Gillian (Clark) takes a job as a summer-camp counselor, only to discover that part of the training involves her spending two nights, by herself, on an island in the middle of a nearby lake. That isn’t an ideal sitation for Gillian, since she’s troubled by nightmares of her past, and is unsettled to discover a previous trip by campers to the island, ended when a young girl sleepwalked her way to tragedy. Her spirit is still supposed, according to camp counselor lore, to roam the island, etc. etc. There may be less parapsychological threats to Gillian’s safety, although are they real or just her paranoia playing up? She finds a broken doll, and then finds a tent, with photos of young women taped to the roof inside. Ok: it’s probably not just her paranoia then. The potential culprits include Fred (Clarkin), the creepy owner of the camp, who was part of the previous expedition; his creepy son, Marty (Love), called “Martian” by the other councillors, for reasons that are obscure; and apparently friendly fisherman, Ray (Kash), who shows up and offers first-aid, after Gillian gashes her leg.
Clark is a decent heroine, although one perhaps too defined by her vulnerabilities. The main issue is a script that is astonishingly dumb. For instance, as with any modern wilderness horror, it has to deal with The Cellphone Issue. Here, it does so by Gillian being forbidden from taking hers on to the island, which is kinda neat. Except she does. But there’s still no signal. So she swims out into the water, the phone in a plastic bag held between her teeth, and tries to send a text. When that doesn’t work, she hurls it away in a fit of pique. At some point later, the phone unilaterally decides to send the text. But the recipient doesn’t bother doing anything significant with it. WHAT WAS THE POINT? They should simply have stopped at her being forbidden to take hers on to the island. It’s this kind of inanity which plagues much of the proceedings here, with people behaving in ways that don’t seem credible.
This is just about plausible for the villain – after all, you are a loony stalking camp counselors in the middle of a lake, critical thinking may not be your forte. However, the second half of the film, consists of little more than four people stumbling around, making poor decisions. Much though you want to root for Gillian, and she does find a decent amount of inner fortitude at the end (Let’s just say, “Anchors aweigh!” and leave it at that), the overall feeling is that everyone deserves to be voted off this island.
Dir: Isaac Cravit Star: Annie Clark, Daniel Kash, Steven Love, Richard Clarkin
Watching Atwell walking the streets of forties New York as British agent Eva Delectorskaya does little to dissuade you from the feeling that this could be a prequel to Agent Carter, telling about some of her wartime exploits, before she goes to work for the Strategic Scientific Reserve. There’s actually a good deal more going on: the two-part TV miniseries starts 30 years after the end of the war, when Sally Gilmartin (Rampling) reveals to her daugher, Ruth (Dockery), the truth about her identity as the former Miss Delectorskaya, recruited in pre-war Paris by British intelligence, after her brother is killed by fascists. After things kick off, she is sent first to Belgium, and then to New York where she works on efforts to get America into the war, and continues a relationship with her boss, Lucas Romer (Sewell). However, sent on what appears to be a simple courier mission to New Mexico, she finds evidence pointing to another agenda, and which suggests a traitor within the department. It’s this which leads to her going off-grid: but it appears her fake identity has been compromised back in the present day, with her home under surveillance, by person or persons unknown.
The vast spread of this, taking place over four decades or so, requires the use of two actresses to play the lead, and that can often be an issue. However, here it’s possible to imagine Atwell aging into someone like Rampling – if you look at pictures of the latter from the seventies, they are not entirely dissimilar. [It certainly works much better than the idea of Sewell becoming Michael Gambon, which is the other half of the equation] At three hours, this may be a bit over-stretched, particularly in the second half, where there seems to be a lot of going from one place to another without much purpose. Contrast this to the tenseness delivered by the first part, in particular when Eva and Lucas go to a Dutch border town, where a Gestapo officer is supposed to be defecting, only for the operation to go horribly wrong after a botched exchange of pass-phrases. But whose fault was that? I’d like to have seem more of these thriller aspects, as Hall (who has worked both on Spooks and Strike Back) seems to have a good handle on these.
The ending was a little bit of a damp squib as well: it became apparent early on who the traitor is, if only because all the other credible candidates get bumped off. From that point, you are more or less waiting for the inevitable face-off between the parties concerned, although the acting abilities of those involved certainly help. After a few years, in the acting wilderness, Rampling seems to be undergoing a bit of a late career renaissance, between roles like this, and in Dexter and Broadchurch. Maybe she’ll follow the footsteps of Helen Mirren and become an action heroine for the older generation: on the basis of this, she would probably do rather well.
