Fighting the Fire Dragon

So, mainly what you need to know is — ORANGOPOID!

Now read on.

Ray “Crash” Corrigan in a unicorny monkey suit. Flash versus Crash! This whole wrestlemania spectacular, and the duel with Barin which preceded it, is the serial’s version of the later movie’s tilting spikey platform whip fight, and one realises how wise Lorenzo Semple Jr. was to keep earth in peril of destruction throughout — in the serial, Ming seems to have given up his evil plan and is just, I don’t know, living in the moment.

Flash, meanwhile, is dying in the moment. But it’s not really that big of a cliffhanger — cue the “To Be Continued” card while he’s getting gored, then start the next episode with him jumping back up on his feet and decking the hairy fellow, right? Let’s see if that’s what happens.

“Is there no way a man can conquer the sacred orangopoid?” asks Aura, possibly her best ever line. Some rando in a funny hat lets her in on the secret. This is a glorious cheat, since the conversation is spliced into the furry grappling already seen in last week’s installlment. Rewriting the past is a popular serial trick.

Learning that the pellet with the poison’d in the vestle with the pestle the white spot on the ‘rango’s throat is his Achille’s heel, Aura grabs a spear and hands it to Flash, who, without any instruction, ventilates his opponent’s heel throat. I guess the windpipe is a reasonable thing to aim at.

Ming is very annoyed. He entrusts the rando who spilled the secret with the job of learning who spilled the secret. The rando is in fact his high priest, who has been seen earlier now I think of it. I like that Ming is surrounded by traitors just waiting for their chance to screw him over.

Ray “Crash” Corrigan does some hilarious “death throes” acting, which the editor tries to salvage, only not hard enough. The little foot kicking in the air seems like the only point anyone in the show has tried to be funny. But maybe he thought he was being serious.

I haven’t studied the work of “Crash” but I have to say, he’s no Charlie Gemora.

Since Flash has won, Vultan frays the sleeves frees the slaves and Flash has the right to marry Dale. Ming is pissed, but Vultan scolds him, “You cannot ignore your own law.” What’s the point of being a dictator, then?

Thun leaves to rejoin his people (like Poochy). Dale gets a costume change. It’s very much like a happy ending, except that everyone’s invited to Ming’s palace, a fairly clear indication of a double-cross. Zarkov shows Dale and Flash the earth, seen through a wall safe with a lens on it, a beautiful cloudless grey globe. Zarkov is STILL trying to set up a comms link, not helped by the fact that he’s been relocated from one lab to another just as he was making a crackly breakthrough.

Meanwhile, at Griffith Observatory, Prof Gordon and his cronies speculate incoherently about the strange signals they’ve been unable to detect. Yes, that’s right — they know they’re out there, they think they may be intentional signals, but they can’t detect them.

I’m all excited about the dragon. Will it be an ill-treated iguana or a bloke in a rubber cossie? Or what? I have no memory of this.

Aura, the serial’s wild card, the only character besides Vultan and the high priest with any ambiguity (though Vultan is, I have to admit, a bad guy, it’s just that he’s also an opportunistic turncoat) seems determined to interfere with Flash & Dale’s marriage plans. Poor Aura! Looking for love in all the wrong places (the Tunnel of Terror, the Arena of Death…)

Spying on the young lovers, Aura is outraged to find the high priest spying on her. He outlines a complicated plan involving the fire monster from the tunnel of terror. Ah-hah, so it seems like this episode’s “fire dragon” is the same big-pincered beastie from The Tunnel of Terror (episode 2). Well, you have to get the most out of your kaiju costume.

I won’t give you the whole plan but it involves an amnesia pill, so I am totally there for it. It should be easy to sneak past the fire dragon because it’s after his bedtime, and he can only be awoken by the “sacred gong.” We’ve already had the “sacred orangapoid” this episode, there’s a lot of random holiness on Mongo I wonder if the high priest doesn’t just wander about anointing things on a whim.

I suppose, having speared the hallowed monkeyman, Larry “Buster” Crabbe is now officially an iconoclast, on top of his other talents (swimming, and, uh…) I always fanced that job. Travelling from church to church, smashing the relics. My own sledgehammer and all the cucumber sandwiches I can eat.

Tender scene of Flash and Barin in the boudoir. Barin joshes Flash: “Nervous about choosing a bride?” “Oh, the choice will be easy,” muses Flash. “It’s just that I don’t trust Emperor Ming.” Don’t marry him, then! At least get a pre-nup.

