Category: Review

I am Mother

  By

★★★½
“Lies, damned lies and motherhood.”

After an extinction-event has turned Earth uninhabitable, an underground “ark” holds thousands of human embryos, overseen by a robotic Mother (voiced by Byrne, performed by Hawker). One embryo is brought to fruition, becoming Daughter (Rugaard, resembling a young Jennifer Garner), who grows up into a young woman, educated by Mother to believe she’s alone on the planet. But she begins to doubt what Mother tells her, and these doubts are confirmed when another, older woman (Swank) shows up. Let in by Daughter, she tells tales of humanity outside struggling for survival against robot killers. Everything Daughter has been told is a lie. Or is the new arrival telling the whole truth either?

The film’s main strength is the way it manages expertly the shifting sands of audience perception. Initially, we’re led to believe that Mother is potentially the saviour of humanity. However, it soon becomes clear that the robot is not being entirely honest with her charge, and our sympathies move towards the Woman, who wants to rescue Daughter from her enforced isolation. Yet, in the end, there’s another agenda there as well, and right until the credits roll, you’re kept watching to see beyond the next bend in the story-line. While there are clues dropped, almost from the beginning, you may not notice them until everything comes together. Or perhaps even past that point; I’ll confess, I did have to do some light post-viewing Googling in order to grasp all the consequences.

It’s rare, especially in the SF genre, to see a film without a male speaking part [bar some archive footage from The Tonight Show, anyway!]. Though one senses any money saved on the small cast was simply diverted to an impressive set of production values, depicting not just the facility, but also the devastated outside world after… well, whatever the extinction event was, since it’s never described. That’s not really the focus of the film, yet I felt it was a bit of a shame, The story of the Woman’s survival, up until she came banging on the door, would have been equally interesting as the Daughter’s. I do have… let’s just say, some questions about the coincidence of them arriving at the air-lock at the same time, and also the Woman’s plot-convenient amnesia.

At 113 minutes, it does run somewhat long, and is a little light on action for my tastes. The film is definitely on the more cerebral side of science fiction cinema, something not apparent from the trailer. Rather than explosions, the script prefers to pose awkward questions about the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few, or the moral implications of ripping it all up to start again. However, it never sinks to boring, with decent performances which help guide the film through the occasional doldrums. Hat-tip to Rob for steering me in the direction of a film which I’d otherwise likely have skipped past, in the never-ending and ongoing stream of Netflix original movies.

Dir: Grant Sputore
Star: Clara Rugaard, Rose Byrne, Hilary Swank, Luke Hawker

Revengence Superlady

  By

★★★
“Sympathy for Lady Revengence.”

Despite a mangled title, what you have here is a straightforward tale of vengeance – and its attempts to diverge from that narrative are when the film is at its least interesting. Evil general Ji Xian Tang kills the parents of Ho Yu Fung (Ding): well, I suppose technically he only kills her father, her mother committing suicide by the corpse. In some remarkably unsubtle foreshadowing, Yu Fung is told, “This broadsword is our family heirloom. Our hope for vengeance is in your hands.” Given this, it’s no surprise she escapes with the help of a brave sacrifice from a servant, and becomes the pupil of a kung-fu master.

After what feels possibly as much as weeks of training, she heads out to get her revenge, though her first attempt succeeds only in killing one of Ji’s body-doubles. The film then drifts off-course, as she overhears the servants of traveling scholar Master An plotting to rob him, and helps him avoid that fate. He’s a supremely uninteresting character: they have absolutely no chemistry together and their relationship serves no purpose.  Meanwhile, the General has realized Yu Fung is after him – perhaps a result of her showing up at his residence, and going on about having been sent by “the souls of your victims.” So he unleashes the Iron Monk, a.k.a. Iron Sand a.k.a. Iron Buddha a.k.a. Lord Wang. The subtitles are kinda vague.

Mind you, if I was called Lord Wang, I’d probably have an a.k.a. too.

