Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. By the time you’re reading this, America will have decided whether we’ve decided to fast-track or slow-roll our cultural and economic collapse, and major portions of the country may well be on fire. No one really wants to live through times of great upheaval, and our historical moment feels particularly tragic, suspended as we are between an unsustainable past and an ascendant right driven by cruelty, selfishness, and proud anti-intellectualism. While I can’t fix whatever’s gone so terribly wrong with this world, I can at least offer a momentary reprieve from its horrors, as we join together in kicking the tires and testing the brakes of a fresh collection of film features. From ruinously terrible Netflix releases to bubble-era anime spectacles, let’s take a brief break from our shared struggle, and talk about some interesting films.
First up this week was The Black Cat, a ‘34 Universal Pictures horror film starring Boris Karloff as an architect and duplicitous military commander, and Bela Lugosi as a former soldier coming to get his revenge. Between them stand a young man and woman stranded in Karloff’s estate by an unfortunate accident, each of whom are destined to play an unknown role in the psychological warfare and satanic rituals to come.
Though it’s ostensibly based on the Edgar Allen Poe story, the only resemblance to the master’s tale is the existence of the titular cat, who Karloff regularly employs to terrify the powerfully phobic Lugosi. The true appeal of this film is clearly “Karloff and Lugosi, together at last,” and on that, The Black amply delivers. Lugosi brims with caged fury and quiet intensity, but Karloff is a revelation here, commanding the screen with an arrogant, playful charisma entirely unlike his more traditionally monstrous roles. He actually reminds me a touch of Christopher Lee in this role, and proves equally convincing as both psychological mastermind and satanic cult leader. Pair that with the film’s sterile hyper-modern manor and vigorous soundtrack, and you end up with an altogether superior entry in the Universal horror canon.
We then continued our journey through the glamorous world of bubble era anime films with Venus Wars. In the year 2089, Venus has been partially terraformed, with a population of millions separated between the two countries of Ishtar and Aphrodia. Our protagonist Hiro Seno is a young man with nothing on his mind but girls and motorcycle racing, who gets caught up in the conflict when Ishtar attacks his home city of Io. Alongside his rough-riding friends and young reporter Susan Sommers, Hiro will be forced to fight for his beleaguered home, eventually playing a key role in the liberation of Aphrodia.
Venus Wars offers everything you’d expect from bubble-era scifi: cool bikes, big hair, glamorous cityscapes, and lushly animated mechanical mayhem. Its narrative is essentially a riff on the original Star Wars, and its characters are pretty thinly sketched, but its vision of an inhabited Venus is absolutely captivating, contrasting sand-blasted deserts against towering skyscrapers in a Dubai-reminiscent embodiment of mankind’s hubris. I was also quite impressed with its portrait of shiftless youth under martial occupation; you could really feel the dreamlike unreality of their lives, as life in Io becomes a fragile imitation of normalcy consistently punctured by hails of gunfire.
Much like how the film version of Akira is basically a cliff notes narrative, you can certainly feel the strain of Venus Wars compressing its tale into film-ready action beats with minimal connective tissue. Nonetheless, each of those action highlights impresses in their own ways, offering both clear dramatic stakes and sumptuous mechanical animation. Propulsive, visually enthralling, and even kinda poignant, Venus Wars is an easily recommendable exemplar of anime’s economic golden age.
Next up was Time Cut, a recent Netflix slasher directed by Hannah MacPherson. The film stars Lucy (Madison Bailey), a girl whose life is haunted by the specter of her dead sister Summer (Antonia Gentry). Twenty years ago, Summer fell victim to an unknown serial killer known as The Sweetly Slasher, an event which ultimately destroyed the local community and left Lucy with distant, dispassionate parents. However, when a time machine sends Lucy back to the far-flung year of 2003, she gets a chance to change history and discover the sister she never knew.
Whew, Time Cut is bad, folks. Like, absolutely one of the worst movies I’ve seen in years, and you all know I watch a fair number of stinkers. First of all, though it’s billed as a slasher, it’s clearly not a horror movie – even by PG-13 standards, the film just isn’t interested in building suspense or a sense of danger, and there are basically no deaths throughout. The ultimate reveal of the killer only leans further into the film’s absolute disinterest in its own time-travel conceit, and nothing is ever learned or overcome by basically anyone involved.
What the film seemingly wants to be is a culture-class comedy starring sisters from 2003 and 2023, but it sadly fails in that as well. Even the release of Time Cut’s trailer prompted a great deal of online mockery, as the “big reveal” that was supposed to inform Lucy she wasn’t in Kansas anymore proved a hilariously misguided attempt at evoking an apparently bygone era. The thing about 2003 is that culturally, it’s not really that different from 2023 – there’s no longer a monoculture dictating aesthetic tastes, fashion and architecture are pretty close to the same, and basically the only difference is that people have smartphones now. Beyond that, Time Cut isn’t even good at properly evoking 2003 – most of its incidental props are either anachronistic or ham-handedly obvious, making it seem like the design team simply raided the props department and took whatever seemed fun.
On top of that, none of Time Cut’s fresh-from-Netflix-TV stars can actually act, meaning there’s no real meat to the relationship between the sisters – a deficit further stoked by the film’s exceedingly clumsy script. Basically, it seems like not a single person involved in Time Cut’s production is either good at or enthusiastic about their job, and the end result is a lifeless procession of discordant interactions with no purpose or appeal whatsoever. Even the PG-13 crowd deserve better slashers than this crap.
Our week in features concluded with Seized, which you can probably guess by title alone to be something of a Taken ripoff. This time, a former special forces officer has his son taken (excuse me, Seized) by a cartel overlord, who then demands that officer take out the heads of all his rivals. However, while Taken starred the suitably grizzled but physically indifferent Liam Neeson, Seized benefits from the singular kickboxing talents of Scott Adkins, who attacks this lead role with his reliable mix of personal charm and stunning combat acumen. And the results are, well, it’s a Scott Adkins movie. What do you think?
Whether he’s leading the feature (The Debt Collector, Avengement) or simply offering an ass-kicking cameo (Day Shift), Adkins is one of the current martial arts movie renaissance’ most reliable stars, and he puts in another fine performance here. With Mario Van Peebles offering an unexpectedly nuanced counterpoint in the role of his cartel minder, Seized rises just a notch above the base expectations of its premise every time either are on screen. The focus on gunplay means Adkins can only intermittently flash his martials arts brilliance, but if you’re looking for a lazy afternoon action spectacle, Seized stands as the latest in a long, long line of emphatically watchable Adkins features.
