Category: Review

Death Row Girls

  By

★★
“Despite the poster, more WiP than GwG.”

Misaki (Hoshino) is in prison for stabbing a policeman to death, but is taken from her jail to a remote island. There, she joins the rest of the hand-picked prisoners, who are there to be trained by a mysterious government organization, and moulded into operatives who can be used to protect national security. Most of the inmates just want to make things easy, sleeping with the guards in exchange for privileges, but Misaki is made of tougher stuff, and won’t buckle down to the authorities. While she begins plotting how to escape the island, she needs to overcome a number of problems, not least having no idea about where it is, and whether the small boat they stumble across will be capable of getting them to any other land.

There’s definitely elements of Nikita here, not least the sequence where Misaki tries to take the facility head hostage. Except that, where that breezed through the training inside 25 minutes, it is, more or less, the entire focus of proceedings here. Hoshino snarls nicely as an independent and feisty bad girl, yet neither she nor any of the other residents are in the slightest bit convincing. I’d normally avoid using a phrase like “runs like a girl” as unnecessarily demeaning… except here, where it’s entirely accurate. I can see absolutely no chance – zero, zip, nada – that any credible group would select her, or the rest of the inmates, as potential trainees.

The film does deliver the expected helpings of gratuitous nudity and moderate violence, as things bumble along towards the climax, where Misaki has to battle her jail friend, to the death. Winner gets to leave, loser…well, will be dead, so shouldn’t worry themselves about it. It’s not exactly the best knife-fight you’ve ever seen, and the ending leaves a good deal to be desired in terms of tying up the loose ends as well. The 84 minutes passed reasonably enough though, and it’s reasonably competent, albeit by the genre’s fairly-low standards.

Dir: Sadaaki Haginiwa
Star: Aki Hoshino, Emi Kitagawa, Ren Suzuki, Ami Natsui
a.k.a. Female Prisoner 1316

Gothic & Lolita Psycho

  By

★★★½
“First martial arts movie where the heroine dresses like a refugee from a Sisters of Mercy concert. Er, kids, ask your parents.”

First of all, “Gothic Lolita” is a Japanese style term; Lolita fashion is based on clothing from the Victorian era, and the Gothic sub-genre is…well, suitable for a Victorian funeral, basically. Quite why heroine Yuki (Akiyama) decides to dress like this, after her mother is murdered by a group of five thugs, is never satisfactorily explained. Actually, it’s never even mentioned, putting it alongside the issue of why her father (Yanagi) is apparently a Christian priest, now confined to a wheelchair as a result of the attack. Or where Yuki is now a skilled fighter, armed with a bulletproof, lethal umbrella that can kill you in a variety of ways. Where does she get those wonderful toys, to borrow a phrase.

What matters here are her battles against the five killers, starting with a gambling den house-mother, through a lecherous and psychic teacher, up to the “big bad” (Aoyagi), the man who co-ordinated and led the attack on her parents. They’re a decidedly mixed bag. The lower tier make it clear that Akiyama was likely not cast for her fighting talents, but more to do with her being named “Best Butt in Japan” for 2007, though the film is pleasingly free of nudity. The best is probably her fight against Lady Elle (Momose), a marvellous character who comes off like a highly-caffeinated version of Elle Driver crossed with Hit Girl, complete with sparkly eyepatch and a gun that flips open into a pink mobile phone. I could have watched those two for the entire movie, bickering and brawling.

Yeah, if you hadn’t noticed, it’s more than a little like Kill Bill, though mercifully without anyone droning on about comics. The final battle isn’t quite up to the same level, and there’s a twist in the ending which is probably not necessary: it adds a level of fantasy to proceedings that goes nowhere. But despite the flaws, it remains a unique item, and if you appreciate the recent wave of Japanese hypersplatter, this is another entry you’ll enjoy in the genre, with everyone possessing appropriately-high blood pressure.

Dir: Go Ohara
Star: Rina Akiyama, Yurei Yanagi, Ruito Aoyagi, Misaki Momose

The Breakout

  By

★★★½
“Really, DVD company? “Ultimate chick fighting”? Sheesh.”

S’funny what you stumble across on Netflix, at the end of a long chain of “See also…” recommendations came this, which according to the Amazon listing, this was “the first ever all women’s Mixed Martial Arts fight card.” Which it isn’t. I can state this for a fact, because we already reviewed Hook ‘n’ Shoot: Revolution, from almost five years prior to this night in Minnesota. This has similar strengths and weaknesses: there are clearly a number of talented women fighters, but it’s hard to put together a card without mismatches.

