GHOST ROCK (2003)

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


Any time one looks up an IMDB listing for a given film and finds a martial artist/actor listed as one of the "writers," one should be pretty sure what one is getting.  And sure enough, despite the Old West setting, GHOST ROCK is your basic American chopsocky with minor supernatural content.

In large part GHOST ROCK is cribbed from Clint Eastwood's 1973  "American spaghetti western" HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER.  In that film a man murdered in a corrupt town apparently comes back from the dead to avenge his murder.  Wikipedia claims that the original intent of the script was a naturalistic one, and would have revealed that avenger Eastwood was the twin of the murdered man.  That sensible explanation was dropped, with the result that in the film released the audience never got any rationale for the avenger's appearance.

In contrast, GHOST ROCK provides both a naturalistic and a supernaturalistic avenger.  Twenty years prior to the main body of the story, a gang of outlaws raid a small ranch.  A little girl is killed and the boy who knows her survives to seek vengeance twenty years later in the town of Ghost Rock.  However, for no explicit reason the little girl, grown to womanhood, shows up in town, fully armed and also seeking revenge on the outlaws.  She's literally a ghost, but thanks to budgetary constraints, she never walks through walls, allows bullets to pass through her, or the like.

Naturally there's no telling why it takes both natural-hero John (Michael Worth) and supernatural-heroine Savannah (Jenya Lano) so damn long to find the murderers, particularly when their leader Pickett (Gary Busey) is hiding in plain sight, serving as the mayor of Ghost Rock.  In addition, to make the presence of martial arts in the Old West slightly palatable, Ghost Rock has a substantial Chinese population, who are maltreated by Mayor Pickett and from whom John learned his non-American fighting-skills.  In addition to a second male martial artist who works for Pickett and gives John his best fights, even a couple of local prostitutes show off a couple of kung fu moves.  While no one would ever call the teleseries KUNG FU historically accurate, compared to this rampant silliness it's a veritable model of probity.

Lively gunfights and kung-fu battles make this dumb-fun western watchable but never memorable.  It does try to throw in a little humor, but sometimes the film's jokes are more peculiar than funny, as when saloon-madame Mattie (Adrienne Barbeau, currently pushing seventy years in age) is challenged to knock out a man with one punch, as if this is a common occurence in Ghost Rock's version of the Old West.  A commentary on Barbeau's fame as a "tough girl," or just giving the actress some extraneous "action" to perform to justify purchasing her services to enhance the film's "marquee value?"  On a star-spotting side-note, Worth-- best known to mainstream audiences for the syndie teleseries ACAPULCO HEAT-- is joined here by Christa Sauls, another HEAT veteran.

THE OCTAGON (1980)

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


As with the various DURANGO KID westerns I've reviewed, THE OCTAGON is a film whose metaphenomenality inheres entirely in its use of unusual costumes-- but for the film's villains, not for the hero.  Although Chuck Norris' hero "Scott James" has been trained in the arts of the ninja, his only concession to ninja tradition is that briefly he appears clad in black attire.  Only the bad-guy ninjas appear in full costumes.

There's not a lot to say about the slack plotline of OCTAGON, in which an isolated fortress of ninjas somehow manages to maintain itself in some American forest while periodically sending out its black-clad killers to perform assassinations.  Hero James, who received his training by virtue of being adopted by a ninja master, left the fold in part because of conflicts with his envious brother Seikura (Tadashi Yamashita).  James attempts to keep out of ninja business, but finds himself drawn back in, partly thanks to the contrivance of his mercenary pal McCarn (Lee Van Cleef), who is in the business of hunting terrorists.

I don't expect great acting out of this type of American chopsocky, but in the entire cast Van Cleef is the only actor to bring some elan to his tawdry role.  Norris, Yamashita, Kim Lankford, Karen Carlson-- all turn in dog-worthy performances.  Their clumsy thesping would be easier to overlook if director Eric Karson and his team could bring any energy to the proceedings. One review called OCTAGON "sluggish," which sums up the flick's failings adequately. I will note that this was Karson's first time directing an entire movie, and that he did improve somewhat with his next two martial-arts adventures, 1986's OPPOSING FORCE and 1988's BLACK EAGLE.

