Author: Jim McLennan

Bloodrayne II: Deliverance

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★
“Ah, this is why people hate Uwe Boll.”

Look, I speak as one of the few people on the planet who found the original Bloodrayne other than unwatchable dreck. So when I say that the sequel is a soporific, poorly-constructed, badly-executed waste of time and effort for all concerned, including the viewer – for God’s sake, listen to me. There is simply no rhyme or reason present here, right from the setting which goes from Middle Ages Europe to the Wild West without any credible explanation. Billy the Kids (Ward) is a vampire, kidnapping the local kids, in some kind of half-baked plot device that makes no sense, involving him waiting for the railroad to reach town, to spread his curse. I guess going to a town that already has trains would be too much work. Rayne has to round up a posse to take on Billy and his blood-sucking cronies. Y’know? For the kids….

Malthe is not an adequate replacement for Kristanna Loken. While there are some settings in which she would make an appropriate Rayne, this isn’t it. I can do no better than reproduce goatdog’s limerick on this issue:
She’s entirely too soft-spoken.
She pales next to Kristanna Loken.
She’s not half as pretty,
her accent is shitty,
and her ass-kicking skills appear broken.
Beyond that, even my usually forgiving nature kept stumbling into holes of logic. For instance, Rayne’s posse is mostly there because she blackmailed or threatened them, yet this apprarently creates immediate loyalty, to the point they are prepared to die on behalf of a cause they know basically nothing about. Similarly, there’s a newspaper reporter (Coppola): his third scene explains his presence, yet mostly makes you wonder exactly what he was doing in his first two scenes. The film doesn’t even have consistency of vampire lore: can they, or can they not, be killed with regular bullets? The film says no, but then…

It’s not just a bad vampire movie. Probably worse, it’s a bad Western. Overall, it’s just bad: I generally have more time for Boll than most people [National Treasure was much, much worse than House of the Dead], but even I cannot defend this on any level. The original had a lunatic sensibility, heaving everything at the screen it could find: it may not have made much sense, but you did remember it. The sooner I can forget this, the better-off I will be.

Dir: Uwe Boll
Star: Natassia Malthe, Zack Ward, Michael Pare, Chris Coppola

Michael Hurst explains Bitchslap

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Stumbling around the tubes of the Interwebs, we found the following video, in which Michael Hurst deconstructs the upcoming Bitch Slap, a flick that looks like a most amusing homage to the B-exploitation films we love, with stunt co-ordinator Zoe (Grindhouse) Bell. How can any movie go wrong with Lucy Lawless as a mother superior? For more info, check out the official website. We will, needless to say, be following this one with interest.

Silence of the Lambs

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★★★★½
“Clarice had a little lamb – Buffalo Bill kills to dress.”

One of only three films to win the top five Oscars – Best Actor, Actress, Director, Picture and Screenplay [the others being It Happened One Night and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest] – this is arguably the most critically-acclaimed Girls With Guns film of all time. Foster plays FBI trainee Clarice Starling, sent to interview captive killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Hopkins), from where blossoms a strange, symbiotic relationship where both parties need each other. Lecter can help the FBI find an active killer, nicknamed Buffalo Bill because he skins his victims, while Starling is prepared to open herself up, psychologically, to Lecter’s unwavering gaze.

The relationship between the two is the engine that drives the picture, and it proves Starling’s strength that she is able to stand up to Lecter, to the extent that he develops a respect for her. That’s an interesting contrast to her colleagues in the agency, such as Jack Crawford (Glenn), with whom Starling has an unending battle to be treated as an equal: her physical lack of size [apparent right from the start, when she is an an elevator and towered over by her fellow trainees] is belied by her smarts and strength of character, which propel her forward when many would give up. It says a lot about Foster’s performance, that it is not entirely overpowered by Hopkins’ one; Lecter is another case of a great British actor portraying evil to perfection [see also, in different ways, Ben Kingsley, Alan Rickman, Ranulph Fiennes and Christopher Lee]. If Buffalo Bill is the ultimate misogynist, despite his desire to be a woman, Lecter is the ultimate boogeyman, punishing, in unspeakable ways, those he deems unworthy.

