Author: Jim McLennan

Gone by Dawn + Gone by Dawn 2: Dead by Dusk

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Gone by Dawn ★★★½
Gone by Dawn 2: Dead by Dusk ★★½
“Stripped to kill.”

I decided I might as well combine these two into a single review. Having watched them back-to-back, even though made and set three years apart, they felt very much like the continuation of a single story about the same characters. The main one is Roxy (Mele), who is a dancer at a Wisconsin strip-club run by the sleazy Stag (Therrien), mostly as a money-laundering front for local organized crime. When he and his pal rape an employee, Alana (Pearce), Roxy along with the victim and another dancer, Crystal (Fierman), decide to take revenge by robbing Stag. That means getting into the safe in his office where the money is, and he’s not exactly going to give up the combination freely. Still, nothing that a piano-wire garrotte round the testicles can’t solve, surely? Except, as usual in this genre, the heist doesn’t go smoothly. Stag’s office quickly begins to resemble a mortuary, as unwelcome guests need to be handled.

This was, to be honest, better than I expected. There is, of course, the usual tension in grindhouse-style films about strippers – wanting them to be seen as more than T&A… while simultaneously being required to depict them as T&A. But the movie manages to strike a good balance here: while certainly not short on nudity, the lead actresses deliver performances which manage to make their characters feel like real people. The script also avoids people having to act like idiots too much, and the issue of the safe’s combination is solved in a way which is actually kinda clever. The low budget is a bit obvious in the limited locations and cast – we don’t get much outside of the club and an apartment – although in some ways, that works as much for the feature as against it. For example, it’s likely a factor in story-telling which certainly doesn’t hang around; maybe 65 minutes between opening and closing credits. And while there may be honour among thieves, there doesn’t appear to be much among strippers.

I didn’t think the sequel worked as well. While Roxy returns, she has been recast, being now played by Matheis – I’m not sure what happened to Mele. Still, I did laugh when one supporting character greets her with, “You look different!” Oddly, while the first film started with Roxy skipping town, the second sees her back, working at the same venue where she was involved in a multiple homicide. I know strippers are renowned for making poor decisions, but still… It turns out, having absconded with nine hundred grand of the mob’s money isn’t a good idea. They want it back, and to this end, have sent a trio of hired killers, named the Three Bears by Roxy. They’re prepared to do anything, up to and including both kidnapping and murder. But Roxy, along with Jesse (Radzion), a friend of Alana’s, and another dancer, Alura (Laventure), plots to turn the tables on the Three Bears, by robbing their boss.

Quite why the mob waited three years to take any action isn’t clear, and it’s just one of the problems with the story. Remember how I said the small-scale worked for the first film? That feels less true here, with the expanded script resulting in a bunch of loose ends and an unnecessarily stretched running-time of 107 minutes. For instance, we are introduced to a pair of cops, but they’re effectively unnecessary, and the same goes for a subplot which has Roxy visiting Stag in prison (one of the few players to return from the first film). Generally, I think I preferred Roxy 1.0 as well; I was just never quite convinced by Matheis in the role of an exotic dancer. The bits that work e.g. the ‘snake in the grass’ are mostly borrowed from its predecessor, though again, the movie does a good job with its characters.

Together, they make for a decent double-bill, though if you’re short on time, you might as well watch only the opener, since the sequel adds little in the way of development.  It’s perhaps telling that I must confess to getting distracted in the middle of GBD 2 by a lengthy article on location Club Pierre, one of the oldest strip-clubs in Edmonton. So, not Wisconsin at all. :) But it probably says something when a movie’s location is more interesting that the film.

Dir: Shaun Donnelly
Star: Gone by Dawn – Saleste Mele, Hannah Fierman, Katelyn Pearce, Jayson Therrien
Gone by Dawn 2: Dead by Dusk – Allana Matheis, Skylar Radzion, Ashley Laventure, Koreen Perry

Paradise Hills

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★★★½
“A small-scale beauty.”

