Author: Jim McLennan

The Archer

  By

★★
“An arrowing experience.”

Lauren Pierce (Noble) is an expert archer, leading her high-school team. However, after she rescues a friend from sexual harassment, she finds herself on the wrong side of justice, and is sent to “Paradise Trails”, an incongruously-named juvenile detention facility, where harsh discipline and indefinitely extended sentences are the order of the day. And wouldn’t you know it, the place is run by a former Olympic archer – Bob Patrice (Sage) and his creepy son, Michael (Terry). It’s not long before Lauren is plotting an unofficial departure, along with new friend Becky (Mason), who knows the truth about what’s going on behind the scenes. When they get evidence proving it during their exit, they become the hunted as Bob and Michael will go to any lengths to stop the truth from getting out.

Opening with a claim about being “inspired by true events,” apparently that means the “kids for cash” scandal from Pennsylvania. While there’s nothing wrong with that as inspiration, it’s probably a mistake for the makers, apparently to want to make a serious statement, while adopting the tropes of the juvenile delinquent and women in prison genres. Brutal wardens; sadistic guards; lesbian subtexts… This all makes it kinda tough to take seriously, whatever statement they’re trying to make. And even that’s kinda muddied, beyond “sending kids to jail for bribes is bad.” Not much to argue with there. Probably more questionable, is the way every man here is an utter bastard. It gets kinda tiresome.

The main problem, however, is simply taking too long to get anywhere. The final 20 minutes or so, have Lauren and Becky trying to get through the wilderness around the facility, with Bob and Michael in pursuit. It’s well-crafted and tense, even if it builds to the inevitable final, bow-powered confrontation between Lauren and Bob, which you can see coming from a long way off. Unfortunately… it’s the final 20 minutes. The first hour are a real slog to get through, particularly the chunk after Lauren’s arrival at Paradise Trails. The script doesn’t have any real idea about where it needs to go or what it wants to do, once the basic concepts are established. As a result, it and the characters simply rotate gently in the wind, as interest evaporates gently.

There’s not even any real logic in the concept. Lauren is supposedly a “straight A’s” student with no previous record. Could have fooled me, going by the hyper-aggressive way she beats up on her pal’s boyfriend. That shows experience in the kicking of ass. Been nice if her ability to defend herself had come into play in the facility a bit more. Except, acknowledging women’s ability to be violent might have gone against the narrative apparently being peddled here. In that light, even the heroine’s use of a bow seems like some kind of liberal cop-out to avoid giving her the far more effective force multiplier of a fire-arm.

Dir: Valerie Weiss
Star: Bailey Noble, Bill Sage, Jeanine Mason, Michael Grant Terry

Ring Girls

  By

★★★
“Punches above its weight.”

This dates back from 2005, before Carano was a household name in the world of mixed martial arts, or a somewhat successful actress. At this point, she was only involved in the sport of muay thai, which as it’s name suggests, is a martial art originating in Thailand. She was one of five girls training in Las Vegas under Toddy – a nickname given because the teacher’s real name of Thohsaphol Sitiwatjana was too unpronounceable to Westerners! The goal of both Toddy and his students was a trip to Thailand to take on the best local practitioners of the sport. This “documentary” covers both their training and the visit itself, climaxing with Carano’s battle against the Thai champion.

Quotes are used advisedly around documentary, because of two elements – neither of which help the film. The first is some kind of beef, I’m guessing entirely fabricated, between Toddy and his brother “Master A”, who is a muay thai trainer back in Thailand. Apparently Toddy brought disrespect to the country by teaching their skills to foreign devils or something. [I think this may have been lifted from the life of Bruce Lee?] It’s a bit silly and pointless, but at least it can easily be ignored. Worse are the fake sounds added to the fights, when punches and kicks land. They’re not even well done, and rather than enhancing things, make the contests seem fake.

