Category: Review

Sukeban Hunters

  By

★★★½
“Love that alternate title: Yakuza-Busting Girls: Final Death-Ride Battle.“

This teetered on the edge of a seal of approval, but didn’t quite make it. While there are some lovely moments, two great leads and the recreation of the pinky violence genre from the sixties and seventies, there’s just too much dead wood and pacing flaws, that leave it just short. Still certainly worth a look, with Asami (Asami) and Junko (Rena) going head-to-head as they battle each other for supremacy in the girl-gang world. Junko seems to have got the upper hand, leaving her rival buried for dead in the desert [or whatever passes for a desert in Japan]. But Asami is just warming up: she claws her way, literally, back from the grave, teams up with her old gang-members, and sets about extracting revengs on Junko and her crew.

The two leads are great, with Rena outstanding as a completely-warped boss. To give you some idea, when two underlings screw up, she doesn’t just make them cut off a finger. She pits them head-to-head against each other in digit removal – and the first one to refuse or hesitate, earns a bullet in the head. That’s what I call an incentive to avoid screwing up. She’s also a part-time dominatrix, who enjoys whipping a topless Asami with roses till she bleeds. That’s probably about as sleazy as this gets, and most of the time is more interested in the violence than the pinky, if you see what I mean; there’s a couple of decent extended brawls, as Asumi and her “sisters” take on Junko’s minions [I was initially confused by the sisterhood thing, until I worked out it seems to be a gang term, rather than blood relations].

On the other hand, as noted. some sequences brings things to a halt, most obviously a night-clun sequence which appears as much to be a promo for some band (probably a friend of the director), before going over to the always-popular, unconvincing transvestite assassins. The ending, too, goes on beyond what is necessary or effective, and the digital muzzle flashes are somewhat overdone. But don’t let that dissuade you from what’s a fun entry in the gang-girl genre, and I look forward to the promised second installment.

Dir: Nakadaira Kazushi
Star: Asami, Komine Rena, Motomiya Kenji, Sato Jiro

Geisha Assassin

  By

★★★½
“Surprisingly decent, and much more assassin than geisha.”

Taking a minimalist approach to its plot, particularly for the first hour, it’s about Kotomi (Tsukui), who is on a quest to find the man (Kanai) who was responsible for killing her father (Nomura), a samurai who wanted to leave his sklls to her. To reach the killer, she has to battle her way through a series of lower-level minions, such as a pack of ninjas, a monk and Pocahontas [ok, that might be a stretch, but honestly, that was my first thought on seeing her]. However, after she has fought her way past these henchmen and henchwomen, to reach the boss level, she discovers that things might not quite be the way she always perceived them.

After a series of Japanese films where it seems the experience most required by the lead actress involved modeling bikinis, rather than combat, it was pleasant to discover Tsukui appeared to know her stuff. This is apparent, because Ohara, for the most part, also knows his, keeping the camera an adequate distance from the action, and allowing the battle to flow across the screen without excessive edits. It’s particularly impressive in the fight between Kotomi and the monk, where one shot in particular is remarkable for its length, approaching early Jackie Chan levels. It makes sense that Ohara also worked on the action in Onechanbara, another solid genre entry.

It’s not without mis-steps: the lighting is occasionally crappy, and the film grinds to a halt at the end for a massive glob of exposition, just when it should be rolling out of control. This is significantly better when it keeps the whole “plot” and “acting” thing to a minimum, and concentrates on what it does best: Tsukui kicking ass in a wide variety of ways, ranging from surreal battles with zombie-like creatures who can detach their heads for use as weapons, or rolling around in the mud with Pocahontas. Which gives me an idea for an entirely new series of ‘Disney Princess’ movies, but I digress. Anyway, at a brisk 78 minutes, this doesn’t waste much time, and was certainly of unexpected quality and volume, as far as the action goes.

Dir: Go Ohara
Star: Minami Tsukui, Shigeru Kanai, Masaki Nomura, Nao Nagasawa
a.k.a. Geisha vs. Ninja

Lethal Angels

  By

★★
“I preferred this the first time, when it was called Naked Killer.”

