VAMPIRE MEN OF THE LOST PLANET (1970)

 

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

The most interesting thing about this PLANET is that despite its crapulous quality, it actually made money, presumably on the drive-in circuit. Maybe back in the day it benefited from good ballyhoo, but in any case, PLANET provided Al Adamson with some "street cred" for this early success. 

A few newly shot scenes establish that Earth suffers from a "vampire plague," represented by a few guys with fangs attacking innocent people. This peril is so catastrophic that the government sends a small crew to another world to look for a cure for the plague. Most of the spacefarers are bare stereotypes, except for lead scientist Rynning (John Carradine, who never leaves the ship). Once the ship lands, the other crewmembers begin wandering around taking samples, and supposedly looking for solutions to the vampire plague (though I didn't hear the matter raised again).

For this movie Adamson patched together money-saving sequences from at least six films, including David Hewitt's WIZARD OF MARS. But the biggest contributor was a black-and-white Filipino film from 1956, TAGANI, which involved a conflict between two tribes of cavemen. One tribe sports vampire fangs but does not act vampirishly in any way. For most of PLANET's running time, the film alternates between episodic scenes of the two tribes fighting each other and scenes of the astronauts puttering about. The only "bridge" between the two arcs is the cavewoman Lian, played by Filipino actress Myrna Mirasol in the TAGANI scenes and by Jennifer (FEMALE BUNCH) Bishop in the Adamson scenes. Mirasol gets some okay fight-scenes with bad fanged cavemen, while Bishop only gets to have an unrequited love-relationship with one of the spacefarers. (At least the guy's not putting the moves on the alien girl this time.)

The other major feature of PLANET is that, in order to bring together both black-and-white and color footage, the script had to come up with some sci-fi blather about "chromatic" effects that cause certain scenes on the alien world to be tinted red, blue, or whatever. Arguably these scenes make the film look cheesier than if it had all been black-and-white.

Since TAGANI seems to be lost, PLANET's greatest asset may be that of curating footage that would have otherwise been lost. As I've not seen everything in Adamson's oeuvre, I can't claim that this item is his worst effort, but I think it's probably in the bottom five. Some of the director's "patchwork" jobs, like DRACULA VS FRANKENSTEIN, proved lively enough to make "good bad movies," but PLANET is just a "boring bad movie."

THE WIZARD OF MARS (1965)

 

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

Since penning my largely negative remarks on JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF TIME, I haven't tested the possibility that one of David L. Hewitt's other offerings might be worse than time. But I discovered that WIZARD OF MARS, the first film Hewitt wrote and directed after his script-collaboration for 1964's THE TIME TRAVELERS, was probably the next best thing he produced.

I'm reasonably sure I first saw WIZARD in my teen years, if not younger, and I'm sure that I knew that it was a very cheap movie. After all, toward the story's end, the protagonists have to nullify a temporal stasis by shoving a big pendulum with a stylized sun carved into the mechanism's face so that the pendulum starts swinging again. But unlike some reviewers, I don't object to a film purely because it's cheaply made.

WIZARD concerns four astronauts who have been sent in their spacecraft from Earth to fly over Mars and take readings. A magnetic disturbance causes the ship's instruments to fail, and the craft separates into two stages. I never followed why a ship that had already taken off from Earth would have more than one stage. The whole practice of using stage-sections was always about leaving the planet Earth by jettisoning one section of the ship to lighten the load once the rocket reached a certain point. But that's the predicament in which the four astronauts find themselves: Captain, Science Guy, Comedy Relief and Cute Chick land on Mars in one section while the other part of the ship lands elsewhere. 

All four crewpersons survive, but the section they're in can't go anywhere. They can only return to Earth by restoring the other stage to flyability, but that means locating that section via a radio beacon, and hoofing it over the alien landscape of Mars with limited oxygen supplies

A lot of online reviews didn't like the fact that the astronauts spend the next half-hour just trekking across the Martian deserts, crossing a Martian river, and making their way through Martian caves (played by the Carlsbad Caverns). There's one moment while crossing the river that the quartet is attacked by some sort of vine-creature, but clearly the budget didn't allow for a fully articulated monster, just as having the foursome traipse around in heavy spacesuits didn't allow for much characterization. Yet I for one did get a palpable sense of peril even without a lot of alien attacks. 

