Summer 2026 – Week 1 in Review - Ai Animes 🤖

Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. The summer anime season appears to be an absolute deluge of quality cartoons, but in characteristic fashion, I have so far not sampled any of them. Look, I spent most of a decade writing for ANN’s preview guide, I feel like I can be forgiven for my temporal obstinance when it comes to new shows. Nonetheless, even I feel tempted to check out such enticing propositions as a new Naoko Yamada show or fresh Kyoto Animation adaptation, so I’ll likely be diving in myself in short order, presumably when enough episodes have been released to make a proper meal of any of them. In the meantime, my house has been knocking off film viewings and supplementary series with uninhibited abandon, so let’s see what treasures await in the Week in Review!

First up this week was Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, a surreal artifact of the Czechoslovak New Wave directed by Jaromil Jireš. The film is a dreamlike tale of sexual awakening centered on the titular Valerie, a young girl who finds herself tempted and tormented by lovers, vampires, and dreams of the past. Wandering her town with only fragile talismans for protection, she seeks either transformative revelation or the certainty of her lost family, grasping at ephemeral moments of personal connection all the while.

The film is brimming with charged imagery and inexplicable turns in fortune, with its elegiac tone and malevolent tempters placing it somewhere between Picnic at Hanging Rock and Nosferatu. I imagine much of this film’s imagery is tied closely enough to Czech history to defy my attempts at interpretation, but it’s easy enough to appreciate the film’s clear distrust of the Catholic church, alongside its persistent, ambiguous reflections on the simultaneous freedom/fragility of birds, or contrast of purity and knowledge. And while I felt the film’s repeated cycles of temptation, destruction, and rebirth ultimately turned a touch repetitive, there’s really no contesting the film’s power as a tone piece or visual theater, a languorous, haunting parade of youthful certainty and rigid doctrine collapsing under the revelations of adolescent insight and first lust. A film I’d recommend to any lovers of folkloric ambiguity or theatrical extravagance, so long as they’re comfortable with fairly direct articulations of adolescent sexuality.

Our next screening was The Loreley’s Grasp, a Spanish horror feature directed by Amando de Ossario, who is otherwise best known for his “Blind Dead” zombie films. Tony Kendall stars as a hunter who is hired to protect the girls of a remote boarding school, following a string of violent deaths perpetrated under the light of the full moon. However, after coming across a mysterious woman who seems to vanish into the lake mists, he discovers there is an ancient secret haunting this town, and finds his loyalties torn between the mortal and supernatural.

The Loreley’s Grasp is a scuzzy slice of ‘70s horror that embodies pretty much every trope of the genre’s Italian and Spanish output at the time, filled with high-coiffed and scantily clad young women who alternately giggle and chase each other or scream in blood-curdling defiance as they are fileted by a swamp creature. The acting is certainly nothing to write home about, and the creature design wouldn’t make it to the finals of your local costume contest, but there are scattered moments of beauty and intrigue to be found.

The film’s strongest material relates to the doomed romance between its hunter and monster, a selkie-like creature determined to draw him into an eternal love beneath the seas. The cryptic image that defines her seduction, of the monster in human form dancing away across the murky grasses, is a genuinely compelling, otherworldly vision – between that, the sea-soaked majesty of her underwater palace, and the visceral attack sequences, the film has enough to offer to apologize for its greater deficiencies. It is hard to make a genuinely great movie, so I’ll often settle for a bad movie featuring one or two genuinely great images.

We then watched Mortal Kombat II, the sequel to the franchise’s 2021 revival. With earthrealm once more under threat from the forces of the nefarious Shao Kahn, Raiden’s perpetual quest for new challengers turns up Johnny Cage (Karl Urban), a former martial artist and actor who is more accustomed to faking punches than throwing them. Nonetheless, Cage and his would-be allies are soon thrust into a fresh Mortal Kombat tournament, wherein death is a certainty and the only real question is how gruesomely you go.

Mortal Kombat II proves a confident sequel that makes no apologies or concessions to its non-videogame format, largely dispensing with its predecessor’s attempts at a standard film-original hero’s journey to instead offer an entire goddamn Mortal Kombat tournament. As a result, the film teeters on the edge of shapelessness, but the dual narratives provided by newcomers Kitana (Adeline Rudolph) and Johnny Cage offer just enough structure to keep the whole assemblage moving.

Karl Urban is basically a delight wherever he shows up, and he brings a self-effacing humor to Cage’s fake-it-till-you-make-it origin story. But of course, the real focus here is rightfully on the battles, and Mortal Kombat II does an excellent job of bringing the atmosphere, energy, and gruesome stakes of Mortal Kombat to life. The film is a deliberate throwback, trashy and hammy and hard-headed in the style of lesser Van Damme or Dolph Lundgren features (something it explicitly harkens to through the in-universe filmography of Johnny Cage). Your mileage will depend almost entirely on your fondness for such features, but if you have any nostalgia for the days of direct-to-video films with names like Killborg or Thunder Countdown, you’ll find plenty to love here.

Alongside our film selections, we also checked out the original Bubblegum Crisis, another of anime’s quintessential ‘80s OVAs. The series centers on a quartet of vigilantes known as the “Knight Riders,” who don powersuits to do battle with the “Boomers,” cyborg offspring of the Genom Corporation. The show’s vibes are excellent, combining Streets of Fire’s youth-in-revolt energy and Bladerunner’s android-haunted dystopian narrative to arrive at one of the quintessential cyberpunk settings. The animation is also frequently gorgeous, offering both luxurious mechanical design and evocative scum-stained city backdrops. Sadly, I rarely found myself as captivated by the show’s actual stories and characters as I was by its setting.

The four Knight Riders are themselves pretty boilerplate characters, with Priss defining herself purely as “the cool one,” Nene as “the bubbly one,” and the other two as, well, the other two. And the narratives they encounter never dig into the more interesting parts of their cyberpunk setting, generally just serving as long-winded paths towards big fights between powersuits and cyborgs. Perhaps my expectations were improperly calibrated by having just watched Dirty Pair, which manages to combine a similar setting with a whole lot of intrigue, heart, and comedy, but Bubblegum Crisis just always felt emotionally distant to me – a fine setup in want of a story worth investing in. Still perfectly recommendable as a lovingly animated action drama, but not something I’m likely to return to.

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