THE BRUTE MAN (1946)

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

In this review I commented that HOUSE OF HORRORS, the first in a two-episode "Creeper" series, was much better than it had a right to be, given the temper of the times. I also opined that HOUSE was probably the best film in the ouevre of workhorse Jean Yarbrough. In contrast, the last in the series-- THE BRUTE MAN, a rough prequel to HOUSE-- is pretty ordinary, which probably helped usher the series into oblivion.

The basic story is attributed to Dwight Babcock, who collaborated with George Bricker on HOUSE, and BRUTE's screenplay was written by Bricker and one M. Coates Webster. In HOUSE Bricker and Babcock used the deformed "Creeper" character to take pot-shots at the professional art scene, but there's no such ambition here The Creeper, who never had an origin in his earlier appearances, is wanted for previous murders at the point when he wanders back to a city where he once lived. After he commits a couple more murders, the killer encounters Helen, a young blind woman who does not show fear of his disfigured features. Like the character in HOUSE, the Creeper seems to have a dim desire to find someone who will befriend him, though again the killer is still largely focused on killing those responsible for his situation.

It comes out that two other locals, the now-married Cliff and Virginia, knew the Creeper when he was a normal-looking collegian, Hal Moffett. Because Cliff and Hal were competing for Virginia's attention, Cliff hoaxed Hal into giving the wrong answers on a chemistry test. This resulted in Hal being confined to the chemistry lab, thus giving Cliff the chance to move in on Virginia. Hal, however, contributed to his own tragedy by losing his temper and smashing a chemical container. The resultant explosion not only injures Hal, it also alters his glandular condition and results in the young man's hideous malformation. In real life, actor Rondo Hatton suffered from the disease of acromegaly, and BRUTE MAN was his last film before he succumbed to the malady.

Apart from the interest value of the "origin," though, BRUTE is a routine thriller. Only the blind girl is marginally sympathetic, but she's clearly just a complication in the Creeper's life, as he tries to steal enough money to furnish her with an eye-operation. The Creeper kills a few more victims, including his tormentor Cliff, but he's denied the bravura exit of a death-scene, since the police have to take him alive. Perhaps when the script was produced, no one surmised how close Hatton was to death, but during production, it was clear that his capacity was diminished, so that his last performance was negligible next to his somewhat more noteworthy acting in HOUSE OF HORRORS.

THE FORBIDDEN KINGDOM (2008)

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

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS


Wikipedia quotes a Chinese reviewer who criticized THE FORBIDDEN KINGDOM for its "American-Centrism." But to me this seems entirely appropriate. KINGDOM is essentially a love-letter to the major tropes of the Hong Kong kung-fu genre. John Fusco, an Italian-American who trained in the martial arts since age twelve and sparred with KINGDOM star Jet Li, pretty clearly was not seeking to celebrate Chinese culture as it has been lived by the Chinese, but in terms of the stories they put into cinematic form. Thus Fusco and director Rob Minkoff chose to use an American youth as an identifying character, even though the Caucasian character, played by Michael Angarano, is given the name "Jason Tripitakas," a clear reference to a Sanskrit-language term promulgated through Buddhism and given pop-culture relevance through the 16th-century Chinese fantasy-novel JOURNEY TO THE WEST.

There's no question that the filmmakers hoped to involve America's majority Caucasian audience by giving them a Caucasian viewpoint-character. Yet the Jason character isn't just the standard "exotic adventurer." He's defined almost entirely by his love for Hong Kong fantasy-films, though unlike the main character of BULLETPROOF MONK,  Jason has no fighting-skill whatsoever. An encounter with an ancient golden staff, reputedly once the property of Sun Wukong, the protagonist of JOURNEY TO THE WEST, hurls the hapless Jason into the world of medieval China.

Though Fusco's script uses elements of JOURNEY, the script's main focus is to involve Jason in assorted standard situations germane to Hong Kong cinema. The American youth is taken under the wing of "drunken fighter" Lu Yan (Jackie Chan), who immediately recognizes that Jason is destined to use the staff to liberate Sun Wukong, a.k.a. "the Monkey King," so that this quintessential Chinese hero can vanquish the evil Jade Warlord. The simian superhero is one of two roles played by the film's other big-name star, Jet Li, though Li spends much more time in the guise of another of Jason's trainers, "the Silent Monk." Thus Jason gets the benefit-- and the ordeals-- of being trained by two of the archetypes of kung-fu cinema: the disciplined monk and the drunken "wild man" of forest and tavern.

