The Phantom (1996)

Guns in movies are rarely treated properly, both in how they function and in how they are used.  We all know the old tropes.  They quite often have a seemingly limitless supply of ammunition, only running out as a plot convenience in order to throw a curveball at the shooter.  When people do run out of bullets, they whip their weapon (not a euphemism) at their enemy, as if this will in any way be effective, and, of course, discounting that they’ll ever get more bullets to reload.  After killing an enemy who also has guns, characters will neither take those guns for future use nor check the body for ammunition they can use.  Characters who go underwater while having a gun on their person emerge from the water and immediately start flawlessly shooting, as if the water wouldn’t affect the bullets or the mechanism at all (the exception to this that stands out in my mind is the fantastic sequence in the Coen Bros’ No Country for Old Men).  By turns, audiences forgive, deride, and cherish these instances, and this is usually based on context.  In a film like Taxi Driver, the realism of the filmic world demands that the weapons behave in a verisimilitudinous fashion.  Conversely, in something like Rambo: First Blood Part 2, the expectation is that Rambo would never run out of bullets, because he is a fantasy character in a fantasy world (he is, after all, re-fighting and winning the Vietnam War for all Americans).  

But even in far-fetched circumstances, there are some utilizations of firearms that both dumbfound and generate incredulity.  Not to be too much the doryphore, but such an instance occurs in Simon Wincer’s The Phantom.  Chasing after the badguys, the Phantom (Billy Zane) uses his twin AMT Hardballer .45s to slide down an elevator cable.  Never mind the physics of the descent.  Between the heat generated on the guns and the friction from the cables, those firearms would be better suited for paperweights than weapons from there on out (one instance where throwing guns at an enemy would actually make sense).  It’s funny that this stood out to me, especially considering that the film is a complete flight of fancy in every way, though I can say that it didn’t ruin the experience at all.  But stand out it did.

The Phantom guards the Bengale Jungle from all intruders, sworn to fight greed and cruelty in all their forms.  He becomes entwined in the fiendish plot of rich villain Xander Drax (Treat Williams) to combine and harness the power of three mystic skulls (one gold, one silver, one jade) for his own villainous ends.  The upshot is that he also reconnects with college sweetheart and adventurer Diana Palmer (Kristy Swanson).  Much globetrotting and thrills ensue.

The Phantom is a comic strip character created in 1936 by Lee Falk and distributed by King Features Syndicate.  While the strip is still being produced and printed today (obviously not by Falk, who passed away in 1999), his characters have also appeared in comic books, prose books, animated series, and live-action serials, and that’s to say nothing of the merchandising that comes with a property of this magnitude.  Falk was quoted as saying, “To me, The Phantom and Mandrake [the Magician] are very real – much more than the people walking around whom I don’t see very much.”  This sums up the key to making stories about characters like this (in fact, characters in any genre) work well.  The creators have to believe in them and the world they inhabit.  When they don’t, the result tends to be self-consciously hollow, fetishizing the heightened aspects rather than dealing with these realities as a whole.  As a sidebar, this is why I think a great many of the films which are done in a “retro” fashion (as well as the slew of recent genre spoof movies) simply don’t work; the filmmakers are so busy winking at the audience with the superficial elements rather than crafting a solid film with compelling characters and narratives.  Back to the point, Wincer’s film works for me because it treats almost everything in it with the same perspective.  The action works just as well as the humor does (I realize that co-executive producer and proposed director Joe Dante said that the film was intended, first and foremost, to be comical but was played “disastrously” straight, an opinion with which I have to say I disagree).  It’s light throughout, and if anything, the film owes tons to Steven Spielberg not only in its visual style but also in its tone, which is very reminiscent of his Indiana Jones series (ironic in that his and George Lucas’ franchise was influenced at least partially by strips like The Phantom, but not entirely surprising, since Wincer directed several episodes of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and screenwriter Jeffrey Boam also penned the script for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade).     

