Category: Feature

(Development) Hell is for Heroines: The Films That Never Were

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For every script that makes it to the theatres – or even to video – a dozen crash and burn somewhere on the road. The reasons why are often impossible to discover. Movie studios are understandably reticent about their failures, not least because they tend to cost a lot more money than our screw-ups. However, these scripts often refuse to die, and a number have become public, whether from disgruntled writers or through studio interns.

Often, studios won’t give up on the central idea entirely – in two out of the three cases here, the movies were eventually made, and the remaining one is still possible. Obviously, any draft is likely to change en route to the screen, but for the examples here, new and radically different scripts were/will be commissioned. Barely the faintest trace of these proto-versions remain to be spotted, and that is what makes them so intriguing, since they provide a glimpse into what might have been…

George A. Romero: Resident Evil

“I just…never seen ’em comin’, Reddy. Never even…had a chance to…turn a gun on ’em.”

Romero is most – indeed, almost solely – famous for his trilogy, Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead, so seemed ideal for a movie based on zombie slaughterthon Resident Evil. Brought on as writer/director after filming a Japanese commercial for the game, the script he came up with was rejected by the producers and he was dumped. According to Romero, “I don’t think they were into the spirit of the video game and wanted to make it more of a war movie.” After Steven Norrington (Blade) & Jamie Blanks (Urban Legend) were supposedly attached, the job eventually fell to Paul W.S. Anderson. His take was certainly more of an action flick than a zombie one, and probably also had less in common with the game itself [see elsewhere for our review] But what of Romero’s version?

The main thrust – a mission to contain an outbreak of reanimating T-virus in an underground lab – is preserved, but the hero is male. Chris discovers that girlfriend Jill is part of an undercover military team, and through a (frankly implausible) series of events, ends up on the job as well. The rest of the team is the usual mix of heroes and villains, though “Rosie Rodriguez, a tough, body-built babe” suggests one too many viewings of Aliens.

Romero’s problems are, as ever, plot and dialogue. Chris literally stumbles into a secret entrance, yet apparently played there as a child. Chris and Jill get one brief scene, are separated for 30 pages, then come perilously close to having a quickie between kills. Then there are speeches like, “They made you believe you were doing a good thing when it wasn’t good at all. It was evil! The kind of evil that resides in all of us. Makes us greedy, uncaring. The kind of evil that will wipe us out, in the end. Unless we stand up against it.”

However, the pace is fast and the bio-organic weapons show good imagination – particularly the undead sharks, an idea first mooted in Lucio Fulci’s Zombie. There’s also intelligent, aggressive plants, a giant snake, and the pinnacle of research, the Tyrant, simply one bad mother which I’d really like to have seen on screen. It all ends in a hotly pursued dash out of the facility, similar to the eventual movie, though the very end owes a little to Return of the Living Dead.

That sort of thing means you can see why the producers felt deja vu – indeed, a character even says, “Christ, this is like Night of the Living Dead!” The emphasis is on the zombies; in particular, the dispatch thereof – you’d get more head shots from this film than pumping your ticket money into House of the Dead. I sense the intense, graphic violence would likely have displeased the MPAA, a group with which Romero has crossed swords in the past. Dog Soldiers covered similar “soldiers-in-peril” territory and showed the concept was not without promise, though I profess myself satisfied with the way Resident Evil eventually turned out, despite the cool monsters here. Maybe some ideas will eventually surface in Romero’s long-mooted fourth entry in the zombie series: Brunch of the Dead, anyone?

 Daniel Waters: Catwoman

“Sanity to the wind, the large, now-eerily-shadowy lounge has been completely swallowed by the most multi-layered, full-throttle cat-fight in the history of cinema. The women totally communicate in cat-screeches, all human capabilities on hold.”

Daniel Waters’ career has been one of ups and downs. For every brilliantly-observed piece of satire, such as Heathers, there has been…well, Hudson Hawk. However, also on his resume is perhaps the best Dark Knight movie yet made, Batman Returns – though, let’s face it, with a supporting cast including Christopher Walken, Michelle Pfeiffer and Danny DeVito, a telephone directory would likely have made compelling viewing.

After that film’s success, a Catwoman feature was floated, and Waters wrote a script, dated June 16th, 1995, but it never made it into production. Waters seems to have bad luck like that; see also his The Model Daughter and adaptation of Stranger in a Strange Land. Or, rather, you can’t, as neither got made. Nobody seems to know for sure why Catwoman wasn’t produced, but Michelle Pfeiffer’s pregnancy around this time probably helped shove it onto the back burner. The departure of Burton from the franchise also dampened Pfeiffer’s interest.

Waters’ strength is parody through excess, and there’s something about the world he envisages which parallels the society in Demolition Man, except in reverse. While both enforce happiness on their inhabitants, San Angeles has erased violence in all its forms (at least until the arrival of Snipes and Stallone!), while Oasisburg has turned vigilantism into a spectator sport. The Cult of Good, led by Captain God, wipe the floor with criminals, to the cheers of an adoring crowd. However, they aren’t quite what they seem, as Selina Kyle finds out. She’s recovering there after losing her memory in the events of Batman Returns, but dons her catsuit once again to take on the not-so-good guys.

There is a feminist subtext here, particularly a sequence where the camera swoops around Oasisburg, passing over the undertrodden females. Subsequently, a slew of…ah, copycats hit the city streets, in a backlash of feminist fury. Yet Daniel Waters’ middle name is not “subtlety”, and neither sex gets off lightly – this sexual revolution ends in a massive…er, catfight in the ladies’ room.

This is, very clearly, a parody of the superhero genre, playing with the conventions of secret identities, powers, merchandising and so on. The part of Spooky, one of the CoG members who is a woman masquerading as a male superhero, looks to have been written for Michelle Yeoh – one move is described as “a famous maneuver of renowned Hong Kong actress Michelle Khan — hint, hint” which puts Waters several years ahead of Hollywood in recognising her talents.

It is perhaps a little too light-hearted for the likes of Tim Burton, and somebody such as Sam Raimi would have been a better fit. Outside of Selina, there’s not much characterisation, but it’s still undeniably a fun script to read, with any number of scenes – not least the finale – that leap off the page into the imagination.

Subsequently, Selena Kyle vanished from the Ashley Judd version of the story, being replaced by a character called Patience Price – see here for a review of a 2002 script. However, the latest word on the Halle Berry version seems to be to toss everything out: “We aren’t keeping anything from Catwoman except the original idea: the character,” said slated director Pitof in an interview. Odds are that it will be a very different film from Waters’ script. And that’s probably a shame.

Brent Friedman: Tomb Raider

“Lara takes a few steps back, runs and leaps to the first pillar, pulling herself up on top. A tall flame ignites from the top center of the pillar! Instinctively, Lara backflips, executing a half twist in midair as she lunges back for the ledge”

Few films had as twisted a path to the screen as Tomb Raider. [For a three-part history of some of the rumours since August 1997, see here, here, and here] Friedman’s was among the first – and certainly first publicised – attempts at a script, on which Patrick Massett, John Zinman, Akiva Goldsman, Luc Besson, and Steven E. DeSouza later tried their hands. Both Friedman and DeSouza had experience in transforming games to movies (Mortal Kombat and Streetfighter II respectively), but neither received credit for the final version.

Friedman’s script, dated 17th July 1998, is pretty lacklustre and cliched; reports suggest he was caught between the demands of Paramount Pictures and Eidos Interactive, and as a result ending up compromising away any originality and imagination. Part of the problem was that of all the producers and executives involved, only one had actually played the game. This might explain the opening sequence in which both Lara’s parents are killed in a Himalayan air-crash, a radical deviation from the game mythos.

The McGuffin here is a map which points the way to El Dorado, the lost city of the…er, Incas? Aztecs? Mayans? Atlantans? Lara is pitted against Malvern, an Australian who also, in one of the film’s eye-rolling character traits, owns a whaling ship, so must be the bad guy. Lara battles him over a secret treasure capable of transforming base metals – in a twist, it’s used to make plutonium rather than gold.

The script bips from Tibet to Curacao, then settles down in Peru, before a finale in the Pacific, where Lara’s actions are hardly ecologically sound, and kinda contrast with the “villainous aquatic mammal killer” theme. Mind you, there’s something mildly sadistic about this Lara: at one point she shoots two rivals with tranquilizer darts, then covers them in honey and leaves them to the fire ants.

Once they enter the El Dorado complexes, the script reads like a description of levels from the game, with levers to pull, gaps to jump, tunnels to swim through, and keys to rooms located in other places. It’s hard to see how this could have been brought to the screen without feeling like you were watching someone playing the game. In addition, the trick used to locate an entrance is a painfully direct steal from the textbook of Dr. Jones – as is the massive, rolling boulder that forms one of the traps inside.

Interestingly, one element that survived to the final movie is a fight which turns out to be a training session, in which her Tibetan monk mentor, Karak, resembles Clouseau’s Cato. The script is also heavily gadget-laden, making Lara come across like some Jane Bond, rather than someone who is all the secret weapon she needs. Overall, it’s not likely to grab the viewer by the throat, and would likely have failed to satisfy game fans or casual theatre-goers. However, it’s not much worse than the one eventually used – let’s hope the upcoming sequel, Cradle of Life, addresses this weakness, perhaps the most common one seen in game-to-movie conversions.

Postscript: I was also going to include William Gibson’s script for Alien III here, but after discovering that movie went through no less than ten writers, think it deserves an entire article on its own, covering the horde of different versions available. Don’t hold your breath though…

Les Femmes Nikita

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In 1990, Luc Besson made Nikita – known as La Femme Nikita in the United States – one of the most influential action heroine movies of all time. It inspired one official remake, an unofficial Hong Kong version, a TV series that ran for 96 episodes, and elements of it have cropped up ever since, in a huge range of creative endeavours, from The Long Kiss Goodnight through Prisoner Maria to Dangerous Prey and Phantom: The Submarine. With the release of the original movie in a “Special Edition” DVD (albeit one that, by most accounts, isn’t very special), and the first season of the TV show also coming out in a box-set, it seems like a good opportunity to take a look at the films and series which owe the most direct debt to Besson’s creation.

  • Nikita (film)

    ★★★★½

    nikitaLuc Besson’s original contains all the necessary elements which would become standard for the field. A criminal is “killed” by the government, only to be resurrected into a new life as an assassin for the authorities. Initially resistant, she eventually embraces her new life, but a romance reminds her of the world she left behind, and becomes a potentially lethal threat to her existence when it starts to interfere with her professional capabilities.

    This kind of thing has been done so often since, in one form or another, it’s hard to remember how fresh and invigorating it seemed at the time. Even so, not many movies since have had the courage to make their heroine a junkie cop-killer, and it says a lot for both Parrilaud and Besson that Nikita still comes over as sympathetic. She’s a victim of circumstance, her only use to the state as a trained killer, but the film strongly makes the case that she remains a person, with feelings and emotions like the rest of us.

