Tag: g

The Girl Who Got Away

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★★★
“The plot that got away.”

This isn’t the first movie I’ve seen, in which a woman escapes apparent death at the hands of a serial killer, only for them to track her down years later. However, the twist in the narrative here, which perhaps pushed it over the necessary boundary for inclusion on the site, is that the killer is also female. The victim is Christina Bowden (Johnson), who as a young girl was the sole survivor of Elizabeth Caulfield (Tuckerman) and her “child farm”, for want of a better phrase. Bowden has slowly put her life back together and is now a school teacher. She’s also looking to adopt another troubled teen, Lisa Spencer (McCarthy), and pay it forward. Then she gets a visit from local sheriff Jamie Nwosu (Iwuji).

For Caulfield has escaped during a transfer, and may be heading to finish what she started. Jamie does what he can to offer protection, but the stress is clearly taking an increasing toll on Christina and her psyche. Her relationship with Lisa disintegrates ad she tries to keep her in the dark about her own past.  Then dead bodies start to pile up. At first, it seems Caulfield is the obvious suspect, until the victims become people about whom she wouldn’t even know about, let alone have any reason to kill… If you are anything like me, you’re perhaps a bit ahead of the story, and there are some elements where you wonder why everyone is so slow to put the pieces together.

To the film’s credit it doesn’t stretch these aspects excessively. On the other hand, I still have questions about a number of the developments in the final act, some of which had me muttering “Hang on a moment…” under my breath. I’m prepared to cut it a certain bit of slack, for what had been a slow burn to that point, suddenly turned on the nitrous, and went fairly intense grand guignol. It’s a trade-off I’m usually prepared to make. It does help balance a movie that does feel overlong at 116 minutes, with elements in the early going, that never come to any particular fruition. I’d rather have seen more of Caulfield, who is backgrounded too far to be a truly effective horror threat.

That may at least be somewhat deliberate, as this isn’t exactly the horror movie implied by the poster. It’s perhaps more of a psychological drama, with thriller components. Regardless of genre or marketing, the performances are generally solid though. Johnson does an effective job of playing someone with a rough past, whose future suddenly does not look all that bright either. Over the course of proceedings, it’s certainly one hell of a character arc, and the audience are more or less compelled to go along with her, willingly or not. I can’t say it’s entirely successful as an entity, yet there are moments here that are effective enough. It may have been almost two hours, yet I didn’t feel they were entirely wasted.

Dir: Michael Morrissey
Star: Lexi Johnson, Chukwudi Iwuji, Willow McCarthy, Kaye Tuckerman

Gloria (1980)

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★★★½
“Gloria, you’re always on the run now…”

Yeah, I’ll confess to having Laura Branigan’s eighties hit running through my head on repeat almost the entire movie, even if its lyrics can only be tangentially tied to it. What also struck me is how strong of an influence this was on Luc Besson’s Leon, especially at the beginning. I mean: a criminal gang takes out an entire family in a New York tenement, except for one child, as punishment for the father having tried to steal from them. That survivor takes refuge with a very reluctant neighbour with mob ties, who then has to protect the child as they move about the city. There’s even a scene where one of the gang fires his gun at a nosy resident.

In this case, the protective neighbour is Gloria Swenson (Rowlands), and the child is Phil Dawn (Adames), son of a mob accountant, who is also in possession of a highly incriminating notebook given to him by his father. Gloria makes no bones about her opinion, telling the parents, “I hate kids, especially yours.” However, necessity is the mother of motherhood, as it were, and her maternal instincts end up being awakened by six-year-old Phil, who swings wildly between acting three times his age and one-third of it. Gloria has no issue with using lethal force against those she perceives as a threat, as she seeks to broker a deal that will trade the book in exchange for her and Phil being allowed to walk away. This brings her into contact with mob boss Tarzini (Franchina) – not for the first time.

