Author: Jim McLennan

Yoga and the Kungfu Girl

  By

★★½
“Your flexible friend.”

I’m trying to figure out if the “the” in the IMDb title used here is superfluous. “Yoga and Kung-fu Girl,” as on the DVD sleeve would make more sense, given the heroine’s martial arts are a combination of traditional skills with extreme flexibility. In some ways, it’s a slightly less exploitative version of things like The Crippled Masters, with its amputee-fu. The heroine here, Phoenix, could similarly make a living as a carnival exhibit, given her contortionist abilities, which are here shoe-horned into use to provide a style of fighting. To say this works with variable success would be an understatement. There are moments when her talents and flexibility are genuinely impressive. However, there are others where her limitations and lack of training are painfully apparent.

The story has Phoenix (Chan) as an orphan, taken in by the formidable Madame Kao, who brings Phoenix up as part of her troupe of martial artists, while providing herbal remedies to the local people [I must say, the transition that had her foster kids flipping across the meadow, to become adults at the far side, was kinda neat] Phoenix’s best friend is Ho Fei (Chi), but he has a bit of a gambling problem, stealing from Madame Kao to fund his habit. Trouble ensues, not helped by a jealous rival trying to frame Kao for bad medicine, and additionally, Ho ends up accused of a murder he didn’t commit. It’s up to Phoenix to lead the charge against the villains responsible.

This appears to have been made as a vehicle for Chen, but it doesn’t seem she ever appeared in anything else after this – whether due to commercial failure or a lack of personal interest. Perhaps wisely, the script makes her character mute, limiting the need for actual acting: she communicates in sign language instead. Her skill-set provides the movie with its sole gimmick, and apart from that, this is largely indistinguishable from any other genre entries of the time. The only area where it makes an impression is the final fight, where Phoenix, Ho Fei and another of Madame Kao’s orphans face off against the big boss.

That it requires three of them to take him down is quite understandable, and it’s about the only moment where Phoenix’s unusual and acrobatic style of kung-fu works, because it’s one ingredient in the recipe for the resulting fight, not the entire dish. When it (or she) tries to stand on its own merits, there just isn’t enough to sustain the interest for more than a few minutes of “Ooh: I didn’t realize spines could bend to such a shape”. It’s possible, had she persevered, that the rather homely leading lady might have eventually managed to go on to develop into someone capable of carrying a feature. However, you would be hard pushed to feel that the world of martial arts movies is a poorer place, because the sub-genre of contortionist-fu never apparently managed to establish a foothold past this singular entry.

Dir: Sun Yung
Star: Phoenix Chen, Chi Kuan Chun, Pai Ying

Sendero, by Max Tomlinson

  By

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

When you think of drugs, terrorism and South America, Colombia probably comes first to mind, thanks to Pablo Escobar and his cartel pals. However, it’s far from the only country in the region with a troubled history. Peru has had its fair share of strife: it produces virtually as much cocaine, and the Marxist guerillas of the Shining Path movement fought a long, bloody war against the government through the eighties. It’s during this time that the novel begins. Young girl Nina has her father killed by soldiers hunting the guerillas in her rural village, and her brother Miguel vanishes to join the Shining Path.

More than two decades later, Nina has grown up to become a cop in Lima, with the dirty war against the Shining Path apparently over – the terrorists have now, effectively, merged with the drug traffickers. She encounters Malqui, the former village priest who spent eight years in prison for protesting the murder of Nina’s father, and mentions knowing someone who had recently met Miguel. However, before she can get any more information, Malqui is picked up by the authorities and vanishes into the dark network of secret prisons. For it seems the dirty war is not as over as is publicly stated. To rescue Malqui – and perhaps be reunited with her long-lost brother – Nina is going to have to get her own hands dirty as well.

I must confess, I confused the title with “sicario,” the drug cartel term for hit-man. Between that and the cover, I was expecting something… different. Turns out, sendero is Spanish for “path” – and those who support the guerillas. Quite whether this includes the heroine is an interesting point. After the death of her father, it seems odd for her to end up as part of the government authorities, yet she becomes part of the “resistance” as she seeks to locate and free Malqui. Though by the end of the book, it’s clear that the remnants of the Shining Path are no more the solution either, with their morality little if any less problematic. The entire novel could be printed in various shades of grey: even Nina is prepared to do bad things for what she perceives as a good end.

