Category: Review

Shero

  By

★★½
“Lifestyles of the rich and attractive.”

Not to be confused with Sheroes – because I know I did – this is a TV series from Singapore, marking the country’s first appearance on this site. So that’s nice. It’s the story of the Zhang sisters, Yin Xi (Wong), who runs an (almost) all-female bodyguard company, SHERO, and her younger sibling, photographer Yin Chen (Peh). While on a job in Australia, Yin Xi is attacked, and disappears: unknown to anyone, she is hospital, having lost her memory. Yin Chen takes over the company, and works to unravel the mystery of why her sister was attacked, with the help of Yue Rui Xiang (Tan), the CEO of a shipbuilding company who is a client of SHERO.

Turns out, there is a lot going on here – as you can imagine, given there are twenty episodes, each around 45-50 minutes long. Fifteen and a quarter hours, in total. So, for example, there’s an eventual connection to the murder of the sisters’ parents, seven years previously, which needs to be addressed. It also feels like SHERO need to ramp up the background checks on their employees, since it feels like all of them have secrets. Or as another example, there’s one worker who was a former drug addict – which is okay, this was known when she was employed. But her mother is a raging alcoholic, now victim to a blackmailer; a situation now seriously affecting her daughter’s work for the company. 

So, really, there’s as much soap opera here as action, with romantic entanglements and family drama very much the order of the day. I was expecting something a little more like Pamela Anderson’s V.I.P. series (which I feel I must get round to reviewing), but this is much more one over-arching story-line across all twenty episodes, with occasional side-plots. Everyone in the show is almost weirdly attractive, and while I get that Singapore is one of the richest countries in the world, this feels almost a promotional video for the country [Makers Mediacorp are a state-owned media company, so that may be a factor]. Certainly, the Australian capital of Canberra gets its product placement in – and they are not the only ones. 

There are some action scenes, mostly martial arts based, though guns seems to end up doing most of the killing. But they’re competent rather than particularly outstanding. The use of both amnesia and multiple personality disorder as plot points is hackneyed, both of these coming and going as the plot requires. Though I was impressed by how unexpectedly bleak the show ends up being. While I might not have made it to the end had I been more actively watching it, it was simply something not too demanding, to distract me while I got my daily exercise in. As such, it filled the gap in my morning regime adequately. Yeah, “adequate” seems like the right word for this overall.

Dir: Chen Yiyou
Star: Joanne Peh, Romeo Tan, Carrie Wong, Nick Teo
The whole series is available with subtitles on YouTube.

Carnage Park

  By

★★½
“Goes off the rails, and not in a good way.”

There’s a very strong start here, and this makes the way it implodes at the end all the more disappointing. The film certainly hits the ground running. It’s 1978 in rural California, and ‘Scorpion’ Joe Clay (Hébert) is fleeing from the scene of a botched bank robbery. His wounded partner in crime is bleeding out in the back seat, and there’s a hostage, bank customer Vivian Fontaine (Bell), in the trunk. But when he pulls off the road to sort things out, freeing Vivian so she can help, we discover there are much worse things in the desert than scorpions. For Joe quickly gets his head blown apart. 

This is the work of completely insane Vietnam vet, former sniper Wyatt Moss (Healy). He lures people off the road, torturing and killing them, because… Well, because he’s a completely insane Vietnam vet. I will not be taking any further questions on the topic at this point. He has the tacit collusion of his brother (Ruck), the local sheriff, though even he has just about had enough of covering up for Wyatt’s madness. Vivian does manage initially to get the jump on the predator. However, she commits the fatal mistake, a common one in horror movies, of not making sure the killer is really dead. And guess what? He is not, leading to an extended chase sequence through the mines on the remote property. 

Which is where the problems occur. Keating mistakenly thinks that having things unfold in near pitch-darkness, save for the occasional flash from a muzzle, somehow enhances proceedings. He is incorrect in this case. Not least because it goes to such an extreme, and for so long, the only evidence I had that my TV wasn’t broken, was the subtitles I had fortuitously left on from the previous movie. When it literally emerges, blinking, back into the light, you get a couple of captions in lieu of a climax, before the end credits roll. I am in no way exaggerating, when I say that it ranks among the worst endings I’ve endured, over the more than twenty years I have been running this site. 