And there I was, thinking Maleficent: Mistress of Evil would be the prettiest picture I saw in all of 2020. There’s a new champion, and whoever assembled the look of this one should have been honoured at the Oscars. Shot in Barcelona and the Canary Islands, it beats Maleficent by almost entirely avoiding CGI, in lieu of stunning locations such as the former residence of sculptor Xavier Corberó: “a mazelike estate constructed from cement that features nine connected structures and 300 arches.” That quote comes from a feature in Architecture Digest, which is not something every film gets, shall we say. And it deserves one, for the entirety of this is a 95-minute coffee-table book. Even when the plot stumbles, you can wallow in a remarkable visual style, achieved for the relative pittance of $10 million.

That plot concerns Uma (Roberts), who has just refused the hand in marriage of the young man chosen by her family. She is sent off to the titular establishment, on a remote island, to be “re-educated” into a more pliable form, under the guidance of The Duchess (Jovovich). Uma meets others going through the same treatment for various reasons, but plots to escape, with the help of the one she truly loves. Only for this to be derailed when the true nature of the “re-education” is revealed, explaining why Paradise Hills has a 100% success rate with its patients, despite a very low-key approach, mostly consisting of yoga. Yet, it turns out to be an method which can perhaps be leveraged against those who seek to control Uma.

As a modern-day fairy-tale, it works quite nicely, driven particularly by the visual style which feels like the dream of a mad interior designer. However, it’s not as clever as it thinks it is, and occasionally descends into the painfully obvious, such as The Duchess clipping thorns off roses. ‘Cos the roses represent the young women, being shorn of their individuality and essence, y’see? Yeah, I rolled my eyes a bit at that. You also wonder why they bother with flashy stuff like cranking Uma up to the roof on a carousel pony, in order to show her holograms of her intended. It seems entirely unnecessary, given the… considerably more physical, shall we say, nature of Paradise Hills’ true solution.

But it’s fun to watch Jovovich in a role which doesn’t require her to kick ass – except, perhaps of the psychological kind. For she still exudes menace, even when being extremely polite, or perhaps due to this. Managing to make “You’re just a prickly little pear” into a dire threat is no small feat. While Roberts is decent enough, the rest of the supporting cast of inmates (González, Macdonald and the ever-clunkily named Awkwafina) seem largely redundant. We’re never given much reason to care about their characters, and I found the film achieved greater impact when it stayed focused on Uma. But given the beauty on display, I’m largely prepared to forgive its other flaws.

Dir: Alice Waddington
Star: Emma Roberts, Milla Jovovich, Eiza González, Danielle Macdonald

The Rhythm Section

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★★★
“Not really worth the wait”

The action-heroine genre has seen its share of high-profile flops in the past. But this long-delayed entry, originally due out in February 2019, is among the worst, setting a record for the lowest ever opening at the North American box-office for a wide release. It took in only $2.8 million from 3,049 theaters when it opened in January, and ended with a worldwide gross below $6 million, against a budget of $50 million. While smaller in scale, that’s a Cutthroat Island level of failure. Did it deserve such a fate? Well, it’s not that bad. It ain’t great. But it seems almost defiantly unlikable, going against cinematic norms in a way that’s brave – and, I suspect, ultimately foolish. The result is something whose commercial demise is unsurprising, beginning with a title that makes only tangential sense, even after you’ve seen the film.

It’s the story of Stephanie Patrick (Lively), whose family died in a plane accident, causing her to go into a downward spiral. Three years later, she’s a crack whore, when contacted by journalist Keith Proctor (Jaffrey). He tells her the crash was actually a terrorist attack, basing this claim on information received from a source with intelligence connections known only as “B”. After Proctor is murdered, Stephanie finds B (Law) and convinces him to help her acquire the necessary skills to become an assassin. Stephanie then goes after all those involved in the attack, including the shadowy figure known only as U-17. To do so, she takes on the identity of Petra Reuter, an assassin killed by B, and uses the resources of ex-CIA officer Marc Serra (Brown), now working as an intelligence broker.

