SANTO VS INFERNAL MEN (1961)

 

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

Seven years after Rene Cardona offered the iconic wrestler a shot at the silver screen, Santo finally took the plunge-- sort of.

I reviewed the first of these two Cuban-location films, and now I found on streaming a subtitled copy of SANTO VS INFERNAL MEN. Both movies decline to call the performer in the silver mask "Santo," and his character in both movies is a subordinate to another police agent-- Fernando Oses' "El Incognito" in BRAIN, and Joaquin Cordero's mufti drug-cop "Joaquin" here. The mad scientist plot would become far more typical of Santo's adventures under producer Rene Cardona, starting with SANTO VS. THE ZOMBIES.

Unfortunately, INFERNAL is dull from start to finish. I'm sure the producers of the Santo series threw in these mundane crime-films from time to time to save money, but I doubt any of them are very noteworthy. The only interesting aspect of the film is how many performers went on to play key roles in the Cardona lucha-verse: Gina Romand, Joaquin "Doctor Satan" Cordero, and Enrique Zambrano. In addition, one story is that while wrapping up INFERNAL, the movie crew found that Castro's forces were taking over the country. The story of the crew's escape from that entanglement would probably make a better movie than anything in this infernal waste of time.  

THE FACE OF THE FROG (1959)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

As of this writing I've not seen the first sound film adaptation of Edgar Wallace's FELLOWSHIP OF THE FROG, but I did review the sequel. And now, thanks be to streamng, I've seen this 1959 adaptation, which was successful enough to launch a long series of German crime films, called krimis, and also not infrequently adapted from other Wallace works.

As I've said in similar reviews, I've no familiarity with the source novel. However, one online review of the Wallace work-- the second in a brief series of novels about a clever Scotland Yard cop, Inspector Elk-- indicates that the novel is mostly a straight mystery, in which Elk seeks to learn the identity of the frog-masked mastermind whose cutthroat gang has been committing London robberies and eluding capture for at least a couple of years. However, since German crime films had not been successful in the fifties for some time, it seems director Harold Reinl and his crew upped the violence content, making this FROG into a high-jumping adventure. The strategy was a success with German moviegoers and possibly other Europeans as well, so that FROG gave birth to a plethora of krimi films. I note that one of those thrillers that I reviewed previously, DEAD EYES OF LONDON, shows a much more kinetic attitude to the Wallace material than had the previous sound adaptation, THE HUMAN MONSTER.

Further, though clever Inspector Elk was probably the sole star of the book, in FROG he's obliged to share the position of central hero with an amateur detective-- an ironic development, since in his time Wallace was noted for making his detectives police officers rather than amateur sleuths. In the book a character named Richard Gordon, a British prosecuting attorney, is the boyfriend of the story's heroine Ella. But in the movie Gordon (Joachim Fuchsberger, also the doughty hero of DEAD EYES) is the wealthy nephew of another Scotland Yard official, whose romancing of Ella may be more important to the story as a whole, and this Gordon is so serious about amateur crimefighting that he and his stoical butler practice judo holds on one another. In fact, the two of them have a spirited fight with a bunch of Frog henchmen that carries a slight Batman-and-Robin vibe. True, both of the heroes get taken down by superior numbers. But after being held in durance vile for what must be several days (because both uncaped crusaders grow substantial beards), this dynamic duo breaks out in spectacular fashion. Other scenes that were a trifle hyperviolent for 1959 include a scene with a knife-wielding thug slicing open a bobby's throat, and a big raid by the cops on the Frog's HQ, which includes London cops unleashing machine-gun fire on the ruthless criminals.

But though the Frog is opposed by both the superior brainpower of Inspector Elk and the brawn of his ally Gordon, it's really the princess that slays the frog, to misquote KING KONG. For no explicit reason, the Frog-- whose precise identity was never important to me, so I barely remember his ID-- falls in love with Ella, and he demands that she willingly agree to be his bride. When Ella refuses, the Frog has his henchmen launch a complicated plot in which a sexy chanteuse seduces Ella's irresponsible brother and then frames him for murder-- all so pretty Ella will willingly go to the altar with the batrachian criminal's civilian identity. It's the weakest aspect of a generally tight police thriller with some strong violence, a few cool gimmicks, and an encore for the first "mystery villains" of the 20th century.          

THE PHANTOM RIDER (1946)

 

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

Although the 1946 PHANTOM RIDER is mostly a by-the-numbers "costumed cowboy" serial, it has some points that elevate it above the level of the routine. 

For one thing, it has nothing to do with the Universal chapterplay of the same title, which was essentially just another outre-outfit oater. In that 1936 offering, Buck Jones just donned an all-white outfit, possibly with the idea of suggesting that he was ghostly, like The Ghost Rider of the comics, who appeared in 1949. In the 1946 serial, Doctor Jim Sterling (Robert Kent) ends up donning a costume designed to make him look like an ancient Indian spirit, consisting of buckskins, a feathered headdress, and a rubber mask covering his entire face, purportedly to make others think that he's Indian. The Rider never fools any white villains into thinking him a spirit, though a good number of the local Indians-- never given a tribal name-- apparently can't tell red-hued rubber from crimson flesh.

For the other thing, RIDER possesses some good progressive (back when that word meant something) political content. Easterner Sterling is on his way to become the doctor to a small western town, whose name might be Big Tree, like the nearby Indian reservation. On his way to town in a buckboard, Sterling gives a lift to Blue Feather (George J. Lewis), the college-educated son of the Indians' chief. Blue Feather provides exposition about how he educated himself so that he could improve the lot of his people in living in the white man's world, especially in dealing with the bandits menacing both the whites and the Indians. Blue Feather's main ambition is to create an Indian police force, vetted by the federal government and with the power to arrest the lawless. Sterling shows his approval of this lofty goal-- and within the first chapter, gets direct evidence of bandit predations. Blue Feather is wounded and sidelined, so the noble doctor decides to take over the young Indian's mission. With the help of schoolmarm Doris (Peggy Stewart), Sterling decides to assume the appearance of an ancient Indian savior, The Phantom Rider, to convince the Indians to follow the white man's way of fighting oppression.

