Author: Jim McLennan

Pretty Poison

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★★★½
“Perkins not weirdest character in movie! Shock! Horror! Probe!”

I was expecting more a quirky comedy than a dark thriller from this 1968 film, and only bothered with it because I’m a fan of Perkins (Edge of Sanity is a beautifully-lurid retelling of the Dr. Jekyll story, with the trash quotient cranked up to 11). Imagine my surprise when… Well, let’s start at the beginning, shall we? Juvenile arsonist Dennis Pitt (Perkins) is finally released back into the community as “cured”, though his fondness for fantastic invention appears unchanged. For a while he works at a chemical in the small town of Winslow without apparent issue. But trouble looms in the pretty, 17-year old shape of Sue Ann Stepanek (Weld), even though she appears to be squeaky-clean – an honor-roll student, majorette, etc. To entice her, Pitt spins a tale of being a secret agent, investigating a plan to poison the water supply. Sue Ann seems to swallow it, hook, line and sinker, but after one of their ‘sabotage mission’ goes wrong, it’s apparent that Sue Ann has her boyfriend seriously trumped when it comes to sociopathic behaviour.

Black delivers a fairly bleak picking away at the fabric of semi-urban Americana, with a near-Lynchian feel for the rottenness that lurks just beneath the thin veneer of civility. Perkins is, more or less, repeating the same role he had played in Psycho eight years earlier, though in a slightly less socially-inadequate version. As noted, it initially seemed more like a comedy, with this Walter Mitty-esque character leading on the teenager, and is not particularly interesting as such. However, things skew almost completely around in the middle, with Stepanek becoming the dominant character in the relationship, controlling Pitt in such a way that makes the viewer wonder if that was always her intention (the final scene also suggests this to be the case). She’s a good deal better at concealing her darker side, and while the conclusion is somewhat contrived, requiring Pitt basically to surrender, it makes sense in its own twisted way.

Weld was actually 25 when this was made, which may explain the maturity of her “teenage” character, though physically, it’s not a stretch. Her background – a nervous breakdown at age nine, an alcoholic at 12, and a suicide attempt around the same point, all likely triggered by the pressures of her career as a child actress – certainly may have helped with her portrayal of a character that’s rather darker than many of her role in the decade. If there are certainly girls with guns who killed more people, few have done so beneath a more innocent-looking exterior.

Dir: Noel Black
Star: Anthony Perkins, Tuesday Weld, Beverly Garland, John Randolph

Double Duty

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★★½
“Action? Comedy? Romance? The Jill of all trades, proves master of few of them.”

After 20 years in the Marines, MJ (Lesseos) returns to civilian life, but finds it somewhat hard to adapt to life as a civilian. Her old college friend Sophie (Duerden) helps her adjust – somewhat – and introduces her to Craig (Sizemore), a designer who is perhaps rather more feminine than MJ. Sophie is working on a charity auction, not realizing her assistant Carl (Freeman) is planning to steal the top item, a Faberge egg. Meanwhile, hypnosis has given MJ the ability to get in touch with her inner woman – but the problem is, every time someone snaps their fingers, she switches between her two personas. There is that of the rough, tough and gruff Marine, and then there’s the other, a giggling girlie for whom breaking a nail would pose a deep, personal crisis. Which will win out when the chips are down?

To be fair, the actors and their characters are not the problem here. The concept of a marine having to return to civilian circumstances has enough in it to power a movie, and Lesseos is believable as a soldier, in a way that many actresses wouldn’t be [see Mena Suvari in the Day of the Dead remake as a counter-example]. Still looks pretty good, given she’s… Well, let’s just say, I was surprised. Sizemore is playing against type – the star of Black Hawk Down and Saving Private Ryan is usually the one who’s in the military – yet is none the less effective for it. However, the entire film is almost stolen by Karen Black, who plays the adviser called in to help MJ become a lady; this unfolds complete with a My Fair Lady reference, at which I must confess I did laugh out loud.

