Author: Jim McLennan

No Way to Escape

  By

★★★
“Just deserts.”

This is a sprightly and energetic Chinese knock-off, borrowing heavily from Resident Evil and Aliens in particular. There’s a research lab deep underground, in the middle of the Gobi Desert, which has suddenly gone radio silent. The research they were doing there was… well, I’m not 100% certain quite what it involved. While a lot of the dialogue in this is in “English”, I’m using quotes advisedly. Especially on the scientific front, it seems to be more of an enthusiastic word-salad, like “by chance, precise data from the gamma variable appear,” throwing jargon about radiation and DNA splicing into the mix, in lieu of anything coherent. Anyway, it seems Ohm Technology are into some fairly shady shit, to nobody’s surprise.

A group is sent out to find out what happened, and more importantly, bring everything back on line. The only man who can do it, apparently, is Doctor Haven, a kinda autistic super-scientist, who’d like to get his hands on the data. To protect him, three Lara Croft-alikes are assigned: leader Bai Zhi (Yu), the flirty Bi Jiao (Wu); and veteran Gui Che (Xu). Also coming along are a bunch of cannon fodder, and leader of the mission, Principal Gabon (Ger), who is clearly evil because he’s played by a Westerner. They haven’t even reached the base before they encounter the local fauna: scorpions that can swim through human flesh like water. So if you stand on one, it’ll pop out the top of your head.

These are, at least, only normal sized. But when the expeditions enters into the base, the women are appalled to discover this isn’t the rescue mission intended, with any survivors being ruthlessly gunned-down by Gabon’s men. [Those foreign devils…] Turns out he intends to seize the technology and use it for nefarious purposes, but not everyone is in favor of this. The heroic trio rebel, Dr. Haven refuses to get the systems running again, and even some of his own men decide they can’t in good conscience take part in Gabon’s plan. All of which would be merely morally interesting, if it weren’t for the F-sized version of the scorpions roaming the facility due to leakage of gamma rays. Or something.

You’d be hard-pushed to identify anything new or particularly innovative here. But it keeps moving, without significant downtime, and there’s enough background to make it feel more than you’re just watching a video-game. For instance, Bai Zhi is there partly to look for her fiance, who worked at the base before he suddenly vanished. There’s also a lot more interaction between the characters and the monsters than we usually see in this kind of thing. Though the quality of the combination FX is uneven, and the editing of the action is sometimes choppily incoherent. No great matter. This is a film pitting soldiers against freakin’ giant scorpions, and firmly checks the boxes of what you would want and expect from such a production. 

Dir: Yun-Fei Lu
Star: Sai-Chu Yu, You-Xuan Wu, Dong-Mei Xu, Dieter Ger

This review originally appeared on Film Blitz.

Hunt Club

  By

★½
“Stupid hunts.”

Oh, dear. I appreciate that actors have to work, like everyone else. Van Dien, in particular, has a reputation in our house as someone whose name is not typically a badge of quality. But it’s sad to see Suvari is now apparently in the same career boat. I can only presume the offers aren’t exactly flooding in, if this is the work she has to take on. It’s another variant on the old Most Dangerous Game story-line. Here, it sees redneck entrepreneur Carter (Van Dien) luring in women with the promise of $100,000, while remaining vague on the details. Turns out the victims then are pursued through the forest and have to survive for 24 hours. Spoiler: they don’t.

Their latest prey is Cassandra (Suvari), who joins up after having a fight with her girlfriend, Tessa (Stojan), in the cafe where Carter and his teenage son Jackson (Peltz) are eating. This is going to be Jackson’s first hunt, though he’s… not exactly as enthusiastic about it as his father. I should not need to describe any plot elements further. If you’ve seen as many as one (1) of this kind of thing before, you’ll be able to predict almost every story beat to perfection. There is a twist, in regard to Cassandra and the motivation for her actions, which does at least explain some of the idiocy present. Otherwise, this is painfully predictable, and executed in a manner which is equally tedious, almost as if intended to suck away any tension.

It doesn’t help that none of the characters here rise about the most basic and banal of cliches, with the hunters the worst. Obviously, this kind of plot has an inevitable gender political subtext. That’s fine, except when, as here, the makers decide that’s insufficient, eschewing all subtlety to rub the audience’s face in it. Hence we get an extended sequence of Carter and the other hunters sitting around, spouting fringe subReddit BS, which could only be written by a true believer in toxic masculinity. For instance, someone actually wrote this: “We are men. We are primal, strong, sexual beings. We used to be the stronger sex.” I can state, with 100% certainty, I’ve never heard anyone speaking like that. Ever.

