Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. With the winter season now solidly underway, we’re finally reaching the point where we can separate meaningful contenders from first-episode pan flashes, a process that so far seems to be indicating this is an entirely sequel-centric season. We’ve got 100 Girlfriends, Ave Mujica, and The Apothecary Diaries, the third of which I have at this point heard enough about from enough reliable sources that I’m actually getting curious. Of course, I’ve also still got plenty of Armored Trooper Votoms to get through, and have recently started the ‘87 TV adaptation of the Hindu epic Ramayana, which my housemate first watched as a kid. So yeah, eclectic mixture of media at the moment, and I’m having a delightful time with all of it – including these fine film features below, which I have hand-selected for your latest Week in Review. Let’s get to it!
First up this week was The Big 4, a recent feature by Timo Tjahjanto. Tjahjanto’s stellar resume made this an inevitable viewing for me; he’s proven himself adept in both action (The Night Comes For Us) and horror (May The Devil Take You, “Safe Haven” from V/H/S 2), and spearheading a boisterous action-comedy felt like a natural next step. The film stars Putri Marino as Dina, a police officer and daughter of a man who secretly led a second, assassination-centric life. Investigating her father’s death, Dina eventually tracks down the “Big 4” assassins who were also raised by him, with all of them ultimately falling into the crosshairs of another maniacal killer.
The Big 4 falls into an exuberant, ambitious category of action-comedy populated by the likes of Kung Fu Hustle and RRR, featuring larger-than-life characters, gleefully ridiculous gags, and copious quantities of fake blood. It’s the kind of film where an explosion will leave two sneakers with stumps rising out of them, and where a villain might be undone by reminding him of his embarrassing childhood nickname. Its plot is mostly an excuse for facilitating such sequences; once Dina runs into Big 4 leader Topan (Abimana Aryasatya), the film is off to the races, a riotous “getting the band back together” adventure stuffed with explosions and vulgarity.
While the scene-to-scene plotting can feel a little untethered, The Big 4 maintains a solid core by virtue of the chemistry shared by its titular siblings. They provide the human counterpoint to the film’s overall violent insanity; villains are introduced like the stars of their own music videos, and while the action isn’t quite as frenetic or physically impressive as in The Night Comes For Us, Tjahjanto nonetheless proves he can pull off intense fight scenes even without a superhuman martial artist like Iko Uwais. The script could likely use a tightening, but it’s hard to complain about a film this generous; and with the conclusion offering a shameless sequel hook, I imagine I’ll be lining right up for round two.
Our next viewing was The Ox-Bow Incident, a ‘43 western starring Henry Fonda as a cowboy just returning to town, settling in for a few drinks and maybe a spot of fighting before another local races in, saying that rancher Larry Kinkaid has just been murdered. A posse is soon roused to avenge Kinkaid’s death, with the sheriff’s deputy further deputizing a dozen or so men, all of them led by civil war veteran Major Tetley in his military finest. Fonda rides with them alongside several other objectors, hoping to at least offer a modicum of justice to whichever poor souls they intend to lynch.
The Ox-Bow Incident is a righteously furious western, skewering the alleged necessity of outlaw justice thirteen years before The Searchers, and longer still before westerns would begin apologetically framing themselves as “revisionist.” Like many of my favorite films, including Fonda’s later Twelve Angry Men, it draws together an assortment of perspectives that illustrate the variability of personal morality and folly of self-righteousness, understanding that the battle of our alleged better natures against our baser instincts as a riveting struggle that requires no further embellishment.
Henry Fonda serves as the sharp-eyed fulcrum of Ow-Bow’s moral lever, balancing the weight of evidence against the alleged perpetrators, and blackness of crime committed against the outstanding ambiguity and bloodthirstiness of the accusers. As testimonies pile up from a bevy of fantastic bit players (Anthony Quinn is a frequent scene-stealer), the only guilt made clear is that of the self-made lawbringer, the hollowness of spirit that inspires a small man to put on a costume he didn’t honor and speak with an authority he didn’t earn, finding shelter in the easy cruelty of hateful consensus. Like High Noon, The Ox-Bow Incident examines the spirit of its society and finds little worth liking; also like High Noon, it has instantly become one of my favorite westerns.
We then checked out Dead Silence, an ‘00s horror film centered on the alleged inherent terror of ventriloquist dummies. When our protagonist Jamie (Ryan Kwanten) receives a dummy named Billy in the mail, he thinks little of it until his wife is horrifically murdered. Seeking answers, he returns to the home he fled long ago, piecing together a familiar story of witchcraft and revenge from the ruins of his old town.
There is very little that will surprise you in Dead Silence; it follows the predictable beats of any “vilified eccentric comes back for revenge” horror drama, and is altogether too proud of its predictable twists besides. It’s also the bluest film I’ve seen in recent memory; the director went completely overboard on the film’s color filters, and thus it looks like every scene takes place inside some kind of massive aquarium. But all that aside, the film’s most fundamental issue, at least in my eyes, is that ventriloquist dummies simply aren’t that scary.
I feel like we culturally accepted the concept of an evil ventriloquist dummy in the wake of Goosebumps essentially embracing one as its mascot, but the Goosebumps stories themselves trend more towards comedy and surprise than horror, mostly just offering cheeky, largely defanged twists on horror staples. They served as a fine introduction to horror when I was seven years old, but three decades on, I’m confident in declaring we can retire the spooky ventriloquist dummy.
Our next feature was Dragonslayer, a fantasy adventure produced during Disney’s short-lived “dark era,” meaning you might see some blood or part of a boob. Peter MacNicol stars as Galen, a young would-be wizard who is conscripted to fight a dragon when his old master dies. With little control over his latent abilities, Galen’s battle against the dragon is messy and unpredictable; in fact, his early attempts at victory only antagonize the beast, seemingly proving the necessity of the king’s virgin-sacrificing pipeline. However, with friends at his side and a little help from his old master, Galen swears he will overcome the fiend.
Dragonslayer is an unusual feature in a variety of ways, even setting aside its un-Disney-like gloom and violence. For one, its narrative is largely a story of repeated failure – as you can see by the paragraph above, the plot is circular and brief, a series of gallant but ultimately useless attempts on the great dragon. Both that dragon and the magic opposing it are framed as relics from an old age, fantasies that are dying from this earth; the film practically opens with Galen’s master seeing his magic utterly fail him, and the king’s original plan for the dragon is to simply wait out its dwindling lifespan. Galen never truly seems in control of his own magic, either – he gathers tools and concocts plans, but his abilities are never formalized or reliable, only the prayer of a talented young man to an old and unknowable god.
As you might guess, all of that ambiguous, gloomy texture made me feel quite at home with Dragonslayer. I like when magic or supernatural beasts are essentially framed as unknowable forces of nature; such dynamics feel more inherently mystical and ominous than magic framed as a concrete mathematical system. Dragonslayer even goes a step further, actually contextualizing its fading mythologies in the face of the system that truly killed them: Christian doctrine, which creeps steadily into the margins of Dragonslayer until even grand acts of wizardry are framed as a blessing from the lord. That lurking specter lends the whole film a sense of melancholy that is further bolstered by its gloomy, tactile set design, an ambiguity echoed by the actually reasonable choices of the film’s allegedly evil king. A humble yet uniquely engaging fantasy feature.
