Category: Review

Hanna (TV series)

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★★½
“More is less.”

I was quite surprised to hear about Amazon taking up Joe Wright’s 2011 movie of the same name, and turning it into a TV series. There didn’t seem to be an enormous amount of point: the film was perfectly self-contained as it was, and didn’t appear to need expansion. Having now watched the eight 50-minute episodes from the first season… I’m still not sure of the point.

The first three are more or less a stretched-out version of the original movie, beginning with Hanna (Creed-Miles) and her adoptive father Erik Heller (Kinnaman) living completely off the grid in the middle of a European forest. They are re-located by the CIA black operation which had attempted to turn Hanna into a super-soldier, under the control of Marissa Wiegler (Enos – amusing to see her and Kinnaman on opposite sides, since they were partners on the American remake of The Killing), and from which Erick had freed her. Hanna is kidnapped, and taken to a secure facility, though escapes and has to make her way across Europe, solo, in order to be re-united with her father.

So far, so adequate, though the knock-off Chemical Brothers electro-noodly score served mostly to remind me of how good the original was, and we could certainly have used more of Hanna in action. It’s in the middle section that this completely loses its way. If you’ve seen the film, you’ll know on her trans-continental journey, the heroine is befriended by a British family and their daughter, Sophie (Barretto). Here after they part ways, Hanna takes a detour to Britain, hangs out with Sophie, and spends the middle episodes being a teenager, with all the annoying brattiness that entails. Was there anyone who wanted to see this? Certainly not me, and this very nearly went into the “Did not finish” pile as a result, because it’s extremely annoying.

The series does somewhat redeem itself over the final couple of episodes. We discover that the project from which Hanna was spawned, is still operating – and this comes as much of a shock to Marissa as anyone. Hanna and Erik head towards the complex which houses it, with the aim of liberating all the other proto-Hannas, pursued both by Wiegler and the combined forces of the military-industrial complex. However, not everyone necessarily wants to be rescued… The series ends on an open note, and Amazon recently announced there will be a second season. To be honest, you couls get caught up by skipping the first six episodes entirely, and just watching the movie, then parts 7-8.

The series does fill in much more of Hanna’s back-story, in particular how she became part of the project, and I also did like the way Wiegler’s position shifts over the course of the show. It will be interesting to see where she goes in the next season, since her position is now little less precarious than Hanna’s [and as we see at one point, Marissa has some skills of her own!]. On that basis, I’m not prepared to write this off yet, since it will now have to find fresh earth to till. Hopefully Farr does a better job there with original ideas, than of transforming his own work for the small screen.

Creator: David Farr
Star: Esme Creed-Miles, Joel Kinnaman, Mireille Enos, Rhianne Barreto

Death Angel December

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★★
“Liable to provoke hibernation.”

Marginally competent, and just not very exciting, this low-budget offering is the story of December (Kurishingal). As a young girl, she watched as the rest of her family was slaughtered by Law (Ramsey) and his villains, the result of a debt owed by her father. A decade or so late, she has grown up and taken to the streets as a vigilante, seeking vengeance on those responsible. Or, until she finds them, any other perpetrators she comes across during her night-time ramblings through the mean back alleys of the city. Helping her mission, is that she now works for the police, which puts her in a prime position to ensure, for example, that any evidence pointing in her direction goes “missing”.

The main problem here is the lack of any significant progression in story or characters. Once the basic concept is established, it’s more or less clear where this is inevitably going to end: in December confronting Law – who, miraculously, looks exactly like he did when killing her family a decade previously – and his minions. Little of interest happens during the eighty minutes in the middle to escape from the cinematic rut which this ploughs, save perhaps a brief interlude where one of her colleagues on the force mistakes her nocturnal activities for something else, and consequently thinks she’s moonlighting as an escort. They have a good laugh about this confusion, needless to sa… Nah, who am I kidding: she rips open his chest and pulls out his heart.

That’s actually one of the highlights – it helps that it is largely realized through physical effects, rather than the crappy CGI, of which we see rather too much in the rest of the film. The old nemesis of low-budget cinema, bad audio, also rears its ugly head on occasion, most notably a scene shot in a foyer, which sounds as if it was recorded inside a toilet bowl. Re-recording dialogue in post is an actual possible thing, y’know: given the copious voice-over, the makers would seem to know this. Not helping is the painfully inept nature of the fights, especially true for the final battle, which appears to have been filmed in a public park, using swords made of tin-foil.

