Author: Jim McLennan

Control Room

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★★½
“In space, no-one can hear you roll your eyes.”

The major impact of watching this was largely to remind me of what incredible films Alien and Aliens are. It’s clear director Berdejo and writer Julien Deladrière think so too (the company who made this is called Nostromo Pictures: enough said). But they are just not up to the task of assembling something which can stand up to any comparison. Admittedly, it’s a largely thankless job. They are far from the first to fail at this, and not the worst either. However, I would lay most of the blame on Deladrière, because it’s the script which had me looking for the nearest airlock. The basic shape is fine. A mining colony on a hostile planet, populated by families, comes under attack from unstoppable monsters. Yeah: like I said, this should be largely familiar.

It’s in colouring between these lines that everything falls apart. First, Olivia (Mauleón) is burdened with a clunky back story. Two decades earlier, as a young child, she had to listen as her parents were killed by what’s insinuated to be the same creatures. Now, she’s all commitment averse, not least because she’s coming to the end of her 15-year contract with the mining company, and is looking forward to retiring back to Earth. This is a disappointment to her boyfriend and his daughter, Mera. Consequently, when the aliens attack, Olivia does things by the book from her position in the titular location, even at the cost of colonists’ lives.

This callous indifference horrifies her colleague, Arlo (Casas), even after his refusal to go by the same book, trying to save his parents, leads to more and unnecessary deaths. But if you are already predicting that she will learn the value of heroic sacrifice and go to great personal risk to save non-biological daughter Newt, sorry, Mena… Yeah, I guess that would technically be a spoiler, but it’s so obvious this is where the story is going, I do not feel it truly qualifies. That’s the main issue here, a script which possesses absolutely no ability to surprise the viewer. Except, perhaps, in Olivia’s remarkable ability to survive multiple encounters with monsters who snuff out everyone else’s lives in a couple of seconds.

The start is actually decent, and generates surprising tension considering it’s largely Olivia and Arlo watching dots, representing both humans and ETs, move around on their monitors. While neither we nor they initially see the attackers (yeah, I would expect such an advanced facility to have full CCTV too), the audio is chilling enough to make the point. The aliens are never fully revealed – there seems to be some kind of cloaking tech involved, Predator style – but what you can glimpse is decent enough. It’s just the increasing sense of deja vu, especially after Olivia leaves the control room. From then on, the sense of claustrophobia it generated evaporates, to be replaced by the heroine’s increasing indestructability.

Dir: Luiso Berdejo
Star: Loreto Mauleón, Óscar Casas, Alexandra Masangkay, Junio Valverde

Last County

  By

★★½
“Who’s home-invading who?”

I suspect the main problem here is a story which takes too long to get going. By the time things do kick off, my interest was already on… if not quite life support, it was likely seeing a doctor regularly. While things do then perk up in the second half, it feels too late. We begin with Abby Gardner (Ohm), a recovering alcoholic and mother to a young daughter, whose marriage falls apart after a car accident with the child in the back-seat. Her husband gets custody, and Abby begs for them to come visit her. Before that can happen, her home is entered by Bennet (Rand) and his wounded partner, who have absconded with a duffel-bag full of drug money.

The good news? It’s not long before the cops start to show up, under Sheriff Bill McLean (Campbell). The bad? They are far more interested in the loot than the well-being of Abby, Bennet or anyone else who gets between them and the hold-all. After an enthusiastic bit of rake-wielding (!), Abby goes from hostage to something closer to an accomplice. It’s a decision which makes her hopes for survival, and being re-united with her daughter,  significantly harder to achieve. The idea does offer an interesting (if highly cynical) twist on the usual home-invasion dynamic. Rather than fighting against the intruders, the home-owner ends up working with them, because they are now less of a threat than those supposed to protect her.

I did feel this switch in sides for Abby was a little too sudden. If she’d been given a darker past, then her siding with the drug mules would have been more credible: a fondness for booze did not cut it for me. I also never liked her very much. While it’s one thing to have a nuanced character with shades of grey (and that’s certainly the case with Abby), her maternal status was wielded like it trumped everything. Not for me, it didn’t. As a result, there were points where I almost forgot she hadn’t been part of Bennet’s crew all along. On the other side (literally), I appreciated how the cops ranged from almost honourable to entirely self-serving in their goals. 