Dir: Edward Hall Star: Hayley Atwell, Rufus Sewell, Charlotte Rampling, Michelle Dockery
I don’t mind The Asylum studio at all. They are notorious for churning out their “mockbusters” – low-budget, similarly-titled movies intended to cash in on a bigger budget film’s publicity e.g. Transmorphers. And, let’s be honest, most of those do suck. However, they have achieved some renown for cheerfully silly creature features, the best-known of which is the Sharknado series. [Though in our house, we worship at a shrine to Mega Python vs. Gatoroid, starring those titans of 80’s bubblegum pop, Tiffany and Debbie Gibson.] Avengers Grimm occupies an odd middle territory: while its title is clearly intended to be riding the coat-tails of Avengers: Age of Ultron, yet a more accurate mockbuster title would be the one given above. The sole reference justifying the A word is when one character says, to no particular purpose, “We’re not heroes, we’re avengers.” Marvel’s legal department would probably beg to differ there.
For this is actually about the crossing over into the modern world of fairy-tale characters. The villain here is Rumpelstiltskin (Van Dien), who hijacks the magic mirror belonging to Snow White (Parkinson) since it can – an ability inexplicably omitted by the Brothers Grimm – act as a portal to our own, magic-free universe. He travels through dragging her with him, and by the time Snow’s princess posse catch up, he has become mayor of Los Angeles, because time flows at a different rate here. He is creating an army of “thralls,” mind-controlled minions that will do his bidding and allow him to expand his realm from a city to much further, and must be stopped. While Snow is trying to do just that, the arrival of her allies poses a problem, as they bring with them the last fragment of the mirror: it can be used to return to their world, or allow Rumpelstiltskin’s pals to join him. Making matters worse, he has enlisted the help of Iron John (Lou Ferrigno) and turned him into an unstoppable killing machine to hunt down the princesses.
This is as much an exercise in limiting expectations. Do not expect anything to do with Marvel, and instead something that’s an energetically low-budget riff on Once Upon a Time crossed with Enchanted, and you’ll be about there. There are probably a couple of princesses too many: outside of Snow, only Red Riding Hood (Peteron) and Rapunzel (Vanderbilt) made much impression, the latter swinging her weighted hair around like an offensively-coiffeured version of GoGo Yubari. There’s a nice subplot which has Red more or less going on her own mission, to take down the big, bad Wolf – one of Rumpel’s sidekicks – because he killed her parents. That’s the kind of inventive storytelling we could have used more of, or perhaps showing how the princesses adjust to modern life, which seems to happen with little more than a flick through a fashion magazine. However, Van Dien and Ferrigno make good foils for the ladies (many of whom come from Team Unicorn), and there are adequate quantities of princess ass-kicking. I was adequately entertained: and that’s more than can be said for my short-lived attempt to watch Once Upon a Time. This is a case where, as far as I’m concerned, the mockbuster tag probably does the film more harm than good.
Dir: Jeremy M. Inman Star: Lauren Parkinson, Casper Van Dien, Elizabeth Peterson, Rileah Vanderbilt
I’ve endured enough of these that I get the increasing feeling they are cranked out on a Japanese assembly-line somewhere, for they seem to have the same elements, right down to the title, which involves a random combination of words such as Assassin, Female, Geisha, Girl, Lady, Ninja and Woman. Get some porn actress, whose talents are neither in acting nor in martial arts, a few robes and some samurai swords, then have everyone run around some generic but potentially “historical” location, such as a forest. You’ll want a lot of sitting around chatting, since that’s particularly easy to film, and sprinkle lightly in mediocre sword-play. Intersperse the story with lengthy sex scenes every 15 minutes or so. Package in a non-descript sleeve that promises more than it can ever deliver. Release. Profit.
Because this kind of dubious excuse for a movie is incredibly cheap to make, and it seems there’s an endless appetite for them, both in the West and (presumably) in Japan – much like any old cack with a zombie in it will currently get a release here. I watch them so you don’t have to. Trust me, there are times when this site is a chore, not a pleasure. This theory isn’t inviolate: Geisha Assassin is actually pretty good. Lady Ninja Kasumi, on the other hand, possesses absolutely nothing to separate it from all the other sword-wielding soft-porn which has strayed across my disinterested eyeballs in the past.
The heroine is Kasumi (Young-mi), who became a ninja in order to protect her little brother, Kotaro. She’s sent on a mission to spy on a nearby clan, and defeats a member of their Hakuga squad, run by the Itagaki brothers. Injured in the process, she is nursed back to health by a friendly medicine-peddler. However, the other Itagaki brothers are keen to get their hands on the ninja responsible for their colleague’s death and… Well, let’s be honest, it was at roughly this point that my interest vanished over the event horizon, sucked in by this low-rent combination of clunky cinema, bad fight scenes and tedious humping. I think there was something about another, freelance female ninja, and an assassin who could disguise himself as a small child, which I guess deserves half a star for sheer novelty. There are times I feel guilty about not giving a film my full attention. This is not one of those occasions. This is the first in a series which runs ten volumes – needless to say, I won’t be bothering with the others.
While made in 1986, you’ll frequently find yourself thinking this could be from a decade or two earlier, though to be honest, the style in this samurai-revenge-crime-whatever film is as all over the place as the plot. Some of that works well. Having the heroine’s sword turn into a ribbon, which she then twirls artistically, is more successful than it sounds. However, the multiple breaks for little disco-dance sequences, involving dry ice and flashing lights… Not so much. The set-up is great. Three condemned men are recruited, Nikita-style, to become shadow agents, working for the government. One of them manages to have a wife and a daughter, but has to leave them for their own safety.
