Author: Jim McLennan

Lust for Freedom

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★½
“Lust Highway”

lustforfreedomUndercover cop Gillian Kaites (Coll) needs a break from the force after an operation goes wrong, with her boyfriend and fellow cop being gunned down in front of her. She goes on a road-trip, but has the misfortune to go through a town where the local cops are in league with the prison to arrest fetching young ladies on fabricated charges. They can then be shipped off to jail and… Well, the script is kinda vague on the specific purpose behind this, clearly quite significant, operation involving a large number of people and no small effort. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, and presume the ends, whatever they may be, justify the means. Gillian ends up framed for drug possession, and has to survive against brutal guards, brutal fellow prisoners and matron Mrs. Puskar (Trevor) – in the interests of sustaining suspense, I will avoid revealing whether or not she is brutal. Eventually, the brutality on display becomes too much, and she leads the inmates in a revolt against their cruel captors. In other words: women in prison plot 3A.

It’s not a genre which naturally is at home here: whether it qualifies, depends on the approach taken with the heroine as much as anything. How pro-active and action-oriented is she? It’s really a judgment call, but in this case, Coll is physical enough to qualify, and there are a couple of other elements that just about push this into the fringes of our territory. Most obviously, is the lengthy pro-style wrestling match between two inmates, at the behest of Puskar. It’s notable, because one of the participants is actual pro wrestler Dee ‘Queen Kong’ Booher, who was part of the GLOW franchiseas ‘Matilda the Hun’ (a name shamelessly stolen from Death Race 2000), and at 6’4″, certainly deserves the name. Kaites also professes to possess some close-combat abilities, befitting her role as a cop – which she, curiously, never mentions during her incarceration – and uses these to defend herself.

The downside is, this isn’t very good in most aspects, ranging from the overuse of voice-over, clearly as a penny-pinching tactic to avoid the rigours of sync sound recording, through a godawful soundtrack consisting largely of two songs by eighties hair-metal band Grim Reaper (in the film’s defense, it actually was the eighties), to the performance of the lead. This is Coll’s only credit ever, according to the IMDB, and you can understand why. Compared to, say, the Female Convict Scorpion films which were my last dip into the field, it’s positively chaste, outside of a lesbian scene between scream queen Michelle Bauer and porn starlet Summer Breeze. So you have something which is neither tongue in cheek, nor excessive, nor well-acted or filmed. Kinda hard to work out what the point actually is. Great poster though…

Dir: Eric Louzil
Star: Melanie Coll, William J. Kulzer, Judi Trevor, Elizabeth Carlisle

Raven Hawk

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★★★
“But is it Raven Hawk or Ravenhawk? “

ravenhawkThe sleeve and the IMDB seem to differ. Either way… In 1979, young Native American Rhyia Shadowfeather is forced to watch as her parents, opposed to the building of an industrial plant on native land, are killed in front of her. Rhyia, sent catatonic by the shock, is framed for the murders and sent to an asylum. 12 years later, the van transferring her to another facility crashes, and the adult Rhyia (McLish) is presumed killed. Except, of course, she’s still alive, and seizes the chance to extract vengeance on those responsible, who have profited from the plant, which was constructed after the opposition was disposed of, and is now belching pollution into the environment. Top of the food chain there is Philip Thorne (Atherton), but on Rhyia’s trail is federal marshal Del Wilkes (Enos), who may be on thin ice, investigating on the reservation.

McLish is a former bodybuilder, who was a two-time Ms. Olympia, and was featured in Pumping Iron II: The Women. Pyun seems to have something of a “thing” for those – see also Sue Price in Nemesis 4, but at least McLish doesn’t the same neo-alien look to her. Chiseled out of stone, certainly, but cinematographer George Mooradian does a good job of simply making her look fit. Indeed, credit Mooradian for a film that looks an awful lot better than most TV movies, taking full advantage of the spectacular landscapes and scenery (both physical and biological!). Some of it was shot here in Arizona, in and around Page, most notably the Glen Canyon Dam Bridge from which one of her targets topples; it’s a long way down, since the bridge was the highest arch bridge in the world when it was completed in the late fifties.

