THE INDIAN TOMB PART 2 (1921)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological*                                                                                                                          It's now over a year since I screened the first, over-two-hours part of Joe May's INDIAN TOMB. I rendered no firm opinion, since I hadn't seen the second part. Now that I have done so, and can consider the two parts together, I can say that although May's epic doesn't stand as one of the great silent films, it deserves to be regarded as a strong experiment with what I earlier called the "painterly" approach to cinema.                                                                     

When last we left European innocents architect Herbert Rowland and his fiancee Irene, they were stuck in the palace of the Maharaja Ayan (Conrad Veidt). Rowland came to India in the belief that he had been hired to design a tomb for Ayan's dead wife Savitri, and Irene, worried that Rowland was in over his head, followed. After many long, brooding scenes on the massive edifices of Ayan's India, the Europeans learn that because of Savirti's adultery with an Englishman, Ayan plans to kill his wife and then entomb her. Rowland is torn between trying to flee with Irene and seeking to talk Ayan out of such an uncivilized enormity. However, though the innocents don't know it, Ayan has already undertaken murderous actions against the Englishman (Paul Richter). Part One ends on a cliffhanger as to whether he will survive the attacks of Ayan's soldiers. He does, but he's also captured and fed to some tigers. Rather a depressing outcome for a cliffhanger.                                           

  Rowland and Irene don't see this, but they're kept in the loop by Savitri's maid, and they consider making a run for it. Ayan, who has forbidden his people to talk with the Westerners, orders the maid to do a little dance for him at a celebration, and she's killed by a poisonous snake. This decides the two guests on taking their leave, and they take Savitri with them, I guess out of sheer decency, though that gesture guarantees that Ayan will pursue with all his resources.    

In theory, one might think this is where the adventure gets going. However, whatever may have happened in Thea Von Harbou's original novel, or in Fritz Lang's scenario for the movie, Joe May flenses all of the excitement from the conflict with medium and long shots designed to place maximum emphasis upon the imposing buildings in the background. Rowland has a couple of lackluster fistfights with Indian guards, and then he, Irene, and Savitri depart in a boat. Maybe there was a scene left out somewhere, because when Ayan and his men show up on the quay, all the boats are floating out of reach. Did Rowland cut all the moorings? One minion dies by crocodile attack while trying to fetch a boat for his rajah. But it's only a minor delay. The three fugitives try to escape via a high mountain pass, but Ayan and his horde are right on their tail. Somehow Irene falls behind and Ayan captures her, demanding the return of Savitri for Irene's life. But Savitri has one last gambit to stay out of the hands of her husband-- one that causes Ayan far more pain than any physical assault could have.                                                                          

Though the mystic yogi Ramigami barely appears in Part 2, I consider that the second section keeps the same phenomenality as the first, where the ascetic is shown performing literal miracles. But though director May acts as if the massive Indian sets are his movie's only attraction, Conrad Veidt sells his brooding, Byronic sinner with a set of larger-than-life gestures, and effectively steals the movie from the other performers. I don't make the Byron comparison lightly. I've no idea what Von Harbou's novel was like, but May turns its narrative into the movie-equivalent of one of those wordy verse-dramas from Romantic authors like Byron and Shelley, May's characters often seem like humanized ants, doomed to be forever dwarfed by the heaven-challenging edifices they have created. Only Ayan, "sympathetic villain" though he is, seems equal to the monumentalism, for his love for Savitri is so heartfelt that he's willing to kill for it. In marked contrast to many similar melodramas, Savitri never offers an excuse for her adulterous actions, like being betrayed or treated cruelly by her husband. One doesn't even know if she ever felt anything for Ayan, only that within the scope of the movie, another man holds her love. And Ayan can only seek to make her betrayal into a monument to his lost love-- which is what Rowland ends up completing for the rajah, before he and Irene go back to the safety of a very un-exotic Europe.

MADAME WEB (2024)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*

MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*                                                                                                                                              "It's like, a woman's natural instinct is to protect, to give-- and it's like [Cassandra's] instincts to do both mix with her powers"-- actress Isabelle Merced's take on her movie MADAME WEB.                                                                                                                                    This is a really weird one. It's not weird in a psycho-obsession way, for it's too middle-of-the-road in its appeal to represent anything truly personal. And yet it's not oddball in terms of any artificial intellectual obsessions, like a lot of the MCU movies. It's a movie selling itself as a superhero movie, which goes out its way to elide a major source of the genre's appeal, and it's also a "girlboss" film in which the main heroine isn't really an aggressive know-it-all, as is the case in so many other girlboss movies. The above comment from one of WEB's actresses is the closest thing to a "theme statement" I could find in the dvd's extras, and even director/co-writer S.J. Clarkson didn't really say anything in her few comments beyond platitudes about feminine representation. Most of all, WEB is a puzzle because it was based on a minor side-character within the corpus of Marvel's SPIDER-MAN comic-book stories-- hardly the sort of property most major film-studios would attempt to monetize, even given the fact that Sony couldn't work with anything except the corpus of SPIDER-MAN stories. (I mean, if Sony could do Madame Web, surely they could have adapted the earlier character of Spider-Man's premiere female foe, The Black Cat, who would have been much more marketable IMO.)                                                                     

 So, here's the origin of Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson). She's just a gleam in the womb of her mother Constance when Constance goes exploring in Peru's Amazon forest, seeking a rare spider whose venom may stave off her unborn child's genetic illness (though the audience doesn't find out the motivations until later on). Constance finds the rare spider, but her guide Ezekiel (Tahar Rahim) kills her to steal the spider, which he believes will make him into a super-spider-man. A legendary tribe of spider-like natives come across Constance, who was also bitten by the spider before Ezekiel took it. The natives can't save Constance, they save the infant Cassandra. Somehow Baby Cass is transported to America, where she's entered into a fosterage program, though the viewers never know anything about what happens to the young Cassie in that system, any more than they-- or Cassie-- ever knows who her father may have been. Though the character doesn't make explicit comments about having lacked a mother, the film's diegesis makes clear that such is THE defining issue in Cassandra's life.                                                                   

                                                                                                      Since Cassandra can't change the past events that deprived her of a mother, the script's solution is that the protagonist should become a mother-- albeit only in a figurative sense, to avoid getting boy-cooties, I guess. She works as a New York paramedic and has no love-life and may never have had one. But a near-death incident causes the awakening of precognitive talents resulting from her mother being bitten by the super-spider. Cassandra (by now, the use of the Classical prophetess' name should be evident) has visions of a man she's never seen-- the twenty-years-older Ezekiel-- being attacked and killed by three costumed spider-women (all based upon characters from Marvel, of course).                                                             

