Category: Review

Nightblade: A Book of Underrealm by Garrett Robinson

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

One of the common problems I’ve found with fantasy novels is establishing the universe. It’s clearly going to be very different from the reader’s, and the author needs to get them up to speed on how things work in the book’s setting. If this isn’t done quickly and effectively, the reader can be left floundering in a world they know nothing about. Robinson uses a neat trick to get around this. His heroine, Loren, basically knows nothing about it either, because she has been brought up in a remote rural area. Virtually all she knows about life outside the woods comes from tales told to her by an itinerant tinker, and her dreams of becoming a heroic thief seem no more than fantasies.

That all changes when she encounters a fugitive, Xian the mage. Fed up with her life – and given the severely abusive parents, it’s hard to blame her – she throws her lot in with him. That’s how everything starts: as she discovers the world around her has a lot more to offer than household drudgery and arranged marriages, so do we. She has a couple of advantages over the usual runaway: she’s “country strong” having been brought up to hunt, providing her with a skill-set which will putt her in good stead to hold her own in a more urban environment. And on her departure, she takes a dagger, a family heirloom of sorts, which for some reason, strikes fear into the subset of those she encounters, who recognize it.

Loren is, perhaps, a little too well-prepared occasionally: while I can see how running and climbing trees would translate into parkour-like city skills, her adeptness at picking locks was a little eyebrow-raising. However, this ia a relatively minor issue, and more than outweighed by the strengths of Robinson’s writing. He draws a world which is easy to imagine in your mind’s eye, populated by a range of memorable characters. I appreciated the almost total lack of the near-compulsory romantic angles, and that Loren is far from the only strong woman to be found in these pages. Already, we have met Auntie, the shape-shifting mage who runs the underworld in the city of Cabrus, and Damaris, a scarily well-connected smuggler who helps Loren, yet appears to have her own agenda.

As the introductory book to a six-volume series, there is rather less than a complete story told here, though neither is there one of those oh-so annoying cliffhangers. There are instead questions, which will presumably be answered down the road. Where did Loren’s blade come from? What is its significance? What about the mysterious gems Damaris is smuggling? And who is Jordel, the man who is also after Xian, yet seems to keep encountering and assisting our heroine? I was left feeling fulfilled by what I had read, yet also wanting more, and that’s a combination which is not as frequently found as you’d expect.

Author: Garrett Robinson
Publisher: Legacy Books, available through Amazon, both as an e-book and a paperback
Book 1 of 6 in The Nightblade Epic series.

Kidnap

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★★
“Car troubled.”

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. And considering Halle Berry’s last appearance on this site was for Catwoman, that’s saying something. This is so dumb, I genuinely felt I could feel my IQ slowly sliding away as I watched the movie. Even now, simply remembering it has me feeling more stupider by the sentence. If this review ends up sounding like Beavis & Butthead by the end, that will be why. Its plot is beyond simplistic. Karla Dixon (Berry) has her child abducted from a New Orleans park while she’s on the phone, by husband and wife kidnappers Margo (McGinn) and Terry (Temple). Losing her cell in the process, she takes off after them in hot pursuit, and nothing will get in her way for the next 80-odd minutes.

Which is 75 minutes longer than it would have lasted, had anyone behaved smartly. The six-year-old kid is likely the smartest person in the whole movie, and he spends most of it whimpering in the back of a car. Fortunately for him, the only thing dumber than the box of rocks which is his mother, are the two boxes of rocks which are Margo and Terry. Or possibly the entire pallet of rocks scriptwriter Knate Lee must have in his head, for thinking this procession of poor decisions and eye-rolling developments could possibly pass muster. At least, with any audience not consisting of fellow six-year-olds.

