THE MUMMY'S GHOST (1944)

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

 The most notable aspect of MUMMY’S GHOST, directed by frequent horror-helmer Reginald LeBorg, is that it’s the first of the four Kharis films to return to the idea of reviving the spirit—technically, the “ghost” in the title—of Kharis’ long-lost princess in a contemporary body.  In the previous two films, Ananka herself is of no great importance.  It’s her tomb, the cynosure of a modern cult of Egyptian paganism, that the mummy Kharis defends, and it’s because of the tomb’s desecration that the cult’s high priest sends the mummy after the desecrators.  As noted in the previous MUMMY-movie essay, it’s the high priest’s passion for a modern woman that usurps the idea of the undead mummy being reunited with his lost love.

At the start of GHOST several years have passed since Kharis is supposed to have perished in a fiery holocaust in the Massachusetts town of Mapleton at the end of MUMMY’S TOMB.  The setting remains in Mapleton, but now the students at the local college profess disbelief that a living mummy ever existed.  Among the disbelievers is young Tom, who little suspects that his current girlfriend will prove to have an intimate connection with Kharis.  The girlfriend, name of Amina (Ramsey Ames), has Egyptian heritage in her background, thus returning to a notion expressed in Karl Freund’s MUMMY : that though one might expect reincarnation to transcend ethnic boundaries, it’s apparently easier for Egyptian spirits to show up in those descended from Egypt.  Unfortunately, Amina is an underdeveloped character, vastly inferior to Helen Grosvenor, the heroine of THE MUMMY.  Similarly, the film’s script has little interest in any of the glories of ancient Egypt.


Meanwhile, though it’s never revealed just how Kharis survived the holocaust, the two extant priests of the Egyptian cult (located in the Egyptian city of “Arkham,” a clear shout-out to H.P. Lovecraft) are aware that  the mummy has not been destroyed.  Again, a wizened George Zucco gives the requisite orders to priest-in-training Yussuf Bey (John Carradine), sending him to America.  But there’s a new wrinkle.  Since the desecrators from THE MUMMY’S HAND were killed in MUMMY’S TOMB, the priests’ new concern is that the mummy of Princess Ananka has been put on display at a Mapleton museum.  Yussuf’s mission is to revive the mummy of Ananka and bring both mummies back to Egypt.  No further plans are mentioned: the priests don’t nurture any overt plans to conquer the world with a mummy-army.  It's implied that all they want is to reclaim what they consider to be their sacred property.


Even before Yussuf arrives to take charge of Kharis, the mummy kills a local professor who makes the mistake of experimenting with tana leaves.  Amina begins to have weird fears about anything suggestive of ancient Egypt, and at one point she walks in her sleep, drawn by the presence of Kharis.

Once Yussuf locates Kharis, priest and mummy break into the museum at night, but their plans to revive Ananka’s mummy are apparently foiled by the capricious Egyptian gods.  Before Yussuf’s eyes the body within the mummy-bandages simply fades into nothingness.  He takes it as a sign that the spirit of Ananka has become fully embodied in a modern female body, and he and Kharis depart after committing another incidental murder.


While the local police come to grips with the mummy’s return and try to set traps for the creature (easily the film’s most forgettable scenes), Yussuf and Kharis find and abduct Amina.  This breeds the first conflict between the bandaged monster and his spooky handler.  In the two previous Kharis films, the mummy’s handlers both fell in lust with nice American girls and so compromised their devotion to their faith.  There was no conflict with the mummy, though, since Kharis had no interest in any female but the one he loved in ancient times.


Yussuf becomes infatuated with Amina within moments of having captured her.  The poor girl’s given no chance to cope with the dire fate being thrust upon her when Yussuf is encouraging her to marry him, promising her (just as Turhan Bey did to a similar victim in MUMMY’S TOMB) the gift of mummified immortality, even though Yussuf himself does not seem to be any sort of immortal.  Kharis overhears the betrayal, breaks in and destroys his only ally in the strange land of America.  The mummy attempts, rather pathetically, to escape to parts unknown with Amina.  Tom arrives on the scene but fails to impede the invulnerable creature.  A convenient mob of townspeople show up to help the young man chase his fiancee’s abductor.  In a downbeat ending rare for a 1940s Universal film, the mummy walks into a swamp with Amina.  But even before Amina drowns, she shows the withered face of a mummy.  In contrast to the fortunate fate of Helen Grosvenor, Amina has been completely claimed by her ancient heritage.  Later,  in the subsequent MUMMY’S CURSE, Kharis apparently takes a subterranean tunnel, still carrying Amina's drowned body, all the way from Massachusetts to Louisiana.  There both of them emerge from a Louisiana swamp-- Amina comes back to life for no particular reason, albeit played by another actress-- and once they begin their pas de deux of death.


