Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. With the summer anime season already commencing, we’ve got an absurd bounty of promising new productions to look into, from Naoko Yamada’s A Witch in Mongolia to the new Ghost in the Shell, dazzling aesthetic throwback Goodbye Lara, and even a brand new adaptation from Kyoto Animation. Sometimes I have to scramble to fill out my year in review posts, but between this season’s contenders, Witch Hat Atelier, and Journal With Witch (it’s clearly a particularly witchy year), 2026 is looking to be one of the strongest years in anime for quite some time. Meanwhile, my own house just finished up the original Bubblegum Crisis, leaving me wavering between Magic Knight Rayearth and Galaxy Express 999 as our next legacy viewing. I’ll let you all know how that shakes out soon enough, but in the meantime, let’s run down the week in films!
First up this week was Dragon Inn, a ‘67 wuxia feature directed by the legendary King Hu (Come Drink With Me, A Touch of Zen). The film is set during the Ming Dynasty, wherein the War Minister Yu Qian has just been falsely accused of treason, and sentenced to death by the eunuch Cao Shaoqin. Cao then sets his sights on Yu’s fleeing children, who have made their way to the remote Dragon Inn – however, the Yu family have allies of their own, and Cao’s minions will soon find themselves facing off with a trio of legendary warriors.
Based on my experience with the extraordinary A Touch of Zen, I was sorta expecting Dragon Inn to be a bit more contemplative and resistant to genre classification. But as it turns out, King Hu had a pretty specific idea in mind here – Dragon Inn is essentially a Seven Samurai-esque holdout mission, getting to the action almost immediately and never relenting thereafter.
A Touch of Zen’s bumbling Chun Shih here stars as the effortlessly confident Xiao Shaozi, a master of the martial arts who introduces himself by terrifying a roomful of warriors, intentionally drinking poison, and catching and returning an assassin’s blade with chopsticks alone. That should give you some indication of the style of heroism employed by Dragon Inn’s stars, who make terrific use of the film’s titular stage as they soar, slash, and deploy carefree one-liners in defense of their charges. With more outright, lovingly choreographed action than the wuxia standard, Dragon Inn serves as both an exemplary demonstration of the genre and also an easy access point to its treasures; King Hu is a master, and Dragon Inn a clear product of a master at work.
Our next screening was the recent horror feature Whistle, directed by Corin Hardy (The Hallow, The Nun). The film centers on Chrys Willet (Dafne Keen), a recent high school transfer who discovers a strange, skull-shaped whistle in her new locker. While meeting up with some new acquaintances after school, one of them has the bright idea of actually blowing on the extraordinarily cursed-looking artifact, thereby instigating a series of events that basically anyone who’d taken one look at the damn thing could see coming a mile away.
Whistle is a medley of a few teen horror staples – we’ve got some I Know What You Did Last Summer, a touch of Final Destination, and that “I’m drawing a line in the sand, don’t read the fucking Latin” premise right from Cabin in the Woods. I feel like the precise threat embodied by the Whistle worked a bit better conceptually than in practice – the idea of “your destined death catching up to you” doesn’t really facilitate as many novel chase sequences or scares as you might expect, and a fair number of the film’s major sequences fall flat as a result. That said, the second half picks up with a one-two punch of truly gruesome kills, and I have to give the film some begrudging credit for sneaking in Chvrches “Final Girl” as its victory anthem. Nothing exceptional, but a watchable enough horror flick.
We then hopped back to our ‘50s horror grind, screening the aptly tilted Earth vs the Flying Saucers. Directed by Fred F. Sears, the film centers on the newly married couple Russell and Carol Marvin, who are working on “Project Skyhook,” a mission intended to deploy ten research satellites into earth orbit. Unfortunately, those satellites are all immediately shot down by a cavalry of flying saucers, who proceed to blow up the Skyhook base of operations and inflict all manner of calamities on the people of earth.
Earth vs the Flying Saucers is a fine example of the classic “boardroom kaiju” genre, wherein some supernatural threat is countered by a bunch of grave-looking officials holding meetings and discussing various plans of action. Some of my favorite Godzilla films fall in this genre, and Shin Godzilla is practically a parody of the form, though Flying Saucers plays it fairly straight. Sometimes it’s just nice to watch a bunch of competent people make rational decisions; in light of our current “governance by raw id” paradigm, it feels like a precious luxury to imagine our rulers have any thoughts in their heads at all. There are some vague thematic gestures towards humanity’s inclination towards violence in Flying Saucers’ first half, but for the most part it’s an even mix of grim-faced discussions and Harryhausen-animated saucer battles; clearly far from the sultan of stop-motion’s best work, but still a welcome effort.
Last up for the week was the 1980 adaptation of Flash Gordon, adapted by Mike Hodges from the comic strips by Alex Raymond. Sam J. Jones stars as our titular football star, who ends up roped into an interstellar conflict when the earth is threatened by the malevolent Ming the Merciless (Max von Sidow, if you can believe it). Working alongside his captured fellow earthlings, Flash will have to exploit every angle in order to foment a rebellion against the hateful Ming, and at last bring peace to the galaxy.
Flash Gordon is an altogether charming adventure, offering colorful production design, committed performances, and plenty of dramatic feats of derring-do. The film’s greatest strength is its commitment to tone; it plays as neither self-parody nor self-serious reinvention, instead running through its camp drama with total sincerity (much like the live-action One Piece adaptation). Such an approach necessarily requires the cast’s full dramatic commitment, and Flash Gordon is fortunately blessed with a strong one; Max von Sidow is obviously fantastic, but I was also quite impressed with the performances of the film’s dueling princes Timothy Dalton and Brian Blessed.
Blessed in particular basically runs away with the feature, offering a booming, exceedingly lovable performance all through the film’s back half. Whether he’s sentencing Gordon to trial by combat or directing his legions of winged vikings into battle, he always seems like he’s having the time of his life, and his joy is extremely infectious. Lavish sets, plentiful swashbuckling, and a great cast to swash those buckles – Flash Gordon’s simply a fine time at the movies.
