Author: Jim McLennan

Amazons (1984)

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★★½
“Almost 30 years later – despite binders full of women – this is still politically advanced for its day.

This made for TV movie first aired in January 1984, and was likely fairly topical at the time, with Geraldine Ferraro then on her way to becoming the VP behind Walter Mondale. It’s still just her and Sarah Palin as far as major party tickets in American history go. Her candidacy is foreshadowed by this piece of masculine paranoia. Stowe plays Dr. Sharon Fields, a doctor who is sued for malpractice after her hospital patient, a leading Congressman, had an unexpected psychotic episode, which leads to him playing in traffic. She finds a series of similar deaths linked by trace elements found in autopsies, all of men, whose deaths benefit women, in general or specifically. Turns out they are assassinations, carried out to the orders of an ancient, matriarchal cult: they now have their eye set on the leading presidential candidate – who just happens to have picked a woman as his running mate.

It’s an impressive cast. As well as Stowe (now lording it over the rich and famous as the matriarch in guilty pleasure Revenge), there’s Stevens as cult member Kathryn Lundquist, and Dobson as Rosalund Joseph, another hospital worker – the two faced off previously, in Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold – while Scalia plays the cop whom Fields has to try to convince. Behind the cameras, the cinematography is by Dean Cundey, who did the Back to the Future trilogy, The Thing and, er, Ilsa, Harem-Keeper of the Oil Sheiks; the music is from Basil Poledouris (Robocop); and it’s the directorial debut, outside the series, of Starsky [as in “…and Hutch”], three years before he did The Running Man. Solid stuff, and from a technical level, this makes for a pretty decent TVM, both in performances and production values.

However, the concept and the script appear nothing more than a Robin Cook medi-thriller laced with a large helping of delusional male chauvinist nonsense, portraying women – and, in particular, those who want to achieve political, social or economic power – as literal man-haters, who have absolutely no qualms about poisoning or killing by other means, any man unfortunate enough to get in their way. Admittedly, it’s not carried out with the level of hysteria one might think; in some ways, it’s fairly sympathetic to the Amazons. But it makes little or no sense (I mean, this cult has been around for thousands of years and has achieved exactly what?), and there’s no detectable irony, despite the absolute daftness of the central concept. Surely the eighties weren’t as naive as all that? Actually, looking at the hairstyles and fashions on view here, I think they were.

Dir: Paul Michael Glaser
Star: Madeleine Stowe, Jack Scalia, Stella Stevens, Tamara Dobson

Angels’ Brigade

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★★½
“Charlie’s Magnificent 7 Angels.”

After her brother is severely beaten by a drug dealer, Las Vegas lounge singer (!) Michelle Wilson (Kiger, Miss January 1977) is visited by his teacher (Cole), who knows the location of the cartel’s drug warehouse. Wilson puts together a team of women who have reason to want to take the dealers down, including a stuntwoman (Anderson) and an undercover cop (Grant). There’s also a martial-arts instructress, a model and, tagging along, one of the teacher’s pupils. They build a heavily-armed van, train in the ways of war, and rip off a bunch of militia types for weaponry, before staging a successful raid that destroys the warehouse. However, the mob (led by veteran actors Peter Lawford and Jack Palance) are not prepared to let them get away with it.

This is best known through its use – in a severely truncated form – on MST3K, and I suspect that’s where most of the 1,200+ votes on the IMDB come from [it’s more than, say, the rather better-renowned Black Mama, White Mama]. The unedited version is less worthy of derision. I wouldn’t call it great cinema, but it heads from Point A to Point B in a brisk fashion, and the practical effect – stunts, explosions, etc. – are decent enough. Of course, there’s little or no characterization to speak of, on either side, it’s clearly ripped off from Charlie’s Angels, and there’s a weird unevenness of tone that is hard to handle. For instance, the militia types are incredibly incompetent, bumping into each other at the drop of a swastika, but then the girls seriously consider dropping a truck on the head of an informant.

However, I couldn’t bring myself to hate this to the level its former position in the IMDB Bottom 100 would project. There’s something almost charmingly naive about such a simplistic approach, and it’s also refreshingly free of any romantic angles to slow things down. At a few points, I even found myself contemplating the remake potential. If the discussed all-female version of The Expendables ever comes to pass, it might not be too dissimilar to this, though hopefully with more originality.

