SON OF SAMSON (1960)

 

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

Maciste gets one of his chronologically earliest outings when he shows up (according to the dubbed voiceover) in Egypt in the eleventh century B.C., which is more or less the time-period during which the Biblical Samson lived. As in many such films, Maciste (Mark Forest) doesn’t actually know who he is or where he came from. But because he’s been adopted by a tribe of impoverished Egyptians, who are apparently conversant with the Hebrew story of Samson, he’s dubbed “the son of Samson.” I would imagine that the original Italian script did not involve the Samson reference at all, given that the simple plot makes no reference to Hebrews of any time period. The opposition between “good tribe” and “bad tribe,” so indispensable in most peplum-films, consists of native Egyptians being oppressed by Persian invaders and their Egyptian servitors.

The Persians’ chief representative is Queen Smedes (Chelo Alonso), the wife of the rightful Pharaoh. A voiceover asserts that her loyalty to the Persians is supposed to be a secret, but it’s hard to see how she could conceal her loyalty to the occupying forces, particularly after she has the old Pharaoh assassinated. She has a potential opponent in the Pharaoh’s handsome young son Kenamon, who hobnobs with the lower classes and even has a love connection with a poor girl. So Smedes uses drugs and an amulet-- possibly magical, or maybe a hypnotic aid--to brainwash Kenamon so that he marries his father’s former wife, ensuring that Smedes remains on the Egyptian throne.

Maciste naturally comes to the defense to the tormented lower classes, not least because Maciste like Kenamon has a girlfriend among their ranks. He plans to arrange a rebellion against the evil queen, but he catches Smedes’s eye when performing in the local arena (suggesting that the 11^th-century Egyptians had their own version of the Roman “bread and circuses.”) Smedes brings Maciste into her palace, and from their G-rated lovemaking, it becomes increasingly ambivalent as to whether she’s subverting his will with drugs and if he’s just playing her to suss out the easiest way to overthrow her reign. Smedes is too smart for Maciste, slipping the hero a knockout drink him and having him flung to the crocodiles. However, Maciste is too tough for the crocs and ends up leading the good Egyptians against the bad collaborators and the Persian occupation—which is naturally all wrapped up in one big climactic battle.

This is a fairly ordinary muscleman-flick, without any outstanding stunts or fight-scenes. Chelo Alonso provides the strongest element in the film, particularly when she does a sexy dance to captivate the hero. Maciste and Kenamon are loose mirror-images, given that regal “bad girl” Smedes threatens both of their relationships with noble but poor “good girls,” even though the evil queen is interested only in Maciste and never makes any moves on her stepson/husband. Yet it’s Kenamon who gets his girl in the end, while out of the blue Maciste suddenly decides that he’s got to desert his lady love in order to go questing to help more people in trouble. Given that none of the Maciste films connect with one another, there should be no objection to the hero settling down with a wife in one era, given that he’s destined to pop up in some other timeframe. But maybe the scripter just thought the audience would like to see their immortal hero toss off the chains of matrimony in favor of having yet more never-ending adventures.    

SANTO AND THE BLUE DEMON VS. THE MONSTERS (1970)

 

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

Though in the wrestling ring the titular luchadores Santo and the Blue Demon were rivals, the exigencies of the movie-business made them allies on the screen, starting with this, apparently their first "crossover" film. Both of their cinematic personas were wrestlers who went around from place to place as part-time superheroes, beating up spies, mad scientists, and of course, monsters.

The film's "monster mash" aspects, however, are less interesting than this 1970 film's resemblance to the first "quasi-Santo" film, SANTO VS. THE EVIL BRAIN. In my review I described how the wrestler known to the world as "Santo" accepted a sidekick-type role in BRAIN, during which a mad scientist brainwashed his character and even forced him to fight his crimefigting ally El Incognito.

MONSTERS actually devotes quite a bit of screen-time to the same conceit-- though the Blue Demon performer, who had been featured in his own series of stand-alone luchadore films, may not have liked being relegated to this secondary status. But even before mad scientist Doctor Halder unleashes the forms of resuscitated monsters upon the world, the evildoer catches Blue Demon spying on him. The hero is subjected to a brainwashing machine that turns him into Halder's servant. Halder also uses the machine on all the monsters to force them to do his will-- though he doesn't seem to want to do anything but make the monsters run around attacking people. Inevitably Santo has to battle his lucha-buddy, just as the two fighters of EVIL BRAIN did, after which the two heroes are once more united in the fight against evil.

