GRENADIER (2004-05)

 

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

"The ultimate fighting strategy is to erase the enemy's will to fight."

I read a few of the seven volumes of the 2002 manga GRENADIER, but since I didn't finish the series, I can't say if this 12-episode TV anime captures every nuance of the source material. But since the twelve episodes possess a well-defined conclusion, there's a good chance that the anime represents the main plot-threads of the manga, especially since it only lasted about three years.

GRENADIER-- and no, the title doesn't have anything to do with the modern military term-- takes place in what is presumably a far-future world, but one that has no ties to any aspect of human history. There's no attempt to establish a distinct backstory for the world, either. The first episode implies some clash of cultures between the older, honor-bound samurai-like ethos centered around the sword, and the newer practice of a limited technology, mostly focused on hand-held guns, cannons, and a few specialized technologies, all of which create a "steampunk" vibe. In that first episode, samurai-type Yajiro seeks to use his blade-- with which he can perform a few marvels-- to liberate one of his group's leaders from a heavily armed fortress. But then he finds out he's a support-character in the story of Rushuna Taro, who's more or less the "grenadier" of the title.

Rushuna, a big-breasted female with a cowboy hat, is a practitioner of a discipline one might well call "gun-fu" a la John Woo, but with a much greater range of fantasy involved. As Yajiro mostly watches, Rushuna invades the fortress using nothing but her inimitable skill with a single pistol. I frankly lost track of whether or not the heroine used sci-fi ammunition. However, the emphasis of the overall story is that Rushuna can perform miracles with simple ballistics-skill. For instance, she can penetrate the "steampunk-mecha" armor of one opponent by firing a brace of bullets that hit the armor in the same place and thus rupture it. Yajiro is captivated by the busty blonde, at least partly because she has her own unique ethos. Rhusuna follows the teachings of a female perceptor named Tenshi, located in a distant city, and Tenshi's credo is that of erasing the will to fight amongst the various cities and countries. Apparently, Rushuna means to lead by example, for thought she shoots a lot of enemies, she's so infallible about hitting them non-fatally that the Lone Ranger would be jealous. Rushuna also projects the unfailingly sweet demeanor, and though she often cradles men to her ample breasts, she seems to have no erotic tendencies whatever and never gets mad even if she thinks Yajiro peeps at her in the bath. I don't know a Japanese word that might mean "anti-yandere" but such a word might fit Rushuna. (The duo does however acquire a third member, a young, boyishly-dressed girl named Mikan, and she supplies some of the saltiness absent in the main character.)

It would be nigh-impossible to depict a mission as long-range as Rushuna's unfolding in real time. Thus after Rushuna and her two aides quell a few minor bullies in small towns, the heroine is informed that there's a bounty on her head, and that it was put there by her beloved teacher Tenshi. Being a total innocent, Rushuna bends her path to Tenshi's city in order to plead her case. As the trio travel overland on foot-- I'm not sure we even see anyone using horses or similar mounts at all-- they're attacked by various members of Tenshi's honor guard. All of these warriors have highly specialized pseudo-scientific attainments and Rushuna has to use her brain to figure out how to counter each of their powers, with some incidental aid from Yajiro and from Mikan (who has the rather original talent of fashioning useful tricks out of balloons). Naturally, once the three good guys show up in Tenshi's court, they find (not surprisingly) that Tenshi is a prisoner of a conspiracy that has abrogated all of her ideals.                 

There's a lot of strong fighting-action in GRENADIER, though Rushuna uses only very minimal hand-to-hand maneuvers. Her amusing gun-trick is that the heroine can use her bounteous funbags as a makeshift bandolier, storing ammunition in her boobs and popping out bullets every time she needs to reload. This is about as racy as the show gets most of the time, though one of Rushuna's passing allies is the madame of a brothel (who also has special martial powers, BTW). Yajiro and Mikan get their own B-plots and these are nicely executed, though they remain secondary to Rushuna's quest to root out the threat to her idealistic philosophy. I see a few possible parallels-- not influences as such-- between GRENADIER and the samurai-drama RUROUNI KENSHIN. But KENSHIN possessed a deeper cultural resonance despite its metaphenomenal content, while GRENADIER is just a pleasant but ad hoc fantasy-world with some memorable gimmicks.        

SMALLVILLE 3:5-6 ("PERRY," "RELIC," 2003)

 

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

"Perry" is essentially a 2000s take on the standard comics-trope in which some investigator, often Lois Lane, tries to learn Superman's secrets or nature. The only novelty here is that most comics-stories didn't place the elderly editor of the Daily Planet in the position of the investigator.

This version of Perry White has built up some journalistic credits for previous investigations, but now he's hit the skids and is working for a sensationalistic rag that specializes in occult happenings. To his (almost) good fortune, Clark Kent's powers are on the fritz due to a solar flare, and Perry witnesses some suspicious phenomena that get his journalist's nose twitching. He originally came to Smallville seeking to get an interview with Lana thanks to its being the 14th anniversary of the famed meteor shower, but Lana doesn't cooperate since that event caused her parents' deaths. Perry tries to get dirt on Clark from various regulars-- Lana, Chloe, the Kents, and even Lex Luthor-- but he had a previous encounter with Lex and the younger Luthor does not regard Perry with any friendly intent. Perry also investigated some aspect of Lionel Luthor's career but was forced to back down on that investigation. So Perry's looking for a big break, and he thinks Clark is it. In the end, Perry resorts to a test of Clark's powers that's straight out of the old "Lois Lane jumps off a building to test Superman" book.

This is a mediocre episode, notable mainly for foregrounding Clark's eventual journalism career and for building on the subplot of Lex's psychiatric evaluation.

Not much better is "Relic." A number of TV shows, such as MOONLIGHTING, had established the routine in which regular characters of the show would "flash back," imagining themselves incarnating other people in other times. In "Relic," though, the mechanism is not a simple flight of the imagination. Rather, Clark Kent starts flashing back to 1961, apparently re-experiencing events that happened to his father Jor-El when he came to Earth and "passed" as an Earth-human. Clark isn't privy to his father's thoughts, so the episode never reveals exactly what Jor-El was doing on Earth. Toward the end, two motives are suggested: (1) that Jor-El came to Earth as some sort of "rite of passage," and (2) that he was scouting out possible adoptive parents for Little Kal-El, possibly because the Kryptonian scientist possessed advance knowledge of Krypton's future destruction. I'm not sure if the writer knew which reason would fit in best with the series' future developments, and so maybe they were just tossing shit at the wall to see what stuck.

While Jor-El, under the name "Joe," passes through Smallville, he saves a young woman from a mugger. The young woman is Louise McCallum, great aunt of the current-day Lana Lang, while her assailant is none other than the father of Lionel Luthor, name of Lachlan. Later Lachlan murders Louisa and Louise's husband Dex is falsely accused of, and imprisoned for, Louise's murder. Jor-El is also loosely connected to the murder because he had some romantic moments with Louise, so Clark gets to re-live a parallel version of his relationship with Lana, given that Kristin Kreuk also plays Lana. (In contrast, the barely present Lachlan Luthor is not played by either of the Luthor actors.)

"Relic" is poorly paced and does little to advance the running narrative of Kryptonian visits to Earth, as recorded in the Kawache Caves. I didn't research what if any relevance this episode has to that narrative in the long haul, but I suspect this was just a toss-off tale that no one bothered to reference again.     

