DARK CITY (1998)

 

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

Even seeing DARK CITY in its theatrical release-- 11 minutes shorter than the version I just screened, though without any major plot/character alterations-- I thought it would have been a smash success if it had starred, not the skilled but relatively unknown Rufus Sewell, but a major star like Bruce Willis or even Arnold Schwarzenegger. Unfortunately, though many critics liked CITY for its dense symbolism, it proved a box-office bomb. The failure didn't end the career of CITY's director/co-writer Alex Proyas, who'd scored a breakout with the similarly themed 1994 CROW, but it looks to me like he never made another film to equal of either of his ventures into "cities of dreadful night."

 In such cities-- not least Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS-- the protagonist is often a helpless victim, harried by authorities from pillar to post, as inimical forces seek to turn him into just one more cog in the city's great machine. But this CITY mixes scenarios of disempowerment with those of a corresponding empowerment, as if Proyas were seeking to cross METROPOLIS with Kubrick's 2001. Consider: when we first see John Murdoch (Sewell), he awakens, naked in the waters of a bathtub, his mind a tabula rasa. Except for his being a fully-grown man, it's a perfect intrauterine fantasy. And there's even a doctor in attendance, sort of. Once the "newborn" is out of the tub, the phone rings, and a man claiming to be Murdoch's doctor tells him to get out before certain enemies overtake him. Fortunately, despite not knowing his own name or history, Murdoch at least remembers how to dress himself-- not to mention knowing what a phone is-- and leaves. On his way out he does see a murdered girl in his room, which convinces him that someone's out to get him.

 The amnesiac hero wanders a city where the sun never seems to come up. Murdoch barely manages to dodge another scenario that comes close to involving him in another woman's murder. Police Inspector Bumstead (William Hurt) seeks Murdoch as a suspect in past murders, and by seeming coincidence meets Murdoch's wife Emma (Jennifer Connelly). Her husband John left her after she (supposedly) had an affair, which seems to be someone's setup for the narrative that Murdoch became a serial killer out of sexual frustration. As Murdoch wanders about, he's cornered by pale-fleshed men in fedoras and trenchcoats, who attack him. But unlike many a noir protagonist, conflict brings out new power in Murdoch: a power to control the realities of the Dark City. It's as if Murdoch's encounter with mysterious beings encourages him to develop transhuman powers. However, in marked contrast to the way Astronaut Bowman develops power thanks to alien manipulators, Murdoch develops his strange reality-warping abilities despite the overlords.

  Murdoch never precisely regains his memory, as would a film noir protagonist. Instead, what he learns is that everyone in the City has been programmed with fake memories by The Strangers. Though they appear to be pale-skinned humanoids, it's eventually revealed that they belong to a dying race, whose true form-- that of "energy bugs"-- is seen only once. The Strangers inhabit and revivify the bodies of dead humans, seeking a way to preserve themselves by studying a collection of humans-- implicitly taken from Earth, whose environs were duplicated by the Dark City-- in order to learn some secrets of the human spirit. This is not an overly original idea, but Proyas gives it great mythic dimension by his depiction as a world where time becomes frozen and human histories can be endlessly rewritten by memory-manipulations. The use of particular symbols-- both natural ones like spirals and artificial ones like clock-faces-- contribute to the sense of The Strangers' domain as a domain where all should abandon hope of independence.     

 To be sure, Murdoch has help getting out of the box intended for him. Once he meets the woman who claims to be his wife, he doesn't so much remember her as to fall in love with her through her act of loving him. Inspector Bumstead's resolve to understand all of the City's mysteries also proves a useful ally. But the doctor who wants Murdoch in the film's first scene-- Doctor Daniel Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland) -- is eventually revealed to be responsible for Murdoch's empowerment, having taught the man how to attune himself to the machines that maintain the city, so that he can alter the City's reality as much as the Strangers do. This culminates in a bang-up psychokinetic battle between Murdoch and the Strangers-- though the emotional climax is Murdoch's decision to recover the life he never had with Emma, even though it was a false scenario created by the aliens. I should note in closing that Murdoch puts an end to the Strangers by bringing the Dark City into full sunlight, which destroys them just as light is said to banish nightmares. Despite Proyas' many references to noir cinema-- not least having chanteuse Emma sing the song "Night Has a Thousand Eyes," composed for the 1948 noir movie of that same name-- CITY proves to be the place where hope is kindled into new being, rather than being abandoned.                  

