DAUGHTER OF DON Q (1946)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

Without getting into my phenomenality-categories first this time, the greatest significance of this well-wrought Republic chapterplay is that it's the last of a half dozen sound serials to star, or co-star, a female with combative abilities. This leaves out assorted works in which female support-characters may be able to shoot a little, or one later serial that substantially re-uses most of its action-sequences from one of the earlier six. 

DAUGHTER's title was probably a toss-off reference to the Douglas Fairbanks Sr silent movie DON Q SON OF ZORRO, but only because the two narratives share adventurous content, not any story elements-- and both may have been distantly indebted to Cervantes' DON QUIXOTE, even though that story was all about invalidating tales of derring-do. Story-wise, DAUGHTER sounds like some of the silent serials in which some evildoer sought to deprive a rightful heiress of her inheritance. I don't know how many of those old serials showed the heiress fighting off thugs with jui-jitsu, though.

In contrast to the majority of serials, the primary evildoer, one Manning, exists just to get the ball rolling. He learns of the existence of a land grant that was bequeathed to assorted parties, but Manning's the only one who knows of it. Thus, if he hires a gang of thugs to kill off the other heirs, while making the deaths look accidental, Manning claims all the property. However, the lion's share of villainy falls to the hired killers, led by Roy Barcroft of PURPLE MONSTER fame. The murderers succeed in knocking off one or two heirs, but their scheme goes awry when they go after the judo-skilled Dolores Quintero (Adrian Booth). One might think that Manning's plan to make all the deaths look accidental is ruined as soon as Dolores and her reporter-pal Cliff (Kirk Alyn) tell the cops of the organized attempt(s) on Dolores' life. But maybe Barcroft's just one of those guys who never read his Santayana.

 Alyn and Booth (the latter under the former billing Lorna Gray) already had assorted serial roles under their belts, with Gray/Booth still renowned as lead villain Vultura in PERILS OF NYOKA, while Alyn's big roles as Superman and Blackhawk were yet to come. But the leads play off one another well and are given good dialogue and bracing action-scenes. The uncanny phenomenality only appears in two of the assassins' attempts to "covertly" knock off Dolores. In one chapter, the thugs take the captured heroine to a closed fishing-shop and set Dolores up to get impaled by a harpoon-- supposedly the contrivance of the Mafia or something. In another chapter, one of the thugs dons a museum's suit-of-armor and attacks Cliff-- and the armored crook is somehow able to defy Cliff's pistol, though in real life medieval armor could not repel bullets. In both of these peculiar stratagems-- which are weird enough to fall into the uncanny domain-- the villains don't create their own odd weapons, but just "find" them. Still, there are some serials in which costumed villains steal their only super-weapons from good-hearted inventors and put those powers to evil usage-- and if I'm going to credit those malcontents with possession of a death-ray as part of their repertoire, then I guess I can also credit Manning's mooks as having bulletproof armor in their arsenal. 

THE BLACK BELLY OF THE TARANTULA (1971)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

Here we have another giallo with an animal-name, testifying to a minor Argento influence on director Paulo Cavara. Cavara's only well-known giallo (this being the better known of two) lacks Argento's focus upon seamy psychology and aesthetic murder-scenarios, and often Cavara's pace has more resemblance to fast-paced polizitteschis. 

World-weary police inspector Tellini (Giancarlo Giannini) is thinking about a career change, maybe one that would allow him more time with his sexy wife Anna (Stefania Sandrelli). Then a serial killer with a unique murder-pattern gets dropped in Tellini's lap. Beautiful women with no known social connections begin dying at the hand of a madman who's unusually sadistic. The killer utilizes a special poison derived from that of a tarantula hawk-wasp: venom with which the wasp paralyzes a spider in order to lay its eggs in the spider's flesh. Used on the madman's victims, the venom paralyzes them so that they remain conscious as the killer eviscerates them.

Tellini isn't intellectually intrigued by the murders as some detectives might be, and indeed, despite his training he seems disgusted by the case. And after the maniac has preyed upon such victims as Barbara Bouchet and Barbara Bach-- he decides to go after the inspector's wife as well.

Though the killer's method is very inventive, and he's the star of the story as the murderer usually is in such dramas, TARANTULA is most noteworthy for the ambivalent ending (that's why the SPOILER warning is here). In short, Tellini finds the madman, and after a violent battle-- simply kills him. Cavara's last shot is of the guilty officer leaving the scene of the murder and disappearing into a crowd of regular citizens. The strong implication is that Tellini will get away with the crime, but whether he regrets playing executioner, the viewer can only guess. Not many ambivalent conclusions work well in the giallo subgenre, but Cavara's is one of the best.

 

GLADIATOR OF ROME (1962)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological* 

Until I saw the above poster, with Gordon Scott's heroic Marcus on one cross and flanked on either side by two hot crossed babes (sorry, couldn't resist), I didn't notice that the same scene in the film had been intended to crudely replicate the familiar Christian scene of Jesus between the two thieves. I'm not saying that director Mario Costa was using the visual allusion for anything in particular. Although there's some plot-elements in which the good guys are being persecuted by Emperor Caracalls for being Christians, there's almost no Christian or anti-pagan polemic in GLADIATOR. And as other reviewers have noted, there's not even much gladiator-action either.

  If anything, GLADIATOR is a little more of an anti-slavery thing. Two Silicians, Marcus and his princess Nisa (blonde Wandisa Guida) are taken to Rome as slaves, with the former being trained for the arena and the latter becoming a house-slave. It's also in Rome, though, that both of them, who are not romantically involved, pick up romantic partners. Marcus becomes infatuated with a barmaid named Aglae (brunette Ombretta Colli), while a Roman noble, Valerio, becomes enchanted with Nisa. There are a lot of talking-head scenes in which the slaves plot to gain their freedom, with occasional interruptions by Gordon Scott beating up Roman soldiers. Before getting put up on a cross, Marcus is threatened with having his eyes burned out so I guess that's a little more exotic than the usual tortures.     

So, are there no bad women in this particular peplum? Female villainy does get representation from a tertiary character, Tullia (Eleanora Vargas) wife of Anno, both of whom join in tyrannizing over slaves, though I'm not even sure they cared about persecuting Christians. Actress Vargas appears to be significantly older than the other two female performers, though I don't have access to her birthdate. I heard, but did copy down, one line in which she seems to be disapproving of the younger Valerio wasting himself with a commoner female. There are no Mrs. Robinson moments as such though. In a fair number of peplum in this period, I have seen oppositions between good young women and bad older woman, so the writers of this otherwise unremarkable movie may have been playing around with that familiar trope, but not really doing much with it. Anno ends up getting killed in an end-battle that liberates Marcus and the hot crossed babes, Tullia ends up mourning him, and all the good people are freed by the auspices of a brand-new Emperor in town.     