To race past a lot of boring exposition, it turns out that the future spider-women are just teenagers in present-time, and since Ezekiel has also gained vision-powers from the spider-venom, he decides he's going to use his vast wealth to track down the teens and kill them before they kill him. (How did Ezekiel get rich with his powers of prophecy and Spider-Man-like abilities? Who knows?) Cassandra manages to find the girls and shepherd them away from Ezekiel, who assumes an all-black latex outfit as he crawls from wall to wall on his hit-mission. For the rest of the movie, Cassandra runs from pillar to post with her young charges, just barely managing to out-predict Ezekiel. I'm not sure why Ezekiel, who's been using his powers longer, can't use his powers to outguess the heroine. Possibly it's because it's only important that Cassandra should be able to realize her ability to change the future, since this is the essence of her feminine ability to protect and to give. Eventually, Cassandra's defensive strategies bear fruit, so that Ezekiel's superior male might succumbs to Cassandra's feminine ability to think outside the box. The film ends with the assumption that Cassandra will also play a big role in guiding her three figurative daughters to their destinies as full-fledged superheroines-- though we never know what factors are going to make them become heroes. (Maybe none of the girls want to become costumed crusaders-- and if not, isn't that a future that they can change if they please? That possibility is never suggested.)                                              

Clarkson's peculiar approach only makes sense to me in terms of Hollywood's attempt to seek equity for the female of the species. Since big, expensive action-thrillers generate a lot of money and fame for successful raconteurs, advocates of social justice reasoned that the action-genre would become more equitable if more action-movies starred actresses. The problem with this logic is that the audience that was theoretically going to support all of these female-led films, comprised of American Liberated Women, did not significantly support such films, regardless of the films' good or bad qualities. Women viewers simply did not turn out for big expensive action-thrillers as often as male viewers did, because in general women don't like such thrillers the way male viewers do. So I theorize that Clarkson and her collaborators tried to rewrite the social justice narrative to make it work for women's dominant tastes. If women don't support action-thrillers in which all-female groups like the Birds of Prey and the Marvels get into fights with lots of flashy powers-- maybe that same audience will buy a female-led superhero flick that's structured like a super-expensive Lifetime movie. I'll conclude by stating that although the script for WEB is clunky and undercharacterized, I do not, unlike the podcaster The Critical Drinker, explain this by a snide reference to WEB being Clarkson's first theatrical feature. The woman had been working professionally as a television director for roughly twenty years before this film. She may well be a mediocre director, even in her TV works-- but the failings of WEB can't possibly stem from lack of experience.                                                                        

THE CHRISTMAS DRAGON (2014)

 

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

CHRISTMAS DRAGON is a slow-moving American kids' fantasy shot in the forests of Utah with assorted no-name actors. I think the location is supposed to be medieval England because of some of the names (Garrett, Roslyn) and one or two English accents, but no place-names are ever mentioned in the dialogue. I assigned DRAGON a fair mythicity mostly for the basic notion of putting a Santa Claus narrative in a vaguely Tolkienian world of elves and goblins-- Tolkienian mostly because in that universe, goblins/orcs are created as a mockery of elves. In this movie by director/co-writer Tom Lyde, elves are turning into goblins-- though the main threat to human welfare is the disappearance of "Father Christmas." Unfortunately, Lyde has little idea as to how to construct a world of magical fantasy, relying more on hijinks after the fashion of GOONIES.

There's some wasted potential drama in the initial set up, taking place six years before the main story. Ayden (Bailee Michele Johnson) is a teenaged girl living on a farm with her parents, first seen receiving a Christmas present from them (with a quick cut to the beaming face of Father Christmas, as if he had anything to do with the matter.) Then emissaries from the local lord, a pair of tax collectors named Gazared and Bomtail, visit the farm, accompanied by a quartet of hired thugs and a jail-wagon. A quarrel breaks out, making it evident that the tax collectors came with the intention of capturing the family and selling them as slaves. (The briefly mentioned lord they work for is never "on stage.") When the emissaries stick the two parents in the rolling cell, Ayden flees to avoid capture. She stumbles across a nest of dragon eggs that she's never seen there on her own land. The trespass brings a Mama Dragon swooping down, and she burns up all the guards, though the two collectors in charge escape. Sadly for Ayden, the ravening beast also firebombs Ayden's parents.  

                                                                                                               Cut to six years later. Ayden, rather than being embittered by her loss, seems to be a happy, level-headed teen who doesn't in the least hate dragons, even though one gratuitously killed her parents. Ayden lives in a vaguely religious orphanage with five other kids, mostly younger than Ayden, and most of whom sport American accents. She waxes rhapsodic about the custom of gift-giving, but the other orphans seem to think Christmas is some ancient custom no one celebrates any more. Then Ayden meets an elf in the woods. It's not clear if she's seen any elves before this, though the girl seems surprised that this one has super-long ears and fangs. The ugly elf gives her a magical "waystone" and tells Ayden she alone can save Father Christmas, who stands on the brink of death. He also speaks of some vague cosmic threat called "The Snarl" but does not explain further.                                                                                                                                                                                                             The glowing stone convinces the other kids to join Ayden on a quest to find Father Christmas's HQ, which is implicitly somewhere in their country and not at a certain North Pole. One kid gets left behind when the two slavers from earlier take him prisoner, and often these two minor evildoers seem the main villains over the abstraction of the Snarl, for the kids encounter Gazared and Bomtail in two separate scenes later. After a lot of pointless wandering in the forest, the waystone guides the kids into contact with a roguish adult named Airk, who joins them despite his having a deep dark secret.   

The kids and their adult friend wander some more and encounter a small handful of ogres and goblins, while someone makes the belated conclusion that the once beneficent elves are changing into malevolent goblins. The group also comes across a young dragon wounded by human hunters, and Ayden is first in line to play the role of Androcles to the hurt beast.

                                                                                                              We finally get all the exposition that should've come in the first hour when the kids are attacked by goblins but saved by a staff-wielding kung-fu lady elf, Saerwyn (Melanie Stone, the only performer who puts some spirit into her line-readings). After also punching out Airk, thus establishing their shared romantic history, Saerwyn explained that Airk stole a magical globe from his father-- none other than Father Christmas himself-- thus bringing about the crisis. The ersatz Santa Claus has for a thousand years used the magic globe both to suspend time on the night when he runs around delivering gifts, as well as suspending his own aging processes. Airk's mother died at some earlier point, but he stole the globe with some half-baked notion of turning back time to bring her back. He presumably failed but didn't just go back home to return the globe for "Reasons." Now that everyone finally knows everything-- except maybe what the Snarl is-- the kids can journey to Father Christmas's home and dope out what they can do to revive "the spirit of Christmas" with their childish imaginations. The aged Father gets all better and even drives a flying sleigh pulled by the young dragon rescued earlier.  

I suppose I'm being harsh with a project almost certainly aimed at very young, very undiscriminating children. But Lyde does such a bad job with some half-decent concepts that I think even most of those kids would be pretty bored and would start asking to play RUDOLF THE RED-NOSE REINDEER before even finishing this draggy dragon effort.     

                                                                                                                     

JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH (2008), JOURNEY 2: THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND (2012)

 

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

Of these two loosely interrelated movies, the first, a fairly straight remake of Verne's classic SF novel, has much of the feel of the strong juvenile adventures that Walt Disney did in its heyday, not least in the company's 1950s adaptation of 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA. Both JOURNEYS posit the idea of "Vernian science fiction," meaning that all the things Verne wrote about in his books were based on real phenomena in both his world and the world of the 21st century. (The second movie throws Jonathan Swift and R.L. Stevenson into the mix for good measure.)

