Author: Jim McLennan

Senora Acero: Season three

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★★
“Third time’s the harm”

Halfway through the final installment, Chris came in. She paused, watching for a moment, then said, “They spend far too much time talking, and not enough time killing.” Just a shame she waited 93 episodes to express so succinctly one of the main problems with the series. For, even if the final arc had its share of bloodshed, if you average it out per show, it’s about the level of a mid-strength nosebleed. It certainly put the novela into narconovela. Though the problems began at the start – or, rather, the end of the second series where heroine Sara Aguilar was apparently gunned down. This being a show where escape from death was common, I spent the first 20 episodes waiting for her to return. Spoiler: she doesn’t.

Instead, attention turns to Vicenta “La Coyote” Rigores (Miranda), who turns out to be part of the Acero family. This brings her into conflict with all the Acero enemies, including Indio (Zárate), and Governor of Chihuahua, Chucho Casares (Goyri), who also runs an arms trafficking group. But she has allies on her side, including ICE agent Daniel Phillips (Franco), and some familiar faces from the first two seasons. That’s a very high overview. As you can imagine, with about 62 hours of episodes in this season to fill, there are a lot of threads being weaved (So. Many, Pregnancies) and chit-chat necessary to explain them all, as loyalties shift with the breeze.

Part of the problem is, how little of it has any impact. Another part is, as a legal immigrant to America, I am fiercely resistant to a heroine who smuggles people across the border – and that was even before the not-so veiled references to American politics. The two main ICE characters, Phillips and his boss Indio Cardena, are both depicted as corrupt – even if, in the former’s case, it’s a “good” kind of corruption, becoming sympathetic to migrants and their plight. Though on the evidence of this show, based on who’s crossing the border illegally, Trump may have had a point when he said Mexico weren’t sending their best… Say what you like about Sara Aguilar, she at least largely operated in her own country.

Another problem. Writing about the second series, I described supporting character Tuti as “our most “love to hate” character. Not just in the show, or narconovelas generally, but perhaps the history of our TV viewing.” Guess who gets an expanded role in season three? Nails on glass, people. There are some new characters I liked – hell, Cardena, until she went rogue – but it wasn’t enough. I was amused by how narconovela weddings go wrong with about the inevitability of pro wrestling weddings. Whether raided by ICE or the bride getting gunned down in her dress, while her groom is involved in a fist-fight, they never take place as intended.

With about 20 episodes to go, I came to the conclusion this would be the last season I would watch. While the action component did ramp up somewhat down the stretch, it wasn’t enough to make me second-guess my decision. With a further two seasons, totalling 146 more episodes, I was hard-pushed to see the show coming back, and so am content to draw a line under the Acero dynasty after this series.

Creator: Roberto Stopello
Star: Carolina Miranda, Luis Ernesto Franco, Jorge Zárate, Sergio Goyri

Daughter of Don Q

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★★★
“No relation to Maggie, presumably.”

Lorna Gray, the lead here, had been the villainess in Perils of Nyoka, but graduates to the role of protagonist. This is notable for its contemporary, urban setting, without any of the “jungle girl” trappings of previous Republic serials. Heroine Dolores Quantero  (Gray, although now billed as Adrian Booth) is a thoroughly modern woman, who happens to be proficient at jiu-jitsu, and also no mean hand with a longbow. The former is of rather more importance than the latter, which only really crops up during one episode. Perhaps this feistiness is genetic, since Dolores is a descendant of Don Quantero, a heroic historical figure [the title of this may be a nod to 1925 silent film, Don Q, Son of Zorro, starring Douglas Fairbanks].

Another member of the family, Carlos Manning (Mason) becomes aware of a land grant given to their ancestor by the Spanish crown, which will allow him to claim ownership of large tracts of property. However, the rights would be divided among all the Don’s descendants, so Carlos decides to start bumping off other family members. The process begins with the attempted theft of a heirloom from Dolores’s house which details the Quintero genealogy. This alerts her to the plan, and along with journalist Cliff Roberts (Alyn), she looks to protect her relatives and get to the bottom of Carlos’s scheme, dodging retaliatory efforts to lop her off the family tree.

