Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. I’ve been keeping myself busy this week, screening plenty of movies while also marching through legacy anime (Galaxy Express 999), OVA artifacts (Cyber City Oedo 808), and videogames (Mina the Hollower plus Elden Ring). All that has been balanced alongside some determined hacking at my increasingly sizable novel, which I’m beginning to realize cannot possibly resolve itself in a tidy three hundred pages. For all my efforts to impose a strict outline on the narrative, the unfortunate fact is that sometimes shit just happens while you’re writing, and suddenly what you imagined as a “brief digression” is now an entire leg of the journey. Thus I find myself feverishly writing my characters out of self-inflicted narrative pitfalls, with the finish line seemingly retreating further into the distance every time I glance towards it. I couldn’t be happier, really, and I’m looking forward to sharing some more concrete reflections once I have something more concrete to reflect upon. In the meantime, let’s run down the week in films!
First up this week was The Sand, a 2015 horror feature centered on a group of college kids enjoying a raucous beach trip. Awakening after a night of debauchery, they discover that everyone who slept directly on the sand has disappeared in the night. Attempts to find their friends soon reveal a harrowing development: some sort of creature is now nesting beneath the sands, ready to drag down anyone foolish enough to brave them.
The Sand is the kind of low B-tier horror movie that can’t even decide on its own name, alternately advertising itself as “Killer Beach” within its own title sequence. Nonetheless, the inherent fun of its “the floor is lava” premise cannot be denied, and The Sand offers a generous number of desperate gambits regarding navigating the surface, beating the heat, and generally coming up with some sort of escape plan to survive its malevolent coastline.
The CG gore sequences are egregious yet oddly charming; I don’t mind when a film swings for the bleachers based on strengths it clearly lacks, even if I’m somewhat saddened to consider that in earlier eras, such effects would be handled with even more endearingly ramshackle practical effects. That said, in earlier eras this film likely wouldn’t exist at all, so I can’t really complain about the digital era facilitating scrappy productions’ body horror dreams, particularly when they’re attached to a script that is so invested in exploring all the fun possibilities of its premise. Nothing I’d recommend outside of cheesy low-rent horror enthusiasts, but something of a gem if that describes you in particular.
We then screened The Giant Claw, a ‘57 creature feature directed by Fred F. Sears, starring Jeff Morrow as an aeronautical engineer who spots some kind of UFO during a test flight in the Arctic. While initially doubted by his superiors, the subsequent disappearance of several unrelated crafts prove that there is indeed Something Out There, though it is apparently invisible to radar devices. Eventually, the horrible truth is revealed: humanity is being hunted by a giant bird from an “antimatter galaxy,” and must marshal all its resources to defeat this avian aggressor.
The Giant Claw is a fairly conventional ‘50s creature feature in most regards, full of tense conversations about martial countermeasures and clearly giddy with the recent scientific revelations of the atomic age. The film actually builds up the threat of its extraterrestrial beastie quite well, stoking the tension and mystery through an inexplicable series of clashes and increasingly close calls with the monster itself. That said, The Giant Claw’s clear claim to “fame” is the absolutely preposterous design of the creature itself, which falls somewhere between the nefarious bird-people of The Dark Crystal and Big Bird’s least photogenic cousin.
The creature is far too ludicrous and unconvincing in its form and movements to evoke anything approaching terror, but is actually quite charming in its own so-bad-it’s-good sort of way. The continuing progression of attacks and countermeasures as the creature stalks the globe are also fairly well-paced and executed, and I’ll definitely give the film credit for making its heroine at least as capable and badass as its male lead, but there is just no talking around the transcendentally silly design of the monster itself. A film like this makes me appreciate all the more the talents of Harryhausen and the Toei kaiju feature teams; the design and movement of the monster itself is the lynchpin of films like these, and while both of those teams make success in that sphere seem like a given, a production like The Giant Claw assures me that it is clearly not.
Next up was Millionaires Express, an ‘86 action comedy starring and directed by Sammo Hung. He leads a sprawling ensemble of characters all tangentially related to the titular train, which is known to be carrying a number of wealthy passengers all ripe for the robbing. As the train makes its way towards a sleepy frontier town, it will become a lightning rod for bandits, professional thieves, righteous lawmen, and all manner of other high-kicking, tough-talking combatants.
Millionaires Express is a rollicking and characteristically scattershot adventure by Sammo, starring as many people as he could possibly fit in the picture. Sammo spectacles can sometimes get either unwieldy or aimless, and this one threatens that through its rambling first half, but the uniting narrative factors of train heist and town defense fortunately keep things from getting too out of hand.
The jokes range from riotously farcical conversations to Buster Keaton-adjacent train spectacles, and the last act is an absolute feast of martial arts drama, featuring insane acrobatics and an excellent duel between Sammo and the legendary Cynthia Rockwell. Sammo is about as full of a writer-star-director-producer full package as you could hope for, and Millionaire’s Express ably shows off the absurd range of his talent, demonstrating the unifying proficiencies of physical combat and physical comedy along the way.
Last up for the week was Steamboy, Katsuhiro Otomo’s second film feature, set in an alternate 19th century where steam-based technology has already pushed humanity into an alternate industrial revolution. The film centers on James Ray Steam, a teenage inventor following in the footsteps of his genius father and grandfather. When his grandfather sends a mysterious metal orb back to James’ home in England, it sets in motion a wild chase for the next frontier in steam power, one that will see the safety of all the world hanging in the balance.
As a boyhood adventure, Steamboy is a bombastic delight; as a reflection on the course of technology, it often felt a touch too idealistic to invest in. Steamboy feels like an odd film to watch at our own point in history; a discussion of science’s potential staged at the advent of the industrial age, when it might well have seemed like science would lead us to a more egalitarian stage of human existence. Of course, none of this happened – instead, the modern era has seen us reifying existing social structures to the point where the common people have neither the power nor the intellectual capacity to rise against their overseers, all of which has been facilitated through the steady progression of science and technology.
It’s a film for the dreamers, clearly; Otomo’s “can science avoid being used for war?” would likely evoke a hacking scoff from Tomino, but the film is nonetheless a visually lovely and persistently exciting experience, brimming with fun mechanical marvels and delightful flourishes of character acting. The playful theorized industrial revolution of Jules Verne and the like is simply a wondrous template for anime drama; both Nadia and Turn A Gundam are at their best when they revel in this distinctive era’s eccentricities, and I’d happily gorge on far more anime that celebrate this fertile avenue of science fiction. And subgenre aside, Otomo, please direct another one! We are starving here!
