Month: August 2014

‘Cleaners’ season two premieres on August 19

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cleaners chriqui gershon - 1We loved the first season of Cleaners, Crackle’s series focusing on hitwomen Emmanuelle Chriqui and Emily Osment, their efforts to escape the relentless pursuit of their employer (Gina Gershon), and untangle a plot involving an autistic child and $50+ million in loot. It was fast-paced, brutal, and full of entertaining characters on both sides, as well as being largely unlike anything else currently on television. The good news is, a second season was commissioned, with all the main names returning [well, those that survived the bloody finale of the first series!], and that hits streaming service Crackle and its partners on August 19. According to Variety:

Season two of “Cleaners” is set on a small Caribbean island where Veronica (Chriqui) and Roxie (Osment) think they are about to cash in, just to realize they have not escaped their past. The duo arrange to meet Eileen (Missi Pyle) to split a $57 million take, but she has teamed up with “Mother” (Gershon) to have the girls “erased.” Meanwhile, FBI agent Frank Barnes (David Arquette) is recruited by a CIA agent (David Rees Snell of “Last Resort”) for an off-book mission. “The second season looks bigger and badder than the first,” said Chriqui. “Shooting it felt more like a film set than a television set.” The “Cleaners” second season was filmed on location in Puerto Rico. Chirqui said that “changed the look of the show” from the first season, which was shot in Los Angeles.

This series has been expanded from six to twelve episodes, and should even be worth sitting through commercials which you can’t fast-forward. Here’s the trailer for season two; expect a review here, whenever we manage to clear the decks for a spot of binge-watching!

The Dalton Girls

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★★★½
“How the West was wo(ma)n.”

dalton-girls-os1“Oh, you can’t trust a man, ‘cos a man will lie,
But a gun stays beside you till the day you die.
A man is a cheater, with his triflin’ ways,
But a gun’s always faithful, ‘cos a gun never strays.”
   — Holly Dalton (Merry Anders)

The above comes from a rather strange musical number, injected into the middle of this B-Western for no particular purpose. It’s sung by Holly, the leader of the titular gang, consisting of four sisters: the older pair Holly and Columbine (Edwards), are forced on the lam after a sleazy funeral director tries to force himself on Holly, resulting in his encounter with the business end of a spade. Six years later, they have been joined by younger siblings Rose (Davis) and Marigold (Sue George). and are raiding stage coaches around the West.

Things are derailed when one of their targets is carrying W.T. “Illinois” Grey (Russell), a gambler on his way to the Colorado boom town of Dry Creek. Columbine falls for him, and casually suggests Dry Creek as the location for the gang’s next raid. They raid the bank, and get away with $6,000 – which was supposed to go to Grey, and he is shot in the process. He trails them to Tombstone where, rather than tell the sheriff, he blackmails the gang to get the money back, and Holly decides to get revenge by raiding the high-stakes poker game where he is wagering the cash.

It’s a wonderfully grey film, morally speaking: unlike many Westerns of the era (1957), it isn’t black-hatted villains metaphorically twirling their wax moustaches, as they go up against square-jawed good guys in their white hats. Here, there isn’t anyone whom you could truly place at either end of the moral spectrum. The Daltons, Holly in particular, are victims of their family reputation – the film opens with their brothers being hunted by a posse, and gunned down in the desert. [The funeral director who assaults her is displaying the corpses for a 25-cent admission fee, which appears based on the fate of the real Dalton Gang].

On the other hand, Grey is certainly no hero either, a pragmatist whose main focus is looking out for #1. Naturally, crime can’t be allowed to pay, and the ending reflects that. However, the journey is a surprisingly forward-thinking one, with only the doomed Grey-Columbine romance counting as an expected element. There is probably one sister too many, since they do blur together, and absolutely nothing like the tagline on the poster happens [“snared them in their love traps at night”? Really?], though that may not be a bad thing. Apart from the fact that the outlaws are women, the story doesn’t have much new to offer. However, considering the era, that alone is still borderline radical, and plays a good two decades ahead of its time, if not more.

