SCOOBY DOO AND THE GOBLIN KING (2008)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

I won't say that the basic idea of the DTV movie SCOOBY DOO AND THE GOBLIN KING is anything special. The worlds of fantasy-film are overflowing with dozens of quest-tales in which protagonists both meek and mighty have to cross into the realm of evil faerie-people to get hold of some arcane object that imperils both the good faerie-people and the mortal world. In that respect, GOBLIN KING is no worse than other run-of-the-mill outings.

Wikipedia notes that this one was one of the few DTV films at the time in which the supernatural was treated "straight" in a Scooby movie, but that observation ignores that different TV shows fluctuated on this subject as well, as seen in the 1985 THIRTEEN GHOSTS OF SCOOBY DOO.

The humor in GOBLIN KING is a little better this time out. This may be because only Shaggy and Scooby are enlisted for the quest of stealing the Goblin King's sceptre before it can fall into the hands of an evil mortal magician. The others-- Fred, Daphne and Velma-- have no mystery to solve and are consequently sidelined. The most interesting thing to happen to them is that, very briefly, the villain transforms them into classic Halloween monsters. I'm not saying that there isn't the usual lame pratfall humor, but at one point both Shaggy and Scooby dress up in drag to infiltrate the goblins' domain. I suspect the animators were referencing the tradition of Bugs Bunny, since the normally cowardly Great Dane even plants a big sloppy kiss on the face of the Goblin King, very much in the Bugs tradition.

Perhaps the video's oddest touch is that while it acknowledges that most of the Scooby Gang's villains have been "outed" as clever villains posing as monsters, Shaggy and Scooby also encounter a bunch of specters in the otherworld who are dead ringers for their old villains. Wikipedia cites most of them, but does not comment on the dead-on imitation of Disney's "Headless Horseman" that might've invited litigation had Disney noticed. The late Lauren Bacall has one of her last voice-roles herein.

MOON IN SCORPIO (1987)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*


There's a good reason why "sailboat thrillers" never became an established genre. Despite one or two exceptions to the rule, like 1989's DEAD CALM, most of the time it's impossible to do much of anything in the restricted space of a relatively small sea-craft out in the wastes of the ocean.

To complicate things further, director Gary Graver claimed that this seaborne slasher was originally intended to revolve around a supernatural menace. Allegedly the film's producer converted the writer's original story into a slasher-film, and juggled the editing in a manner that made the story confusing. I have no problem crediting this, but even so, it doesn't seem like either Graver or writer Robert Aiken gave the producer much to work with. This is no disappointment regarding Aiken, a small-time actor who'd only scripted one other film (another of Graver's directorial efforts). But Graver sometimes was able to enhance the poor scripts of other films with dynamic cinematography.

MOON IN SCORPIO is another "in media res" film. The Coast Guard comes across a drifting sailboat on which five of the six known occupants are missing or dead. Only one remains to tell the tale: frenetic Linda (Britt Ekland), and the rest of the film is composed of her flashbacks to the horrific incident, occasionally interrupted by talking-head scenes between Linda and a psychiatrist.

Given Graver's story about the producer's interference, I'm not surprised that the identity of the psycho-killer-- a "mystery monster" who escapes an asylum and somehow gets in good with one of the boat's guests-- never makes much sense. But it's evident that the script also devotes no more than cursory interest in the other five characters, although in theory it ought to be their psychological conflicts that heighten the tension once they're all stuck with each other at sea.

I won't say that the bad script of MOON IN SCORPIO is any sort of missed opportunity, but there is a little potential in the opening set-up. Linda has just married Vietnam veteran Allen (John Philip Law), and she knows he's close with two other surviving veterans, Burt and Mark. Yet she doesn't expect Allen to accept an invitation to spend their honeymoon on a sailboat with the two guys and their respective girlfriends. Some chaotic flashback scenes of the three soldiers in Vietnam-- apparently not part of Linda's own flashback-- establish that they committed some mutual sin in Vietnam, a sin which was originally going to unleash a supernatural menace. Even with the monster excised, this plot could have been used to make clearer that the trio's bond stems out of shared guilt, and that this guilt, as well as Allen's general experiences in war, make it difficult for Allen to re-acclimatize to civilian life. But the three men and the three women are all zeros in the personality department, and so even this minor potential goes to waste.

