TARZAN THE MAGNIFICENT (1960); TARZAN GOES TO INDIA (1962)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: (1) *good*, (2) *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

Once again I find myself reviewing two Tarzan flicks in which one's very good and the other's just "eh." Unfortunately as time went on the franchise would turn out more of the latter than the former.

I'm going to do the lesser work first, even though it's second in terms of chronology, just because I feel like getting it out of the way. Director John Guillerman's TARZAN GOES TO INDIA registers as a huge disappointment alongside the same director's excellent TARZAN'S GREATEST ADVENTURE, even though the director once again shot the ape-man's adventures on colorful location-settings.

Theoretically the setting in an Indian jungle should have sparked the creativity of the writers (one of whom was Guillerman). India has long been a watchword for the wondrous and the exotic, and even Tarzan's long-standing concern with elephants might have been related to Indian beliefs or customs concerning the animals. But INDIA is not much more than a NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC travelogue with a little action interspersed.

The plot is as predictably simple as the hoary ivory-hunter schtick from the 30s films. Tarzan, who just happens to be friends with a Maharajah, is called to India for his elephant-expertise. The Indian government has given an engineering company permission to construct a new hydroelectric dam in a certain valley, in order to bring the prosperity of progress to the locals. Unfortunately, some 300 elephants dwell in the valley, and they'll all be drowned when the dam's building inundates the valley. There's one way that Tarzan and his allies (a young boy named "Jai," and the Maharajah's daughter) can lead the elephants out of the valley, but it means trampling some of the construction-work of the engineers. Most of the engineers, with the exception of heavy Brice (Leo Gordon), don't want to kill elephants (nothing is said of other animals in the valley) but they're desperately trying to finish the dam before the monsoon season, so human progress comes first. Tarzan has a handful of episode encounters with local wildlife (such as a nice struggle with a cobra) before he leads his allies and the elephant-herd through the engineer's construction to safety. Then, with a nod to the importance of progress, he and his allies help the engineers rebuild, and everyone's happy but the villain Brice, who gets killed earlier.

There's nothing horribly wrong with INDIA; it's just flat, as are most of the actors' performances. Jock Mahoney's first of two performances of Tarzan is adequate, but he doesn't quite pull off Gordon Scott's steely-eyed glare at the film's villain. None of the one-shot characters are very interesting, though the character of Jai (played by an Indian actor of the same name) seems to be an early template for another Jai, a support-character played by Manuel Padilla Jr. in the 1966-69 Tarzan teleseries.

Moving a little backwards, TARZAN THE MAGNIFICENT, directed and partly written by long-time journeyman Robert Day, seems to pattern the look of MAGNIFICENT on Guillerman's ADVENTURE. For the last time Gordon Scott plays a Tarzan who sweats and gets wounded, as well as speaking complete sentences. As seen before in TARZAN AND THE LOST SAFARI, once again Tarzan becomes saddled with leading a group of mostly-helpless civilized types from one African spot to another, though the ape-man is primarly concerned with getting fugitive raider Coy Banton to justice. Tarzan's "Stagecoach"-style retinue is made up of pretty stock figures: a comely young woman, a disgraced doctor, a engineer (albeit an educated black man, whom Tarzan says is the only one he *wants* coming along), and a couple with a troubled marriage. The husband, Mr. Ames (Lionel Jeffries) in said couple is the prime source of causing trouble for Tarzan's expedition, as he's a conceited Englishman constantly seeking to prove his virility and usually screwing things up for others. But Tarzan has to take him along for specifically altruistic reasons: because many Africans will lose needed work if Ames' business deal doesn't go through. There's a development the Weismuller films would never have countenanced: Tarzan the Capitalist Stooge!

However, just as STAGECOACH had its motley crew pursued by hostile Indians, Tarzan's group is relentlessly pursued by the raider-family to which Coy belongs: the patriarch Abel Banton (John Carradine) and his three other criminals sons, all heavily-armed expert trackers. To my recollection this is the first time film-Tarzan ever faced a whole family of villains, as opposed to his meeting separate-but-related opponents (as in TARZAN AND THE TRAPPERS) or whole tribes, which are admittedly "extended families." Abel Banton's monomaniacal desire to rescue his favorite son Coy from justice gives him a touch of tragic grandeur, even if he is still a thief and a murderer.

