Category: Review

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41

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★★★½
“Out of the frying-pan and into the fire goes our heroine.”

Right from the start, Nami (Kaji) established her utterly hardcore credentials, as she’s trying to dig her way out of the dungeon where she has been for the past year. With a spoon. Held in her teeth. She’s let out for the day because a bigwig is visiting, but takes the opportunity to attack warden Goda (Watanabe), almost depriving him of the sight of his other eye. As punishment for the resulting riot, Goda sends four guards to gang-rape Nami, and all the inmates are sent to a hard-labour camp. On the way back, they beat Nami as punishment, leaving her near-dead but it turns out that was just her ruse to get the guards to open the back of the van and escape. She leads the women across a blasted landscape, revenge once more on her mind, with Goda’s men in hot pursuit.

It doesn’t work quite as well as the original, in part because Nami’s motivation isn’t as clear and powerful: it’s only at the end that I realized who she was out to get (and, for the second time, we get a climax on a roof that, remarkably, actually ends, without someone toppling off it). It’s just not as strong a motive, considering everything she has been through by that point, and her terseness reaches almost epic proportions, so isn’t much of a help. Second time round, Ito has reined in the sexual aspects considerably, but has upped the surrealness, as if to make amends, and the results are a couple of truly brilliant sequences. One has a body turn into leaves and blow away, while the other sees a literal river of blood announce the death of a character. However, once they break out of jail, Nami seems largely passive, observing proceedings rather than driving them, and that deflates her value as a heroine.

It’d certainly be wrong to describe this as a failure, because it is undeniably successful at generating the atmosphere and tone desired by Ito, and Kaji is as charismatic as ever, with a powerful screen presence few actresses of any era can match. However, those elements exist in something of a vacuum here, and the results, while worthwhile, are less effective than I seemed to remember them.

Dir: Shunya Ito
Star: Meiko Kaji, Kayoko Shiraishi, Fumio Watanabe, Yukie Kagawa

Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion

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★★★★
“One of the all-time classics of the women-in-prison genre.”

This archetypal “women in prison” film is lifted above its colleagues in the genre, most of which are little more than crude exploitation, by being pretty damn sophisticated exploitation. The two main factors are Ito’s great sense of visual style, and Kaji’s almost-silent performance as Nami Matsushima. She ends up in jail after being betrayed by her cop boyfriend Sugimi (Isao), who turns out to be in league with the Yakuza he was investigating. Nami vows to escape, and the film starts with her doing so, but she is quickly recaptured, thrown back into jail, and her fellow inmates are punished for her actions, causing them to turn against her. While not her fault, she’s involved in an incident which costs the warden (Watanabe) his eye, and he vows to break her at any cost. That’s an awful lot easier said then done, and what happens as a result might be what Nami wanted all along. Meanwhile, Sugimi, seeking to tie up the loose end she represents, promises another inmate, Katagiri (Yokoyama) parole, if she takes care of Nami.

I’m not quite sure how the DVD sleeve on the right reaches the conclusion that this “inspired” Kill Bill: maybe nodded to it in an elevator once, because “female revenge” is really about all they have in common. However, it stands perfectly well on its own merits, powered by Kaji, who has one goal in mind – escaping and taking revenge – and anything else just washes off her back. If you can imagine her as a female, darker version of Cool Hand Luke (without the hard-boiled eggs!), refusing to bow to the sadistic guards, when it would be far easier to do so, you’ll be in the right ballpark. She has no “superpowers,” just an extraordinary persistent resilience and inner strength that makes her a remarkable heroine. Particularly considering this was his feature debut, Ito’s use of colour and Dutch angles to enhance the action are quite remarkable in its lack of restraint. The screen glows green as Nami takes her revenge, for example, and there’s another shot which looks like a Hieronymus Bosch vision of hell, for its lurid shades, while the camera will till 90 or even 180 degrees to make its point.

