Author: Jim McLennan

Slaughter in the Desert, by Michael Beals

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

Katelyn Wolfraum is a German expat, who was working as a field agent for MI-6, until an unfortunate incident just before the war, involving a member of the British Royal Family, left her persona non grata with the authorities. Fast forward to 1941, the depths of World War II, and she’s an intelligence analyst under Colonel Lyons and Major Trufflefoot in the North African desert. With Field-Marshall Rommel tearing across the terrain in a blitzkrieg, she finds herself trapped deep behind enemy lines, along with a motley international band of Allied soldiers. When they discover evidence of a Nazi super-weapon about to be deployed, Kat and her colleagues decide to take the fight to the enemy and sabotage the Third Reich’s plans. But complicating matters is the presence of Kat’s foster father, who is now a high-ranking officer in the SS, tasked with ensuring the saboteurs are stopped.

A shaky start here, with the map in the frontispiece depicting a country called “Lybia”. Oops. And, indeed, after an early burst involving Kat’s imprisonment in, and subsequent escape from, the Tower of London, the first half of the book is mostly generic soldier stuff. She’s just one of a group, and not a particularly important one either, to the point that I was seriously wondering whether or not this would even qualify for the site. These stages weren’t very interesting or exciting, with a lot of random zipping around sand-dunes and running gun-battles against Ze Germans and Eyetalians. However, things improve in both departments further in: Kat became more pro-active and independent, demonstrating a hatred for fascists, that drives on her comrades when some would prefer more cautious options, and a love of Really Big Explosions which is quite endearing. The presence of a specific mission – stopping the Nazi super-weapon from being deployed – also gives proceedings some much-needed focus.

It’s still not what I’d call great or even good art, and there are too many unexplained holes in areas such as Kat’s background [though some may be explained in the second book, going by the snippet included as a teaser at the end here] The only sequence which sticks in my mind is the final attack, when Kat and the men launch a potentially suicidal assault on a coastal facility: they don’t know which of the three submarines docked there is the real target, so need to sink all three. It’s startlingly hyperviolent, culminating in two thousand tons of explosives going up – though describing it as “roughly equivalent to a 2-kiloton atomic bomb” is another faux pas, considering no atom bombs even existed for several years after this is set. Given the efforts made at military accuracy elsewhere by the author, I’d expect better. Overall, it needs considerably more Kat, and there’s no reason why she couldn’t have been operating solo for much of this, rather than diluting her obvious talents.

Author: Michael Beals
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 2 in the Adventures of Kat’s Commandos.

Bad Apples

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★½
“Rotten to the core,” indeed…

Ineptly constructed on just about every level, this proves that stealing from better movies – most obviously, Halloween and The Strangers – is not a guaranteed recipe for success. Teacher Ella (Grant) is has just moved into a new home with her husband, Robert (Skipper), who works at the local hospital. Left alone in the house on Halloween night – that whirring sounds are my eyes rolling – Ella becomes the target for two young girls (Prichard + Collins) in masks, whose unfortunate pre-natal experience has apparently left them with severely psychotic tendencies. Or so we are left to presume, for the bulk of what follows.

It’s not a terrible set-up. Unfortunately, the execution is almost irredeemable. Let’s begin with the technical aspects. The audio levels are in dire need of balance: I lost track of how many times I had to lunge for the remote control, either to turn the volume up, or then back down. And the cinematographer appears to have been a cat, going by how much of the film takes place in near-impenetrable darkness. This all becomes such a chore to watch, an Oscar-winning script and performances would have struggled to keep your attention. Not that this will exactly be unjustly overlooked by the Academy, shall we say.

For this feels like a 20-minute short extended to feature length. So many scenes end up being little more than empty padding, outlasting their usefulness – if they even had any to begin with. Is this a horror film, or a drama about a married couple moving house? There were times when I wasn’t sure. Indeed, the entire Robert character could be excised from the film with little or no impact. Yet, just when the sisters are stalking Ella through her house, and the tension should be ramping up inexorably, the film breaks away to a particularly superfluous sequence of her husband at work.

