RED SONJA: QUEEN OF PLAGUES (2016)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

I'll get the main objection to RED SONJA: QUEEN OF PLAGUES out of the way: while hypothetically a barely animated motion comic might work for some genres, the genre of sword-and-sorcery needs lots of visceral bloodletting to have its optimal effects.

QUEEN is based on a "Red Sonja" comic issued by the company Dynamite, and written by big-name author Gail Simone. I haven't read the original comic, but given that Simone adapted her own script for this DTV project, I don't imagine that there are any major differences between the two. QUEEN is never more than an average formulaic S&S adventure, but at least it has a coherent plot and characterization, which is more than one can say of many big-screen efforts.

The backstory for this version of Red Sonja is that years ago she was enslaved and turned into a pit-fighter by King Rylack, the Butcher of Zamora. She and one other female fighter, Dark Annisia, survive the pit's rigors. Rylack is driven from his lands by Good King Dimath, who releases both women from imprisonment. Years later, Dimath's kingdom is under siege by a foreign army. His people have lost the will to fight, so he sends for Sonja to train them in the arts of war. Still grateful for Dimath's actions, Sonja also enters the fray when the enemy forces attack. But guess what former ally, whose name sounds like that of Robert E. Howard's "Dark Agnes" heroine, ends up fighting Sonja in the field, and apparently passing on a plague to the heroine? And guess what absent evildoer is actually pulling Annisia's strings without her knowledge?

None of the big reveals are very engrossing, any more than one revealing that there is no plague, just an insidious poison devised by a proto-scientist. Indeed, there's really no "sorcery" here, though in one short section Simone introduces some fish-humanoids that have nothing to do with the main story. But I give the movie a "fair" rating because even though the animation can't portray blood-and-guts, the script does get across the general sense of a brutal world where right and wrong are entirely decided by who can swing the meanest sword.

Simone's script also gives Sonja a new origin only tangentially related to the first version from 1975. The backstory still stresses that Sonja became a mercenary wanderer after her family was slaughtered by ruthless soldiers, but she isn't raped and she doesn't get any special gifts or counsel from any sort of deity. The revised Sonja-history thus eliminates many aspects of the early origin that feminists found problematic. Still, whether Simone or someone else at Dynamite concocted the new story, there's nothing about it to distinguish it from thousands of other vengeance-seeking warriors in popular fiction.

BLOOD LAD, SEASON ONE (2013)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological*

The BLOOD LAD manga ran from 2009 to 2016, but despite its popularity it only generated one season of ten TV episodes and a couple of OVAs. 

The story: we see a world dominated by demon humanoids-- though in the short series we mainly see a werewolf, a Frank-monster in a lab coat (so that calling him "Franken Stein" is accurate), and the star, a twenty-something vampire, Staz Blood. Staz is the boss of his area of Demon World, and he's extremely tough and clever.  However, unlike his fellow demons, Staz has a fetish for the entertainment-media of the human world, particularly Japanese anime and manga. But there are problems crossing over to the human world, so Staz has to get his jollies from a distance.

Then a denizen of the human world, a young girl named Fuyumi, shows up in Staz's territory. Staz soon figures out that she's in his world because she's the ghost-body of her dead self, but Fuyumi doesn't know what happened to her. Staz becomes her protector partly because he's intrigued with human culture, though this may be a standard "tough guy" defense for helping an innocent victim.

Staz takes Fuyumi back to Japan and tries to find some way to restore her to life, so that she can go back to her regular existence. However, even the action of visiting the mortal sphere draws Staz and Fuyumi into a web of intrigue organized by other demons, one of whom is Staz's estranged brother. There's also a winsome young woman, Hydra, who attaches herself to Staz and shows her affection for him by shooting him in the head (nonfatally, of course).

The series is a good setup to the manga series, naturally ending before it can resolve even one plotline. I read about fifty-sixty episodes of the manga, and it seemed to me that, like a lot of shonen manga, it got badly overburdened by too many characters. But if one's looking for a good basic shonen with strong action, silly comedy, and even a little theorizing about how demon existence works, BLOOD LAD is worth a try.

THOR: DUMB AND DUMBERER (2022)

 

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

How did LOVE AND THUNDER manage to go from the general dumbness of THOR RAGNAROK to the level of "out-dumbering" itself several times over? Let me count the ways.