As in the 1938 LONE RANGER serial, the bandits are hiding under the cloak of counterfeit authority. Local Indian agent Carson (LeRoy Mason) is not the real person assigned to the post, but an otherwise unnamed schemer using the position to coordinate his gang's activities. The Rider pops up and starts preying on the predators, they try to stop him, rinse and repeat. 

Despite a cool setup, RIDER falls into a lot of pedestrian situations, with no memorable cliffhangers and mostly gun-action. According to THE FILES OF JERRY BLAKE, the hero's rubber-mask disguise had a restrictive effect on what both Robert Kent and any doubles could do in fight-scenes. But the photography here is much crisper, and thus more involving, than in many later serials, so RIDER always looks good even if one has seen the same business a dozen times before. The story would have gained some heft had it built up conflicts between Sterling's profession and his avocation, or the character of Schoolmarm Doris. JERRY BLAKE liked the comedy relief of "Nugget," a grizzled miner, but he didn't do anything for me. The villains are also ordinary and no better than they have to be, and the formation of the Indian police force comes about a little too easily. I'm glad I had the chance to see it but will probably not watch it again. I suppose Bad Progressives would sneer at the serial for placing a "white savior" in charge, but to me it makes a world of difference when the savior, whatever his race, is helping others save themselves         

HOLY GHOST AND THE FIVE MAGNIFICENT SCOUNDRELS (1972)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological* 

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

This spaghetti western-- the third of three by director Roberto Mauri, apparently all copying from this Gianni Garko vehicle-- just barely qualifies for uncanny status. But this time the uncanny phenomenality stems not from the hero; whatever "Spirito Santo" might have been in the first two films, here he's just a standard ingenious cowpoke, and his spiritual name connotes his general goodness-- though he's not really much more noble than a dozen other Sabata-types.

Santo (Vassili Karis, playing the role in all three Mauri movies) is called upon to stop an elusive arms dealer, The Loner, who goes about in an all-black costume. The guy hiring Santo-- I didn't catch his name-- compares the Loner to the Scarlet Pimpernel, though the Pimpernel wasn't in print until the stage play came out in 1903. Santo also has a meet-cute with the official's cousin Elizabeth (Daria Norman), but she has so little to do with the main story that halfway through I suspected she was the Loner, who's on the small side. Anyway, Santo thinks he needs to engage the services of the five "scoundrels" of the title, all of whom had odd but not memorable idiosyncracies (one thinks he's a pirate, the other a priest-- that sort of thing). I have to admit that because these characters burn up a lot of screen time, that makes the original Italian title much more appropriate than the current streaming title, "Gunmen and the Holy Ghost."

So Santo gets involved with various side-characters, all tedious, and only toward the end does the film work back around to preventing the Loner's scheme, which to hijack some gold. Santo and his goons kill the Loner, who is unmasked as the town sheriff. In a "big reveal" scene that FIVE does nothing to set up, Santo figures out that his boss is behind the Loner's activities, and that the sheriff was just a pawn. The boss is also jealous of Santo's attentions to Elizabeth, who, the boss also reveals, is not really his cousin, and that he plans to marry her. Providentially, even though the big boss has Santo dead to rights, Elizabeth shoots him dead. However, then it's revealed that Elizabeth was also in the big scheme, and she gets killed in a shootout with a deputy. So why, if they both knew they weren't cousins, did they perpetuate the fiction? Because the screenwriter was drunk or ill or stupid, I guess. I've seen more boring spaghettis than this one, though whenever the "scoundrels" were on the screen I stopped paying attention. Oh, one exception-- one guy's a conman who claims that he got jailed because he was selling a miracle cream that enlarged women's breasts-- but which had a deleterious effect if the cream got rubbed off on a man's chest.

              

FANTOMAS (1932)

 

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

This French movie is apparently the first sound outing for the mysterious criminal Fantomas. It starred a French cast and was directed by a Hungarian, Pal Fajos, who'd made a couple of Hollywood films prior to working on this project. I don't know what if any of his non-American oeuvre might be metaphenomenal in nature but, as other reviewers have said, the first half-hour of FANTOMAS feels like a better-photographed version of one of the silent "old dark house" movies of the period. 

I reviewed the first FANTOMAS novel in 2018 and liked it well enough. However, I didn't make that many notes about the plot of the novel, so I guess the parts of the novel involving the mysterious villain's crimes didn't do much for me. Though I'm not a Fantomas fan, I give the character props as an important transitional figure within the superhero idiom. Bur since I remember little about the crimes of the novel, I can't say if the 1932 movie is adapting them accurately. All I can say is that Fajos works well with the French actors, particularly in the opening scenes, making them seem reasonably alive despite their being bare plot-functions. The movie does get across the inscrutable nature of this perhaps-uncatchable fiend, and unlike the book, there's a scene in which the villain dons an all-black catsuit with a black cowl, in which garb he strangles a woman to death. Later he wears another "costume" of sorts, attending a party in a tuxedo but donning a domino mask when he attacks a potential witness. I assume that actor Jean Galland portrays the murderous thief in all his disguised personas.

