THE POWER WITHIN (1995)

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


I've gotten a fair amount of entertainment from the DTV flicks of PM Entertainment, but only when the producers stuck with their strength: putting tough-ass actors-- Don Wilson, Lorenzo Lamas, Cynthia Rothrock-- in situations that ensured non-stop action. The company was so well-practiced in the art of action-movies that they could take a fourteen-year-old kickboxer, Ted Jan Roberts, and make him a DTV star in the '93 MAGIC KID and its next-year sequel. (I haven't watched these in a long time, but as I recall Roberts' character is not "magic" in any way, and only occasionally dresses up in ninja gear, in contrast to the probable influence on both films, 1992's THREE NINJAS.)

Since Roberts was about 16 around the time of filming POWER WITHIN, someone at PM must've thought that the most logical idea was to do a KARATE KID ripoff. However, whereas the senior PM writer on the project, Joe Hart, had done some good trash-action pics like RING OF FIRE 3 and T-FORCE, he must've written POWER WITHIN with half his brain turned off. And the movie gets no stylistic help from director Art Camacho. POWER was his directorial debut after working largely as a stuntman/ stunt coordinator, and he increases the awfulness of Hart's largely senseless script by staging action-scenes that barely have any resonance with said script.

Much like the protagonist of 1984's KARATE KID, Stan (Roberts) is a young nerd who isn't able to date the pretty girl he likes or fight back against school bullies. Stan takes karate classes, but can't get a handle on self-defense and even his little brother calls him a "loser." He also lacks a father-figure, living only with his brother and his weird ex-child star mother (Karen Valentine).

While Stan is suffering teenaged torments, Vonn, a villainous heist artist (William "Karate Kid" Zabka), steals an ancient ring from a museum exhibit. He shows up at the house of the man who hired him to steal the ring, only to inform the crime-boss that he Vonn plans to keep the ring and the money the boss paid him. The ring evidently gives Vonn super-kung-fu power, for he easily beats downs the boss's goons (none of whom wield guns) and leaves.

It's at this point that Hart's script goes totally off the rails. Instead of giving Stan some real training a la KARATE KID, the script introduces a mystic Oriental fellow, Yung, who has custody of a ring identical to the one Vonn stole. Later it will be revealed that the two rings were forged in ancient China inside a "volcano," and that they gave an emperor such power that he laid waste to his domain. This scenario, which sounds like Tolkien put through a mixmaster, isn't even followed through to explain why Yung kept custody of one super-ring but the other one simply fell into the hands of archaeologists somehow.

Stan, recovering from being beat down by the ex-boyfriend of the girl he likes, is approached by Yung, who plans to give Stan the ring. Vonn conveniently chooses this moment to home in on Yung's ring, so that absolutely no one else witnesses Yung fighting off Vonn and his black-clad henchmen. Yung is fatally wounded, but has enough mystic strength to teleport himself, Stan, and Stan's car to another location. Why can't Vonn find his way to that location? Who knows?

Yung dies, bequeathing the ring to Stan with lots of pseudo-Oriental bullcrap like "The explanation is too simple for you to understand." Stan reacts to the death of this mysterious stranger like Luke mourning Obi-Wan, but the youth gets over it when he finds that he can now beat up bullies with no effort at all. The ring even helps in school, mentally feeding him answers to a teacher's oral questions and seemingly improving a test-score he took before getting the ring.

Hart then pads out the flimsy script with throwaway scenes: Stan dating the girl of his dreams, Stan's mom getting hit on by a cop and a routine "Obi-Wan return" scene, when Yung's spirit comes back into Stan's life to mouth more witless platitudes. All of this leads up to a lackluster duel between Vonn and Stan. Vonn wins, gains ultimate power-- and then Stan, despite having shown no sign of any strength aside from what the jewelry gave him, somehow zaps the rings to dust.

