MY DEAR KILLER (1972), WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO YOUR DAUGHTERS (1974)

 

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

Here are two police-thrillers that just barely make it into the domain of "the giallo" thanks to killers who sometimes employ unusual murder-methods.

KILLER's director/co-scripter Tonino Valerii had written a couple of scripts for metaphenomenal films in the 1960s, but this was his only giallo. He brings to the film decent but not outstanding visuals, and so the story seems far more concerned with the heroic policeman's mystery-solving and not with the nature of the serial killer.

KILLER certainly starts off with a bang. The first murder victim is seen standing beside a country swamp, one surrounded by excavation equipment. Some unseen person takes control of a "claw" machine and uses it to slice off the victim's head. Detective Peretti (George Hilton) is assigned to the case, and as he seeks to make sense of the peculiar killing, others begin dying as well. This leads Peretti to delve into a cold case that involved the kidnapping of the little daughter of a rich man. The kidnapper collected his ransom but killed off both the little girl and her father. 

I must confess here that for some reason I decided to read the summary on Wiki, as I usually do not, because I found it a little hard to follow who was who-- even though most of the possible suspects consisted of the rich man's family and their servants. It soon becomes evident that the unknown killer is assassinating everyone whom he thinks might possess a clue to his dastardly deed. Because I read the summary, it seemed to me like Valerii barely made an effort toward implicating the other suspects. But I can't claim this time that I pegged the killer in advance.

I liked Hilton and other members of the cast, which includes Helga Line (in a very brief role), William Berger, and Marilu Tolo (who has a brief upper-body nude scene). But even though the photography looks good the mise-en-scene is pretty slow. The killer's only other atypical weapon is a rotary saw, but in other scenes he just uses a knife or a club. No competition for Argento here.

  Massimo Dallamano's DAUGHTERS is much more effective, for all that the killer is really just a mob-enforcer (mostly seen in a motorcycle-outfit) who occasionally uses very bloody methods of rubbing out targets. He's also working to eliminate all potential witnesses to a crime that involves an older range of victims: high-school age girls who, overconfident of their own abilities to suss things out, get pulled into a sex ring. 

The story centers upon two investigators: Inspector Silvestre (Claudio Cassinelli) and female district attorney Stori (Giovanna Ralli). Though there are one or two moments where Stori's gender is raised as a dramatic problem, both characters are seen to be forthright and conscientious in the efforts to expose the conspiracy. Dallamano, who had previously contributed a decent giallo in WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO SOLANGE?, focuses almost exclusively on the "police-thriller" aspects of the story. I found Dallamano's narrative drive far more compelling that it was in SOLANGE, as well as the way the script (co-written by Dallamano) develops the insidious operations of the corrupt sex ring, run by ambitious men who get off on their ability to control their underage victims absolutely. If it weren't for the presence of the bloody-handed assassin, DAUGHTERS wouldn't be a giallo at all.         

THE HYPNOTIC EYE (1960)

 

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

Someone said that artists are like sorcerers who can be bound by their own spells. Certainly this is true of those creators who become so enraptured by certain themes that they repeat them obsessively. That said, obviously there are also creators to whom spell-casting is just a job, and they use magic after the fashion of Mickey Mouse’s junior magician in FANTASIA. -- THE CURSE OF THE MUMMY'S TOMB review.

Look, I told you the history [laughs]-- I had an idea, a wacko idea about the line, then instead of making a film for 45 bucks with a line in a loop and a voiceover, we're into 365,000 bucks. It was cast badly, and it wasn't a very good movie by any stretch of the imagination [laughs]. I went on to do better things. This was an early, quick effort. I must tell you, I never took it very seriously, it was all just sort of a lark.-- ASTONISHING B-MONSTER interview with HYPNOTIC EYE screenwriter William Read Woodfield. 

It's easy for a critic to wax philosophical about the complexities of a famous filmmaker like, say, Alfred Hitchcock. Not only was Hitchcock embraced, due to his superb directorial skills, by major film-companies, he was one of those creators who came back to favorite themes over and over. Hitchcock gave interviews that repeatedly testified as to his personal erudition. Thus, if a critic noticed that a character in an original script written for AH was named "Justine," the critic might feel himself justified in asking Hitchcock if this was a calculated reference to the most famous literary character by that name, the one created by the Marquis De Sade.

I don't know how educated William Read Woodfield, the architect of THE HYPNOTIC EYE, was at the time he wrote the movie with his wife (who has no other writing-credits on IMDB). Woodfield was known principally as a Hollywood photographer, and IMDB only testifies to his having written two episodes of the TV show SEA HUNT before he wrote EYE. In the excerpt above, Woodfield claims to have gone on to "better things," by which he presumably meant high-prestige TV shows like COLUMBO and MISSION IMPOSSIBLE (and not so much for his scripts for TIME TUNNEL and LOST IN SPACE). 

