Month: January 2003

If They Only Knew, by Chyna

  By

★½
“Now we know. We just don’t care…”

This is probably the first WWF bio from a wrestler who never won the world title. Yet Chyna made her mark, largely through her abandoning the T&A of the women’s division, to take on the likes of Triple H and Stone Cold. This would seem to be an interesting angle, from which to report. So why is the result so goddamn…well, whiny? Part of the problem is that any wrestle-bio has to compete with the genius which was Mick Foley’s first book, Have a Nice Day – for insight and sheer good humour, it’s almost impossible to beat. Yet that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t bother trying. Chyna, on the other hand, runs out little more than a “woe is me!” tale about what a horrible life she had, all the way from her childhood, up until the WWF plucked her from obscurity to make her a star.

If she’d paid her dues, I might have more sympathy, but there’s hardly any info on her (apparently brief) time as an indie wrestler. You get a fair bit on the training at Killer Kowalski’s school, but otherwise, you can’t help wondering if there are any number of other women who are more deserving of the chances she’s had (Intercontinental Champion! Playboy centrefold!) and wouldn’t complain about everything so much. Hell, she could always go back to her planned career as an air-hostess – indeed, this might yet be her best option if she doesn’t meet with success outside the WWF soon, and that’s something notable by its absence since her departure. What insights there are come from other people e.g. WWF heavyweight champ (at time of writing) Chris Jericho, who says, “Women’s wrestling is kind of dead in the States almost. In Japan, it’s awesome”, though subsequent comments about “porky, chubby lesbians” may merit a visit from Manami Toyota and Mima Shimoda.

But the best quote comes from Luna, daugher of Maurice ‘Mad Dog’ Vachon: “We’re shit-out-of-luck. We’re not strippers. We’re not bimbos. We’re not empty-headed females. We like this sport. We love to entertain. We didn’t want to be in this sport to be close to men – we got in this sport because we love wrestling. But SOL, baby. You know what the men have done to us? Besides paying us tons less than the men, objectifying us into eye candy, T&A, the little wet dream for the little weenies? They turned us on each other… And the real bitch is, you try and get tough, you show ’em you’re into the moves and counter-moves and that you can take a dive off the top rope as good as any of them, they start calling you a man, a dyke, a ‘roid junkie, a muffin diver, all that crap. SOL, Joanie, SOL.” This is far more honest and to the point than anything Chyna comes up with – any chance of Luna writing a book?

By: Chyna
Publisher: Harper-Collins, 2001, $26.00

The Spree

  By

★★
“Xinia, Burglar Princess, learns that crime does pay.”

Good films about women burglars are hard to come by, for some reason. Mind you, good films about male burglars are also kinda thin on the ground; need I say any more than Hudson Hawk. This isn’t quite as bad (at least they don’t burst into song at any point), but falls well short of something like License to Steal, and comes closer to The Real McCoy territory. Xinia (Beals) is a burglar, who falls in love with snake rancher, Bram Hatcher. Bad news: he turns out to be an undercover cop. Good news: he wants a new career…as her accomplice.

This simple tale of infatuation, inevitably, turns out to be not so simple. The problem is, it’s still pretty simple-minded, with only one real twist, which is so unsurprising, it probably fails to count as a twist. Tommy Lee Wallace (Halloween III) handles the burglary scenes nicely, in particular an opening which has the heroine progressively more cornered in a house. She ends stuck in a bathroom, behind a shower curtain, with the owner in the room and about to have a shower; her escape is audacious, but it’s all downhill from there.

Could have done without the frequent sex scenes too; the use of a double for Beals is laughably obvious (breasts and face never seen together), while Boothe was 47 when this was made, and really should know better than to flash his ass. Rita Moreno, who won an Oscar for West Side Story, also turns up as Xinia’s mother – should probably have given Beals some dialogue coaching, as her accent wavers between doubtful and AWOL. Your interest will likely do the same.

Dir: Tommy Lee Wallace
Star: Jennifer Beals, Powers Boothe, Garry Chalk, John Cassini

Blood Games

  By

★★★
“A Deliverance of Their Own“

I guess Blood Sport was already taken? It’s softball beauties vs. rednecks after: a) the visiting ladies thump the home side 17-2, b) the team owner has to extract his fee at gunpoint, and c) the gals resist – forceably – the crude advances of the locals. Before you can say, “duelling banjos”, they’re being pursued through the woods, and picked off one by one.

