Category: Review

Relentless

  By

★★
“Hell Salvador…”

From just about all I’ve read, the director seems entirely earnest in his desire to make a serious film about a serious problem, human trafficking in Central America. That the end result falls almost entirely wide of the mark is a bit of a double-edged sword. In terms of making its intended point, that it feels more like a B-movie from the fifties is a bad thing. But on the other hand, the serious film about the serious problem would likely be considerably less amusing.

Holly Drew (Shaw) runs a coffee shop in what I’m guessing is Portland, carrying on a family tradition of working with farmers in El Salvador: fair trade, ethical production, etc. Her daughter, Ally (Sweeney), is visiting the coffee farm there, somewhat reluctantly: some kind of college credit seems involved. Her stay is rudely interrupted when she and a local friend are kidnapped by Los Discipulos, a local gang. With the local cops worse than useless, Holly goes down there herself, and plunges into the underworld with the help of slightly sleazy but good-hearted Fern (Castro), on the trail of Ally before she can be auctioned off to the highest bidder.

A major problem here, is that Tracy clearly wants to be sympathetic to the locals. It opens with stuff about the civil war there causing a cycle of poverty and violence, etc. Yet in the light of subsequent cinematic events, this comes over more excuse than rational explanation. Because for the purposes of the film, modern-day El Salvador has to be depicted as a “shithole country” (to quote the current American President). Otherwise, where’s the threat to Holly and Ally? So for example: the local police are depicted as being thoroughly corrupt or entirely useless, and no-one beyond Fern seems willing to help Holly in the slightest. If you come away at the end doing anything except agreeing with Trump, you haven’t been paying attention.

The other big problem is character motivation, especially for Fern. He abandons Holly, right at her moment of greatest need… except he subsequently doesn’t. Neither his departure, nor his return, make sense, except that both are necessary for a film in which he’s a supporting character to the “relentless” mother. Similarly, the actions of Los Discipulos often left me scratching my head. They didn’t fit the likely behaviour patterns of the hardened criminals they are supposed to be – again, save for being required by the plot.

We’ve seen almost exactly this kind of “lost daughter” scenario before, in the decent Never Let Go and slightly less-decent Taken Heart. Whether due to the sense of (literal) deja vu, or just because the components aren’t as effective, this falls below the standard of either. Shaw’s performance is likely the only half-decent aspect, and it needs to be in the service of a more considered script. If I’d been making this, I’d have had Fern part of the notorious El Salvadorean anti-gang death squad, La Sombra Negra, and taken Holly down a darker path of vengeance. Sadly, what we have here is considerably more lightweight and predictable, and almost entirely forgettable.

Dir: Lance Tracy
Star: Lauren Shaw, David Castro, Sydney Sweeney, Peter Holden

Pirates! by Celia Rees

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

Although I haven’t read much pirate-themed fiction, I find the premise interesting; so I’ve had my eye on this historical novel ever since the BC library (where I work) acquired it. It definitely didn’t disappoint! Set mostly in the early 1720s, with some stage-setting in the years leading up to those, this action-packed tale follows the life and adventures of first-person narrator Nancy Kington (b. ca. 1704), the daughter of a Bristol merchant, who finds herself packed off to the family’s plantation in Jamaica at the age of 15, and is subsequently led by circumstances to voluntarily sign articles on a pirate ship.

Pirates, of course, are sea-going robbers; by definition, they forcibly steal other people’s property for their own profit. Obviously, they’re off of the ethical strait-and-narrow path, and in shady moral territory. The piratical profession most naturally appeals to brutal and self-serving types who don’t have any particular moral sense or empathy with their fellow humans. (Some may be more brutal and selfish than others –and some spectacularly evil and sadistic types may find the pirate life an opportunity to gratify their propensities.) Like Robert Louis Stevenson before her, British writer Rees gives full recognition to that reality.

