Month: July 2014

Asian School Girls

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★★
“This is at least better than Transmorphers.”

asianschoolI have a lot of time for The Asylum. I met head honcho David Michael Latt back in 2002, when Sharknado was not even a twinkle in his eye, and have been following the studio’s rise to pop-culture icon ever since. They’re best known for their “mockbusters”, designed to cash in on bigger-budget title – including the sublimely-titled Snakes on a Train, which didn’t really have much in common with Samuel L. Jackson’s opus – and also cheesy monster movies, typically involving over-sized or over-aggressive species. This doesn’t fall into either category, and to be honest, isn’t one of their more successful efforts. While obviously not intended to be taken entirely seriously, based simply on a title which had me looking over my shoulder before clicking it on Netflx, it isn’t self-aware enough to succeed as a knowing parody. Nor is it competent enough to stand on its own merits.

The heroines are four – yes – Asian school girls, whose illicit evening out in a nightclub is derailed when they are drugged and raped. After the police are unable to take any action, one of them subsequently commits suicide, and the other three decide to locate and take revenge on the perpetrators, working their way up the chain of supply. Naturally, this requires them to go undercover at a strip-club. It’s not long before the dead bodies are piling up, and the police, led by a dogged detective (Johnson) with a personal interest in the case, are closing in on the perpetrators. Nor is the douche who runs the market in unconscious jailbait happy at their actions, and kidnaps the trio, locking them up in a basement cage where they will be perpetually on-call to service his customers.

There are a couple of directions this could have taken, but the unwillingness to commit to a specific mode of operation – parody or serious? – leaves it coming off as half-hearted and a pale imitation of genuine Japanese imports like Hard Revenge Milly. One moment it’s acknowledging its silliness e.g. the strip-club MC’s dead-pan announcement that as well as Asian School Girl night, it’s also Plushies and Furries, the next, it has a rape scene that is genuinely unpleasant. It’s clear they aren’t “real” school girls – Scarlet is more tattooed and pierced than your typical merchant seaman – but Aotaki, as the fiery Hannah, is the only one to deliver a performance that makes you believe, yes, they could be capable of slicing off dicks. The rest of the cast lack the necessary intensity to sell the concept, and while I can look past the obvious flaws in plot logic, this certainly falls into the category of a film which fails to live up to its poster.

Dir: Lawrence Silverstein
Star: Sam Aotaki, Catherine Kim, Minnie Scarlet, Andray Johnson

300: Rise of an Empire

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★★★★
“Faster than Greece-d lightning.”

300riseaI’m going out on a limb here, and predicting that Eva Green is going to be the next great action heroine. She seems very taken by strong female characters, from Morgan Le Fay in Camelot, through Vanessa Ives in Penny Dreadful, and we recently noted her contribution to the marketing for Sin City 2. But this was unexpected. We watched it, purely because we saw and enjoyed the original film, and didn’t expect this one to come anywhere near qualifying for the site. I mean, we were aware of Artemisia – almost a decade ago, Brian wrote a piece for the site, detailing why she’d be a good subject for a movie. However, we were expecting this to be an entirely macho film, likely bordering on the homoerotic, as mercilessly parodied in Meet the Spartans. We certainly didn’t expect her to be so pivotal to this sequel.

Well, technically, it’s neither sequel nor prequel to 300; it’s more of a companion piece, depicting events elsewhere around the same time, and focusing on the naval battle between the Persian forces, nominally under Xerxes (Santo), and the Greek ones of Themistocles (Stapleton). In an earlier encounter, Themistocles killed Darius, Xerxes’s father, which sent Xerxes off the deep end – carefully shepherded there by Artemisia (Green). She is a Greek citizen whose family was slaughtered by their soldiers when she was young, with her being subject to years of horrific abuse. Left for dead, she was rescued by Persians, switched sides and rose through the ranks, now seeing in Xerxes a chance to extract retribution on her former nation. Unlike Xerxes, who was portrayed in the original as Caligula with muscles, Artemisia is smart and resourceful, not making the mistake of under-estimating the Greeks in general, and Themistocles in particular. Indeed, as far as we are concerned, she was much more interesting than the hero, particularly in terms of back-story. She also kicks serious ass, both with a bow and her pair of swords.

As far as general film-making goes, this seems to have built on Spartacus, in much the same way that Spartacus built on the original 300. Indeed, there’s a fairly explicit nod to it, in the casting of Peter Mensah as Artemisia’s trainer, a similar role to the one he played in Spartacus. This means lots of slow-motion and buckets of digital gore, which seems to hit the camera lens more often than it hits anywhere else. It also perhaps means playing faster and looser with history: neither Darius’s death nor Artemisia’s fate are as depicted in the movie. But, hey, when facts conflict with drama, it makes cinematic sense for the former to give way. If what you have here occasionally topples over into video-game style, it rarely looks less than lovely, and if Artemisia wasn’t enough, we get a bonus action heroine at the end, as Queen Gorgo (Headey), leads the Spartan reinforcements into action. Now, will someone please give Green a full-on starring role in which she can kick butt, and tell me where I go to sign up?

