STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE (1979)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological, metaphysical, psychological, sociological*

I admire the wit of whoever summed up STAR TREK THE MOTION PICTURE as “Where Nomad Has Gone Before,” referring to the script’s clear indebtedness to John Meredyth Lucas’s script for the Classic Trek episode “The Changeling.” To be sure, though, Wikipedia relates many mutations of the STTMP script that was ultimately credited to Alan Dean Foster and Harold Livingston, though creator-producer Gene Roddenberry and others also did uncredited rewrites, and stars William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy had some level of input as well. The final on-screen story—and here I should note that I’m reviewing the theatrical release—proved to be a partial inversion of “Changeling.” The TV episode told the story of Nomad, a radically empowered Earth space-probe that seeks out Earth with the notion of sterilizing all imperfection. The movie, however, is about a radically empowered Earth space-probe that seeks out Earth looking for its creator in order to obtain some sense of “meaning” about its existential status.

Partly because of some of the script’s dramatic limitations, the overall story is easier to break down into sheer plot-points than were many of Classic Trek’s more ambitious episodes. STTMP definitely borrows from “Changeling” the basic trope of “Planet Earth is in peril from an invading entity," in this case a gargantuan cloud moving through space toward the Federation homeworld, blasting through a few Klingon ships on its way. By this time, the Enterprise’s five-year mission has long ended, with most of its crew assigned to other duties. The former Captain Kirk (Shatner) is now an admiral, while Mister Spock (Nimoy) has apparently resigned his commission in order to undergo a ritual purification of his human emotions on barren Vulcan. The Enterprise itself has been refitted and put under the command of a new captain, Decker (Stephen Collins). But for reasons that don’t entirely hold up, the Federation insists on sending the Enterprise out to investigate the cloud-menace by re-assigning to the command of the ship to Kirk, who usurps Decker’s captaincy, and also bringing back all the usual suspects: McCoy Sulu, Chekhov, Uhura, Chapel and Scotty. Along with Decker, some new (and younger) faces are also present, though the only one of significance is Lieutenant Ilia (Persis Khambatta), with whom Decker shared some unspecified romantic experience.

The Federation does not reach out to Mister Spock, but Spock—whose mental powers sometimes reached improbable heights—somehow reaches out to whatever entity inhabits the cloud. Spock, feeling attuned to the entity in some way, drops his purity quest and volunteers his services to Kirk and his former co-workers. It’s a matter of some irony that Spock’s subplot becomes so integral to the plot of STTNG, for in one of its earliest forms the script was devised for an episode of a never-produced, Spock-less TREK teleseries.

The Old Gang soon find that Spock has become more dispassionate than ever before, not even rising to retort against barbs from his former sparring-partner McCoy. Spock has, in effect, become the “computer” McCoy often accused him of being, seemingly concerned more with making contact with the alien intelligence than with saving the Earth from an invader. In an episode of the Classic series, this situation would have occasioned a barnstorming moral debate, in which Kirk and McCoy would have sought to convince Spock of the value of human emotions. But the script can’t very well torpedo the very plot-point that justifies bringing Spock on board, for Kirk and Co. know that they may need Spock’s psychic attunement to discover what’s going on in the cloud. So Kirk and McCoy can do nothing more than express vague disquiet with the Vulcan’s behavior. The other members of the Old Guard get even less to do than this, and their presence never rises beyond the level of a nostalgia-fest.

Decker gets a little more linear treatment, even though the viewer really never knows much about him save that he’s an earnest young captain. Within a certain space-navy protocol, Decker butts heads with new commander Kirk, and at one point Decker shows that he simply knows more about the retooled Enterprise than does the man most associated with the vessel. Decker also supersedes a prerogative almost exclusively given to Kirk’s character, since he alone gets something akin to a romantic arc.