I think viewer expectations may have played a part here. Reading the above, and with the film coming from the producers of the 007 franchise, you are likely imagining a slick, Bond-esque slice of escapism. It’s not that. First off, Stephanie is… Well, let’s be honest, a bit shit as an assassin. When she asks B how long it’ll take for her to become good, he replies, “Your menopause will be a distant memory.” They don’t have that much time, and the results are consequently rough around the edges, not least because she almost completely lacks the necessary killer instinct. She has the motive, just not the method.

Frankly, she’s very, very lucky to survive the first couple of missions, and that’s only one of the aspects which strains credibility. The makers get a demerit for using Ireland to fake the North of Scotland, and it appears remarkably easy to track down international terrorists. Perhaps the book on which this was based did a better job? Given the gritty nature of proceedings, I was expecting a greater level of intrigue and deception. For example, despite being officially “unattached”, I was predicting B or Marc to still be working on behalf of their former employers, manipulating Stephanie towards their ends. Maybe I’ve just watched too many episodes of Homeland.

There are some impressive elements. Probably the most outstanding is a car chase, filmed to look like one take, shot entirely from inside Stephanie’s vehicle as she flees the scene. It’s almost as good as the one from Children of Men, the gold standard for such things. I also did like Lively’s performance: she has rather more to do here than she had in The Shallows, and acquits herself well, both dramatically and in the action scenes (she smashed her hand up badly while filming a fight scene with Law). However, on reaching the end, I found myself unmoved, and given the general lack of spectacle present, this isn’t one I’ve much interest in revisiting.

Dir: Reed Morano
Star:  Blake Lively, Jude Law, Sterling K. Brown, Raza Jaffrey 

Darlin’

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★★★½
“Mother of all predators”

This strange little film probably makes more sense if you’ve seen The Woman, in which a feral cannibalistic woman, played by McIntosh, was captured and kept in the basement of a dysfunctional family. While this features McIntosh in the same role, it does work as a standalone film: its predecessor may help explain some of the background. Here, the woman drops off her equally uncivilized teenage daughter (Canny) at a hospital. Unsure of quite how such an unusual child should be handled, Darlin’ – called that, because of a bracelet spelling that out which she is wearing – is handed over to the Catholic church.

In particular, to St. Philomena’s Home, a dubious institution run by an even more dubious Bishop (Batt). He sees in Darlin’ the chance for his parish to make a name for itself by “redeeming” their new ward in the name of the Lord, which would help them stave off an impending financial crunch. But when the Woman returns to the hospital, and finds her daughter is no longer there, it quickly becomes clear that she will go to any lengths to recover Darlin’ and punish those who are trying to exploit her. And even though the teenager is no longer quite the wild child she was, as the saying goes: You can take the child out of the woods, but you won’t necessarily take the woods out of the child…

McIntosh is probably best known for her work on The Walking Dead. But on this site, we adore her for Let Us Prey, and her directorial debut is little if any less savage. However, it is probably fair to say that the script – also written by McIntosh – tries to cram too many things into its pages, and comes up short as a result. Not to say there aren’t moments of supreme effectiveness. Just that they are diluted by the film’s desire to go in so many different directions. For example, despite the Woman’s apparently inexorable quest for Darlin’, she vanishes for much of the second half, instead just hanging round a homeless women’s encampment to no particular purpose. It’s a shame, as I don’t think I’ve seen a more genuinely scary female character in a film for a very long time. [Though Darlin’ doesn’t fall far from that tree, at least initially]

The rest is more hit or miss. Going after the Catholic Church for child abuse is… Well, it feels kinda obvious, though there’s a righteous anger here which does at least seem honest. And the civilized version of Darlin’, despite now being able to communicate through speech rather than growls, seems less interesting, as if she had lost much of what separated her from any other teenage girl. Neither of these really work so well, as the more linear concept of a mother prepared to do absolutely anything to reclaim her daughter, which is when the film is at its best and most memorable.

