ULTIMATE AVENGERS 2 (2006)

 

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

Whereas ULTIMATE AVENGERS was just a pedestrian failure, ULTIMATE AVENGERS 2-- released a few months later during the same year and written by the same writing-team-- is more the "interesting failure." The first film, allegedly based on Marvel's ULTIMATE AVENGERS comics-franchise, was concerned only with setting up its version of "how the Avengers came together," here consisting of Thor, Iron Man, Captain America, Black Widow, Hulk, Giant-Man and Wasp. But this time the writers made an attempt, however clumsy, to emulate the emotional melodrama of Marvel Comics-- which is more than a lot of the live-action iterations have tried to do.

 Some of the melodramatic setups seem more like excuses to get some of the cast-members out of the way. Since the first movie showed Bruce Banner getting in dutch with SHIELD for transforming himself into his emerald alter-ego, in Part 2 Banner's been locked down in a containment cube while a SHIELD doctor questions him. This effectively keeps Hulk out of the action till near the end. Thor isn't much different. The thunder-god spends a lot of time quarreling with his all-father about hanging out with humans too much, only to pitch in at the climax. Iron Man's about the same narcissist as always, and Black Widow tries to play den-mother to the group, but suddenly Captain America becomes obsessed with crusading to distract himself from time-displacement. This idea could have been done well, but once the main conflict-- another invasion by those dull ET-evildoers the Chitauri-- Cap's inner crisis gets kicked to the curb. For no particular reason Giant-Man becomes a snark-meister, alienating his wasp-winged girlfriend-- perhaps because this series lacked a Hawkeye for that function?

On top of all that, an eighth potential Avenger comes into the mix: the Black Panther. The hero's new origin is at least less encumbered than the one from the MCU's 2018 movie, bringing in a potentially good conflict between the reactionary attitudes of the Panther's subjects and the Panther's relative commitment to interaction with the First World countries. This time T'Challa attains the kingship thanks to a shapechanging Chitauri who spends most of the film looking like a leftover Nazi officer. The explanation for this peculiar affectation is that during the Chitauri's covert involvement during WWII, the shapechanger took the identity of a Nazi officer named Kleisser, in which form he killed Captain America's partner Bucky. There's no explanation as to why "Kleisser" continues to look like a Gestapo chief sixty-something years later, when he kills T'Challa's father. The extrinsic reason for the nasty-Nazi guise is to keep reminding viewers that he's the same entity on whom both Cap and the Panther desire vengeance-- though when they finally do, it's very underwhelming, even when the Panther's. inexplicably acquired the ability to morph into a panther-man shape.

At least I know what the writers were going for with giving two heroes the same enemy. But I have no clue as to what they were going for by making Giant-Man an overly critical douchebag. He rails on The Wasp, possibly because she's funding his research with her superior wealth and he resents that he needs her help. But again, this melodramatic point is just dropped later so that the character can undergo a sacrificial death. On top of all that, the action scenes are mediocre. The only standout moment occurs when Wasp, using some hyped-up strength, actually slams her way through a squamous Chitauri body and kills the ET dead.     

     

HULK AND THE AGENTS OF SMASH, SEASON ONE (2013-14)

 

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

Both this TV cartoon and AVENGERS ASSEMBLE were launched in 2013, the year after the MCU culminated its "Phase One" sequence of films with THE AVENGERS. Both animated serials followed the template of the MCU AVENGERS in terms of mixing heavy-action sequences with lots of comedy relief-- as indeed the Classic Marvel comics had. ASSEMBLE enjoyed six seasons while SMASH only got two. But with the former show, credited to showrunner "Man of Action," ended up producing a show with merely superficial humor and characterization-- unintentionally presaging the rot that would overtake the live-action MCU by Phase Three. With the latter program, showrunners Paul Dini and Henry Gilroy accomplished more in two seasons than Man of Action could have done with twice as many episodes. In short, Dini and Gilroy captured the fun of early Marvel comics.

