DORORO (1969)

 

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

Back in 2024, I wrote a review of the 2019 remake of the 1969 adaptation of Osamu Tezuka's DORORO. At the time I cross-compared the 2019 anime with some of the manga available to me, because I didn't think there was any possibility of the 1969 anime coming my way. But then thirteen episodes showed up on streaming, which led me to find the other 13 on YouTube.

My main takeaway is that the series is very episodic, while the animation is crude without being as charming as that of Tezuka's most famous TV-anime, ASTRO BOY. Like all versions, Hyakkimaru starts out as a paraplegic child, deprived of most of his major bodily organs by a spell sent by his evil father.  A genius gives the child mechanical enhancements and trains him to attack the demons who now possess the hero's stolen organs, for he can recover one organ for every demon killed. Hyakkimaru's joyless mission is given an injection of human feeling when war-orphan Dororo, perhaps eight years old, attaches herself to the crippled samurai and follows him throughout his twenty-six adventures.

Since I've seen most of the stories twice before, I can't help feeling most of them lack verve, much less concrescence. The overall theme is that in the same way that both mortal samurai and demons prey on ordinary people, and deserve to be extirpated, but there's no elaboration of this conceit. A lot of weird Japanese yokai appear here, but the animation can't really capture their grotesquerie, and Hyakkimaru's climactic encounter with his father is given no buildup.

The gender identity of Dororo is not referenced until the very last episode too, so that I wondered if the showrunners just decided to make Dororo a boy. In one episode, Dororo beats up five kids her own age, which I thought was quite a feat for a child with no real martial training, especially a female child. But in the last episode Hyakkimaru reveals that he always knew, throughout all their adventures, that Dororo was female-- which is not true of the original Tezuka manga. Indeed, there's even a scene in the cartoon where Dororo is bathing nude within Hyakkimaru's line of sight, and she does nothing more than facing the other direction to conceal her femininity.

I'm glad I got a chance to see these early B&W cartoons, but the best any of them get is just fair. The 2019 incarnation is superior in all respects.

                    

     

LADY FRANKENSTEIN (1971)

 

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

Despite the high-toned diction and philosophizing in Mary Shelley's most famous novel, FRANKENSTEIN is more than a little perverse in its psychology. The titular experimenter grows up with his adoptive sister Elizabeth (his cousin in the first edition) and they plan to marry when they come of age. Yet Frankenstein's ambivalence is reflected in a weird dream of his mother coming back to life. When he decides to create a patchwork man, guided by old alchemical texts, it's in defiance of his father's scorn for such a project. And when his creation gets loose-- largely because Frankenstein had no plan for what he'd do with his "offspring"-- the monster devotes himself to killing off most of the people in the scientist's orbit.

Going on the account of director Mel Welles, who said that he wrote it with fellow American Edward de Lorenzo-- LADY FRANKENSTEIN was conceived from the start as being a sleazier version of a Frankenstein film. Yet to some extent Welles gets closer to the core perversities of Shelley's novel than most movies about the erring scientist.

In LADY, Baron Frankenstein (Joseph Cotten) has been experimenting on transplant surgery for twenty years since he was expelled from the medical academy for his radical ideas. Only his slightly younger colleague Dr. Marshall (Paul Muller) knows that for the past three years, while Frankenstein's daughter Tania is away at medical school, he and the Baron have been working on assembling and rejuvenating a patchwork man. They use a corpse-thief named Lynch to provide them with body parts, and once he provides them with the fresh brain of a hanged man, they're ready to proceed. However, the same day they plan to bring the dead form to life, daughter Tania (Rosalba Neri) returns to Castle Frankenstein.

Initially Tania seems nothing more than a loving daughter, one who spied on her father's early experiments and who has emulated him by finishing her training as a surgeon. There's no sense of improper emotions between Tania and her father, though Marshall, who nurtures a concealed affection for Tania, might be viewed as a father-surrogate, though actor Marshall was only about ten years older than actress Neri. We know nothing about Tania's sexual history, but the first hint of her perverse nature is slightly suggested by her lingering interaction with studly stable-boy Thomas (Peter Whiteman), though he can barely speak coherently due to a past bout with fever. 

On the night of the experiment, Marshall warns Frankenstein that damage to the creation's brain could make it dangerous. Tania learns about the experiment and wants to assist. Initially Frankenstein doesn't want her to risk getting in trouble with the law, and then he changes his mind for no stated reason. Frankenstein and Marshall revice the body with lightning, but as Marshall feared, the resulting Monster is a mindless berserker and kills Frankenstein without provocation. The deformed creature then stalks off into the countryside and begins knocking off nearly everyone he meets-- though he does forego mudering a young boy after killing his parents. How the unthinking beast-man knows to hide itself after getting the local constabulary on his tail, the film does not say. The creature also kills Lynch and other corpse-thieves but does not seem to know them.

Tania formulates the idea that the only way to take vengeance on the superhuman ravager is to make a second monster to fight it. Prior to Lynch's killing, Tania approaches the reprobate for new body-parts, but he will only accept sexual payment. Though Tania declines, the encounter possibly gives her the idea to use her beauty to make a monster in a different manner. Aware of Marshall's suppressed passion for her, she tells him that she loves his mind but must have a beautiful male body to love as well-- and proposes that the two of them murder the hunky Thomas and swap out Marshall's brilliant brain for Thomas's impaired consciousness.

                        

Tania then lures Thomas to her bed and seduces him, so that Marshall can smother him to death with a pillow. Tania makes some mention of giving Thomas the chance to be a "whole being," but it's pretty clear that she wants to indulge her desire for father-substitute Marshall, but within a youthful body like her own. Significantly, she does marry and bed Marhsall before they kill the stable-boy, so if all she wanted was sex with an older man, that inclination would have been voided. But making a new "child" to kill the creation of her father-- her symbolic "brother," if one goes by the logic of SON OF FRANKENSTEIN-- seems to be the means of both avenging and surpassing her father. So Tania completes the experiment and births her second monster. "New Monster" is not deformed like the first one and could pass for an ordinary man. But since all the story-pieces are now in place, the "Old Monster" wanders back to the castle for no particular reason, and soon the two super-strong beings duke it out. As monster-fights it's just adequate, and the Old Monster seems the more powerful until both Tania and "Charles" stab him to death. Then some convenient villagers burn the castle down, and Tania and "Charles" have sex amid the flames. Yet "Charles" decides that it isn't a Frankenstein film without a monster turning on its creator, so he strangles her before the flames get him.

By assigning high psychological mythicity to LADY FRANKENSTEIN, I'm not saying any character is psychologically complex, even on the level of Robert Bloch's PSYCHO. It's only the total pattern formed by all the characters that has a certain complexity that taps some of the original Shelley perversity. Also, while I often class mad scientists as being just as monstrous as their creations, here I felt Tania had more of the "villain" vibe.          