GHOST is something of a mixed bag.  In contrast to previous Kharis-helmers Christy Cabanne and Harold Young, LeBorg proves a phlegmatic, unimaginative director here.  He devotes an unfortunate amount of time to long shots of the mummy shambling through the forest.  This strategy may have given Lon Chaney Jr. more time to perfect his unique “mummy-walk,” but it also spotlights just how slow the creature is and how easy it should be for victims to run away from it.  Tom and Amina, though not unsympathetic, lack even the breezy appeal of the average 1940s stock characters.  The script forces Yussuf Bey to fall in lust so quickly that not even John Carradine’s sonorous voice can make the development seem convincing.

Still, there’s some pleasure in seeing this B-film flaunt the usual conventions of its kindred.  In most such films, no matter who else gets killed, the romantic couple is sacrosanct, even when they’re not overly likeable.  Although GHOST may be the least exciting Kharis-film overall, the death-scene of Amina by itself may be for many the most memorable such scene in the whole four-film series.




           
 

SLEEPAWAY CAMP (1983), THE PROWLER (1981), RIPPER: LETTER FROM HELL (2001)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: (1) *fair,* (2,3) poor

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*


SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

I’ve not reviewed many “psycho-slasher” films here, other than (arguably) the original PSYCHO and its remake.  Unfortunately, none of these three films tap into the sort of delirium found in the best exemplars of the subgenre.


SLEEPAWAY CAMP, written and directed by Robert Hiltzik, proves the best of the three.  In contrast to many better funded slashers, the cast doesn’t include either old-pro actors brought in for a few days’ shooting or young up-and-comers who went on future fame.  However, as Jim Harper points out in his slasher-survey LEGACY OF BLOOD, CAMP benefits from casting a lot of fairly ordinary looking people.  Hiltzik also takes a fairly low-key approach to the pace, which doesn’t make for many thrills but at times gives the proceedings a decent creepy feel.


Several years previous to the main storyline, careless teens at the titular camp bring about a boating accident in which someone—it’s not entirely clear who—is killed.  Years pass, and teen girl Angela-- who’s so retiring that she seems borderline autistic—is sent by her adoptive mother to Sleepaway Camp, along with her male cousin Richard.  She’s the instant outcast amid all the raucous boys and catty girls, though Richard tries, rather ineffectively, to protect her.  Despite her shyness, she picks up a devoted boyfriend, which is more action than her cousin receives.  In what may be a case of transference, on first arriving at camp Richard encounters Judy, a queen-bitch type with whom he had some minor fling before, but now Judy won’t give Richard the time of day.  Yet Angela picks up a handsome young suitor without even trying.  Then bully-boys and bitch-girls commit all manner of petty nastiness, and soon a mystery killer deals out death to both bullies and bitches.  The killing-methods are passably gruesome though not as well executed as those in this film’s first two sequels.

Speaking of the sequels, I saw both prior to screening the original film.  The sequels make explicit the first film’s “big reveal:” not only that Angela is the killer, but that she is a he; a boy masquerading in drag due to the perverse upbringing he was given by the adopive mother. Without that bit of prompting, I might not have foreseen that wrinkle, for Hiltzik only puts forth a few sparse clues as to Angela’s true nature.  I don’t agree with the prevailing critical view that the slasher-subgenre invariably deals with concepts of sexual dysfunction.  However, it’s true that most of the stronger entries in the subgenre exploit this trope.  SLEEPAWAY CAMP includes none of the psychological subtleties of, say, PSYCHO, but it’s reasonably effective genre-fare.

Not so another 1980s slasher with an incredibly overrated reputation, Joseph Zito’s THE PROWLER.  Thrills are hard to come by given Zito’s plodding pace and deadly-dull script, and though it has a couple of old-pros in the cast (Lawrence Tierney and Farley Granger), they don’t do anything of note, while the young noname cast is singularly unimpressive, even for a slasher-film.  PROWLER does have a great deal of nostalgic defenders, however, so I have to assume that the film became notorious thanks to the name-value of makeup-and-effects guy Tom Savini.

Like most slashers, this one centers around an event that should be an occasion of mass celebration and turns it into one of mass murder.  Thirty years previous to the main story, an unnamed soldier ends his hitch but returns home to a Dear John letter.  At a graduation-ceremony he murders his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend with a pitchfork and then escapes.  The site of the ceremony is closed for the next three decades, until someone decides to hold another graduation-ceremony there.  In no time at all, dead teens are piling up like cordwood.