Dir: Pollyanna McIntosh
Star: Lauryn Canny, Bryan Batt, Nora-Jane Noone, Pollyanna McIntosh

Stripped Naked

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★★★
“Firmly dressed to kill”

Even if the film doesn’t quite live up to the title and poster, it turned out to be better than I expected… from the title and poster, to be honest. It has been my experience that, the more lurid the advertising, the more disappointed I’m likely to be. Films like this often don’t just fail to deliver on what they promise, they also struggle with basic aspects of film-making, like plot and characterization, providing a double-whammy of failure. While the former is true here (no-one, at any point, is ever stripped naked), the underlying construction proved to be solid enough to keep me watching and engaged, to a greater degree than I was anticipating.

Cassie (Allen) gets dumped out of the car after a bitter argument with boyfriend, Jack (Cor). Seeking help from another car, she finds herself in the middle of a drug-deal which goes horribly wrong for everybody else. This leaves her in possession of $90,000 in cash, and about the same value of meth, providing a potential way out of her job as a “professional undresser”, shall we say. However, Jack finds the money in Cassie’s house, which she shares with fellow dancer, Jade (Pirie), and the former owner of the money sends a hitman (Slacke, looking like a low-rent version of Bill Oberst Jr.) to recover it. It’s not long before the bodies start piling up, and Cassie realizes she has bit off more than she can chew.

From the sex-and-violence angle, this is remarkably tame. Despite being strippers, both Cassie and Kyle seems remarkably attached to their clothes. There is some secondary nudity from the background, but on the whole, the story could have had them be waitresses, without the slightest impact. It also takes Cassie a while to tap into the inner bitch she needs to be, for survival, but that does become an increasing part of her character as the film develops. One incident in particular had me remarking, “Good riddance to bad rubbish.” There’s another interesting dynamic present, in the shape of Kyla (Cinthia Burke), one half of the sibling team who run the venue where Cassie works, and who turns out to have a murky past of her own.

It’s characters like these which make it work. Kyla and brother Howie (Linden Ashby), for example, are not your prototypical sleazy strip-club owners, being rather kinder than generally depicted. Cassie and Jade both have unexpected depths, too, though I do have qualms about the latter’s eyebrows, which have been tweezed into near-oblivion. Jack is probably the most underdrawn and, consequentially, least-interesting character. The plot unfolds along the lines you’d expect, though the final reel delivers some unexpected twists, and not everyone you think is going to survive, ends up doing so. Had this actually provided the heady mix of grindhouse elements promised by the title, poster and trailer (below), it could have been a classic, rather than the acceptable way to pass the time it turns out to be.

Dir: Lee Demarbre
Star: Sarah Allen, Jon Cor, Tommie-Amber Pirie, Mark Slacke

The Nightingale

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★★★
“Pack your bags, we’re going on a guilt trip!”

History is largely filled with people being unpleasant to each other, usually for belonging to a different race, religion, nationality or even species [if you want to go back to the Cro-Magnons pushing out the Neanderthals about 40,000 years ago]. It’s sad and unfortunate, but it’s not something for which I feel personal responsibility – not least because it tends to work in both directions. My ancestors may have been part of the British Empire who, for example, invented the concentration camp in the Boer War. But my ancestors were also subject to the ethnic cleansing of the Highland Clearances, forced out to make way for sheep. Attempts to make me feel guilty for the sins of my forefathers are thus largely doomed to fail.

And what we have here, is a well-crafted exercise in manipulation. It’s set in what is now Tasmania, then a penal colony where the British garrison were trying to maintain control, both of the prisoners and the indigenous population, using savage brutality against both. One of the former is Clare Carroll (Franciosi), an Irish woman convicted of theft who is now married to another prisoner and working in an army garrison. She is at the mercy of Lieutenant Hawkins (Claflin), who wields a letter of recommendation, which would give Clare and her family freedom, as power over her. Circumstances escalate to a night where she is raped and left for dead, while her husband and infant child are murdered. Hawkins leaves for the capital of Launceston, in pursuit of a promotion. Clare follows, intent on revenge, helped on the trail by Billy (Ganambarr), an Aboriginal tracker, who has also borne the brunt of colonial savagery in his past.