NIGHT OF THE SKULL (1974)

 

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

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

This movie, currently streaming as NIGHT OF THE SKULL, is one of the rare Jesus Franco directorial efforts not marred by his free-form wackiness.  At the same time, it's no more than a decent time-killer.

The film starts off introducing us to an English lord, Archibald Marian. For some reason he's torqued off at his relations, because he's reading aloud some faux-Biblical gobbledygook about God avenging himself upon a "perverse generation."  Archibald seems to have some fascination with the Classic "four elements" of Greek belief, and he rants about the elements being used to kill his enemies. However, there's a mysterious figure in a skull-mask lurking nearby, and this specter apparently takes inspiration from the Lord's yammerings. He knocks out the Lord and buries him alive, thus fulfilling the "earth" symbolism.

 Also living in the Lord's manor are his wife Cecilia, his illegitimate daughter Rita (Lina Romay), and two married servants, Rufus and Deborah. Though Rita has been allowed to live at the manor, she's been forced to accept the role of a servant. Later she will tell a constable that both Archibald and Cecilia used to beat her, and eventually this testimony is borne out. Other potential heirs to Archibald's fortune descend upon the manor for the reading of his will: his cousin Simon (William Berger) and his wife Marta, and somewhat later, his legitimate son Alfred (though possibly by another wife than Cecilia). During the reading, the lawyer reveals that Archibald left two wills: one in case he died a normal death, the other in case he was murdered. The first one divides the estate between everyone except for Rita, the second one leaves everything to Rita alone.                                                                                       

Cecilia doesn't take her disinheriting well: she comes into Rita's room and whips her just a few times (rather restrained for the often torture-happy Franco). The killer knocks out Cecilia and ties her up on the shoreline, where we're later told she was killed not by the waters but by exposure to the high winds, making this the "air death." Despite this second fatality, most of the characters continue to hang out around the manor while they're being interviewed by police or are bouncing off one another. A fire-death for Deborah ensues, but this doesn't keep Alfred and Rita from enjoying a possibly incestuous affair. The killer targets them too but doesn't leave either of them dead. Then Simon seems to give the game away to the audience, providing a "water death" by drowning his wife Marta in a bathhouse. But wait, then Simon is confronted by the Skull Killer, who takes off his mask and reveals that-- he's Archibald, who at some earlier time was assaulted by Simon and survived that attempt at murder but lost his memory. Then Archibald got back his memory and went through police training under the name "Brooks," so that he could enter the manor when he pleased. So then-- who's the Archibald who got buried alive at the outset, whose body was taken into custody by the officials?                               

I checked a few online reviews to see if anyone had commented on this lunacy but didn't see anything. However, it's possible that unlike me most of the reviewers won't give away endings even if they show that the director was just goofing around with no intention of delivering a basic formula effort, even if that's what SKULL appeared to be from the start. Crazy-ass Franco's normal methods of off-the-wall storytelling are signaled before the big ending, though, with a sequence in which a lady psychic tries to talk the dead patriarch but gets killed and has zero effect on the plot. Though the fragmented screenplay suggests that more than one murderer appears in the story, NIGHT OF THE SKULL is still a better title than the original NIGHT OF THE KILLERS. This is not in any way a giallo film despite the era in which it appears; it's an old dark house that includes a masked killer like the original CAT AND THE CANARY movie. Franco also may have been joking when he had the credits claim that SKULL was based on a CANARY all right, but one written by Edgar Allan Poe, which is of course nonsense. A comment on IMDB claims that at some point Franco confessed that he stole the plot from Edgar Wallace, but if so, that wild and crazy Spaniard must have put that Wallace work through his own personal mixmaster.   

THE LAST WITCH HUNTER (2015)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*                                                                                                                                                 I'd never heard either positive or negative reviews of this Vin Diesel project, but now that I've seen it, HUNTER has one standout aspect. While I can tolerate a lot of derivative plots and characters in my search for good-- or even just fun-- adventure-movies, I'm aware that some viewers get immediately turned off by anything that seems stereotypical. For various reasons, HUNTER gave me some sense of how an adventure-hater feels when faced with an especially mediocre specimen.                                                                                                     

HUNTER, based on some D&D concept that Vin Diesel was able to copyright (somehow), hinges on Diesel's protagonist Kaulder being immortal. Thus a 14th-century Kaulder joins with other warriors to destroy the evil Witch Queen (Julie Englebrecht) who unleashes the Black Plague on the world. Presumably she has even worse plans in store for humanity when Kaulder slays her. And the dying Queen curses Kaulder with-- immortality? Wait, how does she know this will be an undesirable fate to this guy? Yes, I, like every fantasy-viewer, have seen umpteen stories about immortals who get existentially exhausted with eternal life. But the Witch Queen doesn't have any particular reason to assume that her killer is going to be so discomfited. This major stumbling-block in storytelling is just one of too many others.                                                   