Though both shows were free to pick and choose from the vast array of heroes and villains in Marvel's complex continuity, SMASH has much more fun with their choices, while with ASSEMBLE, every reference feels a lot like homework (a common complaint about the later MCU, by the way). What most surprised me about SMASH was how interesting they made all the HULK continuity from the 21st century iterations, few of which I've visited. Naturally a cartoon made for commercial TV had to change some things. SMASH's Red Hulk, though he has the same basic origin as the comics-version, is much less of a physical threat, while the barbaric powerhouse Skaar is not literally the Hulk's progeny, though there's a loose figurative filial relationship between the two. In the comics Hulk's perennial sidekick Rick Jones was only briefly changed into the monstrous "A-Bomb," but the cartoon's A-Bomb is more of a juvenile joker as well as a hypester, turning his exploits with the SMASH team into the stuff of podcasts. She-Hulk stays pretty much the same, strong and sassy, while the Big Green Guy manages to be a "smart Hulk" who doesn't come off as a cloying castration of the original hero's monstrous appeal.

I won't review all 26 episodes of SMASH's first season, for though I enjoyed them all, they could be fairly criticized for a certain sameness. Their best feature is, as I said above, the writers' ability to peg particular parts of the Marvel mythology and give them added appeal. I can't exactly quantify what SMASH does right and ASSEMBLE does wrong, except to say that the choices of SMASH don't seem nearly as predictable. For instance, thanks to a time-travel jaunt, the Hulk, a sixties co-creation of Jack Kirby, brings back to his time a big crimson dino called Devil Dinosaur to serve s pet-- the original "Devil" having been one of Kirby's 1970s creations. I enjoyed the episode "Deathlok" less for the presence of the titular cyborg hero than for the fact that the evildoers were the shapechanging Skrulls, whom the MCU tried to recast as some sort of put-upon marginalized alien race. And then there's "The Hunted," in which the Not So Jolly Green Giant gets stranded on Marvel's version of Monster Island, which plays host to over a dozen weird creatures culled from Marvel's "monster books" of the 1950s and 1960s. Of course, a lot of ideas don't work at all, like a bizarre plotline in which the ADD-afflicted A-Bomb tries to study the mystic arts under Doctor Strange. But usually even the episodes with hokey plotlines have some funny bits in them. Voicework is uniformly fine, with the standouts being Fred Tatasciore as Green Hulk, Clancy Brown as Red Hulk, and Eliza Dushku as "Too Sexy for Your Party" She-Hulk.

                 

BEVERLY HILLS VAMP (1989)

 

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

I don't know the genesis of the above poster, showing VAMP's star Eddie Deezen flinging open the coffin of a hot blonde vampiress, only to find her covered in bath-suds. However, it's cleverer than anything in the movie. And while the vampire-babe in the poster is certainly not based on the appearance of fifty-something costar Britt Ekland, the bit with a girl covered in suds is the sort of sexploitation that Ekland could have performed in her 1960s prime.

So three young guys come to Hollywood hoping to make movies, Kyle (Deezen) and his two buddies, Dope One and Dope Two-- whom I refuse to distinguish from one another since the writer and the director (Ernest Farino and the notorious Fred Olen Ray) did not do so. The three schmucks take a brief meeting with a low-rent producer, Pendleton (Jay Richardson), simply because he's Dope One's uncle, and he sends them off with a pat on the head. While in the glamor capital of the world, the Two Dopes get the idea to buy some glamor at a Beverly Hills brothel. Although Kyle has a steady girlfriend back home, he allows himself to be talked into going along.

  The brothel they choose, however, is that of Madame Cassandra (Ekland), and she has three sexy pros in her entourage (Michelle Bauer, Jillian Kesner, and Debra Lamb). However, all four femmes are vampires, the only other occupant of Cassandra's cheap-looking bordello being a gay major domo. After some pleasantries, the Two Dopes go off with their bedmates. Kyle however resists being seduced for vague reasons, and he manages to get away. The next day he realizes that the Dopes haven't come back to the motel room, and yadda yadda: stuff happens and eventually Kyle teams up with Uncle Pendleton to infiltrate the brothel and defeat the evil lady vamps, in order to save the Two Dopes. 

