Category: Review

Everly

  By

★★★½
“In which Salma Hayek suffers from an apartment complex.”

everly6Not sure how this managed to escape attention in our 2015 preview, because it’s hard to think of a film more directly positioned in our wheel-house. This unfolds entirely in a single building, close to real time, the vast majority of it (as with 2LDK) in one apartment, where Everly (Hayek) has just been outed as betraying her boss, a ferociously vicious Japanese mobster called Taiko (Watanabe). Desperately, she calls her mother (Cepeda), begging her to take Everly’s daughter out of town, but when that route is closed, they’re forced to hide out with Everly in the apartment. It’s not much safer, for Taiko has offered a bounty to anyone in the building willing to take down his turncoat – and also some increasingly-deranged professionals. Meanwhile, we also find out more about Everly’s history, which includes four years trapped in the apartment building as a sex slave for Taiko and his cronies.

Lynch has described this as Die Hard in a room, with Hayek instead of Bruce Willis. Despite sharing a similarly “ironic” Christmas setting, it isn’t: Lynch may wish it were, but the pacing is nowhere near perfect, the script isn’t as engaging, and whatever Watanabe’s qualities are, he’s no Alan Rickman. Not to say that it’s a bad film at all, especially considering this wasn’t originally supposed to star Hayek. Back in February 2012, Kate Hudson was announced as headlining the cast, before being replaced 15 months later by Salma Hayek. One can only wonder what difference that might have made, because her replacement certainly takes the role and owns it. [Side note: she’s only a couple of months younger than me. Damn…] It’s also gleefully and gloriously R-rated, not skimping on the bad language or hyperviolence, resulting in a comic-book feel which works nicely.

However, this leads to problems with the script, right from the opening sequence in which an apparently untrained Everly takes out, with unerring accuracy, an entire room of gangsters. Given her supposed prisoner-like status, it also proves remarkably easy for her mother and daughter to join her, basically swanning into the building on the pretext of visiting someone on another floor. And, to be honest, some of those who lay siege to our heroine aren’t as amusing as Lynch and scripter Yale Hannon seem to think, with the Sadist (Igawa) in particular overstaying his welcome. On the other hand, the lack of any romantic interest is refreshing: the only vaguely sympathetic male character is a Japanese man, and he spends his entire screen-time bleeding out on the sofa. It probably needs to be more unrelenting and with a better sense of escalation: as is, the film peaks in its opening 10 minutes, when it seems killers are popping out from everywhere. However, it’s been a while since we’ve seen Hayek in an action role: between this and Bandidas, she has done a good enough job, it’s something I wish we got to enjoy more often.

Dir: Joe Lynch
Star: Salma Hayek, Hiroyuki Watanabe, Laura Cepeda, Togo Igawa

The Sword Woman, by Robert E. Howard

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

swordwomanThis collection of five short pieces by pulp era master of rough-and-tough fiction Robert E. Howard includes two unfinished story or novel fragments dealing with barbarian heroes in the Conan mold. But the focus of this review is on the title story and two others, “Blades for France” and “Mistress of Death” (the latter completed by Gerald W. Page after REH’s death), which are the only Howard stories that feature one of his most striking and memorable characters, “Dark” Agnes de Chastillon, sometimes called, in medieval/early modern fashion, Agnes de la Ferre, after her home village. (There’s another collection that uses the same title story and also includes “Blades for France;” but it only includes one –or possibly both, I’m not sure– of the fragments later used by Page to complete the third story.) These tales are first-rank parts of the Howard canon, and my five-star rating above refers just to them. They’re violent, gritty tales of historical action-adventure, with a tone like that of the Conan and Kull stories but mostly without supernatural elements. (A wizard does appear as the villain in “Mistress of Death.”)

Howard was not as constrained by the sexist attitudes of his day as many of his contemporary pulp writers were. So some of his writings are trail-blazers in terms of female roles. Where women in pulp action yarns were usually passive, meek and needing rescue (or sinister and sneaky, wreaking their evil by stealth and treachery), Howard dared to actually portray some women who step out of the damsel-in-distress mode to pick up lethal weapons and use them;. But they don’t lose their moral compass as a result, so that they’re genuine heroic figures rather than villainesses.