   The audience doesn't get to see Kaulder learning the evils of immortality, for the film immediately shuttles to the present day. Though the Witch Queen is dead, an entire race of witches still exists on the fringes of regular civilization, and Kaulder has become an enforcer for an organization, the Axe and Cross, that monitors witch-activities. Neither the culture of the witches nor the monitoring organization get much elaboration, but Kaulder trusts one guy, Dolan 36 (Michael Caine), as his contact person. Dolan 36 is assassinated (apparently) and Kaulder launches a crusade to find the killer.                 

  Since Kaulder doesn't practice magic, he has to draft a witch to help his investigation, so he chooses, almost randomly, a hot young conjuress named Chloe (Rose Leslie). Chloe is given little reason to help Kaulder at first, though a convenient plot-device has Chloe's buddy knocked off by Kaulder's enemies, so this becomes motivation enough for her to risk her own life. (The writers probably wanted to imply that Chloe had the hots for the reticent hero, given a late scene where she seems jealous of another woman's attentions to Kaulder.) Kaulder beats down various unmemorable menaces until he finally learns that his enemies are out to revive the Witch Queen. This contingency isn't even anything the Queen arranged in anticipation of her demise. There's some gobbledygook about how Kaulder's immortal existence is the key to the Queen's revival, but it was all forgettable too. The final battle between Kaulder and the grotty Queen is fairly well choreographed, but everything else is from hunger. In 2015 the film made more than it cost, but not much more, which may be the reason no threatened sequel has materialized.

          

SHIN ULTRAMAN (2022)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*                                                                                                                                                  Though I grew up watching dubbed US reruns of the sixties ULTRAMAN series, the show didn't grab me as it did so many others here and in many parts of Asia. I found the episodes too repetitive, so I've watched almost none of the later serial shows or movie adaptations. But the producers of SHIN ULTRAMAN suckered me with their title, which made me think that this production might be a radical rethinking of the original concept, as 2016's SHIN GODZILLA was for that franchise.                                                                 

Instead, aside from a cute joke about the movie's title in the opening credits, everything about this SHIN seems like a tedious recycling of the TV show's already repetitious tropes. Once again, giant kaiju perpetually menace Japan, bringing about the formation of a monster-fighting task force, the SSSP. Once again, a helpful alien named Ultraman descends to Earth to help the locals with their infestation, but during one battle with a big beastie, SSSP officer Shinji (Takumi Saitoh) is slain. And again, Ultraman then merges with Shinji's body and takes on the Earthman's identity at the SSSP. My impression is that Ultraman's imposture simply went on from the first episode of the sixties teleseries to the last, with each story hinging on Fake Shinji morphing into gigantic Ultraman to battle a titanic creature. But since a feature film needs more closure than that, SHIN ends with Ultraman sacrificing his life to bring the innocent Shinji back to life. (Sorry if I spoiled the big revelation.) In between the start and the finish, there are various conflicts as to various alien presences, and which are or aren't good for Earth, but none of them stuck with me. There was a moderately entertaining sequence wherein a young female SSSP officer gets transformed into a giant woman, but this didn't involve any interesting plot-action. The movie made a lot of money, and given the limitations on my knowledge of ULTRAMAN trivia, I might be missing all sorts of nuanced references. But as reboots of ancient franchises go, I'd like to give this one a kick in the SHIN.    

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, SEASON TWO (1997-98)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological, sociological*                                                                                                                                                                                                           With Season 2, BUFFY takes on its true structure, as against the "scaffolding" provided by Season One, which means that for the purposes of my review I can once more return to the practice assigning grade-letters to the episodes for Poor, Fair and Good. Whedon ramped up the backstories of all of the regular the characters, upgraded David Boreanaz's Angel to that of a regular cast-member, increased the participation of Cordelia, introduced a continuing boyfriend for Willow, and quickly dispatched the inadequate menace of "the Anointed One" in favor of the deadly duo of Spike and Drusilla, both of whom had intimate ties to Angel's origins. There's also a greater elaboration of the Slayer mythology, which would bear larger fruit in future seasons.                                             

