Shin Super Robot Sunday: Zone Fighter

Toho Studios wasn't done with 1973 after Godzilla vs. Megalon. The studio had successfully ventured into tokusatsu television programming in 1972 with Warrior of Love Rainbowman (a name that will come up again later), and 1973 saw a new live-action superhero series with direct ties to the Godzilla franchise: Zone Fighter. 

The show famously included Godzilla as a recurring guest character, but also Godzilla villains King Ghidorah and Gigan, and a number of episodes were directed by Toho feature film directors Ishirō Honda and Jun Fukuda. The show began broadcasting on Nippon Television on April 2, 1973, but despite its pedigree, only lasted 26 episodes before cancellation. 

Zone Fighter, or Ryūsei Ningen Zone (literally “Meteor Human Zone”), tells the story of the Zone family, fugitives from the destroyed planet of Peaceland who fled to Earth and disguised themselves as the Sakimori family. However, the aliens who destroyed their planet, the Garogans, have come to Earth, and the Sakimori children, take up the fight to save their adopted planet.

       

 

The primary hero is the eldest son Hikaru Sakimori, who can transform into the masked Zone Fighter by shouting “Zone Fight Power!” He can additionally transform into a gigantic 62 meter (204 ft.) tall form by shouting “Zone Double Fight!” His sister, Hotaru Sakimori, can transform into Zone Angel, and their kid brother Akira Sakimori, can turn into Zone Junior. Neither Angel or Junior could become gigantic. Their dad, Yochiro Sakimori, is an inventor who works for a toy research institute, providing the heroes with various gimmicks and weapons. 

 

Zone Fighter himself takes obvious design cues from Ultraman, but with a predominantly silver and blue color scheme with red trim. Abilities include flight, defensive and offensive energy projection, grappling, wrist-mounted missiles, and even teleportation. Like contemporary giant heroes, he has a time limit on his giant form before he runs out of energy. And like the Ultras, Zone Fighter is not a robot, but a dude who can get huge. 

 

The Garogas are skull-faced aliens who aren't huge either. Instead, they launch their dreaded terror-beasts from space to Earth in rocket pods, like a kaiju ODST. The terror beasts are usually giant monsters or cybernetic mixtures of monsters with various metal parts bolted onto them. 

One of the terror-beasts, Jikiro is a full robot. Appearing in the second episode, Jikiro is launched to Earth to attack a weakened Zone Fighter, and nearly succeeds in killing him. Jikiro is a 78 meter (256 ft) tall metal monster with a hunchbacked, reptilian head and magnetic powers. It also has an adorable parachute that deploys after he hits atmosphere, allowing him to land safely.

       

 

Being a monster-of-the-week, Jikiro was destroyed, but he was rebuilt later in the series as Super Jikiro, with more powerful armor and weapons before being destroyed once more. 

Zone Fighter is an interesting side story of the Showa-era Godzilla franchise. Cancelled amidst poor ratings and an oil crisis, it nevertheless exists as an official part of Godzilla continuity taking place after Godzilla Vs. Megalon. After fleeing Earth, Gigan was captured by the Garogas and used to attack Earth, and he was killed by Zone Fighter. There were a few manga that ran alongside the show, but after its run the show drifted into obscurity. 

       

Curiously, in 2015, the YouTube channel Daikaiju Legends began a fan project/sequel series to Zone Fighter (called Zone Fighter) which uses American actors for the human cast and stop-motion action figures to represent the monsters and heroes including Zone Fighter and a bunch of Ultraman characters. Its odd, and the acting leaves no question that its a fan-film, but the stop motion effects are an interesting workaround to not having suit actors and miniature city sets, and the production quality jumped several levels of sophistication in the intervening five years.

 

Next time on Shin Super Robot Sunday: Senkosha Productions goes from a King to a Baron.

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_Fighter

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%B5%81%E6%98%9F%E4%BA%BA%E9%96%93%E3%82%BE%E3%83%BC%E3%83%B3

https://wikizilla.org/wiki/Zone_Fighter

https://wikizilla.org/wiki/Zone_Fighter_(series)

https://godzilla.fandom.com/wiki/Zone_Fighter_(Series)

https://www.tohokingdom.com/kaiju/tv/jikiro.html#jikiro

https://fan-made-kaiju.fandom.com/wiki/Zone_Fighter_(Daikaiju_Legends_series)

Old-ish Video Games: Two Worlds

2007's Two Worlds is a strange, buggy, unbalanced mess held together with code and Polish profanity. And yet I find it oddly compelling.

Developed by Reality Pump (a Polish company established in the 90s and more recently famous for the glitchy, broken meme factory Raven's Cry), Two Worlds comes across as a copycat of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which released a year earlier.

The similarities are strong. Both are non-linear open-world high fantasy games with a main quest that's mostly optional. Both take place in a mostly temperate forest terrain with touches of the exotic on the fringes. Both have factions you can join. Both have a magic system that can be abused if you know what you're doing (those are the best magic systems).

Whereas Oblivion casts you as a firefighter stamping out hell-portals opening up all over the country because a doomsday cult wants to summon their god, Two Worlds starts with a more personal approach.

The hero's sister is kidnapped by a doomsday cult that want to resurrect a dead god. Totally different.

The major difference is that the nameless protagonist, is a complete idiot. His sister is kidnapped in the opening cutscene because he leaves her, wounded and bleeding next to a tree, so he can investigate the safety of an abandoned hut. When the conspirators approach him to blackmail him into working for them in order to rescue her, he takes it at face value. When he's able to contact his sister telepathically at various sites and learns of the quest to resurrect a dead god, he writes it off as hokey superstition, despite being able to be leveled up as a wizard. When it becomes obvious that collecting the artifacts the cult wants would be disastrous, he goes along anyway. One of the artifacts is actually powering the defense of an innocent city against orcish attack and when you kill the guardians and take it, the orcs invade the city and kill everyone in it before you exit the dungeon (you can apparently abuse the magic system and resurrect the cityfolk with a leveled up spell, but there's no story reason to do so).

Don't feel too attracted, that's supposed to be the player character's sister.