Although the early going is certainly derivative, most obviously of Quentin Tarantino, there’s no shortage of energy and surprises as we move through proceedings. We discover, for example, that Vivian is already having a bad day, and this may be a factor in her eventually having had enough, and fighting back. She staggers through the hellish landscape, encountering other victims – both alive and dead – trying to find a way out or help. Yet she ends up self-sabotaging these hopes, in the most unfortunate of fashions, leaving her entirely on her own. Such a shame the film decides not to give its heroine the finale she deserves, instead burying both it and Vivian in the darkness of an underground mine, and offering no satisfactory resolution to speak of.

Dir: Mickey Keating
Star: Ashley Bell, Pat Healy, James Landry Hébert, Alan Ruck

Circle of Bones

  By

★★½
“More of a semi-circle, really”

For whatever reason, I had a strong sense of deja vu while watching this, but I’ve been unable to track down any record of me having written it up. I may be confusing it with Blood Hunters: Rise of the Hybrids, which had the same director and star, or it may simply be the fairly generic nature of the story. This focuses on FBI agent Karen Wu (Chang), who travels to the Philippines to investigate a human trafficking ring. There, she’s met by local liaison officer Luciana Ramos (Torre), and they gradually uncover that the abductions and disappearances are tied to an occult group overseen by the mysterious Eduardo Vicente (Ignacio).

Originally, he was the leader of your basic hippie commune, until accidentally unleashing an entity known as Yawa, who had been trapped underground for centuries. This took over Eduardo, turned him evil, and started demanding human sacrifices from the surrounding area, the aim eventually being to give Yawa immortality. This is all recounted in flashback by Karen, who was found stumbling around in the jungle, covered in blood and saying “Yawa… Yawa…”.  After a period back in the United States, she has now returned to the Philippines, and the story is gradually prised out of her by local Detective Liz Fajardo (Victoria). She is piecing together the case after an attempted SWAT raid on another occult location goes horribly wrong, with the entire squad being wiped out.

There’s way too much creeping around shadowy facilities here, and there’s also a sense that English, the language in which most of this unfolds, may not be the language of choice for a number of the participants. Chang, I should stress, is fine: however, a number of the supporting cast are on considerably shakier ground. The plot is mostly humdrum and predictable: if you don’t see the big twist at the end coming, from more or less fifteen minutes in, then you need to be paying greater attention. In some ways, it feels like a throwback to the adaptations Hammer Films did of Dennis Wheatley’s Satanist books in the sixties, though this could definitely have used the gravitas of someone like Christopher Lee at its centre.

It is rather more action-oriented, with Chang doing a decent job there, operating both with her bare hands and with various weapons. It helps the cult members have no problem being used as cannon fodder, not least because, thanks to Yawa, death is barely an inconvenience. But it feels like the scope of the whole cult never lives up the early foreshadowing, when there’s talk of millionaires being involved and a hotel complex which has shades of Epstein’s island. I’d have liked a bigger conspiracy to appear, rather than it just being Eduardo and his acolytes. This is interesting only in spurts, and it needs a less cliched plot and some better performances, to wrap around its reasonably well-executed action.

Dir: Vincent Soberano
Star: Sarah Chang, Marella Torre, Jana Victoria, Ian Ignacio

Mary From the Prayer Ward

  By

★★½
“When you order Wynonna Earp on Temu.”

I mean: Stetson wearin’, six-gun shootin’ country gal, on a mission to slay demons, vampires and things that go bump in the West? Yeah, it’s like that. Mind you, there’s a rough start to this, with three minutes of what is likely a top contender for the worst acting of 2026. I guess it’s good to get it out of the way early, and it does make the rest of the cast look like Oscar candidates in comparison. To be fair, Jones is decent enough in the title role. Even when lumbered with some pretty clunky globs of exposition about a 17th-century Satanic cult, she is generally tolerable, and occasionally above that.