 WHEN SHE WAS BAD (G)-- Joss Whedon both wrote and directed the premiere episode of Season 2, just as he had the season finale of Season 1. But though PROPHECY GIRL is one of the better episodes of that season, BAD is the show's first leap into new territory. Buffy Summers was certainly not the first hero to cavil at her unjust destiny as a hero, or to refuse the call, or even to become irked with the ingratitude of the people he/she saved. But I can't think of a previous hero who started bagging on her friends to express her resentments. Giles only speaks part of the truth, that Buffy becomes hostile toward her inner circle due to her near-death trauma. But when she does a sexy dance with Xander, the fellow who saved her life but remains in the "friend zone," she mocks his secret desire to be rewarded for his Galahad-like actions, even though he made no such demands upon her. She resents them all, including Angel, for forcing her to be their hero, and only after she lets the "badness" run its course can she have a shot at regaining her natural "goodness." Next to all that, there's not much to derive from the plot of the Anointed One, a child-vampire who failed to project adequate menace from the first, to revive the Master. Still, the Master's skeleton does give Buffy a target on which to exorcise her trauma, and I suspect that Whedon had that scene planned out when the script for PROPHECY allowed for the Master's remains to survive in that form, rather than that of scattered ashes.                                     

SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED (F)-- While this one's more back in the mode of the first season's "freak of the week" pattern, it's still fun to see how the writers managed to work out a Frankenstein theme in the context of Buffy's high school-- making it one of the few menaces not explicity tied to the Hellmouth. 

SCHOOL HARD (F)-- While Buffy and friends try to navigate the perils of a Parent-Teacher conference, Spike and Drusilla come to town and take over the Anointed's operation. From the first, the two of them make an appealing villainous pair, showing an abiding love for one another despite their remorseless murders of human victims. Spike remains associated with the series until the bitter end, thanks to the contrast between his rapacity and his acidic sense of humor. Even Buffy's mother Joyce gets a rare scene defending her superhero daughter, clouting Spike with a blunt object when he and his fellow undeads attacks the conference. 

INCA MUMMY GIRL (F)-- For once, a mummy gets some exposure before the more traditional werewolf. Ampata, an Incan princess sacrificed eons ago, revives in a Sunnydale museum and begins romancing Xander, who thinks she's an exchange student. Decent but nothing special. 

REPTILE BOY (F)-- Another just OK episode, as Buffy and Cordelia learn the problems of dating college boys. Some are so focused upon their advancement in the adult world that they're willing to sacrifice females to a reptilian demon living beneath Sunnydale.                                                                                                 

 
 HALLOWEEN (G)-- Though this episode isn't the first to play with "grass is greener" fantasies, the script uses Halloween as an occasion for most of the regulars to experience hypothetical lives as what they are not. All of these are rooted in insecurities based in their current lives-- Xander wants to be more manly, Buffy wants to be more womanly, and Willow is at odds with her own sexuality. Ethan Rayne, a nasty acquaintance of Giles', bestows on the three of them, and several Sunnydale children, costumes that transform the wearers into literal versions of the identity portrayed. Apparently Raine just wants to spread chaos for no particular reason, much like the ancillary menace of Spike, who finds the transformation of Buffy into a helpless upper-class noblewoman much to his liking. Naturally Buffy bounces back and demonstrates the superiority of modern Girl Power. The character of Oz (Seth Green) makes his second appearance on the show, presaging his hookup with Willow.                 

LIE TO ME (F)-- Buffy reconnects with Ford, a fellow from her pre-Slayer existence, but he hasn't reached out to her just to invite her to beer and skittles. Ford represents a cult of vampire-fans who think the bloodsuckers are just a bunch of swinging dudes-- a prescient conception, coming about eight years before the first TWILIGHT book and its sprarkly vamps. Ford's evil action, that of betraying his friends to Spike's coterie, is rooted in tragedy, but he's not resonant enough to stand as a mythic character.  

THE DARK AGE (F)-- I'm assuming the "dark age" referenced was Rupert Giles' own youth. Thanks to the connivances of Ethan Rayne, the Buffy gang learns that the two of them once belonged to an occult group that unleashed a demon named Eyghon. This one's good mostly for showing that Giles, as much as Buffy, has his own cross to bear, even if it was one of his own forging.                                                         

