THE KNIGHT OF SHADOWS (2019)

 

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

Considering how awful some of Jackie Chan's 21st-century productions have been, whether from the East or the West, KNIGHT OF SHADOWS is certainly way ahead of any of those embarrassments. Though it's almost entirely formulaic, at least there's some sense of what the formula is supposed to be.   

We're in medieval China, probably around the 17th century, since Chan's character Pu Songling is based on a famous storyteller of that era. The author's stories, particularly the supernatural ones, were often adapted in China, most famously in the original CHINESE GHOST STORY movie. But this fictionalized version-- I'll call him "Pu" for short-- isn't content to write about the supernatural. He also travels from town to town, exorcising demons whenever he comes across them. Pu's principal weapon is the "Yin-Yang brush," a calligraphy-brush with which he can sketch mystic patterns that in turn banish demons. He also travels with three goofy CGI demons, and the fact that one demon is named "Farty" aptly describes the level of humor the film's shooting for. This accords with Chan playing Pu as a jolly bumpkin, seemingly more concerned with selling his story-pamphlets in every town to which he travels. He's not a dedicated demon-hunter but just fights the critters wherever he happens across them.    

In one town, Pu gets mixed up in with a demon that rips off some precious jewels, but that's just an excuse to have him encounter a comic foil, a naive young village cop (Lin Bohong) who eventually becomes Pu's apprentice, little as Pu wants one. However, the more crucial support-character is another demon-hunter, Yan (Ethan Juan). Yan is on the trail of a pair of female demons, Xiaoqian (Elane Zhong) and Jin (Lin Peng). These two demons feed on human souls by promising immortality to young women and then imprisoning them in a painting for eternity. Yan has had a romantic relationship with Xiaoqian that one source claims is derived from the same story that gave rise to CHINESE GHOST STORY. However, KNIGHT adds some confusing business that I don't think would've occurred to a 17th-century teller of tales: that Yan apparently used to be a demon and Xiaoqian used to be a human. These needless complications, happily, don't distract from the strong melodrama of the Yan-Xiaoqian love scenes, which are as ripely melodramatic as anything in CHINESE GHOST STORY.

Between the heavy panting of the romance scenes and the wacky comedy of the funny demon hunters, KNIGHT forces viewers to put up with a lot of tonal shifts. The script compensates with a very episodic structure, making those shifts fairly tolerable. Not much of the comedy works, except for a bravura sequence with Pu in a room full of mirrors. Not only can Demoness Jin strike at Pu through the mirror-surfaces, slapping or choking, she also cuts him off at the waist, literally, so that Pu's two halves run around the room doing silly things. Given that sixty-something Chan can't possibly ever duplicate the martial feats for which he became famous, it's fun to see him try to come up with wild stunts via CGI. KNIGHT is never in the least profound, but it's highly colorful and lively, and that makes it worth a look.

   

            

CYBER-TRACKER 2 (1995)

 

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

Though the mythicity of the second and last CYBER-TRACKER is no better than the first, the action and the various story-complications are much better. Since both films had the same director, the difference may stem from a different writer producing the script.

The first film ended with the implication that the legal system was going to abolish the custom of using robotic "cyber trackers" to publicly execute accused criminals. However, such automatons are still being used, though one scene mentions that the robots can be programmed to capture rather than kill. In the ensuing interval between films, secret service agent Eric Phillips (Don Wilson) has married crusading reporter Connie (Stacie Foster). Neither of them seems too perturbed by the fact that the government still uses trackers for public executions. Though Eric is still called a secret service agent, he's first seen playing undercover cop, just so the movie can begin with a big cops-vs-crooks action scene. However, the real story starts when Eric's at home watching TV, and he sees a news broadcast showing his wife Connie assassinating the governor.

It's a robot assassin, of course, and it's the product of a new conspiracy headed by one Morgan (Anthony deLongis) The real Connie was kidnapped by Morgan's thugs, who delayed killing her so that she would be found dead at the most propitious time. However, Connie breaks free, clobbers two of the thugs with handy bludgeons, and tries to reconnoiter with Eric. A tracker (Jim Maniaci) overtakes Connie first, but Eric runs it down with a car, temporarily inconveniencing the robot. (There's a slightly funny scene following the usual car-chase, where the tracker instructs a befuddled cop as to where he can seek "emotional support" for his distress.)

Not content to have framed Connie, Morgan has his techs manufacture an Eric robot, sending it to kill the fugitives in a police station (an unsubtle TERMINATOR riff). In the movie's best fight, a less hostile tracker (Maniaci again) interferes with the Eric-robot's mission. The Eric-robot then combines two familiar fight-tropes: (1) he rips off the tracker's arm to beat him with it, and (2) he knocks his head clean off.

More gunfights and car chases follow, and eventually the Ericbot is destroyed. Eric makes an ally of a "friendly" tracker-- one the agent worked with on the undercover case from the film's beginning-- and the small group of Eric's allies seek out Morgan at his HQ. The Connie-bot (Foster of course) has a nice moment beating down the tracker, Eric dodges a laser gun, and Morgan's female aide (Athena Massey) has a brief fight with one of Eric's allies. A "super-tracker" is eliminated within a minute by the laser, and Eric gets to throw down with Morgan, who's a little tougher than the average corporate greedhead. All that, and a big lab-destroying explosion too. Now that's the kind of simple pulp-action I expect from PM flicks!               

CYBER TRACKER (1994)

 

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

I've occasionally appreciated the better formula-flicks from the defunct straight-to-video studio PM Entertainment. However, this brain-dead effort, despite starring what might be PM's most bankable star, proves thoroughly routine.   

Don Wilson plays Eric Phillips, a secret service agent assigned to protect government bigwigs, lives in a near-future Earth that looks almost like regular Earth: the presence of cyber-trackers. These emotionless automatons serve roughly the same purpose as the judges in the British JUDGE DREDD comic: once assigned to overtake sentenced criminals, they immediately execute them with arm-guns. The script shows zero interest in how this sociological state of affairs came about, and we never see more than one cyber-tracker at a time. always played by the same hulking actor, Jim Maniaci.

Though Eric's devoted to his job, he's lost a wife who didn't like the danger he lived with, and an obnoxious fellow agent constantly seeks to undercut Eric's authority. (Since the other agent is played by Richard Norton, fans know there will eventually be a match between Norton and Wilson, though the script makes viewers wait until the bitter end for the fight.) However, Eric's biggest problem is that he won't help the governor he's guarding with some illegal project he's got going with Cybercore, the company that makes the trackers. So the villains frame Eric for murder and send a tracker to kill him. Eric is then conveniently enlisted by a rebel group seeking to eliminate Cybercore's influence over the government, and guess what, the head of the rebels is a hot young babe named Connie (Stacie Foster).         