    It is these that eventually prove her downfall, when she encounters Victor the cleaner (Jean Reno), and realises that he is what she will eventually become. Seeing him kill people, as easily as we would swat a fly, it’s clear that, no matter how lengthy her indoctrination and training, she still kept her essential humanity and there is a line she won’t cross. Mind you, the original ending was rather more explosive, with Nikita turning her skills to exact revenge on her creators. Whether through a lack of resources, or a desire for a less confrontational finale, this was dropped in favour of a softer, more ambivalent ending which was also copied by subsequent versions.

    Though this might have been nice from an action heroine point of view – as is, you wonder why they bothered with all that specialized training – I’m more than prepared to settle for the actual version of the film. The performances are all sound, Parillaud’s in particular (her “singing” voice is a stroke of genius!), and Besson’s style shines through a bluish haze of raindrops, wet streets and car headlights. Avoid, at all costs, the English dubbed version: that’s what Point of No Return is for. Even if you can’t or won’t read subtitles, you will have little difficulty in understanding the film, such is the raw emotion the actors put into their portrayals.

    At two hours long, there is perhaps a slight deficit of actual action, not least in comparison to the hyperkinetic pace of contemporary genre entries. Some facets of the film, such as the romance, seem overplayed, albeit largely because the actors get the significance over so well. However, it’s not as if you’ll find yourself looking at your watch, and – if you’ll pardon the pun – the execution here is almost flawless.

    Dir: Luc Besson
    Star: Anne Parillaud, Tcheky Karyo, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Jeanne Moreau

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  • Point of No Return

    ★★★

    ponrThis was called The Assassin in Britain, though a more fitting title would be Remake of No Point. I hadn’t seen this since it originally came out, and it was a quite deliberate choice to watch it first for this article, hoping to escape the sense of deja-vu. Unfortunately, I couldn’t: its strengths are exactly those of Besson’s original, while the weaknesses are largely its own.

    I can see the purpose of remakes, be they of old movies or foreign ones, when you bring something new to the table. However, it’s entirely understandable that Luc Besson passed on directing the American version, pointing out that he’d already made the movie he wanted. For Venice, read New Orleans. For Nikita, read Nina. For Jeanne Moreau, read Anne Bancroft. About the most significant difference in the storyline is that Fonda listens to Nina Simone.

    Balancing the cast off, most are fractionally less effective than their French counterparts, although not so much that you’d notice. There are two exceptions: Dermot Mulroney fails miserably as Maggie’s boyfriend, J.P, to the point where I would have run screaming out the door, and that was after less than two hours in his company. Their relationship fails to convince, and since Badham places it close to the centre of the film, it’s a major flaw.

    On the other hand, Harvey Keitel comes perilously close to stealing the whole show as Victor the Cleaner. Jean Reno was good in the original, yet Keitel brings a whole new dimension of menace, and clearly inspired Tarantino for Pulp Fiction. They missed the chance for a spin-off of genuine inventiveness there.

     But what little originality actually is brought to the film, largely doesn’t work, in particular a sappy romantic montage between Maggie and J.P. As a director, Badham does a good job with the action sequences – you’d expect nothing less given his track record in the likes of War Games – even when all he’s really doing, is recreating scenes such as the kitchen shoot-out (watch those desserts fly!). There does seem to be rather more Fonda underwear footage too… :-)

    Relocating everything to the States is not such a bad thing. While I don’t know about the French government, a school for psychotic murderers is by no means beyond the bounds of possibility – the infamous School of the Americas does much the same for Latin American death squads. And, taken on its own, this is not a bad film. But if you have ever seen the French original, then the American remake becomes entirely superfluous and, as mentioned above, it feels more like you’re watching an English dub, albeit a credibly well-voiced one.

    A remake was supposed to be necessary because American audiences wouldn’t watch a subtitled film, but when the box-office spoke, Point took only $30m. The original was a French take on a mostly-American genre, but something is definitely missing when it comes home. Perhaps Badham should have slept with Fonda during production, as Besson did with Parillaud.

    Dir: John Badham
    Stars: Bridget Fonda, Gabriel Byrne, Dermot Mulroney, Anne Bancroft

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  • Black Cat

    ★★★½

    blackcatBefore the official remake of Nikita came out, Hong Kong had already delivered its take on the matter. The film starts in New York, and a large part of this is in English, though the acting there is so woeful as to make you lean towards the Chinese dubbed version. The heroine, Erica, is made more sympathetic: while she still kills a cop, she’s not a junkie, and is “shot” while trying to escape. She wakes up under the watchful eye of Simon Yam, in the “Uncle Bob” role (though here, he’s a ‘cousin’).

    From here, the plot is similar to Nikita – missions, qualms, romance, escape attempt, etc – and interestingly, her boyfriend (Thomas Lam) is a photographer, an idea also used in the later Point. There are, however, significant differences in the details. For example, Erica has a chip implanted in her brain, supposedly, to help her achieve her full potential, but all it seems to do is give her raging headaches [admittedly, a potentially useful control mechanism]. They also skip the etiquette lessons, which seemed irrelevant to me anyway – how do good table manners help, when your mission solely involves the use of a sniper rifle?

    The specifics of her missions are also altered. The final test, rather than an assassination in a restaurant, is to kill the bride at a Jewish wedding, for reasons left unexplained – but given the heavy weaponry carried by a lot of guests, it’s perhaps no bad thing! Others involve shooting an executive of the WWF (the nature group, not the wrestling federation!), a throat-slitting at a Japanese hot spring resort, and, in the best-staged sequence, dropping a lot of metal from a great height onto the roof of her target.

    However, the movie’s main strength is Jade Leung, who fully deserved the Best Newcomer award she won at the 11th Hong Kong Film Awards. Every facet of her character is consistent and believable, certainly more so than Bridget Fonda – it’s at least the equal of Anne Parillaud, and arguably may be even better. Yam is perhaps a kinder, gentler handler: he doesn’t shoot his protege in the leg, for example, yet the relationship between them is missing the romantic spark which lurked in the original. As for Thomas Lam, he’s not Dermot Mulroney, and that alone is an improvement.

    The film is undeniably flawed, not least in a soundtrack that is often wildly inappropriate, and seems to have been pulled at random from easy-listening CDs. But its core is solid, and in a lot of ways, this is a more justifiable movie than Point of No Return. While the story remains the same, Black Cat does at least bring a bottle to the party, adding enough new twists to make it interesting (and avoid a lawsuit). Leung’s fine performance is an unexpected bonus.

    Dir: Stephen Shin
    Star: Jade Leung, Simon Yam, Thomas Lam

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  • Black Cat 2: The Assassination of President Yeltsin

    ★★★

    blackcat2While neither Nikita nor The Assassin ever resulted in a sequel, the success of Black Cat lead, immediately to a follow-up. This is both good, in that it forced D&B Films into coming up with some new concepts, and bad, because what they came up with is a barely coherent mess. They take Leung – who had won the ‘Best Newcomer’ award – and give her a role where she gets to speak twice. The real star is Robin Shou, well before his Mortal Kombat days, and with a much better haircut too.

    He plays a CIA operative – the laserdisk subs say this stands for Central Intelligent Agency, clearly dating this before 9/11 – who is investigating a group out to assassinate President Yeltsin. Their chosen hitman has been beefed up with some kind of ill-explained technological wizardry, but luckily, one person can detect the radiation he gives off: Black Cat, who now has a chip in her head (to match the one on her shoulder, hohoho). This leads to an amusing sequence where Black Cat heads off on her own, charges into a mall, and shoots an old lady because – wouldn’t you know it? – the senior citizen just happens to be giving off the same kind of radiation, courtesy of her medical treatment. Well, I found it amusing, anyway; there’s something about a head-shot which spatters the face of a nearby clown with copious amounts of blood. Er, just me, then? :-)

     Okay, the movie may never be dull, and is certainly not short on action. Yet it doesn’t make any sense. Why would the CIA send operatives into Russia to save their president? And what are they doing operating in America? Isn’t that illegal? Oh, I forgot – it’s the CIA we’re talking about here. Leung’s robotic performance – even though entirely appropriate, since she now comes with an remote-control off switch – also feels like a terrible waste of her talents. There’s a lot of wire-work in the action sequences, but it’s not badly done; the highlight is probably a fight in a steel-works where both Robin and Jade have to take on large numbers of adversaries. The final battle, when Black Cat fights the assassin around the wreckage of a crashed plane, is cool too, with the two antagonists bouncing off the debris.

    However, the overall impact is bitty and sporadic. While there are some nice ideas, they are poorly thought-out and developed, and the script doesn’t meld them into any kind of satisfactory structure. The action sequences feel equally bolted-on, though I did like the use of a President Yeltsin lookalike (at least, one presumes it was a lookalike, though I recall the real ex-President Gorbachev did appear in a Wim Wenders film). After the critical acclaim that greeted her debut, Jade Leung could have turned her skills in any direction; unfortunately, this disappointing follow-up is largely symptomatic of the poor choices that seem to have dogged her subsequent career.

    Dir: Stephen Shin
    Stars: Robin Shou, Jade Leung, Zoltan Buday, Patrick Stark

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  • La Femme Nikita: season one

    ★★★
    “French kissing in the USA”

    To say I approached this show in a roundabout way would be an understatement. 15 years after its original screening, after three separate movie versions and two seaseons of the largely unrelated version of the story starring Maggie Q, I finally got round to it. So, bearing tht in mind, it’s a different beast from what I expected – mostly because it’s a lot less action-oriented. Peta Wilson, as lost soul turned government operative Nikita, looks like she could potentially kick your arse, but (largely for budgetary reasons, I believe) there’s only token moments of hand-to-hand action: the focus is much more on spycraft, undercover work and deceit, rather than full-on assaults. There are still occasional sequences, but even these tend to involve relatively brief gun-battles, not the martial arts brawls which are one of the new version’s trademarks.

    The other chance is that Section One, their version of Division, is not malicious – at least not in the same way. It’s certainly a heartless organization, which is utterly ruthless, and prepared to dispose of anyone who may interfere with their actions, but it’s more an awareness that when you’re dealing with terrorists, organized crime or other threats to the country and world, you can’t be unwilling to get your hands dirty. It leads to a significant bleaker overall tone, and is amazingly prophetic, given this was screened well before 9/11 led to this attitude become a necessary part of national security. Early on, it’s established that you can never trust Section heads Operation (Glazer) and Madeleine (Watson, who was also part of the remake, playing Senator Pierce – her given name there was also Madeleine), to the extent that their deceit becomes almost a cliché.