THE OUTLAW (1943)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*                                                                                                                                              This naturalistic film, arguably the first in the subgenre of "sex-westerns," just barely qualifies for one of my ten tropes-- that of "bizarre crimes"-- and even then, the crime only takes up about three or four minutes of screen time and is more psychological than physical in nature.                                                                                                   

I'd seen THE OUTLAW a couple of times before my recent rescreening. For several years, I've known a lot of little factoids about the movie. That it was filmed in 1941 but blocked by the Hays Code until 1943. That the cast consists of just four main characters and a tiny number of support-roles. That OUTLAW was the debut film for two of the actors, Jack Buetel and Jane Russell, both under exclusive contract to producer Howard Hughes for the next seven years. I've learned other bits and pieces since my re-watch, but as of this writing I don't know exactly how the project came about, or why it was important enough to Howard Hughes to assume directorial duties on OUTLAW, even though he'd only directed one other film thirteen years ago. But given the fact that Hughes had acquired partial ownership of the studio RKO by 1941, I think his main aim was to win fame with a big, money-making picture with lots of sex appeal, and that he probably outlined his list of story-preferences to screenwriter Jules Furthman and let Furthman figure out how to stitch everything together.                         

The result was an overbaked melodrama that a number of modern viewers have called "campy" or "so bad it's good," though these assessments don't quite capture the nature of OUTLAW. For one thing, Furthman finds some inventive ways to bring together the four essential characters: Billy the Kid (Buetel), Rio McDonald (Russell), famed gunslinger Doc Holiday (Walter Huston), and Pat Garrett (Thomas Mitchell), sheriff to the New Mexico town of Lincoln. All of the film's action takes place either in Lincoln or in the wilderness surrounding it. Garrett and Rio have both lived in town for an unspecified amount of time, while Billy and Holiday converge on the town for separate but related reasons. However, Holiday has been in Lincoln before. At the film's opening he's on foot and chasing down a man who stole his horse, so he comes to Lincoln because unnamed witnesses told him they saw the horse and its rider heading for the town. But Holiday explicitly mentions that he hopes to encounter his old pal there in Lincoln. Holiday is surprised to learn that Garrett has recently become a lawman, and there's a strong suggestion that the two of them may once have been involved in extra-legal activities. Holiday also knows that Rio and her aunt "recently" moved to Lincoln, suggesting that he knew the younger woman-- whom he calls "his girl"-- in her previous residence in Socorro (probably meant to be identical with the town of that name in New Mexico). Given Holiday's greater age, it's not impossible that he set up Rio, apparently more a "mistress" than a girlfriend, on her Lincoln chicken-ranch, though there's no way to prove this speculation.               

Holiday finds his horse in the possession of Billy, who claims he bought the roan from a stranger. Holiday seems not the least bit interested in Billy's excuse, and Garrett prepares to arrest the alleged horse thief before Holiday can gun Billy down. But Holiday is amused by Billy's nerviness, and when the young man decks Garrett in mid-arrest, this also amuses the older gunfighter. But Garrett is enraged at having been one-upped in front of his old comrade, and he orders both men to leave town by sundown.                                                                                                                                                  Before either can do so, that night Billy is attacked in the barn where he stables his horse by a gun-wielding would-be killer. He wrestles down the assailant and finds that it's the lovely Rio. He's never met her, but when she gives her last name and the name of the town she formerly occupied, he realizes that she's the sister of a man Billy killed in self-defense, when the two men quarreled over a woman. While holding Rio down Billy comments on her comeliness. Rio responds by faking Billy out and trying to stab him with a pitchfork. Again Billy restrains her, and they roll in the hay some more, concluding with what might be a scene of Billy raping the nubile Rio in deep shadows-- though clearly Hughes wanted to keep things ambiguous.     

The next day Holiday and Billy have not left town, and an ambitious would-be deputy challenges Billy and gets gunned down. When Garrett seeks to arrest Billy, Holiday sides with the youth, increasing Garrett's sense of betrayal. Billy gets wounded, so Holiday tries to hide him at Rio's ranch, and then leaves to decoy pursuers away from Billy. Rio cooperates but never makes the slightest reference to Billy having ravished her-- again, Hughes playing it as safe as he could in the Hays era. For the month that Billy in in Rio's care, Rio falls in love with Billy, and even her aunt confesses his charms. Billy, who has expressed sentiments about the treachery of women, doesn't reciprocate. Indeed, both Holiday and Billy insult the young woman by implying that their quarrel over the roan takes priority over their rivalry for Rio.                                                                     

Most of the rest of the film's events take place in the wilderness, as Garrett relentlessly pursues the two fugitives. Though Rio stays behind at the ranch, she ensures her future participation by peevishly filling the canteens of both men with sand. Later a vengeful Billy returns to the ranch and utters threats that sound like those of ravishment. But what he actually does is to drag Rio out into the desert and tie her up, so she can suffer the rays of the sun as Billy and Doc did. Garrett and his captive Holiday find Rio, and Garrett, anticipating that Billy will change his mind and return to free the girl, sets a trap. Billy is captured. Yet if he thought Rio's ordeal would "tame" her, he's proved wrong by an incident in which she nearly drowns Billy.                                                                                         

 I won't specify the exact way that the conflicts between Billy, Holiday and Garrett shake out at the climax, except that Rio's role in the story becomes an indirect one. In later years, the three-way male conflict led to many critics divining a homoerotic vibe between the trio. It's not beyond the bounds of possibility, but I would have to see evidence that either Hughes (at least in his capacity as producer) or Furthman had a habit of working such material into a lot of other, ostensibly mainstream movies. However, one of Holiday's last speeches about the precarious friendships between males-- particularly two powerful males-- could have been just as easily written for any number of less risible westerns. Even Garrett's animosity, hating Billy for his having made the sheriff look bad in front of an esteemed friend, could have appeared in a lot of the mainstream movies Furthman had been writing since the 1910s. Also common to a lot of westerns was the idea that sooner or later the roving gunfighter needs to settle down and make babies with a likely spouse. There's more than a little of the "war between men and women" going on throughout the picture, but the conflict between Billy and Rio is resolved as it is in almost every other Hollywood romance-- whereas only death, not sex, resolves the conflict between the three men. There are some campy-sounding lines in OUTLAW, particularly all the odd remarks about how much Billy and Holiday love their little horse. But despite the excessive nature of Jane Russell's feminine assets-- which were more responsible for selling the movie than any of the conflicts of the males-- I tend to think that excess serves the cause of heterosexuality.                                 

