VIRTUAL COMBAT (1995)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

Hyde Park Entertainment came close to PM in terms of churning out reams of STV products for cable and video rental stores. PM tended to concentrate on action movies, while Hyde emphasized softcore thrillers like the NIGHT EYES series. That said, the redoubtable Don Wilson made three flicks for Hyde Park. I've found a number of Wilson programmers to be passable formula entertainment. But though I've not seen them all, VIRTUAL COMBAT may be the worst thing Wilson ever did, though the fault surely lies with the guys behind the camera.

COMBAT takes place in the near future, and like most such action-fare, it's really just the modern world with one or two SF-tropes added. VR technology has become the big thing in future-Las Vegas, so much so that local cops like David Quarry (Wilson) and his partner John spend most of their time hanging out in VR parlors-- though John avails himself of VR sexcapades, while David hones his martial skills by battling VR opponents. One opponent is Dante (Michael Bernardo), and he kicks real boy David's ass in their first bout. Unfortunately, a world-beater named Burroughs (first and middle names "John Carter," hah hah) has his scientists invent a way of bringing VR programs into the real world-- sort of the 3-D printing of the 1990s. Burroughs' main purpose seems to be to corner a new market on VR prostitutes, both creating regular good-lookers like Liana (Athena Massey) and "specialty types" like whip-wielding dominatrix Greta (Dawn Ann Billings). But the same tech that births cyber-babes also unleashes cyber-villain Dante, and one of his first actions is to kill David's partner.

Avenging his partner then becomes David's only motive in life for the rest of the film, though he finds a little time for a nothing sex scene with Liana. But director Andrew Stevens's idea of a plot is that of providing minimal connective tissue between a bunch of mediocre fight-scenes. Even Liana and Greta get to throw down a little. But only the climactic combat between David and Dante shows decent choreography, which may stem from the two actors working to their strengths. But Dante's never very threatening, not least because he doesn't utter his own lines, but strides around close-mouthed while his dialogue is uttered by the booming voice of Michael Drn.

Eventually all the rogue programs are destroyed, even "good VR" Liana, though David can still visit an iteration of Liana. Where? Why, in the VR sex parlors! And so COMBAT ends by coming "full circle"-- or is that "full-circle jerk?"                 

STAR TREK: PICARD (SEASON ONE, 2020)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological, sociological*

SUPER HEAVY SPOILERS

Before venturing into this review, I wrote this essay to demonstrate that any nostalgic appeal for the STTNG series the producers hoped to evoke with PICARD was all but absent in me. In part I wrote:  

In the 1980s, as Roddenberry saw the franchise he'd created taken over by other hands, TNG gave him his last chance to infuse a teleseries with his guiding ethos. Yet this time he didn't want a series that stressed heroic action and character conflict. As many TNG critics have observed, Roddenberry wanted characters who had advanced beyond personal interest, not least with regard to that old devil sensuality. As the characters lacked personality in those early years, the players couldn't do much except to pontificate-- though always with the most earnest attitudes possible. For me, as a viewer not much impressed with TNG's early years, the culmination of this tendency appeared most egregiously in the first-season episode "Skin of Evil," which I call "The One Where Picard Has Righteous Conversations with an Oil Slick." 

What little online criticism I'd seen of PICARD had been negative, and I had little reason to extend the show any benefit of the doubt, given that PICARD's producer Alex Kurtzman also had his fingers in the Trek TV shows DISCOVERY and STRANGE NEW WORLDS and in two of the last three TREK theatrical movies. All of these I deemed garbage whose only merit was to make even the weaker TREK entries of the Rick Berman years look like genius. So when I liked PICARD, I can only posit that the crucial difference for me was Season One's showrunner was novelist Michael Chabon. For me, Season One's ten episodes bring out the Liberal political themes of TNG better than any ten episodes of the original series-- though of course PICARD has the advantage of presenting a unified narrative.

It's quite possible that some reviewers didn't like Chabon's labyrinthine storyline, and I must admit that I don't think it fully tracks, though that doesn't invalidate other qualities. Chabon drew strongly upon two TREK narratives I've not revisited since their theatrical debuts-- NEMESIS (2002), the last movie to spotlight the TNG cast, and the 2009 STAR TREK, which did not involve the TNG mythos but which Chabon seems to have retconned into said continuity, at least with respect to one event. Since I think Chabon's reworking of the TNG mythos was key to my enjoyment of the season, in this review I'm going to focus less on the story's dramatic twists and turns than on the phases of the Chabon timeline-- hence, SPOILERS.

PHASE 1-- In the distant past, a mighty civilization is destroyed by their populace of androids, usually called "synthetics." Though the organics die, they exile the synthetics to another dimension, and leave behind a recording, known as "The Admonition," to warn other sentients of the consequences of empowering synthetics.

PHASE 2-- At some later millennium, the Romulans discover the Admonition. A secret society, the Zhat Vash, dedicates itself to the prevention of another synthetic uprising.

PHASE 3-- The events of TREK NEMESIS transpire, culminating in the death of the synthetic Federation officer Data. As I recall, in that time-frame synthetics are not prevalent.

PHASE 4-- The events of TREK '09 transpire, though the only event referenced in PICARD is the destruction of Romulus, the Romulan homeworld. Chabon asserts that this event takes place in TNG time, and that Admiral Picard leads a humanitarian effort to rescue the imperiled denizens. However. not all Federation officials approve of succoring the Federation's rivals, and for that reason, the Zhat Vash takes an action that some might deem counter-intuitive. Apparently synthetics are being used in greater numbers at the time, so Romulan operatives somehow mess with a large number of synthetics on Mars. The synthetics revolt, which somehow impairs the Romulan rescue effort. Reactionary elements in the Federation use the revolt as an excuse to both shut down the rescue effort and to legislate against the further creation of synthetics. Picard opposes both measures and seeks to reignite the rescue effort by threatening to resign-- only to have his resignation accepted. Picard does succeed in rescuing a large number of Romulans and relocating them on the planet Vashti, but then the former Admiral goes into seclusion.

PHASE 5-- Unbeknownst to Picard, Data, prior to his death, created at least two twin female androids, Dahj and Soji, with the help of human scientist Maddox. Both are separately raised by human families without their even knowing they're synthetics, probably to keep them from being destroyed under the new laws. Maddox, wanting to continue his synthetic research, emigrates to another planet with some like-minded associates and populates that world with an android population. (It's a fine touch that the world is named Coppelius, after the robot-making mad scientist of Hoffmann's story "The Sandman.") The Zhat Vash wants to annihilate all the synthetics, but they don't know where Coppelius is. But they are able to locate Dahj and Soji. For some reason, agents Narissa and Narek track Soji to her workplace-- an abandoned Borg cube-- and seek to tap her memories to learn the location of the homeworld that Soji has buried in her subconscious memories. Other agents of Zhat Vash seek to abduct Dahj for similar treatment, but her cyber-skills activate and she kills them. Other memories surface, leading Dahj to seek out Picard-- who then has to learn all of this continuity in reverse order.

Though many details of the scenario are weak, they serve quite well to advance the political ethos of the story, which coheres admirably with a running trope from TNG: "androids are people too." PICARD is almost lyrical in its efforts to champion synthetics as not just an underclass in need of rescuing, but as a species of "children" that deserve the kindness and amity of all sentients. And while the Romulans are "the bad guys" for choosing to make synthetics into scapegoats, they are not, as in many TNG episodes, totally wrong. Toward the latter half of the season, the inhabitants of Coppelius are aghast to learn that a Romulan fleet seeks to destroy their world. Picard and his new crew cannot save them, but the synthetics can reach out to the extradimensional androids to save them. Picard is naturally just as much opposed to a Holocaust of organics as of synthetics, and he manages to sway the Coppelians to renounce the alien synthetics (who are seen briefly as some sort of tentacled Cthuluoids).

