Category: Review

Final Girl

  By

★★½
“Hannah and her sister…”

horrorThe ‘final girl’ is a concept familiar to horror fans, being the last survivor who confronts the killer at the end, and typically defeats them (until the sequel, anyway!); mostly chaste, intelligent and resourceful, examples could include Ripley from Alien, Laurie Strode in Halloween, and one we’ve previously reviewed here, Erin in You’re Next, which somewhat subverts the concept. This movie, boldly claiming the trope for its title, goes further down that road, but I’m not sure it does so with as much assurance or wit. Set mostly in a deliberately-indeterminate time (judging by the fashions, the fifties seems a reasonable guess), it begins a decade or so earlier, with new orphan Veronica being quizzed by William (Bentley) as to whether she’d like to learn a “special” job. Fast forward 12 years, and she is about to go on a mission: taking care of four thoroughly unpleasant, upper-class young men, who have formed a “killer’s club,” that takes young, blonde women out to the woods, then hunts down and murders them. But in Veronica, they’re going to find themselves taking on a victim more than capable of handling herself.

It’s the annoying gaps here that manage to derail a potentially great idea. We never know who William is, or quite what happened over the following 12 years; in some ways, Veronica is remarkably ill-prepared for the events that unfold, so it doesn’t seem like she was training full-time. Nor can this have been the goal all along, given the killers are hardly any older than Veronica herself. And once she is finally taken into the forest, having successfully “flirty fished” for the gang of four, there is an overlong scene of them sitting around playing Truth or Dare, which sheds zero light on proceedings, and offers no insight into the characters on either side. It’s a good example of a film not being as smart as it thinks. However, good to see Breslin, whom we’ve wanted to adopt since Signs, shifting into more mature roles, and she does well, adding credibility to some of the more ludicrous plot elements e.g. a drug that causes you to hallucinate your worst fears. C’mon, that’s barely even trying.  It was also nice to see Cameron Bright as one of the killers; I think the last thing I saw was him playing the carrier in Ultraviolet opposite Milla Jovovich.

The forest scenes is lushly photographed, and once things finally kick off, the payback is decently delivered. It just takes too long to reach that point, and of all the ways the concept could have been used, Shields and the four writers apparently chose the least interesting path. You can tell it’s the director’s first feature, and while his background gives him a good handle on the visual aspects, the script is too weak for any amount of style to cover up the cracks.

Dir: Tyler Shields
Star: Abigail Breslin, Wes Bentley, Logan Huffman, Alexander Ludwig

Angel Terminators 2

  By

★★★★
“Angels of death”

angelterm2I have not seen Angel Terminators, so cannot comment on its merits or flaws. However, it does not appear that this impacted my thorough enjoyment of this slice of early 90’s Hong Kong goodness, and nor did the mangled subs which leave me a little vague on some details. The two heroines are Chitty (Lee) and Bullet (Oshima), who are… Cousins? Sisters? Not sure. Bullet has just got out of prison, having turned to delinquency after blaming her policeman father for the death of her mother. He and his partner (Hu) – who adds to the confusion because everyone calls her Big Auntie – try to achieve a reconciliation, but Bullet is unimpressed. She goes to her former gang boss for money, having taken the fall and gone to jail for him, but he just wants Chitty to become a hostess. The fight than ensues, kicks off a chain of events which leads to Bullet stealing some jewels belonging to the boss, who unleashes the accurately-named Brother Mad (Wong).

Will there be mayhem? Yes. Will there by fisticuffs and much gunplay? Yes. Will there be people strung up from lamp-posts like some kind of novelty Chinese lanterns? I’m not saying: I’ll let the film retain some element of surprise. But for all its broad strokes of characterization, it manages to deliver a relatively-even tone, without any of the slapstick and comic interludes which sometimes plague other entries. Indeed, it does become progressively darker, with a kidnapping forcing action that then goes horribly wrong, setting up even further death and violence. This is all accompanied by high-quality action, right from the get-go, starting with Hu leading an assault on criminals holed up in a restaurant, before quickly bringing you a battle between Lee and the leaders of another training squads in a gym, then escalating from there through to a bloody finale.