One interesting aspect of the script's construction is how each group manages to lose some members, not just to death (Tate the engineer, two of Banton's sons), but also through disaffection. Mrs. Ames, tormented by her husband's ridiculous braggadocio, falls in love with Coy Banton's charms and releases him so that he'll take her away. Predictably, her action doesn't pan out very well for her. Meanwhile, after two of Abel's four sons have died, the last one in the party walks away from the mission and out of the story. Abel Banton comes very close to dealing out Old-Testament justice upon his offspring, but ultimately refrains. Abel ends up dying shortly after being reunited with his favorite, however. The film climaxes with Tarzan having a brutal battle against Coy Banton atop a rocky crag, a fight which is clearly modeled upon the end-fight in ADVENTURE, and almost as well-executed.

THE BEAST WITH FIVE FINGERS (1946)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*

One interesting similarity between this 1946 film and 1935's MARK OF THE VAMPIRE is that in addition to holding in common the exact same pattern in the categories I list above, both films are also about a character who tries to fake a supernatural visitation, only to be victimized by his fantasy that the supernatural now haunts him. BEAST does proceed to that point a little more logically than MARK does, however.

I read the original "Beast with Five Fingers" short story years ago, but have not reread it for the purpose of this essay. Though I'm sure the filmmakers took some key concepts from the prose tale, one review asserted that the film changed a lot of the details, so I'll approach the BEAST as its own animal.

My discussion necessitates a thorough summary:

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

A rich former pianist, Francis Ingram (Victor Francen), occupies a villa in Italy. A stroke has crippled him, though he still has one strong working hand. His only relatives live in England, but there are still three people in his life: Bruce (Robert Alda), an American living in Italy on his wit and charm, Julie (Andrea King), a young woman engaged to be Ingram's nurse, and Hilary (Peter Lorre), Ingram's secretary, who spends all his times poring over Ingram's library for its recondite occult contents. Despite his age and crippled condition, Ingram falls in love with Julie and wants her to stay with him. However, Julie has an off-again on-again affair with Bruce, which is somewhat in the "off" position as she plans to leave Italy, much to the chagrin of both Bruce and Ingram. During a conversation with the condesceding patriarch, Hilary foolishly reveals to Ingram the affair between Bruce and the woman Ingram now loves. Ingram almost chokes Hilary to death with his good hand, and then fires him. But the same night Ingram, spooked by intimations of death, gets out of bed, roams the halls in his wheelchair and ends up taking a fatal tumble down a flight of stairs.

Soon the late Ingram's greedy relatives show up, expecting a substantial inheritance. One of them smugly tells Hilary that he plans to transport everything in the estate, including Hilary's beloved library, back to England. When the will bequeaths Ingram's entire estate to Julie, the relatives object, and conspire with the family lawyer to contest the will. The next night the lawyer is strangled, and some evidence points to the idea that Ingram's detached hand has assumed a ghostly existence and is out to kill those who contest the will. In due time it comes out that Hilary is faking the existence of a spectral hand so that Julie can keep ownership of the library, since she's favorably disposed to his continuing his studies. However, Julie isn't favorably disposed to murder. She's saved from being killed when Hilary begins to lose his marbles and see the hand of Francis Ingram appearing before him, until it finally strangles him to death-- though the coda reveals that Hilary merely killed himself with his own psychological spectres.

The psychological texture of BEAST-- scripted by Curt Siodmark from the prose tale and directed by Robert Florey-- is much denser than that of Tod Browning's MARK OF THE VAMPIRE. Yet while one can see a faint conformity with the Freudian "Oedipus complex" in MARK-- a conformity which David J. Skal theorized may have been derived from Browning's encounter with Freudian theory-- BEAST seems to play around with Oedipal elements only to take them off in another direction.

In TOTEM AND TABOO Freud theorized that in antiquity aging patriarchs attempted to keep all the young women (possibly including their daughters) to themselves, so that the young man had to rise up and kill the patriarchs to get back the women. Ingram is from one angle just such a "bad father," as was Baron Otto in MARK, although the process by which Ingram falls in love with Julie is given greater development. But though Bruce is Ingram's competition, Ingram and Bruce never exchange any hostilties. Instead Ingram's almost "kills the messenger" when Hilary tells Ingram of the affair, though even before that Bruce remarks that Ingram treats Hilary like dirt. Freud might thus see Bruce as the "favored son" and Hilary as the "son out of favor." This pattern, which may or may not occur in the original short story, was one which Siodmak had invoked independently in his earlier WOLF MAN script.