Blockhead protagonist aside, the combat controls are clunky, horse controls are clunkier, the map is not overly thought-out despite being rather large (there's only one river, the big one dividing up two major zones), and the English voice over acting is amazingly awkward. I went for a heavy fighter type of build and the penultimate boss was murdering me despite my high level, so I cheesed him with a low level cold spell that I beefed up thanks to the overpowered magic system. The ending glitched out on me and took me right back to the main menu without showing the cutscene, so I had to reload a save.

And yet.

And yet there's something to this video game equivalent of a B-Movie. The map is big. The environments are quite scenic, the soundtrack by Harold “the guy who wrote Axel F” Faltermeyer is kind of great, and while some of the zones are clearly undercooked (the swamp, the snowy area, the desert tucked away in one corner and so on) riding around and exploring remote corners is bound to turn up something interesting: A quest line, a dungeon to clear out without any attached quest, bandit camps, orc patrols, stone dragons that can be cheesed because you have a faster attack rate and can get them into a stagger loop as you pound on them without taking a hit. There are monsters that only exist in smaller areas. I was riding around on a skeleton horse. There was an entire city I never entered because it was locked. There were giant gates in the middle of the map I never figured out how to open.

In short, it has mysteries that reward exploration.

I wouldn't go so far as to recommend Two Worlds as a good game. There are many like it that do the same things it does with polish and balance, but I did have fun, which is the entire purpose of a video game.

Legends Never Die: Lando Calrissian and the Starcave of ThonBoka

In the Fall of 1983, Del Rey published the last of the Lando Calrissian Adventures, Lando Calrissian and the Starcave of ThonBoka. Like the rest of L. Neil Smith's trilogy, it mixes gambling, comedy, Lando trying to find peaceful solutions to problems, Libertarian themes, and a hefty dose of weirdness.

This time, Lando and his astrogator/flight instructor Vuffi Raa meet and befriend a giant space manta that can naturally fly through hyperspace. His name is Lehesu and he's an Oswaft. Lehesu wanders innocently through the Centrality sector, but in doing so he draws the attention of the Centrality and Imperial Navies, who follow him to his home nebula of ThonBoka (literally “Starcave” in their language) and blockade it, slowly starving the Oswaft.

Deciding to help them, Lando runs food through the blockade by conning and gambling his way through the fleet, and plot threads draw to a conclusion. The strange renegades with a grudge against Vuffi Raa are fully explained, Rokur Gepta's origins and the fate of the Sorcerers of Tund are revealed, and we finally get to meet Vuffi Raa's parents. All this, and Lando teaches space mantas how to play Sabacc.

Its a weird, wild ride that takes place almost exclusively in space. There's a brief side trip to Tund, but that's a dead world thanks to Rokur Gepta. Lando is either onboard spaceships or is floating around in a space suit. The banter between Lando & Vuffi Raa remains a huge part of the series' charm and even their goodbye is handled with bittersweet wit.

Much like Han Solo and the Lost Legacy, there's a melancholy edge to this story. Lando's adventures in the Centrality are coming to an end, and he's going to go off with enough treasure to buy himself a city and an urge to settle down and become a legitimate businessman. The party's over and Lando needs to return to the Galaxy at large for the movies to take their course.

Its a satisfying conclusion to a fun ride. Not quite as quick-paced as The Han Solo Adventures, but Lando's a different kind of scoundrel. Han's general solution to problems is to shoot his way out, and Lando only kills two people in this entire trilogy. Instead, this trilogy hammers home the theme that Lando is a weirdness magnet, which would carry through into later stories.

I recommend it, but its not essential tier like Daley's Han Solo trilogy or Zahn's Thrawn Trilogy. In the 90s this trilogy was also reprinted as an omnibus, which is a good way to get it.

Legends Never Die: Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu

The Lando Calrissian Adventures are a fascinating slice of Star Wars history. It was 1983 and Return of the Jedi had just hit theaters. Star Wars novelizations had taken a break after The Han Solo Adventures and the only consistent inter-movie tie-ins were the Marvel Comics ongoing series.

All of a sudden, a new trilogy of pre-movie adventures hits, centering around dashing gambler, future Baron-Administrator of Cloud City, and Colt 45 spokesman, Lando Calrissian.

Tasked with writing them was L. Neil Smith (the L stands for Lester). Smith was an early adopter of Libertarianism, joining the party in 1972 and becoming very active in it and running, unsuccessfully, for office several times. This includes an awkward run for President in the 2000 election where he was only on the ballot in Arizona thanks to a dispute with the leading national Libertarian candidate, Harry Browne.

Failed presidential bids aside, his first published sci-fi novel was The Probability Broach in 1979-1980, an alternate history story in his North American Confederacy series. After four of those, Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu was his fourth novel.

The book features a young, fresh-faced Lando as the new owner of a beat up transport named the Millennium Falcon. He doesn't really know how to fly. He doesn't even have his signature moustache yet. What he does have is exceptional skill at the game of sabacc. Lando wins a droid from an academic during one such game, but he has to travel to the Rafa system to claim it.

Once there, the droid turns out to be the chipper, helpful, oddly starfish-shaped Vuffi Raa. Lando also runs afoul of the local governor, Duttes Mer, who strongarms him into searching for a lost artifact, the Mindharp, which once belonged to the long-lost Sharu race that populated the system. Supervising Mer is the sinister robed figure of Rokur Gepta, the last Sorcerer of Tund, a Dark Side Force tradition that I can best describe as “flamboyant insane space wizard” and I love it.

After a few misadventures, run-ins, and a psychedelic trip through space and time inside an ancient pyramid, Lando finally finds the Mindharp and, naturally, its more than it seems.

A couple observations. The Libertarianism really shows. Lando is a freewheeling adventurer with no patience for the government or taxation. Lando also doesn't kill anybody, which contrasts him nicely with the Han Solo Adventures where Han & Chewie solved most problems guns blazing. Lando's a talker, Han's a fighter. While the Han Solo Adventures had their share of comedy, here, Lando is frequently the one cracking jokes, usually in sardonic response to something Vuffi Raa says.

Lando without his moustache is just...wrong

Not that there aren't action sequences. Even the sabacc game at the beginning is written as exciting as a made-up card game with constantly changing cards can be.

It also sets a precedent that would carry through with Lando throughout the Expanded Universe. Since Lando's more of a face than a brawler, he always seems to end up in weird situations where shooting his way out is impossible, or at least, not ideal.

Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu is an oddball story that doesn't have the pulpy action movie heritage of the Han Solo Adventures, but works as a slower burn of weirdness. I liked it, because a) I really like Lando, and b) its really funny, but I can see why not everyone would be into it. That said, I do recommend it as Expanded Universe reading material. 

Legends Never Die: Han Solo and the Lost Legacy

Han Solo and the Lost Legacy caps off Brian Daley's Han Solo trilogy, and was published four months after The Empire Strikes Back was released.

Frozen in carbonite, book trilogy ended. 1980 was a rough year to be Han Solo.

After making haste out of the Corporate Sector, Han, Chewie, Bollux and Blue Max are bumming around a backwater sector called the Tion Hegemony doing odd jobs like working for a flying circus.

Adventure comes calling in the form of one of Han's old academy instructors turned treasure hunter: Trooper Badure. Badure's recruits Han to get to the planet Dellalt to find a long-lost treasure ship, The Queen of Ranroon. The ship belonged to a fabled pre-Old Republic conqueror, Xim the Despot, and is said to be guarded by a legion of his deadly war robots. The ship has been the stuff of spacer legends for generations.

After a high-speed chase across a university, Han agrees and meets the rest of Badure's team: Hasti, a miner who's sister discovered the clue to the treasure's location and was killed for it, and Skynx, an eager Ruurian historian who's just about the most adorable fuzzy caterpillar person in the galaxy.

Dellalt proves to be a dangerous world, with a criminal mining operation, a reclusive group of deadly cultists in the mountains, and centuries-old war robots that are just as deadly as their reputation.

And then Gallandro shows up with a grudge against Solo for being humiliated in Han Solo's Revenge.

Considering Raiders of the Lost Ark came out a year later in 1981, the comparisons are inescapable. A character played by Harrison Ford goes on a hunt for ancient treasure and has to deal with angry natives and hostile armies. Probably coincidental, but the pulp element convergence here is striking.

Gallandro himself works as a stand-in for the sinister Setenza from The Good, The Band and the Ugly. His moustache is a little more flamboyant, but there's a lot of Lee Van Cleef in the character. He is one of the few people in the galaxy that Han is legitimately frightened of.

Like the rest of the trilogy, Daley's action sequences are fast-paced and exciting. The aforementioned university chase (which itself has a lot of similarities to one of the few bright spots in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull), then there's a mountain chase on a giant metal disc, and a large-scale battle at the climax where everyone's fighting everyone as the war robots advance.

This time, though, there's a tinge of melancholy throughout. Its been a fun ride, but the party's coming to a close. Han makes more mistakes. Hasti, the potential love interest, rejects his advances, saying she wants something real and not a love-em-and-leave-em type. The ancient labor droid Bollux has a touching conversation about obsolescence and free will with the war robot commander. Skynx the academic is rushing to get as much adventure and knowledge into his life before he matures to a full adult and turns into a near-mindless butterfly. Bollux and Blue max have to leave Han by the end because they're not in the movies.

The passage of time undercuts everything in this book, and by the end, Han & Chewie have managed to piss off everyone important in the Corporate Sector and Tion Hegemony, so they bounce around the idea of doing a simple spice run for Jabba the Hutt.

The Han Solo Adventures are a blast to read and can be found individually or in omnibus formats. If you're of a tabletop persuasion, its essential reading for a Scum & Villainy type of game. Highly recommended and essential Expanded Universe reading.

Brian Daley would continue on with a few Star Wars projects, but not more novels. He wrote the script adaptations for the Star Wars Radio dramas (1981, 1983 and 1996, respectively). The audio dramas are really quite good, by the way, and expanded on a few themes that weren't in the movies.

Daley himself died in 1996 of pancreatic cancer shortly after recording of the Return of the Jedi radio drama wrapped. According to his official website, which is still up as a memorial to him, some of his ashes were to be scattered at the Little Big Horn Spirit Gate memorial to help defend it from inter-dimensional threats. 

Legends Never Die: Han Solo's Revenge

Han Solo at Stars' End was published in early 1979. The sequel, Han Solo's Revenge followed in late 1979. Whereas Stars' End ended up a prison break story, this turns into almost a James Bond style adventure/mystery.

It begins with Han and Chewie (and the droids Bollux and Blue Max) operating a movie theater on a desert planet for easy credits. Unbeknownst to them, they've accidentally created a religious experience for the desert natives by showing a documentary of a water world. The scheme ends in a hurry when they try to show a different movie and they're back in space, desperate for cash.

The solution comes in a simple, lucrative smuggling operation. One catch: Han finds out it involves running slaves. Han & Chewie are rogues, but they absolutely refuse to get involved with any slavers. The immediate situation resolved, an angry Han Solo sets out to find the slavers and get the money they still owe him.

To that end, Han runs into one Fiolla of Llord, a beautiful, idealistic and resourceful woman who's also a Corporate Sector Assistant Auditor-General trying to track down the very same slaving ring. Meanwhile Chewie has his hands full dealing with a persistent skip tracer named Spray, who shoves his way onto the Falcon, intending to repossess it once all the shooting stops.

Shootouts on a luxury spaceliner, planet hopping, a bomb on the Millennium Falcon, a high speed swoop bike chase scene five years before the speeder bikes of Return of the Jedi, and an encounter with Gallandro, the deadliest gunslinger in the Corporate Sector, if not the entire Galaxy.

Much like Stars' End, Revenge runs at a rapid clip of action sequences, betrayals and more action sequences. Comic relief is also strong, as Bollux and Blue Max continue to provide their mix of competence and comedy, while Spray becomes an amusing foil for Chewie.

The real standout is Fiolla, one of the first genuinely memorable Expanded Universe female protagonists and love interests for Han. (Jessa from Stars' End counts too, but she's only there at the beginning and end of that story). Resourceful, witty, and occasionally naive in contrast to Han's practical cynicism, she's great. If one were feeling woke, it could be pointed out that she is a non-Caucasian female hero in a Star Wars story from 1979 and it was no big deal because the franchise was always diverse, but that would shatter the narrative.