I would say things escalate towards the expected face-off, in which Abby, Bennet and Sheriff McLean stand in a triangle, pointing guns at each other. But “escalate” may suggest a little more impetus than is actually present. It does remain watchable, with Ohm and Campbell delivering the best of the performances – you can see each figuring out their next move, like chess grand-masters. The ending, however, seems a little too convenient for its own good, and while I get that everyone may under-estimate Abby, that only goes so far. Technically, it’s solid enough. I was just never particularly engaged, and the innovation present in the concept doesn’t follow through to the characters. It’s going to be forgotten as quickly as its generic title.

Dir: Barret Mulholland
Star: Kaelen Ohm, Gord Rand, Nicholas Campbell, Keaton Kaplan

Eenie Meanie

  By

★★★½
“Eeenie Meanie – minor no.”

I don’t know which is more irritating: a film that isn’t very good, or a film which teeters on the edge of greatness, then botches it. This falls into the latter camp. Writer/director Simmons does a lot right, especially considering it’s his feature debut. But just when my finger was hovering over the seal of approval, the film makes a near-disastrous wrong turn. This happens to a degree I found myself annoyed and impressed in equal measures. The first thing it gets right is casting Weaving, who has quickly become one of my favourite action actresses. Here, she plays Edie, who been driving getaway for her criminal dad since her early teens. Now though, she’s trying to go straight: she has a bank job and is attending college.

Naturally, life isn’t that forgiving. A one-night return to her useless, junkie, intermittent boyfriend John (Glusman) left her pregnant. When she goes to tell him, he’s neck deep in trouble from his latest scheme, which has left him in debt to local boss Nico (Garcia). No problem. John can pay it off by robbing $3 million from a local casino, which will be giving out the money as the prize in a poker tournament, loaded in the trunk of a muscle car. He just needs someone to steal the vehicle and be a getaway driver. Much against her better judgment, Edie finds herself agreeing to help, to save John’s life. But again, fate has no interest in making it easy for her. Various figures from Edie’s past return to run interference, both emotionally and more directly.

Simmons has a crisp ear for dialogue, and there’s a blistering pace from the beginning. We learn quickly about the skeleton of Edie’s dysfunctional upbringing, then how she’s doing her best to escape it. However: you can take the girl from the dysfunction, but you can’t take the dysfunction from the girl. That’s clear when her bank is robbed, and she critiques the criminals’ work: “They made, like, five mistakes before they even hit the drawers.” In motion, this is a beautiful thing to behold, with some solid, crunchy car-chases and action which feels grounded. The problems are the emotional and dramatic elements, which ring horribly hollow. I get John saved her from being pimped out by her foster father. But her loyalty to him doesn’t sit with her otherwise hard-nosed pragmatism.

Worse still is her inexplicable desire to reconcile with her now wheelchair-bound father (Steve Zahn), in a scene which appears to have been spliced in from a Hallmark film. Things get mercifully back on track for the heist and its aftermath, which are thrillingly staged. Just when I was creeping towards the seal of approval again, it can’t stick the landing, with a finale too tidy for its own good. It’s like Simmons fell too much in love with his lead character – something I certainly understand – and pulled a happy ending out of thin air for Edie. Given some of her acts, I would be hard-pushed to say she deserved it, morally. Yet it is another fine entry in Weaving’s filmography, and despite the missteps, far from a bad start for Simmons either.

Dir: Shawn Simmons
Star: Samara Weaving, Karl Glusman, Andy Garcia, Jermaine Fowler

Arisen: Operators, Volume I – The Fall of the Third Temple, by Michael Stephen Fuchs

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

From what I can tell, Arisen is a massive zombie apocalypse saga, with a heavy military focus, by Fuchs and Glyn James. There are fourteen books in the main series, but Fuchs has also spun off related sets to tell other stores set in the same universe, such as Arisen: Raiders. The Operators series appears to be another. It looks to be intended as a trilogy: at the time of writing (March), part one is out, with part two next month and the finale in 2026. It feels like subsequent installments might be more team-oriented, but part one? Hoo-boy.

Yeah, this is the first book to ever get a five-star action rating from me. It just doesn’t stop. There’s a sub-genre called “hard SF,” which according to Wikipedia, is “characterized by concern for scientific accuracy and logic.” I suggest this could be labelled as hard action, with a great deal of information about hardware, like guns and vehicles. Here’s a sample paragraph: “The boat itself is a low-observable, reconfigurable, multi-mission surface tactical mobility craft with a primary role to insert and extract SOF in high-threat environments, but can also be used for fire support, maritime interdiction, and VBSS missions, as well as CT and FID ops.” I’m not sure what much of that means. Though I suddenly have a strong urge for a glass of whisky and a cigar.

