Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. You’ll be pleased to learn that I ran through an absurd collection of features this week, in both live-action and animated varieties, and even finished a full anime series in the bargain. I also checked out the first two Heaven’s Feel movies, along with the usual assortment of horror features ranging from compact new thrillers to an Italian classic. It was actually such a productive week that I’m saving a couple of this week’s films for next week, so if you’ve been following my twitter and are wondering why Magnetic Rose or Touch of Evil don’t show up here, don’t worry. More reviews are assuredly coming, but in the meantime, let’s break down a fresh stack of features in the Week in Review!

We started off this week with a couple of sturdy, traditional horror films, courtesy of Shudder’s vast catalog. First up was The Furies, a no-frills slasher with about three minutes of setup and a lean eighty minute running time, centered on a group of women who find themselves waking up in coffin-like chambers in the woods, with a variety of menacing killers hunting them.

If you were to produce a film adaptation of the game “Dead by Daylight,” I’m not sure you could do a better or more accurate job than The Furies. The rules of its “game” naturally inspire seeds of tension among its survivors, and its kills are some of the most gruesome I’ve seen, without veering into the extended sadism of the torture porn genre. Its characters and plot are thin, but at eighty minutes, that’s clearly by design – this film was made for hooting and hollering at with other slasher fans, without a second wasted on anything tangential to the core slasher experience.

After that, we checked out Hell House LLC, a found-footage production about a group of people who design haunted house attractions for Halloween, but soon find their latest house haunting them!!! Though I physically cannot resist laughing at its premise, Hell House LLC is actually a solid film on the whole, making magnificent use of its appropriately spooky-ass venue.

Structurally, the film uses a documentary about the “Hell House tragedy” in a very effective way, presenting bits and pieces of evidence about the event, including an ominously vague customer’s video, to prime the audience’s expectations before diving into the archival tapes of the actual Hell House team. One of the great strengths of found footage horror is that it undercuts the audience’s expectation of intentionality in cinematography, therefore making the audience feel inherently less safe. When a camera held by a character pans over a dark figure, but the character themselves doesn’t actually notice, it’s far more anxiety-inducing than if an authorial-eye camera were to simply linger on that same figure. Hell House LLC uses a variety of similar tricks, as well as one magnificently spooky clown mask, to make the audience feel just as trapped as the cast. A fine addition to the found footage collection.

Next up was this week’s crown jewel, Dario Argento’s magnificent Suspiria. All I knew going in was that it was a key work of Italian horror, and that Kunihiko Ikuhara was a big fan of the film – but honestly, that would have been clear regardless within this film’s first five minutes. Centered on a girl who’s just arrived at an ominous dance school, the film combines horror, school drama, and surrealism in a manner that feels graceful, thrilling, and absurdly anime.

Every goddamn shot of this film is beautiful, combining marvelously complex background geometry and careful camera placement to create a consistent sense of delirious, threatening unreality. The use of color, intricate set design, and symmetry collaborate to create a world that truly feels like a dark and terrible fable, grounded by Jessica Harper’s forceful performance and the sturdy, familiar beats of a boarding school mystery.

The school is such a fun set that I felt giddy simply watching Harper and her fellow students creep up and down its halls – the film looks like how a dream feels, with characters hiding in shadows that seem to possess a genuine physical presence, or creeping through tiny windows only to find themselves in a place more horrible than the one they left. With a gloriously larger-than-life supporting cast and a perfectly cued soundtrack by the band Goblin, Suspiria felt like the most generous film experience I’ve had in some time. I may have found one of my new favorites.

Inspired by kViN’s phenomenal article on the history of ufotable, I decided to see for myself what the crew had been up to, and checked out the first Heaven’s Feel film. And yep, it turns out they’ve been honing some impressive new tricks over the years. This film pulls off a synchronization of traditional animation and digital effects that feels unlike anything else in anime, creating a remarkable sense of visual depth and physical impact. Though the actual direction can be quite stiff at times, and the character acting is limited (likely a partial consequence of this franchise’s inexpressive character designs), the fight scenes are breathtaking, and the “power up” moments in particular are absurd to behold. Any fan of action animation should at least check out this film’s delirious midpoint fight.