WHAT'S MY LINE PTS 1-2 (F)-- LINE might not have high mythicity-- though it's the first to explore the process by which Watchers choose and train Slayers-- but it's a roller-coaster ride of action and pathos. Spike finds a ritual that will help bring Drusilla out of her torpid state, and he needs to capture Angel, Drusilla's sire, to bring it off. To keep Buffy from interfering, Spike summons (pays for?) the services of a cult of assassins to kill her. At the same time the assassins arrive in Sunnydale, so does a mysterious young woman, Kendra, who attacks Angel and Buffy with her super-martial-arts skills. Turns out she's the new Slayer in town, activated when someone or something sensed Buffy's temporary death during PROPHECY GIRL. Kendra becomes the Buffy gang's ally against Spike and the assassins, and Buffy wonders if she might give up the Slayer duties to the New Girl. Up to this point, the series hasn't said much of anything about Buffy's relationship to her absent father, though by the way Buffy becomes jealous of Giles' regard for Kendra, clearly he's beginning to assume that status for her. Also, Xander and Cordelia start snogging on the sly.                                                                     

TED (P)-- "Go knock on his door, and he'll probably kill you." A new man, name of Ted (John Ritter), starts dating divorcee Joyce, but Buffy senses he's not the man he claims to be. I'd like to give the scripts points for referencing Freud, but it's sort of a Bizarro-Freud, in that the daughter is not Oedipally competing with her mother,but is rather renouncing the evil father in favor of the good one. Points deducted for the lack of backstory for Ted having made a "Stepford Husband" out of himself. 

BAD EGGS (P)-- The Buffy gang (not yet called "Scoobies") are assigned by a teacher to play parents to eggs, and there are some cute humorous touches here. But the revelation that certain henfruits are not from hens, but from some vague crustacean creatures that take over people's minds. Buffy has to deal with this case of demonic crabs and with two vampires from the Old West.  

SURPRISE (G)-- Buffy's friends want to surprise her with a party for her seventeenth birthday, but Spike and Drusilla have a different celebration in mind, bringing forth a demonic figure, the Judge, who may be capable of destroying the world. And the real surprise is the revelation that schoolteacher Jenny Calendar, a potential romantic interest for Giles, is in truth allied to the gypsy cultus that wants Angel to suffer. To her credit, Jenny tries to simply send Angel away, but complications ensue, and for the first time Angel and Buffy make love-- with tragic consequences.

 INNOCENCE is not labeled a "Part 2," but the story follows directly on the heels of SURPRISE's concerns, with the Judge still a threat, though "good vampire" Angel becomes a much more substantial threat. I've always thought Whedon's vampire cosmos was a little vague on the process of vampirization. Apparently, a demon invades the being of the vampirized victim, but the original soul remains, somewhere, because in this episode we learn that years ago, Angel aroused the ire of a gypsy tribe, and that they restored his human soul to him so that he would suffer. But to make sure if he never stopped suffering, they added a codicil by which he would return to his demonic self if-- he experienced bliss? At any rate, that's the story. The bad version of Angel, sometimes called Angelus, then torments the gang for several episodes after The Judge bites the dust, with aid from Spike and Drusilla. One of the most cynical myth-ideas here is that Buffy's act of innocence, that of opening herself up to her lover in the most intimate manner, also renders herself vulnerable to the degradations of experience.                                  

 PHASES (P)-- To compensate for the previous episode's heavy dramatics, Buffy's first encounter of the werewolf kind is comparatively light. There's not much attention to sussing out the lycanthrope's identity, since only two suspects are presented, and one of them is proved innocent halfway through the narrative. Oz, who's been invited into the gang since he started dating Willow, is the lucky wolf-man, who managed to keep his claws clean of human deaths during his full-moon rampages. The real menace is a misogynistic werewolf-hunter, given the generic name of Cain, who wants to add the beast-man's pelt to his collection. PHASES is unusually heavy with anti-male remarks, which becomes rather tiresome when it includes Willow bonding with Cordelia, mere days after the former pitches a fit at learning of the latter's relationship with Xander.

BEWITCHED, BOTHERED, AND BEWILDERED (F)-- Cordelia dumps Xander, so he persuades budding witch Amy to cast a love spell on her. It backfires, and every female in Sunnydale, except for Cordelia, starts macking on the young man, including Buffy, Buffy's mom, Jenny Calendar, and Willow. The more serious menace of Angelus, Spike and Drusilla gets overshadowed by the comic romp.                                                                                                   

  PASSION (G)-- The short vacation from heavy drama ends. Though both Buffy and Giles feel betrayed by Jenny Calendar's agenda re: the curse upon Angel, the teacher begins researching a ritual that might return the vampire's noble soul. But Angelus and his buddies get wind of it, and this has fatal consequences for Giles' true love. The vengeful Watcher attacks the hideout of Angelus and his clique, and Buffy has to save Giles by clocking him. The episode is bookended by voiceovers about the ambivalent allure of passion, read by David Boreanaz, though the reflections might have made more sense coming from Anthony Stewart Head. 