It’s effective, in the same way that a 2×4 across the head will get your attention. It’s not exactly subtle in the parallels being drawn between Clare and Billy, who have both suffered at the hands of the evil Brits, and who subsequently bond over their victimhood. Hawkins is such an evil swine, he might as well spend the entire film twirling his mustache. But despite being such an obvious attempt at generating outrage, it’s not without its merits. Franciosi delivers a fierce and intense performance, as someone who has lost everything, and so is prepared to go to any lengths to take revenge on those who destroyed her life.

Perhaps the most chilling sequence has her hunting down a soldier, already wounded in an encounter with the local population (which seems to have strayed in from an 80’s Italian cannibal film!). The savage way in which she takes him down and then beats his head to a pulp with her rifle-butt… Yeah, she is clearly highly motivated. However, the simplistic way in which white men are, almost without exception, portrayed as stereotypical villains undoes much of the good work put in by the actors, and dampens its overall effectiveness.

Dir: Jennifer Kent
Star: Aisling Franciosi, Baykali Ganambarr, Sam Claflin, Damon Herriman

The Obsidian Curse

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★★
“Cursed or worse.”

Blair (Brauns) gets out of prison, after a year inside for drug offenses, and is shocked to find her boyfriend (Caraccioli) has married Yvonne (Cameron), who has become the step-mother of her young child. Worse follows, for visitation is contingent on Blair finding and maintaining regular employment – not easy given her rap sheet. Her boyfriend’s new wife, very kindly, points her in the direction of a job as a tour guide at a local cavern. So far, this sounds more like some kind of Lifetime TVM – and not even the good Lifetime TVM – to the point I was wondering why I had this one on my ‘to-do’ list.

Ah, here we go. For, it turns out, the cave system is home to a witch who has been infected with a curse. Blair has become the patsy who is going to take the curse off. And it’s a particularly nasty curse, which basically turns her into a magnet for evil creatures of all kinds, from zombies to vampires. If she’s going to see her daughter again, “maintaining regular employment” has just become a relatively minor problem. I love this idea. It’s like a more feisty and action-oriented version of Night of the Demon [the fifties movie, rather than the eighties one], with the concept of a curse which cannot be dispelled, it has to be passed on to someone else to get rid of it. The concept of Blair having to figure out how to do that, while simultaneously fending off a selection-pack of night creatures, is one with great potential.

Unfortunately, it’s not what we get, at all. To begin with, there’s the ending [spoilers follow]… Well, it doesn’t have one. There’s absolutely no sense of closure. Blair is still cursed, little or no closer to finding a solution, and separated from her kids. I’ve grown used to this kind of thing in books, where you’re given the first volume free, then left dangling to try and get you to buy future volumes. It doesn’t work there, and here, the movie doesn’t even have the grace to inject a cliff-hanger ending into things. It just… finishes, lying there like last night’s empty beer-cans. [spoilers end] Nor is there any escalation: you’d expect things to ramp up, towards a battle against a particularly Big Bad. Nope.

On the positive side, the monsters are surprisingly well-realized for the budget, with some particularly effective mask work. And despite a strange accent, Brauns (from Sweden, reaching Los Angeles via England, New Zealand & Australia – which explains the accent far better than the movie does!) is a decent heroine, driven by her strong maternal love. There is some good camerawork, not least a sequence in which Blair has to battle her way across some heathland, through a small army of zombies. However, neither this, nor even a cameo from horror icon Bannister (star of the Phantasm franchise), can come close to countering the thoroughly underwhelming effort, put into what’s little more than half a story, and missing any final climax entirely.

Dir: Rene Perez
Star: Karin Brauns, Cody Renee Cameron, John Caraccioli, Reggie Bannister

47 Meters Down: Uncaged

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★★★
“One for the shark buffet, please.”

