Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. It is fucking cold out as we enter our first week of December, and what’s more, my neighborhood’s usual street parking has been outlawed in deference to the kind of New England blizzard which may well never return to Boston. So I’m cold and I can’t park anywhere and the year’s nearly ending, which of course always heralds its own signature suite of anxieties and responsibilities and reflections on our eternal, unstoppable relinquishing of days, just in time for January to inform us that yes, it is indeed possible to be colder and more miserable than December, just watch me. So that’s where I’m at right now, but I’ve at least gotten most of my Christmas shopping done, and am also so far ahead on my reader projects that I’ve indulged in some more DnD retrospective pieces, which I’ll hopefully be sharing with you soon. In the meantime, cold weather only means more movies, so let’s see what we’ve got in the latest Week in Review!
First up this week was Dagon, another horror feature by Stuart Gordon, the director behind the delightfully seedy Re-Animator and From Beyond. Though it opens with a scene reminiscent of its titular tale, Dagon is more generally an adaptation of The Shadow Over Innsmouth, wherein a man journeys to a sleepy New England fishing village and discovers its residents have sworn their service to a terrible deep-sea monstrosity. Though Dagon substitutes Spain for New England and gives its lead a girlfriend, the film is otherwise a fairly loyal adaptation of one of Lovecraft’s most fully realized and film-friendly tales.
As you’d expect from a Stuart Gordon film, the acting is both inconsistent and overwrought, but the set design and practical effects are absolutely delightful. Dagon truly brings the barnacled alleys and rainswept manors of Innsmouth to life, evoking Lovecraft’s original descriptions so completely that it’s easy to feel transported and trapped within his world’s damp, claustrophobic streets. Spain was an excellent choice for this adaptation; while most suitable New England villages have at this point been modernized beyond evoking Lovecraft’s visions, the cobblestone streets and decaying fishing huts of Dagon feel like a place that time forgot, perfectly realizing both the aesthetic texture and the class commentary that simmers within Lovecraft’s tale.
Gordon understandably ratchets up the violence and scandal of the tonally driven original, but that’s basically how it goes for every Lovecraft adaptation, and as with From Beyond, Gordon does an excellent job of making Lovecraft’s ideals feel at home within his Hooper or Carpenter-esque exploitation theater. I was a little afraid the film would rely on clumsy CG for its beasties, but there are literally only two moments of CG throughout, in a film that otherwise embraces the practical pleasures of Gordon’s ‘80s work. If you’re a fan of Lovecraft or any of the directors I’ve mentioned here, you’ll almost certainly have an excellent time with Dagon.
Next up was The Warrior and the Sorceress, which is, as you might have guessed, a sword and sorcery feature from the genre’s ‘80s heyday. David Carradine stars as a warrior playing two local bandit groups against each other, in an exceedingly B-movie echo of Yojimbo. Aside from Carradine’s sprinkling of star power, and the commendable physicality he brings to the film’s sword fights, there’s really not much to separate this one from the pack. Roger Corman flew to Argentina and produced ten cheap features like this in a row, each of them apparently notable only for things like “the titular sorceress never wears a shirt.” Still, I have an apparently insatiable appetite for scrappy fantasy drama, and if you’re similarly afflicted you’ll likely have a fine time with this humble feature.
Our next screening was Top Secret!, a spoof of spy dramas, Elvis Presley films, and much else besides, written and directed by the Airplane! team of Jim Abrahams, Jerry Zucker, and David Zucker. Val Kilmer stars as a chart-topping crooner responsible for half a dozen hits concerning surfing and skeet shooting, who is enlisted as a secret agent when selected to perform at an East German cultural festival. That’s basically as far as the narrative goes in terms of coherency; the rest is a rambling array of incidental gags and absurdist setpieces, all vaguely tethered via their adjacency to war drama convention.
Apparently Top Secret!’s lack of narrative coherence was blamed for its ultimately disappointing returns, but frankly, the joke density is so thick and commitment to the bit so complete that I’m not really sure where they’d have stuck a moment of earnest narrative drama. The film’s gag density is only matched by its hit ratio; practically every joke here lands, with their concepts ranging from thuddingly literal interpretations of dialogue (“I don’t know any German,” “Oh, I know a little German – there he is, right over there”) to a saloon brawl executed entirely underwater. The film is both more consistently funny and more gracefully aged than Airplane!, and Val Kilmer absolutely proves his underexploited comedic chops. An easy recommendation.
We then screened The Substance, a recent slice of body horror written and directed by Coralie Fargeat. Demi Moore stars as Elisabeth Sparkle, a one-time Oscar-winning actress who at fifty has just been kicked off her aerobics TV program, effectively ending her career. Desperate to regain the spotlight, she embraces a mysterious medical procedure centered on “The Substance,” a drug that actually spawns a second, younger self from her original body. The rules clearly state that she and “Sue” (Margaret Qualley) must share their time in the sun – however, Sue’s increasing fame soon leads to some breaking of the rules, with catastrophic results.
The Substance is an intriguing riff on The Portrait of Dorian Grey, pairing the grotesquery of celebrity and daytime TV culture with an external world of sterile, looping corridors and glaring primary colors, a perpetual waiting room adjoining an austere injection chamber. Even before things get truly gnarly, the focus on needles and flesh and Dennis Quaid noisily munching prawns creates a persistent sense of invasion and fragility, a sense that our skin is only loosely corralling our bones and flesh that amplifies precipitously as the horrors mount.
Among these giallo-reminiscent endless hallways and glaring lights, The Substance crafts a vision of fame that seems timeless in its specificity. The era of quasi-aerobic sexpot celebrity is dead and gone, but this very anachronism points to its underlying inescapability; Sue’s program isn’t truthfully any different than the work of modern pop stars, fitting snugly within the paradigm of allegedly guileless sex appeal that defines idoldom at large. And while Qualley weaves effortlessly between absolute command of her youth and rage at Sparkle’s impositions upon it, Moore feasts upon the sorrowful meat of her role, affecting a fall-of-Rome gravitas that lends a human core to the film’s tongue-in-cheek indulgence. The Substance’s pleasures are ultimately more skin-deep than something like Sunset Boulevard, but it’s still a confident, generous feature.
