Tag: p

Pink Heat

  By

★½
“Die Hard in a saloon.”

You know you’re deep into one-man, to put it mildly, film-making territory, when the same name gets 7½ of the first 10 credits (one is shared). That’s spreading your talents thin, even if you are Steven Spielberg. And Sean LaFollette definitely isn’t Spielberg. The story is told in flashback, with the heroine Elizabeth (Burgess) the proud recipient of two pink-handled revolvers for her birthday. While she’s off getting her gun-belt, the family saloon is invaded by a group of out of town criminals, who take the rest of her family hostage, and shoot her grandfather dead. Fortunately, Elizabeth takes after her late mother, who was a crack-shot, and is therefore in a good position to pick apart the perpetrators.

Die Hard? More like Die Limp. For there’s almost nothing here that reaches the level of competent, from the ill-conceived structure through to the ridiculous and pointless voice-over. This includes such gems as, after Elizabeth rescues her boyfriend, “I ran to Mark. I was relieved to know that he was alive.” That should be a script direction, not a voice-over: “Elizabeth runs to Mark, clearly relieved to know he is alive.” Then there’s the heroine’s style of gun-fighting, which would be better suited to a primary school playground than taking on hardened criminals. A gun in each hand, she thrusts her arms forward alternately while firing, a hardly credible approach extremely unlikely to generate accuracy, and with the unfortunate effect of making her resemble a train engine in motion. And we are provided with absolutely no explanation for the criminals’ actions: what exactly are they trying to achieve by the taking of hostages?

Probably the most aggravating part of the entire production, however, was the music – a LaFollette composition, naturally. He seems to be going for a minimalist, John Carpenter vibe. It doesn’t work, and sounds simply as if he was only able to afford half the notes on a musical scale. Because the soundtrack consists of a series of pieces, in which four notes are repeated in strict succession, for however long is necessary for the scene in question. Even in a film of low standards like this, it’s quite outstandingly bad, and if it hadn’t been LaFollette the director giving an approving nod to LaFollette the composer’s work, would surely have rapidly resulting in a replacement being sought.

Positives are not easy to find. I did quite like the opening, which feels like a pastiche of Western movie cliches… because that’s exactly what it’s intended to be, since it’s a show put on for tourists. Burgess does at least look the part – albeit rather more so when attired in her mother’s long coat and Stetson, rather than wandering the house in some fairly gratuitous underwear! However, you’ll be hard pushed to remain interested through to a climactic battle which includes the bad guy pausing in the middle of a fight for his life to take a swig of whisky, before a final resolution which literally had me rolling my eyes in my head.

Dir: Sean LaFollette
Star: Jordan Burgess, Adam Joseph Lopez, Joey Catalano

Proud Mary

  By

★★★
“Leonetta: The Professional”

Despite the distinctly retro feel of the poster, intro and much of the music, this is very much a contemporary affair. Mary (Henson) is an enforcer working for Benny (Glover): at one point, she was in a relationship with his son, Tom (Brown), and he still wants to continue it. During one hit on a debtor, she finds the target’s young son, Danny (Winston), obliviously playing video-games in his bedroom. Struck by guilt, she leaves him alone, and keeps an eye on the kid thereafter. A year later, she rescues him from the abusive drug dealer who has “adopted” Danny, but the resulting bloodbath is a big problem. For the dealer in question worked for Benny’s biggest rival, who is not happy about the removal and demands Benny find the culprit. Mary, who was already fed up and wanting out of her career, has to decide exactly where her loyalties lie.

As the tag-line on top suggests, I was getting very strong hints of a gender-reversed Leon: a female hitman taking a young boy under his wing, and protecting her from the evil forces which threaten to engulf them. There are, admittedly, a number of differences: Mary is not the simple creature who was Leon, and her relationship with Danny is basically maternal, rather than the slightly creepy yet endearing one between Leon and Matilda. Though the main change is one the film almost seems to underplay, when it could (should?) have been the dramatic focus: Mary killed Danny’s father. The major conflict which I expected should ensue from this, never quite materializes.

