SUPERMAN/SHAZAM!: THE RETURN OF BLACK ADAM (2010)

 

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

I understand the rationale of most of the "DC Showcase shorts" series is to provide a venue in which to celebrate established DC franchises (in contrast to the DC comic book SHOWCASE, which usually debuted new features, or old features revived in some altered form, like the Kupperberg DOOM PATROL). Still, I suspect some business motive informed this 2010 iteration of the "Shazam" property, even though the original Captain Marvel didn't get his own live-action movie until nine years later.

It would be kind to call most post-Golden Age revivals of the Captain Marvel-verse "underwhelming." Even admitting that a lot of the original comics were as formulaic as any other comic of that time, the raconteurs working with the heirs of Shazam did come up with a good range of witty, charming tales. Most adaptations of this particular property have lacked both wit and charm, and SUPERMAN/SHAZAM is no exception. Its plot is mostly an excuse for big fight-scenes. Young boy Billy Batson lives a simple life, trying to be a good person despite his poverty, until one day a super-powered villain, Black Adam, starts trying to kill him. Fortunately for the boy, Superman is around to stymie Black Adam, though the Man of Steel alone can't defeat the evildoer. Then Billy is summoned to the sanctuary of the wizard Shazam, who bestows on the boy the powers of Captain Marvel. The newborn hero joins Superman to defeat Black Adam, and Black Adam dies (impermanently, since he had yet to be essayed by Dwayne Johnson). The only distinction of this ordinary short is that Shazam is voiced by James Garner in his final performance.

The other three shorts, as I recall, were originally shown as "extra added attractions" on one of the WB animated program, and each is about half the running time of the 25-minute showcase for Captain Marvel. First up, proving equally pedestrian, is "The Spectre." The Ghostly Guardian, in his civilian identity as policeman Jim Corrigan, investigates the murder of a prominent L.A. citizen and finds that the butler did it. Not really, but there's nearly no emotional engagement with the actual characters in this underbaked mystery, so it might as well have been the butler. The version of the Spectre here recalls the gruesome but repetitive incarnation of the 1970s.

There's also "Jonah Hex," who did get his own film that same year, and the most one can say is that this 12-minute short is better than the feature film. Here the disfigured bounty hunter has to cross swords with a female schemer who proves a fairly dangerous adversary, and the outcome is congruent with the endings of the nihilistic spaghetti westerns on which the character of Hex was modeled.

The best of the lot is "Green Arrow," which packs a lot more into its dozen minutes that all the rest combined. While planning to pop the big question to his girlfriend Black Canary, the Emerald Archer is called upon to protect a young girl, the new queen of a made-up  European nation, from an assassination attempt. Not only is the dialogue clever and the characterization sharp, this short also features two of Green Arrow's best (if not only) costumed opponents, Merlyn the Magician and Count Vertigo. And since the Canary sings her own sweet song at the climax, that makes this short both a hero-crossover and a villain-crossover, for those of us who keep track.

JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF TIME (1967)

 

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

Though David L. Hewlett wrote and directed nine or ten movies in the sixties and seventies, his standout accomplishment would seem to be co-authoring the script for 1964's THE TIME TRAVELERS, which blew my young mind in some second-run theater in the late sixties. To be sure, co-writer Ib Melchior is said to have substantially revised Hewlett's contribution, with the result that Hewlett later recycled his time-travel ideas into JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF TIME. It's easy to see what JOURNEY took from TRAVELERS, probably with just enough alterations to throw off accusations of theft.

TRAVELERS concentrates on a group of researchers who accidentally open a portal to a future era, The scientists are taken in by one of the last civilized redoubts in a decaying world, and the displaced travelers end up saving their future heirs from destruction via time-travel.

JOURNEY injects a nasty new corporate boss, Stanton (Scott Brady), into the mix. Stanton orders three scientists (young Mark, young Karen and old Doc Gordon) to make a breakthrough in their time-travel project or he'll fire them all. Mark pushes the project to its limit, with the result that the whole lab travels to the far future. As in TRAVELERS, the future world is in the midst of a war between two parties, but this time, the displaced technicians learn this from a group of aliens. The aliens (one of whom is played by Lyle Waggoner) came to Earth hoping to colonize it, but the ongoing war discourages this plan. They basically exist to serve the same purpose as the future-Earth people, explaining how Earth has gone to pot but that the travelers may be able to fix things if they return to their own century. 