The death-scenes are the only reason to watch PROWLER, but at that, they’re fairly paltry affairs.  One expects stereotyping of characters in slashers, but these imperiled teens aren’t even effective stereotypes.  The idea of using a pitchfork as the killer’s modus operandi may have helped boost the film’s notoriety, for as other critics have observed, most slashers favor visceral, non-ballistic weapons for their murders.  That makes it all the odder that PROWLER should be one of the few films where the killer actually uses a mundane gun at one point—admittedly to shoot someone who’s just shot him.  Still, on that basis alone the Slasher Hall of Fame should refuse to admit the Prowler, for breaking with tradition.  There is a “final girl” here, as there is not in SLEEPAWAY CAMP, but like PROWLER’s other characters she’s as dull as dirt.  There’s also a nonsensical “shock ending” strongly indebted to dePalma’s CARRIE.

RIPPER: LETTER FROM HELL is a more modern recreation of the old chestnut about a contemporary killer attempting to emulate the deeds of uber-slasher Jack the Ripper.  Again a years-earlier traumatic event precedes the main story, as we see two women, Molly and Maggie, menaced by an unseen killer during a driving rainstorm.  Flash-forward several years, and it’s revealed that in some manner Molly (A.J. Cook) survived the carnage.  She and several other bright students are now at college, taking a criminology course from Professor Kane (Bruce Payne), renowned for his writings on the psychology of serial killers.  Molly doesn’t work or play well with her study-group partners, but collegiate conflicts are the least of the students’ problems.

Their class’s studies in Rpperology inspire someone to start duplicating the Ripper’s murders of Victorian prostitutes.  One might expect, given the college milieu, that the students might be persecuted for sleeping around and being generally improper, but the script doesn’t impute any fevered sexual hijinks to them.  The guessing-game begins: is it one of the students?  Is it the professor, or the spooky policeman (Jurgen Prochnow) obsessed with Kane’s guiltiness?  Is the killer the same person who menaced Molly and her dead friend at the start of the picture?

As with PROWLER, the characters are too thinly drawn even to function as enjoyable stereotypes.  Their big claim to individuality, if one may call it that, is that a number of them share the initials of Jack the Ripper’s victims.  But even for a slasher it seems improbable that a group of randomly assembled college students would just happen to have all the requisite initials.  John Eyres’ direction is generally impressive except in the death-scenes, which are often visually confusing or tedious.  Despite all the opportunities for academic pronouncements on the psychology of the Ripper specifically or serial killers generally, there’s zero insight here into the twisted passions of a killer.  In the DVD commentary Eyres reveals that RIPPER’s killer was supposed to be someone other than the culprit revealed, but that because of constraints related to budget, the killer’s  identity was shifted to another suspect.  This may explain why the climactic revelation proves gratuitous and unsatisfying.




For what it’s worth, this is one slasher in which male and female victims are not only killed in the same proportion, but are killed without revealing a lot of boobs and butts.  The film ends on a slight ambivalence, raising the possibility that it's been seen through the eyes of a mad person, but it's so tenuous that I don't regard it as being of any consequence.







                     

THE PIRATE MOVIE (1982)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

 

 

According to Wikipedia, "the movie was made soon after the 1980 New York City Central Park and 1981 Broadway theatre production of The Pirates of Penzance produced by Joseph Papp, which re-popularized swashbuckling pirates as a theatrical genre."

Since PIRATE MOVIE only uses a few songs from the Gilbert and Sullivan work, it's likely that the filmmakers didn't have overall rights, for most of the music is original.  None of the music comes close to the standard of the operetta, though the opening number "Victory" (using shots from the 1942 pirate flick THE BLACK SWAN) is a fun pirate-cliche mashup.  There's also a strange number with the quizzical title "Pumpin' and Blowin'," that can't help but sound borderline-pornographic despite the presence of cartoon fish and the bubblegum-pop stylings of singer Kirsty McNychol.

Unlike PENZANCE, PIRATE MOVIE is a metaphenomenal film in that the majority of the action takes place within the dream-fantasies of central character Mabel as she loosely re-enacts the story of PENZANCE from a female perspective. This conceit aligns the film with the uncanny version of the trope "delirious dreams and fallacious fantasies."  Mabel doesn't technically enter the sort of fantasy-worlds seen in films like THE DAYDREAMER; it's closer in tone to the Monkees film HEAD, in which the audience watches the dreamer pass through a farrago of strange experiences.  Aside from the aforementioned cartoon animals, the film also includes very dated fantasy-intrusions from STAR WARS and RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, as well as a moment where Kirsty McNychol simply stops the action and demands a "happy ending."

