ZORRO'S FIGHTING LEGION (1939)

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

ZORRO'S FIGHTING LEGION is one of several serials on which John English and William Witney shared co-director credit.  It's a good solid adventure-romp with a colorful villain: Don Del Oro, seen above facing off against the titular hero.  It never quite scales the heights of great serial-adventure which the duo attained with ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MARVEL and THE DRUMS OF FU MANCHU, however.

Like a lot of serials, LEGION has a good setup and a lively finale; it's all the episodes in between which cause the serial to sag in the middle when viewed as a whole.  The best serials are those in which at least some of the "middle" episodes are bracing in their own right, allowing the audience to suspend their knowledge that (a) the hero's not going to die in the middle of the story, and (b) the hero's not likely (if ever) to die at the end either.  Of LEGION'S 12 episodes, only once did I find one of the hero's perils bracing: trapped in a burning room, with snipers outside ready to riddle him if he tries escape through the main door, Zorro manages to use his whip to swing through a high window to safety.

The aforementioned setup is a little more political than in most serials.  In the time of Juarez's Mexico, the fragile country seeks to shore up its reputation for fiscal soundness by shipping gold shipments from the San Mendolito mine to Mexico City.  When Yaqui Indians begin raiding the shipments, Zorro takes a vacation from his home in Old California and investigates.  He and his "legion" (a group of similarly-masked vigilantes) learn that the Indians are being commanded by a mysterious man in golden armor, representing himself as "Don Del Oro," the reborn "gold god" of the Yaquis.  One wonders why a Native American god doesn't have a Native American name, but rather a Spanish one.

Modern viewers, sympathetic to the treatment of Native Americans throughout history, may be tempted to sympathize with the Yaquis' desire to reclaim their ancestral lands from the descendants of Spanish invaders.  Naturally this is an aspect of real-world ethics that LEGION simply can't address.  The most one can project is that in theory the Juarez rule of Mexico, had it lasted, probably would have been better for the Yaquis than the overlordship of Don Del Oro, who is, as the climax unsurprisingly reveals, a white guy.

Reed Hadley makes a fine Zorro, with a number of above-average swordfight-scenes.  An interesting side-note is that female lead Sheila Darcy, though she doesn't get to do much of anything here, would play a version of the famed Dragon Lady in her next serial, TERRY AND THE PIRATES.

ODYSSEUS: VOYAGE TO THE UNDERWORLD (2008)

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


The Sci-Fi Channel has certainly aired many made-for-video/cable flicks that are worse than ODYSSEUS: VOYAGE TO THE UNDERWORLD.  But I suppose this item-- which I caught in a rerun buried in the wee hours-- annoys me because it's so indifferent to being bad, or (even worse) to being boring.

I recognize that this film probably came about not because someone was burning to tell the untold tale of Odysseus meeting Penelope, Queen of the Dead, but because some producer put up the needed money and someone else found that the studio could film something, anything, cheaply at such-and-such a location in Romania.  I have nothing against "desperation film-making," where the filmmakers are essentially throwing everything possible at the audience to keep them in their seats.  What I dislike are filmmakers who throw things in a desultory manner, not even trying to "hit" anyone.

The Italian muscleman films of the 1950s and 1960s were probably made for roughly similar reasons.  Got some togas left over from THE ROBE?  Let's do HERCULES.  Got some 16th Scottish costumes lying around?  Let's put archaic hero Maciste in Scotland to fight witches (Maciste in Hell, 1962).  But though there were some dull *peplums* as well, at least they usually tried to get their basic mythology right.

Quick summation of the VOYAGE: thanks to the song of the sirens, Odysseus and his men (including the ODYSSEY's author Homer) end up stranded on an island filled with marauding harpies.  They meet a strange woman who will help them get off the island if they take her with them.  The only problem is, when no one's looking she turns into a gigantic smoke monster and...

Oops. Sorry; that was the plotline for the last season of LOST.

I assume that the writers may have started out trying to figure out a new story for Odysseus (played gamely here by Arnold Vosloo), and realized that the most logical thing would be to have him encounter yet another dangerous female on an island, in imitation of the original's encounter with Circe and Calypso.  Odysseus and his men are a trifle suspicious of the nameless woman (identified in the caption-crawl as "Persephone" even before her name is given).  But they have nothing to go on until Athena, patron of heroes, sends a vision to Odysseus, informing him that the woman is the Queen of the Dead, exiled to the island because she wanted to take over the rule of the world from Zeus.  The writers don't trouble to explain how she's going to do this, any more than the LOST writers cared to explain what their smoky villain was going to do once he got loose.

