Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. I come to you today directly from the Elden Ring mines, having been laboring on FromSoftware’s latest since literally the moment it was released. Elden Ring is the biggest Soulsborne yet, and with two other housemates also vying for playtime, it will surely be a while still before any of us return to civil society. Sixty hours in, the game still feels too good for this world; too perfect an articulation of the best virtues of open world and combat gameplay, too close to the “theoretical perfect game” I’d theorize by combining the greatest aspects of four masterpieces.
As a result of Elden Ring’s all-consuming perfection, our selection of films this week has largely been guided by the principle “can you follow this film over your shoulder during your turn on Elden Ring.” Light selections are the order of the day, but we still managed to scrape together an interesting collection of viewings. Let’s storm down the Week in Review!
We started off the week in typical fashion with Battleship, a film adapting… that children’s game where you put little pins in a board to try to sink your opponent’s battleships. Battleship is basically drowning in US Navy propaganda, utterly squanders its terrific secondary cast (Neeson, Plemons, and even a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him Rami Malek), and clearly exemplifies the literary brain drain at the heart of modern Hollywood. I had a pretty great time with it.
I think propaganda just has to be more insidious than this to really irk me? Battleship is so loudly in love with the navy and its big cool ships that my distaste looped right back around to fondness. Beyond celebrating the game of Battleship itself (which the film truly succeeds in, remarkably enough), this is clearly a film for the inner five-year-old who believes big navy ship are the coolest things in the entire world. Long, luscious pans down battlements or across bridge interfaces essentially provide much the same appeal as any mecha anime, celebrating the simple pleasure of big machines that kill good. There is no craft in Battleship’s script, but also no pretension; “what if battleships had to fight aliens and it was awesome” is where the story begins and ends.
I do have to give the film particular credit for one inspired choice. Early on in the film, a big energy bubble separates the main characters from the rest of the world, essentially creating a closed battlefield with clear resources for the remainder of the film. Through this choice, Battleship is able to instill its later conflicts with the weight of genuine consequences, with the clarified “board variables” allowing for genuine tactical investment. It’s a trick that any fan of great shonens like Hunter x Hunter should appreciate, and it goes a long way towards making this film an overall success. If your story is a game, lean into it, clarify the stakes, and let the audience follow along!
We followed that up with another seaborne adventure, the ‘50s creature feature It Came From Beneath the Sea. This one’s notable almost purely for its stop motion beast, a giant octopus brought to life by the reliable Ray Harryhausen. That octopus is indeed pretty sweet, but it appears infrequently, and the minutes between are largely filled with an unconvincing love triangle where it’s never quite clear if Science Man is actively surrendering his girlfriend to Army Man or not. I like to think they all collectively married each other, as Science Man and Army Man had the best chemistry out of any of them, but either way I’m glad they got that whole octopus situation sorted out.
That was followed by the week’s first genuine classic, the formative giallo film Blood and Black Lace. Centered on a fashion school that’s experiencing a rash of killings, Black Lace typifies many of the flourishes that would come to define the genre, and offers a marvelously lurid murder mystery in the process.
The use of prominent colored lighting, ornate mise-en-scene, and even smaller touches like those ever-present black gloves all position Black Lace as a confident precursor to later achievements like Deep Red. Just check out the film’s opening credits to get a sense for how goddamn stylish and stately this production is, utterly self-assured in its mix of haute couture stylings and salacious murders. The choice of a fashion studio as venue is particularly inspired, with the film effectively leaning into the impersonal horror of undressed mannequins (a terror that is further invoked through the killer’s anonymous mask).
In terms of structure, as one of the earliest proto-slashers (we’re still a decade out from Black Christmas), I found it interesting how much Black Lace leaned into the procedural elements of its mystery narrative. Obviously the slasher genre didn’t come from nothing, but it can be hard to see the genre’s roots in its current incarnation; through Black Lace, it becomes clear that the slasher genre is in some part a child of noir, except with the focus shifted from the beleaguered detective to the hapless murder victims. Through Black Lace’s procession of incidents, we see mystery and melodrama negotiating with the pure horror of its kill scenes, as a whole new style of drama struggles to be born. An interesting historical artifact, and also a highly effective film.
Our next feature stretched close enough to glory to actually make me angry, as we checked out the recent feature Come True. Come True explores some fertile horror territory, focusing on a young woman who is haunted by restless dreams. In these dreams, she passes through distant ziggurats and fractured memories, each journey unique in its own way, but all of them ending in a confrontation with the shadow man. A mass of darkness with two pinpricks for eyes, he waits at the heart of each dark dreamscape, forever watching.
That sort of dream shit is scary, and Come True finds an effective midpoint between the shadow apparitions of sleep paralysis and Lovecraft staples like The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. The film’s direction and cinematography are also excellent; lots of striking compositions, and the use of unreliable mini-monitors for the dream visions greatly enhances their ambiguous impact. But the goddamn movie just doesn’t follow through – at the very end, it retreats from any meaningful sort of climax or even just a conclusion, abandoning its dramatic duty with a tossed-off “it was all a dream.” “It was all a dream” is the coward’s way of apologizing for not thinking of an ending, and it drastically soured my impression of a film that otherwise frequently verged on excellent. Respect your audience enough to follow your story to its end, please.
The week’s final viewing was another classic, as we checked out Roger Corman’s House of Usher. Corman’s lengthy catalog of B-horror tossups are far less significant than his role as a mentor for the luminaries of New Hollywood, and House of Usher itself is mostly just functional in terms of its cinematic ambitions. But oh, Vincent Price, how you languorously drape your sorry self over each piece of furniture, and draw out your every line to the savory peak of schmaltz. Price was born to play Poe characters; Poe writes precisely how Price acts, and you can see how Price relishes the opportunity to embody his heart’s truth. Poe’s stories are generally a bit too concerned with psychological melancholia over narrative action to make for great film drama, and House of Usher isn’t really an exception, but watching Price despairingly cradle his precious lute is worth the price of entry all by itself.
