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The first action heroines

By Jim McLennan February 28, 2018 March 2, 2018 Feature

“Within a sensational action-adventure framework of the sort generally associated with male heroics, serials gave narrative preeminence to an intrepid young heroine who exhibited a variety of traditionally “masculine” qualities: physical strength and endurance, self-reliance, courage, social authority and freedom to explore novel experiences outside the domestic sphere.”
— Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts by Ben Singer

Despite what some people apparently think, the action heroine predates Ellen Ripley by… oh, almost eight decades. What should likely be regarded as the first of its kind actually appeared just five years after the Lumiere brothers shocked the audiences with a train arriving at a station. It was called Le Duel d’Hamlet and was released in 1900, as part of a program at the Exposition Universelle in Paris that year. The film clocks in at just under two minutes, and is an excerpt from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in particular the fencing scene with Laertes – it’s basically nothing but action! This is notable, not just for being the first filmed “version” of the play, but because the part of Hamlet is played by Sarah Bernhardt, at the time one of the most renowned stage actresses in France (or any other country).

However, the crown of the earliest “true” film action queen perhaps belongs to the little-known Gene Gauntier. She got her start in the first decade of the 20th century, before credits became established, which partly explains why her place in history has almost evaporated. She literally walked on to her first film set with no experience to become a stunt-woman, being thrown into 30-foot deep water – despite not being able to swim! While acting was not her sole talent – she wrote the scenario for a 1907 adaptation of Ben Hur, which ended up costing her studio $25,000 in a landmark copyright case – it was her role of “Nan, the Confederate Spy” which merits her claim to the title here. In 1909-10, the character appeared in The Girl Spy, The Girl Spy Before Vicksburg and The Further Adventures of the Girl Spy.

Similarly ground-breaking was What Happened to Mary – note, no question-mark, it being a statement rather than a question. This was the earliest motion picture serial made in the United States, the first of its 12 monthly episodes being released in July 1912. This was also a very early example of cross-promotion. The idea originated as, and was then tied to, a series of stories in Ladies’ World Magazine; these were left unfinished, as a contest for readers to submit their own endings. However, each episode stood alone, with titles such as The Escape from Bondage or A Race to New York.

The series helped make a star of Mary Fuller, who had previously appeared in 1910’s Frankenstein, the first cinematic adaptation of Mary Shelley’s story, playing the doctor’s fiancée. After Mary, she’d go on to further serial success with Dolly of the Dailies, which depicted the adventures of Dolly Desmond, lady reporter extraordinaire. In an October 1914 poll of stars in Motion Picture Magazine which garnered a total of 11 million votes, she finished third among actresses, behind only Clara Young and Mary Pickford. She was also a screenwriter, who had eight scripts turned into films between 1913 and 1915. But her career was basically over by 1917; she subsequently had more than one nervous breakdown and spent the last 26 years of her life in a psychiatric institution, before dying in 1973, all but forgotten.

Sadly, both these are now largely lost. Only a couple of episodes of Dolly survive, one discovered in New Zealand of all places (apparently, it was often the final worldwide stop for prints during the silent era) in 2010. That entry was #5, titled The Chinese Fan. In in, Dolly goes to Chinatown to review a play. Unfortunately, the brooch she is sporting is actually a Triad symbol, leading to her being kidnapped by a Chinese gang. However, this ordeal simply allows our heroine to help free a heiress, also abducted for the usual nefarious purposes of Chinese gangs from the era, fortuitously getting a scoop for her paper at the same time.

The popularity of Mary and Dolly led to a legion of imitators, including The Adventures of Kathlyn, which introduced the “cliff-hanger” concept to serials. It starred Kathlyn Williams, who like Fuller was a writer, and also directed on occasion. Kathlyn was a 13-episode series, which takes place in the Indian sub-continent, in the fictitious country of Allaha, as the heroine goes to rescue her kidnapped father from Oriental intrigue. While little remains of the series, or the feature version two years later, the novelization by Harold MacGrath is available through Project Gutenberg, and we have reviewed it here.

You will see her bound by fanatical natives on the top of a giant funeral pyre and watch the flames creeping ever nearer her helpless form. You will see her tied with thongs in a tiger trap as human bait for the blood thirsty beasts of the jungle. You will see her swimming for her life to escape a maddened water-buffalo in the black waters of a Bengal river. Time after time, in scene after scene, this actress takes her life in her hands and walks grimly up to the very jaws of death in order to portray with lifelike realism the actual adventures of MacGrath’s heroine.
— Advertising poster for The Adventures of Kathlyn

The series was ground-breaking in other ways, particularly its advertising. The film is credited by some as being the first use of a trailer: a short clip from the next episode shown at the end, to whet the audience’s appetite. Spin-off merchandising associated with it included a cocktail, face-power, perfume and more than one song. And like Mary, it was among the first examples of media cross-promotion, with the story being serialized in newspapers from Los Angeles to Boston. In Chicago, Kathlyn and Dolly ended up facing off directly. The former had her story serialized in the Chicago Tribune, the newspaper paying the then remarkable price of $12,000 for the rights – 10% of the cost of making the series, and about $300,000 in modern money. Following its success in boosting the publication’s circulation, its local rival the Evening American, under legendary mogul William Randolph Hearst, bought the rights to Dolly of the Dailies, in order to run its story there.

1914 saw action heroines become a veritable craze, giving us The Exploits of Elaine and The Perils of Pauline (both starring Pearl White), Lucille Love, Girl of Mystery (starring Grace Cunard) and The Hazards of Helen. White was perhaps the name most associated with serials in the public’s eye, appearing in half a dozen over the rest of the decade. [Though she was firmly based on the East coast, and apparently never even visited Hollywood] But Pauline remains perhaps the best known serial, with its simple yet open-ended plot. If Pauline Marvin (White) dies before she marries, she will not inherit her fortune; instead, it’ll go to her guardian, Koerner (Paul Panzer). No prizes for guessing where this leads. Repeatedly…

Grace Cunard was a particularly interesting character, who was a prolific writer, and co-directed many of her own adventures, alongside frequent co-star Francis Ford (the older brother of renowned Western director, John). Cunard created the character of “My Lady Raffles,” described as, “a jewel thief with a delightfully reckless charm,” and also played the Queen of the Apaches, a Robin Hood-like heroine, in the 1916 serial, The Purple Mask. The advertising for the latter series promised: “The most mysterious plot; the swiftest action; the most fascinating locale – Parisian high society and the Apache underworld; dare-devil stunts; romance, adventure – a true love-story”

“Miss Holmes is everywhere in the picture, flipping cars on fast moving trains, boarding engines and remaking train schedules after cutting into the train dispatcher’s wire from all sorts of remote mountain way stations; fording rivers up to her neck in icy water, and holding up members of the raiding gang at the point of her trusty automatic.”
— Reel Life, May 05, 1917

However, it was The Hazards of Helen which became the longest-running of these serials, with 119 episodes through February 1917. The first fifty or so episodes of Helen starred Helen Holmes, but when she left the studio, they turned to the woman generally recognized as Hollywood’s first stuntwoman, Rose Gibson (renaming her Helen Gibson, naturally!), who had occasionally doubled for Holmes. Gibson had first performed in a Wild West Show at age 17, but when her current employer suddenly closed, stranding the performers in California, she ended up working part-time in the fledgling movie industry. Her first billed role was in Ranch Girls on a Rampage, which is not as good as its title sounds.

Helen recounts the adventures of its titular heroine, a telegraph operator stationed at a remote outpost in the West, who saves the company from ruin and disaster on a near-weekly basis. There may have been some inspiration from Holmes herself, who was the daughter of a railroad engineer, and she also took a significant part in production behind the scenes. In a 1916 interview for The Green Book Magazine, she said, “If a photoplay actress wants to achieve real thrills, she must write them into the scenario herself. And the reason is odd: Nearly all scenario writers and authors for the films are men, and men usually won’t provide for a girl, things they wouldn’t do themselves. So if I want real thrilly action, I ask permission to write it in myself.”

Worth noting these early action heroine were not strictly limited to serials, however. The year also gave us the standalone short feature (1000 ft, which I think works out to about 14 minutes) When The Cartridges Failed. In this, Gertrude McCoy plays an office worker who stands in for the usual armed guard on a wage delivery. She has to defend the money from an attempted robbery, despite the revolver she was given having only two bullets loaded into it. While the movie itself is gone, the one still image which survives (above), suggests this may well be an early, standalone “girls with guns” film.

“I have always been afraid. But I would be ashamed to let fear rule me.” – Pearl White

These women didn’t just play daring heroines. Being an actor was a risky job in the early days, because it was a time before stands-in were at all common. If something dangerous needed to be done, it was usually the player who did it, and there was no respecting the gentler sex, when it came to embracing danger. For instance, in her diary entry for April 6th, 1914, Mary Fuller wrote, “They blew me up with a Black Hand bomb today, doing Dolly of the Dailies (No. 7). The charge of dynamite was very heavy. The shack was wrecked, my clothes were torn and blackened, and blood ran from a scalp wound,” adding almost laconically, “It was exciting. I hope my fans will like it.” She also almost drowned, filming a scene for Mary in which she played a mermaid.

Similarly, the Des Moines News in 1912 said admiringly of Kathlyn Williams, “She has never refused to risk her own safety for the sake of a good picture.” Her area of particular renown was working with animals, including big cats (as shown in the picture above), causing Kathlyn to be known as “the Unafraid”. Even before her serial, she required stitches in a head wound after a lion tore a gash in her scalp during the filming of Lost in the Jungle. The Los Angeles Times said of another Williams’ film, The Lady and the Tigers, “Miss Williams was required to enter the cage of three tigers lately brought from the jungle, which were untamed and didn’t know a moving-picture genius from a meat-pie.”

Injuries were common, though in the experience of Pearl White, they “never happened when I was doing what looked really dangerous… Why worry about the big things? It’s the little ones that get me.” But there was no shortage of major stunts done by these leading ladies. As an example, those performed by Helen Holmes included “riding a balky horse down a steep cliff and plunging into the river; dropping from an aerial steel cable onto the roof of a boxcar going 20 mph; leaping from a burning building; jumping from the roof of one moving train to another; and dropping from a trestle into an automobile.”

For real sangfroid though, it’s hard to beat Ruth Roland, star of 1919 series The Adventures of Ruth. According to her director there, George Marshall, “I used to shoot at her feet with real bullets. Didn’t bother her none.”

But it couldn’t last. From a modern perspective, the passing of the 19th amendment by Congress in 1919, giving women the right to vote, may have sapped the public’s drive for strong cinematic heroines. But for whatever reason, the genre died out almost entirely in the twenties. By 1936, the Los Angeles Times was able to proclaim, “There are no more serial queens…Helen Holmes, Pearl White and the others have long since retired, and the ladies of the serials now prefer to let their menfolk wear the pants.” It would be several more decades before anyone even remotely comparable would return to the screens in America.

Below, you’ll find a YouTube playlist including a number of the films discussed above, in chronological order. It starts with Sarah Bernhardt’s scene from Hamlet, then goes through Gene Gautier’s The Girl Spy Before Vicksburg, The Car of Death starring Helen Holmes, and the Chinese Fan episode of Mary Fuller’s Dolly of the Dailies, finishing with several parts of The Hazards of Helen, starring both Holmes and Helen Gibson.

Pearl White: The Heroine of a Thousand Dangerous Stunts

By Jim McLennan February 26, 2018 February 23, 2018 Feature

American actress Pearl White was dubbed “Queen of the Serials” for her roles in some of the most popular episodic cinema productions. Beginning in 1914 with The Perils of Pauline, she was a pioneer of action heroine roles, famous for doing her own stunts, regardless of the risk. The following interview with her was originally published in the September 1921 issue of The American magazine, and offers a glimpse into the lost world of movie-making, almost a century ago.

This picture shows Miss White walking the pole at the top of a ship’s mainsail, fifty feet or more above the deck. If she had slipped and fallen, she undoubtedly would have been killed. Once, when she was visiting the battleship “Mississippi,” the sailors begged her to do a “stunt.” Whereupon she climbed to the top of the forward “haystack” mast, the only woman who ever did it on any battleship.

Pearl White’s name is a synonym for courage and daring; yet she says she is “a born coward.”
“I have always been afraid,” she declares; “but I would be ashamed to let fear rule me”

By Mary B. Mullett

Pearl White is one of the most amazing human beings I ever have encountered. As I was leaving her dressing-room at the Fox Film Corporation studios in New York, the man who had arranged the interview asked me what I thought of her. “She’s a wonder!” I said. “Yes,” he agreed. “And the most remarkable thing about her is that she is a living wonder. She has done enough hair-raising stunts to kill half a dozen ordinary girls. Of course, she is doing only regular feature pictures now. No more stunts!… Well—that is—”

He hesitated a moment; then we laughed. No more stunts? That was a joke. She has been in danger over and over again during the past year; and she will keep on doing that sort of thing, because she is “that sort of girl.”

“The perils of Pauline” made Pearl White famous as a “stunt” star. Then came “The Exploits of Elaine,” “The Iron Claw,” “The Fatal Ring,” “The Lightning Raider,” and other serial pictures. All over the world, her name became a synonym for courage and daring.