Things unfold in the rural Kansas town of Bentley, where a series of gruesome murders is baffling police chief Peaks (Neighill). He seems oddly unaware of the presence in Bentley of Mary, whose parents were fighters of the occult, killed in the line of duty. She now carries on the family tradition, with the help of her blind uncle Hughes (Polk). Naturally, these murders are the work of the unsubtly-named Velkir the Butcher (Smith), who is intent on completing a ceremony originally started in 1690’s Salem. For, y’see, the witch trials there were not hysteria, so much as a carefully-constructed cover-up of the truth, which involved a Satanic plot to raise Hecate. “What’s a Hecate?” asks Chief Peaks. Explanation follows.

It does feel like the structure of the film is a little weird. It’s not until well after the half-way point that Peaks and Mary formally team up, leading to a bit of a gallop towards the obvious confrontation with Mr. Butcher. This partnership requires a diversion, in which Mary takes him on a house call, helping a woman who is reporting strange happening in her home. He blames psychological issues, until she demonstrates otherwise, thereby convincing him of her genuine skill-set. It feels like this should have happened much earlier, to explain the casual way in which this nun is allowed to poke around crime scenes. Well, she’s got a clerical collar on, which seems to demonstrate a loose understanding of religious garb. 

My main issue, however, was the copious use of highly unconvincing CGI, from muzzle flashes and blood spatters, to showers of sparks as the supernatural entities are dispatched. It absolutely took me out of the situation every time I noticed them. Which was every time they appeared. Which was every time anything much happened. Neighill is certainly guilty of trying do much: between writing, directing, editing, co-starring, composing songs, etc. it feels like every other credit is his. But despite a cover pic (above) which makes it look more like Mary from the Special Ed Class, this isn’t worthless. As noted, Jones is an engaging heroine, and Smith’s scenery chewing antics are fun, taken in the right, B-movie way. It’s no replacement for Wynonna Earp. Yet as dollar store knock-offs go, I’ve seen worse.

Dir: Andrew Neighill
Star: Mandy Jones, Glenn Polk, Andrew Neighill, Christopher Thom Smith

The Red Peri, by Stanley G. Weinbaum

  By

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

This 1935 novella is only the second work I’ve read by pulp-era American SF author Stanley G. Weinbaum (the other is his first and best-known short story, A Martian Odyssey, which is included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, 1929-1964). But despite dying at the age of 33, in his meteoric writing career (which spanned only about 18 months), he produced dozens of short stories and two posthumously published novels. (A number of the stories were published posthumously as well.) He earned a place in Sam Moskowitz’s Explorers of the Infinite: Shapers of Science Fiction (1974), and his stature in the genre’s history remains high more than 50 years later.

Though born in Louisville, Kentucky, as a child Weinbaum moved with his parents and sister (the family was ethnically Jewish, but to my knowledge there’s no indication that he was ever religiously observant) to Milwaukee, and lived there for the rest of his short life, except for study at the Univ. of Wisconsin at Madison from 1920-23, where he first majored in chemical engineering and then switched to English literature. (He left without graduating, after being caught taking an exam for a friend on a dare.) After his marriage in 1926, he worked at a variety of odd jobs, but began writing seriously in the late 1920s and submitting his work to magazines. A Martian Odyssey, published in July 1934, was his first sale, and brought him immediate acclaim in the small SF fandom of that day.

American SF between the World Wars was a sort of literary ghetto, disdained by critics, and found mainly in a handful of small-circulation niche magazines, dominated by editors committed to the genre’s “hard” tradition, in which the speculative element is strictly based on extrapolation from known science and scientific accuracy is a paramount concern. (Literary matters like character development, well-crafted prose, and original plotting, in that era, was sometimes of less concern.) Weinbaum, like many of the genre’s writers in his generation, had the scientific background and interest to write hard SF, but his English literature education/interest also gave him stylistic skills superior to those of a lot of his contemporaries. Both qualities are evidenced in this short work.

