DARKMAN III: DIE DARKMAN DIE (1996)

 

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

Bradford May directs Darkman in his last feature, but this time the hero gets to go out with a much better script than he got from installment two. Michael Colleary and Mike Werb, who also worked on the script for the 2001 LARA CROFT TOMB RAIDER, arguably give the hero his best outing in terms of both a better villain and a superior dramatic situation.

However much time has passed since DARKMAN II, the gangs in the unnamed city have come to fear the disfigured crusader (again Arnold Vosloo) who preys upon their kind. But one crime-boss, Peter Rooker (Jeff Fahey), sees a chance for profit. Having been informed that Darkman possesses freakish super-strength, Rooker wants to create more super-strong men to serve as his enforcers so that he can dominate the crime-world. Rooker is so obsessed with this aim that he pays no attention to his wife Angela and his kindergarten-age daughter, both of whom are innocent of Rooker's true nature.

A woman who calls herself Doctor Bridget Thorne finds her way to Darkman's hideout. She tells him that she was the ER surgeon who severed his nerve endings to save him the pain of his burns, and when Darkman is less than impressed with this accomplishment, she offers to help him perfect the perfect, non-degradable artificial skin the hero desires. The temptation wins Darkman over.

But it's a mistake, for Bridget originally "saved" Darkman with the hope of experimenting on him, and now she has the chance. Further, Rooker is her backer and she is his mistress, which fills in the blanks as to why a crime-boss thought that power-duplication could be in his wheelhouse. Darkman is deeply betrayed, given that he hasn't trusted anyone in a long time, but though Bridget does manage to make new super-henchmen, the hero escapes her clutches.

Darkman decides to take down Rooker in his usual manner, using the subterfuge of disguise to infiltrate the mastermind's world. However, when he masquerades as Rooker and enters his home to seek out missing data, Darkman is forced to sympathize with the plight of Angela and her little girl. This moral nature keeps Darkman from being a simple monster like his "Phantom of the Opera" model, and adds more dramatic heft to the hero's struggle against the villain. In the end, after some above-average fight-scenes, the crusader has a lively battle with Rooker, now dosed up on strength-serum, and the battle ends with a grotesque fate for the villain. A coda establishes that although Angela does reach out to Darkman, seeking to know his nature, he's aware that his deformity repels her, and he ends his saga by returning to his lonely vigil.

DARKMAN II: THE RETURN OF DURANT (1995)

 

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

Five years after the theatrical release of DARKMAN, Universal brought out two DTV sequels, both directed by Bradford May.

Though Peyton Westlake keeps the same "Phantom of the Opera" digs he had in the previous film, his former girlfriend never manages to locate him, so she's out of the picture for the duration. Unfortunately, thanks to the workmanlike script, Darkman's first opponent Durant managed to survive his helicopter crashing into a bridge, losing no more than a few months in a coma. On top of this good fortune, Durant's thespian counterpart Larry Drake got top billing for RETURN over the actor now essaying the bandage-wrapped crusader, Arnold Vosloo.

By a staggering coincidence, though Durant doesn't go looking for Darkman, his next business venture causes their paths to cross once more. Durant's criminal empire fell apart during his coma, so he decides to look up a mad scientist, Hathaway, who has been working on particle beam-weaponry for sale to the highest bidder. Since Hathaway needs a workshop to perfect his weapons, so Durant picks an existing laboratory and decides to muscle the owner, another scientist named Brinkman, into signing away his property for a song. 

Though Durant kills the stubborn scientist, Westlake just happens to have approached Brinkman to collaborate on Westlake's pet project: to perfect the artificial skin that he hopes to use to cover his damaged features, as well as the substance he uses for his masquerades in his Darkman persona. So Darkman is not just pissed that Durant is back, but also that the evildoer has ruined another of the hero's chances for normalcy.

Darkman has two allies this time out. One is a crusading lady reporter who helps the hero expose Durant's return, and the other is the sister of Brinkman, who's tempted to sell the lab to Durant until she finds out the truth about her brother's murder. Neither of them is any more interesting than Durant and his thugs, though it's of some significance that the actress playing the sister is Renee O'Connor, who would sign on to play Gabrielle on the XENA WARRIOR PRINCESS show. Once all the plot points are set up, director and writers shake vigorously with multiple shootouts, fistfights, and deceptive masquerades.

