BEN 10 (2005-07)

 

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

Though I often survey serial cartoons by their seasons, here I've decided to combine all four seasons of the original BEN 10 show into the same review. The reason is simple: there's barely any difference between an episode from Season One and one from Season Four. There are a few two-part episodes, but no sweeping arcs, and the three significant characters-- ten-year-old Ben Tennyson, his same-age cousin Gwen, and their grandpa Max-- stay the same. In fact, all four seasons are supposed to take place in one summer, where the two kids join their grandpa in his RV and tour the country. 

The expedition turns out to be much more adventurous than Grandpa expected, for at the outset Ben finds a strange device of alien origin, and when he touches it. it binds itself around his wrist like a living watch. Then aliens attack, seeking the device, an "Omnitrix," and Ben learns that he can defend himself and others by transforming into super-powerful heroes, all derived from ET-DNA. After a short period of adjustment, Ben becomes enthralled with the prospect of being a superhero, despite the protests of his irritated cousin Gwen. Grandpa Max, for his part, turns out to have inside knowledge of alien incursions on Earth, and he's often able to render critical advice to Ben on "going alien."

Though Ben and his relations contend with various hostile ETs, the series follows the template of most superhero comics, in that as soon as the superhero debuts, a coterie of super-villains springs up to become the crusader's "rogues' gallery." The eccentric Earth-crooks-- the animal-obsessed Doctor Amimo, sorcerers Hex and his niece Charmcaster. the evil clown Zombozo-- are a lot more fun than the extraterrestrial menaces, and the writer-collective behind the series, "Man of Action," frequently features crossovers of the colorful criminals.

As a gesture toward girl-fans, Gwen soon gets a power-upgrade in that she becomes a talented sorceress in her own right, giving Ben a "sidekick" to help in the fight-scenes. The most frequent jokes arise from the quarrels between Ben and Gwen, with Max playing referee, and there's a certain sameness about all three of them, even given that serial TV characters usually don't change much from season to season. I suppose the predictability of the setup helped with the show's longevity in other iterations, but I for one never found any of the Tennysons even slightly nuanced. The most subtle episode has Ben and Gwen travel to the future, when both of them are thirty-something adults. Mature Ben, called "Ben 10,000" because of all the alien powers he's mastered, seems to live in some joyless funk for reasons never disclosed, and Mature Gwen has brought him into contact with his younger self to snap Mature Ben out of his depression. However, in the only other episode taking place in this future, Ben 10,000 has become a routine well-balanced hero, and even has his own ten-year-old kid-- meaning that the writers never meant to open up any complex avenues for this simple kids' adventure series.               

CROWN OF SHADOWS (2025)

 

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

On one hand, CROWN OF SHADOWS is just another micro-budget fantasy with the usual subpar CGI-FX. On the other, it's a missed opportunity, because it's over two hours of pseudo-Tolkienian nonsense, with even less concept of Tolkien than the awful IN THE NAME OF THE KING series. The writer and director-- who have no other IMDB credits-- act at all times as if they're serving up a grand history of the fantasy-world Aberon, when in truth it's less well-designed than even your basic D&D domain. The creators cover up their lack of design with booming Gregorian music. static shots of well-costumed characters reciting portentous dialogue, and implied connections to the Lovecraft mythos of "The Old Ones." (This is signaled by an opening quote from HPL's "Call of Cthulhu," though the cosmic pessimism of that author has nothing to do with Tolkienian dynastic struggles.) There is enough fighting to qualify the film for combative status, but the performers are not very good with either emoting or fake-fighting.

There was a little potential here, though, in that CROWN concerns family quarrels over power. The previous regime is overthrown by Ginnarra (Megan Tremethick), daughter of the previous king, who perishes in a military battle. The king's death means that his son Elderon (Andrew Gourlay) is next in line for the legitimate throne, but Ginnarra seems to hold all the power. Naturally there's no attention as to how Ginnarra gathered such great armies to oppose those of her late father; all we see is the queen and her high priests making obeisances to their evil gods. I think they may be responsible for the CGI dragons, though we don't see them in combat. Most of the action is low-level, as soldiers burn up time trying to corral Elderon, or Elderon interacting with weird mystical characters. The conflict between Ginnarra and her brother doesn't catch fire till near the end, when she captures him and plans to sacrifice him to her dark lords. But she pauses to torture him first with some magic spell, and this leads to her undoing. 

CROWN is also one of the few dynastic struggles in which the script doesn't make even minor attempts to justify Ginnarra's quest for power. Was she mistreated somehow? Did she resent Elderon being next in line for the throne? Late in the film, the script introduces Ginnarra's grown son, who ends up dueling against Elderon at the end. Who's his father, and under what circumstances was the son raised? The writer doesn't even think it's important. I suppose I've seen worse cheap fantasy flicks than CROWN, but even the cruder sword-and-sorcery flicks seem to have a better sense of what they're copying.    