To a greater extent than Stevenson, though, she recognizes that there can be a range of nuanced moral qualities among pirates, with not all of them quite fitting that model –especially in a time and place where patriarchy and male chauvinism, legalized slavery, and institutionalized inequality and injustice greatly constrict many people’s lives and choices, and might render the right side of the law as morally dicey as life under the Jolly Roger. (That’s not unlike the situation in the Old West, or in medieval Europe, where “outlaws” might sometimes be decent people pushed outside the law by others using the system for their own gain.) Personally, I think that pirates who aren’t brutal and selfish as such, and who do have a strong moral sense and a concern for others, can be interesting characters in the ways they navigate the shades of grey that their position necessarily entails; and that’s true of our heroine here. (Yes, a lady who happens to be a pirate can be an honorable and admirable heroine!)

This is fiction in the Romantic tradition –that is, fiction that seeks primarily to evoke strong emotional responses from the reader, sometimes enhanced, as they are here, by extreme situations and exotic settings. The Romantic aim is fully fulfilled here; I was taken captive by this pirate right away, turned the pages as fast as I could at every opportunity, and experienced a wealth of complex emotions throughout the story. (It’s not, however, a “romance novel” in the Harlequin sense –though it has clean romance as one strand of the plot, which I appreciated– and it doesn’t “romanticize” things like piracy, slavery, and the grim realities of ocean-going life in the 18th century). It’s also fiction with serious food for thought, as well as rousing adventure, and a very moving portrait of cross-racial friendship. Like most modern Romantic fiction, though, it borrows Realist techniques, with a concern for verisimilitude and historical accuracy. (In common with some other authors, Rees used the contemporary nonfiction A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, which she and some others attribute to Daniel Defoe, as a key source.) Nancy’s narrative voice is engaging and quick-flowing, with a slightly archaic flavor in word choices and diction for realism, but is much easier to read than an actual 18th-century narrative would have been.

Born in 1949, former schoolteacher Rees is an accomplished novelist, the author of some 19 books, and a History major (she actually had a double major, but History was one). Her publishers market her books to the YA age group (and the BC library put this one in the Juvenile section on that account), in this case probably encouraged by the fact that Nancy and her friend and fellow pirate Miranda are in their teens. Bad language of the d-word sort is present but relatively restrained, rape or attempted rape and prostitution are part of their world but not portrayed in great detail, and while there are some very violent and grisly moments, Rees doesn’t wallow in them. The content here, IMO, wouldn’t be harmful to a healthy teen; and I could see plenty of teen readers of both sexes eating it up with a spoon and asking for more. But it could just as easily have been marketed as an adult novel; there isn’t anything stereotypically juvenile or “kiddish” about it. (Teens in Nancy and Miranda’s day were expected to grow up quickly, and our gals here definitely did –they have far more in common, in their capacities and general attitudes, with today’s adult women than they do with typical modern teens.)

This particular edition of the book has a moderately interesting interview with the author (originally published in a Michigan newspaper), and a few pages of discussion questions and activities, aimed at younger readers, that could be used for common reads in a book club or classroom. At the time it was published, the novel garnered a number of prestigious accolades from the likes of the American Library Assn., the International Reading Assn., etc. For once, I think it deserved every critical recognition it got (and I don’t often agree with the critical community!).

“You may wish me luck, or curse me for a damnable pirate,” Nancy writes near the close of her account. This reader opted for the first choice, without apology!

Author: Ceilia Rees
Publisher: Bloomsbury, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book

Pitbull: Tough Women

  By

★★★
“Still Poles apart.”

Having enjoyed the same director’s Women of Mafia, I thought I’d check out this earlier film, part of his Pitbull series, also about Polish cops ‘n’ criminals. Unashamedly populist, in its home country the featire set a record for opening weekend admissions by a local movie, and topped the overall box-office there for 2016. More surprisingly, it was also a hit when released in Britain, reaching fifth place at the box-office in its first week, due almost entirely to the Polish expat community there. ‘

It’s a similarly sprawling tale to Mafia – perhaps even more so – which covers a range of characters, on both sides of the law. Despite the title, disappointingly, the focus is not particularly on the women. While there are certainly no shortage of interesting female characters, as we’ll see, the central one is ‘Sugar’ (Fabijanski), a member of a biker gang who is tasked with a revenge hit on ‘Majami’ (Stramowski), a cop who shot and killed a fellow gang-member. However, Sugar ends up diverting into a convoluted scam involving smuggling fuel oil. I can only presume this scheme made sense to the Polish audience, because I had no real clue what was going on.

