Month: January 2003

Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever

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★★
To quote Marshall Fine: “Kaos would have saved everyone a lot of time and money by simply eliminating the stars and the story and releasing Ballistic as Giant Fireballs, Vol. 1.”

Despite the title, this movie rarely pits Ecks (Banderas) vs. Sever (Liu). The two spend more of the film teamed, up taking on the evil duo (Henry and Park) who killed Sever’s family and have kidnapped Ecks’ son – perhaps a spoiler, but anyone who didn’t see that one coming, was probably run over on the way to the cinema.

The film raises a number of interesting issues. Unfortunately, they stem more from the cinematic process, such as wondering why no-one taking part in the car-chases ever appears to drive faster than the speed limit. I know it’s Canada, but these are supposed to be characters living on the edge, not concerned with getting traffic tickets. And speaking of Canada, why are so many American government agencies operating in the open, blowing things up and shooting anyone in range, with barely a whimper from the locals?

The other problem is that no-one in the movie can act – we should perhaps exempt Liu, since she has barely a dozen lines. The scenes of Banderas and his wife (Soto) are woefully lacking in chemistry, and Ray Park is simply dreadful, despite looking so much like Oz from Buffy, that I kept expecting a full moon and a transformation. The plot is equally inept, tacking on an entire chunk about microscopic robotic assassins which is almost totally redundant. It’s nice that the studio changed Sever from male to female, but the results are…well, at time of writing, the Rotten Tomatoes review score runs 64-0 against the movie, which must be some kind of record. [Update, December 2013: Try 110-0!. Which is, indeed, the worst ever.]

There is one great sequence, when Sever is ambushed at a library, in which she mows down an entire army, picking up their weapons and turning them against their owners. This culminates in a fabulous shot from above of a victim dropping onto a car which you keep thinking is going to cut away – it doesn’t. That, however, is it, and despite such brief flashes of potential, this is largely lame, tame and full of unfulfilled possibilities. Ten years ago, it might have been a Hong Kong movie starring Simon Yam and Yukari Oshima – on the whole, that would have been much more entertaining.

Dir: Kaos
Star: Antonio Banderas, Lucy Liu, Gregg Henry, Ray Park

Silk 2

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★★½
“She’s back! Except, thankfully, she’s not – it’s someone different.”

Was the world really crying out for a sequel? I guess Silk proved profitable enough for Gabrielle to replace Verrell as the titular cop, three years later and without any explanation. I’ve liked Gabrielle since her barnstorming double role in Deathstalker II, but even I have to admit she’s not really well-cast here, with her voice inappropriate for a supposedly tough crimefighter. Mind you, anyone would have problems with cliched aphorisms of the “Crime doesn’t pay” kind demanded by the dialogue.

After an opening third which is pretty dull and pointless, things do liven up – you get the impression someone actually thought about the script, rather than just spending an hour in Blockbuster, cribbing it off the back of other movies. The goods at the centre of things here are a set of Japanese scrolls which were guarded by a sect of warrior monks; on loan to a “Hawaiian” art-gallery (looks like the Philippines once more), they are switched for a set of fakes. The shenanigans that follow are not perhaps a surprise, yet they are carried out with sufficient energy to keep an uncritical viewer content.

I should point out that, as in the first film, the picture at right does not actually occur anywhere in the movie. Gabrielle does get one surprisingly decent fight sequence however [and I’m not saying that because of her loose-fitting robe, or the wildly gratuitous shower scene which precedes it]. More of such action would have helped – instead, this ends up as a passable, if not exactly memorable, waste of time.

Dir: Cirio Santiago
Star: Monique Gabrielle, Peter Nelson, Jan Merlin, Maria Clair

Yes, Madam

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★★★★
“Early HK girls-with-guns flick sets high standard.”