The film as a whole is a great reminder of how guns work as a “force multiplier”, allowing a skilled woman to face and defeat opponents who are clearly physically stronger than her. That said, the action is merely okay – albeit, given Najafi was responsible for the awful London Has Fallen, “okay” counts as a significant improvement. We were distracted by the frequent, blatant product placement for the remarkably bullet-resistant Maserati, in which Mary whizzed round town [we really needed a scene of someone trying to jack her car, and getting his mistake forcibly explained to him]. While it takes place in Boston, there’s not enough sense of place to make it matter: it could be any grimy inner-city. 

Henson – whom, I assume, uses her middle initial to distinguish her from all the other Taraji Hensons – is solid enough as the heroine, carrying its emotional weight effortlessly, and she keeps this worth watching, despite the flaws. Though this often feels like it’s trying to be weightier than it deserves, almost as if trying to live up to her Oscar-nominated standards. Yet at its heart, this is a formulaic “assassin with a heart of gold” feature, and there just isn’t enough beyond the obvious going on, plotwise, to separate it from its predecessors. Might have been better to embrace its clear B-movie roots, and roll with that aesthetic, rather than abandoning it after about ten minutes.

Dir: Babak Najafi
Star: Taraji P. Henson, Jahi Di’Allo Winston, Billy Brown, Danny Glover

Petra by Cheri Lasota

  By

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

Petra is a teenage Roman slave at around the birth of Christ. She is completely under the thumb of her sadistic master, Clarius, until a strange conjunction of events and a poisonous herb with mystical qualities changes the power dynamic entirely. Both of them, together with her lover, Lucius, attain immortality. But it’s an immortality which requires the two men to drink from Petra annually, or they will degenerate into sub-human monsters. Neither is happy with the arrangement: Clarius is not used to being reliant on anyone, least of all his former property, and Lucius hates the fact Petra agreed to submit to their ex-master, in order to save him. As the centuries stretch into millennia, Petra begins, slowly, to put together a group people who will be capable of defeating Lucius and the immortals he has recruited, allowing her to live in eternal peace with Lucius.

If you’re getting a bit of an Interview With The Vampire vibe here, you are not far off the mark, with the story spanning multiple human lifetimes. Fortunately, it largely stays clear of the vampiric cliches, and what could have been little more than Twilight with delusions of historical significance becomes a little more. It’s recounted in flashback from the 18th century, though there are huge gaps in the narrative, where you’re left to wonder what Petra was doing during the 1,300+ intervening years. I’m still a little vague on the specific mechanism of the immortality, too: it is based on Petra’s blood, the herb, or is it the combination? But my major problem was the overpowering emphasis on the romantic angles. Look, we get it: Petra and Clarius are super in love. Now, can we move on to interesting anecdotes about life everlasting?

Proceedings take a sharp right turn in the 14th century, when Lucius has had enough of it all, and bails. This volume is, frankly, much more interesting with him not about. Petra goes in search of him, and the resulting adventure is easily the strongest section of the book. Hearing stories of an “immortal”, she heads out from Genoa, hoping that it’s her lover, and finds herself trapped in Kaffa, a port on the Crimean Peninsula, which is being besieged by the Mongol hordes. It’s a hellish landscape, made all the worse by the plague-infected corpses which the attackers lob over the walls (this actually happened – it was the first recorded case of biological warfare, and helped decimate Europe, as merchants who survived the siege brought bubonic plague with them when they returned home). This is a very well-handled meshing of historical events with fictional characters, working to good effect. I’d like to have seen more of this, and less sloppy romance.