Speaking of the support cast, PICARD includes two characters from TNG, Troi and Ryker, and one from VOYAGER, Seven of Nine, but they play only small, though resonant, parts. Picard engages a new motley crew to aid him in his investigation, and while none of them are compelling, they all serve their purposes well enough. The only crewmember that shows potential is the Romulan youth Elnor, who views Picard as the father he never had but resents the admiral for having absented himself. The two villains Narissa and Narek are much better than most TNG foes, though. Narek inserts himself romantically into Soji's life to probe her memories, and his sister Narissa is visibly jealous of the hookup, threatening Narek to make sure he sticks to the mission. Narissa gets a solid demise in a battle with Seven of Nine-- one of several well-choreographed fight-scenes in this season-- but Narek's fate, that of being apprehended by Federation forces, was left on the cutting room floor.

But inevitably the show wouldn't work if Patrick Stewart didn't bring his A-game. I reject critics who said Picard is just "carried along" by events, for he's clearly the moral linchpin of Season One. Stewart's Picard is just as intermittently righteous and self-deprecating as he ever was in TNG, but here he's dealing with an issue far more substantive than most of those seen in the old show. (And I say that as a person that doesn't automatically validate the many Liberal permutations of the save-the-marginalized trope.) PICARD is a rare example of a sequel that improves on the original-- though I see that Michael Chabon may not contributed as much to ensuing seasons as to this one.        

VAN HELSING (2023)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

There's at least three other franchises named Van Helsing, and this one, by CGI-director BC Fourteen, may be the least of them.

I decided to sample this VH, though, because while researching XTERMINATOR for my review, I learned that the villainous robot made an appearance in VH, as well as (very briefly) the BC version of Bigfoot. But the great-grandson of Abraham Van Helsing, astronaut Jack Van Helsing, is the star here-- though he doesn't directly contend with either X or two other evil presences in the muddled story.

I made fun of the fact XTERMINATOR obviously swiped its basic plot from ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, but VH might have been better with more story-theft. There's sort of an arc in that the script tells viewers that the Earth was turned into a wasteland in 2022, and by the end of VH, the hero returns to humankind's homeworld and sees that life has begun to thrive again. But this does not happen because of anything done by the hero or anyone else. VH is just a jumble of separate scenes that BC wanted to execute. Only in one way is VH better than its predecessor: VH has one decently executed fight-scene, where Jack in his spacesuit duels a similarly garbed  enemy while both are floating in space. But BC partly undermines his own scene by capriciously naming Jack's opponent after the Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau for no good reason I can see.     

XTERMINATOR AND THE AI APOCALYPSE (2023)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

I know nothing about the origins of this low-budget CGI oddity. But just as a guess, it looks and sounds as if writer/director/voice-actor "BC Fourteen" started out trying to make a fan-film about the armored adversary from George Lucas' prequel STAR WARS series, General Grievous. Then he reworked his CGI model into a more skull-faced humanoid and dubbed hm "Xterminator," but kept the raspy, acerbic voice-characterization.

The setting is some futuristic sparse-opera-- my new term for a space-opera so sparse in details that it might as well be a western. Almost all we see of humanity are various armored soldiers, under the command of one Grace Sherwood, and her raison d'etre as a commander of Earth-forces is to play "Thunderbolt Ross" to the robotic villain Xterminator. He calls himself "X" for short, but he's an apocalyptic AI who despises humans as much as humans despise him. So who does Sherwood call upon when her creator obliges her to rip off "Escape from New York" and send someone to Mars to rescue a missing diplomat? That's riiiight...

While X is on his Mars mission, motivated by both carrot and stick, Sherwood decides to hedge her bets by unleashing an intelligent shark-monster. Megalodon, to ambush X. Why does Megalodon exist in this sparse-opera? Same reason Sherwood confers with an intelligent Bigfoot: a director's silly in-joke. because he worked on an early CGI junk-flick, BIGFOOT VS MEGALODON. For good measure, Sherwood also arranges a Martian jailbreak to add to X's headaches.

Though XATAA is never more than a junk-flick, I might have been slightly entertained if Fourteen had been able to deliver on all the promised action. But just as was the case with all the SYFY big-beast fests, action costs too much money for cheapie CGI movies. There's just barely enough violence for XATAA to qualify in my combative mode category. Yet while I can't recommend the film, it did make me a bit curious about Fourteen's half-dozen "Bigfoot" junk-flicks.   

    

RESIDENT EVIL: DEATH ISLAND (2023)

 

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

Though DEATH ISLAND appeared six years after VENDETTA, the filmmakers did their level best to present this film as a rough sequel. Villains Arias and Diego from VENDETTA are referenced, while Diego's daughter Maria follows up on her quest for vengeance, established in the closing moments of the earlier film.

ISLAND is still pretty good kickass, zombie-smashing action, but it's a little disappointing in that the new Big Bad is not nearly as good as Arias. That said, Dylan Blake has clearly been designed to have a trauma-arc like that of Arias. Several years before the main action of ISLAND, he's a mercenary soldier hired by the Umbrella Corporation, creators of the T-virus, to quell the rampaging zombies. Blake, forced to kill his best friend when he's infected, decides to unleash an ultimate bio-terror upon mankind to exterminate the depredations of human beings, as well as to expunge his sense of personal guilt. The script proposes a weighty theme but doesn't manage to sell it adequately.

However, one element where ISLAND excels is the one in which VENDETTA was deficient: fighting femmes. The RESIDENT EVIL franchise became well-known in narrative cinema for spotlighting the tough-girl character of Alice-- but she was an original creation for the live-action movies. At some point, the filmmakers intended to emphasize the game-character of Jill Valentine, and though that character made one or two live-action appearances, ISLAND seems to be the first time the game-character gets a worthy adaptation. Valentine and her soldier-partner Leon Kennedy are essentially the stars of this outing, with other regulars-- Rebecca Chambers, the Redfield siblings-- in secondary roles. Valentine arguably gets more narrative attention, given that she's being "introduced" to the motion-capture series, and if she's not as superhuman as Alice usually is, she's still a formidable femme. And although Maria Gomez takes the hard fall this time, the filmmakers gave her an excellent hand-to-hand battle with Kennedy to go out on.           

RESIDENT EVIL: VENDETTA (2017)

 

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

This RESIDENT EVIL motion-capture movie came out long enough after the last in the series, 2012's DAMNATION, that someone in production termed VENDETTA a "reboot." In terms of content, it's indistinguishable from the previous two in the series, but in terms of style, VENDETTA is as impressive as the best of the live-action EVILS.

The main hero here is Chris Redfield, primarily a character known from the RPG. In the EVIL world, illicit experiments have given rise to the T-virus and its variants, which are capable of instantly mutating human beings into ravening zombies. Redfield and his counter-terrorism unit attack the domicile of a known dealer in T-virus bioweapons, Glenn Arias, who has taken captive a female undercover agent. The soldiers are attacked by zombies created by Arias, and then Redfield suffers the sort of trauma that never happened to Chuck Norris. Redfield squares off hand-to-hand with Arias, who looks like a well-dressed day-trader, and the less muscular Arias trounces the bulky warrior. Then Arias leaves his zombies-- including the transformed female agent-- to finish off Redfield, while departing in the company of hottie Maria Gomez and her father Diego, who for some reason has been transformed into one of the bulky virus-mutants called a "Tyrant." Once the villains have escaped, air support flies in and bombs the zombies, saving Redfield.

Four months later, scientist and former agent Rebecca Chambers (also a game character) has succeeded in formulating a vaccine that can keep the virus from spreading. Arias learns about this somehow, and he unleashes his virus on the research facility. Though the other scientists are zombiefied, Chambers saves herself from that fate with her vaccine, after which Redfield and his team extract her. Chambers and Redfield then seek the help of another agent with considerable counter-bioweapons experience, Leon S. Kennedy. Kennedy has some previous trauma bugging him, but he finally agrees to join another assault on Arias after Maria and Diego Gomez attack first, kidnapping Chambers.

