ROCKULA (1990)

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


SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

I hadn't watched ROCKULA in years, and my memories of it were not good, but I gave it another look anyway. The film was directed and co-written by Luca Bercovici, who had his greatest success with 1984's GHOULIES and its three sequels. None of the GHOULIES films are especially good, but they're pure poetry next to ROCKULA.

I have to assume that Bercovici's took his main inspiration from comic horror flicks like YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, but ROCKULA doesn't understand anything about the vampire-story subgenre. In the setup scenes, we learn that Ralph, a vampire who looks like a twenty-something mortal, is actually over 400 years old, as is his only living relative, his mother Phoebe, with whom he still lives. Neither of them seem to suffer any of the needs or vulnerabilities of vampires, although they do display fangs on the odd occasion.

It's not Ralph's fault he still lives with his mom: he seems to be really, really unlucky at love. Centuries ago he met his one true love, Mona, but before they could be joined, Mona was killed by a pirate with a rhinestone peg-leg. Since that first evil encounter, Mona keeps getting reincarnated in a new body every 22 years. But apparently the Rhinestone Pirate does as well, since he appears at each reincarnation to kill Mona off, before Ralph can know the joy of sex.

It's modern times, and Ralph doesn't even want to stir out of the house, for fear of meeting Mona again and watching her die. Eventually, after talking to his own reflection for a while (don't ask), he ventures forth, and runs into Mona-- or rather, she runs him down with her car when he steps into the street. Again Ralph tries to avoid the cursed girl, but when he finds out that she's a club singer, he finds himself moved to form his own band, of which he is the lead singer-- Rockula!

However, though the Pirate doesn't immediately appear, Ralph has a rival in Mona's ex-boyfriend Stanley, a huckster who sells expensive funeral plots. Stanley observes his ex spending time with Ralph and consults a psychic, the suggestively named "Madame Ben Wa." The psychic tells Stanley that the only way he can defeat Ralph is to dress up as a pirate, compete with rhinestone pegleg. Stanley doesn't plan to kill Mona, though, only to deep-freeze her until she loves him again.

The comedy scenes are lame despite the efforts of the actors, but the lame jokes provide some relief from the even worse music. At times ROCKULA looks like a long music video punctuated by some narrative digressions, and I suspect that the movie was designed with the notion of pushing the music, credited to none other than Hilary Bercovici, brother of Luca.

My SPOILERS is for the film's only interesting psychological motif. It turns out that "Madame Ben Wa" is none other than Ralph's mom Phoebe, who has never wanted her little boy to marry and thus leave her. Implicitly-- though the script glosses over this point-- she's been the sole source of the "pirate curse" for centuries, suborning some schmuck like Stanley to kill off Mona at the appropriate time, so that she could continue living with her precious boy. For what it's worth, Phoebe-- whose name connotes "the moon," even as one derivation of "Mona" does-- isn't planning to seduce her son a la MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE; she just wants him to keep him in her eternal orbit. Yet Bercovici doesn't really play fair with the Big Reveal, since Phoebe, despite acting weird at times, doesn't really act in a way that might throw suspicion on her.

All that said, though, I must admit if there's a little goofy symbolism in the psychic's name. Is Ralph, in a symbolic sense at least, an object she keeps inside her, for her satisfaction? But this bad pun is about the only time the film aspires to the Mel Brooks level of smutty jokes.

ADDENDA: Although the film does end up with a comic battle between Ralph and Stanley, neither character shows a high level of dynamicity, so this is a subcombative comedy, not unlike the later CANNIBAL WOMEN IN THE AVOCADO JUNGLE OF DEATH.

STAR TREK: "THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE" (1967)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological*

THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE is another "terror-of-technology" episode, though there's no attempt to imagine the nature of artificial intelligence, as in THE CHANGELING. The titular machine, sometimes called "the Planet Killer," is a gargantuan, nearly invulnerable cylinder that travels through space, breaking up planets and consuming their remains, regardless of whether or not the planets were inhabited. Kirk and company theorize that it was some alien race's Ultimate Weapon that went berserk, perhaps killing its makers and then continuing to follow its pre-programmed course of destruction.