 

      

FIVE MILLION YEARS TO EARTH (1967)

 

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

Having just recapitulated the plot of this film in my review of the original TV serial QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, I won't repeat more than the essentials here, to wit:

Londoners (including resolute scientist Bernard Quatermass) uncover a buried spaceship, replete with the corpses of once intelligent locust-men, possibly of Martian origin. Martians' activities in primitive times bred mutant cavemen with psychic powers, who intermarried with other cavemen after Martians' demise. Spaceship somehow triggers a massive panic in Londoners, causing them to go berserk while poltergeist energies run rampant, and a gigantic devil-like image of a "horned" Martian appears in the sky. Quatermass and his allies disrupt the psychic image of the Martian and destroy the mechanism, saving London.

Obviously the Hammer remake has the great advantage of a feature film budget, so the FX not possible for the nearly-no-budget TV show get much better execution here. Director Roy Ward Baker is also able to use a lot more inventive camerawork to play up the actions and reactions of the performers. Still, Baker can't disguise the fact that for the movie's first hour MILLON is a very talky "detective story" devoted to ferreting the nature of the dead aliens and their interference with human evolution.   

Nigel Kneale adapted his own TV script for this film, and for the most part he hits the same points as the original production. Quatermass (this time ably portrayed by Andrew Keir) still opposes the military's attempts to cover up the controversy, though the TV show placed more emphasis upon the importance of humankind not taking its warring ways to the stars. (Indeed, the TV version of Quatermass even gives a concluding lecture to that effect, which lecture does not appear here.) The TV show plays up the subliminal effects of the spaceship's presence upon Londoners near its burial site over the course of centuries, and though the basic idea is still in the movie, the script elides mention of European myth-motifs like "The Wild Hunt." MILLION offers almost none of the quirky interviews seen in the TV serial, in which Britons were invited to see fictional versions of themselves on the telly.    

Some aspects are stronger, though. I don't recall the TV show emphasizing that the Martian locusts knew that their civilization was doomed, even before the last of them died in a ship-crash on ancient Earth. Nor do I recall Kneale's first script using the term "colony by proxy," which phrase makes clearer that the aliens sought to perpetuate their culture through their manipulation of primitive humans. Kneale never quite makes clear in either script the utility of the Martians giving some humans psychic talents, if having a quasi-Martian culture on Earth was the sole consideration. The author's endgame is much clearer: humankind had to have their inheritance from the insect-people bred into them as a kind of "racial memory," as the film calls it, in order for humans to respond as required to the spaceship's influence. Kneale makes this racial memory into a blanket explanation of humanity's universal beliefs in devils and spirits, and for the space of a 90-minute movie, the notion is at least credible. Certainly the climax, in which one of Quatermass's colleagues dispels the devilish energy-image by penetrating it with a metal crane, still holds up today, even if the movie as a whole comes nowhere close to the great classics of the period like FORBIDDEN PLANET and INVADERS FROM MARS.  

Most of the film's other performers function largely as support for Keir, but Barbara Shelley stands out as a scientific investigator who becomes "possessed" by the alien energies. Though Shelley had made a name for herself in a half-dozen previous Hammer films, this was the actress' last job for the studio.      

QUATERMASS AND THE PIT (1958-59)

 

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

Though I liked Hammer Studios' FIVE MILLION YEARS TO EARTH back in the day, I haven't reviewed it as yet. Then I noticed one streaming channel made available QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, the original TV 1950s serial on which MILLION was based, and so I decided to check out the original production on which the 1967 movie was based.

It wouldn't be hard to draw lines of influence to both real-world speculations about "alien ancestors" or famous fictional variations on that theme, such as H.P. Lovecraft's 1931 AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS. Indeed, the Lovecraft work even contains a not dissimilar idea as to how humanity may have been bred as potential pawns for alien conquerors. 

Like MOUNTAINS, PIT is an archaeological mystery, in which investigators come across remnants of an ancient civilization on Earth. Unlike Lovecraft, Nigel Kneale, creator of the Quatermass series, posits that there are no living survivors of the alien colonists. However, Londoners' unearthing the buried redoubt of the ancient aliens triggers something in the ship they left beneath the earth. This is a weak point in Kneale's script, since it's never clear as to why anything in the archaic ship still works after five million years. 

Professor Quatermass (Andre Morell) is called in to consult on the mysterious redoubt, and he immediately butts heads with an army martinet who sees everything in terms of military advantage. The pacing is necessarily slow and deliberate, as Quatermass and his allies uncover various aspects of the alien civilization. One of them doesn't make a lot of sense: an artifact that's mistaken for an unexploded bomb from WWII. I'm sure this had a short-term impact for British viewers, whether they had lived through the Blitz or not, but that particular sidenote didn't have much of a payoff. The meat of the story is the investigative team digging beneath London streets and uncovering a graveyard of insectoid aliens (who also have not deteriorated over five million years). Quatermass eventually speculates that the insect-people were colonizers, possibly from Mars, and that, because they couldn't adapt to Earth's environment, they experimented upon primitive ape-men to make them into pawns. I'm not sure what utility it had for the Martians to endow their pawns with psychic talents, but Kneale supposes that after the last Martian ship crashed to Earth, it killed all the Martians but some of the experiments got loose on Earth and so interbred with "normal" hominids.

I'm tempted to think that in PIT Kneale was influenced less by Lovecraft than by British horror-writer Arthur Machen, whose famous tale "The Great God Pan" posited that the Greek terror-deity still survived to menace humankind in a more or less archetypal form. Even without being unearthed, the ship has been stimulating occult experiences in London and maybe in Britain as a whole, causing people to experience such phenomena as elves and poltergeists. The ship's power becomes even stronger once it's unearthed, with the result that Londoners start experiencing a fanatical emotional upsurge compared to "The Wild Hunt" of Nordic mythology. However, Quatermass speculates that this "hunt" was part of the aliens' mythology, and that it was actually a purge among their own kind, to eliminate impurities. The determined scientist must find a way to annul the ship's influence in order to save his people from the evils of war.

Kneale's message is pretty unsubtle, particularly since after all the shouting is done, Quatermass lectures the world on his anti-war stance. But all the incidents of supernatural phenomena being somehow generated by the alien ship, or by latent psychic talents of humans, are still fun, and Andre Morell brings more humanity to his role than have some other performers.          

SMALLVILLE 3:4 ("SLUMBER," 2003)

 

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

Like "Extinction," "Slumber" is mostly a fill-in episode, though it leads into a new Lex arc. Said arc involves not only an attempt to rob Lex of his sanity but takes the conflict between Lex and Lionel to a new level.

But this is a Clark-centric episode, with only minimal details about his relationship with his parents (whose farm gets bailed out thanks to Lex's beneficence) or with his gal-pals. He dreams that he's enjoying a skinny-dipping encounter with Lana at a local lake, and he goes with the dream, even though the action is out of character for Lana. He sees a strange girl who calls herself Sarah Conroy, though she has a habit of disappearing, and when he encounters her again, she's being pursued by a weird caped figure, the Traveler. Yet the most tumultuous incident in the dream takes place when Clark visits Lex at the latter's mansion. After some minor badinage, Lex shows Clark a sword reputed to be able to cut anything, and then suddenly swings it at Clark. But it's a fakeout, because Lex has learned Clark's true nature and wants to see the sword shatter on Clark's arm as the acid test of his theory. The topic of how Lex might feel about knowing Clark failed to confide in him hasn't been raised for some time, but this fantasia shows that Clark feels intensely guilty over the sin of omission.

