Author: Jim McLennan

Born of War

  By

★★
“Warn of bore”

While technically solid, and occasionally looking quite good, this may be the laziest scripting I have seen in a movie for a long time. I feel I may have lost actual IQ points through the process of watching it, such is the degree of stupidity which this provides. The heroine is Mina (Black-D’Elia), a college student whose life is upended when she and her little sister narrowly escape a home invasion by Arab terrorists, in which both her parents are killed. She’s rescued by intelligence agent Olivia (Leonard), who tells her she’s the only heir of an Afghani warlord, Khalid (Arditti). Her mother betrayed him, and had to change her identity: he finally caught up with the family, and wants his daughter back.

As protection, Olivia assigns her to private contractor Simon (Frain), who helps teach her certain skills. When further attempts to kidnap her follow, Mina has had enough of running, and agrees to be handed over to Khalid, after having a tracking device implanted. This will allow the military to locate the terrorist leader, and take him out, giving Mina her revenge. Except, things are not at all what they initially appear. There’s a whole hidden agenda, involving an oil company with designs on the region, duelling warlords and members of the intelligence community who appear to be operating without formal sanction from the government. To survive, Mina will need to stab someone with a CD, and carry out impromptu surgery. With a rock.

Yeah, it’s like that. I lost track of the number of times I rolled my eyes, snorted derisively or shook my head in annoyance. Sometimes, more than one of these in combination. I think it began with the home invasion, where a single, completely untrained (at that point) college student was able repeatedly to get the drop on a trio of hard-core fanatics. You just cannot get the quality terrorist minions these days. The same incompetence litters the path of the movie throughout. For instance, if they had once searched their captive, they’d have found the CD she broke and later used as an improvised weapon. Even after Mina finds the truth out and becomes disposable, multiple opportunities to do just that – dispose of her – are wasted.

The same writer-director pairing, of Jewson and husband Rupert Whitaker, was also responsible for Close, which at least had Noomi Rapace in it. This does not, and Black-D’Elia isn’t an adequate replacement. Her broad American accent is another point of pain, with the script’s explanation for it, more of a token gesture, really. The film does look sharp, and if you have this on in the background – say, if you are doing the ironing – it could conceivably pass muster. However, any attention to detail might well peel off the thin gold-plating of competence. A film which relies on two people bumping into each other entirely by coincidence, in a large city, is definitely one with major problems.

Dir: Vicky Jewson
Star: Sofia Black-D’Elia, James Frain, Lydia Leonard, Philip Arditti

The Escape

  By

★★
“Not so great…”

I’m just going to begin by quoting the opening credit titles. Spelling, grammar and punctuation as received. “At the early stage of Republic of China, Yuan Hsi Hai wanted to rebel the democratic government & be the king. But there were 300,000 soldiers at Yuan Wan under the command of General Tsai obstructed his desire, so he cheated General Tsai to Peking & confined his movements. So Yuan who lived in Chu Jen Hall could fulfil his ambition but…” I reproduce this because, to a large extent, that’s everything I’ve got in terms of the over-arching plot here. It’s all about Tsai (Kwan) getting out of the city, in order to lead his troops and, presumably, frustrate Yuan’s dictatorial ambitions.

Key to this is Peking Opera star Hsiao Yu (Lee), who is hired by Yuan’s men to keep an eye on the General. However, she’s not as loyal as her employer would hope, and she gradually becomes attached to and involved with Tsai. This eventually results in her helping him to escape the house arrest under which he has been placed. I believe this to be true with… let’s say 90% confidence. There does appear to be other stuff going on: none of it is able to make it through the terrible presentation, and out the other side, to provide details which I prepared to commit to the keyboard. It’s kinda clear why Lee’s Queen Boxer made it out in the West, and this didn’t, even though both were made around the same time.