This is unfortunate, as there’s otherwise a lot to like here. Even though an unknown at the time, you can see why the film focuses on Carano, who is clearly not just the best fighter, even to my amateur eyes, she is also the most charismatic. Sometimes, this works against it: we barely get to learn the results of the other four fights in Thailand. But it mainly helps, like a low-budget movie which lucks into starring a future Oscar winner [hello, Cyborg 2!]. And despite the post-audio’s relentless attempts to derail things, the fights are quite impressive, with the impact of the blows apparent purely from the visual side, such as the reaction of the punchee.

It all makes for a rather inconsistent blend of fact and fiction, and everyone involved would have been better served by deciding in which camp they stood. If fictional, develop a better narrative, with setbacks (at the risk of spoilering, I’m not sure we see any of the girls ever lose a match). Or go strictly factual, and use the time spent on things like Toddy’s family issues, perhaps to give us deeper background on the fighters. Heck, more info on the Thai women would have been welcome, too, comparing and contrasing life in Bangkok to Las Vegas. However, you should not let these criticisms put you off watching this (I stumbled across it on Amazon Prime), as it’s still an interesting insight into the tough world of women (or the world of tough women?) in martial arts.

Dir: Jennifer Ferrara + Thomas Weber
Star: Gina Carano, Master Toddy, Ardra Hernandez, Lisa King

Daughter of the Wolf

  By

★★
“Bit of a bad dog.”

The cinematic goodwill Carano accumulated as the result of her electric debut in Haywire, is rapidly evaporating. I understand that you can’t expect to work with Steven Soderbergh every time, but the returns have been diminishing with a relentless steadiness since for her. This is certainly the worst one yet, though in her defense, the problem are less to do with her performance. They are more the results of a script which takes several, widely disparate ideas, and doesn’t just fail to connect them into a coherent whole, it also manages to screw them up on an individual level, to the point where most of them become little more than silly garbage.

We join a kidnapping already in progress, as Charlie (Gillis-Adelman), the son of Clair Hamilton (Carano), having been abducted by “Father” (Dreyfuss), a cult-like leader who has long held a grudge against Clair’s dad. Quite why he bothered waiting until after the target was dead to take his vengeance, is one of the many things this film fails to explain adequately. At the supposed handover of cash for Charlie, a fire-fight breaks out, which is right in the wheel-house of Clair, a former soldier. Two of the three kidnappers end up dead, the third, Larsen (Fehr), is not such a bad guy, and ends up saving her life after she falls through the ice. Still, she makes him take her to Father, and matters are complicated by the presence of a pack of wolves, who appear to have their own agenda.

About the only thing which saves this are the amazing Canadian landscapes, lushly photographed by Mark Dobrescu. There’s one location in particular, an ice waterfall, which is jaw-droppingly beautiful to an almost implausible degree, forming the backdrop to one of the movie’s less than impressive action sequences. Of course, someone goes over the edge, plummeting to their doom. Oh, wait. My mistake: they subsequently show up again later, with little evidence of damage beyond a somewhat annoyed expression on their face, as if mildly inconvenienced by an out of service elevator. This implausible approach reaches its nadir in Father three-ironing a canine off a precipice with his rifle butt, a moment which genuinely made me laugh out loud. And not with the movie.

Indeed, the wolves are set up as if they’re going to be important, only to vanish from the film, before inexplicably returning for  a tacked-on coda which had me rolling my eyes. While I did like the concept of leaping right into the action, the resulting attempts to fill in the backstory are painfully clunky and add little if anything. It’s definitely a case where less would have been more: simply making it Clair vs. the kidnappers should have been sufficient. We certainly don’t need a distaff cross between two Liam Neeson films, Taken and The Grey. Carano still does have a physical presence that possesses potential. But she really needs to be making better choices.

