SCREAM OF FEAR (1961)

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


The French horror-thriller DIABOLIQUE (1955) earned good box office in America, a success which facillitated Alfred Hitchcock's adaptation of Robert Bloch's novel PSYCHO in 1960.  Seth Holt, directing an original script by Jimmy Sangster, actually comes closer to the basic plot/counterplot structure of the 1955 film, and delivers a strong thriller as well, though not by any means equal to the example of PSYCHO.

When I viewed SCREAM a few years back, I tended to view it through a quasi-Freudian lens.  After all, the film centers upon young crippled heiress Penny Appleby(Susan Strasberg), who has been estranged from her wealthy father for ten years following his divorce of her mother (deceased at the time of the film's beginning).  Having lived in Italy all that time, she returns to the France-based estate of Mr. Appleby, who by this time has married another woman, Jane (Ann Todd).   In Freudian terms, one might well read this scenario as that of the daughter coming to "rescue" her father from a "bad mother," or to be sure, a bad stepmother.  At one point Jane shows herself aware of this sort of scenario, though she protests against being thought of as an evil stepmother out of "fairy tales," not Freudian wishdreams.

Penny's return to her family home, however, is marked by the absence of the father she may have come to "rescue."  Jane and her faithful chaffeur Robert insist that Mr. Appleby has simply left on business and plans to return. But why then does Jane start seeing the corpse of her father popping up at times, only to disappear when anyone else comes to look?  Is Penny the sort of "perilous psycho" (as in BLACK SWAN)  who poses more danger to herself than anyone else?

Though I sometimes anatomize certain film-plots in detail when I feel that it justifies a deep reading, my recent re-viewing of SCREAM convinces me that it doesn't justify such a treatment.  SCREAM is a very skillful blend of suspense and chills, but there's less here than the sum of the screenplay's clockwork parts.  In part this is because the film telegraphs its indebtedness to the so-called "rational Gothic" narrative, in which an apparent haunting is merely a set-up designed to drive someone insane.  Penny's sanity is never seriously in question, so it's plain that we have a "phantasmal figuration" brewing, the only mystery being the identity of the culprits.  The hoaxers' plot is the sort of thing that feels pretty ingenious while it's being related within the context of the film, but in keeping with Hitchcock's famed "refrigerator logic," Sangster's scheme unravels in the cold light of day.  The same thing applies to any psychological tropes, Freudian or otherwise, that one might hope to descry in the film.  Because Penny herself, in the DIABOLIQUE tradition, isn't what she seems either, her inner workings prove subordinate to the mechanics of the plot.  It was Hitchcock's genius that he could disclose revised motivations without losing the sense of the significance of the psychological tropes suggested.  In his hands, a character like Jane Appleby-- who is seen to "steal" men from both the older and younger generations-- might have become a more emotionally charged figure, but Sangster only uses her to connect his dots.

Sangster and Holt, admirable as they are, are no Stefano and Hitchcock. 

THE SON OF DR. JEKYLL (1951)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: * psychological, sociological*

Within the circumscribed "family" of 1950s horror films, Columbia's SON OF DR JEKYLL seems an odd offshoot.  It's the only horror film directed by one Seymour Friedman, though one of the writers, Jack Pollexfen, had written for Edgar Ulmer's MAN FROM PLANET X and would collaborate on a handful of other metaphenomenal films later in his career.  The film looks much like a 1940s Universal horror-film, in that SON is heavier on action than ghoulishness.  1946 was the last year to see a fair number of "follow-up" horror films, including DEVIL BAT'S DAUGHTER, SHE WOLF OF LONDON, and THE SPIDER WOMAN STRIKES BACK, but this tendency faded in keeping with the downturn of the genre's popularity during the late 40s and early 50s. In addition, such "horror-series" concepts seem to have dwindled once Universal Studios delivered ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN in 1948, which essentially ended the studio's long association with its celebrated horror-icons. Aside from SON, not until 1955 did any American studio produce another "horror-serial" film, whether the later film's relationship to a previous opus was formal (REVENGE OF THE CREATURE) or informal (ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET THE MUMMY).  Only in the late 1950s did Hammer Films successfully resuscitate the concept of the "horror serial" film.