She's also a genuinely good cop, which makes a strong contrast to the hard edge the Corporate Sector Authority had in the first book. Tyrants like Viceprex Hirken aren't the only employees in the Authority, which adds a nice layer of nuance.

I absolutely recommend Han Solo's Revenge for fast-paced scum and villainy action, adventure and romance. 

Movie Review: Robin Hood (1991)

So you're probably already aware of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves which is an entertaining but ultimately mediocre and hollow movie with a great soundtrack and a damn entertaining Alan Rickman performance.

But also released in 1991 was another Robin Hood movie. Directed by action veteran John Irvin and written by Sam Resnick and John McGrath. McGrath was a veteran TV writer but this is Resnick's only film credit on IMDB. The cast is full of veteran actors, but the biggest name a modern viewer will recognize is a young Uma Thurman in her Post-Baron Munchausen, Pre-Pulp Fiction early 90s period.

Robert Hode (Patrick Bergin) is the Saxon Earl of Huntington and friend Norman Baron Roger Dauguerre (Jeroen Krabbe). Things go sour when Sir Miles Folcanet (Jurgen Prochnow AKA the guy from Das Boot) arrives and arrogantly starts throwing his weight around. He's here to marry Dauguerre's niece Marian (Uma Thurman), but that's not why Robin rebels.

Much the Miller (Daniel Webb) is caught poaching and Robin stands up for him, preventing Sir Miles from blinding the peasant. During his trial, words get heated, pride gets insulted, and Robin punches his way out of the castle and becomes an outlaw with his kinsman Will Scarlett (Owen Teale). They hit upon the standard beats of the river fight with Little John (David Morrissey), the attempted thievery on Friar Tuck (Jeff Nuttall), Marian running off to join Robin disguised as a young man. All against the backdrop of Prince John's regency during King Richard's imprisonment.

So why is this “The Good 1991 Robin Hood movie?”

Tone.

It gets the spirit absolutely right. There's no way that an early 90s medieval movie would ever reach the joyful spirit of The Adventures of Robin Hood, but while the costumes and sets feature lots of browns and washed out lighting, the spirit of the movie is deeply earthy. Characters sing (not elaborate musical numbers, just little ditties as they go along). There's some swashbuckling. There's trick shooting. There are glimpses of historical awareness, though they muddle together All Souls' Day with the Lord of Misrule tradition that belongs to Christmastide or the Merry Men getting powerful Welsh longbows about a hundred or so years before they became truly dominant in English battle tactics.

These are legitimate mistakes, but there's an attempt at verisimilitude and not something so nakedly absurd as the Ewok Village or Celts or a Moor traveling the 12^th Century English countryside because he has a Wookiee life-debt like in Prince of Thieves.

Then there's the romance. Marian is great here as a strong-willed and very court-savvy young woman with a sharp tongue. She has no interest in Sir Miles, and is charmed by Robin's benevolence and hot-blooded heroics. Even when she goes tomboy, she's still a girl in disguise and not simply an action movie character with boobs. This Marian's actually kind of bad in a fight, but still manages to get some good shots in. Compare with Prince of Thieves Marian who starts off the movie showing off her sword skills but becomes useless in the climactic fight scene. 

Robin himself is great too. There's no “You killed my father/betrayed my King, I need revenge!” motivation. He's just a proud, hot-headed nobleman with a rigid sense of morality who commits to his actions. Not quite Erroll Flynn heroic, but definitely channeling him.

Jeff Nuttall's Friar Tuck is also interesting. Nuttall was a major figure in 60s counterculture and artistic movements with an anarchic streak. Here he plays Tuck as a thoroughly shady character: evicted from his monastery for murdering another friar, he now travels the countryside selling chicken bones as saints' relics. Its an interesting thought behind why a man of God would go around with a band of outlaws, but Tuck's postmodern shadiness contrasts hard with Robin's straightforward heroism.

Straightforward heroism is the order of the day here. Robin is good, Sir Miles is bad (but not “consorting with sorcery and trying to rape Maid Marian” bad), and the two spiral toward a deadly confrontation before a legitimately earned happy ending.

Besides Men in Tights, this forgotten little gem is the best Robin Hood movie made in the last thirty years or so. Highly recommended.


 

Bike Week Bonanza: Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, Every Which Way But Loose, Heroes of the East

I've taken to riding an exercise bike and watching a movie every day to kill two birds with one stone.

Mortal Kombat (1995)

Surprisingly good and probably the best video game movie adaptation. It plays smart by keeping it close to the original “Deathmatch Tournament” plot with broadly-drawn archetypes meeting up to punch each other.

Set design is outstanding and the CGI isn't overused beyond the limits of mid-90s graphics. Christopher Lambert is a stroke of genius as Raiden. The rest of the heroes are well handled, especially Johnny Cage's story arc. The Goro costume/effects are impressive. Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa steals the show as douchebag sorcerer Shang Tsung.

The fight scenes rely too much on quick cuts. Scorpion doesn't do much except have a cool fight with Cage. Sub-Zero dies like a bitch.

Unpretentious and a lot of fun. Probably the best Paul W. S. Anderson movie I've seen.

Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997)

The sequel that replaces almost the entire cast except Liu Kang and Kitana. James Remar (from the Warriors) does a serviceable job as Raiden, but lacks the touch of amused madness that made Lambert's version so good. Brian Thompson (the bad guy from Cobra) is halfway to a good Shao-Kahn, but making him into a daddy's boy hurts the character badly, but that's also because Shinnok ruins everything.

Surprisingly faithful to Mortal Kombat 3's plot, it suffers from a plot that's more ambitious than its budget can allow. Smoke and Cyrax get fun fights. Nightwolf shows up for one scene to spout vision quest nonsense about animalities to Liu Kang. The heroic Sub-Zero II (yes, that's canon) shows up to fight Scorpion, spout some ninja nonsense, and then vanishes entirely from the movie in a complete waste of one of the series' most popular characters. Sheeva, Rain, and Baraka die like chumps. Which I guess is in character, but still...

CGI is more heavily used, to its detriment. Motaro looks like ass. Liu Kang and Shao-Kahn's dragon vs hydra Animality fight is AWFUL. Set design remains pretty good.

Considerably weaker than the first. Pretty bad, but entertaining at least.

