Author: Jim McLennan

Mulan Joins The Army

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★★★
“She’s in the army now…”

Y’know, considering this is now more than eighty years old, this was likely better than I expected. Chen makes for a solid and engaging heroine, right from the start, when she tricks the residents of a nearby village, who demand she hand over the proceeds of her hunting [I am hoping the dead bird which plummets to the ground with an arrow through it, less than three minutes in, was a stunt avian…]

Equally quickly, we begin to see wrinkles in the storyline, which might be unexpected if you have only seen the Disney versions. The first of these, is that Mulan’s deception here takes place with the agreement of her parents. She doesn’t sneak out with her father’s sword in the middle of the night, to take his place in the conscripted army of the Emperor. Her martial tendencies have been at least tacitly encouraged: according to Mom, it was her father who taught her the use of the bow and spear, since she was a little girl.

Mind you, with Mom saying things like, “Dying on the battlefield is much more glorious than dying at home,” no wonder Mulan comes up with the idea of being Dad’s stand-in. Her parents aren’t exactly happy about it, but they do understand the situation, and accept her decision.  This pro-military stance is something which runs through much of the film. Before leaving, Mulan says, “Father, I thank you for teaching your daughter how to fight. You are allowing me to fulfill my duty to the country, and my filial duty to you… You have granted your daughter her dearest ambition – to be of some use to her country.”

Given this came out during the Japanese occupation of China, the theme of “Let’s all unite and do our part to defeat the invaders” seems rather brave. Though oddly, when the film was released, it provoked riots in which copies of the film were burned, due to rumours the director had collaborated with the Japanese to get it made.

The second most obvious change is the time-frame. Mulan doesn’t just knock off the barbarians and return home in a month or two. No, she goes career, eventually rising to become marshal of the army, due to her bravery and smarts, as well as helping uncover a double-agent high up in army command. It’s twelve years before she is able to see her parents again, though she looks suspiciously similar to when she left. It likely helps she doesn’t have to rise through the ranks, being able to inherit her father’s position as his “son.”

While the action quotient is, unsurprisingly, fairly low, there’s a cool bit where she goes on reconnaissance, dressed as a woman – so, a woman disguised as a man, pretending to be a woman. Got it. She is caught by two barbarian guards, but bursts into song, distracting them long enough to stab them to death. That’s a first, I think. Though I could have done without the further musical interlude at the end, the romance between Mulan and her long-time friend Liu Yuandu (Xi) is never over-powering, and is more a sidelight than the main attraction.

Obviously, its age and origin have to be taken into account, and expecting modern-day production values would be silly. Yet, allowing for everything, I’ve been considerably less entertained by many more recent films. The whole thing is now on YouTube, with English subtitles, and should you be interested, is embedded below.

Dir: Bu Wancang
Star: Chen Yunshang (Nancy Chan), Mei Xi, Han Langen, Liu Jiqun

Enola Holmes

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★★
“Puts the ‘no’ in Enola.”

Complete ranking of Enolas

  1. Enola Gay
  2. Enola Holmes
  3. That’s it.

I’m probably not the only one who spent much of the film humming OMD’s classic Enola Gay to themselves – released 40 years ago this month, coincidentally. And, sadly, it remains my favourite Enola, by quite some distance. This was more annoying than anything else, though I’ve never been on the Millie Bobby Brown hype-train. I didn’t think much of Stranger Things, and her performance in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, interfered with what I want to see i.e. monsters fighting. Here, I found her more irritating than engaging, though in her defense, she wasn’t helped by some poor directorial choices.