I commented in my review of HAUNTING FEAR that usually director Ray's main concern with his narrative was as an excuse to have his stock company players strut their stuff, and that's true here not only of Richardson and the three young sexy things, but also of guest stars like Robert Quarry and Dawn Wildsmith. Writer Farino was mostly an FX guy, and only wrote three movie-scripts, this one, a tough-cop flick I've not seen, and WIZARDS OF THE DEMON SWORD, which according to this blog holds the record as Ray's worst film. Clearly Ray depended on the sexy women to sell the film, and he provides ample footage to justify that "high" concept. The girls, Deezen and Richardson are the film's only assets, as well as maybe one or two jokes that actually land, as opposed to the dozens that are terrible.        

On this blog I've sometimes stated that such-and-such a movie had a good idea that went unused. That's not the case here; Ray and Farino have no ideas beyond "vampire brothel=lots of sex scenes." If anything, they deliberately screw up their own parameters. All we know about Madame Cassandra-- technically the focal icon of the story-- is that she set up her operation in Beverly Hills and immediately got some sort of protection from the local cops. The whole idea of doing so implies that the vamp-hookers are going to prey on customers while the cops cover up the disappearances. Yet the movie opens with scenes of two hot vamps chowing down on a couple of officers. And toward the movie's end, Cassandra has killed (offscreen) the chief of police with whom she made her contract. Such actions seem not only counter-intuitive, they kind of imply that the hot vamp babes weren't able to draw in enough regular johns to satisfy their blood-hunger. In a similarly stupid scene, Cassandra mesmerizes Kyle so that he can't run away. Then she natters with one of the hookers, the one who intends to fang Kyle, until Kyle regains his senses and escapes. I can understand filmmakers thinking they're smarter than their audience when they serve up schlock. But it takes a special level of incompetence not even to be able to get schlock right.      

    

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, SEASON FOUR (1999-2000)

 

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

College is a time for reassessing priorities, and while a Slayer can't change a lot about her life, her show can. Angel is gone from the regular cast (though he makes two appearances this season to hype his new show), and Seth Green's Oz will also depart soon, as old character Spike and new character Riley Finn assume greater importance. I'd generalize that there aren't as many high-mythicity episodes this season as in Three.

THE FRESHMAN (P)-- Buffy, Willow and Oz commence classes at Sunnydale U while Xander joins the workforce, and Giles spends the rest of the season unemployed but not hurting for money. Recurring characters Riley Finn and Maggie Walsh are introduced, as is a new clutch of young vampires led by a sardonic blonde, Sunday. Buffy's trouncing of the vamps is probably the only thing in her comfort zone. For most of the season Mama Joyce is usually out of the picture.

LIVING CONDITIONS (P)-- Buffy's first experience with a dorm-mate is something less than positive, as she and fellow college roomie Kathy Newman get on each others' nerves. Conveniently, Kathy proves to be a demon. Once she's out of the way, Willow moves in with Buffy.      

THE HARSH LIGHT OF DAY (F)-- Buffy, on the rebound from Angel, becomes invested in a new guy, Parker, but he turns out to be a "love-and-leave-'em" type. Anya returns and has immediate success in seducing Xander, as well as adding to the show an acidulous attitude even more penetrating than that of Cordelia. Willow encounters former Cordette Harmoney, and learns what viewers observed at the end of Season 3; that Harmony's become a vampire, albeit an incompetent one dependent on the help of her new boyfriend, Spike. He's back in town looking for the Gem of Amara, a talisman that can immunize vampires from their usual weaknesses. Once he has it, he engages Buffy in a big daytime brawl on the campus, which goes totally unnoticed by students and faculty. Buffy relieves Spike of the ring and he flees. The ring later turns up on an episode of ANGEL in its first season.

FEAR ITSELF (P)-- The Scoobies get trapped in a Halloween party whose terrors are real, thanks to a fear-demon named Gachnar. Yes, it's just another make-work menace, but at least there's further development of Willow's witchy ways.