The women fare little better: the apparently “feminist” intent severely undermined by a relentless focus on having the women humiliated while scantily-clad. Five minutes of role-reversal at the end, accompanied – and I wish I were joking here – by a lesson in Greek mythology, does not cut it. The action is equally implausible, both in concept and execution, such as knives being thrown incredible distances into people’s foreheads, and any impact is nullified by the fact you have been given no reason to care about anyone involved. For much of the movie, Cassandra’s entire persona is “woman threatened by men”. That’s it. Don’t know about you, I need a little more depth of character – and  that turns out to be largely false. Even by the low standards of Van Dien’s filmography, give this one a wide berth.

Dir: Elizabeth Blake-Thomas
Star: Mena Suvari, Casper Van Dien, Will Peltz, Maya Stojan

When the World has Ended, by Rick Wood

  By

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

“It just seemed as if Hell opened up one day and that was that. Instant carnage, liberated monsters, death for all. They rose from somewhere beneath the ground, attacking for no clear reason and killing until God knows when.” That’s how this starts, so there’s no hanging around. Cia Rose is one of the few survivors, for whom every day survival is a perilous endeavour. She’s seventeen, and the daughter of a scientist. When the monsterpocalypse took place, the rich, influential and powerful – who, it appears, knew this was coming – headed for their shelters. Her father was allowed in, to research the invaders. Cia was not.

Four years later, she’s barely scraping by, running from the creatures or their mindless human slaves, known as Wasters. She still holds a grudge, albeit an understandable one, at being abandoned. But Cia is devoted to “Boy”, an autistic child whom she saved after his parents were torn apart by Masketes, a vicious flying species with lethal fangs and claws. The two are separated when Cia is captured by a pack of Wasters, and most of the book is concerned with her attempts to re-unite with Boy. During the process, she discovers that regular humans can be as much a threat as any monster, and finds out the truth about what happened to her father, both back in the early days of the invasion, and since then.

Wood certainly doesn’t stint on the horror, with much rending of flesh by the monsters, though I never really got much of an idea of what they looked like. For example, a Thoral has four legs and is “about the size of the average bungalow.” More than that, I’d be hard-pushed to say. Regardless, life is now nasty and brutal, not least when Cia is captured and made to become part of a repopulation program. The resulting sex scene is, perhaps intentionally, borderline creepy given the heroine’s age. Though it’s worth noting the story is set in Britain where the age of consent is 16 – not that “consent” is much of a factor here.

I think the biggest misstep is at the end, where Cia takes action which results in the immediate deaths of hundreds of people, destroying what had been a safe haven. No matter how bad your Daddy issues, and regardless of the reason, it’s hard to come to terms with the vast carnage for which she is directly responsible, willfully and very much with malice aforethought, while still empathizing with the character. Even though nobody we particularly care about is lost – only bad people, judged by Cia’s severely questionable moral code – it yanked away almost all desire to follow her progress through this post-apocalyptic landscape. It was basically a teenage temper tantrum. Having raised two teenagers, my tolerance for those is slim, especially with the lethal consequences they have here.

Author: Rick Wood
Publisher: Independently published, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 4 in the Cia Rose series.

Call Her King

  By

★★½
“Tries hard to be Trial Hard“

After the impressive surprise which was Jericho Ridge, I figured I should try out another BET Original movie and see how it fared. As the grade above should tell you, the answer is comparatively poorly. While technically adequate in most departments, it’s one of the more implausible Die Hard knockoffs I’ve seen. In a world where No Contest exists, that takes some doing. The high concept here is “Die Hard in a court-house” with Judge Jaeda King (Naughton) about to pronounce sentence in the trial of convicted murderer Sean Samuels (Mitchell). Barely has she said “death”, when the court is stormed by a force led by Sean’s brother Gabriel (Gross), a.k.a. “Black Caesar”.

King escapes the initial onslaught, along with Sean, his defense attorney, and Stryker (Messner), one of the courthouse guards. Gabriel, however, is not just interested in freeing his brother. He also puts the prosecuting attorney on trial in a kangaroo court, designed to prove the flaws and biases inherent in the system. Much of the film is therefore split between King and her group trying to figure out how to survive, as well as escape, and the courtroom side of things, where nasty little secrets are revealed, such as the prosecutor’s relationship to King having been more than professional. I will say, Miller does a good job of keeping both sides of the story moving forward. It would have been easy for the chattier portions to bring things to a halt: that doesn’t happen.

