Category: Feature

The Zero Woman series

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“Zero as a limit”

We’ve covered a couple of entries in the series previously, but I’ve decided to start work a rather more comprehensive set of reviews, systematically watching them in order, rather than the sporadic pieces previously published, as they fell across my retinas. Some of those pieces were also reprints from a previous publication, and were also shorter than the ones I’ve grown accustomed to writing. This was largely inspired by stumbling across the first movie, dating from the seventies, and realizing that I could now cover the entire set. I hate incompleteness. :) This will be an ongoing project, likely taking me through the winter and into next spring, so check back often (okay: fairly often!) for updates.

Like the Sasori: Female Prisoner Scorpion movies, its inspiration was a series of manga (left) by Toru Fujiwara, who seems to have a certain interest in the genre, to put it mildly. This generated one film in the seventies, but it doesn’t appear to have been much of a hit: unlike Scorpion, the series then went into hibernation. However, it has been suggested in more than one place that the film was an inspiration for, or at least an influence on, Luc Besson’s Nikita, which tells a similar story of a woman ‘brought back from the dead’ to serve her government, by carrying out missions that can’t be officially sanctioned. This, of course, then spawned its own (more or less) successful spin-offs, many of which we’ve already documented. But in a nice display of circularity, this likely fed into the revival of the series in the new millennium.

The new version, though straight-to-video rather than theatrical, and clearly made on smaller budgets, proved rather more successful, spawning a total of nine movies between the first, in 1995 and Zero Woman R in 2007. What’s kinda interesting is that, rather than having any degree of continuity, these films each starred different actresses as the titular operative. This may simply have been a budgetary concern rather than any conscious artistic decision, but certainly gives a nice sense of Zero Woman’s disposability, from the government’s point of view (as well as perhaps the viewers’, one AV starlet being as good as another for certain purposes, if you know what I mean, and I think you do).

So, what follows are all nine entries, in chronological order of Japanese release. This may cause some confusion, since the order of release in the West was not necessarily the same as in their home territory. For instance, the entry sub-titled Final Mission here, appears to have been the first “new” release, dating from January 1995. It’s not clear if the next film, released later that year and titled Zero Woman 2, is referring by that number to Final Mission or the original seventies incarnation, Red Handcuffs. tl;dr? Don’t worry your pretty little head about it. They’re pretty much interchangeable. And with that, on with the show!

  • Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs

    ★★½

    When the series started in 1974, it originally appeared to be trying to take on the Female Convict Scorpion series at its own game – both were inspired by Toru Shinohara manga series. However, going by the fact it took more than two decades for a second entry in the series, I can only presume the commercial returns weren’t anywhere near as strong. This starts off well, with policewoman Rei (Sugimoto) luring in, and then blowing away, the man responsible for torturing and killing another woman. Turns out the perpetrator was a diplomat and in the resulting scandal, Rie is sent to jail. Her chance at redemption comes when a gang of thugs stumble into the kidnapping of the daughter of a politician (Tamba): to avoid a scandal, Rie is offered a pardon if she infiltrates the kidnappers and kills them all. Initially, all goes to plan, with the first member taken out quickly, but it soon becomes clear the other members are rampaging psychos, and the situation rapidly spirals out of control, to the point where the politician yanks his support and orders the deaths of everyone, in the name of damage limitation – including both his daughter and Rie.

    The promising beginning is a bit of a con, as the majority of the film has Rei not doing much more than sitting around, waiting for the gang to destroy itself. Occasionally, she will prod them in a certain direction, but generally, they don’t exactly need much encouragement and she’s mostly passive rather than the vengeful fury for which I hoped. Now, there’s certainly plenty of tbe “fury” bit, with some of the most enthusiastic arterial spray I’ve seen for its time, and some of the torture scenes are close to unwatchably brutal (the cops are every bit as bad as, and perhaps worse than, the criminals in this area). However, Rei just isn’t as interesting a character as Sasori, despite sharing the same terse approach; she does fit in pretty well, to a cast of characters who all seem to possess few human or sympathetic qualities.

    Things escalate particularly nicely at the end, when the police discard the “softly, softly” approach [which in seventies Japan, appears to mean “not actually killing people yourself“] and go after the gang, who have moved on to take a bunch of other hostages. This leads to a chase and shootout at an abandoned US military base, which probably also meant something significant in 70’s Japan, going by the occasional hints of anti-American sentiment. Noda has a broad stylistic palette, throwing montages, hand-held camera and freeze-frames into the mix, the last-named perhaps trying to evoke the manga spirit. It doesn’t come off as particularly memorable however, and if the lack of its own artistic style is more than made up for in copious sleaze, you can certainly see why no-one dared (or bothered?) to follow in its footsteps for more than 20 years.

    Dir: Yukio Noda
    Star: Miki Sugimoto, Eiji Go, Tetsuro Tamba, Hideo Murota

  • Zero Woman: Final Mission

    ★★★½

    Probably the least accurate title of any film ever – at least Friday the 13th put out a few movies before using “final” – you definitely should begin here if you’re looking for much coherence. Rei (Iijima) is now partly employed as secretary to the head of Section Zero, but also takes out criminals for whom traditional channels of law enforcement aren’t enough, for one reason or another. She also pals around with Takako (Fukuoka), a detective from another section and a girl he helped bring out of delinquency, in what’s vaguely intimated as a love triangle. One night, they witness a hit and run, and discover the perpetrator (Suzuki) is the daughter of a powerful economic figure. Despite encountering official resistance, Rei and Takako persist with their investigation and, inevitably, this brings out more robust sanctions.

    This does take some time to get going: it’s probably about 25 minutes before the car-micide in question, really kicks things off, and the film is more or less in a holding pattern until then. Still, Iijima certainly looks the part, and unlike some of the other occupants of the position, you don’t get the sense she got the role purely for her willingness to disrobe. Indeed, she manages even to take a shower and gun down an intruder without straying much beyond the boundaries of PG-13. Not that there’s exactly a shortage of nudity in this production, most of it coming from Suzuki, who is portrayed as being kinda depraved and heavily into S/M. Indeed, this seems the case for the director, as Rei spends a far too large chunk of the second half, tied up and being tormented by what can only be described as a cackling sex dwarf [literally half his lines must have been, “Bwahahahaha!”]. Quite what this says about Enokido’s predilections, is probably best glossed-over.

    There’s a cool colour palette used here, mostly blues and grays, and a couple of scenes which will certainly stick in the mind. One is the previously mentioned shower-ambush, and the other is one where Rei is on the phone to Takako, when their conversation is rudely interrupted on his end: gradually, she realizes that something is very, very wrong. It’s expertly crafted, with good performances from both ends of the telephone line, and you can’t help wondering that more of this, rather than so much of the Laughing Gnome, would have elevated this to a classic. Instead, it’s merely hints at greatness, and settles for being solid and effective, starting the franchise in a way of which the original movie could only have dreamed.

    Dir: Koji Enokido
    Star: Naoko Iijima, Takako Fukuoka, Misayo Haruki, Miho Suzuki

  • Zero Woman 2

    ★★½

    Confusingly titled in the West, without any indication it wasn’t the first of the rebooted franchise, this perhaps explains why there’s little or no explanation of… Well, anything, really. What is Section Zero? Who is Rei? Where did she come from? “Never mind about that,” seems to be the film’s attitude, “Here are Natsuki Ozawa’s breasts to distract you from such trifles.” That’s particularly the case early on, when it seems Rei is unable to go five minutes without showing them off, whether it’s through being molested, becoming inescapably randy or simply taking a soapy shower (to wash off the blood after a kill, so I guess it’s a shower necessary to the plot – it also replays the intruder shower scene from its predecessor, with a different ending).

    Fortunately, their novelty apparently wears off for the director, and we get on with the actual plot, which involves a stolen suitcase of bearer bonds, belonging to a politician. Rei is sent to retrieve them, working her way up through the shady network of fences which handle such things. As help, she’s assigned a member of the regular police (Watari? – credit information is basically non-existent here), but he turns out to have his own plan, to recover the bearer bonds himself and make a nice profit by selling them back to their owner. However, said owner is also working his own way up the chain, and kidnaps the sister of one of the thieves, as leverage for the return of his property. That brings the perp (Kosugi, the son of Sho Kosugi, iconic star of a million ninja flicks) into an alliance with Rei, and they storm the warehouse where the hostage is held, for a bloody confrontation.

    It’s more obvious that this is clearly shot on video – and not particularly HD video at that, though that may be a product of its era as much as anything. This generaly gets better as it goes along, unless you are interested in Ms. Ozawa’s breasts, in which case your mileage may vary. The plotting contains a decent number of twists and turns, and Kosugi helps deliver a competent amount of action. However, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t struggle through the earlier sections. In particular a scene where she is forced by a fence whose day job is a butcher, to sniff coke and then raped by him. While at least he gets his just deserts (let’s just say, there’s a meat-hook involved), it’s both entirely unnecessary and clearly intended to titillate the audience. Not cool, and it left a bad taste in my mouth, which even an impressively nihilistic conclusion was unable to remove entirely.

    Dir: Daisuke Gotoh
    Star: Natsuki Ozawa, Saori Iwama, Kane Kosugi, Hiroyuki Watari
    a.k.a. Zero Woman

  • Zero Woman: Assassin Lovers

    ★★★★
    “Grimly fiendish yet effective killers’ romance.”

    zerowoman3Mob boss Daidohji (Yutani) has the city almost within his grasp, thanks to a minion promising him material he can use to blackmail the mayor. But his success is short-lived, as the minion is taken our by Rei (Takeda), who is then ordered by her boss Takefuji (Nishioka) to finish the job, taking out Diadohji and the rest of his gang. Not that the mobster is sitting back and waiting: he hires his own assassin, Katsumura (Matsusa), to get to Rei before she can get to him. However, neither killer is exactly happy with their role as pawns in the bigger scheme of things, and when they meet, it’s time for a little R&R. As in “romance and rebellion.”

    This is the best of the saga which I’ve seen to date, mainly because it does a better job of striking a balance among the various elements. The storyline and characterization are not lazily ignored in preference for more easily exploitable elements; not that there’s any shortage of either sex or violence, but they seem to flow naturally from the plot, rather than appearing to drive it. The relationship between Katsumura and Rei has some credibility to it, with each seeing a reflection of themselves in the other. But will that be able to over-ride Rei’s strong loyalties to Section Zero? The film does a good job of keeping that in doubt, right up to the very end, where Rei is given the ultimate in ultimatums by Takefuji, and it’s not clear what way she’s going to jump.

    There’s also a nice, slick look to the film, which unfolds under an apparent endless array of neon lights, and on perpetually-moist streets, a visual style that helps conceal the low-budget nature of proceedings. While the story may rely to heavily on the clichés of the genre, those involved, on both sides of the camera, execute – pun not intended – their responsibilities with enough flair and energy to counter-balance its shortcomings, and the end result is certainly a significant improvement on the first two films in the revived series.

    Dir: Masahide Kuwabara
    Star: Kumiko Takeda, Keiji Matsuda, Charlie Yutani, Tokuma Nishioka

  • Zero Woman: The Accused

    ★½
    “Putting the zero in Zero Woman”

    zerowoman4After the genuinely impressive bleakness of Assassin Lovers, the series comes crashing back to earth with a splat like a rotten tomato for this entry, which fizzles out early on, and then manages to lumber on for another 45 minutes. Rei (Tachihara) spends her time between missions hanging out at a gay bar, and rescues one of the rent boys, Mitsusu (Kitagawa), who ply their trade there after a vicious assault – accompanied, it has to be said, by the least appropriate music in the history of cinematic homosexual rape. He ends up moving in with her, to the latest in a series of unfurnished apartments provided by Section Zero, and the two damaged individuals start creating a life, of sorts, for themselves. However, there’s a serial killer, apparently with a deep hatred of men, operating in the area, and Rei is given the mission of tracking down and eliminating the psycho.

