LEGEND OF THE SEEKER, SEASON ONE (2008-09)

 

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

As I have only read the first of Terry Goodkind's "Seeker" books, WIZARD'S FIRST RULE, I can't speak to the overall quality of the series, or whether it was a crying shame that Sam Raimi's teleseries adaptation didn't get more than two seasons. But the first novel offers in part a theme opposed to most otherworldly Tolkienian fantasies. one that might boil down to, "Power of all kinds-- not just One-Ring power-- corrupts the good and the bad alike." The dramatic consequences of this theme are that even the three pure-hearted heroes are innately capable of harming one another, even with the best of intentions.

Though most of the 22 episodes of LEGEND's first season don't adapt incidents from the first book, the overall outlines remain the same. Large portions of Goodkind's unnamed fantasy-verse have been conquered by the military might of tyrannical Darken Rahl, whose long-range goal is to control all life through assorted sorcerous stratagems. However, it's been prophecized that a rare crusader for justice, the Seeker, is destined to kill Darken Rahl. Young Richard Cypher (Craig Horner) is raised without knowing that he is the Seeker, but soon he's drafted to fulfill his destiny by two other heroes. One is elderly wizard Zed (Bruce Spence), who arranged Richard's concealment from hostile forces. The other, Kahlan (Bridget Regan), belongs to a line of priestesses, the Mother Confessors, and she becomes vital to Richard's mission-- although she threatens it as well, as the two fall in love, causing distractions from their purpose.

Some storylines are definitely derived from Goodkind, as with an arc involving the heroes trying to keep Rahl from obtaining the Boxes of Orden, whose power can corrupt even the Seeker. Other episodes are built around "done in one" problems. Yet even the simpler episodes, despite comedy relief, often reflect grim realities about war and death. This may be a reason why LEGEND didn't catch on like Raimi's more famous fantasy-serials, HERCULES and XENA. 

Only one episode merits a rating of high mythicity, and that is "Denna," a faithful adaptation of a long sequence from WIZARD'S FIRST RULE. In this sequence, Richard is captured by Denna (Jessica Marais), who attempts to break his will via torture. Like Kahlan, Denna belongs to an all-female priestesshood, but where Kahlan's order compels obedience through the emotion of love,  Denna's order uses pain. To some, this might sound like Goodkind importing the Marquise de Sade into a Tolkienian fantasy-setting. Yet because Goodkind structured his world so scrupulously, the concept is both dramatically and mythopoeically compelling. 

One additional point of merit is that the showrunners did contrive a "wrapup" in the final episode of Season One, in case they didn't get another order of episodes. This meant a lot of rewrites to make Season Two come about-- but, going on memory, the game was indubitably worth the candle.           

LOVE AND DEATH IN THE GARDEN OF THE GODS (1972)

 

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

All of the giallo contributions of director/writer Sauro Scavolini took place within the space of about two years, while both before and after that 1971-72 period Scavolini plied his trade in other genres. But since that small sample of works includes one of my ten best giallos, YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM, Scavolini's "farewell to giallos" merits some sustained attention.

Structurally, GARDEN isn't as well-constructed as the best of this subgenre. Like a lot of "old dark house mysteries," the film's eminent character is dead when the main story starts, and the audience must follow an amateur detective sussing out the unhappy lives of rich siblings Azzurra (Erika Blanc) and Manfredi (Peter Lee Lawrence).

The "detective," an unnamed professor of ornithology, rents the sumptuous estate where Azzurra and Manfredi were raised. The professor knows nothing of the former occupants of the estate: he only intends to study the bird life in the adjacent forest. However, in said forest the bird-fancier discovers a pile of wadded-up audiotape. The professor untangles and cleans up the tape, which he's improbably able to replay on a tape machine.

 The tapes reveal the history of Azzurra as she confides in her psychiatrist regarding her twisted history with Manfredi. Both were raised without the oversight of their parents, so that they started sleeping together as kids, which grew into a sexual relationship. Later Azzurra marries another man, and Manfredi takes up with a "free spirit" named Viola, but neither of them is able to let the other sibling go. For instance, the tapes reveal to the professor that after Azzura married, Manfredi left the estate for a while, only to return with Viola, attempting (without much success) to maintain an art studio. In keeping with the title, the forbidden love of the siblings culminates in death, and the surviving sibling even extends his menace to the amateur detective.

GARDEN's pace is slow, possibly to take full advantage of the opulent setting of mansion and vernal paradise. The "love and death" trope isn't uniformly maintained throughout the professor's discoveries, but I assign high-mythicity to GARDEN less because of its rambling plot than for Scavolini's formulation of the transgressive couple, an "Adam and Eve" who exist not to propagate a new future but to be destroyed by their past. To be sure, the script (by Scavolini and a woman with no other IMDB credits) backs off on the incest-theme. Azzurra, who often manipulates Manfredi to keep him at her beck and call, cruelly tells him that they were never brother and sister: that he was a boy adopted by the family after Azzura's actual brother perished in childbirth. But this revelation seems random, since it doesn't hold any consequences for the plot-- and besides, if Azzurra's parents wanted to preserve the illusion of a viable male heir, why didn't either of them stick around to administer the estate and make sure that the two phony siblings made good marriages? The unnamed parents are more like a pair of otiose divinities who just dump their progeny into a beautiful paradise, just to watch them destroy one another.

Oddly, the trope of "perilous psycho" applies to both siblings, and though Manfredi is the one who becomes a murderer, Azzurra's Sadean influence seems far more profound and pernicious.

                  

  

VIRTUAL COMBAT (1995)

 

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

Hyde Park Entertainment came close to PM in terms of churning out reams of STV products for cable and video rental stores. PM tended to concentrate on action movies, while Hyde emphasized softcore thrillers like the NIGHT EYES series. That said, the redoubtable Don Wilson made three flicks for Hyde Park. I've found a number of Wilson programmers to be passable formula entertainment. But though I've not seen them all, VIRTUAL COMBAT may be the worst thing Wilson ever did, though the fault surely lies with the guys behind the camera.

COMBAT takes place in the near future, and like most such action-fare, it's really just the modern world with one or two SF-tropes added. VR technology has become the big thing in future-Las Vegas, so much so that local cops like David Quarry (Wilson) and his partner John spend most of their time hanging out in VR parlors-- though John avails himself of VR sexcapades, while David hones his martial skills by battling VR opponents. One opponent is Dante (Michael Bernardo), and he kicks real boy David's ass in their first bout. Unfortunately, a world-beater named Burroughs (first and middle names "John Carter," hah hah) has his scientists invent a way of bringing VR programs into the real world-- sort of the 3-D printing of the 1990s. Burroughs' main purpose seems to be to corner a new market on VR prostitutes, both creating regular good-lookers like Liana (Athena Massey) and "specialty types" like whip-wielding dominatrix Greta (Dawn Ann Billings). But the same tech that births cyber-babes also unleashes cyber-villain Dante, and one of his first actions is to kill David's partner.