MY BLOODY VALENTINE (1981, 2009)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: (1) *fair,* (2) *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

MY BLOODY VALENTINE is definitely one of the most iconic eighties slashers, thanks to the memorable image of a killer garbed in mining-gear and wielding a pickaxe. This is a fair accomplishment, since VALENTINE appeared in theaters before Jason Voorhees made his first canonical appearance in FRIDAY 2, and before Michael Myers enjoyed his second outing. This means that the writers had a strong sense of one basic appeal of the slasher HALLOWEEN had established: that of the masked killer.

Director George Mihalka and the writers, however, structure VALENTINE more like a mystery, complete with red herrings. The setup is efficiently established in the mining-town of Valentine Bluffs: twenty years ago, on the night of a popular Valentine's Day dance, five miners were buried by a cave-in thanks to the owners' negligence. One miner, Harry Warden, survived and murdered not only the owners, but other victims in order to set down an edict: that others will die if the city ever holds another Valentine's dance. And despite the fact that Warden is captured and sent away to an asylum, for twenty years there are no dances. Then the custom is re-instituted in 1981-- and people start dying. Did Warden escape captivity, just like Myers in HALLOWEEN?

Whereas Myers' mask does not hide his true identity, it's soon clear that Warden's not the culprit, just by the way other characters act suspiciously. However, the killer is just as much a victim of trauma as Warden, and so there's a loose continuity between the two. At the film's end the association is made stronger by the way the copycat disappears into the bowels of the mine, suggesting that even if his body is found, he'll be as much of a spectre of doom as his predecessor. Sadly, only the killer proves interesting, and all the other characters are ciphers. There are some decent gore scenes but nothing to stand with the best death-FX.

Released as a 3D movie, the VALENTINE remake, directed by Patrick Lussier, quite naturally does not try to sell the same mystery to consumers who probably already know the original's plot. Thus various names from the original movie are kept but the roles are changed and/or rearranged. Thus male lead Jensen Ackles takes his name, Tom, from the original but is mostly a different character. His father, now deceased, was one of the townsfolk victimized ten years ago by crazed Harry Warden, and Tom returns to the town (renamed "Harmony") purely to sell the mines to the highest bidder. 

I didn't care for a long sequence where Lussier shows the original killer knocking off various victims, but the director made up for it by a well-choreographed scene in which The New Killer picks on a couple who just had a motel hookup. I was very surprised to see an extended nude scene with a gorgeous female in a 21st-century film, since at the very least the whole scene would have to be cut for commercial TV prints.

Tom was formerly the boyfriend of Sarah, the lead of the first film, but now she's married to town sheriff Axel, whose character in that film was not romantically aligned with the lead female. In another original scene, Tom goes down into the mine and is attacked by The New Killer; he survives though another worker is slain.  Witnesses from Harry Warden's rampage attest that Warden was murdered vigilante-style, though they can't find the body where they buried it.

Since The Miner was not about to move into Freddy Kruger territory, we're left with a limited number of suspects for The New Killer, and tthe 2009 film fails at creating sufficient red herrings. But its greater failure is that the script doesn't exploit the strengths of the 1981 movie, with its anxieties over the potentially deadly occupation of mining, and the associations of Valentine's Day. Though I appreciate some of the kinetic scenes in the remake, its mythicity has less substance than one of its 3D effects.  

DORORO (1969)

 

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

Back in 2024, I wrote a review of the 2019 remake of the 1969 adaptation of Osamu Tezuka's DORORO. At the time I cross-compared the 2019 anime with some of the manga available to me, because I didn't think there was any possibility of the 1969 anime coming my way. But then thirteen episodes showed up on streaming, which led me to find the other 13 on YouTube.

My main takeaway is that the series is very episodic, while the animation is crude without being as charming as that of Tezuka's most famous TV-anime, ASTRO BOY. Like all versions, Hyakkimaru starts out as a paraplegic child, deprived of most of his major bodily organs by a spell sent by his evil father.  A genius gives the child mechanical enhancements and trains him to attack the demons who now possess the hero's stolen organs, for he can recover one organ for every demon killed. Hyakkimaru's joyless mission is given an injection of human feeling when war-orphan Dororo, perhaps eight years old, attaches herself to the crippled samurai and follows him throughout his twenty-six adventures.

Since I've seen most of the stories twice before, I can't help feeling most of them lack verve, much less concrescence. The overall theme is that in the same way that both mortal samurai and demons prey on ordinary people, and deserve to be extirpated, but there's no elaboration of this conceit. A lot of weird Japanese yokai appear here, but the animation can't really capture their grotesquerie, and Hyakkimaru's climactic encounter with his father is given no buildup.