Dir: Greydon Clark
Star: Susan Kiger, Sylvia Anderson. Jacqulin Cole. Robin Greer

Alien Resurrection

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★★★½
“Alien vs. Firefly”

It’s not often that a film series manages to recover from – or even, survive – such a disastrous mis-step. But the Alien franchise managed it, though it took five years to come to fruition, and a Really Big Cheque to Sigourney Weaver [reportedly, $11 million, as well as a producer’s credit. The results, while short of the original two movies, are an awful lot better than its predecessor, managing to progress the story, re-invent Ripley and be generally entertaining. However, from a 2012 perspective, it’s painfully obvious that writer Joss Whedon recycled large chunks of the supporting characters, and turned them into Firefly. We’ll get to that a bit later.

It is set 200 years into the future, and begins with scientists on a space-station creating a clone of Ripley, using DNA from blood samples. They also remove the alien queen embryo which she was carrying, growing that, but keep her around for further study, intrigued by her apparent mix of human and alien DNA that’s giving her unusual powers [not unlike the way Alice fuses with the T-virus in the middle Resident Evil movies]. Docking with them is the Betty, a ahip operating on the fringes, which is bringing the scientists some meat popsicles in which they can incubate more aliens. Annalee Call (Ryder) appears to recognize the threat Ripley poses, and tries to kill her – but it’s too late, as the aliens have escaped their containment facility. Ripley and the crew have to team up, to try and fight their way back through the station to the Betty, which is the only means of escape left.

That’s an improvement in terms of a storyline over 3, simply because it is one, and provides a skeleton upon which a good amount of interesting ideas and fun sequences can be built. Jeunet came to the movie from some visually-striking French films, such as The City of Lost Children, and there’s a much better sense of cinematography apparent here – it’s a striking contrast to Fincher’s approach, where it appears his main direction to the DP was “Darker. Make it darker.” Here, you can see what’s happening: particular standouts include the first confrontation between Ripley and the Betty crew, in the basketball court, where Ripley sinks a long-range shot behind her back [legitimately done by Weaver], and a lengthy underwater sequence, where you’ll probably find yourself trying – and likely, failing – to hold your breath.

But the central idea is the one of Ripley now being something more than human, and Weaver has a great deal of fun with that, playing as if she’s half a beat ahead of everyone else, and completes her transition by no longer being scared of the aliens. It’s them who need to be scared of her, and again, I’m reminded of Milla Jovovich in the RE series: more than human, and yet, less than human at the same time. There’s even a creature with the proportions the other way round – monster with a touch of human – like Nemesis from RE: Apocalypse, and it was no surprise to read that Paul W.S. Anderson was one of the many directors considered for this (Danny Boyle, Peter Jackson, Bryan Singer and David Croneberg beinh among the others). I briefly drifted off to speculate on the possibility of an Alien vs. Resident Evil cross-over; would probably have been a lot more fun than anything involving Predators.

As noted, what’s startling are the parallels between the Betty and the Serenity, from Whedon’s show Firefly, which came out in 2002. Both operate on the edge of legality, with a small crew of oddballs: Capt. Frank Elgyn (Michael Wincott) is somwhat less sympathetic than Mal Reynolds, but in both you have a captain/first-mate/pilot trio of two men and a woman, two of whom are in a relationship, plus a mechanic from an unexpected minority (there, a woman; here, disabled). If Perlman’s lumbering mercenary Johner isn’t a blatant dry run for Jayne Cobb, I don’t know what is, and there’s more than a touch of mechanic Kaylee Frye to be seen in Annalee. Writing as someone who found Firefly no more than a passable timewaster, it’s amusing to see Whedon was stealing from himself. Still, if you’re going to plagiarize, best use your own work, I suppose.

Oddly, Whedon hated this finished product almost as much as Fincher did the third, saying, “It was mostly a matter of doing everything wrong. They said the lines…mostly…but they said them all wrong. And they cast it wrong. And they designed it wrong. And they scored it wrong. They did everything wrong that they could possibly do. There’s actually a fascinating lesson in filmmaking, because everything that they did reflects back to the script or looks like something from the script, and people assume that, if I hated it, then they’d changed the script…but it wasn’t so much that they’d changed the script; it’s that they just executed it in such a ghastly fashion as to render it almost unwatchable.” It seems likely that’s why he recycled so many of his characters for Firefly.