THE FINAL SACRFICE (1990)

 

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

Now THIS-- unlike that boring MERLIN'S SHOP OF MYSTICAL WONDERS I recently reviewed-- is the sort of "bad penny" that MST3K was great at turning up. The hosts had a lot of fun tearing it down, BUT-- SACRIFICE had its own dippy lack of logic that made it entertaining (in a pathetic sense) in its own right. It's a very low-budget horror film shot mostly out in the wilds of Canada by film-students, with actors who gave lackluster performances, but its redeeming merit is that the director/co-writer clearly had no grasp of what story-elements he needed even for basic drive-in fare.

I tick off the oddball points of interest:

Out in the forest, a well-dressed man (later named Satoris) supervises the killing of a man by his hooded henchmen. Then the scene cuts to a farmhouse where a young man, Troy, lives with his aunt. After we watch him thumb through a book with some vague occult illustrations, his dialogue with his aunt establishes that his father is deceased.

Then an intertitle declares that it's seven years later, though nothing much changes. Troy is still at the farmhouse, though the aunt is not seen, but somehow the hooded henchmen know he's doing something they don't like, so they invade the house. Troy escapes on a bike, but because the hoods have a car, he later hides in a stranger's truck to get away.

The stranger, with the weird name of "Rowsdower," finds Troy but lets him hitch to whatever his destination may be. However, the cult-members somehow track Troy in this new vehicle and give chase. Troy and Rowsdower elude them, but Rowsdower suddenly reveals that he knows exactly who the cultists are and what their aim is. They're the surviving members of an archaic cult whose power was destroyed by a vengeful god, but if they can make a "final sacrifice" to some idol, their long-lost city of evil will be reborn. And Rowsdower knows this because-- he used to be a member of the cult! Holy Crazy Coincidence!

The two fugitives hide in another farmhouse, and though the cultists search the house, they fail to find their quarry. Then the duo run into the house's owner, a garrulous old man (whom the MSTies compare to Yosemite Sam) -- and guess what? He ALSO knows all about the cultists, thus providing more exposition.

It all wraps up with the cult trying to execute Troy before the idol. There's a dull, skill-less fight between Satoris and Rowsdower. Satoris is defeated, the cultists scatter, the idol falls -- and the evil city is born anyway. But nothing happens as the film just peters out, having shown utter incompetence at creating suspense-- and yet, being entertaining because of that incompetence.    

          

 

DETECTIVE DEE: DEMON CURSE (2022)

 

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

Long ago I read a handful of the mystery novels of Robert Van Gulik, who brought the exploits of medieval Chinese magistrate Judge Dee to Western audiences. I've also seen one of Tsui Hark's high-ticket "Detective Dee" films, and this later film follows Hark's pattern of stressing supernatural adventure over mystery. The Dee here is younger than in the traditional tales Van Gulik used as his template, and so is known only as "Detective Dee."

The Empress of China is due to arrive at a particular city, but as there have been strange murders therein, Detective Dee (Benny Chan) and his aide come to town to sort things out. Dee does not believe in ghosts or demons, but despite his acumen and martial skills, he can't keep others from being killed. What he eventually finds is a cult of humans planning to sacrifice the Empress for an "ascension rite," and though they're not demons, they do seem to command some sort of ill-defined magic.

Though the settings and costumes are sumptuous the script seems rushed, and I wondered if it had been done for TV. The action-scenes looked as if the photographers had "undercranked" the film-speed to make it look as if the actors were moving faster than in real life. I can't say I followed all of the details of the story, partly because the voices used for the dubbing were rather peculiar. This isn't actively bad, just underwhelming, so it probably shouldn't be anyone's first Detective Dee film.  

THE NAKED WITCH (1964)

 

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

Initially I meant to give NAKED WITCH a quickie review, because it was a chore to watch director/co-writer Larry Buchanan pad the already short film with enervating tracking shots of the Texas wilderness. But upon re-examination, I must admit that the script is probably the best original writing by Buchanan, eclipsing even the risibly titled MARS NEEDS WOMEN.

To be sure, Buchanan gives off mixed signals. The main script centers upon a witch who comes back to life to take vengeance on those who maltreated her in life. Yet Buchanan begins the film with a tedious prologue-- a voiceover lecture accompanied by illustrations from Bosch-- talking about the long history of evil witches making compacts with Satan-- even though the Naked Witch is never said to have made any such pact. Padding is the usual suspect here too.

An unnamed student goes to Luckenback Texas to research the folklore of witches. Most of the German-descended townsfolk won't talk to him, but a pretty young blonde, Kirska, takes him to the house she occupies with her grandfather. She gives the student a guest bed, in which an unnamed witch of the 19th century, referenced only as "The Widow," slept a century ago. The fellow opines that all witches were just scapegoats for societal troubles, so Kirska also offers to loan him a book on local folklore. He's not overly flirty toward Kirska, but he pays her a compliment, so when she returns with the book, she wears a sexy black nightgown. The student, perhaps feeling out of his depth, declines to make a pass, so she leaves him to his reading.

The book chronicles more real history than a latter-day writer could have possibly known. Sometime in the 1800s, the Widow (Libby Hall), an unmarried and unpopular woman in Luckenbach, sleeps with a rich married man, one Schoennig, with the idea that he means to divorce his wife and marry her. Schoennig-- who is also Kirska's ancestor--  not only reneges on promises, he accuses her as a witch to get her out of his hair. The community duly executes the Widow via burning (not shown) and then nails down her corpse in a grave with a metal stake. The execution's imagery slightly resembles the one in Bava's 1960 BLACK SUNDAY, but since that film wasn't released to the US until 1961, Buchanan might not have seen SUNDAY before completing the film in the same year, only to have it sit on a shelf until 1964.

Night falls, and the student goes chasing after the Widow's grave. He unearths it with ease, finds the corpse nailed down by the stake, and pulls out the stake, his voiceover telling us he has some idea of exhibiting it. He wanders back to his lodgings-- it's still not entirely sure that he hasn't been under a spell-- and falls asleep. Behind him, the Naked Witch resuscitates, though her film-nudity is confined to side-boobs. She follows the student to the house and takes the stake from him while he sleeps. Then, to save Buchanan the trouble of more angled shots, she seeks out Kirska's room, rips the black nightgown right off the girl's body and flees. Clothed now, she goes after the few surviving descendants of her seducer, killing two men by using the stake as a dagger.