While I liked the modern scenario, it’s a bit of a mixed bag, both in terms of story and in Dolores’s character. Even by the low standards of serial villainy, Carlos’s plans seem both ridiculous and ill-conceived. I was particularly unimpressed by the attempt to have Dolores shot with a harpoon gun while dangling in a net, apparently because it would look like a “vendetta killing.” Yeah, between two gangs of whales. The serial even seems to have a bottle episode consisting largely of footage taken from previous parts, with the heroine and hero describing their previous brushes with death. Considering there are only 12 chapters to begin with, this recycling of previous peril is disappointing, as is the apparent inclusion of action footage from earlier serials, such as The Masked Marvel.

However, some of the more imaginative elements do work, such as Dolores going undercover as the target in a knife-throwing act, and some of the supporting characters are surprisingly memorable. That the heroine knows and uses martial arts may also be close to a first for Hollywood, even if it’s a few basic throws at most. Despite this, she does still have a tendency to fall unconscious too easily, and sit back when things kick off – though we’ll give her the benefit of the doubt for the fight where she takes a chair to the face! While overall entertaining, the finale is particularly disappointing in terms of her passivity, with Cliff speeding to her rescue, as the crate she’s tied up in, is about to be thrown off a high bridge. I’d rather she had rescued him, or at least herself. I guess jiu-jitsu and archery was as far as Republic were willing to go, in the way of female empowerment.

Dir: Spencer Gordon Bennet and Fred C. Brannon
Star: Lorna Gray (as Adrian Booth), Kirk Alyn, LeRoy Mason, Roy Barcroft

Girl Vs. by Xela Culletto

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

While a quick read, at 205 pages, after slogging through a couple of what can only be described as “chonkers”, I really didn’t mind. It’s briskly-paced, hits the ground running and largely doesn’t stop thereafter. I have some concerns about where things might go in subsequent volumes, so will probably stop here, just to be safe. However, I enjoyed what I read well enough.

It opens with an alien invasion having taken place, and humanity not getting the best of the subsequent war. The Vela, as the creatures are called, have taken over most cities with brutal force, scattering the surviving population to remote areas. One of these is Rhyan, whom we first meet living in a cave, as part of a small group. She lost the rest of her family to the Vela, and hates them with a passion. Rhyan puts that into effect with her blades, getting rid of any aliens that stray too close to her hide-out. However, circumstance forces her on the road, and she ends up at Springfield, a human stronghold with plans to take the fight to the Vela.

It was only while writing this, that I realized I didn’t actually know much about what the aliens looked like. I know they have claws. But beyond that? Here’s about the only meaningful descriptive passage: “It looked the same as them all—four long legs, bent into a ‘z’, supported the plump abdomen. Rising above that was a middle section from which taut appendages shot forth long serrated claws. The swiveling head, with its unblinking black eyes, was perched on top.” It has to be said, they also die very easily – I lost count of how many a teenage girl took out of the course of the book, with even a dozen being dispatched in one fight – to the point you wonder how they managed to defeat Earth’s armies.

Despite the heroine’s single-minded devotion to the cause, there are suggestions the aliens’ motives may be not as genocidal as they seem, with a theory they were looking to save the Earth from humanity by “thinning the herd.” I did notice the author’s page on Amazon says, “Aliens have always held her fascination, and she hopes to meet one someday,” which makes me wonder if these ones could indeed turn out to be benevolent-ish. To be honest, that’d kinda suck. I much prefer my alien invasions without moral ambiguity.

This is better when it’s not hinting at such things, with a laudable body count on the human side too, and a heroine who is easy to root for, even when some of her acts are morally dubious. There’s hardly a dull moment to be found, as we head to a climax where Rhyan and her colleagues are the only thing stopping a call for alien reinforcements going out. Bit of a helicopter ex machina there, yet I can’t complain about the heroine finally catching a break, after all she has been through to that point.

Author: Xela Culletto
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 2 in the Sinister Skies series.

