Category: Review

Girl Fights Back, by Jacques Antoine

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

I’ve come to the conclusion I prefer bad films to bad books. A bad film can be appreciated and offer entertainment in unexpected ways. I’ve rarely found that to be the case with literature, which just… lies there, dully. If a movie sucks, then you can at least allow it to drift into the background, while you check your phone, play with the cat, or do household chores. A bad book, on the other hand, requires every bit as much effort as a good one: the return on that investment is just a great deal less.

Not that Girl Fights Back is truly bad. There are few books that are the publishing equivalent, say, of Plan 9 From Outer Space. But it is strikingly mediocre, with a heroine whose name might as well be “Mary Sue” rather than “Emily Kane”, since she’s so idealized. I mean, five minutes in the company of this teenage girl, and a hardened professional espionage agent melts like butter: “He must have glimpsed in her eyes just then the immense wellspring of compassion and forgiveness that made its home there, and sighed as his shoulders visibly sagged, perhaps under the weight of the knowledge that she could indeed forgive him.” Damn. That’s a sentence and a half. He’s not the only one: Everybody Loves Emily, it appears, whether it’s her school-friends or lethal ex-CIA operatives.

She is the daughter of George Kane, a man with a murky past, who works as a chauffeur/bodyguard for a former government executive, who also appears to have been involved in his share of previous shenanigans. To cut a long story short, their past comes back to haunt them: the estate where they live is attacked one night, by a group seeking information about a research project into “super soldiers” with which both George and his employer were involved. The attackers think Emily is part of it; fortunately, she is out in the woods that evening, and is able to return later and rescue her father, who clues her in to the situation. So, what does she do, after overcoming the shock of all these traumatic events, to foil those hunting her?

If you guessed, “Return to school, as if nothing had happened,” you are the author of this book.

Seriously. I know she’s a martial arts wizard, and there’s such a thing as “hiding in plain sight.” Still, this ranks as among the most baffling of decisions I can remember a character making. She could have hidden out with the rest of her family, or gone on the run independently. Nope. Back to class and hanging out at the dojo it is. There’s also the striking way in which a major character is suddenly disposed of: “____ died that night, having never regained consciousness.” Well, that’s a shocker, especially since they had been quite chatty over the preceding hours.

The martial arts heavy nature of the action is also somewhat problematic, since this kind of things is hard to describe: reading about kung fu, tends to be a bit like reading about juggling. It’s nowhere near as exciting as seeing it, unless the writer is particularly good. Antoine is not, and we get sentences such as, “Emily slid one hand along her arm, until it became a ridge-hand strike to the side of her headgear, and in the ensuing confusion jabbed to the center of her chest.” Not exactly painting a thrilling word-picture, is it?

The book does possess a philosophical tone, which occasionally hits on some nuggets of interest. I particularly liked this one, on gender differences: “Boys fight for dominance, she thought, which means that at some level they understand they must preserve their defeated enemy. Otherwise dominance will not have been achieved. But girls fight to injure or eradicate. They have no use for a defeated enemy, which makes them much more malevolent than boys, she concluded.” Overall, however, that’s the exception rather than the rule, and I reached the end with absolutely no interest in seeing what happened next.

Author: Jacques Antoine
Publisher: Amaterasu Press, available through Amazon, both as an e-book and a paperback.
Book 1 of 7 in the Emily Kane Adventure series.

Emergency Exit

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★★★
“A heroine who stands against heroin.”

Released in 1980, it was only the previous year – as an opening caption tells us – that women were allowed into the Greek police force. So this obscurity [hence the low-quality images, for which I apologize!] was perhaps the first Hellenic entry in our genre. The heroine is Daisy Alexiou (Karlatou, best-known for playing Prince’s mother in Purple Rain), one of the first batch of policewomen, whom we first see in an introductory training montage. Initially assigned to traffic duty, her role in chasing and capturing a bank robber quickly gets her assigned to narcotics. Which is fine with her: she has a strong anti-drug streak, due to the personal impact it has had on her, proclaiming, “It is a disgusting disease, that kills people and rots their society.” Given this, I was wryly amused to see Daisy smokes like a chimney. Hey, it was the eighties…

She gets to see the human face of the heroin problem when she captures a junkie, Tassos Bekiris (Eskenazy), trying to burgle her apartment. Their relationship helps him get clean temporarily, until a relapse sends him back into the arms of mother smack. He ends up shot dead, and the evidence, unfortunately, points increasingly towards Daisy. Before the police net, under the command of her boss, Markos Angelou (Foundas), closes on her, she has to track down the real killer, who is also the kingpin of the local drug trade. Or, rather, queenpin. For the boss is Katia Theohari (Mavropoulou), the owner of a local import-export business, who traffics the dope inside hollowed-out statues.