These begin with the cloying opening montage of baby pictures, proceed through a lengthy sequence of Karla at her day job – yes, you get to watch nothing except a harried waitress serving customers – and finish with the phone-call informing her of an upcoming custody battle with her ex-husband. The movie has just wasted its first 15 minutes on entirely inconsequential irrelevancies, since none of the preceding have the slightest significance during the rest of the film. Then there’s the chase itself, which relies far too much on happenstance, with Karla repeatedly losing contact with the kidnappers, only fortuitously to bump into them again: I guess Louisiana must be about the size of Hyde Park. It’s full of other ludicrous moments, like Karla trying to run Terry over, only to stop for no apparent reason, or her trading down from a shotgun to a knife.

The sole saving grace is Berry, and it’s a significant one, since she is on-screen in virtually every shot. She puts over a raw passion and drive which goes some way – albeit, not far enough – toward salvaging the woeful material. You can see how she was an Oscar-winning actress, even when spitting out cringe-inducing, sub-Taken lines such as, “Let me tell you something, as long as my son is in that car, I will not stop. Wherever you go I will be right behind you.” You do get the sense Karla is an utterly irresistible force of nature, prepared to do absolutely whatever is necessary, including wrestling with Margo while the car careers through a (suspiciously-empty) tunnel. Enjoy and appreciate this intensity: forget absolutely everything else.

Dir: Luis Prieto
Star: Halle Berry, Chris McGinn, Lew Temple, Sage Correa

Dueños del paraíso

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★★
“The main powder here is soap, not cocaine.”

Business is on the streets, check it out.
Survival of the strongest they’re the ones in charge
It’s at gunpoint, it’s outside the law.
Your word is your bond and you know it, man.
How many lives have been lost to loyalty?
If you’re my partner take care you can’t fail me
Honor comes before love.
The streets are fierce because they know I’m here.
We’re the masters of this dream, All American dream
I’m brave not merciful, I’m bad to the bone
By steel, tequila and blood we’ll be the masters of paradise

Based on the above theme song, and credits which are a fast-paced montage of gun-fights, explosions and chases through the Everglades, you’d be expecting a action-packed creature that will keep the adrenaline pumping. The reality? Not so much. Indeed, just about every gun-battle in the 71 episodes here could be fitted into the opening credits. Despite this being the much-touted return of del Castillo to the genre, after her success in La Reina Del Sur, she is just one in a slew of characters, and while central, is arguably not the focus.

The title of this 2015 show translates as “Masters of Paradise”, and it occupies a not dissimilar time and place to the previous year’s Viuda Negra: Miami during the infamous cocaine wars of the late seventies and early eighties. Rather than taking some inspiration from the actual character of Griselda Blanco, this Mexican-Chilean co-production invents an entire set of fictional characters. At the core is Anastasia Cardona (del Castillo), the wife of a Mexican drug lord who is forced to flee the country after war breaks out with a rival group of traffickers.

They try to set up shop in Florida instead, which brings them to the attention some of well-established local rivals, the Quezadas, led by Leandro (Varoni). While Anastasia’s husband soon bites a bullet, the twist is, it’s not the enemy who are responsible: Anastasia herself killed him, in a fit of jealousy. Not that this stops Leandro’s chief hitman from taking the credit, or from attacking the funeral, stealing the corpse and then dropping it from a helicopter into the courtyard of his house – to make some kind of point, I guess. They follow up by kidnapping Anastasia, leaving her for dead in the swamps, and when she eventually recovers, vows to take revenge.

If this was what the show was about, it would be fine. However, it’s much more about the everyday lives of her various minions and their families, in particular, Conrado San Miguel (Zabaleta) and Adán Romero (Torre), the latter of whom is just as newly arrived in Miami. These all unfold against a backdrop of Anastasia’s quest for power and revenge, but the latter feels more like an afterthought. Think of it as similar to the way Zombieland was a road movie, that just happened to unfold against a backdrop of the zombie apocalypse. So this is a soap opera, that just happens to unfold against a backdrop of drug dealing and vengeance.

