Category: Review

Werewolf Woman

  By

★★★
“Hungry like the wolf”

wolfwomanWhile there have been plenty of female vampires over the year, the number of female werewolves is a lot smaller. There’s the wonderful Ginger Snaps (and its not as wonderful sequels), the forgettable Cursed, TV series Bitten, and most infamously of all, Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf.  However, perhaps the closest relative here is a little off to one side: the remake of Cat People, made by Paul Schrader in 1982. It is not dissimilar in tone and approach, both taking a firm, if somewhat hysterical psychosexual tone to proceedings, and Giorgio Moroder’s musical score sounds like the synthesized one here. Both have heroines whose transformations are triggered largely by sexual excitement, and who eventually find a man happy to love them for who they are – only for that happiness to be short-lived. Of course, this one being grindhouse, the reason for its abrupt termination is her boyfriend being stabbed to death while trying to stop her from being raped, which triggers a rampage of revenge that justifies its inclusion on this site.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here. It’s also a sexual assault which triggers the psychological problems for Daniela Neseri  (Borel). The psychological trauma and Daniela’s obsession with a family legend involving an ancestor who supposedly turned into a predatory animal, form a potent combination, and she develops a deeply-held belief that she also changes into a wolf at the full moon. That doesn’t appear to be the case, but it still brings tragedy down on the family, when Daniela gets all hot and bothered after seeing her sister (Lassander) making love to her husband. The resulting carnage get her committed to a psychiatric hospital by her aristocratic father (Carraro), only for Daniela to escape after an encounter with the facility’s local nymphomaniac. After some more brutal murders, which baffle the local police, she finally meets her soulmate, who works as a stuntman. And this takes us back to where this paragraph came in.

It’s pure exploitation cinema, not skimping at all on the nudity, and with a healthy amount of gore as well – what else would you expect from a director who, the same year, gave us Deported Women of the SS Special Section? This isn’t quite as sleazy, though certainly is not family viewing, and is well enough made to make for an interesting viewing experience for broad-minded spectators. Borel has a nicely lupine quality about her, and even if the transformation sequences [most notably the opening dream sequence] leaves a bit to be desired, the various elements – the heroine, her family, the cops who gradually realize the connection between the corpses – are tied together with a script that has had more effort put into it than you might think. They truly don’t make them like this any more.

Dir: Rino Di Silvestro
Star: Annik Borel, Howard Ross, Dagmar Lassander, Tino Carraro
a.k.a. La lupa Mannara or The Legend of the Wolf Woman

Winter’s Bone

  By

★★★½
“A grim fairy-tale.”

Ashlee Thompson as Ashlee Dolly (left), Jennifer Lawrence as Ree Dolly (centre) and Isaiah Stone as Sonny Dolly (right)Not perhaps our traditional fare, but there’s a good case to be made for its inclusion, with a strong, single-minded heroine who is prepared to do whatever it takes, including putting herself at considerable risk, to keep her family together. Certainly, you can see why Lawrence went on to stardom, and knowing her subsequently as Katniss Everdeen makes going back to her breakthrough role interesting. For you can see echoes of Katniss’s steely determination in 17-year-old Ree Dolly, trying to cope with a mentally-ill mother, two young siblings and an absent father. She’s just about coping, until she discovers that her father has skipped out on an impending court date for cooking meth, and put up the family home as collateral for his bail bond. If Ree can’t track him down, the bail company will be able to seize the family’s property and turf them out. Tracking him down is going to require Ree poking her nose into some very unpleasant corners of rural Missouri, where some intimidating characters have good reason for the missing man to remain that way.

