The Vindicator (1986)

The Canadian superhero team Alpha Flight was introduced in 1979 in issue #120 of Uncanny X-Men, but their leader was introduced individually a year earlier in that same comic’s issue #109.  Although more popularly known as Guardian in his team’s own title (which premiered in 1983), James MacDonald Hudson was actually first known as Vindicator (okay, Weapon Alpha if we’re picking nits) with his ass-kicking battle suit.  I have never disguised my outright love for Alpha Flight, and the first thirty-six or so issues are some of my favorite comics from the Eighties (possibly ever).  Now, Vindicator wasn’t my favorite member of the team (that would be Sasquatch), but he was remarkably different from other superheroes of the time (at least to my young mind) in that he was a scientist more than a man of action from the very outset.  This nature would mold how he led the team and ultimately shape his destiny.  

It’s a good thing the name Vindicator was changed, since, aside from sounding neat, it doesn’t pertain very much to the character.  The word vindicate basically refers to clearing an accused person’s name.  It has nothing to do with kicking ass, taking names, or battling supervillains.  As a codename, Guardian, on the other hand, fit Hudson well since part of his and Alpha Flight’s job was to guard Canada as a state-sanctioned superteam.  Funny enough, there was another, non-comic-related Vindicator out of Canada, and he is the titular character of Jean-Claude Lord’s The Vindicator (aka Frankenstein ‘88 aka Micro-Chip-Man).  Ironically, the moniker fits him slightly better than it does John Byrne’s four-color creation.  Slightly.

Evil corporate muckety-muck Alex Whyte (Richard Cox) and his evil scientist minions have finally completed work on a space suit which can be remotely controlled but inexplicably also has the built-in function of inducing primal rage in its wearer anytime anything touches them (how handy).  When good scientist (he wears jeans and a Hawaiian shirt to work) Carl (David MacIlwraith) raises a stink over where the money that’s been cut from his budget is going (three guesses), Carl quickly becomes a liability that has to be eliminated.  One laboratory explosion later, and Whyte now has a prime human test subject for his project (speedily and oh-so-covertly renamed Project: Frankenstein).  Unfortunately, there is an issue with the remote control unit that restrains the rage defense.  Oh, no!  That’s gonna leave a mark!

This is another one of those films where, if you were just told the plot, you would think it was lifting ideas wholesale from more successful American films, particularly Robocop, Darkman, and Universal Soldier.  You have a human scientist whose body is decimated in a deliberate “accident.”  You have a corporation’s conscription of said human’s body for their own project.  You have the project’s turning on his creators.  You have a human turned into a living weapon.  You have the idea of a man who pushes away the woman he loves because he no longer feels human.  And yet, this film was released one year before Verhoeven’s film, four years before Raimi’s, and six years before Emmerich’s.  Of course, it also has allusions to films like the much earlier The Colossus Of New York and the Frankenstein story in general, though of the two, I’d say it’s closer to the former than the latter.  Aside from the “playing God” angle, this film has absolutely nothing to do with Mary Shelley’s tale.  It’s just a convenient touchstone for the filmmakers to use strictly for its place in the public’s consciousness.  

After his transformation, Carl is supposed to embody the film’s pathos and provide its violent catharsis.  So, we have scenes like the one where Carl spies his reflection in a store window and pitches a wicked pity party.  This is alternated with scenes where Carl talks to his pregnant girlfriend Lauren (Teri Austin) though her synthesizer and avoids her seeing him because of his ugliness.  Then we have a scene where Carl bloodily tears through some bad guys.  Then we have a scene where Carl takes off his mask, notices his reflection in some water and pitches a wicked pity party.  And so on.  Now, I think an audience could accept one scene where the sight of his own deformity causes Carl to have a violent episode.  But two or more are simply earmarks for a sad sack character, and they’re tough to want to follow.  There’s also the idea that because someone looks grotesque they must behave grotesquely.  This works for the revenge/action scenes.  Lamentably, the emotional scenes don’t work as well, because Carl is so hellbent on being miserable while still trying to maintain contact with his lady, he comes off as dejected and little else.  Had Carl watched Lauren from afar, interceding on her behalf only as necessary, but never daring to make contact, this theme of the monster who feels undeserving of love would likely work better.  It wouldn’t necessarily be more original, but it would work better (it would also hew closer to Frankenstein, I think).