So, we get things like Adán’s daughter having issues with a jealous classmate at her new school. Conrado’s wife, Erica, is an aspiring actress, who is lured in by a sleazy producer into material of a more, ah, “adult” nature. An interfering mother-in-law. Unwanted pregnancy. A sprinkling of sexual tension. It’s mostly generic stuff, blandly uninteresting and little more than background noise as far as drama goes – though I was amused by the first name-check of B-movie director Russ Meyer I’ve heard in a telenovela. Another problem was the Chilean co-production elements, which keeps diverting the film off to that South American country, almost inevitably at the worst possible moment, just when things are getting going in Florida.

Duenos del paraiso

All told, probably less than a third of this is what I’d call “the good stuff”. Much of that is down to del Castillo, who is as solid as ever, and has plenty of opportunities to deliver her trademark stare, capable of melting a hole in sheet metal. I also note the presence of Oscar-nominated actress Adriana Barraza as Anastasia’s mother, Irene Medrano, who has an entire graveyard worth of skeletons in her closet; that’s certainly a better pedigree of supporting cast than most series can boast. Other positive elements include the husband and wife “cleaners”, who have a thriving business disposing of all the dead bodies, and occasionally effective moments, such as when one character is given the news of her mother’s death, in medium-long shot, and told almost entirely in her reaction.

However, the scripting in particular seems to be remarkably sloppy. At one point, Leandro Quezada appears to be stricken with a terminal disease, but this plot-line appears to be casually discarded, almost as if it never happened. The time-frame doesn’t make a great deal of sense either: there’s a gap of seven months when Anastasia recovers from her kidnapping, during which Quezada and his clan are doing… apparently nothing, when they have a perfect opportunity to bury their enemies for good. It performs another great leap forward for the final couple of episodes as well, skipping over two years, for no clear purpose. And that ending supposedly offers a big twist, yet is incredibly obvious: while I’m usually no good at spotting these things, even I saw this one coming from a long way off.

It never quite became irritating or annoying enough for me to give serious consideration to giving up, and was, at least, relatively consistent in its tone and style throughout. My disinterest was mostly a result of the content. It feels as though the makers didn’t want to tell a story about crime and criminals, so much as bolt the elements of a traditional soap-opera onto a hot topic, seeking to exploit del Castillo’s previous work and reputation, rather than capitalizing and building on it. Definitely a disappointment.

Creator: Pablo Illanes
Star: Kate del Castillo, Miguel Varoni, Jorge Zabaleta, José María Torre

Duenos del paraiso
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Duenos del paraiso
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Duenos del paraiso
Duenos del paraiso

 

Maniac Nurses

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★★½
“Nurse! The screens!”

That this Belgian flick starts off with a dedication to Ilona Staller (a.k.a. Italian porn star, Cicciolina), artist provocateur Jeff Koons, and Traci Lorde, likely tells you it should not be taken too seriously. Certainly, the amusement to be found largely requires the viewer to be aware of the genres to which this is a homage. This is best exemplified by the Ilsa trilogy, yet there are also aspects borrowed from women-in-prison and Naziploitation in general. The more you’re familiar with those, the more you’ll get out of this: if you’re not, this will seem just a bad movie. A really bad movie.

The plot, such as it is, takes place in a facility of indeterminate, yet likely medical, purpose overseen by the evil and sadistic Ilsa (Brown) – actually, let’s just take “evil and sadistic” as read for the rest of the characters, since it applies to pretty much everyone. There’s her second-in-command, Greta (Farago), who is increasingly jealous of the attention Ilsa pays to the younger, prettier Sabrina (Makay), who spends her time reading poorly-drawn comic books when not engaging in random acts of carnage.

Thinking about it, the latter element also applies equally to everyone else here. As does Sabrina’s fondness for lingerie. Anyway, when not hijacking cars on the nearby roads, or hunting those unfortunate enough to camp in the woods, these maniac nurses are torturing their victims. Yet Greta’s jealousy eventually leads her to reveal the (not very) shocking truth about Sabrina’s origins. This triggers the most casual of rampages by the latter, in which she wanders round the facility at a moderate pace, gunning down everyone in her path.