On the “tough woman” front, the focus is on two new recruits to the police force, Zuza (Kulig) and Jadźka (Dereszowska). It doesn’t take long after completing their training,. for the shine to come off, as they realize the harsh realities of law-enforcement work, and the inevitable moral compromise beneath the surface. These are exemplified in Izabela (Magdalena Cielecka), a cop who is more than prepared to bend the law in order to protect it, to put it mildly. Both rookie officers have their issues, in particular Zuza, who eventually ends up having an affair with Sugar, while his girlfriend ‘Drabina’ (Alicja Bachleda) is in jail.

Elements of all this work very well. The characters are strong, performances solid, I loved the purely pragmatic approach of the cops (needed to deal with criminals who hardly obey the niceties of polite convention either), and there are some fine moments of pitch-black humour. I was especially amused by the scene involving stepping in a half-dissolved corpse, and the subsequent discussion over protocol, whether or not the poor policewoman should keep her footwear, and forensic pathology:
   “There’s the liver.”
   “A liver’s that small?”
   “It’s normal, but half is on your shoes.”

The problem is largely Vega’s failure to tell a coherent story. I wondered if this might be down to my lack of local knowledge e.g. the fuel scam, perhaps enhanced by not having seen the previous entries in the Pitbull franchise. However, reading some local reviews [all hail, Google Translate!] suggests it’s not just me, with this being a common complaint. I can’t help wishing the writer/director had actually delivered on the potential of his premise: while certainly an equal-opportunity piece, this still falls short of what I wanted. Perhaps Vega knew he had half-assed it, and that’s why he circled back around so quickly for the not-dissimilar Women of Mafia.

Dir: Patryk Vega
Star: Sebastian Fabijanski, Joanna Kulig, Anna Dereszowska, Piotr Stramowski

Zombies Have Fallen

  By

★★
“Cheap at half the price.”

It’s not often that a film cost less to make, than the television set on which I watched it. But it appears this was the case here, with the budget reportedly coming in at five hundred pounds. No, there’s not a “thousand” missing from that. £500. What you get is probably not too far from what you would expect for that – some of the aerial photography and locations do appear to represent good value for money. Budget isn’t the real issue here though. This British film’s main problem is the drastic shift in story for the final third, when it suddenly morphs, for no reason, from a SF/thriller, into a full-on zombie apocalypse which the makers have neither the budget nor the talent to depict.

The heroine is Kyra (Parkinson), who was captured while a toddler by Raven Health, who are intent on developing and exploiting her latent psychic abilities. Probably close to 20 years later, she is broken out of their facility with the help of an activist bounty-hunter, who sends her into the care of one of his proteges, John Northwood (Heath Hampson). But the company head, Raven (Richardson) won’t let his asset escape easily, and dispatches a hunter of his own, Max (Gardner), to bring Kyra back. After about an hour of the chase, Kyra shows up at a wedding just over the Scottish border in Gretna Green and turns the entire congregation into zombies with her talents. 

What? Yeah, it was as abrupt as that, and the remainder of the film is your typical zombie bashing action. I do have to award a bonus half-star for the semi-automatic bagpipes, which double as a flamethrower. Laughed like a drain at that, and it’s the kind of dumb invention at which low-budget films can excel [see the early works of Peter Jackson for good examples] Unfortunately, the zombie effects and actors are awful; while the depiction of Kyra’s telekinetic powers is not exactly top-shelf, it’s somewhat hidden by the editing. If the randomly selected locals, pretending to be undead (or bad mimes, it’s hard to tell), had been also better concealed – such as behind a mountain – we’d all have been better off.

I substantially preferred the earlier sections. Parkinson is not unsympathetic, as the heroine struggling to come to terms with her powers (though if she has been kept locked up all the time, how did she apparently learn how to drive?), and Hampson comes over like a low-rent version of Liam Neeson. If the film had kept down that route, it would likely still not have been “great”, by any reasonable standard, but could certainly have been adequate. Instead, we’ve got something which looks almost as if it was slapped together from two entirely different films. Any redeeming qualities are largely trapped behind a severely questionable title (really, if you’re going to ape another movie, you can pick a far better one than London Has Fallen) and even more dubious cover artwork.