Every Which Way But Loose (1978)

Clint Eastwood as street fighting trucker Philo Beddoe with a pet orangutan named Clyde. No reason given for Clyde. No reason needed.

Philo falls in love with a mysterious country-western singer Lynn Halsey-Taylor who leaves him one night and he takes off after her with his ape and his best friend Orville (Geoffrey Lewis).

Philo's something of an asshole since he keeps provoking fights everywhere he goes. He pisses off an idiot biker gang and a short-fused pair of cops. Both groups chase after him.

Its funny, and shows the American working class as affable and heroic. His sidekick Orville finds love with a young Beverly D'Angelo, but Philo himself discovers that the woman he's followed to Denver from California is a shallow, selfish manipulator.

Its good, but fairly subversive toward the idea of romance. Doesn't really stick the landing. Its got an old lady blowing up motorcycles with a shotgun, though, so there's that.

Heroes of the East AKA Shaolin Challenges Ninja AKA Zhong hua zhang fu (1978)

Shaw Brothers production. Directed by veteran martial artist/stunt actor/director Chia-Liang Liu and starring Shaw Brothers staple Gordon Liu/Chia-Hui Liu. Action comedy about a Chinese man put into an arranged marriage with a Japanese woman. Both like each other, but both are martial artists and deeply proud of their respective heritages/styles.

Misunderstandings lead to arguments, which lead to some Taming of the Shrew moments and then lead to him inadvertently insulting all of her martial arts teachers, who show up looking to avenge the insult.

Cue a series of fights where Liu has to fight them off one by one, using different Chinese Kung Fu styles against their varied Japanese styles.

Its got a light touch and (typical of the genre) the fight scenes are where it shines. Nunchaku, katana, jian swords, spears, sai, butterfly swords, three-sectioned-staff, judo, karate, drunken boxing, crane style, ninjutsu, etc. Watch Kung Fu movie fight choreography, and you'll see how just about every modern Western action director needs to be slapped in the face repeatedly for their terrible editing choices.

Naturally, the Chinese protagonist wins (reconciling with his wife along the way), but the Japanese fighters aren't treated like cartoon villains like in a lot of other Kung Fu cinema (remember, WWII Japan was not kind to China). Its a showcase and celebration of different styles of martial arts. Entertaining and impressive. 

Movie Review: Mr. Majestyk (1974)

1974's Mr. Majestyk is a curious little early action film that's largely been forgotten, despite having a reasonably large pedigree.

It stars timeless tough guy Charles Bronson as Vince Majestyk.

It was written by pulp western and crime novelist Elmore Leonard.

And it was directed by big picture filmmaker Richard Fleischer, who directed 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Soylent Green, Fantastic Voyage and, uh, Conan the Destroyer.

Its about a grumpy Vietnam veteran with a criminal record who now owns a melon farm in Colorado. All he wants to do is bring in his harvest for the year, but fate seems to have it out for him.

Sounds like a Steinbeck novel about the plight of the working class and death of the American Dream, right?

Wrong. This is Bronson we're talking about, not Tom Joad.

After a confrontation with a small time shakedown scheme, Majestyk gets arrested on bogus charges. During a stay in prison, he meets mob hitman Frank Renda, played by gangster character actor Al Lettieri. The two hate each other immediately.

When the mob tries to spring Renda during a prisoner transfer, a firefight with the cops ensues. In the chaos, Majestyk grabs the keys to Renda's handcuffs and drives off with him in the prison bus. Renda tries to cut a deal, but Majestyk has other plans.

He wants to hand the hitman over to the police in exchange for dropping the charges against him so he can go back to his melon farm. It doesn't work out as planned. Renda escapes and boy is he mad.

The good news is that the charges against Majestyk got dropped. The bad news is that Renda's out to kill him. The best news is that he can go back to his melon harvest. On one condition: That he act as bait to lure out Renda.

The harvest is brought in successfully. He starts up a relationship with migrant worker and union activist Nancy Chavez (Linda Cristal). He helped her out at the beginning of the movie and hired her group.

But then tragedy!

Renda makes his move, but Majestyk's not at home, so the mobster settles for the next best thing: destroying the melon harvest with sad violin music playing over it. I swear it makes more sense in context.

What follows is a very satisfying road to revenge. Its got shootouts. Its got an old Ford pickup barreling down perilous mountain trails with Bronson bouncing around in the flatbed shooting a shotgun. Its got ramp jumps. Its got a car going over the side of a cliff and exploding. Its got Bronson jumping through a window blasting away with his shotgun.

Its good stuff.

There's a few nods to the labor disputes of the early 70s, but at its core, its basically a libertarian western. The man just wants to get his harvest in and make some money, and the cops do nothing except get in the way of that.

Everybody else in the movie thinks he's crazy, since with all the madness going on, his main fixation is the melon harvest. But in context, it makes sense. Its his livelihood and independence on the line, and he'd be ruined it he couldn't sell the crop. Even the melon massacre works in that context. The hero and villain both understand the symbolism of the crop.

There are some slower parts here and there, but Leonard's script keeps things building nicely.

It may not be his finest work, but at the end of the day, its Charles Bronson kicking ass for a hundred minutes. What more do you need to recommend it?

Pulp Review: The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard (pt 1)

The poetically unimaginative but accurately titled The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard is a book of short fiction from 2008 that collects a massive number of short stories from arguably the best writer of the Pulp Era. 

I've been reading the collection on and off for several months now, and while there's a very good reason why Conan is Howard's most enduring creation, this book provides an excellent survey that hammers home just how damn good he was as a writer.

Some of the stories are better than others, with some I would call essential fantasy reading, but there isn't a single one I would say is “bad.” The theme being horror, that's what you end up with: spooky tales, the genesis of the Weird West genre, monster hunters, and eldritch abomination slayers. Action and imagination are the cornerstones of Howard, and every single genre he puts his hand to spins something enjoyable.

Rather than dwelling on a single story, I'll review them in smaller chunks because while they've all been enjoyable, some have more meat on their bones than others.

In the Forest of Villefère (Weird Tales, August 1925)

A traveler named de Montour is passing through a forest on the way to the village of Villefère. He meets a fellow traveler, Carolus le Loup. With a name like that, he's obviously a werewolf and attacks de Montour when the moon rises. A slight tale, but atmospheric with explosive action at the end.