Arisaka

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★★★★
“The wilderness strikes back.”

The heroine here, Mariano (Salvador), has to count as the baddest bitch I’ve seen in quite a long time. In terms of being a sheer, unstoppable force, she’s right up there with Jen from Revenge. There’s an absolute moral compass at play here, which combines a stoic refusal to harm the innocent, with utter ruthlessness when it comes to punishing the guilty. And she is judge, jury and especially executioner, when it comes to determining who’s who. Of particular note, most action heroines tend to kill only when directly threatened. Here however, once Mariano has decided you’re on the wrong side, death can come for you at any moment, without the need for any further provocation.

She is a Filipino police officer, part of a convoy taking the vice-mayor of a town to testify against a drug cartel. In particular, he’s going to name names of those in authority who are working with the cartel. Naturally, this can’t be allowed to happen, and it’s no surprise when the convoy is ambushed. Mariano is the sole survivor, and takes possession of the official’s cellphone, which contains the incriminating evidence. It’s not long before Sonny (Confiado), the cartel leader shows up, demonstrating a ruthless approach to the situation, and none too happy to discover he’s one short in the corpse department. He and his lackeys, including one of Mariano’s colleagues (Acuña), enter the jungle in pursuit of the wounded fugitive. She gets help from a young indigenous girl (Romualdo) and her family, but doing so exposes them to Sonny’s brutal wrath.

That’s when the gloves come off, thanks in part to Mariano being led to a stash of World War 2 weapons, left behind when local soldiers were trying to escape the Japanese. I’ll admit to raising an eyebrow at this. Would such weapons really be in perfect working order, after 75 years in a tropical jungle? Hey, I’m no expert. [Despite running this site, I haven’t even touched a gun since moving to Arizona in 2000!] With that as a given though, what follows is some remarkably splattery head-shots, as Mariano works her way through Sonny’s henchmen, and up to the inevitable confrontation with the man himself.

Interspersed in this are flashbacks to her back in the big city, being ordered to shoot someone entirely on the say-so of her boss, to prove her loyalty to her colleagues. That is about the extent of insight into Mariano’s character the film offers, but it’s enough to work, since actions here definitely speak louder than words. Indeed, the audience is likely better off than the heroine, getting subtitles for the native dialogue, a language which Mariano doesn’t speak. The intent is typically clear enough, even if a few scenes did leave me a little uncertain as to their purpose. Overall though, the result is an engrossing and always interesting watch, which doesn’t hold back, and takes no prisoners. Much like its central character.

Dir: Mikhail Red
Star: Maja Salvador, Shella Mae Romualdo, Mon Confiado, Arthur Acuña

The Tiger Woman

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★★½
“A leopard which changes its spots.”

Am I the only person irrationally annoyed by the title of this 12-episode serial? It takes place in South America, where the only tigers are in captivity. And look at the picture of the heroine. LOOK AT IT. In what universe is that a tiger? I mean, the ears are a nice touch, but it’s very obviously not tiger stripes. Though it has been pointed that in its location, the jaguar is known as el tigre. Which might make sense if there was any other jot of Hispanic culture to be found here. [GWG readers: “Get on with it!”] Oh, alright… if you insist.  

As mentioned, we’re in South America, where two competing oil companies are seeking to establish their territory. The Inter Ocean Oil Company are the current occupants, and have been working in association with the indigenous population, under their white queen (Stirling), known as the Tiger Woman. But if they don’t strike oil soon, their franchise will expire. A predatory, far less friendly (but unnamed) company, is standing by, to make sure that doesn’t happen, allowing them to take over. But Inter Ocean has sent top troubleshooter, Allen Saunders (Rock Lane), to work with the Tiger Queen and block their enemy’s attempts. Those get more desperate as the deadline approaches and Inter Ocean appear to be succeeding. Complicating matters is the Tiger Queen’s original identity as missing heiress, Rita Arnold, something her enemies want to use to their advantage.