Dir: David Hackl
Star: Gina Carano, Brendan Fehr, Richard Dreyfuss, Anton Gillis-Adelman

M in the Demon Realm, Vol. 1-2, by Mark William Hammond

  By

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

I feel a little uncertain about reviewing this, since it’s basically two-thirds of a single novel. Or maybe two connected novellas. Oddly, the three entries get longer as they go, starting at 110 pages, increasing to 160 for the second and finishing off at around 210. I’ve been waiting for the third and final part to show up on special offer for a while, but it hasn’t happened. The first two parts were somewhat intriguing, just not enough to convince me to pay full price. So I finally decided to publish and be damned. Wait and see its cost drop the week after this goes live…

Anyway, the heroine here is Emma Ricci, who begins the first book, M in the Demon Realm, as a fashion student in New York. However, she has a heritage and legacy to live up to, one of which she is only dimly aware, through recurrent disturbing dreams. It comes into sharp focus after demonic warriors attack her and her boyfriend, killing him; only her latent skills allow her to survive. No-one believes her account, except for a small group of Chinese guardians led by Li Bai. Emma – or M as she becomes – learns she is the descendant of a Chinese warrior bloodline. She is now the only thing standing between someone trying to open a portal that will unleash literal hell on earth, which is why she was targetted.

Fortunately, her allies can train her, in particular, to use a ribbon sword which is “liberated” from a local museum. That, and some unexpected assistance from a giant canine, allow M to face the threat and recover the (slightly Lament Configuration-like) artifact used to open the gate. In volume two, M in the Empire of the Dead, she returns it to the Tibetan monastery where it is kept, only for the relic rapidly to be liberated by the bone demon. Baigujing. The action shifts  to Paris and its labyrinthine catacombs, where Baigujing begin preparations for its use. This time, M is going to need to fight her battles, not just on Earth, but in hell itself.

It’s decent enough, from what I can tell: I’ll presume the obviously dangling loose end about M being a twin is going to form a key element of the third volume. The basic premise is probably over-familiar: something something Buffy. However, the Asian influence is nicely done, and while Vol 1 + 2 have similar stories, the different locations provide variety. The depiction of hell is also well-drawn, feeling like a written version of Hieronymus Bosch. My main issue is the characters, which feel under-written. M, in particular, doesn’t seem to be given much depth. What is she thinking? How does she feel about her transition from student and part-time waitress to saviour of the planet? I’d be hard pushed to tell you, to this point. That, and slightly repetitive action scenes, explains which I’m waiting for a discount on part three.

Author: Mark William Hammond
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Books 1-2 of 3 in the M in the Demon Realm series.

Shuddhi

  By

★★★
“Social justice vs. warrior.”

I should probably start by providing some background the film omits – likely because the intended Indian audience were well aware of it. In 2012, a notorious gang-rape took place in Delhi, the victim subsequently dying. Of the six attackers, four were sentenced to death and one committed suicide in prison – but the sixth, being a juvenile, could only receive a maximum sentence of three years. This loophole appalled many, including two journalists depicted in this film, Jyothi (Nivedhitha) and Divya (Karagada), who begin a campaign to revise the law.

At the same time, American photographer Karlyn Smith (Spartano) returns to India, with a very different but even more personal mission: taking revenge on the men who raped her. This is a highly-risky job, beginning when her attempt to buy a gun turns into a mugging. Matters aren’t helped when another attempted robbery leads to her attacker’s death, and a subsequent police investigation by Rakesh Patil (Purushotham). Nevertheless, she persists, tracking down and eliminating the gang responsible like a female Charles Bronson; initially, one by one, then finding the remainder as they crash a house party.

It really feels like two different movies edited together. You have Jyothi and Divya, touring the country putting on little stage plays, offering an interpretive dance version of gang-rape in a bid to raise awareness. Then there’s Karlyn, opting for a considerably more direct form of protest: shooting rapists. The threads only overlap at the end, in an extended coda where Karlyn may or may not have drowned. It’s all rather confusing, and the film’s insistence on jiggling the time-line for dramatic effect is also more irritating than enlightening. For instance, it opens with an off-camera shooting, that turns out – for no good reason – to be the second robbery attempt on our vengeful heroine.

The good news is Spartano – who has almost no previous feature work to her name – does an excellent job with her part of the film, and it’s that which held my interest. Interesting decision by the makers, to create and cast an American character for this role, rather than using an Indian actress. [The director know the actress from his time at the New York Film Academy, and also brought on board an American music director and cinematographer] Yet it still manages to weave in to its narrative strands from Indian mythology: the title is an alternate name for the goddess Durga, the Hindu warrior goddess. Wikipedia tells me her “mythology centres around combating evils and demonic forces that threaten peace, prosperity and dharma of the good. She is the fierce form of the protective mother goddess, willing to unleash her anger against wrong, violence for liberation and destruction to empower creation.”

