FINAL CURTAIN (1957)

 

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

“I know that I must find that object, even though I don't know what it is I must seek. I also know I fear that I will find that object. This night the calling is stronger than it had ever been before. This night was to be the night I had looked forward to with fear, knowing all the time that it had to come sooner or later and there was nothing that I could do to heed that call. This was to be the night. This, the last night of our play. This night when all of the others had gone home.”

I'm as surprised as anyone else might be, knowing of Ed Wood's notorious artistic failings, to find that anything he did registers as "good." And FINAL CURTAIN boasts many of the same failings as Wood's full-length movies. But judging CURTAIN only by its symbolic discourse, it is good on those terms. This 22-minute item is like a massively clumsy version of Edgar Allan Poe-- and though I can't prove it, I suspect Poe was one of Wood's inspirations for his sometimes-rambling confessional narratives.

Long ago, SF critic Algis Budrys wrote an essay on HP Lovecraft for some SF-magazine, archly claiming that Lovecraft mastered a POV Budrys called "first person hysterical." The comment wasn't true of Lovecraft at his best, but it was true of a lot of the works of HPL's literary idol Edgar Allan Poe, whether Poe's frenzied narrators dealt with physical danger (the torture-victim of "Pit and the Pendulum") or with internal upheavals (the protagonist of "Tell-Tale Heart"). And "first-person hysterical" certainly fits the unnamed protagonist of CURTAIN, as attested by the snatch of dialogue printed above, from the very beginning of the story.

So, backstory to the project. Prior to August 1956-- the time when Bela Lugosi, the most bankable actor Wood ever worked with, passed away-- Wood had written various spec-scripts, whether original or adaptations of Wood's own prose stories, as potential vehicles for Lugosi. FINAL CURTAIN would have clearly drawn upon Lugosi's iconic Dracula image, by having Lugosi play a stage actor who had just finished starring in a play about vampires, and who remained, throughout the narrative, clad in a tuxedo because that's what his stage-character had been wearing for the play's final performance that day. (Had Lugosi played the part, an audience would have assumed that the actor had essayed the part of Dracula, though the script never says so.) After Lugosi died, Wood managed in 1957 to shoot two pilot episodes for a proposed anthology teleseries, PORTRAITS IN TERROR-- one being FINAL CURTAIN (which came about because Wood secured permission to shoot his film in an empty theater) while the other was entitled THE NIGHT THE BANSHEE CRIED. When no network bought the project, Wood subsequently re-used footage from both in his 1959 feature NIGHT OF THE GHOULS. Ironically this movie also failed to receive commercial exposure until being discovered for the home video market in 1984. Then a copy of FINAL CURTAIN was found and released to said market in 2012. 

CURTAIN's protagonist is an unnamed actor (Duke Moore) who starred in a vampire-play for "months," and now that the play's run is over, he remains in the now-empty theater because he has some unexplained intuition about finding some "unseen object." The Actor (as he's billed in the credits) never speaks out loud, but a voiceover-- the only words spoken in the episode-- purports to be the Actor's inner thoughts, though the often-frenzied mental dialogue was recorded by another Wood player, Dudley Manlove. The Actor never devotes so much as a stray thought to his past, his profession, or anything but the vague unease haunting him. He starts at every cat's yowl, every creaking board.

After ten minutes of these ruminations, the actor heads upstairs, still unusually apprehensive about everything he sees and feels in the theater. He enters the prop room and sees what he momentarily mistakes for a woman with long blonde hair. When the apparition does not move, he remembers that it's the dummy of a vampire that was used in the play. The actor fingers the dummy's dress and her long hair, and he seems to have fallen in a little in love with the image, much the way Poe's protagonists conceived sudden amours. He starts to leave the room, takes one look back-- and suddenly the "dummy" (Jeannie Stevens) smiles and beckons to him. The terrified thespian manages to blunder his way out of the room, and once he's in the corridor outside, he simply goes back downstairs. Since "the Vampire" (as Stevens is billed) does not appear again, the Actor is able to dismiss the experience. 

After more ruminations, the Actor enters the "last room" in the theater. There he discovers a coffin-- though all the audience sees is a boxy shape, like an overturned cabinet. The Actor opens the "lid" of the "coffin," which he decides is the "object" he's anticipated, and he crawls in and shuts the lid, whereon the film ends with the implication that he smothers himself to death with a figurative Premature Burial.

Frankly, I went back and forth a little regarding the phenomenality of this short tale, with respect to "the Vampire." Ed Wood certainly didn't care about making things clear, so any conclusion I make might be my personal preference alone. I wouldn't have put it past Wood to have imagined (a) a real female vampire who just happens to be the spitting image of a prop dummy used in a play, and (b) who decides to stop by the theater in which the Actor's roaming around, as she's been called to him by his "half in love with easeful death" train of thought. Indeed, the plotline of NIGHT OF THE GHOULS-- the movie into which Wood inserted scenes taken from CURTAIN-- revolves around the notion that a phony spiritualist accidentally summons real ghosts. But at least the ghosts of GHOULS actually DO something, forcing the crooked medium into a coffin, where the swindler dies just as the Actor does.

Yet, even granting Wood's capricious plotting, it might be a bit more likely that the Actor simply imagines the prop dummy coming to life and beckoning to him-- which is, incidentally, the only really scary scene I've ever seen in a Wood movie. And the scene works because, in large part, viewers half expect it. And I'm not talking about expecting the Big Reveal because any viewer can see that the "dummy" is breathing. I'm saying that, because the Actor strokes the dummy's hair and clothes as if he's thinking about making out with the mannequin, it's the perfect "revenge of the feminine" for the dummy to come to life and say, "Sure, come on, big boy" with her gestures. Therefore, the Actor conjures up his own punishment, much as the narrator of "Tell-Tale Heart" imagines that he can hear the beating heart of the man he murdered. The Vampire-scene is also a turnaround-- probably unintentional-- on the end scene from Wood's GLEN OR GLENDA, where cross-dresser Glen's wife willingly permits him to share her clothing.

The Vampire-scene also mirrors the episode's final moments, in that first we see an unliving object seem to come to life, after which a living man makes himself unliving. One online review claimed that the Actor is really dead from the first, but I think this interpretation robs the character of any empathy. Wood might not have understood how to make the Actor sympathetic to an audience, but he WANTS viewers to feel for the thespian's inner turmoil. The Actor has played a living dead man for "months," and there's the broad implication that he's been seduced by the idea of death. The setup is not unlike that of the actor-protagonist of 1947's A DOUBLE LIFE, who becomes overly invested in playing Othello, to the extent that the performer begins thinking that he is Othello, with deadly consequences. 

                    

Does Wood come close to tapping Poe's unique exploration of the dark side of human psychology? No, but I think Wood, even though he made this pilot when he was still in his thirties, showed a penchant for death-haunted characters throughout most of his cinematic career. Whatever TV-network might've watched Wood's pilot-episodes would have been entirely justifying on rejecting them as having no prime-time potential. But in some ways, the short CURTAIN does a better job than the full-length features at translating Wood's anxieties into a "personal myth"-- one with at least a little more universality than the director's passion for angora sweaters.