The heroine is something of a step forward from Jungle Girl, with Rita/Ms. Tiger at least making an occasional effort to get involved in the fisticuffs (copious, to the point half the oil company’s profits must have gone on replacement furniture). However, it’s rare for this to last more than a few seconds, and it seems she’s as fragile as cut crystal. Run into a wall? Knocked out. Trip on the carpet? Knocked out. Looked at askance by a bad guy? Probably knocked out. I swear, there are times where it feels like she spends half her screen time unconscious.However, as in Jungle Girl, there are odd moments which rise above, though I’m not sure the aeroplane spin would be a move familiar to white goddesses from the sky.

She does have a regal presence (perhaps due to Sterling’s background as a model, before she turned to acting), even if her throne looks a bit like it was built out of banana boxes. Ms. Tiger is also reasonably brave, always willing to put herself in danger when necessary for her tribe – or, probably more relevantly, necessary for cliff-hanger purposes.  I was less impressed with the plotting, especially the shenanigans of the villains, which seem almost random, rather than well-conceived to their particular aims. For instance, they’re supposed to kill Rita, then get someone else to impersonate her and claim the inheritance. If that’s the best plan you can come up with… you need to bring in some kind of outside consultant. Again, it feels as if everything they do is for cliff-hanger purposes, not as a means to an end. It gets kinda repetitive after a while.

Still, this was a big hit, and led to Republic fast-tracking another vehicle for Sterling. Only a few months after this was released, production started on Zorro’s Black Whip, in which she would get to be more of a proper lead.

Dir: Spencer Bennet and Wallace Grissell
Star: Linda Stirling, Allan Lane, Duncan Renaldo, George J. Lewis
Subsequently re-released in 1951 as Perils of the Darkest Jungle, and in a cut-down TV version in 1966 as Jungle Gold.

Shut In

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★★
“Woman who talks through doors”

After Run Hide Fight, this is another film produced by political outlet The Daily Wire. This inevitably leads to reviews which are as much concerned with the leanings of the production company, which is annoying, albeit understandable. If the Huffington Post got into the movie business, I imagine the same thing would happen. But it also ignores the fact that you would have to look hard here, to find much indication of a political agenda. A considerably bigger issue is that it’s quite dull, with a heroine who spends much of the time living up to her apparent Native American name given above. Certainly, I hoped for more from this synopsis: “When a young mother is barricaded inside a pantry by her violent ex-boyfriend, she must use ingenuity to protect her two small children from escalating danger while finding an escape.”

The mom in question is Jessica (Qualley, the daughter of Andie McDowell), a recovering drug addict who is preparing to get out of town, and start a new life with adorable little moppet, Lainey (VanDette), and her toddler, Mason. Unfortunately, her plans are derailed by a troublesome door, and the arrival of her skeevy ex-boyfriend and father of Lainey, Rob (Horowitz), who is still very much under the control of his meth habit. Dodgier still is his skeevier pal, Sammy (Gallo, making his return to features after close to a decade), who has a very poor reputation, to put it mildly. An argument with Rob leads to Jessica being nailed inside the pantry, with her two children outside, Rob storming off promising to return when she has learned her lesson. Worse follows, with Sammy sleazing his way back. As a storm erupts, he poses an unspeakable threat to Lainey, who now also has to take care of Mason, under Jessica’s increasingly fraught instruction.

Especially in the first half, this means a lot of Jessica shouting through a door, and Lainey whining “I am hungry/am scared/need the toilet” in repetitive order. It gets old very quickly. Even though Gallo certainly makes for a slimy villain, the reality is that the film has locked itself in a confined space, along with its lead character. Neither of them are going anywhere for about the first hour. Caruso attempts to ramp up the tension by having everything threatening happen out of sight of both his heroine and the audience, but I never felt particularly concerned. This is a case where it felt like we needed a more direct approach to the threat. There’s also a weird religious subtext, which is neither prominent enough to be significant or objectionable. So I was left wondering what the point of it was.

Things do pick up, at least somewhat, for the final reel, where things are allowed out of the closet. Had the script worked on that basis from the start, this might have had a chance. Instead, it’s the very definition of “too little, too late.”