Probably wisely, the script doesn’t give McLish many lines, leaving the chat to the rest of the cast, a solid bunch of character actors, including Mitch Pileggi (The X Files). The story generally works well, the villains growing steadily more and more disturbed as the body count grows, Shadowfeather apparently able to vanish like a ghost. It is a little heavy on the “tormented and put-upon Indians” angle – yeah, I get it, give them a casino or something and let’s all move on. Disappointingly, Shadowfeather is also robbed of her ultimate vengeance, a strange scripting decision that significantly devalues everything which has gone before. However, it remains generally solid, and you’re left with a vague sense of disappointment that McLish didn’t keep on with the action flicks. She’s certainly no worse here than a certain other body-builder was, in his early genre efforts.

Dir: Albert Pyun
Star: Rachel McLish, John Enos III, Ed Lauter, William Atherton

Hullabaloo: Animated steampunk action heroine seeking your support

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hullabaloo2Currently running on IndieGogo is this campaign to assist in the funding of an animated feature, Hullabaloo, which hopes to resurrect the virtually dead art of traditional, 2-D, hand-drawn animation. Even Studio Ghibli, the home of animation deity Hayao Miyazaki, seems to be heading that way, and it’s easy to understand why: it’s an astonishingly intensive process. The president of Ghibli once estimated that all his company’s resources, going full bore, could produce five minutes of feature-quality animation a month. No wonder the trend is increasingly toward CGI. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing: the best works of Pixar show that story and characterization are more important than medium. But the loss of cel animation takes a tool away from the storytellers, and I personally find CGI still falls short when it comes to depicting human emotions accurately.

Hullabaloo was created by James Lopez, with animation by Bruce Smith, both long-time veterans of the industry, who worked on some of Disney’s classics, including The Lion King, Tarzan and The Emperor’s New Groove. Now, they’ve gone independent, and are looking to raise money for this project – it has really taken off, with the campaign already having raised more than three times its initial goal, with almost three weeks still left. But why is it of interest here? Well, if the pic on the right hasn’t given that away, because it promises to kick the arse of most Disney – or, indeed, most animated – films, in terms of its strong heroine. Here’s the synopsis, which sounds more than slightly like Adele Blanc-Sec, in terms of atmosphere and settings:

Hullabaloo is the story of Veronica Daring, a brilliant young scientist who returns home from an elite finishing school to find her father–the eccentric inventor Jonathan Daring–missing without a trace! The only clue left behind points Veronica toward Daring Adventures, an abandoned amusement park used by her father to test his fantastical steam-powered inventions. There she discovers a strange girl named Jules, a fellow inventor who agrees to help Veronica in locating her missing father and discovering the secrets of his work.

Together, Veronica and Jules learn that Jonathan Daring has been kidnapped by a mysterious group of influential persons, who seek to use his latest invention for nefarious purposes. These villains are wealthy and influential and neither Veronica nor Jules can stop them openly. But determined to save her father and holding true to the family creed that technology should be used for the good of all, not the greed of some, Veronica assumes the secret identity of “Hullabaloo”, a goggled crusader who uses wits and science to combat evil and oppose the nefarious conspiracy that has taken her father.

Got to love a story which also appears to be pro-science, as well as intent on providing a strong female role model for kids, something which isn’t as common as it should be [and even when it appears, can end up going off the rails – see Brave for example, which started an awful lot stronger than it finished]. Yeah, latching on to the steampunk trend does perhaps seem a little too bandwagon-jumping. But if you’re going to use an “antique” style like cel animation, then it does perhaps make more sense to put it into a period setting. And, it has to be said, there hasn’t been a “true” steampunk feature released for a while: there have been some with steampunk elements e.g. Sherlock Holmes, or even the version of The Three Musketeers made by Paul W.S. Anderson. But this seems a good deal more full-on, and can only be applauded as such. Of course, there’s a long way to go from where they are now, with the quarter of a million raised a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of the full feature. Hopefully, it’ll end up both getting made, and looking as cool as it has the potential to be.
hullabaloo

Modesty Blaise (TV pilot)