Dir: Sam Hampson
Star: Tansy Parkinson, Heath Hampson, Tony Gardner, Ken Richardson

Code Name: Griffin, by Morgan Hannah MacDonald

  By

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

A painfully clunky mix of spy and crime thrillers, this really needs to decide which it wants to be. Alexandria Kingston – code name Griffin, in case you hadn’t guessed – was an abused child, with the good fortune to be rescued and brought up by Margaret Murphy, the head of Irish organized crime in Boston. Though to avoid Alex being targeted for leverage, she was never acknowledged to be part of the family. As an adult, Alex joined the CIA and became a top field agent, jet-setting over the globe on demand. But when her foster mother suffers a stroke, she returns to Boston to find herself in the middle of a war for control of the turf. The rival Killeen clan, sensing an opportunity, pounce. It’s up to Alex and her brothers to defend the family – and then take the battle to the Killeens.

It’s all utterly implausible. Apparently, the CIA don’t bother doing any kind of background check on their employees, and have no problem recruiting and giving security clearance to people with close ties to organized crime. Alex, meanwhile, wobbles uncertainly between remarkable proficiency and incompetence, as necessary to the plot. She can reel in a member of the Killeen family by simply ordering a whisky, yet this top-notch spy inexplicably can’t form sentences when faced with her former childhood sweetheart. I admit her latter burbling is actually kinda endearing, but c’mon: have some consistency in your lead character. And, of course, the Murphys are an almost saintly crime family. By which I mean, they still do prostitution and human trafficking, they just do them the right way. Yeah. About that…

This still might have made for an interesting detour in an established series, if we were already fully convinced of her talents as a CIA operative, with an unrevealed past. Instead, we get barely a handful of pages at the beginning to establish her credentials, with no real context: she exists in a vacuum. There’s also a fondness for the kind of florid consumerist prose I thought had gone out of style with Bret Easton Ellis culminating in this remarkably superfluous description of Alex’s perfume: “The sensuous bottom notes of Sri Lankan sandalwood and Indonesian patchouli were mixed with high notes of Bulgarian rose and citrus to add a feminine touch that was irresistible to the opposite sex.” I swear, I literally rolled my eyes at “high notes of Bulgarian rose”.

I can’t knock the action too much. There is a steady stream of set-pieces throughout the book, and MacDonald does describe these with a clear eye, and no shortage of savagery. [You wonder what, exactly, Boston law enforcement are doing while all this is going on, since Alex does not mess around, and the pile of bodies left in her wake is considerable. It just needs to be in the service of a much better constructed plot.

Author: Morgan Hannah MacDonald
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 2 in the Griffin series.

Sólo quiero caminar

  By

★★
“Oceano’s quatro”

We watched this Spanish film, by coincidence, on the same night as Ocean’s 8, and the Hispanic entry came off as a poor imitation, even though it was made a decade earlier. A four-woman gang’s attempt to steal from Russian mobsters in Spain falls short, though only a single member of the crew is arrested. One of those who escape, Ana, marries Mexican drug-lord Felix (Yazpik), only to discover over the ensuing months, he’s an utterly abusive bastard. After she is pushed out of a car at high-speed, ending up in hospital, the other three, including her sister Aurora (Gil), the one who was caught, decided to take revenge on Felix. The plan is to start by stealing first his data then move on to his money, the loss of which will cause his new Korean partners to kill him. However, his right-hand man, Gabriel (Luna), begins to suspect the women – yet his qualms about Felix’s increasingly brutal ways help lead to increasingly split loyalties.

This isn’t as good as the above synopsis – or the German DVD sleeve on the right! – might make it sound. Instead, it’s a two hour-plus mess, with far too many scenes serving purposes that are either poorly explained or entirely non-existent. Aurora’s time in prison, for example, is virtually irrelevant, except for another scene showing what bastards men are [she is eventually released thanks to the provision of sexual favours to a corrupt judge; one of the themes here seems to be that men are degenerate sleazeballs]. And when the heist goes into motion, there’s absolutely no sense of structure, which would allow the audience to follow along. Why is that tunnel being dug? Does anyone know what’s going on? And then there are the “Koreans”, who are very clearly speaking Chinese. Not sure if this was casual racism, or just extremely sloppy film-making.