After this dimestore dalliance with Earth's cosmic fate, the time-lab jaunts off again, trying to return home. The major part of the story shows them getting bounced around to different eras of the past, mostly represented by stock footage. They end up in prehistoric times, Stanton and Gordon die, and the two young scientists become the world's new Adam and Eve. (Ugh.) The only slightly clever scene in this low-budget mishmash involves Stanton, the villain of the piece, accidentally bringing about his own doom via time-paradox. Everything else is just a bunch of actors standing around reading technobabble. Now I may have to watch one of Hewlett's other offerings, such as THE MIGHTY GORGA to see it excels JOURNEY in mind-numbing mediocrity.

BEES IN PARADISE (1944)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

Two years after Val Guest wrote KING ARTHUR WAS A GENTLEMAN--which contained a minor "fallacious figment" trope -- for British comedian Arthur Askey, Guest both directed and co-wrote this oddball trifle in which four British airmen get stranded on an "island of women." (I say "four," but it's really just Askey and three guys who exist to feed him lines but play nearly no real role in the story.)

Fantasy-fans have celebrated Guest for his rigorously logical sci-fi dramas like QUATERMASS XPERIMENT and ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN, but he did a lot more comedy than he did "straight" sci-fi, and it's clear that Guest regarded BEES IN PARADISE as nothing but a lark. His script doesn't bother giving any history for the titular island of Paradise. The uncharted desert isle lies somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, but it's populated entirely by beautiful young Englishwomen, with the exception of one older woman and one underage child. The society's rules were written down some time back and kept in a temple, but there's no sense as to how long ago this happened, or who founded this gynococracy. The ladies have apparently modeled their culture on that of honeybees, for many of them wear similarly-striped apparel, and they only allow men to come in and propagate new children if they agree to become "drones" whose fate is to die after breeding. Said drones are killed indirectly, being cast from the island in one way or another, which is a call-out to the way real male bees get expelled from the hive when the queen doesn't need them any more. Finally, even though a lot of girls dress up in FLASH GORDON costumes and though the upper ramparts of their city are dominated by Islamic-looking minarets, all the occupants know current slang and references (like the names of movie stars) and they have modern conveniences like indoor plumbing.

So, at the very time the airmen parachute down to Paradise, the queen and her advisors happen to be in need of new men, preferably to breed a new generation of girl babies. (What the bee-girls do with the male infants is not specified.) Usually the queen herself is the one in need of a new consort, but for some reason the main rapacious female is one Rouana (Anne Shelton), who is in charge of the government's "propaganda." Rouana immediately claims shrimpy Arthur Tucker (Askey), but though the other girls talk a lot about their frustrations, there's only one other hookup between an airman and an island girl, and it's the girl that Arthur wants. Rouana, though, tricks Arthur into going through a ritual of betrothal, and this leads to silly scenes in which she tries to persuade him to join in a mad honeymoon of passion before he has to take the big sleep. What little plot there is revolves around Rouana's pursuit of Arthur, which is ambivalently fulfilled at the climax, and everything else consists of episodic routines, ranging from a girl's rugby contest (over the unclaimed guys, of course) and a strange jungle-woman who plays games with a small alligator. 

Though I doubt this opus ever made it to American shores, the performers all speak very clear, unaccented English, and the script, as mentioned before, rattles off half a dozen references to American movie stars, not to mention "Mister Disney's Bambi." I grant the movie a fair mythicity rating simply for carrying through with the conceit of female "workers" who only use the "drones" to breed and then dispose of them. But most of the jokes  and the songs (oh, yeah, it's also a musical) are instantly forgettable.

DRAGON AGE REDEMPTION (2011)

 

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

This apparent feature film is actually a compilation of cheaply-but-adequately shot "webisodes" derived from the 2009 DRAGON AGE RPG. REDEMPTION shares roughly the same universe as an animated DTV film, DRAGON AGE: DAWN OF THE SEEKER, which like REDEMPTION also emphasizes conflicts between various heroes on the trail of an evil mage. 