THE BLACK SWAN (1942)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

I can just barely justify assigning this naturalistic film a trope in my system, based only on the fact that in THE BLACK SWAN, pirates are made into the means of overcoming piracy, and thus are factors in bringing about the very civilization that moviegoers fled to theaters to escape.

SWAN-- which according to my sources is barely based upon the Rafael Sabatini novel-- starts off by abjuring any of the politics that informed both Sabatini's most famous novel CAPTAIN BLOOD and the 1935 film adaptation that became the granddaddy of all sound pirate films.

This is a story of the Spanish Main - - when Villainy wore a Sash, and the only political creed in the world was - - - Love, Gold, and Adventure.

But in fact, SWAN uses basically the same political backdrop as CAPTAIN BLOOD, with England seeking to make inroads against Spain's colonial holdings in the New World, the aforesaid Spanish Main. The broad implication to most English-speaking audiences was that England was going to become a better master than Spain.

Only through scraps of dialogue do the characters make clear that the male principals in the story-- the historical Henry Morgan (Laird Cregar) and the fictional Jamie Waring (Tyrone Power) and Billy Leech (George Sanders) -- start out as English privateers, who are free to pillage the ships and colonies of the Spanish. Yet the film starts out with what seems an outright act of violent piracy, as Waring, Leech and their forces attack the Argentinian town of Corrientes. However, the raiders then suffer a counterattack, and Jamie is taken prisoner and stretched upon a rack by the Spanish governor. This state of affairs only lasts long enough for Waring to exchange some barbs about past hostilities, and then Waring is rescued by a force led by his bosom chum Tommy Blue (Thomas Mitchell).

The governor changes places with Waring on the rack, but the interlude's real purpose is to introduce two other characters. One is the minor figure of Lord Denby (George Zucco), England's governor of Jamaica, whose presence in a Spanish-held city is never explained. Waring implies that Denby's been giving aid and comfort to the enemy, hanging Englishmen, presumably other privateers. The dialogue has also established by this time that Waring thinks that Morgan, something of a father-figure to Waring, has been hanged in England.

Though Denby claims that England and Spain have made peace, Waring tells his buddies to stick Denby in a cell. Then the much more important character of Denby's daughter Margaret (Maureen O'Hara) shows up. Waring immediately begins courting her in his preferred manner, trying to force a kiss upon her. She bites his lip, he knocks her out, and then throws her over his shoulder, implicitly planning to continue the courtship elsewhere. Then he forgets about Margaret-- rather unceremoniously dropping her to the floor-- as the last major character in the story pops up. It's none other than Henry Morgan, who, instead of getting hanged, has been appointed to take Denby's place as governor of Jamaica. The broad implication is that the former privateer is supposed to be better than Denby at ridding the Caribbean of pirates.

Waring and Blue are only reluctantly converted to serve Morgan's cause, while Leech makes clear that he plans to continue as a full-time pirate. In Jamaica, Denby cedes his position to Morgan and then disappears from the story, but his continued presence in Jamaica makes it convenient for Margaret to go on living there-- and thus for Waring to court her by more "civilized" methods. But in contrast to many similar swashbucklers, including CAPTAIN BLOOD, the female lead shows no overt sign of interest in the male lead, for all that Waring recites the usual "your lips say no but ..." schtick. Despite Waring's forcefulness and charisma, Margaret cleaves to her current fiancee, a weak sister named Ingram.

However, if Denby is only a suspected traitor, Ingram is the real thing. He sells intel on incoming treasure-ships to Leech and his gang, and even warns them when the ships under Morgan's command go on the hunt. To Margaret's credit, she does notice one of Ingram's suspicious transactions, but she still makes plans to marry him. This enrages Waring, so that he kidnaps her and takes her away on his ship. This leads into Leech's forces overtaking Waring's one ship, and lots of romantic tensions as Waring runs a long con to convince the pirate that he and Margaret deserted decent society to elope. 

SWAN is the closest thing we have to a perfect pirate movie, with note-perfect performances by Power, O'Hara, Cregar, Sanders and Mitchell, and an inimitable score by Alfred Newman. Yet the script by Ben Hecht and Seton I. Miller excels in establishing how much fun robbery and rapine are when they're performed in the name of civilization. Whether by accident or design, Margaret never overtly responds to any of Waring's roguish sallies until he proves to her that he's actually joined the side of the angels. Thus, when the two engage in a final liplock at the movie's close, Morgan laments that "it's the end of the Spanish Main"-- dolefully returning the viewer to the real world, where love, gold and adventure only survive in stories.

THE ZEBRA KILLER (1974)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

Once more a streaming service has unearthed a specimen of "weird cinema" for all interested parties, one that, from what I've heard, has never received an American VHS or DVD release.

Slightly before he directed the well known "blaxploitation" film ABBY, grindhouse veteran William Girdler (a White guy, incidentally) made this obscure low-budget psycho-thriller, starring Austin (ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13) Stoker. The city of Louisville is plagued by a serial killer, but with a difference. The killer not only executes various victims with no known connection to one another, he uses different murder-methods each time. Stoker's character, Black police detective Frank Savage, is assigned to find the killer, alongside his cheery White partner. Strangely, even though the police captain is constantly raging about the need to end the threat, there's only one mention of the possibility of other cops pursuing the case, and nothing, least of all a task force, comes of it.

As I recall, the big reveal turns out to be the old "killing off the jurors who sentenced his father" trope, though Girdler, who also provided the script, doesn't spend much time on the murderer's motivations. Even less well explained is his peculiar disguise. Though the Zebra Killer (never called that in the film) is a White guy (James Carroll Pickett, who only acted in two other films, both directed by Girdler), during his crimes he dons blackface and a big Afro, and affects a stereotypical Black accent. To complicate things further, Zebra Killer holds a grudge against Savage. Zebra not only calls Savage to berate him with racist insults and to give him clues, he kidnaps the detective's girlfriend and threatens to kill and/or rape her. Zebra has one long scene where he rants at his captive about race relations, but nothing he says possesses any psychological heft, and he doesn't even try to assail her in any way. Did Girdler, without saying so and perhaps losing his grindhouse audience, want to imply Zebra had some negative compensation issues? The world will never know. But Zebra's attire and varied killing methods make him an uncanny psycho, even though none of the methods themselves are uncanny.