I can't discount Woodfield making light of his work on EYE. At the same time, the Woodfield giving the interview is not necessarily identical with the Woodfield of 1960. Who can say that the writer didn't tap some deeper part of his consciousness back then, when he was desperate to be something better than a writer on SEA HUNT? He claims in the interview not to have been aware of William Castle's theatrical gimmicks, but any film boasting the fake come-on of a non-existent process called "Hypno-Magic" makes that claim pretty dubious. Similarly, was a guy trying to break into the world of low-budget horror-films, if only temporarily, necessarily ignorant of trends in the genre? The late 1950s are marked by an escalation of the violence in horror movies, and EYE certainly fits that trend as well.          

 

Further, one need not assume that 1960 Woodfield followed the same critic-approved creative process as Alfred Hitchcock. Woodfield may have testified to his own process as being loosely associative in nature, through the barely necessary EYE character Philip Hecht, a police psychologist of some sort. We first meet Hecht showing off the way his mind works by tossing darts at a bunch of newspaper clippings on the wall, constructing a "sentence" out of his having hit, in succession, Sigmund Freud, a Valentine's Day card, and the derriere of Jayne Mansfield. That sort of process resembles the way Woodfield talks about putting EYE together out of his fascination with stage hypnosis acts.

But EYE isn't really all about sex, as per Freud's own obsessions; it's first and foremost about violence. Like this famous scene:

Within the film's first ten minutes, we see this scene and learn from dimwit cop Dave Kennedy (Joe Patridge) that the girl who sets her own hair on fire is just one of many curious self-mutilations that have been taking place in recent times. Possibly they've all occurred on Dave's beat, since he's been assigned to divine what seems to be a serial-assailant mystery with no assailant evident. Yet Dave, though he seems too dumb to know how to spell "psychology," finds his way to the mystery's solution by random association, for he tells Hecht that he and his girlfriend Marcia (Marcia Henderson) plan to take in a new hypnotist act that night. 

 The film-viewer will solve the mystery long before Dave does, once said viewer sees the Great Desmond (Jacques Bergerac) working his magic on stage. Oddly, we first see Desmond tormenting four seated men with illusions of being extremely hot or cold, etc. But once he calls three pretty young women up on the stage for a routine, the viewer easily deduces the hypnotist's complicity in the unsolved acts of violence.

 To be sure, there's the strong suggestion that the women in the audience are very anxious to have the charming Desmond exert his power over them. Marcia almost volunteers to be one of the hypnotist's subjects, but her friend Dodie takes Marcia's place as Sacrificial Lamb. Later, Dodie is the next self-mutilation victim. Does Dave start to suspect Desmond then? No, but Marcia does, and then she puts herself in harm's way, dating Desmond in order to learn his secret.

But Woodfield has a twist on the usual formula of the sexually-repressed male serial killer-- one of whom. Norman Bates, would make his cinematic debut that same year. Desmond's stage assistant Justine (Allison Hayes) might wear the costume of The Pretty Girl who's supposed to distract audiences from an illusionist's tricks, but she's the one in control of everything Desmond does. She's also evidently his superior in hypnotism, in that she personally commands Marcia to enter a scalding shower and almost succeeds in another mutilation except for Dave's timely arrival on the scene.    

The unexpected appearance of Justine somehow triggers Dave into doing actual police work, like interviewing all the mutilation victims (which one would have thought he'd have already done). Admittedly, this time he's seeking to learn if any of them encountered Desmond before. Hecht helps Dave figure out that all of the victims, including Dodie, have been hypnotically commanded to forget their encounters with Desmond. To be sure, none of this detective-work proves relevant. A post-hypnotic command forces Marcia to return to the theater, where Desmond is using his powers (enhanced by a mechanical strobe-light eye held in one hand) to enthrall his entire audience. Dave and Hecht arrive on the scene, Marcia is saved, and the two evil hypnotists die.

I don't know if Woodfield ever read anything about Sigmund Freud outside of some Sunday-supplement article, and I don't know if he was aware that the name Justine is attached to a character created by Sade-- though in fairness, that character was a victim of sadism, not a perpetrator. Woodfield may not have thought that much about his twist on the male-predator trope. He may have been thinking of famous folk tales about feminine jealousy like SNOW WHITE. Another model that comes even closer to EYE's plot is one version of the Medusa story. In this iteration, Medusa starts out as a gorgeous mortal woman. She's pursued by the god Poseidon, and despite her taking shelter in the temple of Athena, he rapes her there. Then, to add injury to injury, Athena (who apparently has no power to curse Poseidon) avenges the pollution to her honor by cursing the mortal woman to become the grotesque Gorgon with the petrifying visage.