SEEKER didn't have much to say about the status of elves in this fantasy-world, but REDEMPTION makes clearer that they've become a marginalized outgroup, victimized and sometimes enslaved by both human beings and a humanoid species, the "Qunari." The first protagonist one encounters is Tallis (Felicia Day), who's liberated from prison by her Quanari masters to hunt down a renegade sorcerer. The sorcerer Saarebas (whose name sounds like that of the comics-character Cerebus) plans to perform a dangerous incantation. In tracking down one of the mage's henchmen, Tallis encounters a human knight, Cairn (Adam Rayner), and after some squabbling over their common quarry the mage, Tallis persuades Cairn to join forces with her, even if they may end dueling over custody.

In their progress, Tallis and Cairn come to an elf-village from which Saaerebas has stolen a young girl for sacrifice. The girl's boyfriend Josmael (Masam Holden) announces his intent to go after the raiders, so the two more experienced fighters reluctantly allow him to go along. The trio encounter the wizard's forces, which include a gang of fighters called "Reavers." Saarebas escapes again, but leaves behind one Reaver, Nyree (Marcia Battise), and Tallis talks Nyree into joining their force for a greater payoff when the four of them take on the sorcerer's forces.

Naturally REDEMPTION doesn't devote much of its short run-time to world-building, but there's more attention to character conflict than in SEEKER, and the fight-scenes are decent if unexceptional. As D&D flicks go, it's an okay timekiller.

DOCTOR JEKYLL LIKES THEM HOT (1979)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

I'd seen the title of this movie in many concordances over the years. My opportunity to see the strangely titled flick came thanks to a YouTube download of a dubbed English version-- but one with Italian-subbed scenes cut from the English version re-inserted, so I assume the source was a DVD edition. Both the English title and some of the ads, like the above poster, were clearly designed to sell HOT as a screwball comedy, maybe referencing the sort of sexploitation efforts for which Edwige Fenech was best known. The scene above, showing a scantily clad Fenech about to club a guy who looks a husband sneaking in after hours, naturally has zero to do with the story, and why anyone would have thought that image had some relevance to any "Doctor Jekyll" movie shall remain a mystery for the ages.

Though Fenech is the star of many of her sex-comedies, here she plays the supporting role of Barbara, ruthless secretary to an equally ruthless British businessman, known as Doctor (no first name) Jekyll (Paolo Villaggio). He's not any sort of doctor so far as I can tell, but people like his family butler Pretorius (hah!) are aware that he's the grandson of the original Jekyll from Victorian times, so I guess "doctor" might be-- a nickname? Anyway, Jekyll is a major player at a corrupt drug manufacturer, Pantac, and the board of directors asks him to figure out a way to make one of their drugs profitable after it fails its trials. Jekyll, who's the absolute opposite of the I-wanna-be-a-saint persona of the Stevenson character, decides that the best gambit is to incorporate the highly addictive drug into a new brand of chewing gum. Jekyll lays a plot to smuggle the drugged gum into the mouths of the British Royal Family so that they'll endorse the confection to the public.

However, just as Original Jekyll had some dark undercurrents compromising his goodness, this Jekyll shamefully admits to his butler that sometimes he feels like-- doing good. Not long after that, he stumbles across a secret room in his own mansion, where he meets Fake Original Jekyll. In other words, for some ninety years this version of Jekyll escaped the law by both morphing into Hyde (though he just looks like an old guy) and keeping himself alive in the hidden room with various devices. Old Hyde, who may or may not know what a rotter his grandson is, encourages Jekyll to drink the fabled formula, and then expires.

You see where this is going: Nasty Jekyll becomes a goody-good Hyde, his angelic nature displayed by the way his dark hair turns curly and golden. (The same thing happens to everyone else who gets exposed to the serum.) So Angel Hyde zooms off to the Royal Palace and foils the plot against the royals, mostly by dumb luck. None of Nasty Jekyll's pawns recognize Angel Hyde, including ruthless Barbara.