SON is patently an "informal follow-up" to the last major film on Jekyll and Hyde, MGM's 1941 opus.  SON begins in the London of 1860, showing us an amended fate for the original Doctor Jekyll; having just killed his wife in the monstrous form of Hyde, the rogue scientist flees an angry mob. He attempts to use his potion to change back to Jekyll but the mob sees Hyde take refuge in Jekyll's lab and sets the building on fire. In the form of Jekyll the fugitive falls from a great height and perishes, exposing his secret to all of London.  Two of Jekyll's colleagues, Utterson and Lanyon (characters from the original Stevenson story), learn that Jekyll has left behind an infant son. Utterson conceals the infant's history and raises little "Edward" as his own.

However, when Edward reaches maturity and becomes engaged to Utterson's niece, Utterson reveals Edward's true history and cedes to him the family estate of the Jekylls-- including the late Jekyll's notes.  The London press finds out that there's a new Jekyll in town, and they mercilessly persecute the young man, creating in him a desire to reform his father's bad name.  At the same time, Edward begins to see unexplained sights, such as a young woman who appears at his home and then "ghosts" away.  Is he going insane from the stress?  Or is someone manipulating him-- someone who just may have manipulated Henry Jekyll as well?

The answer should be transparent to anyone who knows the tradition of horror-serial films, which tend to exonerate the heirs of horror-icons, and sometimes the icons themselves as well (as seen in the aforementioned DEVIL BAT'S DAUGHTER, for one example).  To give the game away, Henry Jekyll's experiment was tainted by his false friend Dr. Lanyon, and Lanyon has tried to gaslight Edward in order to destroy his reputation and acquire his property.  Edward foils the culprit without unleashing his inner Hyde (though he does transform briefly during an experiment).  In fact, Edward gets into three or four separate hand-to-hand fights in the course of the film, making SON one of the most pugilistically-inclined horror-flicks of the decade, even taking into account similar tendencies in the Italian horrors.

SON is a simplistic melodrama, particularly in terms of its execution of Edward's daddy issues-- though I was amused at one character indirectly invoking HAMLET by speaking to the hero of his "father's ghost."  However, I give it a fair mythicity rating in the sociological department, because of its emphasis on the scurrilous nature of mob mania.  Edward is less of a monster than London, with its ruthless journalists and scummy blackmailers (the source of Edward's supposed delusion with the girl).  SON does at least imitate a tradition of horror-films seen in many better films, not least the 1925 PHANTOM OF THE OPERA and James Whales' two FRANKENSTEIN films, in which the crowd terrorized by the monster becomes a monster in its own right. There's a slight "class warfare" element to the blackmailer subplot, though it hardly compares with the same theme as invoked in the last two major Jekyll-Hyde films.

BATMAN AND ROBIN (1949), BATWOMAN (1968)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*


Two bat-flights this time out, one sanctioned by DC Comics as a legitimate adaptation of BATMAN, the other meant to ride the coattails of the sixties' successful Bat-teleseries.

In my review of the 1943 Batman serial, I said that although the production values were "cheapjack," director Lambert Hillyer occasionally gave certain scenes an Expressionistic flair in keeping with the original inspirations of the comic book series.  The serial also benefitted from a pleasingly hateful villain, even if he isn't politically correct in modern times.

In contrast, Columbia's second and last Batman serial lacks any virtue except the sort of fast action characteristic of serial-king Spencer G. Bennett.  Unfortunately, because the budget still isn't good enough to give the titular heroes decent costumes, the action-scenes look much less impressive than in Bennett's strongest serial-works, such as 1943's MASKED MARVEL.  Robert Lowery takes over the role of Batman but doesn't manage the Zorro-esque charm of the previous actor, while John Duncan rarely impresses watchers with anything but the sense that he's far too old to be a "boy wonder."

The serial does at least score with a powerful masked villain, the Wizard, who boasts abilities of hypnotism and (eventually) invisibility.  However, his main raison d'etre is that he commands a machine that allows him to control cars and other motor-vehicles remotely, which seems like a rather punk device next to, say, the Flying Wing seen in both 1937's DICK TRACY and 1938's FIGHTING DEVIL DOGS. There's not much suspense devoted to revealing the villain's identity in that the serial provides a prominant red herring but no "least likely suspects."  On the whole BATMAN AND ROBIN's best moments are those that proved unintentionally funny, as when Batman fights a hood who accidentally (?) rips off his cape, whereon the hero tries to re-don it during the fight.

