Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Our late summer weather reprieve finally broke this week, meaning I’m hunkering down for half a year of gloomy New England doldrums. I’ve never been thrilled to live in a region whose weather feels like the meteorological embodiment of depression, but I imagine I’ll bear it with roughly as much grumbling as usual, and as much media to distract myself as I possibly can. As far as that goes, my house is now done with Andor and nearly out of Slayers, meaning it’s time to add some new productions to our daily diet. I’m thinking Future Boy Conan will be our next classic series screening, and I’m eager to see a young, fire-eyed Miyazaki tackle his first TV production. In the meantime, let’s break down some goddamn films!
Having just finished the second season of Andor, we elected to conclude the series with a rewatch of Rogue One, the original filmic introduction of its lead character. Felicity Jones stars as Jyn Erso, the daughter of the lead designer of the Death Star. Rescued from an imperial prison transport by Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), she rises from reluctant hostage to heroic freedom fighter, leading a team of rebels in a daring mission to steal the Death Star’s design schematics.
It was quite an odd experience transitioning from Andor back to Rogue One. At the time of this film’s release, it felt like a refreshing break from Star Wars convention; now, in comparison to Andor, it was astonishing to see how much this film is indebted to reference points inherited from the original trilogy. It’s still a fine enough adventure film with plenty of strong performances, but the John Williams trills and character cameos just feel grating at this point, a clear demonstration of how nostalgia is a poor substitute for original storytelling. And nostalgia aside, why do you cast Donnie Yen if you’re not going to let him kick ass!? Nonetheless, Rogue One is an easy watch with far more confidence in itself than the actual sequel trilogy, and certainly hits that “we’re all pushing ourselves over this finish line together” scrappy desperation of Star Wars’ best moments.
We then continued our slasher travels with A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, which sees Freddy Krueger continuing his war against the lucid dreaming children of the ‘80s. The surviving Dream Warriors of the third entry are ruthlessly hunted by Freddy, who ultimately uses the dreams of new arrival Alice Johnson (Lisa Wilcox) to conscript fresh victims. In order to defeat the Dreamin’ Demon, Alice will be forced to swiftly master her dreams and become the one, the only, the Dream Master.
Honestly, I’ve been pretty impressed with the course of the Elm Street films so far. The first one is a genuine classic, the second a wild audible into psychosexual discovery, and the third a natural escalation of Freddy-versus-child violence replete with inventive murder sequences. Elm Street’s dream premise means its horrors are literally only limited by the imaginations of its producers, and The Dream Master continues the series’ hot streak with a procession of delightful original nightmares that take a welcome note from giallo’s reverence for hostile architecture. Plus Wilcox is actually great as the lead, and the finale features the most impressive display of practical body horror grotesquery in the franchise so far. A great victory for Freddy; at this point, it seems easy to declare that Elm Street is by far the most reliable of the Halloween-Friday-Elm Street lineage.
Next up was Mazes and Monsters, an ‘82 made-for-TV movie starring Tom Hanks in his first lead role, as the young college student Robbie Wheeling. In spite of the warnings of his parents, Robbie is seduced by several classmates into joining their campaign of Mazes and Monsters, an obvious Dungeons & Dragons analogue that sees its player delving into mysterious temples in search of glorious treasure. However, fantasy soon begins to blur with reality, as Robbie’s traumatic memories find a fresh outlet through his tabletop adventures.
Whew, what a silly watch this was! My housemate threw it on expecting a D&D-flavored adolescent adventure, some sort of Jumanji-style clash of fantasy and reality. Instead, what we got was the D&D version of Reefer Madness, a film that embodies and validates the Satanic Panic-adjacent fears of tabletop gaming’s early years, when particularly credulous parents could be convinced that rolling dice and wearing wizard hats might be a gateway to devil worship. It’s actually pretty fun when the cast are going on adventures together, but swiftly grows tedious once Hanks gets lost in his own psychological dungeon, while the production values are eminently TV-level throughout. Nothing worth seeking out, but a welcome reminder that those suffering from mass delusions will always accuse others of the same.
Our last feature of the week was The Hitcher, an ‘86 thriller starring C. Thomas Howell as a young man driving alone through West Texas, who picks up a hitchhiker (Rutger Hauer) in order to help himself stay awake. Unfortunately, Howell finds more than he bargained for when his new companion first attempts to kill him, and then stalks him across the desert roads, leaving behind a trail of bodies for Howell to explain to the cops.
The Hitcher is an effective, minimalist pressure cooker of a film, taking supreme advantage of its austere setting, and ensuring every car, character, and fork in the road is exploited to its maximum potential. The film keeps its variables lean for as long as possible, only transitioning to the larger context of Howell being framed for murders once all the juice has been squeezed from its initial premise, and even then the scope remains personal, a series of grudges both tangible and unfathomable playing out across the Texas desert.
None of this would work unless Howell’s pursuer was genuinely terrifying, a force who seems to carry an almost supernatural weight of menace. And Rutger Hauer more than provides, electrifying with his every wide-eyed stare and conspiratorial smile, acting with such confidence and clarity of gamesmanship that it seems obvious Howell is facing the devil himself. It was praise for Hauer’s performance that put The Hitcher on my radar, and that praise is more than deserved; through violent intensity and callous charm, Hauer constructs one of the great movie monsters.