Then there’s the ending. If the preceding 75 minutes require the usual horror movie idiocy from the victims… Well, it’s nice to see the film is equal opportunity, and demands the same from its killers. After this, comes a coda. We know this, because we are given a large, superfluous inter-title: “CODA”. I literally LOL’d at that. This ties everything back up to where we started, though tells us little we probably couldn’t have guessed, and thus largely falls in line with the other superfluous scenes.

This would probably be somewhat more tolerable, if you looked at it as a loving homage to 80’s slasher flicks, with their practical effects and simplistic approach. The problem is, this is rather closer to the tidal wave of post-Halloween knock-offs, which a friend at the time memorably disparaged as “shot on video shit-heaps”. While nice to see a film with women on both ends of the stabby implements, the problems here are monumental, and this demonstrates that good intentions are no more a guarantee of success than aping better movies.

Dir: Bryan Coyne
Star: Brea Grant, Graham Skipper, Hannah Prichard, Andrea Collins

Luc Besson’s ‘Anna’ gets trailer

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It has been a rough couple of years for Luc Besson. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets became possibly the biggest flop in European cinematic history, despite – or, perhaps, because of – being the most expensive movie ever made there. It cost so much money that it sank his EuropaCorp studio, already struggling after other failures, deep into financial trouble. Then, in May, a rape allegation was filed with police by actress Sand Van Roy. That opened the door for a slew of others to come forward with their #MeToo stories about Besson. It was quite a fall for a man who had enjoyed the biggest hit of his career with 2014’s Lucy.

We’ll always have a soft spot for Besson here. Even if he had simply directed Nikita, that would have assured his place in GWG lore. But apart from that and Lucy, there was also Leon, Angel-A, The Fifth Element, The Messenger and Les Aventures Extraordinaires de Adele Blanc-Sec. Not all hits: not all necessarily focused on their action heroines. But in terms of overall contribution, he’s arguably the director who has given  more than any big-budget film-maker to our genre. It’s like someone gave Andy Sidaris talent, and all the money he wanted.

Needless to say, we were excited to hear about Anna, which seemed like a return to his action heroine roots. Details were scant, beyond the cast announced as including supermodel Sasha Luss – who had a bit part in Valerian – along with Helen Mirren, Luke Evans, and Cillian Murphy. Normally, you’d be forgiven for rolling your eyes at the thought of a model acting… But Besson resurrected Milla Jovovich’s career after its disastrous start in the likes of Return to the Blue Lagoon, and she simply went on to become the queen of action heroines over the last couple of decades. Still, the lack of information was troubling, especially as the release date loomed ever closer. Well, trouble no more, because here’s the trailer:

It appears that Mirren plays her handler, Olga, and Murphy is the cop on the hunt for Anna. I think it’s safe to say this has just become 2019’s most anticipated movie in the GWG household. [Okay, maybe second, behind Godzilla: King of the Monsters] It looks like a slick, hard-hitting combination of Nikita and Atomic Blonde. Hey, if it’s even in the same area of quality as those, this will be money well spent. The tagline on the French poster translates as “A woman can hide another,” which seems to refer to the “supermodel by day, ass-kicking assassin by night” vibe I’m getting from it. It also seems to be riffing on the title of a 1983 French comedy starring Miou-Miou, Attention, une femme peut en cacher une autre! But the main thing is that it appears extremely solid on the action front. 

Having overcome significant doubts as to whether it would ever be released, Anna hits US cinemas on June 21. Expect a review here very soon after that. With the rape charges being dropped in February by French prosecutors due to a lack of evidence, perhaps 2019 will be the year Besson’s fortunes take a much-needed upswing.