Some of the PM releases are good in terms of mounting decent if unremarkable action-scenes, but TRACKER's many scenes of gunfire and car chases are tedious in the extreme, and the one big kung-fu fight at the end is just fair. The Connie character can't fight but she's reasonably cast as a reporter allied to a rebel group in order to seek justice, though the script, having set up a new romance with her for Eric, doesn't develop that subplot. The movie's only original touch is a concluding quote from Ayn Rand.        

ARABELLA BLACK ANGEL (1989)

 

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

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

I don't know if at the time ARABELLA was made, giallos were enjoying a comeback, but since the movie was recently released on a DVD volume called "Forgotten Giallos," I'm guessing the movie wasn't overly successful. I've seen no other directorial efforts by Stelvio Massi, though he was a cinematographer on a number of better-known Italian films, including Giuliano Carnimeo's only giallo, THE CASE OF THE BLOODY IRIS. The writer has no other credits on IMDB, which might explain why the script for ARABELLA tends to wander about at times.

As others have observed, ARABELLA amps up the near-hardcore sex right away. Some reviews call Deborah (Tini Cansino, niece of Rita Hayworth) a nymphomaniac, though all one knows from the first few sequences is that she's not getting any at home. (I think the name Arabella is used for a fictionalized version of Deborah.) We only know of one transgression, when the upper-class Deborah goes to a warehouse sex party, looking for love-- though not, as she specifies in the warehouse scene, for pain. Unfortunately for the young woman, Italian cops raid the party. One cop, DeRosa, seizes Deborah, believing her a hooker, and sodomizes her to exchange her freedom. Deborah goes home, and the next day we see her life with husband Frank and live-in mother-in-law Martha (Ida Galli, the only name I recognized from other films, such as THE CASE OF THE SCORPION'S TAIL). Frank, as a result of an accident shortly after his wedding to Deborah, became both wheelchair-bound and impotent. The result is that he's a petty tyrant.to the women, even though he's apparently able to give them a ritzy upper-class existence just by writing popular crime novels.

 The next day, DeRosa finds out Deborah's upper-class background, and he heedlessly beards her in her own lair, hungry for more easy pickings. The cop corners his prey and talks her into having sex on the property. Deborah goes along with the extortion but Frank in his wheelchair spots the assignation. Deborah sees Frank watching, picks up a handy hammer and apparently kills the cop. (I say apparently because a careless end-scene suggests he might have survived, but this incident was probably nothing but a toss-off notion.) 

The killing of the cop has zero consequences; Deborah and Frank simply bury him on the grounds, and he's barely mentioned afterward. What does affect the plot is Frank having seen Deborah interact with another man. Not only does it stimulate Frank on some level, he decides he wants his wife to go around getting into more sexual encounters, so that the author can incorporate them into his book. (If it wasn't a sex thriller before, I guess it becomes one by fiat.) Deborah is either a nympho or an unusually obedient wife, for she goes along with Frank's scheme. However, her sexual peregrinations also supply the movie with the giallo-trope of escalating murders. Some mysterious person begins killing off people in Deborah's orbit-- including a potential blackmailer she didn't have sex with-- and this is what brings in the cops. The film then shifts its focus to an inspector named Gina.         

 

I don't know if the filmmakers thought audiences might add Gina to the movie's very small pool of suspects for the crimes, but the inspector never seems a potential murderer despite being (a) lesbian and (2) psychologically messed-up because her mother killed her father long ago. I doubt anyone was convinced, though, because the script tosses out such details so carelessly that they don't seem to have any importance. Even Gina's quarrel with her lover, female reporter Agnese, just seems contrived to occupy time, up to the point Agnese is one of the killer's victims.

 After a handful of desultory murders, the script jams together three big reveals at the end. One is that Frank, though probably still impotent, isn't actually wheelchair-bound. (It's not explained very well but I think the idea was that he spontaneously healed yet kept his recovery secret from Deborah in order to keep a mental hold over his wife.) The second reveal is that Gina is actually Frank's half-sister, for Frank was her mother's child by a different husband. The third is no surprise at all, because the mother of Frank and Gina is Martha. who's the only possibility left given that both Deborah and Frank would be too obvious. 

Martha's motive is a favorite among makers of sex-thriller films: she's a prude who hates sex. period, with the slight implication that she resents her daughter-in-law getting so much action. To be sure, though, Deborah isn't a good advertisement for concupiscence. Though she's not a developed character and Cansino isn't much of an actress, there are a few scenes that put across how badly women can be used by men, whether they're husbands or casual extortionists. Those scenes are the only reason I grade ARABELLA's mythicity as fair. But if one has any hopes of ARABELLA being a stylish giallo, those hopes are doomed to perish quickly.          
    

    

PIRAHNA-MAN VS. WEREWOLF-MAN (2010)

 

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

I guess Streaming has finally outpaced both the commercial TV of my youth and the days of video rental stores, if it can summon forth, as from the vasty deep, a fifteen-year-old monster-mash crapfest I never heard of.    

Now, ordinary when I raise the specter of--

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

-- it's usually because I'm revealing detailed plot points. But for PIRAHNAWOLF, I'm going to reveal the story that the crap-movie probably could have told adequately, at least as far as crap-moves go:  

Reporter Lexi Glass (Carrie Long) thinks she may have hit the big time. Stuck doing routine local news in Anytown U.S., she hears about two brutal slayings of blonde women, and witnesses think they heard the howling of a dog or wolf. While investigating, Lexi starts having weird dreams. Sometimes she feels herself experiencing the serial murders, as blonde women are attacked by a werewolf-killer. Less often, she also dreams herself swapping spit with a handsome bearded man she's never met. The two forebodings come together when Lexi learns more about her family background. Her mother had an affair with a man who was a werewolf, and by him she conceived a son, also a werewolf and a half-brother to Lexi. Lexi realizes that she's been experiencing the murders through her brother's eyes, and when she meets him in his non-werewolf persona, she's immediately attracted to him, dinner and a movie be damned. So they swap spit, because evidently as the child of her mother Lexi just can't resist those wolf-boys. However, she realizes she really doesn't want either to protect a killer or to raise little lupine babies, so she strangles Wolf-Brother to death without so much as a "one who loves him enough to understand" sentiment.   

Now, that's a serviceable if unremarkable plotline for a werewolf movie, and maybe if I'd read a summary that covers those points, I would have watched that movie more quickly than about a dozen other lycanthrope streaming-flicks that I haven't yet watched. But I have to admit I was lured in by the title PIRAHNA-MAN VS. WEREWOLF-MAN, even though I didn't expect much.

Trouble is, the two artistes behind this dreck thought they'd enhance the simple premise of their werewolf story not only by shoehorning in a Pirahna-Man (who's also Lexi's father), but also a convoluted origin in which (1) the original werewolf killed all hands aboard a nuclear submarine, (2) the submarine gave off nuclear waste that contaminated some pirahna-eggs, which (3) Lexi's father ate so that he became a "piscathrope." ALSO, the werewolf tends to kill lots of people in Lexi's social circle, a la Original Frankenstein's Monster, though not for any particular reasons I could suss out. AND ALSO, Lexi has some sort of spirit-guardian who wears a papier-mache mask over his face and who guides Lexi through some of her backstory-revelations, as well as enlisting Lexi's horny roommate to serve as the reporter's guardian.