Ten years later, he’s working a case when he meets his daughter, Ocho (Ishihara) employed by the man he’s investigating, Denzo. The end results is, the case blowing up, the death of both he and Denzo, and Ocho’s recruitment by his boss as a replacement. She can avenge her father by getting the evidence that will bring down the whole syndicate, in particular, a fake license hidden in the sash of a kimono. Unfortunately, this sash is now evidence in a murder investigation, and is in the hands of the police. And Denzo’s mistress, Oren (Natsuki), is out for her own revenge, on the woman she blames for his death.
Plenty of scope here, certainly. Unfortunately, the potential is frittered away after that blistering first twenty minutes, becoming bogged down in a welter of male characters who tend to look the same, act the same and sound the same. It’s a constant stream of corruption, lies and deceit that becomes quite wearing: the yakuza are corrupt, the cops are corrupt, even the local priests are corrupt, their grave-robbing antics being what kicks the quest for the kimono sash off. But it’s all too meandering, and Gosha [who also directed The Yakuza Wives] seems to be much more in love with these subsidiary characters than they deserve. Ocho and Oren are fine – the latter, in particular, is a memorably slimy creature, who is not as weak as she appears. There just isn’t enough of them.
Occasional moments here do work: mostly, when the two female leads have not been shunted off to one side, making way for macho grunting by top-knotted sword-wielders. I don’t have a problem with films like this, that take a different approach to familiar material. However, style alone isn’t enough, and what’s left here is infuriatingly flawed. There’s the basis of a great storyline, and a pair of superb central characters; that’s a foundation many movies would kill for, and on which Gosha could have built. Rarely have I seen such solid ground wasted as badly as occurs in this film.
Dir: Hideo Gosha Star: Mariko Ishihara, Mari Natsuki, Masanori Sera, Takuzô Kawatani
a.k.a. Jitterna. There’s also some question over whether it’s Shadow or Shadows. The IMDb goes for the former, the DVD sleeve the latter.
There’s a lot going on in this World War I spy thriller: probably a little too much, though it’s still generally interesting. The titular character – I wouldn’t go so far as to call her a heroine, for reasons that will become obvious – is a nameless German spy, whom we first see coming ashore at the British naval base of Scapa Flow. Her two male associates are captured, with Meyer (Booth) being “turned” by British intelligence officer, Colonel Foreman (More). Meyer reveals the fraulein’s mission is to find out on what boat Lord Kitchener will be leaving the base, so it can be attacked. Despite More’s desperate efforts, the plan succeeds and Kitchener is killed. That’s not the first time she has caused problems: in a flashback, we see her seducing French scientist Dr. Saforet (Capucine), in order to steal the secret of a dreadful new chemical weapon. Meyer, now a double-agent, is sent back into Germany with the aim of killing her, and appears to succeed. However, that’s just a ruse, so the not-so-good doctor can complete her biggest mission: organizing a raid on Allied headquarters to steal their defense plans, in advance of a massive German push.
It’s refreshingly grey in terms of morality. Neither side comes off as occupying the high ground, and there’s very much a sense of grubby necessity. For instance, when the agent is being presented with a medal for her role in killing Kitchener, the presenting German officer refuses to shake her hand, because he considered Kitchener a fellow officer as well as a friend, and his death was “cheating”. But they are perfectly happy to use her talents: when the idea of sending a woman in is questioned, her commander replies, “Why not a woman? She has imagination, precision, courage beyond any man on any battlefield. She has only two weaknesses: traces of pity and grains of morphine.” The latter adds an extra wrinkle in her final undercover role, as a nurse on a Red Cross train, heading to the front, and she has no reluctance in using her body to achieve her goals – whether with men or women. Kendall gives a solid performance, and I was surprised to discover this was inspired by a real person, Elsbeth Schragmüller, whose identity as “Fraulein Doktor” was not revealed until almost 30 years after the end of WW1. Details of her actions are still sketchy, offering the makers a blank canvas on which to paint: no evidence she was a bi-sexual drug-addict, for instance!
As noted, there’s too much going on here. The mission to kill Kitchener could have been an entire movie in itself, as could the theft of the chemical weapon, but instead, these are galloped through at an over-anxious pace. The finale then seems to forget about its leading lady entirely, heading off in an completely different direction, depicting the German attack, both with conventional weapons and poison gas, and the effects on the Allied troops. Shown below, it is truly a nightmarish sequence of epic proportions, enhanced by Ennio Morricone’s discordant score: I believe the Yugoslav army supplied military extras, and that ups the ante considerably. It makes for a grim, rather than rousing finale, bringing home to the fraulein, the responsibility of what she has done. I can see why it was a commercial flop and has largely been forgotten, yet despite its flaws, it deserves a better fate than obscurity.
