BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER (2022)

 

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

If there's one good thing about the long run-time of FOREVER-- which is what I'm sure some people felt it lasted, watching it in the theater-- it's that it finally gave us a MCU movie that didn't have a stupid joke for at least the first twenty minutes. (This in contrast to THOR DUMB AND DUMBERER, which describes Thor's loss of his father, brother and realm as if a litany of Seinfeldian mishaps.) 

So once the movie has delivered its respectful eulogy to the character of T'Challa the Black Panther-- who had to die in concert with the real-life passing of actor Chadwick Boseman-- it's time to get down to the movie's real agenda: the promotion of more girl-boss characters in the MCU. First, Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) assumes control of Wakanda, and one of the first actions taken against her reign is a bunch of mercenaries trespassing on the realm to steal vibranium. The always tedious spear-tosser Okoye (Dainai Gurira) foils the incursion, and Ramonda embarrasses one of the colonizer nations in the U.N., lecturing them about what a danger they all present to the world. (Of course her nephew Killmonger almost unleashing a world war doesn't count in the scales.) 

A year after T'Challa's passing, Ramonda makes noises about daughter Shuri (Letitia Wright) trying to duplicate the Black Panther power-herb and assuming the Panther mantle, despite the fact that all previous depictions show Shuri as a miracle-making scientist with no combat experience. Shuri demurs. Meanwhile, a CIA-backed expedition, looking for vibranium in the sea, is wiped out by a squad of blue-skinned water-warriors-- and sadly, it's at that point that FOREVER starts to become another dopey over-politicized Marvel movie.

Since no witnesses are left behind, the evil colonizer nations suspect Wakandans of the retaliation. And though the Africans are innocent of the deed, the leader of the water-warriors seeks out the Wakandans to force them to implicate themselves. Said leader (Tenoch Huerta) is the MCU's "through-a-glass-dumbly" version of Marvel's Namor the Sub-Mariner, more on whom later. Namor tells Ramonda and Shuri that he somehow knows that there's a single scientist responsible for the CIA's vibranium-detection machine, and he wants Wakanda to find and capture the scientist for him. Apparently Namor's kingdom-- now called Talokan rather than Atlantis-- wants to use Wakanda as cats-paws in order to keep their subsea existence secret. Later dialogue suggests that Namor also wants to back the African nation into a corner, so that they join Talokan in making war on the surface world.

Despite the gravity of this international situation, Okoye talks Ramonda into letting Shuri accompany the spear-lady as she looks for the scientist, as if it's a cake-walk that will help Shuri get over his mourning for her lost brother. The two Wakandans find the scientist, who is yet another girl boss, scientific prodigy/Black American Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne). It's not certain whether or not the two Wakandans intend to surrender the American teenager to Namor, but it becomes academic. Somehow, both the CIA and the Talokans monitor the Wakandans' movements, resulting in a cookie-cutter car chase and Okoye being defeated by the water-warriors, who take Shuri and Riri prisoner.

In theory, once Namor has custody of Riri, he ought to want to kill her to keep her from disseminating her vibranium-detection device to the colonizers. Shuri pleads that Wakanda could keep her out of the hands of the CIA (though since the Americans stole the tech from Riri, Riri's death would have no effect on their access to the tech.) Possibly Namor always meant only to use Riri as a bargaining chip to make Wakanda play ball, though there were certainly a lot of better ways to have done so. In any case, after Namor has told Shuri the sad story of his Mayan people's emigration to the sea to escape Spanish persecution, Shuri and Riri escape Talokan. Namor doesn't like having his captives escape, and he unleashes an attack on Wakanda that costs the life of Ramonda. This, at least, is the straw that breaks Shuri's reluctance, and she determines to take up the mantle of the Black Panther to foil Namor.