There’s no shortage of the exploitative aspects, however, with copious amounts of toplessness and arterial spurting, as well as an amusing chunk of lesbian lust, where five minutes with Nami proves sufficient to turn a stool-pigeon into a devoted admirer. So this is not exactly family viewing, let’s be clear on that front. However, it’s quality is difficult to deny, and as sex ‘n’ violence goes, this is definitely from the top-shelf of the liquor cabinet.

Dir: Shunya Ito
Star: Meiko Kaji, Rie Yokoyama, Natsuyagi Isao, Fumio Watanabe

Last Man Standing

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★★½
“Competently bland, as usual with Lifetime. “

Kinda odd to see Dickerson – cinematographer on a lot of Spike Lee’s movies, and Eddie Murphy’s Raw – directing this Lifetime original movie. It’s certainly not edgy, though that’s not what Lifetime is exactly about. You largely know what you’re going to get with their output. Something technically decent, usually with decent enough performances, but something that clings to the viewer’s comfort zone like a limpet. Is it wrong to criticize the channel for that, when it has absolutely no interest in pushing the envelope? It’d be a bit like coming down on Disney for making kids movies. It’s what they do: deal with it.

The heroine here is Abby Collins (Bell), a former soldier and technician who is now a soccer Mom with a veterinarian husband (Hall) and cute-as-a-button daughter. But, inevitably, dark forces loom, when she gets word a former army colleague has apparently committed suicide. Before she knows what has happened, her spouse has been kidnapped and someone is using that to force Abby to break into her colleague’s office and do some shady financial transactions. It’s up to her and another ex-soldier. Jeremy Davis (Phifer), to figure out what’s going on, the connection to her past, and rescue Mr. Collins: it’ll take all of Abby’s skills, both electronic and technical, before the “shocking” truth is revealed.

Quotes used advisedly, because I’d recommend a trip to the optician’s, if you can’t see the twist in the script (co-written by Bell’s husband I note) before it shows. There are other glitches in the story, such as the semi-cheating way in which Abby’s past is hidden from the audience for much of film. However, if you can forgive the utter predictability of it all, and the lack of discernible flavour, there are worse ways to pass an hour and a half. It’s a difficult task for any actress, managing to be convincing both as a home-maker and and an ass-kicker: Bell does a decent task on both, though the stunt-doubling for action purposes is often less than subtle. Compared to some of the stuff aired by Lifetime, this is by no means all that bad, though you don’t have to look far to find its flaws.

Dir: Ernest Dickerson
Star: Catherine Bell, Anthony Michael Hall, Mekhi Phifer, Ella Anderson

Girls Against Boys

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★★★½
“Despite the director’s name, not really a chick flick. Thank you: I’ll be here all week.”

Shae (Panabaker) is not having the best luck with men. Her older boyfriend just dumped her, to try to get back with his wife, and a night where she drinks to forget ends up with her being raped in the stairwell of her apartment building. Fortunately, there to lend a helping hand is Lu (LaLiberte), a barmaid who turns out to have a dark side. A really dark side. As in, when Shae is reporting her rape. Lu takes the desk sergeant to a motel, handcuffs to the bed, sticks a gun into his crotch and pulls the trigger. When the authorities prove about as useful as they usually are in this situation, Lu helps Shae take revenge on the bastard who raped her. Then his friends. Then the ex-boyfriend. But when Shae finds a guy who might actually not be a total douche-bag, Lu is still thoroughly unimpressed.

Almost from the start, the film is playing, more or less openly, with the question of Lu. Is she real? A projection of Shae’s violent revenge fantasties? Or, in the end, does it matter all that much? This has been compared to Baise-Moi, which I haven’t seen, but the vibe I got from it was more Ms. 45. That’s true in several ways: the New York setting, the way the violence escalates from “legitimate” targets to the innocent, and even a key scene near the end, taking place at a Halloween party. Here’s it’s as if Lu exists to give voice to the situation, in a way Zoe Tamerlis’s character couldn’t voice. However, Panabaker isn’t generally as good in her role, and we really don’t sympathize with her as much, perhaps because her problems are, to a degree, of her own making.

