SUPERGATOR (2007), DINOCROC VS. SUPERGATOR (2010), DINOSHARK (2010)

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

Based on my results with these three "colossal critter" films, maybe I'll stick with those of that have a "vs." in the title from now on.  It's not that these combative films are all that much better than the subcombative ones, but the former show a greater propensity toward the absurd.

I started off my mini-marathon of gobbling gargantuas with SUPERGATOR, one of the two reptilian marauders who would be cage-fighting one another three years later.  The other one, DINOCROC, I did not get the chance to screen, but since it came out three years earlier, possibly it set the pattern for this spate of films associated with Roger Corman's production company (or companies, as the case may be).

The design of the big gator, apparently brought into being by a nasty company trying to weaponize growth hormones, is quite underwhelming.  The best the CGI guys could do, as shown above, was to stick stegosaurus-like spikes on the creature's back.  As is often the case in these flicks, two separate teams of professionals must converge in order to join their resources and kill the big beast: in this case, the biogeneticist who created the monster and a vulcanologist investigating a possibly live Hawaiian volcano.  The lead actors, Kelly McGillis and Brad "Ned Blessing" Johnson, acquit themselves with this tedium a little better than some of their fellow thespians have. The additional threat of the volcano is a nice touch but it doesn't really dispel the general tedium.  As with most Corman flicks there are some cute but vacuous bimbos tossed into the mix.

DINOCROC VS. SUPERGATOR has a small advantage over SUPERGATOR in that it's directed and co-written by Jim Wynorski.  Wynorski will never be anything but a junk-film director, but in general I've found that he does try to keep his goofy trash scenarios lively.  To be sure, Wynorksi follows closely in the footsteps of Roger Corman by injecting as much bimbo-flesh as he possibly can, but unlike the director of SUPERGATOR, Wynorski seems to choose a better breed of bimbo.
He also throws in a couple of references to Cormanological film-history, as when the bimbo-gamewarden's boat is named "Wild Angel" and a tour-guide shows tourists where "She Gods of Shark Reef" was made.

While SUPERGATOR stuck pretty close to the template, D VS. S at least tosses in other familiar tropes: David Carradine as the evil mogul whose company creates the two beasts (guess neither one is supposed to be a "dino" anymore), a karate-chopping mercenary lady, a "ragin' Cajun" crocodile hunter who tells the audience that "crocodiles and alligators are natural enemies," and a field of giant mushrooms.  Oh, and the bimbo-gamewarden runs around in hot pants. 

The almost inevitable disappointment is that in all of these "vs." films, the creature-battles last only three minutes at most, so they're always perfunctory affairs.  Since the "dinocroc" for some reason is able to run around on its hind legs like a T-Rex, the poor supergator seems outmatched from the start.  Bad form, Wynorski!

Then it's back to pure tedium with DINOSHARK.  Director Kevin O'Neill has a long resume as a visual effects man on some above-average fantasy-films, as well as some which, like the yet-unscreened-by-me DINOCROC, are probably no better than they have to be.  DINOCROC was the  first of O'Neill's four director-credits, but DINOSHARK doesn't engender in me any fierce desire to see his other efforts.  Most of the time the viewer doesn't even get much of a look at the malefic monster, so it's not even on a par with the supergator in that regard.

The attempts of the humans to track down the "dinosaur-shark" are dull, dull, dull, and the beast's attacks are not much better.  Only at the very end does the female lead get the best line, one which sums up the real appeal of these "nature's revenge" flicks, as she blows away the monster shark:

"Welcome to the Endangered Species list, you bastard!"

FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*


Though FRIDAY THE 13TH was unquestionably prompted by the success of 1978's HALLOWEEN, Sean Cunningham's work displays a very different aesthetic.  Whereas Carpenter's film has a cerebral quality that never entirely vanishes even during its most visceral sequences, Cunningham's signature work shows a more purely visceral appeal.  Cunningham's frequent lingering shots of the inscrutable forests surrounding Camp Crystal Lake put me in mind of Meir Zarchi's 1978 work I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE.  I doubt that Cunningham, who at the time was hoping for a solid financial success in his career, would have emulated Zarchi's controversial GRAVE had he seen it.  Still, the similarities between the two go beyond just content and setting. Both films place characters who are fundamentally guiltless in horrifically violent circumstances.  In a DVD commentary Cunningham denied that the appeal of the film was that of "identifying with the killer," as asserted by Roger Ebert and others.  His explanation invoked rather the truism that FRIDAY was about "bad things happening to good people."