This did rather well at Taiwan’s 1973 Golden Horse awards, winning Best Film, Leading Actor, Screenplay and a special award for “Outstanding Performance” going to Lee (she lost Best Leading Actress to Hsiao-Lao Lin in A Heroic Fight). All I can say is, it must have been a very slow year in cinema, for this largely plodding and uninteresting history-political drama to have triumphed. Though, again, the presentation does it no justice. For example, there’s one scene where Tsai is repeatedly writing something in large letters on paper. It’s clearly very important to him. Unfortunately, the subtitles – as ever, intended for a Chinese audience, not a Western one – don’t bother to translate it. So its significance is entirely lost.

Lee is about the only reason to watch this, and the film definitely goes up a gear whenever she’s on screen. Her background actually was in the Peking Opera, making this right in her wheel-house. The director – and some sources also credit both Kwan and Florence Yu Fung-Chi – wisely lets her talent shine through, and it’s a no-nonsense approach that works. Witness, for example, the casual way, she shoves a victim out of the way with her feet, after crushing his larynx. But one of the problems is, I honestly couldn’t tell you who’s she’s fighting at the end, or why, since the General has already escaped. It’s just another element lost in translation here, like so many others, and leaves this an underwhelming entity, in the only form available.

Dir: Min-Hsiung Wu
Star: Judy Lee, Peter Yang Kwan, Lee Hung, Cheung Kwong-Chiu 

The Blind Spot, by Michael Robertson

  By

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

On the surface, Scala City is an idyllic, hi-tech world of prosperity, peace and morality, albeit at the cost of omnipresent surveillance of its residents. But there’s a dirty little secret. The Blind Spot is an area where surveillance is barred, and where the citizens of Scala City go to blow off their sordid steam. Its residents have cybernetically enhanced bodies, something rejected by Scala City, and a zero-tolerance policy for any kind of monitoring. It’s run by Wrench, who has kept his daughter Marcie Hugo under strict control since the death of her mother. However, like all teenagers, the 16-year-old Marcie is seeking to spread her wings, and has been making covert excursions into Scala City, with the aim of moving there some day soon.

The problem is, an escalating series of terrorist attacks have been occurring in the city, which it appears someone is trying to blame on the Blind Spot, in order to trigger a war between them and the city. After one of Marcie’s trips is caught on camera, the heat gets turned up, and she – along with the Blind Spot’s most infamous computer hacker – becomes the only person who can prevent a conflict that could lead to the destruction (at least in a digital sense) of both sides. She believes the perpetrators may have help from inside the Blind Spot, suspecting in particular a close accomplice of Wrench, who also happens to be the father of her best friend.

The world-building here is solid enough. As well as Marcie, events unfold through the sad eyes of Nick, an overweight and largely unloved Scala City resident. He’s addicted to the Wellbeing App, which records only the positive things people say about each other, sharing it with them. This is…scarily plausible, to be honest, though the split focus is a little unwieldy. No connection between this pair of story lines is established until about two-thirds of the way through the book, although they work well enough on their own terms. The idea of a city with a Jekyll and Hyde personality is also well-executed.

A bigger problem, for me, was the sudden reticence on Marcie’s end. Initially, we experience things through her eyes, knowing everything she knows. Then, at a certain point, we get cut out of the loop, from a narrative point of view, as she and her hacker pal begin their plot to track down and expose the real terrorists. We’re left on the outside, not knowing what’s going on – and when we do find out, there naturally being a grand reveal, it’s not very satisfying. It relies too much on the “all-powerful hacker” trope, and the identity of the traitor in their midst is also unconvincing. The story ends up being a swing and a miss, though with the book being free on Amazon, I probably can’t complain. Though it’d have to be at the same price point to get me to go any further into the series.

Author: Michael Robertson
Publisher: Self-published, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 6 in the Neon Horizon series.

Guns of Eden

  By

★★
“Fires mostly blanks.”

Buffalo police officer Megan (Sadeghian) is a highly-skilled cop, but has a crisis of confidence after being involved in the accidental shooting of a colleague. To help get her out of that mindset, partner Jeremy (Johnson) invites Megan on a weekend camping getaway in upstate New York, along with another couple. This goes horribly wrong, after they stumble across the summary execution of a drug-dealer by the local sheriff, Preacher (Kennedy) and his death squad. The four campers are now a problem for Preacher, so he seals off the area, and unleashes a slew of hunters, putting a ten thousand dollar bounty on the head of each target. Of course, you don’t have to be psychic to see it won’t be easy, courtesy of Megan.

