★★
“Game for just about anything, but mostly moping.”
The main mission given to Rie (Shiratori this time) is a little bit different, from her usual, straight-forward assassinations. Instead, she’s given the job of protecting a witness. Nana (Matsuda), the disgruntled mistress of an organ-trafficking ring, who has had enough and agreed to co-operate with the police. Rie is part of the protection detail, but soon finds out that the gangsters, under ever-so strange boss Kaneda (Nogami) with his transvestite tendencies, are not going to sit back and wait for Nana to take the witness stand. Oddly, the cops let Nana stay in her own apartment, perhaps figuring that’s the last place her former lover would look. but when that is unsurprisingly stormed, Rie takes the target back to the operative’s flat, where they hang out, exchanging small talk – that’s mostly Nana, of course, since Rie is about as talkative as the enormous pet fish she has in a tank, and to which she feeds goldfish.
However, there are complications, because it turns out that a senior politician has an ill daughter, who is relying on the organ trafficking ring for a black-market transplant. The word comes down to Rie’s boss, Mutoh (Ryu) that the investigation has been squashed, and Nana is to be dumped out of witness protection, as no longer of interest. That would almost certainly be a death sentence, because her betrayal of the gang isn’t limited to her knowledge of their actions, she also swiped a large suitcase of their cash before turning police informant. But has she done enough to endear herself to Rie, that her bodyguard might be prepared to go off-book and continue with the original mission on her own initiative? Or, better yet, entirely take out Kaneda – whose weirdness has now graduated from transvestitism to cannibalism.
This is too chatty to succeed, especially when the conversation is so one-sided, as are the ones between Nana and Rie. They do form a somewhat interesting contrast in characters, and Shiratori certainly has the physical presence to carry off the part of a cold-blooded assassin, to a much greater degree than some of the previous actresses in the series. But to reach the bloody finale, you have to sit through a solid 70 minutes of her moping around her apartment, with our without Nana, and that’s more than an entire month’s quota of mope for me. The L they’re missing from the sleeve probably is “lugubrious”. Kids, look it up…
Dir: Hidekazu Takahara
Star: Chieko Shiratori, Ichiho Matsuda, Masayoshi Nogami, Daisuke Ryu
I first encountered this in a dreadful copy on Youtube: dubbed, cropped to 4:3 and apparently filmed off someone’s TV during a Force 10 storm at sea. However, what was left after that, was still impressive enough to make me track down a better copy. Well, somewhat better: it had subs, albeit burned in and incomplete, while the 16:9 ratio was at least a vague approximation to the original widescreen print. Still, you take what you get, and this is certainly enough fun to overcome the adversity of any flaws in the format.
I can see why, purely for reason of brevity, the title above was preferred to the full one of The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent, even though the latter is more accurate. For the Sea Serpent has a supporting role here, met once on their way in, and again on the way out – it’s much more about what happens in the middle. Three years after their men left, the women of the Stannjold clan leave their shores under the command of Desir (Dalton), trying to find out what happened to them. Encounter #1 with the monster leads them to be shipwrecked on the same shores of the Grimault tribe as their menfolk, whose king, Stark (Devon), has set them to work as slaves in his mines. After initially appearing to welcome the women, it becomes clear that Stark has plans for the new arrivals as well. Viking high-priestess Enger (Cabot) has her own agenda, however: having set her eyes both on Desir’s husband and, for more immediate and pragmatic reasons, Stark, she sabotages Desir’s first attempt to free the men.
Star Jill Kelly is an adult actress. I mention this, because it seems highly likely that most of her 300+ other works – perhaps The Butt Sisters Do Philadelphia or Sodomania: Slop Shots 5 – are likely better scripted, filmed, edited and generally well-made than this dreadful piece of crap. I should have known, given Donald G. Jackson’s involvement – he’s probably the worst film-maker I’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter, and I speak as someone fully familiar with the works of Ed Wood, Andy Milligan, J.P. Simon and Uwe Boll. They are all pretenders beside Jackson, and even though this barely runs an hour, your patience will be sorely tried. And by “tried”, I mean at the level where gnawing a limb off to escape will seems credible.