Since the Witch never has dialogue-- not even being quoted within a voiceover, as occurs with the Widow in the book-flashback-- there's no explanation as to where she got her supernatural powers. During the flashback the Widow prays to be avenged on her accuser's family, but she does not pray to Satan, so for all the audience knows, she was granted her powers by a vengeful Heaven. The student tracks her to a pool, where she mesmerizes him and has sex with him. Then she goes after Kirska, also using remote hypnotism to pull her out of her house. The student recovers his wits and intervenes, though his "struggle" with the Witch is so desultory, it's obvious to the viewer that the actress intentionally falls down so as to be killed by the stake, this time for good.

One source claimed that WITCH was the first cinematic use of a recrudescent witch anywhere. Obviously BLACK SUNDAY puts the lie to this claim, though offhand I don't know of any American feature films in which a dead witch comes back to malefic life.

This is a clansgressive film with respect to both the sex and violence that the Witch doles out to 20th-century persons born outside her natural timespan.              

MERLIN'S SHOP OF MYSTICAL WONDERS (1996)

 

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

The above VHS cover is a total lie as to the content of MYSTICAL WONDERS, but it might be the best thing to come from this misbegotten pile of crap. It didn't even yield a very good episode of MST3K, which is the only way I would have ever screened it.

I'll be brief because the project is so pedestrian, it's not even worth ranting over. The shop of the title is actually a little shop of two horrors, in which unwitting victims are brought into contact with cursed items thanks to a modern-day venue run by the magician Merlin and some fat chick.

First story concerns the fate of a hot-shot newspaper columnist (the "demihero" of my subject line) who acts obnoxiously toward the greybeard proprietor. In retaliation the sorcerer gives the unbeliever a book of magic to eff around with. The guy almost kills his wife but a magic spell from the book backfires on him. There's no particular "ironic justice" to his fate though the actors are competent.

The second story is a cut-down version of the director's feature film THE DEVIL'S GIFT, about a cursed cymbal-playing monkey (the "monster" in my subject line). I saw GIFT many years ago and though it was nothing special, at least it was an adequate cursed-object horror flick. But it becomes lame thanks to being cut down for time and interpolated into the frame story of Merlin's shop. The original film had an unhappy ending, but here Merlin saves the imperiled victims. 

The only MST3K joke I remember was a line about DENNIS THE MENACE's Mister Wilson exposing himself while watering his lawn, or something like that.   
    

  

THE WAR OF THE NINJA MONSTERS: JARON VS. GOURA (2024)

 

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

At the end of my review for GOD REIGA VS KING OHGA, I wrote:

Happily, there have been no sequels to this embarrassment, and IMDB claims that writer-director Hayashiya is now working on a project with two new monsters. I'd like to think it could only be an improvement, but that's probably just wishful thinking.

Well, this 2024 movie must be the one alluded to, and it is a small improvement, though one has to parse out what screenwriter Shinpei Hayashiya had in mind. It helped me that I think he borrowed, in a roundabout way, from the 2016 film COLOSSAL, about a young American woman who finds that she has the ability to control a giant kaiju-like creature.

First, in the Japanese town of Chichibu, we meet two young guys who work for a gym, though they're only at the gym for a few minutes. At the same time they're listening to their manager complain, a Shinto priestess goes on a local TV show and proclaims that Chichibu is in danger from an archaic ninja cult, the Jirai.

The two guys-- unnamed according to the subtitles-- wander out into the nearby forest. They enter a cave and faint-- and the next thing they know, both of them are gigantic versions of themselves, looming over Chichibu. However, the locals don't see two giant humans: they see two reptilian monsters, one looking like Godzilla and the other a four-footed critter loosely like Gamera. An additional curiosity: when newspeople try to take video or photographs of the creatures, they don't appear visible in any form. Yet the two "monsters" have tangible effects on the buildings they hit, though there's very little building-bashing, since that would have been overly expensive.

There are some comic scenes of receptionists at the Self-Defense Public Relations office, who don't know what to make of calls about monsters. However, one female supervisor seems to know what's going on, for she references the Jirai, just as the priestess did.

Soon, it's evident that a Jirai ninja, a bald guy with an eyepatch, is controlling the monsters, hoping to unleash chaos for some vague purpose. His control may be lacking, because a couple of times "Jaron" and "Goura" attack each other, which would seem to be counter-intuitive. But Supervisor Girl turns into Ninja Girl and goes into the forest, where she finds Bald Guy and a few other ninjas. She defeats all of them, and around the same time, some citizens come across the same cave the two guys entered. They find the two guys comatose, but they become conscious when the evil ninjas are beaten. The huge monsters disappear, and all's right with the world.

There are many comic bits that probably play much better in Japanese, but they're not overly painful, as they were in GOD RAIGA. This is a curiosity among monster mashup because this time the giant monsters are not the focal icons, and though all the characters are flimsy, I suppose the main menace here is really "the Jirai" as a whole, since they unleash the kaiju, and the good ninja is too routine to be the star.

  

     

    

HOUSE OF THE WOLF MAN (2009)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

**SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS**

HOUSE, as many others have observed before me, must have been a labor of love for writer-director Eben McGarr. Clearly no one would seek to duplicate the look of the 1940s Universal monster-mashes without having an abiding affection for the material. At the same time, McGarr-- who to date only has a smattering of credits on IMDB-- wasn't doing a "straight" version of a Universal monster-mash, nor was he doing a spoof-horror, like ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN and at least three different films titled MONSTER MASH. I'd guess that he hoped to appeal to the enthusiasts of "so bad they're good" films, but with a calculated irony that would have been foreign to guys like Ed Wood and Jerry Warren.

The setup: five individuals are summoned to a mysterious castle for an inheritance. None of the five-- athletic Reed, his scientist-sister Mary, antiquarian Sully, "loose woman" Elamira, and big game hunter Whitlock-- think that they're all related to their summoner, Bela Reinhardt (Ron Chaney, grandson of Lon Chaney Jr). But they're all willing to check things out in case there's a big payoff. 

All five are meant to be sendups of familiar Hollywood "types," and though the first four recall similar POV characters from "old dark house" mysteries, the big game hunter Archibald Whitlock seems to have been imported from an imitation MOST DANGEROUS GAME. McGarr's script doesn't expand the other four beyond the stereotypes they represent, but the writer lavishes more attention on Whitlock. He shares the Nietzschean worldview of GAME's Count Zaroff, and travels with three African bearers just in case he decides he wants to hunt something. In a mild shot at 20th-century racism, Whitlock knows the lead African's real name but calls him "Leopold" for his amusement, while he's never learned the names of the other two. That said, he's equally arrogant toward White people, since in the film's best line, he says to Reed, "I shall call you Azrael because the name Reed displeases me." I'm probably in the minority, but I think all five actors did well with their deliberately artificial dialogue, whether the dialogue hits or misses-- and there are possibly more misses than hits. All five performers make Ron Chaney look worse, because there can be little doubt that he was hired just for the value of his familial connections.

