★★½
“Because ‘Killing Asian model of few words’ wouldn’t fit on the DVD sleeve.”
This is a surreal revenge thriller, which begins at a scrapyard where the bickering of a couple is interrupted by an Oriental woman (Tsang), who shoots them dead and takes a car. A series of similar encounters follows, which take a similar form: we are introduced to one or more characters; then the woman shows up, and kills them, leaving a toy car behind at the scene as a marker. This includes a photographer and her assistant; an antiques dealer and his girlfriend; the owner of a dance club, etc. Meanwhile, two cops are following the trail of corpses and Hot Wheels, and it gradually becomes clear that the woman’s actions are tied to a car accident the previous year, with which all her victims had a connection of some kind.
It’s a very chilly piece, with a central character about whom we know almost nothing for the great majority of the film, making it difficult to empathize with her murderous rampage. Meanwhile, it doesn’t take long before we realize that just about everyone else to whom we’re introduced, is going to get shot, so there’s no point in getting attached to, or even caring about them. The role is one that was written for Tsang, who never appeared in anything else, as far as I can tell: that probably says more than anything else. She’s not bad, and has a certain cold charisma that’s appropriate, but there just isn’t enough on which to hang any criticism of her performance. Certainly, despite a willingness to shed her clothes, she’s nowhere near as good as Brigitte Lahaie was in the other Rollin flick we’ve reviewed here, Fascination – interestingly, that appears to be explicitly referenced in one scene here, with a scythe being wielded in a very similar way.
It does remind me somewhat of Ms. 45 too, with a lead character who lets her violent deeds speak louder than her words, though the motive there was a good deal clearer, and placed up front. The highlight is probably an early gun-battle in an almost deserted fairground, which has an eerie, suspenseful quality that’s quite effective, and it’s interesting to see a Rollin movie which does not include female vampires, a staple of his work. However, on balance, I think a few more fangs, perhaps accompanied by a less willfully-misleading title, might not have been a bad thing.
Dir: Jean Rollin
Star: Tiki Tsang, Frederique Haymann, Jean-Jacques Lefeuvre, Karine Swenson
Evil mastermind Snakehead (Liu) kidnaps eight of the world’s top assassins, and transports them to a bunker in his Bangkok lair, where he makes them fight each other to the death, laughing maniaally all the while. Why? Because he’s an evil mastermind, that’s why: it’s what they 
This starts with a memorable sequence in which Inoshika Ocho (Ike) fights off a number of attackers, armed only with her umbrella; albeit, an umbrella that is rather more heavily-armed than most. While she succeeds, she ends up losing all of her clothes in the process, leading to some artful staging in which the discarded umbrella is used to hide her naughties bits. Unfortunately, the rest of the film, while occasionally reaching the same levels of unsanity is largely crude and unpleasant. Even the central concept – a gang smuggling drugs in the vaginas of junkies – falls firmly into that category.
Let’s be clear, right out of the gate. There is really not much original about this Korean mini-series, which takes huge chunks, almost wholesale from Nikita and Alias, to the extent, for example, that we perpetually referred to one character as “Amanda”, since she reminded us so much of Melinda Clarke’s character from Nikita, right down to her fashion choices. However, as long as you’re not looking for anything startling in the way of originality, this is slick yet gritty, with characters that are interesting to spend time with, and a handle on the action that’s easily the match for its equivalent in the West. Let’s start with some significant plot exposition, because there’s quite a lot of characters and story crammed into the three one-hour (or slightly more) episodes.
Phew. Plenty going on there, with enough for a full 13- or 22-episode order of most series, between all the twists, turns and revelations e.g. turns out Cha’s relationship to Chairman Kwon is rather more personal than she is aware. Given how much gets crammed in, the opening installment is a bit of a slow start. The entire first episode is more or given over to setting up the scenario, with Cha showing very little of the skills she has developed later on. She’s semi-competent in basic martial arts, which is perfectly fine when it comes to beating up fellow pupils. But we soon find out that this level of skill is far from enough, when she comes up against Jang and the other professional killers of SS1. Early on, it’s Choi who is most entertaining, portraying a dutiful and dogged cop whose superiors refuse to give him more than a gas pistol which is, similarly, pretty useless in the clutch.
