BIKINI BEACH (1964), HOW TO STUFF A WILD BIKINI (1965)

PHENOMENALITY: (1) *naturalistic* (2) marvelous
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*


The five "canonical" (so to speak) Beach Party films-- those that headlined those overaged high-schoolers Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello-- were all directed within about three years by William (BEWITCHED) Asher.  Since it appears that he was just trying to knock them out as quickly as possible before the "beach film" fad did the big fade, it's not exactly surprising that he didn't choose the sophisticated comedy of Noel Coward as his model.  It's also not surprising that what Asher's beach films most resemble content-wise is the more hyperkinetic comedies of the silent era; lots of visual gags centered around a very loose plot.  To be sure, none of Asher's beach films-- and possibly no beach film ever, by anyone-- ever comes up to the best of silent comedies a la Chaplin and Keaton.  Still, they're probably no worse than your average Keystone Kops flick.  Possibly the casting of Buster Keaton in the fifth and last film, HOW TO STUFF A WILD BIKINI, was a tip of the hat by Asher or one of his people to their comic model.

Of the two, BIKINI BEACH has a little more of that thing called "plot."  Since the first film centered on surfing and the second revolved around "muscle beach" activities, the third in the series moves toward a less beach-oriented sport: drag-racing.  A popular English singer, "the Potato Bug" (read: lame Beatles spoof), comes to the local beach to participate in a big drag-race.  When the Bug makes a play for DeeDee (Funicello), Frankie (Avalon) drops his surfboard and enters the race alongside his rival. 

On another front, rich elder statesman Harvey Honeywagon (Keenan Wynn) also arrives on the scene, determined to prove that members of the "bikini generation" all act like animals.  To prove this he takes a man-sized chimpanzee (Janos Prohaska)-- who goes by the name "Clyde" and so may be the spiritual ancestor to the orangutan from EVERY WHICH WAY BUT LOOSE-- and trains the chimp to do all the things surfers can do (well, at least with a surfboard; Clyde never gets to make whoopee with any of the beach-babes).  Honeywagon seems a bit of a rewrite of the snotty professor from 1963's BEACH PARTY, who came to study the beach-teens as if they were animals, but Honeywell has an ulterior motive for his contempt.  He wants to arouse public ire at the loose morals of the beach youth so that the beach will be closed and he can buy up the land to expand his neighboring "old folks' home."  This may be the closest Asher ever gets to portraying his own generation as inherently jealous of the vivacity and sex appeal of the younger generation, but the script lets Honeywagon off the hook.  The teens' teacher (Martha Hyer) shows up to protest Honeywell's mischaracterization of the flaming youths (who are, the film keeps telling us, fundamentally and boringly moral) and ends up converting the journalist to her side.

A lot of silly, causality-violating things take place, particularly during the de rigeur fight between the surfers and Erich Von Zipper's biker-goons.  A surfer slugs a biker so hard he hits the ceiling, and dancer "Candy" knocks people around with the shimmying vibrations of her butt-- but none of them are meant to violate the fundamentally naturalistic feel of the flick.  So all these bits of nonsense, as well as the chimp-who-can-ride-a-surfboard, fall into the naturalistic versions of their appropriate categories.

Boris Karloff makes a quick cameo here, filling in for the late Peter Lorre, who had appeared in the second beach film.  His dialogue references to Vincent Price, who perhaps never lived down his appearance in the first Asher beachfilm, and even makes a coy allusion to Price's real-life hobby of art-collection.

1965's STUFF plunges more than any previous beachfilm into the wackiest possible aspects of a marvelous comedy, and it's not a good transition.  The story's a mess, beginning with "naval reservist" Frankie stationed out in the Pacific Islands and getting cosy with a native girl (Irene Tsu, seen above with Keaton).  One presumes that he's only having G-rated sex with the sarong-wearing seducer, but even so he gets quite jealous when she suggests that DeeDee may be back on the beach having some applesauce for the gander. Frankie appeals to the local witchdoctor Bwana (Keaton) for help.  Bwana uses heap big magic to materialize hot babe Cassandra (Beverly Adams) on the beach, who in theory can mesmerize every beach-boy to keep them from moving in on DeeDee.  However, the spell doesn't work on one guy, Ricky (Dwayne Hickman), who continues to pursue DeeDee for the rest of the picture.