On the positive side, Kurishingal has a striking appearance that makes for a great poster, and director Woodell does know what to do with the camera. Between the two of them, they manage to stop things from collapsing entirely, even if my interest was sorely taxed at times. The IMDb tells me this was apparently a remake of a short film the pair made two years earlier, called Scarlet Widow. That ran about a quarter of the length, and may well have been a more appropriate running-time for the content. The additional 70 minutes here feels almost like needless padding, with a script in need of significant additional development in order to sustain itself over the length of a full feature.

Dir: Bennie Woodell
Star: Leena Kurishingal, Will Cummings III, Chad Meyer, Charles Ramsey
a.k.a. The Long December

Naam Shabana

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★★★½
“Four for the price of one?”

If you took four different films, by four different directors, and edited them together into a single entity, you might end up something similar to this. Oh, make no mistake: I still enjoyed most of this. It just doesn’t feel like a coherent whole, perhaps because it is a spin-off involving some of the same characters from an earlier film, Baby. For at least three-quarters of it, however, not having seen its predecessor shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

The first chunk is perhaps the weakest, introducing us to the heroine, Shabana Khan (Pannu), a college student and judo expert, with something of a quick temper. She has just started going out with a new boyfriend, when they get into an altercation with some cat-calling men, which ends with him dead in the street. It’s all rather unconvincing, not least the early incident which does a very poor attempt to establish Shabana’s zero tolerance for harassment.

Things do improve significantly thereafter, for it turns out she was under observation by a shadowy arm of the Indian government as a possible agent. She’s contacted by Ranvir Singh (Bajpayee), who offers to help her take revenge on her boyfriend’s killers, if she comes to work for him. With the authorities apparently uninterested in the case, Shabana accepts, and the next section covers her vengeance, and subsequent training under Singh. This is likely when the film is at its best, taking an interesting concept and executing it with some energy and flair.

Shabana then vanishes from her own movie in the third quarter, as we return to the topic of international arms dealer Mikhail (Sukumaran) he was briefly glimpsed at the beginning, making short work of two Indian agents in Vienna. Authorities have tracked down his ally, Tony, and apply pressure, hoping to discover Mikhail’s location. However, it turns out Mikhail has been using the services of a doctor to change his appearance, making the task of locating him that harder, and it becomes a race against time before he changes again, and the trail is lost.

Which brings us to another switch in direction for the final section, in which Shabana is sent into the hospital where Mikhail is about to get plastic surgery, in order to assassinate him. Here, she’s teamed up with Ajay Singh (Kumar), who was apparently the hero of Baby. There was a point where it looked like he was going to take over – not that we’d have minded too much, as we’ve always enjoyed seeing Kumar in action (despite his creepy mustache here), but this is supposed to be an action heroine film. Fortunately, that’s where it ends up.

Despite feeling a bit like Nikita, a bit like Peppermint, a bit like Alias and a bit like a Jason Bourne movie, there’s plenty going on, and the running time feels considerably shorter than its 147 minutes. It helps that its heroine is made to look relatively plain, rather than the typically stunning Bollywood actress. 

Dir: Shivam Nair
Star: Taapsee Pannu, Akshay Kumar, Prithviraj Sukumaran, Manoj Bajpayee

Slaughter in the Desert, by Michael Beals

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Literary rating: ★ ★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆½

Katelyn Wolfraum is a German expat, who was working as a field agent for MI-6, until an unfortunate incident just before the war, involving a member of the British Royal Family, left her persona non grata with the authorities. Fast forward to 1941, the depths of World War II, and she’s an intelligence analyst under Colonel Lyons and Major Trufflefoot in the North African desert. With Field-Marshall Rommel tearing across the terrain in a blitzkrieg, she finds herself trapped deep behind enemy lines, along with a motley international band of Allied soldiers. When they discover evidence of a Nazi super-weapon about to be deployed, Kat and her colleagues decide to take the fight to the enemy and sabotage the Third Reich’s plans. But complicating matters is the presence of Kat’s foster father, who is now a high-ranking officer in the SS, tasked with ensuring the saboteurs are stopped.

