ROUTE 66: "IN THE CLOSING OF A TRUNK" (1963)

There are far too many naturalistic psycho-killers out there for my phenomenality-blog to encompass. However, just for variety I'll include one such from the 1960-64 CBS series ROUTE 66. Though most if not all of the episodes were resolutely naturalistic, the scripts, often by series-co-creator Sterling Silliphant, often attempted to infuse the travels of its earnest young men with a rambling poetry more typical of an Ibsen drama than a broadcast TV show. The following is more of a summary than an explication, though it does contain some interpretive sections.

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PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*

In this episode, regular hero Tod Stiles (Martin Milner) plays good Samaritan to fifty-something woman Alma (Ruth Roman), whom he meets when she is returning to the fishing-village of her youth to reclaim her father’s property. Tod soon learns that no one in the village will welcome Alma due to her scandalous past. 

Twenty-seven years ago, Alma became pregnant by some youth whose name she never revealed, and who apparently left town unaware of his legacy. Alma then seemingly went mad and beat her father Jim to death with a bludgeon, and then tried to conceal her crime by stuffing Jim’s body in a trunk. Alma was sent to an asylum for almost three decades. Prior to her exile her child Mattie was born, but Jim’s brother Kyle (Ed Begley) raised Mattie in the village, poisoning the young man’s mind against his mother for her patricide. Kyle has also concealed from Alma that Mattie is present in the village, but he doesn’t want to take any chances that she might win Mattie back.

 Therefore, Kyle plants in Alma’s mind the suggestion that Tod may be Mattie. Tod does nothing to encourage this notion, but he can’t bear to leave the pitiable old woman on her own, and because he helps her at her house, Alma quickly buys into the delusion of Tod’s true identity. In fact, when she flashes back to her love affair with the nameless stranger, she imagines him looking like modern-day Tod—which seems problematic given that in present time she’s hanging onto the real Tod and trying to keep her with him as her beloved son.

 Tod rails at Mattie, but the latter refuses to come clean, having experienced the shame of having been called a bastard and taking refuge in Kyle’s paternal care. Kyle finally comes up with a way to mousetrap his addled niece. While Tod is present at Alma’s house, Kyle sends Alma two reminders of her crime: a man-sized trunk containing the same sort of bludgeon Alma used on her father.

Possibly Kyle hopes to simply drive Alma bonkers, but she reacts more extremely. She picks up the bludgeon and strikes at Tod. He avoids her swipes but trips and hits his head. Alma then flashes back to her previous crime, even though she hasn’t actually beat “daddy’s” brains in, and loads the unconscious TOD into the trunk—where, upon awakening, he begins to suffocate, complete with all the usual “Route 66” poetic meditations. To the young Samaritan’s good fortune, Kyle has been watching, and since he doesn’t want a real death on his conscience, he and Mattie rescue Tod and call the authorities. 

Before the cops come, Alma treats everyone to a monologue in which she reveals her reason for having killed her father. It seems that Jim, whose drunken rages had already driven off Alma’s mother, became irate when he learned that Alma was pregnant with a bastard. He threatened to punish her by shoving her in a closet as she had when she was a child. But Alma feared the darkness would harm her unborn child, and thus she attacked Jim, killed him, and (not coincidentally) placed his dead body in the same confinement he’d used on her. The episode then ends with Mattie finally being willing to reconcile with his suffering mother. However, given that Alma attacked her other “son” and tried to suffocate him in a figurative “womb,” Mattie might not actually benefit from mending fences. 

ADDENDUM: I should add that while there's no reason for a viewer to think that Tod looks at all like Alma's dead father-- which might be a reason for her to attack him-- the script makes a point of having Kyle say that Tod rather resembles Mattie. Mattie asks Kyle why their resemblance should matter, since Alma has never seen her son in the flesh. But of course Alma has seen the absent father, and if Tod resembles the son, he could also resemble the father-- and that would make the hoax on Alma a bit more persuasive. This item brings a new interpretation to the attack-scene, though the script does not spell it out. Nowhere in the story does Alma voice any animus toward her unnamed lover, thinking of him only with rosy memories, and it's not even clear whether or not he knew when he left that he had knocked her up. Yet in real life it would be natural for Alma to nurture some resentment of the man who, intentionally or not, deserted her in her travails. Thus Alma's attack on Tod could be more directed at the absent daddy. Alternately, she might even be, in her demented state, somewhat conscious that she's attacking her "son" because he reminds her of the man who left her in the lurch. 

THE NEW MUTANTS (2020)

 

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

NEW MUTANTS was the last film in the X-Men franchise to be released under the 21st-Century Fox banner before the big Disney takeover. It's not much of a climax for Fox's twenty-year old management of the franchise, but at least it's better than the train wreck that was X-MEN ORIGINS WOLVERINE.