Dir: Alberto Lattuada Star: Suzy Kendall, Kenneth More, James Booth, Capucine
Firstly, a quick note on the title here, which is a little odd. The subtitles call it August ’08, which would make more sense, since it’s based on the spat that month between Russia and Georgia over the territory of South Ossetia, which had seceded from Georgia with Russian backing. Fortunately, you don’t need to know much about the murky geopolitical climate, though this is firmly entrenched on the side of the Russian “peacekeepers,” so probably should be be relied upon for accuracy [I note it was banned in the Ukraine]. The heroine is Kseniya (Ivanova), a single mom who packs her son Artyom (Fadeev) off to be with dad, so she can go on a trip with her new boyfriend. Unfortunately, father is a soldier stationed near the border; when things kick off down there, communications with the outside world are all but cut. Kseniya embarks on a perilous mission through the war-torn landscape to retrieve Artyom, with the aid of recon commander Lyoha (Matveev). Artyom, meanwhile, retreats into the fantasy world he has constructed to deal with the trauma, in which he is the hero, CosmoBoy, fighting with the aid of a giant robot against the evil Darklord.
Fairly epic in scale, this does a particularly good job at depicting the hellish nature of battle, in particular the urban kind, where snipers and other threats potentially lurk in every window. It’s also effective when portraying Kseniya’s devotion to Artyom, and her willingness to take any risk to reach him, albeit driven in part by guilt over the poor initial choice to ship him off. While the CGI initially seems a bit ropey, it makes more sense when you realize it’s a child’s imagination, and the production values are generally high-quality. The film’s weakest section is probably the middle, where Kseniya takes a back seat, literally hanging on to Lyoha’s belt and following him on a mission to rescue refugees trapped by the conflict (like I said, “peacekeepers”…), I’d rather have seen her continue as the courageous and self-dependent woman she is, both in the early going, and during the rousing finale, as she makes her way through what’s described as the most dangerous three miles in the world.
Still, even when the movie forgets its action heroine tendencies, it’s a solid piece of war cinema, that easily sustains its 132 minute running-time. Currently available on Netflix, this is the kind of unexpected find that makes having the service worthwhile. For I’d almost certainly have missed it otherwise, and that would have been a shame, since the performances and overall quality are generally more than up to Western standards.
“If a young Soviet woman patriot is burning to master the machine gun, we should give her the opportunity to realize her dream. If a young Soviet woman wants to become a sniper, we should not discourage her desires.”
— Pravda, 1942
Despite numerous steps towards equality in the past century, there remains only one military theater which has seen large numbers of female soldiers take part, in many areas on an equal footing with their male counterparts. This took place in World War II, on the front between the Nazis and Soviet forces in Eastern Europe, where it’s estimated that more than three-quarters of a million women served on the Russian side. Around 200,000 were decorated for their efforts, with 89 receiving the highest honour, being awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union. It was not so much a philosophical choice by those in charge, as much as one necessitated by expediency.
When the Germans first attacked in 1941, women who attempted to volunteer were turned down, but the Russian forces suffered such a hellacious level of losses that any such restrictions were soon loosened. This echoed a similar situation which had occurred in the later stages of the First World War. After the Russian Revolution got under way in early 1917, fifteen women’s formations were created, such as the charmingly-named “1st Russian Women’s Battalion of Death”. During the Kerensky Offensive, they went over the top into enemy territory when their war-weary male counterparts were reluctant to do so, capturing at least temporarily, a swathe of enemy territory, and were praised for their courage. However, they faced increasing hostility from the men, and the battalions were dissolved after less than a year.
25 years later, women were in particular used as snipers and pilots, but served across virtually the entire range of military fields, including as machine gunners, tank drivers, medics, communication personnel, and on anti-aircraft batteries. There is an issue in terms of verifiable historical data: most of the evidence for and reports on these soldiers, comes solely from the Soviet side. It’s not cynical to think the stories may quite possibly have been exaggerated or fabricated, to varying extents, in the interests of wartime propaganda. However, for the purposes of the rest of this article, we won’t bother trying to separate the legend from the facts: after all, the former are likely to be far more entertaining! So let’s take a look at some of the most-renowned women soldiers to take up arms against the Third Reich on the Russian front.
Snipers
The Russians found women to be particularly suited to the job of sniper: the traits required Major General Morozov, “the father of the sniper movement”, was quoted as saying that “a woman’s hand is more sensitive than is a man’s. Therefore when a woman is shooting, her index finger pulls the trigger more smoothly and purposefully”. By 1943, there were over two thousand female snipers in the military, with more than 12,000 confirmed kills between them. The photo on the right, taken in Germany in May 945, shows a dozen members of the 3rd Shock Army, 1st Belorussian Front, who racked up 775 kills between them, led by Guard Lieutenant VI Artamonov – second row down, second from the right, who had 89. But that tally pales beside the queen of all Soviet sharpshooters.
