Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. It’s been a productive week on my end, as I’ve been keeping up my jogging routine, hacking away at the new book, and sampling a variety of new productions courtesy of you generous readers. My only scribing struggle at the moment seems to be balancing my own fiction with a return to writing DnD quests for my friends; I’d sorta been using DnD as a springboard back to traditional fiction, so I’m both out of practice and somewhat loathe to divide my already-limited writing time. That said, “my friends are clamoring to play through more of my adventures” is an extremely good problem to have, and in the meantime, I’m quite enjoying the ongoing theatrics of my housemate-DMed new campaign. And of course, the movie screenings have maintained their place of pride within my weekly endeavors, so let’s quit with the rambling and get to some films!

First up this week was 20 Million Miles to Earth, a ‘57 scifi creature feature starring Willian Hopper, Joan Taylor, and the inimitable effects of my beloved Ray Harryhausen. When America’s first manned flight to Venus crash-lands in the Mediterranean sea, locals manage to save two astronauts and one mysterious egg, which an enterprising young boy sells to an eccentric doctor. The egg soon hatches, and out pops a delightfully fun-sized Creature from the Black Lagoon who soon grows into a towering monster, threatening all of Rome with his jerky stop-motion arms.

So yeah, pretty classic kaiju scenario here, hewing closely to the King Kong/Godzilla model with an added touch of Venusian scifi whimsy. The narrative is familiar and performances unexceptional, but such quibbles are of little consequence in a picture so dedicated to celebrating Harryhausen’s marvelous creations. From its first appearances as a palm-sized reptile to its eventual grappling with elephants and even Rome’s colosseum, Harryhausen’s creature is convincingly integrated within its environment and persistently sympathetic, merely a lost creature in a strange, antagonizing world.

The creature is the true hero of this film, seeking only to avoid danger and eat sulfurous rocks. It never once instigates conflict with anyone; even when it comes to other animals, the Venusian monster remains docile and curious until it is provoked into fury. The creature’s clear blamelessness adds a nice touch of melancholy to the proceedings, and sequences like its battle with a gaggle of scared villagers in a barn demonstrate Harryhausen’s methods at their most convincingly integrated, human actors seemingly crossing blows with a real, substantive presence. Some real movie magic in this one.

We then checked out Hatchet II, the sequel to Adam Green’s squishy slasher throwback, with Danielle Harris reprising her role as the put-upon Marybeth Dunston. Emerging as the sole survivor of the first film’s ill-considered bayou tour, she soon returns to the swamp with an army of would-be ghost-hunters, determined to destroy the monstrous Victor Crowley. This prompts a series of exceptionally terrible things happening, involving tools ranging from a six-foot-long chainsaw to a belt sander.

Hatchet II is advertised as “even more senselessly gory” than the original, which it indeed is, but that’s really burying the lede regarding this sequel’s appeal. Far more crucial is that the manipulative showman “Reverend Zombie” has been upgraded from cameo appearance to co-lead, meaning motherfuckin’ Tony Todd (the original Candyman, and an unimpeachable horror legend) dominates the film drama from start to finish. With Todd at the helm, and a generally increased level of both production sheen and acting talent, Hatchet II dances nimbly from execution to execution, offering a graceful, reverent throwback to slashers’ golden age.

Then it was time for more adventures with Gamera, as we checked out his seventh film adventure Gamera vs Zigra. This time it’s more trouble from those outrageous alien interlopers, who open the film by blowing up a moon base before demanding humanity surrender and be consumed. Fortunately, two young children are yet again up to the task of facing them, working together with their parents, the military, and a helpful dolphin trainer to defeat this new menace. And of course there’s Gamera himself, who after a brief nap emerges to face the earth’s latest shark-like adversary.

Given these films were produced on an annual schedule on a budget of three rubber bands and some chewing gum, I suppose we must extend some grace towards their increasingly repetitive structure. Nonetheless, Gamera vs Zigra is indeed a close retread of Gamera’s prior alien-focused adventures, echoing Gamera vs Guiron in every aspect except for its predecessor’s relative narrative solidity. Daiei Film would go bankrupt before this entry was even distributed, which I suppose itself serves as a testament to the scrappy resilience of these shoestring productions; it’d have been nice for our turtle buddy to go out on a more climactic or conclusive adventure, but I suppose exiting in style in the company of a particularly gnarly-looking opponent is more the Gamera way.

I then headed out to the theaters to check out Backrooms. Based on Kane Parsons’ Youtube series (which was itself based on the original 4chan pitch of the Backrooms themselves), the film stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as a man whose life is unraveling – his wife has kicked him out, his cut-rate furniture store is floundering, and he spends his nights drinking himself to sleep on his crummy bedroom displays. One day, Ejiofor discovers something extraordinary in his store’s basement – a wall that isn’t really there, through which he can slip through into a strange labyrinth of endlessly repeating rooms and corridors. With his purpose seemingly restored, Ejiofor sets to work exploring this impossible realm, and possibly finding his way home in the process.

The task of translating the alternately non-narrative or wiki-brained Backrooms concept into a feature film would necessarily require some skillful reimagining, and in this collaboration with writer Will Soodik, Kane Parsons does exactly that. Parsons’ own talent is beyond dispute – beyond his excellent Backrooms videos, I feel like his work on fellow projects The Oldest View and People Still Live Here is even stronger, evoking a surrealist menace and nostalgic melancholy that feels almost impossibly thoughtful and world-weary for a man so young.

The trick of channeling that talent into a feature-length narrative film clearly required a little massaging, and Soodick assists in that with a workmanly script that smartly reframes the Backrooms as a metaphor for our tendency to drive ourselves in unproductive circles, or ultimately nest in comfort at the expense of personal growth, growing ever-more distanced from the real world with each self-gratifying abstraction. The personal narrative is frankly a little thin, which makes it fortunate that they cast an actor as tremendously talented as Chiwetel Ejiofor to bring it to life. His performance finds abundant humanity in the anxiety of a life ill-spent, and sells a mid-film turn that clearly could have used another fifteen minutes of seeding.

But all of this narrative frippery is really just an excuse to let Parsons do what he does best on a larger scale: present vast, inexplicable monuments to human history, to the ways we mark and are marked by the places we inhabit, and to the hopes we place in adventure, discovery, and whatever other handy frameworks we employ for finding purpose in a senseless world. His imagery here is as strong as any of his online shorts – the endless halls, the cruel blue sky, the vast, anonymous expanses of concrete and carpet. Parsons is a genius still in the process of honing his own talents, and if this is his first thrust at the big leagues, I have tremendously high hopes for his future.