It’s easy to become somewhat jaded, particularly when you’re watching films because of their genre, without applying any quality control. But then you find a movie like like this, which looks like just another generic action heroine flick, yet instead delivers everything you could want from low-budget action, easily making up for in energy what it may lack in polish. With Lee, Oshima and Hu, you have a hand of three aces, and the film is only a couple of Khans (Cynthia and Michelle, a.k.a. Michelle Yeoh) from having the best cast ever in a HK action heroine film. Unlike some (hello, Avenging Quartet), it lives up to that.

Dir: Lau Chan + Chin-Ku Lu
Star: Moon Lee, Yukari Oshima, Chi Yeung Wong, Sibelle Hu

Sword and Sorceress XVII, edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  By

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

sword17This is another volume of editor Bradley’s long-running Sword and Sorceress anthology series. Published in 2000, it collects 21 tales by, as usual, a mix of both newcomers to the series and veteran contributors. I’ve encountered stories by at least four of the writers here –Vera Nazarian, Deborah Wheeler, Diana L. Paxson, and Patricia Duffy Novak- in earlier volumes.

Of the stories here, Nazarian’s “Caelqua’s Spring” was far and away the weakest. It has some beautiful passages, but ultimately the world-building is lacking, I couldn’t relate to the main characters, and the plot never gelled enough for me to be able to really have a handle on the premise. The whole thing struck me as very much an exercise in vaguely New Age-style mysticism, without a lot of content. (This author’s “The Stone Face, the Giant, and the Paradox” also exhibited tendencies that way in some passages; but there, the story was well-told enough to compensate for this. That’s not the case here, IMO. All in all, it’s a very inferior work to her earlier “Beauty and His Beast.”)

To various degrees, though, I liked all of the other stories. Jenn Reese’s “Valkyrie” draws nicely on Scandinavian mythology (which I can appreciate, being of Viking stock myself) in a story that assumes that the myths are real. Novak’s “Luz” and Cynthia Ward’s poignant “The Tears of the Moon” are set in fantasy worlds where pagan goddesses really exist; the former is a particularly thought-provoking tale. “Free Passage” by Mary Catelli features Amazons (but not all Amazons are nice or honest people!) and an herbalist’s quest for an herb that will save her people. We have a coming-of-age story of sorts, with a sorceress’ apprentice as protagonist, in ElizaBeth (no, that’s not a typo!) Gilligan’s “Demon Calling.” In “Hell Hath No Fury….” Lee Martindale suggests that even demons are entitled to be treated fairly and honestly. (This is one of the few stories in the series with a humorous tone.) Dave Coleman-Reese (Jenn Reese’s husband, and one of three male writers represented in this volume) contributes perhaps the deepest story in this book, the outstanding “Memories of the Sea.”

Another favorite was “My Sister’s Song” by T. Borregaard, a graduate student in archaeology whose writing is flavored by that interest. This is one story that actually has no magical or fantasy element at all, though the setting is exotic, the narrator’s cultural environment unfamiliar to most readers, and the denouement really unique and unusual; it’s straight historical fiction, a fictionalized re-telling (with invented characters –though there really were warrior women among tribes like the Heptakometes) of a real incident in the resistance of the indigenous tribes around the Black Sea to Rome’s attempt to conquer them.

Charles Laing’s “Weapons at War” is short and light, a humorous gag involving sentient weapons bickering with each other; but it’s meant to be short and light, and that’s fine. And Carrie Vaughn’s “The Haunting of Princess Elizabeth” is neither fantasy (it’s set in Tudor England) nor endowed with a heroine who’s either warrior or sorceress, although she’s certainly a strong-willed, tough-minded young woman; but it’s a good story, probably best calculated to appeal to British history buffs. To be sure, history doesn’t record that the ghost of her mother Anne Boleyn (later joined by the shade of Katherine Howard, and eventually of Jane Grey) watched over and counseled the young Elizabeth until her accession to the throne –but the Elizabeth depicted here didn’t tell anybody, and nobody but she could see them.