Volcanologist Trevor Anderson (Brendan Fraser) is at a crossroads. He's about to lose his college department funding, but his research is his legacy to Trevor's long lost brother Max, who went missing while searching for the supposedly fictional "Center of the Earth." By coincidence, his sister-in-law asked Trevor to keep his nephew Sean (Josh Hutcherson) at his house while she's away doing whatever. The sulky thirteen-year-old doesn't want to be baby-sat by his uncool uncle, but by dumb luck the two of them stumble across a clue to the late Max's destination. So off they go to Iceland, to retrace both Max's steps and the course of Jules Verne's novel.

With the help of a sexy young mountain guide Hannah (Anita Braem) -- whom both the 13-year-old and probably 40-year-old ogle repeatedly-- they make their way to the supposed entry point. Though not intending to go spelunking, an accident forces them into doing so, whereupon in due time they discover that there is indeed a prehistoric world beneath the earth, including an internal sea. 

Verne kept his pocket "lost world" conservative, with only minimal sea life, and one big dino, encountered by his protagonists. Not surprisingly, the movie-writers introduce a lot more flora and fauna, not least the almost obligatory T-Rex. But I didn't mind, because the script is creative with its use of science-factoids to produce a good strong sense of wonder-- while also working them into the subplots of Sean bonding with Trevor and Trevor "bonding" (so to speak) with Hannah. A standout scene involves the three explorers on a raft, first being attacked by "jumping piranhas," and then being paralleled by plesiosaurs, who are only interested in feeding off the piranhas. The script even finds a novel way to redo the explorer's escape from the subterranean domain that takes inspiration from the novel but finds a different path to the same goal, and a justified happy ending.

JOURNEY did well at the box office, and that led to a sequel of sorts, in which Sean, played by a 17-year-old Hutcherson, has become a full-fledged Vernian, essentially inheriting the obsession of his father. His mother is now married to Hank Parsons (Dwayne Johnson), a former Navy codebreaker, but Hank has yet to bond with his stepson. So in his attempt to humor the kid, Hank agrees to translate a coded message that Sean believes was sent by his grandfather Alexander (Michael Caine), a Vernian obsessed with finding the supposedly fictional "Mysterious Island." Little does Hank realize that by helping Sean correlate a smattering of alleged clues about the Verne novel, TREASURE ISLAND and GULLIVER'S TRAVELS, Hank ensures that the two of them will soon be off island-hunting in Hawaii.

The unlikely duo engages a helicopter service to take them to the coordinates from the message, where no island is supposed to exist. The pilot is a comedy relief guy (Luiz Guzman) and his assistant is his comely teen daughter Kailani (Vanessa Hudgens), who's present to give Sean some romance (since he missed out the first time). A storm drives the copter into a crash landing, and guess what: there's the Mysterious Island, with no explanation as to why no one (except Grandpa Alexander) found the place before.

JOURNEY 2 had a complete change of director and writers. Yet even had the sequel used the same people who did CENTER, the core concept would have been undermined by the fact that Verne's MYSTERIOUS ISLAND novel doesn't involve giant creatures-- a reputation that arises only from the 1961 Ray Harryhausen movie. Nevertheless, once the four wayfarers find their way to Alexander, everyone acts as if finding giant bees and birds and dinos on the island agrees perfectly with Verne's book. A ticking-clock peril arises when the quintet realize that the island is rapidly sinking. But in this case, they are able to devise an escape using something from the actual novel: the continued presence of the Nautilus, the submarine left behind by the long-deceased Captain Nemo.

The FX are okay and most of the performances are adequate, though Johnson's "Big Tough Teddy Bear" schtick is getting pretty old. But in place of the first JOURNEY's sense of wonder, the writers provided only a lot of lame jokes for JOURNEY 2. Though I just watched the film, the only humorous bon mot I even remember is a slightly offbeat reference to "Mr. Mxyzptlk" of SUPERMAN comics.

THE INDIAN TOMB PART 1 (1921)

 

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

Some time back I saw Fritz Lang's 1959 remake of this classic German silent, which remake I've not yet reviewed. I wanted to see both parts of the silent before I did so, and I thought I'd found copies of both on YouTube. Surprise! I finished Part 1 and found that there was no Part 2. So here I'll confine myself to the silents' version of THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, and get around to the RETURN OF THE JEDI conclusion later.

Lang had a couple of reasons for being invested in remaking the silent work. He worked as a scenarist on the 1921 film and campaigned to be selected as director, though that job went to the more experienced Joe May. In addition, it was on this film that Lang met his future wife Thea Von Harbou. She was also on the writing staff, helping to adapt her 1918 novel, and supposedly she and Lang shared an interest in Things Indian. Thus the 1921 TOMB stands as a harbinger to the couple's collaboration on METROPOLIS, which Von Harbou wrote in 1925 and Lang adapted in 1927. 

The "tomb" of the title might be deemed a 20th-century fictional imitation of the Taj Mahal, which a Mughal emperor had built in 1631 to house the remains of his wife. Apparently Von Harbou wondered what it would be like if a modern-day Hindu ruler decided to create such a tomb, but for a wife who was not dead yet. 

Whereas the 17th-century emperor culled his builders from the Islamic world, in the 20th century the British still held dominion in India. Thus Ayan III (Conrad Veidt), maharajah of Bengal, decides that he wants to hire as tomb-designer the 20th century's most renowned architect, Englishman Herbert Rowland (Olaf Foriss). But Ayan's too impatient to send an emissary by plane to England. The rajah descends into a massive catacombs (one of the movie's many astounding sets) and awakens a holy man deep in suspended animation. Ayan commands this holy man, name of Ramigani (Bernhard Goetzke), to teleport himself all the way to England to obtain Rowland's services. And sure enough, in an era when cinematic miracles were not that common, that's just what Ramigani does. 

At that moment Rowland, in conversation with his fiancee Irene (Mia May, wife of Director Joe), happens to express his envy of the Taj Mahal as a great architectural milestone, one he wishes he might emulate. Irene assures him that he could beat that old Indian tomb all hollow, and then she's called away by a phone call from her dad. Viewers never learn why Irene's dad called her, so clearly the writers just wanted the actress to speak her lines and then get out of the way. 

In Irene's absence, Ramigani just manifests in Rowland's sitting room. Rowland walks in and is stunned to see an unfamiliar turbaned man in his house, particularly one offering him a fantastic job in India. The architect orders the equally perplexed butler to show the swami the door. However, Ramigami's there long enough to plant the seed of temptation in Rowland's mind, and the architect calls the envoy back and agrees to the contract. He's so besotted by his dream that he leaves immediately, informing Irene of his plans only with a note. Irene, for her part, has some intuition of danger and tries to find her fiancee with a phone call. The all-knowing Ramigani blocks this action by using telekinesis to disable Rowland's phone.