On occasion I like flicks that throw everything and the kitchen sink into the mix, but here it's just low-energy and tiresome. All the extraneous material makes me wonder if the writers thought they were doing an absurdist take on monster-movie tropes-- and that leads me to label the film an "irony." It's also a combative irony thanks to a few minutes of fighting between the title monsters, though it's a poor example of both categories.    

        

ALIENATOR (1990)

 

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

Re: the above lobby card-- I'll bet the makers of this cheapjack film didn't run any ads using the name "Terminator" in the domestic U.S. back in the day.

As I've commented before in slightly different terms, Fred Olen Ray's movies break down into either dull shit (of which WIZARDS OF THE DEMON SWORD is the current nadir) and lively shit (with CYCLONE occupying the apex). ALIENATOR-- which happens to be the only other movie credit for writer Paul Garson, author of CYCLONE-- is closer to being dull shit than lively shit. Still, it did engage me in one minor way.

As I've also said before, all Ray movies are just standard genre-stories, loosely constructed so that Ray could slot in as many of his favorite actors as he could manage. Usually, though, it's easy to tell who's the star of the show-- a heroic barbarian, a kick-ass motorcyclist, or an imitation Terminator. But I found myself asking, "Is the top-billed 'Alienator'-- actually called a 'Hunter-Unit' in the film proper-- really the primary character/phenomenon?"

 Oh well, on to what passes for a story. An opening title card informs us that the film begins out in space, following a rebel insurgence against a "tyrant" sporing the Biblical name of "Baal." So, we might think, we're going to hear about one or more good rebels, like Luke Skywalker, right? Ah, no, because the raid led by the rebel leader Kol (Ross Hagen) claimed "thousands of innocent lives," so maybe Kol, sentenced to die on a prison planet, is not a sterling hero. Or is he the best of a bad lot? The warden of the planet (Jan-Michael Vincent) fairly thirsts to vaporize Kol, and beats on the prisoner for the least excuse. Then the warden gets distracted by the arrival of an official named Lund (Robert Clarke), and later he exchanges bitter bon mots with his sexy subordinate officer, and ex-girlfriend (PJ Soles). However, somehow Kol breaks free, beats down or kills various guards (causing one to be victimized by big worms that bore into one's flesh), and then steals a ship. But Kol has a tracking device attached around his neck, so the warden just sends a "hunter-unit" to follow the fugitive and complete his execution.

Kol makes landfall in some US national park. He wanders around and gets summarily knocked down by an RV. The four collegians therein-- a nerd, two interchangeable girls, and an arrogant pre-law guy-- take the injured alien to the local park ranger (John Philip Law). Kol tells the Earthlings part of the truth--that the hunter-unit will destroy everything in its path to get its quarry-- but also claims that the empire plans to invade Earth. The hunter shows up at the ranger station, proving to be a statuesque female with a metal bikini, a white fright-wig, and a laser-ray mounted on one arm (Teagan Clive). The idiot pre-law guy shoots at her, and the hunter-unit demolishes the station and forces the Earthlings and their ET guest to flee. As she stalks them, she also runs into two goofus comedy relief hillbillies, whom she kills when they shoot at her.

The victims take refuge with an old ex-military guy who lives alone (I guess not in the park per se). Kol doesn't participate in the defensive fight, but he suggests using a metal net to deactivate the hunter's circuits, which of course works where bullets did not, (Not surprisingly, this Terminator clone is both part machine and part organic, though there doesn't seem any good reason for the prison-planet to have used a cyborg rather than a robot.) However, Kol recognizes a kindred spirit in the nasty pre-law guy, and he exercises his one super-power-- a previously unmentioned ability to take over bodies, like that of the asshole guy-- before the "Alienator" revives and chops off Kol's head. 

Even though Ray's faux-Terminator is the film's selling point, the script shows no interest in what she is or even if she possesses anything like consciousness (aside from a throwaway scene in which she pets a deer in the forest). Kol the ruthless revolutionary is really the figure central to the story, whether he's killing "thousands of innocents" or involving naive Earth-people in his troubles. Garson could have swiped Kol's basic type from any number of stories in which alien criminals come to Earth and are pursued by alien cops, such as 1987's THE HIDDEN. I should add that Kol's influence upon the prison planet doesn't end when he leaves it, for the delegate Lund turns out to be a Kol ally, and Lund also kills a few redshirts before the warden takes him out.                          

Because of the rustic setting and the presence of Robert Clarke, some reviewers labeled ALIENATOR a remake of THE ASTOUNDING SHE MONSTER. Though ALIENATOR is often as dull as MONSTER, at least the 1990 trash-film doesn't indulge in a phony-baloney cheat-ending. As in most Rayflicks, the talented actors are placed on the same level as the untalented ones, whether it's John Philip Law or Dawn Wildsmith. They're all just uttering undistinguished rote dialogue-- unless, like Teagan Clive, they have next to no dialogue at all.  

TO KILL WITH INTRIGUE (1977)

 

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

Otherwise known as JACKIE CHAN'S HAMLET! Okay, I'm the only one who calls TO KILL WITH INTRIGUE by that name but given that this obscure Taiwanese flick predates Jackie's jolly image, I could justify the name just on the basis that this has to be Chan's grimmest, most morose role up to this point in his career.

However, one of INTRIGUE's scenes made me think of the key HAMLET scene in which the hero renounces Ophelia, possibly (as some critics speculate) after he's made her pregnant. In INTRIGUE, young nobleman Shao (Chan) meets with Qian (Yu Ling-long), a maid in his father's court, and tells her to take a hike, despite knowing that she has a bun in the oven. Not too much later, he bursts into the court, telling all of the guests celebrating his father's birthday to get lost too. The guests leave, and Father Lei yells at Shao. Shao says he did it all to keep innocents out of harm's way, and he removes an item from his tunic: a dismembered hand with the image of a human-headed bee drawn upon it. Shao doesn't say how he came by this curious oracle, but he claims it's the calling-card of a gang of kung-fu bandits, the Killer Bees, whom Lord Lei attempted to wipe out. While the lord is conferring with his son, wife, and retainers about the incipient attack, four guests return to the court-- only to drop dead. A strange one-handed man shows up (maybe a cutesy reference to Jimmy Wang Yu's One-Armed Swordsman?) and demands the return of his hand. Shao flings the dead hand to the probably dead man and the latter bounds away.