Lyudmila Pavlichenko
“I wear my uniform with honor. It has the Order of Lenin on it. It has been covered with blood in battle. It is plain to see that with American women what is important is whether they wear silk underwear under their uniforms. What the uniform stands for, they have yet to learn.”
— Pavlichenko
Pavlichenko was credited with 309 confirmed kills. Let’s put that into perspective. In all of Kill Bill, the Bride killed only 70 people, less than one-quarter of those who fell victim to Pavlichenko. Even Chris Kyle, the hero of American Sniper, barely reached half her tally, using far more advanced weaponry. And her count may be low. A skeptical Red Army unit insist she proved her prowess, pointing her at two Romanians working with the Germans. When she took them down, she was accepted, but didn’t include them in her official tally, “because they were test shots.” But when she entered actual battle conditions, she froze, until the young soldier next to her was killed. The incident shocked her into action, and she took out two German scouts that same day.
A hundred of her subsequent victims were Nazi officers, and another 36 were snipers working for the other side, taken out in lengthy battles that could last as long as three days and required her to stay in one spot without moving for up to 20 hours. Wounded four times, she was eventually withdrawn from the front, becoming instead a trainer of other snipers and also going on morale-boosting and political trips. These included a 1942 sojourn to America and the United Kingdom, where she became the first Soviet citizen to be officially welcomed at the White House. Unlike many of her colleagues, she made it through the war alive, and after hostilities ended, finished her education and took up a position as a research assistant at the Soviet Navy’s headquarters. She died in 1974, at the age of 58.
Folk singer Woody Guthrie wrote a song inspired by her: “In the mountains and canyons, quiet as the deer/Down in the forest knowing no fear/Lift up your sight, down comes a Hun/Three hundred Nazis fell by your gun.” And in February this year, a film inspired by Pavlichenko’s life was released. The Russian-Ukrainian co-production was called Battle for Sevastopol in Russia, and Indestructible in the Ukraine, and was filmed just before relations between the two countries went south. According to reports, “As played by Yulia Peresild, the film’s heroine is unsmiling and unremittingly tough. “War’s no place for cowards,” she says. She vows to “kill 100 enemies”, hugging her rifle, and upbraids a fellow sniper for firing a shot to finish off a Nazi dying in agony. “They don’t deserve an easy death,” she says.” Here’s the trailer; no subs, but it’s one for which we’ll certainly keep an eye out.
Nina Alexeyevna Lobkovskaya
Nina’s willingness to join the army became a burning desire after her father, a machine-gunner was killed fighting the Germans. She wrote in her memoirs, “Hatred for the enemy that was causing so much human suffering choked me. That hatred cemented my resolution to join the army.” Initially serving as a nurse, in October of 1942, the 17-year-old girl was accepted into the women’s sniper school, near Moscow, along with almost three hundred others. After nine months of training, she was sent to the Kalinin front, and was soon achieving renown for her skills, a regimental newspaper writing, “Nina Lobkovskaya has a sharp eye and steady hand. Her rifle never misses.” In 1944, Lobkovskaya was wounded, but ran away from hospital to rejoin her unit and continue fighting. She was still only 20 by the time the war had ended, but was credited with 89 kills.
Roza Yegorovna Shanina
If there was a pin-up girl for Soviet snipers, Shanina (shown atop this article) would probably be it. Though her tally – a “mere” 59 confirmed victims – was not among the highest, her character and heroic character have resonated through the subsequent decades. Her strong personality was apparent well before the war: at age 14, she walked 120 miles to study at college, against the wishes of her parents. After her brother was killed in action in December 1941,. she asked to join the military, but she was not accepted until June 1943. She graduated with honours, and joined the 184th Rifle Division the following April, being appointed commander of a female sniper group. Barely two weeks later, she was awarded her first military decoration, the Order of Glory 3rd Class, having taken out 13 members of the enemy while under fire.
Even after her platoon was disbanded and snipers were withdrawn, Roza persisted: when her request to be returned to the front was refused, she went anyway [she was reprimanded, but avoided formal sanction] Her renown even reached the West, including her photo in the Washingtom Times-Herald and an AP report in September 1944 describing her as “the unseen terror of East Prussia”, citing a Red Army report describing how she sniped five Nazis in a single incident. Shanina was wounded in the shoulder by enemy fire in December, but persisted in efforts to obtain official sanction for service at the front. She finally obtained it on January 8, 1945, but wouldn’t survive the month. While shielding an injured officer, Roza was hit by a shell fragment, and died the following day. She was about two months shy of turning 21.
However, Shanina had – in disregard of regulations – kept a diary over the last few months of her life. This record of her war, along with a large number of letters she had written to friends and relations, were published in the mid-sixties and rekindled interest in this Soviet heroine.