The problem is that the rest of the film falls flat. Lesseos in feminine mode is much less amusing, and does not improve with repetition, shall we say. Some of the comedy is startlingly unfunny, such as the scene where MJ takes on a drunken biker-chick in a bar – I felt embarrassed for all those concerned, just watching it. Although that low point is never quite matched, the bar is set low, and it’s also the kind of film where people only get shot in the arm [that happens three times in about twenty seconds at the climax]. The moments of the heroine kicking butt with some style are sadly few and far between, and I was left with the definite feeling that Lesseos deserves a better vehicle for her talents.

Dir: Stephen Eckelberry
Star: Mimi Lesseos, Tom Sizemore, Susan Duerden, Alfonse Freeman

Malibu High

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★★★½
“Student by day, hooker turned assassin by night. I kid you not.”

This one popped out of nowhere, on a box-set of discs called Drive-In Cult Classics: most of these were unremarkable double-feature fillers, and this started off looking the same way, Kim (Lansing) is fed up with life: she’s still in high-school at age 18, is about to flunk it, has no money, just lost her boyfriend (Taylor), her father hung himself and her mom’s a total bitch. Finally, she opts to use her natural resources (if you know what I mean, and I think you do) to resolve these issues – though when her mother suggested Kim get a job, I’m not sure she meant as a whore working in the back of a VW van for the ultra-sleazy Tony (Mann). Her ‘popularity’ there lets her move up to work for the slightly-less sleazy Lance (Howard). Which is where the film takes an abrupt right turn, as she discovers a taste for killing – not least on her former pimp – and starts work as, to use one of the movie’s alternate titles, a high-school hit girl.

In other words: exactly the sort of lurid exploitation we love. Kim is just such a spiky, unlikeable heroine, she could never come out of Hollywood [the words “wildly inaccurate” leap to mind when looking at the poster, right]. While her tan-lines need work, one can only admire her single-minded and logical approach to resolving her problems – a true self-starter, able to work without supervision. Perhaps the high point is when Kim triggers cardiac arrest in her principal by showing him her breasts, after having flushed his heart medication down the toilet. If that description has you keen to see the film, you won’t be disappointed. Of course, if you think that’s tacky and silly… Well, you’re spot-on there too, and it doesn’t help that some of the stock music used here would later be re-cycled by The People’s Court and SCTV.

Inevitably, of course, Crime Does Not Pay for Kim, and it ends in a foot-chase along the beach, with Kim’s ex-boyfriend in hot pursuit. It’s not the kind of film I could possibly recommend to a random stranger, but there’s a loopy individuality at work here, that I thoroughly enjoyed. It’s a movie intent in going its own direction, for good or bad, and doesn’t care what you think. A nostalgic reminder for what drive-in movies should be about, it’s something of a surprise that Lansing never apparently appeared in anything else, after this excellent piece of trash cinema.

Dir: Irvin Berwick
Star: Jill Lansing, Alex Mann, Stuart Taylor, Garth Howard

Salt trailer

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Angelina Jolie is likely the queen of Hollywood action heroines: not just for her roles as Lara Croft, but also in Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Wanted, delivering the perfect mix of attitude and aggression necessary to the genre. Hence, Salt is one of our most-anticipated action films of 2010, in which she plays a operative who finds herself… Well, just watch the trailer, it’ll fill you in on the details.

Ninja Masters

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★★★½
“Solid action, hampered by limited acting and particularly poor storyline.”

It’s nice to see Hong Kong making a decent action heroine film: that’s really where the genre started off, and it’s been responsible for some of the best entries in the field. That said, this doesn’t quite deserve to be placed on the same level, but star Jiang Lui Xia certainly has her potential – my immediate thought is to put her in the same film as Jeeja Yanin, and we might really have something. [Sidenote: Jiang got her big break as the result of a couple of unusual ways. Viral videos she posted on the Internet, which in turn got her a slot on a reality show called The Disciple in Hong Kong, produced by Jackie Chan. The winner – not her – got to star in a feature.] Much like her Thai colleague, Jiang is clearly a martial artist first, and actress…well, probably fifth or sixth, despite her resemblance to Shin Eun Kyung from My Wife is Gangster. She seems to have three expressions, used in strict rotation, and the plot is frankly implausible nonsense too.

