Author: Jim McLennan

Shero

  By

★★½
“Lifestyles of the rich and attractive.”

Not to be confused with Sheroes – because I know I did – this is a TV series from Singapore, marking the country’s first appearance on this site. So that’s nice. It’s the story of the Zhang sisters, Yin Xi (Wong), who runs an (almost) all-female bodyguard company, SHERO, and her younger sibling, photographer Yin Chen (Peh). While on a job in Australia, Yin Xi is attacked, and disappears: unknown to anyone, she is hospital, having lost her memory. Yin Chen takes over the company, and works to unravel the mystery of why her sister was attacked, with the help of Yue Rui Xiang (Tan), the CEO of a shipbuilding company who is a client of SHERO.

Turns out, there is a lot going on here – as you can imagine, given there are twenty episodes, each around 45-50 minutes long. Fifteen and a quarter hours, in total. So, for example, there’s an eventual connection to the murder of the sisters’ parents, seven years previously, which needs to be addressed. It also feels like SHERO need to ramp up the background checks on their employees, since it feels like all of them have secrets. Or as another example, there’s one worker who was a former drug addict – which is okay, this was known when she was employed. But her mother is a raging alcoholic, now victim to a blackmailer; a situation now seriously affecting her daughter’s work for the company. 

So, really, there’s as much soap opera here as action, with romantic entanglements and family drama very much the order of the day. I was expecting something a little more like Pamela Anderson’s V.I.P. series (which I feel I must get round to reviewing), but this is much more one over-arching story-line across all twenty episodes, with occasional side-plots. Everyone in the show is almost weirdly attractive, and while I get that Singapore is one of the richest countries in the world, this feels almost a promotional video for the country [Makers Mediacorp are a state-owned media company, so that may be a factor]. Certainly, the Australian capital of Canberra gets its product placement in – and they are not the only ones. 

There are some action scenes, mostly martial arts based, though guns seems to end up doing most of the killing. But they’re competent rather than particularly outstanding. The use of both amnesia and multiple personality disorder as plot points is hackneyed, both of these coming and going as the plot requires. Though I was impressed by how unexpectedly bleak the show ends up being. While I might not have made it to the end had I been more actively watching it, it was simply something not too demanding, to distract me while I got my daily exercise in. As such, it filled the gap in my morning regime adequately. Yeah, “adequate” seems like the right word for this overall.

Dir: Chen Yiyou
Star: Joanne Peh, Romeo Tan, Carrie Wong, Nick Teo
The whole series is available with subtitles on YouTube.

Carnage Park

  By

★★½
“Goes off the rails, and not in a good way.”

There’s a very strong start here, and this makes the way it implodes at the end all the more disappointing. The film certainly hits the ground running. It’s 1978 in rural California, and ‘Scorpion’ Joe Clay (Hébert) is fleeing from the scene of a botched bank robbery. His wounded partner in crime is bleeding out in the back seat, and there’s a hostage, bank customer Vivian Fontaine (Bell), in the trunk. But when he pulls off the road to sort things out, freeing Vivian so she can help, we discover there are much worse things in the desert than scorpions. For Joe quickly gets his head blown apart. 

This is the work of completely insane Vietnam vet, former sniper Wyatt Moss (Healy). He lures people off the road, torturing and killing them, because… Well, because he’s a completely insane Vietnam vet. I will not be taking any further questions on the topic at this point. He has the tacit collusion of his brother (Ruck), the local sheriff, though even he has just about had enough of covering up for Wyatt’s madness. Vivian does manage initially to get the jump on the predator. However, she commits the fatal mistake, a common one in horror movies, of not making sure the killer is really dead. And guess what? He is not, leading to an extended chase sequence through the mines on the remote property. 

Which is where the problems occur. Keating mistakenly thinks that having things unfold in near pitch-darkness, save for the occasional flash from a muzzle, somehow enhances proceedings. He is incorrect in this case. Not least because it goes to such an extreme, and for so long, the only evidence I had that my TV wasn’t broken, was the subtitles I had fortuitously left on from the previous movie. When it literally emerges, blinking, back into the light, you get a couple of captions in lieu of a climax, before the end credits roll. I am in no way exaggerating, when I say that it ranks among the worst endings I’ve endured, over the more than twenty years I have been running this site. 