Then the attack by the Killer Bees begins in earnest. Armed men appear on the estate-walls, and into the courtyard five coffins appear. The coffin lids shoot off, and up spring the assault's leader and four cohorts, all attired in flower-masks, as if seeking to conflate death and fertility. The leader is Ting Tan-yen (Hsu Feng), a beautiful woman wearing a half-mask over her lower face, and after swearing vengeance, she engages Lord Lei in sword-combat. A melee breaks out, but the Lei family is overmatched. Ting kills the hero's mother and father and easily beats down Shao's weak nobleman-fu. However, he manages to get a sword to Ting's throat. She invites Shao to kill her but only after she shows him the facial scar beneath her mask, a wound she got from Shao's father when she was still a child. Doubt, the curse of the Melancholy Dane, causes Shao to hesitate, and Ting knocks him out.

When he awakes, he sees Ting from behind and thinks it's his lost love Qian. Ting tells Shao that she spared his life so that he'd suffer as she suffered the loss of her family. Shao can do nothing but go looking for the woman he spurned, even for reasons he thought beneficent.

To be sure, Shao wasn't completely stupid about the risks of chasing off his pregnant mistress; he mentioned to his father that he sent a friend named Jin to look after Qian. Jin does show up just as bandits attack Qian, and he kicks their asses before taking Qian to his house. However, Jin doesn't seem to know why Shao disavowed his mistress. Qian wants to flee the general area and Jin obliges her, so that when Shao comes looking, no one's to home.

A disconsolate Shao stays at Jin's house. Ting shows up, twisting the knife by telling Shao his friend's gone off with his lover. Then she calls Shao a "beast," which just so happens to be what Qian called Shao when he gave her the kiss-off. Shao hallucinates that Ting is Qian, embraces her, and summarily beds her. It's not clear if Ting is aware he's mistaken her for someone else, though there's no question she could've stopped Shao if she'd wanted to. After they've had sex and Shao's passed out, he mumbles Qian's name and Ting runs off, jealous as hell. (I admit Hamlet didn't do quite this much bed-hopping, though a fellow named Freud claimed that he had a certain ambivalence about his mama.) 

Then Shao pays the price for a grudge against Jin, as three paid assassins break in on him. He fights them and he kills one, but the other two knock him out. Fourth Dragon, an older noble, shows up and tells his assassin-employees that they assaulted the wrong man. He pays them off but when they want to murder the unconscious Shao, Fourth Dragon drives them off. He has Shao brought to his home, apologizes, and tells Shao that Jin ripped off the cargo that Fourth Dragon's guard-escorts were protecting. Slightly later, Ting shows up again-- "I am your shadow," she mocks the anguished hero-- and though she won't tell Shao where Jin and Qian are, she tasks him with not even having the filial piety to bury his slain parents. Further, she says, they were buried by none other than his recent benefactor, Fourth Dragon. Shao, unable to find his lost love, sublimates his desires by pledging loyalty to a "second father," joining the Dragon's guards. Does Fourth Dragon take the place of Lord Lei, the father whose virtue became suspect? The clan of the assassins attacks the guardians, and Shao leads the fight against them, calling himself "Fifth Dragon." But the assassins really start losing when Ting Tan-yen joins the battle, without explaining why she interceded. She leaves Shao in the care of Fourth Dragon for the time being but later persuades him to let her take Shao to her own domicile. 

On top of all these sturm-and-drang incidents-- Shao finding a new father to replace the dead one, or having his life preserved by the woman who killed both parents-- Fourth Dragon meets the governor, to whom his life is forfeit for losing a precious cargo-- and it's none other than the robber Jin, who is ALSO the head of the assassin-clan. Basically, everything Jin has done has been to advance his clan's power in the region, and he even takes credit for eliminating the Lei family. This may have been an overreach on the author's part, since Jin doesn't seem affiliated with the Killer Bees, who aren't mentioned or seen again after the opening fight. Jin fights and kills both Fourth Dragon and his aide, and then proceeds to his estate, where he uses honeyed words to persuade Qian to marry him. She agrees, wanting to protect her child and grieving because she's been told Shao is dead. 

Now, thus far INTRIGUE hasn't had anything like Hamlet's ghostly father, or even the Devil whom Hamlet half-suspects of having sent the paternal apparition. However, there is a slight sense of passing into another world when Shao is taken to Ting's estate. Ting heals Shao but won't let him leave if he can't beat her in kung fu. He practices continually, but he's unable to up his game. He challenges her anyway, and she punishes him in various ways, which reminded me of the ordeals heroes would undergo from goddesses. (Admittedly the Classical deities didn't make their acolytes swallow hot coals or suffer having their faces burned). Finally, in contrast to the majority of chopsockies, Ting realizes Shao can't equal her. She feeds him a drink mixed with her own blood, and this empowers him so that he can now destroy Jin and save Qian, even though Ting's implicitly condemned to a loveless existence.

I admit that Shao's quest for vengeance isn't responsible for the deaths of almost all of the principal characters, as Hamlet's quest causes the fall of the Danish court. However, a few times the English translation criticizes Shao's inability to tell good from bad, which is closer to Hamlet than most martial-arts heroes ever come. Shao's overly trusting friendship with Jin makes it possible for the evil plotter to end the lives of the Fourth Dragon family, and (maybe indirectly) those of the Lei Family too. It is a major error when Ting's Killer Bee allies just disappear. In a plot-sense Jin's assassin cult more or less takes the place of the recrudescent bandits, even though Ting clearly does not connect the two in any way when she cuts a bloody swathe through the assassins to protect Shao. While INTRIGUE was no more than a bump in the road of Jackie Chan's ascension to international success, it does deserve to be better known as one of the few kung-fu films to possess some psychological depth. I haven't seen all the films in Hsu Feng's repertoire, but I doubt any other role she played came close to that of the tormented Ting Tan-Yen.   

   

                 

THE KILLER METEORS (1976)

 

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

I don't exactly why I liked KILLER METEORS even in a minor way. It's certainly not because the movie is anyone's favorite Jackie Chan film, for although it received an early American video release thanks to the Chan fandom, the Chan-man occupies a supporting role in METEORS. This is primarily a Jimmy Wang Yu chopsocky, and I can't describe it better than a reviewer who said it was a movie made when Wang Yu was on the downside of his popularity and Chan was about to hit his stride. To be sure, at this point Chan had not yet found his metier, and METEORS is one of the few movies where Jolly Jackie plays a complete villain.

In many previous reviews I've assailed various HK movies for doing a bad job of melding the chopsocky genre with that of the murder-mystery. My most frequent criticism is that the mystery-choppers, at least as they appear in their English versions, are frequently sloppy, tossing in new characters at random and not providing strong motives for the principals. METEORS, though, was comparatively restrained in terms of introducing the main characters and sticking with them, so even if not every motive completely tracked, at least I could keep track of who was who.