The gender identity of Dororo is not referenced until the very last episode too, so that I wondered if the showrunners just decided to make Dororo a boy. In one episode, Dororo beats up five kids her own age, which I thought was quite a feat for a child with no real martial training, especially a female child. But in the last episode Hyakkimaru reveals that he always knew, throughout all their adventures, that Dororo was female-- which is not true of the original Tezuka manga. Indeed, there's even a scene in the cartoon where Dororo is bathing nude within Hyakkimaru's line of sight, and she does nothing more than facing the other direction to conceal her femininity.

I'm glad I got a chance to see these early B&W cartoons, but the best any of them get is just fair. The 2019 incarnation is superior in all respects.

                    

     

LADY FRANKENSTEIN (1971)

 

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

Despite the high-toned diction and philosophizing in Mary Shelley's most famous novel, FRANKENSTEIN is more than a little perverse in its psychology. The titular experimenter grows up with his adoptive sister Elizabeth (his cousin in the first edition) and they plan to marry when they come of age. Yet Frankenstein's ambivalence is reflected in a weird dream of his mother coming back to life. When he decides to create a patchwork man, guided by old alchemical texts, it's in defiance of his father's scorn for such a project. And when his creation gets loose-- largely because Frankenstein had no plan for what he'd do with his "offspring"-- the monster devotes himself to killing off most of the people in the scientist's orbit.

Going on the account of director Mel Welles, who said that he wrote it with fellow American Edward de Lorenzo-- LADY FRANKENSTEIN was conceived from the start as being a sleazier version of a Frankenstein film. Yet to some extent Welles gets closer to the core perversities of Shelley's novel than most movies about the erring scientist.

In LADY, Baron Frankenstein (Joseph Cotten) has been experimenting on transplant surgery for twenty years since he was expelled from the medical academy for his radical ideas. Only his slightly younger colleague Dr. Marshall (Paul Muller) knows that for the past three years, while Frankenstein's daughter Tania is away at medical school, he and the Baron have been working on assembling and rejuvenating a patchwork man. They use a corpse-thief named Lynch to provide them with body parts, and once he provides them with the fresh brain of a hanged man, they're ready to proceed. However, the same day they plan to bring the dead form to life, daughter Tania (Rosalba Neri) returns to Castle Frankenstein.

Initially Tania seems nothing more than a loving daughter, one who spied on her father's early experiments and who has emulated him by finishing her training as a surgeon. There's no sense of improper emotions between Tania and her father, though Marshall, who nurtures a concealed affection for Tania, might be viewed as a father-surrogate, though actor Marshall was only about ten years older than actress Neri. We know nothing about Tania's sexual history, but the first hint of her perverse nature is slightly suggested by her lingering interaction with studly stable-boy Thomas (Peter Whiteman), though he can barely speak coherently due to a past bout with fever. 

On the night of the experiment, Marshall warns Frankenstein that damage to the creation's brain could make it dangerous. Tania learns about the experiment and wants to assist. Initially Frankenstein doesn't want her to risk getting in trouble with the law, and then he changes his mind for no stated reason. Frankenstein and Marshall revice the body with lightning, but as Marshall feared, the resulting Monster is a mindless berserker and kills Frankenstein without provocation. The deformed creature then stalks off into the countryside and begins knocking off nearly everyone he meets-- though he does forego mudering a young boy after killing his parents. How the unthinking beast-man knows to hide itself after getting the local constabulary on his tail, the film does not say. The creature also kills Lynch and other corpse-thieves but does not seem to know them.

Tania formulates the idea that the only way to take vengeance on the superhuman ravager is to make a second monster to fight it. Prior to Lynch's killing, Tania approaches the reprobate for new body-parts, but he will only accept sexual payment. Though Tania declines, the encounter possibly gives her the idea to use her beauty to make a monster in a different manner. Aware of Marshall's suppressed passion for her, she tells him that she loves his mind but must have a beautiful male body to love as well-- and proposes that the two of them murder the hunky Thomas and swap out Marshall's brilliant brain for Thomas's impaired consciousness.