The most notable artistic element here though, is the narration – something which may have been added by distributor Troma, since he is not mentioned in the film’s credits. If you’ve seen the opening of Faster Pussycat, this is basically that kind of over-ripe exposition, yet goes on for virtually the entire duration. It’s surreal, borderline insane and likely further evidence this is intended as a thoroughly self-aware pastiche of cult, B-movies, whose incoherent narrative is a deliberate stylistic choice. As such, it’s almost bulletproof, critically speaking. When a film is intended to be terrible, saying it is, doesn’t have much impact.

While the actresses here are certainly easy on the eye, their performances are virtually non-existent – although in their defense, they could have been Meryl Streep, and would still probably not have survived the dubbing. Again: this is quite possibly intentional. Yet, even as I certainly got the joke, it was one which out-stayed its welcome. The genres in question are ripe for parody – and I speak as a fan of them, more or less. If done right, you get the glory of something like Reform School Girls, which had energy, invention and Sybil Danning. This needs more of all three. Particularly Sybil Danning.

Dir: Leon Paul De Bruyn [as “Harry M. Love”]
Star: Susanna Makay, Hajni Brown, Celia Farago, Nicole A. Gyony
a.k.a. Maniac Nurses Find Ecstacy

Annihilation

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★★★½
“Some-thing in the way she moves…”

12 months after apparently vanishing while on a covert mission, the husband of former soldier Lena (Portman) suddenly shows up, unable to remember what happened, and suffering massive organ failure. The couple are quarantined by the government, and Lena learns of “Area X” in Florida. An apparent meteor strike has led to a “shimmer” which is gradually expanding in size: all expeditions into the area have vanished without trace, until Lena’s husband showed up. Lena joins another such expedition, led by Dr. Ventress (Leigh), hoping to reach the lighthouse which marks the apparent focus of the event, and discover something which can help her husband.

It’s probably best if I say not much more about the plot, though this will make the movie a bit difficult to review. Let’s just say, it soon becomes clear that the world inside the shimmer is radically different, and any creatures present there are also… changed. The overall feel is a bit like a female-led version of John Carpenter’s The Thing, where you were never sure what nightmarish creature lay around the next corner. Here, it begins with a mutated giant crocodile, which has developed multiple rows of teeth more in common with a shark… and only gets worse from there. One in particular is the stuff of nightmares, and is so dreadfully creepy, I wish we’d seen more of it or its associates.

The characters who make up the all-woman crew of the mission are a little generic. They are each given somewhat trite motivations for their agreement to join what is, to all intents and purposes, a suicide mission. But the actresses concerned take what they’re given and flesh out their roles well: it’s particularly great to see Leigh, who was one of my favourite actresses in the late eighties, before largely vanishing from features until The Hateful Eight. Meanwhile, Lena’s background in the military helps her take charge, and deal with situations which, to be honest, would likely have me running and screaming. It’s another in Portman’s portfolio of strong women, going all the way back to Leon.

If there’s a real flaw, it’s likely the ending, which appears to dip towards trippy psychedelic territory, closer to 2001. While The Thing was intended to do nothing more complex than scare the crap out of the viewer, and was all the better for a relentless focus on this goal, Garland appears to be trying to say something Very Deep about… something. I’m still not quite sure what. One interesting angle to consider though, is that it’s all being told by Lena in flashback – and she has shown herself quite capable of being economical with the truth. So, is what she recounts, actually what happened?

Based on the first book in a trilogy, by all accounts this diverges fairly radically from the novel. It does appear the studio were unsure of how to handle the rather unusual work which resulted, and the film went straight to Netflix almost everywhere bar America. This is perhaps an indication of its chilly, somewhat spiky nature, and what you have here a film more to admire than like.

Dir: Alex Garland
Star: Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson

Tomb Invader

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★½
“Deserves to be buried.”