Although the early going is certainly derivative, most obviously of Quentin Tarantino, there’s no shortage of energy and surprises as we move through proceedings. We discover, for example, that Vivian is already having a bad day, and this may be a factor in her eventually having had enough, and fighting back. She staggers through the hellish landscape, encountering other victims – both alive and dead – trying to find a way out or help. Yet she ends up self-sabotaging these hopes, in the most unfortunate of fashions, leaving her entirely on her own. Such a shame the film decides not to give its heroine the finale she deserves, instead burying both it and Vivian in the darkness of an underground mine, and offering no satisfactory resolution to speak of.

Dir: Mickey Keating
Star: Ashley Bell, Pat Healy, James Landry Hébert, Alan Ruck

Circle of Bones

  By

★★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

  By

★★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

Sister’s Revenge

  By

★★
“The Harder They Fall”

This gains something for novelty value, coming from Jamaica – a country from which I think I have only ever seen one film before, reggae classic The Harder They Come. It’s also so obscure, there’s no listing for it in the IMDb. Unfortunately, despite being available to watch on Tubi, the presentation leaves a lot to be desired, particularly in the subtitles. The film’s dialogue is in a roughly equal mix of heavily-accented English, and Jamaican patois, often in the same sentence. It feels like the subs were generated purely by an audio to text application, so the English captioning is spotty and there’s no translation at all for the patois. As subtitles go, they’re basically useless.

I was still able to discern the plot easily enough, though details like the lead character’s name remain a mystery, in part because of the lack of other sources of information. I’m going to call her Sister (Francis), in line with the title. She is a soldier, who is also responsible for taking care of her 16-year-old sibling, Blessing (Wallace). Unfortunately, Blessing has just confessed that she is pregnant, and worse, there are two possible fathers. Sister is less than happy about this. After confronting the young men, and getting nowhere, she goes to the police and convinces Officer Dibble (Vassell) to arrest them. This lasts only until the mother of one, Sonia (Russell), bribes Dibble to let them go, having failed to bribe Sister to drop the case. 

It’s therefore up to Sister to make sure justice is served herself. She abducts one of the perpetrators, and makes him confess, an act which allows the case to go up above Dibble’s head. Sonia then pays Dibble more, to take care of Sister permanently, but her military training makes him no match. [To be fair, when he goes to see the men, he’s holding his hand-gun sideways, then tucks it into the front pocket of his jeans. Jamaican police are rather loose with firearms training, it appears]. She then repeats the exercise with Sonia, extracting a confession on video of her bribery, allowing her and Blessing to achieve closure, apparently deciding they will raise the child together. 

It seems very basic, though given the subtitle situation, this is no bad thing. The first half in particularly is very chatty, basically an extended series of conversations: Sister & Blessing; Sister, Blessing & Dibble; Sister & Sonia; Sonia & Dibble. Director Brown doesn’t seem to have a lot of shots in his locker, so these have to sustain on the acting, and that’s a mixed bag. Francis and Russell are the best, and the scenes between the two guardians do crackle, but Wallace is unconvincing, and I was never particularly on Blessing’s side. [The sex seems to have been entirely consensual] I’m reluctant to be too harsh, since the presentation certainly doesn’t help. Outside of being a groundbreaking curiosity, I’m not convinced there’s much of note here. 

Dir: Richard Brown
Star: Jessica Francis, Jayvia Wallace, Candice Russell, Andrew Vassell

The Bitter Taste

  By

★★½
“Olympic-level self indulgence.”

I have to give this credit for being something different. A vampire sports movie? Not a genre cross I’ve seen before. Especially when the sport is… um, modern pentathlon, the least-watched member of the modern Olympics. It’s a five-discipline event, based on the skills needed by a cavalry officer: running, shooting, fencing, swimming and horse-riding. All five play their part here, mostly in the form of Marcia Lorenz (Dordel), a former pentathlete, who is now a hunting guide. Well, was. She just got fired, and has absconded with valuable antique documents belonging to the customer who was responsible. Driving through remote woods, she stops to help a woman by the road, and that’s where things kick off. 