Rowlands is great in this, and you can see why she’s one of the few actresses to have been nominated for an Oscar in a girls with guns role. Director Cassavetes was her husband – he was originally just going to sell the script, but took on the director’s role after his wife was cast – and their long history of working together likely helped provide her nuanced performance. The problems are elsewhere. Phil is certainly no Matilda, and I was largely with the opinion Gloria expressed above. There’s also no-one like Stansfield, to act as an antagonist. Tarzini isn’t seen until the end, and up to that point, Gloria is opposed largely by a series of faceless goons.

Even given her background, it does seem remarkably convenient how she and they seem to stumble into each other in every other scene. It’s as if the film took place in a small farming town, rather than a city of over seven million inhabitants at the time. However, the film is never less than engaging due to Rowlands, who was fifty when the film came out, so is definitely older than your typical action heroine. Though your biggest takeaway may be how early eighties it all feels. Chris, who lived in New York at the time, loved that even seeing a car identical to her first one parked in a scene. Personally, I just had to marvel at how an unaccompanied six-year-old could buy a train ticket from New York to Pittsburgh without anyone batting an eyelid. Truly, a very different world… But what I really want to know is this: what happened to Gloria’s cat?

Dir: John Cassavetes
Star: Gena Rowlands, John Adames, Basilio Franchina, Buck Henry

Gloria (1999)

  By

★★½
“Gloria, non in excelsis“

Nineteen years after the original, four-time Oscar nominated director Lumet opted to remake Cassavetes’s movie. Though by some accounts, it was more a case of him wanting to work, rather than being particularly attracted to the project. If the results are anything to go by, he should have stayed at home. For the film was a bomb, and leading lady Stone received a Razzie nomination for her efforts. I wouldn’t have said she was that bad, though she’s clearly not at the same level as Gina Rowlands in the original. It does also address some of what I felt were its’ predecessor’s weaknesses. However, it tones down the central character, and this helps lead to what you’d be hard-pressed to argue is other than an inferior product overall.

It keeps the basic premise. Gloria (Stone) becomes the unwilling custodian of a young boy (Figueroa), whose family was wiped out by the mob. However, the kid is in possession of incriminating data, which could either be his salvation or his death knell, so Gloria has to protect him as the Mafiosi try to hunt him down. The big change is, rather than being a neighbour with some mob ties, Gloria here has just got out of jail, having served a three-year sentence after refusing to squeal on her boyfriend, mob lieutenant Kevin (Brit actor Northam, sporting a very credible New York accent, i.e. Chris didn’t complain about it!). When he brushes her off, she absconds with both the boy and the floppy disk which holds the data here. All 1.44 MB of it, I guess. For comparison, the original image of the poster (right) is larger than that. Gotta love tech in the nineties.

This does give the film a clear antagonist in Kevin, something lacking in the previous version, and the child here is less irritating, with a character that seems more consistent. The problem is Stone’s take on the character, which feels like the “Is Diet Pepsi alright?” flavour of the character. This one is considerably less ruthless: while she is happy to wave a gun around, I don’t recall her ever shooting anyone, which Gloria v1.0 did with an almost reckless abandon. Her motivation is also considerably more selfish, spawned (at least initially) by a desire to hit back at Kevin for dumping her.

You can perhaps tell the difference simply by comparing the posters for the two movies. The one here appears more interested in putting Stone’s cleavage front and centre: I note the kid did not stay in this picture. Indeed, on its own merits, this would have been a fairly marginal entry for the site, since it’s closer to a thriller-drama than an action movie. It does possess some effective enough moments, though some of these are cribbed wholesale from the original. This is not as terrible a remake as its reputation indicates: the core concept is too strong for that. Yet any purpose to it remains obscure at best, and entirely missing at worst.