When your story is one with which every viewer will be familiar, like this, it increases the need to nail the execution. Here, the results are a bit of a mixed bag, and I’m being extremely kind with that description. The best thing the movie had going for it, is Sadeghian in the lead. As the poster indicates, it looks like she could have been a better Lara Croft than Alicia Vikander (y’know, back when Lara still used guns…). She does a good job of commanding the viewer’s attention when she’s on screen. Unfortunately, the villains are feeble in comparison: often they’re the biggest danger to themselves, either deliberately or, in one especially eyeroll-worthy scene, accidentally. There’s a political subtext here too, which seems all the more dubious, given the film’s topic.

The biggest issue, though, are the frequent ways in which its flaws are obvious. A convenience store shoot-out, in which not even a packet of chips is displaced. A villain who gets “knocked out”, by a stone, marginally above pebble sized, lobbed gently toward them. The heroine supposedly being chased by a random hovering helicopter, while the vegetation nearby barely moves. Bad guys (and girls) whose incompetence is only exceeded by their inaccuracy. Thoroughly unconvincing bullet-holes. The list of problems here is just too long to ignore. On the other hand, I very much appreciated the presence of veteran actress Lynn Lowry, as a local who is less than enamoured by Sheriff Preacher. In a movie often teetering on the edge of self-parody, she has a calming influence, that helps keep proceedings grounded.

Lamberson also makes decent use of the wilderness locations. In particular, a series of narrow canyons, that provide a mazelike setting through which the hunters and hunted must proceed. But the good elements – the final knife fight between Megan and Preacher is also energetic – never last long, before something shows up to take you out of the viewing experience. I’d been waiting for this to show up on a streaming service for a while. Suffice it to say, it fell some way short of my expectations, and I probably shouldn’t have bothered getting my hopes up.

Dir: Gregory Lamberson
Star: Alexandra Faye Sadeghian, Bill Kennedy, Peter Johnson, Nicole Colon

La Reina Del Sur: season three

  By

★★★
“La reina de Sudamérica”

Even though the third season was announced just a couple of weeks after our review of the second series was posted, I was still surprised when it suddenly popped up on Netflix earlier this year. I’d simply forgotten about the show, it having been part of that bygone BC era (before COVID). But I was still pleased to see it, even if three years had passed since the last season. In screen-time, it appears to be even longer, perhaps four or more years since the end of the second series. Teresa Mendoza (del Castillo) is now in jail, the DEA having finally caught up with her in Australia, though her daughter Sofia escaped, taking up a new identity in Spain.

It’s not long before Teresa is sprung from jail, at the behest of her ex-husband Epifanio Vargas (Zurita), who is now the Mexican president. He has his sights set on extending the reign through quasi-legal means, but is getting opposition from the American government. To stop that, he needs a stash of evidence which details all the black ops activities carried out by the US government in South and Central America. The price for his breaking Teresa out, is her tracking down the “White Rider” who has the stash, and recovering it for Epifanio. He can then use it as leverage against the United States, to get them to drop their opposition to his “constitutional reforms.”

This leads to Teresa spending much of the series travelling around various locations in South America, including Peru, Colombia and Argentina. It’s not clear if this is related to del Castillo’s previous troubles with the Mexican government, resulting from her relationship with El Chapo. I kinda feel that should all have been squared away by now, but you never know. While a significant portion of the show does take place in Mexico, those are mostly the sections involving Epifanio. Only the very end appears to show Teresa there, and there’s nothing which couldn’t be staged easily enough, from outside the country. This contrasts to much of Teresa’s overseas scenes, which firmly place the actress on location.