The heroine here is Yaël Sion, an Israeli special forces soldier, who lost her parents in a terrorist attack when she was young, and has become utterly self-reliant as a result. We begin with her part of an operation against Palestinian terrorists on the West Bank. But it’s not long before the pandemic strikes, and political concerns become irrelevant, as the world turns into a hellhole. Every hour brings a new, ferocious battle for survival, and any sanctuary can suddenly become a deathtrap. It’s positively relentless, Yaël needing to fight not the infected, but the living. Things perhaps peak in an ocean-side fire-fight simultaneously involving the Israeli military, Hamas terrorists, civilians desperate to escape, and the undead. And Yaël, who just wants the boat described above.

While the open water is relatively safe, it’s hardly the end of her problems, as she encounters survivors, good and bad. It’s a chilling realization that survival means suppressing the natural human desire to help, even when this means condemning them to death. Yaël is utterly ruthless when she needs to be, and certainly has the skills to handle the situation. I’d love to see a movie made of this, though to some extent we already did: World War Z is a clear touchstone, with other genre classics also referenced, such as Aliens. The action here is almost non-stop, very well written, and considering the book is 573 pages, I raced through it. If any of the other entries are GWG-oriented, I’m certainly going to check them out. Just as soon as my heart-rate returns to normal.

Author: Michael Stephen Fuchs
Publisher: PF Publishing, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 1 (for now) in Arisen: Operators. But as discussed above – it’s complicated…

Bikini Nuns

  By

★½
“Nunacceptable.”

On seeing the title and poster (which looks suspiciously AI-generated, and I know AI-generated warrior nun imagery) for this, I immediately knew two things. Firstly, I had to review it for the site. And secondly, it was going to suck like an Electrolux. And, verily, the prophecies did come to pass. Here is the review, and it is, indeed, pretty terrible. Chris’s sarcasm did flow mightily, and I’m going to have watch a large number of episodes of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations with her, to make up for this abomination. Not that there isn’t scope for an interesting story, involving a cadre of warrior nuns, seeking revenge for a long-past atrocity. It’s just that this is not that movie. Indeed, it’s barely a movie at all. 

The three Sisters of No Mercy here (have I used that joke before? It feels vaguely familiar) are Mary (Wunna), Sarah (Rakhvalova) and Eva (Legallais-Moha), operating under the guidance of a priest (Kouros), and seeking to find those responsible for the 1992 massacre of an orphanage. Quite why they have waited so long before embarking on this mission is unclear, as is why they insist on questioning people far too young to have been in any way involved. Except possibly as orphans. They gradually work their way up the chain, in scenes which are excruciating only in their lack of pacing to find the man supposedly at the top, Victor Vargas. Only to find – gasp! – there’s one final twist as to who was behind the incident, and its purpose.

There’s about enough material in this for a quarter-hour short. It actually runs ninety-eight glacial minutes. The difference is filled with scenes in which one of the nuns walks into a room in her underwear and puts on her nun attire, with no sense of urgency at all. Seriously, if there’s one of these scenes, there’s at least six of them. They are seen lounging by the pool in bikinis once, so I’m not going to claim the title is entirely inaccurate. But I feel that Nunderwear would have been more appropriate. I will defer to the experts over at Nunsploitation.Net to pick apart the film’s accuracy, for things like nun accessories worn inside out, etc. I wasn’t expecting accuracy, or even anything convincing.

But, if I may be forgiven an appropriately religious appeal: Christ, this is dull. Witness the strip poker scene which had us wondering if we had misunderstood the whole purpose of the game. I mean, why do you need poker chips? Don’t you bet with your clothes? Isn’t that the point? If the makes had actually bought wholesale into the premise, and had fun with it, this could have worked. There is a tension between Old Testament vengeance, and New Testament forgiveness, which could have been fertile ground for exploitatative exploration. Instead, this would have had more energy if performed by a troupe of sloths. Blasphemy has never been so dull. 

Dir: Sushank Kini
Star: Chrissie Wunna, Clara Legallais-Moha, Christopher Kouros, Anna Rakhvalova

Girl Fight: A Muay Thai Story

  By

★★★
“How to get punched in the face.”