Nevertheless, Irene ferrets out Rowland's destination and hops a plane to Bengal. Rowland, arriving at the palace of the rajah, takes in all the exotic sights for a while. But eventually he finds out the awful truth. Ayan's wife Savitri cuckolded him, not just with a young British officer (Paul Richter, who would later essay the role of Siegfried for Lang's NIBELUNGEN), but one whom Ayan considered "a friend." The movie rather lightly passes over the morality of this affair, leaving the audience to assume that Savitri and the young Brit represent the forces of true love. Rowland is disturbed to learn that his new project is designed to be a method for murdering a willful wife, but he can't try to leave without provoking the rajah's wrath.

Irene reaches the rajah's palace but Ayan won't let her see Rowland, using the excuse that he doesn't want the architect's labors interrupted. There's a suggestion that Ayan might be thinking about taking Irene to wife once Savitri is out of the picture, but no major romantic advances take place. Indeed, as the film reaches the two-hour mark, May sets up the cliffhangers for Part Two: British Lothario about to be captured by Ayan's soldiers while Rowland realizes he's contracted leprosy. Another miracle-stunt is provided by Ramigani, who rescues Irene when she wanders into a tiger-pit, apparently by making her unseen by the big cats.

I can't make a final determination of the artistic worth of Joe May's INDIAN TOMB until I've seen the whole thing. The first half is slow going for modern tastes, though I can appreciate that May sought to capture the wonders of Exotic India with the sort of "painterly" approach at which Silent Cinema excelled. That said, the only sequence I found visually evocative was the swami's rescue of Irene from the tiger-pit. No one will ever know if Lang might have made the 1921 TOMB better, but in his later German works like METROPOLIS and the aforementioned NIBELUNGEN, Lang showed himself better at artful mise-en-scene than anything in TOMB. Of course, given that I've seen none of May's other German works, that comparison doesn't prove Lang to be the better director in all respects. Though TOMB was not a financial success, it was almost certainly green-lighted because May had scored with MISTRESS OF THE WORLD, a serial with EIGHT feature-length parts. (And modern audiences think the MCU invented interconnected movies...) As it happened, both Lang and May emigrated from Europe to America in the 1930s, though Lang transitioned into A-level films while May, who didn't bother to learn English, spent the remainder of his career in B-flicks.

Without seeing Part 2, I can't be sure of TOMB's combative status, but since I remember the general outline of Lang's remake, I think the whole movie can best be termed a subcombative adventure.

COMIN' AT YA! (1981), TREASURE OF THE FOUR CROWNS (1983)

 

PHENOMENALITY: (1) naturalistic, (2) *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

I've devoted space to a number of limited talents who made one or two notable films and then either left the industry or become hired guns for TV. But there are also a number of people who really had no discernible talent except to take advantage of trends.

In the sixties American actor/producer Tony Anthony parlayed the enthusiasm for spaghetti westerns into a short career as a star of Italian horse operas, four featuring a character called "the Stranger" (largely a Clint Eastwood clone) while the fifth was the above average BLINDMAN. The craze for the subgenre had bottomed out in the mid seventies, and Anthony went into other endeavors. However, in the late seventies he made contact with two other businessmen. Between the three of them they not only brought a single spaghetti oater into prominence (with Anthony as the lead), they also launched a new iteration of the fifties' "3-D craze" with their western COMIN' AT YA. The film's success led to American studios launching 3-D versions of properties such as JAWS and THE AMITYVILLE HORROR. However, the eighties 3-D craze lasted no longer than the one in the 1950s, for when Anthony and his partners tried to duplicate their success in 1983 with TREASURE OF THE FOUR CROWNS (also starring Anthony), they crashed and burned. Anthony retired from filmmaking, though one of his collaborators, Gene Quintano, had fluctuating success as a Hollywood writer and/or director for the next ten or so years.

The success of the 1981 film isn't hard to understand. While it's just another formula western-- albeit one more sentimental than the more famous Italian works-- director Ferdinando (BLINDMAN) Baldi and composer Ennio Morricone revived many of the sensory and narrative tropes they'd used throughout the first wave of the spaghettis. It's a very simple story of white slavers abducting the bride (Victoria Abril) of gunfighter Hart (Anthony), followed by Hart's involved efforts to rescue his wife and to revenge himself upon the outlaw gang. There's no metaphenomenal content and it might be a stretch for me to categorize Hart's mission as an example of naturalistic "bizarre crimefighting--" though Hart does blow up a whole town before executing his main enemy by blowing up the windmill to which the villain is bound. Ironically, the flick's greatest asset was that it only used the 3-D effects sparingly.

I don't know what went on afterward, but I will theorize that Anthony and his partners instantly decided that their new motto would be "nothing succeeds like excess." One quote claims that Quintano wanted to follow up the success of COMIN' AT YA with a heist film like TOPKAPI. But clearly the story put together by Anthony and Quintano (albeit turned into a screenplay by three other guys) is much more indebted to a much bigger 1981 success: Steven Spielberg's RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. That said, TREASURE OF THE FOUR CROWNS does often seem like a hideous amalgam of RAIDERS with a very bad heist-film-- and the strange result may be the only imitation of Indiana Jones that didn't have a combative hero anywhere near it. Even the return of Baldi as director and Morricone as composer couldn't stem the chaos that ensued.

Anthony didn't look very dynamic when he was shooting owlhoots in COMIN' AT YA, but in CROWNS he looks pasty and bloated when he's seen, all on his own, negotiating various traps in a cave, trying to obtain an artifact for his employers. For the film's first ten minutes phlegmatic protagonist "J.T. Striker" is assailed by animals, automatic traps and what seem to be discarnate spirits, with no rhyme or reason. He escapes the cave, returns to civilization (somehow) and delivers the desired artifact to his employers. After minor resistance, the employers talk Striker into assembling a heist-team that can break into the compound of a malevolent cult-leader. For scientific reasons, Striker's benefactors want this "tomb raider" to steal a treasure from the compound which will make it possible to summon forth the power of "the Four Crowns" (even though one crown was lost in antiquity, so there's really only three).

The film spends about half an hour having Striker recruit a bunch of maladjusted ne'er-do-wells who will constitute his ideal heist-team. These half-baked characters aren't worth describing, except to say that they demonstrate that none of the writers knew how to execute even limited characterizations. Even trapeze artist Liz (Ana Obregon) sparks no interest. Striker eventually talks even the most reluctant allies into joining his team, though he does so in part by whipping out the cave-artifact and showing his partners how it can call forth poltergeist-related effects. It never occurs to Striker that this might have fatal consequences, because the script says, "Shoehorn in as many ridiculous 3-D effects as possible, no matter how you do it."

Then the remainder of the film is devoted to the team's glacial progress as they break into the cult-compound. To sum up, traps of some sort kill all of the heist-artists except Striker and Liz (the better to make sure they're able to hook up in the end). Then things look grim for the survivors when the cultists catch them and start to spray them with machine gun fire. However, Striker has just obtained two mystic gems from whatever crowns are in the sanctum. The gems give Striker the power to enact a ghastly reprise of the Nazi-Killing Scene from RAIDERS, wiping out the cultists with patently phony FX and lots of objects-flying-on-wires. Once all the villains are dead, Striker is able to throw off the influence of the possessing power, whatever it was, and to destroy the gems so that no one can use them again. Roll credits.