This get off on the wrong foot at the very start, Enola (Brown), Sherlock Holmes’ sixteen-year-old sister, breaking the fourth wall and addressing the audience, something she does frequently. Director Bradbeer used this technique in TV series Fleabag, but I’m not a fan: it takes me out of proceedings, reminding me I’m watching a film. What follows is less a convincing evocation of 1900 England, than contemporary America playing girl power dress-up, with “nasty women” blowing things up as they seek to defeat the evil patriarchy. One of these is Enola’s mother (Bonham-Carter), whose vanishing without warning starts things off, causing Enola to begin searching for her, based on coded clues left behind. It escapes me quite why the missing parent couldn’t simply write, “Dear Enola, Gone off to be a suffragette. Love, Mum.”

Not that it matters, because Enola rapidly abandons this quest entirely, in favour of a case involving the young, attractive and entirely personality-free aristocrat, Viscount Tewkesbury (Partridge), whose vote is crucial to get a reform bull passed, expanding the ability to vote [in reality, no such change took place until almost twenty years later – but hey, why let facts stop you from twisting history for your political points?]. On his trail is a mysterious and ill-intentioned man (Gorman), with whom Enola crosses paths. She also has to fend off attempts by her other brother, Mycroft, to have her consigned to a very Handmaid’s Tale-looking boarding school. This is intended to have Enola brainwashed into being the quiet and submissive woman society expects.

The politics on view here are cringeworthy, particularly from Mrs. Holmes, who speaks almost entirely in feminist fortune-cookies, such as “Don’t be thrown off course by other people. Especially men.” It’s one of those cases where merely leading by example isn’t enough: you have to virtue-signal your morality by announcing it, explicitly and repeatedly, which I find immensely off-putting. Hence, we get gobbets of political sermonizing, such as Sherlock (Cavill) being told, by a black, female martial-arts teacher – something I’m fairly sure wasn’t common enough  in the Victorian era to pass without comment: “You don’t know what it is to be without power. Politics doesn’t interest you… because you have no interest in changing a world that suits you so well.” You go, sister!

Speaking of which, the portrayal of the great detective is no more accurate than the other element. “Sherlock Holmes always works alone!” proclaims Inspector Lestrade. Uh, I guess the creators never heard of Dr. Watson, an intrinsic character, from the very first Conan Doyle story? You just never get any sense of keen intellect from Cavill’s performance. Guess they didn’t want to overshadow Enola and her Big Brain. Yet, under all these flaws, is a decent movie, trying to get out. The look of things is lovely, and some of the action sequences are well-handled, even if a slip of a girl like Enola hardly seems equipped to trade blows with grown men.

Maybe they could have made more use of her archery skills (above), which are set-up, then entirely forgotten. Like so much else, that gets lost in the rush to cram an “uplifting” message into the movie, rather than letting one flow organically from it.

Dir: Harry Bradbeer
Star: Millie Bobby Brown, Louis Partridge, Henry Cavill, Burn Gorman

 

Les Filles du Soleil

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★★★
“Three into one won’t go”

There’a a good film in here. Actually, there may be as many as three good films in here. But the way in which they are melded together, manages to rob a good chunk of the power and impact from all of them. We begin by following Mathilde H (Bercot), a war journalist clearly modelled on Marie Colvin, down to the eye-patch and traumatic experience in Homs, Syria – Mathilde lost her eye there, Marie was killed. She has just started the process of embedding herself in Kurdistan, covering the locals’ attempt to regain territory taken from them by ISIS. The second story is that of Bahar (Farahani), leader of a Kurdish women’s battalion, who was forced to flee her hometown, losing her son in the process. She has heard rumours he is being radicalized and trained as a child soldier in occupied territory, and will risk anything to liberate him.

But wait! There’s more. For Bahar was also captured by ISIS herself, and held as a sex-slave, until she managed to escape and make her way back across the front-line. Her subsequent recruitment into the military, gives her the chance to take revenge on her captors – both for herself and for the thousands of other women who weren’t so lucky as to regain their freedom. On their own, any of these stories would be fine. The problem is that Husson does a real dog’s dinner of assembling them into a single narrative, and the result weakens all of them. There’s a convoluted structure of flashbacks and side angles, to the point that Mathilde ends up serving little narrative purpose herself. It’s a pity, as in Farahani, the director has found a marvellous actress, worthy of playing the heroine. In particular, she has amazing eyes that are both luminous and expressive. She reminds me a bit of the famous “Afghan Girl” photograph.