Several things here do fall into the “very good to excellent” category. The throbbing electronic soundtrack, with added Joy Division and Donovan, is highly effective. LaLiberte is excellent in her role as the unfettered voice of violent rage, perhaps no better, than when she’s telling Shae the story of how her father started selling her for sex to his friends when she was five. And the cinematography is occasionally awesome: there’s one shot involving a mirror, near th end, which is simply breathtaking – to the point that I rewound it, purely so I could enjoy it once more. The story has been criticized for being thin, and that’s fair comment, since there is rather too much footage of the heroines going from place to place. However, if you can ignore the lurid advertising and largely misleading trailer, going in with few preconceptions of what to expect, it’s a decent, chewy piece of thought-provoking grindhouse.

Dir: Austin Chick
Star: Danielle Panabaker, Nicole LaLiberte, Michael Stahl-David

Escape (Flukt)

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★★★★
“Memo to self: Scandinavian women were bad-ass.”

14th-century Norway, not long after the Black Death has decimated the population. Signe (Andreasen) and her family are on the road, seeking a new life, when they are attacked by bandits. Signe is captured and taken to their camp, ruled by Dagmar (Berdal); she was expelled from the nearby town, whose inhabitants thought she was a witch. Signe isn’t the first girl abducted to give the matriarch a family; there’s also Frigg (Olin), a younger girl whom Dagmar is inducting into the ways of the clan. But Frigg is not there yet, and help Signe to escape: needless to say, an enraged Dagmar and the rest of her gang, are soon hot in pursuit, chasing them across the chilly (and beautifully-photographed) wilderness.

It’s a straightforward story, effectively told, and held together by very good performances from the two leads. It would have been easy for Signe to become some kind of teenage Rambette, but her transformation from plucky but inexperienced daughter into someone who can credibly take on a bunch of crypto-Vikings is well-handled. She hardly ever goes hand-to-hand with them, avoiding the obvious issues of size and strength, in favour of guild and wits. In the other corner, Dagmar, while being a complete bad-ass bitch, who looks like she would rip you head off for us, if she found herself short of a goblet, is given enough backstory to turn her into something of a sympathetic character, which is more than you can say for most villains in this kind of survival flick.

Of course, there are inevitably points where the characters behave in ways that are more necessary for the plot, than perhaps the most logical course of action. However, I can’t say those irritated myself or Chris too much – and she’s usually far less lenient of such things, especially in action heroine movies, where I want to give the film the benefit of any doubt. The action scenes are well-handled, and the deaths each pack more wallop than you’d expect, with the way in which they’re staged enhancing the emotional impact. It’s more than a little reminiscent of Pathfinder, another Norwegian film, made in 1987, which was also set in medieval times, and concerning a young boy abducted by a savage tribe [it was remade by Hollywood a couple of years ago, transplanting the story to North America].

However, the mother-younger daughter-older daughter triangle here adds a significant new angle, and clocking in at a brisk 82 minutes, there’s hardly an ounce of fat in the form of wasted moments, on its lean Scandinavian frame. What few such pauses there are, you can just admire the lovely Norwegian scenery.

Dir: Roar Uthaug
Star: Isabel Christine Andreasen, Ingrid Bolsø Berdal, Milla Olin, Kristian Espedal

Magnificent Warriors

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★★★★
“Raiders of the East Ark.”

Ok, the above is a rabid simplification; there are no artifacts here at all, but there’s no doubt Michelle Yeoh’s adventurer owes more than a touch to the archaeologist we all know and love – not least in the bullwhip she wields in the opening sequence. While for nasty Nazis, read nasty Nips, with the Japanese who are occupying mainland China at the time of this film, so villainous they might as well be twirling wax moustaches and wearing top hats. They’re building a poison gas factory, and it’s up to Yeoh, agent 001 Yee and scoundrel Ng to stop them.