As indicated above, one of the basic plot-problems of FOREVER is the needless insertion of the Riri Williams character, who originally appeared in 2016 as the Marvel comics-character Ironheart, more or less a female version of Iron Man. An IRONHEART TV project is bruited to be due in 2024, but as far as the movie is concerned, Riri is even flatter and less interesting than all of the other girl-bosses. Even the minor support-character Nakia (Lupita N'yongo), returning from the first film, has more charisma, although she too is a needless insertion.

There's also an extended "spiritual communion" between Shuri and the spirit of the first film's villain Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan), and even in a post-death scene, the scripters-- the same ones who wrote BLACK PANTHER-- find it impossible to seriously denounce this ruthless Black revolutionary. This reluctance to decry revolutionaries when they're "intersectionally correct" is mirrored in the treatment of the MCU Namor. Whereas the comic-book Namor makes war upon surface-dwellers, he never tries to dragoon other nations into a forced alliance. The MCU Namor is as despicable as Killmonger, but the movie-makers cannot condemn him, as it can the "colonizers," because he belongs to a non-White race.

Minor points: Winston Duke has a fair assortment of scenes reprising the M'Baku character, and he steals every scene he's in. Martin Freeman reprises the role of Everett Ross, the White guy who gets dumped on to compensate for the filmmakers not being able to dump on all persons of White ancestry, as they might prefer. A few other Marvel characters from the SUB-MARINER franchise-- Fen, Attuma and Namora-- are tossed into the mix, but contribute nothing of importance.

Production values are high but director Ryan Coogler is no better than average both in terms of action-choreography and dramatic interactions. Like the first movie, FOREVER is symbolically significant for depicting the fantasy of an African techno-wonderland, though the introduction of the sketchy Talokan realm detracts from the various Afrophilic motifs seen in the first film.

HELLBOY (2019)

 

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

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

This HELLBOY was intended to be a reboot of the two-film series directed by Guillermo del Toro in the 2000s, but the 2019 movie came a cropper in the box office. 

I was never a big fan of the HELLBOY comics. I bought the series for a little while when it began, as I liked Mike Mignola's art, but I thought his plots were pretty ordinary and didn't deliver for me much emotional resonance. I'd have to say the same for the two animated projects I've reviewed on this blog, and the two live-action films I've seen but not yet reviewed, though I liked star Ron Perlman in the role quite a bit. 

Since I didn't follow the comics, I haven't read any of the narratives that are said to have influenced the script, credited to Andrew Crosby, though apparently both creator Mike Mignola and fantasy-author Christopher Golden contributed as well. But frankly, while the Perlman-del Toro films also struck me as merely adequate, this version capitalizes on the feature's need for psychological depth.

While I don't need to see every hero screaming his discontents to the heavens, the fact that Hellboy began life as a demon-child cast out of Hell into the Earth-realm, and adopted by a human "father," suggests more than a little potential character conflict. The Perlman Hellboy tended to toss off his alienation from mortals with a grunt and a smart remark. But this script foregrounds the New Hellboy (David Harbour) with the sense of being a complete outsider, constantly risking his life to battle malign occult monsters and magicians, and yet not bonded to the people he fights for. He also has a lot of daddy issues with his adoptive parent Professor Broom (Ian MacShane), in that Hellboy suspects maybe Broom just wanted a monstrous tool to use against supernatural threats.

The newest threat involves a sorceress named Nimue (Milla Jovavich), slain and torn into pieces by the sword Excalibur in the days of Merlin and King Arthur. Nimue is getting brought back to life in 21st-century Britain by various old foes of Hellboy, such as the pig-demon Gruagach and the witch Baba Yaga. What makes this recrudescence stand out from many similar ones, both in the HELLBOY franchise and in horror films generally, is that Nimue wants to bring Hellboy into her rulership of Earth. This sort of temptation is familiar as well, but the script blends it with the hero's doubts about his mission and his foster father's motives. 