                                  

        

SINTHIA THE DEVIL'S DOLL (1970)

 

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

Intellectually, I know that SINTHIA THE DEVIL'S DOLL looks like the bastard child of Ingmar Bergman and Kenneth Angar-- and only if said bastard was chained in a basement during its formative years. Still, I like it better than any of Ray Dennis Steckler's other movies, probably because I never thought he took any chances in his other endeavors. Steckler's films always just lurch from one incoherent incident to another, with barely any plot or character, and SINTHIA is no exception. But when Steckler produced this psycho-nudie for the grindhouse theaters, he did make the attempt to emulate the look of a hallucinatory arthouse-movie and even used the pseudonym "Sven Christian" to gull patrons into thinking he might be some sort of Swedish artiste. Yet the grindhouse distributors of the era didn't care about films as art, only how much female skin was on display. Maybe Steckler saw some art-movie that made him want to do better than his usual tripe. That he wasn't capable of producing even above-average sexploitation is a shame, but I still find SINTHIA an interesting failure.

Although Steckler had directed one previous psycho-film, 1964's THE THRILL KILLERS, and would direct at least two more following SINTHIA, the 1970 film doesn't involve the sort of physical perils typical of most psycho-killer movies. The title character doesn't even seem to be in danger of harming herself, except in the metaphysical sense of needing to atone for past crimes. We only know two things about Sinthia (portrayed by two-time actress Shula Roan), and Steckler tediously repeats those items over and over. One is that at age 12, Sinthia gets her first kiss from a boy and relates this fact to her mother. Then some time afterward, Sinthia becomes homicidally jealous of her father when he makes love to her mother. (She has one significant line, complaining about the father's attentions to her daughter). Sinthia stabs both parents to death with a knife (making her demurer than Lizzie Borden, I suppose). Then she burns down the house as well.

Though the law never doubts that Sinthia committed the crime, for some reason she's remanded to the custody of a never-seen aunt and uncle. Sinthia does have to continue seeing a psychiatrist, which apparently goes on for eight years. But viewers only see 20-year- old Sinthia being told by her unnamed analyst that he thinks she's cured. However, one last step is required before the doctor can release her from his supervision and can pronounce Sinthia capable of re-entering society, including her marrying an unspecified suitor. He subjects Sinthia to a hypnotic trance, telling her that the only way she can atone for her crime is to imagine killing her parents again, but with the alteration that she too dies in the fire she set. This bizarre excuse for therapy allows Steckler to make most of the narrative into an extended dream, the better to work in as many nude-scenes as possible.    

The first dream-sequence can be fairly termed Sinthia's guilt-complex, as she dreams herself in Hell, surrounded by semi-clad male and female devils who mock her for wanting her father sexually. This sequence ends with Lucifer ordering Sinthia to be whipped-- and then suddenly, with no transition, she's on a beach, where lives a couple: an artist, Lenny, and his wife Carol. The dead father's name is said early on to have been "Leonard," and the same actors who play Lenny and Carol played Sinthia's murdered parents. So, to be as generous as possible in following Steckler's rough logic, this sequence is Sinthia avoiding the psychiatrist's commandment to atone.

As the dream goes on, Sinthia relates to Lenny and Carol as if they were her revived father and mother-- though with some wacky differences, like having a brief lesbian hookup with Carol. Yet Carol, being part of Sinthia's dream, also acts as if she knows Sinthia, a stranger, plans to move in on Carol's husband. On top of that, Lenny takes Sinthia to a rinky-dink theater to see a play Carol's performing in. And it's here that Sinthia meets yet another fractious older couple, Mark and Liz. In fact, when the two of them stage a fight on stage, Sinthia intervenes to protect the "good father" from the "bad mother." It's possible-- though hard to be sure-- that Steckler intended to portray Sinthia deflecting from her original transgression by seeking out an older man who doesn't look like her late father. At any rate, Sinthia does shift her attentions, and dreams that she's marrying Mark in a church. Everyone in attendance seems okay with it-- until a naked woman, presumably Liz, intrudes and embraces Mark. Suddenly Sinthia's back in Lenny's arms for a few minutes. Finally, she wakes up, back in the psychiatrist's office. 

The shrink is waiting for her. Without even asking Sinthia questions, he seems to know that her first dream-fugue failed. So he repeats his earlier counsel: Sinthia must try to dream the circumstances of the double murder, but this time force herself to die in the fire she sets. Sinthia agrees to try. In moments she's back with her four middle-aged overseers, but now they sound like they're prompting Sinthia to do as the analyst suggested. Sinthia has a vision of her soul afire, and then she succeeds in returning to the death-scene in her home. Again she knifes the copulating parents, but she doesn't perish in the fire she sets. Lenny comes back to life to insist that she repents of her evil acts. At last Sinthia (conveniently nude at this point) concludes that "I must be pure once more," and Lenny tells her that she can only atone by loving her own soul-- whatever that means. 

\Steckler randomly tosses in a few more hallucinatory scenes, one of which repeats Sinthia confessing her "first kiss" to her mother. It's anyone's guess as to what this could have signified to Steckler. Then there's one more confrontation scene, with both Mark and Lenny claiming Sinthia while both Liz and Carol oppose them (albeit only with words). Then somehow this all moves Sinthia to re-dream the murder-scene, set the fire-- and force her dream-self to perish in the fire.

Sinthia wakes, the psychiatrist pronounces her cured, and out of the office she goes to meet her fiancee. Which of the two male actors from the dream portrays the fiancee? Take a wild guess.

As mentioned before, my wild guess as to this movie's genesis is that Steckler saw some artfilm that impressed him, so he tried, in his incompetent way, to emulate it. Maybe he'd read a little Freud, for it was Big Sigmund's belief that once a child became entrained upon the opposite-sex parent, in adulthood that offspring would always be looking for some sublimated version of the parent. So maybe sinful Sinthia overcomes her guilt, but only by accepting the sublimated version of her father-image into her adult sex-life. Still, it might be argued that the young psycho, rather than atoning for her terrible actions, gets a happy ending in exchange for killing her mother, since her Electra-complex is satisfied by a daddy-lookalike.   

                

BEHAVING BADLY (2014)

                                                                                                                                                                                                           

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological, sociological*                                                                                                                                                                                                        Phenomenality first: the only reason this strange sex-farce rates as "uncanny" is because there are scenes in which adolescent protagonist Rick (Nat Wolff) and his simp-buddy Billy (Lachlan Buchanan) witness hot lady "saints" appear to them, and *only* to them, to dispense vague advice. It's not clear if these bizarre characters have any real existence in the world of the movie, though "Saint Lola" does give Rick some information about an event that has not yet transpired. That some psychological projection is also involved is suggested by the way each of the lady saints-- the other one's name being "Saint Poppy"-- looks exactly like each of the adolescent's respective mothers and are of course played by the same actresses playing those "real life" characters, Mary-Louise Parker and Elizabeth Shue.

Source material second: BADLY, the only prominent credit by director/co-writer Tim Garrick, is based upon a 2000 comedic novel, WHILE I'M DEAD FEED THE DOG, and it's so referenced in the credits, though author Ric Browde publicly disavowed the adaptation. Having read a summation of the novel, all I can say is the movie does use some of the novel's comic concepts.                                                                                                                                     Presumably because of the source material, BADLY has some unusual-- not to say superior-- deviations from the standard teen sex comedy. In teen comedies with one central protagonist, the hero is usually either a gormless innocent who gets in over his head but is essentially good-hearted, or a conniving "player" who seeks to manipulate older manipulators. Both are usually given serious-minded leading ladies who want the guys to clean up their acts so that they can be molded into decent boyfriend material. Not infrequently, there also exist "bad women" who serve to tempt the hero from the correct path. Sometimes the bad girls are skanks of the same age as the protagonist, but they can also be predacious older women. Antagonism to true love also takes the form of jealous boyfriends of the desired leading lady, or husbands of the predatory cougars.                                                                  

 One curious thing about BADLY is that it can't make up its mind as to which type the main character is. Sometimes he acts the part of the innocent caught up in designs beyond his ken. Then he often turns around and performs some manipulative action to gain the upper hand. Not a few online reviews found him "unlikable," and I concur, though the reason stems from the script wanting to have the character play off both of the main two stereotypes.