This 1990 movie starts slow; any viewer will know exactly where this is going, yet they still take half an hour to get there. It’s not as if the time is spent on characterisation either; most of the softball team were clearly chosen for their appearance, while the yokels are straight from Cliched Casting, Inc. Yet if they’re stereotypes, they are undeniably creepy ones, well-portrayed by Cummings and Shay. Rosenberg uses them with enough skill to make you wonder why she never directed again, and ones things get going, she keeps the film going, without much slack.

Playing Babe, daughter of team owner Ross Hagen, Laura Albert is about the only one of the girls to make any impression as a character; she’d go on to become a stuntwoman, working on the like of Starship Troopers. The rest of her colleagues take showers, get assaulted (a sequence verging on the nastily gratuitous), die, turn psycho and take revenge, all without exhibiting any significant personality traits. Quite an achievement in itself. Another one of those movies which will put you off going to rural, Southern parts of America.

Dir: Tanya Rosenberg
Star: Laura Albert, Gregory Cummings, Luke Shay, Shelly Abblett

Witchcraft X: Mistress of the Craft

  By

★★★
“Tackily entertaining entry in sorcery saga. Mine’s a pint…”

This comes from Vista Street Entertainment, whom you might remember produced some of the worst entries in the Women Who Kick Butt box-set; they’re kinda like a poor man’s Troma. The series mostly feature attorney Will Spanner, but he took a break for this entry, being temporarily dead: it’s that kind of world. While I’ve not seen 1-9, I found this entertaining – trash rather than garbage – though Chris kept making sarcastic comments about Stephanie Beaton’s nipples (or lack thereof).

She plays an LAPD detective sent to England to extradite a Satanic serial-killer (Knowlton). Before she can, he’s freed from custody by vampire queen Raven (Daly) to assist in a dark ritual. Luckily, there’s white witch Celeste (Cooper), who runs round London at night, fighting evil in a fetching, powder-blue PVC costume, complete with cape. Cue catfights, human sacrifice and a ten-minute chunk where all three leading ladies get naked, simultaneously but separately.

Daly (plus henchwoman Emily Booth) chews the scenery to fabulous effect, and the Raven/Celeste conflict is the stuff of which franchises are made – imagine Buffy and Glory, ten years after. Given sufficient beer, experienced bad movie lovers will appreciate the badly dubbed sound effects, clunky dialogue and cheap production values. But how can you not like a heroine who travels on the astral plane, yet still also uses payphones, clad in her little costume? It will, however, probably be some time before I get Chris drunk enough to pick Witchcraft XI from the unwatched pile…

Dir: Elizar Cabrera
Star: Wendy Cooper, Eileen Daly, Kerry Knowlton, Stephanie Beaton

Pushed to the Limit

  By

★½
“A title equally applicable to heroine and viewer.”

If I ever become an evil overlord, I will conduct thorough background checks on all entrants to my martial arts tournament, to ensure they are not related to anyone I may previously have had killed. I will also teach my guards that if a prisoner is apparently not in his cell, they will use mirrors to examine all its corners, rather than rushing in and allowing him to drop from the ceiling onto them.

But I digress (if you can do so, before actually saying anything). In this film, wrestling champion Mimi Lesseos plays…wrestling champion Mimi Lesseos. Clearly a stretch for her there, then; think her brother and mother are perhaps also…her brother and mother. Is this a documentary? ‘Course not: real life would never be so cliched and predictable as this, which plods along, almost entirely as predicted. Mimi (Mimi) loses her brother to evil Oriental drug dealer Henry (Henry) – with hindsight, telling “gook” jokes was probably not a wise move on his part – who just happens to run a martial arts tournament. I trust I need say no more with regard to the plot.

Lesseos makes for a decent fighter and a tolerable actress, though the subplot which has her as a showgirl in Vegas is irrelevant, inane and positively wince-inducing. She does rely too much on wrestling moves – flying drop-kicks are not a genuinely viable tactic in deathmatches, I imagine. It’s the story that really kills this. There’s a moment when it seems that the bad guy is becoming infatuated with Mimi, regardless of her background, and this could have gone somewhere. Instead, it’s discarded as she works through a range of opponents, leading to the (yawn) final confrontation with her brother’s killer. The result is something which works, only if you’ve never seen any of this kind of film before – having a female lead is a nice idea, but much more effort is needed, rather than thinking this is sufficient, in and of itself.

