★½
“Car trouble.”
I’m tempted to be very snarky, say something like “The torment here is entirely on the viewer’s end” and make that the totality of the review. However, that’s a dangerous precedent, one I don’t want to set. Before long, I’d be phoning it in, and churning out nothing but single sentence reviews. I would instead spend my time sitting on the couch, eating Doritos and scrolling idly on my phone, before dying prematurely of a heart attack, and turning Chris into a grieving cat lady. Do you want that to happen, Torment? Do you, really? However, it probably does say something that such morbid speculation is still considerably more fun than either watching or writing about this.
It’s one of those films where the time-line is jumbled up. This kind of script requires a lot of writing rigour to work, and Leone doesn’t have it at all. Though I already had a sinking feeling with an opening title sequence which looks like it was made on Windows Movie Maker. And not a current version, either. We begin with a woman picking up another women off the side of the road, and the title card. We then get a woman leaving her apartment, walking down to the car-park, getting in her vehicle. She drives around. Fills it up with petrol. Drives around some more. Parks in a different parking structure. We’re eight minutes into a 73-minute film, and I am already checking out.
Turns out there’s someone locked in the trunk. Though do not make the mistake of thinking it’s the woman picked up at the beginning. Dear me, no. That sequence turns out to be the opener for the final part of the film, a bit of stalking of the hitch-hiker through the woods. It gives the strong impression of having been tacked on as emergency filler, after the sudden realization they had done with the main plot, and only had 55 minutes of material. That is mostly to do with the woman in the trunk, who is radio host Elaine Margo (Bird). She has been kidnapped by the mysterious driver (Cay), because… Uncertain. Elaine obviously has murderous secrets of her own, but how they impact her abductor is never adequately explained.
Instead, there’s a lot of driving. Which I get. it’s clear there wasn’t much money here, so the makers went with a concept that requires few locations, and a very small cast. But it doesn’t help that the two leads are similar in appearance, so when we get scenes outside the car, it’s often unclear who is involved in them. This is just another misstep in a movie which seems compulsively drawn to making them. You’ll reach the end – which is really the beginning – and will likely feel nothing more than bemused irritation at best. It almost made a nihilist out of me, because I was left questioning the point of this film’s existence, as well as my own.
Dir: Anthony Leone
Star: Amy Cay, Paisley Bird, Isabella Giardini, JD Isabelle


★★★
It’s a samurai film. Except, it’s a Western. Only, it’s one which takes place in Scotland. I trust that’s cleared up any confusion here. However, you will still need to manage your expectations, because based on both the poster and the trailer, it would be easy to go in expecting something action-packed. It is not. At all. That element is heavily back-loaded, to the final fifteen minutes. It does include one of the more imaginative and splattery kills I’ve seen this year. Probably a bonus half-star for that alone. However, it’s more a movie about mood, atmosphere and scenery than arterial spray. But I lived in Scotland. I already know it’s pretty.
This was a real and pleasant surprise. I wasn’t even sure if this would qualify for the site, or if it would end simply being too gentle. Whole it’s not going to get any awards for hard-core action, it does fit in here. More impressively, it managed to make my empathize with someone whose views are ones I’d generally disagree with. It takes place in Iceland, where Halla (Geirharðsdóttir) is a middle-aged, single woman, waging a near one-person campaign of sabotage against heavy industry, mostly by disabling the power-lines which supply electricity to it, disfiguring the landscape and exacerbating climate change. It’s a game of cat and mouse, with the authorities keen to stop the eco-terrorist from dissuading foreign investors.
However, Halla has issues of her own, beyond the net closing in on her property destruction. A long-dormant adoption request is suddenly approved, and she can’t risk further criminal acts, as a conviction would bar her from proceeding. She intends to go out with a declaration of her manifesto, literally flung from the Reykjavik roof-tops, and a final act, stealing Semtex to blow up a key electricity pylon. Her accomplice, government employee Baldvin (Ragnarsson) is increasingly concerned about the “one last job” trope, and twin sister Ása (also Geirharðsdóttir), a yoga teacher, threatens to put a spoke in the adoption process too, by vanishing off to India for two years to live with her guru.
I get the idea of what this is trying to do: really, be a female-centric version of The Hitcher. Though to some extent, that franchise went there itself, in The Hitcher II: I’ve Been Waiting. Here, we have Bobbi Torres (Camacho) driving across New Mexico in her sweet muscle car, and when she stops for fuel, has an awkward encounter with Sheriff Bilstein (Schwab). Things get worse when she gets back on the road, and is quickly pulled over by the officer for speeding, which gets her a thousand dollar ticket she is unable to pay. Thanks to a prologue, we know Bilstein has a psychopathic fondness for tormenting and killing young women. This ain’t gonna end well.
Sloane Tarnish is not exactly your typical bounty-hunter. Indeed, she’s training for a medical degree when her shady uncle, Vin, talks her into helping out with a little job. Craving excitement, she agrees, and finds herself posing as the wife of a Fleet officer, seeking to intercept a data key with potentially very explosive information on it. A year later, Vin’s ship turns up without him on it, and she finds herself the new captain, leading the crew as they try to figure out where Vin has gone, and why he vanished. To fund this search, Sloane takes up the bounty-hunting mantle.
I must admit, my initial reaction to this was, it is less than a film, than footage from a group of Viking LARPers (Live-action Role-playing). The resources on view here are… not great. But the deeper I went into this, the more I found myself able to forgive the limited budget, and began to appreciate the story it was telling, and the characters inhabiting it. Oh, there are still major problems, such as in the “battle scenes”. And I use quotes there, since the count of participants there feels like it might reach… eight, if we’re being charitable. But when it wasn’t making ill-advised efforts to be epic in scale, I ended up enjoying this, and subsequently bought the Blu-ray.
Not to be confused, in any way, with Zero Hour!, the 1957 Canadian film which was spoofed mercilessly in Airplane! This unfolds mostly over one night in a high-rise, where Ida (Hoover) is the last person left in the building, having taken over from best friend Katrina (Dumont). She finds herself being harassed by a pair of masked figures, and simultaneously receiving messages on her phone and computer from her husband, Isaac (Groetsch). Which is perhaps even more disturbing to her, because Isaac was killed in the home invasion which opens the movie. So what’s going on? Has he become a ghost in the machine? Do they have cellphones in the afterlife? Or is there a more prosaic explanation?
At the beginning of this, I wondered if I was watching a Godzilla film. Because it opens with atomic bomb footage, depicting French test in the Pacific. We know what this leads to: gigantic lizards with fiery bre… Oh, hang on: it’s actually a group of women, looking for a place reputed to have particularly gnarly (if my knowledge of beach-speak doesn’t fail me, and it probably does) waves. There are three surfers, plus photographer Sarah (Galloy), who has been out of the game since an accident which wrecked her confidence. The island they find isn’t on any map, so it must be good, and not a death-trap waiting to happen to them. Right?
Well, this is a real roller-coaster ride of style and incompetence. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a Chinese film where the subtitles were quite so incomprehensible. Even though this one is on the YouTube channel for an official Chinese streaming service (iQiYi), the soundtrack was entirely muted at some points, and the soundtrack replaced by jaunty elevator musak at others. Despite being a mere sixty-six minutes, the presentation is therefore something of a test of endurance, and I am also not prepared to guarantee the accuracy of the plot synopsis, character names or actors. There was heavy use of Google Translate required, there being no IMDb page for the movie. I did my best.