It’s far from perfect, however. The biggest flaw is Ryder, who is completely unconvincing, and not a patch on her predecessors [if you’re thinking, “What predecessors?”, there’s a clue in the initial letter of her character’s surname…]. I wasn’t too fond of the way the film went in the final act, and the human-alien hybrid is neither convincing nor scary. It’s damn hard to believe that Whedon came up with five endings, and this was the one Jeunet picked as the best. But, really: after the dismal failure which was part three, it was a major relief to see something even semi-competent, which managed to sustain my interest (okay: consciousness) much better, and be generally entertaining.

Dir: Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Star: Sigourney Weaver, Winona Ryder, Ron Perlman, Dominique Pinon

Hoodrats 2: Hoodrat Warriors

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★½
“And no: neither of the actresses on the cover actually star in the film, as far as I can tell.”

When Chino (Rodil) beats up his woman, Lucia (Sparagna) decides it has happened for the last time, and accompanied by her two friends, Celia (Mortel) and Miriam (Cho), she gives him a dose of his own medicine, with a baseball bat. This turns out to be a clear case of thinking without acting, because it turns out he’s a big kahuna in one of the local gangs, and is now out for revenge on the trio. After a drive-by cripples their vehicle (a ghettomobile with the amusing personalized plate, ‘ICUHATN’), they are stuck deep in enemy territory, with a lot of unfriendly people looking for them. And even if they make it out alive, what then?

I like the idea a lot: it could have become a Latina take on The Warriors, an urban nightmare journey pitting the heroines against a range of city low-lives, as they battle their way back across Los Angeles. And, perhaps surprisingly, the acting is not terrible: I was expecting something sub-amateur, but the three ladies are competent, and Rodil is actually more than adequately unpleasant as the villain. Arellano knows where to point the camera too – and, as an aside, you do not appear to need any knowledge of his previous Hoodrats. Two things, however, undo all the positives, and send this heavily into the red.

Firstly, the script is really badly written, with any number of scenes that outstay their welcome or are simply unnecessary. I’ll describe a couple of the worst offenders. Late on, two of the women are captured; the third just wanders off, bumps into a complete stranger and has an irrelevant conversation, resulting in her grooving out to some tunes. What? That, however, is a masterpiece compared to the scene where they seek help from the local king pimp, the inexplicably-British Baron of New Orleans. He looks like Simon Pegg, sounds (dubbed?) like Russell Brand, and must have been an investor in the film, because there is absolutely no justification for the seemingly endless minutes of screen time allocated to his vapid burblings.

The other problem is the fights, which are largely predictable, uninteresting and completely fail to be hard-hitting. For instance, the enemies met by the three women as they head home, are inevitably…three women, and the sluggish cartwheel move Lucia uses, apparently inspired by capoeira, doesn’t improve with repetition. I’ve seen films where my attention drifts away, except during the action scenes: here, however, it drifted away more during the action. It builds to a finale in what could well be a school gym, that is ludicrous in its implausibility, though is a fitting end to an inept work.

Dir: Edgar Arellano
Star: June Marie Sparagna, Donnabella Mortel, Arden Cho, Neal ‘Xingu’ Rodil

FMW: Torn to Shreds

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★★
“Megumi Kudo: the real ‘Barb Wire’…”

I really wanted to use little barb-wire icons to mark this one, instead of the usual stars, but whenever I typed in “barb wire jpg” into search engines, I always seemed to find myself staring at Pamela Anderson.  Yes, get those digressions out of the way early, that’s what I always say…

This is the sixth in Tokyo Pop’s ongoing series of releases featuring Japanese wrestling from the FMW (Frontier Martial-arts Wrestling) federation, and while the others have all contained women’s matches, it’s the first to concentrate exclusively on this angle. So credit to them for putting out what is – correct me if I’m wrong – the first official release of Japanese women’s wrestling in the West. Unfortunately, that’s largely where the credit stops as far as they’re concerned.

