THE TIME TRAVELERS (1964)

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

Quick personal note: THE TIME TRAVELERS was one of the few 1960s SF-films that I saw in a movie theater, though not in its original 1964 release. To the best of my recollection, I saw it bundled together with two others films—probably THE GORGON and THE VALLEY OF GWANGI—in a triple feature that played a neighborhood theater, probably around 1967-68.

Thus my opinion of the film is partly informed by nostalgia. It’s not that it was ever a great favorite in the sense that I sought to see it any time it played on TV, nor did I add to my video collection once I had the chance to do so. Even at a young age I didn't deem it an equal to the classic SF-films of the preceding decade, such as THE WAR OF THEWORLDS and THIS ISLAND EARTH. Yet though I was probably catching whatever TV-broadcasts I could even by 1967, I have the feeling that TIME TRAVELERS was unusual in presenting a large number of “gosh-wow” wonder-elements in one package—a time-space warp, a post-nuclear civilization on future-Earth, radiation-created mutants menacing said civilization, a generations-ship that the surviving civilized Earth-people intend to use to voyage ot Alpha Centauri—and lots and lots of androids. This was a pretty good array of wondrous elements for an independent film with a pretty limited budget.

The film’s opening could have been set in the 1920s as easily as the 1960s. On an unnamed campus, a trio of scientists labor on an experimental time-viewing device. Somehow their device opens a time-space portal. The scientists— young man Steve, older mentor Von Steiner, and young lady scientist Carol—hesitate to explore the portal. However, dimwitted comedy-relief Danny, a technican from the local power plant, steps through the opening, entering a barren post-nuclear landscape, later revealed to be Eart circa 2071 AD. This forces the scientists to follow him. Fierce mutants, deformed by radiation, attack the time-travelers. However, the travelers are rescued by a member of a hidden civilization, who commands a troop of androids who have eyes but no other prominent features.

According to Varno (John Hoyt), the de facto leader of the hidden civilization, he and his people are the last normal human beings, mostly descended from scientists who survived the nuclear devastation. The mutants are the descendants of the military men who went to war, though the mutants blame the scientists for the world’s fate. Beccause food is scarce in the future, their only hope is to escape Earth is a generations-ship that will carry a complement of normal people all the way to Alpha Centauii. However, the rocket can only transport so many people—who will sleep in suspended animation while their androids tend the ship—and so Varno and his people can't take the time-travelers along. The travelers'

only hope is to use the future’s advanced technology to get back to their own time, even though that world is doomed to be destroyed.

Director Ib Melchior provided the script, which, aside from the nuclear references, would not have been out of place in a 1920s SF-magazine: exactly the sort of thing that the film’s cameo guest-star Forrest J. Ackerman would have grown up reading. All of the characters are paper-thin, the comedy-relief is lame, and some of the futuristic gimmicks wouldn’t have looked out of place in a 1950s TV commercial for Westinghouse products. Melchior even drags in a standard stage magician’s trick to stand in for having a person travel through space-time. Yet I don’t think it’s entirely nostalgia that gives me a sense of gravitas regarding humankind’s struggle to escape its own fate. One of the most effective moments in the script—though it passes without much comment—is when Varno explains that his people plan to launch the generations ship from the site of a mammoth atomic crater: new life springing from old death, as it were. More central to the plot is the “bitter necessity” that will force the scientists to leave behind the time-travelers to conserve space on the rocketship.

There are also slight indications that the scientist-cabal is far from the apex of humanity. Carol, the typical empathetic female, questions their choice to keep the mutants at arm’s length. When she’s told that the mutants won’t make nice, she accepts it, but in one of the underground caves she encounters a deformed, helpless fellow whom a scientist calls a “deviant.”  Carol prevents the hotheaded scientist from executing the intruder, but after she succors the fellow, he disappears from the story-- unless he’s somewhere in the big melee that takes place when the mutants stage an invasion. The melee, by the way, is quite impressive for a tight-budgeted film like this one.

Some time-travel stories, such as BEYOND THE TIME BARRIER, allow for the possibility that the past can be changed, but I rather like how TIME TRAVELERS refuses to give the modern world that  “out.”  The scientists’ escape-project is destroyed, but the providential advent of the time-travelers makes possible the survival of humanity, albeit due to a whole lot of dumb luck. As a coda to this happy ending, Melchior repeats a lot of rapid-fire key scenes from the film to depict the strangeness of the temporal loop—and I must admit that he succeeded with the young me, as I felt my mind blown as much here as by anything in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY.  