I would guess that from the first, director/co-writer Josh Boone knew that this film, an adaptation of a Marvel Comics X-Men spin-off, wasn't getting anything like the budget allotted to the X-films. That may be why the film diverges from the NEW MUTANTS comic book so radically. In the comic, the titular teenaged mutants are trained as superheroes at Professor X's special institute, with the expectation of their serving the same role as the earlier X-Men: fighting for justice and mutant rights. Here, Boone brings the teens together in a gloomy hospital inhabited only by the five teens, a medical doctor named Reyes (Alice Braga) overseeing their care, and a few assistants. Reyes claims that the five of them are to be trained in the handling of their mutant superpowers, and the teens acquiesce to some extent, since all five have had dire experiences in which they hurt ordinary humans with those abilities. However, the youths are not happy to be confined to the grounds by a force field, and this leads to an eventual breakdown between the young heroes and their captors. In addition, viewpoint character Dani lives in fear of encountering a demonic creature linked to her Cheyenne heritage, and eventually the mutants must deal with the reality of this supernatural threat.

Though the five teens-- Dani, Illyana, Rahne, Sam, and Bobby-- have no shortage of fantastic powers, the film lacks the budget to show them being exercised to any great extent, and so what we get is akin to a long TV-episode with a better than average budget. The idea of emphasizing horror rather than adventure in the New Mutants' cinematic debut is not without precedent, since the whole demon-plotline is derived from a celebrated comics-narrative called the "Demon Bear" storyline. (Personally I found the original tale over-hyped). Boone does provide some decent scare-scenes that put the teenagers in situations where their super-powers are of no avail. But Boone's script fails to give any of the characters much of a story-arc beyond running around, complaining and being terrorized. The one character who comes alive to some extent is, ironically, that of Illyana, whose complicated relationship to X-Man Colossus must of necessity be elided. That said, the script makes Illyana into a snarky "mean girl" who's forever taking shots at her fellow inmates, most of all "new fish" Dani, and actress Anya Taylor-Joy makes the most of her diva status. There's a mild, non-canonical lesbian encounter between Dani and Rahne, but thankfully, it's not trumpeted with the offensiveness of the Woke Filmmakers. Yet it's also not that dramatically interesting for all the subdued handling.

Even if the franchise hadn't been absorbed by Disney, and even if the film hadn't come out in the wake of the China Virus, I tend to doubt that this spin-off would have earned another outing.

THE DYNAMITE SHAOLIN HEROES (1977)

 

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

Two surprises about this low-budget chopsocky: that it's an early directorial effort by Godfrey Ho, who would become infamous in the eighties for churning out dozens of incoherent ninja-films, and that by comparison HEROES is fairly comprehensible, though the plot is still not easy to follow and it's easy to confuse the characters, since the only "name" actor in the film is Lo Lieh. 

In fact, I rather lost track as to whether Lo Lieh's character was or was not the secret identity of the film's only real hero, "the Lotus Man." In fact, the oddly named mystery-man seems to have borrowed a few tropes from Western superheroes. Though attired in regular Chinese clothes for the most part, Lotus Man's identity is masked by the basket-like hat known in Japan as the Komuso. And whenever the Lotus Man foils a crime, he leaves behind a dart with a lotus-flower attached, not unlike the spider-sigil left behind by the American pulp crusader The Spider.

To be sure, the "crimes" with which Lotus Man is concerned are sociological in nature. The historical setting is hazy, but I presume it must take place during the Qing Dynasty, because all the bad guys are looking for loyalists who supported the earlier Ming Dynasty. Lotus Man frequently shows up to help out Ming patriots, rather like the Scarlet Pimpernel succoring French royalists, but with more bare-handed fighting. (Lotus Man, unlike his enemies, uses no weapons.) 

Early on the plot also introduces what seems to be a B-plot, though it eventually takes over the film. Young Chinese aristocrat Ching Ching, daughter of Ming patriot Kang, is subjected to an arranged marriage to a prince, presumably a Qing (Lo Lieh). Ching Ching thinks the prince is a wimp and admires the heroic Lotus Man (Lois and Clark, anyone?) Then a second Lotus Man appears to confuse matters, though in due time the copycat is revealed to be one of the Qing enforcers, who's also in love with Ching Ching. 

The film's lively fight-scenes are mostly in the middle, while those at the climax prove forgettable. As noted there are no other central heroes but Lotus Man, though strangely, even though Kang and Ching Ching are not martial artists, they have a maid who fights the Qing henchmen about a minute before she's killed. The "dynamite" of the title is just more hyperbole, and no one is referred to in the English translation as a Shaolin. There is one Buddhist guy who doesn't like seeing the lotus, a symbol of peace, corrupted by the violent acts of a vigilante, but I don't think he was supposed to be any sort of "Shaolin."