It does live up to the claim of “nonstop action” on the sleeve, certainly, and when Yeoh is in full flow, it’s a joy and absolute delight to see. For example, almost the first fight has her wielding a rope with a blade on the end, and it’s better action than many films have as a climax. There’s plenty of similar scenes, and more than enough moments make you go, “Whoa!”, in your best Keanu voice. Though for my tastes, and especially towards the end, there’s too much running/driving about, firing of weapons, explosions and stuff that doesn’t particularly showcase the skills of those involved. Supporting actress Cindy Lau comes over well as the feisty sidekick of the man they have to rescue.

This was the last action film in the first stage of Yeoh’s career; in 1988, she retired, and married D&B Films owner Dickson Poon, until her return to the screen in Supercop. This is perhaps the least well-known of her early trilogy of starring action roles, behind Yes, Madam! and Royal Warriors; in all honesty, it is probably the slightest, yet is still an impressively insane piece of work.

Dir: David Chung
Star: Michelle Yeoh, Derek Yee, Richard Ng, Lowell Lo

Zeiram + Zeiram 2

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★★★

Zeiram and its sequel, Zeiram 2, both concern a creature which combines all the most unpleasant and lethal features of The Thing with The Terminator. It’s humanoid, at least in the number of functioning limbs, but its head appears almost mushroom shaped – though it’s hard to tell where Zeiram ends and its hat begins, for there’s a second face, embedded in the hat. This is capable of extending on a tentacle, to attack victims, taking in nourishment, and there’s evidence to suggest that it can absorb their DNA and use it to create monsters. Oh, and the rest of it is almost impossible to destroy.

However, trying to do exactly that is Iria (Moriyama), an interstellar bounty hunter, who has laid a trap to take Zeiram into an alternate, uninhabited dimension, in order to deal with him in a way that will pose no threat to the local population. However, she reckons without the arrival of electrical techs Kamiya (Hotaru) and Teppei (Ida), who have been dispatched by the power company to investigate the power-drain resulting from Iria’s tech. Through an unfortunate series of events, they end up in the alternate dimension with Zeiram, while Iria is largely stuck in our world, trying to keep them alive until she can fix her portal and get in there to help them.

The problems here are largely two-fold. Kamiya. And Teppei, There are few things less appealing than comic relief characters whose antics and mugging are supposed to be endearing or amusing, but fail miserably on both fronts. They bring very little to proceedings except for running time, and that’s a shame, because there is no shortage of bizarre inventiveness on view. And when the pair stop trying to be characters, shut the hell up, and simply team up with Iria to kick alien arse, it’s a lot better, because whatever they do to Zeiram, he/she/it just keeps mutating into another form and fighting back. You get the sense being fed through a wood-chipper would only be a minor inconvenience.

This also helps cover up Moriyama’s somewhat limited set of fighting skills. Admittedly, it’s possible she had to slow things down in order to fight a giant mushroom, but the hand-to-hand combat here is choreographed at about the speed of a Strauss waltz. She does have screen presence, however, and looks decent enough firing a gun. To a casual eye – that’d be my wife’s, wandering through the living-room – this could look like an episode of Amemiya’s Power Rangers, and it’s not surprising he would go on to direct some Kamen Rider films. But it’s too uneven to succeed: for every moment where you go, “Cool!”, there’s another where you’ll roll your eyes, or just go “Eh?”. For instance, the section where Zeiram squeeze out goo onto the ground, which grows into a half-man that has a burbling conversation with Zeiram, before getting its head stomped on. Altogether, now: eh?

The sequel, which came out three years later, restores the “i” in the title, which was inexplicably removed from the original for it US release by Fox Lorber. This installment starts off as if it’s going to go in some radically different directions, even if all the main players are back. Iria is seeking an ancient artifact called the Carmarite, and additionally, has a new assistant, but he turns out to be untrustworthy. Meanwhile, a shadowy group has succeeded in regenerating Zeiram as a cyborg warrior (which makes a lot more sense if you’ve seen the anime, and know its origins), bending its will to their needs and turning it into a weapon. While initially successfully, this works about as well as most plans usually do, and it’s not longer before Zeiram is much more a menace than an ally.