It’s Lecter that people remember, quote and fear – to the extent that the movie sometimes topples over as the result of his but Starling is the heart of the film, defying convention by being a heroine who has, basically, no romantic side [there seem to me to be vague homoerotic hints, but that may just be the result of subsequent data about Foster]. She doesn’t sleep with anyone: indeed, she doesn’t appear to sleep, with her life outside the FBI Academy barely sketched. Starling is intensely focused on her task, and prepared to go to any lengths to accomplish it. She is pushed beyond her limits in the process, and digs deeper than she ever imagined possible, on a journey into her personal heart of darkness. If occasionally far-fetched [there being no way the FBI would let a trainee gallivant around on a top-level case like this], this is a landmark entry in the genre, with quality performances that have rarely been matched.

Dir: Jonathan Demme
Star: Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Scott Glenn, Anthony Heald

Devil’s Den

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★★★
“The final battle for the soul of mankind will be fought in a bar full of possessed strippers.” Best. Tagline. Ever.

Sadly, despite the above tagline, the movie doesn’t quite live up to expectations. It has some very interesting ideas, but kinda goes about them the wrong way: I love the idea of a government task-force that roams the world, taking out vampires, werewolves, etc. I enjoy the concept of government-sponsored assassins, working on behalf of pissed-off senators. Instead, for the most part, the film wants desperately to be From Dusk Till Dawn – an admirable target, for sure, even if it falls short on almost every level. Vamp is another obvious touchstone for the script, which has Quinn (Sawa) stop off at the titular strip-club on his way back from Mexico, only to find the buffet is of the patrons, not for the patrons. Fortunately, government agent Leonard (Foree) is there too, looking for the queen of the ghouls, and so is Caitlin (Hu), a two-gun lady whose purpose in attending the venue is less clear. Decapitations ensue.

Perhaps part of the problems with the flick, is that the director – originally Jeff (Texas Chainsaw Massacre III) Burr – took his name off the pic after getting fired by the writer, Mitch Gould. Gould then completely re-edited the picture and wrecked it, according to Burr, who says it was “A fun bad movie, with energy and personality. Now it is just a bad movie.” It certainly has its flaws: there’s remarkably little flesh for a strip-club, especially one that promises ‘Live Nude Girls’ – depending on your definition,. at least one and possibly two-thirds of that promotion is entirely unfulfilled. Some of the mask FX also appear to be of the Halloween leftover variety, and there is generally just too much restraint. It is the kind movie that needs to go gloriously over-the-top, if it’s to stand any chance of a credible comparison with the titles it’s aping [not least on the DVD cover shown right].

That said, there is a fair amount to enjoy here, with the performances, particularly of Foree and Sawa, being entertaining. Sawa is perfect as a stoner dude who, while initially freaked out for obvious reasons, eventually comes to terms with what’s going on: during the climatic fight between Caitlin and the queen ghoul, he just sits there with a goofy grin on his face, taking it in like we all would. Foree, a horror icon since his performance in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, also delivers a quirky turn, and there’s a sublime sequence where he and Quinn, both fans of cinematic samurai Zatoichi, imagine what the blind swordsman would do in their shoes. Hu’s role builds gradually throughout the film, and eventually brings this into GWG territory, which I wasn’t expecting initially. She handles the action scenes fairl well, covering all the bases with gunplay, sword skills and martial arts – I note that one of the stuntwomen on the film is Zoe Bell, whom you should remember from her role in Death Proof. If the potential is never fully realized, there is enough going on to make it a pleasant-enough way to spend 85 minutes.