When you think of the martial art form known as Muay Thai, New Jersey is probably not the first place to come to mind. But it’s in the town of Toms River, on the Jersey Shore, that Prairie Rugilo set up an all-women’s gym with the aim of teaching students Muay Thai. It began as occasional classes she taught in the Brick Police Athletic League, but demand allowed her to set up her own, dedicated space. If you don’t know, Muay Thai is described here as “the art of eight limbs”, which personally, raises more questions than it answers. What are the other four limbs? Was it developed by Thai spiders? Let’s just call it a form of kickboxing, and move on.*

Rugilo and her girlfriend, Jaime Phillips, a detective sergeant with the Ocean County Sheriff’s Department, train their students in the style. For some, it’s just a way to get fit, but others want to put their skills to practice in the ring, and this documentary follows two in particular: DeAna Mendez and Hazelle Dongui-is. We see them going through the preparations, their first fights, and the aftermath. Though the film seems least interested in the actual bouts, where it feels like we get to see more of the audience, than any coherent footage of the action.

But that’s actually ok. Rugilo loses more fights than she wins, and her students achieve mixed results too. For example, Mendez loses her first bout, and has a chance at redemption yanked away, because her opponent has to withdraw after Lasik surgery. She ends up going to another gym where she can train along with her young son (an issue with that whole “women only” thing). Dongui-is is the most successful, but we see least of her. What I did find particularly fascinating was a strong emphasis on the mental elements. Rugilo reckons her first loss is largely because her opponent was switched out at the last minute, and she couldn’t get into the right head-space. It seems the result can be decided before you enter the ring.

I did like Rugilo, who has an impressive attitude, and takes victory or defeat in her stride. I loved her speech at the end: “You know life isn’t always gonna go our way. It’s not always easy, and it’s not always happy, but we learn to overcome those setbacks… We can just learn from them and get stronger and be a better person on the other end of it.” That’s empowering, even as a I sit here on my couch with a bag of Doritos. You may well leave this with a little more respect for those willing to get in the ring, and be punched in the face. And a little less interest in ever doing anything like that yourself.

Dir: Matthew Kaplowitz
Star: Prairie Rugilo, Jaime Phillips, DeAna Mendez, Hazelle Dongui-is

* – I subsequently found out the eight limbs are two each of the hands, elbows, feet and knees. Never say this site is not educational.

Run Baby Run

  By

★★★
“Don’t run before you can walk.”

For a good while, this struggled to retain my interest, and when it did, the problems outweighed the positive aspects. Fortunately, after a solid hour of faffing around in ways that provoked mostly rolling of my eyes, the film found its stride. That’s funny, because it’s a running reference. Ok, not very funny. Down the stretch it both figuratively and literally pushes the pedal to the metal, in quite an impressive manner. My reaction was divided. Part of me wondered, where the heck this was earlier on? However, rather than petering out like a sad trombone, there’s no question it’s better for a film to finish strongly, and give the viewers something positive to take away with them. 

The story is relatively simple. Diana (Leira) is out running on a forest trail, when she finds herself being stalked by a mysterious figure in a hooded sweatshirt (Cowell). That, basically, is that. And it is probably both the film’s greatest strength and its biggest weakness. There’s some stuff around the edges, such as Diana being deaf. This is never particularly relevant – yet I liked that it wasn’t, because it never became her defining characteristic. The nature of the story also means there’s relatively little dialogue. It’s probably a good thing, since this Spanish film is in English (and, oddly, French), with some line-readings fairly clunky as a result. It also means the music has to do a lot, and sometimes, it’s guilty of trying too hard. 

The main problem though, is the story, which is embarrassingly obvious to anyone familiar with the wilderness survival genre. For example, when Diana stumbles across some abseiling equipment and decides (apparently randomly!) to rappel down a cliff face. you just know that her stalker is going to appear at the top, when she’s midway through the descent. Similarly, accepting a lift from a truck driven by a large, hairy man… Yeah, surely there’s no possible way that could end badly. Cue the eye-rolling. Yet, it’s from then on the film begins to succeed, embracing the increasing insanity. For example, Diana also has to fend off a mad, old French woman, with incredible strength, who keeps a teddy-bear in a cage. 