KINGDOM is a thinly plotted action-film, in which both the staff and an immortality-serum function as "objects pursued by both heroes and villains." Jason's quest to finish his quest and get back home obviously becomes secondary to the first team-up of Chinese titans Jackie Chan and Jet Li. As far as delivering on the team-up elements, Fusco gives both actors some pleasant but non-demanding scenes to play off one another, including an inevitable fight-scene before they become allies. No one will ever call this Chan-Li battle one of cinema's great fights, but it's adequate for what it does. Perhaps because Chan and Li are so charismatic, Angarano has little to do beyond being a source of humor. Still, he gets a little romance with a female heroine (named in honor of Cheng Pei Pei's "Golden Swallow") and has a decent fight with one of the Warlord's henchmen, a witch-woman who evinces yet another kung-fu fantasy-trope: that of the supernatural being able to extend her hair like a net of tentacles.

KINGDOM has no interest in the theme of JOURNEY TO THE WEST, with its opposition between the ruthless ambition of the Monkey King and the enlightenment of Buddhist knowledge. It's just a lively, fairly diverting martial-arts films, different from the hundreds once turned out in Hong Kong only by virtue of a bigger budget and internationally known actors.

DESTROY ALL MONSTERS (1968)

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


I have to say up front that I came tardy to the Toho Godzilla series, catching the late 1960s releases in the theater and the earlier ones on television. I was in much the same boat in terms of discovering Marvel comics in the late 1960s and playing catch-up afterwards. The one advantage these situations have in common is that the reader/viewer gets somewhat inundated with all of the story-tropes built up over several yeas. In my case at least, the "embarassment of riches" filled me with a desire to trace the tropes back to the "primal origins."

DESTROY was intended as a potential send-off for all of Toho's roughly interrelated kaiju films, Some of the monsters had crossed over several times, with GHIDRAH THE THREE-HEADED MONSTER and MONSTER ZERO as the standouts. Other critters had made only single appearances, such as Manda in ATRAGON. The titular creature from VARAN THE UNBELIEVABLE barely appears, allegedly because the studio's monster-costume had deteriorated to the point of no return.

Inoshiro Honda, who had helmed most of the key kaiju since 1954's GOJIRA, seems to be agreeing with an executive alleged to have claimed that the series had run out of ideas. DESTROY follows the pattern established in MONSTER ZERO, where insidious aliens take control of Earth's monsters and use them to conquer Earth. As in ZERO, everything on Earth seems to look like the 1960s, but a multi-national project has resulted in a permanent moon base. There are token efforts to show non-Japanese actors in minor scenes, but all of the main actors are Japanese, and lead male Katsuo (Akira Kubo) and his crew are constantly jetting around in flashy rocket-ships more reminiscent of Buck Rogers than of NASA.

Further, for the first and only time in the series, all of Earth's monsters have been humanely pacified and confined to a well-stocked Pacific isle, sometimes called "Monster Island." The implication is that Earth's scientific knowledge has grown so great that even the mighty Godzilla can be restricted to a single island with a device that sprays noxious gas at him. Joining him are Manda, Mothra, Rodan, Angilas, Baragon, Gorosaurus, Varan, Spiga, and Godzilla's son Minilla-- with Mothra seeming a bit out of place, since the giant moth had always been a "good monster" not given to random rampages.

This time the alien visitors strike right away, rather than making overtures of peace as those in MONSTER ZERO did. The Kilaaks-- all of whom look like Japanese women in silver lame outfits-- take over the moon base, implanting control-devices in all of the personnel. The takeover of the moon base and the abduction of the inhabitants of Monster Island are apparently the last steps in the Kilaak's long-term plan. Whereas the invaders of ZERO simply controlled monsters through radio-waves broadcast from their flying saucers, the Kilaaks don't seem to have as many vehicles, since they "seed" Earth with a great quantity of receiving-units, all hidden in obscure places. The idea seems to be that the control-waves are beamed from the moon but have to be re-broadcast on Earth in ordet to control the monsters when they start attacking strategic Earth-cities. However, during Earth's swift response to the incursion, forces of the United Nations (or some similar group) manage to uncover a lot of the receiver-units, and the monsters seem to keep on rampaging nonetheless.