Avenging his partner then becomes David's only motive in life for the rest of the film, though he finds a little time for a nothing sex scene with Liana. But director Andrew Stevens's idea of a plot is that of providing minimal connective tissue between a bunch of mediocre fight-scenes. Even Liana and Greta get to throw down a little. But only the climactic combat between David and Dante shows decent choreography, which may stem from the two actors working to their strengths. But Dante's never very threatening, not least because he doesn't utter his own lines, but strides around close-mouthed while his dialogue is uttered by the booming voice of Michael Drn.

Eventually all the rogue programs are destroyed, even "good VR" Liana, though David can still visit an iteration of Liana. Where? Why, in the VR sex parlors! And so COMBAT ends by coming "full circle"-- or is that "full-circle jerk?"                 

GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI (1993-94); GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI MOVIE (1994)

 

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

I'd seen a few random episodes of this anime teleseries long ago but recently decided to take the plunge and watch all the subbed episodes online, as well as comparing them to the first two years of the 1991-99 manga series. Though some anime serials change many details about the manga-stories they adapt, or even produce totally original installments, all 45 episodes of the SWEEPER series are based on the tales of Takashi Shiina. The biggest changes are slight increases in slapstick violence and the injections of support-characters not in the original stories, probably just to increase their run-time.

Most of the episodes are done-in-one, with the exception of occasional two-parters. Starring character Reiko Mikami is a "ghost sweeper" in her late twenties or early thirties, and she uses a variety of supernatural weapons to exorcise troublesome ghosts and demons who plague modern-day people and businesses. Mikami is as courageous and resourceful as the best heroes, but she's also extremely mercenary, taxing her customers with huge bills so that someday she can become a rich woman. She's also slightly larcenous-- one episode displays her knowledge of burglary techniques-- and she constantly underpays her male assistant, seventeen-year-old Tadao Yokoshima. She gets away with this because she's super-hot and knows that horndog Yokoshima will accept any wage just to scope her out. The fact that she's exploiting the youth, however, does not keep her from doling out brutal punishment to the teen any time he tries to feel her up, or even expresses a negative opinion of her. Yokoshima, for his part, is clearly meant to be the "goat" of the series, the one who has all the terrible things happen to him-- and because he's such an unregenerate perv, his sufferings are funny. As contrast, Mikami also employs a naive young female ghost, Okinu, who's much milder in temperament than either Mikami or Yokoshima, but still generates her share of difficulties.

SWEEPER's cast has a healthy variety of equally wacky support-types, and as I noted, sometimes the writers injected them into adaptations of stories where they didn't appear. Happily, unlike some later manga-concepts, the first couple of years of the manga didn't overpopulate the series so as to distract from the central star and her two primary helpers, which arguably occurred with URUSEI YATSURA. This concentration on the three principals helps generate suspense about their responses to one another. While Mikami never becomes generous, she will fight for her friends, and sometimes even for "friendly enemies." It's not clear from the first two years of stories if she becomes a syndromic sadist through her constant thrashings of Yokoshima, though it will be interesting to see if the character changes at all in the manga as a whole. She does show some regard for his welfare at times, and even respects him a bit, until he inevitably loses that respect thanks to his horniness. 

SWEEPER is always light-hearted and non-serious, though manga-artist Shiina comes up with some creative concepts from time to time. For instance, when the team accidentally injures Santa Claus. they have to complete his rounds for him, though Shiina mentions that in modern times there are so many kids in the world, Santa has to choose recipients by sheer chance. A wilder sort of folklore-crossover has Mikami take on the Pied Piper of Hamelin-- albeit one put through a mythic mix-master, since his abilities include the power to turn adults into little kids (Mikami being his first victim) and to summon rats as his minions. The final episode adapts a story in which the ghost-sweepers get trapped inside a movie, interacting with fictional characters who are fully aware of being fiction. Something about the way treats the movie characters reminded me of the Japanese folklore-idea of the *tsukumogami,* an inanimate object that takes on a pseudo-life thanks to associating with humans. Neither the manga nor the anime is interested in any existential questions. But even ideas with potential unused can supply a sense of the creators' raw creativity. In conclusion, even before finishing my survey of the manga series, I like SWEEPER enough to say that its feminine protagonist ought to rank more highly in the lists of "best heroines ever."

ADDENDUM: After the teleseries ended the producers finally wrote what seems to be, from available info, an all-original story for the franchise. This hour-long OAV is also a very peculiar crossover, for it pits Reiko and her team, as well her usual support-cast, against the vampire Nosferatu. There's no resemblance between this monster and the character from the silent film classic, but it's implied that the spirit of the vampire somehow traveled to medieval Japan and possessed the body of the famous lord Nobunaga Oda. A contemporary exorcist seems to have slain the vampire-lord, but he reincarnates in modern Japan, along with his aide Ranmaru. Both Nobuaga and Ranmaru were real historical figures, though so far as I can tell most later expansions on their careers were not "fictionalized" enough for them to comprise crossover-icons. Anyway, the dead exorcist also appears in modern times and gives Reiko a magical spear with which to vanquish the demon. Reiko is her usual money-grubbing self but still steps up when Nosferatu endangers her world. None of the support-characters do much and Reiko's cowardly assistant Tadao only gets substantial time because the exorcist-ghost possesses him, using his body to help Reiko. The film recycles the usual tropes of the manga with no originality, though anyone in 1994 "shipping" Reiko and Tadao would have been pleased that when Reiko's life stands in danger, she thinks of her assistant moments before "he" shows up to save her. This Galahad fantasy, however, does not keep Reiko from beating up Tadao several times for his horndog behavior. There are a few decent scenes but overall, the movie-- given the subtitle "The Resurrection of Nosferatu" in a dubbed English version-- lacks the charm of the teleseries and the original manga.             

                                     

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.

 

GARTER COLT (1968)

 

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

Along with 1967's LOLA COLT, the similarly named GARTER COLT stands as one of a very small handful of Euro-westerns starring tough female protagonists. Unfortunately, it also may be the worst of that small group.

The script shows traveling gambler Lulu "Garter" Colt (Nicoletta Machiavelli) as sharing the distanced manner of standard spaghetti male protagonists: emotionally reserved and super-competent. However, Lulu is never interesting, even when she shows off her skills with a pistol, routing stagecoach robbers or protecting a young maiden from rapine. Part of the problem may be that Lulu herself is never in real danger. Her projection of coolness is interrupted when she falls for a French soldier involved in the war between Emperor Maximillian and Juarez, but the lover is killed by a bandit named "Red" (Claudio Camaso).

Though most of the screenplay is filled with jokes and absurdities that go nowhere, the one thing the writers seem to be passionate about is the Red character, who is as "hot" as Lulu is "cold." For once a spaghetti villain has his own romantic arc, for throughout GARTER Red pursues a spicy young lass, Rosy, whom he may have already bedded. Rosy mostly resists Red in favor of a younger swain, but the movie's only real amusement inheres in her vacillations as to which lover to choose. Red tries to persuade her to choose him by tying Rosy above a boiling-hot, muddy spring. Also, he situates an innocent little boy upon her shoulders, so that the kid will die with Rosy if she falls in. The setup doesn't make much sense, but it's relatively original. Lulu comes along at the right minute and propels Red into the boiling spring, which kills the fiend on the spot.

