Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. With my housemate back from vacation, my progress through Sailor Moon’s final season has slowed precipitously, but I am determined to complete the journey! And though I miss Chibi Usa, if that’s the bargain that must be made to ditch Pegasus, I will make it gladly. Meanwhile, my house’s reassembly has facilitated a return to Strahd for our DnD group, wherein I continue to be deeply unimpressed with Chris Perkins’ approach to character design. Practically everyone I’ve come across in on-book DnD feels no more substantive than that guy in an RPG who says “there are many dangers in the forest” and exactly nothing else – even Strahd himself, who is allegedly the centerpiece of this campaign, is a tedious and superficial villain. Still, we are determined to conquer this foul land, and I’ll be sure to keep up my reports on our efforts to do so. In the meantime, let’s break down some films!
Our first viewing of the week was Krull, another ‘80s fantasy adventure of little lasting renown. Ken Marshall stars as Prince Colwyn, a young man destined to unite two kingdoms through his marriage to Princess Lyssa. However, before the ceremony can conclude, their castle is attacked by the Slayers, vicious beings who travel from planet to planet under the orders of the mysterious Beast. With his lady love captured, Prince Colwyn will have to pursue the Beast’s moving castle, gathering what allies he can in order to conquer the forces of evil.
Krull’s got a pretty obvious pitch: fantasy films are hot right now, Star Wars is hotter than the sun, let’s see how we can combine the two. Thus the film features an interplanetary menace whose minions look an awful lot like Stormtroopers, facing off against similarly plastic-clad knights with laser rifles.
The film’s dedication to this conceit is halfhearted at best; outside of the opening battle and the Beast’s fortress, there is little to differentiate Krull from your standard fantasy adventure. And that’s likely for the best; the film’s clashes of sword-wielding warriors and dudes with laser rifles always feel a bit preposterous, while its traditionally fantasy material is freewheeling and richly furnished with evocative sets and beautiful matte backdrops. In contrast, the Beast’s castle feels more Argento than Lucas, with the princess seemingly trapped within a vast, moodily lit skeleton of some long-dead celestial creature. Between these richly appointed soundstages and an unexpectedly poignant script, Krull rises above its derivative genesis, offering a strangely alluring and ever-morphing fantasy adventure.
We then screened Longlegs, a recent horror-thriller starring Maika Monroe as a clairvoyant FBI investigator, and Nicholas Cage as the mastermind behind a long series of inexplicable murders. Though “Longlegs” leaves notes declaring his presence at each of the murder scenes, his own role in the killings is unclear – for each “crime” involves a murder-suicide orchestrated by a family’s father, with no sign of outside interference.
Longlegs’ enthusiastic marketing as one of the “scariest films of all time” had me skeptical even before viewing, as such claims are generally intended for audiences who frankly don’t watch many horror movies. And yeah, don’t believe the hype; Cage is great, but his performance is not going to terrify anyone who’s seen The Silence of the Lambs, which this film is aping as passionately as possible, and whose two serial killers were combined into Cage’s character here. Additionally, though it mostly proceeds as a crime procedural, it would be wise to judge the film more as a tone piece; the eventual reveal of the killer’s method is preposterous and unsatisfying, so don’t get your hopes up for a grand reveal that smartly ties everything together.
Once you set aside those expectations regarding either Longlegs’ horror or thriller aspirations, what you get is a self-important but handsomely shot collection of anxious moments, complete with some delightfully weird flourishes from Cage. The film’s pleasures are skin-deep, but they do exist; just don’t think too much about the narrative holes papered over by unreliable narration, or quibble with the film’s superficial engagement with the occult. Hopefully next time, writer-director Osgood Perkins will leave the writing to someone else.
We then checked out the recent film adaptation of City Hunter, which was actually my first experience with the franchise. Ryohei Suzuki stars as Ryo Saeba, a hotshot cop and irrepressible horndog, who teams up with the sister (Misato Morita) of his late partner in order to take down an illicit super-drug operation. Along the way, they attend confusing cosplay-pharmaceutical conventions, beat up villains, and generally have a riotous time in Shinjuku.
Ryo Saeba’s character is basically “what if Supercop-era Jackie Chan was also Master Roshi,” and City Hunter generally soars or falters based on which half of that archetype is being highlighted at any particular moment. The film’s frequent sex comedy mostly serves as a reminder that this is based on a manga from the ‘80s, but the fight choreography is actually quite excellent, and Suzuki plays both halves of Ryo’s character with panache and commitment. An altogether trifling feature, but an easy enough afternoon watch.
Last up for the week was Late Night with the Devil, a recent horror feature framed as an episode of a ‘77 late night variety show, Night Owls with Jack Delroy. David Dastmalchian stars as the Delroy in question, who took some time off broadcasting after the death of his wife, and now seems on the verge of being canceled for good. Desperate for a ratings boost, he engineers a Halloween special involving an alleged psychic, professional skeptic, and parapsychologist, who has brought with her a girl who claims to be possessed by a devil.
Late Night with the Devil’s commitment to its structural conceit is laudable and wildly effective. The film proceeds with the desperate energy of a live broadcast from the end of the world, with the encroaching hints of supernatural terror frequently pushed aside in the cast’s desperation to keep the cameras rolling. The set design is totally convincing, and Dastmalchian does a marvelous job of evoking that smirking, we’re-all-in-on-the-joke energy of ‘70s talk show hosts. Oddly enough, the clear artifice of the film’s conceit actually makes us in the audience feel all the more vulnerable; with the strings and trickery of Night Owls so clear on-screen, the inherent distancing effect of traditional cinematic spectacle is extracted, making us feel no more safe than any of the cameramen following Delroy’s antics.
The film escalates effectively through interviews and supernatural demonstrations, tapping into that specific transgressive energy of watching a live late-night production that your parents probably wouldn’t approve of, with all the attendant sense of anxiety and possibility. It’s a bit like the warped advertisements and found footage shorts of Adult Swim, features like Too Many Cooks or Unedited Footage of a Bear, wherein our structural assumptions regarding television convention are challenged and unmoored, all the better to make us feel like there is something deeply, sacrilegiously wrong here. Watching Late Night with the Devil sorta makes me understand why a believer might find the devil so frightening, such an aberration in the established order – for while television is not furnished with psalms and prayers to the creator, it possesses its own forms of ritual and worship, and perverting them creates a vividly disorienting effect.