Both Wang Yu and Chan plan renowned martial arts masters. Mei, the former's character, seems to be a roaming crusader, and he's nicknamed "Killer Meteors" because he possesses some strange weapon of that same name, though no one knows what the weapon  is because its victims are always destroyed. Hua, Chan's character, seems to be a nobleman in exile, living with a small entourage. When Mei answers Hua's summons to his home, Hua explains that his wife Lady Tempest (Lee Si-Si) fed him a slow-acting poison for some offense. Hua can't penetrate his wife's formidable defenses, consisting largely of four adepts with special powers, like hurling darts or wielding magical magnetism, so Hua hires Mei to steal the antidote from Lady Tempest. Hua accepts the task, and one of the first things he does to enter the Tempest court is to persuade one of her court-women, Lady Phoenix (Lily Lu-yi), to pretend that he's one of her slaves. At the same time, Mei also has another girl in his life, one Fung (Yu Ling-lung), and though there's no explicit sex here. Fung does visit Mei in jail once and apparently gives up her womanhood to him.

In addition to various sockings and choppings, there are also assorted crosses and double crosses, which I won't try to recapitulate. One IMDB review asserts that the screenplay by one Gu Long was adapted from the writer's own wuxia novel, and if so, I'd venture this is why the plot seemed to hang together reasonably well, even if I didn't buy every motive. The ending seems to set up a confrontation between Fung and Phoenix, the two rivals for Mei's love, but they just disappear for a time and then Phoenix shows up to unite with Mei, perhaps suggesting that Fung met some unpleasant fate. Chan and Wang Yu fight twice, but neither battle is exceptional given their stature in the world of martial movies. The revelation of the "killer meteors'" nature leads me to call this movie a magical-era fantasy, though it's much less evocative than one of Lo Wei's previous works in that vein, 1971's VENGEANCE OF A SNOW GIRL-- which I also esteem far above the two mundane Bruce Lee films Wei made around the same time. I don't know how many times Lo Wei might have crossed paths with Gu Long, except that after they made this shot-in-Korea Taiwanese cheapie, they again collaborated on a second kung-film in Korea as well, TO KILL WITH INTRIGUE, which had Chan as the sole star and Yu Ling-lung, again in a support-role.

LEGO MARVEL SUPER HEROES: AVENGERS REASSEMBLED (2015)

 

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

Almost a dozen of these short LEGO adaptations of Marvel properties have been floating around for about ten years, and I've tended to put off looking at any of them. Maybe the shortness of the features prejudiced me against them, because I have watched most of the available LEGO transformations of DC Comics and have even given some of them fairly positive reviews, for all that I'm no LEGO fan. But then, the very fact that a fair number of the DC ventures are an hour and a half indicates that someone in their production expended some effort. I suppose I thought Marvel wasn't that invested in working with LEGO to produce anything that captured the appeal of Marvel properties.

I don't think REASSEMBLED fails to do so utterly, but it's not very memorable either, even judged as simple kids' entertainment. We meet the Avengers-- mostly the standard roll call from the four live-action movies, though The Vision get a bit more exposure here than he did in the features. The heroes are making silly preparations for a party when the evil robot intelligence Ultron takes control of the Iron Man armor, with Tony Stark still inside. This at least satisfies the almost requisite "heroes forced to fight each other," and when Ultron commands Iron Man to fly off, the others must find a way to free their friend. They eventually learn that Ultron's taking control of the Iron Man armor is just a prelude to mobilizing Stark's flying squadron of armored robots, the Iron Legion, for purposes of world conquest. Frankly, since the idea of the Iron Legion debuted in IRON MAN 2, I always thought it sounded more like the conception of a supervillain than of a superhero.

This would seem to be a sufficient plot for a short of about 22 minutes. But for reasons that might have to do with marketing, the script squeezed in two extra villains, Baron Strucker and Yellowjacket (apparently an enemy of Ant Man in this world), and guest-shots for both Spider-Man and the Iron Spider. There are a lot of jokey lines, and a couple were a little diverting, but I'm not surprised that the LEGO aesthetic doesn't fit Marvel characters very well. After all, Marvel gained fame for being hip, and that's why LEGO is a better match with DC-- for DC's the company famous for showing "it's hip to be square."    

ANGEL SEASON 3 (2001-02)

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






HEARTTHROB (F)-- Some time transpires between Angel learning of Buffy's death at the end of BTVS Season 5, and the beginning of HEARTTHROB. Angel has left the agency for some time to grieve, but his retreat is interrupted by a demon-attack. When he returns, he learns that the agency's guest Fred, whom the heroes rescued from Pylea at the end of Season 2, has stayed confined to her room because of her anxieties about contact with others-- except for Angel, whom she worships. Angel returns just in time to be guided, along with Gunn and Wesley, to save some teenagers from a vampire gang. The good guys kill the vamps, but a female, Elizabeth, was the romantic partner of a male vamp, James. The bereaved bloodsuscker undergoes an operation to make him more powerful than Angel, an operation involving his heart-- which also relates to the story's romantic metaphor, as Angel deals with surviving the broken heart he carries due to Buffy's passing. The episode ends with the revelation that Darla has somehow conceived a child from her last interaction with Angel.

THAT VISION-THING (F)-- Cordelia's visions start to carry dangerous consequences, and the detectives suspect that someone is interfering with the messages sent by the Powers That Be. Lilah has messed with Cordy's visions in order to extort Angel into performing a task, and he reluctantly agrees. He travels to another dimension, where he must defeat a powerful demon in order to liberate a prisoner. Angel surmises that this prisoner, later revealed to be a human named Billy Lane, will serve some fiendish purpose for W&H, but he exchanges Billy for the termination of the curse, and then follows up the deal by killing the curse-sender.

THAT OLD GANG OF MINE (P)-- Since Gunn started working for AI, his former vampire-slaying gang is taken over by a new guy named Gio. Suddenly someone starts killing off harmless demons, so one guess as to the culprit. The gangbangers invade Lorne's club, which doesn't have wards against human violence, and the Angel group has to curb the gangstas' enthusiasm for demon-killing. There's a cute scene in which Cordy finds out about the implicitly sexual transaction between Angel and the female Furies, which is one of various early signals the writers put forth as to a possible romance between Angel and Cordelia.

CARPE NOCTEM (F)-- This is a lighter episode despite some dangerous moments. An old man named Marcus has been using his ability to switch bodies to live it up in other people's bodies before returning to his own body and leaving the original owners to perish. As the detectives investigate these anomalies, Marcus switches bodies with Angel, who's then confined to an old-age home. Marcus then provides much humor as he tries to figure out how things work in Angel's domain, and when he learns he's immortal he plans to keep the vampire body for good. After all returns to normal, Angel gets the news that Buffy has been restored to life. A meeting between the two of them is indicated but was never filmed.     

FREDLESS (G)-- Up to this point it's not been clear exactly why the ANGEL writers introduced Fred to the ensemble, except for the possibility that since Wesley provided the pedantic "Giles" of the group, Fred might've been brought in to be the wacky but incisive "Willow." Still, Fred is more a walking-wounded type than any BUFFY character, and the default attitude of the Angel group toward her has been bemused protectiveness. The episode FREDLESS offers the possibility that Fred may find better care from her parents, who arrive in LA seeking their missing-for-five-years daughter. There's a thankfully brief subplot as to whether the cornfed parents might be something sinister, but the main plot concerns the inexplicable attack of a giant bug-demon. Fred initially does not want to see her parents because seeing them makes her whole Pylean experience too real, though she finally resolves to return home with her family. However, Fred realizes that she can't return to being the innocent she was before, and her Pylean experiences, however negative, have made her uniquely situated to help the noble mission of Angel Investigations.  