Some of the other ten stories, from the amount of back-story or the complexity of the world-building, read like they could be parts of a story cycle. For instance, sorceress Cynthia in Dorothy J. Heydt’s “An Exchange of Favors” (set in an ancient Greek milieu where the Olympian deities are real, and intervene in mortal affairs as selfishly and capriciously as in the legends) could easily be, and maybe is, a series character. A number of these ten are emotionally complex, powerful and evocative stories, on a par with the gems in the previous anthologies I’ve read in the series; the prevalence of that caliber of story in these volumes is a tribute to Bradley’s skill as an editor. Often it’s difficult to make comments on these without spoilers. But I can say that after you read Cynthia McQuillen’s “Deep as Rivers,” you won’t view trolls with the race prejudice you did before.

Diana L. Paxson characteristically sets her “Lady of Flame” in Dark Ages Scandinavia (where the demi-deities of mythology are real) and uses her knowledge of actual early northern European cultures to create a rich cross-cultural narrative. Almost all our protagonists in these selections are magically gifted –healers, conjurors, scholars, etc.– but Blaze in Bunnie Bessell’s “The Summons” is a fighter, called upon to make a significant moral choice in the deepest tradition of serious fiction. Probably the most poignant story here is “The Price of the Sword” by Kim Fryer –which, in our world of post-traumatic stress disorder and addictive violence, speaks to us symbolically of the psychic costs of warfare, even if it’s waged with guns and bombs instead of swords. Lisa Silverthorn’s “Soul Dance” also deserves mention here as another standout and favorite. But all of them are good, and none deserve to be slighted, though considerations of space and time force me to.

If you’re a fan of swords and sorcery, strong heroines, fantasy in general, or just well-written traditional short fiction with a plot, you won’t go wrong with this series, IMO!

Editor: Marion Zimmer Bradley
Publisher: DAW, available through Amazon, currently only as a printed book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Africa

  By

★★½
“Supermodel goes wild.”

africaKinda dumb, to say the least, yet not entirely reprehensible. Supermodel Victoria Young (Potgieter) is under a lot of stress, having just signed a huge new contract, and to clear her head decides to take a drive across the South African veldt. A close encounter with a truck propels her car off the road, and the dazed Vicky wanders off in the wrong direction, away into the bush. Her manager/boyfriend Josh Sinclair (Wise) is left to co-ordinate search and rescue, though the police seem to think it’s just some kind of publicity stunt, and in the cut-throat world of modelling, there is no shortage of those seeking to exploit Vicky’s absence for their own ends. Meanwhile, by the time she regains her full faculties, she has no clue how to get back to civilization, and has to figure out how to survive a hostile environment. Plus, as time goes on, fend for herself, finding food – as well as avoiding becoming food for the local fauna.

I could certainly have done without the entire urban shenanigans, which appears to have strayed in from a bad 90’s Lifetime TV movie. Much more interesting is watching Vicky disintegrate from a pristine beauty, into someone who has to rip the leg off a half-scavenged carcass in order to eat, in between bouts of hiding up trees while a pride of lions takes a nap below. Some of the early sequences border on supermodel torture-porn, for example, as she agonizingly pulls a thorn from her foot, even though it is kinda obvious that the actress was never in the same scene with anything larger than a monkey. Similarly, the sequence where she pulls a grub out of a rotten tree, and cooks it on a stick like a disgusting living S’more, would have been more impactful had it then continued, unflinchingly to show Vicky chowing down on it. Though I did kinda snigger at the cut instead, to a rival model throwing up in the bathroom.

I’m not sure how realistic it is intended to be: I suspect that drinking raw water from a water-hole, in which various wild animals have been trampling [and, likely doing other things], would be a fast way to the emergency room. It might have been nice had they provided some rationale for her survival skills, even a token one such as her growing up on a farm; if you actually dumped Kate Moss into the middle of Africa, the real outcome is likely going to be a bit different. I did like how Vicky’s survival was entirely dependent on her own actions – there was no helicopter flying in at the end, as a deus ex machina. However, it would have been greatly improved by having the courage to focus purely on the “Woman vs. Wild” aspect, as the rest of it is mostly nonsense, which adds very little to proceedings.