    It’s hardly less than obvious who it’s going to be, but almost everything here is played at such a low-key, with no measurable intensity, so it’s even hard to be annoyed by this lack of subtlety. About the only moment with any energy is when Rei’s boss Mutoh (Yamashita) smacks her across the face for a bit of backtalk. However, my ennui was overcome by the scene where Mitsusu gives Rei a haircut. Considering this film is less than 80 minutes long, I think I could have very easily done without this – and, ideally, rather more action. After an opening which might impress upon you the importance of not getting stuck in an everyday routine, Gotô seems to lose interest in staging any set pieces, and the final few minutes certainly don’t make up for what has gone before.

    Inexplicably described by Tom Mes as “the best” in the series, I found it severely uninteresting on just about any level, being badly hampered by poor performances, direction which struggled to reach workmanlike and, in particular, a script which is largely bereft of ideas. This and Assassin Lovers feel like the Jekyll and Hyde of the series; it’s as if all the good stuff somehow ended up in its predecessor, leaving this installment with just the inept film-making.

    Dir: Daisuke Gotô
    Star: Mai Tachihara, Yuujin Kitagawa, Shinji Yamashita, Daisuke Yamazaki

  • Zero Woman: The Hunted

    ★★½
    “You just can’t get good henchmen these days.”

    Zero_Woman_The_HuntedIf ever I become an evil overlord, I will ensure my minions’ idea of security does not involve walking slowly in the open, towards an attacker, while firing wide of them from a range no greater than a slightly oversize dinner-table. That’s the first thing we take from this, which begins with a thoroughly implausible scene where Rei (Ono, who had been a part of 90’s J-pop group CoCo) manages to drown her target, a German industrialist, despite him being roughly twice her size, and without anyone in or around the swimming-pool noticing anything. She then climbs out, pulling a gun from who knows where, kills bodyguards who’d fail the Imperial Stormtrooper accuracy exam, and abseils down the side of the building to escape. That sets the tone for much of what follows, combining a reunion with someone from her past, a blossoming relationship with a chef, and her boss’s traditional surly reluctance to allow anything as banal as “personal happiness” to distract his #1 killer from her work.

    It’s rather bitty, and there are too many scenes of Rei sitting around her apartment, staring wistfully into space or oiling her breasts. I should point out, however, this is actually oiling of the breasts that turns out to be necessary to the plot, which has to be worth an extra half-star in anyone’s book. As usual, it’s a different actress in the role, but Ono is a significant part of the problem here, as she just isn’t convincing as a hard-assed hitwoman, lacking the presence or even, apparently, the basic competence for the role. Fortunately for the film lasting more than five minutes, those she’s going up against are even worse, being unable to hit a barn if they were inside it. The film does redeem itself in the final 20 minutes or so, when all the threads tie together, and we realize that her boss was not kidding when he said, “There’s no place for you, except in Zero Section.” Things thereafter return to a grim and pessimistic worldview, and this shows the series at its most effective.

    However, once you get past the initial mission to kill the German, there isn’t enough genuine action in this for it to be memorable. Maybe it’s a function of the low-budget, with your production being much cheaper, when you are filming your lead actress trying to look intense, instead of needing to expend money on blood squibs, blanks and other actors [I think it was renowned B-movie director Jim Wynorski who once described nudity as the cheapest special effect]. But it’s a method that is harder to pull off successfully, and in this particular instance, I can’t say the approach makes for more than marginally passing entertainment.

    Dir: Norihisa Yoshimura
    Star: Mikiyo Ono, Reina Tanaka, Kou Watanabe

  • Zero Woman: Dangerous Game

    ★★
    “Game for just about anything, but mostly moping.”

    zero woman dangerous gameThe main mission given to Rie (Shiratori this time) is a little bit different, from her usual, straight-forward assassinations. Instead, she’s given the job of protecting a witness. Nana (Matsuda), the disgruntled mistress of an organ-trafficking ring, who has had enough and agreed to co-operate with the police. Rie is part of the protection detail, but soon finds out that the gangsters, under ever-so strange boss Kaneda (Nogami) with his transvestite tendencies, are not going to sit back and wait for Nana to take the witness stand. Oddly, the cops let Nana stay in her own apartment, perhaps figuring that’s the last place her former lover would look. but when that is unsurprisingly stormed, Rie takes the target back to the operative’s flat, where they hang out, exchanging small talk – that’s mostly Nana, of course, since Rie is about as talkative as the enormous pet fish she has in a tank, and to which she feeds goldfish.

    However, there are complications, because it turns out that a senior politician has an ill daughter, who is relying on the organ trafficking ring for a black-market transplant. The word comes down to Rie’s boss, Mutoh (Ryu) that the investigation has been squashed, and Nana is to be dumped out of witness protection, as no longer of interest. That would almost certainly be a death sentence, because her betrayal of the gang isn’t limited to her knowledge of their actions, she also swiped a large suitcase of their cash before turning police informant. But has she done enough to endear herself to Rie, that her bodyguard might be prepared to go off-book and continue with the original mission on her own initiative? Or, better yet, entirely take out Kaneda – whose weirdness has now graduated from transvestitism to cannibalism.

    This is too chatty to succeed, especially when the conversation is so one-sided, as are the ones between Nana and Rie. They do form a somewhat interesting contrast in characters, and Shiratori certainly has the physical presence to carry off the part of a cold-blooded assassin, to a much greater degree than some of the previous actresses in the series. But to reach the bloody finale, you have to sit through a solid 70 minutes of her moping around her apartment, with our without Nana, and that’s more than an entire month’s quota of mope for me. The L they’re missing from the sleeve probably is “lugubrious”. Kids, look it up…

    Dir: Hidekazu Takahara
    Star: Chieko Shiratori, Ichiho Matsuda, Masayoshi Nogami, Daisuke Ryu

The Sasori: Female Prisoner Scorpion series

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In the first half of the 1970’s, Meiko Kaji was to the slightly-disreputable end of Japanese cinema, much what Pam Grier was to the same end of Hollywood movies. Both made a career out of playing strong female characters, often operating on or beyond the boundaries of the law, and with no compunction about using violence to achieve their ends – which often involved taking revenge on those (almost alwayx men) who had wronged them. The Sasori [Japanese for “scorpion”] was not Kaji’s first foray into the genre, having cut her teeth on the Noraneko Rokku [Straycat or Alleycat Rock] films, a couple of years previously.

And it’s probably not even her most well-known work in the West: that would be Lady Snowblood, which deposited her in an earlier era, as a female swordswoman, and whose theme was “borrowed” by Quentin Tarantino for Kill Bill, Volume 1. But in terms of enduring appeal, the character Sasori has them both beat, with sequels, remakes and spin-offs continuing for more than 35 years after the original, through the 2008 Hong Kong remake. Even now, it’s an iconic character that has rarely been matched for sheer bad-assery.

The credit for this is not entirely Kaji’s, though obviously her portrayal is indispensable. Often forgotten is that the character of Sasori did not originate on the silver screen, but in a manga, by Toru Shinohara (shown, left). He has something of a track record in the genre, having also created the comic on which the Zero Woman series was based, and written the story for Metropolitan Police Branch 82. Perhaps even more important to the saga’s lasting suggest was director Shunya Ito, who took the potentially-tawdry premise, and elevated it above and beyond the level you’d expect, with a visual style that goes far past any other mere “women in prison” flick. It’s such a fully-formed approach, right from the get-go, that it feels like the work of a far more experienced director.

Truly, it was one of those moments in movie history where things come together in such a way as to produce results which manage to be more than the sum of their parts. While the quality of the six films which came out during a five-year span from 1972-77 is undeniably variable. they all have their merits and remain worth your attention, even four decades later. Let’s take a look at each entry from the seventies incarnation in turn.

The series theme, Urami-Bushi, written by director Shunya Ito and sung by Meiko Kaji.


“You’re a beautiful fiower”, his words flatter you today.
But once you’re in full bloom, he’ll just toss you away.
Foolish, foolish, foolish woman’s song…
Her song of vengeance


“Sorrow is my fate”, so you’ve given up on men.
Show him your tears and he’ll bring you grief again.
Tearful, tearful, tearful woman’s song…
Her song of vengeance.


“You cling to your dreams,” they scorn your world of lies.
So you try to wake up, but you can’t open your eyes.
A woman, a woman, a woman’s heart is her song…
Her song of vengeance.

  • Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion

    ★★★★
    “One of the all-time classics of the women-in-prison genre.”

    This archetypal “women in prison” film is lifted above its colleagues in the genre, most of which are little more than crude exploitation, by being pretty damn sophisticated exploitation. The two main factors are Ito’s great sense of visual style, and Kaji’s almost-silent performance as Nami Matsushima. She ends up in jail after being betrayed by her cop boyfriend Sugimi (Isao), who turns out to be in league with the Yakuza he was investigating. Nami vows to escape, and the film starts with her doing so, but she is quickly recaptured, thrown back into jail, and her fellow inmates are punished for her actions, causing them to turn against her. While not her fault, she’s involved in an incident which costs the warden (Watanabe) his eye, and he vows to break her at any cost. That’s an awful lot easier said then done, and what happens as a result might be what Nami wanted all along. Meanwhile, Sugimi, seeking to tie up the loose end she represents, promises another inmate, Katagiri (Yokoyama) parole, if she takes care of Nami.

    I’m not quite sure how the DVD sleeve on the right reaches the conclusion that this “inspired” Kill Bill: maybe nodded to it in an elevator once, because “female revenge” is really about all they have in common. However, it stands perfectly well on its own merits, powered by Kaji, who has one goal in mind – escaping and taking revenge – and anything else just washes off her back. If you can imagine her as a female, darker version of Cool Hand Luke (without the hard-boiled eggs!), refusing to bow to the sadistic guards, when it would be far easier to do so, you’ll be in the right ballpark. She has no “superpowers,” just an extraordinary persistent resilience and inner strength that makes her a remarkable heroine. Particularly considering this was his feature debut, Ito’s use of colour and Dutch angles to enhance the action are quite remarkable in its lack of restraint. The screen glows green as Nami takes her revenge, for example, and there’s another shot which looks like a Hieronymus Bosch vision of hell, for its lurid shades, while the camera will till 90 or even 180 degrees to make its point.

    There’s no shortage of the exploitative aspects, however, with copious amounts of toplessness and arterial spurting, as well as an amusing chunk of lesbian lust, where five minutes with Nami proves sufficient to turn a stool-pigeon into a devoted admirer. So this is not exactly family viewing, let’s be clear on that front. However, it’s quality is difficult to deny, and as sex ‘n’ violence goes, this is definitely from the top-shelf of the liquor cabinet.

    Dir: Shunya Ito
    Star: Meiko Kaji, Rie Yokoyama, Natsuyagi Isao, Fumio Watanabe

  • Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41

    ★★★½
    “Out of the frying-pan and into the fire goes our heroine.”

    Right from the start, Nami (Kaji) established her utterly hardcore credentials, as she’s trying to dig her way out of the dungeon where she has been for the past year. With a spoon. Held in her teeth. She’s let out for the day because a bigwig is visiting, but takes the opportunity to attack warden Goda (Watanabe), almost depriving him of the sight of his other eye. As punishment for the resulting riot, Goda sends four guards to gang-rape Nami, and all the inmates are sent to a hard-labour camp. On the way back, they beat Nami as punishment, leaving her near-dead but it turns out that was just her ruse to get the guards to open the back of the van and escape. She leads the women across a blasted landscape, revenge once more on her mind, with Goda’s men in hot pursuit.