To start with, FMW are a long way from being the best Japanese federation for women’s wrestling – they don’t even bother these days, having given up several years ago (these bouts largely date from 1995, so are hardly current) and think they might even have gone bankrupt now. Secondly, in line with FMW’s policy of hardcore – they’re kinda the Japanese equivalent of ECW – the women have largely been chosen for their willingness to do the extreme stuff, rather than any actual wrestling ability. This shows itself most prominently in the case of Shark Tsuchiya, whom I’ve encountered on several “unofficial” tapes, and is definitely one of the worst pro wrestlers I’ve seen. It’s significant that the best wrestler to be seen in this title is KAORU, who’s actually from another federation.

Thirdly, while they could have cherry-picked the best matches, most of the fights here are off one card, including lame rookie bouts not really worthy of note. [People like Sonoko Kato might be good now, but she had a lot to learn in those days…and was unlikely to do it in FMW] Fourthly, and most damningly, since the others are perhaps less within Tokyo Pop’s control, the two presenters are awful. John Watanabe is clueless, while his irritatingly fey partner, Eric Geller, annoyed me in a disturbingly Tarantino-esque way. On the DVD, you can at least switch to Japanese commentary during the matches, but you will want to skip their inter-bout “banter”.

There’s only one bout here that’s genuinely memorable, and it’s purely on a geek-show level. It’s part of the long rivalry between Shark Tsuchiya and the queen of FMW, Megumi Kudo, and is notable for it being a barbed-wire match, with the ropes of the ring being replaced by strands of (entirely genuine, I might add) barbed-wire. Having seen Kudo fight in cards for other promotions, I know she can actually wrestle, but there’s no sign of that here, stuck as she is with a useless lump like Tsuchiya. The bout follows almost the same pattern as all their others: Tsuchiya brutalises Kudo, Kudo bleeds, Kudo comes back gallantly.

The only major change here is how much Kudo bleeds: it’s buckets. I’ve seen few men’s matches as gory, and this is certainly among the worst of women’s bouts (there was a cage match pitting Shimoda and Mita against Watanabe and Ito that may come close). Kudo takes some severe bumps, particularly against the folding table that just won’t give, taking four attempts to break it [the Japanese must make them of stronger stuff!] You’ll probably find yourself shaking your head as Kudo’s face becomes totally red, a mask of blood.

The DVD offers some extras: brief highlights from an additional bout, extra footage of Watanabe and Geller (oh, joy…), a picture gallery of FMW wrestlers and some cheesecake footage of Kudo, which you’d be advised to watch before you see her gushing blood, as that will likely destroy any cuteness factor present for her. In other words: nothing to sway the vacillating purchaser.

As mentioned, it’s good to see this release, even if as an introduction to Japanese women’s wrestling, it’s largely a failure, being neither representative, nor good enough to attract the casual viewer. Meanwhile, the hardcore fan will likely have the bouts already, and will certainly possess better. This is a shame since there are some phenomenal athletes to be found, and it’s an area deserving of exposure here, particularly given the largely-woeful state of mainstream women’s wrestling. If it opens the gate to other, better titles, it’ll have performed an excellent, much-needed job, but on the whole, you should go for some of the unofficial tapes available through the Internet: names to look for would include Manami Toyota, Akira Hokuto, Aja Kong, Kyoko Inoue and Mima Shimoda. And definitely not Shark Tsuchiya…

Star: Megumi Kudo, Shark Tsuchiya, KAORU, Combat Toyoda

Hell’s Fury: Wanted Dead or Alive

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★½
“There’s nothing like a good Western. And this is nothing like a good Western.”

Eryn Cates (Hague) returns home to Texas from finishing school in New York, to find her family farm teetering on the edge of foreclosure [maybe if they hadn’t spent all that money to send her to finishing school in New York…]. In a misguided attempt to help things, her brother tries to rob a stagecoach carrying payroll, but is injured. The attempt fails, but local mogul Mortimer (Harris), who holds the loan on the Cates farm, sees a chance and pockets the loot. Two Texas Rangers, including the young and handsome Flint (Hagenbuch) show up to investigate the robbery, but it’s up to Eryn to save the family property, take on the mantle of the bandit, fend off the unwanted advances of Mortimer and engage in pseudo-romantic banter of the least interesting or convincing sort with Flint.

