SON OF GODZILLA (1967)

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


Though I wasn't crazy about the idea of SON OF GODZILLA back in the day, a recent revisit reveals that it's not that bad, and definitely stands as the best Godzilla film by Jun Fukuda, certainly more fun than the previous GODZILLA VS. THE SEA MONSTER.

In addition, even though Ishiro Honda is the revered master of all things Godzilla, he did a much blander version of a roughly similar story three years later in YOG MONSTER FROM SPACE. Both films dealt with small groups of human beings confined to an island full of bizarre monters. But even though all of the human characters of SON are just as negligible as those in YOG, the Fukuda film comes up with more interesting events to torment the people.

SON begins with a scientific expedition attempting to control Earth's weather for the purpose of feeding an overpopulated Earth. Unfortunately, they've chosen to set up their experiment on an island where some giant mantises-- possibly leftovers from prehistoric times, like Godzilla?-- are roaming around. In addition, Goro, a nosy reporter, parachutes down to the island, thinking that he's going to get some sort of scoop there. The scientists, having no transportation off the island, must reluctantly accept Goro into their midst. While there Goro spots a comely sarong-clad beauty, though no one believes him because the scientists think the whole native population was evacuated. Later they find out that the young lady, name of Raeko, is actually the offspring of a Japanese couple who died on the island and left Raeko to grow up alone, though she knows many of the island's secrets.

When the scholars run one of the weather-tests, a mysterious radio broadcast from the island-- which is also seen "calling" Godzilla out at sea-- disrupts the machine and causes a chain reaction. For four days a "radioactive storm" besieges the island, though Goro and the scientists protect themselves in their bunkers. The radioactivity causes the mantises to become larger-- hence their new name "Gimantises"-- though this seems a needless elaboration, since the island already has a couple of really, really big monsters. One, not seen until over halfway through the film, is giant spider Spiga, who has apparently been around long enough that Raeko can tell Goro all about its habits. The other, however, is still in its egg, and it's a baby of the Godzilla species, later named "Minilla." The Gimantises uncover the egg, crack it open and try to prey on Minilla. Godzilla shows up and kills one of the mantises, after which the Big G apparently decides to adopt this leftover member of the species.

With even more monsters in residence, the scientists now want to call for aid in getting off the island, but their radio's shot. Goro finally wins over Raeko into meeting the scientists, and they use her island-knowledge to escape some of the creatures. While the humans struggle to repair the radio-- which they eventually use to signal their people-- Godzilla has assorted scenes trying to teach Minilla the art of being a giant monster. However, by the climax Godzilla and "son" are forced to fight the other monsters for supremacy. The humans all escape and also use their device to put the two Godzillas "on ice," for the time being.

The chemistry between the actors playing Goro and Raeko enlivens all of the human-focused scenes, given that the scientists are a pretty dull lot. The main attraction, though, is the spectacle of Godzilla playing "daddy." Some of Fukuda's antics are OK-- I rather liked Minilla playing "jump the rope" with his sleeping parent's tail-- but I could have done without Minilla throwing a childish temper tantrum. Minilla is also shown using the same atomic breath Godzilla has. Perhaps this was the real purpose of the radioactive storm, to provide some tie to Godzilla's own origins, but none of Fukuda's characters ever think about such discrepancies.

THE EROTIC CIRCUS (1969)

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


I watched EROTIC CIRCUS on Youtube, and the best thing about this low-budget sexploitation feature is the title. However, the alternative title-- ORGY IN THE PSYCHO HOUSE, which is the title that appears on the Youtube print-- is actually a lot more appropriate.

PSYCHO's long shadow envelops CIRCUS just as it does many other 1960s horror films. I imagine that other low-budget grindhouse productions ransacked the Hitchcock oeuvre before this one, but I have to give credit to writer-director Henri Pachard-- in his third film before he went on to a long. long career in hardcore flicks-- for sticking somewhat close to the PSYCHO pattern.

The "psycho house" is a farmhouse out in the bleak countryside, inhabited by an older, unnamed woman (billed as "Mom" on imdb), her adult son Jaimy, and a weird caretaker, Yenos, who's seen axing some unfortunate woman to death in the film's first few minutes.  Mom's brother Louie, a coke dealer, takes it into his head to come visit, bringing along two skanky ladies, implicitly involved with him in making erotic films. Mom receives her visitors with ill grace, and the stage is set for indiscriminate murder, interspersed by either visual fantasies about sexual encounters or Louie trying to gross people out in one way or another. Louie's the first victim of the mystery killer-- kept decorously off-camera as Louie is knifed to death-- and the girls are next.