Yet the Freudian paradigm doesn't work here as well as it does in MARK, or even DEAD MEN WALK. In the Florey-Siodmak scenario, "despised son" Hilary could not care less about the feminine prize coveted by Bruce and Ingram. As noted earlier, Hilary cares only about his astrological research. The purpose of the research is never clearly spelled out but seems to have something to do with forecasting the date of individual deaths. His motive for killing, or attempting to kill, the intruders on his territory is to protect the property he refers to as "his books."

I briefly wondered if the script had been tooled with Peter Lorre in mind. By 1946 Lorre had long since established a vivid history of playing men who were either mad or perverse by societal standards-- M, MAD LOVE, THE MALTESE FALCON. By contrast with the Lorre characters in these narratives, Lorre's Hilary seems utterly asexual. However, an anecdote from Siodmak asserted that he had framed his script with handsome Paul Henreid in mind for the role, not Lorre.

Still, whether the asexuality of Hilary stems from the original story or the film-script, the film-Hilary evinces some fruitful parallels to other horror-film madmen who seem obsessed with gaining some pure, non-utilitarian form of knowledge-- not least of which would be Robert Florey's 1932 "adaptation" of another famed horror-tale: MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE, which invented "Doctor Mirakle" to be its Frankenstein-like rogue-scientist.

Similarly, whereas the transferred hand of MAD LOVE seemed to carry an Oedipal charge, there's no grounds for interpreting the "beast with five fingers" as some phallic substitute. Even though the "beast" never exists outside of Hilary's mind, one might say that Hilary has corrupted the hand of his former master, or at least its image, even as Frankenstein perverts dead bodies. The parallel holds even in terms of the source, for unlike many of Hollywood's bitter crippled characters, Ingram is forbidding but never actually villainous. Hilary alone casts Ingram in the role of supernatural avenger, and Hilary pays the price for this presumption.

Given that so many Hollywood films have deferred to Freud for rationales about haunting spectres conjured up by guilty minds, this digression from Freudian motivation is worth noting. It may not be very clear what Hilary wants to achieve with his astrological research, but at least his character demonstrates a broader concept of *libido,* demonstrating-- on a somewhat parallel path with Carl Jung's theories-- that sex is not the only thing human beings truly value, much less the only thing they think to be worth killing for.

CLAYMORE (2007)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*

I've recently finished all 26 episodes of the FUNimation release of this dark-fantasy anime teleseries, without any recourse to the manga on which the series is based. In one sense this may be just as well, as net sources have asserted that the manga series had not yet finished at the time that the teleseries was scheduled to conclude. I didn 't know this while watching the DVDs, but I would certainly concur that the ending to the series fails to satisfy the dramatic underpinnings of the story. The last episodes feel padded not only with sheer hyperviolence but also with a number of tedious scenes showing one of the minor characters taking forever to reach a certain destination.

I do admire the basic concept of CLAYMORE. The series takes place in a dark, medieval-feeling fantasy-world where the human inhabitants are constantly under attack by carnivorous, shape-changing monsters called "Yoma" (named for a bogie from Japanese mythology). To combat the Yoma, a mysterious organization creates sword-wielding warriors colloquially called "Claymores," which the manga presumably derived from the Scottish sword. Claymores are created by somehow hybridizing human beings with Yoma so that the Claymores have supernormal powers, enabling them to change shape to some extent and to heal from extraordinary wounds, even to the extent of reattaching torn limbs. The usual Faustian problem arises from this stratagem, though: Claymores have a tendency to convert to Yoma at some point, at which point they must be slain by their own kind.