As such, it’s a very thought-provoking read, and opened my eyes to the history of a country about which I had never known much previously, and its social and political struggles. If there’s a weakness, it’s probably the way in which Nina ends up taking a seat in the second half, with the story’s focus shifting to Miguel and his colleagues in the Shining Path [though among them, Comrade Inez does partly fill in for the lack of Nina]. It’s a shame, for Nina is an excellent heroine: one who never forgets either where she came from, or where she wants to be, and is willing to risk everything for others, in a highly altruistic manner. Hopefully, the second book is all Nina, all the time.

Author: Max Tomlinson
Publisher: Sendero Press, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 2 in the Sendero series.

Mardaani

  By

★★★½
“Korma’s a bitch… Uh, I mean KARMA…

Officer Shivani Shivaji Roy (Mukerji) is part of the Serious Crimes Squad in Delhi, whose approach to policing is very much “by any means necessary.” However, she is taken out of her area of expertise when Pyaari. a young girl she has been helping goes missing from an orphanage. Everything indicates the girl has been picked up by a sex trafficking ring, run by Sunny Katyal (Verma) and his partner, Karan (Bhasin), and will soon be sold off to the highest bidder and exported out of the country. Roy has to work her way up the chain to rescue Pyaari, despite opposition both from her boss, because it’s not her responsibility, and from the gang. As she gets nearer to the top, the climb becomes increasingly hard, with the criminals making it clear they won’t take lightly the threat to their lucrative business which Roy represents. It’s also clear they have friends in high places.

There’s a long-standing issue of extrajudicial action by the police in India, known locally as “encounter killings.” This film is far more likely to be the problem than the solution here, with the heroine behaving in a way of which Dirty Harry would certainly approve, yet severely at odds with contemporary Western policing methods. That’s apparent right from an early scene where she publicly assaults a culprit, punctuating a list of his offenses: “Section 143 – unlawful assembly. [Slap!] Section 147 – rioting. [Slap!] Section 132 – abetment of mutiny [Slap!]”, and so on. To see a male police officer do this in a modern movie would be shocking. To see a woman do it? It’s… kinda awesome, especially in India, a country where at the time the film came out, woman represented only 6.6% of the police force.

This comes to a climax at the end,. when she faces off against Karan, and he mocks her, saying his contacts will ensure he gets off lightly. She replies, “They can do it only if you reach the police station. But you won’t reach the police station, because this is India.” Then, when he asks, “Are you going to murder me in front of everyone?”, she responds, “In India, if 50 people take the law in their hands and kill someone, then it’s not called a murder. It’s called ‘Public outrage’.” As a rabble-rousing, cryptofascist call for vigilante justice due to corruption goes… This one certainly doesn’t hold back.

But it still works well, with Mukerji making Roy a well-rounded and sympathetic character. Her mission is driven as much by a semi-maternal rage as the usual macho bullshit, and she relies just as much on intelligence as brute force. Although the film loses steam when diverting attention to the bad guys, who are little more than cartoon caricatures, I especially enjoyed the phone-calls where Karan attempts to intimidate her, and fails completely. For Roy goes all Liam Neeson on him instead: “I don’t know what your name is. I don’t know where you are speaking from, who your boss is, or where you have kept Pyaari. But I’ve figured your type… I will hunt you down in 30 days.” Even the most liberal of viewers would be forgiven a fist-pump at the end when justice, legitimate or not, is served, piping-hot with a side of poppadoms.

Dir: Pradeep Sarkar,
Star: Rani Mukerji, Tahir Raj Bhasin, Jisshu Sengupta, Saanand Verma

Angel Strikes Back

  By

★★½
“You only film twice…”

This is a sequel to Angel With The Iron Fists, and again sees Ho playing Agent 009 – though this time, the character is named Ai Si, different from its predecessor. Whatever… Here, she’s on the trail of the unimaginatively named Bomb Gang, who do exactly what you’d expect. They threaten companies, extorting them for large sums of money, and if they don’t pay up… things go boom, courtesy of their new, highly concentrated explosives. It’s led by Xiang Xiang, a.k.a. the Specialist (Shen), who has taken over a nightclub run by her twin sister, to act as a front for the group. Though, as in Fists, the true lair of evil villainy is a delightful excess in unnecessary over-production, resembling a game-show set on acid, with bonus trap-doors.