Anyway, Mr. Wang tries to force Yu Fung’s teacher to give her up, and Master An spends the night at a Buddhist temple run by cannibalistic monks(!). Yu Fung shows up to rescue him, and to do so, has to go through a spectacular series of traps. These made me strongly suspect this might originally have been shot in 3-D, since they tend to come straight for the camera. It’s certainly the film’s most memorable sequence, even in 2-D. Then she suddenly remembers about the whole familial slaughter vengeance mission thing, and it’s eventually off to battle past Wang, then face Ji around and up a large pagoda. You just know someone is going off the top…

Definitely getting an extra half-star for the Buddhist temple apparently run by people who’d seen Indiana Jones and Cannibal Holocaust, it helps that Ding kinda has a resemblance to a young Michelle Yeoh (at the time this came out in 1986, she was just getting started across the frontier in Hong Kong). She has a nice, acrobatic style; there were a couple of scenes where I thought she was being doubled, only for the camera then to show, no, it was actually her doing the moves. However, the pacing has a lot of room for improvement, grinding to a halt more or less whenever Master An is on screen. Between that and the entry-level nature of the storyline, this doesn’t manage to live up to the “Super” element of its title.

Dir: Tôru Murakawa and Qitian Yang
Star: Ding Lam, Yau Kin Kwok, Wong Jun, Lee Jun Fung
a.k.a. 13th Sister or Lucky 13

Double Play, by Kelley Armstrong

  By

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

Some years ago, my Goodreads friend Mary J.L. gave the original novel of the author’s Nadia Stafford trilogy a favorable review, and that put it on my radar. As a rule, I don’t read novels that are only published in electronic format (it does have a audio version, but I don’t listen to audio books either), but I do read short e-stories; electronic publishing provides a forum for those works which no longer exists in print, what with the demise of general-circulation magazines. This tale, as a novella, occupies a middle ground, but commercially novellas are in much the same boat as short stories –a single one wouldn’t sell very well in print format. So I felt it was fair to treat it the same way, and thought it would be a good way to check out the series for myself.

From reading the descriptions, and some reviews, of the novels in the original trilogy, I figured I would have enough knowledge of the characters and their situation so as not to have a problem understanding this one. That proved to be true. However, a significant caveat is that this continuation does contain spoilers in the romantic-triangle aspect of the novels and some of the denouement of the third novel, Wild Justice, so readers who would be very bothered by that should read the series in order. (And regarding the romantic triangle, probably shouldn’t read either this review or the novella description!)

Ex-cop turned guest lodge owner/manager Nadia (“Dee”) Stafford’s action qualifications aren’t in question; but some might challenge her heroine qualifications since, as the Goodreads description makes clear, her unadvertised side occupation is as a hit woman. But Nadia’s not your average amoral, anything-for-money hired killer; she’s actually a lady with a very lively conscience, a concern for justice and the protection of the innocent, and a strict code of professional ethics to govern her extra-legal line of work. Though I haven’t read much fiction with assassin protagonists, I think they can be interesting characters when they approach their work with a sense of right and wrong and ethical obligation; and Nadia qualifies in that respect. Of course, I don’t endorse her career choice (and she’d actually agree that it’s objectively wrong, even though she’s not planning to quit). But I can still like and respect her, and wish her well; and when she’s willingly putting her life on the line to help someone in trouble, as she is here, I’m not one to deny her a “heroine” accolade.

When our story opens, Nadia and her lover, fellow assassin Jack (who was introduced in the first novel) are in the process of building a house in the woods near her lodge. At the moment, though, Jack’s in his native Ireland on business, and phone communication between the two is precarious because of their security concerns. In the first chapter, she’s approached by an acquaintance from a shadowy vigilante organization she’s had contact with before, who’s looking for Quinn, one of the organization’s operatives –and Nadia’s ex-boyfriend (pre-Jack). He’s dropped out of sight, and it’s clearly not intentional; he’s been kidnapped, by parties and for purposes unknown. In their milieu, just placing a missing persons report and letting the police do their job isn’t a practical option; so Nadia’s soon off to Virginia to help with the search and (hopefully) rescue, and the action takes off. (And don’t forget Jack in Ireland….)

The 17 chapters alternate between Nadia’s first-person narration and third-person narration, but from Jack’s perspective and in his vocabulary. Some readers may find his predilection for the f-word as all-purpose adjective and adverb wince-worthy –he doesn’t say it much, being notoriously laconic, but he thinks it repeatedly. (No other character uses it to that extent, however, and Nadia, while she might occasionally let slip a cuss word or vulgarism, doesn’t use it at all.). A Byzantine plot lies behind the kidnapping, and I deducted a star for ultimately contradictory plotting: a number of details in the previous chapters, given the denouement, don’t really make sense, IMO. (And, recalling the old TV show America’s Dumbest Criminals, the villain here could qualify for star billing on a World’s Dumbest Criminals show, if there were one.)