One omission I did note was that the character of Charles (rechristened "Fandor" in the novel) is downgraded to just the assistant to Juve, the inspector in charge of pursuing the elusive criminal. So here Charles has no real backstory, but he does-- in contrast to the novel-- get to face off with the disguised Fantomas in a climactic brawl. In contrast to the practice of later sound serials, the two combatants more time whaling on one another with lamps and chairs than with bare fists. But before the viewer gets there, one has to forge through a lot of dull mystery scenes.          

NIGHT OF THE SKULL (1974)

 

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

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

This movie, currently streaming as NIGHT OF THE SKULL, is one of the rare Jesus Franco directorial efforts not marred by his free-form wackiness.  At the same time, it's no more than a decent time-killer.

The film starts off introducing us to an English lord, Archibald Marian. For some reason he's torqued off at his relations, because he's reading aloud some faux-Biblical gobbledygook about God avenging himself upon a "perverse generation."  Archibald seems to have some fascination with the Classic "four elements" of Greek belief, and he rants about the elements being used to kill his enemies. However, there's a mysterious figure in a skull-mask lurking nearby, and this specter apparently takes inspiration from the Lord's yammerings. He knocks out the Lord and buries him alive, thus fulfilling the "earth" symbolism.

 Also living in the Lord's manor are his wife Cecilia, his illegitimate daughter Rita (Lina Romay), and two married servants, Rufus and Deborah. Though Rita has been allowed to live at the manor, she's been forced to accept the role of a servant. Later she will tell a constable that both Archibald and Cecilia used to beat her, and eventually this testimony is borne out. Other potential heirs to Archibald's fortune descend upon the manor for the reading of his will: his cousin Simon (William Berger) and his wife Marta, and somewhat later, his legitimate son Alfred (though possibly by another wife than Cecilia). During the reading, the lawyer reveals that Archibald left two wills: one in case he died a normal death, the other in case he was murdered. The first one divides the estate between everyone except for Rita, the second one leaves everything to Rita alone.                                                                                       

Cecilia doesn't take her disinheriting well: she comes into Rita's room and whips her just a few times (rather restrained for the often torture-happy Franco). The killer knocks out Cecilia and ties her up on the shoreline, where we're later told she was killed not by the waters but by exposure to the high winds, making this the "air death." Despite this second fatality, most of the characters continue to hang out around the manor while they're being interviewed by police or are bouncing off one another. A fire-death for Deborah ensues, but this doesn't keep Alfred and Rita from enjoying a possibly incestuous affair. The killer targets them too but doesn't leave either of them dead. Then Simon seems to give the game away to the audience, providing a "water death" by drowning his wife Marta in a bathhouse. But wait, then Simon is confronted by the Skull Killer, who takes off his mask and reveals that-- he's Archibald, who at some earlier time was assaulted by Simon and survived that attempt at murder but lost his memory. Then Archibald got back his memory and went through police training under the name "Brooks," so that he could enter the manor when he pleased. So then-- who's the Archibald who got buried alive at the outset, whose body was taken into custody by the officials?                               

I checked a few online reviews to see if anyone had commented on this lunacy but didn't see anything. However, it's possible that unlike me most of the reviewers won't give away endings even if they show that the director was just goofing around with no intention of delivering a basic formula effort, even if that's what SKULL appeared to be from the start. Crazy-ass Franco's normal methods of off-the-wall storytelling are signaled before the big ending, though, with a sequence in which a lady psychic tries to talk the dead patriarch but gets killed and has zero effect on the plot. Though the fragmented screenplay suggests that more than one murderer appears in the story, NIGHT OF THE SKULL is still a better title than the original NIGHT OF THE KILLERS. This is not in any way a giallo film despite the era in which it appears; it's an old dark house that includes a masked killer like the original CAT AND THE CANARY movie. Franco also may have been joking when he had the credits claim that SKULL was based on a CANARY all right, but one written by Edgar Allan Poe, which is of course nonsense. A comment on IMDB claims that at some point Franco confessed that he stole the plot from Edgar Wallace, but if so, that wild and crazy Spaniard must have put that Wallace work through his own personal mixmaster.   

AWESOME LOTUS (1983)

                                   PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 

MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological* 

                                                

           

AWESOME LOTUS looks to be the equivalent of a standup comic trying to hone his talents in dunghole comedy-clubs where, as the saying goes, "no one sees you being bad." I assume most of the participants were amateurs, given that hardly any of them did anything beyond this movie. However, though the director David O'Malley didn't score with this attempt to execute the anarchic comedy of 1980's AIRPLANE, he did end up working as writer and/or director from the eighties to the 2010s. In fact, he wrote and directed (probably with some input from Sam Raimi) the underrated biker-comedy EASY WHEELS.                                                                                               

 The scattershot script is just one problem, co-written by one of the main actors, Peter Schuyler. But none of the actors do anything more than speak their lines correctly. Lorraine Masterson starts out the film as simple farm-girl Emily Anne. She gets torqued at her three older brothers, takes a kung-fu correspondence course (complete with instructional record), beats up her siblings, and leaves the farm. (Silly as it is, this is the strongest scene in the form.) When the viewer next sees her, apparently several years later, she's wearing a Chinese robe and a matching hairdo, and is calling herself "Awesome Lotus." Somehow she's become a master assassin, as well as a trainer of assassins, and her whole philosophy seems to be about confronting death, which would be fine if the script got any humor out of the subject. (She does have one decent line: "There's nothing like death to start your day.") The representative of a silk company (whose company name is the anagram SISSI) claims that his models are under attack by an evil organization, FART. There's some talk of it being a conspiracy to advance the fortunes of rayon in the fashion industry, but later the truth comes out: the evil mastermind Basset (made up to slightly resemble Hitler) resents the silk industry because vicious silkworms killed his beloved basset hound. Yeah, there's a lot of jokes like that one.                                                           

