Video Nasties: The Definitive Guide

VIDEO NASTIES: THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE
(Unrated, Severin Films, approx. 14 hrs., DVD release date: June 3, 2014)

On May 9, 1984, BBC2 aired the ninth episode of The Young Ones, which was such a runaway alternative comic success that it was picked up by MTV in 1985, before the American network became synonymous with original programming. Like a live-action Beavis & Butt-head, the main characters, spurred on by punk rock caricature Vyvyan, seek instant gratification from the rental of a so-called "Video Nasty" but are too stupid to set up their VHS player. Vyvyan even fills the device with dish detergent because the tape box warned him to keep it clean and free from dust. Long story short: they never get to watch the magnetic beacon of their "all-night orgy of sex and violence." The feeble vampire they outwitted with lethal sunlight rises from the grave to reveal himself as the tape's owner, Harry the Bastard, now set to collect 500 quid in late fees.

That program, which featured a surprise performance by The Damned ("Only pop music can save us now!") of a song written specifically for it, was how many of the luminaries who became horror scholars and filmmakers learned about the flood tide of Video Nasties, certain videocassettes for exploitation flicks that reveled in depravity and brutality. Though a few were of films that were edited for British cinema release, for the most part, these tougher pills to swallow would never trouble a theater or television. They were hard to come by until the VHS revolution became official. Lax standards meant that gross-out movies were coming out on tape in their uncut formats and with no classification, often drawing attention to themselves with lurid cover art that promised forbidden thrills. Teenagers would consume them as rite-of-passage ceremonies, daring amongst themselves to not be chickened out by whatever extreme violence was just around the corner, prefaced by an flurry of tracking-defying snow on the image.

But a mere month after that "Nasty" episode of The Young Ones premiered on British television, the horror train came to a screeching halt thanks to the unchallenged passing of the Video Recordings Act by the UK House of Commons. It was a private member's bill drafted by Sir Graham Bright which became law September 1, 1985, and turned the British Board of Film Censors into a de facto classification group meant to regulate the distribution of VHS tapes. Criminal law was leveled at producers, distributors and retailers alike to stall the dissemination of movies which the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959. 39 of them were successfully outlawed, another 33 were acquitted and a list of 82 were classified as "Section 3" and, thought not taken to court, were subject to lawful confiscation and destruction. Only through BBFC approval could they legally stocked on store shelves, and the censors' board became infamous for going further than the cinema committee in editing for content.

The story of my previous review on Video Nasties: Draconian Days focused chiefly on the circumstances of the VRA's royal assent, specifically the quirky attitudes of BBFC head secretary James Ferman and also the black market underground where horror buffs congregated, often times beset by overzealous enforcers eager to catch cineastes with illicit videotapes. But I also retired my current non-NTSC copy of Video Nasties: The Definitive Guide to purchase the same inaugural three-disc package in its proper U.S. release from Severin Films. At last, I can finally revisit Jake West and Marc Morris' 2010 predecessor to Draconian Days, Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship & Videotape, as well as the same barrage of movie trailers and commentary from several of the participants in the accompanying set, including Kim Newman, Alan Jones, Stephen Thrower, and Patricia MacCormack.

Furthermore, I can address in more depth somebody who popped up in the last review yet is important to me because he was the only person on the defense against the Conservative politicians and lobbyists who rammed the VPA down Parliamentary halls. His name is Martin Barker, who I referenced in tandem with Alex Chandon, the shot-on-video gorehound who made a talk show appearance where he was basically drowned out by the overbearing forces of reaction. It happened also to Mr. Barker, but when he got shouted down, it really does feel more like a gut punch than I could have anticipated watching the doco for the first time in years.