Unfortunately, it has much the same weaknesses as its predecessor (and without even the sublime glory of that moment). There’s a good chunk of time where 009 all but vanishes from her own movie, with the spotlight instead being given over to her ally in the investigation, Deng Lei (Tang). There are certainly far too many scenes of people sitting around in night-clubs, or of one set of suits chasing another set of suits around the streets of Hong Kong. Deng ends up captured by Xiang Xiang, who attempts to seduce him into joining the gang, and after he spurns her, Deng is thrown into a cell conveniently next to the twin sister. Fortunately, Ai Si is able to locate the facility, leading to a very Bond-esque climax, in which the forces of law and order storm the complex, resulting in a massive gun-battle. Throw in some gadgetry plus a Barry-esque soundtrack (in some places, actual Barry), and it’s a surprise Eon Productions weren’t consulting their lawyers.

There are some parts here which certainly will stick in memory. The sequence where Deng upstages a strong-man in his night-club act, and is rewarded by having a poisonous spider slapped on his shoulder. Fortunately, Agent 009 is prepared with (I mentioned the gadgets) her incendiary aerosol. And so begins their relationship, albeit at the cost of his jacket being reduced to ashes. Or the bit where Ai Si disguises herself as a man, because… because a bit of cross-dressing seemed required for every Hong Kong action heroine of the late sixties. It’s about as convincing here, as it is everywhere else i.e. not very. Ho’s talents on the action front are little improved from Fists, and leave Tang to take up the slack in this department

The elements here could have been an entertaining pastiche of spy movies – though I am just not certain that was the aim. When you’re unsure how seriously a movie is supposed to be taken, the viewer is likely to be left in cinematic limbo. In the end though, it doesn’t work well enough to be a good imitation of the Bond franchise, and nor is it sufficiently lampooning to be considered a parody of it. 

Dir: Lo Wei
Star: Lily Ho, Tang Ching, Shen Yi, Chiang Kuang-Chao

Bad Grandmas

  By

★★
“Near-dead.”

There is entertainment value to be found even in bad movies. Bad action, horror and SF are sometimes just as amusing as the good stuff. But bad comedy is almost irredeemable: that’s why Mystery Science Theater 3000 rarely go there. Bad comedy just… sits there, dull and unamusing, almost worthless. And that’s what we have here. It’s a somewhat interesting idea, with some potential. Unfortunately, the execution – mostly in the script and direction – are so woefully inept that even the brave efforts of Florence Henderson, in her final film, aren’t enough to salvage it. And wasting the talents of Pam Grier needs to be some kind of cinematic capital offense.

Mimi (Henderson) is trying to help out her friend Bobbi (Wall), who is being thrown out of her house by an evil son-in-law. She goes to confront the perp, only for him to end up dead. She and her senior citizenette pals dispose of the body, hiding it in a freezer. But this just brings them to the attention of Harry (Reinhold), the local loan-shark to who the son-in-law owed two hundred grand. He kidnaps Bobbi, demanding the house or the money; Mimi is having none of that, and when Harry sends over an associate to collect, the henchmen ends up similarly dismembered and in the deep-freeze. Meanwhile, the local sheriff (Batinkoff) is also sniffing around, initially having been investigating Harry’s financial dealings.

Henderson does her best with material which seems designed to destroy any audience sympathy. For example, her first victim isn’t killed initially, and Mimi immediately stabs him in the heart to finish the job. I remind you: this film is supposedly a comedy. If it wanted to go this “dark passenger” route [and it includes an explicit reference to Dexter], that might have worked better, and I’d have been fine with it. Make Mimi a retired serial killer, former CIA operative or something to explain her apparent psychopathic tendencies. For the ease with which she slides from genteel retirement into cold-blooded dispatch is jarring and at odds with the light-hearted tone for which the film is aiming (and, largely, falling short).

A far more egregious complaint would be putting one of the godmothers of action heroineism, Grier, in a timid, mouse-like role, beneath a poorly-considered blonde wig, and giving her next to nothing to do. I know she’s in her late sixties, but that never stopped the similarly-aged Helen Mirren from letting rip in Red. I just breathed a sigh of relief on checking Pam’s filmography to discover she had appeared in other films since. Bad enough this was Henderson’s swan-song, we didn’t need it also to be that of an unquestioned icon like Grier. I sense where this is trying to go – something similar to the Bad Ass franchise, with its similarly mature cast of Dannys Glover and Trejo. However, that knew what to do with its characters, and made much better use of them than this, a well-intentioned failure.

