★★★★
“Fast, hardware-heavy fun in Chicago, Japanese-style!”
Watching this dubbed was, for once, viable since despite its Japanese origins, it’s firmly set in and around Chicago. So we did sit through some of it in English, but the accents were woefully Cal-girl and thus we’d recommend sticking with the Japanese, even more unlikely though it might be. That out of the way, this is an action-packed romp, in three episodes but effectively one story. Rally Vincent and May Hopkins, one a crack marksman, the other an explosives expert, own a gun store, but are blackmailed by the ATF into helping nail an arms ring. It’s not as simple as it seems, since the perps have connections at a high level, and the services of a former Soviet Special Forces hitwoman.
The episodic structure means there’s never a dull moment and you effectively get three climaxes for the price of one, with the car chase in #2 perhaps my favourite. If it occasionally teeters on the edge of cheesecake – Rally gets her blouse shot open – it’s made clear early on that the heroines have little time for romantic dalliance. Indeed, there’s little time for anything much, including character development, but the story charges on at a great pace, so it’s not as if they’re wasting time.
You can see why Sonoda set it in America, since handguns are illegal in Japan, and the crowded streets would likely impair the auto quotient. Creator Kenichi Sonoda’s fondness for fast cars was apparent in his earlier work, Riding Bean, and by the end of this, Chris had decided she wants a Shelby GT Cobra, just the like the one Rally drives. Drool. :-) A lot of effort went into reproducing Chicago and wiser heads than mine (who have actually been there!) say it’s accurately detailed. Though undeniably great fun, perhaps the most amusement we got was from pretending the opening song was the theme to Saturday Night Live, to which it bears a spooky resemblance…
Dir: Mori Takeshi
Star (voice): Michiko Neya, Kae Araki, Aya Hisakawa
Don’t look for Aruba Red in your local video store. You won’t find it, because it is a beer. Yes, an alcoholic beverage. So, what in heaven’s name is it doing on this site? Well, as far as I know, it’s the only beer inspired by a female action heroine, albeit a fictitious one.
Somewhere around the middle of the series, I realised that this is soap-opera, pure and simple. As someone who’d never be seen dead watching a soap, this was disturbing. Fortunately, moments later, Jim Fenner did something else truly rotten to the core, and my attention went back to H.M. Prison Larkhall. Such is the joy of the show: it defies categorization.
Director Latt and star (and wife) Little came to our attention through a highly-amusing comedy about TV, Jane White is Sick and Twisted. This is radically different, but still effective, thanks to Little’s performance as Heather. The sole survivor of a warehouse massacre, she is taken, catatonic, to a mental hospital. The bad news is, associates of the gangsters she killed want her dead – try convincing a doctor his staff have been bribed to off you. [They skip the potential ambivalence as to whether Heather actually 
Wuhrer plays Sasha, a space pilot coerced into attempting to stop a rocket, hijacked by evil emerald dealer Conrad Nash (Rossi) and his creepily incestuous sister Carla (Rubin), from ploughing into LA. The proper pilot (O’Keefe) provides assistance, with much running around corridors and plunging into a glycerine tank. Yes, glycerine: a feeble excuse to give our heroine the wettest T-shirt of all time. Between this and the “ass panning” (as Chris described Simandl’s fondness for shooting at waist level), it seems disturbingly fetishistic, though a large chunk is due to footage spliced in from another movie – see 
This is the first Cyn-flick seen in a while: rumour has it, she made a brief diversion (after implants) into erotic thrillers, but the good news is, she’s back in the martial arts arena. The bad news is, er, the film. It starts with her DEA colleague, about to bust a Colombian drug-lord, promising Julie (Rothrock), “Four kids, a dog, and a house with a white picket fence.” You 
Director Terlesky starred in one of my favourite guilty pleasures, Deathstalker II, but this shows he still has much to learn about directing and, particularly, scripting. There just isn’t enough going on here to sustain attention, with too many scenes taking twice as long as necessary. Swanson plays Jenna, assassin for a government counter-terrorist agency which is now creating incidents in order to get increased funding. She switches sides and protects TV journalist Jordan McNamara (Dukes), whom she has been ordered to kill – her handler Dalton (Madsen) must now take her out.
Our qualms were largely because, unlike Run Lola Run or Groundhog Day, which made no attempt to explain what was happening, here there’s just enough logic to be unsatisfying. The “rules” are clearly important – for example, do time-travellers keep their memories? – yet are inadequately laid out. We spent the last 15 minutes with furrowed brows, trying to see if it made sense. It may, or may not, but either way was an unwelcome diversion in an otherwise pleasant surprise.
This long-running series, with the 11th entry due in 2003, takes place in an alternative reality where vampires have equal rights as citizens. Heroine Anita Blake is a state-appointed executioner (“when good bloodsuckers…go bad…“) in St. Louis, who takes out the undead trash and also has a day job – actually, more of a night job – raising zombies. Oh, did I forget to mention them? There’s also were-creatures, ghouls, and pretty much the whole range of supernatural monsters.