Martin Barker is now the emeritus professor at Aberystwyth University's film/television/stage department, but in 1983, he was another academic doing research on the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act 1955 and found a phrase (and other linguistic choices) which shared eerie similarities to the moral panic over Video Nasties in The Sunday Times: "Seduction of the Innocent." It was the name of a book by psychologist Fredric Wertham which was essentially propaganda stating that comic books published by DC and EC were the root of juvenile delinquency and aberrant sexuality. Werthem's views, which were duly challenged decades later when his findings went public, gave American congress and British parliament both the impetus for imposing restrictive, censoring regulations on publishers. In America, the Comics Code Authority was put in place to sanitize the content of pulp comics to often ridiculous extremes, and it successfully drove William Gaines into devoting himself full-time to Mad magazine to buck the Code.

Almost 40 years since the Harmful Publications Act, and with Margaret Thatcher's campaign promises amounting to nil, independent video stores which were cropping up at every gas station and candy shop were suddenly placed in the same position as the comic book merchants. The Helen Lovejoys of England, led by Mary Whitehouse, appropriated the label of Video Nasties as seen in the papers as did inspectors assigned to mass murders of ponies. Police raids became a recurring grievance and often times hilariously misguided, because the flexible definition of obscenity caused lawmen to presume pornographic intent in such movies as Samuel Fuller's The Big Red One and the Burt Reynolds/Dolly Parton musical comedy The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. The official DPP list of problem titles wasn't published for a while nor was it consulted by the BBFC, although James Ferman is quoted as having led the campaign to bring certain titles to the attention of Tony Hetherington.

What gives Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship & Videotape such a fascinating, disturbing charge is, once again, the chance to hear from all sides of the debate. Whereas Ferman was given ample room in Draconian Days, this time the designated villain is MP Graham Bright, and even he doesn't seem so mustache-swirling compared to someone like Dr. Clifford Hill. In Martin Barker's findings, as well as his communication with Oxford Polytechnic's Brian Brown, ongoing research that Bright was certain will prove the negative affects of Video Nasties on children and dogs(!) were the results of Dr. Hill's  sabotage against the Oxford staff and fabrication of the statistic that 40% of children had seen a Video Nasty. Bright still sees himself on the right side of history, but he was one of many gullible dolts who fell for the huckster's line regarding Snuff, one of the most infamous of the Nasties.

Snuff, as is well known amongst trash aficionados, was producer Allan Shackleton's retcon of Michael & Roberta Findlay's (The) Slaughter, an unmarketable Charlie Manson cash-in made in Argentina, 1971, and then shelved until 1975, resurfacing with an alternate ending which purported to show the crew of the Findlays' film murdering a girl for real. The immortal tagline used to promote it, inspired by urban legend, claimed that it was "made in South America, where life is cheap!" Such a trick was exposed as the hoax it was in Variety and the New York Times, not to mention the plainly visible amateur qualities of the "authentic" kill scene. but the snuff movie myth persisted and soon it was seen as a job for Scotland Yard. 1978's Faces of Death was another lynchpin for the "Nasty snuff" controversy, made all the more thorny because it was an American mondo mock-documentary (trigger alert: genuine animal killings and Holocaust atrocity newsreel) where people couldn't tell, or didn't even bother to tell for the sake of their crusade, where the stock footage ended and the re-enactments began.

Jake West and Marc Morris are clearly on the side of Martin Barker, who gives an impassioned closing remark that rings all the more true in this modern American political climate. They allow Stephen Thrower's palpable disgust over the insanity of the "British island mentality" obsessed with perceived contagion to bounce off Kim Newman's equally piercing observation on the incriminatingly gory cover art: "Did the ad people really not see where this was going to end?" While future creative types such as Neil Marshall, Christopher Smith and Andy Nyman reminisce on their childhood exposure to Nasties with warmth and humor, the sad truth is that Go Video, in a misguided bid for provocateur's publicity, sent Mary Whitehouse a copy of Cannibal Holocaust and apparently blew the lid off this Pandora's box of fanatical paranoia and draconian intervention. What the hell were they thinking in a clime when James "God's Cop" Anderton was the chief constable of Manchester?