She plays Yi-Yi, the bodyguard of a gangster’s wife; when her charge is kidnapped, Yi-yi starts getting phone messages leading her to various locations. Hoping to redeem herself by rescuing the wife, she follows along, only to discover she is walking into trouble. Turns out the battles which result are being streamed over the web, with bettors wagering on the results. As Yi-Yi’s reputation rises, the sites become more and more popular, and profitable; can she fight her way through, to discover the truth about what’s going on? Yeah, “total bollocks” would be putting it kindly. It is not much more than a flimsy excuse to move the heroine from level to level, until a final confrontation with tae kwon do fighter Kosugi.

Fortunately, the fights are entirely acceptable, with a range of spectacular, if somewhat contrived confrontations – such as the one in a disco, outfitted with a pit containing a shallow pool of water (maybe it’s a standard accessory for Hong Kong discos?). The best is perhaps a kitchen brawl against German Wanja Götz, where just about everything bar the sink comes into play; there’s also one on a set of bamboo scaffolding, which appears to be the current venue of choice in the same way that car parks or Chinese restaurants were in their time. They were nicely put together, and sufficient to keep us watching, despite subtitles on our copy which were a) ten seconds behind the dialogue, and b) in Lolcat font. That we were willing to struggle past this says a lot about the fights, though even they could do nothing to help a particularly lame plot. Still, we’ll be interested to see where Jiang goes from here.

Dir: Xiong Xin Xin
Star: Jiang Lui Xia, Sam Lee, Eddie Cheung, Kane Kosugi
a.k.a. 7 Assassins

Fighter

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★★★
“If you see only one Danish/Muslim action-heroine kung-fu film this year… It’ll be this one. Almost for sure.”

Certainly one of a kind, this coming-of-age film tells the story of Aicha (Turan), a Muslim girl born of Turkish parents, who is obsessed with learning martial arts – the last thing her father wants. This thoroughly unfeminine interest, in the eyes of her community, is carried out in secret, but Omar (Banissi), a friend of her brother’s fiancee’s family finds out, and is thoroughly unimpressed. “I don’t fight girls,” he says dismissively, when ordered to spar with Aicha, and this leads to his ejection from the club by their teacher (Xian). When he confronts Aicha at the engagement party, the resulting argument becomes a brawl, and leads to the breaking off of the engagement – which is doubly unfortunate, as the bride-to-be is discovered to be pregnant. Meanwhile, Aicha has to prepare for an upcoming tournament, alongside her training partner, Emil (Melville) – and for which Omar has also signed up as a contestant.

There’s a good deal of this which feels borrowed from The Next Karate Kid, and if you can not predict how the tournament unfolds, you definitely need to watch more movies. However, the cultural backdrop gives this a freshness not found in the actual storyline. While women may have made huge strides in many parts of the world, it’s clear that there are still societies where subjugation is almost a norm, and female members of such societies have to struggle to obtain rights and freedoms taken for granted in many places. Here, Aicha’s fondness for martial arts is bad enough; but her presence in a mixed class, in close contact with those of the opposite sex, is enough to get her labelled a cheap slut. This is not an exaggeration: recently, here in Arizona, an Iraqi immigrant ran over and killed his daughter, allegedly because she was becoming “too Westernized.” In the light of incidents such as this, the film seems almost to understate the situation if anything.

Turan is a martial-arts expert with no professional acting experience and that’s occasionally apparent. While the fight sequences are put together and executed with grace and power, she does seem to struggle when asked to deliver more than the shallower emotions. The rest of the cast are up to their tasks, even if the roles are perhaps not much more than broad stereotypes. Still, it’s different from the norm, and is definitely worth a look, as a reminder that action heroines are not only found in the most obvious of locations or cultures.