BEER BAD (F)-- Like "Band Candy," "Beer Bad" depends on a make-work menace but the chaos unleashed by the dubious evildoer provides more than average amusement. Buffy, her ego bruised by having been conned into bed by Parker, begins hanging out in the college bar with fellow students (all male) who drink a lot of beer. However, the bartender hates snotty collegians and puts a spell on the beer, so that anyone who drinks it begins to regress to a caveman (or cavewoman) level of intelligence. Gellar in particular gets to shine with her walk on the primeval side. And while there are various remarks about men being concerned only with sexual conquest even when not reverted to cavemen, the script plays fair. For the only time in the series, Cave-Buffy evinces an attraction to Xander, indicating that she's not insensible to his charms but can't relate when she's in her "normal" persona; only when her sexual inhibitions are lowered.

WILD AT HEART (F)-- Earlier episodes hinted at the underground militia known as The Initiative, but they finally take center stage when they find and abduct Spike. A scientist with this monster-capturing operation fits Spike with a brain-chip that causes him pain any time he attacks humans, and though Spike will escape the installation, he'll remain largely "neutered" for the remainder of the season, allowing for much entertainment value. This subplot is better than the main one, in which Oz feels a soul-connection to Veruca, singer in another youth band, causing Willow considerable pain before any of them learn that Veruca too is a werewolf. Veruca dies and Oz almost kills Willow, so Oz leaves the college, determined not to return until he finds a way to cancel his curse.

 
THE INITIATIVE (F)-- The other shoe drops, revealing that Professor Walsh is one of the heads of the government's secret installation beneath Sunnydale, while Riley and some of his college-buds are soldiers serving the cause. Spike escapes captivity and when he goes looking for Buffy, he finds and tries to fang Willow. He then finds he can't attack her, which Willow initially interprets as disinterest, resulting in the two enemies having a weird conversation about the vampiric version of erectile dysfunction.

PANGS (G)-- The Buffy Gang celebrates its first Thanksgiving gathering (still with Joyce off somewhere), though Willow, channeling her collegian mother, complains that the holiday falsifies the truth about Native American genocide by Euro-colonists. Buffy however wants a proper holiday observance to give her a sense of continuity with her new family. Angel comes to town, having been told by an oracle that Buffy may be in danger-- a prophecy confirmed by the manifestation of the ghosts of several Chumash Indians, massacred by the Sunnydale colonists of the period. (One of the ghosts' signal habits is to cut off the ears of victims; I'll bet that the script originally meant to reference "scalps" but backed off the image due to political sensitivities.) Spike invites himself to the Thanksgiving dinner in order to avoid Initiative pursuit and the Scoobies force themselves to tolerate him to learn more about his former captors. Spike is also vital to counteracting Willow's sentimentalization of the savage ghosts, and she soon learns that good intentions don't mean much in a struggle for life. Angel almost succeeds in concealing his presence from Buffy.

SOMETHING BLUE (G)-- Willow's as fragile from Oz's leavetaking as Buffy was from having slept with Parker, but the young witch shows greater propensity for letting her emotions go haywire. The Scoobies contemplate performing a truth spell to get more information out of Spike, who makes the most of his being an unwelcome houseguest. Willow instead performs a spell which she thinks will make her pain go away, but instead it causes reality to change in line with any random thing she asserts. The outstanding effect is that one of Willow's unserious remarks results in Buffy and Spike believing that they've fallen deeply in love with one another, with all the attendant wild humor of that situation. Later the false relationship between the enemies will take on real ramifications.

HUSH (G)-- The usual concerns continue-- Riley and Buffy becoming more intimate, Spike being a rotten guest to both Giles and Xander-- while for her part Willow befriends a fellow collegian interested in Wicca: Tara McClay. This sets up Willow's swing toward the Isle of Lesbos for the rest of the season, but the predominant menace is that of demons who look like skull-faced morticians, the Gentlemen. These creatures enforce a spell of silence over Sunnydale because the only thing that can dispel them is a female scream. After much use of mimed gestures and visual aids, the Gentlemen are defeated, and Buffy and Riley find out about their respective demon-hunting agendas.