However, just when you think the film is going into new and interesting territory… Well, I’m not quite show how it happened, but before long we were back in more or less the same situation as the original. Blah blah irritating comic relief blah another dimension blak Iria unable to help (this time because she gets herself locked in a room), etc. You’re looking at something which borders on being a remake of the original, and unlike something like Terminator 2, which upped the ante significantly, while telling a largely similar story, there isn’t any real sense of progression or development. Much as before, things do get better when things move into action, and Zeiram is again, a shape-shifting nightmare that won’t stay dead. And this time, not even a cute dog which strays into proceedings is off the menu.

It also helps that, this time around, Moriyama has a better handle on the action angle. Previously, it was very much a case of kick, pause, punch, pause, move, but she is a good deal more fluid here, and makes for a more credible heroine as a result. However, her strength is still more in the “looking cool with a gun” department, because her punches still look like they might be troubled by a damp paper-bag. On balance, the sequel’s lack of invention is approximately balanced by the overall improvement in Iria’s character and the slightly better overall production values – it still looks like you could fund it from your bedside table change – and it’s as worth watching as the first part. Which would be “somewhat”: call both of them a rent (or more likely these days, a download), rather than a buy.

Dir: Keita Amemiya
Star: Yûko Moriyama, Mizuho Yoshida, Kunihiro Ida, Yukijirô Hotaru

The Bullet Wives

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★★½
“A heavily-armed version of The First Wives’ Club.”

According to the film’s introductory narration, Thailand now has about three women for every man. This has led to many men both having an “official” wife, while also keeping a mistress, and not exactly being secretive about it – when the wife dies, the mistress gets “promoted” to replace her, which has obvious implications for both parties. In order to protect their rights, the eives form an association, the FCWI, which stands for First Class Wives International. Not to be outdone, the mistresses do the same thing, with the ECWI (Economy Class Wives International). After two members of the former are gunned down on a stretch of highway, the two groups seem set for a fiery and murderous collision between the wives and mistresses.

Except, it doesn’t really happen until the very end. Even at a brisk 77 minutes, there are way too many scenes of the two groups sitting around chatting, getting information from a guy who is selling to both sides, and deciding not to attack each other quite yet. Some of the technical aspects are also remarkably awful, given what appears to be a professional production in other ways – the audio, in particular, appears to have been recorded on a cellphone [which reminded me of another weird aspect; the informant’s cellphone appears to be right out of the 1980’s, the size of a brick, while everyone else has modern ones]. And since it appears the cast are almost entirely models, rather than even model/actresses, the performances are largely uninspiring, though Punnakan as first wives’ leader Jittra, does hold the viewer’s attention nicely when on-screen.

What also worked for me, surprisingly well, were the action choreography and cinematography. However, for that to happen, you must accept that the former is clearly intended to by hyper-stylized rather than in any way realistic. Once I understood and accepted that, I was able to enjoy those for what they are, and the camerawork is nicely fluid and, occasionally, truly beautiful, as when there’s a slow zoom out with the camera going up, over a bathtub containing a dead body. It’s moments like that which will keep you watching, through the severely tedious sitting around and feminine bickering.