For Dumb Thing #1, I'll start out with the sort of continuity error only comics nerds care about. From everything the MCU said about Asgardians, they seemed to be following the science-fiction interpretation of Warren Ellis from the nineties:

Ellis' worked seemed to be an attempt at reconciling the divinity of the Asgardians with the science-fiction tradition of the Marvel Universe. He suggested that the Asgardians were simply advanced parasitic aliens who had a millenia-long relationship with the human race.-- COMICS ALLIANCE, 2009.

I don't think any script said it outright, but I always assumed that the Ellis explanation was why the MCU could rationalize a Heimdall played by Idris Elba; he was just some alien who decides to be Black rather than Nordic, and so totally was not a token at all. For all earlier phases, the Asgardians seemed to be the only "gods" in the MCU, not counting the Eternals, who existed in their own bailiwick. But with DUMBERER, suddenly all the gods of human history have a real existence, explicitly tied to human belief, just so that Taika Waititi could adapt Marvel's "Gorr the God Butcher" sequence from 2013. I haven't read the "Gorr" sequence, but to judge from DUMBERER, it must be just as bad as Watiti's version, because it couldn't possibly be worse.

Dumb Thing #2: So Gorr (Christian Bale) is this alien guy, and almost all of his people have died of starvation, except his daughter Love, and she too is on her last legs. He cries out to his god Rapu, exhorting the deity to bestow on his faithful worshippers their ultimate reward. Rapu appears, though he has no intention of doing anything at all for Gorr or his dead people. But Rapu just happens to have a god-killing weapon, the Necrosword, lying around, and Gorr uses the blade to kill Rapu. Then Gorr decides that all other gods in the universe are as bad as Rapu and that he's justified in destroying them all. I can't claim that this is the first time the MCU presented a "sympathetic villain" whose early trauma justifies treating him with moral kid gloves. But at least the other villains existed in "serious" films.

Dumb Thing #3: Okay, I get that Watiti made money turning the THOR franchise into a comedy. But does he have to start out DUMBERER with a smarmy voice-over that mocks every dramatic event in the hero's life?

Dumb Thing #4: Thor (Chris Hemsworth) goes adventuring with the Galaxy Guardians, but for some reason, heroic activity fills him with anomie, except when he gets a gift of a chariot drawn by screaming goats. Thor dumps the Guardians when he gets a distress signal from Sif, injured from a run-in with Gorr. Thor helpfully tells Sif she won't get into Valhalla because she didn't die in battle, and then heads for Gorr's next target, New Asgard, where Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) reigns as "king."

Dumb Thing #5: Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), suffering from terminal cancer, journeys to New Asgard because she has some mysterious intuition that the fragments of Mjolnir, destroyed by Hela in RAGNAROK, can help her out. Sure enough, Mjolnir reassembles itself in her presence, and endows Jane with the power of Thor, which was never before specified to have anything to do with Mjolnir's magical powers. Oh, and eventually we learn that for no express reason, using the Thor-power drains Jane's already limited energies. Not exactly a god-blessing, hmm?

Dumb Thing #6: Though DUMBERER was sold as something of a "girl boss" movie, neither Lady Thor nor Valkyrie is as overbearing on that trope this time out. However, even CGI fights don't make either one of them look particularly good choreography-wise, while Hemsworth's Thor still acts the badass. Carol Marvel could kick both women's asses handily.

Dumb Thing #7: Thor wants his hammer back, but he can't very well take it from cancerous Jane, and besides-- his axe Stormbreaker is--

No, I can't even say that one. It's too dumb to speak aloud.

Dumb Thing #8: The heroes defeat many of Gorr's minions but can't stop him from abducting dozens of New Asgard's children. Thor and his femme allies seek out Omnipotence City, the hangout for all the gods of all time, where Thor gets to meet that other thunder-god Zeus. Thor wants to raise a god-army to defeat Gorr and rescue the children. But though Zeus is aware of Rapu's demise, and of the God Butcher's ravages, he doesn't think the Necrosword is a threat to him, and all the other gods agree, for Reasons. Zeus embarrasses Thor (but not Lady Thor or Valkyrie), but the trio manage to steal Zeus's lightning and escape. 

Dumb Thing #9: Viewers belatedly learn that Gorr wants to obtain Thor's axe, because it's belatedly revealed that the weapon can open a dimensional doorway to Shen-Long, the Eternal Dragon, who will grant Gorr's wish to snap his fingers and kill all the gods.