While no RAIDERS-imitator was ever able to touch the hem of Spielberg's directorial jacket, Anthony and Quintano may be the only ones to botch the basic idea of the daredevil-adventurer. Neither Striker nor any of his aides get into exciting fights or execute thrilling escapes,. So it appears that the guys who forged the main story thought that all RAIDERS had going for it was a big boulder at the start and a bunch of evildoers getting blasted to smithereens at the conclusion. But though CROWNS flopped at the 1983 box office, I have the impression that people looking for the next "so bad it's good" film probably will get more of a boost from CROWNS than from COMIN' AT YA.

Though Anthony retired after CROWNS, Quintano was able to parley the success of COMIN' AT YA into a career. Oddly, a year or so after the awfulness of CROWNS, he co-wrote two more Indiana-clones for Cannon Films, the back-to-back films KING SOLOMON'S MINES and ALLEN QUATERMAIN AND THE LOST CITY OF GOLD. Mediocre as these movies were, they look like models of well-executed formula fiction next to CROWNS, so I think the rapid improvement must lie with Quintano's co-writers, even though they didn't have stellar careers either.

TREASURE PLANET (2002)

 

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

I never got round to watching TREASURE PLANET even on DVD. The film, an expensive combination of computer-made and hand-drawn animation, flopped at the box office, but that wouldn't have kept me from watching it. More likely, I just didn't think the idea of "Treasure Island in Space" sounded very promising.

Some cinematic flops come about because the movie in question is hugely out of touch with what the audience wants to see. But other, more mediocre flicks have enjoyed all levels of success, based on having some gimmick that catches the public fancy. PLANET turns out to be a competent film, but it lacks such a gimmick, and plays as nothing more than ordinary, with all its pirate-tropes turned into those of "space-pirates," and with many book-characters turned into various alien entities, few of which prove memorable.

The story of TREASURE ISLAND is so well known that I probably don't even need to provide a link to my writeup of the novel, though I will anyway. In lieu of a summary, I'll cover just the major points of similarity and difference. 

In the novel juvenile protagonist Jim Hawkins lives at the Benbow Inn with his sketchily described parents, and the father dies early in the story, though with very little ceremony. In PLANET the father has deserted Jim and his mother. Planet-Jim (voiced by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is more of a daredevil, trying to make up for his lack of a male role model by racing futuristic vehicles and getting in trouble with the law. But Jim and his mother need money in both stories, and when the opportunity to find a lost treasure-trove presents itself, that's all the excuse Jim needs to go adventuring.

In place of the unmemorable book-adults who enlist the ship that goes looking for treasure, Planet-Jim journeys into space in the company of a comedy-relief adult, a doggy-humanoid named Doctor Doppler (David Hyde Pierce). The spaceship of course looks like an old-timey frigate, and in contrast to the novel's almost total absence of female characters, the movie's version of the ship is commanded by one Captain Amelia (Emma Thompson), an anthropomorphic cat-alien. While this injection of femininity into a "boys' adventure" could be done badly, and often has been, Amelia is the most interesting variation in the movie, with her spit-and-polish officer played off the bumbling insecurities of Doppler.

The book does a far better job of setting up one of the story's main twists: that the treasure-seeking ship has been crewed almost completely by ruthless pirates, and they're all under the command of the oleaginous ship's cook, John Silver (Brian Murray). In place of Long John's missing leg, this Silver is a cyborg with a missing eye and arm, replaced by cybernetic units. He talks up Jim, ostensibly to keep the boy from suspecting anything, though in contrast to the book Silver does become much more paternally bonded to the fatherless young man. Thus it's merely predictable when the climax includes a scene in which Silver chooses against his selfish interests to save Jim, in strong contrast to the novel, where Silver is never more than a charming rapscallion.

Various bits of original business are more enjoyable than the main plot, with its ticks on the castaway Ben Gunn (a robot named B.E.N.) and a crewman who takes an intense dislike to the innocent Jim (here, the bad crewman is a crab-alien named Skroob). The interplay of Doppler and Amelia is the film's main asset, though there's also a nice moment when Jim has to defeat Skroob aboard the space-frigate by causing the nasty crab to "fall up" into outer space. But despite the changes in Planet-Jim's template, he's still bland, and his encounter with adventure certainly doesn't yield any of the horrific experiences found in the original's exploits. 

Wikipedia claims that over time the film has found some vindication as a "cult movie." But if so, I think it's probably a very small cult for a pleasant but unexceptional formula-flick.

DAUGHTER OF THE JUNGLE (1949)

 

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

I saw DAUGHTER OF THE JUNGLE so long ago I remembered nothing about it. From the few online reviews, I assumed it was just a one-off "jungle queen" story that would go through the motions of the usual jungle-adventure story. Yet strangely, the character of Ticoora (Lois Hall) has more in common with the jungle-melodramas of Dorothy Lamour than with the adventure-stories of Bomba and Jungle Jim. 

Ticoora was a small girl when she, her rich father and the pilot of their plane all crashed in some obscure part of Africa. The three white people were unable to make the difficult trek out of the wilderness-- I think because there are hostile tribes all around-- so for something like the next ten years Ticoora grows up with only vague recollections of civilization. 

Ticoora is sort of an anti-Sheena. In the origin of Sheena, the heroine's father dies and the young girl is raised by a native tribe, and thus she becomes a savage fighter. But though Ticoora doesn't receive training from natives, much less from animal adoptive parents, she's often seen swinging around on vines like it's second nature. She and her father eke out their living by treating natives with superior white medicine, but this earns them enmity from the local witch doctor (Frank Lackteen).

Then another plane crashes, and Ticoora meets her first new white men in ten years: Two are cops who have custody of the other two plane-passengers, both of whom are criminals being transported to prison. The four men want to get back to civilization, and I think they're willing to risk the dangerous trek because they have handguns. Ticoora goes with them-- but the meaner of the two crooks, Dalton (Sheldon Leonard), has plans to make sure he also escapes imprisonment.

There's very little action in DAUGHTER, and I rate it a subcombative adventure because there aren't any significant fights involved as the heroes try to escape both hostile natives and fierce animals. Ticoora wears an outfit that allegedly was recycled from the 1941 serial JUNGLE GIRL, presumably so that the filmmakers could re-use scenes from that chapterplay. But the heroine of JUNGLE GIRL could fight a little bit, while the only real action DAUGHTER swipes from the serial is a hard-to-see scene with Ticoora slaying a crocodile in a river. Overall she shows no true toughness, screaming when accosted by a gorilla and failing to hit back when Dalton slaps her, requiring one of the cop-characters to come to Ticoora's defense. The only significant metaphenomenality in the flick follows the trope "exotic lands and customs," if only because the witch doctor keeps ranting about using "voodoo" on the outsiders.