This aspect is certainly helped by a strong performance from Gross, who manages to avoid the obvious tropes of such a situation, and comes over as smart, well-spoken and committed. He’s no Alan Rickman of course; then again, who is? I found myself, if not quite on Gabriel’s side, at least seeing his point of view and his grounds for extreme action. The main problem is a failure to set King up as credible opposition. Before things kick off, there’s no reason to view her as an action heroine: all we see is her being easily beaten by her martial-arts teacher. Then, suddenly, she – or, rather obviously, Naughton’s stunt double – is kicking butt and spraying bullets around like a grizzled Army Ranger.

Okay, Naughton is far better than Anna Nicole Smith, though that’s a low bar for anyone to clear. She does okay with the dramatic side of things, though the script occasionally gives her little to work with. The broken relationship with her spouse feels like another element poorly lifted from Die Hard, and things like her overhearing another judge go full racist were so obvious as to trigger an eye-roll. Miller does have a nice visual eye, e.g. the shot of the attackers marching towards their target was a genuine stand-out, and there’s enough competence to stop it from being actively annoying. However, its script needed more work, and perhaps a better central concept, to succeed in an over-crowded field.

Dir: Wes Miller
Star: Naturi Naughton, Lance Gross, Jason Mitchell, Johnny Messner

Hussar Ballad

  By

★★★
“Russian off to war…”

This is an adaptation of a Russian play A Long Time Ago by Alexander Gladkov, but was inspired by the real-life exploits of Nadezhda Durova. She was a woman who basically pulled a Mulan, concealing her gender in order to defend her homeland in the Napoleonic and other wars of the early 19th century. Durova joined the army on her 23rd birthday and served honourably for a decade, even after her true gender was discovered. Tsar Alexander I was impressed when he heard about Durova, giving her a promotion after summoning the soldier to his palace in St. Petersburg. Wounded by a cannonball at the Battle of Borodino, she eventually retired in 1816, with the rank equivalent to captain-lieutenant.

Somehow this became a light and fluffy slice of musical rom-com. 17-year-old Shura Azarova (Golubkina) is an accomplished rider and tomboy, who meets Hussar officer Dmitry Rzhevsky (Yakovlev), and is mistaken by him as a brother in arms. [As usual in these things, significant suspension of disbelief is required!] When war with France breaks out, Rzhevsky returns to his unit and Shura convinces faithful family retainer Ivan (Kryuchkov) to help her join the army in disguise. She makes a name for herself as a skilled and brave courier, though her relationship with Dmitry is more adversarial than romantic. There’s a French actress on whom he has designs, triggering her jealousy. Mistaken as rivalry, Dmitry and Shura end up having a duel, though the war keeps interfering in its execution. 

All is forgiven after Shura is captured on a spying mission, Dmitry leading his platoon to the rescue, and leading to a rather decent extended fight, running through a ransacked stately home. [While the actual swordplay is no great shakes in general, the other stunts aren’t bad, including Shura leaping down off a balcony, which looks to have been done by the actress herself] The sudden moments where people burst into song are a little jarring initially, yet I got used to them – probably, again, a point of comparison to Mulan. The production is quite large in scale: there’s an opening ball sequence that’s impressive, and the battle scenes aren’t bad, albeit not quite War and Peace [though some of the costumes from it were recycled here!]

There is the obvious, and given the era probably entirely expected, patriotic theme, with discussions about defending the motherland. The film’s premiere took place on the 150th anniversary, to the day, of the previously-mentioned Battle of Borodino, a famous and bloody encounter between Russia and Napoleon’s forces – best known for inspiring the 1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky. However, it’s rarely heavy-handed, and for all its fluffiness, lack of substance and shortcomings in the motivation department, you do find yourself rooting for Shura. To be honest, perhaps to a greater degree than Dmitry, who comes off as a bit of an arrogant dick. Likely more genuinely progressive than anything coming out of Hollywood around the same time. 

