We watch... so you don't have to.
Attack of the Killer Butt Cheeks
If that's not what the show is supposed to be, then God help us all, because the locusts can't be far behind.
The fact that this series springs from the very warped mind of Corman, the infamous king of atrocious movies, is a strong hint that Black Scorpion is meant to be very chewy fare indeed. The title character is the superhero alter ego of detective Darcy Walker, a cop whose father was murdered while carrying a badge himself. Darcy decides to get into the vengeance business and becomes the Black Scorpion, apparently by raiding the Baywatch wardrobe trailer.
The Scorpion is played by newcomer Michelle Lintel, a former Miss Kansas and presumably the inspiration for Austin Powers' Fembot foes. It's a good thing too, because for whatever true superpowers the Scorpion lacks, she more than makes up for it in butt cheeks. Her costume is even more revealing than the one Pamela Lee made famous and some of the camera angles used in the pilot episode take incredible advantage of the lack of fabric.
Since it must have taken several years to brush up on the mechanical engineering necessary to pack herself into that wisp of a uniform, it's understandable she never had time for acting lessons. Then again, who needs acting when you and your costume make Lucy Lawless and the Xena leathers look like Calista Flockhart in a burlap sack?
Ample physical gifts aside, Black Scorpion is a supremely incompetent superhero. She goes hand-to-hand with her first supervillain, Firearm, three times during the course of the show. He mops the floor with her all three times. This is the same supervillain that eventually gets beat down by a senior citizen. In addition, there is one scene that begins with Darcy lifting weights. When the supposed superhero is lifting a fifth of the weight I put up in the gym that very afternoon, it's surprising she can manage two grocery bags at the same time, let alone a half-dozen thugs.
Darcy morphs into Black Scorpion via some kind of power ring that transmogrifies her clothes into the uniform, sort of like a one-person Wonder Twins setup. Thanks to this wonderful advance in technology, which her sidekick Argyle describes as "rearranging the molecular structure at an atomic level," Darcy's car also changes from a new Corvette into some retro-70s pimp Vette with the huge front wheel wells and a spoiler large enough to hold weddings under.
So this guy Argyle, who can turn a bathtub full of Jell-O into a pile of hundreds thanks to the greatest scientific advancement in the history of mankind, instead uses it to give a beauty queen an instant swimsuit.
I guess he's pretty smart after all.
Corman, who made a name for himself by producing hundreds of movies for less than the cost of one Titanic, is at his penny-pinching best in Black Scorpion. Plastic scorpion dolls that look they came from the 25-cent vending machines at the supermarket become "Scorpionmobile Stingers." A third of the shots are repeated ad nauseam, Legos are used to create miniatures and I'm pretty sure the supervillain's costume was a Casper mask.
They scrimped and saved on the fight scenes as well. Thanks to The Matrix and Jackie Chan, we viewers have been spoiled when it comes to hand-to-hand combat. Black Scorpion drags us right back to the stone age, complete with Captain Kirk judo chops. Lintel supposedly knows Tae Kwon Do, but perhaps she confused it with Tai Chi since she just might be the slowest human being on the face of the earth. Thanks to her glacial style and martial arts choreography that a hippo could master, the fighting interludes have all the intensity of Senior Center Bingo Night.
Supposedly Corman has already shot 22 episodes of Black Scorpion for a total of $12 million. An entire season for less money than NBC shells out for one episode of ER. The maxim that you get what you pay for has never been so true.
Yet for all the bitching and moaning about acting, writing, direction and action, Black Scorpion is, hands down, the funniest show on the air. I have yet to figure out how we humans distinguish the laughably bad from bad that needs to be put to sleep. For some mysterious reason, I can laugh out loud at Black Scorpion and spend a content 60 minutes letting it infect my brain, while a mere 45 seconds of leering at the late, unlamented Tucker would have me screaming for Judgement Day.
There's a conundrum for all you egghead artificial intelligence researchers out there. I guarantee if you were to design a sentient HAL-like computer that could analyze television shows and you inputted both Tucker and Black Scorpion, the machine would decide that consciousness is too terrible a burden to bear and promptly reformat its own hard drive. Yet we homo sapiens can not only tell the difference, but a piece of our DNA encodes for neurons that actually relish the inane and inept. I call it the Manimal gene.
You'd think that for the last couple billion years, evolution could have been busy with some more important things, like weeding out cancer or hairy backs. Instead, we humans can distinguish ourselves from the beasts only by our ability to laugh at The Highwayman.
Judging from his success with B-movies, Roger Corman must have decoded the Manimal gene fifty years ago. Much like downing a bottle of bubble gum schnapps, you know a full hour of Black Scorpion is bad for you... yet it tastes too good to turn off.
Now if we could just get Corman working on Three Sisters, we'd be all set.