When we sat down to talk, I looked at her curiously. She has fine dark eyes, sensitive nostrils, an expressive mouth. There isn’t an ounce of superfluous flesh on her body. In manner, she is as frank and unaffected as a boy. In fact, when she was talking about some of her experiences, she often said, “There was another boy in the company” — as if she herself were a boy.

As I thought of the things she has done, they seemed incredible; and I asked the question which millions of persons who have seen her on the screen must have wanted to ask:
“Aren’t you ever afraid?”
“Afraid!” she said. “I’m always afraid! I’ve been afraid all my life!
“I was born in Green Ridge, a little Missouri village which doesn’t exist now. My mother was an Italian and my father was Irish, although he was born in this country. An Irishman, you know. isn’t afraid of the devil himself. But as for my brother and me, we were a beautiful pair of cowards.

“I was afraid of people, afraid of animals, afraid of the dark – afraid of everything! We were the poorest children in town, and that’s saying a good deal. Half of the time I didn’t have any shoes. And because we were poor and because we were cowards, all the other kids picked on us.

“When I was only five years old, I played in ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ with a strolling company that came to the village. Of course the other children wanted to do it, and because I got the chance and they didn’t, they were jealous. So they picked on me all the more. But I was such a coward that I never stood up to them. I’d hit back and then run – with the emphasis on the ‘run’. My brother did the same.

“When my father found this out, he got a strap and told us that if he ever heard of our being beaten by any of the children, or of our running away from them, he would give us an extra whipping himself. He did it too. And soon we learned that it was better to stand up to the children than to take our punishment at home

“When my father found that we were afraid of the dark, he set out to cure us of that too. At night he would send us on errands, each of us in a different direction. Often I’ve had to go half a mile, or more, out on some dark and lonely road. And I couldn’t pretend that I had done it; for he made me go after something which I had to bring back as proof that I really had gone where I was sent. He used to send me to the dark cellar for things, and up0stairs to the dark bedrooms. He meant it all right, but it didn’t cure me. I am still afraid of the dark.”

“And do you mean that now, when you do dangerous stunts for the pictures, you are afraid?” I asked.
“I do mean it!” she said emphatically. “I am petrified with fear. Cold! Frozen! Terrified! I tell you. I’m a coward.”
“Yet you never have someone take your place when there is a particularly dangerous stunt to be dangerous gone through with, do you?”
“You mean, do I ever have anyone ‘double’ for me, as we call it in moving pictures? No, I never have done that.”
“Why not?”

“Well, there’s a sort of fascination about it, for one thing. And after it’s all over, there’s a kind of exhilaration in having done it! I suppose it means more to me because I am afraid. You say to yourself ‘I thought I couldn’t go through with it, but I did!’ And that makes you feel good inside.

“Then, too, you must remember that when I began working in the pictures, I didn’t count for much personally. I wasn’t famous. When I did ‘The Perils of Pauline’ it was the picture that drew. If I broke my neck, or my back, or spoiled my poor face, they could get somebody else. After I had made a reputation, it was different. My name counted then, so then they did want me to have someone double for me in any very dangerous stunts.”

“Why didn’t you do it?”

“Partly from pride and partly because, for some reason, I never seem to get hurt doing the big things.” She rapped on the wooden table beside her. “I’ve done a million stunts. I’ve been hurt over and over again. But” (rap, rap, rap) “it never happened when I was doing what looked really dangerous.

“At least, not since I have been in moving pictures. When I was a young girl, I traveled with the circus for a while doing a trapeze act. Once, when I was hanging by my right hand, the ligaments in my wrist pulled out, and I dropped. I fell on the edge of the net, rolled out of it, came down on my shoulder, and broke my collar bone.

“Once I went into the pictures, my serious injuries have come through some slight mischance; not during a big moment of danger. For instance, in one picture I was bound with ropes, my hands tied behind me, and I was left in the cellar of a building, which was then set on fire. The hero was to rescue me just in the nick of time.

“Everything went smoothly until he tried to carry me up the stairs. I was still bound, and he had thrown me over his shoulder, with my head hanging down his back. He had carried me up six or seven steps when he lost his balance, and toppled over backward. I couldn’t help myself, so I struck on the top of my head, displacing several vertebra.

“That was the worst hurt I have received. The pain was terrible. For two years I simply lived with osteopaths, and to this day I have some pretty bad times with my back. Yet you wouldn’t have called that a dangerous stunt, or any stunt at all, so far as I was concerned.

“In another picture, I was thrown into the water from a ferryboat just as it was coming into the ferry slip. The slip is enclosed by high walls of solid planking, reaching down into the water, and it would look as if I could not escape being crushed between the boat and the wall of the slip. But at the crucial moment a rope is thrown to me, I catch it, and am pulled out just in time to miss death.

“Well, the program was carried out all right. I was thrown into the water; then, while the ferry—which looked to me as big as the Woolworth Building—came slowly closer, the rope was thrown to me. I had been afraid I would miss it; but I didn’t and they pulled me up onto the dock just in time.

“Then, as I lay there in somebody’s arms, with my eyes closed, I said, ‘Well, boys! I did it! And with that, I threw out my left arm in a gesture which anyone might have made in those circumstances. As I let it drop, my hand went over the side of the dock; and at that moment the ferryboat crashed in, caught my hand, and broke the bones in all the fingers.

“Do you see? The dangerous part of the stunt went off all right. And then, when it was all over and I was ‘safe,’ I did a simple little thing and got my hand smashed.

As the heroine in “The Black Secret,” Pearl White has a fight with a ruffian who throws her down a flight of stairs. She has had many of these struggles on stairs, one of them continuing down several flights and resulting in her jaw being dislocated.

“In one picture I had to fight with another boy down several flights of stairs. It was real fighting, too; rolling over and over, striking our heads against the banisters and the wall, struggling all the way. I accidentally knocked the other boy unconscious; but aside from that and the inevitable bruises, neither of us was hurt.

“Then we wound up with what looked like a comparatively simple stunt: he was to be sitting on a low bench in the hall below, and I was to jump over the banister from above and land on him. Then we were to roll off onto the floor and continue our fight. It wasn’t a very big jump, and the bench he was on was only about two feet high.

“I made the jump all right, landed on him, and we rolled off. But as we went over, his hand happened to catch me just right, at the side of my neck, and dislocated my jaw! Again the big stunt had gone through safely, and my injury had come in some unexpected mischance.

“Why, I was standing on the curb one day, waiting for a street car. Millions of people do that and never think of danger. Neither did I. But when I stepped off— only about a six-inch step—I somehow fell and broke my ankle.

“When I first went into pictures, we were making some cowboy scenes up in the Bronx, right near New York. I was a good rider; in fact, it was my riding that got me my chance at moving picture work. Although I was a ‘trap’ performer in the circus, I was crazy to be an equestrienne and was always riding the horses around ‘the lot’ in my spare moments. Later, I traveled with a theatrical company, doing one-night stands in the Southwest. And every time I had a chance, I would get a a horse and go cavorting around the country.

“In that way I learned to ride pretty well. When it came to the wild riding necessary in the pictures, I did all kinds of stunts. I’ve been thrown dozens of times; and while I have been knocked out repeatedly, I never was badly injured.

“One day, in making those Wild-West pictures in the Bronx, I was doing a perfectly simple bit of work, just straight riding. However, the sun was in my eyes and 1 didn’t notice a little sapling ahead. It wasn’t thicker than my wrist, anyway. But my pony dashed by so close to the sapling that it struck my knee and broke my knee cap.

“So why worry about the big things? It’s the little ones that get me. There was the time, for instance, when we were making pictures down in Florida. In one scene, I was to jump off a moving steam yacht. And, by the way, I want to say this: I never do a serious stunt without first studying the possibilities of danger, so as to avoid an accident if I can.

“In this case, for example, the director told me to jump from the rail of the yacht, at the middle of the boat, which was to continue steaming ahead until it moved out of the picture. I was to have a life preserver in my hand and was to keep hold of it as I struck the water.

“Well, I did some thinking on my own hook. And then, when the director had gone off to the tug, where the camera man was, and which was to keep abreast of us so as to get a long shot of the whole performance, I hunted up the captain.

‘”Do you know from what part of the boat I am to jump?’ I asked him.
“Why, from toward the stern,’ he said.
‘”Not at all!’ I explained. ‘I’m to jump from the middle of the boat.’
“‘But you can’t do that!’ he said. ‘If I’m steaming ahead, the suction will carry you under the vessel.’
“‘I know that,’ I told him. ‘But if you stop your engine, I will get away, and your momentum will carry you out of the picture all right. I’ll have somebody give you the signal when to stop.’

“I made another change, too. I realized that if I held onto the life preserver when I struck the water, my arm would get an awful wrench. So I let go of the life preserver just before I hit the water, and then caught hold of it again as I came up.

“But,” she went on with a touch of bitterness,”there was one thing which nobody had told me! Perhaps they did not know—certainly I did not know—what was in the water between the yacht and the tug. . . . Sharks! … I saw several of them around me as I swam to the tug; and I was too frightened then to do anything but swim—and pray. I did both as hard as I could.

“Again luck was with me. Or maybe it was Providence. I believe in praying. I confess that I don’t do enough of it, except when I am frightened. But I’m scared so often that I keep in pretty good practice.

“Anyway, I escaped that time, when the risk was really a serious one. And then the next day, when I was doing a scene on the beach, where you wouldn’t have thought I could get hurt if I tried, I stepped on a shell, cut my foot, had blood poisoning, and was laid up for three weeks.

“At one time, I thought I wanted to be an aviator; so I had a couple of months of off-and-on instructions; off and on as to lessons, I mean; for I never went ‘off’ the ground. About that time we were making a picture in which the hero was cast away on a desert island. The place was really Staten Island, in New York Harbor; but there are parts of it which are deserted as anything you will find in the South Seas.

‘They wanted a scene where the heroine lands on the island in an airplane, rescues the hero, and flies away with him. They thought I would double for this scene; have somebody else actually fly the machine for the long shot of it in the air. They could take close-ups of me starting it and landing.

“But I insisted on making the whole trip. The machine they had was an old one-passenger Wright biplane, so I had to go alone. I never had been in the air by myself. My only experience hid been running the machine on the ground. But the director didn’t know this, and I didn’t tell him.

“As a matter of fact, I made the flight safely. But as I came down to make the landing, I miscalculated the distance and ‘landed’ in the water! If it had been a hydroplane, I might have been all right. But it wasn’t. And when the machine struck, the engine simply turned over with a jump, and the whole thing sank. Luckily I got out and swam ashore. Now, that really was a dangerous stunt, because I didn’t know how to fly an airplane. Yet I wasn’t hurt.

“I had another very unpleasant experience in the air. They wanted a scene showing the heroine taking a little pleasure ride in a captive balloon, such as you will find at many amusement parks. But in this case the villain was to cut the ropes and set the balloon adrift.

“We staged the scene at Palisades Park, across the Hudson from New York City. There was no one in the basket but the aeronaut and myself. According to our plan, after the ropes were cut the balloon would go off over New Jersey, and we would descend after being in the air about fifteen minutes.

“But about ten minutes after we were cut loose, a sudden storm broke. It was April and this was a good old-fashioned April thunderstorm, with rain, wind, lightning, and all the trimmings. I don’t suppose it lasted over twenty minutes, but they seemed to me like twenty years. We were drenched to the skin and half frozen.

“In order to rise above the storm, we threw out ballast and got up to about five thousand feet. Then, when the storm passed and we wanted to come down, we found that we were over New York City! We did not dare to descend there. The balloon might land on the edge of a twenty-story building and tip us into the street.

“For three hours and a half we were in the air; most of the time over the city, although once we were carried two miles out to sea. But we didn’t dare to come down in the water, of course. Most of this time, I was busy tearing a long roll of tissue paper in pieces and dropping them over the side of the basket. As they fell, they would show in which direction the currents of the air below were moving. There seemed to be different levels, on which the currents moved in different directions. At first, the aeronaut would throw out ballast in order to rise; or would let some of the gas escape, in order to descend.

“In this way we jockeyed around, trying to get into a current which would carry us to a safe landing place. But we couldn’t make it. Finally, all the ballast was gone and, to complicate the situation still more, the bag was leaking gas. We had settled down until we were only about a thousand feet above the roofs of New York and were slowly sinking still nearer to them.

“But my luck held; for finally the wind veered, carried us clear of the city, and we came down safely. But that was the longest three hours and a half I ever put in.

“As a rule, when you are doing picture stunts, there isn’t any long-drawn-out suspense. It generally goes with a rush, and the danger is over before you have time to lose your nerve.

“For instance, I have walked a board across an open court between two twelve-story apartment houses. The board was perhaps fifteen feet long and was laid from one roof to the other. If I had made a misstep, or had lost my balance, I should have fallen those twelve stories to the paved courtyard below.”

“Perhaps you’re not afraid of being in high places,’ I said.

“Afraid is too mild a way to put it!” was the earnest response. “I am almost rigid with terror. If I looked down, I should be lost. I am a Catholic, you know; and I never do one of these stunts that terrify me, without saying a ‘Hail, Mary’ as I start.

“Often I have had to jump across a four-foot chasm between two buildings. Four feet isn’t very wide a jump, when you have a running start. But suppose my foot slips, or my toe catches, just as I take off. It that happened—Well, it never has.” Again she rapped on the table beside her.

“Are you superstitious?” I asked.