Formula-movies always show their indebtedness to better films, but if they're good formula, they show an understanding as to what made the earlier stories work. POWER WITHIN, though, picks its tropes erratically, showing no sense for what makes any of the tropes persuasive. It isn't even as interesting as the Ed Wood sort of films that take formulas and subject them to relentless overbaking. The most I can say for the film is that if one can ignore all the gaffes, Roberts's fights with various goons are watchable, though that lousy end-fight manages to ruin even that.

DRAGONSLAYER (1981)

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

Aside from 1978's CORVETTE SUMMER, DRAGONSLAYER is the only film that Matthew Robbins both directed and co-wrote (collaborating on both films with one Hal Barwood).

It's interesting that, even though the genre of fantasy was booming in 1981 thanks to numerous Tolkien emulations and to D&D games, DRAGONSLAYER operates as a elegy for the worlds of fantasy. Though the specific location of the narrative is the made-up "Urland," it's just Dark-Ages England by any other name. At this time, Christianity is making major inroads into the culture but the old ways of paganism have not yet died. However, even Ulrich, the foremost wizard in Urland, tells his apprentice Galen that he Ulrich is not long for this world, at a time when wizards are becoming scarce.

In an opening cadged from THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, a coterie of poor farmers, led by the apparently male youth Valerian, approach Ulrich for help in banishing a dragon. As seen in the archetypal European dragon-myth, this particular dragon, Vermithrax, has taken up residence in some caverns near their farmland, and over time the rulers of the realm have appeased the dragon by feeding it female virgins. Said virgins are selected each year by a lottery that supposedly selects from all females of a certain age, though it seems that only the poor people's daughters have ended up as dragon fodder over the years. Ulrich swears to help the farmers, but he meets what appears to be a death by mischance. Galen (Peter MacNicol) chooses to accompany the farmers back to their territory, and in the process learns that Valerian is actually a young woman disguised as a boy, as part of her father's strategy to keep her out of the dragon's mouth.

Galen does have considerable magic powers, and he brashly attempts to slay the dragon by simply burying it in its own cavern. However, Vermithrax breaks free and scours the countryside with fire. This puts Galen in bad odor with reigning king Casiodorus, who is largely responsible for the custom of dragon appeasement. He and his soldiers confiscate Galen's magical amulet, and although the young wizard escapes, he's unable to do anything more to fight the dragon. In fact, he comes into further conflict with the King when Galen reveals to Casiodorus' daughter Elspeth that she's never been included in the lottery.

Galen, armed with new weapons given magical potency, attempts to slay the dragon himself, but fails, though he does manage to kill the king's foremost flunky. However, at the eleventh hour it turns out that the deceased Ulrich is not quite sincerely dead, and that he's laid a secret plan to kill the dragon all along.

Robbins and Barwood's medieval world lacks many of the glorious tropes of heroic adventure. Casiodorus is not just an aristocratic parasite, but a fool, since he vainly hopes that the dragon will simply die someday. Galen sees this dream proved a folly when he invades the cavern and finds that Vermithrax has spawned a small brood of carnivorous dragonets-- which would eventually prey on the people as well, save that Galen kills them. The Christian priests are no better, being presented as vain in their trumped-up belief that God will save them from the ravening beast. Even Valerian's father, though approving of her alliance to Galen, admits that he'll be glad to see magic die away. Ulrich's plan, in effect, destroys both the last dragon and the last wizard, clearing the path for the triumph of materialism and general mediocrity. However, the last minutes of the movie allow Galen and Valerian to cherish the hope that at least a little magic will survive.

GODZILLA (2014)

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


In my review of SHIN GODZILLA I observed that it was the first Japanese-made Godzilla film since the original to focus entirely on a battle between the giant monster and the Japanese military. Of course, America's 1998 version followed that trope, but given the derivative nature of that movie, I tended to think its lack of other big monsters was largely reflective of the script's lack of imagination.