Dir: Paul Matthews
Star: Dorette Potgieter, Greg Wise, Patrick Bergin, Elizabeth Berkley

Legend of the Red Reaper

  By

★★
“Putting the ‘myth’ in myth-takes.”

E9_DB9_A2_F463_F4_E83974065_EB26_B06842This received a certain level of notoriety before even being made, after Legendary Pictures rejected the script, citing a whole raft of (entirely legitimate) reasons, yet also saying, “While I am personally drawn to the presence of a female action hero, it is currently a tough sell with the less than stellar way Sucker Punch was received.” Creator Cardinal went public with the rejection email’s content: seems like a good way to ensure no-one will work with you in Hollywood again, but that’s her decision. However, the film did eventually get made, albeit (or so the story goes) only after a production company embezzled 40% of the money, she worked as a pro wrestler to raise funds, a post-production company lost her footage, and Uwe Boll bailed her out. You can only admire her dogged determination to complete the project she wrote, produced, directed, starred in and edited. Unfortunately, when I say “you can only admire”, the emphasis is on “only”, because the end result isn’t very good.

Interesting Boll became involved, since there’s more than a hint of Bloodrayne, another film series of his. Except, rather than an immortal half-vampire redhead heroine, hacking and slashing those who created her, this is about an immortal half-demon redhead heroine, hacking and slashing those who created her. In this case, it’s Aella (Cardinal), the offspring of a human mother (Swenson) and the demon Ganesh (Eddy), who was sold as a slave to the latter by Mom, only to escape later and become a Reaper, part of a clan who protect humanity from these demons. She has fallen in love with a human prince, Eris (Mackey), who is betrothed to another, and also has to handle getting porcupined with arrows by hunters who want her blood, which has magical properties. Though not nearly as magical as Ganesh’s, and it turns out it’s the only thing keeping her mother alive. She’s running out fast, especially after donating some of her precious stockpile to Aella – albeit with some nasty side-effects, triggering an internal struggle between the two halves of her ancestry. Still, the solution is pretty simple: head for the best source of the blood. That would be Ganesh himself.

It’s all over complex, not very interesting, and plagued by just about every faux pas you have ever seen in low-budget cinema. Excessive voice-over? Check. Gratuitous use of slo-mo and strobe effects? Double check. Thoroughly unconvincing day-for-night photography? In copious quantities. I suspect Cardinal’s “Jill of all trades” approach worked against the film: when you’re wearing all the hats, who’s left to take a step back and apply a coolly critical eye to proceedings? That’s really what the film needed, and at 101 minutes, trimming would have helped as well. It strikes me that, if you combined the production values of this and the action choreography from Warrioress, you’d have a good crack at something impressive. Although both demonstrate that passion isn’t enough by itself, Warrioress was at least outstanding in the combat department. Here, there’s much banging of swords together, and little else, leaving the end result all but forgettable.

Dir: Tara Cardinal
Star: Tara Cardinal, Ray Eddy, David Mackey, Eliza Swenson

Point of Honour, by Madeline E. Robins

  By

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

“I lost my virginity. I lost my innocence. The world seems to regard this as the same thing as honor, but I do not.”
–Sarah Tolerance, Point of Honour

pointOver the last several decades, the detective genre has come to be graced by quite a few brave, gun-packing female P.I.s, who can handle the rough stuff on the mean streets of the urban jungle, as well as the more cerebral arts of observation and deduction. Robins’ Sarah Tolerance is one of this sisterhood, but with a key difference: her beat is the London of 1810, and the guns she packs are one-shot flintlocks –so it’s practical to wear a sword for backup, and luckily her brother’s now-deceased fencing master (with whom she ran away years ago) taught her to use one very capably. The term P.I. isn’t in use in her world; she bills herself as an “agent of inquiry,” a profession she’s created for herself.