    It doesn’t work quite as well as the original, in part because Nami’s motivation isn’t as clear and powerful: it’s only at the end that I realized who she was out to get (and, for the second time, we get a climax on a roof that, remarkably, actually ends, without someone toppling off it). It’s just not as strong a motive, considering everything she has been through by that point, and her terseness reaches almost epic proportions, so isn’t much of a help. Second time round, Ito has reined in the sexual aspects considerably, but has upped the surrealness, as if to make amends, and the results are a couple of truly brilliant sequences. One has a body turn into leaves and blow away, while the other sees a literal river of blood announce the death of a character. However, once they break out of jail, Nami seems largely passive, observing proceedings rather than driving them, and that deflates her value as a heroine.

    It’d certainly be wrong to describe this as a failure, because it is undeniably successful at generating the atmosphere and tone desired by Ito, and Kaji is as charismatic as ever, with a powerful screen presence few actresses of any era can match. However, those elements exist in something of a vacuum here, and the results, while worthwhile, are less effective than I seemed to remember them.

    Dir: Shunya Ito
    Star: Meiko Kaji, Kayoko Shiraishi, Fumio Watanabe, Yukie Kagawa

  • Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable

    ★★★
    “Because a baby is for life – even if the Yakuza think otherwise. “

    When this begins, Nami (Kaji) is on the run, and slices the arm off Detective Kondo (Narita) after he handcuffs himself to her. She befriends street hooker Yuki (Watanabe), who runs foul of the locak Yakuza gang by turning tricks on their turn, while trying to care for her brain-damaged brother, whom she also services sexually, to stop him from raping women(!). After Nami is involved in the death of a gang member who was blackmailing her, the gang’s madam Katsu (Lee), who knew the Scorpion from her own prison days, captures her, locking our heroine up in a literal big bird-cage. But after the true horror of the Yakuza’s treatment of their women is revealed (it starts with a golf-club going where no golf-club should ever go), Nami escapes and carves a bloody path of revenge on those responsible. When Katsu realizes what’s going on, she turns herself in to the police, figuring jail will be safe from Sasori’s wrath. Take a wild stab in the dark… Which, by coincidence is exactly what Katsu deserves.

    There are some angles to this I liked. For instance, the way that Nami is taking revenge here, less for herself – really, she gets off pretty lightly, in comparison to the previous two installments – than for others. I also enjoyed the way she… Well, I’m reluctant to spoil it, but let’s just say, she takes care of Katsu and Kondo without getting her hands dirty. However, the positives are largely balanced out by Yuki, who is one of the more irritating and pointless creatures in cinematic history. Her life appears to be a litany of bad choices, and the film seems to realize how tiresome she is: in the second half, she’s largely relegated to flicking lit matches into the sewer where Nami is hiding out (in a fetching blue dress, it has to be said).

    This would be Ito’s last entry in the series: he’d later go on to direct Gray Sunset, which beat out Kurosawa’s Ran to become Japan’s official Academy Award entry for the Foreign Film category in 1985. He seems to have reined in some of his more stylish visual excesses here, which is a bit of a shame, as that’s one of theings which helped elevate this series above the level of generic exploitation. This certainly delivers on the sleaze front [yet could be seen as pro-life, an interesting combo!], but at least in the first half, doesn’t have a great deal more to offer.

    Dir: Shunya Ito
    Star: Meiko Kaji, Mikio Narita, Yayoi Watanabe, Reisen Lee

  • Female Prisoner Scorpion: Grudge Song

    ★★★
    “Can Sasori escape the hangman’s noose and live happily ever after?”

    Nami (Kaji) is about to get married, but her wedding day is rudely interrupted by the arrival of the cops, who arrest her. On the way to prison (and, unsurprisingly, death row, given the body count left behind in the previous three movies), she takes out the driver, causing a crash. The injured Scorpion staggers away, and is rescued by Kudo (Tamura), a former political radical who was brutalized by the police for his actions, and so has a massive load of resentment against them. After being informed of Kudo’s harbouring of Nami by a worked at the sex-club where he works, the cops take him in: and use both physical and psychological torture to try and make him give up her location. Eventually arrested, Nami is sentenced to death, but the cops intend to make sure the time leading up to her execution is as unpleasant and possible, and the detective in charge, Hirose (Tsukata), is intent on making even Nami’s death as lonely an experience as possible.

    “Just when I thought I was out… they pull me back in.” Michael Corleone’s quote from Godfather III seems appropriate here, as it appears Nami was preparing to settle down to a normal life, difficult though it is to see her as a happy housewife. Of course, the cops won’t let it lie, and so begins another cycle of revenge. As in the previous entry, it’s less Nami’s vengeance than her associate’s, at least initially, as we discover Kudo has as much, if not more, reason to hate the police as she does. The final section, however, returns to its roots, with Nami back in prison and having to handle hostility, not only from the police but the guards, though by this time, she has at least attained near-legendary status among the other prisoners, as you’d expect. Doesn’t stop her screwing with another prisoner, who appears to be calmly awaiting her fate: the point of that seemed kinda lost, and unnecessarily cruel.

    The last of the series in which Kaji starred, it was also the only one of her four movies not directed by Ito. His replacement, Hasebe, is competent enough, but only rarely brings the same sense of style to proceedings. Kaji is as worth watching as ever, but for too long, she seems like a supporting character in her own movie, with the focus more on Kudo. Chalk up another win for misleading advertising though, as Nami certainly does not use the long rifle with which she is pictured on the DVD sleeve (right).

  • New Female Prisoner Scorpion 701

    ★★★
    “Reset! Reset!”

    Just goes to show that the “cinematic reboot” is not a 21st-century invention, e.g. Batman or James Bond. For a mere three years after Meiko Kaji showed her sting as Nami, the studio reset the series, giving it a new director, new (and much more talkative) lead actress, and returning Nami Matsushima to a happy, criminal record-free young women, with a loving boyfriend. Except, of course, he turns out not to love her quite as much. Things start to collapse after her sister uncovers evidence of major government corruption, and passes it to Nami, shortly before being kidnapped. After Nami uncovers the truth – her sister is killed and she is framed for the murder, with the help of her boyfriend, and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Initially an easy mark for the tough girls in her cell, Nami soon develops her mean streak. And she’s going to need it, because the politician behind it all is looking to tidy up the loose end she represents, by killing her and making the death look like a suicide. Name turns the tables, in incendiary fashion, and it’s clear that she’s one loose end that won’t be quietly disposed of.

    Y’know how On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is a really great Bond film, with a crappy Bond, Lazenby being the merest shadow of Connery? That’s the situation we have here. The film would be perfectly serviceable, but with every (largely superfluous) word, gesture and action, the viewer can’t help but be reminded of Kaji, who simply fits the character being depicted here, far better. Not that Takigawa is a bad actress. It is just that Kaji made such a strong impression in the role, anyone else playing the character is almost bound to seem like a pale imitation in comparison. Without Kaji or the surrealist touches brought to the previous entries by Shunya Ito, there really isn’t much to distinguish this from the rougher end of the pinku genre, with Kohira appearing to take particular interest in the rape.

    The sections after Nami breaks out are the best, in terms of style, and it’s hard to put your finger on any problems: “competent” is likely a good word for this. But probably the most damning indictment, is that I watched the film, wrote most of the review, and then realized almost nothing about the second half had stuck in my mind at all. I ended up having to pull the movie up, just to convince myself I hadn’t been called away to dinner half-way through or something. I hadn’t: it had just failed to make any significant impression on me.

    Dir: Yutaka Kohira
    Star: Yumi Takigawa, Ryoko Ema, Nobuo Kaneko, Ichiro Nakaya

  • New Female Prisoner Scorpion: Special Cellblock X

    ★★★½
    “And we bid a fond farewell to Nami, and a third different actress.”

    The comparisons of Takigawa to Lazenby above proved appropriate in another way, both being canned after one entry playing the iconic title character, which is probably just as symptomatic of something. The replacement here as Nami Matsushima is Natsuki, who seems to go back toward a more taciturn heroine, closer to the original. But it’s, effectively, another reboot, with not even a nod to the previous entry. In this case, the heroine is a nurse, framed for her involvement in the hospital murder of a politician who was threatening to expose corrupt practices.

    The film starts with her being sent back to jail after a failed escape attempt: that resulted in the rest of the inmates being punished, and they’re none too pleased to see her brought back. There’s also a pragmatic guard who is happy to keep the inmates supplied with cigs and chocolate in exchange for peace, but his position is threated by the arrival of a new head of “security”, with a much tougher stance. After trying to expose the abuse to a visiting dignitary, he ends up in hot water, and teams up with Nami, the pair going on the lam through the mountains, chained to each other – it’s a bit like Black Mama, White Mama, with characters forced to work together for their mutual benefit.

    In some ways, this feels like a combination of the first two movies: it has the “woman wronged by the man she loves” theme of the original, and then the “escape through a blasted landscape” plotline from its immediate sequel. There’s also the usual helpings of abuse, though the sexual content here is significantly toned-down, with Natsuki barely showing a nipple. On the other hand, the S&M seems more intense, most notably a scene where multiple prisoners are bound and hung up, to be brutally beaten. By this point, I’ll confess that my interest in that aspect, never exactly great, was all but non-existent. Things did perk up post-escape, with some excellent cinematography, as the pair struggle through the deserted landscape [it’s easy to forget how concentrated the Japanese population is, leaving some areas almost desolate]. Of course, it ends with another vengeful confrontation for Nami – not for the first time, on a roof.

    The paucity of original ideas to be found here likely indicates why the series went into dormancy thereafter. As a way to wrap up, however, it works fairly well, particularly if you consider it as a “greatest hits compilation” from the preceding entries. While Natsuki still falls short of the intensity brought to the role by Kaji, she is an improvement on Takigawa, and this moves at a brisk enough pace to sustain interest, even in a viewer looking for less prurient aspects.

    Dir: Yutaka Kohira
    Star: Yoko Natsuki, Masashi Ishibashi, Hiroshi Tachi, Takeo Chii

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See also

  • Lady Snowblood 1 + 2
  • Sasori
  • Scorpion Double Venom
  • Scorpion’s Revenge
  • The Zero Woman series

Zeiram

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“Z is for Zeiram”

Keita Amemiya was one of the directors of the show Kyõryû Sentai Zyuranger, a Japanese series which provided the initial basis (and much footage) for Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. But he is a bit of a Renaissance man, also working in animation, video games and illustration. His work seems to have a common sense of imagination, to the extent that it can be a bit overwhelming. A review of his first feature, Cyber Ninja – a title that, alone, give you a fairly idea of the location from where Amemiya is generally coming – hits the mark: “A feature length video game commercial, a much too-long advertisement for a Namco arcade game that never made its way into American pizza parlors.”

For our purposes here, however, we are concerned solely with Zeiram, his creation which spawned two live-action movies, a six-part anime adaptation, and I’m pretty damn sure a comic-book [though Google isn’t proving much help, and I’d have to go down and open my comic boxes to confirm that; since the last time they were cracked was, I kid you not, in 2000, I am reluctant to break the seal on them now]. As we’ll see the titular creature is very much the villain, but it easily qualifies here thanks to its kick-ass heroine. I had hoped to get round to watching the anime in time for this month’s installment, but I didn’t quite make it. Since baseball Opening Day and the subsequent summer go-slow is almost upon us, probably best if I cover the two movies now, and I’ll add the anime… hopefully in April, but no promises! [Update: got to it in May, so not too bad!]