BATWOMAN, unfortunately, doesn't have even "so-bad-it's-good" moments.  For once, though we do have a Mexican superhero-character who wrestles (albeit only briefly), Batwoman doesn't seem to be a wrestler by profession.  One of her allies tells the audience that she's independently wealthy a la her model Bruce Wayne, though she chooses to be a selfless crimefighter.  Played by Maura Monti, Batwoman doesn't have any weapons except her sexy body, and only has one semi-lengthy fight against the thugs employed by her opponent, the mundanely named "Dr. Eric Williams."

Williams follows the pattern of many previous "luchadores" films in which wrestler-heroes battle mad scientists.  In particular Williams and his aides are attempting to breed an army of gillmen with which to take over the world, or something like that.  Williams has no particular motivation beyond being a standard mad scientist, and his gillmen are just the usual men-in-suits, given no great flair by director Rene Cardona Sr.

I realize that Cardona directed many, many more films than what most Americans know of his oeuvre, which is mostly the superhero/horror films.  However, I've found the few works I have seen pretty dull going, and that includes BATWOMAN, which includes a lot of slow-going underwater location scenes.  I've mentioned that Monti only gets one fight-scene, but aside from some sub-sea gymnastics, she spends a lot of time in conversational scenes. 

I can imagine a lot of fantasy-fans enjoying BATWOMAN just for its virtue of simplicity: it certainly never pretends to be anything more than what it is. But I'd rather re-watch what may be Cardona's best such film, the far more lively "luchadora" film DOCTOR OF DOOM.

LAND OF THE LOST (1974-77)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: * psychological, cosmological, sociological*


I'm not sure why I didn't watch LAND OF THE LOST back in the day.  I assume that I thought I'd become too old for it, since it was focused on a younger age-bracket.  Over the years I heard a lot of good things about the relatively consistent treatment of the sci-fi concept, which dealt with three modern-day people-- adult Rick Marshall and his two kids Will and Holly-- being transported into a prehistoric universe inhabited by dinosaurs, ape-people, and a race of reptillian humanoids possessed of a half-understood ancient technology.  But I didn't check it out, even though I'd heard that a number of famed SF-prose writers contributed scripts, including David Gerrold, Ben Bova and Theodore Sturgeon.

Having watched all three seasons now, I'm sure I would have liked it when I was in the age-range of the show's kid-characters. The stories are simple but logical, and show good sentiment without becoming treacly.  Considering that this was the period during which children's television shows were expected to exhibit "prosocial values," LOST's stories make their prosocial points with a minimum of preachments.

Symbolically speaking, LOST's most interesting facet is how it opposes the friendly humanoid ape-men, the "Pakuni," against the inflexibly hostile reptile-men, the "Sleestack."  The Pakuni, though sometimes slow to accept the humans and their makeshift technology, suggest the appeal of humanity's anthropoid ancestors, and their ability to learn from the Marshalls suggests their ability to move forward.  In contrast, though the Sleestack possess technological knowledge handed down from their ancestors, they remain locked in primitivism and are unable to move forward-- revealing perhaps more commonality with the Satanic snake in Eden than the Land's furry versions of Adam (and presumably Eve, though no female Pakuni are seen). Only one Sleestack named Enik (Enoch?) retains knowledge, but he is a time-traveler and not typical of his people.

The third and final season becomes a little too much like Gilligan's Island, as far too many "guest-stars" are allowed to pass through the time-vortex and join the Earthpeople-- which by this time included the kids' uncle, brought in to replace the actor who'd been playing the father but chose to split from the show.  There was less emphasis on believable science in the last season as well, but this didn't turn out as badly as it could have-- and I confess I like the invention of Torchy, the fire-breathing sailback dino (seen above).

As I reached the series' end, I didn't expect a wrap-up. I didn't get one, either.  But even though I didn't grow up with this show, I rather wished the producers had allowed the kids to escape the Land of the Lost.

