★★★½
“A hot mess. And de la Huerta is not bad either.”
“My name is Abigail Russell. I look like a slut, but don’t be fooled—this is merely a disguise to lure the dangerous predators who walk among us. This is their jungle, their breeding ground, and tonight I am on the hunt. These are the cheaters, the married, lying scum. They are like diseased cells cultured in alcoholic petri dishes that destroy unsuspecting families and infect millions of innocent vaginas. There is no cure for the married cock—only me, the nurse.”
Even Lionsgate didn’t know what to do with this, the film sitting on the shelf for about two years, before being quickly released without much fanfare. And, to be honest, you can see why, because it’s the kind of lurid, nonsensical trash that gives real cinema a bad name. As such, we naturally adored it. As the introductory monologue above should make clear, Abigail Russell (de la Huerta) is an angel of vengeance, who prowls the streets looking for cheating husbands, luring them in, and then wiping them out. She does so, believing she is saving their families from finding out the terrible truth. In reality, she is a nurse who is nuttier than a Christmas fruitcake, and when the colleague (Bowden) she is supposed to mentoring spurns Abigail’s friendship, in favour of a man, she sets out to destroy the perceived betrayer’s life.
de la Huerta is perfect, combining a body to die for, with a face best described, with my usual literary eloquence as “kinda weird.” Imagine an alien imitating a human being and you’ll be in the right area; that apples to the way she speaks too, which seems – and I’m fairly sure this is entirely deliberate – as if heavily drugged. Combine this off-kilter central performance with some of the ripest dialogue spat out by a character since Joe Eszterhas was in his prime, plus stylistic comic-book depiction by the second-unit director of Resident Evil: Extinction, and you’ll be in the right area as far as knowing what to expect. But it goes above and beyond in just about every area, although this is something of a mixed blessing: the most interesting stuff is Abigail’s predatory lifestyle, which is genuinely unusual and disturbing (for any male, at least; Chris spent much of this section nodding her head in approval!). When it turns into a remake of Single White Female for the middle portion, things becomes over-familiar, and de la Huerta just doesn’t have the same acting chops as Jennifer Jason Leigh. [Not that many actresses do]
Things perk up nicely for a grand guignol finale, which sees Abigail roaming the corridors of the hospital, dispatching anyone who gets in her way, and even some who don’t, with manic abandon. Naturally, as with all good horror, it ends with a set-up for a potential sequel, and it’s one we wouldn’t mind seeing. In a genre where all the icons are male, e.g. Freddy, Jason, Pinhead, etc. Nurse Abigail Russell is potentially the most interesting female candidate for some time. And while I can certainly see why this isn’t for all tastes – indeed, “taste” is about the least applicable word for this – we appreciated its clearly satirical intent and were happy to go along for the ride.
Dir: Doug Aarniokoski
Star: Paz de la Huerta, Katrina Bowden, Corbin Bleu, Boris Kodjoe
If ever I become an evil overlord, I will ensure my minions’ idea of security does not involve walking slowly in the open, towards an attacker, while firing wide of them from a range no greater than a slightly oversize dinner-table. That’s the first thing we take from this, which begins with a thoroughly implausible scene where Rei (Ono, who had been a part of 90’s J-pop group CoCo) manages to drown her target, a German industrialist, despite him being roughly twice her size, and without anyone in or around the swimming-pool noticing anything. She then climbs out, pulling a gun from who knows where, kills bodyguards who’d fail the Imperial Stormtrooper accuracy exam, and abseils down the side of the building to escape. That sets the tone for much of what follows, combining a reunion with someone from her past, a blossoming relationship with a chef, and her boss’s traditional surly reluctance to allow anything as banal as “personal happiness” to distract his #1 killer from her work.
Aoki appears to have streaked like a star across the pinky violence firmament, appearing only in the trilogy of which this is the first, and one other film, Gakusei yakuza, before returning to the streets whence she came. Or I like to think that was her origin, anyway, and this is less a dramatic work, than a documentary depicting her life. Sharing the same name, Rika is the child of rape, a GI impregnating her mother before being deployed to Korea, and it’s not long before one of her mother’s boyfriends/customers [the film is sketchy on this detail] has taken a similar approach to Rika. She ends up heading an all-girl gang, but is sent to a reformatory after an opposing, male gang leader accidentally dies during a fight with her. But it’s not long before our heroine escapes, only to find some rivals have taken advantage of her absence, and the rest of the gang has been abducted and are about to be sold off to Vietnam. The boss offers to sell them to her instead, and Rika blackmails her father into paying up, only for the women to be sold anyway.
This obscurist Hong Kong revenge flick is a little different, mainly because the couple at the heart of the film are lesbians. Admittedly, this is largely for crass, exploitative purposes: the dialogue quoted above, pretty much confirms the makers want to tut-tut disapprovingly at the love that dare not speak its name, while simultaneously depicting it in salacious detail. Such is the nature of Cat III in the mid-90’s, this seems to want to be something like Naked Killer, released two years earlier to this in 1992, but just doesn’t have the desire to go for the full delirious insanity, necessary to pull the concept off. Particularly in the middle section, it drags horribly, with the story diverting off into the usual triad drug-smuggling, betrayal and cop investigations that we’ve seen a million times before.