Author: Jim McLennan

A Heroic Fight

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★★★
“Fight for your right to… fight.”

Well, this is certainly… a film. Indeed, of all the movies I’ve seen, it is unquestionably… one of them. Is it good? Bad? I’m still not sure. There are so many shifts in tone here, you’ll get whiplash. It’s clearly intended to be a parody of eighties Hong Kong cinema (even though it was made in Taiwan), yet is equally guilty of committing many of the same sins. I can’t deny the imagination here. A gangster, the unfortunately named Mr. Duh (Chao) is embroiled in a struggle for control of his empire with a lieutenant (Wei) who wants to start dealing drugs. To this end, the boss’s grand-daughter is kidnapped, only to be rescued by conveniently passing martial arts actor Hsiao-Long (Lin). He – and I’ll get back to that – is part of a film studio under his father (Yuen), who specializes in action and special effects. They end up hired by Duh, putting their skills to use to protect the grand-daughter and, at one point, fake the boss’s death.

It’s all a thin excuse for a variety of skits and action sequences, which run the gamut from cringey to very impressive. The former would include the prepubescent daughter doing slutty Madonna cosplay, in what’s basically an extended commercial for McDonalds, while Material Girl plays. Note: not a cover, the actual song. Jennifer Rush and the Yellow Magic Orchestra also have their catalogue plundered by the soundtrack here, which may explain why this has never seen an official Western release. The good stuff includes most of the action, which have so much imagination crammed into them, it almost hurts, from Hsiao-Long’s tricked-out BMX bike, to the final fight, in and around the film studio. Even the grandchild’s kidnapping involves a Mickey Mouse costume and use of helium balloons which I suspect would not pass close inspection, either by a scientist, or by Child Protective Services.

Lin’s skills, while wire-assisted, are notable. Though confusingly, it appears she is playing a male actor, who specializes in playing female roles. [Yes, but what are her preferred pronouns…] Given her career contained no shortage of male roles, this is quite meta, and her first scene appears to parody the kind of films in which she achieved fame. I would say that a lot of this has not dated well, with many references lost in the mists of time, even to those of us who have seen more eighties HK films than we’d like to admit. These are therefore left dangling to no particular point or reaction for a contemporary viewer. Fortunately, the action is probably as good as I’ve seen in a Taiwanese production. These often tend to come across as the poor relation of the work being put out by Hong Kong studios at the time: you’d be hard pushed to argue that’s the case here. Albeit only in spurts, this is every bit on par, and Lin’s tiny talents are enough to keep the pot bubbling.

Dir: Chung-Hsing Chao
Star: Hsiao-Lao Lin, Yuen Cheung-Yan, Dick Wei, Chung-Hsing Chao

Iron Jawed Angels

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★★
“Largely unable to get out the vote.”

There’s a fascinating story to be told about the struggle by American women to get the vote. Unfortunately, this isn’t it. Rather than being content to tell the story of the battle and those who fought in it, von Garnier (a German director who gave us Bandits)  seems to want to force these women from the 1910’s into modern feminist configurations. This position is set out particularly clearly in a deliberately anachronistic soundtrack, which at times makes the story feel more like Hamilton. And to be clear, that’s not a good thing. The focus is campaigner Alice Paul (Swank), beginning in 1912 when she returns from England, her passions set on fire by the work there of Emmeline Pankhurst, as documented in the rather better Suffragette.

Alice initially seeks to work with the leading American group, the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association, led by Carrie Chapman Catt (Huston), only to find their methods not radical enough for her tastes. This eventually causes her to form her own group, and begin protesting against President Woodrow Wilson, including a daily picket of the White House. Matters come to a head after the United States enters World War I, with such protests being seen as unpatriotic. This leads to Paul and other women being arrested on dubious charges, and after beginning a hunger strike in protest, the women are force-fed. Eventually, Wilson is convinced to support their cause, with the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote, being passed in 1920.