Dumb Thing #10: When Thor learns Mjolnir's influence is making Jane's cancer worse, he tries to bench her, but you can guess how well that works out. Valkyrie does remain benched; maybe Watiti knew her furious non-acting might undermine even his clumsy dramatic conclusion. Said conclusion takes place in the Shen-Long dimension, and Jane falls victim to her illness, though this will later be counted as "dying in battle." Thor has the opportunity to attack Gorr before he makes his wish, but he simply appeals to the mass murderer's better nature instead. And it works, so that Gorr perishes and his dead daughter lives. All the other people who died due to his self righteous crusade? Ah, collateral damage by a villain isn't worth dwelling on; only collateral damage by HEROES.

There are probably some other dumb things in DUMBERER, but those are all that I can bear to remember just now.

TENEBRAE (1982)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

Prior to this movie, Dario Argento had not made a psycho-slasher since 1975's DEEP RED. After he followed up the surprise hit of SUSPIRIA with the much more adventurous INFERNO-- which flopped, though I consider it one of Argento's top three-- he decided to play to his strengths once more, and gave his fans a return to the world of psychotic "darkness" (the English for "tenebrae.")

TENEBRAE the movie, both written and co-directed by Argento, is mirrored within the movie by TENEBRAE the book, or rather a book written by American author Peter Neal (Tony Franciosa). He, his agent (John Saxon), and his aide Anne (Daria Nicolodi) travel to Rome to hype his novel, a study of a psycho-killer's obsession. Not long after their arrival, a serial killer butchers a beautiful young woman. He leaves behind evidence suggesting that he the killer is a fan of Neal's work, and has patterned this first murder after the fictional events of TENEBRAE. Two Roman cops naturally investigate Neal for clues, and happen to be around when the killer telephones Neal to exult in his deeds.

Neal has no answers for the police, and rather than playing detective simply tries to finish his business in Rome in order to go back home. But as is so often the case, the killer starts attacking many people, male and female, some of whom are loosely in Neal's orbit. There are no eccentricities about the POV killings; just edged weapons and lots of blood (so much blood that the American version, UNSANE, was severely cut down). As is typical for many slashers, there's no big reveal at the end; one of the cops just blunders upon the killer at work, resulting in a very bloody climax.

Argento deems TENEBRAE his best work, but this may be partly because he based the "copycat killer" on an odious fan who became a nuisance to the director during an American visit. Argento doesn't put across his interest in the Italian demimonde, though at times he communicates a sense of the absurd in that death sometimes threatens from other sources than a serial murderer. (One victim is harried by a vicious dog that only coincidentally drives him into the blade of the killer.) 

Despite some Nietzchean-sounding stuff about killers looking into the darkness and the like, none of the characters seem like more than ciphers, so that the psychological myths are fair at best. Most of the actors are well cast but unexceptional in their roles, though Franciosa, usually known for laid-back, cool operators, offers the film's most nuanced performance. The script reels out various commentaries on Neal's alleged misogyny that are almost certainly responses to similar criticisms of Argento's movies-- though, as is usually the case, at least a couple men die alongside all the beautiful women.

INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM (1984)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological*

Not only do they not make 'em like this any more, they CAN'T-- which makes me like TEMPLE OF DOOM more than I did back in 1984. (Of course, back then I didn't have CRYSTAL SKULL as an example of a really mishandled Indy Jones effort.)

Two aspects of TEMPLE's overall structure mitigate against it from Square One. First, George Lucas and his co-writers made the film coat-tail on  the previous entry by recycling two of the set-pieces intended for RAIDERS: the big battle in the Hong Kong night-club and the mining-car race. (Director Steven Spielberg also claimed that they wanted to use the mine sequence to mock the critics who called RAIDERS a "theme park ride," long before the rise of the big superhero franchises.) Second, TEMPLE eschewed the Nazi villains in which audiences were already invested. Even in 1984, no one in the U.S, remembered the iniquity of the Indian Thuggee cult, except for film-buffs who remembered the 1939 GUNGA DIN film (as I imagine both Lucas and Spielberg did). 

Of course the filmmakers also circumvented the risks of honking off Marion Ravenwood fans by setting the movie prior to RAIDERS. This allowed Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford, of course) to emulate his partial model James Bond by having a romantic fling with a different leading lady, nightclub singer Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw). I didn't originally care for the shrill humor of Willie , who took almost as many silly pratfalls as Oliver Hardy. Still, Willie does show moments of gumption and/or intelligence, so she's not totally a pampered princess. She gets a better character arc than does Short Round (Ke Huy Quan), who's mainly a shout-out to pop-culture artifacts like the comic strip TERRY AND THE PIRATES, wherein kid-adventurers got to traipse around the globe endangering their lives.