I have to find some amusement, too, in the way Neil Marshall and Andy Nyman enshrine their first encounters with Meir Zarchi's notorious I Spit on Your Grave. Nyman, who is Jewish and wound up feeling offended by the Nazisploitation on show, also recalls being drawn to the yellow-bordered replication of the poster art for Zarchi's film, with its "sexy woman's arse" and the clutched knife and the threats of cutting, chopping, breaking, and burning four men (plus a mysterious fifth in the original adverts, including the trailer) beyond recognition. Marshall was so devastated that he refused to revisit it ever since he caught the Nasty taxi: "It might ruin the effect it had on me at the time." He even goes so far as to mourn the innocence of those dodgy tape dubs by criticizing A Serbian Film for its clean photography.

The jury is still out on whether A Serbian Film is the new Last House on the Left or the new Nightmares in a Damaged Brain. The latter was viewed by Derek Malcolm, film critic for The Guardian, in preparation for a court trial where he claimed Romano Scavolini's eternally lousy slasher film was "well executed." The judge's response: "Well executed?! The German invasion of Belgium was well executed!" Nightmares' UK video distributor, David Hamilton Grant, was imprisoned for a year after releasing a gorier edit of the film instead of cinema-approved version. As Grant‘s lawyer, Geoffrey Robertson, states "The problem with censorship test cases [is] they're never very good examples of the material." Well, there was one exception: Palace Video's Stephen Woolley and Nik Powell scored a coup in releasing Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead simultaneously in theaters and on video, where it became biggest-selling release of 1983, and then fought successfully against its prosecution.

The battle for Raimi's brilliant spam-in-a-cabin debut was won, but the war ended up feeling lost, regardless. The Tories were going around with sizzle reels of the most tasteless moments from the Nasties list as instant recruitment tools. None of them ever screened all of the movies in full, operating purely on upper class sanctimony and political gain. Poor Martin Barker, who has his say to disquieting effect in the 21st century, was earnestly trying to rise above the hysteria of the moral majority in the hope that at least 5% of the audience would come to some reasonable epiphany. Cuts, cuts, cuts were made to the very raisons d'être for these sensational bombardments, reducing them to the dreary piffle they actually were. And the Video Recordings Act of 1984, which we come to learn wasn't even sanctioned properly, meted out cruel punishment to the fledgling local retailers, hitting them with fines and prison terms before eventually doing away with them in pure oligarchic fashion by instigating the pricey classification process.

Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship & Videotape manages to pole vault over the lowly yet high bar of nostalgia and land on the back mat of relevancy. Once you get past such gimmicky touches as digitally-enhanced VHS-style defects and at least one rather suspect personality in the clutch of genre specialists (more on that momentarily), the film is likely to invoke cries of "Never again!" in even the least seasoned horror buff. Though I have seen a great deal, if not all, of the 72 Video Nasties in my lifetime, nothing in those films is as unsettling as the ways in which a doddering, duplicitous coalition of wolves and sheep turned what has always been a socially harmless pastime into a scapegoat.

The first disc of the Video Nasties: The Definitive Guide package contains the fittingly 72-minute feature proper (albeit with no captioning or alternate language options), a motion gallery for the 82 "Section 3" Video Nasties and nearly an hour's worth of vintage UK video company idents/logos that will come as a surprise to many American viewers who can describe the Media Home Entertainment graphic from memory ("bawomp-bomp-bomp"). Disc two presents original trailers for the "Final 39," those movies which were considered violations of the Obscene Publications Act, and disc three corrals trailers for the "Dropped 33." Virtually all of these films have been released on UK DVD uncut as of 2017, with a few exceptions due to taboo content (I Spit on Your Grave, Deep River Savages, Faces of Death) and a dozen plus others merely down to lack of proper re-releases (Frozen Scream, Nightmare Maker, the cinema-barred Fight for Your Life). Only Love Camp 7 was denied a video certificate in the 2000s and was never advocated further like Last House on the Left.

