BLOOD BATH (1966)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*


Both the production history and the functional narrative of BLOOD BATH prove incredibly convoluted. Yet, even though the plot of this chop-shop concoction from Roger Corman's AIP company is hard to follow, there are some interesting mythic aspects to the story as a whole.

The consensus on that complicated history seems to be that first Corman bought a spy thriller shot in Yugoslavia, and then added more scenes to the footage to make it into a horror film for American release. This version, which included new scenes of actor William Campbell as a deranged painter, eventually appeared on American television as PORTRAIT OF TERROR. But prior to that, Corman wanted more changes to make the movie viable for release to cinemas.

Jack Hill was assigned to rewrite the script and to direct more new scenes, and thus he seems to be the person most responsible for the better elements of BLOOD. Hill's altered version still did not please Corman, and two years later he assigned another director. Stephanie Rothman, to shoot yet more scenes, and then BLOOD BATH finally enjoyed a general release in 1966. (To further complicate things, even more scenes were shot to pad the feature when it came to television under the alternate title TRACK OF THE VAMPIRE). Rothman's main contribution was to give Hill's mad painter a vampiric nature, though since she no longer had access to actor Campbell, she had to use another actor wearing vampire-fangs, as well as re-dubbing some of Campbell's dialogue.

More than one reviewer has noted that Hill, in moving the original film's action from Europe to Venice Beach, California, may have patterned his revision of the script after Corman's earlier directorial effort, 1959's A BUCKET OF BLOOD. At the very least Hill was probably emulating the way BUCKET's writer Charles Griffith had drawn upon California's beatnik culture as a backdrop for the murderous career of would-be sculptor Walter Paisley. Both films play upon the beatniks' reputation for exaggerated artsiness, as BLOOD shows by starting off with a scene where a pretentious beat named Max shows off his system of "quantum painting," which consists of shooting one of his own canvases with a paint-gun. That said, the beats in BLOOD come off a little better than the ones in BUCKET, and the starring psycho-killers of the two films could not be more different.

Whereas Walter Paisley has no actual artistic talent, and merely impresses his gullible audience with his counterfeit creations, Alberto Sordi hearkens back to earlier, more magisterial wax-museum fiends. At the start of the film, he's apparently been killing women and turning them into wax statues for some time, but he doesn't exhibit them, merely keeping them in his studio. Implicitly they inspire him to execute a financially-successful series of paintings known as "Dead Red Nudes," showing women both undressed and impaled.

Sordi's studio is presumably a leftover from earlier versions of the film, as is his relationship to the building, which boasts an Old World clock-tower. In a dialogue that may also recycle older elements, Sordi informs one of his intended victims that once his family owned the building, but now he's forced to live in it as a tenant, employed to keep the clock running. Possibly the clock-tower was meant to be one of those many edifices transported from Europe to the U.S. brick-by-brick, but Hill's script doesn't trouble with such details. Sordi claims that the clock has been in operation since the 11th century, except for one time, when Sordi's ancestor Erno-- also an artist-- was burned at the stake. (Presumably Hill's script had Erno accused of being a witch, which Rothman changed into accusations of vampirism.) The broad implication is that Erno's troubles also took place in the Old World, but Hill isn't overly concerned with Sordi's loss of his clan's high-class privileges.

Instead, Sordi is obsessed with Melizza, a long-dead woman who betrayed Erno Sordi to the Church. Sordi still has his ancestor's painting of Melizza, and relates to his victim the allegation that Melizza's soul was captured in the painting. As if to prove that the mistress of Erno still has some occult impact on the life of the modern artist, Sordi's currently dating Dorean (Lori Saunders), a woman who's a dead ringer for Melizza. Sordi fears the spectre of Melizza, but he's fascinated with her, imagining that she appears in his dreams (where she's of course also played by Saunders). His obsession with killing women presumably started out as the compensatory desire to wield power over females, though of course the insertion of the erratic vampire element adds another complication.