At the time of the story, all Claymores are female, with the viewpoint character being one Clare, the only warrior in the narrative to form a strong attachment with a male, name of Raki. However, some backstory informs us that in earlier days the organization experimented with both male and female hybrids. Male Claymores proved useless, however, for they tended to become seduced by the Yoma impulses too easily. I would have liked to have seen the script touch more deeply on the perceived differences of male and female psychology that led to the superiority of females in this matter, but there's only the vague statement that the power of the Yoma nature has a quasi-sexual appeal. The implication is that dudes just can't keep from going werewolf, though it seems to be inevitable that the female warriors eventually succumb as well. I only listened to the English soundtrack, but I suspect the Japanese translation didn't address the psychology in much greater depth.

Sociologically CLAYMORE bears a strong resemblance to many manga and anime in which male characters are almost entirely omitted in favor of a sisterhood based on female companionship, a narrative motif that became extremely popular in Japan during the 1990s and 2000s. However, at base CLAYMORE is yet another Japanese valorization of the samurai ethic, translated into fantasy-world terms. The Claymores travel from place to place like the traditional ronin (masterless samurai), defending small enclaves of normal humanity in exchange for payments that are passed on to their main organization. Strangely, in 26 episodes I never saw anything resembling the ruling powers of the world, with the exception of Yoma masquerading as human lords. The exclusion of such a ruling class in the teleseries helps emphasize the Claymores' distance from ordinary human beings, who fear and sometimes revile Claymores as just another species of monster. More tellingly, Claymores are forbidden by their masters to strike down even evil human beings, which may be the organization's means of keeping the Claymores themselves from becoming rulers. This touches on another fault of the teleseries: that it never reveals the essential nature of the Claymore organization as being good, bad, or beyond such terms. In any case, the series places all of its emphasis on the near-unbridgeable gulf between the noble warriors and the humdrum town-dwellers. I'm reminded of Socrates' assertion in THE STATESMAN as to how two virtues might conflict: that of the temperance that flourishes within a community versus the rule-breaking courage of the professional soldier.

Naturally, there is partial redemption for the Claymores, beyond their own insular sisterhood, signaled from the start by Clare's friendship with ordinary town-boy Raki. However, over 26 episodes this theme of rapprochement is unevenly developed, with more narrative emphasis going to Clare's emnity for recurring villainess Priscilla, a "Claymore gone bad." As a villain Priscilla is poorly developed, which may have much to do with the series not being able to draw from a finished manga. A couple of episodes are devoted to a much more interesting "bad Claymore" named Ophelia, who like many Japanese villains has a well-developed capacity for sadism. One of the serial's most gripping moments begins with Ophelia slicing off Clare's legs at the knees, and then challenging her former comrade to re-attach her limbs before Ophelia can kill Raki. Unfortunately, Ophelia doesn't last as long as I would've liked.

In conlcusion, CLAYMORE is a worthy enough series of its kind. And for all I know at present, it might even be better than the original manga.

THE HOUSE OF USHER (2006)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, cosmological*









SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

Directed by Hayley Cloake, the 2006 HOUSE OF USHER isn't literally true as an adaptation of the famous Poe novella "Fall of the House of Usher." However, compared to the 1989 adaptation by director Alan Birkinshaw, the Cloke version at least touches on some of the themes Poe invoked in the original "Usher."

This time the naive visitor to a modern-day Usher mansion is a young physical therapist named Jill (Izabella Miko). She receives news that an old friend, Maddy Usher, has died. Upon attending the funeral, she becomes reacquainted with Roderick, aka Rick, Usher, with whom she had a past love affair. However, apparently neither Maddy nor Rick ever told Jill much about their background. Soon Jill re-commences her love affair with Rick, even though he suffers from the disease of neurasthenia and has some odd habits-- talking to himself while he writes, seeking surcease from his hypersensitive nerves by immersing himself in an isolation tank. The Usher house also boasts a wizened old housekeeper who repeatedly warns Jill to get lost.

One online reviewer commented that Cloake's USHER felt more like suspense than horror. That's somewhat justified, in that Cloake spends about eighty percent of the film having Jill moving along dimly-lit corridors or being tormented by the housekeeper's admonitions or by her own growing suspicions. However, what keeps this film from being mere suspense is that Rick isn't just a rich oddball. Jill learns (SPOILER again) that the Usher family is obscurely cursed in that the entire line consists of twins continually giving birth to twins. This alone is enough to propel the flick into the "weird families and societies" trope, although admittedly not much overtly horrific happens throughout the story..

