendan Fraser's character in the first series. Allegedly Cruise dominated the filming thanks to his enormous box-office clout, with the result that Ahmanet (Sofie Boutella) was reduced to being the opponent of the main hero. Cruise's clout didn't deliver good box-office, though, so this take on THE MUMMY unraveled.
Taken on its own terms, MUMMY is probably no better or worse than a lot of successful popcorn flicks. Cruise's Nick is another of his bad-boy types, using his status as a sergeant in the US army to hunt for caches of Iraqi treasure. He romances lady archaeologist Jennifer (Annabelle Wallis) and steals a map from her; in addition, Nick further talks his buddy Chris (Jake Johnson) into abetting his skullduggery. What Nick doesn't suspect is that Jennifer works for a secret organization, the Prodigium. Jennifer's bosses fear that the mummy of Princess Ahmanet, who in ancient times slew her whole family, may be about to revive and to conjure forth Set, the ancient evil deity of the Egyptians. Nick's duplicity is exposed but for some reason his superior assigns Nick to help Jennifer's investigation of Ahmanet's tomb. During this tomb-raiding expedition, Chris gets poisoned by a mystic spider and turned into a Renfield-like servant to Ahmanet before he's killed.
I won't attempt to replay every beat of this noisy FX-heavy film. Suffice to say that Ahmanet does come back to life, and that she, like her 1990s predecessor Imhotep, has almost godlike magical powers, which she proceeds to wield against modern humankind. Nick dies, but he's brought back to life by the mummy-woman, who wants to use him as a dedicated sacrifice to Set. Loosely, Nick has to avoid his usual selfish habits and become a hero to defeat Ahmanet's evil, though the script doesn't ever make Nick resonant enough for viewers to identify with his superficial struggle.
Most of this MUMMY proves thoroughly routine, but I did like the scene in which Jennifer introduces Nick to her Prodigium boss, who's none other than a 21st-century version of Henry Jekyll-- who comes complete with his own inner Hyde. Viewers don't get any backstory as to how this Jekyll became the head of a monster-stopping organization. However, since a hypothetical Jekyll would be devoted to restraining his own inner demon, it makes a modicum of sense that he might also devote himself to corralling the "outer" breed. In fact, during Jekyll's colloquy with Nick, "Eddie Hyde" comes forth and suggests making a deal with Ahmanet for everyone's mutual benefit-- except the majority of mortals, of course. Nick and Hyde have a pretty good hand-to-hand fight, which I liked better than any of the forgettable battles with Ahmanet's zombie minions. Eventually the evil mummy is defeated but Nick, who's sort of undead, retreats from human contact, accompanied only by Chris (who also got resurrected in the interim).
Had THE MUMMY been successful, Universal had plans to use the movie as a tentpole for a "shared universe" involving various famous Universal monsters. The film's failure skotched those plans and maybe that's just as well, given how the studio failed to commit to Kurtzman's ideas about focusing upon the monstrous mummy. This 2017 film doesn't qualify as a crossover, given that both Nick and Ahmanet are strictly one-shot icons, and the icon of Jekyll-and-Hyde by himself doesn't sustain a crossover-vibe. (Ironically, the only iconic monster in this production was not one of the "classic" Universal monsters.) But THE MUMMY does have two distinct monsters, so the story qualifies as a "monster mashup."
PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* MYTHICITY: *poor* FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure* CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological* Six years after Marc Singer reprised his Beastmaster character in this 1991 flick-- which cut its costs by eschewing fantasy-settings and placing most of the action in modern times-- LANCELOT GUARDIAN OF TIME attempted a similar "fish out of water" plot with the actor. Despite decent production values and an assortment of "name" actors, LANCELOT failed to score with the same "dumb fun" approach as BEASTMASTER 2, nor did the 1997 film find its own identity. This may be because the credited writer and director had little previous experience in filmmaking, and LANCELOT evidently didn't improve their fortunes, since IMDB doesn't list any subsequent credits for either raconteur.
There are a few indications that the script wanted to come up with a more rounded approach to its time-travel scenario. Back in pre-Camelot England, when the future king is still a snot-nosed kid who has yet to pull any swords from any stones, evil sorcerer Wolvencroft (John Saxon) learns of young Arthur's destiny. The evildoer kidnaps the youth to twist the tail of good sorcerer Merlin, so Merlin sends for the foremost knight Lancelot (Singer) to beard Wolvencroft in his lair. There's a seemingly interminable conversation between the villain and the knight, in which Wolvencroft tells Lancelot about planning to take Young Arthur to some future era. The medieval warrior seems to understand the concept of time-travel without batting an eye, but he doesn't manage to stop Wolvencroft from doing exactly what he planned to do. But it's OK, because Merlin then sends both Lancelot and his horse to 1997 as well.