There are quite a lot of familiar faces for this one. There’s the long-running relationship between Teresa and Russian mobster, Oleg Yosikov (Gil). This is somewhat reflected in the love triangle of her daughter, now very much her own young woman. Sofia has to decide between Oleg’s son, Fedor, and street-kid Mateo Mena. He rescues Sofia from a sticky situation, and those who want to use Sofia to force her mother into compliance with their wishes. There’s also faithful sidekick Batman, who has been with Teresa since the beginning. On the other side, as well as her ex-husband, whose power is now grown to such an extents as to be a real threat, there’s long-running DEA nemesis Ernie Palermo. He brought Teresa in, and is very keen for her to serve the rest of her eighty-five year prison sentence.

Interestingly, there’s more of a cross-border conspiratorial element here, focused on American politician, Senator Jane Kozar (Beth Chamberlin). She’s very keen for the evidence of dirty Yankee deeds not to come to light, and Palermo is the tip of the spear in those efforts. However, his repeated failure to deliver on Kozar’s needs, eventually leads to a shift in loyalties, after she tries to get rid of him. Similarly, after President Vargas has got his hands on what he needs, his ex-wife becomes surplus to requirements, and he blows up the mine in which she and her team find the data. He then brokers a deal with Kozar, while Palermo joins with Mendoza for the final face-off, at an dinner in Mexico, where Kozar has gone to cement the alliance.

This all unfolds over the course of sixty episodes, each running about 40 minutes, from “Previously…” to “On the next episode…” You’ll understand this gives plenty of room for plot threads, and the above barely even scratches the surface. There’s family disagreements, pregnancies that might or might be unwanted, betrayals, life both high- and low-, and much more. It does feel as if the focus here was considerably more split than previously. It seems like Epifanio’s palace intrigues, including his current wife and her desire to escape with their son, occupy more time than Teresa’s own problems. Add on the stuff north of the Rio Grande, and I can’t help wishing they remembered about the title of the show a bit more.

That said, it’s certainly never dull, with every episode adding another twist, bringing another threat into play, or revealing another layer to one or more of the characters. The writers do a very good job of keeping all the different strands in play, and it never becomes difficult to understand. Everyone is given clear, strong motivations for what they do, and the veteran characters especially do well in terms of carrying the drama forward. I was somewhat less impressed with the younger players, such as Sofia, who comes over as a bit of a whiny teenager. Maybe she’ll grow on me, though I wouldn’t count on it. My tolerance for whiny teenagers isn’t what it was…

At this point, there has been no word of a fourth season. del Castillo herself said in February, “Yo creo que la tercera es la última,” which translates as, “I think that the third is the last.” After 12 years and 183 episodes, it has certainly been a journey, and I can’t blame her for wanting to move on. If this is the end – and the finale doesn’t resolve everything – I think it’s a good point to draw a line under the show. One major character receives everything they deserve at the hands of Teresa Mendoza (below), and it’s safe to say that it’ll be a long time before Senator Kozar decides to set foot across the border again. My mornings won’t be the same without La Reina, and I guess I’ll have to find other ways to practice my Spanish!

Showrunner: Marcos Santana
Star: Kate del Castillo, Antonio Gil, Humberto Zurita, Isabella Sierra

Little Hero

  By

★★½
“The calamari fights back…”

Although almost a decade earlier than Lin Hsiao Lan’s slew of fantasy kung-fu flicks, this shares a lot of the same elements – not least an approach to narrative coherence best described as “informal.” This starts at the beginning, where we don’t even get introduced to the participants, before the martial arts breaks out. As we learn a little later, it turns out this pits Chu-Kwok Su-Lan (Shang-Kuan) against three members of the Devil’s Gang, in defense of her two, largely useless sidekicks. This is just the first of numerous encounters between our hero – yes, it’s another unconvincing male impersonator out of Taiwan – against various members of the group, and eventually their leaders, Gold Mask (Lo) and Silver Mask (Wang).