The same ambivalence appears with regard to Rick's romantic goals. Although as a male teen Rick's beset by hormonal urges, he desires a girl his own age, classmate Nina (Selena Gomez), and though he lusts after her he also pictures her in an angelic fantasy. This would be the "madonna" part of the "madonna-whore" dichotomy of male desire identified by Freud, while the "whore" part is loosely ascribable all other women, not least Rick's mother Lucy (Parker). Lucy's not any sort of "predacious older woman," and there's no indication (except for his "Saint Lola" maybe-fantasy) that Rick is attracted to the womb that bore him. But Lucy and Rick's father don't live together anymore, and Lucy constantly signals familial chaos by complaining that one of these days she'll divorce her cheating husband. Arguably, any "older woman" intrigue is deflected onto Pamela (Shue), the mother of Rick's best friend Billy, and unlike a fair number of teen-hero protagonists, Rick does sleep with this predacious older woman. Rick also does errands for a sleazy guy at a strip club (a father-substitute perhaps), so Rick's no innocent, though the script can't make up its mind how blameless he is for his own situation.

Amid all the random nonsense-situations in Rick's life, I find myself reflecting on whether or not, in contrast to most teen comedies, this one's source material may have taken the whole "whore complex" and ascribed it not just to three or four characters, but the nature of the sin-wracked world itself. Though Rick's major problems don't emphasize those standard tropes of "jealous boyfriend" or "jealous husband"-- they are there in the story, but very muted-- most of the males-- Rick's father, the strip club manager, various gangsters and even fathers of the Church-- are all drawn into the web of sin. Rick is clearly Catholic going by a scene where he makes confession, and implicitly Billy is too (though he doesn't have his "Saint Poppy" vision until the movie's end, just for a closing joke). Though one can't make broad generalizations about the actual practice of Catholic believers, I think that in fiction the Catholic faith is shown as having fetishized the "lust of the flesh" (1 John 2:16) so that it becomes the embodiment of the world's delusions, against which faith struggles. And in BEHAVING BADLY, this means a fleshy world where women hold much of the real control. Two other mature women pursue Rick, though not as avidly as Pamela, and she for good measure also has something going on with one of the local priests, so it's no surprise that she's the biggest "whore" in the movie. To be sure, even the "angelic" Nina, raised by fundamentalist parents, is clearly intrigued by Rick's ability to walk on the wild side.

Is BADLY-- which I term an "irony" rather than a simple comedy-- a funny movie in any sense? Only fitfully, like an episode of FAMILY GUY. The producers managed to get a lot of recognizable names to contribute small parts-- Heather Graham, Dylan McDermot, Justin Beiber (in a cameo), Patrick Warburton, Cary Elwes, and Gary Busey. Of them all, Busey is slightly funny and of course Graham is unfailingly hot. But Elizabeth Shue has all the best scenes, some of which are very slapsticky in nature. In one scene, Pamela expects Rick to meet her in bed, and when a third party intrudes, she gets the unwelcome visitor in a crotch-grab that he clearly does not enjoy (though he pretends he does). Later, when a comely newslady comes on to Rick a little for an interview, Pamela tackles the competitor and gets summarily punched out. While drunk she even kisses on her own son a little, which goes a long while toward explaining why Billy, lacking an angel to "save" him, more or less turns gay.

                                             
            

THE HOUSE OF USHER (1989)

 

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

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

In my review of this film, I noted that it was one of three 1989 collaborations between producer Harry Alan Towers and director Alan Birkenshaw, and that two of those three were fake adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories. So I decided to look at HOUSE OF USHER, which slightly preceded Birkenshaw's MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH.

My re-watch confirmed that the 1989 USHER was as bad as I remembered, as well as a much worse take on Poe than MASQUE. Whereas Birkenshaw's direction on the later film is at least competent, the visuals for USHER are ugly and dispiriting, and the plot-action is just one lumbering grossout scene after the other.

The plot, such as it is, starts with an engaged couple, Ryan and Molly (Rufus Swart, Romy Windsor). They're driving through the English countryside, trying to find the castle of Ryan's uncle Roderick Usher (the same name as the protagonist of the titular Poe story). Two weird children appear in the road, and the driver has to crash the car to avoid hitting the kids-- who are not seen again until the film's end. Molly is largely unhurt, but Ryan suffers injuries. As it happens, though, the butler who works for Roderick happens to be in the area.

Molly passes out, and when she wakes up, she's at the Usher Castle. She meets Roderick (Oliver Reed), who tells her that Ryan was taken to an English hospital, but that Molly can't go visit him until he's better. Having no means of transportation, Molly accepts the situation, though the elder Usher and his servants all seem eccentric. Roughly like the Poe character, Roderick has unusually sharp senses, though the film mostly forgets about this element when it's convenient.

It takes this plodding movie forever to get to the heart of the matter: Roderick's got Ryan squirreled away in the castle, to use him as a threat against Molly. Because the Ushers suffer from a "blood taint," Roderick wants Molly to wed him so that he can produce a line of healthy children. I can't resist mentioning that this part resembles the plot of the original Gothic novel, THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO, though I doubt either the writer or director were aware of that book. I can only guess that the writer picked up on the arguable incest-elements of the original story, in which Roderick has his sister buried alive for some transgressive reason, and he reworked that into a "bad father" drama. So most of the film is about Molly trying to win free of Roderick's tyranny, like a lot of mainstream Gothics.

For good measure, halfway through the movie the audience learns that Roderick has a brother named Walter (Donald Pleasance), who's lived for years in the castle as a virtual prisoner. But Walter, who wears a drill-bit glove on one hand, may be crazier than Roderick. After a lot of blundering attempts at shock, there's a big fight between Ryan and the psycho brothers, and the house catches on fire as Roderick chases Molly--

And suddenly, with no explanation, or even a dream-transition, Molly and Ryan are back in their car, on the English highway, looking for Roderick's castle. But this time, Molly, guided by "women's intuition," suggests they drive back the way they came. As they do so, the same two kids from the opening are seen walking along the highway, but they merely watch as the car implicitly drives away from its encounter with the Gothic patriarch.

This ending is probably the most interesting thing about this dismal movie. Possibly Birkenshaw thought this "arty" touch would grab the horror-audience. I've discussed the idea of the "movie as premonitory dream" in my review of INVADERS FROM MARS. But that film plays fair in showing the viewpoint character having dreams that may or may not come true, and USHER utterly fails to understand how the dream-trope works when well done. Next to this massive misfire, Birkenshaw's follow-up MASQUE proved refreshingly ordinary.

THE PHYNX (1970)

 

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

THE PHYNX (the name of a four-man musical group created by the U.S. government to function as spies) is one of the weirdest attempts of a producer from an older generation trying to profit from the 60s "youth movement." It just barely qualifies as a metaphenomenal movie, mostly by virtue of one gimmick: the musician-spies briefly use "x-ray specs" that can see through women's clothes but not through their undergarments. 