After the overly long Hong Kong fracas, Indy, Short Round and Willie get stranded in India. A poor village takes them in, and an old sage informs the foreigners that they have been drafted in the service of their god Siva. The local maharajah has confiscated from the village the sacred "Sivalingam," which results in the village's poverty and their loss of their children to unnamed abductors. Later Indy will call upon his archaeological knowledge to claim that the Sivalingam is one of five lost Sankara stones, which in theory can give their owner ultimate power. (Indy doesn't mention that in Hindi "Sivalingam" carried the connotation "Siva's penis.") 

Indy follows the sage's sage advice, not so much because he believes he's been chosen by Siva as because he thinks the stones could be a great archaeological find. He and his entourage seek out the Maharajah's palace, but at first there's nothing more threatening there than a dining-table laden with foods too gross for Willie's spoiled palate. Indy does mention that the palace was once host to a Thuggee cult, one that killed victims for the glory of bloodthirsty Kali, before the cult was wiped out decades ago by the British, whose forces still occupy India. But if the Thuggee are really gone, who's that nasty fellow who sneaks into Indy's bedroom and tries to strangle him?

In no time, the foreigners are propelled into a world of subterranean darkness, full of evil magic and creepy-crawly things. On a DVD extra Lucas commented that he wanted the "middle part" of the planned Indiana trilogy to be the darkest part, presumably like THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, even though the Indiana films were meant to stand alone. In one respect, the greatest darkness is that for a time the Thuggee make the hero one of them with their dark magic, which gives poor little Short Round some bad moments. As for  vicious vermin and dessicated corpses, RAIDERS had a fair share of these elements too, so TEMPLE could be seen as just upping the horror-house ante. But Lucas and Spielberg upped the ante a little too much. After the head priest of Kali, one-dimensional fiend Mola Ram (Amrish Puri), tears a man's heart from his chest cavity, public outcry prompted the formation of the "PG-13" rating. I've noticed that Lucas and Spielberg indulged in no further in gross-out stunts either in LAST CRUSADE or in CRYSTAL SKULL.

While I knew that RAIDERS was just as full of thrill-ride set-pieces as was TEMPLE, the use of the Ark centered Indy's struggle in the history of the Final Solution. The Siva-stones are a more superficial creation, and even in 1984 I knew that it was a little fatuous to oppose Siva to Kali, given that in Hindu myth Kali is just one of the names given to the wife of Siva. If our friendly neighborhood tomb raider knows this, he doesn't mention it in the course of the film.

The threat of the Sankara stones remains vague, though if they have anything to do with Mola Ram's ability to perform literal magic in the world of Indiana Jones, they're at least a lot more formidable as a menace than anything in LAST CRUSADE. I liked some ambiguous lines suggesting that Indy is briefly possessed by Siva, thus confirming the prophecies of the village sage. The theft of the village children, stolen to work the mines under the palace, provides an ample substitute for the sort of human slaughter the real Thuggee practiced.

The mine-car ride never grabbed me all that much, except for one part: when a Thuggee jumps into the car with the three good guys, Willie finally gets her act together and punches him right out of the vehicle. I take away a point for the curious scene in which the Indian Maharajah uses a voodoo doll. Let's keep our pulp-menaces straight, shall we?

Though I'm sure Lucas and Spielberg had no political agenda, in a sense TEMPLE ends up being a farewell to the blood-and-thunder of American pulp magazines, which traded frequently (though never exclusively) on xenophobic fantasies. TEMPLE is as modern a take as one could produce on such fantasias without venturing into deconstruction territory, given that one of the heroes saving the Hindu children is a non-white child and another is a white guy arguably manipulated by a Hindu god. One might occasionally see other movies with ties to pulps and serials, like the 1991 ROCKETEER-- but that was all thunder and no blood, which seems to be all that Hollywood can produce these days.

ROUTE 666 (2001)

 

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

ROUTE 666 is a decent little psychodrama about a crimefighter resolving his issues with a criminal daddy in the dry bowels of the American Southwest. Oh, and it's got zombie ghosts too.

By the whims of fate, federal marshal Jack La Roca (Lou Diamond Phillips) is assigned, along with other marshals, to track down a Witsec fugitive in the Southwestern desert. Jack, his partner Steph (Lori Petty), annoying putz P.T. (Dale Midkiff), and some redshirts track down "Rabbit" Smith (Steven Williams), who's supposed to testify against the mob the next day. Trouble is, mob hitmen show up to get in the way. After some bloody gun-battles, the marshals try to find the quickest route to their destination. The less than trustworthy Rabbit mentions a road, Route 666, which was condemned and closed due to a controversial incident about a slain prison work crew there.