There is a loose justification for all of these flying fisticuffs: literally flying, in the case of the Mask brothers. For they zoom about on their strap-on wings, accompanied by VTOL airplane sounds, more befitting a busy day on an aircraft carrier. Anyway, the excuse is the pursuit of a legendary artifact called the Phoenix Sword, which was being transported to Master Chen in Dragon City. Its couriers are ambushed, yet manage to hand off the case containing the weapon to a random orphan, conveniently bathing nearby.  The Devil’s Gang then kidnap Chen’s daughter, demanding another legendary item, the Dragon Sword in exchange for her safe return. Chen is having none of it, so recruits a bunch of his former students, including Su-Lan, to go after the kidnappers and rescue his daughter.

There is some other stuff. However, a) the above is all you need to know, and b) I’m not clear enough on much more, to be willing to commit fully to putting it on the Internet. In any case, this is definitely one of those films where, if you don’t like this fight sequence, just wait – because there will be another along in a few minutes. I suspect my rating might well be higher if there was a decent presentation of this film available. It only appears to be available in a severely cropped version, which half the time is zoomed in far too close to appreciate what’s going on, and in an English dub that leaves no molecule intact of the performances beneath it.

All that’s left after this scorched earth approach to the visual and audio elements, is to appreciate the berserk imagination on view. This reaches its peak at the end, where Su-Lan faced off on the beach against a pair of giant octopi. Their preferred method of attack is to squirt mini-octopi at him. While I can certainly appreciate the surprise value inherent in such an approach, it doesn’t seem very sustainable. As a finale, we then get Su-Lan against Gold Mask – who is no longer masked – on what looks like a children’s adventure playground. Again: none of this makes sense in the context of the story, something I felt tended to be aggravating rather than enjoyable. If you’re of a more relaxed attitude, you may well get more out of this than I did.

Dir: Hung-Min Chen
Star: Polly Shang-Kuan, Barry Chan, Lieh Lo, Hsieh Wang

Who Is Erin Carter?

  By

★★★★
“Discipline isn’t an issue in Ms. Carter’s class.”

Okay, I will admit that this strained credibility on a number of occasions, to the point that buttons were popping off its shirt. But I don’t think the makers were exactly going for gritty realism, and the bottom line is: I enjoyed this a lot. Certainly, more so than Special Ops: Lioness, another limited series which we were watching concurrently. To at least partially address the question posed by the title, Eric Carter (Ahmad) is a supply teacher working in a Spanish school. She lives with her partner, Jordi (Teale), and their somewhat disabled daughter, Harper (Watson). But at the supermarket, Erin foils a robbery in order to save Harper, and it becomes very clear that her skills are not limited to the arena of education.

Turns out, Erin has a past, and the publicity resulting from her impromptu heroism brings it to visit. She finds herself embroiled in murder, organized crime and police corruption, as well as more normal familial drama, such as neighbourhood jealousy and whiny pre-teen nonsense. One of the seven 45-minute episodes is entirely in flashback (unexpected Jamie Bamber!), explaining the reason she changed her identity and moved to Spain, as well as why those from her history are keen to catch up with her. Even the spectacularly unobservant Jordi begins to realize that his other half is not quite as claimed. Her original explanation of a relapse into alcoholism doesn’t exactly explain all the sudden absences, injuries and unusual behaviour Erin is now exhibiting, as she tries to manage the escalating situation.

As you can see, you will need to suspend your disbelief, not least in the reveal of the big bad, who turns out to be a remarkably coincidental person, already in Erin’s life. But there’s a lot to enjoy here, such as the sardonic comparison between “Mommy life” and Erin’s violent and deceptive past. She can go from swapping bitchy comments with a school colleague, to punching throats, in what feels like the blink of an eye. I was also impressed with the combat scenes, which tend to have Erin using anything she can find around her, and possess an impact considerably greater than most TV series. Ahmad, who was in Les Filles du Soleil, possesses a terse fighting style that’s effective.