Dir: “Andrew Quint” [but see above]
Star: Kelly Hu, Devon Sawa, Ken Foree, Karen Maxwell

Countdown

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★★
“I think the alternate title applies to Petty’s career.”

Mad bomber Chris Murdoch (London), is running around Seattle, blowing up Japanese people. FBI agent, Sara Davis (Petty) is part of the team looking into the case, but though they take Murdoch’s Japanese girlfriend (Kawagoe) into custody, Lt Sugimura (Amami) of the Tokyo police sweeps in and demands they release her, so she can be returned home – her father has influence on both sides of the Pacific. Davis won’t let that happen, since the girl is their main hope of catching the bomber; he, needless to say, is none too pleased to find the love of his life in the hands of the police.

Based on a Japanese novel, Christmas Apocalype, this is a pedestrian story, not enlivened by anything particularly exciting in the script or from the performances. Petty is hardly a convincing FBI agent, with limbs like twigs, and both Amami and Kawagoe are clearly fresh from their “English as a Foreign Acting Language” classes; while you understand what they’re saying, there isn’t much depth to their performances, in that language, at least. The main problem, however, is that Murdoch’s behaviour makes no sense. The purpose in his original actions is never explained, and he behaves in convoluted ways that are only logical, as far as setting up the cinematic artifice goes.

The best thing I can say about this is, the pyrotechnics crew does a decent job of blowing things up. Otherwise, it’s a mundane time-passer, workmanlike enough on the technical level, that never succeeds in going any deeper than the most superficial level, taking the “cross-cultural cops” idea we’ve seen so often before, and doing nothing with it. It builds to what passes for a climax, at a classical concert: that makes about as little sense as anything which led up to it.

Dir: Keoni Waxman
Star: Lori Petty, Yuki Amami, Jason London, Miwa Kawagoe
a.k.a. Serial Bomber

Return of the Sister Street Fighter

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★★
“Maybe she shouldn’t have bothered.”

The third in the series loses a lot of the loopy insanity that made the first one such a classic. Shiomi is still as kick-ass a heroine as ever, but I have to say, it was a severe struggle to remain conscious throughout, despite the brief 77-minute running time. By most accounts, the story is largely a re-tread of the second film, with Koryu Lee (Shiomi) going from Hong Kong to Yokohama, to track down a missing woman, only to find herself crossing paths, swords and a variety of other weapons, with local organized crime – since the target of her search is now the mistress of Oh Ryu Mei (Yamamoto). He pits wannabe warriors against each others in death matches, to decide who is fit to become a minion, only to find Lee is more than up to taking them on. He turns to freelancer Kurosaki (Kurata), who agrees to take out the unwanted snooper for twenty million yen.

While certainly possessing its surreal moments – such as the sudden realization that the sexy tune being played in the background at a strip club is, er, Danny Boy – there isn’t the same sense of unfettered imagination. And while the lack of editing during the fight sequences is a refreshing contrast to modern techniques, the alternative favoured by Yamaguchi involves a lot of hand-held camera. Unfortunately, it does not appear that the steadicam had yet made its way to Japan, and the results are disjointed, with Shiomi shining despite of, rather than because of, the presentation. Her skills with the nunchakus are particularly impressive, even if the fight in which she uses them largely consists of a pose-off with the weapons. It’s a significantly less-entertaining piece of work than the original, and that’s a shame.

Dir: Kazuhiko Yamaguchi
Star: Etsuko Shihomi (Sue Shiomi), Akane Kawasaki, Yasuaki Kurata, Rinichi Yamamoto

Ms. 45 trailer

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Ms. 45 is one of the quintessential girls-with-guns films of all time, taking the concept and running with in a way that beautifully combines the fascination with the fear. Here’s the original trailer for Abel Ferrara’s grindhouse classic – you can read our article on the movie here.

The Brave One

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★★★½
“Death Wish with female angst.”

