Ten Statements About....THE RETURN OF CAPTAIN INVINCIBLE (1984)

The second our President (Michael Pate) sings a song
composed of the word 'bullshit' repeated ad infinitum....
you know this isn't just any super-hero movie.

Long before the Age of Reason

Evil waged unholy treason.

Believe me that no mother ever cried for Midnight."

1) So help me, I am so a sucker for mock newsreel footage. Yes, there's a certain arch tone to the opening sequence that provides us with Captain Invincible's backstory. But there's also--thanks primarily to Alan Arkin--a great deal of fun, and it's hard not to imagine how he'd do in an actual pulp adventure film.

2) This is, of course, another insane film by the insane filmmaker Phillipe Mora--and as such, we have to accept that certain things will be somewhat fluid....like simple continuity (part of Christopher Lee's scheme is to drive ethnics into ghetto communities--one of which is called 'Sicilian Heights' on the sign outside, and is refered to as 'Sicilian Villa' by the salesman, for example...and that's in the first fifteen minutes).

3) Given that Michael Pate plays the President in both this film and The Howling III: The Marsupials, I have to wonder if Mora actually has his own little universe where all these mad musings of his mind gambol together. But then, if we accept that, we have to accept that in Mora's mind the President is inclined to go into a song and dance number where he repeats the word 'bullshit' about fifty times....

I did mention this is a musical, didn't I?

Dracula sings!  Fu Manchu dances!  Sherlock Holmes...
enjoys the hell of out himself?

4) Of the ten musical numbers, many of which seem to ape different American musical genres, three are the last known songs by Richard O'Brien and Richard Hartley. And boy, do they stand out....particularly the song for Christopher Lee's Mr. Midnight, 'Choose Your Poison,' and the defacto duet of Lee and Arkin, 'Midnight.' Especially after some really rough patches, those songs give the film a jolt of energy.

5) Kate Fitzpatrick, who plays the female lead Patty, is truly dreadful. She frequently resorts to the broadest sort of pantomime to convey what she needs to (like bugging her eyes and grasping her throat to indicate she's suffocating), and actually detracts from Arkin's rather good all-in performance.

6) This film would simply not have worked without the performances of Arkin and Lee, who dive right in and approach their characters absolutely seriously. In a movie filled with caricatures and buffonery, these two actors make sure the immortal enemies Invincible and Midnight are throughly believable...and that keeps the film from sliding headlong into total and absolute nonsense.

7) I really have no idea what's going on in the sequence where it's hinted that we're about to learn Mr. Midnight's evil plan. Why is everything in Keystone Kops speed? Why is that strange monster that serves as Midnight's sidekick romping with black-lingerie clad girls? What. The. Fuck?

...and this is not the most undignified thing Phillipe Mora
asks Alan Arkin to do....

But then...it is a Phillipe Mora film and, as such, bugfuck insane.

8) It's not just that 'Choose Your Poison' is the kind of song that only O'Brien and Hartley could write, with its twisting lyrics that weave in an amazing number of alcohol and cocktail references into it....it's that Christopher Lee delivers it with such overwhelming glee. He seems to actively be having the time of his life singing and dancing in this number, and his enthusiasm is transfered to the audience.

9) With Midnight's scheme of driving all ethnic peoples off Manhattan Island and sending them afloat, I have to think that Mora thought he was doing a satire on the then still fresh in people's minds Superman films...but what interests me is how I am sure this film was an inspiration--unintentional or not--to Albert Pyun's godawful Captain America film, with its boy who worships the hero growing up to be President and asking the help of said hero many years later to stop a maniacal, fascist madman....

10) As bad as this film is in spots, it's impossible to hate something so unafraid of its own corniness as to have its hero inspired by such icons as FDR and--in the climax--Kate Smith (who apparently gave Mora permission to use her famous 1933 recording of 'America The Beautiful').

Overall...a true oddity--how many super-hero musical comedies are there in the world, let alone ones starring Adam Arkin and Christopher Lee?--that makes up for its moments of bad taste and mediocrity with the trademark Phillipe Mora nuttiness and some central performances that manages to pull this film together by sheer force of will.

Ten Statements About....THE HOWLING III: THE MARSUPIALS (1987)

I know European women are supposed to be hairy, but
DAAAAAMMMMN!

"What you need is a smoking gun."

"What I need is a werewolf holding a smoking gun."

1) As if it wasn't apparent from such previous entries on his cv as the woman-raping human cicada epic The Beast Within or the super-hero musical parody The Return of Captain Invincible (which features Christopher Lee singing and dancing his way through a bartending chart), Phillipe Mora is not a person who plays by the rules...and Lord, does this film bear this out. Who else would look at this franchise and think, 'this would be perfect for my marsupial spy/romance/satire'....

2) That being said...the opening of the film, which features anthropological footage of a group of aborigines posing before a female werewolf they had just tortured and killed, the black and white slowly fading into full color, is truly disquietingly surreal.

3) While I will admit that female lead Imogen Annesley is very sexy, I was more intrigued by the performance of Dagmar Blahova as the Russian lycanthrope Olga. It's not because she is attractive--she isn't--or that her dialogue is convincingly delivered--it isn't. It's because she has such a weird physicality that she brings to her role, especially when she's in the transitionary state between human and animal, that you can't take your eyes off her. The way she snaps her teeth and contorts her face is far more convincing than the low budget werewolf masks that other people are saddled with.

Boy, some of these at-home pregnancies
go horribly wrong....

4) Boy, if you're going to base your werewolves on a specific species, I can't think of any animal more nightmarish that the Tasmanian Wolf. The way, judging from the film footage shown in the movie, that animal was able to open its toothy mouth so impossibly wide is insane....

5) There is such a demented sense of kitchen-sink-edness to this film, as if somebody is whispering in Mora's ear, 'How about we try this?' This is a film where it seems like the orientation changes every ten minutes, which oddly enough gives it an insane sort of energy that drives it forward. However....

6) The film grinds to a total halt roughly the moment we find out that Max Fairchild's Tylo has called down this legendary werewolf spirit to destroy the military contingent sent out to annihilate the remaining werewolves. The fifteen minutes before the end becomes a meandering, sputtering group of disconnected scenes that shows that no one had an idea how to end this movie. You could easily lop off the last ten minutes and not miss anything significant.

7) And on a related note--it rings false that some twenty years passes in that fifteen minutes, and the fact that the low budget demanded a major plot development is reduced to a big gout of expository dialogue only makes that final act a real soporific.

"Yeah, well...I went native, opened an organic bakery,
joined a commune...the usual...how about you, Bill?"

8) Let's be honest here--the special effects are pretty much uniformly awful. The little marsupial baby in particular is wince-worthy. Luckily, the film is so lunatic in its plotting, fearlessly dropping stupid idea after stupid idea into the pot that you can overlook much of the lame animatronics and rubbery masks.

9) I rather like how this film gleefully has its aboriginal guide character back away very suddenly from the expedition when it realizes this werewolf spirit is on the hunt, advising people how slowly they're going to get et if they don't turn tail and run.

10) I can understand the reasoning behind why a key scene with Barry Otto's Beckmeyer interviewing Thylo suddenly switches from film to videotape, but the abruptness of the changeover and the length at which the video portions go on blunts the impact.

Overall...yes, it's a dumb, dumb movie I cannot possibly defend on many levels. But the severely demented nature of the plotting creates an energy and sense of fun that draws me in every time. If only they truncated that last section...