The best scene in WIZARD takes place halfway through the film. To the travelers' dismay, they learn that the signal they've been following is coming, not from their ship, but from an ancient probe Earth sent to Mars long ago to remotely study planetary conditions. Comedy Relief is particularly incensed by this, and he fires a round or two at the useless derelict craft. Captain belatedly realizes that the old hulk still has a partial store of liquid oxygen within it, and the astronauts are able to tap this resource to keep themselves alive for a few days longer. I might quibble that all the oxygen-deprived wanderers ought to think "possible oxygen resources" the moment they see the probe. But I still like the lines spoken by Comedy Relief, to the effect that they're going to die on this world after having sent a probe to discover if life was possible there.

Then the quarter finds a Yellow Brick Road-- and did I mention that Cute Chick's name was Dorothy? But happily, Hewitt doesn't pursue any other parallels to the 1939 movie classic; I think these two references were just minor touchstones designed to give a cheap movie a little extra color. The road takes the four to a dead-seeming city, where the adventurers encounter the former occupants, preserved under glass as it were. The audience sees just one of the preserved Martians up close, and it turns out to be the head of the creature from 1965's SPACE PROBE TAURUS. The Earthlings find evidence of intruders who were apparently incinerated for trespassing. 

Then they meet The Wizard of Mars himself (the floating head of John Carradine). Presumably he too is one of the preserved Martians, but he's fully able to communicate with the Earthlings. He gives them a lecture about his people's past follies, and instructs them to move the pendulum-thing in order to put an end to the Martians' unnatural perpetuity. The astronauts do so, and the Wizard apparently rewards them by projecting them back into their craft (possibly fully restored?), only seconds after the ship was torn apart-- though the travelers still retain vestiges of their ordeal: sweat, grime, and five-o'-clock shadow for the guys.

The Martian trek scenes were. for me at least, saved from tedium by various instrumentals by composer Frank A. Coe. But Hewitt deserves some credit for trying something fairly ambitious. Though he's not able to achieve the poetry necessary to make WIZARD truly magical, at least Hewitt understands that poetry is what he's shooting for. 

 

 

LUPIN III: SECRET OF THE TWILIGHT GEMINI (1996)

 

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

Just to get a detail about this TV-special's title out of the way: no one in the story uses the phrase "Twilight Gemini." But there are a pair of matched diamonds, one of which is called "the Twilight," and thus the two gems are Gemini-like twins. 

According to legend, the joined diamonds can open one's way to a great treasure. So this is another "treasure-hunt Lupin," as well as being "adventure-Lupin," since there's not a great emphasis on humor here. More importantly, GEMINI also provides a rare example of "gentleman-Lupin." The master thief does try to steal a kiss from Fujiko, but he doesn't show the "drooling lech" persona of his more goofball exploits. For most of the film, he renders chivalrous aid to Lara, a much younger woman, and doesn't mack on her once.

A quasi-familial connection-- an ailing old man who had some avuncular influence on the master thief's early career-- gives Lupin the Twilight Diamond and tells him that it's one of two keys to a fabulous treasure. This bounty was the accumulated wealth of the "Geltic" people, who for decades have been a scattered people. The Geltic tribe was attacked by treasure-hunters from England and from some made-up nation, and though the invaders couldn't remove the treasure from its impregnable vault, the Gelts lost their holdings.

After getting the diamond, Lupin is cornered by Zenigata and a small army of cops. The thief is inadvertently rescued by a group of uniformed thugs, but their leader, the whip-wielding Sadachiyo, wants the diamond. Lupin escapes these forces as well, but he will meet them again in the Gelts' domain, somewhere in Morocco.

 Sadachiyo's thugs are connected to a group of robed conspirators who claim to be seeking a rebirth of the Geltic culture. Coincidentally, Lupin also meets the young female Lara, who's a native of the Geltic tribe and whom Lupin saves from cops. She too wants her people to rise to their former greatness, and she repays Lupin by leading him to her people.

