Hello folks, and welcome the heck back to Wrong Every Time. It’s been a dubious week in seasonal anime, as Uzumaki’s second episode demonstrated a total collapse in animation quality, while Dandadan’s premiere proved perhaps a touch too frantic and boner-centric for my delicate sensibilities. Nonetheless, I charge bravely onward in this media wilderness, consoled by the fact that there will always, always be more fantastic films for me to watch. We hit a couple significant ones this week, pairing one of the greatest achievements of film’s early years with an intriguing recent innovation in horror cinema. And I’ve also been filling in more gaps in my anime education, by munching through the first half of Trigun’s iconic original adaptation. I’ll have more to say on that once I’m through, but for now, let’s charge through some films!
We first screened the original Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s silent masterpiece, centered on a city of the future engineered by its master Joh Fredersen. The business tycoons and socialites of the city’s utter strata live a charmed life among the city’s shining towers, while down below, the workers struggle and die to maintain the churning of its terrible machines. Drawn down from paradise by a mysterious stranger named Maria, Fredersen’s heir Freder learns of the plight facing Metropolis’ workers, and vows to become the mediator between the “head and the hands” of the city’s titans and underclass.
Metropolis is a gorgeous spectacle of lush production design and fervent idealism, presenting one of the most vividly realized fantasies I’ve seen in film, and populating it with larger-than-life icons of industrialized capitalism’s heroes and villains. Far divorced from the misguided obeisance to naturalism that has so fully infected modern cinema, its characters overflow with wild emotion, presenting through their ecstatic facial contortions a mirror of the grandiose scenery enveloping them.
The city itself is a persistent visual marvel, alternately drawing on cubist, futurist, and gothic art traditions to create a backdrop of overwhelming scale and beauty, and employing remarkable tricks of framing and visual juxtaposition in order to combine miniatures, painted backdrops, and towering full sets into a city that feels both dreamlike and tangible. It is easy to draw a line directly from Metropolis’ visual maximalism, romantic science fiction, and earnest revolutionary storytelling directly to the stories of Osamu Tezuka and beyond; in fact, I would say any fans of classic anime would find Metropolis a natural companion piece, or even Rosetta Stone, for the aesthetics and ambitions of Tezuka and his progeny.
But praising Metropolis in terms of its influence belies what an immediately captivating experience it is on its own terms. Brigitte Helm’s dual performance as the saintly Maria and amoral machine devil is electrifying, with scenes like her desperate attempt to ring the bells of the undercity appearing like a renaissance painting in action. Fritz Rasp delights as the Thin Man, an agent of capitalist inevitability who looms over the cast like a nefarious scarecrow. There are mad scientists and evil doppelgangers and sacrifices to Moloch – once you dispense with the weight of its historical significance, you discover one of the most thrilling, beautiful, and eminently watchable films in existence.
I next checked out All Hallows’ Eve, a ‘13 anthology horror film centered on a babysitter who’s watching two siblings over Halloween night. One of the kids discovers their Halloween candy is accompanied by an unmarked videotape, which turns out to contain a collection of horror shorts linked by the presence of “Art the Clown,” an evil clown that kills you. Of course, this isn’t any usual videotape – it’s a super-spooky cursed videotape, and watching just might make Art kill you, too!
You’ll have to excuse my deadpan, this film really sucked. There are fragments of decent material within the film’s three anthology pieces, but the entirety of the feature is held down by the simple fact that no one involved can sell a line. Every scene plays like a first table read by actors who are probably getting replaced anyway, the film’s scares rely entirely on unconvincing Spirit Halloween masks and gore, and Art the Clown himself never gains any definition or even just some malevolent charisma. I’d figured the fact that Art would springboard from this to his now three-entry-strong Terrifier franchise meant there must be some fun twist to his character, but there’s certainly no evidence of that here.
Next up was Skinamarink, the much-discussed festival circuit feature promising a horror experience like little else in the genre. The film is indeed a unique experience, a slow cinema exercise in minimalism that attempts to turn horror’s flourishes of terrible implication into the monster itself. We follow two young children whose parents mysteriously disappear in the night, alongside all the doors and windows leading out of their home. Through long held shots, heavy visual distortion, and warped cartoons droning in the background, Skinamarink evokes the encroaching presence of a something within their home, a hostile being they cannot dare to name.
For a while, the film didn’t really work for me. I got nothing out of Paranormal Activity, and have such general disdain for films that offer nothing but “what was that!?” bumps in the night that I have affectionately dubbed them “general spookums” features, horror movies for people who don’t actually like horror. And yet, as the minutes trailed on and the darkness grew more pronounced, I started to get it. The film carefully, unceasingly evokes that particular sense of dislocation one can only feel as a young child, when your parents aren’t home and you don’t know why, and the sudden rush of freedom can only do so much to paper over the underlying chasm of fear.
It’s clear that Skinamarink needs to make contact with some raw nerves of personal anxiety to truly grab you, but once it takes hold, the sense of nameless, formless evil invading this home is palpable, a hand of shadow slowly encircling the neck. The lack of cinematic mediation facilitates a greater sense of vulnerability, as hopes like “maybe dad will come back” or distractions like their ever-glowing television are snuffed out one by one. I have total respect for the film’s clarity of purpose, and though it didn’t always work for me, this is the kind of film that will undoubtedly be someone’s scariest movie of all time. A must-see for any student of horror’s manifold forms.
We finished up the week with Wild Zero, wherein the young would-be rocker Ace learns all about love and rock ‘n roll, helped along the way by his good friend Guitar Wolf (yes, from the band). After helping the group during an altercation with their manager, Ace is provided a whistle to blow if he ever needs their assistance. That opportunity comes sooner than expected when alien invaders start turning everyone into zombies, necessitating an extremely rocking counteroffensive by Ace, Guitar Wolf, Bass Wolf, Drum Wolf, and whoever else wants to join the wolf pack.
Wild Zero is a snot-nosed, irreverent midnight screening spectacle, full of exploding heads and rocking Guitar Wolf tunes. It is pretty much bombast incarnate, embodying a punk rock ethos not far removed from something like Tank Girl, and tethering its indulgent action and screeching waves of feedback to Guitar Wolf’s earnest declaration that “love has no race, nationality, or gender!” If you’re not cheering every time Guitar Wolf appears on screen, you’re doing it wrong – and trust me, you’ll be doing a lot of cheering by the time the man himself draws his guitar-sword to slay the alien menace. If you have any appreciation for earnest camp or rock ‘n roll, you’ll find a lot to love here – and if you are twelve years old, this will probably be the greatest film you have ever seen.