One facet of the movie which stands out is its conflict between technology/civilization and mysticism/primitivity.  Clearly, the jungle that the Phantom inhabits is a wild place, and the Phantom himself is looked upon as a quasi-demigod.  The natives in the area believe him to be immortal, referring to him as “The Ghost Who Walks,” but this is a legend created to maintain order (the mantle of Phantom is a legacy passed down from fathers to sons [I believe Kit Walker, the Phantom of this story, is the 21^st in the line, though I could be wrong about that]).  The Phantom does not impose his will on those who look up to him.  He simply fights in their name in order for them to continue to keep their freedoms (something we all wish were more commonplace).  Diana connects the two worlds directly (though Kit can exist in both as indicated by his trip to New York City, his true place is in the primal forest).  She comes from a high society family, but she is an adventurer at heart, and while she quite prefers the latter to the former, she can handle both well.  In fact, when we are introduced to her, she has just returned from the Yukon where she contracted malaria, and she leaps at the opportunity to go into the jungle at her newspaperman Uncle Dave’s (Bill Smitrovich) mention.  Conversely, Drax is the force of corporate greed.  His world is ensconced in concrete, steel, and glass, and he kills people at a whim right on his own property because the lawmakers/peacekeepers in this modern society are thoroughly corrupt and in his pocket.  His intent is to use the ancient skulls (a form of technology in the guise of magic, if we take Arthur C. Clarke’s dictum that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” as law) as weapons, the implication being that innocent people would be the targets (as they are always the collateral damage of warfare, which is how Drax wants to use the artifacts), and thus being a force of subjugation.  The Phantom is the antithesis of everything Drax is as a character (with the exception of wealth, although Kit’s fortune comes from precious stones which he treats like baubles), and it is with this quality that he defeats him (still, truth be told, the Phantom also has a form of primitive technology akin to the skulls which aid him in this, and he does use firearms, so in this way, he is a synthesis between civilized and primitive, a trait many pulp heroes share).

The Phantom is an enjoyable, airy action/adventure film.  The cinematography by David Burr is gorgeous, and the mobile camerawork is dynamic and fluid.  The stuntwork and effects are impressive as all get out.  The action itself is filled with tension and follows the structure of series like Indiana Jones and James Bond, where it rises and falls, and most importantly, escalates.  It’s not enough for the Phantom to be stuck in a truck on a rickety rope bridge.  No, he is stuck in a truck on a rickety rope bridge with an innocent kid tied up in the back, the ropes breaking, a several hundred foot fall beneath, and only one hand free to do anything.  This is after a chase through the jungle, some fisticuffs, and more.  This is not the Batman series (1989 – 1997), though it was clearly produced because of that franchise, but they share certain flavors.  That said, this film does distinguish itself enough from the Warner Bros films and satisfies enough to be its own thing and worth seeing for a good time.

MVT:  The production values, its design, cinematography, locations, and so on are grand, especially considering its $45 million budget (which unfortunately wasn’t even recouped from its theatrical release).

Make or Break:  The initial action set piece sets the bar in all respects for the film, and the ones that proceed from it match it quite nicely in quality.

Score:  7/10         

Critters (1986)

Trends are something of a blessing and a curse.  On the one hand, they do provide some form of stability and predictability.  We know (to within some degree of certainty) what will happen in any given superhero film (you could even say in any summer tent pole film these days and you could probably also describe how each shot will be composed, rendered by a computer, and edited, but that’s a screed for some other time).  And these films are (generally) flocked to, because of the familiarity they engender.  Of course, the better ones do something a bit more original within their parameters.  It has always been this way.  Unfortunately, most of them are not the better ones.  

On the curse side, the same predictability of content ineffably leads to staleness, and from that point it becomes more and more a series of motions gone through, until they are no longer financially rewarding and boring beyond all reason.  Thus do we come to lineage stretching from Gremlins in 1984 to Ghoulies to Stephen Herek’s Critters to Munchies to Hobgoblins.  After being beaten to within an inch of its life, the trend will generally go into a coma for some time, and eventually will be resurrected for audiences who are either unfamiliar with them in the first place or have a nostalgic itch that they scratch for those who were around the first time down the road.  These cycles (like almost all cycles) are nigh inescapable.  That’s why they’re cycles.

One day, on the maximum security prison asteroid of Sector Seventeen (not to be confused with Space Station Eleven, where the Bearded Men live), eight Crites (think porcupines but more ornery) manage to escape while under Commander Zanti’s (played by Michael Lee Gogin and named for the similarly themed “The Zanti Misfits” episode of the classic Science Fiction series The Outer Limits) wardenship.  He calls upon a pair of interstellar bounty hunters to kill the mini-space-criminals and bring back their scalps (more or less).  Needless to say, the Crites’ purloined ship just so happens to crash land in Kansas, not too far from the Brown family farm.  Time to feed.