Dir: Natasha Arthy
Star: Semra Turan, Cyron Bjørn Melville, Behruz Banissi, Xian Gao

Raging Phoenix

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★★★★
“Want another piece of Chocolate?”

If you’ve seen Chocolate – starring the same lead actress, though confusingly billed under a different name here – you’ll know what to expect, and the film delivers much of the same. Which would be stunning, brutal fight scenes combined with moments of mind-numbing tedium. The plan for Yanin’s career seems to be to contrive methods by which she can avoid acting: last time it was autism; here, it’s a drunken style of kung-fu which helps mitigate a voice that might charitably be compared to broken nails on glass. She plays former rock-star(!) Deu, who is on the edge of being kidnapped, when she’s rescued by Sanim (Tang). He and his fellow masters of alcohol-fu have all lost ladies in their life to the kidnappers – who, it turns out, are doing this because… No. You wouldn’t believe me even if I told you – and are trying to locate their lair. Deu joins the team, and agrees to act as bait, to see if the kidnappers will go after her again.

After a brisk and entertaining start, this drags badly in the middle. At 111 minutes, it is simply too long, and needs to lose at least a quarter of an hour. However, as with Chocolate, the action makes up for any such deficiencies, with the final reel featuring an escalating trio of fights, any of which would be entirely credible climaxes for any other movie. This culminates in a battle against female body-building champion Roongtawan Jindasing, the leader of the kidnappers, which is the most savage, knockdown, heroine vs. villainess brawl I’ve seen in… Ever? I can’t think of anything to match it immediately. Jindasing’s raw power pitted against Yanin’s devastating flexibility makes for a fabulous contest, and this is preceded by some great “pairs martial-arts” [when you see it, you’ll understand], when Deu and Sanim try to take out the villainess.

A fractional complaint is that the spotlight, action-wise, is not solely on Yanin, especially in the first two-thirds of the film. While the co-stars are by no means incompetent, it’s a step down from Chocolate, where the focus was squarely on her, and going into the last turn, this one getting a seal of approval seemed unlikely. However, the movie found an entirely new gear – one apparently just not available to other film-makers – and surged over the finish line. Just as Chocolate was the best action-heroine film of 2008, it looks like Raging Phoenix will be right up there in the 2009 contest.

Dir: Rashane Limtrakul
Star: Jeeja Yanin, Kazu Patrick Tang, Nui Sandang, Sompong Lertwimonkasem

The Vanquisher trailer

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Thailand seems to be going through what the Hong Kong movie industry did in the eighties – a sudden discovery of action heroines. Chocolate paved the way – we’ll be covering the latest film of its star, JeeJa Vismistananda, next month – but others appear to be leaping on the bandwagon. Here’s a trailer for The Vanquisher [even if the trailer gets that spelled wrong!]. Looks kinda promising.

The Avengers (film)

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★★½
“An object lesson on all the things which can go very, very wrong on the journey from script to screen.”

Film-makers really need to let the sixties go, especially when it comes to mining TV schedules and turning them into movies. The Mod Squad, Thunderbirds, Wild Wild West: the remainder bins in Walmart are littered with the DVD corpses of failed attempts. While it’d be a massive stretch to call this incoherent mess anything like a success, it does have some merits, not least in the casting of Fiennes and Thurman as John Steed and Emma Peel. If undeniably different to Patrick McNee and , it still works, despite the unfortunate efforts to shoehorn in a romantic relationship between the pair; one of the things that made the original series work was the lack of this, with Steed and Peel being strictly business. Thurman, in particular, appears to be working her way towards The Bride territory, with a similarly wide range of funky costumes. In that light, much of her performance makes a great deal more sense.

