Hey folks, and welcome on back to Wrong Every Time. I hope you’re all staying warm through these interminable winter days, and am happy to report I’ve got a sturdy pile of film reflections ready for your perusal. I’ve also been continuing my journey through anime of the past; after subjecting my housemates to eighty episodes of Tomino, I figured it was time to call for suggestions from the crowd, and thus Outlaw Star served as our latest anime endeavor. I last saw Outlaw Star in episodic fragments after school on Toonami, so it was quite a blast of nostalgia to return to its crew, and even more satisfying to realize Outlaw Star is just a damn good time. I’ll probably rustle up some composed thoughts on the show soon, but for now, let’s run through a fresh selection of feature films!
First off, our continuing march through slashers of dubious canonicity led us back to the Scream franchise, as we charged through Scream III and Scream IV in quick succession. With the first Scream defining itself via its meta understanding of slasher film convention, and the second making do with the conventions inherent in horror sequels, the conceptual pickings are understandably slimmer for these later entries.
The third entry makes some hay about the conventions of “horror trilogies,” but there’s frankly not much to dig into there. Much more effective is its film-within-a-film conceit, wherein a streak of killings upset the production of the in-universe Stab 3, the third film adapted from the book written by in-universe reporter Gale Weathers about the first Scream’s killings. Yes, our levels of meta storytelling have indeed become impossibly nested, but watching characters run around a backlot designed to evoke the actual sets of the first Scream is nonetheless an oddly engaging concept, and seeing Gale Weathers contend with an actress evoking her most obnoxious qualities is a treat.
For Scream IV, Wes Craven necessarily shifts from commentary on sequels to commentary on remakes, which is of course accompanied by a dramatic rerun of the first Scream’s narrative, now featuring the original survivors of Sidney, Dewey, and Gale as the town’s hardened veterans. There’s a cheap sort of fun to be had in admiring Craven’s close-but-not-quite approximation of his own prior hit, complete with actors who were clearly cast to look and sound like their predecessors. But what truly justifies this film, beyond the fading allure of the franchise’s meta trickery, is that the kills are actually tense and gruesome. It seems odd to say regarding the director of The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes, but the Scream films have always been a fairly chaste and non-threatening sort of slasher, and cranking up the messiness of the murders does a fair job of justifying this film.
Our next viewing was They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, a ‘69 psychological drama centered on a Depression-era dance competition. With the allure of provided meals and a $1500 prize awaiting the last couple standing, couples must dance until they drop for days, weeks, and eventually months, earning only a ten minute break for every two hours of dancing. Who will succeed, who will fail, and who will win the hearts of our gracious audience!? It’s the show of the century folks, so secure your seats and cheer those kids on!
From its opening juxtaposition of the dance competition’s rules and protagonist Robert’s reflections of a horse being put down, They Shoot Horses’ central thematic point is clear. Even while waiting in line for their tickets, the key players reflect on how much they’re like cattle, with Robert’s partner Gloria stating that “we’re worse than cattle, because we know the hammer is coming.” But a theme need not be subtle to be impactful, and as two hours of physical exhaustion and willful cruelty by their ringmaster unfold, mankind’s capacity for both exertion and dehumanization becomes clear in every shaking body and thousand-yard stare. Dance competitions like this fall into a tradition of “at least they’ve got it worse” human spectacle stretching from lions versus Christians to Hunger and Squid games, but here, neither fantasy nor historical distance can protect us from the acknowledgment of our ringmaster’s philosophy. Miserable people want to see misery, and is that so wrong?
You come to hate the dance’s ringmaster Rocky (Gig Young) almost as much as the actual dancers do, both for his implacable indifference to the suffering he causes, as well as his unwelcome understanding that cruelty is what the audience truly wants. As the weeks of torture built up, I was reminded of that line from The Sea Wolf – “there’s only so much a man will bear just to stay alive.” There is something tragically uplifting in just how much these dancers bear to stay alive, but ultimately, their dreams of glory are worth nothing more than a cattle’s idle curiosity about their conveyor belt’s destination. A furious and gripping film.
Next up was The Gold Rush, which served as my introduction to Charlie Chaplin’s filmography. As it turns out, this Chaplin fellow is pretty darn funny, and a hundred years of cinematic developments have done basically nothing to diminish the craft or impact of his comedy. Even down to the basic way Chaplin duck-waddles around the screen, it’s clear he is one of those rare comedians who has absolute physical control of his body, and can contort any given muscle in precisely the right way for optimal comedic effect. And his mastery of the screen itself is equally refined; with basically every aspect of this film’s production in his hands, he creates a perfect marriage of stage set and physical execution, with the ultimate effect coming outrageously close to the holistic visual comedy of a great Looney Tune.
The Gold Rush migrates comfortably from setpiece to setpiece, its comedy ranging from balletic pratfalls to tragic misunderstandings to the correct way to cook and eat a shoe. Though narrative clearly isn’t its priority, it nonetheless weaves a coherent narrative path out of Chaplin’s adventures in the Alaskan frontier, banking successfully on the innocent charm of his Tramp persona. Watching Chaplin’s Tramp made me understand why Rowan Atkinson plays Mr. Bean without words; in this realm of elegant physical comedy and fundamental human emotions, words would only clutter the drama, and detract from the purity of emotion as conveyed through expression and body language. Chaplin was the first and quite likely the best of these comic geniuses, and his work is as funny and formally impressive today as the day it was first released.
We then watched Peeping Tom, a 1960 Michael Powell that until this week stood as the most important missing link in my horror cinema education. Peeping Tom caused such a scandal when it premiered that it actually damaged Powell’s career, but it’s since gone on to be recognized as one of the key predecessors to horror’s transformation through the ‘70s and ‘80s, as well as a masterpiece in its own right.
The film centers on an aspiring film director named Mark, who is never seen without his trusted camera at hand. There’s a reason for that: Mark’s father dedicated his son’s childhood to pursuing his own studies on fear, and thus Mark spent his every youthful moment both on-camera and at the mercy of his sadistic father. As a result, Mark has grown up both timid and dedicated to continuing his father’s work, to the extent that he kills women purely so he can capture their expressions of mortal terror.
Even as a modern viewer with hundreds of horror films behind him, Peeping Tom’s voyeuristic framing and uncomfortably human killer makes for an unsettling viewing experience. It’s clear that Powell was struggling with the inherently voyeuristic nature of cinema, with its odd mixture of artifice and earnestness, and Mark serves as a surprisingly sympathetic vehicle for this theme. It was relentless filming and the prodding of a director’s hand that drove him into this state, and it’s clear that he thinks only completing this project, his “documentary,” will free him from his urges. Peeping Tom even finds the time for a genuinely convincing love story between Mark and one of his tenants, drawing a further line between Mark’s project and the general search for connection or truth that drives all artists, all documenters of human frailty.
And yet, in spite of Mark’s human complexity and sympathetic qualities, the scenes where he’s seeing footage for his documentary still feel like heart-stopping crosses with the devil himself. Carl Boehm is able to perform some kind of perverse magic trick of personal transmutation; when a woman is alone with Mark, the self-assurance and slight melody of his voice somehow shifts from comforting to concerning, while his perpetual half-smile no longer implies a joke the two of you are sharing. Between Boehm’s remarkable performance and Powell’s utter confidence in lighting and staging, Mark’s kill scenes are both chokingly tense and visually enthralling, with the perspective shots of Mark’s camera and the undeniable thrill of the experience making the audience complicit in his project. A film that precipitated and predicted the fundamental questions of modern horror, all while offering a flawless and frightening experience of its own.