The plot of this movie-- unreleased by Warner Brothers in its own era, and unavailable until the era of DVDs-- claims that for reasons not revealed until the last half hour- the Communist country of Albania has abducted or lured away about thirty or forty performers, mostly from the 1940s and 1950s. The U.S. is unable to infiltrate Albania, so they induct four ordinary civilians, teach them to be a band, and arrange for that band to play in Albania in order to liberate the prisoners. Perhaps unnecessary to say, but eventually the spy-guys succeed in getting all the American celebrities back to their own country. 

All of this folderol is aggressively unfunny, not to mention slow and lacking in even basic slapstick, and even the various attractive women aren't played for maximum sex-appeal. The architect of this mess seems to be producer Bob Booker, collaborating on the original story with a guy who barely had any IMDB credits, and it seems like they were channeling an old forties cameo-fest like HOLLYWOOD CANTEEN.  It's like Booker and his crew watched a few episodes of THE MONKEES and crossbred that format with CANTEEN, without even figuring out how to give the majority of the old timers anything interesting to say or do. The long list of aging celebrities included such "happening" people as Xavier Cugat, George Jessel, Edgar Bergen (with the inevitable Charlie McCarthy), Rudy Vallee, Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan, the two best-known Bowery Boys, and "The Lone Ranger and Tonto" (John Hart and Jay Silverheels, possibly their only reunion since they worked together on the 1950s LONE RANGER teleseries).

By the way, the flimsy reason they've all been brought together is because the Albanian President's wife is an American (Joan Blondell) wanted to be surrounded by people from her own culture-- including, supposedly, "the original Golddiggers."  But Booker and crew weren't referencing the Golddiggers of Dean Martin's sixties TV show, but ostensibly a bunch of performers from the 1930s "Golddiggers" films. None of these performers were billed, so they were in actuality probably just a bunch of sixty-something ringers, not any real 1930s actresses-- although the script calls attention to the fact that the dictator's wife, played by Joan Blondell, was in one of the original "Golddiggers" movies. (I think she might be in all of them, but I'm not checking.)

Bob Booker was born in 1931, and it would appear that PHYNX was mostly his attempt to enshrine all the cultural icons he'd enjoyed in his youth, with only the most nugatory head-nods toward sixties youth-culture. Strangely, writer-producer Carl Reiner was almost ten years older than Booker, but Reiner's DICK VAN DYKE was pretty damn successful at finding a way to bring together the culture of his formative period-- and maybe many of his writers, though I haven't checked-- and making the older content blend in with sixties touchstones like Beatles, Man from Uncle.

Oh, and there's also a goofy moment where the Phynx and a bunch of other people use electric guitars to shatter a confining Albanian wall, but this feels more like an excursion into cartoon-logic.  

HEY, GOOD LOOKIN' (1982)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

Though HEY GOOD LOOKIN' was released in the early 1980s, in its original conception it would have been released as the fourth of Ralph Bakshi's "urban cartoons" of the early seventies, following FRITZ THE CAT, HEAVY TRAFFIC and COONSKIN. According to this Wikipedia article, Bakshi initially filmed a version of LOOKIN' with a similar plotline, but in a format that combined animation with live action. Warner Brothers became antsy over the film's potential box office, in part due to negative publicity for COONSKIN, and refused to give Bakshi the funds to complete the movie. About seven years later, Warners became bullish on animated projects again. The sequence of events seems unclear, but apparently Bakshi decided at some point to rework LOOKIN' into a more traditional animated film, using money from other projects to fund the second version. Thus he managed to release the new LOOKIN' in American theaters, to lukewarm response given that the cultural moment had largely passed for "adult animation" in the United States. But LOOKIN' still became a cult film through video and cable release, though it's not clear if Bakshi esteems the finished version.

My estimation is unambivalent: I think it's Bakshi's finest feature-length work. All of Bakshi's features have an episodic feel-- the result of the famed director having honed his craft in gag-oriented cartoon shorts. But in Bakshi's attempt to capture a semblance of his experience in urban Brooklyn of the early 1950s, he captured a "myth" far more substantial than his attempts to render Tolkienian fantasies-- a myth I like to denote as "the clash of civilizations."

The first twenty minutes of LOOKIN' don't seem to reference any major sociological myths. Most of the setup follows the antics of two Brooklyn guys in their early twenties, who don't do anything but drink, hang around poolhalls, and talk about women: Italian-American Vinnie Genziani and Jewish-American Crazy Shapiro. Neither one seems to have a job, so there's no telling where they get money for booze (though it would be easy to buy Vinnie as a pool-hustler). Vinnie apparently has no relatives, while Crazy has just one: his father Solly, an overweight hulk who has no compunctions against shooting at his son when annoyed, and who can get away with such actions because he (Solly) is a cop. The audience also sees that both smooth-looking Vinnie and geeky Crazy are members of a gang of white youths, the Stompers, but the only consequential event in those first twenty minutes is that Vinnie enjoys a "meet-violent" encounter with a girl he used to babysit years ago: Roz Featherschneider. Roz is definitely not a little girl now, as evinced by how all the guys ogle her ginormous hooters, and Vinnie begins thinking seriously about dating her, though he's too cool to give away his feelings. As for Roz, though she's initially stand-offish, she falls hard for Vinnie, at least according to what her hormones tell her.

The clash of civilizations-- or at least, of cultures-- looms large when night falls, and Vinnie and Crazy, tired from their escapades, sack out on the nearest beach. In the morning Crazy gets himself in trouble, and Vinnie panics, deserting his boon companion. (To be sure, Crazy extricates himself from his difficulties on his own.) But Vinnie's loss of coolness carries a harsher penalty. In his fear he runs past the boundaries of "the white part" of the beach and enters the forbidden terrain of "the black part." Vinnie finds himself surrounded by big black beachgoers, many of whom wear leather jackets at the beach and are members of the Black Chaplains, an urban youth-gang with which Vinnie's gang has frequently locked horns. Vinnie also meets the Chaplains' leader, the implicit pimp Boogaloo Jones. Boogaloo incarnates for the period "The Great White Fear," in that he's a clever, smooth-talking conniver. As soon as Boogaloo sees Vinnie, he wants to renew old hostilities just for the sake of sheer nastiness. He smooth-talks Vinnie into setting up a rumble between the two gangs, and adds that if the Stompers won't fight, the cool Italian will have to battle all the Chaplains by himself.

At the same beach, Vinnie not only locates Crazy, he also stumbles across Roz and her girlfriend Eva, though romance is no longer Vinnie's main concern. Roz and Crazy are particularly hot to fight the Black Chaplains, and the four seek out the other Stompers-- who could care less about Vinnie's crusade. Eventually, though, the white gang gets fired up to attack the black gang, when the former get provoked by one of Boogaloo's actions. So on the surface, Vinnie's problem is solved. 

Except that Crazy is, well, crazy. He's not just the amiable geek he usually seems to be, as when he becomes irate at Vinnie and puts a knife to his friend's throat. That night, while the four youths are farting around, Roz sees a car in a white neighborhood, driven by two Black Chaplains. Crazy's triggered by the "jungle bunnies," chases them down in his car. Then, over the feeble objections of Vinnie and Eva (the latter protesting, "I don't understand. Negroes are like people, too"), Crazy shoots both men dead. Unlike Crazy and Roz, who are jazzed by the incident, Vinnie knows that this is serious shit. (We don't know what if anything Eva sees or thinks, for she disappears from the story after the shooting.) Vinnie then separates himself from his friend and his potential lover.