It’s a disturbing glimpse into a world that seems barely part of America. I haven’t been so unsettled by a film’s location for a long time – the only comparable movie I can think of, is the East European gypsy slum in Import/Export, which looked more like a bomb site than a functioning residential area.  Outside the natural surroundings of the Ozark Mountains, beauty is rare here; happiness, even rarer: survival is a full-time occupation, leaving no time for anything else. Outside of Ree, and her young sister and brother, who are too little to know different, there is hardly anything approaching a sympathetic character here. They virtually all pose a threat of some kind to Ree’s mission, and she has to navigate her way through them as if they were wolf-infested woods, knowing the right time to push, and the right time to back down. Except, even Ree isn’t fallible, which is how she ends up on the floor of a barn, beaten to a bloody pulp. Yet that’s when help arrives, from an unexpected source, and I guess, almost everyone lives happily after. Or as happy as possible, given the circumstances.

Lawrence is great, convincing and sympathetic, resilient and focused, a heroine who is credible without being incredible. Indeed, all the performances hit the required spots, to a degree where you wonder if Granik simply put out a casting call for meth dealers. However, the script isn’t as convincing, relying too much on people who have behaved one way, suddenly switching tack, for no obviously apparent reason beyond it being necessary for them to do so. It’s not exactly light entertainment either, and if you’re expecting flashy set-pieces, definitely look elsewhere. Falls more into the category of films which are to be respected, rather than enjoyed, yet Lawrence’s portrayal takes the viewer along, on a trip into the heart of Missouri darkness.

Dir: Debra Granik
Star: Jennifer Lawrence, John Hawkes, Lauren Sweetser, Garret Dillahunt

Dakiti, by E. J. Fisch

  By

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

dakitiThis series opener is a rousing science-fiction action adventure yarn, far better crafted than today’s average first novel. (I’m guessing that Transcendence Publishing is a real small press, not simply a printing service for self-publishing authors; but in either case, Fisch has taken her craft seriously and given readers a polished work.) The premise appealed to my liking for action-oriented heroines, so I took the opportunity to try out the series by downloading this novel when it was offered free for a day. (I’ll definitely be buying a print copy!)

We have here a tale of interplanetary intrigue, set in a far-future galaxy widely colonized by humans, whose far-flung settlement has brought them into contact with various alien races. Our main series characters belong to one of these, the humanoid Haphezians. They’re not really “super-human,” but they are taller and more muscular than Earth humans, with strength and endurance to match; and with two stomachs, they only need to eat every few days. (Otherwise, they’re physically much like humans, except for more vividness and variation in eye and hair color.) In this novel, we also meet another alien race, the reptilian Sardons. Characters from all three races will interact here, in a galaxy that’s riven by tensions, and sometimes open warfare.

Much of human space is ruled by a powerful Federation. But some fringe human planets like Tantal maintain their independence; and as in the Star Wars universe, the Federation faces resistance from a guerrilla insurgency that has elite fighters, the Nosti, who have special telekinetic powers (unlike the Jedi, theirs are derived from injections every ten years with an illegal psi-enhancing drug). The Haphezian monarchy faces a terrorist insurgency of its own, called Solaris; and some years ago fought a war with the Sardons, who sought to end the Haphezian monopoly on the caura extract trade. Ziva and Aroska serve the Haphezian Crown as agents of the HSP, Haphezian Special Police; and Haphezians are much in demand from other, less combat-capable, peoples as allies or as mercenary soldiers. That’s what’s brought hereditary Tantali governor Enrike Saiffe and his son Jayden on a diplomatic mission to Haphez near the novel’s beginning. Meanwhile, there’s a plot afoot that Ziva and her team will have to discover, and it’s a nasty one.

All of this political background is quickly sketched here in the process of narrating swiftly-moving events, without noticeable info-dumps (I expect it to be developed more in the succeeding books). Haphezian culture is suggested a bit more fully than that of the other two races involved here, but detailed world building isn’t the author’s strong point. Rather, her strong points are tight plotting, smooth and direct prose style that does what she wants it to, well-written action scenes (and a lot of them!), a conflict against a foe whose aims and methods are definitely evil, though that doesn’t mean that we think the Haphezian regime necessarily resembles goodness incarnate; and above all, character development and interrelationships between characters. (We’re not talking about romantic relationships here, but human relationships –and Haphezians are as “human” as you and I in those respects, regardless of how many stomachs they have.) Fisch throws some twists and turns into her plot (one of these I saw coming –but the satisfaction of guessing rightly is part of the fun!) and the last chapters especially are suspenseful right up to the end (reading these, I was glued to the screen!).