One minor political joke shows up amidst the supporting villains. Durant's first customer for the beam-weapon is an ex-army vigilante hungry for fight crime, but he unlike Darkman is demeaned because he's said to be both "far right" and a "Nazi," as well as Durant's patsy to cull rival crime-overlords. Durant himself seems apolitical, but one of his goons just happens to be ex-KGB, making him the only halfway memorable henchmen. It might have been a decent joke if the writers had pitted the "Nazi" army guy against the "Commie" henchman, but instead they waste even the minor comic potential by having the army guy hurl his "Commie" insult against the also apolitical scientist Hathaway. 

TRANCERS 3 (1992)

 

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

I don't know if the producers of TRANCERS 3 wrote out the character of the hero's wife because the actress who'd played her, Helen Hunt, had just rocketed to the Big Time with the teleseries MAD ABOUT YOU-- with this installment marking Hunt's last contribution to the series. But irrespective of the precise reasons, Tim Thomerson's hero Jack Deth works much better when he's not happy, so the loss of a stable love-life was an improvement. 

Even before a new conflict begins, Deth is having marital trouble with Lena (Hunt). Then he gets his mental essence summoned back to his native time, the 23rd century, because yet another evil genius has started unleashing the zombies known as "Trancers," this time in the hoary old year of 2005. It's not clear to me as to what happens to the body Deth was occupying when his future-self vanishes, but I guess Lena views his leave-taking as desertion. When Deth makes it to 2005, he learns that in the meantime Lena divorced him and married someone else. She appears just long enough to tell the hero how happy she is, and then Deth's nicely pissed off for his next battle with evildoers.

This time the villain is the risibly named Colonel Daddy Muthuh (Andrew Robinson), so named because he's been both father and mother to all the soldiers under his command. Muthuh has some notion of conquering his timeline with his small army of super-strong zombies, though most of them just look like ordinary gym-rats, including a female fighter (Dawn Ann Billings). Robinson has a nice time chewing the scenery and up to this point essays the series' best villain.

Deth gets diverse help from Movie #2's character Alice (Megan Ward), a big alien goon he calls Godzilla, and a female Trancer-cop called T.J. (Melanie Smith). But Deth's the whole show here, even if it's pretty much a roadshow in terms of its meager FX budget.

THE INHERITOR OF KUNG FU (1983)

 

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

This bargain basement Taiwanese production is mostly notable for teaming up two of Hong Kong's notable martial arts talents, Ti Lung and Chang Ling. 

Unfortunately, it's hard to talk about the movie for a couple of reasons. One is that the English dub seems inconsistent about attributing the characters with names. Chang Ling is Princess Chin Chin, at least to my ears, but I think Lung's character is called both Chin and Shu. I'll use "Shu" just because it doesn't sound like the other character's cognomen.

Shu meets the princess when she and her handmaid are traveling alone in Shu's country. Brigands attack the two women, and Shu tries to defend them, only to get beat down because his kung fu is no good. However, Chin Chin's is excellent, and she routs the bandits all by herself.

After praising Shu for really trying hard, she reveals that she represents a foreign clan, and that she wants to establish good relations with the head of Shu's clan, who is both Shu's kung-fu trainer and his father. However, Shu's father believes that Chin Chin's people are devoted to "devilish arts," so he refuses her diplomatic mission. Chin Chin and her servant take their leave, and the father punishes Shu for getting things wrong.

While in isolation, Shu falls down a rabbit hole (or something) into a snowy domain. He meets a weird old monk who trains him in kung fu, and then leaves. Then Shu's father summons him, claiming that for some reason he thinks Shu has a priceless book of mystical kung fu practices. Shu tries to prove himself innocent, and when his father tries to kill him, he flees. Then fighters from other lands assail him, particularly one sneering creep who apparently can do real magic, since he briefly takes on the form of Shu's beloved sister.

Chin Chin appears to help Shu, and eventually the hunt for the book leads to a major battle between clans. The payoff, such as it is, is the reveal that Shu's father was hoping to use the mystic techniques to dominate every one else. In a subplot that probably suffered some sizable cuts, Shu's sister loses her mind Ophelia-style for some reason, and she "accidentally" causes her evil father to fall on a stake and impale himself, while he apologizes for causing her insanity-- I think.

Aside from the magical masquerade, the only other fantastic content is a moment when Chin Chin and an opponent fight each other while gliding across the surface of a river. This one's purely for devoted fans of the two principals.

THE DOLL SQUAD (1973)

 

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

THE DOLL SQUAD is definitely the best movie from the directorial chair of Ted V. Mikels. Of course, even the best Mikels is primarily enjoyable for its absurd cheesiness, though I give him sociological points for jumping on to the bandwagon of feminist heroism at the height of its seventies manifestations.