KILLED BY DEATH (F)-- Buffy catches the flu and has to go to the hospital, despite a childhood experience that left her deathly afraid of hospital stays. But she becomes curious when juvenile patients report being menaced by a ghoulish creature whom only kids can see. Compared to many of the makeshift BUFFY monsters, "Der Kindestod" has a more Old-World demonic flavor, and the episode is strengthened by Buffy's relationship to the imperiled kids, as Buffy has to put aside her usual adolescent concerns in order to be "the adult in the room."   

I ONLY HAVE EYES FOR YOU (G)-- This time, instead of Angelus playing games with Buffy's heart, both the vampire and the vampire slayer becomes the pawns of an unquiet spirit haunting Sunnydale High. Jim Stanley, the ghost of a 1955 student, wants forgiveness for his having murdered his lover (and teacher) in a fit of passion. However, he keeps possessing victims in order to replay the scenario of the murder, which can have fatal consequences. The Buffy gang eventually figures things out, but the ghost's obsession is only solved by a contrivance that includes the eleventh-hour intervention of the late teacher's spirit. Still, the episode continues to excel with the theme of the almost corruptive influence of passion. 

GO FISH (F)-- The "freak of the week" here is so contrived that I almost designated this episode a "poor fish." However, there's just enough mythicity relating to the "war between men and women" to give the story a little more heft than the ordinary freak-show. And the menace, involving the mutation of the Sunnydale Swim Team into fish-men, almost certainly plays upon the sexual danger of that archetypal fish-man, The Creature from the Black Lagoon (who even gets name-checked).                                                               

BECOMING PTS 1-2 (F) -- Joss Whedon both writes and directs the season finale here as he did for Season One, but the results are just decent. Since Jenny's death in PASSION, the show teased viewers with the possibility that Buffy's gang would find the teacher's research as to how to restore the human soul to Angel. So of course they find it, in just such a way as to conflict with Buffy's determination to end the threat of Angelus for good.  The audience gets a look at Angel's pre-vampire existence, before he's turned by Darla, a female vamp from the first episode. Kendra returns, but only to die in Part 1, setting up the appearance of Faith in Season 3. Angelus wants to unleash a demon that will consign the human world to a hell-dimension, but this is a doom too far for Spike. The limey vamp helps Buffy contend with Angelus so that he Spike can escape with his love Drusilla, which may or may not have been meant to presage Spike's return to the series later on. A minor character named Whistler, described (without explanation) as a "good demon," serves to provide extra exposition but nothing else. The episode includes Joyce forbidding her daughter from Slayage, and this plays into the final scene of a traumatized Buffy departing Sunnydale.   

THE GATES OF HELL TRILOGY (1980-81)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: (1) *fair* (2,3) *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*                                                                                                                                                 I saw all three of these haunted-house/zombie films separately but this was the first time I watched them together, to see if they justified their alleged connections to the Lovecraftian cosmos. While it's true that director/co-writer Lucio Fulci worked in some references to HPL, Fulci's emphasis on gore and the walking dead doesn't resemble much in that author's work. I didn't get a very favorable impression of this trilogy the first time around, and I didn't find too much more worth commentary this time either.                               

 CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD is the strongest offering, and the most Lovecraftian. In HPL's story THE DUNWICH HORROR, the residents of the fictional Massachusetts town of Dunwich are besieged by various evil phenomena, brought about by foul humans who open a gate to the world of the elder god Yog-Sothoth. In CITY, an evil priest in Dunwich sacrifices his own life in order to open the gates of hell and allow the living dead to enter the earth-realm. While the rural residents are suffering various weird phenomena, in New York a psychic named Mary (Catriona MacColl, who stars in all three of these movies) perceives the threat but is so overwhelmed that she's paralyzed and is believed to be dead. Fulci later follows up on this bravura opening scene by having Mary revive just after having been partly buried in a coffin. By dumb luck, reporter Peter (Christopher George) became interested in Mary's peculiar demise and happens to be at the cemetery when Mary revives, so that he's able to free her. She then dragoons him into helping her travel to Dunwich (supposedly built over what used to be Salem!) so that they can prevent the evil priest's handiwork. Fulci throws a variety of other characters, none of whom are as sympathetic as Mary and Peter, though I wondered where Fulci was going when he has a mental patient named Sandra confess to incest fantasies. But pretty much everyone is set up to be the victim of various gory deaths. They're well enough done but the only involving aspect of the story is the quest of Mary and Peter to stop a catastrophe. It helps that George and MacColl have better chemistry than MacColl has with her other co-stars.                                                                                   