THE MYSTERIOUS DOCTOR FU MANCHU (1929)

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

This Paramount film, the first sound adaptation of Sax Rohmer's famous Chinese arch-fiend, transforms the "devil-doctor" into a rather pedestrian serial murderer.  The film was directed by Rowland V. ("SON OF FRANKENSTEIN") Lee, who also directed the sequel, and co-written by Lloyd Corrigan, who had writing credits on all three of Paramount's Fu-related films.  Perhaps one should blame them for the transformation, in which this version of Fu seems closer in spirit to a production like Lon Chaney's 1927 MR. WU than with the Rohmer creation.

There are, to be sure, some touches indicating that the writers did research the Rohmer books.  The names of Fu's perennial opponents Nayland Smith and Doctor Petrie are used, though the new characters have very different histories from their prose versions.  One of policeman Nayland Smith's subordinates sports the name "Weymouth," who was a recurring cop-character in the early books.  At one point Nayland Smith even addresses the villain as "the insidious Doctor Fu Manchu," which was the American title of the first Rohmer Fu-novel.

But it's plain that the filmmakers wanted no part of Rohmer's "yellow peril" mad scientist, even though they couldn't avoid the central theme of racial conflict implied by the figure of Fu Manchu.  As an interesting touch, the movie's Nayland Smith consults at one point with the Chinese legation, whose representative expresses that Fu Manchu is no fit representative of the Chinese people.  It's possible that Lee and Corrigan meant to scale down the mythic nature of their Fu's evil, so that he would no longer seem to be a "yellow peril."

The only facet that the prose villain and this one have in common is that both of them evolve from the violence of the Boxer Rebellions, during which Chinese "secret societies" attempted to throw off the yoke of European influence in China.  In the first novel, Fu Manchu is an exceptionally gifted member of one such society. 

In MYSTERIOUS, this Fu Manchu (Warner Oland) is a gifted Chinese doctor who believes that the white people in his land are essentially beneficial.  However, when some Boxers take refuge in his house, the British army blast away at them, incidentally killing Fu's wife and son.  In Oland's only good acting-moment, Fu is catastrophically traumatized by his loss, and he plans to avenge himself on the Englishmen who took part in his tragedy. 

As it happens, one of Fu's white colleagues leaves his little daughter in Fu's care prior to the man's death.  Though civilized Fu initially treats little Lia as a daughter, vengeful Fu sees her as the emblem of the accursed white race.  Though Lia (Jean Arthur) grows to adulthood as Fu's ward, believing her foster-father to be entirely saintlike, Fu plans to use her to help him kill his targets.

He does so with his only metaphenomenal talent, for this Fu, somewhat like the prose version, is a master of hypnotism.  The film jumps in time between Lia's childhood and Lia's adulthood, during which time Fu manages to slay most of the British soldiers who wronged him.  Presumably he uses Lia as some kind of mesmerized stalking-horse, possibly setting the victims up to be poisoned, since Nayland Smith comments that this is the killer's dominant method.  Certainly this seems to be Lia's function when she encounters Fu's last two targets, General Petrie and his son Jack.  Of the two only the older man actually participated in the Boxer Wars, but Fu has sworn to end the family lines of all who injured him.

It should be no great surprise when young Lia falls in love with one of her intended targets, young Jack Petrie (Neil Hamilton, later of BATMAN teleseries fame). Jack happens to be a medical doctor like the "Doctor Petrie" of the novels, though Jack Petrie's profession doesn't have any impact on the narrative.  Fortunately for the Petrie family, Inspector Nayland Smith has been investigating the murders, though he doesn't initially know that the respected doctor Fu Manchu is behind the killings.  However, he ferrets out Fu in jig-time.  The Petries are saved and Fu chooses to drink his own poison to evade Western justice.

Lee's direction, allegedly done for both silent and sound versions, has a stagey look, though at times the action is allowed to ramp up slightly.  Dialogue has a crisp sound to it, but Fu is the only individual who gets any meaningful characterization; the rest are just simple ciphers.  The plot gives Lia a few opportunities to agonize at having been betrayed by her father-figure, but Jean Arthur's performance is over-ripe, just as Oland's Fu is a little on the bland side.  There's the usual bad comedy relief for the period, of course.  A minor character, a female Chinese servant who helped Fu raise Lia, proves that not all Chinese are bad in that the servant distracts Fu at a crucial time, allowing Lia to avoid poisoning her lover.