After Sordi kills the film's first-seen victim-- Daisy, who just happens to be the girlfriend of "quantum artist" Max-- Daisy's sister Donna teams up with Max to go looking for the missing woman. This allows Hill to repeat the story of Sordi's evil ancestor, at which Max scoffs. However, Sordi in his "vampire" form tracks down Donna and murders her on a merry-go-round. This could have been the film's best visual sequence, except that there are spectators on the carousel when the scene starts, all of whom mysteriously vanish during the murder.

The viewer also finds out that although Sordi has been busy killing women and turning them into his artistic property, Dorean complains that he hasn't even "made a pass" at her during their dates. Clearly, though he's drawn to the Melizza lookalike, he also fears her as his nemesis. This instinct is proven right at the end. In vampire-form Sordi tries to attack Dorean. She escapes with the help of the somewhat heroic beatniks, but then chooses to take refuge at Sordi's studio. The mad artist has reverted to his human self, but Dorean's appearance causes him to lose it. He ties her up and prepares to both kill and immortalize her. At this point, the soul of Melizza-- who took no particular exception to all the other slain women-- suddenly intervenes. She causes some of Sordi's wax-embalmed victims to rise up and force him into his own wax, while the beatniks arrive to help Dorean out of her bonds.

It's hard to say why Corman liked Rothman's interpolations of Sordi's vampirism. Rothman certainly had no space to explore the traditions of vampire fiction in this cobbled-together melange, but maybe Corman simply thought vampires were more commercial than mad painters. The element of Melizza's mystic painting, for which Hill has taken credit on Youtube, is more compelling, and one may fairly ask why the Melizza-ghost only intervenes when her modern lookalike is in danger. Hill does not enlarge on this situation, but it does seem possible that Dorean really is Melizza's descendant, even as Sordi is that of mad painter Erno, and thus Sordi's breaking a sexual injunction by attacking Dorean. What I find most enjoyable about BLOOD BATH is that Hill consistently shows everyone in his world as being fascinated with both sex and death when they're couched in the abstracted world of art. There's no fear of the "male gaze" in this world, which seems fitting for the man who later directed films like THE BIG DOLL HOUSE.  Even simple Daisy wants to see her beauty given representation, and becomes angry at Max when he does a conventional portrait of her and then ruins it with his paint-gun. Even without Rothman's changes, I doubt that Hill's original script explored the themes of transgressive art in any depth. But despite the film's flawed execution, Sordi is still an interesting monster, half indebted to the example of wax-sculptors like Henry Jarrod of HOUSE OF WAX, and half to the long shadow of Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO.

PARANOIAC (1962)

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


SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS


This film's title is undoubtedly beholden to the success of 1960's PSYCHO. However, Jimmy Sangster's script, said to have been loosely based on a Josephine Tey novel, bears less in common with Hitchcock than various "old dark house" thrillers.

Once again, rich English people got troubles. The progenitors of the Ashby clan both died years ago, so that now the Ashby mansion is inhabited only by two grown children, Simon (Oliver Reed) and Eleanor (Janette Scott), and by their aunt Harriet. But no one says much about the dead parents. Eleanor cares only about mourning her lost (and favorite) brother Tony, who apparently committed suicide in the ocean when he was fifteen, though the body was never recovered. For his part Simon shows every sign of becoming a hard-drinking wastrel, who continuously duns the family lawyer for extra money. However, only on a specified date will both Eleanor and Simon divide the wealth left to them by their parents. Eleanor's behavior suggests that she may commit suicide to be with her beloved brother, and Simon intimates that she'd be better off in an asylum-- which would make it possible for Simon to enjoy the entire bequest.

With only weeks to go before the inheritance date, a stranger saves Eleanor from drowning herself. Eleanor sees in him a resemblance to the dead Tony, and indeed he claims that he is Tony. He survived his suicide attempt and went wandering for several years, until he finally chose to return to claim his part of the inheritance. Eleanor is thrilled to have him back, while Simon and Harriet are more ambivalent-- and with good reason. Sangster quickly reveals that Tony is an impostor with only a nodding resemblance to the deceased brother, and that he's been coached in the family's history by his co-conspirator, the son of the family lawyer. However, "false Tony" is at heart a decent fellow, and he dislikes deceiving the vulnerable Eleanor.

