Month: July 2026

Circle of Bones

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★★½
“More of a semi-circle, really”

For whatever reason, I had a strong sense of deja vu while watching this, but I’ve been unable to track down any record of me having written it up. I may be confusing it with Blood Hunters: Rise of the Hybrids, which had the same director and star, or it may simply be the fairly generic nature of the story. This focuses on FBI agent Karen Wu (Chang), who travels to the Philippines to investigate a human trafficking ring. There, she’s met by local liaison officer Luciana Ramos (Torre), and they gradually uncover that the abductions and disappearances are tied to an occult group overseen by the mysterious Eduardo Vicente (Ignacio).

Originally, he was the leader of your basic hippie commune, until accidentally unleashing an entity known as Yawa, who had been trapped underground for centuries. This took over Eduardo, turned him evil, and started demanding human sacrifices from the surrounding area, the aim eventually being to give Yawa immortality. This is all recounted in flashback by Karen, who was found stumbling around in the jungle, covered in blood and saying “Yawa… Yawa…”.  After a period back in the United States, she has now returned to the Philippines, and the story is gradually prised out of her by local Detective Liz Fajardo (Victoria). She is piecing together the case after an attempted SWAT raid on another occult location goes horribly wrong, with the entire squad being wiped out.

There’s way too much creeping around shadowy facilities here, and there’s also a sense that English, the language in which most of this unfolds, may not be the language of choice for a number of the participants. Chang, I should stress, is fine: however, a number of the supporting cast are on considerably shakier ground. The plot is mostly humdrum and predictable: if you don’t see the big twist at the end coming, from more or less fifteen minutes in, then you need to be paying greater attention. In some ways, it feels like a throwback to the adaptations Hammer Films did of Dennis Wheatley’s Satanist books in the sixties, though this could definitely have used the gravitas of someone like Christopher Lee at its centre.

It is rather more action-oriented, with Chang doing a decent job there, operating both with her bare hands and with various weapons. It helps the cult members have no problem being used as cannon fodder, not least because, thanks to Yawa, death is barely an inconvenience. But it feels like the scope of the whole cult never lives up the early foreshadowing, when there’s talk of millionaires being involved and a hotel complex which has shades of Epstein’s island. I’d have liked a bigger conspiracy to appear, rather than it just being Eduardo and his acolytes. This is interesting only in spurts, and it needs a less cliched plot and some better performances, to wrap around its reasonably well-executed action.

Dir: Vincent Soberano
Star: Sarah Chang, Marella Torre, Jana Victoria, Ian Ignacio

Mary From the Prayer Ward

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★★½
“When you order Wynonna Earp on Temu.”

I mean: Stetson wearin’, six-gun shootin’ country gal, on a mission to slay demons, vampires and things that go bump in the West? Yeah, it’s like that. Mind you, there’s a rough start to this, with three minutes of what is likely a top contender for the worst acting of 2026. I guess it’s good to get it out of the way early, and it does make the rest of the cast look like Oscar candidates in comparison. To be fair, Jones is decent enough in the title role. Even when lumbered with some pretty clunky globs of exposition about a 17th-century Satanic cult, she is generally tolerable, and occasionally above that.

Things unfold in the rural Kansas town of Bentley, where a series of gruesome murders is baffling police chief Peaks (Neighill). He seems oddly unaware of the presence in Bentley of Mary, whose parents were fighters of the occult, killed in the line of duty. She now carries on the family tradition, with the help of her blind uncle Hughes (Polk). Naturally, these murders are the work of the unsubtly-named Velkir the Butcher (Smith), who is intent on completing a ceremony originally started in 1690’s Salem. For, y’see, the witch trials there were not hysteria, so much as a carefully-constructed cover-up of the truth, which involved a Satanic plot to raise Hecate. “What’s a Hecate?” asks Chief Peaks. Explanation follows.

It does feel like the structure of the film is a little weird. It’s not until well after the half-way point that Peaks and Mary formally team up, leading to a bit of a gallop towards the obvious confrontation with Mr. Butcher. This partnership requires a diversion, in which Mary takes him on a house call, helping a woman who is reporting strange happening in her home. He blames psychological issues, until she demonstrates otherwise, thereby convincing him of her genuine skill-set. It feels like this should have happened much earlier, to explain the casual way in which this nun is allowed to poke around crime scenes. Well, she’s got a clerical collar on, which seems to demonstrate a loose understanding of religious garb. 