As mentioned I think it's possible that Lee and Corrigan sought to make Fu more human, a victim of real tragedy-- although none of the characters seems to feel any of his pain, with the inspector reducing him to "criminal insanity."  However, this Fu is largely a stock Chinese character for the period who is never more than the sum of his parts.  His personal tragedy in no way reflects on the justice or injustice of British imperialism; it's just a method to motivate the murders.  In one sense, though I'm aware that a fictional figure like the prose Fu Manchu could be used as a boogeyman by conservative interests, the idea of a Chinese supergenius, even if evil, casts a far longer shadow than this simple melodramatic construction.

This Fu uses none of the outre weaponry of his prose original, and only utilizes hypnotism on his faux-daughter.  If this element were not present, I might consider MYSTERIOUS just as naturalistic in its phenomenality as the aforementioned MISTER WU.

And though I deem most Fu Manchu films, like the books, to fall within the mythic category of "adventure," the attempt to scale Fu down to a pathetic serial murderer allies this film more with the mythos of drama.  I have not yet screened the sequel, but tend to believe from descriptions that it too falls into the same category.

BLACK MOON (1934)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

 

In my reviews for two Halperin Brothers films, WHITE ZOMBIE and REVENGE OF THE ZOMBIES, I thought it odd that the first film didn’t dwell on the sociological theme of black zombies being forced to labor for a white overseer, while the later film did invoke a similar theme with respect to Cambodian victims of Euro-imperialism.  I briefly wondered if the theme had been repressed in WHITE ZOMBIE due to American sensitivities about the history of real-world slavery.  The nature of Columbia's 1934 BLACK MOON, however, would suggest that not every producer was so reticent.

BLACK MOON is the sort of horror-film seemingly made for Marxist analysis, dealing as it does with the demonization of an imperialized people (the black natives of fictional Caribbean island San Christopher) and the horror of a member of a dominant race (Caucasian in this case) as she “goes native.”  I don’t deny that this sort of “sociological mythicity” does exist; I simply don’t believe that sociological myths are as central to human art as Marxist analysts like to think.  However, while BLACK MOON has the potential to develop in the other three Campbellian categories—psychological, cosmological, or metaphysical—it really doesn’t develop beyond the matrix of the sociological.  I will say that the central myth of MOON is that of Faustian temptation, which exceeds the boundaries of the imperialism theme.

The film opens in America with a seemingly happy family consisting of prosperous businessman Steven Lane (Jack Holt), his wife Juanita (Dorothy Burgess) and their small girl-child Nancy.  But though Juanita has been absent from her birthplace San Christopher for roughly five years, she suddenly begins to yearn after the island.  She begins playing drums in imitation of the natives of San Christopher, and conveys her intention to visit the plantation of her uncle Doctor Perez.  In response he sends an emissary named Macklin to dissuade her.  In a conversation between Juanita and Macklin, Macklin reminds Juanita that when she was a child, her black nurse Ruva initiated her into the rituals of blood sacrifice.  Juanita was “poisoned by the voodoo,” as Macklin puts it. Juanita refuses to be deterred, planning to take her daughter and daughter’s nanny with her to her uncle’s estate.

 Steven, somewhat worried about Juanita’s behavior, asks his private secretary Gail (Fay Wray) to go along on the trip.  Gail—who has almost resigned from Steven’s service because she’s secretly in love with him—consents.

Dr. Perez is far from happy to receive his niece, but the natives celebrate Juanita’s return.  In time we learn that Perez was responsible for saving Juanita from her black nurse’s ministrations and sending her to America, where she met Steven.  Curiously, Perez still employs Ruva on his plantation, which seems rather strange given her culpability in seducing Perez's niece.  The closest one can come to “explaining” this lapse is that later Perez tells Steven that at the same time he liberated Juanita he killed the natives’ high priest, which had the (extremely convenient) effect of pacifying the entire native population due to their fears that their gods had turned against them.  Now that Juanita has returned, it’s clear that the natives still have plans for her.  One of their first acts is to kill Nancy’s nanny so that evil Ruva can take over the child's care.

The natives’ reach even extends, very improbably, to America, in that one of their men journeys there and kills Macklin just as the emissary is attempting to warn Steven.  One might think that this event would send Steven speeding to San Christopher, but for some reason—presumably to build tension in the film-- he remains in America until Gail manages to sneak out a telegram to him despite the watchfulness of the natives. 

