GHOULIES (1984), THE GRANNY (1995)

                             

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: (1) *poor,* (2) *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: (1) *drama,* (2) *comedy*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological, psychological, metaphysical*

Because the first GHOULIES and the first GREMLINS were in production at the same time, no outsider can be certain as to whether director/co-writer Luca Bercovici’s low-budget horror-film was meant to bite the style of the big Warner Brothers production. Warners lost a court case against the GHOULIES franchise, paving the way for three more low-budget entries in the series. Nevertheless, while it’s possible that Bercovici may have utlitized diminutive demons because he was aware of the GREMLINS project, the plot of the initial GHOULIES outing resembles the Warners project far less than the plot of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Case of Charles Dexter Ward.”

In point of fact, none of the gross little creatures in the first film—either the actual fetal-looking monsters called “Ghoulies,” or a pair of benign magical dwarves—are the center of the story’s action. That center is none other than sorcerer Malcolm Graves, first seen about twenty years before the main action of the narrative. Graves intends to make a ritual sacrifice of his infant son Jonathan to gain Satanic power. The boy’s mother sabotages the ritual, so that Malcolm can’t kill Jonathan as planned. However, the far-sighted sorcerer has a henchman spirit the child away. Jonathan is raised to manhood without knowing anything about his true parentage, and apparently Malcolm passes away naturally before he has the chance to perform the sacrificial ritual again. However, Malcolm’s death sets plot-wheels in motion. The grown Jonathan and his girlfriend Rebecca are informed that Jonathan has received the bequest of Malcolm’s mansion, so the two of them take possession with an eye toward leaning more about Jonathan’s heritage.

Unsurprisingly, Malcolm’s spirit is still hanging about, and over time he usurps Jonathan’s personality, causing the young man to dabble in the occult. To make matters worse, the two young people hold a party for their friends at the mansion, which results in many young people meeting unremarkable deaths at the hands of the Ghoulies or other demons—all so that Malcolm can take permanent possession of his son’s body (and maybe his girlfriend too). The story culminates in a magical battle between father and son, but though Malcolm is defeated, he, not the Ghoulies, provides the narrative’s motive force—whereas the focal characters of the sequels—none directed by Bercovicci—are more about the Ghoulies themselves.

GHOULIES will probably be the directorial work for which Bercovici will best be remembered, but his actual best work came almost ten years later-- and ironically, in THE GRANNY, the writer-director really does lift a page from the GREMLINS idea.

In yet another short prologue, a young woman, apparently demon-possessed, first tantalizes and then kills her own father. A stranger with the “spell-it-backward” name of “Namon Ami” shows up, and claims that the girl’s not possessed; she just made improper use of the curative potion he gave her. He exposed her to sunlight and she dissolves like a vampire.

Cut to modern times, and the mansion of Anastacia “Granny” Gargoli (Stella Stevens), who sits around moaning about her age and her lost beauty. Her constant companion is Kelly, the illegitimate daughter of one of Granny’s rotten grown children. Kelly, despite being played by knockout Shannon Whirry, is a shy and retiring type, the better to contrast her with the lousy relatives. All of them seem like refugees from an Andy Milligan film festival—two brothers who want to see Granny die to inherit her wealth (and who plot to poison her), a niece who makes up to her uncle, and a nephew who challenges Granny to a wrestling-match.

But before the nasty brothers can commit matricide, Namon Ami shows up. He gives Granny his special potion, giving her explicit instructions about how NOT to take it. Of course Granny ignores the injunctions and does what she pleases. As a result Granny dies and comes back as a sort of zombie-witch, dealing out comical deaths to her rotten offspring, replete with many Freddy Kruger-isms.

In contrast to the “Nightmare on Elm Street” films, THE GRANNY is about nothing except horrific gags, so in essence this is a more explicit comedy-horror than GHOULIES. Stella Stevens, never known as a subtle performer, apparently has a high old time wreaking havoc with one-liners, and the deaths have a perverse edge that puts them above run-of-the-mill films of this type. For her part Kelly has to abandon her shyness just to survive, and proves to be, rather improbably, a tough-ass fighter, taking on both the nasty niece and her grotesque grandmother.

There’s a suggestion of a sequel, but it’s just as well that THE GRANNY never spawned a franchise. It’s definitely one of a kind.

