MAN ON THE SPYING TRAPEZE (1966)

 

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

This Eurospy cheapie has only two minor things going for it: a couple of familiar actors and a memorable if meaningless English-language title. FWIW, it seems to be the only English translation of a film by Spanish director Juan de Orduna.

American agent Jerry Land (Wayde Preston of the TV western COLT .45) gets to traipse around various Euro-locales seeking to find a missing microfilm and the spy ring that stole it. He has various punch-ups with enemy spies-- for once, independent operators rather than loyalists to particular nations-- and romances a pretty brunette played by Helga Sommerfeld. Preston's decent in the fight-scenes but doesn't project much cool, despite a colleague playfully calling him "James Bond."

The sole metaphenomenal content here appears when Land is captured by thugs led by Noe (DR SATAN AND BLACK MAGIC) Murayama, who attempts to make the agent talk by squeezing his head with metal rods.     

  

DAUGHTER OF DON Q (1946)

 

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

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

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

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

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

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.

                  

  

CREEPING DEATH (1972)

 

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

CREEPING DEATH is certainly a better title for this unwieldy mix of spaghetti western and giallo than KILL THE POKER PLAYER. The odd thing about this failed fusion is that many of the more violent spaghettis sometimes show elements in common with equally violent giallos. However, westerns in general have a harder time dealing with "slow burn suspense"-- and despite DEATH's quota of saloon brawls, that seems to have been the intent of director/co-writer Mario Bianci, a prolific filmmaker though most of his works have not been translated into English.

Like many spaghettis DEATH begins with a double cross and centers upon a hunt for hidden riches. However, two-fisted federal agent John Pinkerton (Robert Woods) lacks the usual cynical motive of the spaghetti fortune-seeker. He seeks to locate a cache of bank money stolen by three outlaws, one of whom kills the other two. Pinkerton centers his investigation on a particular town where one or two persons have been killed by poisonous snakes. The same town plays host to a herpetologist, suggesting that some malcontent in the populace decided to weaponize the reptiles to eliminate witnesses.

The snakes, and the "bizarre crimes" for which they're used, aren't all that important to the story until the climax, and Pinkerton's detective work seems at best random. DEATH is generally boring and wastes the lovely Nieves Navarro in a purely decorative role. A better meld of western and murder-mystery appears in 1974's A KNIFE FOR THE LADIES.   

      

LUPIN III: MISSED BY A DOLLAR (2000)

 

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

MISSED BY A DOLLAR was the last Lupin TV special to be animated in the traditional fashion. More importantly, though, DOLLAR is much less dominated by the tropes of wild fantasy found in many Lupin stories of the period. Here the master thief and his gang oppose an evil financial cabal that seeks to manipulate world events, and the only metaphenomenal elements of DOLLAR are the rather low-level tricks Lupin uses to bamboozle Zenigata.

As usual the Lupin gang only oppose greater evils as a means of maintaining their freedom to commit generally harmless crimes. In fact, in the opening sequence the master thief begins the adventure in an apparently legal venue: participating in a New York auction (albeit in disguise) for a rare ring. However, another party outbids Lupin by a mere dollar, and on top of that, Zenigata arrives with a squad of New York cops to seize the master criminal. Never daunted, Lupin simply evades the cops and steals the ring, However, an enforcer working for the mystery bidder steals back the ring and tries to kill Lupin in the bargain. Of course all Lupin viewers know that this means war.

Lupin briefs his comrades in crime on his plans: the ring can guide one to a fabulous brooch, which in turn confers incredible luck upon its possessor. It's not entirely clear why Lupin wants the brooch. He natters a bit about a Lupin Empire, but somehow he convinces Jigen and Goemon that the brooch will lead to a big payoff. Fujiko isn't interested because she's become fascinated with the world of high finance, though she changes her tune when reversals decimate her wealth. Fujiko's attempt to transition from crook to high financier proves the reverse of Lupin's new enemy: Cynthia Craymov, already the head of a banking empire. Her father was the deposed tyrant of a small country, so Cynthia wants to rule an empire founded in high finance. She believes implicitly in the brooch's power to convey luck, though said power is never unilaterally proven. Her main enforcer is an ex-KGB killer with a penchant for knife-fighting, but Cynthia's cool resolve makes her the main opponent.