Lupin's gang doesn't have much to do here. Jigen accompanies Lupin to Morocco, but he only has two-three scenes. Fujiko overtakes Lupin, trying to deal herself in, but aside from showing her boobs she also gets short shrift. Goemon isn't even mentioned in the first half, but by sheer coincidence, he shows up just when Lupin needs him. Goemon is hunting not treasure but Sadachiyo, because the latter-- whom in the English translation Goemon calls "he," for all that the character looks like a butch female-- betrayed the samurai ideals both of them had expoused in their training days. Sadachiyo doesn't explain the old grudge, any more than his choice in gender-attire. But since he can slice apart rocks with his whip the way Goemon can with his sword, the viewer will take Goemon's account at face value. Zenigata has assorted comic scenes, but he could have been easily written out with no effect on the plot.

Lupin, who seems more devoted to helping Lara than to finding treasure, eventually sorts out the identity of the cult-leader, and the treasure is unlocked so that the true Gelts can regain their lost prominence. For once the Lupin gang gets no payoff in the end, though sentimental Lara gives Lupin one of the diamonds, and he nobly claims that he'll cherish it, rather than splitting it with his gang. 

I omitted some history vis-a-vis Lara's familial relation to the gang-chief who set Lupin on this trail in the first place, but the fine points aren't very significant. GEMINI is formulaic Lupin, not actively bad but generally unimpressive. I rate the film "fair" in mythicity only because the story-trope of Lupin coincidentally helping out marginalized peoples does seem to loom large in various anime productions, though I doubt the trope appeared often, if at all, in the original Monkey Punch manga.    

DEVILMAN STORY (1967)

 

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

DEVILMAN STORY (a title which at least distances the film from any adaptations of Go Nagai's DEVILMAN) is a very dull adventure from director Paolo Bianchini, though at least it's a little better photographed than some other efforts from the same period. 

The titular "Devilman" is a mad scientist (possibly "Ken Wood") who sets up his own installation somewhere in North Africa, manned by various Arabs. His dastardly plot involves creating an artificial "super-brain," which he hopes to insert in his own cranium in order to give him the intelligence he needs to conquer the world. To this end, he kidnaps a brain surgeon from Europe and spirits him down to his hidden HQ. However, the surgeon's daughter Christina (Luisa Barrato) begins searching for her missing father, and by chance crusading journalist Mike Harway (Guy Madison) joins forces with the young lady and accompanies her to North Africa. Devilman abducts Christina and plans to perform some experiment on her before getting her father to do the big brain-switch. Harway is succored by an Arab tribe, whose leader conveniently reveals that he's been seeking his lost daughter for years. Harway infiltrates the installation, and though he can't overthrow Devilman, he escapes and gets the good Arabs to attack the bad Arabs. Christina and her dad are rescued and Devilman is defeated, never getting his brain transfer.

A year later, Bianchini would work with Wood, Madison and Barrato on SUPERARGO AND THE FACELESS GIANTS, which, while no classic, is a huge improvement on this rote exercise. DEVILMAN is not, as some termed it, a "Eurospy" flick, seeming to be a swipe on a few tropes from the 1960s FANTOMAS movies. Those films, building off the novels of the early 20th century, followed the exploits of master criminal Fantomas as his schemes were continually foiled by an intrepid journalist. But Fantomas was a clever villain, while Bianchini (who allegedly co-wrote the DEVILMAN script) doesn't even put forth basic effort with his super-fiend. It's a minor flaw that the starring villain is never actually called Devilman in the dubbed English version (though I assume that he is in the Italian original). But a more major one is that the evildoer's master plan couldn't possibly work. It would be one thing if Devilman plotted to enhance his normal brainpower. But he seems to be talking about total brain transplant, which of course would eliminate the personality of the villain along with his original brain. Like Fantomas Devilman wears a silver mask all the time, and there's a "Doctor Doom moment" when the heroine pulls off the covering and beholds a mutilated visage (which the viewer does not see). Admittedly the sixties version of Fantomas doesn't have any more deep motives for his depredations than Devilman does, but at least Fantomas had a sense of style.