Ostensibly Arias wants to nullify Chambers before she can make his bioweapons obsolete. However, unlike the standard Chuck Norris evildoer, Arias also has a trauma in his past, and it's actually more emotionally resonant than Kennedy's. Years ago his estate was carpet-bombed by someone who didn't like his munitions-profession, but as it was the day of Arias' wedding, his bride perished in the holocaust. Now Arias gets the nutty idea that Chambers is going to become his new bride, though he also has some demented idea of somehow transplanting part of the dead bride into the scientist's body. Fortunately, Kennedy, Redfield and a few allies storm Arias' base, resulting in the destruction of his plans and most of the villains (though Maria survives, possibly for later use). 

This is a good kick-ass film, without any great complexity but with a fair amount of emotional resonance. Oddly, though Chambers and Maria are positioned as action-girls, and there's one unnamed female ally in the big climax, this time the guys get all the good scenes (including Redfield's rematch with Arias, which has a more salutary outcome).        

                   

RESIDENT EVIL: DEGENERATION (2008)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

DEGENERATION was the first motion-capture animated film based directly on the popular video game, and the first time an adaptation linked up the game's protagonists, soldier Leon S. Kennedy and scientist Claire Redfield. That means that viewers like me-- who only knew the series that starred original movie-character Alice (Milla Jovavich)-- had to go Alice-less.

While the character design of Claire Redfield has a stronger vibe than I've seen in a lot of motion-capture animation, the story is a fairly dull setup of all the basics of the franchise. The viewer learns how an evil corporation designed the insidious T-virus, which has the unfortunate side effect of turning its victims into killer zombies. If one doesn't want to hear that much about the mechanics of who did what to whom, DEGENERATION fails to provide much in the way of dynamic characters or situations.

Its most positive aspect is that this film got all the exposition out of the way, so that the next in the series, DAMNATION, offered a lot more of the kickass action integral to the live-action movie franchise.      

NIGHT FRIGHT (1967), TOP LINE (1988)

 

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

Despite having lots of trash-films to choose from on streaming channels, I can't help checking out the various junk offered on the Mill Creek collections. I haven't found anything outstanding yet, even in a "so bad it's good" way. Yet at least sometimes even crap gives me exercise in finding a new way to condemn it.

I'd seen the cheapie "teens vs space monster" flick NIGHT FRIGHT broadcast on TV long ago and remembered nothing about it but a general negative impression. And there really was almost nothing to remember. It's at least a small curiosity that this dull 1967 drive-in fodder got re-released on some 1980s video label with a new title, implying that FRIGHT might be a more violent version of Spielberg's E.T. 

Most of the film involves a gorilla-like monster who emerged from a "spaceship" stomping around a rural town and killing off a few generally "clean" teens, before the sheriff (John Agar, the only "name" actor) brings the creature down. No one else can act their way out of a paper bag, and the monster is only shot in darkness, probably to conceal the suit's zipper. One small novelty in the script is that the monster isn't an alien. According to an explanation by the town's high-school professor-- who was apparently involved with the US space program at some time-- the creature is an Earth-animal, possibly a real gorilla, whom American scientists experimented on so that it could survive in outer space. So the "spaceship" was American-made, but it was launched with, what, zero publicity?  Frankly, the 1959 origin of DC's monster-ape Titano-- also an Earth-anthropoid sent into space, where he got special powers-- makes this bland piece of tedium look pretty sad.

     

TOP LINE, an actual eighties movie, is at least lively if no more consistent than NIGHT FRIGHT. 

Italian writer-director Nello Rossati had worked on at least two decent junk-movies known to me: the Ursula Andress sex-flick THE SENSUOUS NURSE and DJANGO STRIKES AGAIN, the only legitimate sequel to the 1960s DJANGO. I suspect that Franco Nero's association with TOP LINE was born of having worked with Rossati on the DJANGO sequel. The poster makes TOP look like another Indiana Jones clone, but what viewers got was an erratic, confusing "thriller" about an author and his girlfriend who discover that there are aliens among us.

What's the nature of the aliens, and what are they doing on Earth? Why do various government agencies pursue Author Ted and gal-pal June (Nero and Debrah Moore) to keep them from revealing the aliens' dubious secrets to the public? Why did guys like William Berger and George Kennedy consent to do glorified cameos here? Maybe this nonsense would have been more bearable if Nero and Moore had played a tough guy and girl like the leads of RAIDERS. Then, TOP might have been a decent "Indiana Clone." But all the stars do here is run away a lot. There are just two diverting scenes. In one, the protagonists are pursued by a Terminator-like robot, but they manage to thwart the automaton by luring him into the horns of a dilemma-- a dilemma consisting of a savage bull. In the other, Ted finds out the hard way that his ex-wife is one of the aliens, and that she's actually a lizard-like humanoid in Earth-disguise. Rossati doesn't write any memorable dialogue here, but Nero sells the scene with his look of horror, implicitly at having slept with a lizard-lady without catching on to any difference. The bottom line is that TOP LINE is pretty close to the bottom, but Moore and Nero keep this crap from being as stinky as many other timewasters.

            

FIST OF THE NORTH STAR (1995)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

In my review of the 1986 anime adaptation of this ultraviolent shonen manga, I gave that flick a "fair" mythicity rating, but only because the makers were loosely keyed into some of the philosophical concepts behind certain forms of the martial arts. That said, it was still just a garden-variety fantasy-adventure, in which a brooding hero wandered around a devastated earth, dispensing violent justice to depraved criminals and madmen. I think director Tony Randel and writer Peter Atkins-- reunited since their teaming on HELLRAISER II, which was also the best film on both of their resumes-- tried as best they could to make a decent time-killer on a very modest budget. But the results were less consequential than the sort of efficient-if-average American chopsockies for which star Gary Daniels became best known, such as BLOODMOON and HAWK'S VENGEANCE.

Randel's direction has been attacked by some fans, but he closely followed the storytelling example of his template, as much as did the NORTH STAR anime. The manga, being a typical shonen of the 1980s, leavens its bloody mayhem with scenes of the tormented hero Kenshiro (Daniels) brooding over his sufferings. His stoicism is expressly contrasted with the freakish fiends who sadistically prey upon the weak and helpless, not least a pair of winsome children. Randel and Atkins deliver pretty much the same content in their live-action movie, but somehow it doesn't ring as true as some of the better (but still average) post-apoc films in the Western tradition. It's true that the actors playing the main villain's nasty henchmen, such as Chris Penn and Clint Howard, mug horribly. But such roles don't generally allow for any nuance, so that's not really the performers' fault.

The live-action film's main problem may be writer Atkins' inability to do anything interesting with main villain Shin (Costas Mandylor). He's pretty much the standard ruthless conqueror who plans to rebuild a shattered world in his own image, but his only personal aspect is his history with Kenshiro. Years previous to the film's "present," Shin coveted Julia (Isako Washio), girlfriend of Kenshiro and challenged Kenshiro to possess her. Though both are masters of their respective styles-- "North Star" and "Southern Cross"-- Shin won the battle. The villain then departs with his prize and leaves the hero alive. This is a pretty good reason for the hero to brood, but in most chopsockies, the humiliated protagonist trains like a demon to overcome his enemy in a return match. If Kenshiro trains in the time between his defeat and his rematch, it wasn't depicted-- and I don't think the 1986 anime shows anything similar either. 

Randel's film is also undermined in that Kenshiro's signature move involves rapid-fire blows to his opponent, which transmit such massive stress to a human form as to cause it to explode. Animation can make this fantasy seem persuasive, but in live action, even a greater budget for practical effects could not have pulled off this stunt. So it all comes down to Daniels and Mandylor slugging it out in a boring and predictable climax. The only good thing about the film is, as I said earlier, that it did lead to Daniels-- a mediocre actor but a quality martial artist-- making other films that weren't as ambitious but did not, so to speak, have as far to fall.