There's a subplot in which Lupin appears to fall to his death, in such a way that both his friends and Zenigata are convinced he's finished. The sequence is good for a laugh as Zenigata mourns his foe (or at least the impossibility of ever accomplishing his monomaniacal goal). There are some decent but workmanlike action-sequences, with Fujiko getting just one femme-formidable scene in which she shoots a guy menacing Goemon. In the end Cynthia's crimes are exposed and the brooch ends up in good hands, though for a change all four of the super-crooks end up temporarily broke. There are some acidulous comments on the financial mentality, but anyone wanting a critique of capitalism would need to look elsewhere.  

FLYER AND MAGIC SWORD (1970)

 

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

When I only saw one online description of this Hong Kong-Thailand co-production, and said summary said it involves rival clans fighting over a salt mine, I suspected that the title was a fantasy-fakeout. And yes, there's no magic sword and no one even does "trampoline flying."

The hero is Wai Chin (billed as "Nai Mi," possibly to obscur,e the actor's Thai heritage), and since childhood he's been in love with Lan Choo (Fan Ling), daughter of Tien-Long (Dean Shek of ENTER THE DRAGON fame). I don't know why Tien-Long won't let them marry, but he seems totally preoccupied with the aforementioned salt mine. His rival for the mine-- which is barely seen-- is called "Wu Tang" in the streaming dub. But while Wu Tang is a bastard, Tien-Long might be worse. The film's opening scene-- and it's the film's best scene-- starts with Wu Tang and his soldiers attacking Tien-long's house. Outnumbered, Tien-Long, Lan Choo, and their retainers flee to a bolt-hole, but Wu Tang sets the house afire, so that the bolt-hole fills with smoke. Three retainers try to escape, and Tien-Long kills them-- moments before the patriarch changes his mind and allows the rest of his coterie to get out.

After that, FLYER is just a melange of combat-scenes and wistful romantic interludes between Chin and Choo. Only one "magical" implement appears, in that one of Chin's opponents wields a "boomerang claw-weapon." Most of the fighting is sword-fu, with Choo getting in hers only in the first scene, but nothing's memorable in that department. One might call this a reversal of ROMEO AND JULIET, where the two lovers survive and the patriarchal clans (no mothers are seen) destroy one another.      

AMAZONS AND GLADIATORS (2001)

 

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

While my recent screening of BATTLE OF THE AMAZONS yielded only stinky cheese, AMAZONS AND GLADIATORS offers a more pleasing aroma.

In the BATTLE review, I said that it was no sin to be unoriginal, only to be lazy. In GLADIATORS writer-director Zachary Weintraub produced a cheese-fest consisting mostly of sexy men and women fighting each other, motivated only by a routine revenge fantasy. And the feminist tropes of the film are just as superficial. Nevertheless, GLADIATORS is never lazy but delivers its conflicts with considerable energy.     

Most of the action takes place in a fictional Roman province, "Panne," supposedly "60 years after the death of Christ." But it's a very mutable history, for its villain is the real-life Roman officer Marcus Crassius, famed for putting down the slave revolt of Spartacus. In this tale, Julius Caesar fears the popularity of Crassius (Patrick Bergin) with the Roman people, so the emperor appoints the soldier governor of Panne. Crassius resents being exiled from Rome, so he becomes a tyrant to the common folk under his reign. As one of his depredations, he kills the mother of heroine Serena and consigns the young girl and her sister Gwyned to slavery. As adults the two of them (played by Nichole Hiltz and Wendi Winburn) are trained as dancers, but their beauty attracts the attention of Roman officials. Gwyned (she of the oddly British name) becomes reconciled to a ritzy captivity, but Serena kills a Roman who tries to rape her. Luckily, there's an Amazon captive (Jennifer Rubin) close to hand, and the warrior-woman not only helps Serena escape, she paves Serena's path to join the Amazons of Queen Zenobia.

There was a historical Queen Zenobia who battled Rome, but she wasn't a contemporary of Crassius (and neither lived just 60 years after Christ's death). Real Zenobia also had no association with the Greek legends of Amazons, but this one-- who's not a major character here-- rules a tribe of female warriors who live out in the forest. They don't steal men to mate with but are defined purely as rebels against Roman authority. Serena trains as a woman-warrior and nurtures a desire to be revenged on Governor Crassius. Ultimately, after a lot of complications, Serena gets the chance to duel Crassius to the death in his low-rent imitation of a Roman arena.