“No! I believe it’s unlucky to break a mirror—because then you’ll have to buy a new one. I think it would be unlucky to fall in front of a street car—because you might be run over. But I don’t have any so-called mascots, or things that I think bring me luck. I try to be careful, and then I let it go at that. The reason I rap on wood is simply because other people do, and I have picked it up from them.

“Experiences like those I have had make you feel that you will die when your time comes—not before. Anyway, the thing I dread is not death, but being maimed or disfigured. That’s another reason why I prefer the big risks. If I missed my footing and fell a hundred feet, it would kill me. If I fell twenty feet, I might only be crippled for life, or hopelessly disfigured.

“Yesterday we were doing a scene here in the studio and I had to fall backward through a large picture hanging on the wall. It was a fall of less than six feet. It didn’t look like much of a stunt, but I’d rather have jumped off a seventy-foot cliff into the water than have done that little backward tumble onto the floor. Yesterday we did the scene from the front. To-day we do it again from the back of the painting. And I’m afraid! Honestly I am.”

“You speak of jumping off a seventy-foot cliff,” 1 said. “Have you ever done it?”

“Oh yes, several times. There’s a cliff that high up at Saranac Lake, and I’ve jumped from it for three different pictures. I’m not good at jumping into the water, either. I can drop all right and strike the water with my toes, which is the proper way. But when I jump, I come down on my heels; and that gives a bad jar to the spine.”

“Of course you are a good swimmer?” I asked.

“I can swim pretty well now. But when I first did stunts where I was thrown into the water, I couldn’t swim a stroke. If there had been any hitch in the program, I should have drowned. But you know,” she laughed, “a company has a very good reason, aside from any considerations of humanity, for wanting to save the actor. Especially if the actor is a star.

“Suppose half the scenes of a picture have been made. They have cost a lot of money. And suppose I am the star who is featured in the play. If I am killed, they can’t substitute somebody else; so they try to protect themselves by having all the scenes which are not dangerous made first. The ones in which the star risks his or her neck are done last. Then, if anything does happen, someone can double for the disabled or deceased star, and the picture can still be shown. The close-ups nave already been made. And in the long shots the double will not be recognized.

“For instance, suppose it is that seventy-foot leap up at Saranac. Three separate views of it are taken. There is a close-up of me, just as I am jumping off, and another close-up as I strike the water. Then there is the long shot. To make this, the camera is far enough away to show the whole height of the cliff, and the actual leap from start to finish. There can be no fake about this. The seventy-foot jump is actually made. But the figure is so far away that you can’t recognize the features.

“The close-ups are probably not made at the real cliff at all. In the one which shows the beginning of the leap, I am jumping from a ledge into a net, or perhaps only about ten feet into the water. For the close-up of me striking the water, I have made only a short jump from a bank or a platform, which does not show in the picture.

“Now suppose all the scenes have been made, except the long shot of the actual seventy-foot leap. And suppose something happens to me when I do make that leap. If I am killed, or injured, they can find an expert diver, dress him in my clothes, put a wig on him that will be like my hair, take the long shot—and the picture is saved. So that’s why the dangerous stunt is kept until the last.”

“What was the worst experience you’ve ever had?” I asked.

She thought for a moment, then gave a little laugh.

When a bunch of moving picture German soldiers thrust their bayonets almost within pricking distance of her throat, Pearl White could only shut her eyes and hope that the men behind those particular guns were good judges of distance.

“I think the hardest thing I ever did was during the drive for the Victory Loan. The New York Fire Department sent out one of its huge ladder trucks, with a crew to operate it, and I went along. They would raise the ladder almost straight into the air—not leaning it against a building —and I climbed it, one rung for each subscription from the crowd below. I think there were seventy-two rungs. I went to the very top; then over the top, and down the other side, one rung at a time.

“The worst thing about it all was the slowness: of it. I used to stand on that ladder, simply praying that somebody would take another bond—and take it quickly! People in the crowd, or in the windows, would call to me. Apparently, I would look down and bow. But I had to shut my eyes when I did it. We went all over the city with that awful ladder.”

“But why did you do it, if you were so frightened?”

“I don’t know—one doesn’t want to be a quitter. Being a coward is one thing. You can’t help that. But acting the coward is very different. I’m not ashamed of feeling fear. But I would be ashamed if I let my fear rule me. I guess that’s it.

“There was another time when I did something which absolutely terrified me, and which wasn’t done for the pictures, or for anything as worth while as patriotism either. It was just a ‘publicity’ stunt. I believe it was in 1915, when one of the picture companies was moving into a new building. The scheme was this; I was to climb down the front of the building to an electric light sign, then down this sign to a painters’ scaffold, and paint one letter of the company’s new sign. Our publicity manager had got a steeplejack to make the attempt first, and the steeplejack had proved that it could be done.

“But the manager began to get cold feet as the day approached. So he arranged for me to wear a harness under my clothing and to have strong wires attached to this harness. The wires would not be visible to the crowd in the street; and they would be fastened to something on the roof and ‘paid out’ as I climbed down. Then, if I lost my footing, or my head, or my nerve, I wouldn’t be killed.

“But when the time came, I found that the manager had let a lot of newspaper men come up where I was to start! Well! It would be a fine story, wouldn’t it, to tell about me! How I was all tied with wires. So I told the manager that I wouldn’t have the wires used. It would simply ‘make a Chinaman’ of me.

“‘Well then,’ he declared, ‘you mustn’t go! We’ll call the whole thing off. We can say that you are sick.’

“I was sick; sick with fear! But if I backed out, I should ‘make a Chinaman’ of myself. So I insisted on going through with it.

“I got to the electric sign safely and began to climb down that. It was one of the meanest things I ever saw—that sign. It shook and swung and behaved as if it were bewitched. But I managed to reach the scaffold all right. While I was climbing down, I looked up occasionally, and I could see the manager, leaning over the top, watching me. His face was dead white.

“I painted the letter as I had been told to do; but before I was half through, the manager began calling me to come back. 1 paid no attention to him. I was safe where I was, and I was in no hurry to take the return trip. I was glad he was suffering. I said to myself, ‘He got me into this. Now he can worry a while.’

“I finished the letter on the sign, and then I deliberately painted my own initials on the wall of the building. I made them good and large, too. It was the Saturday before Easter, I remember. I knew they would have to stay there over Sunday, anyway, and I thought I might as well get what I could for myself out of the experience. I think I must have been down there twenty minutes. Then I climbed back. When they helped me over the ledge at the top—the manager fainted.’

“And you?” I asked.

“Oh, I didn’t faint, if that’s what you mean. I never have fainted. I’ve been knocked unconscious a good many times, but I’ve never fainted.”

“You said you were afraid of animals. Have you ever done stunts with lions and other wild beasts?” I asked.

“Yes, of course. Last year we were making a picture down in Cuba, and they had a famous lion, called Jimmie, for some of the scenes. In one of them, I went into a sort of cave, which was already occupied by Jimmie. I sat down on the sand, according to directions, and was proceeding with the action, when Jimmie suddenly leaped at me. Perhaps I swerved aside. At any rate, he missed me and struck the sharp edge of a rock, cutting his paw. He stopped a minute to lick the cut—and then turned to attack me again. But before he could reach me, the trainers were on him.”

“No more lions for you, after that, I imagine!” I said.

She looked at me with the expression I had noticed so often while we were talking, a curious mixture of nonchalance and intensity.

“Not for half hour or so,” she said; “then we did the scene again. Fortunately, Jimmie behaved better that time. Or maybe he’d lost his taste for me.”

‘If the photographer went on turning the camera handle when Jimmie leaped at you, it must have made a great picture,” I said. “Do they often get these thrilling accidental scenes?”

“They happen once in a while, but I never have known of an accident picture that could be used. You see, they never fit into the story. The time I sank the airplane, for instance, the picture couldn’t be used, because the story required me to land safely and to rescue the hero from his desert island. It is always that way. The accident spoils the story.

“Once I had to make a flying leap from a moving automobile to the running board of another machine which was racing abreast of it. I missed the running board and fell. I had on a leather coat, which caught in the wheel, and 1 was carried for at least one complete revolution before the machine could be stopped. But the picture of the accident couldn’t be used, because in the story I made the leap successfully.”

“Speaking of automobiles, I must tell you of the most wonderful nine days I ever spent. It was one summer during the war. I was sick of New York, fed up with Broadway, disgusted with everything and everybody. We had just finished a picture and I had a six-weeks vacation ahead of me. The very first night of it, I packed a bag, had a roll of blankets put into my car, and started out alone to get away from all the noise and glare and sordidness of the city into the good clean country.

“I told you that I was afraid of the dark. I am! But I slept every night under the car, in some lonely field away from the road. One night I was frightened half out of my wits when a cow almost stepped on my arm, which was sticking out from under the machine. I used to drive at night, too; and when the road ran through woods I was in terror every minute of the time. But I kept on going. I followed no set route, but wandered around in all directions.

“The fourth day, I turned into a little by-road up near Schenectady and came to a shabby farmhouse. The yard seemed to me to be alive with dogs, which set up a tremendous barking. The rumpus brought a woman to the door, and I asked her for a glass of water. I hadn’t been near a hotel since I had left New York. It had rained more than once; but I had a rain coat and had kept right on going. I would buy food at village stores and eat it when I came to some quiet bit of road. It was a wild proceeding; but I was happy, out under God’s stars, as I told myself, and all that sort of thing.

“Well, the woman asked me if I wouldn’t get out and stay a while. I had been sick of people—but not of people of her sort. So I got out and we two sat there on her little porch and talked for five hours! She was wonderful. Uneducated, so far as schooling went; but with a philosophy of wisdom of her own. I never have felt so small as I did sitting there and listening to her.

“We talked of everything; of right and wrong, of why people are what they are, of what is really worth while, and of what is only on the surface and doesn’t count in the long run.

“It was a strange experience; and, for me, a very wonderful one. I had been half inclined to come back to New York. But after my talk with her, I stayed out five days longer. I think I would have spent the whole six weeks that way if I hadn’t gone to Albany. After nine days of roughing it, I went to a hotel there to have a few hours in a bathtub and to replenish my limited supply of clothing. As luck would have it, I met friends there, and they persuaded me to give up what they considered my mad escapade. But those nine days will always be literally the ‘nine days wonder’ of my life.”

2018 in Action Heroine Films

By Jim McLennan January 1, 2018 January 1, 2018 Feature

Before we get into looking forward to next year, let’s look back at 2017, and what happened to the films mentioned in our last preview. Not a bad year, with Wonder Woman proving that an action heroine based on a comic-book could more than hold her own at the box-office. Though Ghost in the Shell proved that wasn’t necessarily a guarantee. The Resident Evil and Underworld franchises had perhaps the final outings, with their current personnel. And Charlize Theron solidified her credentials as the current queen of Hollywood action heroines, with Atomic Blonde (then known as The Coldest City) delivering the year’s most bone-crunching action. But what of the titles we mentioned there, which never arrived? Where is Annihilation? The Godmother? Red Sparrow? Read on, for updates on these, and other entries currently scheduled for 2018…

Alita: Battle Angel (Jul 20)

I loved the anime. I adored the manga. I am… not certain about the live-action adaptation. The trailer looks good, but the over-sized eyes they’ve given Alita are really distracting, especially since she’s the only one who has them. Still, Robert Rodriguez has done enough in the past to deserve slack: both Planet Terror and Sin City showed he knows his way around an action heroine, and it’s likely better he does it, than the original intended director of James Cameron. [How the mighty have fallen…] Though after the commercial failure last year of Ghost in the Shell, I wonder if the market is ready for this?

Anna (TBA)

Details are extremely sparse about Luc Besson’s new directorial feature. It will be a lot smaller in scale than the under-performing Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, with a budget estimated at $30 million, compared to Valerian‘s $220+ million. It will star Sasha Luss, who had a small role in Valerian, as well as Cillian Murphy, Luke Evans and Helen Mirren. But beyond that? Besson offered one image (right) through Instagram, along with the cryptic comment, “When Nikita meets Leon…” That’s all we have for now. While listed for 2018 on IMDb I’ve a feeling this may end up drifting back into 2019. Hopefully we’ll know more by next year’s version of this article!

Annihilation (Feb 23)

Directed by Alex Garland, who got a lot of acclaim for Ex Machina, it stars Natalie Portman as Lena, the leader of an all-female expedition, who enter an environmental disaster zone called “Area X”, in search of her missing husband. According to Garland, Lena “finds a very strange, dream-like, surrealist landscape, and goes deeper and deeper into that world, and also into that mindset.” A teaser trailer was released in September, and emphasis was definitely on “teaser,” since it keeps all the movie’s cards very close to its chest. But the cast, also including Jennifer Jason Leigh and Gina Rodriguez, has our attention, and the full trailer (a still from which is above) does nothing to decrease our interest.

Cadaver (Aug 24)

This should have come out in August 2017, but was shunted, first to February and now August. Not usually a good sign. It centers on ex-cop and recovering alcoholic Megan Reed (Shay Mitchell), who takes a graveyard shift at a hospital morgue, and according to the IMDb synopsis, “faces a series of bizarre, violent events caused by an evil entity in one of the corpses.”