    
                   

QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE (1958)

 

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

The phrase "tongue in cheek" not infrequently comes up in reviews of QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE. But no matter how many tongues are lodged in how many cheeks, QUEEN's not a comedy because it isn't structured around the production of jokes and funny situations. Despite all the risible elements of the movie-- not least the presence of top-billed Zsa Zsa Gabor, the Venusian with a Hungarian accent-- the plot is structured like a drama. The essence of the story is yet another reprise of the War Between Men and Women, in which the men win the contest by killing a monstrous incarnation of femininity.

The usual backstory routine: Ben Hecht, writer of many Classic Hollywood movies, either composed or inspired a ten-page treatment about a planet ruled by inept females. Allied Artists bought the treatment for one of their low-budget sci-fi productions, such as 1956's WORLD WITHOUT END, as well as hiring that movie's director, Edward Bernds, for QUEEN. The credited screenwriter was Charles Beaumont, who has scored some success in SF-magazines but in 1958 had only successfully sold three television scripts before this job. What Beaumont and any uncredited collaborators produced was almost certainly compromised by QUEEN's low budget, recycling costumes and props from three or four other SF films, including a giant spider-puppet from WORLD WITHOUT END. 

Though Beaumont had yet to make his Hollywood bones, he does establish his gender-conflict fairly clearly in the opening scenes, at least as well as the best-known "babes in space" movie of the 1950s, CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON. Unlike that 1953 flick, QUEEN's space voyage is manned by an all-male team of four astronauts. Three of them, Captain Patterson (Eric Fleming) and two other young guys named Mike and Larry, express a desire to take on an exploratory mission in space, but they're obliged to do a "milk run" to an orbiting space station, escorting its architect Prof. Konrad (Paul Birch) to that destination. Even being told that they're to investigate anomalous signals to the station doesn't satisfy these seekers of glory, none of whom have any strong ties to females of the species (though Larry is constantly portrayed as the facile ladies' man of the bunch.)

However, when their spaceship approaches the station, a mysterious ray destroys the orbital and everyone aboard. Patterson and his three-men crew seek to avoid the ray, but it must not be the same one, for the ship is transported all the way to a jungle-planet. Despite an initial sighting of snow-- poetically described as "angel's hair"-- the four astronauts find that both atmosphere and gravity allow them to leave the ship and wander through a potted-plant jungle. Konrad theorizes that they've reached Venus, even though it doesn't look anything like established theories about the planet's nature.

Beaumont doesn't waste time on the discrepancy, for the viewer instantly gets proof that the planet MUST be Venus, since the guys are taken prisoner by a gaggle of love-goddesses. Okay, they're just a lot of cute girls in short skirts, but they're armed with disintegrator rays, so the guys have to go along. The astronauts see no men of any age (or women who are extremely old or young), and a tribunal headed by mask-wearing Queen Yllana (Laurie Mitchell) accuses the Earthmen of plotting an invasion of Venus. Yllana announces that the men are to be executed, but then she simply has them confined in some room together.

While under "cathouse arrest," the Earthmen meet Talleah (Gabor), allegedly a scientist, though she never says anything remotely technical. She gives the guys a quick and dirty summary of Venusian history. Ten years ago, Venus engaged in a war with another planet (whose name sounded like "Mordor"). Venus won, but the planet suffered radiation bombardments. Yllana and her all-female coterie somehow overthrew all the Venusian males and exiled them to a neighboring "satellite." Yllana and her allies are apparently fine with never enjoying male company again, but Talleah has assembled a gang of rebels planning to end the Queen's rule. Also, the Earth-guys learn that Yllana is responsible for blowing up the space station, and that she plans to do the same to the planet Earth.

However, everyone thinks that Patterson ought to try making out with Mask Maiden, so he vows to take one for the team. Unfortunately, Yllana takes off her mask and reveals that her real reason for hating men is because nuclear radiation ravaged her facial features (though the rest of her is perfectly fine). She wants to make an exception of Patterson, so that he becomes her consort on Venus. But not only does the captain have "butterface" issues, he's already got the come-hither from Talleah, so he turns Yllana down.

One might think that Yllana now has no reason to keep any of the Earth-dudes, and I don't think she even says anything about letting them live long enough to watch Earth die. Bernds must have insisted on re-using his damn fake spider from WWE, because the Earthmen briefly escape with Talleah and a couple of random girl-buddies, but only long enough for Mike to get attacked by, and saved from, the unconvincing arachnid. So Talleah fakes apprehending the fugitives and takes them back to their previous set. Beaumont kills a little more time by having Patterson capture Yllana and letting Talleah don the Queen's mask to impersonate her-- but this gambit also fails. Yllana escorts all of her enemies to the site of the long-range disintegrator ray, which looks like a giant easy-bake oven. Then Yllana presses what she calls a "red button" (actually black) -- and the machine simply doesn't work. Talleah's rebels attack Yllana's guards in a half-hearted battle, while Yllana runs inside the machine to make it work. Instead, the ray-machine blows up and finishes off the Ugly Duckling. Talleah becomes queen and orders the return of Venusian men from exile. The world has been safe for the return of heterosexual coitus, so the astronauts conveniently receive orders that they can stay on Venus for at least a year of humping.

Beaumont's best movie/TV work was ahead of him. But though he crafted a sloppy script, that's probably helped the movie in its claim to "so bad it's good" status. Ironically, there are some major tropes in QUEEN that could have made for a decent formula-movie, along the lines of Bernds' equally cheap WORLD WITHOUT END-- and not just the trope of the male-female war. Yllana "coulda been a contender" for good villainy, given that she holds warring males responsible for her disfigurement, and thus for her exclusion from hetero happiness. During Talleah's mask-masquerade, Patterson comments that she could be Yllana's "twin sister" (despite the accent), and the idea of heroes and villains mirroring each other is another rich trope, even though you'd have to make Talleah interesting for the trope to work at all. It's interesting that Patterson refers to the ship's attackers as "deadly neighbors," and what better justifies regime-change than finding out that your neighbors are already plotting against you? But all of QUEEN's tropes are as stillborn babes. Zsa Zsa wouldn't have been selected for a good script at all, so her casting is another of the movie's "tongue-in-cheek" aspects. And wouldn't most actors prefer to be known for a notorious dog than for an efficient formula-film remembered only by a small coterie of nerds?

                        

 

STEEL FRONTIER (1995)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

Now THIS, unlike some of the sludge I've recently reviewed from the defunct PM Entertainment, is what the company was capable of when it put good people in charge of their low-budget action-movies. I've seen other good formula-flicks from director/co-writer Jacobsen Hart and co-writer Paul Volk, but STEEL FRONTIER is an exceptionally good reworking of the post-apoc subgenre and of the westerns that partly inspired them.

Once again, some idiot dropped the Bomb, and that instantly flung the remnants of humanity back into the framework of the Old West, with scattered enclaves of hard-working tillers of the soil, continually menaced by wasteland savages (cannibals called "roach-eaters") and by a roving gang of ruthless bandits. In deference to the influence of MAD MAX, this gang of "Death Riders" use automobiles rather than horses to cross the desert, and the bandits themselves seem to be rogue members of the US army. That their leader (Brion James) is given the name "Quantrell," emulating that of the post-Civil War raider, indicates that the writers wanted to allude to the power of the military to foster tyranny. Other members of the Riders include Quantell's second in command Acker (Bo Svenson), the leader's wimpy son Julias (John C Victor), and other weirdos, one of whom is named Chickenboy in reference to his feathery attire.        

