Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week I’ve been continuing my journey through the outstanding summer productions, following up A Witch in Mongolia with a run through Science Saru’s The Ghost in the Shell. Having only previously viewed Mamoru Oshii’s take on the material, it was a bit of a surprise to see how breezy and energetic the source material could be. Watching this version made me feel all the more validated for having munched through Shirow’s classic era OVAs this year, which actually provided a much stronger comparison point than Oshii’s ponderous, melancholy interpretation – it seems like Shirow is fundamentally a pulp action-comedy writer at heart, and I think this new adaptation works much better in that light than as an era-bound and sorta reactionary political text. Of course, all that scifi action was supplemented by a healthy selection of feature films, so let’s dive into the Week in Review!

First up this week was The Quest, a ‘90s adventure film starring Jean-Claude Van Damme as a New York thief in the roaring twenties, who finds himself inadvertently shipped off to Thailand. After being sold to the locals by the conniving Lord Edgar Dobbs (Roger Moore), Van Damme ends up learning the finer points of Muay Thai and competing in local underground rings. Eventually, his fame brings him the renewed attention of Dobbs, and the two hatch a scheme to steal the golden dragon offered as prize for a legendary Tibetan martial arts tournament.

The Quest proved a distinctive and exceedingly generous Van Damme escapade, produced at perhaps the one moment in history when he had the clout to conjure a self-directed period piece into existence. The pitch is basically “what if we combined a Shaw Bros tournament film with a rambling Indiana Jones adventure,” and that is a strong pitch indeed, even if the second part turns out to be more set dressing than genuine action-adventure DNA. The film is greatly improved by the presence of Roger Moore, who basically sells its “globe-trotting heist feature” framing single-handedly, and generally conducts himself as a more lovable rogue variation on his James Bond character.

After some variable rambling around Thailand, the film’s second half both focuses and narrows its appeal, offering an entire sixteen-competitor martial arts tournament contrasting a variety of different styles. For those expecting a standard adventure feature, this likely feels like an overlong detour; for those with a martial arts fire in their hearts, it’s a preposterously generous display, dispensing with inessential frippery like “romance” or “plot” to deliver a thrilling parade of physical prowess. If you enjoy Bloodsport or similar features, you will have a delightful time with The Quest.

Next up was The Running Man, Edgar Wright’s recent adaptation of Stephen King’s ‘82 novel. Glen Powell stars as Ben Richards, a laborer who ends up blacklisted for expressing pro-union sentiments, and thus agrees to go on the murderous reality show The Running Man in order to afford medicine for his sickly daughter. As a Runner, Richards must survive for thirty days while being hunted by the Network’s professional killers, filming himself all the while, with every eye in America trained on his tail.

The Running Man is a loud, angry, and fairly unfocused film, maintaining Edgar Wright’s bombast and energy while discarding the wry precision of his earlier works. Though it bears little in common narratively with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Running Man, it very much evokes the tone of ‘80s American action movies, their sense of muscular bravado and sneering impropriety. And for that, I sorta have to respect it; it’s basically an ‘80s B-movie produced for a hundred million dollars, a love letter to Rollerball and Death Race 2000 and Escape from New York, a film that I have to imagine Wright knew would not make its money back. Glen Powell’s natural charisma is unfortunately muted by the anger of his character here, and the script is very extremely stupid, but I was otherwise quite charmed by this throwback to a banner era of bad-yet-fun movies.

We then checked out The Being, a skuzzy ‘81 creature feature directed by Jackie Kong, starring her husband-slash-producer Bill Osco as a detective attempting to account for a series of murders and disappearances in a small Idaho town. After tussling with local magnates both civil and commercial, our sleuth discovers the culprit is some kind of radiation-fueled monstrosity, born of the runoff leaking out of the town’s local nuclear disposal site.

There is not all that much movie to The Being; it’s clearly something of a vanity project for its co-creators, funded by the profits of Osco’s far-more-profitable exploitation films. Osco can’t really act, and Kong’s direction never rises above a serviceable understanding of genre shooting, but the film does have one factor in its favor: a delightfully gooey antagonist, whose lantern fish teeth and single leering eye make for a charming final confrontation. Nothing I’d recommend to anyone but genre diehards, but any movie with a fun, lovingly hand-made monster gets a pass in my book.

I then headed out to the theaters to check out Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil, a hard reset on the franchise’s tortured cinematic history. Austin Abrams stars as Bryan, a medical courier who’s tasked with delivering a high-priority package to Raccoon City General Hospital. Unfortunately, his journey just so happens to coincide with the moment a chemical breakout begins turning the city’s denizens into mutated zombie monstrosities, making for an unexpectedly eventful delivery mission.

Abandoning any foolhardy attempts to directly adapt the stories of games that never had good stories in the first place, Cregger’s Resident Evil instead seeks to emulate the felt experience of playing a great survival horror game, and god damn does it deliver. Building on the playfully game-like cinematography he employed in Barbarian, Cregger hones in close on one poor soul’s journey through the apocalypse, presenting each turn in Bryan’s journey as a series of discreet, coherent mechanical obstacles full of doors no one wants to open, and corners no one would wish to glance around.

The gamified horror film is an increasingly well-furnished subgenre (the recent Infested is a terrific example), and I think Cregger might take it to new heights here. There are few textual nods to the original franchise (a familiar “health kit,” a save room typewriter), but persistent attempts to channel the progressive satisfaction of game design into cinema (a visually coherent procession of levels, a sense of “powering up” with fresh gear). Though this might seem like a poor concession for cinema, I think in truth it’s more just an evolution of the tools action and horror films have always used to present sequences with clear internal stakes (“we gotta get to the choppa!”), merely extrapolated across the length of an entire feature.

Bryan’s grappling with personal consequence and feud with one particularly persistent abomination give the film just enough sense of dramatic continuity, while the sharp sense of humor that has brightened all of the Whitest Kids You Know alum’s filmography is allowed its fullest manifestation here, as Bryan feuds with unbreakable locks and goggles in relatable disbelief at each new monstrosity. For all its strengths, the film probably wouldn’t work without Abrams’ performance – he brings the same tension-puncturing humor to Resident Evil that made him so delightful in Weapons, and feels so attuned to Cregger’s sensibilities that I’m already anticipating their next collaboration. Videogames have spent quite some time unsuccessfully attempting to be movies, but Cregger has already solved making a movie that’s also a videogame.