The main theme throughout a huge swath of the original "DPP 72" is that they were, at their very core, rip-offs. Often times to the wary consumer looking to indulge their yen for ultra-violence, often times they were dopey, shoddy capitalization on a worthier, trend-setting title. Many still found amusement in the latter, naturally, but you can spot plenty of films that wouldn't have existed without Alien, Dawn of the Dead, Last House on the Left, The Night Porter, Halloween, and/or Friday the 13th. The Video Nasties became so popular as a result of major distributors being too pricey or afraid of piracy, and their reputations were sealed thanks to the outraged publicity. Every once in a while, you get a director like Tobe Hooper, Dario Argento or even Ruggero Deodato who managed to go beyond the call of duty. There's a lot of Joe D'Amato, Jess Franco and Lucio Fulci on the list, as well. These names are certainly disreputable but also phenomenal cult figures, too.

So on we go, through the dense fog of cannibalistic creature features, Third Reich torture shows and ample supply of slashers and body snatchers. You'll get Fight for Your Life, starring William Sanderson as a racist fugitive who invades the home of Christian blacks and makes sport of degrading the father. There's Ursula Andress doused in honey, as befitting her most famous role in Dr. No, to appease the Cannibal God. Clint Howard? Rachel Ward? William Shatner? Gratuitous Giovanni Lombardo Radice (a.k.a. John Morghen)? We got ‘em. The chintzy Herschell Gordon Lewis touchstone Blood Feast? The early Weinstein production that was like a rash on 1981? A supernatural shocker from a Fassbinder collaborator as well as the horrendously cheap sequel which leeches long stretches footage from its source? All these, plus countless oddities which have since been given lavish reissue treatment from Arrow Video, such as Eaten Alive, The Slayer, Contamination, Island of Death, and The Witch Who from the Sea.

The introductions to the 72 trailers, or at least the ones handled by the most revered horror writers, break down fairly easy like on the second Definitive Guide. Alan Jones emcees a lot of the Italian titles (Antropophagus, The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, Zombie Flesh Eaters), Stephen Thrower scores the Jess Franco leads (Bloody Moon, Devil Hunter) in between singing the praises of Andy Milligan and S.F. Brownrigg and Kim Newman will show up periodically for a slasher (Pranks, The Burning, Terror Eyes) or a major (Last House on the Left, Bay of Blood, Snuff). Old friend Patricia MacCormack has more to do here than last time, and the names not found in the earlier set but who chime in here include biographer Brad Stevens (who discusses Tobe Hooper and Abel Ferrara), professor Julian Petley (who dominates Cannibal Holocaust and the Video Nazties), Dark Side editor Allan Bryce (who contributes short, sharp shots at Cannibal Ferox, Don't Go Near the Park and The Toolbox Murders among others), and Birmingham buff Xavier Mendik (he does a fine job with I Spit on Your Grave, Dead & Buried and Unhinged).

Nucleus Films' Marc Morris and particularly Emily Booth feel like the oddest ducks in the gallery. Morris seemed to be at ease during the intros found on the Draconian Days set, but this time I felt he was working off a script when it came time to discuss Mardi Gras Massacre and Cannibal Terror, which is the second worst cannibal movie he's been tasked with next to Jess Franco's Cannibals from the Section 3 catalogue. He's essentially reciting full plot synopses of the kind you'd find on some of those collective VHS tapes' backsides. That suspicion is definitely true of Ms. Booth, who gives the set some minor sex appeal at the expense of credibility. Her intros to The Werewolf & The Yeti, Visiting Hours and Killer Nun provide the kind of over-pronounced TV hostess presence where you can surmise she's reading the trivia off cue cards. I pined for the Katarina Leigh Waters bookends from those Scorpion Releasing DVDs.