Wolfshead (Weird Tales, April 1926)

The sequel to the above story, this time a new narrator travels to Africa and the fortress of one Dom Vincente da Lusto, a trader and slaver who has carved himself a small empire there. Among the guests there is de Montour, who is himself a werewolf now and tries to lock himself away from others when the moon rises, but of course that doesn't work 100% and a couple people in the castle start dying. Then one of Vincente's courtiers starts a slave revolt as a power play against him and it ends in some literal explosive action. The slavery issue (which makes sense given that its set during the Age of Sail, also Dom Vincente isn't a very good man in the first place) will be a turnoff for some but the action is top notch and an early example of a “heroic werewolf” in fiction. De Montour's desire to lock himself away during the full moon notably prefigures Larry Talbot from the Wolfman movies.

The Dream Snake (Weird Tales, February 1928)

On a warm summer night down South, an old man named Faming explains his horrific dreams of being hunted by a gigantic snake. Every night its the same dream, only the snake gets closer. A short and simple creepy tale.

Sea Curse (Weird Tales, May 1928)

Now we're getting somewhere. The first of the “Faring Town” stories about a small coastal town that suffers from weird incidents. This is about two drunken scoundrels and pirates named John Kulrek and Lie-lip Canool. Kulrek did wrong by one of the girls of the village, and when she died at sea, her old mother, Moll Farrell, places a curse on the two. I'll say no more, since the payoff is fantastic.

Twofer Review: The Shadow (1994) and The Phantom (1996)

Russell Mulcahy (the director of Highlander) adapts Walter Gibson's pulp hero The Shadow, with Alec Baldwin in the title role as Lamont Cranston. The plot centers around Shiwan Khan (John Lone), last surviving descendant of Genghis Khan, and powerful mystic, arriving in New York with a dream to conquer the world. The plot involves something about a bomb, but honestly that gets lost in the shuffle.

Still, the cast is very solid, with Penelope Ann Miller, Peter Boyle, Ian McKellan, Tim Curry, Jonathan Winters, and a small cameo from James Hong. A solid adaptation of the Shadow, it hits on a lot of character beats and traits like Margo Lane, the network of agents, his dual .45s, even his sinister long-nosed appearance when he's in full Shadow costume.

There's some origin stuff about Cranston being an opium kingpin in Asia at the start before beginning his mystical journey which is completely unnecessary and Shiwan Khan's plot feels like it loses cohesion along the way (I want to conquer the world, but I also want to blow up New York City!). The good outweighs the bad, however, and it hits all the right notes on the Pillars of ADVENTURE.

Crazy pulp elements: Khan's goons wear armor and run around 30s NYC with crossbows and swords. A flying, intelligent CGI dagger with a bad attitude. Shiwan Khan smuggling himself to the US in a coffin just so he can mind control a security guard into killing himself. Actually, most of what Shiwan Khan does. He's pretty fun.

Another 90s adaption of a pulp hero, Lee Falk's hero The Phantom was directed by Simon Wincer (Free Willy, Quigley Down Under, several episodes of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles). The plot centers around Kit Walker (Billy Zane) as a two-fisted masked avenger who prowls the African jungles as the Ghost Who Walks having to deal with an American businessman and gangster, Xander Drax (Treat Williams) who's searching for several mystical crystal skulls scattered across the world that will give him unlimited power. And can shoot lasers. Mostly lasers. Knowledge was their treasure, you know.

Again, the cast is very solid, with Kristy Swanson, Catherine Zeta-Jones, James Remar, and Patrick McGoohan in key roles. Pacing is great, location shots are lush, and the physical stunts and effects are pretty incredible. Zane's also really charming in the lead role. It gets a little odd when the Phantom has conversations with the ghost of his dead father that only he can see, but its an excuse to have McGoohan on screen, so I don't mind as much. The Shadow nails the glitzy and grimy aesthetic of 30s New York, but overall The Phantom is a little more fun and the plot holds together tighter.

Crazy Pulp Elements: An all-female squadron of flying pirates. Xander Drax throwing a spear through a man at a meeting in his office. A trapped microscope stabs out a man's eyes. Phantom's horse and wolf clearly communicating with each other to figure a way to get him out of a scrape.

It turns out the pseudo-Pulp revival thing from the 90s was actually pretty good. Both of these movies are solidly entertaining, have heroic heroes, villainous villains, beautiful women, handsome men, exotic locations, tight pacing, and meaningful peril. They're not relevatory or what you might call “modern classics,” but they're leagues better than most modern dreck passing itself off as Action-ADVENTURE.  

“You misjudged our men. Don't misjudge our women.”

The Crimson Pirate is a 1952 swashbuckler from director Robert Siodmak and starring Burt Lancaster. Siodmak was one of many German directors who fled the Nazis in the 1930s and made a name for himself as an excellent thriller director. Lancaster had come up from a circus acrobat background and only started acting after WWII.

The plot revolves around pirate captain Vallo (Lancaster) a freewheeling corsair with a fondness for red clothing who cleverly captures a ship carrying Baron José Gruda (Leslie Bradley), a highly placed member of the King's court (The king is never named, nor is the kingdom, but most of the named characters imply Spanish descent, even if everybody speaks with English or Transatlantic accents.) Gruda cuts a deal with Vallo. The pirate will be handsomely paid if he can capture rebel leader El Libre.

Naturally, things don't go as planned and Vallo and his First Mate Ojo (Nick Cravat) get caught up in mutiny, chase sequences, a beautiful rebel woman named Consuelo (Eva Bartok) whom Vallo falls in love with, and an eccentric professor, Elihu Prudence (James Hayter). All of that adds up the ADVENTURE. Its also got a young Christopher Lee in a minor role as one of the King's officers.

There's a lot to recommend about this movie. The Mediterranean locations standing in for the Caribbean look great in Technicolor and the action moves at an incredible clip that is sadly missing from most modern action films. There aren't a lot of swordfights in the film and the stunt choreography goes for physical running, jumping, climbing, tumbling and so on. More people get hit with belaying pins (size: S, type: Bludgeoning, 1d3 damage) than swords.* For an example of the kind of gags in this, there's a pirate with a peg leg who gets stuck during a fight, gets one of the King's men to help get it free, clobbers the guy, and in his glee, he immediately gets stuck again. Its an old gag, but damn if it isn't executed well.