Zeiram + Zeiram 2

By Jim McLennan

★★★

Zeiram and its sequel, Zeiram 2, both concern a creature which combines all the most unpleasant and lethal features of The Thing with The Terminator. It’s humanoid, at least in the number of functioning limbs, but its head appears almost mushroom shaped – though it’s hard to tell where Zeiram ends and its hat begins, for there’s a second face, embedded in the hat. This is capable of extending on a tentacle, to attack victims, taking in nourishment, and there’s evidence to suggest that it can absorb their DNA and use it to create monsters. Oh, and the rest of it is almost impossible to destroy.

However, trying to do exactly that is Iria (Moriyama), an interstellar bounty hunter, who has laid a trap to take Zeiram into an alternate, uninhabited dimension, in order to deal with him in a way that will pose no threat to the local population. However, she reckons without the arrival of electrical techs Kamiya (Hotaru) and Teppei (Ida), who have been dispatched by the power company to investigate the power-drain resulting from Iria’s tech. Through an unfortunate series of events, they end up in the alternate dimension with Zeiram, while Iria is largely stuck in our world, trying to keep them alive until she can fix her portal and get in there to help them.

The problems here are largely two-fold. Kamiya. And Teppei, There are few things less appealing than comic relief characters whose antics and mugging are supposed to be endearing or amusing, but fail miserably on both fronts. They bring very little to proceedings except for running time, and that’s a shame, because there is no shortage of bizarre inventiveness on view. And when the pair stop trying to be characters, shut the hell up, and simply team up with Iria to kick alien arse, it’s a lot better, because whatever they do to Zeiram, he/she/it just keeps mutating into another form and fighting back. You get the sense being fed through a wood-chipper would only be a minor inconvenience.

This also helps cover up Moriyama’s somewhat limited set of fighting skills. Admittedly, it’s possible she had to slow things down in order to fight a giant mushroom, but the hand-to-hand combat here is choreographed at about the speed of a Strauss waltz. She does have screen presence, however, and looks decent enough firing a gun. To a casual eye – that’d be my wife’s, wandering through the living-room – this could look like an episode of Amemiya’s Power Rangers, and it’s not surprising he would go on to direct some Kamen Rider films. But it’s too uneven to succeed: for every moment where you go, “Cool!”, there’s another where you’ll roll your eyes, or just go “Eh?”. For instance, the section where Zeiram squeeze out goo onto the ground, which grows into a half-man that has a burbling conversation with Zeiram, before getting its head stomped on. Altogether, now: eh?

The sequel, which came out three years later, restores the “i” in the title, which was inexplicably removed from the original for it US release by Fox Lorber. This installment starts off as if it’s going to go in some radically different directions, even if all the main players are back. Iria is seeking an ancient artifact called the Carmarite, and additionally, has a new assistant, but he turns out to be untrustworthy. Meanwhile, a shadowy group has succeeded in regenerating Zeiram as a cyborg warrior (which makes a lot more sense if you’ve seen the anime, and know its origins), bending its will to their needs and turning it into a weapon. While initially successfully, this works about as well as most plans usually do, and it’s not longer before Zeiram is much more a menace than an ally.

However, just when you think the film is going into new and interesting territory… Well, I’m not quite show how it happened, but before long we were back in more or less the same situation as the original. Blah blah irritating comic relief blah another dimension blak Iria unable to help (this time because she gets herself locked in a room), etc. You’re looking at something which borders on being a remake of the original, and unlike something like Terminator 2, which upped the ante significantly, while telling a largely similar story, there isn’t any real sense of progression or development. Much as before, things do get better when things move into action, and Zeiram is again, a shape-shifting nightmare that won’t stay dead. And this time, not even a cute dog which strays into proceedings is off the menu.

It also helps that, this time around, Moriyama has a better handle on the action angle. Previously, it was very much a case of kick, pause, punch, pause, move, but she is a good deal more fluid here, and makes for a more credible heroine as a result. However, her strength is still more in the “looking cool with a gun” department, because her punches still look like they might be troubled by a damp paper-bag. On balance, the sequel’s lack of invention is approximately balanced by the overall improvement in Iria’s character and the slightly better overall production values – it still looks like you could fund it from your bedside table change – and it’s as worth watching as the first part. Which would be “somewhat”: call both of them a rent (or more likely these days, a download), rather than a buy.

Dir: Keita Amemiya
Star: Yûko Moriyama, Mizuho Yoshida, Kunihiro Ida, Yukijirô Hotaru

Iria – Zeiram the Animation

By Jim McLennan

★★★½

Though released several years later, this is a prequel to the two Zeiram movies, telling the story of the first encounter between Iria (Hisakawa, who was also Sailor Mercury) and Zeiram. At the time, she was an apprentice bounty-hunter, working alongside her brother Gren. They take a mission to rescue a VIP and recover the cargo from a stranded space-ship. However, once there, they discover the “cargo” is actually the alien Zeiram, which a corporation is interested in using as a weapon. The result leaves her brother apparently dead, and Iria now the target for the corporation, who want to hush up their thoroughly-dubious plan, by any means necessary. Fortunately, as well as her own skills, our heroine has the assistance of former rival bounty-hunter, Fujikuro (Chiva), endearing urchin Kei (Kanai), and Bob (Ikeda), a colleague whose consciousness has been turned into an AI.

The six-episode (about 25 mins per part, by the time you skip the opening and closing credits) series worked, for me, a little better than the live-action, simply because of the nature of animation: there’s no need for restraint. There were times in the movies where you could see where Amamiya wanted to, but has to restrain his imagination for budgetary reasons. Here, there’s close to a fully-fledged universe, with content which would likely be well beyond the budget of anyone not named James Cameron. There’s also a nice character arc for Iria: initially, she is probably too big for her boots, with an over-inflated sense of her own skills. When she meets Zeiran, she soon discovers she isn’t quite the cat’s whiskers, at least, not to the extent she thinks.

As with most animation of the time, it’s not going to be confused with Miyazaki, and it would be silly to expect otherwise. However, there remain weaknesses. Most obviously, and surprisingly – because it’s the same issue as in the live-action version – is the diversion of time to secondary characters, in particular Kei and sidekick, the latter of whom is there for one purpose only (too spoilerific to discuss in detail; I’d say it falls into the category of “surprising, but almost entirely pointless”). That’s true for much of the plot, which feels over-similar to the Aliens series, and at times, the conspiracy angles just seem to be there to fill in time, before we get to the inevitable final battle between Iria and Zeiram. It did generally keep my interest, overall; but I can see why it hasn’t exactly been remembered as a classic of the medium.

Dir: Tetsuro Amino
Star: (voice) Aya Hisakawa, Shigeru Chiba, Mika Kanai, Masaru Ikeda

Teenage Kicks: the “last cinematic taboo” of the action-heroine.

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I’ve noticed a clear trend over the past couple of years for action-heroines to skew younger. Both of the principal 2011 genre entries to date, Sucker Punch and Hanna have featured heroines who aren’t old enough to drink, particularly in the latter’s case. One of the most anticipated films, currently in pre-production, is The Hunger Games, in which a 16-year old girl is press-ganged into a fight to the death, against other teenagers. But we’ve seen examples previously too, notably in last year’s Kick-Ass, where a foul-mouthed moppet stole the film in many people’s eyes, albeit not without causing a great deal of controversy.

Let’s review these, and some other entries in the sub-genre, both historical and fictional. You can find them all the way back to the seventh century, such as China’s Princess Pingyang, who was born in 598, and was instrumental in raising and leading an army of 70,000 men in a successful rebellion against the Emperor Yang, before reaching her twentieth birthday. This helped establish her father as the first Emperor of the Tang dynasty, often regarded as a high-point of Chinese civilization. We can perhaps file Mulan in this category too, though the poem does not assign her a specific age.

Joan of Arc was perhaps the first world renowned teenage action-heroine. She led the French army at the age of 16 or 17, lifting the siege of Orleans and turning the course of the Hundred Years’ War in France’s favour, though it rumbled along for decades more. A little later in French history, Jeanne Laisné, known as Jeanne the Hatchet after a crucial role in preventing the capture of Beauvais by the Duke of Burgundy. Many countries have their own “Joans”, and sher may well have been an inspiration for Maria Rosa, a 15-year old girl who claimed divine visions and led a rebel army during the Brazilian Contestado War around 1914.

Around the year 1660, we find the lyrically-named Görwel Christina Carlsdotter Gyllenstierna. Wikipedia tells us this Swedish noblewoman “was known by her contemporaries for her great learning as well as for her interest and skill within sports normally reserved for males.” She was referred to as “A Minerva and an Amazon in one”, and made herself widely known in her mid-teens, when she challenged a Lieutenant Colonel in the Swedish military to a duel – he had married her cousin against the consent of her family. I couldn’t find any record of the duel’s result, but she would certainly seem to qualify as an action-heroine.

A fairly notable case was that of Mary Ann Talbot (above left), who took a male name and joined the British Navy at age 14. to be with her lover. She was wounded twice and captured by the French before returning to London four years later. She only revealed her gender when a press-gang tried to re-enlist her forcibly, at age 19. She then became a servant in the household of a publisher, who subsequently published her memoirs. Another teenager to take this route around the same time, was 17-year old Anna Lühring, who fought in the Prussian Army as “Edward Kruse”, and remained with her unit even after her true identity was discovered.

Such tactics were necessary in Western society because of the increasing belief that women were not “fit” for combat. It was still possible as late as 1915, when Dorothy Lawrence (right) posed as a man to reach the Somme front-lines, where she laid mines, until illness forced her to reveal her identity. Her memoirs are available, free, from Google E-books. Finally, a couple of others about whom not much is known. Candelaria Figuerdo joined the Cuban revolutionary forces in 1868 at 16, and is said to be the first woman to fight in defense of Cuba. And Rayna Kasabova was a Bulgarian air force pilot and the first woman in the world to participate in a military flight. At 15, during the First Balkan War in 1912, she flew above Edirne to throw out propaganda leaflets in Turkish.

The purpose of all this is to show that age, or lack thereof, is no impermeable barrier. Even when barely into the teenage years, and certainly too young to vote or drink, women are capable of courage and action. But it has long been a problematic in the movie world. While I wouldn’t claim it was the first of the genre, undeniably the most influential was Luc Besson’s Léon, a.k.a. The Professional. In this Natalie Portman played Matilda, a 12-year old who sees her whole family gunned down by a corrupt DEA squad, but has the good fortune to live next door to a taciturn assassin (Jean Reno) who takes her in – not without qualms on his part. She wants to become a ‘cleaner’, like him, so she can avenge her family, and launches a one-girl assault on the DEA headquarters. That triggers their head, the supremely-psychotic Gary Oldman, to marshal forces of his own, setting the scene for a truly memorable final battle.

It’s one of my all-time favorites, but a number of critics found the relationship between Matilda and Léon troublesome, such as Gene Siskel calling it “questionable in its would-be sexy portrayal of a pre-teenage girl.” Part of the problem is it is Matilda who tries to instigate a physical relationship, pouncing on the first thing anywhere approaching genuine affection that she has ever experienced – Léon isn’t much more emotionally-rounded, and has no idea how to respond, except for a vague feeling it’s not right. But it is, apparently, okay to train Matilda as an apprentice killer. These aspects were a lot more explored in the extended European version, which runs 25 minutes longer; the US version was edited after test audiences reacted badly to Matilda’s more adult activities.