THE MEDUSA TOUCH (1978)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological, psychological, metaphysical*

Though the plot of MEDUSA TOUCH reads like an imitation of Stephen King’s CARRIE, the source-novel by Peter Van Greenaway was published a year before King’s novel. The success of CARRIE’s film-adaptation still may have paved the way for the cinematic translation of the Greenaway work.

MEDUSA, directed by Jack Gold, has a classy look to it, not unlike other upscale horrors of the seventies, such as THE OMEN. Misanthropic Mister Morlar (Richard Burton) is nearly bludgeoned to death by an unknown assailant, so Detective Brunel, a French cop visiting in London, gets on the case. As he does, Brunel begins to cull evidence to suggest that Morlar hacked off a lot of people because he brought about calamities to those that knew him. It’s eventually revealed that Morlar possesses incredible telekinetic abilities, and that he’s been using those talents subconsciously for years, bringing about disasters, apparently out of a subconscious God-complex.

Brunel’s methodical realization of the horrific truth is well-handled, and Lino Ventura’s portrait of the world-weary cop is far more compelling than Richard Burton’s standard “booming-voice” incarnation of the malevolent misanthrope. The down side is that Morlar has no real psychology to speak of; he’s just mad as hell at the world for overly vague reasons (aside from having had a termagant mother). The “Medusa” metaphor has no real application, and actually would have worked a lot better for Stephen King’s titular telekinetic, who, unlike Morlar, has serious body-shame issues. Given the god-like proclamations of Burton’s character, maybe THE ZEUS TOUCH would have been more appropriate.

MASK OF VENGEANCE (1980)

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

Though there are a lot of bad Hong Kong chopsocky films from the seventies and eighties, most of them are bad in an unambitious way. MASK OF VENGEANCE has one minor virtue: its badness results from an embarrassment of absurdities.

I’m sure no one, either in China or any other country, would have remembered this oddity long after its release. As of this writing it has just one independent blog-review and three short comments on IMDB, one of which compares MASK’s director Hsueh Li Pao to Edward Wood Jr. I’ve no idea if the film ever enjoyed video release, though only rather recently did it show up on Amazon Streaming, meaning that, in theory, a whole new audience could discover the film as occurred with the oeuvre of Ed Wood. That said, it’s not very likely that will happen, because most “good bad films” appeal to their audience by advertising the movies’ alleged pleasures with simple, straightforward plotlines.

No one would ever call MASK OF VENGEANCE straightforward. In its opening scenes it looks like it may be some sort of “martial tournament” flick, though oddly the tournament is devoted only to knife-fighting, which I strongly suspect is not a real thing. The master of the revels is a masked man who admits to the hero that he arranged the games in order to lure an old enemy, an expert knife-fighter, out of hiding. In addition, the masked man presides over what looks like a cult of masked knife-fighters, though there’s never any explanation of the cult’s purpose. The hero—named Tian in the opening scenes, though I believe he assumes two other names later—is searching for his lost father, and for some obscure reason elects to help the weird masked guy find his enemy.

The opening scenes are no better or worse than any other chopsocky of the period, though there’s a Wood-like touch in that Tian proves his martial skills by shattering the swords of the masked fighters with his tiny jade knife (never seen again in the rest of the film). But once Tian starts nosing around, dozens of barely explained characters cross his path, including a swordswoman (played by Shih Szu, famed for her appearance in LEGEND OF THE SEVFEN GOLDEN VAMPIRES) and some strange woman who claims she’s Tian’s wife (I think this is Nora Miao, once wife to Bruce Lee). I quickly lost track of the plot amidst all the confusing introductions, though there is one hilarious moment—which I for one would not blame on the English translators—in which Tian tries to identity himself to his father by pointing out a distinguishing mole. I believe the line was, “Look at my mole, Dad! Look at my mole!”

Toward the end Tian and all of his allies—which may include a father, mother, and sister he never knew—return to fight the masked guy in his cult-temple. Though it’s not exceptional fight-choreography, the villain distinguishes himself by fighting the good guys with primitive grenades and a metal glove with a spike-attachment. MASK might be most entertaining, even for dedicated badfilm lovers, if they just watched the opening and closing sequences, and took my word for it about the “mole” line.

HALLOWEEN (2018)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociologicaL*

I yield to no one in my scorn of nearly all of the sequels of the original HALLOWEEN. (I have not seen both of Rob Zombie’s non-canonical adaptations, so I exclude them from consideration.) Whereas one can find interesting motifs in the sagas of Jason and Freddy as those franchise-fiends passed from creator to creator, all of the HALLOWEEN sequels, even those with John Carpenter’s input, went down, down, down, into a burning ring of tedium. 