Because all of the monsters remain under the mad scientist's control, none of them have any individual characterizations, and so their battles with the wrestlers might as be conducted with a bunch of nondescript henchmen. It's of passing interest that Halder's monster-menagerie includes not only such usual suspects as a mummy, a wolfman, a tophatted vampire and a "Franquenstein Monster," but also a human-sized Cyclops. There are also a couple of female vampires running around, one of whom tries to seduce Santo, but they're excluded from the fight-scenes. Director Gilberto Solares makes vivid use of wide-angle shots to give the battles extra punch-- which is more than I can say for a similar 1973 effort, pitting the two wrestlers against low-grade versions of Dracula and the Wolf Man.

SANTO VS. THE ZOMBIES (1962)

 

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

Now this is what a Luchadore film ought to be! It's not only good because it's the first full iteration of the Santo persona, but also because the film was shot at Mexican studios and given a more substantial budget. I compared the first "quasi-Santo" film, SANTO VS. THE EVIL BRAIN, to a particularly bad Monogram feature. In contrast, ZOMBIES looks like a really good B-movie from one of the major U.S. studios of the forties. In terms of convincing sets and fluid camera-work, ZOMBIES is easily the equal of the Roy William Neill "Sherlock Holmes" films.

To be sure, the plot is less akin to mystery-fiction than to the wild and wooly world of superhero serials. I would imagine that these action-heavy chapterplays enjoyed popularity in Mexico due to their emphasis on action rather than dialogue. Many tropes of the adventure-serial, such as the masked villain out to rule the world with forbidden technology, went largely dormant in U.S. movies once the serials were no longer in production. But many Mexican films kept the trope going all through the 1960s, even in such unusual vehicles as 1957's AZTEC MUMMY.

The film begins with two converging plotlines: the attack of costumed, invulnerable zombies upon a local bank, and the tearful search of Gloria Rutherford (Lorena Velasquez, who went on to make three more Santo movies) for her missing scientist-father. I don't think anyone ever finds the father, but as Gloria discusses the matter with plainclothes police, she notes that the elder Rutherford was researching the phenomenon of Haitian zombies. This sequence also introduces the missing man's brother, Tio Genaro, and his devoted servant. The two of them have absolutely nothing to do with the story except (and any viewer should see it coming) to provide the Big Reveal that Genaro is the masked mastermind behind the zombies, while the servant is his equally masked henchman. There's a tossed-off mention that Genaro was partly crippled in a mine he co-owned with his brother, but if this was meant to provide motivation for his hijacking the brother's research for evil ends, this plot-thread is left dangling. The allusion to Haitian beliefs also proves a dead-end, for the never-named mastermind uses scientific wizardry to bring dead man back as near-invulnerable zombies

Somehow Santo-- who apparently has his own Batcave-like sanctum, even though this film appeared four years prior to the popular TV show-- finds about the zombies' depredations. Most of the film follows him driving around and tussling with the zombies in some vivid fight-scenes. But because it's all so well-filmed, I didn't even care that I didn't know why the zombie-mastermind sent his slaves to abduct a bunch of young boys from what was either a school or an orphanage. The zombie-master seems to have no particular goal in mind, though toward the end he sends his servants to abduct his niece Gloria, not only to lure the cops into a trap but also to make Gloria into another zombie. 

Fernando Otes, who played the primary hero in EVIL BRAIN and had Santo as his sidekick, plays one of the zombies here. Otes also co-wrote the story with two other collaborators, one of whom was director Benito Alazraki. Though Alazraki never made another luchaodore film so far as I can tell, he deserves considerable credit for helping to formulate the definitive look of the Santo series.

SANTO VS. THE EVIL BRAIN (1961)

 

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

Though I've seen a dozen or so Santo films, I've avoided reviewing any here, having been informed that their genesis had a complicated beginning. Nevertheless, here goes.

