Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. You all doing okay this week? I’m personally feeling fan-fucking-tastic, having knocked out a couple of anxiety-provoking appointments late last week, and also just reveling in all the great shows we’ve been munching through recently. Anne of Green Gables and Sherlock Hound are simply wondrous slices of pre-Ghbili goodness, Star Driver embodies all that thorny thematic density that first enthralled me in anime, and even the ongoing Spy x Family is proving to be more charming and hilarious than I expected. You subscribers are treating me very well at the moment, and I only hope I can return the favor by suggesting some awesome films for you all. Without further ado, let’s burn down a fresh Week in Review!

Our first feature of the week was Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, an early ‘70s horror production about three friends who move to a rural farmhouse in upstate New York. Having recently been released from a mental institution, Jessica and her husband Duncan both hope that a change of scenery will improve her condition, while their mutual friend Woody tags along to help set up their new life. When they arrive, they discover a woman named Emily has actually been squatting at the farmhouse, and invite her to stay as well. But over time, Jessica begins to suspect there is something sinister about this place, something that cannot be explained by her own unreliable mental state.

Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is an intriguingly morose film, from its heavy fogs and desaturated colors to the quiet solemnity of its premise. The film’s leads embody the dying embers of ‘60s counterculture, not quite willing to fully join society, but beyond the point of believing in any sort of mass social revolution. And because Jessica’s mental instability is a given from the start, her process of seeing strange visions feels much like an encroaching disease, a curse she is desperate to hide from friends and family. With its stately pacing and ambiguous narrator, the film calls to mind the classic intersection of gothic and feminist literature, embodied by texts like The Yellow Wallpaper or The Turn of the Screw. Yet for all that, it also embraces the indulgences of ‘70s horror, culminating in a grand visual realization of all of Jessica’s fears.

It’s an interesting film, that’s for certain. I wasn’t always gripped while watching it, but I keep returning to it in my mind, turning over its various complementary aspects and seeing new components of the whole. Part psychological drama, part drive-in horror tableau, and most principally an elegy for an era, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death feels like a quietly essential piece of the American horror canon.

We then watched an admittedly less essential feature, the hilariously named The Bye Bye Man. I’ll admit, this film’s goofy-ass title had me cracking up basically the whole way through, but if you’re a more mature viewer than I, you might be able to appreciate this film’s genuinely compelling elements. The good: a villain who essentially exists as an intellectual meme, with knowledge of his name actively summoning him into existence. The process of being haunted by him is equally compelling; his presence slowly infects your reality, with calling cards like a coin rolling on the ground or a hound baying in the distance serving as markers of his approach. Additionally, the film’s cold open, where a suburban man swiftly and mercilessly “solves the problem” of his neighbors having discovered the monster’s name, is an effectively stark slice of madness.

The bad: pretty much everything else, I’m afraid. The film’s direction and cinematography aren’t noteworthy in any way, the overt plot tries to draw far too much drama out of an unconvincing love triangle, and most damningly, the actual villain is fully revealed early and often, absolutely draining him of any terror or mystique. The idea of strange signifiers like coins and distant hounds signaling a monster hunt? Dynamite. The actual resolution of that hunt, when a guy who could really use some moisturizer sets his ridiculous CG dog upon you? Disastrous. Like so many other films, The Bye Bye Man is undone by its faith in its own CG – if every scene that fully showed its villains was cut, the film would instantly become more effective. Through showing its full and disappointing hand so early, The Bye Bye Man undercuts its entire second half, making the end result only slightly more compelling than its title would indicate. 

Our next feature sadly proved to be a complete dud, as we screened the Canadian thriller Disappearance at Clifton Hill. The film concerns a young girl who witnesses a kidnapping while on a family trip, which she returns to investigate as an adult. There are shades of family drama, character study, and traditional thriller here, but every thread of this film ends up underserved and neglected. Instead, the film seems content to drift through one aimless scene after another, mostly just luxuriating in the off-season melancholy of Niagara Falls.