HEY, GOOD LOOKIN' (1982)

 

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

Though HEY GOOD LOOKIN' was released in the early 1980s, in its original conception it would have been released as the fourth of Ralph Bakshi's "urban cartoons" of the early seventies, following FRITZ THE CAT, HEAVY TRAFFIC and COONSKIN. According to this Wikipedia article, Bakshi initially filmed a version of LOOKIN' with a similar plotline, but in a format that combined animation with live action. Warner Brothers became antsy over the film's potential box office, in part due to negative publicity for COONSKIN, and refused to give Bakshi the funds to complete the movie. About seven years later, Warners became bullish on animated projects again. The sequence of events seems unclear, but apparently Bakshi decided at some point to rework LOOKIN' into a more traditional animated film, using money from other projects to fund the second version. Thus he managed to release the new LOOKIN' in American theaters, to lukewarm response given that the cultural moment had largely passed for "adult animation" in the United States. But LOOKIN' still became a cult film through video and cable release, though it's not clear if Bakshi esteems the finished version.

My estimation is unambivalent: I think it's Bakshi's finest feature-length work. All of Bakshi's features have an episodic feel-- the result of the famed director having honed his craft in gag-oriented cartoon shorts. But in Bakshi's attempt to capture a semblance of his experience in urban Brooklyn of the early 1950s, he captured a "myth" far more substantial than his attempts to render Tolkienian fantasies-- a myth I like to denote as "the clash of civilizations."

The first twenty minutes of LOOKIN' don't seem to reference any major sociological myths. Most of the setup follows the antics of two Brooklyn guys in their early twenties, who don't do anything but drink, hang around poolhalls, and talk about women: Italian-American Vinnie Genziani and Jewish-American Crazy Shapiro. Neither one seems to have a job, so there's no telling where they get money for booze (though it would be easy to buy Vinnie as a pool-hustler). Vinnie apparently has no relatives, while Crazy has just one: his father Solly, an overweight hulk who has no compunctions against shooting at his son when annoyed, and who can get away with such actions because he (Solly) is a cop. The audience also sees that both smooth-looking Vinnie and geeky Crazy are members of a gang of white youths, the Stompers, but the only consequential event in those first twenty minutes is that Vinnie enjoys a "meet-violent" encounter with a girl he used to babysit years ago: Roz Featherschneider. Roz is definitely not a little girl now, as evinced by how all the guys ogle her ginormous hooters, and Vinnie begins thinking seriously about dating her, though he's too cool to give away his feelings. As for Roz, though she's initially stand-offish, she falls hard for Vinnie, at least according to what her hormones tell her.

The clash of civilizations-- or at least, of cultures-- looms large when night falls, and Vinnie and Crazy, tired from their escapades, sack out on the nearest beach. In the morning Crazy gets himself in trouble, and Vinnie panics, deserting his boon companion. (To be sure, Crazy extricates himself from his difficulties on his own.) But Vinnie's loss of coolness carries a harsher penalty. In his fear he runs past the boundaries of "the white part" of the beach and enters the forbidden terrain of "the black part." Vinnie finds himself surrounded by big black beachgoers, many of whom wear leather jackets at the beach and are members of the Black Chaplains, an urban youth-gang with which Vinnie's gang has frequently locked horns. Vinnie also meets the Chaplains' leader, the implicit pimp Boogaloo Jones. Boogaloo incarnates for the period "The Great White Fear," in that he's a clever, smooth-talking conniver. As soon as Boogaloo sees Vinnie, he wants to renew old hostilities just for the sake of sheer nastiness. He smooth-talks Vinnie into setting up a rumble between the two gangs, and adds that if the Stompers won't fight, the cool Italian will have to battle all the Chaplains by himself.

At the same beach, Vinnie not only locates Crazy, he also stumbles across Roz and her girlfriend Eva, though romance is no longer Vinnie's main concern. Roz and Crazy are particularly hot to fight the Black Chaplains, and the four seek out the other Stompers-- who could care less about Vinnie's crusade. Eventually, though, the white gang gets fired up to attack the black gang, when the former get provoked by one of Boogaloo's actions. So on the surface, Vinnie's problem is solved. 