Dir: Noam Murro
Star: Sullivan Stapleton, Eva Green, Rodrigo Santoro, Lena Headey

Nurse 3D

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★★★½
“A hot mess. And de la Huerta is not bad either.”

Nurse 3D“My name is Abigail Russell. I look like a slut, but don’t be fooled—this is merely a disguise to lure the dangerous predators who walk among us. This is their jungle, their breeding ground, and tonight I am on the hunt. These are the cheaters, the married, lying scum. They are like diseased cells cultured in alcoholic petri dishes that destroy unsuspecting families and infect millions of innocent vaginas. There is no cure for the married cock—only me, the nurse.”

Even Lionsgate didn’t know what to do with this, the film sitting on the shelf for about two years, before being quickly released without much fanfare. And, to be honest, you can see why, because it’s the kind of lurid, nonsensical trash that gives real cinema a bad name. As such, we naturally adored it. As the introductory monologue above should make clear, Abigail Russell (de la Huerta) is an angel of vengeance, who prowls the streets looking for cheating husbands, luring them in, and then wiping them out. She does so, believing she is saving their families from finding out the terrible truth. In reality, she is a nurse who is nuttier than a Christmas fruitcake, and when the colleague (Bowden) she is supposed to mentoring spurns Abigail’s friendship, in favour of a man, she sets out to destroy the perceived betrayer’s life.

de la Huerta is perfect, combining a body to die for, with a face best described, with my usual literary eloquence as “kinda weird.” Imagine an alien imitating a human being and you’ll be in the right area; that apples to the way she speaks too, which seems – and I’m fairly sure this is entirely deliberate – as if heavily drugged. Combine this off-kilter central performance with some of the ripest dialogue spat out by a character since Joe Eszterhas was in his prime, plus stylistic comic-book depiction by the second-unit director of Resident Evil: Extinction, and you’ll be in the right area as far as knowing what to expect. But it goes above and beyond in just about every area, although this is something of a mixed blessing: the most interesting stuff is Abigail’s predatory lifestyle, which is genuinely unusual and disturbing (for any male, at least; Chris spent much of this section nodding her head in approval!). When it turns into a remake of Single White Female for the middle portion, things becomes over-familiar, and de la Huerta just doesn’t have the same acting chops as Jennifer Jason Leigh. [Not that many actresses do]

Things perk up nicely for a grand guignol finale, which sees Abigail roaming the corridors of the hospital, dispatching anyone who gets in her way, and even some who don’t, with manic abandon. Naturally, as with all good horror, it ends with a set-up for a potential sequel, and it’s one we wouldn’t mind seeing. In a genre where all the icons are male, e.g. Freddy, Jason, Pinhead, etc. Nurse Abigail Russell is potentially the most interesting female candidate for some time. And while I can certainly see why this isn’t for all tastes – indeed, “taste” is about the least applicable word for this – we appreciated its clearly satirical intent and were happy to go along for the ride.

Dir: Doug Aarniokoski
Star: Paz de la Huerta, Katrina Bowden, Corbin Bleu, Boris Kodjoe

"My name is Abigail Russell. I look like a slut, but don't be fooled—this is merely a disguise to lure the dangerous predators who walk among us. "
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Hapkido

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★★★
“Forbearance. It’s vastly over-rated…”

lady_kung_fu_poster_011934 Korea is under the yoke of Japanese occupation. At the hapkido school of martial arts, Yu Ying (Mao), Kao Chang (Wong) and Fan Wei (Hung) are learning the form. On graduation, they return to China and open an establishment of their own, only to fall foul of the Japanese Black Bear group, who bully both local residents and other schools, and try to run the hapkido practitioners out of town. Despite their teacher’s mantra of “Forbearance,” of which Ying has frequently to remind her colleagues, hot-headed Wei is eventually baited into fighting and killing some of the Black Bear students, and has to go into hiding. Chang’s efforts at diplomacy fare no better, leaving him beaten within an inch of his life, and the Bears seize the opportunity to tell Ying they’ll be incorporating her school into theirs. She finally realizes that turning the other cheek can only go so far before you have stand up for what’s right. Which, in this case, is some kicking of asses belong to the Japanese and their minions.