Despite the clumsy sequences with the caretaker, clearly Pachard wants the viewer to suspect weak, passive-looking Jaimy. But, big surprise, it's Mom doing the killings. It's really not much of a surprise, since early on some non-specific sexual activity between mother and son is indicated, and a final sequence glosses this. After having killed all the intruders, Mom then spends several minutes applying a dress and makeup to Jaimy. Then the film ends, making clear that this time, "Norma," not "Norman," is really the guilty party.

IMDB reviews assert that this probably wasn't the full film, not least because there's not much real-time bump-and-grind. However, there's enough perversity on display that CIRCUS almost seems like the sexploitation version of the old saw about vaudeville-- i.e., if you don't see your fetish on display, just wait a minute and there'll be another one.

THE CURSE OF THE CRIMSON ALTAR (1968)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *metaphysical, psychological*


SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

I'll get the expected complaint out of the way first: that it's a shame that a movie starring Christopher Lee, Boris Karloff and Barbara Steele doesn't boast a script worthy of the actors.

To be sure, Steele has such a small role that I suspect that she was only engaged for a few days, so maybe her greater participation was off the table from the get-go. But both of the characters played by Lee and Karloff share the stage quite a bit with viewpoint-character Robert Manning (Mark Eden), so there's no excuse on that front.

ALTAR's biggest failing is that Robert is a bland lead, given a bland mission. His brother Peter disappears while traveling for the brothers' antique-dealing business, and the only clue is a note that leads Robert to a small English town called Greymarsh. Robert checks out a mansion occupied by an urbane fellow named Morley (Lee) and his cute niece Eve (Virginia Wetherell), but neither of them can adequately explain the note's provenance or Peter's disappearance. No one in Greymarsh gives Robert any help, though strange old duck Professor Marsh (Karloff) gives the young man lots of background on the town's supernatural history. In particular, the Morleys had a witch in their family centuries ago, one Lavinia (Steele), a green-skinned, horn-headed sorceress seen only in visionary sequences.

Robert, with the aid of Eve, continues stumping around trying to solve the mystery, though the character as written never seems all that torn-up by his brother's disappearance, or even being told (by Michael Gough's creepy butler-type) that Peter is dead. Robert himself has visions in which he sees his brother being judged by Lavinia and her costumed cultists, after which Robert expresses total ignorance of all this occult business. Professor Marsh is happy to toss out tidbits about Pan and Herne the Hunter, but the script doesn't really have much to offer in terms of pagan lore-- even though Chris Lee would play a slightly similar type of character five years later in another pagan-horror film, THE WICKER MAN.

In the end (remember those SPOILERS), there's no real witch, only Lee playing at being a warlock, and using some very unlikely hypnotic techniques to control people's beliefs about a recrudescent Lavinia. Only at the end is there a small suggestion that Lavinia might be real. Lee, stranded on the roof of his burning mansion, seems to be surrounded by the image of the green-fleshed sorceress, while on the ground Robert and Eve react as if they too are seeing this apparition. But since both of them have been somewhat under Morley's mesmeric aegis, it's also possible that they're just seeing what Morley wants them to see. The scene seems to be more of a last-minute "gotcha" than a serious reversal of the story's main thrust about mysticism-via-hypnosis.

Lee and Karloff definitely give their thinly-conceived roles far more gravitas than the parts deserve.

LANCER: "A SCARECROW AT HACKET'S" (1969)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *metaphysical, psychological*


SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

I've usually found the western teleseries LANCER to be a weak-sauce version of BONANZA (middle-aged patriarch works a ranch in the Old West with his adult sons). That's why I was surprised to find that one 1969 episode of the series provided one of TV's better "weird westerns."

The trouble begins not with the Lancer family (consisting principally of patriarch Murdoch and his sons Scott and Johnny) but with one of their neighbors, Silas Hacket, who with his young son Jeremy works a small nearby ranch with a cornfield (and the titular scarecrow, though it doesn't get a lot of visual emphasis). Silas falls ill and passes away, but not before making the eerie claim that he wills his land back to the devil, who gave it to him. The Lancers take young Jeremy under their wing, assuring him that they won't honor such an extravagant claim and that the ranch will become the youth's properly.