The Kilaaks are actually snake-like beings that were bred to flourish in hot climes and who retreat from cold into stony hibernation-shells. Thus their tactic of taking the appearance of Japanese women doesn't track especially well, particularly when they can control real humans for their world-mastering schemes. The Kilaaks are arrogant about their superior technology, but they're even more hubristic than the average invading extraterrestrial, since at one point they even use one of their human agents to tell the United Nations the location of their base. Thus Katsuo's team is able to infiltrate the base despite its being guarded by Godzilla, rip off an important part of Kilassk control-technology, and bring it back to the military scientists, so that they can reverse-engineer it and turn the monsters against the aliens.

When all is said and done, all the dodgy plotting serves just one purpose: to give the monsters a reason for going on assorted apocalyptic attacks. Individual monsters make a few peripatetic assaults on non-Japanese targets, but Honda saves most of his city-model work for yet another Tokyo thrashing, as Godzilla, Rodan, Manda and Mothra raze the city. Missiles from the military seem to cause as much destruction as any of the titanic terrors.

As good as the Tokyo Stomp is, it can't compare with the ten-on-one monster rally, when humans send their ten native monsters to confront the Kilaaks. The aliens then unleash their own alien servitor, Ghidrah. What's masterful about this fight-scene is that although Ghidrah is played by a man-in-a-suit like the other monsters, the monster's wings and weaving heads made it difficult to stage an involved fight with so many monsters. Honda and his crew used a solution not unlike the conflict of the Big G and Angilas in GODZILLA RAIDS AGAIN: keeping the action rooted to one spot-- aside from some up-and-down motion on Ghirdrah's part-- while using quick cuts and brutal violence to keep the audience invested. Numerous times both Ghidrah and his opponents bite one another savagely, reminding the audience that they are, after all, colossal animals.

All ends happily for Earth and its hulking monster-heroes, and it would've made a good send-off for the original series, had the box office not proven strong enough to keep the franchise running. Continuity glitches aside, DESTROY ALL  MONSTERS remains one of the best of the kaiju genre.

THE INCREDIBLES (2004)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*


There's a rich irony in the fact that THE INCREDIBLES provided Hollywood's most incisive look at the superhero idiom, years before superheroes became a mainstay in popular entertainment. Arguably, Brad Bird's salute to the 1960s pop culture-- replete with references to James Bond, Jonny Quest, and the Fantastic Four-- has still not been equaled in terms of philosophical insight, particularly not by the aesthetically erratic Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Following on the heels of the 1989 BATMAN, Hollywood studios made substantial investments in big-budget s superhero films, though most of the completed productions focused on less-than-stellar properties like Judge Dredd, Blade, and the Mutant Turtles. The 2000s kicked off a short wave of studio investment in high-ticket American icons like X-Men and Spider-Man, which indirectly made possible the still-current success of the MCU. Many of these "second-wave" films sought to render the themes of Silver Age comics into the context of Hollywood blockbusters, but INCREDIBLES universalized those themes in such a way that they became practically timeless. For that reason the animated film has sometimes been called "the best Fantastic Four film that didn't literally star the Fantastic Four."

In the 1960s, the general public still conceived of costumed heroes as nothing more than colorful escapism, even when given touches of campiness, which is one reason the BATMAN teleseries touched a collective nerve. But the Silver Age superhero was far less represented by any version of Batman than by the 1961 debut of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's FANTASTIC FOUR, one of the first features to proclaim that being a superhero wasn't always a bed of thornless roses. The FF's world was one where, to get hyper-literary for a moment, William Blake's "innocence" and "experience" remained equally viable. Still, not until Roy Thomas masterminded his "Kree-Skrull War" (1971-72) did any professional authors make a thematic contrast between the "innocence" of comics' "Golden Age of superheroes" and the "experience" that Silver Age comic books sought to incorporate, usually in some form of politically-based "relevance."

INCREDIBLES doesn't have the history of Marvel Comics to play with, so its "era of innocence" takes place roughly 15 years before the main body of the film. Bird doesn't create a "continuity" as such; it's just loosely established that for some time bunches of  superheroes and supervillains have thronged the skies of modern-day America. Mister Incredible is one of the foremost heroes, seeming something like a cross between a boulder-shouldered version of Superman and the FF's team-leader Mister Fantastic. But he also becomes the crux of the heroes' downfall. Thanks in part to the interference of Buddy, an obnoxious kid who wants to be Incredible's sidekick, the heroes are all forced to hang up their capes, conceal their powers, and seek to "be like everyone else." It's probably not a coincidence, though, that this all happens to Incredible at the same time he ends his career as a "lone wolf" hero by marrying a costumed heroine, Elastigirl. Thus the law against superheroes fortuitously comes about just when the viewpoint hero is obliged to embrace domestic life and hold down a nine-to-five job.