Aside from the opening scene, the script just barely finds energy in the film's middle to have Lotus lead her two allies-- her blind mentor Tofu Caca (Schuyler) and a blonde guy who hits his foes with a tennis racket-- against Bassett's compound, where they have comic fights with ninja guards. This looks like something that should have happened as the movie's climax, because the one they filmed really blows, even in comparison to all the other bad scenes. But to pursue my comedy-club analogy to the bitter end, since arguably at least one graduate of this "club" got better, I guess AWESOME LOTUS served a purpose.                                                                                                                                                                                                

PHANTOM OF THE RED HOUSE (1956)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*                                                                                                                                                   From what I can tell, although PHANTOM OF THE RED HOUSE is one of the earliest of the Mexican horror films to have received dubbed distribution in the States, it's not all that well thought-of. It seems to be the only horror move in the repertoire of Miguel M. Delgado-- at least I didn't recognize any other titles in his oeuvre-- but frankly I liked this comic "old dark house" film better than a lot of serious horrors from the period, and better than many of the American offerings in that subgenre.                                                           

The main plot is entirely derivative: a rich old guy pops off and the heirs, in order to claim any of his property, must dwell in the house for a set period of time. This naturally gives a masked maniac the chance to start knocking off the heirs to clear the path to the money. I actually don't remember anything being said about a "last man standing" who'd inherit everything if all the other heirs are gone, but maybe the scripters thought that sort of thing was a given.                                                                                 

Anyway, after one or two of the nastier victims are knocked off, the main heroine hires a detective to ferret out the "phantom" killer, who's a moderately spooky figure in a cloak, fedora and fright-mask. The shamus is also a goofus by the name of Diogenes Holmes (Antonio Espino), and in many comedic ODH movies, he would be the star.                                                                                                       

But Diogenes is not the main character, nor is the mystery killer the star, nor are most of the other candidates for murder (some of whom also sport names as wacky as the detective's, such as "Dr. Hipocrates Piedra," "Pedro Satan," and a woman nicknamed "Mulehead." No, this time, in a subgenre where the lead female is usually some colorless ingenue, PHANTOM gives viewers a lively, daffy female who's much funnier than the dopey detective. She too sports a peculiar name, that of "Mercedes Benz de Carrera," or "Mercy" as her boyfriend calls her, but as played by Alma Rosa Aguirre, she enlivens the predictable antics just as much as Bob Hope did with a similar role in the 1939 CAT AND THE CANARY. Delgado keeps things visually interesting with some quality B&W photography, but the oddball psychology of the female lead-- who, for once, isn't some simp who denies that she cares about a big inheritance-- is the main attraction in this "casa rosa." (Not that I ever found out the meaning of the estate's name, BTW...)                                                                                                                                                             

WHITE PHANTOM (1987)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*, 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*                                                                                                                                                   In my review of SAKURA KILLERS, I could only guess as to the connection of that film and this same year ninja-movie, and if asked could not have even proved which film came first. Happily, IMDB provided a link to the apparently archived site NINJAS ALL THE WAY DOWN, where site-runner CJ Lines not only reviewed the film here, he also tracked down and interviewed PHANTOM's writer-director Dusty Nelson, and recorded the interview for posterity here, on the site DEN OF GEEK. Nelson specifies that while he lived in Pittsburgh, he made contact with a company that had access to raw Taiwanese footage about ninjas and gangsters, and that he Nelson was asked to edit the footage and add in enough new scenes to cobble together a movie for VHS release. Once that task was accomplished, the same company rustled up enough capital for Nelson to write and direct WHITE PHANTOM. Nelson states that it was the idea of someone in the production company to link PHANTOM with SAKURA by using the same villains and one supporting character. Incidentally, Lines misremembers an IMDB detail: the site attributes the Taiwanese footage to a fellow named "Wang Yu," but does not claim that this is the same as international one-armed wonder "Jimmy Wang Yu."                                                         

  So Nelson and his people went to Taiwan with three American actors-- star Jay Roberts Jr, leading lady Page Leong, and "name actor/supporting player" Bo Svenson-- and made PHANTOM. Svenson's character is some sort of Interpol-like commander who's supposed to be the same as SAKURA's Chuck Connors. The previous character was just named "The Colonel," while PHANTOM gives him the full name of "Colonel Slater." Slater's trying to get a lead on what the Sakura ninja-clan did with a stash of stolen plutonium. Though the Sakura clan is led by a mysterious man whose face is never seen, Slater tries to get intel from the clan leader's heir apparent Hanzo. The colonel blackmails an exotic dancer named Mei Lin (Leong) to get close to Hanzo and pump him for information, if she can manage to avoid getting pumped full of lead or anything else undesirable.               

A wild card then deals himself in. Known only as "Willi" (Roberts), this duster-clad American seems content to bop around Taiwan (or whatever place in Asia Taiwan is pretending to be), playing basketball and boffing prostitutes. However, he keeps turning up and messing with Sakura gangsters when they shake down average citizens for protection money. When not confounding gangbangers with his laid-back martial talents-- sort of like a "drunk-fu" practitioner-- he pays court to Mei Lin. This infuriates Hanzo and aggravates both Slater and Mei Lin, though in time the dancer is won over by Willi's raffish charms. One scene suggests that Slater recognizes Willi from some previous contact, but the script is not consistent on this point. Hanzo complains to his dad about the "white ninja" interfering with Sakura's protection racket-- a term used long before Willi actually dons white ninja-gear-- and Masked Dad thinks Willi represents some extinct clan, implicitly one with which Sakura had issues. As I recall, everyone pretty much forgets about finding the plutonium stash.                                                         