Despite the above critical evisceration, it’s not entirely without merit. There’s something of a Quentin Tarantino or Martin Scorsese feel to this, not least in the conspicuous use of music to punctuate proceedings. That includes both usual Hispanic entries like Los Lobos, to entirely unexpected content, such as Patti Smith’s cover of the Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter. Those inspirations are also reflected in Yanes’s unstinting eye for violence. The scene where Felix takes a hammer to the hands of a victim is nasty – yet necessary, bringing home beyond any shadow of doubt how evil he is. When things are in motion, Yanes seems to have a decent handle on how to shoot and edit things, and I liked most of the performances here as well, from a fairly well-known cast. It’s just a shame the script seems to consist of pages torn from a better movie, thrown up into the air and placed in random order. The struggle simply to follow what was happening, entirely sucked the life out of my initial enthusiasm for this.

Dir: Agustín Díaz Yanes
Star: Victoria Abril, Ariadna Gil, José María Yazpik, Diego Luna
a.k.a. Just Walking or Walking Vengeance

Locked Up

  By

★★★½
“Trash of the highest order.”

Do not mistake the above rating for suggesting that this is a “good” movie. By most normal standards, it would hardly qualify. But what we have is a throwback to the glory days of exploitation, in particular Filipino women-in-prison flicks like The Big Doll House or Black Mama, White Mama. Here, schoolgirl Mallory (McCart) is sentenced to two years in Thailand juvenile detention after whacking a rich bitch classmate bully upside the head with a pipe (below). At first, the place seems almost like a holiday camp. Then, her guardian leaves, and Mall is taken out the back to the real facility, a cesspool of degradation and brutality, where the inmates are exploited in ways both sexual and violent. 

All the tropes of the genre are there. A sadistic warden (Weiss, apparently delivering her lines phonetically – which is actually perfect for her emotionally-dead character). Gratuitous shower scenes. A predatory lesbian, Riza (Maslova), who is naturally the one whom Mallory must eventually battle in the prison’s fight club, a death-match with freedom on the line for the winner. A nice lesbian, Kat (Grey), who takes Mallory under her wing and trains her in martial arts, as well as engaging in a lengthy session of canoodling with her. No prizes for guessing this was the scene where Chris walked in. [I swear, my wife has some kind of tingly, Spidey-sense for sleaze…] A prisoners’ revolt. Cohn, who also plays Mall’s guardian, adds his own grindhouse spin too, such as the scene where she captures a rat and eats it raw, after the warden off cuts her regular food.

In case any of the proceeding is in any way unclear, this is not high art. Yet, I thoroughly enjoyed this for its melodramatic excesses and unrepentant approach to wallowing in what many would term the cinematic gutter. [Wrongly, I’d say, although that’s a topic for a separate, five-thousand word essay…] It helps that the performances are mostly on the nose; I especially enjoyed watching Maslova, who positively slithers her way around every scene in which she appears. At first, I was inclined to dismiss McCart, who in the early going, appeared to have one expression: permanently aggrieved. Then I realized, if anyone has good reason to be permanently aggrieved, it’s Mallory, since she’s pretty much a punching-bag for life, from the first scene to the last. By the end, I was rooting for her, every punch.

I would like to have seen more of the fight club, not least establishing Riza’s bad-ass credentials, and having Mall take on others as a build-up to the grand finale. There are also some unexplained story elements too, such as the question of why Mallory wants nothing to do with her father. Yet this is the kind of film where such things as the plot matter little, if at all. I stumbled across this accidentally on Netflix and had a blast. However, more than for most movies I review here, that comes with this caveat: your mileage may vary.