Fifteen years later, Incredible and Elastigirl have maintained their regular identities of Bob and Helen Parr. Their two kids, Dash and Violet, have manifested their own unique powers, but they've had to conceal their abilities for the sake of conformity. Interestingly, each of the family-members copes differently. Helen seems to forget her superheroic past pretty easily, while middle-schooler Dash simply "acts out" by pranking teachers. Violet, the older sibling, acts as if the ritual of concealment has traumatized her, appearing as a slightly creepy "shrinking violet" who hides her face behind her long hair. Bob, however, can't cope. He still tries to fight crime and disasters in simple, non-costumed disguises, and he loses his temper when his smarmy boss keeps him from preventing a mugging. He seems ripe for a mid-life crisis when a mysterious benefactor, aware of Bob's heroic past, gives him the chance to be a superhero again.

Naturally, this devil's bargain has a devil behind it. Buddy, the annoying kid who once idolized Mister Incredible and wanted to be his sidekick, has channeled his former admiration of the hero and become a vengeful supervillain, Syndrome. The villain's main motive for employing Mister Incredible is to train a robotic device capable of killing any superhero-- one that has, in truth, already murdered several of the retired crusaders. Syndrome, in addition to wanting Incredible both humiliated and dead, plans to unleash the robot on a large city, so that he Syndrome can come to the city's rescue and become the world's greatest hero.

Domesticity, however, comes to Incredible's rescue. Even though Helen initially fears that her husband is revolving his mid-life troubles in a more mundane manner, her suspicions lead her to track Incredible down. For good measure, her super-powered kids manage to tag along, in tried-and-true Jonny Quest fashion, thus giving them the chance to undergo a baptism-of-fire in spite of parental protection. With all this setup done, the rest of the film is devoted to high-powered action as "the Incredibles" take on Syndrome and his organization.

I've devoted much space to the setup of  the conflict between Incredible and Syndrome because it also reflects the hero's ambivalence about domesticity. Even though he embraces marriage freely, society's celebration of mediocrity renders the domestic world joyless and uuinspired, until he finds a way to unleash his "inner superhero" once more. The movie's theme of "conformity vs. exceptionalism" is one that deserves fuller treatment in a separate essay, even though it should be noted Brad Bird has dismissed reviewers' attempts to link him with philosophical luminaries like Ayn Rand and Nietzsche. In truth, even if Bird never read a line of either philosopher, he nonetheless succeeded in mining the same imaginative potential one finds in the best Silver Age comics. If I was going to sum up that potential, it might take the form of a roundabout twist on a Blake aphorism:

"Time is in love with the productions of eternity."

YOG, MONSTER FROM SPACE (1970)

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


Sentiment causes me to use the Americanized title for my review of this 1970 Japanese kaiju, originally called "Space Amoeba." Since no entity in the film is ever actually called "Yog"-- the name perhaps being a creation of some publicist-- the Japanese title is more accurate. However, since I still remember seeing "Yog" on a double-bill with "Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster," I choose the more colorful title.

YOG is, however, one of the weakest kaiju films of the period. A space probe returns to an isolated island on Earth with an unwelcome guest: an invisible amoeba-organism that can mutate ordinary beasts into huge monsters, which the amoeba presumably plans to use in some plan for conquest. One can only speculate, for the only time the amoeba "speaks" is when it takes control of a human being-- and even then, the viewer never learns what the creature's ultimate goal is.

In contrast to the primary template of giant-monster movies, no elaborate models of cities are destroyed here: all of "Yog's" creations are confined to the island. There happen to be a smattering of humans confined to the island-- a photographer and some companions-- and they find themselves forced to stop the alien invasion at its origin point. All three of the amoeba's monsters are given names in the screenplay, though there really seems no particular reason for anyone on the island to name them, particularly since the monsters are vanquished rather easily despite their impressive size.