Clark finally wakes from the dream and learns from the Kents that he's been sleeping a day and a half. Clark later finds out that he has a new neighbor in the Bolger family, but the only one living in the house is Nicholas, uncle of Sarah, while Sarah is at a hospital, lying in a coma since the car accident that took her parents' lives. Nicholas has been drugging Sarah to keep her in the coma so that he could keep control of her inheritance-- and he would've got away with it too, if some stray meteor-rocks hadn't endowed Sarah with telepathic abilities. On some level she's aware of what her uncle's doing and has cast him as the menacing figure of the Traveler. Then she messes with Clark's dreams on some instinctive level in order to attract his attention. The fantasias aren't anything symbolically deep, but there's some visceral suspense in that Clark has no powers in Sarah's dreams, and that only she can actually end the dreams so that Clark can save her from her enemy. So "Slumber" rates as a solid if unremarkable tale.                   

SMALLVILLE 3:3: "EXTINCTION" (2003)

 

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

And just like that, we're back to the old status quo, all the cosmic revelations forgotten. 

I don't know if the writer(s) thought the audience wanted a new take on the over-abundant 'meteor freaks" that plagued SMALLVILLE's first season. But now it comes to pass that a "freak-killer" has begun pot-shotting those given special powers by kryptonite radiation, and at the episode's opening, he kills a fellow assaulting Lana Lang.

This is a very talky episode, in which various regular characters discuss the rights and wrongs of vigilantism, with Clark being totally against the practice of assassination while other Smallville students are not so condemnatory. Clark soon learns that the killer is student Van McNulty, who nurses a grudge against the freaks. Though Van doesn't know Clark's true nature, he figures out how to use kryptonite bullets, which is almost the only engaging section of the episode. The conclusion is very low energy though Lana gets to do a little kung-fu again. The Lex subplots are a similar waste of time, leaving me to guess that the writer was told to just keep things on an even keel for this story, with no contribution to the greater mythology.      

GALAXY WARRIORS (2022)

 

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

It's time for another game of "how low can you go," specifically the "micro-budget edition." I just finished another micro-type in RANGERS: BLOODSTONE-- and despite my having almost nothing good to say about BLOODSTONE, next to GALAXY WARRIORS the earlier micro was comparatively watchable.

The failings of GALAXY are particularly egregious because it's a "woman-in-prison-film," IN SPACE. Really, how hard is it to watch the old Jack Hill classics and cobble together something that at least emulates that example of lively trash. 

Instead, we're introduced to two outer-space lady bounty hunters. Demeter (Christine Emes) and Vesta (Alianne Rozon). After a piddling adventure capturing a villain fleeing in another spaceship-- all with no FX or good costumes-- Demeter finds out that her sister Artemis has been sentenced to space-prison. So of course, both of them get themselves sent to the same prison in order to get Li'l Sis free. (BTW, though the majority of the characters have names culled from Greek mythology, all of these usages are entirely meaningless, and it's not even consistent since one male character bears the name "Jeb.")       

There's no nudity, no over-the-top melodrama, and no decent fight-scenes, so GALAXY belongs in some galaxy far far from here, presumably in some undeserving alien's trash compactor.

SMALLVILLE 3:1-2: "EXILE/PHOENIX" (2003)

 

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

SMALLVILLE's Season 2 ended on a big cliffhanger, with Lex about to die in a crashing plane after being deserted by his new bride Helen Bryce. The resolution of Clark's identity-arc is not quite so showy. Clark learns that the survival-ship AI, supposedly channeling the persona of Clark's late Kryptonian father Jor-El, expects Kal-El to become the conqueror of humankind. This freaks him out so much that he tries to break his ties to all denizens of Smallville lest he bring catastrophe on them through the evil nature he thinks he's inherited. (His conversation with the ship does result in the partial destruction of the Kent home, so he's not without justification there.) To quell the influence of his goody-goody personality, Clark dons the red kryptonite ring of past episodes and begins his "exodus." This seems a little counter-intuitive, though I suppose one could argue that the red ring normally makes Clark into a libido-controlled lone wolf, and that he's hoping that will keep him free of the AI's influence. The AI will later tell Jonathan that Clark's leavetaking suited the AI's plans just fine, though this is probably just authorial mopping-up. 

Three months pass, during which it seems that the Kent farmhouse is totally reconstructed. (That's some great insurance policy!) Lana, Jonathan and Martha have been in perpetual worry-mode, having had nearly no contact with Clark. By dumb luck, though, Chloe finds out that the country mouse is hanging out in the big city of Metropolis, but she keeps the info to herself for fear of causing Clark to run again. She approaches Clark once, trying to persuade him to return home, but after he rebuffs her, she ends up revealing his location to Lana and the Kents. Additionally, in Metropolis Clark has a brush with police lieutenant Maggie Sawyer, seen previously in one Season Two episode, and then gets a more substantial contact with the series' version of Morgan Edge. This version of the comics-character is an unregenerate crime-boss with ties to Lionel Luthor, and just as Lionel is a devlish tempter to Lex, Edge tempts Clark into the crime-- though the intention is to rob Lionel of the blood-sample Bryce took from Clark, now theoretically in Lionel's hands.  

Lana seeks out Clark in Metropolis but fails to overcome his self-indulgent persona. Jonathan makes plans to force Clark to return, and Martha points out that it's not possible. However, Jonathan has access to the octagonal Kryptonian ship-key, or maybe a duplicate thereof, and somehow manages to communicate with the AI. For unclear reasons, the AI charges up the humble Kansas farmer with Kryptonian mojo, and Jonathan charges all the way to Metropolis to lay down the fatherly law. The two clash and Clark is tempted to kill his adoptive dad, but at the last minute he destroys his red ring and returns to normal, and to Smallville.

Meanwhile, Lex didn't die in a plane crash but got stranded on an uncharted desert isle. There he undergoes a malarial dream, imagining that he shares the island with a quirky castaway who has already committed patricide-- something Lex has clearly fantasized about since guessing that Lionel sabotaged Lex's flight. Lex escapes the island, partly thanks to a birthday gift-- a compass-- from the Kents.

Clark thus ends his exile, though there's no discussion of the AI's revelation here or in "Phoenix." The metaphor of the phoenix is one that Lex applies to himself as he greets the father he thinks tried to kill him, though one could apply the metaphor to the return of Good Clark as well. However, Edge and his goons follow Clark to the farm to get the package Bad Clark stole for them, and Ege holds the Kents prisoner to ensure Clark's cooperation. Edge also threatens to reveal what he knows of Clark to Lionel, but Clark manages to maneuver things so that Lionel learns nothing and Edge appears to get killed. Meanwhile again, Lana finally gets a second chance to let her martial skills shine since "Precipice," as she surprises Edge's goons and takes them out.                 

Though Lex doesn't entirely let Lionel off the hook, he comes to the conclusion that Helen is the real culprit in his near-murder. He confronts her during a supposed "second honeymoon," but she escapes the plane via parachute and never again appeared in the series. Despite the disposition of the faithless wife and Martha's loss of a natural child, this two-parter is almost entirely about the paternal figures of SMALLVILLE-- which is funny because a Phoenix is a being that has no true parents of either sex.  

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, SEASON SIX (2001-02)

 

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

Death Comes for the Vampire Slayer-- but not permanently. 