Since Hellboy can't trust Broom, he gets some human (or quasi-human) allies to cheer him on. To be sure, Ben Daimio (Daniel Dae Kim) is a reluctant ally, an M-11 agent investigating Nimue's activities, and he tends to greet the monster-hero with jeers more than cheers. The other major ally is Hellboy's former childhood friend Alice Monaghan, now an adult woman (Sasha Lane). I found these performer's contributions to the big fight-scenes tended to mitigate some of the sameness of the battle-stategies of the hero, who is of course basically a Real Big Guy with a Gun. 

I must assume from the film's 'R' rating that the producers made a conscious decision to push the envelope on gore, and I applaud the effects. I don't imagine director Neil Marshall deserves sole credit for the improvement, but his HELLBOY is light years beyond the so-so thrills of the 2008 DOOMSDAY. I particularly enjoyed how Marshall and company raised the ante on the standard "opening of the gates of hell" trope, by having well designed hellspawn attacking Brit citizens by mutilating them with Boschian creativity. I won't go into Hellboy's interesting connections with Arthurian mythology, but these associations work reasonably well, though I suspect the ideas had some very episodic origins. Indeed, I could have lived without the subplot about the Osiris Society, who are introduced and then play no major role in the story. OTOH, I quite liked Hellboy's visit to Mexico despite its irrelevance to the main plot, because his squaring off against a vampire luchador seemed like an affectionate homage to the wrestling-genre of Mexican cinema.

Harbour in my view is just as good as Perlman was in the role, and though Dae Kim's character doesn't have much of an arc, the saucy stylings of Sasha Lane add some comic touches in addition to some strong fight-scenes. I glanced at a few negative reviews but it's like these guys saw a different movie than I did. Given how much homogenized horror is out there, all the filmmakers here delivered a consistent level of grue and creepiness. Supposedly, despite the bad box office, a sequel remains in the works.

NINE 1/2 NINJAS (1991)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*

The ninja craze had mostly wound down by the late 1980s, resulting in a smattering of ninja comedies like 1989's NINJA ACADEMY and this oddball combination of ninja-spoof and (very slight) satire of the 1986 erotic drama 9 1/'2 WEEKS. In fact, the parody scenes of WEEKS are pretty much overwhelmed by a non-stop barrage of dopey gags.

NINE is more like a spoof of a typical rom-com, but one where the two leads can take off from their day-jobs indefinitely in order to play ninja games. Endlessly perky young woman Lisa (Andee Gray) is astonished to find that she's going to be evicted illegally from her apartment. She has a meet-cute with tuxedo-wearing mystery man Joe Vogue (Michael Phenicie), who gives Lisa scant sympathy until he learns that he, too, is about to get booted from his precious apartment. Then he declares war on Arnold Gruber, the real estate magnate responsible for the evictions. Gruber, who is implicitly an evil guy even though he doesn't really have an evil plot beyond foreclosures, retaliates by summoning a bevy of goofy ninjas to assault Vogue. For the most part they don't even use that many exotic weapons, but simply keep engaging Vogue (who wears polka-dot ninja gear at one point) with cheesy martial arts. I wondered for a moment if I could count some of the rapid-fire costume changes as some sort of magic, but I decided such tricks were just "fallacious figments" in the naturalistic mode; that is, they just violate natural law because the story says they can.

Anyway, sulky Vogue is obviously attracted to sprightly Lisa, and she to him, but he's been romantically hurt in the past. He prolongs their association by teaching her ninja skills, claiming that she's in danger now that Gruber knows of their association. Lisa never really gets good at fighting, but the sexual tension continues to build between the two of them. One of the ninjas hired to kill Vogue becomes an ally or sorts: Vogue's own mother Gladys (Magda Harout, who plays her character like a nagging Jewish mother). Gladys keeps encouraging Vogue to break down his reserves and commit to love, and if he won't, she'll beat some sense into him.