In contrast to the majority of American films in this subgenre, the script treats Zebra's racism as an unusual deviance. Savage gets along fine with his White partner, and they toss racial barbs at one another like a low-budget Culp and Cosby. Savage is a cool, laid-back hero even though it takes him a really long time to get anything done. Girdler shows a scene of Savage practicing karate at a dojo to foreground a later battle (though not a climactic one) in which Savage nearly beats the stuffing out of Zebra. Possibly Pickett simply didn't know how to do anything in a staged fight but fall down? This means that Girdler, after giving Savage several chances to overcome his opponent, then has to let Zebra whip out a hidden knife and wound the detective, so that the killer can escape for the final reckoning later.

It's an odd movie, which invokes racial tension verbally but barely shows any incidents. In fact, Savage even shakes down a Black guy purely on suspicion, which most blaxploitation heroes would never do. There's a comic scene in which the two detectives come across a pimp (familiar face D'Urville Martin) who's being beat up by five of his hookers. The cops' solution is to call a paddy wagon, pile the pimp and the hookers into the same van, and let the girls continue beating their victim. Nevertheless, I rate the film's mythicity as "fair" simply because it captures some of the sociological dynamics of the period.

SISTER STREET FIGHTER: FIFTH LEVEL FIST (1976)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

Possibly Toei Studios thought the Tina Long character (called two different names in different releases) was played out, for though they used the SISTER STREET FIGHTER rubric for this movie, star Etsuko Shihomi played a new character, name of Kiku, There's also a move away from the wild pulp fantasy of the trilogy, with a heroine taking on a variety of disparate kung fu practitioners. 

Kiku exists in a fairly ordinary world, practicing kung fu while her parents pester her to get married. She has some sort of job, the nature of which I couldn't figure out, but somehow she's assigned to be a translator for an American bigwig coming to Japan. In this way she unwittingly meets a group of criminals who will become her enemies, and a Japanese cop, Takagi, with whom she shares some possible romantic sentiments. 

The villains are drug smugglers again, but this time they operate in a Japanese movie studio, where it seems like the majority of employees are in on the illicit practice. One of their minor employees, a half-Black, half-Japanese guy named Jim, is made by Takagi's anti-drug unit. So the gangsters just kill Jim so he can't roll on them.

However, the late Jim's half-sister Michi (Mitchi Love, who appeared as a different character in the first and third Tina films) is also a member of Kiku's martial arts class. Michi seeks to avenge Jim and gets captured. Takagi can't find her, so Kiku decides to launch her own investigation. She takes the role of an extra on a current studio movie, finds Michi, and then it's action, action, action for the film's last half hour. Only two elements reflect the pulpiness of the earlier films. Instead of warriors dressed up in archaic garb, some of the actors in the gang remain dressed in traditional Japanese garb, and one particular guy, wielding a real katana, looks to me like a ringer for LONE WOLF AND CUB's Tomisaburo Wakayama. The second element is that when Kiku is captured, the villains tie her to a fully functioning sawmill, implicitly a prop, yet as capable of slicing a heroine in half as any sawmill from ancient "mellerdramas." Sadly, no one makes any knowing comments on the hoariness of this death-trap.

There are a few liberal political touches here. One is Jim's alienation from his mother's people because he looks Black. Another is a scene in which Takagi urges Kiku to be more traditionally feminine. He's not seen to complain when the two of them join to take down the movie-gangsters. But Kiku doesn't get a chance to crow, because strangely the film ends on a freeze-frame, implying that Takagi may die of gunshot wounds. And so on this curious note the SISTER STREET FIGHTER franchise came to an unequivocal conclusion.

LITTLE MISS INNOCENCE (1973)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

Chris Warfield's LITTLE MISS INNOCENCE (a more fittingly ironic title than TEENAGE INNOCENCE) isn't a metaphenomenal movie, though it almost certainly inspired 1977's DEATH GAME, which makes it into some concordances due to its psycho-thriller additions.The version I saw on Youtube has certainly had a lot of sex-scenes removed, as well as a scene mentioned in an IMDB review, in which one of the female characters mentions having been raped by her brother.

Fifty-something bachelor Rick (John Alderman), gainfully employed as a music arranger, enjoys a comfortable pad in Los Angeles. Driving along a boulevard, Rick spots two teenaged girls thumbing for a ride and he lets them hitch. The slightly more dominant female is Carol (Sandy Dempsey), while her more soft-spoken companion is Judy (Terri Johnson). Rick lets them out at some point, but not before they find out where he lives. After some puzzling discussion as to Rick being old enough to be a father to them, they nevertheless show up on his doorstep.

Rick thinks they just want a quick roll in the hay, so he enjoys a night with both girls. There also follows a rather misleading scene in which Rick squires the girls around to see the local sights, as if he were a devoted dad with his two teen daughters, but I assume this irrelevant sequence was thrown in to substitute for deleted sex-scenes if the flick was sold to television. But the crux of the real conflict is the girls won't leave when Rick tells them to do so, and they make certain Rick can't call the cops by informing him that Judy's underage, so he's guilty of statutory rape. Yet even their private dialogue doesn't clarify what they want of Rick. Not until the last half hour does the viewer hear that Carol has talked Judy into a big experiment, to see if it's possible to screw a man to death.

Carol's hostility to the male of the species would make more sense with the rape backstory. But the script, co-written by Warfield, doesn't put all the blame on her, and indeed, the relatively shy Judy is the first one to initiate sex with Rick. Clearly she's at least partly intrigued by the experiment to see how much sex an experienced male can dispense.

Toward the end, the two young vixens exhaust Rick. Carol at least considers other options-- the use of a dildo, or tortures a la De Sade, whom both girls know about, at least by reputation. But no exotic sex-acts are shown, although Rick's hands are bound at the time when the young ladies finally decide to leave. Yet, while they could just leave him tied up to starve-- since he doesn't seem to have any regular friends who might stop by-- even hard-ass Carol consents to let him loose before they depart. The clever irony at the end is that Rick begs them not to leave, because he's grown addicted to their sweet torments.

I grade the mythicity high precisely because the girls aren't true sadists or psychotic man-haters. They have a clinical, "innocent" desire to explore the functioning of the male anatomy, and Rick is their experimental subject. In closing I'll note that the director of photography is cult director Ray Dennis Steckler, but I've yet to see any of his directorial efforts look this well photographed. 

ANGEL (1984),. AVENGING ANGEL (1985), ANGEL III: THE FINAL CHAPTER (1988)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

I decided to watch the three ANGEL films of the eighties mostly to see to what extent they fulfill my designated trope of "bizarre crimefighting," given that in all three films the protagonist functions with two identities; one respectable, the other out for vengeance.

