Hammer's followup to their own 1965 version of H. Rider Haggard's novel isn't much of a sequel to the earlier film and it isn't based on Haggard's own sequel, Ayesha: The Return of She, either. It is "based on characters created by" the author, and that only barely. Most notably, She herself is absent. Oh, there's a young European beauty named Carol (Olinka Berova) who has, in essence, been nominated to take the Queen's place, but she's just an ordinary girl with no qualifications for the position other than her resemblance to Ursula Andress. On second thought, that makes her the perfect choice. For in this bizarre take on Haggard's characters, the great and terrible She-who-must-be-obeyed is reduced to nothing more than an impotent figurehead, Queen of the lost city of Kuma, which is actually ruled by a group of psychics called the Magi. If the film were honest about any of this, it might have worked. For instance, the one power She and her King, Kalikrates (John Richardson), actually possess is immortality; it might be interesting to see how an ability to outlive your opponents translates into political power. Instead, we get Phillip (Edward Judd), a psychiatrist who falls for troubled Carol -- and, significantly, a man who must ultimately save her. The only "vengeance" in this film is that directed at powerful women by sexist filmmakers. Which is odd because it was written by Peter O'Donnell, author of the Modesty Blaise books. Odder still in that the movie opens with an attempted rape that Carol appears to thwart with pre-Carrie psychokinesis, a talent that is never used again. (Can it be that even attempted rape is sufficient to render women powerless?) Senseless and silly, but the ending, by the Sacred Flame, isn't bad.
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Hammer's followup to their own 1965 version of H. Rider Haggard's novel isn't much of a sequel to the earlier film and it isn't based on Haggard's own sequel, Ayesha: The Return of She, either. It is "based on characters created by" the author, and that only barely. Most notably, She herself is absent. Oh, there's a young European beauty named Carol (Olinka Berova) who has, in essence, been nominated to take the Queen's place, but she's just an ordinary girl with no qualifications for the position other than her resemblance to Ursula Andress. On second thought, that makes her the perfect choice. For in this bizarre take on Haggard's characters, the great and terrible She-who-must-be-obeyed is reduced to nothing more than an impotent figurehead, Queen of the lost city of Kuma, which is actually ruled by a group of psychics called the Magi. If the film were honest about any of this, it might have worked. For instance, the one power She and her King, Kalikrates (John Richardson), actually possess is immortality; it might be interesting to see how an ability to outlive your opponents translates into political power. Instead, we get Phillip (Edward Judd), a psychiatrist who falls for troubled Carol -- and, significantly, a man who must ultimately save her. The only "vengeance" in this film is that directed at powerful women by sexist filmmakers. Which is odd because it was written by Peter O'Donnell, author of the Modesty Blaise books. Odder still in that the movie opens with an attempted rape that Carol appears to thwart with pre-Carrie psychokinesis, a talent that is never used again. (Can it be that even attempted rape is sufficient to render women powerless?) Senseless and silly, but the ending, by the Sacred Flame, isn't bad.
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++1/2 Middling effort that re-works H. Rider Haggard's novel in some very important ways, yet manages to stay true to its own internal logic. Three Englishmen are lured into a quest to find a lost city in Africa, where they find a beautiful queen (Ursula Andress) who has little regard for her subjects, yet is delighted that one of the Englishmen (John Richardson) appears to be the reincarnation of her former lover, a man of ancient Egypt. Significantly, the queen is introduced as She-who-waits; though she is later called She-who-must-be-obeyed, the damage is done: this She, in power and beauty, is a pale shadow of her literary counterpart, and much less interesting as a result. Does, however, include one nice, if particularly cruel, scene in which a daughter is returned to her father. Peter Cushing also stars. Followed in 1968 by the semi-sequel, The Vengeance of She. +++1/2 She is not a funny book, but one priceless scene involves a proud Englishman who has been summoned, along with a high-ranking slave, before the ruler of a lost and now-degraded civilization. The slave falls immediately to his hands and knees, creeping forward ever so slowly. The Englishman, refusing his companion's undignified advance, chooses to walk. But what a walk! Following the slow-moving slave, he can either pause between each step or raise one leg and wave it about until given room to put it down again. Either way, he realizes, he looks almost as silly as the slave. This is the charm of She. It is not the most exciting adventure you will ever read, but its characterizations are sharp and believable and unapologetic. The adventure begins when three Englishmen, one of whom might be related to an ancient Egyptian, set out to discover the truth of tales passed from generation to generation about a strange city and an even stranger woman said to rule there with an iron hand. The good stuff, on the other hand, begins when they arrive, literally finding much more than they ever believed possible. And that's because it is only then that the characters really begin to shine -- not as archetypes but as real people who act and react not perhaps as we would want them to, but refreshingly as people