BARGAINING PT. 1-2 (F)-- In the wake of Buffy's demise, the Scoobies seek to keep up the crusade of slaying vampires and demons. They also try to keep Buffy's death secret from the rest of the world (not counting, I guess, the honking big headstone with her name on it), in part by using the Buffybot to fight alongside them, despite the robot's many cognitive limitations. After Giles returns to England, leaving the management of the magic store to Anya, Willow decides to perform a spell to bring the (buried) Slayer back to life, though both Spike and Dawn are left out of the loop. A gang of motorcycle-riding demons learns that the patrolling Slayer is just a robot, so they disable the bot and begin razing Sunnydale (no cops are ever seen trying to stop them). Willow, Xander, Tara and Anya commence the spell, but the demons interrupt them, forcing the Scoobies to scatter. Unbeknownst to the Scoobies, the spell works, and Buffy is restored, albeit in a buried coffin. She's forced to claw her way to the surface, and when she emerges, she seems distanced from reality. After lots of Sunnydale violence, the Scoobies, except for Spike, witness Buffy regain enough vigor to trash the demons, though the question of her recovery is still up for grabs.

AFTER LIFE (F)-- Spike finds out about Reborn Buffy and expresses his extreme displeasure with the group having messed with a magical resurrection. Buffy seems to be regaining her memories, but now everyone in the group experiences weird phenomena, thanks to a "hitchhiker demon" that crossed over to Earth by riding Buffy's spirit. The demon's good for a few creepy effects but it's mostly a time-killer. Once it's destroyed, Buffy confides the truth to Spike: her spirit was in some heaven-like realm that gave her feelings of peace and serenity. Her return to life is thus a torment to the heroine.

FLOODED (F)-- With Buffy's return to life comes all of the problems of being alive: principally, that it costs money, and the Summers family doesn't have any. On top of regular difficulties, Buffy has a glancing encounter with The Trio, the "Big Bads" of this season. One of them, Andrew, made his first appearance here, where he was revealed to be the brother of Tucker, the summoner of the hellhounds in "The Prom." The next, Warren, created the robot girl in "I Was Made to Love You" and the Buffybot, and the last is Jonathan, an uber-nerd seen in various previous episodes. The three of them combine their talents with magic and mad science with the aim of becoming supervillains (though they only want to conquer Sunnydale), and they plan to get rid of the Slayer even before committing their first major evil. A subplot regarding Willow's over-use of magic is further developed when Giles berates her for all the things that could've gone wrong with her spell; Willow's outrage at being questioned is a good foretaste of things to come. The episode ends with Buffy getting a call to meet with Angel, which event follows up Angel's having been informed of the resurrection in a Season 3 episode of ANGEL. Their meeting is not depicted in either show.

 LIFE SERIAL (F)-- Getting past the peculiar pun of the title, Buffy's new life becomes a series of disappointments in relation to education and employment. Meanwhile, the Trio start testing Buffy with various menaces to learn her weaknesses. Nerd jokes abound, Willow again shows more indications of magical obsession, and Buffy finds it easier to hang with Spike than with the Scoobies.

ALL THE WAY (F)-- Halloween comes to Sunnydale once more, but of course not all the evils take the night off. Xander reveals to the group that he and Anya are now engaged to be married, though in private the young man expresses doubts about the nuptials to Giles. (Buffy also expresses doubt about the union to Giles, though it's not clear for several episodes what the Slayer's objections are.)  Dawn makes plans to rendezvous with a girlfriend so that the two of them can neck with a couple of high-school boys in the park. However, both guys are vamps, and they have a bunch of bloodsucking friends, forcing Buffy, Spike and Giles to come to Dawn's rescue.     

ONCE MORE, WITH FEELING (G)-- All of Sunnydale is trapped in a "wacky Broadway nightmare," so that everyone, including the Scoobies, find themselves singing and dancing about their inner feelings, often regarding things they'd rather keep concealed. They even get invisible musical accompaniment, just as in musical theater and movies. A dancing demon named Sweet is responsible, though he can only work his magic if summoned. He initially thinks Dawn summoned him, and his price will be that she must join him in his hell-realm as his bride. (The true identity of the summoner is the episode's only flaw.) The unleashing of deep emotions endangers the romantic unions that musicals usually celebrate-- Xander and Anya, Willow and Tara-- though the greater menace is that surrendering totally to the emotional whirlwinds can cause one to spontaneously combust. And perhaps nothing better illustrates the series' trope of "hell is other people" than the song Giles sings to Buffy, about fearing that she's too dependent on him, a song that Buffy cannot or will not hear yet. This causes Giles to send his Slayer to face Sweet alone, and though he changes his mind later and all the Scoobies join together to rescue Dawn, the tumult in Buffy's mind leads to her to reveal to all of them the Big Truth: "I live in hell, 'cause I've been expelled, from Heaven." Sweet is defeated only because Spike, the only one in the group beyond ordinarily morality, saves Buffy-- thus paving the way for their romance, which is as doomed as all the others. I could do a separate essay just on the songs alone-- which combine existential despair and silly doggerel, and somehow make it work. 

TABULA RASA (G)-- How do you follow an act like "Once More With Feeling," which is all about hell being other people? Well, one might as well try a Divine Baggy-Pants Comedy-- though the comedy still comes from a place of tragedy. Tara is tempted to leave Willow after uncovering how Willow messed with Tara's memories. Willow swears not to perform any magic for a week, but almost immediately, magic junkie that she is, she sets a spell to make everyone forget their troubles. Instead, all of the Scoobies, including Spike, forget who they are, and try as best they can to re-construct their identities with raucous results. The external menace is a loan shark-- a literal shark-demon, that is-- trying to force Spike to pay a debt. But the memories must come back and have bad consequences for Tara and Willow and ambivalent ones for Buffy and Spike. Giles departs for England and does not return until late in season six.      

       

SMASHED/WRECKED (G)-- These episodes might as well have a Part 1/Part 2 label, because they're almost exclusively about (1) Willow's addiction to her magical "highs" even after Tara leaves her, and (2) Buffy's increasing attraction to Spike. "Smashed" begins with Willow using her increased powers to restore Amy-- changed into a rat in Season Two-- back to humanity. Though Amy's not a substitute for Tara, she encourages Willow to extreme behavior, setting her up for an even deeper spiral in "Wrecked." As for Spike, he makes the accidental discovery that though the chip in his head still keeps him from harming humans, Buffy's return from death has made her subtly different, so that Spike can hit her now without consequence. Since his past attempts to woo her with affection haven't worked, he resorts to calling forth her savage side by engaging her in fisticuffs. Buffy will later claim that her first intercourse with Spike was just her emotional reaction to losing Giles, but it's clear that she is drawn to his amoral roguishness but can only respect him (slightly) as a guy able to trade punches with her. The Trio starts another wacky plot. Dawn gets mixed up with Willow's descent as she foolishly takes the teen to a place that deals in dark magic. After incurring censure from Buffy, Xander and Dawn herself, Willow makes a sincere attempt to go "cold turkey." Though the parallels with drug addiction are obvious, the episode avoids falling into allegory thanks to the writers' appreciation of all the characters' existential problems.   

GONE (F)-- For some reason, the Three Dorks invent an invisibility ray. They accidentally turn it on Buffy, and though she doesn't know how her new unseeability happened, she takes great pleasure in feeling liberated from her immediate problems, much as Giles feared she would. Much as enspelled beer lowered her inhibitions, being invisible makes it easy for her to beard Spike in his lair and initiate sex with him. However, after sex, he kicks her to the curb, knowing that she's just using him. The Trio capture Willow and try to lure Buffy into a trap. They too become invisible. but not only can they not overcome the Invisible Slayer, all return to visible status and Buffy meets her "nemeses" for the first time. They escape but Warren has made a real attempt to kill Buffy. presaging his more ruthless acts later in the season.    

