Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. While I’m continuing to churn through the summer season’s outstanding highlights (I’m currently about halfway through the new Ghost in the Shell), the story of the week has undoubtedly been Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave. The game’s scale is frankly a bit intimidating; my housemate and I are each running different initial routes, and the profound differences between them are already cluing us in to how much game we’re really dealing with here. Nonetheless, I’m quite enjoying the game’s mixture of high fantasy, strategy, and world exploration, and even if the game isn’t quite matching Three Houses’ level of character writing, I’ve still grown quite attached to my team of sewer-scavenging weirdos. I’ll let you know how I feel after I pour another ungodly quantity of hours into the experience, but for now, let’s run down the Week in Review!
First up this week was Twilight Zone: The Movie, an ‘83 adaptation of Rod Serling’s original series. This film tunes down the contemplative, ironic tone of the original series and ups the spectacle, matching the general Twilight Zone conceit to the talents of its formidable guest directors. The film runs through four consecutive episode concepts adapted from prior Twilight Zone episodes, directed by John Landis, Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante, and George Miller.
As you can guess by that directorial roundup, this film is less interested in capturing the precise style of Serling’s original series than seeing major horror directors repaint that series in their own colors. The results are, as you might expect, somewhat uneven. Landis’ segment is largely a bust, concerning a racist American who gets his comeuppance through being transported to Nazi Germany as a Jew, a Klan lynching as a black man, and also the Vietnam War (the supposed irony of this third one is a little shaky). It’s a fair enough revenge fantasy, but certainly not one of the original show’s stronger concepts, and Landis doesn’t do much to elevate it.
The second segment is pure saccharine nostalgia, a tone Spielberg knows very well. The story concerns a group of retirement home tenants who are given a second chance at childhood, and discover their old bodies might not be so bad after all. This segment is an extended walk to a very simple point, noteworthy only for the excellent melancholy stinger of its conclusion, the only moment where Spielberg rises above maudlin to evoke genuine poignancy.
The film’s second half is much better than its first, in large part because the stories being adapted are both inherently stronger and also better-suited to this film’s goals. Dante gets to adapt “It’s a Good Life,” which is one of my all-time favorite short stories, concerning a boy whose every wish immediately manifests in reality. He obviously can’t match the creeping dread of the original prose, but the story lends itself well to Dante’s sideshow-style specialties, the adaptation coming across like a blend of the original tale and Beetlejuice.
Miller helms the last segment, an adaptation of the iconic “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” The narrative paucity of the original story is of little concern to Miller; in order to furnish his tale, he turns the entire cabin against our flight-wary protagonist, building up the pressure even before we see the thing on the wing. It’s classic Miller, and a fine conclusion to an uneven but ultimately satisfying collection of not-quite-Twilight Zone tales.
Our next viewings were a pair of Roger Corman films, which we drew from deep in Tubi’s dark depths in order to form an unintentionally synchronous double feature. The two films were the ‘82 Forbidden World and its ‘91 remake Dead Space, both of which are essentially low-budget pastiches of Star Wars and Alien. From Alien, they take the general plot: a rapidly mutating lifeform begins devouring its way through a lab of scientists. From Star Wars, they take their protagonist: a space-faring cowboy with robot companion who is absolutely not Han Solo, but nonetheless embodies every one of Han Solo’s mannerisms.
Neither film is anything close to essential or really “good,” but they’re both interesting in their own way. The first one actually has better set design and practical effects, largely owing to the presence of up-and-coming set designer James Cameron, who’d be directing Aliens only four years later. It also embodies all the low graces of ‘80s-era Corman, meaning there’s a lot of inexplicable nudity, as well as a cast that mixes past-prime leads with whoever’s willing to participate in aforementioned nudity. On the other hand, Dead Space features a more convincing Han Solo, as well as Bryan Cranston putting in an unsurprisingly better-than-necessary performance as the lead scientist. On the balance,
I’ve gotta give the prize to Forbidden World – it steals less flagrantly and embraces its own B-movie appeal more unabashedly, serving as a fine demonstration of Corman’s ‘80s oeuvre.
We then checked out Viral, a 2016 horror film centered on a pair of sisters whose family has recently moved to a California suburb. Concerns about making new friends or parental drama are swiftly forgotten in the face of a more pressing issue: a strange infection running rampant in their community, turning anyone who catches it into a violent, zombie-like carrier. Isolated in their home by military lockdown, the sisters will have to fight to survive this horrifying new menace.
Viral isn’t a particularly compelling film in most regards; its threat is played out, its stars aren’t particularly convincing (it’s a film that cares so little about performances it’s willing to cast Machine Gun Kelly), and there are basically no distinctive, memorable horror setpieces. What the film did offer was an oddly nostalgic portrait of pre-pandemic social assumptions, before the germ theory of science was politicized by our current crop of ascendant reactionary cretins. I suppose it’s not a great sign that a film about an apocalyptic virus makes me yearn for a version of humanity that would exhibit similar caution in the face of such an existential threat; unfortunately, as it turns out, a good portion of humanity are as stupid as they are evil.
Last up for the week was The Thief of Bagdad, a 1940 adventure film starring Sabu Dastagir as the titular thief Abu, John Justin as the young king Ahmad, and Conrad Veidt as the sinister vizier Jafar. After being tricked and imprisoned by Jafar, Ahmad joins forces with Abu, and flees to the kingdom of Basra. Though Ahmad swiftly falls in love with the princess of Basra, her toy-obsessed father ends up granting her hand to Jafar instead, leading into a maelstrom of adventures involving transformations, genies, magic carpets, and much else.
The Thief of Baghdad is basically a perfect adventure movie, an ideal fusion of Arabian Nights-cribbed fantasy and fundamentally excellent filmmaking. The script is efficient and lively, the direction is graceful and energetic (the incomparable Michael Powell of The Archers co-directs), and the stars all sink into their roles, offering a hundred glorious minutes of fantasy adventure marked by constant invention and Sinbad-esque breezy cheer. It’s no surprise that the Disney version stole as much as humanly possible from this film; this film is already perfect, there’s not much you could do to improve on it.