A side-note: in the same way that I stated that the heroic "Durango Kid" was an uncanny presence with his bandana-masked getup-- but that ordinary bandits wearing bandanas would not be-- not all ninjas convey an uncanny vibe.  I'm not likely to ever review the 1997  naturalistic modern-day karate-film KICKBOXING ACADEMY.  But this film's very minor use of "ninjas"-- who are just a coterie of modern-day thugs in ninja costumes-- does not convey any uncanny status upon its narrative. 

LOST SOULS (1998), INNER SANCTUM II (1994)

PHENOMENALITY: (1) *marvelous,* (2) *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*


Not long ago I got a temporary freebie for the HBO channels, and my first complaint was that all of the channels were recycling stuff from the 90s.  When I had HBO in the 90s, I knew that incarnation showed a lot of trash, but at least it was NEW trash.

Then, while cleaning off some old tapes, I come across two specimens of cheap nineties flicks that came close to eradicating any nostalgia I had for the period, at least in terms of the horror genre.

Neither film is any good, but of the two, LOST SOULS rates lower.  This is a dreary Canadian-made telemovie which reminded me slightly of 1976's BURNT OFFERINGS, wherein a rather bland American family moved into a old house in the country and promptly began encountering strange phenomena.

The Robinsons are the family in question here, and the only interesting thing about them is that their 12-year-old daughter Meaghan, an autistic, begins to show greater signs of involvement once they move into the house.  The parents and their other child, a teen boy, don't have to deal with any of the real-world problems attendant on dealing with even a high-functioning autistic, so in effect Meaghan is just another predictable excuse for a "weird kid" who makes contact with the spirit world a la POLTERGEIST.  At least the player chosen for the role, British child-actress Laura Harling, managed to make her character interesting despite her largely withdrawn nature.  This is more than the script did for any of the other characters, particularly headliners John Savage and Barbara Sukowa.

The essence of the script is the old "ghosts trying to direct the living to their real killer" schtick, and it proceeds with reasonable logic from plot point A to plot point B.  The most entertaining aspect of the telefilm is that at the climax, when the real killer reveals himself and the ghosts come out to finish him, the film's budget was too low to allow for FX of any kind.  So the killer just hears the ghosts screaming in his ears, causing him to fall to his death.

INNER SANCTUM II, by renowned schlockmeister Fred Olen Ray, provides a little more fun even though the so-called plot is thoroughly illogical.

I have not seen the film of which this was a sequel, though from descriptions it seems to have been a naturalistic "erotic thriller" about a husband trying to gaslight/kill his wealthy wife, only to be killed by her in self defense. 

As Number Two (in every sense) begins, heiress Jennifer is now being haunted by memories of her husband Baxter, who returns in her dreams with a ghoulish demon-face, threatening to finish her off.  She consults with an impotent psychiatrist (David Warner) who can only give her various drugs.  But legal affairs, conducted in part by "Count Yorga" (Robert Quarry), must go on, and Baxter's brother-in-law Bill arrives with his wife to hear the reading of Baxter's will.  Then Jennifer starts seeing Old Demon-Face running around in the real world.  Has poor Jennifer flown round the bend?

Of course not: it's Colonel Mustard in the Living Room with a Demon-Face Mask.  But oh wait, Colonel Mustard gets killed, so it's really Mrs. Peacock with a claw-hammer who's the main villain.  The brief attempt to gaslight poor Jennifer by making her dream-demon come to life qualifies this film for uncanny status in terms of the "phantasmal figurations" trope, while Jennifer's traumatized nuttiness qualifies the film for the "perilous psycho" trope.  Incidentally, starring actress Tracy Brooks Swope manages to make her character pathetic rather than sympathetic. Perhaps the film's writers felt the same way toward the character, for in contrast to the plots of most supposedly erotic thrillers, this one ends with the gaslight-girl still crazy and seeing real-world demons.  Maybe it was director Ray's intention to suggest that the demons were real after all, but there's no support for that view in the script.  Also, the sex-scenes are among the most perfunctory I've ever seen in this sort of flick.

The only pleasures one can get from this are two: (1) spotting actors known for better roles elsewhere, and (2) a longish three-way cat-fight involving star Swope, her nurse Jennifer Ciesar, and former "RED SONJA villain" Sandahl Bergman. 

