Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week has seen me burning through a diverse grab bag of anime selections, as with my housemate away, I am once again free to watch whatever the fuck I feel like. I had the clear goal of “consume the entirety of Sailor Moon” in mind for last time, but I have yet to find such an obvious guiding objective for my current rampage, and thus my picks have been a touch more eclectic. I caught up on the first season of Dandadan (reasonable, not my thing), munched through the Ruin Explorers OVA, and have most recently been dabbling in the various adaptations of Masamune Shirow’s manga, including the ‘80s Appleseed adaptation and Dominion Tank Police. Let me know if you’ve got any recommendations I might like below, but for now, let’s burn down the week in films!
First up this week was It Came From Outer Space, a ‘53 science fiction feature starring Richard Carlson as an amateur astronomer who witnesses a meteor crashing in the Arizona desert. Upon investigating, he realizes the object was actually an alien spacecraft, which is buried in a rockslide before he can prove his discovery. However, over the following days, more and more locals begin disappearing from the nearby town, returning either as emotionless doppelgangers or simply not at all.
Given its title, you’d be forgiven for thinking It Came From Outer Space is some Them!-style also-ran, a creature feature with nothing to show but some hokey rubber suits. But with the combination of Jack Arnold (Creature From The Black Lagoon) behind the camera and a Ray fuckin’ Bradbury film treatment to work from, Outer Space proves itself something quite superior, proceeding much like a visually graceful, uniquely disquieting Twilight Zone episode peppered with Bradbury soliloquies.
Bradbury is one of my all-time favorite writers, with his various novels and bounteous short stories demonstrating a superior connection to the fantastical, a nostalgic obsession with place, and an absurd gift for lyrical prose. And Black Lagoon is by far my favorite of the classic Universal horror features, offering majestic underwater photography that, more so than any other film I’ve seen, captures the romance of water treated as another world altogether. Between Bradbury and Arnold’s contributions, It Came From Outer Space proves a melancholy, majestic, and altogether superior pot boiler, foregoing cheap twists in favor of a pointed assessment of human fragility.
I then checked out Ruin Explorers, a four-episode ‘95 OVA directed by the reliable Takeshi Mori. The series centers on the two adventurers Ihrie and Fam, who are determined to extract the “Ultimate Power” from the ruins of an advanced precursor civilization (hence the title). Along the way they meet a prince with a tragic tale, attract a handful of fellow explorers to their cause, and ultimately face off with a terrible wizard who – I mean, you know how this goes, right?
I’ve been seriously jonesing for more tabletop-reminiscent dungeoneering escapades, and Ruin Explorers fit the bill perfectly, achieving its modest ambitions with moderate distinction. The series’ regular attempts at humor are shrill and annoying, but that’s basically expected for this era; loud noises, sudden violence, and hyper-exaggerated expressions were apparently the peak of wit in the ‘90s. More importantly, Ruin Explorers actually tells a coherent film-length story, never gets bogged down in exposition or repetition, and features a main party likable enough to make the journey a pleasant one. Pair all that with its attractive, nostalgic art design (love those pointy ‘90s noses), and you end up with a largely unexceptional but eminently watchable adventure.
Incidentally, I still haven’t quenched my thirst for this sort of thing, but it looks like there simply aren’t that many anime fantasy adventures in this style. Once you’ve watched Lodoss War, the pickings seem extremely slim, as most modern fantasy fits into the more directly JRPG-derivative isekai style. Is the next step really just Slayers, or is there anything else out there?
Our next viewing was the ‘54 adaptation of Ulysses, directed by Mario Camerini (alongside some contributions by cinematographer/maestro of horror Mario Bava, who appropriately pitches in for the Polyphemus segment). Kirk Douglas stars as the great and terrible Ulysses, who strives with wavering devotion to return to his faithful wife Penelope. Silvana Mangano plays a double role as Penelope and the sorceress Circe, while the commanding Anthony Quinn stars as head suitor Antinous.
The film is a fair adaptation of the original Odyssey, abridging or combining some number of Ulysses’ exploits, but for the most part animating both the body and spirit of its source material. This, of course, presents its own set of problems, for as anyone who’s read The Odyssey knows, Ulysses is likely history’s least sympathetic protagonist. He’s a self-absorbed philandering gloryhound who sacrifices the lives of his crewmates through a combination of idiocy and indifference, and who basically fucks his way across the Adriatic all while his faithful wife fends off an army of suitors. Ulysses’ values are so alien to us as to present a parody of virtue, meaning my general engagement with The Odyssey involves admiring the texture and details of Homer’s world while wincing at every step of its vainglorious brute of a protagonist.
As far as that goes, the texture of this adaptation is fine on the whole, though only the Mario Bava sequence distinguishes itself as truly gripping. Silvana Mangano is a natural for this kind of heightened historical drama performance, and Anthony Quinn disappears as fully into his role as he does in La Strada or The Guns of Navarone, while Kirk Douglas basically just plays his American cowboy self. It felt strange in Spartacus and it feels strange here, but hey, sometimes you wanna watch a cowboy fight a cyclops, and Douglas is here to provide.
Last up for the week was Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie, as I continued my inexorable crawl through the anime films of the ‘80s and ‘90s. The film opens with the nefarious M. Bison on the hunt for Ryu, hoping to add him to his collection of mind-controlled super soldiers. Meanwhile, the American and British governments hunt for Bison himself, with respective agents Guile and Chun-li seeking revenge for Bison’s past wrongs. Eventually, all of these warriors will congregate and clash, seeking to find on the battlefield the peace that eludes them.
I know this film is considered a quasi-classic in certain circles, which sorta makes me wish I’d watched it before Fatal Fury, which is both better-animated and possesses an actual narrative. Street Fighter II is instead simply an excuse to set up a procession of moderately animated fight scenes, pitting Ryu and his companions against a variety of their arcade antagonists, and at times even embracing the visual layouts of the game itself. Perhaps less loyalty to the source material might have done this film good – most of the principles have done better work elsewhere (director Gisaburo Sugii directed Night on the Galactic Railroad!), so I have to imagine this film’s dubious art direction and general shapelessness were just a quirk of its uniquely fast-tracked production. Still, it’s always nice seeing Chun Li kick Vega straight through a wall.