Turns out the woods belong to the Countess Badesky (Wolf), a Bathory knockoff who escaped execution with her four henchmen, but have been locked in their estate for centuries courtesy of a magic spell. They’re not happy about it, but maintain their eternal youth by drinking the blood of penathletes, who are considered the ultimate warriors. It’s unclear what they did before the sport was invented in 1912. Kinda lucky Marcia was an expert in the sport, before injury ended her career. And what are the odds? Those documents she lifted are key to lifting the occult lockdown and letting the Countess roam free. Only Marcia, plus possibly plucky fisherman Josh (Paseti) and local cop George Balough (Alexander-Sieder), stand in her way. 

There is actually more going on, as you would expect in a film running one hundred and thirty-one minutes. Logic is not its strong suit, stuff happening simply because the makers think it looks good. Marcia donning a wedding dress she finds in the castle is one such conceit. Not only does it fit perfectly (okay, it may be a little small in the bust, if you know what I mean and I think you do), she keeps it on while swimming. This kind of thing will eventually elicit derisive snorts, but is perhaps inevitable, with Tolke and Dordel having written, directed, produced, starred, edited and shot the whole thing between them. The film desperately needed an outside perspective to say, “Hang on – that’s a bit much, isn’t it?” 

Dordel was previously in Mission NinetyTwo, which also seems to have been inspired by her real-life activities. There, it was a background in forest science; here, it’s Dordel actually being a fairly adept pentathlete. Her skill-set is spun off in this case, into a batshit crazy film which wears a grab-bag of horror influences on its sleeve. from the hedge maze of The Shining through to blatantly lifting Evil Dead II‘s “Swallow this!” line. Sometimes it works, but it is in desperate need of editing down. A streamlined version of this – with less jerky editing – might have had cult potential, along the lines of Bloody Mallory. Instead, it comes over too often as bloated and self-indulgent, when it needs to be lean and mean. 

Dir: Guido Tölke
Star: Julia Dordel, Rita Wolf, Nicolo Pasetti, Anne Alexander-Sieder

Ghost Killer

  By

★★½
“Spectrally short of satisfying.”

By coincidence, I watched this after Baby Assassins 3, without realizing the star here plays Chisato in that franchise; the director here was also its action director. Discovering the overlap is a minor demerit against Ghost Killer, because it counts as something of a waste of her talents. It’s a lovely idea – if you’re just an action fan in general, then it likely scores half a star higher. However, specifically as an action heroine film, there is room for improvement. It begins with the assassination of an assassin. Hideo Kudo (Mimoto) works for a criminal organization, and his death occurs in somewhat murky circumstances. The spent cartridge used to kill him, takes on his vengeful spirit, and the casing is picked up by an innocent college student Fumika Matsuoka (Takaishi). 

After a period of mutual adjustment to being haunted and doing the haunting, Fumika agrees to help Kudo find out who was responsible for his murder, and take revenge. She is the only person who can see and talk to Kudo, and when she grasps his hand, that allows him to take over her body, with all the associated hitman abilities. Along the road to his vengeance, they will have to deal with a date-rapey triple tag-team, as well as another assassin in the same organization, a former student of Kudo, Toshihisa Kagehara (Kuroba). That pair’s relationship is a little fraught, even after Kagehara is convinced about the reality of what is happening. 

The first half of this is very solid, highlighted by the performance of Takaishi as both a college student and a vengeful killer – simultaneously, which makes it all the more remarkable. It means she has to be an expert fighter, and somebody who wouldn’t say “Boo!” to a goose, as her and Kudo tussle for control. I feel as if that enough would have been sufficient to propel the narrative of the entire film. However, it ends up diverting into less interesting Yakuza-based activities in the middle, and it almost becomes easy to forget that Kudo is dead. There aren’t really any surprises once the framework of the situation has been established, heading towards the eventual and predictable confrontation between Kudo and his killer. 