Said writers, however, do explain what's keeping Persephone penned up on the island.  It's nothing less than the Golden Fleece, woved together with the coat of the Nemean Lion--

Oops again.  It's actually a doodad called "the Hellfire Cross," which sounds like something the writers pulled out of some 20th-century horror movie they'd written.  But this is what I mean by the filmmakers' inability to play by even the fuzzy rules set by the old peplum.  Homer can claim that this "cross" was constructed by Hephaestus and charged up by Zeus, but the problem remains: why would Greek gods be fiddling around with any sort of cross?  In similar fashion, all through this dialogue varies between portentous archaism and modern-sounding discourse, including, of all things, a paraphrase of Nietzsche's maxim that "what does not kill me makes me stronger."

Anyway, Athena isn't content to tell Odysseus to keep clear of Persephone; she also wants him to stab the goddess with the cross, because for some reason the gods need a mortal to do the dirty deed.  Persephone finds out soon enough that her pawns are getting ideas of their own, and she tries an interesting strategy: masquerading as Odysseus' long-unseen wife Penelope.  Though Odysseus sees through the charade he has sex with her anyway.  Following their intimacy, Persephone, not needing the average pregnancy-test, declares that she now has Odysseus' newest boy-child in her womb, and tries to use the fetus as a bargaining-chip.  This could have been an intersting moral problem even within the context of a fast-paced adventure, but the script drops the ball and concludes the film with the usual predictable face-off.

The most I can say for this film was that it was more fun to dis it than to watch it.

STARSHIP TROOPERS 2 (2004); STARSHIP TROOPERS 3 (2008)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: (1) *fair* (2) *good*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

Though the Campbellian function remains the same in these two sequels to the 1997 original, the underlying myth-narratives change quite a bit from film to film.

In my review of STARSHIP TROOPERS. I categorized it as an irony because:

In an irony, even if the main characters seem to triumph in the end, there's always a subtle downside to their apparent victory.

TROOPERS was consistent throughout in terms of ironizing the struggle of young hot-looking human beings against squirmy, squishy bugs. TROOPERS 2 keeps the original's writer Ed Neumeier but takes on as director Phil Tippett, who executed visual effects on the first film as well as many other FX-films going back to STAR WARS.  As Tippett and Neumeier comment on the DVD track, TROOPERS 2, being far less well-funded than the original, pursued the course of many low-budget direct-to-video efforts: it follows the narrative of the horror film.

I've commented on my other blog that works in the horror genre most often imitate the Fryean mythos of the drama.  In that mythos, tragedy and defeat are strongly possible-- or at least more possible than they are in most adventure and comedy mythoi-- though not inevitable.  Though the characters of TROOPERS 2 are not much more well-rounded than those of Verhoeven's original, they are a trifle more sympathetic by virtue of the type of horror narrative used here-- which Neumeier calls "the haunted castle."

There's only a hint of the heavy FX-action toward the beginning of the film.  Then the story takes on the aspect of what television shows call a "bottle episode," in which all the action takes place on one principal set.  A detachment of Earth soldiers, cut off from air support on a bug-infested planet, takes refuge in an abandoned outpost.  There they find one man left behind in the brig: Captain Dax (Richard Burgi), arrested for having killed his superior officer.  With Dax's help, the co-ed infantry repulses another bug attack, and then tries to settle in until help can arrive.  However, they take in a few other soldiers that apparently survived encounters with the enemy, only to learn that they aren't what they seem.  Think ALIEN meets "wolf in sheep's clothing."

The assorted conflicts and tensions within the pressure-cooker environment are fairly pedestrian.  By default Dax emerges as the strongest protagonist, as heroine Pvt. Sahara (Colleen Porch) learns that he no longer considers himself a "hero of the federation" (the film's subtitle) because he's realized what a fucked-up mess the ruling Earth-government is.  Dax makes explicit all the anti-fascist criticisms that the 1997 film left implicit, thus dispersing the ironic impact. Neumeier's script still include a few ironic touches, but Dax's superior point-of-view allows for much more dramatic identification-- though to be sure, the captain still gives up his life fighting alien bugs.  His legacy at the film's end is that Sahara is allowed to see the federation's duplicity; a feat impossible for Johnny Rico, viewpoint character for the Verhoeven work.  TROOPERS 2 is watchable but nothing special.