On the plus side, Stephen Thrower has more of an opportunity here to animate his enthusiasm. He's particularly amused by one technical note found in the screenplay of Andy Milligan's Blood Rites (The Ghastly Ones) and latches onto a ridiculous line of dialogue from Bloody Moon: "I bet he's never even made it with a girl, the phony Spanish lover!" He's still the most outwardly knowledgeable voice to be found, and among his many highlights are appraisals of Frederick Friedel's Axe and Andrzej Zulawski's Possession, starring Cannes' Best Actress of 1981, Isabelle Adjani, and featuring FX work from Carlo Rambaldi. Alan Jones shares press show memorabilia and biographical details pertaining to certain movies, as well as a disastrous introduction to Lucio Fulci on the set of one early 1980s project. His comments on Scavolini's Nightmare are to the point ("quite misogynistic, very trashy") and he stands up again for Antonio Margheriti in the form of Cannibal Apocalypse. And Kim Newman is as spirited as ever, talking about one particular "hand grenade of a movie" as well as such tripe as Don't Go in the Woods and Frozen Scream, which was on the prosecuted list for two months, the second shortest span next to Unhinged. He also shares the 10 minute precursor to the trailer for Cannibal Holocaust, the longest intro of them all, with Julian Petley and director Ruggero Deodato himself, who returns for House on the Edge of the Park opposite Xavier Mendik.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the one person whose academic verbosity left me a little dumbfounded, if not outright skeptical. That is, oddly enough, Patricia MacCormack, one of the secret weapons of the Draconian Days package. Never have I felt the gulf between scholarly interpretation and critical thinking blown wider apart than when listening to her mount peculiar defenses of Boogeyman II and Bruno Mattei's Zombie Creeping Flesh (Hell of the Living Dead). Given her humor in talking about a peculiar side effect of gorilla blood in Night of the Bloody Apes and her true-blue fandom in regards to Fulci's The Beyond, I don't know if I can fully agree with the shameless appropriations of Mattei's film (wildlife stock footage, Goblin soundtrack on loan from Dawn of the Dead) as merely a "greatest hits of Italian cinema" or the way Bogeyman I dominates Bogeyman II to offer a fresh reinterpretation of existing footage. It's one thing to bring up artistic pretension in regards to The Witch Who Came from the Sea, the other to turn a blind eye to the abysmal filmmaking of Boogeyman II and Zombie Creeping Flesh in order to find an accidental kernel of significance. What I ultimately glean from MacCormack's thoughts on those two, which aren't all that "well executed" when you get right down to it, is that Grade Z cinema is being elevated merely to Grade Y.

Final tho...Don't Go in the House! Oh, you did? Well, then Don't Open the Window! You didn't listen. Again. Don't Look in the Basement! Goddamnit!! Fine. Don't go for Don't Go in the Woods! Thank you. You chose wisely for once. Now you take care of popcorn duties while I put in this VHS copy of Night of the Demon.

Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief/Sea of Monsters

PERCY JACKSON & THE OLYMPIANS: THE LIGHTNING THIEF
(PG, Twentieth Century Fox, 118 mins., release date: February 12, 2010; SRP: $19.99)

PERCY JACKSON: SEA OF MONSTERS
(PG, Twentieth Century Fox, 106 mins., release date: August 7, 2013; SRP: $39.99)


Take your mind back to 2010, the year film adaptations of young adult novel franchises were in full swing. J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter already rang the box-office bell five previous times and the grand finale was given the Kill Bill treatment with The Deathly Hollows, Part One arriving in late autumn. Stephanie Meyer's Twilight was on its third entry, Eclipse, and the first in Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games series was in embryonic pre-production after Lions Gate secured the movie rights.

Lost in the shuffle was Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief, based on Rick Riordan's own teen-oriented bestseller, relegated to the typically faithless dumping grounds of early 2010 by Twentieth Century Fox. This scheduling was a sign of avoiding competition with the teen lit titans, all boy wizards and bohunk monsters, as well as the final product being inescapably seen as a transparent clone of the inaugural Harry Potter films, most blatantly deduced from the employment of journeyman Chris Columbus as the director, someone who has embraced his hired gun status to the point where his production company is even named 1492 Productions. It's not like anyone was expecting a brave new world as far as Percy Jackson was concerned.

