THE LONE RANGER (1938)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*


Five years after the premiere of THE LONE RANGER on radio, the character-- whose backstory had remained vague up to then-- was given an "origin story" that became the accepted mythology for both the Ranger and his Indian friend Tonto.  Ironically, though the owner of the franchise George Trendle disliked various aspects of the Republic serial's script, he imported the "last surviving Texas Ranger" origin into later iterations of the hero's adventures.  Allegedly this is also the first time those adventures used the "William Tell Overture" that became inextricably tied to the character.

The story evolved from five credited writers and was directed by the reigning kings of the sound serials, William Witney and John English.  Perhaps their interest in regular western films caused the creators to plot the RANGER serial a little more tightly than most.  Many serials tend to unfold all of their basic characters and setups in the first two episodes and began to fall into a repetitious pattern in which the villain keeps pursuing some goal and the hero keeps stopping him, but doesn't catch the evildoers until the final episode.

RANGER starts with a basic idea seen in many films: having the villain, here one "Captain Smith," usurp the position of a legally constituted authority-figure in order to hide his evil deeds.  Captain Smith, along with a coterie of bandits, kills a man named Jeffries, appointed to administer tax collection in Texas, and assumes Jeffries' identity.  When he fears that a contingent of Texas Rangers may interfere with his control of the local constabulary, Smith/Jeffries has his men gun them down from hiding.  One ranger survives, thanks to the ministrations of Tonto (Chief Thundercloud).

The Lone Ranger opposes the villain's taxation and stirs up other locals to oppose him as well.  Smith hopes to break the rebellion by uncovering the Ranger's identity, but it happens there are five guys in town with the build of the Ranger, all of whom are resisters.  This subplot had been used in earlier serials, in which the audience was encouraged to guess which candidate was the real Ranger.  This is one of the less worthwhile devices of the serial, partly because all of the candidates are just cookie-cutter goodguys, partly because the serial concludes by actually showing the audience the face of the real Lone Ranger.  And you know you don't pull the mask off that ol' Lone Ranger.

Still, though there are the usual breathless cliffhanger escapes here, some non-villainous characters do get killed for real, and the script gives their deaths more gravity than one usually sees in serials.  A notable death is that of the blacksmith who makes the Ranger's silver bullets, who's rather easily tracked down by Smith's owlhoots-- thus suggesting that the "silver bullet" gimmick is one that doesn't work too well if the hero's operations are confined to one locale.

This Ranger (played by Lee Powell) is no namby-pamby milksop.  In one scene, he rescues Tonto from Smith's men when Tonto's about to be whipped.  While Tonto keeps a gun on the goons, the Ranger challenges the leader to a fight and wipes up the desert with the thug.  Later, Smith/Jeffries gets the brilliant idea to marry heroine Joan to keep her from testifying against him.  The Ranger and Tonto interrupt the nuptials, after which the hero slashes the outlaw-boss with a whip, warning him not to try forced marriage again.  Needless to say, no wedding-bells are heard in future installments.

The sociological issues in this serial are necessarily broad, but the partnership of the white lawman and the faithful Indian companion seems portrayed as an alliance of equals here.  As with Zorro, there's some enjoyment to be had from seeing the hero defy the minions of the law, even when the law has been taken over by ilicit impostors.

TIN MAN (2007)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: * psychological*


I'm certainly glad I gave TIN MAN a pass the first time the mini-series premiered on the SYFY Channel.  Had I seen it before screening NEVERLAND, a mini-series on roughly the same theme and directed by the same director, the memory of TIN MAN's abject awfulness might have spoiled my enjoyment of Willing's later opus.

My review of NEVERLAND should make clear that I'm not a literalist with respect to adaptations.  I enjoyed NEVERLAND even though it rewrote the "Peter Pan" continuity of J. M. Barrie, and even professed a mild liking for Willing's 2009 mini-series, which turned ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND into a simplistic "outsider saves the world" scenario.

Happily, there's an explanation as to why the later Willing directorial efforts come off better: he wrote ALICE and NEVERLAND, while TIN MAN is credited to a writer-producer team named Mitchell and Van Long.  I choose to blame these gentlemen for not just being free in their adaptation of L. Frank Baum's WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ, but for using the OZ concept as an excuse to make a thoroughly tedious take on STAR WARS.  Interestingly, I spotted the writers' indebtedness to the Lucas franchise before looking up the team's credits, which happened to include three episodes of STAR WARS: THE CLONE WARS about four years after TIN MAN.

