Month: May 2024

Blood Valentine

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★★½
“Dubbed to death”

This is another in a recent burst of Thai action heroine movies, including The Secret Weapon. But it’s less successful, although the deficit is not entirely the movie’s fault. The only version I could find was a dubbed one on YouTube: over the years, I have developed a strong preference for watching films in their original language, unless absolutely necessary. Here, that proved to be the case, and it was basically a reminder of why I prefer subtitles. This isn’t just dubbed into English, it was dubbed into English by Indians. Imagine watching a gangster film set in New York, where everyone has a Swedish accent. It’s immensely off-putting, and I had great difficulty in getting past it.

The plot has a hitwoman, Chris (Kingpayome), who has worked for Mr. Ralph (Macdonald) since before the birth of her daughter, Rin (Prommart). The daughter is being brought up in the family business, along with another girl, Joi, who was rescued from a crime scene. However, Rin is now in those difficult teenage years, and is being distracted by a schoolgirl crush on Sun, a senior at her college. This causes her to lose focus and make mistakes in the assassinations she carries out with her mother, for “Ralph Elimination Ltd”. Coming under pressure from her boss, Chris decides to take the liability of Sun out of the picture. Needless to say, Rin is not exactly happy about this decision.

It’s better in the second half then the first, once it stops being badly-dubbed teen soap-opera, and turns into badly-dubbed action, which is tolerable. Things aren’t exactly what they seem initially, and the dynamics of the situation become considerably more interesting as a result. I’ve seen enough of this kind of thing to feel I knew where this was going. I was expecting it to have Chris eventually coming to terms with her daughter’s wish for a normal life, and then protecting Sun from Ralph’s murderous intentions. No. Does not happen. Well… it kinda does. But the way it gets there, is in a rather more plausible manner, with everyone from Chris to Ralph having credible motivation for their actions.

Outside of the dire dub, the main issue is perhaps the somewhat underwhelming action, both in quantity and quality. It’s only okay in both departments, except for Rin’s final assault, which is a nicely-staged attack on Ralph’s headquarters. That is a shame, since the script is one of the better ones, and Prommart feels a little like she is channeling Natalie Portman in Leon. Though that might just be a combination of her hairstyle, and the way the movie ends. It does teeter over into melodrama on occasion, not least with a lengthy, emotive video message from Chris to her daughter. Overall, however, there is an impressive fatality rate, and it would likely be close in entertainment value to the preceding entries – if only it was available in a similar format.

Dir: Isara Nadee
Star: Metinee Kingpayome, Ray Macdonald, Nitchanart Prommart, Phiravich Attachitsataporn
a.k.a. Ladies First

Jack Squad 2: The Next Generation

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★½
“Do you know what the definition of insanity is?”

This is a question posed by the bad guy (Fears) towards the end of this, and of course, he provides the usual explanation in response: “It’s doing the same thing, expecting different results.” After watching this, I would choose to adjust it slightly. A valid definition of insanity is making the same movie, and expecting different results. Because it is, more or less, what Rankins has done here: it’s a remake of his own movie from fourteen years ago, Jack Squad. Now, there’s something to be said for that. I mean, Cecil B. DeMille did The Ten Commandants twice, while directors from Hitchcock to Michael Haneke have remade their own films. 

The difference is, they were kinda busy. For instance, Hitchcock directed twenty-five features between his two versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much. Since the original Jack Squad in 2009, Rankins has made just one feature: Angry Kelly in 2014. Did he not manage to come up with more than one original idea in a decade and a half? And that count is presuming Angry Kelly is not about a man who is annoyed because he was drugged and robbed by a trio of women. I’ve not seen it, I can’t say. Here, we get a little variation at the start, where the original Jack Squad get hunted down, and a bit at the end, where there’s dissension in the ranks over hidden money.

In the middle though? It’s a blatant re-make. Three young women decide to make money by drugging and robbing men. This goes wrong, when one of the targets is a courier for a violent drug boss, carrying a large sum of cash. They make the ill-advised decision to hold onto the money, a choice which brings them into the crosshairs of its real owner. If anything, we have even less going on this time. It’s a good half-hour before the new trio, of Cassie (Green), Nikki (Alexander) and Cam (Lynn) put their scheme into action. I guess there is at least some altruism, the goal – at least initially, before the designer shopping kicks in – being to cover the medical bills run up by one of the trio’s mother.

The overwhelming sense of deja vu here is what knocks the overall rating here down below the original. I mean, the three characters feel almost like bad photocopies of their predecessors. There’s one who has qualms about the whole concept, while another refuses to give it up at any cost. It’s likely a little more technically competent, though at basically two hours long, is still painfully over-long. There’s a weird subplot where one of the women has a mentally challenged brother, who wants to be a baseball pitcher. This does eventually show relevance, though the way it does, might have you wishing they hadn’t bothered. If we don’t get Jack Squad 3 until 2037, I am completely fine with that. 