The most amusing feminist trope comes after Crassius' death, when the assembled Amazons, having put down the small contingent of Roman soldiers, warn the arena-patrons never to abuse women, or they'll face Amazon vengeance. GLADIATORS is more compelling, even in its cheesiness, when it simply depicts women as willing to fight for justice-- even if these justice-fighters just happen to all be unbelievable hotties. There's no attention to how the Amazons came to separate themselves from patriarchal rule, nor is there any sense of their even having a culture or religion; they only qualify as a "weird society" by the mere fact of being an all-female tribe. There are a few puzzling scenes where a wisewoman utters predictions of Rome's imminent doom and even claims that Serena will play some role in that downfall. Only at the end does the prophet provide closure, claiming that Serena's Amazons will participate in the sacking of Rome, alongside the more typical suspects, the Goths and Vandals. I don't think that Goths, Vandals or even early converts to Roman Christianity would be very welcoming to Amazonian customs. But within the movie's terms, I suppose the apparent fulfillment of the prophecy falls into the uncanny domain as well.                     

BATTLE OF THE AMAZONS (1973)

 

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

The standard legends about Amazons assert that the warrior-women lived apart from males, except when they raided neighboring villages and kidnapped men for temporary stud service. Alfonso Brescia's Italian trash-peplum gets that part right, but adds the idea that the Amazons ruled by Queen Eraglia (Lucretia Love) keeps some males as slaves.

BATTLE has a rushed look even for an exploitation flick, possibly because the Italians wanted to "mockbust" Terence Young's more expensive production, THE AMAZONS. That's probably why the three credited writers (one of whom was Bruno Corbucci) took the obvious tack of ripping off THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN. After the women warriors kill the headman of one village, his daughter Valeria (Paola Tedesco) decides to oppose Amazon tyranny. She hires handsome bandit Zeno (Lincoln Park) and his fellow rogues to train her people to fight.

It's not an irredeemable sin to be unoriginal, but it is to be lazy. Though Valeria is not much of a heroine, most of the Glam-azons are good looking enough to provide the sort of spectacle the movie needs. But the battles, even when not performed by stuntmen in drag, are unexceptional. And since the script has no interest in examining Amazon society from any sort of feminist angle-- which, admittedly, would be very atypical for any Italian film of the sixties or seventies -- BATTLE becomes something of a slog, rather than a fun if mindless peplum.

In addition to the "weird societies" trope, BATTLE also employs "outre outfits" in that the Amazons sometimes fight wearing outsized masks, whose real purpose was to conceal the masculine nature of the ladies' stunt-doubles. Over twenty years later, the show XENA WARRIOR PRINCESS also made frequent use of masked Amazons, though I don't know if the producers did so for a similar reason, or if someone on staff saw BATTLE and thought that the mask-thing was cool-looking.    

RAWHIDE: "INCIDENT OF THE BLUE FIRE" (1959)

 

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

Like INCIDENT OF THE PALE RIDER, BLUE FIRE is one of a handful of tales from the early seasons of RAWHIDE that use uncanny scenarios to throw doubt upon the substantial and rational aspects of the world.

Gil Favor's band of hard-working drovers and the cattle they shepherd are far from civilization when they encounter the "blue fire" of the title. The electrical phenomenon is said to herald lightning-strikes, but the drovers don't need the azure discharge to tell them that they stand in peril of a stampede, if the prevalent storm clouds should panic the easily spooked "beeves." Favor assures his men that the "St. Elmo's fire" is harmless, but the fact that he, like other 19th-century cowboys, don't know what the hell it is makes the situation even more unnerving. The terminally superstitious Hey Soos makes things no better by maundering about deaths and devils.

Into the drovers' camp comes an individual who becomes a flashpoint for all the cowboys' inchoate fears: a footloose fellow named "Lucky" Markley. Markley himself is a would-be drover, as he tries to sell Favor a tiny herd of scrub cattle he's rounded up. The cows are of such inferior stock that Favor won't have them. However, because they're in the midst of marauding Comanches, the trial-boss allows Markley to work for him as a drover, at least until they reach some civilized port. Unfortunately for Favor, Hey Soos openly disparages Markley as the harbinger of bad luck, and the rest of the men are just as leery of the stranger.