The one aspect of the film I like is the concept of Carl being literally desensitized.  He cannot feel pain or ecstasy (he lacks genitals in that regard, anyway).  If he is touched, he is programmed to respond with wrath, thus removing him from humanity even further.  He has become almost precisely a brain in a box.  And yet, he doesn’t even have complete control over that since he cannot completely command his body to do what he wants it to do.  And then, like almost everything else in the film, this intriguing plot device is negated utterly out of hand.  In fact, this film has got a whole lotta dumb (sing it to the tune of the Led Zeppelin song) going on in it.  Why would you give a synthetic being a rage defense mechanism activated simply by touch?  Lauren’s roommate Catherine (Catherine Disher) literally mocks her best friend only days after she has presumably buried the man she loves.  The bounty hunters (including Pam Grier as Hunter; get it?) are going to use vaporized acid on Carl (as if a strong breeze wouldn’t blow it back in their faces).  Hunter also seems to gain and drop her moral compass like a rabbit’s vaunted rate of intercourse.  A truck explodes immediately upon impact with a guard rail but before it plummets over a cliff (a classic, to be sure).  A corpse just shows up in a closet it would never have been within a million miles of just for a quick jump scare.  The score for the film’s finale made me think A.C. Slater was going to show up and bust a move at any moment.  I’ll save the very best of the dumb moments, because it’s pretty spoiler-y, but rest assured, if you watch this film, you’ll spot it in a heartbeat (although in fairness, you could very likely feel that some other dumb element is the most egregious, and you would still be right).  

All of this said, if I had seen this film as a fourteen-year-old boy, I would have loved a lot of it.  There’s some fun action.  Some of said action actually springs from some cool ideas.  There’s a little bit of nudity.  There are some sleazy bits.  Alas, the dumb moments, the moments that make you throw your hands up in despair, really overpower the moments that could have made this a better entry in the Sci-Fi/Action genre.  They did for me, at any rate.  The Vindicator isn’t detestable, but it’s not memorable either.

MVT:  The suit, designed by Stan Winston Studios, is pretty nice for a low budget film.  It looks a tad unwieldy, and it doesn’t appear to be very functional at all, but with the mask off, the facial makeup effects work fairly well.

Make Or Break:  The first kill scene with Carl versus some bikers is the Make.  The villains are classic cardboard thugs, and the justice meted out to them is satisfying while also being a nice step or two over the top.

Score:  5.75/10     

Frankenstein's Castle Of Freaks (1974)

Why in the hell would anyone ever put their faith in an assistant?  They are a uniformly untrustworthy breed of employee, as just about every version of the archetype has proven in both prose and visual media.  Fortunately, they are typically also deformed physically so as to show us their unfaithfulness without dint of anything approaching proof of any variety.  Unfortunately for the mad scientists and so on who hire them, the assistant is also craftier than his/her master.  And while the boss may wield the full powers of the supernatural from his very fingertips or be able to breathe the spark of life into a corpse (or collection of corpses), the assistant knows how to procure the raw materials needed to achieve the master’s goal.  Ever tried making veal piccata without the piccata?  Assistants are usually so sycophantic, because they want what their employer has, and as the old saying goes, if you can’t be an athlete, be an athletic supporter.  Besides, who knows better how to topple a giant than someone who knows the weakest spots on its body?  

Naturally, the other side of this coin is the assistant who actually values his/her master’s well-being above all else (think Waylon Smithers), though this makes them no less dangerous to other people (who have the major disadvantage of not being the boss).  The relationship between master and assistant is singular (just pray you’re on the master’s good side, though that doesn’t guarantee your safety, either).  Imagine my surprise, then, when Count Frankenstein (Rossano Brazzi) in Dick Randall’s Frankenstein’s Castle Of Freaks (aka Il Castello Della Paura aka Terror Castle aka The House Of Freaks, etcetera, etcetera) has not one, not two, not three, but four assistants, all of them creepy, duplicitous, and ugsome(except for Gordon Mitchell’s Igor, who is the very exemplar of a Mitchell-ian granitic performance).

The film opens in media res with a bunch of villagers (including one in a pair of designer blue jeans and a plain white dress shirt) surrounding and being attacked by a caveman (Loren Ewing) who is later named Goliath.  Once the creature has been felled, Frankenstein and his cronies make off with his corpse and perform some enigmatic procedure on it.  They next dig up a woman’s corpse for some nebulous reason, though dwarf Genz (Dr. Loveless himself, the Oscar-nominated Michael Dunn) just can’t stop himself from groping one of her breasts.  The Count’s daughter Maria (Simonetta Vitelli) soon shows up with beau Eric (Eric Mann) and friend Krista (Christiane Rücker), and things turn even odder.