Except that Crazy is, well, crazy. He's not just the amiable geek he usually seems to be, as when he becomes irate at Vinnie and puts a knife to his friend's throat. That night, while the four youths are farting around, Roz sees a car in a white neighborhood, driven by two Black Chaplains. Crazy's triggered by the "jungle bunnies," chases them down in his car. Then, over the feeble objections of Vinnie and Eva (the latter protesting, "I don't understand. Negroes are like people, too"), Crazy shoots both men dead. Unlike Crazy and Roz, who are jazzed by the incident, Vinnie knows that this is serious shit. (We don't know what if anything Eva sees or thinks, for she disappears from the story after the shooting.) Vinnie then separates himself from his friend and his potential lover.

With atypical swiftness, the NYPD sends one of their best men to investigate: Solly Shapiro. He interrogates Boogaloo, and though the pimp has no way of knowing who killed his followers, he makes the Iago-like suggestion that Solly ought to ask one of the Stompers about the crime-- such as Solly's own son. During what seems to be the exact same night as the shooting, Roz gives herself to the flustered Crazy, precisely as if she deemed herself a hero's prize. But then Solly shows up, driving Roz off as the corrupt cop beats the hell out of his son. The beating is so brutal that the average viewer can't help but pity the ignorant youth despite having seen him murder two people. Crazy then breaks the code of the streets, telling his father that Vinnie killed the victims.

Vinnie doesn't know of the betrayal but packs his bags to leave town, apparently the next morning. But he manages to run into the very area where the Stompers and Chaplains have arranged to hold their rumble. Solly shows up there as well, happy to frame Vinnie for the crime. The real killer, though, has some sort of mental breakdown. Crazy gets up on a roof overlooking the rumble, dressed up in a wacky superhero-costume, and begins firing down on everyone in the street. Both sides shoot at each other until one of the white guys is slain, at which point it becomes too real for both groups, and they fade.

The weird psychedelia in Crazy's head could justify a couple of paragraphs of explication, as the mad youth seems to be warring on the city in which he was born while encountering various grungy versions of Jungian birth-imagery. Bakshi then works in one non-psychedelic threat, for the all-knowing Boogaloo shows up on the roof. But instead of directly taking action against the murderer-- say, by pushing him off the roof-- Boogaloo confines himself to breaking into Crazy's frenzied reverie with the odd words, "You ain't got no rhythm, baby." For some reason, this has the same effect. Crazy launches himself off the roof, unintentionally making up for his betrayal by landing on Solly, killing both of them instantly. And Vinnie is left to a joyless existence without his closest amigo.

Well, except that all of these events take place within a frame story. The first half of the frame shows a sketchy middle-aged dude approaching a fat, middle-aged tart on the New York streets, offering to tell her the story of Vinnie and Roz. Then the other half of the frame concludes by revealing that the two old farts are Vinnie and Roz. Old Roz berates Old Vinnie for his past cowardice but gives him one last chance to redeem himself.

Although Bakshi as author clearly denounces the meaningless violence and racism of gang-culture, he manages to do so without becoming in any way preachy. For example, when the Stompers and the Chaplains meet for the rumble, the black gang-members perform a big flamboyant dance-number (rotoscoped from real performers) while the white bangers advance in a march, looking like goose-stepping Nazis. Yet Bakshi certainly doesn't make the Chaplains into sinless angels. The racism of both groups implicitly stems from both their poverty and resulting ignorance, and one of the songs Bakshi chose for LOOKIN' argues that despite all the claims about masculine honor, "the truth is, we were bored."

This may be the only film I've reviewed so far that I've categorized as having both the uncanny and naturalistic versions of the "delirious dreams and fallacious figments" trope. That's because all the "figment-tropes"-- such as Crazy inexplicably being able to massacre about a dozen men, just for the sake of a joke-- don't violate the naturalistic content of the narrative. However, Crazy's breakdown-fantasy has a coherence that goes beyond the bounds of naturalism, and so Crazy's mad dream projects HEY GOOD LOOKIN' into the domain of the uncanny.