 We meet the hero first, though, when he has to mercy-kill one of the Death Riders' victims: a man with his legs torn off, left to die in the desert. This is the taciturn Yuma (Joe Lara), whose origins are never revealed, though there's the suggestion that he might have been, like Mad Max, an enforcer of the law. Some reviewers compared Yuma to Jesus, I guess because he has long hair and because late in the film he gets wounded in the side. But there's a clever allusion to Yuma's real nature in a conversation between Quantell and Acker, where Quantrell opines that he doesn't like his gang's name because "Death rides alone." And who does director Hart immediately cut to, riding alone on his motorcycle to his death-dealing conflict with evil? Only one guess allowed.

 There are no great surprises to the plot. The Riders take over a peaceful town and began heaping indignities upon the residents, including beautiful Sarah (Stacie Foster) and her young boy. Yuma shows up and joins the Riders in order to whittle them down from within, before making an all-out assault, aided by Sarah and some of the more courageous townfolk. Quantrell, who's left town to coordinate with other members of his gang, finds out about the rebellion and leads more bandits to wipe out the whole town. Instead the bad guys are taken out and heroic Yuma gets the de rigeur final battle with the main villain, before cycling off into the sunset.

Aside from the allusions to Yuma being both Jesus and Death, the writers provided the actors with lots of quick emotional moments. Quantell, raging when he finds that Yuma killed his son. Sarah trying to get the cowardly populace to fight back. Sarah's son trying to save his mother from rape with a slingshot and undergoing a rite of passage as he manages to kill the idiot Chickenboy. Svenson confessing to Yuma that before the Bomb fell, he'd hoped to become an astronaut, and wondering if some of them are still in orbit above the ruined world. And though I've rarely been impressed with Joe Lara, here he does a fine job of putting across his version of a "man with no past." And for once, the usual PM policy of punctuating the drama with explosions, gun-battles and fistfights works to good effect.    

V: THE FINAL BATTLE (1984)

 

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

At the end of my review of the original V miniseries, I described how Kenneth Johnson, creator of the V franchise, had contributed ideas to the 1984 three-part sequel. However, he parted ways with NBC and distanced himself from the project by letting his work be billed under the protest-pseudonym "Lillian Weezer." 

I also noted that it's impossible to know if Johnson's V-vision would have been better than what NBC put together with its own producers and their director of choice, Richard T. Heffron. Now, while I don't find in Heffron's repertoire as many famed accomplishments as I find in Johnson's, I did see a lot of the former's TV and theatrical works, and he certainly was no hack. I particularly admired a telefilm he directed regarding the Nez Perce tragedy, I WILL FIGHT NO MORE FOREVER.

One big advantage Heffron had was that Johnson's 1983 story supplied all the necessary setup for the Visitors' stealth invasion of Earth, thus eliminating much of the need for exposition in the sequel. But one great improvement is that Heffron's writing-staff pared down a lot of the extraneous characters from the '83 series. Additionally, whereas the main characters of Julie and Mike (Faye Grant, Marc Singer) proved a little banal in the first film, the addition of a third central character, Ham Tyler (Michael Ironside), provided a greater sense of conflict. Unlike civilians Julie and Mike, Ham joined the rebels as an experienced combat veteran, and he wasn't shy about expressing his opinions on how the resistance should be run, or even openly defying his "old pal" Mike. 

An equally strong parallel idea focused more upon the villainous head of the Visitor operations, Diana (Jane Badler). Technically in both serials, a male alien named John (Richard Herd) held the power of command over the mission, but Diana received much more attention in the '83 two-parter, and BATTLE found even more ways to play up the feminine fiend. In fact, she too had to deal with internecine troubles, since a superior officer, one Pamela (Sarah Douglas), comes to Earth to take over the project. However, Diana shows her propensity for super-villainy by simply assassinating her commander.

That's not to say BATTLE is perfect. Despite fewer characters, there are a lot of disposable subplots, giving the three segments a choppy feeling. However, the best subplot from the '83 serial-- that Earth-girl Robin giving birth to a hybrid-- receives strong execution. In fact, the Interplanetary Mama gives birth to two such hybrids, and Part 2 shows a particular moment of horror when Robin's birth of a human-looking girl infant, Elizabeth, is followed by a reptilian goblin springing from her uterus. However, Part 3 saves the heroes the difficulty of putting down the goblin-child, for it perishes by exposure to Earth-bacteria-- which development in turn gives the Earthlings the chance to show the Visitors that visiting-time is over.

There's also a decent arc for the quirky "good alien" Willie, played in a modest, self-effacing manner by the future Freddy Kruger. Compared to the Johnson narrative, BATTLE has much less pontificating about a return of fascism, and more visceral action. Even the Julie character, usually not seen in the field, gets to shoot down bad aliens with her laser pistol. Heffron and company also drop one of the plot-threads suggested in '83, that the Earthpeople might seek to summon some of the ETs who'd been enemies to the Visitors-- which was a terrible idea, even though it would have fit Johnson's labored WWII parallel. It's far more satisfying to see the Earthlings win the BATTLE on their own.

            

V; THE MINI-SERIES (1983)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

Though I read IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE, the Sinclair Lewis book that purportedly inspired Kenneth Johnson's two-part TV miniseries, I remember nothing about said novel. Johnson's V is more memorable than Lewis, thanks to those spiffy Visitor uniforms. Frankly, though, I think Johnson's main inspiration might have been those morale-boosting war movies of the early 1940s. Clearly, having the heroic rebels combat the tyrants by writing "V"-- as in "Victory"-- over the tyrants' posters was an explicit callback to Hollywood iconography.

That said, Johnson's story of a race of aliens who invade Earth using false promises and blandishments more than advanced weapons offers only a paper-thin critique of fascism. The Visitors also pose as human-like ETs clad in bright red outfits, but in due time the good guys learn that they're all lizard-like beings whose scaled bodies are concealed under plastic "human" skin-- a fairly clumsy gambit, though Johnson makes the most of various moments when someone tears away the false flesh. That the Visitors want to pirate Earth's water for the benefit of their dying homeworld is a standard enough SF-trope. However, Johnson really pours on the corn by claiming that these denizens of an alien environment just can't wait to chow down on homo sapiens. Not too many SF-authors would favor the idea that ETs from one world could even tolerate organic sustenance from another one. In addition, even though all of Earth is placed in the position of Europe under the sway of the Axis Powers during WWII, the most villainous member of the evil Visitors, deputy leader "Diana" (Jane Badler), is played by an American actress affecting a British accent.

Johnson introduces about twenty Earth-characters who respond in various ways to the wheedling impositions of the Visitors, though naturally most of them function as support-characters. The two who get the most attention are biologist Julie (Faye Grant) and reporter Mike (Marc Singer), who eventually uncover the awful truth about the aliens. Almost half of the mini-series consists of various sketched-out characters reacting to the Visitors' advent, and almost none of them are compelling as characters. I suppose I must acknowledge that one of those characters is a Jewish survivor of the WWII concentration camps, though this seems an indulgence on Johnson's part, given that the Visitors are not concerned with human racial or ethnic divisions. But one female teen, Robin (Blair Tefkin), has the misfortune to sleep with a handsome male visitor. This establishes a subplot about the first spawn of a human/Visitor mating, one that extends into the follow-up 1984 miniseries. In addition, a pre-Freddy Robert Englund shows up as one of a small number of Visitors who oppose the vicious plots of their kindred. These covert resisters eventually make common cause with the Earth-rebels, though again, not until the sequel series does their alliance become important. 

Though none of the actors are given the chance to work nuance into their performances, athletic Marc Singer, one year after his first turn as "The Beastmaster," keeps the action level high enough to counter the melodrama. The series was popular enough to generate a sequel the next year, on which Kenneth Johnson worked briefly before falling out with NBC executives. Thus whatever script-ideas Johnson contributed to the sequel were controlled by other authorities and not representative of his creative priorities. Johnson later authored a prose novel about how he felt the show should have progressed. As of this writing, though, it's impossible to say if his direction would have better or worse than what followed the original two-part series.

