CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (1954)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological, metaphysical, cosmological*

CREATURE begins by quoting the origin of the universe a la Genesis, yet afterward immediately shifts into a straight scientific account of life being born from the oceans rather than from the Garden of Eden.  Did the producers have the Biblical reference thrown in to placate audiences who might’ve taken a dim view of a purely materialistic account of the evolution of life?  It’s possible, but in any case the injection of the numinous supports the script’s assertion that before man arose, there might have been many other “experiments” that God and/or Nature perpetrated.  The opening sequence ends with the sight of the petrified hand of some dead humanoid—a hand like that of a human, except that this dessicated relic sports claws.  When a living exemplar of this almost-vanished species makes his first appearance on camera, he too does so by putting forth a clawed hand—to the accompaniment of a loud “dah dah DAH” musical sting—suggesting that in this world, the essence of the alien is symbolized by the interface of the human hand— the tool with which man builds things—with the destructive claw of the beast.

The claw beckons the audience to follow the adventures of the scientists who find it buried in rock in some Latin American country.  One of those scientists, Doctor Maia, invites a team of scientists from the U.S. to mount an expedition in the same territory, a territory enclosing the ominous-sounding “Black Lagoon.”  Three Americans—Doctor David Reed, his fiancés Kay, and Doctor Williams, who arranges the expedition’s financial affairs—elect to hire a boat and accompany Maia down the Amazon River to find more fossils.  But even before the expedition proper begins, it’s clear that Reed and Williams represent opposed aspects of man’s quest for science.  Reed speaks altruistically about wanting to learn more about the origins of life in order to gather knowledge that will help mankind explore outer space.  Williams merely wants to garner financial rewards in the here and now.

Before the boat-trip even begins, the film shows an Amazonian native attacked by a modern-day descendant of the claw’s owner, though the film naturally does not disclose the creature’s full appearance so early.  Some time later the expedition arrives on the scene to find the body.  Some time later the heroes will learn about local legends of a “Gill Man” who can breathe underwater, but though they don’t yet suspect his existence, the creature begins to follow these new intruders into his domain.

When the boat enters the Black Lagoon, prior to any sightings of the Gill Man, Kay displays her fascination with raw nature by speaking of “the beautiful lagoon.”  It’s not clear as to how long the Gill Man’s been around, but since he doesn’t seem to have any Gill Women around, one has to assume that he must have been spawned long, long ago.  But one look at Kay and the Gill Man apparently remembers the joys of spawning.  Following the famous “water ballet” scene in which Kay goes swimming and the Gill Man swims beneath her, mimicking her movements in a quasi-erotic manner, the monster decides to attack the boat, shredding one of its nets.  When the scientists are finally convinced of this anomaly’s existence, Reed wants to capture it for scientific study, while Williams seems more interested in killing it with his handy spear-gun.   “Dead or alive,” Williams asks Reed, “what’s the difference?” In a sense Williams speaks for that part of science that cares only about dissecting living things for the sake of sterile curiosity, while Reed implicitly respects the ecology of living things, though in 1954 the modern philosophy of ecological science had yet to get off the ground.

The Gill Man kills another crewmen and maims another man in the party.  With the help of the boat’s Latino captain (who has a nice moment when he shows Williams that the doctor’s money doesn’t put him in charge), the scientists manage to drug the Gill Man.  However, their success is short-lived.  The creature escapes and blocks the ship’s exit from the lagoon, forcing Williams and Reed to contend with it.  Callous Williams meets his maker at the clawed hands of his distant ancestor, and Kay is abducted into the creature’s subterranean boudoir.  Reed and his fellow adventurers arrive in time to keep Kay from becoming the mother of a new race of fish-people.  The Gill Man appears to perish, but as most fantasy-film fans know well, he returns in two more films.  Both of these will be covered separately, but arguably the “Black Lagoon” films present the decade’s most empathetic treatment of a science-fictional creature, and make him the fit heir to the Universal tradition of great monsters.

TRINITY AND SARTANA (1972)

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


TRINITY AND SARTANA bears no relation to either of the original Italian versions of these characters, but at least the film is an actual Italian production

Neither the character of "Trinity" (played by black actor Harry Baird, who explains his name by saying he's "from Trinidad") nor the character of "Sartana" have any resemblance to the ongoing franchises the Italians built around the names "Trinity" and "Sartana."  The closest resemblance here is that TRINITY AND SARTANA imitates the knockabout farce-adventure seen in the "Trinity" films, rather than the violent, cynical tone adopted by the original "Sartana" films, which are more in the line of earlier spaghettis like those of "Django" and, of course, "the Man with No Name."