Yet, dismal as most of these sequels are, they have one saving grace: they aren’t presumptuous. They give crappy pulp horror movies to people who want crappy horror movies, and what you see is what you get.

David Gordon Green’s 2018 reboot of the franchise manages to be both presumptuous and tedious at the same time. Unlike the Zombie films, this one doesn’t remake the Carpenter film, but uses that movie as a jumping-off point for a fresh continuity. Here, Michael Myers is captured shortly after his relatively brief murder-spree in the first film, and he remains incarcerated in an asylum for the next forty years. Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is the only person to survive Michael's original rampage, and though in the new continuity she’s no longer his sister, she’s lived the life of a gun-hoarding survivalist for all those years, because she feels the conviction that someday, Michael will come looking for her. That conviction has cost her, for her adult daughter Karen does not share Laurie’s sense of destined confrontation. Both she and her husband have distanced themselves from the mordant old lady, though Laurie’s teenaged granddaughter Allyson still reveres her “crazy grandma.” It doesn’t take a crystal ball to guess that on the fortieth anniversary of Michael’s murders, he will escape the asylum and go looking for Strodes.

When I heard some of the pre-movie hype for this project in 2018, I was wary that actress Curtis and others were redefining the HALLOWEEN franchise as an analogue to feminine trauma in response to violence. After watching the film, I was at least relieved that the film was not framed as a #MeToo fable like CAPTAIN MARVEL. Michael may not be an incarnation of Satanic evil, as Carpenter’s original film suggests, but at least he doesn’t suffer the fate of being dumbed down into a representation of the patriarchy. Indeed, though “the Shape” doesn’t connote anythinig beyond “nasty serial killer,” at least in this iteration he looks physically imposing.

Yet earlier franchise-films were at least good dumb entertainment even without a well-conceived monster, as seen in HALLOWEEN 2. What sinks this film (which director Green co-wrote with two collaborators) is that Green signals every aspect of the story with a total lack of subtlety. He opens the film at Michael’s asylum with a couple of podcast-journalists trying to provoke a reaction out of the uncommunicative killer by showing him his mask. How a reporter would have acquired such an item, or why the presiding pyscholoist would allow such dramatics, are questions Green does not bother to anticipate. He’s no better with regard to the motives of Laurie Strode. There’s some bland bullshit about how traumas make their citicms want to fixate on their tragedies. But it’s all just an excuse to turn Laurie into Sarah Connor, tricked out with lots of firepower and a fiery trap designed to execute her nemesis. (Presumably this version of Michael, who just barely qualifies as marvelous by virtue of surviving an automobile run-down without consequence, will get his abilities upgraded when the franchise re-animates him.)

Like the characters, the stalking-scenes are competent but unexceptional. Sadly, this dull exercise in psuedo-relevance made money at the box office, so there will probably be more of these “Mickey Myers” entries. It’s a shame that the script was too weak to give Jamie Lee Curtis anything to do but grit her teeth and fire off various guns. I for one prefer to remember the series ending with her comeback in HALLOWEEN RESURRECTION, which is the true Laurie Strode in my eyes.

DRACULA (1973)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, metaphysical*

Because Bram Stoker spent years working for a theatrical company, a few critics have wondered if he may have structured his most famous novel so that it could be easily adapted to stage. Stoker himself never authored a play of DRACULA, but the book became a very successful play in other hands, not least because the character of the “king-vampire” allows for a featured actor to really storm some barns. That said, both the novel and most of the adaptations for stage and screen have still devoted considerable attention to all of the equally strong supporting characters. Not all of the novel’s characters make the transition to other media—Quincy Morris is a frequent casualty—but there’s at least some attention to exploring the mentalities of the support-cast.

Dan Curtis’s 1973 DRACULA was given the full title “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” in its TV release, in order to imply a greater fidelity to the source material than previous adaptations. Of course the Curtis production did not appreciably follow the novel any more closely than either of the best-known cinema-versions, the 1931 Lugosi vehicle and the 1958 Chris Lee work, nor should anyone expect total faithfulness in a ninety-minute version of a sprawling novel. Both the 1931 and 1958 films change a lot too, but one thing they do quite well is to provide a good balance between the supporting characters and the story’s monstrous star.

Not so the Curtis DRACULA. Jack Palance gives a memorable, intense performance as the vampire count, but all of the other characters are seriously underwritten, as if the director was so awestruck by the wonderfulness of Palance that he instructed all the other actors to mute their performances.