Angel Hyde runs back home, followed by his own thugs. In a fun reverse of the usual Hyde-ing-strategy, the fugitive transforms back into Jekyll and waves off the henchmen. Nasty Jekyll is appalled at the good deeds of his other self and swears never to revert. However, he begins to make schemes to seduce Barbara. His secretary shows her distaste for her employer by punching him to the ceiling, and adds insult to injury by saying that she's fallen for the curly-haired golden boy. There's no trace of this feeling in the one scene Barbara has with Hyde, but this sudden amour serves its purpose: Jekyll finally transforms back into Hyde so he can get some. Unfortunately for Barbara, Angel Hyde is too nice to have sex, and he even uses the serum on her, making Barbara a golden-haired goody-good. The two of them then attempt to spread their goodness gospel to the corrupt Pantac heads, but there's a reversal I won't detail, and this transforms a movie that looks like a silly comedy into a sour irony in which the villains win. 

I can't exactly say that either the goofy humor or the satirical elements work all that well, but I have a muted appreciation for the way the writers inverted some of the Jekyll-Hyde tropes. The original title of this film was "Doctor Jekyll Junior," which might have been better, since in Stevenson Hyde is sorta-kinda Jekyll's younger self. The confusing Italian title translates to "Doctor Jekyll and the Kind Lady," and Angel Hyde is called a homosexual several times, which is-- pretty confusing, if as some people say Hyde is supposed to be the "kind lady." 

PUZZLE (1974)

 

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

This giallo is atypical of its kind in three ways. It's wholly naturalistic, having no black-gloved killers or weird murder-scenarios, and just barely qualifies for the "bizarre crimes" trope. In addition, though some giallos end with life-or-death brawls, this is one of the few giallos I've seen in which one of the protagonists shows unusual competence in not one but two hand-to-hand fights. And so far, this is the only giallo I've seen that stars a male character and a female character with about equal emphasis, instead of the more common approach of opposing one against the other.

A British citizen with memory-loss (Luc Merenda) has struggled for months with his dubious identity. He knows that his ID said his name is Peter, but nothing else. Then he's approached by a man who says his real name is Ted and that he owes some dangerous people a lot of money. Yet, when the fellow pulls out a gun and threatens the newly christened Ted, a mysterious protector shoots the gunman from a distance. 

Someone also goes through the trouble of sending Ted new information: that, in the course of his memory loss, he deserted a wife named Sara (Senta Berger) back in Portofino, Italy for over half a year. Still remembering nothing, he sends a communication to Sara and ships out to Portofino. Though stung by Ted's apparent desertion, Sara loves him enough to meet him again and becomes his aide in sorting out the mystery.

Like other stories with amnesiac protagonists, Innocent Ted soon finds out that he used to be Guilty Ted, a guy who conspired with other criminals in a heroin smuggling operation. The script, partly written by director Duccio Tessari, shows uncommon empathy for the beleaguered couple as they try to patch up their relationship as well as get rid of the criminals dogging their tracks, and both Merenda and Berger turn in strong performances.

The mode in which the heroin is smuggled is the only moderately bizarre thing in the movie, though the climax includes a singular method of "heroine defense," when sexy Sara must defend herself from an attacker with a handy chainsaw. This, however, would be Tessari's only other giallo after 1971's BLOODSTAINED BUTTERFLY, as he was far better known for action-movies, such as  directing the superior 1975 ZORRO the next year, and having written better than average strongman-films like GOLIATH AND THE DRAGON and HERCULES IN THE HAUNTED WORLD.

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS (2002)

 

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

With TWO TOWERS, Peter Jackson and company have a slight but measurable falling-off from the successful adaptation of FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING. On a commentary for the extended version of TOWERS, Jackson and his writers confessed a certain difficulty with the middle section of RINGS, and said difficulty is reflected in an unnecessary straying from the structure of the trilogy's second part.

I commented in my review of the TOWERS novel that one of Tolkien's master strokes was to sunder the Fellowship at the end of Part One, and then, throughout Part Two, to show the three separated groups each making new allies who all proved indispensable to the war-effort-- respectively the Riders of Rohan, the Ents, and Gollum. Technically these alliances still take place, but the pacing is somewhat off in contrast to that of the books. 