I admit to largely hating Harper, who is almost a cliche of the bratty, narcissistic and somewhat precocious little girl – admittedly, that may be the point. There are hints she has violent tendencies of her own, albeit this angle is never developed in the first series. The show escalates nicely, until a final episode where Erin and an unexpected ally end up going on the offensive, and things are wrapped up in a reasonable manner. The show did well, topping Netflix’s English-language chart in its week of release, and is still #3 at the time of writing. I’d certainly like to see another series, with this unexpectedly having become my favourite new show of 2023 to date. Though I’m still not sure of the answer to the title’s question.

Creator: Jack Lothian
Star: Evin Ahmad, Sean Teale, Douglas Henshall, Indica Watson

The Wrath of Becky

  By

★★½
“Did we learn nothing from John Wick?”

Don’t mess with someone else’s dog. This is a good rule of thumb in most cases, but especially so when the owner is an unhinged teenage psychopath, with the both the talent and desire to inflict carnage in retribution. The last time we saw Becky (Wilson), she had disposed of a gang of neo-Nazis who had invaded her house in search of a key, and killed her father in the process. Now, a couple of years later, she is a waitress in a diner, and renting a room from Elena (Burse). Three more individuals with, um, alternative political opinions enter the diner. This is not going to end well.

In response to their rude behaviour, she pours coffee on the crotch of their leader. The response leaves Elena dead and, worse, they kidnap Becky’s dog. She tracks them to the home of their group’s leader, Darryl (Scott). You know that messy mayhem is going to follow, and will not be disappointed. The film does address the gloomy murkiness which plagued the first one, allowing its gory murders to unfold in the full light of the sun. However, in most ways it falls short of its predecessor: the sequel has seen a new writer-director pair come on board, and the results very much have an air of “second verse, same as the first – just not as good” air to them.

The differences are on both sides. Becky is harder to empathize with, being little more than a teenage psychopath now. Sure, she had issues in the original movie. Yet the trauma she went through meant her reactions were understandable. Here, from the outset she seems a bit of a dick, callously treating foster parents for her own benefit. On the villainous side, it’s a mixed bag. The film repeats the trick from the first film of putting an unexpected actor in the role of the lead villain (there Kevin James) and Scott does well. But the frequent idiocy of his underlings is too convenient. They’re not a credible threat, and Darryl’s failure to secure Becky at a key moment undoes much of the good work that has gone before.

However, don’t take the above criticism as an indication there’s no fun to be had here. You just need to be aware this is a considerably more mean-spirited affair, and it’s probably only the kills that will stick around in your mind. I did laugh out loud more than once, for example when one of the gang reveals his son’s name to Becky, sealing his own fate [though again: why not just lie, dude? It isn’t hard…] The ending sees the CIA recruit Becky, because they are now apparently responsible for domestic counter-terrorism. Wait, what? Oh, well. If they’re going the Nikita route for further sequels, I suspect the authorities have bitten off more than they can chew. Maybe next time Becky can go after Antifa.

Dir: Matt Angel, Suzanne Coote
Star: Lulu Wilson, Seann William Scott, Denise Burse, Jill Larson

The Watcher, by Matthew Hattersley

  By

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

Somebody really liked Killing Eve… If you’re going to write a story about an amoral female assassin, working for a shadowy group, who becomes involved with a woman she’s supposed to kill, then you are basically inviting such comparisons. These are unlikely to be favourable to your work. I’m just sayin’. This started off okay: however, a single sentence at the 46% mark was basically a large neon sign as to how this was going to end, and proved exactly the case, as this collapsed in a slew of implausibility. Now, I’m not a trained assassin, so can’t comment on those elements. However, I do work in IT, and it’s clear the author does not. For instance, if someone was to leave our company on bad terms, their access would be immediately removed, as a top priority, so they couldn’t… oh, waltz in thereafter and download all our highly sensitive data. Sheesh.