Dir: Sidney Lumet
Star: Sharon Stone, Jean-Luke Figueroa, Jeremy Northam, George C. Scott

Ghost in the Cowl, by Jonathan Moeller

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Literary rating: ★★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆½

This one was probably teetering on the edge of a seal of approval, except one aspect. For what’s supposed to be book one in a series, the author spends a lot of time discussing events prior to the book getting under way, such as the tragic loss of the heroine’s true love. However, subsequent research revealed that this is not the start of Caina Amalas’s history. The Ghost Exile series is actually a sub-set of her saga, which appears to consist of no less than 26 primary works. According to the Goodreads listing, this is #11, so we are clearly well under way. I’m a little annoyed, since I never like joining stories in progress. However, this entry is strong enough to stand on its own.

It’s a fantasy setting, populated by powerful mages, alchemists and warriors, where kings and emperors battle for power and territory. As a teenager, Caina became part of the “Ghosts”, the intelligence arm for the Emperor of Nighmar. Over the following years, she acts as a spy and assassin for him, with a particular talent for disguise, though is capable of using force when necessary. Going by the title of the sub-series, she seems to have incurred the wrath of her masters somehow, and as we start this entry, has been sent to re-establish a compromised spy ring in the geographically critical city of Istarinmul. It’s a scant two weeks after losing both the love of her life and the man who had raised her, so she’s still a bit fragile. 

This likely explains why she ends up diverted off-mission, instead risking her life to rescue the children of a widowed innkeeper from the hated slavers of Istarinmul. Yet this opens the door for her to cause havoc as a near-mythical figure, the Balarigar; find out why there has been a sudden surge in the need for slaves; and trigger what may be the Giant Fireball to end all Giant Fireballs, using the occult/chemical concoction known as Hellfire. There’s plenty going on, and when Moeller concentrates on the present (rather than rehashing previous events) this is a fast-paced page-turner. I consumed the entire second half in one sitting, a rare event given my usually fractured reading habits.

Caina, at least by this point in proceedings, is a well-rounded heroine, who is skilled without being overpowered. Part of what makes her so effective is, she knows her limits and how to get things done within them. For example, she knows she can’t beat the enhanced warriors known as Immortals in a straight fight, so uses stealth to get around them. Without having read earlier entries, her dwelling in previous tragedy was a bit annoying, and didn’t add much to this entry. But with the genuine first three books of her story in an omnibus edition for just 99 cents, this still easily did enough to make buying that collection a no-brainer.

Author: Jonathan Moeller
Publisher: ‎CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book.
Book 1 of 9 in the Ghost Exile series (but see above). 

Grisaia Phantom Trigger – The Animation

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★★★
“Time changes everything… or does it?”

DISCLAIMER: I have no knowledge on the backstory of this series. Grisaia Phantom Trigger – The Animation is the latest story in the Grisaia universe, that originally began as a series of “visual novels” (which as I understand, have more in common with a computer game), was then turned into a manga and the 13-episode anime series The Fruits of Grisaia which got two sequels, The Labyrinth of Grisaia (a TV movie) and The Eden of Grisaia (10 episodes), before we reached where we are here. GPT-TA is the new stand-alone film of that series, which came out last year and was also shown in cinemas. As none of the above mentioned series or films have been dubbed and released in Germany, my home country, I never saw anything before this movie. I belong to those anime fans who prefer to see their stuff in a language they can understand.

But that actually doesn’t matter at all, for this film serves as a very good introduction to the uninformed like myself. It therefore can be watched by those who have never seen an episode of this series before. As a matter of fact, the film consists of two longer episodes, combined into a movie, that thus tells us two separate stories. The first part serves as an introduction, which I felt was a bit dialogue-heavy. The second half was around 15 minutes longer than the first and provided more of the action stuff that fans love. But the way it was done was very nice.

So, what’s it all about? There was a US-Japanese anti-terrorism organisation called CIRS: after having become public knowledge, a new agency for covert operations was created, called SORD (Social Ops, Research and Development). This organisation has established many schools within the country, where homeless poor orphans from unfortunate backgrounds are being trained and schooled to protect the country (meaning: to kill people).