    There are some direct nods to Besson’s movie: her first assignment is to murder a target in a crowded restaurant, and the bathroom assassination crops up in a later episode. On the other hand, there is one significant difference from the original film, in that Nikita here is genuinely innocent of the crime for which she is sentenced, simply happening to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Her refusal to engage in the actions Section demands of her is a strong thread of the first season, with a reluctance to compromise her moral code being pitted against Section’s desire to control her for their own ends. Early on, she risks “cancellation” (termination with extreme prejudice) more than once, by disobeying orders, usually to protect others from Section action.

    Another area in which this show differs from the current version, is a much more pronounced use of music. There are fairly lengthy sequences, several minutes on occasion, where scenes unfold over almost all of a song. A soundtrack CD was about the only piece of merchandise given any wide-scale release by Warner Bros, including the title track by X-Files composer Mark Snow, as well as songs by Depeche Mode and Morcheeba. Also popping up in the first season, are Morcheeba, P.J. Harvey, Sister Machine Gun and several tracks by neo-classical/industrial band In The Nursery, whom I coincidentally went to see in Hamburg, back around the time these episodes first aired. It’s certainly a trademark of the show, and is an aspect I consistently enjoyed.

    On the other hand, apart from the lack of action, the angle I liked least was the relationship between Nikita and her handler/fellow agent, Michael (Dupuis). I’ll come right out and say it: I hate ‘shippers, and storylines that pander to them are nothing more than an irritant to me, especially in shows which I watch for action, where they do little except interfere with the good stuff, in my humble opinion. [We’ve seen this in the new incarnation, where the show has disintegrated from one of the best shows on TV, into little more than Mr. and Mrs. Smith And Friends.] I’m definitely a “noromo”: If I wanted unresolved sexual tension and relationship nonsense, I’d watch daytime soap operas. Right from the first time Nikita and Michael meet, it’s doe-eyed heaven, even though there is obviously little or no honesty, trust and anything else on which a genuine relationship could ever be founded.

    There are also a number of aspects of the show which now seem undeniably dated, which is always going to be an issue when a series is trying to be “cutting edge”. Most obvious is the technology – an early episode has tech wiz Birkoff explaining about IRC, something now so passé, an explanation would probably be needed again! – but the opening credits always get a chuckle, especially the final “morph” at the end, which looks incredibly cheap. Meanwhile, Wilson’s accent drifts in and out without rhyme or reason: at times, she seems straight off Bondi Beach, while at others it’s almost entirely subdued.

    The episodic nature of this, with less concentration on an over-riding story arc, is both a strength and a weakness. It frees the creators up for some really good stories, but there’s not much incentive to plug in the next episode – I largely watched them in double-bills, but it took me more than seven months to get through the first season’s 22 shows. I enjoyed the bleakness and emotional chilliness depicted here, which as noted above, is probably more relevant now than then, but the obviously lower production values, and its replacement of high-energy action with dramatic angles that Wilson isn’t quite up to handling, brought its overall entertainment value down significantly. I’m probably just about interested enough to pick up the second season at some point: however, that is not likely to be for a while.

    Star: Peta Anderson, Roy Dupuis, Eugene Robert Glazer, Alberta Watson

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  • Nikita: season one

    ★★★★
    “TV Sinners”

    Most action-heroine fans will know that this was not the first TV series inspired by Luc Besson’s classic GWG film. Between 1997 and 2001, La Femme Nikita ran for four full seasons, plus a shorter fifth one, with Peta Wilson playing Nikita. In early 2010, the CW Network announced it was developing a pilot to try out a new version of the show, and this was picked up for a series in May. The CW seemed a bit of an odd choice: their idea of an action heroine tends more towards shows like Gossip Girl and the 90210 reboot, with a target demographic of 18-34 year-old women. So was this version going to showcase a kinder, gentler Nikita?

    I was reassured by the casting of Maggie Q as the lead, who has a solid action pedigree, both in Hong Kong (Naked Weapon) and the West (Live Free or Die Hard and M-I:3). While its source material was clear, it took a different approach. Instead of telling Nikita’s story from the beginning, with her recruitment into a shadowy semi-official organization and training as an assassin, it starts later, after she has mutinied and left them. Now, she is working to bring down the organization known as Division, its leader, Percy (Berkeley), and his right-hand man, Michael (West), who trained Nikita before she went rogue. Her ‘secret weapon’ is Alex (Fonseca), a new recruit going through training, while acting as Nikita’s mole and feeding her information, allowing her to sabotage and obstruct Division’s missions.

    The results have generally been pretty impressive, probably the closest thing to a true kick-ass heroine on network TV since the demise of Alias [which may have have happened some time before the end of Alias, if you get my drift]. If not quite as dark as the Wilson incarnation, it is certainly satisfactory on this level, with death, torture and treachery lurking in just about every episode. The characters arcs certainly have their twists and turns: the alignment of loyalties at the end of the series is radically different from where they started, with people on both sides crossing over. It’s easy for a show like this to get into a rut – Division sets up an operation, Nikita foils it, or whatever – and the generally avoided this pitfall.

    In what one suspects was a nod to the target demographic, this was as much about Alex as Nikita, who has her own past to contend with. There is, probably inevitably, the love interest, in the form of a blandly attractive next-door neighbour, who is basically the first man she meets after Alex completes her training and goes into the outside world. There was something similar for Nikita, though this first looked to be heading in one direction, then swerved in another during the second half of the show. That was one of a number of changes made mid-season: it seemed as if the makers needed to fine-tune things on the fly; I was concerned where this might lead, but it didn’t hurt the show.

    One particular improvement was the appearance of Amanda (Melinda Clarke). Initially Division’s psych evaluator, she took a much more prominent role, and the relationship between her and Alex made for an interesting dynamic, not unlike Sidney Bristow/Irina Derevko [hmmm…]. We also enjoyed Berkeley’s portrayal of Percy: remembering him as the heroic, if inept George Mason in 24, this was a real change. The final couple of episodes had some epic twists, though I was a bit peeved with the “deaths”, which proved not to be terminal. I find it a cheat: as we saw with Buffy, once a character has come back from the grave, death tends to lose its sting, though the execution here was not as clunky or contrived.

    They even crammed in nice nods to the original movie and its TV predecessor too, with a dive down a chute to escape, and a cameo from Alberta Watson, one of La Femme Nikita‘s actors, as part of the intelligence committee supposedly in charge of Division. By the time the dust has settled, Nikita was driving off into the sunset with a surprising ally, and Alex was also teamed up in a new way, setting things up nicely for the second series. Whether it was going to get one or not seemed in doubt for a while, as the rating did sag mid-season, dropping the show onto the ‘bubble’. However, it was announced in May that the CW would pick it up for another series, moving the show to Friday nights to play along with Supernatural.

    However, all the plot is perhaps secondary; we want to see ass being kicked. I have largely to agree with Maggie Q, who said, “In terms of action, I don’t see our quality of action on any other show right now. I’m sorry. They may have bigger explosions, but our fights are genius.” For TV work, it’s certainly well above average, and she was apparently instrumental in getting the original co-ordinator fired: “This is my genre, what I’ve been doing for 14 years. I know it well. There’s a level of quality I will not let dip, ever, when it comes to the action… I said, he’s gotta go. It’s dipping. It hasn’t dipped enough in a way that audiences have recognized yet, but it will. I know his style. He’s not innovative. He doesn’t have what it takes to take the show to the next level. And we’re done. We’re done here. We need to bring someone else in.”

    What stands out in particular is how much of her own work Q is doing [and, to a lesser extent, Fonseca]. As she also pointed out how much things have changed: “I remember seeing bad wigs on doubles. Then they cut to a close-up, then there’s a wide shot and you know the actress is not doing it. When I fight, you’re right there in our faces – very Bourne. You expect that from that calibre [of film], so why wouldn’t you expect it on TV?” That’s what I think probably impressed me most about the show: at its best, you could stand it beside Salt, and it would not suffer in the comparison. Here’s an example:

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    Yep. I think it’s safe to say that the series has delivered copious amounts of high-quality action, combined with mostly interesting characters, and sufficient plot twists to keep us thoroughly entertained. Overall, it ranks among our favourite five shows of the year to date, of any genre, and comfortably leads the pack as far as action heroines go. We’re already looking forward eagerly to its return, so we can find out what lies in store for Nikita, Alex and Amanda. Oh, and some of the non-heroines too. I guess. :-)

    Star: Maggie Q, Shane West, Lyndsy Fonseca, Xander Berkeley

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  • Nikita – Sexy Killer

    ★★
    “French kissing… And rather more…”

    [Note. This is a XXX-rated film, so while I’m being very restrained, the discussion of it is, of necessity, still for mature readers.]

    nikita sexy killerI don’t have any problem with pornography, but the concept of porn with a storyline leaves me somewhat baffled: it’s a combination that doesn’t seem to make sense. Personally, I either want to watch people having sex or a movie with actual characters and a storyline; I don’t think I’ve ever been in the mood where I’ve thought, “I want 2 1/2 hours that combine hardcore pornography with more traditional elements of cinema,” but that’s what you have here. Actually, 2 1/2 hours of hardcore pornography alone, seems like serious overkill, by a factor of somewhere between five and ten. I certainly didn’t get through this in one sitting.

    But I was intrigued by the concept. The porn parody has a long, disreputable history, from Skinemax fluff like Lord of the G-Strings through to hardcore entries like – and, I swear, I’m not making this up – Naporneon Dynamite. But this, dating from somewhere between 1996 and 1999, depending on which source you believe, is the first I’m aware of which was based on an action heroine. [Subsequent investigation turned up what appear to be multiple entries involving Lara Croft-alikes. I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for reviews here] The star here, Sarah Young, got her start doing Page 3 shoots at the age of 14 (!), and transitioned to hardcore later, under the care of her future ex-husband, Hans Moser. Last I could find out, she had quit the adult industry, and was studying to be a lawyer.

    Anyway. This film may simply be titled “Sexy Killer”, going by the print – this would make more sense from a “not having Luc Besson sue your ass off” front, but the IMDb begs to differ, so I’m going with that. It certainly does follow the basic storyline of Nikita, particularly early on, though the crime which gets the heroine, Sarah Lester (Young) on her journey into Nikita, is a home invasion – albeit one which turns into a group sex scene between the actual invading of the home and the cops showing up. Then, as in the original, she shoots a cop while high, but is bailed out of the resulting life sentence, by Serge (Clark), who offers her an alternative: wet work and other operations for the organization in which he works. There’s a restaurant scene where she has to assassinate another diner, and another mission involves sniping from a window, both of which will be familiar to fans. But the film does divert at the end, where – and I trust I’m not spoiling this for anyone – Nikita lifts some incriminating documents she’s supposed to be recovering, and uses this as leverage to break free from her employers. Which is actually a kinda cool idea, I have to admit. I also appreciated the cat-fight between Nikita and her mentor/colleague, Jeanette (Sartori). Besson missed a trick there, I feel. And the subsequent lesbian canoodling.