Whereas Willing's scripts for ALICE and NEVERLAND show some awareness of the narrative myths underlying the original works of Carroll and Barrie, the Mitchell-Van Long script for TIN MAN pays only superficial attention to both the content of Baum's Oz books and the classic MGM film-adaptation.  One can understand any adaptor wanting to avoid close comparison with a work as iconic as the 1939 WIZARD OF OZ, but the duo's approach does so by descending into stock cliches and tired characterizations.

The viewpoint character here is a modern-day decendant of Dorothy Gale, "D.G." (Zooey Deschanel), but in the first section her real-world discontents take a decided back seat to the character of "Wyatt Cain," who approximates the Tin Man of the novels and movies.  In the typical Oz narrative all of Dorothy's male accomplices are damaged figures who take inspiration from her in order to act decisively.  Wyatt Cain has assorted issues dealing with the loss of his family at the hands of the evil sorceress Azkadellia-- but damaged and in need of inspiration he is not.  Cain is the standard "tough sheriff" of westerns, with his designation "tin man" referring to his former status as a policeman in "the O.Z." or "Outer Zone."  Though Cain is not very much like the characterization of Han Solo in STAR WARS, I  speculate that the producers drew on memories of STAR WARS and its space-opera transformation of western tropes in order to give their Oz-imitation a more standard figure of male efficacy.

The standins for "the Scarecrow" and "the Cowardly Lion" *are* allowed to be more in line with other versions. "Glitch/Scarecrow" must find a way to cope with his scattered brains (removed from his skull by the sorceress) and "Raw/Lion" must find his courage, etc.  But both proved flat characters lacking in the humor seen in the 1939 film, so their efforts aroused in me little identification.

As the charmless foursome continue their peregrinations throughout the O.Z., D.G.'s story-arc is given more emphasis.  She learns that the parents who raised her on Earth were androids, who are technically called "homos," thus leading to screamingly stupid lines like, "How do you find a homo?"  D.G.'s real parents are the King and Queen of Oz, both held in prison by the adolescent Azkadelllia-- who happens to be D.G.'s sister.  However, Azkadellia's tyrannies are not entirely her fault.  When the two girls were very young, they trespassed on a cave where the spirit of a witch-- implicitly the Wicked Witch of the West-- attacks them.  D.G. flees, making it possible for Azkadellia to be possessed by the witch's spirit.

Three years later, Tim Burton would also craft a version of ALICE in which two female rulers in Oz were at odds as a result of sibling rivalry.  However, Burton's version allows for some adroit characterizational moments, while the conflict between D.G. and Azkadellia never goes beyond the level of reciting necessary plot-points.  Moreover, Azkadellia's plot to dominate the O.Z. with a device called a "Sun-Seeder" lacks any mythic resonance, standing in for a threat comparable to the "Death Star" of the original STAR WARS.

Generally the performers acquit themselves adequately despite the lumpish dialogue and too many scenes that amount to filling in time for a long, three-part narrative.  But none of the performances are worth suffering through the tin-eared dialogue of TIN MAN.

BLANKMAN (1994), C.H.O.M.P.S. (1979)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: (1) *fair,* (2) *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: (1) *psychological, sociological,* (2) *psychological*


"A black man would rather miss than look bad."-- Woody Harrelson's character in WHITE MEN CAN'T JUMP.

I can't say I found BLANKMAN very funny, but as the above illo shows, the two black stars (Damon Wayans, David Alan Grier) don costumes that make them look REALLY bad.  That does demand a special sort of *chutzpah.*

The film has its most amusing moments toward the start, when Wayans' Darryl and Grier's Kevin are seen as children, geeking out over the 1966 BATMAN show while trying to watch it on a malfunctioning TV set.  Then the two kids quickly grow up-- or at least one of them does, mentally speaking.  Kevin becomes a normal guy who works for a television news show, where he lusts after anchorwoman Kimberly (Robin Givens).  Darryl remains frozen in geekhood, working on various absurd and worthless inventions while being supported by Kevin and cared for by their grandmother.