Ziva Payvan is a complex, round and dynamic character, embodying more than physical strength, good aim with a gun, and quick reflexes –though she’s got all of those, in enough measure to make her a VERY formidable fighter in any combat situation; you definitely don’t ever want her as an opponent! She’s an intelligent, layered person with a capacity for strong feelings, an inner moral code, and a lot of loyalty; but she’s not necessarily likeable. A product of a rough childhood and adolescence and of a dysfunctional family, she harbors some secrets and has made some bad choices, one of them really dark. And her government has trained her, and used her, as a professional assassin for State-sanctioned killings, with attendant toll on her softer feelings. She’s also abrasive, arrogant, and hot-tempered. But Fisch manages to make her a person you care about.

Aroska Tarbic is also a well-developed character, a strong, tough male well able to handle himself in combat, and with no problems about fighting shoulder-to-shoulder alongside of a woman. (Commendably, Fisch shows both male and female characters routinely taking fighting responsibility, and handling it well.) Indeed, all of the important characters here come to life in the author’s words. Many of the situations and scenes here are powerfully emotionally evocative.

One aspect of the premise here is problematical: Haphez is a highly-developed, tech-savvy planet with a culture that undoubtedly boasts centuries of development. It seems implausible that they wouldn’t have developed a more efficient judicial system, and a more efficient way of carrying out capital punishment, than they apparently have here. We can say the same for a few key details of the plotting that don’t stand strenuous examination too well. And hard-SF buffs will quibble about the impossibility of real-time interplanetary radio communication between planets that are light-years apart, given the relatively slow speed of sound waves. (In Ursula LeGuin’s fictional Hainish universe, an invention called the “ansible” eliminates this problem –we’re not told how, it just does!– but as far as we know, Haphez doesn’t have the ansible.) None of these factors kept me from really liking the book, though! I absolutely plan to continue with the series.

Note: Bad language here (strictly of the d- and h-word sort) is minimal, and there’s no sex, explicit or implied. Very romance-phobic readers can approach this tale without fear.

Author: E. J. Fisch
Publisher: Transcendence Publishing, available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Lady Avenger

  By

★★½
“Big hair, big sunglesses and a little budget.”

ladyavengerDeCoteau gave us one of the all-time worst GWG films, in American Rampage. Made the same year, 1989, this is surprisingly… Well, while I wouldn’t go so far as to say “good,” it looks like Citizen Kane beside Rampage; let’s settle on “surprisingly semi-competent.” The heroine, Maggie (Sanders), is serving time in jail, when she is let out on furlough to attend the funeral of her murdered brother. Maggie escapes, and sets about tracking down those responsible, working her way up the chain of command, wielding everything from a baseball bat to a flamethrower(!), and with a fetching line in 80’s wraparound shades, which she wears even when exploring a dimly-lit warehouse. Hey, it was the eighties, man – the decade that gave us Miami Vice! How you looked was at least as important as what you did… The trail of those responsible ends up a good deal closer to home than is comfortable; the character in question is not exactly unexpected, so that doesn’t count as much of a spoiler.

There’s probably only one person in the cast you’ll recognize, and you have to be a B-movie aficionado even for that – scream queen Bauer (under her name at the time, Michelle McLellan) shows up as Maggie’s two-timing friend, who delivers a copious amount of entirely gratuitous nudity and lingerie, to liven things up. Sanders was the Playboy Playmate of the Month for January 1990, which tells you just about all you need to know regarding her acting ability. Wisely, the script opts not to test the limits of her thespian ability, giving her a bit of low-tier emoting early on, as she gets told of her brother’s demise and attends her funeral, before she heads into stone-faced machine of vengeance mode. The villains are a curiously preppy-looking bunch of drug-dealers, all white, mostly with nice teeth, and many wouldn’t seem out of place at a frat party.  Still, they all go down like ninepins, though the action is of widely varying quality; some of the car chases are pretty good, yet on the other hand, the less said about the grenade sequence, the better.