Of necessity Jonathan Harker gets a little more attention than the other support characters, since the Curtis film spends roughly the first half-hour on the usual encounter of count and solicitor in Dracula’s castle. But after Harker’s served the purposes of the vampire (and the script), the count lets his wives have him (a twist mirrored in the Coppola version), and so Harker more or less becomes the TV-film’s “Renfield.” However, he’s a Renfield that does nothing interesting and gets dispatched at the end with no real emotion. Because Harker gets reduced in importance, so does his fiancée Mina, and though as in the novel the vampire-hunters use her connection to Dracula to track the count, Mina herself comes off as little more than a puppet for either side to use. With Harker’s dimunition, Arthur Holmwood assumes greater importance as the “earnest young man” type, but neither he nor his wife Lucy has any dimension. She no longer flirts with other men, since Arthur’s the only one in her life, but she’s almost indistinguishable from Mina except in order of vampirization. Worst of all, the film doesn’t even allow its Van Helsing the chance to chew the scenery with his weighty revelations about nosferatu—meaning that the story lacks one of its most mythic aspects: the assertion of the reality of things from beyond the grave.

Palance, as said before, makes a better than average Dracula, convincing in both the erotic scenes with his victims and in the film’s climactic fight-scene. The end-battle is certainly not as impressive as the climax of the novel, or the very different confrontation at the end of Terence Fisher’s work. But it does have enough back-and-forth energy that the Curtis film qualifies as one of the more combative Draculas.

POWER RANGERS DINO THUNDER (2004)

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

Though I have an abiding appreciation for the sheer wackiness of the POWER RANGERS franchise, I doubt that I’ll devote a lot more time to reviewing its many offshoots. Still, I got a few cheap thrills out of the MYSTIC FORCE incarnation, and so I took a chance on DINO THUNDER as well.

By sheer chance, I happened to choose one of the few serials that attempts a sort of rough “continuity” between the various Americanized adaptations, even if the original Japanese “Super Sentai” shows may not have had any such linkages. One epidose even provides a chronology between the various shows that had aired up to that time, and there’s a crossover with the characters from an earlier (and much duller) show, POWER RANGERS NINJA STORM. But DINO’s main accomplishment is to bring back the character Tommy Oliver from the original show, MIGHTY MORPHIN POWER RANGERS.

On that program, Tommy was something of a “bad boy” who provided contrast to the regular “clean teen” heroes. Since the actor playing Tommy was in 2004 almost twenty years older, this time Tommy appears as a member of the establishment, a science teacher who still has a penchant for tecruiting promising Rangers. He starts out with only three this time, two guys and a girl, who at first seem to have a little of the “Breakfast Club” rebel-vibe of the American POWER RANGERS from 2018. However, once the trio is called upon to defend Earth from the incurions of Mesogog—a humanoid with a dinosaur-head—the teens all get respectable jobs in a cyber-café whenever they’re not busy fighting Mesogog’s varios monster pawns.

As if anticipating the villain’s theme, Doctor Oliver’s specialty is paleontology, and all of the Rangers get various tinker-toy weapons somehow related to tyrannosaurs and pterodactyls and whatnot. The fight-choreography is adequate, but the main attraction remains the goofball monsters. Indeed, one of the standout episodes of DINO shows the three heroes watching on DVD an original (albeit dubbed) episode of the very “Super Sentai” show which provided much of DINO’s Ranger-footage. DINO’s scripts are also leavened with some decent original humor not dependent of nutty men-in-costumes. The show’s primary comedy relief, an ambitious girl reporter, loses her youth to one of the monsters. As if knowing that this condition will be reversible, she whines, “It’s not bad enough to be a woman in this business; now I have to deal with ageism!”

I don’t know how closely the English-language scripts mirror those of the Japanese show, but someone evidently decided to follow the template of MIGHTY MORPHIN, since DINO also has a “bad boy” who starts out opposing the good Rangers but ends up becoming their ally as “the White Ranger.” In addition, though in most of these serials the older mentor-figure leaves the fighting to the teens, Tommy, now “the Black Ranger,” battles alongside his students. Usually the acting on RANGERS shows is no better than it has to be. However, Jason David Frank brings a lot more dynamism to his scholastic butt-kicker than one usually expects, and so Frank pretty much blows the younger actors out of the water whenever he shares the screen with them. Since there are some episodes in which Tommy goes missing for awhile, and others in which he can’t get out of his black armor, obviously Frank wasn’t available for the whole series. Happily, he does come back for the wrap-up.