Bespectacled British yobs with wands were traded in for sullen Manhattan boys with swords, whilst Hogwarts and Quidditch morphed into Camp Half-Blood and junior cadet games of Capture the Flag. Instead of Ron Weasley, Riordan's best friend figure was a black teenage satyr/sensei/servant named Grover, which was more of a hard personality change than the rather traditional appearance of a feisty female warrior, Annabeth, a clear understudy for Hermione. The characters may have adopted physical deformities familiar to its Greek mythological trappings, as Dumbledore in this universe was Chiron, a centaur split between human and horse at the torso, but critics and audiences knew exactly where this film's true inspiration lied.

17-year-old Percy Jackson (Logan Lerman) is introduced as oblivious to this strange co-existence between gods and men, and only when Zeus (Sean Bean) accuses brother Poseidon's (Kevin McKidd) demigod son of burgling his lightning rod staff (why, there's the magic wand!) does Percy gradually realize his secret identity. For Percy is indeed Poseidon's progeny from a love affair with a mortal woman named Sally (Catherine Keener), and on a field trip to the museum overseen by wheelchair-bound Professor Brunner (Pierce Brosnan), a gargoyle posing as a substitute teacher attacks Percy in private, inquiring about the missing bolt. Brunner and "junior protector" Grover (Brandon T. Jackson) intervene, whisking Percy and Sally away to the Half-Blood campgrounds. Alas, Sally is forbidden to enter being a pureblood and all and is kidnapped by a Minotaur minion of Hades (Steve Coogan).

Afflicted with dyslexia and ADHD which are revealed to be talents rather than stigmas, Percy is confronted with the rumor of his treachery and vows to rescue his mom and set things straight with the holy trinity of Olympians. However, time is of the essence as Zeus has threatened war on the eve of the summer solstice, which means catastrophic natural disasters shall engulf Earth in flames. Percy defies Chiron's orders and ventures out to locate the Underworld where his mom is imprisoned, with Grover the goat-boy and Athena's steely daughter Annabeth (Alexandra Daddario) tagging along. Guided by a map handed down by the Luke (Jake Abel), the cocky absentee son of Hermes, Percy and friends travel cross country from Jersey to Nashville to Las Vegas collecting teleportation pearls to save them and all of mankind from premature damnation.

Chris Columbus, former screenwriter for Steven Spielberg (Gremlins, The Goonies) and protégé of John Hughes (Adventures in Babysitting, Home Alone), is quite a populist filmmaker at heart. I try not to level accusations of pandering at him, because I've seen worse hired gun filmmakers in my time and he at least knows how to make a film which is genuinely charming for all audiences. I grew up watching Home Alone almost on a Mobius-style loop and Mrs. Doubtfire remains a fun little diversion to this day. I even tout 1991's Only the Lonely as proof that Columbus was a generous actor's director on par with Hughes, who also helped prove John Candy was a multi-faceted, undervalued presence with Planes, Trains and Automobiles. But in the new millennium, I can't help but feel Columbus has calcified into a joyless groove, especially given that his previous film prior to The Lightning Thief was I Love You, Beth Cooper, a forced, unfunny attempt at recapturing the glories of both his and the late Hughes' pasts.

Having begun the 2000s with Harry Potter & The Sorcerer's Stone as well as The Chamber of Secrets, the 2010 arrival of Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief feels like an Oracle's sad prophecy come to life, as Columbus' workmanlike reputation comes full circle to drag him down into uncut mediocrity. Columbus' slavish, Johnny La Rue-style devotion to crane shots, the minimal-stakes melodrama and his astounding lack of visual humor can be felt with all the finesse of a blow from Thor's hammer. Whatever touches he once demonstrated with ensemble casts has become an every-actor-for-himself Survivor Series where a lot of talented people get taken down for the count. Moments of striking spectacle which incorporate some effectively seamless CGI (I especially enjoyed a ferry ride down the boulevard of broken dreams) are taken to loud, repetitive dead zones which are as immersing as trying to dunk a cookie in a lab dish full of milk.