really would under similar circumstances. As you might expect from a book about a woman known to her people as She-who-must-be-obeyed, Haggard also provides an intriguing take on the issue of male and female dominance. Adapted several times for the screen, including one silent film for which Haggard himself wrote the intertitles, but perhaps most famously in 1965, in a film starring Ursula Andress. * Tangential adaptation of John Norman's Tarnsman of Gor that has exactly one redeeming feature: then-recent Playboy Playmate of the Month Rebecca Ferrati in a primitive bikini. Urbano Barberini is thoroughly unconvincing as wimpy physics professor Tarl Cabot, who is mysteriously transported to a counter-Earth named Gor, where he must learn to fight with sword, shield, and bow to recover an artifact stolen from Miss Ferrati's city. The embarrassingly slack script is filmed straight by director Fritz Kiersch, who did somewhat better with his first film, The Children of the Corn. A tarnsman, by the way, is a person who can ride large warbirds called tarns, but don't expect to see one in this bargain basement effort. ** Shapeless TV adaptation of Madeleine L'Engle's novel about two kids, helped along by a friend and three strange old women, who travel to distant planets in search of their missing father, a brilliant scientist who disappeared a year earlier while working on a top secret project for the government. Manages to turn L'Engle's most emotionally powerful scene, the ending, into an action sequence, after which the film simply doesn't know when to quit. Not surprisingly, the film is neither as horrific as the novel nor does it contain any of the author's nods to Christianity. With unimpressive special effects and a kind of galactic medium who gets her kicks by using her crystal ball to watch live versions of America's Funniest Home Videos. Not that it matters, but in an interview with Newsweek's Melinda Henneberger, L'Engle herself denounced the film, saying, "I expected it to be bad, and it is." (She also dismissed J. K. Rowling's first Harry Potter book as "a nice story but [with] nothing underneath it.") This film stars Katie Stuart, Gregory Smith, and David Dorfman as the three kids, and Alfre Woodard, Kate Nelligan, and Alison Elliott as the old women. ** Sinbad the Sailor (Kerwin Mathews) forges an uneasy alliance with a crafty magician (Torin Thatcher) to sail to a dangerous island where Sinbad can reverse the spell that has left his fiancée (Kathryn Grant) only a few inches tall and the magician, not-so-coincidentally, can recover the magic lamp he covets. No doubt a delight for single-minded stop-motion animation fans (Ray Harryhausen shows us a giant cyclops, a snake woman, a dragon, and more), the clunky acting and dialogue are likely to turn away everyone else -- along with a weak story that is ultimately built around a lamp that seems hardly worth the effort, in spite of the boy genie it contains. *** Bittersweet time-travel fantasy about the love affair between a seventies playwright and an actress in 1912. Pleasant movie with good performances by both Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour. The script -- by Richard Matheson, based on his own novel Bid Time Return -- has everything you would want, and less: the romance itself relies a bit too heavily on destiny and not nearly enough on good old fashioned wooing. Still, not a bad way to spend an hour and a half. *** Three very special kids, with the help of three very special old women, attempt to save their very special father after he disappears while working on a mysterious project for the government. One of the kids, the one from whose perspective the story is told, is sort of normal, but that, we learn, is only an unfortunate temporary condition. Time has very little to do with this Young Adult hybrid of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, which should have been called A Wrinkle in Space, as these extraordinary travelers bounce about the galaxy looking for dear old dad. A Newbery Award winner, though presumably not for the story per se or the characters, but for L'Engle's honest and unflinching view of life as a mixture of both good and evil, as well as for her optimistic view that good can prevail. And make no mistake: once things turn bad for these kids, they turn very bad indeed. All served up on a light base of questionable Christian theology. Made into a TV film in 2003, and followed over a quarter century by four other books featuring the same families. **** Much lauded short French fantasy film about a young boy (Pascal Lamorisse) whose unlikely friend -- a red balloon that follows him from place to place -- provokes differing reactions from the people he meets along the way. Undeniably cute modern fairy tale with imaginative situations and impressive photography only gets better as the viewer invests it with his or her own symbolic meaning. Features a music score and very little dialogue. 32 minutes. * Carter's first Thongor book reads like juvenilia but was marketed as adult fantasy, lending unwelcome credence to the old idea that fantasy has no real literary value. Derivative, superficial, and repetitive. Fight, capture, rescue: the pattern repeats itself over and over as Thongor and friends pursue their quest to save the ancient world of Lemuria from destruction. All sorts of bad guys seek to sacrifice Thongor to their pet deities, but, as the wizard eventually points out, Thongor leads a charmed life. Meaning: the only thing that gets sacrificed here is suspense. This revised edition includes an introduction in which Carter tells us that this, his first published book, was the seventh he had written. Those first six must have been real beauties. |
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