 Markley (affably played by Skip Homeier) does nothing to provoke this hostility, though he makes one arguable error. While he and another drover are rounding up a stray steer, three Comanches accost them, demanding not only the steer but also Markley's horse. Markley shoots one brave, and the other two flee, but return later with a larger contingent of Comanches. The drovers resent Markley for bringing on more trouble, though the Comanches probably would have sought to plunder the herd no matter what happened. The men want Markley cast out. Favor alone defends the man, so much so that even Markley wonders why the trail-boss protects him, given that Favor owes Markley nothing. Favor tells a tale of having lost a young male companion during a round-up due to "bad luck," and it's implied that Favor believes in determining life by one's own actions, not through beliefs in good or ill fortune. It's this novel approach that keeps FIRE from being just a dime-a-dozen "it is wrong to give in to mob rule" morality play.

The stunning conclusion suggests that Favor's view is too simple. Finally, just as the Comanches move in for a raid, lightning strikes and the cattle stampede. Only a skillful maneuver has the chance to box the cattle in and quell their rampage, and Lucky Markley performs the deed-- sort of. The viewer alone sees how Markley, riding his cowpony, is struck in the head by lightning, killing him-- and yet, somehow horse and rider curtail the stampede, as well as scaring off the Indian raiders. Later the drovers find both horse and rider. The horse is dead from falling and breaking his neck, but there's nothing to indicate how the so-called "jonah" died, except slight burn-marks on the back of his neck. Was Favor's "favored son" killed, only to complete his task despite being a dead man in the saddle? The episode ends with no pat answers for anyone and thus stands as one of the very best "weird westerns" ever produced for television.         

FIVE WOMEN FOR THE KILLER (1974)

 

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

KILLER was the third directorial film for Stelvio Massi. In Italy he would become known more for hardboiled crime films than for horror, but I suspect today English-speaking film-fans mostly know Massi for his second and last giallo movie: 1989's bizarre ARABELLA BLACK ANGEL.  

Next to ARABELLA, KILLER comes as a bit too conservative, though the cinematography is always good (particularly in the generously lingering female nude scenes) and the basic situation is compelling. Writer Giorgio (English actor Francis Matthews) returns to Italy, anticipating a reunion with his pregnant wife Erika. To his horror he finds her newly dead, the victim of a miscarriage. The baby survives at a local hospital, where Giorgio consults with his own doctor, one Lydia (Pasquale Rivault), an in-law to Erika. The writer then gets a double body-blow when he steals a look at his own file, and sees that Lydia diagnosed him as infertile, incapable of siring a child.  

Erika's death then precedes (unleashes?) a serial killer who begins knife-killing women-- often pregnant women who have some connection to Giorgio. In giallos, the trope of "gotta kill all the sexy women" usually focuses upon promiscuous females who usually are not in a family way. But since no woman can get pregnant naturally without SOME promiscuity, KILLER might have offered some psychological insights on the durable "woman as virgin or whore" trope. However, most of the time Massi's pace is slow and the (subbed) dialogue is mundane. Even though the victims are just tangentially connected to Giorgio, those associations are enough to interest the police.

The slow pace allows Massi to build a better supply of red herrings than one finds in many thrillers (including ARABELLA), and the complications regarding Giorgio's infertility and the killer's identity dovetail nicely. The murderer's obsession with pregnant victims is enough by itself to propel the film into the uncanny domain, though it helps that the murdered women have strange symbols carved into their flesh. And Massi does flout convention by making the killer's glove grey rather than black.  

THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES (1972)

 

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

This is an average but still tolerable adaptation of the classic Doyle tale. As I just finished rereading the source material today, I find myself excusing a lot of odd changes just because it was a TV-movie with limited time and money.   

I rather liked the straightforward Holmes of Stewart Granger, while the Watson of Bernard Fox (best known as the character "Doctor Bombay" on BEWITCHED) was efficient enough. Watson's long sojourn at Baskerville Hall is cut for time, which makes sense. Yet the writer also tries to work in Holmes' masquerade as a moor-hermit, which only makes sense if Holmes is absenting himself from the hall so that he can study all suspects at his leisure.

Unlike the 1939 version, this HOUND keeps the idea that the villain Stapleton (William Shatner) has his wife masquerade as his sister to hoax his prospective victim (and cousin), as well as having used another female pawn to bring about the death of the earlier target. On the other hand, the writer troubled to build up Doctor Mortimer as a red herring, which Doyle never does. This proved an enjoyable development because it gave Anthony Zerbe better lines than the literary character got.