For all that, though, the story is a page-turner, and the two lead characters are, for contract assassins, genuinely likable. Readers of the trilogy already are familiar with them; but I got to know them here in a way that’s not possible just from book descriptions. We also get glimpses of their psychological baggage –Jack’s going back to Northern Ireland’s bloody Troubles in his teens, and Nadia’s as a past rape victim. (While the two aren’t married, their love for each other is sincere and has a good effect on their lives, and the references to their lovemaking aren’t very explicit.) While I hope the novels in the trilogy are better plotted, I still liked this literary appetizer enough to plan to give the series opener a try!

Author: Kelley Armstrong
Publisher: Traverse Press; available through Amazon, currently only along with the next novella, Perfect Victim – both as e-books and in paperback.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Sumuru

  By

★★
“Queen of Outer Space”

A spaceship piloted by Adam Wade (Shanks) and Jake Carpenter (Bridgett) crashes on a planet at the far end of our galaxy. They’re searching for a colony which had landed there almost a millennium previously, only to find things not as expected. Somehow, over the centuries since, women have taken absolute control of society, relegating men to literal slaves, and worshipping a giant serpent as their deity. However, the men discover the planet is about to shake itself to pieces, and the residents need to be evacuated. Adam makes an ally of the current queen, Sumuru (Kamp), but that alone makes an enemy of high-priestess Taxan (Levin). She has held a grudge ever since the women elected Sumuru leader, and is intent on taking her place, by any means necessary.

This was (very loosely) based on a character created by pulp writer Sax Rohmer, best known as the creator of Fu Manchu. Less renowned is his character Sumuru, originally invented by Rohmer for a BBC radio series just after the war. She then became the villainess in five books published during the fifties. There were two previous movie adaptations in the sixties, also with Harry Alan Towers involved as producer. Shirley Eaton – best known for her painted death in Goldfinger – played Sumuru in The Million Eyes of Sumuru and The Girl From Rio. I’ve seen the first, and it doesn’t qualify for inclusion here; though if you’re interested, here’s my review elsewhere.

I mention all this, largely because it means I have about a hundred words less to write in regard to this. It’s a thoroughly forgettable South African film, which plays somewhere between an old-school episode of Doctor Who (the last time I saw so many scenes apparently set in a gravel-pit) and The Perils of Gwendolyn. It is at least slightly closer to the first novel than the previous movies; the book did have Sumuru plotting to create a “new world order,” ruled by women, but here it’s more a result of unfortunate circumstance, centuries ago, than any kind of deliberate plan. And given how quickly society unravels after the arrival of Adam and Jake, I’m uncertain how it lasted 900 years.

This really needs to have done more with the concept of a gynocentric civilization, and pitting warrior priestess against technocrat is an interesting idea. However, the film just doesn’t have the resources to construct anything close to what’s needed, with little more than 20 actors of either sex. There are too many missteps, such as the way the women speak exactly the same language as the spacemen [compare 12th-century English to what we have now, as a yardstick], or the remarkably well-preserved “ancient” technology. Adam occasionally provides a nicely sardonic commentary on the silliness of it all, and we do eventually get the hoped-for face-off between Taxan and Sumuru. It’s precious little return, and you’ve got to endure far too much running around rocky terrain, for even these small pleasures.

Dir: Darrell Roodt
Star: Michael Shanks, Alexandra Kamp, Simona Levin, Terence Bridgett –

Immortal Fist: The Legend of Wing Chun

  By

★★
“So, is there, like, an anime convention in town or something?”

The above quote does suggest that the makers here appreciate how ridiculous the entire thing is. And that self-awareness may be the main thing which saves this from being largely cringeworthy. Just because you can make a fantasy kung-fu film with no budget, and largely filmed in a Californian park, doesn’t mean you should make a fantasy kung-fu film, etc. etc. Kaya (Caminiti) is your normal high-school girl. Except for being adopted, parents unknown. And the recurring dreams about martial arts battles. And the four mystical guardians who follow her around. And, it turns out, that she’s the great-granddaughter of the original Wing Chun (Bennett), and her last surviving descendant. Evil forces are intent on ending the bloodline; the guardians try to stop them, while attempting to convince Kaya to… er, get her arm cut off so she can claim her mystical birth-right and resulting mad skillz.

