Category: Review

Crusade of Vengeance

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★★★½
“Look! Beneath the cheap silliness, some decent performances lurk…”

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.

Despite a weird Scandinavian accent that seems out of place in what’s supposed to be England (and is actually Lithuania), Pacula does well, bringing the right intensity to her ‘wronged mother’ role. Hauer is fab as we expected, while Vosloo gets to act more than in either Mummy movie, and is actually good. They help hold up a film that occasionally wobbles between uncomfortable rape scenes, silly humour and Culver’s costume, that resembles a fur coat which has gone through a shredder. Between that and her height, she looks more like the model she was, than a forest huntress, but does kick butt in an efficient manner. While the story goes almost exactly as you’d expect, this is one of those cases where you will be entertained, if you allow yourself to be. If no-one will mistake this for a classic, cut the movie some slack, and work with the film, rather than picking holes in it. Especially for those still mourning the death of Xena, the payoff will be more than adequate for a rental on a midweek night.

The film was released by MTI Home Video on January 24th. See their site for more details.
Dir: Byron W. Thompson
Star: Joanna Pacula, Arnold Vosloo, Rutger Hauer, Molly Culver
a.k.a. Warrior Angels

La Culata: Mexican Standoff

  By

★★
” Like a low-budget Andy Sidaris film. If he was Mexican and couldn’t talk his actresses into undressing.”

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!).

There are elements of this that are quite laudable, with a host of strong female characters – not just Navajas, but her main adversary, the mob boss knows as “La Culata” (Cepinska), who has a fondness for female enforcers. Both the roles, and the performances behind them, are interesting enough to hold your attention, and some of the supporting pieces are also decently constructed. However, for every step forward, there’s at least one, and often two back. The storyline is over-stuffed, and at 113 minutes, this would benefit from a lot of editing. The action is largely poorly-shot, probably to conceal the limited combat talents, and with bizarre mis-steps such as one awful moment where the heroine throws her knife down the barrel of an enemy’s gun. Look, if you’re that good with the weapon, just embed it in their eye, alright? There are several moments where it looks like this is going to kick off, but doesn’t – most notably, we never get the expected confrontation between La Culata and Maria, which is a shame. Instead, the finale is the biggest let-down since the Hindenburg.

Certainly, don’t be fooled by cover art which appears to have strayed in from Single White Female, or something similar. This is a zero-budget action movie, but coming from a culture which doesn’t exactly regard women as equals, deserves some credit for putting them front and centre. However, the execution in this case leaves just too much to be desired.

Dir: Jorge Ramirez Rivers
Star: Cecilia Ponce, Anna Cepinska, Guillermo Iván, Manuel Sevilla
a.k.a. Maria Navajas 3

Blubberella

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★★
“Not quite the wholesale disaster this might seem…”

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.

And yet, even if it took us two sessions to get through this, I can’t bring myself to hate it, not least because of Hollister, who goes at things with gusto. It’s clear this is an actress who does not get to play the lead often, least of all in an action flick (though for obvious reasons, the action can kindly be described as “limited”). Even if this is a parody of one, both her and Boll deserve credit for breaking down one of the taboos seen everywhere in body conscious Hollywood. There are moments here which are just surreal, such as a dream sequence where Blubberella plays a game of Risk with Hitler (played by the director!) and Fletcher in blackface. WTF? No, really: WTF? There’s also a lengthy scene parodying Precious, which is unsurprising, considering it’s about the only other film I can think of where a morbidly obese woman is the heroine.

I probably have a higher opinion of Boll than most people: when he avoids making video-game films, the results can be really good [Darfur and Rampage both kick ass]. However, comedy really isn’t his forte, and too much of this ends up missing its mark, most often through being over-played in one way or another. Rather than a shot-for-shot remake of a film that wasn’t exactly a huge success, Boll and co. might have been better off with a broader spoof of superhero films, which would have given them a bigger palette for their unsubtle satire. That said, I will admit that I did laugh, and laugh out loud, more often than I expected, and it’s a hell of a lot better than Boll’s last attempt at “offense humour,” Postal.

Dir: Uwe Boll
Star: Lindsay Hollister, Brendan Fletcher, Michael Pare, William Belli

High School Girl Rika: Zombie Hunter

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★★½
“High School Girl? Check. Zombies? Check. Hunting? Not so much.”

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.