When the Enterprise comes into contact with the cloud-colossus, it’s immediately clear that they have no ability to challenge the entity’s power. Kirk sounds a bit like the later Captain Picard, refusing to scan the cloud for fear of seeming aggressive. However, the entity scans the Enterprise, and it beams Lieutenant Ilia off the ship. Ilia never comes back, for the alien uses her mortal body as a template for a lookalike robot, Robot-Ilia, who shows up on the Enterprise, using this faux human body to communicate with the “carbon units” on the ship—which the entity has mistaken for an independent mechanical intelligence. Robot-Ilia still possesses some of Ilia’s memories, and seems drawn to Decker. The young captain doesn’t seem especially broken up by losing his former lover, and he’s quite willing to instruct the lissome robot in the ways of “carbon units.” I suppose one can call this “taking one for the team.” In her dialogue with the humans, the robot reveals that the entity within the cloud is called “V’ger,” and it seeks its Creator, which it believes to be on Earth.

Spock then takes the bull by the horns, donning a personal spacesuit and jetpack to plunge into the cloud. Following Spock’s quasi-mystical contact with V’ger, Kirk pulls the rash Vulcan back to the Enterprise. Confined to sick bay, Spock tells his human friends that he was mistaken to hope for an entity of pure logic, that V’ger is some sort of intelligent machine, but one racked with a fierce desire for self-understanding, not that different from that of “carbon units.” Spock’s epiphany traduces his desire to become the embodiment of Vulcan logic and to expunge his humanity, though by the end of the film the character just defaults back to the status he held on the original teleseries.

The Enterprise can do nothing to keep the Cloud of V’ger from drawing closer to Earth, and to further exacerbate tensions, Robot-Ilia, having completed her study of the carbon-units, informs them that V’ger plans to expunge them both from the ship and from Planet Earth, believing that they somehow impede V’ger from contact with the Creator. Kirk, in his only standout character-moment, bluffs Robot-Ilia into granting the carbon-units an audience with the unstable entity. This audience leads to the Big Reveal, as Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Decker all learn that V’ger is the space probe Voyager 6, which was radically rebuilt on the planet of machine intelligences. This clue gives Kirk the insight he needs to attempt using old NASA transmission-codes to set up a dialogue with the mechanical entity. However, V’ger wants more than just talk; he wants direct contact with the Creator. Kirk and Co. realize that the only solution to V’ger crisis is if it receives an infusion of the human “capacity to leap beyond logic,” so that in theory it will go off and investigate other dimensions and leave the Federation alone. Decker sacrifices himself by providing the infusion, allowing himself to merge with Robot-Ilia in a sort of *hieros gamos* of which the ancient Greeks would never have dreamed. Once the godlike robot has its pound of human flesh, so to speak, it vanishes and the Enterprise once more flies the friendly skies of Federation space, looking forward to its next adventure.

In my original theatrical viewing of STTMP, I was naturally disappointed that the dramatic aspects of the show were sacrificed for this Big Abstract Idea (not to mention being put off by all the ghastly uniforms worn by the crewpersons, which outfits were then squirreled away in someone’s stock closet, never again to see the light of day). Nevertheless, purely from a mythopoeic perspective the movie succeeds in putting across its inversion of God’s creation of man and His demand for “tendance.” Here, man makes a device that, thanks to some plot-convolutions, goes far beyond what humanity can achieve in the physical sense. However, this “machine-god” needs tendance in the form of instruction about what to do with all this immense power. Spock plays a role that inverts that of Paul on the road to Tarsus, where the “god” speaks to the erring postulant by telling him in essence, “Don’t be like me.” Decker and Ilia are the beautiful young couple sacrificed to sustain the god, more as food for thought than as actual food— which also has the extra added effect of getting that young upstart out of Kirk’s command chair for good. Later iterations of Movie-Trek would emphasize some of the elements left out of STTNG, such as physical adventure and dramatic conflict—though I don’t think even the best of the movies ever captured the best myth-aspects of Classic Trek.  

CARRY ON SCREAMING (1966)

 

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

Though I've not seen all of the eleven CARRY ON films prior to SCREAMING, I've the impression that this film is a little more rigorously plotted than most flicks in the franchise. If so, this may be because the producers were trying to hew to the model of "old dark house" horror-films rather than just sticking to the looser setups for British vaudeville gags. 