  

But if anything's weaker than Chaney's performance, is McGarr's conception of Reinhardt, who occupies the position of the "main menace," but who is more poorly conceived than the most threadbare Monogram mad scientist. Here are the big reveals: Reinhardt is the offspring of Peter Frankenstein, son of Wolf in SON OF FRANKENSTEIN, and the never-mentioned sister of Bela the Gypsy from WOLF MAN. Therefore, even though his real surname is Frankenstein, his "house" has inherited the werewolf curse-- though maybe it doesn't pass through paternal genes, since none of his offspring have lycanthropic qualities. And who are his offspring? All of the supposed heirs (though one may be adopted, that part was hard to follow) are half-siblings because Reinhardt had sex with at least four mothers. This leads to a little recrimination when Mary realizes she's been vamping half-bro Whitlock, though like most Universal horror-flicks, no inappropriate genes were mixed in the scripting of this movie.

And what is Reinhardt's endgame, given that he's due to "wolf out" soon? Well, he has some hazy "survival of the fittest" notion, in that he wants to test his children in bloody battle. Somehow this will help him suss out whether his lycanthropy is some biological mutation, rather than a magical curse. It makes no sense, and most if not all the "heirs" get killed by Reinhardt's rampage. Whitlock and the bearers at least put up a fight, but they're slaughtered too. However, a certain "abandoned experiment" escapes confinement, and once again, the Frankenstein Monster Meets (a) Wolf Man. The fight's one of the better things about HOUSE, being livelier (though no longer) than the one from the 1943 movie. 

One more visitor arrives during the fight, and yes, it's Dracula, decked out in full Lugosi regalia, and he either finishes off the last victim or makes her a vampire. Oddly, though Dracula and the Monster are the only characters who make this a crossover, both of them are irrelevant to the movie-- which would have been improved if there had been SOME reason for Reinhardt's family-killing madness.

       

              

BIGFOOT VS. MEGALODON RESURRECTION (2025)

 

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

"Mother of mercy-- can this be the end of Bigfoot?"

Probably not; there's some other BCF opus called MEGA TRUMP not currently on streaming, which spares me from yet more exposure to the director's lame "satire."

For some goddamn reason the god Ra, who's popped up a few times, resurrects Megalodon, and sends the shark-man to Earth to dominate the humans. This seems unnecessary, since humans are already under the thrall of mechanical overlords, but whatever.

Bigfoot-- back to looking like a Sasquatch again-- hears of his enemy's rebirth and goes to fight him. He has a new female commander, a robot named Coila, though previous installments didn't mention intelligent robots at all. There's also a small robot, X-Max, who somehow knows that his name sounds like a stool-softening Earth-product from thousands of years ago.

Bigfoot makes sex overtures to Coila even though she has no imitation genitalia, curses a lot, and finally ends up on Earth to fight Megalodon. I guess Ra causes them both to grow to kaiju-size, because they throw down amidst skyscrapers. The fight's a little longer than the last one, but only adequate. Megalodon is defeated but nothing is said about the fate of the humans under robot dominion. I can't say that there's anything resembling a "high point" in this dopey series, but RESURRECTION would be a good place to stop anyway.      

 

BIGFOOT GOES TO HELL (2023)

 

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

In my review of BIGFOOT VS MEGALODON 2, I said it gave a slight "ray of hope" in that the movie delivered at least on a couple of its tenuous subplots. But I didn't really believe BC Fourteen would get even as good at storytelling as Ed Wood. Sure enough, BIGFOOT GOES TO HELL, the next flick in this hypothetical "series," defaults back to jibber-jabber.

In his wheelchair at the end of time, Lucifer gets all wrong up at the pestilence of humanity, whom he considers sycophantic (the soundtrack saus "psycho-phantic") to the will of a non-existent Heaven and its non-existent God. So he sends another demon, Baphomet, to rain nuclear death on Earth-- which I thought was already devastated. Either before or after Baphomet does this, he runs into Bigfoot (back to looking like a fanged monkey) in another spaceship. The two ships exchange fire, and Bigfoot is killed. His spirit shows up in Lucifer's hell, where he exchanges witless dialogue with the Devil. Then when Lucifer has had enough, an angel, looking like a standard Cupid, pops in, and apparently everything Lucifer did is unwritten. A living Bigfoot shows up at the Allies' base and thinks he's had a weird dream.

Toward the beginning someone claims Princess Kali died in a previous installment. I'm not going back to check though. It's not a combative adventure but it is a monster-mash. If I didn't consider Baphomet and Lucifer monsters, there's also a crocodile-man who's the reincarnation of Anton Sandor LaVey.     

BIGFOOT VS. MEGALODON 2 (2023)

 

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

I don't plan to visit any more BC Fourteen projects after I finish all those relevant to my "monster mashup" project. Yet BIGFOOT VS. MEGALODON 2 provides a small ray of hope, for after three of his animated crapfests in which the director just screwed around, BVM2 actually delivered something it promised. 

First, we get an assemblage of monsters attacking the Allies, which seems to be a callback to a subplot about a "beast world." Two of the monsters have already received ample screen-time in the series: the shark-humanoid Megalodon and Tickles the Clown. The other two appeared in very brief scenes before: a werewolf named Crosscoe and a big bulky monster named Bartholomew. The latter will later be revealed to be the Frankenstein Monster, and this revelation sets up another subplot in which his creator Doctor Frankenstein is also somehow wandering around the Fourteen-verse.

After the monsters attack the Allies (in spaceships), the Allies' new commander Grace Sherwood (also seen only in space-armor) asks Bigfoot, monster that he is, to infiltrate the ranks of the beast-people. It doesn't work, since the evil monsters don't buy the defection for a moment. But the plot works to bring about what the title promises: a climactic throwdown between Bigfoot (now looking more like a sasquatch than a big fanged monkey) and Megalodon. The fight lasts less than five minutes, and it's nothing special, but at least one promise finally was lived up to.

Van Helsing and Kali are gone without explanation, though possibly they're on maternity leave. I didn't miss them, though Sherwood and her boyfriend Holmes are no better.        

BIGFOOT VS KRAMPUS (2021)

 

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

In this flick it's Christmastime, which might mean that the creator conceived or issued his effort around that time in the real world. But if KRAMPUS is BC Fourteen's idea of a gift, I'm glad not to be on his Xmas list.

This one, like TICKLES, is just a lot of witless talking-heads scenes with no real action. I hoped in an earlier review that maybe this version of Krampus wouldn't have any dialogue, but he did, as do two other monsters. the Cucuy (also called the Boogieman) and some pumpkin-headed fellow called "Jack Pumpkinhead" and thus probably ripped off from one of L. Frank Baum's OZ books. Hey, what's more Christmassy than petty theft?