A shaky start here, with the map in the frontispiece depicting a country called “Lybia”. Oops. And, indeed, after an early burst involving Kat’s imprisonment in, and subsequent escape from, the Tower of London, the first half of the book is mostly generic soldier stuff. She’s just one of a group, and not a particularly important one either, to the point that I was seriously wondering whether or not this would even qualify for the site. These stages weren’t very interesting or exciting, with a lot of random zipping around sand-dunes and running gun-battles against Ze Germans and Eyetalians. However, things improve in both departments further in: Kat became more pro-active and independent, demonstrating a hatred for fascists, that drives on her comrades when some would prefer more cautious options, and a love of Really Big Explosions which is quite endearing. The presence of a specific mission – stopping the Nazi super-weapon from being deployed – also gives proceedings some much-needed focus.

It’s still not what I’d call great or even good art, and there are too many unexplained holes in areas such as Kat’s background [though some may be explained in the second book, going by the snippet included as a teaser at the end here] The only sequence which sticks in my mind is the final attack, when Kat and the men launch a potentially suicidal assault on a coastal facility: they don’t know which of the three submarines docked there is the real target, so need to sink all three. It’s startlingly hyperviolent, culminating in two thousand tons of explosives going up – though describing it as “roughly equivalent to a 2-kiloton atomic bomb” is another faux pas, considering no atom bombs even existed for several years after this is set. Given the efforts made at military accuracy elsewhere by the author, I’d expect better. Overall, it needs considerably more Kat, and there’s no reason why she couldn’t have been operating solo for much of this, rather than diluting her obvious talents.

Author: Michael Beals
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 2 in the Adventures of Kat’s Commandos.

Bad Apples

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★½
“Rotten to the core,” indeed…

Ineptly constructed on just about every level, this proves that stealing from better movies – most obviously, Halloween and The Strangers – is not a guaranteed recipe for success. Teacher Ella (Grant) is has just moved into a new home with her husband, Robert (Skipper), who works at the local hospital. Left alone in the house on Halloween night – that whirring sounds are my eyes rolling – Ella becomes the target for two young girls (Prichard + Collins) in masks, whose unfortunate pre-natal experience has apparently left them with severely psychotic tendencies. Or so we are left to presume, for the bulk of what follows.

It’s not a terrible set-up. Unfortunately, the execution is almost irredeemable. Let’s begin with the technical aspects. The audio levels are in dire need of balance: I lost track of how many times I had to lunge for the remote control, either to turn the volume up, or then back down. And the cinematographer appears to have been a cat, going by how much of the film takes place in near-impenetrable darkness. This all becomes such a chore to watch, an Oscar-winning script and performances would have struggled to keep your attention. Not that this will exactly be unjustly overlooked by the Academy, shall we say.

For this feels like a 20-minute short extended to feature length. So many scenes end up being little more than empty padding, outlasting their usefulness – if they even had any to begin with. Is this a horror film, or a drama about a married couple moving house? There were times when I wasn’t sure. Indeed, the entire Robert character could be excised from the film with little or no impact. Yet, just when the sisters are stalking Ella through her house, and the tension should be ramping up inexorably, the film breaks away to a particularly superfluous sequence of her husband at work.

Then there’s the ending. If the preceding 75 minutes require the usual horror movie idiocy from the victims… Well, it’s nice to see the film is equal opportunity, and demands the same from its killers. After this, comes a coda. We know this, because we are given a large, superfluous inter-title: “CODA”. I literally LOL’d at that. This ties everything back up to where we started, though tells us little we probably couldn’t have guessed, and thus largely falls in line with the other superfluous scenes.

This would probably be somewhat more tolerable, if you looked at it as a loving homage to 80’s slasher flicks, with their practical effects and simplistic approach. The problem is, this is rather closer to the tidal wave of post-Halloween knock-offs, which a friend at the time memorably disparaged as “shot on video shit-heaps”. While nice to see a film with women on both ends of the stabby implements, the problems here are monumental, and this demonstrates that good intentions are no more a guarantee of success than aping better movies.

Dir: Bryan Coyne
Star: Brea Grant, Graham Skipper, Hannah Prichard, Andrea Collins

Shira: the Vampire Samurai

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★★
“Blade-ette”

I could have sworn I’d seen this before, to the point where I almost skipped over it on Amazon Prime. But on checking, appears not. Did I watch it, and just not review it? Or does it only seem very familiar? It’s clearly trying to be a low-budget, female version of Blade, with its half-vampire heroine taking on her cousins, with their plans against humanity. In this case, Shira (Jason) is bitten by a vampire in medieval Japan, but somehow ends up not going full-bloodsucker herself – apparently because she tried to commit suicide first. The film bounces back and forth between then and the present day, where she has become a vampire hunter, along with her Scooby gang. Yet she has also come to the attentions of Kristof (Zmed), who owns a strip-club for reasons that, I’m sure, are entirely necessary to the plot. He and his former Nazi death-camp vampire scientist assistant want to use her in a breeding program to create a new race of super-vampires, who can go out during the day. Shira, naturally, is having none of this.