THE PHANTOM EMPIRE (1988)

 

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

In my review of Fred Olen Ray's HOLLYWOOD CHAINSAW HOOKERS I mentioned the same director's PHANTOM EMPIRE as a bad example of his having squirted out a terrible movie made in a few days with a bunch of favorite actors. I know nothing about the circumstances of EMPIRE's genesis, though I doubt it was anything more than a movie in which he had enough funding to send his players tromping around Bronson Canyon for a few days of shooting.

In one of the "city" scenes, a monster attacks some picnickers and is shot down. Girl archeologist Denea (Susan Stokey) thinks that certain clues about the creature might lead her to the legendary city R'yleh, an obsession of her late archeologist father. (The city's name is cheerfully swiped from H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos.) Denea gathers together a bunch of fellow explorers, whose identities are less significant than the actors' previous labors on Ray's behalf. There's so little to say about the characters that I'll just reel off the actors' names for whatever name-game pleasure readers might get from Ross Hagen, Dawn Wildsmith, Jeffrey Combs, Robert Quarry and Russ Tamblyn. Tamblyn alone doesn't accompany the others on their trek into a series of subterranean caves.

After walking for a day or so, the stalwart seekers come across various human-sized monsters like the one from the picnic, a fur-clad cave-babe, and Robby the Robot-- or rather, a replica of the famed automaton from FORBIDDEN PLANET. There's at least a minor explanation for the robot's presence, for the explorers also encounter an alien space-babe (Sybil Danning, playing a character billed as "Alien Queen"). The Queen, who crashed in the uncharted territory (not city) of R'yleh eons ago, has spent all that time trying to repair her ship with the help of the robot. As soon as she sees the newbies, she decides to enslave them to her service. This leads to the film's only somewhat memorable scene, for Hagen's character objects to this high-handed treatment, and Alien Queen handily beats his ass down with but a few skillful moves. (Did Ray have some dim memory of Hagen's earlier near-beatdown by a kung-fu lady assassin in 1973's WONDER WOMEN?)

The movie doesn't so much come to a conclusion as peter out. There's a little entertainment in the credits sequence, where Ray references the help of "the City and Country of Caprona." Caprona is one of Edgar Rice Burroughs' many fictional terrains, which was also something of a grab-bag of fantasy-tropes, though not as incoherent as those of EMPIRE. The film's title riffs on the 1935 Mascot serial of the same name, but even that is by comparison relatively well conceived for a simple pulp-fantasy adventure. Though neither the explorers nor the menaces they encounter are very interesting, the menaces are just a random collection of hazards with no apparent relation to one another, so I suppose the five dull explorers are the centric characters here. Still, in contrast to most works of ERB and his imitators, EMPIRE sports too little action to qualify as anything but subcombative. 

SCANNERS (1981)

 

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

Full disclosure: I've never had much use for the horror-plays of David Cronenberg, which one might gather from the fact that in the twelve years of this blog I've reviewed none of the movies he directed and only two in which he acted. I can loosely respect the basic inventiveness of his ideas, but he's not good with characters. Any time I watch a Cronenberg film, I feel as if he's playing puppet-master with the players, putting them through certain plot-based actions without any sense of internal conflict or decision. In my view he has some of Hitchcock's tendency to reduce characters to schematic designs, but without Hitchcock's saving grace of idiosyncratic humor, which makes that director's characters seem more alive.

SCANNERS's main character is bland everyman Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack). He has nearly no history, for his affliction-- that of hearing voices in his head-- has made him into a wandering vagrant. He's first seen through the eyes of a dowager who fancies that he's sexually attracted to her-- after which she succumbs to a spasmodic attack, as if she's been cursed by Cameron's "evil eye." Also in the early scenes is a demonstration of the film's best known effect: a man's head exploding as the result of psychic invasion.

Cameron is captured by a secret institute, Consec, which is overseen by obsessed scientist Ruth (Patrick McGoohan), although the real authority is security expert Keller. Ruth explains that Cameron is one of several dozen individuals termed "scanners," all of whom have mind-reading and telekinetic powers. The scientist further explains that the scanners were created by in utero exposure to the analgesic drug "ephemerol," though Ruth does not immediately mention that he invented said drug. Ruth enlists the somewhat pliable vagrant into the world of espionage, claiming that another scanner, Revok (Michael Ironside), is going around assassinating any scanners allied to Ruth. Though Cameron is logically indebted to Ruth for giving him greater control over his malady with injections of ephemerol, Cronenberg's script provides no solid justification for Cameron to plunge into the world of sci-fi spy adventure. 