There are a couple of nice ideas here, so let’s get those out of the way first. The master hunter is an amusingly male version of the Onechanbara heroine, both in the cowboy hat and otherwise scanty clothing. And I liked the fact there is actually an intelligent, polite zombie thrown into the mix, who retains his fondness for humanity (or does he? For he’s still a bit bitey…). However, it’s the best part of an hour before anything approaching the title is seen, by the time Rika loses her arm, gets her new one and comes to terms with the new, strong urges to swing a sharp sword in the direction of anything lacking a pulse. When it does…it’s really no great shakes either, and the action aspects of this are absolutely no match for the likes of Machine Girl or Hard Revenge Milly.

This is, however, operating in a rather different genre, as you’d expect from the makers of the catchily-titled Girls Rebel Force of Competitive Swimmers, which occupies an uneasy middle-ground between horror and soft-porn. This is mostly horror, occasionally comedy (the Three Stooges who are also roaming the town could have taken their comic mugging and left, without doing the film the slightest damage), and the action is some way back, likely less important than the “let’s all compare our breast sizes” scene. I’m certainly not averse to horror, and on that basis, given its low-budget, it’s a harmless time-passer. But given the title, I’d have liked to see Rika do an awful lot more actual hunting of the zombies.

Dir: Kenichi Fujiwara
Star: Risa Kudo, Takeshi Yamamoto, Mai Minami, Tsugumi Nagasawa

The Forty-First

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★★★½
“Robinson Crusoe during wartime.”

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.

Given this was made in 1957, during the height of the Cold War, with Joe Stalin barely cold in the ground, it’s relatively even-handed, with Govokha portrayed sympathetically, especially given he was The Enemy [his colleague in the White Guards are definitely bastards, as we see when they ruthlessly interrogate an torch a native village in pursuit of the Bolsheviks]. This apparently led to some issue with the censors, who were less impressed. Anyway, Maria is an engaging character, well ahead of her time, and prone to random outbursts of “Fish cholera!” when vexed [look, I’m just reporting that’s what the subtitles say]. She takes surprising glee in gunning down the enemy, keeping count as she does so: Vadim almost becomes kill #41, hence the title. It’s the middle section where she really comes to the fore, taking charge of a difficult situation until the more romantic elements take over.

Even these, which would normally have me rolling my eyes, aren’t too bad, because of the political angle, leading to lines such as “You’re asking me to loll on a feather-bed with you and eat chocolates? When those chocolates are all smeared with blood?” Not your usual romance, shall we say. The ending is just superb: it’s one of those which you absolutely should see coming (it’s foreshadowed enough), but still comes as a surprise. Add in some great settings, both in the desert and by the sea, as well as an interesting visual style and, if this isn’t as action-packed as one might wish, given its era, this remains a surprisingly worthwhile watch.

Dir: Grigori Chukhrai
Star: Izolda Izvitskaya, Oleg Strizhenov, Nikolai Kryuchkov

Wonder Woman (Unaired TV Pilot)

  By

★★★
“Nowhere near as bad as you might think.”

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.

Yeah, there’s probably too much going on, as it establishes that Prince is not just an action heroine, but also a business mogul, being the CEO of Themyscira Industries, and a woman: y’know, with needs. They each have their separate identities: it’s a nice touch, though not all of this needed to be put across in the pilot I think. They might have been better off bringing the other angles in down the line. What does work, surprisingly well, is Palicki, who both looks the part – a particular surprise, given the heat the costume took – and manages to hit most of the dramatic points necessary. However, I can see how fans of the comic books would probably still hate it, since there’s barely any acknowledgment of her ancestry as the princess of an all-female tribe from a remote island.

I particularly liked the hard-edged “neo-vigilante” approach of Wonder Woman, who has no aversion to violence and at one point, flat out kills someone by driving a pipe through his neck. Don’t recall Lynda Carter doing that: The Dark Knight has a lot to answer for. On the down side, the script does have its fair share of cliches, from the grieving mother through to the romantic interest. But, really: you can turn on the television any night of the week and see far less interesting or well-considered excuses for series, which somehow managed to get themselves green-lit. It has potential to be, if not great, at least half-decent: given the lack of action heroines on TV these days, it’s a pity this one received the televisual equivalent of a wire coat-hanger.