There's no way to know precisely what 1960 William Woodfield had on his mind when he (and maybe his wife with him) wrote EYE. But even if he later thought of the movie as junk, he didn't write it as indifferently as most junk of the time was written. The movie is lurid, but it's preoccupied not with a male predator killing women as a sex-substitute (paging Norman again), but with a ruthless queen determined to make sure no mortal woman could outshine her without suffering for it. Even a last-minute "motivation" for Justine's actions-- she whips off a facemask to reveal that she too is scarred like her later victims-- bears some resemblance to the way the Greek goddess Athena carried around the image of a Gorgon's head, either on her shield or her clothing, with which to terrify her enemies. I think it's eminently possible that Woodfield, thinking more in terms of free association than in terms of studied metaphors, formulated a story in which women lose their beauty due to feminine jealousy-- and at the risk of sounding misogynist, that just might be a theme to which female horror-fans might warm more than would males of that species.                             

FRECKLED MAX AND THE SPOOKS (1987)

 

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

Well, at least FRECKLED MAX can lay claim to being the best German cut of a Czech TV series adapted from a book, FRANKENSTEIN'S AUNT, by a Swedish author.

I usually don't review compilations, but given that the seven episodes of the Czech (I think) series FRANKENSTEIN'S AUNT probably won't ever come my way intact, I thought I might as well give this hour-and-a-half smorgasbord a look.

However, aside from noting MAX's place in the history of monster mashup movies, there's not a lot I can say. Often compilations can be incoherent because they leave out a lot of establishing elements. However, here there were only seven episodes, and it still seems incoherent. I think it's unlikely the show had regular scripts, but rather that the makers just jammed a lot of goofy incidents together and let the actors have fun performing them.

The "Max" of the title is an orphaned circus kid who resents the adults exploiting him after his parents' deaths. So he runs away from the circus, and to the Castle of Doctor Frankenstein, where he becomes the roving viewpoint character for some or all of the absurdities. Henry Frankenstein is gone, but both his monster, named "Albert" after Einstein, and his aunt Hannah (Viveca Lindfors) are still around. The main plot, such as it is, seems to be the quest of Albert-- who just looks like a big dumb guy-- to marry a local human girl, Klara (sexy Italian actress Barbara de Rossi). While Albert courts Klara, other monsters hang around the castle doing silly things for who knows what reasons-- the ghost of Erzebeth Bathory, called "The White Lady," and Dracula, played by Ferdy Mayne of FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS fame. The IMDB page says that Eddie Constantine played some sort of water spirit in the TV show, but I didn't see him in the compilation.

Though MAX is about as plotless as a movie can be, I must admit all the actors and their costumes looked good, so I was moderately entertained once I gave up expecting anything but pretty pictures.    

VIOLENCE JACK (1986, 1988, 1990)

 

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

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

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

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

       

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

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

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

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

                       

SNOW WHITE (2025)

 

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

A funny "inverse parallel" struck me when I thought of this revisionist remake alongside the 2024 movie WICKED PART ONE.

The story of Dorothy in Baum and at MGM is "Us Us Us" (i.e., Dorothy needing and finding friends/allies) but WICKED transfers the story to the Witch, whose story is all "Me Me Me."

The story of Snow White both in fairy tale and at Disney is "Me Me Me" (Snow finding her own identity) but the 2025 revision makes her story about "Us Us Us."

Of the many complaints I heard about the 2025 SNOW WHITE, none of them mentioned the strange insistence on altruistic motives for Snow (Rachel Zegler) throughout the script. I don't discount the other complaints. I'm sure the filmmakers thought the de-emphasizing the original's romance elements would be in line with feminist thought. And I don't doubt that they shifted the meaning of the "Snow White" name so that the film wouldn't seem to be trumpeting the virtues of Whiteness. But I was quite surprised that the film opens with a long musical number telling the audience how from childhood Snow was taught by her royal mother and father to serve the people rather than ruling them. In expansive scenes showing kid-Snow working in the kitchen with the plebes, we're told via song that "the bounty of the land belonged to all who tended it." This redefinition of Snow White's character arc away from personal wish-fulfillment and toward a super-altruism becomes particularly ironic given the much-excerpted scene regarding Snow's interaction with the dwarfs.

Online pundits made much of this scene, in which Snow seems to be ordering the dwarfs, in their own house, to clean things while she sits back and supervises. Admittedly this was a change from the attitude of the 1937 Snow White, who industriously cleans the house herself to repay the "little men" for their kindness to her. But in fairness, the exact connotation of the 2025 Snow-scene is that she's discreetly telling the dwarfs to clean up a big mess that they just made-- and without even mentioning that the rough talk from six of them hurt Dopey's feelings. The rather mild commandments from 2025 Snow are not that different from 1937 Snow being a little strict with the dwarfs as she becomes their surrogate mother. 

Further, the cleaning-scene is nowhere near as egregious as all of the instances in which 2025 Snow is constantly worrying about the fate of her precious people, under the tyrannical rule of the Evil Queen (Gal Gadot). Even her alleged "romance" with the handsome bandit Jonathan (Andrew Burnap) is predicated on her trying to persuade him to help her free her people instead of doing things for the benefit of himself and his fellow forest-thieves. In a duet between Jonathan and Snow, he accuses her of focusing on "princess problems" (are those like "white people's problems?"), but there's no real suggestion that this Snow is entitled in any way. 

