Woman Avenger

★★★½
“A simple tale of vengeance, vigorously told.”

womanavengerThis appears to have been virtually the sole starring role for leading lady Shen, and that’s a shame. While, unfortunately, the only way you can see this is a badly cropped, English language version, her martial arts talents are undeniable. Chris caught the last 15 minutes on her lunch-break, and once she saw the skills on display, went from mocking the dubbing to yelling “Kick him in the balls!” at the TV. Repeatedly.

She plays Lu Ling Chi, who is delivering goods with her husband in the countryside when they’re attacked by a band of robbers. He is killed; she raped and left for dead. She’s rescued by a conveniently passing Buddhist priestess (Tai), who nurses our heroine back to health and, after some doubts as to the nature of her mission, teaches her kung-fu. Three years of training later, Lu goes undercover to infiltrate the gang, in the process, setting a new record for “least convincing male impersonator”, even by the low standards of martial arts films. She works her way up the chain, yet still lacks the skills necessary to best their leader, Kwong Wu Chi (Peng). However, she meets a woman (Yeung, I believe, though she’s not in the IMDb listing), crippled by Kwong and reduced to working as a prostitute. Her father used to be Kwong’s kung-fu master, and she offers to give Lu that techniques which will take him down.

The stuff between the fights is mostly blandly inoffensive, following the standard tropes of the genre, such as training montages, while Lu perfects her skills, under both her teachers. Though it is certainly unusual that both those are martial arts mistresses, rather than masters, making this an almost literal war of the sexes. But the presentation, in particularly the ludicrously inappropriate dubbing, reduces the film to something you might find at 3am in the morning on the El Rey network. [It’s not all the dubbing: Kwong’s blond wig doesn’t exactly encourage solemnity] Similarly, the reduction of the frame to a strict 4:3 ratio does the abilities of the stars absolutely no service at all.

It still isn’t enough to conceal the expertise of the participants though, with even the training montages showcasing Shen’s extraordinary flexibility. There’s a genuine sense of progression over the course of the film, with Lu learning new techniques and building them into her arsenal. For example, she learns how to attack her enemy’s joints from the priestess, and that’s seen a lot against the lower minions. However, it proves ineffectual against Kwong, and she needs to adopt different tactics, radically different from her early bouts. This allows Shen to demonstrate a number of styles, and if some are better than others, the overall impact remains impressive. Below, find a sample of her skills: I love, in particular, the way she disarms the gym owner, then discards the weapons obtained! I have to wonder why she never received any further chances to shine as a lead; whatever the reason, it’s probably our loss.

Dir: Lee Tso Nam
Star: Shen Kwan Li, Peng Gang, Tai Chi-Hsia, Sharon Yeung Pan-Pan

Warrior Women

★★★
“If Xena was a history teacher.”

warriorwomenThis short series, originally produced for the Discovery Channel in 2003, consists of five, 45-minute episodes, each one focusing on a different historical figure. Specifically (and in Netflix-listed order), they are Joan of Arc, Grace O’Malley, Boudica, Lozen and “Mulan” – quotes for the last used advisedly, but we’ll get to that in a moment. The episodes themselves seem a little disjointed, composed of three separate elements that don’t quite mesh. You get talking-head interviews with academics and historical experts; dramatic re-enactments of events from the women warriors’ lives; and Lucy Lawless stomping around the locations, occasionally doing semi-practical demos like sword-wielding. The last seems particularly pointless, and seems inserted purely to appeal to Xena fetishists – not least the sequence where Lawless is getting woad applied on her face, and is informed by the giggling painter, that “the binding agent in this particular agent is semen.” And a thousand fan-fics were born…

The other main issue is, particularly in the early episodes, there isn’t anything new here – Joan, Grace and Boudica are all women whom we’ve written about here in the past, and you are largely watching them go over well-worn territory here. For example, it’s hard to imagine anyone interested enough in the topic to watch the show, will also not already have heard of Joan of Arc. The only one I hadn’t heard of before was Lozen, an Apache warrior and contemporary of Geronimo; however, the approach for this story is deadly dull, batting so straight down the “noble savage” archetype, that I literally fell asleep. The final episode is entitled “Mulan”, and I wondered how they were going to squeeze 45 minutes out of this, given virtually everything known about her is a single poem.  The answer, it turned out, was to spent 80% of the show talking about someone completely different from the late 18th century, whose sole connection to Mulan was being Chinese. This is a bit like titling your show “King Arthur” and then talking mostly about the Duke of Wellington. They’re both Brits, right?

