★
“Put this on your blacklist. And that’s snow joke.”
This isn’t quite the worst action heroine film I’ve ever seen. That dubious honour still goes to Naked Avenger, I think. But this one certainly deserves to be in the conversation. I don’t think a movie has ever lost my interest so quickly. Literally before the opening credits rolled, I realized this was the kind of almost entirely undiluted rubbish, I wouldn’t waste five minutes on, if I didn’t have to for this site. How bad was it? The film is still on, and I’ve already started writing the review. That’s virtually unprecedented. The main problem is audio which appears to have recorded on a flip-phone, from the bottom of a swimming pool. It’s among the worst I’ve ever heard on a commercial release. Initially, I thought it might be the source, but the Prime Video version was just as intolerable. At least that version had closed captions.
The plot is no great shakes, though has some potential. Sarah Camden (Buckner) comes home from the Marines to bury her mother. While she’s at home, her little sister is killed on the streets of her local town. Sarah – code name Snow Black – realizes it has been taken over by gangsters and drug dealers, with even the mayor in their service. After her father is also murdered, she decides to clean up the neighbourhood. The issues with this are plentiful, beginning with the fact our heroine’s tattoos wouldn’t actually be allowed on a Marine. Then there’s the fact she doesn’t actually fight anyone much until 55 minutes in – and this only runs 80 minutes. While Buckner looks at least somewhat the part, when she finally gets into action, it takes place in slow-motion, presumably to disguise her lack of fighting ability. This is probably also the first time I found myself wishing for some rapid-fire editing.
Let me be absolutely clear. There is hardly a single aspect of this, which is not excruciatingly incompetent. The only scene that is even slightly memorable is when Sarah’s Aunt Sydney goes into battle herself, taking on a barful of gang members. She’s played by former Bond girl Gloria Hendry, from Live and Let Die and Black Belt Jones. Now in her seventies, it’s not a great action sequence, to put it mildly. But that it happens at all, is the best thing the movie has to offer. They should have made the whole film about her and Sarah’s father, played by another veteran action star, Van Clief (the Black Dragon), who is approaching eighty. The concept of senior citizen vigilantes is something which might have done a better job of holding my attention.
Instead, this is 100% one of those films which I had to sit through, so that you do not have to. Find something, anything else to do, and you can thank me later. Oh, hey: the end credits are now rolling. It’s clearly time to wrap this up.
Dir: Robert D. Parham
Star: Sarah V. Buckner, Robert D. Parham, Ron Van Clief, Humberto Gonzalez