 

TERMINATOR: DARK FATE (2019)

 

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

Though FATE is indubitably one of the many films affected by Hollywood's version of DEI, it's not nearly as entertainment-free as many others from this unfortunate period. To be sure, the only entertainment stems from the abilities of director Tim (DEADPOOL) Miller and the FX-crew, and not from the script cobbled together by three writers swiping as much as feasible from TERMINATOR 2.

Like other films in the TERMINATOR franchise, FATE seeks to ignore later films in the series, in the case choosing to proceed as if it takes place a few years after the second film. Yet the script, presumably to suit the demands of producers, perversely cancels out the audience's good will by reversing the events of T2. Eight years after Sarah Connor and a T-800 Terminator (Linda Hamilton, Arnold Schwarzenegger) saved Sarah's son John from death by a T-1000, another Terminator (also Schwarzenegger) ambushes Sarah and John, kills John, and escapes. The time-travel paradoxes of this event are not explored, for the script's priority is to introduce two new female presences to this iteration. 

One of them, Dani (Natalia Reyes), is meant to provide a XX savior-figure in place of the slain John, for somehow his death simply changes the future so that Dani will be the great military leader who defeats Skynet. (The script initially fakes out the viewer with the implication that Dani's going to be the mother of a female savior, but the revelation is profoundly dull.) The other new woman warrior is Grace (Mackenzie Davis), a cyborg enhanced with mechanical implants, and who deals herself into this struggle even though-- she's from a totally different future with a different cyber-intelligence, Legion? Yeah, I didn't even try to follow the logic here. But Legion follows the same basic pattern as Skynet, sending back a metamorphic "fluid metal" Terminator (Gabriel Luna) to kill Dani. And somehow both aggrieved Sarah and the T-800 sign up to protect Dani and defeat the time-traveling assassin.

The crappy "dramatic" arcs of Dani and Sarah are worthless, hollow imitations of the superior John and Sarah arcs from T2, and the one for the T-800 is only minimally better than either, mostly because one suspects that this derivative film marks Schwarzenegger's farewell to his signature character. But though new faces Reyes and Luna are dull, and Hamilton returns to do nothing but scowl and glower alternately, Mackenzie Davis proves a much more charismatic presence than the other newbies, and Miller gives her plenty of demanding stunts that keep this otherwise dull pot boiling. The one good thing about this bad script is that because of it, FATE bombed at the box office, and it's to be hoped that at long last this franchise, which peaked with the first two films and never really blossomed again, will be allowed to fade into the past.
        

VIOLENCE JACK (1986, 1988, 1990)

 

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

If people say you can’t do something, then you want to do it even more. Things that are considered forbidden, means other people aren’t doing them yet! -- Go Nagai

From what spotty English-language reviews I found online, I don't get a sense that all, if any, of these three OVAs were totally faithful to Go Nagai's manga VIOLENCE JACK. But I have no doubt that they had total fidelity to Nagai's aesthetic of transgressive sex and violence. 

Before watching these productions, I read a few months' worth of the manga online, just to get a sense of its parameters, and I got the sense that it's a fairly loose concept. Such looseness was probably ideal for an OAV series, in that it wouldn't be expected to adapt an accepted continuity, and to date the original JACK material has proved too hardcore for even the Japanese to adapt fully into an anime series. In addition to being far more violent than even a lot of Nagai's other works, JACK is alleged to be the first manga/anime to delve into the post-apoc disaster genre-- which had been around a long time but was not usually melded with the genre of high-octane adventure. (Roger Zelazny's DAMNATION ALLEY was one predecessor.)  But this mainly allowed the protagonist-- a ten-foot-tall giant capable of brutal retaliation to protect the innocent-- to wander from situation to situation as he pleased. So I don't believe the original manga followed a strict continuity, and neither do the OVAs.

       

HAREM BOMBER was the first-released OVA in Japan, but it doesn't make any concessions regarding introducing Jack, and it only provides a sketchy backstory for its world. It all takes place in the Kanto region of Japan, which was so devastated by a meteor strike that it became a pocket world of ravaged human cliques. What happened to the rest of Japan, or the rest of the world? You'll never learn from the anime. As in many later genre-pieces, roving gangs of plunderers comprise the only authority, and the most powerful gang-leader is a warlord, Slum King, who comes into conflict with Jack. The two fight a bit, get separated, and the rest of the film concerns Jack protecting a young couple from the motorbike-riding looters. Slum King steals women to sell to sex slave-rings, and he's an equal opportunity employer, given that he has a whip-wielding lesbian henchwoman who sorts out the new acquisitions. Since Nagai probably intended to have some more climactic clash between the hero and Slum King down the line, the story's big fight concentrates on Jack vanquishing one of the warlord's henchmen, the titular Harem Bomber. In a twist of expectations, the girl lives and the boy dies, and there's a fuzzy reference to some Nagai concept about Jack has some sort of link to an ethereal bird-creature.

EVIL TOWN, the second OVA, feels more like an intro to Jack. A huge section of a Kanto city is swallowed by an earthquake, with the result that several humans are confined to the sunken area, unable to get back to the surface. The survivors break into three groups-- A, B and C-- and A's citizens are the ones who unearth Jack from a pile of rubble, where he's apparently been comatose. Jack at first tells the A-guys that he has no name but then dubs himself "Violence Jack" because he happens to have a huge jackknife with him. Though at first the taciturn hero defends the A-group from the freakish and malevolent denizens of the B-group, eventually Jack turns on both when he learns that the C-group is totally made up of women who have been abused and preyed upon by both groups. Though some of the women can fight-- particularly one muscular babe-- Jack defends them and makes it possible for them to return to the surface. TOWN seems to state a key tenet of Nagai's creative philosophy: that the "freaks" are not intrinsically less moral than the "straights," given that the latter group is willing to descend into rapine at the drop of a hat. TOWN is unquestionably the most extreme of the three OVAs, barraging the viewer with scenes of nudity, rape, bloody slaughter, cannibalism and even a little necrophilia.

HELL'S WIND, as well as being the name of a predacious gang of bikers, is the weakest of the OVAs. The gang menaces a small town seeking to get back to normal civilization, but the bikers, who report to the warlord Slum King, continually prey on the innocents. Long before Jack makes the scene, Hell's Wind assaults a young couple, killing the man and raping the woman, one Jun. She trains herself to become an Action Girl so that she can take revenge, but Jack more or less saves her the trouble, so that Jun doesn't have a satisfactory arc. Jack, though never demonstrative, seems to have a special liking for a young boy, and based on what little I read of the manga, I think that the two characters were intertwined in some way, though this never becomes explicit.

EVIL TOWN has the strongest sociological motif, implying that when men and women are confined together in a figurative prison with no outside contact, the men will become inveterate rapists. But though this is an intriguing idea, it's just a side-dish to the main course, which is loads and loads of sex and violence.

                       

FILIBUS (1915)

 

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

FILIBUS is billed as the first film in history with a "female supervillain." Given that the titular villainess appears about four years after the first FANTOMAS book, and she has three separate identities, it's likely that someone involved in this Italian production sought to emulate the success of the French supercriminal. The movie, running about 80 minutes, seems not to have been a financial success, but since it's true that there weren't a ton of starring female villains in the early 20th century, even in other media, FILIBUS has attracted some attention in feminist circles.

At the movie's opening, Filibus is lauded as an elusive "sky pirate," who preys on her victims with an airship and a small crew of henchmen, who alone know that Filibus is both a woman and a prominent social figure, name of Baroness Troixmonde (Valeria Creti). If anyone thought that FILIBUS was going to be a rousing Vernian story about airship battles, though, the low budget of the film shows itself in the fact that one barely gets a look at the ship, except for static shots of the crew leaning on the railings. It's not even clear how the damn thing operates, be it by balloon-power or by powered flight.