Winnie (Lee) has a grudge: against gang boss Bowen (Yuan) in particular, but also against just about any man who abuses women. She puts together a team of four underlings, such as Yoyo (Sum), whose family was killed by thugs, and uses them to take out anyone whose lustful desires overwhelm their common sense. Now, it’s time for the big one: Bowen. Winnie sends Yoyo in as an undercover nanny, to scope things out and obtain evidence of Bowen’s illegal dealings. However, once in, she finds out that Bowen is now largely reformed, and Yoyo also objects to Winnie’s plan to wipe out all of Bowen’s family, including his six-year old daughter. Meanwhile, she’s also being investigated by Jet (On), a cop who knew and almost dated her at college, and is on the case of the mysterious deaths of mob bosses at the hands of beautiful ladies.

This is just too restrained to work. There’s a striptease routine by one of the minor underlings at the start, but after that, it conspicuously fails to live up to its alternate title, of Naked Avengers. Lee is good value as the overlord, but if you think you’ve seen it all before, you probably have. Even the scene where one of the girls has to take on a chained pervert for training purposes is lifted, wholesale, from Naked Killer – except, rather than in a dungeon, it appears here to take part in a car-park or something. [There’s a prominent “keep left” sign in the background, whose looming presence reminded me of nothing more than the ending to a Monty Python sketch]

The action occasionally has its moments, but rarely gets above competent, and it’s only in the final battle, where the schisms in the group fracture and send it on a path of self-destruction, that things become somewhat interesting, and it’s a case of too little, too late. Instead, there’s too much time spent on Jet, who is a waste of space and screen-time, and his lacks of charisma means his relationship with Yoyo has as much chemistry as…as… a thing that doesn’t contain any chemistry. Man, I hate it when a simile falls apart, half-way through. Or is it a metaphor? That I was pondering such grammatical issues during the viewing, probably tells you more about the film than anything else. If there’s a single way in which Naked Killer isn’t clearly better, I think I missed it.

Dir: Steve Cheng
Star: Tin Sum, Andy On, Jewel Lee, Yuan Yuan

Sucker Punch

  By

★★★★½
“Suckers for punishment?”

Before getting to the film, what’s perhaps even more interesting is the critical reaction: it has been a long time since I’ve seen a film provoke such savagery, e.g. the Chicago Tribune’s Michael Phillips, who wrote: “The film abdicates so many basic responsibilities of coherent storytelling, even coherent stupid-action-movie storytelling, director/co-writer/co-producer Zack Snyder must have known in preproduction that his greasy collection of near-rape fantasies and violent revenge scenarios disguised as a female-empowerment fairy tale wasn’t going to satisfy anyone but himself.” Ouch. That’s far from the only example, and covers the common planks used to whack Snyder: incoherence, faux-feminism and dubious sexual politics.

There’s not even any genre love lost. Joe Wright, director of the somewhat similarly-themed Hanna, which came out two weeks after Sucker, tore into it: “I probably shouldn’t say this but the posters for recent films with girls kicking arse – there’s one out at the moment – there’s girls in the poster in bikinis and crop-tops, and they’ve got pigtails and they’re dressed up as schoolgirls. They’re being sexualised, this is supposedly ‘Girl Power’ female empowerment and that’s bullshit. Female empowerment is not about sex, that is the point of female empowerment. It’s about brains and not objectifying women.”

It’s worth pointing out Wright hadn’t seen the film, but I can’t say I support his position of laying down canon law on what does or does not constitute “the point of female empowerment”, or accept that sex is incompatible with it, as he states. There’s multiple routes to the goal, just as the Camille Paglia approach to feminism differs from the Andrea Dworkin one. It’s not a Spandex leotard – one size fits all – and to denigrate another piece of entertainment (which is, after all, what both Hanna and Sucker Punch are) for an alternative approach seems petty and mean-spirited. There’s room in the playground for both. Of course, I’m not someone who relies upon Hollywood to provide any kind of moral compass: if you do, I’d say you have far bigger problems than Sucker Punch.

But those who like it, really like it. It’s rated at 6.6 on the IMDB, from over 25,000 votes, so it’s not just studio shills. Compare other critically-savaged and commercial genre “failures”: Barb Wire (3.1), Catwoman (3.2), Ultraviolet (4.0). Sucker is more in line with something like Underworld (6.8), and the reaction on Twitter is also far more positive. Star Cornish may have a point when she said, “It’s so stylised, so specific; there’s no other film like it at all. When you have something totally new, it’s going to be judged to the 10th degree… When you’ve got a totally new concept, it’s a love or hate relationship.”

