TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: MUTANT MAYHEM (2023)

 

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

Well, if this piece of Seth Rogen-written MAYHEM has nothing else to recommend it, it does end up making his GREEN HORNET movie look way better.

As I've probably mentioned in other reviews, I was never a Ninja Turtles fan. I never read the comics and even the best movies and TV shows are just mildly enjoyable in my book. But MAYHEM made me offended on behalf of the breakthrough success of the Turtles' creators, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. 

The comic book certainly had its moments of comedy, being partly a spoof of Frank Miller's ninja-filled DAREDEVIL narrative, and when the teen-terrapins were transformed into kid-friendly cartoons, most adults were most familiar with the turtles' love of pizza and skateboarding.

Yet, at base the Turtles are adventure-heroes in the same vein as other ground-level crimefighters like Daredevil and Batman. In every other iteration, the Turtles have practiced their ninja moves, with their specialized weapons. for most of their young lives under the tutelage of the rat-mutant Splinter. They might not be the brightest bulbs on the Christmas tree, but they're always peerless fighters.

But that didn't fit the joke-happy priorities of Rogen and his collaborators. So the first time these Turtles take arm against a sea of scurrilous scumbags, they almost get their clocks cleaned because it's their first fight.

Rogen stated that he wanted to emphasize the "teenage" part of the mutants, so what we get is a cross between a normative Turtles adventure and frequent teen-comedy tropes. Therefore, Splinter isn't a wise old rat-ninja, but a cranky old rodent who hates human beings, and is voiced by Jackie Chan. (Why, Jackie? You're rich, you don't HAVE to do crap!) April O'Neil isn't an adult reporter allowed to share the secrets of the Turtles, but a high schooler who wants to be a journalist but tends to puke when she's upset. The more prominent villains are elided in favor of a character loosely based on Baxter Stockman-- that is, a human mutated into a fly-creature-- but who is a real fly-man, created by the same chemicals that altered the turtles and their mentor. His name is of course "Superfly," which I also consider an offense against the 1970s movie-- even though I wasn't a big fan of that either.

Sadly, this witless, unfunny travesty made more than twice its budget at the box office, which once again proves the old saw that there's no accounting for taste.

YOU DON'T MESS WITH THE ZOHAN (2008)

 

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

Once upon a time, there was a western movie-- or maybe more like 411,557 western movies-- in which an Eastern city slicker went out West and conned the noble White settlers into fighting the noble Red tribes, so that the con man could buy up their land once the two groups had killed one another.

Now what has that trope got to do with the almost-a-century-long Middle East conflict between Israelis and Arabs? Beats me, but the trope proved useful in resolving an insoluble conflict set up by the premise of ZOHAN. I think it safe to assume that, given the difficulty of using said conflict for comedy, this was probably the same "out" employed by writers Robert Smigel and Judd Apatow and by writer-star Adam Sandler when the three of them completed the first draft of ZOHAN's script in 2000. In any case, that was the basic trope behind the final script when the movie was released to theaters in 2008.

So in the Sandlerverse, the prolonged struggle between the denizens of Israel and Palestine (other Arabs are not mentioned) has one important difference from our world: each side has one, and apparently only one, superhuman agent. Israel has "Zohan" Dvir (Sandler), while Palestine has Fatoush, nicknamed "Phantom" (John Turturro). There's no explanation as to why these super-agents can perform great feats of strength or resist gunfire, and it's probably just as well the writers didn't try. But Zohan becomes tired of the never- ending battles, and he wants to emigrate to the U.S. so that he can live his dream of becoming a great hairdresser. In the pursuance of this goal, Zohan allows the world to think that Phantom has slain him, and then smuggles his way into America. (Since his illegal status is never mentioned, presumably his secret agent skills, or his espionage contacts, help him pass as a naturalized citizen.)

Zohan takes up lodging in a New York borough that just happens to be evenly divided between Israeli-Americans and Palestinian-Americans. Zohan makes a few friends, but because of his lack of experience he can't get a job doing "dos." However, the cute owner of a Palestinian hair salon (Emmanuelle Chiriqui) gives Zohan a menial cleaning job. Inevitably he gets to show his stuff, and he becomes incredibly popular.

This chain of events has two negative consequences. While the salon's business picks up and the owner is able to pay her extremely inflated rent, a block-busting landlord decides to use violent techniques to get rid of anyone not already turned out by his high rental rates. In addition, a Palestinian recognizes the hairdresser as the counter-terrorist Zohan, and he lets Phantom know about his enemy's location.