 

As soon as the contingent begins traveling the road, Jack experiences weird visions, in which he beholds flashes about what happened to the work crew. The discovery of the prisoners' gravesite discloses an unpleasant truth: one of the slain convicts was Jack's bank-robber father. 

Though the marshals have lost the hitmen, a new menace appears: the ghosts of the convicts, all stone-faced zombies carrying the tools they bore when they died building the road. The ghost-zombies are invulmerable to human fists and to bullets, though they have one limitation: they can only manifest on the concrete road, or through other concrete media. When the marshals lose their cars, they're forced to play a deadly cat-and-mouse game. But can Jack get through to one of the cats, the one who sired him?

Jack is definitely the focal point here, and he's even drawn as a savior destined to end the curse upon Route 666, as is made clear when Jack has a different kind of vision, and communes with an Indian seer who proffers some general advice. Lori Petty gives good support to Phillips' dour, perpetually-wound-up fed, but although Dale Midkiff does a creditable job with his A-hole character, he adds nothing to the story, which would have benefited by more emphasis on Jack's psychology: his motivation for becoming a cop in reaction to his old man's history.

Still, it's a good one-shot B-film, and only one of two features, along with the 1988 SCARECROWS, essayed by director/co-writer William Wesley.

THE BLACK RIDER (1954)

 

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

Wolf Rilla, son of Walter "Doctor Mabuse" Rilla, enjoyed one career-transcending moment when he helmed the 1960 VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED. I say "transcending" rather than "defining" because most of Rilla's career consisted of directing low-budget British flicks, many of which looked like "quota quickies."

THE BLACK RIDER does show Rilla dipping his toes in the shallow end of the metaphenomenal pool. At a time when at least a few British units were trying to compete, on lower budgets, with the American sci-fi boom, RIDER looks a lot like a pokier version of one of those British modern-Gothics of the 1930s, like 1934's THE BLACK ABBOT. In fact, the script uses the same trope as ABBOT, for it deals with how conspirators are hiding in a run-down monastery and using a spectral being to keep the curious away. Yet the titular "Black Rider" is of such minor consequence to the story that the script starts out calling the spectre "the Black Monk," as if he's the ghost of some condemned religious votary, and then uses the term "Black Rider," who's given the connotation of a Satanic Wild Huntsman running around snatching up souls for hell. The movie opens with one scene of a villager wandering too near the monastery and getting the crap scared out of him by the Rider-- who is mounted not on a traditional horse, but on a disguised motorcycle.

Neither the phony spirit nor the malcontents behind him are the stars of this show, but by an odd coincidence, hero Jimmy Marsh (Jimmy Hanley) is also an aficianado of the 1950s motorbikes. In fact, when he's planning to unveil his new vehicle to his girlfriend Mary (Rona Anderson) and her father Robert, there's some misfired comic business about how the two of them think Jimmy's concealing some scandalous affair from them. Indeed, there's so little going on in this sleepy town that it's like they have to conjure up a scandal to stay awake. 

Robert, editor of the local newspaper for which Jimmy writes on occasion, doesn't like motorcycles because they represent change, and he doesn't care about the local legend of the Black Rider for much the same reason. Jimmy thinks there's some deeper story about the monastery, but when he investigates at night, someone knocks him on the head and tosses him down a dry well. His assailants, evidently intending to end Jimmy's life, don't realize that the well-wall is broken and allows Jimmy access to a tunnel, through which he wanders until he exits the monastery.

The film then dithers around for a while, showing other clean-cut British youths tooling around on their bikes for some reason until Jimmy can convince some friends to make a Hardy Boys assault on the monastery. The fight between Jimmy's group and the criminals is over so fast it doesn't rate as belonging to the combative mode, but once the villains are corralled, it turns out that they're actually spies. In fact, they have in their possession a compact "atomic sabotage device," with which they intended to blast a nearby tank factory or something like that. The head villain gets no good lines but is played by one of the few faces modern viewers might recognize, Lionel (FIRST MEN IN THE MOON) Jeffries.

Most of the movie is dull, with the minor exception of a few lovely shots of the English countryside, well composed by cinematographer Geoffrey Faithfull. He would work with Rilla again on VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED and with Robert Day on both CORRIDORS OF BLOOD and FIRST MAN INTO SPACE. Writer A.R. Rawlinson had seen better days contributing to the scripts for Hitchcock's 1934 MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH and Stevenson's 1937 KING SOLOMON'S MINES.