DOOMED (F)-- Buffy and Riley come clean with each other, but Buffy's reluctant to continue a doomed relationship. Earthquakes strike Sunnydale, a foretaste of yet another demon-inspired apocalypse. While the Scoobies seek to learn the threat's nature, Spike is so despondent at his impotence that he tries to kill himself. Drawn into a fight, Spike exults to learn that his brain-chip doesn't keep him from beating down demons. Though he'll later betray the Scoobies in this season, he shows indications of becoming somewhat bonded to them as he never was to his fellow vamps.

 

  A NEW MAN (F)-- Ethan Rayne makes another of his peripatetic visits, and this time he enchants Giles into changing into a huge horned demon, apparently hoping that the Slayer will kill Giles. In this form Giles can only speak a demon-language, and no one can understand him but Spike. The Spike-Giles scenes are the highlight of this so-so episode.

THE I IN TEAM/GOODBYE IOWA (G)-- These two episodes offer a very delayed introduction to the season's "Big Bad," the cyborg-demon amalgam Adam, created in the Initiative's laboratories by the obsessed Maggie Walsh. Buffy is invited to visit the Initiative and to coordinate her demon-hunting with the government's, though Walsh has her own agenda. Walsh sets up Buffy to be killed but fails, after which Walsh's creation slays her out of hand. When Buffy and Xander infiltrate the Initiative, they and Riley are confronted by Adam who wounds Riley and escapes. Adam's precise motives for creating death and chaos seem to be an extension of the scientific outlook that created him: he does it just because he can.

THIS YEAR'S GIRL/WHO ARE YOU? (G)-- Faith wakes up from her coma and learns how the Scoobies killed the Mayor. She seeks out Buffy and fights her, but Faith is forced to break off when police arrive. It's not clear why the police have a file on Faith, though the Council may have been involved after their own failure to imprison the rogue slayer. To Faith's good fortune, the Mayor left her a mystic trinket that enables Faith to "hide in plain sight" by switching bodies with Buffy. Thus Buffy/Faith is taken prisoner, first by the police, and then by the Watchers' Council, while Faith/Buffy has a good time assuming Buffy's role. However, Faith isn't able to restrain her ruder tendencies, and witchy Tara immediately senses something wrong. While Buffy/Faith escapes the Council and seeks to convince Giles of the truth, Faith/Buffy cons Riley into sleeping with her. Contrary to expectations, Faith doesn't enjoy the deception, and she plans to leave Sunnydale. Providentially Adam unleashes a gang of vampires upon a local church, probably as another experiment. Real Buffy responds by seeking to save the innocents, but so does Real Faith, having become seduced by the allure of being a hero. Once the vampires are finished off, the two Slayers fight again, and with the help of a witch-doohickey Real Buffy recovers her own body and Real Faith is consigned to her own, as well as to the gnawing discontent with her own corrupted soul.

SUPERSTAR (P)-- Once again, a lightweight episode follows several heavy-drama stories. Jonathan, the aggrieved nerd from "Earshot," gets hold of a magic spell that alters reality, so that he is everyone's hero and all the Scoobies defer to him, believing that he's always been the best of them. Eventually Buffy's iron will exposes the truth. I suppose the scenario might be a satire of "Mary Sue" fanfiction, in which an author inserts an idealized version of him/herself into some commercial property. It's still a slog.

                                                 

 WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE (P)-- What, another haunted-house party, in the same season? Granted, this time the make-work menace creates chaos by taking advantage of the sexual fireworks between Buffy and Riley once they reconcile. But it's still just a parade of disparate horrors, just like "Fear Itself."

NEW MOON RISING/ YOKO FACTOR (F)-- Though the gay relationship between Willow and Tara has largely been implicit, it takes center stage here as Oz returns to college, claiming that he's conquered his werewolf transformations with meditative spells. However, Willow finds herself tugged between an old love and a new one, and Oz soon finds that emotional turmoil brings out the beast in him. Meanwhile, Spike wants the removal of his chip so badly that he offers his services to Adam, which might be deemed the show's first "super-villain team-up." In "Yoko" Spike tries to undermine the Scoobies by telling each of them that others talked trash about him/her, which does elicit a major falling-out. Angel also comes back to Sunnydale, trying to make amends for a quarrel he had with Buffy in an ANGEL episode. He and Riley experience hate at first sight and duke it out. 

