DESERT PHANTOM (1936), THE RANGE BUSTERS (1940)

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

Following the muse of completism as always, I screened these two oaters, both ostensibly remakes of the 1932 NIGHT RIDER. 

In my review of the Harry Carey production I mentioned that the Night Rider was just an outlaw dressed in black, who made no pretense about being a ghost. In DESERT PHANTOM, the masked outlaw is frequently called a "ghost"  or a "phantom," though I didn't notice that the villain had taken any special pains to make himself seem spectral. He's trying to force a pretty young girl to sell her ranch by pot-shotting her ranch-hands, in contrast to the 1932 outlaw, who was just a bandit. 

The hero here is Billy Donovan (Johnny Mack Brown), not a traveling marshal like Carey but a man looking to avenge his sister's murder. Whereas Carey's marshal masqueraded as an outlaw to find his quarry, Donovan pretends to a dude trick-shot artist, impressing all the folks in town, especially the pretty young thing, who invites him to be her bodyguard. The dude outfit is tossed aside for more manly attire, but Brown's scenes in foppish garb are the film's highlight.

In place of NIGHT RIDER's comic sidekicks, PHANTOM builds up a red herring, the girl's crippled stepfather, who may or may not be truly crippled. Eventually the Phantom is rounded up with no great surprises, though for a B-western this one has some nice action-sequences.

THE RANGE BUSTERS keeps the red herring-- a blind man this time-- and the potshotting masked figure, but though the word "phantom" gets tossed around, there's no consistent sense that anyone thinks he's a ghost. The disguise just barely shunts this flick, the first of a series called "Range Busters," into the realm of the metaphenomenal. This time much more emphasis is placed on the three members of the Range Busters team, who float around solving or avenging crimes for no particular reason. (For some reason the characters all sport, more or less, the same names as the actors.) Of the three westerns based on this script, this is the least interesting.

X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE (2009)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*

In my previous X-film reviews, I've noted that the filmmakers showed little ambition with regard to building a stable X-MEN brand. Instead of implementing scripts that allowed the major franchise-characters to play off one another, the filmmakers chose generally formulaic storylines, the better to plug in whatever new characters suited their grab-bag fancies. The producers never seemed to think that a stable ensemble might be a good thing, and so X-characters would come and go with little discernible pattern. Some of them, like Cyclops, left simply because the actor became engaged by other projects, and Fox Studios, already stuck with one breakout star in the franchise, probably did not want to put any of the other thespians under a long-term contract, given their opinion that they could plug in just about any character into any situation without alienating the superhero-movie fan.

The “breakout star” to which I referred is of course Hugh Jackman, whose talents made certain that the character he played outshone all of the others in the fluctuating ensemble, just as the comic-book character had outstripped his comrades in four-color popularity. Presumably one or more of the filmmakers anticipated duplicating the Wolverine popualrity, since the first film in the series makes the question of his dubious origins a primary narrative concern. Two films later, Fox decided to do a film centered only upon the character's origins, while tossing in a few random X-characters in order to lure in suckers who thought they were getting another mutant-ensemble film.

I've not re-read any of the “Wolverine origin” tales in some time, so I'll make no comparisons between the comics and ORIGINS. But the movie script seems concerned with little more than connecting some of the narrative dots established in the previous films.

Take for instance the sketchy picture of Wolverine's earliest-seen years, growing up in rural Canada circa 1845 alongside two vague parents and a half-brother, Saber-Tooth. (Obviously both characters have everyday names, but I'll stick with their superhero cognomens for clarity's sake.) After a hazy family falling-out, the brothers venture out into the cold, cruel world, and learn that they both have mutant powers, slowing their age-rates and gifting both with “healing factors” that allow them to heal all wounds. In addition, both have “claws” of one sort or the other, though the film must grunt and groan to get viewers to the place where the hero gets his adamantium upgrade.

Wolverine and Saber-Tooth both display animalistic rages, though the hero naturally seeks to control his more than does the future “evil mutant.” To judge by the film's temporal montage, the two brothers do absolutely nothing for the next hundred-plus years but serve in assorted military conflicts-- until we get to the latter part of the 20th century. Aroundthis time, the brothers are co-opted to join an American “Black Ops” team, composed entirely of mutants and headed by William Stryker, familiar to viewers as A Guy Who Knows Stuff About Wolverine's Mysterious Past.

The other mutants are, for the most part, randomly chosen minor players in the long-running X-saga, with one exception: Wade “Deadpool” Wilson, whose comic-book version enjoyed breakout success as well. However, the writers make this version of Deadpool into a figure of little importance, existing largely to provide a formidable opponent for the end-scenes, but not one well integrated into the story.

