Author: Jim McLennan

Wyvern Awakening, by Joanna Mazurkiewicz

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

There are reviews which are easy to write, because – good or bad – the subject generates a lot to talk about. This is not one of those. It’s a bland slice of semi-urban fantasy, which just… sits there, the literary equivalent of a bowl of vanilla pudding. It’s not good, nor is it bad enough to be memorable. It merely exists, remarkable mostly in how unremarkable it is. Put it this way, I finished it less than 24 hours ago, and I can’t even remember the heroine’s name, so little impression was made. Instead of writing, I find myself almost preferring the Star Trek musical episode Chris is watching next to me. And I don’t really like Star Trek. Or musical episodes. 

It starts off feeling like a Harry Potter knockoff. Heroine (checks notes) Astrid was orphaned after her parents were killed by a powerful mage, leaving her with a facial scar, when she defended herself with her own innate arcane talent. She’s then sent to live with some nasty relatives, who treat her badly, almost to the point of abuse. Yeah, it’s all very J.K. Rowling. She has a dream where she suddenly realizes the Mage was Duke Jorgen, the city’s ruler. She vows to take revenge, and fortunately, the Duke is having a contest to find a new assistant. Astri, who is the last of the wyvern shape-shifters, joins the competition and goes through the resulting trials.

Yet, the closer she gets to Jorgen, the more confused she becomes, because he hardly seems like the parent-murdering type. He is, of course, far too attractive to be evil. Read that sentence with as much sarcasm as you wish. So, if you want every encounter to be overflowing with unresolved romantic tension, here you go. The problem is, there’s no consistency in Astri’s approach. One minute, she is about to get all kissy-face with him, the next she’s leaving him to be tortured by rogue shifters. She’s supposed to be a strong, independent heroine, yet is frequently neither. And what are the rules of this contest anyway? They seem to be made up as the trials progress. 

There are some decent elements. I was amused by the her scabrous pair of pocket pixies – named Jetli and Lenin, because reasons, I guess. There’s also a sense of bigger forces at play beyond Astri’s personal problems. The last trial brings these particularly into focus. But the final revelation has been telegraphed from almost the very beginning, and is as thoroughly unimpressive as I feared. I suspect this might be aimed more at a YA audience. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that, except there are YA books that can still work for an adult audience. Then we have this, which does not. To be honest, I suspect even my 13-year-old self might have found it severely deficient, in a number of areas. 

Author: Joanna Mazurkiewicz
Publisher: Self-publshed, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 4 in the Mage Chronicles.

Ride Hard: Live Free

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★★★
“Daughter of Anarchy.”

I was a little nervous on reading the IMDb trivia section: “Three motorcycle clubs participated as extras and offered technical advice.” If this sucked and I gave it a bad review, would I get a visit from a group of annoyed bikers, offering me ‘technical advice’ with a wrench? Turns out I needn’t have worried. While low-budget by Hollywood standards, it has some interesting ideas, and the execution is competent enough to pass muster. The events here take place after the collapse of the United States, when everywhere West of the Mississippi has basically been left to fend for itself. In this part of Nevada, that means two biker gangs, the Skoners and the Gypsies are fighting for control.

A particular wrinkle: all guns were seized by the authorities shortly before things collapsed, leaving them highly rare. But while being chased by the Skoners, 12-year-old Zyra (Rhodes), stumbles across a cache of weapons and ammo in a caravan. The bikers, under leader Tank (Russo), want the guns very much. Zyra proves quite capable of using her new-found force multipliers, leading to a stand-off between the young girl and the motorcycle club. Complicating matters: the Gypsies get word of the cache from a disgruntled Skoner, and prepare to make their own move against Zyra. It’s all unexpectedly interesting, and is a bit different from your typical post-apocalyptic shenanigans. In its thoroughly unconventional heroine, I was reminded a good deal of Molly. 