The film's one violation of reality- i.e., a "fallacious figment"-- is an explosion that blows up several villains but does nothing but blacken their faces and blow their clothes off, except for their longjohns.

RED: WEREWOLF HUNTER (2010), RED RIDING HOOD (2011)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: (1) *poor*, (2) good
FRYEAN MYTHOS: (1) *adventure*, (2) *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: (1) *sociological,* (2) *psychological, metaphysical, sociological*

These two films play upon the mythology of the “Red Riding Hood” folktale, though the treatments are as far apart as mountain and valley.

“Werewolf hunters” don’t have as detailed a lineage in the cinema as “vampire hunters.” Still, the basic idea of RED: WEREWOLF HUNTER could have been a worthy addition to the former pack.  RED’s titular heroine is a member of a family of werewolf hunters, introduced to the viewer by a sound narrative device: Red falls in love with a young outsider.  She brings him to her woodsy home with the intention of telling her all about herself and her family’s anti-werewolf crusade.  Unfortunately for Red, there’s a new werewolf in town.  Unlike others of his breed he possesses the power to change at will, rather than being subject to the moon’s phases.  He uses that power to gather a cult of his fellow shape-changers.

Unfortunately, though RED is set up to promise kickass thrills, neither the FX nor the fight-choreography is ever more than pedestrian.  This might have been forgivable had the script done anything interesting with the relationship between Red, Red’s family, and her outsider-boyfriend.  But none of the heroes are given more than cursory characterization.  Early in the story the boyfriend is bitten by the werewolf, which exacerbates the family’s hostility to him as an outsider.  But the script doesn’t do anything with the conflict, though Red’s mother tells a tragic story of losing her husband to werewolf-ism.  The overall story is perhaps a little better than the average Syfy-Channel film, but not by much.

RED RIDING HOOD, however, delivers a complex, free-form take on the essentials of the Riding Hood tale.

In the original folktale the entire action centers upon “Grandma’s House.” HOOD’s script, with the aid of skillful direction by Catherine (TWILIGHT) Hardwicke, builds a taut and imaginative tale around Daggerhorn, a small medieval community constantly harried by both natural wolves and werewolves.


The central character is a young woman named Valerie.  She’s first seen as a child, disobeying her mother’s commandment to “come right home.” Instead she holds a clandestine meeting with Peter, a boy of the same age, and with the same tendency to rebel, as they go hunting in the forbidding forest.  This scene merely establishes the tension between the village and its individual members, for then the film shoots forward, showing us Valerie and Peter at a marriageable age.  The lure of money impedes their marriage, as Valerie’s parents want her to marry Henry, a young man of greater substance.


As described the situation sounds stock-in-trade.  But Hardwicke uses dozens of careful details to make the community of Daggerhorn seem like a natural habitat, in which the tensions of people living together symbolically birth the spectre of “the wolf.”  In medieval folklore the werewolf was the threat from within, a member of one’s community who manages to conceal his lust to turn rogue and maim his fellows like an animal.  Hardwicke consistently exploits that metaphor to good dramatic effect.

While Valerie and Peter face their personal crisis, the community as a whole is menaced by new wolf-attacks.  Some locals believe that a werewolf is once more their nemesis, and send to another city to gain help from a famed killer of werewolves, Father Solomon (Gary Oldman).  Before the father arrives, a group of young men, including Peter and Henry, stalks the marauder and succeeds in killing a real wolf.  However, when Solomon arrives, he declares that a werewolf is still out there.  Moreover, he voices for the first time the idea that the werewolf lives amid the small community.  Solomon’s own previous experience informs this opinion, for he dedicated his life to killing werewolves after being forced to kill his own wife for her werewolfism.

Not only does the werewolf kill again, it invades the city, causing havoc and proving itself invulnerable to the weapons of Solomon and his soldiers.  Further, in a private moment the wolf manages to get Valerie alone.  It speaks to her mentally, claiming that it wants her to join him as a shapechanger and telling her that they are the same, reminding Valerie of her childish hunting-forays.