THE STILL OF THE NIGHT (1982)

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *poor*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*


I have the dim recollection that I once read a Robert Benton interview in which he claimed that his psycho-thriller STILL OF THE NIGHT might have been a box-office success in its day. What he should have done was to re-jigger the script he wrote with David Newman -- Benton's previous collaborator on both the 1978 SUPERMAN and the earlier Broadway comedy based on him-- so that co-star Meryl Streep was the killer. This struck me as singularly foolish thinking, to expect that the audience could be swayed by this one change.

STILL doesn't have a very remarkable script, but to the extent that it works at all, it's because Meryl Streep is not the killer, and psychiatrist Sam Rice (Roy Scheider) has to prove she's not a killer in order to satisfy their common romantic arc. The two leads provide serviceable performances, but Benton-- who loads the film with references to famous Alfred Hitchcock tropes-- shows no more understanding of the way Hitchcock's stories worked *as stories* than he understood anything about the Superman mythos. This may be shown by the fact that toward the end Streep's character has a "big reveal" about the nature of her relationship with her quarreling mother and father-- and the supposed "reveal" turns out to be a whole lotta nothing (aside from its reference to VERTIGO).

From the glacial pace of the direction, I think Benton had some idea that he was "above" the crude excitement of the psycho-thriller: the actual "psycho" here isn't even as interesting as the sex-killer from Hitchcock's FRENZY. The only scenes that are slightly compelling take place as Rice "re-imagines" some weird nightmares experienced by a patient. However, though the imagery is creepy-- a weird little girl with a teddy bear, for instance-- the images are clearly straightforward representations of things the dreamer has seen in real life, which marks STILL as being strongly influenced by Sir Alfred's SPELLBOUND. Thus, the dreams in this film, like those in the earlier one, register in the naturalistic mode.

REAL MEN (1987)

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


REAL MEN was the only directorial effort of Dennis Feldman, who is best known for writing such formula action-films as THE GOLDEN CHILD and the 1999 VIRUS. It's one of those comedies that some viewers will swear to be outrageously funny, while it leaves others cold. My reaction was lukewarm at best.

Feldman's script makes no pretensions to making his scenario even mildly believable. An agent of the FBI has just made contact with an alien visitor, but said agent is killed by an assassin. Despite the agent's death, somehow he communicates to his superiors the essence of the alien's needs. In exchange for a very minor item-- a simple glass of water-- the alien is willing to give Earth one of two major gifts: either a "big gun" capable of blowing up a planet, or a "good package" that can help the government eradicate a major pollution menace. The good agents of the FBI want the "good package," but there's a rogue element in the agency that wants the gun, and so do various Russian agents.

Because the rogue element has left the good FBI drastically lacking in resources, the chief assigns one of his loyal agents, Nick Pirandello (James Belushi), to seek out a man who looks exactly like the murdered agent, so that the substitute can finesse the trade without incident. However, the lookalike is wimpy civilian Bob Wilson (John Ritter), so Pirandello must find a way to draft the unwilling citizen to serve the FBI's ends.

REAL MEN is little more than a basic buddy-comedy, in which Pirandello manipulates the confused Wilson into serving his purposes. The only interesting psychological motif in the story is that once Wilson does become committed to the mission, he takes on a macho attitude-- just as Pirandello, not coincidentally, begins to decline in his balls-to-the-wall masculinity. This comes about in part because the agent encounters a sadistic torturess-- apparently not one of the opposing agents-- who forces him to confess his vulnerability and weakness to her. However, like most of the jokes in the film, this one doesn't go anywhere. Feldman's script shoots for broad irony, not least with the basic setup of the aliens-who-just-want-a-glass-of-water. Yet the story fails as an irony, largely because it's too invested in the idea of giving wimpy Wilson a macho upgrade so that he can trounce bullies and such.

Neither the heroes nor the villains utilize any marvelous weapons against one another, though I've decided that the villains' desire to acquire a marvelous weapon lends them a marvelous phenomenality, even though the closest they personally get to the metaphenomenal is a lame joke where some of the bad agents dress up like clowns for no particular reason.

MESSAGE FROM SPACE (1978)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, cosmological*

Sometimes nostalgia mellows my opinion of a given film. I may still be conscious that the film is inadequate, but it may come to seem like a time-capsule of a particular period.