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★½
“Modesty blasé“

modestyblaise1982It seems that around every two decades, someone decides it’d be a good idea to adapt Modesty Blaise. First up, in 1966 was a wretchedly camp adaptation, so bad I can’t bring myself to watch it again, starring Monica Vitti and Terence Stamp. In 2003, there was My Name is Modesty, which was a good deal better, but appears to have been a quickie intended to allow Miramax to hang onto their rights to the character. In the middle, dating from 1982, ABC took a shot at creating a TV series inspired by Peter O’Donnell’s anti-heroine, but it never went further than this 50-minute pilot. In it, Modesty (Turkel) and her trusty if no longer Cockney sidekick, Willie Garvin (Van Bergen), rescue a student from an attempted abduction. Turns out, she’s the last piece in activating a cryptographic device, that Debbie DeFarge (Seymour) intends to use to crack the stock-market. Federal intelligence agent Gerald Tarrant (Curtis) requests Modesty’s help to recover the device, so she and Willie head down to Mexico to stop DeFarge’s evil plan.

I think the kindest thing you can say about this is, maybe it made more sense in 1982. This certainly isn’t the Modesty I imagined, one whose history on the streets may be in the past, but is never entirely buried beneath the surface. Turkel is striking enough visually, and I was amused to see her rip open her skirts, the better to fight villains, but she doesn’t have any kind of edge or darkness to her character. That’s somewhat understandable – after all, American network television in the early eighties was hardly renowned for pushing the envelope – but, why bother adopting Modesty Blaise if you want something so utterly bland and neutered? Van Bergen is even more mis-cast: when writing the script for the original film, O’Donnell said he was thinking of Michael Caine as the ideal actor for the role, who is about as far from Van Bergen as imaginable.

After the moderately exciting opening, there is an awful lot of sitting around and chatting, whether it’s in Modesty’s house, or after they’ve been captured by Defarge’s minions (including renowned pro wrestler, Professor Toru Tanaka). The final five minutes sees a brief flurry of activity, as they try to stop the computer from executing Defarge’s buy and sell orders – though the computer in question resembles, in shape and size, a washing machine rather more than anything you’d see in a finance house these days. The cutting-edge technology shown here has not aged well either, with Blaise able to rescue the Western financial world by picking up another phone connected to the same line, thereby disrupting the device’s ability to communicate. Yeah, that degree of planning is not exactly going to get Defarge honored by the Supervillains Academy. Wikipedia claims Sparks wrote the theme song, but that definitely isn’t them on the pilot, and I suspect their version was for a different, unconnected attempt to adapt the show.

Should you be interested, I’ve embedded a video copy of the show below. Not great quality, but I can’t say even watching this on Blu-Ray would make it bearable. Roll on 2021 or so, and the next scheduled adaptation. We know Quentin Tarantino’s a fan, and Neil Gaiman as well, with the latter having written an unmade script based on I, Lucifer. Maybe the fourth time will be the charm.

Dir: Reza Badigi
Star: Ann Turkel, Lewis Van Bergen, Keene Curtis, Carolyn Seymour

Fugitive at 17

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★★½
“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Lifetime TVM version)”

fugitiveat17Holly (Avgeropoulos, best known for her role in post-apocalypse series The 100) is a high-school hacker in Philadelphia, convinced against her better judgment to attend a college party with her best friend. These doubts prove amply justified, as her friend ends up dead, after being dosed with drugs by slimy sex offender Spencer Oliphant (Van Dien), and Holly is blamed, with no-one believing in Oliphant’s existence – it’s doesn’t help that the two girls were on probation for an earlier pharmaceutical incident. On her way to jail, other prisoners in Holly’s van are busted out, and Holly also goes on the lam with the help of Dan (Rindress-Kay), intent on tracking down Oliphant and exposing him as the real culprit. Hot on her trail is Detective Cameron Langford (Cox), who wants Holly to come in before she makes things worse for herself, but has to deal with problems of her own, because the dead girl was the daughter of a major contributor to the mayor’s campaign.