The performances certainly help, and are almost all effective. Beyond Rhodes and Rivera, there’s good support from Sons of Anarchy veteran Rivera as Gauge, the area’s overlord, and Chaz as an acerbic radio host, who could win third place in a Danny Trejo lookalike contest. I also want to mention R.A. Mihailoff, Vanessa Dorrei and Juan Espinosa as members of the Skoners. They all manage to create well-rounded characters with admirable efficiency. What is a little confusing, is the whole thing appears to be told in flashback by an older version of Zyra. This never quite gels, in part because the film doesn’t bother to circle back to the “present day” at the end, and consequently leaves the audience somewhat dangling in the breeze. 

I did wonder quite how Zyra came to be wandering the Nevada desert by herself, and how she had survived to that point. A little more development would have gone a long way: it leaves scope for a prequel, along the lines of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. There’s no doubt that the “technical advice” adds authenticity, and it’s a rather more nuanced depiction of bikers than you generally get – especially in the post-apocalyptic genre. Although it doesn’t soft-pedal the violence necessary, it’s typically toward a specific goal, and as a result feels more like a case of ‘tough times create hard men’. Or, in the case of Zyra, rather tough little girls as well. I wasn’t expecting much here, and was pleasantly surprised. 

Dir: Tony Mendoza 
Star: Lainee Rhodes, Derek Russo, Emilio Rivera, Jeff Chaz

Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa

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★★★
“Top of the world.”

Reaching the summit of Mount Everest once is a remarkable achievement, done by only a few thousand people in history, with hundreds having died in the attempt. But what about climbing the world’s highest peak on no less than ten occasions? Such is the achievement of Lhakpa Sherpa, a woman from Nepal who had to overcome remarkable adversity in a number of ways to complete this feat. This documentary is the story, both of her tenth (and most recent, to date at least!) ascent, and of her life. It’s an impressive story of fortitude, though never really answers my most burning question. I can understand wanting to climb Everest once. But why do it so many times?

Lhakpa was born in 1973, and grew up when girls weren’t allowed to go to school. She carried her brother there, two hours each way, but wasn’t allowed to learn herself. This didn’t stop her from breaking with local tradition in a number of ways. She had a child outside of wedlock, and also became a mountain porter as a teenager, another position reserved for men – she cut her hair short, so her gender would be less apparent. In 2000, she became the first Nepalese woman to reach the top of Everest and survive. The same year, she met climber Gheorghe Dimarescu and the pair married in 2002. They climbed together, and had two daughters, Sunny and Shiny. But there was a dark side, with her husband’s vicious temper turning their relationship abusive, until she left him in 2012.

I do feel the film rather overplays this element of Lhakpa’s life. While it’s obviously significant, it almost seems to robs her of agenda, forcing the viewer to see much of the events through the lens of his behaviour. The structure may enhance this. Rather than unfolding chronologically, there are two parallel streams, one depicting her tenth attempt to reach the top, while the other slowly fills in the background of her life, and the two never quite seemed to mesh effectively for me. Her attitude in dealing with life’s obstacles is amazing, and leave a remarkable impression, such as how Lhakpa worked in a Connecticut supermarket, while raising her two daughters, before returning to her home country.

It does appear her profile has been raised by her remarkable, and largely under the radar, achievements. The documentary shows her finding a sponsor who will fund expeditions: I don’t know if she still works in Whole Foods! I hope not, because she deserves better, with the simple facts of her story being immensely empowering to anyone, and a lesson that any dream can be achieved. But I did not feel that this film really provided much more insight into the person, than a reading of her Wikipedia page would have offered. I was left with questions, such as about her first child, which the film didn’t want to address, and it felt like some outside viewpoints (even Lhakpa’s family) would have benefited the end product. It remains worth a watch: just don’t expect more than a surface portrait.

Dir: Lucy Walker
Star: Lhakpa Sherpa, Sunny Dijmarescu, Shiny Dijmarescu

Black Day

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★½
“Too little, and much too late.”