The Black Ops team spells the end of Wolverine's military career, as he finally gets disgusted, leave the team behind, and gets a lumberjacking job in Canada. He even gets a beautiful girlfriend, who, since she's not in the earlier films, practically has “red shirt” tattooed on her skull. No moviegoer will be the least bit surprised that the bad spymasters don't just leave Wolverine to his own devices. Stryker pays a call on the Canadian hero, relating that Wolverine's half-brother has started targeting the other members of the old team for no particular reason. In addition, most moviegoers, having already seen Stryker in a bad light, will suspect that he's not doing Wolverine any favors with this warning.

Sure enough, Saber-Tooth appears to kill off some people, including the lovely girlfriend, but it's all part of a larger deception, aimed at giving Wolverine a desire to upgrade his powers so as to be avenged on his half-brother. Stryker's plans make very little sense in terms of achieving any real-world goal; they're all about connecting those continuity-dots. Once Wolverine has his adamantium claws, the film devolves into an unholy mess about Stryker trying to create the ultimate mutant by crossbreeding powers, or something equally stupid. Supposedly the whole scheme is being funded by the U.S. Government, though they've only sent one general to oversee the operation, whom Stryker simply knocks off when it's convenient.

The film's only saving graces consist of Jackman's incredibly committed performance, shining through the dreck like a light-beam through fog, and a boxing-scene between the hero and the film's version of long-time X-enemy The Blob. The rest of it is just a big farrago of clumsily-executed FX-scenes and lots of poorly executed characters. The nicest thing one can say about ORIGINS is that it was so bad, the series had nowhere to go but up after this.

AVENGERS GRIMM (2015)

 

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

There’s a long if not vernerable tradition of cinematic piggybacking, wherein a cheaply made film emulates some aspect of a more expensive production in order to profit from the latter film’s high profile. On occasion the imitative film occasionally to be something of a mirror image to the film imitated, as when THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN was followed by THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN. A few such imitators are at least deent if unexceptional entertainments, as is the case with COLOSSAL MAN. However, some imitators—particularly the “mockbusters” of recent years—don’t offer even rudimentary story values.

It goes without saying that most of the piggybackers are derivative crap. AVENGERS GRIMM, though, seems to have been undertaken to see if it could win some reputation for being crappier than the crappiest. I imagine some conversation wherein the head of the Asylum Studios floated the idea of mockbusting Marvel Studios’ AVENGERS franchise. He would’ve been duly advised that Disney, the owners of the franchise, would have sued the company into the ground if they even attempted doing mock versions of the Marvel superheroes, even if the Asylum did get away with mockbusting THOR. Then, in this imaginary conversation, the studio head gets the idea: instead of mocking superheroes, they’ll use the public-domain characters of folklore as their heroes. One critic alleged that the Asylum scripters might have also been swiping from the ABC series ONCE UPON A TIME. Yet, given that Disney built its empire in large part on adapting folklore and children’s stories, that alone may be the reason the heroes of AVENGERS GRIMM are all a bunch of folkloric princess-types.

The makers of GRIMM manage a rare feat: they select five model-beautiful actresses to be the “Avengers” of the title, yet make all of the heroines so dull that they sustain no erotic interest. The five actresses playing the heroines—combative versions of Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Cinderella, and Red Riding Hood—are partly responsible, since their line-readings are inexcusably tedious. But the script is the prime culprit.

Like many mockbusters, the narrative consists mostly of a lot of pointless running around. Rumpelstiltskin (Casper Van Dien) tries to take over the fairy-tale kingdom ruled by Snow White. As the two rulers battle in Snow’s courtroom—the only part of the kingdom the viewer ever sees—both of them fall through a portal that takes them to the more mundane, and less expensive, realm of Earth. Three of the other heroines—Cinderella, Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty—follow to assist their queen, while the one badass girl in the group, Red Riding Hood, goes to Earth in search of her enemy the Wolf. For no particular reason, six months go by between the two portal-jumps, so that by the time fhe other four heroines arrive on Earth, years have passed for Snow and her enemy. She hasn’t done a whole lot with herself during that time, but Rumpelstiltskin has assumed a human identity, Mayor Heart, with his own supernatural police force and plans for conquering the whole world. This leads to a lot of poorly organized and poorly choregraphed battles, with the heroines being joined by a man who literally turns to iron, Iron John (Lou Ferrigno).