The werewolf escapes again, but this only causes Solomon to become more draconian in his methods to ferret out the wolf’s secret identity.  In due time Valerie is accused as a witch, and the village is divided between those who easily condemn her and those who defend her.  At the climax Valerie does learn the wolf’s identity, which proves to be the culmination of a cleverly wrought mystery.


This bare summation passes over a number of fine characterizational details, as well as the film’s evocations of the Red Riding Hood story.  Often when movies reference such well-known story-motifs, they do so with a cloying cuteness.  But HOOD treats the motifs of the folktale—grandma and her house, the red cloak, walking through the mystery-haunted woods—with rare intelligence, always using them to tell Hardwicke’s story, not simply to score familiarity points.
 
  

PHANTOM FROM 10,000 LEAGUES (1955), OCTAMAN (1976)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: (1) *fair,* (2) *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: (1) *psychological, cosmological*, (2) cosmological

“The sea rules us, Mister Baxter”—Dr. King in PHANTOM

These two films, though separated by a couple of decades, both deal with marine monsters, both of which are called “sea serpents” during their respective stories, even though neither one looks like the least bit like the traditional monster.  Both, like 1954’s CREATURE OF THE BLACK LAGOON, offer their audiences a “close encounter” with a nonhuman life-form, and as such fall under the Campbellian function of the cosmological.


PHANTOM is not an easy film to watch. Though it sports an interesting Lou Rusoff script, Dan Milner’s direction is listless, hardly ever varying from a standard mid-level shot.  It’s perhaps best seen as a collection of themes that Rusoff would explore to better effect a year later with Edward Cahn on SHE CREATURE.
First we see a classic shaggy-dog joke, played for pathos: a fisherman goes fishing and gets caught and killed by a “fish”—the “phantom” of the title, who looks like a man with a dragon’s-head.  The fisherman and his boat, both showing evidence of burns that should be impossible at sea, both wash ashore.  They’re not the first such casualties, which prompts government agent Grant to arrive on the beachside scene.  While examining the evidence, Grant meets two suspicious individuals: young George, who works for the nearby oceanographic institute, and a man who initially calls himself Stevens.  His real name is later revealed as “Ted Baxter”—which name had no special connotations in those pre-MARY TYLER MOORE days—and that he too is an oceanographic expert.  Agent Grant eventually discovers that the government sent Baxter as an unofficial covert agent, because Baxter has become notorious for an experiment which Grant describes as a potential “death ray,” though its main application was using radiation on marine life.


Shortly thereafter the audience meets Dr. King, the obsessed-seeming supervisor of the institute, and his daughter Lois, first seen complaining about how he’s been “neglecting” her for his work.  King has his own complaints, for he suspects that both his employee George and his secretary Ethel are spying on him.  Later he’s proven right, though Ethel is spying for the U.S. government (because her son was one of the victims of the monster) while George has been suborned into a life of espionage by foreign spy Wanda.


And King has good reason to fear being exposed: like a sea-happy Doctor Frankenstein, he’s activated a deposit of uranium on the nearby ocean floor, which casts forth a gleaming “shaft of light” and which is guarded by the Phantom.  The reasons behind the monster’s actions are never explored: one presumes that it’s pleased with its mutation and so guards the source of it, though the trope evoked feels more like the notion of the dragon guarding his gold.


It also comes out that King derived his out-of-control experiment from Baxter’s research, giving Baxter a strong motivation to uncover King’s secret.  Unlike many similar mad-scientist films, King is not the least bit hostile toward Baxter’s investigations, and seems to encourage Baxter’s attentions toward Lois.  Oddly, at one point he invites Baxter to come calling at King’s house.  Baxter walks in on Lois when she’s coming out of the shower.  “Your father told me to open the door and come in,” explains Baxter in a line rife with Freudian potential.  Lois gets mad at her father but not at Baxter, another odd turn on the usual courting-tropes.


Grant and Baxter team up to investigate the monster, but since the Phantom’s confined to the ocean, Rusoff’s script brings in George as a secondary menace, for he tries to kill Grant with a spear-gun and both men with poison capsules while trying to get access to King’s research.  He does succeed in killing Ethel but is eventually taken prisoner.  King, finally overcome with remorse for the monster’s killings, uses a bomb to destroy himself, the deposit and his blasphemous creation.