In this particular school, where the orphans consist solely of young girls, the teenagers are taken care of by a young man Haruto, who with his long hair almost looks like a woman himself. He could have his own interesting backstory – he doesn’t shoot, but has others do it for him – something I suspect happened in one of the prequel shows. Than there’s sharp-shooter Touka; the Russian Ninja Murasaki; hot-shot action-girl Rena, who’s totally devoted to her ‘Master’ Haruto; Chris, the “mother” of the team, a handsome woman; and the female (and underdressed!) director. There are a couple more characters, but they hardly have much more than a cameo.

The teen girls are nice, and love to banter and bicker with each other in the way normal pupils would in school. But when they are on a mission they make, as we say in Germany, “nails with heads” – meaning they definitely don’t take prisoners. Seeing these otherwise lovely girls, delivering head-shots here and there quite bewildering to me, It was also a bit much for the new teacher, Miss Arisaka, who is kidnapped in the first episode, though still decided she would continue her new job at this unusual school.

The second part then gets into the real action. It’s a more complex story about a comatose former agent who gets kidnapped from a ship. When the girls find him, he’s dead, his heart having been ripped out. The team finds out that the heart, that was originally supposed to go to a leader of the secret service, has been stolen by Russians who have been duped by the seller, who sold the same heart twice. After they recover the heart, they get tricked immediately again by a false courier. As young hot-shot Rena pursues the courier, and then the woman the heart has been given to, she finds out much to her surprise that the woman is her childhood friend Maki, with whom she spent time on the streets, trying to survive.

It’s that second act that makes me like this movie especially. Sure, the idea of hero and villain having a history together, is nowadays an old, almost beaten-to-death cliche. But unlike a recent Bond movie, where the connection is only unimaginatively drawn, and never given any emotional meaning, this small anime film does so much more (and better) with the idea. In that childhood, they called themselves “Sics” and “Bucks” – Rena found Maki behind a coffee shop – and lived on the streets, fighting for food, which they shared. A gangster decided that Rena should become a killer and Maki a prostitute, but as things went on also Maki became a killer, the right-hand woman for  heartsick Russian mob boss, Alexej Nicolaijewich. She is as devoted to her master as Rena is to hers, leading to a very intense fight, first with guns then with bare hands.

Though just 88 minutes long, this is very well done. The few short scenes of the childrens’ childhood give their fight more meaning then the talked about (but never really felt) conflict between for example 007 and 006 in GoldenEye. The fight itself is well-choreographed, looks believable (I’m very well aware I’m talking about an anime!), has exactly the right length and comes across as deliciously hard. And while the whole story about the stolen heart is solved in the end, I liked that this movie doesn’t end the way one would expect. The otherwise trigger-happy Rena doesn’t kill Maki, and also learns about her responsibility to follow orders from Haruto. So there’s a learning curve here.

As Nicolaiewich has died peacefully, Maki has no interest in following the Russian gangsters: her obligation was to Nicolaiewich not the organisation. Following Rena’s request, Haruto is taking her under his wing to become a new member of the team. I liked this ending as something different to what a Hollywood actioner would typically serve us. Also, twisting cliches is something I find very rewarding storywise. It’s quite astonishing that big blockbusters in Hollywood can’t be written and directed with the same care as much smaller budgeted Japanese anime. The storytelling in Hollywood’s entertainment industry has really declined sharply, in my opinion. This movie shows you don’t need a big budget to add some more personal touches to your main characters.

The animation itself is well done – good but probably not great, as there are a couple of static images, probably to save money. Also remarkable: this anime was able to tell its story without the typical ecchi or anime humour, so no panty- or booby-shots. The main focus is on the drama and interaction of the different characters, though I couldn’t complain about the action. It was a good mix of both elements. Also, I can say the German dubbing was very well-done. The German voice actresses sound much more grown-up than those in the Japanese dub (I listened for a minute into it) where the girls sounded all very kawai, very cute… The dialogue itself sounded very believable in the German version, especially the bantering and the saucy/funny comments of the girls.