GOLDENEYE (1995)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological, sociological*

To get the phenomenology issues out of the way first, there's so much high-tech in GOLDENEYE that I leaned toward considering it to be within the marvelous domain. However, so far as I know, all of the science presented in the film-- EMP weapons, cyber-assaults on banking websites-- were entirely within the realm of possibility in 1995. In addition to one or two James Bond gadgets, such as an exploding pen, the film also sustains an uncanny "outre skill" in the unique assassination-method used by Bond's above-seen secondary opponent, Xenia Onatopp (Famke Janssen).

Before getting further into the subject of the film's villains, I should focus on the hero. This was the first and best of Pierce Brosnan's four Bond films, and Brosnan does his finest job of coordinating the aspects of toughness and charm that made Connery so appealing in the role. Sole credited writer Michael France never wrote a Bond film before or after this one, and, given that he didn't do terribly well in his later superhero films, such as the 2005 FANTASTIC FOUR, France must have been all but channeling the dry wit of earlier Bond authors, when he scripts "new-classic" Bond lines like "No more foreplay" and "She always did enjoy a good squeeze."

The cyber-terrorist plotline isn't profound but it does its job efficiently, aided in part by the comic performance of Alan Cumming as a master hacker. Since this was the first Bond film to appear following the end of the Soviet Union, I thought the script missed the mark by not having the cyber-attack-- one oriented on destroying Great Britain's economy-- orchestrated by some old Socialist hard-liner, seeking to bring about the fall of capitalist society. Instead, France goes with an Old Friend Bent on Revenge, and the actor playing said villain doesn't have much to work with.

GOLDENEYE is also one of the few Bond films wherein the secondary villain is far more interesting than the main foe, not least because of the former character's name, a clear tip of the hat to Fleming's "Pussy Galore." France's script doesn't give any background to Xenia Onatopp, but director Martin Freeman makes her the embodiment of what might be called a kissing-cousin to that of the "toothed vagina:" i.e., the "crushing vagina." For reasons never revealed, Xenia has tremendous strength in her legs, so that she can crush a man's ribs to jelly while masochistically enjoying any pain her victim wreaks upon her in trying to get free. Freeman's mise-en-scene between Bond and Xenia in a Russian bathhouse is easily the film's best single scene, and probably has been the one most used as a highlight-clip.

The script is clearly influenced by third-wave feminism, though I suspect that this was camouflage on the part of France and Freeeman. In contrast to way filmmakers of the 1980s handled Bond, the first film of the 1990s is marked by lines of extreme political correctness. I didn't mind the film recasting Bond's superior M as a female, but M's lines to Bond, calling him a "sexist, misogynist dinosaur" and a "relic of the Cold War," are tiresomely agenda-driven. Later, the 'good girl" Natalya rants against "boys and their toys" and condemns Bond's womanizing, as does a minor character near the film's opening. Fortunately, politicization doesn't totally emasculate the Bond mythos, not least because Brosnan's Bond successfully seduces the two younger women. It's possible that the filmmakers were using these lines purely with an eye to publicity, seeking to "rebrand" the appeal of Bond for the 1990s. At the same time, one can't overlook that all these third-wave gestures might be cancelled out by the persona of Xenia Onatopp. Not only does she represent a specifically feminine form of power gone bad, she even dies in a situation that resembles the "V" of her own leg-lock.

SIMON SEZ (1999)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*


The only interesting point about SIMON SEZ is that so many people who watched it complained about a lack of plot-- and yet, certainly many of the same people in 1999 who stayed away from Dennis Rodman's second (and so far, last) starring film probably contributed to one of the summer's big successes, THE MUMMY. Neither film has a plot worth mentioning, but if anything, SIMON SEZ makes clear from the get-go that it's nothing but sub-James Bond adventure. It's a lot like the B-films churned out for the DTV market, but with more money spent on it, but its lack of pretension puts it slightly ahead of Rodman's other star-turn, 1997's DOUBLE TEAM.