Dir: Jared Cohn
Star: Kelly Ann McCart, Kat Grey, Maythavee Weiss, Anastasia Maslova

Bird Box

  By

★★★
“A not-so quiet place”

Malorie Hayes (Bullock) is nervously heading towards the birth of a child, supported by her sister (Hayes), when a mysterious epidemic of suicidal psychosis breaks out worldwide. In the ensuing carnage, Malorie finds shelter in the home belonging to the acidic Douglas (Malkovich), whose wife dies trying to help Malorie, and a small number of other survivors. They figure out the epidemic is triggered by entities of some kind who are now prowling the planet – if you see them, you are overwhelmed by your worst fears and kill yourself. The obvious defense is not to make eye contact. Yet how do you survive in a world you cannot see? Especially when it turns out that those who were previously psychopathically inclined are immune to the effects, and are free to roam that world, with their sight intact.

The structure here is a bit problematic, bouncing back and forth between the early days of the apocalypse, and five years later when Malorie and two children are making their way down a river towards a supposed sanctuary. This both robs the early scenes of some tension, since we know who will and won’t survive, and eventually leads to a troublesome and unexplained leap: how, exactly, did they get from stuck in the city, to farming in the middle of a forest? However, it manages to get by, largely on the strength of Bullock’s intensity. This is apparent from the very first scene, where she’s instructing the five-year-olds on their imminent journey, in a thoroughly unmotherly manner.

If you’re looking for an explanation, you’ll need to look elsewhere, as the film never provides any. I’m not sure whether the book in which this was based was any more forthcoming [one thing I do know is, in the novel and not the movie, the sanctuary was populated by people who had deliberately blinded themselves] This isn’t necessarily a problem: indeed, it has been a genre staple going back at least to Night of the Living Dead, to present an apocalypse and its consequences without rationale. Yet, the specifics of the event here seem particularly contrived e.g. simultaneous parturition, and if you’re overly concerned with story logic, this may prove troublesome.

Fortunately, the performances help overcome this – not limited to, but certainly highlighted by, Bullock’s. Her gradual evolution from someone who isn’t certain she wants to be pregnant, into a fiercely protective mother (even to someone else’s kid) is nicely handled, and convincing. She gets particularly good support from Malkovich, playing the jackass character who appears almost de rigeur in any apocalyptic scenario. As many have noted (and the review tagline suggests), there is more than a little similarity to A Quiet Place; though I found that rather underwhelming, and the brutally internalized nature of the threat here seemed considerably more effective. The prospect of having to lose your sight is certainly scarier to me, and if far from perfect, I found enough cheap thrills here to make the time worthwhile.

Dir: Susanne Bier
Star: Sandra Bullock, Trevante Rhodes, John Malkovich, Sarah Paulson

Slay Belles

  By

★★★
“Not-so silent night”

Not to be confused with RuPaul’s 2015 album (I kid you not), this starts off on shaky territory. I mean, a director who credits himself as “Spooky Dan Walker”, and three edgeladies as heroines, wannabe YouTube stars who think dropping F-bombs every second sentence is cool? I was thanking my lucky stars this had a running time of 76 minutes. This trio of urban explorers head off to an abandoned theme park in the middle of nowhere called Santa Land, only to find it not as abandoned as expected, with a giant horned monster, Grampus, roaming the area, operating as the devil’s Christmas ambassador to naughty children. Or adults, which is where Alexi (Klebe), Dahlia (Slaughter) and Sadie (Wagner) come on to its menu. Fortunately, Santa Land’s owner is there to help: who else but Mr. Claus (Bostwick) himself?

And that’s really where the film becomes considerably more fun. Because it plays fast and loose with the whole mythology of Christmas, depicting Santa as a hard-drinking, cursing biker who gave up the business because toys started being mass-produced. It’s a winning performance from Bostwick, who hand-waves away the girls’ questions about how he operated with increasingly irritated dismissals of “Magic!” This irascible charm seems to rub off on the heroines, who shift from irritating to endearing, and develop distinct personalities beyond their colour co-ordinated outfits and wigs, as they buckle down to fight Grampus and save… Well, less Christmas, and more the world in general.