And then there's the matter of Craig Titley's screenplay, who apparently has invoked a powerful deity I never read about in all of my Homeric high school days: Diangellus, the God of Exposition. Whenever a mortal man has no faith in the sanctity of mise-en-scène, he seemingly prays to mighty Diangellus for a thudding line of over-explanation, thereby robbing any incident of magic, wit or intelligence. It makes the film seem more like a professor's waffling lecture than a majestic feat of storytelling, as everything has to be elaborated on with stern, mood-killing bluntness. Percy's newfound destiny is given to reams of tiresome specifics without any true feel for discovery or introspection, whereas revelations like the trio realizing the rat-infested garden shop is really Medusa's lair require a lot of thudding, literal exclamations that clutter and grate.

The name of that death trap is "Auntie Em's Garden Emporium," by the way, a backfiring allusion which reinforces just how much this makes The Wizard of Oz feel even more like The Odyssey by comparison. The stifling blandness of the central heroic threesome is enough to make you want to click your heels thrice and long for home. Logan Lerman may have the face of Disney-period Kurt Russell and the coiffure of Zac Efron, but Percy Jackson comes across more like a Luke Skywalker figurine with such a colorless, angst-ridden arc to burden. Ditto Alexandra Daddario, who has the piercing blue eyes of a junior Meg Foster but little worthy motivation behind them. Brandon T. Jackson has to play deadly straight the stereotypes satirized in Tropic Thunder, thus his incessant jive-talking and nervous subservience have all the gallantry of Chris Tucker.

Columbus overcompensates with a top-flight supporting cast who put their money where their cheeks are. Uma Thurman's bitter, bitchy Medusa ("I used to date your daddy!" she righteously sneers at Percy) could evoke dreaded memories of Emma Peel and Poison Ivy, but she clearly relishes the job and gives it a seductively sinister glee. Pierce Brosnan's grizzled but still velvety charisma adds true nobility to the dialogue (well, most of it, although even he makes his obligatory "horse's ass" quip induce a strange smile) as much as Thurman conjures up alluring bile. But the real fun is to be had when the trio encounter Hades' Hollywood hideout, with a saucy Steve Coogan in arena rocker leather chaps and the smoldering Rosario Dawson (the Mimi of Columbus' Rent) as his reluctant bride Persephone, a trophy wife more voluptuously desperate than any of the fictional housewives on Wisteria Lane. One would love to see a black comedy spin-off starring these two mismatched myths.

The Lightning Thief, though, seems content to climb the peak of Mount Obvious, resigned to its Potter-by-numbers fate which effectively squanders the potential for a bankable franchise. Even the soundtrack lays it on thick, with ridiculous deployment of AC/DC when Luke mentions the "Highway to Hell" and a Vegas interlude at the Lotus Hotel & Casino pumping up "A Little Less Conversation" and "Poker Face" as the youths partake of a certain flower-shaped cookie which dutifully distracts them from their mission, given their inconsistent knowledge of Greek lore. Unfortunately, their obliviousness is shared by Columbus and Titley, who have no new tacks with the fantasy adventure material passed on by Riordan, who probably deserves better than to be aligned with the Potter plagiarisms. His Percy Jackson is reduced to a Half-Blood Fool.

1492 words later, and now here we are talking about the streamlined Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters, a late-blooming sequel which jumps straight ahead to a foreign director, the amusingly-named Thor Freudenthal, and brings in Green Lantern scribe Marc Guggenheim to adapt the second of Riordan's five volumes. The Prisoner of Azkaban this ain't, with Percy Jackson still unresolved in his daddy issues and having regressed in his confidence and fighting skills. The three principal stars return fairly more seasoned, with Lerman having wowed in The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Daddario opting for the C-list scream queen route thanks to Texas Chainsaw 3-D. Brandon T. Jackson, meanwhile, is stewarded out of the picture quickly despite being written less gratingly than before, the better to make room for a few new trekkers in Percy's latest quest.