Usually the main stars of each CARRY ON film belong to an ongoing ensemble of comedians, including Jim Dale, Joan Sims, Charles Hawtrey, Peter Butterworth, Bernard Bresslaw, and Kenneth Williams. In contrast to this tendency, the central characters of SCREAMING are a devious duo of mad scientists. Orlando Watt (Williams) and Valeria (Fenella Fielding, making the last of two appearances in a CARRY ON movie). Hawtrey, Sims and Bresslaw all have minor supporting roles, while major support-roles are filled out by the characters of Albert (Dale), who loses a girl to the monstrous mad scientists, and the two cops investigating the disappearance, Slobotham (Butterworth) and Sergeant Bung (Harry H. Corbett, who made no further CARRY ONs).

Americans best know Fielding for her role in 1962's THE OLD DARK HOUSE, a collaboration between the American director William Castle and Hammer Studios. This is about as close as SCREAMING gets to anything done by England's premiere horror-makers at Hammer, given that the film is all about a weird family, comprised not only of the Watts but also their pet Frankenstein Monster, "Oddbod." To be sure, Orlando may not even be alive any more, since in his first appearance Valeria is keeping him alive with electrical charges, which they both use to keep Oddbod functioning. But to defray their expenses in their expensive "old dark house," the Watts use Oddbod to abduct local girls, whom the sinister scientists change into wax statues by reversing the dead-coming-to-life currents, or something like that. The Watts then sell the statues to English department stores, and if the viewers wonder about just how remunerative this scheme could be, the script chooses not to dwell on the matter.

After Oddbod steals Albert's girlfriend Doris (Angela Douglas), Albert seeks out the local constabulary. Bung is only too happy to have a new case, to give him an excuse to escape his shrewish wife (Sims). They find one clue at the site of Doris's abduction: a very hairy severed finger. Back at the Watts manor, the duo discover that Oddbod's dropped a digit, so they infuse the hairy beast with more electricity and he grows the finger back. Later, the finger, accidentally exposed to electricity at the police lab, grows back a whole body, which makes it way to the manor and gets dubbed "Oddbod Junior."

Bung and Slobotham investigate the Watts simply because they're in the vicinity of the crime, but neither cop really suspects anything, while Bung is more than a little enamored of voluptuous Valeria. For some reason, though, the Watts think of the constables as a real threat. Albert finds Doris's waxen body in town, but can't prove that it's a transformed human being. So Orlando, who studied with both Doctor Frankenstein and Doctor Jekyll, slips Bung a Mister Hyde mickey, so that the beastly Bung will do Orlando's bidding and steal Wax Doris. Bung reverts to normal without remembering what he's done, but the Watts try to get rid of the investigators with a plot derived from Doyle's "The Speckled Band." Bung still doesn't catch on to the villains, but he gets Slobotham to masquerade as a woman to lure out the kidnappers. This all leads to an epic (for CARRY ON) battle, when Orlando sends the two Oddbods to kill off the detectives. Bung changes into Sergeant Hyde and beats down the monsters. Orlando gets undone when a bolt of lightning providentially revives a mummy he has to have around, and the mummy takes Orlando's secrets to their graves. In a final coda, the married Sergeant Bung finds a way to get around his nagging wife and to shack up with vivacious Valeria.

There are a good smattering of ribald jokes and silly slapstick here, though nothing in particular stands out. Valeria doesn't appear to be a real "vamp"-- even if she does duplicate TV-host Vampira's "mind if I smoke" schtick, so it's not till the belated introduction of the mummy "Rubatiti" and the ersatz Edward Hyde does CARRY ON SCREAMING register as a monster mashup.

QUEST FOR THE MIGHTY SWORD (1990)

 

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

I've not found time in the past ten years of this blog to review any of the four Italian-made ATOR films that arose like the success of 1982's CONAN THE BARBARIAN like so many vultures flitting around a fallen corpse. Yet it's not that I hold them in as much contempt as I do the really poor sword-and-sorcery outings, not least CONAN THE DESTROYER, which managed to do everything wrong that the first film did right. The ATOR films are cheerful Italian cheese for the most part, and they certainly do not drag along trying to burn up screen-time, as I recently found to be the case with THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER. 