Holly makes for an interesting character, even though Avgeropoulos is way too old to be playing a teenager, being the best part of a decade older than the alleged high-school student. Mind you, with Van Dien drooling all over her, that’s probably for the best. While the film does specifically indicate she has no parents, and is, in fact, also taking care of her sick grandmother, there isn’t the necessary intensity to convince me that Holly could survive on her own. It’d also have been cool to have had her make more use of her technological skills to track down Olyphant, perhaps destroying his life in the same way that he destroyed hers, toying with him before eventually handing him over to the police. That’s the way I’d have gone, had I been writing this: however, it would certainly not have been suitable for screening as a Lifetime TVM. Given this, it’s no spoiler to reveal that the film ends with hugs all round, lessons learned, and a cleaned-up version of Holly, no longer sporting dyed hair and piercings, serving birthday cake to her granny.

It’s a painfully obvious ending, and there enough other mis-steps on the way there to have me rolling my eyes on occasion. Holly’s breakout from custody is far too convenient, and I can’t say I would expect the police to take seriously a fugitive, calling after having broken into someone else’s house, who claims the house-owner is the real culprit and, look, I found drugs they were hiding.  But if the storyline is, more or less, pants, the performances aren’t bad, with Cox giving a nice performance as a single mom having to juggle a harassing husband, and troublesome son – though, with this being Lifetime, his delinquency extends no further than being caught skateboarding on private property. Van Dien is also suitably sleazy [Man, it doesn’t seems so long ago he was playing high-school students himself; must watch Starship Troopers again some time.] and you certainly find yourself rooting for him to be taken down. For what this is, it’s okay: however, it’s another case where the makers could have aimed a good deal higher.

Dir: Jim Donovan
Star: Marie Avgeropoulos, Christina Cox, Casper Van Dien, Daniel Rindress-Kay

The Naked Killers

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★★½
“Because ‘Topless killers’ wouldn’t sell quite as well, I guess.”

naked killersNot to be confused with the Hong Kong exploitation classic Naked Killer, this 1977 Spanish film is set mostly on a Pacific island inhabited solely by a veteran Japanese soldier, Yamato, who thinks World War 2 is still going on, and three women, whom he rescued from a plane crash when they were small children. He has raised them in military style, to defend the island against any “invaders”, and it’s not long before these show up. They come in the form of a boatload of treasure-hunters, who have heard that a Japanese freighter carrying gold wrecked itself on the island’s shoals. Adding an additional layer of complexity, the crew, a collection of ne’er-do-wells apparently chosen at random from the dockside, are planning a mutiny, unhappy with captain Paul, and old salt Walter, who knows the island’s location. This leads to a rather unusual alliance between Yamato and his adopted daughters with Paul and Walter, as they fight for survival against the latter’s former employees.

It’s more than a little bizarre, not least because the actor playing the soldier is very obviously not Japanese at all. I was thoroughly confused when he called himself a Japanese officer, until I realized this was made not long after the last Imperial Army holdout. Teruo Nakamura, having surrendered in December 1974. The other unusual aspect is making him more than somewhat sympathetic: perhaps this is due to Spain’s position in the war, which leaned toward the Germany-Japan Axis under General Franco, who had died not long before this was made. He’s shown very much as a father figure, loyal to a fault (which is why he stuck to his post for 30 years after everyone else gave up) and utterly honourable. Witness his face as one of the mutineers tells him the Japanese emperor is now shining the shoes of the American president every morning, or his embarrassment as he tries to breach the subject of s-e-x with his nubile foster family. It’s kinda endearing, despite this still being the worst case of yellow-face I’ve seen since Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

The film’s original title translates as The Island of Burning Virgins, which is one of the most awesome titles in exploitation history. Naturally, they spend an impressively hygienic amount of time frolicking in natural pools – though I do have to wonder, where the hell did they get their thoroughly modern bikini costumes? And they’re naturally delighted when the handsome captain shows up, happy to demonstrate to them what this s-e-x thing is actually about. However, they are not mere puppets, laying some rather nasty jungle traps for the “invaders”, and with hand-to-hand skills that are occasionally surprising. It is, of course, extremely silly, very dated and questionable in a whole number of ways. However, it certainly isn’t boring, and compared to certain jungle girl films I’ve seen, can only be appreciated for that.