Purely on a historical level, this 1985 film merits attention since it started the whole action-heroine genre in Hong Kong cinema, which thrived for the next decade, producing some of the finest entries ever made. It also was, effectively, the start of the careers of Michelle Yeoh and Cynthia Rothrock. Interesting to see how they’ve since headed in opposite directions: Rothrock to low-budget erotic thrillers, Yeoh to the Academy Awards.

But even on its own terms, and despite a few mis-steps (forgivable in any pioneer), this is still greatly entertaining. It’s classic good-cop/bad-cop material, with Rothrock playing Carrie Morris, a Scotland Yard officer send to help Yeoh find a microfilm which incriminates the manically laughing chief villain (James Tien), and is in the unwitting possession of three shysters.

For some reason these are named, in the subbed version, Strepsil, Panadol and Aspirin – one is played by famous HK director Tsui Hark. The subbed version also includes some very goofy comedy (including a cameo by Sammo Hung) that, frankly, I could have done without; score one for the dubbed version which excises this, and also treats you to a dubbed Rothrock, sounding more like the Princess of Wales. On the other hand, her nickname in the subtitles is – and I wrote this down – “nasty foreign chick”. Something lost in translation there, I reckon.

It all builds to a fabulous, extended brawl in which our heroines take on the bad guys in a plate-glass showroom (er…perhaps it just seems that way). This remains one of the finest showcases of female martial arts on the screen. Up until then, it’s been solidly entertaining, pacey and with some thought apparently having gone into the plot and characters. It’s a classic, in more ways than one.

Dir: (Corey) Yuen Kwei
Star: Michelle Yeoh (as Michelle Khan), Cynthia Rothrock, John Sham, Man Hoi

Fathom

  By

★★★
“Credits includes “Parachute jump suits for Miss Welch by…” ‘Nuff said.”

Released five years before Jennifer Garner was even born, there are some odd similarities between this 1960’s time-capsule and Alias:

  • A girl is plucked to work as a secret agent…
  • …for a group that may not be all it seems…
  • …and is tasked with a perilous mission…
  • …which involves exotic gadgets…
  • …not to mention running around a lot…
  • …in a variety of interesting costumes.

Hmmm.

After an excruciating opening sequence, with what feels like a real-time jump from 30,000 feet, parachuting dental hygienist (!) Fathom Harvill (!!) is recruited by HADES to find a lost nuclear detonator. Which might not be nuclear, or a detonator, and which two other interested parties are also keen to find. The latter aspect is where the film is most entertaining, twisting and turning in its second half like a frantically fruggin’ go-go dancer. There’s also entertainment to be had in seeing a very young Richard Briers: I kept expecting Penelope Keith to peer over the bushes.

Chronologically between Modesty Blaise (with whom it shares a composer and Clive Revill) and Barbarella, its attitude fits there too. To modern eyes, Fathom is very passive, doing little except run; a little karate would have helped. It’s all hugely Sixties, wouldn’t stand the slightest scrutiny, and wobbles precariously near camp – as you’d expect from the original Batman director. The music is excruciatingly easy-listening: at one point, Welch halts it by taking the needle off a record, and I hoped that’d be a running gag. I was disappointed, but just can’t bring myself to dislike any movie with explosive ear-rings.

Dir: Leslie H. Martinson
Star: Racquel Welch, Tony Franciosa, Ronald Fraser, Richard Briers

Big Boobs Buster

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★★
“Does exactly what it says on the tin.”

As you can probably surmise from the title, this is most emphatically not a gentle and touching saga of four women who laugh, cry and grow together. Instead, it’s about a schoolgirl, traumatised by rejection due to her small chest, who adopts a secret identity in order to make silicone moulds of her larger-bosomed schoolmates. I’m tempted to claim it’s based on an Oscar Wilde short story, but your credulity is already under enough strain.