In contrast, the Queen is selfhood personified, and her competition to be "fairest in the land" has less to do with feminine beauty and more to do with their differing definitions of what is "fair." For Snow, "fair" signifies the total social equity she raised to believe in, and which she never questions for a moment. (Presumably she believes in "inclusion" too, since she inhabits a multi-racial medieval kingdom.) For the Queen, "fair" means whatever gets her what she wants. Her big solo number, "All is Fair," is a terrible song with awful doggerel lyrics. But the song gets across the script's labored point: the Queen only uses the word "fair" ironically, as in the saying, "All's fair in love and war." And the Queen would amend even that only to "self-love," because she's incapable of any other form of love. Additionally, this means that her command of the kingdom is founded on the Hobbesian idea of "the war of all against all," endless competition for self-gratification. This is certainly an atypical script from credited writer Erin Cressida Wilson, best known in cinema for erotic/psychological thrillers like CHLOE, SECRETARY, and THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN. In all likelihood, she just took the money and wrote what some Disney functionaries told her she had to write.

Nothing else in SNOW WHITE is as interesting as the battle of Snow and the Queen as representations of altruism and selfishness, respectively. The script's treatment of this important theme is both jejune and naive, particularly when it suggests that the only good reason for having a love affair is to get your "non-aristocratic prince charming" help you promote the cause of equity. But it's at least a better theme than anything in WICKED PART ONE, with its endless self-pitying "me me me" refrain.  

What else? The CGI dwarfs, I guess. If I'd seen the film as a kid-- not knowing any of the backstage rumpus brought about by Peter "Dickhead" Dinklage-- I would probably have found the animated little people reasonably entertaining, assuming I'd never seen the 1937 original. They're not horrible, but they would have been better played by costumed dwarfs.

Performances? Zegler sings well but as an actress she's bland, and I for one can't tell if she could do better with a better script. Burnap tries harder to bring charm to his good-hearted rogue so I think he probably can act. Gadot looks great as the Evil Queen, but she's also utterly one-note in terms of character. The entire significance of Snow's "death-by-apple" is bungled with some extraneous stuff about rescuing Snow's lost father, who's not really alive anyway yatta yatta yatta. When the reckoning comes between Snow and her adversary, the Queen manages to snuff herself in a scene that I found reminiscent of the climax of 2005's THE BROTHERS GRIMM. Given the context, I guess Disney could have found worse sources to steal from.

There's no question that Leftist politics informed the decision of 2025 SNOW to downplay romance in favor of group ethics. But I have seen far, far worse examples of ideological distortion than this one. SNOW WHITE probably wouldn't even crack the Top 50. 

 

XXX: THE RETURN OF XANDER CAGE (2017)

 

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

Maybe I was just in the mood for near-mindless action, but I enjoyed this retread more than either of the first two films. My snap judgment is that I enjoyed the directorial moxie of DJ Caruso, who'd done a couple of previous high-ticket thrillers before this, but who's not exactly known as an action-guy.

Both of the previous films involved marvelous technology kept somewhat on the margins. CAGE foregrounds a major tech-threat involving "Pandora's Box," a device that can cause US satellites to crash to Earth like ballistic missiles. The heroes themselves don't use many gadgets themselves, except for a pair of briefly-seen "strength gloves" with which one can punch through steel. It's possible that in reviving the franchise the producers decided they would go full-bore with the "James Bond As Science Fiction" trope.  

Xander Cage, said to have been knocked off in the second franchise-movie, is really alive and off the grid, not wanting to get drawn into further espionage games. However, the Pandora's Box device is stolen by a bunch of extreme-sports agents, and one of those crashing satellites apparently kills Gibbons (Samuel L. Jackson), the former head of the XXX program. The spy-chief in charge (Toni Collette) figures out that Cage is still alive and coaxes him into using his extreme-sports skills in the service of Good, even if he doesn't believe that the government is a good in itself. "It's all just rebels and tyrants," Cage tells the chief. Her response of "which are you" somehow gets him to sign up. She tries to give him a team of Marines for his support-team and Cage kicks them to the curb, selecting his own backup.

Understandably, none of the secondary players are as charismatic as Diesel's Cage, and the same is true as the enemy-team, with the possible exception of the other team's Really Hot Girl, Serena (Deepika Padukone). I'll give away one of the film's reveals by noting that the other team is also an XXX team that had been recruited by the maybe-not-dead Gibbons, and so you have another example of different government agents getting pitted against one another. The identity of the villain who has the deadly device is only a minor twist, but just when you think all is well-- it's time for another spyjinks-doublecross! Also, if anyone was missing Ice Cube's XXX 2.0 from the second movie, he comes in at the end, making this another crossover-movie.

The dialogue generally counterpoints the action: airy and light and thus matching Diesel's encore performance. Padukone and Ruby Rose (as a sniper) provide some femme-fight action, while Donnie Yen and Tony Jaa furnish representation on the XY side. Nina Dobrev as a non-combatant agent drawn into the chaos provides some humorous moments. The flick was a success, and thus I'm surprised that no further installments have appeared as yet.   
       