WANTED (2008)

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


"For the first time, Wesley-- you're in control."-- Sloan, WANTED.

Even though the above quote is spoken by a character who will prove to be the hero's primary antagonist, his words define a world of difference between the source graphic novel by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones-- reviewed here-- and the 2008 film, a Russian-American production directed by Timur Bekmambetov and scripted by three writers associated with the FAST AND FURIOUS franchise.

Though the film WANTED deals with far fewer marvelous entities than the graphic novel does, I've argued that the main reason for the film's alterations were due to the need for "narrative clarity:"

The WANTED movie chose to use super-assassins-- a bunch of ordinary men transformed into a cult of killers by a secret organization's rituals and weapons--because that was the easiest narrative concept to put across in a two-hour film. The WANTED graphic novel, however, began as a proposal to DC Comics, which would have taken the old 1970s SECRET SOCIETY OF SUPER-VILLAINS concept and cranked it up for the ultraviolence audience...

However, the changes were more than cosmetic. The Millar graphic novel is one I deemed to be little more than the manifestation of an "idiot id," in that the protagonist's concept of self-actualization is that of being able to go on spree-killings whenever he pleases, because he's the biggest badass in a world already dominated by super-villains.  As I said in that review I have no problem with an author who decides to flout morality in all respects, as with the Marquis de Sade.  But such defiance pales a bit when the only motive behind all that anarchy is just another form of "conspicuous consumption."

The film, in a far more sophisticated manner, allows for the existence of altruistic motives while not losing sight of the original story's goal: to show a pathetic wage-slave actualizing himself by becoming the greatest badass in a world of badasses.  Thus pathetic Wesley Gibson (James MacAvoy) endures a humiliating wage-slave existence for just as long as it takes to pound in the suckitude of his life-- all in a much breezier manner than one sees in the over-obvious Millar-Jones work.  Then Gibson is initiated into a world of chaotic violence by two gun-wielding assassins.  One, he is later told, is "Cross," a master assassin who killed the father Gibson never knew, and now seeks to kill Gibson as well.  The other is the sultry female killer "Fox," who draws Gibson out of apparent danger and initiates him into the world of the Fraternity, a thousand-year-old cult whose assassins murder people to keep the world safe from evil.  Gibson doesn't entirely buy into their raison d'etre-- getting mystic messages about who they kill from a gigantic loom, whose threads are supposedly attuned to the will of Fate itself.  However, after the Fraternity members demonstrate that he possesses untapped powers of badassery inherited from his father, Gibson can't wait to ditch his dull compromised life and embrace the life of a super-assassin.


In the graphic novel Gibson becomes a super-killer with a modicum of training.  But as noted above, the film is more about the elusive feat of control, so the training becomes a more significant narrative element in the film.  In keeping with their name, the brutal members of the Fraternity "initiate" Gibson in a variety of ways-- beating him, knifing him, forcing him to risk his life in dangerous stunts.  But the violence not only serves to arouse Gibson's killer instincts, it also breaks down his false expectations about life.  Given that the FAST AND FURIOUS franchise might be subtitled "Zen and the Art of Maniac Auto-Driving," the film similarly gives Gibson's training sequences the feel of an anarchic version of the teleseries KUNG FU.  Of course the feats that Gibson and Fox can accomplish-- causing bullets to bend in their flight after being fired, flipping cars so that they spin in the air like pinwheels-- all belong to the realm of gosh-wow fantasy.  In addition, while I critiqued the graphic novel for its "paucity of imagination," Bekmambetov and his team make their super-assassin's world into one with great visual humor.  Even a car-chase scene that would be grindingly obvious in most American films is punctuated by moments of weird humor, as when Cross must give chase to Fox and Gibson by stealing a truck full of bobble-head animals.

I won't dwell on the specific twists and turns of the plotline, except to say that at least they have the potential to surprise an audience, in contrast to the lame "gotcha" featured in the GN.  Where Millar and Jones simply create a group of characters who have no altruistic impulses, the script for the film presents the notion of the "Loom of Fate."  One never really knows if the Loom has any genuine power to target persons who deserve to be assassinated.  But because the script leaves the Loom ambivalent, one can view it as every ideal that has ever been used as a rallying-point for violence-- and each individual can decide how far that applies in the real world. 