Dir: Srikant Chellappa
Star: Florence Henderson, Randall Batinkoff, Judge Reinhold, Susie Wall

Atone

  By

★★
“atone: make amends or reparation.”

I mention the above for two reasons. Firstly, because Chris wondered why the film was called “At One”. Secondly, because when it finished, I turned to her and said those four little words which mean so much: “I can only apologize…” Yes, to use it in a sentence, I’ll be atoning for picking to watch this low-rent “Die Hard in a church” offering, for some time to come. [Though the following night, I had to sit through her choice of Justice League: paid back in full, I’d say…] There were a couple of aspects here that weren’t terrible; unfortunately, the overall execution was painfully close to… well, god awful seems the appropriate term here.

Laura Bishop (Fleming) is a former soldier, struggling to adapt back to civilian life. Through her father, she gets a job as a security guard in a local megachurch which is about to open. And what are the odds, she hasn’t even been able to complete new employee orientation before a group of terrorists, led by White (Short) storm into the building and take the employees, in particular Reverend Mark Shaw (Rusler), hostage. Worse still, Laura’s little daughter is also in the building, so she has to find and take care of the moppet, as well as fending off the terrorists.

This seems to be teetering on the edge of being a faith-based action-heroine pic, which is a rate, although not quite unique entity – The Trail comes to mind. These aspects are not too badly-handled: despite the setting, they’re mostly played fairly light, and I actually found the motivation of the chief villain quite refreshing. I say this to make it clear that I’m not slagging this off for its beliefs. Especially not when there are plenty of other, perfectly credible reasons to slag it off. The entire subplot involving her daughter, for example, makes no sense, and she just kinda wanders out of an emergency exit, largely forgotten thereafter. There’s also the bizarre “street fight club” of which Laura is a member, which forms the opening scene, and is never mentioned again.

It feels as if, for every step forward this takes, there are two back. Farrelly, better known as WWE’s Sheamus, shows up as one of the bad guys, and crosses himself every time he kills someone, which is the kind of endearing quirk that works. He and the heroine have a decent bathroom brawl. But then there are amateur digital effects, poor continuity and no sense at all of escalation, as well as villains who fall astonishingly short of even basic competence. The explanation about why Lauren has her PTSD, is held back until the very end, far too late for the viewer to care one whit. It’s all a jumbled, and worse, largely boring mess. They say the devil has all the best tunes. On the basis of this, he can likely also lay claim to the best girls-with-guns films as well.

Dir: Wes Miller
Star: Jaqueline Fleming, Robert Rusler, Columbus Short, Stephen Farrelly

Ameera

  By

★★
“Explanations. They’re VASTLY over-rated…”

I should probably have learned from my first experience with Ms. Hu: the thoroughly mediocre jungle ensemble piece which was Angel Warriors. For her latest film, she moves from being merely one of a number of interchangeable pieces into the lead, and proves singularly underwhelming for that role. Though in her defense, this could have starred someone with far more charisma, martial arts ability and acting talent, and it would still not have been very good. For all its flaws, Warriors did at least have a fairly coherent plot. This, not so much. For example, it’s a full hour and ten minutes in before we discover what the villain’s Big Plan actually entails. To that point, we know it’s called Operation Hurricane, and little else. Why, pray tell, should we care about the bad guys achieving their goal, when we have no idea what it is?

Things aren’t much better on the heroine’s side. We first meet Ameera (Hu) as she takes part in a gun-battle against ill-defined opponents for ill-defined reason, on behalf of the ill-defined organization for whom she works. This goes wrong, she gets suspended, and the organization subsequently vanishes for the great bulk of the movie, so who cares? However, it turns out her mother has been kidnapped by the villains, in order to get their hands on the products of some research which was being carried out by her dad. It’s up to Ameera and her boyfriend, Jason (Hsu), to ensure they don’t get it, and stop Operation Hurricane – whatever it may be. Though before you can care, you will first have to stop snorting derisively at pseudo-science babble like a virus being “enabled with an isotope nanometers.”

I do have to say, it looks nice, with some very crisp cinematography, and was not a cheap production in terms of locations, sets and cast. This, in no way, excuses the shockingly ropey CGI effects, or the way the action is staged, so you get to see little more than the participants waving their limbs at each other. There is quite a nice car-chase round some winding mountain roads, with Jason on a motorbike chasing after the truck insude which Ameera is dangling. Again, the photography is lovely, until it’s spoiled, first by Jason’s Magazine of Infinite Ammunition, and then the MS Paint-like explosion after a car goes over the edge.