And just to keep the sports-theme going, Von Zipper ends up teaming up with Cassandra to win a motocycle race, but naturally Ricky and DeeDee win it.  However, gender inequities are forgotten and true love is validated in the end, when Frankie (who has remained stayed on that island for most of the picture) magically pops back to the beach to reaffirm his bond with DeeDee, for which the next steps are presumably marriage and the baby carriage.

Though the plot is all over the place, the songs are a little wittier than the usual romantic fluff, while the opening titles, executed in claymation by Art (GUMBY) Clokey, may be the funniest thing in the film.  Instead of a cameo by a horror-actor, for this last beach-blanket blitz Asher has his wife Elizabeth Montgomery appear for a second as a Samantha-esque witch-- a nice bit of pop-cultural dovetailing, since to this day BEWITCHED and the beach-films remain the two works for which Asher is best remembered.

ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET THE KILLER (1949), ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1953)

PHENOMENALITY: (1)  *uncanny,* (2) marvelous
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

I chose to bracket these two Abbott and Costello films purely because these were the only A&C films to co-star the inimitable (though much-imitated) Boris Karloff. 

The first (whose posters expanded the title to read ...THE KILLER BORIS KARLOFF) doesn't really depend all that much on the acting talent of Karloff.  The original plot for this typical murder-mystery comedy was written with Bob Hope in mind and was rewritten for Universal's comedy duo, as referenced in Wikipedia:

The role eventually played by Boris Karloff in the film was originally a female character named Madame Switzer in the final shooting script which was then titled, Abbott and Costello Meet the Killers. Five days before shooting, Karloff was hired and the character was changed to a swami.

It's unclear to me whether or not the original female character was meant to be a hypnotist, but if so this was certainly the best aspect of the script.  KILLER concerns a murder committed in a respectable hotel where Abbott works as a house detective and Costello as a bellboy.  Costello, always the goat in these films, has the misfortune to threaten the murder victim before the latter is found dead.  He becomes a suspect alongside several shady residents of the hotel, including Swami Talpur (Karloff) and Angela (Lenore Aubert).  It comes out that none of the other red-herrings are any more guilty of the murder than Costello, but as they're all desperate to keep the police from nosing around in their business, they make various attempts to set up Costello as the fall guy for the crime. 

As in her previous A&C outing, ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN, Aubert is sleekly attractive but she only has a few scenes.  Karloff's near-supernatural ability to hypnotize the hapless bellhop is the only memorable gimmick the film has, resulting in its best scene, in which the testy swami continually attempts to make the bellboy kill himself, which act he invarably bungles.  The comedy isn't overly funny here and the plot feels disjointed as a result of placing most of the narrative action on the other suspects, rather than on the real killer, who only becomes a menace to the hero late in the story.  There's a minor subplot with the customary "straight romantic couple" but it could have been dropped and no one would have noticed.

The "Boys'" third encounter with a classic movie-monster finds them cast as American cops transferred to London to study British police methods, which naturally extends to having the comics dress up as bobbies.  During that time several London scientists are killed, scientists who just happen to have critiqued the outrageous theories of Doctor Henry Jekyll (Karloff).  It turns out that the killer is the werewolvish-looking Mister Hyde, who can "hide" in plain sight by transforming into Doctor Jekyll.

All the usual Jekyll-and-Hyde mythology is thrown out the window here, in that this verison of Jekyll cares nothing about the "good and evil in man's soul."  He's just a standard mad scientist avenging himself on his enemies, and Karloff, who had played many such roles before, executes it again with customary professionalism, though the role gives him no opportunity for Karloff's usual humanizing touches.  The only exception to this appears near the end of the picture, when Jekyll reveals that he nurses an unholy passion for his own young ward (Helen Westcott).  In this ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE essay I noted that liaisons between persons related only through a legal fiction should logically be called "legal incest," and I called attention to the "intensity" that the taboo aroused when the legality existed as opposed to similar situations where it did not.  I must admit that it seems strange to find even this sort of EDWIN DROOD-like form of incest in an Abbott and Costello picture, but it does make the film more psychologically diverting.