The only minor complaint in my book is that I felt this is a great beginning for a series I would like to continue. Unfortunately, it is (at least for the time being) the end point of the story as far as any German releases are concerned. Well, who knows… maybe the DVD label will now also release the sequel Grisaia Phantom Trigger – The Animation: Stargazer and the sequel series Grisaia: Phantom Trigger that was announced recently?

Dir: Motoki Tanaka

Girl Vs. by Xela Culletto

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Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆

While a quick read, at 205 pages, after slogging through a couple of what can only be described as “chonkers”, I really didn’t mind. It’s briskly-paced, hits the ground running and largely doesn’t stop thereafter. I have some concerns about where things might go in subsequent volumes, so will probably stop here, just to be safe. However, I enjoyed what I read well enough.

It opens with an alien invasion having taken place, and humanity not getting the best of the subsequent war. The Vela, as the creatures are called, have taken over most cities with brutal force, scattering the surviving population to remote areas. One of these is Rhyan, whom we first meet living in a cave, as part of a small group. She lost the rest of her family to the Vela, and hates them with a passion. Rhyan puts that into effect with her blades, getting rid of any aliens that stray too close to her hide-out. However, circumstance forces her on the road, and she ends up at Springfield, a human stronghold with plans to take the fight to the Vela.

It was only while writing this, that I realized I didn’t actually know much about what the aliens looked like. I know they have claws. But beyond that? Here’s about the only meaningful descriptive passage: “It looked the same as them all—four long legs, bent into a ‘z’, supported the plump abdomen. Rising above that was a middle section from which taut appendages shot forth long serrated claws. The swiveling head, with its unblinking black eyes, was perched on top.” It has to be said, they also die very easily – I lost count of how many a teenage girl took out of the course of the book, with even a dozen being dispatched in one fight – to the point you wonder how they managed to defeat Earth’s armies.

Despite the heroine’s single-minded devotion to the cause, there are suggestions the aliens’ motives may be not as genocidal as they seem, with a theory they were looking to save the Earth from humanity by “thinning the herd.” I did notice the author’s page on Amazon says, “Aliens have always held her fascination, and she hopes to meet one someday,” which makes me wonder if these ones could indeed turn out to be benevolent-ish. To be honest, that’d kinda suck. I much prefer my alien invasions without moral ambiguity.

This is better when it’s not hinting at such things, with a laudable body count on the human side too, and a heroine who is easy to root for, even when some of her acts are morally dubious. There’s hardly a dull moment to be found, as we head to a climax where Rhyan and her colleagues are the only thing stopping a call for alien reinforcements going out. Bit of a helicopter ex machina there, yet I can’t complain about the heroine finally catching a break, after all she has been through to that point.

Author: Xela Culletto
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 2 in the Sinister Skies series.

The Girl and the Gun

  By

★★★
“The equalizer”

The protagonist is a young woman (Gutierrez), who works in a department store in Quezon City, the largest city in the Philippines. Her life is one of constant drudgery, with what income not spent on her tiny, shared apartment, being sent home to her mother in the countryside. She can’t afford to buy new stockings to replace her torn ones – a fact which brings her into conflict with her manager – or even go out with colleagues for drinks after work. She has a lecherous landlord, and is treated by everyone as the perpetual doormat she is.

Then she finds a gun.

She initially does nothing with the weapon, discarded in the alley by her apartment building. But after being sexually assaulted, she picks it up, and everything changes – it gives her a voice, both literally and psychologically. The key trigger (pun intentionally) is using it to rescue her flat-mate from being assaulted by her boyfriend. She then suddenly realizes she doesn’t need to take it anymore: whether “it” is her boss harassing her about the stockings, or simply a shop worker being rude to her. Having the weapon gives her the confidence to stand up for herself, a surprisingly radical concept. Perhaps a variant of “An armed society is a polite society,” as Robert A. Heinlein once said.