Ferrigno and Van Dien, the sole name actors, are also the sole attractions in this mess. And of the two, Van Dien is the only one who has a little fun with his villainous role, while Ferrigno is, as always, Ferrigno.

THE GREEN SLIME (1968)

 

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

Like the following year’s LATITUDE ZERO, THE GREEN SLIME had its origins in a collaboration between an American producer and the Japanese studio Toei. Japan supplied the location shooting, the director and the crew, while MGM provided funding and a handful of American actors (though most of the support-cast was made up of Caucasians who lived and worked in Japan). SLIME was also conceptually connected to a series of space-opera films helmed by Italian workhorse Antonio Marghiretti, though the finished product was not given any explicit ties to the Italian series. (Whether or not the Italians contributed leading lady Luciana Paluzzi, I do not know.) American producer Ian Reiner contributed the basic story idea, but the finished screenplay earns some marks on the trivia-meter because one of the three authors was Bill “co-creator of Batman” Finger. Sadly, all of these notations on SLIME’s behind-the-scenes production are more interesting than the film itself.

Nearly all of SLIME’s action takes place in outer space, at a time when the forces of Earth have successfully tamed the solar system with spaceships and space stations. (So little action takes place on Earth that there’s no indications as to the planet’s sociocultural makeup, though it sounds like Americans are pretty much on top of everything.) A giant asteroid careens into the solar system, threatening Earth. An expedition takes off from Space Staiton Gamma, co-commanded by two officers, Rankin (Robert Horton) and Elliott (Richard Jaekyl). The astronauts successfully land on the asteroid, plant explosive charges on it, and take off again, after which that particular threat to Earth ends with the asteroid’s explosion.

However, one of the crewmen steps in some “green slime” while on the asteroid. The slime—rather than being wiped out when exposed to radiation in the station’s decontamination chamber—is actually strengthened by the radiation, and grows into a one-eyed, tentacled green monster. The first time the creature is shot by ray-blasters, its blood propagates into more of the Slime-kind, slowly overwhelming the astronauts.

Director Kinji Fukasaki, unlike his contemporary Ishiro Honda, had far more success with down-to-earth drama than with the metaphenomenal genres. However, he does keep the action constant, though the rubbery, pop-eyed slime-monsters probably didn’t give too many American kids any nightmares. There is an amusing theme “Green Slime” theme song that bookends the film, but the script is too pedestrian to birth any worthwhile “so bad it’s good” moments.

I re-watched the film in part to see if the monsters of the title were the actual stars of the show, but the main character is actually Commander Rankin. He and Commander Elliott are romantic rivals for Lisa (Paluzzi), though at the time that Rankin is assigned to Elliott’s station, Lisa has thrown Rankin over and become engaged to Elliott. But even that aspect of the commanders’ relationship pales beside their roles as the spacefaring versions of Goofus and Gallant. Elliott is Goofus, constantly making bonehead errors and never learning from them, while Rankin is Gallant, who’s inevitably right about everything—even though his uncompromising rightness costs him a girlfriend for a time. However, the invasion of the Green Slime works out well for Rankin, for Elliott, haunted by his failures, sacrifices his life to rid the universe of the Green Slime—implicitly clearing Rankin’s path straight back into Lisa’s arms.

JUSTICE LEAGUE: THE NEW FRONTIER (2008)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*

This adaptation of Darwyn Cooke’s 2004 graphic novel, DC: THE NEW FRONTIER, received the implicit imprimatur of the artist, in that Cooke is credited with providing “additional material” to the script by Stan Berkowitz. Nevertheless, most of the things that made the graphic novel unique have been sacrificed for the 75-minute running time, and possibly also in order to earn the PG-13 rating.

I can appreciate the efficiency with which the sprawling graphic novel has been condensed. For instance, the Lovecraftian menace of the Centre—a dinosaur-inhabited island derived from a DC Comics’ Silver Age feature—benefits from the condensation, providing a more consistent sense of danger to the heroes. Not surprisingly, the film also purges all of Cooke’s callbacks to DC’s history of non-superheroic adventures, though some of them—the Blackhawks, the Challengers of the Unknown—make glorified cameos that may confuse newbies to the DC Universe. Since the title of the film does not celebrate DC Comics in general, but rather the specific history of the Justice League, the costumed characters get almost all of the attention.

JLTNF is still essentially faithful to the major story-arcs of Cooke’s narrative, particularly those arcs involving the Hal Jordan Green Lantern, the Barry Allen Flash, and the Martian Manhunter. JLTNF does drop one of the important subplots involving Superman and Batman, and in compensation the two heroes get some extremely minor new scenes. In addition, the film is careful to keep all the key emotional scenes that involved any of the major superheroes.