Of the three stories, probably unsurprisingly, it’s the most action-oriented one which I liked best. Bahar and her fellow soldiers make their way into enemy territory through a tunnel. It’s mined, yet they have a captured ISIS soldier to guide them past the booby-traps… or will he? It’s almost painfully tense, and a stark reminder that in this kind of war, you can never truly relax, with potential death lurking around every corner. It also helps that Bahar carries herself in a way that seems legitimate and battle-hardened (a bit of a shame the film isn’t apparently interested in the details of how she went from being a wife and mother, to commanding troops on the front-line). But just when this is getting a full head of steam, we suddenly switch to an extended flashback of her time in captivity. This would have worked much better as a chronological narrative. Instead, it’s a fatal blunder from which the film sadly never recovers. Rather than surging towards a climax, it peters out in sadly predictable melodrama.

Dir: Eva Husson
Star: Golshifteh Farahani, Emmanuelle Bercot, Zubeyde Bulut, Maia Shamoevi
a.k.a. Girls of the Sun

Alice, by Joseph Delaney

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

I previously reviewed the ninth volume in the Wardstone Chronicles series, I am Grimalkin, and site contributor Dieter was kind enough to send me a copy of this, the 12th installment. It’s obviously a bit odd to be so selective about reading and reviewing a series, but neither Grimalkin nor Alice are the main character, and by all accounts, the other volumes don’t qualify. I probably should read all the others, to be completely fair in my assessment here… But then I look at my pile of unread books, which even though it’s largely virtual, is threatening to declare independence and become its own country. So, file that under “some day”.

Things have moved on a bit since my last encounter. The Fiend – basically, the Devil – is still separated from his head, and the heroes and heroines are seeking for the necessary artifacts that will allow him to be disposed of permanently. In particular, they have two of the three weapons necessary. However, the third, the Dolorous Blade, is not on Earth. To find it, someone will need to descend into the realm of the dead knows as the Dark, journey across its many territories to the Fiend’s domain, where the relic is hidden under his throne. That someone is powerful witch, Alice Deane. But there are a lot of the deceased in the Dark who are very keen to reacquaint themselves with her, because Alice is responsible for them being there…

Despite my intermittent knowledge of the series, I didn’t find that was a problem at all. The book does a good job of bringing the reader up to speed with recent events, and Grimalkin provided sufficient background on the world and situation, that I didn’t feel lost. A fair bit of the book is also told in flashback, to Alice’s time as an apprentice, somewhat unwillingly, to the witch Bony Lizzie, telling the story of how she broke free and discovered her true potential. These are intercut with her progression through the Dark, which is an evocatively unpleasant place, both in decor and inhabitants. Fortunately, she has help there, in the shape of Grimalkin’s apprentice assassin, Thorne, though her loyalties are uncertain.

While an enjoyable and fast-paced read, one issue I had was the lack of any real escalation. When they finally arrive in the throne-room, what they face hardly feels like the final boss it should be. But my main complaint came at the end, when it appears – pending the 13th and final volume – that the entire exercise proved unnecessary. Alice seems to have risked her life and soul for no real purpose. If I’d been her, I would have been more than a bit miffed at getting what’s not much more than a “Thanks, but we’re going in another direction” for her efforts. On that basis, this is probably a book where you should probably enjoy a gruesome and chilling journey, instead of the rather underwhelming final destination.

Author: Joseph Delaney
Publisher: Greenwillow Books, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
a.k.a. The Last Apprentice: I Am Alice
12 of 13 in the Wardstone Chronicles series.