  
 Like most ninja-movies, the action is episodic until the narrative reaches the (pretty decent) end-fight between Willi and Hanzo. But Nelson works in a fair number of character-moments, mostly between Willi and Mei Lin-- so that there's some mild sadness when Mei Lin gets sacrificed by this war of ninja-clans. Roberts does credible kung-fu stunts-- a particular standout is the way he flummoxes a bouncer by pretending to "accidentally" block him or hit him-- and I liked that he's a bit of a rogue, not just a flat goodguy. I'm guessing that Roberts, who retired from filmmaking years ago, remembered his first big role fondly. In my review of one of his last movies, 1990's AFTERSHOCK, I noticed that Roberts' central character was named "Willi" like the hero in PHANTOM, and that a support-character is named "Colonel Slater." It seems likely to me that Roberts chatted up the scriptwriter and simply asked him to interpolate the names of two PHANTOM characters for AFTERSHOCK characters that originally had no connection. Since Roberts plays the two characters substantially the same, one could imagine that AFTERSHOCK tells the story of Willi and Slater after they survive a sci-fi apocalypse.     

SAKURA KILLERS (1987)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*, 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*                                                                                                                                                  On IMDB I saw a number of reviews asserting that they found this Taiwanese ninja-flick "so bad it was good." All I can say is that SAKURA KILLERS didn't tickle my funnybone. Yes, it's an incompetent, low-budget movie with two charisma-free leads, and you see a lot of low-level ninja-tricks, one of which had a black-clad "Sakura killer" writhing on the ground like an earthworm. But the only slight asset of this pedestrian effort is that the fighting, while not noteworthy, is at least reasonably constant.                                             

   The Plot: black-clad ninjas, working for a Japanese crime ring named "Sakura," steal a videotape with a scientific secret on it. To protect freedom and democracy, a guy called the Colonel (Chuck Connors) calls upon two of his--agents? Allies? Guys he met in a bar? Whatever the standing of Sonny (Mike Kelly) and Dennis (George Nichols), in no time they're off to Japan (for which Taiwan is a stand-in) to find the criminal ninjas. But even though both guys have some martial training, they're also encouraged to find a master and train as ninjas, since it takes a ninja to beat a ninja. I don't know why, though. The very first time the guys ask a waitress about the Sakura organization, she sets a bunch of ninjas on their tails, and Sonny and Dennis beat the masked men handily.                                   

Nevertheless, with equal ease the two goofs stumble across a ninja master and his cute daughter, and he puts them through some mild rigors. The result is that not only do Sonny and Dennis master all the ninja devices, they can quick-change into ninja costumes in the blink of an eye, with demon-masks covering their faces. Moreover, both the old man and his daughter help the guys fight their enemies, so they've really got it easy. KILLERS is barely an adequate time-killer, but it boasts two curiosities. One is that according to IMDB, American director Dusty Nelson recycled elements of this movie into the same-year WHITE PHANTOM, though none of those elements included Sonny or Dennis. The other slight distinction is that although Chuck Connors' scenes in the film only add up to about ten minutes, he gets the only decent scene when he blows away a couple of ninjas with a shotgun-- though of course a repeating rifle would have been more appropriate. 

THE MARK OF ZORRO (1974)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*, 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*                                                                                                                          Director Don McDougall, whose long list of TV episodes includes some very nice work for shows like RAWHIDE and Classic TREK, probably had to make the best of things when he drew this assignment. He had to take the script for the 1940 MARK OF ZORRO, one of the most sumptuous swashbucklers of the Classical Hollywood era and squish its plot and action down into about 75 minutes. Still, enough of the mythic aspects of the 20th-Century Fox version of Zorro come through that I can give this 1974 MARK a fair rating.                                                                                                       

 The telefilm's best asset is star Frank Langella in the dual role of Zorro and his foppish civilian ID Diego Vega. The actor had to follow closely in the shoes of Tyrone Power, but I thought he gave both characters as much mojo as anyone could under the circumstances. Ricardo Montalban is in a similar position, playing Esteban, the military power behind the corrupt alcalde's rule, but in some ways he's better off, since his normal acting-style was more florid than that of his predecessor, and thus his Esteban doesn't seem too derivative. The rest of the cast deliver decent perfs, from Gilbert Roland and Yvonne deCarlo as Diego's dad and mom, to Robert Middleton and Louise Sorel as the alcalde and his perhaps unfaithful wife. Anne Archer gets one good scene as the romantic interest Teresa-- the one taking place in the church, where Zorro's pretending to be a priest-- but her character doesn't get nearly as much attention as the Linda Darnell version did. She doesn't even get a final clinch with the hero at the conclusion. Her casting in terms of her age is a bit odd too. In the 1940 film, Gale Sondergaard, then a little over forty, played the aunt of Teresa, and that role was played by Linda Darnell, who was then seventeen. In contrast, Anne Archer was only seven years younger than Louise Sorel. There's an odd remark by Middleton's character about how some figure akin to Zorro may have been observed in "The Pyrenees" of Spain, which was perhaps meant to address where Diego got the idea of Zorro. Possibly this remark was in the 1940 film too, but I'm not inspired to find out.