That said, the actual topic, Wang Cong’er, a leader of the White Lotus Sect who rebelled against imperial rule, was a very good one. The story is one that certainly deserves to be better known – I’m quite surprised the movie industry there, which has mined many less interesting characters in the past, hasn’t developed anything based on her life, which had a nice, “heroic bloodshed” arc to it, right up to Wang flinging herself from a cliff, rather than let herself be captured. This is one where the various approaches mesh to excellent effect, despite the rather tenuous efforts to connect her to Mulan; not just building a living character, but putting her in a historical context that makes sense. It’s a shame the other four episodes only manage to achieve the same success on a sporadic basis.

Dir: Noel Dockstader and Patrick Fleming
Presented by: Lucy Lawless

The Woman Who Dared

★★★½
“Flight of fancy.”

womanwhodaredMade during World War II under the Vichy regime which controlled the South of France, it’s tempting to read the story as a metaphor for France’s struggle to be free. It begins with the Gauthier family having to relocate their family garage business, to make way for an airfield (strictly recreational, mind). This, along with a visit by famed aviatrix Lucienne Ivry (Vandène), rekindles a love of flight Pierre (Vanel) has had since his days as a mechanic in World War I. At first, his wife Thérèse (Renaud) is dubious, but after she experiences the joy of soaring through the air, her passion soon exceeds his. She flies, he mechanics, and they prepare a bid, out of their garage, to set a record for long-distance flying by a woman – even as Ivry prepares a much higher profile and better funded attempt on the same mark.

Oddly, it’s a film which reminded me most of two anime. Firstly, the work of Hayao Miyazaki, which has consistently demonstrated a love of flight – most obviously, Porco Rosso. Yet here, it’s odd that a film so much about aviation, is literally grounded. The only shots of planes in motion are taken from the earth, and Thérèse’s record-breaking flight is entirely off-screen. In this, it feels more like The Wings of Honneamise. This was a movie about an alternate-world race into space – yet it was a great deal more concerned about the human aspects than the actual end result. Similarly, this is as much about the love Thérèse and Pierre have for each other. It does come with a note of caution about how shared obsessions can cause tunnel-vision; they even sell their daughter’s beloved piano to fund their project.

Given the era, it’s remarkably forward-thinking. Lucienne and Thérèse are portrayed as easily the most competent aviators, with the men pottering around in their flying machines by comparison. Yet Thérèse is also the glue that holds the Gauthier family together; when she moves to the big city to take on management of a car dealership, their home life suffers considerably. I’d have liked to have seen a better case made for what the appeal of flying is; you’re left to deduce it second-hand, from the reactions of those who have experienced it. Regardless, the appealing central characters here help ensure the viewer is slowly drawn in to proceedings, through a low-key process of familiarity. There’s something particularly genuine about their relationship, and how they’re prepared to sacrifice so much for each other’s dreams. If you’re not holding your breath as Thérèse’s attempt unfolds into disconcerting silence, and even Pierre’s steadfast confidence begins to waver, you’ve clearly not noticed the ominous and foreboding processions of orphans through the town’s streets…

Dir: Jean Grémillon
Star: Madeleine Renaud, Charles Vanel, Raymonde Vernay, Anne Vandène
a.k.a. Le ciel est à vous (The Sky is Yours)

Women on the Run

★★★
“Letting the Cat III out of the bag.”

womenChinese teenage martial-arts champ Li Siu-Yin (Guo) is seduced into a life of prostitution by her boyfriend, but eventually snaps and kills him. She escapes to Hong Kong, only to be arrested there, and given a stark choice: help ensnare crime boss King Kong (Kim) or be deported back to China. Unwillingly, she takes the former and goes back over the border with undercover cop Hung (Cheung), who is also having an affair with colleague David (Lai). However, it turns out that David is in cahoots with King Kong, and the pair end up in Canada and in jail. It’s a long way back from there, before the two can take their revenge on the men who betrayed them.