Erica (Foster) has a very comfortable life: nice job as a radio host, imminent marriage to a doctor. This is suddenly destroyed in minutes, when she and her fiance (Andrews) are brutally attacked: he is killed, and she is left a nervous wreck, who sees a threat in every shadow on the city streets. A move to Kansas, while probably better for all concerned, would not be so cinematically or narratively interesting: instead, she buys a black-market gun for protection. A chance encounter on the subway unleashes her inner Bernhard Goetz and before you know it, she’s sweeping the scum off the streets, up to and including the crime lord whom even Detective Mercer (Howard) cannot touch, while simultaneously documenting the city’s reaction to her exploits on the airwaves. This brings her into contact with Mercer, since he is also investigating the vigilante slayings; his suspicions in this area gradually turn towards his new friend.

There’s obviously, more than an element of Death Wish here, though the heroine here is motivated, at least in part, by more than revenge. Foster is solid, as you’d expect – her character is an interesting parallel [or, in some ways contrast] to those she played in Silence of the Lambs and The Accused, and is hardly Charles Bronson. Jordan cranks up the psychological instability with more dutch angles than any film since Battlefield Earth, but the film is generally restrained, avoiding the more lurid angles, though it possesses a more than pessimistic opinion of the justice system. One does sense more could have been done with the media aspects: the resultant feeding frenzy, with the killer becoming a heroic figure to some, is only brushed against, and nothing much is made of the fact that her attackers videotape their crime. However, it’s still a credible slice of urban paranoia and disfunctionality. In many ways, its closest cousin is, perhaps surprisingly, The Dark Knight: to obtain closure, Erica has to decide, just like Bruce Wayne, how far into the abyss she is prepared to descend…

Dir: Neil Jordan
Star: Jodie Foster, Terrence Howard, Naveeen Andrews, Mary Steenburgen

Juncture

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★★★★
“Dead woman walking.”

Let’s start off by giving us a heroine who is dying, thanks to an inoperable brain tumour. Way to bring me down, Juncture: what do you think this is? DamesWithDiseases.com? The Hallmark channel is tha…oh, hang on. She’s following a child-porn purchaser back to his house, and guns him down? Hmmm. This is clearly not your everyday Illness of the Week flick. For Anna Carter (Blackport) has decided to go out with a bang: several of them, in fact. Realising she only has a short time to live, she decides to extend her day-job as the co-ordinator for a charitable foundation, and correct the failings of a justice system: neglectful mothers, drunk drivers, selfish CEOs, they’re all likely to meet impeccably-dressed vengeance.

While not exactly action-packed – it’s more about the philosophy of violence than the actual execution – and for the most part, thoroughly depressing, it’s a very intriguing and largely successful work. It’s main strength is Blackport, perfectly cast for the role, at first looking like a china doll, emotionless and placid. It’s only gradually that we see the seething mess of contrasting (and largely conflicting) emotions that are inside, since her decision is not something that has come out of thin air. There are some spotty bits of plotting here, noticed by Chris with her laser-guided Script Deficiency Spotter 3000TM. For example, why go after someone buying kiddie-porn, when you could go after someone making it? Some of the other choices of targets seem a little odd, and Anna also makes little effort to cover her tracks: even if she’s dying, she would still presumably want to continue her mission for as long as possible.

Still, there’s a great deal to admire here, with every penny being squeezed out of the budget. Particular kudos to cinematographer Richard Lerner and composer Neal Acree, whose efforts enhance proceedings significantly – the results look to be the product of a significantly-higher budget, than the rumoured million dollars. It leaves you questioning what you would do in the same situation: follow Queen Latifah off on a Last Holiday, or head for the dark side, as Anna does here, with a mission for what you perceive as the ‘greater good’? Certainly more thought-provoking than usual, it’s intended as the first part on a trilogy, though stands fairly well on its own, I would be very interested to see how things proceed from here, as Anna heads towards closure, both personal and medical.