My main problem is that Paul never feels an authentic character. She comes over more like a 21st century woman transplanted to the time, which as result, makes her story feel almost like a bad episode from the current incarnation of Doctor Who. It chooses to manipulate history purely for dramatic purposes, such as shoehorning in a romantic relationship with a newspaper cartoonist. Yet for all the obviously liberal credentials inherent in the story, according to the film, only one black woman supported the suffrage movement – and just for a minute or two, before exiting the film. Awkward, that.

Despite the above, and the film in general being a stylistic mess, you’d have to try particularly hard to screw up the underlying story, which is generally an empowering and rousing one. You’d have to be a colder heart than I, not to feel aggrieved by the treatment Paul and the other women suffer in pursuit of their cause, and the film does manage to do these elements justice, simply by reining back in the attempts to jazz things up. I was amused (and slightly pleased) by the disdain of NAWSA towards their bomb-flinging sisters across the Atlantic, who were rather keener on direct action. Though the main moment which amazed me was the scene where President Wilson walked out of the front gate of the White House, tipping his hat to the protestors as he passed them. Truly a different era.

Dir: Katja von Garnier
Star: Hilary Swank, Frances O’Connor, Julia Ormond, Anjelica Huston

Injun

  By

★½
“I Spit on Your Movie.”

I never thought I’d find a film which would leave me yearning for the subtle and understated pleasures of the original I Spit on Your Grave, but here we are. 35 years on, and this cringeworthy copy was made, transplanting events to the old West. A further decade later: with a couple of re-titlings which jostle each other for inappropriateness, it’s out on a number of free movie streaming platforms. I’m here to tell you, not to bother. Even in the low-rent neighbourhood which is rape-revenge movies, you could close your eyes, pick a random entry, and be almost guaranteed to find something with a better script and general execution.

It begins on a bizarrely integrated farm, I’m guessing at some point after the end of the Civil War. Comanche adopted white girl Ana (Sawyer) lives there with her native American husband and their son, plus a Hispanic woman, a black guy and a geezer in glasses. Their names are not important. For onto the ranch ride six escaped convicts, led by former Confederate officer Jeb (Herrick). After some ominous banter with geezer in glasses, they kill everyone – told you their names weren’t important – except for Ana who is merely gang-raped, staked out and left for dead. Fortunately for her, she’s rescued by a conveniently passing man called Barfly (Neff). Nursed back to health over what must be a period of several hours, she sets out for revenge against the six escapees, who inexplicably decided to hang around the ranch.

You know me: I’m not exactly one to complain about questionable stereotypes. But even I had to wince on a number of occasions. It might have been Jeb’s Mexican sidekick, Chico (Venture), who sports an F-sized sombrero and droopy mustache. It might have been Ana’s squaw cosplay and whooping war-dance. It might have been the original title, with its even more dubious poster and tagline: “Payback’s an Indian bitch!” I’m all in favour of political incorrectness in order to make a point, or even simply to trigger certain folk. I get the feeling though, that everything here was done out of sheer ignorance. As such, this is no fun at all.

If you’re going to knock off I Spit on Your Grave so blatantly (down to there being a mentally-challenged member among the rapists), then you really need to put more effort into it. The rape here is a scoop of vanilla ice-cream compared to the intensity of the original. The revenge has almost no impact either, with third-rate special effects: the “scalping” is particularly unimpressive. Oh, hey: rather than cutting someone’s genitals off, she sets fire to them. That’s what passes for imagination and innovation here. The performances just about pass muster: indeed, there’s likely too much of them, especially with the gang sitting around the farmhouse and jawing, as their numbers steadily shrink. Your interest and attention will likely suffer a similar fate.