Given how much I was braced for something irredeemably bad when I discovered who had directed this, I will confess to being pleasantly surprised. This is, however, at least as much a result of my low expectations, as any reflection of the film’s quality, and you’d be well-advised to follow suit. If you’re looking for a slice of cheesy, straight-to-video 80’s goodness, from a time in history not long after the question “VHS or Beta?” was still being asked, and with a lurid sleeve to match, this and a couple of beers will represent a throwback to a more innocent era. The trailer below offers a perfect appetizer for it.

Dir: David DeCoteau
Star: Peggy Sanders, Tony Josephs, Jacolyn Leeman, Michelle Bauer

Blood Soaked

  By

★★
“Zombie Women of the S.S.”

bloodsoakedIt’s nice to see a horror movie which has women on both sides: not just the “final girl” trope, but as the entirely deranged pair of antagonists. This is equality at work, folks! In this case, the villains are sisters Sadie (Grendle) and Katie (Derryberry), who were apparently left orphaned by the unexpected death of their father who was… Well, if I’d to guess, I’d say he was trying to continue the work of Nazi scientists, with the aim of creating an army of undead slaves through the use of a resurrection serum, who can then be used to bring about the Fourth Reich. I’m kinda assuming this, from the use of copious public-domain Nazi footage during the opening credits, and the swastikas hanging around their desert bunker. Meanwhile, peppy student Piper (Wilder) is starting at college, and before long is exploring her sexuality with fellow student, Ashley (Corona). The pair head out into the desert, but a roadside encounter with our psycho sisters kicks off the horror part of proceedings, with Piper in particular being stalked, captured and dragged into the Naziettes lair where even worse things await.

There are two main problems here: one stylistic, and the other an issue of pacing. The former is the decision to switch into high-contrast black and white, when it first becomes clear to Piper, the trouble she’s in. While it certainly adds impact to the that moment, the film-makers apparently forgot to flip the switch back on their camcorder, and any impact is lost. You give your film a title like Blood Soaked, and we expect to see… well, blood. Here, however, it might as well be chocolate sauce, as used by Alfred Hitchcock in Psycho. That’s when you can see it at all, as the high-contrast mentioned tends to wash everything into the two ends of the spectrum: all or nothing.

Equally problematic, is the film taking too long to get to a point where it is even attempting to justify the title. It barely runs an hour between opening and the end credits rolling, which should be an incentive to get cracking and have things moving on at a fast pace. We do not need to see Piper showing up to college with her mom. We do not need to see Piper and Ashley meeting and building their relationship. We do not care. I’d have been a lot more interested to see what Sadie and Katie were up to over the decade after their father died, though quite how such a pair of certifiable loony tunes were able, not just to survive but flourish, escapes me. In the end, it commits the single, unforgivable sin of both original grindhouse cinema and modern films which attempt to reproduce its philosophy: it’s mostly dull. By the time the mayhem eventually showed, I was already trying to figure out if I could do household chores, while leaving this on in the background. Never a good sign…

Dir: Peter Grendle
Star: Heather Wilder, Rachel Corona, Hayley Derryberry, Laina Grendle

Sword and Sorceress XII, edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  By

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

sword12Another reliable winner from Bradley’s long-running anthology series, with a good mix of genre stalwarts and talented newcomers. For once, I read this volume without interspersing it between other books, and read the stories almost entirely in order. In this case, the really outstanding stories tend to be clustered closer to the back; but most of the earlier ones are also solid, competently-told tales of their type.

The one worthless clunker in the collection, IMO, is Carolyn J. Bahr’s “Does the Shoe Fit You Now?” a cynical and predictable re-imagining of the supposed situation some time after the part of the story of Cinderella that we know, from an anti-male, anti-marriage standpoint. It preaches to the choir of women who’ve married self-centered drunks and given up on the male gender as a result; but like most tracts in the form of “fiction,” it doesn’t succeed well as either, unless the aim was solely to resonate with that audience. (And news flash: physical work is going to a part of ANY lifestyle, married or single, that involves earning one’s keep and contributing to the world.) Nor does it really fit the collection theme: it has no fantasy element apart from the nominal “fairy-tale” connection, Cinderella is neither warrior woman nor sorceress, and stealthily running away from a bad situation without trying to change it (especially when that involves reneging on a commitment) is not a strong or “empowering” action.