Don’t Cry Mommy

  By

★★½
“And the first shall be last”

I say that, since this Korean film appears to have been at least a partial inspiration for not one, but two Bollywood films which were recently reviewed here: Maatr and Mom. And, indeed, Thai telenovela Revenge also has something of the same theme: a mother who seeks vengeance against those who raped her daughter. If I’d seen this first, it would probably have had a greater impact. As is, even though not the film’s fault, it feels over-familiar. What is the film’s fault is a tone which appears engineered to be as depressing as possible, by any means possible. While fair enough in some aspects – you can’t argue it’s inappropriate for the material – this reaches its peak in an unforgivably melodramatic moment where a cake shows up with the title of the film on it. I’m fairly sure that eye-rolling and a derisive snort was not the intended reaction.

It does possess a couple of minor twists. When daughter Eun-Ah (Nam) is assaulted by a gang of fellow scholars, they videotape the attack. The threat of posting this is then used to blackmail her into further humiliating acts. It’s not really much of a surprise when this eventually triggers further tragedy. To the film’s credit, it’s not very interested in the assault, which is depicted in just a few seconds; it’s certainly not emphasized or stressed in the way some entries in the rape-revenge genre do. However, neither does it seem particularly interested in the revenge side, which is crammed into the last 20 minutes or so, in an almost perfunctory fashion. There’s no sense of catharsis to be found for Yoo-Lim (Yoo Sun), and by extension, not for the audience either. Which may be the point –  yet it doesn’t make for much… “fun”. Not that it’s impossible for a depressing film to be worthy, from Grave of the Fireflies through to Requiem For a Dream. However, it’s really not why I’m a fan of the girls with guns genre.

But the main problem is, it’s all too predictable, by no small measure. This was apparently based on a real Korean case, but in that, the perpetrator was herself raped at the age of nine, and waited twenty-one years before killing her attacker. I can’t help thinking that, while it might have been more difficult to turn into a screenplay, it would definitely have been a take with which I’m not familiar. Instead, this offers just another parade of predictable developments, ticking off boxes as it goes. If I’ve seen one scene in the courtroom where a group of smirking assailants get off with little or no punishment, I’ve seen half a dozen. It has gone beyond a trope, and the execution here does nothing to alleviate the severely cliched nature of the sequence. It is a pity, as I can’t fault either lead actress for their performance, which put over no shortage of emotional anguish. I just wish it had been in the service of a better story.

Dir: Yong-han Kim
Star: Yoo Sun, Nam Bo-ra, Shin Dongho, Yu Oh-seong

Ready, Willing and Able

  By

★★★
“Puts the ‘able’ in disabled.”

This is certainly something of a novelty and/or a gimmick. But it’s none the less reasonably effective for it. Templeton – who is a woman, despite her first name, given to her after the character of Christopher Robin in the Winnie The Pooh books – suffered from polio as a young child. This left her with a badly damaged right leg; despite this, she pursued an acting career, and became a regular on soap The Young and the Restless for eight years. While I’ve seen a few disabled action heroes – Daredevil was blind – as far as disabled action heroines go, it’s basically her and Imperator Furiosa from Mad Max. And Charlize Theron wasn’t genuinely short an arm, so advantage Templeten. Though, sadly, she appears to have passed away in 2011.

She plays Samantha ‘Sam’ Martin, a former CIA agent who is confined to a wheelchair after a mission goes wrong. Back in civilian life, she goes for a job as the manager for at corporate security firm F.R.T.R.I.S. The owner, Lamont Vaughn (Steve DuMouchel), quickly terminates the interview without giving Sam a fair change. As revenge, she seeks to show how the company’s security sucks, by breaking into their HQ. Doing so, she finds evidence indicating that F.R.T.R.I.S are involved in shady business, involving chemical weapons. Attempts to alert the authorities go nowhere, so Sam puts together and leads a team of her old colleagues to find irrefutable evidence of Vaughn’s wrongdoing. However, the CEO quickly becomes aware of her efforts and takes countermeasures.