Seriously, those are the film’s three components, and each is just the weakest possible tea: the heroine’s relationship with her sister is never meaningfully explored, her tendency towards compulsive lying never bears satisfying dramatic fruit, and the actual resolution of the film’s mystery is handled off-screen, seeming much like the director ran out of film stock with the climax still ahead of him. I’m all for subtlety, but that’s not the same thing as the absence of drama altogether. Aimless, underwritten, and overlong, Disappearance at Clifton Hill offers no rewards for even the most patient viewer.

Fortunately, our house rallied from that disappointment with one of the most exuberant, action-packed, and astoundingly generous films we’ve seen: the recent Telugu blockbuster RRR. Set in 1920, the film centers on two real-life revolutionaries who each fought against British colonial occupation. The two men never met in real life, but fuck that – here, they are both best friends and destined antagonists, because that’s just way more exciting. Ram serves as a soldier of the occupation, hoping to rise to the point where he can arm his people, while Bheem is seeking a kidnapped girl of his village. Together, they clash and collaborate across unimaginably epic confrontations, putting the ostensible thrills of modern Hollywood blockbusters to shame.

If you’ve seen much Indian cinema, you presumably have some familiarity with the vivid style and scale of Bollywood films, much of which is retained by this south Indian production. But in concepting and executing its grand setpieces, RRR draws widely and skillfully, embracing all manner of spectacles across its three hour run. The sequence introducing Ram is a masterpiece of high-speed martial arts choreography, embodying the simultaneous brutality and balletic elegance of a film like The Raid. Meanwhile, both Bheem’s introduction and the scene where the two meet feel like Spielberg’s highest peaks on crack, rollicking adventure setpieces where any questions of “too much?” are unanimously countered with “not enough.” Then there’s that later sequence that feels almost Jackie Chan-esque, where our heroes form a two-man tower of guns and high kicks, and the dance-off, oh my god… I could seriously ramble about this film’s highlights for hours, so numerous, various, and excellent they are.

Given that most people who follow me presumably share some affinity for the dramatic boldness of anime, there is just no excuse for you not to sit down and watch RRR right this minute. Seriously, find yourself three hours, gather a like-minded group of friends, and treat yourself to a genuine masterpiece of cinematic excess. The film feels like the natural evolution of half a dozen action cinema traditions, taking the lessons of James Cameron, Sammo Hung, and countless others in order to construct a robust new vocabulary of action entertainment. RRR feels like where action cinema should be at, a window into a future not hamstrung by serialization and formula. If you enjoy awesome shit, you need to see this movie.

So impressed were we with RRR that we immediately dove into director S. S. Rajamouli’s previous work, the two-part epic Baahubali. The films center on a would-be king who is cast downriver as an infant, only to return to claim his birthright as a young man. Of course, the five-hour story is significantly more complicated than that; the young man doesn’t actually know he’s a prince for most of the first film, and a considerable portion of its middle stretch is dedicated to a flashback covering his father’s whole life story. And given this is a Rajamouli feature, you can be sure each new plot development is accompanied by an exuberant display of action-adventure excess, whether it’s our hero demonstrating his romantic passion by scaling an entire mountain range, or the collision of a hundred thousand bandits and two hero-class city defenders.

With its longer runtime, Baahubali has the leeway to build up a more robust cast of characters than RRR, evoking an almost Lord of the Rings-scale vision of a kingdom in turmoil. The film’s star Prabhas isn’t quite Ram Charan’s equal as a martial artist, but Rajamouli compensates with copious sequences of full-on battlefield drama, making sure to provide consistent “did you see that”-tier inventions like a spinning blade-fronted battle chariot, or a race between a makeshift sled and an avalanche. And while the narrative bookends of the young prince’s journey are largely straightforward, that middle flashback sequence treats us to some genuinely gripping courtroom intrigue, evoking a King Lear-style sense of dynastic tragedy. But ultimately, all of this rambling is likely tangential to the fundamental appeal of this film: Baahubali kicks ass, and though it’s a bit less crisply paced than RRR, any fans of Rajamouli’s most recent attraction should absolutely check out this film as well. What a treat to discover a new director already at the peak of his powers!