My main issue, however, was the copious use of highly unconvincing CGI, from muzzle flashes and blood spatters, to showers of sparks as the supernatural entities are dispatched. It absolutely took me out of the situation every time I noticed them. Which was every time they appeared. Which was every time anything much happened. Neighill is certainly guilty of trying do much: between writing, directing, editing, co-starring, composing songs, etc. it feels like every other credit is his. But despite a cover pic (above) which makes it look more like Mary from the Special Ed Class, this isn’t worthless. As noted, Jones is an engaging heroine, and Smith’s scenery chewing antics are fun, taken in the right, B-movie way. It’s no replacement for Wynonna Earp. Yet as dollar store knock-offs go, I’ve seen worse.

Dir: Andrew Neighill
Star: Mandy Jones, Glenn Polk, Andrew Neighill, Christopher Thom Smith

The Red Peri, by Stanley G. Weinbaum

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

This 1935 novella is only the second work I’ve read by pulp-era American SF author Stanley G. Weinbaum (the other is his first and best-known short story, A Martian Odyssey, which is included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, 1929-1964). But despite dying at the age of 33, in his meteoric writing career (which spanned only about 18 months), he produced dozens of short stories and two posthumously published novels. (A number of the stories were published posthumously as well.) He earned a place in Sam Moskowitz’s Explorers of the Infinite: Shapers of Science Fiction (1974), and his stature in the genre’s history remains high more than 50 years later.

Though born in Louisville, Kentucky, as a child Weinbaum moved with his parents and sister (the family was ethnically Jewish, but to my knowledge there’s no indication that he was ever religiously observant) to Milwaukee, and lived there for the rest of his short life, except for study at the Univ. of Wisconsin at Madison from 1920-23, where he first majored in chemical engineering and then switched to English literature. (He left without graduating, after being caught taking an exam for a friend on a dare.) After his marriage in 1926, he worked at a variety of odd jobs, but began writing seriously in the late 1920s and submitting his work to magazines. A Martian Odyssey, published in July 1934, was his first sale, and brought him immediate acclaim in the small SF fandom of that day.

American SF between the World Wars was a sort of literary ghetto, disdained by critics, and found mainly in a handful of small-circulation niche magazines, dominated by editors committed to the genre’s “hard” tradition, in which the speculative element is strictly based on extrapolation from known science and scientific accuracy is a paramount concern. (Literary matters like character development, well-crafted prose, and original plotting, in that era, was sometimes of less concern.) Weinbaum, like many of the genre’s writers in his generation, had the scientific background and interest to write hard SF, but his English literature education/interest also gave him stylistic skills superior to those of a lot of his contemporaries. Both qualities are evidenced in this short work.

The Red Peri is set partly in space but mainly on Pluto (which had been discovered relatively recently, in 1930), in a future era in which humans use rocketry to travel to the planets of the solar system, but mostly to Venus and Mars; a small town on the Jovian moon Titan is as far out as their settlement goes, and the outer planets are rarely visited at all. (No date is actually given in the text, though the cover copy gives 2080; I’m not sure where that’s derived from.) Trade between these three middle planets is lucrative, but bedeviled by space pirates; and none of the latter are more feared than those of the pirate ship Red Peri. (Peri is Persian for imp or elf.)

25-year-old Frank Keene, our American viewpoint character and co-protagonist, a radiologist and physicist, has a brief run-in with a red-haired pirate (you can’t see much through a space-suit visor, but he did see that) when the freighter he’s traveling on is robbed by the Peri. A year later, he and an elderly fellow scientist, researching cosmic radiation in deep space, have to make an emergency landing on Pluto. That very cold world proves to hold a couple of secrets, one of which being that it’s the lair of the Peri –and it’s no real spoiler to reveal that “The Red Peri” is also the moniker of the pirate captain, who happens to be a very attractive young lady.