Shira: the Vampire Samurai

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★★
“Blade-ette”

I could have sworn I’d seen this before, to the point where I almost skipped over it on Amazon Prime. But on checking, appears not. Did I watch it, and just not review it? Or does it only seem very familiar? It’s clearly trying to be a low-budget, female version of Blade, with its half-vampire heroine taking on her cousins, with their plans against humanity. In this case, Shira (Jason) is bitten by a vampire in medieval Japan, but somehow ends up not going full-bloodsucker herself – apparently because she tried to commit suicide first. The film bounces back and forth between then and the present day, where she has become a vampire hunter, along with her Scooby gang. Yet she has also come to the attentions of Kristof (Zmed), who owns a strip-club for reasons that, I’m sure, are entirely necessary to the plot. He and his former Nazi death-camp vampire scientist assistant want to use her in a breeding program to create a new race of super-vampires, who can go out during the day. Shira, naturally, is having none of this.

This probably would have worked better if it had decided whether it wanted to be Shira’s origin story or not. Either stick to the feudal Japan setting or the modern one: instead, the constant bipping between the two is thoroughly confusing rather than enlightening. A better-written script would have handled her creation in a brisk five minutes, then have allowed more opportunity to develop the contemporary portion, which comes off as rather under-cooked. Not helping matters here are the slew of supporting characters, most of whose purpose and motivations are never adequately explained. The whole thing feels almost as if this was a trilogy, edited down to feature length, with little regard for a coherent narrative. As a result, subplots are left sticking out at a variety of awkward angles.

For example, Shira is being pursued through the centuries by Kenji (Klein), a samurai with a grudge. What is the serum Shira apparently has to take on a regular basis? And a descendant of Professor Van Helsing also shows up, to no particular purpose. On the plus side, the fight scenes are copious and surprisingly well-choreographed. Admittedly, with regard to the latter, it probably helps that I watched this immediately after the dire Hollywood Warrioress, which would make anything look good in comparison. So, amend that to be “seem surprisingly well-choreographed,” perhaps. And if you don’t like this one, there’ll be another along in a couple of minutes. It builds to a “homage” to Enter the Dragon, with Shira chasing Kristof through a hall of mirrors. Because…  Hell if I know. Why not?

It makes about as much sense as the rest of the film, e.g. why does Shira’s boyfriend (Dwonzh) spend so much time with his shirt off? Pondering these enigmas may well provide as much amusement as the movie itself.

Dir: “Simon” (Jeff Centauri)
Star: Chona Jason, Adrian Zmed, Louis Klein, Lawrence Dwonzh
a.k.a. Vampire Shadows

Hollywood Warrioress

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★
“Just because you can make a film…”

The IMDb says this is a 2016 movie. The copyright in the end credits says 2014. But shooting was apparently going on for this at least as far back as 2011, according to Internet reports. I suspect a lengthy production, shot on weekends, when the participants have some spare time, which may well explain the presence of five credited directors and eight cinematographers. Which in turns helps explains the wretched awfulness of this. Clearly a passion project for Dutch, who is its star, (one-fifth) director, (one-third) writer and executive producer, this proves that passion by itself is not sufficient.

She pulls double duty, playing both the goddess Athena, and Deborah, her chosen vessel on earth. Deb is tasked with stopping the evil machinations of multimedia mogul Girard Devereau (Young), who is kidnapping teens around Los Angeles for some malevolent purpose [a news broadcast early on puts the number of victims at 500; at the end, the number Debbie actually releases, can be counted on the fingers of one hand]. To this end, the Deborator is given ill-defined special powers, which she largely fails to use, while traipsing around Hollywood, looking for her niece, wannabe singer Anna (Andrews). She has been kidnapped by Morgana (D), one of Devereau’s minions who moonlights as a therapist. Or maybe it’s just to stop Anna from singing – in which case, we’re firmly on Team Morgana.

The best thing which can be said, is that Dutch looks good in her battle bikini. About the only genuine laugh I got from this, was when she was hit on by a pimp, who thought she might “appeal to the ‘warrior princess’ crowd”. Otherwise… Well, I initially thought it was an interesting stylistic choice to have all the fights in slow-motion. Then I realized that was actually the speed at which the “combatants” were moving. Welp. Right from the start, the digital effects are similarly inadequate. It would be charitable to say that they might have passed muster 25 years ago. At this point, you’d probably be able to match them on a mid-level iPhone.