Three of the four ATORs-- the first, second, and fourth-- were written and directed by best-known-for-porn raconteur Joe D'Amato. For the third, IRON WARRIOR, another director, Alfonsco Brecia, took over, and this may have sparked D'Amato to pull out all the stops with the fourth and last Ator flick, QUEST FOR THE MIGHTY SWORD. I can't say it's good, but it's certainly unusual, being sort of a mashup between bits and pieces of The Siegfried Saga and a lot of quasi-Freudian pop psychology.

The film opens with not one but two Ators: the father, who rules over an unspecified kingdom, and his identically named baby son. It's possible that the older Ator may even be the one from the first film (though none of the stories in the series are literally tied to one another). The only reason for thinking this is that Older Ator is married to a woman named Sunn, while in ATOR THE FIGHTING EAGLE the hero's beloved was named Sunya. (She was, incidentally, a woman First Ator was raised to believe was his sister, which didn't prevent their doing a little canoodling even before they found out that they weren't related. And yes, D'Amato does manage to top that bit of perversity here.)

In any case, Older Ator possesses a magical sword, apparently given him by the gods, and the king uses the blade to personally take on any challengers in a "trial by combat" if they dispute his judgments. On the same day that he does so, one of the gods, Thorn by name, appears in the court and demands the return of the sword. Older Ator refuses. An armor-clad goddess named Dejanira (Margaret Lenzey) also runs up, trying to persuade the merciless deity to let Older Ator keep the weapon. Thorn slays Older Ator with a spear, which somehow causes the sword to become broken, which may be the reason the spear-god leaves the weapon behind. Thorn condemns Dejanira to the fate of a "sleeping beauty," confined to an underground cave until such time as a strong man rescues her-- which is more or less the same curse that Odin pronounces upon Brunhilde in the story of Seigfried.

Sunn also decides to crib from the saga. Since she plans to kill herself now that her husband's dead, she takes both her infant and the pieces of the broken sword and entrusts both to a dwarvish type named Grindl (who appears in a troll costume very similar to that of Thorn's brief appearance in the opener). Grindl wants some sort of payback for raising Baby Ator and keeping custody of the shattered sword, so when Sunn begs him for a lethal poison, Grindl slips her an aphrodisiac mickey. Not only does Sunn have sex with the malignant dwarf, the overlord Thorn decides to wreak further vengeance on Sunn by transforming her into a woman obsessed with giving herself to any man who asks. This curse becomes important later.

Meanwhile, Baby Ator grows into Ator II (Eric Allan Kramer), and he quickly gets tired of his substitute father, who refuses to fix the broken sword of Ator's heritage and uses the young fellow as a handy slave. This sequence is plainly meant to mirror the fostering of Seigfried by the dwarf Mime. Nephele (Marisa Mell), a mysterious female who may be one of the gods, shows up to inform Ator that his mother is still alive and suffering her cursed fate. Ator makes a couple of attempts to kill the "bad father," and he finally succeeds when he manages to repair the broken sword-- also a bit derived from the Seigfried-Mime conflict. Once this is done, Nephele instructs Ator to go looking for Dejanira, even showing the young hero an image of the comely Amazon so that he'll be sufficiently motivated. Armed with the restored sword, Ator braves the cave and its protectors, a slime-covered dragon and what looks like a conjoined-twin soldier armed with sword and shield-- and possibly a robot conjoined-twin soldier, to boot. The doughty (or  is that dotty) hero triumphs over his foes and pulls Dejanira out of her trance, escaping the cave before everything goes boom.

Ator and Dejanira more or less pledge their love to another in the tradition of Seigfried and Brunhilde-- but unlike those two, they have to deal with an encounter with a "bad mother" as well as a "bad father." When the heroes take a few brewskis at a local tavern, they stumble across a put-upon but mature beauty, who's been a whore for several years now. Ator rescues the woman from a ruffian. She tries to repay him with a roll in the hay, but Ator shows her only pity-- which is exactly what is needed to dispel the curse upon the woman, who is none other than Sunn. Apparently all of her hard living immediately catches up with Ator's mom, for she ages quite a bit more than the twenty-something years it took Ator to grow to manhood, and perishes. Dejanira admits that she knew of Sunn's curse but could not speak of it, even though she's been made a mortal by Thorn.