What most hurts the film as an adaptation is that the script fails to provide context in terms of two histories, both real-world history and the history of the DC Universe. Cooke’s graphic novel built on established continuity, in which all of the costumed heroes of the 1940s, including but not limited to the Justice Society, find themselves forbidden to keep operating by politicians and postwar paranoia. Within the history of DC Comics, this retroactive continuity was introduced to explain why so many 1940s heroes quit fighting crime in the 1950s (the real-history reason being that superheroes fell out of favor and simply got cancelled). Cooke elaborated on the 1950s outbreak of fear about Communists, people of color and “little green men,” and used it as a springboard to celebrate the rebirth of DC costumed heroes in the late 1950s. However, JLTNF speeds past the expository section, so that a viewer not already familiar with the comics would barely understand what happened to the Justice Society. The matter of American paranoia is watered down, and most of Cooke’s comments, insightful or not, regarding the marginalization of colored people just disappear. The only scene that adequately captures the sense of governmental overreach appears when federal agents attempt to capture Barry Allen—the quintessence of the straight-arrow superhero—and put him in some black-ops prison for his vigilante actions.

A few of the non-superhero characters—spy-master King Faraday and commando-commander Rick Flagg—still appear in supporting roles. But Cooke elaborated a vision of heroism that included both ordinary, skilled mortals and the characters with godlike powers. But JLTNF doesn’t even suggest such a vision, and the result is that it’s just another animated adventure of the Justice League--admittedly with better graphics-- but nothing more.

THE ADVENTURES OF ZATOICHI (1964)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*

MYTHICITY: *fair*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*

Everyone’s favorite blind samurai-masseuse made his ninth appearance in this amiable if unremarkable melodrama.

The itinerant hero, journeying through medieval Japan on his way to a sacred festival, meets a man who asks the blind fellow to deliver a message. Zatoichi presumes that it’s a love letter. In truth the young man is in hiding after having been implicated in Yakuza business, and the recipient of the letter is the fellow’s sister. Once Zatoichi knows the truth, he’s unable to keep from involving himself in the young man’s troubles, even though the local Yakuza have their own pet samurai.

There’s a second family-oriented subplots, though they aren’t as persuasive as the main conflict, or even a throwaway moment when Zatoichi reminisces about his being abandoned by his father. Perhaps that’s why he travels around, lending his talents to the needy-- not just out of altruism, but as a deferred act of familial defense?

The only downside is that the blind hero’s uncanny swordfights are usually over too quickly to prove very impressive.

ALMIGHTY THOR (2011)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *metaphysical*

I’m no fan of Marvel Studios’ largely botched adaptation of Marvel Comics’ franchise character The Mighty Thor. Still, even the least of the three big-budget films, THOR RAGNAROK, offers a little more entertainment than this straight-to-DVD mockbuster.

Director Christopher Ray—son of Fred Olen Ray, whose credits also include reams of undistinguished schlock—hangs his narrative on that most popular of Nordic myths, the threat of Ragnarok, the utter destruction of the world. And how does he handle this portentous matter? With lots of tedious photography of people either running through woods, or running through some big city (presumably L.A) whose streets have no nearly no people in them. Loki (Richard Grieco) kills off his father Odin and one of his brothers in order to possess the Hammer of Invincibility. Younger brother Thor (Cody Deal), who manages to seem callow in spite of his impressive pectorals, swears vengeance on Loki. However, since he doesn’t know how to fight, a Valkyrie named Jarnsaxa (Patricia Velasquez of the MUMMY movies) succors the son of Odin. The two of them spend most of the movie running from pillar to post on a formless quest that the writer seems to be making up as he goes along. The script tosses in a few raggedy versions of Norse myths-- the weavers-of-fate known as the Norns, and some hellhounds given indifferent life by bad CGI. For what it’s worth, “Jarhsaxa” is the name of Thor’s wife in one myth. However, the writer’s book on Norse Mythology for Dummies must have been missing some pages, since he also works in the non-Norse name of “Hrothgar,” maybe just to prove he’s read BEOWULF.

The only actor who even tries to bring a little chutzpah to this mess is Grieco, who does his level best to exude unremitting malice, since this version of Loki is no trickster, but just a really mean, mean guy. The actor’s close-ups are most effective on those occasions when the film’s makeup department succeeds in keeping his skin a deathly shade of white.