For most serious readers, any mention of the Regency period immediately conjures the thought of Jane Austen, who introduced so many of us to it, and directly or indirectly influenced just about every later writer who employed that setting. Robins is one of them; she calls her predecessor “one of the sharpest, funniest writers in the English language,” and tips a hat to her with the opening sentence here: “It is a truth universally acknowledged….” But the rest of that sentence lets us know immediately that her picture of the Regency world encompasses a much broader and darker canvas than Austen’s: this is not only a world of aristocrats and landed gentry, but of harlots and bawds, pickpockets and Bow Street Runners, and a world where sinister things can go on. And where Austen’s heroines might push the envelope of social conventions a bit (Lizzie Bennett, for instance, is smarter and more outspoken than many males then –or now– are really comfortable with), Sarah will outright defy them. The typical Austen heroine doesn’t pack (and use) weapons, wear male-style breeches and ride a horse astride rather than side-saddle, nor live in a cottage out back of her aunt’s high-end brothel and have a male prostitute for a friend.

This book is a bit of a challenge to classify. It’s definitely a mystery (and, before long, a murder mystery); and one with an indebtedness to Dashiel Hammet that I recognized even before reading Robins’ mention of him in the same sentence with Austen –which has to be the first time in history that pair was juxtaposed! But it also has a claim to be science fiction (if you classify alternate-world yarns as SF), because this is a slightly alternate Regency England, where the regent is Queen Charlotte. (Robins explains the few other minor differences in her “Note on History, and of Thanks.”) This isn’t, as some reviewers have supposed, a pointless quirk; it plays into the fabric of Tory vs. Whig political infighting that’s crucial to the plot. (In writing alternate-world fiction, the diverging premise has to be something that could plausibly have happened. That test is met here, since in this world Prince George’s marriage to a Roman Catholic wasn’t kept secret, and was wildly unpopular with commoners and ruling class alike; and there was ample precedent in other countries for royal women to hold regencies, while England itself had had a few ruling Queens.) It brings to life a setting so nearly like real-world Regency England, though, that it qualifies in my book as historical fiction. (Some people have apparently classified it as a “romance,” but it doesn’t follow the conventions of the romance genre as the book trade would define that.)

If classifying it could be a challenge, though, rating it wasn’t. I really like this period of history (as a fictional setting –I wouldn’t have liked to have lived in it!), with its more formal manners and speech, the slower pace of a world attuned to horses and written messages rather than cars and cell phones, the grace of a lifestyle that’s not yet complicated and coarsened by high technology. Added to the appeal of the setting is that of the central character. Sarah is a wonderful, well-realized creation: not perfect, but principled; kind, generous, honest, smart, brave, capable; no bully, but well able to hold her own in a fight –in short, just about everything I admire in a heroine. Robins delivers a page-turning plot, spiced with some action scenes, centering around a mystery that’s really challenging (I figured out most of it slightly ahead of the big reveal, but not all of it!), and does a good job of tying one plot strand, that might have seemed pointless to some readers, to the main plot in a brilliant way. Her style is pitch-perfect for the setting, with a bit of a 19th-century flavor that’s not exactly like the original, but still lets you know you aren’t reading something dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, nor limited to a 200-word vocabulary. She captures a lot of the authentic idioms and flavor of actual Regency speech, and provides enough description to give the writing a “you are there” quality.

Obviously, her treatment of sexual matters is franker than Austen’s, not shying away from the fact that this was a period with a gender-based double standard that stinks as badly as the manure and sewage in the streets, where just one of the king’s sons had no less than 10 out-of-wedlock kids and London alone had some 50,000 prostitutes (by the century’s end, it would be 100,000). But there’s no explicit sex here, and despite Sarah’s “fallen woman” status and sexual choices we might disagree with, she definitely comes across as a woman who takes sex seriously, who respects herself and others, and doesn’t stoop to exploitative or lewd behavior; nothing she’s done or does here makes us disrespect her. As far as bad language goes, there’s some, as there actually was in the speech of that day; not a plethora of it, and I’d guess mostly not too rough, though I can’t tell. This copy was bought used, and it turns out a previous owner used a dark pen to blot out most of the cuss words. (Sigh! As a writer myself, though I personally feel that usually the less bad language a book has, the better, if a writer chooses to put it in, I think his/her choice should be respected enough to let readers read it as it was intended to be, and make their own evaluations of it.)