The 2014 effort has much in common with the "monster-vs.-military" trope, but it does labor mightily to orchestrate a climactic battle between this spanking-new incarnation of Godzilla and a couple of insect-monsters called "Mutos." In contrast to the 1998 film, 2014-Godzilla mines a trope seen in the first few Showa films, which asserts that creatures like Rodan, Anguirus and the Big G have migrated from caverns far beneath the Earth's surface. And although there are some fulminations against nuclear power in G-2014, this seems to be the first time a Godzilla-film suggested that these archaic monsters were mutated in archaic times, when the Earth was filled with naturally occurring radioactivity. This explanation does make it a little more logical that Godzilla and the Mutos should be attracted to radioactivity, and it even gives the Mutos their own counter-tactic against modern humans: the ability to project EMP waves that paralyze electrical functions.

Sad to say, this attention to mining earlier tropes provides G-2014's only attraction. While G-1998 is a competent blockbuster, G-2014 looks like it was made by a director trying to get noticed for his skill with military scenes (though apparently Gareth Edwards' only feature-length film was another creature-work, MONSTERS, which I have not seen).

The film suffers not just from dull human viewpoint characters, but also from an initial bifurcation of viewpoint. The initiating setup begins with Joe Brody, supervisor at a U.S.-Japanese atomic plant, who loses his beloved wife to an apparent nuclear meltdown. However, fifteen years later, Joe tries to convince his grown son Ford-- the real viewpoint character of the movie-- that the meltdown is actually a government cover-up for an anomalous event. Joe perishes, but Ford inherits his mission, and becomes the viewer's-eye that witnesses the cause of the anomaly, the resurrection of one of the Mutos. This creature's appearance brings forth its mate, as well as another prehistoric creature, one that preys on Mutos. A Japanese scientist (cannily named "Serizawa") gives this "alpha predator" the name of "Gojira."

The possible consequences of the Mutos mating and spreading more of their kind seems somewhat derivative of G-1998, and they become the film's central threat, with Godzilla as something of a coincidental rescuer. But Godzilla is sorely under-used, and the design of the Mutos is unimpressive-- when one can see anything at all, given that the lack of electricity eventuates in far too many scenes shot in partial darkness. Even the outdoor scenes are hard to see, though Edwards seems to find plenty of light when it comes to depicting military goings-on.

I wasn't crazy about SHIN GODZILLA devoting far too much attention to the humans buzzing around and trying to dope out the big monster. But at least some of the dialogue was okay, and the explanations of Godzilla's freakish nature were interesting. I can't say that any of the human characters of G-2014 held my attention even as well as Nick Tatoupoulos.

GODZILLA ON MONSTER ISLAND (1972)

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


The American name for GODZILLA VS. GIGAN doesn't make much sense, since the audience only sees Monster Island briefly, before heroic monsters Godzilla and Anguirus depart said isle in order to fight the bad monsters. However, the Japanese title is also problematic, since Gigan, despite being touted as a major adversary alongside fan-fave Ghidrah, ended up being one of the Big G's least well-remembered opponents. And at least the title MONSTER ISLAND does suggest the idea of the film's only attraction, a big monster-battle-- and since those battles take place on the Japanese mainland, well, that's a "monster island" of a sort, too.

ISLAND is one of the lowest points of the Showa series, not least because it recycles footage and music from earlier Toho efforts, including bits of the highly recognizable Anguirus-Ghidrah tussle in DESTROY ALL MONSTERS. But at least there are some new, well-staged battles between Ghidrah and Godzilla. In contrast, new heavy Gigan-- apparently some sort of space cyborg, since he has a cycling buzzsaw that sprouts out of his stomach-- wears out his welcome once he's shown off his limited bag of tricks. (He also has arms that terminate in single curved talons, apparently made of metal.) As in earlier films, Godzilla and Anguirus function more or less like superheroes who come running when humans are in danger, though at least this time the villains behind the monsters are planning to destroy the whole Earth to make it habitable for them.