Dir: Miguel Iglesias
Star: Sita Sadafi, Roxana Dupre, Inca Maris, Alejandro del Enciso

Nina: Crazy Suicide Girl

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★★
“Well, it’s certainly different. Note: different, not necessarily good”

NinaPosterThis micro-budget Italian offering seems to go about things almost entirely in reverse. Rather than establishing the characters, then dropping them into a scenario, this starts with Nina investigating a missing girl, Anna. The disappearee seems to have some connection to the dodgy “Xstasy” video company, fronted by Cesare Mazza (Guerra), and behind that, an apparent Satanic cult under the leadership of Marcus (Visconti), who is actually a woman. Apparently, they take the offcasts of illegal Eastern Europeans from the porn shoots, and sacrifice them to their demonic master.

But what’s never really addressed in any real detail is Nina. Is she a cop? A private detective? An assassin for hire? And what exactly did she do to merit the title of, and I quote, “Crazy suicide girl.” Must have been something pretty cool and interesting, right? We never learn. She does point a revolver at her temple and pull the trigger, but since we have no clue if it’s loaded or not, I’m finding myself underwhelmed there. She does torture someone with a blowtorch to extract information from them. But I had just finished watching 24: Live Another Day, and let’s be honest, that isn’t enough to turn Nina into Jack Bauer in a dress.

I did quite like the heroine, who has an off-center attitude to her and a look which is not conventionally pretty. But the film probably needs to decide what it wants to be, and stick with it, rather than trying to combine aspects of the hard-boiled detective thriller, Dennis Wheatley adaptation, soft-porn and action heroine genres. Because, the scripts doesn’t handle any of them particularly well. For instance, the “detecting” aspects are so conveniently simplistic as to be an embarrassment, right from when Nina discovers a porn DVD in Anna’s bedroom. Another problem is an almost total lack of motivation for anyone involved here, from Nina through Cesare and up to ‘Marcus’: they seem to exist purely because the plot demands they do.

There’s no shortage of nudity and the gore effects are fairly plentiful, if characterized more by enthusiasm than quality. But it’s only at the very end, which hints at a sequel with the potential to be more interesting than this film, that you get some idea of what this was trying to accomplish. It’s a shame there wasn’t less of a gap between intent and execution, pun not intended.

Dir: Christian Arioli
Star: Irene Giordano, Mauro Cipriani, Gabriele Guerra, Stefania Visconti

Shaolin Girl

  By

★★★
“Shaolin lacrosse, rather than soccer.”

Shaolin Girl photo 02Rin Sakurazawa (Shibasaki) has been training in shaolin kung-fu for over eight years. When she returns to Japan, she finds her dojo abandoned and derelict, and her former master Kenji Iwai (Eguchi) is now working as a cook in a local restaurant. She is recruited by a waitress there, Minmin (Yuqi). for the lacrosse team at the local Seikan University, but learns some harsh lessons on the nature of teamwork The university president, Yuichiro Oba (Nakamura), has another agenda, and seeks to draw Rin over to the dark side, by getting her to use her skills for more violent ends which he can then exploit. But it turns out that she was sent to China for good reason…

After the recently reviewed Beach Spike took volleyball to extremes, albeit to dubious effect, the inspiration here is equally obvious. That’s clearest during the end credits, when a lacrosse shot does exactly the same “turning into a fiery dragon” thing as in Shaolin Soccer. Still, despite having Stephen Chow as executive producer, and the presence in minor roles of a couple of actors from Chow’s Western breakout, in Chi Chung Lam and Kai Man Tin, this does go its own way for much of the film. Fortunately, it doesn’t try to reproduce the “plucky bunch of underdogs” story, which Soccer was affectionately parodying. This is far more about Rin’s personal journey of enlightenment, as she realizes there’s more to that than simply the physical aspects. Indeed, if you’re looking for action, the first two-thirds of this will be pretty disappointing, and even the lacrosse games aren’t very interesting.