The first complication is that although masked wrestler Santo became a Mexican celebrity in the early 1950s, the performer himself (one Rodolfo Huerta) declined to appear in a 1952 film that would have been the first cinematic depiction of his persona. Instead, that film's wrestler-hero role was renamed and played by another actor.

The second complication is that even when Huerta finally agreed to appear in his costumed role in this film, whose exact title is merely THE EVIL BRAIN, he was not the star, nor did he depict the persona of a wrestler who was also a part-time superhero. Instead, Huerta plays what seems to be an undercover cop wearing a wrestling-outfit. This character isn' called Santo, but rather goes by "El Enmascarado" (The Masked  One,) and in BRAIN's first scenes he gets turned into the zombified slave of the titular mad scientist, in which state he remains for about half the picture. The film's actual hero is another masked police agent, known only as El Incognito, and played by Hernando Otes, who also co-wrote BRAIN's script. While Santo/Huerta had kept his character out of movies for the decade of the 1950s, Otes had parlayed his wrestling-persona into a half-dozen movies, wherein he usually played a hero named "La Sombra Vengador." In any case, while the evil scientist Doctor Campos sends his thugs and the hypnotized Enmascarado around on various criminal errands, Incognito trails along and eventually, after a hand-to-hand struggle with his fellow agent, manages to free Enmascarado from his mental enthrallment.

Both this film and a second called THE INFERNAL MEN (also still written by Otes but without his Incognito character) were lensed on a shoestring budget in pre-Castro Cuba by director Joselito Rodriguez. I haven't watched INFERNAL as I've no access to a subbed version, but I don't imagine it looked much better than BRAIN, whose visuals and stuntwork are about on the level of a particularly bad Monogram movie. Not until 1962's SANTO VS. THE ZOMBIES did the character take off in films, remaining popular for the remainder of the decade.

THE MARSHAL'S DAUGHTER (1953)

 

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

THE MARSHAL'S DAUGHTER is one of the many extremely cheap  western features that came out in the early fifties, a little before television began to edge the cheaper flicks out of the arena. Purportedly the movie's star Laurie Anders was the protege of producer Ken Murray, and he was attempting to see if he could launch a series of movies with Anders as a double-identity crimefighter. As "El Coyote," Anders' character Laurie Dawson dons a face mask and heavy garb that disguises her femininity, much as Linda Stirling had in the serial ZORRO'S BLACK WHIP about a decade earlier. However, it would appear that DAUGHTER did not rate even one sequel, and Anders did not make more than a few more acting appearances.

I've seen comments to the effect that DAUGHTER wasn't as good as the average grade-C oater, but as I'm no fan of that subcategory, I think this was a modest success in terms of showing how a female hero might take up crimefighting during the Old West. Laurie is the only child of Marshal Dawson (silent film-cowboy Hoot Gibson), but though she appears to be a woman of her time, she's been raised to be "the son her father never had," being adept with both riding and shooting. She also has an advanced knowledge of jui-jitsu and even demonstrates it on her hapless boyfriend. Possibly this element was meant to suggest that the action took place in the 20th century, but if so I don't remember seeing any other prominent indicators of modernity.

Though there are no actual Mexican characters in the story, Laurie apparently tries to pass herself off as a Mexican man-- addressing her opponents only in Spanish, for example-- because it's assumed that many such males are on the short side. (One bandit, prior to getting clocked by Laurie's judo, calls El Coyote a "runt.") In a couple of scenes, Laurie more or less signals her use of Mexican motifs by doing a ventriloquist act with a puppet speaking in Mexican dialect. This of course is as far as the film is willing to go in suggesting the perils of a double identity.

Action and dialogue are fair, but the film's main significance is its attempt to promote a female action-hero-- oddly, about a year before a TV show succeeded with the 1954-57 ANNIE OAKLEY series.

HOBGOBLINS (1988), HOBGOBLINS 2 (2009)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

For me the most interesting thing about HOBGOBLINS is my own response to seeing it without the accompaniment of mocking commentary. I think that the first time I viewed the most famous production of writer-director Rick Sloane, I saw the MST3K version. After that viewing, I fully agreed that this was one of the worst films ever made. Then I recently re-watched the film sans commentary. While I still considered HOBGOBLINS to be dull and stupid, it was more amusing without voice-overs analyzing its shortcomings. 