ADDENDUM 3-18-19: For reasons stated in this essay, I've altered some of the determinations made in this review, one being that I've decided that TROOPERS 2 does align with the mythos of irony rather than that of drama.

 

TROOPERS 3, in comparison to the second film in the series, is something of a return to form.  In the DVD commentary for the first sequel, Neumeier references John Ford's 1934 film THE LOST PATROL, which concerned a group of British soldiers lost in the Mesopotamian desert during WWI, menaced by Arab enemies and an "enemy within," a soldier who becomes lost in religious fanaticism.  Neumeier, wearing both writer and director hats this time, again isolates a detachment of soldiers from air support on a bug-world, but this time the heroes spend most of their time in the desert, and the "religious fanatic" is Marshal Anoke (Stephen Hogan), a prominent officer in Earth's Psychic Corps.  Neumeier develops a plotline seen at the end of the first film, in which Earth-forces captured a "brain bug" from the enemy forces.  It turns out that this bug is a plant, who essentially brainwashes Anoke to believe that God is really an even bigger "brain bug" on the very world where Anoke and the others become stranded.  (I really don't think I'm giving anything away here; Anoke's peculiar attitude and actions mark him as some sort of changeling-type early on.)

Though again the plotline is nothing unique, Neumeier returns the franchise to a more ironic stance.  For the first time there's a significant portrait of organized religion on the TROOPERS version of Earth.  But though it's briefly seen as a possible threat to the ruling powers, Neumeier quickly ironizes the social function of faith as much as that of military power, and by film's end the military has co-opted the power of religious imagery for their fascist agenda.  Perhaps the most inspired example of Neumeier's many satirical moments in the film is his deft rewriting of a line from the Verhoeven film, when the slogan "It's a good day to die"  is altered to "It's a good day to BUY."  In this line Neumeier captures the manipulativeness of the Iraq War years, during which President George W. Bush exhorted U.S. citizens to continue buying to stimulate the country's economy, and thus to indirectly support the continued military efforts in Iraq.

Incidentally, Johnny Rico, again essayed by Casper Van Dien, returns to this TROOPERS franchise here, but he's essentially unchanged and is used largely as "the cavalry" that comes to rescue the few humans that survive Anoke's betrayal, including former Vulcan Jolene Blalock.  And though it took three films to do so, the third in this franchise finally does adapt the one aspect of the Heinlein book that fans griped most about missing from the first adaptation-- the powered "mobile suits."  Given the budget of TROOPERS 3, the suits aren't exactly prepossessing, but I liked seeing them anyway.  But the real star of TROOPERS 3 is the return to irony, in which humans and bugs alike are seen as no damn good whatsoever.

STARSHIP TROOPERS (1997)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*

In the DVD commentary to the film, director Paul Verhoeven and screenwriter Ed Neumeier agree with the sentiment that Richard Schickle expressed (albeit uncertainly) toward their movie:

"War makes fascists of us all!"

TROOPERS, released six years after the prosecution of the Gulf War, seems less applicable to that conflict-- or to Verhoeven's own childhood experiences during the Nazi occupation of Holland-- than to the Iraq War of 2003. Verhoeven claims that he received criticism for the alleged fascism of ROBOCOP, whereupon he decided to up the game by adapting Robert Heinlein's STARSHIP TROOPERS and giving it the downbeat nature of the literary form known as "the irony." In an irony, even if the main characters seem to triumph in the end, there's always a subtle downside to their apparent victory. Here that downside takes the form of main character Johnny Rico becoming essentially "brainwashed" (Verhoeven's word) by the forces that insist on the utter valorization of military effort in any and all manifestations.

The script is clever. The propaganda-slogans and preposterous false logic that various characters use to support the war effort of Earthmen versus alien "bugs" is meant to constantly de-stabilize the viewers' identification with the heroes' efforts. It may be, though, that at base it's a little too clever for its own good. Because Verhoeven and Neumeier don't really want viewers to empathize with their unconsciously fascist protagonists, the characters are often overly flat, as is often the case with satirical figures. Additionally, though the filmmakers intend to make the audience regret the large-scale loss of young lives to the military machine, only a few of the characters succeed in projecting real feeling. One of the few that does is Dizzy (Dina Meyer), with whom audiences relate because it's established that she bears an unrequited torch for main hero Johnny (Casper Van Dien), who in turn carries a torch for somewhat distant officer-in-training Carmen (Denise Richards). The filmmakers reveal that early viewing audiences told them that they killed off the wrong female lead, as Dizzy perishes and Carmen lives. But though one might see this as somewhat indicative of anti-feminism, as the filmmakers do, it may also be that the audience simply identified with Dizzy's greater spectrum of humanity and hated to lose her.