The heroes, joined by a sidekick named Skiold, seek to flee to some shelter free from the designs of Thorn, but if the Odin-like divinity is still pulling any strings, we don't hear of it. Seigfriend and Brunhilde then encounter three more characters derived from the saga: crazed ruler Gunther, his scheming sorceress-sister Grimhild (eighties sex-bomb Laura Gemser), and Gunther's dwarvish servant Hagen. Without dwelling on the saga-equivalents too long, suffice to say that the original idea is that the brother and sister try to chisel in on the great romance of Seigfried and Brunhilde. Sure enough, Gunther and Grimhilde have the same agenda, though they go about it a lot differently. Grimhilde assumes the likeness of Dejanira so that Ator ends up sleeping with the wrong hot girl. As for Gunther, he's apparently decided to borrow a little from HOUSE OF WAX as well, for he plans to "wed" Dejanira by encasing her in plaster. Ator not only comes to the rescue and defeats Gunther, Hagen and several men, he also can conjure up a new weapon out of nothing, for he suddenly manifests a mini-crossbow on his wrist to kill two Gunther-minions. After the villains are all dead, the young lovers flee the castle-- but the film's last shot shows a laughing dwarf appear on the screen before the credits roll-- Thorn, possibly, exulting in some scheme to doom the duo, as they were undone in the saga.

I've occasionally found a high degree of mythicity in apparent sword-and-sorcery junkers like THE SCORPION KING 2. However, even though I believe D'Amato was pursuing some Freudian themes in his remix of the Seigfried narrative, I don't get the sense that he was doing so for any purpose but to keep the pot boiling, as it were. But at least it's a lively enough pot this time.

WONDER WOMAN 1984 (2020)

 

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

My first thought about WONDER WOMAN 1984 is to wonder why its director/co-writer Patty Jenkins thought this was a particularly compelling story for the second Wonder Woman film. So far the story of the Amazing Amazon is her only current cinematic success since the 2003 MONSTER, so I would think she'd be trying to bring her "A-game." I'm not at all surprised that her collaborator Geoff Jones thought this bland regurgitation of "The Monkey's Paw" was a good bet, for I've found almost all of his movie/TV work to be routine and derivative. It may be, though, that neither of them was able to think past their own ambitions.

In Jenkins's case I get the sense that she wanted to make a movie that would boost her reputation as a director in other, possibly more  reputable genres. That may be the main reason the comedy and romantic elements sometimes overwhelm those of the adventure-mythos. The 2017 WONDER WOMAN had its share of narrative hiccups. but at least I didn't get the sense that Jenkins just phoned in the superhero elements.

What's most frustrating is that, as a comic book reader, I'm aware of a lot of WONDER WOMAN stories that would have made good movies, and maybe even still given Jenkins the chance to strut her stuff with other genre-material. But the story for WW84 seems like some toss-off tale that some disinterested comics-writer whipped out to fill a WONDER WOMAN deadline. The film's opening scenes telegraph the jejune moral of the entire narrative: "anything worthwhile must be earned honestly," a truism to which Johns and Jenkins bring absolutely no original thought.

I'm also flummoxed as to why Jenkins and Johns (and a third, less celebrated writer) set the film in the 1980s at all. Since the climax involves the possibility of nuclear armageddon, I suppose the writers thought that such a thing couldn't happen these days, now that most nations don't bother declaring war to take military actions. But the threat of nuclear holocaust has been done to death, to the point that no one save a kid-viewer could feel it to be a clear and present danger to the world of the Amazon.

It's possible that the eighties gambit was designed to keep Jenkins's second film distanced from the now moribund DC Extended Universe. Jenkins is clearly indifferent to the way Wonder Woman is setup in BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN, wherein it was indicated that the Amazon remained in retirement since her debut-exploit during the First World War.  Here, Diana Prince puts aside her regular life as a Smithsonian relic-expert, donning her battle-armor and thwarting a mall-robbery. I suppose one can assume that she didn't mean to keep up the superhero game, and that she promptly disappeared again after her 1984 outing. 