It appears my memories of this were conflated with another “Cat III” (the Hong Kong adults-only film classification) kung-fu film, the considerably more sleazy Escape From Brothel. Aside from some nekkid kung-fu and a couple of scenes of sexual violence, this is mostly mainstream. And it’s kinda hard to take the gang-rape sequence seriously when the perpetrators are set up as being Really Bad People by punting a clearly stuffed dog, as they make their way into the warehouse where our heroines are hiding out. Elements like these deflate entirely apparently serious attempts at drama; see also a flashback to an apparently kinder, gentler era of airport security when you could not just take your stun-gun onto a plane, you could apply it to other passengers without anyone rushing you with a drinks trolley. Ah, those were the days, eh? There are also bad subtitles which translate the line “smoke some weed” in English as, “get some sweet meat,” and a really nasty portrayal of Canadian law-enforcement, that left me wondering if the directors got a traffic ticket in Vancouver or something.

Fortunately, salvaging proceedings are some decent to solid action, as you’d expect from Yuen, who has a long track record of such things. Both Guo and Cheung are more than credible; the former, in particular, to an extent where it’s a surprise that she never appeared in anything of significance again. As a villain, Kim lets his feet in particular do his talking, and he makes for a formidable opponent, particularly at the end. There are a number of solid sequences before that, that let both leads show their skills – though I could perhaps have done without the comedic drug addiction, Liu doing her best kung-fu after a little H. I guess it’s a variant on Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master? All told, this is more or less your typical Cat III film, containing both the good and bad the classification implies. Action, exploitation, comedy, brutality and nonsensical aspects all rub shoulders, with the end product being… Well, while I could point out any number of other flaws, let’s accentuate the positive instead, and just say. this is certainly never dull.

Dir: David Lai and Corey Yuen
Star: Tamara Guo, Farini Cheung, David Lai, Kim Won-Jin

We Are Monsters

★★
“Swedish grindhouse: Some assembly apparently required.”

wearemonstersThe rape-revenge genre is a problematic one. Done properly, it can be awesome, and pack a real wallop. See Ms. 45, or Thriller: A Cruel Picture for examples where the makers got it right. But there are an awful lot of mis-steps possible on the way. Unfortunately, this proves the point, mostly by being remarkably… Well, “bland” is probably appropriate, and is also damning criticism. For these kind of movies should be offensive, because rape is. If its depiction isn’t hard for the viewer to watch, you’re not doing it right. On that basis, the makers here definitely get it wrong.

Emma (Oldenburg) is on a business trip, in her role as a PR advisor, when she gets in the wrong taxi. She regains consciousness, tied up in a remote cabin. There, she’s at utterly at the mercy of savvy psychopath Jim (Ralph Beck), and his simpleton sidekick, Pete (Andersson). It soon becomes clear she is not their first victim. And also, that they have no compunction about disposing of their left-overs. That’s just the start of Emma’s descent into hell, which is a necessary component of the genre. To be followed by her turning the tables and subjecting her attackers to equal brutality, to the cheers of the audience. In theory, anyway.

The first off-putting element is, it’s supposedly set in America, yet clearly isn’t, with accents roughly as convincing as Inspector Clouseau [Emma, bizarrely, is supposedly Australian – one presumes that was the only accent Oldenburg could do!]. There’s no reason beyond crass commercialism, why its location couldn’t be the real one, of Sweden. Then we get to the downswing, and there’s no emotional impact at all. We’re given no reason to care about Emma, except that she’s the victim, nor any reason to hate Jim and Pete, save they’re the perpetrators. Now, we don’t need any more reason, but it’s appallingly lazy film-making to rely on such a simply dynamic. The series of attacks are shot in such a superficial way they’re frankly boring, when they should leave the viewer shaken and stirred.