I feel the need to start with the IMDb synopsis, because it explains things considerably better than the film. “The Story of two former military criminals turned special sleeper cell Soldiers of Fortune by a secret agency called “The Order of the Black Box”. While agent Sage Martinez is undercover as a low level drug dealer’s wife her more volatile and violent sister Jay Bird is A.W.O.L that’s until they get orders for a special mission (their last kill mission to buy their freedom).” This bears so marginal relationship to what I just watched, if it weren’t for the characters’ names matching, I’d be wondering if it came from a completely different film. Little beyond the names is recognizable.

Here’s what I have. Two women: one strangles her demanding husband, the other kills a pair of security guards who attempt to sexually assault her. There’s something about a mysterious black box left on the former’s doorstep. The pair then meet and team up to take on a cannibalistic family who have been abducting and eating babies. The end. On the copy I saw, the entire film (which runs not much over forty minutes) then repeats in a “Director’s Cut” version. I guess this is slightly more coherently assembled, but is almost exactly the same footage, broken into chapters. It comes no closer to covering the points in the synopsis above.

This is, according to the credits, “Raphael Robinson’s Black Day.” On the one hand, it demonstrates a chunky ego. Usually, you become known first, then get to attach your name to your films, e.g. John Carpenter’s Vampires. Who the hell is Raphael Robinson? According to the IMDb, he had one (1) feature before this, which had no votes, critic or user reviews. Bit early to be going Francis Ford Coppola. On the other hand, if Black Day is anyone’s, it would be Robinson’s, since he wrote, produced, directed, edited and did the cinematography on it. He is literally the only crew member mentioned on the film’s IMDb page. The charitable reaction is: very gracious of him to shoulder responsibility and accept all the blame. 

Because simple coherence is missing here. The synopsis is intriguing. It’s just present in the film at “may contain traces of” level. If it had been laid out correctly, I’d have tolerated this much better, because as a low-budget tale of two heroines going after cannibals, it has some energy. Jordan as Jay and Kay as Sage possess presence. Watching them chew up and spit out the members of the Darkwell clan, working their way up to patriarch Creed (Kenney) made for slightly amusing in-flight entertainment (god knows what my fellow passengers thought!). There are occasional moments where Robinson seems to have a clue what he’s doing behind the camera. But it doesn’t appear he read his own film’s synopsis, and the whole thing feels painfully like it was made up as he went along.

Dir: Rapheal Robinson
Star: Krissy Kay, Llola Jordan, Bill K. Kenney, Ella Rose Henning

Breathe

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★★½
“Air apparent.”

I only remembered about this when looking at our preview for last year, and realizing I’d not heard anything more about it. Turns out it was released on April 26th, to what was apparently “limited theatres,” the same day it hit on-demand. I must have missed the memo. So, here we are, and it’s very much a bit of a mixed bag. The scenario is interesting, if vague. Initial tension building is well-done, but the further it went on, the more it struggled to hold my interest. It’s a post-apocalyptic scenario, with the oxygen level of the atmosphere rapidly depleted to a lethally low percentage. This wiped out almost everyone – though where all the corpses went is one of many unanswered questions.

Among the few survivors, living in an air-tight Brooklyn bunker, are mother Maya (Hudson, looking impressively svelte), father Darius (Common) and daughter Zora (Wallis). Though Darius leaves one day and doesn’t come back, leaving his wife and child to fend for themselves. A few months later there are unexpected visitors: a group led by Tess (Jovovich). She claims to have known Darius, and needs to see his oxygen creator, because the one in their bunker in Philadelphia is breaking down, and they’re about to run out of air. Maya is highly suspicious – Darius never mentioned Tess – but Zora convinces her mother to trust Tess and her group, at least somewhat. No prizes for guessing whether or not this is a mistake.