However, the other selections more than make up for that one. 17-year-old (at the time this was published, in 1995) Karen Luk and L. S. Silverthorne contribute good exercises in humorous fantasy with “A Lynx and a Bastard” and “Dragonskin Boots,” respectively. Luk’s title characters would make series protagonists that I’d enjoy seeing more of. (I can say the same thing for Kaitlyn and Alvyn in Patricia Duffy Novak’s “The Lost Path” –and Novak was, at publication time, working on a novel featuring them!) “Though the World Is Darkness” by Lisa Deason pits her protagonist against a challenge more intimidating than fire-breathing dragons or pillaging hordes, and one far more obviously relevant to the real world –loss of eyesight. Heather Rose Jones’ “Skins” is a new twist on the shape-shifter theme, and very well done. One of two male authors represented here, John P. Buentello, makes use of the craft of glassblowing in “Demon in Glass” to tell a satisfying tale, though exactly how the magic system works there was a bit murky to me. Mercedes Lackey collaborates with Elisabeth Waters here to produce, in “Dragon in Distress,” another well-crafted yarn featuring Tarma and Kethry, whom I first encountered in an earlier volume of this series. (That’s also a story with a humorous touch.)

As usual in these volumes, a number of the stories struck me as truly outstanding, with a seriousness of tone and an evocative power that went straight to my heart. Several of these were by other veteran writers whose work I’ve also enjoyed in one or both of the earlier volumes in this series that I’ve read: Diana Paxson, Jennifer Roberson, Deborah Wheeler, Vera Nazarian. Like her earlier “Beauty and His Beast,” Nazarian’s “The Stone Face, the Giant, and the Paradox” explores the difference between physical appearance and moral worth. (The story here also pushes the limits of language to try to convey mystical experience that doesn’t translate well to language, but manages to do it without alienating the reader.) Paxon sets her “Stone Spirit” in a still-pagan Dark Ages Norway, where things like trolls and draugs are real, and people think their lives are ruled by Wyrd (Fate); being of Scandinavian descent myself, that background strikes a chord with me. (Patricia Sayre McCoy, on the other hand, draws as successfully on ancient Chinese culture to create the world of her “Winter Roses.”)

Wheeler’s “Silverblade,” besides being a gripping story on its face, makes particularly striking use of symbol and metaphor to say things about challenges, obsessions, and parent-child relationships. One of my favorite stories here, “Garden of Glories” by Roberson, has very little fantasy element at all. The cultural-historical background is one we can’t identify in the real world, and one of the two sisters depicted here has a talent for mending things that’s more than figuratively magical, as one minor incident shows; but basically this is “just” a story about human relationships (sisterly, filial, romantic, marital), about choices, about being true to our nature, about growing and changing; above all, about caring and love. It could easily have been written as descriptive fiction –very, very good descriptive fiction!

Two of our protagonists here (the title characters of “Chance” and “Amber”, by Tom Gallier and Syne Mitchell, respectively), are assassins by trade, trained to be good at a morally dark and lethal profession, and whose lives haven’t offered them much in the way of other options; but that doesn’t mean that either of them are sadistic, nor lacking in a sense of honor or capacity for love. Chance in particular is one lady you won’t soon forget, and her story is another of my very favorite ones here –but be warned, it’s not a sweet and warm-fuzzy tale, and her path in life isn’t an easy one.

My comments haven’t touched on all the 22 stories, but hopefully I’ve touched on enough to convey the flavor of the collection. In many of these selections, the quality of the world-building and character development cries out for expansion into a novel or story cycle. If swords-and-sorcery, or just good storytelling in the short format, is to your taste, then this is a collection well worth your time!

