Invincible Space Streaker (1977)

I have never been skinny-dipping.  I never fully understood some people’s fascination with it, but different strokes and all that.  I have, however, streaked.  Let me set the scene for you.  I was young (I’m guessing less than ten years old), and I was taking my nightly bath.  If I remember correctly, my parents had some friends over, and my calls to my parents were going unheeded (why, I don’t recall).  For some inexplicable reason, I got it into my head that the best way to fix my parents’ wagon was to leap out of the tub and hustle my bare ass down the street.  Which I did.  At that time, we lived on 11^th Street.  I made it to 15^th Street before I was finally nabbed by a couple of my siblings.  I’m surprised I didn’t incur any injuries like slicing my foot open (even more surprising since I used to walk around barefooted a lot back then).  At any rate, I didn’t do it because of any sort of exhibitionism on my part, no desire to show off the goods, such as they were.  It was just an impulse borne of a child’s frustration (one that was repeated once more to much less fanfare a short time later).  But the boys in Chi-Lien Yu’s Invincible Space Streaker (aka Fei Tian Dun Di Jin Gang Ren) love to skinny-dip.  In fact, I could imagine these kids being perfectly at home in a Turkish bath house.  You could notch it up to simply being a cultural difference, but seeing a bunch of naked boys on film is a bit jarring to me and more than a little creepy, considering this film’s plot and despite its innocent attitude.

Dr. Mou appears from a frothing lake in his golden-helmeted, supervillain persona and quickly transforms into his human form, which comes with a snazzy black dressing gown.  He conjures up two red-shirted henchmen, one of whom I believe was supposed to be Scottish.  Why?  Why not?  Meanwhile, pre-teen Hsiao Po is almost singlehandedly losing his team’s soccer match by being the world’s worst, most distractible goalie (primarily centered on reining in his brother/cousin/something-or-other Hsiao Wen who has a penchant for pissing in public [seriously, this kid has one of the weakest and/or smallest bladders in the world]).  Post-game, the boys frolic in the aforementioned skinny-dipping hole, where Dr. Mou finds them and lures them to his secret lair with the promise of turning them into superheroes (but actually just turns them into monkeys, pigs, and more henchmen).  Nevertheless, the joke’s on Mou, because he does actually manage to change Po into his nemesis, the titular Streaker.  Fights and things ensue.

In the grand tradition of the Japanese Tokusatsu genre and the insanity of films like The Super Inframan, Invincible Space Streaker is aimed squarely at children and their desire to see shit blow up and monsters fight each other (who doesn’t?).  This, then, is why the film focuses so strongly on a threat from a child predator.  Dr. Mou is absolutely shudder-inducing in the way he entices these kids.  He’s the Pied Piper, but instead of a flute, he uses a poster of a superhero to lead the kids into danger.  Of course, there’s no actual sexual molestation involved (but, man, is it heavily suggested as a strong possibility), and I do believe that the filmmakers approached the story earnestly (plus, I’m sure there are culture gaps shading my impressions).  Instead, the children are tortured and transformed into animals.  The children all get along with each other, more or less.  It’s adults who are threats and/or just incompetent (including, but not limited to, Mrs. Lin, the school teacher who barely keeps track of her wards and gets a slingshot to the ass for her trouble [don’t worry, she returns the favor]).  In films like this, children are front and center, and what’s more worrisome to children than adults who intend them harm or can’t properly protect them?  

Naturally, since the kids are the focal point of the story, they are the ones who are empowered in this world.  Even while in the clutches of Dr. Mou, the children do just about as they please.  Wen even gets to take a whiz over Mou’s shoulder due to a breakdown in communication (a classic metaphor for the disparity between the ways adults and children view the world as well as another excuse to have a kid flash his bird at the camera).  The Space Streaker (I don’t recall if they ever call him anything other than “superman” in the film, and he never makes it into space, anyway) is the ultimate encapsulation of child empowerment.  That the superhero in this movie is actually a child is interesting, unlike in other shows and films of this ilk where they’re teens or young adults.  In costume, the Streaker is actually the height of a young boy (though for the more dangerous/experience-required stunts, he’s played quite obviously by an adult).  His costume most resembles one of the famous Kamen Rider characters from Japan, just much, much cheaper and less colorful.  Many a young boy dreams of being a superhero, and in this film, Po gets his wish without being matured into adulthood.  In this way, it’s somehow more satisfying from the perspective of youth, because the superhero is still a kid.  In other words, you don’t have to be a grownup to be powerful.