One can look to Japan for other provocative examples, both live-action and animated. The origins go back well before that, however, to the sixties and the pinky violence genre, which combine sex and…well, violence. While not all such “bad girl” films necessarily involve teenagers, some would certainly qualify, such as the marvellously-titled Terrifying Girls’ High School: Lynch Law Classroom, which lobs horror elements into the mix. I hope to cover more from this genre in the coming year. But teenage terrors extend beyond this: others worth mentioning with characters who can kill you as easily as they’d go shopping include Azumi, The Machine Girl and Mutant Girls Squad. These all represent an interesting counterpoint to the rigid role models typically imposed on women in Japanese society, and their popularity may represent a rebellion of sorts against this.

In a somewhat more light-hearted vein (for the most part), many anime and manga series have had teenage protagonists – as you’d expect, given they are often the core audience. The archetype goes back at least to the mid-1950’s, and Osama Tezuka’s Princess Knight, about a princess who must pretend to be male, so she can inherit the throne. There are too many of these even to list here, but some of the most well-known action-oriented examples in the West include Project A-ko, Sailor Moon, Blood: The Last Vampire, Cutie Honey, Gunslinger Girl (left), Noir and Dirty Pair – particularly Dirty Pair Flash, where both Kei and Yuri are seventeen-year olds.

Probably the most notorious example of live-action is Battle Royale, which follows a class of 15-year olds as they are kidnapped by the goverment, put on a deserted island and ordered to kill each other, in order to strike fear into the rest of the nation’s youths. The results show that lethal intent is by no means limited to the male sex, and the film was condemned at the time of its release in late 2000, by some in the Japanese parliament as “crude and tasteless”, who also complained about the ‘R15’ rating, saying it was liable to harm teenagers. Rumour has it that it has been “banned” in the United States, but it’s more that the makers were concerned about possible US lawsuits, post-Columbine. The movie may eventually come out – in its 10th-anniversary, 3D version!- this year.

The movie is unquestionably an influence on The Hunger Games, a young-adult novel written by Suzanne Collins, now in the process of being made into a major film. In both the setting is sometime in the future, when the threat of chaos has forced the totalitarian government into tough measures: randomly selecting children to participate in a “kill or be killed” contest, televised nationally “pour discourager les autres”, as Voltaire almost once said. Collins has never acknowledged the similarities, and it’s possible she was unaware of underground cinema – but it’s hard to believe everyone who saw the manuscript was similarly ignorant.

My major concern is whether the film will be able to pack the wallop contained in some of the book’s sequences, while working within the PG-13 rating it’s aiming for. [I note the irony of the rating system: there’s nothing to stop teenagers from buying the books which describe, in bloody details, murder of and by children. But see those same fictional events acted out in a cinema? Not without an accompanying parent or guardian] One suspects the result will, inevitably, be watered-down: it will take some skill from director Gary Ross, to replace the visceral impact with a more emotional one. It’s certainly not the Twilight saga, which has sharply divided readers. Bella is too ’emo’ for many tastes, but the supporting characters provide some counterpoints to that argument. If you’re looking for strong female roles in that genre, forum contributor Yâoguài provided a useful introduction to some other entries worth a look.

Quick: name a film where Saoirse Ronan plays a teenage assassin – besides Hanna. She seems to have developed a taste for the genre, as she also plays one in Violet & Daisy, directed by Geoffrey Fletcher (the screenwriter for Oscar-winner Precious). She is Daisy, along with Alexis Bledel as Violet: the two young killers for hire accept what they think will be a quick-and-easy job, until an unexpected target throws them off their plan. Said Ronan, “They couldn’t be more different [from Hanna]. Daisy is a really, really sweet girl. She’s not a natural killer like Violet is… They have their own little world. And everything is poppy and fun and about puppy dogs and dresses. They’re taking on this job because they want to get this dress that their pop idol has. Her name is Barbie Sunday.”

On television, one show stands out above all others: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which followed the life of Buffy Summers, through the discovery of her powers and on through college and into adulthood. But the first three seasons of the series (as well as the feature which preceded it) all took place at High School, and it’s there that the show’s foundations were laid – and some would argue, its best work done (certainly, the show received its best ratings). The influence of Buffy on the field has been enormous, with a slew of shows which owe a debt to her in one form or another, and it’s no exaggeration to say that the heroine became a cultural icon. Indeed, it found a success, both critical and commercial, which those involved have found somewhat hard to recapture. Joss Whedon’s subsequent forays into TV, in Dollhouse and Firefly, both were canceled due to low ratings, though the former has its own devoted cult following.

Even the most contentious of the above, however, were a mere blip compared to the – and there’s not really another word – shitstorm that greeted Kick-Ass last year, mostly for its tiny killing machine, Hit Girl (Chloe Moretz). The relationship is similar to that in Leon, except that it’s her father (Nicolas Cage) who is her tutor. And, while Matilda never actually kills anyone, Hit Girl does so with gleeful, foul-mouthed abandon. “Okay, you cunts – let’s see what you can do now,” she says, before taking apart an apartment full of drug-dealers and low-lives. When it comes to the action, she’s certainly a great deal more competent and confident than the hero.

But not everyone was impressed…

“Millions are being spent to persuade you that Kick-Ass is harmless, comic-book entertainment suitable for 15-year-olds. Don’t let them fool you… It deliberately sells a perniciously sexualised view of children and glorifies violence, especially knife and gun crime, in a way that makes it one of the most deeply cynical, shamelessly irresponsible films ever… The reason the movie is sick, as well as thick, is that it breaks one of the last cinematic taboos by making the most violent, foul-mouthed and sexually aggressive character, Hit-Girl, an 11-year-old.The movie’s writers want us to see Hit-Girl not only as cool, but also sexy, like an even younger version of the baby- faced Oriental assassin in Tarantino’s Kill Bill 1. Paedophiles are going to adore her. One of the film’s creepiest aspects is that she’s made to look as seductive as possible… She’s fetishised in precisely the same way as Angelina Jolie in the Lara Croft movies, and Halle Berry in Catwoman. As if that isn’t exploitative enough, she’s also shown in a classic schoolgirl pose, in a short plaid-skirt with her hair in bunches, but carrying a big gun. Kick-Ass is not the harmless fun it pretends to be. Yes, it’s lightweight and silly, but it’s also cynical, premeditated and mindbogglingly irresponsible. And in Hit-Girl, the film-makers have created one of the most disturbing icons and damaging role-models in the history of cinema.”

Even for the most reactionary critic on the most reactionary newspaper (The Daily Mail) in the UK, that’s harsh – and largely unjustified. There’s very little sexual about Hit Girl at all; the hero has absolutely no interest in her (being keener on a girl who thinks he’s gay!), and she’s almost entirely no-nonsense and practical. The only possible exception is the scene where she dresses in the schoolgirl uniform shown atop this piece to get into the villains’ headquarters, and that’s exploiting the vulnerability of the image than its sexuality. But guess which pic, of all the dozens possible from the movie, is used to illustrate the review on Tookey’s own website? Yep. The same. He’s happy to condemn, while simultaneously exploiting it for his own moral agenda.

But his reading of the movie says a lot more about the writer than the film: as another critic mentioned, “If anyone finds her sexy. it’s because they find little kids sexy”. And the truth finally came out, as Tookey admitted (in the unrepentant review linked above) to having “experienced at first hand the attentions of three different men who would now be called paedophiles.” Three? As Oscar Wilde nearly put it, “To be molested once may be regarded as a misfortune; three times looks like carelessness.” It’s a known fact paedophiles were usually themselves abused as children, so I have absolutely no problem in calling Tookey out for expressing his tendencies in this area: put bluntly, I’d not leave my kids alone with him. And he was somehow surprised by the backlash?

This is by no means an exhaustive survey. I could have gone on at quite some more length. Hanna. True Grit. Let the Right One In. But it does reflect, to some extent, the way society views teenage action heroines, because they are even more transgressive that adult action heroines. Women aren’t “supposed” to be assertive, self-confident or prepared to battle, physically, for what they believe. The same is true for children. Combine the two and – despite the examples drawn from history given above – you’ve got something which pushes a lot of society’s buttons. And I suspect that’s not something which is likely to change anytime soon.

See also:

The History of Roller Derby

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We used to be fairly well into roller derby, and reports of these bouts have previously graced the pages of this site. Our involvement in the scene came to a sudden halt a couple of years back when a shift-change at work left me holding down the fort on Friday and Saturday evenings, which are basically the prime nights for bouts. While the shift has its advantages, it does mean the only bout we’ve seen in about the past five years was one at the Arizona State Fair which happened to coincide with a midweek night off. I still possess my AZRD shirt, which I wear it to work occasionally, and have followed (vaguely) the schisms and ructions as groups have split, flourished and folded locally. Phoenix alone, as well as AZRD, has the Arizona Derby Dames, Arizona Roller Girls, Harmonic Violence Rollergirls, Renegade Roller Girls and Desert Dolls Roller Derby (somewhat) active, more than any other city in the world. I’m unsure whether this splintering is a good thing.

But while randomly kicking around Netflix, I noticed not one, not two, but three documentaries covering the topic, and figured I might as well use my bandwidth to watch them. After all, roller derby continues to grow, and is among the sports being considered for inclusion in the 2020 Olympics [though as “roller sports”, it seems likelier its more civilized cousins such as inline skating, will get the nod]. It doesn’t seem to be the passing fad some suspected – there’s over a thousand women’s flat-track leagues worldwide on this list – so for those interested in kick-ass heroines, the following films all provide an initiation into the sport of queens.

  • Hell on Wheels

    ★★★½
    “In the beginning was the word, and the word was ‘Austin’…”

    The revival of modern-era roller-derby started in Austin, Texas, when a man of dubious background and apparently even more questionable character, Dan Policarpo, arrived in the city and started talking up the sport to anyone who would listen. While he didn’t last long – taking loans out in the names of his skaters doesn’t inspire confidence – he was instrumental in putting together the first in what would become a worldwide wave of amateur, but extremely dedicated, all-girl roller-derby leagues. At the center in Austin were four women – Heather Burdick (a.k.a. Sugar), April Herman (Queen Destroyer), Anya Jack (Hot Lips Dolly) and Nancy Haggerty (Iron Maiden) – who founded Bad Girl Good Women and were captains of the four teams. However, it was not long before the inevitable drama starts, with the rest of the participants wondering for exactly whose benefit they were risking life and limb, as well as sacrificing their free time.

    And when I say inevitable, this is not a gender slam, since we’re currently “enjoying” something similar in the male-dominated world of pro wrestling here in Arizona. It’s more that strong personalities, contact sport and money are unlikely to be a good combination, and the film demonstrates this in spades. Things come to a head after a financial fiasco involving calendars, and a very nasty injury at a bout that turns out to be an uninsured event, and about 3/4 of the skaters slough off into a rival league, setting the stage for even more drama. You couldn’t script this stuff, and it’s remarkable that Ray was there to capture it from the very beginning, well before Dave Attell showed up to film it for Insomniac, before A&E covered the original league for Rollergirls and way before Drew Barrymore and Ellen Page took any interest.

    However, it’s a double-edged sword, in that there’s far more footage of league meetings than league matches – and if you can work out what’s going on in the latter, you’re better than I am. Admittedly, that may be because, in these early days, they weren’t actually very good skaters. As for the former, most get-togethers appear to take place in bars, or other places not conducive to the recording of crystal-clear dialogue. But it’s worth persevering, for the characters and drama that unfolds with a remarkably even hand. It would have been easy to portray the Gang of Four as exploitative tyrants, but one makes the point that they wanted to run the league like communists, and it failed miserably. There are also times when the film should have called out the BS of those present, such as when a skater gets all snotty after an audience member grabs her crotch… instead of merely spanking her as intended… while she’s dressed as a sexy schoolgirl. Yeah. I think you lose much right to credible outrage at that point.

