Author: Jim McLennan

Steele Wool

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★★★
“Puts the ‘hard’ in hard of hearing…”

Daphne Wool (Varela) has finally had enough of her abusive husband, so has killed him, chopping up the corpse and keeping it in a storage locker. Which actually is a good thing, because it turns out he was wanted by the Mob, and there was a price on his head. For their “help” in carrying out the hit, Daphne and pal Tony Steele (Cappello) are rewarded, but things go further. Daphne becomes a full-time assassin for the gangsters, learning to kill with everything from a paper-clip up, while Tony acts as her facilitator. However, they quickly become a liability to the organization, and are given a “poison pill” contract, being sent to kill weapons inventor Vincent McCabe.

The approach here is very much light in intent. Witness how Daphne’s training is largely watching movies like La Fille Nadia [sic], or the way in which she does, in fact, use a paper-clip as the instrument of one target’s demise. The film does a decent job of countering this with an awareness that this is a dirty and unpleasant business, as when she visits (from a distance) the widow of a target and their now fatherless child. It is a difficult balance for a movie to strike, and I’m not convinced Cappello gets it right, resulting in some awkward lurches in tome from the comedic to the supposedly heart-felt. Both come off a bit flat: I never got past a wry smile, and was never completely engaged.

This is not Varela’s fault, nor that of her character. Daphne is played gloriously against all the tropes of the female assassin: it’s no coincidence her most effective undercover disguise is an estate agent. Add to this, Varela is deaf: this element affects, yet does not define, her character and that’s exactly the way disability should be portrayed. It is even worked nicely in to the plot, with one of McCabe’s weapons in development being a sonic cannon. However, I’d like to have seen more of her in action; perhaps for budgetary reasons, this is limited, or perhaps Cappello just wasn’t interested in that aspect.

This brings me to the other issue: Cappello the director is too much in love with Cappello the actor. The latter wears out his welcome well before riding to the rescue of the supposed heroine, in McCabe’s underground lair. This is a shame, since Daphne is such a gloriously unconventional character, the reverse should have happened. Tony is never interesting to begin with, the script (also by Cappello, naturally) forgetting to give him any particular reason to exist, beyond Daphne needing someone to talk to. Having him become the hero for the finale, feels forced and unnatural. This is not enough to derail an excellent concept, or negate what I think is likely only the second disabled action heroine on this site, after Ready, Willing and Able. Yet it’s definitely a pity.

Dir: Frank A. Cappello
Star: Cami Varela, Frank A. Cappello, Nicholas Ontiveros, Arina Manta

Tracie Tanner Thrillers, Vol 1-3 by Allan Leverone

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Parallax View
Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆½

This largely unfolds over the period of about a week in May-June 1987. History buffs will recall that being the time when the Soviet Union was beginning to fall apart, and it’s that which provides the background to the novel. President of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev is trying to shepherd his country into a more open era, but is facing strong opposition from some elements within the government. He writes a letter to his American counterpart, Ronald Reagan, whose contents are potentially explosive, and which the anti-Gorbachev faction in the Kremlin will do anything to stop. They fail to stop the communication being handed to American courier and CIA agent Tracie Tanner in East Berlin, but that’s only the start of their efforts to prevent Tracie completing her mission.

This is the kind of book I liked despite its flaws – and there are quite a few of those. The plot really wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny: it’s the old “She can’t trust anyone” trope, and it’d take about five minutes of thought by a trained intelligence operative to figure out how she could bypass that. Meanwhile, Tracie has no qualms putting her complete faith in the male lead, hunky (but thoroughly doomed – he just found out he has an inoperable brain tumour) air-traffic controller Shane Rowley. No surprises for guessing where those two end up. Despite the period setting, there’s not much sense of that very specific era, and Leverone does spend too much time diverting into background information on characters who, in truth, are not more than fringe players. Finally, while it’s clear who the “bad guys” are, it might have helped if there had been a particular antagonist, rather than a series of relatively faceless Russian agents and American traitors.