Then Tony gets a taste of some night-time weirdness: an unseen individual playing the piano in the family chapel, and a clown-masked figure who attackes Tony with a bill-hook. To further complicate things, Eleanor's feelings toward her supposed brother began to become more amatory, which causes her distress, though one could rationalize that on some subconscious level she's aware that he's not really her brother. Tony is then invested enough to ferret out the truth: the real brother didn't commit suicide, but was killed by Simon. All of Simon's later irrational behavior springs from his guilt over the murder, and to keep him from going completely off the rails, Aunt Harriet has been donning her clown-masked outfit, which somehow convinces the crazed Simon that she's a live version of Tony. Yet on some level Simon's  aware of the truth, because he's got the mummified brother of the Real Tony (paging taxidermist Norman....) stowed away in the chapel.

Possibly the Tey novel is better on psychological acuity than Sangster's script, since none of the characters in the film hold up to close scrutiny. Harriet's costumed ritual is never really explained, though her wild attire looks forward to the more bizarre serial killers of eighties slasher films. Eleanor's brush with incest doesn't really amount to anything, since the viewer knows Fake Tony's not really her brother. Simon-- played in scenery-chewing style by Oliver Reed-- is unquestionably the central figure of the family romance, though the title "paranoiac" doesn't really apply to him. When he's explaining his crime to his listeners, he never expressly says that he killed Tony out of greed for the estate, and Sangster seems to let the audience assume that to be the case, since earlier viewers have seen him willing to put Eleanor away for  the sake of filthy lucre. Since all three Ashby offspring are supposed to be in their teens at the time of Tony's murder, I find it interesting to wonder if Simon might've murdered Tony precisely because Eleanor treated Tony as her favorite. But I confess there's nothing in the film to support reading it in a more Freudian (or Hitchcockian?) manner.

A BUCKET OF BLOOD (1959)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*


Of all of Roger Corman's directorial works from the fifties decade, A BUCKET OF BLOOD is probably the most well-liked film. It certainly has its fair share of charms, ranging from a witty script by Charles B. Griffith and a captivating performance by film-fan favorite Dick Miller as the witless psycho-murderer Walter Paisley.

Griffith almost certainly knew of earlier films about madmen making murdered corpses into wax statues, since HOUSE OF WAX, the quasi-remake of 1933's MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM, had appeared in theaters six years previous. But in both of these horror-films, the wax-sculptors were obsessed with the artistry of their endeavors. In contrast, Walter, a lowly busboy at a cafe, is a wannabe who has no artistic talent or ambition. Influenced by the high-flown, art-obsessed yammerings of the cafe's beatnik clientele, Walter has delusions of attempting sculpture in order to win the heart of his female colleague Carla, whom he's longed after for years, and who is also desired by their mutual employer, the cafe-owner Leonard (not one of the beats, though he constantly wears a beret to imply his affiliation to their artsiness). Leonard is in essence a slightly more "hip" version of Walter, in that neither man cares about art, even in the pretentious manner of the beatniks, but only with the filthy lucre that follows artistic success.

Walter, nebbish that he is, accidentally kills both a neighbor's cat and an obnoxious undercover cop, and his idea of coating them in wax originates as a method of concealing the bodies. However, he gets the inspiration of showing off the clay-coated feline off to the cafe-attendees as if it's a genuine sculpture. The adulation Walter receives-- not least from Carla-- is as much of a drug as those the beats utilize, and thus he puts the body of the waxed-up cop on display as well. From there it's a quick progression to killing people on purpose and then putting them on display-- though, because Walter is such a doofus, his handiwork is found out in jig time, and he ends up paying the ultimate price.

The satire of the West Coast beatnik scene, and of pretentious artsiness generally, is somewhat repetitious, and there's no sense that Griffith or Corman knew anything but authentic Beat art like that of Ginsburg and Ferlinghetti. But Dick Miller's performance anticipates the horror film's increasing dependence on the trope of the "nerd gone wild."