Conan sidekicks Valeria in “Red Nails” and pirate queen Belit in “Queen of the Black Coast” come to mind (actually, since she’s Conan’s boss in the latter story, one could argue that he’s her sidekick there!), as does Red Sonya in “The Shadow of the Vulture.” Agnes is cut from similar cloth; but where these other women are all in stories with a male protagonist, Agnes is the protagonist and first-person narrator of her stories, and the only one of the four to appear in more than one tale. That allows her to take center stage much more obviously in the reader’s focus, and for Howard to develop her more as a character; in “Sword Woman,” he actually gives us her origin story, something he seldom if ever did for his other series characters.

Agnes was reared as a peasant in early 16th-century France, though her abusive father is the out-of-wedlock son of a duke (and uses his father’s name as a family name). In a vividly-sketched opening scene, that shows you exactly the kind of drudgery-filled bleakness her life up to then has been, when she’s about to be physically forced into an unwanted marriage to a youth she detests (and who knows that), her sister secretly hands her a dagger to commit suicide with. Instead, she uses it to knife her would-be groom/rapist, “with mad glee,” and takes to the woods. Circumstances soon give her the chance to get some combat training from a skilled mercenary, which she takes to like a fish to water, instinctively. With a tall physique strengthened by hard work, and quick reflexes, she’s a fighter to reckon with, and her embrace of that lifestyle is completely believable. She’s resolved to be no man’s sexual plaything; motherhood isn’t something she wants for herself; and the chance to be free, her own boss, and able to taste the world and its adventures is like a liberating new birth. (And she’ll have adventures in spades, with her share of dangerous enemies.)

Given her background, I could completely sympathize with the appeal this has for her, and understand her choices. I don’t think Howard intends to make an anti-marriage, anti-family statement through her, or to imply that her choice is the only legitimate one for a woman to make. But he does have the courage to portray her as the person she is, with legitimate reasons for feeling the way she does; and that he’s also questioning the kind of patriarchal, sexist perversions of marriage and family life that could turn those things into a prison (which they were never intended to be) for a woman, and make her willing to choose celibacy to escape it. And then too, he’s recognizing that the idea of “primitivism,” of escaping from society’s constraining rules, roles and routines, that leach every bit of freedom and spontaneity out of life, and being free to carve out your path in the world with your own courage and strength, is just as appealing to a woman as it is to a man, and for the same reasons.

If Howard had lived to write more about Agnes, and followed her for more of her life, who knows: she might someday have found a male who didn’t want to to imprison and dominate her, whom she might have wanted to be with as an equal, and might even have someday decided she was ready to have a child. (And if she had, I think she’d have been a doggone good mom!) But even if that had ever happened, you can bet she’d never have become any man’s slave or drudge.

All three stories exhibit the strengths Howard fans appreciate in his work: strong, exciting story-telling, full of adventure, suspense, and violent action, all of it well-drawn; excellent prose style; and good, vivid characterization. Agnes’ character, of course, dominates all three, and she’s one of Howard’s most memorable figures, round and nuanced. Like her sword-swinging soul-sisters mentioned above, she’s no choir girl, but she’s not evil in any sense. She doesn’t revel in killing (her “mad glee” near the beginning of the first story is an emotional reaction to the thrill of self-achieved deliverance and escape from hell on earth, not homicidal mania as such); on the contrary, she’s quite capable of showing mercy even when it’s not deserved, of genuine kindness to others, and of putting her life on the line even for an enemy. She’s a woman with principles; and while her early life has made her so emotionally repressed that she’s never been able to cry, she’s still got feelings, and can need comfort at times. (In other words, she’s a human being, not an animated stone statue of Superwoman.)

But several other characters are also developed with some moral complexity, especially Etienne Villiers. REH was also a serious student of history, and makes effective use of real historical persons and situations to flavor his historical fiction; these tales are no exception. In the third story, IMO, Page imitates Howard’s style and character conception quite well; I disagree strongly with critics like Jessica Salmonson who find the story inferior and see Agnes there as an unrecognizable, wimpy parody of herself. (If they weren’t dead by the time she’s done with them, there are a few male characters there who’d probably dispute the claim that she’s wimpy!

The editor of this collection isn’t named (Leigh Brackett contributes a worthwhile introduction, but I doubt if she was the editor), but whoever it was clearly just threw the last two selections in as filler to bulk up the book. They’d be better included in a collection of Howard fragments. The stories cited in the second paragraph above would have been better choices, IMO; then the collection would have been a genuinely thematic one showcasing all of Howard’s action heroines! Maybe some publisher will pick up on that idea?