Every time I read in this book, I was glued to the page; I’d have read it non-stop if I could have, and as it was finished it in just a bit over two weeks, which for me is a pretty quick read, indicative both of its interest level and its smooth flow. I’d love to see it adapted as a movie, provided it was done faithfully (though Hollywood’s track record for faithful adaptations of books isn’t great)..

Note: There’s some bad language here (as there actually was in the speech of that time), but not much of it. I’m guessing it’s not too rough, but I can’t say for sure –I read this in a used copy, and a previous owner had used a dark pen to blot out most of the cuss words!

Author: Madeleine E. Robins
Publisher: Tor, available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

The Last Survivors

  By

★★★½
“Oregon, after the rain…”

lastsurvivorsThe Pacific North-West is now a blasted, bone-dry desert, in which a few survivors eke out a precarious living, drawing what water they can from their wells. Intent on taking over the entire area is Carson (Gries), who bullies landowners into joining up with his posse, so he can take their water, or simply fleeing – and kills those who won’t comply. Hiding out is Kendal (Richardson) and her sick brother, Dean (Stewart – seriously, who calls their kid “Boo Boo”?), who needs lots of water to help his failing kidneys cope. She is seeking a distributor cap, so the plane they have stashed in the barn can be used to fly them to safety, but will she find that before Carson figures out their “deserted” farm actually holds both them and a functioning well?

There are a lot of strong elements here, but they are counter-balanced by a number of weaknesses. To get the latter out of the way first, Dean’s character arc is painfully obvious; five minutes in, Chris turned to me and said, “You know he’s going to die, right?” Also, the kid who lives next-door, Alby (Charles), doesn’t serve much purpose at all, until the very end, when he simply steps into Dean’s shoes as someone who needs Kendal’s protection. And speaking of Kendal, she is remarkably well-kept, considering she’s living in a world where every drop of water is a precious asset to be conserved. Long, luscious locks, apparently shampooed daily, fresh-faced complexion, etc. In terms of styling, Kendal needs to be much more Charlize Theron in Fury Road, and less Aeon Flux.

While these negatives are more or less severe, they don’t outweigh positives that are equally apparent, and greater in number. Kendal is an unrepentant bad-ass, prepared to do absolutely whatever it takes, for her and her brother to survive, whether it’s with her pump-action shotgun or a katana – the latter seems to be preferred on the video sleeves, although it’s actually the former she uses more often. The almost complete lack of romance, often seen in YA novels and films, is very refreshing; there’s no hero over whom Kendal goes all moist-eyed, and the only real love shown is for her sibling. The supporting cast is very good too, highlighted by Gries, who seems about a million miles from his best-known character, Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite. The rest of his crew are little less scary, and there’s a nice, albeit very minor supporting turn from horror legend Barbara Crampton. The Mojave Desert stands in for drought-stricken Oregon well, with the photography making heavy and effective, use of sepia filters.

It is a bit of a steady climb through the foothills, before things start to kick off, so you do need to be a little patient. However, the payoff is largely worth it, even if the final batter, between Kendal and Curtis’s daughter, Brooke, leaves a little to be desired, mostly because Brooke has never been established as much of a credible antagonist beforehand. Like the rest of the film’s flaws, I can’t say it damaged our enjoyment beyond repair; there’s still plenty to enjoy, and Richardson carries the film with an assurance beyond her years.

Dir: Thomas S. Hammock
Star: Haley Lu Richardson, Booboo Stewart, Jon Gries, Max Charles
a.k.a. The Well

War Witch

  By

★★★
“Definitely not Sabrina.”