    Mostly, though, it’s about the sex. Lots and lots of sex, with the ratio of that to plot being approximately 3:1. And, since the running time is 152 minutes, that is an awful lot of multiple aardvarking, as Joe Bob Briggs used to call it. As for what happens in the remaining 38 minutes (approx), you have to cut the performances some slack, given dubbing where the voice actors are far more enthusiastic with regard to moaning and groaning, than the actual dialogue. But, actually, the actors aren’t bad: in particular, Clark is spot-on, as the world-weary agent tasked with keeping his rebellious underlings in line, and a good equivalent to Tchéky Karyo (or Gabriel Byrne, if you prefer the remake). But the action scenes are perfunctory, and little more than a token gesture – admittedly, it’s an entirely different kind of action in which the makers are interested, so criticizing them for this seems irrelevant. It is possible to make films that mesh hardcore sex with narrative in an interesting way: Caligula is perhaps the best-known example, and Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, by reports, also does so. Here? Not so much, and it’s probably of interest only to Nikita completists.

    Dir: Mario Bianchi (as “Nicholas Moore”)
    Star: Sarah Young, Christoph Clark, Stefania Sartori

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Anna-Nicole Smith, Action Heroine?

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“Twin towers”

I confess to a certain bemused amusement with regard to Anna Nicole Smith. The 1993 Playmate of the Year is not my type at all – the word “grotesque” has crossed my lips more than once concerning her physique – but her 14 month marriage to multi-millionaire J.Howard Marshall was like watching a train wreck. Did anyone ever doubt it would all end in tears and lawsuits? She was 26, he was 89; five years after his death, an LA judge awarded Smith $449,754,134 from his estate (it works out at somewhere over $40,000 for every hour of the marriage!). That verdict is still being appealed, but hell, for that money, wouldn’t you sleep with a ninety-year old?

In addition to a number of videos entirely reliant on her flesh, the former Vickie Lynn Hogan from Mexia, Texas has also starred in two “proper” films. I bought these on a whim – I was drunk, too, but it took quite some time before I plucked up the courage (and, let’s be honest, consumed an appropriate amount of alcohol) actually to put either of them into the DVD player.

  • Skyscraper

    ★½

    The obvious point of comparison for Smith would be Pamela Anderson, another Playboy playmate who moved into films of doubtful quality, but any such comparison would be unfair. To Anderson, that is, who given the right role, is not actually too bad. With Smith, you get the feeling she simply has no talent, and any character would be a stretch, let alone the Shakespeare-aware, ace helicopter pilot and crackshot she is supposed to portray in this shameless Die Hard clone.

    She is trapped in a tower block by a bunch of criminals who are after a computer chip which…er, well they never actually say what it does, but they clearly want it bad. Just like Brooce, she’s bickering with her other half, a police officer – “I wanna have a baby,” she whines, not long after the immortal line, “Well, excuse me for still believing in Sunday walks in the park and little babies.” It was at this point, that my sympathy for her character made its excuses and left.

    Other points of similarity with McTiernan’s classic action film:

    • Hero/ine crashes in through a plate glass window, half-way up the building.
    • Slimy worker tries to cut a deal with the terrorists, only to get a fatal come-uppance.
    • Bad guys are largely European types – though in Skyscraper they look pretty gay, too.

    When in motion, the general execution is not so bad, and the first of these probably provides the film’s best sequence, as Smith leaps onto a window-washer’s cradle, and dangles from a cable, trying to avoid gunfire from the rooftop. Not brilliant, I admit, but compared to much of the rest of the movie, it stands out as tense and well-staged.

    The script and the acting sink this one early, and it’s damned further any time Smith opens her mouth. The chief villain – associate producer Hubner – quotes Shakespeare badly, mixing in the odd Biblical quote for good measure: his performance is mercilessly skewered in one review which includes a highly amusing parody of his style. Another article, now sadly lost, spent half its time detailing a Saturday night search for a copy of the video. The other supporting characters such as the cowardly security guard are, at best, good ideas badly implemented, and at worst, pointless wastes of space (who are probably also associate producers – there’s a coincidence!).

    Smith whips ’em out four times: one shower scene, two consensual sex scenes (one as a flashback, while she’s right in the middle of evading the terrorists!), and one rape – the last of these might actually have some vague relevance to the storyline, but the others certainly don’t. Her attempt at any kind of action are ultra-lame as well, presumably out of fear that any kind of sudden motion could rupture an implant. She might have been better served by trying to smother the terrorists, Double Agent 73 style.

    It’s easy to imagine the pitch for this one: “It’ll be Die Hard with tits!” Given the vast number of other clones in that style made before and since, such an endeavour was probably inevitable – and in the right hands, or at least with the right leading lady, might have had some potential. Instead, the main reason to watch this is for some cheap laughs at the most woeful acting performance since the early days of Pia Zadora. Bad movie fans will likely love it; everyone else should stay clear.

    Dir: Raymond Martino
    Stars: Anna Nicole Smith, Charles M. Huber, Richard Steinmetz, Branko Cikatic

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  • To The Limit

    ★★

    To_the_Limit_FilmPosterIf this film is superior to Skyscraper, it’s largely because it has a good bit less Anna Nicole in it. You may even actually find yourself paying attention, simply because the plot doesn’t make much sense for the first 45 minutes; you wonder how it took three writers to come up with the plot, unless they were locked in separate rooms. It was only later that I discovered it’s a semi-sequel to another Martino work, Da Vinci’s War, in which Nouri and Travolta’s characters previously appeared. Does help explain why the movie hits the ground running and doesn’t bother to explain who anyone is.

    From what I can work out, ANS is Colette, an undercover CIA agent. It is at least more plausible than the helicopter pilot thing, since the best undercover agent is somebody no-one would ever believe was one. This makes Anna Nicole very, very good indeed. She gets involved when her lover (Nouri) is blown up by a car-bomb on his way to the wedding of Da Vinci (Travolta), which is simultaneously rudely interrupted by a massacre, though it’s not a patch on the amazing one in Queen’s High.

    It does leave Da Vinci’s new wife dead, and he himself is badly injured, and barely survives a follow-up attempt in the hospital, when a “nurse” tries to poison him. It all turns out to be orchestrated by the heavily-tattooed, bearded but bald, bad guy Arthur (Bannon), who is after a CD-Rom that threatens to incriminate him in…oh, the usual bad-guy stuff, I guess: murder, drug-dealing, and not phoning his mother on Sundays.

    As a result, both Da Vinci and Colette are now being hunted, and must team up to ensure their safety from a constant stream of assassins pointed their way by Arthur. A pleasing number of these are women, but what else would you expect from a film containing no less than three Playboy Playmates of the Year? [Smith (1993), Rebecca Ferratti (1986), and Kathy Shower (1985)]

    This is shallow, straight-to-video fodder, but is at least workmanlike, and Travolta is a good deal less smug than his more famous brother. I still question the need for three writers, especially given a particularly lame climax on the Hoover Dam, which will certainly have you handling your CDs more carefully for a while. Nicole Smith is slightly better than in Skyscraper, though any speech longer than a sentence starts teetering perilously towards “I wanna have a baby!” territory.

    tothelimitThere is one decent sequence in which she shoots her way out of a motel, which I confess had me wondering briefly who this competent action actress was. Otherwise, it’s pretty much business as usual, with two sex scenes (Nouri and Travolta are the unfortunate actors involved), one bath scene and a shower scene, both of which have Colette paying special attention to cleaning certain of her bits, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. Actually, I’m reporting the shower scene second-hand; I dozed off, and it was left to my fiancee, Chris, to experience that horror…

    Dir: Raymond Martino
    Stars: Joey Travolta, Anna Nicole Smith, Jack Bannon, Michael Nouri

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  • Illegal Aliens

    ★★½
    “Anna Nicole’s last film. It’s probably her best, though that’s not saying much.”

    Okay, her swansong won’t be up there with James Dean’s or Bruce Lee’s, but this does at least sense its own idiocy, rendering the movie somewhat bullet-proof, critically speaking. It’s supposed to be dumb, wildly implausible and hideously over-acted. So condemning it for these flaws is complaining because your hotdog tastes of meat. A trio of shape-shifting aliens land on Earth to protect it from the scum of the universe. Thanks to their first encounter with our culture coming in the shape of a porno mag, they opt for the form of attractive women. Two end up getting jobs as FX/stunt people in Hollywood – a sadly underexplored angle – while the third is…Anna Nicole Smith. Then their nemesis (Laurer, the actress formerly known as Chyna) turns up, taking over the body of a mobster’s wife, and prepares to bring about the end of the world. Can she be stopped?

    We do have a huge tolerance for “bad” movies in this house, not least Smith’s earlier efforts, so maybe appreciated this more than most. However, for every neat idea, such as the trio taking Cameron, Lucy and Drew as their human names, another doesn’t work at all, or is just creepy, like the director’s apparent obsession with AN’s toilet habits. The film also swings from decent production values – some stunts and chases are large-scale, though I suspect may come from other flicks – to cheapjack as hell. For instance, at one point there’s a ‘Super Villain Monologue Timer’, an amusing idea…except they spell it “Villian”. Ouch. Laurer channels Vincent D’Onofrio from Men in Black to an embarrassing extent, but is still oddly fun to watch, though there’s a strange difference in approach between her or Smith, and the other two leads, who play it almost straight.

    There’s no doubt this film is, if not cashing in on her death, certainly shrugging its shoulders and taking advantage of an unfortunate situation. I don’t really blame them for that, even if anyone looking for skin will be wasting their time here. In sharp contrast to her previous, ah, body of work, AN’s clothes remain on; as exploitation goes, this is tame and restrained. And that may be the main problem: a failure by the makers to decide which way to go. SF/action or all-out comedy? There’s enough of each to suggest, with greater commitment, either might have worked better. Instead, it comes off as somewhat lukewarm – can’t say we were ever bored, yet I can’t say I was ever more than mildly amused.

    The DVD was released in the US on April 22nd by MTI Home Video, and includes a commentary, deleted scenes and bloopers.
    Dir: David Giancola
    Stars: Anna Nicole Smith, Joanie Laurer, Gladys Jimenez, Lenise Sorén

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Anna Nicole Smith sees herself as a modern-day Marilyn Monroe, and it’s tempting to suggest that her best hope of lasting fame probably lies in sleeping with the President, followed by an early suicide. This would be cruel and unkind but, having sat through these, I’m not feeling especially sympathetic towards Vickie Lynn. Mercifully, the ongoing lawsuits appear to have terminated her movie career, and for once, I can only appreciate the slow, tortuous nature of the legal process in modern America.