I give this show’s mythicity a higher average rating of “fair.” The show’s use of dinosaur-lore doesn’t register very strongly, but in the psychological department, it does sustain an intermittent “Jekyll-Hyde” theme, since, in addition to the two “bad-boys-turned-good,” Mesogog just happens to be a scientist who shares his body with a dino-creature.

VOYAGE TO THE PREHISTORIC PLANET (1965)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*

MYTHICITY: *fair*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*

Though it’s now possible to locate unedited copies of Alexander Kazantsev’s 1962 PLANET OF STORMS, most viewers, including me, are likely to settle for watching Roger Corman’s 1965 Americanization of the Russian movie, VOYAGE TO THE PREHISTORIC PLANET. Though Corman re-used footage from the Russian movie in one other film, PREHISTORIC seems to capture the essence of the original adequately. Obviously, Corman’s director Curtis Harrington cut out references to Soviet ideology—for instance, one of the astronautswas originally an American defector—and the director also worked in new scenes of American actors Basil Rathbone and Faith Domergue for box office appeal. But the 1962 film seems less concerned with ideology than with Kazantsev’s take on the “first contact” type of SF-tale.

Indeed, Corman’s re-titling proves apt. Some online reviews compare PREHISTORIC to 1956’s THE ANGRY RED PLANET. Both movies follow a contingent of astronauts in a SF-future where humanity is just beginning to explore other planets in the solar system. In both films, the astronauts are surveiled by intelligent inhabitants that never make direct contact with the Earthmen. However, RED PLANET makes a modest attempt to suggest the alien nature of the explored planet, Mars, while PREHISTORIC is more concerned with showing the world of Venus recapitulate an otherworldly version of Earth-evolution. In this PREHISTORIC has more resemblance to some of the 1950s films using the same trope, such as the thoroughly mediocre KING DINOSAUR.

Kazantsev probably didn’t have a lot more money to work with than most of the American low-budget efforts, but his filming of the astronauts stolidly plumbing the mysteries of Venus proves fairly evocative. PREHISTORIC doesn’t follow the template of American “swampy Venus” stories; most of the terrain is craggy, barren land interrupted by occasional trees. Two of the local fauna include alien versions of a brontosaurus and a pterodactyl, and the astronauts encounter reptilian humanoids, though these appear to be savages with no intelligence. When the astronauts find evidence of intelligent life, there’s a little speculation about whether the reptile-people are responsible, but the idea isn’t seriously entertained.

The only other environmental milieu is an inland sea, wherein the astronauts—whose suits work equally well underwater as on the planet’s surface—find a submerged temple with statuary. One statue suggests that the temple’s makers worshiped a pterodactyl-god, which idea gets recycled in Corman’s other cut-and-paste job, VOYAGE TO THE PLANET OF PREHISTORIC WOMEN. The longer the astronauts stay, the more the sense that intelligent denizens are still around, though they choose not to reveal themselves. One explorer keeps hearing a feminine siren-call, and his comrades tell him he’s been reading too many comics (one of the few overt Americanisms injected in translation.) The astronauts theorize that on Venus intelligent life may have started in the ocean, only to migrate to land, which loosely recapitulates one of the less popular evolutionary theories of the 20^th century.

Though there are some plodding sequences, and no real characterization to speak of, Kazantsev’s narrative maintains some suspense thanks to the presence of Robot John, an automaton who might have been Russia’s answer to Robby the Robot. John’s presence contributes to the film’s most bracing sequence. When two explorers are menaced by lava-flow from an erupting volcano—which, incidentally, seems to block the Earthmen from contact with a hypothesized alien city—the astronauts hitch a ride on the shoulders of Robot John. However, Kazantsev decided that John’s creator gave the robot his own self-preservation program—possibly in an explicit rejection of Isaac Asimov’s “laws of robotics”—and John almost dumps his passengers (one of them his creator) into the lava before the men deactivate him.

Kazantsev adapted PLANET OF STORMS from his own novel, so it may be that the rocky Venus-terrain may mirror the imagery of the book, rather than being totally the result of directorial expedience. In a few scenes Kazantsev’s Venus bears a nodding resemblance to Gustav Dore’s illustrations of the rough ramparts of Hell. But the main object seems to be, as noted, to allow the viewer to enjoy looking in on the evolutionary process, albeit in extraterrestrial guise.