Like most Sandler movies, ZOHAN has some funny bits mixed in with various tedious indulgences. The basic idea of the agents of two warring powers coming to a rapprochement, even if their countries don't, is laudable. But because the script has no idea as to how to make things work out for a happy ending, they resort to the idea that the landlord, who's allied with White supremacies for some reason, serve the function of the evil city slickers fostering conflict for profit.

There's just barely enough superhero-style combat between Zohan and Phantom to justify calling this a combative comedy. 

THE REINCARNATION OF ISABEL (1973)

 

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

Renato Polselli must have enjoyed working with the three principal actors of 1972's DELIRIUM-- Mickey Hargitay, Rita Calderoni, and Christa Barrymore-- because they're all back in this subsequent flick. Barrymore, though, gets the short end of the stick, for she's just one of various female victims knocked off to facilitate "the reincarnation" of a long dead witch.

Whatever minor virtues were present in DELIRIUM, though, were left behind when Polselli concocted this dumb farrago of murders and Satanism. As in the 1972 film, the story's driven by the murder of nubile women, whose blood is used in a witch-cult's attempt to revive the corpse of Isabel (Calderoni). For some reason none of the lesser girls work until the cultists come across the actual reincarnation of Isabel. Young Laureen (also Calderoni) fortuitously shows up, along with her uncle (Hargitay), at the very castle where the Satanists are conducting their experiment. And so a bad time is had by all.

ISABEL is so disjointed, I could easily believe everyone making the movie was on drugs. The only memorable bit of goofiness is when one of the witches announces that he's actually Count Dracula-- and then, absolutely nothing more is said about the matter!

DORORO (2019)

 

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

Since I rated the mythicity of the live-action DORORO as more concrescent than that of the original 1967-69 manga series by Osamu Tezuka, I had some curiosity as to whether an anime series could achieve any similar feat. I had no access to the 1969 anime adaptation, but I did to this one from 2019-- which, from my partial readings, seems to have borrowed not only from Tezuka but also from a 2016 manga-reinterpreation of the original Tezuka material by another artist. I didn't attempt to re-read all of the manga iterations, but sampled bits and pieces from each series.

Because of that sampling, I noticed that the creators of the 2019  DORORO had a reasonably original take on the character of Hyakkimaru, the paraplegic samurai who shares top billing in the feature alongside his young (only apparently) male companion Dororo. As a child, Hyakkimaru's warlord-father Daigo sacrifices his own son to numerous demons in exchange for his realm's prosperity. Each demon takes a body part from the infant, leaving him no more than a lump of dying flesh. A highly skilled doctor not only saves the life of the discarded infant, he outfits Hyakkimaru with artificial limbs and trains him to use his psychic senses to perceive the world around him, in lieu of his lost sense-organs.

Now, when the two manga-artists depicted Hyakkimaru at the outset of each feature, the samurai is seen as being fully able to act the part of a normal human, despite having been deprived of his normal abilities. But the writers of 2019 correctly perceived that it should be almost impossible for a person lacking most of his senses to segue so easily into emulating the way normal humans interact. Thus, though the 2019 Hyakkimaru possesses the same motives as other versions--to slay all the demons who stole his body parts, in order to get them restored to his maimed body-- he shows so little affect as to make Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry seem like a bon vivant. The slow re-acquirement of his humanity from episode to episode is thus something that the acerbic Dororo can nurture while they ply their demon-hunting trade.

In addition to killing many diverse demons to restore his human attributes, Hyakkimaru is also drawn, little by little, into a conflict with the father who sacrificed him, and with the son whom Daigo did not sacrifice, Tahomaru. Tezuka's manga kills off the second son of Daigo in his only episode, so that the climactic confrontation is between Hyakkimaru and his father. The 2019 anime repeatedly pits the two brothers against one another until the climax and raises more ethical issues as a consequence. For instance, though Tahomaru is moral enough to realize that Daigo committed a terrible crime, that crime resulted in the prosperity of the warlord's realm, and thus Tahomaru feels that preserving the realm necessitates the slaying of the unfortunate sibling.

This series may be somewhat more organized than the original manga, but DORORO is still very episodic, and nearly none of the demons are memorable presences. One exception is a sprite who's capable of making humans speak and act in reverse of their actual intentions. This leads to some very welcome comedy when a young woman tries to talk Hyakkimaru into marrying her, and he, under the sprite's influence, agrees. Dororo, who's been crushing on her partner for some time (though she thinks he's been fooled by her boy-imposture), is of course enraged by this seeming betrayal.