There’s also a thread where Pete spends a lot of time watching slasher films. If there’s an intended moral there, it’s a remarkably hypocritical one, given the genre in which this firmly operates. Eventually, after an aborted escape attempt or two, the inevitable happens. The makers do at least get that right, with Emma inflicting some truly brutal revenge, including one scene I defy any man to watch without squirming. Yet, the ineffective nature of what has gone before robs the revenge of any significant impact, and it instead falls into the category of “too little, too late.” Having shallowly enjoyed the directors’ previous effort, the “spam in a cabin” film Wither, their attempt here to recapture the spirit of the grindhouse era was severely disappointing.

Dir: Sonny Laguna, Tommy Wiklund
Star: Hanna Oldenburg, Torbjörn Andersson, Ralf Beck, Niki Nordenskjöld

When Animals Dream

★★½
“Let the right lycanthrope in.”

when_animals_dream_poster_1200_1773_81_sIf the vampire has been an equal-opportunity cinematic monster over the years, that’s less the case for the werewolf. Maybe it’s all the hair or the brutal strength, but from Underworld to Twilight, the ‘wolves have tended to be dogs rather than bitches – much though the latter might have been improved by a pack of ladies running around, like Taylor Lautner, with their tops permanently off. [I’d certainly have been on Team Jacobetta…] There are some exceptions – most notably the Ginger Snaps series, the first of which is among the best horror films of the 2000’s. This shares a similar theme, of a teenage girl who is disturbed by the changes in her body, which turn out to be more than just standard puberty. But the tone is rather more introspective, and to be honest, a good deal less successful.

The heroine here is Marie (Suhl) who has just started a job at the local fish-processing factory, when she starts to experience changes, both physical and mental. But it turns out not to be just Marie. Her mother (Richter), whose wheelchair-bound state Marie had always presumed was the result of a mundane illness, turns out to have the same affliction. After she had killed a local, her husband (Mikkelsen) had come to a pact with the local doctor, to prevent his wife from being… oh, dragged out of the house by a mob of angry villagers, wielding pitch-forks and torches, near enough. Her near-catatonic state is actually the result of a heavy regime of pharmaceuticals. And, now that Marie is beginning to exhibit the same symptoms, perhaps it’s time for her also to begin the same regimen. Or figure out an escape, with the help of her new boyfriend and co-worker, Daniel (Ottebro).

As the intro to this review hints, Arnby appears to be trying for a similar atmosphere to another Scandinavian monster mash, Let the Right One In. But too much of this comes over as flat and uninteresting, without enough development of the plot or characters. The performances are mostly good, Suhl underplaying things to the point of emotional deadness that’s actually entirely appropriate to the dead-end life into which she would otherwise be headed. It’s part of the point: her disease is also the cure for the disease of achingly tedious normality. Unfortunately, the movie spends too much grounded in that normality, and delivers on the aching tedium in full measure, mostly of slow and plodding. Arnsby eventually gets to the meaty stuff, with an impressive climax on board a ship at sea – nowhere to run, nowhere to hide – and if you’re in the right mood, looking for something more contemplative, this would perhaps hit the spot better. Unfortunately for the film’s grade, I was wanting something more traditionally horrific, and consequently found this to be no full-moon; probably a half-moon, at best.

Dir: Jonas Alexander Arnby
Star: Sonia Suhl, Lars Mikkelsen, Jakob Oftebro, Sonja Richter

Wicked Blood

★★★
wickedbloodLittle Miss Sunshine no more.”

The obvious inspiration here is Winter’s Bone, with its similar tale of a teenage girl trying to rescue her meth-infected family. Indeed, given the title here goes so far as to share the same initials, this feels almost like a “mockbuster,” hoping to capitalize on RedBox or Netflix consumer confusion. That said, it’s solid enough, even if there’s just something… wrong about watching Abigail Breslin, one of our most beloved of screen moppets since we saw her in Signs, blowing people up with hand-grenades. She plays Hannah Lee Baker, a bright young girl with a fondness for chess, but an orphan. Along with her older sister Amber (Vega), she lives with her Uncle Donny (Temple), who cooks meth for local crime boss, Frank Stinson (Bean). As Amber falls for Stinson’s rival, Hannah works on a chance to move away from their precarious position, but “Uncle Frank” isn’t exactly going to let any of them leave easily.