In my review I asserted that the thing separating Doyle's novel from most film adaptations was that Doyle made the Hound-mystery a meditation on the human tendency to regress to the primitive and egoistic. The 1972 HOUND is no different, but its depiction of the killer hound is more bracing than I've seen in two of the more expensive productions. This is particularly true because the beast turns on its master, which is in some ways more visually satisfying than Doyle's conclusion. And this may be the only HOUND where, after the dog's dead, the heroes still hear a distant, mysterious howl.     

       

THE NEXT VICTIM (1976)

 

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

SPOILERS

A lot of the hour-long progarmmers on Brian Clemens' THRILLER emphasized mundane naturalistic psycho-killers. My only real reason for labeling this psycho as "uncanny" is because Clemens' script models him strongly after Norman Bates, with a "Lodger" touch or two worked in.

Rich lady Sandy Marshall (Carroll Baker) returns to the apartment she shares with her not-so-rich husband Derek. Sandy has been in the hospital recovering from a car crash, and she's still occupying a wheelchair, though her prognosis is that she will regain full mobility. Sandy's expecting just to pass the day quietly while Derek's gone on business. However, it's a hot summer day in London, and most of the locals have gone to the beach for the weekend. Unfortunately there's also a serial killer who's been preying on London women lately. The cops have one clue: a single prospective victim escaped the murderer, and she heard him refer to her as "mother."

A couple of cops get on the psycho's trail, and though they ferret out the correct suspect, they have no impact on Sandy's apartment ordeal. The killer gains entrance to the gated complex by pretending to be a delivery driver, and the camera's careful not to show his face at first-- though there's no mystery because there's only one suspect, aside from a briefly seen, creepy maintenance guy (Ronald Lacey).

Sandy doesn't hear from a neighbor when she expects to, which causes her to start worrying. Then in the near-deserted complex, Sandy encounters a handsome young guy named Tom (Max Mason). She appreciates his company at first, since he claims to be a resident. But eventually Tom seems "off" to Sandy, especially when he speaks of her car accident as highly improbable-- as if someone might have arranged it. And he also mentions that he served his wheelchair-bound mother for ten years, which seems to be his reason for wanting to hang out with Sandy.   

Clemens almost seems to be setting up Tom to be some amateur detective who (correctly) suspects Derek of being a wife-killer. So when Sandy knocks Tom over the head and tries to wheel away for her very life, Clemens seems to be leading the viewer to believe Tom's a good guy. But no, Tom's the Oedipal assailant, though Clemens, to keep his precious ambiguity, barely explicates Tom's psycho-profile. The beleaguered viewer can only presume that Tom targeted Sandy and meant to kill her but started seeing her as "good non-sexual mother" rather than the "bad sexual mothers" he believed his other victims to be. But as Sandy flees, she needs a new antagonist--so Deadly Derek comes back that same night to knock off Sandy and blame it on the psycho. He and Tom end up fighting over Sandy, and after both men die, the movie just ends, unceremoniously. Usually Clemens' THRILLER dramas are solid if unambitious melodramas-- but this one is just a jumbled botch.  

ACES GO PLACES (1982)

 

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

Though I'm far from being a great fan of Chinese comedy films, I enjoyed the zany slapstick of the ACES GO PLACES series, and the first film in the series did a good job of setting up the three principals, who I believe remained together for all five entries. The basic idea seems to be "what would have happened if the "Phantom" thief of PINK PANTHER joined forces with two eccentric HK cops in fighting crime.

Hong Kong super-thief King Kong (Sam Hui) rips off a diamond shipment and then finds out he's robbed the Mafia. The aggrieved crime-lords send various assassins to HK to avenge their honor, particularly a master burglar named "White Gloves." To apprehend Kong, the HK government calls in an American cop of Asian extraction, Albert Au (Karl Maka). He more or less takes the place of the wacky Inspector Clouseau of the PANTHER films, though his main physical characteristic is his total baldness, a testimony to the popularity of the KOJAK teleseries in Hong Kong. Albert's HK liaison is lady cop Nancy Ho (Sylvia Chang), who's constantly accused of being "mannish," and who does get the movie's best fight-scene.         

There are a number of nice comic stunts, though nothing particularly stands out, but the film has too many car chases and crash-ups. The finale contains the only metaphenomenal element, when King Kong counters a fleet of Mafia automobiles with a collection of tiny, remote-controlled toy cars, each loaded with explosives. I tend to doubt anyone in 1982 could actually create such vehicular weapons, but since the script believes that, I'll treat the little cars as uncanny devices.  

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.