This was originally titled Rebelle, perhaps a slightly better title than something that sounds as if it comes from a Norwegian death-metal album. Perhaps the change was to avoid confusion? A quick Google Images search for the original name shows you that was also the title for Brave in some territories. Safe to say, this is nothing like that. It’s the worthy, rather than anything else, tale of a young girl, Komona (Mwanza), who is kidnapped from her African village by anti-government forces at the age of 12, and forced to join their army. Her apparent supernatural ability to “see” government forces brings her to the attention of their leader, Great Tiger (Mwinga), who appoints her as his “war witch.” But on discovering the fate of the previous three appointees – a clue, they didn’t retire with full pensions – she deserts, along with an albino colleague, Magicien (Kanyinda). Their happiness is short-lived, as their commanding officer (Bastien) recaptures Komona and turns her into his concubine, right up until a nasty trick involving a piece of fruit and a razor-blade.warwitch

A few things stand out. Firstly, the casual approach to everyday violence, which seems to numb all those who perpetrate it, including Komona. But it can still be chilling, most notably Komona’s understated description of her uncle: “Every time he would cut the meat with his machete, it would remind him of what happened to his family… I will not tell you what happened to his family. Because, if I do, you won’t listen anymore.” Yikes. There’s also the way in which the supernatural permeates things, and no-one seems too bothered. As well as the whole “war witch” thing, which is as bizarre as Ronald Reagan using an astrologer, Komona sees the ghosts of her dead parents, and one of the reasons for deserting is so she can give them the proper burial and send them to rest. Magicien makes and carries “grigri”, talismans designed to protect him, and when he seeks a white rooster to offer as a dowry, the price of information on where to find it is one such amulet. Magic, it appears, is everywhere. As, apparently are albinos: I think there are more shown in this film than in every other movie I’ve ever seen, combined.

It’s very restrained on just about every level. In some ways that works, since it avoid the obvious histrionics you expect from the subject matter. But I have to say, I found Mwanza’s performance – or, rather, her non-performance – extremely flat and distancing. It’s hard to care about all the death on display, when it seems the central character is unbothered by it. Nguyen doesn’t explain some significant aspects either, such as the “coltan” which Great Tiger has his forces mine, is short for “columbite–tantalite”, an important ore used in electronics. Demand for this in the West is among the causes of conflict in the region. Would have been nice to find this out from the film, rather than Wikipedia. My over-riding reaction to the film was one of relief that I don’t live there, mixed with an appreciation for the the things we take for granted, like running water and a lack of roaming militia groups. This is a glimpse into another world; it’s just not one I have much interest in visiting again.

Dir: Kim Nguyen
Star: Rachel Mwanza, Serge Kanyinda, Alain Lino Mic Eli Bastien, Mizinga Mwinga

When Taekwondo Strikes

  By

★★★½
“The Angela Strikes Back”

7242870.3There’s more than a hint of Hapkido here, with many of the same cast, and more less the same thirties setting, with Korea again laboring under the yoke of Japanese occupation, etc. Things kick off when Jin (Wong) seeks sanctuary from the occupying forces in a local Catholic church. The Japanese soldiers rush in, but get demolished by Uncle Li (Rhee), a rebel topping their wanted list who has been hiding out as the priest’s gardener. Jin and Li depart, along with the priest’s niece (Winton), but the priest himself remains, and is captured and tortured for information about Li’s whereabouts. Wang Lin Ching (Mao) is drawn in when Li asks her to check on the cleric, causing her to become targeted by the Japanese too. An attempt to rescue the priest goes wrong, ending with Li being captured, and the others having to flee Korea for mainland China. However, that may not be far enough, and when the Japanese figure out where they are, they us Li as bait to lure Wang and the others out of hiding.