It’s a good cast, though both Breslin and Vega bring some baggage in their filmographies: Vega was one half of Robert Rodriguez’s Spy Kids series, so is clearly growing up as well. They aren’t the only ones in unusual roles, Also kinda weird to see the very Yorkshire Bean sporting an American accent; while I won’t say whether or not he lives up to the Sean Bean meme, this is probably the third-creepiest Uncle Frank in cinema history [behind the ones in Hellraiser and Blue Velvet]. The chess metaphor is nice, if somewhat over-used; it’s clear Hannah is the smartest tool in her family, and the only one that’s capable of thinking further ahead than the next meal. She desperately wants to avoid becoming like Donny, having seen the terrible toll “hillbilly crack” has taken on him and his life, and is prepared to go to any lengths to avoid the same fate.

However, there is certainly a sense that we’ve seen this all before, with nothing particularly new in the storyline department. While I certainly admire the way Heather went about things, some of her actions were rather poorly explained, seeming to serve no purpose for her expressed goal. In particular, she opts to start stealing meth from Uncle Frank, but doesn’t appear to have any particular plan with what to do with her box o’ drugs. I’d like to have seen more of the heroine using her intellect, playing the factions off against each other, and using her smarts for leverage, because that’s obviously Hannah’s biggest edge, and the film doesn’t make enough of it. However, the performances are effective, and they help this one pass the time perfectly adequately, even when the plotting leaves a considerable amount to be desired.

Dir: Mark Young
Star: Abigail Breslin, Alexa Vega, Lew Temple, Sean Bean

The Wrong Car

★★
“The first Uber paranoia film?”

wrongcarI was kinda amused by the concept here, which tells the story of law student Trudy (Savre), who is drugged and raped after getting into what she thinks is a “NetCar” – a thinly-disguised Uber – vehicle, only to find it driven by a predator who waits near venues for vulnerable (read, “drunk”) young women, who are expecting the Uber… sorry, the “NetCar” they ordered to show up. The police are, as typical in this kind of TV movie, powerless to help, and it’s up to Savre and her roommate, Gretchen (Raisa) to track down the perpetrator. To that end, Trudy becomes a NetCar driver herself, seeking to stop the rapist before any more women fall victim to him. Her new career puts Trudy in the way of further danger, after a pair of gangbangers get into her car, yet also brings her potential romance in the cute, well-off shape of investment advisers Donovan (Davis).

My amusement was partly due to family history, as Chris was (for a couple of months) an Uber driver for some extra money. Turned out not to be worth her effort for the return – but nor was her life as a driver anywhere near as exciting as Trudy’s. Chris was never hijacked by anyone, to go pick up one of their friends who’d been shot, for instance. Nor did she meet any cute, well-off investment advisers. Not that she told me, anyway. For this is a neo-Luddite scare story, about the dangers of a technological innovation, which carefully ignores things like, for example, the fact that anyone who calls an Uber car can then see exactly where it is on the app – so would surely know, even if utterly drunk, it was not pulled up in front of them. But why let that get in the way of a made-for-Lifetime slab of misandry?

For, make no mistake, that’s what it is: there is literally not a man in the film who is what I would call a decent human being, being a selection of sexists and creepers, when not actually rapey. After a couple of movies from Lifetime that have actually been solid (Big Driver and Deliverance Creek), this was definitely a step back into the cliches for which their previous output was somewhat notorious. That said, as a pulpy pot-boiler of entertainment, it’s competently created, with Savre a credible enough heroine who has a nice arc after her assault, going through the various stages of reaction on her way to deciding Something Must Be Done. It’s not too hard to see where this is going to end up, and the script in general offers few, if any, surprises – one, to be precise. Yet I can’t deny a certain gratification is provided by the final resolution, though I’d probably still have preferred justice involving a more “bullet to genitals” approach. Probably not very Lifetime-friendly that, though…