There's no great depth in this very 80s comic romp, so I grade the psychological motifs of the comedy pretty low on the mythicity scale.  There's not even an interesting Oedipal conflict between Mabel, her age-appropriate lover Frederic (Chris Atkins), and Frederic's adoptive father The Pirate King, who makes a pass or two at Mabel, calling her a "nymphette."  For those who lived through the 80s, however, it does provide a wonky touchstone for the era, and is certainly easier to watch than a lot of the more popular badfilms of the decade-- which probably accounts for its sentimental popularity on IMDB.

THE MUMMY'S HAND (1940), THE MUMMY'S TOMB (1942)

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


Many horror-film references have observed that Universal's 1940s "Mummy" film-series wasn't overly ambitious in comparison to Universal's unrelated solo 1932 film, THE MUMMY.  In my review of the last film in the series, THE MUMMY'S CURSE, I said:

The Universal horror film THE MUMMY (1932) is one of a very small number of films whose mythicity I'd rate as "excellent" rather than "good" (the highest rating accorded any film thus far reviewed here). None of the 1940s Universal "Mummy" films, indirectly spawned by the 1932 work, come anywhere close to that level, but they're always enjoyable time-wasters.

One of the most impressive aspects of THE MUMMY is its ability to suggest how modernity related to the crushing metaphysical wight of the ancient world.  Though the modern world is not rejected, the 1932 movie displays a proper sense of awe before the long-vanished world of Egypt, in spite of the fact that this civilization-- like Imhotep, the titular mummy of the movie-- is long dead.  Critic James Twitchell made a facile attempt to reduce Imhotep to just another manifestation of Freud's Oedipus theory, but it's clear to me that the terror of THE MUMMY has far more to do with the metaphysics of history than with the psychology of the family romance.

However, on re-viewing the first two MUMMY films of the 1940s, I found to my surprise that the creators of the films were not entirely blind to the terrors of history.  They are lighter films, but maybe not just "time-wasters."

The original MUMMY dealt with a rejuvenated wizard, who was seem only briefly in mummy-wrappings.  The 1940s films keep its titular mummy, name of Kharis, in his wrappings as he shambles around, shrugging off bullets and strangling victims with his one good hand.  But I'd argue that in narrative terms the real star of both HAND and TOMB is not the mummy, but the high priest who seeks to control Kharis. In HAND it's a middle-aged man named Andoheb (George Zucco), while in TOMB it's a relatively young man named Mehemet (Turhan Bey).  But both of them don't just content themselves with dutifully sending the mummy around to kill infidels.

Both Andoheb and Mehemet are pictured as dedicated servants of a still-extant cult devoted to the gods of old Egypt; hence their antipathy to moderns who intrude upon sacred Egyptian tombs.  As depicted they have no lives outside of their holy duties.  There are no families in the cult; one presumes new members enter only through a process of conversion.  The early scenes in each film may remind one of the George Lucas-ism that there are only two Sith Lords at any time.  In HAND, Zucco's Andoheb is sent on his holy mission by a wizened, unnamed high priest (Eduardo Cianelli), while in TOMB, it's Andoheb-- recovered from his "death" at the conclusion of HAND-- who sends Turhan Bey's Mehemet on his way.  No other acolytes are seen in either movie.

In HAND, the wrath of the cult is aroused when American adventurers start messing around the tomb of the Princess Ananka, who was the beloved of Kharis in ancient Egypt.  In TOMB, the villainous priest takes Kharis to America to pursue the heroes of the first film, now aged 30 years.  In contrast to the 1932 film, neither of these two films have the slightest interest in either reviving the mummy of Ananka or finding her current reincarnation: this trope will only be unearthed in the next two films in the series.  What HAND and TOMB do plunder from the 1932 film is the idea of a man who represents the dead past preying on a woman of the modern age.

MUMMY'S HAND, directed by Christy Cabanne, has often been criticized for its overabundance of comic touches, and I'm in the company of those who don't like either comedy relief Wallace Ford or his "straight man" Dick Foran as the two tomb-raiding adventurers.  But given that Andoheb regards the Americans as desecrating Ananka's tomb, it's significant that he wants to do his own desecration to the female member of the party, Marta (Peggy Moran).  Maybe he views it as payback, but to the audience, identifying Marta as a good American girl, this is the equivalent of the ancient world plundering the modern one.  At the film's end, Andoheb is ignominiously shot to "death" not by Marta's leading man (Foran) but by the comic relief (Ford).  One wonders if either director Cabanne or one of the scripters had a yen to see a comic character act out of character for once, and kill someone instead of doing something silly.  Foran heroically neutralizes Kharis by depriving him of his revivifying "tana leaves" and setting him afire.