Hard to argue with that: at one point, Karlyn says, “When you get used to it – killing – it’s as easy as breathing.” And there’s one particularly memorable shot at the party where Karlyn just stalks past an opening, and it suddenly feels like a wildlife documentary about tigers hunting. Just a shame they film didn’t go full-bore into this aspect, rather than diluting it with Jyothi and Divya’s ineffectual social campaigning.

Dir: Adarsh Eshwarappa
Star: Lauren Spartano, Nivedhitha, Amrutha Karagada, Shashank Purushotham

Girls With Guns Calendars 2020

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This our tenth round-up of girls with guns calendars – an annual December tradition which started back on our sadly now defunct GWG forum in 2011. I thought initially this was going to be a lean crop, but after much diligent Googling (someone’s got to do it…), that turned out to be far from the case. We actually ended up with one more than in 2019! Below, you’ll find prices (generally excluding shipping), sample images and links to purchase for all the calendars we could find. We’ll add more if we find them, feel free to email us if you know of any others

TAC GIRLS

TacGirls.com – $16.95

“Tactical Girls® 2020 Bikini Gun Calendar starts in January of 2020 and brings you 13 months of beautiful women with some of the world’s most exotic weaponry in realistic tactical settings. The 2020 Tactical Girls Calendar includes the Cadex CDX-40 Shadow Precision Rifle in .375 CT, the Kel-Tec KSG KS7 Short bullpup Shotgun and last but not least the DRD Tactical Aptus takedown 5.56mm pistol which is combat-deployable from a concealed backpack in 60 seconds. All of these, along with a variety of carbines, battle rifles, machine guns, pistols and sniper rifles, all with gorgeous models in realistic settings.”

LIBERTY BELLES

LibertyBellesUSA.com – available from MilSpecMonkey.com, $16.99

“If you’re feeling a bit oppressed by tyrannical rules — appeal to heaven! If that didn’t work, take a revolutionary look back at the historic founding of freedom with our Liberty Belles 1776 calendar for 2020. With designs inspired by Benjamin Franklin’s “Poor Richard’s Alminac” — our calendar features a Lunar calendar, a side measurement tool, the odd bit of wisdom here and there, and —of course— girls with guns. This calendar features only Federally observed  holidays.”

GUNS AND GIRLS

GunsAndGirlsCalendar.com – $19.95

“The 2020 GUNS AND GIRLS wall calendar is packed with beautiful pin up models and many of today’s most popular weapons, everything from handguns to AR-15’s. This 16 month large format calendar is 17″x 28” when hung up and a perfect gift for any Armed Service Member, Police Officer or Shooting Enthusiast. Also includes a bonus 12 month poster inside giving you two calendars in one package! “

HOT SHOTS

HotShotsCalendar.com – $19.50

Sadly, this will be the final year of what has become one of the staples of the genre. “When we set out back in 2008 we wanted to try and create something different with the intention to complete a year for each month of the calendar. Our aim was simply raise as much money for injured servicemen and women as we could during that time, however long it ended up being, We’re proud to say that last year saw us hit that milestone of twelve years in publication along with 10’s of thousands of dollars/pounds donated to various wounded veteran charities.