Anyone can review Tomb Raider. Here, we go the extra mile and review the third-rate knock-off version. For despite being someone whose fondness for maverick studio The Asylum is already on the record, even I have to admit this one is not at all good. It’s one of their “mockbusters”, clearly designed to cash in on the Tomb Raider reboot, and I can see some potential ways how this could have worked. For example, hire a real athlete – ideally Jessie Graff, but probably someone cheaper from the parkour field – and make a no-frills but CGI-free version, with a heroine actually doing impressive things in the running, jumping and climbing department. [Call me, David Michael Latt! Let’s talk…] Instead, we get a cast of four, walking around a forest for 80 minutes and bickering at each other, book-ended by five minutes of somewhat interesting action.

This is, however, as much a rip-off of Indiana Jones as Tomb Raider, right from a heroine called Ally (Vitori), as in short for “Alabama”, who lectures in archaeology at a university. There’s an early scene involving escape while being chased by a rolling stone, differentiated largely by the presence of spikes on it. Hmm. The main plot concerns the search for an artifact called the Heart of the Dragon, which Ally’s mother died looking for in China, twenty years previously. When the late mother’s journal resurfaces, Ally is drawn back to China – or, at least, stock footage thereof, before cutting to the non-Chinese forest – by billionaire Tim Parker (Sloan). He has hired Ally’s rival, Nathan (Katers), and the difference in tomb raiding, sorry, invading philosophy is what leads to the bickering mentioned above.

The lack of energy here is likely the most painful element. Our explorers go through the forest at approximately the speed you would escort an elderly relative around a botanical garden, and when they eventually reach the artifact site, and further booby-traps are unleashed, there no sense of urgency to escape. Even after one of the team is taken down, it’s entirely lacking in emotional impact, partly because the victim served little or no purpose to that point, and partly because they were painfully annoying whenever they opened their mouth. The “real” original movies, particularly the second entry, were no great shakes, yet they look like classics put next to this pale and weak imitation.

Vitori does occasionally look the part, and the minimal amount of action she gets to do is not poorly handled. I did like the sequence where a terracotta statue came to life and had to be fought: it’s exactly the kind of thing I expected to see from this. The film needs about sixty more minutes like it, rather than the jaw-jacking in the woods we actually get. Though considering this was likely made for less than the budget devoted to the care and nurture of Alicia Vikander’s eyebrows, I guess we should be grateful for whatever we get.

Dir: James Thomas
Star: Gina Vitori, Evan Sloan, Samantha Bowling, Andrew J Katers

Fugitive of Magic by Linsey Hall

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

It’s probably worth noting that although this is Volume 1 in the somewhat clunkily-named “Dragon’s Gift: The Protector” series, it follows in the wake of two other Dragon’s Gift threads by the same author, The Huntress and The Seeker. While you don’t need to have read those to enjoy this, it does explain a structure, which could seem somewhat odd. For the volume sets up a trio of treasure-hunting magicians – Cass, Del and Nix – then all but discards the first two and concentrates heavily on Nix. Turns out Cass and Del were the subjects of the Huntress and Seeker sagas respectively, and the Protector gives Nix her turn in the spotlight. This is why some aspects, such as the shop run by the three women, seems more than a bit undeveloped: I presume they were featured in the ten or so previous volumes set in the same world.

With that out of the way… Nix is chasing down a shoplifting pack of demons, when she stumbles across a murder scene. The killer manages to frame her for the murder, which is unfortunate because the victim was a close ally of the vampire race. Their top enforcer, Ares, locks a nasty collar around Nix’s neck to ensure she doesn’t skip out before her date in court, three days hence. Worse still, their court contains mind-readers, who will undoubtedly discover her secret [shared by Cass and Del]. For as well as her relatively mundane conjuring skills, allowing her to pull things literally out of thin air, Nix is also a FireSoul. That’s a very, very forbidden talent, allowing her to absorb the abilities of others. In order to avoid exposure, she needs to locate the real killer, a quest that will bring her into an uneasy partnership with Ares, and take her to a long-forgotten castle in France, St. Pancras railway station in London, and other locations both magical and mundane.