Overall the film has a more knockabout slapstick feel than KILLER.  Some reviewers didn't care for the inclusion of a largely unrelated plot about London suffragettes fighting for equality, but it does make for a good brawl, with "bobby" Costello taking a lot of punishment.  The very athletic Hyde is never played by Karloff, but by stunt actor Eddie Parker, and the script gives Parker some better-than-average fight-scenes.  The final joke, in which several cops imbibe the Jekyll serum and fill Scotland Yard with maniacal Hydes, is pretty silly even for A&C.

JAWS 3 (1983), JAWS THE REVENGE (1987)

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

 There’s not much point in inveighing against sequels.  Given that some of them make respectable money, they’re inevitable.  However, many film-reviewers critique sequels for ignoring the deeper themes of an original (or quasi-original) work—such as Spielberg’s JAWS—and concentrating only on base sensationalism.  A common joke is to imagine a sequel to HAMLET redone as an action-movie, with some title like HAMLET 2: THIS TIME IT’S PERSONAL (courtesy of the cartoon show DUCKMAN).


Sensationalism, however, is not the worst sin of a sequel.  Dullness is.  Thus I find that in comparison to Jeannot Swarc’s leaden foray into shark-infested waters for JAWS 2, JAWS 3 is a distinct improvement.  Directed by Joe Alves (second unit director on the previous JAWS films), with a script including input from Carl Gottlieb and the renowned Richard Matheson, the film is no more than serviceable, combining aspects of a slasher-film and a disaster-movie.  But at least it’s not a dull slasher-disaster-shark movie.

I’ve never seen the film in the three-dimensional format of its original release (under the title JAWS 3-D), but I would guess that the filmmaker’s desire to play to this gimmick resulted in a greater emphasis on thrills rather than tedious psuedo-Spielbergian psychologizing.  As Roy Scheider presumably gave the film a pass, Chief Brody is written out of the story (and is later pronounced dead of a heart attack in the fourth and last film), and the emphasis is placed on Brody’s two sons, which is the only point picked up from the Swarc sequel.  And though their mother Ellen also makes a minor appearance, the film’s setting is happily moved from the played-out field of Amity Island to Seaworld, a marine-themed park in Florida.


The characters are all simple types, many duplicating functions seen in the first film: Mike Brody, though a teen, fills the concerned “family man” role and there’s an experienced shark-hunter named Philip who takes the Robert Shaw role.  For the first time a female character occupies a more central role—that of the “know-it-all” essayed by Dreyfuss—though this particular know-it-all , an employee of Seaworld named Kathy, is directly responsible for bringing down the wrath of a Great White.  In a trope probably lifted from GORGO, Kathy persuades the park’s owner to capture a baby Great White.  The baby shark dies in captivity, and soon its mother—a shark about ten meters bigger than the sharks from the previous entries—besieges Seaworld.


Incidentally, just as Kathy is the first significant heroine, the park’s owner Calvin Brouchard marks the series’ first significant black character, though despite the casting of Louis Gossett Jr the role seems race-neutral.  Brouchard is merely the new version of Mayor Hamilton’s money-hungry douche.  The script’s only awareness of his race appears when Brouchard makes a strange remark about keeping different marine species in different cages, which he sardonically calls “marine segregation.”

The script keeps the emphasis largely on thrills, particularly in some strong set-pieces: one involving the mama shark attacking a waterskiing chorus-line and menacing tourists passing through a submerged passageway.  Because the script does place considerable emphasis upon the menace of the sea, with some better-than-average underwater photography, this gives JAWS 3 a stronger cosmological theme than the Swarc sequel.

Sadly, JAWS THE REVENGE sputters out by following the pattern of the second film: the sea is insufficiently seen, and the script devotes an excruciating amount of time to tedious human beings.  As noted above the film establishes that Chief Brody has died of a heart attack, which his wife Ellen relates to the trauma he suffered in sharkfighting.  A mysterioso opening suggests that the film may become a meditation on the horrors of the sea, but the film never delivers on this potential.  The story posits that a new shark comes looking for the Brody family back on Amity Island, and the film begins promisingly when the beast manages to catch and kill the younger Brody son. Very briefly the film verges into MOBY DICK territory, with the bereaved Ellen claiming that the shark’s out to get them while Mike argues that it’s just a dumb beast.  But the script, rather than concentrating on the metaphysics of piscatorial evil, fumbles by wasting time on the Brody family’s daily lives.  Much time is wasted on the flat and annoying character of bereaved Ellen, as the story takes the trouble to give her a new man in her life (Michael Caine, probably brought in for marquee value) though the heroic arc still centers upon the shark-killing destiny of Mike Brody.  The film’s one saving grace is that when Brody’s ship does finally come to grips with the fourth and final version of “Bruce the Shark,” this incarnation’s the biggest yet—perhaps absurdly so, but at least the shark’s last appearance still maintains his status as an icon of terror.  