Dir: Simuel Denell Rankins 
Star: DeShon Green, Samiah Alexander, Tinesha Lynn, Gregory J. Fears

Girl with a Gun: An Annie Oakley Historical Mystery, by Kari Bovee

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Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆½

This is an interesting idea. Take a real-life historical action heroine, whose life provides the underlying framework, and write a fictional story around that. Obviously, Annie Oakley really existed, and the broad strokes of her life here are accurate. If you’ve read our article on her, you will already know she did indeed take part in a shooting contest against famed marksman Frank Butler. That helped win her a spot on Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, with which she traveled both the United States and the world, amazing crowds with her markswomanship. The book adheres to these elements faithfully.

However, there’s a lot more going on here, which Bovee has added in. Almost as soon as Annie starts working for the show, her tent-mate, a young Indian woman, turns up dead. She is not the last corpse to do so, and there are no shortage of suspects in the crimes being committed either. The show’s manager, Mr. LeFleur, who seems to carry a torch for Annie. Twila Midnight, a medicine woman of mysterious origins, who conversely, has a passionate dislike for the heroine. Vernon McCrimmon, with whom Annie had crossed swords in the past – ending badly for him. Or possibly even Frank Butler, whose skills are failing him, with Oakley taking over as the show’s top attraction, or Buffalo Bill himself, who has skeletons in his own closet.

It’s likely not much of a spoiler to rule out the figures who actually existed like Butler, but Bovee does a decent job of keeping you guessing among the other characters. The evidence points one way, then the other, before things come to a head after an attempt is made on Annie’s life. This is only foiled due to the hedonistic tendencies of her replacement tent-mate. I think it probably works better as a whodunnit, rather than as an action story. Though there are plenty of rounds fired over the course of the book, these are almost entirely in the show’s arena, and the descriptions don’t generate a great deal of energy. You are instead left with a sense that perhaps you needed to be there.

This is a fairly straightforward story, with a generally good sense of historical time and place, capturing 1885 in the mid-West. Though I was amused by Twila saying, “His fever is high. It may be a virus,” since the first virus was not discovered and isolated by science until 1892. There’s not an enormous amount of complexity to Annie’s character here either. She’s relentlessly good-hearted, even to people who really do not deserve her kindness. But that’s part of her heroic nature, I guess, and Annie’s desire to provide for her family, as well as her loyalty to her horse, Buck, who also comes under threat, make for admirable qualities. I’d call this a solid read, which doesn’t seek to push the envelope, and if not aiming high, does hit most of its targets. D’you see what I did there?

Author: Kari Bovee
Publisher: Bosque Publishing, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 3 in the Annie Oakley Mystery series.

Abigail (2024)

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★★★
“And Then There Were None – with vampires”

SPOILER WARNING FOR THIS REVIEW: ESPECIALLY IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE TRAILER!

Trailers can do a lot of damage to a movie’s impact, and is definitely the case here. If the trailer hasn’t outright told us the idiot gangsters had kidnapped a little vampire girl, the first third could have been very suspenseful. To elaborate: we witness the kidnap of an innocent little girl; normally our sympathies would immediately be with the victim, worrying about her well-being. We explore the setting and characters are more or less established. Then a gruesome murder happens and the gangsters wonder, “Who’s killing our people? Why? The girl’s father is big in the (criminal) underworld and has a mysterious henchman named Valdez. What’s his story? Is it all a reckoning for past misdeeds?”

This potential homage to Bryan Singer’s semi-classic The Usual Suspects falls flat, as anyone who saw the trailer (and posters) already knows it’s the little girl who is pulling the strings and will murder the gang of misfits. It’s a total fail by the marketing department responsible, though you understand a wish to signal to horror fans it’s something for them. I guess it will pay a dividend in the end – though will keep people away who are not horror fans and might have gone, expecting a crime thriller. In any case, the big surprise is ruined and you can’t help wonder if that was the best way to go.

When Hitchcock released Psycho in 1960, no people were allowed into the cinema after the movie had started, and the audience had no idea what awaited them. You thought it was about Marion Crane stealing money and going on the run… until she got stabbed in the shower. That was a real shock. You won’t experience that here, and no-one cares for the first victim (played by the unfortunately now deceased Angus Cloud). At one time, a plot with a group of people in an enclosed space and a killer amongst them, would have made for fine suspense. The film makes no secret about taking inspiration from Agatha Christie’s 1939 thriller And Then There Were None (originally known by another, non-PC title!), and the same concept works in Alien – a fine horror/thriller in space with as much focus on characters as on suspense.