The psychological interest here lies not in the machine, but in one of its victims. As the Enterprise ventures into a solar system devastated by an unknown force, they find one survivor aboard a shattered Federation ship: Commodore Matt Decker, a friend of Kirk's. Decker has almost been unhinged by watching his ship crippled and his crew destroyed by the Planet Killer, so while Kirk and Scott attempt to salvage the wrecked ship, Decker is sent back to the Enterprise. This proves to be an error on Kirk's part, for once Decker's on a functioning ship, he displays an  Ahab-like determination to destroy the Planet Killer. He assumes command and tries to pit the Enterprise's inadequate resources against the space-behemoth.

DOOMSDAY is another of the series' "white-knuckle" episodes, concerned with the imminent peril of the mammoth menace and the possibility that an obsessed Starfleet officer may get everyone killed as a result of his own desire for a "do-over," or even a displaced desire for suicide, to join the dead crew he feels that he failed. William Windom gives a stellar performance as the obsessed Decker, though both Shatner and Nimoy play off him well. Decker seems to be the first indication that even a man who rises to the lofty position of starship-commander may prove unequal to the task; prior to this episode, the only psychologically flawed Starfleet officer was Ben Finney of COURT MARTIAL,  and he was explicitly sent around the bend because he didn't realize his dream of becoming a ship-captain. There won't be too many Decker-like officers in future episodes, but the Roddenberry-verse always leaves open the possibility that power-- or even a lack of power-- can corrupt.

STAR TREK: "THE APPLE" (1967)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *superior*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*


Despite some obscure points in the script, "The Apple" is a huge improvement on earlier TREK scripts that dealt with similar subject matter. This may be because Max Erlich's script managed to meld two established TREK-tropes: the problems of tyrannical computers ("Return of the Archons") and of the stagnation of a bucolic existence ("This Side of Paradise.") Neither of those societies seemed particularly desirable-- the latter was too uneventful, while the former was too harshly legalistic, broken only by weird festivals of violent activity. "Apple," however, makes its stagnant society pleasing by appealing to the Christian ideal of unsullied innocence.

Kirk and his crew, prompted by other starships reporting anomalous "sensor readings" about an unexplored world, investigate with a larger-than-normal landing-party-- Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Chekhov, and several redshirts, most of whom will be dead by episode's end. In terms of its lush vegetative life, the planet seems to be a reborn Garden of Eden. However, some objects seems to work like booby-traps: a thorn-shooting flower kills one redshirt, an explosive rock slays another. There's no final verdict on whether these objects are the creation of the malign mechanism that rules the planet: they seem to have been tossed out to ramp up the danger to the crewmen, not because they have in purpose in the design of the being that controls everything.

Thorn-flowers and rock-bombs might not have had any place in the original Eden, but Kirk and Comapny soon get a taste of Old Testament fury when their unseen opponent hurls lightning bolts from the sky, killing yet another redshirt. (The one redshirt who's never in serious danger is Landon, a young blonde yeoman whose romantic relationship with Chekhov is important to the plot.)

In due course the Kirk Krew gets the lowdown from the planet's natives: crimson-skinned humanoids who go about dressed in South Seas-like attire and call themselves "the Feeders of Vaal." Though not immortal, the Feeders know neither age nor sickness, thanks to the rigidly controlled environment provided by Vaal, an ancient computer-system buried deep in the earth. Vaal's only outward aspect is a cave-mouth carved into the head of a serpent, but it's soon clear to the crew that Vaal doesn't like trespassers in his domain. The computer makes no more immediate attacks on the crew and allows them to stay in the Feeders' village, but this may be because the machine has decided that the orbiting Enterprise is the greater threat. The computer fixes a tractor-beam on the ship, threatening to drag it down to destruction, and for the next day or so commanding officer Scott is stuck in the midst of a deadly game of tug-o-war.

(It's a good thing Vaal is so distracted, because given his powers, he probably could have zapped the whole Kirk Krew with lightning while they slept in one of the Feeders' grass huts.)

While the ship's fate lies in doubt, Spock and McCoy debate the societal status of the Feeders. McCoy takes the position that the Feeders' culture has stagnated, in part because Vaal doesn't allow them to mate unless they need a "replacement" for someone killed by accidental death.  Spock, always a little dubious about Earthmen's need to convert everyone to their way of life, argues that the primitives have found their ideal way of life and that the Federation ought to leave well enough alone. Both arguments are academic, since Kirk will seek Vaal's destruction to save his ship, but it's one of the better philosophical oppositions of the series.