JOKER (2019)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*


I wasn't especially stoked to see JOKER, based on rumors that it might take some inspiration from the Moore-Bolland KILLING JOKE, of which I was not a fan. It turned out that the Todd Phillips-Scott Silver script only draws upon one aspect of the graphic novel: the idea that Batman's most notorious villain started out as a failed stand-up comic. The film's structure is much more indebted to Martin Scorsese works like TAXI DRIVER and THE KING OF COMEDY, and I'm moved to wonder if, prior to Phillips getting the nod for the directorship, he and Silver might have skewed their screenplay in the Scorsese direction specifically because the famed director was briefly attached to the project. If so, Scorcese's departure did nothing to cause Phillips and Silver to distance themselves from their inspiration. At the very least, someone behind the scenes remembered that Robert de Niro had essayed the main role in KING OF COMEDY, that of a deranged comedian who kidnaps a talk-show host, and performed a shout-out to that film by casting de Niro in the role of a talk-show host idolized by Arthur Fleck, the Man Who Would Be Joker.

Circa 1981, Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix, who dropped a lot of weight to look as bony as the master criminal) lives in low-rent Gotham City squalor with his mother and works as a hire-a-clown. Despite being victimized by both street-thugs and his boss, Fleck constantly tries to follow his mother's injunction to put on a happy face. In fact, he often can't help it, since he suffers from the condition of pathological laughter, of bursting out into nervous guffaws at the most inopportune moments. One such moment takes place on a subway, where Fleck, clad in his clown-gear, lets loose some involuntary chortling in the presence of three dissolute Wall Street roysterers. However, Fleck just happens to have a gun on him this time, and goes Bernhard Goetz on his tormentors.

Because Gotham City is a sinkhole, the idea of a clown-avenger strikes a chord, and protesters begin donning clown-makeup, anticipating the modern dissident's "V for Vendetta" masks. Wealthy Thomas Wayne-- father of Bruce, only twelve at this time-- excoriates the wastrels who would idolize a murderer, but this merely feeds the fires of discontent. To be sure, though Phillips's scenario has obviously taken some cues from Christopher Nolan's revision of the Batman mythos in BATMAN BEGINS, the script doesn't indulge in Nolan's empty-headed Marxism. In Phillips' Gotham, cruelty pervades all classes, and though lip service is paid to the corruption of those in high places, the people on the bottom rungs show themselves to be just as willing to kick off people further down. This marks JOKER as the Fyrean form of "the irony," in which all righteous order has departed. Even the suggestions that the heroic Batman will be birthed from this chaos don't lessen the sense of overall despair-- and in addition, this is a subcombative drama, given that this nascent form of the Joker has no real enemy to strive against.

Joaquin Phoenix is present in almost every scene, so it's entirely his movie, and it succeeds purely through his energetic presence. The last third still drags, though, as the script writes itself into a hole vis-a-vis the fatal encounter of Fleck and his talk-show idol. On a sidenote, I have the same continuity-oriented difficulty with JOKER that I did with KILLING JOKE-- that if an author makes the Joker sympathetic by imagining that he started out as a witless loser, it's nearly impossible to imagine criminal genius arising from such an unlikely source. That said, some accounts hedge the film's bets by stating that there's no proof that Fleck becomes the authentic Joker who will go up against Batman, that Fleck himself may be an inspiration to a superior fiend-- which is an "out" that Alan Moore could not have utilized.

DEAD HEAT (1988), THE TUXEDO (2002)

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


In this review I'm pairing two films that have absolutely nothing to do with one another, except that they're both incredibly bad action-films despite having "A" level money and/or stars behind them.

So-- which is worse?

I hadn't seen DEAD HEAT since the late eighties, and screening it again only made me more aware of its shortcomings. This is one of the many "buddy cop" films popular during that decade, though most such films start out by emphasizing some incompatibility between the two officers. In contrast, sole credited writer Terry Black-- whose other credits are a handful of TV episodes-- makes Doug Bigelow (Joe Piscopo) and the punnily-named Roger Mortis (Treat Williams) almost identical in being "rule-breaker" types who perpetually aggravate their frazzled captain. It's kind of like teaming Mel Gibson with another Mel Gibson (LETHAL WEAPON appeared the previous year), with the only real difference being that Roger dresses in a natty fashion while Doug wears sporty muscle-shirts. Oh, and nothing is said about Doug's romantic history, whereas Roger has apparently had a fling with a lady mortician working for the cops.

