Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week I’ve been keeping active in spite of this summer’s absolutely brutal humidity, heroically jogging through the pain before collapsing into an air-conditioned puddle. I’ve also been keeping busy on the anime screening front by finishing off the first season of Witch Hat Atelier, which proved, well, likely as good as it could be. The unfortunate issue with Witch Hat Atelier is that it is so well-suited to its original medium that any adaptation will almost necessarily be a lesser version, and though this production team is obviously excellent, there’s basically no way to effectively translate the original manga’s deftness of paneling, or to perfectly balance its drama versus its humor. Still, it’s certainly a strong show in its own right, and will undoubtedly find a place within my annual wrap-up. I’ll likely be tackling one of this ongoing season’s many apparent delicacies next, but in the meantime, let’s burn down the week in review!
First up this week was Isolation, an ‘05 creature feature set on a farm in rural Ireland, whose owner Dan (John Lynch) has agreed to inject two of his cows with an experimental serum that will allegedly facilitate faster growth. However, when one of the cows gives birth to a calf that is itself pregnant with several horrifically misshapen offspring, he finds himself facing off with both a deadly contagion and a creature that should never have been born.
I was pitched on Isolation being “basically Alien on a cattle ranch,” and to be frank I’m not sure I can improve on that description. The gang’s all here: cramped chambers full of industrial equipment, awful creatures that scamper and evolve in the dark, an uncomfortable focus on forced pregnancy and birth as a gateway to horror. Director Billy O’Brien marshals limited resources to tremendous effect; with just a handful of actors and a modest series of farmhouses, he successfully evokes a Nostromo’s worth of sickly anxiety, desperate creature-hunting gambits, and yes, a whole hunk of isolation.
Beyond the tightness of the script and excellent location shooting, Isolation is also quite generous in terms of its visual effects. Both the half-formed fetal monsters and their resilient sibling are awful creations, successfully brought to life through strong physical props and effectively grotesque animatronics work. Isolation sets clear goals for itself and clears them with distinction; it’s always a pleasure to see such sturdy, impactful work in such an efficient production shell.
My scouring of anime’s OVA era next led us to Hades Project Zeorymer, an apocalyptic scifi drama centered on Masato Akitsu, a teenage boy forced by government agents to pilot the imposing Zeorymer mecha. Squaring off against him are the ominous forces of the Empress Yuratei, who hopes to gain the powers of Zeorymer for herself. However, both these forces are in truth motivated by something darker, a terrible legacy that will unite all the unfortunate children of this era’s true architect.
The four-part OVA is an adaptation of an apparently much sleazier manga, whose exploitation-drama roots remain clear in the show’s grim-verging-on-predatory narrative beats. This actually makes for a unique and satisfyingly bleak scifi narrative, as our hero wages someone else’s war against a series of mecha pilots who all seem on the verge of hysteria or collapse in their own right. The design work is also exceptional; there are frequently impressive cuts of mechanical animation, but more than that, the show’s backgrounds and mechanical designs are intricate and alluring, selling us on a world where technology has become a stultifying cocoon, and human beings have had their base humanity steadily extracted via mechanical or genetic meddling.
That concept lends a vital emotional strength to the series’ central bond, between a boy who seems to be losing his human identity, and a girl who wishes she could believe in her own. Not the most narratively inventive or complex work, but a fine piece of gothic mecha melodrama.
We then checked out one of the year’s biggest surprise hits, the recent horror feature Obsession. The film centers on a shiftless twenty-something named Bear (Michael Johnston) who is hopelessly in love with his best friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette). While seeking a gift to accompany his long-awaited confession, he ends up purchasing a “One Wish Willow,” a novelty item that promises to fulfill any one wish of its wielder. After wishing for Nikki to love him “more than anything in the world,” it briefly seems like Bear’s dreams have come true – but as time with his newly adoring Nikki stretches on, it becomes clear that he has made a horrible mistake.
Obsession is a monkey’s paw-themed pressure cooker that stretches its resources with impressive grace, banking heavily on the go-for-broke performance of its mind-controlled heroine. Alongside the staple moments of anxiety and entrapment you’d expect from this premise, the film finds some novel new angles of horror, while its cinematography ensures a perpetual sense of claustrophobia that ultimately applies to both of its leads.
I think what I particularly found most compelling was how its protagonist-slash-villain Bear was actually trapping and tormenting two individuals – both the close friend he decided he’d prefer to lock inside a willing sex slave, and that clearly conscience slave herself, a being utterly desperate to retain his love in spite of not really understanding what human love or social behavior are actually like. I also appreciated just how much of the horror here came from Bear’s own actions; he’s genuinely one of the most monstrous figures I’ve seen framed as a film’s protagonist, and it’s at times difficult to watch him continuously doubling down on his own narcissism and wounded self-righteousness. While the film overall didn’t land with quite as much impact as I anticipated given its exuberant word-of-mouth, it’s nonetheless a compelling horror debut that pins down the violence implicit in our era of young male entitlement, while also using its fantastical embellishments to gesture towards terrors that are stronger for their vagueness of implication.
With our spirits lightened by the success of Gamera’s first revival feature, we then soldiered on through Gamera 2: Attack of Legion. This time around, a meteor crash-lands in Hokkaido, releasing a number of insectoid beasties who swiftly colonize the subways of Sapporo. After it becomes clear they are constructing an egg for cross-planetary pollination, Gamera shows up to stop all that nonsense, leading to a sequence of clashes between our turtle buddy, the swarming man-sized monsters, and their massive alien queen.
Attack of Legion serves as another fine entry in the new Gamera chronology, matching the heights of Godzilla’s Heisei adventures. The film crucially embraces the same stroke of genius as the contemporaneous Godzilla vs Destoroyah: if your kaiju star’s eventual antagonist is heralded by an army of man-sized harbingers, you can do a lot more in terms of human-scale action scenes, and even lean into direct horror territory. Between that dramatic flexibility and the generally superior human-side drama, Attack of Legion manages that crucial balance of simultaneous conflict on the individual, country-wide, and kaiju-specific levels.
Like its predecessor, Attack of Legion features the special effects brilliance of Shinji Higuchi, who would go on to work with Hideaki Anno on Shin Godzilla and Shin Ultraman. In his hands, Gamera and Legion are blessed with sprawling city sets to stomp through, offering more action payoff than any previous Gamera feature. And Legion itself is a wonder of a design, evoking Biollante in its massive scale and many-armed complexity. The film ultimately delights on all fronts, fully realizing the promise of Godzilla’s roundest competitor.