Dir: Eldar Ryazanov
Star: Larisa Golubkina, Yuriy Yakovlev, Igor Ilyinsky, Nikolay Kryuchkov

Blondie Maxwell Never Loses

  By

★★★
“Miss-nority report”

This French film takes place a little way into the future, though society has undergone radical changes. Law enforcement is now privatized, with investigations contracted out to private investigators, who have to balance their costs in order to turn a profit on the cases they accept. One such PI is Blondie Maxwell (Langlart) – and to get the obvious out of the way first, no, she is not blonde It’s mentioned once, but never explained. She is currently on the trail of the terrorist Boloch, who has been mounting a campaign against Chronos Industry, the all-encompassing tech company, which is invested in almost every area of everyday life. The reward would go a long way to solving her perilous financial situation.

She gets a case to investigate the murder of an escort. It seems an open-and-shut case with the evidence squarely pointing at a journalist. However, something doesn’t sit right with Blondie, and the more she picks at the crime, the more it seems a set-up job. Even her getting the case seems suspicious, since authorities know she doesn’t have the resources to investigate it properly. The journalist claims the victim was actually his source, who was going to blow the lid of Chronos, not least a “dark” area of their network where murder for hire is bought and sold. Is he telling the truth, and what does this have to do with Boloch and his campaign?

As the tag-line above implies, this bears a significant resemblance to Stephen Spielberg’s Minority Report, with its tale of law and order run by technology. which someone on the inside gradually comes to realize isn’t as idyllic as it seems. This is rather less nuanced. At one point, a colleague of Blondie says, “Our job is to make the world safer. If that means sacrificing a little liberty, it works for me. It works for us all. It’s a choice we make as a society.” However, it’s clear Ivanowich’s sympathies are more aligned with Benjamin Franklin. This is very much a pre-liberty screed, though credit for being at least somewhat ahead of the curve with its concerns about artificial intelligence, an issue of increasing scrutiny in 2023.

Unlike Minority Report, it doesn’t have the budget to create a fully-fledged future society. This one looks like ours in almost every way, just with a few added bits of gadgetry, such as displays embedded into contact lenses. Maxwell’s main trait is her dogged determination to find out the truth, regardless of the personal cost, and she makes for an admirable heroine. As played by Langlart, she’s down to earth, though there were points where it seemed like the script had all but forgotten about Blondie. Either Ivanowich fell too much in love with the setting. or the story might have benefited from fewer characters and a sharper focus. Definitely not terrible though, and a good example of what can be done with imagination instead of budget.

Dir: Julien Ivanowich
Star: Léonie Langlart, Stéphane Dufourcq, Vincent Terrier, Boris de la Higuera

Cascade

  By

★★
“Falls off.”

It’s kinda interesting to compare this to Mercy Falls. Both concern an ill-fated trip into a scenic wilderness – all trees and waterfalls – by a group of friends, which goes increasingly off the rails. The main difference is, in Mercy, the call was coming from inside the house, as it were. Here, the threat is definitely external. The target is four friends, just finished high school and about to enter the world at large. Jesse (Oulette) will work as a mechanic; his girlfriend Alex (Waisglass) wants to leave their small town and go to college, but hasn’t plucked up the courage to tell Jesse yet. Making matters more complex, her father is part of the Dark Saints, a biker gang and generally criminal enterprise. 

This matters, because the Dark Saints just lost a shipment of drugs, the plane carrying it having crashed in a remote region of a nearby national park. Their minions are on the hunt for it, but – what are the odds? – Alex and her friends are first to stumble across it. A discussion ensues about what to do, but it’s all rendered moot after they cross paths with the minions. Before you can say, “implausible plot line,” Jesse has broken his leg and he, plus another of the quartet, pregnant pal Em (Laflamme-Snow) have been captured by the bad guys. It’s up to Alex to figure out what to do, as the only member of the group left able to operate freely.

Which is fortunate, since she’s also the smartest of the people wandering in the woods, and it’s not even close. Let’s just say, pond life would likely rate second or third place among these people, and I’m including both the hikers and the minions in those rankings. Seeing her mental wheels spinning as she out-thinks and outmanoeuvres her enemies is one of the few pleasures this offers. But it’s like watching a grand master playing chess against a pigeon. The only genuine and credible threat is her Dad and the Dark Saints, and they don’t show up until the very end of proceedings. With Alex’s witless friends, dumb and/or unlikable, the ones in peril, the stakes here aren’t enough to engage the viewer either. 