PSYCHO may be a greater influence on FRIDAY than the Carpenter film. The musical score by Harry Manfredini frequently references Bernard Herrmann's distinctive PSYCHO theme, and the first viewpoint character introduced by the narrative, a girl named Annie, perishes early in the film just as Marion Crane does in the Hitchcock film.  And most persuasively, the killer assumes the imagined personality of a long-dead relative as protection for the guilt the killer feels over that relation's death.

Further, in place of Carpenter's suggestions regarding the unknowability of evil, Cunningham's figure of evil possesses the same human dimensions as the Norman Bates of both creator Robert Bloch and adapter Alfred Hitchcock.  Scripter Victor Miller has commented that his psycho-killer is in essence "a mother who would have killed for her kids." (At this late date, does anyone not know it's Mrs. Voorhees in Camp Blood with the axe?)  But to be precise, her precious son Jason is long dead, and the 1958 flashback at the film's outset shows that Voorhees has already taken vengeance on the counselors who let her boy perish in the lake.  All of Voorhees' other acts of violence-- burning down the camp a year later, and coming back in 1980 when the owner tries to re-open the property-- are only defenses within her demented mind.  When Voorhees chooses to go after the counselors before Camp Crystal Lake has even opened, at a time when no children are endangered, it's patently clear that she's caught in what Freud would term a "repetition-compulsion."  Unable to come to terms with the painful experience of losing her child, Voorhees must repeat the circumstances of her vengeance over and over, imagining that the new camp counselors deserve the same punishment as those who wronged her.  Only in this way can she imagine Jason being "alive" when he speaks through her, pleading to see her kill his murderers again and again.

Miller's characters are simply drawn, but I don't think any of them are depicted as sex-crazed fools, which would become a dominant trope in FRIDAY's sequels.  The counselors' warnings about the camp all come from disreputable sources: a town "crazy," a surly truckdriver, and an uptight cop.  Cunningham may have chosen to use all of these male characters as "red herrings" for the true killer, to keep the audience's suspicions focused on a male killer until the climax, when Voorhees is belatedly introduced.  In terms of the techniques used for a real mystery-tale, this late introduction would be a failure, but here it supports Cunningham's vaunted theme of the intrusion of the irrational upon ordinary life.  In addition, the DVD commentary for FRIDAY argues persuasively that Alice, the "final girl" here, is not the least bit "virginal," contrary to those critics who assumed that all "final girls" should be, simply because that was the pattern HALLOWEEN set.  Indeed, in one scene it's Alice who proposes that the counselors play "strip poker," so it's clear that she's as randy as everyone else.  At the same time, Cunningham gives the young counselors' sexual endeavors a light-- one might even call it "innocent"-- touch.  The only character who sees their sexuality as evil is Mrs. Voorhees, and even then, she isn't condemning sexuality as such.  In her mind the young people's ability to celebrate their bodies is inextricably linked to their capacity for negligence.

The most mythic moment of FRIDAY was conceived as an addendum to the main script. Famed makeup artist Tom Savini suggested that Alice should have a final "gotcha" dream in which she was attacked by the rotting corpse of the long-dead Jason. On one level, this incident prefigures the fact that when FRIDAY proved successful, Jason would become the new horror-protagonist, Mrs. Voorhees having "lost her head."  But it's unlikely that the filmmakers were thinking of that contingency at the time; the dream of Jason's recrudescence was just one more thrill-ride on the cinematic roller-coaster, one clearly derived from the conclusion of Brian dePalma's CARRIE.

What's fascinating about this sequence is that even though Alice, like all of her friends, is fundamentally innocent, on some level she accepts and internalizes the guilt of Mrs. Voorhees.  Even though she wakes from the dream, she ends the film telling the surrouding officials, with an unshakable conviction, that Jason is "still down there," under the lake, haunting it with his unquiet spirit.  Once he was revived in truth, however, Jason became a very different type of mythic presence-- more accessible, but not necessarily an improvement.

MEGASHARK VS. GIANT OCTOPUS (2009), MEGA PYTHON VS. GATOROID (2011)

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


Though most of the "colossal critter" movies that show up on the SYFY Channel are pretty lean pickings, I've noticed that the reviews they receive on IMDB usually fall into two categories. 