Then she offers to help her flat-mate handle the abusive boyfriend permanently… But will she take the final step and go through with it? Hold that thought though, because the film then takes a left turn, diverting to tell the story of the weapon, and how it ended up in the alley. This is, unfortunately, a misstep in cinematic terms, with a segment which does not travel anywhere nearly as well as the first half. It’s a rather impenetrable story of death squads, corrupt cops, drug dealers and familes, which I can only presume, reflects life in the underbelly of urban life in the Philippines. It seemed, to me, like a pointless diversion that didn’t say much of interest about anything, and when the film eventually returns to the “girl” part of the equation, any forward momentum had been lost.

That’s a pity, as there were points when it seemed like an Asian take on Ms. 45, with its heroine almost mute until the point at which she powers up with a fire-arm. This heroine is considerably more sympathetic, in part because she shows considerably more restraint. While she fantasizes about killing her rapist, for example. she doesn’t actually pull the trigger on him. However, as well as the unwanted diversion into the history of her weapon, the ending is less polished. It’s one of those open ones, where the audience has to decide what happens. These tend to feel like a cop-out, as if the writer couldn’t come up with a proper way to finish the film. Still, the first fifty minutes do enough, to make this worth a watch.

Dir: Rae Red
Star: Janine Gutierrez, Felix Roco, JC Santos, Elijah Canlas
a.k.a. Babae at baril

Goodbye Honey

  By

★½
“Trucking terribly written.”

There is a good concept here. Unfortunately, rarely have I seen an idea so conspicuously derailed by dreadful execution. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves though, and begin by focusing on the positives here. Dawn (Morgan) is a truck driver who is on a cross-country route, and pulls off the road into a remote, wooded location for an obligatory rest stop. Barely has she come to a halt, when a terrified young woman, Phoebe (Gobin), shows up outside her cab, demanding help. She claims to have been abducted, and been held nearby. But she managed to escape from her kidnapper, who is now hot on her heels, with evil intentions. However, is the new arrival speaking the truth or is she dangerously deranged?

It’s safe to say, you have my attention with this set-up, and Morgan is nicely unarchetypal as an action heroine, both in her middle-age, and a world-worn appearance which is about as unglamourous as you could imagine. She’s likely the best thing about this, and her performance was good enough to stop the whole thing from imploding entirely. This matters, because the script appears almost intentionally crafted to wreck any suspense or interest, resulting from both the premise or the lead performance. Within a few minutes of Phoebe’s arrival, Dawn has lost the keys to the truck and had her phone broken. Given the character is intended to be a highly competent, no-nonsense sort, this just doesn’t work. 

There are then two major mis-steps in terms of story-telling. A pair of stoner dudes show up, and the film grinds to a halt as Dawn has to deal with them. It’s painfully obvious they have nothing at all to do with Phoebe’s situation, and it’s embarrassing how shallow the writing for them is. Then, after they have mercifully departed the film, we get a lengthy, entirely superfluous flashback, telling us in detail how Phoebe was abducted, and what life was like in the cellar where she was kept for months. Guess what? We don’t care. It doesn’t matter, and adds nothing at all to the situation at hand. The final straw is the revelation of a connection between Dawn and the kidnapper, Cass (Kelly), which completely defies belief. I may have snorted derisively.

Inevitably it leads to him showing up and a confrontation between him and Dawn, where we learn the truth about Phoebe’s claims. Guess what v2.0? By this point, I didn’t care about then either. The film was on the screen, and I was looking in its general direction. But it would be a stretch to say I was paying any kind of attention, There is something to be said for a low-budget film cautiously writing its story within the limitation of what can be afforded: here, that’s a truck and a forest. However, the failure to convert that into anything meaningful or interesting thereafter, must also be laid at the door of the writers. 