Things certainly perk up in the final act, Rin eventually being provoked – mostly through attacks by Oba’s minions on everyone she cares for – into an assault on the villain’s lair. This appears to bear some relation to Bruce Lee’s unfinished Game of Death, as she works her way up through a pagoda, to the top level where she faces Oba, and… Well, things veer off into Matrix territory, with Rin apparently being The One, or something. If heavy on the CGI, it’s certainly spectacular, with the water effects being particularly lovely. All told, I didn’t mind this: it struck a nice balance between the elements, and it’s a winning performance from Shibasaki. However, it certainly suffers in comparison with its predecessor, and it appears clear Chow’s work on this, involved little more than cashing the cheques.

Dir: Katsuyuki Motohiro
Star: Ko Shibasaki, Tôru Nakamura, Kitty Zhang Yuqi, Yosuke Eguchi

Breakaway

  By

★★
“Marginally better than having your kneecaps broken. “

breakawayAfter a brisk start, this gradually falls apart, the script collapsing under the strain of too much disbelief, as everyone whizzes around in search of $300,000 in stolen mob money. This was taken by Myra (Thompson), a courier for a gangster boss, Anton (Ray Dash). She wanted out of the business, but makes the mistake of telling him so, and her “last job,” delivering money to a hitman, is actually an ambush. Myra escapes with the cash, causing Anton to send a string of other killers after her, most notably Grey (Joe Estevez). Meanwhile she tries to avoid detection, with the help of both her two-timing boyfriend Carter (DeRose), who is cheating on her with a cafe manager Gina (Harding – yes, it’s that Tonya Harding) and a college professor Dan (Noakes), whom she meets at an art gallery. Everyone schemes, double-crosses and fights each other, to try and recover the brown paper-bag containing the cash, leading to a final battle at Anton’s.

Initially, it’s quite promising, with Myra being efficient and effective in her job, more than capable of taking care of herself. [Her character’s fondness for wearing a really short skirt doesn’t do any harm either!] However, it soon becomes apparent that her survival is equally due to the howling ineptness of everyone whom she comes up against. I don’t know if the aim was to make Anton and his minions out to be lovable buffoons, but if so, it only half succeeds: they nail the “buffoon” part in the bulls-eye. Which is a lot better shooting than can be said for the henchmen, since they couldn’t hit a barn if they were inside it. This starts off amusing, until you realize their incompetence is not a joke.

It’s the kind of film where, if everyone behaved with any morsel of common sense, things would be over in 10 minutes. Instead, you have frequently to resist the urge to yell at the screen, whenever the characters instead behave with the willful stupidity necessary to the plot. As noted, some of the elements here have potential, Thompson among them. It’s unfortunate that the makers did not apparently have enough confidence in her ability to carry the film, and chose to throw all the other plot threads on top. These don’t add depth or complexity, so much as unnecessary encumbrance. Grey is the only other character with any credibility, and the film would have been much better, if it had been stripped down to he vs. she. Junk the minions, junk Carter and, especially, junk Gina, because Harding’s performance serves solely as a demonstration of the gulf between professional actors and amateur ones.

Dir: Sean Dash
Star: Teri Thompson, Tony Noakes, Chris DeRose, Tonya Harding

Kate Bush, Action Heroine

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katebush4It remains a matter of some small pride that the first album (kids, ask your parents!) I ever bought, was Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside. Unlike some artists from my days as a callow youth, she has stood the test of time very, very well, and over three decades later, despite many wannabes over time (coughToriAmoscough), there has still been no-one like her. I’ve been on a bit of a Kate Bush revival of late, inspired by her current return to live performance in London, after a gap of 35 years. Reviewing her work, both aural but particularly, the visual, I get the sense she had some action heroine tendencies of her own.

James and the Cold Gun

“It’s hot and sandy, the land is old and dry. Here rides a man with a sheet of ice by his side.”  Those lines were penned by Bush to accompany the sheet music for the song from her debut LP. I always presumed that it was inspired by James Bond, but that doesn’t seem to have been the case, Kate saying in an interview when asked if it referred to anyone in particular, “The answer is: nobody. When I wrote the song, James was the right name for it.” Her record company wanted this to be her first single, but Bush held out for Wuthering Heights. Good call, I suspect: this is a great deal more conventional, but lacks the drop-dead, “what the f—?” impact of Heights.