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Even if it fails, I’d rather have a film with ambitions, that tries something different, rather than another Judd Apatow/Seth Rogen “comedy”. There’s some parallel to be drawn between Snyder and Dutch maverick Paul Verhoeven. You could link Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake to Robocop, while 300 and Starship Troopers are both pseudo-fascistic tributes to the glory of war – and Sucker Punch would be Snyder’s Showgirls, a critically-reviled flop, damaged by its rating. Except here, it’s the PG-13 which hurts, but we’ll get more into that a little later.

The movie itself is imperfect; by some measures perhaps not even the “best” GWG film I’ve seen at the cinema this month. However, it is thoroughly cinematic and can only be admired as such – I’m far more likely to pick up the Blu-Ray DVD of this than Hanna. An un-named 20-year old (Browning) is sent to a lunatic asylum by her stepfather, after rejecting his attentions and being made the scapegoat for the death of her younger sister; her lobotomy is scheduled for five days time. Turns out the asylum is a high-end brothel where our heroine – nick-named “Baby Doll” – and the other girls are kept to perform for the pleasure of various high-rollers. Baby Doll plots an escape, the tools necessary lifted by her accomplices while she entrances the staff and customers with her dancing. During these, Baby Doll retreats even further, to fantasy worlds to do battle against dragons, robots, samurai warriors, etc. But which “reality” is real?

There’s more doubt over that, than which reality Snyder likes: hands-down, it’s the one filled with carnage, and his love for it shows. It’s only April, you could nominate these as the best four action sequences of the year, and I wouldn’t argue. My personal favourite sees the five girls storm the trenches in World War I, taking on steampunk-powered German zombies, with the aid of a rocket-powered walking tank. Remarkably, as cool as that sounds on the page, seeing it on screen is even better. Yes, all bear more than a passing resemblance to video games: they still work, possessing an elegant flow to them. And while none of the heroines will make Zhang Ziyi lose sleep, nor are they left looking horribly out of their depth, a major fear on hearing a High School Musical star was involved.

Since Baby Doll is explicitly stated to be 20, this doesn’t strictly fall into the category of “teenage action heroines,” but her hair, clothes, make-up, etc. all are designed to evoke the spirit of what Chris disparagingly called, “schoolgirl porn” – but the PG-13 rating means it can get absolutely no closer, so really, what’s the point? At least Showgirls delivered the goods: Baby Doll’s fantasy world might as well have been an office, college dorm or, frankly, convent, instead of the world’s most demure brothel. Reports indicate it took seven submissions and the removal of 18 minutes to get past the MPAA, so I have to ask. Should a film that, on one level, is about an abused girl forced into prostitution by her step-father, share a rating with Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire?

However, I do like a little more plot and better characterization with my action sequences. I think Baby Doll probably sings more than she speaks in the film. Browning is responsible for the cover of Sweet Dreams, which backs the immensely creepy opening that paints, in swift efficient brush strokes, the lead-up to her arrival at the asylum. It’s almost as if Snyder says, “Well, that’s that out of the way,” and there’s nothing anywhere near as effective the rest of the way. The rest of Baby’s posse don’t even get the benefit of that, and remain little more than lingerie-clad chess pieces, to be moved around the board of Snyder’s (undeniably impressive) imagination. Same goes for the plot, which has the action sequences more grafted on, than flowing naturally from the plot.

Overall, however, for all its undeniable flaws, this is a rare beast: an action film where women [rather than a singular woman] take center-stage. I’m hard pushed to think of anything like it out of Hollywood since, perhaps, The Descent, and this is clearly on a much bigger scale. Unfortunately, the luke-warm box-office probably makes it unlikely anyone else will follow suit, though I get the feeling it will do very nicely on DVD. It’s certainly close to a unique movie, for its combination of style, content and execution, and I tend to think/hope that the passage of time will be kinder to it, than most contemporary critics.

Dir: Zack Snyder
Stars: Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens

"It’s certainly close to a unique movie, for its content of style, content and execution, and I tend to think/hope that the passage of time will be kinder to it, than most contemporary critics."