It's questionable as to how much Poe consciously meant to invoke the spectre of incest in his "Usher." At the very least, the image of the original Roderick and Madeleine living together in a dark old mansion suggests a potential taboo-violation. In the prose story, Roderick conveniently forgets Madeleine's tendency to experience deathlike seizures, and prematurely buries her; she then claws her way free of confinement and strangles Roderick to death. Cloake references this comeback late in the film, but without the burial-motif. Not content with aping REBECCA's mean housekeeper, this USHER also borrows from JANE EYRE, revealing at the eleventh hour that Maddy is still alive. She apparently faked her death to avoid being sucked into the curse-pattern, but her avoidance simply caused Rick to go looking for new breeding-grounds. In a denser psychological tale, the author might exploit more resemblances between Jill and Maddy, but Cloake isn't up to that task.

Aside from Isabella Miko, most of the performances are dull. The ending does have a slight twist that I for one didn't see coming.

HEAVY METAL (1981)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama, irony, comedy and adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological, metaphysical*




As I'm not versed in the practice of music criticism, I can't address one of HEAVY METAL's most prominent aspects: the breadth of the musical accompaniment. I can appreciate the thought that went into the selection of contributing artists-- sometimes it seems more thought than was given to the selection of writing-and-animation-talent! I like that HEAVY METAL incorporates both the hard-driving tunes one usually associates with the term "heavy metal," as with "Radar Rider" and "The Mob Rules," but that it also includes slow ballads like "True Companion" and "Blue Light."

As I think over the stories in the HEAVY METAL anthology-- some of which are affecting in the film proper though they all look rather shallow on paper-- I'm reminded that whenever songs try to tell stories, the narratives generally have to be as stripped-down as possible. It may be that, even though HEAVY METAL the movie adapts some of its stories from comics-tales seen in the same-name magazine, the influence of the musical aesthetic keeps any of the narratives from being overly complex. Granted, any anthology trying to sell itself on the fourfold appeal of sex, drugs, rock-n-roll and ultraviolence might not be expected to be especially deep. But it's not a given that such an anthology would have to be simple: hence, my "stripped-down song-narrative" observation. The scriptwriters' decision to link all the stories through the Loc-Nar gemstone, a.k.a "the sum of all evils," proves the film's best symbolic touch. Old-time movie-theater audiences used to follow a "bouncing ball" to sing lyrics; in HEAVY METAL audiences get to follow a bouncing Mephistopheles as he relates his various successes and failures in corrupting humans (the film's "metaphysical" function for what that's worth).

Almost all of the narratives are enjoyable on the eye-candy level, and few 1980s reviewers gave METAL credit for its visual, as well as auditory, sumptuousness. The film's use of rotoscoping as a substitute for full animation hurts it at times, but unlike some CGI films I might name, HEAVY METAL is never dull. And whereas anthologies like DEAD OF NIGHT have been known to mix a little comedy with their serious dramas, METAL manages to prove its mettle by putting forth at least one story to fit one of Northrop Frye's story-mythoi.

"Harry Canyon," for instance, I judge to be a "drama." The tough cabbie of the story's title is tacitly modeled on the hardboiled private-eye works of Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler, but projected into a grundgy Moebius-like future where corruption runs rampant and the police don't investigate cases unless they're paid up front. Canyon gives shelter to a shady lady on the run from a pack of villains searchng for the fabulos Loc-Nar, with predictable results. Although Canyon gets to hump the babe and blow away a few bad guys, "Canyon" doesn't have the invigorating spirit of heroic adventure and it's not quite nihilistic enough to make a good irony. At best it's sort of like a futuristic Chandler-story with a few ironic motifs borrowed from Hammett.

The splatter-gore horror-tale "B-17" I judge to be a true ironic work. Like many slasher-flicks, the story is straightforward in presenting a narrative in which "no one here gets out alive." WWII pilots encounter zombies. WWII pilots get eaten. End of (my least favorite) story.