MUMMY'S TOMB, directed by Harold Young, has a grimmer tone to it.  As noted above, the script takes the odd approach of setting the story 30 years in the future, though everything in the film still looks like the 1940s.  The characters played by Foran and Ford have aged 30 years courtesy of old-age makeup, while Moran's character, having married Foran, has passed away, though not before leaving a grown son, John Banning (John Hubbard).  At the time when Mehemet smuggles the invulnerable mummy onto American shores, John is scheduled to marry his fiancee Isobel.

Mehemet sends Kharis to deal death to those who transgressed against Ananka's tomb.  It's a little odd to see the heroes of the original film get knocked off in the sequel, but now that they're supposed to be old, one might argue that they're a little more expendable than the young couple-- which curiously had the effect of making these American heroes just as doomed as the culure of ancient Egypt. Mehemet has the misfortune of seeing Isobel, with the result that he's smitten enough to consider marrying her. After he kidnaps her, the script has Mehemet claim that he intends to make Isobel into an immortal mummy, which doesn't make a lot of sense since he himself is just an ordinary man.  The kidnapping leads John and an angry mob, where Mehemet's shot when he tries to draw a gun on John. This time the mummy goes up in flames along with an entire house-- shades of the 1930s FRANKENSTEIN-- but it doesn't keep Kharis from returning in THE MUMMY'S GHOST two years later.

Griffin Jay was the only scripter credited on imdb to both of these movies and the GHOST sequel, though not to CURSE, the final film in the series.  Both he and the two directors hadn't made any horror films prior to their encounters with mummy-movies, though Jay had done one borderline metaphenomenal film prior to HAND: an exotic serial called QUEEN OF THE JUNGLE.  Jay would seem to be the individual with the strongest horror-credits, as he also worked on THE RETURN OF THE VAMPIRE, CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN and DEVIL BAT'S DAUGHTER.




 

THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (2004)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

I’ve seen none of the stagings of the famed Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, so I won’t dwell on what differences the movie— whose script is credited to Webber and director Joel Schumacher—may have from the stage-play.  As with other reviews in this series, my concern is only with the film’s indebtedness to the original book and its other cinematic adaptations.

Although the Dwight Little version seems the first movie to place the Phantom-tale within a framing-device, Schumacher’s film uses the device for a more sentimental effect, opening as Raoul de Chagny, now a very old man, visits the dessicated ruins of the Paris Opera House for an auction.  Implicitly Old Raoul “remembers” the bulk of the film, though as with most other movies of this type, he’s not confined to remembering only the things he personally saw.  In contrast to most usages of the frame concept, the film cuts back to Old Raoul a couple of times before the concluding frame-sequence.

This version keeps many elements from the book, naturally re-arranged and even expanded.  As in the book two new managers are taking over the 19^th-century Paris Opera House from the old manager, and as in the book they prove less than enthusiastic about learning that they have to deal with the opera’s resident ghost.   Christine is a chorus girl along with her friend Meg, daughter of opera-functionary Mademoiselle Giry, who here as in the book acts as an intermediary between the Phantom and the opera’s managers.  Carlotta is on hand for the changing of the guard, but when she sings for the company, a huge curtain falls and almost hits her—one of many near-fatal accidents brought about by the Phantom.

When Carlotta departs in a huff, Christine gets her big chance, for Mme. Giry tells the managers that Christine can sing Carlotta’s part.  Faced with an impromptu audition, Christine impresses the company and gets the role.  In addition, she tells Meg of having recognized her childhood sweetheart Raoul in the party, though he hasn’t yet recognized her. Strangely, though Raoul doesn’t recognize her when she auditions, he does a little later, when she’s performing on stage.

Christine’s great talents are the result of her secret teacher, the “Angel of Music” whom she’s heard since her father passed away during Christine’s childhood.  This is a minor deviation from the book, where Christine doesn’t hear the voice of the “Angel” until she’s somewhat older, attending a musical conservatory.  Also in contrast to the book, where only the readers are encouraged to associate the mysterious teacher with Christine’s dead father, this Christine strongly entertains the idea that her tutor may be the literal spirit of her father.

