If ever a costumed superhero fared worse than The Phantom, s/he slipped right past me. The serial was bad enough (though Tom Tyler, who'd done such a remarkable job in THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MARVEL, looked good in "the very first costumed superhero" costume): with the aid of his four-legged sidekick, Devil (a wolf, here played by a dog), he lords it over a tribe of (apparently) lost White Men (some of whom sport some ridiculous greasepaint). The serial featured some solid stuntwork, but was, overall, a bit of a disappointment. The feature version, with Billy Zane, was better, but, it, too, suffered from inconsistency (as when our hero, on horseback in pursuit of a truckload of fleeing ne'er-do-wells, simply jumps up on the horse's back and springs through the air... to land atop the speeding vehicle). But the worst of the lot- by far- has to be this anime wannabe. So simple-minded in conception and execution is it that even fast-forwarding through it becomes tedious. Just one more letdown in an ongoing series of same.
Review of Phantom 2040