Dir: D.J. Caruso
Star: Rainey Qualley, Jake Horowitz, Luciana VanDette, Vincent Gallo

Huge Shark

  By

★★★
“Girls with flare-guns”

Over in my non-GWG life, I’ve been on a bit of a kick of Chinese animal attack movies lately. These are kinda their version of SyFy original movies, though usually do have slightly better production values. I mean, how can you resist titles like The Bloodthirsty Bees or Big Octopus? Most are disposable fun, but I was surprised to find this one qualified for inclusion here. Two reviews out of one viewing? I’m fine with this. Especially, as initially it didn’t look particularly relevant, or even interesting. Four people on a boat trip, all of them ending up (largely through a series of poor choices) in the water. There’s the title creature in the area, so they opt to head for a nearby small boat, left abandoned because its occupants became a shark appetizer.

I didn’t like this very much at the start, with 3/4 of the characters being far more irritating than anything else. I was expecting the only man, Zhou Tianming (Huang), to be the focus. But, in a pleasant surprise, the film does not hang around, and disposed of him quickly. Indeed, barely by half way (although at only 68 minutes, this is never going to outstay its welcome), we are down to just one person left. The good news is, it’s the only non-irritating human, Shen Xin (Zhao). She’s a doctor and also comfortable in the water, being a good surfer and swimmer. These skills will be helpful, and the rest of the film is a marked improvement.

It is obviously inspired by things like The Shallows, particularly in the way Xin ends up stuck on a small, rocky outcrop. But I particularly liked the way the director did not feel the need to jazz things up thereafter, with flashbacks or the heroine bonding with a passing seagull. There’s nobody for Xin to speak to, so the rest of the film has almost no dialogue, and the silence adds to the tension. That’s especially the case during the night scenes, which are lit just well enough to make it seem that shadows are lurking everywhere around the rock, without requiring a pair of night vision goggles. 

It’s not hard to figure out where it’s going, especially after she gets her hands on a can of petrol and a flare gun. Though the kicker at the end – there’s usually a final moment in these films, where you think the creature is dead, then see its eggs or whatever – was definitely an unexpected treat. Overall, there’s half a good movie here, with Zhao making an effective and appealing heroine, once she gets the chance to be (translation: once everybody else in the film gets eaten). I understand the need to demonstrate the threat the shark poses. But I would really not have minded in the slightest, if they’d cut out all the soap-opera stuff about Tianming dumping his girlfriend, in favour of showing more from Xin’s battle for survival.

Dir: Huang Zhaosheng
Star: Zhao Yihuan, Huang Tao, Hong Shuang, Luan Mingyuan

Perils of Nyoka

  By

★★★½
“Serial thriller.”

After the success of Jungle Girl, Republic looked to repeat the process the following year. However, despite bringing back the heroine, they were able to avoid paying Edgar Rice Burroughs again, because Nyoka was not a character who appeared in the original novel. It may also be why she has a different surname here, and her father is missing, rather than killed. Republic used a different actress too: Kay Aldridge replaced Frances Gifford, who was unavailable. Aldridge had recently seen her contract with 20th Century Fox expire, though had some qualms: “I did it with the attitude we had in that day that to make a B-western or a serial was a comedown for a featured player at Fox. It was a comedown in one way, but it was a comeup in another way because I was the lead. They paid me about $650 a week, which was pretty good money at the time.” Still, it proved her most popular role, though she retired from acting just four years later, to get married.

With a title clearly nodding to 1914’s The Perils of Pauline, this operates at a particularly breathless rush, even by serial standards, over its 15 episodes. The main plot has Nyoka Gordon in search of the Tablets of Hippocrates, both because they offer a cure for cancer, but in order to help find her father, who vanished mysteriously in the African wilderness years previously. Well, I say “African”. There’s really no effort at all made to make Southern California look like anything other than Southern California. Anyway, she’s joined in her quest by Dr. Larry Grayson (Moore, best known as TV’s Lone Ranger) and other scientists, but opposed by the evil Vultura (Gray) and her native minions, who wants the tablets for herself. Actually, from a modern perspective, Vultura probably has more of a claim to the artifacts than the tomb-raiding Westerners, Nyoka’s protestations about them belonging to “humanity” notwithstanding.