Crime, under the control of mob boss Minelli (Jon Polito), runs rampant in a city where the police are both lazy and chicken-hearted.  Darryl and Kevin's grandmother practices social activism and gets rubbed out by Minelli's thugs.  The more childlike Darryl takes her loss harder than Kevin does, but he also has the more proactive response.  Though he can't fight, he does possess enough science-knowledge to design a bulletproof superhero costume for himself.  He succeeds in his first crimefighting efforts by luck and gumption, but when he attempts to tell people his hero-name is "Blackman," he's misunderstood and the press dubs him "Blankman."  Darryl invites Kevin to join him as his crimefighting partner.  Kevin declines.

To Kevin's dismay, crusading reporter Kimberly falls for the mysterious stumblebum superhero.  But when Minelli's crooks stage a trap for Blankman, Kevin steps up, dons his costume, and uses his karate-skills to fight alongside his dotty brother.  Darryl does have a few oddball inventions that help them out: some funky jet-skates, a bomb-sniffing robot made from a old washing-machine.  These, being slight improvements on then-current technology, would be subsumed under the phenomenal category of the uncanny, except that the bulletproof costume qualifies as a marvelous invention..

Though the script validates the wishful thinking of childhood, the theme isn't pursued with any rigor.  Polito's Minelli is, though not a supervillain, slightly bigger-than-life: he boasts of wearing pure satin clothes when he robs a bank and rises to the comic-book model by constructing a death-trap for the captured heroes.  Givens plays her Lois Lane role straight, which allows her to be a decent foil to Wayans' antics.  The most interesting theme suggested by the sibling rivalry between Darryl and Kevin.  This has less to do with their sexual competition for some Freudian mother-figure (though Kimberly does echo the grandmother's social activism) than with the fact that Kevin has to be the "father" in the relationship, trying to force his simple sibling to grow up.  Darryl, the "fantasy-principle" to Kevin's "reality-principle," rarely shows overt resentment toward Kevin, although I did find it significant that Kevin gets shot, albeit nonfatally, because Darrly neglects to tell him that his superhero suit ISN'T bulletproof.

CHOMPS (which I refuse to keep typing with the damned periods) has three scripters but the main story is credited to long-time cartoon-producer Joseph Barbera.  Possibly the most entertaining section of the film is the animated credits-sequence, which shows an enemy spy being repeatedly undone by a clever dog, who at one point utters a "wheeze-laugh" like that of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon-dog "Muttley."

I file this one under the "psychological" Campbellian function simply because the main plotline centers around a trope almost as old as Greek Old Comedy: Young Man desires Young Woman but must first validate himself with Young Woman's father.  But this element is kept to a very simple level, for it's clear from the start that this is a low-impact kid-oriented comedy, tied to children's love for dogs-- including the robot dog of the title, whom the Young Man invents in order to impress the Young Woman's father.  To be sure the film did come out in a PG version in 1979-- the only offensive material stemming from the "salty language" of another dog-character who can think like a human being.  The filmmakers also released a "G" version, which was probably more in line with the script's basic nature.

Simple comedies have their own charms, of course.  However, Barbera's story doesn't show an awareness as to how to increase tension, even after the example of vanilla-but-still-endearing comedies like Disney's THE COMPUTER WORE TENNIS SHOES.  The film starts out with the Young Man (Wesley Eure of LAND OF THE LOST) demonstrating to his girlfriend how his robot dog will be the next great thing in crime-prevention. If BLANKMAN was indebted to the myth of Batman, CHOMPS patterns itself on Superman.  Not only does "Chomps" possess super-strength, super-speed and X-ray vision, the aforementioned "thinking dog" even recites his take on the old Superman slogan: "It's a bird, it's a plane, it's Super-dog!"

But in contrast to BLANKMAN, CHOMPS doesn't come up with decent villains who might ratchet up the tension, even for a kid's comedy.  The main villain, played by Jim Backus, depends on two bumbling crooks to uncover the secret of "Chomps."  The mere fact that this character can't find better-- or at least funnier-- help made me long for the comparative ruthlessness of Cesar Romero in the TENNIS SHOES film.  Once Barbera's script establishes the wonderment of the powers available to "Chomps" (played by the canine star of the "Benji" flicks), said script keeps repeating similar stunts over and over, as if it were stapling a bunch of unassociated cartoons together.

By 1979 director Don Chaffey had done a number of "animal-pictures," including Disney's THREE LIVES OF THOMASINA, which also made considerable use of an "varmint voiceover."  His direction here is pedestrian, but it's no more than the script deserves.  CHOMPS looks to have been his last animal-focused effort.  Fantasy-fans are more likely to remember for such disparate works as 1963's JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS and 1975's PERSECUTION.