This probably would have worked better if it had decided whether it wanted to be Shira’s origin story or not. Either stick to the feudal Japan setting or the modern one: instead, the constant bipping between the two is thoroughly confusing rather than enlightening. A better-written script would have handled her creation in a brisk five minutes, then have allowed more opportunity to develop the contemporary portion, which comes off as rather under-cooked. Not helping matters here are the slew of supporting characters, most of whose purpose and motivations are never adequately explained. The whole thing feels almost as if this was a trilogy, edited down to feature length, with little regard for a coherent narrative. As a result, subplots are left sticking out at a variety of awkward angles.

For example, Shira is being pursued through the centuries by Kenji (Klein), a samurai with a grudge. What is the serum Shira apparently has to take on a regular basis? And a descendant of Professor Van Helsing also shows up, to no particular purpose. On the plus side, the fight scenes are copious and surprisingly well-choreographed. Admittedly, with regard to the latter, it probably helps that I watched this immediately after the dire Hollywood Warrioress, which would make anything look good in comparison. So, amend that to be “seem surprisingly well-choreographed,” perhaps. And if you don’t like this one, there’ll be another along in a couple of minutes. It builds to a “homage” to Enter the Dragon, with Shira chasing Kristof through a hall of mirrors. Because…  Hell if I know. Why not?

It makes about as much sense as the rest of the film, e.g. why does Shira’s boyfriend (Dwonzh) spend so much time with his shirt off? Pondering these enigmas may well provide as much amusement as the movie itself.

Dir: “Simon” (Jeff Centauri)
Star: Chona Jason, Adrian Zmed, Louis Klein, Lawrence Dwonzh
a.k.a. Vampire Shadows

Hollywood Warrioress

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★
“Just because you can make a film…”

The IMDb says this is a 2016 movie. The copyright in the end credits says 2014. But shooting was apparently going on for this at least as far back as 2011, according to Internet reports. I suspect a lengthy production, shot on weekends, when the participants have some spare time, which may well explain the presence of five credited directors and eight cinematographers. Which in turns helps explains the wretched awfulness of this. Clearly a passion project for Dutch, who is its star, (one-fifth) director, (one-third) writer and executive producer, this proves that passion by itself is not sufficient.

She pulls double duty, playing both the goddess Athena, and Deborah, her chosen vessel on earth. Deb is tasked with stopping the evil machinations of multimedia mogul Girard Devereau (Young), who is kidnapping teens around Los Angeles for some malevolent purpose [a news broadcast early on puts the number of victims at 500; at the end, the number Debbie actually releases, can be counted on the fingers of one hand]. To this end, the Deborator is given ill-defined special powers, which she largely fails to use, while traipsing around Hollywood, looking for her niece, wannabe singer Anna (Andrews). She has been kidnapped by Morgana (D), one of Devereau’s minions who moonlights as a therapist. Or maybe it’s just to stop Anna from singing – in which case, we’re firmly on Team Morgana.

The best thing which can be said, is that Dutch looks good in her battle bikini. About the only genuine laugh I got from this, was when she was hit on by a pimp, who thought she might “appeal to the ‘warrior princess’ crowd”. Otherwise… Well, I initially thought it was an interesting stylistic choice to have all the fights in slow-motion. Then I realized that was actually the speed at which the “combatants” were moving. Welp. Right from the start, the digital effects are similarly inadequate. It would be charitable to say that they might have passed muster 25 years ago. At this point, you’d probably be able to match them on a mid-level iPhone.

Maybe we should nickname her Deborah “One Take” Dutch, given the occasion on which an actor obviously flubbed their line, yet the take was still used? More damning than all the technical flaws, are a storyline which has no sense of escalation or urgency to it at all. I’m not even certain I could state with confidence what Devereau’s end-game is supposed to be here. Rule #1 of movie villains: Have a clear purpose. Actually, it goes for heroes, too, and the Deb-meister is no better. Sure, she’s trying to recover her niece. Yet for someone supposedly blessed by Athena with special powers… her methods are largely indistinguishable from those of any normal person, worried about a missing relative: contact known associates and the cops. By all accounts, Dutch seems really nice, so it pains me to be so harsh, but there’s unfortunately very little of merit – or even acceptable quality – to be found here by a neutral observer.