Cocaine Godmother (Jan 20)

I’m not quite sure what’s going on here. Last time we checked, this biopic about Griselda Blanco starring Catherine Zeta-Jones, was known as The Godmother and principal photography began in November 2015. But according to the IMDb, that production is now circling development hell, with Catalina Sandino Moreno as the lead. Best as I can tell, Zeta-Jones instead moved over to play the role in this movie (left), which will be skipping theatres. It will also be skipping DVD, apparently, and appearing instead, directly on Lifetime. I suspect this may limit some of the more salacious elements of Blanco’s story!

The Darkest Minds (Sep 14)

An adaptation of the young adult novel of the same name by Alexandra Bracken, here’s the Wikipedia synopsis: “When Ruby woke up on her tenth birthday, something about her had changed. Something frightening enough to make her parents lock her in the garage and call the police. Something that got her sent to Thurmond, a brutal government “rehabilitation camp.” She might have survived the mysterious disease that had killed most of America’s children, but she and the others emerged with something far worse: frightening abilities they could not control. Now sixteen, Ruby is one of the dangerous ones…” Particularly of interest, Gwendoline Christie, playing a bounty hunter of teens who escape from the camp.

The Girl in the Spider’s Web (Oct 19)

Author Stieg Larsson may be dead, but the media machine grinds on, with a fourth novel featuring Lisbeth Salander and journalist Mikael Blomkvist, having been written by another author. This is being adapted by Hollywood, without even waiting for a Scandinavian version, though neither Mara Rooney nor Daniel Craig will be returning to their characters. Replacing Rooney is Claire Foy, best known for her roles as two British queens: Anne Boleyn, and Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown. After not being particularly impressed with the first American take on the characters, we’ll see if “not being a superfluous remake” helps this at all.

Headlock (TBA)

IMDb synopsis: “After new CIA recruit, Kelley Chandler is seriously injured during a mission, surviving only on life support, his wife Tess (Dianna Agron), a former CIA operative, becomes determined to find out what happened to her husband. As the details of Kelley’s last mission unravel, showing that his accident was an inside job, Tess puts everything on the line to keep Kelley out of harm’s way, even if that comes with dangerous consequences.” Will we ever see this? For its status was changed to “Completed” on Oct 17… 2015; the still above was released more than a year prior to that.

Ocean’s Eight (Jun 8)

I’m a bit surprised they bothered, after the firestorm of criticism – some justified, some not – which followed the all-female Ghostbusters remake. This might have a better cast: Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Anne Hathaway and Helena Bonham Carter, though what the hell is an “Awkwafina”? Must confess to not having seen any of the male versions of the franchise, so at least this storyline will seem relatively fresh to my eyes. On the other hand, there’s a reason I haven’t seen any of the male versions…

Proud Mary (Jan 12)

Starting off 2018, we have Taraji P. Henson playing an organized crime hitwoman in Boston, who leaves a young boy orphaned after a job goes wrong. Described elsewhere as “John Wick’s action meets Foxy Brown’s retro style” – though you could quibble that Foxy Brown was certainly not “retro style” – those are some lofty platform shoes to fill. The story doesn’t exactly particularly new, and I’m likely about 80% sure I can figure out where it’s going to go. When the producer says it’s about Mary “finding her purpose and her heart again through this relationship with this kid,” that whirring sound you can hear are my eyes rolling…

Red Sparrow (Mar 2)

Jennifer Lawrence’s return to the action genre also re-teams her with Francis Lawrence (no relation),who directed three-quarters of the Hunger Games‘ movies. She plays a former ballerina, Dominika Egorova, whose dance career is ended by injury, and who becomes a Russian spy instead. She falls for a CIA officer, played by Joel Edgerton, a relationship which makes Egorova consider becoming an American double-agent. The trailer doesn’t skimp on the promise of sex and violence, and according to Lawrence (the directorial one), will have a “hard R” rating. This year’s Atomic Blonde, maybe?

Scorched Earth (Feb 2)

This was originally supposed to be out last year, but vanished without trace from the schedules. At least, until just a couple of days ago, when a trailer suddenly appeared (and can be seen as part of the playlist below). It takes place in a post-apocalyptic world, where a bounty-hunter named Atticus Gage tracks down criminals. Which wouldn’t seem to fit in here, except that Atticus is played by Gina Carano, who looked very impressive in Haywire. The same can probably not be said of the trailer, unfortunately, which looks very generic; I hope the movie has more of Carano in action. This will be getting a limited theatrical release, and also opening at the same point across video-on-demand channels

Swords and Sceptres (TBA)

According to the IMDb synopsis, this is “A tale of women’s empowerment, Swords and Sceptres tells the true story of Lakshmibai, the historic Queen of Jhansi who fiercely led her army against the British East India Company in the infamous mutiny of 1857.” Lakshmibai is often considered “India’s Joan of Arc” and this isn’t the only film to tell her story this year. We’ll also get The Queen of Jhansi, but that appears to be a “pure” Bollywood film. This includes Rupert Everett, Derek Jacobi and Jodhi May, as well as the less well-known Devika Bhise as the Queen, so likely has a better chance of a Western release.

Tomb Raider (Mar 16)

She’s back! 15 years after Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life underwhelmed, Lara returns, this time in a grittier and less… ah, “bosomy” version. Alicia Vikander straps on the vest and twin pistols for this reboot of the franchise, as previously worn by Angelina Jolie. Is she “strong” enough? We’ll see, but similar qualms about Gail Gadot as Wonder Woman proved unfounded. Fellow Scandinavian Roar Uthaug is directing this, which gives me cause for optimism since he also gave us the remarkably bad-ass wilderness pic, Escape (Flukt). If this can match it, we’ll have the best Tomb Raider film thus far.

Traffik (Apr 27)

Here’s the official synopsis for this one: Investigative journalist Brea Stephens (Paula Patton) goes on what is supposed to be a romantic getaway to a cabin in the woods with her boyfriend, John Wilson (Omar Epps), but after a chance encounter with a suspicious gang at a secluded truck stop, they find themselves unknowingly in possession of a phone containing proof of the gang’s sex trafficking exploits. Caught in the crosshairs of the relentless crew, Brea and John are left with one mission: survival.

Widows (Nov 16)

Directed by Steve McQueen – no, the other one, who did Oscar-winner 12 Years a Slave – this is based of the eighties TV series of the same name [which I must get round to reviewing – I watched two of the three seasons, but it then fell off my radar]. Assuming it follows the same lines, this will be the story of a group of women, whose husbands are killed during a botched armed robbery, who decide to carry on and pull off the raid themselves. In this version, the widows will be Viola Davis, Elizabeth Debicki, Michelle Rodriguez and Cynthia Erivo.

Below, you’ll find a playlist with the seven currently available trailers for the above movies, to whet your appetite some more!

Girls With Guns Calendars 2018

By Jim McLennan December 1, 2017 December 1, 2017 Feature

Welcome to our seventh annual round-up of girls with guns calendars, just in time for your Christmas shopping delight. Below, you’ll find prices (generally excluding shipping), sample images and links to purchase for all the calendars we could find. We’ll add more if we find them, feel free to email us if you know of any others. It has been a rough year in some ways, with several familiar names apparently not publishing this time around, including Alex Smits, Guns & Camo and (for a second successive year, so we’re calling them D.O.A. for now) Magpul. But we have also found a couple of new entries!

TAC GIRLS TacGirls.com – $16.95 “Tactical Girls® 2018 Bikini Gun Calendar starts in January of 2018 and brings you 13 months of beautiful women with some of the world’s most exotic weaponry in realistic tactical settings. The 2018 Tactical Girls Calendar includes the Cadex Tremor .50 BMG Precision Rifle, the Kel-Tec KSG-25 bullpup Shotgun and last but not least the DRD Tactical Semi-Auto .338 Lapua Magnum! All of these, along with a variety of carbines, battle rifles, machine guns, pistols and sniper rifles, all with gorgeous models in realistic settings.”
LIBERTY BELLES LibertyBellesUSA.com – $19.99 “Liberty Belles takes a glamorous glance at the world of tactical military jobs with a sexy twist! This project honors the special operations military forces within the US Navy, US Air Force, US Marine Corps, and US Army by boosting morale and creating awarness for various career fields within the armed forces. We believe our tactical bikinis and attention to detail helps our brand stand out above others in the same field. The 2014 Liberty Belles Calendar followed the same precedence as it’s 2013 Clips and Hips predecessor that was created by Chasen Grieshop, Gary Stevens, and Jarred Taylor. In 2012, these original three creators set out to create a tactical girl calendar that surpassed the average tried and true girls-with-guns idea, thus Clips and Hips was born. Since then, the creative forces behind Clips and Hips have gone their separate ways; however, the idea has since taken new form.”
GUNS AND GIRLS GunsAndGirlsCalendar.com – $19.95 (inc. shipping) “The 2018 GUNS AND GIRLS wall calendar is packed with beautiful pin up models and many of today’s most popular weapons, everything from handguns to AR15s. This 16 month large format calendar is 17″x 28″ when hung up and a perfect gift for any Armed Service Member, Police Officer or Shooting Enthusiast. Also includes a bonus 12 month poster inside giving you two calendars in one package!“
GUNS AND CAMO GunsAndCamo.com – $13.95. While there does appear to be a cover image for this one, it looks like the domain expired in early November, and at least one source says it has been discontinued. I’m not optimistic.
HOT SHOTS HotShotsCalendar.com – $16.95 “Returning for the 11th year running, Hot Shots Calendar went on the road for the 4th of July. The girls experienced true independence, travelling freely through the state of Wyoming; locked, loaded and ready to shoot (for the calendar)! This year’s theme showcases the deadly combination of the amazing Hot Shots girls and some serious weaponry. As always, Hot Shots Calendar aims to support the bravery and sacrifices made by the armed forces who continually risk their own lives to protect ours. Proceeds from the calendar are donated to charities in the UK and US such as Help for Heroes in honour of their service to their country. Gracing Hot Shots once again are veterans Rosie Jones, Kelly Hall and India Reynolds. Hot Shots also welcomed new girls Lauren Houldsworth, Tina Louise, Charissa Littlejohn and Liberte Austin to complete our sensational seven.”
ZAHAL GIRLS zahal.org – $23.90 It’s finally ready! The Zahal Girls 2018 calendars are ready and waiting to be shipped all around the world! The 2018 Zahal Girls calendar features all of our girls with Israeli & US made rifle accessories & tactical gear. All girls are IDF veterans that server in combat positions such as: Infantry & Infantry shooting instructors. The calendar is made out of 14 high quality chromo paper sheets, all joint together with a metal spiral, a small hook at the top (for hanging) and printed with high quality ink HP printers. Lovie M. – Shooting Instructor & Range Master Natasha P. – Infantry “Caracal” Battalion Shiran A. – Shooting Instructor & Range Master Esti S. – Infantry “Caracal” Battalion Shir E. – Shooting Instructor & Range Master Orin J. – Combat Search & Rescue
RED BUBBLE RedBubble.com – $28.00 Tough wire binding and hanger Stunningly sharp digital printing Start the year with the month of your choice 200gsm satin art paper with a tougher cover
GURLS N GUNZ CafePress.com – $19.99 Keeping track of important dates is easy with our high quality 12-month Wall Calendar Choose your own start month and year Pages measure 11″ x 8.5″; calendar measures 11″ x 17″ when hung on wall 100 lb cover weight high gloss paper, wire-o bound Full-bleed, full-color printing
CCFR Gunnie Girl Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights – $19.95 Finally, if you’re looking for something more PG-rated, you can head north of the border for this gun advocacy group. “This year’s calendar highlights and promotes some of our amazing CCFR women with beautiful, tasteful and stunning photos of them and their favourite firearms. The funds raised from this project will be used to financially support the women’s program. Each calendar comes with a registration number for prize give-aways. Quantities are limited.” Not sure if the price is in US or Canadian dollars.

Amazons: Miss-ology in fact and fiction

By Jim McLennan November 1, 2017 November 1, 2017 Feature

Hippolyte, queen of the Amazons, with Herakles between Amazons. Fragment of a terracotta volute-krater, created: circa 330–310 B.C

Not in strength are we inferior to men; the same our eyes, our limbs the same; one common light we see, one air we breathe; nor different is the food we eat. What then denied to us hath heaven on man bestowed?
— Queen Penthesilea, The Fall of Troy

Wonder Woman has spent this summer closing in on The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, for the title of biggest worldwide box-office by an action heroine (depending on how you view The Force Awakens – personally, I’m with-holding a definitive opinion until I see how the series develops). So it seems an appropriate point to take a look at the legendary Amazons – the women warriors tribe of which Diana Prince is supposedly a part. But how “legendary” were they? Is there evidence to suggest they might, in part, have been based on real women warriors of ancient times?

The Amazons of myth

The first mentions of the Amazons were by 8th-century Greek poet, Homer, in The Iliad, though these were little more than passing references. King Priam of Troy recounts a battle from his youth: “I looked on the Phrygian men with their swarming horses, so many of them, the people of Otreus and godlike Mygdon, whose camp was spread at that time along the banks of the Sangarios: and I myself, a helper in war, was marshalled among them on that day when the Amazon women came, men’s equals.” Similarly, among the exploits recounted of Bellerophon, who captured and tamed the flying horse, Pegasus, was that “he slaughtered the Amazons, who fight men in battle.”