Any technical shortcomings, however, pale in comparison to a script that is spectacularly reluctant to give the viewer any meaningful information, short of having its fingernails pulled out. Both characters and plot elements show up without explanation, and you’re left trying to figure out who or what they are, and why you should give a damn. Long before the climax, where Ameera is suddenly and inexplicably re-united with the organization that suspended her, an indeterminate amount of time ago, you’ll have abandoned any hope of this being any more than incoherent if well-shot nonsense.

Dir: Xiao Xu
Star: Melrose Hu, Ambrose Hsu, Andrew Lin, Bryan Leung

Forgotten Gods by S. T. Branton

  By

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

Vic Stratton is a woman on a mission. She’s seeking out Rocco Durant, the New York mobster who was responsible for the deaths of her parents five years ago. With the cops unable to do much, she turns vigilante, and is finally on the brink of taking her vengeance when…Well, things get cosmically weird: specifically, “something both large and seemingly on fire blotted out the whole skyline across the river with its brightness.” She ends up fishing a man out of the river, who was carrying a glowing sword which makes fast work of Durant’s henchmen. Turns out, the man, Marcus, is a former Roman legionary: centuries ago, he became a guard in Carcerum, a realm to which a selection of unpleasant deities were banished by King Kronin.

Now, Kronin is dead, killed by his oldest ally, Lorcan, and Marcus needs to find a hero, worthy of carrying the Gladius Solis, the only weapon capable of keeping the gods in check. However, they are beginning to make their presence felt on Earth, and Vic isn’t the only person to have made a new friend following their dockside encounter. Durant has become an underling to Lorcan, and has picked up some disturbing new talents and character traits. For Lorcan is planning to put together an army of the undead, and is using Durant and his contacts to further that end, creating a “vampire factory.” Durant is vampire #1.

I enjoyed this. It doesn’t hold any surprises in terms of where the first volume ends – the cover pretty much gives that away! But the ‘odd couple’ relationship pairing of Vic and Marcus works well, and is occasionally surprisingly poignant. Vic’s original misgivings seem justified, when Marcus is unable to grasp the concept of an “actor”, but the two end up needing each other more than it initially seems. He needs her as a guide through the very different modern world. While as well as learning the art of fighting, she needs him to break opens the scar-tissue of deep cynicism, with which she has increasingly been affected since her parents were killed.

I’d call this first volume mostly set-up, and it’s only at the end where Vic comes into her own. In particular, she kicks into high gear when she has to rescue Marcus from a truly hellish situation in the vampire factory. The resulting sequence, involving a pit of vampires in production, is messy, to put it mildly. It demonstrates Vic’s take no prisoners attitude: she has had that since the beginning, and when combined with Marcus’s training and the Gladius Solis, eventually make for a powerful heroine. The journey there is entertaining though, and this was very much one I “watched” as much as read, the story playing out in my mental cinema. [The ‘gangster turned vampire’ aspect reminded me of Innocent Blood] Further volumes in the series have been marked for potential purchase.

Author: S. T. Branton
Publisher: LMBPN Publishing, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 4 in the Forgotten Gods series.

Pink Thief

  By

★★½
“Pink only on the outside”

Lan Hsiao-Tieh (Lu) is one of four illegal immigrants to Hong Kong, who manage to escape from the human traffickers bringing them to the colony – albeit after Lan has been raped by one. She and her friends just about manage to eke out a living on the edge of society, which treats them very unkindly in comparison to legal residents: for example, working as a coolie, they get only a fraction of the wages. As a result, they’re forced into criminal activity. One of the victims of the resultant pick-pocketing is the feared Chief Detective Lu (Lui), who tracks down the gang and makes them an offer: go undercover and help in his investigation of a Triad gang called the Eagles, in exchange for legal status. Lan is doubtful – until she realizes that one of the targets is the man who raped her. With the assistance of training from a retired thief, Lan is inserted as the moll of the gang’s leader, Hao (Tien Feng).