Petra says that she’s an accomplished swordswoman – and given the hundreds of years she’s had to practice with weapons, that makes sense. There’s rather more talk than walk, in this volume, though I sense this may be a case of the author wanting to keep her powder dry for subsequent volumes and the battles against Clarius which seem destined to come. Would I read them? Hard to say. Lasota showed she has plenty of potential, but there’s still a risk this could end up collapsing into teenage mush. Probably a case where I’d borrow volume 2, or wait for a 99 cent sale on Amazon.

Author: Cheri Lasota
Publisher: CreateSpace, through Amazon – this was part of the Dominion Rising collection for Kindle.
Book 1 in the Immortal Codex series.

The Policewoman, by Justin W. M. Roberts

  By

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

“…courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear.”

Debut author Justin W. M. Roberts and I became acquainted recently in the Action Heroine Fans group that I help moderate on Goodreads. I noticed his mentions of this novel there, and was interested enough to accept his generous offer of a hardcover review copy; but no guarantee of a good review (or a review at all) was asked or expected. This book had no trouble earning its stars on its merits! For much of the time while I was reading it, I expected to give it four and a half stars, but after the impact of the ending, there’s no way I could give it any less than five.

“Write about what you know” is an axiom Roberts clearly takes seriously. British born (and a graduate of Hull Univ.), his father was an army general, and the future author seems to have been what’s sometimes called in U.S. slang an “army brat,” who grew up in close proximity to military bases and traveling around the world to different postings. For the past 25 years, he’s made his home in Indonesia; this book is set partly there and in the British Isles, and like the author, his titular heroine straddles the two cultures.

He also appears to have a background in police and/or military counter-terrorist services. His knowledge of S.W.A.T. (special weapons and tactics) terms and procedures, firearms specs, and both British and Indonesian police and military organization and organizational culture and traditions is extensive, to put it mildly, and he puts this to use in spades throughout the book. It’s noted at the beginning of the book that almost all of these tactics are “intentionally disguised” to protect police and military officers (so that baddies can’t use the book as a text to learn what to expect!), but it still has a very realistic feel. We’re in the hands of a writer who knows his stuff here; readers who need and want technical accuracy won’t be disappointed. For other readers like me, who don’t know one brand of firearm from another and have little technical knowledge of covert operations, much of this information will go over our heads, but it will still give a feeling of verisimilitude, and maybe impart some knowledge that will stick! (Seven and a half pages of glossaries of organizational “alphabet soup” and British, Indonesian and Irish military/police slang and terms and Gaelic –here spelled “Gaeilge”– phrases are provided; and if you’re anything like me, you’ll refer to them frequently.)

To write a gripping tale of action adventure, of course, one needs more than technical knowledge. Such a story requires a fundamental, high-stakes conflict with moral issues that matter, involving believable characters that the reader can actually care about. Roberts delivers that here, too. His story is set in 2026, in order to allow for the full effects of planned downsizing of the British army, scheduled to be fully effected in 2020, and for the related rise of a new player in international drug trafficking, the Irish Drug Cartel. The book opens with a grisly and highly attention-grabbing torture scene that (once the reader interprets it in the light of the information that follows in the first chapters) establishes the moral polarities very clearly.

Heroine Sarah –half Indonesian, half European, from a military family, and raised partly in England– still in her 20s, is a high-ranking and very capable officer in the paramilitary wing of the Indonesian National Police. She’s seconded early on to Interpol and sent to England to join the task force battling the Cartel. It’s no exaggeration to say she’s one of the best, and best-drawn, action heroines I’ve encountered in fiction. The other important characters are also vividly realized –Niall, the Cartel’s pet psychopath and torturer, is as radically evil a figure as you’ll ever encounter in a book. (There are so many secondary ones that some of their names and sometimes organizational affiliations are hard to keep track of, but you don’t actually have to –in those cases, I just sort of went with the flow. :-) )

There’s a lot of action, but significant character development and interaction as well. (Some readers found the first four chapters slow-paced or even boring, because of the introductions and setting up of the situation, but I honestly did not; I thought Roberts did a good job of holding interest there.) While I’ve classified this as action-adventure rather than mystery, the author effectively uses some techniques of mystery fiction in places to hide clues in plain sight. Some parts of this book are profoundly moving, and it packs a very real emotional wallop. The narration is in third-person, present tense mode; this took some getting used to, but I actually adjusted to it pretty quickly. A quibble might be that some Cartel members are more loose-lipped and careless than would probably be the case in real life, but that is a minor quibble.