The Red Peri is set partly in space but mainly on Pluto (which had been discovered relatively recently, in 1930), in a future era in which humans use rocketry to travel to the planets of the solar system, but mostly to Venus and Mars; a small town on the Jovian moon Titan is as far out as their settlement goes, and the outer planets are rarely visited at all. (No date is actually given in the text, though the cover copy gives 2080; I’m not sure where that’s derived from.) Trade between these three middle planets is lucrative, but bedeviled by space pirates; and none of the latter are more feared than those of the pirate ship Red Peri. (Peri is Persian for imp or elf.)

25-year-old Frank Keene, our American viewpoint character and co-protagonist, a radiologist and physicist, has a brief run-in with a red-haired pirate (you can’t see much through a space-suit visor, but he did see that) when the freighter he’s traveling on is robbed by the Peri. A year later, he and an elderly fellow scientist, researching cosmic radiation in deep space, have to make an emergency landing on Pluto. That very cold world proves to hold a couple of secrets, one of which being that it’s the lair of the Peri –and it’s no real spoiler to reveal that “The Red Peri” is also the moniker of the pirate captain, who happens to be a very attractive young lady.

A Dr. Mike Goldsmith provides a reasonably spoiler-free page-and-1/2 Introduction and about five and a half pages of footnotes to this Grammaticus Books re-print. As this added matter reveals, despite Weinbaum’s determination to write “hard” SF, this book has its share of scientific inaccuracies (though it also exhibits some solid science as well in places). Some of these are simply the result of the limited scientific knowledge available in 1935: for instance, not much was known then about Pluto (and Weinbaum’s depiction of it was plausible at the time), and nobody back then realized that the range of radio signals is practically infinite. But (though Goldsmith doesn’t pick up on it), the author makes a MAJOR scientific error which his entire plot depends on, and which was clear to me even with my weak background in science. There’s also an “insta-love” factor going on here that’s not really credible (at least, to me). But on the plus side, our main characters are vital, nuanced and well-drawn, and Weinbaum creates a thought-provoking, morally complex situation which engages both the reason and the emotions of these characters, and of the readers.

While the ending of the tale wraps up the immediate plot here effectively, readers will probably want a continuation to the narrative; and Weinbaum in fact intended to write more about these characters. Sadly, that wasn’t to be. Less than a month after the story was published, he was dead of lung/throat cancer, brought on by his heavy smoking (and initially misdiagnosed as tonsilitis, resulting in a misguided tonsillectomy that just added uselessly to his pain). So readers will have to use their own imaginations to project future developments!

Author: Stanley G. Weinbaum
Publisher: Grammaticus Books; available from Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.
A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

The Pinkertons

  By

★★★½
“We never sleep.”

When we think of the tough women in the old West, the first ones that come to mind are usually, the criminals. Let’s face it, most people we celebrate as “legends of the old West” today were not really heroes. More often, they were people who broke the law, or highly questionable personalities such as Calamity Jane, Belle Starr, Pearl Hart or Etta Place. But we should not forget there is also the other side of the law! Though women were present in quite a number of job areas and were vital in the development of the country, very often history writing has focused rather on the achievements of men, overlooking the women’s part of the success story. But now and again, an interesting yet forgotten character is rediscovered and attracts new attention.

One of these characters is Kate Warne (sometimes spelled Warn), born in 1833 in New York. Coming from a poor background, life turned even more challenging after she became a widow at just 23 years old. She was working as a cleaning woman when she saw an advertisement in a newspaper. Allan Pinkerton, head of Pinkerton’s detective agency, was looking for new employees, interested in working for him. The agency were involved in quite a number of fascinating cases, such as the “Molly Maguires”. Those events were referenced in the Sherlock Holmes novel The Valley of Fear, and subsequently became the basis for a 1970 movie with Sean Connery and Richard Harris. Warne was able to convince Pinkerton to employ a female, arguing that women have an eye for details and are excellent observers. Indeed, it seems that Pinkerton grew quite fond of her as he spoke highly of her after her death.