With the first film-- which hit big box-office with its tagline "High school honor student by day, Hollywood hooker by night"-- the young prostitute is not a crimefighter as such. High schooler Molly Stewart (Donna Wilkes) pays for her private school education by turning tricks under the name "Angel" on the Hollywood Boulevard. Both her father and mother deserted Molly and so she became a pro to avoid being sent into the foster system, but she's picked up a "street family" consisting in part of former stuntman Kit Carson (Rory Calhoun) and lesbian apartment manager Solly (Susan Tyrrell). A little ways into the film, a protective cop named Andrews finds out her secret but merely tries to talk her into quitting the life.

So in this film Molly's double identity only becomes a sort of "crimefighting" after the fact. when a necrophiliac serial killer begins picking off prostitutes on the Boulevard, including a hooker friend of Molly's. Molly arms herself with a handgun but when she and her friends encounter the killer, it's actually Kit who does the shooting. So in the first film, Angel's qualifications as a vigilante avenger are pretty limited.

AVENGING ANGEL takes place a few years later. With some unspecified help from her new father-figure Andrews, Molly (now played by Betsy Russell) is taking law courses, though her status is vague. (One scene shows her actually litigating a case in court, though perhaps she was meant to be a paralegal.) Yet for whatever reason she's also become far more proficient with firearms. 

Andrews is slain by gangsters seeking to acquire all of the properties on the Boulevard (sort of a sleazy update of the Western trope of the Evil Banker foreclosing on Virtuous Ranchers). Molly decides to revive her Angel persona in order to go undercover and make contacts, calling upon both Kit and Solly in the process. When the mobsters try to rub out a witness to their crimes, Kit and Angel (her bare face hanging out and all) drive them away with blazing rifle-fire. This leads to more encounters between the virtuous vigilantes and the evil exploiters, the highlight of which is the climax. In this gleefully over-the-top sequence, the head mobster and his gunsels kidnap an infant in the care of Solly, in order to regain custody of the crime boss's son-- who is, unfortunately, dead. This leads to a macabre scene in which the heroes prop the body of the mobster's son in a wheelchair to simulate life. It doesn't work, but it does lead an entertaining game of "toss the helpless infant around." As in the first film, Calhoun and Tyrrell provide ample support to Russell's heroine, who seems much gutsier and more forthright than was the Wilkes incarnation.

Three years later for the filmmakers (but seven or more years later in the movie-universe), Molly (now played by Mitzi Kapture) has given up the bar for the life of a freelance photographer. There's no real semblance of a "street family" for Molly this time, though she does meet one or two old acquaintances. Though it's true, as some reviewers said, that the two films directed by Robert Vincent O'Neil are glossied-up versions of Boulevard existence, new writer-director Tom DeSimone provides an even more colorless mainstream effort, despite working in a white slavery ring tied to a porn film operation.

The initiating incident for Angel's second crusade is a little more interesting this time, though DeSimone could've done much better with the setup. Molly accidentally runs into the mother who deserted her years ago, and it just so happens the mother's involved in the aforementioned enterprise. Molly's Mom lasts only long enough to inform Molly that she's got a sister she never knew about, who's gotten roped into the porn-movie operation, and then Molly's Mom is knocked off for Reasons. Molly revives her Angel persona once more as a means of getting access to the operation, being interviewed by Queen Bee Nadine (Maud Adams). The heroine also recruits a couple of very forgettable male allies for her sting. Molly reveals the truth to her sister Michelle, and despite initial resistance, Michelle ends up finding out the awful truth before Molly comes to the rescue.

Though DeSimone had made some choice grindhouse movies with HELL NIGHT and REFORM SCHOOL GIRLS, everything in FINAL is very pedestrian. Whereas O'Neil never met a blood-squib he didn't like, there's very little gun-action here. Kapture is pretty but underwhelming in these days before her turn on the cable series SILK STALKINGS. There are only two decent scenes in the movie: Molly hoaxing a pimp into baring it all for prospective sex, only to kick him into the streets naked, and Molly impaling a villain with a cargo-hook. Despite having some talented performers, particularly Adams, his script gives them nearly nothing to do. There was a cable-made sequel in 1993 with yet another actress playing Molly, and going on my memories, I think it was probably on the same bland level as the DeSimone effort.

Though I'm not a fan of any of the movies in the series, researching their provenance did lead me to this excellent DVD review of the first three films, which also provided strong insight into the genesis of eighties "Striploitation" movies.

SHAOLIN WARRIOR (2013)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

I started watching this 2013 film because the streaming service on which the movie appeared mislabeled it as a 1980s Gordon Liu flick with a similar title. From what I can tell, the main character is played by one Ye Jianwei, and WARRIOR appears to be shot on video on just a few sets, and subtitled to boot.

Feng (Jianwei) is a young man who seeks to avenge his murdered sister, so he takes refuge in a Shaolin Temple, hoping to master enough skills to kill the murderer. Trouble is, the villain is a highly placed general, and he sends his soldiers to the temple to capture Feng. What results is a lot of fights punctuated by Feng getting captured or freed, the latter accomplished by a young monk his own age. The fights are competent but nothing special.

The one potential metaphenomenal element of WARRIOR is that the general is a nut with a cannibal fetish, and he not only killed Feng's sister, he cooked her and ate part of her, while feeding other parts of her roasted body to some of his officers for a prank. But the movie doesn't evoke any dread in the villain's fetish, so the bizarre crime of WARRIOR is merely naturalistic. 

COMIN' AT YA! (1981), TREASURE OF THE FOUR CROWNS (1983)

 

PHENOMENALITY: (1) naturalistic, (2) *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

I've devoted space to a number of limited talents who made one or two notable films and then either left the industry or become hired guns for TV. But there are also a number of people who really had no discernible talent except to take advantage of trends.

In the sixties American actor/producer Tony Anthony parlayed the enthusiasm for spaghetti westerns into a short career as a star of Italian horse operas, four featuring a character called "the Stranger" (largely a Clint Eastwood clone) while the fifth was the above average BLINDMAN. The craze for the subgenre had bottomed out in the mid seventies, and Anthony went into other endeavors. However, in the late seventies he made contact with two other businessmen. Between the three of them they not only brought a single spaghetti oater into prominence (with Anthony as the lead), they also launched a new iteration of the fifties' "3-D craze" with their western COMIN' AT YA. The film's success led to American studios launching 3-D versions of properties such as JAWS and THE AMITYVILLE HORROR. However, the eighties 3-D craze lasted no longer than the one in the 1950s, for when Anthony and his partners tried to duplicate their success in 1983 with TREASURE OF THE FOUR CROWNS (also starring Anthony), they crashed and burned. Anthony retired from filmmaking, though one of his collaborators, Gene Quintano, had fluctuating success as a Hollywood writer and/or director for the next ten or so years.