They are more significant in the saga of Heracles (a.k.a Hercules) and his twelve tasks. The ninth was to obtain the belt belonging to Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. This had been given to her by Ares, the god of war, and was used to carry her sword and spear. He did convince her to hand it over peacefully, but the goddess Hera was intent on stopping Heracles, and roused Hippolyta’s subjects against him. In the ensuing battle, Hippolyta was killed by Heracles. This is the first time we hear of Themiscyra as their home. though rather than an island nation, it was a town near the Black Sea, in what’s now Turkey. Another Greek hero, Theseus, also encountered them; some stories have him accompanying Heracles and marrying an Amazon, triggering a long conflict with Athens, known as the Attic War.

The main source for information is Herodotus, a historian of the fifth century B.C. The story he tells starts with the Greeks defeating the Amazons and taking three shipfuls of them captive, only for the prisoners to overthrow their captors, and land in Scythia, on the north of the Black Sea. “The Amazons had nothing except their arms and their horses, and got their living… by hunting and by taking booty.” There, they fought the locals, until the Scythians decided to make love not war, and sent their young men out to befriend the raiders, which they did so successfully, it led eventually to an entire separate tribe, the Sauromatai, about whom he says:

From thenceforward the women of the Sauromatai practise their ancient way of living, going out regularly on horseback to the chase both in company with the men and apart from them, and going regularly to war, and wearing the same dress as the men… As regards marriages their rule is this, that no maiden is married until she has slain a man of their enemies; and some of them even grow old and die before they are married, because they are not able to fulfil the requirement of the law.

This is relatively restrained, and seems plausible compared to some of the other myths which circulated about them. Not least is the whole “cutting off a breast so they could fire their bows better” thing, which appears possibly to stem from a mistranslation of “Amazon”. None of the depictions to be found in classical art, for example, show them with a count of breasts below two. There’s also the concept that they would get together, once a year, with the men of a nearby tribe, for the purposes of procreation, retaining only the resulting female children. Or the claim by Diodorus Siculus , that the Amazons of Queen Myrina used the skins of gigantic snakes, from Libya, to protect themselves at battle. Cool story, bro’.

Our pal Diodorus is also a primary source for the tale of Queen Thalestris and Alexander the Great, though some other biographers also mention her. He says Thalestris “was remarkable for beauty and for bodily strength, and was admired by her countrywomen for bravery.” She showed up in Alexander’s camp with 300 Amazons in full armour, and when asked why she had come, replied it was to have him father a child. “He had shown himself the greatest of all men in his achievements, and she was superior to all women in strength and courage, so that presumably the offspring of such outstanding parents would surpass all other mortals in excellence.” Thirteens days of, ahem, intense diplomatic negotiations followed – but history does not record whether any offspring did!

While Wikipedia snarkily comments, “Battles between Amazons and Greeks are placed on the same level as – and often associated with – battles of Greeks and centaurs,” they were a popular subject for art, to the point where there was a word for its depiction: Amazonomachy. It symbolized the Greeks’ struggle against everything uncivilized. Typically, the Amazons were portrayed in the style of Scythian horseman, again echoing the story of Herodotus. It’s perhaps interesting to note that on the relief sculpture of two female gladiator found at Halicarnassus, they were identified as Amazonia and Achillea, presumably the “ring names” of the women involved.

The Amazons in reality

All of the above stories were regarded as just that: stories, with no basis in fact. But as the world was gradually explored, there were various encounters with local inhabitants around the globe, which suggested that the legends may not have been without same basis in fact.

Originally, there were various names for the River Amazon: Rio Grande (Great River), Mar Dulce (Sweet Sea) or Rio da Canela. The one we know today, only came about after a 1542 expedition under Spaniard Francisco Orellana. On June 24, he and his men had a skirmish against natives, and “witnessed twelve tall arrow-shooting women, pale and nearly naked, with their hair braided around their heads, apparently acting as captains of the male warriors defending against the incursion. The women clubbed any warrior who tried to retreat.” A captive described the empire of Queen Conori, and the similarities in some aspects with the Hellenic Amazons, such as capturing men for breeding purposes, impressed Orellana enough that his expedition called the river they were exploring, the Amazon. That name stuck.

They were, however, still generally regarded as being little more than mythical. Belief in them as a historical entity was limited to the fringe, most notably Swiss scholar Johann Jakob Bachofen. In 1861 Bachofen published Mother Right: an investigation of the religious and juridical character of matriarchy in the Ancient World. This suggested civilization had gone through four phases, including “Das Mutterecht,” a matriarchal ‘lunar’ phase, which was the origin of the Amazon myth. Some suggest he was an influence on Richard Wagner, in particular with regard to the Valkyries.

Elsewhere around the world, various societies and groups have evolved which mirror, in some aspects, those attributed to the Amazons by the ancient Greeks, such as being matriarchal and/or warrior in nature. For example, there were the Dahomey Amazons (right), a book about whom we previously reviewed. They were an all-female military regiment of the central African Kingdom of Dahomey, in what’s now Benin, which lasted from the 17th century until relatively recent times – their last surviving veteran reportedly died as recently as 1979. We have also talked about how the legendary Viking raiding parties were not as unisex as often supposed. And in 1857, the Daily True Delta carried this report, detailing at some length the all-women bodyguards recruited by the King of Siam (presumably when he wasn’t flirting with English schoolmarms…).

Meanwhile, back in their more traditional territory near the Black Sea, evidence in support of the myth was uncovered in the mid-90’s. Archaeologists dug up burial mounds near the town Pokrovka, in what is now Kazakhstan. Based on the content, these belonged to the Sauromatai, the tribe mentioned earlier. But the most relevant finds were multiple skeletons of women who had been interred with weapons. The New York Times reported, “One young woman, bow-legged from riding horseback, wore around her neck an amulet in the form of a leather pouch containing a bronze arrowhead. At her right side was an iron dagger; at her left, a quiver holding more than 40 arrows tipped with bronze.”

This makes sense: just as now, a gun offers a great equalizer in terms of countering an opponent’s size and strength, so did a horse and a bow in ancient times. There’s no reason why a woman would not be able to acquire just as much proficiency as a man in these areas. However, there’s nothing to suggest they lived separately from the men, in the way the ancient Greeks described. They would still have presented a startling contrast to Greek women. It’s believed they were tattooed, smoked marijuana and drank fermented mare’s milk, turning it into an alcoholic beverage known as kumis which is still consumed today, by the peoples of the Central Asian steppes.

Amazons in popular culture

Wonder Woman is just the most recent, and certainly most successful incarnation of the Amazon clan to find its way into the mass media. Virtually since the time of Herodotus, there have been a steady stream of tales, more or less exploiting prurient interest in the concept of a tribe entirely consisting of women. It has been used in ways both derogatory and complimentary: to mock women for losing their femininity, as well as to inspire them in their battle for increased rights. The suffragettes of the early twentieth century, in particular, frequently used the Amazons as a totem in their poems and stories.

One of the earliest films about them was 1933’s The Warrior’s Husband, which “tells the story of the Amazons, who ruled over men thanks to the sacred girdle of Diana, and Hercules who came to steal it.” This comedy was based on a Broadway play, most notable for giving Katherine Hepburn her big break, in the lead role of Antiope (shown right). According to The Telegraph, “The role required her to enter by leaping down a flight of steep steps while carrying a large stag on her shoulders. The RKO talent scout was so impressed by this feat that he offered her a film contract.”

We should mention the Amazon film that never made it to production. In early 1939, German film-maker Leni Riefenstahl was working on a feature about Penthesilea, the Amazon queen who fought in the Trojan Wars. She had secured funding from Hitler, locations in Libya, and had even begun training young sportswomen to play the roles of Penthesilea’s army, with Riefenstahl (a bit of an Amazon herself – she did her own free climbing for her directorial debut, Das blaue Licht) playing the queen. However, the outbreak of World War II derailed what would certainly have been an interesting take on the myth.

Two years later, in October 1941, Wonder Woman made her debut, appearing in All Star Comics #8. She was the creation of William Moulton Marston, a psychologist who had already become famous as inventor of the polygraph, and there was no doubt on which side of the battle he stood. “Wonder Woman,” Marston wrote, “is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world.” He also called bondage a “respectable and noble practice,” which perhaps cast WW’s Lasso of Truth + Bracelets of Submission in a rather different light!

There have been no shortage of subsequent films to take the Amazon theme – though most of these bear about as much resemblance to the myth, as the myth does to the Scythians who inspired it! I’m not even going to attempt a comprehensive listing of these. Instead, I’ll pick and choose ten somewhat representative candidates, some of which have been reviewed on this site. They’re listed in chronological order.

Queen of the Amazons (1947) – or “Journey to the land of stock footage” as one review put it. The first, and certainly not the last, to relocate the myth to the African jungle.
Love Slaves of the Amazons (1957) – Made in Argentina in 1956, along with a film called Curucu, Beast of the Amazon, and using some of the same cast. Director Curt Siodmak claimed to have made the film because he had 10,000 feet of color film left over from Curucu but could not export the unused film.
Amazons of Rome (1961) – A rather misleading American retitling, of a film originally known as Le vergini di Roma, “The virgins of Rome”. But a surprising cast here, which includes Louis Jourdan, Sylvia Syms and Michel Piccoli.
Thor and the Amazon Women (1963) – An Italian/Yugoslavian co-production, filmed largely on location in the Postojna Caves of what is now Slovenia. Lobs some Scandinavian mythology into the mix, for no readily apparent reason, and may be anti-feminist rather than empowering!
Battle of the Amazons (1973) – “Tedesco makes a good impression as the feisty heroine, and it’s a nice touch to have women effectively leading both sides. Sadly, the Amazons also step aside when the action kicks off, largely being unconvincingly replaced by male stunt doubles in masks and wigs.”
War Goddess (1973) – “Credit is due to both Johnston and Sun, who take on material that often strays to questionable or even laughable, with a straight-faced intensity which is rather more than it deserves.”
Hundra (1983) – “The producers purchased some of the left-over costumes and props from Conan, which makes sense since the story here is also largely recycling its plot as well. Admittedly, it does so with a significantly enhanced feminist agenda, although this consists as much of portraying men as nothing but mindless boors as anything uplifting.”
Amazons (1986) – “There’s certainly plenty going on, with plots, treachery, topless human sacrifice, bad blood and an alternate dimension largely realised with dry ice and strobe lights. The action, unfortunately, sucks, though credit is due to Randolph for struggling with a lethargic snake, making it look like the most ferocious attack in cinematic history.”
Amazon Warrior (1998) – “The fight sequences just about pass muster – it helps if you squint at them sideways, rather than giving them your direct attention – and it appears that after civilization has collapsed into anarchy and chaos, what remains will resemble an SCA get-together, albeit with rather more fur bikinis.”
Amazons and Gladiators (2001) – “No real surprises in the plot, with everyone getting more or less what they deserve. But despite accents which roam the globe from Australia through England to America, it’s well-acted and well thought-out, with very few mis-steps. “

It’s to television, however, that we turn for the most well-known incarnation of an Amazon in pop-culture: the TV series Wonder Woman, which aired for three seasons from 1975-79, with Lynda Carter in the title role, playing superheroine (and Amazon refugee) Diana Prince. It followed on from an earlier, rejected pilot movie starring Cathy Lee Crosby, and the second pilot proved a much greater ratings success. After the first season was set in World War II, the following series (retitled The New Adventures of Wonder Woman) took place in the present day, and the result was one of the most iconic action heroines of the decade on television. There was a 2011 attempt to revive the show, with Adrienne Palicki as Diana; despite the presence of David E. Kelley as a writer, the pilot episode was never officially aired, and the project quickly died.

The other television show people will generally associate with Amazons is, of course, Xena: Warrior Princess. This is a bit of a grey area: despite sharing a number of characteristics, Xena herself was never a formal member of the Amazon tribe, despite helping them out on a number of occasions. However, irritating sidekick Gabrielle became their queen (more by chance than intent), and over the six seasons for which the show ran, there were typically between two and four episodes per series, featuring the tribe to some extent.

Amazons have turned up elsewhere, and sometimes in shows where you wouldn’t exactly expect to find them. Examples include Series 7 of Supernatural, which had an episode titled ‘The Slice Girls’ in which Amazons had made a bargain with their mother, the goddess Harmonia, turning them into monsters. Or in 2003, the SF show Stargate SG-1 had “Birthright”, in which the Amazonian legend was specifically mentioned, after the crew met the Hak’tyl Resistance, a group of female warriors. More recently, it was announced last year that the producer of NCIS, Charles F. Johnson, was working on Amazons, a live-action TV series about the Dahomey warriors mentioned above, though nothing more has been heard of the project.

It will be interesting to see if the critical and commercial success of the Wonder Woman feature will re-kindle interests in Amazons as a whole. While Diana Prince is a creation of DC Comics, the Amazons themselves are very much in the public domain, and can be used by any artist – be that on TV, film or in literature. The door is thus wide open for such uses: I’m a little surprised The Asylum haven’t already given us a mockbuster version of Wonder Woman, especially considering they did put out Sinister Squad… We’ll see what 2018 brings.