However, a newcomer (Pat Hingle) arrives at the Lancer ranch, ushered in by a blistering wind that the newcomer himself calls "infernal." He introduces himself as Absolem Weir, and presents evidence that he has a lien on the property. Murdoch promises to have the local lawmakers investigate Weir's claim, but clearly his sympathies are with Jeremy. Further, Absolem-- who perhaps borrows his first name from the rebellious son of Biblical king David-- seems uncannily omniscient about everyone at the Lancer ranch, particularly Johnny, who has a quasi-criminal past as a gun-for-hire. Absolem even displays the Batman-like talent for disappearing whenever someone's looking away from him.

While the lien is under investigation, Absolem takes it upon himself to visit the ranch in question, and he seems to be exert a charismatic influence upon Jeremy-- perhaps because Jeremy needs a new father-figure. However, Absolem's conversations-- in some cases taking place in that dismal cornfield with its scarecrow-- seem to focus more on tempting Jeremy to cross over to some darker existence. He shows off an ability to handle a gun, and though he doesn't exhibit any supernatural talents as such when he and Johnny come to blows, there's a peculiar moment wherein Weir spitefully spooks Johnny's horse by uttering a cougar-like cry.

Despite all of these devilish suggestions, the Lancers' investigation indicates that Weir's lien is phony. This disclosure leads to a concluding gun-battle between Johnny and Weir. Yet scripter Samuel Roeca and director Marvin Chomsky (the latter best known for three STAR TREK episodes) still manage to keep a sense of the unfathomable. The two men fire at each other from cover, and Johnny's fire hits not Weir but the implacably standing scarecrow. When the other Lancers show up, Weir has simply disappeared, this time for good, as the land is ceded back to the rightful owner.

It's not a perfect episode. Too late in the story, Johnny remembers a legend about the devil wanting to "grow souls" in some barren piece of land, a legend which would've been more effective toward the beginning of the narrative. But it's certainly a better metaphenomenal western than seeing Hoss Cartwright dress up like the Easter Bunny.

THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH (1999)

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

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

As in the previous Brosnan-Bond film, the villains are fairly down to earth in terms of their technology-- once again, involving an attempt to unleash a nuclear bomb, though this time, the villain is out to create a capitalistic hegemony rather than to foment war between nations. However, Bond's super-car is back, complete with a surface-to-air missile, which is enough to boost the movie into marvelous territory. Bond himself has a new gimmick, a flash-bomb inside a pair of glasses, and in the film's rousing opening action-scenes he pilots a submersible boat in pursuit of an assassin.

WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH is the first and last Bond film directed by Michael Apted. It's also the last Bond writing-credit for Bruce Fierstein, after he received sole billing for TOMORROW NEVER DIES. For whatever reason, Neil Purvis and Robert Wade, who share screenplay credit with Fierstein on WORLD, apparently became the new favorites of the producers, for the two of them remained attached to the franchise all the way through 2015's SPECTRE.

WORLD shows some of the ambitiousness of GOLDENEYE in terms of redefining Bond for the nineties. As in GOLDENEYE there are some attempts to tweak Bond's image as a ladykiller, while still allowing him to bed three women in the course of the film. Yet the film emphasizes Bond's role as a spy engaged in battling real-world terrorism, which in this case is entwined with a particular capitalistic enterprise. In the aforementioned opening scenes, Bond, seeking to learn who killed a MI6 agent, is used as an assassin's pawn in killing British oil magnate Robert King. Moments before King is slain, Bond sees the tycoon conclude a meeting with Bond's superior M (Judi Dench), and a past romantic vibe between M and King is strongly implied. Despite a long pursuit of the person responsible for the bomb, the agent is unable to keep the assassin from taking her own life, ostensibly out of fear of a mysterious "him."

MI6's investigation suggests that Robert King was killed by terrorists targeting a pipeline under construction in Azerbaijan. Further, M had an involved professional relationship with Robert King in addition to any unverified personal attachment. Years ago King's daughter Elektra was kidnapped, and King came to M for help. Instead of liberating Elektra, M sought to use Elektra as a means of trapping her kidnapper, noted terrorist Renard. M failed to trap Renard, though a later attempt on the head terrorist left a bullet in the man's brain, while Elektra managed to get free sans M's help. Now Elektra King (Sophie Marceau) has inherited her father's firm, and Bond suspects that Renard may seek to attack her and her company once more.