The Sexy Killer

  By

★★½
“Cheap Chinese knock-offs aren’t limited to toys and electronics.”

Not to be confused, in any way with SexyKiller, this 1976 Shaw Brothers film is more of an unofficial remake of Coffy. Wanfei (Ping), a nurse by day, decides to go vigilante by night, after her sister falls victim to druglords and ends up brain-damaged and drooling. With most of the police force in the pockets of the dealers, Wanfei opts to go undercover as a drug-addict of loose morals, so she can make her way up the chain of command, to deliver justice on behalf of her sister to the sinister Boss (Hsia). This finds her an ally in Weipin (Hua), a childhood friend and honest cop whose hands are tied by pesky bureaucratic niceties, like “needing a search warrant”; she’s also encouraged by her pundit boyfriend (Wei), who has long taken a strong anti-drug stance.

This has its moments, and I’m likely remembering those more fondly than the movie overall, which grinds to a halt in the middle, and diverts far too much running time over to Weipin. Action-wise, this is from the Dark Ages of Hong Kong movies, after the death of Bruce Lee and before Jackie Chan resurrected the genre. The fights here are pedestrian and poorly-staged, with Ping’s credentials particularly limited, though male viewers may be distracted by her alternative assets [another review described her as spending most of her career lying on her back, and there’s plenty of that to go around here too]. The problem with remakes, is you inevitably compare them to the original, and while the heroine here is easy on the eye, there’s a reason Pam Grier is a genre icon, and Chen Ping isn’t.

Onto those “moments” mention above, which are the film’s saving grace. They start with Wanfei’s showing off her topless kung-fu, and build up to her crashing a car into the Boss’s mansion and letting loose on his minions with her shot-gun, apparently made by Perpetually Loaded Armaments, Inc. The film’s highlight probably comes when we discover what happens when you fire said weapon at a water-bed, which is something the Time Warp crew really should be looking into. However, between the opening and the finale, this comes over mostly as a pale (literally) imitation of Pam Grier’s journey down the same path, from three years previously.

Dir: Chung Sun
Star: Chen Ping, Yueh Hua, Wang Hsia, Szu Wei
a.k.a. The Drug Connection

Zorro’s Black Whip

  By

★★★
“Masked woman with a whip? Despite being almost 70 years old, still better than Catwoman.”

This 12-part serial from Republic was a spin-off from the success of Zorro – though despite the title, the Z-word is never mentioned. It moves the legend from Spanish California to Idaho in the 1880’s, just before a vote to decide whether it would become a state. Villainous Dan Hammond (McDonald) begins a violent campaign to prevent this, and is opposed by local newspaper owner Randolph Meredith, who has a secret identity as The Black Whip, a masked vigilante. When he is shot dead, his sister Barbara (Stirling) takes up the cape and whip, along with the help of undercover federal agent, Vic Gordon (Lewis). Together, they foil Hammond’s increasingly-desperate plots as voting day nears, and escape from 11 precarious positions. Well, it is a serial, after all…

Within the harsh limitations of the format, it does its best. In less than 15 minutes per episode, they have to fit in opening credits, a recap, replay the previous cliff-hanger, resolve that, set up the next cliff-hanger and finish with the closing credits. It leaves precious little time for plot or character development, which may explain why all the bad guys wear black hats. Seriously. They could reduce crime by 90% simply by banning the sale of non-white headgear, or so it would appear. Vic does most of the heavy lifting, action-wise, brawling frequently; Barbara generally stands back and uses her whip, which makes sense. Though, to be honest, the villains are remarkably oblivious to the Whip’s feminine curves: they’re blinded by their own sexism, at one point rejecting a suggestion Babs is the masked marauder, saying, “She couldn’t be! The Black Whip’s got to be a man!”

While clunky, sporting a dreadful ending for Hammond, and truly a product of its time (1944), the action is frequent and competent, thanks to the second-unit work of the legendary stuntman Yakima Canutt, who was the inspiration for much of John Wayne’s on-screen persona, and is best-known for staging the chariot-race in Ben Hur. The horse-work here is still outstanding: Babe DeFreest was the double for Stirling, and can be seen riding with her here. You could edit this down into a somewhat hyper feature, which would still be complete nonsense, yet given its age, is far from unwatchable.