Once again Toho resorts to aliens as the prime movers behind a monstrous assault, but these extraterrestrials are perhaps the least interesting instigators of the period. The script's big idea is that, instead of the aliens being simply a hard-luck race looking for a new world to colonize, these beings are sort of a sub-race that survived when the dominant race of their world exhausted all resources. ISLAND is exceptionally preachy about humans having a lot in common with the dead aliens, and pedestrian as well, since the script thinks it's brilliant to pick up on the old canard that only cockroaches will survive once humans wipe themselves out. Thus these creatures are, despite their alien origins, are literally big cockroaches who can disguise themselves as humans. This time, though, the Cockroach People decide not to wait for humankind to destroy itself, but nudge things along.

The only interesting sociological myth of ISLAND is that the script reflects how thoroughly the Showa producers deemed the Godzilla series to be "for kids." The principal viewpoint character is a goofy manga artist named Gengo, and the level of his talent is shown when he imagines a couple of condescending faux-monsters who incarnate "homework" and "strict mothers." His questionable talents cause him to come in contact with the organizers behind a theme park, World Children's Land, which is also devoted to monsters (though all we see is one big Godzilla-statue). The organizers, however, are the Cockroach Men, and so Gengo and his allies-- one of whom is a young woman looking for her alien-abducted brother-- get involved in exposing the plot of the Cockroaches. The only member of Team Gengo who's at all interesting is his girlfriend Tomoko, who shows off her black-belt karate skills in a couple of scenes.

TAUR THE MIGHTY (1963)

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


I reviewed the sequel to this film here, where I said, among other things-

I should note that THOR was filmed back-to-back with another peplum with the same star and director, TAUR THE MIGHTY.  Both "Thor" and "Taur" were toss-off names applied to a hero who, the story goes, was originally going to be called "Tarzan" until the Edgar Rice Burroughs organization took exception.  This goes a long way toward explaining why the protagonist has no resemblance to the Scandinavian thunder-god of mythic and comic-book fame.

Until recently I'd never been able to view this film, which was probably shot back to back with the second given the use of many of the same actors in different roles, aside from the main character and his sidekick. Now that I've seen the standard English version of TAUR, I can state, for what little it's worth, that the dub calls Taur "Thor," just as did THOR AND THE AMAZON WOMEN. Though neither film is a classic, even for the peplum subgenre, TAUR feels almost like a less colorful dry-run for AMAZON WOMEN, which has more interesting incidents amid its equally formulaic script.

TAUR starts off with two royal sisters, Illa and Tuja, being hassled by a couple of enemy soldiers out in the wilds of what might be North Africa (actually shot in Yugoslavia). To their rescue comes a tough young fellow-- but no, it's not Taur, but a young orphan, Syros, whom Thor found in the forest and raised as his son (sort of like Classic Hollywood Tarzan's relationship with "Boy.") Syros beats off the baddies and returns the girls to their father the King of Some Kingdom. Syros asks for the hand of blonde Illa and the king agrees. They start planning a wedding, and since they figure Thor ought to attend, the king sends a Black African servant, Ubaratutu, to fetch Thor for the festivities.
Ubaratutu, it should be noted, is just as muscular as Thor, but occasionally shows a streak of cowardice, a streak which isn't apparent in AMAZON WOMEN.

A little later, Thor and Ubaratutu arrive at Some Kingdom, but they find only corpses, since the neighboring warriors of Quesos (?) have carried away as slaves everyone they didn't kill. Since Syros isn't among the dead, Thor insists that Ubaratutu come along as they seek out the Quesos realm and free Thor's buddy.

The heroes soon learn that most of the survivors of the raid have been confined underground, where they're forced to mine gold and refine it in a rather anachronistic furnace (complete with conveyor belt!) The women get different treatment, being trained as sword-wielding warriors to fight in some arena somewhere. Both Illa and Tuja have survived to join these almost-Amazons, though the script's only reason for keeping both alive is to force them to fight each other blindfolded later on. The tyrants in charge of the operation are Queen Akiba and her high priest El Kab, who are pretty much your standard evil rulers. Since Thor can't immediately free everyone from the soldiers, he and Ubaratutu blend in with the slaves, apparently with no real plan but getting close enough to figure out how to undermine (heh) the whole megilla.