DOUBLEMEAT PALACE (P)-- This is the first subpar episode of Season Six, and its gimmick reminds me much of something from Season One. Willow continues to battle her desire for magical stimulation, with her college classes being barely referenced after "Wrecked"). Apparently, Buffy was paying bills with the remains of whatever resources Joyce left the two girls. But now Buffy's broke, and despite a generous donation from Giles, she has to take a humiliating day-job, that of food service at a burger franchise, the Doublemeat Palace. Everyone goes on about the secret ingredient, and when some employees disappear, Buffy comes to suspect that it just might be-- PEOPLE! But that would be too easy, and so the entity responsible for the missing employees is just another one of the many make-work menaces abiding in the Buffyverse. Spike, Xander and Anya all have minor roles, though Anya's "vengeance demon" BFF Halfrek shows up briefly. Amy, wanting to undo Willow's resolve to resist temptation, charges up her powers, but this development has no consequences except that Willow unfriends Amy.

DEAD THINGS (G)-- In "Smashed," Spike briefly encountered the Trio and coerced them into analyzing the functioning of his brain-chip, but this episode is the first one where he's directly affected by one of the dorks' eccentric schemes. Warren invents a brainwashing device, and all three dopes want to use the device to lure women into sleeping with them. Warren first targets his former girlfriend Katrina, who spurned him after learning about his pleasure-bot, and he successfully brings her back to the Trio's lair under dominion. However, his control wanes and when Katrina tries to leave, he kills her. Warren then gets the idea to undermine the Slayer's confidence by making her think herself guilty of Katrina's death. The plot works, and Buffy is as torn up at the thought of having killed an innocent as she was when Faith did so. Despite all the consequences to Buffy's friends and family, she heads for the police station to turn herself in. Spike blocks her, they fight, and Buffy tries to exorcise her self-disgust at sleeping with the vampire by beating him to a pulp. But Spike's interference keeps Buffy from confessing too soon, so that in the police station she hears an officer mention Katrina's name and realizes that this is a Trio plot. In this episode, Buffy confesses her dalliance with Spike to Tara and begs Tara not to shame Buffy by telling anyone else.

OLDER AND FAR AWAY (F)-- It's another story where the main characters are stuck in a "haunted house," but this one's pretty good, as well as giving viewers a vacation from the Trio. The Scoobies plan to hold a birthday party for Buffy at the Summers house, but Dawn is still alienated by the fact that Buffy almost left her behind in order to atone for "killing" an innocent. While speaking with a school guidance counselor, Dawn innocently wishes that everyone would have to stay at home forever. And this comes to pass, because the counselor is a disguised Halfrek, making trouble for humans out of a perverse concept of justice. The party ensues, with Xander inviting a handsome young guy to meet Buffy, and Tara in the same house with Willow for the first time in over a month. Spike crashes the party with a (harmless) demon-buddy. But Buffy's accidentally brought in an even more malefic menace than Halfrek: a nameless demon with a sword, able to pop in and out of floors or walls. Ultimately Buffy vanquishes the sword-demon and Halfrek is obliged to cancel the curse. Both the fight-scenes and Spike's attempts to woo Buffy in secret make this a good basic adventure.               

 

AS YOU WERE (F)-- While Willow continues to battle her addiction, Buffy gets some indirect aid to throw off her besotted fascination with Spike. Riley Finn comes to Sunnydale and invites Buffy to join him in a thrilling monster-slaying adventure, which invitation she eagerly accepts. But the big egg-laying monster has less impact on Buffy's life than the revelation that in the year of his absence, Riley's married another kickass female, name of Sam (Ivana Milicevic). Buffy also suffers humiliation when her ex witnesses her debasing herself with Spike, who happens to be involved (very improbably) with the plot to unleash egg-monsters on Sunnydale. Riley and Sam take their leave, and Buffy breaks it off with Spike-- though naturally things don't prove so simple.

HELL'S BELLS (F)-- I assume the "bells" of the title connote the wedding bells that the show seemed to be leading up to for most of the season re: Xander and Anya. This episode, nominated for three Emmys, often seems to play for broad comedy as the wedding day transpires, forcing together two undesirable groups of guests: Anya's demon buddies and Xander's gross relatives. But then Xander meets an uninvited guest who brings him a terrible vision of his future with Anya, and he leaves her at the altar. The guest's vision is fake, but it uncovers real demons in Xander's soul-- though he does make an effort to overcome them in the next episode.

NORMAL AGAIN (F)-- Technically this is a decently done melodrama, in which Buffy is poisoned by a Trio-summoned demon. She then begins alternating between her regular existence and a world in which she's stuck in an asylum and her physicians seek to convince her that her entire Slayer-identity is a psychotic fantasy. But despite the cant about Buffy being disgusted with herself due to her sleeping with Spike, the idea that she buys into the fantasy and almost kills her friends seems incredibly contrived. Of more interest is the fact that Xander returns and hopes to mend fences with Anya despite breaking her heart.

ENTROPY (G)-- Anya does not want to mend fences with Xander; she wants him to suffer supernatural vengeance. But neither she in her mortal form nor any of her demon-kindred can wish a dire fate on her ex-boyfriend. She makes numerous funny attempts to fool one of Xander's friends into making a wish to hurt him, but though they all sympathize with her broken heart, none of them will do the deed. She gets the bright idea to try the same routine on Spike, knowing that he regards Xander as a wanker. This doesn't work as Anya intends, but her dialogue with Spike leads to an interaction that, if anything, torments Xander in a basic, non-supernatural manner. As icing on the cake, all the Scoobies who didn't already know about Buffy's dalliance with Spike-- excepting only the absent Giles-- get the benefit of a big soap-operatic revelation scene. However, arguably the real meat of the episode is a prolonged conversation between Spike and Anya about how repressed and uptight the Scoobies are, which holds at least a grain of truth.     

SEEING RED // VILLAINS // TWO TO GO // GRAVE (G)-- And so at least we reach the four-episode conclusion of Season Six. Even though a lot of time is devoted to the inevitable breakup of Buffy and Spike, the writers have been building up to Willow's crisis since the earliest episodes.

SEEING RED boasts one of the archetypal scenes of male-female conflict in the series. A day or so after Spike slept with Anya, he shows up at the Summers house with the intention of rendering some apology. However, Buffy isn't having any, and Spike's lust for her overcomes all reason, as he deludes himself that he can make things right by forcing intimacy on her. The filmmakers avoid the usual action-trope of two super-beings going at one another in a big throw-down. Instead, Buffy can't seem to marshal her forces against his attack, just as if she were an ordinary female against an ordinary male, and only at the last moment does she get things together to kick him away. Not long after that, the Trio make another attempt at super-villainy, with Warren using a mystic talisman to make himself a powerhouse. However, Buffy gets some covert help from Jonathan, so that she defeats him, though he escapes and leaves his partners in the hands of police. However, later still Warren shows up at the Summers place, and uses a mundane pistol to shoot Buffy. He only wounds her, but his indiscriminate firing also kills Tara, mere hours after she and Willow reconciled.

In VILLAINS, Willow tries and fails to bring Tara back to life. She goes berserk with grief, intending to slaughter not only Tara's killer Warren but the other two members of the Trio as well. She stokes up her power by invading the magic shop and draining power from the arcane books. Warren finds out Willow's coming for him and takes measures to escape, while Andrew and Jonathan cool their heels in jail. Buffy, Xander and Anya attempt to save Warren but Willow first tortures and then kills him. Meanwhile, Spike, wanting to do something to change his monstrous nature, leaves Sunnydale 

The title TWO TO GO tells it all: the Scoobies endeavor to keep Willow from killing both Andrew and Jonathan by freeing the duo from jail and seeking to hide them. The two nerds are something less than cooperative, though Andrew is still the bigger villain of the two. The Scoobies take cover at the magic shop, but Dark Willow thunders in, and only a spell from Anya holds her in check. Willow transforms herself into a powerhouse via magic, not unlike what Warren did earlier, and she and Buffy throw down. Willow finally neutralizes both Anya and Buffy, setting things up for the cliffhanger return of Giles.