First is Clarisse (Leven Rambin), daughter of Ares and doppelganger for Katniss Everdeen. It's she whose stamina and arrogance puts her at the top of the Camp Half-Blood student body, as the newly-introduced camp owner Dionysus (Stanley Tucci with an amusing drinking problem; Chiron appears recast with Anthony Stewart Head) appoints her to head an expedition to locate the Golden Fleece, which is the only cure for the sickly memorial tree, erected by her father Zeus after she has fallen, that is the source of the camp's protective force field. But the culprit, once again being the blandly malevolent Luke, outs himself to Percy and drives the conflicted hero into further rebellious action alongside Grover, Annabeth and a one-eyed half-brother named Tyson (Douglas Smith).

Tyson essentially serves the bumbling sidekick role the MIA Grover did in the original, but with Chris Columbus receding into a production credit, Freudenthal's overall approach is more (non-union German?) Spielberg equivalent than even Columbus could claim. The film is like a less frenetic version of The Goonies, replete with intrigue on an abandoned, ancient ship (with Confederate zombies instead of pirates), but also cribs liberally from Jaws (the Charybdis is mistaken initially for a swarm of shark fins) and Raiders of the Lost Ark, especially in the finale involving a golden chest Luke uses to re-animate Kronos, the dreaded Titan who ate his own godly children but was foiled by the three Olympian brothers. Like the first film, the movie's set pieces involve some cute variation on a classic Greek figure, such as when The Grey Sisters appear as reckless, sassy taxi drivers (played by TV comediennes Missi Pyle, Mary Birdsong and Yvette Nicole Brown) who spill the beans about a numerical prophecy which concerns Percy. Also, in one of the minor nods to the star-powered stunt-casting from before, Luke's papa Hermes finally turns up, but less as Joe Pantoliano's boorish stepfather from the original and more in the form of a UPS clerk played by the dashing Nathan Fillion, the Canadian Bruce Campbell himself, thus making the resentful Luke seem more like the dull brat he really is when the former Captain Mal drolly steals his one big scene.

There is a way to make teenaged conflict work on a dramatic level which also incorporates time-honored folklore, but between both Percy Jackson movies, lackluster screenplays and badly-calculated direction are the main curses which prevent them from scaling such heights. Watching the prejudiced Annabeth belittle and berate the adolescent Tyson, who looks like the son of Encino Man, in such a shallow, unpleasant manner feels like a gross misjudgment, and when Grover finally reappears as the maid for gigantic cyclops Polyphemus (boomingly voiced by Ron "Hellboy" Perlman!), it's back to the old shuck-and-jive. Even Percy Jackson himself doesn't appear to get a fully-satisfying reaffirmation, a further shame considering Lerman is capable of greatness. Even more than the first film, whose fractured familial bonds were at least consistent with Columbus' not-so-auteur stature, this is dramatically stunted and as clockwork as the Colchis bull who charges the camp at the beginning. The movie brings Percy back to square one out of sheer laziness and the beats are all too familiar.

Say what you will about the Harry Potter, Twilight or Hunger Games film series, but at least they each created their own respective worlds and populated them with convincing analogues for their types of fan, allowing people to lose themselves in the stories. With the Percy Jackson duo, there is a crushing sense of impersonality and dreary obligation which goes against any types of vicarious thrill one could ascertain. At least Thor Freudenthal is a marked improvement over Chris Columbus, especially in regards to staging his action scenes and creating more indelible images. Such moments of marvel as Percy and friends riding a candy-colored Hippocampus as well as getting sucked into the Bermuda Triangle crackle with joy and tension, but ultimately the Diary of a Wimpy Kid director is fitted for the same strait-jacket as the over-qualified Lerman.

Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters feels direct-to-DVD caliber through and through, which will definitely not be enticing if there is a third installment. Too much time has passed between the first and second, and the cast are clearly getting too old for their parts. Much like Columbus and Hughes' own Home Alone series, don't be shocked if you find the second sequel recast and ushered out to an even more minute degree of fanfare. The gods are not that crazy, after all.