Everyone with an interest in cult film has probably heard the theory that SQUAD may have some marginal influence upon Aaron Spelling's CHARLIE'S ANGELS, which debuted three years after SQUAD hit theaters and which, like SQUAD, featured a heroine named Sabrina. If it's true that either Spelling or someone working for him saw SQUAD, though, that person didn't follow the template closely, but simply figured out a way to adapt the femme formidable movies of the low-budget market into something acceptable to television audiences.

Anyway, SQUAD is very much a cheapjack "female James Bond" film, and the aforementioned Sabrina (Francine York) is the central heroine, while the other members of the Squad are really just her subordinates, distinguished only by their specialties. Some are combat-oriented, which others are of more questionable application to spy-missions, like psychiatry. The girls make use of a few spy-gimmicks, such as a lighter that spews flame, but most of them are unimpressive due to the budget. Of the other five Squad-sisters, only Tura (FASTER PUSSYCAT KILL KILL) Satana has garnered any grindhouse fame, though Lisa (HEE HAW) Todd shows up for a brief role as the villain's moll.

Said villain is former espionage agent Eamon O'Reilly (Michael Ansara). He starts off his campaign of evil by blowing up a US space rocket, and a government official (Anthony Eisley, third-billed despite a very brief presence on-camera) calls on Sabrina and her Doll Squad to investigate. However, O'Reilly anticipates the Squad's response and goes proactive, knocking off some of the group's ancillary members. This does nothing to stop Sabrina from figuring out his identity, whereon she reveals that she and O'Reilly were once lovers when he was on the side of right. In jig time Sabrina and her aides figure out where O'Reilly makes his base, and they plan to assault his island home. When Sabrina does invade and question her former squeeze, she learns that he plans to dominate the world with a plague of rats with bubonic plague-- apparently distributed from satellites, though Mikels had no budget for spacecraft models.

Given that Mikels films are notorious for their poor pacing, in which characters either stand around talking or walking around on low-energy errands, he actually gives SQUAD a little visual oomph. He gets a lot of health from the jazzy score of Nicholas Carras, whose tunes make the on-screen action more compelling than it would have been sans music. The first half of the film is still slow for all that, but at least it doesn't put you to sleep while waiting for the main set-pieces of the last half, the invasion of the base. This consists of Sabrina and her five subordinates, all clad in polyester leotards, infiltrating the poorly guarded island and taking out numerous guards with gunshots, high kicks and karate chops. The girls are clearly not real martial artists, but they look OK, though Mikels missed a bet by not allowing former PUSSYCAT Satana, the only one with a history of cinematic fighting, to strut her stuff. 

Mikels even delivers moderately well on the frustrated romance trope, having Sabrina captured by O'Reilly. They talk over old times, he tries to talk her into becoming his queen when he rules the world, and when she refuses, he claims he planned to kill her anyway. She gets the upper hand, albeit more through trickery than combat, and then the Squad gets away after blowing up the installation for a big finish (though I think they pretty much shot up all the guards). The ladies do lose one of their own in the conflict, but they show about as much reaction to the loss as if they'd smudged their mascara. 

Only once does the script, partly credited to the director, move into Ed Wood territory. Out of nowhere, the psychiatrist member claims that she thinks O'Reilly wants to conquer the world because he suffers from a castration complex brought on his mother not loving him. I hypothesize that whoever wrote this speech was imitating the sort of pop-Freudianism used by Ian Fleming to motivate his villains. But not only does the script not give the assertion even minor logic, there's no follow-up to the idea-- unless we're supposed to think that the Squad's assault on the villain's base mirrors the villain's fear of being destroyed by rampaging femininity...

CHAMELEON (1998), CHAMELEON II; DEATH MATCH (1999), CHAMELEON 3: DARK ANGEL (2000)

 

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

I suppose fans have ROBOCOP to blame for all the SF-adventure films in which whole cities dispense with standing police forces (all before "Defund the Police!") and depend rather on privatized law-enforcement units. To be sure, the original ROBOCOP takes the position that privatized law is not a good choice over police who report to government oversight, so maybe it's not ultimately responsible for dipstick iterations of the concept like the two FUTURE FORCE movies.

The three CHAMELEON TV-movies are certainly not down in the bottom level of dreck; all three are just decent formula entertainment. United Paramount Network shot a number of these TV-films from 1995 to 2004, and while never outstanding I generally esteemed their best stuff over anything offered by SYFY Channel's original efforts. CHAMELEON was one of a few that was structured as a possible teleseries, though no such series manifested.