Bolivia’s Fighting Cholitas

By Jim McLennan September 1, 2017 July 25, 2017 Feature, Videos

Professional wrestling is perhaps more international than you’d expect. While traditional territories – USA, Japan, Mexico and the UK – still remain the powerhouses, there is hardly a country in the world without its own local pro federation. But even I had not heard of Ecuador’s cholita luchadoras. Cholita is a term used for the native women there, usually found at the bottom of the social pyramid, both in terms of wealth and education. So the term translates as the “fighting cholitas“, who use pro wrestling as a way out of poverty, and to help them at least approach the average wage there, which is around $270 per month.

While initially intended purely for local consumption, it has achieved renown, both local and internationally, and become a tourist attraction. Local company “Andean Secrets” – run by one of the cholitas – runs excursions that pick visitors up at their hotel and take them to one of their shows at the Multifunctional Centre in El Alto. Tourists have to pay five times the cost for locals, but the price does get them ringside seats. In style, it’s closest to Mexican lucha libre, with the good girls (technicos) going up against the rudos, who cheat. abuse the audience and collude with a corrupt referee to try and achieve victory. You can generally tell who’s who from the names they choose. There’s an almost standard format to these: Chela la Maldita, Sonia La Simpática, Juanita La Cariñosa (Affectionate), Rosita La Rompecorazones (Heartbreaker) or Silvina La Poderosa (Powerful).

An exception is the matriarch of the cholitas, known as Carmen Rosa. She was part of the original group of cholitas and one of the three who made it through the training program. She said, “For me, wrestling is my life; it is in my heart. It makes it hard for me to choose between wrestling and my family. They have asked me to stop fighting and sometimes I think about quitting, but I can’t. My heart beats fast at the mere mention of wrestling, or when I go to see a show, not to mention when I am about to enter the ring. There is nothing I love more than wrestling.” But even after a decade, she’s not fully professional: her day job is running her family’s local snack-bar.

That’s par for the course – as another example, Benita La Intocable (the Untouchable, one of the most high-flying of the cholitas) was training to be a nurse. Because the pay received is still peanuts by Western standards – typically no more than thirty dollars for their night’s work – but it’s an improvement on the very limited opportunities available to cholitas, typically as maid or other menial work. For until recently, the indigenous men and women had suffered a long history of discrimination, denied education, health care and public presence. The election in 2006 of the first Bolivian President from their group, Evo Morales, has helped address things, but there’s a reason the cholitas fight in El Alto, not the more prosperous La Paz.

They first entered the ring around the start of the millennium, the idea of local promoter Juan Mamani. Initially intended purely as a gimmick during a period of audience decline – he also considered using midgets – it took off in an unexpected way, with over fifty women showing up for that first open try-out. But after years under Mamani’s thumb, in which the women took the risks, and the associated damage, while his promotion, Titanes del Ring (Titans of the Ring) took the profits, there was a schism. Carmen and others among his top wrestlers left in 2011, starting up their own independent association, Diosas del Ring (Goddesses of the Ring), to gain the fruits of their own efforts. [Mamani allegedly then hired another woman, to play what I guess was Carmen Rosa v2.0!]

It was initially a struggle, with the women struggling to find even a place to train, and some of the defectors subsequently returning to Mamani – a man whom National Geographic once described as “a tall, angular man whom it would be kind to call unfriendly”. But Carmen and her colleagues persisted, and now they’ll get close to a thousand people attending their weekly events. She has become a celebrity, and not just in El Alto or even Bolivia. Carmen has traveled widely as a result, including trip to America and Peru, as well as being brought to London for 2015’s ‘Greatest Spectacle of Lucha Libre’ festival at York Hall.

The most immediate difference any wrestling fan will notice, is the costumes. While in America, wrestlers typically wear a limited amount of tight-fitting clothing, intended not to interfere with their moves, the cholitas come to fight in the traditional native costumes, consisting of multiple layered skirts (typically five or six), and little bowler hats which perch on top of their long, braided hair. [Bonus fact: the angle of the hat indicates marital status] It seems implausible they would be able to do anything requiring significant movement, but you’d be surprised. Also worth noting: the women need particular endurance, due to the altitude. Bolivia’s capital, La Paz, is the highest in the world, and the nearby low-income suburb of El Alto, home of the cholitas, is more elevated still, at over 13,500 feet above sea-level. Simply breathing is hard work, that far up.

The matches are not limited to women vs. women, with the cholitas taking on their male counterparts, as dictated by the storyline. It’s a one of a kind breed of professional wrestling, and a take which goes beyond the first impression of the unique style. For it is sports entertainment, not just based on athletic talent combined with the struggle of “good against evil,” but a version which offers social and political commentary too. Below, you’ll find a playlist of Youtube videos, including both documentaries and other clips, which give a bit more insight into the world of the fighting cholitas.

“Sometimes my daughters ask why I insist on doing this. It’s dangerous; we have many injuries, and my daughters complain that wrestling does not bring any money into the household. But I need to improve every day. Not for myself, for Veraluz, but for the triumph of Yolanda, an artist who owes herself to her public.”
— Yolanda La Amorosa

The incredible, true survival story of Juliane Koepcke

By Jim McLennan May 1, 2017 August 26, 2019 Feature, Videos

Surviving when the plane in which you’re flying, disintegrates around you at a height of 10,000 feet is remarkable enough. When you land in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, one of the most hostile environments on Earth, and have to make it alone for more than a week, with virtually no resources, as you try to find your way to safety, that’s astonishing.

If you’re a 17-year-old girl? It’s off the charts amazing.

Admittedly, Juliane Koepcke was not your average teenager. Indeed, she could hardly have been better prepared for her ordeal. Her family moved to a research station in the Peruvian rainforest when she was 14, so her father, zoologist Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke, could continue his work. Juliane was initially home-schooled, and the curriculum covered much more than the traditional three R’s. She said, “I’d lived in the jungle long enough as a child to be acquainted with the bugs and other creatures that scurry, rustle, whistle, and snarl. There was almost nothing my parents hadn’t taught me about the jungle.” However, she was required to complete her education in the capital Lima. On Christmas Eve, 1971, she and her mother prepared to fly back from there to Pucallpa, the nearest airport to their home.

They would never arrive. The pilot made an ill-advised decision to fly through a thunderstorm, in a poorly maintained plane [the airline, LANSA, had a bad reputation for mechanical reliability, and would cease operations a few weeks later]. A lightning bolt hit the craft, igniting a fuel tank in the wing, and triggering catastrophic structural failure. Juliane fell two miles, still strapped to her seat; the protection it offered, together with the somewhat cushioned landing offered by the rainforest canopy, is likely why she became the sole survivor. She was not uninjured: she had a broken collarbone, a serious gash on her leg, a partial fracture of her shin and a torn knee ligament. Given the circumstances, though, it could have been much worse.

That was brought home later, after she came across some other victims: “When I turned a corner in the creek, I found a bench with three passengers rammed head first into the earth. I was paralysed by panic. It was the first time I had seen a dead body. I thought my mother could be one of them but when I touched the corpse with a stick, I saw that the woman’s toenails were painted – my mother never polished her nails.” With her sole piece of regular food a bag of candy, she had to try and make her way out. The key to her survival was finding a tiny rivulet, and following it downstream. She knew that this trickle would flow into a larger creek, and this in turn would join a river: eventually, she’d find people. Her quest was helped by hearing the call of a hoatzin, a bird Juliane recognized as nesting near open water.

Her wilderness knowledge helped when she reached the river too. The undergrowth along the bank was too dense to allow for progress, so Juliane opted to float down the middle. There, she knew potentially lethal stingrays won’t go, preferring the shallows, and also that piranhas are not a threat in quickly-moving water. But a cut on her arm had become infected with maggots, forcing her to extreme measures, after Juliane found a boat with a motor and a barrel of diesel fuel. “I remembered our dog had the same infection and my father had put kerosene in it, so I sucked the gasoline out and put it into the wound. The pain was intense as the maggots tried to get further into the wound. I pulled out about 30 maggots.”

She opted to spend the night there – her tenth in the jungle since the crash – and that proved to be her salvation. For she had stumbled across a seasonal camp belonging to some loggers, who were astonished to show up the next day and discover a blonde woman in their camp. Juliane recalls, “They believe in all sorts of ghosts there, and at first they thought that I was one of these water spirits called Yemanjá. They are blondes, supposedly.” They had heard about the crash on the radio, and took her downstream in their boat, to a local hospital that could tend her injuries, which now also included second-degree sunburn.

The authorities hadn’t been able to locate the crash site, but with Juliane’s help, they found it, and her mother’s body was eventually recovered on January 12, more than three weeks later. The creepiest thing? “My mother wasn’t dead when she fell from the plane. My father thought she’d survived for nearly two weeks – perhaps up to January 6, because when he went to identify her body it wasn’t as decomposed as you’d expect in that environment – it’s very warm and humid and there are lots of animals that would eat dead bodies. He thought she’d broken her backbone or her pelvis and couldn’t move.”

Juliane helped advise the makers of a movie based on her experiences (Miracles Still Happen, see below, or review here) and returned to the area in the early eighties, to study the area’s native bats. But it was close to two decades before she began to achieve closure. She returned to the crash site with German film-maker Werner Herzog, as part of his documentary Wings of Hope about her ordeal. Herzog was particularly well-suited to make the film, because when he was location scouting for his movie Aguirre, Wrath of God, he had initially been booked on the flight which crashed – only being saved by a last minute change in plans. Following that, Koepcke was able to write her own story, published as When I Fell from the Sky in 2011.

Below, you’ll find first Werner’s Herzog’s documentary Wings of Hope, and then the Italian feature film Miracles Still Happen, starring Susan Penhaligon, offering both factual and fictionalized versions of her remarkable story of survival. It’s truly one of the most incredible ever experienced and a testament to how knowledge can make all the difference between life and death.

The Ghost in the Shell universe

By Jim McLennan April 1, 2017 April 3, 2017 Feature

Science-fiction writers largely whiffed on predicting the Internet: as a sweeping generalization, they were too busy with rocket ships and flying cars to see the biggest change in human society since the invention of the internal combustion engine. William Gibson’s “Sprawl” trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive), which began in 1984, is a rare example which saw how the interconnectedness of people and things would become an everyday part of life, for better and worse. But one of the more accurate projections of our networked future was a Japanese manga series, first published in 1989: Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell, which has been powerfully influential since, from The Matrix through to HBO’s Westworld.

It was not Shirow’s first foray into the interface between man (or, more frequently, woman) and machine. He began in 1983 with Black Magic (made into Black Magic M-66), which preceded The Terminator in its story of a journalist trying to save a young woman from a relentless android. This was followed two years later by Appleseed, a series which according to Wikipedia, “merges elements of the cyberpunk and mecha genres with a heavy dose of politics, philosophy, and sociology.” Sound familiar? 1986’s Dominion then introduced readers to the fictional setting of Newport City, which would also become the home for Major Motoko Kusanagi, the protagonist of Ghost in the Shell.

The world

It is the near future. The world has become highly information-intensive, with a vast corporate network covering the planet, electrons and light pulsing through it. But the nation-state and ethnic groups still survive. And on the edge of Asia, in a strange corporate conglomerate-state called ‘Japan’…

So opens Ghost in the Shell. First published as a serial in Young Magazine, it began in April 1989, and was set, at that point, forty years in the future. By this point, technology has advanced to a level where every aspect of humanity, physical or mental, can be augmented by prosthetic devices. Almost everyone has taken advantage of at least a few upgrades. Some, such as Kusanagi, have embraced the concept to such extent they have entirely artificial bodies in addition to a “cyberbrain”. This enhanced version of the organ can be transferred at will between physical forms, and allows direct connection into information networks.

However, these innovations are not without their downside. If something is networked, it can be hacked. And if it can be hacked, it will be hacked, leading to potentially lethal acts of cyber-terrorism. These can be deadly, not only to the direct target – for if you can take over someone’s brain, they can then be used as your “puppet,” to commit further crimes. The hacker can even implant false memories into the victim, covering their tracks. Such sophisticated criminals require equally sophisticated law-enforcement, and this is where Section 9 come in. Led by Major Kusanagi, and operating under the watchful gaze of bureaucrat Daisuke Aramaki, they have the freedom of action necessary to tackle the most difficult cases.

It’s not just technology that has changed from the current time. Between now and then, there have been two further world wars: the third was nuclear, and the fourth was not. The net result has been the break-up of several world powers into smaller fragments. Most notably, the United States of America split off two sections, leaving only nine states behind. The American Empire occupies the South and East, while the Russo-American Alliance controls the West coast and North-East corridor. This seems eerily prescient too, with some in California currently contemplating secession. Let’s hope the American Empire’s bloody and brutal invasion of Mexico, included in the future world here, does not come to pass as well.

Japan, however, survived the two global conflicts relatively well, and has developed into a superpower. While some areas were hit with nuclear weapons in WW3, “radiation scrubbing” technology was developed, which meant these were not long-term wastelands and could be rebuilt relatively quickly. It remains a democracy, though as the opening text suggests, it’s an occasionally fragile one, with pressures from interested parties – in particular corporations – creating a dynamic tension between the needs of business and individuals. As a result of the wars, there are also a significant number of refugees from other Asian countries, which cause tension and represent a serious political powder-keg.

The Major

The heroine has had almost as many forms as there have been adaptations of the manga. Which is not a problem, because this is a universe where, if you want, you can change your body as often as your socks. It’s also why the criticisms of “whitewashing” leveled at the film for casting Scarlett Johansson never made any sense to me. Kusanagi can take any shape she wants, because her body is entirely artificial. The Major has described herself as nothing more than a fist sized clump of brain cells, without her robotic body. How she looks is purely an aesthetic choice. And, let’s face it: if I were a woman, and could look like anyone I wanted, ScarJo would be a more likely selection than most.

