TAI CHI ZERO, TAI CHI HERO (2012)

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


The TAI CHI films of director Stephen Fung offer good basic fantasy kung-fu  set in China at the turn of the 20th century. This has been a fertile ground for Hong Kong/Chinese filmmakers, but Fung offers a different touch: the machine-loving West in this film is more technologically advanced than it was in the real world, so that once or twice we see wild "steampunk" mechanisms that would have been impossible during the real world.

On the Chinese side, the traditions of magical martial arts, this time subsumed under the discipline of "tai chi," remains pretty consistent with other cinematic depictions, in that true masters of the art can perform phenomenal physical stunts.  As an extra added attraction, the hero Lu Chan (Jayden Wong) seems to have some sort of demonic persona within him, but this aspect of his nature is not explored in any detail in the two films.  Presumably Fung intends to wrap up the supernatural subplot in a sequel, but anyone watching should be aware that this plotline will not be resolved.

In the first part, Lu Chan-- the "zero" of the title-- seeks out a remote Chinese village in order to learn the art of tai chi, in order to cure his particular demonic malady.  The locals all refuse to train him, including the pretty daughter of the village's grandmaster, Yu Niang, and they meet his requests for tutelage by thrashing him in assorted comic scenes. Over time Lu Chan learns to approximate the moves of the villagers from watching how they move as they beat him up.  At the same time, Yu Niang's fiance Feng Zei-- obviously the villain, since he wears Western clothes-- plots to dispossess the people of the village and use their land for a new railroad.

The first film has a nice blend of comedy and action, particularly when Lu Chan and Yu Niang join forces to defeat the monstrous octopus-armed wrecking machine Feng Zei brings with him.  However, the second film loses the comic feel once Lu Chan becomes a kung-fu superman, losing all the winsome qualities he had before, and even winning over the stubborn female lead.  HERO is just as spectacular as ZERO, but it lacks the heart of the original. And as said before, the lack of closure with respect to the demon-plotline is aggravating.

At times Fung's script hints at some rapprochement between the science-based outlook of the West and the mysterious arts of the East.  All too often, though, he succumbs to the frequent chauvinism of Chinese films about this historical period, and so undermines the validity of his implied theme.

ADDENDUM: Originally my review was accompanied by a repro of a TAI CHI lobby card. But even though there are numerous film-review sites featuring similar material for these two films, someone associated with the film and/or its distribution chose to file a legal infringement complaint. Presumably they didn't notice my site in particular, but just targeted a bunch of sites to justify their billable hours.

Since I don't care enough about these extremely minor films to counter-claim, I have erased the offending picture and substituted a picture of the Gooneybird from TARZAN ESCAPES, which sums up my opinion of the whole business.

SPY HARD (1996), YOUR HIGHNESS (2011), YEAR ONE (2009)

 

 

 

 

 

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

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*


Though "gross humor" is often derided as an "easy" way for a comedian to get a laugh, in truth it's just as hard to do *good* gross humor as any other kind.

SPY HARD, the earliest of the three I'll review here, is not a particularly good film, but it probably comes closer to its goal than the other two.  Like the ZAZ-team parodies it emulates, SPY HARD takes a scattershot approach to spoofing its subject-- this time the genre of the "superspy film"-- but its best jokes only come up to the level of the Zuckers' lesser ones.  (To be sure, ZAZ didn't do that well with its superspy spoof in TOP SECRET.) 

All the expected jokes, particularly the sexual ones, make their usual appearances, particularly in the name of Leslie Nielsen's bumbling spy, "Dick Steele," aka "Agent WD-40."  Nielsen's character is indistinguishable from his Frank Drebbin character of the NAKED GUN films and teleseries, so it's not surprising that the villain steals the show.  Andy Griffith plays the evil genius General Rancor, who gets all the mileage he can out of being a spoof of James Bond's "Doctor No."  Where No merely lost one hand, Rancor lost both arms due to Dick Steele, and tends to lose his substitute robot arms at the drop of, well, an arm. Best Rancor joke: Steele greets him by saying, "I'd shake your hand, but I don't remember where I left it."