The ambivalence of the Greek name "Electra"-- which I'll address shortly in more detail-- may give the game away early. Bond, as he so often does with women he seeks to protect, falls into bed with Elektra, but in a reversal on TOMORROW NEVER DIES, he finds out that his new conquest was previously seduced by a villain, in this case Elektra's former captor Renard. The two are both partners in romance and in crime, and their long-range plan is to trigger an atomic meltdown to eliminate other pipelines in the vicinity, so that Elektra's hegemony will be unchallenged. Elektra willingly collaborated in the slaying of Robert King, partly because she blamed him for not ransoming her (she also blames M, and comes close to snuffing her as well), partly because the British magnate "stole" the Azerbaijan oil-lands from Elektra's mother, though we never hear much of anything about this alleged theft. Bond, aided by a requisite Good Girl (Denise Richards), leaps through a series of action-hoops to head off the holocaust, though in terms of stuntwork, none of the set-pieces equal the one at the film's opening. However, in terms of emotional resonance, none of Bond's athletic actions prove as grueling as his fatal confrontation with Elektra, in which, in contradistinction to his normal gallantry, he's forced to shoot her dead to keep her from launching the nuclear option.

In some quarters Elektra King was touted as movie-Bond's first "head villainess," as opposed to a henchwoman like Pussy Galore or Xenia Onatopp. However, Elektra doesn't really have the mojo to full that role. Part of her failure as a villain lies in the fact that her vengeance is set into motion by a more experienced male terrorist, even though there are a few moments in which Renard becomes somewhat subordinate to Elektra. Moroever, actress Sophie Marceau just doesn't have the talent to pull off a role of such emotional depth. Both Brosnan and Robert Carlyle (who plays the bitter, doomed terrorist Renard) act Marceau under the table.

Authors don't always use Greek words to reflect their original associations, but I think Purvis and Wade had some knowledge of both the Greek myth of Electra and the appropriation of the name by psychology. In the latter discipline, an "Electra complex" was one in which a grown daughter has become fixated upon her father, whether emotionally or erotically. Carl Jung coined the term as a response to Freud's "Oedipus complex," and the reference grew out of Electra's role in Greek myth. In this myth-cycle, the Greek lord Agamemnon returns from the Trojan War in triumph, only to be murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegistus. Only Electra, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, seeks to avenge her father, manipulating her younger brother Orestes into slaying the two people responsible for Agamemon's death.

Interestingly, Purvis and Wade turned the original Electra situation on its head. In their hands, Electra honors her mother and views her father as a thief, though this orientation probably came about after Robert King, on the bad advice of M, failed to save Elektra. Thus the daughter-figure in WORLD resents both the father and a "bad mother," reversing Electra's focus on her mother and a "bad father." This is probably as far as the parallels were meant to go, though Bond does serve Elektra's ends the way Orestes does those of his sister. Renard bears no strong comparison to anyone in the Greek tale. However, since he's probably named for the folkloric trickster-fox Reynard, he might be seen as an embodiment of Elektra's own treacherous nature.

This is also one of the few Bond films in which the villains have some human dimension, with the result that M's ruthlessness with regard to innocents doesn't leave her looking very heroic.  The darker aspects of the storyline bid fair comparison with the similarly doleful 1997 espionage-teleseries LA FEMME NIKITA.

ROSARIO + VAMPIRE, SEASONS 1-2 (2008)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *metaphysical, psychological*

I have yet to devote any of my comics-writings on ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE to the Akihisa Ikeda manga series ROSARIO + VAMPIRE (2004-07), for the simple reason that I haven't yet finished reading it. However, there were only two seasons of the 2008 teleseries anime adaptation, so it's easy enough to review.

 I have read enough of the manga to state that the anime is only broadly faithful to its source material. Some manga-stories are directly adapted, and all of the main characters appear, but the anime never does a narrative that lasts longer than two episodes, plainly because there are only 13 episodes in each of the two seasons. And while the original manga sports numerous sexploitation tropes, whoever did the anime seemed not to know the adage "less is more." ROSARIO the series is filled with so many gratuitous panty-shots that it manages the signal feat of making them all rather boring. In addition, whereas the manga-series uses comic elements but has more of an adventurous tone overall, the anime is pure "harem comedy."

Teenager Tsukune Aono has such low grades that he can't get into any prominent high schools. By chance, he enrolls in a private school, Yokai Academy, only to find that it's a school that exists in an otherworldly dimension. The inhabitants of the dimension are all monsters-- some Japanese, some Western-- and the students at Yokai, though they all appear as human beings, are learning how to emulate humans in order to move among them without being detected. Tsukune can't initially get away from Yokai, and then he meets a female monster, vampire Moka Akashiya, who makes him want to stick around, despite the threat to life and limb. In the first episode Moka learns that Tsukune is a human being, and she helps him conceal the fact from the other students-- including three other female monsters who find Tsukune to be endlessly enticing: succubus Kurumu, snow-woman Mizore, and witch Yukari (who, in keeping with many Japanese serials from the nineties on, is a "lolicon" middle-schooler who constantly embarrasses Tsukune with her attentions). The five of them become friends who belong to the same club, and the four monster-girls are frequently called upon to defend the powerless human from other monster-students. Of the four, Moka the vampire is indisputably the most powerful, and most of the episodes conclude with her clobbering an enemy who's conquered all other opposition. Each trouncing, and the number of seconds it takes, is announced by a bat-narrator, a device that becomes so tedious that one soon welcomes the couple of times that Moka gets knocked around by a superior antagonist.