The best aspect of this dog of a movie is the familiarity of the cast: Eure, Backus, Valerie Bertinelli, Conrad Bain, and even bungling henchmen Chuck McCann and Red Buttons, despite the laugh-impaired script they execute.

I regard both of these as "combative comedies" because both do build on superhero tropes, though CHOMPS is something of a stretch.


ADDENDA: Changed my mind on the latter pronouncement: the dog's blundering opponents are too low-energy to allow for the combative mode.

REVENGE! (1971), THE HOUSE THAT WOULDN'T DIE (1970)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: (1) poor, (2) *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: (1)*metaphysical*, (2) *psychological*


I happened to screen close together these two 1970s telefilms, whose only other common bond is that they star acclaimed Hollywood actresses in their mature years, and that they share marvelous phenomenality.

REVENGE! recalls the 1960s vogue for featuring older actresses in horrific roles, what some wag once styled as "granddame guignol."  Indeed, the vogue would continue throughout the 1970s, and Winters had already made her first contribution to that corpus of films in the same year with WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH HELEN?

In Joseph Stefano's brisk script, adapted from a suspense novel, Winters' character Mrs. Hilton is out for "revenge."  Her knocked-up daughter committed suicide thanks to her rejection by the baby's father.  Mrs. Hilton, who happens to own a house once used by an earlier owner to confine his mad wife, gets the idea to visit vengeance upon her daughter's seducer. 

However, the mad lady captures the wrong person: innocent businessman Frank.  Confined to a basement, Frank denies being the guilty party.  Fortunately for him, Mrs. Hilton dearly wants a confession and apology, though it's not clear whether she plans to kill him anyway.  Thus she keeps Frank alive, long enough for his wife Diane to miss him.

Becoming frantic at her husband's unaccounted disappearance, Diane ultimately seeks the aid of psychic Mark Hembrec (Stuart Whitman).  However, in the story's most devious twist, Hembrec is a fake psychic, but Diane's turmoil unleashes real powers in herself.  She guides Hembrec to the Hilton house without even consciously identifying it as the place of her husband's captivity.  After that, the film plays a waiting game: will the two investigators tumble in time to save Frank?

REVENGE is a taut suspense-flick and nothing more.  There's potential for some metaphysical speculation once Hembrec the Faker is convinced that psychic powers do exist, but nothing comes of it.

THE HOUSE THAT WOULDN'T DIE was adapted by one Henry Farrell from yet another original novel.  Farrelll's credits were pretty strong in the "granddame" department, as he contributed to WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE, HUSH, HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE, and the aforementioned WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH HELEN.  The director this time out was the well-seasoned John Llewellyn Moxey, who delivers a strong spooky atmosphere.

Granddame though Barbara Stanwyck was at the time, she plays a straight heroine-type, one Ruth Bennett.  Ruth's own aunt dies and leaves her an old house dating from the Revolutionary War.  Ruth plans to move in and invites her adult niece Sara (Kitty Winn) to come along.  Little is said about Sara's family but given that Ruth and Sara have a close mother-daughter relationship, it appears Sara's own mother is dead.  While Ruth and Sara look the old place over, they make the acquaintance of two locals, both aged appropriately for each woman, young Stan (Michael Anderson Jr) and mature Pat (Richard Egan).

Then, after a little prefatory spooky stuff, a spirit possesses Sara, who attacks Ruth.  Sara later recovers without knowing what happened.  Ruth wants to know what happened to her niece, and begins researching the past of the house.  Pat also gets possessed, giving Ruth a brutal kiss and later getting into a fight with Stan.

With the appropriate research in hand, the victims reconstruct the house's history: that there had been a family in which a father murdered his daughter and her lover for having defied his wishes.  The daughter has been possessing Sara, while the cruel father has been inhabiting Pat.  There's no mention as to why the spirit of the lover doesn't show up. Maybe because it's not his dwelling-place?  There's a strong climax in which Ruth is finally able to lay to rest both unquiet spirits.

In contrast to REVENGE, there's a slight degree of mythicity here, suggested by the implied Freudian family romance in the story.  I have not read the novel on which the film is based, but even the bare outlines of the ghost-story seem to suggest paternal jealousy of the young couple, though there's a little diversionary material in that the murdered lover and the father took the opposite sides in the war.