It’s likely at its best while there’s still some doubt about the answer, with a good sense of uncertainty ratcheting up the tension as noted. Just don’t think about the science – how do you make an “EMP generator” out of a flashlight and some copper wire? Though some reviews are wrong to question how guns work without free oxygen: gunpowder, etc. contain it internally. Best avoid the unsubtle social metaphors too, e.g. a black character staring at a mural which says, “We can’t breathe”, obviously a leftover from the BLM protests, or the quoting of Malcolm X. Hudson and Jovovich are the glue which holds this together, even when you can’t see the bulk of their faces due to the helmets needed to sustain life outside.

Their interactions work: far less effective is Worthington playing Lucas, post-apocalyptic trope #23, the loose cannon sidekick. Once Tess and Maya are no longer getting to share scenes, it feels as if the air goes out of the film (an especially appropriate figure of speech given the circumstances). Lucas and Zora then have to take centre-stage, and the results are unimpressive, as the film limps towards an ending too easily contrived. I did like the look of the film, with the world a filter-tinted nightmare that has gone to absolute hell, with some impressively destroyed cityscapes.  The script, on the other hand, needed considerably more work to reach acceptable, and ends up wasting good work by its two leads.

Dir: Stefon Bristol
Star: Jennifer Hudson, Quvenzhané Wallis, Milla Jovovich, Sam Worthington

The Undeserving

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★★★
“Save a horse, ride a cowgirl.”

I’m slightly grading this on a curve, because this is likely the best of the low-budget modern blaxploitation movies I’ve seen, by some margin. By “normal” standards, that still falls some way short of Oscar-winning, with the limited resources still being obvious at some point. But compared to some of the other entries I’ve sat through, this is a palpable improvement, avoiding many of the worst cliches of the genre, in favor of a story which has had some attention given to it. It’s not an African-American knockoff of Scarface, like so many others, and does not entirely rely on a soundtrack of bad rap songs by the director’s pals. That alone puts it ahead of the pack.

It begins with an assassination carried out by arms dealer Lion Caldwell (Russell). He’s wants to kill the person who’s blackmailing him, and make it look like he’s the target. But to ensure there are no loose ends, he will also kill the hitwoman, Harper (Lavan). However, the intended target gets wind of the plan, and switches wigs with an innocent bystander, causing Harper to shoot the wrong target: Lion’s ex-wife, and the mother of his daughter. The whole mess ends up with Harper dumped in a lake, shot multiple times, and stabbed for good measure. Of course, she’s not dead. She is able to make her way to shore, where’s she’s rescued by a couple. The husband is a surgeon, and able to patch her up in-house, rather than notify the authorities. Yeah, I rolled my eyes a bit at that.

Thereafter, Harper makes her way back to her family, from whom she has been estranged, following a gun accident. Her sister, Fire (Curstin), is less than impressed to see her sibling back. Word reaches Lion that his tidying up hasn’t been successful, so he sends his top man, First (Peri), to take care of Harper once and for all. Should her family get in the way, who cares? If you’re thinking this could end up blowing back on Lion… yeah. There’s more thought into this than I expected, though the plot remains imperfect. There’s a second woman left for dead in the lake, but that doesn’t appear to go anywhere much.

I did like a lot the setting for this being “black country”, for want of a better phrase. Not seen a film with that background before; this genre is typically light on horse-riding: Beyonce has a lot to answer for, I suspect! The action is a bit of a mixed bag – some moments work considerably better than others – and there’s some very bad CGI for a gas-pump explosion. But the characters are as well-written as the script, with some unexpected elements. For example, Lion is trying to reconnect with his estranged daughter, in a similar way to Harper and her family. Based on this, I’d not be averse to looking at more of Elmore’s work.

Dir: Joseph A. Elmore Jr.
Star: Nyra Lavan, Oshea Russell, King Curstin, Joshua Peri

Girls With Guns: Best of 2024

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Over on our Facebook page, we regularly post girls with guns images. These are the photos which have been the most popular there over the past year – one for each month, and a couple of wild-card entries. We’re currently voting for the best pic of 2024 there, so come and cast your vote! Otherwise: enjoy; use the arrows at the bottom to scroll through the pics, and click on any to enlarge.

Miss January

Image 1 of 15