The most obvious one here is a main event which pitted Megumi Fujii against local fighter Cody Welchlin. Fujii was a perfect 10-0, while Welchlin had exactly one fight on her record. I read online Welchlin was a late replacement, and if so credit is due for taking on one of the top fighters in the world at two weeks notice. However, the result was exactly as you’d expect, and over inside three minutes [Fujii has subsequently become only the second MMA fighter of either sex to start her career going 22-0 – and the consensus is, the sole defeat on her record was a highly-dubious loss]. The penultimate fight between another local, Kelly Kobold and Adrienna Jenkins, was more even, with both fighters having double-digits victories. But Kobold charged in from the get-go, and never let up, even raining up punches when Jenkins was above her, and those blows resulted in a verbal submission at 3:26 in the first round.

Three minutes was about the average length of the bouts; Ginele Marquez got a rear naked choke on her opponent Liz Posener at the 3:16 mark in her bout. Marquez had Gina Carano in her corner: Carano is not just one of the top fighters in women’s MMA, she’s also the star of the upcoming Stephen Soderbergh flick Haywire. Was quite surprised the production didn’t mention her presence at all, as they did speak to some of the male MMA artists present, such as Jens Pulver [who was Jenkins’ fiancé]. Erin Toughill, another noted name, was also involved, doing colour work round the cage, and the production came over as generally slick and professional.

The shortest match of the night – lasting exactly one minute – was a bit unfortunate, as Shayna Baszler actually broke the arm of her opponent, Samantha Anderson. She was applying a submission hold on the arm, but it seemed that Baszler fell forward, resulting in the pressure being made much worse, and resulting in a clean break of her humerus. Ouch. The opening contest [on the DVD – there was an amateur fight not included for some reason] was the only one that lasted longer than one five minute round, with Marissa Inhofer beating Kirsty Bushnell. As well as being the brother of another MMA figher [Nick Inhofer was on The Ultimate Fighter 3] Inhofer was a roller-derby girl, and seemed to have brought a large contingent of her team-mates with her.

I can’t claim to be an expert in MMA, but as noted, the ‘Ultimate Chick Fighting!’ tag on the DVD sleeve does the women involved a disservice. As one of the commentators pointed out, “Pain doesn’t discriminate,” and it was also noted that it’s harder for women, since they typically have to hold down a full-time job, as well as fit in the rigourous training required. Respect is definitely in order. However, at the point of this event (March 2007), there still seems to be a lack of depth in the talent pool, which leaves a card like this short of truly successful.

Star: Megumi Fujii, Kelly Kobald, Adrienna Jenkins, Cody Welchlin

Nexus: The Drug Conspiracy

  By

★★
“You’ll probably need some drugs to get through this one.”

If you’re going to use a cover like this, you’d better live up to it, even if we can forgive the heels as artistic license. And while not a complete lie, this takes far too long to deliver, and comes up short of expectations. Holly (Kosaka) is a nightclub singer, separated from her husband, who got custody of their daughter due to a DUI Holly got, with the daughter in the car. On arrival at his house to pick up their child for a scheduled visit, she finds him missing – and a gun in the basement, along with a case of drugs. She calls the police, but ends up getting arrested after the police find her husband’s body, and her fingers on the murder weapon, which has mysteriously moved from the basement to the scene of the crime. The drugs have also vanished; while held in jail over the weekend, Holly gets a visit from their owner, who busts her out and insists she return with him and his thugs to the house to show her where they are. Can she escape their grasp, rescue her daughter and find out who the real murderer was?

Among the things we learn from the movie is that trees give off a shower of sparks when hit by bullets, there are only three cops per American town, and getting shot in the knee doesn’t slow you down. Yeah. I can forgive many things in low-budget films, but stupidity isn’t one of them, and too often, we were left rolling our eyes as the story developed. Kosaka isn’t bad in the lead role, and shows a commendable willingness to do stunt, not least being swept down some fairly nasty-looking rapids, as she tries to escape from her pursuers. It’s only then that the film develops any real energy, Holly developing in to a (somewhat) unstoppable force, prepared to go to any lengths to save her offspring.