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

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Rana, Queen of the Amazon

  By

★
“Should come with a box of moist towelettes.”

ranaThere are times when watching a film raises existential questions. Who are we? Where are we going? Or, in this case, why the hell did I start this damn website if it means I have to watch stuff like this? I knew, going in, it would be cheap, but I was hoping for something light-hearted, a tribute to the “jungle girl” serials of the forties. Hell, I’d have settled for a micro-budget version of The Perils of Gwendoline, a film which manages to be both innocent and incredibly trashy at the same time. Instead, what I got was something that was badly-made and, frankly, creepy. I think the sequence which drove this home was when American agent Alexandria Solace (Murphey) was running through the “Amazonian” forest [quotes have rarely been used more advisedly] when she falls into a pool of quicksand. And spends the next, seven minutes, thrashing around in the mud, trying to climb out, in painfully obviously pandering to a certain, specialized fetish market. Not being part of said target audience, it was the longest seven minutes of my life. There was also rather too much… strangulation going on – to similar purpose, one imagines.

The feature is divided into three “episodes”, so does seem to be aiming for a serial approach, with titles being “The Jungle Woman versus the Nazis”, “The Jungle Woman and the Flowers of Death” and “The Jungle Woman and the Fangs of Death”. Though would it be churlish of me to note that there is only one actual Nazi? That would be Ilsa Von Todd (Krause, who has gone on to a semi-respectable career in B-horror), whom we first see plotting to take over the world with her army of mind-control zombies. [Actually, we first see her putting on her stockings. V-E-R-Y  S-L-O-W-L-Y] Though she hasn’t exactly got very far – the army count reaching precisely “one” – it’s apparently deemed sufficient threat for the US to send agent Solace down to the Amazon to stop her. Which she does, with the help of Lana, and after significant amounts of thrashing around and unconvincing fisticuffs between the three of them and the zombie.

However, no sooner has Von Todd been returned to the United States, than she escapes and heads back to the jungle, to take revenge on Lana in the second installment. Beginning with the quicksand scene mentioned earlier, this involves also involves Lana being tied up and struggling against her bonds for an extended period, before finally escaping through the kind of ludicrous deus ex machina which does, I guess, also harken back to cliffhanger serials. The finale sees [sigh] Von Todd escaping from federal custody again, but don’t ask me any details, since I had lost the will to live by this point. I do seem to recall a “snake” at one point which was clearly a green sock puppet.  I may have hallucinated this. The best thing I can say, is the theme song is kinda catchy. Otherwise, let us never speak of this again.

Dir: Gary Whitson
Star: Pamela Sutch, Tina Krause, Dawn Murphey, Laura M. Giglio

Sister Street Fighter

  By

★★★★
“The lady dragon just attacked our wig warehouse!”

sisterstreetfighterfI have reviewed this previously, way back at the birth of the site, as part of the Women Who Kick Butt box-set, where it was easily the best film present. However, that was in a dubbed version, and having recently got hold of a copy in the original Japanese, I thought it deserved a re-watch. I’m pleased to report it remains a supremely loopy bit of fun, fully meriting the seal of approval and deserving of its own page, However could it be otherwise, with dialogue such as the title caption above, or the unforgettable line, “I killed fifty bulls with my bare hands in South America, you know.” It’s 70’s martial arts plot #26: central character goes to look for missing relative. In this case, it’s Tina (Shihomi), whose brother, an undercover cop, vanished while looking into a Japanese drug cartel. She agrees to follow in his footsteps, and soon finds the gang, under boss Hayashi (Yamamoto), handle snoopers with extreme prejudice. As that caption suggests, they bring the merchandise in using heroin-infused wigs(!), and the eccentric boss is now keeping Tina’s brother as a plaything in his basement – presumably alongside the “men who know where they are and care, but don’t drink.”