                                  

        

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER (1979)

 

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

I don't think most Edgar Allan Poe stories lend themselves to feature-film adaptation. Thus, I'd usually rather see an adaptor "juice up" an adaptation of a problematic work like Poe's USHER in order to make the film work according to the necessities of cinematic storytelling, rather than plod his way through a script with absolute fidelity to the prose source.

Of course, there are good deviations and bad deviations. Alan Birkenshaw's 1989 HOUSE doesn't even make a token effort toward keeping faith, and so it's just rubbish, consisting of all sorts of junk, including the kitchen sink. However, when Richard Matheson adapted USHER for Corman in the 1960 film, he apparently realized that the audience would need some reason for the house to be so malefic. And so Matheson imported, possibly from Hawthorne, the idea that the house was pervaded with the degeneracy of the Usher ancestors-- which works dramatically, even if it doesn't have much to do with Poe.

TV-scribe Stephen Lord does something similar to Matheson in working out a new scenario for this TV-film. After the principals have lurked about for the first hour of the movie, Roderick Usher (Martin Landau) reveals to the viewpoint character Jonathan (Robert Hays) that the reason the house constantly shifts and shakes is because Roderick's ancestors performed rites of devil-worship there. I don't think this was a particularly good idea. However, as long as we don't see cartoon devils running around, Usher's superstititon can be relegated to his own demented fantasies.

Somewhat better is Lord's alteration of the viewpoint character. Whereas Roderick's visitor in the story is just an old school chum, Jonathan is an architect who knew Roderick in school, and Roderick summons him to attempt shoring up the unstable edifice. Jonathan, having no idea what he's getting into, brings along his new bride Jennifer (Charlene Tilton).

Though it takes a while for Jonathan to learn the history of the house, Lord immediately lets the POV character in on Lord's big change about the last two surviving Ushers. In the prose story, Roderick is afflicted with an illness that makes him hypersensitive to loud sounds and other sensory impacts, while his sister Madeleine suffers from catalepsy-- which situation leads Roderick to entomb his sibling, maybe not quite innocently. In the movie, both Roderick and Madeleine suffer from the same disease, and Madeleine (Dimitra Arliss), rather than going mad after getting buried alive, is the epitome of that trope known as "the madwoman in the attic." Indeed, the first time Jonathan meets the crazy lady, she tries to kill him with an axe.

If in the story the crumbling house is the objective correlate to Roderick's disintegrating mind, here monstrous Madeleine lines up with the self-destructive house. Roderick and his servant Thaddeus (Ray Walston) confine her in a room, but she gets loose again, menacing poor confused Jennifer. Oddly, the house itself "kills" the madwoman with one of its tremors, dropping some masonry on Madeleine. This gives Roderick the justification to nail his sister into a coffin. But she gets better and breaks free, pushing the nails out of their holes with her bare fingers. She kills the servant and menaces both of the innocent bystanders, and frankly, Arliss makes one of the better cinematic Madeleines, her eyes weeping tears of blood. She seems okay with just killing everyone in her path. Roderick belatedly decides he's doomed to die by her hands (and by the evil will of the House, I guess), though that begs the question as to why he imagined he could triumph over the cursed house by working on its supports. Anyway, at least the filmmakers got that part of the Poe story more or less right, since Roderick dies fighting with Madeleine, allowing the two innocents to escape. I gather the budget didn't allow for a model-house sinking into a tarn, so lightning hits the house and the vile dwelling goes up in flames. 

Apparently the production was somehow linked to the Classics Illustrated comics-line, since there's a quick shot of CI's cover of their USHER adaptation before credits roll. I don't know how good the comic was, but I've seen far worse USHER films than this one.

   

                          

DEADLY INHERITANCE (1968)

 

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

Contrary to the creative poster illustration above, the "perilous psycho" of DEADLY INHERITANCE doesn't wear a mask, and both he and his fellow conspirator are very ordinary-looking. This early giallo-- probably the only one by director/co-writer Vittorio Sindoni, whose other credits I don't recognize-- doesn't offer any sadistic set-pieces like the slightly later works of Dario Argento, and in many ways, INHERITANCE seems like a lot of the 1960s versions of "old dark house" movies. Sindoni may have seen Bava's groundbreaking BLOOD AND BLACK LACE, because he places a lot of visual emphasis on good-looking women. But there's never any doubt that the motive of the mystery killer is largely pecuniary.