Part of the film’s thematic concern is identity.  Brad (Scott Grimes) is a young teen boy, kicking off his journey into manhood.  Yet, he still plays around with homemade explosives (back when this sort of thing would get a pass in a film as simply youthful mischief) and delights in tormenting his older (and sexually active) sister April (Nadine Van der Velde).  His ordeal against the aliens will force him into a role of responsibility, where he has to think of people other than himself, because their lives are literally in his hands.  Town drunkard Charlie (Don Opper) is another character who is searching for an identity.  He was a great baseball pitcher, but when things didn’t work out, he became a souse.  He also needs to accept responsibility, but Charlie needs to rethink a purpose in life he once had.  The bounty hunters are able to change their appearances to blend in (not that their actions would ever keep them incognito for long).  The more dominant of the two quickly settles on the persona of (super awesome) rock star Johnny Steele (Terrence Mann).  His partner cannot settle on a look (“nothing likes me”) and has to go through no less than three, before settling on the one which brings the issue full circle (okay, maybe a half-moon).

In my opinion, the screenplay (co-credited to Herek and Dominic Muir) doesn’t stick to one single genre, but it blends them all quite well at the same time.  Aside from the obvious Science Fiction (I would swear that the farm setting was chosen for the steep hill which leads down to the main house, which is strikingly analogous to the iconic hill image from both the 1953 and the 1986 [the same year this film was released] versions of Invaders From Mars) and Horror genres (including a pair of red eyes staring in at Dee Wallace from outside her kitchen window, recalling The Amityville Horror), there is also much of the Western in Critters.  It takes place squarely in the American Midwest.  It involves a gang of criminals converging on and terrorizing a small town (shades of High Noon and The Magnificent Seven).  There are gun-toting bounty hunters (whose every move sets off a sound effect reminiscent of a cowboy’s boot spurs).  It has a drunkard who needs to find his inner badass (a la Rio Bravo, El Dorado, and hell, even Blazing Saddles).  There are even Westerns on various televisions in the background.  Nonetheless, these elements feel as intrinsic to the film as any others.  That’s solid script structure and filmmaking, in my eyes.     

Not uncoincidentally, Herek’s film is also largely Spielbergian (and especially evocative of Spielberg circa 1986) in tone (Steven Spielberg having been an executive producer on both of Joe Dante’s Gremlins films).  You have a destructive element introduced into a small community, like in Jaws.  You have a resourceful kid as the main protagonist, like in E.T: The Extraterrestrial (in which Dee Wallace also appeared).  You have a scene with a UFO gliding over a rural road, like in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (and an image I used to have a jigsaw puzzle of as a youngster, in case you were wondering).  One of the Crites even bites the head off an E.T. doll, as a little poke in the ribs at the Hollywood juggernaut and his schmaltzy version of an alien creature.  Further, the film is imbued with a feeling of Americana, though it never gets too specific about it. 

As you can clearly see, Critters is most definitely a trend-following rather than a trendsetting piece of cinema, and I liken it to a sort of fruit cup medley (to borrow the parlance of school cafeteria menu creators everywhere).  It is an admixture, but like the proverbial fruit cup, its variegated flavors play well with each other, and they (usually) complement one another quite nicely.  The runtime flies by swiftly, and the creature effects, provided by the legendary Chiodo Brothers, work persuasively at bringing the Crites (from the smallest furball to the full-sized “adult”) to life.  Sure, they all have one personality, and that one is stereotypically flippant, but you just can’t help liking the little bastards.

MVT:  The glorious (and practical, did I mention all the effects are practical?) effects by the aforementioned trio of siblings are glorious.  Of course, a few years later they would gain cult status with their phenomenally freaky take on a perennial bugaboo with Killer Klowns From Outer Space.  But all of their work maintains a sense of style and character which is difficult at  the best of times to cultivate from layers of rubber, metal, and cables.

Make Or Break:  The Make for me is the multiple iterations of Johnny Steele’s hot-licks-infused rock anthem, “Power Of The Night.”  The music video for it is both noticeably self-conscious as well as being a fine example of the form during the heyday of Hair Rock.

Score:  7/10