Aside from Griffith, SPY HARD's main asset is that, like the better Bond films, it supplies an ample quantity of sexy women, including Nicolette Sheridan, Stephanie Romanov, and Marcia Gay Harden, most accompanied by goofy names of the "Pussy Galore" variety.  The gross humor is applied with a light touch, which puts the film a little ahead of the second two AUSTIN POWERS films.  The script is partly credited to the Friedberg-Seltzer writing-team, who have become infamous for a spate of lame, unfocused gross-humor spoofs whose titles are always some version of "[fill in the blank] MOVIE."  These films, which are almost uniformly awful, have earned the scorn by many film-fans, but detractors of F&S may be surprised to find that SPY HARD sticks pretty close to the subject of Bond-spoofery rather than wandering into a host of irrelevant pop-culture venues, as the "MOVIES" do.  However, SPY HARD does take a shot at HOME ALONE for no good reason.

I was largely bored when I watched YOUR HIGHNESS in the theater, but I decided to give it a second try. I still didn't like the film's attempt to package American comedian Danny McBride along the lines of a new Jack Black, this time in an otherworldly D&D fantasy where everyone, particularly McBride's character, finds themselves unable to pass even a few moments without a reference to cocks, pussies, or someone or other being "gay."  I should note that, in the interests of political correctness, the one really gay villain is treated with a dollop of compassion.  The plot involves Thadeous getting dragged along when an evil wizard kidnaps Fabious' fiancée, but eventually finding his own brand of heroism-- as well as forming a booty-call relationship with tough lady warrior Isabel (Natalie Portman).

On my second viewing I did think that there was some potential in the set-up: perennial screw-up Prince Thadeous (McBride) nurses a resentment of his near-perfect brother Fabious (James Franco) because Fabious is automatically guaranteed to become king, insuring that everyone's always sucking up to Fabious.  (The thought that Thadeous would still be in line for the kingship if Fabious kicked off doesn't occur to anyone in the kingdom.)  So Thadeous' horndog nature could be seen as overcompensation for being constantly downgraded.  The script's intelligent enough to put this much psychological insight out there, which is more than most "gross humor" films even attempt.  But the writers-- who seem to understand the dynamics of high fantasy fairly well-- don't really want to poke any holes in the image of Fabious' perfect hero-prince, so there's not really anywhere for the story to go except for Thadeous to get over his sibling-envy and "man up." The fight-scenes and the FX-- particularly the five-headed dragon seen above-- impressed me more than a number of more expensive fantasy-flicks of recent years, particularly the recent I, FRANKENSTEIN.  The perfect blend of "high fantasy" and "low humor" still has yet to be made, though.

As of this writing YEAR ONE is the most recent outing for Harold Ramis as director.  Though most celebrated as a writer, Ramis also directed a number of good comedy-films, including CADDYSHACK and GROUNDHOG DAY.  The decade of the 2000s wasn't so fortunate for director Ramis, starting out with the dismal remake BEDAZZLED (2000) and ending with this film.  In YEAR ONE Jack Black and Michael Cena play two dumb cavemen, "Zed" and "Oh," who wander out of their enclosed valley into the world of the Old Testament.  They encounter figures who are wildly separated from one another by the Bible's version of history, meeting first Cain and Abel, then Abraham, Isaac, and the city of Sodom.  For good measure, Sodom's reigning princess has been given the non-Biblical name "Inanna" (original name for the goddess best known as "Ishtar").  Some of the cavepeople from the tribe of the two dummies also get taken as slaves in Sodom, and two of them are women coveted by the doltish cavemen.

Black and Cena deliver as much moxie as they can playing a sort of reverse Laurel-and-Hardy-- that is, a team in which the passive member of the team keeps getting screwed over by the bullshittery of his more aggressive buddy.  The jokes, though, are even more unfunny and repetitive than those in YOUR HIGHNESS, and on top of that they feel forced, as if Ramis was just delivering the goods he thought the audience would want. 

What's most interesting about the script is what it doesn't do: no mingling of the fantasy-material often found in both the caveman-genre and "the Bible film."  As I've observed elsewhere, most cavemen films can't resist tossing in dinosaurs.  Such movies attain an "uncanny" status given that they're producing an altered version of real history, not positing the dinos as an intrusion of the marvelous upon the commonplace world.  YEAR ONE, though, isn't mixing dinos with cavemen, but cavemen with Biblical priests and patriarchs.  I suppose I should also judge YEAR ONE as "uncanny" on the same basis, given that historical periods are lumped together in the same cavalier fashion as the cavemen/dino flicks.