If they’d adopted this approach from the beginning – hell hath no fury like a separated mother – this might have been salvageable, even on the low budget. They could even have lobben in her using the new drug mentioned here, Nexus – a mix between cocaine and ecstacy – to sustain her rampage. Just a thought. Instead, the script spends way too much time hanging around and chatting about things, instead of doing them, and the results are as pedestrian as you would expect.

Dir: Neil Coombs
Star: Grace Kosaka, Andrew Kraulis, Jefferson Mappin, Nick Alachiotis

6 Guns

  By

★★★½
“Hannie Caulder with less cleavage. And no Christopher Lee.”

The Asylum studio are infamous for producing ‘mockbusters’ – straight to DVD look-alikes of big-budget movies, designed to benefit from their publicity budgets. These have included their own versions of Sherlock Holmes and War of the Worlds, but they do make their own original works, including cheesy delights such as Mega Python vs. Gatoroid, starring 80’s popsters Tiffany and Debbie Gibson. They come in for a lot of flak as a result – some justified, some not, for this is neither mockbuster nor cheesy, and is surprisingly solid, if you want a straightforward Western tale of revenge. Selina Stevens (Mears) has to watch as her husband and two young sons are killed by Lee Horn (Mead) and his gang; she is brutally raped and left for dead, beginning a decline into alcoholic despair. Having reached bottom, she meets bounty-hunter Frank Allison (Van Dyke), and asks him to teach her how to shoot – conveniently, just as Horn’s crew start to make their way back to town. The townsfolk’s repeated affirmations that they feel safer with Frank around, might have been a bit premature.

Ok, ‘original’ might be a bit of a stretch, as the storyline is more than a bit reminiscent of Hannie Caulder [which I must get round to reviewing at some point], though sensibly reins back the glamour Raquel Welch provided there. On its own merits, however, this is based on a solid trio of central performances, with Mead particularly memorable as the black-hearted thug – in an interesting twist, it’s revenge which also triggers his initial assault on Stevens’ family. Selina’s transition to a gunslinger is nicely handled; she doesn’t exactly become a sharpshooter – but when opportunity presents itself, can shoot a fairly stationary target at shortish range, which is credible. Against this its low-budget nature is highly-obvious, with the “town” inhabited by about 12 people, and the action in general could have been spliced in from any randomly-selected 1950’s oater.

This remains a decent tale, satisfactorily told, with interesting characters, good performances and more than a local resonance, given its placedropping of Arizona names. And in case you’re wondering, no, there are not six guns in the movie, despite the title [depending on the count, there might be five or seven…] Still, you’d be hard-pressed to argue that this doesn’t fall in the upper echelon of the studio’s movies: this kind of thing should escape from The Asylum more often.

Dir: Shane Van Dyke
Star: Sage Mears, Barry Van Dyke, Geoff Meed, Greg Evigan

Colombiana

  By

★★★
“The revenge and hit-woman genres could cross-pollinate each other. Just not here.”

There are moments where this seems to have the potential to break out beyond its story, but once you get past the strong central core, the script has very little to offer. Cataleya (Saldana) narrowly escapes death when her parents are killed on the orders of their gangster employer, Don Luis. She flees from Colombia to Chicago and is raised by a family friend, but never forgets where she came from, and has revenge on her mind. Grown-up, she becomes a hit-woman, but has a side-project of payback. She has an occasional boyfriend (Vartan) who knows little about her, and a dogged FBI agent (James), intent on tracking down the mysterious, elusive killer. Y’know: all the usual baggage that goes along with being an assassin.

The action, however, is what rescues this, and when the heroine is in motion, it’s generally fluid and effective. There are two sequences in particular that stand out: Cataleya’s hit of a gangster in prison, and the final showdown where she goes to Don Luis’s headquarters, and takes on… Well, to borrow a famous line from another Besson script, “Everyone!” They are well-staged, with Saldana showing flexibility and athleticism of an impressive degree (Besson’s fondness for parkour also shows up). However, between these two, there isn’t much to speak of; a third sequence, involving a swimming-pool filled with sharks(!) fails, mostly because you’re wondering why the hell Cataleya opted to swim across said pool rather than – oh, I dunno – walking around it?