Director Roberts returns for a sequel to 47 Meters Down, once more diving (literally) into similar territory. Here, he doubles down, this time sending four young women underwater to be trapped and become shark bait, rather than two. Munching ensues. But there’s enough variety in this iteration for it to prevail, after a pretty shaky opening act. This plays like some bizarre version of Mean Girls, with heroine Mia (Nélisse) getting pushed into her school’s swimming pool by a bratty fellow pupil. It’s all very short skirts, perfect teeth and family drama, to the point that Chris was beginning to look at me oddly and wonder what the hell I’d put on.

Anyway, Mia and stepsister Sasha (Foxx) bail on the intended sailing excursion to go off with pals Alexa (Tju) and Nicole (Stallone) to a secret swimming hole in the Yucatan where they, and apparently no-one of Hispanic origin, live. The pair’s dad is some kind of marine archaeologist, who found an underwater Mayan city down there, so for a lark, the four decided to do an impromptu bit of cave diving. BIG mistake. A collapse seals off the exit, and the only way out is to go on, down and through the underwater complex. Not helping, to put it mildly, are the giant white cave sharks which are apparently delighted to have a bit of variety in their diet, in the form of American teenager.

It certainly perks up when the angsty teenage drama is abandoned in favour of swimming and screaming. Roberts pushes the camera in really close for the most part. Combined with the (understandably) limited amount of light, this does make for some rather chaotic sequences. Yet on the other hand, it unquestionably emphasizes and enhances the claustrophobia which is the tension’s main contributor. The sharks are genuinely creepy too, not least having lost their sight due to the conditions – if shark eyes are chilling, then sightless shark eyes are worse still. I got the impression this was wanting to be an underwater version of The Descent, and there are much worse targets at which a horror film could aim.

It all ends in a grandstand sequence of increasing peril, as the (less than four) survivors try to make their final escape from the water. Admittedly, it does rely on sharks that apparently don’t want to commit to the munching, preferring a little love-nibble to snapping their victims in half (a similar issue to Crawl, where the non-disposable characters appeared to be made out of kevlar). Despite this cop-out, it’s a rousing enough finale, largely making me forget the early struggles. If there’s nothing much among the performances to suggest the daughters of Jamie Foxx and Sylvester Stallone should be following in their fathers’ footsteps, as adequately entertaining shark movies go, this one is certainly… adequately entertaining. And I speak as something of a connoisseur of adequately entertaining shark movies.

Dir: Johannes Roberts
Star: Sophie Nélisse, Corinne Foxx, Brianne Tju, Sistine Stallone

Women’s Justice, by Chrissy Wissler

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

In the 1880’s, the town of Butte, Montana is a mining boom-town – instead of gold, it’s mostly copper which fuels its economy. The wealth comes at a cost, as the huge amounts of acrid smoke belched from the smelters and plants turns day into night, along with creating perpetually “noxious, disgusting air.” Off the train and into this smog steps Cat, a woman with no shortage of a past. A former prostitute, but also a ranch-hand, her preferred outfit of blue jeans and six-shooter is most atypical for a woman of the times. Almost immediately, she is drawn into the mysterious and suspicious death on the street of another “fallen woman,” Norma. The apparent cover-up goes right up to “Copper Kings” such as Marcus Daly (a real tycoon from that time and place), and it quickly becomes clear that whoever was behind Norma’s demise, is none to happy to find Cat looking into the matter. To find the truth, she’s going to have to navigate her way through both ends of Butte society.

What stands out for me is Wissler’s incredibly verbose style, in which a whack on the shoulder with a plank merits several pages of descriptive prose. There’s one sequence, where Cat returns to the boarding-house where she’s staying, and discovers an unexpected dinner party in progress, when it feels like chapters elapse between the front-door and dining-room. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing – it’s not like she’s Alexandre Dumas, getting paid by the word. Indeed, it’s often interesting to get a deep dive into Cat’s thoughts and motivations, since she has a past that influences much of her behaviour; not least, a hinted-at violent incident involving her sister, Alice and her abusive husband. But there were times when I would have been happier for the plot to move forward at less of a glacial pace.