With atypical swiftness, the NYPD sends one of their best men to investigate: Solly Shapiro. He interrogates Boogaloo, and though the pimp has no way of knowing who killed his followers, he makes the Iago-like suggestion that Solly ought to ask one of the Stompers about the crime-- such as Solly's own son. During what seems to be the exact same night as the shooting, Roz gives herself to the flustered Crazy, precisely as if she deemed herself a hero's prize. But then Solly shows up, driving Roz off as the corrupt cop beats the hell out of his son. The beating is so brutal that the average viewer can't help but pity the ignorant youth despite having seen him murder two people. Crazy then breaks the code of the streets, telling his father that Vinnie killed the victims.

Vinnie doesn't know of the betrayal but packs his bags to leave town, apparently the next morning. But he manages to run into the very area where the Stompers and Chaplains have arranged to hold their rumble. Solly shows up there as well, happy to frame Vinnie for the crime. The real killer, though, has some sort of mental breakdown. Crazy gets up on a roof overlooking the rumble, dressed up in a wacky superhero-costume, and begins firing down on everyone in the street. Both sides shoot at each other until one of the white guys is slain, at which point it becomes too real for both groups, and they fade.

The weird psychedelia in Crazy's head could justify a couple of paragraphs of explication, as the mad youth seems to be warring on the city in which he was born while encountering various grungy versions of Jungian birth-imagery. Bakshi then works in one non-psychedelic threat, for the all-knowing Boogaloo shows up on the roof. But instead of directly taking action against the murderer-- say, by pushing him off the roof-- Boogaloo confines himself to breaking into Crazy's frenzied reverie with the odd words, "You ain't got no rhythm, baby." For some reason, this has the same effect. Crazy launches himself off the roof, unintentionally making up for his betrayal by landing on Solly, killing both of them instantly. And Vinnie is left to a joyless existence without his closest amigo.

Well, except that all of these events take place within a frame story. The first half of the frame shows a sketchy middle-aged dude approaching a fat, middle-aged tart on the New York streets, offering to tell her the story of Vinnie and Roz. Then the other half of the frame concludes by revealing that the two old farts are Vinnie and Roz. Old Roz berates Old Vinnie for his past cowardice but gives him one last chance to redeem himself.

Although Bakshi as author clearly denounces the meaningless violence and racism of gang-culture, he manages to do so without becoming in any way preachy. For example, when the Stompers and the Chaplains meet for the rumble, the black gang-members perform a big flamboyant dance-number (rotoscoped from real performers) while the white bangers advance in a march, looking like goose-stepping Nazis. Yet Bakshi certainly doesn't make the Chaplains into sinless angels. The racism of both groups implicitly stems from both their poverty and resulting ignorance, and one of the songs Bakshi chose for LOOKIN' argues that despite all the claims about masculine honor, "the truth is, we were bored."

This may be the only film I've reviewed so far that I've categorized as having both the uncanny and naturalistic versions of the "delirious dreams and fallacious figments" trope. That's because all the "figment-tropes"-- such as Crazy inexplicably being able to massacre about a dozen men, just for the sake of a joke-- don't violate the naturalistic content of the narrative. However, Crazy's breakdown-fantasy has a coherence that goes beyond the bounds of naturalism, and so Crazy's mad dream projects HEY GOOD LOOKIN' into the domain of the uncanny.

MARRIED WITH CHILDREN: "OLDIES BUT YOUNG UNS" (1991)

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

This fifth-season episode is mostly a "life dumps on Al" story. Kelly gets a complementary subplot, while Bud, Peg, Marcy and Jefferson appear mostly as window-dressing.

It's Saturday night and Kelly has been waiting an unusually long time for her date Vinnie (Matt LeBlanc). Bud is kind enough to suggest that his sister's date isn't coming because her long history of hookups have left her "hagged out." Kelly suggests that he ought to go practice lovemaking with his Ninja Turtles doll, Donatello. Vinnie arrives and Kelly introduces Bud as the troll who lives under the house, which Vinnie completely believes. Vinnie quells Kelly's anger at his lateness by giving her a GARFIELD book. "No other boy has ever given me literature!"

Al comes home, and after warning Vinnie not to touch his daughter, pesters the family with his obsession about an old song, a fragment of which he heard on the radio. When neither the family members nor the neighbors can identity the tune-snippet Al heard, the frenetic shoe salesman invites over an old buddy named Charlie (Joseph Bologna), also Vinnie's dad. Why didn't Al didn't just call Charlie on the phone and hum the tune-snippet? More on that later.

Al seeks out an oldies record store, but the employee can't help him. The shoe salesman launches into an impassioned plea for God to hear his one lousy desire, and, as if in answer, a nearby jukebox starts playing the exact song Al wants. He's able to buy the record he wants and take it home. But in Al's world, God giveth only to take away.

The only reason Charlie and Vinnie are in "Oldies But Young 'Uns" is to set up the back-door pilot that appeared in the same season a few episodes later, focusing almost entirely on the antics of father and son (with a piddling guest-appearance by Al Bundy). Said pilot was titled "Top of the Heap," the same as the very short-lived sitcom that resulted. "Top" is IMO one of the worst back-door pilots ever made, but it was the only time the makers of MARRIED WITH CHILDREN succeeded in spinning anything off from their one huge sitcom success.

WANDA THE SADISTIC HYPNOTIST (1969)

 

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

Even by the late 1960s, apparently the grindhouse audience was still so starved for female nudity that the patrons would sit through any kind of pseudo-artsy stuff as long as it had T&A. Writer-director Gregory Corarito, though he only worked on four feature films in his career, certainly didn't render anything resembling genuine art. But WANDA THE SADISTIC HYPNOTIST is a engaging, albeit simultaneously confusing, sex romp that merges T&A with S&M.

A guy wearing sunglasses (whom I'll call Sunglasses) takes some dope and then wanders down a city-street, glancing at mannequins in a store window and imagining that they're live nude girls. Sunglasses-- according to one review, played by the director-- then stops in a grindhouse to see a movie. The movie he watches-- whose title claims that it stars a "Miss Dikey Diketon"-- ends up providing most of WANDA's narrative, though occasionally the focus shifts back to the grindhouse theater, just to remind the viewer that Sunglasses is still there, watching, just like one of the intended filmgoers.

In the film proper, an ordinary fellow, Sylvester, is driving down a country road in his car, when he blows a tire and crashes. As if anticipating his advent, two hot women appear and transport Sylvester to their mansion. Once the injured man awakens, they introduce themselves as Wanda and Greta (Katharine Shubeck, Janine Sweet). At least one of those names seems to be an in-joke, for in VENUS IN FURS, Sacher-Masoch's best known celebration of the paraphilia named after him, the woman who torments the pain-loving POV character is named-- Wanda. I'm not sure the name "Greta" has similar significance. However, Corarito uses the name again in his 1975 DELINQUENT SCHOOLGIRLS, but for a much nastier female.

Of the two probably lesbian ladies, Greta's the nice one, showing some degree of concern for Sylvester's condition. Wanda, however, clearly nurtures some grudge against the male of the species. Not only does she maintain the mansion, where Sylvester's the only male amid numerous often-nude females, she's apparently learned hypnosis, in that she can mesmerize her male captive into doing anything she desires. She establishes Sylvester's lowly status by whipping him with a riding-crop, and then forces him to wander about the estate while the women mock him. Not that Wanda's entirely averse to messing with her acolytes. She hypnotizes one Zelda, explicitly said to be lesbian, and tells her that she's a nympho, which leads to Zelda raping the bound Sylvester.