Despite the fact that the nearly immortal heroine has been kicking around for almost seventy years, though, the script acts as if nothing has transpired in Diana's life since the conclusion of the first movie, which included the death of her first love Steve Trevor. Part of the "Monkey's Paw" plotline involves Diana meeting a version of Steve once more, whom she must eventually renounce in order to embrace the future. Again, this might be appealing if she'd been mourning for ten or even twenty years. But seventy years, with a woman who apparently does not age? Hard to credence.

The item that brings an ersatz Steve to life is an under-explained god-artifact, the Dreamstone, which can grant the wishes of its possessor. The first person to unintentionally use the stone is Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig), a new Smithsonian employee with raging inferiority issues. Desiring to possess the power and beauty she perceives in Diana Prince, Minerva enhances herself into the persona that will eventually become that iconic Wonder Woman foe, the Cheetah. But Minerva's limited ambitions are nothing next to those of frenzied real estate speculator Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal). Once Lord learns of the Dreamstone's power, he transfers the stone's wish-making potency into himself, after which he starts granting wishes regardless of their real-world consequences-- which culminate in the threat of nuclear destruction. 

Gal Gadot manages to score with her lively interpretation of Wonder Woman despite the dull and often inconsistent plot. Wiig and Pascal are never more than adequate in their roles, though I give the script a few extra points for giving the movie-Cheetah an origin reminiscent of the original character from the Golden Age of Comics. The action-scenes are decent but not especially memorable, and certainly not sufficient to wipe out the bad taste of a tedious storyline. Even an overly "woke" movie like 2019's CAPTAIN MARVEL wasn't this thoroughly bland, if only because one garner some entertainment by taking shots at its shrill Leftie politics.

ROBOC.H.I.C. (1990)

 

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

I hadn't seen ROBO C.H.I.C. since I rented the VHS, probably forty years ago. I remembered only that it was a pretty lame comedy, and didn't even know then (as I know now) that star Kathi Shower didn't even complete the film, so that her scenes had to be finished by another actress. The only time it came onto my radar again was when I heard that the film had been re-issued on DVD, but its owners, in order to avoid being sued by the people behind the ROBOCOP franchise, they re-titled the film CYBER C.H.I.C. 

Then it happened that some kind (?) soul downloaded the original VHS recording onto YouTube, sans any "cyber" changes. So I gave it a look, wondering if it might fall into the "so bad it's bearable" category.

My verdict is that though ROBO C.H.I.C. is too dull and repetitive to compete with truly demented movies like TROLL 2, one might get some laughs from it if one smoked a little weed first. However, to disclose my current sentiments, my current un-favorite film is the nearly forgotten TERMINATION MAN, which I abhorred because it capsulized all the limitations of the "deal film." ROBO C.H.I.C. isn't good in any way, but at least it's not a "deal film." Rather, it's just another "film on the make."

So what's the C.H.I.C. about? There's absolutely no spoof of ROBOCOP here. Wacky inventor Sigmoid Von Colon decides to create a female robot (Shower at first, later Jennifer Daly) for no particular reason. There are a handful of nude scenes while Colon works on his new toy, but he seems mostly insensible to her charms. He doesn't give her a name, nor does he plan to show her off to the scientific community, but for some reason he does install a laser ray and a sonic boom device in her artificial chassis. He spends a huge amount of time teaching the robot girl assorted bits and pieces of human culture, but he doesn't have any thought about making her into a crimefighter until the two of them witness some thugs hassling a lady. Of her own accord, the humanoid woman beats up the lowlifes-- and then Colon dubs her Robo C.H.I.C. and decides she would make a good crime-crusher.

Conveniently enough, a wimpy mad bomber named Harry Truman Hodgkins (Burt Ward) undertakes to hold the city for ransom with strategically placed nuclear bombs, which Hodgkins alone can control with his codes. Trouble is, the police, led by a short commander with compensation issues, are total morons and they arrest him without worrying about the city's destruction. However, various criminal elements decide to kidnap Hodgkins in order to leverage his invention. Robo C.H.I.C. goes looking for the mildly irritated bomber and has an assortment of totally unconvincing fights along the way. Toward the end a gang-boss hires the services of a rival scientist (played the film's only other "name," Jack Carter) to zap the cyber-crimefighter, but eventually the heroine vanquishes the bomb threat, and everyone's happy, even the short policeman.