Considering this is nearer four decades old than three, it has stood the test of time surprisingly well. Alexiou doesn’t mess around, happily hurtling into danger without a second thought, and proves generally competent, save for an ill-advised undercover operation, which ends badly and seems to exist largely so we can see Karlatou dressed as a hooker. Outside of the cigarette use (so rampant it feels like Marlboro were one of the producers), the most dated thing here is probably Daisy and Markos having a romantic relationship, in total violation of every boss-subordinate protocol. But both the story and characters still feel reasonably contemporary, and Karlatou carries herself effectively.

This clocks in at a meaty 123 minutes, though if director Foskolos was not quite so fond of slow-motion, it could well have been closer to 100. He appears also to appreciate gravel-pits, with the bank robbery at the start and the drug buy at the end, both ending up in what looks suspiciously like the same location. The latter does result in an laudably downbeat conclusion, tying back in to why Daisy is so down on drugs. Yet it’s with a twist that makes for an ambivalent ending: while she may have cleared her name of Tassos’s murder, it seems Markos will now be forced to cover up multiple other killings in which his officer was involved. I suspect Daisy’s commendation for bravery might be a while…

Dir: Nikos Foskolos
Star: Olga Karlatou, Giorgos Foundas, Alberto Eskenazy, Gely Mavropoulou
a.k.a. Eksodos Kindynou or Εξοδος Κινδυνου

Avengers Grimm: Time Wars

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★½
“Fairy disappointing.”

I was one of the few who didn’t mind Avengers Grimm, appreciating its poverty-row energy, while acknowledging it had little or nothing to do with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. With Avengers: Infinity War storming the global box-office, it’s not much of a surprise to find The Asylum going back to the same well. However, despite the same director, and much of the same cast, the script botches the timey-wimey aspects badly enough that the first half, in particular, becomes a slog that’ll test the audience’s endurance.

The villainess here is Magda (Maya), the queen of Atlantis, who storms out of the ocean with her army of soldiers – well, there’s at least four of them, with any more appearing entirely through not very good digital copy/paste. She’s looking for Prince Charming (Marcel), as if he can be convinced to marry her, Magda will become ruler of the land as well as the sea. In her way is Lookingglass, an organization created by Alice (Licciardi) to protect Earth from all these fairy-tale threats. She gets the band back together: Snow White (Parkinson), Red Riding Hood (Elizabeth Eileen) and Sleeping Beauty (Marah Fairclough), the last-named of whom has her own interest in the Prince. Magda isn’t going to let them interfere with her plans of world domination, so throws them through a portal in time and…

Well, not very much. There’s an enormous amount of wandering around thereafter, in what has to be rampant padding to feature length. As just one example, Sleepy gets captured and stuck in a glass case – a situation with which viewers will certainly be able to empathize. While Rumpelstiltskin returns from the first movie, he’s now played by a different actor. And that The Asylum could apparently no longer afford Casper Van Dien, replacing him with someone cheaper less well-known, should probably be considered as a red flag. Confusing matters further, Prince Charming is black and sports a fake British accent. I found one of these things deeply offensive. :)

The main appeal of the original was seeing all these D*sney princess types being bad-asses, to varying degrees, and kicking ass – that appears here in VERY intermittent spurts. For example, Red still uses her bow, yet only on a couple of occasions, to the point it’s more of a token gesture. I’m not sure who’s responsible for the fight choreography here: it seems barely passable at best, and is often feeble. I don’t recall the predecessor being quite as bad in this department, though the mists of time may be working to its benefit. While Avengers Grimm was cheap and an obvious rip-off, it had enough gonzo energy to slide past. Time Wars is merely cheap and an obvious rip-off; as such, it probably has more in common with our other recent Asylum review, Tomb Invader. Not least, in that both sent me off to sleep during the duller moments.