   

   

JAWS (1975), JAWS 2 (1978)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: (1) *good*, (2) *poor*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological*


At present the trope to which I've given the least attention on this blog is that of "astounding animals," having reviewed only two films with the uncanny phenomenality (NABONGA and LEOPARD MAN) and one with the naturalistic phenomenality (THE SAVAGE GIRL).  And none of these films dealt with one of the most interesting aspects of such films: the viewer's confrontation with the strange-but-true nature of the other animals with whom he shares this planet.  This is one fascinating manifestation of the phenomenological function that Campbell calls "the cosmological," which is devoted to sussing out the physical nature of the cosmos.

 

However, the viewer can only find this function within the initial film in the series.  Steven Spielberg's JAWS spawned a couple dozen other "animal attack" films, but like the rest of the series, most of them did not really concentrate on knowing the nature of the animal in order to bring forth the viewer's awe and terror.  I would imagine that the cosmological meditations on the power and nature of the shark derive from Peter Benchley's bestseller novel (which I have not read), and that he and fellow scripter Carl Gottlieb simply adapted these meditations into the screenplay.  No such meditations make it into the finished sequel JAWS 2, even though Benchley and Gottlieb scripted that as well: possibly the two of them "shot their bolt" with the first film and never got it back.  (Benchley went on to have other piscatorial books adapted by television: Gottlieb produced his best writer-director work in 1981's CAVEMAN.)

 

To some extent a measure of the JAWS screenplay's success surely derives from the directorial input of Spielberg as well: his shark-haunted Amity Island is filled with dozens of "bits of business" both by the principal and peripheral characters.  Had any film since Frank Capra's days got so much mileage out of a quote as minor and meaningless as "That's some bad hat, Harry?"  Spielberg would tend to use this Classic Hollywood approach toward verismilitude in the majority of his subsequent films, though JAWS is one of the few times the majority of critics appreciated him for it.  Possibly the JAWS screenplay benefits from having pruned the Benchley novel down to its existential essentials, which may have made it more popular with the critical elite.

 

Putting aside the Ibsenesque touches about the cupidity of Amity's ruling body, more conerned with profit than human lives, the central conflict is between the merciless "killing machine" that is the Great White and the three men who choose to throw himself in its path.  These three-- Brody (Roy Scheider), Hooper (Richard Dreyfus) and Quint (Robert Shaw)-- are types Spielberg would use over and over in varying combinations: the conflicted family man, the educated know-it-all, and the plainspoken "real man."  I hesitate to read any deeper themes into them than that, having seen this howling monstrosity paraphrased from a work by Frederic Jameson:

[Jameson] views Quint's demise as the symbolic overthrow of an old, populist, New Deal America and Brody and Hooper's partnership as an "allegory of an alliance between the forces of law-and-order and the new technocracy of the multinational corporations ... in which the viewer rejoices without understanding that he or she is excluded from it."-- Wikipedia "Jaws" article.

 

The most I will say is that I do think it significant that Quint, the only member of the three-man crew who possesses a lifetime of experience with the sea, is the only one of the three who perishes in the maw of the shark.  However, I prefer to interpret this development as less ideological and more poetic in nature: Quint lives by the sea and he dies by the sea.  Benchley's novel, incidentally, kills both Quint and Hooper, and Quint dies not in the horrific mouth of the shark but by an accident not unlike the one that claims Captain Ahab in MOBY DICK.  Benchley and Spielberg don't anatomize the shark quite as extensively as Melville anatomized the whale, but when JAWS is done, even the shark's destruction doesn't dim one's memory of him as a creature of almost supernatural ferocity.