Dir: Jeffrey Reiner
Star: Adrianne Palicki, Elizabeth Hurley, Carey Elwes, Tracie Thoms

The Last Rites of Ransom Pride

  By

★★★
“Well, at least it’s different…”

Though nominally a Western, this perhaps has more in common with the surreal works of Alejandro Jodorowsky, in particular El Topo, with mystical elements and downright weirdness. Ransom Pride (Scott Speedman, from the Underworld series) is killed in a gun-battle while trying to broker an arms deal with the locals. His corpse is kept by the local bruja, or witch (de Pablo), because her brother also died in the fight, shot by Ransom. That doesn’t sit well with his lover, Juliette (Caplan), a half-breed who has been raised in blood since slitting the throat of the Mexican general who killed her parents, while still not yet a teenager. She returns to Ransom’s home, and recruits his brother (Foster) to help recover the body, on the way back to Mexico, meeting a bevy of strange characters and situations. Their mission doesn’t sit well with the Pride patriarch (Yoakam), a gun-fighter turned preacher, who sets loose a pair of hunters, but is prepared to get his own hands dirty in pursuit of that “whore of Babylon.”

In terms of visual style, it seems almost as if the appeoach was to try and irritate the hell out of the viewer, with frequent interruptions of scenes with a few frames takes from other sequences, past or yet to come. It certainly keeps the audience on their toes, but is both overused and outstays its welcome. That’s a shame, as there are other elements worthy of credit, not least the overall look, which has a bleached tone that is quite effective. Caplan is undeniably impressive, as is de Pablo – both come over as women with whom you do not want to mess. That’s impressive given both are probably best known previously, for fairly bland TV fare. Here, they are genuinely disturbing, and it’s a mix of the generally decent performances, and weird sense that anything could happen, that kept me watching.

On the downside, as well as the opaque visual sense, the audio is not infrequently as muddied as the picture, though it’s harder to say whether or not it was deliberately so. The script also has a tendency to drift off into areas that are probably not necessary – there’s too much backstory involving Ransom and his brother, when the film should instead have been moving forward. Finally, the editing during the action scenes is disappointing fractured, to the extent that you largely have to wait for the dust to settle and see who’s still alive. The negatives and positives end up just about balancing, and the end result is something that you don’t mind watching, yet will likely not have much interest in seeing again.

Dir: Tiller Russell
Star: Lizzy Caplan, Jon Foster, Cote de Pablo, Dwight Yoakam

Girl Boss: Escape From Reform School

  By

★★½
“Bad girls go to…the seaside?”

Serial escaper Ruriko (Sugimoto) is more persistent than good, and is dragged back to reform school after her seventh escape attempt ends the same way as her previous six. After whizzing through most of the standards of the women-in-prison genre in about 30 minutes or so e.g. corrupt staff, gratuitous nudity, solitary confinement, etc. she and a few of her colleagues (supposedly teenagers, but that clearly ain’t the case) break out as a group. Splitting up to avoid detection, they arrange a rendezvous at a deserted building by the sea, from where they plan to hijack a ship and escape Japan for good. Truth be told, a sense of urgency isn’t exactly top of the their skill-set, and as they meander their way there, various escapades happen, of which the only significant one is Ruriko meeting, by chance, a male criminal (Watase), who is also trying to out-run the law. But the police are also keen to ensure that they run their record in terms of Ruriko to a perfect 8-for-8…

I watched this less than a week ago, but already, I can’t remember very much about it. Sugimoto is her usual charismatic self, and the film is certainly more interesting when she’s on-screen. However, the supporting characters are entirely forgettable, and in my mind, all merged into one amorophous, largely uninteresting blob. That’s particularly problematic after they split up, which is when the film seems to lose direction entirely, meandering around until the finale, where the police besiege the perps in their beach-house. I have to say, the major takeway from that is how incredibly inept the Japanese SWAT team are. Not only are they easily held at bay by criminals armed with precisely one gun, they mill around like disturbed sheep in the face of anything coming the other way, e.g. burning tyres, and are completely oblivious to even the most basic law-enforcement principle, such as “maintaining a perimeter.” If those are supposed to be the elite, it makes me wonder how the hell Ruriko managed to get herself caught the previous seven times she escaped.

It’s probably significant that the lack of compentence by the special forces of law and order is my lasting memory here. While competently made, and touching all the expected bases [that’s clear from the way solitary confinement in the prison involves Ruriko both bondaged up and topless!], it doesn’t have any real heart or passion, and if you skip this one, you won’t be missing much.

Dir: Sadao Nakajima
Star: Miki Sugimoto, Yuko Kano, Hiroko Isayama, Tsunehiko Watase

Amazons (1984)

  By

★★½
“Almost 30 years later – despite binders full of women – this is still politically advanced for its day.