Pilots
The air was another field of war where women could take part on an almost equal footing with men, physical strength not being a major requirement. Indeed, even before war broke out, Russia had the likes of Marina Raskova, who had become a navigator in the Air Force as early as 1933, and was the first woman to teach at the Zhukovskii Air Academy. After the war started, Raskova convinced Joseph Stalin to form three combat groups for women – not just women pilots, but also with female ground support personnel. From 1942 through the war’s end, they flew over thirty thousand combat missions, with over thirty members becoming Heroes of the Soviet Union. That included Raskova herself, who commanded one of the units, the 125th Guards Bomber Aviation Regiment, until her death in a plane crash.
The “Night Witches”
“We bombed, we killed; it was all a part of war. We had an enemy in front of us, and we had to prove that we were stronger and more prepared.”
— Nadezhda Popova
Nachthexen was the perjorative nickname given by the Germans to the 588th Night Bomber Regiment. This was the result of their tactic of switching off their engines in order to glide up unheard and deliver their payload on the target, with the noise of the wind whistling in their wings supposedly like the sound of witches’ broomsticks! The group had to rely on stealth tactics, as their planes were slow and outdated Polikarpov Po-2’s, intended for us as training craft and crop-dusting. However, their very slowness gave them a tactical advantage, as they could fly at speeds of less than 100 mph, where enemy planes like the Messerschmitt Bf 109 would stall out and fall from the sky.
The main tactic used was to fly in groups of three: two would operate as decoys, drawing the fire of anti-aircraft guns, while the third made its bombing pass. It would then swap places with one of the decoys, until all the planes had delivered their lethal cargo. They were so accurate, the Germans spread rumours that the women pilots had been injected with drugs to give them cat-like night vision. But their stamina was equally tested: the limited capacity of the planes often forced them to fly fifteen or more sorties per night, often under heavy fire. Their craft had no radios, no radar, and the pilots didn’t bother with parachutes, because the low altitude at which they operated would have rendered them useless.
One such pilot was Nadezhda Popova, who was born in the Ukraine, and whose life was changed one day when a plane landed near her home. She said, “I had thought only gods could fly. It was amazing to me that a simple man could get in a plane and fly away.” Nadezhda secretly signed up at a gliding school as a 15-year-old, and made her first solo flight and parachute jump the following year. Popova joined up, having lost both her brother and the family home to the war and flew a total of 852 missions, including on one occasion, eighteen in a night. She was shot down multiple times, but always survived, and had numerous other close brushes with death. After one mission, she counted 42 bullet holes in her plane and told her navigator, “Katya, my dear – we will live long.” She wasn’t wrong: Popova made it through the war and for almost seven decades after, dying only a couple of years ago, at the age of 92.
There was, at one point, plans for an Anglo-Canadian-Russian co-production inspired by the squadron, starring Malcolm McDowell, Anna Friel and Sophie Marceau, to be directed by Alexander Siddig, but funding for that fell through. Below, is a documentary (in six parts) on the Night Witches, along with a special bonus, the 1981 Russian feature, В небе ночные ведьмы (Night Witches In The Sky). The former has subs; the latter, unfortunately, doesn’t but still shows you the kind of planes they were flying. It was directed by Evgenia Zhigulenko, one of the members of the 588th, who was awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union decoration for her exploits, so one imagines it’s likely to be fairly accurate.
Lydia Litvyak and Yekaterina Budanova
The term “ace” in regard to fighter pilots is not a vague term: it means someone who has achieved five or more confirmed takedowns of enemy planes. Litvyak and Budanova are the only female fighter aces in the history of flight. Litvyak had 12 solo kills (plus 2 or 4 shared, depending on the source), while Budanova had 11 air victories, six as an individual and five shared; for a while, they were comrades as part of the 586th Fighter Regiment. Litvyak, known as the “White Lily of Stalingrad”, allegedly after the flower painted on the side of her fuselage. When war broke out, she was already a flight instructor, but didn’t have the necessary experience to enlist and become a fighter pilot. So she cooked the books, adding 100 hours on to her logged time, and was accepted.
She shot down her first two victims on September 13, 1942. The second was a German ace himself, with 11 kills, Erwin Maier. After being captured, Maier asked to meet the pilot responsible: when introduced to Litvyak, he thought it was some kind of joke, until she described their dog-fight in detail. She always had a rebellious streak, and on returning from successful missions, would engage in aerobatics over the base, knowing that it irritated her commanding officer. But she had a feminine side as well, and seems to have been in a relationship with fellow ace Alexei Solomatin. When he was killed, she wrote to her mother, “He was not my type, but his insistence and his love for me convinced me to love him”. Litvyak’s fate remains uncertain: she’s generally regarded to have been shot down and killed during a vicious air-battle in August 1943, but some speculate she survived the landing, was captured by the Germans, and moved to Switzerland after the war. Presuming the former, she was posthumously awarded Hero of the Soviet Union by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990.
