Hey folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I am frustrated to admit that spring still offers no sign of its allegedly imminent arrival, but I’ve been making do the best I can, and putting all this time inside to work on various media projects. Admittedly, one of those projects was just “play the shit out of Pokémon Violet,” but I’ve also been dedicating myself to several more reputable endeavors. Alongside our usual film viewings, we’ve also started on two more anime projects: the original Dragon Ball, as well as the ‘97 adaptation of Berserk. Both have been engaging in their own ways, though Berserk’s unrelentingly grim tone has made for necessarily staggered viewing. Fortunately, what Berserk lacks in cheer is more than made up for by Dragon Ball, which has so far proved itself to be just as joyful and significantly more horny than I remember. Anyway, I’ll likely have more to say about those journeys once I’m further in, but for now let’s run down the week’s feature films!

Our first film of the week was The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, a recent Terry Gilliam feature starring Adam Driver as an ad executive who’s lost his spark, and Jonathan Pryce as a man who once starred as Don Quixote in Driver’s thesis project, and who now seems to truly believe himself Quixote. On a shoot in Spain near the village where he once created his film, Driver is struck by a desire to check in on his old friends, and soon finds himself serving as Poncho on Quixote’s final adventure.

As is appropriate given both Don Quixote’s wildly extended development time and Gilliam’s general narrative tendencies, this film is a sprawling and inconsistently glorious mess. Like many Gilliam films, Don Quixote rambles impatiently between disparate and preposterous episodic adventures – unlike the best of them, these episodic tales don’t really congeal into a greater whole. It seems that like the film’s stars, Gilliam found himself obsessed with the legend and the failure of Don Quixote, but unable to articulate whatever truth dangled from the far side of Quixote’s mystique. What is left are anecdotes and embers, scattered moments of poignancy or truth floating in a sea of pandemonium.

Fortunately, Gilliam, Driver, and Pryce are all so talented that the journey is valuable in spite of its vague destination. All three men seem to be seeking the same truth, grasping at something vital and significant – Driver through his desire to return to authentic cinema, Pryce through his performance as a man of stature, and Gilliam through his careful tinkering with Quixote’s mystique. Though the film doesn’t articulate an answer, I could feel the urgency of its question, its desire to find the profound in the absurd after a full career of struggle. Perhaps it’s only appropriate that Gilliam’s quest to divine the essence of Quixote would end in failure, slamming into the dust and looking up to see sunlight piercing a windmill’s sails.

We then watched the 2007 horror feature The Mist, an adaptation of a Stephen King novella. Starring an ensemble cast of convincing small towners, the film centers on a seemingly murderous mist that drives a Maine community to shelter in their local supermarket, where they are haunted by both mist-born threats and their own creeping anxieties.

The Mist is a sturdy and effective pressure cooker of a film, embracing the almost screenplay-ready efficiency of King’s novella in order to provide a tense and varied horror experience. The ambiguity of the mist threat allows the film to neatly partition itself into three acts, proceeding from “what’s going on” to “we need to man the walls” to “our own demons will destroy us.” The enduring threat presented by an apocalypse-minded Christian zealot felt ripped from the headlines back in George W. Bush-era America; fifteen years down the line, Marcia Gay Harden’s character now feels like a proud reminder that the sickness of religious fanaticism is never far from the surface of our society.

Harden’s rambling keeps the tension high even when the literal monsters subside, offering a constant call to embrace the Id and level your assumed righteousness at your fellow man. Meanwhile, the film’s intricately ghoulish, almost Harryhausen-esque monster designs means its CG holds up far better than similarly dated films, making sequences like the cast’s journey into a spider-infected pharmacy a genuine nightmare. Top all that off with one of the most gut-wrenching endings in horror, and you end up with an altogether excellent horror film, one that easily counts among the superior King adaptations.

Our next feature was Blair Witch, the 2016 continuation of the classic franchise, directed by Adam Wingard. Blair Witch apparently got a lot of hate when it came out for not measuring up to the original, and having watched it, I can agree that it’s not as scary or vital as The Blair Witch Project. But frankly, that just doesn’t seem like a fair comparison. I consider The Blair Witch Project to stand among the most effective works of found footage, folk horror, and horror in general, meaning any sequel that doesn’t establish itself as an instant classic is bound to be a letdown.

Removed from the expectations of following up a masterpiece of horror cinema, Blair Witch proves itself a perfectly effective horror film. While the opening sequences make it seem like we’re in for a more conventional slasher experience, the film quickly embraces the style and spooks of its predecessor, offering some fun variations on the original’s most famous setpieces. Adam Wingard feels like a great director who’s had terrible luck in terms of projects – his Death Note adaptation was panned for being melodramatic and juvenile, but Death Note has always been melodramatic and juvenile, you were just so young when you read it that you were still able to take it seriously. Blair Witch similarly embraces the heart of its source material, and while it’s far from essential, it’s still a fine entry in the found footage genre.

Last up for the week was George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, which has the humble honor of being one of the most influential horror movies of all time. While the original Night of the Living Dead established many tropes of zombie cinema, Dawn of the Dead expanded Romero’s vision from a farmhouse to an entire blighted seaboard, offering a leap in scale similar to that from Max Max to The Road Warrior. As a zombie plague spreads across America, two SWAT officers and two newsroom employees snag a traffic report helicopter, and attempt to outrun the apocalypse. With each refueling stop offering a fresh chance for danger, the crew eventually stop down on top of a massive shopping mall, and attempt to make it their personal kingdom.

Much of what we associate with modern zombie media was either established or solidified in Romero’s fiery sequel. The link between zombies and rampant consumerism is made playfully yet insistently clear through the film’s tongue-in-cheek contrast of flesh-eating zombies stumbling through a brightly lit mall, regaled by chipper announcers listing off flash specials. The fundamental idea of a mall as a venue for horror has been reprised by Chopping Mall and many others, while basically the movie in its entirety has been adapted through games like Dead Rising and Left 4 Dead. It’s hard to take five steps in the horror sphere without bumping into something that in some way owes tribute to Dawn of the Dead, and that comes down to more than its fundamentally strong concepts – the film simply kicks ass.

That Road Warrior comparison wasn’t just an idle contrast of scale – much like that sequel, Dawn of the Dead elects to shower its audience in all the juicy payoffs its predecessor only gestured towards, offering setpiece after setpiece of thrilling zombie action. The fundamental conceit of “we must turn this mall into a sustainable fortress” is a masterstroke that pays continuous dramatic dividends, giving the heroes clear incentive to make a diverse variety of counterattacks and flanking maneuvers against their dead-eyed cohabitants. It’s always a little frustrating when horror protagonists fail simply because they made stupid decisions; delightfully, Dawn of the Dead revels in the precise opposite, consistently surprising and impressing with the ingenuity and bravery of its heroes. On top of all that, if you watch the Dario Argento cut of the film, you’ll be treated to the sweet sounds of Goblin at the peak of their powers. On the whole, Dawn of the Dead is a classic that reaffirms its essentiality with every watch.