½
“Does ANYONE know what’s going on?”
Ladies and gentlemen, we have finally found it: the Plan 9 From Outer Space of action heroine films, which manages to combine shoddy production values and pretentious nonsense to devastating effect, with the result being a completely incoherent mess. I knew I’d made a terrible, terrible mistake inside the first five minutes, which consisted of utterly overlong shots of a beach, into which a woman strolls, apparently coming directly from a clearance sale at Hot Topic, and performs an interpretive dance routine. She then wanders aimlessly round the woods, and menaces another woman, who is tied to a tree, while endlessly repeating, “Blood for blood. A life for a life. The wheel upon which we must all be broken.” It didn’t get any better, or any more comprehensible, thereafter.
For the closest thing you’re going to get to an explanation, I turn to the official synopsis, as written by the director: “Iconoclast is the story of a lone warrior who is resurrected by a dark goddess and sent into the wilderness to slay all of the old gods and take their power, so that she can craft him into a powerful weapon to wield against the crusading knights that sweep across the land.” Ooh. Sounds quite good. I wouldn’t actually mind watching that film. However, it bears absolutely no resemblance to what was delivered, and even less to the sleeve. I should have realized that any production with an obviously “artistic” cover is not going to live up to it. I remember first learning that particular lesson at the video store in the late 80’s, with any number of sub-Frazetta covers that concealed badly dubbed Italian B-movies.
It pains me to skewer this as utterly irredeemable, since it was obviously an effort of love for Argo. Based on the Kickstarter page, he appears to have gone out to New Zealand and begged WETA for some leftover bits and pieces of armour and weapons from Lord of the Rings, and shot their footage there. I’ve no idea why they bothered, because unlike LotR, this is not in the slightest bit epic. Indeed, there is nothing to indicate this wasn’t shot in the forest behind Argo’s house, never mind New Zealand. What narrative there is (as opposed to droning pseudo-philosophical nonsense, vaguely derived from Celtic mythology 1.0.1) , gets delivered entirely in voice-over, by completely different people to those performing on screen. The fight scenes are staggeringly inept, and the storyline is flat out baffling, with no clear expression of even the most basic of ideas.
About the only positive thing I can say is that Ms. Hot Topic, a.k.a. “The Black Goddess of the South Gates” (Kristel) is kinda hot, if you like chicks who have angel wing tattoos on their back. Otherwise, how bad was this? By the end of it, I was devoting more attention to arguing with 9/11 Truthers on Reddit. That’s pretty frickin’ terrible.
Dir: Sean-Michael Argo
Star: Stellar Kristel, Sean-Michael Argo, Petra Grace, Penny Walker
A meteor crashes into Tokyo Bay, creating a cloud of “cosmo-amphetamine” that infects everyone in the area. When they die, that drug immediately takes over, bringing them back to life as flesh-eating zombies. Colonel Kirihara is leading the rescue mission, and sends his daughter, K-ko (Suzuki) into the contaminated zone to scope things out. She finds that one of his underling, Captain Fujioka, is using the chaos to carry out human experiments, deliberately infecting survivors with the cosmo-amphetamine, in order to turn them into an unstoppable force of undead soldiers. He’s not willing to let anyone get out alive, least of all K-ko. Fortunately, her father gave her a battle suit, which helps to even the odds against the living dead army she faces.
Having used my entire quota of hyphens for this review in that tag-line, what do we have here? I could remember virtually nothing about the original, even though it was only a couple of years ago we reviewed it. Seems to have ended up with the same vaguely mediocre rating though. The problem here, however, is mostly one of pacing. After a brief flurry of impressive activity at the beginning, there’s not much happening on the action front for about an hour, and what takes its place falls short of adequate entertainment.
Maybe I’m getting old and deaf. Or maybe it’s just not a good idea to have dialogue that appears to consist largely of characters yelling (or whispering) over the top of each other. Either way, probably a negative the muddy audio is the main thing I remember about this survival horror film. Childhood friends Sarah (Bosworth), Abby (Aselton) and Lou (Bell) re-unite for a weekend on an island near where they grew up. There’s some reluctance here, Abby and Lou not having been on speaking terms for some years, due to the latter having slept with the former’s boyfriend years previously. The island is supposedly deserted, so they’re surprised to encounter three men hunting there, one of whom is known to Lou. A drink leads to another, and before you know it, Abby has fended off advances, in lethal fashion. The two survivors don’t take kindly to this, and begin hunting the trio to take revenge for their friend.
In February 2002, Ingrid Betancourt was travelling through a rural area of Colombia, as part of her campaign in the presidential election for the Green Party. She was stopped at a road-block run by the Marxist rebel organization, FARC, and when they realized who they had, she and her assistant, Clara Rojas, were kidnapped. Betancourt would spent more than six years of jungle captivity with the guerillas, until she was rescued, in a startling piece of deception, by Colombian military forces. This documentary film tells her story, through archive footage and interviews with Betancourt, Rojas, other kidnappees and some of the FARC members.
I was beginning to wonder. With the March 2017 date fast catching up, all we’d seen had been a couple of teaser clips, and I was bracing myself for an announcement that the release had been pushed back. But here we are, with the first official trailer for the film. I must confess, at this point I am largely unable to comment on how this relates to the other versions of the story, in manga and anime, since it has been a 
About to get married, Kira (Riddervold) and Marco (Campos) head out for a last quiet weekend together, at a luxurious cabin in the woods. Unfortunately, they become the target for the local rednecks and their kidnapping plot. This goes wrong, leaving Marco shot dead and Kira raped, then shot dead. Both bodies are buried in the woods, but – what are the odds? – it’s at the base of a tree where a native American woman was similarly slain by American soldiers in the mid-19th century. The spirit of that victim resurrects Kira out of her grave, in order for her to take her vengeance on those responsible.
This Lifetime TV movie is the story of Brooke (Butler) and Lance (Good). The happy young couple get into an accident returning from celebrating her promotion at the restaurant where she works. The pedestrian they hit is killed, while Lance breaks his leg, and is confined to bed while he recuperates. To assist with that task, since Brooke has to work, they hire Chloe (Hartley). She initially appears perfect for the job, helping out with the household chores as well as her nursing work. However, it’s not long before strange little incidents suggest that not all is well in Chloeland. We see her life with an abusive boyfriend, and she develops an attachment for Lance well beyond the normal bounds of professional concern. Might this, possibly, be something to do with the accident?