"Captain Sternn" and "So Beautiful So Dangerous," both adapted (with significant changes) from stories that appeared in the HEAVY METAL magazine, are comedies. As a stand-alone comics-story Berni Wrightson's "Sternn" was an exquisitely-rendered shaggy dog tale with an ending that didn't work; in the film, the addition of the "Loc-Nar" to the equation improves the narrative tension. In addition, this sequence boasts the best dialogue, and the character Hanover Fiste's long rant against Captain Sternn is eminently quoteworthy. Angus McKie's sprawling "Dangerous" tale is condensed to a handful of space-stoner jokes and a routine about an alien robot getting married to a nice Jewish girl. Tolerable but nothing special.

North American feature-film animation, dominantly oriented on comedy, rarely drunk deeply of the mead of pure adventure-- making it all the more weird that a Canadian studio, rather than one from the U.S., produced the major breakthroughs of "Den" and "Taarna." The things I remember best from watching METAL on a big screen were the wild visuals of these pop-cultural mythologies: the hero Den being pursued by soldiers mounted on giant flying insects, Taarna abasing herself before a gigantic stone idol like something out of the 1940 THIEF OF BAGDAD. The former was based on the "Den" comics-series authored by Richard Corben, who seemed to derive it from equal samplings of Edgar Rice Burroughs and H.P. Lovecraft. The latter was an original tale, albeit visually indebted to the comics of Moebius. As I recall, in the "Den" tale the sentient Loc-Nar takes the place of a simple treasure-item from the original tale, so that when Den resists the temptation to gain power from the devil-globe, the Burroughsian adventure acquires a pleasing Faustian touch. "Taarna," however, was designed to give the audiences closure as on some far-off planet the female barbarian Taarna is called forth to destroy the Loc-Nar.

One interesting sociological aspect of HEAVY METAL is its treatment of female characters. In many ways METAL seems to channel many of the gender-tensions of the 1970s decade, tensions that were arguably shunted off to the side in 1980s cinema. On one hand. the stories "Harry Canyon" and "Dangerous" use female bodies as pure spectacle, with no finesse whatever. "Den" is a little more clever. It's very straightforward about being a male action-fantasy, dealing as it does with a nerd whose transition to another world mutates him into a super-tough muscleman. And yes, as soon as he gets to the otherworld he saves a huge-breasted girl from a human sacrifice, and she immediately rewards him with her body thereafter. However, though the film makes clear that the girl too is from Earth, it omits to mention (as the comic did) that she too was transformed from ordinary humanity to this pneumatic beauty. So in the original comic book, she's living her "fantasy"-- even though it's suspiciously in tune with a "male fantasy."

The "Taarna" sequence received some criticism in that the heroic barbarian girl dresses like a G-stringed stripper. Of course, it should be mentioned that many male pop-culture heroes stride around half-naked as well, not least Den as well as Tarzan and Conan. And like many heroines of live-action cinema of the 1970s, the fact that the heroine's hot doesn't diminish her ability to kill the villain very dead..

DOUBLE DRAGON (1994)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*


DOUBLE DRAGON, the 1994 film adaptation of the popular 1980s video game, was a film I liked purely as I would enjoy a wildly-painted roller-coaster ride. Indeed, the film is so much like a real roller coaster that I'd be surprised if there's a solid twenty minutes when two or more characters aren't screaming "Whooaahh" at the screen (which action is almost the very last thing seen in the flick).

DRAGON focuses on two brothers, Jimmy and Billy Lee, who possess one half of a medallion which, unbeknownst to them, possesses fabulous magical powers. The other half is owned by megalomaniac Kogo Shuko (Robert Patrick, sporting hair that looks like silver Brillo), and he wants the full medallion so that he can conquer the futuristic (2007) civilization of New Angeles. He and his bizarrely-garbed gang of crazies come after the Lees and their few allies, including their sensei Julia Nickson and their impish tough-girl buddy Alyssa Milano. Lots of fight-scenes, largely silly in tone in deference to the PG rating, ensue.

There's nothing clever about DOUBLE DRAGON, whose four writers include Paul 'BATMAN' Dini and Michael 'SHOOT-EM-UP' Davis. The flick pretty much borrows its chaotic futureworld from better films like ROBOCOP and THE WANDERERS, and its one sociological underpinning (Patrick as your basic "grab it all" tycoon-villain) is bare of subtext. It's also a film where death really has no dominion. Nickson's character dies offcamera in an early scene, but though she stays dead her spirit shows up, Obi-Wan style, to cheer the heroes on at the climax. Over halfway through the picture, some writer must've thought the Lees needed some extra motivation to hate Shuko beyond his having killed their sensei, so Shuko offhandedly reveals that he killed their father as well. But though it's mentioned once or twice afterward, no one takes the matter very seriously.