So far, WANDA sounds like it's made for viewers who were not content with simple ogling and who were into at least light sadomasochism. However, there's a small "revolt of the male" when a "funeee farm" escapee shows up at the mansion and intimidates the women with displays of masculine temper. He releases Sylvester, but the two men don't really take any major revenge, even for a softcore film, except that the guys force the women to raid Wanda's supply of LSD. After some very boring psychedelic visuals, mostly just repeating scenes already shown, Wanda manages to place both men under her hypnotic sway. The girls then send the maniac back to the asylum and cause Sylvester to forget everything that happened. He gets in his presumably repaired car and drives away.

Then, just to show that Corarito didn't forget his self-insert back in the grindhouse, Sunglasses leaves the theater, gets in a car, and drives down a country road. His tires hit a nail-trap, his car crashes, and up pop Wanda and Greta, ready for more fun.

It's because of this "film turns into reality" schtick that I label WANDA an "irony," since this term best describes stories in which all logic and morality has vanished from the world. Of Corarito's other three films, I have seen his 1970s T&A-fest, DELINQUENT SCHOOL GIRLS. This is more of a straight comedy with similar elements, wherein three fugitives from a nuthouse take over a girls' school. These demented fellows terrorize the ladies in a very comical manner, until the ending. Then there's a "revolt of the female," in which a class of judo-girls rebels and kicks all the guys' asses. Say what you like about this writer-director, at least he was consistent.

 

DELIRIUM (1972)

 

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

Though the story of Renato Polselli's DELIRIUM is fairly obvious-- when it's not incoherent-- it earns myth-points for being fairly "in one's face" about the "war between men and women," even when some members of one sex join the wrong side.

Main character Herbert Lyutak (Mickey Hargitay) lives in some unspecified part of Europe. Though he and his wife abide in a ritzy-looking house, Herbert's only source of income is that of a criminologist who advises police on the behavior of psychos. (This doesn't count his service in the American military during Vietnam, though this detail appears only in the American version.) But first we see Herbert plying a deadly avocation. He meets a pretty girl in a bar and offers to give her a lift to her destination, but Herbert callously murders her-- and it's not his first killing. The local cops, aware of a pattern-following serial killer in town, learn that Herbert was seen with the murder victim, so that he's briefly a suspect. But then someone commits a new murder while Herbert's in custody, so the cops drop their suspicions and never give Herbert a second look until movie's end.

The identity of the second killer remains in play until the end, but no viewer will really doubt that all the non-Herbert murders are committed by his devoted wife Marzia (Rita Calderoni). Given that she's constantly bleating about how deeply she loves Herbert, and that no one else has a motive to help him, Marzia's shared guilt in the killing of female victims is no surprise. Herbert does knock off a male victim too, but just for self-protection, not for psycho-killer reasons. Herbert is driven to kill because he's filled with remorse about being impotent with his wife, and he seems to derive some relief from murdering women, though he doesn't sleep with them either. 

Just as Polselli has no intention of creating a story of detection, he also doesn't get into the psychology of Herbert or Marzia, and I could barely figure out the identities of most of the other characters thanks to Polselli's scattershot script. Though Herbert's wife has remained technically virginal since the couple's marriage, she apparently enjoys sapphic relationships with her maid Joaquina (Christa Barrymore) to blow off steam. 

It's not the cops who bring Herbert down, but Joaquina, who attacks Herbert with a whip because he's about to blame all the killings on Marzia. The different versions give Joaquina different reasons for attacking. In the Italian, she does so because she's in love with Marzia; in the English one, it's because one of Herbert's victims was her sister. I didn't fully watch the English version, but I don't think it offered much beyond extra murder scenes, and a loose implication that maybe PTSD was partly to blame for the psycho's impotence. This add-on motive proves irrelevant, since Herbert always seems driven by intertwined passion for, and hatred of, femininity. 

The glossily-photographed murders look great, but it's hard to say that they don't implicate the director in a certain amount of misogyny. I'm not sure that the maid's brutal attack on Herbert counts as any sort of "Revenge of the Female," but it helps that I liked Barrymore better than star Calderoni. The other victims are also stone glamour-pusses, though I recognized none of the performers. Hargitary and Calderoni certainly dial the emotion up to eleven, and for good measure Polselli throws in some wild sex-dreams in which Hargitay struggles in peplum-style chains while his wife and her maid cavort in bed. But at least no one can accuse Polselli of falsification. He promises the viewers "delirium," and that's just what he gives them.

THE CANTERBURY TALES (1972)

 

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

It may have been as long as fifty years since I saw all three movies in Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Trilogy of Lust." Frankly, I only remember liking one sequence from his first effort, 1971's THE DECAMERON. Nothing else stuck with me, least of all the middle entry, CANTERBURY TALES, which was VERY loosely based on the famous Chaucer anthology.

Pasolini's trilogy is well regarded by many critics, possibly because the writer-director glossed his adaptations of famous short stories with a patina of Marxist critique of authority. I'm sure I wasn't aware of the creator's pseudo-intellectualism back in The Day. I like to think that I can give any creative work a fair hearing in terms of mythicity and other concerns irrespective of the author's stated politics. But in this case, I don't think Pasolini had anything on his mind but putting a lot of sex and violence on display and then trying to shame audiences for being seduced by those physical attractions. 

There are only brief moments of metaphenomenal content here to justify my review of TALES here, none of which merit detailed commentary. Two Greek gods interfere very slightly when a sweet young thing seeks to meet her young lover despite the presence of her old blind husband. An old woman curses an official to Hell and the Devil just happens to be on hand to fulfill the curse. There's a sort of demonic bacchanale at the end, but since all of these phenomena take place in narrated stories, all qualify as "fallacious figments."

Though Pasolini shot most of TALES in England with well known English actors (as well as Pasolini's Italian regulars), he shot without sound so that he could loop in both English and Italian dialogue later. Thus, even the English actors don't appear to be speaking their own language.

I confess I'm mostly indifferent to Chaucer. I acknowledge his significance in the history of literature, but I'm not passionate about his oeuvre. That said, I can at least find some humor in his stories. From Pasolini I only get a small-minded meanness of spirit. But he put in enough sex to grab audiences at a time when cinema was experimenting with more adult content, so I suppose the director also has his place in the history of film. But compared to his much better 1967 EDIPO RE, this is just an indulgent mess made more unpleasant-- and unfunny-- by his pretensions to satirical intent.

SINBAD OF THE SEVEN SEAS (1989)

 

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

Luigi Cozzi might never have made a really good movie in his long career, but give him credit: he always seemed to be TRYING to entertain, rather than just cranking out routine potboilers.

SINBAD OF THE SEVEN SEAS is slapdash, yet not routine. There's just one mythic thread in the story that allows me to rate its mythicity as "fair," but SEVEN's main appeal for most viewers will be its over-the-top approach to the swashbuckling tropes of Arabian Nights movies, borrowing from 1940's THIEF OF BAGDAD and 1958's THE SEVENTH VOYAGE OF SINBAD, though the main influence is Cozzi's earlier movie ADVENTURES OF HERCULES, one of two films he did with actor Lou Ferrigno, who also plays Sinbad here. It's because of the borrowing from ADVENTURES that I call SEVEN a Cozzi movie. He wrote the script with two other credited writers and was supposed to direct the project as well. But due to scheduling conflicts, Enzo G. Castellari (a director better known for war movies and westerns than for fantasies) helmed SEVEN, and Cozzi was later enlisted to edit the raw footage into the surviving movie.