Author: Robert E. Howard
Publisher: Zebra Books, available through Amazon, only in paperback.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Anne of the Indies

  By

★★★★
“Timbers well and truly shivered.”

anne of the indiesStrikingly ahead of its time, this 1951 film looks for a while like it will meander down a well-trod path – woman pirate falls for handsome hero – but ends up going in a completely different direction, and is all the better for it. Captain Providence is the scourge of the seas, the most notorious pirate out there, infamous for a ruthless approach to any British captives. While the latest batch of victims are being made to walk the plank, Frenchman Pierre François La Rochelle (Jourdan), found in chains below decks is spared: he’s startled to discover Providence is actually a woman, Anne (Peters), and accepts her offer to join the crew. He tells her of buried treasure, pointing to which he has half a map; the other half is owned by a resident in the British stronghold of Port Royal, and he’s set ashore to go negotiate for it, while Anne’s ship, Sheba Queen, waits off-shore. Except, it has all been a massive ruse, with La Rochelle actually working for the British, after they captured his vessel. Hell hath no fury like a woman pirate scorned: Anne kidnaps Pierre’s wife, with the intent of selling her into white slavery. Can he get her back?

What’s particularly effective here is the second part of the film, after Anne realizes she has been duped. Conventional plotting would have her abandoning her own career and continuing to chase after Pierre. Not here: her response is basically, “No, fuck you“, doubling down with the intent of extracting personal vengeance, by kidnapping his wife and selling her into slavery. Though as one review points out, “The fact that there were not many – indeed, probably not any – Arabs wandering around what is now Venezuela in the 1710s trading in fallen European women isn’t allowed to get in the way of this storyline.” This Anne, who lets her quest for revenge consume her over the latter half, is a fascinating character, even if, naturally, morality has to win out in the end. Her conscience, personified throughout by the ship’s doctor (Marshall), must awaken, allowing for a finale offering redemption through heroic sacrifice. But considering when this was made, it’s arguably even more transgressive for its time than the ending of Thelma & Louise.

The other outstanding feature is Peters, who handles herself particularly well, giving the impression of knowing what she’s doing. This is particularly the case in a (semi-)friendly bit of swordplay between Anne and her piratical mentor, Blackbeard (Gomez). You’re not expecting much, since the former is a heroine in a 1950’s movie and the latter looks to have the range and mobility of a sofa. But it’s really good: it might have been undercranked, but it still looks lightning-fast and genuinely skilled, doing a good job of establishing Anne’s credentials as someone to be feared and respected. Director Tourneur is best know for his classic RKO horrors, such as the original Cat People and I Walked With a Zombie, but shows that his talents were not limited to black and white chills, and work just as well on these wide open, Technicolor seascapes. The quality here is virtually across the board, with the exception of James Robertson Justice’s highly-dubious Scottish accent, and has certainly stood the test of time.

Dir: Jacques Tourneur
Star: Jean Peters, Louis Jourdan, Herbert Marshall, Thomas Gomez

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The Queen of the Pirates

  By

★★½
“Court in the act.”

queenofthepiratesSandra (Canale)  and her father fall foul of the local tyrannical Duke (Muller) after they refuse to pay his excise duty. Arrested, the arrival of the poor but noble Count of Santa Croce, Cesare (Serato), saves them from death – or a fate worse than in Sandra’s case, as the Duke has a profitable sideline, shipping local girls off to the Middle East. After escaping, they join up with a local pirate band, who agree to help target the Duke after Sandra bests their leader in sword-play. To gain the hand of the duke’s daughter, Isabella (Gabel), Cesare agrees to hunt down the “Queen of the Pirates” who has brought trade to a standstill, not knowing that his target is the same woman he helped save, and since then has had a secret longing.

Its storyline is more than slightly similar to the other Italian piratess movie we also covered here, Queen of the Seas, from the following year. This is slightly weaker, mostly because Sandra ends up taking a back seat to the heroic Cesare in the second half, though it benefits from a solid supporting performance by Gabel, who brings a genuine nastiness to her role as the spoiled heiress, who is perfectly happy to endorse Daddy’s white slavery operation, as long as it keeps her in jewels and pretty dresses. The shift in focus from Sandra is disappointing, not least because she can handle a sword pretty well – that’s clear right from the fight against the Duke’s excise-men, and reached its peak during the friendly duel against the pirate king. Really, given the era (1960) and Canale’s provenance as a former runner-up in Miss Italy, it’s genuinely impressive.

