Hello folks, and welcome the heck back to Wrong Every Time. The weather has finally shifted at this point, allowing me to drag my decrepit body into motion and actually get a few jogs in over the last week. To the surprise of no one, this has led to generally higher energy and better spirits, which have been further bolstered by my dramatic progress running through my outstanding reader projects. I’m currently down to just two articles I need to send to drafts, and have already hammered out a pile of notes for the first, leaving me potentially days away from being current for the first time in over a year. Granted, that list will soon be supplemented by all the incoming April bounties, but goddamnit, I’m taking my victories where I can find them. In the meantime, let’s see what treasures we uncovered in this week’s film excursions!
First up this week was Together, a recent horror production starring Alison Brie and Dave Franco as a couple in a long-term yet fraying relationship. Moving from the city to a small town only seems to drive the pair further apart, until they happen upon a mysterious cavern while hiking around their property. Seemingly transformed by their experience in the cave, the two fall under a supernatural force of attraction, one which seems intent not just to keep them together, but to fuse them into one.
Together is a nasty and effective piece of body horror, a tidy debut by writer-director Michael Shanks that makes excellent use of limited resources. Shanks’ script and the convincingly fatigued lead performances successfully articulate the film’s decaying central relationship to the point where when horrible supernatural things start happening, it almost feels like a reprieve from scenes of Brie and Franco intentionally hurting each other. With such a strong emotional dynamic at its center, Shanks seems to understand that less is more in terms of the set dressing; light flourishes of folk horror paint a vague yet evocative scene, while a solid mix of practical effects and well-employed CG ensure the film maximizes its body horror potential. A slow burn towards a proper Society-style conclusion.
My house then concluded its journey through the Godzilla film canon by screening the final millennium era production, Godzilla: Final Wars. Like most millennium features, this one is set in its own distinct timeline, one that acknowledges many of the mid-century films in order to propose a modern era where regular kaiju attacks are thwarted by superhuman mutants working for the Earth Defense Force. However, when aliens arrive with the power to control both mutants and kaijus, it will be up to a small force of survivors and the Big G himself to protect earth from the combined might of every other giant monster.
You would think a premise like “Godzilla fights all the monsters” would be impossible to fuck up, but Final Wars is sadly one of the franchise’s weakest entries. Practically everything to do with this film’s mutant force only drags the energy down; attempting to graft a TV budget Matrix ripoff to a Godzilla shell is as clumsy as it is ineffective, and every time the scene shifted to the leather-clad mutants, it felt like an ad break between actual Godzilla sequences. These characters don’t really count as the requisite “human element” because they don’t act like human beings – and meanwhile, Godzilla’s impressive rogues gallery is basically squandered as a series of indistinguishable cannon fodder. I will at least give props to the team for casting stone-faced professional wrestler Don Frye as a katana-wielding commander; Frye cannot act at all, and adds a welcome splash of absurdity to the film’s human-side drama.
We then screened the recent Clown in a Cornfield, adapted and directed by Eli Craig (Tucker and Dale vs Evil) from a novel by Adam Cesare. Katie Douglas and Aaron Abrams star as Quinn and Glenn Maybrook, a daughter and father who move to the sleepy town of Kettle Springs following the death of Quinn’s mother. Quinn swiftly makes friends with a group of teens who enjoy making short horror videos, often starring the town’s mascot “Frendo” the clown. Of course, soon they find themselves stalked by wholly unauthorized Frendos, and I’m sure you can see where all this is going.
The film is sort of a reverse-Children of the Corn throwback slasher, with the genre-savvy bluntness of its title extending to its general tone. The film could use at least thirty percent less winking at the camera (Tucker and Dale this is not), and never really impresses in terms of its suspense or horror payoffs. That said, the cast is quite pleasant, and the generally organic script (self-aware quipping aside) makes it easy to care about Quinn and Glenn. Far from essential, but a reasonable slasher diversion.
We then checked out Punishment Park, a ‘71 pseudo-documentary. After President Nixon declares a state of emergency in response to anti-Vietnam protests, objectors are rounded up en masse, resulting in America’s prisons swiftly reaching full capacity. As such, would-be prisoners are now offered the alternative of Punishment Park, where they will spend three days marching across the California desert. If they can reach the American flag waiting at the end, their sentences will be exonerated; if captured by the pursuing police and national guardsmen, they will serve out their sentences as usual.
The film splits its attention between two groups of objectors: one who are prepped to begin their fifty-three mile trial, and another who are about to present their case before a tribunal of their peers. Between these two parallel dramas, Punishment Park offers a searing portrait of what America thinks of itself versus what America really is, the high-minded rhetoric and calls for “decency” that precede the unrelenting application of state violence. While the tribunal group’s pointed articulation of America’s fascist pretensions are scoffed at by scandalized politicians, their fellows on the ground are beaten and deprived, hounded by the rabid dogs we call police and servicemen.
As you might guess, the film is a pretty tense experience, and one that feels shamefully relevant fifty years on. Practically every red line of civil society this film posits we might cross is already long behind us; our modern politicians make no semblance of following any moral principles or even rules of law, our modern police are indeed gestapo who seek only to serve and protect themselves, and anyone who critiques the regime can easily be unpersoned at will, redefined as a dangerous dissident element in retrospect. Ferocious and timely as ever, Punishment Park serves as a shameful reminder that we have recognized the evil in our midst for decades, but are seemingly incapable of extracting the conservative, jingoistic, anti-intellectual, fundamentally fascist impulse from the soul of America. ICE is no new development; these people have always walked among us, eager to turn their fragile egos and short tempers into open violence.