The background stuff doesn’t work either, particularly the efforts to give her a normal life, which seem both perfunctory and contrived, and Vartan’s role is entirely pointless in emotional terms. I suspect, going by past history, Besson would have been better off directing this himself, not giving it to the man who handled the eminently forgettable Red Siren and Transporter 3. This might be as close to a Leon sequel as we’ll ever get. However, a while back, probably nearly 15 years ago now, I came up with an idea for a film about a woman who witnessed her family being killed, and a decade later, came back for her revenge. I even got as far as starting on a script. While I’m probably biased, I’m pretty sure it was better than Colombiana.

Dir: Olivier Megaton
Star: Zoe Saldana, Lennie James, Michael Vartan, Jordi Molla

Sweet Karma

  By

★★★½
“Hang on: I thought revenge was sweet, not karma? Oh, well: never mind.”

After she gets word, back in their native Russia, that her sister has been killed in Toronto, Karma (Bechard) vows revenge on those responsible. This pulls her in to a seedy, dangerous world of sex trafficking, with women being lured from Eastern Europe to the West, with the promise of legitimate jobs, only to forced on arrival into working as strippers or worse, by the criminal elements who organize and run the business, with a fist of iron. As Karma stabs, shoots and bludgeons her way up the chain of command, those at the top grow increasingly restless. Initially, they think a rival gang is responsible, but the evidence eventually convinces them Karma is, indeed, a bitch,

This was better than I expected, with the obviously low budget working more for the film than against it, enhancing the ‘grindhouse’ feel that you have here – Karma is mute, which adds a definite resonance of Ms. 45 or Thriller: A Cruel Picture, though little more than that. It’s certainly not short on nudity and violence, but rarely topples over the edge into gratuitous, being largely necessary to bring out exactly how callous those are, treating the women as nothing more than slabs of meat, as in the scene where the girls “learn” pole-dancing.

After the initial death – an assault using office supplies, whose aftermath has Karma puking her guts out into a waste-paper basket – it does take a little while to get back to the nitty-gritty. There’s also a mis-step towards the end, where attention is diverted from the heroine, to an undercover cop (Tokatlidis) who is none too pleased to have his case threatened by an avenging angel. And some of the dialogue is a little too Tarantino-esque, e.g. burbling on about hockey. Well, it is Canadian, I guess.

However, the pluses generally outnumber the minutes, with some imaginative deaths, not least the pimp lured into a bathroom and offered “cocaine” by Karma. Bechard, despite her lack of dialogue, does a good job of putting across the determination she feels in pursuing her goal, and I liked the throbbing techno soundtrack which underscores proceedings. I’m also pleased to see it avoid the faux trappings of some recent genre entries, such as Machete. I was expecting something a good deal shinier, shallower and, well, shittier; instead, it’s a grubby and fairly serious look into a world which we probably would rather ignore.

Dir: Andrew Thomas Hunt
Star: Shera Bechard, John Tokatlidis, Frank J. Zupancic, Christian Bako

Memoirs of a Lady Ninja

  By

★½
“The world’s first Christian soft-porn ninja film. And probably the last.”

This one is so obscurist I couldn’t even find an IMDB entry for it, despite a fairly high-profile release from Tokyo Shock. I can perhaps see why. It’s more an excuse for a series of coupling, mostly involving Hara, who has gone on to greater fame in the 3-D Sex and Zen movie. She plays a blue-eyed ninja called Hijiri. She gets frames for the theft of a scroll which can be used to gain immortality, and ends up falling off a cliff. She is nursed back to health by a Christian named Seitaro (Yoshioka), but their peaceful existence is threatened, as the scroll’s previous owner sends out minions to retrieve it, and another religious sect also vows to convert adherents to the ‘heathen’ religion, by any means necessary.

So many problems here, not least that no-one involved in this can fight their way out of a paper-bag, in particular Hara, who manages to block full swings from samurai swords with something better suited for opening envelopes. There’s a whole subplot about her mother also being a ninja, and abandoning the heroine for her own protection, shortly before she was killed, which has left Hijiri with issues. It is not very interesting, and serves largely to provide the McGuffin necessary for the final battles, when she has to take on the “Saint” at the head of the rival sect, and defeat someone who has read the scroll of immortality.

It deserves some credit for the blue-eyed ninja idea – Hijiri’s father was a Portuguese trader – and it’s got an unusual take on both xenophobia and religion, unashamedly depicting Christians as the good guys [while I’m agnostic, I appreciate seeing something you rarely get, even in the West]. However, it’s executed with such a complete lack of skill, as to have me reaching for the fast-forward through significant chunks [and I confess to actually using it in the sex scenes]. Despite my summary up top, there is apparently a Part 2 of this knocking about. It’ll likely be quite some time before I can be bothered to review it.