Why, then, is this film so incredibly dull?  Well, several reasons.  First and foremost is the fact that, even for all of the lunacy packed into this thing, it’s still extraordinarily incoherent.  Even if you view the film as a childhood fantasy/nightmare, it just makes no sense.  None of this is assisted in any way by the camerawork and editing.  The shots are always uncomfortably close to characters, jittery, and cut together like they were just thrown into a blender.  It’s what was once dubbed “MTV style” before MTV.  I’m a fan of camera zooms, something for which Asian cinema is known (and sometimes ridiculed). Nevertheless, not only are there simply way too many of them in Invincible Space Streaker (if you made a drinking game out of their frequency, you would be obliterated within five minutes), but they’re also almost completely unmotivated.  They’re zooms for the sake of zooms, and they make an already bizarre film into a muddled one.  Most egregious of all, the action scenes, the one thing we hope will actually gratify in a film like this, are boring.  They are one note repeated constantly, and like everything else in the movie, they leave the viewer scratching his head rather than grinning.  All things considered, I suppose that the final (recycled) shot of the boys skinny-dipping with the title “Thank you for coming” rather than “The End” just about says it all.

MVT:  The costumes are fun in a goofy, threadbare way (including a wolfman who looks like an escapee from a grade school production of Little Red Riding Hood), but they’re underutilized to the point of frustration.

Make or Break:  The opening soccer game outlines the tenor of the film, for better or worse.  Mostly worse.

Score:  4/10         

The Phantom (1996)

Guns in movies are rarely treated properly, both in how they function and in how they are used.  We all know the old tropes.  They quite often have a seemingly limitless supply of ammunition, only running out as a plot convenience in order to throw a curveball at the shooter.  When people do run out of bullets, they whip their weapon (not a euphemism) at their enemy, as if this will in any way be effective, and, of course, discounting that they’ll ever get more bullets to reload.  After killing an enemy who also has guns, characters will neither take those guns for future use nor check the body for ammunition they can use.  Characters who go underwater while having a gun on their person emerge from the water and immediately start flawlessly shooting, as if the water wouldn’t affect the bullets or the mechanism at all (the exception to this that stands out in my mind is the fantastic sequence in the Coen Bros’ No Country for Old Men).  By turns, audiences forgive, deride, and cherish these instances, and this is usually based on context.  In a film like Taxi Driver, the realism of the filmic world demands that the weapons behave in a verisimilitudinous fashion.  Conversely, in something like Rambo: First Blood Part 2, the expectation is that Rambo would never run out of bullets, because he is a fantasy character in a fantasy world (he is, after all, re-fighting and winning the Vietnam War for all Americans).  

But even in far-fetched circumstances, there are some utilizations of firearms that both dumbfound and generate incredulity.  Not to be too much the doryphore, but such an instance occurs in Simon Wincer’s The Phantom.  Chasing after the badguys, the Phantom (Billy Zane) uses his twin AMT Hardballer .45s to slide down an elevator cable.  Never mind the physics of the descent.  Between the heat generated on the guns and the friction from the cables, those firearms would be better suited for paperweights than weapons from there on out (one instance where throwing guns at an enemy would actually make sense).  It’s funny that this stood out to me, especially considering that the film is a complete flight of fancy in every way, though I can say that it didn’t ruin the experience at all.  But stand out it did.

The Phantom guards the Bengale Jungle from all intruders, sworn to fight greed and cruelty in all their forms.  He becomes entwined in the fiendish plot of rich villain Xander Drax (Treat Williams) to combine and harness the power of three mystic skulls (one gold, one silver, one jade) for his own villainous ends.  The upshot is that he also reconnects with college sweetheart and adventurer Diana Palmer (Kristy Swanson).  Much globetrotting and thrills ensue.