For an Italian muscleman film, TAUR is pretty skimpy on romantic interludes, but it does offer an assortment of female-female sword-duels. Script and direction frequently take advantage of comical possibilities, though a forced arena-fight between Thor and Ubaratutu seems designed to humiliate the black guy. (FWIW, he gets better treatment in AMAZON WOMEN.) Perhaps the funniest consequence of the English dubbing takes place when Illa, freed from captivity, chases Akiba into a cavern. Good girl corners bad girl alongside a crevasse, and then utters the deathless line, "I should kill you!"-- just before pushing Akiba into the crevasse. Maybe some dubber didn't know the difference between "should" and "am going to?"

Anyway, the evil mining operation gets blown up, the villains are slain, and the former slaves of Some Kingdom take over. Syros is all set to marry Illa once more, but instead of sticking around for the wedding, Thor informs Ubaratutu that it's time for them to go looking for a new adventure. And off they go, the peplum version of Ebony and Ivory-- even if they only get one more outing.

KING SOLOMON'S TREASURE (1979)

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


Though the 1937 KING SOLOMON'S MINES remains the most faithful adaptation of any work by H. Rider Haggard, KING SOLOMON'S TREASURE may be the runner-up.

To be sure, there's not a lot of competition. Since the silent era, only three Haggard works-- SHE, KING SOLOMON'S MINES and MINES's sequel ALLEN QUATERMAIN-- have seen adaptation, and it's a sad state of affairs that for modern movie-watchers the best-know version of Haggard's long-running white-hunter hero comes from two terrible 1980s movies, the 1985 SOLOMON'S and its immediate sequel, ALLEN QUATERMAIN AND THE LOST CITY OF GOLD. The second of these adapted a few elements from the novel ALLEN QUATERMAIN, but it was primarily, like the earlier film, a clear knockoff of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK.

TREASURE, completed two years before the debut of Indiana Jones, is probably the closest adaptation ALLEN QUATERMAIN-- which actually gets explicit mention in the credits-- will ever receive. Though Haggard's initial Quatermain book is the better work, ALLEN is arguably more influential. In the later book Haggard promulgates the trope of the "lost race," a civilization that has somehow become separated from the rest of the world and that keeps all the customs of some archaic culture. Many authors, not least Edgar Rice Burroughs, mined this trope repeatedly throughout 20th-century pop fiction. To a small extent, ALLEN also contributed to the trope of "surviving prehistoric life," in that its heroes are forced to battle unusually large crabs. To be sure, Jules Verne's yet earlier JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH was probably the main influence on the signature work of prehistoric survival, Conan Doyle's 1912 THE LOST WORLD.

TREASURE doesn't entirely hew to the 1887 Haggard novel: in addition to oversized crabs, the heroes of the story also come across a couple of dinosaurs before reaching a lost colony of Phoenicians, conveniently next to a smoldering volcano. The film uses the same characters from the two Haggard books-- great hunter Quatermain (John Colicos), Sir Henry Curtis (David McCallum), and Captain Good (Patrick MacNee)-- as well as including Umslopogas (Ken Gampu), the Black African tribesman who joins Quatermain in the second novel. However, instead of alluding to the previous African journey of the three Englishmen, they go looking for King Solomon's Mines and end up encountering Zu-Vendis, the kingdom of the Phoenicians. Presumably the producers wanted the title to remind moviegoers of the first book, which is far better known today than the second one. The three Englishmen and their African buddy are welcomed by the city's queen Nyleptha (Britt Ekland), who in the book is one of two sisters. (Oddly, the 1987 QUATERMAIN film gets this detail right, but not much else.)