BILLY (G)-- Though both BUFFY and ANGEL executed a number of stories, good and bad, about how women often get the short end of the stick throughout history, BILLY may be the best meditation on how the XX sex were short-changed by biology. Billy Lane, rescued by Angel from a hell-dimension in THAT VISION-THING, was liberated because W&H owed a favor to Billy's rich uncle. However, Billy hates women and possesses the psychic talent to exacerbate the negative feelings of men towards women. Billy gratuitously gives Lilah a demonstration of his ability by causing her legal rival Gavin to become incensed against her, battering her severely before the spell wears off. Cordy's vision-powers clue the heroes into what Billy's doing. Lilah, somewhat less than charitable toward Billy, informs Cordelia that Billy can activate a "primordial misogyny" in men. Billy uses his power to make Wesley attempt to assault Fred, a sequence made more harrowing by the fact that Wesley secretly likes the super-genius. The climax kills Billy dead in an inventive manner, and in a minor subplot, Angel begins teaching Cordy hand-to-hand combat, which gives her a little more resemblance to a certain vampire slayer.

OFFSPRING (F)-- A few previous episodes hinted at earlier conflicts Angelus and Darla had with Holtz, a 16th-century vampire killer. OFFSPRING opens with Holtz's first big scene, at a time in the 1700s when Holtz has captured Angelus but loses him to a rescue by Darla. In modern times, the Angel Team investigates an apocalyptic prophecy, but a more pressing problem raise its head when pregnant Darla shows up at the hotel. The writers don't immediately address how Angel was able to impregnate a fellow vampire, but Cordy almost immediately blames Angel for the little stranger. However, Darla hasn't changed much, repaying Cordelia's kindness by trying to suck her blood. Darla flees and almost preys on a small boy, but Angel overtakes and fights her. Still, Angel spares Darla because she bears his child. Meanwhile, a demon named Sajihan brings a still living Holtz to the 21st century.       

QUICKENING (F)-- In line with prophecies that suggest Darla's baby will be a "miracle child," both W&H and several demon cultists dog the Angel Team's tracks, hoping to remove the baby from Darla's womb and use it for assorted mystical purposes. Most of the episode consists of fighting and fleeing, and concludes with Holtz confronting Angel, whom he believes to still be Angelus.             

LULLABY (G)-- I was never impressed by the Darla character, though actress Julie Benz portrayed her well. However, Darla's last hurrah is also her best outing. Though unlike Angel she has no soul, her child is human and she feels the effects of his spirit, which makes her regret all of the terrible things she did as a vampire. Angel, taken prisoner by Holtz and his demon-servants at the hotel, manages to break free. The demons later attack the Angel Team while they're caring for Darla, whose pregnancy is coming to term. The heroes speculate that the Powers That Be made the conception possible but that the Powers may fear that the miracle child may bring about an apocalypse. Holtz continues to attack and at the climax Darla, who's grown to love the child, realizes that if she gives birth, she'll lose her soulful quality and may even destroy her own offspring. Thus she stakes herself so that her body dissolves and the infant alone survives. An interesting DVD extra asserts that Darla has always had a loose mother-son vibe toward Angel, who's both her true lover and the only vamp she ever sired. But all of her past actions flowed from self-interest, while Darla finally transcends her evil in an act of self-sacrifice. Holtz sees Angel with the newborn and decides to take a new tack for vengeance.         

DAD (F)-- The writers, having set up a situation where Angel Investigations could be besieged all season by baby-hunting demons, have to do some fancy stepping to restore the status quo. Angel becomes hyper-protective of his child, now named Connor. Another wave of baby-hunters strikes the hotel, but Angel devises a set-up to annihilate the attackers. He then crashes into the office of current W&H big shot Linwood and makes clear that if the baby even gets a cough, Linwood will soon be coughing up blood. Meanwhile, Holtz dispenses with his demon servitors because he wants loyal soldiers in his crusade, and makes his first convert in a young woman named Justine. Also, Lorne starts hanging out with AI since his club has been closed again.

BIRTHDAY (F)-- The gang celebrates Cordy's birthday, not knowing that she's been suffering migraines due to the increasing pain of her visions. A vision strikes her and her body falls comatose, while Cordy's spirit floats free, unable to touch anything or communicate with anyone. She's visited by a spirit guide from the Powers That Be, and he informs her that the half-demon Doyle should never have given her his precognitive powers. Because she's fully human, the visions will eventually kill her. The Powers That Be offer to rewrite Cordelia's history so that she becomes a major TV actress. She refuses until her guide lets her hear part of a conversation where Angel petitions the Powers to release Cordy because she's "weak." Cordy angrily lets the Powers change her history, and so she gets to be the Big Star she always wanted to be. Yet in jig time her normal personality and sense of responsibility re-assert themselves, not least when she sees that in her alternate reality Angel receives the visions and goes half-crazy in reaction. Cordelia returns to her regular status with an infusion of demon-energy, ensuring that she can endure the visions painlessly.

PROVIDER (G)-- Ironically, while in the first season Cordelia repeatedly nagged Angel about getting more well-paying cases, this time Angel is desperate to rack up lots of money to help raise Connor. This causes the team to divide its efforts into too many directions. Angel undertakes a mission to clean out a nest of vampires, Gunn and Wesley protect a woman from her undead husband, and Cordy has to rescue Fred and Lorne from demons who want to separate Fred's ultra-smart brain from her body. Though many of the ANGEL comedies are a little too baggy-pants for me, PROVIDER has a better conceptual focus and delivers good payoff on all the plots. Also, both Wesley and Gunn become interested in Fred.

WAITING IN THE WINGS (P)-- Angel's extreme protectiveness toward Connor fades a bit as he and the others go out for a night at the opera (albeit leaving a resentful Lorne home minding the baby). However, after the first performance, Angel claims that he saw the identical prima ballerina in 1990, utterly unchanged. Angel and Cordelia, neither of whom has become conscious of the sparks between them, get trapped in a time-loop by a spell that makes them re-enact the romance of earlier lovers, one of whom is the ballerina. Nor surprisingly, Angel references his previous experience with this plotline in the BUFFY episode I ONLY HAVE EYES FOR YOU. Gunn, Welsey and Fred come to the rescue and all the heroes fight harlequin-masked demons while seeking to solve the mystery of the cursed dancer. In other developments, Wesley loses the contest for Fred's heart before he even has a chance to fire a shot. Also, just as Angel begins considering that he might have feelings for Cordy, up jumps Groo, her old lover from Pylea.