Andy Sidaris: A man, a plan, a genre

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My wife Arlene uses all of these fancy words like “motivation” and “story”. Where the fuck did you learn those words? I couldn’t spell “story” if you spotted me the “s” and the “t”, for chrissakes. — Andy Sidaris

You have to give Andy Sidaris a lot of respect. For twenty years or so, he has been living outside the Hollywood studio system, happily putting out his own style of movies. You don’t do that without tapping into something popular, and Sidaris’ formula is simple: Bullets, Bombs and Babes. The DVDs even have symbols by the chapter stops to indicate content in these three areas.

The product that results usually involves a number of Playboy playmates in a variety of exotic (yet not too expensive) locations e.g. Las Vegas, chasing the bad guys with a selection of weaponry and gadgets. Throw in some gratuitous but inoffensive nudity, a little action (not overly bloody!) and a curious, almost total, lack of profanity. Wrap in a suitably enticing sleeve, release to video, and wait for the profits to arrive. So obvious, you wonder why no-one else thought of it first.

It’s perhaps no surprise that Sidaris gravitated towards the action genre, having for many years been a TV sports producer, winning seven Emmys in the process. He also was responsible for the football scenes in M.A.S.H., though director Robertn Altman stiffed him out of credit for that, to Sidaris’s lasting disdain; more than 30 years later, he said of Altman, “If you call up central casting and say “send me a prick over,” he shows up.”

Yet his career got off to a slow start, more than a decade passing between his directorial debut and his third feature, Malibu Express, which is probably the first “true” Sidaris movie in terms of style and content. This was a happy time for the low-budget film-maker, as the growth of video meant an enormous demand for product. And Andy, along with his wife Arlene, and occasionally son Christian too, was in a great position to supply that need. Their small but well-crafted action adventure pics might not out-rent the latest Hollywood blockbuster, but they’d likely outlast it on the shelves.

In the third millennium, financing new movies has become a little harder, but the Sidaris catalog has found a new lease of life on DVD. They put a lot of major studios to shame in terms of extras, especially given the low retail price – commentaries (albeit with Sidaris occasionally drooling over his actresses a bit too much), featurettes, trailers and the “Andy Sidaris Film School” where you learn how to stage car-chases, etc. How he gets all those Playmates to star in his movies remains a trade secret. :-)

Since I started writing this, Andy Sidaris passed away from throat cancer in March 2007, without getting to make Battlezone Hawaii – the script was written, centred on the theft of a Faberge egg, but it never went into production. Having now seen all his “bullets, bombs and babes” flicks, there are none which merit a seal of approval. A few are good; others are actually pretty bad. But they have a consistency of tone and content which is somehow re-assuring. You know, more or less, exactly what you’re going to get, and they always deliver.

To quote Arlene, “The Sidaris dynasty is built on the theory that every four years there’s a college freshman in a frat house on a Friday night who wants to see a Sidaris movie.” And with their rolling, but always photogenic, cast of dolls and hunks, not to mention plots that never tax the brain, Andy Sidaris makes near-perfect movies for that situation. Crack open the beer, order the pizza, switch off all conscious thought and be entertained..

I feel like when there’s nudity required, it’s there. Certainly some of it is gratuitous, I’m not going to lie to you, but hey, that’s what we’re here for. In the play ’42nd Street’, where he says “You go on that stage an unknown, you come off that stage a star,” I say “You step into that hot tub an unknown, you step out that hot tub a star.” — Andy Sidaris

Stacey

By Jim McLennan

★★★½

While this wasn’t Sidaris’s first feature – he’d done The Racing Scene, with James Garner in 1967 – this was likely the prototype of the BB&B (Blood, Bullets & Babes) flicks that would become his trademark. If all the elements do not quite mesh in the way they eventually would, they are all present, mostly in the shape of Anne Randall, a former Playboy playmate who plays private investigator Stacey, and looks a bit like Heather Graham.

The story bears more than a slight resemblance to Malibu Express (below), except with the sexes swapped out. Here, the PI is a she, called in by a rich invalid to investigate the shenanigans surrounding her extended family, and soon discovers an employee is banging one relative and blackmailing her gay husband, among other unpleasantness. He soon turns up dead, and there’s no shortage of suspects. Stacey finds the camera set-up he used to get the blackmail material, and retrieves a couple of rolls of undeveloped film [Yeah…that pretty much dates the film, right there!]. However, when the bullets start to fly in her direction, she realizes that someone wants to prevent the prints from being seen, and is prepared to stop at nothing towards this end.

Stacey is actually pretty cool: perhaps more so than some of Sidaris’s later heroines, the script makes it clear that she’s both smart abd capable of taking care of herself, with or without a gun. She also drives, very fast, something showcased in the final chase, pitting a race-car against a helicopter – it’s undoubtedly contrived, but the speeds on view are undeniably impressive. If they’d done a movie version of Honey West, this might have been kinda like it, though Stacey does take her top off with rather more frequency than Ann Francis would ever do.

That’s perhaps the result of this being a co-production between Sidaris’s production company and Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, each putting up half of the $75,000 cost. The production values are good, and there’s some surprisingly enthusiastic blood-squibbing going on. If some elements appear to have strayed in from Agatha Christie, and the supporting cast are entirely forgettable, there should be enough going on to keep the viewer interested, and I’ve seen an awful lot worse come out of the 70’s drive-in market.

Dir: Andy Sidaris
Star: Anne Randall, Alan Landers, James Westmoreland, Anitra Ford

Malibu Express

By Jim McLennan

★½

Female action fans would be well advised to give this a wide berth. Actually, so should everyone else, unless they’re fans of crass sexism, extremely clunky exposition and hideous country & western. Cody Abilene (Hinton) is a PI hired by Countess Luciana (Danning) to look into the export of illegal computer technology to the Russians, centred on the home of Lady Lillian Chamberlain. Who is responsible? Oversexed chauffeur Shane? Daughters Lisa and Anita? Or the maid, Marion? [groan…]

Luciana and police Detective Beverly MacFee (Sutton) are the prototypes for later Sidaris action heroines, but otherwise this is crude soft-porn with few redeeming features. Were impressed with Danning’s amazing costumes though; never realised you could do so much with a roll of coloured crepe paper. The hero starts off driving a DeLorean, which rapidly goes in for repair, and is replaced by a series of less-expensive junkers which the production can afford to abuse. The over-frequent voiceovers that add nothing to the plot. The sub-plot involving a family who’d have been thrown off the Dukes of Hazzard for being too stereotypical. Need I go on?

With all the bed-hopping, this isn’t a film that has dated well – two decades of AIDS see to that. But it’s hard to imagine an era in which this could ever have seemed like passable entertainment. The occasional spurts of genuine imagination (such as the resolution, which I have to admit we didn’t see coming) aren’t nearly enough to justify the 101-minute running time. I suspect that a film concentrating on Luciana would have had much more potential – albeit at the cost of several more rolls of crepe.

Dir: Andy Sidaris
Star: Darby Hinton, Sybil Danning, Brett Baxter Clark, Lori Sutton

Hard Ticket to Hawaii

By Jim McLennan

★★

Also known as Hard Titties in Hawaii – at least in this house – it’s a big step forward as far as the evolution of Sidaris’ work goes. After the flailing around that was Malibu Express, he’s now firmly settled on Hawaii as a location, and jiggly action/adventure as the genre. However, he still unfortunately seems to want to cram lame comedy in there, such as clunky references to his previous films, while many of the actors appear not to have been chosen for their thespian ability – to their credit, Speir and Carlton aren’t particularly the worst offenders.

They play, respectively, a local agent and a former agent now embedded in a new identity, courtesy of witness protection, who stumble across two packets of diamonds belonging to drug dealers. With the help of a couple of colleagues, including the brother of Cody Abilene from Malibu Express (Cody has apparently gone off to learn acting – which certainly explains his previous “performance”), they have to destroy the crime syndicate, though I’m pretty sure you can fill in the rest of the plot yourself. Not least because of the wildly gratuitous “let’s take our tops off!” sequences, such as the relaxing brainstorming session, which naturally takes place in a jacuzzi. [Carlton doesn’t even bother to get anything above her belly-button wet.]

The great majority of this film is actually a lot less fun than it sounds, since too many of the earlier scenes are pointless padding, despite blatantly thieving one of the best lines from Aliens. Even the nudity is not particularly well done, and the action is limited since the sum total of federal manpower is apparently “four” – I blame budget cutbacks. Then you reach a final 15 minutes where razor-edged frisbees, a villain who proves harder to kill than Jason Vorhees, explosive-tipped crossbows, and a snake contaminated with stuff from cancer-infected lab rats (no, really!) all suddenly play their part. This turns the last reel into berserk excess that’s gory by Sidaris’ standards, but undeniably and endearingly loopy. It’s just a shame that you have to sit through 75 pretty dull minutes in order to find this madly imaginative climax.

Dir: Andy Sidaris
Star: Dona Speir, Hope Marie Carlton, Ronn Moss, Rodrigo Obregon

Picasso Trigger

By Jim McLennan

★★★

Salazar (Aprea) is a famously devious assassin who gets shot by a sniper just after he donates a painting (of the emblematic ‘Picasso triggerfish’) to a Parisian art gallery. This sparks a series of lethal attacks on undercover federal spy teams who are Salazar’s enemies. But are the various bad-guys, who use all manner of tricks to eliminate government agents, all working for a criminal mastermind?

Sidaris makes amusing action films by casting Playboy pinups and hunky TV actors, and crafts low-budget Bond style thrills in exotic locations. There’s not much point in expecting greatness from these stereotyped heroes and villains, as the quintessential Sidaris formula simply requires some beautiful women to strip at regular intervals, a number of offbeat stunts and violent explosions, occasional bouts of kung fu, and frequent travel scenes in small planes, flashy boats and fast cars. On these terms, Picasso Trigger is a splendidly uncomplicated production showcasing several enjoyably ridiculous gadgets: a boomerang grenade, a radio-controlled toy car bomb, and a missile launcher disguised as a crutch!

If what you want is a speedboat chase in which the hero cannot shoot straight, lots of busty babes in bikinis (or less) carrying enough weaponry to fight a small war, crooks guilty of everything from drug-smuggling to snuff movies and white slavery, and a scattering of throwaway one-liners, Picasso Trigger fits the bill, perfectly.

Jeff Young
Originally published in Video Vista
www.videovista.net

Dir: Andy Sidaris
Star: Dona Speir, Hope Marie Carlton, Steve Bond, John Aprea

Savage Beach

By Jim McLennan

★★½

This one doesn’t really get going until the second half, when the search for a lost hoard of Japanese wartime gold, looted from the Philippines, leads to a remote island. There are CIA agents, revolutionaries, a left-behind Japanese soldier and, of course, our lovely heroines Dona and Taryn (Speir and Carlton) who end up there after their plane crashes in a storm. Or rather, “storm” – you can get a cheap laugh by seeing the bright blue skies as they land in the middle of a clearly hose-supplied downpour. Sidaris probably felt the need to justify their otherwise implausible strip-tease shortly after departure. Or do FAA regulation stipulate pilots must remove their tops in emergencies? Two take-offs for the price of one…

Such clunky exploitation is disappointing, but the back and forth round the island is fun, though note how our heroines’ carefully-applied camouflage paint mysteriously vanishes minutes later. Not that it impairs their concealment abilities, given the brilliant white shirts they wear. Kudos to Teri Weigel as the rebel who spouts rhetoric before, during and after undressing, giving the lie to the myth that Playboy centerfolds can’t talk and walk simultaneously. The rest of the cast, however, seem to have problems in this department, though Speir acquits herself creditably.

