Black Scorpion (2001) Part 2

 

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

[The following is a continuation from the first half which you can read HERE. And yes, they were written separately over time, the first devoted to the first half of the one season of television and the later covered here to the final. You can tell a lot of additional emotion in the words what the final review and progression was.]

Halfway through viewing the Black Scorpion television series, you have a villain with dwarfism, more of a trickster who rides about on a hover board in the air (part of the show's then low budget CGI). He is dressed as Cupid firing arrows at bystanders that cause them to fall in love with the first person they see. He never returns after that one episode, and certainly is the most baffling moment of the whole season. He is not even the main villain of the episode, but there to cause mayhem in a scenario where the leads are paired with villains they had romances with, adding to the weirdness.

Black Scorpion, to be blunt, could have done with more of this as by the second half the sense of decline and numbness started to kick in trying to watch the show. It was doomed by the inherent structure of having to pad out forty plus minute episodes for its original station the Sci-Fi Channel, which would have been an hour with the advertisement breaks.  This is a huge crippling flaw, as you can feel the show having not enough to come up with in terms of good material, more so for a twenty two episode show, eventually draining for myself to see. It eventually has to rely on the same specific villains being brought up over and over even in cameos, as the show has established early in the season it can have even dead ones cloned back to life.

It is a programme where not a lot is sustained or memorable, and whilst the episodic nature could have been worked around, there is a sense too of the budget being way too small to really push into anything more than its template. It has to rely on a lot of dialogue and including all those poorly put together fight scenes with actors who (with sympathy for them) are clearly not trained even to do choreography. One episode is about virtual reality, which is strange as surely by 2001 the first wave of VR as a craze had died out in the late 1990s and would have waited to the 2010s for the tech to improve. It is mostly just to add production value in a fantasy medieval set or two for the deadly VR game, which allows Roger Corman to recycle his Deathstalker films for footage. Even then, the episode squanders cult actor and bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno as a fantasy grunt than a villain which could have boosted the show for a moment considerably. Set in a scenario where someone wants to use VR to help the homeless, by putting them in a virtual utopia, only for the mayor to use it for the prisoners in jail, Black Scorpion's political satire is still a mangled but fascinating mess even if less pronounced. Even a late running plot, of police chief Henry Strickland wanting to run for mayor, is quickly written off in two of the last episodes when it could have been rewarding to see where that went for the series finale.

A large part of the show, always and still the most compelling running joke, is that Mayor Worth is to blame for most villains due to his corruption. He even hires a band of female rockers, whose music is not as bad as everyone says but is grungy alt-rock with horror punk lyrics, to subliminally cause riots through their music for a mock morality campaign. That is satire the show had right in the palm of its hands and could have toyed with. That the show's humour instead is mostly bad puns, based on the villains' gimmicks, sadly becomes more and more the case in the last half of the season when before there was more playfully fun comedy. Even the villains themselves eventually become interchangeable baring one or two exceptions, like a hockey player that Mayor Worth accidentally has paralysed by his own team mates to rig a game, getting a robot suit from a mad scientist so brazen he enters a hospital room randomly and even has a glossy catalogue of his deadly tech.

Most of the time though the show is relying on buxom actresses in fetished costumes, neither helped by the fact the heroine's willingness to kill them is still there, even despite defending herself from accusations of this at one point. There are too many villains and too many killed off, preventing any from gaining traction through the series. Those that do sustain a bit of time are not really interesting either, baring their sidekicks of the opposite sex and common trademark of novelty themed bombs to throw out the back of the van like explosive ice cream scoops, as was the case in the first half of the series. Adam West, who was a stand-out in the early episodes as the Breathtaker, is reduced to a goon to eventually escape prison and is merely voiced acted, which is a miserable waste. The one figure who gets someone interesting is Stoney Jackson, as the Gangster Prankster, with an odd but memorable second episode where Jackson gets to stand out. That and the premise at least shake things up. That Argyle is forced against his will onto the side of the villains, actor BT one of the most charismatic of the leads, and where the plot eventually leads to. That, when Gangster Prankster is sick of a comedian mocking him on television, it leads to the creation of a device that causes people to expand like balloons and even explode when they laugh. It is bizarre, with a death-trap involving being tickled on the feet and Gangster Prankster wanting to cause mass explosions by dropping feathers on Angel City on a plane, but it is at least idiosyncratic for a series which is repetitive most of the time. If the show had kept to this warped, low budget pulp, it may have gotten more mileage for me.

Instead, I struggled eventually to even get through the series for writing a review, let alone to complete, all in spite of any episode by itself being innocuous. This is a show which, if shorter, would have been tolerable in spite of being very conventional, but as an episodic narrative where the characters will not progress it becomes harder to sit through for each episode's length and the amount of episodes. Michelle Lintel's lead has moments of conflict but really has no wiggle room to drastically evolve her character, whilst Scott Valentine, in-between directing one episode where we get an ice skating Black Scorpion for a memorable moment, plays a character who is pulverised all the time by villains. That also includes Black Scorpion herself, who usually kissing him afterwards, means that in-between their romantic chemistry, his character is also eventually going to be a masochistic if he was not before.

One of the few episodes to really take a challenge, and hence one of the only good ones, drastically upturns the show even in a scenario which eventually retcons this, bringing back normalcy by the end credits in a bizarre sci-fi twist. That Black Scorpion's identity is revealed and leading to everything getting darker - friends are forced to sleep in their cars due to their connections to Darcy, the police are after her, and Valentine's detective changes in his conflict of emotion. That this has to be amended by the lead getting a clone of herself, who is rapidly degenerating the moment she left the cloning tub due to an ever increasing brain, is weird yet gets into something compelling, including the continuous aspect of the lead having to fight against her alter ego, literalising it here.

It is one of the few compelling episode, and still in mind of having the bad puns and being around a villain from the first half of the series who is an evil photographer, the episode having to be forced out of all the series' bad creative decisions to be good. Even the two episode finale, which should be a major climax, feels brittle. Soupy Sales, famous among other aspect for his daily children's television show Lunch with Soupy Sales, plays a useless TV psychic who gets villains, abruptly just new clones than already in jail as they were, to cause crimes for him to predict. The resulting narrative has a lot of padding and does not feel like a jump in drama in the slightest. It becomes twisted in a way which is not dramatically compelling but just morally wrong too from one character, when Argyle has Darcy's dead father cloned to help her through a crisis of faith as a superhero. This would be the end of this version of the character, followed up by two compilation movies from episodes of the show, and frankly any semblance of this show working was clearly visible halfway through as not being there. Roger Corman whilst a man of huge talent is imperfect, and there is really a sense here, ironically, whilst he could make films cheaply and quickly in his golden era, that a television schedule is its own structure which could not be easily deal with. Black Scorpion had moments there were entertaining, but so much for a show I had to sit through for a long time I can gladly live without now.