Here's Venom In Yer Eye

          Roger Corman's latest is a series on SCI-FI that appears to be embarrassing to nearly everyone but him. Based on two Showtime movies I hadn't heard of before, Black Scorpion presents a gender-reversed Batman story. Unfortunately, this is pretty much the Schumacher version of Batman. Black leather and molded rubber, lots of skin, T&A and generally asinine through and through.

         Essentially - based on what I could stomach of the first few episodes - this is something to set superhero adaptations back quite a few years. The writing is terrible, as if people who hadn't looked at anything on the comics market in the past 25 years (if ever) were given explicit orders to write something "comic booky." The clichés abound, including the main character finding herself with a partner (they're police officers) who's mooning over her costumed alter ego but never puts two and two together. Meanwhile, Darcy (Black Scorpion's civilian guise) repeatedly comes close to letting him in on the secret, but something always gets in the way.

        As bad as the writing is, the acting generally lives down to it, and wherever those two have come to rest the "action sequences" have staked out a floor or two below it. The press material tells us that the star, former Miss Kansas Michelle Lintel, is a two-time medal winner in track (Junior Olympics) and a martial arts expert, but precious little of that is in serious evidence here. Oh, she's in fine shape - the black, rubberized teddy of a costume doesn't conceal much - but real action is something this show doesn't have. The fight scenes by and large are horribly coordinated, with people recoiling from blows that plainly miss by half a foot or more. Whenever anything (especially anything with a vehicle involved) is supposed to be moving quickly it's painfully obvious that they've just sped the film up. Sometimes it looks as if Benny Hill has risen from the grave to direct scenes, and someone just forgot the signature music. Anyone who watches this regularly has no claim to superiority over the average Power Rangers fan.

         SCI-FI bought into the project solidly, though, not only buying a full 22-episode season but having brief synopses of all 22 episodes up on a Black Scorpion section of their website before the first episode aired.

        There's probably only one way to really enjoy this series: Get the right, fun, heckling crowd together and make sure everyone brings plenty of alcohol and maybe some… combustible herbal aids, too. Not that I'm officially condoning such things, mind you.

        By and large, this is one show to make non-cable subscribers gloat about what the rest of us are wasting money on.

                                                                                                                                                MJN