Despite various ludicrous occurrences in the wandering narrative, the only thing that rises to the level of a "fallacious figment" concerns a talking parrot. After some byplay with the bird seeming only to imitate whatever human speech it hears, the creature gets caught between two gun-happy parties-- at which point the parrot cries out, "I'm neutral!"              

THE HYPNOTIC EYE (1960)

 

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

Someone said that artists are like sorcerers who can be bound by their own spells. Certainly this is true of those creators who become so enraptured by certain themes that they repeat them obsessively. That said, obviously there are also creators to whom spell-casting is just a job, and they use magic after the fashion of Mickey Mouse’s junior magician in FANTASIA. -- THE CURSE OF THE MUMMY'S TOMB review.

Look, I told you the history [laughs]-- I had an idea, a wacko idea about the line, then instead of making a film for 45 bucks with a line in a loop and a voiceover, we're into 365,000 bucks. It was cast badly, and it wasn't a very good movie by any stretch of the imagination [laughs]. I went on to do better things. This was an early, quick effort. I must tell you, I never took it very seriously, it was all just sort of a lark.-- ASTONISHING B-MONSTER interview with HYPNOTIC EYE screenwriter William Read Woodfield. 

It's easy for a critic to wax philosophical about the complexities of a famous filmmaker like, say, Alfred Hitchcock. Not only was Hitchcock embraced, due to his superb directorial skills, by major film-companies, he was one of those creators who came back to favorite themes over and over. Hitchcock gave interviews that repeatedly testified as to his personal erudition. Thus, if a critic noticed that a character in an original script written for AH was named "Justine," the critic might feel himself justified in asking Hitchcock if this was a calculated reference to the most famous literary character by that name, the one created by the Marquis De Sade.

I don't know how educated William Read Woodfield, the architect of THE HYPNOTIC EYE, was at the time he wrote the movie with his wife (who has no other writing-credits on IMDB). Woodfield was known principally as a Hollywood photographer, and IMDB only testifies to his having written two episodes of the TV show SEA HUNT before he wrote EYE. In the excerpt above, Woodfield claims to have gone on to "better things," by which he presumably meant high-prestige TV shows like COLUMBO and MISSION IMPOSSIBLE (and not so much for his scripts for TIME TUNNEL and LOST IN SPACE). 

I can't discount Woodfield making light of his work on EYE. At the same time, the Woodfield giving the interview is not necessarily identical with the Woodfield of 1960. Who can say that the writer didn't tap some deeper part of his consciousness back then, when he was desperate to be something better than a writer on SEA HUNT? He claims in the interview not to have been aware of William Castle's theatrical gimmicks, but any film boasting the fake come-on of a non-existent process called "Hypno-Magic" makes that claim pretty dubious. Similarly, was a guy trying to break into the world of low-budget horror-films, if only temporarily, necessarily ignorant of trends in the genre? The late 1950s are marked by an escalation of the violence in horror movies, and EYE certainly fits that trend as well.          

 

Further, one need not assume that 1960 Woodfield followed the same critic-approved creative process as Alfred Hitchcock. Woodfield may have testified to his own process as being loosely associative in nature, through the barely necessary EYE character Philip Hecht, a police psychologist of some sort. We first meet Hecht showing off the way his mind works by tossing darts at a bunch of newspaper clippings on the wall, constructing a "sentence" out of his having hit, in succession, Sigmund Freud, a Valentine's Day card, and the derriere of Jayne Mansfield. That sort of process resembles the way Woodfield talks about putting EYE together out of his fascination with stage hypnosis acts.

But EYE isn't really all about sex, as per Freud's own obsessions; it's first and foremost about violence. Like this famous scene:

Within the film's first ten minutes, we see this scene and learn from dimwit cop Dave Kennedy (Joe Patridge) that the girl who sets her own hair on fire is just one of many curious self-mutilations that have been taking place in recent times. Possibly they've all occurred on Dave's beat, since he's been assigned to divine what seems to be a serial-assailant mystery with no assailant evident. Yet Dave, though he seems too dumb to know how to spell "psychology," finds his way to the mystery's solution by random association, for he tells Hecht that he and his girlfriend Marcia (Marcia Henderson) plan to take in a new hypnotist act that night. 

 The film-viewer will solve the mystery long before Dave does, once said viewer sees the Great Desmond (Jacques Bergerac) working his magic on stage. Oddly, we first see Desmond tormenting four seated men with illusions of being extremely hot or cold, etc. But once he calls three pretty young women up on the stage for a routine, the viewer easily deduces the hypnotist's complicity in the unsolved acts of violence.

 To be sure, there's the strong suggestion that the women in the audience are very anxious to have the charming Desmond exert his power over them. Marcia almost volunteers to be one of the hypnotist's subjects, but her friend Dodie takes Marcia's place as Sacrificial Lamb. Later, Dodie is the next self-mutilation victim. Does Dave start to suspect Desmond then? No, but Marcia does, and then she puts herself in harm's way, dating Desmond in order to learn his secret.

But Woodfield has a twist on the usual formula of the sexually-repressed male serial killer-- one of whom. Norman Bates, would make his cinematic debut that same year. Desmond's stage assistant Justine (Allison Hayes) might wear the costume of The Pretty Girl who's supposed to distract audiences from an illusionist's tricks, but she's the one in control of everything Desmond does. She's also evidently his superior in hypnotism, in that she personally commands Marcia to enter a scalding shower and almost succeeds in another mutilation except for Dave's timely arrival on the scene.    

The unexpected appearance of Justine somehow triggers Dave into doing actual police work, like interviewing all the mutilation victims (which one would have thought he'd have already done). Admittedly, this time he's seeking to learn if any of them encountered Desmond before. Hecht helps Dave figure out that all of the victims, including Dodie, have been hypnotically commanded to forget their encounters with Desmond. To be sure, none of this detective-work proves relevant. A post-hypnotic command forces Marcia to return to the theater, where Desmond is using his powers (enhanced by a mechanical strobe-light eye held in one hand) to enthrall his entire audience. Dave and Hecht arrive on the scene, Marcia is saved, and the two evil hypnotists die.

I don't know if Woodfield ever read anything about Sigmund Freud outside of some Sunday-supplement article, and I don't know if he was aware that the name Justine is attached to a character created by Sade-- though in fairness, that character was a victim of sadism, not a perpetrator. Woodfield may not have thought that much about his twist on the male-predator trope. He may have been thinking of famous folk tales about feminine jealousy like SNOW WHITE. Another model that comes even closer to EYE's plot is one version of the Medusa story. In this iteration, Medusa starts out as a gorgeous mortal woman. She's pursued by the god Poseidon, and despite her taking shelter in the temple of Athena, he rapes her there. Then, to add injury to injury, Athena (who apparently has no power to curse Poseidon) avenges the pollution to her honor by cursing the mortal woman to become the grotesque Gorgon with the petrifying visage.