The story is just another among thousands on the theme of "two factions seek the same McGuffin," in this case, a disc containing specs for constructing a super-weapon. Rodman's character Simon (no last name) is an Interpol agent dragged into a kidnapping case by a former Langley classmate, Nick (a manic Dane Cook, trying to sell himself as the next Jim Carrey). There's lots of shooting-scenes, martial arts scenes, and crazy car-driving scenes, all fulfilling the basic quota for the mindless action-film. Simon, despite his trademark face-jewelry, is the only halfway serious character in the film, while everyone else-- his two aides (dressed like Franciscan monks for some damn reason), the capering villain, and the villain's clown-garbed henchmen-- seems to be competing with Cook to be the nuttiest of the nutty. The villain, for instance, wants to use the super-weapon to blow up the Eiffel Tower simply because he's tired of looking at it.

It's by no means a good film, but I've seen worse films that were overly impressed with their own cleverness. The super-ray-thing definitely edged the film into the domain of the marvelous, though there are other metaphenomenal tropes, in addition to the bad guy's unexplained desire to have his henchmen dress like refugees from A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. Rodman's tech guys also create a mechanical spy-bee, and his car comes equipped with a parasailing parachute.

GAS-S-S-S (1970)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

GAS-S-S-S, a movie with an absurdly long alternate title that I'm not going to type, was the third-to-last film officially directed by Roger Corman. Going by remarks cited on Wikipedia, Corman blamed the failure of GAS-S-S-S at the box office on AIP's cuts and marketing strategy. Thereafter he largely abandoned directing and continued as a film producer because he found that job easier. He defended the "intellectual" content of GAS-S-S-S-S even though he admitted he might have kept keep the film's concepts too well hidden under its humorous content.

The title of GAS-S-S-S is also the source of its only metaphenomenal content. By accident the U.S. military unleashes a poison gas that slays only people over the age 25. Presumably it affects the whole world, though the movie only focuses on a handful of young Americans trying to sort out their place in the new scheme of things. As is often the case with post-disaster films, the characters don't have to deal with piles and piles of dead bodies; it's more as if the gas has simply erased the older generations from existence. The film's focal characters are a romantic couple, male Coel and female Cilia. Their names are so similar that I suspect writer George Armitage was indicating some shared nature, perhaps thinking they had a shared "celestial" (derived from Latin "caelum") nature. Coel and Cilia jaunt about the country, meeting absurdities like golf-playing bikers and a crazed football team. They even run into a man who seems to be a reborn Edgar Allan Poe, riding a motorcycle with a black-clad babe behind him. "Poe" warns that the younger generation is doomed to make the same mistakes as the older one. Even God is a running character, intruding to comment on the action, and apparently bringing back a small coterie of dead people near the film's end. It's an almost plotless "road movie," and despite a number of violent altercations-- including one or two rapes-- the film ends on a note of affirmation, predicting that the young people will defy the odds and forge a more positive world.

GAS-S-S-S's alleged humor usually falls flat. The only joke that works fairly well is one in which a bunch of young guys duel one another with imaginary guns, as if they were kids playing cowboy games, and as they fire at each other, they yell out the names of famous western actors, ending the duel with the portentous name of John Wayne. This seems aimed at liberal-minded kids who rejected the ethos of the American western, but scripter Armitage didn't have the first idea as to how to extend this concept through the rest of the film. Coel and Cilia, along with a few friends they pick up along the way, also encounter other hostile, male-centered societies, like the crazy football team. Yet there's no clear indictment of male privilege. If anything, the aforementioned rape-scenes loosely validate male privilege. In one of the scenes, the girl being abducted yells that one victim yells that she wishes she's taken karate lessons instead of needlepoint, or something like that. In an even stranger scene, a gang of rapists are defeated by a victim who enjoys her assault so much, and so often, that she leaves them all exhausted, and for good measure lectures them on the greater sexual capacities of women. Even in 1970, it's awfully hard to imagine any women in the audience being amused by this jape.

Corman, born in 1926, became an independent film director in 1954. Although he didn't make films with explicit teen appeal until 1957, when he directed both CARNIVAL ROCK and ROCK ALL NIGHT, much of his product became associated, rightly or wrongly, with the teen-centered drive-ins of the decade. Throughout the rest of his career, Corman often catered to what might be loosely termed "the youth market," and even though he was in his early thirties when he produced his first rock-and-roll films, I hypothesize that he took some pride in his ability to suss out what young audiences wanted. Often this came down to the formula called "blood, beasts and breasts," which would also suggest a greater focus on young male, rather than female, viewers. I certainly am not faulting Corman for being a commercial filmmaker, or even for making films that tended to appeal mostly to guys. But his reputed tendency to have loose scripts even during filming, and to inject gratuitous sex-and-violence scenes in haphazard fashion, goes a lot toward explaining why GAS-S-S-S turns out so poorly.