Though Sloane's titular faux-Gremlins are technically the stars of the show, the human characters opposing them are just flatly rendered versions of familiar character-types that their nonsensical exploits almost rise to the lunacy of TROLL 2. The "lead male" is ordinary schmuck Kevin. Kevin has a girlfriend, Amy, but she seems perpetually dissatisfied with him, and her pretense of being virtuous suggests that Kevin's not getting any from her. In contrast to these two unfulfilled lovers are their pals sex-crazed Daphne and her soldier-boyfriend Nick, who have no compunctions about jumping into Nick's van to do the deed at any given moment. Even more on the outs than Kevin is literal "fifth wheel" Kyle, who has no girlfriend and whose only erotic stimulation comes from talking to a sex-call operator (played by a sedate older woman). In an early scene Nick challenges Kevin to spar with him, both fencing with garden utensils, and after much poorly choreographed flailing about, Kevin is humiliated in front of his already standoffish girlfriend.

In his attempt to make Amy proud of him, Kevin takes a job at a local movie studio, and inadvertently unleashes a group of scruffy aliens from a vault in which they've been kept prisoner for decades. An elderly studio guard informs Kevin that the Hobgoblins possess the power to make humans see their fantasies come to life, but only so those fantasies can turn around and destroy the fantasizer.

I won't go into the tedious and predictable way Sloan has characters like Daphne and Kyle beleaguered by their fantasies (though, thanks to Kevin, they're saved from being executed by their dreams). Patently, even though Kevin does not importune the Hobgoblins for any wishes, their mere existence serves to fulfill his wishes for greater agency, since he become the de facto hero. Nick tries to act the part of the alpha male and is apparently destroyed, only to be comically resurrected near the conclusion. The most embarrassing fate falls to prudish and hypocritical Amy. The Hobgoblins bring forth her desire to be a Slutty Girl, but instead of having some dream-scenario manifest, Amy seeks out a local dive, "Club Scum," which deserves the honor of "least believable dive ever filmed for a movie." Kevin and his goofball friends rescue Amy amid a lot of incoherent slapstick, and the Hobgoblins are destroyed in an explosion by the old security guard-- leading many to wonder why he didn't do this when he had the creatures confined to the vault.

Though the sequel didn't appear until over twenty years later, HOBGOBLINS 2 purports to pick up with the same characters a few years later. They're all necessarily played by a new group of actors, none of whom are any better or worse than the first batch. The five former high-schoolers are now in college, taking some sort of psychology course, though none of them shows the least bit interested in the subject. The requirements of the course lead them to a psychiatric hospital, and they learn that an old acquaintance, the man who owned the movie studio, is now an inmate. In roundabout way the inmate reveals that not all of the Hobgoblins are dead after all. He doesn't explain why the survivors decide to focus all of their attention on the five dorks, but obviously Sloane knew that no one would care if he did.

After the middling success of HOBGOBLINS in the eighties video market, Sloane directed five of the six VICE ACADEMY movies. HOBGOBLINS 2 is closer to the VICE movies in delivering a greater quantity of scattershot dumb jokes, whereas the first film tended to run each of its dumb jokes into the ground via repetition. The concentration on more jokes means that the Hobgoblins don't actually do that much, and surprisingly, Sloane refrains from repeating the trope about Kevin proving himself to Amy. The use of the "nerd makes good" trope didn't exactly make the first film GOOD, but it provided a little continuity for all the chaos.

Most of the humor is relentlessly self-referential and lacking any sense of timing or wit, and once more Sloane keeps his production values as low as they were in the first film. This means, among other things, that the Hobgoblins look as bad in 2009 as they did in 1988, not being for a moment convincing as anything but ratty looking puppets. I'm glad I had the chance to watch them together, just to see how this particular crap-artist attempted to keep some things the same while varying others. But frankly, even the VICE ACADEMY films offered marginally more entertainment value.

OBLIVION; BACKLASH: OBLIVION 2 (both 1996)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

Although the western genre had an inestimable influence on the space-opera genre, not too many movies attempt to reproduce the subgenre of the "space western," where the viewer beholds alien worlds that coincidentally duplicate most if not all of the iconography of western films and fiction. The subgenre might not be inherently ludicrous, but the sense of the ludicrous is very hard to avoid. These movies, filmed by Full Moon in Romania in the same year with substantially the same casts, don't make any attempt to avoid the mood of levity. But even though the intent of writer Peter David was probably to play everything for laughs, the actual chuckles are few and far between.