JAWS 2 was almost destined to pale in comparison to the original, but even so, the producers chose poorly in hiring Jeannot Swarc to helm the film.  With a few exceptions Swarc in 1975 had principally worked in televison movies and series, and it's clear from the film's earliest scenes that he's practically an anti-Spielberg in terms of handling characters. Brody, the only returning member of the first film's trifecta, becomes nearly as colorless as the cookie-cutter inhabitants of Amity, and is lifted from mediocrity only by the strength of Scheider's performance.  Lorraine Gary returns as Brody's wife, and worries a lot; Murray Hamilton returns as Mayor Vaughan and continues to be a profit-seeking douche.  Such colorless characters probably wouldn't be as noticeable in a teleseries episode, but here their banality becomes excructiating in the big-screen format. The new shark in town strikes a victim here, a victim there, but only becomes an impressive menace in the last twenty minutes of JAWS 2, where once again Brody is the only man who can take out the fishy fiend. 

I debated whether or not Swarc's take on the shark was so tedious as to propel the film into the realm of the naturalistic, but ultimately I decided that in those last twenty minutes Swarc does basically follow through on Spielberg's inhuman killing-machine characterization of the briny beast, so JAWS 2 falls into the category of the uncanny as well.

DUEL (1971), ROAD RAGE (2000)

PHENOMENALITY: (1) *uncanny,* (2) *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: (1) *good,* (2) *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

DUEL, certainly one of the three most celebrated television movies of all time, has been praised so effusively that there’s no need for me to add to the chorus.  Thus, accept as a given my agreement with all the praise of Richard Matheson’s adaptation of his original short story to telefilm format, Steven Spielberg’s tense direction and Dennis Weaver’s strong performance as an everyman driving cross-country and falling prey to the menace of a maniacal tanker-truck driver.

The one original thing I can say about DUEL is of course in terms of my NUM theory.  On the face of things, DUEL sounds much like what I’ve usually described as a naturalistic thriller in ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE essays like THRILLER KILLING.  Certainly most if not all of the “vehicular violence” films that came out in the forty-plus years following DUEL’s oil-drippings, including 2000’s ROAD RAGE, which may well be the worst of that breed.

However, the one element most of the imitators did not follow was the uncanny sensibility with which Matheson and Spielberg treated their subject matter.  In naturalistic thrillers, a psycho-stalker, however dangerous, is fundamentally intelligible.  The audience may not understand the stalker’s motivations in all respects, but he is not constructed as being beyond ordinary experience in any way: he’s merely an atypical extreme within a naturalistic phenomenality.

In uncanny thrillers, however, the psycho-stalker does have carry such a construction, some aspect of mysteriousness that cannot be reduced to commonplace experience.  Years before the “slasher-film” craze promoted the idea of the psycho-killer whose face is not seen by the audience until the conclusion, Spielberg employs the same visual trope for DUEL, never allowing the audience to see more of the truck-driver menacing Dennis Weaver than a hand or a pair of feet.  The affective result is that, even though the audience knows that some mortal man is driving the truck, the driver's near-invisibility makes his mortality ambiguous. Indeed, for most of DUEL’s running-time I for one felt as if Dennis Weaver were being chased by an inhuman beast in the form of a truck; an impression Spielberg clearly plays to at the telefilm’s climax.  At this point, Weaver finally turns the tables by forcing the mammoth truck to plunge off a high cliff, during which the truck emits an animalistic “groan” as it falls to its “death.” 

Thus, with these considerations in mind, I categorize DUEL’s dominant trope—that of the “perilous psycho”—as belonging to the uncanny phenomenality.  I note in passing that DUEL is among the first psychos to employ a mundane-seeming object as the means of dealing death, foreshadowing the shears of THE BURNING and the power drill of SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE.

ROAD RAGE, however, doesn’t just eschew any uncanny tropes, as most vehicle-violence films do.  RAGE, directed by longtime mediocrity Sidney J. Furie, actually tries to trade on some of the concepts of DUEL to force some sparks into its tired battery.