This is a rare giant-monster film in which even the counter-measures of the humans fail to sustain the combative mode. A monster displays the power to project waves of cold; the humans invent a way to heat it up and kill it. Two monsters are conveniently confused into fighting one another by "supersonic waves," but there's little logic about how the humans manage to figure out this vulnerability. In addition, all of the Earthlings are singularly boring, even for this type of film, and the only thing I enjoyed about the film was the image of one monster, a giant octopus, walking upright on his tentacles.

It's hard to believe that Ishiro Hondu, responsible for so many strong fantasy-films, churned out an effort this listless.

BEAST FROM HAUNTED CAVE (1959), CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA (1961)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: (1) *drama,* (2) *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*

I've not seen the 1957 crime film NAKED PARADISE. Ostensibly both of these films, written by Charles B. Griffith, re-purposed the core idea of that film-- a bunch of crooks making a getaway, and pulling some innocents along with them-- and just added a cheap monster for the drive-in crowd.

BEAST, Monte Hellman's first work for producer Roger Corman, is thin stuff, but it looks really good, thanks to stunning South Dakota locations. Since I haven't seen PARADISE, I don't know if any of Griffith's dialogue is recycled from the earlier film, but the snarky comments of the gangsters-- who have come to a ski resort in the mountains to steal gold bars from a bank vault-- make up for the flaccid action. The crooks, with an innocent man in tow, head for the (literal) hills. but they run into the Beast from Haunted Cave, an amorphous monster who lives up there. The script shows no interest in what the creature is or how it got there. I will note in passing that the main gangster's gun-moll-- who doesn't appear to have an analogue in the earlier crime-flick-- seems to be an original creation, though her world-weary attitude reminds me not a little of a similar figure in the 1955 Corman-produced DAY THE WORLD ENDED.

CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA, directed by Corman himself in a Cuban setting, lacks any of the visual elan of Hellman's BEAST, though purportedly Hellman directed some fill-in scenes for a TV edition. I would admit that there's a little more tension here-- the gang-leader is out to dump a treasure in the ocean to prevent his Cuban partners from getting their share, and his efforts are continually undone by both the meddlings of fate and a real-life goony-eyed monster. However, the comedy is so obvious that even the best scenes-- provided by a dimwit police agent working undercover with the mobsters (played by scriptwriter Robert Towne under a pseudonym)-- fall rather flat.

Oh, and that monster really sucks, regardless of Corman's attempt to send up his own cheap monster films.

STEEL AND LACE (1991)

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


The "steel" of the title is a female cyborg-- apparently built in part from the body of a rape victim-- and the "lace" represents the sexy disguises the cyborg adopts to trap the men who caused the humiliation and demise of her original body.

The workmanlike story-- directed by a guy mostly known for visual effects-- has just one potential myth-moment in it. The film begins with a prologue, showing how a rich boy goes to trial for raping a young woman, Gaily Morton, and gets off because four of his buddies testify that he was never there. Gaily is torn up by this travesty of justice, and despite the efforts of her scientist-brother Andrew, she manages to kill herself. But before she dies, one of the script's writers shows his awareness of Greek mythology by revealing that "Gaily" is short for "Galatea." In Greek lore Galatea is a statue brought to life by the sculptor Pygmalion. STEEL, however, is not really indebted to that myth, but rather to the modern myth of BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN. Andrew somehow gets hold of his sister's dead body and turns it into a cyborg-- which five years later, he sends on a killer rampage against the rapist and his accomplices.

There are naturally a couple of viewpoint characters-- a cop and an artist-- who become involved in figuring out the common thread between all the slayings. It's no knock against the writers and the director to admit that these are nothing characters; viewpoint characters are often not meant to do anything but serve as audience proxies. Nor is it surprising that the villains are one-dimensional evildoers. Emerson, the rich-boy rapist, needs only a thin mustache to make him into Snidely Whiplash, while his four accomplices are merely pathetic, whom Emerson treats like flunkies for having saved him from justice.

But the script might have done something with the Frankenstein-and-his-sister-bride motifs. Andrew's robot-making talents come out of nowhere and have no connection to anything except for avenging the death of his beloved sister. There's a desultory attempt to give Robot-Gaily a tragic dimension, in that she doesn't want to be a tool of death-- even though once or twice she seems to remember things that only Real-Gaily would know-- but the writers clearly made the cyborg's internal feelings secondary to coming up with slightly inventive ways for her to kill her victims. (Faint praise, but I did like the helicopter decapitation a little bit.)