DAUGHTER was listed in the Medved Brothers' FIFTY WORST FILMS OF ALL TIME, but it's too dull to deserve that distinction. Its only assets are the good looks of Hall and the gangster-schtick of Leonard. George Blair also directed the oddball fantasy-flick SABU AND THE MAGIC RING and some ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN episodes, but the main distinction of his career was helming the 1960 horror-film THE HYPNOTIC EYE, which I remember fondly though I've not yet found the chance to review it.

THE SINBAD TRILOGY (2015-16)

 

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

As the dates cited for this "Sinbad Trilogy" should clarify, I'm not referencing the Sinbad movies of the esteemed Ray Harryhausen. I think there is a portmanteau name for this film-series in the original Japanese, but I couldn't find an English translation for that name; hence "the Sinbad trilogy."

I've seen no other works from Nippon Animation, the principal Japanese studio that produced the Trilogy, but their Wikipedia writeup asserts that, unlike many other Japanese animation units, Nippon has always concentrated on family-friendly fare. The Trilogy-- consisting of three hour-long movies that are more like episodes of a teleseries-- has almost no intimations of sexuality on the part of its male star Sinbad or his female co-star Sana, both of whom look to be about thirteen years old. The dominant aesthetic of kid-friendly graphics put me somewhat in the mind of Herge's TINTIN, but transplanted into an Arabian Nights fantasia.

The Trilogy owes very little to the Sinbad tales in the Thousand and One Nights. Nevertheless, the writers of these interlinked films manage to capture the same approach of the Oriental stories, in which the inhabitants of a vaguely medieval Arabic world find themselves constantly encountering incredible marvels. This juvenile Sinbad, for example, lives with his mother, aspiring to go to sea someday like his father, even though his sire disappeared on his last voyage. Sinbad is at first refused to join the crew of one Captain Razzak because of the boy's tender years. However, when he defends a young girl named Sana in the city-streets from the attack of men on flying carpets, Razzak takes Sinbad under his wing, Later, Sana chances upon the vessel at sea, after which Razzak pretty much puts all regular business on hold in order to take Sana back to her people.

Sana, the daughter of an island of sorcerers, is the perfect medium that allows the youth (along with comedy-relief sidekick Ali) to continually encounter countless wonder-works: a flying wooden horse, a magic lamp, giant pachyderms, a cyclops, water horses, and, of course, the villains who brought about the fall of Sana's people, the evil Galip and his toady Daal (first seen as one of the carpet-riders who attacks Sana early in the film).

Just as Ray Harryhausen's films are often slackly plotted to allow for a panoply of wonders, there's not a strong plot in the Trilogy either. Somehow Sana was exiled from her people, and she has to get back to them, even if that means she and Sinbad may be separated from one another. The relationship of Sinbad and Sana is never romantic as such, though the girl-boy dynamic isn't entirely absent. The first film is the strongest in that it sets up all subsequent action, while the second (which focuses on the magic lamp, though it has precious little impact on the story) is weaker. The third and last movie builds up the idea of the paradise-like culture of Sana's parents, who combined the rigor of science with the charms of magic in some fashion, but this blessed union is ruined by the ambitions of Galip and his minions. Yet even though Galip is poised as a danger to world peace, his threat seems amorphous at best. In the end, once Sana has returned to his people, Sinbad goes back home. There's a suggestion that he might seek out his father some day, but the matter never comes up, though strangely his buddy Ali conveniently learns that his captain is also his lost daddy. 

Since Sinbad and Sana are not fighters, the Trilogy falls under my heading of subcombative adventure. The focus is never on the ostensible conflict, but on the parade of wonders that Sinbad beholds, and this production certainly captures the mood of Arabic fantasy better than many comparable works from American studios.

KING OF THE LOST WORLD (2005)

 

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

KING OF THE LOST WORLD was clearly designed to "mockbust" the big-budget KING KONG of 2005. But it seems that the producers at The Asylum company were a little more cautious than usual, because on occasion the owners of the franchise built upon the 1933 KONG have become litigious. Thus even though there's a giant ape in the advertising, he doesn't play a central role in the narrative. What the writers did to avoid lawsuits was to mash together elements of the original KONG and the public domain Conan Doyle book THE LOST WORLD. with maybe a touch or two from the 1925 movie adaptation of the Doyle book, which many consider animator Willis O'Brien's dry-run for KONG.

Come to think of it, another major influence was the teleseries LOST, which had burst upon American audiences the year before. So this film is the WORLD based on LOST, complete with a bunch of castaways stranded on an isolated island. None of the characters, unlike those of the TV show, are at all memorable, despite the fact that the four with the most lines are given the last names of the Doyle heroes: Challenger, Roxton, Malone and Summerlee. (Summerlee gets a sex-change, BTW.) 

While the survivors spend roughly half the film getting eaten by or running from giant monsters like pterodactyls and giant scorpions, Challenger (Bruce Boxleitner, given top billing as compensation for lending the film his name recognition) has some mysterious secret, and toward the end, when no one cares anymore, it's revealed that he's a government agent looking for a lost nuclear bomb, which is used to wipe the Mysterious Island off the map.

The big KONG elements are not the giant ape, who's present for only a few minutes, but the natives who intend to sacrifice the castaways to their giant (unnamed) ape god. To help avoid accusations of racism, though, the island's inhabitants are not Natives of Color, but the mostly white descendants of another group of airline-crash victims, who formed their weird society for who knows what reasons. The natives are the source of the film's one amusing scene, when Challenger gets "challenged" by a ferocious island-girl who is for some other reason a mistress of skilled stick-fighting.

Aside from the terminal weirdness of the stick-fighting scene, and the almost accidental homage to KING KONG's cinematic precursor, KING OF THE LOST WORLD should remain a world well lost.

THE ISLAND AT THE TOP OF THE WORLD (1974)

 

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

The literary genre of the "lost race novel" probably peaked in the 1930s with LOST HORIZON and various Doc Savage novels. After the innovations of both jets and satellites, it became harder and harder to sell the idea of cultures being so isolated that the rest of the world knew nothing of them. However, in the 1960s, writer Ian Cameron took a shot at reviving the genre with three novels set in contemporaneous times. One of these books, THE LOST ONES, became the basis of Disney's ISLAND AT THE TOP OF THE WORLD.

Disney's producers probably realized that the public tended to think of the genre as old-hat, so the script for ISLAND set the events in 1907, and had the explorers travel in an old-timey dirigible. (Following the late Walt Disney's imprimatur to monetize their productions, there were plans to place a version of the Dirigible at one of the theme parks, though the film's failure ensured that this did not take place until 1992, at Disneyland Paris.) The basic purpose of the expedition, though, remained the same: wealthy Anthony Ross (Donald Sindel) hires a crew to venture to a little-known volcanic area in Alaska, seeking Ross's son Donald, missing for two years. The film's explorers include the dirigible's captain, anthropologist Ivarsson ("name" actor David Hartman), and eventually, reluctant Inuit guide Oomak (Mako). 