Dir: Spencer Bennet and Wallace Grissell
Star: Linda Stirling, George J. Lewis, Francis McDonald, Hal Taliaferro

Female Slave Ship

  By

★★★
“Could have lived more fully up to its promise later, when the Japanese taste for pinku films had really awakened.”

It isn’t terribly ahead of its time, but one senses this could have done better later in the career of leading lady Mihara – she’d go on to movies such as the unforgettably-titled School of the Holy Beast. Here, however, exploitation largely stops at the title, with no sex to speak off [a cutaway to a gramophone needle is as salacious as it gets], female flesh is strictly limited to underwear, and the violence consists of bloodless gun-battles and a plethora of backhand slaps. With admirable equality, these are administered both to the square-jawed Japanese office hero, Lt. Suguwa (Sugawara), and the dozen women on whose ship he ends up, as World War II winds towards its end.

He was carrying crucial radar plans, when his plane is shot down. He gets picked up by a white-slaving vessel, taking a dozen women to Shanghai for sale – most are hookers, but there’s also Rumi (Mitsuya), who thought she was signing up as a combat nurse. Oops. Operations are overseen by the “queen” (Mihara), who is clearly a bad girl, since she smokes and sits with her legs crossed. However, the plan is derailed when the boat is hijacked by pirates: the girls, under Sugawa, mount a rebellion, but they are, frankly, a bit crap at it, and the pirates reverse the coup inside two minutes. It turns out the Americans wants Sugawa and the plans, so the pirates head for an island, to cut a deal with a Chinese spy for the officer, and auction away the curvier cargo. Can Sugawa and his bevy of beauties escape, despite the queen’s efforts to play both sides?

While not unentertaining, as noted above, it’s a film that would likely have been more successful made in 1970 rather than a decade previously. That said, Mihara is an excellent villainess, right from the first time we encounter her, as Sugawa tries to stop Rumi from getting a whipping for having the temerity to go on deck. She’s far more fun that the bland hero, and the film’s needle moves appreciably toward “Interesting” whenever she’s on screen. Unfortunately, that’s not often enough.

Hard to Die

  By

★★★
“I just want to get my clothes on and get out of here.”

This slice of cheese couldn’t be any riper. Five employees of the Acme Lingerie Company are called in to work on a Saturday to do inventory, despite the presence of creepy janitor Ketchum. A misdelivered package arrives, intended for Dr. Newton, an investigator of witchcraft, and when the ladies open it, they unleash the soul of a serial killer (allowing the use of flashback footage from a previous Wynorski flick. Sorority House Massacre). Meanwhile, the workers, having got all dusty gathering up boxes in the basement, make the logical decision: to take showers and try on the latest Acme line of skimpy products. Which they then wear for the rest of the film. As the unleashed killer picks off them, and everyone else in the building, one by one. Fortunate that there’s an arms dealer who has also set up shop on another floor, and who has left large quantities of merchandise and ammo around…

For the first 70 minutes, you’ll be wondering why this even qualifies for the site. It’s more in the campy horror line, with the emphasis more on the “camp” than the horror: always nice to see genre icon Forrest J. Ackerman in a supporting role. Otherwise, this is basically an excuse to ogle scantily-clad babes, but the tone is kept light – check out the squeaking sounds when they are assiduously soaping their breasts in the shower. Even the deaths are basically off-screen, with a fraction of the gore we get now, more than twenty years on. As a B-movie, it’s fine, but despite the title, Joe-Bob Briggs was about a million miles off when he said, “It’s the female version of Die Hard, full of lighting-hot action.” There’s a reason just about everyone involved uses pseudonyms. And then, fortunately, there’s the final reel, to which no description can do justice. Fortunately, someone posted it on YouTube, so I think I’ll just let the footage speak for itself.

Quite why they waited until the end to unleash this furious assault on the senses, I don’t understand. Is it great art? Not in the slightest. But it crams in more marvellous, lingerie-clad, automatic, dumbness into ten minutes than many better-known GWG entries do in their entire running-time, and should only be respected as such.