One is the "outrage against the standards of good entertainment" review, in which the reviewer tears apart the flick based on its many failings of sound plot, believable characters, and so on.

The other is the "this is so bad it's funny" review.  Of these two review-types, this one is the more interesting, because it raises the question: once a movie has decided to revel in its badness, can it be fairly critiqued? 

Is it at all feasible to conceive of "standards" for a deliberately bad film?

My answer is, yes and no. As to the "yes," anyone can conceive of such standards.  But since the whole idea of a bad movie is to flout one's expectations of formal merit, there would seem to be no way to make those standards anything but purely personal, which would make the answer into an operative "no."

Take for instance the Asylum film MEGASHARK VS. GIANT OCTOPUS, a 2009 opus which seems to have received far greater attention than most of SYFY's cookie-cutter airings.  This monster-mashup has just one scene that grabs me in the part of my cortex that says, "this is so deliriously stupid it's funny:" the above scene in which the Megashark leaps out of the ocean and gobbles up a 747 airliner, dragging it down into the sea with it.  One fan liked the scene so much that he devoted an IMDB thread to it, terming it "the greatest scene in all Movie Hollywood."  I find myself wondering if some of the appeal of this scene rests with bringing together two icons from 1970s cinema: the rapacious shark and the endangered 747.

However, for me that scene provides the only real entertainment in MEGASHARK.  The big fish's opponent, the Giant Octopus, is by no means as nicely rendered as this "Spawn of Jaws," and the script is otherwise dead-serious and deadly dull.  There's one scene in which former singer Debbie Gibson, playing a tough Navy officer, lays out a panicky seaman with a deft punch in the face, but that's the only other scene I recall.  The clash of the titanic terrors is a distinct disappointment.

The same crummy level of FX applies to the battle of the two gargantuas of MEGA PYTHON VS. GATOROID, and as an added minus, neither beastie even looks as passably good as the Megashark.  What MEGA PYTHON has going for it is a more enjoyable subplot than MEGASHARK's dull routine: an emnity between the movie's two female characters, both played by female pop-singing idols-- the aforementioned Debbie Gibson as park ranger O'Hara and Brittani as animal activist Doctor Riley.  The subplot builds to a catfight-battle between the two termagants in a much more pleasing manner than the main plot dealing with the monsters-- though, to be sure, the climactic Brittani-Gibson fight doesn't rise to the level of the best cinematic f/f contests.

Many of the "colossal critter" flicks futz around with issues of conservation and animal activism, almost always treated with a politically-correct solemnity.  In place of this, MEGA PYTHON treats both the "activist" and the "conservationist" as stupid, ego-obsessed characters spoiling for a fight.  Riley starts the idiocy by releasing pythons into the ecosystem of a Florida State Park, but O'Hara compounds it by breeding huge gators to eat the pythons-- almost like a monster-movie version of "I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly."

Brittani and Gibson brought enough vivacity to their cartoonish roles that MEGA PYTHON managed to score several times with my delirium-loving cortex, which is the only standard I can use to elevate the PYTHON above its more popular SHARK kindred.  That, and the fact that during the movie Micky Dolenz, playing himself, meets a horrible death before he can sing even one note.

THE MAN FROM PLANET X (1951), THE NEANDERTHAL MAN (1953)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*

MYTHICITY: (1) *fair* (2) *poor*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological*

THE MAN FROM PLANET X was the first fantasy-film collaboration, as both writers and producers, between Aubrey Wisberg and Jack Pollexfen, who within the same year also wrote (but did not produce) THE SON OF DR. JEKYLL.  PLANET has the honor of being one of the first films in the vanguard of the decade's burgeoning investment in the SF genre, and still remains a favorite, though the script sometimes wanders in its commitment to its characterization of its alien visitor.

Four characters are assembled to witness, in distinctly low-budget fashion, the first visit of an extraterrestrial to Earth-- specifically, a small island off the coast of Scotland.  Two, Elliott and Mears, are scientists, though Mears has some unexplained bad reputation to his credit.  Another is Elliott's daughter Enid, who has a crush on the fourth, somewhat older man, American journalist Lawrence.  The last relationship provides a modicum of romantic interest, though happily Enid and Lawrence don't take too much plot time from the real star of the show.

