HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 2 (2015), HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 3 (2018)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *metaphysical, psychological*


It's not saying much to assert that the sequel to HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA is an improvement on the first film, given how tiresome and pathetic it was. It's of passing interest to me, though, that it improved precisely because most of the story ditches the original "hotel for monsters" schtick, and lets the comical creatures cavort in other settings.

It's seven years since the first film, thus giving new married couple Mavis and Johnny time to give birth to a five-year-old rugrat, Dennis. New granddad Dracula (Adam Sandler again), having started out his comic career interfering with his daughter's life, returns to his old ways, for Dennis seems to be late to manifest any vampiric powers from Drac's side of the family. This problem provides the initial excuse for the vampire-lord and his goofy band of ghouls to take leave of the hotel's confines. Drac fools Mavis and Johnny into taking a trip without Dennis so that Drac can expose Dennis to a "monster training camp," the very one from which the Big D matriculated. This outing leads to a handful of moderately amusing gags, both about the monsters' "road trip" and the camp itself, which is now replete with multiple child-safety measures. Further, Dracula is aghast to discover that his maybe-human grandson has a different sort of "bat man" for his favorite hero, as in the one published by DC Comics.

Though Drac does return to the hotel afterward, very little of the plot-developments center around the running of the hotel itself. Drac's gross father Vlad returns from limbo and starts bossing his son around, and Drac tries to keep Vlad from finding out that his granddaughter has married a human. Further, for the first time some nasty-minded monsters appear: a legion of grotty bat-creatures, who menace Dennis but ironically bring his vampire powers to the fore. In a climactic battle-scene reminiscent of the 1966 BATMAN show, Drac, Mavis and Dennis beat the crap out of the bad bats, paving the way for overall reconciliation and all that jazz.

Not surprisingly, the third installment returns to the worn-out schtick of the first tilm, but instead of confining the action to Hotel Transylvania, this time most of the story is tied to a cruise-ship, the Legacy, and various other seaward sites.

First, there's a prologue showing how Dracula constantly eluded the murderous attacks of nutty vampire-hunter Abraham Van Helsing, who just doesn't like vampires because the prof's a dopey bigot. (Naturally, this film doesn't include anything like the first film's spotty references to the way Drac's breed go around hunting for humans). Following the prologue, Dracula begins thinking about taking a wife to replace his dead amour, but his daughter convinces him to get away from hotel business and take a cruise. On board the Legacy, Drac is immediately smitten by the ship's captain/entertainment director. Ericka.

But Ericka has a hidden agenda: she's the great-granddaughter of Van Helsing, now a cyborg with a human head, and he's drafted Ericka in a plan to destroy all of the monsters on the cruise. Not surprisingly, Ericka's initial emnity toward the vampire lord takes a turn for the better-- which is more than the film's predictable litany of dumb gags does.

The best thing about the third film is that, in spite of the presence of a menacing monster-hunter, the film doesn't attempt a combative conclusion like that of the second opus. I'm obliged to label the second film as combative, but the first and third are not, making it possible for me to dismiss the series, at least for now. Since HT3 was another box-office success, presumably another of these things will be glutting movie screens in the near future.

IT'S ALIVE (1969)

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


Of the eight direct-to-TV films Larry Buchanan made in the late sixties, IT'S ALIVE is the only one not based on an earlier AIP movie. I think that I may have seen this film aired on TV at the time of its premiere, or if not, at some time close to it. At  the time I thought it one of the worst films I'd ever seen.

I'm a little more forgiving now, though it's still obvious that Buchanan made ALIVE with the same workmanlike approach seen in the AIP adaptations. It's been said that ALIVE is based on a Richard Matheson story, but Matheson is not credited, and it seems likely that Buchanan simply took the base idea of the story and reworked it to suit his location shooting and the talents of his actors-- of whom only former Mouseketeer Tommy Kirk was the only "name."

A tourist couple, Norman and Leilia, go driving in the Ozarks, but their car runs low on gas. They pick up a young hitch-hiking paleontologist  named Wayne (Kirk), who has come to the area to examine prehistoric remains.  Wayne suggests that they seek out a small farm run by an eccentric middle-aged, Greely, and his housekeeper Bella. Greely has no gas to offer the travelers, but he has a makeshift zoo for tourists, and insists that the trio get a look at the remarkable creature he has confined down in a subterranean cave.