There's no way to know precisely what 1960 William Woodfield had on his mind when he (and maybe his wife with him) wrote EYE. But even if he later thought of the movie as junk, he didn't write it as indifferently as most junk of the time was written. The movie is lurid, but it's preoccupied not with a male predator killing women as a sex-substitute (paging Norman again), but with a ruthless queen determined to make sure no mortal woman could outshine her without suffering for it. Even a last-minute "motivation" for Justine's actions-- she whips off a facemask to reveal that she too is scarred like her later victims-- bears some resemblance to the way the Greek goddess Athena carried around the image of a Gorgon's head, either on her shield or her clothing, with which to terrify her enemies. I think it's eminently possible that Woodfield, thinking more in terms of free association than in terms of studied metaphors, formulated a story in which women lose their beauty due to feminine jealousy-- and at the risk of sounding misogynist, that just might be a theme to which female horror-fans might warm more than would males of that species.                             

VIOLENCE JACK (1986, 1988, 1990)

 

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

If people say you can’t do something, then you want to do it even more. Things that are considered forbidden, means other people aren’t doing them yet! -- Go Nagai

From what spotty English-language reviews I found online, I don't get a sense that all, if any, of these three OVAs were totally faithful to Go Nagai's manga VIOLENCE JACK. But I have no doubt that they had total fidelity to Nagai's aesthetic of transgressive sex and violence. 

Before watching these productions, I read a few months' worth of the manga online, just to get a sense of its parameters, and I got the sense that it's a fairly loose concept. Such looseness was probably ideal for an OAV series, in that it wouldn't be expected to adapt an accepted continuity, and to date the original JACK material has proved too hardcore for even the Japanese to adapt fully into an anime series. In addition to being far more violent than even a lot of Nagai's other works, JACK is alleged to be the first manga/anime to delve into the post-apoc disaster genre-- which had been around a long time but was not usually melded with the genre of high-octane adventure. (Roger Zelazny's DAMNATION ALLEY was one predecessor.)  But this mainly allowed the protagonist-- a ten-foot-tall giant capable of brutal retaliation to protect the innocent-- to wander from situation to situation as he pleased. So I don't believe the original manga followed a strict continuity, and neither do the OVAs.

       

HAREM BOMBER was the first-released OVA in Japan, but it doesn't make any concessions regarding introducing Jack, and it only provides a sketchy backstory for its world. It all takes place in the Kanto region of Japan, which was so devastated by a meteor strike that it became a pocket world of ravaged human cliques. What happened to the rest of Japan, or the rest of the world? You'll never learn from the anime. As in many later genre-pieces, roving gangs of plunderers comprise the only authority, and the most powerful gang-leader is a warlord, Slum King, who comes into conflict with Jack. The two fight a bit, get separated, and the rest of the film concerns Jack protecting a young couple from the motorbike-riding looters. Slum King steals women to sell to sex slave-rings, and he's an equal opportunity employer, given that he has a whip-wielding lesbian henchwoman who sorts out the new acquisitions. Since Nagai probably intended to have some more climactic clash between the hero and Slum King down the line, the story's big fight concentrates on Jack vanquishing one of the warlord's henchmen, the titular Harem Bomber. In a twist of expectations, the girl lives and the boy dies, and there's a fuzzy reference to some Nagai concept about Jack has some sort of link to an ethereal bird-creature.

EVIL TOWN, the second OVA, feels more like an intro to Jack. A huge section of a Kanto city is swallowed by an earthquake, with the result that several humans are confined to the sunken area, unable to get back to the surface. The survivors break into three groups-- A, B and C-- and A's citizens are the ones who unearth Jack from a pile of rubble, where he's apparently been comatose. Jack at first tells the A-guys that he has no name but then dubs himself "Violence Jack" because he happens to have a huge jackknife with him. Though at first the taciturn hero defends the A-group from the freakish and malevolent denizens of the B-group, eventually Jack turns on both when he learns that the C-group is totally made up of women who have been abused and preyed upon by both groups. Though some of the women can fight-- particularly one muscular babe-- Jack defends them and makes it possible for them to return to the surface. TOWN seems to state a key tenet of Nagai's creative philosophy: that the "freaks" are not intrinsically less moral than the "straights," given that the latter group is willing to descend into rapine at the drop of a hat. TOWN is unquestionably the most extreme of the three OVAs, barraging the viewer with scenes of nudity, rape, bloody slaughter, cannibalism and even a little necrophilia.

HELL'S WIND, as well as being the name of a predacious gang of bikers, is the weakest of the OVAs. The gang menaces a small town seeking to get back to normal civilization, but the bikers, who report to the warlord Slum King, continually prey on the innocents. Long before Jack makes the scene, Hell's Wind assaults a young couple, killing the man and raping the woman, one Jun. She trains herself to become an Action Girl so that she can take revenge, but Jack more or less saves her the trouble, so that Jun doesn't have a satisfactory arc. Jack, though never demonstrative, seems to have a special liking for a young boy, and based on what little I read of the manga, I think that the two characters were intertwined in some way, though this never becomes explicit.

EVIL TOWN has the strongest sociological motif, implying that when men and women are confined together in a figurative prison with no outside contact, the men will become inveterate rapists. But though this is an intriguing idea, it's just a side-dish to the main course, which is loads and loads of sex and violence.

                       

BLOODY PIT OF HORROR (1965)

 

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

I've argued in a separate essay that BLOODY PIT OF HORROR is more than just another dumb horror flick about a menace in an old castle. Though its writers and director were probably innocent of any desire to make PIT "arty" in any way, I find it likely that they were aware of how routine many similar old-castle flicks had become even in the short period of Italy's investment in horror cinema. After all, PIT was being shot at the same Palazzo Borghese castle that had hosted two generic flicks, THE VAMPIRE AND THE BALLERINA and THE PLAYGIRLS AND THE VAMPIRE. Whatever behind-the-scenes crew might have been in both of these as well as PIT, the only obvious point of continuity is the lead male player, Walter Brandi.

There's nothing very notable about the victims here than in the earlier two films. Since the "old dark house" flicks of the silent era, there was an established trope in which a group of vulnerable individuals get trapped/stranded in some house where a mystery killer seeks to knock them off one by one. In this case, PIT, like the two 1960 movies, ups the level of pulchritude seen in old dark house films. This time the group is led to a remote castle by Parks, a publisher of crime and horror books. I have no idea if Italian publishing houses actually went around looking for locations at which to shoot photos, and since one guy in the party dresses up in a skeleton costume a la Italian comics-villains like Diabolik and Kriminal, it's possible Parks is publishing fumetti, not "real books." Frankly, the location-scouting thing sounds more typical of movie companies, like the one making this film. In any case Parks brings with a couple of male assistants, his star writer Rick (Brandi), his secretary Edith (Louise Barrett), and four gorgeous models. Of the persons in Parks' party, only two get anything like two-dimensional characterization. Edith, despite not ever having seen the castle before, feels strangely drawn to it. Rick occasionally tosses out wry remarks about his association with this farrago, and we later learn he was a reporter and fell into writing horror books because it seemed easy.

Parks orders his people to break into the castle, thinking it deserted. The unnamed "master of the house" (Mickey Hargitay) and his whole two servants (both strapping men in outfits like those of Venetian gondoliers) order the group to leave. However, from a secret vantage the master sees and recognizes Edith, whereon he changes his mind, permitting the crew to remain for the night, as long as they keep clear of the castle's dungeons.