I found most of the set-pieces of the film competent but somewhat dull, whether dealing with gun-battles or exploding heads. I concede that the concluding psychic battle between Cameron and Revok deserves its fame, but the revelation of a filial relationship between the two, brought about by Ruth, strained my credulity.

The most interesting aspect of all these spy-fi antics lies in Cronenberg's treatment of psychic phenomena. I've seen thousands of fictional representations of mind-reading, for example. However, most of these depictions show the psychic gleaning the thoughts of his subject as if he were doing nothing more strenuous than thumbing through the pages of a book. One might deduce from this common depiction that most writers think of the interaction of two minds as being (appropriately enough) "ephemeral," as if the mental energies produced by both minds were utterly intangible. Instead, Cronenberg sees psychic force as FORCE in the true sense. A scanner's scans invade a subject's body the same way any physical object would, disrupting the normal functions of the organs, causing nosebleeds, headaches, and exploding heads. In my long experience I can't think of any other metaphenomenal authors who have followed Cronenberg's unique take on mental powers, and I have my doubts that even the various SCANNERS sequels-- none of which included participation by Cronenberg-- even bothered to pursue this unusual story-trope.  

KING OF THE WILD (1931)

 

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

I've seen very few serials from the era of silent cinema, but my impression is that a fair number of silent chapterplays dealt with fairly mundane threats, like accused men trying to prove their innocence. It's not surprising, then, that the hero of this early sound serial, one Robert Grant (Walter Miller), is mostly an ordinary guy trying to clear his name after he's accused of killing an Indian prince. Grant's quest for justice forces him to pursue one of the real criminals to the jungles of Africa, where the majority of the action takes place. In Africa Grant ends up foiling the schemes of big-game hunter Harris as he tried to move in on a diamond mine owned by a brother and sister, the latter becoming the leading lady of the tale. For twelve chapters there's lots of fighting and running around, as well as a handful of forgettable cliffhangers, until Grant finds the evidence that exonerates him.

Aside from its minor place in serial history, there are two points of interest in this somewhat creaky Mascot production. One is the narrative's sole source of metaphenomenality, in that the evil Harris picked up a most unusual henchman in his travels: a hairy ape-man named Bimi. There's little discussion of Bimi's nature, but he's immensely strong, seen bending metal bars in an early scene. Since he's not an animal despite being very hirsute, I think the writers' intent was that Bimi was some sort of "missing link," and in my system that aligns him with other types of "freakish" forms of life. I concur with reviewer Jerry Blake that the script doesn't go the obvious route and make Harris tyrannize and torment his apish pawn. Though Harris remains a cad, he treats Bimi fairly well during all of their scenes, which makes the missing link's loyalty relatively believable. 

The other point of interest is that even though only old-movie buffs will recognize most of the actors, such as Dorothy (PHANTOM EMPIRE) Christie and Mischa Auer, WILD gives Boris Karloff one of his juiciest pre-Frankenstein roles as conniving Arab Mustapha. I can't claim that Mustapha is any better as a character than dozens of other Karloff heavies from the period. But at least Dear Boris gets enough screen time to strut his stuff, in contrast, say, to 1927's TARZAN AND THE GOLDEN LION, where one has to look hard even to make him out.

HAUNTED HARBOR (1944)

 

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

The "haunted" element of this forties serial-- a phony dragon-creature made of metal-- is the only metaphenomenal aspect of the story, and in keeping with its static appearance, it isn't actually able to do anything but pop up from beneath the ocean eaves to scare off the local (Pacific Island?) natives. HARBOR, in contrast to most chapterplays, was loosely derived from a novel, though I've no idea if the mechanical dragon appeared therein.

The plot follows the trope of "innocent man seeking to prove his own innocence." By 1944 this type of hero was relatively rare among all the superheroes, detectives and servicemen seeking to corral world-conquering villains. To be sure, Kane Richmond, the actor playing unjustly accused ship-captain Jim Marsden, had essayed the role of Spy Smasher two years previous. Here, as Marsden pursues evidence to exonerate him, he's called upon to handle big brawling fight-scenes in most if not all episodes. Sadly, his female lead Patricia doesn't get any choice fight-scenes, even with other females, which was an area in which actress Kay Aldridge distinguished herself in 1942's PERILS OF NYOKA. However, she does get to handle a pistol a few times, so at least she's not a shrinking violet. 

The villains are thoroughly one-dimensional-- they're using the artificial dragon to cover their illicit activities-- but at least their leader is played by the venerable Roy Barcroft of "Captain Mephisto" fame. Apart from Richmond, Aldridge and Barcroft, the rest of the cast is forgettable, and I only liked one death-trap, in which Patricia is bound to a chair and in danger of being ventilated by a spear-device.