The Phantom is a comic strip character created in 1936 by Lee Falk and distributed by King Features Syndicate.  While the strip is still being produced and printed today (obviously not by Falk, who passed away in 1999), his characters have also appeared in comic books, prose books, animated series, and live-action serials, and that’s to say nothing of the merchandising that comes with a property of this magnitude.  Falk was quoted as saying, “To me, The Phantom and Mandrake [the Magician] are very real – much more than the people walking around whom I don’t see very much.”  This sums up the key to making stories about characters like this (in fact, characters in any genre) work well.  The creators have to believe in them and the world they inhabit.  When they don’t, the result tends to be self-consciously hollow, fetishizing the heightened aspects rather than dealing with these realities as a whole.  As a sidebar, this is why I think a great many of the films which are done in a “retro” fashion (as well as the slew of recent genre spoof movies) simply don’t work; the filmmakers are so busy winking at the audience with the superficial elements rather than crafting a solid film with compelling characters and narratives.  Back to the point, Wincer’s film works for me because it treats almost everything in it with the same perspective.  The action works just as well as the humor does (I realize that co-executive producer and proposed director Joe Dante said that the film was intended, first and foremost, to be comical but was played “disastrously” straight, an opinion with which I have to say I disagree).  It’s light throughout, and if anything, the film owes tons to Steven Spielberg not only in its visual style but also in its tone, which is very reminiscent of his Indiana Jones series (ironic in that his and George Lucas’ franchise was influenced at least partially by strips like The Phantom, but not entirely surprising, since Wincer directed several episodes of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and screenwriter Jeffrey Boam also penned the script for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade).     

One facet of the movie which stands out is its conflict between technology/civilization and mysticism/primitivity.  Clearly, the jungle that the Phantom inhabits is a wild place, and the Phantom himself is looked upon as a quasi-demigod.  The natives in the area believe him to be immortal, referring to him as “The Ghost Who Walks,” but this is a legend created to maintain order (the mantle of Phantom is a legacy passed down from fathers to sons [I believe Kit Walker, the Phantom of this story, is the 21^st in the line, though I could be wrong about that]).  The Phantom does not impose his will on those who look up to him.  He simply fights in their name in order for them to continue to keep their freedoms (something we all wish were more commonplace).  Diana connects the two worlds directly (though Kit can exist in both as indicated by his trip to New York City, his true place is in the primal forest).  She comes from a high society family, but she is an adventurer at heart, and while she quite prefers the latter to the former, she can handle both well.  In fact, when we are introduced to her, she has just returned from the Yukon where she contracted malaria, and she leaps at the opportunity to go into the jungle at her newspaperman Uncle Dave’s (Bill Smitrovich) mention.  Conversely, Drax is the force of corporate greed.  His world is ensconced in concrete, steel, and glass, and he kills people at a whim right on his own property because the lawmakers/peacekeepers in this modern society are thoroughly corrupt and in his pocket.  His intent is to use the ancient skulls (a form of technology in the guise of magic, if we take Arthur C. Clarke’s dictum that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” as law) as weapons, the implication being that innocent people would be the targets (as they are always the collateral damage of warfare, which is how Drax wants to use the artifacts), and thus being a force of subjugation.  The Phantom is the antithesis of everything Drax is as a character (with the exception of wealth, although Kit’s fortune comes from precious stones which he treats like baubles), and it is with this quality that he defeats him (still, truth be told, the Phantom also has a form of primitive technology akin to the skulls which aid him in this, and he does use firearms, so in this way, he is a synthesis between civilized and primitive, a trait many pulp heroes share).

The Phantom is an enjoyable, airy action/adventure film.  The cinematography by David Burr is gorgeous, and the mobile camerawork is dynamic and fluid.  The stuntwork and effects are impressive as all get out.  The action itself is filled with tension and follows the structure of series like Indiana Jones and James Bond, where it rises and falls, and most importantly, escalates.  It’s not enough for the Phantom to be stuck in a truck on a rickety rope bridge.  No, he is stuck in a truck on a rickety rope bridge with an innocent kid tied up in the back, the ropes breaking, a several hundred foot fall beneath, and only one hand free to do anything.  This is after a chase through the jungle, some fisticuffs, and more.  This is not the Batman series (1989 – 1997), though it was clearly produced because of that franchise, but they share certain flavors.  That said, this film does distinguish itself enough from the Warner Bros films and satisfies enough to be its own thing and worth seeing for a good time.

MVT:  The production values, its design, cinematography, locations, and so on are grand, especially considering its $45 million budget (which unfortunately wasn’t even recouped from its theatrical release).

Make or Break:  The initial action set piece sets the bar in all respects for the film, and the ones that proceed from it match it quite nicely in quality.

Score:  7/10