Some of the lines, emphasizing the willingness of the soldiers to sacrifice their lives for "the species," sound as if they were lifted straightforward from Heinlein's book, which is, though not fascist as such, does present the case for military hostilities as valid without much questioning. However, it might be said that the filmmakers present their case with roughly the same level of one-sidedness.

Perhaps the real lesson here is that art, just as much as war, has the propensity to "make fascists of us all!"

THE WEREWOLF (1956)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological*

Fred Sears' THE WEREWOLF appears the same year as his most lauded film, THE EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS, and one year before THE GIANT CLAW , which would become his most infamous work.

The long-time workhorse Sears died the same year, with five of his films not yet in release due to his prolificity. He would seem to be one of many "jobbing directors" in Hollywood who drifted into SF-films simply because they were popular at the time, as his only significant metaphenomenal film prior to the late 1950s was 1951's BLACKHAWK serial. But by my lights he does seem to be one of the rare "B" directors who engaged with the material enough to render above-average results.

I commented earlier that CRY OF THE WEREWOLF, despite grounding its were-creature in a mystic curse, was pitifully low in the mythicity department thanks to unimaginative handling. Sears' WEREWOLF grounds its fantasy in a science-fictional concept, yet shows far more myth-complexity in any given sequence that CRY did in its entire running-time.

Despite attempts by works like THE HOWLING to conceputalize whole "brotherhoods of wolves," the definitive symbolism at work with the werewolf is that of man against his fellow men; of one man being as a wolf who disrupts the community of men, the human "sheepfold" if the metaphor is not too strained. THE WEREWOLF is far from equalling the classic film THE WOLF MAN in this respect, but it uses its SF-tropes to forge its own significant identity.

During World War II mad scientists were constantly trying to create monsters, not infrequently with some demented notion of serving the war effort. Over ten years after the end of that war, the mad scientists are again at work, but this time the two responsible for creating a "scientific werewolf" labor under the shadow of impending nuclear holocaust. Doctors Forrest and Chambers come across innocent everyman Duncan Marsh (Steven Ritch), rendered unconscious from an auto crack-up in the wilds of snowbound northern California. They decide to use him as a test subject for their prospective anti-radiation serum, with the idea that when the Bomb falls, they'll have an antidote with which to build a new society.

Out of this fractured desire for a new society springs, of course, the aforementioned anti-societal werewolf. Marsh, rendered amnesiac, escapes the scientists and flees to one of the local towns. Ironically his first victim is not another innocent, but a more mundane sort of "wolf," a common mugger. However, as the lycanthrope flees the scene of the crime, he also claws up one of the local deputies. Sheriff Haines (Don Megowan) and his fiancee Amy, among others, are then at a loss to explain the activities of an assailant who seems at once man and beast. The script, having already revealed the nature of said assailant, nevertheless plays fair by gradually teasing the characters into realization of their opponent's bizarre nature.

The character of Amy (Joyce Holden) is used to downplay the trope of the werewolf's attractions for the fair sex. Amy is almost empathically troubled by Marsh's condition even before she knows what he's become, yet there's no hint of any romantic beguilement on her part: she remains, in contrast to the Gwen Conliffe female lead of THE WOLF MAN, steadfast to her sheriff-fiancee. One palpable reason for this plot-development is that prior to becoming a hunted beast Marsh was just an ordinary man with both a wife and child. Mrs. Marsh and her son later enter the story, trying to find out why their once-respectable paterfamilias has become the target of a major manhunt.

In addition, the mad scientists are not idle. Just as the local posse chases the wolf-man, the scientists pursue him as well, but with the object of killing him to protect their secret. Inevitably, though they get it in the end, nothing can save the werewolf from his usual tragic fate.

In addition to its intelligent (if perhaps a little predictable) script THE WEREWOLF benefits from the bleak snowy landscapes through which the locals must hunt the beast who was once a man.

THE EVIL DEAD (1981)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*


I don't remember much about my earliest screening of EVIL DEAD, except that back in the days of videocassettes I rented it together with EVIL DEAD II. Like many horror-fans, I found the more manic (and comic) version of the story to be the more interesting. My recent rewatch of EVIL DEAD on Halloween weekend was probably the first time I bothered to see the original opus again.

