Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. With the various projects attendant to the year’s end now complete, I’ve been returning to my usual watching habits, meaning I’ve got a genuinely fresh crop of film reflections for you all. Alongside the usual features, I’ve also spent the last week munching through the original Mobile Suit Gundam, and have quite enjoyed the show’s first dozen episodes. More than anything else, I feel impressed by the confidence with which it proceeds: the characters feel fully realized, the narrative trajectory feels almost inevitable, and countless tiny details gesture towards a solidity of worldbuilding that helps me genuinely invest in this world. I can easily see why it inspired such fervent fandom, and look forward to continuing Amuro’s traumatic journey as soon as possible. But first, some movies!

Our first watch of the week was the 2018 Halloween, which frames itself as a direct sequel to the original, picking up Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis)’s story decades after the events of the first Halloween. Laurie’s experiences with Michael Myers have left her a traumatized survivalist, whose obsession with Michael has soured her relationship with her daughter and granddaughter. However, when the man himself escapes from a botched prison transfer, it will be up to Strode and her family to make sure evil dies for good.

If you’ve been following along with these weekly reflections, you’ll likely know my general reaction to Halloween 2018 before I even say anything. The film’s entire reason for being is to break one of what I consider the cardinal rules of horror sequels: don’t treat the original as a holy text, with all of your own ideas merely serving as genuflection to some detail from your predecessors. If I wanted to watch the original Halloween, I’d watch that; spending your running time reminding me of a better movie I could be watching is rarely the path to my heart.

The film rarely rises above that standard of gesturing towards better scenes from its predecessors, though its staging and lighting design admittedly pull off a handful of tense moments and nice compositions. But alongside its conceptual issues, this Halloween also suffers from the damning issue of not being scary, and really only tangentially being a horror movie. By setting the film decades after its central heroine has already evolved into her final form, Halloween denies itself any sense of suspense or building dread regarding what’s going on; our heroes don’t seem helpless before an unknowable threat, they are actually highly prepared for a fully quantified one. As such, the film tends to seesaw more between character drama and action movie, with limited success in both fields. Someone more enthused by reverent sequels might find plenty to enjoy here, but I was not impressed.

After that we screened a movie I hadn’t seen in many years, the 1999 version of The Mummy, starring Brendan Fraser as an adventurer enlisted to lead two siblings (Rachel Weisz and John Hannah) to the lost city of Hamunaptra. On the way, they acquire a gaggle of American rivals and a scattering of cursed artifacts, ultimately leading to the revival of the cursed Imhotep. Fraser and his buds are then chased halfway to Cairo and back, suffering calamitous misadventures all along the way.

It’s a little hard to be objective with The Mummy, as I saw this early and frequently enough that it’s secured a permanent nest in my adolescent memories. But as far as my lying eyes can tell, the film really holds up, and actually feels even more enjoyable now that Hollywood has largely forgotten the art of the rip-roaring adventure.

Brendan Fraser is a delight, and brightens every scene with his brilliant smile and trusty pistols. Hollywood could never quite figure out how to play him as a leading man, but this is the closest they got: his buffoonish comedy chops are downplayed but still present, his irrepressible over-expressiveness is perfectly suited to a story so filled with insanity, and he has never looked hotter. Rachel Weisz also rises high above the general standard of “action hero companion,” with the wise choice to frame the story from her perspective ensuring this always feels like a collaborative adventure. And the secondary cast is brimming with memorable performances, like Kevin O’Connor’s endearing vacillation between sad puppy and triumphant tyrant.

Alongside the cast, The Mummy succeeds on the back of its convincing sets and smartly realized stunt work. It’s a little funny to think that when this came out it was highlighted in large part for its CG elements (the mummy, the scarabs), because looking back from our current era, what most stood out to me was how much practical work was still employed here. The sets are real, the stunts are real, they tramped out into a real desert to shoot it, and I’m really thankful they made the effort. The CG thrills of modern action films will crumble with age like pillars in sand; a dude actually leaping from a burning building to a horse’s back is eternal.

Inspired by that watch, I decided to check out its ancestral predecessor, screening Universal Pictures’ version of The Mummy starring Boris Karloff. Though its drama is more centralized on men standing in well-furnished rooms gravely discussing things, I was nonetheless surprised to see just how much of this film’s central narrative was retained for the ‘90s film. The actual beats are largely the same, only the focus has changed: rather than centering on a devil-may-care adventurer, this film emphasizes the perspective of Karloff’s bride-to-be, a half-Egyptian woman played by Zita Johann.

The interplay of Karloff and Johann is the heart of this film, and both run away with the material. Johann is so convincing as a snarky, self-assured young noblewoman that her transformation into Karloff’s thrall feels like a genuine tragedy, her own pleas to save her true self ringing with honest desperation. And Karloff more than fulfills his reputation as one of cinema’s most grand and intimidating monsters, with the power of his gaze requiring no explanation, only its own self-evident presence. The Mummy is unlikely to scare modern audiences (for much the reasons Karloff himself describes in Targets), but the impact of its performances remains uninhibited by age.

Next up was Hobo with a Shotgun, which I feel compelled to state was something I walked in on my housemates watching, leaving me little choice in the matter. The film is a full-length expansion of one of the fake trailers from Grindhouse, and like Grindhouse itself, it’s an exercise in bringing ‘70s exploitation theater back to life. I was initially just put off by the film’s senseless grotesqueries, but I have to admit, I eventually began to see the strangled poetry in a line like “I want to cut my dick off and rub it all over your titties.” The film succeeds the most when it gets really weird in its own mythology, like when it introduces two metal-clad, seemingly timeless assassins who are collectively referred to as “The Plague.” Absolutely nothing to see here if you’re not into vulgarity as violent catharsis, but I found a little more heart than I was expecting, and certainly appreciated it.

We finished up the week with Twins, a ridiculous film featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito as unlikely twins who were separated at birth, and only come to find each other in middle age. Schwarzenegger stars as Julius, a man blessed with all the fruits of academia, but no practical knowledge of the world. Upon learning of his brother’s existence, he immediately sets out to find him, and eventually discovers streetwise former orphan Vincent (DeVito). Though Vincent initially assumes this is some kind of scam, he eventually warms up to Julius, and the two enjoy charming buddy adventures all across the southwest.

Twins is preposterous on paper, and only works because of the individual and collective chemistry of its perfectly chosen stars. Schwarzenegger is an absolute delight in this film; casting him as an oversized school boy was a stroke of genius, as the man’s ability to emphasize a discordance between extreme physicality and meek body language is one of his greatest strengths. The fact that Schwarzenegger embraces his accent makes me think a lot of folks discount him as nothing but a slab of meat for action movies, but the dude’s comedy chops are genuinely formidable; it is precisely because he understands his body’s impact so well that he is able to turn confidence and intimidation on or off like a light switch, making him an ideal family film teddy bear.

DeVito’s also great, of course, and does an excellent job of realizing the hunger for family and understanding that is Twins’ emotional core. It’s all exactly as fun as you’d expect from a DeVito/Schwarzenegger teamup, leaving me ultimately surprised no one had ever previously foisted this film upon me. If you’re a fan of guys being dudes, check it out.