Leilia is the only one who senses that Greely isn't quite right, and she's proven correct when the loony fellow traps all three of them in a cage beneath the earth, and boasts that he plans to feed them to his creature. Paleontologist Wayne figures out that the carnivorous, reptilian humanoid is a survival from prehistoric times, called a "megasaur" or something like that. Eventually Greely explains that he came across the creature and began feeding it with various large animals. Since the madman has no plans beyond keeping his pet creature fed, one supposes that he could have continued using animals indefinitely, but then there would've been no conflict. So at some point he found it convenient to ambush lost travelers like his latest three visitors and give them to the creature. However, he fancies Leilia and offers to save her from the megasaur, even noting that he'd cheerfully get rid of his housekeeper and let Leilia take her place.

Bella, though terrified of Greely's violence, becomes the trio's only ally, though she isn't able to keep Norman from being killed. None of the travelers are interesting-- Wayne, for existence, exists just to give the audience insight on the dinosaur-man's supposed provenance. Only Bella sustains some sympathy, especially given that Buchanan, largely seeking to eat up time, devotes a substantial sequence to showing how Bella fell into Greely's clutches and was terrorized into becoming his virtual slave.

As Greely, actor Bill Thuman is alternately good and bad-- bad when he attempts to "play mad," good when he simply confines himself to a quiet menace. Both he and his mesozoic minion come to a bad end-- bad also in the sense of being tedious and anti-climactic. Allegedly, Thurman also played the monster, who is your basic "zipper-up-the-back" critter, complete with absurd ping-pong ball eyes.

BURIED ALIVE (1990)

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

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

Film-adaptations of E.A. Poe are almost never adaptations as such. More often they're grab-bags of tropes taken from several Poe tales, and nothing exhibits this tendency more than Gerald Kikoine's EDGAR ALLAN POE'S BURIED ALIVE.

With a title like that, one might fairly expect that the scriptwriter would build, at least partly, on the two most famous Poe-stories involving immurement: "The Premature Burial," or "The Cask of Amontillado." But BURIED only borrows one motif from "Cask," and sticks it into a scenario that slightly resembles Poe's asylum-run-by-inmates tale, "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether."

Yet even here, Kikoine and his scripters-- both of whom show no other credits on IMDB-- tosses aside the irony of a mental hospital run by madmen. Instead, the story takes place in the melodramatically named "Ravenscroft Institute," which is a correctional home for teenage girls. The opening "teaser" scene shows one of the girls seeking to escape the institution, only to be beaten down and murdered by a killer wearing a Ronald Reagan mask.

 The viewpoint character is Janet (Karen Witter), a new instructor, hired by headmaster Julian (Robert Vaughn). It's made clear that Janet and Julian have already made each other's acquaintance, with the strong suggestion that they've enjoyed some romantic interlude, and that this strongly influenced the process by which Janet got the job.

Once there, Janet has to butt heads with teenagers who don't give her any respect. There's surprisingly little exploitation of the girls' charms, particularly since director Kikoine had a long list of softcore sex movies previous to this, and largely ended his career after doing this and one other horror-flick for trashmeister-producer Harry Alan Towers. However, Janet's real problem is that she starts having psychic flashes, imagining herself falling through the ground, or being entombed. In one of her conversations, it comes out that Janet and Julian both had tyrannical parents, but the script makes very little of Janet's past, focusing, rather transparently, on the fact that Julian's father-- also his predecessor in running Ravenscroft-- inflicted rather severe punishments on Julian.

It's in one of Janet's visions that the viewer gets a brief taste of Amontillado wine, when she witnesses a ghastly old man (John Carradine) breaking through a stone wall, grabbing Janet and ranting "Bad! Bad!" at her. The big reveal at the film's end is that Julian finally got so torqued at his mean dad that he walled him up behind one of the Ravenscroft walls, and that, ever since, the ghost has been sending weird visions to the residents, though somehow the revenant can't seem to torment the one who actually committed the murder. Janet is apparently a better medium for his message, in that she starts poking around into Ravenscroft's history-- leading to the lesser reveal that Julian is the killer. I say "lesser" because he's almost the only possible suspect, aside from another of the instructors, a dotty fellow played by Donald Pleasence (easily the best perf in the film). I never did understand why Julian was killing off various girls, but Janet finds evidence of his earlier murders, leading to a conclusion in which the ghost very belatedly evinces enough power to avenge his murder.