The espionage-angle makes PHANTOM an odd entry in the 1950s monster sweepstakes, establishing an odd parallel between the way civilians are seduced by the spy life, with Grant making use of Ethel much the same way Wanda makes use of George—though Wanda’s methods include literal seduction.  The female principle gets rather unusual handling in the script.  Though Lois is fairly colorless, Wanda is described as a mixture of “beauty and poison,” Ethel is threatened twice with a spear-gun (once by George, once by King) before George uses that weapon to kill her, and King describes science as a “devouring mistress.”  As with many earlier mad-scientist movies, the implication seems to be that only individual scientists are responsible for reckless tamperings with nature, and that only the government can control such matters.

OCTAMAN literally revisits the storyline of CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, being an uncredited quasi-remake of CREATURE by its original scripter Harry Essex, who also directed.  In the wilds of an unnamed Latin American country, a troupe of scientists, funded by a money-hungry promoter, search through a inland series of lakes, looking for a so-called “sea serpent”—though it’s really the “Octaman,” a humanoid being with the features and extra arms of an octopus.


Essex blamed the failure of the film on the risible costume, and it’s true that it’s a bad one, given a design that only modern CGI might make impressive.  But Essex’s direction is just adequate—OK with actors, not that good with scenery—and his script also fails to evoke even a tenth of the mystery found in CREATURE, or for that matter, KING KONG.  The promoter directly references KONG, apparently with the notion that he can capture the Octaman and exhibit him—meaning that he must not have seen the end of the picture.








Essex’s script is also murky about the Octaman’s powers of reproduction.  Unlike the denizen of the Black Lagoon, the Octaman has apparently fathered a mini-octopoid, for it’s seen at the film’s beginning when Octaman rescues it from a fisherman.  But it’s never seen again, and it’s not clear if the creature has any ardent feelings toward the crew’s female member (Pier Angeli).  Only at the end does Angeli do one thing that Fay Wray didn’t do: to distract the creature from her lover, she offers herself to the Octaman.  He carries her away, presumably to experiment with hybrid vigor, only to be blasted down by the menfolk.  Thankfully no one quotes the final line from KONG.


To paraphase Dino deLaurentis, “Nobody cry when Octaman die.”
 

CAT GIRL (1957)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, metaphysical*

Lou Rusoff’s SHE CREATURE ended on an upbeat note for its monstrous female, but about a year later Rusoff's CAT GIRL, like its probable inspiration 1942’s CAT PEOPLE, consigns the titular female fiend to destruction by the forces of realism and practicality.

The film doesn’t open on the title character Leonora Brandt (lion-brand?).  Instead it begins with her aged uncle Edward looking out the window of his English manor into a dark and stormy night, awaiting his niece’s arrival.  A brief conversation with Edward’s housekeeper establishes that Edward has a legacy he wants to bestow on Leonora, one that connects in some strange way to the caged leopard in the cellar.

The scene shifts to an inn not far from the manor, where Leonora and her three associates have paused—a couple named Kathy and Alan, and Leonora’s husband Richard Johnson.  Interestingly, Leonora is never addressed as “Mrs. Johnson.”  Despite the fact that they’re only a few miles from Edward’s domicile, Leonora fears seeing her uncle again and begs Richard to take her back to London.  Richard proves indifferent to her fears, urging her to be “practical,” though in this scene and others it’s clear that he merely wants to placate her wealthy uncle’s whims so that he won’t cut Leonora out of his will.  While at the inn Leonora encounters what seems a more positive male figure from her past, a psychologist named Brian—only to find out that after they broke up (for reasons never specified), Brian married another woman, name of Dorothy.

In DELIRIOUS #5, Steven Johnson interpreted Leonora’s fear of her uncle as indicative of an incestuous, or quasi-incestuous, relationship. There’s no overt testimony of such, but it’s clear upon Leonora’s arrival that she shares a bond with her uncle, for she hears the roar of the caged leopard below when no one else in the room with Leonora hears anything.  The uncle refuses to interact with Leonora’s guests, though he does come across Richard cheating on his wife with Alan’s girlfriend Kathy.  Later that night, when everyone else is asleep, the housekeeper summons Leonora (who isn’t sharing a bed with Richard) to meet Edward in the cellar, a room where in earlier days Leonora was never allowed to trespass.