However, you shouldn’t necessarily let any of the above dissuade you, since they are largely the kind of criticisms I only realized after I’d finished the book, and was contemplating this review. The author does a fine job of managing the pace, keeping things moving at a fast and furious rate. There’s one hurdle after another for Tracie and Shane to overcome, as they hurtle towards the final confrontation, atop a building in Washington. There are even occasional moments where I was genuinely impressed by Tracie’s smarts, such as her taking two motel rooms on opposite sides. Leverone has a very good eye for action, and some of the set pieces are positively cinematic, such as the fight on board a B-52, and its subsequent marginally controlled descent. Could quibble about the way Tracie needs “rescued” at the end, except it’s foreshadowed well enough to make sense.

All Enemies
Literary rating: ★★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

After finishing Volume 1, I was pleased to discover I’d been smart enough to pick up Volumes 1-3 as a freebie (you can also get the first seven books for ten bucks). Having been solidly entertained by the first book, I headed more or less straight in to the next two, figuring that it would be a good candidate for our first ever featured book review. I wasn’t disappointed. This is another slick page-turner, albeit one with some of the same issues as its predecessor.

It begins only a couple of days after the events which ended the first volume. Traci is already back out in the field, even though she is still healing – both physically and mentally – from the damage she suffered while completing her mission.Only the personal intervention of President Reagan saved her from being drummed out of the CIA by Director Aaron Stallings, but it’s clear she is not exactly his flavour of the month.

A couple of months later, in September 1987, things kick off properly with the abduction of US Secretary of State J. Robert Humphries from his home in Georgetown. He’s a close personal friend of the President, who orders Stallings carry out an off-the-books operation, using a lone operative, to find out what happened and who’s responsible. No prizes for guessing to whom the director gives this fraught mission The initial evidence all seems to point to it being a Russian plot, this being the peak of the Cold War, but the more Tracie looks into the matter, the more it seems the Russians are being set up to take the fall, and the real culprits are elsewhere. Trying to tell Stallings this only gets her fired from the CIA; naturally, this is barely an inconvenience for the heroine.

As in the first book, the circumstances do throw Tracie back onto relying almost exclusively on her own talents. While she does get some help from CIA Analyst Marshall Fulton, it’s mostly information, which helps her put the pieces together. He’s a desk jockey, and although brave enough, ends up literally dropped off by the side of the road, as Tracie speeds off on her rescue mission. There is a slight sense of romantic tension between them; it doesn’t amount to much, yet still feels a bit awkward, considering how close we are to the personal tragedy Tracie endured in book #1. Her stoic refusal to call for back-up also felt a little strained. I get she no longer had official standing, yet there’s a point where this seemed a tad contrived.

It is a bit more of a stealth mission, which is what leads to the slightly lower kick-butt quotient for this: there’s more creeping around, trying not to be detected, in place of plane crashes, gun battles and chases. However, it feels more coherent and has a better ring of plausibility to it. Each piece of the story connects well to the next, and does a good job of drawing the reader along, towards the eventual climax on an small island off the East coast. My reading is usually split, with one book on my phone and a different one on the tablet. So it likely says something that, as soon as I finished this, I loaded up volume three on both my devices, the better to get into it.

The Omega Connection
Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆

Again, there’s no much of a pause between the end of one story and the beginning of the next. No matter how much Tracie may have been taxed by her exploits, she’s thrown back out there by boss Stallings, on another hazardous mission. I do wonder about her motivation, since she’s now entirely off-books, no longer even being a CIA employee: why love your country so much, and be prepared to put your life on the line for it, when its agencies treat you in such a disrespectful manner? I’d be high-tailing it towards the private security sector after all she’s gone through. That might just be me though.