                        

Tania then lures Thomas to her bed and seduces him, so that Marshall can smother him to death with a pillow. Tania makes some mention of giving Thomas the chance to be a "whole being," but it's pretty clear that she wants to indulge her desire for father-substitute Marshall, but within a youthful body like her own. Significantly, she does marry and bed Marhsall before they kill the stable-boy, so if all she wanted was sex with an older man, that inclination would have been voided. But making a new "child" to kill the creation of her father-- her symbolic "brother," if one goes by the logic of SON OF FRANKENSTEIN-- seems to be the means of both avenging and surpassing her father. So Tania completes the experiment and births her second monster. "New Monster" is not deformed like the first one and could pass for an ordinary man. But since all the story-pieces are now in place, the "Old Monster" wanders back to the castle for no particular reason, and soon the two super-strong beings duke it out. As monster-fights it's just adequate, and the Old Monster seems the more powerful until both Tania and "Charles" stab him to death. Then some convenient villagers burn the castle down, and Tania and "Charles" have sex amid the flames. Yet "Charles" decides that it isn't a Frankenstein film without a monster turning on its creator, so he strangles her before the flames get him.

By assigning high psychological mythicity to LADY FRANKENSTEIN, I'm not saying any character is psychologically complex, even on the level of Robert Bloch's PSYCHO. It's only the total pattern formed by all the characters that has a certain complexity that taps some of the original Shelley perversity. Also, while I often class mad scientists as being just as monstrous as their creations, here I felt Tania had more of the "villain" vibe.          

THE FINAL SACRIFICE (1990)

 

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

Now THIS-- unlike that boring MERLIN'S SHOP OF MYSTICAL WONDERS I recently reviewed-- is the sort of "bad penny" that MST3K was great at turning up. The hosts had a lot of fun tearing it down, BUT-- SACRIFICE had its own dippy lack of logic that made it entertaining (in a pathetic sense) in its own right. It's a very low-budget horror film shot mostly out in the wilds of Canada by film-students, with actors who gave lackluster performances, but its redeeming merit is that the director/co-writer clearly had no grasp of what story-elements he needed even for basic drive-in fare.

I tick off the oddball points of interest:

Out in the forest, a well-dressed man (later named Satoris) supervises the killing of a man by his hooded henchmen. Then the scene cuts to a farmhouse where a young man, Troy, lives with his aunt. After we watch him thumb through a book with some vague occult illustrations, his dialogue with his aunt establishes that his father is deceased.

Then an intertitle declares that it's seven years later, though nothing much changes. Troy is still at the farmhouse, though the aunt is not seen, but somehow the hooded henchmen know he's doing something they don't like, so they invade the house. Troy escapes on a bike, but because the hoods have a car, he later hides in a stranger's truck to get away.

The stranger, with the weird name of "Rowsdower," finds Troy but lets him hitch to whatever his destination may be. However, the cult-members somehow track Troy in this new vehicle and give chase. Troy and Rowsdower elude them, but Rowsdower suddenly reveals that he knows exactly who the cultists are and what their aim is. They're the surviving members of an archaic cult whose power was destroyed by a vengeful god, but if they can make a "final sacrifice" to some idol, their long-lost city of evil will be reborn. And Rowsdower knows this because-- he used to be a member of the cult! Holy Crazy Coincidence!

The two fugitives hide in another farmhouse, and though the cultists search the house, they fail to find their quarry. Then the duo run into the house's owner, a garrulous old man (whom the MSTies compare to Yosemite Sam) -- and guess what? He ALSO knows all about the cultists, thus providing more exposition.

It all wraps up with the cult trying to execute Troy before the idol. There's a dull, skill-less fight between Satoris and Rowsdower. Satoris is defeated, the cultists scatter, the idol falls -- and the evil city is born anyway. But nothing happens as the film just peters out, having shown utter incompetence at creating suspense-- and yet, being entertaining because of that incompetence.    

          

 

DETECTIVE DEE: DEMON CURSE (2022)

 

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

Long ago I read a handful of the mystery novels of Robert Van Gulik, who brought the exploits of medieval Chinese magistrate Judge Dee to Western audiences. I've also seen one of Tsui Hark's high-ticket "Detective Dee" films, and this later film follows Hark's pattern of stressing supernatural adventure over mystery. The Dee here is younger than in the traditional tales Van Gulik used as his template, and so is known only as "Detective Dee."

The Empress of China is due to arrive at a particular city, but as there have been strange murders therein, Detective Dee (Benny Chan) and his aide come to town to sort things out. Dee does not believe in ghosts or demons, but despite his acumen and martial skills, he can't keep others from being killed. What he eventually finds is a cult of humans planning to sacrifice the Empress for an "ascension rite," and though they're not demons, they do seem to command some sort of ill-defined magic.

Though the settings and costumes are sumptuous the script seems rushed, and I wondered if it had been done for TV. The action-scenes looked as if the photographers had "undercranked" the film-speed to make it look as if the actors were moving faster than in real life. I can't say I followed all of the details of the story, partly because the voices used for the dubbing were rather peculiar. This isn't actively bad, just underwhelming, so it probably shouldn't be anyone's first Detective Dee film.