Like most DUEL-imitators, RAGE isn’t satisfied to focus on one man’s existential confrontation with death, but rather employs at least two characters as the victims of vehicle-vengeance.  RAGE starts out with something close to a meet-cute moment, when Sonia (Danielle Brett) tries to give her cheating boyfriend Bo the gate.  When Bo refuses to leave her alone, a limo-driver named Jim (Casper Van Dien) tries to come to her rescue, only to get his head beat in.  Bo leaves Sonia behind with gallant wimp Jim, who offers Sonia a ride home.  However, in their progress Jim makes the mistake of cutting off a big truck, which tries to run down Jim’s car.  The meet-cuties shake it for a while, but like the Everready bunny the big truck just keeps coming and coming.  For the rest of the film, the cute couple keep running and running, arguing and falling in love in the process, until Jim finally finds a way to destroy their pursuer.

For the first thirty minutes, it looks as if Furie really intends to do a complete one-off of DUEL, right down to having Jim commit the same sin as Weaver’s character: the sin of cutting off a big-rig in traffic.  During that short period, the driver(s) of the menacing truck cannot be seen, thanks to the truck’s tinted windows.  Very briefly the truck does begin to seem like an inhuman presence a la DUEL.  This is best illustrated by a scene when the vehicle crashes through a gas-pump and continues to chase the couple, even with gas-flames dancing on the truck’s exterior-- easily the film’s only memorable scene.

However, the DUEL citations soon go out the window, as Jim and Sonia finally do get a look at the truck’s drivers: none other than Bo and a couple of friends.  It’s quickly revealed that Bo’s still pissed about being thrown over by his girl, enough to commit vehicular homicide.  This means that the cut-off in traffic was actually just a “fake-out” designed to hoax the audience, but for such a petty result that one wonders why Furie thought it worth the trouble.  The truck soon begins to show signs of wear and tear, dispelling any claim it might have had to uncanny presence.

Given that one tends to expect routine characters and action-sequences in this breed of junk-film, RAGE’s failings in these departments are not surprising.  But in this case Furie should have stuck with making a predictable vehicle-vengeance story like 1997's JOYRIDE.  The allusions to a work whose quality he can’t hope to touch are just embarrassing this time out.      

    

THE LAST ACTION HERO (1993)

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

Directed by John McTiernan, who helmed two classic 1980s action-opuses-- 1987's PREDATOR and 1988's DIE HARD-- THE LAST ACTION HERO offers fewer interesting observations in terms of its somewhat over-obvious repetitious script than in its attempt to push the adventure genre toward comedy without actually becoming one.

Comic spoofs of "serious" adventure genres have been around since the birth of cinema, but HERO isn't really a spoof, for all that it makes fun of the tropes of what the film calls "action movies."  Perhaps McTiernan and his writers didn't want to bite down too hard on the hand that fed them, but I prefer to believe that beneath all the jokes there lay a desire to validate the absurd excesses of adventure-cinema.

The plot is as straightforward and simple as any "straight" shoot-'em-up.  Middle-schooler Danny Madigan constantly escapes reality by cutting school to watch adventure-movies, with his favorite being a series starring maverick cop Jack Slater, played by real-life actor Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Danny's behavior exasperates his widowed mother, but the script suggests-- without overdoing the pop-psychology-- that Danny finds in Slater a role model for masculine behavior in lieu of his late father, much as young John Connor bonds with Arnold the Terminator in 1991's TERMINATOR 2.

However, where a comedy would make this identification ludicrous while an ironic satire would make it deplorable, HERO actually shows that Danny has learned his lessons pretty well.  True, when a magical "golden ticket" transports Danny into a dimension where Jack Slater and his adventures are all real, Danny constantly points out the artificiality of the tropes with which Slater lives, as with the "cartoon cat" who's one of Slater's fellow officers.  Nevertheless, Danny bonds somewhat with the thick-witted Slater (also Schwarzenegger of course), and shows considerable insight into the male relationships encoded by the adventure-genre, noting how the acrimony between Slater and superior Lt. Dekker masks their strong feeling for one another.  It's also evident that Danny isn't a brainwashed movie zombie: that he can recognize the excessive sexism of adventure-films, as when he and Slater visit a video-store in Slater's world and Danny points out that all the workers in the store are improbably beautiful models.  And of course, though Danny has to be dragged kicking and screaming into being an adventure-hero, he does step up to the bat, whereas a real comic hero would find ways to undermine the whole "proving oneself" process.