The film certainly loses points for obviously cloning Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury, also released in 1972 and similarly based on a conflict between Japanese and Chinese martial arts schools. The strong anti-Japanese sentiment is no less shrill and strident here, and the style adopted for the fights is also largely similar, with one or other of our hero(in)es taking on a large group of rival students, before finally battling the big boss (or The Big Boss, if you prefer…).  Still, this is remarkable for the future output of those involved in the film. As well as being an early entry in the careers of Mao, Wong and Hung, there are minor roles for Billy Chan, Lam Ching-Ying (Mr. Vampire), Yuen Biao, Corey Yuen (director of Yes, Madam, She Shoots Straight and DOA: Dead or Alive) and Jackie Chan, who plays one of the Black Bear students.

But it’s mainly a showcase for the leads, and the action demonstrates why they’d all go on, to varying extents, and become stars in their own right. Mao is, obviously, of most interest here. After an early demonstration in Korea, which shows her as the smartest and sharpest of the trio, she largely takes a back seat in the middle, trying to keep the peace and practice that whole “forbearance” thing, before exploding into action again at the end. Particularly cool is the use of her weighted braids as a weapon, to whip her opponent about the face – you never saw Bruce Lee do that! And this is probably what defines the film. When it’s trying to be no more than a Lee-mitator, it comes off as second best, for obvious reasons. However, when the creators go their own way, it’s inventive and much more entertaining as a result. Shame the ratio isn’t tilted more heavily towards the latter.

Dir: Huang Feng
Star: Angela Mao, Carter Wong, Sammo Hung, Bai Ying
a.k.a. Lady Kung Fu

Never mind girls with guns, here are “waitresses with weapons”

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shooters
The Colorado town of Rifle was founded in 1882, and took its name from the Rifle Creek which flows through the town – that, in turn, was named after a trapper left his weapon on its banks around the time. Given that, it seems reasonable for a town restaurant to be called “Shooter’s”, though it isn’t quite what it sounds like. Said co-owner Lauren Boebert, “I consulted with my Christian friends and everyone said ‘Shooters’ sounded like a bar or a strip joint. But I thought, this is Rifle — it was founded around guns and the Old West. We called it Shooters and started throwing guns and Jesus all over the place.” And what do they mean by that? To quote the AP report: “As she takes your order, waitress Ashlee Saenz carries a pad, pen and a loaded Ruger .357 Blackhawk revolver holstered on her leg, Old West style. It’s loaded, and she knows how to use it.” One imagines no customer ever dares stiff a waitress on her tip in this establishment.

It’s a theme Shooters carries beyond their armed serving-staff, also hosting classes that qualify attendees for a concealed carry permit – the one in May drew 25 people, paying $75 (which also included dinner). And local police chief John Dyer is entirely fine with it, perhaps in part because the town hasn’t seen a shooting death in well over a decade, the last such being in 2001. “If it was a bar, I might be saying something different.” [The restaurant doesn’t serve alcohol –  not even shots, hohoho] “But I have no problem with it. And besides, they make a really good burger.”

I’ll admit, some aspects of this seem a little strange: girls with guns, fine, but girls with guns and Jesus? That’s a new one on me, and none of the reports delve further into that aspect, which I’d have thought would have merited additional inquiry.  While not exactly an expert on the Bible, I seem to recall Jesus being rather more into loving thy neighbour, though on the other hand, he never expressed any particular opinion on the topic of the Second Amendment. But I’m still down with the idea, even if personally, I think they could improve on it by having the waitresses dress to match the theme as well: cowgirl, policewoman, Milla Jovovich, etc. When the zombie apocalypse happens, between the good burgers and the girls with guns, there would probably be no better place to take refuge!

From left, Shooters staffers Ashlee Saenz, owner Lauren Boebert, Jessie Spaulding and Dusty Sheets stand in front of the business in their work attire.
Ashlee Saenz works behind the counter at the Shooters Grill in Rifle.
Ashlee Saenz, firearm holstered to her leg, takes an order to a table at Shooters Grill in Rifle.
Jessie Spaulding serves food at Shooters in Rifle.
Lauren and Jayson Boebert, owners of the Shooters Grill in Rifle, stand outside their restaurant.

Checkmate

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★
“Obscure, and justifiably so.”

checkmateYou know a film is rare when the IMDB is using a photo from a completely different movie with the same name to illustrate it – at least, unless Cynthia Rothrock has had a sex-change, got a tan and changed her name to Lawrence Fishburne. I’ve gone for the Netherlands title here, because most of the copies floating around the usual sources seem to be from that. It reminds me a little bit of First Shot, which was also about psycho militia leader, Dutch Leonard (Nichols). seeking revenge on a federal agent, Kate Mason (Rothrock), whom he blames for the death of his brother. It’s FBI rather than Secret Service, and for obvious reasons, Rothrock is a good deal more hands-on than Hemingway. But that’s about the only advantage this offers, as it’s yet more evidence for the increasingly inalienable rule concerning Cynthia Rothrock films: the American ones suck. The fact that this one is not more easily available is perfectly understandable, because if I owned a distribution company, I wouldn’t release it if they were giving the rights away.