This was the first serial I had watched since Zorro’s Black Whip, and I really appreciated the relentless pace with which things moved forward. There’s literally never a dull moment, despite the usual overlap: opening of each episode recaps the previous cliffhanger, then details how (usually) Nyoka gets out of the peril in question. These escapes were a bit varying in quality: some of them were clever, others were more or less cheats, e.g. falling from a great height into a pool of water that wasn’t there previously.

But the show never gives pause to consider such things, moving on to the next treachery, chase or fight sequence. Of particular note is the antagonist also being a woman, and Vultura is every bit as smart, driven and hands-on as Nyoka. There’s potentially an alternative version of this where she is the heroine. It’s definitely an improvement on the “ignorant savages” portrayed in Jungle Girl. Indeed, Nyoka v2.0 is also a clear upgrade on the original, being much more self-reliant, certainly the equal of the men.

Admittedly, the pace is maintained at the expense of just about everything else. When you have perhaps 15 minutes in which to cram a recap, escape, move the plot forward and then set up the next cliffhanger… there’s never going to be much chance to get in a lot of character development. Everybody here is more or less what they appear in episode one, and there’s hardly anything in the way of an arc for anyone across the four hours. Hard to complain though, since it is for understandable reasons. What matters here is not any backstory, it’s a simple matter of hooking the audience into coming back the following Saturday for the next episode. Having shotgunned as many as five episodes back-to-back, I can’t argue with its success on that front.

I also feel I should mention the animals. Fang, Nyoka’s dog, is perhaps the smartest canine I’ve ever seen on a show: to be honest, he’s more intelligent than some of the human characters, and does a remarkable amount, especially considering his lack of opposable thumbs. There’s also a little monkey, belonging to one of her sidekicks, who chips in, while Vultura keeps a pet gorilla. That, however, is a guy in a not particularly convincing suit. Though considering it gets into fisticuffs with Dr. Grayson, I can understand why they didn’t want to use a real primate for that! Their cute presence do make me wonder if this was aimed as much as kids as adults. Though given the amount of violence – there are corpses everywhere, albeit bloodless ones – it feels a little inappropriate for children by modern standards.

The show proved popular enough to be re-released a decade later, under the rather confusing title, Nyoka and the Tigermen. A few years further down the road, it was converted into a 100-minute TV movie, Nyoka and the Lost Secrets of Hippocrates. Normally, hacking out such a large amount of content would render any cinematic product incoherent. But I can see how it would be possible here, though I dread to think how adrenaline-crazed that end product might be!

Dir: Bill Witney
Star: Kay Aldridge, Clayton Moore, Lorna Gray, Charles Middleton

Shadow Eclipse: Voyage, by E.M. Gale

  By

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

After a brisk and entertaining start, this gets increasingly bogged-down in its own universe as it goes on. And, boy, does it go on. At a thousand pages in the print version, this became a severe slog, and ends in a unsatisfactory way. A second novel seems promised, but this came out in 2019, and has yet to be forthcoming. Maybe the writer got bored of the whole thing too?

As mentioned, it opens promisingly. Florentina Clarke (who hates her first name so much, she insists everyone just calls her Clarke) is having a really bad day. First, she has been turned into a vampire. Then, she and her grad student friends are thrown through time and space when an experiment misfires. They end up two hundred years in the future, on a far-off planet, and have to learn how to come to terms with a whole new way of life. Clarke is best-suited, and ends up getting them passage on a smuggling ship, where helped by her new vampire skills, she becomes part of the mercenaries who defend the ship. However, it turns out her future self – vampires being immortal – is rather famous and/or notorious, and she finds herself having to cope with that, and the resulting threats to her life.