“Find the real killer in X hours to prove your innocence, or else” is a fairly well-worn plot, but Hall manages to add enough novel elements to keep it fresh. The same is true of several other elements: the incredibly handsome, brooding vampire with whom the heroine has unresolved sexual tension, for example, manages to be be somewhat less irritating here than usual. I think the first-person narrative helps there: Nix’s inner monologue is nicely self-deprecating, and was more often than not in tune with what I was thinking as a reader. Ares is clearly there to do a large block of the heavy action work. But I was pleased to see that Nix does not hesitate to wade in there, right from the opening sequence, which sees her and her two friends engage in what is basically a pitched battle in the middle of the street against multiplying numbers of demonic entities.

I suspect you probably would be better off not leaping in to the universe like this, ten volumes down, and must confess to being slightly miffed something described as “Book 1” is far from being that. However, this was devoured at quite a rate, and offers a fast (if not particularly challenging or thought-provoking) and enjoyable read. Though the story clearly leads on to volume two, it doesn’t cliff-hanger the reader to death, and I’d certainly consider reading further – by which, I mean earlier – entries.

Author: Linsey Hall
Publisher: Bonnie Doon Press, available through Amazon, both as an e-book and paperback.

Hostile Intentions

  By

★★
“Not brought to you by the Mexican Tourist Board…”

Nora (Carrere) and her two American friends cross the border to Tijuana for a weekend of partying. It doesn’t quite go as expected: the trio instead end up locked up in a Mexican police-station. When two cops on guard at the jail attempt to rape one of her pals, Nora grabs a gun and shoots them both dead. While this perhaps does solve the immediate problem, it obviously creates some rather heftier issues. The three women go on the run, assisted by another inmate, Juan Delgado (Gómez), who has the local knowledge they need to survive south of the border. It turns out Juan was just about to sneak across the American border, and he agrees that if they will fund the payment to the coyotes for him and his family, they can come too.

To say this doesn’t present a positive portrayal of Mexico as a holiday destination would be putting it mildly. Even though the incident which kicks everything off is actually the result of uncouth actions by another group of tourists, it doesn’t exactly depict the locals – the police, especially – in anything except a horrible light. Of course, this is also the poster-child for Bad Decisions Made Overseas, so it’s not as if Nora and her pals deserve to escape the consequences of their own actions. #1 would be “Going to Tijuana,” which in the mid-nineties was a major drug-hub, the local cartel being among the most feared gangs in Mexico. [In 1997, the DEA called the Tijuana Cartel “undeniably the most violent” organization.] So, my sympathy for Nora’s predicament is muted at best.

Even Juan and his family aren’t exactly sympathetic. Between cheerfully confessing that “everybody” wants to sneak across to America, and the gun-battle that breaks out between the illegal immigrants and the federal agents on the U.S. side, they’re basically walking advertisements for Trump’s wall. While this may be partly the result of societal changes over the two decades since this was released in 1995, I think it probably seemed dubious at the time, based off the poorly-considered scenes spent both at the American consulate and behind the scenes with the Border Patrol. I kept expecting these to play some role in subsequent events: never happens. 

The main positive from this is Carrere, whose portrayal of Nora provides – despite the snark above – an energetic enough heroine, pro-active rather than reactive. She especially seems so, when set beside her two travel-mates, who largely sit around bemoaning their fates. There’s no particular reason why there need to be three women here at all; the others serve little purpose, except for an embarrassing subplot where one of them slept with the other’s boyfriend. Not that this has any significant impact, thanks to the “sisters before misters” philosophy on view. If this had been a solo adventure for Nora, Carrere has the charisma to have pulled it off. Instead, we get an ill-conceived exercise, which can’t figure out whether it wants to be liberal or conservative hogwash.

Dir: Catherine Cyran
Star: Tia Carrere, Lisa Dean Ryan, Tricia Leigh Fisher, Carlos Gómez

Demon Hunter

  By

★★★
“Hey-ho… Let’s go!”