Filibus sets her cap to swiping a pair of fabulous diamonds, and since she knows that renowned detective Kutt-Hendy is protecting the gems, she launches a plan to frame him for the theft. She assumes the identity of a male count and cozies up to Kutt-Hendy's sister Leonora so that she can monitor the detective's plans. At one point Filibus' henchmen use a sort of metal cab lowered from their airship in order to expose the sleuth to sleep gas. Then they take his handprint with a copying process, so that they can make him look guilty of collusion later.

In addition to being cheap, the film is fairly slow and plodding, even though the two principals are good. Kutt-Henry, after getting framed, worries that he might be schizophrenic. Eventually he works things out and sets a trap for Filibus, and manages to both capture her and learn her identity. However, the wily crook gets free and escapes in her airship. Perhaps the producers hoped that the film would be popular enough to garner a sequel, but it wasn't in the cards.

FILIBUS, though significant for the gender of the villain, is not a combative work; it's just a heist tale starring the heist artist, possibly more like Arsene Lupin than Fantomas. It's also not any sort of monument to Lesbianism or "genderfluidity," any more than Conan Doyle's only Irene Adler story. Modern activists could probably conjure more of these phantoms from multiple readings of TWELFTH NIGHT than they ever could from FILIBUS.           

PLANET OF THE VAMPIRE WOMEN (2011)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*

Imagine that in the sleaziest era of Roger Corman's career-- I'll say the eighties, just for fun-- someone gave Corman, free and clear, the script to Mario Bava's PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES. Of course Corman would monetize the gift by making his own version of PLANET, with not only vampires but lots of tits and blood, and a few scenes swiped from his 1981 New World messterpiece, GALAXY OF TERROR.

That's what writer-director Darin Wood put together with PLANET OF THE VAMPIRE WOMEN, with numerous STAR TREK in-jokes as well. Surprisingly, I liked this goofy thing despite its extremely derivative nature. It's crap, but it's lively crap, and the quantity of cute actresses willing to provide upper-body nudity didn't hurt.

Quick summary: a crew of colorful space-pirates led by Capt, Richards (Paquita Estrada) raid a mammoth space-mall and escape with their booty. Space cop Falco in his own ship pursues the pirate craft, so Richards steers her ship onto a mysterious forbidden planet. Richards pays for her rashness, for some sort of energy-beings infect her, and she becomes a fanged space-vampire. She kills a couple of her crewmates and sabotages the ship. After she flees, the other pirates do recon on the planet. They find it's inhabited by such weird creatures as flying stinger-bugs and bipedal boar-people. Cop Falco also lands on the planet, but though he wants to arrest the pirates, he soon realizes that the vampire is creating more creatures like herself and thus is the greater cosmic danger. The cop and the pirates-- those don't get vampirized-- make a truce to get away in his ship, which proves extremely necessary because there's an ancient computer system on the planet that comes alive, attempting to destroy the whole planet to keep the vampire beings from escaping. However, Richards and her allies escape in the other ship and head for the space-mall, where they begin randomly killing people. The cop and the pirates join forces to save the day, but alas-- saving the day is not in the cards.

In addition to boobs and blood, there's a lot of fighting in the film, and though none of it is well-done, Wood and his costumers make the whole thing look super-colorful, not unlike the day-glo look of Sixties Batman. It's such a pleasure to see a cheapo SF-film that looks fairly pleasing to the senses-- even not counting the nudity--that I give PLANET extra mythicity points just for getting across the look of a PLAYBOY style future full of cheerful degeneracy. And besides-- who can hate a movie that shows space vampires shooting lightning from their eyes?             

PHANTOM 2040, SEASON TWO (1995-6)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

Since the wrapup of Season 2 seems a bit rushed, it's possible that the producers were hoping to get one more season for their unique concept. Still, at least some subplots, such as the disposition of the missing father of Kit, are fully realized.

RITE OF PASSAGE/THE WORLD IS MY JUNGLE-- Both of these episodes are just recap shows with some new voiceovers, so they have no impact on the ongoing stories or their mythicity.

SANCTUARY-- Guran plans to take Kit back to Bangalla in Africa in order to complete his training as the Phantom. However, Nia wants to kidnap the hero and take him back so that she can use him to restore her rulership. To that end, she teams up with a master hunter, Gunnar, to take Guran prisoner as a way of luring the Phantom into their clutches. Gunnar has a secret agenda though, for he plans to execute a "most dangerous game" with the Man Who Cannot Die, hunting the Phantom down in the Sector Zero jungle. But Guran happens to harbor a deep secret with respect to a mysterious creature known as "the Shadow Panther," and that secret, alluded to in Season One, gets fully exposed here. "Sanctuary" directly follows the events of the last new episode of Season One, "A Boy and His Cat," which ended with Max Jr having retreated from the real world into a cyberspace haven. Rebecca makes a long-shot attempt to revive her son.

THE TIES THAT BIND-- Rebecca ramps up her plans to launch Cyberville, which will include her project of decimating most of Earth's ecology, although Phantom and his allies don't yet know her specific plans. She does launch an assault on Sean One's orbiting cities, though. Graft, for his own reasons, joins Max Jr in cyberspace and manages to talk the eccentric genius-youth into returning to the real world. A small army of biots attacks Phantom and his allies at their clandestine meeting-place, and even after the androids are vanquished, this development raises the possibility of betrayal from within. Graft then confides to Vaingloria that he plans to take over Rebecca's Cyberville project, and he tries to use Doctor Jak to that end. At one point both Sagan and Kit's aunt are injured, enraging Phantom into destroying the Cyberville project, at least temporarily. The episode ends with Kit's self-doubts about his status as a hero.

THE WOMAN IN THE MOON-- Sean One survives Rebecca's attack, and he seeks to persuade all of the orbital colonies to declare independence from Earth. Max Jr and Graft, however, try to swing the vote to their benefit. Vaingloria and Doctor Jak get taken on board the satellite as part of the big scheme, so I guess Vaingloria is the titular "woman in the moon." (This was probably a reference to a famous film about space travel, directed by Fritz Lang, who also helmed the film METROPOLIS, to which PHANTOM 2040 owes more than a little). I confess I didn't follow why Graft and Max Jr were farting around with the voting process, though, since they end up attempting to blow up the satellite, which seems to have been Rebecca's preference as well.     

MATTER OVER MIND-- Thanks to Graft's uneasy partnership with Max Jr, the junior Madison decodes the formula for the super-poison Max Sr almost unleashed during the Sector Zero catastrophe. By chance hacker Sparks gains access to the formula as well, altering the Phantom to its existence. The cyber-entity Mister Cairo learns of the formula as well and his encounter with the intel triggers in him a vague idea to "go home," though he has no idea how he was created. Sparks' investigation reveals that Cairo is a computer-probe that was split off from Doctor Jak's mind, and thus Cairo earnestly desires to be reunited with his creator. The Phantom team seeks to prevent that unison to protect Kit's secrets, but Heisenberg and Pavlova intervene to liberate Cairo. When Phantom again seeks to keep Doctor Jak from downloading Cairo's information, the shock-jock reveals the humanity beneath his obstreperous facade. Jak was originally a crusading journalist married to a tabloid reporter named Pavlova (on whom he patterned his android helper). Human Pavlova sneaks on board the train carrying Max Sr's shipment of poison, but she's killed by exposure to the poison. To learn the reason behind her fate, Jak splits off a part of his own mind to become the cyber-entity Cairo, but this eradicates some of his own memories and apparently shifts him into emulating the persona of his dead wife, being preoccupied with meaningless entertainment. The Phantom team is also made privy to Rebecca's plan to test a new iteration of the super-poison, making it possible to destroy the Madisons' chemical factory. Cairo then gives Phantom a gift of information that will solve the mystery of the Sector Zero catastrophe. An earlier episode worked in a reference to Miles Archer in THE MALTESE FALCON by naming Kit's teacher after that character. Here, it's clarified that the cyber-entity Cairo is named after the gunsel of that novel, for the technician who creates Cairo is made to look like Sydney Greenstreet, the actor playing Cairo's boss in the 1941 FALCON movie. Also, the two Pavlovas bear a slight resemblance to the two Marias of METROPOLIS.