Dir: Christine Dupree, Deborah Dutch, Chad Hawks, James Panetta and Rusty Pietrzak
Star: Deborah Dutch, Edward X. Young, Angelica Drum Andrews, Debbie D

Teenage Hooker Becomes a Killing Machine

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★★
“Why, yes – yes, she does…”

You’ll understand why, when skimming leisurely through a streaming channel on the Roku, I screeched to a halt at this title. Even though the “official” English title is just Killing Machine, I knew I immediately had to watch it. Yet, while the title technically reflects what happens, it’s a masterly bait-and-switch. For instead of the expected grindhouse apocalypse, it’s far more arty and surreal. The word “Lynchian” is likely over-used, yet it’s hard to argue its accuracy here. If David Lynch had been contractually obligated to deliver a movie with this title, it’d perhaps have looked very similar.

The synopsis is about what you’d expect. The nameless schoolgirl prostitute (Lee) is caught turning tricks by her teacher (D-t Kim), and the pair start a relationship. But when she becomes pregnant and declares her love to him, he decides the best way out is, with the help of a few friends, to convert her into a cyborg killer for hire. Except, in a Robocop-like twist, she proves capable of breaking her programming, and turns her new found talents (including a machine-gun, mounted in a place machine-guns were never intended to go) on those who created her.

All of which still sounds a lot of fun. Except, trust me, it’s not, and it’s clearly not intended to be. Nam is interested more in Creating Art, with a capital A. This is apparent right from the beginning, which opens with the credits, running very slowly, backwards. They run again, in a forward direction, at the end; this pretension seems like unnecessary padding in a film which (perhaps mercifully) only runs 58 minutes, including about ten minutes for both sets of credits. It’s a lurid, shot on video nightmare, that takes place in a back-alley world, where the lighting is perpetually neon-harsh, and there’s always a hip soundtrack, ranging from Ryuichi Sakamoto to the Gypsy Kings.

It almost feels like an hour-long performance art prank at the audience’s expense, not least given the amount of time devoted to characters laughing hysterically for no apparent reason. Nam seems to feel that anything worth doing is worth overdoing, in the sense that virtually every scene continues well past the point where it has worn out its welcome or point. Yet it’s clear he knows his B-movies: for instance, the heroine’s first mission is obviously inspired, almost to the point of plagiarism, by the one in Nikita. It’s as if the director was going, “Well, I could give you what you expected… Nah. Let’s not. Instead, here’s another scene of the bad guys laughing hysterically for no apparent reason.”

I will say this for it. You will not have seen anything like Killing Machine before, and I will remember the movie, when most other films reviewed for this site have long been forgotten. However, neither of these points are necessarily a good thing. The joke’s on the viewer here.

Dir: Gee-woong Nam
Star: So-yun Lee, Dae-tong Kim, Soo-baek Bae, Ho-kyum Kim

No Tomorrow, by Luke Jennings

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Literary rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆½

“I’m just you without the guilt.”

As we recently discussed, the first book and first season of the TV series had some major differences. The second book does make a significant effort to narrow the gap. Indeed, by the end, we have almost got to the same point as at the end of the TV show, albeit by a rather different route. Then, just when I was expecting this to wrap up and set the stage for the second season, Jennings drops a major bomb. I have to say, well-played: I don’t think I’ve ever been quite as stunned by a twist in a novel before, yet thinking about what had gone before, it made perfect sense. I’m really curious to see whether the TV show follows suit, because if so – nothing will be quite the same again.

To that point, we had more of the cat-and-mouse games between the international assassin codenamed “Villanelle” [though these days, it’s basically her real name, with her true identity buried deeply in the past], and harried MI-5 operative Eve Polastri. The latter is struggling to balance her increasing obsession with Villanelle, and a husband who would greatly prefer it if she was not jetting off to Venice or Moscow at a moment’s notice, leaving him to open a tin of beans. Eve is very much a desk jockey, and not exactly suited to go head-to-head with a ruthless killer. Can wits and persistence counter cold-blooded psychopathy?

It was the twisted relationship between the two which separated the first book and the TV series, with the show having much more development in this area. Jennings said his approach to the second book was altered by the strong reaction of fans to the TV version, and you can tell: there are a couple of scenes which can only be described as fan service, apparently inspired by one notorious broadcast line [Villanelle’s confession to Eve, “I think about you, too. I mean, I masturbate about you a lot.”] This angle really doesn’t fit, considering Eve finished the first book literally tooling up to kill Villanelle, and I found it an abrupt and jarring shift in tone.