  THE BEYOND recapitulates roughly the same scheme. In 1927, a diabolical painter creating a door to hell within a room in a New Orleans hotel (one of seven, though the characters all talk as though one is enough to unleash the living dead onto earth). A vigilante group kills the demon-worshipper but of course he's managed to set the wheels in motion. In 1981 ownership of the hotel is bequeathed to Liza (MacColl) and she attempts to fix up the building to make it a going concern. A woman with white eyes, seen in 1927 reading an occult book, appears in the hotel and workers start getting injured or killed. Then Liza meets Emily, a white-eyed woman with a guide dog. Is she the descendant of the 1927 woman? Who knows? In the end everyone's just being set up for a gory execution, and the only Lovecraftian element is the name of the aforementioned occult book-- which I'll come back to later.                                                                

Despite Fulci's public statement that he meant to give HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY a Lovecraftian vibe, I saw nothing reminiscent of HPL or of Henry James, whose TURN OF THE SCREW gets quoted at the film's conclusion. HOUSE is the most like a standard haunted-house tale, though I must admit that the "haunt" is not anything like your typical ghost. Lucy (MacColl) moves, along with husband Norman and small son Bob, to a Massachusetts mansion without knowing anything of its heinous history. The "rise of the dead" is limited to a strange girl-ghost-child who befriends Bob, and whom no one else sees. However, the killer lurking in the mansion and intermittently offing victims isn't precisely the walking dead. He's the former occupant of the house, the comically named Doctor Freudstein, and he has kept himself alive by harvesting blood cells from his prey. (He has a no-face look thar might remind one of the then-current slasher-killers, one of whom Fulci would essay in his 1982 NEW YORK RIPPER.) The victims this time are more sympathetic than those of THE BEYOND but their awful fates seem a fait accompli.

                                                                                                              As for the occult book mentioned in THE BEYOND, it's named "Eibon," and I have no doubt that Fulci or a co-writer got the name from some HPL story. However, there's a slight irony in Fulci's use of the name. The book was invented by HPL's fellow writer and correspondent Clark Ashton Smith, who gave HPL permission to name-check this particular magic tome in HPL's stories of his elder-god cosmos, probably because HPL had initiated the basic idea that Smith was emulating. Now, Smith's baroque fantasy-stories were at their most extreme never as gory as a standard Fulci film. But quite a few Smith stories deal with the same tropes seen in this trilogy: the menace of living corpses, described with considerable delectation, or of victims condemned to dwell in the twilight of an undead existence. But it's probably not likely that Fulci knew anything about CAS, so the confluence of zombies is at best a synchronicity.               

WHITE PONGO (1945)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological*                                                                                                                                            There can be little doubt that I've wasted considerable time researching the genesis of this "girl and gorilla" potboiler, but once I learned that there had been two "white gorilla" movies that came out in 1945, I felt compelled to look into their possible relationships. Here's what I posted on Classic Horror Film Board after getting input from the scholarly folks thereabouts.                                                                                                                                     "So in August 1944 Sig Neufeld announces that because PRC's NABONGA is a success he's going to do a movie called "White Gorilla," directed like NABONGA by Sig's brother Sam. But apparently before PONGO gets made, Louis Weiss and Harry Fraser dust off some of the footage of 1927's silent PERILS OF THE JUNGLE (which Fraser wrote, and which appears to have had no white gorillas) and combine it with new footage, with Ray Corrigan of NABONGA playing both a hunter and a white ape, all of which I think hit theaters before Neufeld's WHITE PONGO. Contrary to my early impression, a squib on Wiki says that WHITE GORILLA did make money, Then PONGO comes out in October 1945, according to the Wiki writeup, with Corrigan playing Pongo (whose name almost rhymes with "Nabonga"). One online reviewer says that the same white gorilla suit was worn by Corrigan in both movies, though I don't know you'd prove that, and that it later showed up in Jerry Warren's MAN BEAST."                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 After sorting all that out, though, what do we have in producer Neufeld's follow up to NABONGA, which I found moderately engaging even though it too was a potboiler?  Well, PONGO's not even a "trash classic," though it does have its share of oddball details.                                                                           