My main observation is that there really isn't much to say about DEAD in his "straight" manifestation. Writer-director Sam Raimi patently made the film as cheaply as possible, with no-name actors in one location. It's principally a movie that gets by on the technique of Raimi's camerawork and the special FX, which are very much of their time in terms of their fascination with splattery gore.

EVIL DEAD I is funny, to be sure, but in contrast to the sequel, the humor stems from laughing at the transparent cheesiness of the story, not from imaginative setups within the story proper (with the possible exception of the notorious "Tree Rape.") I imagine that Raimi, unlike many previous cult-film makers, was aware of the risible nature of his story. The most one can say is that EVIL DEAD was a "training-exercise" that gave him good experience for much better work down the line. The same applies to principal actor Bruce Campbell, who's pretty terrible throughout DEAD, even though he was the only one of the unknowns to acquire some measure of lasting fame.

I term this film's function "sociological" only because it follows a common narrative trope in constructing a small, unstable society and then exploiting the tensions between the characters. Here it's five young college-students renting a cabin in the Tennessee woods, who have the misfortune to unleash a bevy of Sumerian demons, who take turns possessing each of the students and turning them against their fellows. The possessions turn each possessee into gross monsters who can only be stopped by dismemberment. This might have been more impressive if all the characters were not such ciphers that they make the victims of FRIDAY THE 13TH movies seem like figures from an Ibsen play by comparison.

BEFORE I HANG (1940)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, cosmological*

As I remember, I first saw Boris Karloff's first three "mad doctor" films for Columbia in chronological order of production. I also remember thinking that the third, BEFORE I HANG, was the least of the three.

However, on re-viewing HANG, I think it's a little more adventurous than the previous two Columbia Karloff-outings, both of which concerned a dedicated but somewhat fanatical scientist trying to bring people back to life through new scientific procedures. HANG, however, pursues a different course toward restoring life, as Karloff's Doctor Garth argues that his unique treatments can reverse old age. A lot of people may idly wish for this or that person to return from the dead, but it seems to be a more universal wish to reverse the course of aging.

In TYRANNY OF THE NORMAL, Leslie Fiedler argues that modern attempts to slow that course are the equivalent of Faust's ancient bargain, even if moderns need not actually sign devilish contrasts in their own blood. Nick Grinde's HANG, despite being a cheap B-film, sometimes touches on this theme very aptly. The film begins with Garth already in prison for having committed a mercy killing. He makes an impassioned speech to the warden to be allowed to continue his research, asserting (as many modern anti-aging treatments do) that aging isn't inevitable: that proper treatment can eliminate the "poisons" that build up in the theoretically eternal cells. Most B-grade mad scientist-films don't try very hard to provide even a modicum of scientific logic to their wondrous effects, so the scripters of HANG should be credited for grounding Garth's speech in this particular theory of human aging-processes.

Naturally, Garth soon learns that you can't get something for nothing, when he attempts to reverse aging by injecting himself with the blood of a fellow prisoner, a convicted murderer-- perhaps more borrowing from HANDS OF ORLAC and MAD LOVE than from FAUST here. Garth manages to de-age himself, perhaps about twenty years, but the cost of this devil's bargain is that he begins to commit senseless murders. However, unlike the alter ego of Mister Hyde, this doctor manages to conceal his deeds so well that the authorities believe him a modern saint (not least because he holds out the promise of eternal youth) and commute his sentence. Soon Garth is free, and one of the first things he does is to try to persuade a small elite class of talented men to join him in gaining relative youth. His effort fails, as one of the older men eloquently refutes the need of the aged to have any more lifetimes. In frustration Garth kills his dialectical opponent and nearly menaces his daughter before he's finally detected and brought to the hangman's noose.

The anti-aging theories supply the aforesaid cosmological content, but the most interesting psychological component, apart from the Faust/anti-Faust debate, is what HANG leaves hanging. Unlike Faust, Mister Hyde and most over-reachers who get a second lease on life, Garth never becomes preoccupied with pursuing the opposite sex once more. I don't know if the screenplay's writers even gave the idea any thought, as they were attempting to promote the idea of Garth as fundamentally well-intentioned. In addition, while the magic of makeup may have de-aged Garth to Karloff's real fiftysomething age, there was no way a production like this one could have reversed time enough to make Garth into a credible predator, as was the case with Hyde. Thus "death" rather than "love" becomes the obsession of this bargain-basement Faustian.