The success of the 1981 film isn't hard to understand. While it's just another formula western-- albeit one more sentimental than the more famous Italian works-- director Ferdinando (BLINDMAN) Baldi and composer Ennio Morricone revived many of the sensory and narrative tropes they'd used throughout the first wave of the spaghettis. It's a very simple story of white slavers abducting the bride (Victoria Abril) of gunfighter Hart (Anthony), followed by Hart's involved efforts to rescue his wife and to revenge himself upon the outlaw gang. There's no metaphenomenal content and it might be a stretch for me to categorize Hart's mission as an example of naturalistic "bizarre crimefighting--" though Hart does blow up a whole town before executing his main enemy by blowing up the windmill to which the villain is bound. Ironically, the flick's greatest asset was that it only used the 3-D effects sparingly.

I don't know what went on afterward, but I will theorize that Anthony and his partners instantly decided that their new motto would be "nothing succeeds like excess." One quote claims that Quintano wanted to follow up the success of COMIN' AT YA with a heist film like TOPKAPI. But clearly the story put together by Anthony and Quintano (albeit turned into a screenplay by three other guys) is much more indebted to a much bigger 1981 success: Steven Spielberg's RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. That said, TREASURE OF THE FOUR CROWNS does often seem like a hideous amalgam of RAIDERS with a very bad heist-film-- and the strange result may be the only imitation of Indiana Jones that didn't have a combative hero anywhere near it. Even the return of Baldi as director and Morricone as composer couldn't stem the chaos that ensued.

Anthony didn't look very dynamic when he was shooting owlhoots in COMIN' AT YA, but in CROWNS he looks pasty and bloated when he's seen, all on his own, negotiating various traps in a cave, trying to obtain an artifact for his employers. For the film's first ten minutes phlegmatic protagonist "J.T. Striker" is assailed by animals, automatic traps and what seem to be discarnate spirits, with no rhyme or reason. He escapes the cave, returns to civilization (somehow) and delivers the desired artifact to his employers. After minor resistance, the employers talk Striker into assembling a heist-team that can break into the compound of a malevolent cult-leader. For scientific reasons, Striker's benefactors want this "tomb raider" to steal a treasure from the compound which will make it possible to summon forth the power of "the Four Crowns" (even though one crown was lost in antiquity, so there's really only three).

The film spends about half an hour having Striker recruit a bunch of maladjusted ne'er-do-wells who will constitute his ideal heist-team. These half-baked characters aren't worth describing, except to say that they demonstrate that none of the writers knew how to execute even limited characterizations. Even trapeze artist Liz (Ana Obregon) sparks no interest. Striker eventually talks even the most reluctant allies into joining his team, though he does so in part by whipping out the cave-artifact and showing his partners how it can call forth poltergeist-related effects. It never occurs to Striker that this might have fatal consequences, because the script says, "Shoehorn in as many ridiculous 3-D effects as possible, no matter how you do it."

Then the remainder of the film is devoted to the team's glacial progress as they break into the cult-compound. To sum up, traps of some sort kill all of the heist-artists except Striker and Liz (the better to make sure they're able to hook up in the end). Then things look grim for the survivors when the cultists catch them and start to spray them with machine gun fire. However, Striker has just obtained two mystic gems from whatever crowns are in the sanctum. The gems give Striker the power to enact a ghastly reprise of the Nazi-Killing Scene from RAIDERS, wiping out the cultists with patently phony FX and lots of objects-flying-on-wires. Once all the villains are dead, Striker is able to throw off the influence of the possessing power, whatever it was, and to destroy the gems so that no one can use them again. Roll credits.

While no RAIDERS-imitator was ever able to touch the hem of Spielberg's directorial jacket, Anthony and Quintano may be the only ones to botch the basic idea of the daredevil-adventurer. Neither Striker nor any of his aides get into exciting fights or execute thrilling escapes,. So it appears that the guys who forged the main story thought that all RAIDERS had going for it was a big boulder at the start and a bunch of evildoers getting blasted to smithereens at the conclusion. But though CROWNS flopped at the 1983 box office, I have the impression that people looking for the next "so bad it's good" film probably will get more of a boost from CROWNS than from COMIN' AT YA.

Though Anthony retired after CROWNS, Quintano was able to parley the success of COMIN' AT YA into a career. Oddly, a year or so after the awfulness of CROWNS, he co-wrote two more Indiana-clones for Cannon Films, the back-to-back films KING SOLOMON'S MINES and ALLEN QUATERMAIN AND THE LOST CITY OF GOLD. Mediocre as these movies were, they look like models of well-executed formula fiction next to CROWNS, so I think the rapid improvement must lie with Quintano's co-writers, even though they didn't have stellar careers either.

THE PUNISHER (2004)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

Though the marketing for the second PUNISHER film places considerable emphasis on the Marvel hero wearing the skull-costume denied him in the 1989 movie, Thomas Jane doesn't really spend a helluva lot of time in said costume. Without that "outre outfit" and the one "diabolical device" in the story (a ballistic knife), I might still categorize the movie as "uncanny" thanks to the protagonist's mission to take down all criminals.

I've not read any of the comics-stories on which the film is ostensibly based. However, I tend to doubt that Marvel did a version of Punisher that deviated so sharply from his established origin. In the original tale-- which may have been "borrowed" partly from the first Don Pendleton EXECUTIONER paperback-- ex-Marine Frank Castle and his family witness a mob execution in Central Park. The mobsters shoot them all, but Castle survives to become the Punisher, warring on all criminals.

This time out, Castle is an undercover FBI agent. His imposture of a gangster eventuates in a raid on a smuggling operation headed by one Bobby Saint. Bobby dies, and his mafia-boss father Howard Saint (John Travolta) moves heaven and earth to learn the identity of the agent who caused his son's death. Saint's minions, led by enforcer Glass (Will Patton), assault a family reunion and kill a few dozen people, including Castle's wife. But despite the agent's formidable gun-skills Castle is shot and thrown into the sea.

He survives, and weeks later rather remarkably reveals that he's still alive to the police, apparently to shame them for not catching the killers. Even more remarkably, the cops don't try to take Castle in for questioning-- which shows that the scripters just wanted a dramatic scene no matter how improbable. Said scripters are director Jonathan Hensleigh, who had peaked in the nineties with the silly but amusing ARMAGEDDON, and Michael France, whose only good piece of writing was his partial contribution to GOLDENEYE.