DELINQUENT SCHOOLGIRLS (1975)

 

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

One online review of this 1975 sleaze-fest was that it offered viewers a sampling of different erotic fantasies. But as it happens, writer-director Greg Corarito made one male fantasy constant to almost all of those presented here: the fantasy of hot women being not just as horny as men, but just as indiscriminate.

I haven't seen three of the five films Corarito directed in his short career, but SCHOOLGIRLS seems to recycle, and expand upon, an incident in 1969's WANDA THE SADISTIC HYPNOTIST. That psuedo-arty grindhouse item concerned two rich lesbians who had the habit of capturing wayward men and using hypnotism to subject them to various indignities. As I noted in my review, there's a very brief "male revolt" in that an escapee from an asylum invades the lesbians' mansion and gets the upper hand-- although the revolt is short-lived and the film ends with the women back in control of their project.

SCHOOLGIRLS centers upon three "psychotics" who escape from a madhouse, which is where the film gets its alternate title of CARNAL MADNESS. However, since the film's theme concerns the aforementioned fantasy of female concupiscence, SCHOOLGIRLS remains the better title. A lot of films depict helpless women being held captive by marauding males, but these schoolgirls are in their way just as dangerous as the mesmerizing lesbians of WANDA.

The school in question is a correctional institution for wayward young women, where the majority of enrollees are about to leave the campus for an unspecified holiday. But about fifteen or so hot young women are not allowed to leave due to "delinquent" behavior, and those fifteen-- though only about six have speaking roles-- continue to have classes with a skeleton crew of instructors. Not all of the young ladies are horny, though the least lust-filled, Greta the Ardent Feminist (XXX actress Sharon Kelly), ends up serving the male audience by persuading other females not to wear their bras. Penny is the most man-hungry, while naive young Betsy forms a curious attachment to her fifty-something sex-ed teacher Mister Miller, because she says he reminds her of her uncle. (Insert "bad uncle joke" here.) Though the institution seems to be secular, often the girls are seen in approximations of Catholic schoolgirl outfits.

Into this largely feminine domain, where only two male professionals are in attendance, barge the three wild and crazy guys. The de facto leader is Carl (Michael Pataki), who does celebrity impressions at the drop of a hat. The second fellow is Bruce (Steven Stucker), a swishy homosexual. The third is Dick (Bob Minor), a randy guy who ends up pulling the other two into his desires for satisfaction. That satisfaction could potentially allow for rape, though the three malcontents are such goofs that it's impossible to take them seriously.

After escaping the nuthouse, the dumbbells stumble across a farmhouse, occupied by a grizzled farmer and his frustrated young wife. The trio pick up a couple of weapons here, while Dick gets to vent his passion on a woman who only pretends "maidenly resistance."

Then the threesome stop at the school, raiding the kitchen for food. Two busty female cooks catch them, but do the two young women run to get the authorities? No, they attack the three guys with such weapons as rolls of salami, so of course the ladies get overwhelmed pretty quickly. But probably they don't suffer anything more than a little groping, since they're later seen playing cards with the goofs. (Aren't the guys supposed to be trying to escape the law as expeditiously as possible?)

Slightly before the advent of the nutsies, Betsy visited her secret crush Mister Miller. It turned out that he's got a thing for her too, but he has a weird way of showing it, that of putting her under full hypnosis (more on this later). During Betsy's second visit to Miller, all unaware of what he does with her, the three bozos witness Miller's peccadillo. They break in, perhaps hoping to get in on Miller's action. However, in his capacity as a biology teacher Miller has a tankful of (non-poisonous) snakes to hand, and he drives the psychos away with his serpents, just before Miller himself suffers a heart attack. 

The two non-gay bozos chat up a couple of girls smoking MJ, and both ladies seem amenable to some fun with complete strangers, until Carl and Dick honk them off. The females try to run, but Bruce cows them with his rifle-- and presumably they get tied up and left somewhere, because they aren't seen again. While Carl and Bruce try to find transportation, Dick comes across another two busty beauties playing polo-- at night, no less-- and tries to get grabby. The girls beat him with their mallets but get caught by Carl and Bruce, and Carl threatens the two women into fighting one another. (Just to keep things comic, he admits to Dick that he had no intention of killing either of them.)