Today, it doesn’t seem to be enough. You instead end up with superficially drawn characters, about whom you just get to know enough to understand where they come from, and then you blast in with the gory action scenes. Don’t get me wrong; I liked the movie. But I would have liked it more if I had cared for the characters fate. They die here and there, they twist and they turn – and I just don’t care for them at all. The movie just has not the time to build its characters, or doesn’t want to take the time for it. Which is a pity but perhaps a sign of our frantic, “more, more, more” times. I recently saw a new BBC version of Christie’s story; while they took the time to tell it, they overloaded the plot because simple, storytelling has gone out the window in today’s film narrative.

The big problem is, the moment the main characters are established as gangsters, you don’t really feel pity for them. Why should you? They are mean spirited people – bad guys – and that is a minor flaw in the concept. Having largely sympathetic space travellers finding an alien life form is quite the opposite. We are supposed to side with them because it’s a vampire. But the necessary character building hasn’t been done, and because one twist isn’t enough the movie gives us two or three more. At the end we are supposed to root for Abigail (Weir) and last surviving gangster Joey (Barrera), fighting one of her own who turned against them. Directors Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett are asking too much of us emotionally. Should we always side with the underdog? Why? In the end they are all monsters, therefore equally unlikable, though the movie tries to make us pity the little vampire, that big daddy doesn’t really seem to care about, until he shows up at the end.

The same directors did much better with Ready or Not, where you constantly felt for Samara Weaving’s character, thrown into the pit with an insane, blood-thirsty family. It doesn’t work well here, due to the basic premise. The leads are hardly more than sketches and even Joey doesn’t get much more than being a junkie mom who cares for her little boy. It’s not enough in the development department, folks! The actors all do good work – as far as I can tell. In Germany, you get distracted by the choice of dubbing actors: the voice actor for Cloud is hardly bearable and Kevin Durand’s German voice sounds almost like Patrick from SpongeBob Squarepants which is… distracting! Also, I feel in the German version, a lot of humour is lost, I guess something to do with line delivery. I can imagine a line like “I hate ballet!” being hilarious in English, but in the German version it has no real effect.

I don’t know any of the actors save Durand and supporting actor Esposito, but the greatness of Weir’s performance can’t be stressed enough. I did believe her helpless girl – or would if I hadn’t been spoiled before – as well as the frightening vampire. How many people can scare a bunch of grown-ups? Though, of course, it’s not new ground. We saw how effective such casting can be when Kirsten Dunst did it thirty years ago in Interview with a Vampire. The trope of the “scary, evil kid” in general reaches back until at least the 1950s. The production design is beautiful and luxurious for the old villa with bar and billiard table, a kitchen (strangely situated in the cellar?), secret tunnels in a library, a computerized control room and a pool underground for corpse disposal. Similarly great is Brian Tyler’s effective score which I would really like on CD instead of the digital release.

I was less impressed by Barrera who plays the main gangster role. She is set-up as the intelligent, tough and strong woman, but her actions constantly contradict this, e. g. she can’t imagine a kid could be evil. Why? Because she has a child of her own? Everyone knows children are natural monsters and only by time, education and life experience become “human”. Her colleagues turn out partly smarter than her there. And when she, a normal mortal, tells a vampire, “I’m going to kill you now!” you wonder how delusional she can be. There’s a big goof at the end, when she gets her mobile out to call her son and say goodbye. Weren’t all cells collected early on by Esposito’s character? If she had another, wouldn’t she have been able to call help? Why didn’t she? Perhaps I missed how she got it back – maybe in the control room when the two vampires were fighting. Someone please enlighten me? [Jim. I think when she’s in the control room unlocking the house, she sees the bag of collected phones and takes one from it. Not exactly highlighted though!]

Strangely, the movie is claimed to “re-imagine” Universal’s Dracula’s Daughter from 1936. Having seen the classic movie, I can hardly see any similarities, save the main character is a female vampire, and daughter of a vampire. Her father turns up in a last minute surprise, effectively adding nothing except for re-establishing the classic Hammer vampire, of the Christopher Lee variety. Still, despite these flaws this is a good, entertaining horror movie. It’s not really suspenseful as the main characters are disposable and not developed enough to care about. And the trailer… (see previous rant!) It’s also surprisingly gory. I remember a time when such a movie would have been for 18+ audiences in Germany; this is 16+. Well, it’s not the 1980s anymore and Catholic priests aren’t sitting in German censorship board meetings anymore, so… enjoy!

Dir: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett
Star: Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens, Kathryn Newton, Will Catlett

Now, that trailer… Again: SPOILER WARNING!