Maybe we should nickname her Deborah “One Take” Dutch, given the occasion on which an actor obviously flubbed their line, yet the take was still used? More damning than all the technical flaws, are a storyline which has no sense of escalation or urgency to it at all. I’m not even certain I could state with confidence what Devereau’s end-game is supposed to be here. Rule #1 of movie villains: Have a clear purpose. Actually, it goes for heroes, too, and the Deb-meister is no better. Sure, she’s trying to recover her niece. Yet for someone supposedly blessed by Athena with special powers… her methods are largely indistinguishable from those of any normal person, worried about a missing relative: contact known associates and the cops. By all accounts, Dutch seems really nice, so it pains me to be so harsh, but there’s unfortunately very little of merit – or even acceptable quality – to be found here by a neutral observer.

Dir: Christine Dupree, Deborah Dutch, Chad Hawks, James Panetta and Rusty Pietrzak
Star: Deborah Dutch, Edward X. Young, Angelica Drum Andrews, Debbie D

Teenage Hooker Becomes a Killing Machine

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★★
“Why, yes – yes, she does…”

You’ll understand why, when skimming leisurely through a streaming channel on the Roku, I screeched to a halt at this title. Even though the “official” English title is just Killing Machine, I knew I immediately had to watch it. Yet, while the title technically reflects what happens, it’s a masterly bait-and-switch. For instead of the expected grindhouse apocalypse, it’s far more arty and surreal. The word “Lynchian” is likely over-used, yet it’s hard to argue its accuracy here. If David Lynch had been contractually obligated to deliver a movie with this title, it’d perhaps have looked very similar.

The synopsis is about what you’d expect. The nameless schoolgirl prostitute (Lee) is caught turning tricks by her teacher (D-t Kim), and the pair start a relationship. But when she becomes pregnant and declares her love to him, he decides the best way out is, with the help of a few friends, to convert her into a cyborg killer for hire. Except, in a Robocop-like twist, she proves capable of breaking her programming, and turns her new found talents (including a machine-gun, mounted in a place machine-guns were never intended to go) on those who created her.

All of which still sounds a lot of fun. Except, trust me, it’s not, and it’s clearly not intended to be. Nam is interested more in Creating Art, with a capital A. This is apparent right from the beginning, which opens with the credits, running very slowly, backwards. They run again, in a forward direction, at the end; this pretension seems like unnecessary padding in a film which (perhaps mercifully) only runs 58 minutes, including about ten minutes for both sets of credits. It’s a lurid, shot on video nightmare, that takes place in a back-alley world, where the lighting is perpetually neon-harsh, and there’s always a hip soundtrack, ranging from Ryuichi Sakamoto to the Gypsy Kings.

It almost feels like an hour-long performance art prank at the audience’s expense, not least given the amount of time devoted to characters laughing hysterically for no apparent reason. Nam seems to feel that anything worth doing is worth overdoing, in the sense that virtually every scene continues well past the point where it has worn out its welcome or point. Yet it’s clear he knows his B-movies: for instance, the heroine’s first mission is obviously inspired, almost to the point of plagiarism, by the one in Nikita. It’s as if the director was going, “Well, I could give you what you expected… Nah. Let’s not. Instead, here’s another scene of the bad guys laughing hysterically for no apparent reason.”

I will say this for it. You will not have seen anything like Killing Machine before, and I will remember the movie, when most other films reviewed for this site have long been forgotten. However, neither of these points are necessarily a good thing. The joke’s on the viewer here.

Dir: Gee-woong Nam
Star: So-yun Lee, Dae-tong Kim, Soo-baek Bae, Ho-kyum Kim

No Tomorrow, by Luke Jennings

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

“I’m just you without the guilt.”

As we recently discussed, the first book and first season of the TV series had some major differences. The second book does make a significant effort to narrow the gap. Indeed, by the end, we have almost got to the same point as at the end of the TV show, albeit by a rather different route. Then, just when I was expecting this to wrap up and set the stage for the second season, Jennings drops a major bomb. I have to say, well-played: I don’t think I’ve ever been quite as stunned by a twist in a novel before, yet thinking about what had gone before, it made perfect sense. I’m really curious to see whether the TV show follows suit, because if so – nothing will be quite the same again.