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From about the midpoint on, it is entirely predictable, and becomes much less interesting as a result, despite some efforts to suggest that Cesare might not really be smitten by the heroine – just pretending to be, in order to lure her in. There’s also some desperately unfunny attempts at comedy, courtesy of his squire, and the English dub appears to have been written by someone practicing for International Talk Like a Pirate Day, spattering every other sentence with gratuitous nautical vernacular. I can’t call it disastrous, and at 75 minutes, doesn’t outstay its welcome; there’s just too much queening and not enough pirating in this for me.

Dir: Mario Costa
Star: Gianna Maria Canale, Massimo Serato, Paul Muller, Scilla Gabel
a.k.a. La Venere dei Pirati

Le Avventure di Mary Read

  By

mary read

★★★
“Graded as a solid sea-plus.”

While best known for notorious horror film, Cannibal Ferox, director Lenzi’s career covered almost the entire gamut of genres, from spaghetti Westerns through Eurospy films and giallo, to war movies. He also did historical adventure films like this, starring Gastoni as Mary Read, a highwaywoman who takes a spot on a corsair ship run by the unfortunately-named Captain Poof (Barnes). After his demise in a sea-battle, Mary takes over the ship, leading daring raids on any and all who cross her path, on sea or land. Given Poof was working with the approval of the British crown, and supposed to be targeting only its enemies, this provokes a reaction, in the shape of Captain Peter Goodwin (Courtland), who is ordered to take care of Poof, unaware he has been replaced by Mary. However, complicating matters, he also knows her personally, having been locked up in prison with her back in England, and had a brief fling with Read at the time. Can he bring his former love to justice?

queen of the seasDespite its age – this was made in 1961 – it has stood the test of time fairly well, except for a romantic ending which is both predictable and unfortunate. This turns the heroine into exactly the subservient woman she spent the first 80 minutes not being. Up until then, it plays well ahead of its time, with Read taking no crap from anyone, and proving to be skilled both with a pistol and a sword, as well as her words. [And perhaps a needle, some of her costumes, particularly the red one, being quite spectacular] The production values are generally pretty impressive, especially in the naval sequences; they clearly had a couple of full-scale boats to work with, rather than miniatures. However, its recreation of what is supposedly “17th-century England” leaves a lot to be desired, unless the landscape and costumes of that era were a lot more, ah, Mediterranean than I was aware! I’m also rather hard pushed to swallow Read’s intermittent efforts to pass as a man: I guess eyesight was not as sharp back in the day.

Clocking in at a brisk 85 minutes, there’s not much chance to pause for breath. This helps paper over holes in the plot, such as the Governor of Florida apparently not bothering to mention to anyone, that his party was raided by a woman pirate. But I like the way Read is portrayed as smart, for example, out-thinking Goodwin and getting him to fire on a supporting ship – she wants to destroy his reputation as much as anything else. However, this makes the final resolution all the more implausible, and I’d far rather have seen her sail off into the sunset, perhaps with Ivan (Longo), the crew-mate who seems to carry a torch for her. I guess this wasn’t quite far enough ahead in its thinking.

Dir: Umberto Lenzi
Star: Lisa Gastoni, Jerome Courtland, Walter Barnes, Germano Longo
a.k.a. Queen of the Seas

The Last Stratiote, by LeAnn Neal Reilly

  By

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

“Sharp scent of hot blood
blooms beneath darkening skies.
Justice rends March night.” –Elira Dukagjini

Full disclosure: The author offered me an advance review copy of this novel, with no conditions on how I reviewed it.

laststratioteStratiote is simply the Greek word for soldier; but it was a term particularly applied, in the 1400s and 1500s, to Greek and Albanian mercenaries who fled from their homelands to escape Turkish invaders and hired out to fight, first against the Turks for the Venetians and later in other European wars as well. So the title might suggest a historical novel; but our setting is actually mostly in contemporary Boston (which has an Albanian immigrant community). Its roots, though, lie in the small country of Albania (and neighboring Kosovo), the poorest and least modernized part of the poor and not-very-modern Balkans.