[The film was released on August 12 by MTI Home Video. It comes in widescreen, with a director’s commentary and behind-the-scenes footage. More information can be found at MTI’s website, and the film’s official site.]

Dir: James Seale
Star: Kristine Blackport, Jeff Nicholson, Diana Dresser, Andrew Porter

Ms. 45

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★★★★★
“Dark Angel.”

Abel Ferrara is one of the most interesting of American film-makers, with an uncompromising vision that has seen him almost entirely shut out of mainstream cinema: the closest he’s come to a Hollywood movie was his Invasion of the Body-Snatchers remake, which was a failure on just about every level. Instead, he’s been on the outside, looking in, with films that range from the brilliant to the near-unwatchable. You never know what you’re going to get. It can be something raw and amazing, like Bad Lieutenant, or it can be a garbled, self-indulgent mess, such as his attempt to adapt William Gibson’s New Rose Hotel.

Ms. 45 falls firmly into the first category, held together by an amazing, luminescent performance from the then 17-year old Zoe Tamerlis [a.k.a. Zoe Lund], whose character Thana is entirely mute – except for one word, whispered in the final scene. She works in a garment factory, run by sleazy owner Albert (Sinkys): one day, she is raped on the way home. Worse follows, as when she stumbles in to her apartment, another intruder is there, and violates her again. However, with the aid of a convenient domestic appliance, she kills him – and now possesses his gun, with which she can take on, single-handed, the men she now perceives as threats.

As Thana’s mental state disintegrates, however, her action gradually shift away from justified. While the viewer initially sympathizes with her, and cheers her on, it slowly becomes apparent that she has become entirely unhinged, paranoid and delusional. She goes from reaction to pro-action, dressing up and going out with the specific intent of luring men in and killing them. In many ways, Thana ends up worse than those who triggered her rage, spiralling down into what are basically random acts of violence: Tamerlis had, allegedly, been a victim of rape the previous year by a professor at Mount Holyoke College, and did not report it. As Ferrara put it, “Women are brought up in a male dominated society. You’re being raped every day, one way or another. That is the metaphor of the film.”

Hmm. While I can acknowledge the political subtext in Thana’s muteness [especially since it appears largely to be psychological, going by the last scene], I’m not quite sure how seriously I take this claim overall, given Ferrara actually plays one of the rapists, and a large percentage of the time is spent objectifying and fetishizing his lead actress, to the extent where Chris felt she looked like a supporting actress in a Robert Palmer video. Perhaps the most memorably instance of this is Thana, dressing up as a nun – but one that also wears stocking and suspenders – before heading out to a Halloween party. With her blood-red lipstick, she kisses each of the bullets before loading them into her gun, a sequence which tells us much about Ferrara’s repressed Catholicism [also apparently rampant in Lieutenant, where both Ferrara and Lund worked on the script], as well as paying homage to the other great New York street-sweeper, Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver.

Certainly, Tamerlis’s reading of the film is rather different. [Spoiler alert] “No, Ms. 45 is not about women’s liberation, any more than it is about mutes’ liberation, or garment workers’ liberation, or your liberation, or my own. Notice that her climactic victim is not a rapist in the clinical sense. He is her boss. The real rapist. Our real rapist… Ms. 45 presents a humble, yet well-crafted metaphor for rebellion of the any-sexed oppressed. But the gun was put in a woman’s hand. A woman carried that universal message, and so it was all the more powerful. It made us shiver. Male and female. Different timbres and temperatures of shiver, but shiver all round.”

Running counter to that, or perhaps lending it an additional depth, is that the one who stops Thana, in effect betraying her, is one of her own. It’s a woman and a fellow garment worker, her former friend Laurie (Stuto), who stabs her in the back, literally – a metaphor that I’m certain was not accidental, any more than the phallic positioning of the knife at Laurie’s crotch. [End spoilers] The subtext there seems to be that the oppressed can not be trusted to stick together in their battle against the oppressor, even though Laurie is a strong-enough personality in her own way. She certainly has no problem responding in kind to the barrage of verbal harrassment she and Thana suffer as they walk home from work. Our heroine, meanwhile, has ‘victim’ written all over her in the early stages of the film, though the strength she eventually finds and displays, is clearly in a radically different and anti-social direction.