I first became aware of this novel through an article back in February about MMA champion Ronda Rousey and 
In the slasher genre of horror, the perpetrators seem almost exclusively male: Michael Myers, Jason Vorhees, Freddy Krueger, etc. Women can play an important role, and we’ve covered some of them here before – but it’s much more often as the “final girl”, than the one wielding the machete. However, it’s often forgotten that, in the original Friday the 13th movie, the killer was not Jason, but his mother, so there is some precedent for the female antagonist. See also Nurse 3D, American Horror Story: Coven or perhaps best of all, 
While twice as long as the first series, at 12 episodes rather than six, I can’t say it’s actually any better. Indeed, I think the dilution of the main element which was so much fun the first time round – the relationship between the two, disparate hitwomen, Roxie (Osment) and Veronica (Chriqui) – leaves this season less entertaining. Yes, it’s bigger and more exotic: but it feels spread thinner, to the detriment of the core aspects. The story takes up shortly after the events of the first series, with V+R in the Caribbean, waiting to get their share of the money from Eileen (Missi Pyle) and Mother (Gershon). But instead, an assassination squad is sent to get them, kicking off a reunion with Veronica’s “parents”, a deranged killer who thinks Roxie is his dead wife, a rogue CIA operative who sends Frank Barnes (Arquette) after Mother, and so on. It builds to a climax where Veronica, previously injected with a lethal nanobot virus that’s about to go off, takes part in an underground death match at a cockfighting arena, to prove her love for the deranged killer. I shit you not.
The ranking here would probably be at least half a star higher, if I had the slightest freakin’ clue what’s going on here. For this has truly the worst subtitling I’ve seen in a quarter century of watching Hong Kong action films, with text that is entirely illegible more often than not. You’re left trying to piece together the plot, based on fragments of sentences and on-screen action, which significantly subtracts from the entertainment value. Good thing we have the Internet, and can turn to that for a coherent synopsis of proceedings, that will shine some light on who was doing what to whom, and why.
Well, crap. I was following that, right up to “batch of gold”.
This grindhouse obscurity manages to rise above the limitations of its budget, and proves an effectively nasty piece of work. The titular teenage “heroine” (Carpenter) is on the way to see her older lover, but embarks as well on a killing spree that first includes a classmate and the guy who picks them up, then a householder (Michael Findlay) whose swimming pool Janie hijacks, before moving onto a predatory lesbian and finally her lover’s girlfriend (Roberta Findlay), whom she strangles with a belt. This is all told in flashback as she tells the story to her disbelieving bedmate – though the corpse he discovers in the bath-tub rapidly changes his mind. Oh, and did I forget to mention, for extra sleaze points, he is also Janie’s daddy? Damn. All of her exploits are accompanied by narration from what could be seen as an ancestor of Dexter’s “dark passenger”, exhorting Janie to further murderous acts, in a placid and matter-of-fact tone that is actually all the more chilling for its calmness.
It’s hard to be critical of a film for being cheap, when the movie is not only aware of its own cheapness, but wears this on its sleeve like a badge of honour. “So what if I’m made entirely by amateurs with their pocket-money,” it seems to be saying. “We didn’t care, so why the hell should you?” I could list all the flaws here – crappy sound, low-quality video, acting your local amateur dramatic group would reject, awful use of stock classical music that would make Gustav Holst spin in his grave – but its response would simply be “…and your point is?” In the interests of space, let’s largely take those aspects as thoroughly read, and get on with the rest of our review. The setting is Chicago, and far from Armageddon having hit, it looks pretty much like the city we know – trains run in the background, for example. There is some introductory guff, which is hardly convincing, and nor is there anything particular “Prehistoric” about the leading ladies here, beyond a bit of fur trim.