Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week I’ve returned to full apartment hunting mode, having emerged from a variety of familial obligations to find myself still lacking a goddamn home. Nonetheless, I’ve also found time to at last get back into regular movie screenings, which my diminishing buffer of older reviews must surely appreciate. Frankly, I was nearing the point of being forced to admit to my house’s collective reality television addiction, and break down the finer points of concocting a winning America’s Got Talent audition. That may still come one of these days, but for now I’m happy to be regaining another sliver of normalcy via movie screenings, while also playing as much Baldur’s Gate 3 as I can possibly slot in. I’m not sure I could ever abandon the narrative opportunities provided by a charisma-centric character, but hewing enemies in two with Karlach’s giant ax seems to have awakened something in me, and I’m seriously considering having my next character prioritize breaking stuff real good. I’ll have more Baldur’s Gate reflections once I’m deeper in, but for now, let’s break down a fresh collection of films!
Having completed the entirety of Dragon Ball, Z, and Super over the past few months, we topped off the collection with a viewing of Dragon Ball Super: Broly, the remake-slash-sequel serving as the next canonical entry in Goku’s eternal saga. In keeping with its revival of a ‘90s film villain, Broly also serves as an aesthetic return to Z form; gone are Super’s geometrically simplified character designs and thick line weight, replaced by an aesthetic that harkens back to the thin lines and richly painted cel photography of the original Z. I imagine Super’s designs are more animation-friendly, but to be honest, I wish the show always looked like this – Super’s look feels “clean” to the point of aesthetic anonymity, while Broly and the eras it’s evoking are rich in visual texture, accentuating rather than reducing the impact of Toriyama’s designs.
Alongside its generally superior art design, Broly is also far more dynamically storyboarded and energetically written than its preceding films. The film begins with a recounting of the destruction of planet Vegeta that feels both iconic and refreshingly grounded, as the various key players of Goku and Vegeta’s origins clash with an urgency and sense of consequence quite unlike Z and Super’s frequent dramatic weightlessness. The dialogue is snappy and rich with voice, while the cinematography ranges from majestic shots of desolate planets to furtive angles set in dark corners, mimicking the combination of pride and paranoia with which the saiyans faced their final days. Even through the modern-day introduction of Goku and Vegeta’s latest foe, the storyboarding maintains a cinematic feel that sets it apart from the show proper’s strictly functional layouts.
The film cannot ultimately escape the fatal flaw of all Dragon Ball films: their habit of mimicking Z arcs’ worst excesses, and thereby devoting their second halves to fights that just go on and on ad nauseum. It’s a little strange to me that the shonen franchise which is most insistent on the merits of endless battles is also one of the least interested in spicing up those battles with strategic interplay or dramatic twists; it’s pretty much always just Goku and his opponent punching and roaring and powering up to punch and roar some more. Still, at least the animation of Broly’s battles is quite impressive, taking advantage of the film’s superior art design and actually embracing some energetic martial arts choreography. While still constrained by the limitations of the Dragon Ball filmography, Broly is otherwise an altogether superior example of the form, and a refreshing return to Z’s iconic artistry. If you’re interested in checking out a Dragon Ball film, this is the one to pick.
Our next viewing was Keanu, a buddy comedy starring Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key as cousins Rell and Clarence. Though these two are by all accounts mild-mannered dudes, when Rell’s kitten Keanu is stolen during a break-in, they are forced to infiltrate the criminal underworld in hopes of retrieving him. Immediately mistaken for the murderous “Allentown Boys,” they attempt to fake it until they make it, masquerading as badasses for the sake of their feline friend.
Keanu feels almost like a portal into an alternate dimension, one where Key and Peele leapt directly from their sketch show into Judd Apatow’s shoes for a fresh decade of stoner buddy comedies. The film has modest ambitions and modest successes; Key and Peele’s obvious chemistry means it’s always pleasant hanging out with them, but Keanu stretches too few jokes across too much running time, while lacking either the inventiveness or bite of their sketch comedy work. It is a perfectly okay feature, which frankly just makes me all the more thankful Peele immediately pivoted towards his increasingly essential directorial work.
We then checked out April Fool’s Day, a slasher that, like its namesake holiday, turned out to be fundamentally irritating and seemingly designed by assholes. As with the fabled day of fools, April Fool’s Day seems to believe that promising something and then simply doing something else is actually the soul of wit, rather than a simple betrayal of our assumed social obligation to not be dicks to each other. Thus April Fool’s Day proceeds on both an in-narrative and meta level, with its characters performing dickish pranks under the thin rationale of April Fool’s Day humor, while the movie itself does the same thing regarding its promise to offer a slasher movie.
Because yep, I’m spoiling it, no one dies in this movie, it was all a prank. That’s easy enough to figure out from the film’s thoroughly underwhelming kill scenes, but what makes it worse is the pride with which it devotes its last act to unveiling its “masterful” secret. By the end, I was hoping some actual killer would bust through the wall and murder this collection of insufferable pranksters, but no such relief was offered. In the end, April Fool’s Day offers no more than the same lesson every fool mistakes for insight: most people don’t assume you’re lying to them for no reason.
Infuriated by the lack of payoff in April Fool’s Day, my housemates demanded the satisfaction of a genuine horror movie, and thus I quickly put on The House By The Cemetery. As the third entry in Lucio Fulci’s “Gates of Hell” trilogy, I expected a squelchy, grindhouse take on Argento atmosphere, and was not disappointed. Heck, within the first five minutes of this film a woman gets stabbed in the back of the head so good that the blade comes out her mouth, meaning this movie accomplishes in its first scene what our last feature failed to over its entire runtime.
Things proceed in predictable Fulci fashion from there, as a man researching the suicide of his mentor movies into the titular house, bringing his accommodating wife and seeming spiritually connected son along. The narrative can never quite bring the father and son’s narratives together, though they do offer an interesting blend of subgenres: the father’s investigations are all giallo procedural work, while the son treads in a dreamlike world of ghosts that calls to mind Fulci’s previous The Beyond. The film’s structural messiness means its ending doesn’t quite congeal effectively, but the road there is lined with tense environmental horror and reliably messy deaths. Fulci may lack the grace of Argento or Bava, but he still knows how to feed hungry horror fans.