Bigfoot jabbers a little about finding the missing Jack Van Helsing clone, though everyone else seems to think he's dead-- including his lady friend Kali, who's apparently become pregnant by the lookalike clone of the original clone. Krampus, despite being summoned into being by Lucifer, doesn't do much of anything, much less fight Bigfoot. Fourteen didn't come back to his crap-universe again until 2023, when he released two films I've already reviewed-- VAN HELSING and XTERMINATOR-- and then finally condescended to deliver the second part of BIGFOOT VS. MEGALODON.          

TICKLES THE CLOWN (2021)

 

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

Had it not been for one IMDB reviewer, I would not have guessed that this flick, with a title suggesting a routine "evil clown" horror flick, was an installment in BC Fourteen's nutty space-opus. I'm not sure whether or not this was a good thing, though. 

TICKLES plays like its author had binge-watched all of the "Hannibal Lecter" films, for half of the film is wasted as Princess Kali makes three trips to a futuristic prison to converse with an inmate dressed like a grotesque clown, Tickles. He appears to be purely mortal, though the script says nothing about what crimes he committed or why the guards allow him to remain dressed as a clown. Kali's mission: Doctor Jekyll thinks that Tickles is the only living being possessed of a "sociopath gene." Jekyll thinks that if the Allies can harvest this genetic material from Tickles, they can weaponize it against the Illuminati and end the Allies' long war with the evil aliens. But the good guys can't just beat up Tickles and take his genes, because supposedly anesthetizing the subject will mess up the experiment. So for half the film Fourteen gives viewers stupid talking-heads scenes in which Kali talks with Tickles, who keeps sexualizing her even though she's in a heavy space suit.

Other parts of the film consist of romantic drivelings between Kali and her lover Van Helsing, or of unimaginative cussing by Bigfoot. Toward the last half-hour of the flick, Fourteen somehow breaks out of prison and pilots his way into deep space. There he crosses paths with Van Helsing and blasts him to smithereens. Oh, no, will the poor princess be deprived of her lover? Ah, it's ok: Jekyll knows how to clone the deceased clone, and in no time it's back to status quo, except that Tickles makes contact with the Illuminati through their agent Crowley.

Other points of (meager) interest: so far it's the first film in the series that contains so little action that it's subcombative. Fourteen tosses in a Nietzsche quote at the movie's opening, which might be a little impressive if it wasn't the SAME EFFING QUOTE that EVERYTHING ELSE USES. There's a brief convo between Bigfoot and a werewolf that suggests a possible uprising of a "beast world," and that sounds more interesting than anything in this total dud. 

                  

BIGFOOT VS. MEGALODON (2021)

 

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

The "Bigfoot in Space" series was only two installments old when the writer-director managed to produce what might be the worst in the series.

True, BVM is just more plotless blather with explicit sexual language added. But this time, BC Fourteen introduces the mutated shark Megalodon, and even troubles to give him an origin of sorts-- but does not actually trouble to produce a face-off, much less a battle, between the two monsters. Possibly I'll see one in BVM 2, though that didn't get foisted upon the streaming public until 2023. 

The next installment for 2021 took Bigfoot down a Yuletide pathway, BIGFOOT VS. KRAMPUS. If I'm lucky, maybe Krampus will not be capable of speech, and I'll be spared more of Fourteen's rotten dialogue.    

BIGFOOT VS. THE ILLUMINATI (2020)

 

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

Given that this film shares the same date as TRUMP VS THE ILLUMINATI, the creator probably never meant to follow up his lame "satire" directly. Thus BIGFOOT VS THE ILLUMINATI stands as a soft reboot of the other film, with no references to the Trump-Clone or his climactic confrontation with Lucifer. All of the other regular characters are in place: Van Helsing (now said to be the clone of a Jack Van Helsing, who as far as I know never appeared anywhere), his suit-clad paramour Kali, the Allies, the Illuminati (whose foot soldiers are now called "Archons"), and the occultist Aleister Crowley, who's been incarnated in the body of a Bad Grey alien. Bigfoot appeared briefly in TRUMP but did almost nothing, so that may have been the director monetizing the animation-work he did in advance of this flick. BVTI may also be the first appearance of "Xterminator," who gets his own feature in 2023, and his appearance in the same film as Bigfoot makes the movie a very minor monster mashup.

This time, Van Helsing goes looking for Bigfoot to help out against the Illuminati, going on the memory that the real VH was acquainted with the hairy monster as a buddy. Their meeting is complicated by the fact that VH is a clone, but Bigfoot eventually gets over his reluctance and joins the space-war effort. Fourteen's sloppy script more or less implies that Bigfoot is a thousands-years-old survivor of the devastated Earth, but how he came to live in the galactic empire is never related. Bigfoot talks tough and uses lots of foul language, but he does very little and most of the combative action here is just spaceships, fighting with the most minor CGI-FX.

Once again, it's a lot of plotless jibber-jabber with a few esoteric references to Crowley's occultism thrown in for no good reason. Oh, and there's also no explanation as to whether Kali's ship-physician "Doctor Jekyll" has anything to do with the original Victorian experimenter. As I work my way through this sludge, I think an explanation is unlikely to appear, so if anyone's a crossover-icon here. Jekyll's probably not one.  

  

TRUMP VS. THE ILLUMINATI (2020)

 

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

I've reviewed a couple of the low-budget, made-for-streaming cartoon movies made by writer/director BC Fourteen, and both were pretty dull. I have to assume that Fourteen, whose career is dominantly in CGI animation, keeps getting work because streaming services are willing to buy kilotons of animated flicks. This would make sense if all of Fourteen's movies were designed to keep the kiddies entertained. Instead, the guy has a whole science-fiction series which uses foul language, meaning that someone thinks there are consumers, adolescent or older, who might be beguiled by such films. I doubt that most streaming-consumers are even aware of Fourteen's efforts, and the only reason I decided to explore them further is because I'm deeply into both (a) crossovers and (b) monster-mashes.

TRUMP VS. THE ILLUMINATI seems to be the first of Fourteen's SF-series, also involving such featured characters as Bigfoot, Xterminator, and Jack Van Helsing, a clone of the descendant of the DRACULA slayer, appearing here three years before he gets his own film. In the time of the historical Donald Trump, Earth is wiped by aliens called "Illuminati," who look like the popular image of alien abductors, "The Greys." However, the Chinese clone Trump, and Clone-Trump escapes Earth before it's destroyed. He lands on Mars and lives there, with another lost astronaut, for a thousand years.