To that point, we had more of the cat-and-mouse games between the international assassin codenamed “Villanelle” [though these days, it’s basically her real name, with her true identity buried deeply in the past], and harried MI-5 operative Eve Polastri. The latter is struggling to balance her increasing obsession with Villanelle, and a husband who would greatly prefer it if she was not jetting off to Venice or Moscow at a moment’s notice, leaving him to open a tin of beans. Eve is very much a desk jockey, and not exactly suited to go head-to-head with a ruthless killer. Can wits and persistence counter cold-blooded psychopathy?

It was the twisted relationship between the two which separated the first book and the TV series, with the show having much more development in this area. Jennings said his approach to the second book was altered by the strong reaction of fans to the TV version, and you can tell: there are a couple of scenes which can only be described as fan service, apparently inspired by one notorious broadcast line [Villanelle’s confession to Eve, “I think about you, too. I mean, I masturbate about you a lot.”] This angle really doesn’t fit, considering Eve finished the first book literally tooling up to kill Villanelle, and I found it an abrupt and jarring shift in tone.

The rest of it though, is really well-done, from the explanation of The Twelve’s intent through to Eve’s dogged piecing together of her target’s identity. I read the whole thing in about 30 hours, which is far from my usual leisurely pace. Staying up late, waking up early, in front of the TV… I ripped through it, powered by Jennings’s great eye for description; particularly in terms of locations. Whether it’s attending a conference of neo-Nazis on an Alpine mountain-top or shivering in a cell, deep in the bowels of the infamous Lubyanka prison, the reader feels there.

The balance of the book also feels improved. The first was mostly about Villanelle, with Eve almost feeling like a supporting role; this time, it’s much more even. Indeed, the contrasts in the transitions between the two lead characters form some of the book’s most memorable imagery. For example, we jump from Villanelle prepping the ground by seducing her next target, Rinat, to following Eve on her way home from work:

“The sun is low in the sky, half obscured by oyster-pink cirrus clouds. Rinat turns to beckon to the waiter, but he’s already standing there, as patient an unobtrusive as an undertaker. In the bus, moving at a snail’s pace up the Tottenham Court Road, the only person to give Eve a second glance is an obviously disturbed man who winks at her persistently. It’s a warm evening and the interior of the bus smells of damp hair and stale deodorant.”

This bone-dry dark wit is fairly common, and the style with which Villanelle operates can only be applauded, making up for in quality of mayhem perhaps what the book lacks in quantity. I suspect she would make a fine Bond villain, with an eye for the grandiose and demonstrative over the purely functional [There’s an idea: with all the talk about diversity for 007, why have we never had a Mrs. Blofeld?] In the absence of that, Sunday nights can’t come quickly enough.

Author: Luke Jennings
Publisher: Mulholland Books, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 2 of 2 in the Codename: Villanelle series.

The Executioners

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★★½
“Home of the hits”

“I realized that there was no such thing as a boundary between good or evil, black and white, right or wrong. All I learned is that this world is divided by the executed and executioners.” The above is spoken by a character toward the end of this, and explains the significance of the title, though your mileage may vary as to how convincing it is as an explanation. Four young women go to a country house by a lake, which holds dark memories for one of them. Belle (Dallender, known here from I Spit on Your Grave 2) watched her father die of a heart attack there, after he rescued her from drowning, and has been plagued by guilt ever since. There’s also Kay (Burn), a writer who is working on a “story of home invasion, mixed with supernatural elements.” And, wouldn’t you know it? Barely has the trip started, before three men burst in and take the group hostage.