Our titular “last stratiote” is Elira Dukagjini (a.k.a. a “certified Albanian whack job”). Born and bred in a part of the world that’s been a seething cauldron of religious and ethnic hatreds for centuries, that aspect of her heritage is very prominent in her attitudes. Her little sister and two cousins were lost to her when they were kidnapped into sex slavery, and she herself was the victim of a brutal gang rape that left her female organs too damaged to bear children. Not being of a gentle or forgiving disposition, she’s channeled her rage and vengefulness into becoming, among other things, a vigilante on a blood vendetta against sex traffickers.

This brings her into contact with our other two main characters, symbolically-named James Goodman, an ICE agent (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the branch of Homeland Security which is in charge of combating sex trafficking), and Mirjeta, the woman he loves, who fled the horrors of her Albanian homeland as a teen, but who, as the book opens, has been snatched by those who would drag her back there. The complex relationship that develops between these three characters is at the heart of the book, but they’re well-supported by a full cast of strongly-drawn characters. (In particular, you gotta love Zophie!)

Given that action-heroine types often function in and are shaped by a rough milieu, they’re often rough-edged. But Elira vastly pushes the envelope on the “rough” idea; if characters like Red Sonya or Jirel of Joiry are likened to a Brillo pad, she’s an industrial-strength metal sander. She’s not simply tough, hard-drinking, and sometimes potty-mouthed; she’s also bisexual, very promiscuous, a cocaine addict (yes, so was Sherlock Holmes, whom I like, but he didn’t have access to modern knowledge of how harmful drugs like this are; Elira does), and capable of dishing out mayhem that causes trained cops to vomit. Hanging out with her, as a reader, yanked me WAY out of my comfort zone.

But by following the Muse to create this character and let her be who she is, Reilly helps us to learn to empathize rather than judge; and I did come to empathize. Elira isn’t essentially evil (though sex traffickers unlucky enough to meet her might think that she is, before they died!), and underneath the grunge and capacity for savagery, she’s a hurting woman to whom the world hasn’t been very kind. Like all of us, she’s on her own unique journey; and by the end of the book, she’s a lady I honestly liked, respected, and straight-out admired. If you read the book, you’ll find out why; and you might feel the same way. You’ll for sure never forget her!

This novel has a lot going for it. Reilly’s writing skills are top-notch; she handles language very well in bringing out the exact effects that she wants, and she knows the perfect way to handle scenes that in lesser hands could be a challenge. She’s done her homework very well, even to the point of being able to write dialogue in Albanian (with English translations), and she knows her Albanian history and geography, etc., even to the point of identifying the tribal groups (Elira and Mirjeta are Ghegs, the main group in the north, as the Tosks are in the south). Her wide reading allows her to enrich the book with literary allusions; Elira’s quite a fan of Shakespeare, among other things, and enjoys composing haiku poetry. (And I’m anxious to find the translation of the Scots dialect in the Robert Burns quote!). There are also quite a few contemporary pop culture references, but they’re not just thrown in as a cheap way of faking texture; they’re actually used to make points in discussion. And there’s really powerful, creative and effective use made here of symbolism, and a unique take on the vampire mythos.

This isn’t solely a novel of action and intrigue. James Goodman was a philosophy student, and there are some major philosophical/theological discussions here that touch on issues naturally suggested by the story. What moral claim does the idea of “Blood Law,” the need for blood vengeance in kind for genuine wrongs, have on us? How far does it go, and what effect does it have on the avenger? What place does forgiveness have –and does it demand pacifism in the face of aggressive evil? And what does the Roman Catholic spirituality that Elira was raised with have to contribute to those questions? There are Moslem villains here who are engaged in really vile deeds; does that mean we’re justified (as the author’s fictional Code Red hate group claims) in hateful words and actions towards all Moslems?

Of course, would-be guru Jacob Stryver here isn’t the most lucid or reliable philosophical guide –and isn’t meant to be! That can mean that some of Goodman’s discussions with him aren’t always 100% easy to interpret. But other than that, most of the few negative points I saw in the book are very minor quibbles. Some plot points I thought weren’t completely smooth; but in the main, Reilly crafts her plot very well, with pieces of it coming together like a jigsaw right up to the end. And a real page-turner it is!

Note: The f-word appears here at times, along with some other profane and scatological bad language. There are a couple of short sex scenes that may be more explicit than some readers prefer, and an instance of implied female-female oral sex, in a quasi-public place, that a male character stumbles on and watches for several minutes feeling titillated. However, the author doesn’t attempt to titillate the reader, and none of this content is there for its own sake or for shock value.