Dir: John Stimpson
Star: Danielle Savre, Jackson Davis, Francia Raisa, Christina Elmore
a.k.a. Black Car

Wreaths of Empire, by Andrew M. Seddon

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

wreathsIt’s often frustrating to me that in today’s two-tiered fiction market, in which the big-time tier is practically a closed caste and the tier that admits everybody else is so glutted that gems get easily buried beneath the mountains of slag (and nobody knows where to look for them), it’s really difficult for some first-class authors to get the recognition and readership they deserve, and would have had a generation ago. Andrew M. Seddon is definitely one of these authors. He and I have been Internet friends for over ten years; I had the privilege of beta reading this excellent novel a couple of years ago (and Andrew is kind enough to mention me in the acknowledgments, though he truly didn’t need much if any help from me!) and now, since he’s generously given me a signed copy, I have the added privilege of being one of the first persons to review it anywhere.

Andrew writes high-quality historical and supernatural fiction, but it’s probably fair to say that his literary first love is science fiction. A medical doctor, his training and experience in the life sciences gives him a predilection for the genre’s “hard” tradition, in which science is handled accurately and the speculative element builds on credible extrapolation from actual knowledge. Wreaths of Empire stands in this tradition; it’s also a work of “space opera,” set in a far-future galaxy with far-flung human settlement, against the background of “a clash of civilizations,” humans vs. aliens in a high-stakes interstellar war, with battle scenes, intrigue, and plenty of action. In its roots and for much of its history, this tradition tended to be associated with shallow characterization, a simplistic “us against them” orientation, and heavy concentration on description of hardware and display of technological and scientific speculation to the neglect of the human element. Happily, none of those features have ever characterized Andrew’s work, and don’t here. This is a novel where the key element is people (whether they’re human or alien) and the choices they make –people and choices we come to care about greatly.

Readers of Andrew’s earlier novel Iron Scepter will recall that there we find the malevolent Hegemony, which dominates human space, plotting to gin up a war against another space-faring race, the Gara’nesh, in order to use fear and hatred of an outside enemy to solidify its own control over its hapless subjects. This new novel is set in the same universe, like much of Andrew’s SF. (Despite the broad chronological framework that ties them together, though, these books aren’t a “series;” they can each stand alone and be read independently.) Here, though, our setting is much later; the bloody Gara’nesh war has dragged on for decades, shaping the lives and attitudes of a whole generation that’s never known anything else. When we meet Jade Lafrey in the prologue, she’s an ensign in the Hegemony’s space fleet –an ensign who’s destined to make a crucial choice that will have far-reaching consequences, for the galaxy and for two sentient species.

Eleven years later, as peace negotiations are finally opening, Jade’s a (space) Naval Intelligence officer, called on to deal with a complex behind-the scenes intrigue that may threaten the diplomatic efforts, if not the survival of humanity itself; and it will be very difficult to tell friend from foe. She’ll get her share of fighting action and physical jeopardies and challenge as a result. As an added bonus for action heroine fans, the author actually gives us two action-oriented ladies here; besides our protagonist, one of the secondary female characters, interstellar smuggler Trevarra, can also handle herself well in a fight. (In fact, while the one-star kick-butt quotient above rates Jade’s performance, if I’d rated Trevarra’s it would have been three.)

Earlier this year, I was asked if I could provide a blurb for the cover copy of this book. I can’t think of a better way to finish this review than to quote it. “Top-notch SF author Seddon creates possibly his best novel yet in Wreaths of Empire, bringing a new depth and freshness to the space opera tradition. A wonderful heroine to cheer for; a well-crafted, character-driven plot; some of the genre’s finest writing; excitement, suspense, and food for thought –what more could a reader ask for?”