The most significant aspect of BURIED ALIVE is that it's the final role of horror icon John Carradine, though as a role it is-- in more ways than one-- pretty insubstantial.

THE SHADOW RETURNS, BEHIND THE MASK, THE MISSING LADY (1946)

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


Of all the masked avengers to spring from the pulps, the Shadow would seem to be the least promising to be reworked into comedic terms. However, these three Monogram B-films are at least much livelier than the two dull B's produced by Grand National in the late 1930s.

The films are almost certainly modeled on the light-hearted adventures of Nick and Nora Charles, with Lamont Cranston as a young man-about-town (and nephew of the police commissioner!) as Nick and his fiancee Margo Lane as Nora. To be sure, whereas the THIN MAN flicks mastered a sort of effortless joie de vivre, the writers of these ersatz SHADOW films force in so much allegedly clever dialogue that the viewer is practically drowning in bon mots. To make things more complicated, the crimefighter's faithful taxi-driver Shrevvy has his own girlfriend Jenny who follows him around-- and both girls are perpetually suspicious that their guys are using crimefighting as an excuse to gad about.

The devoted Shadow-phile will never hear a word spoken as to why bon vivant Cranston has assumed the masked identity of the Shadow. Despite the fact that the radio serial had become successful by 1946, there's no indication that this avenger has to "power to cloud men's minds," though he does seem to be able to project his shadow into unlikely lighted spaces. Otherwise, he's just a guy wielding guns and wearing a mask and dark topcoat. To be sure, the various directors of these flicks must've wanted to give Shadow-fans a little action, for Cranston, as played by serial star Kane Richmond, does get into a few fights, rather than just threatening people with his dark presence.

In all three films, Cranston and his entourage seek to solve some mystery, usually involving some "macguffin" or other. In SHADOW RETURNS, there's a formula for a radical new plastic at stake, though this object gets far less attention than Margo's latest jealousy over her beau, or her pique when she can't get him across the altar. Phil Rosen directed with uncredited assistance from William Beaudine.

BEHIND THE MASK is, if anything, even sillier. A villain poses as the Shadow and forces the hero to clear his name, but this takes a back seat to such scenes as Margo posing as the Shadow, even though she's wearing Cranston's outfit and said outfit does not even slightly fit. Again Beaudine worked on the film, though the director of record is Phil Karlson.

In one respect THE MISSING LADY is the most interesting of the trio, and not because of the "lady" of the title, a MacGuffin in the form of a jade statue. In MASK Karlson sedulously followed the daffy comedic model provided by the first film, and the script for LADY does include some goofy stuff, like a pair of old biddies who like to race with their apartment building's elevators. But there are some gloomy, seedy crime-scenes-- particularly at the opening-- that look forward to Karlson's serious crime-films of the early fifties, such as 99 RIVER STREET and THE PHENIX CITY STORY. Sad to say, Karlson's last films included a return to daffiness in the form of the "Matt Helm" film series.

FURY OF THE CONGO (1951), SAVAGE MUTINY (1953)

PHENOMENALITY: (1) *marvelous,* (2) *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *poor*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*



Thanks to Youtube I finally managed to re-screen the only two JUNGLE JIM films I had not reviewed yet.

FURY OF THE CONGO is one of the liveliest, albeit most nonsensical, entries in the series. Jim (Johnny Weismuller) starts out rescuing a man named Cameron from a crashed plane. Cameron's on a hunt for Dunham, a lost biochem professor. Actually, the professor's mission sounds more like a naturalist's specialty, since Dunham went into the Congo looking for a strange hybrid beast, the Okongo, which is a cross between an antelope and a zebra. (Naturally, the film uses horses with fake stripes.)

Jim guides Cameron into the wilds of the Congo. A scene-shift informs the viewer that Dunham has been captured by evil white hunters. The hunters have also captured a bunch of Okongos, because the beasts have a special narcotic juice in their glands, as the result of eating and converting native narcotic plants. The crooks force Dunham to harvest the drug, as well as drafting many of the local native men to help with the Okongos-- though the viewer doesn't really see the native men doing much of anything to justify the trouble they later cause for the villains.