Doug and Roger have an altercation with robbers who seem invulnerable to gunfire, but the cops manage to take out the thieves-- at which point the coroner reveals that the men seem to have already died before being killed, in that they have a special preservative in their veins. This clue causes the buddy-cops to investigate the facility from which the chemical came. During the investigation Roger is attacked by another undead killer, and as a result Roger is slain. However, by that time Doug has learned that the company has a "back from death" machine, so he uses it to bring Roger back. However, the effect is not permanent, for as the investigation continues Roger's body begins to deteriorate. Eventually, the two cops-- whose belated incompatibility is that one's dead and one's alive-- find the people responsible for the reanimated robbers, one of whom is played by Vincent Price in a handful of unimpressive scenes.

By the end of the movie, even the "dead/alive" incompatibility is erased, when Doug too is zombified. But, lame though the zombie-humor is, I couldn't help feeling that the order of transformation was wrong, since Piscopo's persona in the film was edgier than that of Williams, so that the former might've been a little funnier doing dead-body jokes.

On a small psychological note, while I'm usually impatient with queer readings of films in this subgenre, I could actually see it applying here-- partly because of the cops' sartorial difference, and the fact that they end up as fellow zombies more or less stuck with one another (for all that the film's last line riffs on CASABLANCA: "I think this is the end of a beautiful friendship."

As bad as HEAT is, though, I would say THE TUXEDO is worse, perhaps because Jackie Chan has more talent in one foot than Joe Piscopo has in his whole body.

Chan plays Jimmy Tong, a Chinese-American who drives a taxi and longs after a pretty Chinese woman, though he can't work up the nerve to ask her out. He gets a job as a personal driver for a smooth fellow named Clark Devlin (Jason Isaacs). Devlin takes a fancy to Jimmy and lets Jimmy see his ritzy apartment, though he warns the driver not to touch a special case with a tuxedo inside. Their conversations suggest to Jimmy that Devlin is a James Bond-like superspy, and Jimmy asks his employer for advice on girls. Jimmy acts toward Devlin like a mentor, even though at the time Chan, pushing fifty, was almost ten years older than Isaacs.

Then Devlin appears to perish in an exploding car, and Jimmy, having only rudimentary knowledge of the spy's agenda, decides to seek out his killer. He dons the mysterious tuxedo and finds that it's a genie's lamp that can do almost anything: prompt him with the knowledge he needs in any situation, or force Jimmy's unskilled body to perform athletic wonders. By dumb luck Jimmy contacts a newbie spy from Devlin's agency, a young woman named Del (Jennifer Love Hewitt), and convinces her that he's the legendary Clark Devlin. Together they investigate a terrorist corporation out to pollute U.S. reservoirs with a fairly ingenious plot involving "water strider" insects.

As in many of his later films, Chan mugs through his part, while Hewitt tries to match his lunacy by playing her character as equally loopy. Chan's role seems like an idea that might've worked a little better for a younger actor, particularly with respect to his mooning over an unrequited love, but the actor's attempts to act cute at nearly fifty years of age are doomed from the word go. In some scenes Chan is aided by FX to accomplish his stunts, but there are enough real athletics to please the devoted Chan-fancier. But in my case, the lameness of the superspy routine and the paltry characterizations make THE TUXEDO inferior even to a dog like DEAD HEAT.

THE HANGED MAN (1974)

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


Here's a "weird western" that bears a nodding resemblance to 1999's PURGATORY, in that both concern western protagonists with an ambivalent relationship to death.

Seasoned gunfighter James Devlin (Steve Forrest) has been sentenced to hang for vague reasons in a small western town (is there any other kind, in westerns?) Though the gunfighter has a cute young senorita (Barbara Luna) who wants him to live for her, Devlin seems philosophical about his impending doom. During a pre-execution conversation with a friar, Devlin makes three "lucky guesses" about the friar's state of mind, and then shows off his set of Tarot cards, a gift from a gypsy woman he once helped. Naturally, the card that interests the outlaw most is the Hanged Man, though Devlin mentions that the card doesn't signify death, but a major change in one's life.