Author: LeAnn Neal Reilly
Publisher: Zephon Books, available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Deaf Mute Heroine

  By

★★★½
“Silent but deadly.”

deafmuteheroineThe physically disabled hero has long been a staple of martial arts, to the extent that is is sometimes referred to, tongue-in-cheek, as “cripsploitation”. The One-armed Boxer, The Crippled Masters, Zatoichi – it’s a genre that survives more recently than you may think, with Mat Fraser, recently seen in American Horror Story: Freak Show, starring in 2009’s Kung Fu Flid. While this is rarer for heroines, they are not immune, with Japan giving us the Crimson Bat series, reviewed elsewhere on this site. This is another entry, Wong playing the titular heroine, Ya Ba, who is unable to speak or hear, but can still fight a mean battle, assisted by reflective wristbands that let her see who’s sneaking up from behind, in lieu of hearing them.

She comes into possession of a set of pearls, taking them off some robbers with extreme prejudice. However, this brings down the wrath of Miss Liu (Huang), leader of her own gang, and whose brother was one of the robbers. While her first attempt to kill Ya is unsuccessful, Lui’s poisoned flying daggers do injure her. Ya is found and nursed back to health by kindly cloth-dyer Yang Shun (Ching); romance blossoms, and the pair marry, with Ya figuratively hanging up her wristbands;  she actually puts them away in a box. That’s relevant, because her husband ends up entrapped into responsibility for a friend’s gambling debt by Liu, and she demands he steal Ya’s wristbands as payback. That opens the way for Liu and about five billion henchmen (count may be approximate) to launch their attack. But that’s not the only threat she faces, since lurking in the wings is another talented master, with a previously relationship to Ya and who was left with a nasty facial scar for his pains.

The fights are good. Really good. As in, the final battle between Ya and Lui (below) may be the best of the era I’ve seen between two women – like most of the action here, it’s fast, hard-hitting and imaginative, weakened only by some unsubtle wirework. The film is also bloodily messy, to a somewhat surprising extent, and both Wong and Huang make for highly-effective characters, the latter making up for the former’s silence.  However, the movie grinds to a halt in the middle, as the focus shifts off Ya to her husband, who is both a great deal less interesting and almost unlikeable. The film is also hampered by poor availability: while the version I watched was as close to complete as possible, that required a combination from three different sources, including one print dubbed into German(!) and another which was sub-VHS quality with a large logo in one corner. That helps leave this short of getting our “seal of approval,” but if a good copy ever becomes available, we might re-visit it. For as I said to Chris, what’s not to love about a wife who never says a word?

Y’know, our couch really isn’t so bad, when you get used to it. :)

Dir: Wu Ma
Star: Sally Wong (a.k.a. Helen Ma), Shirley Huang, Ching Tang, Wu Ma

The Mini-skirt Mob

  By

★★★
“Hell hath no fury like a blonde scorned.”

miniskirtIt’s not much of a stretch to imagine this coming out of Japan, as an early ancestor of the pinky violence genre. Though that would probably require the additional of significantly more nudity, since it proves surprisingly coy on that front, without a nipple to be found. The central character is Jeff (Hagen), a rodeo star who has just married Connie (Jackson). This does not sit well with his old flame, Shayne (McBain), who heads an all-girl gang, The Mini-skirts. Together with a group of male bikers (who include cult legend, Harry Dean Stanton), they harass the newlyweds, on and off the road, until a tragic accident leads to the death of one of the bikers. Then, the gloves come off, with Jeff and Connie besieged in their caravan by Shayne and her crew. However, they find an unlikely ally in Shayne’s sister, Edie (McCormack, who had previously been nominated for an Oscar as the tiny psychopath in The Bad Seed). While she stepped aside from Jeff when Shayne decided she was interested, Shayne is now sniffing around Edie’s current man, Lon (Jeremy Slate) and Edie has no interest in stepping aside again.

It’s an interesting set of power dynamics here: Shayne is the one who runs things here, manipulating others – Lon in particular – to do her bidding without the slightest qualm. For instance, after Lon has brawled with Jeff to the point where the latter has pulled a rifle on the gang, as far as Lon is concerned, that’s the end of the matter. But Shayne casts aspersions on his manhood, basically goading him into further action. She has also the whip-hand in her relationship with Edie, who is initially happy to follow along, clinging to her big sis’s coat-tails, until the scales fall from her eyes and she realizes how far Shayne is prepared to go in her quest for vengeance against the man who has – oh, the horror! – found love in the arms of another woman, Or, as Shayne puts it, “You need a real woman, Jeff – not a mouse.” Rodents are something of a running theme, it appears: she also tells a touching story of a visit to a zoo with Jeff, where she watched a snake hunt and swallow alive a mouse. Who said romance was dead?