In a small French country-town, a rich old fellow dies and leaves a will that has the heirs up in arms. The late father left behind three beautiful daughters-- Simone, Rosalie and Collette-- and a quirky-looking adopted son, Janot. At the reading of the will, the heirs learn that none of them can collect their share of the bequest for the next three years, when Janot comes of age. Why the old guy couldn't just put Janot's share in a trust is not raised by anyone, and soon, a mystery killer starts knocking off possible heirs, starting with Janot. 

Normally, these "all heirs die but one" stories make no sense, because the remaining heir will inevitably fall under suspicion of the crimes. INHERITANCE does have a work-around of sorts, but I can't claim the killings are anything watchable. Of the three main actresses, I only knew Femi Benussi, while I'd seen the guy playing Janot in the later giallo TORSO. Sindoni keeps things percolating well enough, though, and never better than an early scene, prior to Janot's demise, when the aforementioned Janot peeks on his adoptive sister Simone (Benussi) while she's showering. This seeming throwaway nude-scene does figure into the denouement, though, and it adds a little spice to the generally routine story. If Sindoni had worked a little harder giving the victims even minor characterization, I might have upgraded this flick's mythicity to "fair."             

THE MYSTERIOUS MAGICIAN (1964)

 

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

Opinions seem divided as to where DER HEXER, the "krimi" adaptation of Edgar Wallace's 1925 book THE RINGER, stands. Some reviews call it one of the worst of its ilk, others, one of the best. My take is somewhere in the middle: MAGICIAN is an enjoyable romp without a lot of substance.

A young woman is gruesomely murdered and her body gets tossed in the Thames. When Scotland Yard investigates, it's discovered that the victim possesses an indirect celebrity: she's the sister of a professional assassin, the Ringer-- whose name in German became "hexer," meaning magician or wizard. (The English dub uses the latter term, even though the movie's title uses the former.) He's called the Ringer because he's got an uncanny ability to assume many disguises in order to knock off his targets. The movie's vague about what the Yard knows about the Ringer: on one hand, they have the info that he was somehow exiled from Britain, yet no one knows what he looks like sans disguises. Perhaps the book's more consistent on that point.

I would guess that the book doesn't inject as many allusions to sex as MAGICIAN does. For instance, from Goodreads reviews I know that though the book-version of the story has the sister killed for discovering some skullduggery, MAGICIAN has her find out that her employer's involved in white slavery. Similarly, I'll bet the main character of the book isn't as much of a "player" as Joachim Fuchsberger's Inspector Higgins-- for all that the cop's engaged to a pert young miss named Elise (Sophie Hardy). The overall sexiness of the film stands in contrast to the comparatively higher quotient of violence in many krimis: only the opening murder and the Ringer's killing of the big boss-- with a sword-cane through his heart-- caught my attention.  

Edgar Wallace created a fair number of oddly named masterminds in his career, but the Ringer's only an "uncanny villain" by virtue of his power of disguise-mastery. It's suggested that the cops covertly admire the assassin because he's only targeted other criminals, and indeed the Ringer is really the star of the story, more than any of his pursuers. I can't speak for the book, but the movie ends with the assassin escaping after killing the last of the white slavers. I don't think Wallace usually resurrected his criminals for any encores, but Goodreads also informs me that the author also published a collection of stories, ALIAS THE RINGER.        

EL ROJO (1966)

 

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

The "fair mythicity" rating on EL ROJO isn't at all for the generally routine spaghetti-western plot, but for an assortment of odd little touches writer-director Leopoldo Savona throws into the mix. 

We open on the scene of a wagon-train family arriving at the site of their newly acquired land, where they intend to work a gold mine. Then everyone in the family gets shot dead by arrows-- yet we don't see any marauding Indians about. Years later, four stalwart citizens of a nearby town are celebrating how rich they are before the admiring townfolk. Then a mysterious arrow is shot from an unknown Indian assailant, just missing the luminaries-- all on the very same day that a laconic stranger named Joe (Richard Harrison) arrives in town. Can there be a connection between all of these events?

No surprises here: the four rich guys-- Navarro, Wallace, Laskey and Ortega-- made their riches by killing off the family of goldminers and then by acquiring their mine. However, one member of the family wasn't there to be slaughtered, and it's the laconic stranger named Joe, who's looking for revenge. The Indian sniper, who has no lines in the picture, witnessed the slaughter of the family. Maybe the association of their bloody deaths is why Joe is called "Rojo" just once-- not counting a very oblique reference at the movie's end.