Three elements caused me to enjoy this film despite its lame "we know it's all a big joke" atmosphere. First comes the costume designs of one Fiona Spence (no relation to an actress of the same name), which supply lots of pleasing eye-candy. Second, occasionally a few of the scenarios are a little funny, and I find myself wondering which if any flowed from the efforts of Michael Davis, whose SHOOT-EM-UP is replete with dozens of adventure-tropes-turned-into-cartoons. Third, Robert Patrick seems to have loads of fun with his comic-menacing villain, without ever breaking character. Patrick's Shuko is so ironically self-involved that I could imagine Robert Downey Jr. referencing Patrick's performance for the role of IRON MAN's Tony Stark.

I will note that I probably wouldn't have liked it this much had I paid money to see it in a movie theater.

DEAD MEN WALK (1943)

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

PRC's DEAD MEN WALK follows the same basic pattern as their earlier MAD MONSTER (also starring George Zucco) and THE DEVIL BAT starring Bela Lugosi, because in most respects the villain gets all the narrative attention. However, DEAD does change things up a little in that Zucco acts as both villain and hero, playing a dual role as Satan-worshipping vampire Elwyn Clayton and his good twin brother Lloyd.

Though no one expects great directing from PRC's B-pictures, I'd say that director Sam Newfield (brother to Sigmund Neufeld, head of PRC Studios) turns in a very unremarkable job even compared to his own earlier Zucco effort, THE MAD MONSTER. Newfield's writer on both MONSTER and DEAD was another longtime toiler in B-efforts, Fred Myton. Both also collaborated on a film I reviewed here earlier, NABONGA, and both are remembered for little beyond their horror works.

What's more frustrating about DEAD is not the static look of the direction but a sense of wasted potential. As noted in my review of SEVENTH VICTIM, it was rare in the 1940s for even horror films to allude to present-day Satanism. The master fiction-work of vampirism, DRACULA, even alludes to ties between the vampire-lord and Satanic worship. But the allusions in DEAD are scattered and meaningless, functioning as little more than advertising buzz-words.

I mentioned an Oedipal current in the MGM horror-film MARK OF THE VAMPIRE. With some effort one might see one in DEAD as well, but it, like the references to Satan, gets no dramatic elaboration and so takes on no symbolic resonance. Evil Elwyn comes back from the dead as a vampire and proceeds to torment his good brother Lloyd by doing the sort of heinous thing Lloyd would never do: molesting Lloyd's (and presumably Elwyn's) niece by sucking her blood. But the niece Gayle (Mary Carlisle) remains nothing but a passive victim and generates no interest in her own right.

Only in one scene does the script touch on Freudian patterns more directly. Elwyn has been preying on Gayle a little while, causing Lloyd great consternation in that he knows he can't convince anyone that his brother's back from the dead as a vampire. Gayle's fiancee David, like some other locals in the town, suspect that kindly Lloyd has gone bonkers and is somehow making Gayle sick. There's one scene in which David challenges Lloyd in a misdirected attempt to save Gayle from her paternal protector. However, with relatively little complication Lloyd manages to persuade David to help him fight the vampire, and David does prove industrious in trying to keep the intefering townspeople out of the way.

Nedrick Young, the actor playing David, incidentally, became better-known as a screenwriter than an actor. Dwight Frye does an acceptable job playing "Zolarr," a mad hunchback who worshipped his Satanist master and who essentially retreads old Renfield-ground for this poverty-row Dracula. The final scene, in which Lloyd sacrifices his life to rid the world of his "shadow-self" Elwyn as well as zany Zolarr, shows the most imagination. Just as Elwyn seems close to killing Lloyd, a distant rooster crows and announces the rise of the sun, whereupon Elwyn begins losing power and soon succumbs. It's rather odd that a vampire who abhors the sun should have an assistant whose name sounds like "solar," but the cock's-crow, probably introduced just to get across the idea of the dawning sun as quickly as possible, does add some verve to the climax.