On the way there Steven makes the acquaintance of a sailor named Lunch (Clarence Muse), a black American from Georgia.  They bond somewhat because Lunch has a girlfriend on the island, though he like Steven is worried about the influence of voodoo.  In an extremely bizarre if brief conversation, Lunch refers to the islanders—including his own girlfriend—as “monkeychasers.”  He explains the epithet as a reference to the natives' habit of chasing monkeys to steal their coconuts.  I can't help but suspect that the writer who coined the epithet-- possibly Clements Ripley, who originated the magazine short story on which the film was based-- may have really had on his mind the then-prevalent racial fantasy about black people mating with apes.

By the time Steven reaches the island, it’s too late for Juanita, for she's become totally engrossed with voodoo worship.  Perez reveals more of Juanita’s strange story to Steven, mentioning that Juanita’s parents were killed in one of many periodic native uprisings, and that Ruva inducted her into voodoo-rites that went on until Perez found out when Juanita reached age fifteen.  Steven asks this rather negligent father-figure why he stays on the island despite the repeated trouble.  Significantly, Perez states his case in terms of personal courage rather than personal profit, saying that many of his people have died here but that “we have never run.”

With Hunch’s help Steven manages to spy on a voodoo ceremony.  He’s dismayed to see that Juanita has become the voodoo queen, dancing orgiastically before a huge crowd of male and female worshippers.  The high priest prepares to execute the scheduled sacrifice, who is none other than Lunch’s girlfriend.  Steven, who’s brought a gun to the game, shoots the high priest before he can kill the woman.  Steven and Lunch flee the area, not seeing that the sacrificial victim is finished off by Juanita (though the camera shows the act at such a distance that it’s hard to make out).

  The natives don’t immediately strike back, but rather send Juanita into the plantation house.  Steven keeps mum and doesn’t reveal that he knows what she’s become.  Juanita brews a drink to knock out her husband, but the girl Nancy accidentally sips it instead, revealing the plot but taking no permanent harm.

 

The natives attack the house in force.  Steven, Perez, Gail and Nancy try to escape, but only Perez gets away.  Juanita schedules her husband and her husband’s would-be lover to be sacrificed. Perez manages to come back and rescue the two adults. This leaves the worshippers with but one candidate for sacrifice: the little girl.  For the first time, Juanita resists her indoctrination, horrified at the thought of killing her own blood-kin.  However, the spell of the drums is upon her, and when the ceremony commences, the only thing that saves Nancy is that Steven shoots his wife from afar.  The natives are shocked into docility by their priestess’ murder, and they allow Steven to reclaim his daughter without further violence. 

This docility apparently allows Perez to return to power once more, for after Juanita’s killing, he appears back on the island for one last scene, laying flowers upon his niece’s gravesite while surrounded by a couple dozen black natives, some of whom wear Christian robes and sing Christian-sounding hymns.  Lunch mans a sailboat in which Steven leaves the island with his daughter and with Gail.  By this time, Gail has confessed her hidden love to Steven, making it possible for the “bad wife” to be replaced by a good one.

Strangely, despite the film’s title I recall no mentions of the moon or its phases.  Most likely the title connotes the state of total darkness that ensues during the “dark of the moon,” which in turn connotes the idea of black races rising against white mastery.  However, this mild poeticism is the only one asserted by MOON’s script.  Despite the fact that the plot references such lurid subject matter as blood-sacrifice, brainwashing, racial antipathies and a woman almost committing a Medea-style murder, both script and direction are pedestrian, lacking the sort of delirious quality of WHITE ZOMBIE or Edgar Ulmer’s THE BLACK CAT. 

All of the characters—including Juanita, functionally the “monster” of this horror-opus— are treated as little more than bare plot-functions.  Their dialogue is never more than adequate to keep the plot rolling, lacking the sort of humanized touches that give the characters their own provisional identity.  Juanita, having been polluted by a "taste for blood" at an early age, does not attempt to justify her status as a voodoo-queen, and her one moment of rebellion has no narrative impact.  At the same time, she doesn’t glory in her evil, so her execution has no purgative effect.