Dir: “Arch Stanton” [Jim Wynorski]
Star: Robyn Harris, Lindsay Taylor, Debra Dare, Orville Ketchum

Fascination

  By

★★★★
“An iconic low-budget combination of sex and violence.”

Mark (Lemaire), is a thief on the run from his collaborators after absconding with the loot. He takes refuge in a remote country manor, all but surrounded by water, which he believes to be deserted. Turns out he was almost right. The sole inhabitants are a pair of chambermaids, Eva (Lahaie) and Elizabeth (Mai), but despite his gun, they don’t seem quite as terrified of the intruder as one feels they should be, and tell him they are expecting some other female visitors later that evening. Elizabeth does take a shine to Mark, and tells him he should leave, but Eva uses her wiles to keep Mark there. The rest of his gang show up, and lay siege to the house, but Eva takes the loot out to them and single-handedly dispatches them, before returning to the manor. As night descends, the visitors finally arrive, and the noose tightens around Mark’s neck, as the truth about the get-together is revealed…

Watching porn stars try to act is often a painful experience, but renowned 70’s XXX starlet Lahaie is perfectly cast here. She plays a feral creature, driven entirely by instinct, and with no qualms about using sex or violence to achieve her aim, of keeping Mark in the house for the night. The sight of her stalking across the bridge which forms the castle’s sole entrance, wielding a blood-stained scythe almost the same size as the actress, is one that will stick with you. The film does betray its cheapness with some fairly crappy effects [you’re going to have someone hacked apart with a scythe, you should do better than some red gunk on the throat], but more than makes up for it with a parade of strong, confident and sensual female characters. Mark is by no means an idiot or a weakling, but from the moment he arrives in the house, it’s clear he’s completely beyond his depth, out-maneouvered at every turn by the women.

Indeed, right from the opening scene, where a group of elegant ladies sip blood in a slaughterhouse, there’s something off-center about proceedings, and Rollin maintains that sense throughout. While Rollin made several entries in the vampire genre, this is easily his most interesting take on the genre’s mythology – one which doesn’t actually mention the V-word at any point in the film. Lahaie and Mai deserve much of the credit for that.

Dir: Jean Rollin
Stars: Jean-Marie Lemaire, Brigitte Lahaie, Franka Mai, Fanny Magier

The Tournament (2009)

  By

★★★
“The exotic life of an assassin is all glamour and exotic places, e.g. all-expenses trips to Middlesbrough.”

Every seven years, thirty of the world’s greatest assassins gather together for a battle. The winner gets $10 million, while bettors view the action remotely and gamble on the duels, face-offs and bloodbaths which ensue. Each assassin has a tracker implanted, and has a scanner where they can see the location of any other contestants nearby. This time, it’s in Middlesbrough, England, with reigning champion Joshua Harlow (Rhames) returning after he it told the murderer of his wife will be taking part. One of the 30 dumps their tracker into an alcoholic priest (Carlyle), who is “surprised”, shall we say, to become the target for the other 29. Lai Lai Zhen (Hu) realizes he’s an innocent, and vows to protect him, while also trying to win the competition.

The concept is, of course, completely implausible, and if you can’t drive a bus and a tanker through holes in the plot, you’re not trying. There are far too many assassins, too: of the 30 listed, probably no more than half a dozen get any lines, so they’d have been better off shrinking the number and giving them actual personalities. What results is basically “kill porn”: a massive number of deaths, some impressive, a couple genuinely spectacular, but possessing no emotional content or resonance whatsoever. That said, this is by no means unentertaining. Hu (I have consciously got to stop myself from calling her “Cindy-Lou”) seems to be carving a niche for herself as a low-rent version of Lucy Liu, and the action here is decent, and undeniably copious.

It all builds to a massive chase on a motorway, which sees the bus driven by the priest, being chased by the tanker driven by Harlow, while Zhen fights off the parkour guy from Casino Royale, in, on and around the bus. Mann has clearly been watching all the right movies, and if he needs a trailer reel for a career as a second-unit director, then he should just pop the DVD in and leave the room for 90 minutes. The writers, on the other hand… It really took three of them to come up with this complete nonsense? What did they do with the rest of the beer-mat?

Dir: Scott Mann
Star: Kelly Hu, Robert Carlyle, Liam Cunningham, Ving Rhames