Despite being considered the father of American Tae Kwon Do, and a good friend of Bruce Lee, this was Rhee’s only released film (rumors of another have been heard). Seems a bit of a shame, as he makes his presence felt here, particularly toward the end. For action heroine fans, the focus will naturally be on Mao, and we’ll get to her shortly. However, we shouldn’t forget Winton, also in her only film role, who makes an immediate impression as an martial arts trained nun  Going by her clothing, anyway; the film is kinda loose on Catholic ritual. Man, The Sound of Music would have been so much cooler, if Julie Andrews had only known kung-fu…

As for Mao, she has a couple of absolutely stellar fight scenes, including a church brawl [after the soldiers realize she isn’t Catholic, because she didn’t cross herself on entering!], a battle in a forest, and the final fight. However, in terms of her action, things perhaps peak when she returns to her family restaurant to find a long-haired Sammo Hung, playing a Japanese henchman, roughing up her mother, along with his goons. The last is embedded below – it should start at the correct time, but if not, 39:20 is where you want to be. I just love the way she casually flicks her pigtail round the back just before things kick off, as if to say, “I am serious Angela Mao. This is serious business.”

The one thing that stops the film from getting a seal of approval is a disappointing slump in the middle, after the (fairly lame) effort to rescue the priest. Nothing much happens for what feels like a good half-hour, and that’s a shame, since the action elsewhere is both copious and often excellent. Many fights are virtually the equal of any Bruce Lee film, not least because there are half a dozen excellent martial artists involved here, rather than Bruce being far and away the best. This adds a real sense of balance to proceedings, and if you’re looking for an introduction to the movies of Angela Mao, this is certainly recommended.

Dir: Huang Feng
Star: Angela Mao, Jhoon Rhee, Carter Wong, Anne Winton

Serena and the Ratts

  By

★★
“Look what the RATTs dragged in…”

serenaA somewhat jumbled mix, this sounds like a film about a punk-rock band but certainly isn’t. It actually starts off playing as a WW2 version of The Terminator, then morphs in the middle to become a mongrel crossbreed of Leon and Nikita, more or less abandoning the whole time-travel aspect entirely. The reasons for this do eventually become clear, yet still leave you feeling like the first third of the film was an entire waste of effort. To begin in the middle, Serena (Marie, who as you can see from the left, even looks like early Anne Parillaud) is a young woman, plucked off the streets by the Boss (Thomson) and raised in his image to become an assassin. She and her boyfriend, Leonard (Neal) are given a very strange mission. A group of scientists have discovered how to manipulate the space-time continuum, allowing them to travel in time, and they have sent someone back to kill Hitler as a child. A counter-group, the RATTs – Researchers Against Time Travel – believe this will just make things worse i.e. allowing someone else, more competent, to rise instead, so through Boss, hire Serena and Leonard to kill the assassin. So how do you stop someone, when those behind them have the ability to control time itself, and counter every move?

By coincidence, I watched this the same week as Predestination, and that film demonstrates how time-travel, altering past effects and the resulting paradoxes, should be handled. Here, the film never gets a firm grasp on it, and nor does the budget allow for anything approaching the credible depiction of a previous era that is necessary. The performances are all over the place too, mostly under-emoted and flat, though there’s also the worst apparent attempt at a British accent I’ve heard in years: Dick Van Dyke snorts derisively from the corner. [Look, I know we make great villains and all, but if you don’t have someone who can do it properly, and the Britishness isn’t necessary to the plot, I have to wonder: why bother?] As noted, there’s a sudden switch in focus, and it’s quite jarring, although I suppose it kinda makes sense for a story (nominally) about time-travel to have a fractured structure. Here again though, it doesn’t add anything to the plot, and a more linear retelling might perhaps have allowed the makers to build more empathy with Serena.

It wouldn’t have impacted the plot much, since it’s only at the end, when the Boss does the whole “let me tell you the entire plan for no good reason” thing – a staple of movie characters since early Bond flicks – that it makes sense. However, please note the sharp distinction between “sense” and “compelling viewing”, since the latter is never even approached here. Technically sound, with some interesting camerawork and a decent soundtrack, this remains just marginally passable as entertainment, mostly thanks to a script in need of at least two more rewrites.

Dir: Kevin James Barry
Star: Evalena Marie, Jonathan Thomson, Dave Neal, Marek Tarlowski