Strangely, though the Pollexfen-Wisberg team sought to give their visitor a sense of visual strangeness-- seen above in both the design of the air-helmeted alien and his spaceship-- their science is no better than the FLASH GORDON serial of the 1940s, in that the scientists' first inkling of extraterrestial advent is the appearance of, not a mere spaceship, but a whole *planet* that has wandered into Earth's solar system, yet fails to cause the sort of gravitational effects that such a body ought to have.  Since we later learn that "Planet X" is dying, it seems impractical that the alien and his unseen people would choose to pilot it around like a ship.  Perhaps, for all the scientific fallacies incumbent on the idea of the "invading planet," there's some archetypal appeal to the idea, even for a production too modest to realize any spectacular effects from it.

The film's first half-hour, during which the Earth-people attempt to establish communication with the visitor, is easily the strongest.  Since the alien never communicates directly with the protagonists, his motives are initially as murky as the fogbanks pervading the island-- which also serve to conceal the film's dependence on studio locations, aside from brief scenes at the Griffith Observatory.  Initially the alien seems willing to communicate, though he possesses a powerful ray gun that can paralyze the will of its victims.  While the others aren't looking, Mears turns on the visitor, attempting to cut off the X-ite's air supply in order to learn his secrets. 

The alien survives Mears' interference and returns to his ship with Enid in tow.  At this point the script's implicit sympathy for the exploring ET is inverted, as the Earthpeople learn that the Man from Planet X is the vanguard of an invasion force, set to help his people settle the Earth and get rid of its current inhabitants.  In the end the Planet X invader is defeated and his people are diverted, but curiously, the script gives Enid a last line in which she expresses a confusing sympathy for the alien trespasser.

Still, the moody quality of this low-budget effort, principally the creation of director Edgar G. Ulmer, persuades one to like PLANET X despite its flaws.  One can't say the same of NEANDERTHAL MAN.

I've found many a silk purse amid sow's ears like TWELVE TO THE MOON and PHANTOM FROM 10,000 LEAGUES, but this "Dr. Jekyll and Mister Caveman" outing defeats me. 

In contrast to PLANET X, which sets up the protagonists in an adept manner, NEANDERTHAL assembles its cast of characters in a clumsy fashion.  The earliest scenes deal with a hunter who is dumbfounded to see a saber-toothed tiger roaming about in the California High Sierras.  He fades out of the story, but game warden Oakes also sees the strange beast, usually played by a modern tiger, though at one point the filmmakers insert a shot of a tigerskin rug wearing "tusks" because they couldn't get the tiger to wear them!  Oakes contacts a university zoologist named Harkness, the principal viewpoint character of the story.  Harkness seeks to confer with a local scientist named Groves who lives in the area, but the scientist is absent from his house, though Harkness takes dinner with Groves' fiancee Ruth and his daughter Jan.

Groves is first seen in a nearby city, having a row with other scientists who reject outright Groves' theory that neanderthal men had the same innate intelligence as modern men.  The script fails to provide any psychological reason for Groves to be so obsessed with this idée fixe, but he's not content to rail at his colleagues, but goes off on Harkness when he finds a strange guest at dinner.  This might be a little more understandable if Groves were an "alpha male" type who proved fiercely protective of either fiancee, daughter, or both.  But there's no romantic chemistry between Harkness and any of the women in the household, be it daughter Jan, fiancee Ruth or a strange deaf-and-dumb servant named Celia. 

It comes out that as a consequence of Groves' researches into matters prehistoric, he's come up with a serum that can regress any species into its primordial ancestor.  He's responsible for regressing a house cat into the saber-toothed tiger, as well as covering things up when Harkness and Oakes shoot the tiger.  Groves is also apparently responsible for substituting the shot-up corpse of a deer for the tiger, though the script never establishes how he arranges this complicated rigamarole. 

Harkness later learns, by searching the doctor's lab, that he also experimented on regressing his servant Celia, and leaves the incriminating evidence around, in the form of photographs showing Celia at different stages of regression.  However, according to the doctor's notes the female of the species proved less suscepible to primitive regression-- something of a backhand compliment, I suppose-- so Groves, after unleashing yet another sabre-toothed tiger on an already excited community, decides to experiment on himself a la Doctor Jekyll.

