Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. We’re finally reaching some warmer spring days at this point, which means I can finally… well, mostly just stay inside and keep watching movies, while also feeling somewhat more guilty about doing so. I also watched through the entire Fishman Island abridged version that Toei have been airing in place of new One Piece, which left me with mixed feelings; there were certainly places where the original version could use tightening, but also essential moments and crucially paced sequences that were either excised or abridged to a deleterious extreme. Regardless, the viewing prompted me to finally write the Fishman Island thematic essay that I’ve been thinking about for ages, so you can all look forward to that coming sometime soon. In the meantime, let’s break down the week in films!
Having run through every slasher on every list of top slasher films on every film website I’ve come across, my housemates’ ceaseless hunger for bloodshed at last forced me to simply throw a dart at the board, landing on the random peak era flick Happy Birthday to Me. I wasn’t expecting the film to be any good, but I apparently vastly underestimated just how incompetent the lesser slashers truly are.
The usual assumptions about slashers all apply here – the film is tasteless and incompetently produced, the actors can’t act and certainly don’t look their age, and there’s no meaningful thematic takeaway. That’s all pretty standard stuff for the genre, but Happy Birthday to Me doubles down on the incompetence via its utterly inane script. The premise is simple: the top ten students at a private academy are being mysteriously killed off, and it’s up to the survivors to figure out who amongst them is the killer. The execution is… well, let’s get into it.
The film’s core failing is its pursuit of the inherently dubious ambiguity of “the killer could be anyone,” meaning none of its characters are allowed to develop personalities or emotions, only motives and alibis. This means that there is essentially no emotional narrative in the film, just random stuff happening, a sensation that is further amplified by the ambiguity regarding our heroine’s mental state. Then, (and I’m spoiling the ending, but actually doing you a favor here) it turns out that some other girl (literally some other girl, I think she gets two lines prior) has been impersonating our heroine by employing a flawless latex mask of her face, all in order to kill a bunch of people who had done nothing to her, because through doing so she hopes to frame our heroine as suffering some sort of psychotic relapse. Of course, she actually reveals the truth of this plan the moment it’s realized, which might cause some to wonder why she went to all this trouble and killed all these people if she wasn’t actually going to… you know what, I’m done. I have clearly spent more time thinking about this narrative than its architects spent conceiving it, and that is on me. Bargain-bin slashers: viewers beware.
We then decided to enjoy some vintage Jackie Chan in Twin Dragons. The film stars Jackie in a double role as the twins Ma Yau and Ma Wan, who are separated at birth owing to some wacky baby hostage shenanigans. One is raised into a virtuosic pianist and conductor, while the other learns martial arts and racing through a life on the streets. Eventually the two collide as adults, leading into some inevitable comic mixups as each proceeds to stumble through and fuck up the other’s life.
Twin Dragons is unfortunately not a peak Jackie production, leaning too much on its twins gimmick to fully satisfy in terms of either physical action or comedy. Whether it’s Sammo Hung or Chris Tucker or whoever, Jackie’s action-comedies require a game partner to really shine, and placing Jackie alongside himself doesn’t really cut it. And with less-than-convincing effects used to realize Jackie’s twin nature, it frequently feels like Twin Dragons is patting itself on the back for doing the bare minimum, an unfortunate failing for an actor whose films are generally defined by death-defying maximalism.
Still, Jackie is undeniably charming, and Twin Dragons’ premise facilitates a reasonable mix of the slapstick action and fish-out-of-water comedy that Jackie does best. Jackie’s best roles see him as a sort of iron-fisted Mister Magoo, flailing his way through outrageous stunts with such grace that it’s hard to separate intention from luck. Whether he’s stumbling through the pit while conducting an orchestra or deploying spinning kicks through an automobile factory, Twin Dragons provides enough of that core Jackie appeal to be worth an idle viewing.
We also checked out the third and fourth Dragon Ball Z movies, which I group here because there is frankly not that much to distinguish them. While my journeys through the Naruto and One Piece films offered plentiful unique takes on their worlds and tones, the same cannot be said for these Z films, at least so far; they uniformly segue from fifteen minutes of checking in with the Z crew to thirty minutes of dubious action, demonstrating only the repetitive simplicity of Z’s ur-narrative.
For these two, there was basically one thing that interested me per film. First off, The Tree of Might struck me with its close resemblance to a Sailor Moon narrative, featuring an evil seed-born tree that would sap the energy from the earth, as well as its bishonen defenders. A common enough world-threatening conceit, but it did have me wondering about the cross pollination of staff and ideas between these two early ’90s Toei productions. And then Lord Slug opened with a sequence that exemplifies the incidental pleasures of hanging out with the Z crew: Gohan annoying the hell out of Piccolo with his choreographed whistling song. Always nice seeing more of those two during Gohan’s Dragon Ball Hat early days!
We then returned to horror with the recent feature Where The Devil Roams, the third film by the preposterously talented Adams family. The trio star as carnival attractions in the lean, dark years of the carnival tradition, the parents serving as background dancers while their generally mute daughter sings on stage. It’s not a very good act, and they know it; what keeps them going is mostly mule-headed determination, along with their murder-outings spent dismembering local business tyrants. Eventually, a hope emerges: the hellbound treasure of a fellow performer, with which limbs can be restored even if severed, thereby dazzling the blood-bidden crowd.
Where the Devil Roams is a cold and grimy feature, winding through slow days of hardship and bloodshed with a killer’s certainty of purpose. Stretching towards a costumed period piece is an ambitious reach for the Adams, but they skillfully conceal their limitations through persistent focus on the times between performances, when the family are simply camping in the woods and yearning for warmer bedding. Through this procession of days, the tragically lopsided romance of parents Maggie and Seven comes into focus; he a one-time doctor broken by war, she an idle romantic propelled by delusion. And their daughter between them, alien and unfeeling, voicing childish reveries in a stained angel’s garb.
Three films in, the Adams know well how their own performances can command and chill on-screen. Toby Poser is their not-so-secret weapon; her mixture of innocent hope and unfeeling cruelty, as well as her imposing physical presence, call to mind Kathy Bates’ electrifying horror performances. And though their bonds are painted with a light touch, the film’s violent setpieces are anything but; bodies are distorted and dismembered without mercy, then reconstructed with the tenderness of a girl dressing her favorite doll. Intense, atmospheric, and oddly poignant, Where the Devil Roams proves an exceptional addition to the Adams’ increasingly impressive canon.