It helps that even pushing 40, Lancaster was in phenomenal physical shape and his best friend and fellow circus veteran Nick Cravat had an incredible sense of timing for physical comedy and was equally as fit. Cravat is great in this, and doesn't speak a single line. Apparently his Brooklyn accent was too strong to make sense in a 17^th Century Pirate Adventure, so he acts as a kind of Teller for Lancaster's commanding Penn. The two made nine films together.

Looking up the film, the original screenplay was a serious pirate movie by Waldo Salt, who was on the Hollywood blacklist for, well, being an actual member of the American Communist Party. Robert Siodmak (who was the brother of The Wolf Man screenwriter Curt Siodmak. Robert was the better director of the two.) apparently turned it into an all-ages comedy adventure. Though there's a bit more going on under the hood. Lancaster, a proud leftist, included anti-authoritarian themes and even the “Crimson Pirate” himself is a kind of nod to the Red Scare of the era.

So technically, yes, it IS liberal message fiction, but it happens to well handled because none of those little nods get in the way of the universal themes of heroism, freedom, honor and love that the movie is filled to the brim with.

Its remarkable how amenable audiences can be to your ideas when you don't ram them down their throats.

The Crimson Pirate is unabashedly light, airy fun. Its a bit sillier than, say, Errol Flynn's pirate masterpieces, and a bit more simplistic, but its a straightforward tale of love and redemption and freedom. What's not to like about that?

Absolutely recommended.

*I always wondered what the hell belaying pins were in my old AD&D Arms & Equipment Guide and why they merited inclusion among legitimate weapons. Now I'm pretty sure it was movies like this. 

"Talk about a workplace romance gone wrong."

Warner Brothers and DC continue to chase the dragon that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Suicide Squad, and they continue to make weird creative and tonal decisions that continuously hamstring that effort.

It made me think a lot of thoughts, so buckle up, this is going to be a long one.

Task Force X, more commonly referred to as the Suicide Squad, dates back to a couple issues of The Brave and the Bold in 1959 where it was a government agency formed when the Justice Society disappeared for a while. They were mostly military people and disappeared into retirement/obscurity after a while. 

The second, more popular, critically acclaimed version that this movie is largely based on, dates back to 1987, where a government official rounds up a bunch of hardened criminals with super powers or advanced technology, and sends them across the world to do government wetwork where they either succeed or get themselves killed. Either way, its a win-win for Uncle Sam. But not THE Uncle Sam, who actually is a character in the DC Universe. 

Told you so.

 There's also a modern version of the team similar to the 80s-90s version, but this time with a little less inter-team backstabbing and with Harley Quinn attached because its a new continuity and they needed a popular character to add to it because that's what temporarily sells comic books.

What this means is that in one form or another, the Suicide Squad has existed in three different major DC comics continuities (Pre-Crisis, New Earth, and New 52). This is also why explaining comic books to normies is both frustrating and time consuming.

So before we get into it, here's the Spoiler-free Review: Suicide Squad is the most entertaining movie of the DC Cinematic Universe, but its still not very good and continues to be frustrating in how close it can get to getting it right and how painfully often it misses the mark. 5/10.

Anyway, the movie version is assembled much like the 80s team. Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) proposes a disposable black ops team made up of hardened super criminals in the wake of Superman's bland death in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice so that the government has some way to check the next Superman who shows up and isn't interested in Truth, Justice, and the culturally sensitive way.

Oh yeah. Spoilers for Batman v Superman.

Waller is pretty spot on for what the comic version is all about and is herself a bad, bad lady when she needs to be. She recruits decorated war hero golden boy Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman) to serve as field commander and babysitter for her team. She does this by setting him up with an archeologist named June Moon (Cara Delevingne) who is possessed by an ancient entity called the Enchantress who is obviously magical but they persist in calling it extradimensional. Waller has the Enchantress' heart in a suitcase that she can stab voodoo-doll style if the freaky witch lady starts getting out of line.

The rest of the team consists of Deadshot (Will Smith), a world-class assassin and marksman; Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), the Joker's girlfriend and equal in lunacy; Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney), an Australian crook who uses trick boomerangs and fought the Flash; Diablo (Jay Hernandez), a former gangbanger with deadly pyrokinetic abilities and a desire for redemption; Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) the Batman villain who looks like a crocodile; Slipknot (Adam Beach), a jobber from Firestorm's old series who's good at climbing things. Oh, and they're also joined by Katana (Karen Fukuhara) who isn't a villain at all, but she does have a magical sword that captures the souls of the people killed with it. To their credit, they don't even bother trying to explain that one away as being extradimensional vaguely advanced science. She's a left field pick, but its fine, and it has me crossing my fingers that they actually go and make a Batman and the Outsiders movie. Because I'm the lunatic who wants to see them pull off live action Metamorpho and Geo-Force.

GEO-FORCE!

Anyway....

We're introduced to most of the team through flashbacks as to how they got arrested, usually through Batman and in Boomer's case, the Flash in a brief cameo.

While the team is being assembled, Enchantress goes off the reservation and frees her brother, Incubus, only instead of meeting him in outer space, they meet up in a subway. She goes rogue, Waller tries and fails to kill her, Incubus powers her up and gives her a cleaner costume, and the two proceed to build a gigantic glowing bomb that may or may not be a light grenade for vaguely defined reasons. But its definitely a threat. Because Waller says so.

The squad mounts up and chafes under Flag's gung-ho leadership and they fight their way through a city crawling with relatively easily killed minions and yadda yadda yadda, the villains end up bonding with each other and who's the real monster blah blah blah and it literally ends like Ghostbusters.

No, not this year's biggest movie trainwreck. I mean the original Ghostbusters.

The plot is derivative as hell and the only reason it isn't linear is because its broken up by numerous flashbacks. The editing is also really weird and reeks of executive meddling, since there are introductions, then introductions again, then recaps of things that happened half an hour ago, and other messes like that.

The meat of the movie is a ensemble character piece as these weirdos are thrust into an increasingly bizarre adventure. A lot happens, but the actual plot is surprisingly simple. Curiously for a character piece, the three top billed characters are the ones I had the most problems with.