Since the name of this ninja-game is more or less that of vaudeville-- if you don't like one joke, there'll be another one along in a moment-- I suppose it's silly to fault the film for not making clear just what Vogue's mission as a ninja was, before he got into his tiff with Gruber. Perhaps needless to say, Vogue conquers his foes and Lisa conquers Vogue's reluctant heart.

I found a few random jokes funny, but it was tough sledding getting to them. I will spoil one such gag just because it was rather timely, since NINE came out two years after the 1989 BATMAN. In one mostly tiresome scene, Vogue tries to build up his own cadre of ninja aides. But all of the interviewees are losers, especially one fellow in traditional ninja-gear, except for having little bat-ears on his cowl. Vogue's response: "No. Just-- no."

FEMALE MERCENARIES II: MAD DOCTOR OF BLOOD ISLAND (2008)

 

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

I checked out the TUBI offering, MAD DOCTOR OF ZOMBIE ISLAND, thinking it some sort of nineties throwback to the Philippine "Doctor Moreau" films of the seventies and eighties. As is often the case, the story behind the movie is more interesting than the movie.

TUBI lists the date as 1995. Thanks to the perspicacity of the site-runners on MONDO DIGITAL, this review makes clear that the filmmakers came out with a 1995 movie with "female mercenaries" and "zombies" in it, and that the film on TUBI is actually 2008's FEMALE MERCENARIES II, a rough sequel to the 1995 film movie. I'd never heard of any of the productions associated with director Gary Whitson and his company WAVE Productions, and that's because WAVE's camcorder productions were almost exclusively circulated via mail order-- reason being that they were more heavily invested in fetish scenarios than even regular DTV films about sexy mercenaries.

Though the introductory crawl makes it sound like two female freedom fighters, Karen and Tracy, will return from the first film to battle evil, they alternate screen time with various other heroines with some sort of agenda against the main villain, so there's no clear focus on any heroine or group of heroines. Rather, the narrative emphasis-- if one can call a bunch of poorly coordinated scenarios a narrative-- is on an evil scientist, sometimes billed only as "Gabrielle" (Pamela Sutch). Gabrielle isn't responsible for the zombie apocalypse-- that was caused by a meteor strike on Planet Earth-- but she does like to create lots and lots of clones of herself and other women, some of whom are her opponents, making the alleged story even more confusing.

The aforesaid scenarios include lots of upper-body nudity, fistfights, bondage, and even a lingering quicksand death. There are no outstanding fights and the women are at best moderately attractive and bereft of acting talent. Since there are barely any men in the story, I suppose MERCENARIES would pass the Bechdel Test, since the girls are all too busy fighting each other to bother talking about men. This movie's greatest value is that if one goes through the rigor of watching it, I predict the watcher will gain a new appreciation for the Aristotelian unity of FRANKENSTEIN ISLAND.

THE LION OF THEBES (1963)

 

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

LION OF THEBES, produced in the waning days of the peplum craze, was a loose sequel (though with none of the same actors) to 1961' s THE TROJAN HORSE, also directed and co-written by Giorgio Ferroni. This indebtedness to a slightly more reputable historical film, concerning the Fall of Troy, may be why LION didn't follow the usual "paint-by-the-numbers" formula as did so many other strongman-films.

In one variation on the story of Helen of Troy, after the city's fall she somehow ends up in Egypt, where her great beauty once more causes political complications. THE WORLD'S DESIRE, an 1890 fantasy-novel by Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang, is, aside from LION, the only other fictional story I've seen based on the archaic legend. In this version of the story, Helen (Yvonne Furneaux) escapes Troy in the company of her Greek bodyguard Arion (Mark Forest), who, despite having been in the service of her husband Menelaus, apparently followed Helen to Troy when she was maybe-abducted by Paris. Understandably, to play down the image of Helen as a faithless woman, the script doesn't dwell on that part of the story.

