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| ♪It's the Eye of the tiger It's the Thrill of the fight |
The worst thing to happen to movie discussion was when fedora neckbeards started calling clichés "tropes", built a website about it that turned into a 2009-era Epic Cringe Compilation, then became he/hims and kept calling clichés "tropes", only with their made-up stories being about owning chuds in line for Starbucks instead of slaying forty bullies with their trusty blades.
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| This was every millennial who now calls you an incel. |
The reason this is gay is because it has resulted in all movie writing trying to comment on "tropes" instead of telling a story anyone might want to watch. A perfectly good movie can be and has been made using nothing but clichés strung together, all the more impressively because it pre-dates many of them even being clichés. Based on some Shadowesque radio play long forgotten, 1931's Chandu had a becaped hero raiding tombs and rescuing princesses from black-clad villains who captured scientists to build death rays long before the first Superman comic dropped, and longer before Lucas and Spielberg ripped off the formula and killed cinéma with their merchandising-friendly pulp pastiches.
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| No smartphones, no bathetic quips, just an evil megalomaniac and his flunkies living in the moment. |
Frank Chandler (Edmund Lowe) heroically culturally appropriates the mystic arts of Indian yogis to battle Roxor (Béla Lugosi, fresh off his star-making turn in Dracula). Lugosi was always disappointed at his frequent typecasting but it was his own fault for being far too entertaining as a villain. Roxor has so much infectious enthusiasm for mayhem you soon find yourself half-rooting for him. When his death ray is complete, he spends several minutes of screentime gleefully imagining what cities he's going to blow up with it, having made no plan whatsoever beyond actually having it.
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| "No! No, you can't bury him alive!" "Why not?" - actual dialogue |
The camera effects and miniature work are impressive for the early 1930s, when the death of the silents largely resulted in static, verbose productions. Cameras dive and circle like seabirds all over the place. Chandu conjures a mini-me to keep tabs on the inebriated comic relief sidekick, which has no plot relevance but they could do the effect, and to 99% of viewers it still might as well have been magic.
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| "I can do that with a green bedsheet in my basement!" - 50,000 guys who never will. |
Chandu received a serialised sequel in which, strangely enough, Lugosi played the title role. It's fun, as those old serials were, but this one has everything you need. It can play back-to-back with the 90s Shadow and Phantom, John Carter and the Brendan Fraser Mummy flicks and not feel out of place. Reject TVTropes; retvrn to cliché.
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