The trope dominating SEVEN is what I called, in my ADVENTURES review, the "jigsaw quest," wherein something important is broken into two or more segments, with the result that the protagonists must exert themselves to assembling all the pieces again. However, it's impossible to judge from the English dub of SEVEN whether the original Italian script was any better in terms of explication. Over the course of the movie, I just barely cobbled together the idea that in Sinbad's time the city of Basra is a paradise without crime or evil, *possibly* due to its possession of the five mystic Gems of Basra. The evil vizier Jaffar (John Steiner), in addition to swiping his name from the villain of the 1940 THIEF, plans to gain control of the gems and use them to conquer the world. But Jaffar can only do this-- I think-- if he can cause the Princess of Basra Alina (Alessandra Martines) to become his willing bride, since she apparently has some unspecified connection to the gems. To this end Jaffar uses his magic to brainwash the King of Basra and all the soldiers of the city, and then he sticks Alina in a brainwashing machine that looks like a huge blood-draining device. Doesn't brainwashing cancel out the "willing bride" part? Oh well, this is just Cozzi swiping wildly from the part of the 1940 THIEF in which 1940 Jaffar uses a magic rose to make a princess fall for him-- though that evildoer at least really loves the young woman he's endeavoring to seduce.

But Alina's will can't be broken by the machine because she nurtures an undying love for her distant swain, Prince Ali (whose name is oddly similar to her own). Moreover, she knows that Ali is on his way back to Basra alongside the musclebound captain of a sailing ship, Sinbad (Ferrigno) and his merry crew, which includes a dwarf, a Viking, and a Japanese samurai who quotes Confucius at one point. When these heroes arrive in Basra, Sinbad goes alone to the royal palace, where Jaffar traps him in a pit of snakes. A little later Jaffar's guards capture the other crew-members and consign them to a torture chamber.

The inevitable escape of the heroes show some cool touches of originality. Sinbad, instead of fighting the snakes, talks to them, emphathizing with their lot in life under such a cruel master, and-- they allow him to make a rope of their bodies so he can climb out of the pit! You won't see anything like that in a Syfy fantasy film. Then, when Sinbad barrels into the torture chamber to save his friends, there's a cool muscle-tussle in which a guard, every bit as beefy as Ferrigno, wraps a chain around Sinbad's chest and tries to crush him. All of the bad guards end up in a pool of piranhas (guess they weren't any of the brainwashed victims?) and the heroes retreat from Basra in their sailinig-ship.

Jaffar sends skull-headed warriors to attack the ship, and of course the warriors repulse the attack. But the fiend's other action is more problematic. In theory he should want to keep the mystic Gems of Basra close to the palace, in case he's able to break Alina's will. Instead, he decides he will send four of the five gems (I think either the original writers or the translators lost count) flying off to  dangerous areas of the world. so that Sinbad and company will get destroyed by various perils. (A surviving still shows Jaffar conferring with one of the menaces, as if he personally teleported himself to that locale to arrange things.)

The pattern here is the same as in ADVENTURES OF HERCULES: when the heroes defeat a monster, they harvest one of the gems from him/her/it. The story is rendered somewhat incoherent in that for some reason Jaffar magicks Sinbad's crew back to their ship and out to sea, so that Sinbad's last couple of endeavors are solo missions. (I assume the idea about Jaffar's intervention was a belated, flimsy justification for the crew having disappeared from a large part of the movie.) Most of the monsters-- a stone sentinel, ghost knights-- are dull, and the only one that's a little interesting is an adventure with some island-dwelling Amazons. To be sure, they're not very impressive women warriors, since they capture the crew with traps, while their queen Farida (Melonee Rodgers, seen above) mesmerizes Sinbad with her hootchie-kootchie. It might have seemed more on point to have Ali tempted by Farida, since his resistance would have mirrored that of Alina. But the script never gives Ali even one strong moment, even when a minor character claims she intends to duel Ali, though no such duel transpires.

In his solo wanderings Sinbad makes two new allies, a tough girl named Kyra (Stefania Girolami) and her dotty wizard-dad. (Stephania shares her last name with Ennio Girolami, the guy playing the Viking, and both are allegedly the children of substitute director Castellari.) The wizard helps re-unite Sinbad and his crew, now possessed of all the mystic gems, so that they can launch a frontal assault on Jaffar. The sorcerer has one last card to play, conjuring a duplicate Sinbad to match biceps with the original. But of course the good guys win and Jaffar faces the fate of-- being forced to resign his position as vizier???

I don't know how seriously to take any of the writeups on the film. One makes it sound like Castellari produced a bunch of unusable raw footage, far more than needed for a feature film, and Cozzi was called upon to edit it. Another story is that SEVEN was supposed to be a four-part telefilm, which might explain Castellari having produced a huge amount of footage, but the story as it exists doesn't seem to have enough plot content for a serial work. 

Ferrigno doesn't produce any stellar acting, but he looks like he's having a good time, just because his hero can smile and crack bad jokes instead of just grimacing at the cameras. John Steiner may or may not have provided his own dubbing but he wins the Snidely Whiplash Award for turning up the acting-amps to Warp Eleven, making old Conrad Veidt seem positively subdued. A female muscle-star of sorts, Teagan Clive, appears only for a handful of scenes in which she provides Jaffar with someone to talk to, but she doesn't do anything more, much less getting into her promised duel with Prince Ali. But though Teagan doesn't get to show off her stuff, Martines, Girolami and Rodgers provide a nice sampling of pulchritude.

Lastly, despite all the supernatural wonders of SEVEN, in terms of phenomenality it falls into the domain of the uncanny, because the whole thing is a story told by a mother (horror actor Daria Nicolodi) to her little girl. This story-within-a-story probably started out as a shout-out to the original Arabian Nights, despite an utterly false claim in the movie's prologue that SEVEN is based on a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. But just as I esteem SEVEN slightly for its sloppy but colorful swipes, I have to give props to a prologue that would perpetrate such a hoax in the name of Poe, one of the great hoax-lovers in all Western literature.

THE THREE STOOGES GO AROUND THE WORLD IN A DAZE (1963)

 

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

I saw DAZE back in "The Day," though probably not at a first-run theater in 1963. Back then I only knew the Stooges from the movies, as I didn't see the theatrical shorts until the next decade, so I had no basis of comparison. But even if I had been exposed to the shorts, I probably still would have liked DAZE just because it moved quickly and had a fair amount of slapstick violence, however tame next to "Classic Stooges."

On viewing the film again, I still found it basically appealing in terms of offering a simple formula comedy-adventure built around an engaging premise. It just isn't really funny, and may be the least amusing of the six feature-films in which the final threesome-- Larry Fine, Moe Howard and Curly Joe DeRita-- appeared.

An opening placard apologizes to the late Jules Verne for swiping the premise of AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS, and then we meet the three dimwits in England, where they work as servants to Phileas Fogg III (Jay Sheffield). The accomplishments of Phileas's ancestor are so well known that a pair of thieves get the idea to trick the wealthy young man into duplicating his great-grandfather's feat, but with the added touch that Phileas must do so without using his fortune to buy his way. Phileas accepts roughly the same wager as his ancestor, to circumnavigate the world without using his money simply to buy a few plane trips. Naturally, his faithful servants volunteer to go along. During their trek across the globe the four guys pick up a romantic interest for Phileas (Joan Freeman) and are pursued by both police (who think Phileas robbed a British bank) and the two thieves (planning to knock off the young man so that they will never be suspected).