The two fugitives end up in Egyptian Thebes, taken in by the court of Ramses II (Pierre Cressoy). Though the Pharaoh already has a favorite named Nais (Rosalba Neri), he makes intimations that he wants to marry Helen. Arion is clearly in love with Helen and is willing to protect her against all comes, though Helen's feelings are not immediately clear. Ramses susses out his possible competition by inviting the strongman to compete in a wrestling-tournament. When Arion wins, the Egyptians dub him "the Lion of Thebes."

Ramses faces a political threat from rival pharaoh Menophis, whose soldiers have gathered near the city. However, evil usurper Tutmes steals a dagger from Arion and uses it to slay Ramses, intending to frame the Greek for the crime. Nais, knowing nothing of this plot, seeks to peacefully rid herself of the competition for "Pharaoh's favorite" by showing Arion and Helen to a tunnel  by which they can escape the city and Ramses' unwanted attentions. Tutmes foils the escape, trapping Arion between two cell-doors that descend from the ceiling (handy, in a deserted tunnel) and taking Helen prisoner.

Arion frees himself from his prison by bending the bars with his uncanny strength, after which a nice-guy Egyptian priest, not wanting Tutmes in control, guides the Greek warrior out of the city. (He also takes charge of Nais after she finds the dead body of Ramses, saying something about keeping her safe, but the would-be Pharaoh's favorite never appears again.) As Arion departs the priest tells him that among the troops marshaled by Menophis is a Greek ally, none other than Menelaus, fresh from the sack of Troy.

Arion makes his way to the camp and reports to his former commander and the husband of his beloved. To the hero's chagrin, Menelaus has zero interest in rescuing his wayward wife; he just wants to loot Thebes. Nevertheless, the forces of Menophis and Menelaus assault Thebes, and thanks to the frontal assault, Arion is able to sneak into the city and rescue Helen from a descending stone slab designed to crush her slowly. Menelaus kills Tutmes and is killed in turn. Menophis assumes control of Thebes and generously allows the two Greeks to depart in peace, with Helen pledging her love to Arion at last.

Though there are a couple of well-choreographed fight-scenes in LION, the movie is more noteworthy for Ferrone's fluid direction and well-lighted sets, and for solid melodramatic performances from the cast. Forest probably turns in the most nuanced acting seen from any boulder-shouldered hero in one of these films. The only discordant note is purely a matter of personal opinion-- why would a Pharaoh want the merely pretty Furneaux if he could already had Rosalba Neri, who had a body capable of launching a thousand, uh, ships?

URSUS IN THE LAND OF FIRE (1963)

 

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

LAND OF FIRE was the sixth Ursus film but the third and last to star Ed Fury, who originated the role in the initial 1961 movie, easily the best of the nine. FIRE, though, proves nearly forgettable.

One big problem with the script is that the title seems to promise some big conflict stemming from the hero's encounter with some entities in the "Land of Fire." Maybe there are some nuances left out of the English translation, but I doubt it, because the Land of Fire is just this volcano region neighboring an unnamed kingdom. For some reason the inhabitants consider the volcano-area taboo, but they don't seem to worship the volcano or anything. The taboo territory barely even affects the plot, which, as you might guess, is once more about who controls the kingdom.

Ursus belongs to some tribe of shepherds living nearby the Big Kingdom. He has a meet-cute with Princess Diana (Lucianna Gilli) when she falls from her horse into a lake. Not far away, Diana's cousin Mila (Claudia Mori) and the king's general Hamilcar (Adriano Micantoni) watch but make no attempt to succor Diana. They take custody of Diana after Ursus rescues her, but later Hamilcar misrepresents Ursus' actions as an attempt to kidnap the princess. The king sends soldiers with Hamilcar to apprehend Ursus, but he takes refuge in the taboo Land of Fire. However, this has a down side in that he gets buried in a landslide.

Hamilcar then gets condemned by the local priest for having let his men transgress on the taboo terrain, and the king seems okay with letting his general get executed. Hamilcar then kills the king and enacts a coup with his soldiers. In an attempt to legitimize his sudden ascendance to the throne, he marries Mila for her connection to the royal bloodline.

