★½
“Don’t start anything you can’t finish.”
One of the potential pitfalls of making a low-budget film, is assuming you’ll get the chance to make another. It’s different with a book, where the production (or not) is entirely in your own hands. But if you opt to create your film on the basis there will be a franchise, and there isn’t… You’re likely to leave the audience severely peeved. That’s where we find ourselves here. This came out in March 2022. Three and a half years later, I could find no meaningful evidence of the sequel this desperately needs. As a result, all the set-up which is carried out in this initial installment, leaving precious little time for much else, appears likely to be wasted.
Things begin fifteen years ago, when there is a battle for supremacy between various families, whose members possess superpowers. Eva Hawk and her husband are lost in one battle. To protect her daughters, they have their memories scrubbed so they have no knowledge of their abilities and are adopted out. Fast forward to the present day, and that conditioning is breaking down, with Elegance (Anderson), Vengeance (Mora) and Liv (Evans) being trained to use their talents for good, along with their cousin Keisha. The aim is for them to take on Ms. Brimstone (Dervin), the leader of the clan responsible for what happened to their parents. Needless to say, she’s not happy about it, and sends her minions to make sure the Strong sisters cease troubling her.
You have to wait a very long time for anything of much significance to happen, after the initial flashback to previous events. Character introductions (and there’s no shortage of them), the trio discovering that they have abilities, the ramifications of that, training of their abilities by their Uncle Al, encounters with minor bad guys to hone their powers, etc… It’s really only in the final fifteen minutes or so, that we get to the expected confrontation with the Brimstone clan. And when it shows up, it’s nothing special. The superpowers appear to have been consciously chosen for the cheapness with which they can be captured on film, e.g. mind control/reading, telekinesis (basically limited to people flinging themselves about), computer hacking, etc.
I do feel slightly bad about the low rating here, because it does feel like the makers’ hearts are in the right place, and there are occasional moments where it feels like things work. However, some of the performances here would not pass muster in community theatre of the least discerning kind, and the story is several revisions short of working. Most glaringly, one person is not killed by the Brimstone clan when they have both every opportunity to do so, and no apparent reason to keep them alive. It’s plot manipulation of the most basic kind, and was the point at which I stopped being able to give this the benefit of the doubt, and resorted to energetic eye-rolling instead.
Dir: Ramasses Head
Star: Kara Anderson, Cash Evans, Sierra Mora, Keely Dervin