Hello folks, and welcome the heck back to Wrong Every Time. The winter anime season is in full swing at this point, and surprisingly enough, I’m actually watching some currently airing anime. Laid-Back Camp is as charming as ever, and Horimiya is readily demonstrating Masashi Ishihama’s talents – but ultimately, Wonder Egg Priority is in a league of its own. The show’s first episode was so gracefully composed, creative, and beautiful that it essentially demanded my attention, evoking those same “shut up and sit down, you’re watching a masterpiece” shivers I got from the premieres of Madoka, or The Eccentric Family, or Flip Flappers. I’ve got a notes article out on that episode already, and am hoping to continue writing on it through the season – but in the meantime, yes, I did indeed also watch a bunch of random movies this week. Without further ado, let’s break ‘em all down in the Week in Review!

As anyone who’s been reading these posts likely knows, I’m a big horror fan, and I’ve lately been trying to fill out my knowledge of horror films. For a while, this meant bouncing around all the big tentpole franchises, taking in the first entries in franchises like Halloween and Friday the 13th. I’m generally not a big sequel person; great stories are generally cohesive objects that use up their ideas the first time around, and I’d personally rather experience more new things than huddle over the dying embers of an old idea. But in horror films, the idea of franchises that go on and on is an essential part of the model – and so this week I decided to pay tribute to that model, by checking out the second and third Nightmare on Elm Street films.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddie’s Revenge is a profoundly weird sequel, and presumably a good example of just how much individual entries in these franchises can chart their own path. The film centers on a boy named Jessie, whose family moves into the house of the first film’s heroine, with predictably bloody results. Much of the strangeness of this film likely stems from Jessie’s position – though he’s a boy, he’s consistently framed using the cinematic language of a “final girl,” a damsel who shares a special relationship with the killer. And beyond this, the film is absolutely drenched in clear homoerotic imagery, with an underlying “Freddie is the demon inside me” metaphor that feels like some slanted approach to a sexual awakening narrative.

Freddie’s Revenge isn’t a particularly good horror movie – the kills aren’t terribly inspired, the film is frankly mean-spirited (Jessie’s actor Mark Patton ultimately contributed to a documentary on the horrible filming process), and the structural novelty of casting a boy as the final girl never really pays off in any way. But it’s an exceedingly interesting “broken” movie, using the trappings of Freddy Krueger’s world for a story that is very little like a traditional slasher. I could see by the end of this one that pursuing these franchises wouldn’t necessarily feel like watching the same movie over and over.

In contrast, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors felt exactly like Elm Street’s logical sequel: the original but bigger, with a more ambitious exploration of Freddie’s menace, and just enough continuity to reward franchise veterans. Not content with a single streetful of victims, Elm Street 3 sends us to a mental ward, where all of the patients are suffering from recurring Freddy nightmares. Elm Street 3 is brimming with fun, ridiculous kills, and features a great return appearance by original survivor Nancy Thompson. The film plays firmly within the lines set by the original, meaning it’s less interesting than Freddie’s Revenge, but also significantly more effective as a slasher film. I chose Elm Street as a series to follow because Krueger’s nightmare sequences offer far more potential for creativity than a dude with an axe; Dream Warriors follows through on that potential with gusto.

Next up, we watched this week’s crown jewel: Wolfwalkers, the latest film by the European animation team Cartoon Saloon. I’m ashamed to admit I haven’t watched either The Secret of Kells or Song of the Sea, but that’s about to change; Wolfwalkers was brilliant, and I absolutely need to consume everything this team has created.

Wolfwalkers centers on a young English girl named Robyn, the daughter of a hunter who has been tasked with killing the wolves in a nearby forest. Those wolves have their own protectors, though: Wolfwalkers, people who can take the forms of wolves as they sleep. Robyn ends up encountering a young wolfwalker named Mebh, setting in motion a series of events that will change both their lives forever.

Wolfwalkers shines on basically whatever front you approach it. The core relationship between Robyn and Mebh is absurdly charming, while Robyn’s relationship with her father (played by a perfectly cast Sean Bean) is loving yet complex, beset with tension due to the difficult circumstances of their lives. Pull the camera back a bit, and Wolfwalkers is revealed as a ferocious illustration of England’s colonial practices, exploring not just how imperialism destroyed native ways of life, but also how it ground up its own people in the process. Add in the film’s gorgeous, inventive background aesthetic, and you have a film that is as accomplished as it is effective. Art design that conveys both the wonder of nature and the entrapment of society, characters whose fierce humanity makes their struggles easy to empathize with, and a narrative that teaches without lecturing, asking us to be mindful of the darkness in our history and nature. Just a marvelous film on every level.

Next up, we watched Save Yourselves!, which I’d classify as the first millennial midlife crisis film that I’ve seen. The film’s gimmick is that a couple in their thirties are having relationship trouble, and thus decide to spend a week away from technology and society in order to reconnect. Unfortunately, that particular week away happens to coincide with a devastating alien invasion, meaning our heroes essentially sleep through the apocalypse, only to wake up in a fallen world.

Though it’s a horror-comedy, the only genuinely scary thing about Save Yourselves! is that it implies my generation has arrived at the point where we’re making narcissistic American Beauty-style movies about ourselves. Frankly, there’s not much to recommend this one; it takes a good forty minutes or so to even get off the ground, and in the meantime, its leads are so unpleasant to each other that it’s a chore to spend time with them. Then, because it’s wasted so much time on setup, it only gets maybe thirty minutes or so of goofy apocalyptic shenanigans before it abruptly ends, without answering any of the questions it was ostensibly exploring. There’s about a third of a good movie here, but that’s not a recommendation-worthy ratio.

After that, I rebounded with another quasi-classic: Re-Animator, an exceedingly loose adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s Herbert West stories. Re-Animator delights in its over-the-top imagery, taking its story of doctors attempting reanimation in the most gruesome directions possible. The practical effects measure up to classics like The Thing and The Fly, but Re-Animator’s greatest weapon is Jeffrey Combs, who throws everything at the wall in his performance as mad scientist Herbert West. Combs is one of the most electrifying mad scientists I’ve seen, affecting a perfect mixture of eerily cold professionalism and over-the-top passion for reanimating corpses. The film is tasteless and gross, but if you like tasteless, gross, and very good horror movies, it absolutely qualifies.