It’s our pleasure to bring you the final instalment of the iconic HOTSHOTS Calendar as a Greatest Hits Mash Up of all our proudest moments. We’ve had many themes over the years and we fully understand it’s all subjective, so with that in mind, we will be opening up the whole archive in 2020 for you to purchase in so you can enjoy and keep forever. We wanted to make sure we finished at the top of our game and we feel this is the best way for us to bow out…”

ZAHAL GIRLS

zahal.org – $25.90

“We are proud to present our new ZAHAL Girls Calendar which combines the best of both sexy models and the tactical gear world. No gun bunnies! Only IDF veterans. Size is Approx A3“

BIG GUNS

The Art of Lorenze Sperlonga – $15.00

“A 12 month collector’s edition wall calendar entirely dedicated to Lorenzo’s paintings of sexy outlaws and provocative sharpshooters. A long journey from western to sci-fi, passing through steampunk and fantasy. A beautifully printed 12″ x 12″ glossy calendar that opens out every month to an impressive 24″ x 12″ artwork. Two glamorous pinup each month for extra fire power, uncensored, the way he originally created them! Plus a calendar template with squares big enough to write notes if you want to! These are not simply pin-ups. These are killer pin-ups.”

BMC TACTICAL

BMCTactical.com – $20.00

“After a one year hiatus, our BMC Tactical Guns and Girls calendar is back! This year we‘re donating a portion of the calendar sale to help in the fight to kick cancer’s ass! I want to thank everyone that put this together: Photographer Alejandro Marentes; Producer and overall badass Luke Anthony at Agency 66”

WEAPON OUTFITTERS

WeaponOutfitters.com

In a cunning marketing plot, this one is available in two versions. Safe For Work ($19,95): “The new 2020 is just around the corner! We call this the SFW calendar (PG-13, non-nude) but it will still probably offend some people! But like we say: Don’t like it? Don’t buy it!”

Not Safe For Work ($29.95): “This is our adults only calendar (nude).  If you like this kind of content, consider joining and donating to our Patreon for as low as $1 a month!”

DILLON PRECISION

DillonPrecision.com – $14.99

“The Dillon Precision 2020 Calendar is in stock and ready for your reloading room, office, or wherever you want to display the World’s Finest Models and Firearms.”

Hostile

  By

★★★
“We are the monsters.”

After an un-specified global apocalypse, humanity is reduced to small bands of scattered survivors, who have to try and scratch out survival, while avoiding the attacks of “reapers”, mutated creatures which stalk the landscape, especially after dark. One of those survivors is Juliette (Ashworth), who is on a foraging mission in the desert when an accident throws her off the road, and leaves her with a badly-broken leg. She has to wait for help to arrive, fending off the reaper (Botet) which is prowling the area, with whatever she can find to hand. As she does so, she thinks about life before the apocalypse, where she escaped drug addiction with the help of her boyfriend, gallery owner Jack (Fitoussi) – only for happiness to be fleeting, and taken away from her when multiple tragedies strike.

Initially, the structure bugged the hell out of me. Just when tension was being ramped up, with Juliette in peril and having to cope with a host of issues, simply to survive, we’d suddenly flash back to mundane reality, and thoroughly unconvincing chat between her and Jack. This happened on multiple occasions, and I was left wondering what the relevance of it all was. Beyond her apparent issues with reading, there seemed to be little or no connection. Finally, at the end, you suddenly get the point. While it’s quite a touching revelation, and the ending in undeniably poignant, I’m not sure it was enough to counter all the irritation the approach generated earlier.

The other problem, is that Turi is considerably better at the action/horror aspects, than at relationship drama. It’s a while before we see the first reaper. Juliette’s first encounter with one takes place inside a caravan where she foraging; the camera remains outside and, brilliantly, we only see the impact of her battle with the creature on the caravan, as well as hearing it, of course. When we finally see one, it lives up to what our imagination has crafted, and is creepy as hell. That’s thanks mostly to Botet’s fine work as a “body actor,” along the lines of Doug Jones. In contrast, there’s little or no wallop packed by the scenes involving Juliette and Jack, which are closer to bad soap-opera.

As noted, you eventually understand why, yet I can’t help thinking there were better ways to handle it. While necessary exposition, front-loading all the set-up, rather than spreading it out through the film, and doing so more efficiently, would perhaps have helped. I’d rather have seen how we got there from here (“there” being the post-apoc world, in case it’s not clear), than rehash every detail of what’s clearly a doomed relationship. If we’d had the reaper stalking her over an extended period, that might also have helped credibility in terms of the final revelation, and a bit more likeability for the heroine would have been welcome. As is, the good here is really good; it’s unfortunately countered by a number of significant issues.