Dir: Jeremy M. Inman
Star: Lauren Parkinson, Christina Licciardi, Michael Marcel, Katherine Maya

BloodLust, by Auryn Hadley

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

Three millennia previously, the Terrans landed on the planet of Ogun, and took it over. The native Iliri, though in many ways superior to the new arrivals in both mental and physical ability, ended up subjugated. They are now very definitely second-class citizens, only remembering vague legends of their once-proud past. One such is Salryc Luxx, a rare pure-bred Iliri who is a private in the army. Despite the fierce prejudice against “her kind”, she gets a try-out for the Black Blades, the military’s elite special forces. Which, it turns out, is a haven for Iliri and their supporters. Sal becomes the first woman in the unit, and her talents – including the ability to shape shift – quickly become an essential part of the team, allowing her to become one of their top covert assassins. However, her presence also causes significant static, not least her relationship with the Black Blades’ commanding officer, Blaec.

Oh, dear. Who knew there was a market for thinly-veiled identity politics crossed with soft porn? But let’s start with the positives, such as the well-considered setting – I liked the way that metal is an extremely rare commodity, helping explain the lack of both firearms and vehicles (though it’s not yet quite clear how the Terrans got to Ogun? Wooden spaceships?). Hadley also has a good hand on the action aspects, with Sal’s missions being tense and bloody. However, Sal is a bit of a Mary Sue, being stronger, faster and just downright better than any man, even including the hand-picked soldiers of the Black Blades. It’s all a bit too obviously author wish-fulfillment.

Still, it is considerably less problematic than the relationships here, not least the idiocy of Blaec. For a commanding officer, he’s as dumb as a log, right from when he has a one-night stand with a woman, and lets her dictate a key element of the test Sal and her two rivals will go through the next day. For the woman is Sal, using her shape-shifting talents. Well played, it has to be said. But he then starts an actual relationship with her, in defiance of all (very sensible) military orders of officers bedding subordinates. And my eye-rolling reached epic levels when it turns out that Sal’s post-operation reaction is to go full-on nympho – hence the title, I guess – in particular, getting sweaty with colleague and fellow assassin, Cyno. Which makes Blaec go all sad puppy.

Everything about these aspects feel just… wrong, on so many levels. From the Goodreads reviews, it appears this is an entry from the “reverse harem” fiction genre, in which, according to UrbanDictionary.com, a single girl is liked and followed by a bunch of handsome men. You learn something new every day, I guess. If this had been mentioned a bit more in the Amazon blurb, rather than being described as, “a powerful and intriguing female lead, the likes of which the fantasy genre hasn’t yet seen,” I might well have skipped it.

Author: Ella Summers
Publisher: Spotted Horse Productions, available through Amazon as both an e-book and paperback.
Book #1 of 7 in the ‘Rise of the Iliri’ series.

Diamond Dawgs

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★★
“Car trouble.”

It’s hard to believe a film rated two stars exceeded expectations, but when I saw this had scored just 1.7 out of ten on the IMDb, I was braced for something much worse. I mean, cross off the friends of the cast and crew who scored it a “10”, and 72% of voters have given it the lowest mark possible. Make no mistake, this isn’t great. It’s not even good. But this is not quite as irredeemably bad as that score would imply.

The story concerns the car thief gang of the title, including Ciara (Johnson) and Pretty (Manning), who work under the heavy thumb of South Central (Núñez). They target a party being held by rappers High Rollaz, not realizing the trunk of one car lifted contains the only copy of a master tape for the High Rollas latest album. The trio, led by Millions (Green), start to follow the Dawgs’s trail, only for things to get complicated when Ciara and one of the High Rollaz fall for each other.

Made in 2009, the production values here are shaky at best, with the video in particular not having aged well. You could likely record better quality footage on a medium-end phone these days, and the sound might well be improved, too. The story is woefully thin: there are scenes which either stay far beyond their purpose (unless that purpose was to showcase one of the rap songs on the soundtrack), or don’t appear to serve any purpose at all. The action, such as it is, is very poorly-executed: the Dawgs do very little actual crime after the opening sequence. Basically, rob the party and that’s it.

And, yet… On a couple of occasions, the film did surprise me. For instance, there’s one scene where South Central forces one of his minions to play Russian Roulette, and it’s genuinely disturbing. Núñez’s acting experience is apparent, and weirdly, his performance here reminded me of Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s portrayal of Negan in The Walking Dead (which, obviously, it well pre-dates). There’s the same sense he’s entirely unhinged, and could go off into insane violence at any moment. We also get the Most Unexpected Star Trek Reference of All-Time, when a drug dealer says of his product that it will, “Get you high, like Captain Kirk… The young Kirk, the one getting all the alien pussy.” I laughed, anyway.