There are certainly holes in the plot logic. Where is Thana getting all the bullets from, and why is she such a crack-shot, despite presumably having never having handled a gun before? Yet these are in step with the pitch-black tongue-in-cheek humour the film contains: witness the long, rambling monologue inflicted on Thana by a guy she meets in a bar [her muteness making her the ultimate good listener]. I laughed like a drain at the sequence where Thana tries to get her landlady’s dog run over in traffic, as its nosiness concerning the severed body-parts round her appartment poses a threat. And when disposing of said parts, there’s surely nothing that you want to hear less, than for someone to shout after you, “Hey, lady! You dropped your bag!”

Chris, who lived in the Big Apple during the early-80’s, can also attest to the attitudes and dialogue as being authentic Noo Yawk, and the film does an excellent job of portraying the city as a predatory jungle, with a threat lurking behind every corner, especially for someone as attractive as Thana. Of course, “threat” is relative, and by the end, our heroine is the biggest threat – albeit only to those with a Y-chromosome, and the question of whether they deserve it or not is, to some degree, debatable. Still, in the words of the great philosophers, Paul Cook, Steve Jones and Ronny Biggs, “No-one is innocent.” Particularly in these days of movies produced by bean-counters, it’s refreshing to see a film that eschews a black-and-white approach in favor of an arc that takes us with a character as they journey into somewhere very dark and unpleasant, without needing to resolve things in a manner best described as, “…and they all lived happily ever after.”

[The pics and quotes here largely come from zoelund.com, a tribute site apparently run by Zoe’s ex-husband.]

Random notes

  • Tamerlis used to show up to some screenings of the film [above, outside the Nuart theater in Los Angeles] and discuss the social and political implications of the movie afterwards with the audience.
  • Which must have been interesting, as even the grindhouse theaters that were the movie’s natural home found it difficult viewing. In Cult Movies 2, Danny Peary says of the film, “Never has a 42nd Street theater been so quiet and disciplined as when Thana went through her rounds and murdered every offensive male who crossed her path… Unexpectedly, the men who had whooped all through Amin and the obscenely gory previews of Dr. Butcher, whimpered worrisomely “Oh, my God” and slumped in their seats and shut up.”
  • It’s still unavailable in the United Kingdom except in a version where the rape scenes are cut by one minute, 42 seconds. Even the 2000 US DVD was re-edited: the cuts include changes to the first rape featuring Ferrara’s cameo, which is split by an insert shot from a later scene, the second rape omits a line “This oughta make you talk, huh?” and the climatic shoot-out removes an on-screen murder, which now occurs off-screen.
  • The film inspired a song by L7, with the same title: “She’s got a gun, just make her day: don’t fuck with her, she’ll blow you away. She walks the streets at night and they think she is a whore. She’s gotta deal with you – she’s gonna even out the score.” The less well-known Dandi Wind also wrote a song called Ms. 45: “Today I bought a gun, Now I’m dressed just like a nun.”
  • “According to Tamerlis, her performance in Angel of Vengeance provoked a sniper attack on her in New York, wounding her.” — 1983 Virgin Film Yearbook
  • While Tamerlis experienced some success as a screenwriter and actress [Larry Cohen’s Special Effects is certainly worth checking out], she was a long-time drug user first of heroin and then cocaine. This contributed to her death of heart failure in Paris, in 1999.

Dir: Abel Ferrara
Stars: Zoe Tamerlis, Albert Sinkys, Darlene Stuto, Helen McGara
a.k.a. Angel of Vengeance