In far-off 2028, corporate culture is now served by privatized enforcement agency IBI. Cloning has been perfected, and IBI, seeking to create their own "super-agent," brings forth one of the first adult clones to be genetically crossbred with three species of animals: cougar, falcon and chameleon. Said agent is Kam (Bobbie Phillips), who is supposed to an emotionless enforcer for the IBI, and for her remorseless creator. However, her first mission for IBI puts the company in a bad light: they want to kill off a man who's invented a "credit chip" that allows him to get around billing systems. The IBI does kill the inventor and his wife, but Kam, when tasked with killing the inventor's young son, rebels and flees with him.

Phillips generally strikes a good balance between her training as a martial-arts badass-- she looks very Terminator-esque wearing dark shades and riding a motorcycle-- and her innate humanity, for all that she's a "sub," a "substitute human"-- sometimes abbreviated as "subhuman." There are a few reflections on the morality of making clones to serve as a slave species, but the script doesn't pay a lot of attention to moral issues. 

Anyway, despite Kam's prickly nature, she and the kid remain together most of the film, working as de facto partners until Kam finally defeats IBI. Well, actually she defeats a rogue faction headed by her mean creator. Once this faction has been taken down, Kam is free to rejoin a less tainted IBI for future adventures. 

Personally, I would have dropped the preposterous "animal DNA" stuff. Maybe I could have bought into her having her muscles enhanced with "cougar DNA," but "chameleon DNA" giving her the power to blend into her surroundings was for me a bridge too far. If the creators just wanted her to be excluded from the normal ranks of humanity, being a test tube baby could have worked as well as the animal-hybrid trope.

CHAMELEON 2: DEATH MATCH shows how the concept probably would have played out in a regular series. This time there are no rogues in the IBI household, but Kam does have to deal with being assigned a new (and unwanted) cop-partner Booker. As the two of them go head to head with a gang-lord named Dulac and his many allies, MATCH shows itself to be much more focused upon crime-fighting action a la DIE HARD. There's one vague suggestion that IBI may still harbor some corrupt elements, but for the most part it's all about stopping the career criminals. The predictable arc of Kam's interaction with Booker-- first they fight, then they protect each other's backs-- is pedestrian and does nothing to advance Kam's perceptions of her own humanity. And although Phillips is still very sexy, the sequel lacks the sex-scenes of the original. Granted, those sequences were rather tame given that they were meant for broadcast television, but they did add some ambivalence as to what duties Kam was trained to perform for her "masters." In place of sex, there are a few more extended kung fu fight scenes.

With the last telefilm, subtitled DARK ANGEL, the creators seemed to go all out, possibly guessing that this would be their last time to breathe life into their chameleonic heroine-- which indeed it was.

To be sure, as with the other two films, the script is very spotty on a lot of details-- not only about this future-scape's grand scheme, like how people live in a corporate-dominated culture and how they feel about clones like Kam-- but even the details about how Kam lives her life when she's not out kicking criminal butts. The writers apparently forgot that the original timeframe was 2028, for the prologue shifts the time ahead about ten years, though nothing about Kam's life in the IBI has changed in the least. She does have a slightly more compassionate handler this time out, though he exists only to utter vague misgivings about Kam's temperamental nature, and the possibility that she might be as capable as a wild animal of indiscriminate killing because she's "subhuman." It's not clear why any IBI official cares about indiscriminate killing, if indeed they have no government oversight. Still, the scene does make the viewer sympathize with Kam over a hierarchy that created her as a living weapon and then hypocritically submits her to psychological review.

Elsewhere in the city, scientist Tess Adkins (Teal Redmann) and her father are working for an energy company, trying to harness "dark matter" as a new source of energy. However, a subordinate scientist and a tough bodyguard named Kane (Alex Kuzelicki) betray the project. They kill Tess's father and carry off the dark matter device, despite Tess's warning that the power of dark matter could unleash a "black hole" capable of destroying all life. The young woman escapes, which doesn't immediately concern the conspirators, until they get the device back to their base, where they find that they can't make the machine work. So they go looking for the scientist, at about the same time Kam is assigned to run the witness to ground.

This basic scenario was already used in the first movie, but this time the stakes are raised in terms of both action and drama. The chameleon-girl finds Tess, but so does Kane-- and in that first martial encounter, Kam realizes that her opponent is also a "subhuman" clone, since he can both fight and heal wounds as well as she can. Moreover, even though he's an adult, Kam recognizes Kane as her clone-brother, though she hasn't seen him since both of them were little kids being raised by a surrogate mother. Again the script drops the ball on a lot of intriguing questions. Was Kane just made from roughly the same hybrid gene-recombination process as Kam, or were they literal brother and sister, albeit nurtured by the nameless surrogate mother? At some point in the past, the IBI simply loses track of Kane. Since he seems to have free will and nothing is said about his having been sold to foreign powers, the best assumption is that he simply decided to go rogue on his own-- though that doesn't really explain why Kam has conveniently forgotten all about him until the time of DARK ANGEL. (Since both of the clone-people wear black attire, maybe "Angels" would have been a better title.)