Oh, and Hayashi also collects martial artists: “Some rich men buy race horses or keep an expensive dog as a pet. But I keep unusual humans instead of animals. It amuses me.” This includes everything from an expert in the Okinawan Kobudo, a chained sickle, through to a pack of Thai kickboxers called the “Amazon Seven.” There’s also a guy with a mohawk who shoots poisoned darts from his blowgun, and bunch of fairly ineffective minions, who walk around wearing what look kinda like ski-masks made of straw. Wisely, they remove these before going into battle, although this does make me wonder what the point is. These and more will all, at some point or other, be faced down by Tina and/or her own allies, including colleagues of her brother, Sonny Hibachi (Chiba) and Emmy Kawasaki (Hayakawa), as well as a ballet-school teacher, because everyone in Japan knows some version of karate, it appears. [I should also mention the unfortunate logo of the karate school is a swastika!] Though Tina’s most startling skill is her ability to fall hundreds of feet from a high bridge, then re-appear without the slightest explanation as to how she survived.

Yamaguchi’s directorial style appears to consist of tilting the camera semi-randomly, leading to some sequences being Everyday Etsuko Shiomis, seen from unusual angles. But he also is smart enough to stand back when appropriate, letting her and everyone else do their thing, and this is when the film earns its keep. Watching Shiomi duel with nunchakus is worth the cost of admission alone, with the rest of the fights, and the general lunatic approach, merely a bonus. Released almost exactly a year after Enter the Dragon, the debt owed to that classic is certainly clear, not least in the tiger claws wielded by Hayashi. If some performances may be on the functional side (watch the drug withdrawal scene for truly epic over-acting), it still does a better of job of repaying its debts than many other imitators of the time, being an enjoyable slab of excessive kung-fu action in its own right.

Dir: Kazuhiko Yamaguchi
Star: Etsuko Shihomi, Shohei Yamamoto, May Hayakawa, Sonny Chiba

Xena: The Huntress and the Sphinx, by Ru Emerson

  By

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

xenahuntressBeing a fan of the old Xena, Warrior Princess TV series (1995-2001), when I stumbled on it on BookMooch, I snagged a copy of this original spin-off novel based on the series. (Published in 1997, it reflects the first couple of seasons.) Wanting a light, short book to fit in between other reads, I recently started it without ultra-high expectations; I expected it to be passable entertainment that I’d rate at three stars. I wounded up rating it a bit higher, due to some unexpected positives.

Xena and sidekick Gabrielle (who here actually comes into her own as pretty much an equal partner in the adventure) get drawn into a rescue mission for some kidnapped preteen girls, and the Sphinx from Greek mythology is involved. But Emerson has worked other strands of classical mythology into her tale as well: the titular “huntress” is the legendary Atalanta, and both Nausicaa and skilled weaver Arachne play roles in the story. The author’s use of these elements is deft, staying faithful to the characterizations and back-stories of these figures, while at the same time fleshing them out and giving them believable personalities. She’s also faithful to the portrayals of Xena and Gabrielle (and another series regular who makes a cameo, Mannius); their character, and the qualities of their relationship, are brought to life faultlessly. Some mention is made, here and there, of incidents that happened in series episodes; but while series fans are the primary intended audience, prior knowledge of it isn’t really necessary. Readers who never watched it, or who (like me!) can’t remember all of the first two season’s episodes, can still enjoy the book easily.

A weakness of the series was that the writers never anchored it at any point in ancient history; persons and events from across two millennia and more were just thrown together in an anachronistic jumble. We have a bit of that here, too. In this novel, soldiers who fought in the recent Trojan War (waged a bit before 1200 B.C.) are still drifting back home –but the poet Homer, who actually lived a few centuries later, appears here as a young student bard. You can’t take this as historically-grounded fiction; it’s better to view the setting as a fantasy world that happens to have jumbled parallels to history.

If the reader can do that, the book has a number of pluses. Emerson approaches her tale seriously; there’s a touch of dry humor in places, but not the often juvenile humor and double entendres that series fans will recall (perhaps with rolled eyes). Although the Sphinx is an obviously fabulous monster (as is a cyclops who makes a cameo appearance), magic and the doings of gods and goddesses don’t play a role here otherwise; we’re mostly in the realm of natural human behavior. The emotionally-evocative situation and the interactions of the characters have some genuine depth, with serious moral/psychological life lessons in view. Our characters (and the reader) will be surprised by a couple of plot twists, and the whole is woven into a fabric that would do Arachne credit. Dialog is rendered in a colloquial modern English which we can interpret as translating an equally colloquial version of ancient Greek, but obvious anachronisms are avoided.

