Hello folks, and welcome on back to Wrong Every Time. After a couple of weeks feeling under the weather, it appears both my health and the general temperature seem to be improving, leaving me prepped and ready to face a fresh new spring. It also seems to be a time for new beginnings as far as media projects are concerned; my house has recently completed Armored Trooper Votoms, Critical Role, Cobra Kai, and Ramayan, leaving my slate clean for some ambitious replacements. I’m currently still figuring out what classic anime I’d like to check out next, but in the meantime am also considering a journey through the Toei Godzilla films, having had such a good time recently with the productions of Ray Harryhausen. But for now, let us turn to the week’s screenings, and see what nutrients can be extracted from our latest film adventures. On to the Week in Review!
First up this week was the newly released Netflix feature Leo, in which Adam Sandler stars as the titular fifth grade class lizard. Alongside his turtle companion Squirtle (Bill Burr), Leo wiles his days away cynically psychoanalyzing each incoming class, only for the sudden knowledge of his imminent natural death to light a fire under his scaly, 74-year-old belly. Determined to experience all the world has to offer, Leo attempts to escape via weekend homestays with the students, only to find his passion in genuinely helping the fifth-graders with their various insecurities.
So yeah, it’s basically Stand and Deliver starring Adam Sandler as a talking lizard, which I can’t imagine sounds like a recipe for success. And on top of that, it’s actually a musical, packed with songs that could most charitably be described as “passably melodic.” And yet, for all its dubious fundamental qualities, I actually quite enjoyed this feature. The key trick of Leo is that it is simultaneously sympathetic to its young cast and also aware their current problems are largely ephemeral; Leo will take great care in assuring a boy that back hair is normal, but also isn’t above consoling a crying child with a refrain of “shut up now, crying is stupid and really bores me.”
Tracking a careful line between sympathetic and saccharine, Leo finds itself in the position of a fatigued yet undeniably compassionate parent, laughing at the foibles of youth while still earnestly guiding its kids forward. The problems its characters face aren’t special, and Leo knows that – but at the same time, through his increasing investment in the lives of his “students,” our star comes to understand the unfathomable satisfaction of genuinely improving someone’s life, whether they’re a helicopter-parented youth or an unappreciated substitute teacher. Sharp yet earnest, with a world-weariness that still leaves room for new hope, Adam Sandler’s animated family film proves one of the most mature features of his career.
We then checked out Pumpkinhead, a supernatural horror film starring Lance Henriksen as Ed Harley, a single father who works an out-of-the-way roadside store with his son Billy. While Harley is away running an errand for a neighbor, his son ends up wandering into the path of some dirtbiking teens from the big city, with tragic results. Mad with grief, Harley carries his son’s body to the home of a capricious bog witch, and ends up unearthing an evil beyond his control to wreak terrible vengeance on his foes.
Within a sea of frequently dubious ‘80s creature features, Pumpkinhead stands out by virtue of several outstanding advantages. First off, the film successfully evokes a true southern gothic tone, luxuriating in the local legends and ominous backwoods of its ambiguous setting. As an admitted sucker for folk horror, southern gothic obviously falls well within my wheelhouse, and Pumpkinhead’s setting, costume design, and appropriately hardscrabble dialect align to provide it a unique sense of place and mythology, even before the actual monster appears. The film’s sense of authenticity and poignancy is further bolstered by Henriksen, who ranges from confident joy to absolute despair, then onward through both vengeful certainty and furious regret.
Things remain mournful all through the film’s later reaches, owing to its wise choice to frame neither Henriksen nor his revenant’s targets as either blameless or condemnable. The true monster here is grief, amorphous in its form and endless in its capacity to inflict further destruction, a monster both Henriksen and his son’s killers are aligned in combating by the film’s end. While it’s perhaps a touch light on actual murderous payoffs, that seems perfectly appropriate for a film that possesses such sympathy for all of its key players. An altogether superior creature feature.
I then continued my journey through the ‘80s OVA boom with Wicked City, helmed by Ninja Scroll/Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust director Yoshiaki Kawajiri, based on a novel by Vampire Hunter D creator Hideyuki Kikuchi. The film centers around Renzaburo Taki, a “Black Guard” tasked with patrolling the boundary between our world and the Black World of demons. In order to protect a sage crucial for maintaining the peace between these worlds, Taki is forced to team up with the beautiful demon Makie, and face off with all the devils Kawajiri can conjure.
If Ninja Slayer is like ninety percent ultraviolence with a side portion of rape, Wicked City reverses the formula, centering the majority of its scenes around the threat or realization of sexual violence. This made it a pretty exhausting watch on the whole, a situation that remained unmitigated by its extremely thin, frankly nonsensical plotting and characterization. Kawajiri offers an admirable array of evocative layouts throughout, but the actual content of Wicked City is superficial when it’s not unpleasant, and more often the latter than the former. In spite of the excellence of Kawajiri’s other films, this one’s an easy skip.
Our next viewing was the original Piranha, directed by Joe Dante and produced by Roger Corman. A clear riff on Jaws, the film sees a resort-speckled river infected with deadly piranha, who have been genetically engineered to be smarter, faster, and more resilient than their natural brethren. With only a few open miles of river between the piranha swarm and carefree swimmers, a private investigator and local drunk will have to team up to save as many vacationing toesy-woesys as possible.
Piranha was essentially Dante’s graduation project from the House of Corman, preceding his ‘80s heyday of The Howling, Gremlins, and It’s A Good Life. Universal were actually planning on blocking the feature, seeing it as competition for their own Jaws 2, but Spielberg himself gave it a pass as parody, and would later help Dante land those last two positions.
It’s easy to see why Spielberg was more flattered than offended. In spite of ripping flagrantly from Jaws’ most iconic moments (the opening, the villain, several of the kills, and even the dolly zoom), Piranha is simply a fine horror movie in its own right, offering a strong sense of building dread and paying off with chaotic feeding frenzy scenes, cut carefully to imply three times as much bloodshed as they reveal. There is an undercurrent of Spielbergian intelligence to this film that goes beyond its cribbed ideas; the way victims are arrayed to create a sense of gamified conflict to solve, the solemn moments offered to otherwise cartoonish villains, and the Raiders-style falling domino setpieces all provide Piranha a sense of sturdiness and humanity, making it less a ripoff than a companion piece.