After her successful performance, the Phantom lures her down to his subterranean world, rather earlier than he does in most movie-versions.  The 1925 film’s imagery of Christine’s supernatural conveyance—first by horse, then by boat—is recapitulated in the film’s best musical scene.  Christine seems rapt by the entire experience, though one presumes that, since she’s considering that this bizarre masked man may be her father’s spirit, her emotion hasn’t shifted into the domain of eros as yet.

There follows a duet between them as he plays his piano, and then, an incomplete unmasking-scene, in that she yanks off the Phantom’s mask and sees his face, but the audience does not.  He rages at her feminine curiosity before he transports her back to the real world, giving her a ring emblematic of their bond and telling her to stay away from Raoul. Seeing his deformed face apparently doesn’t dispel in Christine that the Phantom’s the spectre of her father, for she still seems convinced of the idea late into the picture.

The diva Carlotta attempts to regain her position at the opera, but as in the book the Phantom sabotages her performance so that she croaks like a toad.  Unfortunately for his courtship of Christine, the Phantom goes further than this.  Because a stagehand has mocked him by talking of the Phantom’s “noseless” face and his skill with a noose, the Phantom hangs the man right on stage during a performance, echoing a similar scene in the 1962 Hammer adaptation.

For once, a version of Christine seems duly freaked-out by the notion that her teacher (and father?) may be a murderer: even Leroux’s version seemed blissfully blind to the hanging-incident.  She seeks the company of Raoul, and their old passions re-ignite.

Shortly afterward comes the scene of the Bal Masque.  In some versions of the story, this takes place after the Phantom has told Christine that she’s engaged to him, and warns her not to see anyone else.  Naturally this Phantom, though he never explicitly claims to be her father, can’t very well claim that the two of them are engaged.  Nevertheless the Phantom becomes jealous seeing Raoul with his prized pupil.  Whereas the Phantom usually dons the costume of the Red Death and passes amid the celebrants without much interaction, this time the Phantom—who deems himself the true owner of the opera—addresses the entire assemblage, telling them that they will soon perform his composition, “Don Juan Triumphant.”  Then he uses his knowledge of stage-magic to disappear back to his private underworld, leaving Raoul confounded by a hall of mirrors.

At this point Mme. Giry confides in the tormented Raoul, revealing her part in the secret origin of the Phantom.  In the book, Eric is abandoned by both parents and ends up in a traveling circus that tours throughout Europe and Asia, where Eric finally finds an outlet for his devious genius with the Persian royalty—thus paving the way for his return to Paris.  Here, Giry as a young girl sees the Phantom pass through Paris in a carnival freakshow.  She witnesses how he kills one of his nasty keepers via strangulation, and helps the deformed boy conceal himself beneath the opera-house.  Thus this Giry becomes far more of a direct benefactor, rather than a convenient go-between.  One might expect that she might have taken on a parental role to the Phantom, as the character of Carriere does in the 1990 telefilm.  But though she apparently facilitates the Phantom’s rise to power, there seems to be no emotional connection between the two of them in the film, any more than in the book.

     Christine, feeling agitated by the looming threat of the Phantom’s attentions, seeks out the local cemetery, still half-convinced that he’s her father and that she can appeal to him somehow.  The Phantom apparently follows her there, but so does Raoul.  Thanks to Mme. Giry’s backstory, Raoul can at last tell Christine that the Phantom is no relation to her. The two men duel with swords.  Raoul wins the bout but spares the Phantom at Christine’s insistence.  The Phantom escapes once more.

At last Raoul and the opera’s managers convince Christine to be a Judas goat, giving a performance of FAUST designed to lure the Phantom into the hands of the police.  He comes out and the two of them sing another duet before the audience and the waiting police, during which Christine possibly begins to believe in their “passion play” for the first time.  Yet she unmasks him onstage, revealing his ugliness to the audience in a crueler manner than any Christine before this one.  In retaliation, the Phantom causes the great chandelier to fall upon the audience, and once more spirits Christine to his lair.

A note on the Phantom’s “ugliness”: while the stage-version made the Phantom suitably hideous, the Schumacher film confines itself to giving actor Gerard Butler a little putty-like deformity that hardly seems worthy of all the fuss.  One might presume that the minimal monster-makeup insured that some viewers could still entertain the illusion of a comely Phantom.

Raoul follows the Phantom, but this time, the Phantom captures him.  As in the book, the Phantom bargains with Christine, promising to spare Raoul’s life if Christine marries the Phantom.  She doesn’t consent to the bargain, but she gives him a kiss that essentially redeems him, so that the Phantom frees the young lovers and disappears.  Christine’s love for Raoul is undiminished, but she does show some divided feelings for her erstwhile demon lover.