Though some critics read this film as being little more than a paean to violence-- which it is, in part-- it devotes a fair amount of attention to bringing human dimension to Gibson's Quest for Fearlessness.  Fox, who is a rather flat character in the graphic novel, is imbued with a puckish sense of humor and an enigmatic feminine viewpoint, and both characters are well essayed by James MacAvoy and Angelina Jolie. 

Because the emphasis here in on excitement rather than on the elision of all heroism, I view the 2008 WANTED as belonging to the "adventure" mythos, whereas the GN conforms better to the mythos of the "irony."

NO SUCH THING (2001)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *metaphysical, sociological*


SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS


In NO SUCH THING Hal Hartley, who made his name with low-key naturalistic films like 1989's THE UNBELIEVABLE TRUTH, attempts to provide a modernist take on the classic fable BEAUTY AND THE BEAST.  By "modernist" in this case, I mean that his project involves undercutting the expectations of anyone who expects traditional narrative.  Allegedly Hartley wanted his "Beast" to be played by avant-garde director Jean-Luc Godard, similarly known for movies devoted to breaking down normative narrative.

Literary modernism was in general not kind to faerie and fantasy, so it's a bit of a surprise that the film begins by focusing upon a genuine Beast (Robert John Burke), who lives in the wilds of Iceland, sustained by tribute from neighboring, regularly-terrified villagers.  In contrast to the lion-like Beast favored by both Jean Cocteau and the Walt Disney Corporation, this Beast has goat-like horns and the ability to breathe fire like a dragon.  In contrast to being a lord enchanted by magic, Hartley's Beast has no origins; he claims to have existed since the dawn of mankind, but has no idea how he came to be.  Though he's remained hidden under the cover of his legendary status up until the 21st century, his tedious, unrewarding existence comes to an end when a gang of journalists come to investigate the legend of the monster, and he kills them all.

In the traditional story "Beauty" is drawn to the Beast because of her father's trespass against the Beast's privacy. In THING, the Beauty is the slightly dowdy office-worker Beatrice (Sarah Polley), and she's drawn to the Beast because one of the slain journalists was her fiancee.  As she works for a major news organization, run by the acerbic "Boss" (Helen Mirren), Beatrice is given the chance to fly to Iceland and investigate the murders--

--at which point we see one of Hartley's first deviations from customary expectations.  A normative narrative, be it an archaic fairy tale or a modern imitation thereof, would have Beauty on the Beast's door right away.  Instead, Beatrice's plane goes down in the sea.  She alone is rescued, albeit crippled.  The Beast's story is put aside while Beatrice, sent back to a hospital in the U.S., endures a lengthy and painful operation that restores her to her normal status. In the film's best moment, when Beatrice leaves the hospital, people touch her for good luck, as if her miraculous rescue imbued her with godly power.

This sequence is Hartley's biggest flouting of the expectations of normal narrative; thereafter, she eventually makes it to Iceland, interviews the people in the Beast's neighborhood, and finally beards the Beast in his lair.  But Beatrice has no obligation to stay in the Beast's company to expiate a parent's debt: rather, she pulls out a gun and tried to kill the creature who murdered her fiancee.  The creature can't be harmed by guns, but he would dearly like to end his pointless life.  Beatrice resembles the fable's "Beauty" only in that she is able to repress her horror of the unknown and speak with its living incarnation.  Thus she learns that the Beast knows of one scientist who claimed to be capable of ending an immortal's existence-- one "Doctor Artaud," probably named after the founder of the so-called "Theater of Cruelty" in the 1930's.

At this point THING verges away the BEAUTY AND THE BEAST text almost completely, taking on more resemblance to 1933's KING KONG, a film which arguably patterned itself after the traditional tale.  In exchange for helping the Beast locate Artaud, in order to put an end to the Beast's existence, he must follow her back to civilization and suffer the ignominy of being ballyhooed by the press, as well as swearing not to kill anyone no matter how aggravated he becomes.  The Beast's ennui is such that he agrees, and eventually this Beauty does something worse than almost bringing about the Beast's death: she puts him on display for her own career-furtherance.  Just to further puncture the romantic theme of the original story, during one of the Beast's publicity tours Beatrice, now somewhat famous herself, enjoys a one-night stand with a handsome stranger.