The plot of the first film, such as it is, follows the well-worn path of the young man who must assume a lawman's responsibilities after his father, marshal of the town of Oblivion (apparently the only town on the alien planet) is murdered by owlhoots. The young fellow here is Zack Stone (Richard Joseph Paul), who rides the vengeance trail against his father's killer, the lizard-humanoid Redeye (Andrew Divoff) and his gang, one of whom is the whip-wielding Lash (Musetta Vander). Prior to getting news of his father's death, Zack saves the life of a "native" (Jimmie F. Skaggs) and so gains himself a Tonto-like sidekick. 

The progress toward Zack's vengeance is a slow one, delayed by many unfunny set-pieces with the locals of Oblivion. Some of the actors playing these parts have very little to do, particularly Isaac Hayes and Meg Foster (as a cyborg deputy), but that may be a mercy compared to the horrible jokes mouthed by Carel Strucken, Julie Newmar (as the saloon-owner "Miss Kitty") and George Takei, who turns in one of the worst performances of all time. I suppose it was a natural response for the actors to resort to mugging in response to David's clotpate humor, but it doesn't  make it any easier to watch. Divoff, Skaggs and Foster all play their parts fairly straight, but project only the mood of trying to be done with it all. Only Musetta Vander has some fun with her role as the dominatrix-like Lash, though it's easy to see how a lesser actress could've have effed up even this minor potential.

The only noteworthy thing about OBLIVION is David's odd decision to make new Marshal Zack an "empath," which functionally means that he doesn't just avoid violence for his own sake, but also to experiencing his enemy's pain in "Corsican Brothers" fashion.. This leads to an oddly sadomasochistic scene near the end, when the evil Redeye is slain by a giant scorpion and Zack re-experiences the villain's death-sufferings. But David doesn't give this angle any psychological heft, any more than he does the "avenging the father" trope, and the empath thing is dropped in the sequel.

BACKLASH: OBLIVION 2 is a modest improvement in some areas, largely because there are far less opportunities for George Takei to make terrible STAR TREK ad-libs. However, despite the prominent use of Musetta Vander and her ass-less chaps in advertising, she's given very little to do, and even the new villain-- Redeye's brother Jagger (Divoff again)-- gets his villainy adumbrated. This, however, only makes more time for mug-happy perfs by other actors.

Julie Newmar repeats the defining aspects of saloon-owner Miss Kitty, which consist of her riffing on her famous "Catwoman" character by hissing and saying words like "purr-fect." She has a couple of odd "action" scenes, both of which concern her chastising cowpokes who get out of line with the saloon-girls. She upbraids one offender by performing some sort of painful chiropractic procedure on him. In a second scene, she knocks a man down a staircase by whacking him with her hands-- not so much with slaps, but with blows that sort of resemble the way a cat bats at a toy mouse. It's possible Newmar improvised these odd bits of business just for the hell of it. In a rushed subplot, it's suggested that she may be Zack's believed-to-be-dead mother, but David's script utterly fails to ground this sort-of revelation in the early parts of the story. Miss Kitty also gets killed and comes back to life, subjecting the viewer to yet another "cat" schtick.

Newmar, though, remains charismatic even when she's doing crap. Not so the character of Sweeney (Maxwell Caulfield), a bounty hunter looking for Lash. Sweeney dresses and talks like a Victorian Englishman, but while rounding up his desperado he comes into conflict with Marshal Zack, not least because Sweeney also tries to seduce Zack's sort-of girlfriend Mattie (Jackie Swanson). Sweeney is alleged to be more or less the same as a character David used in his STAR TREK prose fiction, but here all the bounty hunter does is waste time.

It's hard to choose which of these garbage flicks smells worse, but I guess I have to give that dubious prize to BACKLASH. In OBLVION the awfulness of George Takei is somewhat mitigated by the charms of Musetta Vander, whereas there's nothing to compensate for the badness of Newmar and Caulfield in the second film.