    But, for all its uncritical approach and other flaws, this is the Declaration of Independence of roller derby, a historic document which shows how the whole thing got started. Austin set the tone for both the good and the bad aspects of the sport-industry-crypto-feminism which we know and love today, though after this film, you’ll be left feeling it’s something of a miracle the whole shebang didn’t crash and burn during its formative years.

    Dir: Bob Ray

    [The whole doc is now available to watch online, though the DVD comes with a lot of extra footage, commentaries and other assorted bells and whistles.]

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  • Brutal Beauty: Tales of the Rose City Rollers

    ★★½
    “Too much ego and not enough doughnuts.”

    For the next entry, we leap forward to 2009, and Portland – a city which all we know about, we learned from Portlandia. And, on that basis, of course it’s a city which has roller derby, where it sprung, virtually fully-fledged to four-figure crowds. This is less of a landmark doc, in that it doesn’t cover the beginning, middle or end. It’s basically a year or so in the lives of the participants in the Rose City Rollers, which is the Portland league. It covers both their local season, and then, once that’s over, follows the travelling team, the Wheels of Justice, first as they head down to San Francisco to take on their hated rivals, then over to Denver for the regional championships.

    S’okay. The problem is there’s very little here any fan of the sport won’t already know about, or have seen before, and not enough to draw in anyone else. Is it heretical to say that roller derby chicks can be stereotypical in their individuality, just as much as those in the mainstream they profess to detest? That is the impression that comes over here, and a couple of the women are… Well, to be honest: really annoying. I guess there’s a certain kind of extroverted type who will be attracted to roller-derby. But simply because you strap on wheels and give yourself a fake name, doesn’t necessarily stop you from being an irritating bi… Well, let’s just say: I don’t care in the slightest what kind of tattoos you get, and move on, shall we? As for “Roller derby saved my soul”, even as a fan of the sport, I reckon that counts as going overboard. What next? “Roller derby cured my tumour”?

    It’s a shame, since when concentrating on the sport, the documentary is decent enough. There’s a great explanation of the rules involving donuts [incorporating a plug for the city’s famous Voodoo Doughnut store!], and they also provide a better insight into the separate and largely distinct roles of jammers, pivots and blockers, as well as the different skills needed for each. In contrast to some other leagues, the theatrical fights and things like the punishment wheel are nowhere to be found in Portland. However, it’s not long before we’ve abandoned derby and are back at watching one women yell at another through a bathroom door. As an insight into the appeal of the pastime, it’s a good deal less than satisfactory.

    [This one can currently be seen on Hulu without a subscription being needed.]

    Dir: Chip Maloy

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  • Blood on the Flat Track: The Rise of the Rat City Rollergirls

    ★★★★
    “The best of the recent docs for the novice to the sport.”

    In contrast to Brutal Beauty, this succeeds to a far greater degree is in putting over the attraction of roller derby. The first couple of films seem aimed more at the devotee, and it was more or less taken as read that already you liked it, or were at least somewhat interested. Here, I think even the more casual viewer will find themselves sucked in. They may or may not want to go any further, but the doc does a much better job of explaining the entertainment to be found, both for participants and spectators. The sheer sense of fun that is found at the best roller-derby events [or even, to be frank, the crappy ones, which we have also attended!] is a good deal more palpable here than in the other films, which concentrated on personalities to a greater extent than the sport. That isn’t the case here, and to an outsider, the results are likely better for it.

    Not that there is any shortage of said personalities, such as the mother and daughter who both take part in the sport, or the three sisters who have been roller-skating virtually their entire life, and are feared across the entire Seattle league. There are, admittedly stories about romance and marriage included, but even these have a close connection to roller-derby, like the guy who proposes after his girlfriend became part of the championship-winning team [I can relate to this, having proposed to my wife immediately after the Arizona Diamondbacks won the 2001 World Series!]. I also enjoyed the insight into the different teams, like the Sockit Wenches (right) or the Derby Liberation Front, and the different ways in which they both perceive themselves and are perceived from the outside. Each has a different group personality, which of course, attracts other like-minded individuals, reinforcing that aspect of the team.

    In common with the rest of the films, it covers a period of time rather than necessarily any particular sequence of events, mostly around the 2006 season, where the Wenches were trying to dethrone the reigning champion DLF. There’s enough footage of actual bouts that you can understand the skill of the participants, and the danger inherent in the sport. It’s frank in admitting that sex appeal is part of the draw, especially for the male audience, but I can attest that the film is also correct when it states that after about 15 minutes, that simply isn’t important. With its host of likeable players, it’s no surprise that the derby scene in Seattle continues to prosper, with the fed holding the national record for single-event attendance, having pulled 6,885 to a show in June 2010.

    [It doesn’t seem to be available to stream online for free; we found it on Netflix. ]

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Rina Takeda: The Next Action Heroine?

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Last month, we saw MMA star Gina Carano hit the big-screen in Haywire, but she’s not the first genuine female martial-artist to have started a movie career. Most obviously, Cynthia Rothtock was a five-time World Karate Champion in forms and weapons, and has a number of black belts in various disciplines. Similarly, Jeeja Yanin was a third-Dan black belt in Taekwondo, before hitting the silver screen in Chocolat. But here, we’ll be looking at the name that has recently emerged out of Japan, Rina Takeda, holder of a black belt in Ryukyu Shorin-ryu Karate.

Born in 1991, Takeda was reportedly inspired to take up the martial-art at the age of ten, when she saw her father get knocked out of a karate tournament, and was determined to avenge his defeat. [If you’ve seen the “plot” – quotes used advisely – of some of her films, this makes a great deal of sense…] In 2005, she auditioned to become a member in J-pop group Morning Musume, and to date, has appeared in three films, as well as a recurring role on the Japanese comedy-superhero series, The Ancient Dogoo Girls. There’s a certain sense that her talents have not yet been matched by the material provided, but everyone has to start somewhere. Just ask Angelina Jolie, whose career started with Cyborg 2…

[November 2013 update: we can add Dead Sushi to her resume, where she plays the daughter of a famous sushi chef, who has to fight off reanimated… well, sushi. It’s from the director of Machine Girl, but having just watched the trailer, I think a well-stocked fridge will be needed!]

  • High-Kick Girl

    ★★★
    Less a “film” than “fights spliced together, interspersed with cut scenes from a Mortal Kombat knock-off”.

    The entertainment value you get from this may depend on your expectations. It undoubtedly works best as a party-tape, show-casing the “no wires, CGI or stunt doubles” approach, but I have to beg to differ with some of the critical savaging it has received. Even on our forums, it divided opinions, with some posters calling it “moronic and offensive” and “complete TRASH”. While I can see its weaknesses, and it’s no classic, at least in the first half, it does deliver pretty much everything you’d expect in the way of teenage ass-kickery.

    The plot – such as it is, and I wonder what they did with the rest of the postage-stamp – is as follows. Kei Tsuchiya (Takeda) is a student under master Matsumura (Naka), but fed up with training, goes out to “hunt black belts.” This brings her to the attentions of the Destroyers, a gang of mercenary martial-artists called the Destroyers, extend an invitation to her to join them. Turns out it’s a trap, designed to lure in Matsumura, against whom they have a 15-year old grudge, and with the kidnapped Kei as bait, they await her teacher’s arrival. And that’s the main problem. The first half sets up Kei as fearless and tough, but after the chief villain shows up, spends much of the second-half whimpering on the floor: Matsumura does far more of the heavy lifting, despite his claim, rather questionable on the evidence here, that “karate is not for fighting.”

    And that’s a shame, as Kei makes a good impression, right from her first bit of action, which sees her surprise an unsuspecting opponent with a kick to the head from a standing position, as shown on the right. Another standout was the kickfest (below), against another real-life karate star, Yuka Kobayashi. Stylistically, however, the main problem is the director’s repetitive, frequent use of slow-motion: while this is great in the aforementioned “party tape” atmosphere (where, if someone yells, “Wow, look at that,” you can turn around and see it again), it is badly overused and drags the viewer out of the cinematic experience far too often: lob this kind of stuff on as an extra on the DVD, if you must.

    The reviews which aren’t writing this off entirely tend to point out that it works better if you regard it as some kind of martial-arts promotional piece, and that would tie in with the heavy emphasis that “Karate is a martial art for protection.” [Personally, I feel a good pair of running shoes would be just as good there] However, there’s little doubting that Takeda is the real deal in terms of fighting ability, and shows a willingness to take punishment as well as dish it out, that is certainly to her credit. However, the inexperience of both her and the creators in the more traditional aspects of film-making – for the final battle, the location appears to be a school gymnasium, on loan to the Destroyers! – do significantly hamper the overall merit.

    Dir: Fuyuhiko Nishi
    Star: Rina Takeda, Tatsuya Naka, and a host of faceless minions

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  • Karate Girl (2011)

    ★★★½
    “On the plus-side, this does have a plot. On the other hand, you kinda wish they hadn’t bothered.”

    The film manages to cram just about every cliché of martial-arts films into its 92 minutes, with a plot driven by four major threads:
    a) You killed my father, and must pay.
    b) You run a rival school, and must pay.
    c) You are generally not a nice person, and must pay.
    d) You kidnapped my sibling, raising them as one of your own and training them in your evil techniques, before sending them out to kill me. Oh, and you must pay for this too, naturally.

    Ayaka Kurenai (Takeda) can only watch as her father, a master of karate, is killed in front of her very young eyes, and her sister Sakura (Tobimatsu) is dragged away by the perpetrators. A decade or so later, Ayaka goes viral after using her skills to stop purse-snatchers in the cinema where she works, an event that brings her to the attention of Tagawa Shu (Keisuke), the man behind it all. He still covets the family belt, having apparently missed it when killing the man and kidnapping his daughter. He sends out some minions to verify if she is who she seems – then when that’s done, plays his trump card, revealing he has Sakura, in his evil grasp. Little does he reckon that Sakura’s family loyalties run deeper than all the training the Evil Dojo can drive into her…

    Yeah, the plot is a load of pants, and the acting is nothing to write home about – it’s serviceable enough, in line with what you’d expect from a movie with this title. I did enjoy most of the action, and the relaxed style of editing which lets you see the performers and their skill. It doesn’t always work, but enough of it does to make for a generally-entertaining time. British-born Heselton. who looks like a pissed-off Simon Pegg on steroids, comes across well, but the highlight is probably the scene where a pair of Tagawa’s minions go to Ayaka’s karate school, and take on, first her classmates, then her, in an effort to flush her true talent and ancestry out.

    Both Takeda and Tobimatsu show potential here. The latter is another young discovery – the next next generation of action heroines? – and it’s startling to realize she is just 14. One suspects child-labour laws must be a good deal laxer in Japan than the West. Let’s just hope their next film isn’t plotted out on the back of a beer-mat.

    Dir: Kimura Yoshikatsu
    Star: Rina Takeda, Hina Tobimatsu, Horibe Keisuke, Richard William Heselton

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  • Ninja Girl (Kunoichi)

    ★½
    “Save your time, save your money, and go watch Karate Girl instead. Again, if necessary.”