I will say, the film does look half-decent, with Diego Guijarro’s cinematography popping nicely off the screen, and the Canadian backdrop is scenic. But too often, the film pulls its punches, whether it’s a character leaping off the waterfalls, depicted with them simply vanishing out of sight, or a pivotal car crash in which it appears no vehicles were actually harmed. This might as well be a TVM, with only the potty-mouths of some inhabitants meriting more than a PG rating. It’s all blandly innocuous, and despite Waisglass’s best efforts, it never gels. Things like Em’s pregnancy, for instance, feel like an afterthought, which goes nowhere and seems like nothing more than a cheap ploy to get audience sympathy. Memo to the film-makers: it didn’t work. 

Dir: Egidio Coccimiglio
Star: Sara Waisglass, Joel Oulette, Sadie Laflamme-Snow

Killing Ruth: The Snuff Dialogues

  By

★★
“Editing. It’s a choice.”

As soon as I saw the running time of this was one hundred and thirty-one minutes, it immediately went onto the back-burner. I have a busy life, and I’ve going to devote close to two and a quarter hours to a low-budget movie, it is going to be when I have a lot of time to spare. My qualms were obvious, and proved very well-founded. This absolutely had no need to be so long. Indeed, it feels like a first draft, which became a shooting script, and everything filmed then ended up in the end product. Entire scenes are superfluous, and those which aren’t could use between “some” and “an oce-lot” of tightening up.

It’s the story of Ruth Keeley (Huljak), who comes home one day to find her father shot dead in his car. She eventually discovers that he had been a hit-man, working for Rod Porter (Jackson), and ends up following into the family business, as it were. On one job in a hospital, she ends up befriending Mrs. Connors (Wallace), the patient in the next bed to her target, and starts sharing her life with the old woman, who offers zero moral judgement. That includes her relationship with long-suffering boyfriend Cameron (Sanzari), and the quest to find out who was behind the death of her father, and why. Which turns out to be exactly who I expected, from about two hours previously.

The idea at its core is not a bad one. There’s something to be said for the idea of an assassin being plain and unremarkable, allowing them to slide past without attracting attention. Ruth is certainly that, being a waitress until her change in career direction, and Huljak is a good choice. She’s incredibly normal, and about as far from the Luc Besson-style of supermodel hit-woman as you can imagine. I’d like to see a film where we have a hitwoman dealing with everyday issues in between violent killing sprees, such as figuring our taxes, or dealing with annoying neighbours. This, however, is more interested in low-key conversations – and by “low-key”, I mean too many scenes which, to borrow a Python quote, wouldn’t “voom” if you put four million volts through them.

Even Wallace, who brings value to everything she’s in, isn’t able to energize things adequately. Not helping: the film brings in ideas, then discards them again, almost at random. For example, Ruth’s late father shows up and talks to her for a bit, then just… doesn’t. Or she gets a mysterious letter from her father’s killer; an angle which the movie forgets about entirely for a good hour, before bringing it back in, semi-randomly, at the end, to try and achieve closure. Long before that point, this had been reduced to the level of background radiation. It was on, and I was in the same room as it. Much more than that, I can’t commit to. But it definitely fails as action, probably as a thriller, and largely as drama too.

Dir: Nicholas Kinsey
Star: Irena Huljak, Dee Wallace, Kevin Jackson, Patrizio Sanzari

C.A.T.S. Eyes

  By

★★★
“The not-so Gentle Touch”

This was a sequel to hit series, The Gentle Touch, which had finished its run after five series in November 1984. Police detective Maggie Forbes (Gascoine) has quit the force, but had been recruited by Nigel Beaumont (Warrington) to join a somewhat unofficial Home Office group called Covert Activities Thames Section a.k.a. CATS, along with two other women. Their cover is the “Eyes” detective agency – hence the show’s title. They investigate various crimes and cases, mostly but not exclusively those which pose a threat to British national security. It ran for three series, covering thirty episodes, from April 1985 through June 1987, and was apparently fairly successful in the ratings. 

The obvious inspiration is Charlie’s Angels, in that you have a female trio, of different styles, solving crimes under the loose supervision of a man. However, the differences may be more significant than the similarities. While they do have different personalities, the clearest distinguishing trait in the British show is class, rather than hair colour. There’s working class Fred Smith – short for Frederica (Ash) – middle class Maggie, and upper class Pru Standfast (Rosalyn Landor), replaced after the first season by equally posh Tessa Robinson (Ward). It’s more grounded as well. Although the trio here do sometimes go undercover, it’s not an excuse for cheesecake, with them taking on the roles of women in prison, roller derby girls, etc. The CATS ladies are more likely to be barmaids or hotel workers in the line of duty.