In the book, Merry and Pippin are taken by two separate bands of Orcs, respectively sent by Saruman and by Sauron. Riders from the country of Rohan attack the Orcs and the Hobbits escape. Legolas, Gimli and Aragorn track the Hobbits all the way to the Forest of Fangorn, in which the Hobbits have taken refuge, but the trio of warriors are forestalled from going farther by the appearance of the reborn Gandalf, now Gandalf the White. All of this action takes place in the book, but the book is better organized. When Gandalf redirects the threesome to the business of seeking out the king of Rohan to make him an ally, it has a more logical presentation, while in the movie, the mission to Rohan seems to come out of left field. '

Meanwhile, Merry and Pippin accomplish their task: they find and befriend Treebeard. However, their accomplishment is somewhat muted by the fact that Gandalf has already encountered Treebeard in Fangorn and communicated to the Ent some of the doings of Saruman-- all of which diffuses the role of the Hobbits. I suspect the writers only injected this unnecessary scene so that they could throw a shock into the viewing audience when Treebeard says he's going to take the Hobbits to "the White Wizard," and they're afraid of being surrendered to Saruman's tender mercies. This scene cuts away just as Merry and Pippin see a figure in white, but viewers never see the Hobbits' response to the reborn Gandalf, because the movie doesn't want him to be fully seen on-camera until he meets the three warriors. 

The experiences of Merry and Pippin among the Ents are extremely abbreviated, possibly for budgetary reasons, since the animation of the Ent attack on Isengard had to be one of the film's most expensive sequences. Jackson and company just barely get across Tolkien's feelings about the destruction of nature by human industry. In contrast, the script does leave in a very pointless comic bit where the two Hobbits drink Ent-water and talk about getting taller from it, as well as a scene where they get temporarily caught by a man-eating tree more or less swiped from the "Tom Bombadil" section of FELLOWSHIP.

As for the journey to Rohan, Gandalf's crew accomplishes roughly the same purpose of freeing King Theoden from the influence of Saruman's pawn Wormtongue, and of mounting Rohan's defense against an invasion by Orcs at Helm's Deep. The inclusion of a subplot involving refugees from the villages seems at best a ploy to make the defenders more sympathetic, but I found it a waste of time. Similarly, the screenwriters spend a lot of time with scenes in which Theoden's niece Eowyn develops feelings for Aragorn, but since Aragorn can't seriously be tempted away from his love for Arwen, I found these scenes pointless-- except insofar as they help motivate Eowyn to masquerade as a man and join Rohan's soldiers for her big moment in RETURN OF THE KING.

However, for the most part the journey of Frodo, Sam and Gollum works out well, and the divided mind of Gollum/Smeagol is put on full display. They encounter Faramir of Gondor, brother to the slain Boromir, and thus the heroic halflings must wonder if history will repeat itself in Faramir's coveting the Ring. Jackson and company tease the viewers with this possibility more than Tolkien did, but I felt that was a legitimate take on the character, even if it made Faramir a little less noble. The writers also expand upon the idea that Denethor, steward of Gondor, showed a disproportionate affection to the older brother Boromir, while acting as if Faramir could do nothing right. This too is in Tolkien, so a slightly different take on the matter didn't bother me. The one big change to the Frodo section is that Jackson et al decided to move the Hobbits' big fight with the giant spider into the last film of the trilogy.

The DVD commentary goes into considerable detail about an alternate character arc for Arwen. The filmmakers were concerned that the book kept Aragorn and Arwen separate for most of the story, and that this long-distance romance might not prove pleasing to moviegoers. For a time Jackson and company had actress Liv Tyler train with swords so that her character Arwen could join Aragorn at Helm's Deep. Apparently this plot-idea was leaked to the public and many Tolkien-purists objected to Arwen becoming "Xena Warrior Princess." I would have had no intrinsic objection to such a development, just as I liked seeing her have a more active role in FELLOWSHIP. However, the filmmakers had so many balls in the air that it's just as well they rewrote things so that Arwen stayed back in Rivendell. 

Lastly, I should note that, even if Tolkien was rather ambivalent about which "two towers" were referenced in his subtitle, Jackson is wholly unambivalent: his two towers are without question those of Saruman and Sauron. Symbolically both are doomed to fall by the conclusion of both trilogies, though the times of magic and mystery are similarly destined to expire as the Age of Men comes into being.

Oh, yes, and as I mentioned in the FELLOWSHIP post, the big battle scenes are totally killer.