I'm not sure I get the meaning of the season finale's title GRAVE, except that after Willow has her magical duel with Giles and saps his mystically-endowed powers from him, she has grave intentions for the whole world. In short, she forgets about Andrew and Jonathan-- who later escape the Scoobies and flee the country-- and decides to bring an end to the world's endless pain by destroying the world. Only Xander can stop Willow's vengeance, and he does so in such a way that counters (but does not disprove) the theme of the season's first half-- that "hell is other people"-- with the theme that "other people are also the only redemption from hell."

And so ends what some might deem the BUFFY series' best season. My memories of Season Seven, the last roundup for the show, are not quite so salutary. But then, Six could not have provided any sort of closure, even an imperfect one, so Seven may turn out to be something of a "necessary evil."                 

DRACULA'S FIANCEE (2002)

 

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

Though I've seen about ten Jean Rollin flicks, I've never reviewed any. I confess I find it hard to get a handle on Rollin's almost plotless exhibitions of female pulchritude, most often in the form of willowy lady vampires. And yet, though I don't think most Rollin movies have much thematic content, he does have an individual style that sets him apart from thousands of routine sexploitation filmmakers. FIANCEE is one of the last three films he directed before he passed in 2010. 

Now, while there exist dozens of films which invoke the name "Dracula" without having any relation to the character, or to any aspect of the Stoker novel, FIANCEE has both. Stoker's DRACULA is a rich work with more symbolic layers than all of Rollin's films combined-- or all the Hammer vamp-films too, for that matter. Yet for FIANCEE Rollin isolated one major trope from Stoker and made it his own: the trope of innocence seduced by timeless evil. For most of the novel, the king-vampire stalks Mina Murray, and almost makes her into one of his own kind-- and yet Mina becomes, in many ways, Dracula's foremost opponent, summoning forth a primal goodness to battle archaic evil.

 Yet Rollin inverts that formula for his own purposes. The viewer never knows much about Isabella (Cyrille Gaudin), the "fiancee" of the title. There's a toss-off remark by the nuns who keep her prisoner that Isabella shares the genes of Dracula, which loosely implies that she, unlike Mina, is some descendant of the vampire. Further, Isabelle is entirely willing to become joined with the dark lord, and though it's not clear exactly what will happen if the two of them are united in unholy matrimony, the nuns are eager to prevent her nuptials, as are the film's primary POV characters. An elderly somewhat psychic professor with no proper name and his young male student Eric (Jacques Orth, Denis Tallaron) have dedicated themselves to preventing the wedding of Isabella and Dracula. It takes them a while to gsther intelligence, as they first engage in colloquy with a (very good looking) village madwoman in order to learn Isabella's presence in the nunnery. Yet, even though technically the madwoman doesn't have much to do with the story, thematically she reflects Isabella's true nature, for the fiancee seems able to spread some virulent madness to her captors. Rollin gets a lot of incidental humor from the weird behavior of the nuns, by the way.

In many similar stories, Dracula would be stage-managing a bunch of lackeys to secure Isabella's release. Instead, he seems to exist in some sidereal world, gaining access to the mortal world through the venue of a grandfather-clock. The vampire-lord does so little in FIANCEE that this may be one of the only Dracula movies in which Dracula is less central to the story than the maiden he seeks to violate-- which would make the FIANCEE title unusually appropriate. Isabella, Dracula's willing bride, spreads madness among the nuns, and the mostly feminine beings who assemble for her wedding seem more like Isabella's unholy bridesmaids. I'm not sure if Rollin was hip to the cinematic tradition of the "monster mash"-- it doesn't appear in any of his works I've seen, in contradistinction to, say, what one sees in the films of Paul Naschy. But if Rollin had just wanted an excuse to film a lot of scenes with hot monster-women, he could have just made all the bridesmaids vampires. Instead, Rollin's script takes the trouble to make up a weird term for non-vampire creatures-- "Parallels," for whatever reason-- and the wedding party includes at least two non-vamps: an "Ogress" and "a She-Wolf," though naturally Rollin blows no bucks on makeup or appliances. Incidentally, the small role of the She-Wolf is played by frequent Rollin collaborator Brigitte Lahaie.

So Isabella gets free, and the Professor and Eric try to stop her from hooking up with the Big Vamp-- and after a lot of incidents, they fail, and the unholy union apparently takes place. Rollin's script also tosses out various psuedo-poetic bits of dialogue, but he's never been a filmmaker known for scintillating repartee. So the film just kind of ends on a dispiriting note, though as I said it's hard to feel much when one doesn't know what's at stake. But it's a nice-looking film, maybe one of Rollin's best in a formal sense.                            

     

MARRIED WITH CHILDREN: "THE BALD AND THE BEAUTIFUL" (1989)

 

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

Though Season 3 is generally the season in which MARRIED WITH CHILDREN found its raunchy voice, there were still a fair number of episodes that weren't much better than some of the lesser "absurd comedy" shows from around the same time, like 1991's HERMAN'S HEAD. In fact, with a little rewriting, "The Bald and the Beautiful" probably could have aired as an episode of a bland-com like the sixties DONNA REED SHOW. The main conflict is that both Al and neighbor Steve become obsessed with the possibility of losing their hair. They don't solve this problem, but they get their spirits bolstered when they compare themselves to fully bald guys.

The only noteworthy aspects of "Bald" are a couple of scenes between Bud and Kelly. The demon-children have of course been at each other's throats for the previous seasons, but "Bald" emphasizes Kelly's role as a tormentor for her brother just as Peg exists to torture Al (though Al gets off pretty easy in general in this tale). After Bud is informed that he shares his father's genes and will probably also lose his hair in adulthood, he plaintively asks if his parents had him as a "biological experiment." Kelly teases him relentlessly, and none of his jibes about her promiscuity can compensate for his genetic doom. After Kelly fakes pulling a big clump of hair from Bud's head, and he runs off, Kelly has the following exchange with her mother, who's been watching the prank.

KELLY: "Mom, you don't mind that I'm playing with Bud, do you?"

PEG: "No! That's why we had him!"      

This one good line in a routine story provides a foretaste of the many variations on male/female antagonism that will appear in future seasons, and that trope, more than anything else, makes MARRIED one of the most mythic American sitcoms. 

ASSASSIN (1976)

 

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

Twenty minutes from the end of this film, I was ready to describe this obscure Taiwanese chopsocky as an entirely naturalistic martial drama, about noble Chinese patriots seeking to assassinate Mongke Khan (Bai Ying), the head of a Mongolian invasion force attacking China. But at that point in the film, the Chinese leader decides that he wants one of his commanders, Ling (Tien Peng), to impersonate a Chinese officer who's been condemned for betraying China to the Mongols. And how does the official want Ling to bring about this imposture? Why, he brings in a tanner who usually cuts off animal skins and asks the guy to cut off the traitor's facial skin, which Ling then wears into the Mongolian camp-- a gambit which is for the most part a big success. This is ASSASSIN's only enjoyably brain-fried moment, though, for most of the rest of the movie is dull.