SWORDSMAN III: THE EAST IS RED (1993)

 

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

I assume that if the subtitle "east is red" is accurate with respect to the Chinese original, there's some pun involved on the name of the villain, Invincible Dawn, because he/she unleashes so much bloody carnage.

The third and last of the SWORDSMAN films dispenses with the starring characters of Ling and Kiddo from the first two films. In SWORDSMAN, both of them were young practitioners of a particular kung-fu school and they became involved in the battles of other schools to obtain a world-conquering manual of martial arts. I criticized that film for not really establishing the ethos of the main characters, but SWORDSMAN II did much better, in that Ling and Kiddo attempt to flee the fractious kung-fu world and appear to succeed by film's end. Taking their place here is a new viewpoint character, a court official named Ku (Yu Rongguang of IRON MONKEY), but he's not the central figure. That honor goes to the aforementioned male-turned-female kung-fu master Invincible Dawn (Brigitte Lin, returning to reprise her role from the second film). 

As EAST begins, it's been some years since Dawn appeared to perish at the end of SWORDSMAN II. The various martial clans lack a strong leader, and perhaps this lack encourages another attack of Japanese forces on the Ming rulership. It's possible that the Ming court seeks an alliance with Spain, for when we first see Ku, he's escorting a contingent of Spanish sailors to the last known location of a sunken Spanish ship from the second movie. (It was said to be Dutch in that movie's subtitles, but whatever.) Ku guides the Spaniards to the area where the ship was lost, which (in this film at least) is also the location where Dawn appeared to perish. 

For some reason Ku also guides the foreigners to the reputed gravesite of Dawn, where they all encounter a mysterious old man. At this point, the Spanish leader reveals that he wants to plunder the grave and steal the martial-arts manual, which he assumes was buried with the evil kung-fu master. I don't know how a bunch of Europeans with no kung-fu training could possibly have harnessed the book's powers, but anyway Ku takes exception to profaning the grave of a deceased master. However, Ku finds a new ally in the old man, who turns out to be Dawn in disguise, and who kills all the Spaniards.

Ku seems thrilled to see Dawn alive again, though he's not thrilled at his penchant for wholesale murder. Ku has some harebrained of enlisting Dawn to straighten out the chaos of the kung-fu world, for almost the first words out of his mouth is the news that a lot of martial masters are assuming the identity of Invincible Dawn in order to gain prominence. Indeed, we later find out that one of Dawn's courtiers, name of Xue (Joey Wong), has taken on Dawn's mantle.

After that setup, the rest of the film devolves into just one magical battle after another, with Dawn vanquishing nearly everyone with her special wuxia skills. Ku is more or less the guy who uncorks the genie but can't control it, but he doesn't seem to be conscious of his mistake, possibly because he's such a flat character. Ku also gets into some fights with the only slightly less powerful Xue, and in the background there's some indication that the Spaniards and Japanese have become allies against China. But from that point on, the filmmakers' only desire is to overawe the audience with a few dozen wuxia wonders. In the end Dawn regrets all of his misdeeds and retires from the kung-fu world-- which might disappoint some fans who felt some more exacting punishment was due.

While EAST is more interesting than the first movie by virtue of showing the near-impossibility of reining in such superhuman fighters, it's still not that impressive even in comparison to the better "chopwackies" of the 1970s and 1980s.   
            

     

BEASTMASTER SEASON ONE (1999-2000)

 

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

Just as the 1982 BEASTMASTER film was based only loosely on a 1960s Andre Norton space opera, this teleseries was based very loosely on the first film. There were two DTV movies in the nineties, but neither was worth much, aside from their keeping the franchise alive, until this series germinated.

Just as XENA took advantage of the unspoiled lands of New Zealand, BEASTMASTER shot in both Australia and Canada in order to put across the sense of a primeval fantasy-world. Though XENA had a higher number of strong myth-episodes, its jumbled use of different historical periods compromised any sense of the "enchantment" that many fantasy-fans prefer. BEASTMASTER takes place in a fantasy-world with no connection to Earth, and overall the producers did a better job of evoking, through sight and sound, the appeal of a sword-and-sorcery world, for all that the hero fights evil not with a sword but a staff.

As in the 1982 movie, titular character Dar (Daniel Goddard) is the last of his tribe, who are slain by invading hostiles, this time named "Terrons" and led by a ruthless warlord, King Zad (Steven Grives). Because Dar possesses an innate rapport with the entire animal kingdom, he can speak to them and sometimes ask their assistance. Four nonhuman creatures regularly travel with Dar: tiger Ruh, eagle Sharak, and two ferrets, Kodo and Podo. Dar also befriends itinerant scholar Tao (Jackson Raine), who provides a certain amount of comedy as well as discoursing on abstract matters far from Dar's concern. As is the case with most sword-and-sorcery serials, most stories are episodic, concerning Dar and Tao wandering from place to place, either being menaced by assorted aggressors or coming to the aid of innocents. There are occasional opponents whose peril extends over more than one episode, but there are none of the big, ambitious story-arcs seen in the aforementioned XENA.      

