Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. I didn’t really plan on it, but based on what we watched, it turns out this week features a particularly dubious film theme: movie adaptations of video game franchises. Though we’re long beyond the days of Uwe Boll acquiring rights for pennies and exploiting well-intentioned art grants to make garbage, movie adaptations of games still possess a fairly dubious reputation, a predictable byproduct of games generally interactivity over narrative. Aside from the surprisingly endearing Sonic the Hedgehog, cinematic game adaptations generally just tend to emphasize the narrative paucity of their source material – and while this week’s viewings didn’t exactly circumvent that obstacle, they at least left me with plenty to say regarding their attempts. Let’s run down some would-be films in the Week in Review!

First up this week was Need for Speed, the entirely superfluous adaptation of a game series whose cumulative narrative amounts to “cars go fast.” Offered such a free and open canvas, this adaptation’s writers could have basically written anything, so long as it primarily focused on characters with a deep, abiding need for speed. Sadly, the very freedom of that assignment seems to have spooked them, as Need for Speed barely has a story at all.

The film falls into that familiar terrible script territory of being simultaneously obvious yet also incoherent. You might think that’s a contradiction, but it’s actually quite common: bad professional writers tend to understand what general shape a movie should take (opening scene of heroic bravado, hero brought low by a rival, getting the gang back together, early triumph, major setback, final triumph), but the connective tissue between these central beats is either abandoned or forgotten, resulting in characters that do things simply because this is what happens next in a movie like this. As a result, Need for Speed veers wildly between disconnected narrative road stops, and its characters never develop any semblance of coherent, evolving personhood.

The script is no better in terms of its dialogue than its structure, meaning even the extremely talented Aaron Paul is unable to sell the pain of his fraught position, nor the relationship he allegedly develops with heroine Imogen Poots. Fortunately, and frankly a little surprisingly, the actual racing sequences are quite reasonable: well shot, fairly tense, and generally embracing live-action stunt work over CG chicanery. The film is too long and too poorly written to justify watching for the races, but credit where credit is due, the core car action is actually solid.

We then watched The Inside Outtakes, a collection of scattered additional footage shot during the creation of Bo Burnham’s Inside. I’d sort of figured this would be a collection of musical B-sides, and there is a bit of that, including a generous helping of supplementary Jeff Bezos jingles. But for the most part, these outtakes hover around the fringes of Inside’s final material, revealing the alternately painful and tedious process of bringing those polished numbers to life.

Considering Inside is already a self-reflective commentary on the hubris and agony of artistic production in the online age, you might be wondering what further insights such tossed-off fragments might offer. Well, it’s certainly not an equal companion piece to the final project, but that’s sort of the point. Through the course of the Inside Outtakes, it is made emphatically clear how for ninety percent of the creative process, Bo really doesn’t have anything at all: a lighting trick that might be cool (or is it stupid?), half of a chorus that’s missing a punchline, a chord progression that could maybe go somewhere.

Through revealing the iterative, often fruitless process of composing and recording his skits, Burnham successfully tears through whatever veil remains between artist and audience, emphasizing that what might come across as effortless comedic timing or human insight is really just a lot of time and effort mixed with some hard-won technical proficiencies. Watching nine attempted takes collapse into one quasi-workable final cut is humanizing and comforting; while Inside feels like a definitive statement, the outtakes emphasize that no idea arrives fully sculpted, and that artistry is far more about experimentation and diligence than acting as some vessel or conduit for universal truth. Probably of more interest to fellow artists than general audiences, but nonetheless an enjoyable, quietly reassuring watch.

Next up was Planet of the Vampires, a scifi-horror feature by the reliable Mario Bava (Black Sabbath, Blood and Black Lace, etc). While investigating a mysterious signal from a distant planet, the crew of two ships come under attack by some sort of spectral invader – a life form that has no body of its own, and thus seeks to steal our shells. The surviving crewmates must do battle with their own former companions while unlocking the secrets of this life form, and hopefully escaping alive.

Planet of the Vampires feels much like “what if Alien was produced in the style of an original Star Trek episode,” even down to the inclusion of a precursor race that was also tricked by the parasitical life form. The makeup work of the zombified crewmates sadly can’t compare to the timeless suspense and anxiety of Bava’s best films, but the film fortunately compliments its attempted spookums with plenty of delightful stage design. Sequences of the survivors exploring vast, flickering spaceships feel like Bava at his most Argento-like, and the last act offers a genuinely tense flight from danger, alongside a Twilight Zone-ready twist ending. It’s definitely lesser Bava, but lesser Bava is still a thoroughly enjoyable ride.

We finished off the week with the recent Super Mario Bros Movie, Illumination’s attempt to bring gaming’s most beloved plumber to the big screen. The result is pretty much exactly what you’d expect: competently executed, structurally familiar, and absolutely overflowing with incidental references to the broader Nintendo canon.

Though much wailing and gnashing of teeth accompanied the announcement of Chris Pratt as the voice of Mario, his work here is honestly fine, and he does a fair job of turning a game character with essentially no personality into a likable everyman with a penchant for parkour. He and Peach evoke precisely the same average schlub/action girl dynamic you’ll find in any number of animated family films, which here actually helps round out the inherent context-averse strangeness of Mario’s game narratives. Having Luigi be the damsel in distress was the right choice; not only is it genuinely true to the games, it also gives both Peach and Bowser a chance to express themselves in contexts more sympathetic than “I have you in a cage and will marry you now.”

Anya Taylor-Joy does her best with Peach’s one-note material, but Jack Black unsurprisingly steals the film entirely, delighting in Bowser’s endearing mix of bravado and vulnerable infatuation. A film of just him belting out piano ballads to his absent princess might actually have been better than this one, but Super Mario Bros’ rampage through Nintendo catalog-ripped setpieces is nonetheless an engaging time, if you can forgive Illumination’s tired gags and aggressive needle drops. I’ll admit it, I’ve spent so many hours with these characters that I was more than up for a greatest hits adventure, and left well satisfied. Nostalgia’s one hell of a drug.