COUPLET (P)-- Cordelia wants to have sex with Groo in the worst  way, but she's afraid, for no clear reason, that said activity might interfere with her ability to transmit visions, especially since she went through a lot of trouble to make them painless. Angel is as jealous as hell but will move heaven and earth not to reveal it, and even to help his potential new love get it on with her old flame. The actors seemed to be having a good time with the simple material, but there's still not much meat on the bones, and this time the team has to deal with two make-work menaces. However, the subplot about a cryptic prophecy reaches a culmination when it seems to foretell that Angel will kill Baby Connor.        

LOYALTY/ SLEEP TIGHT/ FORGIVING (F)-- Sajihan, Holtz and W&H all mount various attacks upon the Angel Team. W&H still wants to harvest Connor for some recondite mystical purposes, Sajihan wants Connot dead, and Holtz has decided that he can best make Angel suffer by spiriting the infant off to parts unknown. Wesley becomes so triggered by the prophecy's claim that Angel will kill Connor that the crusader steals the infant to protect him. However, Holtz's pawn Justine cuts Wesley's throat and steals the child from him. A frantic Angel swears vengeance on Wesley, and he and his aides show up in a four-way face-off against Sajihan, Holtz, and a W&H team led by Lilah. Holtz absconds with Connot by fleeing into a dimension-gate opened by Sajihan. Later, the Angel Team finds that they cannot open the same dimensional gate. They use dark magic to summon Sajihan, but they end up imbuing him with superior physical powers. Not only does he defeat the Angel Team, he also reveals that he faked the prophecy that deceived Wesley. Oddly, Justine, acting to save her own life, manages to bottle up the demon. The heroes learn that the injured Wesley was found and taken to a hospital. However, though Angel seems willing to forgive his ally his trespasses, the vampire goes berserk and almost smothers Wesley to death.      

      

DOUBLE OR NOTHING (F)-- This episode isn't anything special, but it furnishes some much-needed relief from all the heavy sturm-and-drang of the Connor Abduction plotline. Cordy and Groo return from their vacation, only to have their good spirits quashed by the doom and gloom in the hotel. Once all these ducks are in a row, it's time to reveal that many years ago, Gunn sold his soul for a mess of pottage, or something along those lines, and now a demon-gambler wants to collect. Prior to this conflict's resolution, Gunn and Fred enjoy some nice romantic moments, even if he does try to blow her off so she won't be harmed by his enemies. The actors are good even though the resolution is lame.       

THE PRICE (P)-- The team belatedly realizes that when they tried to re-open a gateway to the dimension to which Connor was taken, the gate is still letting bad things through to Earth. The make-work threat this time is at least suitably grotty: a small army of phosphorescent slugs that can possess people in their ceaseless quest for liquid refreshments of any kind. One visitor to the hotel dies from being infected, so Angel and the others attempt to seal up the place so that they can exterminate the brutes. Gunn soon realizes this won't work, and when Fred gets possessed, he seeks out Wesley. Wesley renders some useful advice but makes clear that he's not cool with having almost been snuffed by his old boss. The slugs are ultimately disposed of by a very contrived measure, after which one more visitor shows on AI's doorstep: Connor, grown to adolescence in his few days abroad.

A NEW WORLD (F)-- As soon as Connor appears, he tries to kill his dad with a stake-gun. He fails but escapes after knocking Gunn and Groo around. Connor wanders into the projects and saves a young female heroin addict from a dealer and his gang. The two of them find their way to a crib and they make out a bit, but the girl shoots up and kills herself. The dealer and his buddies track down Connor, but so does Angel. The thugs get routed, and Angel tries to reason with Connor, not knowing that (somehow) an aged Holtz has also crossed over. Holtz meets Connor at the end. It's clear that Connor considers the man who raised him to be his real father, but Holtz has deeper plans. In other news, a friend of Lorne seals the gateway, and Lilah, having found about Wesley's rift with AI, seeks to enlist him to W&H.

BENEDICTION (F)-- Holtz has evidently told Connor of his heritage, but he wants Connor to explore his feelings about his vampiric daddy. Just as Connor returns to the hotel, Cordelia has a vision: a gang of vampires are about to attack a woman at a night club. Angel, knowing that Connor is a warrior at heart, invites his son along for the fighting. As it happens, the woman who's going to be attacked is Justine, who's been preying on vampires since Holtz departed with Connor. Lilah invites Wesley to see the show, and though he repudiates her he nonetheless stays to watch, not least because Justine almost killed him. Angel and Connor arrive and help Justine fight the vampires. Though Connor comes close to killing Angel too, the youth experiences a bond with his true sire. Angel locates Holtz and seeks him out for a confrontation, but Connor finds out and fears that one father will kill the other. Holtz however tells Angel that he's had his pound of flesh but now wants Angel to protect Connor, since Holtz cannot. However, Holtz then proceeds to have Justine-- who thinks of Holtz as the father she never had-- to kill him in such a way that it looks like Angel bit his throat to death. A minor subplot shows Groo becoming aware that there's a romantic vibe between Cordy and Angel that neither is fully aware of.       

TOMORROW (F)-- Connor and Justine plot revenge for Holtz. Lorne takes his leave for the time being, and Groo will soon follow, realizing that despite his having hot sex with Cordy, she really cares most deeply about Angel. Lilah continues to tempt Wesley and goes the extra mile by sleeping with him. Connor returns to the hotel and feigns being reconciled to being Angel's son. Because of Groo's revelations, Cordelia begins to think seriously about the matter, as does Angel. However, the Powers That Be want their own pound of flesh. For having endowed her with demon-powers, the Powers suddenly want her on another plane of being. The season ends on a cliffhanger as Justine and Connor plot to end Angel's career for good.             

     

SMALLVILLE 3:11-12 ("DELETE." "HEREAFTER," 2004)

 

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

The next two episodes are not as bad as "Asylum," but they're just average undistinguished tales with cardboard opponents.

Shortly after Lionel has cancelled Chloe's internship with the Daily Planet, she's almost killed by an assassin driving a truck, who is none other than Clark Kent. Clark has no memory of doing anything to Chloe, despite still not trusting her due to her spying on him. In short order other persons in Chloe's circle-- Lana and both of the Kent parents-- also try to kill her. The culprit is Doctor Garner, last seen in the episode "Ryan," and because Chloe has some dirt on him, Garner has enlisted computer-genius Molly Griggs to use a hypnotic email that programs the recipients to attack Chloe. Eventually both Clark and Lex are able to separate Molly from Garner's influence and stop her attacks. It's a disjointed episode, not least because Molly does succeed in murdering a minor character. A comics-sequel outside the range of the TV show brought her back, but both she and Garner are pusillanimous villains. The episode's only asset is a well-choreographed hand-to-hand battle between Chloe and Lana.