Now, it's likely dire things might have happened to the visitors even if they'd obeyed the injunction. But of course Parks can't pass up a chance to take dungeon-pictures, so he and his crew invade the dungeon and set up sexy scenarios. It's all fun and games, until someone loses a head when one of the torture-machines kills him.

There's no mystery about who the killer is, even after it's disclosed that the castle once belonged to a medieval torturer, The Crimson Executioner, killed by authorities in his own domicile. Once Edith eventually gets a look at the castle's owner, she tells Rick she was once engaged to actor Travis Anderson, renowned for having played "muscle men in costume films," Anderson, says Edith, left her without explanation, or even cancelling their engagement, and evidently purchased the castle because he admired the accomplishments of its medieval master. By this time, though, Anderson and his henchmen have already killed a couple more victims, and as in the persona of the scarlet-clad torturer, Anderson begins using his specialized devices to wreak havoc on Parks and the terrified models. He takes Edith prisoner as well, trying to get her to embrace a hanging mannequin with poisoned barbs attached. Meanwhile, Rick, the only one free, has a couple of running battles with one of the henchmen (not sure where the second one went). After the henchman thinks he's killed Rick with an arrow, the guy reports to his leader in the dungeon. However, Rick's death is a fakeout, and he shows up in the dungeon, beating down each of the two men in succession. (Nice of them not to gang up on the writer.) The Executioner conveniently runs into the "poison mannequin" and is semi-literally hoist on his own petard. Rick and Edith alone survive the ordeal, implicitly with some romance for both in future.

Now, there's one minor sociological motif in PIT: that of purveyors of sexy/violent fiction get subjected to real horrors. But no one in the audience was likely to agree with the villain was justified in visiting these dooms on foolish innocents, even though they trespassed on private property. PIT doesn't possess, or claim to possess, internal logic. But given all the lovingly constructed torture devices Anderson has at his immediate disposal, clearly he's been at least fantasizing about subjecting victims to torture-scenarios for quite some time. One device is a huge spider-web with arrows rigged to fire if anyone touches the web-strands: Rick tries and fails to rescue one model (Moha Tahi) from this web of sin. Another is the poison mannequin, which Anderson calls "the Lover of Death." Curiously in the English dub. Anderson genders the mannequin as a "him" even though the dummy has long blonde hair. It would make more sense if Anderson had considered this mock-horror to be a representative of the perils of female sexuality and so would also be roughly congruent with the way the original medieval Executioner dies, by Iron Maiden. 

And why does Anderson want so badly to torture others? Well, the easy answer is that of compensation: he tortures others because he feels tortured. But assuming that the English dub represents the original Italian reasonably well, then the writers were also apparently having fun with the idea of a big strong muscleman who utters lines like "a woman's love would have destroyed me."

Sketchy though both Anderson and Edith are, their one long conversation suggests that Anderson, in pursuing a career as a "muscle man in costume films" formed the idea that he had made himself into "a perfect body." Since physical culture requires denial, Anderson eventually denied himself anything that detracted from his goal of bodily perfection. It's funny when Edith reacts to Anderson's declarations by calling Anderson an "egotist." Yet it's nonetheless true that the villain has validated his ego by worshipping not only his own body's physical power, but also the power that was once wielded by a long-dead master of torture-devices. Italian audiences would have also recognized that when Edith speaks of "costume pictures," she means a specific breed of historical flicks in which a male hero showed off a boulder-shouldered physique, the better to portray legendary heroes like Hercules, Samson and Maciste. The English dialogue does not allude to the fact that by 1965, hardly anyone was making "Hercules films" anymore, so all of Anderson's efforts to sculpt his body for the purposes of cinematic employment would have come to nothing. (And of course the writers would also have known that Mickey Hargitay played Hercules in one Italian-made spectacle from 1960.) However, the existing soundtrack emphasizes only Anderson's fear that somehow the love of a woman will compromise his male integrity. 

I've seen one or two arguments that PIT represents Anderson's rejection of his former fiancee as homoerotic in nature, and for a time I considered this possibility, given that Anderson's only two servants are musclemen like he is. However, the more I thought about it, the less likely it seemed. If Anderson's concern is for keeping the integrity of his "perfect body," then a homosexual encounter would be MORE invasive, not less. It's more likely Anderson keeps around two hulking guards because they present no attractions for him, and also because they're the most effective guardians of his privacy. But when Parks' band brings sexy women into Anderson's domain-- one of whom is the woman he had at least dallied with-- then that occurrence reactivates his antipathy toward sex. As long as there were no women around, Anderson could lose himself in narcissistic dreams of his perfection and of the power once wielded by his idol, the Crimson Executioner. But once the female sex is on his radar, then he becomes obsessed with being a torture-master. 

              

And for my last point, I wondered in my other essay how the writers even came up with the idea of a big muscleman dispensing tortures. And one possibility is that if one or more writers were familiar with the major tropes of the musclemen films, they would have known that a great many of those movies place the bulked-up hero in some situation where he must conquer some infernal device (like a spiked wall) or some huge animal, etc. These tortures are visited upon the hero by men and women who cannot possibly fight the hero on his own terms, and in the case of the women, usually evil queens, there can be an element of sadism, the desire to conquer the noble crusader. I hypothesize that the writers of PIT, if only for the sake of variety, wanted to reverse that trope, so that the hulking protagonist would reveal his own impotence in torturing those weaker than himself.  

ANGEL SEASON 5 (2003-04)

 

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

The final season of ANGEL goes through some odd mutations as it shifts from "film noir mystery" to "working from within to take down the evil company." Further, according to a recent interview with James Marsters, when his character of Spike was resurrected for this series, this exigency may have caused the producers to cut Charisma Carpenter from the cast. This means the character arc for Cordelia is never really brought to a satisfying conclusion, at least in the teleseries. Still, in Season Four the writers had written themselves into a corner with respect to that character, so maybe they couldn't have done much with her anyway. And one more season of Spike, being brought into continuous conflict with his old hell-mate Angel, was probably a decent trade-off.            

CONVICTION (F)-- Season Four dropped the Fred-Gunn romance in a contrived manner so that by Season Five one can hardly tell they were ever together. This set up more unrequited agony for Wesley, who still loves her but can't seem to make a play. Gunn, for his part, gets super-charged with legal knowledge so that he can function as one of W&H's lawyers, just so he has a more definite function in the series than busting heads. Harmony is invited-- by Wesley, no less-- to become Angel's new secretary, but the Senior Partners also send Angel a new advisor, name of Eve, who serves as Hell's liaison. The main plot, about the team trying to prevent LA from being blown to hell, is just filler. The episode ends with Spike appearing in the offices of W&H, but as an insubstantial phantom.

JUST REWARDS (F)-- Not only is Spike a phantom, he also can't leave the evil law offices and so sticks around to bug Angel as much as possible. At the same time, Angel demands that W&H stop supplying a client named Hainsley with grave-derived corpses. Hainsley, a necromancer, threatens to take Angel down, and tries to get Phantom Spike to betray the noble vampire. The expectation set up is that Spike, who betrayed the Buffy team a few times, will do anything to get a body again, but it's no great surprise that Spike is not so much loyal to Angel as disloyal to the necromancer.