Warne was active in solving crime cases and is said to have played an essential role in discovering a plot to kill Abraham Lincoln in 1861. She guarded him when his train passed locations where an attack was planned. (Unfortunately, she wasn’t around in 1865.) For the whole story I refer you to Warne’s Wikipedia page. But I especially like the following sentence there: “It is believed that Pinkerton came up with the slogan to his agency “we never sleep” as a result of Warne’s guard of Lincoln that night.” How much of that is true is difficult to say. Pinkerton himself was rumored to invent his own stories. He was definitely a man who knew how to blow his own trumpet. Though he had successes which prove the quality of his agency, and for a long time the Pinkertons were the most well-known and respectable detective agency.

The real Kate Warne

Kate had become the head of the female detectives department at Pinkerton’s, but died young, at just 35 years old in Chicago, of pneumonia. The Great Fire of 1871 there destroyed a lot of the company’s records, so not so much is known about Warne, apart from what Pinkerton himself reported about her and the cases in which she was involved. But in recent years this highly interesting character has had a resurgence in popular media. Among others, there have been a couple of children’s books, a novel, a non-fiction book about the female detectives at Pinkertons, a comic book and a low-budget movie on Amazon Prime, Pinkerton, in which she appears. She also played a very small role in the three-part TV series about Lincoln on the History Channel, and there has been talk of a big-budget Amazon MGM film, with Emily Blunt playing her and Jaume Collet-Serra directing.

I’m not quite sure when and why this new interest in Warne arose. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it started with this small, Canadian TV series from 2014, that ran until the following May. The Pinkertons was made by Rosetta Media and Buffalo Gal Pictures, in partnership with Channel Zero. Only one season with 22 episodes was produced, and obviously, it was not successful enough to get a second season. Which is, actually, kind of a pity, as the show ended with a cliffhanger. It’s a Western show, yes. But it is also a detective show, making it a very unusual hybrid. We are not used to seeing cowboys and detectives in the same series, and it is a smart way to cater to two different potential audiences: Western and crime fans.

It must be said, the budget was not very high: over the course of the series, we get to see the same sets again and again. The farm where Kate (Martha MacIsaac) lives for the time being, working for the elder Pinkerton, Allan (Angus MacFadyen). The local saloon in which she and young William Pinkerton (Jacob Blair) regularly meet. And the Sheriff’s office where suspects are imprisoned. Also, a lot of episodes take place in the woods or large fields, with single buildings housing the perpetrators or victims. The whole series is set in Kansas City, Missouri in 1865. Pinkerton Sr. thinks a lot of shady things happen here, which is why he insists that his son and new employee Kate stay there and work “undercover”. The Lincoln story discussed above is mentioned, but doesn’t play any role here.

The cases themselves are well-thought out. Not so complicated as to become ridiculous, nor easily and quickly figured out by viewers. They cover a wide range from murder and identity theft, to the killing of a dog. The three main characters are generally given equal attention, for this was before female characters in modern media started to become the center of everything (mostly by showing how inadequate or ridiculous men are, in the opinion of modern TV/film executives). There’s no such need here; while Will is initially not very happy about Kate, especially because his father makes her his superior, he quite quickly acknowledges her expertise and knowledge. They subsequently form a good team and work well together.

The pairing makes it possible for them to investigate different places and witnesses at the same time. Luckily, they also keep tabs on each other, with episodes where one would have been killed if the other hadn’t been around. Allan himself pops up now and again in the show, before he vanishes off to do something else. Other regulars include AnnaLee Webb (Jennifer Pudavick) who owns the saloon and the brothel in it; a black worker on Kate’s farm, John Bell; local sheriff Lawrence Logan; and Kenji Harada, a Japanese man who is initially a client, before becoming a Pinkerton apprentice. MacIsaac plays Kate Warne as a sophisticated young woman without attitude. She is neither a bombshell nor a spinstery type. She is always polite, well-dressed and appears a bit out of place in this typically Western town, as if she does belong more in the big city.