The film also avoids any hint of supernatural phenomena, whether on the side of God or his various competitors.  With this elision Ramis, one of three writers of YEAR's script, is certainly meant to undermine Hollywood's history to validate Biblical history, including the Bible's version of deity.  Zed trespasses on the "forbidden fruit" of a "tree of knowledge" in his secluded valley, but it's really just a fruit, so that Zed gains no knowledge by eating it. A snake does show up, but it doesn't tempt or talk to anyone; it just tries to strangle Oh.  The encounters with Cain and Abraham also suggest that God isn't really sending down any commandments to anyone, and though Zed tries to convince others-- and himself-- that he is God's chosen one, he ends the film by exhorting the natives of Sodom-- whom God never gets round to destroying-- to put an end to all such superstitions.  But YEAR ONE is no LIFE OF BRIAN, which managed to make its raunchy moments work in the context of genuine satire.  The most one can say is that thanks to the stars it's a little more entertaining than BEDAZZLED.

ADDENDUM: SPY HARD and YOUR HIGHNESS both qualify as "combative comedies," but YEAR ONE is merely punctuated by unfocused bouts of slapstick fighting, and so remains subcombative.

KING KONG (1976)

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

He was the terror, the mystery of their lives, and the magic. A year from now that will be an island full of burnt-out drunks. When we took Kong we kidnapped their god.-- Jack Prescott, KING KONG, 1976.

Though the '76 KING KONG is riddled with many bad lines of dialogue, the quote above is a happy exception, and may well be the best line ever written by notorious BATMAN-teleseries scribe Lorenzo Semple Jr.  This line sums up a theme that might be listed alongside some of those I listed in my review of the 1933 classic:  White Explorers as Running-Dog Imperialists, stealing the culture of Third World (and often nonwhite) tribal peoples, this time in the form of the natives' violent god.  This theme is not overt in the 1933 film, though arguably it's strongly implicit in the sequel SON OF KONG. In that film Carl Denham's ship is taken over by sailors with Marxist sentiments, but this doesn't stop the entrepreneur from looting an ancient temple on Skull Island and maybe-not-coincidentally witnessing-- albeit not causing-- the destruction of the island and all of its inhabitants.


I'm not saying, though, that Semple's script is deeply concerned with the fate of Third World natives.  The line, spoken by hero Prescott (Jeff Bridges),  may be interpreted as the writer's attempt to derive added pathos from the original film's famous line, "[Kong] was a king and a god in the world he knew, but now he comes to civilization merely a captive - a show to gratify your curiosity." With his "terror and mystery" line, Semple touches on something profound regarding the relationship of divinity and violence in humankind's early religious history.  Not surprisingly, the rest of the script isn't capable of sustaining this insight, so Semple usually falls back on trite attacks aimed at the vulgarity of the movie industry.  This approach is typified by the massively unfunny line spoken by ingénue Dwan (Jessica Lange): 'Did you ever meet anyone before whose life was saved by "Deep Throat"?'

Equally trite-- though probably much more resonant in 1976-- were the script's villainization of the oil industry.  The basic idea is a good update of the entrepreneur-scenario of the original film, in that in 1976 one cannot as easily imagine Carl Denham's daring if unethical "seat-of-his-pants" filmmaker.  In place of Denham we have the colorlessly named "Fred Wilson" (Charles Grodin), who initiates a voyage to a mysterious fog-shrouded island in search of oil reserves.  Grodin gives a fine performance, making Wilson the ultimate corporate finagler looking for a big score, but one who so lacks Denham's courage that he doesn't even want to pose for a photo with Dwan because he's "a married man." By comparison, Prescott is brave at all the right times, but though he's potentially more rounded than Bruce Cabot's Driscoll, Prescott remains a flat-as-cardboard stereotype of a Concerned Environmentalist.  He says all the right lines, yet curiously fails to earn his status as the film's moral center-- perhaps because for a short period, he does sell out and co-operate with Wilson's idea to take Kong captive.  Prescott is at his best when he first stows away aboard Wilson's ship, and intrudes on Wilson's mission-statement to assert that the readings from the island may have been caused not by petroleum deposits but by "animals breathing."  Had the producers wanted to follow the original film in making the island a haven for many prehistoric terrors, this could have supplied an interesting irony, as the seekers of fossil fuels would have been brought into contact with still-living fossils.