Roberts’ online author profile notes that he’s “an active promoter of secular humanism.” This particular book, however, doesn’t grind any sort of philosophical ax. If it has any messages, they would be recognition that drug use and drug trafficking is a pestilent scourge on the world, and high admiration and respect for the often-maligned work of the brave men and women of the police and military who put their lives on the line to stand against it. (Interestingly, Sarah is a professed Catholic, and that aspect of her character is treated respectfully. Granted, it’s clear that her religious beliefs, as far as they go, are more a matter of birthright church membership than a life-transforming personal spiritual commitment –but she does tangibly demonstrate that they go further than just empty words.)

Some content warnings are needed here. I mentioned an opening torture scene. There are some other torture scenes here as well, all of them graphic, and the violence is grim and bloody, with a lot of messy deaths. The author would say the violent content isn’t any more graphic than it has to be, and (unlike Niall), he clearly doesn’t take pleasure in it; but this isn’t a read for the squeamish. While there’s not much bad language in the first three or so chapters, there gets to be a lot of it later, with quite a bit of use of the f-word. This does reflect English-speaking cop and military sub-culture, as well as the speech of low-life thugs, and also, to a degree, contemporary secular British speech (which apparently has coarsened even more than American speech in recent decades). While there’s some unmarried sex here, the sex between the good characters is loving and not really explicit; but there’s a lot of locker-room–style sexual banter that’s R (or X)-rated. Some female readers might also feel that the book suffers some from the “male gaze” syndrome, especially in the references to a photo of Sarah in a bikini.

In summary, I’d recommend this novel for action fans generally, not just for those who particularly like action heroines (though many of the latter will agree that Sarah’s “the ultimate action heroine!”). The content issues, IMO, don’t detract from its very real merits (and might not bother many readers at all); and the author deserves particular credit for bringing to life an admirable heroine of mixed race, a demographic that gets way too little representation in English-language action fiction.

Author: Justin W. M. Roberts
Publisher: Self-published, available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Pale Queen Rising by A.R. Kahler

  By

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

Claire is the official “court assassin” to Mab, who is the Winter Faerie Queen. Her realm lies in a world parallel to ours, but separate from it, and inhabited by a slew of creatures we humans know only from myth, who can travel back and forth to the mortal world. Mab traffics in “Dream”, which is somewhere between a food, a drug and currency for her citizens, and the product of human emotions, particularly in group settings such as concerts or other shows. However, someone is muscling in on her turf, with the intent of controlling the Dream, and she unleashes Claire to track down the culprit, who turns out to be the ‘Pale Queen’ of the title.

Claire is actually human: she was taken as a child, replaced by a changeling, and brought up by Mab in a palace of ice, not even knowing her real last name. But she’s more used to tasks that require blunt application of force, and is increasingly troubled as her investigation brings her past back out of the shadows – in particular, the apparent involvement of her biological mother with the Immortal Circus, which seems to serve as a front for the illicit trade. There’s also Roxie, a mortal singer who has signed a contract giving her the fame she seeks, in exchange for being a conduit through which Dream can be harvested – and to whose allure Claire is not immune.

Takes a little bit for the situation here to become clear. It wasn’t until a good way in that I figured out the details of what “Dream” was; since this is kinda important to the plot, it should likely have been laid out from the get-go. For an assassin, it has to be said, Claire really doesn’t do much assassin-ing in this volume and that, too, needed to be more effectively established. Anyone can proclaiming themselves an assassin. She does have some moderately bad-ass magical skills, and solid hand-to-hand combat talents, and she needs both of these, as well as help from her own allies, when going up against the Pale Queen’s minions, who have abilities of their own. More likely needed, however.