This perilous situation is eventually followed by a lengthy car chase through the countryside – I guess it’s the engines that are doing the running there. That’s funny, becau… Oh, never mind. It’s actually very well-staged, with a genuine sense of speed and danger. that I found effective. Things are tied up with acceptable neatness, although I wouldn’t have quite done what Diana does at the very end [he said, vaguely, to avoid spoilers]. The final twenty-five minutes or so demonstrate a laudable level of energy – ironically, it’s the section of the film where the heroine does the least amount of running. Given it’s also the most entertaining, I’m not inclined to carp about the accuracy of the title.

Dir: Toni Andújar
Star: Catuxa Leira, Cody Cowell, Muriel Halloint, Oscar Foronda

The Zwickys

  By

★★½
“Half-baked”

This is distinctly a film of two halves. The first is undeniably more impressive, taking the revenge motif and going in an interesting, and at least somewhat novel, direction. However, not long after the half-way point, the script decides to change direction radically. This leaves behind the grounded entity which we’ve had so far, in favour of something with distinct supernatural tendencies. I’m not averse to these per se. Yet they’re an ill fit with what has gone before, and need to be integrated considerably better. Then, things derail completely for the finale, pulling things out of nowhere to achieve a solution, in a gobbet of exposition that completely lost my interest. So, probably 3½ stars for the first half, 1½ for the second. 

It’s the story of the two titular sisters, Kayden (Arias) and Julie (Bennett) – Americans, but now living in Honduras. So if nothing else here, that’s another country crossed off the action heroine map, with the story unfolding in a mix of Spanish and English. Kayden is married (though I guess, hasn’t changed her surname). Or, rather: she was, until her husband is shot and killed by an intruder, when Kayden is out. The local police are useless, whether through incompetence, laziness or corruption, it’s hard to tell. Kayden decides she’s going to take revenge. There are some problems with this. Firstly, she doesn’t have a gun. Secondly, she doesn’t know who to take revenge against.

It’s here where the film is interesting, because a complete lack of experience isn’t something you see often in the vengeance subgenre. It’s quite striking, along with Julie being the voice of reason, and the film’s strongest scene is probably when the sisters are negotiating for a gun with a local dealer. They’re utterly out of their depth, and I was looking forward to seeing how this might all play out. How would they find the target? The answer? A seance with local shaman Miguel (Lagos). Betcha didn’t see that coming. He’s not even particularly helpful, beyond suggesting that Kayden might actually still be in danger. It takes the instigator – and it’s someone I think we’d barely seen, if at all – to show up at Kayden’s house and explain everything.

While the occult stuff was certainly unexpected, and doesn’t really serve a significant purpose, it was at least entertaining, and Lagos makes for a creepy psychic. Admittedly, digging up the corpse of her dead husband to retrieve his wedding ring was… a bit of a stretch. Still, it’s the final section which truly sinks the film, triggering one of the biggest cases of, “Is that it? Really?” I’ve suffered over the past couple of years. None of it made sense, especially in the light of Kayden’s earlier and unchallenged proclamation that nobody knew her late spouse better than her. When a film has to lie to the viewer like that, it loses almost all credibility. Turn this off after a hour, trust me on that.

Dir: The Valle Brothers
Star: Silvana Arias, Melany Bennett, Edwin Lagos, Sheyla Downing

Extraction, USA

  By

★★
“Wears its bleeding-heart on its sleeve.”

Marni (Johnson) is stuck in the titular town, where oil fracking is causing problems from earthquakes to poisoning the local water supply. She’s barely scraping by as a single mom to teenage son Jason (Strange), working as a bartender for sleazy owner Daryl (McMahan), who has a bad case of wandering hands, and hustling customers at pool. Her life is upended when Steph (Carpenter) comes into the bar, kicks Marni’s ass on the pool table, and the two end up making out in the back alley. When Steph becomes aware of Darryl’s safe full of cash, she suggests they liberate it, to finance a new life for them and Jason, far away from Extraction.

Naturally, things do not go quite as planned. The first attempt ends in failure, though  do discover the source of Darryl’s unreported income. [There’s a huge plot-hole here, in that they’re seen in Darryl’s office, and end up having to knock the witness out. They would surely have been identified, yet the matter is never mentioned] Realizing her actions could put Jason at risk, Marni regrets her decision and breaks up temporarily with Steph. They reconnect and decide to make a second attempt, this one a higher-risk plan involving kidnapping Darryl and forcing him to open the safe at gunpoint. [Though weirdly, they buy Airsoft guns mail-order for this. Was Walmart closed?] However, getting the cash might not be the end of the matter.