Lange's Dwan takes the place of "Ann Darrow," the third principal character who intrudes upon Kong's sanctum.  Perhaps because she is an aspiring starlet, the script does not position her as an innocent, much less a virgin, though strangely her "Deep Throat" line may be the closest she comes to that mythic status. (Dwan ends up on Wilson's ship because she took passage on another ship to audition for a film-role, left a below-decks party in which "Deep Throat" was being screened, and survived the ship's sinking because she was on deck and managed to escape in a lifeboat.)  It seems that the producers wanted Dwan, like Prescott, to be more rounded than the original character from 1933.  Yet Dwan, like Prescott, doesn't always convince one with her character shifts.  Initially terrified of Kong, she gets over her fear a little too fast, as Semple hedges his bets with more goofy lines, as per the famed "You Goddamn chauvinist pig ape!"  Once free of Kong's grasp, she does evince sympathy for the doomed giant, something Wray's Darrow never did. One of the film's best scenes-- a scene without any parallel in the 1933 film-- takes place in the ship's hold, where the drugged Kong has been imprisoned.  Dwan falls into Kong's prison and is saved from death when Kong catches her. His more-than-beast magnanimity-- releasing her when he could have crushed her for her role in his captivity-- so impresses her that at the film's climax she puts aside her glory-seeking ambitions and tries, without success, to save the king from his execution.

But as I said in my first KONG review, these three viewpoint characters are not the center of the film: Kong is.  It almost goes without saying that this Kong lacks the symbolic richness of the original.  To the filmmakers' credit, the references to Kong's animal nature-- as when the sailors debate what the big monkey's going to do with his prize-- don't completely overpower Kong's status as a "terror and mystery." This was a danger, one that arguably was fulfilled by the impoverished script of Peter Jackson's 2005 remake.  As many before me have said, Kong's sympathetic status is enhanced by Rick Baker's lifelike facial masks and his overall performance in the "ape suit," though it's also fair to say that the suit doesn't look too good in long shots.  Director John Guillerman's reshoots of Kong's big battle-scenes, both on the island and in New York, are fair at best, and Kong's one encounter with another dino-critter is tedious.  This Kong isn't allowed to be as gratuitously bloody-handed as the original-- no biting people in half, or dropping them from great heights-- though to be sure Kong still kills a bunch of train-passengers in one of the better-executed scenes. 

I viewed the original KONG as a film in the "combative mode." The big ape's triumphs over various monsters on Skull Island were more than just exercises in Willis O'Brien's superb animation skills; they also furnished proof that he was the King of All He Surveyed-- thus making it more pathetic when he falls victim to the power of modern technology.  It's understandable that the 1976 filmmakers had no interest in providing the same number of Kong-dino conflicts, but one consequence is that Kong loses some of his sovereign status.  Also, the script errs by allowing Kong to run loose in the city for a period.  The original wisely realized that Kong's threat would fade once modern weapons, even those of 1933, were wielded against him: his horror proceeds from his erupting on the city-dwellers like a bomb.  By having Kong lurk around in hiding for a time, his menace is dissipated. Something similar occurred in 1998's GODZILLA, and even in 1953's BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS, where the creature's disease-bearing nature insulated the monster from a direct attack.  This delaying action seems predicated on arranging things so that Kong's Last Stand at the World Trade Center can be made moderately logical, and to give Prescott a way to redeem himself for his sins.  But the attempts of Dwan and Prescott to save Kong take away from Kong's status as an icon of power and terror.

I observed in my review that the biplanes of the 1933 film may carry a resonance of "respect for a fallen foe."  From a graphic angle, this film's use of attacking helicopters is a decent compromise, since biplanes would not have been feasible.  But there's no deeper symbolic reading of the 'copters, though the film's attitude toward technology as a whole suggests that Man the Tool-User has won the fight before it even started.  In any case, because Kong's battles on the island and in the city are not central to the theme, this is not a film in the combative mode.

BATTLE OF THE WORLDS (1961)

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


BATTLE OF THE WORLDS was the second film whose direction was entirely credited to famed Italian genre-director Antonio Margheriti.  Previous to BATTLE Margheriti had directed a much more static science-fiction film, ASSIGNMENT OUTER SPACE.  BATTLE, while hampered no less than ASSIGNMENT with a miniscule budget, does a far better job in conjuring the "sense of wonder" that was the province of most Italian-made SF films.