There are some interesting ideas here, such as the notion we live in some kind of Matrix-styled VR multiverse. But there are just too many mis-steps – and ones which would have been easily avoidable, and are unrelated to the lack of resources. For instance, why the guardians take the form of young, thoroughly non-Asian Americans, could have been explained away with a quick line or two about adopting the best shape to blend in to modern society. Nope. There are way too many loose ends that go nowhere as well, such as Kaya’s school pals. This is all the more irritating, because the film ends with absolutely nothing of significance having been resolved: it’s an attempt at delivering a cliffhanger, which is staggeringly unsatisfying.  I hate that nonsense when books pull it, and it’s no better here. Especially as this runs only 73 minutes, even including all those superfluous loose ends. Tighten it up, and give us a proper, complete story. If we want a sequel, we’ll let you know: don’t tell us.

However, I actually quite liked the performances here: Caminiti is a winning heroine, with a dry reaction to the increasingly bizarre situation in which she finds herself. The guardians, led by Tai Fong (director Beyer), have an amusing mix of personalities, but it’s Bennett as Wing Chun who manages to steal the film, despite only having a few scenes – she’s taking proceedings far more seriously than they probably deserve, and elevates the whole thing as a result. Technically, it’s not bad, with some interesting use of filters and colour in the “other” realm. In the end, this is not much more than a glorified fan film, with aspirations clearly well in excess of its ability to deliver. As an apparent first feature, there’s something to build on, yet I suspect it might have been better released as a web series. This could have helped address some of the more obvious flaws, and perhaps found the cult following to which it seems to aspire.

Dir: Lon Beyer
Star: Silvana Caminiti, Lon Beyer, Josh Fesler, Elle Bennett

The Dawns Here Are Quiet

  By

★★★½
“Can’t see the forest for the Nazis”

It’s the summer of 1942, and Soviet forces are facing the invading German Army. After Sergeant Major Vaskov (Martynov) requests soldiers for his anti-aircraft battalion who won’t get drunk and molest the local women, he gets what he wants. Except, the new arrivals are an all-female squad of soldiers, with whom Vaskov is initially singularly ill-equipped to deal. However, they prove their mettle, led by the efforts of Rita Osyanina (Shevchuk), and eventually win Vaskov’s respect. While returning to the barracks one night, Rita stumbles across two Nazi paratroopers; she, along with four colleagues and Vaskov, form a search party, and head deep into the surrounding forest to capture the Germans. However, they discover the real force is significantly bigger, and must begin a guerilla warfare campaign to disrupt the enemy’s mission, harrying them through the wooded and marshy terrain.

In contrast to larger epics, it’s a very small-scale, up close and personal approach to the war, taking place well away from the front lines. Released in two parts (though at 188 minutes, it’s less then twenty longer than Saving Private Ryan), the first section takes place at the anti-aircraft emplacement. The action there is mostly far overhead, and in the early going, it is a little tough to separate the rush of similar-looking women to whom we are suddenly introduced. Though I did like the stylistic approach of having the war take place in harsh black and white, while the soldiers in more peaceful times are depicted in colour, with an almost dreamlike version of reality.

When we get to the meat of the story, the film improves significantly. It’s fairly standard “small group taking on a larger force” stuff, a topic which has been mined frequently for war movies, from Zulu and The Alamo through Ryan to 300.  Yet it’s still effective to follow Vaskov and his handful of untested soldiers, as they go into battle with far more experienced warriors. Quite deliberately, the enemy are kept almost faceless, given no humanity at all: their speech is left unsubtitled, for instance. As the losses mount inexorably, there’s a genuine impact to them, and you’re left with an up-close and personal look at war and the human cost it has. Yet at the end, a radio broadcast casually dismisses the preceding three hours of heroic sacrifice with, “During the day of June 3rd, no major engagement took place on the front. However, some minor local fighting occurred in certain sectors.”

Based on Boris Vasilyev’s 1969 short novel of the same name, there was also a 2015 mini-series for Russian television (a review of that is coming soon); a Tamil-language Indian film (Peranmai); a Chinese TV series; and more unusually, the story was turned into not one but two operas, one in Russia and the other in China. However, this version was nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar, where it lost out to Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. No death before dishonour there. 