Like his Victorian antecedent, Groves soon learns that "going primitive" isn't all that it's cracked up to be, and essentially rebuts his own theory.  Groves repeatedly transforms into a bestial ape-man who kills or injures everyone he encounters-- more on which later.  Thanks to Harkness' detective work, a manhunt for the killer ape-man is organized.  The neanderthal man is attacked on two fronts, being first savaged by his own tigerish creation and then shot by the hunters.  In approved werewolf style, he reverts to his human self as he dies of his wounds.

The one victim whose life is spared by the Neanderthal Man is a curious one: a woman named Nola, who is implicitly raped by the ape-man after he injures her date.  The word "rape" is never actually used, but Nola's description of the way the creature attacked her leaves little doubt.  It's strange to see so visceral a topic raised in an early 1950s SF-film, but it seems virtually thrown in for a quick exploitative effect.  It seems particularly strange given that Groves is so obsessed with his theory that he seems to have no passion for either his fiancee or the serving-girl he experiments upon.  But if Pollexfen and Wisberg meant this development to suggest his unbridled id, the scene fails to generate any such insights.

Additionally, the dialogue in NEANDERTHAL is one of the worst I've seen in a film of the period.  At least Ed Wood's dialogue was entertaining in its demented way.

THE ILLUSTRATED MAN (1969)

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

American cinema of the 1960 was replete with many "artsy" films, the belated spawn of the French New Wave.  Jack Smight's adaptation of three Ray Bradbury stories from the author's collection THE ILLUSTRATED MAN had an advantage over other metaphenomenal art-films, however, in that many of Bradbury's stories of the 1950s and 1960s, sometimes appearing in tony magazines like ESQUIRE, utilized the same "high-art" approach as the New Wave's films. 

I don't know whether Smight or his scriptwriter Howard b. Kreitsek chose the three stories out of the eighteen in the collection, but someone certainly chose the stories with an eye to the "generation gap" prevalent in the period's culture. Only one of Bradbury's stories, however, actually plays to that concept, suggesting that the filmmakers were not that concerned with fidelity to Bradbury.

One of the film's central conceits takes the opposite of the usual Hollywood approach to anthology-films: instead of featuring dozens of disparate actors in the assorted stories, actors Rod Steiger and Claire Bloom are in all three stories as well as the "wraparound" story, a device also borrowed from the book but given a very different treatment.

Discounting the wraparound for the moment, the lead story "The Veldt" is the closest to Bradbury's version.  Bradbury's story deals with the deadly result of parents allowing their children to be "babysat" by the virtual-reality "television" of the future.  Bradbury's story is a little more of a screed against parental permissiveness, while Smight's version tends more to show as inevitable the children's deadly rebellion against their parental units.

"The Long Rain" deals with the psychological dissolution of a team of soldiers stationed on eternally rainy Venus.  Of the three discrete stories, this is the more visually spectacular.  The original story mentions, but does not show, native Venusians hostile to the soldiers, aligning the story with Joseph Conrad's tales of colonial disintegration.  The film-version does not mention natives; in place of colonialism, the filmmakers-- perhaps with an eye to the ongoing Vietnam conflict-- emphasize the conflict of the rank-and-file soldiers with their commander.

"Last Night of the World," however, entirely rewrites the substance of Bradbury's tale, which I discussed in greater detail here.   Since this story has no overt conflict, it's not surprising that Smight and Kreitsik rewrote it, changing it from a gentle elegy for all humanity to a condemnation of the tragic results of believing in false oracles.

The wraparound, however, is the part of the film that holds up best for current audiences.  In the book, a young man wandering in the wilds of America simply stumbles across an "illustrated man," a freak whose body is entirely covered with tattoo-like images.  When the wanderer gazes at any image for a long enough period, he "sees" the story behind the image, which is one of the stories in the book.  The wraparound is not much used in the prose anthology, as it would have become quickly tedious.  But in the film the meeting of the wanderer and the illustrated man in the Smight film (dubbed "Carl" and "Willie" respectively) is one that escalates in strangeness between the three stories, taking on increasingly sinister tones.  The wraparound in the book simply ends when the wanderer runs away, having seen a tattoo-image of his being murdered by the Illustrated Man.  Smight expands on this, giving a sort of chimerical "reason" as to why the fated hostility evolves between the two strangers. In essence, as in the other stories, a conflict between an "older generation" and a "younger generation" seems to be at the root of the conflict.  There might even be some influence from the Frazerian concept of the "sacred king" who advances to his position by killing the old king, but I can't say that Smight's other works reflect a strong interest in mythography.