Sadly, very little else of the movie does, though one wonders how familiar those whose reviews ripped into it were, with the original series – things like henchmen in teddy-bear costumes would fit in there, yet seem idiotic in isolation. The version as released was hacked down from 150 minutes to 89, and I suspect much of the excised footage is in the middle, since that’s where what remains falls apart completely. Sir August de Wynter (Connery) has taken control of the weather, and is using this to blackmail the world’s governments. It’s up to our suave, sophisticated duo to stop him: Peel goes up top to defuse the controlling device, while Steed stays down low, to face de Wynter in hand-to-hand combat. This might have worked better, if I didn’t keep thinking, “Sean Connery is five years older than my Dad.” While there is more to the plot than this, it’s an aspect of the film where more cutting would likely have been welcome.

The style is nicely captured, and Peel stands as the equal of Steed, in no way secondary or subservient to him, as is shown in a marvellous sword-fight between the two. Thurman has no problem at all handling the action side of things, and we even get two Umas for the price of one, thanks to a cloning subplot which is never fully developed or explained [part of the hour left on the cutting-room floor, I suspect]. It seems that the individual pieces were all in place: however, the disaster movie which resulted [budget, $60m; US box-office, $23m] shows that the road to cinematic hell is paved with good intentions.

Dir: Jeremiah Chechik
Star: Ralph Fiennes, Uma Thurman, Sean Connery, Jim Broadbent

Supporting Actresses

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“Sidekicks with guns…”

The power of the action heroine is such, that the character often appears in films as support to a male hero – sometimes without any particular justification beyond the fact that it’s cool. Even movies which you’re watching for other reasons can provide a pleasant surprise in these terms. This piece provides pointers towards some of the more interesting examples.

The Chronicles of Riddick. A survivor from the previous film, Pitch Black, “Jack” turned out to be a young girl, who disguised her sex in order to survive. Five years later, she’s now played by Alexa Davalos (right), and her character, who has taken bad-ass Riddick as a role-model, is now imprisoned in a subterranean jail on the aptly-named planet of Crematoria. Her favourite game is, “Who’s the best killer?”; when she’s accompanying Riddick, opportunities to play are numerous.

Eight Legged Freaks. In this cheerful update of the 50’s giant insect picture, Kari Wuhrer plays the local sheriff; while eventually giving way to David Arquette for the final confrontation in the spiders’ lair, she holds her own for much of the movie, dispatching arachnids with style, flair and a Buffy-esque bit of crossbowing.

Formula 51. Samuel L. Jackson plays a chemist, trying to sell his new concotion to various interested parties in Britain. His former employer, the Lizard, unhappy by the defection, sets Dakota (Emily Mortimer) on him – she is a British hitwoman, working off her debt to the Lizard. But back on her old turf, she discovers an old flame is involved, and is still burning brightly for her…

Hero. This Jet Li vehicle, nominated for the 2003 Best Foreign Film Oscar, features both Maggie Cheung and Zhang Yi-Yi, the former as one of three assassins out to kill the king, the latter as the pupil of another member of the trio. One of the highlights of the movie is a full-on battle between the two, which is not a long way short of Zhang’s classic Crouching Tiger duel with Michelle Yeoh.

House of the Dead. This critically slated video-game conversion offers three supporting action heroines behind its extremely dull hero. There’s his girlfriend, fencing mistress Alicia (Ona Grauer, left), Coastguard officer Casper (Ellie Cornell), and Liberty, an Asian-American in a patriotic outfit who (like all Asians) knows kung-fu. Sadly, two out of three don’t make it to the end.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. As the evil Queen Jadis, who has sunk Narnia into perpetual winter, Tilda Swinton kicks surprising ass, with a sword that turns anything it touches to stone – and she captures the seductive appeal of the dark side wonderfully well. The final battle against the forces of good sees her wielding two swords to good effect as she leads her army against Aslan’s troops. You go, girl…

Mr. Brooks. On the trail of Kevin Costner’s serial-killing family-man is Detective Tracy Atwood, who is simultaneously dealing with a messy divorce and the escape of another serial-killer she helped put away, known as The Hangman. When Brooks kills her ex-husband, she is the suspect, and her partner is told to arrest Atwood. She disarms him handily, and courtesy of information from Brooks, who is somewhat fascinated by her, heads off to an impressive fire-fight in a darkened corridor with the Hangman and his accomplice.

