Hello folks, and welcome on back to Wrong Every Time. It’s a beautiful day out today, so I’ll try and keep this brief so we can all enjoy the sun. I’ve certainly done enough sun-shunning already these past few days; my housemate’s idle interest in checking out Bloodborne has predictably turned into an all-Souls rampage conducted by three of us, with Bloodborne and Demon’s Souls falling in quick succession, and the original Dark Souls soon to follow. The games are certainly still challenging, but I’ve played all of them enough that this journey also feels nostalgic and even cozy; there is a certainty of input and response in FromSoft games that makes mastery feel much like a dance, while seeing a new player deal with their “sense of humor” is almost as good as playing through it yourself. And of course, we also made time for a fresh collection of films, including some timely holiday selections. Let’s get to work!

With 4/20 falling on Thursday of last week, my housemate insisted we celebrate the holiday with some stoner comedies, leading to a viewing of Cheech & Chong’s first film, Up in Smoke. In spite of being a forty-year-old comedy in one of the least reputable comedy subgenres, Up in Smoke holds up remarkably well, owing largely to both Cheech Marin’s personal magnetism and his easy camaraderie with Tommy Chong. It’s a buddy comedy where you can believe the leads are actually buddies, full of those stoner comedy-specific moments of mental oblivion, where the confusion of an intense high gives way to a kind of zen deadpan, and suddenly everyone’s laughing at nothing.

Alongside the strength of the main leads, Up in Smoke succeeds by offering a genuinely engaging narrative, rather than simply wandering from skit to skit. Cheech and Chong stumble into a border-hopping escapade featuring a van built entirely out of weed with the aimless confidence of committed stoners, while the cops on their case offer some of the film’s best scenes while also giving the overall story a sense of structure. The whole thing ends in a delightfully ridiculous concert that feels like the cast celebrating their own movie, the cherry on top of a film that’s clearly smarter than its leads would have you believe.

We followed that up with How High, which earned the unique dishonor of possibly being the most misogynistic film I’ve ever seen. Method Man and Redman star as stoners who, owing to some magical weed that summons ghosts (don’t ask, the film certainly doesn’t care), manage to cheat their way into Harvard. Harvard’s old fuddy-duddies expect these street-smart newcomers to prove themselves expulsion-worthy monsters in no time, and… yeah, that’s basically all they do. They torture their fellow students and the staff, they cheat on everything, and they romance any women they see with suave lines like “hey bitch, show me them titties,” to which every woman in this film replies with an improbable “aw, you’re so sweet.” Also there’s a racist Asian caricature! Almost forgot about him. God was this movie awful.

We then watched Afflicted, a found footage horror film about two friends planning to document their year-long trip around the world. However, when one of the pair is assaulted by a strange woman in Paris, he begins developing a variety of strange and concerning symptoms. Eventually it becomes clear that he’s turning into a vampire, forcing the pair to race for a solution before his killer instincts take over.

Afflicted makes good on its “remember An American Werewolf in London? Well try A Canadian Vampire in Paris” premise, crucially establishing a compelling bond between its two leads before anything supernatural happens. The two are such charming travel companions that I was frankly a little sad to see them rear-ended by a horror movie, but after some slight growing pains as the two wander around the obvious reality of what’s happening, the film proves itself just as confident tracking vampires as backpackers. I was particularly impressed by the film’s two genuine action setpieces, wherein a chest-mounted camera provided us a firsthand perspective of vampiric stalking and agility. The film isn’t particularly scary, but the chemistry between its leads and ingenious riffs on found footage staples make for an easy viewing experience.

Next we checked out one of the few universally acclaimed Argento features I hadn’t seen, the late-era Opera. From the title on down, it’s clear that this is his take on The Phantom of the Opera, and he attacks the project with typical Argento flair. Rather than the original phantom’s no-nonsense dispatching of threats to his beloved muse, this one’s a bit of an exhibitionist, and prefers to have his muse Betty (Cristina Marsillach) personally view his “performances.” To make sure Betty never looks away, he ties her up and tapes needles under her eyes, ensuring that refusing to watch his murders will steal her eyesight altogether.

Aside from that uniquely uncomfortable touch, Opera is classic Argento through and through, marrying giallo thriller plotting to shades of the impressionist lighting and set design he employed in Suspiria and Inferno. The central opera house venue facilitates a scale of drama like little else in Argento’s catalog, while also offering plenty of the quietly ominous corridors and supply closets that the man somehow alchemizes into venues of unspeakable dread. The film also seems uniquely personal to Argento; it’s clear he sees a bit of himself in Betty’s in-film director, who wishes to marry the glorious excesses of his horror movies to the majesty of traditional theater. Argento’s opposite project of drawing theater into horror doesn’t quite secure the marriage his counterpart is seeking, but it does result in a damn fine horror movie.

Last up for the week was Flux Gourmet, a pitch black comedy concerning an artist’s retreat for “sonic caterers.” Sonic caterers are experimental performance artists who extract noises from food preparation, thereby combining cooking, musical performance, and interpretive dance. It’s an odd premise for an art form, but Flux Gourmet is much odder still, from the flatulence-cursed “hack journalist” who serves as our perspective character, to the nested psychosexual resentments that undergird the relationships of the retreat’s three current occupants.

Peter Strickland conducts this orchestra of oddities with an entirely straight face, making it easy (well, at least easy for me) to sink into the emotional and thematic churn of outsider art and the wounded souls who make it. Because sonic catering isn’t a real art form, Flux Gourmet’s commentary on the push and pull of creation and collaboration (or egoism and abjection) feels universal, with all of the films’ characters united in their desire to create something of meaning (even if they’re not sure what that meaning is). This is the only thing they agree on; otherwise, the film’s marvelous cast are a basket of vipers, with the documented group’s genuine talent chafing beneath the grip of their domineering marketer-leader Elle. Elle finds her match in Jan Stevens (an utterly fantastic Gwendoline Christie), who looms over her wards in a procession of ornate warlock robes, pursuing a game of brinkmanship regarding the trio’s use of an overbearing flanger.

If this all seems a little incoherent or hard to parse, that’s not surprising. It is a credit to Strickland’s constancy of vision, consideration of artistry divorced from aesthetic form, and earnest belief in these characters that Flux Gourmet holds together, and actually speaks in a coherent voice. Individual scenic pleasures like the group’s lively performances and bonding exercises (Christie’s ominous “shops” exercise feels lifted from Strickland’s horror roots) eventually entwine into a full-throated cry of yearning, one character’s need for adoration joining in chorus with another’s desire to claim an absent childhood, and still another’s quest for a connection without the mediation of words. The film is stately and anxious, brooding and vain, encompassing all the qualities its characters seek from their own in-film performances. In its final moments, it achieves in narrative what it embodies in form: emotional catharsis in pursuit of the new, inspiration dredged from nightmares and splattered on the stage, all for the sake of ambiguous meaning and uncertain applause. A thunderous, tragicomic lament for the plight of the artist.