The picture ends with the final frame, as Old Raoul visits the gravesite of his late wife Christine, only to find that some other visitor has left a single rose upon the grave—implying that the Phantom’s love, no matter how frustrated, has endured.

As a romance, the Schumacher version is one of the best, with all three principal actors giving vivid performances.  Aside from the “Angel of Music” set-piece I praised above, none of the musical numbers particularly grabbed me, but the quality of their performance is never in doubt.  The film’s greatest problem is the underwhelming nature of the Phantom’s makeup.  It seems pretty easy for Christine to sing that the Phantom’s face “holds no horror for me,” when it can’t possibly inspire horror in the audience-members.

THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1998)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

“I’m not a phantom. I’m a rat.”—Julian Sands’ psuedo-Phantom

 I watched Dario Argento’s PHANTOM OF THE OPERA on home video ten years ago, but I must have blocked out the memories.  Before my recent re-screening, all I remembered was that, like most Argento films as well as Robert Englund’s 1989 take  on Gaston Leroux, this 1998 flick was replete with many gore murders.  Yet having re-screened the Englund film and found that it had some interesting content, I returned to Argento’s film with reasonable optimism.  I’m not a huge Argento fan, but even the weaker films tend to display Argento’s flair for creative death-scenes.

The film starts about twenty years before the Paris Opera House is built in the late 1800s.  A tearful couple, evidently unable to care for their infant child, places their baby in a basket and lowers it into the sewer.  Like Moses’ famed craft the basket floats down a subterranean river until a bunch of rats spot it.  They jump into the water and push the basket to shore, having apparently decided to raise the child as one of their own.

This is the first clue that Argento’s PHANTOM is going to be so far from the source-material as to make the 1983 Markowitz telefilm look like a model of fidelity.  I get the feeling that Argento skimmed the book, came across the short section in which a ratcatcher drives rats before him, and had the inspiration that the enmity between the rats and the ratcatcher was the most interesting part of the story.

In the name of fantasy, I can buy a lot of animals-raising-humans scenarios.  Wolves, apes, birds, lions—all grist for the mill.  But rats—or any animal too intrinsically small to suckle a human child—could only work as elements in a comedy.  And given the reputation of rats as filthy disease-carriers, that comedy would have to be of the blackly ironic variety.  I can imagine a director with a manic sense of humor—Ken Russell, perhaps—making such an absurdity work within an absurd world.  But Argento, for some bizarre reason, plays it straight. 

Twenty years later following his adoption, the Phantom—he has no other name—is skulking beneath the Paris Opera House.  He’s established something of a legend, sustained by the opera’s lower-class employees. He doesn’t seem to be doing anything in particular—certainly not composing any operas.  He’ll kill anyone who trespasses on his underworld domain—he speaks the above line about being a rat to one such trespasser before killing him-- and he has a long-standing feud with the opera’s ratcatcher, a bumptious clod who boasts of all the rat-tails he’s collected over the years.

Despite having lived with rats all his life, this Phantom has no deformities, not even so much as a bad skin condition.  He’s also flawlessly urbane.  Shortly after he hears Christine (Asia Argento) sing for the first time, he meets her in a hallway.  She speaks to him first, convinced that she heard him speak to her first.  Possibly Argento meant to suggest a psychic link between them, though there’s no evidence of it in other scenes.  He praises her ability but at no time suggests that she become his musical pupil.  Though he doesn’t seek to tutor Christine, he does follow the usual procedure of tormenting Christine’s chief competitor, the diva Carlotta—played for very broad comedy, though the 1990 telefilm did the same thing better. Christine becomes more intrigued with the handsome stranger than with her current suitor, Raoul de Chagny. Once more Raoul becomes simply a young nobleman on the make, but Christine prefers to regard him as a “brother.”  Curiously, in addition to the usual figures from the novel—the harried managers, the conceited but unworthy diva—Argento includes Raoul’s usually-omitted brother in the cast, though under a different name.  Argento uses the brother just as the 1925 film did, as someone with whom Raoul can exchange a few meager lines.

This Phantom seems more like Tarzan than the Leroux character.  This Phantom bonds with rats like Tarzan does with apes, though the former prodigy never expressly commands the rodents to do things for him. The Phantom’s extremely strong, for he tosses one man like a rag doll and shrugs off gunshot-wounds during a fight-scene.  Whereas other Phantoms fulfill the “outré outfits skills and devices” trope in terms of the costumes they wear or the weapons they utilize, this seems to be the only one who possesses an uncanny physical ability.  I've included the trope "perilous psychos" because the Phantom is deranged by his upbringing, though he's not the sort of mastermind who performs the "bizarre crimes" of other versions, nor does he sport any "freakish flesh."