There then follows some fairly nasty brutality and sexual violence, which seems especially dubious since the director has made energetic (and, let’s be honest, not unsuccessful) efforts to sexualize the attractive women – both before, and even more questionably, after that scene. The victims continue wandering round in their underwear for no good reason, when any real person would have quickly reached for their clothes. However, the tables are turned, with the three attackers turning out to be a bit crap at the whole home-invasion thing. With them tied up, it’s time for the quartet to mete out their own brand of justice – something which Belle, especially, is very keen to do.

This is where things get at least somewhat interesting, and rather meta. For it turns out the home invaders were not acting on their own initiative. They had been hired to attack the house, by person or persons then unknown, and were live-streaming their actions through bodycams back to their employer. Who is lurking in the woods nearby, and may or may not be ready to intervene on behalf of their employees. The scripting in this section is mediocre: one woman’s break for help and fate is so rapidly glossed-over as to be inconsequential, and one of the attacker becomes an ally with little more than “I’m gonna trust you with a gun. Remember, we’re not the enemy.”

As the poster suggests, Serafini is going for the grindhouse aesthetic. I’m just not sure how well he nails this. The nasty and repellent elements, he seems to have a good handle on, and Dallender impresses in her role. Yet the films in that field which have stood the test of time offer more than that, and it’s there where the film seems to fall short most obviously, with this likely making little or no lasting impression. The eventual explanation raises more questions than it answers, and doesn’t appear to make a great deal of logical sense. If you like your meat raw and bloody, this one may be more to your taste than it was to mine. If only they’d named all the characters after Disney princesses.

Dir: Giorgio Serafini
Star: Natalie Burn, Jemma Dallender, Rachel Rosenstein, Anna Shields

Codename: Villanelle vs. Killing Eve

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Credit: Entertainment Weekly

“You are an evolutionary necessity.”

With the second series of Killing Eve starting this month, and one of our most eagerly anticipated TV shows of the year, it seems a good point to take a look back at Luke Jennings’s original source material, and its translation to the small screen. Codename: Villanelle was originally self-published by Jennings as four separate novellas, the first (with the same name) appearing in February 2014. It was followed by Villanelle: Hollowpoint in August, then Villanelle: Shanghai and Odessa in February and June of the following year.

It wasn’t Jennings’s first published work: far from it, with Atlantic appearing back in 1995. These were mostly what Jennings calls “politely received but unprofitable novels,” adding “Our income was, to say the least, patchy.” That probably explains why he was dance critic at The Observer newspaper for 14 years. Which in turn explains the entry in his bibliography which stands out as most un-Villanelle like: his co-authorship of The Faber Pocket Guide to Ballet…

Codename: Villanelle was optioned for the screen relatively quickly after the first novella, in spring 2014. Initially pitched to Sky Living, they turned the project down, but it was reworked by writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge, to put more emphasis on Eve, and these modifications also triggered the title change. It was a wise decision, I think. Codename: Villanelle seems very passive, a label given to a character (and half-meaningless unless you’re an expert on French perfume). Killing Eve is considerably more active, and also reflects the shift in focus from the hunter to the hunted. It helped get the show picked up by BBC America, and in autumn 2016, the show was given the go-ahead for an eight episode first series. But such was the advance buzz, that a second series was commissioned before even the first episode was broadcast.

This proved to be a wise decision. For it became a word-of-mouth hit, with ratings increasing by two-thirds from the first episode to the last. Critical reaction was no less enthusiastic: Killing Eve was included in more TV writers’ top tens for 2018, than any other show. Sandra Oh’s performance as Eve was particularly lauded, and she won the Golden Globe, Screen Actors’ Guild and Critics’ Choice Television Awards for her portrayal. The success of the series helped propel the first book onto the best-seller lists, and allowed Jennings to quit his day job at The Observer. The second volume, No Tomorrow, was published in October; we’ll have a review of that up later in the week.

But for now, we’re concentrating on the first book – and in particular, comparing and contrasting the show with its source material. What are the similarities? And, perhaps more interestingly, what are the differences? [Of necessity, what follows include significant spoilers for both TV and literary incarnations]

Villanelle

“They had recognized her talent, sought her out and taken her from the lowest place in the world to the highest, where she belonged. A predator, an instrument of evolution, one of that elite to whom no moral law applied. Inside her, this knowledge bloomed like a great dark rose, filling every cavity of her being.”