It’s Jackson, using so much hair-spray she doesn’t need a motorcycle helmet, who keeps this watchable – even when the biking scenes, juvenile delinquent hi-jinks and Budweiser product placement begin to wear thin, and that doesn’t take very long. However, the siege of the caravan racks up the tension, and brings an unexpected and quite nasty death, albeit one clearly accomplished through thoroughly unconvincing stunt-doubling. That, and a finale where Connie shows an equally unexpected streak of malice, left me suitably entertained, though it would certainly be a stretch to call this anything more than throw-away drive-in fodder.

Dir: Maury Dexter
Star: Diane McBain, Ross Hagen, Sherry Jackson, Patty McCormack

They Call Me Macho Woman!

  By

★★★
“A B-movie, and entirely unashamed of it.”

macho womanLurking behind what has surely to be one of the worst titles in cinema history (truly a Troma creation), to my surprise, this is actually a solid enough little low-budget flick – albeit one that is straightforward to the point of idiocy. Widow Susan Morris (Sweeney – blonde, so definitely not the woman on the cover!) is out in the wilds. looking for a house where she can get away from it all. Unfortunately, she crosses paths with the monstrous Mongo (Oldfield, who reminds me of someone, but I can’t work out who) and his gang of drug-peddlers, and they do not take kindly to the interruption. It isn’t long before Susan has to find herself a new realtor. And that’s the least of her worries, as she finds herself perpetually in peril from the gang, who have every intent of raping and then killing her. Or maybe killing her, then raping her. They don’t seem too fussy about that. But everybody has their breaking point, and when they push Susan too far, she snaps, and takes the fight to her attackers.

Yes, it’s dumb. Yes, it’s cheap. Yes, it makes little or no sense, in particular her sudden transformation from plucky but largely ineffective heroine [who can’t even stab someone in a way that causes them more than moderate discomfort] into a warrior woman, capable of embedding a shiny axe in your head from 15 paces. But, you know what? It’s never boring, and I’ve sat through more than my fair share of low-budget crap that figures talk is cheap – so we’ll pad things out with lots and lots of that, before getting to anything approaching the meaty stuff. No such bait and switch here. We open with Mongo demonstrating his favourite weapon, a headpiece with a spike attached, which makes him look like a disgruntled unicorn, and after little more than five minutes of backstory involving Susan chatting to the real-estate agent, things kick off. And once they do, they don’t stop kicking until the final credits roll after 81 briskly entertaining minutes, as she is harried from one peril to the next, with laudable diligence (if variable competence) by Mongo and his henchmen.

Few involved here show any degree of acting talent, yet this shortcoming doesn’t matter very much, since we’re dealing with broad caricatures – let’s face it, subtlety would be a waste of time. There are some ludicrous mis-steps, such as the sequence where Susan escapes by running over the heads of the gang, which appears to have strayed in from a Jet Li movie. In what world does this even make sense? It could also have done with ramping up the exploitation elements considerably: much of the violence is implied (though the guy getting impaled on a nail was nicely done) and there’s no nudity. If talk is cheap, breasts are almost as inexpensive, and much more appreciated. It would also have helped if the stuntman used to stand-in for Sweaney, had been given a wig that matched her hair: hers is wavy, his is curly, and the difference is obvious. Yet I can’t bring myself to hate this, despite its obvious flaws. I was satisfactorily entertained, even without the use of alcohol.

Dir: Patrick G. Donahue
Star: Debra Sweaney, Brian Oldfield, Sean P. Donahue, Mike Donahue
a.k.a. Savage Instinct

Real Dangerous Girl, by K. W. Jeter

  By

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

kimoh“I didn’t start out killing people,” the petite, under-21 Korean-American narrator of this first book in the author’s Kim Oh series observes matter-of-factly in the opening sentence. “I had to get to that point. Kind of a work ethic thing. But once I decided to do it –it worked out. I mean –not for them. The people who got killed. I mean for me.” This isn’t the voice of an egoistic sociopath, though. Kim has a conscience and sound moral instincts; she doesn’t pick up the gun readily, and when she does, the danger she poses isn’t to the innocent. (But the guilty had better watch out!)