Edward, calling his brother’s child “my Leonora,” shows her the caged leopard and tells the girl that their family shares a common curse in which they share identity with a great cat.  It’s lightly suggested that the leopard may be more than a simple beast, though only at the story’s end does it seem to possess any strong metaphysical traits.  Edward tells Leonora that when he dies, the curse will descend upon her, so that she will revel in the leopard’s killings and be “as one” with it.  Thus he encourages her not to make his brother’s mistake: that she should never reproduce. Leonora doesn’t believe him and flees, but not before Edward encourages her to touch the leopard’s fur, which apparently bonds her to the big cat. After Leonora runs away, Edward releases the creature from its cage and allows it to kill him.

The leopard escapes the manor.  The authorities are called in, and because Leonora is so distraught, they call in the closest psychologist, Brian.  Brian attempts to refute Leonora’s fears of werewolfism with paternalistic logic.  But the next night Leonora discovers Richard messing around with Kathy, and, as if in tune with Leonora’s savage hatred, the leopard shows up and kills Richard.  Guilty Leonora tries to confess, but the police suspect no one but the leopard. 

Brian talks Leonora into seeking psychiatric help at the sanitarium he runs.  Brian never makes any direct overtures to her, but he’s evidently not forgotten her charms, since in his wife’s presence he calls her “Lee,” prompting Leonora to observe that no one else calls her that.  At the sanitarium Leonora imagines that she transforms into a were-cat, but when Brian challenges her to summon the cat, as she claims she can, Leonora fails.  She seems to improve enough that Brian releases her, hoping that normal life will dispel the last of her abnormality.

Instead, her release encourages Leonora to plot Dorothy’s death. Brian makes this easy, since he encourages Dorothy to help Leonora despite Dorothy’s fearful presentiments.  When Brian invites the two of them to meet him at night—the time when the leopard can prowl best—Leonora tries to set things up to have her “other self” slay Dorothy.  Only Brian’s belated ability to listen to his own presentiments prevents Dorothy’s death, with the result that Leonora perishes instead.  The curse is in theory laid to rest, though the film fades out on Edward’s haunted manor and the forbidding forest, as the voices of Edward and Leonora repeat phrases spoken in life.

CAT GIRL isn’t as stylishly directed as CAT PEOPLE; Alfred Shaughnessy is never more than simply competent.  However, though most critics prefer CAT PEOPLE’s script for its ambivalence as to the existence of the supernatural, I find that sort of ambivalence tedious.  I like the way CAT GIRL shows up the conceit and pretension of patriarchal society, as represented by Richard and Brian, by showing the profundity of the world of feelings to which women are sensitive—and, by extension, the reality of Leonora’s shared identity with a prehuman creature.

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: ON STRANGER TIDES (2011)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

By the time Disney made the third PIRATES sequel, I'd become pretty sick of the support-cast provided by the characters essayed by Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley.  I thought that the idea of a film focused on Captain Jack Sparrow would prove an immense improvement.

I was, sadly, wrong.

To be sure, ON STRANGER TIDES isn't bad because it doesn't have those two support-characters, but because it doesn't bother to dream up new ones.  Sparrow's eccentric crewmen barely get any screen-time, aside from simply taking up space in the background.  His villains-- the infamous Blackbeard, seeking the Fountain of Youth, and his scheming daughter Angelica-- are new.  But whereas the villains of earlier installments became so involved, so baroque, that one often lost track of their motivations, Blackbeard and Angelica are predictable and boring villains.

In addition, TIDES's budget no longer allows for any of the meaningless but kinetically-dazzling sequences, like Sparrow in limbo, having conversations with other versions of himself.  Johnny Depp does an adequate job with the script he's given, but he seems pretty uninspired.  Penelope Cruz may be one of those actors who does her best work in her own language and ends up seeming entirely vapid in any other films.

The best thing about TIDES is that it may put an end to the series at last. 

DREAMCHILD (1985), HEAD (1968)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: (1) *good,* (2) *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: (1) *drama,* (2) irony
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: (1) *psychological, sociological (2) *metaphysical, sociological*

These films are built around the trope I term “delirious dreams and fallacious figments.”  This trope aligns with the uncanny when the diegesis includes either (1) literal dreams that lend the narrative the metaphenomenal quality of “strangeness,” or (2) breaks in the rational continuity of the story that aren’t explained as dreams but create the same emotive effect.

