Hello everyone, and welcome on back to Wrong Every Time. You all doing okay? I’m frankly feeling a bit lethargic at the moment, but fortunately, my current tasks are largely mechanical ones. Just gotta write this here opening paragraph, find some screencaps for the week’s features, and plug it all into the CMS – perfect lazy afternoon work, after which I’ll be clearing my head with a nice jog. My own micro-moods aside, we’ve got quite an interesting collection of films this week, ranging from another Hitchcock classic to the original Top Gun. I can’t imagine I’ll be adding anything to the Top Gun discourse that hasn’t been rehashed a thousand times already, but I’d be a terrible reviewer if I let my intellectual redundancy stop me from opening my big fat mouth. Let’s start off with a tragic misfire from one of my favorite directors, as we burn through a fresh Week in Review!

Having already watched all of John Carpenter’s generally agreed-upon “good” films, our forays into his less-acclaimed features commenced with the late-90s production Vampires. And though I would love to tell you that this one’s actually a hidden gem, the consensus sadly held out: Vampires kinda sucks, and is not a film I’d recommend to anyone but the staunchest of Carpenter completionists.

There are certainly interesting elements in Vampires. Most prominently, the film’s attempts at creating a “vampire western” result in some unique tonal collisions, with the grimy, claustrophobic look of Carpenter’s general oeuvre awkwardly pressing against his attempts to evoke grandeur through wide-open cinematography, or pathos through lingering sequences of stoic men driving places. But alongside the film’s general clumsiness of execution, it’s perpetually dragged down by a mean-spiritedness and juvenility of tone that emanates from both its lead actor (a perfectly/unfortunately cast James Woods) and its relentlessly ugly script.

Vampires is a mean film, and not mean in the interesting, tortured-character-study sort of way. It’s mean in the way a playground bully will push you down, then start calling you homophobic slurs when you cry – behavior I would readily expect from any of this film’s leads. The film exudes the cruel bravado of angry masculinity, and given it lacks the tension or conceptual inspiration of Carpenter’s better work, there’s really nothing to focus on except that ugliness of spirit. An unfortunate low point in an otherwise scuzzy yet star-studded directorial career.

Fortunately, recent Shudder release The Cellar served as an excellent palate cleanser, and yet another fine entry in my beloved “malevolent architecture” subgenre. The Cellar focuses on a family who’ve just moved into an ominous country townhouse, full of creaking doors and strange symbols, which they are for some reason certain will enrich their children’s lives in some unmentioned way. Of course, the usual spookums commence with much haste, and soon the family’s teenage daughter is spirited away by some creature in the cellar. Though the cops suspect mundane explanations, the girl’s mother knows something sinister took her daughter, and embarks on a journey to unlock the house’s terrible secrets.

Man do I love a story where the house is the monster. Though the performances and direction are perfectly reasonable, the star of The Cellar is the house, and it is a Damn Good House. Strange gothic symbols over all the doors, ominous old records droning lists of numbers, and staircases whose destinations change depending on the whims of their owner. From the moment they insisted on the titular cellar having “only ten stairs” I knew they’d be doing some evil shit with that pronouncement, and I certainly wasn’t disappointed. Though it’s frankly not the scariest of haunted house movies, The Cellar possesses more than enough narrative invention, visual fantasy, and architectural disorientation to serve as a fine example of why buildings should be scary more often. If there’s a closer adaptation of SCP-087 out there, I want to hear about it!

Our next feature was Shadow of a Doubt, an early Hitchcock feature starring Teresa Wright as Charlotte, a profoundly bored teenager, and Joseph Cotten as her beloved Uncle Charlie. Utterly fatigued by the mundanity of the world and her own small-minded parents, Charlotte’s wish for a more enthralling existence is answered when Uncle Charlie arrives to stay with the family. Charlotte sees her uncle as a beacon of worldliness and excitement, but odd discrepancies in his behavior soon raise doubts as to his true nature. And when two men from the government arrive with even more questions, Charlotte begins to realize the wider world might not be such a glamorous place.