Then there's the big finisher, when the psychos barge in on a karate class, where a male karate instructor is teaching about 12 girls. Penny is there and seems more than willing to be abducted and ravished by Big Dick. Carl, though, has an itch to play director, and he wants all the girls to perform a chorus line, but without a certain item of feminine protection. This sparks a fight between Dick and Feminist Greta (and Sharon Kelly seems to have done a fair amount of training to perform things like a stomach-throw). In no time, all the girls and the one male teacher swarm the goofballs and beat them down, sending them back to the bughouse-- though a coda claims that they escaped again.

None of the alleged madmen shows any real madness; they just seem like big, stupid teenagers out for sex wherever they can find it-- so none of them are "perilous psychos" in more than a naturalistic sense. Only Mister Miller's little hypnosis experiment elevates the movie into the uncanny domain, and then only because his experiment with Betsy involves using one of his non-poisonous snakes to go (one assumes) where he can't go anymore. Corarito passes over this fetishistic experiment very quickly, but both the experiment itself and the hypnosis used to achieve it constitute a bizarre crime of the uncanny kind.

LEGO DC BATMAN: FAMILY MATTERS (2019)

 

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

This DTV animated film, the ninth in the DC series, follows in the wake of THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE. The script for FAMILY doesn't pursue the previous film's idea of "Bruce Wayne, Conspicuous Consumer." Yet there's still an argument that in some ways Batman can be, as he's termed late in the film, a "narcissistic jerk." (Did the kids who were the main audience for this DTV have any idea what a "narcissist" was?) Though the Dark Knight still puts his ass on the line to defend the helpless, he also gets a charge out of being a hero. He hates devoting any time to the philanthropic pursuits of his billionaire alter ego, because it takes time away from his crimefighting.

During a meeting with his board, Wayne is told that the corporation can save considerable expenses by adopting a new computer program known as Brother Eye. Wayne not only embraces this policy, he also decides to sell off Wayne Enterprises so that he can be Batman full-time, despite protests from butler Alfred, Current Robin and Nightwing (the latter evincing worries about his "trust fund"). 

At the same time all this is going on, a new criminal mastermind, the Red Hood, begins making inroads in Gotham, enlisting the talents of many prominent Bat-foes into his service: Killer Croc, Penguin, Riddler, Scarecrow, and Two-Face. In fact, Red Hood devotes quite a time to conferring with Two-Face, who happens to be enduring a villain's "mid-life crisis," because he's often considered a "B-lister." (Would he have been happy if they called him a "second-rater?")

Red Hood begins laying traps for the current members of the Bat-Family, which in this narrative also includes Batgirl and the New Batwoman. (I don't recall a previous Lego-video claiming that Nightwing and Batgirl had started dating, but that's the game plan here.) I don't know if in 2019 the average kid, given Internet access, would have been surprised by the revelation of the Red Hood's identity, especially since in the comics the Big Reveal was almost twenty years old. Suffice to say that Red Hood's career of crime is something of an imposture. However, Two-Face essentially takes over his operation for real, weaponizing Brother Eye and his worker-robots, the OMACs, to conquer the city, so that the five Bats have to assemble to stop him.

Given that Two-Face drops his criminal pattern of focusing on "twos," nearly any villain could have been plugged into his place. The main threat stems from the computer and its drones (both extrapolations of scenarios presented in the 1970s by Jack Kirby's short-lived series OMAC). As it happens, Batman's the one forced to emphasize the double nature of his existence, since he uses his two identities, costumed and uncostumed, to outwit the schizophrenic marauder. The cowled crusader does realize that he needs to maintain both his identities in order to better serve Gotham, and his Bat-fam largely functions to point out his strengths as well as his weaknesses. One interesting aspect of FAMILY is that while the other Lego-Bat films don't show more than cursory scenes of fighting, all five Bat-heroes get a lot of martial action (G-rated of course) against their assorted foes.