Dir: Jiro Ishikawa
Star: Saori Hara, Mutsuo Yoshioka, Akari Hoshino

We Are The Night

  By

★★★★
“German vampires – but the polar opposite of Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu.”

Lena (Herfurth) lives on the edge of society: stealing from other criminals, and running from the cops. But her life changes forever, when she comes to the attentions of Louise (Hoss), a rich socialite, who runs with her pack of friends. Louise is actually a centuries-old vampire, who sees something in Lena’s eyes, something for which Louise has been searching for many decades. She bites Lena, and her transformation into a creature of the night begins. It’s not without its issues: to force Lena to come to terms with her new-found strength and speed, she is handed over to a pimp, a scenario which turns into a blood-bath. While Lena does adapt, the police investigate the killings and Tom (Riemelt), who knew Lena from her street days, realizes there’s a connection between her and what happened.

While there’s precious little new here, in terms of content, it’s really a film where the style is probably more important, and the makers nail this impeccably. It’s a glossy, shiny movie, set in a world that looks like a car advert [and, as an aside, there are some very nice cars here!], where the streets are perpetually wet and the only light is neon, with a perpetually thumping techno beat as the soundtrack. Of course, your mileage may vary as to how that translates into a cinematic experience, but I loved the attitude on view, despite the short attention span and focus on distracting the viewer with shiny, pretty baub… Ooh! Sparkly things! Sorry, where was I?

It’s the moments that you’ll remember: Lena’s bath-tub transformation with her old life literally melting off her, or the restaurant scene where one of the immortals proves exactly how hard-core a smoker she is, by stubbing a cigarette out in her eye. And the radical feminist philosophy is engagingly confident, espoused here as, “We eat, drink, sniff coke, and fuck as much as we like. But we never get fat, pregnant, or hooked.” Louise helped kill off the male vampires because they were a waste of undeath, and has deliberately avoided turning men since. It is, if you like, a distaff version of The Lost Boys, crossed with Daughters of Darkness, with some fine action set-pieces thrown in, that I wish they’d extended a bit. When you contrast this with lame vampire updatings like T*w*l*ght, there’s no doubt which is superior.

Dir: Dennis Gansel
Star: Karoline Herfurth, Nina Hoss, Jennifer Ulrich, Max Riemelt

Backyard

  By

★★★
“The film that could only have been made in Mexico, where female life is cheap…”

The US border is all that separates El Paso, Texas, from Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, but the two cities’ ways of life are worlds apart. On the Mexican side, the bodies of women turn up, almost every week: sexually assaulted, with signs of torture and/or body parts missing. The police barely bother to investigate; the victims tend to be far from home, low-paid workers in the factories which drive Juarez’s employment. Into this comes police captain Blanca Bravo (de la Reguera), who vows to track down the perpetrators. But doing so pits her against the multinationals who could do without the bad publicity; against her commander, who says to her face that “women make good nurses, but lousy police officers”; and state politicians, who are uneasy about exactly what she might uncover.

This is based on a very unpleasant reality, also covered in the Jennifer Lopez movie, Bordertown, but one senses that was sanitized for American palates. This doesn’t soft-pedal anything: the brutality, corruption, sexism and poverty depicted makes for pretty challenging viewing. You may recognize de la Reguera from her role as the nun in Nacho Libre, but this is right at the other end of its portrayal of Mexico: barely controlled anarchy where, if you pick the right person, it’s possible to get away with murder. This is personified by the story, running parallel to Blanco, of a young women, who arrived in Juarez to seek work, and her eventual fate. While harrowing, this angle doesn’t shed much extra light on proceedings, and probably dilutes the film’s focus.

The central performance, however, is solid, with Blanco portrayed as someone willing to put everything she has – her career, or even her life – on the line, to protect those who have little or no protection in the eyes of the law. If the film has little to offer in the way of surprises (especially if you’re a fan of Dexter, you’ll be able to spot the psychopath a long way off!), and nor does it offer much in the way of resolution, it’s a decent, if grim, look at a world just a couple of hours drive from where I’m writing this in Arizona. And it’s a world I’d rather keep at arm’s length if possible.

Dir: Carlos Carrera
Star: Ana de la Reguera, Asur Zagada, Marco Pèrez, Alejandro Calva