Like many Hitchcock films, Shadow of a Doubt lights a fuse at the start and refuses to look away, letting the threat of that eventual explosion draw his audience right up out of their seats. Joseph Cotten is effectively affable and even more effectively terrifying, his mask slipping every time he is forced to engage with the “vermin” that surround him. Cotten’s speeches, as well as the film’s tightly constrained structure, bring to mind the style Hitchcock would later return to with Rope – but unlike Rope’s structural experimentation, Shadow of a Doubt is more interested in being a family drama, and there’s no James Stewart coming to save them.

While Cotten serves masterfully as Shadow of a Doubt’s lurking monster, it is Teresa Wright who defines and elevates the film. Her teenage ennui is palpably realized, and the film’s willingness to let characters literally talk over each other means its early domestic scenes ring far more authentically than most family tableaus. Each of her siblings and parents parse as real and recognizable people, which makes it all the easier to invest in how boring Charlotte finds all of them. Equally convincing is her early adoration of Uncle Charlie, a sort of puppy love that pins on him all the hopes and expectations she has for the real world.

Unfortunately, the real world is a much darker place than she was expecting. With no heroic James Stewart or Cary Grant in the mix, it is up to Charlotte to save herself, setting her apart from Hitchcock’s general roster of put-upon heroines. Instead, Charlotte must shed her childish expectations and grow into a genuine femme fatale, eventually even playing her uncle and the police against each other in order to best seize her true goal. And that goal, in the end? To save her mother from knowing the truth about her beloved younger brother, a revelation that would shatter her naïve, idyllic view of human nature, and taint the one bond that defined her as an individual in her own right. As her mother tearfully explains, it’s easy to get so caught up in being a wife or a mother that “you forget you’re a person at all” – as compromised and false as he is, Uncle Charlie is the last remaining slice of independence in her mind, the last fragment that defines her in her rigid domestic existence.

There’s just so much to dig into there! Through the vast fragility of her mother, we come to see that Charlotte was actually right about the slow death of suburban existence, even if her visions of the “real” world were impossibly gilded. And through Uncle Charlie, she is forced to become acquainted with the yawning darkness that exists just beyond her carefully tended yard, the forces of violence and oblivion that her mother lacks the vocabulary to even describe.

Scene by scene, Charlotte must carefully navigate these contradictory worlds, evolving into a person who can defeat Charlie before he destroys her in turn. The film’s script turns their philosophies into a corrupted poetry, the lighting and shadow work evoke the fierce battle of their true natures, and the background characters collectively voice Hitchcock’s own leering perspective, as friends idly discuss the anatomy a perfect crime from the safety of their living rooms. I feel Hitchcock’s female characters are often his fatal flaw, but in Shadow of a Doubt, we see a heroine who actively rallies against and outgrows his bleak fascinations, who endures the crucible of noir and emerges wiser and stronger, while still possessing genuine hope for the world. It’s no wonder to me this is Hitchcock’s own favorite of his films, as it feels like the one film where the protagonist actually beats him, and refuses to believe the world is as heartless as he does. North by Northwest is more expansive and Vertigo is more formally impressive, but in Shadow of a Doubt we see Hitchcock at war with himself, and the results are breathtaking.

With its sequel now in theaters, it seemed past time to finally watch the original Top Gun. I was skeptical that any film would be able to make modern dogfighting particularly interesting, as it just seemed like technology has largely robbed air combat of any visual drama. Our jets are too fast, their weapons are too automated, and everything happens too quickly – can you really make a compelling action movie out of jet combat?

Well, it turns out I’m wrong and also stupid, because Top Gun soars both literally and metaphorically whenever its characters get in a plane. The film’s dogfighting sequences are varied and thrilling, and the direction and script make it easy to follow the essential beats of the drama. From start to finish, every actual flight sequence is a dramatic gift.

Of course, as Top Gun’s memefied pop culture reputation would attest, all the scenes between those flights are patently ridiculous. The oiled-up volleyball match basically sums up Top Gun’s character-focused material: tenuous machismo draped over a vast well of homoeroticism, as Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer stare daggers at each other from across the tarmac. Cruise’s romance with Kelly McGillis is an unconvincing waste of film stock, but the film is otherwise so stuffed with goofy, self-serious one liners and hate-fuck stares that it’s hard to feel disappointed. Top Gun is not really a good movie, but it is certainly an entertaining one, and serves as an essential entry in the “‘80s macho movie strives for cool and spills right over into camp” subgenre.