Dir: Reginald Le Borg
Star: Merry Anders, John Russell, Penny Edwards, Lisa Davis

Legend of the Poisonous Seductress: Female Demon Ohyaku

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★★★
“I’ll no longer be a man’s toy, even if it kills me. I’d like to kill all men who abuse women with power and money.”

female-demon-ohyakuWell, you can’t argue with a title like that, can you? This proto-pinky violence film has many of the elements later developed more fully: a wronged woman is sent to prison, only to escape and seek retribution on those responsible for putting her there. In this case, it’s a period setting with part-time circus performer, part-time prostitute Ohyaku Dayu (Miyazono) finally getting the courage to break away from her sordid lifestyle, with the help of honourable thief Shinkuro (Murai). He’s planning a raid on the local mint, to steal the raw gold they use, and punish corrupt local officials.

However, a treacherous colleague betrays them, for a bureaucratic promotion, and Ohyaku is sent to prison – and, not even a women’s prison. It’s a men’s prison, that doubles as a gold mine. Fortunately, she falls under the protection of Bunzo the Iron Barbarian, which keeps her safe until she can work her wiles on the warden and his bisexual wife (Mishima), the latter of whom is obsessed with getting to tattoo Ohyaku, Our heroine chooses the Hannya demon as the subject – for good reason, as she eventually escapes jail to set about her revenge, and also complete Shinkuro’s raid.

The first and last third of this are truly effective, doing an excellent job of setting up the characters and resolving all the plot threads respectively. You can’t help but empathize with Ohyaku, her predicament and the steely resolve, maintained through some extreme tribulations, to take revenge for her lover – who is nicely drawn as well, Murai coming over as both charismatic and moral, despite his chosen profession. However, it sags badly in the middle third, from her arrival at the prison until her escape; it’s a section which either should have been shortened considerably, or needed more to happen.

Despite being made as late as 1968, it’s shot in black-and-white, which gives it a retro feel. It’s certainly a lot tamer, particularly in terms of nudity, than the technicolor tidal-wave that would be unleashed a couple of years later. Still, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, enhancing the impact of things like a trickle of blood down Ohyaka’s forehead. Some of the torture on view is certainly imaginative, such as being hung by the neck, with your feet just touching a metal plate enough to stop you from strangling. Then a fire is lit under the plate… Damn. Also of interest, the presence of the legendary Tomisaburô Wakayama, best known as the hero of the Lone Wolf and Cub series (a.k.a. Shogun Assassin), as a sympathetic gang boss.

The first in an apparent trilogy, this manages to overcome the weak middle section and leave me interested in following Ohyaku’s subsequent adventures. Miyazono may not have the impact possessed by some of other other pinky violence stars, yet the better-than-average script helps balance that out, and this has stood the test of time better than many of its era.

Dir: Yoshihiro Ishikawa
Star: Junko Miyazono, Kunio Murai, Koji Nanbara, Yuriko Mishima

Loves Her Gun

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★
“A cautionary tale. And you’re cautioned not to watch this movie.”

lovehergunPerhaps surprisingly, given the nature of this page, I’m not inherently averse to the idea of gun control. I lived in Britain until I was in my thirties, which seems to work fairly well without the whole “right to bear arms” thing. It probably made sense in 1776, but certainly wouldn’t be high on my to-do list if I was writing the constitution now. However, I now live in a country with 300 million guns or so, and I’m pragmatic enough to accept that the genie is out of the bottle here: any attempt to impose it at this point, would only impact law-abiding citizen and weaken their ability to defend themselves against criminals who would still have their weapons. Gun control works – but only if you already have it. Anyway, I mention all this to establish that I’m not averse to a movie which makes a well-reasoned argument against guns. Unfortunately, this is about as far from well-reasoned as imaginable. The facile scaremongering here leaves this mild-mannered Brit, who has touched a gun once in his life, with a strong wish for the makers of this, some day, to find themselves in need of some well-armed help.