The heroine has a nicely sarcastic approach to life that is endearing, and Kahler has crafted a world with plenty of potential. However, it feels like a lot of that potential was left dangling. For instance, early on, Claire says, “Monsters can come from anywhere with a flat surface.” At least in this book, that intriguing premise is left unexplored. Most of the time, too, Claire is apparently meandering round in the human world, only popping back occasionally to the, likely more interesting, faerie realm. It may be the case that this works better if you’ve read the author’s previous series, which focuses on the Immortal Circus. As a standalone, however, this is no more than alright, and ends in the unsatisfactory “buy the second volume” way, which I’m increasingly discovering appears to be a thing with e-books.

Author: A.R. Kahler
Publisher: 47North, available through Amazon, both as an e-book and in a printed edition.

Prophecy of Eve

  By

★½
“Puts the ‘eve’ in dry heave.”

This will be a slightly shorter review than usual. For there’s not much to say about a film which runs only 77 minutes, yet still somehow managed to feels both confused and full of unnecessary padding. “Well done”, maybe? Certainly, as a model of what not to do, this hits all the necessary marks. It seems be set in Los Angeles, renamed Angel City, for no particularly good reason. There is a struggle between demons and those they possess – whose eyes flash red at dramatic or necessary to the plot moments – and those on the side of good, whose eyes flash green. Leading the latter side are the Order, and two of their members have, in defiance of the rules, have a child, Eve. Her parents are attacked and apparently killed by the demon-possessed, and Eve is left to fend for herself on the streets, while the Order try to locate her.

They are apparently a bit crap at the locating thing. For 15 years later (!), Eve (Villatuya) is still roaming the streets taking out bad guys with her sword. Meanwhile, demonic possessions have increased dramatically, and it appears to be connected to a certain company and its headquarters downtown. Fortunately, the Order have managed to infiltrate the place, and their operative, Esther (Maxali) has just escaped with footage showing exactly what the company are up to. Eve may be the only thing standing between the world and disaster. Or maybe not. Because the film may not even bother with anything approaching a coherent ending, opting instead to finish just when the film should be ramping up to an exciting climax.

Admittedly, any excitement would likely be a large improvement over what the movie provided to that point. Which would be a string of B-grade martial arts fights and C-grade performances. At first, I thought it was refreshingly ambitious of a Filipino production to attempt to make a movie set in Los Angeles, and quite brave of them to do so in English, when it clearly wasn’t the native tongue of the lead actors. Then, I realized my mistake: this is actually American. Oh, dear. I’m struggling to find many positives, but have to say, the look of the film is rather better than you’d expect from the reported $15,000 budget. It has a nicely drenched sheen of wet neon, that appears to have strayed in from a much bigger production. The poster, too, looks slick, and promises much: unfortunately, these positive aspects only stand in sharp contrast to what the film can actually deliver.

Dir: Ron Santiano
Star: Ia Villatuya, Michelle Laurent, Nicole Maxali, Roberto Divina

PMS Cop

  By

★★
“A not-so fair cop”

pmscopBeginning with a jokey caption stating “The producers of this movie are in no way admitting to the existence of PMS,” this is a rather uneven B-movie, which has a potentially interesting premise. Unfortunately, it then does not do enough with the concept.

Mary (Hall) is a police officer with anger management issues. After beating up a rapist dressed as a clown. she’s ordered to undergo counseling. Her therapist puts her in contact with a pharmaceutical company testing a new drug, Corybantic, aimed at reducing the impact of PMS. After consulting with the leader of the project, Dr. Sokolov (Skinner), Mary starts taking the drug, and is injected with a chip to track her body’s response. But after witnessing her partner being gunned down during a convenience store robbery, it triggers a violent psychotic reaction. The drug company re-capture their test subject, only for her to break out of their restraints and go on a brutal rampage through the facility. Turns out the chip wasn’t just for telemetry either; it came from an abandoned Soviet project into mind-control.

