★★★
“Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start.”
Evil mastermind Snakehead (Liu) kidnaps eight of the world’s top assassins, and transports them to a bunker in his Bangkok lair, where he makes them fight each other to the death, laughing maniaally all the while. Why? Because he’s an evil mastermind, that’s why: it’s what they do for amusement, rather than watch reality shows or potter around in the garden. After the numbers have been whittled down, Som (Siripoing, who played the mother in Chocolate) blocks the gas system used by Snakehead to enforce discipline, and leads an escape from the killing chamber. However, Snakehead had a lot more minions who need to be defeated before she and Gabriel (Messner) finally get to the boss level.
If that plot summary is terser than usual, that’s because there is much less plot than usual, in what is not much more than a thin, if occasionally clever, contrived excuse to slap together a series of fight scenes. As such, logic doesn’t enter in to it much. For example, is there some kind of employment scheme to which evil overlords can subscribe, which provides faceless henchmen willing to go to their deaths in droves? And if so, why not just get them to fight each other for your entertainment? The motive which spurs Snakehead to spend considerable time, effort and money on his scheme – not, it eventually is revealed, for the first time – is completely opaque, and few of the assassins come over any better, with little time or effort put into their characterization. Case in point: Gabriel tries to commit suicide just before his kidnapping, but it comes out of nowhere so has absolutely no emotional impact.
No, this is all about the martial arts, and in this aspect, the film does deliver – albeit more in quantity than quality, without the level of invention seen in, say, The Raid: Redemption. The different styles on view from the participants do give a decent degree of variety, and The Kid (Man, who also did the fight choereography) showcases some impressive moves. There’s certainly no shortage of action, to the extent that this feels more like a video-game with occasional cut scenes to move the plot forward, than an action film with set-pieces of martial arts. However, while tasty enough during consumption, it still ends up being entirely unfilling, and is like a Chinese meal which leaves you hungry, 15 minutes after eating it.
Dir: Raimund Huber
Star: Ammara Siripong, Johnny Messner, Gordon Liu, Tim Man
This starts with a memorable sequence in which Inoshika Ocho (Ike) fights off a number of attackers, armed only with her umbrella; albeit, an umbrella that is rather more heavily-armed than most. While she succeeds, she ends up losing all of her clothes in the process, leading to some artful staging in which the discarded umbrella is used to hide her naughties bits. Unfortunately, the rest of the film, while occasionally reaching the same levels of unsanity is largely crude and unpleasant. Even the central concept – a gang smuggling drugs in the vaginas of junkies – falls firmly into that category.
Let’s be clear, right out of the gate. There is really not much original about this Korean mini-series, which takes huge chunks, almost wholesale from Nikita and Alias, to the extent, for example, that we perpetually referred to one character as “Amanda”, since she reminded us so much of Melinda Clarke’s character from Nikita, right down to her fashion choices. However, as long as you’re not looking for anything startling in the way of originality, this is slick yet gritty, with characters that are interesting to spend time with, and a handle on the action that’s easily the match for its equivalent in the West. Let’s start with some significant plot exposition, because there’s quite a lot of characters and story crammed into the three one-hour (or slightly more) episodes.
Phew. Plenty going on there, with enough for a full 13- or 22-episode order of most series, between all the twists, turns and revelations e.g. turns out Cha’s relationship to Chairman Kwon is rather more personal than she is aware. Given how much gets crammed in, the opening installment is a bit of a slow start. The entire first episode is more or given over to setting up the scenario, with Cha showing very little of the skills she has developed later on. She’s semi-competent in basic martial arts, which is perfectly fine when it comes to beating up fellow pupils. But we soon find out that this level of skill is far from enough, when she comes up against Jang and the other professional killers of SS1. Early on, it’s Choi who is most entertaining, portraying a dutiful and dogged cop whose superiors refuse to give him more than a gas pistol which is, similarly, pretty useless in the clutch.
We were kinda wondering where things might go in the last episode, with Cha having apparently sorted things out. Never mind: a whole new catalog of problems raise their heads, as the removal of her justification for assassination leaves her seeking a return to the normal life, one Chief Min is none too keen to offer. With its emphasis on discovering the truth about SS1 and the organization behind it, this episode reminded me of Alias after Sidney Bristow discovered. Meanwhile, dealing with boy issues was a throwback to early Buffy. However, the human experimentation thread was a fresh ingredient, and the episode didn’t pull from the darkness, with a subplot involving a Mirae whistleblower and SS1’s efforts to hush it up. Even if Cha and Min suddenly can’t hit the side of a barn in their final confrontation, the threads are satisfactorily tied up down the stretch, with an ending pilfered shamelessly from My Wife is Gangster 2, that hopefully hints at more to come down the line.