    From the director of Alien vs. Ninja, the story here centres on a pair of ninjas, Shimotsuki and Hyotsuki, who are carrying on what appears to be a family tradition, kidnapping women from other clans’ villages, and taking them back to their own for nefarious purposes – let’s just say, the phrase “tools of pleasure” crops up on more than one occasion. They ar returning with their latest batch of four, including Kisaragi (Takeda), who is a ninja in her own right. With the help of a mysterious man (Sato), Kisuragi and her colleagues in imprisonment are released from their bondage – but that is only the first obstacle between them and their freedom. Of course, it turns out the heroine is not quite as innocent as she appears, and has an agenda of her own, because her mother was kidnapped by the same sleazy ninjas, when Kisuragi was just a baby.

    Barely an hour long, this still somehow manages to outstay its welcome, managing to spend far more time engaging in borderling misogyny, rather than anything remotely empowering, and a distinctly sleazy tone with plot elements involving castration, venereal disease and a great deal more molestation of helpless women that I generally like (particularly in my ninja flicks). There is really only a single battle of note, when Kisuragi gets to take on one of her captors in a battle that is fairly well-shot and does a good job od showcasing Takeda’s undeniable skills. However, you don’t get the sense that there was more than a couple of days work involved, and even given the short running time, it’s still a negligible amount of what’s on view, and there just isn’t anything like sufficient elsewhere to keep you interested or entertained.

    I haven’t seen Chiba’s earlier work, but it seems to be basically the same “head off to a forest for some film-making” approach that we see here. That can work in the right hands – Versus is justly the most well-know example of that genre. However, here, it’s more like a cheap excuse to disguise the obviously limited production values than anything else. Hopefully, Takeda will soon move beyond this kind of Z-grade dreck: I did read rumours of her being in Chocolate 2, which would be nice if said rumours had the slightest grounding in fact, which seems questionable. Hey, we can dream, can’t we?

    Dir: Seiji Chiba
    Star: Rina Takeda, Yuichi Sato, Masanori Mimoto, Mitsuki Koga

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Pinky violence

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pinkyl“Pinky violence” is a genre of cinema that flourished in Japan during the 1970’s. It was spawned from the “pink film” genre of sexploitation movies, which started the previous decade with Satoru Kobayashi’s Flesh Market, which grossed over 100 million yen on a budget of just eight million. It was originally the domain mostly of independent producers and studios, but as the Japanese market became tougher, due to competition from imported movies and other forms of entertainment, major studios like Nikkatsu and Toei moved in to the field. While the former took the more traditional route, Toei opted to merge sex with the other staple of exploitation cinema, violence.

But what makes them of interest here, is their focus on women as the central characters, active participants in the violence, rather than simply being passive victims. Frequently, the heroines are sukeban, a term which means “delinquent girl” or “bad girl”, often operating in conjunction with, or leading, other girls in a gang, This may form part of a larger Yakuza enterprise, or work entirely independently. Sometimes, the focus is on obtaining revenge or justice for some past crime, whether against the girl or someone she loves. The ratio of sex to violence did vary, as did the setting: while most had a contemporary setting, films like Lady Snowblood took the themes are ran them out against a period backdrop.

While the ‘golden era’ of the genre is generally considered to be in the seventies, the influences and general themes continue on. They can be seen in the likes of the Female Prisoner Scorpion and Zero Woman series, and arguably, even in the new wave of Tokyo Gore movies, such as Mutant Girl Squad or Gothic & Lolita Psycho. We started by reviewing the four movies included in the box-set released by Panik House in December 2005. While it’s now out of print, its contents remains available from various sources, and it’s as good a place to begin as any. Further entries will continue to be added during the coming months, with the movies listed in order of release date.

See also

And, in chronological order

The (Short) Life and (Quick) Death of Charlie’s Angels

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Well, that didn’t take long. While not quite the first new show on the fall 2011 schedule to get cancelled, the Charlie’s Angels reboot did survive much longer. After scathing reviews and ratings that were weak to begin with, and went downhill from there, not even a spot of same-sex canoodling on set could shore things up. Four weeks in, ABC pulled the plug. Let’s start with those reviews, shall we?

  • “ABC’s new drama Charlie’s Angels seem to want to go back to the ’70s to rustle up some girl power, but it fails miserably and offensively… It contains some of the worst acting of the last decade on network television, much of it by Minka Kelly. The writing is atrocious… It sets the standards of television back to, well, the lesser efforts of the 1970s. And that’s nostalgia nobody needs to relive.” – Hollywood Reporter
  • “A cluttered, poorly acted, ridiculously predictable wannabe action show with an alarming wardrobe budget and few surprises… Would be better if it was faster-paced, grittier, and the characters should be more flawed – because that’s how audiences like their heroes in the new millenium.” – Starpulse.com
  • “A silly hour of escapism even less believable than Vampire Diaries. If you were looking for something witty or sly, I think you were out of luck.” – Entertainment Weekly
  • “It’s unlikely anyone expected much from a revival of that eye-candy progenitor Charlie’s Angels; the surprise is that you’re getting so little… [The original] had energy and glamour and a self-aware sense of frothy fun, all of which are missing from this lugubrious update.” – USA Today
  • “The truly and genuinely terrible acting…is hard to separate from the execrable script they’ve been saddled with… It feels like pre-chewed food: intended for easy digestion, it comes out (1) unappetizing, (2) textureless, and (3) devoid of character.” – NPR

It could perhaps have withstood these barbs, if it hadn’t been for the poor ratings. 8.76 million viewers watched the Sept. 22 premiere, leaving it third in the timeslot, with less than half the audience for CBS and Fox’s offerings. That was disappointing enough, but it lost 19% of its audience the following episode, and by week three, it was down below six million. The death-knell was that, among the 18-49 year old demographic key to advertisers, Angels was on a mere 4% of the TVs in use during its time slot.

I watched the show, albeit out of a sense of duty more than real expectation; I loved the first of Drew Barrymore’s movies, but was unimpressed with the sequel, and the series seemed to fall uncomfortably between paying homage to the original, and being in tone with modern action heroine mores. Said creator Alfred Gough, “It won’t be campy or retro. The characters are real and emotionally grounded, but they still like to have fun, wear great clothes, solve crime and kick some serious ass.” And, unfortunately, take orders without question from an unseen male boss. While the makers could hardly dump that, it’s an angle that now comes off as less whimsical than creepy and stalkerish.

This illustrates a tension that couldn’t be adequately resolved. They killed an Angel with a car-bomb early in the first episode, but the show also had silly banter about handbags, and the results possessed an unevenness of tone that dogged things for the entire run. Trying to balance dark and light on television is a lot harder than it looks, and few shows manage to do so effectively; those in charge here should have watched and taken copious notes from Burn Notice, which does this much better (and is also set in Miami).

Mind you, they’d be hampered given there’s little indication of any significant acting talent among the lead trio, whose laughter seemed perpetually forced and who gave their characters little in the way of distinct personalities. I also have to wonder if making them all ex-criminals – rather than underutilized cops, as in the original – made it harder to empathize with them. However, there is also a lot more competition among action heroines these days; when the original aired, kick-ass chicks (even to the limited degree in Angels) were rare. Now: not so much, and Nikita or Sidney Bristow would eat up and spit out the entire trio, picking their teeth with the bones.


That said, the series was not without its moments, and the action, though sporadic, was generally okay – they did at least use guns, despite the presence of Drew Barrymore as a producer. Ironically, the last episode before the death sentence was handed down, was probably the best. This was a loose remake of a cult favorite from the original series, Angels in Chains, which saw the trio thrown into a Cuban prison being used as a source of women for a call-girl ring (I’m sure that was also the plot of a full-on exploitation pic, but I’m damned if I can remember the name). It benefited from a good supporting cast: Erica Durance as a CIA agent, Elizabeth Pena as the prison warden and James Morrison (who played Jack Bauer’s boss Bill Buchanan in 24) as a corrupt businessman.

But I can’t confess to feeling upset in the slightest that it has gone, beyond a sense of vague disappointment that any series involving action heroines has bitten the dust – there aren’t enough on broadcast TV. I’m sure it’ll be used as “proof” that these shows just don’t work, but the problem here was less the concept than the execution. While not the worst remake attempt to come out of Hollywood lately (no-one who saw Knight Rider will argue!), it was a poorly-conceived adaptation of a show that truly was a product of its era, and should have been left as such.

Female Terrorists

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Earlier this month, the Washington Post reported that “A petite, blond-haired, blue-eyed high school dropout who allegedly used the nickname Jihad Jane was identified Tuesday as an alleged terrorist intent on recruiting others to her cause… LaRose, who lived in suburban Philadelphia, allegedly recruited men and women in the United States, Europe and South Asia to “wage violent jihad,” according to an indictment issued in Pennsylvania.” It’s the latest example of an area in which I find myself treading particularly carefully on this site: female terrorists.

I don’t want anyone to think that I advocate, in any way, “real” violence; long-time readers will know of the issues even the perception of such has caused in the past, and I dread to think how many alarms went off in Homeland Security with the Googling required for this piece! But there is still something transgressively – if not appealing, let’s go with “intriguing” – about the concept of a woman resorting to violence for political or social reasons. It seems such a contradiction, for the supposedly-gentler sex, the one which nurtures life, to use such means, that it demands further investigation. Of course, the word “terrorist” is more than somewhat laden with underlying meaning. In reality, the line between “terrorist” and “freedom fighter” is one largely determined by whether or not you support the regime under attack, and the historical record tends to be written by the winners in such struggles. I draw no such lines here: I am more interested in the people in question than the causes they espouse.

What follows is a selection of some of the interesting characters from history, starting more than 130 years ago, and going almost to the present day. I have deliberately excluded suicide bombers from the list, even though these have played an important part in history – for instance, it was a female Tamil Tiger who killed former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991. It just doesn’t seem as interesting to me, to blow yourself up for a cause, when compared to a longer-term commitment to it. I have also excluded some obvious names: Palestinian Leila Khaled, because she has been covered before on the site – and will be covered again in the future, since her autobiography is on my reading list – and also Patty Hearst, since it seems questionable whether she was truly acting of her own volition.

1. In the late 19th century, a number of women were among the active leaders of the Russian nihilist organization Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will), best known for their assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1981. That was organized by a woman, Sophia Perovskaya, with another female member of the Executive Committee, Vera Figner (left) also participating. Four years previously, Vera Zasulich (right) shot and seriously wounded Colonel Theodore Trepov, the hated governor of St. Petersburg.

2. Daughter of an English baronet, and married to a Polish count, Constance Markiewicz was an unlikely revolutionary. But her political commitment, to causes including women’s suffrage and Irish independence, was deep. She was a Lieutenant in the Irish Citizen’s Army and during the 1916 Easter Rising, Markiewicz was appointed second in command at St Stephen’s Green in Dublin She supervised the setting-up of barricades, and was in the middle of the fighting, wounding a British army sniper. After being released from prison, she became rhe first woman elected to the British Parliament, though did not take her seat.

3. In Cuba, Celia Sánchez (right, with fellow revolutionary Haydée Santamaría) became one of the earliest members of the 26th of July Movement, joining the struggle after the coup against President Batista in 1952. After Fidel Castro was jailed, she became the rebel leader in the mountainous Sierra region of eastern Cuba, and was called by Castro, “the greatest guerrilla fighter and the most outstanding leader of the Cuban Revolution.” was one of the first women to assemble a combat squad during the revolution[. She was tasked with making all the necessary arrangements throughout the southwest coast region of Cuba, for the Granma landing, and was responsible for organising reinforcements once the revolutionaries landed.

4. Considered a key figure in the Algerian struggle for independence from France, Hassiba Ben Bouali joined the FLN (National Liberation Front) while studying at the university in Algiers, and became the liaison officer of Ali La Pointe, deputy chief of FLN military operations for the city. She was active in the manufacture and transport of bombs around the city, as part of a campaign now known as the Battle of Algiers, which began on September 30, 1956 when Bouali and two other female FLNmilitants, carried out a series of bomb attacks on civilian locations. She was killed the following year when French forces bombed their hideout.