Dir: Mathieu Turi
Star: Brittany Ashworth, Gregory Fitoussi, Javier Botet

I am Mother

  By

★★★½
“Lies, damned lies and motherhood.”

After an extinction-event has turned Earth uninhabitable, an underground “ark” holds thousands of human embryos, overseen by a robotic Mother (voiced by Byrne, performed by Hawker). One embryo is brought to fruition, becoming Daughter (Rugaard, resembling a young Jennifer Garner), who grows up into a young woman, educated by Mother to believe she’s alone on the planet. But she begins to doubt what Mother tells her, and these doubts are confirmed when another, older woman (Swank) shows up. Let in by Daughter, she tells tales of humanity outside struggling for survival against robot killers. Everything Daughter has been told is a lie. Or is the new arrival telling the whole truth either?

The film’s main strength is the way it manages expertly the shifting sands of audience perception. Initially, we’re led to believe that Mother is potentially the saviour of humanity. However, it soon becomes clear that the robot is not being entirely honest with her charge, and our sympathies move towards the Woman, who wants to rescue Daughter from her enforced isolation. Yet, in the end, there’s another agenda there as well, and right until the credits roll, you’re kept watching to see beyond the next bend in the story-line. While there are clues dropped, almost from the beginning, you may not notice them until everything comes together. Or perhaps even past that point; I’ll confess, I did have to do some light post-viewing Googling in order to grasp all the consequences.

It’s rare, especially in the SF genre, to see a film without a male speaking part [bar some archive footage from The Tonight Show, anyway!]. Though one senses any money saved on the small cast was simply diverted to an impressive set of production values, depicting not just the facility, but also the devastated outside world after… well, whatever the extinction event was, since it’s never described. That’s not really the focus of the film, yet I felt it was a bit of a shame, The story of the Woman’s survival, up until she came banging on the door, would have been equally interesting as the Daughter’s. I do have… let’s just say, some questions about the coincidence of them arriving at the air-lock at the same time, and also the Woman’s plot-convenient amnesia.

At 113 minutes, it does run somewhat long, and is a little light on action for my tastes. The film is definitely on the more cerebral side of science fiction cinema, something not apparent from the trailer. Rather than explosions, the script prefers to pose awkward questions about the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few, or the moral implications of ripping it all up to start again. However, it never sinks to boring, with decent performances which help guide the film through the occasional doldrums. Hat-tip to Rob for steering me in the direction of a film which I’d otherwise likely have skipped past, in the never-ending and ongoing stream of Netflix original movies.

Dir: Grant Sputore
Star: Clara Rugaard, Rose Byrne, Hilary Swank, Luke Hawker

Revengence Superlady

  By

★★★
“Sympathy for Lady Revengence.”

Despite a mangled title, what you have here is a straightforward tale of vengeance – and its attempts to diverge from that narrative are when the film is at its least interesting. Evil general Ji Xian Tang kills the parents of Ho Yu Fung (Ding): well, I suppose technically he only kills her father, her mother committing suicide by the corpse. In some remarkably unsubtle foreshadowing, Yu Fung is told, “This broadsword is our family heirloom. Our hope for vengeance is in your hands.” Given this, it’s no surprise she escapes with the help of a brave sacrifice from a servant, and becomes the pupil of a kung-fu master.

After what feels possibly as much as weeks of training, she heads out to get her revenge, though her first attempt succeeds only in killing one of Ji’s body-doubles. The film then drifts off-course, as she overhears the servants of traveling scholar Master An plotting to rob him, and helps him avoid that fate. He’s a supremely uninteresting character: they have absolutely no chemistry together and their relationship serves no purpose.  Meanwhile, the General has realized Yu Fung is after him – perhaps a result of her showing up at his residence, and going on about having been sent by “the souls of your victims.” So he unleashes the Iron Monk, a.k.a. Iron Sand a.k.a. Iron Buddha a.k.a. Lord Wang. The subtitles are kinda vague.

Mind you, if I was called Lord Wang, I’d probably have an a.k.a. too.