For the majority of the time, it plays considerably more like a TV movie than a genuine feature, to the point where you can almost see the commercial breaks. Just as I was certain of that, there is suddenly a gratuitous sequence where Sam meets one of her team in a bargain basement rock/strip-club. This, along with occasional spots of non-televisual language, suggest it was more likely straight-to-video. The most laudable thing is how Sam absolutely refuses to let her disability stop or even slow her down. She can take out a mugger or chase after an attacker – though I must admit, the sequence where she zip-lined off the roof of the F.R.T.R.I.S building, in her wheelchair, was probably a bit of a stretch.

The final third becomes more or less a single, extended set-piece, covering the team’s infiltration into the F.R.T.R.I.S lair, and subsequent battle with their operatives. Turns out, in a twist, someone with whom Sam is quite familiar is working for the other team, though I can’t say it’s a particularly stunning turn of events, dramatically speaking. It’s all handled competently enough, though again, is never able to achieve escape velocity from the gravity well of mediocrity. I’d probably rather have seen Sam going solo, and exercising more ingenuity and inventiveness rather than her having to rely on her colleagues as much as here. That said, it’s still something you won’t see every day.

Dir: Jenni Gold
Star: Christopher Templeton, Rus Blackwell, Steve DuMouchel, Mike Kalvoda

Vixen

  By

★★
“Die Hardly”

This is a painfully lazy knock-off of a certain, well-known action film, in which terrorists take hostages in a multi-storey building over the festive season. This action is as cover for their actual goal, which is the robbery of a well-secured vault. But one of the inhabitants evades the initial surge, and begins to run interference. They get help and moral support over the airwaves by someone on the outside, and use the air-ducts in the building to avoid detection. Yeah. It’s like that, and you’ll probably understand why my eyes were rolling when we get the line, “Ho-ho-ho, motherfucker.” Now, there’s no doubt the makers openly acknowledge their inspiration. But pleading guilty doesn’t get you out of the crime. At least other, similarly inspired movies, e.g. No Contest  – hell, even Skyscraper – took the idea and added some of their own thoughts. This? Make the central character a woman who knows martial arts. That’s it.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, of course. But if you’re going to get away with such glaringly obvious plagiarism, you need to be top-notch in other areas. Because this inevitably invites comparison with that certain, well-known action movie, and to put it mildly, Vixen comes out behind, in virtually every aspect. The paucity of the resources is the most obvious one. This supposedly takes place at a top-tier security conference, yet is apparently attended by a total of eight people, and takes place in a corner of a hotel ballroom, screened off by drapes. Do not expect giant fireballs, folks. Or destruction of any significant kind, since they needed their security deposit back. While Chen does her best, she is not Bruce Willis, as she goes from attendee to ass-kicker. And Bendza is certainly not Alan Rickman as the leader of the terrorists. It doesn’t help that there seems to be far too much acting in a second language going on here, particularly obvious when Chen has to use her English. Imagine Willis trying to speak Mandarin, and you’ll be in the right area.

She’s on stronger dramatic ground when speaking on the phone to her ex-boyfriend (Yang), who is her liaison on the outside, and tries unsuccessfully to convince the cops there’s a problem, and he’s not pranking them [As depicted here, Chinese police are, apparently really lazy: the investigation consists of calling up the location and asking if there’s a hostage situation. “No,” says the terrorist manning the switchboard, unsurprisingly] I also quite enjoyed Larkin as the acerbic Scottish organizer of the conference: he comes over as a low-rent version of Gerard Butler. He’s about the only person here who seems to be having fun with his role, embracing the necessary larger-than-life spirit. Otherwise, with fights that are merely okay, and take too long to show up, this feels like a poor imitation of little or no point – something even The Asylum might be a bit embarrassed to have their name on.

Dir: Ross W. Clarkson
Star: Lie-ri Chen, Luc Bendza, Byran Larkin, Yang Yang

Nemesis 5: The New Model

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★½
“Left longing for the subtlety of Albert Pyun.”