I’m certainly not the intended audience here, yet I can’t imagine even its target would be able to look past the shoddier aspects, despite what feels like a certain veneer of urban authenticity to the dialogue and characters. It plods on, entirely as you’d expect, to the final face-off, when the High Rollaz try to execute a deal with South Central and his crew, for the return of their tape. I sense the actresses here were chosen more for their visual appeal – it seems most of them were models – rather than their acting ability. Though since they get precious little to do here, it’s very difficult to tell whether or not they have any talent. They do nail the “looking pretty” thing, close to impeccably.

Dir: Chris Rogers
Star: Sherina Manning, Azur-De Johnson, Will Green, Miguel A. Núñez Jr.

Hate Story

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★★★
“Hate trumps love.”

After exposing construction company Cementec as involved in corruption, journalist Kavya Krishna (Dam) is surprised to get a call from Siddharth Dhanrajgir (Devaiya), son of the company’s owner. He ends up offering her a job at far above her previous salary, and the two eventually grow into a relationship. However, it’s all a ruse: Siddharth dumps and firing Kayva, saying, “I fuck those who fuck with me.” When she tries to strike back by telling him she’s pregnant, he has her kidnapped and forced to have an abortion, which leaves Kavya permanently unable to have children. She vows to destroy Siddharth and his company, by any means necessary, using her investigative skills – and no shortage of feminine wiles – to get the information required.

An enjoyable pot-boiler, this has some of the traditional aspects of Bollywood cinema, not least a lengthy running-time of 139 minutes. It is, likely fortunately, light on the musical numbers; though the songs clearly play a significant part, there’s only one scene in a night-club which comes close to what you’d expect from Indian cinema. It’s also an odd mix, which I can best describe as “chaste raunchiness”. This is a film, after all, about a woman prepared to go to absolutely any length for vengeance, crammed chock full of sexual situations… Yet the movie contains no nudity beyond the PG-13 level, and not so much as a kiss. Even Siddharth’s trademark line, frequently repeated in English, is far more politely (and inaccurately!) rendered in the subtitles as “I ruin the people who mess with me.”

I largely tracked this down, because I saw that Hate Story 2 was on Netflix at the time, and not the original.  I feel it’s perhaps the kind of story which would be better served by a Western remake, which wouldn’t have to abide by the strict censorship rules of India. [I’m reminded there is apparently a Bollywood version of Basic Instinct, which I can only imagine!] There may not be anything quite like the poster present in the film, and some of the plot contrivances are, frankly, incredible. For instance, Kayva ends up on the board of Cementec, a position obtained almost solely by making doe-eyes at a cabinet minister for an extended period.

However, it’s still a thoroughly satisfying tale of a woman, abused by a powerful man, turning to strike back at him; a tale of sexual harassment and its reversal like has more resonance now, than when released in 2012. Dam cuts a striking figure, and I thoroughly enjoyed the scheming interplay between Kayva and Siddharth. For example, he sends his investigator to bug her house, only for her to find the audio-visual devices and use them to send disinformation back at him. Then he releases the steamy tapes to the media, framing her for the murder of her lover. I was impressed with the ending, too – it’s moral and grim at the same time. Despite the extended duration, the time sped by: while the sequel is no longer on Netflix, you should still expect a review, sooner rather than later.

Dir: Vivek Agnihotri
Star: Paoli Dam, Gulshan Devaiya, Nikhil Dwivedi, Joy Sengupta

Gia in the City of the Dead, by Kristi Belcamino

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

Gia Valentina Santella is the daughter of a rich Italian family in California. She doesn’t seem to do much with the bountiful hand fate has dealt her: drinking, casual sex and designer labels appear to be her main interests. But her easy life is rudely disrupted after her parents die in a fire at their estate in Switzerland (!). In the aftermath, she is sent a letter from the man who carried out their autopsies, confessing that he was paid off to conceal the real, much less accidental cause of death. As Gia starts to dig into the past, seeking the truth, it soon becomes apparent that it was a good deal murkier than initially appears. And also, that someone has a strong, vested interest in ensuring it stays covered.

Goddamn, this is bland: I finished it only a couple of days ago, and am struggling to recall much more than the basic details. I do recall being rather annoyed, however, that the heroine endlessly quotes gobbets of Budo philosophy… but appears largely clueless when it comes to putting any of her allegedly extensive training into practice. She seems to have endless resources, for example, funding a rather convoluted scheme to make her adversaries believe she has left the company. But these are not matched by her resourcefulness – she then blows the gaff by a ridiculously ill-advised trip to a funeral home. [And don’t even get me started on that particular corpse, which also meets a highly-suspicious end, yet is all but ignored by Gia, at least in this volume]

It just feels as if so many of the incidents here were thrown in without sufficient thought. For example, at one point, someone sets the apartment building where Gia is hiding out on fire, when she’s not in it. Even at the end of the book, when the truth is finally revealed, there’s no logical motivation for this. If it was to get rid of a bit of evidence, then breaking in and taking it would have made more sense. The heroine… Well, she seems to have a good heart in there, somewhere, but this felt more like reading about the misadventures of one of the Hilton sisters: not exactly the smartest knife in the kitchen-block, shall we say.