In the end, Kirk, having seen the natives delivering some ambiguous "food" to the computer's mouth, deduces that his people can weaken the mechanism by keeping it from being fed. Here, too, it helps that Vaal again strikes a provoking blow, sending his followers to slay the intruders. (I'll note in passing that Landon gets one of the few TREK-scenes in which a female crewman kicks some ass, even if all she gets is a single high-kick.) In the end, Vaal is defeated and the Feeders must learn to live without a god, just as the people of the Federation (usually) seem to.

Erlich's idea of Vaal fascinates me. Given the South Seas attire of the natives, my best guess is that he named the computer-god after various "volcano-gods" seen in Polynesian melodramas. These stories usually show natives trying to appease their rumbling deity by tossing one of their people into the volcano's lava-filled mouth. It's possible that some early version of the script did have the Feeders hurling chosen victims into Vaal's crater-- though neither that sort of sacrifice, nor that of the ambiguous foodstuffs actually used, would seem to be of much use to a computer. Erlich may have dropped that angle because it would have conflicted with the idea that Vaal was trying to keep the population stable and unchanging. Vaal's serpentine cave-face is probably conceived as a way to distance him from the image of the Judeo-Christian deity. Vaal is the Serpent and thus a deceiver, not a real creator. Kirk and his crew are the ones who actually present the "Apple of Good and Evil" (as Kirk calls it) to the static primitives, but in doing so the star-travelers are liberators, and Vaal is less a creator-god than an old pagan dragon, demanding sacrifices from an unwitting populace.

BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA (1986), VAMPIRES (1996)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*

BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, though it's a cult-film now, failed at the box-office and so marked the general decline of director John Carpenter's fortunes as a commercial film director.

Much though I enjoyed it, I don't have a lot to say about the film. When I saw it in theatrical release, its breakneck speed somewhat annoyed me. It seemed to me that Carpenter didn't want to spend any time justifying his wild story of Chinese wizards and martial arts cults, for fear of breaking the effervescent, take-everything-on-its-own terms pulp-aesthetic. After repeated viewings, I've gotten used to the pacing, and can enjoy Carpenter's attempt to keep some sort of fantastic apparitions in front of the viewers' eyes at every time. Despite a downbeat, if slightly ambivalent, ending, TROUBLE shows a visual creativity and a comic flair that resembles nothing else in the director's oeuvre, least of his preceding hit with TROUBLE-star Kurt Russell, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK.

I have a dim recollection that Carpenter once claimed he was sending up a species of Hollywood adventure-films, particularly GUNGA DIN, in which Caucasian heroes were seen cutting an easy swath through armies of little brown opponents. This coheres with the representation of lead hero Jack Burton (Russell): almost all of the Asian characters, into whose feuding world Burton stumbles, can fight better than he can. When Burton does manage to give a good account of himself, at least some of his victory stems from dumb luck. He's still identifiable enough to be a hero, rather than the spoof of a hero-- but of course Russell's dead-on John Wayne emulation always undercuts the adventure somewhat. In Kim Cattrall, Victor Wong and Dennis Dun the star gets much more appealing allies this time, in contrast to ESCAPE, while James Hong stands out as Carpenter's best villain.

1996's VAMPIRES (I'll pass on using the possessive "John Carpenter's") is like BIG TROUBLE an ensemble-like film in which one major character leads a bunch of lesser sidekicks against a common enemy. In my mini-review of the original book by John Steakley, I found that the author went so overboard with his nattering about the male bonding between the kickass vampire killers that he neglected to make their battle against a "super-vampire" compelling. Carpenter seems to have kept about the first three-fourths of the book's main plot and deep-sixed most of the rambling asides I didn't like.

This time, while main hero Jack Crow still works with a bunch of male vamp-hunters, most of them aren't given much to do in the non-action scenes, which is all to the good. The one exception is the character of Montoya, who becomes Crow's primary buddy. James Woods and Daniel Baldwin make all the "cowboy samurai" stuff go down easy, and Carpenter ups the ante on the action-scenes that the original author neglected. That said, no one in the film is particularly appealing, even within the sphere of the "tough professional" ethos being evoked here. VAMPIRES also failed to "stake" any claims at the American box office, and despite an energetic Woods performance, doesn't seem to have taken on cult status as yet.