Patriot Games. One of the members of the IRA splinter group is female terrorist Annette (Polly Walker); not actually Irish, she still manages to off a suspected dissident (after having sex with him, of course) with a double tap, before heading off to a North African terrorist training camp, and taking part on the final assault on Jack Ryan’s house. Oh, and her cover is a rare book dealer too.

Rambo: First Blood Part II. Among the most macho movies of all time, we note with interest the presence of Co Bao (Julia Nickson-Soul) as his local guide, who goes through just about everything he does in the jungle. Of course – and this isn’t a spoiler, since it’s painfully obvious – she’s doomed from the start. About the only cliche of the soon-to-be-dead that she doesn’t get to use is taking a picture of her family out, and saying how she looks forward to seeing them again soon…

Terminator 2: Judgement Day. The character of Sarah Connor (right) underwent a startling transformation between original and sequel – a wimpy fraidy-cat became a pumped, focused, extremely capable action heroine, intent on defending her son. Though she ends up relying on Arnie in the final steel-mill battle (which includes Linda Hamilton’s twin sister), she definitely gives the T-1000 her best shot. Several of them, in fact. The next logical step followed, in Terminator 3, where Schwarzenegger faced a female cyborg.

Thir13en Ghosts. The most notable thing about this family-trapped-in-a-haunted-house flick is the wonderful set design, on which they clearly spent more time and effort, than trivial things like plot or characterisation. But Embeth Davidtz turns up in the second half, flinging flares at the errant spooks with no lack of confident competence. She delivers a pleasantly no-nonsense performance until she gets, er, squeezed out of the picture.

Total Recall. While Arnold Schwarzenegger movies are rarely places where female characters do more than hang around, in need of rescuing – though see Terminator 2 above – this has not one, but two action heroines, in Melina (Rachel Ticotin) and Lori (Sharon Stone). The former is a Martian rebel, the latter an administration agent who masquerades as the hero’ wife; they’re opposites in almost every way: good/bad, brunette/blonde, demure/sleazy. Melina saves Arnie’s butt on a couple of occasions, and there’s also a fine brawl between Ticotin and Stone which avoids the usual catfight cliches.

The Transporter 2 – Having thoroughly enjoyed The Transporter, the sequel was already well on the radar. But what we didn’t expect was some serious GWG action, with the psychotic henchwoman (Katie Nauta, pictured left) going berserk in a doctor’s office with two automatic weapons simultaneously. She also rides shotgun after taking our hero hostage on a startling chase through the streets of Miami and, inevitably, faces off against him while her boss makes his escape by helicopter. This finale is a little shorter and softer than expected, but in a film where we were expecting nothing but macho heroics, the mere presence of an action villainess was a pleasant and unexpected bonus.

Van Helsing – From a vampire (Underworld) to vampire-huntress: up until the arrival of Van Helsing (Hugh Jackman) Kate Beckinsale’s gypsy was the last hope of her family and their mission to kill count Dracula. While the guys face off (in a fiesta of somewhat-unconvincing CGI, it has to be said), she has plenty to cope with, in the form of the multiple vampire brides, who can fly, and have superhuman strength, in addition to the usual fangs. Undead catfight! Do have to say, her fate is somewhat disappointing, however.

Zombieland – Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin both give as good as they get from Woody Harrelson and Jason Eisenberg in this post-apocalyptic tale. Initially, it’s a battle of the sexes, with the young women outsmarting the men and taking their vehicle and weapons – then doing it again, for good measure! However, they eventually team up, as they head across country, in an America that is now inhabited almost entirely by the ravenous undead. If you’re familiar with the genre, you’ll know that extreme violence is the only way to deal with zombies, and the ladies are every bit as happy to unleash their weaponry as the gentlemen.