Deadshot. So Floyd Lawton comes from a well-to-do but messed up family and his killing days started early. He tried to challenge Batman with a tuxedo and mask, got arrested, developed a nihilistic “death wish” which was him mostly not caring about whether he lived or died and eventually found out he had a daughter which gave him some semblance of something to live for. Death wish, sleazy white trash moustache, selfish prick, sarcasm, eventual discovery of a daughter that gave him something to live for. These are Deadshot's biggest character traits, and the movie only bothers with the last two. He only ever wears his iconic mask twice, which I understand. You pay for Will Smith, you damn well better use all of Will Smith. Its the lack of a death wish that really makes him generic anti-hero here. The whole appeal of Deadshot is to see him be enormously casual about the deaths of his teammates and about the danger around him, which ironically enough, makes him the perfect member of the Squad because all he cares about is himself and shooting people that annoy him.

Harley Quinn. Personal taste is personal taste, but I prefer the harlequin version from the Animated Series to the modern Suicide Girls camwhore version, mostly because I prefer minimalist designs. Character-wise, this Harley is cheerful, bubbly, and thoroughly psychotic, which is in keeping with the character, but she also lacks an innocence that detracts subtlety from the character. This isn't a knock on her performance, that's fine. My beef is with the writing. 

Part of the bizarre appeal of Harley is her innocence. When she's happy, its a childlike joy. When she's angry, its a tantrum, albeit a deadly one that usually involves hyenas tearing someone apart. She taps into a trickster archetype, a prankster. Making her a sexpot doesn't work for me because it means the Joker regressed her to a teenager instead of a pre-adolescent, which is less horrifying. And let's not bandy about here, the Joker taking an intelligent psychologist and manipulating her into loving him and then fracturing her personality into a thousand broken pieces is HORRIFYING. That's the point.

Joker. I haven't mentioned Jared Leto's Joker for a couple of reasons. First, he has absolutely no bearing on the plot. Whatsoever. You could cut every one of his scenes and it would work out exactly the same. Second, its the arguably the worst on-screen portrayal of the Joker, and definitely the worst live-action one. The Joker's entire existence serves as a mockery. A mockery of sanity, good taste, morality, style, taste, whatever you can think of, the Joker exists to deliberately subvert it. The argument can be made that this version's a mockery of modern day gangsters and their aspirations of opulence. My counter-argument is that its simply not funny in its execution. They get the off-putting weirdness of the Joker down on screen, but they miss the point that he's the Clown Prince of Crime. 

Much of Joker's atrocities are committed because he thinks they're funny. He's even go so far as to let people live because killing them wouldn't be funny. Its also why his history is littered with outlandish gag weapons and deathtraps. Its because he finds his brand of nihilistic absurdity hilarious, and when the writers are good, we too find it hilarious, which is the greatest element of the horror that is the Joker. We can identify with the Joker's sense of humor, which in turn repulses us, because there's that little bit of the Joker inside us all. Much like Lex Luthor in Batman V Superman, the misinterpretation of such an archetypal character as the Joker is downright tragic.

Now, as to the portrayal of Joker & Harley's relationship. The Joker is the primary mover and his erratic, often dangerous treatment of Harley is also part of his villainy. He created her on a whim, and just as often, casts her aside for those same reasons. HOWEVER, on the flipside, Harley is a monster of his creation and is psychotically devoted to him, in a “if I can't have him, no one can” sort of way, which is also comical because its a kind of karmic retribution for ol' Puddin'. Its a relationship built out of two horrible people who are always on the verge of killing each other. Its anything but healthy, but the abuse runs both ways.

Enchantress. Oddly enough, June Moon is fairly close to her comic counterpart, where she is wildly powerful but wildly dangerous. The problem is that she's also the primary antagonist so she has nothing to do with the rest of the team and does little besides sneer, move around creepily, and give Rick Flag something to angst about. Also, I do miss the green witch's hat.

Rick Flag. He starts out as a standard military action movie guy, then he gets involved with Enchantress, then he turns into the team's wet blanket, and then he gets a little more interesting, but not much. He has to play the straight shooter compared to all the villains, but he mostly gets lost in the crowd, and even his “rivalry” with Deadshot feels hollow.

So with all the legitimate complaints about the movie, there are some real bright spots that stand out, even if they're underutilized.

Killer Croc's a lot of fun as dumb muscle comic relief. He buddies up with Diablo, but aside from a few moments where he rips and tears or tosses off an occasional one-liner, he doesn't really do anything. Which is a shame, since the makeup work on him is fantastic.

Captain Boomerang steals every scene he's in because, like the comics, he's a complete and total shitbag. Drunk, filthy, womanizing, cowardly, backstabbing, and yet a survivor who, in the comics at least, is capable of giving the Flash a legitimate fight because he's such a tricky bastard. The scene where he dupes Slipknot into making a break for it only for the bomb to go off is lifted from the comics (except in the books, Slipknot lost an arm, not his head, so he could come back later and job some more). 

The part where Flag smashes the detonator and sets the Squad free because he's mopey about Enchantress is perfectly punctuated by Boomer grabbing his beer and bolting from the bar they're in. Of course its ruined by him showing up again outside when they all march off to the final action sequence for no reason that makes any sense outside of a shoehorned attempt to make these villains into “A FAMILY.” It would've been more in character if Boomer actually did run off only to get dragged back after the final battle's over. But whatever, I'm a big Flash fan, and seeing them otherwise get Captain Freakin' Boomerang done right on the big screen gives me some hope for the Flash movie. Not a lot, but some.

The real standout of the movie, and the character who legitimately gives it heart and soul is Diablo. He's soulful, mournful, and his self-imposed pacifism and hopeless quest for redemption is the actual beating heart of this movie. Sure, his arc's predictable like most of the rest of the movie, but its also the best executed and genuinely more compelling than Deadshot learning how to be an antihero or Harley being an awful person and getting away with it because “WE'RE A FAMILY NOW!”

Top-to-bottom, this is a deeply flawed movie with a lot of bad narrative decisions, but there's also some flashes of gold in there that make it the best entry in the DC Cinematic Universe. Its just a shame that “The best entry” in this case is a mediocre 5/10. Not recommended, unless you like C- and D-listers like I do.