Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. I hope you’re all doing well and acting suitably wary on this Ides of March, whether you’ve attracted the enmity of the Roman senate or not. Personally, I’m feeling close to the opposite of perforated with treacherous daggers: work on articles has been proceeding smoothly, our movie screenings have been largely rewarding, and my house is continuing to munch through episodes of supplemental anime in between the feature films. With Berserk now concluded, we’ve been charging full-time through Dragon Ball, and I’m thinking I’ll next add Dennou Coil into the mix. Catching up on One Piece was truly a game changer; where I once would have taken months to get through one of these personal enrichment projects, I can now happily sit down and watch through ten episodes without fidgeting. I’ll have more collected thoughts on these supplementary anime soon, but for now, let’s break down some feature films!
Having broken into Charlie Chaplin’s filmography with the delightful The Gold Rush, it seemed only fitting to check out Buster Keaton as well, and thus we next screened his 1926 feature The General. The film stars Keaton as Johnnie Gray, a train engineer with two loves in his life: his engine The General, and his girl Annabelle Lee. When civil war breaks out, Johnnie rushes to enlist, but is turned away due to his importance as an engineer. But when The General is stolen by spies with Annabelle on board as a hostage, Johnny gets his chance to be a true hero, as he chases both his loves behind enemy lines and back.
The General is a hilarious comedy, a relentless action movie, and a breathtaking feat of stagecraft and physical performance. Keaton lobs one inventive obstacle after another in poor Johnnie’s path, with the number of “I can’t believe he did that without dying” physical feats soon rising beyond counting. The mastery of bodily movement that elevates his stunts also enriches his comedy; there is a dry, endearing wit in both his reserved expression work and the way his overall movement echoes his emotional turns, leading to some of the most fundamentally satisfying double takes in comedy. The film is genuinely astonishing in its physical daring, and has lost none of its energy or charm in the century since its filming. An absolute must-see feature.
Our next feature was The Final Girls, a horror-comedy from 2015. As you might guess by title alone, The Final Girls is a self-aware spin on slasher films, centered on a young woman named Max whose mother is quasi-famous for her role in “Camp Bloodbath.” Three years after her mother’s death, Max is convinced to attend a fan screening of Camp Bloodbath, whereupon she and her friends swiftly find themselves trapped within the movie.
The Final Girls’ preposterous premise is actually the best thing about it, and inspires most of the film’s best jokes (like when they burden the lap dance-happy “slut” archetype with life preservers and floaties just to keep her from summoning the killer). Unfortunately, the actual scripted jokes are lifeless and lackluster, leaning far too hard on winking self-awareness over fundamental comedic structure. It doesn’t help that the film’s cast don’t seem earnestly committed to their own characters; starring a fleet of post-TV stars who probably should have stayed there, everyone’s tongue is always so firmly in their cheek that it’s impossible to invest in their emotions. Which in turns forces the film to rely on its comedy, which is more aggravating than funny, resulting in a perpetual loop of indifferent drama and unfunny humor.
Beyond the grating script and tired performances, The Final Girls’ cinematography also seems designed to annoy people. The film is peppered with persistent spinning zoom shots that do nothing to ratchet up tension, and seem designed to evoke a campiness that doesn’t actually resemble classic slashers at all. Which gets to this film’s most fundamental failing: it assumes slashers are bad movies with bad scripts, bad actors, and bad cinematography, when in fact most of the iconic slashers fare pretty okay on all those fronts. By embracing an exaggerated narrative of slasher failings, The Final Girls only succeeds in adorning itself in all these failings it spuriously assigned to the films it’s aping. Maybe paying a little more attention to what slashers actually do right might have helped this film from tripping on its own damn feet.
We then watched Diablo Rojo PTY, a Panamanian film about a bus that finds itself trapped in a seemingly never-ending jungle. Featuring uneven performances yet vivid practical effects, Diablo Rojo feels a good bit like an early Sam Raimi film, offering a generous buffet of monsters, witches, and even cannibals. Drone shots of the endless jungle create a vivid sense of loneliness and entrapment, an austere shade of horror that’s neatly complimented by grotesqueries like a coven of witches chowing down on a human sacrifice. The film is unpolished but extremely generous, and a fine selection for any fans of particularly squelchy horror.
Last up for the week was Deliverance, a thriller famed for both its impressive sequence of dueling banjos, as well as the brutal sexual assault that opens its second act. I’d frankly been a little nervous to screen this one for the house, as I hate that sense of vouching for something that’s clearly making people uncomfortable. Fortunately, one of my housemates apparently confused this film with a different Burt Reynolds film (“Gator,” which contrary to their expectations doesn’t actually contain any alligators), and though I was surprised by the suggestion, I was happy to sit along for the ride.
Deliverance follows four Atlanta businessmen on an ambitious camping trip, wherein they intend to paddle canoes down a backwoods river before the entire area is flooded into a lake. Burt Reynolds plays Lewis, a self-proclaimed survivor who dreams of applying his woodland know-how to a post-civilization world. Jon Voight plays Ed, his skeptical but reasonably experienced friend, with the decidedly non-outdoorsy Bobby and Drew filling out their party. The four enjoy a relatively peaceful first day on the water, but Ed and Bobby find themselves accosted by locals on the second, an encounter that ends with Bobby assaulted and one hillbilly dead. From there, the story spirals into a panic of hiding bodies and fleeing the scene, as setback after setback threatens to kill all four of our unprepared survivors.
Deliverance is a text that rewards a variety of analytical approaches, with my own favorite likely concerning the philosophy of Lewis. From a position of total confidence in his frontiersman-like abilities, Lewis is steadily stripped of all pretensions, and forced to reckon with the untamable reality of both nature and mankind. Given Burt Reynolds so often plays devil-may-care heroes who always get the girl, Deliverance’ treatment of his character almost feels like an indictment of his cinematic archetype, and Reynolds plays out his deterioration to perfection. In an era where action heroes often stipulate how rarely they get to look bad in their features, it’s refreshing to see such a withering takedown of masculinity as a force without equal. The backwoods care not for Lewis’ bravado; though he attempts to assign a specific villain to their troubles, his words are only the desperate justifications of a man whose worldview is unequal to the task before him.
The woods’ indifference to our heroes’ struggles feels far more frightening than any overt threat could ever be. Every step they take towards the river feels like a tiny sacrilege, a covenant broken with a world that promised not to harm them, if only they left it alone. There is danger and hostility at every turn here, and after the levee breaks, it feels like every shrouded bend in the river plays host to leering eyes and wicked intentions. The film’s gorgeous photography illustrates the wild splendor of a world untamed, the vast frontier that Lewis was hoping for; by the second half, it feels like the pines and cliff faces of that world are curving in, collapsing on our foolish trespassers. Deliverance is one of those films where you have to remember to breathe, and I recommend it to anyone with the stomach for its horrors.