This begins with an electronics company being decimated by a bomb attack, with its CEO also murdered in his hotel room. Threatening letters had been received, blaming the corporation for its role in the Bay of Pigs fiasco over a quarter of a century previously, an abortive invasion attempt against Fidel Castro’s Cuba, which cost the lives of many Cuban expats. Now, it appears, someone is out for payback. Tracey is assigned, first to bring in the only surviving member of the board, its R&D genius, Edison Kiley, then find out the person or persons responsible and make them stop. The task will take her into the darker corners of the expat community in Miami, over into Cuba itself, before she has to go deep into the almost unexplored territory of the Florida Everglades.

There is a certain sense of deja vu, in that as in All Enemies, the culprit for whom Tracie is seeking, is not who it initially appears. Neither book makes much effort to hide this fact: they’re not really whodunnits. However, it is a little too familiar for my tastes, and she also accepts what she is told regarding this by a certain party as the truth. While she is limited in what she can do, due to her unofficial status, I’d still expect her to be a little more “Trust, but verify…”

The best thing here is likely the main antagonist. They spend most of the film in the background, with Tracie dealing mostly with the results of their action. However, the eventual face-off is worth the wait, a downright brutal and savage brawl in the depths of the Florida swamps. It’s good enough to make me wish they’d met up earlier in the story, and had more than one such encounter. By the end, I’d be hard-pushed to say Tracie had shown much character development. She’s more or less in the same place she was at the start of volume 3 – just with a bullet wound in her leg, and a nasty concussion. However, the whole trilogy proved to be more than an adequately fun read, and I would not bet against further volumes showing up here, down the road.

Author: Allan Leverone
Publisher: Rock Bottom Books, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Books 1-3 of 9 in the Tracie Tanner Thrillers series.

AI Art: Movie Posters

Gallery

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This month, I asked the AI Art generator of Unstable Diffusion to give me some action heroine movie-posters, and this is what resulted. You have to know, it’s better at the concept than the execution. For example, it knows that text will go in certain locations: but actual coherent words escape its grasp. Which is why the titles on a lot of these appear to be written in a bizarre mash-up of Finnish and Russian. You should not expect to see Pictoong coming soon, to a multiplex near you! Still, we’re here for the images. :)

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Offside (2019)

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★½
“As dull as a 0-0 draw.”

Football is known as “The beautiful game,” but you wouldn’t know it based on this documentary, which seems perversely intended to remove anything like that from its topic. It focuses on Olimpia Szczecin, a women’s soccer team in Poland, as they prepare for the coming season. There’s your first problem. Team sports like this are inherently about conflict: there are winners and losers, but these are not determined on the practice field, and that’s where the film spends the bulk of its time. It’s simply not very interesting, unless you have a thing for watching women amble around a park, kicking balls at each other, jumping over low hurdles or being yelled at by their coach (Baginska).

There’s simply no narrative here which can attract interest. There are any number of threads which could have been used, if the film had bothered to explore or even explain them. For example, you’re never told – I had to Google this – that these players are actually amateurs rather than pros, so there’s the potential issue of striking a balance between their day jobs and their passion. Though we never see much “passion”. The only time the film reaches any genuine enthusiasm is when we see a coaching session for young girls, about the only ones in the entire documentary, who appear to be enjoying themselves. The coach also speaks about the importance of dealing with her players’ personal problems and keeping them off the pitch. Yet we never see this happening in any meaningful way.

A football season is inherently dramatic, fortunes ebbing and flowing over the course of meaningful competitive games. Yet this peters out before the campaign begins, robbing us of that tension. The entire season is instead described in a short series of terse captions. What little footage of actual play we see, is disjointed and impossible to get excited about. For example, they reach the final of an indoor tournament, where we’re told they are wearing white shirts, while their opponents are in blue. Except, the entire film is, for no good reason, shot in black-and-white and consequently, you can’t tell which side is which.

Outside of Baginska yelling at people, there’s no sense of any of the players having personalities or lives off the pitch. Why do they play? What are their goals? [Pun not intended] The film seems supremely disinterested in… Well, anything, to be quite honest. Rather than turning up with a story to tell, or even looking to find one, it feels as if they simply showed up for eight weeks in the off-season, due to an error in scheduling, but shrugged and made their film anyway. The irony is that, certainly in the UK, the women’s game has never been bigger, thanks largely to the English team winning the 2022 European Championships. If you told me this film was made by some American dude, to prove the validity of his belief that soccer is the dullest sport on Earth, I would believe you.