As noted above, the book leans considerably more towards Villanelle than the TV series in balancing the characters. In the show, she is initially a blank slate, and only slowly is her background revealed, as Eve peels back the layers behind her fake persona. The novel, however, fills in the basic details by page 13, while Eve doesn’t even appear until almost a quarter of the way in. Villanelle is a convicted triple-murderer, having taken revenge on the criminals responsible for killing her father – just one of a number of incidents that illustrate her socio/psychopathic nature [let’s not get bogged down in labels]. In the TV series, it’s a less family-oriented crime which gets her put away: castrating and murdering the husband of a teacher/lover.

She is then spirited out of prison by a shadowy group, known as “The Twelve” and trained in a range of lethal arts, becoming an assassin employed by them. “Shadowy” is putting it mildly for the TV version. Entirely opaque is probably closer to the truth, since we know almost nothing about them. The novel, in contrast, opens with a depiction of their meeting, and The Twelve deciding to unleash Villanelle on a target. We still don’t know who they are or their goals, however. They clearly don’t mess around though. While Konstantin, Villanelle’s handler, is in an “is he dead or not?” limbo at the end of season one, there’s no such doubt in the book. He’s 100% dead, killed by Villanelle after he has been rescued by her from kidnapping – just in case he divulged any incriminating information. Guess you never know. That’s considerably more brutal than in the show, where Konstantin does indeed “go rogue”.

The Vilannelle we see is considerably more anti-social than in the book, where she is entirely capable of hanging out with people as and when necessary. The version on the page is considerably more sexual too – likely impacted  by the TV show being on basic cable – with a habit, after completing an assassination, of finding some random stranger – male or female, she’s not bothered – for a meaningless fling. For her, it’s all about making them want her, and the resulting power she has over them. [There’s also a rather gratuitous scene, describing in unnecessary detail the unpleasant sexual fetish of one victim]

Eve Polastri

“Eve Polastri is looking down at Lambeth Bridge and the wind-blurred surface of the river. It’s 4 p.m. and she has just learned, with mixed feelings, that she is not pregnant.”

Even on the most superficial level, the small-screen version of Eve is radically different. In the book, she’s British and aged 29. The change in nationality was something BBC America required. Given their audience, it’s somewhat understandable, despite the resulting, somewhat clumsy need to explain why a Yankee is working for the British security services. That Sandra Oh is two decades older than the original Eve diminishes the suggestion in the novel that Eve and Villanelle are two sides of the same coin. Both are professional, childless women who have turned to their work, to the exclusion of almost everything else. Instead, the generation gap creates other echoes, almost a mother/delinquent daughter relationship.

Despite her youth, book Polastri has risen to become the head of her department at MI-5, which arranges special protection for visitors to the UK who are deemed at risk. She’s already intrigued by the whispers of Villanelle she has found, but this becomes a full obsession after the assassin takes out a Russian fringe politician on Eve’s turf, causing the civil servant to lose her position. Both versions then have Eve being recruited for an off-book operation to hunt Villanelle down, cutting ties with her previous colleagues.

This brings tension to Eve’s marriage with Niko, though much more so on television. In the book, while they still have their disagreements when Eve puts work before previously-arranged social engagements, there is a reconciliation (of sorts) towards the end. Niko and his academic pals help Eve crack a USB password, the device containing information that leads to an operative associated with The Twelve inside MI-5. Their marriage is certainly in a far better place at the end of volume one, than series one.

Eve vs. Villanelle

“She knows who I am. Killing Simon was a message, addressed to me. She was saying I can take you, and the people you care about, any fucking time I want…”

It’s at the nexus of the two main characters, in their relationship, that the TV series and book diverge most drastically. Because, in the novel, there pretty much isn’t one. Eve and Villanelle have virtually no conscious interaction at all. Emphasis on conscious, since the most time they spend together is when the killer slips into the spy’s Shanghai hotel room while Eve is sleeping and “inhales her warm smell.” What there is, is strictly adversarial: Eve regards Villanelle solely as a threat who must be stopped. “It’s just beginning,” are the three words from Eve with which the first book ends, as she puts a Glock 19 pistol in her bag. There’s little doubting her intentions.

