Black Scorpion (2001) Part 1

 

Creators: Roger Corman and Craig J. Nevius

Screenplay: Steve Gentile, Nick Guthe, Elijah Aron, Heidi Ferrer, Raly Radouloff, Lev L. Spiro, Malcolm Stephens and Mike Vitale

Cast: Michelle Lintel as Black Scorpion, Scott Valentine as  Det. Steve Rafferty, BT as Argyle, Enya Flack as Tender Lovin', Steven Kravitz as  Slugger, Shane Powers as  Specs, Guy Boyd as Capt. Henry Strickland; Shae Marks as  Babette, Robert Pine as  Mayor Artie Worth, Raye Birk as Dr. Phineas Phoenix

Ephemeral Waves

I've grown tentacles in funny places

[As television series, even one season wonders that were cancelled, can have a lot of episodes, it would be better to cover them in parts, starting here with a curious tangent in Roger Corman's history...]

If we were to look at Roger Corman, the legendary producer and filmmaker, he has worked for so long you can forget that, alongside a legacy of people who brought into cinema and key films, that his career has many properties and even arcs to them. His sixties Edgar Allen Poe films for example are very different to his eighties films he produced. The period after the eighties is an obscure era in itself not as talked about, in which after his last directorial production Frankenstein Unbound (1990), he spent the time just as a producer including readapting films of his from the past as television movies like Humanoid from the Deep (1996). This television show is a curious tangent for him, when he mostly stayed to films, a spin-off of two films made beforehand. Black Scorpion (1995), originally with Joan Severance as the lead, is sexy Batman without subtlety in the comparison, a film with a figure in tight black spandex like the Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher films, with the gadget leaden car, only with a very attractive woman as the hero with a nude sex scene at least in the first film. This was followed by Black Scorpion II: Aftershock (1996). Both were screened on the Horror Channel, a British channel devoted to horror movies which however screened other genres occasionally and where I saw these films. The TV series, when learning of it, felt like an obscure thing out of reach, but thankfully a lot has changed in that time.

Michelle Lintel replaces Severance, a female police officer named Darcy Walker who, inspired by her late father, dons the mask of the Black Scorpion as a rouge figure, even hunted by the cops, to stop super villains who terrorise Angel City. Helped by Argyle (BT), a former gang member as her genius tech man, she can take on the villains. One of the immediate issues is that Black Scorpion the series is very repetitious. Each episode a villain of the week, many having two henchmen (or usually henchwomen). Many of them, due to car chases being more easier for the show to produce, usually have a van to drop explosives out the back of at Walker's car when she pursues them, be it exploding clocks to exploding sports balls. Usually the villain is a buxom model or genre actress in an elaborate costume. The villainess Aerobicide for example, a feminist exercise guru with testosterone stealing beer and robot limbs, is Renee Allman, defying how lack of testosterone works in men in the episode but having a small filmography including Cyborg 2: Glass Shadow (1993) in her career. Her henchwomen are Ava Fabian, former Playboy's Playmate of the Month and actress, and Faith Salie, contributor to CBS Sunday Morning and journalist among other career roles, just to give you an example of the eclectic nature of these cases. There are exceptions, one a villainous male gardener with a giant green thumb, who even gets a tragic romance with the major's secretary and leading to a tangent, from Corman, where you get practical effect made monster plants which make weird noises for an episode.

On the police side, you have regular characters to prop up Walker's story. Scott Valentine plays Det. Steve Rafferty, the police officer who is trying to catch Black Scorpion. He has a complicated chemistry with Walker, including with Black Scorpion as a separate person, which comes to play when one villain uses hallucinatory gas and she is literally fighting herself. There is also a slovenly yet lovable police chief Capt. Henry Strickland (Guy Boyd), and two goofballs Slugger (Steven Kravitz) and Specs (Shane Powers), who I will admit will annoy some in the earliest episodes but do eventually stick with you. There is Enya Flack as "Tender Lovin", Argyle's girlfriend, who he has a loving if argumentative relationship with. When you have a work with a limited budget, you have to rely on the cast you have. This is something that I have especially seen in cancelled television shows I have watched where, especially with the episodic productions, it is always a virtue to have people with charisma to keep the show afloat. To the production's credit, Scott Valentine and Michelle Lintel do have a great chemistry with each other, though it is sad to know that Lintel's filmography is very tiny, with this show (and its own follow up film) one of the only prominent things within it.

Telling the narratives of each episode is pointless, as this is a wash and rinse show in the repetition of the same narrative, something which can work but is unfortunately worse here as the episodes are forty minutes long without advertising breaks, which feels too long in how they are usually structure. A reoccurring aspect, for most of the villains, is that most of them only exist because the mayor, Artie Worth (Robert Pine), is so corrupt it is comical and actually a funny piece of satire in itself. Cheating on his unseen wife with his buxom secretary Babette (Shae Marks), he can be involved with funding for toxic waste to be dumped into the sea, defunding the fire service and even paying a pyromaniac to burn things off the side, making it not a surprise many either try to kill him, kidnap him to the underground homeless person territory or break into his office almost every episode. Even his secretary has a plot for one episode, with the gardening villain who decides to create monstrous (practical effect created) muttering plants to exploit her attraction to power away from Artie. His character, to the credit of the show being deliberately broad, was a highlight in the first half of the series.