A Dr. Mike Goldsmith provides a reasonably spoiler-free page-and-1/2 Introduction and about five and a half pages of footnotes to this Grammaticus Books re-print. As this added matter reveals, despite Weinbaum’s determination to write “hard” SF, this book has its share of scientific inaccuracies (though it also exhibits some solid science as well in places). Some of these are simply the result of the limited scientific knowledge available in 1935: for instance, not much was known then about Pluto (and Weinbaum’s depiction of it was plausible at the time), and nobody back then realized that the range of radio signals is practically infinite. But (though Goldsmith doesn’t pick up on it), the author makes a MAJOR scientific error which his entire plot depends on, and which was clear to me even with my weak background in science. There’s also an “insta-love” factor going on here that’s not really credible (at least, to me). But on the plus side, our main characters are vital, nuanced and well-drawn, and Weinbaum creates a thought-provoking, morally complex situation which engages both the reason and the emotions of these characters, and of the readers.

While the ending of the tale wraps up the immediate plot here effectively, readers will probably want a continuation to the narrative; and Weinbaum in fact intended to write more about these characters. Sadly, that wasn’t to be. Less than a month after the story was published, he was dead of lung/throat cancer, brought on by his heavy smoking (and initially misdiagnosed as tonsilitis, resulting in a misguided tonsillectomy that just added uselessly to his pain). So readers will have to use their own imaginations to project future developments!

Author: Stanley G. Weinbaum
Publisher: Grammaticus Books; available from Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.
A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

The Pinkertons

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★★★½
“We never sleep.”

When we think of the tough women in the old West, the first ones that come to mind are usually, the criminals. Let’s face it, most people we celebrate as “legends of the old West” today were not really heroes. More often, they were people who broke the law, or highly questionable personalities such as Calamity Jane, Belle Starr, Pearl Hart or Etta Place. But we should not forget there is also the other side of the law! Though women were present in quite a number of job areas and were vital in the development of the country, very often history writing has focused rather on the achievements of men, overlooking the women’s part of the success story. But now and again, an interesting yet forgotten character is rediscovered and attracts new attention.

One of these characters is Kate Warne (sometimes spelled Warn), born in 1833 in New York. Coming from a poor background, life turned even more challenging after she became a widow at just 23 years old. She was working as a cleaning woman when she saw an advertisement in a newspaper. Allan Pinkerton, head of Pinkerton’s detective agency, was looking for new employees, interested in working for him. The agency were involved in quite a number of fascinating cases, such as the “Molly Maguires”. Those events were referenced in the Sherlock Holmes novel The Valley of Fear, and subsequently became the basis for a 1970 movie with Sean Connery and Richard Harris. Warne was able to convince Pinkerton to employ a female, arguing that women have an eye for details and are excellent observers. Indeed, it seems that Pinkerton grew quite fond of her as he spoke highly of her after her death.

Warne was active in solving crime cases and is said to have played an essential role in discovering a plot to kill Abraham Lincoln in 1861. She guarded him when his train passed locations where an attack was planned. (Unfortunately, she wasn’t around in 1865.) For the whole story I refer you to Warne’s Wikipedia page. But I especially like the following sentence there: “It is believed that Pinkerton came up with the slogan to his agency “we never sleep” as a result of Warne’s guard of Lincoln that night.” How much of that is true is difficult to say. Pinkerton himself was rumored to invent his own stories. He was definitely a man who knew how to blow his own trumpet. Though he had successes which prove the quality of his agency, and for a long time the Pinkertons were the most well-known and respectable detective agency.

The real Kate Warne

Kate had become the head of the female detectives department at Pinkerton’s, but died young, at just 35 years old in Chicago, of pneumonia. The Great Fire of 1871 there destroyed a lot of the company’s records, so not so much is known about Warne, apart from what Pinkerton himself reported about her and the cases in which she was involved. But in recent years this highly interesting character has had a resurgence in popular media. Among others, there have been a couple of children’s books, a novel, a non-fiction book about the female detectives at Pinkertons, a comic book and a low-budget movie on Amazon Prime, Pinkerton, in which she appears. She also played a very small role in the three-part TV series about Lincoln on the History Channel, and there has been talk of a big-budget Amazon MGM film, with Emily Blunt playing her and Jaume Collet-Serra directing.

I’m not quite sure when and why this new interest in Warne arose. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it started with this small, Canadian TV series from 2014, that ran until the following May. The Pinkertons was made by Rosetta Media and Buffalo Gal Pictures, in partnership with Channel Zero. Only one season with 22 episodes was produced, and obviously, it was not successful enough to get a second season. Which is, actually, kind of a pity, as the show ended with a cliffhanger. It’s a Western show, yes. But it is also a detective show, making it a very unusual hybrid. We are not used to seeing cowboys and detectives in the same series, and it is a smart way to cater to two different potential audiences: Western and crime fans.