At the film's outset, Su Mei (Hsu Feng), girlfriend of Ling, has planned an imposture of her own. After some breast-beating about the danger of the mission, Su takes the place of a concubine who's going to be sent to Mongke. Once Su gets close to the enemy leader, she can pull a Chinese version of the Biblical Deborah by slaying Mongke with her knives. Before she gets there, we're introduced to Mongke, who seems to be a tough, resourceful leader, with a sister, Ha Shi Li (Chia Ling), who's also a martial artist. However, Mongke figures out the plot and ambushes Su. Armed only with two short daggers, Su makes hash of several Mongolians, but Mongke himself easily masters her, even though he doesn't do any impressive kung fu stunts. He then imprisons her, clearly thinking about making use of her, though somehow, he never quite does so. 

 Ha Shi Li, however, signals some possible sibling issues, for she seems very jealous of Mongke's attentions to this Chinese lady assassin. Li corners Su in prison, where she could stab Su to death with ease. However, perhaps to prove her martial superiority, Li simply cuts Su's bonds and challenges her to a duel, Su's double knives against Li's sword. It's a very cool diva-battle, better than the two actresses' fight in THE GREAT HUNTER, and easily the best scene in the movie, including the wacky face-stealing scene. Mongke and his guards forestall the duel's conclusion. However, prior to that, Su cleverly plants a seed in Li's mind, that if she's so great she ought to go challenge Ling to a contest at the Chinese camp. Li does so, and though she doesn't defeat Ling she does slice up a bunch of no-name soldiers, so that both kung-fu divas get an equal chance to shine. Indeed, though Hsu Feng is pictured as being more glamorous than Chia Ling, both are really the only good reasons to watch the film.

The final general dust-up is nothing special, but it has one curious moment. Mongke fights Ling, and Ling manages to stab the Mongol. Su comes up from behind Mongke and also stabs him, at which point Li tries to stab Su from behind. Mongke, who's apparently fallen in love with Su in some off-camera scene, flings Ling and Su away from him, and flings a dagger at-- his sister, in order to save Su. This might have made a little sense had Mongke actually forced himself on Su, only to become so besotted with her that he valued her life over his own, or his sister's. But if that was the intention, the filmmakers totally muffed the execution.       

MARRIED WITH CHILDREN: "GRIME AND PUNISHMENT" (1997)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic* 
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*   

It's "torture Al" time again, though I must give the writers credit. Episodes like ROCK AND ROLL GIRL were pretty obvious that Al set himself up for humiliation as soon as he asked the whole family to contribute money. But GRIME AND PUNISHMENT does a good fake-out, making the episode look like it's going to be a "torture Bud" story.

At the outset, Bud makes the apparent mistake of telling his parents that he's making more money as a talent agent. Al demands that Bud start paying rent on his sumptuous basement lodgings. After a token "running away from home" gag, complete with Bud putting his possessions into a bindle on a stick, the prodigal son returns. Al and Peg for the first time bring out his baby book, and Bud is perplexed to see that there are no pictures. The Parents from Hell claim none were taken because he was such an ugly offspring. Further, the book attests that Bud's first recorded words were, "Bud want food-- Ow." Present-day Bud looks questioningly at Peg, who responds, "Nobody likes a needy baby." This is a rare admission of either Bundy parent using corporal punishment on either kid. It's far more common that when the Bundy parents torture their children, it's through neglect, which is explained by the enormous stupidity and self-centeredness of both Al and Peg.

             

Bud then gives in, but he stoops only to conquer. Once he has a rental contract with Al, Bud brings in a building inspector-- a big fat woman, of course-- to grade the basement as a place for human habitation. Not only does the inspector not give the basement a passing grade, she exerts an authority that only makes sense in Al's World, fitting Al with a shock-collar until he upgrades the dwelling. Al is confined to the basement, and Bud-- well, maybe he goes back to his old upstairs room, or to the couch, since it's improbable that he'd be bunking with Peg or Kelly. Al swears he won't make the improvements, and he even begins enjoying being separated from Peg's wheedling for sex. However, Bud then starts selling tickets to people who want to poke the confined bear. To be sure, Marcy is the only one who explicitly pays for the privilege of forcing Al to listen to her feminist lectures. Kelly's next up, though Bud probably just told her to entertain her daddy with her "improve class" techniques. One of these includes Kelly dressing up as Pocahontas and throwing a tomahawk at an offscreen Al. We don't know where it hits him, but it might hit the lower extremities, since afterward she calls him "Chief Thunder-Pants." (Later the writers can't resist having the pun of Kelly calling her own performances "Chinese daughter torture," even though this takes away from her appearance of innocent sadism.) Then Bud brings out the Big Guns, or maybe the Big 'Uns that Al claims not to like, sending Peg into the cell to take advantage of the fresh meat.

 The Peg-torture finally breaks Al: he agrees to pay for the improvements, and Bud trepidatiously removes the shock collar. However, in a great depiction of twisted Bundy logic, Al's proud of Bud for mousetrapping him, given that long ago Al did the same thing to his father. So for once, Al's victimization leads to a rare moment of father-son bonding, though there's still one last slapstick stunt to keep things on the wacky side.        

THE RANGERS: BLOODSTONE (2021)

 

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

Once in a great while, I'll stumble across a micro-budgeted fantasy flick that, despite limitations of cast-size and fx, still shows a little charm. Not this one, though. In addition to all the usual failings, the flick's most egregious flaw is that the script waits until the last half-hour to inform viewers as to what the object sought by good and evil questers, the titular Bloodstone, is capable of doing.

I noted a 2016 "Rangers" title on streaming that must be a precursor to this one. At least the same individual who wrote, directed, producers and starred in BLOODSTONE plays a character with the same name in the 2016 film, so I guess they must tie together somehow. I strongly doubt that the earlier movie expounded much on the fantasy-world though, or BLOODSTONE would have recycled some of that content here.

 So this much is clear: two groups are looking for some artifact, the Bloodstone. A raiding-party abducts the young daughter of the hero, forest-ranger Drustan (David Nordquist), so Drustan pursues the raiders, though he only encounters two of the evildoers: a snarky "orc" with an English accent and an unspeakin hulk. He has various back and forth encounters with the two. For instance, he declines to kill them from afar in order to follow them to his captive daughter, but they capture him instead and beat him up. He finally kills them both and leaves, but a dark-elf sorceress shows up and revievs the talky one. Meanwhile, Drustan runs into Shariya (Wendy Tuck), a lady elf. He doesn't initially trust her and they get into a short hand-to-hand fight that remains the only memorable scene, but only because it's an elf doing kung-fu blocking-blows. There are more forgettable fights, flashbacks to how Drustan became a Ranger, some mystic stuff about the Bloodstone, and-- I guess it ended somehow, I've already forgotten it.

Still better than WIZARDS OF THE DEMON SWORD, though.          

SUPERMAN LEGACY (2025)

 

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

SPOILERS OUT THE WAZOO

Yes, I'm going to discuss lots of stuff about the film's twists and turns, and so I wouldn't blame anyone for not reading this review before seeing the movie. I tried not to watch very many of the trailers or interview-spots with LEGACY's writer-director James Gunn, and nearly none of the advance commentary. Now that I have seen it, my basic verdict is that it's not "too political" or "too jokey." Rather, it's just, to play off the AMADEUS joke, "too many notions" from a former comics-fan trying to fit in everything and the kitchen sink. However, two days after I saw the film, many reviews and box office calculations suggest that LEGACY will be a winner. It's not impossible that on some future second viewing, I might even like it a little better. But it's far from any sort of masterpiece, and I don't think the movie will provide a new model for good superhero films generally.     