There does seem to be rather more blood here than usual, with some enthusiastic squibbing. However, the characters show a low level of intelligence that is, unfortunately, necessary to the plot. While I’m happy to forgive economies of scale – and, really, the film looks pretty good for the budget – it’s harder to accept flaws in the script that would have cost Sidaris nothing to fix.

Dir: Andy Sidaris
Star: Dona Speir, Hope Marie Carlton, Rodrigo Obregon, Michael Mikasa

Guns

By Jim McLennan

★★★½

Two federal agents (Speir and Vasquez) are hot on the trail of South American gangster Degas (Estrada), after one of their friends is shot during one of his hits – but perhaps that’s really what he wants? Zipping around from Hawaii to Arizona to Las Vegas, this was the first Sidaris movie I saw, and was probably better than I expected. While obviously not shot on an unlimited budget, most of the deficiencies are made up for in energy and a host of interesting characters.

Those on the wrong side of the law come off particularly well: Estrada is suitably nasty, and his sidekick of few words is an early role for Danny Trejo. Add a pair of transvestite assassins, and Devin DeVasquez as Degas’ murderous squeeze, and the heroines seem kinda bland in comparison, despite good support from Chuck McCann and Phyllis Davis, making an impression in small roles. Cynthia Brimhall is perhaps the best of the cover starlets, though I could certainly have done without her lounge singer turn. Speir still seems to be finding her feet, while Vasquez merely looks pouty.

It’s the action sequences which really show up the paucity of the production. Helicopters chasing motorbikes is all very well, but Sidaris might have been better off reining in his ambition, to something more in keeping with his pocket. The smaller-scale stuff works better, such as a nice double-hit involving a computer screen and a radio-controlled boat – they were supposed to return the computer and get their money back, but couldn’t get the blood out of the keyboard…

Dir: Andy Sidaris
Star: Donna Speir, Erik Estrada, Roberta Vasquez, Bruce Penhall

Do Or Die

By Jim McLennan

★★

In a filmography not exactly noted for thought-out plots, this maybe counts as one of the thinnest. Donna (Speir) and Nicole (Vasquez) are targeted by death for Kane (Morita) for their interference in his illegal business ventures. But rather than simply bumping them off, as any sane criminal mastermind would do, he informs them of his intentions to send six separate pairs of assassins after them, beginning the next morning. Our pair of federal lovelies head out of Hawaii, little knowing that a tracker has been placed on them, allowing Kane’s to follow them, while their master sits in his apartment and follows the progress of his “game” on a computer display resembling a bad TRS-80 game [younger readers can Google “TRS-80” if they need specifics], as they proceed from Las Vegas to Louisiana, with a motley crew of associated agents in tow, including infamous Meyer model, Pandora Peaks. No prizes for guessing her role.

There seems to be an awful lot more sex than violence here; the action sequences are not exactly thrilling, and the assassins are, almost without exception, entirely incompetent, so pose little or no threat. Even the boss level ninjas that represent the final obstacle are easily fooled into hanging around inside a hut long enough to be blown-up. The structure is obvious: the ladies are attacked, fend off their assassins with some semi-nifty piece of technology, then there’s the required love-making scene, showcasing generally artificial attributes. Rinse. Repeat. Six times. It’s kinda amusing to see Morita playing a bad guy, not least because his massaging Oriental sidekickess is a good four inches taller than him, as well as about forty years younger.

Brimhall gets to do another musical number, which is startlingly inappropriate in just about every way, though I confess I did find myself humming along when it was replayed over the end credits. However, I also found myself seriously dozing off during the early stages, and little of what transpired subsequently proved sufficient to retain my interest.

Dir: Andy Sidaris
Star: Donna Speir, Roberta Vasquez, Pat Morita, Erik Estrada

Hard Hunted

By Jim McLennan

★★★½

It’s very easy to mock a film, when the lesbian necking starts before the meaningful dialogue, and is immediately followed by a musical number where Cynthia Brimhall channels the spirit of Jimmy Buffett. Yet the endearing loopiness on display here did a better job of keeping my interest throughout than many movies made with far larger budgets. The plot centers on a jade Buddha, containing a nuclear trigger, which starts off in the hands of Kane (Moore), only for it to be swiped by an undercover agent: she is gunned down, but passes it to Donna (Speir), who has to try and keep it out of Kane’s clutches. However, an unfortunate bout of amnesia leaves her partner Nicole (Vazquez) and the other agents trying to find her first.

This is the usual mix of decent production values [if too much footage of aircraft flying], dumb plotting and breasts; the preferred method of communication is radio host Ava Cadell – who occasionally does her show topless from the hot tub. Just don’t drop the microphone. It’s harmlessly entertaining nonsense, and even has some local interest for us here in Arizona, with sequences shot in Phoenix and up the road in Sedona, though the geography on view is a little flakey. We particularly enjoyed Kane’s incompetent henchmen, Wiley and Coyote – as they helpfully point out, “Those are codenames” – with their Acme brand hovercraft. While it’s clear the film doesn’t take itself seriously (the intelligence community is not, presumably, at it like knives on an almost permanent basis), more of this kind of genuine humour would be welcome, letting you laugh with the film rather than simply taking the mickey.

You do get the feeling that Sidaris could make this kind of thing in his sleep: there’s nothing remotely innovative or challenging to be found here. Yet for what it is, this is slickly-made, with more ambition than usually found in the genre. Er, at least as long as the genre is that narrow subset of movies where horizontal action is of equal importance to any other kind – if you know what I mean, and I think you do…

Dir: Andy Sidaris
Star: Dona Speir, Roberta Vasquez, R.J. Moore, Rodrigo Obregon

Fit To Kill

By Jim McLennan

★★★½

Hang on, two movies ago, criminal mastermind Kane was Japanese – now, he’s the son of a Nazi officer who went on the run after the war with a diamond stolen from the Russians? I know I’m watching these all of our order, but still… They even refer to a pendant with a tracking device in it, given to the Japanese version of Kane, even though Moore now appears to be channeling Julian Sands, not Pat Morita. I’m so confused. Still, logic, continuity and coherence are not really the point here, are they?

This centres on said diamond, which a Chinese businessman plans to return to the Russians. When the jewel is stolen during a ceremonial party, Kane’s presence makes him the obvious suspect, not least because he has hired infamous assassin Blu Steele (Strain), turning her to his side after her attempt to kill him is foiled by a bulletproof vest. However, is everything what it seems? It’s up to Donna and Nicole (Speir + Vasquez), and their friends, to solve the puzzle, while dodging remote-controlled attempts to kill them (including a particularly-dumb pair of assassins known as Evel and Knievel), pausing only for changes of costumes, hot-tubs and the occasional spot of soft-core love-making. In other words, business as usual for a Sidaris film.

There’s a cheerful innocence to much of the nudity here, which harkens back to the 60’s, e.g. the radio station receptionist who has a hot tub as her desk, in which she sits topless. I actually prefer this approach to the more “intimate” scenes, and the relatively intricate plot also helps make this aspect a cut above [Kane and Donna end up having to work together after both are captured, which marks the first time I’ve genuinely been surprised by a Sidaris storyline development]. However, it does flag in the middle, and the obsession with remote-controlled models is not one I personally share, though overall, this still remains one of the better productions, with Strain fitting in perfectly as a villainess.

Dir: Andy Sidaris
Star: Dona Speir, Roberta Vasquez, R.J. Moore, Julie Strain

Enemy Gold

By Jim McLennan

★★★

While containing many of the same elements as usual e.g. boobs and bombs, this does at least throw in a new angle, in the shape of some Confederate gold buried in the woods since the Civil War – I can only presume Sidaris must have befriended a Civil War re-enactment battalion. Out enjoying a bit of off-road action, amusingly-named federal agent Becky Midnite (Simpson) and her two co-workers stumble across a diary written by one of the soldiers transporting the gold. However, their plans to search for the treasure are disrupted by efforts to kill them, courtesy of mob boss Santiago. He is upset after they shut down his operation that involved shipping drugs in hollowed-out watermelons. Fed up with the ineptness of his minions, he hires even more amusingly-named assassin Jewel Panther (Strain) to carry out what they have failed to do.

There’s a loopy insanity to elements of this that are kinda endearing, such as with Strain’s bizarre topless sword routine, which comes out of absolutely nowhere, or her costume when she meets a couple of park rangers, which is not your usual hiker’s attire, shall we say. No-one but Strain could probably pull that off, and she’s fun to watch as usual. However, after a prelude which explains the gold, the first half abandons it entirely, and goes off in a totally different (and not very interesting) direction, involving the raid which get Midnite and her squad suspended, amid political shenanigans and an agent who’s secretly working for Santiago. The final showdown between the various parties concerned is, quite possibly, the worst ever committed to celluloid, even allowing for the fact that Santiago is apparently a “hands on” criminal overlord, who believes that if you want a job done well, you should do it yourself.

The action around the forest is well-staged, with a decent vehicle chase whose danger is enhanced by the lack of helmets worn by the participants, and you’ve got to love the crossbow whose bolts explode three seconds after embedding in the target. The sole purpose of this delay seems to be in order for the target to get a “Wile E. Coyote” moment of horrified realization before exploding. Hey, I laughed…

Dir: Drew Sidaris
Star: Suzi Simpson, Bruce Penhall, Tai Collins, Julie Strain

The Dallas Connection

By Jim McLennan

★★

Among Sidaris fans, I imagine arguments over whether this one counts, much like the Never Say Never Again debate among 007 lovers. For this was directed not by Andy, but son Drew; Dad and Mom were merely executive producers. However, the content is much the same, though (and I can’t believe I’m writing this) Drew lacks the subtle touch of Sidaris Sr. Case in point: the very first shot is of the Eiffel Tower, establishing that this is Paris. However, the point is then rammed home with footage of the Arc De Triomphe, Place de la Concorde and Notre Dame. Similarly before the ‘South African’ scenes; we get so much wildlife footage, it feels more like the Discovery Channel.

The story, also by the director (using his first name, Christian), is equally poor; something to do with a plan to steal chips being used in a new satellite system. Details are vague, too many sequences, such as the one at the race-track, are just meaningless filler, and the writer literally doesn’t know his acronyms from his anagrams. On the plus side, Julie Strain makes a good impression as a bad girl, leading her coven of killers who drop their tops at the drop of a…well, not just hat, but virtually any other piece of clothing.