ZORRO IN THE COURT OF SPAIN (1962)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*, 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*                                                                                                                          ZORRO IN THE COURT OF SPAIN starts rather slowly but soon shapes up into a decent little swashbuckler. Most of the movie's alternate titles seem to emphasize the titular masked hero swashing his buckles in Spain, so I've no idea why the English dub I saw claims that the action all takes place in "Lusitania," which in recent centuries usually connoted Portugal. All the names involved in the court-intrigue are almost certainly fictional, so the change wasn't made to offset political connotations.                                                       

As with some of the other "Euro-Zorros" around this time, being set in Europe raises the stakes from the more modest adventures of the California-based Fox. A new grand duke, brother of the previous and deceased duke, has challenged the widowed duchess for the throne of Lusitania. The duchess has gone into hiding with her allies, but for some reason she's separated from her small daughter, and one of those allies takes the little girl to Lusitania Capital (I'll call it) to hide her from the enemy in a monastery/orphanage. The Duke either lives in the Capital or close to it, doing various tyrannical things with the help of his main henchman Captain Miguel (Alberto Lupo), so this choice of locations doesn't seem like the swiftest idea. In due time the Duke and Miguel will get their hands on the kid in order to force the duchess to abdicate. In addition, evil Miguel has been pestering Marquise di Villa Verde to let him marry beauteous Bianca (Nadia Marlowa), despite the fact that Bianca is betrothed to marry the Marquise's son Riccardo (George Ardisson), also Bianca's cousin. Riccardo comes to the Capital just in time for all these events, having been to Mexico for training as a young cavalier (one of two major flippings of the usual Zorro-script).                                                 

     
Apparently, Riccardo and his factotum Paquito got some advance intel on the troubles in Lusitania, because as soon as he arrives, he's already got the whole Zorro idea thought out. He immediately plays the part of the jaded aristocrat with no interest in local politics, so as to allay any suspicions from Captain Miguel and his sister Isabella, who oddly is currently married to the Marquise. The father of Riccardo and Isabella have no interpersonal relations, though, so this may be a change made by a translator. Some Zorro-stories give the main heroine an interfering aunt, which may be where Isabella comes from, but she only has one scene relevant to the narrative and totally disappears from the latter part of the movie. Anyway, Riccardo's louche act alienates both his father and Bianca, but it works to allow the hero to listen in on the plots of his enemies and work to counter them as-- Zorro!                                                           

   
   The fight-scenes are passable and Ardisson makes an okay masked avenger, even though he gets more mileage out of the Riccardo role. But the most interesting change is that although the heroine goes through the usual process of rejecting Riccardo while going gaga over his costumed identity, this time Zorro marries the heroine in his non-costumed identity.    No rationale is presented, though possibly Riccardo does this to block Miguel from forcing Bianca to marry him. Riccardo, knowing that Bianca doesn't love his false identity, refrains from making her share his marriage-bed. But of course, once he rescues the little girl from the evildoers and gives the duchess the chance to oust the evil Duke, Zorro can unmask and the two enjoy connubial bliss. The villains are not very stylish this time, but the romance is much better developed than in the majority of B-Zorros.

THE DEVILS OF TERROR (1959)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*                                                                                                                                              I've heard that some of the "Mexican westerns" of the 1950s had metaphenomenal elements, probably mostly of the uncanny kind, where evildoers dress up like ghosts. A lot of American B-westerns played around with similar elements, but few of them were very noteworthy. DEVILS OF TERROR feels like a close emulation of those old B's, but this time, the titular "devils" are just a bunch of criminals riding around in devil-costumes for purposes of terrorizing a small town's populace. I'm not sure what they get out of it except in one case: they kill off a local landholder to get his ranch. But the man's pretty daughter comes to town to claim her inheritance, so she becomes the riders' new target. Fortunately, a two-fisted government agent named Gaston (Gaston Santos) comes to town and sorts the evildoers out after about an hour of messing around. This was about as routine an oater as one could hope to find. About the only thing was that unlike most horror-thrillers of the period, this was in very brilliant color. Why the studio did so for such an ordinary product puzzles me. But from what I can tell, the lead actor made a couple of other horror-westerns in color around that time-- THE LIVING COFFIN, THE SWAMP OF THE MONSTERS-- so maybe the studio involved thought Santos was going to justify the extra expense.                                                                                                              

THE CASE OFTHE BLOODY IRIS (1972)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*                                                                                                                                              *SPOILERS*                                                                                                                                                                                                      In one respect, I'm not really surprised IRIS isn't one of the great giallos. Director Giuliano Carnimeo uses most of the familiar visual tropes of the genre-- beautiful women getting killed, sometimes with copious nudity, a mysterious killer unseen by the audience, and a host of oddball suspects. But IRIS was Carnimeo's only such thriller, and he's better known for his westerns, like the above-average HIS NAME WAS HOLY GHOST. In another respect, I am surprised that IRIS wasn't better, because the sole credited writer on IMDB was Ernesto Gastaldi. HOWEVER (once again), IRIS is a bit of a transition for Gastaldi. Before IRIS (also going by IMDB), I found all of the author's giallos just okay: STRANGE CASE OF MRS. WARDH (which many fans like better than I do), CASE OF THE SCORPION'S TAIL, and DEATH WALKS ON HIGH HEELS. Yet after IRIS, IMDB lists three of the most myth-intensive giallos of Gastaldi or anyone: YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM, DEATH WALKS AT MIDNIGHT, and TORSO. IRIS isn't a good as the latter three, but it sports some innovative sequences, suggesting that Gastaldi was warming to his work.                                                       

 The story follows the travails of two models, Jennifer (Edwige Fenech) and Marilyn (Paola Quattrini), as they talk on new lodgings at a ritzy high-rise constructed by rising young architect Andrea (George Hilton). They're not aware when they move in that two beautiful female residents have been murdered there. After they've moved in, Andea starts cozying up to Jennifer, and in a short time she reciprocates. But Andrea has an odd, intense inversion to blood, which references the Italian title of the movie, WHAT ARE THESE STRANGE DROPS OF BLOOD ON THE BODY OF JENNIFER? So could he be the mystery maniac, or is it one of several eccentric residents of the high-rise? Of course, it could be the most high-profile suspect (yeah. right): Jennifer's ex-husband Adam, who despite having been divorced from the gorgeous model, still follows her around trying to force her to his will. Adam is the source of the American title, for he ran a small-time sex-cult and wanted Jennifer to participate in the orgies. Adam symbolized the unity of the cult with an iris, asserting that the joined petals of the flower represent the unity of the membership-- though the audience never sees any members in "movie time," suggesting that the organization may be falling apart. Adam hassles Jennifer on the street, trying to browbeat her into coming back to him, because he "owns her." Since this is a spoiler-review, I have no hesitation in stating that neither Andrea nor Adam is anything but a red herring. Perhaps that makes IRIS the first giallo with two titles, each of which references a blind alley.     

