Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week I completed my watch-through of the original Dirty Pair TV series, which has left me wallowing in those tragic post-series doldrums of just wanting to hang out with my animated buds again. Kei and Yuri are a delightful pair of rampaging rascals, and nearly every episode of the series offered a satisfying riff on spy, mystery, or space drama adventures. The series was simply top-notch popcorn entertainment, and though I’ve heard their further escapades offer somewhat diminishing returns, I’m at this point invested enough to run through the various other Dirty Pair adaptations and remakes. It’s frankly been a terrific year so far in terms of catching up on outstanding older productions; I’ve marched through Future Boy Conan, Moribito, Aura Battle Dunbine, and now Dirty Pair alongside my Turn A and Katanagatari rewatches, and have had a great time with all of them. I’ll have to figure out what older favorite is up next, but in the meantime, let’s burn down the week in film!
First up this week was Berberian Sound Studio, a 2012 psychological horror film written and directed by the singular Peter Strickland (In Fabric, Flux Gourmet). Toby Jones stars as a sound engineer who flies from Britain to Italy in order to work on a film that he believes is some kind of pastoral horse-centered drama, only to learn he is actually overseeing a blood-soaked giallo feature. Jones’ initial trepidation regarding the project only amplifies as he is mistreated by his coworkers and shocked by the brutality of the project, with the boundaries between what he is engineering and what he is actively participating in eventually starting to disappear.
So yeah, a horror film that is explicitly about the construction of a seedy giallo production, all framed from the sound engineer’s booth? This was indeed a preposterously Me feature, and clearly also an extremely Strickland feature, given his enduring preoccupation with finding horror in the production of sound, the consumption of food, and the pursuit of unequivocal outsider artistry.
Berberian Sound Studio effectively shocks us with a horror film that we are never allowed to witness; outside of the brilliant title sequence for The Equestrian Vortex that opens the film, we witness the giallo feature only through foley work, voiceovers, and soundtrack stingers. Through this approach, Strickland effectively harnesses the viewer’s imagination, forcing us to lend context to such awful noises as watermelons being butchered into fragments, or radishes having their stems violently wrenched free. I was frankly a touch disappointed that the film ends so swiftly after embracing reality-challenging surrealism, but perhaps that’s just my own indulgent desire for features like The Equestrian Vortex speaking; regardless, Berberian Sound Studio challenges and discomforts and luxuriates in the horror of noise and the tyranny of the artist, offering both tribute and critique to a singular era in horror cinema.
Our next viewing was Magic Cop, a delightfully strange Hong Kong horror-comedy-martial arts blend featuring Lam Ching-ying, a retired cop who mixes traditional investigation with both sorcery and flying kicks. Called back to Hong Kong by a request from his neighbor, he becomes embroiled in a battle against a drug-smuggling magician, and must use all of his ways and wiles to crack the case.
Between Lam Ching-ying’s sober-faced commitment to his entirely preposterous character, and the genuinely excellent action choreography cooked up by director Stephen Tung (action choreographer of A Better Tomorrow, Hard Boiled, and countless other films), Magic Cop offers an experience as surreal as it is satisfying, blending fantastical folkloric invention with consistently coherent, often dazzling martial arts fundamentals. The whole film is a gag, but no one cracks, and Tung’s commitment to realizing an internally coherent vocabulary of curses and counter-curses means the scenes of spellcasting feel just as gripping as the traditional action. An unexpected treasure of a film.
Next up was The Spider Labyrinth, an ‘88 giallo feature directed by Gianfranco Giagni, starring Roland Wybenga as a historian who travels to Budapest in order to check in with a colleague who’s been researching ancient manuscripts. There he discovers his colleague pained and paranoid, warning of dark forces circling him before dying under mysterious circumstances. Determined to carry on his work, Wybenga will soon learn of a dark secret infecting the city, drawing all who question its acolytes into their terrible web.
The Spider Labyrinth is a perfectly reasonable giallo, a traditional tale of creeping infestation drawing on a touch of Dracula and a sizable helping of The Shadow Over Innsmouth. Like most of the best giallo features, atmosphere is everything here, and Spider Labyrinth does a fine job of cultivating paranoia through its strong cinematography and perpetually lurking observers (to say nothing of the inherently beautiful, forbidding scenery of Budapest itself). The film is sadly undercut by its practical effects, which basically amount to a lady in corpse paint and fake teeth, but it does have the good sense to send us off with a generous occult ritual climax. Nothing essential, but an easy recommendation if you’re a fan of Argento and the like.
We then continued our march through the Gamera canon with Gamera vs Guiron. It’s more trouble with those dastardly aliens again, as two boys named Akio and Tom end up trapped on their spaceship and carried along to their home planet Terra. Restrained by the survivors of an alien civilization, they learn they are soon to have their brains eaten – fortunately, Gamera is on the case, and determined to save these two particular boys from the consequences of their actions.
The Gamera series is really honing in on its apparent fundamentals at this point, as we reprise the “two boys must stop an alien invasion” plot in a much more focused shell, with mercifully little of the repeated footage that haunted Gamera’s last outing. It seems the more that Gamera extracts itself from Godzilla’s “kaiju versus the forces of humanity” template, the better it can realize its own “fantasy turtle accompanies boyhood adventures” soul. Thus Guiron finds us pretty much entirely stranded on the alien planet Terra, marveling at strange, lonely architecture and fleeing from pretty ladies who wish to eat our brains. With a condensed, relatively coherent plot and an absolute surplus of Gamera-versus-Guiron battling, this entry proves itself one of the most focused and successful Gamera films so far, and certainly the one with the most delightfully goofy-looking antagonist.