The film leaves a lot of potential on the table. The retired thief angle, for example, is nicely set up: the immigrants initially think he’s a doddering old fool, except that’s just his cover. However, the training through which they go through is never particularly useful once Lan goes on her mission. There’s also an unevenness of tone. It wants to be a sympathetic and serious portrayal of the plight of illegal immigrants in Hong Kong. But the impact of this is rather undone by, for example, the scene where the wife of Lan’s squeeze confronts her. For the pair end up rolling around in a hot-tub, stripped down to their lingerie. While I’m not complaining, it does appear to have strayed in from another film. The same can be said for the soundtrack: I read that it borrows liberally from Planet of the Apes, and I could swear I heard some Rick Wakeman in there as well.

It all rolls along without anything in the way of surprises, until Lan finds out the time and date when a big deal is going down. This sets up Detective Lu with the chance to bust them in the act – and, naturally, gives our lead the change for revenge on her rapist. This is remarkably formulaic, and there’s hardly anything that makes it stand out from the competition. It’s neither serious enough to merit actual consideration as art, nor trashy enough to be a Cat III classic. Despite the promise of the cover, it’s more tacky than sleazy, in its shots of the heroine’s cleavage, never rising past PG-13 level, with even the sexual assault done “tastefully”. I only watched this three days ago, yet it made so little impression, I had to put it on again for the purposes of this review. And I am still struggling to reach our standard five hundred words.

Dir: Yueh Chien-Feng
Star: Lu Hsiao-Fen, Richard Cui Shou-Ping, Lui Ming

Sheba, Baby

  By

★★★
“Neither claim on the top left of the poster are accurate.”

After the success of Coffy and Foxy Brown, Pam Grier continued her career with this not dissimilar blaxploitation flick, albeit one of a more restrained approach. Indeed, this received a ‘PG’ rating at the time of its release in April 1975, something modern ears would likely find shocking, considering the copious use of certain racial epithets deployed here. She plays private detective Sheba Shayne, who returns to her home town of Louisville from Chicago, after getting a telegram from her father’s business partner, Brick Williams (Stoker). He warns that her father (Challenger) is taking on some rough customers who are trying to force him into selling his company. Sheba, naturally, is having none of it, and when the police refuse to do much, starts working her way up the food-chain of scumbags, to the apex predator of The Man, who in this incarnation is Shark (Merrifield).

There’s not much here which could be described as particularly new or exciting. Indeed, I almost passed on the movie entirely, thinking I’d already seen it, but it appears I was confusing this with Friday Foster. That’s the thing about Grier’s career: she received only limited opportunities to break out from the ghetto of blaxploitation, and to some degree, her output is much of a muchness. Though at this point, there were precious few other areas of English-speaking media which allowed women to kick butt in the way she did. We were still in the era before Charlie’s Angels and Wonder Woman, albeit just – WW started the November after Sheba came out, and CA the following year.

For now, Grier was ploughing her own furrow in the vanguard of action heroines, and despite the generic nature of this offering (it was the final movie of Pam’s contract with American International Pictures), still represents okay value for money. It does gloss over the fact that Sheba’s Dad is little more than a kinder, gentler loan-shark, operating what appears to be a payday finance company, of the kind often described as “predatory” these days. It’s not even clear quite why Shark is so keen to take over the business. Fortunately, before becoming a Chicago PI, seems Sheba was a local cop. She still has some of the connections from that time – as a bonus, without having to worry about niceties like ‘due process’ or ‘police brutality’.

Even with the relatively low-key sex ‘n’ violence allowed by the PG rating [which would be “almost none” and “light”, compared to Grier’s previous offerings], it’s still fun to watch her in action. The highlight is likely her encounter with a “street entrepreneur” wearing a suit which looks more like an optical illusion. After he runs off, rather than answer her questions, she simply gets into the back of his pimpmobile and waits for him to return. It builds toward her sneaking onto Shark’s boat, jumping off it, sneaking back on, getting caught, escaping, and eventually chasing him through the Southern bayou on a jetski. It seems to have strayed in from Live and Let Die, and the cops seem remarkably unfazed by Sheba behaving in a manner more befitting Moby Dick, shall we say.

As noted at the top, this falls short of Grier’s best work, though is still better than Foster. It’s workmanlike, rather than impressive, and the restraint necessary for the certificate probably works against it. The words “family-friendly” and “blaxploitation” are clearly better off kept apart from each other, I suspect.

Dir: William Girdler
Star: Pam Grier, Austin Stoker, Rudy Challenger, Dick Merrifield