Hey folks, and welcome the heck back to Wrong Every Time. Today I come to you equipped with ghouls, goblins, and tales of rapturous fantasy, as is only fitting for this most Halloweeny of weeks. Yes, I know Halloween was on Monday, but that’s still closer to this Week in Review than the previous one, so that’s what I’m conceptually going with here. Regardless, this has been a relatively fruitful week of film screenings, including classics of both horror and romance, as well our continuing adventures through the Naruto film canon. Back on the home front, I’ve also been gearing up for the climax to act one of my house’s D&D campaign, where I’m thinking their last opponent might turn out to be an In The Hills, The Cities-style colossus of melded human flesh. Too much? Maybe too much. Still tinkering with that one, I’ll get back to you. In the meantime, let’s break down some films!

Having thoroughly enjoyed the films of both Dario Argento and Mario Bava, it seemed only fitting to continue on with the third titan of Italian horror, Lucio Fulci. Unlike Argento and Bava, Fulci isn’t tightly associated with giallo pictures; his films trend more towards the gore-heavy “video nasty” realm, from his unofficial sequel to Night of the Living Dead through his loose “Gates of Hell” trilogy. It was the second and most acclaimed of that trilogy that we started with: the generously grotesque The Beyond.

The film stars Catriona MacColl as a New Yorker who recently inherited a dilapidated New Orleans hotel. She sets to work renovating the building, but deaths and other strange events keep piling up, all associated with the building’s ominous basement. Eventually, even those who’ve been killed rise again as zombies, prompting a battle to escape the mouth of hell.

The Beyond’s signature strengths are its disorienting, dreamlike atmosphere and its truly brutal kills. Seriously, this film is absolutely loaded with gooey, dripping practical effects; every bad thing you could conceive happening to a human eye happens somewhere in this movie, and you wouldn’t believe the nonsense they get up to with various acids and oils. I’ve personally reached a point where I can just marvel at the practical effects work rather than wince at the gore, but I wouldn’t suggest anyone eat a heavy lunch before screening this picture.

As for the actual story, its near-incoherency feels almost to its benefit. Scripted lines and character actions at times seem to contradict each other, which you might label as accidental discrepancy, but also work perfectly well in conjuring the delirious confusion of living over a hellmouth. Less justifiable are the generally atrocious performances; MacColl in particular can’t pull off a single convincing line read, which may come down to the fact that she and her director didn’t share a common language, but nonetheless makes it tough to feel much genuine fear or sympathy for her character. Still, The Beyond is more about setting a tone and offering monstrous acts of savagery than telling any sort of tightly written human story, and it accomplishes both those objectives with distinction. I’m eager to continue with Fulci’s catalog!

We followed that up with a decidedly less canonical horror feature, 2011’s Shark Night 3D. In spite of its immediately worrying title, Shark Night actually proved to be a perfectly functional horror romp, splitting the difference between slasher and creature feature. You’ve got your van full of collegiate horror archetypes, you’ve got a lake full of hungry sharks, and you’ve got a couple dangerous hillbillies to season. Nothing fancy, nothing surprising, just some good old-fashioned thrills and kills. If there were a grand list of films that open with a van full of hapless college students and absolutely follow through on that promise, Shark Night 3D would be proudly in attendance.

After that we continued our march through the Naruto filmography, screening the franchise’s fourth entry Naruto Shippuden: The Movie. I sort of figured the production team would go all-out for the first post-Shippuden theatrical feature, but this one unfortunately turned out to be a lesser entry in the evolving canon. The first and perhaps biggest issue is that this film’s antagonist is primarily supported by a massive terracotta army, meaning the film relies quite heavily on atrocious CG models.

Anime producers still haven’t figured out how to make CG integration look any good, so you can bet your ass that this 2007-vintage CG looks completely terrible. Aside from that, the film also suffers from the general flattening of characterization that accompanied Naruto’s shift to Shippuden; Kishimoto’s writing ability seemed to diminish precipitously after the break, and that’s apparent in this film’s preference for flat self-seriousness over any flourishes of characterization. Still, there are some good cuts scattered throughout, and it was fun seeing the team work under Neji’s emphatically competent command. I don’t regret watching it, but it’s certainly not worth an active recommendation.

Our next viewing was Snow White and the Huntsman, which asks the question “what happens if we attempt to turn Snow White into a Lord of the Rings movie?” The result is close to narratively incoherent, owing largely to the film’s very bad script, but jesus pesus is it an unexpectedly well-appointed ride. Huntsman’s cast list is absurdly impressive, with the top billings of Kristen Stewart, Charlize Theron, and Chris Hemsworth belying a roster that includes legends like Ian McShane and Bob Hoskins among the seven dwarves. And the production design is just as lavish, offering fully constructed medieval villages and battles with dozens of real goddamn horses charging in sequence.

Sadly, as I said, all of these gifts are ultimately squandered on a script that can’t evoke either convincingly human-like dialogue or the portentous poetry of Tolkien’s prose. I do commend the film for at least attempting period-appropriate dialogue, rather than the “so that just happened” modern cadence of stuff like School For Good And Evil, but the results are ultimately lacking in either grace or voice, leaving Kristen Stewart struggling to imbue her lines with the gravity they’re assigned. Great cast, great costumes, fire the writer and consign him to the darkest of dungeons.

Last up for the week was Roxanne, Steve Martin’s romantic comedy adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac. As in the original play, Martin’s “Charlie” is a man of many talents, from his rapier wit to his prodigious athleticism. However, he possesses a deep insecurity regarding his exceptionally large nose, and assumes it will prevent him from ever finding love. When an astronomy PhD student named Roxanne rents a house in town, he nonetheless falls head over heels for her, only to learn she actually has feelings for his dim-witted fellow fireman Chris. After Chris utterly fails in his attempt to write Roxanne a love letter, Charlie steps in with some key revisions, leading to a romance of Charlie’s words gilding Chris’s lips.

Roxanne is a deeply, unabashedly sentimental film, and all the better for it. Its remote tourist trap setting feels like a sanctuary displaced from time, where everyone in town knows each other, and a boy deciding to climb up on his rooftop and stay there will bring the whole village running. Martin conducts this quaint, off-kilter setting like it’s an extension of his own body, dancing sprightly from witty takedowns to physical comedy, and from there to the rhapsodic prose of his letters to Roxanne. Crucially, there is no villain in this story: Chris isn’t a jerk, he’s just an idiot, and his romantic mishaps are almost as endearing as Charlie’s own. Some sequences, like when Charlie’s nose leads his amateur fire brigade to their first genuine fire, ascend from whimsy into pure fairytale magic, delighting in the joy and irreverence of comic cinema, as if our Charlie were Chaplin himself. A winning testament to Martin’s comedic talents, as well as his uniquely off-kilter view of the world.