After holing up in an abandoned apartment building, where he ends up forging unwanted bonds with the three quirky residents, Punisher lays his scheme of revenge. Rather than making a frontal assault, the hero decides to repay the loss of his family by alienating Saint from his various allies and family members. This operatic plot does give Travolta and Patton a lot of dramatic moments, but it takes some of the expected punch out of the hero's usual ultraviolent pattern. When Hensleigh does finally unleash some action set-pieces, they're watchable, but nothing to write home about.

Jane makes a decent hero, and he does pull off the affect-less persona of the Punisher fairly well. He's a little too Hollywood-handsome to fit the role, though I suppose he fits this overall project, which is just adequate action-movie fodder and nothing more.

HARD TARGET 2 (2016)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

This very belated (25 years!) sequel-in-name-only to 1993's HARD TARGET is an efficient if unremarkable action-opus built on the chopsocky skills of star Scott Adkins as the titular target. But my main interest in it is that its execution is one more demonstration of my trope-theory. 

Prior to this review, I've bracketed two other "hunting humans" films for comparison in order to show that this "bizarre crime" trope, like others in my other categories, can always have "naturalistic" as well as "uncanny" permutations. The distinction between each phenomenality-domain always depends on the absence or presence of narrative motifs that suggest an essential "strangeness" about the events depicted. 

The 1993 Van Damme film takes the concept of the DANGEROUS GAME short story, in which a madman hunts human beings for sport, and turns the practice into a business run by sane but ruthless mercenaries, who offer rich assholes the chance to hunt impoverished homeless people in big cities. The motif of the Promethean madman is gone, but in its place is the idea of transporting a perilous criminal activity to the streets of big cities, where the possibility of exposure is extremely high.

TARGET 2 duplicates the business practices of the first film in that villain Aldrich (Rob Knepper) also organizes hunts of human beings for the entertainment of rich assholes. However, Aldrich centers his operations in the wilds of Myanmar, paying off officials to look the other way while he preys upon poor locals. This is an atypical crime, but given the location the viewer is not as likely to be incredulous that something like this could happen, so there's nothing uncanny about it.

New hero Wes Baylor (Adkins) ends up appearing virtually on Aldrich's doorstep. Baylor, a MMA fighter, accidentally kills a fellow fighter in a tournament, and becomes so distraught that he gives up on life, traveling to Thailand and eking out a living in underground cage fights. Aldrich invites Baylor to Myanmar with the lure of a new fight, and when Adkins arrives, he learns that he's expected to run for his life from armed thrill-seekers.

Aldrich is a flat villain, though ably portrayed by Knepper, whom I knew only from a very different role in 1987's WILD THING, and the rest of his accomplices are no better, with one exception: Sofia (Rhona Mitra). She not only gets one of the most extensive fight-scenes with her quarry-- probably because the actress had established herself for her fake-fighting skills in movies like 2008's DOOMSDAY-- she even has a minor psychological motivation, in that she's hunting men because her despised father was a hunter. Not that motivation is very important in an American chopsocky, but one should acknowledge even small extra touches.

But action sells TARGET 2, and as I said, Adkins delivers on the fight-scenes, and his character gets some romantic support when he succors local native Tha (Ann Truong), whose brother escaped the last hunt. Tha gets a little action of her own, knife-killing a hunter who attempts to rape her, and later managing to kill Sofia, largely by dumb luck more than superior fighting-skill. There's another small arc with one of the hunters being a web-game designer seeking to use the experience for a "first-person shooter" game, but this comes to nothing special, any more than Baylor's predictable redemption.

If a viewer is not interested in sussing out the phenomenality of action flicks, one could probably get the best out of TARGET 2 by fast-forwarding through any scenes that don't involve either Adkins or Mitra fighting.

LOLA COLT (1967)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*

I never liked video stores for their mainstream items, but for the many oddball flicks that the store managers certainly purchased just to fill empty shelves. Those venues are gone now, but their spirit lives on in streaming services like FLIX, which is where I saw this film. LOLA COLT, starring singer-actress Lola Falana, was an elusive "spaghetti western" that afficionadoes couldn't seem to locate in the eighties and nineties, from what I could learn. For the past twenty years I forgot I'd ever wanted to see it, but something prompted me to go looking-- and there it was. In fact, the FLIX copy didn't even suffer the cuts mentioned in IMDB reviews.

In America the so-called "blaxploitation" genre didn't take off until 1970's COTTON COMES TO HARLEM, though that film had been preceded by a few movies and TV shows that focused on heroic or quasi-heroic black characters in ensembles, including those played by Bill Cosby in I SPY (1965), Greg Morris in MISSION IMPOSSIBLE (1966), and Jim Brown in THE DIRTY DOZEN (1967). Yet Italy had a tiny smattering of heroic black characters in films, albeit in support roles in films like TAUR THE MIGHTY and MOLE MEN AGAINST THE SON OF HERCULES. I'm not aware of any female black heroes in Italian cinema prior to LOLA COLT, any more than appear in any other national cinema. Thus I don't know what led some production company to invest time and money making Lola Falana into the first such heroine, beating out Pam Grier's THE BIG BIRD CAGE by five years. (I don't count Grier's appearance in 1971's BIG DOLL HOUSE, where she's not any sort of heroic figure.)

From the one or two short reviews I'd seen of the film, no one seemed too impressed by COLT-- and sure enough, it's a crude, disjointed oater by director/co-writer Siro Marcellini, whose most notable credit is probably writing and directing 1963's BEAST OF BABYLON AGAINST THE SON OF HERCULES. The most unusual aspect of COLT is that it doesn't present a protagonist modeled on the Sergio Leone persona of a money-hungry (but good looking) scofflaw. Possibly Marcellini didn't think such a persona would work for a female hero, since she's nearly as virtuous as any standard Hollywood Western crusader.

Lola is a showgirl traveling with three others in a stagecoach, but the girls are forced to stop in the small town of Santa Anna. It might be near the Mexican border since various characters have Mexican names (though everyone looks pretty European to me, particularly a blonde boy named Pablito). One showgirl has become sick, and the others seek a doctor. Though there's no licensed physician, there is a medical student, a handsome fellow named Rod (Peter Martell) who becomes the sick girl's caregiver. The local biddies don't like the presence of the showgirls, but a saloon-owner gives the shady ladies lodgings in exchange for a singing-and-dancing performance. 

However, even before Lola (the only one who performs) gets on the stage, she becomes aware that Santa Anna suffers repeated attacks led by a bandit named El Diablo (German Cobos). Diablo is pressuring the people of the town to sign over their land to him, and he's terrorizing them for that purpose. However, he's taken an odd course to make sure they don't fight back, having abducted an assortment of hostages, whom he keeps jailed at his ranch. Why he didn't just make the landowners sign their property away as soon as he kidnapped their relatives et al-- the script does not say.