There a number of ways this could have gone. Social satire, as hinted at in the opening caption, or perhaps a modern version of the Frankenstein story. Instead… Well, there’s not much more than Mary, or her “PMS Cop” alter-ego (played by a different actress, Means), roaming the drug company’s building, banging heads together. The gore is enthusiastic and nicely practical; I particularly enjoyed the silicone implants ripped out of one poor victim’s chest, then used as the means of death for another. You don’t see that every day. However, there simply isn’t enough going on with the story-line to sustain audience interest.

It also shifts notably in tone. Early, it’s almost jokey – for instance, the clown rapist ties up his victim with balloons. Yet the humour is abruptly switched off as soon as Mary begins the drug trial; you’re left feeling like the rest of the film is a comedy without jokes. You can certainly check off the movies director Blakey is inspired by. Robocop, The Terminator and possibly Lady Terminator. Not that there’s anything wrong with influences. It’s just that those are all significantly better movies, and Blakey doesn’t bring sufficient new or interesting to offset this disadvantage. In technical terms, the lighting could certainly also have been better, with too many scenes painfully under-lit, in what may have been a misguided attempt as “atmosphere.”

While I’ve seen and enjoyed B-movies which have skated by on even thinner premises, they’ve been able to take their concepts and do more with them. This instead feels like a 15-minute short, stretched into a feature. I suspect it’s one which would have been more effective at the shorter length.

Dir: Bryon Blakey
Star: Cindy Means, Heather Hall, Elaine Jenkins, Megan Dehart

Pearl: The Assassin

  By

★★
“Fake pearls.”

pearlI think perhaps the most memorable thing here was that, while doing my usual pre-review Googling, the search results returned with the warning that, “In response to multiple complaints we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 35 results from this page.” I’m not sure whether I’m surprised or concerned that 35 sites apparently deemed this worth their while to rip and upload a bootleg copy of this, because it probably doesn’t deserve it. I may be particularly disgruntled due to the presence on the sleeve both of helicopters that don’t exist, and someone totally different from the heroine; half a star was docked from the grade for this. In reality, the star  (Patton, the director’s wife – he plays the florist she’s garotting in the picture, right!) looks more like Marilyn Manson, with a high forehead and close to no eyebrows.

Not that this is necessarily a bad thing – indeed, there’s something to be said for a heroine who challenges conventional notions of beauty, and Pearl does that, even if the distributor chooses to hide this behind a leggy, long-haired model type. She looks like a pissed-off killer, out for vengeance – not any longer on the people who killed her parents, for they were taken care of years ago, as others of that same type. Which would be criminals, drug-dealers, pimps, etc. She kidnaps meth scientist Erik (Morales), using his inside knowledge to work up the chain toward top boss Tre (Brown), while Detective Wyatt (Morafetis) follows the trail of bodies left behind Pearl, from the other end.

Even given my tolerance for independent, low-budget cinema, the action here was particularly poor, barely choreographed and possessing absolutely zero impact. Surprisingly, what worked better than expected were the characters, particularly Erik, who actually possesses something of an arc, going from a meth-head with few redeeming features into something of a tragic hero. By comparison, Pearl doesn’t move the needle very much: she starts off the film as a stone-faced killer, and more or less ends it as a stone-faced killer. You do get to see some of her backstory, but it seems more perfunctory, and it’s also simplistic in the extreme: someone killed her family, now everyone must pay. That might have worked for Charles Bronson forty years ago; now, audiences expect rather more nuance. Still, there was one genuinely shocking moment, demonstrating Tre’s utter ruthlessness, and I actually laughed at one of Erik’s lines. Overall, it’s a case of being able to see where the film-makers are aiming; unfortunately, the results fall significantly short of that target, and you’re probably better off sticking with the obvious sources of inspiration here, instead of this attempt to imitate them.