However, ignominy is not the Beast's worst problem.  The Boss presciently comments that soon the average civilized viewer will become bored with even a miraculous being who can neither die nor be killed.  The U.S. military and its grant-hungry scientists are interested in the Beast, though, for they take him prisoner and subject him to assorted deadly forces, indifferent to his sufferings.

Only here does Beatrice shows something akin to "love," though not of a romantic sort: she uses her celebrity to liberate the Beast and lead him to Doctor Artaud, who deduces that the reason the Beast is so invulnerable is because he fundamentally does not exist-- which is the clue to the oblivion he desires.  Yet even here, Hartley ends the film enigmatically.  Hartley conjures with the imagery of the Cocteau film, suggesting that as he dies-- if he dies!-- the Beast first transforms into something like a normal human man.  But the film ends with a close-up of Beatrice's face, her expression ambivalent, which no doubt mirrors the expression of many who watched the film.

Though I myself prefer traditional narrative to ironic twists on same, I believe it's possible to devise an intelligent satire upon the template of "Beauty and the Beast."  But like a substantial number of modernist works, Hartley's NO SUCH THING doesn't have much to offer beyond turning expectations upside down.  Most of its jabs are at easy targets-- the bored consumer, scientists who prostitute themselves for funding-- and the relationship of the lady and the monster, rather than being interpreted in some radical new way, is merely pushed to the side as-- to quote the aforementioned Hartley film-- just another "unbelievable truth."

MOTHRA VS. GODZILLA (1964)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological, sociological, metaphysical*


The fourth Godzilla film is also the third to pit the big lizard against a second colossal creature. However, while Godzilla's previous foes Angilas and King Kong present the same danger to humankind that Godzilla does, Mothra-- making her second appearance following her 1961 debut--
has a different tonality.

Indeed, though the film was retitled GODZILLA VS. THE THING for the American market, the Japanese title shows the correct emphasis: this is structurally a Mothra film in which Godzilla is the giant moth's antagonist. 

A typhoon, rather than atomic tampering this time, is responsible for causing the gigantic egg of the next Mothra to be carried from Infant Island to the shores of Japan.  Indeed, nuclear power is only occasionally addressed in this film, mostly by picking up on the plotline of 1961's MOTHRA, which argues that Infant Island has been reduced to a wasteland by atomic testing.  It's not abundantly clear as to how the islanders can live there at all, though it may be that their resident moth-god provides some help in that regard.  When the storm deposits the egg off Japan, greedy businessmen, much like those from the first Mothra film, lay claim to it and advertise it as a spectacular attraction for "Happy Enterprises."  Some noble reporters, primarily lead male Sakai and lead female Junko, question the businessmen's right to the great egg.  The "Mothra-fairies" appear first to the businessmen, attempting to regain the egg of their deity, but the corrupt corporate types merely try to capture the fairies for further exploitation.  The fairies then appeal to the reporters for help, but even the Fourth Estate can't do much to stir up opinion against Happy Enterprises.  It's rather surprising that the government doesn't intervene in the matter, since the fairies warn that the adult Mothra may attack to regain the egg, and the creature's last rampage would be an event the government wouldn't want to repeat.

Enter Godzilla, rising once again from a short-lived hibernation.  Sakai and Junko journey to Infant Island, hoping to persuade the islanders to summon Mothra to save Japan-- and the egg-- from Godzilla.  The islanders initially refuse, but Junko delivers an impassioned speech which sways them.  The giant moth, moved by the prayers of its people, attacks and almost defeats Godzilla, only to receive a death-wound from the Big G's fiery breath.  Godzilla rises to attack again but the Japanese military delays him again, notably with an electrical trap.

However, the egg has been kept safe long enough that it can now hatch, which it does in a bravura sequence, nurtured by the sacral song of the fairies and the islanders.  (There's even a suggestion that the islander-god may have some existence separate from Mothra herself, since one of the islanders' idols flashes with magical power.)  Two Mothra-larvae hatch from the egg and end up defeating Godzilla by ambushing him with gobs and gobs of enfolding silk.  The larvae and the fairies then return to Infant Island as the reporters bid them a cheery farewell.

