My Year Of Flops Shazamilicious Double Feature: Case Files #120 and 123, The Phantom and The Shadow
I
recently received an email from a My Year Of Flops reader alerting me to the
disquieting fact that the series skipped from Case File 119, Be Kind Rewind, to Case File 121, Earth Girls Are
Easy. The
reader in question is Kit Moore, a blind, illiterate Alabama sharecropper so
inspired by My Year Of Flops that he, she, or quite possibly it (you never know
which of your readers are Lovecraftian arch-ghouls) became a
rare-book-cataloging librarian, whatever the hell that is.
Moore
isn't the only person My Year Of Flops has touched in an inappropriate (if not
criminal) fashion. Just last week I learned about a young man in an unnamed
Third World country who sold his sister into slavery so he could afford
Internet access just so he could read my dissertation on Bratz: The Movie. In honor of these fine folks,
I've decided to try something different: the first-ever My Year Of Flops double
feature.
Today,
I'll be discussing both 1996's The Phantom and 1994's The Shadow. We live in the age of
superheroes. And T-Pain. If you were to remove superheroes and T-Pain from pop
culture, the world as we know it would devolve into madness and anarchy.
Society would crumble. Incidentally, I'm listening to/reviewing the new T-Pain
CD as I write this, so I apologize if my various roles at The A.V. Club bleed together. That's why
I'd like to humbly propose a new superhero franchise about a musician who stumbles
upon a voice distorter laced with gamma rays, which gives him the magical
ability to bang drunken skanks at will, secure half-priced lap-dances, wear
ridiculous hats without shame or self-consciousness, and telekinetically
convince rappers and singers who really should know better that their songs are
fatally incomplete without his signature brand of creepy digital harmonizing.
When
John McCain said that the fundamentals of the economy were sound, he wasn't
talking about the work ethic of the American people or the innocence of
children or even the delicious, delicious cranial fluids of said children,
which really should be bottled and sold commercially. No, he was talking about
the real fundamentals of the American economy: superhero movies and overly
processed R&B.; The rest of the economy may be tanking, but those sectors
are thriving.
It
wasn't always that way. Back in 1996, Billy Zane failed to win the hearts and
minds of moviegoers as a big Goober grape of a superhero in The Phantom. The film begins on a
curiously antagonistic note, with a title card reading "FOR THOSE WHO CAME IN
LATE…" It's as if the filmmakers are telling the audience, "Hey fuckface, you
should already know this shit, but for the slow kids in the class, here's a
90-second primer on the mythology of The Phantom." We then learn that many, many years ago, a
young man witnessed his father's death at the hands of pirates and swore to
fight "piracy, greed, and cruelty in all their forms." That's right: If the
Phantom catches you bootlegging the DVDs of superior films featuring
less-shitty superheroes, he's going to put the smack down.
If
I'd found the following 100 minutes more delightful, this opening might have
registered as a charming nod to The Phantom's past as a 15-part 1943 adventure
serial. Instead, it struck me as unearned cheek. Today's superhero movies tend
to devote enormous time and energy to origin stories. Iron Man, for example, stops just short
of showing the building and testing of Tony Stark's fantabulous metal suit in
real time, but The
Phantom spills
it all out in a mad rush so we can be introduced to what a minor character
adroitly calls "A big, strange-looking thing on a horse, with a wolf."
That's
putting it kindly. The clothes make both the man and the super-man.
Consequently, I had a hard time getting beyond The Phantom's flamboyant
sartorial stylings. With his skin-tight purple bodysuit, kinky black boots, and
double-triangle mask, The Phantom (Billy Zane) looks less like a superhero than
the misbegotten offspring of a raccoon and the grape from the old Fruit Of The
Loom commercial. Or, alternately, a 6-foot-tall penis, or a guy headed to
fetish night at a Prince-owned nightclub. It could be worse: In the comics, the
Phantom wears striped shorts outside his tights, an, um bold fashion choice
that the filmmakers thankfully nixed as being just a little too silly. It is a
measure of how phony and unconvincing the film feels that Zane bulked up for
more than a year to give the Phantom a muscular physique, as illustrated in a
gratuitous topless scene, yet the muscles on his costume still look stenciled
on.
When
not fighting piracy, greed, and cruelty in all their forms, Zane works
diligently on his abs, holds numerous animated conversations with his dead
father, makes sure that the smoking ban in his Skull Cave is strictly enforced,
and generally attends to the demands of being the 21st incarnation of The
Phantom.
The
film's plot concerns a mad hunt for the three mystical Skulls Of Touganda, a
quest that puts Zane into direct conflict with an evil tycoon played with
mustache-twirling zeal by Treat Williams. As is generally the case in superhero
movies, the bad guys have all the fun. Williams entertainingly devours scenery
as a nefarious villain alongside a young Catherine Zeta-Jones as a sexy lady
pirate.