 IRIS's main problem is far too many suspects, all of whom have rather arbitrary eccentricities: a lesbian who hits on Jennifer, her violin-playing father, an old woman who reads horror novels and hides an even bigger secret. Because the police suspect that one of the tenants is the killer, the cops ask Jennifer and Marilyn to continue residing at the complex. Neither model has any reason to do so, but they agree, so that the script will work out. Marilyn dies to show the audience that, yes, it is one of the tenants. The cops are also boring eccentrics in their own way, and the killer's murder-methods are violent but not uncanny. He is crazy, though, and the revelation of his ID justifies my category of "clansgression" here, though for all the buildup we've been given, almost anyone could have been revealed as the serial psycho. IRIS is distinguished by one great scene in this so-so movie. One of the early victims is a beautiful Black woman named Mizar, and she performs for an Italian casino a unique act: challenging individual men in the audience to a wrestling-match. If Mizar can't counter a challenger's attacks with her judo, she promises to become the victor's "slave"-- by which I presume she means "sex slave." This is a fine juxtaposition of a female performer using her sexuality to entice challengers, only to embarrass them with her superior skills. Once or twice, there are remarks that highlight other examples of male chauvinism, but Gastaldi didn't organize these tropes into anything coherent, and all that results is a competent giallo with one kickass scene.             

DEADLY DREAM WOMAN (1992)

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

I admit that I watched a version of this film broadcast on a cable channel that used to show old HK movies, usually with the very rough English subtitles done for Hong Kong's English-speaking residents. So I could be missing lots of subtleties thanks to a subpar translation.

However, I doubt that this inferior "girls with guns" entry had any hidden virtues. DEADLY DREAM WOMAN looks like a lot of HK comedies, with the story cobbled together from all sorts of disparate elements. And one of the biggest is that main character Nightingale Wong (Sharla Cheung Man) waltzes around in a domino mask and costume for no explicit reason. This attire resulted in a number of online sources calling Nightingale a "superhero," even though there's no evidence that she's anything of the kind.

Nightingale is first seen, along with a similarly garbed partner named "Cuckoo," in a meeting of Triad gang bosses. None of these career criminals seem the least bit curious as to why the two women wear weird costumes, but it's not to protect their identities. By way of introducing Nightingale to the other crooks, the chairman of the group-- whom Nightingale calls her "foster dad"-- tells everyone that Nightingale is the daughter of such-and-such a Triad bigwig. Since Nightingale and Cuckoo are later seen to possess considerable fighting skills, the best conclusion is that they're supposed to be either bodyguards or assassins who just like dressing up like a female version of Batman and Robin.     

A young Triad boss, name of "Jaguar," makes his move to gain dominance, bringing in a gang of assassins to murder the chairman and his allies. Nightingale and Cuckoo fight valiantly but both the chairman and Cuckoo are killed. Nightingale escapes in a boat but hits her head and loses her memory. 

At the same time all this is going on, the film introducers viewers to some rather crooked bar-girls, headed by older female Deannie Yip and the younger Chingmy Yau. They find Nightingale and take her in, at least partly hoping to ransom her when they find out who she is. All the scenes with the bargirls are filled with wacky dialogue that HK audiences may've found hilarious, but said scenes were a complete bore to me. Eventually Nightingale recovers her memory and goes on the warpath to get Jaguar, with some assistance from her new girl-buddies. The various action-scenes are certainly better than any of the comedy, but the former are nothing special. The curiosity value of Triad bosses using costumed bodyguards is the only distinguishing aspect of this derivative production.      

         

RAPTUS: THE SECRET OF DOCTOR HICHCOCK (1962)

 

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

I saw the U.S. cut of this film some fifty years ago and was not moved to watch it again until coming across this DVD release. RAPTUS, though dubbed in English, seems to be the full-length Italian film, written by one of the most prolific Italian horror screenwriters, Ernesto Gastaldi. Direction was provided by Riccardo Freda, whose 1957 I VAMPIRI made Italy a major player in the international market for horror film-production, and though Freda used horror elements in other works between 1957 and 1962, RAPTUS is the second "pure" horror movie in Freda's repertoire. However, my re-watch didn't uncover any hidden complexities in RAPTUS, even with the extra footage.  

Bernard Hichcock (Robert Flemyng) is a rich doctor in Victorian England, living in a mansion with his wife Margaretha (Teresa Fitzgerald). After a few minutes of situational setup, the audience learns Hichcock's naughty little secret. At night he likes to dose his wife with a soporific so strong she appears dead, at which point he makes love to her. The script only loosely implies this, since in 1962 a mainstream movie couldn't do more than imply sex of any kind. However, though Hichcock and Margaretha have obviously done this role-playing game before, the doc makes a mistake and overdoses his wife, causing her to die. The script doesn't spend too much more time in this time-period-- we don't even see whether or not there's an official inquiry into Margaretha's death-- and soon the bereaved physician buries his lost love in a family vault on the property, and leaves his estate for twelve years, allowing the servants to manage the house.