While sharing the heroine’s name with the renowned Female Convict Scorpion series, it’s not clear how much of an official remake this is: it’s supposedly based on a manga series, which I don’t quite recall being the case with its predecessors (it was a while ago I saw the original, though – must get round to re-viewing it for the site at some point soon). The concept is not dissimilar, however: Sasori (Mizuno) is sent to prison, where she is brutalized, but eventually escapes, and seeks vengeance on those who were responsible for putting her inside to begin with. However, it’s really poor at providing motive or explanation: for example, after Sasori is left for dead, her body is dumped outside the prison, where a corpse-collector (HK veteran, Simon Yam) rescues and revives her, before training her in the ways of top-end martial arts and sending Sasori on her way. Why? Who knows. Similarly, the reason why our heroine is in prison at all, raises more questions than it answers.
It’s easy to dismiss this, for its low production values, sometimes laughable dialogue and wildly-implausible plot – and I could hardly argue. Yet we still enjoyed this, thanks largely to performances which sustained us through the bad matte paintings, clunky lines, and mediocre action scenes. Of course, to use a pro-wrestling term, we’re huge Rutger marks, so seeing him as evil medieval warlord Grekkor is a big plus, harking back to his work in Flesh + Blood for Paul Verhoeven. Pacula is a “crusader mom” (for want of a better word), back from the Holy Land where she vowed to go after making a deal with God to let her son survive. However, she returns just after Grekkor and his sidekick (Vosloo) have swept her boy off with them. She goes to rescue him, teaming up with three other women on the way, as she heads towards the inevitable confrontation with Grekkor.
I vibrated between 2 and 2 1/2 stars for this, but opted for caution: it’s probably not as bad as it seems, despite an obvious lack of budget and ambition far in reach of its abilities. Or, at least, I maybe liked it a little more. As the alternate title suggests, it’s the third in a series, though information on the first two is scant: there’s no IMDB entry for them, and they appear to have different cast members. The central character is Maria Navajas (Ponce), an abused woman who turned to killing, discovered a talent for it, and took it up as a career. This entry finds her being sought by two different groups of gangsters who believe she ripped them off, as well as the feds. She has to fend them all off, with the aid of a friendly undercover cop (Sevilla) and her agent (played by, according to the IMDB, one of the producers of Napoleon Dynamite!).
This will only make sense, or be in any way entertaining, if you’ve seen Bloodrayne 3: The Third Reich: because it’s basically the same film, with a really fat chick (Hollister) replacing Natassia Malthe. And when I say, “the same film,” I mean the same storyline, same actors playing the same roles, and same scenes in the same locations. Really, I suspect this must have been made at the same time, with Boll simply swapping out Hollister for Malthe every other take. As there, the heroine is a half-human, half-vampire, who finds herself involved in a Nazi plan to take the powers of vampirism and turn them to their own ends. Except here, it is, of course, a spoof – and one so extremely broad, the makers of those Epic Movie flicks would have been cringing on occasion. Fat jokes, gay jokes, Nazi jokes… No easy target is left unstoned, paved with deliberate anachronisms like Segways and Internet dating.
Rika (Kudo) and her schoolgirl pal ditch education for a day and head off to a remote village to check up on her grandfather, who hasn’t been heard from for a while. But as soon as they arrive, the pair come under attack by zombies, initially spawned as the result of a euthanasia drug being tried out by the Japanese government to address the whole “inverse pyramid” thing. They do reach Grandpa’s house, but find him in the stages of advanced Alzheimer’s – at least, until Rika is bitten. Gramps removes the limb, and replaces it with one conveniently lying around, which happens to belong to a master zombie hunter. Who cares if it’s the wrong colour and incredibly muscular? With America preparing a Return of the Living Dead style cleansing operation on the area, Rika and her allies have to locate the King Zombie and kill him, before being reduced to their constituent atoms.
It’s the war between the Bolsheviks and the White Guard. A platoon of the former is left with no route of escape except across the desert to the Aral Sea. They begin the perilous trek, under Commander Yevsyukov (Kryuchkov), aided by the unit’s best sniper, Maria Filatovna (Izvitskaya). During the journey, they capture a White officer, Lieutenant Vadim Govorkha (Strizhenov, who looks kinda like Cary Elwes in The Princess Bride!) who is carrying information vital to his side. The Bolsheviks take him with them, as they head back to HQ, with Maria given the task of guarding him. But when she is separated from her comrades, and left with Vadim to fend for themselves after a storm, duty and loyalty to the cause of Communism becomes conflicted with other less revolutionary emotiona.
Allowing for the fact this was more or less a rough-cut – you can still see the wires as the heroine throws villains around – this actually is far from the atrocity you expect, going from the pre-production fan loathing. The story avoid the whole “origins” thing, hitting the ground running by having Wonder Woman/Diana Prince (Palicki) already fully-active, and busting crime around Los Angeles. Her extra-legal activities, with the local cops’ complicity, bring her to the attention of the federal authorities. Meanwhile, she’s tussling with the board of her company over the merchandise that funds her crime-fighting, objecting to the size of the tits on her action-figure – and, yes, they actually say “tits”, to my surprise. Finally, the villainess (Hurley) is performing illegal medical experiments with steroids and such, to create super-soldiers, and it’s up to Wonder Woman, her plane (wisely, no longer invisible), bullet-deflecting bracelets and lasso which may or may not be of truth (it’s unclear from this episode) to stop her.