However, Ursus survives the landslide and makes common cause with Diana to usurp the man who killed her father. Though Hamilcar is unpopular with his people, Ursus has no army to call upon. Then Hamilcar and Mila put on a tournament to distract the populace with bread and circuses. Ursus disguises himself and contends with other gladiators at the tournament, hoping to undermine the new king by exposing his crimes to the people. But Mila spots Diana in the crowd and smells a rat. Hamilcar forces Ursus to try a game of tug-of-war with chariots pulling him in opposite directions. Being the hero, Ursus wins and challenges Hamilcar to combat. The ex-general simply forces Ursus to fight five warriors, but he wins this game too. However, Hamilcar simply imprisons Ursus (in a cell with a huge stone block pressing down on him) and Diana. 

During this section of the film Mila gets her big scene, relating to Diana a deep envy of her cousin's royal prerogative, and then she punctuates her enmity by whipping Diana. But Hamilcar decides he can placate the people by marrying the legitimate princess, and that's it for poor Mila. Diana's only hope is for Ursus to break free and destroy the usurper.

Fury doesn't get any outstanding fight-scenes, and both he and Gilli come off like stock characters. Mori and Micantoni aren't really any better drawn, but perhaps because they're the villains, they show a little more verve in their performances. FIRE was director Giorgio Simonelli's only peplum (though he may have done one or two period-historicals outside the strongman-genre), and I get the impression he rushed through the assignment as quickly as possible, just as the script cobbles together all the expected cliches. Simonelli probably found his true metier directing farces for the Italian comedy team of Franco and Ciccio, including the effort best known in English-language circles, THE TWO CRAZY SECRET AGENTS.

THE GIANTS OF THESSALY (1960)

 

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

I'm not sure who the "Gigantes" of the title are. Toward the middle of the movie Jason and his Argonauts fight a beast-man who's supposed to be somewhat bigger than they are, though the illusion isn't in the least convincing. Did the Italian filmmakers, including director/co-writer Riccardo Freda, mean to imply that the "giants" were the heroes in Jason's retinue, since they all depart from Thessaly on their quest? I could buy this if the crew included the many legendary names from the ARGONAUTICA of Apollonius. But the only "big name" in the crew is that of Orpheus, who doesn't perform any great musical feats. There's no Hercules, though there is a crewman with the name of Hercules' symbolic brother Eurystheus, but he like the other sailors of the ARGO is just a guy. So I suppose whoever decided on the film's main title was just choosing whatever sounded cool.

Freda's film starts out by radically simplifying the reasons for Jason (Swiss actor Roland Carey) to leave Thessaly to seek the Golden Fleece. (To be sure, the more famous 1963 adaptation by Ray Harryhausen tried to be truer to the epic, with the result that the film didn't manage to finish even an abbreviated version of the story.) In GIANTS, some random volcanic activity, supposedly sent by hostile gods, threatens Thessaly. Jason, the king of the realm, must desert his kingdom, wife and child to seek the Golden Fleece in far-off Colchis in order to end the gods' curse. (It is mentioned that the Fleece originally came from Thessaly, which is roughly true in the archaic myths, but the Fleece's extended absence seems a poor reason for the gods to devastate the whole country.) As Jason departs with his heroic men, he leaves his cousin Adrastus in charge. And in due time, Adrastus shows his true colors, making it clear that he covets both Jason's throne and his wife Creusa. (FWIW in archaic tales Creusa is best known as the name of the wife of Aeneas.)

After the Argo has been at sea for some time, the ship is becalmed and the sailors run out of water. The men campaign to turn back and go home, but Jason refuses to give the command, but also refuses to fight them. The moment he overmasters his retinue by sheer moxie, they get life-saving rain.