At the end of that millennium, the Illuminati face opposition from another band of aliens, called the Allies, who somehow form the idea that only Clone-Trump can destroy the Illuminati, and their devilish master Lucifer. To that end, the Allies' queen Varuna (named for a male Hindu god and claiming to be an "Atlantean") journeys to Mars. Clone-Trump refuses her invitation to battle her enemies, but then Illuminati foot-soldiers, aware of a prediction that the reborn 45th President can destroy them, also show up on Clone-Trump's doorstep. Surprisingly he beats them up, and when reinforcements arrive, Varuna teleports the clone into her ship, where he reluctantly agrees to join them.

Varuna's subordinate Princess Kali may be the one who gathered at least two other clones of Earth-entities: Doctor Jekyll and Bigfoot. Fourteen devotes no time to explaining either one, though he would later use Bigfoot in half a dozen other similar productions. Van Helsing, though, is the only clone with whom Kali is sleeping. Kali may not be a Grey, since she and Van Helsing, like Clone-Trump, are never seen outside of a heavy spacesuit-- which suggests that the director knew his CGI couldn't make credible human beings. Yet another historical figure is apparently reincarnated as a Grey: the 20th-century occultist Aleister Crowley, who communes with the Egyptian god Anubis but serves the unseen Illuminati lord Lucifer.

All of this folderol does align BC Fourteen with other bad-movie makers, such as Ed Wood and Jerry Warren with respect to erratically raiding history and pop culture to buttress their grab-bag universes. Fourteen's version of Donald Trump is as stupidly executed as all his other borrowings, with all the usual Liberal triggers included, so it seems a given that he only used Trump's name as a means of getting attention. From what I can tell, this was Clone-Trump's only appearance in the Fourteen-verse, and most of the installments that followed would focus upon his not-much-less-stupid iteration of Bigfoot. FWIW, I judge Clone-Trump to fit the persona of "monster," since in his confrontation with Lucifer, he's more of an unleashed force of nature than a hero.              

SWAMP THING (1991)

 

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

By 1991, both Alan Moore and Rick Veitch (and artist collaborators) had turned the SWAMP THING into an opus dedicated to metaphysical and psychological speculations. But as far as other media were concerned, there'd never been any Swamp Thing but the two live-action movies, loosely based upon the original 1970s comic series. 

The 1990 live-action teleseries, budget-restricted though it was, at least stayed in tune with the dramatic feel of the first movie. This cartoon series-- consisting of just five "tryout" episodes-- sometimes resembles the overtly comedic RETURN OF SWAMP THING, but without enough jokes for the cartoon to register as a comedy. So I have to deem the 1991 show an "adventure" series, since the emphasis is on turning plant-mutated scientist Alec Holland into a swamp-dwelling crusader, complete with a bunch of crime-fighting gadgets (some of which certainly must have made it into the SWAMP THING toy line).

This swamp-hero also has a small coterie of friends: a couple of kids, a young woman named Abigail (with no romantic angle attached), and two diverse but still bland adult action-guys, Tomahawk (Native American) and Bayou Jack (Black). I think the animators could have switched the dialogue-tracks for the two guys and no one would have noticed any difference. Since the two movies featured mad scientist Arcane as the Thing's only opponent, he appears in all five episodes as Swampy's regular enemy, complete with a gang of mutated henchmen, one of whom is named "Weedkiller." The voice-actor for Arcane gets the short serial's one good line: observing the fall of a radioactive satellite into the swamp, Arcane says, "I love radiation-- it's so INTENSE."

          

SPY KIDS: ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD (2011)

 

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

Robert Rodriguez's attempt to reboot the SPY KIDS franchise eight years later was not a box-office success, but it's the only one I mildly liked. It's not something I would have watched again except for purposes of review, but it does exemplify what I said in the previous SK review: that the writer-director finally did learn the difference between "stupid-wacky" and "clever-wacky."

The opening setup for SK4 alone is far more inventive than anything in the other films, suggesting to me that Rodriguez managed to improve his talent for the absurd in movies like ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO and the first SIN CITY movie. This time the mother of the eponymous kids-- specifically, "step-kids"-- gets equal time, as embodied by lady spy Marissa (Jessica Alba, reunited with the director after both SIN CITY and MACHETE). Marissa is the hitherto-unmentioned sister of Gregorio Cortez, and thus the aunt of Carmen and Juni (who both make minor crossover appearances to support the new franchise). And this time Marissa keeps her spy-dentity secret from both her husband (Joel McHale) and Rebecca and Cecil, his kids by his first (and deceased) wife. Marissa is first seen capturing a super-villain named "Tick Tock" even though she has to endure labor pains while driving a super-fast car and battling henchmen.

A year later, Marissa has stepped down from her duties in order to raise her toddler, as well as trying, not successfully, to bond with her stepchildren. Her hubby, just to add to the faux-irony, is a TV "spy-hunter," who of course has no idea he lives with a secret agent woman. Then time begins to run backward, albeit in slow increments. A new villain, The Timekeeper, has unleashed a secret doomsday weapon, though the genesis of the time-stopping device is muddled at best.  

The Timekeeper's forces attack Marissa's house for some doodad, and this provides the justification for Cecil and Rebecca to learn that they are "step-spy-kids." After various twists and turns, it's up to Marissa, her three kids and the original (now twenty-something) heroes to foil the Timekeeper. Oh, and they have a robot dog voiced by Ricky Gervais, and yes, Rodriguez works in another cameo for Danny Trejo. The director's design sense is no better than it ever was, and the two new kids are no better or worse than the originals. But both the humor and the pacing is better overall. Alexa Vega gets to fight in one scene, but Alba has more presence in her two scenes. The Timekeeper has a better than average motive for his destructive actions. though calling him the best villain in the series is faint praise.          

SPY KIDS 3D: GAME OVER (2003)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

Robert Rodriguez meant this to be the final flick in the SPY KIDS series. I said before that he must have known he couldn't keep the franchise going as the two main actors aged out of their roles, but what he cobbled together for his finale was even less compelling than the first two films in the series.

I have dim memories of having seen part of this movie in a theater, sans 3D glasses-- and since I can't believe I would have paid even Dollar Movie prices to see this, I must have "theater-jumped," possibly to see what Sly Stallone was doing in a particularly- insipid kiddie flick. I mention this to say that I did not experience the movie's 3D effects, though I've read that they were not well-regarded.

This time Rodriguez discards all attempts to ground things even in "superspy reality." A super-villain named the Toymaker (Stallone) has been incarcerated in the real world, possibly thanks to the efforts of Valentin (Ricardo Montalban), grandfather of Carmen and Juni. But the evildoer has constructed a virtual game that has some capacity to take over everyone's 's minds, so the OSS sent Carmen Cortez's virtual self into the game to investigate. Carmen disappears, so the OSS appeals to her brother Juni-- who left the agency for contrived reasons-- to come back and find his sister, and to save the planet. After a handful of VR adventures, VR-Juni gets a lifeline to the real world for one assistant, and he calls up Valentin-- who, though wheelchair-bound in the real world, can become a virtual superhero in cyberspace. Then Juni and Valentin have various adventures, find Carmen halfway through the movie, and Valentin confronts the Toymaker. who is responsible for Valentin losing his legs. Will Grandpa take bloody vengeance upon the Toymaker? Yeah, rhetorical question.