As is standard in these stories, Lancelot quickly falls in with some denizens of modern-day times who help him realize his goals. Here it's a brother and sister in L.A. Brother Michael is a nothing character, not even providing comedy relief, but sister Katherine (Claudia Christian) just happens to be disillusioned with modern metrosexual men and yearns after traditional heroes-- so that Lancelot just happens to fill her dance card. However, since Lancelot is destined to return to his historical period, nothing really gets going with the couple.
The script fails to clarify Wolvencroft's evil scheme, but I think it has something to do with his gaining access to the sword and the stone. He's not able to do this in his own time, because Merlin has mystical safeguards over those items. But by traveling to the far future, the villain can masquerade as a rich 20th-century guy, contact the authorities in Great Britain, and get modern Brits to loan the antiques to an American museum. Once the sorcerer gets hold of the relics, he can use them to summon a demon or something like that. Lancelot duly prevents the sorcerer's evil plot and then returns to his own time with the kidnapped Young Arthur. Instead of foreshadowing Lancelot's tragic love affair with Adult Arthur's queen Guinevere, the doughty knight just happens to meet, in his own era, a dead ringer for Katherine. Happy happy joy joy. It's a rather pokey fantasy, but might be worth a watch if one likes any or all of the three main performers: Singer, Saxon and Christian. Maybe someone else will make the ideal movie about discontented modern women finding their knightly heroes. Though there is some magical stuff here, the setting in modern times keeps LANCELOT from qualifying for my "reign of wizardry" category.
PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* MYTHICITY: *fair* FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy* CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological* MONSTER MASH -- which I first saw on cable under the title "Frankenstein Sings"-- might seem like a G-rated version of THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW. However. the 1995 film was based on a 1967 play, so the source material predates ROCKY by six years. I'm not sure, from online sources, how much of the play the movie kept, but at the very least, the play had the ROCKY-like notion of a young romantic couple getting stranded out in the boondocks, so that they stumble across a castle occupied by several freaky people who mean them ill.
The play was co-authored by Bobby Pickett, the singer famous for the novelty song "Monster Mash," which appeared in the play as well. New writers are credited for the script to this MASH, but clearly the story is still based on the song's loose narrative, that of a mad scientist throwing a party for several of his fellow horror-meisters. This time Pickett not only sings the title song, he plays mad scientist Doctor Frankenstein. He and his de rigeur hunchbacked assistant (John Kassir) have already whipped up their man-monster (Deron McBee), but all the bugs haven't been worked out. For no express reason, Frankenstein's playing host to (1) Count Dracula and his wife Natasha (Anthony Cravello and Sarah Douglas), (2) a wolfman named Wolfgang and his protective gypsy mother, and (3) an ancient mummy who seems to be channeling Elvis and the mummy's factotum Hathaway (Jimmie Walker). When a young couple show up on Frankenstein's doorstep seeking shelter from a thunderstorm, all the monsters want a piece of the potential new victims for one purpose or another.
The simple plot careens from one schtick to another, as the clueless youths Scott (Ian Bohen) and Mary (Candace Cameron) try to dodge the predations of Frankenstein and his eccentric buddies. The mad doctor wants to drain Scott's brain into his monster to make the creature more intelligent, Hathaway wants some sort of sacrifice for his mummy-master, and the vampire couple wants to couple with the ripe young teens. To be sure, Dracula is the one obsessed with making Mary one of his "vampire groupies," whereas vamp-wife Natasha mostly pursues Scott in reaction to her husband's dalliances. The vampire subplot is the best one, since it tests the teens' romantic fidelity to one another. However, the gags are never more than mildly funny, and the 1990s cultural references used to update the 1967 script are usually excruciating. On the plus side, the actors are all doing their best with the silly material, and Pickett is particularly good, given that he was not a working actor. He delivers a subdued but still comically menacing version of the obsessed mad scientist of the song, and if MONSTER MASH excels in anything, it's in giving Pickett a chance to participate in one of the many movie-monster mashups "spawned" in part by his famous ditty.
PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* MYTHICITY: *poor* FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure* CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological* The most demanding thing about this goofy romp-- originally titled FIVE PRETTY YOUNG LADIES-- is trying to decide if it's more comedy than adventure. But as dopey as the concept is-- five young Chinese girls, wearing matching skirts, boots, and halter tops, volunteer to capture an "invisible thief"-- I'd say the movie sells thrills more often than jokes. And really, when the Chinese make a thoroughgoing comedy, one's not likely to be fooled by lots of subtlety.
The five girls-- billed on HKMDB as "Pretty Girls 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5"-- are headed by two "name" stars-- Polly Shang Kwan and Elsa Yeung-- while the other three actresses, according to said database, barely did anything else but BRUCE. The five characters are almost indistinguishable from one another, except that the youngest wears pigtails and sometimes acts childishly. The quintet become involved with crimefighting when some hoods chase a handsome young scientist into the girls' gym. The girl-gang's leader (Shang Kwan) has an uncle on the local police force, so the ladies manage to insinuate themselves into the investigation of the scientist's relevance to an invisible thief plaguing Hong Kong. The scientist, whom the Shang Kwan character fancies, used "moon rocks" to concoct an invisibility formula, and the gangsters who attacked him work for a lady gang-boss (Betty Pei Ting). There's no pretense of detective work here. The girls just show up wherever the script needs them to do so and start kicking Bad Guy ass with their kung fu, though top-billed Shang Kwan performs the best stunts. When the girls aren't on screen, BRUCE is a stone bore-- though sadly, I have seen many films worse than this one.
PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* MYTHICITY: *good* FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama* CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, metaphysical, psychological, sociological* Since my original theatrical viewing of David Lynch's DUNE, I doubt that I re-watched it in full since I did so to rewrite this review. I mention this because when I viewed the first part of Dennis Villeneuve's more recent adaptation, I found myself frequently thinking, "Lynch did this scene so much better-- and this one-- and that one..." Lynch's directorial skills, in other words, were so far above those of Villeneuve that even an extremely flawed movie-adaptation by Lynch remains much more memorable than one that never comes close to encompassing the conceptual breadth of Frank Herbert's novel.
I recorded some of my analyses of the Herbert novel here so as to avoid reflecting in this review on the source material for DUNE '84. In that essay, I identified the master trope of the novel as "good colonists fighting bad colonists for the control of tribal resources." Whereas Villeneuve elides a lot of interpersonal drama concerning the two colonial families fighting over the precious spice of the dune-planet Arrakis, Lynch arguably does the opposite. Roughly the first hour of his movie's 137 minutes is devoted to ticking off not only the main hero, Paul of the noble Atreides family, but almost a dozen others in his retinue, both literal family members and royal retainers. (By contrast, the viewer needs to concern himself only with about four representatives of the villainous Harkonnens.) I've read no histories of DUNE's filming, so I don't know if Lynch really believed he needed to include every single Herbert character, even those who played no real role in the film. But other Lynch projects have indicated the director's liking for working with ensemble-casts whose members display a lot of, shall we say, idiosyncrasies. I think that's likely to have been Lynch's real creative motive for the overstuffed first half of DUNE, not pure fidelity to the novel.
The strongest element of DUNE '84's first half is the portrait of Paul Atreides (Kyle Maclachlan). At times Paul seems somewhat full of himself, being that he's the only child, at least that we know of, of Duke Leto (Jurgen Prochnow) and Lady Jessica (Francesca Annis). Yet Lynch quickly establishes the heroic nature of Paul. Though I don't suppose Lynch had that much interest in the space-opera hero-fantasies of George Lucas-- which almost certainly got DUNE '84 greenlighted by Hollywood producers-- I appreciated that this version of Paul has as much on the ball as Herbert's original. He, like his father, is the epitome of the "good colonist," and it's only the dark plots of the Atreides' enemies-- including the Emperor of Known Space-- that propel Paul into the very different destiny of a foreign-born messiah who liberates the tribal people who adopt him. The scene of the "gom jabbar," in which Paul's mettle is tested to the utmost, foregrounds some of that destiny.