Dir:  Stanislav Rostotsky
Star: Andrey Martynov, Irina Shevchuk, Yelena Drapeko, Yekaterina Markova

Terminator: Dark Fate

  By

★★½
“She’ll not be back”

If you went back in time, and told James Cameron on the set of the original Terminator, that 35 years later, it would have spawned six movies and a TV series, he probably wouldn’t have believed you. It’s not a story which screams “Franchise,” being entirely self-contained. The first sequel justified itself with a sea-change in digital effects which marked a massive shift in the way popular cinema would work thereafter. Everything beyond that? Almost entirely superfluous. And I speak as someone who liked Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines considerably more than most people.

I can certainly see why this flopped though. It comes on the heels of Salvation and Genesys, both of which were commercially dubious and critically disastrous, to the point that Cameron decreed them to have happened in alternate universes, effectively retconning them out of existence. This set Dark Fate up as a direct sequel to the franchise’s most successful installment, which also happens to be one of the greatest action films of all time (it’s likely in my top five, and not the only James Cameron film there either). Comparisons were never going to be kind to Dark Fate.

Then, Miller opens his film with footage from T2, in which an amazingly intense Sarah Connor describes her vision of Judgment Day. Rather than trying to build the movie’s own universe, the audience is immediately reminded of just how damn good its predecessor was. I turned to Chris and whispered, “We really must watch T2 again.” This is not something you should be thinking, thirty seconds into a sequel. It’s just the first in a number of missteps which end up burying the franchise once again, rather than resurrecting it.

The main problem is, we’ve seen it all before. The story is basically the same as Terminator. Or Terminator 2. Or Terminator 3. Robot gets sent back in time by future self-aware AI to kill a human it deems is a threat. Pro-mankind asset gets sent back in time to protect the target. They fight. A lot. There are a couple of wrinkles here. The protector (Davis) is actually an “augmented” human herself, albeit still short of the levels of her enemy (Luna). And Dani Ramos (Reyes) isn’t the mother of someone who’ll save humanity. But it feels less a sequel than a reboot, as we still have to watch Dani going through the whole explanatory process and “Five stages of being a Terminator target” thing.

Probably the main hook, however, is the presence of both Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger, re-united for the first time since T2. Cue another misstep: if their appearances had been unexpected twists, they would both have come as delightful surprises. And the way they are filmed, makes it feel like that may have been the original intent. For instance, when Sarah Connor makes her entrance, we see her feet getting out of the car, the mysterious saviour only eventually revealed. The same is true when the T-800 arrives. Except those bullets were already fired by marketing, with them both showing up, full face, in the trailers. And it’s never explained why a 100% artificial creature like the T-800 has aged 35 years, nor how it’s getting the information with which it helps Sarah.

The familiarity of the plot would be bearable, if the execution was up to much. After all, T2 recycled its plot to a not dissimilar degree. However, it pushed the spectacle to 11, and was superior to the original as a result. This… Did not. Indeed, I was shocked by how ropey much of the CGI and digital work was, for a $190 million budget. Not so much the new Rev-9 model Terminator, which is a slick, oily creation like an intelligent pool of tar. But the meshing with the actors is poor, especially when one or other is made to fly through the air.

Maybe this kind of thing works in superhero films like Miller’s Deadpool. Here, it falls well short of the physical impact we saw in T2, or even T3, where the bathroom brawl felt like it had a bone-crunching realism to it. The low-point here is a battle on a plummeting plane, which is so poorly shot, edited and even lit as to be entirely incoherent. You literally have no idea which was is up, and I was simply left waiting for it to be over, and figure out what happened based on who walks away from the wreckage. [Spoiler: it’s everyone]

The entry isn’t entirely without merit though. While Dani is no Sarah Connor v2.0 (and her brother is worse still, quickly triggering a Chris whisper to me, “I hope he dies soon…”), Sarah 1.0 has a tired cynicism which is endearing and understandable. Maybe if they’d made the film entirely about Connor, spending her life going from place to place, hunting and destroying Terminators? There could then have been a whole slew of styles of opponent, making it the Godzilla: Final Wars entry in the franchise. Arnie, too, possesses a charisma which is mostly notable by its absence from the rest of the cast, though Davis makes a better impression than I feared.

There’s also a brilliant sequence set thirty years ago, depicting a young Sarah and John Connor, which is so well done, I was left wondering if this was unused footage from T2. Again, I’m left to wonder if they should have embraced that wholeheartedly and had the entire film take place in that era. We might then have avoided the SJW beats e.g. Border Patrol = bad, though at least these are relatively light compared to some recent Hollywood product. Well, save the clumsy way Dani becomes the future messiah, which triggered derisive snorting from my direction.