The difficulty of all three of the original three movies is that Rodriguez thinks he's being "clever-wacky" when he's really being "stupid-wacky," and plainly he didn't know the difference. Since he made his film debut in 1992, he'd never done a full-fledged comedy, and his lack of ability to script a good one shows. He also was overly indulgent to performers he liked. While Stallone was nominated for a Razzie due to his mugging performance, actors like Sabara and Montalban were worse, delivering their dopey dialogue with no charm whatever. Gugino, Banderas, Marin and Trejo are barely in the movie. But at least Rodriguez could justify bringing them into the chaos, whereas it's obvious he just included other characters from the first two films because he liked them and/or the actors.

However, something good (in the view of this not-kid viewer) finally came of this tedious, cringe-worthy franchise-- as I'll address in the next review.  

    

SPY KIDS 2 (2002)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

Robert Rodriguez didn't let any grass grow under his feet once the first SPY KIDS made bank: the next one came out the next year. Apart from striking while the iron was hot, the producer/director/writer faced a certain limitation as to how long his central characters could fill the role as "kids." 

Plot-wise ISLAND OF LOST DREAMS is more of the same as #1, even to sending Carmen and Juni Cortez to an island full of weird things. (In interviews Rodriguez cited Harryhausen as an inspiration, but Roidriguez would have to work much harder to come close to Harryhausen's unique charm.) I did think the visuals looked more vivid than they did in the first film, particularly in an opening carnival scene, and I assumed the director had spent more money. Instead, cost-conscious Robert made ISLAND for the same money but reached out to startup effects-houses. This resulted in the carnival-ride "The Juggler," a completely improbable device that throws its riders (encased within compartments) into the air like juggling-balls. I'll at least remember that visual better than all the CGI monsters on the lost-dream island.

ISLAND moves faster thanks to having dispensed with the superficial setup of the first film, and goes the extra mile by claiming that, in the space of a year, Carmen and Juni so impressed the OSS that now the agency not only employs other spy kids but have also instituted a "Spy Kid of the Year" tradition. Though this is even sillier than the Juggler-ride, it gives the mediocre kid-heroes a pair of age-appropriate professional opponents, Gary and Gerti Giggles-- though I deduct points for using the name "Giggles" for characters who are not specifically humorous. Gerti (Emily Osment) is a pre-teen like Juni, while Gary (Matt O'Leary) is in the middle-teen range of Carmen, and becomes her first crush as well as a professional rival. When it comes out that the two rival spy-kids are implicated in the world-conquest plans of their father (Mike Judge in an underwritten villain-role), Carmen has one funny line: "I think I can change him" (the boy, not his dad). But as performers I still found Vega and Sabara charmless.

This time, Vega is the only "fighting female" in the house-- albeit only briefly-- because her mom and dad, as played by Gugino and Banderas, are stuck in a tedious side-story, where the mother's parents (Holland Taylor and Ricardo Montalban) tag along and interfere with the parents' efforts to rescue their kids. Rodriguez had already shown in the first movie his tendency to load the series with performers just because he liked them (Danny Trejo, Cheech Marin), and as memory serves, the third flick in the series gets even worse in that department.          

SPY KIDS (2001)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

I'm going to try reviewing all four films in this franchise, but they're going to be short reviews because this series is SO not aimed at me. In fact, I can't say that it would have been my kind of thing had I been born a Millennial. I'm sure I liked a fair amount of ephemeral junk in my pre-adolescent years, and on the whole I like movies about superspies better than movies about real, mundane spies. And I can just barely tolerate flicks starring high-schoolers as covert operatives. But somehow I think that even when I myself was a middle-schooler, middle-school spies would have been a bridge too far.

The biggest flaw of the first SPY KIDS is that, even though writer-director Robert Rodriguez was going for what he described as a blend of James Bond and Willy Wonka, the first half of the first KIDS takes too much time trying to lend verisimilitude to the goofy concept. Gregorio and Ingrid Cortez are retired superspies who seem to have a flawless life, except for the fact that their middle-schoolers don't know anything of their heroic pasts. But I found that during the setup I thought adult actors Banderas and Gugino had far better chemistry than the two destined "spy kids," Carmen (Alexa Vega, 13) and Juni (Daryl Sabara, 9). The kid-performers weren't terrible, but they also weren't overly charismatic.

The plot is routine. Gregorio and Ingrid come out of retirement to face a threat of a kids' show performer who has invented hordes of killer robots, mostly with the faces of famous children-- as well as both Carmen and Juni, for some reason. The wacky Wonka-esque inventor Floop (a mug-happy Alan Cumming) is really more thoughtless than fiendish, so Rodriguez has to introduce three more villainous types to compensate, played by Robert Patrick, Teri Hatcher and Tony Shahloub. The action is routine too, and the only time the two adult spies get to fight, Rodriquez cuts away from the action--even though he revels in a long sequence of the two kids battling their robot doubles. 

Obviously, the film was successful, so it reached its target audience. I can only say that despite the director's passion for children's films, I've yet to see one I thought really good. Said passion does make me wonder what sort of kid-vids he liked as a youngling, though.

         

KUNG FU PANDA 3 (2016)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological*

Not surprisingly, the simple PANDA formula began to show some cracks in its facade by the third film. No #3 is still a reasonably entertaining variation on that simple theme, but it helps not to look too hard at some things.

This time the main villain is tied not to Po or to Shifu but the turtle Oogwai, who in the first film named Po as the Dragon Warrior and then ascended to another spiritual plane. In PANDA 3 we learn that all is not peaceful on that higher plane, for Oogwai encounters an old enemy, General Kai (a yak), whom Oogwai consigned to the spirit world for his crimes. (I guess for small tyke-viewers, "sent to the spirit world" sounds less grievous than "killed.") Kai was exiled because he'd learned the technique of stealing "chi" from other masters. But living in the spirit-world has done nothing to cool Kai's conquering temperament, and he's already stolen a lot of chi from other ascended masters when he crosses paths with Oogwai. Kai defeats Oogwai and steals enough chi to re-enter the mortal world-- though Oogwai predicts that the Dragon Warrior shall defeat Kai's evil.

By total coincidence, Shifu decides to retire from teaching martial arts, and he appoints Po as the new teacher to students who know more than Po does. Hijinks ensue, and for good measure Shifu also informs the panda that having achieved inner peace (in the second film) is not enough; that his next step must be mastering the power of chi-manipulation. 