Dir: Michael Mileham
Star: Mimi Lesseos, Verrel Reed, Henry Hayashi, Greg Ostrin

Bubblegum Crisis

  By

★★★
“Hardsuits, rogue mecha and day jobs.”

Worthy of note as one of the first pieces of anime made available to an English-speaking audience, (not long after its original 1985 Japanese release), BGC is set in 2032, when Tokyo has been rebuilt, post-earthquake. The Genom corporation are fiddling with Boomers, biomechanical robots of immense strength but with a nasty tendency to run amok. Standing guard are a mysterious team, the Knight Sabers, with their own technological strengths, who alternate between merc work and more altruistic concerns.

Any similarity to Blade Runner is entirely deliberate; the heroine is called Priss, and sings with a band called The Replicants. She, and her three colleagues (Nene, Linna, and Sylia) moonlight from their various day-jobs as the Knight Sabers, each with their own special abilities. The eight episodes in the series combine multiple plot arcs and standalone stories, with mixed effectiveness, though the later ones tend to work better. There’s not much background on the characters, save Sylia, and a tendency to gallop through towards the final fight in a number of the OAVs. There’s a lot of emphasis on the music, but I’m no J-Pop fan, so they needn’t have bothered.

The animation looks a little creaky now, as you’d expect from a show of its age, but also seems to improve as the series progresses – the artists learn what works and what doesn’t. I confess to preferring secondary characters such as Nene, to supposed heroine Priss; when we get to see their lives (as in #8, which has Nene acting as “babysitter” to a teenage girl on a quest to photograph the Sabers), it’s a more fully satisfying experience. Followed by two sequels, Bubblegum Crash and Bubblegum Crisis 2040.

Dir: Various
Star (voice): Kinuko Ohmori, Akiko Hiramatsu, Michie Tomizawa

Coffy

  By

★★★½
“The godmother of blaxploitation’s debut in the field.”

Neither star Grier nor director Hill were exactly strangers to the world of exploitation when they made this, but their combination here created a whole new subgenre, crossing action heroineism with black cinema. Following her would come Foxy Brown, Cleopatra Jones and the rest, but let it be said, Coffy was the first of any significance.

It’s a robust tale – or at least one reused frequently since with minor changes. Nurse Coffy (Grier) goes after those she sees as responsible for leaving her kid sister a drug-addled vegetable, be they low-level pusher, high-level supplier or the politician in cahoots, who just happens to be her lover. There’s no hanging round here; almost before the credits have finished, we get someone’s head being blown off with a shotgun, and Hill brings a hugely gleeful air to the violence. This is perhaps exemplified best by a marvellous and justifiably classic catfight in which Coffy, razorblades hidden in her hair, takes apart an entire escort agency’s worth of hookers.

Dramatically, it’s less successful, with neither the supporting characters nor the plot holding your interest. It often borders on the painfully obvious; when her cop friend turns down a bribe, you just know he’s going to end up hooked to one of those hospital machines that goes “Beep”, and inside five minutes, yep, there he is. Beep. He then vanishes from the film shortly thereafter, though it’s never clear whether he dies or not. At least this does mean we don’t get the even more painfully cliched “flowers on the grave” sequence. But as a Pam Grier vehicle, it’s fine, and if little more than a vehicle for sex ‘n’ violence, with questionable morality and a hackneyed storyline, it is at least done enthusiastically enough to pull you along with it.

Dir: Jack Hill
Star: Pam Grier, Booker Bradshaw, Robert Doqui, William Elliott

Gladiatrix

  By

★★★½
“Proof that the female action heroine’s appeal is at least a couple of millennia old.”

This sculpture, found at Halicarnassus, in what is now Turkey, depicts two woman, Amazonia and Achillea, fighting each other. It’s one of the prime pieces of evidence for female gladiators.