Though Joe has four obnoxious targets for his revenge-- one of whom, Laskey, married a local girl, Consuelo, who was apparently Joe's girl at some time-- director Savona doesn't play up the action/violence scenes as one might expect of a 1966 spaghetti western. Yet ROJO does maintain a curious offbeat charm in some little details Savona throws in. On a couple of occasions, Joe offers cubes of sugar to acquaintances and never explains where he picked up this habit. During one of Joe's revenge-plots, an accomplice-- also a patent-medicine peddler-- sets up a means of distracting the town by offering to burn the Devil in effigy, an odd ritual that the locals immediately embrace. Joe snipes at Consuelo for having sold her soul to one of the rich guys, and the script seems to agree with Joe, for unlike the majority of spaghetti-heroines Consuelo bites the dust.

However, the oddest thing in ROJO is also the only element that makes the film an uncanny western. At one point, a gunhawk comes to town, wearing a black mask over the lower part of his face-- except once, when he removes the scarf and displays an extensive scar that would do Jonah Hex proud. One assumes that one of the villains summoned the outlaw, not least because he's billed as "Nero Burt"-- in English, "Black Bart." Yet Bart (Angelo Boscariol) doesn't make any moves on Rojo. Then, near the movie's end, when Joe has wiped out the last enemy, Bart shows up and utters some cryptic line to Joe about how "the red and the black are together at last." Then the movie just ends, implying-- possibly-- some equivalence between the righteous vengeance-seeker and the Man in Black.

Savona directed four or five westerns I've not seen, some period historicals and one horror movie with the wild-sounding title, "Byleth the Demon of Incest." I may check out other sagebrush sagas in Savona's ouevre to see if any of them are as oddball as ROJO.                 

         

THE ANGEL STRIKES AGAIN (1968)

 

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

I suppose ANGEL WITH THE IRON FISTS must have made money, for by next year director Lo Wei was back again with more of the same thing in this sequel. He used a number of the same actors, albeit in different roles, and for some reason changed the name of Lily Ho's main character from "Luo Na" to "Ai Si." I can't fathom any reason for the change, since Ho's playing the same basic character, with the same low-tech arsenal (the most impressive item of which is a small flamethrower).

This time the "angel" is taking on opponents who seem more in tune with the heroine's role as a government agent: the Bomb Gang, whose leader Hsiang Hsiang (Shen Yi) uses explosives to extort businesses, which sounds a little like terrorist activity to me. That said, everything in STRIKES is a candy-confection with little resemblance to real espionage.

Both Ai Si and Hsiang Hsiang assume peculiar guises at one point, the secret agent dressing as a man for no good reason and the Bomb Gang leader wearing some sort of snaggletooth in her mouth, which I guess was supposed to be funny. The pace is a little better than it was in FISTS, and there are more fight-scenes, though they're all very basic uses of punches, kicks, and karate chops. Both of the ANGEL films would be quickly overshadowed as Hong Kong's kung fu genre developed and brought forth an amazing variety of flicks starring chopsocky divas.

           

ANGEL WITH THE IRON FISTS (1967)

 

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

If you know in advance that ANGEL is primarily a modern-day superspy flick, you may think that the title suggests a blend between that genre and the nascent genre of the Hong Kong chopsockie. What the viewer gets, though, is a pretty low-wattage effort, even if it's one of the few 1960s secret agent flicks to focus on a female hero.

Lily Ho plays Luo Na, alias "Agent 009," and her assignment is to infiltrate a gang of crooks called the Dark Angels. They really seem to be nothing but crooks, with no ties to international espionage and no plans to conquer the world. Nevertheless, even though Luo is doing the job of a police undercover agent, she has a smattering of uncanny spy-weapons, like a metal-edged card that can be used to disarm enemies or a perfume-spray filled with knockout gas. 

 I have no information on the films that director Lo Wei helmed before ANGEL, so it's not impossible that this was one of his first movies that needed strong action sequences. Lily Ho does project pretty good authority in her few fight-scenes, but the only one that catches fire is a battle with a mobster's jealous girlfriend (Fanny Fann). Later Lo Wei would distinguish himself with entries like Bruce Lee's big success FIST OF FURY and my personal favorite of the works I've seen, VENGEANCE OF A SNOW GIRL. But ANGEL is no more than a period curiosity, made risible by the repeated use of musical passages from the library of 007 cinema.