Still, Gun got its moment in the sun. An extended version of the song, over eight minutes long, became the show-stopper for the third and final act of her first, and until this week, only live tour in 1979, demonstrating the mix of music, ballet, mime and theatre in which she has been interested since the very beginning. Reviewing the show, The Guardian wrote “The erotically charged denouement of James and the Cold Gun depicted her as a murderous gunslinger, spraying gunfire – actually ribbons of red satin – over the stage.” Ok, I’m sold. Here’s the sequence in question, taken from the live VHS, so apologies for the mediocre quality – why it has never been re-released on DVD escapes me. Now would seem the perfect time…

Babooshka

Her third album, Never For Ever, gave us one of the most iconic images of her career, as part of the video for Babooshka, a song about a woman who adopts a second identity to test her husband’s fidelity – only for it to be found wanting. In it, Kate adopts two personae, the staid wife, clad entirely in black, and with a veil, and the alter ego, who is dressed in a way much more befitting the heroine of a sword-and-sorcery novel. Which is not surprising, because the style was inspired by drawing from renowned illustrator Chris Achilleos. It wasn’t his first brush with the music industry, as the previous year, he gave the world the controversial cover for the Whitesnake LP Lovehunter, with a naked woman straddling a giant snake

This work was positively subtle in comparison, originally for the first book in the Raven, Swordmistress of Chaos series by “Richard Kirk” – actually a pseudonym for two writers, and not the noted industrial musician. Bush’s take, along with designer Pamela Keat, was somewhat more modest, as you can see in the side-by-side below. But I was fourteen when the song came out, and can still remember watching the video for the first time. My picture can be found in the dictionary to this day, beside the word “gobsmacked.” :)

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The Wedding List

Kate was always extraordinarily well-versed in culture, right from Wuthering Heights: how many 18-year-olds can pepper a song with a sly reference to Armenian philsopher George Gurdjieff? But bonus points have to be awarded for her being inspired by a French girls with guns film even I haven’t seen, Francois Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black. One of Truffaut’s contemporaries, Jean-Luc Godard is often credited with saying “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun” (he was actually quoting D.W. Grifiths), and Truffaut’s film is a fine example. It stars Jeanne Moreau as a widow, who hunts down and kills the men responsible for the death of her husband on their wedding day.

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It seems a clear influence on Kill Bill, even down to the “Bride” crossing of her victims’ names in a notebook. Quentin Tarantino denies having seen it, but then he professed unfamiliarity with City on Fire too. But the best part of a quarter-century earlier, Kate Bush took inspiration from Truffaut for another song on Never For Ever, about a wronged woman who seeks vengeance on her spouse’s murderer – in a particularly Bushian (Bushesque?) twist for additional tragedy points, the widow commits suicide, and is then found to be pregnant. Here’s a sample of the lyrics.

Now, as I’m coming for you, all I see is Rudi.
I die with him, again and again, and I’ll feel good in my revenge.
I’m gonna fill your head with lead and I’m coming for you!
And when it’s all over you’ll roll over the butt of my gun:
One in your belly, and one for Rudi.
You got what you gave by the heel of my bootie.
Bang-bang–Out! like an old cherootie,
And I’m coming for you…

Damn. Kate and the Cold Gun, indeed. While this was never released as a single, it was one of the songs which formed part of her 1979 Christmas special for the BBC, from which the image above is taken, and which is available, with a little searching online. There’s almost an old West feeling to the version here, along the lines of Hannie Caulder – amusingly, the target for her vengeance is played by Kate’s brother, Paddy. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and track down a copy of The Bride Wore Black. For now, here’s the trailer.

Running up That Hill

But before I got, mostly as an aside. Kate’s fifth release, Hounds of Love, is considered by many fans to be her best, and certainly, contains some of her most memorable songs. Running would be one of them, and remains to this day, her most successful song in the United States. The theme here is, how many relationship issues would be solved, if the people involved could just swap places and see things from the other person’s perspective. Not quite sure how the archery motif seen on the sleeve fits into that, but I note that the gesture of drawing a bow is also seen multiple times in the video for the song. It may be another reference to The Bride Wore Black, as the heroine does wield a bow during her quest for revenge.

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