This intriguing piece of archaeological detective work began with the discovery of an opulent grave in the paupers’ section of a Roman-era cemetery in London. Piecing together the clues, the conclusion was reached that, while it could have been a follower of Isis, this was most likely a gladiator’s grave – which was something of a shock, as the occupant was female…

From here, we head into a discussion of how Roman life centred round the amphitheatre and how the gladiatorial games developed. While there wasn’t a great deal of new information here, it was interesting to see a connection made between the rise of the female participant linked to Boadicea’s revolt, which had taken place a decade or two earlier. This would have no doubt opened the Roman mind to the possibilities of broads with swords. Similarly, in Rome, the absorption of the Amazonian legend (originally a Turkish story) could have led to the introduction of the gladiatrix.

Narrated by – who else? – Lucy Lawless, the documentary is hampered by an over-enthusiastic visual style during the battle recreations. At times, these were so hyperactive as to convince me that I was watching clips from the 2001 version of The Arena. While understanding the need to avoid becoming a sequence of talking heads and shots of ruins, the attempts to jazz the inserts up prove more of a distraction than an enhancement. I’d have welcomed more speculation on the life of the gladiatrix too. Still, great to hear a little about the ancestors of Michelle Yeoh and Pam Grier!

Dir: Jeremy Freeston
Discovery Channel documentary, December 2001

She

  By

★★★
“She may be the face you can’t forget…the film, too, has its moments.”

Proof positive that a lack of narrative coherence is no barrier to a good time, She makes about as much sense as you’d expect from a film where the soundtrack veers wildly from Rick Wakeman to Motorhead. It’s post-apocalyptic sword and sorcery, with Bergman as She, the immortal goddess ruling a tribe of Amazon warriors. For reasons which are never explained, She ends up tagging along with hero Tom as he searches for his kidnapped sister. Hey, even Immortal Goddesses need some time off, I guess.

Loosen up, realise this bears effectively no relation to the H.Rider Haggard novel (previously filmed by Hammer, with Ursula Andress in the Immortal Goddess role), and you may find this fun, albeit the dumb kind. I should warn you that the first 20 minutes suck, make little sense and are remarkably tedious. Once we get moving, things perk up, because on their travels, Tom and She encounter a wild range of wacky adversaries: chainsaw-wielding lepers, mad zookeepers, vampires and someone doing a convincing impression of Robin Williams at his most irritating. None of these could hold an entire movie, and Nesher realises this, wisely whizzing them past at high speed, despite the resulting random air, like a D&D adventure written by a rank novice.

The action is competent, if obviously cheap, though surprisingly, Bergman is outdone by her sidekick (Kessler). Tom rescues She, She rescues Tom, repeat with minor variations until it all ends in a pitched battle against the bad guy and his army of, oh, say 30 soldiers. Whatever its shortcomings (and space is too short for a listing), lack of imagination is not one of them. Many less inventive movies are out there – thus, this one can only be applauded.

Dir: Avi Nesher
Star: Sandahl Bergman, David Goss, Quin Kessler, Harrison Mueller

Silk

  By

★½
“Beware: Silk pulls the wool over your eyes.”

One of the primary rules of exploitation cinema, is never to trust a movie with painted box-art. And, verily, no scene like the picture at right occurs in the film. Indeed, the whole film is sold on sizzle rather than steak, and will probably leave you feeling more than a little hungry. Verrell looks the part, though her slicked-back hair is rather too cliched and obvious, and she does appear to be doing her own action. Her lack of acting ability is painfully obvious, however, and Santiago is wise to keep her dialogue to a minimum.

Silence on the subject of the plot would have been well-advised too; it’s particularly woeful, involving drug smugglers and vigilante cops. Large chunks aren’t clear, and the sections which are, don’t capture the interest. The box tries to hype things up, with an amusing line in superfluous verbiage – another rule of exploitation is to beware blurbs with four adjectives in the same sentence (“…a chain of spectacular action footage, from screeching car chases to raging gun battles and blazing explosions of firepower.”) – but it’s a lost cause.

Special mention must be made of the appalling soundtrack, in particular the theme song, and although the setting is supposedly Hawaii, I strongly suspect the Phillipines is closer to the truth. But as the box art proves, this is not a film that can be relied upon to deliver what it promises. One can only wonder what Claudine St. James though of this adaptation inspired by her work.

Dir: Cirio Santiago
Star: Cec Verrell, Bill McLaughlin, Fred Bailey, Joe Avellano