UNLEASHED (F)-- This is a decent filler episode in which the Angel Team protects a brand-new werewolf, name of Nina, from becoming the main course for a bunch of gourmets hungry for werewolf flesh.

HELL BOUND (F)-- Scofflaw though Spike is, he knows that all the things he's done in his vampire persona should doom him to eternal perdition. For the first time, the second "vampire with a soul" is faced with that fate, as a being called the Reaper, whom others at W&H cannot see, continually torments him. The existential confrontation with damnation, however, is circumvented when it turns out that the Reaper is the ghost of a sorcerer who's found a way to preserve his existence by sacrificing other spirits-- even though, technically, Spike is not exactly a ghost. James Marsters gets all the good scenes here, but the story is only adequate.

LIFE OF THE PARTY (P)-- And here's the first crummy episode of Season Five. Lorne arranges a Halloween party at W&H as a means of cementing the firm's relationships with its many demonic and sorcerous clientele. But Lorne has overextended himself by not getting enough sleep, and so he unintentionally starts commanding the other members of his group to do things against their will, much as Willow unintentionally did in "Something Blue." The foremost of these incidents is that Lorne's suggestion that Angel and Eve "get a room" causes them to have sex, though this doesn't have much overall effect upon the series as a whole. During the big bash, a Hulked-out version of Lorne shows up and tries to bash everyone to bits, and once the monster's defeated, Lorne vows to get some sleep.           

THE CAUTIONARY TALE OF NUMERO CINCO (F)-- This episode isn't all that good, but I give it props for trying to write a love letter to luchadores movies. Angel has a violent encounter with Numero Cinco, the W&H mailroom-guy, who walks around in a wrestler's mask-- but this is just a prelude to learning that Cinco is the only one who can stop a demon that feeds on heroes' hearts. The most significant subplot is that Spike, despite still being a phantom, hears some details of the Shianshu Prophecy, and wonders if it might apply to him, not to Angel.

LINEAGE (G)-- Finally one of the stories turns up the drama to eleven and does so in such a way as to reveal the psychological depth of the Wesley character. The opening scenes give the impression that the team is faced with just another new foe: a horde of cyborg assassins. Fred gets injured in these scenes while Wesley, who still has yet to make a romantic pass at her, becomes very guilty at having put her in harm's way. The script still plays it coy as to whether Fred reciprocates his feelings, because the focus here is not on Wesley's future but his humiliating past. His father Roger Wyndham-Pryce is trying to rebuild the Watcher organization that was wiped out in BUFFY's last season, and he wants his son to join him. Wesley, however, wants his independence, even if it does involve working for a hellish law office. The matter becomes irrelevant when it turns out that (a) Roger is a mole, trying to steal a weapon from the office, and (b) Roger is a cyborg, which Wesley only finds out after being forced to shoot his "father" dead. Though the real Roger Wyndham-Pryce is still alive and unaware of all these events, Wesley is once more put through a dark night of the soul, his third following Angel trying to kill him and his loss of Lilah.  

DESTINY (G)-- Up to this point Phantom Spike has been no more than an annoyance to his former pack-mate Angel, but a strange box arrives at W&H and it turns Spike to a solid being again. However, the same magic that works on Spike starts breeding chaos in the law offices and spreading to the outside world The Angel Team gets the info that they can cancel out the magic if the destined champion of the prophecy drinks from a magical cup. Naturally each of the two ensouled vampires thinks he's destined to receive the honor, and they end up having one of the series' best fight-scenes at the climax. This is also one of the last times the show flashes back to the period when Spike had been newly turned by Drusilla, and Angelus, the "big dog" of the vamp-pack, puts Spike to the test. More importantly, Young Spike is sincerely in love with the wayward Drusilla, and his first big quarrel comes about when Angelus, on the outs with Darla, seduces Drusilla. So this provides the genesis of the long rivalry of Angel and Spike, and from then on, their continuing love/hate affair becomes the final season's best feature. The story also brings back evil lawyer Lindsey (Christian Kane), who's running some conspiracy with his lover Eve, W&H's link to the senior partners.

HARM'S WAY (F)-- This makes a good counterpart to "Disharmony," being a focus on how Harmony copes with being Angel's secretary. At the very time that the team is trying to manage a difficult summit between rival demon tribes, Harmony is framed for murder. She blunders about trying to prove her innocence and nearly kills some of the regular cast. One of the better funny ANGEL episodes. A minor development of the Spike story is that he stops talking about seeking out Buffy for a time, possibly fearing that if he sees her again, she'll reject him.

SOUL PURPOSE (F)-- "Hell Bound" put Spike through a hallucinogenic wringer, so now it's Angel's turn, reflecting his loss of confidence after being defeated by Spike. Many of Angel's delusions involve his seeing Spike taking over his position as champion and being feted by the other members of the team while Angel himself becomes the mail-boy. Meanwhile, Lindsey launches the next part of his hard-to-follow plot. He takes the name "Doyle," formerly that of the half-demon psychic who passed on his powers to Cordelia in Season One and convinces Spike to play vigilante.   

 DAMAGE (G)-- Here's a good callback to the history both Spike and Angel had with vampire slayers, as they encounter an insane young woman with Slayer strength. Dana (Navi Rawat) has been in an insane asylum for years following suffering abuse, but thanks to the spell that unleashed all Potential Slayers in BUFFY Season Seven, she comes into her power and breaks loose. Unlike Buffy and Faith, Dana's memory somehow taps into those of the last two Slayers-- the ones whom Spike killed-- so she's out to give Spike grief. The episode loses points for pointlessly bringing back the unfunny BUFFY character Andrew, though the climax does involve his command of other Slayers who take custody of Dana at the end.

YOU'RE WELCOME (F)-- And now it's time to say goodbye to Cordelia Chase as well. Angel, in the midst of contemplating defection from W&H, gets a call about Cordelia awakening from her coma. This may have been mystic flummery, for by the episode's end we learn that Cordelia's body never awakened, though something that looks and feels like the living Cordelia greets the Angel Team. She follows them back to W&H and has brief interactions with Harmony, Gunn and Lorne. She asks after Connor and finds out that Angel agreed to work for W&H in exchange for remolding reality to give Connor a happy life. Cordelia is not shy about telling Angel that he's gone down a bad road, though as in all the other Season Four episodes, she never reveals any details about how she got hijacked by Jasmine. The team learns that Eve has made an alliance with Lindsey to get revenge on Angel, though his actual plot never made much sense. Cordelia aids Angel in defeating Lindsey and sending him to some hell-dimension. The story concludes with Cordelia shuffling off the mortal coil to become a vision-thing of some sort. It's hard to believe the story was conceived as a guest-shot for Buffy.

WHY WE FIGHT (F)-- If nothing else, this one's a good change of pace, as most of the story is a flashback to Angel's years in the US during World War Two. In short, Angel, Spike and two other vampires get trapped in a submarine at the bottom of the sea. The frame story concerns how one of the mortals menaced by the vamps comes back to gain vengeance on Angel.