Dir: Kittikorn Liasirikun
Star: Metinee Kingpayom, Nussaba Punnakan, Manassavee Krittanukoon, Naowarat Yuktanan

The Day

  By

★★½
“After the apocalypse, there will be blood. Oh, yes: there will be blood…”

There are times when not saying too much can work for a film; Night of the Living Dead is the classic example, and it works, because you don’t need to know why there are zombies. Just that they are. A similar approach is taken here: you’re dumped more or less into the middle of a post-apocalyptic scenario, with five people wandering the wilderness. They take shelter in a farmhouse, only to discover it’s actually a trap for a cannibalistic tribe living nearby. The group’s leader, Adam (Ashmore) believes Mary (Bell) deliberately led them into the house, but she convinces them she is a member of a different clan, with just as much reason to hate the cannibals. Knowing they would rapidly hunted down if they tried to make a break for it through the open countryside, the prepare to defend the house against those outside, who want to have them over for dinner. And I mean that, in the most literal sense of the term.

Bell, previously, best-known for playing a possessed girl in The Last Exorcism, is an effective and impressive bad-ass in this movie, gradually moving from the side to centre-stage. There’s also little no attempt to make her prettified: understandable, given the situation, but it always kinda irritates me when heroines are miraculously immune to damage, and always immaculately made-up and coiffured. Definitely not the case here. However, the lack of any significant explanation does damage proceedings, because it means things appear to unfold simply because they need to for the plot, without any other justification: there’s no scene-setting to make them logical. Why did these people turn to cannibalism? What happened to destroy civilization so completely? Unlike NotLD, these are relevant questions, that the film stubbornly refuses to answer. While cheaper aspects, such as the few sets and small cast, are explicable by the budget, more exposition would have been welcome.

I did like the visual style, which is muted, to the point of often almost becoming entirely black and white: there’ll be a single object painted in colour to stop you from getting up and adjusting your set. But rather than a fully-fledged movie, it feels like an single episode taken from a long-running TV series. While it’s one I’d be interested in watching, thanks largely to Bell, as a stand-alone feature, it doesn’t quite work, and feels like a good idea in need of significantly more development.

Dir: Douglas Aarniokoski
Star: Ashley Bell, Shannyn Sossamon, Shawn Ashmore, Cory Hardrict

Killing Car

  By

★★½
“Because ‘Killing Asian model of few words’ wouldn’t fit on the DVD sleeve.”

This is a surreal revenge thriller, which begins at a scrapyard where the bickering of a couple is interrupted by an Oriental woman (Tsang), who shoots them dead and takes a car. A series of similar encounters follows, which take a similar form: we are introduced to one or more characters; then the woman shows up, and kills them, leaving a toy car behind at the scene as a marker. This includes a photographer and her assistant; an antiques dealer and his girlfriend; the owner of a dance club, etc. Meanwhile, two cops are following the trail of corpses and Hot Wheels, and it gradually becomes clear that the woman’s actions are tied to a car accident the previous year, with which all her victims had a connection of some kind.

It’s a very chilly piece, with a central character about whom we know almost nothing for the great majority of the film, making it difficult to empathize with her murderous rampage. Meanwhile, it doesn’t take long before we realize that just about everyone else to whom we’re introduced, is going to get shot, so there’s no point in getting attached to, or even caring about them. The role is one that was written for Tsang, who never appeared in anything else, as far as I can tell: that probably says more than anything else. She’s not bad, and has a certain cold charisma that’s appropriate, but there just isn’t enough on which to hang any criticism of her performance. Certainly, despite a willingness to shed her clothes, she’s nowhere near as good as Brigitte Lahaie was in the other Rollin flick we’ve reviewed here, Fascination – interestingly, that appears to be explicitly referenced in one scene here, with a scythe being wielded in a very similar way.

It does remind me somewhat of Ms. 45 too, with a lead character who lets her violent deeds speak louder than her words, though the motive there was a good deal clearer, and placed up front. The highlight is probably an early gun-battle in an almost deserted fairground, which has an eerie, suspenseful quality that’s quite effective, and it’s interesting to see a Rollin movie which does not include female vampires, a staple of his work. However, on balance, I think a few more fangs, perhaps accompanied by a less willfully-misleading title, might not have been a bad thing.

Dir: Jean Rollin
Star: Tiki Tsang, Frederique Haymann, Jean-Jacques Lefeuvre, Karine Swenson