The main problem here is Nichols, who looks a bit like a low-rent version of Roddy Piper, and whose performance is so cringe-inducingly bad, you’ll be left yearning for Piper’s subtle, underplayed dramatic style. And I don’t even mean yearning for Piper in the classic They Live, but for the Piper who cut promos for the WWF, when his performance basically consisted of yelling a lot. On the plus side, Nichols does at least make an impression, and you will remember him, even if the impression is mostly, “Christ, this is terrible.” The rest of the film is almost completely forgettable: Cynthia does deliver her usual competence in the fight scenes, but there aren’t enough of them, and the garbage which flows between them is more than enough to drown out any positives. The problems start early, with the fake situation Leonard initially uses to draw out his target. Despite hostages and a large quantity of automatic weapons, the poverty-row budget means the federal presence at the siege reaches single figures. And this is after Ruby Ridge; we know this, because it’s explicitly referenced more than once. I’m guessing it inspired the whole “white rights’ militia” villain.

There’s a whole subsequent subplot involving a local judge, who is in cahoots with Dutch, and using the profits of their gun-running business to fund his gubernatorial campaign. It’s no more interesting than the main storyline, and every moment spent there is a moment wasted, since it could be used for better things, such as Cynthia Rothrock kicking some additional ass. Or simply removing it entirely and shorten the film, which would probably be even more welcome.

Dir: Nicholas Celozzi
Star: Cynthia Rothrock, Stephen Nichols, Patrick Wayne, Alex Hyde-White
a.k.a. Deep Cover

Monika: A Wrong Way to Die

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★★½
“She spits on your grave.”

monikaI’m still in two minds as to whether the ending here is utter genius, or the worst cop-out since the entire seventh series of Dallas turned out to be a dream. You could argue a case for either, and I could see your point. On the one hand, there’s a case it renders the previous 80 minutes irrelevant. On the other, it’s also a mindbending twist, which deserves points for sheer audacity, and going to that well, not once but twice. However, the main problem is a central character who is a good deal less interesting than the femme fatale after whom the film is named.

Reagan (Wiles) heads to Vegas after his pal Double (C. Thomas Howell) sends him a pic of the titular hot chick, and tells him she is keen to hook up. On arrival, Reagan doesn’t find his friend; however, he does find Monika (Vincent), and a night of drinking, dancing and making the double-backed armadillo follows. The next morning, she’s gone, and when Reagan meets Double, he’s in for a shock, because he learns that Monika had, apparently, been gunned down the night before. She was the victim of Terry Joe (Branson), a local drug dealer from whom she had stolen a large sum of money, putting him in deep trouble with his boss, Eli (Howard). So, what the hell is going on here? We know that Reagan claims to have “visions,” which sometimes can be premonitions of future events? Is that what he’s seeing? Or is there an alternative explanation, which may or may not be more prosaic?

This isn’t Monroe’s first stab at the action heroine genre. He also gave us It Waits, which I summed up with the pithy, “It sucks.” This isn’t as bad, so I guess he has made some progress over the intervening seven years. There are some interesting aspects to be found and appreciated here, even things which don’t have any significant impact on the plot. For instance, Eli is actually English, but puts on a faux American accent some of the time. Why? It’s never explained, and that’s half the joy. Monika herself is also a fine creation, battling her way through Terry Joe and his minions , with an eye for style and no real regard for her own personal safety. Either of these would have made for a better focus than Reagan, who is very much reactive, rather than pro-active. By which I mean, he responds to the narrative as it unfolds, rather than driving it, and thus makes for an unsatisfying central character. Reagan seems to exist solely to execute the final twists, serving little or no other purpose, and I also have to agree with other reviewers, who have criticized the dialogue as clumsy and poorly-written. Overall, it just about passes muster as a way to occupy the time, providing you’re in an undemanding mood. But I can’t guarantee you’ll be as tolerant of the ending as I was.

Dir: Steven R. Monroe
Star: Jason Wiles, Cerina Vincent, Jeff Branson, Andrew Howard
a.k.a. MoniKa

New banners, courtesy of H Photography

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abanner9.jpgThe more observant among you will probably have noticed a change to the header on top of the page. Gone is Kate Beckinsale from Underworld [well, not quite gone – she may still pop up occasionally!], with instead a random pick from a selection of images, relevant to the site’s theme, provided to us courtesy of H Photography. If you want to see more – rather than the narrow slice needed for our banner – you should immediately head over to their Facebook page and give ’em a like. You can also check out:

Thanks to H for letting us share their work, and the more pages you look at, the more banners you’ll see. Gotta catch ’em all… :)

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