The next episode-- and it's a much more episodic film that the Harryhausen effort-- comes closest to the prose epic. The ship docks at an island that's never called Lemnos, but it might as well, since the isle is inhabited only by women. Queen Gaia (Nadine Duca) explains that all their men went off to war and were lost, while all of their sons died of disease. For a few minutes the sailors are beguiled by the available females, though I have to say that Freda handles the sequence so sloppily that there's barely any erotic charge. Then Jason encounters a sheep that talks like a man, one of his own transformed men. A little later he comes across the chained-up sister of Gaia, and she reveals that both sisters are the spawn of Apollo, though Gaia became an evil witch who used her powers to transform men into rocks and animals. But Jason doesn't have to fight Gaia to free his men, for conveniently Gaia simply perishes from having failed to conquer Jason's loyal heart. I guess all the women were under her control too, since they're not destroyed, and one of them stows away on the Argo to be with the sailor she loves. This sequence is obviously modeled after the "Circe" narrative in THE ODYSSEY, right down to Circe being the offspring of Helios the sun-god (a role later allotted to Apollo in Roman myth).

The Argo makes another port, and the heroes generously help the locals get rid of their ravening, Cyclops-like beast-man. Back at sea once more, one of the men discovers the stowaway Atalanta (an unbilled Moira Orfei). This revelation causes some tension against Eurystheus, the man she followed, and he nobly tries to take the blame for her actions. Then the script more or less drops the matter, and Atalanta only appears in one or two more scenes. (In some versions of the epic tale, the famed huntress Atalanta joins the crew of the Argo, so that's where the scriptwriters got the name, even if the island-woman has no relation to the famous figure.)

Finally, the ship lands in Colchis, but the heroes encounter none of the monsters familiar from the epic or from other cinematic renditions. Jason simply climbs a high wall to reach the fleece and manages to steal the prize without any of the Colchians being the wiser. Then back the ship goes to Thessaly.

Interspersed during these episodes, Freda gives the audience a few scenes of the regent Adrastus consolidating his power. He orders Creusa to marry him, threatening to sacrifice her young son if she disobeys. (This trope is another ODYSSEY-borrowing, with Adrastus as an importunate suitor trying to force Penelope, wife of the long-absent Odysseus, into marriage.) But I guess the evil regent only gets around to hatching his evil plot during the final phase of the Argo's return trip, for when Jason and his men arrive in Thessaly, the wedding is just about to commence. The heroes somehow hide themselves in big golden statues that are transported into the wedding-hall, and then the warriors burst out of them to attack Adrastus and his guards. This big finish, which may owe something both to the Trojan Horse and to the story of Ali Baba (with the thieves hidden in large oil-jars), is certainly the most energetic scene in the whole film. Oh, and bringing the Fleece back to its native land does indeed quell the nasty volcano, allowing Jason to resume his just rule alongside his wife and son.

Even if I was making a "best 100" list of magical-fantasy films made on the cheap, I wouldn't include GIANTS on the list, due to the many ways Freda and his fellow scripters blew so much of its dramatic and mythopoeic potential. But the film earns a "fair" mythicity rating just because of the Lemnos sequence. Unlike Circe in the ODYSSEY, Queen Gaia morphs into an ugly old woman when her identity as a witch is disclosed, and that motif certainly reflects the venerable trope of "woman as deceiver of man." As a side-curiosity, one of the myths of the Greek Earth-godddess Gaia is that, when she becomes perturbed at Zeus' imprisonment of her children the Titans, she tries to overthrow the King of the Gods by giving birth to a race of huge beings called "Gigantes"-- which as already mentioned is just another word for "giants."

Also, while the ARGONAUTICA is an early example of a "crossover story," the non-legendary nature of Jason's crew nullifies that aspect of the original story. Since the only action taken by Orpheus, the one "big name" in Jason's crew, is that of moaning over his lost Eurydice, I see no reason to equate this character with the master minstrel who sang his way in and out of Hell.