On top of that, Po finally meets Li, the birth-father he never knew, and Ping, who regards himself as Po's real father, seethes with jealousy of Po's new dad. Po also has an excuse to hang out with Li in that Li claims that he and his panda-tribe are masters of chi, so they can complete the next stage of Po's training. However, Li actually doesn't possess the skill, and his excuse for lying stands as one of the most cockamamie in cinematic history-- not least because he knows that General Kai will eventually cross chi-swords with Po, which could result in the death of Li's cherished son.

Perhaps worse than all this plotting-by-convenience is that none of the pandas Po meets are slightly memorable as characters, including Li. The pandas were all tiresome and made me wish for more scenes devoted to the Furious Five, who were simple comedy-types that still had some individuality. The evil Kai is the least interesting villain of the first three movies, and even his primary gimmick-- being able to change his enemies into obedient "jade zombies"-- adds no luster to the film. The climactic face-off between Kai and Po is decently staged, but getting there is not half the fun one might expect it to be.

             

KUNG FU PANDA 2 (2011)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological*

Once the first PANDA hit big, the filmmakers stuck close to what worked for both the second and third films: raucous cartoon chopsocky violence with a side-dish of Eastern wisdom. 

In the first film, the story arc of Po the Panda (Jack Black) concerned his efforts to become a kung-fu fighter, though fate-- and the will of the turtle-oracle Oogwai-- threw Po into the deep end of the pool, by promoting him as the destined "Dragon Warrior." In choosing this destiny, Po forswears dedicating himself to the noodle-shop run by his adoptive father Ping (a goose who never informs Po as to his non-goose heritage). But Ping is not the source of conflict: the "heavy father" figure is supplied by Shifu, who puts Po through many rigors before finally conceding that Po deserves his status. Shifu is also, like Ping, an adoptive father, but his "son" became a menace, whom Po must defeat. In essence the first film completes Shifu's arc and he's only of modest importance in the second and third films.

The good news re: No #2 is that while the writers might have chosen to make Po's second "big bad" another kung-fu bully-boy, they crafted a much more ingenious villain this time, one linked to the circumstances that orphaned Po. Having the villain of an anthropomorphic kung-fu flick be a peacock, a delicate-looking bird, might seem counter-intuitive. But the writers shift the conflict to one of weaponry rather than hand-to-hand conflict. Villainous Lord Shen (Gary Oldman) seeks power by weaponizing his clan's discovery of gunpowder into destructive cannons, with which he plans to conquer all of Cartoon-China. But a prophecy about his being defeated by "black and white" leads him to massacre a tribe of black-and-white pandas, leading to the circumstance wherein Baby Po is adopted by Ping the Goose. As it happens, Po and his fellow martial-arts cops encounter Shen's threat at precisely the same time Po experiences existential doubts about his being the only black-and-white panda that anyone's seen in his neck of the woods.

Despite all these doubts, Po's teacher has informed him that the solution is "inner peace"-- and this is what eventually gives the warrior-panda the moxie he needs to defeat the seemingly-unbeatable cannons. The film frames the idea of spiritual transcendence as something as simple as a fortune-cookie maxim, but the movie delivers what the viewer wants: a hissable villain, who relies not on brute force but upon skills with knives (hidden within Shen's wings) and an inventive conclusion in which martial arts trumps, at least in cartoons, martial arms.

A coda establishes that Po's father is still alive after all, setting up the events of the third film.

                  

ARROW: SEASON TWO (2013-14)

 

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

It's been some time since I visited the ARROW series, possibly because I still remember how terrible the later seasons became. However, on re-watching Season Two, I think this season, more than Season One, earned the show the reputation on which those terrible late seasons coasted.

Admittedly one thing never changed about ARROW in any season: the melodramatic characterization was always cranked up to eleven. One big plotline continued from One was that Oliver Queen's mother Moira was tried for her complicity in Malcolm Merlyn's scheme to destroy an entire neighborhood. This caused erratic mood swings in both her adult children, Oliver and Thea, who varied between adoring and despising Moira, though never both in one mood at the same time. Naturally, whereas such a major trial would have taken a year or more in the real world, in the Arrow-verse it's wrapped in a few weeks, Moira is exonerated and even runs for mayor of Starling City.

A somewhat more consequential subplot involves the revelation that Thea unlike Oliver was not the natural daughter of Moira's husband but rather was conceived between Moira and Malcolm Merlyn. In the latter half of the season, Malcolm returns and successfully claims Thea as her true father, even though her initial reaction is to shoot him. The writers also devote a fair amount of time into developing a romantic arc between Oliver and his slightly wacky assistant Felicity.  But though the soap operatics are generally entertaining in the first few seasons, I'd have to say that they never got quite as good as producer Berlanti's debut superhero series, SMALLVILLE. That show also may have had more low points in its first few seasons, but I tend to prefer a show that has a greater variety of the high and low, as opposed to playing things straight down the middle.

Another positive development is that Season Two wraps up many, though maybe not all, of the "island-adventure" plotlines. These flashbacks consumed much time in Season One, showing how Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) got stuck on a not-so-deserted island, dealing with madmen in search of a scientific weapon and other castaways seeking to avoid being victimized. However, as a result of those struggles, Oliver incurs the enmity of former ally Slade Wilson (Manu Bennett), who trained the playboy in archery. Wilson, aka "Deathstroke," returns to Starling City with vengeance in mind, monomaniacally fixated on destroying everything his former pupil loves. That includes the new addition to the cast, Sara Lance (Caity Lotz), who survived her apparent death at sea to become one of the League of Assassins. She incidentally becomes the program's incarnation of the comics' Black Canary, albeit called only "the Canary," and the actress is decent in the role, in marked contrast to her later acting-history.

The various shout-outs to DC characters proves at least as attractive as the well-done action-scenes. There might not be total agreement between the original characters and ARROW's reworked versions of Professor Ivo, Cyrus Gold, William Tockman and Sebastian Blood. But the reworked characters here are generally efficient at putting across good superhero melodrama. (An additional note is that Barry Allen, prior to undergoing his flashy transformation in his own show, appears in a couple of Season Two episodes, as do two of the support-characters from the proposed program.) But Manu Bennett's formidable performance as Deathstroke is Season Two's greatest asset, as is his plan to use the aforementioned super-weapon-- a drug that can make humans into super-soldiers, roughly on the Captain America level-- to make vicious killers into his shock troops against Starling City.  Given TV's budgetary limits, the showrunners made this scenario far more bracing than many higher-budgeted feature films.

My memory is that Season Three still remains decent entertainment, particularly when the Flash starts interacting with the Arrow-verse. I hope to verify that within at least the next year.