The rest of it though, is really well-done, from the explanation of The Twelve’s intent through to Eve’s dogged piecing together of her target’s identity. I read the whole thing in about 30 hours, which is far from my usual leisurely pace. Staying up late, waking up early, in front of the TV… I ripped through it, powered by Jennings’s great eye for description; particularly in terms of locations. Whether it’s attending a conference of neo-Nazis on an Alpine mountain-top or shivering in a cell, deep in the bowels of the infamous Lubyanka prison, the reader feels there.

The balance of the book also feels improved. The first was mostly about Villanelle, with Eve almost feeling like a supporting role; this time, it’s much more even. Indeed, the contrasts in the transitions between the two lead characters form some of the book’s most memorable imagery. For example, we jump from Villanelle prepping the ground by seducing her next target, Rinat, to following Eve on her way home from work:

“The sun is low in the sky, half obscured by oyster-pink cirrus clouds. Rinat turns to beckon to the waiter, but he’s already standing there, as patient an unobtrusive as an undertaker. In the bus, moving at a snail’s pace up the Tottenham Court Road, the only person to give Eve a second glance is an obviously disturbed man who winks at her persistently. It’s a warm evening and the interior of the bus smells of damp hair and stale deodorant.”

This bone-dry dark wit is fairly common, and the style with which Villanelle operates can only be applauded, making up for in quality of mayhem perhaps what the book lacks in quantity. I suspect she would make a fine Bond villain, with an eye for the grandiose and demonstrative over the purely functional [There’s an idea: with all the talk about diversity for 007, why have we never had a Mrs. Blofeld?] In the absence of that, Sunday nights can’t come quickly enough.

Author: Luke Jennings
Publisher: Mulholland Books, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 2 of 2 in the Codename: Villanelle series.

The Executioners

  By

★★½
“Home of the hits”

“I realized that there was no such thing as a boundary between good or evil, black and white, right or wrong. All I learned is that this world is divided by the executed and executioners.” The above is spoken by a character toward the end of this, and explains the significance of the title, though your mileage may vary as to how convincing it is as an explanation. Four young women go to a country house by a lake, which holds dark memories for one of them. Belle (Dallender, known here from I Spit on Your Grave 2) watched her father die of a heart attack there, after he rescued her from drowning, and has been plagued by guilt ever since. There’s also Kay (Burn), a writer who is working on a “story of home invasion, mixed with supernatural elements.” And, wouldn’t you know it? Barely has the trip started, before three men burst in and take the group hostage.

There then follows some fairly nasty brutality and sexual violence, which seems especially dubious since the director has made energetic (and, let’s be honest, not unsuccessful) efforts to sexualize the attractive women – both before, and even more questionably, after that scene. The victims continue wandering round in their underwear for no good reason, when any real person would have quickly reached for their clothes. However, the tables are turned, with the three attackers turning out to be a bit crap at the whole home-invasion thing. With them tied up, it’s time for the quartet to mete out their own brand of justice – something which Belle, especially, is very keen to do.

This is where things get at least somewhat interesting, and rather meta. For it turns out the home invaders were not acting on their own initiative. They had been hired to attack the house, by person or persons then unknown, and were live-streaming their actions through bodycams back to their employer. Who is lurking in the woods nearby, and may or may not be ready to intervene on behalf of their employees. The scripting in this section is mediocre: one woman’s break for help and fate is so rapidly glossed-over as to be inconsequential, and one of the attacker becomes an ally with little more than “I’m gonna trust you with a gun. Remember, we’re not the enemy.”

As the poster suggests, Serafini is going for the grindhouse aesthetic. I’m just not sure how well he nails this. The nasty and repellent elements, he seems to have a good handle on, and Dallender impresses in her role. Yet the films in that field which have stood the test of time offer more than that, and it’s there where the film seems to fall short most obviously, with this likely making little or no lasting impression. The eventual explanation raises more questions than it answers, and doesn’t appear to make a great deal of logical sense. If you like your meat raw and bloody, this one may be more to your taste than it was to mine. If only they’d named all the characters after Disney princesses.

Dir: Giorgio Serafini
Star: Natalie Burn, Jemma Dallender, Rachel Rosenstein, Anna Shields