Dennis Potter’s DREAMCHILD is an excellent example of the first type.  In 1932, a New York university, wishing to celebrate the centenary of the birth of ALICE IN WONDERLAND author Lewis Carroll, sends an appeal for Mrs. Alice Hargreaves (Coral Browne) to come to the States and address the celebration.  Alice, now in her eighties, was the little girl on whom Carroll based the Alice character.  Though the old woman is bemused by her brush with literary celebrity, she consents and makes her first journey to America, thus setting up a sociological encounter between the slow-paced, proper world of her Victorian upbringing and the raucous world of American merchandising and industry.

Accompanying Alice is her young traveling companion Lucy, who clearly finds the New World more attractive than the Old.  Lucy’s particularly attracted to one of the young male reporters who tries to interview the often befuddled granddame.  However, Alice has worse problems than her assistant’s defection.  Alice begins to experience involved flashbacks to her childhood, when she knew the Reverend Dodgson (Ian Holm), who assumed the Carroll pen-name to write the ALICE books.

In keeping with certain literary theories about Dodgson, the Reverend is in a sense a pedophile—though not an undiscriminating one, in that Potter’s version of Dodgson is only in love with the eleven-year-old Alice, not with little girls in general.  At no time does Dodgson make an improper advance toward Alice, connoting that he’s aware of the immorality of his desire but is helpless to prevent it. Despite her childishness young Alice becomes aware of the reverend’s feelings, and seems simultaneously flattered and annoyed.  Alice’s mother is also suspicious, particularly of the reverend’s tendency to take photographs of Alice in fancy-dress outfits.

Old Alice’s flashbacks include dreams—some of which are waking—in which she interacts with the famous characters of Wonderland.  Sometimes she appears as a child, sometimes as the old woman she is—but the inhabitants of Wonderland are not the winsome curiosities seen in most adaptations of the novels.  The Mock Turtle, the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, and the Caterpillar are depicted in line with the original novels: as capricious, indifferent, and often nasty personages that bely the “wondrous” aspect of Wonderland—and perhaps connote the darkness in their creator’s soul as well.  Jim Henson’s team, best known for the cherubic Muppets, proves no less skilled in portraying Carroll’s grotesqueries.

The romance of Lucy and the reporter provides a running commentary on the fading of the elegant Victorian world—particularly when Lucy believes, somewhat correctly, that the reporter has made her acquaintance simply to exploit Alice’s celebrity.  But the core of DREAMCHILD is Alice making her peace with the truth of her nearly forgotten relationship with Dodgson.  Though the WONDERLAND books themselves qualify for the Fryean mythos of “the irony,” in that they present a world where sense and nonsense are inextricably commingled, Potter’s work flirts with the black humor of the irony but essentially partakes of the mythos of drama, in that though Dodgson and his desires are long dead, Alice at last acknowledges the human nature of the man whose forbidden love birthed a masterpiece.

Bob Rafelson made HEAD during the twilight years of the MONKEES teleseries, a light comedy in which the titular singing-group had variously farcicial adventures.  Some episodes of the series used outright marvelous elements like vampires or aliens, but most of the time THE MONKEES used the “naturalistic” version of the “fallacious figments” trope, in which characters would violate time and space for nothing more than the space of a quick, vaudeville-like joke.

The title HEAD connotes that the film is essentially a “head trip,” the term used by the youth-oriented drug culture for a drug-induced phantasia.  HEAD extends the “fallacious figments” trope used on the teleseries into uncanny territory by positing that the whole film seems to be a “head trip,” one taking place more or less within the heads of all four Monkees—Mickey, Mike, Peter and Davy.  Rather than being musicians having funny adventures as in the series, in the movie they’re apparently playing “themselves.” They  seem to be actors continually being put through their paces as they act various parts in genre movies—westerns, spy films, etc.  But every time they leave one set they end up in another, and another, and another, while being stalked by assorted malicious entities, such as a rampaging giant played by Victor Mature.

Despite the film's somewhat Marxist complaints about the Monkess being a "manufactured image," that knowledge does not allow the discontented actors to break free from the genres that constrain them—which constraint is essentially the condition of the Freyan irony.  Not even a few racy moments—including a wry allusion to fellatio—can break the Monkees out of their cage, and metaphysical advice from a swami who looks like the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi leads them nowhere.  The Monkees thus end the film the same way they began it.  Given that in real life the performers were never able to find lasting fame beyond the associations of the Monkees’ reputation, HEAD seems sadly accurate in predicting the destinies of the foursome.