Dir: Bob Cook
Star: Amanda Elizabeth Sawyer, Robert Herrick, Tony Venture, Greg Neff
a.k.a. Scalped! or I Spit on Your Tombstone

Hit and Run, by Andy Maslen

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

Detective Inspector Stella Cole has her life turned upside down when her lawyer husband is killed in a hit-and-run accident, leaving her to bring up daughter Lola on her own, and struggling with an addiction to both booze and painkillers – anything to numb the pain of everyday existence. Though the driver in question is arrested, he receives a paltry sentence of only three years, and Stella begins to plot taking her own revenge. This is brought up short when the perpetrator is killed in prison, and evidence begins to accumulate that her husband’s death may not have been accidental.

The more DI Cole investigates, the murkier things get, as she discovers evidence of a vigilante group, Pro Patria Mori, operating at the highest levels. They’re not exactly happy to have Cole circling them, and decide she needs to be dealt with. However, Stella has been preparing to deliver the most brutal payback she can imagine, when she finds the man responsible, and is no longer a soft target, but prepared for whatever – and whoever – PPM might throw at her. Despite Britain’s strict gun-controls, her job helps her obtain access to everything she needs, before she sets off to the Highlands of Scotland to carry out her vengeance, with absolutely no regard for what the personal cost might be.

Looking back on this, what will stick in my mind is probably a fairly mind-blowing twist at about the one-third point, which quite upends everything I’d believed, and was something I definitely did not see coming. Well played, Mr. Maslen. Well played. I also liked the nicely-detailed way in which Stella obtained her weaponry. Not being au fait with the finer details of police firearms procedure, I can’t comment on its practicality; however, it sounds like it could work, and that’s good enough for me. The action is fairly low-key for the most part, though ends in a rousing finale, with Stella’s assault on her target, who knows she’s coming and has made defensive preparations. Just not nearly enough of them.

There were some other plot aspects that didn’t convince. In the end, the person directly responsible for her husband’s death – as in, actually driving the car – is one of PPM’s top officials, which doesn’t seem to make sense. It’d be more logical to use the person who was actually sent to jail, and they clearly have no issues with throwing low-lives at problems, or access to the same. Similarly, it’d be more logical to have had her work up the chain of command. It still makes for a satisfying and vigorous tale of justice emphatically served, though I’m not certain how there can be six more books in the series. It feels as if Cole has burned an awful lot of bridges, with a return to her job seeming highly problematic. It’s certainly not a light read, yet perhaps is the better for unashamedly embracing the darkness in its topic and heroine.

Author: Andy Maslen
Publisher: Tyton Press, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 7 in the DI Stella Cole Thrillers series.

One Foot Crane

  By

★★½
“As the crane flies.”

We begin with the murder of a family, with the sole (apparent) survivor being a small child, Fung Lin-yi (Li), who is able to escape. Rescued by – and stop me if you’ve heard this one before – a kung-fu master, she is rigourously trained in the titular style of martial arts. It’s fairly nifty, not least for the dagger hidden in the tip of her shoe which she uses to administer the coup de grace, Rosa Klebb style. Fifteen years later, she’s ready to seek revenge on the quartet of outlaws responsible for killing her family, who unlike our heroine, appear not to have aged a day over the decade and a half since they participated in the slaughter. Matters are complicated by a few factors. Her first victim is the father of one of the outlaws, who then starts tracking down the mysterious “One Foot Crane” responsible. There’s also a police official investigating the situation (Sze), and it turns out Lin-yi may not be the only survivor after all (Wei).

Plenty going on here, for sure, though not much of it is particularly of interest. Indeed, from an action heroine point of view, it leads to a dilution of focus, with the movie’s attention being pulled in too many different directions. It ends up doing none of them justice and sidelining Lin-yi, just as things should be getting going. Li isn’t bad, either in performance or with her fists and feet; there’s just nothing particularly special about either facet of her character. It does form an interesting contrast to the recently reviewed Eight Strikes of the Wildcat in one area. That had the heroine taking on three villains for the film’s climax, and this approach makes for a much stronger and more impressive finale than the one here, where she needs the help of two others (using eagle and mantis techniques) in order to take on the final boss. You never saw Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan requiring assistance.