And that’s the problem. It’s between Kudo and his killer, not Fumika. It’s still “in her body,” and I enjoyed the scenes where Kudo is guiding her to hide – telling her when to go around a pillar, for example. But when battle is joined, the film shows Mimoto doing the fighting, not Takaishi. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a very good fight, and that’s why I’d say a general viewer is still likely to be satisfied by it. But I was looking forward to seeing the actress really getting to let loose. After all, having experienced the Baby Assassins trilogy, there’s no issue about her martial arts abilities. Seeing her largely sidelined at the end was a disappointing way to finish things off. 

Dir: Kensuke Sonomura
Star: Akari Takaishi, Masanori Mimoto, Mario Kuroba

Zoya

  By

★★★
“High-quality torture porn”

This was originally made under the working title of The Passion of Zoya, and the Joan of Arc reference is on point. Both were young warriors fighting against the occupation of their native land, captured by the enemy and tortured before being executed. But they became a rallying point for their country as it succeeded in expelling the invaders, and are now revered as national heroines. The real Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya (pictured) was an 18-year-old teenager in 1941, who signed up to be dropped behind the front-line as the Germans invaded Russia, and carry out missions of sabotage intended to make life difficult for the Nazi army. It did not end well, but she became the first woman Hero of the Soviet Union in WW2, less than three months after her death.

Unsurprisingly, the facts are a bit murky, with the regime at the time intent on making a heroine of her, who could be used for propaganda purposes. [There was another film of the same name made in 1944, to that end. It’s on YouTube; I need to find subtitles before I can review it] This was criticized on its release for historical inaccuracies, but most of the events match the Wikipedia page, at least. There is perhaps artistic license over her motivation, signing up after her fiancé was killed in action. Whether her capture was triggered by the betrayal of a colleague in the sabotage cell, Vasily Klubkov (Kologrivy), or the betrayal was after her capture, as depicted here, I don’t know.

As ever, I’m here for the cinematic experience, not a documentary. As such, it’s well made, though concentrates to such an extent on her post-capture experience that it seemed to border on the exploitative. The lengthy sequence where Zoya is stripped and whipped, is the most obvious example, and her stoicism as she refuses to give up any useful information makes things worse. Perhaps the most interesting character beside Zoya is Hauptmann Erich Sommer (Cerny), who seems to feel for his captive, explicitly ordering the troops under his command to refrain from abuse. Not that they necessarily obey. I likely was more impressed by the earlier stages, depicting Zoya’s training and her activities behind enemy lines, which are tense and well-assembled.

There’s no doubt she was being positioned as a heroine, from the first reports of her death in state newspaper Pravda [which included a gnarly, NSFW photo of her corpse]. This feels like it’s trying to do the same thing, right up to her defiant speech on the scaffold: “Comrades, beat the Nazis. Burn them! Poison them! There’s 200 million of us, you can’t hang us all.” I imagine that would have had the intended effect in 1942, of inflaming patriotic anger and willingness to fight. But I can’t say I was particularly moved, with my main reaction to Zoya’s death being relief that her torment was over. More depth and less torture would have been preferable, I’d say. 

Dir: Maksim Brius + Leonid Plyaskin
Star: Anastasia Mishina, Nikita Kologrivy, Wolfgang Cerny, Darya Jurgens

Ferromancer, by Becca Andre

  By

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

Bridget ‘Briar’ Rose is a rarity: a woman who runs a canal boat, transporting cargo along the waterways which form the Ohio & Erie canal network. However, her livelihood is under threat. The increasing growth of the railway as an alternative method of transportation is increasingly a rival for the jobs she takes, and her cousin, Andrew, is looking to see her barge out from under Briar, so he can invest in the railways instead. However, she suspects he is working with an outlaw: a ferromancer, one of the mages who revolutionized industry in Europe, but who had supposedly been wiped out two decades ago due to the threat they posed. 