PRIMEVAL (G)-- Buffy exposes Spike's chicanery and decides that she and the Scoobies must make a frontal assault on the Initiative, where Adam has once more inserted himself. Buffy's only chance to take down Adam is if Willow and the others invoke an "enjoining spell" which taps into the powers that first created the Slayers. After the Scoobies enter the base, soldiers capture them and take them before their commander. Buffy takes aim against the mechanistic outlook of the government, telling the commander "you're all messing with primeval forces you can't begin to understand." In due time Buffy squares off against Adam and her magical power-boost allows her to destroy him. Spike then renders some minor aid to the Scoobies to ingratiate himself, but his status is left up in the air in the season finale.

RESTLESS (P)-- Buffy goes Dada! I realize that the writers were probably all tired from juggling so many balls, but a series of loony dreams did not suffice for a big finish. Buffy, Willow, Xander and Giles are besieged by chaotic dreams due to their having tampered with the mystic forces behind the First Slayer. The content of the dreams is generally superficial, except Buffy's, since this seems to be her first encounter with the archaic but still vague mythos Whedon created for her. This and one previous episode allude to the introduction of a new character in Season Five: Buffy's kid sister Dawn, who is inserted into their continuity much as Jonathan rewrote their history in "Superstar."

              

OLIVIA (1981)

 

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

After the success of 1980's THE BOOGIE MAN, writer-director Ulli Lommel and his wife/muse Suzanna Love began investing considerable energies into producing commercial horror/sf movies. While scouting locations for a potential BOOGIE MAN sequel, Lommel became fascinated with the former London Bridge, which in 1971 had been disassembled and rebuilt across the Colorado River in Arizona, so he and John T. March collaborated on the script for OLIVIA, with Love in the titular role. According to a recent packager, Vinegar Syndrome, OLIVIA did receive some limited screenings as early as 1981 though most references claim it was delayed until 1983. 

Whereas Lommel's script for BOOGIE MAN was relatively layered, OLIVIA's scenario wanders about too much to have much impact. The movie's been called a low-rent VERTIGO, but it has more in common with 1971's HANDS OF THE RIPPER. I don't suggest that Lommel copied that film; only that he pursued a similar strategy in using a "repetition-compulsion" scenario to motivate a female psycho-killer. In both RIPPER and OLIVIA, a female child sees her mother murdered by a killer, and as an adult she becomes a psycho-killer, implicitly identifying with the murderer's power to take life, rather than the victim who suffers and dies.

Olivia (Love) vacillates a bit more than the character in RIPPER, possibly because before dying, Olivia's mother gives her ambivalent advice in the form of the "Rapunzel" fairy tale, claiming that the tale's moral is that princesses will always be rescued by noble princes. Unfortunately, Olivia's mother is a prostitute, and one of her johns asks her to handcuff him for sadomasochistic play. The mother makes the mistake of releasing the john too soon, and he kills her, afterward concealing the crime by tossing the mother's body off London Bridge into the Thames River. Olivia witnesses all of these things but it's not clear if the killer is ever apprehended. Fifteen years later, Olivia has married a conservative man, Richard, who refuses to let her work outside the house (thus keeping her in a "prison tower" a la Rapunzel). Olivia hears her mother's voice and ends up dressing like a prostitute. She entices a customer to take her to his home and replays the sadomasochistic scenario, but with the more desirable ending where she kills the john.

But victims of repetition-compulsion can never find complete satisfaction. Olivia goes out again, and this time she makes a more romantic connection with architect Michael (Robert Walker Jr). He is in London because he's to be involved in the project to disassemble London Bridge and reconstruct it in Arizona. As Olivia continues to see Michael, Richard finds out and confronts the two of them on the aforesaid bridge. The two men scuffle. Richard falls into the Thames, apparently dying in the waters, though no body is found.