On top of all of these "harem comedy" tropes, Moka is also a bit of a Jekyll-and-Hyde as well as a Dracula. When Tsukune meets Moka, she seems to be a sweet-tempered Japanese girl who wears a curious cross-rosary around her neck. He soon discovers that the rosary subdues Moka's "Mister Hyde" persona-- the one she was actually born with-- and that, though she can't take it off herself, Tsukune can, and whenever he does, the powerful, arrogant side of Moka emerges to smash down any and all enemies.

The manga series was able to investigate these potential S&M aspects in much greater detail than the series can (though the closing montage works in a fair amount of nudity and chains). About the only episode which gets as wild as the manga is the first-season episode "Math and the Vampire." The story, in both manga and anime, suggests the pressure high-school students feel to excel in subjects like math, for Tsukune is briefly enslaved by evil teacher Ririko, who dresses in sexy outfits but apparently only gets turned on when her favored student mindlessly spouts mathematical theorems. Appropriately, Ririko's form is that of a Lamia, which in Greek mythology was a female creature that murdered children.

Only the first season follows the plot-line regarding Tsukune's dilemma about trying to romance Moka while not exposing himself to other students as a trespassing human. The other members of the harem find out Tsukune's identity at the end of the first season, and although the producers handle the drama fairly well, the second and last season is devoted to nothing but sex and silliness. It concludes with Tsukune having a big fight with Moka's vampiric father, but it resolves nothing and the series ends by restoring the status quo. My overall finding is that ROSARIO is a watchable if repetitive trifle.

THE GREAT RACE (1965)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*


Like 1952's CRIMSON PIRATE, Blake Edwards' THE GREAT RACE falls into the category of the metaphenomenal only in that it shows characters using technological marvels that are technically possible now but unlikely to have been seen in RACE's turn-of-the-century time-frame-- the combination dirigible-bicycle seen above, a primitive torpedo, a car that exudes a smokescreen long before James Bond's era.

Though RACE is overlong, like a lot of other star-studded productions of the 1960s, it's an enjoyable re-framing of the "mellerdrammers" of the early 20th century, with emphasis on the cliches of state and silent film. Heroic Leslie (Tony Curtis) dresses in white, while villainous Professor Fate (Jack Lemmon) dresses in black. But, rather being crimefighter and criminal, the two are rival daredevils constantly seeking the acclaim of crowds. After showing the various ways in which Leslie wins that acclaim, while Fate always loses out despite his penchant for cheating, the film gets down to a long, cross-continental car-race. To further complicate the contest, suffragette Maggie Du Bois (Natalie Wood) decides that she wants to participate in the race to prove the equality of women. When neither of the daredevils will accommodate her, Maggie gets her own car and tries to compete-- though almost inevitably, she ends up riding with Leslie, and the two end up falling in love, albeit with many arguments and complications. Fate, unlike most melodrama-villains, has absolutely no interest in stealing the hero's girl, only his thunder.

The celebrated pie-fight during the "Prisoner of Zenda" spoof is justifiably the film's most famous moment, though I like almost as much the spoofy western saloon-brawl as well, in which Larry Storch plays a bandit who keeps telling people to give him some "fightin' room" and finally gets decked by girlfriend Dorothy Provine. Curtis plays off his earlier swashbuckling characters with aplomb, while Lemmon puts a great deal of energy into the maniacal Fate, as well as a secondary character, a daffy king whom Fate resembles. It's been said that Natalie Wood didn't want to play the role of Maggie, but she essays the spunky role with as much energy as anyone could have.

I also re-watched the film to gauge whether or not RACE was a combative film. It's not impossible for a work to be combative even if the antagonists are contending via their vehicles, but there's no climactic contest between the cars. Leslie demonstrates a high level of swordsmanship in two scenes, one of which has him out-duel an evil conspirator (Ross Martin), and he has some fights in the saloon-scene, but these incidents seem isolated from the fundamental plot, and so I judge that the film is not combative.