Anyway, back on the amoral female assassin front, we have “Acid Vanilla”, the operational name of a killer working for private company Annihilation Pest Control. They’ve been contracted to tidy up after an executive of tech company Cerberix was seen  strangling a hooker. The employee who witnessed it, Spook Horowitz, and footage of the murder, both have to be disposed of. However, Acid is already teetering on the edge of burnout, and when her target informs her about the realities of the case, the hitwoman decides she is on the wrong side. She and Spook set out to take down Cerberix. This means her boss at APC will send a steady stream of other employees in their direction, in an effort to cover up the widening mess this contract is causing. It needs to be cleared up before Cerberix’s upcoming and much-ballyhoed announcement of their new venture, due to be live streamed across the globe in a few days.

Yeah, if you can’t tell the eventual direction, I don’t know what to say, and Horowitz has to be the least convincing depiction of a “hacker” I’ve ever read. Neither her, nor the relationship with Acid, are credible, and the further the book goes on, the more these elements take centre-stage. It’s a shame, since Vanilla herself is a decent character: the child of trauma, inevitably, yet not a pure psychopath either, and with significant mommy issues, let’s just say. Particularly as a first book, Hattersley should have stuck to establishing her, rather than bringing in the Jiminy Cricket-like character of Horowitz, who can also get whatever information is required by the plot with a couple of mouse-clicks. There’s no shortage of action, to be sure, although it felt almost like a running joke the way Acid inevitably took out the bad guys with head-shots (so many skulls exploding like ripe fruit…), while they only ever aimed at her and Spook’s bodies. Definitely one of the more baffling 4.25-star ratings on Goodreads.

Author: Matthew Hattersley
Publisher: Boom Boom Press, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 7 in the Acid Vanilla series.

Kung Fu Wonder Child

  By

★★
“So. Many. Questions…”

You may have noticed that I’ve been on a bit of a spree with these Taiwanese fantasy-fu flicks of late. However, I think I’m feeling a bit sated with them at this point, and the law of diminishing returns seems to be setting in. There are only so many unconvincing male impersonators, bad effects (both optical and practical) and almost illegible and/or illiterate subtitles a man can take, and I think I’ve reached my capacity in almost of these categories. Fortunately, my queue of such things seems to be nearing an end, with just a couple more to go. Still, after this delirious experience, I feel in need of a week or two’s break from the madness.

The villain here is the usual long-haired sorcerer (Li), who is collecting souls for the usual, megalomaniac purposes, and keeping them in large, ceramic jars in his yard. As you do. Among his collection are the father and sibling of Chiu Hsu (a rather under-used Oshima, albeit very early in her career), and she eventually links up with helpful unconvincing male impersonator, Hsiu Chuen (Lin, of course) and not one, but two, annoying comic sidekicks, Mi Fu and Tudor. Hsiu is a servant at a martial arts school, where her grandfather (Long) is the cook. Except Hsiu wants to learn the skills taught at the school, and Gramps is not just the mild-mannered chef he initially appears to be. Hilarity ensues. Well, if your idea of hilarity is a dog peeing on someone’s face, at least.

This is the kind of thing where it feels like the makers threw every idea they came up with onto the screen, regardless of a) relevance and b) whether or not it could be executed with any degree of competence. For example, the first would include the extended opening prologue about a Chinese hopping vampire, and his two kids. It serves no purpose and seems to have strayed in from a completely different movie. As for the second… well, outside of the willingness of Taiwanese stunt-people to fling themselves around and into things for our enjoyment, this rarely gets to passable, even allowing for it approaching forty years in age. I did laugh that one of the monsters Hsiu ends up fighting, is obviously a flying facehugger from Alien.

That said, there is a surprisingly decent stab at mixing animation with live-action, when the villain transforms into an animated dragon for the final battle. If it’s not exactly Who Framed Roger Rabbit, it’s not notably worse than the Disney efforts in this area. In general though, the execution trails far behind the imagination, and as a result, does the latter something of a disservice. The slabs of childish humor are no more of a help. In the film’s defense, the target audience is likely also childish, or at least, child-ish. On that basis perhaps some slack needs to be cut? Yet I couldn’t help thinking, “It was acceptable in the 80s, it was acceptable at the time…”

Dir: Tso Nam Lee
Star: Hsiao-Lao Lin, Yukari Oshima, Jack Long, Hai-Hsing Li