The main issue is, it feels like the makers are more interested in checking off boxes as a good diversity and liberal ally. Fossil fuels, male chauvinism and big business are bad. LGBTQ, people of colour and feminist activism are good. The plot? Secondary, with the robbery not even being suggested until virtually the half-way point in the film. The problem is, it doesn’t quite have the impact intended on me. For example, Marni complaining about her student loans, resulting from her taking a useless degree, is not the sympathetic flex Yonts believes. Choices have consequences, sweetheart. Did she take on this voluntary debt before or after having Jason? Neither inspire pity here.

I found all these elements and questions a distraction from what should be the meat and potatoes of the plot – or given the film’s sensibilities, the tofu and garden salad of the plot. There’s a whole thread where the drugs are being sold to the oil company to make their employees work harder and… I can’t even. Crop the whole thing down to a tightly-focused heist, and we’d all be much better off. The performances are fine, certainly good enough for that,  though I’m trying to work out the ages here too, since Marni seems way too young to have a son of that age. I initially thought she and Jason were brother and sister.  The problems here are very much on the scripting side, with an ending which is as unsatisfying as the rest of it.

Dir: Mike Yonts
Star: Leanne Johnson, Marlee Carpenter, Chase Strange, Derek McMahan

Red Sonja (2025)

  By

★★★
“Better red than dead?”

It has been forty years since the first crack at adapting the Marvel comic series, in turn inspired by Robert E. Howard’s character, Red Sonya of Rogatino. The first stab, released in the wake of Conan, starred Brigitte Nielsen, and was pretty bad. There have been rumblings of further attempts over the years, with a Robert Rodriguez version, starring Rose Macgowan, gaining traction in the late 2000’s. Though given the dreck in which Macgowan has appeared, it’s probably for the best this never came to fruition. Instead, we have a lower profile – read, smaller budget – version from director Bassett, who previously gave us mercenary Megan Fox, and lead Lutz, who was totally awesome taking her Revenge. 

Indeed, that would make a fine “Matilda Lutz overcomes impalement to take vengeance” double-bill with this. The reboot isn’t bad at all. It certainly is miles better than the eighties version, mostly because of Lutz. She may not be quite as muscular or buxom as the comic-book version. But she does bring the required intensity, and that goes a decent way to making this watchable. The supporting cast are good too, although I was less convinced by the plot in general, which is little more than a grab-bag of clichés. We begin with the quick slaughter of Sonja’s village, then see the adult Sonja (Lutz) roaming the forests of Hyrkania. These are under threat from Emperor Dragan (Sheehan) and his psycho sidekick, Annisia (Day). 

After being captured, Sonja is made to fight in gladiatorial combat. She helps the other captives escape, and they fight a guerilla war to prevent Drakan from obtaining the other half of a mystical tome which has great power. Sonja is almost killed by Annisia – the impalement mentioned above! – but brought back by Ashera, the forest goddess, to face her enemies again. Pretty rote fantasy stuff, in other words. It’s the stuff around the edges that is more fun and, beyond the lead actress, is where the improvement is biggest over the Nielsen version. 

I enjoyed the arena scenes, which felt like Spartacus with monsters. Always nice to see Rhona Mitra (Doomsday), though her role is briefer than I’d like. I also liked Day, whose portrayal of Annisia is entertainingly unhinged, like a psycho version of Lady Gaga. Her relationship with Dragan doesn’t play out as I thought, and I would have preferred more places where the script confounded expectations in this way. I was a little disappointed by the fights, which aren’t as hard-hitting as I expected. Although they feel workmanlike and competent, the hits only seem to have much impact on a couple of occasions. Some editing might have helped: 110 minutes feels longer than necessary.

On the other hand, for a reported $17 million budget, it looks decent, and Bulgaria offers some impressive backdrops on which to paint things like the largely-CGI arena. There are occasional moments of self-effacing humour which help, such as the scene where Sonja gets her battle bikini. The end clearly wants a sequel: however, the very token cinema release (one midweek screening in theatres!) suggests the studio had little faith in it. A pity. I’ve definitely seen much worse, and would welcome further tales of Hyrkania. 

Dir: MJ Bassett
Star: Matilda Lutz, Robert Sheehan, Wallis Day, Luca Pasqualino