Zad is the duo's most frequent enemy but he's less interesting than two support characters not resembling anything in the movies: two magicians, The Sorceress (Monika Schnarre) and her master/tutor The Ancient One (Grahame Bond). Most of the time they simply watch Dar's struggles, like some Howardian take on The Book of Job, occasionally intervening to help Dar or Zad. The Ancient One is impossibly old, and any humanity he may have had has been overlaid by a dry scorn toward mortals. The Sorceress is also much older than she looks, and in olden times she and another student conspired to overthrow their perceptor. For this attempt, the Sorceress was punished with a loss of memory, while the male student was transformed into Sharak the Eagle. The showrunners may have been going for a lovelorn "Ladyhawke" vibe by making Sharak-- originally just a regular bird-- the lost romantic interest of The Sorceress. This trope is sometimes slightly affecting but in Season One at least, it doesn't develop into anything, since the Ancient One has to remain in power to utter all of his gnomic witticisms.        

           

Of the various recurring characters who appear more irregularly, the best is Curupira (Emilie di Raven), a sort of forest-goddess who tasks Dar with doing a good job of protecting her animal subjects. The one-shot characters range from nugatory (a tribe of Amazons) to mythically resonant (a culture of island-dwellers, more fully explored in my only standalone review of a Season One episode). But even those magical entities who are not fully realized still have a touch on unpredictability about them.

Dar has one romantic arc of sorts, in that his lover Kyra is taken prisoner by the Terrons, but it will come to no one's surprise that she disappears during the middle episodes of the season and comes back near the end just to get eliminated from the narrative. Dar himself is something of a pacifist; he seeks to knock out his enemies rather than killing them, though he restrains himself less out of righteousness than out of a desire not to be like his ruthless opponents. As a series it's more often pleasant rather than compelling, but it does have its own unique charisma.     

BEETLEJUICE (1988)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *superior*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

One reason I label BEETLEJUICE's mythicity as "superior" rather than just "good" is because the story-- as much a concoction of Michael Keaton's improvisations as the title character as of the assorted script rewrites-- is one of the most original ever spawned in Hollywood. But when I say "original," I don't mean something created ex nihilo. Nothing comes from nothing, but real originality inheres in the artist's ability to swipe from so many sources that the synthesis *seems* original. 

For instance, one could argue that BEETLEJUICE takes a lot from the basic trope "supernatural being causes trouble for humans." The earliest script was more of a violent horror film, but Tim Burton allegedly saw the concept's potential for absurdist comedy, and for that reason lobbied for Michael Keaton as the star, based on perceiving his skill at channeling manic energy into his roles. But even if one specifies the trope further-- "supernatural being causes comical trouble for humans"-- most supernatural comedies provide some sort of rule-structure for the paranormal presence, be it a ghost, a demon or a leprechaun. No so much for the ghosts of BEETLEJUICE. There's no heaven or hell in the afterlife for these revenants, and though the script avoids touching on theology, the implication seems to be that the spirits of the dead are essentially cobbling together their own unliving cosmos. In places this world feels like a slapstick take on the Greek Hades, where spirits ceaselessly mourn their lost corporeality. There may also be a little borrowing from one aspect of the Egyptian afterlife: the part where the spirits of the deceased can be gobbled up by spirit-eating monsters (here called Sandworms, one of whom plays a big role in the climax). 

Such is the cosmos to which Adam and Barbara Maitland (Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis) are introduced. The two, a couple living in a country house near a Connecticut city (talked about but never seen as such), are childless for reasons not divulged, and Adam in particular has channeled some of his energy on creating a tabletop scale-model of the nearby city. Then both of them perish in an auto accident, and as discarnate spirits wander back to their country house. An unknown entity leaves them a "handbook for the recently deceased," and they realize that they're ghosts. Because ordinary humans can't see them, they can do nothing about their house being sold to a pair of narcissistic vulgarians, Charles and Delia Deetz (Jeffrey Jones, Catherine O'Hara). With the Deetzes come Charles' Goth-outfitted daughter Lydia (Winona Ryder), whose gloomy affectation may relate to the reason for her mother's absence (though nothing about the first Mrs. Deetz is ever disclosed). Being perhaps a little psychic, Lydia can see Adam and Barbara, and over time they see in her the offspring they never had-- which is more than her neglectful parental units can see.      