Meanwhile, Will is a bit of a rascal and wants to prove his worth as a detective to his grumpy but sympathetic father. But he and Kate get along well, developing a friendly working relationship. She doesn’t reveal much about her background. I wonder if screenwriters maybe wanted to set up something along the lines of the Benedict Cumberbatch version of Sherlock Holmes, without the extremes. She definitely has a scientific mind, quoting facts that indicate she is well-read, and uses what could be called early forensic investigative methods. But she is not set up as a genius and doesn’t solve the cases alone: this is genuine team work. In the beginning, I wondered if Kate really belonged in the “girls with guns” genre, since an investigator is not necessarily someone involved in much action. But I shouldn’t have worried: there’s enough to confirm her action heroine status!

Regrettably, the show had an open ending. Billy the Kid turns up with a new experimental rifle to take revenge on old Pinkerton, finally challenging young Will to a duel. They have a shoot-out but the outcome has to stay a mystery, as this is where the show ended. It was, of course, a gamble of the producers, in the hope that a second season would be ordered. Unfortunately it didn’t pay off, and we are left with an unfinished story. I do understand why it might not have been a big ratings success. For a Western fan, there might not be enough gun-fighting; and for a crime series fan, the Western tropes might be largely uninteresting. But I did like the mixture. All in all, this is a nice little show. 

I did sometimes think there could have been better set design: in the interior of houses, everything looked a bit spartan. Also, I wondered if the way the three main characters were such a good team and got along so well, might have made the show too humdrum for many. Some stronger emotional conflicts or personal problems in their relationships with each other, could have made the whole thing a bit more interesting. But you don’t always need that. Sometimes it’s nice just to have a team that does its work, has a good relationship with each other, and that’s it. This is a well-done detective show that might have helped to reintroduce Kate Warne to the modern public. I liked it well enough, and am indeed curious what a big movie about her might offer, if the proposed production with Emily Blunt should indeed become a reality.

Creators: Kevin Abrams and Adam Moore
Star: Martha MacIsaac, Jacob Blair, Angus Macfadyen, Jennifer Pudavick 

Sister’s Revenge

  By

★★
“The Harder They Fall”

This gains something for novelty value, coming from Jamaica – a country from which I think I have only ever seen one film before, reggae classic The Harder They Come. It’s also so obscure, there’s no listing for it in the IMDb. Unfortunately, despite being available to watch on Tubi, the presentation leaves a lot to be desired, particularly in the subtitles. The film’s dialogue is in a roughly equal mix of heavily-accented English, and Jamaican patois, often in the same sentence. It feels like the subs were generated purely by an audio to text application, so the English captioning is spotty and there’s no translation at all for the patois. As subtitles go, they’re basically useless.

I was still able to discern the plot easily enough, though details like the lead character’s name remain a mystery, in part because of the lack of other sources of information. I’m going to call her Sister (Francis), in line with the title. She is a soldier, who is also responsible for taking care of her 16-year-old sibling, Blessing (Wallace). Unfortunately, Blessing has just confessed that she is pregnant, and worse, there are two possible fathers. Sister is less than happy about this. After confronting the young men, and getting nowhere, she goes to the police and convinces Officer Dibble (Vassell) to arrest them. This lasts only until the mother of one, Sonia (Russell), bribes Dibble to let them go, having failed to bribe Sister to drop the case. 

It’s therefore up to Sister to make sure justice is served herself. She abducts one of the perpetrators, and makes him confess, an act which allows the case to go up above Dibble’s head. Sonia then pays Dibble more, to take care of Sister permanently, but her military training makes him no match. [To be fair, when he goes to see the men, he’s holding his hand-gun sideways, then tucks it into the front pocket of his jeans. Jamaican police are rather loose with firearms training, it appears]. She then repeats the exercise with Sonia, extracting a confession on video of her bribery, allowing her and Blessing to achieve closure, apparently deciding they will raise the child together. 

It seems very basic, though given the subtitle situation, this is no bad thing. The first half in particularly is very chatty, basically an extended series of conversations: Sister & Blessing; Sister, Blessing & Dibble; Sister & Sonia; Sonia & Dibble. Director Brown doesn’t seem to have a lot of shots in his locker, so these have to sustain on the acting, and that’s a mixed bag. Francis and Russell are the best, and the scenes between the two guardians do crackle, but Wallace is unconvincing, and I was never particularly on Blessing’s side. [The sex seems to have been entirely consensual] I’m reluctant to be too harsh, since the presentation certainly doesn’t help. Outside of being a groundbreaking curiosity, I’m not convinced there’s much of note here. 