Walking back to her Brooklyn apartment, Allie (Dunn) is the victim of a swift but brutal mugging. It’s the last straw for her, and she bails out of the city the next day, hitching a ride to Texas with a touring rock band and its “charismatic” leader, Clark (Barrero). She stays in his house, and gets a job working alongside local landscaper Sarah (Bisagni), but it unable to shake the PTSD caused by the attack. Sarah introduces Allie to the joy of firearms, eventually leading to her purchasing her own weapon for personal defense. However, the presence of the gun turns Allie into a raging Charles Bronson, as we see when she charges into a local domestic dispute, all a-firearmy. From here, it’s painfully if illogically obvious where this is going to end up. Oh, look: Allie getting her hands on a gun turns out to be A Bad Idea, in an incident a third-grade English teacher would mark down as poorly considered. This is my unsurprised face.

The end credits proudly proclaim that the dialogue was largely improvised, which might be okay, if it didn’t seem they also made the story up as they went along too. There are a number of interesting ways this could have gone. Unfortunately, the film chooses none of them, preferring to drive a path through Austin’s hipster scene, populated by “wacky” people, apparently expelled from Portland for being too smug and self-centred. Marslett seems more interested in them than his lead and her story – Dunn is actually not bad in the role, her character at least not leaving me with violent urges. So, we get lengthy, pointless scenes of a tubing trip down the river, or a party where people write their hopes and dreams on pieces of paper, stuff them into a Yoda piñata and sets fire to it. Very deep. Perhaps worst of all, Clark’s band, The Karate Kids, perform behind mannequins posed into the crane-kick move from the film. Was that idea improvised as well? Because I can’t think of any other explanation for it being such complete shit. Hang on: turns out it’s the director’s band. Explains a lot…

So much of the running-time here is completely wasted on these self-indulgent excuses for film-making, of interest only to Marslett and his cronies in Austin’s scene. The net result, is that Allie’s transformation from scaredy-cat into vengeful vigilante is so fast as to be utterly implausible. They needed to establish the more problematic side of her personality earlier, rather than making it seem as if purchasing a gun immediately causes psychosis since that’s what guns do. There’s a brief spell, where Allie is taken shooting by Sarah, that does catch fire, capturing something of the awe-inspiring power firing a gun can create, but it’s soon forgotten – because we have to go to the Yoda party! Even to a neutral in the debate like myself, this is a facile and simplistic approach to a subject which deserves a far more complex exploration, from people who aren’t fascinated by an aimless, slacker lifestyle that’s entirely uninteresting or noteworthy.

Dir: Geoff Marslett
Star: Trieste Kelly Dunn, Francisco Barreiro, Melissa Hideko Bisagni, Ashley Rae Spillers

Queen of Swords

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qos1★★★
“Leather, whips and lace – gotta love the type.”

In 1817, a young Spanish aristocrat, Tessa Alvarado (Santiago), returns to Spanish California after the death of her father and finds her home in ruins, her father’s manservant reduced to stealing. The town where she was born is run by militaristic governor Colonel Luis Ramirez Montoya (Pelka), who abuses his power, resulting in the miscarriage of justice and the poor living conditions of his subjects. Upset about the state of her birthplace and the murder of her father, Tessa’s path is revealed to her in a mysterious dream where her father comes to her and talks of his murder, his hidden gold, and of his “Avenging Angel”. She will take up arms to protect the people from the town’s governor and to avenge her father’s death. Tessa will do this in disguise behind a mask, becoming that “Avenging Angel”, The Queen of Swords.