We were kinda wondering where things might go in the last episode, with Cha having apparently sorted things out. Never mind: a whole new catalog of problems raise their heads, as the removal of her justification for assassination leaves her seeking a return to the normal life, one Chief Min is none too keen to offer. With its emphasis on discovering the truth about SS1 and the organization behind it, this episode reminded me of Alias after Sidney Bristow discovered. Meanwhile, dealing with boy issues was a throwback to early Buffy. However, the human experimentation thread was a fresh ingredient, and the episode didn’t pull from the darkness, with a subplot involving a Mirae whistleblower and SS1’s efforts to hush it up. Even if Cha and Min suddenly can’t hit the side of a barn in their final confrontation, the threads are satisfactorily tied up down the stretch, with an ending pilfered shamelessly from My Wife is Gangster 2, that hopefully hints at more to come down the line.
While sharing the heroine’s name with the renowned Female Convict Scorpion series, it’s not clear how much of an official remake this is: it’s supposedly based on a manga series, which I don’t quite recall being the case with its predecessors (it was a while ago I saw the original, though – must get round to re-viewing it for the site at some point soon). The concept is not dissimilar, however: Sasori (Mizuno) is sent to prison, where she is brutalized, but eventually escapes, and seeks vengeance on those who were responsible for putting her inside to begin with. However, it’s really poor at providing motive or explanation: for example, after Sasori is left for dead, her body is dumped outside the prison, where a corpse-collector (HK veteran, Simon Yam) rescues and revives her, before training her in the ways of top-end martial arts and sending Sasori on her way. Why? Who knows. Similarly, the reason why our heroine is in prison at all, raises more questions than it answers.
It’s easy to dismiss this, for its low production values, sometimes laughable dialogue and wildly-implausible plot – and I could hardly argue. Yet we still enjoyed this, thanks largely to performances which sustained us through the bad matte paintings, clunky lines, and mediocre action scenes. Of course, to use a pro-wrestling term, we’re huge Rutger marks, so seeing him as evil medieval warlord Grekkor is a big plus, harking back to his work in Flesh + Blood for Paul Verhoeven. Pacula is a “crusader mom” (for want of a better word), back from the Holy Land where she vowed to go after making a deal with God to let her son survive. However, she returns just after Grekkor and his sidekick (Vosloo) have swept her boy off with them. She goes to rescue him, teaming up with three other women on the way, as she heads towards the inevitable confrontation with Grekkor.
I vibrated between 2 and 2 1/2 stars for this, but opted for caution: it’s probably not as bad as it seems, despite an obvious lack of budget and ambition far in reach of its abilities. Or, at least, I maybe liked it a little more. As the alternate title suggests, it’s the third in a series, though information on the first two is scant: there’s no IMDB entry for them, and they appear to have different cast members. The central character is Maria Navajas (Ponce), an abused woman who turned to killing, discovered a talent for it, and took it up as a career. This entry finds her being sought by two different groups of gangsters who believe she ripped them off, as well as the feds. She has to fend them all off, with the aid of a friendly undercover cop (Sevilla) and her agent (played by, according to the IMDB, one of the producers of Napoleon Dynamite!).
This will only make sense, or be in any way entertaining, if you’ve seen Bloodrayne 3: The Third Reich: because it’s basically the same film, with a really fat chick (Hollister) replacing Natassia Malthe. And when I say, “the same film,” I mean the same storyline, same actors playing the same roles, and same scenes in the same locations. Really, I suspect this must have been made at the same time, with Boll simply swapping out Hollister for Malthe every other take. As there, the heroine is a half-human, half-vampire, who finds herself involved in a Nazi plan to take the powers of vampirism and turn them to their own ends. Except here, it is, of course, a spoof – and one so extremely broad, the makers of those Epic Movie flicks would have been cringing on occasion. Fat jokes, gay jokes, Nazi jokes… No easy target is left unstoned, paved with deliberate anachronisms like Segways and Internet dating.