If she can prove that, it will discredit Andrew, and allow Briar to keep plying her trade. She steals the plans from Andrew’s house, and kidnaps his apparent business partner, Grayson, after he finds her and demands the return of the plans. Doing so creates a whole new set of issues, bringing Briar and her crew into contact with some very dangerous people. In particular, Mr. Solon, a ferromancer whose can use the darker magical arts to turn people into soulless automatons under his control. I think the world building here is likely the strongest suit. Though it’s lightly drawn – I’m really curious about what must have been a war between the mages and The Scourge, the organization set up to destroy them. 

The sense of period is also nicely done. For some reason, I kept forgetting it was taking place in America, maybe because I associate canals more with England. But it’s another aspect of the world which I enjoyed, a slightly alternate history where a brief dalliance with magic was ruthlessly crushed. On the other hand, I was rather confused by the motives of a number of characters. Both Grayson’s and Solon’s motivations are murky at the best of times. The former’s fondness for dribbling out both significant and relevant information, which might have helped, annoyed me – considerably more than it did Briar, who just seems to (metaphorically) roll her eyes briefly and keep on hanging out with him. 

Given the era, it’s not surprising that most of the physical action is left to the men-folk. However, Briar does get involved in a brawl with another “canal chick”, for want of a better time. She’s also not averse to a great leveller in the battle between the sexes, which is a kick to the groin! The further we go on, the clearer it becomes that ferromancers are very different to normal people – to a degree where they may not even technically be human. Andre does leave a lot of things open at the conclusion of this, although at least has the courtesy to avoid a direct cliffhanger. Was there enough to get me to buy into further volumes? Likely not immediately, though it’s not entirely off the table. 

Author: Becca Andre
Publisher: Independently published, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 5 in the Iron Souls series.

Survive the Night

  By

★★★
“Never get between a lioness and her cubs.”

There’s a strong parallel between this TV movie and Judgment Night, a theatrical feature, also from 1993, starring Emilio Estevez and Cuba Gooding Jr. Both involve a group stranded in an urban war-zone who incur the enmity of a local gang, and consequently have to fight to eescape. The difference with this – and why it’s here – is the victims are three women: psychiatrist Victoria (Powers), her daughter Julie (Robertson) and sister Stacey (Helen Shaver). They are on their way home after a family Thanksgiving dinner, when a quest for fuel leaves them stranded in the South Bronx. That is just start of their problems, courtesy of Ice (Graham) and his vicious gang of thugs.

Before long, the trio of women are being chased through the streets, buildings and underground passages of the neighbourhood. They need to dig deep into their inner fortitude, with the help of renegade gang member, TJ (Shepherd), who quits them after seeing Ice stab another member dead. There are times where, yes, violence is the answer. This would be one of them, with the women using their wits to build traps for their hunters. As well as dropping an engine block on one. For a TVM from the nineties, this is surprisingly (read: impressively) violent and bloody. The cops are basically useless too: reluctant to get involved, and when they do, Ice disposes of them with almost ludicrous ease.

You can, however, tell how the script tip-toes around the obvious. Ice’s gang of thugs is remarkably multicultural, and this consequently comes across as more of a class conflict, with the obviously well-off Victoria and family, being threatened by the poors. The same racial blindness was the case in Judgment Night, where the gang leader was played by Dennis Leary. He was actually much more effective than Graham, who comes over as someone cosplaying as a gang leader, instead of being one. While it’s Stacey who initially proves the most adept at self-defense, Victoria in particular has a nice arc, realizing the only way to survive is to become as vicious as Ice. Again, it’s a surprising moral given the medium and the era of production. 

It’s a bit of a time-capsule, in this depicting how parts of New York were perceived in the nineties. And having visited the city during the decade, it’s not wrong. Indeed, the version you get here is likely tidier. Toronto stood in as a location for the actual Big Apple, and isn’t particularly convincing in this case. Director Corcoran has a lot of experience in the field, and it shows. Takes a while for things to get going – we need to be introduced to everyone, on all sides, even the irrelevant cops. But after about twenty minutes, when things kick off, the pace is maintained well. This is a solid enough movie by most standards, and  by TVM ones, that makes it a cut above. 

Dir: Bill Corcoran
Star: Stefanie Powers, Kathleen Robertson, Chaz Lamar Shepherd, Currie Graham