In my review of two 1970s Italian space-operas, I noted how much Italian SF-cinema seemed entrenched in the tropes of "the Buck Rogers comic strip."  BATTLE, however, is more kissing conceptual cousins with the Flash Gordon comic, which, as all SF-devotees should know, begins when a rogue planet invades Earth's solar system and begins causing havoc.

In the comic strip, Earth's havoc is the fault of the evil master of the planet, Ming the Merciless.  In BATTLE, the audience eventually learns that there is no living villain behind the rogue planet: that it was originally meant to function as a "Noah's Ark" for the alien race within, but instead became "their tomb." 

Both the comic strip and the movie felicitously ignored the more cosmic disruptions that would ensue if an entire planet somehow forced its way into a solar system.  Such disruptions probably would have wiped out all life in said system before any denizens had a chance to be heroic. But of the two, BATTLE OF THE WORLDS makes a modest attempt to treat the planetary catastrophe in straight, pseudo-scientific fashion, rather than as an excuse for pure heroics, a la Flash Gordon.  That's not say that the science invoked by BATTLE's script is credible.  But there's at least an attempt to provide a reasoned account as to how the planet enters the system, and how the embattled Earthmen can get rid of it.

The spokesman of the glories of science is also the film's most noteworthy character, the acerbic Doctor Benson (Claude Rains).  Benson seems to have been conceived somewhat along the lines of Conan Doyle's equally caustic Professor Challenger, in that Benson considers all of his colleagues to be illiterate jackasses and that he alone has the genius to counter the threat.  Even allowing for the vagaries of the English translation, I suspect that even the Italian dialogue is no less loopy, as Benson says things like “I do not maintain! I ascertain!” To be sure, at the conclusion Benson shows that he can walk the walk as well as talking the talk, for at the climax he accompanies the younger astronauts in their exploration of the alien world, which Benson has dubbed "the Outsider."  This name is providential, for Benson loses his life in his pursuit of this scientific Holy Grail, displaying a quasi-heroic idealism that ameliorates his cantankerous crankiness.  BATTLE has been called Claude Rains' worst performance by some reviewers, but at worst I find it serviceable, and certainly not out of line with what the producers apparently wanted.  I have certainly seen worse performances by American actors taking "jobber" roles in Italian cinema.

The film's worst aspects are not its wonky science or its budgetary limitations: rather, the script tries to throw too many ill-defined viewpoint characters at the audience.  Two of those characters, Fred and Eve, are about to elope at the film's opening, and later they break up for reasons that are far from pellucid. One character, a Mrs. Collins, is seen hanging around the eloping couple and Doctor Benson, but whether she's a servant or a neighbor is never clarified.  The only relationship that works, even meagerly, is that Eve somehow sees through Benson's crusty defenses and attempts to make him admit his own humanity.  But though this is the closest the film comes to human conflict, it lacks any real payoff. 

The most interesting aspect of BATTLE may be its attempt to provide a space-battle-on-a-budget between Earth rockets and flying saucers. Some of these scenes are risible.  A rocket deliberately collides with a saucer, but they both just spin away without being breached.  At one point the Earth-pilots employ music against the saucers for some damn reason: all I remember is Claude Rains quoting Pythagoras.  But from a purely historical vantage, BATTLE does provide one of the first cinematic realizations of an outer space dogfight.

THE MAGIC SWORD (1962), THE MONOLITH MONSTERS (1957)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: (1) *poor,* (2) *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: (1) *adventure,* (2) *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *metaphysical, cosmological*


Up for consideration this time are works associated with two of the most important names in 1950's metaphenomenal cinema: writer/director/producer Bert I. Gordon and writer/director Jack Arnold.  In the latter case Arnold functions largely as a "hired gun," but in the former, Bert I. Gordon was fully in charge of 1962's THE MAGIC SWORD.  The results, unhappily, were not as some of Gordon's other films reviewed here, like THE CYCLOPS and VILLAGE OF THE GIANTS.