Nyleptha has good reason to welcome strangers, for her court is controlled by an evil high priest, who wants her to marry her half-brother in order to secure the throne for the future. The Phoenician queen promptly falls in love with Curtis, and he with her, which of course leads to lots of trouble for the Englishmen and their buddy-- not to mention the fact that the volcano chooses to get active right around the same time. The Englishmen take out a lot of soldiers with their rifles, with Quatermain showing himself the best shot, as in the novels. In contrast to the ending of ALLEN QUATERMAIN the novel, though, where both Allen and Umslopogas perish, Allen is left alive for possible sequels.

Now, having chronicled all of the film's likenesses and differences from the novel, I come to the big question: does being faithful to the book make TREASURE a good film? And the answer is that it's at best watchable. I've seen online reviews trashing the performances of Colicos, McCallum, and MacNee, but I thought all three of them did a fair job of keeping things moderately interesting. (Can't say the same for Britt Ekland, though.) The main problem is that both the script and the direction are simply pedestrian, giving the actors little to work with. I only assign the film with a "fair" mythicity because it does try, however erratically, to bring life to the original "lost race" novel

GODZILLA VS. THE SEA MONSTER (1966)

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


I'm a little more forgiving these days of SEA MONSTER's shortcomings than I was in earlier viewings, but even so, the thing I like best about the film is that it took a script that would've made a terrible "King Kong II" film and converted it into a mediocre Godzilla flick. By my lights this was a fortunate state of affairs, because when Toho Productions did make its second and last "King Kong II" film, they did a better-than-average job with the delirious KING KONG ESCAPES. Thus I'd have to say that SEA MONSTER's virtue is that of the soldier who throws himself on a grenade to protect the lives of other soldiers.

Godzilla, after all, had already had a number of epic films in his repertoire, with SEA MONSTER being immediately preceded by the two monster-mashes that pitted the Earth-monsters against King Ghidorah. Since Toho was reputedly cutting costs on its monster epics anyway. Godzilla's best days (at least in the Showa era) were all but behind him, apart from DESTROY ALL MONSTERS, and even this was originally intended as a farewell project.

The most obvious sign of the penny-pinching times is that most of SEA MONSTER emphasizes a coterie of human beings who get stuck on Letchi, a South Seas island that's a neighbor to Mothra's Infant Island. A motley crew of Japanese youths are dragooned by one of their number into a search-and-rescue for the one guy's brother, and although the brother-location poops out dramatically, it does make for an interesting opening. Once the guys arrive on Letchi, they eventually find the brother, but they also come across a lot of trouble. One source of trouble is a maybe-Communist terrorist organization, the Red Bamboo, who have set up shop on the island to manufacture nuclear bombs. They've also drafted several Infant Isle natives to slave for them, though one comely lass named Daiyo escapes and involves the guys in her difficulties. On top of this, there's also a giant lobster, Ebirah, who just hangs around the boundaries of Letchi and keeps anyone from leaving. It's not clear if Ebirah was created by nuclear run-off, or if it was one of the many subterrranean prehistoric behemoths who found its way to the surface as Godzilla did. Alternately, the big crustacean may be a little of both, like Godzilla. Somehow the Red Bamboo have evolved a way to fool the lobster's senses with a special chemical, which might argue for their direct involvement in its creation.

However, the young girls and girl have one small, if ambivalent, advantage: they find Godzilla hibernating in one of the caverns on Letchi. (Originally this would have been Kong, though presumably that script would've had to find some half-decent reason for Kong to have allowed the terrorists free reign on his island.) With some help from a lightning-rod-- IMO the movie's best scene-- the heroes manage to jolt Godzilla awake, and the rowdy reptile immediately takes on the big lobster. Ebirah retreats, so Godzilla returns to the island-- which means that he becomes yet another problem for the good guys.

The rest of the film involves the heroes running from either Godzilla or the soldiers while waiting for Mothra to wake up and come to their rescue. Despite some lively moments, the remainder of the film becomes wholly predictable, aside from a modesty entertaining final battle between reptile and crustacean.