However, the differences are not limited to how she appears: indeed, in some incarnations (Ghost in the Shell 2), she has abandoned entirely any definitive physical semblance. The Major’s personality is also subject to variation: the anime version is a great deal more stoic than the manga one, where she appears to have come to a fairly happy place with regard to her situation. In the films, she worries frequently about whether or not she is still human – and what that even means. Another aspect which separates her from most of her contemporaries in Section 9, is that she went through full cyberization at a very early stage in her life. Although the details are murky (and also vary, depending on the adaptation), it appears she has been living an entirely artificial life, virtually for as long as she can remember.

Let’s talk about sex. Shirow has had a reputation as a bit of a lech, since virtually the start of his career. It’s an aspect which seems to have increased in his work over time; while he has almost abandoned linear story-telling, his latest artwork book is called Greaseberries, and is about what it sounds like. But even relatively early, content was controversially removed from the Japanese version of the manga, for its original American release: pages which depict the Major’s sideline, involving sex software called “Endorno.” [For the curious. You’re welcome! NSFW, obviously] Many of the Major’s costume choices also seem to come from Stripper Couture R Us, even if somewhat required by the plot, e.g. that skin-tight bodysuit is really necessary for her thermo-optical camouflage. Honest! Just don’t ask why her head doesn’t need it…

Yet curiously, actual fornication is largely missing from the Shell universe, particularly in the animated versions. Perhaps it’s the result of Kusanagi’s cybernetic nature, with her body just a tool for the job? Indeed, love is equally notable by its near-absence. Actually, this is among the things which I find most refreshing about her as a heroine: she’s not defined at all by traditionally feminine conceits like romantic relationships or family values. These tend to get shoehorned in far too often to action heroines, and most of the time (I admit, there are some exceptions), do little more than bring proceedings to a grinding halt, and get in the way of the fun stuff. This diversion of energy isn’t a problem with the Major: she had little or no interest in affairs of the heart. “Career oriented” doesn’t even begin to describe it.

The influences

The 1995 movie of Ghost in the Shell is not the first large-budget attempt at putting the “cyberpunk” world on the big screen. It was beaten to the punch, by a few months, by Johnny Mnemonic, an adaptation of a William Gibson short story, starring Keanu Reeves. The less said about it, probably the better, though coincidentally, Takeshi Kitano is in both it and the live-action Ghost. I’ll just leave you this sentence from another review: “After Henry Rollins is crucified by a fundamentalist Christian assassin played by Dolph Lundgren whose catchphrase is “Jesus time!” (AWESOME), Keanu and his sidekick Jane eventually hook up with the Lo-Teks, a gang of outlaws in the ruins of Newark led by Ice T and a cybernetic dolphin.” Yeah, Unsurprisingly, it was a critical flop then, and hasn’t exactly improved with age.

The reviews at the time of release for Ghost were stellar in comparison, though still mixed. It’s one of those films whose impact and relevance only becomes apparent over time. Like Blade Runner, you wake up one morning and suddenly go, “Holy shit, we’re living in that movie.” Okay, we may not quite yet be seeing the cyberization seen in Ghost; yet we’re getting there, in terms of the amount of time people spend interfaced into virtual worlds, from Facebook to Netflix. Consider this: 1989, when the original comic was published, was the same year Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. Even by 1995, there were less than forty million users of the Internet world-wide, the majority in the United States, and just 23,500 websites. [Working eight hours a day, you could spend a minute on every website, and see the entire Internet in under seven weeks.] The relevant figures in 2017: 3.77 billion users and about a billion sites.

The film-makers who have acknowledged its influence include virtually all the heavy hitters of genre cinema: James Cameron, Steven Spielberg and, most obviously, the Wachowski ~~brothers~~ ~~sisters~~ siblings. When they pitched their idea for The Matrix to their producers, they showed them the Ghost in the Shell movie and said, “We want to do that for real.” Spielberg would make AI: Artificial Intelligence and Minority Report, reflecting ideas explored in Ghost, and his studio, Dreamworks, are behind the live-action version, having bought the rights all the way back in April 2009. Cameron provided a glowing quote for the DVD release, and the transference of personalities seen in Avatar seems to bear a debt to Shirow’s creation.

It’s a two-way street, naturally. Ghost was influenced by what had gone before, and it’s also notable for being a rare anime film co-funded by Japan and Western companies. The results straddle cultures and have stood the test of time better than most of its contemporaries, animated or live-action. It will be interesting to see whether the latest version proves to be so well-regarded and influential, more than two decades after it comes out.

The art of Masamune Shirow

Note: some of the images below are not safe for work.

La Viuda Negra vs. Griselda Blanco: Telenovela vs. real-life

By Jim McLennan March 1, 2017 October 29, 2020 Feature, Review

The young Griselda Blanco: real (left) and telenovela versions.

★★★
“Art VAGUELY imitating life.”

It’s probably safe to say La Viuda Negra is “inspired” by the story of Griselda Blanco, rather than anything more. But there are aspects of the telenovela which are surprisingly accurate, especially in the early stages, before things begin diverging for dramatic purposes. [Note: of necessity, what follows will include major spoilers for the TV series] For example, Griselda did move to the city of Medellin with her mother at an early age, not long after the end of World War 2, and it does appear she was involved in criminal activities there, before even becoming a teenager in the mid-fifties.

A focus of the early episodes sees Blanco joining a gang, which then kidnaps the scion of a rich local family. In the telenovela, this kick-starts her career, because the victim dies, and his father vows vengeance on Griselda, forcing her to go on the run as a young adult. The reality is perhaps even more astonishing, with her former lover, Charles Cosby, reporting that the kidnap and murder took place when Blanco was only eleven years old. After the boy’s parents refused to pay up, the frustrated gang gave her a revolver and challenged her to shoot him in the head. Challenge accepted…

It was around this time she also met her first husband, Carlos Trujillo. In real life, he was involved in forging immigration documents; she had three children with him, all of whom would become involved in the drug trade, and suffer violent ends. The same happened to Trujillo, whom Griselda had killed, shortly after they divorced at the end of the sixties. In La Viuda Negra, her first husband, Puntilla, is part of the kidnapping gang, who goes on the run with Griselda, and is killed by him in Episode 6, after betraying her. [This is kind of a theme through the TV series; if Ms. Blanco has serious trust issues as a result, it’s understandable!]

It’s with her second husband that her career as a drug queen really started to take off, both in reality and fiction – though the latter has Robayo operating over the border in Ecuador, where Griselda (Serradilla) takes refuge. They establish a pipeline to move their product from South America to the United States, using attractive women as mules. The TV version has her having high-heeled shoes built, with hidden compartments to hide the drugs. That seemed a very inefficient approach to me: really, how much could one person carry? The reality made more sense: Blanco actually developed and used specially-made corsets and other lingerie, capable of holding up to seven pounds of cocaine per person. Even in those days, that was worth about a million dollars.

In the TV series, there’s a diversion after they’re established in New York, as Italian Mafia kingpin, Enzo Vittoria, falls in love with Griselda, and abducts her for reasons of affection, despite her having previously shot and wounded him. Never one to leave a job unfinished, she shoots him again, on their enforced wedding day (Episode 19), and this time completes the job. [Should that count as another murdered husband? They technically weren’t married…] However, she gradually grows estranged from Robayo, not least over the upbringing of their son, Michael Corleone Blanco – yes, he was named that in real life too! – and kills him in Episode 26, just before being arrested by long-running DEA adversary, Norm Jones (Gamboa), after having relocated to Miami.

The truth is somewhat different. Vittoria appears pure invention, although DEA agent Bob Palumbo did spend more than a decade on the trail of Blanco. There was indeed a falling out between her and second husband, Alberto Bravo, ending in her killing him. However, this took place back in Colombia. She and her top killers, Humberto Quirana and Jorge ‘Rivi’ Ayala, went to meet Bravo in a parking lot; the resulting gun-battle left Bravo and six bodyguards dead, and Blanco wounded. Later in the seventies, she returned to Florida, rising to the top in a brutal reign of terror, culminating in an infamous double homicide at Dadeland Mall. Her network brought in as much as $80 million a month, but Palombo eventually got his woman in 1985.

So, jail on both sides. But this is where the stories really start to diverge. In reality, she served 13 years in New York for cocaine smuggling, then was shipped to Florida where worse trouble awaited. For hitman ‘Rivi’ had turned stool-pigeon, and with his testimony linking her to literally dozens of murders, the death penalty loomed large. However, his testimony was largely discredited after a bizarre scandal in which he was shown to have paid secretaries at the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office for phone sex. In the end, prosecutors had to settle for lesser charges; Blanco got 20 years, and was released after only seven, returning to Colombia at the end of her sentence in 2004. The day she left, ‘Rivi’ was stabbed eight times in Dade County jail.

The TV series compacts the nineteen years Blanco really spent behind bars, in two separate sentences, into one period in New York alone. These 18 episodes add additional, entirely spurious aspects such as Griselda being forced to engage in cage fights (!) with other inmates, or her being attacked by guards, and getting revenge by setting them on fire. There are a couple of aspects one might call ‘somewhat true’. There was a plan hatched to kidnap the son of John F. Kennedy and exchange him for Blanco, though it never came as close to success as depicted in the telenovela. And while it is true that a man struck up a relationship by writing to her while she was inside, Charles Cosby was not the undercover DEA agent, portrayed as “Tyler” in the TV version.

Certainly, there’s major dramatic license in Blanco’s departure from prison. Rather than just reaching the end of her sentence, there’s a dramatic escape from literally being in the electric chair [which is odd, since no-one has been executed in New York state since 1963, and no woman since Martha Jule Beck in 1951]. Using a drug which gives the impression of death, allows her gang to break her out by ambulance (Episode 44). From there she returns to Colombia, and only at this point, does Blanco cross paths with the most notorious drug-lord of them all, Pablo Escovar. However, it appears they knew each other far longer. Some sources say they were childhood friends, others that he was Griselda’s “great apprentice,” and there are even salacious whispers they were lovers.

So any connection to fact in the show has now evaporated entirely. By this point, the real Griselda Blanco was in her sixties, and suffering badly from the effects of her life of excess – according to reports, “Court records show Blanco was a drug addict who consumed vast quantities of ‘bazooka,’ a potent form of smokeable, unrefined cocaine… would force men and women to have sex at gunpoint, and had frequent bisexual orgies.” After her release, she apparently lived quietly in Medellin. But it wasn’t enough to save her from a violent end. In September 2012, she was killed outside a butcher’s shop – ironically, in a motorcycle drive-by, the style of assassination she had pioneered and which became one of her trademarks.

This is as good a place as any, to mention the remarkably straight-edge depiction of Blanco in the telenovela. Unlike the sex- and drug-fiend described above, teleGriselda never gets high on her own supply, and is strictly monogamous – when anyone can get past her trust issues, that is. That’s something which I also noticed about La Reina Del Sur – and the Mexican TV version was radically different from the American one, where the heroine was not averse to powdering her nose now and again. It’s an odd version of morality, considering how there’s apparently no problem with her being directly and indirectly responsible for the deaths of dozens of people. “Yeah, but they were all bad,” to borrow a line from True Lies.

In the television version, however, she returns to business back on home turf. But there’s a problem, in the shape of Otalvaro. He’s another Colombian drug-runner, who holds a grudge against Blanco because she ordered the execution of his niece in her New York days – albeit for business rather than personal reasons. He teams up with Susana, another character apparently created for the show. She’s a Florida real-estate agent, who becomes part of Griselda’s crew, and is also a lesbian who has a long-time secret affection for her. When her hopes are crushed, she turns bitter, joining forces with Otalvaro, and tangentially, Escobar. Otalvaro’s daughter, Karla, meanwhile, goes the other way, falling for Michael Blanco after Otalvaro kidnaps him; she helps him escape and becomes part of Griselda’s crew.

In truth, these later episodes are less interesting, largely because the focus is so diluted – it gets away from Griselda, rather than focusing on her, as it should since she’s the most interesting character. I haven’t even mentioned Silvio, who betrays Griselda and tries to steal a submarine (!) packed with cocaine. He then gets miffed after she orders the death of his girlfriend, and begins his own, independent plot to take revenge on the family. Also still rattling around Medellin in the later stages is Jones, the series’s version of Bob Palumbo. He isn’t just chasing after her, he also ends up falling in love and prepared to do anything for her. Throw in his son and a renegade colleague, Garcia, prepared to go to any lengths to capture Griselda, and you’ll understand why it feels the writers are going for volume over quality in their storyline elements by the end.

But it’s at the end the story diverts furthest from reality. Instead of having Griselda gunned down in the street by an unknown adversary, she and her longest lasting and most faithful ally, Richi (Román), are trapped in a cold-storage room. Rather than surrender, or be captured by their enemies, legal or otherwise, they agree to a mutual suicide pact. The screen goes black, we hear the sound of gunfire, and the series ends. But mere mortality is no match for the demands of audience ratings. And so, two years later, the show began its second season, with a further 63 episodes detailing the further adventures of Griselda Blanco. The fictional version of the character appears to be even harder to kill than her real-life inspiration.