For all these unquestionable flaws, though, the action is exemplary for a budget-conscious TV-film, boasting four strong fights between Phillips and Kuzelicki and a number of ancillary battles against other lowlifes trying to take Tess prisoner. Kam is consistently shown as being caught between the desire to reconnect with her lost sibling and the necessity to stop his rampage, to say nothing of resenting her own "sub" status. (A memorable line in the prologue conflates her duty "to serve and protect" as being equivalent to a slave's "service.") In contrast to the kid Kam protects in the first flick, Tess doesn't do much to bring out Kam's humanity, given that Tess is just as prickly as her savior for no adequate reason. Still, Kam finally gets a challenge worthy of her talents, not only in her fights with Kane but in her struggle to keep the dark matter from annihilating the world.

Kane, though defeated, escapes, and a coda suggests that Kam may seek to find him again, though he showed no sign of wanting a reconciliation. But even though there would be no more outings for the girl with the animal DNA, at least she went out on a high note.

EMPIRE OF ASH II (1988), EMPIRE OF ASH III (1989)

 

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

Now in contrast to the previously reviewed film PHOENIX THE WARRIOR, these two films come closer to the mark as far as making mildly entertaining films. If you as filmmaker know that you really have no coherent, non-derivative ideas, then just go for broke, and throw everything and the kitchen sink into the mix. The titling of the two films is a prime example of this mentality. They're really films One and Two in a series of two, but some marketing genius decided to make it seem as if they both descended from some hypothetical "EMPIRE OF ASH" out there in the Platonic nether-regions.

Producer Lloyd A. Simandl seems to have originated the basic story, and as both co-writer and co-director he keeps both films on the same basic track. For once, we've got a post-apocalyptic film taking place in heavily forested areas, which never seems to be a serious problem for all the Mad Max-style transports wheeling around. Supposedly we're in a post-nuclear "New Idaho," as played by the forests of Canada, and ordinary people are constantly menaced both by a cult of religious fanatics and by scientific nuts who like to experiment on human subjects. Some reviews claim that the two groups fight one another, but I mostly remember them contending with main heroine Danielle (Melanie Kilgour).

Both films are search-and-rescue films. In the first, the science geeks kidnap Danielle's sister for their experiments, and the gun-wielding warrior woman goes after them. On her way she befriends a roguish traveler, Orion (Thom Schioler), who only reluctantly joins her cause (I think he agreed after she slept with him, but I'm not sure). EMPIRE 2 is full of lots of random running around and shooting, and there are times that neither Danielle or Orion are on screen while the plot just wobbles all over the place. The most charismatic character is not the heroine-- though these are two of a very small number of post-apoc films with female protagonists-- but the main villain, a striking blonde enforcer for one of the evil groups, maybe the techie madmen. I thought for sure the film was setting viewers up for a face-off between good girl and bad girl, but the end just dissolves into another big shoot-up and the rescue of Danielle's sister. The film's highlight is a daffy sequence in which one of the tech-geeks blows up a building by launching miniature missiles from his hat.

There's no trace of Orion or the sister in EMPIRE III, but Danielle decides to help out a young guy named Harris who's trying to rescue his girlfriend from the tech-weirdos-- who now have a hot brunette in charge, and who AGAIN does not get a final catfight with the heroine. EMPIRE 3 is just as aimless as the first film, and Kilgour is still not especially charismatic, with the dominatrix villain again getting some of the best scenes. One small advantage of the aimlessness is that "kitchen sink" approach I spoke of. For instance, there's an amusing scene that brings back the guy with the hat, given the name "Rocket Man," and shows him becoming tongue-tied when two hot young babes want to get a better look at his "missiles." The leader of the religious fanatics this time out is American "heavy" William "CONAN THE BARBARIAN" Smith, but although he intones his pseudo-Christian dogma well enough, his character doesn't do much as a whole. But the first film must've made some money, since this time the producers sprung not only for Smith but also for some cuts from American rock favorites. An implied lesbian almost-rape adds to some of the delirium, and for once the girls chosen to drop their tops are well chosen-- not always the case for a lot of Canadian movies of the eighties.