The racial politics are the most noteworthy aspect of BLACK MOON.  San Christopher is patently a stand-in for Haiti, for Perez even comments that the sacrificial cultists are mostly “hill-bandits from Haiti.”  But there’s a curious quality to this particular voodoo film as against others from the first half of the twentieth century.  Most Caribbean-based voodoo-films tend to portray the natives as largely docile, and voodoo raises its ugly head in the form of just one ambitious voodoo priest, often a rogue white man like Murder Legendre in WHITE ZOMBIE.  BLACK MOON does not for an instant allude to any past injustices done to the black natives of its faux-Haiti. Still, Perez emphasizes that their uprisings are a continuing phenomenon, even though the natives can be quelled by a blow to their superstitious fears.  Admittedly, by the more racist views of the time, this sort of reaction proves that the black natives “need” to be ruled.  Still, the mention of continued uprisings produces the effect of a native population that’s always discontented with the rule of the white masters, even if MOON won’t suggest that there’s any good reason for that discontent.

There’s also a strange elision in the script: why do the black natives want Juanita for their voodoo queen in the first place?  Of the various black natives seen on-camera, only two—the nurse and the high priest—are given names and speaking lines, and neither of them justifies their desire to suborn Juanita.  I speculate that the implicit motive is one of humiliation: after killing Juanita’s parents, the voodoo-worshippers wish to degrade Juanita by tempting her with the Faustian illusion of power.  This would prove that this member of the “ruling class” can be brought down to their level-- which seems a bit like an inversion of the old "natives-need-white-queen-because-they-think-she's-magic."

 

Still, it's hard to know how much intentionality with which to credit the cultists.  At one point, they can be perspicacious enough to send an assassin to kill Macklin, yet at other points, they can become poleaxed whenever someone kills their high priest.  It would seem that the writer had no clear idea of his devilish pagans; they act cleverly when it suits the writer’s purpose, and stupidly for the same reason. 

           This would seem to be director Roy William Neill's second horror film, depending on whether or not the same-year NINTH GUEST can be deemed in the horror genre.  His direction is workmanlike here, showing none of the panache visible in next year's THE BLACK ROOM, much less his celebrated Sherlock Holmes films.

 

 

   

  

 

 

        

TROLL 2 (1990)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: * psychological, metaphysical*

Inasmuch as I've already devoted too litcrit-theory essays to the subject of the insanity that wasTROLL 2-- Part 1 here, and Part 2 here-- I'm not going to devote any great time here to recounting the "plot," if one can call it that. But since I recently re-watched it, and found the film even more gratuitously meaningless than I did before.  It took a perverse sort of anti-genius on the parts of director Claudio Fragasso and writer/wife Rosella Drudi that they were able to mount such an inimitable "perfect storm" of muddled myth-motifs and fractured fantasies-- apparently with little or no realization as to just how bad their work would seem.

Here, in a nutshell, is what I wrote about the *potential* mythic content of TROLL 2:

Two aspects already noted in TROLL PLAYING PART 1 include both vampire tropes and folklore about cannibalistic boogiemen (for which Scandinavian trolls *might* actually be better suited than Celtic goblins). I'll also speculate that given the film's heavy emphasis on the goblins forcing the beleaguered human protagonists to eat tainted food so that the humans will turn into plants, Drudi might even have been influenced by the mythic motif I'll call "eating the otherworld's food," which invariably causes mortals from Persephone on down to remain in the otherworld.

These "potential myths," as I noted earlier, were so thoroughly undermined by the filmmaker's uncritical "everything including the kitchen sink"sensibility that they aren't even comic inversions of the "straight-faced" tropes.   They're just weird hybrids, clues that seem to lead to absolutely nothing.

One other motif I neglected to note, because it appeared so briefly: at one point in the "story," a protagonist claims that all of the goblins in their human forms have facial moles that resemble "four-leaf clovers."  It's not mentioned earlier, nor does it play any role in the narrative.  Apparently it was just a weird idea that Drudi or Fragasso thought of tossing in, just to make the villains a little more gross (not that more grossness is necessary).  But why graft on the goblins the symbol of good luck?  Did Fragasso and Drudi confuse their goblins with Irish leprechauns? 

Even though I get no small satisfaction from "solving" the presence of some oddball motif in a cheap B-movie like PHANTOM FROM 10,000 LEAGUES, I have to tip my hat to a movie that seems designed to frustrate a myth-hunter like myself.

And, having so tipped, the rest is silence.