Despite the badness of both the fights and the jokes, this film qualifies as a combative comedy. Both of the screenwriters were also the film's directors, and neither shows the slightest sense of comic timing, even when a tiny number of the jokes have a little promise. As dumb as the POLICE ACADEMY films were, at least their makers knew what effects they were going for. Oddly, the writer-directors also toss in a number of learned-sounding references into the film, having characters discuss such esoteric matters as entropy and George Bernard Shaw, albeit ineptly. That's why I call this a "film on the make," in that its makers were willing to try any stupid strategy to score in the marketplace-- which as a rule only works once in a blue moon.

MAD MAX (1979)

 

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

I've never been a big fan of the original MAD MAX. I like all of the sequels to some extent, and I appreciate that the film launched the career of Mel Gibson. But as a lifelong afficianado of science fiction, I 've never liked the way George Miller's initial opus gets labeled a "post apocalyptic world." The idea explored in later films, that fossil fuels have been depleted-- possibly by warfare-- is barely addressed in the original movie. 

The dynamic is perhaps more evident within the Aussie culture. The continent consists of a handful of big cities sprinkled around a vast and unforgiving landscape, and so the citizens are arguably more dependent on their vehicles than the citizens of the U.S. One online essay claims that the Aussies were particularly affected by the 1973 OPEC oil shortage, and that Miller's image of insane drivers, fetishizing their vehicles as they speed aimlessly through the Australian deserts, is a recapitulation of the "road rage" that pervaded the country during the shortage.

That said, I'm not claiming that Americans or anyone else are insensible to "car-philia." If that were the case, the original film could not possibly have enjoyed international success, no matter how little its original cost. In addition, there's no question that even if Miller had no interest in sci-fi elements, he knew just how to pull off the kinetics of high-powered vehicles pursuing one another along open desert roads. 

The basic aesthetic of MAD MAX is that of the western. Highway patrolman Max Rogatansky (Gibson) is a married cop with a baby on the way, and he's mightily tempted to hang up the crimefighting gig for the pleasures of regular life. To prevent this, nasty bikers led by "Toecutter" (Hugh Keys-Byrne) step up their attacks, both on ordinary citizens and on other highway patrol officers. This leads to a tragic fate for Max's family and his commitment to revenging himself on the bikers.

MAX is a grimy, visceral thriller. It's not particularly original, but it did give rise to the much better sequels, which in my opinion are the main reason that the original is still remembered. (Note: Alan Moore almost certainly swiped the climactic revenge-scene in MAX for a corresponding sequence in WATCHMEN.)

TERMINATION MAN (1998)

 

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

Though there's a lot of junk-film that yields insights even through their ineptitude. some flicks are just a black hole of worthlessness.

One opening that occurred to me was to spotlight the good looks of leading lady Athena Massey, as I have done above, and claim that this was the only half-decent aspect of the film.

An alternative was to mention that the name of the protagonist, Dylan Pope, was the best thing about the movie. But then I realized the writer probably used some app to toss together dozens of "cool hero names," so I can't even give TERMINATION MAN that much credit.

In the final analysis, this is just a "deal" movie, in which American crap-maker Roger Corman agreed to produce a movie as long as it was shot on the cheap in Central Europe. The movie needed an equally cheap American actor with a merchandisable "name," so the filmmakers got Steve Railsback, still barely known for anything but his perf in a TV-movie about Charles Manson. They added an actress willing to do some brief nudity, Athena Massey. Finally, they cobbled together a stupid plot about a bionically enhanced secret agent, Dylan Pope, and gave him some BS mission about preventing a Serbian terrorist from unleashing a deadly gas on Europe.

The utter cheapness of the movie is most damaging in the fact that this supposed Sixty-Dollar Man can't really do much of anything but run fast and heal his wounds quickly. To me this means that either the filmmakers weren't willing to spring for fight coordinators or that Railsback didn't want to do any fights. I could easily believe the latter, because the actor gives one of the most lackadaisical performances I've ever seen in an alleged action movie.

And that's all I have to say about this cinematic turd.