Aside from this aspect and Moxey's sure hand with the supernatural, Stanwyck's gritty attitude is the best aspect of HOUSE.

THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME (1932), RUN FOR THE SUN (1956)

PHENOMENALITY: (1) *uncanny,* (2) *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: (1) *good*, (2) *poor*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

One of the most interesting manifestations of the "bizarre crimes" trope is the one spawned by Richard Connell's 1924 short story, "The Most Dangerous Game," that of the obsessed hunter who chose to hunt the "most dangerous game," his fellow human beings.  In its basic conception it sounds like the sort of thing the Marquis de Sade might have conceived, insofar as it presupposes a powerful man's intrinsic right to use other men for his pleasure.

Yet prior to conceiving my theory I never knew why so many fantasy-film concordances included it.  The idea didn't violate any aspect of natural law, nor did it have the spooky tone of the non-fantasy horror films.  In substance it seemed more of a naturalistic suspense-thriller.  At best I assumed that the compilers considered the villain some sort of psycho, like author John McCarty, who included MDG in his book MOVIE PSYCHOS AND MADMEN.

However, I think my trope "bizarre crimes" explains the metaphenomenal tone of the story and some (though not all) of its adaptations.  Both in the story and the 1932 film, the villain Count Zaroff might be called mad, but he never shows the frenetic quality one associates with the "psycho."  Zaroff seems utterly convinced that he should have the right to hunt humans, so that in tone he comes closer to daring criminals like Ian Fleming's Goldfinger, who want to create dazzling new crimes simply for the sake of so doing.

Direction in the definitive (so far) 1932 film is credited to both Irving Pichel and Ernest P. Schoedsack.  It was the first metaphenomenal film either man directed, and its fast-paced, intense style looks forward to a simiilar quality in 1933's KING KONG, directed by Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper.  Leslie Banks gives Zaroff the same brooding quality one finds in horror-performers of the same era, but whereas most goodguy-protagonists in horror films are weak sisters, Zaroff finds a formidable match in the form of fellow big game hunter  Bob Rainsford (Joel McCrea), in spite of the fact that Zaroff also has one of sound cinema's first "mute servants" and a pack of dogs on his side.  Zaroff has two other guests on his isolated island-paradise, Eve and Martin Trowbridge. The latter, an annoying comic drunk, exists to be the first victim (or at least the first one the audience sees) of a Zaroff hunt.  Later Eve becomes the "prize" which Zaroff plans to claim once he's finished off Rainsford.  As Eve, Fay Wray, a few months away from film immortality as "the girl in the hairy paw," doesn't get a lot to do, but she does show courage in choosing to be hunted alongside Rainsford.  The exciting climax necessarily expands on the too-brief battle of Rainsford  and Zaroff in the original short story.

The 1956 RUN FOR THE SUN, however, never exploits the bizarre nature of the villain's crime to the same extent as the 1932 film.  Indeed, SUN is barely a remake of the original concept, for it's been retooled extensively to place more emphasis on a pedestrian romance between nature-writer Mike Latimer (Richard Widmark) and Katie Connors (Jane Greer).  Indeed, their budding romance consumes about thirty minutes of film-time before the two of them crash land in a remote section of Central America.  There they meet a courteous-seeming recluse named Browne and his coterie of armed men-- only to suspect that something's wrong when their downed plane disappears.  It soon comes out that Browne and one of his men-- his brother-in-law, in fact-- are ex-Nazis who have fled Europe to avoid prosecution, and they don't want anyone knowing where they are. 

However, Browne has none of the Promethean evil of Zaroff; if anything, he's tormented by the loss of a lady-love.  He professes no Nazi philosophy, having been mostly a fellow-traveler, though there is a mention of Nietzsche amid his reading-material.  However, when he does get around to hunting Mike and Katie, it's simply because they're trying to escape him, not because he has the outsize idea of being a Hunter of Men.  Because SUN lacks any grandiosity to its "bizarre crime," I assign it, and the film, the status of "naturalistic."

ADDENDUM (9/16): I don't know why I failed to gauge it properly, but the 1932 version of MOST DANGEROUS GAME is without a doubt a "combative drama." Heck, Rainsford even defeats one of Zaroff's men by breaking his back with a wrestling-hold-- and you don't get much more spectacular than that.

