Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. We’ve finally hit June, which in pretty classic Me fashion is naturally a call for a wave of “oh god, summer’s started, that means summer is on its way to being over” anxiety. My extremely bad brain aside, it’s actually been a fun week on the home front – we snuck in two D&D sessions taking us halfway through an ongoing tournament, got started on the admittedly inferior but still-pretty-fun Dirty Pair Flash, and began a replay of Final Fantasy VIII, which I hadn’t touched since high school. Alright, technically it’s just my housemate who’s made actual progress – I just spent three hours playing Triple Triad in the opening area, precisely like god intended. I’ll perhaps venture further than Balamb Garden in the week ahead, but for now, let’s run down the week in films!
First up this week was Don’t Torture a Duckling, a Lucio Fulci giallo feature from before his blood-soaked Gates of Hell days. The film centers on a small village where young boys keep dying under mysterious circumstances, prompting fear and distrust among the townsfolk. As the bodies stack up, both the police and one dogged journalist will be forced to uncover all of the community’s dirty secrets.
In spite of its ominous title, the film is actually quite restrained by Fulci standards, diving deep into both procedural drama and pocket character studies, and unpeeling its central town layer by treacherous layer. What emerges is a story of tradition and paranoia, wherein all the bigotries and superstitions of this town serve to conceal the true darkness at its core.
The film benefits strongly from the fact that you can’t throw a rock in Italy without striking some gorgeous and artfully dilapidated ancient village, and effectively contrasts the architecture of its central community against the encroaching threat of modernization – the overpass that hangs high overhead, the audacious new mansion on the edge of town. Through these touches, Fulci asks the further question of whether humanity has begun to move beyond superstition, or if we have simply replaced provincial tribalism with a broader sort of indifference towards our fellow man. A striking and incisive thrust by one of horror’s great champions.
We then checked back in on Gamera, and his continued efforts to save humanity from its own terrible decisions. In Gamera vs Jiger, Japan is preparing for the World Fair-esque Expo 70, and celebrating the occasion by extracting a cursed statue from a ritual burial ground in order to sell expo tickets. Though Gamera attempts to protest, humanity does it anyway, resulting in the release of the nefarious monster Jiger from his sacred tomb. Thus our big turtle buddy must face off with his latest supersized adversary, once more employing the assistance of two boys who happen to be in the area.
With the question of what a Gamera movie is finally answered, his latest escapade continues in the now firmly-established “boyhood adventure” model, this time facing off with an enemy raised by humanity’s meddling in occult island burial grounds. So a bit of a retread in that it basically echoes the concept of Gamera’s second adventure, but with a jolt of confidence derived from hewing to its own path, rather than grasping towards the initial Godzilla-derivative adult drama.
Some incidental flourishes here go a long way towards giving this film its own identity – I particularly liked the cosmic horror-adjacent idea that exposure to the statue would inherently begin to fragment the mind and sicken human beings, as well as the mid-film Incredible Voyage sequence where the boys must use a tiny submersible to go inside Gamera and fight a parasite. The films have at this point established their lane well enough to actually feel somewhat predictable (beyond the obvious template of these kaiju features in general), and the special effects are still somewhat below the standard of Gamera’s contemporaries, but the big turtle is still a perfectly charming on-screen presence.
Next up was The Outing, a supernatural ‘80s slasher noteworthy mostly for its profoundly non-threatening title. Seriously, “The Outing?” Are we picking up parfaits and going window shopping? Fuck, even “The Picnic” could imply proximity to ominous woods, or perhaps a bee potentially stinging someone.
Anyway, The Outing centers on a group of kids who sneak into a natural history museum after hours, and are subsequently picked off by a malevolent genie with an exceedingly loose understanding of genie lore. Nothing to write home about here; a couple reasonably inspired kill scenes, an exceedingly unwelcome sexual assault sequence, and an unfortunate paucity of the genie’s hokey design, which is undoubtedly the best thing about the feature. Back at the time of release, I imagine features like this were determined to downplay their wholly unconvincing rubber beasties; as a modern viewer with an apparently infinite appetite for home-grown practical effects, that’s exactly what I’m here for.
I then checked out Leda: The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko, an ‘85 OVA centered on the young and lovestruck Yoko Asagiri. After composing a song for her crush, she discovers that the melody she has written actually serves as a bridge between worlds, connecting her to the mysterious mirror-world of Ashanti. With her melody affirming her as the champion of the ancient warrior Leda, she will be forced to take up arms to defend this world, lest the forces of evil use her song’s power to threaten her own home.
Leda is a fairly standard classic isekai in terms of its structure, with too little running time to add much texture to its largely barren world. Nonetheless, it offers a vivid demonstration of character designer/animation director Mutsumi Inomata’s unique visual sensibilities, reveling in the large eyes, wispy forms, and ornate costumes of one of the key aesthetic voices of the fantasy OVA era. Mechanical designer Takahiro Toyomasu also gets to show off here, with his inventions ranging from spindly two-legged walkers to Megazone 23-adjacent hoverbikes and an endearingly ramshackle iron giant.
The OVA’s key animation is fluid and expressive, embracing dramatic distortions of form and delighting in odd mechanical anachronisms, with Leda’s essentially boneless dog companion proving a real highlight. It’s also just inherently a little refreshing to see an old-fashioned isekai in this new era, back when their theme was not “I will escape reality and rule in this new fantasy world,” but instead “I will take the coming-of-age lessons I learned here and apply them to the world where I belong.” An exceedingly easy watch.