There’s no denying the author’s talents at generating the nightmarish world, with its poisonous air, and yawning gulf between the haves and the have-nots. Those like Norma can be pitched from the former category into the latter in a moment – and return is almost impossible. Instead, you can end up in the tunnels below the city streets, a virtual living hell for the lowest of the low. Cat’s history gives her an ability to empathize with the lower classes, while still capable of interacting with their “betters”, though there are times when her abilities seem to come close to telepathy, in terms of reading people. She could probably make a great living as a poker player. And despite the pistol on her hip, the action is limited – she never gets to draw it at all. Even the final face-off with Norma’s killer in those tunnels, entered from one of Butte’s grandest brothels, sees her largely defer to others in the name of justice.

There are some typos and missing words in the text, and I wonder if the word “bum” – as in rear – would genuinely have been used repeatedly by an 1880’s cowgirl. It seems rather too British: surely “ass” or “butt” (not to be confused with Butte!) would have been more likely? But despite flaws, this does remains an evocative depiction of a time and place which feels different from the usual Western fare. And it’s all the better for that.

Author: Chrissy Wissler
Publisher: Blue Cedar Publishing, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 2 in the Cowboy Cat series.

The Furnace

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★★★
“Run Mary Run”

Two days after getting married, Mary Harris (Bernadette) is involved in a car accident which kills her new husband and leaves her barely able to walk. But she has one goal: to compete in the Furnace, an ultra-marathon race through the African wilderness, in which she and her late husband had been planning to take part. This aim goes strongly against the desires of her mother, but Mary won’t be deterred. With the help of her mentor (Dlamini, looking like a younger version of Morgan Freeman), nicknamed “Coffin” due to his day-job as a gravedigger, she claws her way back to fitness, and to the start-line. But is she prepared for everything the environment can throw at her, and make it to the finish? To do so, she’ll have to overcome not just the lethal heat, but also predators for whom she’d be a tasty snack, and poisonous scorpions whose venom induces disorienting hallucinations.

It’s certainly a change of pace for Bernadette, who has previously been seen on this site in Killing Joan and All Girls Weekend, as well as the largely woeful I Spit On Your Grave reboot, Deja Vu, not reviewed here. This is a film heavy on the F-word – by which I mean “faith”. Its religious overtones may be enough to write it off for many, but even as someone who possesses no real commitment there, it still worked well enough as a story about fighting through and triumphing over adversity. The race itself is the most effective section, with a constant stream of problems to overcome, and fortunately that does represent the majority of the film’s running-time. I must admit, I guessed the truth about her running companion, Raphaella (Linn) well before the film revealed it, and that angle is perhaps one where the faith-based elements become more than a little overwhelming.

Exhaustive research i.e. five minutes of Googling, couldn’t locate any race comparable with the Furnace, and it does seem a highly perilous endeavour, even with a GPS attached to participants. “If you’re stationary for more than seven hours, you’re disqualified, and we come pick you up,” says the organizer. Shouldn’t that be “If you’re stationary for more than seven hours, you’ve been eaten by hyenas, and we come pick up whatever is left in a bucket”? It’s certainly not my idea of a challenge to which I aspire, but there are people like Mary who seek to push their limits, so it’s not that far-fetched. Throw in decent cinematography and animal work and you’ve got something that  entertained me rather more than I perhaps expected, though Coffin’s voice-over does become a little superfluous in places. It’s not a film which an atheist is likely going to be able to appreciate, yet dammit, even I found myself getting fractionally emotional for the final scene. I’d probably be more inclined to credit Peters’s performance for that, rather than any kind of divine intervention.

Dir: Darrell Roodt
Star: Jamie Bernadette, Luthuli Dlamini, Laura Linn, Thandi Puren