Despite the presence of a comical Creator, there's no sense that Corman and Armitage had any sense of the metaphysical implications of an apocalypse. Thus the only Campbellian function I cite is that of the sociological, as the film is defined almost entirely by a notion of young people wishing that they could remake the world if only all those old people were out of the way.

IRON MAN (2008), IRON MAN 2 (2010)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: (1) *good,* (2) *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological, psychological*


It's almost ten years since the original IRON MAN movie came out. Though it's far from the perfect superhero movie, I've decided to give a "good" mythicity rating in part because it proved as important to its genre in the 2000s as the Tim Burton BATMAN was in the 1990s. Had Marvel Studios not re-acquired the rights to the character in 2006 and made this film, it's entirely possible that the superhero boom of the early 2000s would have dwindled once the big studios ran through the A-list names like X-Men and Spider-Man. Marvel Studios, having a more intimate investment in the genre, used IRON MAN as a linchpin for introducing the mainstream audience to the pleasures of a superheroic shared universe.

Director Jon Favreau is probably correct in crediting some of the first movie's appeal in its "independent film" approach. In contrast to many of the earlier superhero flicks, IRON MAN pays a great deal of attention to establishing character interactions, giving the actors a lot of material in which to invest themselves, as opposed to emoting in front of a green-screen. Back on my first viewing, I was impressed with the film's updating of Iron Man's origin, as well as the central character's shift away from munitions manufacturing. And yet, now I find myself giving the writers less credit in those departments. For instance, the comic-book origin was strong material to start with. In contrast, it's amazing that the scripters made such a silk purse out of the sow's-ear known as the "Obadiah Stane" arc from an early 1980s run of the IRON MAN comic. It was in these issues that writer Denny O'Neil contrived to give Tony Stark a new competitor who took over his business, one who had very loose ties to Stark's late father. The original arc was tedious and superficial, but it seems to have been integral to the movie-script's interpretation of the Tony Stark character in terms of his "daddy issues."

Those paternal conflicts also play into Stark's early willingness to churn out weapons for the military while making excuses about how his technological advances save other lives. Given that Robert Downey Jr. was in his forties when he essayed the character, that factor makes it difficult to credence Tony Stark being naive about the ways of politics and the manufacture of weapons. Still, one may choose to view Stark as an example of "delayed adulthood," which may be one reason he resonated with Millennials, as against the "jet-set industrialist" model on which Stan Lee based the comic-book Stark. Further, whereas Lee probably meant no irony in having Stark injured while selling his munitions-- after all, in the comic-book origin, the munitions-maker is wounded by a primitive Asian trap-- whereas the scripters of the movie clearly wanted Stark to reap the consequences of his own "death merchant" acts, even if villain Obadiah Stane is directly responsible for the munitions falling into enemy hands.

Downey's irreverent but lovable scapegrace is given greater depth by his two primary supporting characters, secretary Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) and military buddy James Rhodes (Terence Howard). Though they're both functioning adults, clearly they can't help enjoying Stark's antics, and so the viewer finds said antics harmless as well. IRON MAN of course cannot escape the deeper sociopolitics of the munitions industry, so in this context it's enough that he does come to see "the bigger stick" as a morally bankrupt course of action. In its place, naturally enough, is the superhero's solution of direct personal action, while his negative image and "bad father" Stane validates Stark's decision by showing his willingness to exploit technology at the cost of humanity.

IRON MAN 2, however, proves somewhat less balanced than the debut film. With the bad father out of the way, the script must substitute an excuse for Stark to spiral into self-indulgence again. It's been stated that the script was indirectly influenced by a well-received story-arc from the comic book, in which Stark became an alcoholic as the result of work-pressures. Favteau's scripters only touched on alcoholic visual motifs, but chose to situate these in terms of an almost manic-depressive concept of Stark, oscillating between moods of invincibility-- seen in the opening scenes where Stark celebrates himself through the medium of a science expo-- and moods of extreme depression. The depression comes about logically enough, as Stark tries to come to terms with the fact that the very device that keeps his heart beating is also slowly poisoning him.