Dir: Miguel Gaudêncio
Star: Natalia Baginska, Roksana Ratajczyk, Kinga Szymanska, Weronika Szymaszek

Fountaine and the Vengeful Nun Who Wouldn’t Die

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★★
“Jack of all trades, master of nun…”

You will probably understand why the title more or less rocketed to the top of my watch-list, especially when accompanied by the poster (right). Naturally, it was almost inevitable that it could not possibly live up to either: the question was mostly, how far short it would fall. The answer is, “a fair bit, yet not irredeemably so,” even if the first half if considerably duller than I wanted. Indeed, it’s also rather confusing, in terms of what’s going on. As well as I can piece things together, Mary (Stern) is a nun who gets sent to an asylum after losing her sister, though it turns out to be less a mental-care facility than you’d expect.

There, she meets and falls for another nun, Lee (Tripp), and the pair escape. Mary eventually falls in with a vigilante group, intent on taking down the criminal empire of Fountaine, while Lee is abducted by the same group. With the help of trusty sidekick Sam (Clower), who was also Lee’s adopted brother, Mary acquires the set of special skills necessary, in addition to a fetching zebra-striped eye-patch and a very pointy Samurai sword This leads to storming Fountaine’s headquarters, in order to rescue her love. I think that hits most of the main points, though I accept no responsibility if I’m wrong. To be honest though, this is not really plot-oriented, being a collage of elements from exploitation cinema over the last fifty years.

The most obvious influence is probably Kill Bill, which was itself a patchwork assembly, so we’ve got to the point where exploitation cinema truly is eating itself. The other angle is clearly the nunsploitation genre of sinful sisters, though it has to be said, this is remarkably chaste in comparison. I think there is only one pair of breasts and zero full nudity in the whole thing, a tally at which Jess Franco would laugh patronisingly. It isn’t even close to being the first “retro grindhouse” entry that harks back to the style, trailing a decade behind both Nude Nuns With Big Guns and the recently reviewed Sister Wrath (a.k.a. Nun of That), the latter in particular doing a better job at being more than a third-gen photocopy of the genre.

Instead, it concentrates on the violence, though to mixed results. When it concentrates on practical effects, it’s not bad and occasionally reaches impressive. However, bad CGI is something you would never have seen in the seventies, and its presence here is equally unwelcome and unsatisfactory. The other problem is the lead actress falling short of the charismatic heroines in the films which inspired this. Pam Grier. Tura Satana. Dyanne Thorne. Meiko Kaji. Christina Lindberg. Stern will not be joining them in the pantheon of greats any time soon. And good retro grindhouse is capable of being entertaining, even if you have no knowledge of the genre’s history. I’m rather less than certain that’s the case here.

Dir: James Dean
Star: Mallory Stern, Ron Clower, Jaclyn Tripp, Zera Lynd

The Undaunted Wudang

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★★★
“Ground and pound.”

Chinese kung-fu movies took off in the early eighties, after the success of Shaolin Temple, starring an unknown teenager called Jet Li. Over the years that followed, a slew of imitators followed, with varying success. Where these largely differed from their Hong Kong counterparts, were in a more grounded approach to combat: wire-work and trampolines were avoided, in favour of players who (like Li) were martial artists first, and actors second. I believe the same is true of the heroine here, though information about Lin is hard to come by. According to the IMDb, this was her acting debut, though it’s tricky to grade her work there, thanks to the rather clunky dubbing on the print viewed for this review.