Dir: Richard Brown
Star: Jessica Francis, Jayvia Wallace, Candice Russell, Andrew Vassell

The Bitter Taste

  By

★★½
“Olympic-level self indulgence.”

I have to give this credit for being something different. A vampire sports movie? Not a genre cross I’ve seen before. Especially when the sport is… um, modern pentathlon, the least-watched member of the modern Olympics. It’s a five-discipline event, based on the skills needed by a cavalry officer: running, shooting, fencing, swimming and horse-riding. All five play their part here, mostly in the form of Marcia Lorenz (Dordel), a former pentathlete, who is now a hunting guide. Well, was. She just got fired, and has absconded with valuable antique documents belonging to the customer who was responsible. Driving through remote woods, she stops to help a woman by the road, and that’s where things kick off. 

Turns out the woods belong to the Countess Badesky (Wolf), a Bathory knockoff who escaped execution with her four henchmen, but have been locked in their estate for centuries courtesy of a magic spell. They’re not happy about it, but maintain their eternal youth by drinking the blood of penathletes, who are considered the ultimate warriors. It’s unclear what they did before the sport was invented in 1912. Kinda lucky Marcia was an expert in the sport, before injury ended her career. And what are the odds? Those documents she lifted are key to lifting the occult lockdown and letting the Countess roam free. Only Marcia, plus possibly plucky fisherman Josh (Paseti) and local cop George Balough (Alexander-Sieder), stand in her way. 

There is actually more going on, as you would expect in a film running one hundred and thirty-one minutes. Logic is not its strong suit, stuff happening simply because the makers think it looks good. Marcia donning a wedding dress she finds in the castle is one such conceit. Not only does it fit perfectly (okay, it may be a little small in the bust, if you know what I mean and I think you do), she keeps it on while swimming. This kind of thing will eventually elicit derisive snorts, but is perhaps inevitable, with Tolke and Dordel having written, directed, produced, starred, edited and shot the whole thing between them. The film desperately needed an outside perspective to say, “Hang on – that’s a bit much, isn’t it?” 

Dordel was previously in Mission NinetyTwo, which also seems to have been inspired by her real-life activities. There, it was a background in forest science; here, it’s Dordel actually being a fairly adept pentathlete. Her skill-set is spun off in this case, into a batshit crazy film which wears a grab-bag of horror influences on its sleeve. from the hedge maze of The Shining through to blatantly lifting Evil Dead II‘s “Swallow this!” line. Sometimes it works, but it is in desperate need of editing down. A streamlined version of this – with less jerky editing – might have had cult potential, along the lines of Bloody Mallory. Instead, it comes over too often as bloated and self-indulgent, when it needs to be lean and mean. 

Dir: Guido Tölke
Star: Julia Dordel, Rita Wolf, Nicolo Pasetti, Anne Alexander-Sieder

Ghost Killer

  By

★★½
“Spectrally short of satisfying.”

By coincidence, I watched this after Baby Assassins 3, without realizing the star here plays Chisato in that franchise; the director here was also its action director. Discovering the overlap is a minor demerit against Ghost Killer, because it counts as something of a waste of her talents. It’s a lovely idea – if you’re just an action fan in general, then it likely scores half a star higher. However, specifically as an action heroine film, there is room for improvement. It begins with the assassination of an assassin. Hideo Kudo (Mimoto) works for a criminal organization, and his death occurs in somewhat murky circumstances. The spent cartridge used to kill him, takes on his vengeful spirit, and the casing is picked up by an innocent college student Fumika Matsuoka (Takaishi). 

After a period of mutual adjustment to being haunted and doing the haunting, Fumika agrees to help Kudo find out who was responsible for his murder, and take revenge. She is the only person who can see and talk to Kudo, and when she grasps his hand, that allows him to take over her body, with all the associated hitman abilities. Along the road to his vengeance, they will have to deal with a date-rapey triple tag-team, as well as another assassin in the same organization, a former student of Kudo, Toshihisa Kagehara (Kuroba). That pair’s relationship is a little fraught, even after Kagehara is convinced about the reality of what is happening. 