Though alcoholism is not the direct cause, Stark-- who has publicly confessed his identity as Iron Man, and who refuses the military access to his armor-- begins acting like a manic drunk, even when in armor. This plot-line culminates in emnity between Stark and his two major support-characters, which leads to major violence when Rhodes dons a duplicate set or armor, takes the name "War Machine," and battles Iron Man in an attempt to bring him under control. This is one of the few areas in which IRON MAN 2 exceeds the original, since the battle of the armored titans here is far better choreographed than the one in the 2008 film. Of course, by film's end Rhodes and Potts are both on Stark's side again, and the key to the industrialist's reformation lies, ironically enough, in his making contact with his late father, who never seemed to appreciate Stark in life.

Downey provides, if anything, an even more nuanced version of the quirky Stark persona than he did in the first film. However, "for every bit of good there's a little bit of bad," and in this case it's a badly chosen villain. Whiplash, a minor villain from the comics, is pressed into service as a "big bad," a conniving Russian whose father's fortunes were ruined by his interaction with Stark's father. Perhaps Favreau and company might have sold viewers on this character, had they been consistent about pitching him as a master planner from the first. However, they introduce him by having him attack Stark in public, like a hundred other vengeance-seeking villains-- and once that's happened, it's hard to credit such a reckless figure as being the great manipulator seen in the rest of the film. I should add that the script also takes one of Iron Man's better 1970s villains, a master-planner type named Justin Hammer, and downgrades him into a pawn of Whiplash.

Sadly, bad judgments regarding the Armored Avenger's villains extended into IRON MAN 3, to date the last and least of the series. But at least the first film stands as one of the more substantive superhero films, even if there seems little potential for any more solo films with the character in the near future.

TARZANA THE WILD GIRL (1969)

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


I still remember seeing this film advertised back in The Day, but I never saw it in the theaters. Something Weird preserved it, and I finally saw it via a Youtube download, confirming my suspicion that it would have been a stone bore in a theater, despite the copious upper-body nudity of the title character (played by one Femi Benussi).

Jungle girls tend to fall into two broad (so to speak) categories: the tough babes and the innocent sylphs. The Italian film-industry tended to make the latter, like the slightly earlier LUANA, though I did wonder if the filmmakers would lean more toward the former pattern, since they'd bothered to rip off the name of the seminal "tough jungle hero." However, such was not the case.

TARZANA is an absolutely by-the-numbers exercise in "jungle rot." A little white girl, the offspring of an English lord, is lost in the African jungle. Fifteen years later, the lord hears reports of a mysterious white girl living in the wilds, and suspects that it may be his lost daughter. Thus he funds an expedition to go looking for the mystery lady.

Often expeditions of white adventurers encounter a lot of opposition from both wild animals and hostile native tribes. TARZANA doesn't bother even coming up to the meager level of LUANA's entertainments, as the former depends a lot of stock footage. Thus the film hardly finds time for any battles between the expedition and the local wildlife. What passes for conflict is that, while some of the adventurers sincerely want to bring Tarzana back to civilization and her grandfather, others want to capture the wild girl for exhibition and profit.

Like Luana, Tarzana never speaks, and so it's never clear as to how she survived in the jungle sans help from local natives. She also seems to have acquired some influence over some of the usual animals-- monkeys, elephants-- and though she shows no talent for fighting, she does at one point send some elephants around to stomp the adventurers' camp. Had this scene been the climax of the film, I might have judged it a combative adventure. However, the end-sequence is mostly about two of the good people managing to approach Tarzana-- despite her having been hit with a trank-dart by bad guys-- and to remind her of her forgotten past by showing the girl a doll she once owned. It's a paltry form of drama, but said climax, as well as the movie's endless small talk, pushes this one more toward the mythos of the drama.

Benussi's nudity has some appeal, but the film's main interest for me is that I wondered how it was ever exhibited in America, given that the "Tarzan" trademark has been aggressively protected by the heirs of Edgar Rice Burroughs.