It must be said, the budget was not very high: over the course of the series, we get to see the same sets again and again. The farm where Kate (Martha MacIsaac) lives for the time being, working for the elder Pinkerton, Allan (Angus MacFadyen). The local saloon in which she and young William Pinkerton (Jacob Blair) regularly meet. And the Sheriff’s office where suspects are imprisoned. Also, a lot of episodes take place in the woods or large fields, with single buildings housing the perpetrators or victims. The whole series is set in Kansas City, Missouri in 1865. Pinkerton Sr. thinks a lot of shady things happen here, which is why he insists that his son and new employee Kate stay there and work “undercover”. The Lincoln story discussed above is mentioned, but doesn’t play any role here.

The cases themselves are well-thought out. Not so complicated as to become ridiculous, nor easily and quickly figured out by viewers. They cover a wide range from murder and identity theft, to the killing of a dog. The three main characters are generally given equal attention, for this was before female characters in modern media started to become the center of everything (mostly by showing how inadequate or ridiculous men are, in the opinion of modern TV/film executives). There’s no such need here; while Will is initially not very happy about Kate, especially because his father makes her his superior, he quite quickly acknowledges her expertise and knowledge. They subsequently form a good team and work well together.

The pairing makes it possible for them to investigate different places and witnesses at the same time. Luckily, they also keep tabs on each other, with episodes where one would have been killed if the other hadn’t been around. Allan himself pops up now and again in the show, before he vanishes off to do something else. Other regulars include AnnaLee Webb (Jennifer Pudavick) who owns the saloon and the brothel in it; a black worker on Kate’s farm, John Bell; local sheriff Lawrence Logan; and Kenji Harada, a Japanese man who is initially a client, before becoming a Pinkerton apprentice. MacIsaac plays Kate Warne as a sophisticated young woman without attitude. She is neither a bombshell nor a spinstery type. She is always polite, well-dressed and appears a bit out of place in this typically Western town, as if she does belong more in the big city.

Meanwhile, Will is a bit of a rascal and wants to prove his worth as a detective to his grumpy but sympathetic father. But he and Kate get along well, developing a friendly working relationship. She doesn’t reveal much about her background. I wonder if screenwriters maybe wanted to set up something along the lines of the Benedict Cumberbatch version of Sherlock Holmes, without the extremes. She definitely has a scientific mind, quoting facts that indicate she is well-read, and uses what could be called early forensic investigative methods. But she is not set up as a genius and doesn’t solve the cases alone: this is genuine team work. In the beginning, I wondered if Kate really belonged in the “girls with guns” genre, since an investigator is not necessarily someone involved in much action. But I shouldn’t have worried: there’s enough to confirm her action heroine status!

Regrettably, the show had an open ending. Billy the Kid turns up with a new experimental rifle to take revenge on old Pinkerton, finally challenging young Will to a duel. They have a shoot-out but the outcome has to stay a mystery, as this is where the show ended. It was, of course, a gamble of the producers, in the hope that a second season would be ordered. Unfortunately it didn’t pay off, and we are left with an unfinished story. I do understand why it might not have been a big ratings success. For a Western fan, there might not be enough gun-fighting; and for a crime series fan, the Western tropes might be largely uninteresting. But I did like the mixture. All in all, this is a nice little show. 

I did sometimes think there could have been better set design: in the interior of houses, everything looked a bit spartan. Also, I wondered if the way the three main characters were such a good team and got along so well, might have made the show too humdrum for many. Some stronger emotional conflicts or personal problems in their relationships with each other, could have made the whole thing a bit more interesting. But you don’t always need that. Sometimes it’s nice just to have a team that does its work, has a good relationship with each other, and that’s it. This is a well-done detective show that might have helped to reintroduce Kate Warne to the modern public. I liked it well enough, and am indeed curious what a big movie about her might offer, if the proposed production with Emily Blunt should indeed become a reality.

Creators: Kevin Abrams and Adam Moore
Star: Martha MacIsaac, Jacob Blair, Angus Macfadyen, Jennifer Pudavick