MESSAGE FROM SPACE gets no such break from me. The late 1970s and early 1980s saw an assortment of lame attempts to duplicate the success of Lucas's STAR WARS, and though none of them succeeded, a few of them are worth watching just as curiosities, like the not-entirely-derivative HUMANOID. However, in this 1978 film MESSAGE is not even medium.

Though there are elements of MESSAGE that were clearly patterned on the Lucas work-- particularly the movie's supposedly cute robot-- the film's immediate model was probably the assorted "sci-fi superhero" TV-shows popular in Japan since the 1960s, since such shows are almost inevitably about a young man, or a group of young teens, acquiring super-powers with which to defend the world. In addition, MESSAGE was directly based on a popular Japanese novel, EIGHT DOG CHRONICLES.

While the original concept had some internal consistency-- eight samurai brothers unite to have adventures-- MESSAGE keeps only the basic idea of eight heroes. Probably following Lucas's idea of a "rag-tag band of misfits," all eight characters-- who are drafted to fight evil aliens -- are totally unrelated to one another, and are not even all Japanese (notably American film-actor Vic Morrow). However, the clumsy script renders all eight characters are incredibly flat stereotypes-- the seasoned old hand, the greedy comedy relief-- and none of the actors' lines confer even the most basic likability to any of these losers.

The worst thing about MESSAGE may be that not only is the selection of the eight heroes thoroughly haphazard-- it even includes the winsome robot-- none of them are really impressive fighters, and all that most of them do is run around firing ray-blasters. Sonny Chiba is minimally involved in the story but apparently his expertise in fight-coordination was not called upon.

The only half-decent thing in the film is a nicely designed "sailing-ship for the stars."

DERANGED (1974), PRAYING MANTIS (1993)

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *poor*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

I hadn't seen DERANGED in many years, so I wasn't sure whether or not it qualified for the uncanny version of the "perilous psycho" trope. As I re-watched the film-- which starts out touting the narrative's status as a real story, complete with knowledgeable narrator-- I found that it was rather in the naturalistic domain, for essentially the same reasons I cited in the 2000 film ED GEIN:

...ED GEIN pursues the approach I called "fictionalized-reality" above, meaning that Gein is rendered with a pathetic, no-larger-than-life treatment... Thus I judge that this version of Gein, unlike Norman Bates and other fictional icons spawned by Gein, to be purely "naturalistic."

DERANGED is much in the same mode, though its estimated budget was no more than $200,000. I can't find a budget for ED GEIN, but I assume that it was considerably higher based on its general look and the greater care taken shooting the scenes. That said, writer-director Alan Ormsby does a fine job with the "thriller" aspects of his imitiation Gein-tale. Additonally, star Roberts Blossom, playing the main character of "Ezra Cobb," may not be as facile an actor as Steve Railsback, but he's a lot more convincing as a dim-seeming, delusional old hermit.

I rate the mythicity of DERANGED as "poor" because I don't think it does very much with the psychological material. A good thrill-ride, but nothing more.

The TV-movie PRAYING MANTIS wasn't based on any real psycho, but was probably strongly influenced by 1987's BLACK WIDOW.  The earlier film dealt with a "black widow" murderess whose main motivation, as I remember, was nothing but money. In contrast, though the script for this telefilm doesn't really dwell on the "mantis metaphor"-- i.e., the popular tale that mantises like black widows slay their mates-- it does make serial killer Linda Crandell (Jane Seymour) a psychotic type.

There aren't, however, any attempts to make Linda especially strange. She starts out by killing the man she's just married with poison, after which she flees town, leaving the cops to pick up the pieces. One witness, remembering the runaway bride, tells the police that he found Linda "eerie," but that's as weird as this psycho gets. The story by one William Delligan-- whose three IMDB-cited scripts all involve violent or ambivalent women-- refuses to reveal exactly what past event traumatized Linda, but the fact that she cuts herself and threatens a woman with an unruly child make it pretty likely that someone, most likely her father, abused Linda as a child. It's surely no coincidence that the only conquests we see are men older than Linda. Even when one scene sets up the lady psycho to dance with her handsome future son-in-law, Linda shows no interest in the younger version of her current beau.

Despite the script's reticence about the psycho's origins-- which is somewhat preferable to the more mechanical Lifetime movies on the same subject-- the only thing to see here is Jane Seymour's good looks and performance.