Unfortunately, the film’s story is nowhere near as impressive as its animation, and is actually pretty dull on the whole. In order to hurry us into the new events of this third route, Heaven’s Feel essentially summarizes the common events of the Fate/UBW routes, making for a film that feels inherently disjointed, and assuming relationships between characters like Rin and Shirou that aren’t really established here at all. That’s probably an inescapable handicap of this sort of adaptation model, but it nonetheless undercuts the film’s pacing, continuity, and emotional impact to a pretty severe extent. That said, I actually very much enjoyed seeing how the events of Heaven’s Feel essentially fill out all the “missing” parts of the earlier routes, creating a pleasing sense of fitting puzzle pieces into place.

More unfortunate is the fact that Heaven’s Feel’s own story just isn’t interesting at all. Shirou is as close to a blank slate as usual, and Sakura might be the least interesting character in the whole cast. Her personality is “I am a perfect yet insecure underclassman archetype,” and her conflict is “will Shirou love me even though my family has sexually abused me,” and the film drags out its articulation of those facts over two punishing hours of long stares and banal conversations. Ufotable seems to believe that the way you make impactful, emotionally rich drama is to take trite, simplistic drama and stretch it out to three times its natural length, but all that accomplished was making me resent the film for wasting my time. And this film’s battles don’t even really relate to its central character drama, meaning we generally get thirty minutes of dull characters slowly articulating basic feelings, followed by a dramatically inert AMV fight sequence, repeat.

Heaven’s Feel’s only thematic questions seem to be “what does it mean to be a hero,” which is a question only relevant to characters in action cartoons, and “is it okay to seek love even if I’m damaged,” which Fate possesses nowhere near the grace or thoughtfulness of characterization necessary to answer. The background art and fight scenes are sweet, but Fate’s writing is as clumsy as ever, and suffers even more from this film’s incredibly slow pacing. Check out the cool battles, probably skip the rest.

Still compelled by the allure of backgrounds and fight scenes, I continued on through the second Heaven’s Feel film, which basically offered more of the same. Sakura is so basic, blameless, and shamelessly fan-pleasing in her design that none of her drama lands with any impact at all, meaning a good half of this film is a tedious slog through a wish fulfillment romance. We’ve moved on from simply basic storytelling at this point – we’ve arrived at the horny part, and as it turns out, Heaven’s Feel is horny in precisely the same sort of “I want a mom who’s also dependent on me, and is completely sex-naive but also a sex god” manner I enjoyed so much in shows like My Little Sister Can’t Be This Cute.

I imagine some dedicated writer could whip up an interesting exploration of how Sakura embodies the Madonna-whore dichotomy that rests at the horny heart of so much anime, but I frankly just don’t care anymore; I’m tired of critiquing why bad art is bad, I’d rather just watch good art. Fortunately, this film has even more fight scenes than the first one, and the film’s centerpiece is just fucking absurd, but I still feel like I’m overpaying for the privilege of enjoying them.

Last up, I finally went back and checked out the rest of Devilman Crybaby, watching it over a few weeks with a friend. I initially dropped it after the first episode’s climactic frenzy of sexual violence, but fortunately (for me at least), the show rarely revels in such crass theatrics after that. Instead, there’s plenty of that messy, painful character stuff that I tend to like, which actually uses Crybaby’s hard-R mandate to great effect, by offering a far more honest look at teenage anger and sexuality than anime usually provides.

That freedom also extends to this show’s visual aesthetic, which felt like a joyous return to the messiness of Yuasa’s early productions. The earnest decency of Crybaby’s central cast is contrasted against the bleak tribalism of humanity at large to powerful effect, culminating in a stunning penultimate episode. Unfortunately, the show is somewhat undercut by Ryo’s role – he’s a complete wildcard of a character, never possesses an ounce of humanity, and also serves as the impetus for most of the show’s escalating drama. While some last-second reveals at least offer an explanation for his decisions, they can’t imbue his prior actions with any emotional weight – that said, Crybaby is still a strong show overall, with a great cast and a fascinating visual style.