I'm not sure if twelve years was a correct translation. It tutrns out to be an important plot point that Margaretha, like Madeleine Usher before her, did not die but survived and somehow started wandering the grounds, possibly being fed by the servants. However long Hichcock's away, he comes back with a new bride twenty years his junior, Cynthia (Barbara Steele). There's a brief mention that Cynthia recently lost her beloved father and became rather unstable, and under these dubious circumstances she became the second wife of an arguable father-substitute.

I was never sure how much Hichcock knew about his first wife's survival, if indeed he was gone from the estate for over a decade. Yet, as soon as the new couple enter the mansion-- decorated with assorted mementos of Margaretha and supervised by a forbidding maid right out of REBECCA-- Hichcock instructs Cynthia that she must not enter a particular room in the house. Later the doctor tells the young woman that the room holds the old laboratory where he brewed the sedative that accidentally killed his first wife, but this BLUEBEARD-like taboo doesn't have great consequence for the plot.

Though Cynthia gets spooked by the musty mansion and sees a specter that is probably Margaretha, her real peril is not her imagination. At some point Hichcock starts gaslighting Cynthia, at one point wearing a grotesque face-mask to drive her mad. He also imprisons her in a coffin, though in Steele's best scene, the tormented wife escapes captivity. Fortunately for Cynthia, she charms a young medical colleague named Kurt, and he ends up coming to her rescue at the climax. 

Just as the sequence of events is unclear, Hichcock's plan doesn't hold much water. He wants to use Cynthia's blood to restore Margaretha somehow, but it's never clear what's happened to her. RAPTUS possibly enjoys a strong reputation because it was Freda's second horror film and the third one for Barbara Steele, who had made her mark in 1960 with Bava's BLACK SUNDAY and followed that up with Corman's PIT AND THE PENDULUM. Steele is beautiful and the setting of the supposed Victorian house is convincing, but the script tosses out standard Gothic tropes without rooting them in narrative logic (for one thing, the minatory maid just disappears from the movie's latter half). RAPTUS isn't a direct adaptation of any Poe tale, though an USHER influence seems likely. Poe uses a lot of death-imagery in his stories and poems, though I don't recall his sexualizing such imagery in any work except the very early BERENICE. I wouldn't have expected such an early Italian horror film to be that daring. Yet RAPTUS still seems overly tame, even for the early sixties.

THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH (1989)

 

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

*SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS*

Though this MASQUE is yet another "phony Poe" movie that captures nothing of the writer's unique appeal, it's certainly the best of the three films British producer Harry Alan Towers made with American journeyman director Alan Birkenshaw circa 1989. In fact, this movie shares with 1989's TEN LITTLE INDIANS the same top-billed stars-- Frank Stallone, Brenda Vaccaro, and Herbert Lom-- as well as having been shot mostly in South Africa. (I assume the exteriors showing a Bavarian castle were put together thanks to Towers' legendary European connections.) Stallone and Vaccaro definitely don't deserve their top billing in MASQUE, and though Lom's role is more substantial, viewpoint character Rebecca, played by Michelle McBride, provides the heavy lifting here. In addition, the real star of the show is MASQUE's psycho-killer, and though she doesn't have very good motivations at least she racks up a pretty strong body count.

Rebecca journeys to the Bavarian castle of a famous rich guy, Ludwing (Lom). He's holding a lavish costume party for his many acquaintances and hangers-on, and one of those guests is soap-opera actress Elena (Vaccaro). Rebecca, in line with her profession as a photographer-paparazzi, hopes to get some sensational photos of the aging soap-queen, though the only thing Elena does at the bash is to canoodle with some much younger men. I assume that the part of Elena was concocted to give Vaccaro a role, since it would have made more sense had Rebecca been focused on the mysterious Ludwig. In any case, she counterfeits an invitation to the party and dons a Cupid-costume, all the better to conceal a camera in her bow. 

Some reviews call this a "slasher." But since the victims are brought together because of the partygoers' indebtedness to wealthy Ludwig, the movie has more structural resemblance to "mystery killer" films, ranging from the "old dark house" flicks of the thirties to the aforementioned TEN LITTLE INDIANS book/play by Agatha Christie. MASQUE does have a killer dressed up in a costume like that of Poe's Red Death, but one can find cloaked murderers in the 1930s as well as in the 1980s-- though the level of violence here is definitely post-slasher. This "Red Death" does want to wipe out all of the partygoers, which is about the only element the movie has in common with the Poe story. Since writer Michael Murray had also worked on the other Towers-Birkenshaw collab of 1989, THE HOUSE OF USHER, he apparently decided to up the Poesque elements by having one victim killed by a knife-edged pendulum.

It takes a while for Ludwig and his guests to twig to the fact that some of the attendees are being murdered (including early fatality Elena), and when they do, the film faces the usual problems of the "old dark house" plot: "how do you keep the pool of victims available for further murders?" Ludwig, who's fixated on keeping his guests together as his extended family, uses mechanical gates to keep everyone confined to the castle, though clearly, it's the script that keeps the panicky guests from escaping by other means. Ludwig is never a serious contender for the Big Reveal, and indeed he's slain by the serial slayer.

The writer doesn't bother with leaving clues to the mystery killer's ID; after a half dozen partygoers are slain, an airheaded actress named Collette (Christine Lunde) simply reveals that her intent was to kill off all the other hangers-on so that Ludwig would devote his attention to her. Of course, her killing Ludwig doesn't track too well with that motivation. But at least MASQUE ends with a lively set-piece: that of Rebecca fist-fighting Collette for three-four minutes before Collette meets her doom. 

There's nothing special about MASQUE, but production values are decent, Lom has some good moments, and McBride makes her simple character appealing throughout. Devotees of bad acting may be disappointed that Vaccaro isn't terrible, but Frank Stallone's nothingburger role as a Bavarian duke should take up the slack.