Behind a remarkably generic and forgettable title sits an entirely reasonable slice of low-budget Irish action-horror. It’s clear creator Kavanagh knows what has gone before, and if the resources here don’t allow her to reproduce them on anything approaching the same scale, she knows her limitations and works well enough within them. Besides, who can resist a film that works a Ramones lyric into its dialogue? Taryn (Hogan) feels responsible for the death of her little sister, abducted and killed on the way home from school. She gets a chance to do something about it, when approached by the mysterious Falstaff (Parle) after her sister’s funeral. He reveals a secret world of demons and sacrifices – Taryn’s sister being one of the latter – and offers Taryn a chance for revenge, if she’ll come and work for him.

We don’t actually learn much of the above until some way into this. We start with the heroine stalking and enthusiastically decapitating one such demon, only to be arrested by the local cops. They’re peeved she won’t reveal where the severed head of the victim is located – not least because she insists this is necessary to ensure he stays dead. Falstaff, meanwhile, has not intention of letting his minion remain in police custody, and informs them there will be a fresh murder every 24 hours they do not let her go. For, it turns out, Falstaff has an entirely separate and significantly less helpful agenda with regard to Taryn, and has simply been using her towards his own ends.

The main asset this film has is Hogan, whom production kinda lucked into, after the original actress pulled out two weeks before shooting started. For Hogan is a third-degree black belt in Shotokan karate, with a slew of titles both national and international. The physicality her experience allows her to bring to proceedings can’t be learned at drama school, and bumps up the action credibility several notches. Given this, it’s a shame that we don’t get see more of her: after the opening head-removal, Taryn is then locked up in custody for the rest of of the first half, and we also have to go through the flashbacks explaining how she became a demon hunter. It might have been better for the makers to figure out whether they wanted to tell an origin story or subsequent tale: this is a little of each, and both likely suffer as a result.

The lazy comparison would be Buffy, but that can be applied to virtually anything where a young woman is battling supernatural creatures. Bloody Mallory is probably closer, with its heroine who is more surly and aggressive than frothy and ironic, and the dark tone here has echoes of The Crow as well. Kavanagh was working on the project for close to a decade before it reached the screen. The struggle to find funding is apparent in some rough edges, and her lack of experience in a story that can’t sustain itself for the full duration. Yet it’s still remarkably polished for not just a first feature, close to Kavanagh’s first narrative film of any kind, with her background being mostly in music videos.  I’m looking forward to seeing where she (and Hogan) might go from here.

Dir: Zoe Kavanagh
Star: Niamh Hogan, Alan Talbot, Michael Parle, Aisli Moran

The Housewife Assassin’s Handbook, by Josie Brown

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

My preferred format for reading is paper; and that’s the only format I support financially, since the only language Big Publishing understands is dollars and cents. Even for a reader like myself, though, e-books have their uses. Writers can offer particular books for free in that format, and that makes it possible to read them first in order to check the quality before you buy the paper edition. And sometimes that opportunity saves you money that would have been wasted if you’d taken a chance on the paper book to begin with! For me, this series opener (which Brown makes available free in e-book format on a permanent basis) was one of those books I was thankful I didn’t have to spend money on, which I’d have regretted.

The novel’s premise is intriguing enough, and the harrowing first chapter grabbed my attention effectively. We’re plunged into the action right away, with present-day events narrated by protagonist Donna in present tense. At the first opportunity, she drops back into a flashback (in past tense) that gives us an introduction to her childhood and family background –and yes, that’s relevant!– how she met her husband, their few years together, and her discovery, after he was identified as the dead victim of a car wreck on the night she gave birth to their third child, that he had a BIG secret: the corporation he worked for was a front that contracted to do wet work for the CIA, and he was an assassin, most recently assigned to help bring down the Quorum, a shadowy organization of ex-government assassins who’ve gone rogue and are out for profit. (They planted the bomb in his car.) We also learn how, needing to support her kids and wanting to better protect them (long story!), and wanting vengeance on the kinds of scumbags who made her a widow, she subsequently agreed to go to work for Carl’s employer, in his old job. (That’s not as big a stretch as it would be for some women –she learned to shoot as a kid, is naturally talented for and very good at it, and met Carl at a firing range.)