Instead, I’ll start by pointing out to any lurking breast-fetishists that the Japanese definition of “big boobs” is, shall we say, not as expansive as ours. Still, less-demanding deviants should just about find enough to keep them entertained in lines like “Damn your raunchy bra!”, especially in a fine opening quarter. With a school full of perverts, it’s a concept with scope for Kekko Kamen-style parody – unfortunately, it peters out when mammorially-challenged heroine Masako (Harumi Kai) joins the track team instead. This is full of the usual tough training cliches, and is thus generally uninteresting.

The tape also includes ten minutes of Masako falling off her bike, plus other wondrous footage from behind the scenes. Wonder what the makers, including respected anime creator Taro Maki as executive producer, did with the rest of their weekend…?

[This review originally appeared in Manga Max]

Creator: Hisashi Watanabe
Star: Harumi Kai, Maruki Itsuki

Tokyo Blue: Case 1

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★★
“Cops and robbers, Japanese style, with much T&A.”

You know where you stand with this film inside five minutes, from the moment policewoman heroine Mika Hino (Shiratori) is made to strip off by bad guys hunting for a key – which she naturally is keeping in her lingerie. Mind you, this pales in comparison with where partner Rin Kakura (Kuribayashi) hides her gun… The problem with this tape is that such intimate details are far more interesting than the plot, a tired and severely uninteresting search for a master counterfeiter.

While there’s no denying the charms of the leading ladies, most of the time they’re displayed with precious little imagination, and their characters are far less appealing than their bodies. It’s also very hard to disapprove of the lecherous colleagues depicted by the movie, when the film is at almost the same mental level. Only in the last fifteen minutes, as Mika strives to rescue the captured Rin from an all-girl team of guards, do things start to perk up, with Mika becoming something of an avenging angel, slaughtering receptionists with effective skill and disturbing delight. Unfortunately, this only really goes to show up the first hour of this film, actually the third in the Metropolitan Police Branch 82 series, for the tedious waste of time it is. Best line in the enthusiastic but futile dub: “I’m a blueberry tart!”

[This review originally appeared in Manga Max]

Dir: Younosuke Koike
Star: Chieko Shiratori, Tomomi Kuribayashi, Keiji Matsuda, Hitomi Shimizu

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: season six

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★★½
“Slaybours, everybody needs good Slaybours…”

Season Six was in trouble from the start, with the titular heroine (literally) dead and buried. Bringing Buffy back from beyond was a problem always likely to perplex, because once you start resurrecting characters, nothing is a threat any more. Although this was handled moderately well, the show really started to fall apart after the musical episode. This demonstrated one thing beyond all reasonable doubt – why the cast are actors. From then on, most of the stories seemed to have been cribbed from daytime soaps. Buffy has sex with Spike, feels bad about it, then does it again. Xander and Anya’s on-off-off-on-off wedding and relationship. Willow and Tara were no more solidly committed, and the clumsy “magic=drugs” story arc was the sort of thing I’d expect to see on Charmed. In addition, the main bad guys for 90% of the series were a trio of geeks, minor bit players from previous episodes, who were about as threatening as flies, albeit rather more annoying.

I will confess to having lost a few episodes in the middle – here in Phoenix, it kept getting pre-empted for even more sucky local basketball – but it was hard to care. When things settled back down (the Suns having failed to make the playoffs), there were only three weeks to go, and after an episode in which Willow and Tara might as well have been saying “Look at us! We’re lesbians!” every line, I was ready to write the series off. Then a misaimed bullet took out Tara and Willow went berserk – black magic, apocalyptically berserk. It was quite, quite fabulous, despite a “love conquers all” ending which while well-handled, still remained cliched. Those two episodes, if not quite redeeming the dreck that had passed before, at least renewed my interest in season 7. Will Willow go straight? Is Spike now all Angelus i.e. mopey, pouty and deeply uninteresting? Time will tell…

Star: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Alyson Hannigan, Nicholas Brendon, Michelle Trachtenberg

Dead Men Can’t Dance

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★½
“Army women are only twist to very routine action flick.”