There’s some suggestion that Budanova may have had more kills than Litvyak. She was a smart young woman, who was top of her class in elementary school, but had to give up her education and help support her family after her father died. A job as a carpenter in an aircraft factory awakened her interest in flying, and she got her pilot’s license at age 18, becoming an instructor three years later. After war with Germany broke out in the summer of 1941, she joined the military and was assigned to the 586th. After proving themselves in air battle, the top pilots from the squadron, including both Budanova and Litvyak, were re-assigned to the 437th IAP, on the banks of the Volga. By the end of 1942, Budanova had been further promoted, to the elite 9th Guards Fighter Regiment, consisting entirely of top pilots. But she would not survive the war: her mechanic, Inna Pasportnikova, gave this account of her final battle:
“She spotted three Messerschmitt going on the attack against a group of bombers. Katia attacked and diverted the enemy. A desperate fight developed in the air. Katia managed to pick up an enemy aircraft in her sight and riddle him with bullets. This was the fifth aircraft she killed personally. Katia’s fighter rapidly soared upward and swooped down on a second enemy aircraft. She “stitched” it with bullets, and the second Messer, streaming black smoke, escaped to the west. But Katia’s red starred fighter had been hit; tongues of flame were already licking at the wings.”
Tank commanders
Aleksandra Samusenko
Originally a private in the infantry, Samusenko won the Order of the Red Star in the Battle of Kursk, the largest tank battle in history, for a fight where she and her T-34 tank defeated three German tiger tanks in an encounter lasting several hours. Later in the war, when her commanding officer was killed, she took over and led her group out of an ambush. She also fought alongside US Army Sergeant Joseph Beyrle, who had escaped from a German POW camp in January 1945, and encountered Samusenko’s group while on the run. Beyrle convinced Samusenko he was legitimate by demonstrating he knew demolitions work, and he became the only American to serve in World War 2 with both the US and Soviet Armies; he helped liberate the POW camp in which he had been held! Unfortunately, there was no such happy ending for Samusenko, who was reportedly crushed to death by another Soviet tank in March 1945. She had reached the rank of Captain.
Mariya Oktyabrskaya
“My husband was killed in action defending the motherland. I want revenge on the fascist dogs for his death and for the death of Soviet people tortured by the fascist barbarians. For this purpose I’ve deposited all my personal savings – 50,000 rubles – to the National Bank in order to build a tank. I kindly ask to name the tank ‘Fighting Girlfriend’ and to send me to the front-line as a driver of said tank.”
So wrote Oktyabrskaya to Stalin in 1943, and the State Defense Committee took her up on the offer, although it was initially seen as no more than a morale-boosting publicity stunt. However, Oktyabrskaya completed the five months training, and when she entered the fray in October that year, her courage and skill proved she was more than propaganda. She developed a fearless reputation, not least for leaping out to repair her tank (which indeed had “Fighting Girlfriend” painted on the side of the barrel, per her request!) after it had been hit and disabled by enemy fire. However, that proved to be her undoing, as during one such mechanical foray, during a January 1944 battle near Vitebsk, she was hit in the head by a shell fragment. While Mariya lingered on for two months, she never regained consciousness, and was posthumously awarded Hero of the Soviet Union in August, at the age of 38.
They also served…
Orphaned at age 11, Nina Onilova was inspired in her chosen military field by seeing the 1934 film Chapaev, which included the character of a woman machine-gunner called Anka. She was originally in the army as a medic, but while tending to the wounded during a battle, she helped a machine-gun post fix their jammed weapon and took over handling it, mowing down the enemy. Recognizing a good thing when they saw it, the crew took her on as their permanent gunner. Shortly after, she was hurt in a mortar blast and spent two months in hospital, until the doctors got tired of her demands to be returned to the front, and released her. Back in action, she single-handedly took out a German tank – without a machine-gun, using Molotov cocktails – earning the Order of the Red Banner and the rank of Sergeant. She was killed during a night battle in February 1942, in which she had already taken out a pair of enemy machine-gun positions and was covering the withdrawal of her fellow soldiers.
A group mention goes to the women of the 1077th Anti-Aircraft Regiment, who were part of the defenses around the city of Stalingrad, which witnessed among the most vicious fighting of the war as the Nazis mounted an effort to take over the city in August 1942. Made up almost entirely of young, local volunteers, barely out of high-school, they were left as the last line of defense against the advancing 16th Panzer Division. With little support, and mostly by dropping their anti-aircraft batteries to the horizontal, the regiment held off the Germans for two days. The official war records indicate they “destroyed or damaged 83 tanks and 15 other vehicles carrying infantry, destroyed or dispersed over three battalions of assault infantry, and shot down 14 aircraft” before eventually being over-run and wiped out.
Ekaterina Mikhailova-Demina was the only woman to perform front-line reconnaissance for the Soviet marines during World War II. Like Onilova, she lost her parents early [it appears any Russian remake of Annie would have some spectacularly bad-ass orphans!], and volunteered at age 15, lying about her age to get accepted. Also like Onilova, she initially served as a medic, but found work behind the lines boring, and applied to join the marines. In February 1943, she became part of the 369th Independent Naval Infantry Battalion. August the next year saw her receive her first Order of the Red Banner for an assault where she single-handedly assaulted a fortified German position, taking 14 prisoners. She received a second Red Banner in December, for a Croation mission where three-quarters of her platoon were wiped out. Let’s end on a happy note. Unlike many of the women profiled here, Ekaterina survived the war – and, indeed, is still apparently living today, at age 89. Judging by the picture on the right, taken in 2013, she looks like she would still be happy to kick your ass!