Dir: Max Strand
Star: Pamela Jayne Morgan, Juliette Alice Gobin, Paul C. Kelly, Peyton Michelle Edwards

Girl Force, by Jonathan J. West

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Literary rating: ★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆

On the one hand, this is a book in desperate, desperate need of a copy-editor. Seriously: this is littered with more typos, grammatical gaffes and clunky phrasing than any other book I’ve ever read. I don’t know what the process was, which brought this to market, but it clearly fell dramatically short of adequate. Even as a first draft, this is something of which I would be flat-out ashamed. At times, I had to read a sentence three times, just to try and figure out what was meant. I have DNF’d books for far, far less. 

And, yet… Not only did I finish this, I genuinely enjoyed the whole, lunatic experience. I don’t know if the editing got slightly better as the book went on. Maybe I just became used to the style, which flies defiantly in the face of, not just all literary convention, but the basic rules of English. Bizarrely, by the end, I found myself almost appreciative of the stream of consciousness, neo-Joycean approach. It’s better demonstrated by example, than description, so here’s a sample paragraph – neither particularly good nor bad by the book’s standards:

Terrorist fighters were all except the junior member the fifteen-year-old boy, all dead, all taken out with kill shot perception of naturality of the cold kill of special forces combat. As feeling neither angry or regret did the unit, the squad of Girl Force have. It was a job that needed to be done and done with maximum efficiency it was.

Imagine 176 pages, just like that. But for all the shortcomings in grammar. spelling, and frequently,  coherence, it doesn’t lack for sheer energy. The five women of the title are a super-secret black ops group, who carry out impossible missions on behalf of the US government, while bickering amiably about what tunes should be played [There’s a blackly funny moment involving suicide bombers and the song It’s Raining Men…] GIRL Force – it stands for Ground Infantry Reconnaissance Logistics – are a vastly disparate quintet, in terms of background and culture. They run the gamut from “hee haw rootin’ tootin’ dixie chick farm girl” Annabelle Huston, to Hannukah Jones, “at the top of the top from Persian and African royalty.” But they are all amazingly talented, in everything from dance to martial arts, loving their country (and puppies), while hating injustice with an equal and admirable passion.

The first mission is an extraction out of China, which escalates into an extended chase sequence, worthy of a Michael Bay movie, before they are swept up to safety. After a brief pause to meet their boss, General Sofia-Jones Washington in their state-of-the-art headquarters, and her nemesis, Senator Karen Mann, it’s back out into the field. For a terrorist  attack has led to the brink of World War III, and GIRL Force represents the only chance of stopping it. But can these five brave women really defeat the five hundred terrorists of ISIL splinter group Crimson Jihad? Oh, who am I kidding. It’s a light challenge. For they are so good at everything, this reads partly like a sly parody of the dreaded Mary Sue trope (which was, itself, originally created as a parody of Star Trek fan-fiction).

Indeed, I’m not sure how much of this is to be taken seriously. If forced into judgment, I’d say rather little: I’d line it up alongside the original Charlie’s Angels movie.  Taken in that light, it’s a fast, frothy read which, against all odds, did have me interested in finding out what happens next. But you definitely need a huge tolerance for what My Fair Lady’s Professor Henry Higgins called the “cold-blooded murder of the English tongue.” Never mind homicide, this may be guilty of war crimes against the language. 

Author: Jonathan J. West
Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book

Girl of Nightmares, by Kendare Blake

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Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆

Warning: while this review contains no spoilers for the book I’m reviewing, it inevitably involves some spoilers for the book to which it’s a sequel, Anna Dressed in Blood. (I didn’t review that one here; see below). The situation in this book directly grows out of the events of the first one; and though the author provides some brief references to those in the opening chapters here, if you have not read the series opener, you would get only the very bare basics of what happened there. IMO, she expected that her readers will read the books in order, and I would strongly recommend doing so. Your whole understanding of the premise here, your engagement with the story, and your understanding of who most of the major characters are as people and your emotional connection to them will be seriously impaired if you don’t!

