Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I have got some real seedy, stinky trash for you all, as I rummage through the refuge of grindhouse cinema American and global alike, and also review a film that validates every meme that’s been made about it. Fortunately, all of the non-memefied films we watched were actually quite enjoyable, while my continuing rush through missed anime films introduced me to an instant classic I’m sure to watch again. We’ll get to that eventually, but for now let’s surrender to the joys of exploitation theater, as we charge through one more Week in Review!

After a significant purge vacation, my house at last returned to its reliably seedy pleasures with The First Purge. Released in the midst of Trump’s presidency, The First Purge thankfully dispenses with the wildly misguided political sensibilities of its predecessor, and sets its violence in the most fundamental terms possible: the purge is an intentional campaign of genocide waged on America’s most vulnerable populations, the behavior of most people during the purge only proves that its fundamental concept of “releasing aggression” is a lie, and the actual murderers are mostly just MAGA diehards bussed in to kill black people.

Having dispensed with any overly broad thematic ambitions, The First Purge is thus better able to tell a genuine human story. The purge’s “test case” takes place on Staten Island, where residents are compelled by a five thousand dollar paycheck to avoid spending the night elsewhere. The terms are simple, incentives clear, and players iconic: one woman who’s simply doing her best to keep the community alive, her brother toying with the possibility of actually participating for a greater payoff, and her former boyfriend, now a drug dealer intent on protecting his operation.

Predictably, The First Purge gets a little preachy and stupid whenever it attempts to engage with the politics of poverty or drug crime. Fortunately, there’s really not much of that – most of the film is dedicated to following the key players as they wind through an increasingly violent purge night, eventually rising and uniting to defend their neighborhood. New director Gerard McMurray actually improves on James DeMonaco’s camerawork, presenting a vision of Staten that alternates between poetically framed layouts and harsh moments of intimacy, with superior action photography to boot. Intense, energetic, and intelligently streamlined, The First Purge returns the franchise to the indulgent, fist-pumping pleasures of its initial high points.

We then watched a trio of Sonny Chiba classics, storming through The Street Fighter and its two sequels in quick succession. Chiba plays Terry (or at least he does in the dubs we were watching), a violent yet highly skilled thug with few loyalties and fewer scruples. The first film opens with him killing one of his clients and selling the other into sex slavery, if you want some glimpse of how far we’re pushing the “antihero” bar here. The Street Fighter plays less like the morally grounded fables of the Shaw Brothers productions, and more like a grindhouse or blaxploitation production, steeped in the  black-hearted grit of yakuza movies. 

Chiba scowls and punches his way through one group of opponents after another, delighting in cheap shots and grotesque killing blows. The film’s tagline is “If You’re Going to Fight, Fight Dirty,” and Chiba embodies that code with relish, while still demonstrating beautiful, high-impact martial arts fundamentals. He fights his way through a martial arts dojo, he fights his way through some yakuza goons, and when fresh assassins are shipped in from China, he fights them too. Chiba is a bad motherfucker, resolutely unlikable all the way through the first film, and his breakout performance is a brilliant grindhouse spectacle.

For its sequels, The Street Fighter doubles down on the original’s tinge of absurdity, with the introduction of characters like Chiba’s newly cyborgian nemesis. The film’s plot is essentially a direct retread of the original (new secret mafia scheme, new wacky sidekick, same old karate dojo), with the original’s cadre of Chinese assassins replaced by a squad of Japanese weapon specialists. These villains dutifully chase Terry all around Japan, at one point even showing up at the top of a ski lift he was sulking on. Terry’s personality is somewhat softened for this film – with the villains made even more ridiculous, Terry has less need to be his outrageous, abominable original self. I frankly liked outrageously evil Terry, but Chiba is electrifying regardless, making for a very satisfying second adventure.