Veteran Hong Kong star Lo Lieh shows up, though despite his high presence in the movie’s opening credits, his contribution should probably be more in the “with…” or “and…” categories, if the makers were being honest. He appears only briefly as a villain, swinging a blade on a chain around. I did appreciate the way the film didn’t subject us to the almost contractually required training montage: one second, Lin-yi is a little girl doing kung-fu, and a cut later, she’s all grown-up and doing kung-fu. However, there is almost nothing else which sticks in my mind, and I finished watching it a scant few hours ago. Still, Li clearly must have had some skills, enjoying a long career in both film and television, appearing as recently as 2020. She was the lead in a 1978 TV series of The Bride with White Hair, and received a “Long-term Service and Outstanding Employee Honour Award” from TVB for thirty years’ service in 2018. This, however, doesn’t merit any further discussion.

Dir: Wu Min-hsiung
Star: Lily Li, Wei Tzu-Yun, Tsai Hung, Sze Ma Lung

The Gentle Touch

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★★★★
“Touched by an angel.”

British television was rather late to the policewoman party. The first such American show, Decoy, had aired in 1957, and been followed in the seventies by Get Christie Love! and Police Woman. But the UK had to wait until the eighties for their first home-grown series. The Gentle Touch just beat Juliet Bravo to the title, beginning its five season run four months earlier, in April 1980. It centered on Maggie Forbes (Gascoine), a Detective Inspector who worked out of the Seven Dials station in central London. The show began with the murder of her husband, also a police officer, leaving her to raise teenage son Steve (Rathbone), despite a strong devotion to her career in law enforcement.

To be honest, it’s more character- than action-driven overall, yet that’s its strength, since it does a great job of creating people who feel “real”. Nobody here is perfect: everyone has flaws, and struggles to cope with life’s ups and downs. Maggie is the focus, having to operate in an era when casual disregard for a woman’s talents was the norm. Not least by her Scottish colleague, Bob Croft (Gwaspari), though he eventually came to appreciate her many talents, such as Forbes’s fierce devotion to justice. Fortunately, her boss, Detective Chief Inspector Bill Russell (Marlowe) always had her back, even if his approach means cutting her no slack either. But every episode seemed to have one or more great performance, taking advantage of the vast pool of top-tier British character actors.

If you’re familiar with British films and television of the time (and I basically grew up with them!), you will see a lot of recognizable faces. Josh Ackland, Enn Reitel, Joanne Whalley, Art Malik, David Kelly, Ralph Bates and even Floella Benjamin – now Baroness Benjamin, then playing a high-class call-girl! The show also covered a lot of social topics not often seen on eighties television, from racism to porn, yet generally managed to do so without feeling like it was delivering a lecture. There’s no denying its success at the time. This peaked with the ninth episode of season three, in January 1982, which was the fifth most-watched TV program of the year in the United Kingdom, seen by almost a third of the entire population.

The odd episode does perhaps teeter on the edge of implausibility, such as a largely ineffective cliffhanger at the end of season four, where a woman walks into Seven Dials station, armed with a hand-grenade, and threatening to blow herself up. Such excesses seemed positively… well, American. I felt the show was better when staying safely British: you could have a good drinking game, based off people offering each other a nice cup of tea. Speaking of which, Gascoine must have had a sponsorship deal with artificial sweetener company Hermesetas: Chris noticed the way she inevitably dropped a couple of their little tabs into her cuppa. Yet I was surprised how well it generally stood the test of time. Its age only occasionally shows, and most of its 56 episodes proved highly watchable, thanks to the solid characters and performances.

