Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week I’m riding high on the back of another successful DnD session, as I lead my players through a post-campaign island adventure with a clear Indiana Jones coat of paint. It’s becoming a tricky thing to provide meaningful challenges for my party of heroes; DnD is reasonably well-balanced from around level four to level twelve (the point where Baldur’s Gate 3 wisely caps you), but after that you reach the point where rogues simply can’t be discovered, warriors can barely be harmed, and magic users can either fly or teleport past any physical hurdle.
As a result, old standbys like pit traps and pressure plates start to become more endearing than genuinely threatening, forcing me to come up with inventive new ways to either kill the party or trick them into killing themselves. Basically all of my experiments in this regard were successful, so I’m feeling more confident than ever that I can maintain a stream of worthy challenges for my near-demigod-level players. And of course, there was also plenty of time dedicated to screening whatever film features caught my fancy. Let’s check ‘em out!
First up this week was Twelve O’Clock High, a ‘49 war drama directed by Henry King and starring Gregory Peck (the first collaboration of the pair, who’d go on to collaborate on The Gunfighter and a handful of other features). Peck stars as Brigadier General Frank Savage, who is brought in to salvage the 918th Bomb Group after their previous commander becomes too attached to the team to actually lead them, and thereby demonstrate the efficacy of daylight bombing runs. Savage’s seemingly heartless methods nearly inspire a mutiny, but over time, he too comes to see his brave subordinates as something like a family.
Twelve O’Clock High is a gripping portrait of an often overlooked aspect of military command. With the 918th fraying from the start, the cruel necessity of military discipline is cast in the harshest possible light, as long-suffering soldiers are reprimanded for breaking formation in order to save the men they’ve come to rely on. In total war, the ideal of grace under pressure is revealed to be an aspiration incompatible with human nature; we can only survive the inhumanity of constant bombing runs by relying on each other, but the moment that reliance supersedes our allegiance to orders, we are broken as soldiers.
The film sculpts its squadron and their leaders with compassion and efficiency, then sends them through hell time and again, beating Peck and his boys into an inevitable fatalism regarding the necessity of their proof-of-concept bombing runs. It’s a war film that sees nothing just or noble about fighting for some distant cause, only the pragmatic contradiction of maintaining loyalty to the orders that are killing you over the men who are riding at your side. Complete with actual combat footage from Allied and Luftwaffe pilots, Twelve O’Clock High offers a searing articulation of war’s inherent insanity, an unvarnished portrait of the limits of human endurance.
Having caught some alluring animation highlights on twitter, I then decided to check out Fatal Fury: The Motion Picture. As one of the few projects Masami Obari not only did character designs for but also directed, the film offers a distinctive snapshot of his visual sensibilities, along with plenty of wild individual cuts from other ‘90s animation all-stars.
The plot of the film is loose and accommodating: there’s a legendary set of armor that bestows the power of the gods, a nasty dude is intent on collecting its pieces and claiming that power, the heroes of Fatal Fury have to stop him. This simple premise facilitates plenty of globe-trotting faceoffs that allow the film’s beautiful background art to shine, while Terry, Mai, and the rest of the crew engage in supernaturally empowered combat. Brimming with highlights from ‘90s staples like Atsuko Ishida, Fatal Fury offers a feast of pose-to-pose animation and exuberantly era-reflective art design, all tied to a reasonable riff on an Indiana Jones adventure.
Our next viewing was Exists, a found-footage horror film directed by Eduardo Sánchez, one of the original co-directors of The Blair Witch Project. The film follows a group of friends on a camping trip to a remote cabin, who suffer a collision with an unknown animal on the way. Following an afternoon of stoned revelry, the group soon find themselves under attack by a mysterious creature, a bipedal force of nature that looks an awful lot like Bigfoot.
So yeah, woodland found footage spookums by one of the original titans of the genre, featuring an assailant in an admirably convincing sasquatch costume. Exists doesn’t reinvent the genre, but it doesn’t have to; the film possesses a reasonable squad of young actors, a keen understanding of sound design as drama, and Sánchez’s reliable talent for shooting the woods in such a way as to consistently imply a hidden threat, a blot on the horizon that may or may not be a lurking predator.
In Sánchez’s hands, the first half of Exists proceeds much like Blair Witch’s early material, building menace out of implication and anxiety from the hapless curiosity of its protagonists. And in its second half, Exists blooms into full-on manic terror, as one camper after another is overwhelmed by a vengeful beast. The film can’t match the imagery, tension, or ultimate payoff of Blair Witch, but “not as good as Blair Witch” isn’t really a fair metric for any horror film. On the whole, Exists offers a fine demonstration of found footage’s fundamentals executed with precision.
Next up was Ladyhawke, an ‘80s fantasy feature starring Matthew Broderick as Phillipe Gaston, a thief who narrowly escapes execution by the ruthless Bishop of Aquila. Through only moderate fault of his own, he soon finds himself wrapped up in a grand adventure, traveling alongside the disgraced former guard captain Navarre and Isabeau of Anjou, a beautiful woman suffering a terrible curse. By day, Isabeau must travel as a hawk; by night, her lover Navarre becomes a wolf, ensuring the two can never truly meet.
I found myself quite charmed by Ladyhawke, in spite of some frustratingly obvious shortcomings. The film’s biggest issue is its musical score, a largely synth-based collection of simplistic melodies that are entirely ill-suited to the film’s fantastical romantic tone. Ladyhawke is largely a film of mood rather than plot, meaning having such a disastrously inappropriate soundtrack strikes a nearly mortal blow all by itself.
Fortunately, there is much else to recommend. Star-crossed lovers Rutger Hauer and Michelle Pfeiffer understand their assignment completely, each disappearing into the larger-than-life Arthurian archetypes they have been presented with. Between them, Broderick is left with the unenviable task of offering this self-consciously majestic feature some human grounding, which he manages by cleverly adapting ‘80s-style snark to medieval fool’s wisdom, carrying on a charming running conversation with whatever god happens to be listening. Strong performances are further bolstered by the film’s excellent location shooting and handsome cinematography, making for a film that’s precisely one soundtrack short of being an altogether superior fantasy feature.