HAUNTED HONEYMOON (1986)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*


I started out generally disliking Gene Wilder's HAUNTED HONEYMOON-- his last film with wife Gilda Radner before her 1989 death, the last film Wilder directed, and a notorious box office bomb. However, on repeated TV-viewings, I've conceived a mild liking for the film, if only because it seems (whatever Wilder's intentions) like a love-letter to the bygone days of "old dark house" movies.

Like Wilder's SHERLOCK HOLMES' SMARTER BROTHER, HONEYMOON is nicely staged. Wilder and his crew clearly knew how to evoke the look of the "phony ghost" stories from the Classic Hollywood era, and the script inserts some of the psychological touches characteristic of the later Hitchcock period. But though there are some decent comedy set-pieces, there's never the sense that the whole is anything but the sum of its parts.

The story is set in the era of radio's heyday as a source of mystery-dramas, though there's almost no topical material relevant to the time-period. Larry Abbott (Wilder) and Vickie Pearl (Radner) are voice-actors on one such mystery-drama, as well as being engaged to be married in the near future. However, Larry has been blowing lines and showing signs of psychological stress. His uncle Paul makes the decision that when the couple travel to the Abbott family mansion, he intends to subject Larry to a form of "shock therapy" in order to purge Larry of his demons. Thus, when Larry and Vickie show up at the family manse, they're treated not just to the usual clique of oddballs-- including the corpulent Aunt Kate (Dom deLuise in drag)-- but also things like a guy in a werewolf outfit. However, it soon becomes evident that someone's not seeking to save Larry's sanity, but rather, to take his life.

Then, after the climax of the film, all of the "uncanny tropes" of the film are overruled by that of the "fallacious figment," for the audience is belatedly told that all they've witnessed is just another radio-drama performed by Larry and Vickie before they leave for their wedding. As the happy couple drives away, an ostensible "host" of the program warns the audience that the happy ending may not be real-- but since that host is an articulate werewolf, his credibility is somewhat lacking.

Compared to most of Wilder's other 1980s flicks, this one at least looks good. I just wish that Wilder-- also one of the writers-- had done more than piddle around with Freudian psychological myths.

THE STEPFATHER (1987)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*


THE STEPFATHER, an enjoyable psycho-thriller that's been much imitated over the years, doesn't go into that much depth in a psychological sense.

The story centers upon a psycho whose true name is never revealed in the film, but who is known through most of the narrative as "Jerry Blake." Whereas some real men have carried on bigamous affairs, sustaining two if not more separate family lives, Jerry seeks to find the ideal family life due to some traumatic event in his past. To this end he worms his way into a family that lacks a father-figure-- from what we see, the families of widows with children. However, when each family fails to live up to his exacting standards of what the ideal family should be, he scouts around for a new family, beginning the process of inveigling himself into the new familial unit, and then kills the previous family.

A year after the audience sees Jerry slay one unsatisfactory adoptive group, he has managed to marry widow Susan Maine, who has one high-school-age daughter, Stephanie. In contrast with some stories dealing with an unwanted step-parent, Stephanie's animus for her new father does not stem from any fixation on her dead dad, who is barely referenced in the storyline. Nor is Jerry, like other evil step-parents, covetous of his stepdaughter's sexuality: he simply wants to control her absolutely, and on some level Stephanie recognizes that his controlling nature goes beyond the bounds of the average step-parent. Unfortunately for Jerry, the brother of a previous murder-victim is trying to track down his sister's killer, and Jerry's efforts to short-circuit Stephanie's suspicions only further his own mental breakdown. In the film's best scene, the killer uses the wrong false name for himself in front of Susan-- precipitating a bloody showdown between the ersatz father and his step-family.

In the symbolic sense Jerry Blake is a "heavy father," but rather than simply imposing his will as most such figures do, he's actually trying to impose a false ideal upon lived reality: an ideal close to the heart of American pop culture. While there's no question in my mind that Jerry is a "perilous psycho" in the uncanny mode, I had to think whether or not STEPFATHER also made use of the uncanny version of the "bizarre crime." Certainly Jerry's not an artful psycho: he clubs one victim to death with a board. But I finally decided that his motif of moving from family to family in pursuit of his twisted ideal qualified as a bizarre crime in itself-- though of course, like any uncanny facet of a narrative, it can be reconfigured to take on a purely naturalistic phenomenality, as one indeed sees in some of STEPFATHER's imitators.