Creator: Terence Feely
Star: Jill Gascoine, William Marlowe, Brian Gwaspari, Nigel Rathbone

Nowhere Girl

  By

★★½
“Slow, slow, slow-slow, quick…”

For the first hour, you may be forgiven for wondering if there has been some kind of mistake, because the poster bears almost no resemblance to what happens in the film. Oh, it’s the same actress, to be sure, and she is a schoolgirl. But it appears, rather than the war story promised, you have strayed into a teenage drama. In it, Ai (Seino) is a talented but troubled student, who seems to be suffering from some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder. The special treatment she receives at school brings her enmity as a result, both from her class-mates and the er homeroom teacher (Kaneko). Though she finds solace in art, including a mysterious major project on which she is working, housed in the school auditorium.

It’s all very subdued. There’s a lot of scenes of people standing around talking. Or, for variety, sitting around talking. The camera is considerably more mobile than the characters, engaging in stately pans and tracking shots around the dialogue, accompanied by classical music that’s positively soporific. Yet, it’s clear there’s something “off” about the whole situation. The school is frequently shaken by earthquakes, and it’s apparent that Ai has a tendency to outbursts of violence, which is bubbling just below the surface. The staff and other students don’t pay attention to the warning signs, and continue to push Ai’s buttons. You’ll understand where I thought this was potentially going to end up, delivering on the image with her going postal on the school.

Not quite.

Trust Oshii to make something which confounds expectations, while still somehow managing to disappoint. See  Avalon or Assault Girls, both films with massive potential, that fall short of realizing it. Here, you have a film which would potentially be a classic, if it started at the hour mark, then built on what follows, for another hour after the credits actually roll. Because what kicks off – at the 67-minute mark if you’re interested in fast-forwarding to that point – is beautifully staged. There’s a spectacular sequence of kung- and gun-fu, whose highlight for me was Ai taking the term “human shield” to a whole new level. Then a revelation to set up a whole new scenario, one that looks very interesting, and… The End.

I do have to mark this down for the film trying to pull off the most clichéd of clichéd twists which, to a significant degree, renders everything previous to that point a waste of everybody’s time. You need to be a supremely confident film-maker to pull it off; while it’s clear Oshii doesn’t lack in confidence, pulling the carpet out from under the viewer really needs to have happened 10-15 minutes in. The longer the conceit is sustained, the more likely the audience’s reaction will be “You’ve got to be kidding me” – and there might well be an epithet dropped in before “kidding”, too. Some day Oshii will deliver on his undeniable talent and imagination. Just not today.

Dir: Mamoru Oshii
Star: Nana Seino, Nobuaki Kaneko, Lily, Hirotaro Honda

Run Sweetheart Run

  By

★★★
“/snorts in Lola”

If I were Ella Balinska, I’d be having a word with my agent. After seeing her major Hollywood career begin with the embarrassing failure of the Charlie’s Angels reboot, she then followed up with an even more dismal flop, the attempted reboot by Netflix of Resident Evil. Now there’s this, which eventually seeped out on Amazon Prime, in a re-cut form, almost three years after premiering at Sundance. This either doubles down on the loony feminist claptrap of Angels, or is a deadpan parody of that kind of nonsense. For the sake of my sanity, and for humanity in general  I’m going to presume it’s the latter, and the grade above reflects this. If it was intended as serious social commentary, slice the grade in half, and God help us all.

Cherie (Balinska) is a wannabe lawyer, toiling away in a Los Angeles legal firm, and suffering all the slings and arrows the patriarchy can hurl at a single black mother. In particular, her boss (Gregg) asks her to stand in for him and take a client, Ethan (Asbæk). out to dinner. He’s handsome, charming… and a demonic entity of some kind, who then proceeds to hunt Cherie through the LA night, after telling her, she’ll be free if she can last till dawn. Turns out she’s far from his first victim, and Cherie’s only hope of help is a mysterious woman called the First Lady (an effortlessly movie-stealing Aghdashloo), who knows a thing or two…

It’s a perfectly fine premise, and as well as Aghdashloo, Asbæk also seems to be in on the joke, over-acting enthusiastically and to good effect. There are moments when this is supremely self-aware, such as when Ethan follows Cassie into his house, then turns and gestures to stop the camera from following. Or the 72-point font exhortations to “RUN!” splattered on the screen at appropriate moments. Yet it feels as if Feste doesn’t understand the genre in which she’s operating. Horror is about confronting fears head-on (albeit in a safe environment), not avoiding them. By pointing the camera away, she’s missing the point. For instance, when Ethan reveals his true form, all we see is Cassie’s reaction, and Balinaka’s pulling of faces is nowhere near a good enough performance to sell it. 