The absence of the men from the local tribe does make for some Amazonian activity, when Jim and Cameron are netted by the women of the tribe, led by the sprightly Leta (Sherry Moreland). Despite the women's spears, Jim wins them over with his jungle charm, and then he, Cameron, and Leta are off to set both the native men and the Okongos free. On the way Jim has to kill a very large spider-- possibly the phoniest in cinematic history, given the way it's transparently dragged across the ground via wires. Jim eventually learns that Cameron is actually the villains' leader, which begs the question as to what he was doing in the plane earlier. Despite all these reversals, Jim succeeds in his mission, leading to the film's best action, where the white hunters are killed by the spears and arrows of the native women.

In contrast, SAVAGE MUTINY is an entirely naturalistic adventure in the Jungle Jim canon, as well as a strange apologia for nuclear bomb-testing. Even before Jim is called upon by his country to aid a British/American nuclear-testing project, the white hunter keeps busy by ferreting out some Communist spies in the Congo.

Afterward, the scientists tell Jim that they want to test their bomb on a particular island off the coast of Africa. It's really important to test the bomb on this isle, since the scientists want to get valuable data on the effects of radiation on the plant life there. However, the island is inhabited, so the scientists need Jim to persuade the natives to be relocated.

Jim has no problem with this duty, and he even challenges one of the headmen of the tribe to a fight to get the natives' respect. However, more Communist agents are still loitering about, and they get the idea to score a propaganda victory over the West. The Commies attempt to sabotage the evacuation so that either the test will be prevented or the tribe will be bombed into extinction. Jim manages to prevent both fates. The final words of the film are the one saving grace of the otherwise tedious tale, since the writers managed to make it seem like the West's freedom to test bombs on primitive isles marked the very apogee of the cause of freedom.

KING OF THE JUNGLE (1933)

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


One year after the debut of Johnny Weismuller in TARZAN THE APE MAN, and some months before Buster Crabbe essayed the role in TARZAN THE FEARLESS, Crabbe had the chance to essay one of the more atypical "ape man" knockoffs in KING OF THE JUNGLE.

I've not read the original novel on which KING is based, Charles Thurley Stoneham's THE LION'S WAY, serialized in 1929. But since the book concerned a young boy being adopted by lions, I think it's pretty likely that Stoneham borrowed his idea from E.R. Burroughs, since Tarzan had been around for over ten years previous. Yet if KING is an accurate representation of the source novel, then Stoneham certainly wasn't a slavish swiper. The author's hero "Kaspa the Lion Man" may have a pedagogical upbringing akin to Tarzan's, but Stoneham's hero may be the least wild of all the wild men.

Director H. Bruce Humberstone-- who would later helm two official Tarzan films-- quickly moves past the "origin story," in which a blase couple go traveling in the Congo and promptly get killed, leaving their toddler son to be adopted by a lion. The boy grows to studly manhood amid a pride of lions, communicating with them only through roaring noises. The nearby natives leave the "lion man" alone, but white hunters capture him, and soon a promoter named Forbes (future "Charlie Chan"Sidney Toler) decides that the wild foundling will be perfect for his circus, dubbing the nameless youth "Kaspa the Lion Man."

It's significant that even though Crabbe's character looks just as buff-and-tough as Weismuller's ape man, Kaspa isn't seen getting into fights. He and some of his lion-brothers are captured in a pit, and then shipped to America in cages. A customs official foolishly lets Kaspa out of his cage, whereupon he swims to shore and mostly avoids the pursuing constables rather than fighting with them. He meets his "Jane," a schoolteacher named Ann (Frances Dee), and she "tames" him rather easily, in particular charming the savage beast with piano music. Through her influence Kaspa more or less resigns himself to joining Forbes' circus, not as an attraction but as a lion-tamer able to put his brethren through their paces. Kaspa becomes civilized enough to learn how he can make enough money to buy back the lions and return to the jungle with them, but in the meantime he and Ann fall into a very chaste love. (The only acknowledgement of sex comes through a few of the female circus performers, who make clear that they like the way Kaspa fills out a loincloth.)