They operate out of what appears to be a combination line-dancing bar/strip-club called Cowboy’s in Dallas, where the four chips are scheduled to be integrated into the system. For safe keeping, the “bureau” give one to each of their agents – what’s wrong with a bank vault? – led by the ludicrously over-inflated Samantha Maxx (Phillips). Another key clue is bullets found at the scene of a drive-by shooting, days after the event. I’d have words with your forensic technicians.

Long before the end, we were making our own entertainment, and you’ll probably get more fun from mocking this. One line is, “I told you – I bite”, to which the correct response is, “Unlike the rest of the film, which simply sucks.” “Do you think those are real?” asked Chris at one point, regarding a particularly scary pair of mammaries. “Yes,” I replied, “and the Pyramids are a naturally-occurring rock formation.” Little wonder Drew has since been relegated by Dad to second-unit work.

Dir: Drew Sidaris
Star: Sam Phillips, Bruce Penhall, Julie Strain, Wendy Hamilton

Day of the Warrior

By Jim McLennan

★★

Andy was back on the helm for this one, but appears to have opted to go beyond subtle self-referential digs into full-blown camp, and I tend to think this takes away from the overall experience. The intent is clear when we are brought into the office of Willow Black, the head of L.E.T.H.A.L. (The Legion to Ensure Total Harmony and Law), and find her exercising on a treadmill in an outfit more suited for an exotic dancer. Which makes sense, because if you’re a female agent of LETHAL, you can bet you’ll be going undercover as a stripper or a porn actress – not quite the empowering government job one might expect. It also appears that breast enlargement surgery is required for all such operatives.

The target this time is the Warrior (Bagwell, who was a fixture in WCW at the time), a former agent turned professional wrestler(!) turned liberator of ancient artefacts and runner of a range of dubious business enterprises, ranging from bootleg films to diamond smuggling. LETHAL have several agents undercover, but someone hacks into their computers (which seem strangely retro from this viewing point). So the spies have to be brought in from the cold by Tiger (Sidaris newcomer Marks) before their cover is blow, including Cobra (Smith), the aforementioned undercover stripper – though there’s not much of her under cover. There is also, for no readily apparent reason, a Chinese Elvis impersonator (Gerald Okamura), though I have to say, he is kinda engaging.

The problem is, when it’s obvious the makers aren’t taking this seriously – and that’s clear from the handicap wrestling match which is the climax, between Willow and Elvis Fu on one side, and the Warrior on the other – why should the audience bother? And though the tone is clearly intended to be light-hearted, it’s not actually very funny: the comic hamming of the Warrior’s surfer-dude sidekicks is particularly dreadful. There also seems to be a lot of padding, such as stock-footage shots of Las Vegas, which go way beyond anything necessary or interesting, and you get far more uses of “I need to get something off my chest,” than are in any way amusing.

And if ever I become an evil overlord, I will instruct all my minions on the perils of hiding out in a shack with “Fuel Supply” spray-painted on the side, especially when the opposition has access to an explosive-tipped crossbow… It can never end well for those seeking cover.

Dir: Andy Sidaris
Star: Shae Marks, Julie K. Smith, Marcus Bagwell, Kevin Light

Return to Savage Beach

By Jim McLennan

★★★½

This was Sidaris’s last film, and after the disappointment of Warrior, it’s nice to see him return to a more straightforward approach, with little of the post-modernity attempted there. It is largely a sequel to Savage Beach, with a raid on the LETHAL offices puzzling Willow (Strain) and her agents, because the only thing accessed was the files on that case, which have long been closed. However, it turns out the villain there, Rodrigo (Obregon) did not die in a fiery, explosive-tipped crossbow bolt explosion as thought, and now sports a nifty mask, apparently lifted from a production of Phantom of the Opera. He sends his blonde minion in her submarine(!), along with his ninjas(!!), back to the island to claim a priceless Golden Buddha buried there, and it’s up to Cobra (Smith), Tiger (Marks) and their himbo colleagues, to stop him.

There are plenty of elements to provoke amusement here, witting and unwitting. The former would include a response to an agent’s description of her revealing dress as “Just something I threw on”, which is basically, “Looks like you missed low.” The latter? Their ‘Lacrosse’ satellite, which they use to track bad guys, but whose footage is clearly not taken from anything like overhead. There’s also the return of the remote-controlled toys, used to dispatch more than one guy, Ava Cadell’s reprise as the bikini-clad radio host of KSXY (along with the co-creator of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as her engineer Harry the Cat!), and how all the heroines and villainess are inevitably caught right when they are changing. I also enjoyed the nuclear countdown, which doesn’t just countdown, but does so in ever more hysterical tone.

There are still some negatives: in terms of drama, the movie effectively ends with that countdown, but there’s still 20 minutes to go. So it’s mostly filled with a rambling explanation by Rodrigo of everything that has happened to him in the decade since…which turns out to be completely irrelevant [“How many endings does this story have?” asks one character, with justification]. It’d also have been really nice if they’d brought back not just Obregon, but also the female stars of the original Savage Beach, Dona Speir and Hope Marie Carlton, rather than just use stock footage; their IMDB credits don’t show them as exactly having been busy. Still, with lines like “Now, what about that swim?” – and, oh look, their tops have come off – this is a fitting memorial to Sidaris, containing all the elements which made his films what they were.

Dir: Andy Sidaris
Star: Julie Strain, Shae Marks, Julie K. Smith, Rodrigo Obregon

The Chameleon series: An algebraic overview

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This trilogy of movies originally started with UPN in 1998, and had the clear aim of trying to generate enough interest for an ongoing show. As yet, that hasn’t materialised (it was most recently considered after part 3, according to Sci Fi Wire), but the series has been going strong anyway.

The setting is the near-future, when corporations have taken over, and even the FBI is now the Incorporated Bureau of Investigations. The star is Bobbie Phillips, who plays Kam, a creation of the IBI. She was made as a special agent, with mostly human DNA, but also traces of cougar, falcon and chameleon. This gives her an interesting power: she can make her skin match her surroundings almost perfectly. Fortunately – or not – this skill is also possessed by her clothes, which is a bit of a plot clunker, designed to avoid both the traditional Invisible Man-styled floating shirts, and gratuitous nudity.

It does beg the question: if you have material that can do this, why go to all the bother of breeding a person that can do it? Wouldn’t it be easier (and more fun for the audience!) to just give them a nice Seven-of-Nineish catsuit? The effect is nicely realised, even if it’s an ability only used at moments essential to the plot – when she mounts her final assault on the villain’s lair, it would be sensible to do so invisibly, but that would make for duller viewing.

Shot in Queensland, Australia, these may not be the most original pieces of work that you’ll ever see, but they are certainly a cut above most TV movies and deserve a better fate than late-night reruns on the Sci-Fi channel (which is where I first accidentally stumbled across them). Hence this primer, which will hopefully encourage mathematicians and others to seek them out.

  • Chameleon

    ★★★½

    chameleonIn mathematical terms, an approximation to Chameleon can be expressed by the following formula:
    (Leon / Blade Runner)2 * Terminator 2 + (0.2 * Predator)
    To go step by step through the equation:

    • Leon: an emotionless assassin discovers new depths within themselves, thanks to a child rescued from a corrupt government officer, also responsible for killing the kid’s parents. Together they develop mutual respect and track down the villain.
    • Blade Runner: artificially-created humanoid life, with a deliberately restricted lifespan, rebels against its creator and tries to extend its longevity. A bounty-hunter is sent on the trail. The twist here, is that good and bad are reversed from Ridley Scott’s classic.
    • Terminator 2: ass-kicking, motorcycle-riding killing machine is taught compassion by a young boy, who possesses something of potentially vital importance to the future of society.
    • Predator: the ability to blend into the background, leaving no trace save for a shimmery heat-haze.

    There: that’s the essential elements covered. This is doing it a slight disservice, since it does have some genuine original ideas, but there is an awful lot which is blatantly lifted from elsewhere. However, credit must be given for stealing from excellent sources, and enough of those involved go at their work with sufficient enthusiasm and energy to make you forget its less than groundbreaking setting and storyline.

    The plot revolves around a hacked computer credit chip which is the equivalent of a bottomless bank account: just before the inventor is slain, he passes it on to his son, and when Kam is ordered to kill him and recover the chip, she rebels and rescues him. She heads off to the countryside to escape, where she links up with a group living outside the urban world where the vast majority of the population now reside (nicely, the countryside has become almost a myth to townsfolk). There, she must fend off the bounty-hunter sent to track her down, as well as coming to terms with the uncertain human feelings she is steadily feeling, before returning for the inevitable showdown with her creator.

    Bobbie Phillips delivers an excellent performance as Kam. In films like this, the balance is important; it’s easy for the heroine to fall into being unsympathetic at one end, or weak at the other, but that’s not the case here. Kam comes across with an almost childlike innocence in some ways, but is perfectly happy with using her sexuality for gain, at one point whoring herself in exchange for gas. It’s a nice contradiction that helps to provide depth to what could be just a stock character. Unfortunately, most of the rest of the cast don’t work as well; Eric Lloyd as the child is particularly irritating, and the villain lacks anything to make you hate him with the necessary intensity. [Returning to the inspirations above, he should take lessons from Gary Oldman or Rutger Hauer]

    The action here seems restrained; a little gunplay and some minor martial arts, but nothing particularly memorable. The sexual scenes make the made-for-TV origins painfully clear, with sheets that appear to be velcro’d to Phillips’ breasts, when she doesn’t have her elbows elegantly positioned in front of them. Still, there’s enough here in the central character to make me want to see more…and lo, what’s this coming along?

    Dir: Stuart Cooper.
    Stars: Bobbie Phillips, Eric Lloyd, John Adam, Jerome Ehlers

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  • Chameleon 2: Death Match

    ★½

    chameleon2Unlike most mathematics, which tends to increase in complexity the more you get into it, the second part of the series has a very simple equation:
    (Die Hard * 2/3) + (Lethal Weapon / 6)
    Disappointingly, study of the above shows that it manages to be significantly less than any of its component parts. Again, we have theft from well-regarded sources, but here, there is almost no originality on view. Let’s see…

    • Terrorists take over a high-rise building…
    • …as a decoy operation for their actual goal.
    • The hero(ine) must take them on single-handed…
    • …save for occasional communications with the black cop running things outside…
    • …while exchanging taunts with their leader via a walkie-talkie.