It has been twenty years since Nemesis 4 apparently signalled the end of Pyun’s cyborg saga. I was therefore rather surprised when a fifth installment cropped up on my radar. Not directed by Pyun, admittedly, but he had given his blessing to it continuing under the guidance of Ferguson. It’s one of those things which probably seemed a good idea at the time, and there are elements that occasionally teeter on the edge of working. However, there’s far from enough content here, and the execution turns into into a fan film for the Nebraskan rivet-head community, with the severely limited appeal that implies. 

In the future, the Red Army Hammerheads are waging a war against the Los Angeles Police Department and their allies. Among the latter is Ari Frost (Craig), a part-human, part cyborg, who was trained in the ways of a warrior by Alex Sinclair (Price). That’s one of those nice elements, having the star of Part 4 show up to pass the torch on; seeing her was a bit like seeing Linda Hamilton pop up in the trailers for the new Terminator movie. Ari and her pals are being hunted by various elements of the R.A.H., dispatched by their leader (Novak), before she can stop them by… Well, you’ll have to watch it to find out. Which is code for “I completely lost interest and stopped paying attention.”

The director seems to think that slapping a random filter on the lens equates to art, and the complete lack of consistency between consecutive shots is enough to give you a migraine. The special effects are mostly bargain basement post work, though the Terminator-like android was decent enough, at least in comparison to most of the rest. The fight sequences leave a great deal to be desired, and the entire film grinds to a halt in the middle, for what amounts to a 20-minute promo film for local venue, the Zero Bar, including the least sexy go-go dancing in cinematic history. That’s a lot, considering the whole thing runs barely an hour between the lengthy opening text crawl of set-up, and equally extended closing credits. And apparently, after the apocalypse, the world will look like downtown Lincoln, Nebraska. Who knew?

Positives are hard to find here. The electronic soundtrack works quite well, including a surprising theme by Velvet Acid Christ, of whom I was well aware previously. Craig isn’t bad either, though when she’s acting alongside her predecessor, you realize that she’s desperately in need of the  sheer physical presence Price brings. Though again, apparently when people get cybernetic implants, they turn into refugees from Hot Topic. Even by the limited standards of what was already a bargain-bin science fiction franchise, this is scraping the bottom of the barrel. To be honest, it would probably have been better for all concerned if they’d left the franchise on the strange yet relatively high note which was the fourth installment.

Dir: Dustin Ferguson
Star: Schuylar Craig, Crystal Milani, Mel Novak, Sue Price

Kat’s Rats by Michael Beals

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

I reviewed the first book in the series last year, and to be honest, found it a bit of a mixed bag. I was thus a bit surprised when the author contacted me and offered me a copy of volume two, in exchange for an unbiased review. Kinda brave. The good news is, this is a genuine improvement. Not perfect, certainly. But it has got one of the best ‘Final Bosses’ I’ve ever seen in a book.

To rewind. Katelyn Wolfraum is a German expat who has switched sides, and is now operating in North Africa as an agent of MI-6. This one starts off with her in and around Morocco, preparing for a looming Allied invasion. However, the water is thoroughly muddied by the presence of various, more or less unaligned groups, from Vichy soldiers to Jewish partisans, with whom Kat and her team of under-the-radar operatives have to interact. With the mission constantly evolving, she has to be quick in her ability to adapt, and fearless in her willingness to go up against enemies, the likes of which the world has never seen.

Which brings me to that Final Boss: an experimental German weapon known as the Landkreuzer P. 1000 Ratte. It’s a tank which weighs – and this is not a misprint – a thousand tons. For comparison, the heaviest tank currently in operational service, the M1A2 Abrams, weighs just 62 tons. This Landkreuzer is mounted with battleship guns, has impenetrable armor and its 16,000 horsepower engines mean literally nothing the Allies throw at it can stop the Landkreuzer. Oh, and Kat’s Nazi father is on board, for extra plot points.