We’ll get round to watching that series in a bit, but after this 81-part marathon, I’m inclined to take a bit of a break! It wasn’t a bad show, and never became a chore: Serradilla is solid in the central role, and I also enjoyed Gamboa’s performance. But as noted, it did appear to lose focus as it went on, and did appear to be over-stretching its material. However, it will provide a useful template, against which other adaptations can be measured. For there are at least two competing Hollywood projects in various stages of production: one starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and the other, Jennifer Lopez. As and when those arrive on our screen, we can see how they compare to the extended version, offered by this telenovela.

Star: Ana Serradilla, Juan Pablo Gamboa, Julián Román, Ramiro Meneses

“My name is Alice. And I remember everything”: Re-viewing Resident Evil 1-5

By Jim McLennan February 1, 2017 September 21, 2021 Feature

With the sixth (and final?) installment in everyone’s #1 zombie-killing video-game adaptation franchise now in cinemas, it seemed a good time to go back and re-view the previous five installments, stretching back almost fifteen years. The original film came out so long ago, I wasn’t actually married. Damn. Now, however, I am. Which is why, one weekend in January, Chris and I ordered out for pizza, ensured the pillows were adequately fluffed and settled in on the couch for a marathon of maximum Umbrella mayhem. How have they stood the test of time? Here are our current takes on the series, preceded by summaries of our original reviews and a link to the full thing. But first, let’s warm up and refresh our memory with the trailers:

Resident Evil (2002)

“You’re all going to die down here!”

What we said then (3½ stars). “Not as good as it could have been, with even the most undemanding viewer able to imagine improvements. Yet, as an action/SF/horror film goes, it’s not bad at all, with very little slack or let-up. The virus is released in the first two minutes, and it’s pretty much non-stop from there on, with plenty going on. Jovovich looks the part, and the final shot has me anticipating the sequel, in a kind of Evil Dead 2 way, with her character getting totally medieval on the zombies’ asses. We can but hope.”

What we say now. This has stood up very well in 15 years, not least because it’s more practical effects than primitive CGI e.g. the zombie dogs. It’s worth remembering that, when it came out, zombies were not in fashion. This was before The Walking Dead, before World War Z; heck, it was even before the Dawn of the Dead remake. Indeed, it’s 40 minutes here before the first zombie shows up, and another 10 before Alice, as we know her, is born. Still, Rain Ocampo (Michelle Rodriguez) stands in well during the early going, the character being perfectly suited to Rodriguez’s sneer. She also gets the best line in the film. After fighting off an early corpse, thanks to Rain’s torrent of automatic fire, J.D. says “I shot her five times. How was she still standing?”, to which Rain replies, “Bitch isn’t standing now. ”

At this point, the makers were stating it was a “prequel” to the games, with Jovovich in effect playing the role of Jill Valentine. Not so sure about that, given subsequent flims, but it’s hard to deny the influence of the final sequence: Alice waking up in a hospital bed, to discover the zombie apocalypse, was also used in both 28 Days Later and the first ep of TWD. There was an alternate ending shot, with her going into Umbrella HQ, but I’m glad they went with the one used, which has an absolutely spectacular final shot, zooming back from her over a devastated city. The makers certainly extracted their bang for every penny of the $35 million budget, and the industrial soundtrack, including both Front Line Assembly and Nine Inch Nails, is perfect. Current rating: upgraded to **** and our seal of approval.

Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004)

“I’m good – but I’m not THAT good.”

What we said then (4 stars). “There seemed to be two kinds of reviews for this: those who ‘get’ what’s intended here, and those who clearly don’t… How you react will likely be similarly split; given you’re on this site, I suspect the odds are in favour of Apocalypse, for its strong intuitive grasp of the ingredients necessary in a good action heroine, and its delivery thereof. Sure, the plot is some way short of perfect, and more/better-filmed fights would have been welcome, but the makers do a sound job of distracting you from the flaws, and there’s enough worthwhile stuff that will stick in your mind, to put it in the top quarter of this summer’s popcorn flicks.”

What we say now. If the original movie was Alien, this one is Aliens, upping the ante largely by vastly multiplying the number of enemies. The scope here is much broader: instead of the claustrophobic feel of a small group in an underground complex, it takes place across an entire city, and it’s not just Alice vs. zombies, she’s also taking on the human soldiers of Umbrella. Since she is the sole intact survivor of part one, we get a slew of new characters, including two from the game, in Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory) and Carlos Olivera (Oded Fehr); the former is particularly iconic in her costume. There’s also L.J. (Mike Epps), who adds occasional comic moments almost entirely missing from the original; not sure if that’s a plus or not.

Alice is now a fully-fledged and hardcore heroine, apparent right from her arrival, crashing through a church window on her motorbike, and capable of snapping her own dislocated finger back into place, with little more than a roll of the eyes. It’s a near-constant stream of action, offering a relentless adrenaline buzz to the viewer, although less adrenaline would have been welcome during Alice’s final fight with nemesis, which degenerates into a choppily-edited mess. And, really: who decided it was a good idea to go through a cemetery during a zombie apocalypse? Still, between Alice and Jill, this remains a two-for-one action heroine special, and can only be appreciated as such. Current rating: holds steady at ****.

Resident Evil: Extinction (2007)

“Good thing I like a challenge.”

What we said then (3 stars). “S’ok. Mulcahy is no stranger to franchise cinema, having done the first couple of Highlander films, and the harsh desert lighting and exterior landscape is a nice contrast to the usual, dark, claustrophobic approach adopted by most Z-flicks. His experience is of particular use in the action sequences, where he does a better job of avoiding the cinematic excesses, in which Alexander Witt indulged, too frequently, last time up. The script is merely workmanlike: it feels too much like a series of cool set-pieces joined in the editing bay, rather than springing organically from the storyline.”

What we say now. I was confused by the opening, and wondered if I’d accidentally put the first film back in the DVD player. For I hadn’t seen this since its cinematic release, and it starts off by re-running the very beginning. Once that was established, we get Ian Glen as the villain – and he’s much needed, offering us a real human “villain” for the first time, and giving Umbrella a face of evil in Dr. Isaacs. The main problem is, Alice has now been imbued with superpowers. Speed and strength, I don’t mind, but telekinesis and the ability to block fire? What is this, X-Men: Extinction? Though clearly the main influence here is Mad Max, right down to Alice’s post-apocalypse chic of a long coat – plus, for no real reason beyond coolness, stockings and suspenders.

This film also absorbs the modern fondness for “fast zombies”, with the main set-piece taking on a slew of Umbrella-enhanced sprinters. While decent, and with an impressive depiction of Las Vegas, it’s likely placed too early in the movie, as nothing thereafter comes close. The only other sequence which might stick in the mind is an attack on a convoy of survivors by zombiefied crows, so I guess you can add The Birds to the list of influences here. I did like the “Pit O’ Millas”, the discards resulting from Dr. Isaacs’s experiments, and am surprised it took them three movies to use White Rabbit on the soundtrack, given its obvious Alice-ness. But Claire Redfield is disappointingly bland, and Alice’s increasing abilities cause way more problems than they solve. Current rating: dropped to **½, though likely a little above that, rather than below.

10 Iconic Sequences from Resident Evil 1-5

These are my picks for the most franchise-defining set pieces from each film. I aimed for two from each, but #3 was so weak, it could only manage a single entry (and that, barely!), so I pulled in an extra one from #4. These are not necessarily the “best” moments. For example, Alice’s fight against the zombie dogs in the original film, is memorable more because it’s the first time we’ve seen her kick ass. It was also that moment in the trailer which sold me on the movie. But having watched all five films in the last 24 hours, these are what stick in my mind.

Alice enters the church (Resident Evil: Apocalypse)
Alice vs. Zombie Dogs (Resident Evil)
Million Milla March (Resident Evil: Afterlife)
Alice vs. Jill (Resident Evil: Retribution)
Tokyo sequence (Resident Evil: Retribution)
Running down that wall (Resident Evil: Apocalypse)
The laser corridor (Resident Evil)
Roof-top escape (Resident Evil: Afterlife)
Alice and Claire vs. the Axman (Resident Evil: Afterlife)
Las Vegas ambush (Resident Evil: Extinction)

The play-list below includes all ten of these. Please enjoy. :)

Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)

“Do you know who I am?”

What we said then (3 stars). “There’s way too much moving about in underground darkness here, and elements are lobbed in from the video game, which make no sense in the context of the movie… Nor is there much feeling of threat to the characters, who cheat death with blithe abandon – the sense of “anyone can die, at any time” present in the original is all but gone… [But] the action, is, as usual for the series, solid – meaning this is, overall, just worth the 92 minutes of your time it will take up.”

What we say now. This saw the return of Paul W.S. Anderson to the series, and wisely, opts rapidly to discard the angle which saw our heroine gaining ever-increasing superpowers. I totally loved the attack on Umbrella HQ by multiple Alice clones – what I call the Million Milla March – which lifts copiously from both The Matrix and the original Aeon Flux animations. Indeed, The Matrix is a source in other ways, not least Arnold Wesker (Shawn Roberts), who clearly is inspired heavily by Agent Smith. This and the other lifts here are a bit too obvious to work: the zombie dogs v2.0 are straight out of John Carpenter’s The Thing, and obnoxious asshole Bennett Sinclair (Kim Coates) is likely too close to Steve Marcus in the Dawn of the Dead remake. Even the use of a prison as a sanctuary from zombies was previously done a few years earlier, in The Walking Dead comics.

I note the walking pace of Evil‘s zombies continues to accelerate, here without any Umbrella tampering. But generally, this is on most solid ground when working with its own content, such as the Axman, who makes a ferocious foe for Claire and Alice (despite far too much slo-mo!). It was the first of the series to be made in 3D, and a lot of the shots used by Anderson make that very obvious, though I didn’t mind that too much. For someone supposedly back to being human again, Alice still seems to be insanely competent, best illustrated in an impressive escape off a roof-top infested with zombies. It even ends on the most hopeful note of any of the series so f… Er, never mind, scratch that. My mistake. Current rating: Upped to ***½; this was rather more impressive than I remembered it.

Resident Evil: Retribution (2012)

“Congratulations. You’re officially a badass.”

What we said then (4 stars). “This is the best Resident Evil movie in eight years. It may not be anything significant in the plot department. There are not hidden depths or great moments of character revelation. But it does contain entirely acceptable amounts of Milla Jovovich Kicking Righteous Ass, and succeeds as an entertainment spectacle, almost entirely due to this. Though actually, this is almost a “greatest hits” package, especially in terms of participants.”

What we say now. Feels like Anderson has largely given up in terms of trying to attract new fans, with a start that’s deliberately confusing, from an opening that plays out in reverse, through Alice’s new suburban life. It also introduces, without explanation, game elements such as characters Leon Kennedy and Ada Wong, and the Las Plagas parasites. But if you’ve been along for the ride since the beginning, this is a blast. It brings in new influences, most obviously Aliens (Alice protecting a pseudo-daughter) and Blade Runner (Ada telling her, “You were one of the 50 basic models”). It’s good to see favourite characters from earlier films return, such as Rain Ocampo or Carlos Olivera, and the cloning concept allows for nice variations. Not all Rains, for example, are on Alice’s side, though you know the concept of our heroine as a happy home-maker is not one built to last.

The scenario, involving a giant Umbrella testing area of different environments, seems a bit contrived, but there was something very similar in the Resident Evil: Underworld novel. I’ll let it slide, since this offers scope for a host of spectacular set-pieces. In terms of pure hand-to-hand fighting, the Tokyo sequence may be close to the best in the series, but the film likely sprays more rounds of ammunition around than any other entry too. It’s also great to see Alice go toe-to-toe against Jill Valentine, harking back to the “But I’m not that good” comment from Apocalypse. In some ways, the gap between the games and the movies has never been greater, with this abandoning almost all creepiness for loud, rambunctious battles. However, this is so solidly entertaining, I’d be hard pushed to call that any kind of a bad thing. Current rating: retains every bit of its ****.

So, what have we learned? Generally, to answer the question asked in the intro, the films have stood the test of time surprisingly well. Video-game adaptations remain problematic for Hollywood (Assassin’s Creed says hello), and the longevity and sheer number of Resident Evil films is almost unsurpassed. I think it’s because Anderson and his team have never felt under an obligation to be “true” to the games. While that may have alienated a chunk of the core fans, it has allowed the makers to focus on a more important task: making entertaining films, for there are aspects of the games which simply would not work on-screen, such as the puzzle-solving. They were also wise to concentrate heavily on practical effects, which tend to last better than CGI.

Not to say there haven’t been mis-steps – the mid-series diversion giving Alice super-powers would be the worst of these. But at its best – and I’d order the series #5, #2, #1, #4, #3, from top to bottom – it is excellent entertainment, that looks far slicker than many films with far bigger budgets, and the focus throughout has generally been on what matters. Which is: a great heroine who kicks ass, with (The Hunger Games please note) no love-triangles and virtually zero romantic interest. It seems Milla Jovovich is certain the sixth movie will be her final chapter, at least. If so, it seems only appropriate to finish by saying: So long, Milla – and thanks for all the mayhem.

Pearl White’s name is a synonym for courage and daring; yet she says she is “a born coward.” “I have always been afraid,” she declares; “but I would be ashamed to let fear rule me”