Plotwise, this is a by-the-numbers action thriller about a special forces group on a mission in the Korean Demilitarised Zone, who get embroiled in a CIA operation to retrieve nuclear triggers. Why it merits any coverage here, is because their command structure is matriarchal, from Brigadier General Burke (Zabriskie), through their operational leader and former agency operative Victoria Elliot (York), down to Staff Sergeant Rhodes (Barbara Eve Harris), who could give R. Lee Ermey a run for his money – Ermey, incidentally, turns up as the CIA boss.

This does add a nice bit of sexual tension to matters, as the leader of the CIA team is Elliot’s lover, played by Michael Biehn – what are the odds against that? Characters like Zabriskie and Harris are fun to watch; however, the action is lacklustre, consisting largely of running around and firing automatic weapons, while the plot is painfully obvious – helpful of the Koreans to build their nuclear facility within convenient walking distance of the border. Still, had to laugh at the reason for betrayal given by the (inevitable!) CIA traitor: “large sums of hard cash, what else?”.

Dir: Steve Anderson
Star: Kathleen York, Michael Biehn, Adrian Paul, Grace Zabriskie

Burn Up W

  By

★★★
“T & A = terrorists and armaments…as well as what you’d expect.”

This teeters infuriatingly close to greatness, but eventually succumbs to mediocrity because of a tendency to juvenile smuttiness, that fatally weakens what is, at heart, an intriguing story and setting. The Warriors are a special police group – mostly female, with one token (lecherous) man – sent in to sort out nasty cases. The main thread in the four episodes here, is a virtual drug which can turn the consumer into a mind-controlled killer – or, presumably, anything else desired.

Each episode has largely the same strengths and weaknesses. For example, one part builds to a gripping finale with the team trapped in their own station, but starts with a scene where heroine Rio is selling her used underwear, to a shop specialising in such stuff. Then her male colleague enters, trying to buy it direct from her. This is played for cheap laughs, but comes across as downright creepy to these (admittedly Western) eyes. Same with the last episode, which ends with an unarmed Rio facing a terrorist…who orders her to strip naked. And did I mention the nude bungee-jumping?

I, of all people, have few problems with gratuitous nudity, but when it brings an interesting storyline to a grinding halt and stops the action, even I have to draw the line. If I wanted to watch animated soft-porn, there’s plenty of it out there, and the creators here obviously have enough imagination that they don’t need to ramp up the jiggle factor – Rio is a character in herself, and I especially liked mad sniper Maya. Presumably aimed at the acned teenage boy market, anyone else will likely find themselves intrigued and irritated in equal measure.

Dir: Hiroshi Negishi
Star (voice): Yuka Imai, Maya Okamoto, Ryutarou Okiayu, Sakaru Tange

Bad Girls: season one

  By

★★★★
“Guilty of being a solid and thoroughly entertaining drama.”

Women-in-prison is not a genre greatly within our remit, since they’re often just an excuse for a bit of soft-core masochism. There are occasional exceptions, however, and this is one, with its origins as a network TV show forcing restraint of the more exploitative aspects, as well as permitting the characters to develop more fully than in a movie.

This is especially necessary, since at first glance they are your usual cliches: slimy warder, do-good governor, lesbian with a heart, wrongly imprisoned innocent, etc. However, over time, we get to see more facets, and the acting is, without exception, impressive. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we particularly warmed to the villains, Jack Ellis as Fenner, a guard who deals out privilege in exchange for sexual favours, and Debra Stephenson as the psychopathic Michelle Dockley.

Credit to the writing too, which maintains a fine balance, most notably the episode which switched between a funeral and attempts to brew up home-made wine. You truly didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. But why does almost no-one ever get out of jail, except in a body-bag? Could probably stand a little less of the unresolved sexual tension between Nikki (the good dyke) and Helen (the nice governor) – I’m no fan of it, gay or straight – but I suspect this side will run and run, and we’re happy to put up with it.

Star: Mandana Jones, Simone Lahbib, Debra Stephenson, Jack Ellis