There are attempts at satire, where Angel City is built on many incompetent figures, but the show's various attempts at politics beyond their mayor do blunder along sadly the more it tries to be serious. It can be funny, such as the Black Scorpion mobile having some of its gadgets removed like the oil slick for being environmentally harmful, but many do radiate ill advised or confused tones. When tackling the homelessness issue, with cops taking them off street, they join the villainess in the episode even when Black Scorpion tries to convince them this is the wrong way to go. Any time this program deals with feminism, the show becomes awkward. That Walker has a tendency to kill her villains flippantly is common, especially with the knowledge that, with all the reused car chase footage of police cars crashing spectacularly, chasing Black Scorpion, there are likely a few officers who have at least retired from duty afterwards. The one running plotline throughout all the series is Dr. Phoenix (Raye Birk), a figure who can resurrect the dead villains to try to reform them, despite it clearly a misguided folly, even clone a character named Gangster Prankster from cremated ashes, a Joker stand-in he tries to turn into an upstanding citizen with a microchip implanted in his brain to induce electric shocks.

It is that episode, Episode 10, where the worse decisions involving the show trying to be serious are found. It starts off well, with a cop carnival to improve public relations with the police, so bad they have to dress up as clowns, but even the leads arrest Gangster Prankster based on presumption of him being a former criminal. This is not helped by the character is being played by an African American actor who, when he becomes a villain again, even says jokingly "Let my people go" whilst breaking out his henchmen. It is an episode difficult to love in the modern era in the worst vibes it portrays, which is worse as Stoney Jackson, an actor you may recognise from Walter Hill films or even being a prominent dancer in the Michael Jackson Beat It music video, is actually one of the best guest stars in the show, getting a Joker rip-off but making it his. He was already in the second Black Scorpion film before, and in terms of getting the most out of a character, including when he is a good guy and working for the police, in a comical cop outfit subduing armed suspects with pies, he is great.

For the first twelve episodes, this show has a cheese to it, knowing its own absurdity when one episode has an exercise bicycle that will electrocute the rider if they get under 25 miles per hour. Snippets of its co-producer, barring a Chopping Mall (1986) poster in alleyway fight, can be found if having to be toned down for television. The sensuality obviously had to be toned down, with a lot of cleavage if anything else the most titillating it can be. The fight scenes, regardless of what could be shown on television, are bad which makes the extended amount of them more of a chore as a result. When Black Scorpion relies on its comedy, you still have to put up with too many awful puns, but it helps bolster the show up considerably, even if this feels out-of-place at a time when superhero films where soon to be the juggernaut into the next two decade's worth of cinema. Lintel is okay, but it says a great deal that she stands out more when she gets to play Walker out-of-character when not showing a clear chemistry with Scott Valentine's character. Be it in hair curlers, dress and surly in a nightmare sequence as an annoyed trailer park wife for Valentine; as a ditzy gold digger undercover; or fighting herself as an evil Black Scorpion. Likewise characters like Argyle, with his argument heavy but loving relationship with Tender Lovin, or the police chief who is always close to retirement, are broad stereotypes but that is a pleasure to have. It argues that with a lot of television, the more I look at, they are the home for actors to really have to stretch themselves to keep their shows afloat if those programs were doomed from the start.

For this series especially, the surprise guests really add a bit to the production depending on the casting¹. In lieu to the comparison to Batman, cast from the 1960s Batman do make an appearance in the first twelve episodes, with Frank Gorshin playing the Clockwise, wishing to steal people's time by aging them artificially. He is great here, which was not a surprise as, among the other pleasures in the 1966 Batman film spun off that show, his performance as the Riddler was one of the best things in said movie. Adam West, as the Breathtaker, a former doctor whose accident losing both lungs led to a mental breakdown and psychopathic tendencies, is in two episodes so far, and if there was ever one good thing to take from this usually average series, it is the hope that Adam West got to play more villains in his career or should have. His humour is still there, stuck behind an oxygen tent/jail cell as he informs a newly created villainess that she should always warm the public on the news of her plans to destroy the city as a standard custom, but there is quite a bit of this where he is legitimately creepy or menacing, something which is unexpectedly exceptional to witness.

There are some bizarre cameos too, and the two that particularly stand-out are worthy to end this part on, just to give an idea of what the time period was like for them to happen. Alongside the fact that Michael J. Anderson, a regular David Lynch collaborator, shares the screen with Frank Gorshin, throwing exploding alarm clocks at the pursuing Black Scorpion car behind, you also have Laura Harring play an assistant to Dr. Phoenix in the episode where Adam West first appears. This same year, the original footage an unused television pilot from 1999, Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001) would be released to acclaim with her in a main role, making Harring's tiny role in a sexy nurse's costume bizarre. More so as this means that there is a scene of her helping a newly resurrected Adam West regain his ability to develop words by exposing her cleavage to him. That she played Babette in Black Scorpion II: Aftershock adds to the curiosity of this. Even more strange? That Dave Mustaine of the thrash metal band Megadeth, and its founder, inexplicably appears in Episode 5 as a pyromaniac called Torchy Thompson. This is emphasised as an instrumental bridge of Hanger 18, one of their most recognisable songs, appears in a fight scene between him and Black Scorpion. Not even the main villain for that episode, as that belongs to a fireman who Walker falls for, it is one of the least likely things to happen. If anything, a series like this will intrigue for these unexpected pop culture tangents to be crossed.

 

[To Be Continued]

 

======

1) Again, as earlier in the review, even an ultra obscure figure is fascinating especially if they were someone who stars in so much work their appearance was not a surprise. One personal highlight for one scene is Irwin Keyes, who I first learnt of as the monster in Frankenstein General Hospital (1988), an ultra obscure Frankenstein parody. He is easily recognisable even if he never has more than a cameo most of the time, and through his career he worked a lot so many have encountered him onscreen. Here he plays a man who is sick of the world and wishes to blow people up with a vest of cartoon dynamite, only for learning to juggle to bring meaning to his life even if he still has to be arrested.