★★½
“More of a semi-circle, really”
For whatever reason, I had a strong sense of deja vu while watching this, but I’ve been unable to track down any record of me having written it up. I may be confusing it with Blood Hunters: Rise of the Hybrids, which had the same director and star, or it may simply be the fairly generic nature of the story. This focuses on FBI agent Karen Wu (Chang), who travels to the Philippines to investigate a human trafficking ring. There, she’s met by local liaison officer Luciana Ramos (Torre), and they gradually uncover that the abductions and disappearances are tied to an occult group overseen by the mysterious Eduardo Vicente (Ignacio).
Originally, he was the leader of your basic hippie commune, until accidentally unleashing an entity known as Yawa, who had been trapped underground for centuries. This took over Eduardo, turned him evil, and started demanding human sacrifices from the surrounding area, the aim eventually being to give Yawa immortality. This is all recounted in flashback by Karen, who was found stumbling around in the jungle, covered in blood and saying “Yawa… Yawa…”. After a period back in the United States, she has now returned to the Philippines, and the story is gradually prised out of her by local Detective Liz Fajardo (Victoria). She is piecing together the case after an attempted SWAT raid on another occult location goes horribly wrong, with the entire squad being wiped out.
There’s way too much creeping around shadowy facilities here, and there’s also a sense that English, the language in which most of this unfolds, may not be the language of choice for a number of the participants. Chang, I should stress, is fine: however, a number of the supporting cast are on considerably shakier ground. The plot is mostly humdrum and predictable: if you don’t see the big twist at the end coming, from more or less fifteen minutes in, then you need to be paying greater attention. In some ways, it feels like a throwback to the adaptations Hammer Films did of Dennis Wheatley’s Satanist books in the sixties, though this could definitely have used the gravitas of someone like Christopher Lee at its centre.
It is rather more action-oriented, with Chang doing a decent job there, operating both with her bare hands and with various weapons. It helps the cult members have no problem being used as cannon fodder, not least because, thanks to Yawa, death is barely an inconvenience. But it feels like the scope of the whole cult never lives up the early foreshadowing, when there’s talk of millionaires being involved and a hotel complex which has shades of Epstein’s island. I’d have liked a bigger conspiracy to appear, rather than it just being Eduardo and his acolytes. This is interesting only in spurts, and it needs a less cliched plot and some better performances, to wrap around its reasonably well-executed action.
Dir: Vincent Soberano
Star: Sarah Chang, Marella Torre, Jana Victoria, Ian Ignacio


I mean: Stetson wearin’, six-gun shootin’ country gal, on a mission to slay demons, vampires and things that go bump in the West? Yeah, it’s like that. Mind you, there’s a rough start to this, with three minutes of what is likely a top contender for the worst acting of 2026. I guess it’s good to get it out of the way early, and it does make the rest of the cast look like Oscar candidates in comparison. To be fair, Jones is decent enough in the title role. Even when lumbered with some pretty clunky globs of exposition about a 17th-century Satanic cult, she is generally tolerable, and occasionally above that.
★★
I have to give this credit for being something different. A vampire sports movie? Not a genre cross I’ve seen before. Especially when the sport is… um, modern pentathlon, the least-watched member of the modern Olympics. It’s a five-discipline event, based on the skills needed by a cavalry officer: running, shooting, fencing, swimming and horse-riding. All five play their part here, mostly in the form of Marcia Lorenz (Dordel), a former pentathlete, who is now a hunting guide. Well, was. She just got fired, and has absconded with valuable antique documents belonging to the customer who was responsible. Driving through remote woods, she stops to help a woman by the road, and that’s where things kick off.
By coincidence, I watched this after
This was originally made under the working title of The Passion of Zoya, and the Joan of Arc reference is on point. Both were young warriors fighting against the occupation of their native land, captured by the enemy and tortured before being executed. But they became a rallying point for their country as it succeeded in expelling the invaders, and are now revered as national heroines. The real Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya (pictured) was an 18-year-old teenager in 1941, who signed up to be dropped behind the front-line as the Germans invaded Russia, and carry out missions of sabotage intended to make life difficult for the Nazi army. It did not end well, but she became the first woman Hero of the Soviet Union in WW2, less than three months after her death.
Bridget ‘Briar’ Rose is a rarity: a woman who runs a canal boat, transporting cargo along the waterways which form the Ohio & Erie canal network. However, her livelihood is under threat. The increasing growth of the railway as an alternative method of transportation is increasingly a rival for the jobs she takes, and her cousin, Andrew, is looking to see her barge out from under Briar, so he can invest in the railways instead. However, she suspects he is working with an outlaw: a ferromancer, one of the mages who revolutionized industry in Europe, but who had supposedly been wiped out two decades ago due to the threat they posed.
There’s a strong parallel between this TV movie and Judgment Night, a theatrical feature, also from 1993, starring Emilio Estevez and Cuba Gooding Jr. Both involve a group stranded in an urban war-zone who incur the enmity of a local gang, and consequently have to fight to eescape. The difference with this – and why it’s here – is the victims are three women: psychiatrist Victoria (Powers), her daughter Julie (Robertson) and sister Stacey (Helen Shaver). They are on their way home after a family Thanksgiving dinner, when a quest for fuel leaves them stranded in the South Bronx. That is just start of their problems, courtesy of Ice (Graham) and his vicious gang of thugs.
This an interesting entry, with a complex lead character who is quite some way from being conventionally “likeable”. Özge Dogruol (Schurawlow) is a Viennese taxi driver, who is harsh, abrasive and has severe anger issues. Indeed, anger is arguably among the least of her issues. She practices Thai boxing as an outlet. Or did, until a sparring session goes wrong, and she ends up breaking her partner’s nose in two places. One night, from her apartment, she sees the dead body of a woman in the opposite building, and the killer (Sheik) standing over the corpse. Unfortunately, he also sees Özge. The police won’t provide protection, and soon after, her cousin is murdered, in an apparent case of mistaken identity.
Alma Siracine (Vacth) was a black ops agent for the French government, until an assignment in Syria went pear-shaped, and she resigned her position. Seven years later, she’s living quietly with her policeman husband in Morocco, until he’s the victim of a drive-by shooting. She finds the attackers and terminates them. Unfortunately, they are the sons of local arms dealer Manour Khoury (Dazi). Not helping, he is under the protection of the French government, being allowed to operate in exchange for funneling information to them about terrorist attacks. Spymaster Joanna Walter (Bercot) decides Alma is a loose end in need of tidying. Alma, naturally, is of a different opinion, and won’t be easy to clean up.