Dir: Guy Patton
Star: Dana Patton, Scott Michael Morales, Justin Brown, George Morafetis

Painkiller Jane – TV Series

  By

★★
“The pain and strain, stays mainly in the Jane…”

painkiller1Originally created as a comic-book by Jimmy Palmiotti and Joe Quesada in the mid-nineties, it told the story of its heroine, Jane Vasko, who became effectively immortal after an incident left her with superhuman regenerative powers. She can still be hurt, certainly – even knocked down – but she heals at a phenomenal rate, rendering her nearly unstoppable. Over the years since, she has crossed paths with a number of other characters, including Hellboy and Vampirella, and the show became a TV movie on SyFy in December 2005, starring Emmanuelle Vaugier as Jane. The film was also used to gauge interest in a potential TV series, and one duly emerged in April 2007, albeit with Kristanna Loken now in the role, and effectively pretending the movie didn’t exist. For example, Jane went back from being a soldier to the law-enforcement agent of the comic, albeit a DEA agent rather than an undercover cop, and the cause of her abilities also became rather less opaque.

Unfortunately, it still wasn’t very good, especially in the early episodes. This is actually my second attempt to review the show: after eight episodes or so in the my original effort, I realized I had entirely abandoned watching them, and simply had them on in the background while I did something else. The return effort proved my attention span was made of sterner stuff, though I admit that I might not have watched every single frame of every single show. But I did make it through to the end, which teases a second series that never materialized, SyFy deciding it would not renew the show in August, with half a dozen episodes remaining to be screened.

painkiller2Certainly, from a 2016 viewpoint, it seems overly familiar, treading territory we’ve seen, with variations, in X-Men, Heroes and Alphas, among others. The core concept here is the “neuro” – someone who has developed an inexplicable paranormal talent which might be anything from invisibility through mind control to fire manipulation. Jane encounters one such on a drug bust at a nightclub, and as a result, is recruited by Andre McBride (Stewart), who leads an undercover team dedicated to capturing and neutralizing neuros. The rest of the team are the usual bunch of shallow stereotypes e.g. computer wiz Riley Jensen (Roberts), ex-military muscle Connor King (Danby), etc. but Jane is “different” in that her first mission results in her neuro-esque ability being awakened, after she is defenestrated from a high-rise window. I say “neuro-esque,” since there’s an ongoing vague debate as to whether she should be chipped and shipped off to NICO, the internment camp set up for the “special”.

After that, however, the show rapidly became not much more than a series of “neuro of the week” episodes, effectively abandoning much real interest in its heroine and her abilities. To some extent, I can understand this: once you’ve established that she is, literally, bulletproof, what more can you do? There’s not much sense of threat. But outside of sporadic examples, the creators didn’t make sufficient use of Vasko’s abilities, which could certainly have come useful, as the most extreme example of “taking one for the team” Nor do they bother to give her much life outside the disused subway station which is her team’s super-secret lair. There’s a brief friendship with the girl next door, which comes to a sudden end with so little impact, it feels like the actress involved must have demanded a pay rise or something. Then there’s a boyfriend, and at least that relationship does end up having a point – like the rest of the show, however, it takes far too long to get there.

For after initially setting up an evil corporation as the Big Bad, the series seem to forget about them completely for the next 20 episodes, before suddenly blowing the dust of the company for the final episode. It seems likely that never-realized second season might have gone in that direction, though if that was always the intent, seems very odd to start off as they did. The budget was apparently jacked up for the final three episodes, allowing for the cast and crew to travel to Hungary and the NICO facility, where it turns out there have been various dubious medical experiments going on, involving reversing the chips implanted to disable the neuro abilities. There are some interesting moral questions raised in this arc, and it’s a shame the show chose to ignore them, until after it had been given the ace.