This made for TV movie first aired in January 1984, and was likely fairly topical at the time, with Geraldine Ferraro then on her way to becoming the VP behind Walter Mondale. It’s still just her and Sarah Palin as far as major party tickets in American history go. Her candidacy is foreshadowed by this piece of masculine paranoia. Stowe plays Dr. Sharon Fields, a doctor who is sued for malpractice after her hospital patient, a leading Congressman, had an unexpected psychotic episode, which leads to him playing in traffic. She finds a series of similar deaths linked by trace elements found in autopsies, all of men, whose deaths benefit women, in general or specifically. Turns out they are assassinations, carried out to the orders of an ancient, matriarchal cult: they now have their eye set on the leading presidential candidate – who just happens to have picked a woman as his running mate.

It’s an impressive cast. As well as Stowe (now lording it over the rich and famous as the matriarch in guilty pleasure Revenge), there’s Stevens as cult member Kathryn Lundquist, and Dobson as Rosalund Joseph, another hospital worker – the two faced off previously, in Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold – while Scalia plays the cop whom Fields has to try to convince. Behind the cameras, the cinematography is by Dean Cundey, who did the Back to the Future trilogy, The Thing and, er, Ilsa, Harem-Keeper of the Oil Sheiks; the music is from Basil Poledouris (Robocop); and it’s the directorial debut, outside the series, of Starsky [as in “…and Hutch”], three years before he did The Running Man. Solid stuff, and from a technical level, this makes for a pretty decent TVM, both in performances and production values.

However, the concept and the script appear nothing more than a Robin Cook medi-thriller laced with a large helping of delusional male chauvinist nonsense, portraying women – and, in particular, those who want to achieve political, social or economic power – as literal man-haters, who have absolutely no qualms about poisoning or killing by other means, any man unfortunate enough to get in their way. Admittedly, it’s not carried out with the level of hysteria one might think; in some ways, it’s fairly sympathetic to the Amazons. But it makes little or no sense (I mean, this cult has been around for thousands of years and has achieved exactly what?), and there’s no detectable irony, despite the absolute daftness of the central concept. Surely the eighties weren’t as naive as all that? Actually, looking at the hairstyles and fashions on view here, I think they were.

Dir: Paul Michael Glaser
Star: Madeleine Stowe, Jack Scalia, Stella Stevens, Tamara Dobson

Angels’ Brigade

  By

★★½
“Charlie’s Magnificent 7 Angels.”

After her brother is severely beaten by a drug dealer, Las Vegas lounge singer (!) Michelle Wilson (Kiger, Miss January 1977) is visited by his teacher (Cole), who knows the location of the cartel’s drug warehouse. Wilson puts together a team of women who have reason to want to take the dealers down, including a stuntwoman (Anderson) and an undercover cop (Grant). There’s also a martial-arts instructress, a model and, tagging along, one of the teacher’s pupils. They build a heavily-armed van, train in the ways of war, and rip off a bunch of militia types for weaponry, before staging a successful raid that destroys the warehouse. However, the mob (led by veteran actors Peter Lawford and Jack Palance) are not prepared to let them get away with it.

This is best known through its use – in a severely truncated form – on MST3K, and I suspect that’s where most of the 1,200+ votes on the IMDB come from [it’s more than, say, the rather better-renowned Black Mama, White Mama]. The unedited version is less worthy of derision. I wouldn’t call it great cinema, but it heads from Point A to Point B in a brisk fashion, and the practical effect – stunts, explosions, etc. – are decent enough. Of course, there’s little or no characterization to speak of, on either side, it’s clearly ripped off from Charlie’s Angels, and there’s a weird unevenness of tone that is hard to handle. For instance, the militia types are incredibly incompetent, bumping into each other at the drop of a swastika, but then the girls seriously consider dropping a truck on the head of an informant.

However, I couldn’t bring myself to hate this to the level its former position in the IMDB Bottom 100 would project. There’s something almost charmingly naive about such a simplistic approach, and it’s also refreshingly free of any romantic angles to slow things down. At a few points, I even found myself contemplating the remake potential. If the discussed all-female version of The Expendables ever comes to pass, it might not be too dissimilar to this, though hopefully with more originality.

Dir: Greydon Clark
Star: Susan Kiger, Sylvia Anderson. Jacqulin Cole. Robin Greer