                          

The Maitlands seek out the source of the afterlife manual: a bureaucratic office where harried caseworkers seek to sort out what fates are allotted to various unquiet spirits. The Maitlands learn that for some reason they have to keep haunting their old house, even though the vulgar Charles and Delia have turned the place into a greater visual horror than either ghost can imagine. The unhappy ghosts learn of the "bio-exorcist" Beetlejuice, who claims to be able to chase the living out of their houses. It's never clear what remuneration the gross ghost desires for his services, nor why he manifests within Adam's town-model. Probably, to the extent that the scripters thought about the matter, both have something to do with Beetlejuice trying to escape restrictions placed on him, *possibly* by the classically named lady-ghost Juno (Sylvia Sidney), who is both Beetlejuice's former boss and the caseworker for Adam and Barbara. The ghost-couple tries to chase away the Deetzes with paranormal tricks but their efforts only intrigue Charles into believing he can exploit his "haunted house" for profit. Though the Maitlands begin to reconsider their exorcism of humans, purely for Lydia's sake, Charles just wants to control the home's former owners. To that end, he coaxes one of his equally clueless fellow travelers to perform an invocation, but the lunkhead screws up the ritual and the Maitlands are in danger of complete annihilation. Lydia can only save them by unleashing the chaos of Beetlejuice-- after which the Maitlands have to save her from the lubricious specter.

Based on available accounts it sounds as if Burton created or encouraged the idea of portraying all of the ghosts as shapeshifters, largely because that idea gave the director lots of latitude for cartoon-like transformations. That said, only Beetlejuice and the Maitlands seem to be able to perform loads of ectoplasmic mutations and poltergeist tricks. Most of the ghosts seen at the processing office seem to be stuck in the forms they had at the time they perished-- throats cut, wrists slashed, one's whole body squashed flat by some sort of conveyance. The BEETLEJUICE script is one of the least polemical ever filmed. Yet, even so, the callous title character can't understand Lydia flirting with death, because in his cosmos there's nothing "easeful" (a la Keats) about the afterlife. Yet even if Beetlejuice is trying to invade the mortal world somehow (he whips up a marriage-ceremony between him and Lydia that will supposedly free him from his bondage), everything he does, even his comical "bio-exorcist" routines, connotes the dead's hatred of the living, just for still being alive. This is a hostility that the Maitlands experience as well, though they're able to transcend resentment in the name of love. In the final moments it's evident they're now providing Lydia with the good guidance she doesn't get from her living parents.

I held off reviewing BEETLEJUICE for a long time because even its few weak points don't keep it from being one of the Greatest Comedies of All Time (note that here I'm not making the "in Hollywood" qualification). I could write another essay just listing all the things that make its funny scenes lastingly amusing, where so many other comedies exhaust their humor once you see the basic joke. But I felt I should set down my thoughts at last, in part because it's impossible to review BEETLEJUICE, BEETLEJUICE without some reference to this originary narrative.                             

SWORDSMAN II (1992)

 

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

It's a minor puzzle to me that the 1990 Swordsman is so mediocre next to its sequel. They used the same characters (though barely any of the same actors) and the same source material. Two of the credited directors for S2, Tsui Hark and Ching Sui-Ting, had forged major pathways for Hong Kong cinema of the late eighties, particularly with the stylish, wonder-filled CHINESE GHOST STORY trilogy. I mentioned that the 1990 film had some mixed backstage history, in that original director King Hu departed the project, but why weren't Hark and Ching able to pull the 1990 film together? 

Whatever the reasons for the first film's failures, S2 finds an admirable way to provide some dramatic compass for the movie, even though this movie like S1 still focuses upon the often-confusing interplay between various kung-fu clans. During the Ming dynasty the generals of a Japanese militia, expelled from their own country, land in China and conspire to usurp the rule of the Emperor. These invaders, at least some of whom are ninjas, join forces with a kung-fu clan seen in the first film, the Sun Moon Clan. This alliance is made possible when the "good" masters of the Clan, one of whom is Ren Yingying (Rosamund Kwan), get expelled by a new master, Invincible Dawn (Brigitte Lin). Though Dawn is male and speaks with a deep voice, he underwent one of those many mystical transformations possible in wuxia movies, becoming female in terms of outward appearance-- though only his courtiers know his true nature. 

After this conspiracy is detailed, the script focuses upon the same two main characters of the first film, Ling (Jet Li) and Kiddo (Michelle Reis). Though both are still young albeit skilled members of the Hua sect, they're thinking about ditching the constant strife of the martial arts world. Kiddo, secretly in love with Ling, wishes that he could see her as a woman, though I have no idea why she constantly runs around in men's attire in the first place. Ling for his part has some romantic attachment to the aforementioned Ren. I confess I barely remember Ren from the first film, but she's a more interesting character this time, having some fun badinage with her serving-woman Blue Phoenix (Fennie Yuen, returning from the 1990 film). 

The assault of Dawn's forces on Ren's Sun Moon court provides one of the film's most memorable scenes, as ninjas ride into battle on their own flying nunchakus and toss scorpions at the guardians, who in turn toss snakes back at the invaders. Ren has to flee. Slightly later, Ling and Kiddo show up at the Hua pavilion and almost get into a fatal fight with their own young colleagues. Once they recognize one another, the martial artists-- all of whom plan to foreswear the martial life-- nevertheless enjoy their old camaraderie, though Kiddo finds herself not embracing being "one of the boys" so much. The youths all get a false message that Ren is being held by Dawn's forces, so they attempt to rescue her, only to get directed to the real location of the exiled Sun Moon luminaries. 