In many ways, the demons' evil is eclipsed by that of humans. The lords and their samurai warriors are responsible for much suffering to protect their power, but people on the lower rungs of society are only intermittently more ethical. Tezuka's anti-war philosophy is conspicuous here, but I can't claim any of 2019's ruminations rise to the level of strong literary myths. The series' strongest trope relates to Hyakkimaru trying to retain his moral nature despite all the carnage he must wreak to regain his physical humanity. I can't say that these ethical moments ascended to a level I would call "mythic," just as the villainies of human beings are also fairly pedestrian. Still, the final episode of 2019 does give Dororo and Hyakkimaru a better closure than did the original Tezuka work. 

 

IRIA: ZEIRAM- THE ANIMATION (1994)

 

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

I wrote in my review of the two ZEIRAM films that while I originally got some mild enjoyment out of them, they didn't hold up well to a repeated viewing. I don't remember if I had looked at this six-episode OVA series-- released the same year as the sequel-- but it's on the same level of unremarkableness.

IRIA is a prequel to both films, dealing with the early history of the titular female bounty hunter. In her space-opera world, she travels from world to world, apprenticed to her more experienced senior Gren. She calls him "brother" at times, but one line of dialogue suggests that their relationship may be adoptive. Iria is shown to be impulsive but determined in her quest to graduate to the ranks of fully professional bounty hunters, and though the OVA series doesn't take much advantage of its animated status, she's seen to be capable in hand-to-hand combat and with a ray-gun.

In addition to Gren, Iria also associates with a bounty-dispatcher named Bob. In the live-action films, he's seen only as a sentient computer; here he's shown to have been an organic life-form, killed by the vicious alien conqueror Zeiram and then transferred to a computer bank. A couple of other support-characters appear to help Iria in her endeavors, but they're not especially memorable.

Since the original ZEIRAM has Iria and Bob waiting on Earth for the advent of the monstrous alien, there's no absolute reason that the prequel needs to show that Iria encountered Zeiram-- or at least one of his species-- on a previous occasion. Possibly the creators thought that they needed both Iria and Zeiram in order to cross-pollinate with ZEIRAM 2. But since the live-action films didn't make me a fan of this irritable ET, I would have preferred seeing Iria test herself against some other opponent.

Even for just six episodes, IRIA is a lot lighter on characterization than the majority of SF-anime, and so proves of no more than modest entertainment value.

FIREBIRD 2015 A.D. (1981)

 

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

"Poor little roadrunner, never bothers anyone,

"Just runnin' down the road's his idea of havin' fun!"

--TV's "Roadrunner Song"

I was surprised to find out that some "50 worst films" doc-- though not one associated with the infamous Medved books-- named FIREBIRD as one of its choices. It's a mediocre movie, but it's not without some decent ideas.

I don't know if it's just a coincidence that this Canadian production appeared two years after MAD MAX, which shared with FIREBIRD the idea that civilization had broken down for some reason, even though people with wild art-cars still found enough fuel to race around the wilderness. But where the loss of resources is just tossed off in MAD MAX, FIREBIRD-- the only well-known work of director David Robertson-- focuses on the politics of shortage. 

In 2015, an energy crisis has come round again, and the government has restricted public consumption of gasoline, and thus the usage of private vehicles. There's no clue as to how this has affected the big cities, because all of the action takes place out in what I assume is supposed to be the American Southwest. In those remote lands, adventurous types known as "Burners" still cobble together their own cars, manufacture their own fuel, and race one another for the pure joy of racing. They defy the law in part because they don't believe that the shortage is real; that the fuel crisis is manufactured so that elites can stay in power.

The Burners are continually menaced by the officers of the DVC, the Department of Vehicle Control. Here they're led by a commander named McVain (Doug McClure), but the officers are something of a law to themselves out in the wilds. The DVC's most elusive opponent is a man known only as Red (Darren McGavin), who drives a souped-up Pontiac Firebird. Red usually just avoids fighting with these "traffic cops" while indulging in his races with other Burners.

Two variables develop. Dolan, one of the DVC officers, goes around the bend after some unspecified assault by rednecks. He starts painting himself like an American Indian, whether he is one or not, and starts killing Burners. McVain doesn't want killings, but he's too weak to oppose his fanatical subordinate.  

The other variable is that Red's estranged son Cam leaves his former home with his mother and comes to stay at Red's garage. The young man slowly warms to his father's lawbreaking way of life, particularly when Cam encounters the nubile daughter of another Burner. The romantic interludes between Cam and the spirited Jill, an experienced driver and gearhead like her dad, are the film's highlight.

The variables collide with Dolan and his men track down Cam and Jill while the two are beginning to get friendly, beating down Cam and kidnapping Jill. This leads to a climactic confrontation in which Red and his fellow Burners raid the DVC compound to exact justice.

FIREBIRD's big problem is that the race scenes are just OK; they communicate the excitement of racing but are not really exciting themselves, least of all in the big climax. McGavin and McClure might have improved things by making their characters more intense oppositions of "scofflaw" and "cop," but they usually seem pretty laid-back at the worst of times. The film's no competition for George Miller in the car-racing sweepstakes-- but then, most of the MAD MAX imitators aren't, either. At least FIREBIRD has some identity of its own, however minor.

BEASTMASTER 2: THROUGH THE PORTAL OF TIME (1991)

 

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

While the second iteration of the BEASTMASTER lacks any of the darker themes of the 1982 original, it's at least silly fun, unlike the abysmal second sequel. 

As the film opens, Dar the Beastmaster (Marc Singer, still looking buff in the role despite the passage of almost ten years) faces a new threat to his world (represented by just a few location-shots in the desert). A new tyrant has arisen, seeking to bring everyone under his control with his (very small) army of raiders. This is Arklon (Wings Hauser), who has apparently had a previous encounter with Dar and his beast-allies before, since Arklon wears a leather half-mask over the part of his face that Dar's eagle clawed. Dar, for his part, has heard a prophecy that he must slay the brother whom he never knew, and in due time it's revealed that Arklon is that brother. I really don't know why any of the credited writers-- the dominant voice, arguably, being that of Jim Wynorski-- bothered with this trope. The script shows zero interest in how the brothers came to be separated, so that there's zero dramatic interest, and only some piddling comedic lines.

The sibling duel of Dar and Arklon is forestalled by the machinations of sorceress Lyranna (Sarah Douglas). She discloses to the warlord that they can acquire a doomsday weapon in order to quell all resistance by visiting a exotic parallel world known as "Ell-A." All the two of them need do is step through a magical portal right out of STAR TREK, and they'll be able to steal the great weapon known as a "nuclear detonator." 

But before Arklon is fully convinced, three cars from savage Ell-A barrel through the portal-- two police cruisers following the car of madcap heiress Jackie Trent (Kari Wuhrer). Arklon has his raiders attack Jackie and the cops, but Jackie gets away. I guess the cops get killed, though the film doesn't show their deaths, perhaps because such a depiction would have been a "downer" amid all the jocularity.

Jackie wanders through the nearby desert and chances upon Dar and his animal buddies: one tiger, one eagle, and two ferrets. The two humans make nice while Jackie tries to wrap her head around being in a parallel dimension. But after two or three jokey episodes, Arklon's men catch up with the duo, and they take Jackie prisoner while Dar is forced to flee. Then the soldiers take Jackie back to their commander, who's decided to use the young woman as a guide to 20th-century Earth. Then, as the villains and their captives venture through the portal, Dar shows up and follows them. Dar confronts Arklon and Lyranna in Ell-A, but the warlord uses his magic super-wand to delay the Beastmaster. Dar gets temporarily captured by the police, while Arklon and Lyranna go shopping for Earth-clothes with Jackie to advise them. 

There follow various alarums and excursions to burn up time, with Jackie getting free and reuniting with Dar. No doubt the writers wanted to distract from the fact that the two villains have no credible plan for invading an L.A. military base to steal a nuclear weapon. They get away with it because the script says they will; nothing more. Finally, after a lot more "fish-out-of-water" tomfoolery, Dar intercepts the evil warlord just as he's about to pass through the portal, and they duel to Arklon's death. Dar goes home with his eagle and tiger, but for some reason leaves his two ferrets with Jackie. Possibly Wynorski thought that a sequel might take the hero back to Ell-A. But since the next installment took place entirely in Dar's world, as far as I recall the ferrets are just back in the Beastmaster's care as if they'd never left.

The principal actors-- Singer, Hauser, Douglas and Wuhrer-- all give the sense that they're having fun with their roles, and that does a lot to prop up the weak script. But the only real consequence of either sequel was that they kept the franchise in play, which led to the 1999 syndicated teleseries, which boasted a few excellent episodes and a much better development of the Dar-Verse than any of the movies put forth.