5. Tibetan Buddhist nun Ani Pachen fled to a monastery at age 17, after overhearing plans to marry her off, but returned in 1958 after her father died, inhering leadership of her clan. She led a guerrilla campaign, overseeing 600 fighters on horseback against the Chinese occupying forces and their tanks, which only ended with her capture in late 1959. She then spent the next 21 years in prison, and after her release in 1981, continued to protest against the Chinese occupation, until forced in exile in India. She said in a 2000 interview, “My father taught me to ride and to shoot. I used to race horses when I was a teenager. They didn’t have separate races for girls. I raced my horse against men.”

6. Fusako Shigenobu (left, with colleague Kozo Okamoto) was one of the founders and leaders of the Japanese Red Army. She is now serving 20 years for kidnapping embassy workers during a 1974 Japanese Red Army operation, she is also believed to have played key roles in other hijackings and bomb attacks. Reputedly ordered the murder, by burial alive, of a pregnant woman colleague for being “too bourgeois.” Another left-wing radical, Hiroko Nagata, while acting as vice-chairman of the United Red Army, directed the killing of 14 members of the group by beatings or hypothermia, during a 1972 purge. With friends like that, who needs enemies?

7. At only 22, Dora María Téllez was third in command for a 1978 operation which seized control of the Nicaraguan National Palace in Managua, taking the entire congress hostage and helping trigger the fall of the Somoza regime. The following year, Sandinista units under her control fought Somozan forces for six straight weeks, before finally capturing Leon, the second-largest city in Nicaragua. Subsequently became a respected historian, but as recently as 2004, was still barred from the United States as a terrotist.

8. Donna Maguire, once called Europe’s most dangerous woman, travelled to Europe in 1989 as part of an IRA active service unit, an is suspected by authorities of a bombing at a British Army barracks at Osnabruck on 19 June, the killing of a British soldier in a car bomb attack several days later, as well as the murders of two Australian tourists mistaken for off-duty soldiers, and a British soldier in Dortmund. Was eventually found guilty of attempted murder, explosives offences and spying on British Army bases in Germany with intent to sabotage. Sentenced to nine years, she was released immediately due to time spent in prison on remand. A family friend said of her: “She was an ordinary girl on the surface, but underneath she was as hard as nails.”

9. During their struggle for independence from Spain, Basque separatist group ETA had some infamous women members. These include Maria Dolores Gonzalez (“Yoyez”), who was later assassinated by the group as a reprisal for having left. Also high in their power structure was María Soledad Iparragirre, known as ‘Anboto’, whose exploits allegedly included the murder of a Spanish army Lieutenant and a car bomb explosion against a military bus, that killed seven.

10. Nelly Avila Moreno, known as ‘Karina’, surrendered to Colombian authorities in 2008 (right), after a long career as a legend in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). One army intelligence source said, “To become a FARC leader you have to been utterly ruthless and vicious, even more so if you are a woman. Karina was both.” As a result of her battles, she was blind in one eye, lost a breast, had bullet wounds along an arm and had combat scars on her face. The 45-year old was in charge of FARC’s 47th Front, which had up to 350 members operating in the northern province of Antioquia. Sentenced to 33 years in jail, she was released in 2009 to serve as a “promoter of peace.”

  • The Baader-Meinhof Complex

    ★★★

    Director Edel is probably best known in the West for the embarrassing Body of Evidence, though would rather be remembered for the much better, if incredibly depressing, Last Exit to Brooklyn. This is certainly nearer to the latter, depicting the rise and fall of the Baader-Meinhof group, also known as the Red Army Faction, the terrorist gang whose actions sent Germany into a state of nervous anxiety in the late 70’s. They started off at the end of the sixties, when Europe was in a state of political flux, but became more radical, engaging in bank robberies to fund their activities and then escalating to bombings, assassinations and kidnappings. The leaders were eventually caught – and I trust this isn’t much of a spoiler – dying mysterious deaths in jail, officially called suicide, but suspected by some as being extra-judicial execution.

    It’s a generally interesting, but also flawed, approach to the subject matter, because it tries too hard to be even-handed, both humanizing the group, while also being sympathetic to the establishment they sought to bring down. It’s hard to do this, while still generating much emotion, because the viewer is left not really knowing for whom they should “root”. In addition, former journalist Ulrike Meinhof (Gedeck – the picture, above, is the real Meinhof) is initially the focus of the movie’s attention, but the way things unfold (and I’m manfully avoiding any spoilers there) mean that things inevitably have to shift away from her in the latter stages. The movie also faces the inevitable problem of any film based on actual events: reality rarely, if ever, follows a three-act structure, and as a result, either the facts or the drama have to suffer – here, it seems to be the drama, with the story not so much building to a climax as petering out.

    That said, the performances are good, particularly Wokalek as Gudrun Ensslin, who has been described as the intellectual head of the RAF. What makes it suitable for inclusion here is the way that both Meinhof and Ennslin are depicted as the driving forces, the engine-room of the Red Army Faction. Andreas Baader (Bleibtreu – who was also the ineffectual boyfriend in Run Lola Run) is depicted as a hot-head, and something of a hypocrite, with a taste for fast cars. It’s clear that Ensslin and Meinhof are the ones that run the group – Baader was, in fact, a high-school dropout and one of the few RAF members who did not attend university. I have vague memories of hearing reports about the group as I grew up; while it was good to have the large blanks in my knowledge filled in, this felt more like a Discovery Channel re-enactment of the RAF’s history, rather than offering anything truly cinematic.

    Dir: Uli Edel
    Star: Martina Gedeck, Moritz Bleibtreu, Johanna Wokalek, Nadja Uhl

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Cops and Robbers, by Thad Brown

  By

[What follows below is the opening of one of the stories in The Smoking Gun Sisterhood, a collection by Thad Brown. Our review of the book can be found here.]

“Are we really, really sure we want to do this?” Brittany’s soft-voiced question hung in the air for a moment, as Lizzie thought seriously about it herself, realizing that it might be the most momentous question she’d ever decided in her twenty-four years. She shifted her tall, lithely-built body on the car’s back seat as she looked over at the speaker beside her. A year older than Lizzie, Brittany as usual affected more attempt at elegance in her dress than her friend did with a plain T-shirt and jeans; the black-haired young woman wore a partly buttoned white blouse over her low-cut tube top, with an imitation silk scarf and a chain necklace which, if not expensive, was at least gaudy. (Granted, her black mini-skirt was no longer in the height of fashion –but then, shopping at thrift stores and yard sales wasn’t exactly like buying clothes at Nieman Marcus.)

But for once, the older girl’s face didn’t wear the usual arrogant expression that caused many people to dismiss her as “stuck-up,” and with which she usually faced a world that, as she put it, hadn’t ever done much but crap on her. Behind her, through the glass, Lizzie could see the low brick building at which they’d just pulled up, and, in the distance beyond, the snow-capped peaks of the Rockies that circled their city. On the building’s door glass the letters read “FIRST NATIONAL BANK.” Resting on the car floor between Brittany’s legs, the Heckler and Koch MP5 submachine gun her dad had brought back from the first Gulf War, and which she’d lifted from her parent’s attic, wasn’t visible from the sidewalk.

Art by Rich Smedley

Riding shotgun in the front, twenty-one-year-old Shelley, Lizzie’s other close friend from their public housing building, was finishing the cigarette she’d obviously lit to steady her nerves, smoking it in deep drags and exhaling in the quick breaths of a person tightly griped by tension. Her chest was bare except for a low-cut tube top that went well with her thick, short-cut coppery-red hair. (Brittany had protested the younger woman’s scanty attire: “Jeez, girl, we don’t want to attract attention! You’re going to stick up a bank, not do a pole dance down where you work!”

But, as Shel had pointed out, she didn’t even own any clothes that weren’t revealing, except her winter stuff –and wouldn’t a parka attract more attention, in mid-summer?) Like Brittany’s, her face, its sharp, rather angular features hardened by more troubles than many people saw in twice her years, was expectantly turned to Lizzie, who knew that though she wasn’t the oldest of their trio, she was the one the others looked to as a leader –especially now, in this scheme that had been hatched in one of their late-night gripe sessions around her kitchen table. The weight of the responsibility knotted her guts, along with nagging guilt and roiling fear.

She took a deep breath, and spoke slowly. “I’m sure of what this money can mean, to me –to every one of us. And I’m sure that we’ve planned this just as well as is humanly possible –we’ve been talking about it for two months, and casing the place for three weeks. This is the perfect time to hit it; there won’t be many people inside. We’ll go in with our guns out, take charge of the situation from the get-go, and be in and out before anybody gets hurt. That guard’s not even going to try to draw, not with three guns already pointed at him; he’s not nuts.” The assurance in her voice belied her own nagging doubts on that score; she’d lain awake half of last night wondering what would happen if he did, or if one of the bank’s customers turned out to be packing heat.

Both she and Shel had taken their weapons out to a box canyon in the mountains near the city several times, and practiced shooting at rocks and pine cones until they could pretty well hit what they aimed at. (Brittany hadn’t; but as she said, if she couldn’t hit a mark with a machine gun, practice wouldn’t help her.) If that happened, she believed that she could handle the emergency, and hopefully just wound rather than, God forbid, kill, or be killed …but there was always that chance. Swallowing hard, she continued. “I’m sure that I’m not going to get cold feet now, we’ve all put too much hope into this for that.”

Turning her head slightly, she faced the car’s owner and driver. About Lizzie’s age, Jackie Fitch was blonde as well, though her hair color came from a bottle while Lizzie’s was natural. Not part of their tight-knit threesome, to Lizzie’s mind Jackie was the weakest link in this plan; but back in their teens, she was the only girl who’d joined the boys from the projects sometimes when they’d blocked off the street outside and drag raced their cars –and whenever Jackie’d raced, she’d won. An oversize pair of imitation dice hanging from her front-seat mirror symbolized her luck; they might need all of it today. “Keep that engine running,” Lizzie addressed her, “and when we get back here you take out like a bat out of hell. Just don’t run into anybody while you’re doing it.”

Jackie snorted, her eyes inscrutable behind dark glasses. “Any fool who can’t keep from hitting people at ninety miles an hour hasn’t got any business doing ninety.” A mirthless smile flickered briefly on her tough features. “Don’t worry about my driving, girlfriend; just see to it that I get my six hundred bucks.” They’d each promised to pony up two hundred for her from whatever their shares of the take amounted to.

“You’ll get it.” Not owning a watch, Lizzie looked at the bank’s outdoor clock. At noon, the bank’s manager would walk out from the shelter of his office into the main room, with his vault keys on him, ready to leave for his lunch. “Get ready,” she told her partners. Undoing the striped bandanna that held back the glorious mane of her more than shoulder-length hair, she shook her tresses out of her green eyes, folded the cloth into a triangle, and tied it point down over her nose and mouth.

Brittany and Shel followed suit, the former with her scarf and the latter with a good-sized handkerchief from the back pocket of her leather pants. Shel, Lizzie knew, had the .50 caliber Desert Eagle from her dad’s drawer. Her hand shaking slightly, she reached into her purse for her own weapon, an unregistered .44 revolver she’d bought cheap years ago out of the back of somebody’s truck, for personal protection. She’d drawn it once, to face down a would-be mugger; but she’d never imagined then that she’d ever be drawing it for a reason like this. With her other hand, she lifted three gunny sacks from the car floor.

The bank’s clock registered noon…