As there’s no teacher-student relationship between Christine and the Phantom, this seems to be the first film where the Phantom is literally her “demon lover.”  She answers her summons to meet him in his lair—atypically, she makes the boat-journey into his doleful domain alone. Down in his lair the Phantom, though no composer, has the requisite pipe-organ and the two of them have the standard singer-pianist duet.  But since there’s no unmasking scene to show Christine that he’s not a fit lover, she lets passion overwhelm her. For once, the Phantom actually gets some.

Most Christines seem blissfully unaware of their Phantoms’ murderous reputations. Even with that in mind, though, Asia Argento’s version seems remarkably dense.  After having sex with a man who lives with rats in a dank underworld, she’s shocked that he’s something less than a gentleman.  He wants her to stay in his lair, and when she refuses, he simply takes the boat and leaves her stranded.  Fortunately, Raoul finds way into the lair and helps her escape.  Upon seeing him, Christine displays an unappealing fickleness, claiming that she’s always loved the nobleman despite having blown him off earlier.  Later, after Carlotta’s been removed as lead performer and Christine takes over, the Phantom storms the stage in mid-performance to abduct her.  Raoul, several policemen, and the comically overblown ratcatcher give chase.  In the ensuing struggle, although mighty “Phantom of the Rats” manages to kill his brethren’s nemesis, police bullets kill the vermin-loving villain as well.  Yet even as she flees his presence—with Raoul steering her away in the rowboat—Christine weeps and wails at being parted from her demon lover.  After that, viewers probably shouldn’t entertain any illusions of wedded bliss for Christine and Raoul.

Asia Argento gives the audience a sexed-up Christine but she’s also petulant, changeable and superficial, while Raoul is so overheated he seems ludicrous. In addition, he’s given makeup and costumes that make him seem callow and unattractive. Sands plays his seductive role with stoical seriousness, but since no one could have given tragic dimension to a man reared by rats, it’s understandable that he never generates much intensity.  Almost the entire “Phantom of the Opera” plot has been shoved into the background to make room for Argento’s signature death-scenes.  However, none of these prove memorable. And when Dario Argento makes a movie in which even the murderous set-pieces are as dull as dirt, you’ve got past the idea of artistic visions spinning off source-material in new directions.  You’ve just got one helluva bad movie. 

AMERICAN NINJA 4: THE ANNIHILATION (1990)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*


Though I've touched on a couple of "uncanny" martial arts films here, I believe this is my first "ninja" film.  This one just happened to come on regular TV, so I re-watched it.

I'm not sure that I could have picked a worse exemplar of the genre had I been trying.  I remember the first "American Ninja" film, with Michael Dudikoff in the lead role, as moderately entertaining, and the next two sequels as adequate time-killers.  But there was a reason that I didn't remember anything about this one, save that it was the first in the series to team up Dudikoff (who made the first two films) with David Bradley, a real martial artist who took over from Dudikoff when the actor didn't want to do film #3 in the series.  Presumably Dudikoff was brought back to the fold with the hope of flogging the series' profitability, though only one more entry appeared, with Bradley as the sole star again

All the 1980s cliches are on display here.  A dangerous madman, allied to an Arab fanatic and an Irish (?) military commander, has put together a mountaintop fortress swarming with fully costumed ninjas.  Because the madman (one of the least interesting villains I've seen in American action-films) has perfected a small nuclear device, the American military sends in a task force.  The task force is captured, and the military men discuss the possibility of just bombing the whole shebang from the skies.  But the officers really really want their men back (shades of every "Missing in Action" film ever made).  So they send in Sean Davidson (Bradley) and some aides.  They get captured too.  So they send for the original American Ninja, who single-handedly infiltrates the fortress, frees the good guys and decimates all the villains, including one big-ass villain comically billed as the "Super Ninja."

Both of the main heroes don ninja costumes, so they fit the "outre outfits" trope, though if they didn't, I'd probably consider that the ninja army also fulfilled this trope in the "uncanny" mode, though I have seen both naturalistic and marvelous ninja films.

Dudikoff (an actor who can't really do martial arts) and Bradley have a brief fight, but "Bradley" turns out to be an Oriental guy who has donned a Bradley disguise for no conceivable reason.  One may speculate that even though the fight was fake, David Bradley might have relished the chance to show how much better his fake kung-fu was in comparison to the actor's.