What Phoebe Waller-Smith did in the show, was broaden and deepen that relationship, in a myriad of ways, both little and big. It feels more like Clarice Sterling and Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs, with a charming psychopath playing games against a dogged, somewhat dour bloodhound. By deepening the discord between Eve + Niko, and her overall discontent with life, and playing up Villanelle’s bisexuality, the TV show has added a slab of unresolved sexual tension between the pair, which simply wasn’t present in the first book. It has certainly helped make the show become a firm favourite in the gay community, though thanks to the wonderful performances of Oh and Jodie Comer, it’s far more than ghetto TV.

I do have concerns, however. In a Reddit AMA, Jennings said, “The fandom drives the success of the books and the show, and also influences it. Killing Eve: No Tomorrow would be a different book if I hadn’t spent time listening to fans.” It seems a perilous route for any creative person, to let the consumers dictate where your story goes. I’ve already seen Xena: Warrior Princess destroyed when its makers started pandering to the demands of gay fan ‘shippers. Will Killing Eve go the same way? We can only hope it doesn’t.

Tarnation

  By

★★½
“The Dead Evil.”

Following on after From Parts Unknown and Sheborg Apocalypse, this is my third encounter with what Armstrong calls “Neo pulp.” All three have strong heroines at their core, which is something I can get behind. But I suspect his approach works best when he builds out his own universe, as in Sheborg. Here, the inspiration is the classic horror of The Evil Dead trilogy (particularly Evil Dead 2), which is a bit of a double-edged sword. You need to have seen those films to get the references – and, in Armstrong’s defense, I suspect most viewers of his work likely will have. The problem, and there’s no escaping this, is Sam Raimi did it better, leaving this feeling almost like an Asylum-style mockbuster. Turning Ash into Ashette and hanging an Evil Dead poster on the wall of your cabin isn’t enough.

Most obviously, Masterman isn’t Bruce Campbell. While fine in Sheborg as the sidekick, she doesn’t have the presence necessary to drag the viewer along on her journey to a blood-drenched hell and back. Oscar (Masterman) is a wannabe singer, fired by her band, who heads off to a remote cabin with her best friend and friend’s boyfriend. Of course, anyone who has ever seen any horror movie will be unsurprised when things go wrong, in particular her BFF being possessed by some kind of entity. Though there’s a lot of… stuff going on besides. Said stuff includes a flying demon with a unicorn’s head, a boxing kangaroo, a rap battle, and insects crawling out of places insects were never meant to go. And blood. Lots of blood.

There’s no arguing the energy here: when the film gets going, it pretty much doesn’t stop thereafter. However, I’d have traded a sizeable chunk of that energy for coherence. Or a sense of escalation. Or anything to help negate the feeling this consists of Armstrong and his team throwing whatever ideas they could come up with, on the screen, in the order they came up with them. Some of those ideas are fun, and you marvel at the low budget inventiveness. which makes a hole in the floor with a rug on it, a portal to the netherworld. Others don’t work, outstay their welcome, or have execution so flawed they should have been strangled at birth.

As a result, the energy becomes increasingly wearing on the soul, to the point that Oscar discovering the magic words to restore normality are, “Klaatu Barada Necktie,” provoked a tired eye-roll rather than the intended mirth. As loving recreations go, it’s certainly not bad; however, if I wanted to watch a blood-spattered story about a weekend spent at a cabin in the woods gone horribly wrong, I’d watch The Evil Dead and its sequels. Hopefully, Armstrong can develop something that shows off his unquestionable talent, imagination and ability to squeeze every penny out of the budget, on its own canvas, rather than painting on top of someone else’s masterpiece.

Dir: Daniel Armstrong
Star: Daisy Masterman, Emma Louise Wilson, Danae Swinburne