Which all sounds considerably more exciting than it is. There’s a lot, and I mean a lot of agonizing over whether or not to look herself and her pals up in the history books, to see their fates. It’s a painfully responsible approach to time-travel  which really doesn’t do much for the reader. The same goes for her relentless angst about whether or not to tell her friends about her vampiric status. Do or don’t, then move on. Matters aren’t helped by a clunky structure in which it fells like every conversation becomes a three-way dance with Clarke’s internal thoughts chiming in after every single sentence. A long way before the end of the book, I was mentally screaming “STFU!” at her inner monologue.

The action components also seem to decline over the course of the book. There’s a point where the ship – which may not be quite what it initially appears – seems to be under almost constant attack, keeping Clarke and her merc colleagues very busy. However, this fades away and a vampire duel is about all it feels like the second half has to offer. I did like Gale’s world-building, with different races kinda-somewhat getting along, and some thought has clearly gone both into the vampires and the time-travel aspects. However, it’s not clear what Clarke’s eventual place in the universe is going to be, and her friends are also rendered increasingly irrelevant as the story progresses. It ends with her vampire boyfriend getting the chance for revenge he has been seeking, though this felt almost painfully foreshadowed and doesn’t provide much satisfaction in terms of tidying up the threads. Can’t say I’m too bothered whether or not volume 2 ever appears.

Author: E.M. Gale
Publisher: Lightbulb Works, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of, uh, 1 in the Shadow Eclipse series.

Aileen Wuornos: American Boogeywoman

  By

★★
“Till death do she part.”

Almost twenty years after her execution, Aileen Wuornos remains a cultural icon. A very rare example of a genuine female serial killer, she was killed by lethal injection in 2002, after being convicted of six murders, and confessing to a seventh. The following year, Charlize Theron won an Oscar for her portrayal of Wuornos in Monster, though for me, the film about the killer which is the best, is Nick Broomfield’s, Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer. It certainly deserves to be ranked among my favorite documentaries of all time, along with its post-execution follow-up, Aileen Wuornos: Life and Death of a Serial Killer. Any other version is going to have an uphill struggle in comparison, and this peters out into a trashy, tabloidesque tale, with perilously little connection to reality.

It does have an interesting structure, with a Broomfield stand-in (Sturgeon) interviewing Wuornos, the night before her execution. At this point, the killer is played by Ashley Atwood, and the make-up crew have done an amazing job, along with Atwood’s capturing of her target’s mannerisms. Wuornos then tells the interviewer the story of her short-lived marriage to yacht club president Lewis Fell (Bell), almost five decades her senior. During this, she confesses to several murders, including that of her brother, though the interviewer pulls her up, as her version doesn’t align with the known facts. This “unreliable narrator” element has potential, but is rapidly discarded – a shame, as what the film offers instead is rather pedestrian.

Overall, it’s not much more than a truish-crime take on pot-boilers like the Poison Ivy franchise, in which attractive young gold-diggers embed themselves in families, before revealing their murderous natures. Here, the young Wuornos (List), considerably more attractive than the Death Row version, charms her way into marrying Fell after just a couple of weeks, much to the concern and chagrin of his daughter, Jennifer (Hearst). We’ve already established Wuornos’s violent tendencies, and these escalate until she murders the family lawyer, who threatens to expose what he has uncovered about her past, unless she takes his cash offer and leaves town. It all builds to a late-night confrontation on a boat in a storm, which I’m fairly certain is entirely fictional.

Farrands has carved out a niche for himself in this kind of not-so-true crime movie, his previous subjects having included Ted Bundy, the Manson killings and O.J. Simpson. Maybe they are more than a shallow skim, with stories which are not largely made up, and provide more insight into their subjects. This has little to offer, and doesn’t have the enjoyably salacious elements of Poison Ivy, even when Aileen is consummating her marriage to her husband. If it had told the story of Wuornos’s whole life, especially with more from Atwood, it could have been worthwhile, especially if embracing the uncertainty around her version of events. Instead, the only real positive result was discovering the two Broomfield documentaries are on YouTube. Guess what I’m watching tonight.

Dir: Daniel Farrands
Star: Peyton List, Tobin Bell, Lydia Hearst, Hamish Sturgeon