It takes place in the late 19th century, when countries like Japan were sending martial artists over to China, to fight the local masters. Chen Xue Jiao (Lin) is part of one such family, whose father dies in mysterious circumstances, and her brother is then killed by the Japanese [it’s not clear from the context if he’s her sibling, or just a colleague in their school]. She’s also on the Japanese hit-list, but escapes with the help of conveniently passing kung-fu expert,  Si Ma Jian (Zhao). Discovering the truth about her father’s death – which I won’t spoil, but really, your first guess is gonna be correct – she finds sanctuary at the Nashan Temple in the Wudang Mountains. There, the head priest (Ma) teaches her the necessary skills to take on her treacherous classmates and the Japanese.

This just about counterbalances an extremely prosaic and cliched plot with the undeniable competence of the martial artists on view. Sun has absolutely no sense of style as a director, yet that’s really the best approach for the film. You just want someone to point the camera in the direction of the performers, so as to appreciate the grace and strength on view, of Lin in particular. The problem here is, apart from that, and some quite pretty Chinese landscapes (especially around the temple), there’s not enough to sustain interest. The pacing is questionable, with Chen not even finding out a pivotal fact about her father’s death until the half-way point. While even the training sequences have some appeal, her actual revenge occupies only the last fifteen minutes or so.

I’m in the middle between the two camps of thought in regard to martial arts films, with no particular preference for either the high-flying and spectacular, or the grounded and more realistic style. For me, it’s all about the execution, and whether it’s done well. Here, it feels as if all the effort went into the action. While the most important part of proceedings, it’s not the sole element that matters. To make a great martial-arts movie, you still need characters and a plot. Otherwise, you’ve got the equivalent of a meal where the main course may be delicious, but the dessert sucks, the service is brusque, and the cloakroom loses your coat. That’s about what you have here.

Dir: Sha Sun
Star: Quan Lin, Changjun Zhao, Yuwen Li, Zhenbang Ma
a.k.a. Wudang

Sister Wrath

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★★★½
“Nun-conformist”

I think it’s safe to say you’ll probably be able to decide within a few minutes, whether or not this is your cup of tea. The opening scene is set in a strip-club where the next act on the main stage is dressed as a nun. After a couple of minutes, she pulls out an unfeasibly large weapon from under her clerical garb, and guns down the mobsters present, in gory fashion. Thereafter, you can expect more of the same, along with extremely savage jabs at organized religion. Catholicism is the main target, but Judaism and Hinduism get their share of jabs: for example, Gandhi is a martial arts teacher. Or there’s a Yiddish hitman, Viper Goldstein (Lavallee), who practices the art of “Jew Jitsu”. If you just roll your eyes at that, this is likely not for you. However, if you roll your eyes and also laugh, then you, like me, may be the intended target audience.

The heroine is Kelly (Nicklin) an aspiring nun with a bad temper, who ends up enrolled, not entirely willingly, in the Order of the Black Habit – though surely Order of the Bad Habit would have been an even better name? Whatever… They are a group of fighting nuns, each named after one of the seven deadly sins. Unsurprisingly, Kelly becomes Sister Wrath, and joins her colleagues, such as Sister Pride (Cipolla), in taking down the criminal empire of Momma Rizzo (Tretheway, shamelessly channeling Shelley Winters in Bloody Mama). Momma isn’t going to sit back and let that happen, however. After her own goons prove not up to the task of taking on the Black Habit, she brings in Goldstein and his Ninja Throwing Stars of David, to escalate the war. With the help of a mole inside the church, he kidnaps Sister Pride, in order to lure Wrath and the rest of the nuns into a trap.

There’s a lot of glorious invention here, not least the remarkably catchy musical number in heaven, which rivals the one at the end of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. [In one of the film’s rare subtle moments, the same actor is here playing both Jesus Christ and the Devil] It’s gory and foul-mouthed, though for whatever reason, remains remarkably chaste: the stripper in the opening scene is wearing pasties. Likely only a lack of the necessary gratuitous nudity prevented this from getting a seal of approval, because the rest of it is right in my wheel-house of poor taste. Cameos from Debbie Rochon and Lloyd Kaufman – again, if you don’t know who they are… – only add to the sense of fun. The latter plays the Pope, who shows up late to absolve everyone of their sins. If not quite reaching the dizzy heights of post-grindhouse classics like Hobo With a Shotgun, it’s one of the rare cases where a B-movie genuinely lives up to the promise of its poster.

Dir: Richard Griffin
Star: Sarah Nicklin, Alexandra Cipolla, Rich Tretheway, David Lavallee Jr.
a.k.a. Nun of That

Warchild: Pawn, by Ernie Lindsey

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Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆

This dystopian future takes place after the United States of America is no longer united, having fragmented into a group of disparate regions that exist in an uneasy piece with each other. The heroine is 14-year-old Caroline, who lives in a remote part of the Appalachians, her town loosely affiliated to the People’s Republic of Virginia. She’s a scout, and one day encounters forces from the Democratic Alliance. The population of her village who escape, head towards the state capital of Warrenville, pursued by the invading army. On the way, Caroline begins to come into startling abilities which were literally injected into her as a small child.

The collapse of the US is a concept which seems considerably more relevant now, than when the book originally came out in 2014; I was surprised to discover that it takes place several centuries into the future, rather than… oh, next Tuesday. This is the element which I think I found most interesting. While the story is a real page-turner, and I enjoyed it at the time, it’s one where I found myself stumbling into plot-holes when it came to writing the review. For instance, if you can get superpowers by syringe, why are there less than a handful of people so enhanced? I’d have expected the authorities to be all over that kind of thing, in particular the military. Instead, it seems almost to be like a post-apocalyptic version of winning the lottery.

Similarly, the way in which Caroline leads the refugees to Warrenville would have made more sense if she’d come into her powers first. That would plausibly help turn the teenager into a Joan of Arc-like figure. Instead, it seems rather contrived the way adults – even the fiercely independent and survivalist Republicons – defer to her, for no particular reason beyond Caroline being the heroine of the book. However, if you can get past that (and again, I didn’t really think about them while I was reading it), then you should be able to enjoy a fast-paced surge of a book, which tends to have something going on, more often than not.

Lindsey certainly doesn’t pull his punches. On more than one occasion a character meets an unexpected and brutal end, and this gives a sense of danger for the rest of them. Well, except Caroline, of course, who is fully engulfed in Heroine Armour, naturally. Still, there is a genuine character arc here, as her relatively pastoral existence is turned completely upside down, and she’s forced into maturity over the course of just a few days, after losing everything she knows. I would be tempted to read the next two volumes, just to see where the story goes: for instance, I’m curious about what happened to Crockett’s gang of Republicons, who just wandered off in the middle of the story. Though I’d need more of a “special offer” for the omnibus edition than the 49-cent saving it provides over buying parts two and three separately!

Author: Ernie Lindsey
Publisher: JCL Publishing, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 3 in the Warchild series.

Infierno Grande

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★★
“Moral: never try and take a pregnant woman’s gun.”

This begins, literally, with a bang. We first meet the heavily pregnant Maria (Docampo), carrying a rifle and preparing to leave her house. A man rises from the floor, and after a struggle for the gun, it goes off, and he drops back down. She hits the road in their pick-up truck, fearful of what she had done, and intending to head back to Naicó, the town where she was born. However, it’s not long before the people she meets on the road, seek to dissuade her from going there. It seems like everyone has a weird story about why her destination  is not a good idea, from mysterious lights that abduct you, to a cult of blond people with possible Nazi connections.

Meanwhile, in flashback, we also see that what happened was she had been escaping from her abusive husband, Lionel (Ajaka) whose treatment of her had become too much. Despite her fears, it turns out she had not killed him, just grazed his head with the bullet. He’s now coming after her, and is not happy about her leaving with their unborn child. It’s all a very slight story-line, and feels more like an Argentinian take on that quintessentially American genre, the road movie. In particular, it’s not so much about the destination, as the journey, the people you encounter along the way, and the way in which you interact with them.

For example, Maria and Lionel both meet the same man at different points. She ends up buying him a meal in a roadside restaurant, despite being strapped for cash, and in turn, he marks the location of Naicó on her map (its absence being another element of weirdness about the place). He, on the other hand, points a gun in his face and harshly interrogates him, as soon as he realizes that his victim had met Maria. It’s an obvious contrast – though like so much about the film, I’m not very sure what point Romero is attempting to make. Even at 75 minutes long, it all feels quite impenetrable, not least due to the lack of resolution. Oh, the Maria/Lionel situation is resolved. It’s just everything else that’s left open to your own interpretation.

The movie includes narration, apparently in hindsight, by her then unborn son, though again: I’m uncertain what is the point of lines like “This story somehow resembles a hunting.” Well, yes? There’s no doubt Maria is certainly attached to her weapon, even if most people she meets, stop seeing her as a threat after they recognize her condition. The film is at its (rather underwhelming) best when she is interacting with others. Her family seems well-known and her late father, who died with her mother in murky circumstances, was the former mayor of Naicó; the resulting dialogue has a relaxed and conversational approach that’s easy to listen to. But once the end credits rolled, I was left largely unsure about the purpose of the whole endeavour.

Dir: Alberto Romero
Star: Guadalupe Docampo, Alberto Ajaka, Héctor Bordoni. Mario Alarcón
a.k.a. Hell and Back

Jailbait

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★★★
“Old for her age.”

Of all the scathing reviews this has accumulated on Letterboxd.com, I think my favorite is the one which starts, “Obviously written by someone who knows absolutely nothing about the penal system.” Yes, seriously. I strongly suspect things like this were written by people who know absolutely nothing about women-in-prison films, and who inexplicably managed to overlook the title of the damn movie in their expectations. Me, I had initially overlooked this, believing it to be just a retitling of the same director’s Locked Up, a glorious slab of WiP insanity. When I discovered it was actually a different movie entirely. it went quickly to the top of my pending pile.

While an earlier work, and it’s clear Cohn is still honing his exploitation craft, this is still a fine slice of modern B-cinema, Not least is the casting of Lane, at that point in her thirties, as “teenager” Anna Nix. This certainly does not hang around. Inside five minutes, including opening credits, she has killed her step-father as he tries to be molest her, been tried convicted and sentenced to 4-9 years behind bars in juvenile detention. Only a few seconds later, we get our first of many looks at the lead actress’s spectacular breasts: artificially augmented, yet top tier work. It’s not long before there’s lesbian sex with her cellmate Genie (Jacobs); abusive sex with sleazy warden Frank Baragan (Hanks); drugs, first smoked, then injected; solitary confinement while naked; and coercion from Kody (O’Brien), the leader of the Low Riders prison gang, who says Anna must join them or face the consequences. Followed, eventually, by more lesbian sex.

In other words: everything you would expect from the genre. Of course, if you go in expecting Orange is the New Black – and, let’s be honest, making that comparison on the poster (above) was… unwise – then you’re probably not going to be happy. Me, though? I went in, looking for something along the lines of Locked Up, and will be checking “Satisfied” on my customer survey. Sure, the only thing less convincing than Anna’s teenage credentials is probably her cello playing (don’t ask), while both script and performances appear to be there, only because Cohn was told they were required elements in a feature film. This is me not caring.

To my surprise, the “Based on a graphic novel” claim is actually legit. I wondered what the creators thought when they heard the rights to their work had been bought by infamous studio The Asylum. Then I saw the cover of issue #1. I suspect the reaction was likely, “Cool! Where’s the cheque?”, and also that the resulting adaptation is a faithful one. Of course, this is a penal establishment where a SWAT team is immediately ready to rush in at the drop of a shiv, yet inmates are allowed to shoot up openly in the prison yard. It’s utterly ridiculous, and complete nonsense. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Dir: Jared Cohn
Star: Sara Malakul Lane, Erin O’Brien, Steve Hanks, Jennifer Robyn Jacobs