Despite what I said above, unfortunately, it does appear the film intends its feminist message to be taken seriously, and at times this drowns the entertaining elements in cringe. Peak levels are reached after Cherie is rescued from an obnoxious alpha male at a party by three sisters, who unironically spout nonsense like, “We desperately need the female brain.” The whole movie is spattered with badly-written dialogue and action along similar lines, rather than letting its meaning flow naturally from events as they happen. Such moments derail what was a promising B-movie. Indeed, if it had been more Ethan vs. First Lady, with Cassie reduced to the annoying footnote she deserves to be, it could potentially have been a classic.

Dir: Shana Feste
Star: Ella Balinska, Pilou Asbæk, Clark Gregg, Shohreh Aghdashloo

The Glorious Asuka Gang!

  By

★★★
“Red Nose Day?”

Dir: Yôichi Sai
Star: Miho Tsumiki, Yôko Kikuchi, Kumiko Takeda, Mikari

This is based on a 34-volume manga series by Satosumi Takaguchi, which began publication in 1985. It is far from the only adaptation. There have also been two OVAs, a live-action drama series, a different feature version made in 2009, and even a pair of drama CDs. This feature, however, is the only one available in the West to date with subtitles. It takes place at an indeterminate point in the future – the year is given as 199X – when “the streets are overflowing with drugs and violence”. There’s a battle for control, which conveniently seems to be along gender lines. The unfortunately naned male “Red Nose Gods”, under boss Toki Masamune, are going up against the all-girl Hibari Group. They are named after their leader (Mikari), who speaks only through her lieutenant, or with the aid of an artificial voice-box.

Out heroine, Asuka (Tsumiki), has just peeled off from Hibari, along with her best friend Miko (Kikuchi), seeking to make their own way on the streets. They quickly gain the enmity of the Red Nose Gods, but more troubling, is that Hibari has ordered Yoko (Takeda) to kill them both. For Yoko is Miko’s sister. This is established quite quickly, and the rest of the movie is various shenanigans as the two groups struggle for power, while the local corrupt police run interference on their own agenda. Will there be betrayal, plotting and heavy use of a Rolling Stones song? The answer is yes, to all three elements.

This feels like it ought to be a straight-to-video title, of which there was no shortage around the time this came out (1988). But the production values are considerably better than normally present in that kind of thing. The cost of merely licensing the Stones’s Satisfaction would have exceeded the entire budget of many V-cinema entries. There are also some quite spectacular sets built to represent “New Kabuki Town”, after the apparent near-collapse of normal society, and the photography is positively theatrical in quality. If you’d told me this was a Japanese remake of Streets of Fire, I would have believed you. Elements like Hibari’s voice-box indicate there was a decent amount of thought put into the various elements too.

So why is it… kinda dull? Or at least, it seems like it should be considerably more exciting. While there are occasional upticks in energy, it feels considerably more chatty than I wanted. Yoko, in particular, seems to act in ways that defy any kind of internal logic, yet are necessary to propel the narrative forward. What is her motivation? What, indeed, is anyone trying to accomplish? For a time, it looks as if Asuka is seeking to take over from Hibari, or replace Toki. This all goes away quite quickly, left by the wayside, and leaving a vacuum in terms of character goals. It ends instead in a straightforward duel between Asuka and Yoko, and there’s a definite sense that, once the dust settles, nothing much will have changed. Maybe that’s the point.