SINS OF THE FATHERS PARTS 1-2-- Rebecca assures Max Jr that she's always known about Graft's attempts to undermine her authority but claims that they cannot stop the Maximum Era. Phantom gets access to information that suggests that his father did indeed cause the catastrophe that slew Max Sr and many others, and this fills Kit with mammoth self-doubt. Meanwhile, Graft and Vaingloria team up with Cordwainer Bird and descend into cyberspace to hack into Rebecca's plans. Kit, despite his misgivings, agrees to travel to Bangalla as Guran wishes, to learn more about the Phantom Heritage. However. he's interrupted by Sagan and DVL, for Sagan has figured out Kit's double identity. Phantom sabotages Rebecca's next project, but it's a fake-out on her part, for she plans to unleash Cyberville and the poisoning scheme. 

In Bangalla Phantom meets the grandfather of Guran, who still maintains the original Skull Cave. Rebecca's life is now complicated in that Max Sr's memory engrams have once more been implanted in a robot body, and the demented automaton tries to take control of Maximum Inc. To the frustration of Max Sr 2.0, he learns that the shipment he originally put on the train-- a toxin designed to eliminate "ghostwood"-- was replaced by Scythe, a more extreme poison with which Rebecca hoped to eradicate the world, aside from the survivors in Cyberville-- meaning that, when the Phantom interfered with the train, Max Sr died because of his wife's meddling. Phantom learns the same information, which exculpates his father of responsibility for the Sector Zero deaths. Phantom returns to Metropia and tries to destroy Rebecca's new plans, only to be attacked by Graft, who's been promised a new organic body by Rebecca. During the struggle Graft almost falls from a great height and Phantom offers to rescue him if he surrenders. Graft feels a moment of remorse and allows himself to fall, but Max Sr 2.0 saves him. Max Jr blunders and seals all of Maximum Inc behind a force field. At the conclusion Kit finds evidence that his father didn't die in the train-crash, and there's a cliffhanger showing that the previous Phantom does still live.

THE SACRIFICE PARTS 1-2-- Thanks to the information provided by Cairo, Phantom locates his father, but the previous hero was indeed affected by the poison, and only recently emerged from a cryonic slumber after sixteen years. The team seeks to find the antidote to the poison to save his life. Meanwhile, Max Jr suspects that his robot-dad has some encrypted data that will make it possible for the Madisons to escape the force-field prison. Max Sr discloses a way that the field can be disrupted, but only by outside forces, so Rebecca reaches out to her sometime associate, the smuggler Gorda. The obese criminal invades the jungle and informs Phantom that said jungle, brought into existence by the mutation of ghostwood, extends to many other areas far from Metropia. Phantom tries to prevent Gorda from freeing the Madisons but fails, barely escaping with his life.

Phantom and Sagan seek to find the formula for the super-poison by covertly accessing the Madison data banks, and Mister Cairo shows up to provide assistance. However, the Madisons retaliate by shutting down the computer system, threatening Cairo's cyber-existence. Cairo succeeds in transmitting the antidote info to the Phantom team, and also meets an old cyber-memory of Max Sr, and the two exchange pleasantries before both are annihilated by the power shutdown. Rebecca then launches a plan to have her biots to the Enforcers, with the aim of usurping the control of the police over the city. With this takeover, Rebecca decides she doesn't need Cyberville as she'll control Metropia as her private kingdom. While Guran seeks to heal Kit's father, Phantom and Sagan disable the compromised biots. Kit's father is somewhat strengthened, though the antidote isn't enough to provide full recovery, and so he must be returned to cryonic status.

THE SECOND TIME AROUND-- Phantom and Guran encounter a relatively ordinary crime, that of hijacking. However, one of the crooks displays a gold coin bearing the traditional "Good Mark," signifying that at some past point in time, he received the protection of a previous Phantom. Guran advises Phantom to release the hijackers, and Phantom reluctantly agrees. The Madisons seek to find out the coin's significance, while the hero accesses VR to figure out how the Good Mark coin came to be in a criminal's possession. It's one of the few weak episodes but is worthwhile for at least showing how one of the earlier Phantoms operated.

ROGUE-- Though Doctor Jak doesn't remember his nobler self, due to his separation from Cairo, Pavlova, who does remember all the disclosures, returns to work as his assistant. Jak records what seems to be a revolt of the self-aware biots, led by Heisenberg, and shows the Phantom coming to the biots' aid against Enforcer robots. The Enforcers thus put out a warrant for Phantom, meaning that he can't be seen accepting aid from Sagan anymore. The greater threat, though, is that Max Jr, who invented Heisenberg, devises a new method to regain control of the android, briefly forcing Heisenberg to fight the hero. Though things get sorted out to the status quo by episode's end, the script makes a good case for the concept of biots becoming self-aware, though without overstating the political interpretation of this championing of diversity, as did so many bad movies of the 21st century.      

THE FURIES-- Phantom tries to figure out a cryptic re mark made by his father before he had to re-enter cryogenic stasis. While looking into the unique properties of ghostwood in the Ghost Jungle, Phantom and Guran spot Gorda setting up some infernal machine and they attack, only to be routed thanks to the secret presence of Max Sr 2.0. Graft and Max Jr attempt to hijack an outer-space shipment of iridium, but they have to tell Rebecca that Gorda got there first. Both "business partners" began considering ways to sever their relationship. Finally both women figure out that Max Sr is playing them, but all the disputants are arrested by Enforcers. Unfortunately, all are also released for lack of evidence 

MOMENTS OF TRUTH-- Phantom and Sparks seek to expose a smuggling operation by Rebecca, which strangely involves a shipment of "special roses." During the investigation, Phantom discovers that Sparks doesn't have much knowledge of many practical matters, so over the teen's protests he gets enrolled in school. An unknown party, later revealed to be Gorda, steals the rose shipment, but she can't initially figure out what's special about the flowers. Graft, in throwing down with Phantom, records the presence of Sparks, so the Madisons seek to learn his identity. The truth is eventually revealed, that the roses were capable of neutralizing the good effects of ghostwood. 

THE WHOLE TRUTH-- The final episode begins with Kit meditating on the presence of mysteries in his life, which may be the reason the scripters kept making references to THE MALTESE FALCON. Rebecca and Gorda, having made their peace, launch a biot attack on the Enforcers for the purpose of conquering the city at last, but Phantom suspects there's more to it than a simple assault. He breaks into Maximum Inc and encounters Max Sr 2.0, who persuades the hero to leave the compound so they can talk. Because the robot still possesses all of the living man's memories, he's able to let Phantom download those memories (using a passcode, "flowers of evil," derived from the title of a poetry-collection by the original Baudelaire). In keeping with many spotty references to a friendship between Kit's father and the original Max Sr, the robot discloses that the two of them were seeking to implement ghostwood to clean up the toxins in Metropia, but without allowing the special plant to crowd out all other plants. As mentioned in an earlier episode, Rebecca substituted tanks of poison in the ghostwood shipment and caused the train to crash in a failed attempt to poison the city. Thus she killed her husband and almost slew Kit's father. (We also see in these memories an image of Max Jr as a pure young child, who has a normal-looking cat named Shakespeare.) All of the villains track Phantom and the robot to the Ghost Jungle, but Phantom evades them, hoping he can use the automaton's data to completely cure the comatose father. However, the cure fails and Kit must resign himself to his father's passing, as well as terminating Max Sr 2.0 (at the latter's request, of course). In a hurry-up-and-finish resolution, the four villains, who have dodged the law over and over are somehow convicted this time, and Kit can finally think about living another life, until the Phantom is needed again.