When I read a glowing review of this novel by one of my Goodreads friends (who went on to glowingly review the subsequent books), it put the series on my radar; so when I saw that the first book was available for free on Kindle, as a hook for the series (it now costs 99 cents), I seized the opportunity to preview it in that format. Jeter is a very successful author with substantial Big Publishing credentials (he chose to go the self-publishing route with this series, and according to his website is excited enough about it that he’s no longer working on anything else). This was my first experience with his work, but I found his craftsmanship and professionalism very evident. It says something about the compulsive readability of this tale that I read the entire novel in two days, which I think is something of a record for me.

Kim’s world is, as a blurb puts it, “dark and gritty.” Orphaned young, she and Donnie, her wheelchair-bound and ailing younger brother, were shunted around through foster care most of their lives. Not yet 21, she’s put herself through junior college early by taking advanced placement classes, and taken advantage of bookkeeping skills picked up from a foster mom to get the only kind of job that offered, in order to be able to make a home for Donnie with her. But what offered was a low-paying job as accountant for what she’s come to realize is a really “dodgy” enterprise, run by a mobster who uses her, among other things, to write checks to pay a guy she suspects is his contract hit man. Pragmatic and a survivor, she’s able to tolerate that, though she doesn’t like it. She clings to the promise her boss made that when he takes the company legit (or at least gives it a more convincing “legit” facade), she’ll be CFO, with better pay and a better life for her little family unit. Instead, she’s shafted and thrown out in the alley like garbage, while a Harvard grad gets the big job. Hit man Cole is similarly downsized, except that his severance leaves him permanently crippled.

These two don’t immediately join forces, and when they do, she’s not motivated solely by wanting revenge (although Cole is). Jeter’s plotting is a lot more nuanced and developed than that. (Firing her didn’t exhaust Mr. McIntyre’s malice; if he survives, she and Donnie might not.) Kim’s a fascinating, three-dimensional character who develops in front of our eyes here, as she moves from what she calls her “Little Nerd Accountant Girl” persona to something else. We can see that she’s attracted to the feeling of empowerment that can come from learning to stand up for herself, and from handling a gun. Some of the same appeal of “primitivism” that readers find in Burroughs and Robert E. Howard is present here, with a protagonist who’s challenged to make her way in a world where the outward conventions of civilization no longer apply. And she gives voice to the anomie of vast numbers of contemporary Americans in her generation, growing up bereft of community and moral/spiritual guidance. (Not identifying with her Korean heritage, at one point she calls herself Feral-American, like the rest of the population. “Nobody tells us what we should do, what we should even freakin’ be…. I gotta try and figure out everything on my own, just like everybody else has to.”) But her instincts are sound, and she remains an essentially decent and likeable person.

The narration here is in first-person present tense, with creative modification where necessary. Jeter’s free-flowing prose never detracts from the story. He delivers violent but never gratuitous action here. with a high body count, but no stress on gore and no “pornography of violence.” (Most of the bodies aren’t dropped by Kim, given her relatively low kick-butt quotient above; but she’s just getting her start in action heroine-hood here. That quotient is apt to rise in the succeeding books.) His emphasis, though (and what makes the book as good as it is) is character development. Kim herself, of course, takes center stage, but all of the supporting characters are vividly drawn, too (though except for Donnie they’re unlikeable; and we can see that Cole’s a much darker personality than Kim is –and that he’s manipulating her for purposes of his own.)

The plot is finely crafted, building perfectly to a powerful denouement and conclusion (which makes it clear that the saga is just beginning). We aren’t told the location, except that it’s a city that has cold weather in winter; sense of place isn’t strong, but that adds to the milieu of rootlessness and atomization. In its way, this is a kind of coming-of-age story. Darkness abounds, but it’s not without light, and a sense of hope even when things are darkest. There’s no explicit sex and very little reference to sex at all, and no obscene speech –indeed, very little bad language at all, and what there is isn’t very rough for the most part. (Jeter uses it sparingly, for realism, but he demonstrates restraint and taste in how he does it.) One plot element, IMO, doesn’t stand examination too well; and real-life child welfare agencies wouldn’t, as here, put kids in foster care in different states (because they’re state-specific). But those were relatively minor quibbles. This is a great start to what promises to be an outstanding series!

Author: K. W. Jeter
Publisher: Self-published, available through Amazon, at this time only as an e-book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads