DEADLY LOVE (1995)

 

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

I vaguely remembered having seen this bit of Lifetime Channel romantic schlock, but nothing else. Having seen it again, I can state that there's nothing memorable about it except for the stunt-casting of Susan "Partridge Family" Dey as a lovelorn lady vampire.

I know nothing about the source novel by one Sherry Gottlieb, except that I came across the online assertion that the adapters took almost nothing of substance from said book. I can well believe that, for Rob Gilmer's script barely has a plot. It looks as if he simply orchestrated a series of romantic interludes punctuated with very mild vampire action.

Rebecca Barnes (Dey) has very little backstory. She was apparently turned into a vamp by a former lover, about which the viewer knows little, except that for some reason he committed suicide by sunlight. He left Rebecca a servant named Elliott, who does not seem to be any sort of vampire-thrall but is fully aware of Rebecca's history and gives her someone to talk with. Rebecca has taken up professional photography, possibly just as an artistic hobby since she seems to have no money worries. She only comes out at night but it's not clear how often she must feed, though there's some vague talk about her bite healing up the wounds she makes after she feeds, I guess so that she doesn't leave the telltale wounds.

At a party she allows a good-looking guy to draw her out to the street. However, he tries to rape her, so she fangs him, drains him, and dumps his body in a trash bin. But previously she also took the guy's photograph and uses it in some magazine display. Two cops investigate the murder-- which they assume was the act of a powerful man, to have lifted the victim's body into the bin-- and one of the cops, Sean (Stephen McHattie) comes across the victim's photo. He seeks out Rebecca for information, and this slowly leads to a romance between the cop and the mysterioso photographer.

What's odd about DEADLY is that there's nearly nothing that moves the story forward. In many similar tales, Sean's partner might become suspicious of his new lady love, which would put pressure on the uncertain relationship-- but here, the partner is just someone for Sean to talk to. The conflict, such as it is, is that once Rebecca has well and truly fallen for Sean, she wants to bring him into her world. And once Sean learns that Rebecca is a creature of the night, will he want to join her?

Even for a romance, DEADLY's pace is deadly slow. The only memorable scene takes place when a mugger attacks Sean and Rebecca on the street; after Sean's knocked out, Rebecca just flings the thug around with her unnatural strength and then carries Sean to safety. This is one of a couple of events that expose Rebecca's secret, but there's no sense of strong narrative momentum. McHattie, despite having even less backstory to work with than did Susan Dey, manages to make Sean fairly charming, but Dey's Rebecca comes off as one note. Yet I doubt anyone will ever remember DEADLY for anything but for the casting of "Laurie Partridge, Tragic Vampire." 

RE-ANIMATOR (1985)

 

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

The worst H.P. Lovecraft story I've ever read is the six-part HERBERT WEST-- REANIMATOR tale from 1922. Some critics have deemed it a juvenile jape, and there may be truth in that, even though HPL was 32 when he wrote the story-- though still about ten years away from his finest works. But whether or not one agrees that WEST is worst, Stuart Gordon's RE-ANIMATOR is definitely a case of taking a sow's ear and making it into-- well, a purse of some material. Silk? Hmm, maybe cotton.

Gordon's screenplay unfolds with the relentless, spare logic of an EC horror-comic. Scientist Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) has, for reasons unknown, become utterly monomaniacal about using his unique chemical experiments to bring the dead back to life. Said experiments result in shambling corpses that ceaselessly shriek in pain and that attack anyone in sight, but this does not deter West even after he gets himself kicked out of a Swiss university. (This may have been a Frankenstein reference, given the original doctor's nationality.)

West obtains entry to the Miskatonic University in Massachusetts, and resumes his experiments after renting a room from another medical student, Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott). Cain already has his share of problems, in that he's sleeping with Megan (Barbara Crampton), daughter of Dr. Halsey, the school's dean. In addition, one of the university's doctor-teachers, Carl Hill (David Gale), seems anxious to put the moves on Megan. But Cain's old problems seem like happy memories when he sees that his new tenant has brought a dead cat back to life, albeit as a spitting horror.

Cain tries to persuade Halsey that West has come up with a genuine marvel, but Halsey's only response is to bar both students from the university. This provides the inciting factor for West and Cain to attempt a human re-animation-- which, one may well guess, only makes things worse. Doctor Hill sticks his nose into the act, but West kills and decapitates Hill. Then he re-animates the dead head and the dead body separately. Science, you know!

I won't go over every twist and turn of the story, except to re-iterate my comparison that it resembles an EC story that becomes incrementally more grotesque until the mind-blowing ending. The characters are all flat types, which is fine considering that Gordon just wants the straightforward momentum, not complexity. The high point of RE-ANIMATOR is the performance of Gale, who, even before getting turned into a living head, evinces a positive lip-smacking love of being evil. I didn't see any reason as to why Hill is the only re-animation who doesn't become a raving maniac. But Gale is so good in this role that I didn't care.

 

INFILTRATOR (1987)

 

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

About a year after director Corey Allen collaborated with Scott Bakula on I-MAN-- an attempt to market Bakula as an eighties TV-superhero on NBC-- the duo tried again, this time on CBS. INFILTRATOR was the better of the two attempts, at least partly because it was shorter and had a better potential romantic arc, but it only became available to the public thanks to being one of several unsold pilots that aired on the CBS SUMMER PLAYHOUSE.

Paul Sanderson (Bakula) is more of a fun-loving eccentric this time in comparison to the solid citizen of I-MAN. Both and a female colleague, Kerry Langdon (Debrah Farentino), work on separate projects at a research facility owned by eccentric genius John Stewart (Charles Keating). But while Kerry's project, that of an advanced space-probe, is going well, Paul's about to lose funding for his invention of a teleportation-technology. 

In addition, Paul's been trying to get friendly with Kerry for some time, but implicitly she regards him as a child-man and refuses to let him get close. Paul, wanting both to impress Kerry and to get her testimony about his project, invites her to see that he's finally succeeded with his invention, but she turns him down, being preoccupied with her own work.

Paul then takes a rash act that makes the scientist of THE FLY seem rational; he teleports himself from his lab into Kerry's lab. He succeeds, but he merges with the space probe known as Infiltrator. Unlike the FLY-guy, Paul initially does not seem to be physically changed. But it doesn't take long to reveal that at times of stress, Infiltrator's computer-brain reacts to stimuli independently of Paul-- such as feeling threatened while driving through busy L.A. traffic. Infiltrator can also change one of Paul's arms into a robot-arm-- one able to shoot lasers, which Infiltrator uses to disable a tailgating truck.

Such transformations pretty quickly trash Paul's easygoing attitude, but ironically, they cause Kerry to become more attentive toward him-- though Paul's not sure who she cares more about: him, or Infiltrator. Paul appeals to Stewart to attempt a separation. However, the blueprints Stewart needs to reverse-engineer Infiltrator's merger have been stolen by a disgruntled scientist, Markus (Michael Bell). So INFILTRATOR follows the same basic plot as I-MAN: newly-minted hero is directed to penetrate the compound of an evil mastermind to neutralize his control of stolen tech. But this time his potential romantic interest goes along, supposedly to monitor the Infiltrator-probe, though as the story proceeds, it's evident that she's begun to have feelings for her alienated colleague.

The actual action of the good guys battling Markus isn't much to speak of; the emphasis is on the horror of Paul transforming fully into a robotic entry. Bakula and Farentino pull off this drama well, and then the story ends with the promise that someday Paul will be cured of his affliction. Two years later, Bakula enjoyed his breakout success with QUANTUM LEAP, and he no longer had to subsist on failed pilots.

I-MAN (1986)

 

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

I-MAN-- a name never used in the movie as such, though "indestructible man" pops up twice-- was an unsold pilot-film about the exploits of ordinary joe Jeffrey Wilder (Scott Bakula) after he's exposed to an extraterrestrial gas brought to Earth by astronauts. This TV-flick appeared on MAGICAL WORLD OF DISNEY, one of the last incarnations of the venerable WORLD OF DISNEY anthology-show to make it to the broadcast airwaves.

The most interesting thing about this failed pilot, aside from spotlighting Scott Bakula before his rise to fame, is that it posits a hero who has no offensive powers as such, only a passive invulnerability. The 1969 teleseries THE IMMORTAL was broadly similar in that it presented a protagonist whose only "super power" was that he never aged, never got sick, and could recuperate from injuries in jig time. However, the hero was at least a good basic brawler-- which can't be said for the character of Jeffrey Wilder.

Wilder is a widowed taxi-driver, with a teenaged son named Eric (Joey Cramer) and an eye for the ladies. He suffers critical injuries in an explosion involving an army transport with the aforementioned alien cargo, but he recovers almost immediately, his wounds healing over in seconds. He escapes the hospital and confides only in Eric (who, unbeknownst to both of them, was also affected in the same way by the same alien materials). However, a government agency, headed by genial spy-chief Bogosian (Herschel Bernardi), tracks down Wilder and obliges him to undergo some tests. Given that this is a fantasy, they allow him to go home when he pleases, but in no time, Bogosian is on Wilder's doorstep, imploring the help of The Indestructible Man.

After guilting Wilder into lending a hand, there's no time to give the cabbie even a crash-course in self-defense. He spends a few hours with an alleged trainer played by sometimes Frankenstein-actor John Bloom, but the trainer doesn't do more anything but bag on Wilder for being an amateur. Teamed up with a lady agent named Karen (Ellen Bry), the two of them seek to infiltrate the HQ of a madman named Holbrook (John Anderson), who has hijacked a laser-weapon system from the government and is using it to blackmail the country. Improbably, Eric is able to tag along with this twosome, and does a better job inflitrating the bad guy's compound, since Eric isn't caught and the two adults are.

There's a boring interlude in which Karen demonstrates Wilder's invulnerability to Holbrook in order to beguile the crazy criminal. Wilder and Karen exchange coy romantic moments. Holbrook's seductive daughter tries to exploit Wilder's "Don Juan heel" and gets punched out by Karen. Actually, Karen shows in one other scene that she has standard training in martial arts, while Wilder never distinguishes himself in that department. Only at the climax, when Holbrook's trying to drive his stolen laser by truck to his next attack-point, Wilder shows definite courage by dropping down onto the truck from a helicopter and derailing the villain's plans. Oh, and it's suggested his invulnerability might wane with lack of exposure to sunlight, but this is only thrown in to create a little suspense about whether Wilder might perish at the end. But the truck-stunt at least lifts him up to the level of one of the lesser combative heroes.

Though Anderson has played good villains elsewhere, he's got nearly nothing to work with, so Bakula's the only performer buoying up this weak attempt at a quasi-superhero. Aside from Bakula's lively performance, the best thing about it is that the pilot doesn't end on a cliffhanger.

LAS VEGAS STRANGLER (1968)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

For some cinema-fans, the rediscovery of this considered-lost grindhouse film is significant because it preserved location shots of Las Vegas as it existed in 1964 (though the film wasn't released to theaters until 1968). For me, it's another interesting test of my theory about the dividing line between uncanny and naturalistic manifestations of the "perilous psycho" trope.

Visually, STRANGLER-- also released with the arty title NO TEARS FOR THE DAMNED-- has nothing in common with American horror films of the period. The script does utilize one element seen in many horror movies, that of the "outre outfit," but this item of attire plays a very small role in the narrative. So it behooves me to ask whether or not the way writers Oliver and June Drake portray their titular psycho merely creates an atmosphere of physical peril, or if it shades into the world of uncanny dread. And to my way of thinking, one of the best ways to generate dread is to put the audience "inside" the mental world of the psycho, rather than allowing the viewers to view from "outside," in a more clinical manner.

Most of what we know about psychotic strangler Jeff Murray (Robert Dix) unfolds through the viewpoint of Lori (Gillian Simpson), who has loved Jeff from afar for four years, a clear case of a cat looking at a king. Jeff and his mother Madeline (possibly widowed, though it's not specified) own a ranch/cotton farm near Las Vegas. Lori, an English girl whose drunken father moved to America and died after marrying Lori's stepmother Hattie, ekes out a living at Hattie's seedy motel. Technically a waitress at the motel lounge, Lori also turns tricks with the locals and, at the start of the movie, tries to steal a twenty-spot from her john's wallet. But whereas Hattie is fine with pimping out Lori, the young woman clearly wants something better in life.

Lori's act of theft is seemingly rewarded: Jeff happens to be in the lounge, and when the john roughs Lori up, Jeff beats the guy down. Then, though he's never before interacted with Lori in any major way-- though in the lounge he seems somewhat aware of how Hattie misuses her stepdaughter-- Jeff takes Lori for a night on the town. They're too busy enjoying the various acts-- including a surrealistic set-piece in which topless girls cavort atop a merry-go-round-- to take much notice of radio reports about another showgirl killing by a serial strangler. In fact, Lori gets so drunk during their date that she wakes up in a motel with a ring on her finger, and Jeff telling her that they're man and wife from now on.

As the viewer works backward to figure out why Jeff did this, it would appear that this was a last-ditch attempt at normalcy on his part. Possibly he sympathizes with Lori a little because of her stepmother's abuses, though he also certainly marries Lori to honk off his own mother Madeline (co-writer June Drake, billed as Liz Marshall). Indeed, Lori has seen Madeline before, and remarks to Jeff that she resented the way Madeline would boss her son around.

When Jeff takes Lori to his ranch, she realizes that she didn't know the half of it. One of the big indicators of Jeff's psychological instability is a huge framed picture on one wall, depicting a younger Madeline, dressed in an evening gown with long black gloves, and Jeff as a child, with long pageboy-styled hair and a Little Lord Fauntleroy outfit. At one point Lori remarks that being dressed in so effeminate a fashion must have hurt Jeff's psyche at the very least, and meeting with Madeline-- who instantly considers Lori to be "trash"-- confirms that Madeline is a "smother-mother." I mentioned above that the viewer doesn't actually know if Jeff's father is alive or dead, though at one point Jeff talks about having seen his old man chase after "an Indian girl." He also characterizes his domineering mother as being both "man" and "woman," which also applies to Jeff himself.

To no viewer's surprise, Jeff is the strangler, venting his sexual confusion by killing showgirls in an unusual variety of ways. There had been various serial killers in American movies going back to the advent of sound films, but usually they all killed the same way. Jeff resembles the eighties slashers in that he doesn't just strangle. He kills one victim with drowning, another with electrocution, and two others by impalement. But in all cases, Jeff takes a trophy from each victim, cutting a hank of hair from their heads with a big scissors, while wearing (here's the "outre outfits" part) his mother's long black evening gloves. Director William Collins even juxtaposes a shot of Jeff looking at one destined victim's long black hair with his memory of his feminized image in the wall-painting. In fact, if I am right that Jeff made one final attempt at normalcy by marrying Lori, marriage does nothing to settle his uneasy mind, and the rest of the film alternates between Jeff's killings, Lori sitting around fretting at the ranch, and several shots at a wild party that furnishes most of the film's gratuitous nudity. 

There's also a gratuitous suggestion that Jeff may also have sought his lost masculinity in a gay encounter, for Lori tracks him down to a gay bar. But Jeff isn't an advertisement for Healthy Homosexuality, and he beats down a male acquaintance who may have been a previous hookup. Clearly Jeff's main thing is that of scalping women of their long hair as displaced revenge against his mother, while at the same time confirming Mother's power by wearing her gloves. In the hurry-up-and-finish ending, Jeff completely loses his marbles and begins to strangle Madeline-- I think with one of her own gloves. Then he's kayoed by a ranch-hand, and the film ends before there's even a word said about turning Jeff over to the authorities.

STRANGLER is an anomaly for a grindhouse film. It resembles the majority of films in that category in that there are no big names in the cast, and the director made no other films on record. But usually, most grindhouse personnel barely worked except within that limited sphere. Oliver Drake, in contrast, had worked on many low-budget films from the late 1920s through the 1950s, writing and directing a few dozen B-westerns. (Reportedly he met his wife June on the set of one such western, and she collaborated with him on other scripts, albeit without credit.) Drake dabbled with other genres-- comedy, mystery, and even an adventure-serial (UNDERSEA KINGDOM). But STRANGLER doesn't resemble anything else in Drake's repertoire. Without further info, I would guess that he just stumbled into an opportunity to script a grindhouse film, finished the task and went back to writing TV-westerns. 

So some thought went into the script for STRANGLER, unlike the vast majority of grindhouse movies. Drake's portrait of a feminized serial killer lacks any subtlety, but it's not any worse than the majority of psycho-films in the sixties. At most, the film might be faulted for not being as delirious as the wildest exploitation-films of the decade, such as the best works of Russ Meyer and Michael Findlay. But STRANGLER is still strange enough to be worth a look.

WATERWORLD (1995)

 

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

In its day WATERWORLD only made back its high production costs over a long haul, which means that in its general release this "Mad Max at sea" concept would have been deemed a box office failure. Still, it made enough money not to be one of the all-time flops, so I tend to think the project got about the level of success it deserved.

The WATERWORLD script devotes as little attention as the "Max" films did to the reasons for the world's apocalyptic transformation, except for a quick mention that the polar icecaps melted and deluged all of civilization. As in most post-apoc films, only isolated enclaves have survived, this time in the form of artificial "atolls" inhabited by ragtag survivors. The more law-abiding communities keep up a system of trade with "drifters," individuals who uses sailboats to range out into the trackless seas looking for valuable resources or relics from the previous order of things. Many of these atoll-dwellers nurture a myth of "Dryland," a surviving continent not entirely subtmerged, but no such place has ever been discovered.

One such drifter, known only as The Mariner (Kevin Costner), visits an atoll looking for trade. He's meant to be a rough, insular figure, wanting to mingle with other humans as little as possible, even after he meets lissome Helen (Jeanne Tripplehorn). Unknown to the Mariner or the other atoll-dwellers, a child named Enola (Tina Majorino), under the guardianship of Helen, bears a tattoo on her back that may be a map to the location of Dryland. A spy for the Smokers-- pirates outfitted with speedboats-- learns Enola's secret and relays it to the pirates' leader, The Deacon (Dennis Hopper).

Under complicated circumstances-- which, among other things, reveal that the Mariner is a mutant who can breathe water-- Helen and Enola join The Mariner on his trimaran when the Smokers attack the atoll. The better part of the film focuses on the slow process by which The Mariner is socialized by being stuck with two females on his sailcraft, while at the same time all three seek to ward off attacks from the Deacon's followers. Eventually, the Mariner and the Deacon face off, one against a small army of raiders, and things blow up real good. Perhaps inevitably, Dryland is indeed found, though the script doesn't deal with just how much land there is, and what may happen when the inhabitants of the atolls start migrating en masse to the flourishing continent

The FX and the action-scenes are WATERWORLD's best features, and probably can be largely credited to director Kevin Reynolds, though reportedly Costner threw his star-weight around on directorial choices and caused a rift between the two creators. But one thing Costner could not alter: he simply was not able to bring off the "antiheroic" aspects of the Mariner's character. The actor tries with might and main to look as if he's bristling with feral attitude, suspicious of everyone, at least partly because of his mutant heritage. Yet even though The Mariner suggests drowning Enola to save on resources, and even though he does throw her overboard in a fit of pique, there's never really any doubt that he'll turn back the trimaran to rescue her. There's no doubt that the Mariner's cold, cold heart will eventually be warmed by the insertion of two females into his isolation because Costner was just not able to project real spiritual darkness. That said, Tripplehorn and Majorino bring a lot of verve to their simple roles, and Majorino was particularly good in her ambivalent reactions to a potential "father figure" in her young life-- though someone, be it Costner or a scripter, couldn't resist recycling the ending of SHANE here. And just to spread some of the blame for the film's failures elsewhere, Hopper's Deacon is no prize either, as he utters assorted phrases so anachronistic that they took me completely out of the world-of-water.

Once or twice, the Mariner seems to possess a certain affinity with the ocean that goes beyond the limitations of the average post-apoc hero. It might have worked better to have portrayed the hero as someone as being divorced from the standards of commonplace humans because of his seagoing nature, rather than just trying to put across ceaseless bad attitude. But you don't always get what you need.

THE ROCKETEER (1991)

 

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

Oddly, not only was Dave Stevens' ROCKETEER comic optioned not long after its publication-- in fact, not too much later than Hollywood began poking around at the BATMAN franchise-- it was one of the first options from an "alternative" comics publisher (i.e., "not Marvel or DC") to make it to the silver screen. 

Curiously, ROCKETEER's script was produced by the writing team of Danny Bilson and Paul DeMeo, who had in the previous year developed a very BATMAN-centric version of DC's comics FLASH character. ROCKETEER, however, charts a course opposite to that of Burton's BATMAN, producing, in accordance with the reputation of the Walt Disney company, a kid-friendly version of the Stevens concept, pruned of the few "adult" aspects of the original. When I saw ROCKETEER in the day, I recall being a little neutral toward it. But I think the movie-- directed by Joe (CAPTAIN AMERICA THE FIRST AVENGER) Johnston-- has aged better than a lot of 1990s action-fare.

The plot is refreshingly linear. Stunt pilot Cliff Secord (Billy Campbell) becomes the accidental recipient of a secret government project, passed on to him during an altercation between the thieves who stole the item and the FBI agents seeking to recover it. Said project turns out to be a rocket-pack, which Cliff's mechanic buddy Peevy (Alan Arkin) adapts for use with a flight-suit, complete with a helmet. Prior to finding out that the pack was stolen, Cliff experiments with the idea of using the outfit in order to make money with stunt performances, but he ends up using it to rescue a pilot from a malfunctioning plane. But this puts the newly christened "Rocketeer" in the crosshairs of both the government agents and the gangsters who stole the pack. The gangsters' immediate boss is Valentine (Paul Sorvino), but the one paying for their services is movie star Neville Sinclair (Timothy Dalton), secretly working for the Nazi cause. Sinclair, who didn't appear in the comic, was modeled on Errol Flynn, who had been posthumously accused of being a Nazi agent by a book of dubious facticity. Even more oddly, Sinclair has a brutish henchmen (Tiny Ron) who's made up to look like the minor 1940s horror-star Rondo Hatton.

In addition, Cliff's girlfriend Jenny (Jennifer Connelly) is an aspiring actress who's in the cast of Sinclair's current movie. Sinclair learns that Cliff has the rocket pack and tries to use Jenny as a pawn to get the prize, though the script manages to work in a jealousy angle for the hero. Feminists might be disappointed that Jenny is largely a "girl hostage" for most of the movie, though she does have one nice moment where she kicks a Nazi agent out of a dirigible.

The FX, still a long way from the supremacy of CGI, are handsomely mounted, and the Rocketeer has a particularly good scene fighting Valentine's armed thugs in a ritzy nightclub. But the best thing about the movie is that it recaptures a vision, not of what the 1940s were really like, but how moviemakers of that time wanted to depict their time. Johnston, Bilson and DeMeo may have been under instructions to keep their adaptation squeaky-clean, but for whatever reason, they produced a near-flawless image of a fantasy-forties, where no one bleeds after getting hit and even gangsters never use swear words. Their effort ended up being in some ways a homage to the Rocketman serials that inspired Stevens than did the original comic book.