According to the author, “Gia Santella is my alter ego, the woman I might have been in a different life.” And that apparently unrestrained wish-fulfillment is perhaps a good part of the problem here. For example, there is absolutely no reason why she needs to drive a red Ferrari, yet she does. We get sentences such as, “I spotted five Ferraris, including one Ferrari 458 Italia Spider, three Lamborghinis Gallardo LP 560-4 Bicolores, and even a McLaren MP4-12C.” If I wanted to amuse myself with an episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, I would do so. At least The Grand Tour has Jeremy Clarkson being snarky about the sports cars.

Author: Kristi Belcamino
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon as an e-book only.
Book 1 of 4 in the Gia Santella Crime Thriller series.

Negative

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★★½
“a.k.a. We’ve Got a Drone And We’re Gonna Use It”

This is a very cunning title. For when you Google “Negative film review”, all you get are a lot of articles about Bright. Hohoho. [In five years time, people will probably have to Google “Bright” to understand this reference] Actually, it refers to a photographic negative, casually taken by Rodney (Roché) in the park. What he doesn’t realize at the time, is that he has accidentally captured the face of Natalie (Winter), a former MI-5 agent who is on the run. She turns up on his doorstep, demanding he turn over the photo to her, but before she can leave, the two Colombian assassins after her, also show up, and she has no choice but to take (the thoroughly confused and largely unwilling) Rodney with her. Together, they head for Phoenix and a safe house owned by Natalie’s former associate, Hollis (Quaterman), with the Colombians in pursuit.

First things first. I was startled to learn some people apparently still take pictures on film requiring an actual darkroom to develop it: personally, this left the movie already feeling like a throwback to the eighties, about as out of time as Phone Booth is now. [References to The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy don’t exactly help there] Moving past that, it all feels rather too understated. Apart from some blood-spatter, we don’t get any real evidence of Natalie’s qualifications as a bad-ass until an hour into the movie – she’s more about evasion than confrontation, save for a drunk guy at a motel. This may have been a function of a relatively small budget – only $100K, and to the credit of Caldwell and its crew, the overall look generally doesn’t show it. [There are some interesting interviews with the director online, explaining how this was possible. They’re worth a read, since he seems a smart guy]

Resources may also explain why it’s pretty dialogue-heavy: two people in a car is about as cheap as it gets. Though the dialogue isn’t terrible, it just isn’t good enough to carry the film, which it needs to do. As the tag-line above suggests, you could play a drinking game based on the number of drone shots: it got the the point where, on more than one occasion, we accurately predicted the next such showing up. And the “Phoenix” the film depicts… Well, let’s just say, there were rather too many palm trees, and not enough cacti for that aspect to ring true. It offers little or no sense of place, with generic suburbia and desert, which feel like they could be anywhere West of the Rockies. 

Everything progresses much as you’d expect, if you’ve seen this kind of film before, eventually reaching the expected gun-battle against the Colombians. This unfolds at night, and it’s tough to figure out what exactly is going on. There’s likely a bigger problem though: by the time you reach it, I still hadn’t quite been given a real reason to care. While I’d like to see more from Winter (the story of how her character got to this point, might potentially have been more interesting than the one actually told), the film likely works better as a technical exercise than an emotional experience.

Dir: Joshua Caldwell
Star: Katia Winter, Sebastian Roché, Simon Quarterman

12 Feet Deep: Trapped Sisters

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★★½
“Drowning, not waving.”

There aren’t many films which will be reviewed both here and on aquaticsintl.com, a site offering “Commercial swimming pool and waterpark industry news” [their opinion: a “woefully inaccurate portrayal of pool technology”]. But then, if you see only one film about sisters trapped underneath a swimming-pool cover this year… Yeah, it’s highly likely to be this one. Eskandari deserves some credit for taking a paper-thin and highly dubious premise and almost stretching it out to feature length. But even he eventually runs out of steam at about the hour mark, and derisive snorting will take over from there. 