SWORD's script is credited to noir-film specialist Bernard Schoenfeld, whose only other metaphenomenal film was the more celebrated SPACE CHILDREN (directed, incidentally, by Jack Arnold).  SWORD has a fairly winsome setup. George (Gary Lockwood), a young would-be knight, is born to a noble family but is raised to manhood by benign witch Sybill (Estelle Winwood).  He wishes to rescue Princess Helene, his "love at first sight," from the evil wizard Lodac (Basil Rathbone).  Lodac's motives are a little more familial than most evil wizards; he wants to feed Helene to a dragon because the king of the land burned his sister when she was the same age as Helene-- implicitly because Lodac's sister was genuinely guilty of witchcraft, though no one dwells on this point.  We later learn that Lodac has been feeding other maidens to his dragon, so Schoenfeld may have been aware of the sacrificial aspects of maiden-and-dragon myths in general, and of the St. George legend specifically-- on which SWORD is very nominally based.

Lodac has an ally in court: the nasty Sir Branton.  Branton has custody of a magic ring which Lodac desires, so the magician agrees to let Branton rescue Helene in exchange for the ring, so that Branton will then receive both Helene and the usual reward of half of her father's kingdom.  Branton's plan is complicated when George shows up to join the rescue party, along with six other noble knights, who were frozen in Sybil's cave and whom George thawed out to serve as his retinue.  Lodac unleashes seven curses to kill off the seven unwanted knights before they can reach the wizard's castle.  One by one George's brother-knights-- who are from nations other than George's English locale-- are killed off by such curses as a giant ogre, a quicksand pit, and a woman whose beauty is the disguise for an ugly hag (Maila Nurmi, aka "Vampira").  One of the oddest deaths is that of the Irish knight Patrick, who even in dying saves George by what Lodac describes as "the power of his faith"-- the only overt Christian reference in the film, and one I found jarring amid all the wild fantasy.

Naturally George makes it to the wizard's castle, though thanks to the meddling of his foster mother he loses his magical weapons and is captured by Lodac.  This misfortune gives Helene the chance to reciprocate his love before she's lined up to be the dragon's next meal.  Sybill redeems herself in helping George re-arm himself to fight the dragon and for good measure finishes off Lodac as well.  The happy ending is so happy that by some unspecified grace the six slain knights are all brought back to life.

SWORD's simple FX, mostly supplied by makeup or puppetry, were nothing that would given Ray Harryhausen any sleepless nights.  I remember vaguely liking SWORD when I saw it at some young age, but while I can easily imagine its FX being charming or frightening to persons in the right mood, I don't think I got much out of them back then, and they didn't do much for me now.  All things considered, despite some pleasing moments-- mostly those involving Winwood's dotty witch-- Schoenfeld's script lacks the heart of the better Harryhausen productions, or for that matter Gordon's previous kid-film outing, the far superior BOY AND THE PIRATES (1960).

In contrast, I remember liking THE MONOLITH MONSTERS quite a bit when I saw it in my youth.  Having been exposed to any number of films about giant ants or apes or dinosaurs, I liked the comparative originality of MONOLITH's menace: meteoritic minerals, whose crystalline facets expanded on exposure to earthly H2O.  Their menace was at once pitless and motiveless: they would grow into titanic Babel-like towers, which would then collapse under their own weight, and scatter their pieces into new territory, like lethal seed-pods.  Like any other unthinking organism, the monolith-minerals were utterly unconcerned about anything that happened to be in their path.  In addition, the deadly crystals automatically leech silicon from living forms, causing their bodies to petrify.

What I now notice, though, is that while the mineral menace is still impressive, the so-called "human interest" is, well, kind of inert.  Director Jack Arnold's two famous "desert noir" films-- 1953's IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE and 1955's TARANTULA-- use the same police-procedural plotting seen in MONOLITH. There's a slow, gradual introduction of the metaphenomenal whatsit into some low-key, humdrum setting-- then some catastrophe, shrouded in ambiguity-- and finally, the revelation of the metaphenomenality's true nature, at which point the viewpoint characters labor mightily to find some solution.  However, the characters of Arnold's desert noirs are simple but reasonably compelling.  In MONOLITH, for which Arnold has only a story credit while the final screenplay is credited to Norman Jolley and Robert M. Fresco, the characters are no more than ciphers, drearily fulfilling their roles-- the hero, the hero's girlfriend, the innocent victims, the gruff newspaperman who gets his wish to see something break the monotony of small-town life.  I'm not necessarily assuming that Arnold's final input made the difference, since MONOLITH's screenplay writer Fresco was Arnold's collaborator on the TARANTULA script.  But for whatever reason, the human characters don't provide the pathos needed to counter the grim neutrality of the monolith minerals.