 SMILE TIME (F)-- I must admit that though there's nothing exceptional about the story, "the one where Angel gets turned into a puppet" remains one of the most memorable ANGEL tales. Spike's huge amusement at Angel's humiliation alone makes the episode, though he takes a back seat to the boss vamp's temptation to romantically pursue werewolf-woman Nina. In between the puppet-hijinks, Gunn begins to lose his downloaded talents and makes an unwise deal, while Fred finally breaks the ice with Wesley. Both lead to bad ends.

A HOLE IN THE WORLD (G)-- Fred is infected with the essence of an Old God named Illyria, which destroys her body and soul despite everything the team can do to prevent it. Even more than the BUFFY episode "The Body," "Hole" shows the utter inability of even super-powered mortals to stave off death, which I assume is the "hole" referenced in the title. A special perk is that for once writer Josh Whedon expands on his quasi-Lovecraftian universe in a fully mythopoeic manner, as Angel and Spike delve into a subterranean domain, "The Deeper Well," only to learn that even attempting to oust an Old God from her chosen vessel will cause untold destruction. Denisof and Acker ratchet up the waterworks to give Winifred Burkle a send-off, while introducing a new character for Acker, that of an incarnate god who has little patience with the fatuities of mortals.                      

   SHELLS (G)-- Wesley has not even a moment to mourn Fred, for he must immediately deal with Illyria, an Old God in human form. She remembers nothing of Fred's existence but is aghast to learn that the world has now been overridden by humans, who were a nugatory species on the level of pond scum. Angel and Spike return from England, having failed to reverse Illyria's possession of Fred's body. They question the W&H scientist Knox, who conspired to give Illyria her new form. Then Illyria abducts Knox, casting aside all opposition. On a minor note, Gunn learns that the process that gave him a permanent download was also involved in Illyria's incarnation, though this seems out of left field. Wesley does not react well to Gunn's accidental betrayal and stabs Gunn, albeit non-fatally. Illyria, with Knox's aid, successfully opens a gateway to a pocket dimension, from which she plans to revive an army of conquest. However, to her great consternation her soldiers have all perished over the centuries, and on top of that Wesley kills Knox. Despite the conflict between Illyria and the Angel Team, the former goddess shows up at W&H once more, having nowhere else to go.

UNDERNEATH (F)-- Eve wants the Angel Team to protect her from the senior partners, who already have Lindsey. None of them knows that for whatever reasons, Lindsey's captors have put him into a suburban paradise with a pretty wife and a child, though his familial pleasures are regularly interrupted by torture sessions with a S&M demon. Eve convinces the team that Lindsey can solve their problems with his insight into the minds of the senior partners, so Angel, Spike, and Gunn invade the holding-dimension to rescue Lindsey. In their absence-- during which time Wesley is still babysitting Illyria-- a hulking man in a suit (Alec Baldwin) invades W&H, trying to find Eve. However, though the hulk (name of Hamilton) is from hell, he's only here to take Eve's place as a new liaison to the firm, so she's not harmed. Gunn isn't so lucky. In order to expiate his guilt for having indirectly caused Fred's death, he takes Lindsey's place in the otherworld so that Angel and Spike escape with Lindsey.

ORIGIN (P)-- Naturally the writers don't really want Connor totally sidelined, since he causes Angel all sorts of grief. So one day Connor's parents bring their son into the W&H offices to find out how their son was able to survive being run down by a car. It doesn't make a lick of sense as to why Connor would still be half-demon if his entire timeline has been rewritten. The writers choose not to explain this, even though they make up a special demon, name of Vail, who's credited with having accomplished the rewriting. And yet there's some balmy prophecy that insists that Connor is the only being who can destroy Vail's enemy, the scheming Sahjhan from Season 4. The only good part of this mess is the scene in which Spike tries to "test" Illyria's powers, which makes for some decent face-smashings.

TIME BOMB (F)-- Though Wesley persuades Illyria to crash into the hell-dimension and to rescue Gunn, the team worries that Illyria's powers will soon build to a crisis point and she'll explode, destroying lots of Earth real estate in the process. Wesley devises a ray-gun to disperse her power, though for most of the episode the viewer is led to believe that he intends to kill her. While this goes on, Angel also has to deal with a legal matter about a sacrificial cult trying to take possession of an unborn baby from its mother. The episode's best feature is a series of time-distortions resulting when Illyria becomes "unstuck in time." Presumably the script was written when the staff hoped to be able to continue for a sixth season, which would have included Illyria becoming a regular, less reluctant team-member.

THE GIRL IN QUESTION (F)-- This is another silly concept. Angel and Spike journey to Italy to protect the decapitated head of a demon-clan master while simultaneously trying to pry Buffy from the clutches of a mysterious, never-seen seducer known as The Immortal. Naturally, since Sarah Michelle Gellar did not choose to come back for what would have been a cameo role, Buffy is only seen from a distance and is never involved in any story-action, any more than is the mysterious man she's now dating. In this comedy both Angel and Spike are played for fools, and even the perpetually uncool Andrew is allowed to shine. The only redeeming virtue of the episode is the writers are still able to keep up the great rapport between Angel and Spike, allowing the viewer to see glimpses of the amity they once shared before either of them got a soul. Flashback scenes also show their wenches Darla and Drusilla having been seduced by the ultra-manly Immortal, which seems like gilding the lily a bit too much.   

POWER PLAY/NOT FADE AWAY (F)-- There are some good moments in this concluding two-parter, but the myth-discourse is palliated by the attempt to shoehorn in all of the subplots, such as the overrated Shianshu Prophecy. (There was even talk of having Buffy make one last guest appearance, but though Gellar might have been willing, the idea was dropped.) In the first part, Angel begins acting evil, as if completely corrupted by running Wolfram and Hart. The rest of the team run around worrying, except for Illyria, who bonds a little with Spike in running around fighting evil. The subplot with Lindsey belatedly takes shape, though he doesn't do much beyond providing bits of info. Angel seems to be auditioning for membership in an elite convocation of demons, the Circle of the Black Thorn, who are the means through which the senior partners work their will upon the mortal plane. Not surprisingly, Angel's running a scam to deceive both the watchful Hamilton and the duplicitous Lindsey. In essence, the hero has realized that there's no point in seeking to use W&H "to change things from within," because the power of the senior partners will always be used to keep humans down. The best that heroes can do is to shake things up, to inflict substantive damage on the lords of Hell, even if they themselves perish. The two-parter finds time to work in character moments for minor figures like Connor and Harmony, and all the major players get to have big action-scenes taking out demonic forces, with Angel squaring off with Hamilton. Lorne, though not a fighter, gets an uncharacteristic final moment that nevertheless sums up his place in the world of champions. The final scene, in which the Angel Team takes arms against an irresistible tide of monsters, does much to redeem all the weak moments of this uneven but still important teleseries.                                     

  

        

  

TO KILL WITH INTRIGUE (1977)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological*

Otherwise known as JACKIE CHAN'S HAMLET! Okay, I'm the only one who calls TO KILL WITH INTRIGUE by that name but given that this obscure Taiwanese flick predates Jackie's jolly image, I could justify the name just on the basis that this has to be Chan's grimmest, most morose role up to this point in his career.