Somehow Michael loses track of Olivia, but after he relocates to Arizona after finishing the reconstruction of the bridge there, Olivia turns up there as well. This is where the VERTIGO reference applies: Michael meets Olivia, but she pretends to be an American tour-guide named Jenny. The two strike up a romance once more, but soon it's time for another "return of the repressed," as Bad Richard, who's been off the grid biding his time, makes his way to Olivia's home in Arizona. He kills Michael, disposing of his body off London Bridge as the john did Olivia's mother. He bullies Olivia into compliance, but she waits until he lowers his guard, at which point she murders him with a butcher-knife in the movie's best scene. After a long sequence in which Olivia puts Richard's corpse in a trunk and dumps it in the same river, the film simply ends.

OLIVIA is not as well-constructed a Freudian paradigm compared to HANDS OF THE RIPPER. We know nothing about Olivia's father, so we don't know if Child-Olivia sees the murder of her mother as a fatal version of the "primal scene." The fact that she marries an authoritarian man, though, suggests some complicity in the idea that women should be deferential to men, lest they pay the price for independence by being slain out of hand. The script is a little too lackadaisical to bring forth this sort of symbolism, but arguably similar material appeared a little later when Lommel and his wife collaborated on the script for 1983's DEVONSVILLE TERROR.         

HARLEY QUINN-- SEASON 2 (2020)

 

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

As was the case with my review of Season 1, I still have not read more than a tiny number of the DC comic books that promoted Harley Quinn to starring status. Prior to this review, though, I did listen to a couple of podcasts on the subject. One, by a podcaster known as "JesterBell," asserted that in the early 2000s, DC wanted to engineer a competitor to the runaway success of Marvel's "merc-with-a-mouth" Deadpool, and that the editors chose Harley for that honor. I could not find any other fans advancing this theory, however, but I tend to believe it.

The Deadpool theory at least has some applicability to specific iterations of Harley. Deadpool's raison d'etre is that he's a mercenary who conveniently only kills bad guys and says a lot of goofy things while so doing. Season 1 pursued a similar course for Harley, in that the moment she became estranged from the Joker, she decided that she wanted to become as vicious and violent as he is-- but only toward other Gotham criminals. For a time during Season 1, she wants to become a member of the Legion of Doom, but her rejection there further embitters Harley, and so in Season 2 she becomes obsessed with disposing of the "big guns" of Gotham, such as Riddler, Bane, and Penguin. However, if QUINN's writers ever read Deadpool, they learned nothing of that feature's trademark snarky humor. QUINN's humor is, to repeat a comparison I made before, like that of ROBOT CHICKEN, predicated on loading familiar pop-culture icons with extreme quantities of sex and ultraviolence. Thus the first episode of Season 2 begins with Harley besting the Penguin by biting his nose off, so that the criminal bleeds to death.

  Still, despite the show's girl-boss rhetoric, the stories never really sell-- or even try to sell-- the idea that Harley Quinn possesses some inherent talent to become Gotham's new crime-queenpin, and the fact that most of her crew consists of goofball losers like Clayface and King Shark confirms that impression. If anything, the script suggest that much of her crusade is a deflection from the thing that truly motivates her, the subconscious desire to become entwined with her gal-pal Poison Ivy. Ivy, for her part, has committed herself to marry another loser villain, Kite-Man, though on two or three occasions Ivy and Harley somehow fell into bed together. The consensus is that both of them are repressing their lesbian tendencies, and that their previous dalliances-- one with an amiable idiot, the other with a murderous psychotic-- prove that Girl-on-Girl Power is far more meaningful than the pitfalls of heterosexual entanglement. And though not every female in the QUINN world is a lesbian, one certainly doesn't get any ringing endorsements of male-female encounters. Catwoman's in a few episodes of Season 2, as is Baman, but they never meet, as if alluding to one of the best-known hetero relationships in comic books might muddy the waters for the ideology.

 In the end, both Harley's quest for queenpin-power and her conversion to lesbitude seem forced and superficial. Later in the season she gets the idea to appeal to Darkseid himself to give her enough power to conquer Earth, and the Dark Lord does so, though he requires that she pass a test by duking it out with the gargantuan Granny Goodness. Harley thus spreads untold devastation to Planet Earth, but hey-- it's OK, because she's reacting to her repressed passion for her best gal-pal. Harley's least worshipful acolyte, the dwarfish Doctor Psycho, attempts to undermine Harley by also petitioning Darkseid for power, but in this case, Psycho ends up facilitating the writers' goal of championing the irresistible amour fou of the two super-villainesses.