I will note that the opening of MONOLITH provides some interesting symbolic considerations of the meteors, regarding them as both "bits of the universe" and "shooting stars on which wishes have been made."  However, these metaphors are not developed during the remainder of the film.

FREDDY VS. JASON (2003)

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


At present FREDDY VS. JASON appears to be the swan song for both franchises, not including remakes. I personally would not mind seeing their stories end on this apocalyptic note.

In contrast to the HALLOWEEN franchise, which boasted one exceptional film and then descended into general mediocrity, the ELM ST and FRIDAY THE 13TH franchises have an organic feel to them, incorporating new elements as various raconteurs came and went.   Both franchises had their share of bad entries, but even the inferior stories show some appreciation for the mythology created for each monstrous presence.

FREDDY VS. JASON, directed by Hong Kong film-alumnus Ronny Yu, is not long on psychological insight.  Still, the scripters' zeal to give props to both "titans of terror" in their crossover results in some insights into the psychological makeup of the two monsters.

For instance, based on the interaction of Jason and Freddy here, one might characterize them as "the terror of the child" and the "terror of the parent." 

Jason, ever since he was promoted to starring monster in the second FRIDAY THE 13TH installment, has been depicted as a literally childlike man who imagines that he is killing for his beloved-- and deceased-- mother.  Freddy, even before he was retconned to make him into a literal parent, was a horror born of the mistakes of Springwood's parents, so that Freddy becomes metaphorically identical with his killers.  Though both Jason and Freddy attack primarily teenagers-- who were of course the target audience in the extra-diegetical real world-- Jason kills them for having failed him when he was a child, giving his murderous rampages the intonation of a child's tantrum.  Freddy kills teens in order to feed upon them, and even to incorporate their souls into his ghostly flesh, a pop-cultural version of Saturn devouring his children.

The first half of FREDDY VS. JASON is fairly forgettable, in that most of it is pure set-up. For once the adults of Springwood-- who are no longer seen as inhabiting a childless community, as they were in FREDDY'S DEAD-- come up with an effective, if not especially moral, way of inhibiting Freddy's power.  Using the power of parental censure, they strike the Freddy case from the records and imprison the few kids that remember Krueger to asylums.  Apparently someone among them-- possibly Campbell, father of teenaged Lori-- came to understand that Krueger's power depended on fear, and that he would lose power if people ceased to believe in him.

In his dream -realm Freddy has endured this marginalization for some unspecified time, with no references as to how he came back from FREDDY'S DEAD.  After a long search he discovers his perfect catspaw, the undead Jason Voorhees, currently in a death-like state from his last appearance.  By taking on the image of Jason's beloved mother-- far from the first time Freddy impersonates a parental figure-- the dream-demon impels the hulking Jason to seek out Springwood.  Once Jason arrives, he begins killing at will, and accidentally foments the legend of Freddy once more.  However, once Freddy's fear-based powers have been restored, he wants to be rid of his catspaw-- whom he terms a "bad dog"-- because Jason keeps killing Freddy's victims.  Freddy causes Jason's consciousness-- such as it is-- to enter Freddy's dream-world, where Freddy eventually takes control.  Borrowing a motif from the eighth FRIDAY THE 13TH, evil Krueger even manages to revert Jason back to the helpless child who supposedly died in the first film.  I suppose I would be a dirty spoilsport to remind anyone that the second film establishes that Jason did not originally die in Crystal Lake, though to be sure he does perish in the general area of the lake back in THE FINAL CHAPTER.

A character from POGO once said, "when two dogs fight over a bone, do you ever see the bone fight?"  Here the bone, or bones, in question are the teen denizens of Springwood. Lori gathers about five like-minded teens together in order to ferret the mystery of the twin terrors besieging their city. (These characters are the weakest link in FVJ: in contrast to some characters from both franchises, none of these young'uns are remotely compelling.)  Once Lori's group manages to figure out who's who, and researches their weaknesses, the film finally shifts into overdrive for the last half hour, as the teens take Jason back to Crystal Lake so that he'll have "the home field advantage" in his fight with Freddy.  It more or less works, and for good measure Lori is able to drag a more or less mortal Freddy into the real world, where he and Jason have an epic "claw vs. machete" battle.