"Hereafter' is a little less insipid in that, though it's a meteor-freak story, this time the afflicted fellow, student Jordan Cross, is trying to do good. Jordan has the ability to read the future fates of persons he touches, and so he gets into trouble trying to save people. The episode feels like so much marking time and there's little urgency to Jordan's crusade. The escalating subplot about Lana's sometime boyfriend Adam Knight gets more attention, the better to lead into the ensuing episode and its resolution of the not-very-captivating Adam Mystery. The episode ends with a loose cliffhanger in that Jonathan suffers an ordinary heart attack, but he's doing OK at the beginning of the next episode.             

METROPOLIS (1927)

 

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

For two major reasons, I'm glad that before I reviewed the celebrated METROPOLIS, I read and reviewed the 1925 Thea Von Harbou novel on which the Lang film was based. The first is that many reviews of the movie tend to treat it as if it were sui generis, spawned from the mind of Fritz Lang alone, or at best, barely acknowledging the novel that preceded Von Harbou's screenplay for her then-husband's attempt to create a new milestone in German cinema. It's true that some great films are made from dubious sources, like the unproduced play that spawned CASABLANCA. But the movie METROPOLIS is as dependent on the profound qualities of the original novel-- flawed and melodramatic though it is-- as any film adaptation of HAMLET is dependent upon the original play.

One odd thing I gleaned from viewing both book and movie is that though the film is deemed a landmark in science fiction cinema, neither work is really solidly in that tradition. METROPOLIS is not a work that sought to extrapolate trends of the future, however improbably rendered, as one sees in the futuristic cosmos of Wells' 1899 WHEN THE SLEEPER WAKES. Von Harbou's megalopolis isn't based on specific advancements in science, but on a quasi-religious vision of a great city wherein zombie-like workers attend incomprehensible machines whose purposes are barely explained to readers. Early in both book and movie, the protagonist Freder compares the city to the great pagan idol Mammon, devouring the spirits of workers as Mammon devoured the lives of child sacrifices. In many ways, Von Harbou's novel is closer to being "religious fiction" like that of the later C.S. Lewis than it is to mainstream science fiction. Von Harbou's argument-- that Metropolis has become a place of corruption like Babylon and Gomorrah of the Bible-- also posits the solution of a secular redeemer who will in time remold the profane city into a sacred one.

 I commented in my review of the book that I wasn't sure how fervently Von Harbou believed in her reworking of Christian myth, as opposed to just using familiar story-tropes to sell her fevered melodrama. Maybe neither she nor Lang believed in the religious content of the story-- which, by the way, Von Harbou lays on with the proverbial trowel, But their belief or lack of it does not change the extent to which the METROPOLIS narrative is modeled on religious concepts.

That said, the Lang film, by the nature of the medium, inevitably cut down the sheer volume of said concepts from what appeared in the novel. Yet I'd still say it's predominantly religious in tone. Lang gives us, largely unaltered, Von Harbou's rewriting of the Christian narrative. Instead of an omnipotent father-god who obliges his only begotten mortal son to sacrifice himself to bring about humankind's redemption, we have Jon Fredersen, the Founder of Metropolis, tyrannizing the city he created, but eventually ceding his control to the merciful reign of his son Freder, who will (presumably) accomplish the salvation of the corrupt city with the help of his saintly soulmate, the "virgin-mother" Maria. Maria gets one of the first profound Christian images in the movie, as she intrudes upon the pleasure-dome of the elite with a band of lower-class children, declaring to the kids that the favored sons of the rich are their "brothers."

Whatever plans Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel) may have for his son's role in mastering the city, it soon becomes apparent to the Great Man that humble Maria (Brigitte Helm) has become the new deity in the heart of Freder (Gustav Frohlich). At the same time there are rumblings of discontent in the underground city of the workers-- probably influenced by the Morlocks of Wells' TIME MACHINE-- and so Fredersen resolves to eliminate both problems in one fell swoop. He colludes with his "court sorcerer," the demonic Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), in order to create a vile parody of Maria, a robot nicknamed Futura (also Helm). But Fredersen's plan to use Futura to be a "scarlet woman" who leads the workers into perdition almost destroys the entire city-- and so, in essence, makes it necessary for the Father to cede power to the Son. It's even suggested in the book that it's the Father, not the Son, who symbolically perishes upon a figurative Golgotha-- though Lang omits this incantatory scene from his film. 

The METROPOLIS film also necessarily downplays what I've called the "reverse-Oedipal" theme of Von Harbou's book-- a theme derived not specifically from the Christ story, but from multiple Oedipal motifs in the Old Testament. The themes are still present in the film, but they are less fevered and compulsory. No one who's read the book is likely to miss Freder's tedious characterizations of Maria as a "virgin-mother" with none of the scarlet woman's sexiness (and an apparent substitute for the mother he never knew). Thus the opposition between the two archetypes may not be as clear in the film as in the book. Still, since Von Harbou alone is credited with the movie's screenplay, implicitly she knew that a lot of the stuff in the book had to be sacrificed.

So what did Fritz Lang bring to the film? The book has a handful of arresting visual scenes, but overall Von Harbou does not bring Metropolis alive as a distinct place. Though METROPOLIS failed at the box office despite attempts to cut down its daunting length (over three hours in the initial cut), it continues to fascinate its adherents with the dynamism of the visual elements of the ultimate future-city. In terms of sensory elan, Lang's city still dwarfs all others, even that of Ridley Scott's Los Angeles in BLADE RUNNER.

 Similarly, the creation of Futura is Lang's, not Von Harbou's. The prose author does not describe any particular process by which Futura becomes the double of Maria, but Lang conceives a form of alchemical sorcery by which the robotic body of Futura takes on the exact appearance of Maria. One might even theorize that Futura assumes all the sexual aspects that have been repressed out of existence in the mentality of virtuous Maria, though I admit that the movie does not advance this theory overtly.

Even with the excisions from the book, there are still slow sections of METROPOLIS the movie, mostly in the form of unnecessary subplots. As for the performers, I was not taken with Frohlich in his one role or Helm in either of hers. Abel is decent as Fredersen, but Rudolph Klein-Rogge dominates the movie with his obsessed Promethean mad scientist, ranting about how Fredersen cuckolded him with the woman who died birthing Freder, and seeking to destroy his old rival's schemes just as Fredersen destroyed the mad scientist's life. Before there was a definitive movie version of Frankenstein-the-unholy-overreacher, Klein-Rogge inhabited that space first.

Ironically, though METROPOLIS did not succeed at the world box office, it had a salutary effect on Lang's career-- for ostensibly the Hitler regime asked Lang to become the new master of German cinema. In response, Lang had his own "Freder moment," refusing the path of tyranny and fleeing Germany for the sanctuary of the United States. Unlike Freder he left his former love behind, though I believe they'd already parted ways when Lang decamped. One might argue that Lang never made another film this ambitious, though much of that can be assigned to the nature of the Hollywood system, as compared to the liberality of the UFA studio. But despite flaws METROPOLIS remains a masterpiece, as long as one remembers the sizeable contributions of Lang's collaborator.