It would be a stretch to say we were storming the box-office, demanding a refund. We don’t see many films at the cinema, and despite my criticisms, this did not feel like we wasted our time or our money. It does deliver, as a cinematic spectacle, and is certainly an improvement over Salvation and Genesys, both of which triggered actual sleep. Yet I was reminded of a definition of insanity: repeating the same actions, over and over, hoping for a different result. It appears making Terminator sequels potentially qualifies.

Dir: Tim Miller
Star: Natalia Reyes, Mackenzie Davis, Linda Hamilton, Gabriel Luna

Handgun

  By

★★★½
“The Equalizer”

Either by intent or accidentally – and we’ll get to that in a moment – this manages to be both an indictment of and an advert for, American gun culture. That’s quite a spectacular achievement, and it’s perhaps no coincidence that the writer/director is British, so brings an outsider’s balanced eye to a topic that’s often acrimonious in the States. Kathleen Sullivan (Young) is a teacher who has just moved from Boston to a small Texas town. She falls for local attorney Larry Keeler (Day), though is only interested in friendship, not a significant relationship. The initially-charming Larry eventually won’t take no for an answer, and date-rapes Kathleen. However, the circumstances and her attacker’s local reputation mean she gets no satisfaction from the police. The meek and mild Kathleen decides to take matters into her own hands, buying a gun and taking up combat shooting – at the very same club Larry frequents – with the aim of meting out her own brand of justice.

Director Garnett is a fairly outspoken Socialist, most well-known in film circles for his work with Ken Loach, and those left-wing beliefs appear to have informed his approach here. For example, he said in regard to this film, “America is built on genocide, has a macho culture and confuses owning guns with individual freedoms.” It doesn’t exactly make him a candidate for a film pointing out the positive elements of gun ownership. But it’s absolutely no stretch to read this as a Janie’s Got a Gun-style tale of empowerment through firearms. Yes, Larry uses his gun to coerce Kathleen into sex. However, we then see her use her gun to punish him when society fails to do so. There’s no doubt that weapons and the skills to use them are part of her transformative process, and the Kathleen we see at the end is a much stronger woman than the one to whom we are introduced. Guns, it appears Garnett is saying, are just a tool which can be used for good or evil – like any other. It’s when they become fetishized to a dangerous degree, problems like Larry arise.

This does lead to the film seeming rather ambivalent, though it’s hard to tell how much of this is due to studio interference. Garnett sold the film to the mainstream Warner Bros, and says, “I had to cut elements from the film that I now regret.” While slow-paced at times, it benefits from a good performance by Young, who is pretty without being perfect (the gap in her front teeth is a seriously eighties throwback), and can also sell the transformation believably into an angel of vengeance. Yet there’s one final twist at the end, with Kathleen stopping short of becoming what she despises, and it confirms this movie’s position as easily one of the more thoughtful films in the rape-revenge genre. You may or may not necessarily agree with what Garrett has to say, yet it’s hard to say he does a poor job of making his argument.

Dir: Tony Garnett
Star: Karen Young, Clayton Day, Suzie Humphreys, Helena Humann
a.k.a. Deep in the Heart

Fear University 1-3

  By

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

I was initially a bit concerned this was going to be a slightly-more horror oriented version of Harry Potter, based largely off the title. I needn’t have been worried. For at least the first two books, this is quite startlingly dark and on the razor’s edge. As for the third… well, we’ll get to it. The setting here is a world where Filipino shapeshifters called aswangs, which feed on the fear of their victims, are migrating across from their home country and through Alaska. Lined up to stop them, by any means necessary, are hunters; it’s a harsh and often brief occupation. To replace those lost in battle, the titular establishment exists on Kodiak Island, to train hunters – mostly members of families who have been in the bloody business for generations.

Into this comes Ollie Andrews, a waitress who kills an aswang, and is recruited (well, abducted is probably closer) into Fear University. Her survival is largely down to an unusual illness/talent: her inability to feel pain. No pain = no fear, and so nothing an aswang can use against her. However, this ability has caused her issues in the past – not least,  her abduction by a father/son pair of psychopaths. Though Ollie escaped, killing the father in the process, she has been pursued by the survivor, Max. This has forced Ollie to change her identity and keep on the move to avoid him tracking her down. FU [I’m not sure if the author chose the name for that acronym!] might offer her somewhere to belong, replacing the family she never had.