It’s not very good, and the problems start right from the format: it was shot on low-definition video, which gives everything a harsh, modern look that really doesn’t suit the genre. Hague is equally unsuited for the role, and never succeeds in putting across any significant degree of emotion. And quite why there’s a kung-fu master in an early scene, I have no idea: he crops up once, and then is never seen again. It’s not as if Eryn exactly wields nunchakus against Mortimer’s minions. There are some cheap laughs to be had, not least the town dance where the band appear to play the same eight bars of The Streets of Laredo for six minutes straight, but most of this is just terribly pedestrian.

The DVD cover blurb claims, “The Quick and the Dead tips its cowboy hat to True Grit in this action packed Western gun battle.” Hmm. The tubes of the Internet deny any such phrase, though since Independent Film Quarterly [or “Quartly”, as the blurb has it] appears to be that endangered species, a print magazine, we can’t definitively claim fabrication here. What I can say with certainty, is that the apparent provider of the quote, Stuart Alson, has crafted a far greater work of fiction in that single sentence, than anything the writers here manage to conjure up in their 72, almost entirely tedious minutes.

Dir: Alan Chan
Star: Hannah Hague, Adam Hagenbuch, Ron E. Harris, Richard L. Olsen

Chicks who love guns

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With Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained opening last week, seems appropriate to go back to his 1997 film Jackie Brown, starring GWG icon, Pam Grier, and give you the full promo video for the fake Chicks Who Love Guns video. Though it’s really not too far from certain offerings out there!

Warrior Queen (2003)

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★★★½
“Rates much better as a drama than for historical accuracy.”

Probably best to approach this with few expectations of this being a factual representation of the time; more than once, it felt clearly like the writer was using the Roman occupation of Britain, and Boudica’s rebellion, as a metaphor for American’s involvement in Iraq. There are certainly enough anachronisms, particularly in the dialogue (the Roman Emperor chatting informally away with the leader of a British tribe, and references to “terrorists”), that it seems deliberate. The basic story is the one well-known of legend: after her husband’s death, and the raping of her daughters by the invading Romans, Boudica (Kingston) led her tribe in an initially successful revolt, only to be stopped when the full force of the Empire was turned on them.

There’s a lot of familiar faces here, most obviously Kingston, who is well-known (in this household, at least) as River Song from Doctor Who – I kept expecting Boudica to enter a scene and say, “Hello, sweetie!” But there’s also Potts, as a deeply creepy Emperor Nero, well before we knew him a nerd in Primeval, and Blunt, as one of Boudica’s daughters, has gone on to significant Hollywood fame. The performances are really what keeps this interesting: Kingston brings the right level of steely resolve to her role, and is particularly convincing when rousing her troops to battle. Equally as good is Michael Feast, as Roman general Suetonius, who is there because of a combination of “professional pride” and the Emperor’s whims, and puts across exactly the right sense of battle-weary experience.

What doesn’t work as well are the battles, in part because the budget for this falls well short of what we’re used to seeing in terms of the approximate period, e.g. Gladiator, 300. There are some moments of spectacle, such as a burning Roman encampment, or a plain covered with corpses, but the shortage of live extras is often embarrassingly obvious. They’re not well-shot either, with an irritating strobing effect which serves no purpose, and Boadica doesn’t do much actual fighting, mostly waving her sword from the back of a chariot [without spiked wheels, I was disappointed to note. Look, if you’re gonna play fast and loose with historical accuracy, you might as well include the coolest thing about the queen…]

Still, I can’t say we were bored, and the solid acting more than made up for the occasionally-shaky production values, though it is definitely important to go in to this, not expecting a Discovery channel documentary. Instead, this is Exhibit A, proving that when cinematic necessity and historical facts collide, the latter will almost always come off worse.

Dir: Bill Anderson
Star: Alex Kingston, Hugo Speer, Emily Blunt, Andrew Lee Potts

Resident Evil: Retribution

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★★★★
“Games without frontiers.”

While being (again) largely disappointed by the previous entry, Afterlife, I wrote: “There’s really only one reason we bother with this series: to see Milla Jovovich kicking righteous ass. Everything else is – or should be – secondary.” And that’s why this is the best Resident Evil movie in eight years. It may not be anything significant in the plot department. There are not hidden depths or great moments of character revelation. But it does contain entirely acceptable amounts of Milla Jovovich Kicking Righteous Ass, and succeeds as an entertainment spectacle, almost entirely due to this.