In my review of MOTHRA I noted that because the giant moth was female, this signified "the hegemony of feminine nature." MOTHRA VS. GODZILLA underlines this hegemony even more than the first film.  If Godzilla and similar creatures represent the face of an unforgiving nature, striking back against the abuse of humanity, Mothra symbolizes the feminine virtue of motherly forgiveness.  It's surely not accidental that Junko, not the more forceful Sakai, is the one to speak most eloquently on the need for the islanders to forgive and forget.  Even the notion of the egg's spawn twin larvae-- mirroring the image of the twin fairies-- speaks to the feminine prodigality of the natural world, as against the destruction wrought by male-oriented technology and weaponry.

YELLOW HAIR AND THE FORTRESS OF GOLD (1984)

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

This U.S.-Spanish co-production, put together by roughly the same team that came out with 1983's HUNDRA-- also starring blonde Laurene Landon-- is pleasant enough escapist adventure.  Compared to many other ersatz "Indiana Jones" knock-offs, YELLOW HAIR is probably near the top of the pack, though it suffers from a wandering, "make it up as we go along" script.

Writer-director Matt Cimber throws in a little metatextual humor, mostly consisting of voiceovers that adjoin the viewer to watch for the next installment of Yellow Hair's supposedly serial adventures.  But happily there's not too much of this.  The titular "fortress of gold" is a hidden sanctuary of a lost tribe called the "Tulpan"-- implicitly pattened on the Aztecs-- who have survived into the late 1800s.  No one knows the location of the hidden warriors, though they emerge from time to time to taunt the Mexican military.  The one "marvelous" aspect of the Tulpan is what appears to be a magical pool with the Midas touch, for when they lower a victim into it, the pool takes on a mystic glow and turns the victim into a statue-- I presume a golden one, though the material doesn't look much like gold.  At no time is the magic pool given any explanation.

Yellow Hair (Landon) is a half-Comanche, half-white woman who has been raised with the tribe since childhood.  She regards her adoptive mother Grey Cloud as her true parent but otherwise knows nothing of her parentage. Grey Cloud also takes in a Caucasian orphan, who grows up along Yellow Hair as an adoptive sibling and takes the name of "the Pecos Kid."  Pecos leaves the tribe and apparently travels around acquiring girlfriends in every small town, while Yellow Hair becomes the tribe's pre-eminent warrior.  Early in the film she uses her fighting-skills to fend off a male suitor who challenges her, and it's plain from Yellow Hair's conversations with Grey Cloud that she's learned to fight so that she won't live the life of a squaw-- though she doesn't seem to have any better goal in mind.

Pecos gets in dutch with the commander of the Mexican militia, partly because he's claimed to have information about the Tulpan.  When Yellow Hair finds out about Pecos being in captivity, she sneaks into the compound and breaks Pecos free in the film's best action-sequence.  The commander retaliates by sending some of his men, led by the Comanchero Flores, to the Comanche camp, where Flores murders Grey Cloud.  While Yellow Hair seeks vengeance on the commander's forces, she also becomes intrigued by the "Fortress of Gold" when an old seer tells her that her true parents came from the Tulpan sanctuary.

After a number of lively-- but low-cost-- action-scenes, Yellow Hair and Pecos manage to enter the mountain sanctum of the Tulpan.  Yellow Hair naively accepts the apparent welcome of the lost tribe and vows to remain with her parents' people.  Pecos leaves for the outside world, but doubles back, in time to rescue his quasi-sister when she learns that the Tulpan plan to turn her into a golden statue.

Though the action is not lively enough to grab anyone not already in the mood for a RAIDERS-lite flick, YELLOW HAIR is serviceable in that regard.  There's a passing suggestion that the two quasi-siblings may have a thing for each other: Yellow Hair seems jealous of Pecos' many trysts, and in one scene she claims that Pecos once tried to see her without her clothes.  Though he claims that it was only to verify whether she was male or female, the issue is dropped and no romantic liaison takes place, though they're implicitly together at film's end.  The fact that the male is allowed many sexual encounters while the female is occupied in defending her chastity incarnates a certain prevalent sociological myth about male-female dynamics, though this too is not explored in any depth.