I should note that Smight also builds up an element completely absent from the Bradbury wraparound: sex.  Most Bradbury stories avoid sex like the plague, but sexual freedom was a major theme of late 1960s cinema, the Illustrated Man's illustrations come about as a result of his encounter with the witchy Felicia (Bloom). 

DARK SHADOWS (1991)

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

According to Wikipedia Dan Curtis didn't want to revive his famous teleseries DARK SHADOWS (1966-71), but was talked into it by TV executive Brandon Tartikoff.  The revival sputtered out quickly, yielding only 12 episodes, currently available in a DVD collection.

It's easy to Monday-morning quarterback, but in retrospect it's plain that the revival could not successfully translate the daytime horror-soap's greatest asset: its brooding (some would say plodding) narrative pace, never to my recollection leavened by the least bit of comic relief.  By luck and/or design, the original DARK SHADOWS shared the meandering, contemplative ethos of those eras loosely termed "Romantic" and "Victorian."  DARK SHADOWS was the teleseries equivalent of a novel from that period, and not exclusively in the novels of the horror genre, such as FRANKENSTEIN or DRACULA.  That same Old World ethos was no less prominent in naturalistic novels like LES MISERABLES and THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP.

Though the 1991 SHADOWS is unquestionably well-acted and well-staged, it was conceived (or re-conceived) with the demands of a weekly teleseries in mind.  There was no question of keeping any of that Old World quality under those circumstances, and, as if to compound the problem, the producers chose English actor Ben Cross to essay the pivotal role of the melancholy vampire Barnabas Collins.  Ironically, Cross may well a much more versatile actor than the original Barnabas, Jonathan Frid.  But Frid captured the sense of a man who had been born in the 1700s, a task for which Cross did not prove suited.

The other performers do adequately in adapting adumbrated versions of the original rambling plotlines from the first years of the original series. The only actor who proves most noteworthy, however, is Barbara Steele in the role of Dr. Julia Hoffman.  In interviews Steele occasionally remarked that most of her horror-film roles afforded her little opportunity to utilize the full range of her acting-skills, but at the very least her Julia Hoffman is a much well-realized individual than most of Steele's other roles.

The themes that made the original SHADOWS so interesting are also marginalized, such as the psychological complexities of the Collins family and the "Upstairs, Downstairs" sociological theme that results in a fascinating parallel between modern-day Victoria Winters and Old World witch-woman Angelique, both of whom are "commoners" who dare to love the upper-crust Barnabas.  The best thing about the SHADOWS revival is that Curtis did manage to end the show on a note of closure, which is more than many short-lived teleseries are able to pull off.

CITY HUNTER (2011)

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

This South Korean-made TV drama, with light overtones of BATMAN and THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO, doesn't resemble anything I saw in my spotty viewing of the 1980s anime CITY HUNTER. Perhaps the teleseries builds on something in the original manga, with which I am not familiar.  In my experience the anime is entirely isophenomenal, however escapist in tone.  The only metaphenomenal element here is that, as shown above, the mystery avenger wears a face-mask that adds to his repute as the urban avenger "City Hunter." Aside from the mask, City Hunter has no uniform, somewhat like this character

The masked avenger doesn't make many literal appearances in the soap-operatic narrative; most of the time he appears to be "Johnny Lee," a young, empty-headed "Don Diego" type who promptly gets embroiled in romantic misadventures with a young woman named Kim Nana.   But he's been trained for a mission of vengeance by his adoptive father "Steve Lee."  The elder man was part of a South Korean military contingent that was wiped out during a secret operation thanks to betrayal from within. Steve Lee is the only survivor, and since infant Johnny's father was among those who died, Steve abducts the infant from his mother.  By the time he becomes a young man, Johnny has been trained in the skills of assassination, and plans to use them on the traitors, all safe within the high echelons of South Korea's governmental and business elite.

The martial arts sequences are decent but far from mind-blowing.  The teleseries' main strength are the traditional boy-girl romance elements, acted with a good sense of variety by the leads.  The only symbolism here is sociological in nature, as the narrative repetitively stresses the need to cast out corrupt individuals in South Korean government. The script never goes beyond this literal-minded pattern, so I rate the mythicity as "poor," though the soap-opera itself is reasonably entertaining.