Somewhat later Ling makes a solo assault on Dawn's stronghold, but when he meets the "master," he mistakes him for a female prisoner and tries to shield Dawn from his own guards. Ling apparently falls for Dawn, who remains silent to conceal her deep voice. (Later the evil martial master learns how to modulate his voice into a feminine register, allowing Brigitte Lin to use her own speech.) Later, during a fractious encounter with Woxing, the father of Ren-- who's secretly colluding with Dawn-- Ling refuses to marry Ren, clearly breaking her heart (but giving Kiddo new hope).

The final battle shows the original Sun Moon acolytes and their Hua allies taking on Dawn's forces, and this results in Dawn's apparent death (though Lin returns as the character in the final sequel). In a nice if acrimonious scene between Ling and Woxing, Woxing mocks the younger man's naivete, saying it's impossible to really leave the martial world. "As long as there are people, there will be grievances. Where there are grievances, there is the martial arts world." I found that such realistic assessments of the Nature of Man acted as a pleasing counterpoint to the many wild wuxia wonders--- killing opponents with thrown needles, uprooting trees when opponents hide inside them. Additionally, though often I think that "queer theory" proponents overstate the significance of male characters masquerading as women, or even transforming magically into women, here t Ahe screenwriters might've had some "genderfluid" ideas going on in their conception of Dawn, though it should be noted that he is still an unregenerate villain as a woman.  At the end of the film, Ling and Kiddo depart the Sun Moon Sect and don't return for the sequel. This may imply that Kiddo's constancy may finally be reciprocated once they leave behind the world of senseless strife.                   

FILIBUS (1915)

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.          

PLANET OF THE VAMPIRE WOMEN (2011)

 

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

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

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

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

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

IN THE NAME OF THE KING: THE LAST MISSION (2014)

 

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

The one good thing about MISSION is that it's so bad I won't have to spend much time on it.

It's also a minimal plus that we're now completely divorced from the faux-Tolkein RPG with which the series began. MISSION is close to being a remake of TWO WORLDS, with stony-faced Dominic Purcell taking over the role of the weary battle-scarred Earth-warrior from the far more charismatic Dolph Lundgren. Curiously, the writer for MISSION eschews the sympathetic-veteran type, choosing instead to make Purcell's character Kaine a reluctant hitman. This choice doesn't make for a hero in whom the casual viewer can invest, particularly since Kaine's "last job" involves kidnapping two little girls from a Bulgarian embassy in the US. Kaine, after having told his criminal bosses that the job is impossible, accomplishes it with very little trouble (no sign of any police action in the whole film) and imprisons the girls in a connex box for the bosses to pick up later. But before he leaves them in their temporary prison, he randomly swipes an amulet from one little girl.    

  Moments later the magical amulet whisks the bewildered assassin into a medieval village under current attack by a fire-breathing CGI dragon. Kaine takes shelter in one of the huts, owned as it happens by two exiled princesses, Arabella and Emelina (Ralitza Paskaleva, Daria Simeonova). Because Kaine briefly shot his pistol at the beastie, the ladies think Kaine's some sort of savior. They give Kaine a breakdown of previous events: they're hiding because a tyrant named Tervon killed their royal parents in order to take control of Bulgaria--

What? It's not the RPG fantasy-world of "Ehb," but medieval Bulgaria? I guess that when Uwe Boll negotiated with Bulgarian reps to shoot there with an all-native cast, someone thought that placing the film's action in a medieval version of their country might help tourism. That might've been interesting if there was anything one learned about Bulgarian history or customs, but as far as cultural depth goes, it might as well still be another interchangeable fantasy-verse.

Almost anyone can predict where the movie goes from here. Kaine doesn't want to get dragged into these RenFair shenanigans, but he learns that the only way to get back to his world to get hold of some other magical doohickey in Tervon's possession. Arabella initially doesn't like Kaine, but eventually they become slightly more romantic with one another. So Kaine goes from reluctant hitman to reluctant savior, with next to no character alteration, and there are lots of poorly staged battles, in which the two princesses show off their swordfighting skills.

Kaine does have one half-decent fight with Tervon before the Earthman returns to Earth. Once there, he suddenly turns on his employers and shoots it out with them, receiving some aid from-- the dragon, which followed him to Earth? What? Anyway, he kills all the other crooks and returns the girls to their daddy, who lets Kaine go free. He walks into the sunset with the dragon flying overhead.

I add the "clansgression" tag to this movie because when Arabella was talking about Tervon killing her parents, I could swear she said that (a) Tervon was her uncle, and (b) he got wroth with her parents because they wouldn't let him marry Arabella, his niece. I could be wrong, though, because I won't waste the time to re-check the scene.