Most of the movie's comic moments are passable but nothing special.  HERO's best moment arrives when one of Slater's villains, the chilling Mr. Benedict (a very excellent Charles Dance) gets hold of Danny's magical ticket and escapes to Danny's world.  When Slater and Danny follow, Benedict exults to them about the chaos he can bring about in this universe:

Dracula? Huh. I can get King Kong! We'll have a nightmare with Freddy Krueger, have a surprize party for Adolf Hitler, Hannibal Lecter can do the catering, and then we'll have christening for Rosemary's Baby! All I have to do is snap my fingers and they'll be here. They're lining up to get here, and do you know why Jack? Should I tell you why? Hmm? Because here, in this world, the bad guys can win!

Of course Benedict is defeated and the two heroes return to their respective worlds, somewhat wiser for the experience but still preferring their own domains.  But the Benedict-speech makes a persuasive argument in favor of the adventure-genre that a comedy never could: the enjoyment of adventure's excessive unreality purely as a compensatory mechanism against the fact that in reality, "the bad guys can win."  A satire might suggest that this could only be a negative compensation, but HERO-- admittedly in a very simplistic, unphilosophical manner-- suggests that the compensation is basically positive in nature.  Even if we know (metaphysically speaking) that evil can win in our world, the desire that good *should* win does not imply that said desire is merely avoidance of reality.  Rather, HERO-- and heroes generally-- exist to suggest that reality can be changed for the better.

THE INVISIBLE WOMAN (1940)

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

European emigres Joe May and Curt Siodmak, who had teamed up for the same-year-released INVISIBLE MAN RETURNS (with May directing), come together again to present a comic take on the "unseeable person" concept, though only contributing the story while one Edward Sutherland took over directing duties.  Most of the comic moments in the earlier two INVISIBLE MAN films tended toward silly farce, and the gender-flipping INVISIBLE WOMAN jumped into the silliness with both unseen arms flailing.

It's appropriate that Shemp Howard has a supporting role in WOMAN, because the plot here is simple enough to be recycled as a Three Stooges short (and may well have been).  Playboy millionaire Dick Russell (John Howard) goes broke as a result of his excesses, but there's hope for a financial comeback if Professor Gibbs (John Barrymore), in whose eccentric inventions Dick has often invested, can complete his experiments on an invisibility machine.  To test the machine Gibbs advertised in newspapers for a test subject.  Working-girl model Kitty (Virginia Bruce) answers the ad, mostly because she and her fellow models are constantly browbeaten at their job by an officious supervisor (Charles Lane), inspiring Kitty to see the gift of invisibility as a means of getting some payback.  Sure enough, as soon as Gibbs makes her invisible, she returns to her place of work and scares the heck out of her supervisor by pretending to be his "conscience."  Upon returning to the Professor's lab, new conflicts arise as Dick becomes intrigued with the unseen ingenue (but isn't quite willing to commit until he's seen the goods), and a group of bumbling mobsters intrude, wishing to use the Professor's invention for evil ends.

Wisely the writers abandoned the Wellsian concept that being invisible gradually unhinges one's mind, though at times Kitty does start acting a little too daffy for her own good, or anyone else's.  In the slapstick conclusion the invisible wench manages to clobber all the mobsters by clonking them from behind.  Then Dick, finally in love with her (because he's had a chance to see her, albeit briefly), arrives on the scene.  Kitty, wanting to force Dick to "fight for her," shoots a machine-gun in his direction, just so he'll feel properly motivated to come rescue her.

The most interesting function here relates to the sociological process by which women "construct" themselves to titillate and trap the male of the species.  Most of the invisibility effects concentrate on showing how well Invisible Kitty fills out various gowns, though this isn't enough for Dick, who argues that anyone who'd become invisible must not be much of a looker.  She beguiles him, though, by becoming only partly invisible, showing off (what else?) her legs.  It might've been more interesting to see him pledge his love before he knew what he was getting for certain, but as noted above he does get to see her visible self before taking the plunge.

Bruce's invisible charms notwithstanding, the best thing about INVISIBLE WOMAN are the familiar faces in the cast, which also includes Charles Ruggles, Oscar Homolka, and "Wicked Witch" Margaret Hamilton, who like Bruce shows a feisty side of womanhood by hitting a thug with a chair!