Though actually, this is almost a “greatest hits” package, especially in terms of participants. Not seen since the first film, are Rain Ocampo (Michelle Rodriguez) and James Shade (Colin Salmon). Apocalypse brought us Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory) and Carlos Olivieira (oded Fehr), while Extinction introduced the audience to Claire Redfield (Ali Larter) and K-Mart (Spencer Locke). Finally, Afterlife was the debuts of Luther West (Boris Kodjoe) and Chris Redfield (Wentworth Miller). But they are all present for this fifth edition: though the focus is kept, as it should be, on Alice (Jovovich). The others all play their parts – notably Valentine, who is now a brainwashed toy of the Umbrella Corporation, out to hunt Alice down – but it’s the MJKRA show, all the way.

The series has had a tendency to end its entries with a wallop, right from the original, with Alice discovering the infection has escaped the Hive. Part 4 was no exception, with Alice and assorted survivors on a supertanker, only for an F-sized swarm of attack helicopter to hove into view, commanded by Valentine. This takes off from there, but begins with Alice plunging into the water, only to rewind in slow-motion to the arrival of the helicopters, then playing forward again. It’s a striking sequence, that certainly hits the ground running. It ends with Alice waking to find herself in a suburban house, with a husband and daughter…or is she? Turns out it’s all an Umbrella simulation: she has been captured, and they still want her, even if she’s no longer the superhuman she was.

There’s an unlikely ally, who releases Alice, and tells her she has two hours to meet up with a rescue team coming in to the under-Siberian complex from the outside, and get out of the place before it all goes boom. To do so, both she and they have to make their way through the various simulated arenas, designed to demonstrate the T-virus effects in Tokyo, Moscow, suburbia, etc. All the while, naturally, Valentine and her many, many Umbrella minions are on their respective tails. It could hardly be a more video-gamesque storyline, and is pretty scant. Still, in an action pic, it’s better to be too simple than too clever (I recently watched both The Raid: Redemption and Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, and will take dumb over aspirations to smart, any day!), providing you use the room freed up for plenty of MJKRA.

It might be wise for Jovovich to contemplate retirement from the series. After all, she turned 37 earlier this month, and there are few things sadder than an action hero/ine desperately clinging on, past their prime (see also, Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning). She’s not quite there yet, being still capable of holding her own, but there does seem to be rather more wirework and greenscreen-fu here than in previous editions. Director Anderson. a.k.a. Mr. Milla Jovovich distracts us by putting his wife in a costume whose S/M inspiration is so obvious, even another character comments on it. On the other hand, we could probably have done without the efforts to imbue Alice with some kind of maternal instincts [inevitably inviting comparisons with Aliens].

The net result is something which doesn’t so much need to be watched, just simply pass in front of a receptive pair of eyeballs. As mentioned, there is not much new here, Anderson happy to recycle the best characters and monsters from the first four movies [though, regrettably, there are no zombie canines for Milla to engage in thigh-powered neck-snapping]. Certainly, it’s lazy film-making, but actually, that’s less of an insult than it sounds. It’s more like going round a friend’s house and he knows, without asking, to provide chips and beer. Sure, it can legitimately be described as lazy hospitality – but when this is just what you want, somehow it seems churlish to complain.

A sixth entry is already mooted, and Miila says that will be her last in the series [hang on: didn’t see say that after part 2?], with a reboot being considered by the producers beyond that. This decision may come as a surprise, if you look at the distinctly underwhelming US box-office figures: only $42 million, barely more than the original, even with a decade of inflation plus the cost of 3D tickets in its favor. However, as noted last time, the meat here is not North America, but overseas. This racked up more than $175 million there, easily enough to justify a further sequel. And, for the first time in a while, I am actually enthusiastic about the prospect: hopefully, Jovovich will go out with a bang like this one, not a whimper like the preceding two.

Dir: Paul W.S. Anderson
Star: Milla Jovovich, Sienna Guillory, Michelle Rodriguez, Ali Larter

"Something which doesn’t so much need to be watched, just simply pass in front of a receptive pair of eyeballs."