Keyword: might. For she has to overcome the prejudices of the other students, due to Ollie not being from one of those historic families. And that’s just the start, as she begins to discover the university’s quest to win the war under its head, Dean Bogrov and his shady scientific experiments. It also turns out there is a third group, operating between the aswangs and the humans, and Ollie’s past comes back into play; she was an orphan who never knew her father, and whose mother abandoned her in a closet. That’s an awful lot to unpack, and for the first two books, Collett does an admirable job. It’s a gritty approach, with Ollie a severely-damaged heroine, who has enough issues for an entire conference.

Those opening two books keep the story going forward. In the first volume, Fear University, she learns to tap into the power her talent gives her; builds a relationship with the similarly-broken young hunter Luke, who is her mentor; discovers aswang saliva can make her feel pain; finds out who her father was; and has to go through a life-or-death test involving both her, and her best friend at FU, Sunny. The second, Killing Season, is a rather drastic change in approach, with Ollie, Luke and others sent north to Barrow for the winter break, when the aswang are most active.  That was the location used for vampire action film 30 Days of Night, and serves the same kind of purpose here. However, it’s almost as much a whodunnit, with the large house which is the hunters’ base apparently home to a killer. Not helping matters: Max shows up in town.

Then there’s the third… I should probably have detected the change in approach, based entirely on the title: Monster Mine. For sadly, the series loses its edge entirely. Rather than turning into Harry Potter, it instead becomes something which combines the whiny angst of the Twilight series, with the Daddy issues from Star Wars. That’s about as appetizing as it sounds, and by the end, this was a chore to slog through. To the point, indeed, that the free novella included in this omnibus edition, was left entirely unread. Collett does, at least, tie things up reasonably well, giving the reader some closure. It’s a pity that the groundwork laid for a memorable anti-heroine over the first two volumes, evaporates so drastically in the third.

Author: Meg Collett
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Books 1-3 of 5 in the Fear University series.

Rattlesnake

  By

★★★
“A tale without enough to rattle you”

This occupies a rather odd middle-ground between a meditation on what it means to take a life, and a violent thriller. I’m not sure it manages to pull either off entirely successfully, yet some striking imagery helped sustain our interest. Katrina (Ejogo) is driving from Phoenix to Oklahoma City, with her young daughter, Clara (Pratt), to start a new life: it’s hinted that there may be an abusive partner in the rear-view mirror. The route takes her across the Texas Panhandle, and in an effort to avoid a traffic jam, she hits the back roads. This turns out to be mistake, as she first gets a flat, then Clara is bitten by a rattlesnake.

Fortunately, there’s a trailer nearby, where Katrina is able to get help; by the time mother and daughter reach the nearby hospital in Tulia, there’s no indication of any snakebite. But a stranger turns up in their room, demanding payment for the emergency assistance, and not the kind covered by their health insurance: a “soul for a soul”. If Katrina doesn’t kill someone by sundown, Clara’s life will be forfeit. After the validity of the threat is confirmed, Katrina seeks a victim, and seems to find one in another abusive man, Billy (Rossi), whom she encounters in a local bar, taking out his anger on his wife, Abbie (Greenwell). But even when her own daughter’s life is at risk, can Katrina find it in herself to go against all her morality, and take another person’s life?

It does pose an interesting question: how far would a mother (or anyone, I guess) be prepared to go in defense of their child? As we learn, Katrina is prepared to sacrifice whatever might be necessary, but it’s a bit of a process to get there. For example, she spends rather too much time hanging around the hospital, hoping for a chance to smother an already-dying patient, conveniently nearby. And Billy is similarly convenient, a character so unpleasant, the resulting moral dilemma becomes massively diluted. It would have made for greater drama if there hadn’t been an easy candidate, and Katrina was forced to choose between her child and someone decent.

Hilditch has a good eye, however, and there are some striking scenes where the heroine experiences visions, reminding her of her task, and that time is running out. A priest spontaneously combusts; a little kid engages in equally self-destructive acts. These help create an unsettling atmosphere, which keep the film’s head above water, when the plot struggles to do so. Ejogo is also decent in the central role, making it relatively easy to put yourself in her shoes. But I’d have like to have seen more of the background filled in here. Katrina does some light Googling, which suggests she is far from the first person to have found themselves in debt. Yet this angle is severely under-explored, and the net result is something which almost feels more like a series pilot.

Dir: Zak Hilditch
Star: Carmen Ejogo, Theo Rossi, Emma Greenwell, Apollonia Pratt