    The plagiarism is more focused too, ripping off highly specific elements, such as the terrorist leader accepting a hostage’s offer of help before killing him, and even the style – witness the bad guy who plummets to his doom from a window, in a shower of broken glass, limbs flailing wildly. It’s shot from above in exactly the same way as Die Hard, and was the point at which I began to yearn feverishly to watch John McTiernan’s greatly superior effort. [Though admittedly, it’s also greatly superior to almost all action movies, save Aliens]

    You get a lot less sex than in the first part; in fact, none to speak of. There’s not even any sexual tension between Kam and her new partner, Booker (Siemaszko), who just engage in the kind of bickering familiar to anyone who has seen a buddy-cop film. Oddly, there is absolutely no mention of the kid who had bonded so firmly to Kam – by the end of part one, she could even say the F-word to him. That’s “family”, in case you’re wondering. I should perhaps stress that this is merely an observation, rather than a complaint.

    Booker and Kam are one team sent into the hijacked tower-block to find out what’s going on and solve the problem. The next hour goes almost exactly as you’d expect, with the terrorists progressing towards their goal, and Kam trying to stop them. Even more than previously, she does seem to keep forgetting to use her power – in such hostile surroundings, I’d have it on all the time. There may be some neurological or biochemical reason for this: it’d have been nice if they’d actually bothered to mention it though.

    There’s one sequence with Kam scurrying, lightning-fast, up a ventilation shaft (left) and a rather good brawl involving her that made me sit up and pay attention, offering hope for the rest of the movie. It’s a red herring. The last twenty minutes finally stop slavishly cloning Bruce Willis, with the villain not being who you’d expect (though if you think about who played the bad guys in the Die Hard trilogy, it’s not hard to work out). One good twist at the end is Kam recovering the “loot” and using it for her own ends, which extends her nicely amoral attitude. There’s also a nod to Kam’s not-entirely human origins, and how they affect her emotions, which would be a good avenue for future exploration.

    But overall, this is a poor follow-up. You shouldn’t try to remake classics, unless you can bring something new to the party, and while Phillips is certainly no worse an actor than Bruce Willis, it’s not enough to stop this seeming a lame copy.

    Dir: Craig R.Baxley
    Stars: Bobbie Phillips, Don Battee, Casey Siemaszko, Tasha Smith

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  • Chameleon 3: Dark Angel

    ★★★★

    chameleon3Part three is a return to form, despite a title which might now seem suspiciously unoriginal, at first glance on the video shelves. But it actually predates James Cameron’s series, leaving his genetically-altered, motorcycle-riding loner firmly in the position of late-comer. The mathematics for this one are harder to define, since the ideas on view are…well, if in light of the first two movies, I’m reluctant to claim originality, they are at least taken from less obvious sources. There is thus an “X” factor to take in account here, where X may or may not be genuine inventiveness.
    (Chameleon / Kung-fu movies) + (Dirty Harry / 6)2 + Factor X

    Note the semi-recursive nature of the formula, with one major element from the first film being rehashed, namely Kam’s acquisition of a child into her protective custody. Note also the plot inversion of many a kung-fu movie – these may be summarised as, “you killed my brother and you must pay!”, while here, it’s “you are my brother and you must pay!”. Yes, the chief threat here comes from Cain, another DNA-hybrid: wolf, bat, etc. though I’m unaware of any of them having the startling regenerative powers he has. Maybe the bat was part vampire, in which case Kam could always try decapitation and stuffing a holy wafer in his mouth, for nothing else – even impalement with a pipe – is a long-term solution. Time to call in Buffy, perhaps.

     A bunch of physicists, including teenage prodigy Tess (Teal Redmann – who, Chris points out, looks like a young Renee Zellwegger), are working on a sample of “dark matter”, when rudely interrupted by Cain. He makes off with it at the behest of his master (bald head, sneer and clearly planning towards Being John Malkovich) for the usual mercenary gain purposes. Unfortunately, the dark matter is unstable and Tess has to convince Kam that in 48 hours, the planet will be gurgling down a black hole like leftover soap-suds. So far, so ho-hum, but the only way to stop it is by exploding an electromagnetic pulse bomb – and the only person to have one powerful enough is a wheelchair-bound terrorist called The Mongoose. Will they find him in time?

    I imagine no-one genuinely doubts the answer, but this adds a whole new plot twist, especially as the last time the Mongoose activated his weapon, its impact was pretty heavy. What happens when it’s used here is never really shown, and there is some scientific handwaving about the black hole absorbing all the energy, but it would be gratifying to think that it became necessary to destroy the city in order to save it. Not least because Cameron’s Dark Angel starts with a very similar premise.

    Even if the heroine’s chameleon-like powers have been all but forgotten, this is the best entry in the series, with some great action, notably Kam’s single-handed demolition of the Mongoose’s gang – I saw this just after coming back from Jet Li’s Kiss of the Dragon, and it’s a battle which stands up well in comparison. Her ruthless brutality is also surprising and you can only sympathise with her handlers, futilely trying to keep her in check. She does what she want, when she wants, to whom she wants, and can only be applauded for it. The child actor here is also a great deal less annoying than first time around, an obvious relief to the viewer.

    There, for the moment, the series rests. What lies in the future is hard to tell, but given the ongoing success of shows like Buffy, Xena and La Femme Nikita, it’d be a foolish man who would write off the chances of Chameleon finally making it onto the small screen.

    Dir: John Lafia
    Stars: Bobbie Phillips, Teal Redmann, Alex Kuzelicki, Doug Penty

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Wholly Trinity

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Police Officer: “I think we can handle one little girl. I sent two units. They’re bringing her down now.”
Agent Smith: “No, Lieutenant. Your men are already dead.”

[Of necessity, this article contains spoilers for both The Matrix and The Matrix Reloaded. If you haven’t seen these two films, you might not want to proceed. And how was the dark side of the moon?]

Few movies have been so influential as The Matrix, with its seamless combination of elements from Hong Kong action, anime, and science-fiction, to which the Wachowski brothers added a sprinkling of semi-original thoughts and some very cool sunglasses. One of the key pieces in the jigsaw is Trinity, played by Carrie-Anne Moss – normally, supporting characters fall outside our realm here, but Trinity transcends the usual bounds imposed on such roles. Along with Lara Croft, she has become one of the most important action heroines of the past decade.

Trinity’s impact is immediate and striking; the opening sequence of the first movie features her character, welcoming us into the “anything is possible” universe of the Matrix. We see the introduction of bullet-time, the camera swinging around her as she freezes in midair, before delivering a devastating kick – an image subsequently aped in everything from box-office smashes (Shrek) to obscure arthouse films such as Takashi Miike’s City of Lost Souls. Her powers are superhuman, reflexes and agility far beyond normal; she apparently vanishes into a phone booth which is crushed by a juggernaut. As Neo would likely say: “Whoa…”

The middle is relatively quiet, Trinity taking a back seat to Morpheus as he gradually opens Neo’s eyes to the real world. But towards the end, she teams up with Neo – pulling rank on him without blinking – to rescue Morpheus, after he is captured by Agent Smith and the other Matrix guardians. The shoot-out in the lobby of that building has to rank as among the most berserk in cinematic history, with hero and heroine both kicking butt spectacularly. Chapter 29 on the DVD. :-) She goes on to pilot a helicopter, from which she leaps as it crashes into a building, then resurrects the dead hero with a kiss. Not just your basic, average, everyday, ordinary, run-of-the-mill, ho-hum supporting character.

She also opens Reloaded, riding her motorcycle through the air before leaving it, mid-flight – the bike continues on as a guided missile (see pic at top). She then gets into a gun-battle with an Agent, both of them in free-fall from a building, which ends in Trinity being shot…and Neo waking with a start, wondering if this was just a dream, or a premonition of some sort. The two have now clearly formed a relationship, which is perhaps damaging, in that Trinity’s role is now closer to that of the usual subservient girlfriend.

However, she is still more than capable of independent action, such as when she, Morpheus and Neo seek the Keymaker, and are led to him by Persephone. This leads to a battle, first against the Twins, two dreadlocked, white brothers who can pop in and out of physical existence at will. Then, as if this wasn’t enought, there’s the highway chase, where Trinity whizzes into traffic at speeds best described as “not slow”, swerving across lanes and around oncoming vehicles as if they weren’t there. The movie ends in a reversal of the first film, Neo resurrecting Trinity with a kiss. Death, where is thy sting…

I was originally going to title this piece, “Trinity – the yin to Neo’s yang,” but in reality, they aren’t complementary opposites, it’s more a blending towards each other. Neo is far from your typical action hero, lacking muscles, three-day stubble and an impenetrable accent – he’s a computer programmer, f’heavens sake! Conversely, Trinity is female without being feminine: her skills lie in traditionally masculine areas such as motorbikes, fighting and technology. “I just thought…you were a guy,” says Neo, on discovering she was the one who hacked the IRS’s computers. “Most guys do,” is her calm response. The portrayal of Trinity deliberately and consciously avoids any sexuality at all, which perhaps partly explains why the sex scene in Reloaded feels jarringly out of place.

Her name resonates on several possible levels:

  • The trinity formed by herself, Neo and Morpheus
  • The Holy Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Matrix was released over Easter Weekend, 1999…
  • The pagan trinity of the Triple Goddess, with womankind represented in three forms – maiden, mother and crone.
  • Trinity was where the first A-bomb was detonated in 1945, thereby starting the Atomic Age.

Note also that the room she is in at the start is number 303, while Neo’s is 101.
Which is actually the case, only the Wachowski brothers know, and they aren’t talking – this silence may be the reason why Reloaded has a more introverted feel, and IMHO doesn’t work as well. Dare I suggest, that if they loosened up and connected with their audience a bit more, the product might not resemble a Philosophy seminar quite as much.

Trinity’s feminine side does show through occasionally, however, most obviously in the nurturing way she initially cares for Neo. She brings him food, causing the traitorous Cypher to comment, “I don’t remember you ever bringing me dinner.” Trinity just rolls her eyes, but Cypher’s jealousy is perhaps a factor in pushing him over the edge into treachery and an alliance with the Agents.

This masculine/feminine contradiction is inherent in all female action heroines, and is perhaps part of the appeal. It is perhaps at the finale of The Matrix that it becomes most clear, as Trinity declares her romantic love for the dead Neo, then revives him, saying, “You can’t be dead… because I love you,” resurrecting him exactly as Prince Charming awoke his bride. It’s a complex, multi-level moment, bringing together the facets of a character which has been interpreted as everything from Mary Magdalene to Princess Leia. Let’s just hope Revolutions does not reveal she and Neo are siblings…

All this, and the ability to look very cool while kicking butt too. Credit to Carrie-Anne Moss, who not only brings depth to a character about whom we (so far) know very little – such as any real background – but who also broke a leg during training for Reloaded. She says, “While we were fighting, there wasn’t a moment that went by when I didn’t physically ache, for almost a year really,” and such commitment can only be admired. Where her career goes from here, no-one knows, but (especially given her current state, i.e. highly pregnant!) would suspect she might want to do a few costume dramas…