One aspect that other moviemakers might imitate is that here Gunn adjures the usual "one gimme" approach to superhero origin films. Instead. like the real comic books, most heroic debuts become "many gimmes" as the creators seek to blend new characters into some overall franchise-universe. Gunn gives us a Superman (David Corenswet) who began his costumed-hero career three years previous to "the present day." There aren't nearly as many wacky heroes, villains and monsters running around as there were in Gunn's SUICIDE SQUAD. Still, there's a motley-crew version of the Justice League in existence and Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) has apparently been making assaults on the Man of Steel for some time, though as in many comics the public perceives Luthor as a law-abiding businessman. Also, Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) knows who Clark Kent really is, and they're seriously involved though not yet sharing toothbrush-space. What a busy three years. LEGACY is probably a better advertisement for the prolific creativity of the DC Universe than SQUAD ever was, though I have a lot of reservations about Gunn's choices.

 The main plot can be summed up as "Superman Vs Cancel Culture." Some weeks prior to the film's main action, Superman intervened in a war between a Middle Eastern country, Jarhanpur, that was being invaded by neighbor-nation Boravia, a U.S. ally. In the 1940s the Man of Steel was occasionally seen forcefully brokering peace/ending wars using nothing but his own force of arms. But in the 21st century, real-world governments don't like it when superheroes enforce peace. Luthor plays on the U.S. government's reticence toward superheroic solutions to set a trap for Superman, though the villain seems to have been selling arms to Boravia for a long time before Superman's intervention there. (This too was a Golden Age trope for Siegel and Shuster: War Profiteers Are the Scum of the Earth.) So Luthor concocts two super-flunkies: Ultraman and The Engineer (who both sport two of the most butt-ugly costumes ever seen in superhero cinema). He dresses up Ultraman, who has Superman-like powers (cue reference to the fourth Chris Reeves film), and has the flunky masquerade as a Boravian avenger. Using computer-interfaces Luthor not only stage-manages Ultraman's fight with the hero, the super-scientist also has Ultraman knock Superman all the way to the Arctic wastes. Luthor does all this not to humiliate Superman, but to find the Kryptonian's Fortress of Solitude. How'd Luthor know of its existence? Watched SUPERMAN II, I guess.

Gunn's conception of the Fortress is almost entirely borrowed from Richard Donner's 1978 classic, except that Gunn adds some funny robots to guard over Superman's few Kryptonian relics and a handy solar healing ray, Keep in mind Luthor can't possibly know that an injured Superman will have such a ray; can't know that when injured the hero might, I don't know, call upon some fellow superhero for help. But it just so happens, for the plot's convenience, that Injured Superman whistles up Krypto, who drags the hero all the way to the Fortress. Later, after Superman has repaired himself and gone out again in search of his foe, Luthor and his crew manage to find the Fortress again. Gunn does maintain a little mystery as to how the villain gains access to the hidden retreat. But this minor note of mystery also serves to cover up the fact that Luthor does all this without having any true knowledge that he can find something in the Fortress to help him cancel Superman.                 

But of course, Luthor's trip is not in vain; he learns a deep, dark secret of Kal-El's Kryptonian "legacy" that hurts his reputation with many, though not all, of the people who have lionized the hero. This fall in popularity makes the government politicos give Luthor a free hand in taking the Man of Steel prisoner. However, as Gunn's plot makes clear, Luthor actually manages to imprison his enemy because the mad scientist also lucks into capturing Krypto at the Fortress. Superman explicitly turns himself over to Luthor because he's the kind of guy who'll even go to the wall for a mangy mutt. I could argue that it would be possible to drop the "Kryptoninan legacy" folderol and keep the plot essentially the same. The legacy plot-point only functions to supposedly motivate the U.S. government to give Luthor a free hand. But then, no government agency is explicitly involved in capturing or even questioning the Kryptonian. Even Snyder's BATMAN VS SUPERMAN did a better job of distilling how a government of humans might react to the precipitate actions of a superhuman. In essence, Gunn wants it both ways: he wants to take a shot at government overreach, but all the dirty work is done by the film's main villain, so the government's role is nugatory.

 I will give Gunn props in that he finds a way to make Clark Kent's colleagues, the reporters of the Daily Planet, vital to the story. In a comic but still essential subplot, Jimmy Olsen discovers that the captive Superman is being held in a "pocket universe." Lois takes this knowledge to the ersatz Justice League in the hope that they will succor their fellow crusader. But not only do we barely know anything about these three yobbos-- Hawkgirl, the Guy Gardner Green Lantern, and Mister Terrific-- we also don't find out why they're mostly indifferent to the fate of Superman. Hawkgirl and Guy are just jerks because Gunn wants them out of the story at that juncture, while Mister Terrific agrees to help Lois not because he holds Superman in any regard. but because Luthor's meddling with extra-dimensional forces could pose a threat to Earth. 

Now, Luthor could have come up with assorted ways of restraining the captive Superman, but in line with Gunn's "too many notions" practice, Gunn decided to shoehorn in quirky DC hero Metamorpho as the method of restraint. Gunn gives the audience no more backstory on the Element Man than he does on the Justice Jerks, but at least Metamorpho shows emotionally torment at working for Luthor, and he actually relates to Superman in a one-on-one manner. Superman, Krypto, Metamorpho, and Metamorpho's Element Baby (don't ask) manage to break out of Luthor's prison just as Lois and Mister Terrific make the scene. It's a slam-bang escape, though too busy for my taste.

The impeding menace of the pocket universe is put on hold because Superman needs time to recover from a close encounter of the Kryptonite kind. The recovery includes a rest at the Kent farm, where we meet Ma and Pa Kent (cast rather against established physical types) for one of LEGACY's few quiet moments. Then there's a well-choreographed big battle scene between Superman and the super-flunkies, while the hero must also seek to save Metropolis from a black hole and the imperiled Jarhanpur from Boravian invaders. Luthor finally has a belated monologue about his obsession with Superman that I found too little too late. The question of Superman's true legacy among humans is more or less wrapped up but in a somewhat superficial manner.

I think my main frustration with LEGACY is that I regarded both Gunn's SUICIDE SQUAD and his three GUARDIANS films as masterclasses in how to adroitly present backstories for large cinematic character-ensembles. In LEGACY, though, Gunn skimped on most of the characters except for Superman, Lois and Luthor. Maybe, despite the clear intention to make LEGACY a tentpole-film, Gunn decided that those three characters had to receive almost all of his attention. And while I have issues with some of the ways Gunn presented information about the three characters, Corenswet, Brosnahan and Hoult have a lot of good scenes playing off one another, probably as good as anything in the Reeve-Hackman-Kidder interactions. So if LEGACY succeeds, it will succeed not so much on presenting a new vision of the Superman mythos, but for being entertaining with dynamic performances and splashy action-scenes.

A last point: LEGACY is not even close to being woke next to the many artistic offenders in that category, from most of the CW TV shows to almost everything in the MCU since 2018, to Gunn's own godawful HBO Max series PEACEMAKER. The story doesn't seriously engage with whatever politics would come about from a superhero ending wars, and the whole BS about Superman being an immigrant was just agitprop from Gunn. Hawkgirl and Mister Terrific may not be very good characters, and they're jerks at times, but she's not a Girl Boss and he's not an Advertisement for Reverse Racism. No one should avoid the film because of false narratives of wokeness, despite all the garbage that almost wrecked the cinematic genre of the superhero.