Anyway, Mr. Wang tries to force Yu Fung’s teacher to give her up, and Master An spends the night at a Buddhist temple run by cannibalistic monks(!). Yu Fung shows up to rescue him, and to do so, has to go through a spectacular series of traps. These made me strongly suspect this might originally have been shot in 3-D, since they tend to come straight for the camera. It’s certainly the film’s most memorable sequence, even in 2-D. Then she suddenly remembers about the whole familial slaughter vengeance mission thing, and it’s eventually off to battle past Wang, then face Ji around and up a large pagoda. You just know someone is going off the top…

Definitely getting an extra half-star for the Buddhist temple apparently run by people who’d seen Indiana Jones and Cannibal Holocaust, it helps that Ding kinda has a resemblance to a young Michelle Yeoh (at the time this came out in 1986, she was just getting started across the frontier in Hong Kong). She has a nice, acrobatic style; there were a couple of scenes where I thought she was being doubled, only for the camera then to show, no, it was actually her doing the moves. However, the pacing has a lot of room for improvement, grinding to a halt more or less whenever Master An is on screen. Between that and the entry-level nature of the storyline, this doesn’t manage to live up to the “Super” element of its title.

Dir: Tôru Murakawa and Qitian Yang
Star: Ding Lam, Yau Kin Kwok, Wong Jun, Lee Jun Fung
a.k.a. 13th Sister or Lucky 13

Sumuru

  By

★★
“Queen of Outer Space”

A spaceship piloted by Adam Wade (Shanks) and Jake Carpenter (Bridgett) crashes on a planet at the far end of our galaxy. They’re searching for a colony which had landed there almost a millennium previously, only to find things not as expected. Somehow, over the centuries since, women have taken absolute control of society, relegating men to literal slaves, and worshipping a giant serpent as their deity. However, the men discover the planet is about to shake itself to pieces, and the residents need to be evacuated. Adam makes an ally of the current queen, Sumuru (Kamp), but that alone makes an enemy of high-priestess Taxan (Levin). She has held a grudge ever since the women elected Sumuru leader, and is intent on taking her place, by any means necessary.

This was (very loosely) based on a character created by pulp writer Sax Rohmer, best known as the creator of Fu Manchu. Less renowned is his character Sumuru, originally invented by Rohmer for a BBC radio series just after the war. She then became the villainess in five books published during the fifties. There were two previous movie adaptations in the sixties, also with Harry Alan Towers involved as producer. Shirley Eaton – best known for her painted death in Goldfinger – played Sumuru in The Million Eyes of Sumuru and The Girl From Rio. I’ve seen the first, and it doesn’t qualify for inclusion here; though if you’re interested, here’s my review elsewhere.

I mention all this, largely because it means I have about a hundred words less to write in regard to this. It’s a thoroughly forgettable South African film, which plays somewhere between an old-school episode of Doctor Who (the last time I saw so many scenes apparently set in a gravel-pit) and The Perils of Gwendolyn. It is at least slightly closer to the first novel than the previous movies; the book did have Sumuru plotting to create a “new world order,” ruled by women, but here it’s more a result of unfortunate circumstance, centuries ago, than any kind of deliberate plan. And given how quickly society unravels after the arrival of Adam and Jake, I’m uncertain how it lasted 900 years.

This really needs to have done more with the concept of a gynocentric civilization, and pitting warrior priestess against technocrat is an interesting idea. However, the film just doesn’t have the resources to construct anything close to what’s needed, with little more than 20 actors of either sex. There are too many missteps, such as the way the women speak exactly the same language as the spacemen [compare 12th-century English to what we have now, as a yardstick], or the remarkably well-preserved “ancient” technology. Adam occasionally provides a nicely sardonic commentary on the silliness of it all, and we do eventually get the hoped-for face-off between Taxan and Sumuru. It’s precious little return, and you’ve got to endure far too much running around rocky terrain, for even these small pleasures.

Dir: Darrell Roodt
Star: Michael Shanks, Alexandra Kamp, Simona Levin, Terence Bridgett –