CREATURE OF THE WALKING DEAD (1965)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*

MYTHICITY: *poor*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

I've seen my share of Jerry Warren productions-- both those in which he directed original (so to speak) films and those in which he purchased other director's films, cut them up and inserted a few scenes he'd directed with American actors.  Everything I've seen has been thoroughly mediocre but no more so than a lot of films in his time period.

CREATURE OF THE WALKING DEAD, which I recently screened for the first time, baffles me.  I've seen a fair number of low-budget affairs whose makers seemed to be speaking their own private storytelling language-- usual suspects including ROBOT MONSTER, GLEN OR GLENDA, etc.

CREATURE doesn't seem to have its own private language, but it seems just as incomprehensible.  And this seems odd, since in every way it looks like a typical mad-scientist film of the period.  In this case, it involves Martin Malthus, a modern-day (circa 1960) scientist who foolishly brings back the "walking dead" of his ancestor John Malthus.  The ancestor was executed at the close of the 19th century for trying to create an elixir of immortality with the blood of murdered maidens, so no one, except perhaps Martin, is surprised that as soon as he's revived he picks up just where he left off.

Now, since CREATURE was largely derived from a Mexican original (apparently lost) entitled LA MARCA DEL MUERTO, the way the film jumps illogically from scene to scene *may* be entirely due to the way Warren cut the film.  I don't imagine Warren did the original footage any good.  Nevertheless, some of the senselessness seems implicit in the original film.  In one of the few detailed online reviews of CREATURE, the site BRAIN EATER describes how young Malthus finds his way into the lab of old Malthus:

Wait a minute: that reminds me. The police! They arrested Malthus, and got him hanged for his crimes. But it seems they never discovered his lab! When Malthus, Jr. gets there, it's exactly as his grandfather left it, complete to the withered corpse strapped to the table. Either the police couldn't be bothered with removing the body, or collecting any of that pesky evidence; or else they arrested, convicted and executed him for something entirely different.
 

Similarly, the very ending of the film-- almost certainlty the work of original director Fernando Cortes-- culminates in the usual "burning laboratory" where Young Malthus fights Old Malthus to protect some babe from being bled to death.  With the babe in tow, Young Malthus escapes the burning lab, and to make sure the old creep buys it, he pulls the door closed after him.  Fair enough, you're thinking...

...Except that the inside door, which comes with a heavy bolt-latch, LOCKS ITSELF after Malthus has gone through it.  Brain Eater remarks that maybe the latch has been closed by the hand of God, and in truth one does see a couple of pointed visual highlights of crucifixes.  But I think a more likely expectation is that Cortes, like a lot of quickie directors, just thought it looked neat.

I've nothing much to say about this one.  I like Mexican horror movies of the period, but most of them are enjoyable for the way they put their cultural spin on the old horror-tropes of Universal Studios.  Warren may be mainly responsible for how dull and incoherent CREATURE is, but I suspect the original aided and abetted the crime.

I find myself wondering who came up with the name "Malthus" for the two doctors.  The best-known "Malthus" in history is the 18th-century English scholar who became famed for his population studies.  I can't see much connection between him and a horror-flick about living dead men, except that the bad guy gets rid of a lot of the "population."

SLIGHT DOWNSIZING

With the completion of my reviews for September, I've completed a full year of my current regiment, which, as announced in October 2011, was to supply a "month's-worth" of reviews for metaphenomenal (or somewhat related) works for each ensuing month.  Assuming I didn't miscount, each month should review as many movies (or TV compilations) as there were days that month.

But it is somewhat of a strain, since I manage two other blogs, one of which I've barely worked on these past months.

Having achieved my "personal best," then, I'm downsizing the frequency of reviews.  I've seen some blogs that confine themselves to posting once every weekday. I may not do a post on every weekday, but at present I'm planning to do as many reviews a month as that month has weekdays.

In addition, this will help me to quell the insane completist part of me that wants to chime in on every single metaphenomenal film/teleseries I see, regardless of whether there's really much to say about them.  Just as one's body can always devour calories far more easily than it can exercise them away, one can always see more sheer *stuff* than one can find time to review.  As much as I like the idea of doing my own compilation of What's Metaphenomenal and What's Not, I probably never will.  At best this blog is, like many such, a diary of thoughts theoretical and otherwise.