STAR TREK: "THE CHANGELING," "MIRROR, MIRROR" (1967)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

That unit is defective. Its thinking is chaotic. Absorbing it unsettled me.-- Nomad, on the experience of probing the female mind.

This quote would seem to prove that even robots inevitably share their creators' beliefs as to the superior logic of the male gender.

Technically the "changeling" of the title isn't at all like the figure from folklore, since the "child" sent forth by an Earth-scientist-- Nomad, an exploratory robot-probe-- actually comes back to his "people," crossbred with an alien device that makes Nomad extremely perilous to Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise. One might compare Nomad more to humans who travel in fairy lands and then come back radically altered, whether inhumanly young or possessed of inhuman powers.

Like "What Are Little Girls Made of?," this Trek-episode seems devoted to the proposition that artificial life has no more claim on accurate perceptions than emotional living beings. Whereas the show's first season is rife with stories involving contagion by aliens or mutated humans, Nomad presents a new menace: the doomsday machine. Nomad's innocuous original mission is accidentally programmed into a mission of destruction, as the relentless machine judges all organic life-forms and finds them "imperfect" by its lofty non-living standards. Only its deference to its supposed "father," Captain Kirk, keeps the ultra-powerful machine from wrecking the ship, as it has earlier destroyed billions of (disposable) lives in a star-system.

"Changeling" is a strong thriller-episode, refreshing in the economy of its single premise: how can one use logic to defeat logic?

"Mirror Mirror," fourth episode of the second season, remains a perennial fan-favorite. It's certainly a lot of fun to watch four duty-bound members of the Enterprise-- Kirk, McCoy, Scott and Uhura-- encounter a Bizarro-world version of their universe: one in which the Johnsonian "Great Society" of the Federation has evolved into a merciless, Mongol-like Empire, devoted to ruthless conquest. Of course, it might put a damper on some of the fun to recall that some cultures contemporaneous with the show's original run DID think of America as being a merciless empire. I don't think Gene Roddenberry would have agreed with those voices back in the day, for he seemed to feel that American-style democracy provided the best of all possible worlds. Still, "Mirror Mirror's" script, by two-time TREK writer Jerome Bixby, may have been designed with Roddenberry's political beliefs in mind. While it might have been impossible to state on the show that democracy wasn't all it was cracked up to be, an alternate-world story could show that even the best of political systems could be corrupted-- and more, that the corruptions would eventually prove transitory.

Aside from the assorted thrills of the "good guys" to get out of the Bizarro-verse, the script also seems designed to play to another favored Roddenberry trope: that of the powerful man who attracts a woman to serve him-- though not necessarily a wife. The character of Marlena, the "captain's woman" to Bad Kirk, is a woman who, despite being a professional at her starship-job, chooses to advance by sleeping with powerful men. Like Bad Spock, Bad Marlena is for the most part won over the essential decency of Good Kirk, though his lovemaking abilities may have something to do with Marlena's conversion as well.

I noted that in the first season, Kirk isn't nearly the "Don Juan" he would later become, though Roddenberry clearly favored the image of powerful male seducers. "Mirror Mirror" seems the first episode that truly casts Kirk in the role of such a perpetual seducer of women.

ON THE BEACH (1959)

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

"You're about to say something serious," says Donna Anderson's character to Anthony Perkins' character, "I wish you wouldn't."

After watching Stanley Kramer's version of Nevil Shute's bestseller, I wish that I might have said something similar to Mr. Kramer. That's not to say that the original novel was any improvement on the film, though reportedly Shute didn't like the film. Though I never had read, and probably never will read, the Shute novel, I suspect that it shares the film's attempt at "high seriousness" about the audience's fears of a nuclear armageddon.

Aside from serving as a producer on THE 5,000 FINGERS OF DOCTOR T, the 1959 ON THE BEACH seems to be arch-naturalist Kramer's only flirtation with metaphenomenal cinema. In my view BEACH shows simply that Kramer, whatever his altruistic motives, was unable to make a compelling film on this type of subject, and should have stuck to his more naturalistic proclivities.