Aura sends a flunky with the doped wine, falsely claiming it as a gift from Vultan. “Sure wish Vultan was head man around here,” says Flash, forgetting that Vultan enslaved him, tortured him, re-enslaved him, and tried to seduce his girl using a stripey bear, shadow-puppetry, expensive jewels and his second-best turkey leg. Also, it’s probably an insensitive thing to say to Barin, who might fancy the top job himself. One of the great innovations of the Mike Hodges movie is to make Flash a big idiot, but the groundwork had clearly been done.

Knocked cold by his roofied plonk, Flash is carried out on a litter while some Franz Waxman plays on a loop — not only sets and props but also music from Universal’s FRANKENSTEIN films get repurposed. I always found the musical connection exciting as a kid, but I never seem to have noticed the sets.

Everyone is perturbed to find Flash missing, but Vultan immediately discovers a scarf dropped by Aura. I wish there were a whole series entitled KING VULTAN INVESTIGATES in which the flightless monarch solves crimes in the mean streets of New York City using deductive reasoning and shadow-puppetry.

Prince Barin plays bad worse cop, strangling the flunky to get info. “Speak, man! Through the Tunnel of Terror?” Urk. Choke. Kaff. Strangling has been an efficient tool for Flash, but it has its limits as an interrogation technique, and clunking the guy’s helmet head against the set wall (for real) may also be ill-advised. But hey, it works!

At around 16:05 you can enjoy Jean Rogers (Dale) and Frank Shannon (Zarkov) getting their cues muddled up and talking over one another, thereby inventing overlapping dialogue ahead of Howard Hawks. A retake was considered too ambitious.

“Are you sure the fire dragon will not molest us?” Aura asks the high priest, who is standing suspiciously close to the sacred gong. Five seconds after Aura and her litter-bearers have lugged Flash into the dragon’s den, he bashes the sacred dinner gong and INSTANTLY the rubber-suited leviathan is awake and on its outsized feet, ready for his Banana Splits audition. Drooper, Snorky, Fleagle, Bingo and… Gocko!

Apparently the creature has a name, never spoken in the serial but established by Alex Raymond: Gocko. First cousin to Gorgo. Ambitiously, the effects team have rigged it up to breath fire, resulting in the poor occupant setting his own costume ablaze. Fortunately it’s just the weird bifurcated dangly horn/feeler sprouting from his latex brow. Definitely a design flaw. I hope the guy’s getting danger money.

Good use of forced perspective to make Gocko look huge. And then it’s —

TO BE CONTINUED

The Strange Case

THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. RX, with its strange title, might never have crossed my path had I not been inspired to track it down as part of my lunatic quest to see all the films illustrated in Denis Gifford’s Pictorial History of Horror Movies, a compendium of horror movie lore that served as a combination of holy writ and porn-stash when I was about ten years old (monsters are the equivalent of porn for ten-year-olds, right?). This mission of madness, known as “See Reptilicus and Die” has caused me to peruse some screwy movies in the last couple of years, and if RX doesn’t take the cake, it at least might be said to hoover up the crumbs.

Really this is a comedy thriller, high on jinks and low on both scares and production values. Patric Knowles and Anne Gwynne are bickering investigators, he a private eye and she a crime writer whose research has a history of getting her into scrapes. It feels like this duo were intended to run into a whole series, and to try and get things off on a good footing screenwriter Clarence Upson Young equips them with enough backstory for twenty films (some of which sound more fun than this one). CUY wrote the similarly lightweight THE GHOST THAT WALKS ALONE and NIGHT MONSTER, but his most exciting credit is LOVE, HONOR AND OH BABY! — a title which made me laugh for about a minute, though I have no particular interest in ever seeing the picture, which does not appear in A Pictorial History of Horror Movies.

Our intrepid couple are investigating a killer who apparently strangles criminals who have escaped justice thanks to the machinations of a slick defense lawyer. All the bodies are marked with a calling card, signed “Dr. RX” — meanwhile Lionel Atwill is at large, as Dr. Fish, looking very suspicious in pebble glasses and leer. Walking racial insult Mantan Moreland is also on hand as Knowles’s man, and at the movie’s climax has to help the hero face not only the mad doctor, but also Nbongo the gorilla, inevitably played by Ray “Crash” Corrigan, who in his long career in furs also played great apes named Naba, Bonga, Nabonga, Pongo and Willie. You can see why he wasn’t called Ray “Versatility” Corrigan.

The film is chiefly interesting for its sheer silliness, which sometimes disrupts the narrative to a disturbing degree (when you find time for a bit for Shemp Howard of the Three Stooges, that’s likely to be the result) — the end shot, of Mantan Moreland, his hair turned prematurely white, laughing insanely, is sufficiently upsetting to have probably guaranteed that Private Detective Jerry Church and his sparky wife never returned for another adventure.

Like a negative image of Rodney Dangerfield.