I give away nothing by stating that despite perils of the air and the snowy Alaskan tundra, the explorers succeed in finding the lost Donald. They also find his hosts, a race of isolated descendants of Vikings, who tend to regard the newcomers as heralds of an invasion force. Ivarsson's fortunate ability to speak Old Norse smooths things over a bit, but an evil shaman wants everyone dead, and Donald doesn't immediately want to leave, being enamored of local lass Freyja (Agneta Eckmeyr). Eventually the outsiders must make a daring trek to return to the outside world via the dirigible. Eventually the Vikings allow the explorers to leave, but only if one of their number remains behind as hostage.

I don't remember when and where I first saw ISLAND, but I remembered little of it. The likely reason is that, despite the skill of director Robert Stevenson in depicting the wonders of the natural world (including a "whale's graveyard"), not much really happens in this "adventure tale." The protagonists never seem in serious danger, the Vikings aren't a bad lot, and the nasty shaman is barely seen. The elder Ross worries that he drove his son away by being a demanding father, but Donald lets him off the hook, saying that he bore his dad no animus, he just wanted adventure. In the book Freyja dies; here she lives and Ivarsson willingly stays behind as hostage, delighted to be immersed in the mysteries of a lost civilization.

On the whole, the film is very safe entertainment, much like a lot of other Disney movies of the decade, though ISLAND is far from the worst of the batch. Around the same time a British production company enjoyed middling success with three adaptations from novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, so the genre wasn't utterly foreign to 1970s filmgoers. ISLAND sunk like a stone, and its only significance might be as an attempt to bring back old-fashioned explorer-tales, though seven years later Lucas and Spielberg ate Disney's lunch with the introduction of the infinitely preferable exploits of Indiana Jones.

THE PHANTOM EMPIRE (1988)

 

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

In my review of Fred Olen Ray's HOLLYWOOD CHAINSAW HOOKERS I mentioned the same director's PHANTOM EMPIRE as a bad example of his having squirted out a terrible movie made in a few days with a bunch of favorite actors. I know nothing about the circumstances of EMPIRE's genesis, though I doubt it was anything more than a movie in which he had enough funding to send his players tromping around Bronson Canyon for a few days of shooting.

In one of the "city" scenes, a monster attacks some picnickers and is shot down. Girl archeologist Denea (Susan Stokey) thinks that certain clues about the creature might lead her to the legendary city R'yleh, an obsession of her late archeologist father. (The city's name is cheerfully swiped from H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos.) Denea gathers together a bunch of fellow explorers, whose identities are less significant than the actors' previous labors on Ray's behalf. There's so little to say about the characters that I'll just reel off the actors' names for whatever name-game pleasure readers might get from Ross Hagen, Dawn Wildsmith, Jeffrey Combs, Robert Quarry and Russ Tamblyn. Tamblyn alone doesn't accompany the others on their trek into a series of subterranean caves.

After walking for a day or so, the stalwart seekers come across various human-sized monsters like the one from the picnic, a fur-clad cave-babe, and Robby the Robot-- or rather, a replica of the famed automaton from FORBIDDEN PLANET. There's at least a minor explanation for the robot's presence, for the explorers also encounter an alien space-babe (Sybil Danning, playing a character billed as "Alien Queen"). The Queen, who crashed in the uncharted territory (not city) of R'yleh eons ago, has spent all that time trying to repair her ship with the help of the robot. As soon as she sees the newbies, she decides to enslave them to her service. This leads to the film's only somewhat memorable scene, for Hagen's character objects to this high-handed treatment, and Alien Queen handily beats his ass down with but a few skillful moves. (Did Ray have some dim memory of Hagen's earlier near-beatdown by a kung-fu lady assassin in 1973's WONDER WOMEN?)

The movie doesn't so much come to a conclusion as peter out. There's a little entertainment in the credits sequence, where Ray references the help of "the City and Country of Caprona." Caprona is one of Edgar Rice Burroughs' many fictional terrains, which was also something of a grab-bag of fantasy-tropes, though not as incoherent as those of EMPIRE. The film's title riffs on the 1935 Mascot serial of the same name, but even that is by comparison relatively well conceived for a simple pulp-fantasy adventure. Though neither the explorers nor the menaces they encounter are very interesting, the menaces are just a random collection of hazards with no apparent relation to one another, so I suppose the five dull explorers are the centric characters here. Still, in contrast to most works of ERB and his imitators, EMPIRE sports too little action to qualify as anything but subcombative. 

THE GOLDEN MISTRESS (1954)

 

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

The above lobby card doesn't entirely lie: GOLDEN MISTRESS was filmed on the real island of Haiti, and voodoo does play a big role in the story (though most of the action takes place at sea, not in Caribbean forests, much less any "jungles.") It's certainly not a "spectacular" film of any kind, though actor/director Abner Biberman, under the name Joel Judge, succeeds at least in capturing much of the natural (but not necessarily "pagan") wonders of the terrain. However, the story is less wonderful, being padded with lots of location scenery and a pedestrian treasure-hunting plot.

Carl Dexter, an old explorer (Biberman), steals a small golden idol from a remote Haitian tribe known as "the Untamed." The people got that name because though they were brought to the Caribbean as slaves, they rebelled and became famed as raiders, before mysteriously disappearing from contact with other tribes. Carl tells his grown daughter Ann (Rosemary Bowe) that this small golden statue is one of hundreds consigned to a local lake near the haunts of the Untamed, and that they can be rich if they can obtain the treasure. However, someone among the Untamed is a voodoo priest, and Carl is struck down by a curse. 

Ann, seemingly less preoccupied with treasure than with validating her late father's desires, seeks the help of a footloose treasure-hunter, Bill Buchanan (John Agar). Bill and Ann don't get along from the start-- he tosses her off his wharf, and she has him arrested-- but eventually they make nice and agree to collaborate on seeking the treasure. 

When Bill and Ann visit a tribe with whom Bill is on friendly terms, more voodoo-inspired bad luck seems to dog the treasure-hunters' trail. In contrast to many similar films, there's not much doubt that the power of voodoo is real, but the script is not very curious about the religion's etiology, aside from showing a number of scenes of natives dancing around, possibly inspired by the voodoo deities. In one instance, though, when voodoo *may* be responsible for sending a shark after a native boy diving in the ocean, this works out well for Bill, who saves the boy's life and wins the help of the kid's father as a guide. (The arrangement doesn't work out nearly so well for the "redshirt" guide, though.) Eventually the script loses interest in mystic curses, and Bill and Ann fall into the hands of the Untamed, who plan to turn the treasure-hunters into two big weenie roasts. The duo escape death without the treasure, but by that time they've found true love.

The oddest thing about MISTRESS is that the voodoo stuff isn't clearly seen to emanate from one particular source, though there is a brief glimpse of a sorcerer in regular clothes, glowering after some character dies. Most voodoo films  place a great deal of emphasis on some magician as an opponent for the sympathetic characters, but here the curses just seem to happen whenever it's convenient for the script. Because the movie exploits the horror of voodoo so minimally, the Bill-Ann romance takes center stage. Bill performs some dauntless scuba-diving feats but there's so little real action that MISTRESS proves to be a subcombative adventure. Oh, and there's a cute kid who provides the usual lame kid-humor. Fans of John Agar and voodoo movies are the only probable audience for this curiosity.