Synopsis shamelessly cribbed from Wikipedia, but why re-invent the wheel? That seems to have been the approach taken by the makers here anyway, for their show which ran a single season from October 2000 through June 2001. The obvious, if unacknowledged, inspiration here is Zorro, in which another member of Spanish nobility, adopts a secret identity in order to defend the downtrodden populace from corrupt officials, etc. etc. Indeed, so close were the similarities that Sony sued Fireworks Entertainment, the producers of Queen of Swords, asserting that there was a breach of their rights. The resulting decision was murky: the court initially ruled the character was in the public domain, but later vacated that decision, and the suit was settled out of court, but it’s certainly possible the legal wrangling contributed to the decision to pull the plug on the show, after only eight episodes had aired.

qos2Certainly, in terms of quality, it’s by no means a disaster, and I enjoyed this more than other, recent shows which were yanked as fast, e.g. Killer Women or the Charlie’s Angels reboot. Of course, the central premise requires quite some suspension of disbelief: the concept that putting a little lacy mask on somehow transforms Alvarado and renders her completely unrecognizable by anyone, is nonsense. It’s not as if the town is full of similar-looking women, and she doesn’t even bother to change her voice. Still, if Superman can put on a pair of glasses to the same end, I guess we shouldn’t pick on Queen of Swords. What does work, is the interesting range of characters. Montoya is a bastard, always out for himself, but he’s quite a clever bastard with it, aided by captain of the guard Marcus Grisham (Lemke). On Santiago’s side, she assisted by her gypsy maid – who, like all gypsies, has psychic powers (I think it’s genetic) – and also by the local doctor, Robert Helm (Wingfield), who also has secrets of his own. These are all well-rounded characters whose interaction is fun to watch.

The action work is a bit of a mixed bag. Santiago was found at an open casting call, and underwent two months of training under swordmaster Anthony De Longis, who also plays Tessa’s fencing tutor in the opening episode. However, portraying the character required cobbling together a patchwork of Santiago with stunt doubles and other replacements, including Natalia Guijarro Brasseur, Roberta Brown, Gaëlle Cohen, Mary Gallien, Mary Jose, and even the occasional male for particularly difficult stunts. Again to quote Wikipedia, this “is exemplified in the Queen’s run up the hill away from the soldiers in Death to the Queen. Mary Gallien started the run, Roberta Brown performed the medium shot duel with swords on the hill, Tessie Santiago performed the spoken parts and was in the close-up, and Natalia Brasseur fell off the cliff.” The results are hardly seamless, and fall more into the category of competent than anything else, with the occasional moment that either impresses, or is painfully obvious in the doubling.

The shows did have some decent guest stars. Among the most memorable was perhaps Bo Derek, who played retired pirate captain (!)  Mary Rose, who is intent on seeing her son escapes a murder charge. She could, at least, do her own horsework, being quite an accomplished ride. David Carradine also appears, getting to wield a sword some years before doing so in Kill Bill, and Sung-Hi Lee plays another action heroine in a later episode, The Dragon, where she plays a member from a temple of Japanese warrior-priests, whose master (Burt Kwouk – not Japanese either!) is killed, and seeks vengeance on the Queen after being told by Montoya she was behind the attack. Elsa Pataky also has a regular role, playing the wife of a local landowner, who is having an affair with Grisham. Other guests in the series include Simon MacCorkindale and Ralf Moeller. Oddly, given the setting, there’s a high percentage of British actors in both the regular and guest cast, led by Pelka who, despite his accent, was actually born in Yorkshire – his exotic name is Polish, rather than Hispanic…

A few random other thoughts: I grew to despise the theme song, which sounds like a low-rent version of something by the Gypsy Kings. But the lack of over-riding romantic entanglement works in the film’s favour. While there’s a sense Tessa and Dr. Helm have an attraction, unlike certain shows I could mention, the storylines never gets bogged down in this ‘shipper drivel. I reached the end with a feeling of sadness that the show never quite did well enough to merit further season. If far from original, and not even the first female version of Zorro [which would be Zorro’s Black Whip], it was generally entertaining, with performances that were better than I expected. Even now, the legal status of Zorro remains undecided, and until that is resolved, I doubt anyone will head down the distaff version path again. Episode 1 is on YouTube.

Star: Tessie Santiago, Valentine Pelka, Anthony Lemke, Peter Wingfield