Since the script hasn't really set up a villain as such-- Forbes being a reasonable fellow who more or less forgets about his desire to exhibit/enslave Kaspa-- a minor villain is tossed in, a fellow who loses a hand to a lion and then tries to destroy the beasts. All he succeeds in doing is starting a fire that ravages the circus and unleashes many of the animals (a standout scene being one where some elephants run amuck in a city-street, knocking over cars and a fire hydrant). Kaspa's only heroic deed in the film consists of keeping his leonine siblings from either killing or being killed, which then leads to a happy-ending resolution.

Since KING has so little in common with the sexy, savage world of W.S. Van Dyke's TARZAN THE APE MAN, I'll conjecture that Paramount simply bought the option on Stoneham's 1929 work as one of many acquisitions, and then rushed KING into production in order to take advantage of APE MAN's release, without actually seeking to tailor the film to resemble any previous cinematic Tarzan iterations. KING is something of a forerunner to the 1984 film GREYSTOKE, in paying more attention to the foundling's personal life than to exotic adventure, but most of the script is banal, despite the fact that one of the three scripters was the celebrated author Philip Wylie. I've no way of knowing how much Wylie contributed, but it's interesting that his earlier novel GLADIATOR resembles KING OF THE JUNGLE, since GLADIATOR is also about a hero for whom internal dramatics are more important than extroverted adventures.

THE VAMPIRE AND THE BALLERINA (1960)

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


When I recently re-screened Renato Polselli's VAMPIRE AND BALLERINA, I noted its use of two vampires-- a beautiful female and a (usually) ugly male-- I wondered if it might have been influenced by Mario Bava's BLACK SUNDAY, which also came out in 1960 and also featured a similar vampiric duo. However, a check at IMDB discloses that Polselli's film came out about three months before Bava's-- which makes the timing probably too close for any influence on Bava by Polselli, either. Possibly both are picking up, albeit belatedly, on tropes used by Riccardo Freda's I VAMPIRI.

Though BALLERINA is limply plotted, it does get across one sociological trope common to many vampire films: the encounter of the blase modern world with the supernatural domains of Old Europe. After an establishing scene in which a local girl is exsanguinated by an unidentified vampire, the film focuses on a traveling troupe of sexy ballerinas who visit the region where the vampire's castle stands. (Presumably this is Italy, since most of the characters have Italian names.) Two blonde dancers, Luisa and Francesca, have their respective boyfriends Giorgio and Luca along for the ride, and the viewer doesn't get any sense that there's any trouble between any of them that might open the door to a demon lover. Indeed, Francesca and Luca become engaged during their sojourn. However, when the two girls wander off the track, they must take shelter from a storm in the castle. They meet Countess Alda, who naturally has a portrait of a lookalike ancestress on her wall, and who has a really ugly servant named Herman. Herman gets Luisa alone and vampirizes her, and after that it's just one routine vampire-trope after another, until the two boyfriends finally get wise to the goings-on and exterminate the two bloodsuckers via the sunlight solution.

The cinematography is far better than the plot, though the film's erotic elements are fairly tame, and even Alda's attempt to seduce Luca is confined to verbal suggestiveness. The best aspect of the story is that Polselli keeps the viewer guessing as to whether Herman or Alda is the true master of the situation, since at the closing each of the vampires accuses the other of being the real evildoer. Since Alda's the one with the portrait on the wall, it seems a little more likely that she vampirized Herman at some time in the distant past, and that he began dominating her at some later point.

The most mythic aspect of the narrative appears close to the beginning. An old fellow playing host to the dancers tells the girls that vampires began as "evil men" who indulged themselves in cannibalism, until an "angel of the Lord" changed them into vampires. This isn't a very Christian-sounding legend-- particularly since ordinary peasants suffer from the depredations of blood-drinkers-- and it's possible that Polselli loosely borrowed this idea from the myth of Lycaon:

n the most popular version of the myth, tested Zeus' omniscience by serving him the roasted flesh of Lycaon's own son Nyctimus, in order to see whether Zeus was truly all-knowing.

In return for these gruesome deeds, Zeus transformed Lycaon into a wolf, along with his offspring