FINAL DAYS OF PLANET EARTH (2006)

 

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

I didn’t see this two-part Hallmark miniseries in its original debut, so the only expectations I brought to my viewing was that I haven’t generally found most of Hallmark’s offerings all that noteworthy. Thus, I was surprised that Robert Lieberman’s direction of a Roger Soffer script provided me with a quite enjoyable ride, in addition with a relatively high level of mythicity.

After viewing the two-parter, I glanced at a handful of online reviews, and noticed that a fair number drew comparisons with the 1980s “V” serials produced by Kenneth Johnson. I suppose it’s not impossible that FINAL might have taken some inspiration from those serials, which enjoyed considerable popularity in their day (though the weekly teleseries inspired by the movies died in one season, as did a more recent incarnation). But if so, Lieberman and Soffer improved hugely on their model, since I found both the direction and writing of V to be terminally bland in all renditions.

V and FINAL both deal with inhuman aliens who assume humanoid appearances when they invade Earth with the intent of subjugating the natives. However, the V-aliens come “bearing gifts” in order to lull Earthlings into complacence, while the aliens of FINAL pursue the more standard course by simply infiltrating human government in order to conquer Earth. Both groups of extraterrestrials eat humans, but FINAL’s insect-aliens provide a touch more pseudo-scientific justification, claiming that these aliens need to assimilate keratin from their prey. (The miniseries never gives the bug-aliens even an informal nickname, but since one character claims that the invaders came from the Horsehead Nebula, I’ll call them for convenience the “nebula-bugs,” partly because the aforesaid character is inconsistent about which nebula the insects come from.) Lastly, since the V-aliens make their phony human disguises from scratch, the nebula-bugs take human corpses and skin them to make what the aliens call their “jackets.”

The aliens reach Earth by hitching a ride on a manned moon mission, and then assuming the guises of the astronauts. For reasons that are never clear, the nebula-bugs don’t kill the mission-commander Phillips, apparently because they’re repelled by his unique blood chemistry. But since Phillips goes mad from the takeover, the bugs simply allow the Earthlings to imprison the former astronaut as a madman. Only a handful of invaders make it to Earth, but one of them is a “queen-bug” who can lay hundreds of eggs, thus providing the foundation for an invasion force.

Fortunately, a handful of Earthlings become alert to the danger, beginning with a pair whose nature screams “opposites attract trope.” One is Walker, a misanthropic archaeologist who has little interest in his fellow humans, and the other Marianne, an entomologist who wishes that humans borrow some of the non-confrontational nature of bugs. Walker and Marianne make common cause with four other Earthlings whom the nebula-bugs have targeted for skinning, and then go on the run, unable to trust any agency, since the local cops have already been taken over by the aliens. Indeed, one of Walker’s perceived aliens, one Liz Quinlan (Daryl Hannah, the only “big name” in the dominantly Canadian cast), is none other than the Queen herself.

Unlike many latter-day alien-invasion scripts, Roger Soffer conveys a fair amount of biological info about the nature of the nebula-bugs, and even if most of that biology is based on Earth entomology, I still appreciate the attention to detail. The six unlikely heroes can barely scrape together even a meager arsenal to prevent the hatching of the alien armada, but Soffer gets a good deal of humor out of their situations, particularly after the group takes on a seventh member by liberating Commander Phillips from the nuthouse. At the same time, Soffer never sacrifices dramatic potential, as with the character of Bella, a refugee from violence in Europe, with her own perspective on conflict. There are a few cheesy moments in FINAL, mostly whenever the nebula-bugs burst huge mantis-like claws out of their “jackets,” though the bugs remain human in all other respects. (Budgetary restrictions, you know.) But the actors handle all the twists and turns with considerable aplomb, with special high marks going to Gil Bellows, Sue Matthew and Campbell Scott as respectively Walker, Marianne and Phillips.

I’ve deemed a lot of alien-invasion films to fit the Fryean mythos of “the drama.” But here, even though the protagonists aren’t overly dynamic, the emphasis seems to be on adventurous thrills—also one of the few fundamental things that FINAL has in common with V.

JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH (2008)

 

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

This telefilm is something of a “repeat journey,” not in being yet another adaptation of the Jules Verne classic; rather, it's a shaved-down remake of a 1999 two-part television movie scripted by Thomas Baum. I remember the two-parter as bloated and unwieldly, so if nothing else, this version has been trimmed down to essentials. Its main resemblance to the Verne work is that the narrative takes place in the same period as the novel, the 1870s, even though the locale is altered from Iceland to Alaska.

Where Verne had his explorers delving into the earth’s core for purely scientific motivations, this JOURNEY invokes romantic reconciliation as the main purpose. Young maybe-widow Martha (Victoria Pratt) hires roving anthropologist Jonathan Brock (Rick Shroeder) and Brock’s nephew to find her husband Edward (Peter Fonda). Some time back Edward—who, the dialogue relates, is significantly older than Martha—went to Alaska looking for an entrance to a subterranean cavern. Though Martha is a woman of her time, she insists on going along on the quest—and it would be a slow viewer who didn’t expect that on the way the appropriately named “Jonathan and Martha” might take a shine to one another.

Long story short, the threesome—who become a foursome when they pick up a Russian aide (replacing the Swedish assistant of the novel—descend the cavern until they find a perfectly preserved prehistoric world. The script does capture a little of the novel’s “sense of wonder” about the nature of Earth’s innards, but verisimilitude is tossed aside when the explorers encounter not just a few leftover dinos, but also a whole tribe of primitives, made up to look like American Indians. By the time the primitives show up, the experienced viewer will not be surprised to learn that Edward has used weapons from the surface world—guns, sticks of dynamite—to make himself a god. However, uneasy lies the head that wears the crown, and the appearance of new faces from the outer world creates more trouble for everyone.

Director T.J. Scott (husband of Victoria Pratt) sets up many engaging location-shots, but he can’t do much with the pedestrian script. Only Pratt’s Martha gets a halfway interesting emotional arc, especially when she finds that the older man she married—more out of admiration than love, and to get away from an overprotective father—has been shacked up for four years with a native babe. The script initially seems interested in making Shroeder’s Brock into an Indiana Jones adventure-type—he’s first seen bare-knuckle boxing an opponent for profit—Brock doesn’t really do anything daring in later scenes, and Shroeder shows little romantic chemistry with Pratt. Peter Fonda probably gets the best lines, but again, nothing much he could do with such a routine character. Had the same characters been plopped down into a mundane African jungle, I would probably consider Brock and Martha to be the focal presences. And while it’s not impossible to adapt Verne’s JOURNEY in a way that places all the emphasis on the explorers—a case in point being this 1993 TV-movie—this 2008 flick, like Verne, makes the setting the star.