  The main deficit of PONGO is that even for a jungle-bungle flick, it's saddled with a thoroughly boring set of stock characters, with only the sole billed actress Maris Wrixton managing to put across a little strong emotion. Here's the setup, which I will relate chronologically instead of the piecemeal way director Sam Newfield tells it.  At some point prior to the action of the film, an anthropologist named Dierdorf sets up a station in the Belgian Congo, hoping to capture the fabled albino gorilla White Pongo, which Dierdorf thinks is the missing link between man and ape. Dierdorf captures Pongo but the ape breaks free and kills him, though Dierdorf's assistant Gerig escapes, only to be caught by a local tribe. (Weirdly, they're called "Negritos," which is a term that is probably verboten today but was formerly applied to tribes from Southeast Asia.) Gerig, whom the tribesmen don't seem in a hurry to execute, tells part of his story to a younger explorer, Gunderson, whom the natives do earmark for sacrifice. Gerig helps Gunderson escape with a diary containing Dierdorf's research. On his way out, Gunderson witnesses the Pongo himself as the gorilla assaults a Black couple who have a chimp on a leash. The Africans flee and we see Pongo take the leashed chimp away. One assumes the object of Pongo's intervention was anthropoid liberation, though since we never see the chimp again, he might have given up captivity to become a tasty morsel for a cannibal ape.                                                 

  Providentially, Gunderson makes it to a settlement but dies of fever, serving only to place the diary in the hands of a group of European explorers. An upper-crust Brit anthropologist, Sir Harry, decides to take his merry band and seek out Dierdorf's enclave in the hope of capturing the missing link-- though until the movie's end, no one in the film ever offers a reason as to why they believe an albino gorilla would be such a link. So, even though the expedition didn't necessarily come to Africa to hunt gorillas, off they go loaded for ape-- Sir Harry, his daughter Pam (Wrixton), his snooty secretary Clive, a German jungle-guide, a comedy relief, another convenient anthropologist, and a hired gun named Bishop (Richard Fraser), who would've been the male lead if the film wasn't primarily about Pongo. That said, Pam provides the only thing like dramatic tension as the group tediously treks toward its destination. Though she has apparently at least dated Clive somewhat, she becomes very smitten by Bishop, though he pretends not to reciprocate. Sir Harry makes clear that he doesn't approve of his daughter making up to a man of the lower class. Eventually the party crosses path with the same "Negritos" who are still holding Gerig prisoner, and Gerig tells them everything that he didn't already tell Gunderson.                                           

  Once the expedition reaches the deserted Dierdorf compound, they set a trap for Pongo. In one of the script's few good details, they're assured that Pongo will show up, because the late scientist planted some sort of rare gorilla-goody vegetation in the area. Pongo does show up and pokes around the compound while everyone's asleep, though he wakes Pam, who sees him and screams. Despite the fact that everyone there is counting on Pongo to show up, for some reason they all think she just imagined the critter. Slightly later, Pam makes an all-out play for Bishop, to which he finally surrenders, moments before Clive walks in and the two men fight, very briefly. However, a new threat manifests as the German guide, with Clive as his ally, takes everyone prisoner and ties them up, for he only went along with the expedition to make his way to a cache of jungle-gold. Clive and the guide take Pam as a hostage, but once they're gone Bishop gets free and reveals that he's a Rhodesian agent who's been trying to find the party guilty of some earlier murders. But Bishop doesn't get to square off with the two rotters. That's left up to Pongo, who kills the bad guys and makes off with Pam. She's spared from the fate worse than death by yet a regular-hued gorilla who apparently also wants some human nookie. The fight between the two apes-- the only fairly lively part of the movie-- ends with Pongo's victory, but he's apparently weakened enough by the fight that the explorers manage to overcome him with nothing more than a gunshot to the shoulder. Pongo is taken prisoner and presumably gets shipped back to Europe for study in the thoroughly anti-climactic ending.                                                                                                                                                                                                And then, in the final ten minutes of the film, someone advances that they've tested Pongo's intelligence (how?) and determined that he's smarter than your average ape, so that proves that he is the missing link to man. Or at least maybe a recapitulation of whatever freak of nature led to such an evolutionary leap in antiquity? Who knows? No one ever states that the gorilla is smarter because he has white hair, but it's impossible not to imagine some sort of rough correlation on the part of the writer. The trope of the dueling beasts, who loosely mirror the conflict of the contentious human males for the sole female, is a little more rewarding, but only a little. For what it's worth THE WHITE GORILLA, cut-and-paste job though it was, captured a little more pulp-poetry at its conclusion.