Though the all-out, Hong Kong-style action is inventive, what I like even better is that in this incarnation Freddy and Jason become the Dracula and Frankenstein of the eighties and afterward.  Jason is the Monster of Frankenstein, lumbering and pitiless, shrugging off almost every assault via sheer strength and near-invulnerability.  Freddy, as much a shape-shifter as Dracula, proves far more agile and clever about wearing down his brutish foe.  The only minor deficit of the Big Fight is that it doesn't find any way to reflect the monsters' respective parent/child orientations, which is relegated strictly to the set-up portion of the film. 

Another neglected notion is that both characters root their monstrous nature in rejection by the normal-- Jason for being a physical freak, Freddy for being "the son of a hundred maniacs."  There's even a sequence in which Freddy probes Jason's mind for weaknesses, and witnesses for himself how young Jason was tormented at camp.  But if Freddy remembers any of his own early torments, he keeps them to himself.

Though the climax allows for potential closure in case one or both monsters never came back within this ongoing series, there's also a coda that plays to those audience-members who want their monsters to be truly undying.

JUNGLE MOON MEN (1955)

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


I speculate that the only reason actor Johnny Weismuller got to play "Jungle Adventurer Johnny Weismuller" was because producer Sam Katzman had presold theaters on his three last "Jungle Jim" cheapies.  Rumor has it that Katzman lost the right to adapt the "Jungle Jim" comic strip, so the last three films in the series starred Weismuller as "himself," up to the usual jungle hijinks.  Johnny even kept Jungle Jim's pet chimp Tamba.

JUNGLE MOON MEN, the second of the three Weismuller-as-himself outings, is a little more imaginative than the usual potted-plant peregrinations, even though the imagination has been borrowed from H. Rider Haggard's novel SHE.  The "moon men" of the title are not-- as would have been fitting for the mid-50's-- aliens from our lunar satellite, but a tribe of pygmies from the realm of "Baku," who worship a moon goddess named "Oma." Their actions become important to Jungle Johnny when a poisoned pygmy dart slays a member of a normal-sized tribe of Africans-- that is, "Africans by way of Polynesia"-- thus causing the tribe's chief to declare war on the pygmies.  Jungle Johnny seeks to bring the pygmies' leader, the aforesaid goddess, to justice in order to prevent further hostilities.

The nature of the pygmies' goddess causes me to label one of this film's functions "metaphysical," strange as that may sound when applied to a routine jungle-adventure film.  But where most jungle-films were satisfied to recycle the old schtick of the "white goddess" who's actually some modern-day Caucasian castaway, Oma is at least a supernormal entity.  She claims to have been alive since the era of ancient Egypt-- hence the Rider Haggard comparison-- and that she remains alive because her people discovered the secret of eternal life.  She invokes two pagan Egyptian deities in her story, just as Haggard did in SHE and its sequels.  Oma claims that all the rest of her people were destroyed by the sun-god Ra, who was jealous of their attainment of immortality. Whether a real Egyptian god truly existed is left up for grabs, but Oma is definitely vulnerable to the radiation of the sun.

She was able to continue her life by fleeing to a series of underground caves, to which she was led by "Osiris, god of destruction." Some scripter desperately needed an Egyptian mythology-book! At most one could say that the real Osiris was a god of death, but Anubis and other death-deities were more intimately associated with the aspect of after-death burial-- which in a sense is what Oma has done, "burying" herself in order to escape the sun's rays. Oma proposes to Johnny that he becomes her new high priest and give her the nookey she needs.  In the end Jungle Johnny exposes Oma to the sun, and she dissolves-- again, roughly along the same lines as the priestess Ayesha in the first SHE novel.

Though MOON MEN offers only bargain-basement thrills, it's more visually interesting than most of the JUNGLE JIM oeuvre, in large part thanks to the pygmies, led by Billy "WIZARD OF OZ" Curtis.  Though the sight of Curtis trying to drive a jeep is hardly great comedy, it's a distinct relief from the antic of Tamba the Chimp.  Jungle Johnny's tagalongs include a lady archaeologist, her rather dull would-be boyfriend, and the usual nasty white adventurer, out to swipe diamonds from the pygmies.  This is one of the few films directed by Charles S. Gould, who logged far more credits as an assistant director on many classic Universal films, including DRACULA, WEREWOLF OF LONDON, and THE GHOST OF FRANKENSTEIN.  That experience may be the reason that MOON MEN looks crisp and professional despite its meager budget.