Siblings Bree (Noone) and Jonna (Park) are the victims, after trying to retrieve the former’s engagement ring from the bottom of the pool. Lackadaisical pool manager (Bell, recognizable to horror fans from the Saw franchise) closes the giant fibreglass pool cover on them – though I defer to the experts at aquaticsintl.com, who said, “There is no way that would possibly ever meet any ASTM standards for pool safety covers used in the U.S.” Having flagrantly disregarded ASTM standards, he then locks up shop, leaving the pair trapped underneath over a long holiday weekend. Their only hope is the pool’s cleaner, Clara (Farr), but she’s not long out of prison, and the felon sees Bree and Jonna as a moist, trapped meal ticket. Her demands to free them begin with the PIN for Bree’s phone, and escalate from there, as the sisters strive for their own escape.

This feels like a descendant of 47 Meters Down, which was the spawn of The Shallows, which called back to Open Water, all using drowning as the main threat. At least here, “being eaten” isn’t on the menu, and the story has to contrive a number of other elements to stretch things out. Thus we (eventually) get the truth about the death of Brie and Jonna’s father, and the latter’s jealousy about the former’s engagement leads to significant quantities of sibling bickering. Jonna initially comes across as quite the bitch, though we eventually discover there are reasons for her being a curmudgeon. Oh, and did I mention that Bree is a diabetic, who needs an insulin shot, like now?

Supposedly “based on true events” – I can hear derisive laughter from acquaticsintl.com as I write – you’d probably need an especially forgiving nature to get past the “I’m so sure” moments here, such as why they bother to tread water for much of the film, when they could just head to the shallow end and stand there [as well as getting much better leverage for their breakout efforts]. In the first half, things are executed with enough energy as to paper over the cracks, and the series of unfortunate events by which the two women end up trapped is more plausible than I expected. However, I can’t helped thinking it would have been much improved, had Bell returned as his Jigsaw character at the half-way point, and released some sharks into the pool.

Dir: Matt Eskandari
Star: Alexandra Park, Nora-Jane Noone, Diane Farr, Tobin Bell

It Stains the Sands Red

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★★
“Aunt Ruby goes on a trip.”

As the world goes through the zombie apocalypse, Molly (Allen) and boyfriend Nick (Mondesir) are elsewhere. Specifically, driving through the desert near Las Vegas, heading towards an airfield where they are going to catch a flight to Mexico – and, hopefully, safely. After their car gets stuck in the sand, Nick is attacked by a lone zombie (Riedinger), Molly flees on foot, striking out in the hopes of getting to the airfield, and pursued by the relentless creature. For it turns out the heroine is having her period, which allows the zombie to track her – and also lends a rather different meaning to the film’s title…

It’s the kind of idea which would have made a strong short film, but falls apart when stretched to feature length. To reach that duration, the story has to bolt on all manner of additional elements, most of which don’t work, while also leaving some gaping plotholes, through which an entire army of the undead could stumble. For instance, there are moments where the zombie is just feet behind Molly; then, in the next scene, she’s far enough ahead to be able to stop for a snooze. Given she seems to have no athletic ability and is clad in shoes which are as far from desert-traversing footwear as imaginable, it feels as if she’s teleporting ahead of her pursuer. Similarly, when she reaches her destination, the script is flipped, and this coke-snorting bitch suddenly becomes a devoted mother, desperate to return to Las Vegas and be re-united with her child. It’s a startlingly unconvincing development.

The aspect that perhaps works best is a surprising one: the relationship between Molly and her pursuer, in particular after he saves her from an unpleasant fate. It’s largely unwitting – just his nature in action – and requires more suspension of disbelief in the way he suddenly can apparently enter stealth mode. But it adds a nice wrinkle, albeit one which is rapidly discarded for the film’s change in direction over the final third. There, the film abandons any effort at inventiveness, and returns to the same furrow which has pretty much been ploughed into the ground [admittedly, where you would expect to find a furrow] by the multitude of zombie films, TV shows, books and games churned out over the past decade or so.

To the makers’ credit, they did at least realize they needed to find something new, a different direction which would help their creation stand out from the walking dead crowd. It’s unfortunate they managed to screw things up in almost every direction once they got past that decision, beginning with a heroine who is startlingly unlikable for the vast bulk of its running time. At one point, she whines at her pursuer, “You’re like every guy I’ve ever met a bar!” I couldn’t help thinking, that’s the kind of comment which says more about the person making it, than the target. You might find yourself rooting for the zombie.

Dir: Colin Minihan
Star: Brittany Allen, Juan Riedinger, Merwin Mondesir