I can't deny that the animation on HARLEY Season 2 is top-notch, as much as Season 1, and I liked this or that bit of voice-work, like Michael Ironside for Darkseid. But ROBOT CHICKEN's style of humor works because each vignette exploits its shock-value very briefly before moving on to the next target. Within the context of a melodrama about costumed heroes and villains, that style wears out its welcome very quickly. And I absolutely cannot forgive these pinheaded ultraliberal writers sticking an idiotic word like "cis-gender" into the dialogue of a classy villain like Mister Freeze!    

MARRIED WITH CHILDREN: "ONE DOWN, TWO TO GO" (1990)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological* 

This fifth-season episode is one of the more interesting in the "Bundy bonding" department. Contrary to the majority of episodes, this time Al doesn't suffer any major violence or humiliation, and the torment Bud suffers results from his mother giving him a form of humiliation that even husband Al never suffers.

The Al-Kelly relationship takes center stage this time. For the previous four seasons, it's been clear that Kelly is often just as parasitic as both Peg and Bud-- stealing Al's money, putting him in deadly situations, et al. He in turn frequently ignores her, which, as this episode explicitly claims, causes her to seek out casual hookups in the hope that he'll pay her attention and forbid her skanky activities. And Al does at least keep Kelly from messing around in his house, thrashing any boyfriend he catches her with. Of course, this seems more like Al protecting his own domicile, for the sake of his ego, than protecting his daughter to teach her good sense. Not that Kelly humps dozens of guys purely because of daddy issues. Clearly, she just likes sex, and being a hot girl she, unlike Bud, can get laid almost any time she pleases. But in "One," she gets fed up with Al beating up her dates and moves to an apartment. Given Al's many claims of wanting to be free of his whole family, "One Down Two to Go" ought to be his sentiments. Yet a small part of him still likes the idea of being a dad to his daughter, even though he knows the daughter is a lascivious moron. A lot of this sentiment is also driven by Al's egotistical beliefs about his self-image. Yet, when he might be better off doing nothing, Al brings Kelly back home-- albeit to the same status quo that made her leave in the first place. (Actually, Bud puts into Kelly's empty head the idea of demanding her own autonomy at home, which is probably a good reason for her to forget the whole thing.)

Bud pays a heavy price for his encouraging Kelly to leave. As long as Peg has two kids at home, she's able to indulge her own ego and imagine herself as being just as young and attractive as when she snared Al. But once Kelly leaves, Peg-- for the only time in the series, I believe-- becomes intensely invested in Bud's upbringing. She starts smother-mothering him, treating her high school-age son as if he's a small boy-- hugging him over and over, feeding him mashed bananas, and bathing him. She does these things only to feed her fantasy of being young again, and it's one of the few times that the confident Peg seems pathetically needy. In contrast to the co-dependent relationship between Al and Kelly, Peg and Bud usually just ignore each other. In 1990, Peg's temporary psychosis would have strongly resembled those of true smother-mothers like PSYCHO's Norma Bates, seeking to compensate for the lack of sexual gratification by fussing over a growing son. Strangely, Peg isn't nearly as bothered by not getting any action from her husband-- she can always use her deprivation as a weapon to flay Al with-- but the idea that she's not young anymore, and thus not deserving of sexual attention, moves her to quasi-molest her son. But once Kelly's back in the house, Peg's psychosis disappears, because she can once more think herself a young thirty-something. Though Bud doesn't say so, one might imagine that Bud's being tormented by his sister-- from rude remarks to full-on slapstick violence-- is far preferable to being entirely neutered by his mother turning him into a pre-sexual child.

ADDENDUM: I should add that even though both Al and Peg are negligent to both of their kids, they often show favoritism to Kelly because both parents think of themselves as having been "cool kids" in school, and having another cool kid strokes their egos. Bud, the bookish son who often can't get a date, is a nerd and thus they show him statistically greater indifference. That said, on rare occasions Al shows slight concern for Bud's welfare depending on the situation, while Peg almost never shows any sign of caring if he lives or dies.