Once the long setup is done, the Harkonnens make their move. Paul's father is assassinated and the hero is thrown into the hostile wastes of Arrakis with his mother Jessica. Their special mental skills, which get only cursory explication, allow them to survive long enough to enter the company of the desert tribes known as Fremen (as in "Free Men," get it?) As Lynch moves to the film's second half, he rushes through many of the novel's important scenes, not least Paul's romance with the Fremen female Chani. The scenes with the Sandworms dominate the latter half, but the visionary segments, in which Paul taps into his special destiny as the savior of Arrakis, are just fair-to-middling. The revelation that Jessica harbors her lord's last child in her womb, their daughter Alia, is terribly underplayed, and Paul doesn't even have any reaction to the fact that his sister is born "a child of the Spice," so to speak.
Many of these problems were not Lynch's fault. It was folly to attempt reducing the pageantry of Herbert's mammoth work to a movie a little longer than two hours. Maybe Lynch would have been able to pull off a substantial adaptation of DUNE had he been able to do two films, like Villeneuve. At least Lynch, unlike Villeneuve, seems to have understood the deep mythic waters into which Herbert had delved. One of the earliest scenes-- following a draggy "Future History lesson" delivered at the outset-- involves the aforementioned Emperor plotting with a member of the Spacing Guild to get total control of the Spice resources on Arrakis by favoring the Harkonnens and undermining the Atreides family, since Duke Leto's popularity threatens the Emperor. This scene is not in Herbert, but it's a masterful bit of cinema, using the physical repulsiveness of the Spacer (who resembles a titanic flatworm in a water-tank) to make a talking-heads scene intriguing. DUNE '84 is not a classic of SF-cinema as is its proximate inspiration STAR WARS. But DUNE '84 at least is on the same mythopoeic page as George Lucas, unlike Villeneuve and his proximate inspiration, the Peter Jackson version of THE LORD OF THE RINGS.
PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* MYTHICITY: *fair* FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure* CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological* If I did not know from interviews that the writers of this project, Danny Bilson and Paul DeMeo, were both stone SF-fans, I might think that ARENA had been written as a mundane boxing yarn, in which the characters' urban environment was taken for granted and needed no explanation. That's how little Bilson and DeMeo tell audiences about the background of the space-station on which all of the film's action takes place. I've seen or read hundreds of sketchy space-opera stories in which Earthpeople of some far-future era gambol about a space-opera cosmos, interacting with a plethora of other, usually-intelligent ETs. But I'm not sure I've encountered any space-opera as sketchy as ARENA.
All the viewer knows about protagonist Steve Armstrong (Paul Satterfield) is that though he has formidable boxing-skills, he's ended up working as a short order cook on the space station with his buddy Shorty (Hamilton Camp), an ET with four (not very believable) arms. A rowdy alien gets in Steve's face, possibly because humans of this era have low status, and Steve punches the alien out, which gets him and Shorty fired. However, the defeated ET was the prize fighter in the very limited stable of fight-manager Quinn (Claudia Christian). Two of her buddies show up at Shorty's domicile to attack Steve, and after a grueling fight, he beats them both. It's not clear that Quinn expressly told her employees to go beat up Steve to find out how good a fighter he was, but after he wins, Quinn just happens to be on hand to offer Steve a contract. He initially refuses but Shorty gets Steve in financial trouble with local fight-fixer Rogor (Marc Alaimo), so inevitably Steve joins Quinn's retinue.
As in every other formulaic boxing-film, Steve starts moving up in the ranks, beating every other fighter he encounters. There's a marginal subplot about how no human has won in the arena-fights for some really long time, which may have something to do with Rogor fixing all the fights. Since Rogor can't bring Steve under his control, he sends his sexy accomplice Jade (Shari Shattuck) to seduce and then poison Steve, so that Steve can't win the match against the ugly ET champion. For no clear reason, Steve just throws off the poisoning, shows up at the match, and promptly trounces his opponent, making the universe safe-- for human boxers, I guess.
Considering how undercooked the ARENA script is, the movie's production values are pretty good, and director Peter Manooghian (who directed two other films that are, like one, connected to the Charles Band-iverse) keeps things lively. Satterfield carries most of the movie with his fight-scenes, though I don't know how much he was doubled. But no one watches this sort of thing for good dramatic acting. Curiously, the script is so laser-focused on giving Steve his big triumph that there's no romantic subplot between the fighter and his manager. Usually, in these sorts of films, the hero's "true love," the female professional, is good-looking but not as captivating as the evil temptress. But this time, actresses Christian and Shattuck look equally glamorous. There's only a sidelong glance or two to suggest that Quinn might be jealous of Jade's incursions, until the end-scene, where the former punches out the latter-- which is my only reason for giving this movie a "fighting femme" tag.