While I was reading the first few chapters, I expected this to be a four-star read. The body of the novel itself (we’ll talk about the italicized chapter beginnings below!) actually is more serious in tone than comedic, although it does have some deadpan humor that arises from the incongruities of Donna’s job responsibilities vs. her domestic ones. Her reflections about the ethics of what she does aren’t approached flippantly, and she’s a well-drawn character who earned my sympathy and respect –a very tough woman, morally and physically, but essentially a good and decent person and a caring mom (who intends to survive and be there for her kids). Brown creates a situation that’s fraught with moral and emotional complexity and shades of gray to start with, and then ups the emotional ante exponentially with a new development –followed by some more really compelling twists and turns, the first one of which I didn’t see coming. (I did suspect the second one.) None of the other characters are developed as fully as Donna, but they’re believable, and the author does conjure a sense of place with the southern California setting (in Orange County). And I liked the depiction of family life, and Donna’s relationship with her kids.

In fairness, I also need to defend Donna against the complaint of one reviewer, who regards her as a moral pariah because she lies to her kids, at a very serious level. Well, yes, she does (although she doesn’t like that situation). But as a reality check, these kids are 12, 10 and 5 years old, with big mouths, limited impulse control, and a child’s immaturity and deficient understanding of danger and the complexities of real-world situations. Even if the lies involved are extreme, telling them the truth in a life-and-death situation, where things they do and say could have disastrous consequences, is not a course I’d advocate.

The principal problem I had here was that the plotting is simply not well thought out, and not convincing. One could argue that the essential premise is far-fetched; but I was okay with suspending disbelief that far. (Whether or not black ops organizations would hire a single mom with kids is a matter of speculation, since real life organizations like this don’t publicize their personnel policies. :-) ) But even within the premise Brown creates, much of her plotting simply doesn’t stand examination. Some of the major actions by the villain(s) are at cross-purposes with some of their other major actions; several events that take place here would involve the police in the story, at a level that couldn’t be ignored, but there’s no indication of that here; Donna’s reasoning for one major decision is weak and unconvincing; and Acme (the company she works for) would be much more actively involved in the decision-making at the end, not passive as it is here. Also, characters could not realistically suddenly just shrug off previously incapacitating wounds (which happens here twice), and there are other significant logical slips that took me out of the story. The author writes prolifically, but she apparently wrote this novel too quickly to take her craftsmanship in plotting seriously, or to put any real thought behind it. (That’s a real shame.)

Finally, a word is in order about the titular “Handbook” aspect. As a gimmick here (and as nearly as I can tell, in the other 15 books of the series as well, though I haven’t read them) Brown prefaces each chapter with short, italicized snippets giving supposed household hints that blend home economics with mayhem. These are unrelated to the story-line (though some may have a passing thematic connection to something in the chapter), don’t advance it in any way, and don’t reflect any things that Donna might actually do. Instead, they’re intended to be humorous (often depending for their humor on exaggerations that are completely over the top). Some readers like these (one reviewer found them to be her favorite aspect of the book!); so as the saying goes, “Your mileage may vary.” Personally, though, their humor generally fell flat for me; it typically strains too hard, and comes across as weak (or nonexistent) and forced. I found them an irritating nuisance that the book would have been better off without. Good fiction doesn’t need gimmicks to appeal; and if the author had given us a tight, plausible, well-constructed plot, this novel wouldn’t have needed any gimmick either.

Ultimately, I gave this two stars rather than one, in consideration of its positive elements; and I did finish it (I had to see how it ended!). But I don’t plan to continue reading the series.

Note: The book includes several episodes of explicit sex –including one that’s very abusive and disgusting, although there’s a defensible literary reason for describing it– and other sexual situations (in the opening scene, Donna’s posing as a prostitute). There’s also some bad language, including the f-word (though in Donna’s vocabulary, the latter is only a verb used in unloving contexts, not an all-purpose adjective/adverb) and in the sexual scenes, vulgar terms for some body parts. Most of the other bad language here is strictly of the d- or h-word sort.

Author: Josie Brown
Publisher: Signal Press, available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.