In addition, one of INTRIGUE's earliest scenes reminded me of Hamlet's rejection of Ophelia, possibly (as some critics speculate) after he's made her pregnant. In INTRIGUE, young nobleman Shao (Chan) meets with Qian (Yu Ling-long), a maid in his father's court, and tells her to take a hike, despite knowing that she has a bun in the oven. Not too much later, he bursts into the court, telling all of the guests celebrating his father's birthday to get lost too. The guests leave, and Father Lei yells at Shao. Shao says he did it all to keep innocents out of harm's way, and he removes an item from his tunic: a dismembered hand with the image of a human-headed bee drawn upon it. Shao doesn't say how he came by this curious oracle, but he claims it's the calling-card of a gang of kung-fu bandits, the Killer Bees, whom Lord Lei attempted to wipe out. While the lord is conferring with his son, wife, and retainers about the incipient attack, four guests return to the court-- only to drop dead. A strange one-handed man shows up (maybe a cutesy reference to Jimmy Wang Yu's One-Armed Swordsman?) and demands the return of his hand. Shao flings the dead hand to the probably dead man and the latter bounds away.

Then the attack by the Killer Bees begins in earnest. Armed men appear on the estate-walls, and into the courtyard five coffins appear. The coffin lids shoot off, and up spring the assault's leader and four cohorts, all attired in flower-masks, as if seeking to conflate death and fertility. The leader is Ting Tan-yen (Hsu Feng), a beautiful woman wearing a half-mask over her lower face, and after swearing vengeance, she engages Lord Lei in sword-combat. A melee breaks out, but the Lei family is overmatched. Ting kills the hero's mother and father and easily beats down Shao's weak nobleman-fu. However, he manages to get a sword to Ting's throat. She invites Shao to kill her but only after she shows him the facial scar beneath her mask, a wound she got from Shao's father when she was still a child. Doubt, the curse of the Melancholy Dane, causes Shao to hesitate, and Ting knocks him out.

When he awakes, he sees Ting from behind and thinks it's his lost love Qian. Ting tells Shao that she spared his life so that he'd suffer as she suffered the loss of her family. Shao can do nothing but go looking for the woman he spurned, even for reasons he thought beneficent.

To be sure, Shao wasn't completely stupid about the risks of chasing off his pregnant mistress; he mentioned to his father that he sent a friend named Jin to look after Qian. Jin does show up just as bandits attack Qian, and he kicks their asses before taking Qian to his house. However, Jin doesn't seem to know why Shao disavowed his mistress. Qian wants to flee the general area and Jin obliges her, so that when Shao comes looking, no one's to home.

A disconsolate Shao stays at Jin's house. Ting shows up, twisting the knife by telling Shao his friend's gone off with his lover. Then she calls Shao a "beast," which just so happens to be what Qian called Shao when he gave her the kiss-off. Shao hallucinates that Ting is Qian, embraces her, and summarily beds her. It's not clear if Ting is aware he's mistaken her for someone else, though there's no question she could've stopped Shao if she'd wanted to. After they've had sex and Shao's passed out, he mumbles Qian's name and Ting runs off, jealous as hell. (I admit Hamlet didn't do quite this much bed-hopping, though a fellow named Freud claimed that he had a certain ambivalence about his mama.) 

Then Shao pays the price for a grudge against Jin, as three paid assassins break in on him. He fights them and he kills one, but the other two knock him out. Fourth Dragon, an older noble, shows up and tells his assassin-employees that they assaulted the wrong man. He pays them off but when they want to murder the unconscious Shao, Fourth Dragon drives them off. He has Shao brought to his home, apologizes, and tells Shao that Jin ripped off the cargo that Fourth Dragon's guard-escorts were protecting. Slightly later, Ting shows up again-- "I am your shadow," she mocks the anguished hero-- and though she won't tell Shao where Jin and Qian are, she tasks him with not even having the filial piety to bury his slain parents. Further, she says, they were buried by none other than his recent benefactor, Fourth Dragon. Shao, unable to find his lost love, sublimates his desires by pledging loyalty to a "second father," joining the Dragon's guards. Does Fourth Dragon take the place of Lord Lei, the father whose virtue became suspect? The clan of the assassins attacks the guardians, and Shao leads the fight against them, calling himself "Fifth Dragon." But the assassins really start losing when Ting Tan-yen joins the battle, without explaining why she interceded. She leaves Shao in the care of Fourth Dragon for the time being but later persuades him to let her take Shao to her own domicile. 

On top of all these sturm-and-drang incidents-- Shao finding a new father to replace the dead one, or having his life preserved by the woman who killed both parents-- Fourth Dragon meets the governor, to whom his life is forfeit for losing a precious cargo-- and it's none other than the robber Jin, who is ALSO the head of the assassin-clan. Basically, everything Jin has done has been to advance his clan's power in the region, and he even takes credit for eliminating the Lei family. This may have been an overreach on the author's part, since Jin doesn't seem affiliated with the Killer Bees, who aren't mentioned or seen again after the opening fight. Jin fights and kills both Fourth Dragon and his aide, and then proceeds to his estate, where he uses honeyed words to persuade Qian to marry him. She agrees, wanting to protect her child and grieving because she's been told Shao is dead. 

Now, thus far INTRIGUE hasn't had anything like Hamlet's ghostly father, or even the Devil whom Hamlet half-suspects of having sent the paternal apparition. However, there is a slight sense of passing into another world when Shao is taken to Ting's estate. Ting heals Shao but won't let him leave if he can't beat her in kung fu. He practices continually, but he's unable to up his game. He challenges her anyway, and she punishes him in various ways, which reminded me of the ordeals heroes would undergo from goddesses. (Admittedly the Classical deities didn't make their acolytes swallow hot coals or suffer having their faces burned). Finally, in contrast to the majority of chopsockies, Ting realizes Shao can't equal her. She feeds him a drink mixed with her own blood, and this empowers him so that he can now destroy Jin and save Qian, even though Ting's implicitly condemned to a loveless existence.

I admit that Shao's quest for vengeance isn't responsible for the deaths of almost all of the principal characters, as Hamlet's quest causes the fall of the Danish court. However, a few times the English translation criticizes Shao's inability to tell good from bad, which is closer to Hamlet than most martial-arts heroes ever come. Shao's overly trusting friendship with Jin makes it possible for the evil plotter to end the lives of the Fourth Dragon family, and (maybe indirectly) those of the Lei Family too. It is a major error when Ting's Killer Bee allies just disappear. In a plot-sense Jin's assassin cult more or less takes the place of the recrudescent bandits, even though Ting clearly does not connect the two in any way when she cuts a bloody swathe through the assassins to protect Shao. While INTRIGUE was no more than a bump in the road of Jackie Chan's ascension to international success, it does deserve to be better known as one of the few kung-fu films to possess some psychological depth. I haven't seen all the films in Hsu Feng's repertoire, but I doubt any other role she played came close to that of the tormented Ting Tan-Yen.