Spring 2026 – Week 2 in Review - Ai Animes 🤖

Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. It’s been a busy week for me, as I’ve been racing to maintain my lead on reader projects while also munching through films and some recent anime productions. Inspired by kViN’s fantastic breakdown of Souta Ueno’s adaptation of last season’s Shiboyugi, I ended up munching through the whole series in a couple of days, and was similarly impressed by Ueno’s economic yet distinctive, holistic approach to the material. In his hands, the series’ death games are rendered ethereal and elegiac, a perpetual synthesis of the freedom of a great leap and the solidity of the approaching ground. The actual source material seemed pretty mediocre, harboring pretensions of human insight that its character writing couldn’t really support, but this would be far from the first time an anime director spun straw into gold. Regardless, Ueno’s elevation of the material has me eager to check out whatever he directs next, and it’s always a thrill to be introduced to a distinctive, vital creative voice. That aside, we’ve got a fleet of movies to get through, so let’s bound right into the Week in Review!

First up this week was Matango, a ‘63 horror feature by Godzilla director Ishirō Honda. The film centers on a group of friends enjoying a yachting day trip, who end up carried by a storm to a mysterious island. With no hope of rescue and supplies dwindling, the group soon begin to turn on each other, a process facilitated by the island’s ready supply of mysterious, strangely alluring mushrooms.

Though the film is clearly pitched on its “killer mushroom men” payoff, Matango is in truth more of a psychological thriller, largely building its tension through the steady, predictable dissolution of a loosely tethered group of acquaintances thrust into the harshest possible conditions. Honda’s choice to play the material straight leads to satisfyingly intense dividends, and his conservative apportioning of science fiction flourishes makes the creeping terror all the more effective. Sequences like our leads observing that even birds avoid this island strike at the essence of ambiguous horror, and when the mushroom men arrive, art director Shigekazu Ikuno ensures they are equal parts surreal and menacing. An unusually dark and thoroughly satisfying turn by Honda.

Our next screening was Dog Day Afternoon. Based on a Life magazine article about an actual ‘72 bank robbery, the film stars Al Pacino as Sonny Wortzik, a young man who intends to rob a bank in order to pay for his partner’s gender-affirming surgery. Things start bad and swiftly get worse, with one of Sonny’s accomplices immediately fleeing the scene, and an accidental fire soon bringing all the cops of New York down on their operation. With the building surrounded and the media hungry for blood, Sonny will have to balance a razor point hostage situation in order to secure his freedom.

Dog Day Afternoon is an incendiary experience, a rollercoaster of righteous victories and harrowing defeats, all led by Pacino’s multifaceted and intensely human performance. Both the police and the court of public opinion are presented as implacable natural forces, rolling tides that can rise up and crash down with unrelenting power. The viewer is invited to gasp and cheer alongside the crowds until things get nasty and personal – then we are called to answer for our delight, our thrill-seeking enjoyment of a man’s life fraying before our lives. And through this agile perspective-hopping, the film turns its hostage situation into a vivid character study, as Sonny is unpacked layer by layer to the point where even his hostages feel more attached to their wounded captor than the hounds baying outside. Just a top notch production from all angles.

We then continued our journey through kaiju cinema with Gamera vs Barugon, the second outing by our questionably ferocious big turtle. After getting knocked back to earth by a meteorite, Gamera proceeds to rage havoc across Japan. Meanwhile, a trio of fortune hunters seek an impressive opal hidden in a cave on New Guinea, only to discover it’s actually an egg containing the ferocious Barugon. With two separate tyrannical reptiles roaming Japan, its defenders must concoct an elaborate scheme to pit these creatures against each other, lest every miniature city be trampled underfoot.

Gamera vs Barugon is undeniably a larger-scale production than its predecessor, with far more significant miniature sets and a whole subplot ripped from King Kong. Unfortunately, the film’s utter narrative incoherence actually makes for a worse film than the scrappy original. The screenplay seems often at war with itself, as if multiple authors were fighting for multiple versions of Barugon; with the narrator frequently redefining Barugon’s powers and weaknesses, it becomes difficult to invest in the human characters’ inexplicable attempts to contain him.

As a result, the film’s middle, frustratingly Gamera-free act feels a lot like treading water. First the narrator will introduce a diamond that can apparently control Barugon’s mind, then immediately tell us that the diamond is not powerful enough to contain him. Instead, they decide to delay him with a downpour of water, which the narrator then informs us is apparently Barugon’s kryptonite. This sort of scattershot storytelling, plus Barugon’s aesthetic weakness as a kaiju (I’ve never felt more like a giant monster was just a guy in a suit), means it’s more of a relief than a triumph when Gamera shows up to do his thing. I’m certainly gaining some fondness for Gamera across these adventures, but I sure wish they’d construct a better film for him to stomp around in.

Last up for the week was Lionheart, a 1990 martial arts feature starring Jean-Claude Van Damme as Lyon Gaultier, a soldier of the French Foreign Legion stationed in Africa. When Lyon hears his brother in Los Angeles has been set on fire in a drug deal gone wrong, he flees his duties and boards a ship to the United States, ending up penniless in New York City. Joining up with local bookie/manager Joshua, he winds up competing in underground fighting pits to pay for his travel to LA, only to find even more trouble when he gets there.

As you can see, I had a little trouble summarizing this one; that preceding paragraph only gets us maybe a third of the way into the film, while ignoring the amorous advances of fight promoter Cynthia (Deborah Rennard), the troubles of his sister-in-law in LA, or the pursuit of his fellow legionnaires. It is not hard to tell this film had too many script editors, or was in fact cobbled together from two unrelated films separately involving fighting pits and French legionnaires.

You could chop off about twenty minutes of Lionheart (Van Damme bickers with his commanding officers, Van Damme wanders through New York, Van Damme is awkwardly seduced) and end up with a much better feature. That said, the essential core of this film is quite strong, offering a distinctive array of one-on-one battles, and giving Van Damme a chance to show off some genuine sensitivity. The lack of momentum definitely hurts, but the high-kicking highlights are excellent, and TV veteran Harrison Page puts in a genuinely impactful performance as Van Damme’s self-styled manager. Certainly not Van Damme’s best (Bloodsport and Hard Target are right there), but still a perfectly watchable feature.

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