Both Doctor Rod and El Diablo take a liking to Lola, particularly after seeing her dance in a skimpy one-piece. Diablo invites Lola to his ranch, where he reveals that his name is the very waspy Larry Stern. Lola lambastes the doctor for the townsmen's unwilligness to fight back, because Lola herself had suffered the depredations of outlaws who killed everyone in her family but her. Still, Lola tries to find a way to undermine Diablo out of a general sense of justice, doing her best to con him without giving up any goods.

Lola eventually leads the townsmen to free their relations, but while the film's building up to that heroic act, the script fills time with long, reasonably well-done fistfights between Rod and Diablo and between Rod and Diablo's main henchman. Most of the other characters are bare stereotypes, though a secondary conflict arises when Rod's local girlfriend Rose gets jealous of the almost-doctor's attentions to Lola. COLT has the minor distinction of being an early Western that ends up validating a white-black romance.

How does Lola Gate stack up as a heroine? Well, she knows how to handle a pistol, though she only shoots two villains in the concluding raid, as well as clubbing two guys with her gun-butt. She's more important to the story as an inspirational figure, so again the last fight with Diablo goes once more to Handsome Doc Rod. I'd still count Lola as a combative protagonist, though Falana's performance is flat and unimpressive, with Martell and Cobos providing the best acting. No one overtly remarks on Lola's skin-color, and even the old biddies are on her side once she liberates the community, so it's hard to say if the filmmakers had any thoughts of responding to civil rights issues with the film. The only time the movie moves even slightly toward the sort of delirious scenes found in good Italian westerns is a late scene in which Lola's next-to-last song in the saloon has her in white robes warbling "Swing Low Sweet Chariot." Yet moments later she flings off the robes, revealing another scanty one-piece and singing another torch song. She's still a showgirl when she leaves with her friends, and when Doc Rod follows her, he seems to join her entourage. (Yeah, that'll work out.)

The sole aspect of the film that justifies (however slightly) my "bizarre crimes" trope is the main villain's odd kidnapping ploy. 

PUZZLE (1974)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*

This giallo is atypical of its kind in three ways. It's wholly naturalistic, having no black-gloved killers or weird murder-scenarios, and just barely qualifies for the "bizarre crimes" trope. In addition, though some giallos end with life-or-death brawls, this is one of the few giallos I've seen in which one of the protagonists shows unusual competence in not one but two hand-to-hand fights. And so far, this is the only giallo I've seen that stars a male character and a female character with about equal emphasis, instead of the more common approach of opposing one against the other.

A British citizen with memory-loss (Luc Merenda) has struggled for months with his dubious identity. He knows that his ID said his name is Peter, but nothing else. Then he's approached by a man who says his real name is Ted and that he owes some dangerous people a lot of money. Yet, when the fellow pulls out a gun and threatens the newly christened Ted, a mysterious protector shoots the gunman from a distance. 

Someone also goes through the trouble of sending Ted new information: that, in the course of his memory loss, he deserted a wife named Sara (Senta Berger) back in Portofino, Italy for over half a year. Still remembering nothing, he sends a communication to Sara and ships out to Portofino. Though stung by Ted's apparent desertion, Sara loves him enough to meet him again and becomes his aide in sorting out the mystery.

Like other stories with amnesiac protagonists, Innocent Ted soon finds out that he used to be Guilty Ted, a guy who conspired with other criminals in a heroin smuggling operation. The script, partly written by director Duccio Tessari, shows uncommon empathy for the beleaguered couple as they try to patch up their relationship as well as get rid of the criminals dogging their tracks, and both Merenda and Berger turn in strong performances.

The mode in which the heroin is smuggled is the only moderately bizarre thing in the movie, though the climax includes a singular method of "heroine defense," when sexy Sara must defend herself from an attacker with a handy chainsaw. This, however, would be Tessari's only other giallo after 1971's BLOODSTAINED BUTTERFLY, as he was far better known for action-movies, such as  directing the superior 1975 ZORRO the next year, and having written better than average strongman-films like GOLIATH AND THE DRAGON and HERCULES IN THE HAUNTED WORLD.

WAR CAT (1987)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

This 1987 film was given the bland title ANGEL OF VENGEANCE in DVD releases, but I still prefer the title from its VHS incarnation, WAR CAT. The heroine of the story isn't especially cat-like, but she does show an ability to turn savage, in contrast to having zero angelic qualities. In terms of phenomenality this flick is largely relevant for being a naturalistic take on the "most dangerous game" trope of human-hunting. 

Heroine Tina Davenport (Jannina Poynter), daughter of a deceased armed forces officer, decides to take up temporary residence in a small American town in order to write a book about her late dad (a motif possibly borrowed from 1979's I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE). Because Tina's hot and runs around the town for daily exercise, she's noticed by a neighboring survivalist group. This group is made of its leader Major Hargrove and about half a dozen hangers-on. Hargrove honestly thinks that the country's about to be consumed by chaos at any minute, while most of his followers just seem to be in the group because it gives them the chance for antisocial activities.

Tina uses an elbow-strike to repel an assault by the most lustful member of the survivalists and then gets him charged by the local cops. Apparently, he gets bailed out by his cohorts, but after one shot of a cop-car there's no sense of any local law enforcement on the scene. Hargrove's survivalists take down an equally scuzzy biker-gang and take their women prisoner. The desire for more feminine company leads the faux-soldiers to kidnap Tina as well, after which at least one of them rapes her.

Hargrove, dedicated to his martial mission, does not rape her, but he decides to execute her. Tina requests a fighting chance: to run ahead and let her oppressors hunt her down. The guys all think she's going to be a sitting duck, but Tina's father trained her in guerilla tactics. One by one, she takes out each of her armed enemies, with an admirable variety-- miniature spears jabbed in one guy's eyes, a noose-trap and a grenade for another one, a throat-slitting for her rapist, and a "fighting chance" fate for Hargrove. 

While the killings are the best part, they're all in the last twenty minutes of this short flick, and most of the rest of the film displays director Ted Mikels' legendary talent for wasting time. One review commented that no one in the film could act, and it's true that almost everyone is a bad amateur, particularly the guy playing Hargrove, who looks like he ought to be a manager at a Wendy's. But if it's true that Poynter came to the film after having been a cocktail waitress, she actually acquits herself fairly well for a non-professional. It's still a blah film, of course, but Mikels had done, and would continue to do, many movies of far worse quality.