painkiller3

That isn’t to say the show was entirely worthless up to that point. There were a few episodes which actually made use of the concepts and developed them in interesting ways. The one I liked most was Playback, about a neuro who could reset time to the beginning of the day. He was being used to plot the assassination of a visiting foreign politician, gradually refining his plan to negate the countermeasures of Jane and her team, as if this were Groundhog Day. Jane’s ability to take damage came in handy here, and the script was well-thought out, both in problem and solution; while they couldn’t foil the neuros plan, they could make the rest of his day such a bad one, he was compelled to rewind one more time. More of this smart invention would have been welcome, but the show instead seemed to run out of ideas almost immediately. I mean, a handful of episodes in, and you’re already going down the “ghost hunters” route? Why not just have a musical episode and be done with it?

AS in most things she has done – hell, even BloodRayne – Loken is fine, and seems to embrace the action aspects with enthusiasm. I’d say that gives her the edge over her predecessor, Vaugier, and the series likely solidifies her position on the B-rung of action actresses [“Can’t afford Milla Jovovich? Give me a call!”] It’s the writing that is the key weakness here, often giving the impression that they were making things up as they went along, never a good thing. Still, it may not be the end for Jane. In July 2014, it was announced that Palmiotti was producing an independent feature film version, with the Soska Sisters signing on to direct. While I’m not sure about them as a choice [I saw their horror film American Mary, and found it very much over-rated], and I haven’t heard anything much regarding the project since, it’s interesting that adapting Painkiller Jane appears to be every bit as difficult to kill off as the character herself!

Star: Kristanna Loken, Rob Stewart, Noah Danby, Sean Owen Roberts

The Paleface

  By

★★★
“Starring the two and only Jane Russell.”

palefaceOr, to steal another line from Mr. Hope, “Culture is the ability to describe Jane Russell without moving your hands”. It’s surprisingly advanced for its 1948 era, with Russell playing Calamity Jane, who is busted out of prison to go undercover and infiltrate an arms ring guilty of the heinous crime of selling weapons to Indians. [Because, from a liberal 2015 perspective, god forbid anyone try to even the playing field on that particular genocide…] She’s set up with a cover husband, but when he turns up dead, she’s forced to improvise and settles on ‘Painless’ Peter Potter (Hope), an itinerant dentist, as the patsy for the role, as they join a wagon train heading West. Needless to say, he’s delighted, and the legend of his own mind only grows after he fends off an attack by Indians – unaware, all the sharpshooting was entirely Jane’s doing. For her aim is to set him up as some kind of heroic Federal agent, provoking the gang into tipping their hand with retaliation.

It’s impressively even in tone, with Jane clearly the smarter, braver and more talented one of the pairing, running rings around Peter as she manipulates him into being the unwitting stalking horse for her mission. It’s only right at the end, when they both have (somewhat inexplicably) been captured by the Indians, that he rises above his humble origins and skills, doing his part in a rousing finale involving some brisk horse stunts. Russell’s performance was the subject of some mockery, Life magazine saying at the time, in a feature called Jane Russell’s Gamut of Emotions, “she demonstrates how to express a great variety of emotions, without twitching a facial muscle.” However, I think it has perhaps stood the test of time better than Hope’s comic mugging, playing into the cold and calculating killing machine trope – she would rather whack Potter into unconsciousness than kiss him. Certainly, it has lasted better than Bob’s rendition of Buttons & Bows, which inexplicably won the Academy Award that year for best original song.

To be honest, the comedic aspects also seem rather out of keeping with the body count, though it’s hard to tell how much of this may be parody of the genre – certainly, the site of Potter standing beside a literal pile of native American corpses is more likely to provoke embarrassed silence these days, than mirthful chuckles. The film is on much less questionable grounds concentrating on the nicely reversed dynamic between the two leads; even if this collapses into the obligatory and entirely expected fluffy ending, the final sight gag did actually make me laugh out loud, and that’s not easy to do.

Dir: Norman Z. McLeod
Star: Bob Hope, Jane Russell, Robert Armstrong, Iris Adrian