The first half of this is very solid, highlighted by the performance of Takaishi as both a college student and a vengeful killer – simultaneously, which makes it all the more remarkable. It means she has to be an expert fighter, and somebody who wouldn’t say “Boo!” to a goose, as her and Kudo tussle for control. I feel as if that enough would have been sufficient to propel the narrative of the entire film. However, it ends up diverting into less interesting Yakuza-based activities in the middle, and it almost becomes easy to forget that Kudo is dead. There aren’t really any surprises once the framework of the situation has been established, heading towards the eventual and predictable confrontation between Kudo and his killer. 

And that’s the problem. It’s between Kudo and his killer, not Fumika. It’s still “in her body,” and I enjoyed the scenes where Kudo is guiding her to hide – telling her when to go around a pillar, for example. But when battle is joined, the film shows Mimoto doing the fighting, not Takaishi. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a very good fight, and that’s why I’d say a general viewer is still likely to be satisfied by it. But I was looking forward to seeing the actress really getting to let loose. After all, having experienced the Baby Assassins trilogy, there’s no issue about her martial arts abilities. Seeing her largely sidelined at the end was a disappointing way to finish things off. 

Dir: Kensuke Sonomura
Star: Akari Takaishi, Masanori Mimoto, Mario Kuroba

Zoya

  By

★★★
“High-quality torture porn”

This was originally made under the working title of The Passion of Zoya, and the Joan of Arc reference is on point. Both were young warriors fighting against the occupation of their native land, captured by the enemy and tortured before being executed. But they became a rallying point for their country as it succeeded in expelling the invaders, and are now revered as national heroines. The real Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya (pictured) was an 18-year-old teenager in 1941, who signed up to be dropped behind the front-line as the Germans invaded Russia, and carry out missions of sabotage intended to make life difficult for the Nazi army. It did not end well, but she became the first woman Hero of the Soviet Union in WW2, less than three months after her death.

Unsurprisingly, the facts are a bit murky, with the regime at the time intent on making a heroine of her, who could be used for propaganda purposes. [There was another film of the same name made in 1944, to that end. It’s on YouTube; I need to find subtitles before I can review it] This was criticized on its release for historical inaccuracies, but most of the events match the Wikipedia page, at least. There is perhaps artistic license over her motivation, signing up after her fiancé was killed in action. Whether her capture was triggered by the betrayal of a colleague in the sabotage cell, Vasily Klubkov (Kologrivy), or the betrayal was after her capture, as depicted here, I don’t know.

As ever, I’m here for the cinematic experience, not a documentary. As such, it’s well made, though concentrates to such an extent on her post-capture experience that it seemed to border on the exploitative. The lengthy sequence where Zoya is stripped and whipped, is the most obvious example, and her stoicism as she refuses to give up any useful information makes things worse. Perhaps the most interesting character beside Zoya is Hauptmann Erich Sommer (Cerny), who seems to feel for his captive, explicitly ordering the troops under his command to refrain from abuse. Not that they necessarily obey. I likely was more impressed by the earlier stages, depicting Zoya’s training and her activities behind enemy lines, which are tense and well-assembled.

There’s no doubt she was being positioned as a heroine, from the first reports of her death in state newspaper Pravda [which included a gnarly, NSFW photo of her corpse]. This feels like it’s trying to do the same thing, right up to her defiant speech on the scaffold: “Comrades, beat the Nazis. Burn them! Poison them! There’s 200 million of us, you can’t hang us all.” I imagine that would have had the intended effect in 1942, of inflaming patriotic anger and willingness to fight. But I can’t say I was particularly moved, with my main reaction to Zoya’s death being relief that her torment was over. More depth and less torture would have been preferable, I’d say. 

Dir: Maksim Brius + Leonid Plyaskin
Star: Anastasia Mishina, Nikita Kologrivy, Wolfgang Cerny, Darya Jurgens