How you react to a film isn’t always a logical exercise. I’m a great proponent of “guilty pleasure” films: movies that, by objective standards, are generally not very good, yet still manage to be, on one level or another, thoroughly entertaining. Barb Wire is one: as soon as you realize it’s a post-apocalyptic sci-fi version of Casablanca, it’s totally awesome. Add this Indonesian movie to the same pile: it contains many things which, on their own, I loathe; yet here, for whatever reason, the whole ends up being a great deal more entertaining that you’d expect from the sum of its woeful parts.
Let’s start with that plot. Which is certainly a great deal more than the film does. Seriously: it takes 50 minutes for anything approaching a meaningful plot element to show up. It opens with a man driving home, being ambushed and stabbed to death. His wife and young daughter find him. Fast-forward ten years, and some thugs attack the house with what may be the longest single burst of automatic weaponry in cinema history, followed up, for no particular reason, by two rounds from a rocket launcher. Cue mother Sarah (Diyose) and pouty teenage daughter Marsya (Camesi) going on the run: Mom has clearly been anticipating this for a while, and has a hideout, stash of weapons and martial arts training. Turns out, there are two factions at play here: the one seeking to kill the family is led by corrupt cop Captain Roy (Fernandez), while playing defense is Paquita (Carter, best known for her role in Falling Skies), who… Well, you will find out eventually. Just don’t hold your breath.
For before you reach that point, there follows alternating scenes of ludicrous excessive gun-battles, and Marsya whining “What’s going on? Make it stop? I said, WHAT’S GOING ON? I want an ice-cream!” [I may have imagined the last, I’m not sure] Normally, this kind of thing would be incredibly grating. But let’s face it, she’s basically echoing what the audience is thinking, so it’s okay. Throw in Kardit’s style of action, which consists of jerking the camera back and forth while simultaneously zooming in and out, and you’ve got the recipe for a headache-inducing exercise, about as far from fellow Indonesian flick The Raid as possible [seriously, if you haven’t seen The Raid, go do so now. It’s the best action movie of the past decade. You can thank me later.].
And yet… If you can handle the fact that the ratio of bullets to reloading scenes is several hundred to one, cope with not knowing what the hell is going on for half the movie, and tolerate characters that are basically a procession of shallow genre tropes, you’ll have fun. Against the odds, I did: there’s at least four women here with no qualms about kicking ass in industrial quantities, and both Divose and Carter bring the necessary intensity to their roles [there’s one awesome shot where Paquita is chasing after a car on foot and is just screaming at it]. There’s a chunk at the end where all three leading ladies are simultaneously fighting for their lives, and that’s a good deal more progressive than you’d get to see in most Western films. For all its many, copious flaws, I was kept entertained – as much by the daft insanity on view, as in spite of it. In the right hands, this could have been awesome: Kardit clearly is not those hands, yet it’s still more fun than I expected.
Gillian (Clark) takes a job as a summer-camp counselor, only to discover that part of the training involves her spending two nights, by herself, on an island in the middle of a nearby lake. That isn’t an ideal sitation for Gillian, since she’s troubled by nightmares of her past, and is unsettled to discover a previous trip by campers to the island, ended when a young girl sleepwalked her way to tragedy. Her spirit is still supposed, according to camp counselor lore, to roam the island, etc. etc. There may be less parapsychological threats to Gillian’s safety, although are they real or just her paranoia playing up? She finds a broken doll, and then finds a tent, with photos of young women taped to the roof inside. Ok: it’s probably not just her paranoia then. The potential culprits include Fred (Clarkin), the creepy owner of the camp, who was part of the previous expedition; his creepy son, Marty (Love), called “Martian” by the other councillors, for reasons that are obscure; and apparently friendly fisherman, Ray (Kash), who shows up and offers first-aid, after Gillian gashes her leg.
She shot down her first two victims on September 13, 1942. The second was a German ace himself, with 11 kills, Erwin Maier. After being captured, Maier asked to meet the pilot responsible: when introduced to Litvyak, he thought it was some kind of joke, until she described their dog-fight in detail. She always had a rebellious streak, and on returning from successful missions, would engage in aerobatics over the base, knowing that it irritated her commanding officer. But she had a feminine side as well, and seems to have been in a relationship with fellow ace Alexei Solomatin. When he was killed, she wrote to her mother, “He was not my type, but his insistence and his love for me convinced me to love him”. Litvyak’s fate remains uncertain: she’s generally regarded to have been shot down and killed during a vicious air-battle in August 1943, but some speculate she survived the landing, was captured by the Germans, and moved to Switzerland after the war. Presuming the former, she was posthumously awarded Hero of the Soviet Union by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990.