With this novel, Blake concludes the Anna duology. The two books are quite similar in terms of style and literary vision. As in the first book, our protagonist and present-tense narrator is high school junior Cas Lowood, the latest member of his family line to wield a magically-powered athame capable of sending those ghosts which are homicidal (not all ghosts are) out of this world into the afterlife. And again, our title character is Finnish-descended Anna Korlov (ca. 1942-1958), brutally murdered by her own mother, a black-magic witch, who cursed the girl with a spell that forced her to haunt the house in which she died and to savagely slaughter anyone hapless enough to subsequently enter it. Near the end of the first book, Anna deliberately cast herself through a portal into Hell (conceived in terms more owing to North American European-derived folk religion than to anything biblical), dragging along with her an utterly malevolent and murderous spirit of enormous power and menace, the “Obeahman,”and thereby saved the lives of Cas and others –but not before she and Cas had forged a genuine emotional connection.

The previous novel took place in the fall of Cas’ junior year in high school. When the second one opens, we’re now in the late spring of the next year, when the school year is rapidly winding down to its close. All during the interval, a grieving Cas has been searching for some way to communicate with Anna and at least obtain some sort of closure. He’s been aided in this quest by his mom, a white witch; by his London-based British mentor (and the mentor of his late father before him) Gideon Palmer; and by his high-school classmate, psychically-gifted Thomas Sabin and Thomas’ grandfather Morfran, a pair who are endowed with pretty formidable magic talents of their own. So far, they’ve drawn a blank. But now, Cas is beginning to find his dreams turned nightmarish with visions of Anna and, increasingly, experiencing very vivid waking visions of her as well. Are these genuine communications from Beyond, or is he simply beginning to lose his mind and hallucinate? (Well, for an answer, you’ll just have to read the book! :-) )

The first novel in the series isn’t an action heroine read. There, although Anna, as a cursed ghost, is formidably deadly (she can, and does, kill people by literally ripping them to pieces), she’s not inflicting her mayhem in a heroic mode; and where physical combat with dark forces is called for, it falls strictly on Cas. This time, though, he’s going to need help in that department; and Carmel Jones, queen bee of the high school’s “in” crowd (and Thomas’ girlfriend; Blake lets her transcend stereotype, which I appreciated) will find herself “getting in touch with her inner warrior princess.” Then there’s magically-gifted teen Jestine “Jess” Reardon, groomed to be Cas’ replacement (long story!) by the ancient Druidic order whose ancestors created the athame, who’s combat-capable as well as smart. And just because Anna’s no longer cursed doesn’t mean that she’s not still one tough ghost…. Action scenes that involve these young ladies aren’t numerous –but they are pretty intense, and potentially lethal (or worse).

Our initial setting is the main setting of most of the first book, the real-life rather large Canadian city of Thunder Bay, Ontario. We also have a couple of ghost-hunting side trips to Minnesota, and then shift to the British Isles for roughly the last half of the book. Again, Blake gives us three-dimensional people in her important characters (both the returning ones and one newly introduced here), who have realistically complex feelings and motivations and nuanced attitudes and interactions, but whom at the same time we can understand and like. Folklore from the Vodoun tradition isn’t as prominent in this book, but the author continues to make good use of Finnish lore, particularly the role of Sami drums in shamanism. Again, this is a very gripping read, with a high suspense factor, several surprise developments (which never violate the logic of the plot, unlike the “surprises”thrown in by some genre writers!), often a real sense of life-and-death danger in places, a high-stakes central conflict, and scenes of ghostly menace which conjure a genuine, powerful sense of creepiness. The emotional intensity of the story, for me, was quite high.

As with the first book, I’d call this an adult novel which happens to have mostly teen characters. I don’t unreservedly recommend it for teen readers because, like the first book, it has a lot of bad language, including profanity and obscenity, the great majority of it gratuitous. (That cost it a star.) But, also like the first book, it has no sexual content, and the violence, though it’s there, isn’t more graphic than necessary. If you’ve read the first book, I’d characterize this sequel as a must-read.

Author: Kendare Blake
Publisher: Tor Teen; available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.
A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.