The execution goes through as planned. Later, Devlin lies in state, with the friar and the senorita talking nearby-- and then he simply gets up. He can't immediately speak-- though that changes later-- and his first communication is a note to the friar, reading, "What did Lazarus do with the rest of his life?"

The local lawmen don't know what to do: since Devlin's been executed, technically he's outside the boundaries of the law. Once the gunfighter can speak again, he reflects on the need to make a change in his old, sinful life. Conveniently, two innocents--a young widow-woman and her cute son-- need help against a land baron/mine owner named Halleck (Cameron Mitchell). In addition, the young woman was specifically widowed because Devlin killed her husband, though this dramatic point is understated to the point that some may miss it entirely.

Some online reviews asserted that Devlin received mind-reading powers after his "resurrection," but I saw no indication of his possessing any special potency, except for his having unaccountably survived hanging. Still, at least one of Halleck's henchmen considers Devlin a supernatural being, and the hero' climactic battle with Halleck's forces takes place in a dingy mine where a smelting-furnace makes everything look the fiery hell to which the villains will eventually descend.

Since this was a pilot for a TV series, the film is quick to send Devlin off on a quest to save other people in a "Fugitive"-like pattern. Luna's character is pretty much forgotten, and the script promotes a cranky old man for comedy relief who adds nothing to the mix.  The story's main trope is closest to that of the phantasmal figuration, since one never knows whether or not Devlin's come back to life for purely natural reasons-- though the fact that he did so gives him an aura of special *potency* like those of the PURGATORY outlaws-- even though their resurrection is literal and thus marvelous in nature.

MIGHTY JOE YOUNG (1949)

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


My one-sentence review of this film: I liked it better when they called it SON OF KONG.

Obviously I don't mean that MIGHTY JOE YOUNG is a remake of the 1933 sequel to the classic KING KONG. But just as SON was a less violent film with a more genial giant, so too is JOE. It's also the last time that KONG's three major prime movers-- Cooper, Schoedsack, and O'Brien-- returned to the icon of a colossal ape-- though to be sure, without any of the prehistoric trappings.

There's also no hint of transgressive sexuality anywhere in JOE. Whereas Kong's strange amour fou toward Ann Darrow always seems strange and inexplicable, Joe orients toward his human friend Jill Young (Terry Moore) rather after the fashion of infant to mother. SON doesn't venture into deep psychological waters either, but at least there's a sort of murky father-son dynamic between "Little Kong" and Carl Denham, the man indirectly responsible for Big Kong's death. Joe Young, who starts out looking like a commonplace baby gorilla, becomes Jill's pet on her father's African farm when she's only eight. But as they both grow to maturity, Joe is almost entirely under Jill's maternal thumb, despite the fact that, for no stated reason, he grows to the unusual height of twelve feet.

Joe also proves utterly obedient to Jill even when she's seduced by two representatives of modern civilzation-- also substitutes for Carl Denham and John Driscoll-- into taking Joe to Hollywood. The older
"seducer," impresario Max O'Hara (Robert Armstrong, also returning to the Kong-well along with the three prime movers), only wants Jill and Joe to perform stunts at his African-themed nightclub, but when the two of them aren't happy in the Big Time, he ends up helping them escape a dire fate. Gregg (Ben Johnson), the younger "Driscoll" analogue, has a less figurative romantic interest in Jill. Although Joe and Gregg get off to a bad start-- Gregg almost shoots the big ape when the latter attacks O'Hara-- Jill accepts Gregg's courtship later, and Joe never turns so much as a ruffled hair in Gregg's direction.

In my SON OF KONG review I complained that the film was too contrived for me, but at least it continued the Denham  character-arc in an interesting manner. JOE is even more contrived, and while not without some melodramatic appeal, SON starts looking better by comparison. Admittedly, JOE may score somewhat better in allowing audiences more empathetic interaction with the big anthropoid, allowing them to get a taste of what Kong's fate would've looked like had he been forced to perform monkeyshines for Denham.

Joe gets a couple of physical contests in the film, playing tug-of-war with ten human musclemen, and fending off some hostile lions, but MIGHTY JOE YOUNG is even less focused on the combative value than SON OF KONG.