I came away from a re-viewing of BEACH not with any deep feelings about the atomic bomb, but with a deep sense of boredom, from watching a bunch of Hollywood actors sit around looking glum about the impending doomsday.

Not that they don't have reason: most of humanity has been eradicated by a nuclear catastrophe-- though not necessarily war-- and the last survivors have assembled on the continent of Australia. However, fallout clouds are advancing on mankind's last redoubt, and so the survivors have to take stock of their lives before they come to an inevitable end.

However, the characters are pretty damn boring, making them far from fitting representatives for mankind's twilight. I don't imagine Shute's work-- aimed at a melodrama-loving bestseller audience-- gave Kramer much to work with. But almost all the characters-- Peck, Astaire, Perkins-- sound pretty much the same. Ava Gardner steals what show there is to steal as the alcoholic would-be lover of Peck, but in the end she's pretty boring too.

As low-rent as Roger Corman's apocalyptic flicks were, I think that any of them-- even TEENAGE CAVEMAN-- probably have more of substance than this bloated Hollywood valentine to the inevitability of death.

ZORRO THE GAY BLADE (1981)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*


I hadn't watched ZORRO THE GAY BLADE since it appeared in theaters. I found it fairly amusing back then, but not so much in a "home theater."

BLADE may be one of those comedies that just doesn't work that well when one doesn't have the "infectious laughter" factor. I remember that the line "He looked like-- like a poof!" worked in the theater, but not so well without a mass audience reaction.

BLADE followed quickly on the heels of George Hamilton's successful LOVE AT FIRST BITE, but since the 1981 film was also the last above-the-title film for the actor, I have to assume BLADE didn't do nearly as well. It may be that Zorro simply wasn't a hot topic for the early 80s as Dracula had been for the late 70s; BITE is a better comedy than BLADE but not by that much.

In the 21st century BLADE's repertoire of gay-jokes and Mexican-dialect jokes probably wouldn't play very well. I find them silly but innocuous. They're not as bad as the borscht-belt stuff that came out of the 1960s-- even in good comedies like GET SMART-- but the BLADE jokes are fairly trivial, like George Hamilton saying "the peoples" instead of "the people."

The gay schtick is more central to the story. Hamilton plays Don Diego de la Vega, but this time he's the son of the original Zorro, the role filled by a fellow named Cesar in the original Zorro sequel. 
As in most of the films that remake the original 1920 film, Diego is a master swordsman trained in the schools of Spain, who returns to the hacienda of his father in California and finds that a military dictatorship now oppresses the people. However, when this version of Diego arrives, he's informed by a faithful servant that the elder de la Vega-- now deceased-- played Zorro twenty years earlier. This inspires Diego to don the black mask and crusade against the petty-- and puny-- dictator, Esteban (Ron Leibman). Then Diego is injured, so he's forced to bring in a ringer, his long-unseen brother Ramon. It happens that when Ramon left California he ended up serving in the British Royal Navy, which apparently not only inflicted on him not only an effete British accent but an effete personality, with a penchant for "gay" colors. Thus, when Ramon doubles as Zorro, he affects costumes all in white or shocking pink. Nevertheless, though Ramon prefers the whip to the sword (hmmm), he proves as adept as Diego at confounding Esteban and his soldiers.

In a twist not derived from earlier Zorro iterations, this time Diego's romantic interest is not of Spanish descent: rather, lead-female Charlotte (Lauren Hutton) is a Caucasian American who's come to California to stump for political reforms to benefit the people. Hutton has an appealing scene in which she tries to confess her love to the Ramon-Zorro, who has to endeavor to keep his pose without revealing that his interests really don't swing her way. (To be sure, one never does see Ramon go after any guys, which might have made eighties audiences a little queasy in the midst of the light entertainment.)

On balance, though the humor is merely fair, some of the sociological observations between Diego and Charlotte, and the gay character is at least one portrayed with verve and daring despite his "whoops ducky" attitude.  Despite being a comedy, the film mounts its duels and chase-scenes better than a lot of straight Zorro films, and the effective music was apparently culled from earlier work by the respected Max Steiner.