The most startling thing might be, this monster wasn’t just some fever dream of Beals’s. It was actually proposed in 1942: Hitler loved the idea, but wiser heads prevailed. However, this book offers a glimpse at what this behemoth might have been like in action. And if you’re a fan of absolute mayhem, like I am, it’s glorious. There’s even an explanation offered for why this action was wiped from the historical record – basically, to make General Patton look good. He’s one of a number of genuine historical figures on both sides who are sprinkled in, adding a certain authenticity. Hence we get cameos by Audie Murphy and Claus von Stauffenberg, and the chunk in Morocco seems slightly influenced by a certain Humphrey Bogart film.

On the downside, the middle section, before the Landkreuzer shows up to provide focus, seems to consist of random action scenes bolted together, severely lacking in narrative flow. Then there’s things like the comparison of the machine to Godzilla: while perhaps not wrong, Godzilla didn’t appear until 1954. And Beals’s strength seems at the “big picture” level: there were times when I was less than clear about the details of who was doing what and to whom. But if you assume the answers to those questions are a) Kat, b) killing them and c) the enemy, you’ll probably not be too far off. Given my main complaint about book one was, “It needs considerably more Kat”: consider that addressed.

Author: Michael Beals
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
2 of 4 in the Adventures of Kat’s Commandos series.

Tribal: Get Out Alive

  By

★★★½
“You had me at homeless cannibals.”

The IMDb omits the colon from the title, making rather less sense. Though it’s not inappropriate, because sense is likely not this film’s strongest suit. Indeed, I’d be hard-pushed to call it a “good” film. It is, however, consistently entertaining, and a fine piece of B-movie making. Ex-soldiers Caitlin (Phythian) and Brad (O’Hennessy) are bailiffs… Wait, is that a thing outside the UK? Just in case it’s not, let me quickly explain: they are not quite cops, but are still legal officials who can, for example, impose evictions or collect debts.

In this case, they and their team are sent to clear a farm which was used as a camp by homeless people, with the permission of the former owner. He has now died, and his son, Richard Kenning (Dodd), wants them chucked off the land. Except, turns out dear old dead Dad was more than a bit of a mad scientist, and was using the tenants for his experiments to create a serum that would enhance human strength and speed – though reducing them to little more than animals. Caitlin, Brad and their colleagues are about to discover that, since his death, the subjects have escaped and have formed a brutal community in the tunnels below the farm. And they have no intention of leaving peaceably – or letting the bailiffs leave at all.

It’s great to see Phythian get the lead in a feature; we’ve been a fan ever since Kung Fu Darling, back in 2016. If the material here is a little basic, it does eventually give her the ability to show what she can do, albeit after a bit too much creeping around dimly-lit tunnels in the first half. Still, there’s a certain British sensibility on view here, which comes over in characters behaving more intelligently than is typical for the horror genre, and also in an unexpectedly pleasant volume of sarcasm. O’Hennessy, whom you may recognize from Game of Thrones, provides solid support, and overall, the film feels like a decent copy of Dog Soldiers. There’s the same plot core of a force finding themselves trapped and out of their depth, though Routledge isn’t able to manipulate the tension as expertly as Neil Marshall did there.

Britain also seems to be putting out some decent martial arts movies of late; perhaps the lack of guns there makes such things more plausible. Scott Adkins, probably the best screen fighter you’ve never heard of, is leading the way, but on the evidence here, Phythian and her trademark cheek-bones may become Britain’s answer to Zoe Bell. The tone is set early, after she and her partner stumble across a drug deal, and the second half has plenty of good action, building up to her confrontation with a serum-enhanced Kenning. There is a plot thread about her suffering from PTSD, though this can safely be ignored as irrelevant. Just crack open an alcoholic beverage or six, ready the popcorn, and sit back to watch Phythian kick arse.

Dir: Matt Routledge
Star: Zara Phythian, Ross O’Hennessy, Rachel Warren, Thomas Dodd