It’s interesting to me; for as much as the very concept of sleaze is important to this film (I would even argue it was the chief reason it was produced in the first place), the filmmakers didn’t go for the brass ring like they could have.  The women get naked throughout the film, and there’s some groping and mud bathing, but it’s also some pretty chaste stuff.  Considering the movie came from Italy (though admittedly [and curiously] directed by an American), home to some of the great cinematic sleaze-meisters, one would think the kinkier aspects would have been played up more.  Nonetheless, the film feels as though they wanted to go for it, but they held back for some undisclosed reason.  Genz watches Frankenstein’s daughter and guests from behind the walls of their rooms.  He’s called a necrophiliac outright, though the only nod we get to this particular quirk is the aforementioned feel-copping.  The majority of the film’s skeeziness comes from the voyeurism of its characters, not their overt participation in specific acts, and the majority of this voyeurism is partaken by the uglier male characters.  Because they are unattractive, the implication is that they are impotent.  Ergo, their only source of sexual gratification is the act of gazing at better-looking (I won’t say “beautiful,” per se) people having successful sexual encounters or reveling in the sensuality of their own bodies (like in, say, a milk bath).  Naturally, the act of looking will eventually give way to action, but even with their ardor up, these males prove as incompetent as they are flaccid.

The film goes to great lengths to emphasize the doings and intrigues of what we would normally consider to be the background characters over bestowing any sort of depth to the main characters.  Bug-eyed Hans (Luciano Pigozzi) hates Genz and wants him gone.  Hunchbacked Kreegin (Xiro Papas) is secretly tagging Hans’s homely wife Valda (Laura De Benedittis), who, incidentally, likes her loving a bit on the rough side.  It’s almost like a gothic soap opera, just with Frankenstein and live cavemen in the mix.  In this sense, it truly is a castle of freaks, since it’s the bizarre assistants who are the focus.  They’re the only characters who seem to display any type of emotion.  Despite the cooing and lovemaking in which the “normal” people partake, it is they who are cold and fairly soulless, on the whole.  The Frankenstein’s Monster facet of the film, which one would think is the whole reason to make a film with the Baron’s/Count’s name in the title in the first place, is not only secondary to the film entirely, but it comes within a hair’s breadth of being superfluous in total, except for the required finale carnage quotient (try saying that three times fast) he fulfills.

Frankenstein’s Castle Of Freaks is an outré mashup of clichés, and there is much in it that is simply unexplained.  Where did this Goliath come from?  Where did the other caveman, Ook (played by Salvatore Baccaro under the outstanding pseudonym of Boris Lugosi; the only thing that could make this cooler would be if Fleming played Goliath under the name Bela Karloff), come from, and do the two cavemen know each other?  What happened to the woman’s corpse from the film’s opening scenes?  Why is there a mineral bath in the middle of Ook’s cave, and why is it okay to bathe in for only short periods of time, and how did Ook never discover this before if Maria likes going there so much?  The filmmakers bring up these oddities, drop them onscreen, and then just leave them dangling in the wind without explanation.  The audience begins to connect dots in their minds which may or may not actually be present in the work (more than likely not), and damn it all if these ludicrous elements don’t make what is essentially a slipshod piece of schlock filmmaking into a bona fide curiosity.  It may never make any sense whatsoever in the grand scheme of things, but it still compels as a filmic anomaly, a Fiji mermaid to be marveled at from one side of the glass, studying the obvious stitching while willing it to be the genuine article.

Make Or Break:  The very first shot of the film thrusts the viewer into an outlandish tableau, and it is our choice to either accept it and go along or to laugh and dismiss everything that follows.  Oddly, either reaction would be valid with this particular piece, and it could even be argued that these reactions may co-exist in the same moments throughout.  This is trash, but it’s oddly engaging trash.

MVT:  The best bits of this film are those which are the most abstruse, specifically because they resist being defined or even acknowledged.  I mean, who would ever think to put Neanderthals in the same movie with Doctor (sorry, Count) Frankenstein and a pervy, pint-sized necrophile?  The makers of this little gem, apparently.

Score:  6.25/10