It's an okay romp, but it proves grating to see the rather limited Curly Joe attempting not one but two of the late Curly Howard's better routines from the shorts. The man probably did his best, but he just wasn't as charismatic or as inventive as Howard.

One of the routines from the shorts deals with Curly Joe being triggered into a manic rage whenever he hears the tune for "Pop Goes the Weasel," and this time the hairless dimwit even displays an uncanny level of strength, enough to break iron chains. In a peculiar commentary on the Asian reputation for sinister mind-control techniques, the Stooges are subjected to brainwashing by Chinese Communists. However, the three morons are so, well, moronic that they infect their three would-be brain-washers with the affliction of  "stooginess."

DAZE is probably still good G-rated entertainment for moppets, but not much more.

ALICE IN WONDERLAND (1931)

 

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

The first sound version of ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND was an independently-made feature whose performers are all unknown to me. According to the Wiki article on the movie, its producers were seeking to exploit a wave of "Alice-mania" that had inspired the early thirties, but this ALICE was not a success.

It is, however, a generally accurate adaptation, aside from excluding any scenes that might require expensive FX, such as Alice's size-changing exploits. Still, most of the events follow the book's chronology fairly well, and occasionally the script throws in a few new jokes. Alice, told that the Queen of Hearts intends to cut off her head, remarks that they're only cards, and she can "cut" them.

The actress playing Alice may be the film's biggest deficit, and not just because Ruth Gilbert was roughly 19 years old. Possibly because she was mainly a stage actress, Gilbert plays the role a bit too broadly. The script does have her show some of the character's moments of egotism rather than making her too nicey-nice. 

Most of the other performers wear heavy costumes, and the outfits are at least decent if not memorable. After seeing the film today, the one scene that sticks with me takes place at the Duchess's house. In the book, the Duchess only vaguely orders the cook to cut off Alice's head, prefiguring the same obsession in the Queen of Hearts. But in this film the Duchess actually comes at Alice with a cleaver, forcing the girl to flee with the Duchess's baby-- which, as in the book, simply makes a pig of itself. The line-readings are faithful but the script doesn't tap into Carroll's universe of lunacy.

As ALICE curios go, this one is tolerable.

THE INCREDIBLE PROFESSOR ZOVEK (1972), INVASION OF THE DEAD (1973)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: (1) *poor?,* (2) *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, metaphysical*

When I started watching a subtitled copy of INVASION OF THE DEAD-- whose title is prefaced by the familiar name of the heroic wrestler Blue Demon and the unfamiliar name of a "Zovek"-- I assumed that the latter was just one of many cinematic luchadores of whom I'd not heard. Instead, I learned that the actor billed as "Professor Zovek" was a real-life Mexican celebrity, a combination "mentalist/athlete/escape artist" who was popular in Mexico until his death in 1972, and whose career is summarized here. After finishing INVASION I looked for and found an untranslated copy of the performer's only other film. Both films were directed by Rene Cardona, one of the leading lights of Mexican horror/SF/superhero cinema.

I rate ZOVEK "poor?" in mythicity mostly as a placeholder, since I can't really judge a movie without knowing what the characters are saying. In every way the performer's first film looks like a typical Mexican translation of an American serial, with some larger-than-life hero charging in to vanquish an insidious mad scientist. 

A plane explodes, killing over twenty scientists, and the government suspects foul play, possibly committed by rogue scientist Doctor Druso. They send for Professor Zovek, who apparently doubles as a government agent when he's not performing escapes in his nightclub act. After some set-up to establish Zovek's incredible abilities-- he's seen hypnotizing some hot chick who I don't think ever appears again-- he heads out to the Mexican countryside, looking for Druso's lair. Druso has already kidnapped Zovek's comic sidekick (popular Mexican comedian Tin Tan) and the hero's new hot blonde girlfriend (Tere Velasquez, sister of the more well known Lorena Velasquez). 

Frankly, I forget the entire middle of the film, but there's a long, long slam-bang fight as Zovek penetrates Druso's lair, for the mad scientist has created a small army of freakish humanoids for some damn reason. Zovek gets a lot of martial-arts action against the freaks and the guards, and even the hot blonde gets some karate-action as well. It seems pretty incoherent, but then, I doubt Cardona wanted to do anything but sell the performer Zovek as a hard-hitting superhero.

INVASION OF THE DEAD is a different, weirder animal. I've no specifics about its production, but since so much of the action again takes place in the Mexican countryside, it seems likely that Cardona almost immediately started a new Zovek opus, possibly on some of the same locations. The original work, according to some reports, may not have originally included the well known luchador Blue Demon.

In 1973 only diehard fans of sci-fi movies knew anything about Ed Wood's PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE; the book that bestowed fame on both the late filmmaker and his film would not be published for another five years. One account claims that Cardona used some clips from PLAN 9 in a Blue Demon film, HELL SPIDERS, but I've not verified that yet. Some reviews peg INVASION as a "remake" of PLAN 9, which it certainly is not. At most Cardona may have decided that he liked the basic idea of an alien force reanimating dead people, because it would be easy to film a lot of ragged zombies stalking around the countryside.

Before any zombies rise, archaeologist Professor Volpi and his hot daughter Erika (Christa Linder) call Professor Zovek to the countryside to consult on some weird archaeological cave-drawings that seem to prophesize a major calamity. Around the same time a fireball strikes the earth, and leaves behind a black metal spheroid. In no time the dead are springing from their graves, making one wonder why there are so many burials far from civilization. The zombies attack anyone they meet and create new zombies when they kill people. The zombies atypically retain some human knowledge of skills like driving cars, but unlike the animated corpses from PLAN, they aren't being used to accomplish any particular game-plan.

As for Blue Demon, he never meets Zovek at all despite the poster above, though there's a scene in which the wrestler supposedly talks to the mentalist over the phone. The Demon largely contributes talking-head scenes with his comedy-relief sidekick about previous alien visitations to Earth, and he has one big scene fighting zombies and a couple of unexplained werewolves, possibly left over from the previous Zovek movie. The sidekick actually gets a better scene, pretending to act like a zombie to avoid being mauled by a gang of the critters.

Zovek, though, is the one who gets the most zombie-fighting action, and this includes keeping a zombified Professor Volpi from strangling sexy daughter Erika. Zovek alone saves humanity by destroying the alien spheroid.

In a contrast to Bela Lugosi's passing before PLAN 9 even started filming, Zovek apparently completed all of his scenes-- including a long speech about how the catastrophe may occur again and again-- before he performed an aerial stunt in Japan and was tragically killed. Possibly Cardona meant to film additional scenes to bulk up the movie's run-time, but ended up doing them with Blue Demon instead.

INVASION is a cheap production. But it wouldn't have cost Cardona much to film a few scenes of alien plotters in gold lame suits discussing their plans, so I think he made a conscious choice to avoid Ed Wood's stilted expository scenes, desiring a sense of mystery about the aliens' nature. Portentous though Zovek's final speech is, it's the only part of the film-- aside from the antics of the comical sidekick-- that works pretty well. To be sure, Christa Linder-- an unusual German face in a Mexican flick-- provides ample pleasures every time she's on screen, but Cardona can hardly take credit for her biological gifts.

Both films are the sort of lively junk on which Cardona built his career, so they're certainly better than a lot of dull Mexican fodder. As an actor Zovek is a little too hyperactive to project any charm or gravitas, but his onscreen fight-scenes have their moments, and had he not made these movies, I suspect almost no one today would remember his faded fame.