Unfortunately, the third and final Street Fighter film is a dramatic step down from the previous two. Terry is entirely humbled at this point, and acts far more like a blacksploitation hero or James Bond-esque superspy than a condemnable street hellion. This robs the franchise of its main source of proudly antisocial outrage, and without his scandalousness, Terry feels much like any other action hero. Couple that with the weakest set of fights in the franchise, as well as a narrative that gets bogged down in tedious political subterfuge, and you arrive at a disappointing conclusion to the noble Street Fighter saga. Still, watching all three in a row felt like spending a night at a dimly lit drive-in movie theater, eyes agog from the salacious spectacles on-screen. I’m a fan.

Continuing with our recent anime investigations, our house then screened the 2020 feature On-Gaku: Our Sound. The film centers on a trio of high school delinquents, whose leader Kenji one day decides they’re going to start a band. Possessing no inherent aptitude for bass, guitar, or dumbs, the trio nonetheless steal some instruments from their school, drag their loot to Kenji’s house, and begin jamming away. The sound they create is raw, visceral, and unvarnished – a primal thud of heavy drums complimenting bass notes thumbed seemingly at random. It is the most powerful and magical thing they have ever created.

On-Gaku is a film unlike anything else in anime, a work whose punk rock, DIY narrative extends to its whole ethos and aesthetic. The film’s simplified character designs look like scribbles from a local zine, but in motion, Kenji and his friends are brought to life with an astonishing acuity of character acting. And when they break into music, the whole world reorients itself to their groove, forms shifting and contorting alongside the rise and crash of their sound. On-Gaku’s musical performances are some of the most astonishing and idiosyncratic sequences I’ve seen in animation, seeking to realize the emotional spirit of music through visual artistry in a manner similar to something like Disney’s Fantasia.

Also, the movie is just really darn charming. Kenji and his friends’ perpetually deadpan affectation is both inherently funny and eminently true to a specific experience of high school. They’re not exactly jaded, they’re just disinterested; in spite of their imposing looks and delinquent reputations, they approach the process of learning about music with total sincerity. The film often finds humor in their wide-eyed responses to concepts like rhythm and melody, but never shames its stars for their ignorance – like the folk singer they eventually befriend, the story itself seems delighted for our heroes, eager to celebrate how special music is alongside them.

I could go on about the particular magic of Kenji’s personality, or how the film finds fresh appeal in high school drama by stripping away most of anime’s dramatic pretension, but it’d be simpler for you to just go and watch it yourself. It’s only an hour and ten minutes long, and it’s undoubtedly one of the most interesting things the medium has produced in the last decade – if you’re reading my blog, you’re already the target audience for a film like this. On-Gaku is a delight, and I would love to see more such charming, distinctive, authentically punk rock anime productions. Check it out.

After a full week of delightful anime film screenings, our pulp-loving housemate returned from a family trip, and made his presence known immediately with a screening of Morbius. That viewing went about as well as you might expect; as the internet has largely agreed, Morbius is a terrible film by basically any metric. The problems start with the casting of Jared Leto, whose personal anti-magnetism tends to only make him appropriate for roles where you’re supposed to hate his guts from the moment you see him. And yet, for all that Leto is an insufferable cinematic presence, his admittedly game performance is actually one of this film’s better features.

Far worse is Morbius’ script, which is basically incoherent in the most fundamental sense. Character motivations are brushed over and nonsensical, connective tissue between scenes is threadbare at best, and there is never any sense of a larger, cohesive world outside of the main characters’ petty conflicts. Morbius feels like it was either written straight through from the first scene to the last with no further edits, or perhaps edited out of twenty more minutes that might explain why anyone is ever doing anything. Either way, the end result doesn’t actually work in any base dramatic sense.

And of course, there’s the utterly unconvincing CGI. Marvel’s shift to full CG from mixed practical/CG effects has meant none of their movies in recent years have looked any good, and Morbius continues that trend, offering floaty, indistinct fight scenes with no sense of choreography, stakes, or impact. Like all Marvel fight scenes, Morbius’ fight scenes wouldn’t impress in a videogame, much less a feature film, and are basically just placeholder visual noise between sequences of Leto and Matt Smith yelling at each other. Combining the usual deficiencies of the Marvel house style with plenty of failings all its own, Morbius proves itself a singular sort of terrible.