It becomes increasingly self-aware as it goes on, poking as much fun at the world of Internet “celebrities” as endorsing it, e.g. the trio insist on taking selfies with the temporarily captured monster. There’s good support from Richard Moll as a local cop, and in particular, Diane Salinger as a local barmaid, who ends up playing a pivotal role, despite (or, more likely, because of) her clear aversion to the festive season. It all ends in a quite unexpected fashion which, if a bit too abrupt, fits nicely in with the slaying of sacred cows – or sleighing of sacred reindeer, perhaps – which has gone before. It certainly seals the three heroines as the pro-active leaders of the film, despite a shaky section in the middle where it looked like a boyfriend was going to end up saving the day. Not so fast, white knight…

I have to say, the Grampus suit itself is incredibly well done, a latex marvel that must have been hell to apply and perform in. While there are some elements which feel under-developed, such as the Ghoulies-like fur-balls which attack in act three, Walker keeps things moving at a brisk enough pace to get away with it most of the time. If not quite the silliest festive film which I’ve seen this year (that would, of course, be Santa Jaws), this deserves to be filed alongside other anti-Christmas movies, such as Gremlins. It’s no Die Hard, of course; then again, who is?

Dir: Dan Walker
Star: Kristina Klebe, Susan Slaughter, Hannah Wagner, Barry Bostwick

Agent High-Pockets, by Claire Phillips

  By

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

In September 1941, the author returns to Manila, the capital of the Philippines, starting work as a nightclub singer and falls in love with American GI, John Phillips. Which is unfortunate timing, because soon after, the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, kicking off the war in the Pacific. A hasty marriage to John follows on Christmas Eve, but Japan invades, and Claire’s husband becomes a prisoner of war. Left to fend for herself, after a period spent hiding out in the countryside, she returns to Manila, adopting the persona of Dorothy Fuentes, born in the Philippines of Italian parents. In order to help the resistance, she opens a venue, Club Tsubaki, aimed at officers of the occupying forces.

This has a nice irony, since the profits from the business are used to fund both humanitarian work for the POW’s held on the islands, and the growing guerrilla forces up country. Additionally, “Dorothy” – also known as High-Pockets, for her habit of keeping valuables in her bra! – keeps her ears open, and becomes skilled at extracting useful intelligence from her patrons, though a combination of flattery and alcohol. This information, about troop movements, industrial facilities, etc. is then funneled back to the Allies for use in the conflict over the next couple of years. It’s a risky business, and eventually, the Japanese break up the ring, arresting those involved. Claire has to withstand torture and hellish prison conditions, before being sentenced to 12 years for her activities.

Fortunately, there is a happy ending here, since the Americans re-took Manila, freeing our heroine after a rough eight months, during which time she lost about 35% of her body weight. After the war she was awarded the Medal of Freedom, and a movie was made of her story – I Was an American Spy, starring Anne Dvorak as Claire. There are some doubts as to the accuracy of her account: a post-war claim for compensation was severely reduced, with many of her statements “later found to be without foundation,” the court even concluding there was “no corroboration of her testimony that she was married.” So we should likely take this her tale here with a pinch of salt as to the details, though the basic elements seem credible enough.

It takes a while to get to the good stuff, with rather too much about her social life, etc. Even after the invasion, she spends a good while suffering from malaria in a hut. The more it goes on, however, the more this improves, as you began to understand the daily terror of living in occupied territory, where every night could be your last, and any knock on the door might be the dreaded kempei, the military police. It’s also fascinating to read her techniques for extracting useful information from her clientele with seemingly innocent questions like “How many will be in your party? I must know so that I can reserve places.” Her matter-of-fact recounting the horrors of prison life is also memorable, such as the incident where a fellow prisoner caught and skinned a cat, eating it raw. Worst of all is the sentence which follows: “There was another cat on the premises, and I began to look at it longingly.”

To modern ears, there is something of a not-so casually racist tone here, Phillips spattering the text with references to “Japs”, “Nips”, etc. and mocking their efforts to speak Engrish [how’s her Japanese, I wondered…] However, given the war circumstances and situation – this was an invading force after all – we need to put this in context. This was a time, after all, when Hollywood was making cartoons like Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips. We probably shouldn’t condemn the author by applying modern standards to an entirely different situation, to which they do not fit.

Author: Claire Phillips
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon as a paperback or e-book.
a.k.a. Manila Espionage