Author: Andrew M. Seddon
Publisher: Splashdown Books, available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Willow, by Wayland Drew

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

willowTheoretically, this book by Canadian author Wayland Drew is the novelization of the 1988 movie Willow. However, it’s not based directly on the movie itself, but on Bob Dolman’s screenplay (which was itself developed from a guiding storyline written by George Lucas). Much of this screenplay was omitted –and some of it apparently changed, usually to condense and simplify the dialogue and action– in filming the actual movie, and one of the stars (Val Kilmer) ad-libbed most of his dialogue. So the movie actually differs significantly from the book; the latter is much richer in world-building and character development and has a number of significant events that aren’t in the former, and that help to explain some character’s attitudes and choices that are only weakly explained in the film. This means that the relationship of the two is more like that of a movie adapted from a book than that of a typical novelization. It also means it’s harder to identify Drew’s individual modifications and contributions than it would be with most novelizations.

Regardless of the prehistory of the book’s text, though, the finished novel is a fine work of epic fantasy, with well-developed characters, a stirring plot that doesn’t have logical holes, and vivid prose. In general conception, it owes something to Tolkien’s monumental Lord of the Rings series –but few works of post-Tolkien epic fantasy do not, and it has its own distinct premise, plot, characteristics and flavor; any literary influence is simply that, not slavish dependence. Like Sauron, Bavmorda is a power-freak magic-wielder hungry for world domination; but where Sauron is an impersonal, off-stage evil force, Bavmorda is a fully human character we see up close and personal, in all her ugly glory. Drew’s short-statured Nelwyn race has some general similarities to hobbits, and perhaps more to dwarves; but in the final analysis, they’re neither, a race and culture all their own. (And the basic structure of a quest narrative in fantasy goes back long before Tolkien, as do other archetypes that appear here.) But like the LOTR saga, it has a very clear conflict of good and evil, and a recurring theme of the necessity and important consequences of the moral choices we’re called to make and the responsibilities we’re called to shoulder, whether we see ourselves as well-qualified heroic types or not.

Lucas’ influence is evident in a few places, where the Mystery of magic is presented in terms vaguely reminiscent of the Force in his Star Wars saga (the kind of thing Francis Schaeffer referred to as “contentless mysticism”), but this is a minor note that has no real significance for the storyline. A more prominent (and more positive) theme is the strong affection for the natural world that’s evident, with the idea that good people care about the latter, while evil results in defilement and destruction of nature. (This is brought out much more in the book than in the movie.) The book is also grittier and more violent than the movie in places, but it has no bad language (Madmartigan’s h-words in the film resulted from Kilmer’s ad-libbing) and no real sexual content, beyond the implication of womanizing by Madmartigan with an innkeeper’s wife at one point. (That aspect of his character isn’t glorified, and is explained as a reaction to an earlier event in his past.)

The action-heroine aspect of the book is embodied in the character of Sorsha (played in the movie by Joanne Whalley), the most important female character in the tale. She’s Bavmorda’s daughter, raised not to question her mother –but there’s another side to her heritage, too. Her moral journey, and the choice before her, will be one of those most central to the book. She’s also definitely raised as a warrior, really comfortable only in battle, in the camp or on the march, or in the hunt for dangerous game, thoroughly accustomed to handling weapons (she sleeps with a dagger under her pillow), and as tough as nails; we hardly ever see her out of her armor. For fans of the action-female motif, the one complaint here is that she doesn’t have much in the way of actual fighting scenes –just a couple in the entire book, although she acquits herself bravely and capably in both of them. It’s arguably a pity that the plot here didn’t allow more scope for the display of her butt-kicking abilities.

In a fantasy genre that’s overrun by bloated series, this one also has the advantage of being a stand-alone book with a contained storyline and a clear-cut resolution. Lucas actually intended to make sequels to the film, but never did; instead, he wrote a series of follow-up books, the Chronicles of the Shadow War. But these are set after the events here, and aren’t directly related to them, or at least that’s my impression –I’ve never read them. (That’s why Goodreads labeled the book “Chronicles of the Shadow War 0,” rather than giving it a number as an actual part of the sequence.) So this would be a great choice for fantasy readers who don’t want to commit to a multi-volume series! But it’s a solid, rewarding read for any epic fantasy fan.

Author: Wayland Drew
Publisher: Ballantine Books, available through Amazon, currently only as a printed book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.