You can also play “Spot the British actor”, with a near-constant stream of guest stars who you might recognize from other places, past or future. As well as Warrington, who’d go on to be the Caribbean commissioner in much-loved Brit-show, Death in Paradise, they include Ray Winstone, Lionel Jeffries, Charles Gray, Marina Sirtis, Peter Capaldi, Anthony Head, James Cosmo, Alan Ford, Ronald Lacey, Penelope Wilton and Alfred Molina. The last-named actually ended up marrying Gascoine in 1986, after his appearance. So that’s nice. The episodes are a bit more of a mixed bag. Some do a good job of capturing the murky world of intelligence, where expedience determines outcomes as much as justice. Other seem frankly implausible. 

Unlike The Gentle Touch, where the work/family balance was a key part of proceedings, we get very little about the trio’s life outside their work. That may be for the best, since Gasgoine is the most effective actress of the three, and things elevate whenever she gets the chance to do her dramatic thing. Action wise, it’s… reasonable. The sponsorship of the Ford Motor Company is kinda obvious, in that almost every episode contains several unnecessary scenes of them driving to or from places, but it’s certainly more credible and genuinely liberated than Charlie’s Angels. While certainly a time-capsule of the eighties (not least the hair!), it has generally stood the test of time reasonably well, and indeed, some aspects may have more resonance now. We watched the show on Sunday mornings, and that may be the best way to approach them.

Creator: Terence Feely
Star: Jill Gascoine, Leslie Ash, Tracy Louise Ward, Don Warrington

Undefeatable

  By

★★★
“Keep an eye out for you, Stingray.”

The traditional rule of thumb is, Cynthia Rothrock’s Hong Kong movies are good, but her American ones are bad. The question is, what category should this one be placed? On the one hand, it’s a Hong Kong production. On the other, it’s filmed in America, with an American cast. On the third hand, it’s directed by notorious schlockmeister Ho, as “Godfrey Hall”. I’m painfully aware how much his work can vary in quality, though I’ll confess, I am generally adequately amused. The results here are a real grab-bad of the good, the bad and the laughable. Put it this way: Cynthia is probably close to the best actor. That’s not something you’ll hear often.

She plays former gang member Kristi Jones, now trying to go straight. But in order to put her sister through medical school, Kristi raises money by taking part in street fights, arranged through her former colleagues in the Red Dragons. Meanwhile, Paul (Niam), a.k.a. “Stingray”, another fighter on the underground circuit, goes mad after his wife leaves him. He begins kidnapping, torturing and killing any woman who resembled his departed spouse. Unfortunately, his victims include Kristi’s sister, and she’s not happy about it. With the help of police detective Nick DiMarco (Miller) and psychiatrist Dr. Jennifer Simmons (Jason), Kristi makes her way through various opponents who might be involved, before focusing on Paul, and the warehouse from which he operates.

This is all, quite obviously, total nonsense. It’s the kind of film where everyone is adept at martial arts – even Dr. Simmons throws a few punches when she gets a visit from Stingray. It’s also the kind of film where a police officer will let the sister of a murder victim tag along on his investigation, because reasons. One wonders how much direction Ho was actually giving the cast. In particular, Niam, whose entire performance seems to revolve around making veins pop in his forehead. There is one (1) decent scene, where Dr. Simmons tries to figure out Stingray’s traumas and issues (his Mommy was bad to him or someting), in order to use them against him and escape. It’s the only moment this rises above the utterly basic.

On the other hand, we’re not here for the psychology. We’re here for the ass-kicking, and the film has no shortage of this, with Ms. Rothrock in decent form, both with her fists and some weapons. There’s a nice – if entirely pointless – scene of her doing forms on the lawn outside her house. But it’s mostly reasonably well-staged hand-to-hand fights, and there’s no question Rothrock acquits herself well. The end fight is slightly disappointing, in that Kristi has been hurt in a previous encounter with Stingray, so has one arm in a sling, and needs help from DiMarco. However, there are not one but two groanworthy eighties action one-liners there: the one in the tag-line above is perhaps only second worst. I couldn’t call this good, yet was I not entertained? Yes. Yes, I was.

Dir: Godfrey Ho
Star: Cynthia Rothrock, John Miller, Don Niam, Donna Jason