Xena, of course, is her tough-as-nails self (with a gentler side that she likes to conceal). With Atalanta along, we have another combat-capable lady in the mix; and between them, they’ll pull off some feats with a chakram and a bow that might cause some jaw dropping. But the violence here is mostly non-lethal, and the rescue of the girls will require as much brains as brawn to pull off. (CAN our heroines pull it off? …Well, you have to read the book to find out!)

One quibble I’d express is that anorexia, which in our terminology is clearly what one character has (though it’s Greek, the term wasn’t used in antiquity, and isn’t used here), doesn’t yield as readily to common-sense persuasion as Emerson imagines it would. But that wasn’t a big problem for me. In the main, I thought this was a pretty well-crafted read of its type. Emerson is a professional writer who’s authored or contributed to at least 30 books, mostly of the fantasy adventure sort, going back to the 80s. This is one of a number of Xena spin-offs that she wrote; and based on this one, I’d be willing to try out some of the others!

Note: There’s no sex in this novel, and bad language is minor and rare (any religious profanity is confined to pagan deities).

Author: Ru Emerson
Publisher: Berkley, available through Amazon, currently only as a printed book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Kickboxer’s Tears

  By

★★½
“Tears are not enough.”

kickboxersA truly crappy plot here, used to link fight scenes that range from the boring – that would be the actual kickboxing, which greatly outstays its welcome – to the impressive. Li Feng (Lee) is visiting her kickboxer brother in Hong Kong, when he is killed by a cheating opponent, after refusing to take a dive on the orders of Mr Wong (Lung). The death also throws into jeopardy the family training gym/healthcare establishemnt [a crossover at which no-one blinks an eye], which was already financially shaky. To both get revenge, and earn enough money to stabilize things, Li goes to Wong, and demands an underground rematch against his fighter. When that happens, but leaves her opponent permanently paralyzed, Mrs. Wong (Yukari Oshima), who is the victim’s brother, as well as the promoter’s wife, demands a winner-take-all match to the death. And she kidnaps Li’s semi-boyfriend (Lam) to make sure Li  turns up for the contest.

This 1992 Hong Kong film has the same jarring shifts in tone present in many of that time and place. Given the sombre nature of the core situation, there really shouldn’t be any room for slapstick humor – yet there are at least two comic relief characters too many here, and I found myself cringing in just about every one of their scenes. The early action is more than a bit ropey too: while it may be ‘authentic’ kick-boxing, it’s pretty dull to watch, and it’s only when the film moves outside the ring that things become interesting, especially when Lee gets going. She has one great street-fight against a group of thugs, another in a restaurant when she’s proving her worth to Wong as an opponent, and of course, the all too brief duel which pits her – literally, since they’re in a pit – against Oshima. All three are a great combination of inventiveness and hard-nosed action, also showcasing Lee’s great flexibility [there’s also an eye-popping training scene, where her character casually does what is best described as the vertical splits].

However, to appreciate these sequences, you are going to have to sit through story-telling of the most cliched sort, plus acting from her supporting cast that would be rejected as lacking in subtlety by Adam Sandler. Particularly irritating is the finale which has three fight scenes going on at once, cross-cutting between them to the detriment of all three, then robs Li of being able to take her thoroughly-deserved revenge personally, before ending so abruptly, I was left wondering if the final ten pages of script had fallen into a shredder, and the makers decided just to do without them. All these other aspect are significantly sub-optimal, and ten good minutes of action do not sufficiently outweigh them. Especially not when those ten minutes are embedded below, saving you an hour and twenty. You’re welcome!

Dir: Da Wei Shen
Star: Moon Lee, Wilson Lam, Mark Cheng, Lung Fong