Hello folks, and welcome the heck back to Wrong Every Time. Today I am looking out at perhaps the first clear day of the new year, a sight that would perhaps inspire me to get off my ass and go enjoy some nature, if it weren’t also twenty goddamn degrees outside. Instead, I will likely stay safely indoors and play a whole bunch of Metaphor: Refantazio, which has succeeded in inheriting its Persona brethren’s capacity to utterly take over my life. Seriously, we’ve got like turn timers running to ensure everyone gets an equal share of Metaphor, it’s an absolute mess over here. Anyway, with two hour timers separating Metaphor play sessions, I’ve also found time for plenty of film features as well. Let’s break ‘em down!
First up this week were a pair of recent found footage productions, as I screened Horror in the High Desert and its sequel Minerva in quick succession. Written, directed, and produced by Dutch Marich, the films combine significant faux-documentary footage with a dollop of the traditional “cameras stumbling around in the dark” style, charting the disappearance of several people into Nevada’s forbidding high desert, and their family and communities’ subsequent efforts to retrieve them.
It takes a little time for Marich’s films to cast their spell. Though they incorporate a variety of alleged primary sources, there’s little of the drip feed of cosmic horror that maintains tension through a film like Noroi; most of these films is taken up with family or witness interviews, and those interviews can get a tad repetitive, while the first film in particular can be a touch clumsy in its implications of potential threats (“who knows what someone might do to him” followed by a smash cut to a gun facing the camera, etcetera). And the actual found footage sequences that serve as climax to each film imply far more than they show; ghosts in the dark, strange figures in the distance, and maybe a brief glimpse of a warped, forbidding face.
Of course, horror through implication, horror that exists just beyond the border of our comprehension, all of that stuff is absolute catnip to me. Once I acclimated to Marich’s style, I found myself enthralled by what felt like the closest found footage equivalent of a film like Picnic at Hanging Rock, or a story like The Willows. My favorite horror stories draw on a fear that cannot be made tangible, a primal assurance that there are forces in this world beyond our understanding or control, and that such forces are made apparent only through inexplicable, fragmentary encounters that most sensible-minded individuals would laugh off as the work of overactive imaginations.
Time and again, Marich’s films stretch towards that obscure ideal, offering just enough conjecture and visual ambiguity to imply there is a world beyond the dunes, and that we are not welcome within it. From The Blair Witch Project through Savagelands, the best found footage projects tend to fit snugly within the traditions of Weird Fiction, offering grave implications and few answers. Films like these leave the viewer with no recourse but to lock their doors and watch the horizon, praying only that the world keeps its dark secrets.
We then checked out One Million Years B.C., a ‘66 Hammer Production directed by Don Chaffey, who also spearheaded Jason and the Argonauts and many other fantasy films. John Richardson stars as Tumak, a caveman of the dark-haired Rock Tribe, who is banished by his father Ahkoba after an altercation regarding some warthog meat. Journeying across the unforgiving wastes, Tumak is eventually discovered and saved by Loana (Raquel Welch), she of the fair-haired Babe Tribe (okay, it’s actually the Shell Tribe). The two of them bond over a series of discordant adventures involving dinosaur attacks, volcanic eruptions, and leadership disputes in both tribes.
A remake of a 1940 film, One Million Years B.C. doesn’t really offer much in terms of narrative drama, as its characters are incapable of any words beyond their own names. What it does offer, and in abundant supply at that, is precisely two quantities: vivid stop-motion dinosaurs courtesy of Ray Harryhausen, and Raquel Welch in a form-fitting caveman bikini. Of the two, I actually think Welch provides the more lasting legacy; her entirely era-inappropriate (yet obviously fabulous) hair apparently set the standard for future renditions of the cave-babe archetype, her influence clear in properties ranging from Futurama to Chrono Trigger. Heck, even that inescapable “the pterodactyls have stolen a maiden to feed their young” beat seems to have its genesis here, with both pterodactyls and maiden performing at the top of their game. Harryhausen dinosaurs in combat with one of the most beautiful women in history – I can see why generations of nerds have baked this film into their subconscious.
Our next viewing was Werewolves, a recent action-horror film that, much like Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall, has the bravery to ask “what if the moon hated us and wanted us dead?” In this case, that hatred is expressed through a supermoon-inspired wave of lycanthropy, wherein anyone who is directly exposed to the moon’s harmful Moon Rays is turned into a werewolf. One year after the first instance of this furry phenomenon, humanity is currently preparing to hunker down for the second night of werewolf whimsy, employing such novel new defenses as “moon sunscreen” and a giant celestial moon blockade.
In spite of my apparent inability to take this premise seriously, I actually quite enjoyed the film’s take on lycanthropy being contracted by moon contact rather than bites, which facilitated a variety of tense mechanical setpieces. With everyone locked indoors and werewolves roaming the streets, the film plays exactly like “Dog Soldiers x The Purge,” even down to Purge 2/3 star Frank Grillo playing the exact same tough-talking hero role here. Between those roles and Boss Level, it’s clear that Grillo understands his wheelhouse: serving as the player avatar in films designed like videogames, complete with lots of gunfights, an emphasis on overcoming environmental hazards, and an overabundance of hokey machismo. I’ll take my lovingly designed practical werewolves where I can find them; game on, Grillo.
Last up for the week was Top Hat, a ‘35 musical comedy starring Fred Astaire as Jerry Travers, an American tap dancer who travels to London to perform in the show of his friend Horace Hardwick (Edward Everett Horton). There, he meets and is immediately dazzled by Dale Tremont (Ginger Rogers), a young lady traveling in the company and finery of Italian designer Alberto Beddini (Erik Rhodes). The two swiftly hit it off, but their courtship hits a snag when Dale is mistakenly convinced that Jerry is in fact his friend Horace, and thus a treacherous two-timer to his wife Madge (Helen Broderick).
Top Hat is as effervescent as the best of screwball comedies, its characters trading witty barbs and swirling through misunderstandings before gracefully resettling into charming, iconic dance numbers like the oft-referenced “Cheek to Cheek.” Astaire and Rogers possess an easy chemistry both on and off the dance floor that Hollywood was able to spin out into ten films of tap dancing romance, and Astaire himself is a master of both tap dancing virtuosity and physical comedy. I was particularly impressed by how well he can take a slap; there is an art to being comically battered, and with Astaire, you can practically hear the “boi-oi-oing” sound effect as his cheek pops and jaw takes a walk.
Astaire’s propensity for comic violence aside, Top Hat is otherwise absolutely stuffed with endearing characters, memorable gags, and impressive dance numbers. Helen Broderick regularly steals the show as Hardwick’s long-suffering wife, who greets the news that her husband has been playing the field with fatigued indifference, and who in one memorable moment appears (at least from Dale’s perspective) to happily pimp out Astaire for the appreciation of all in company. The film takes a moment to get its gears in motion, but is soon racing along with the same comic momentum as Bringing Up Baby or It Happened One Night, all while Astaire dances up a confoundingly graceful storm. An obvious must-see film.
