Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I am celebrating my birthday in style, by formatting reviews, writing up this here blurb, and maybe doing some laundry later. Hell yeah, no breaks on this party train. As far as general week-in-review business is concerned, I have spent the last week getting progressively more angry at Black Myth Wukong, which appears to have been designed by thirty independent developers who were barred from any mutual conversation. As a result, none of the game’s control mechanics, enemies, or environments successfully mesh with each other, which when combined with the game’s frequent outright glitches makes for… well, it’s not Hollow Knight, I’ll tell you that much. I’ll have to let you know next week if this journey to the west ends with me crushing the disk and chewing up its shards, but for now, let’s break down some films!

First up this week was Sette Note in Nero, a giallo feature by the wide-ranging horror maestro Lucio Fulci. Jennifer O’Neill stars as a psychic who sees visions of a victim being sealed inside a wall; pursuing these visions to her husband’s disused country estate, she ends up discovering a body that implicates her husband in an old murder case. Certain that there is more to the visions, and determined to clear her husband’s name, she continues to pursue the case, remaining hot on the trail of a mysterious phantom killer.

Though Lucio Fulci is most renowned for his Gates of Hell trilogy and other gore-heavy horror films, his work spans a variety of genres, including pure thrillers like Sette Note in Nero. The violence here is swift and incidental, shapes in the dark important more for what clues can be drawn from their embellished corners than the lurid thrill of their execution. O’Neill’s visions are detailed enough to swiftly allay any doubts regarding their veracity, meaning much of the film is caught up in pattern-matching, attempting to align details from her dreams to the course of her investigations.

The thrill of these deductions is sadly undercut by the nature of the film’s “big twist” – the key truth the cast is missing is obvious from perhaps the second clue they acquire, leaving the vast majority of the film to serve as unintentional, tedious dramatic irony, as the audience waits as patiently as possible for the leads to catch up with them. Most of the film’s “bombshells” are thus transformed into inert misfires, persistent reflections of how easily mystery drama can be undercut through either the absence or overabundance of inscrutability, leaving the audience either completely behind or well ahead of the cast. There are a variety of reasons I don’t find mystery narratives compelling, and Sette Note in Nero is a prime example of several of them, from the mechanical nature of their resulting plots, to the dubious hinging of drama on an expectation of precisely when the audience will figure out the solution.

Fortunately, Lucio Fulci possesses an excellent eye for visual drama, meaning the film’s individual setpieces are alluring even if the whole can’t hang together. In particular, the “red riding hood goes to grandmother’s house” sequence spotlighted in the film’s posters is an outright stunner, featuring lighting design and cinematography that wouldn’t feel out of place in an Argento feature. I generally don’t expect any given film to blow me away, and am always happy to find fragments of beauty in otherwise questionable features – that investigation sequence is one such diamond, and more than justified the tedious mystery business.

Our next viewing was Kill, a recent Indian production starring Lakshya as an army commando who returns home, having learned the love of his life has been promised to another. The two reunite on the express train to New Delhi, rekindling their love just before the train is taken over by a small army of bandits. Now, in order to save his lover, Lakshya will have to fight his way through roughly forty knife-armed men, abandoning all pretensions of civility in the process.

Kill stands as another fine entry in the New Action canon, films that internalize the lessons of The Raid and John Wick in order to create frenetic, thoroughly grounded, and often quite beautiful displays of martial excellence. The film is not far from a hundred minute interpretation of Old Boy’s hallway scene, and manages to adjust its core scenario with enough frequency and ingenuity to actually keep energy high all throughout that runtime.

Director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat makes phenomenal use of the film’s train-bound physical constraints, setting up one physically parsable and visually compelling confrontation after another as Lakshya marauds down the train. And Lakshya in turn proves himself a capable physical actor, particularly impressing through his second-act transformation from consummate de-escalator to Ender Of Men. A little bit Snowpiercer, a little bit Rambo 2, and a whole lot of fun.

We then continued our slasher education with Halloween 5, a film which finds this once-venerable franchise in serious creative decline. Michael is back, again, and this time dead set on killing his young niece Jamie. The reasons for this, as well as Jamie’s apparent psychic link with Michael, are largely unclear – in fact, it seems the origin for this new goal was woven into a subplot about evil druids that was eventually cut from the final release. That studiousness of plotting should give you some indication of the film’s general quality, as it seeks to return to a narrative model that was always less important than the artful minimalism of its execution.

Anyway, Michael is back, he’s intent on killing his psychic niece, and a rambling collection of babysitters, neighbors, and police officers are all unfortunate enough to stand between him and his target. There’s not much creativity in the conception or grace in the realization of Halloween 5’s various slayings, but you can at least expect your money’s worth of horny teens and bumbling cops all stumbling their way into Myers’ clutches. Additionally, the film’s greatest pleasure is undoubtedly Donald Pleasence as the returning Dr. Loomis, who has at this point quit asking people to take Myers seriously, and is instead taking matters into his own hands. Seeing Pleasence shake a child while screaming at them to tell him what Myers is doing is pretty good cinema; this franchise might be collapsing around him, but he’ll be damned if he’s not there to turn the lights off.

We then jumped back to Jackie Chan for Armour of God, a film that sees him taking on an Indiana Jones-style adventurer role as “Asian Hawk,” who traded in his rock star life for one as a globe-trotting treasure hunter. The film sends him off scouring foreign lands for the titular armor, attempting to retrieve it before a cult does… something really nasty with it. I don’t know, details are unclear, but what is clear is that Jackie is gonna have to run through a whole mess of caves, forests, and monasteries while hunting his quarry.

In spite, or perhaps because of Jackie’s presence as both writer and director, Armour of God feels like one of the most confused and shapeless Jackie features I’ve watched through. Beyond the persistent throughline of “gotta collect the armor pieces,” there is little here that connects one immediate challenge to the next – it proceeds more like a series of videogame challenges, featuring enemies Jackie must outrun and physical obstacles he must overcome in order to achieve his goal. Between that lack of focus, “Asian Hawk”’s vacuity as a character, and the overall paucity of old-fashioned martial arts, I found Armour of God to be a generally disappointing entry in his film canon.