Category: Review

Xena: Warrior Princess season one

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Originally screened: September 1995

It’s assumed viewers are at least somewhat familiar with Xena’s background, as she is first seen burying her armour in an effort to bury her past. Of course, this is about as successful as it usually is in fiction, and it’s not long before she’s saving villagers, including Gabrielle, from slavery. That includes an aerial battle atop platforms, which is the first sign of the show’s strong influence from Hong Kong action films; it was using wirework, in a way that predated its popular arrival in Hollywood. Similarly, the stunning New Zealand locations foreshadow Lord of the Rings, to the extent that I kept expecting to see hobbits gamboling along in Xena’s wake.

There is a sense that the makers were still feeling their way to some extent, not quite certain how the relationships would work out, and the characters develop as the actors grew into them. The same goes for the action; especially early on, the doubling is clunkily shot, and Lawless is obviously not doing as much of her own work. The improvement over the course of the season was palpable, and by the end, both Xena and the stunt players had got a much better handle on the subtleties required. That said, I always had to wince when Xena would cartwheel her way into a situation – wouldn’t, oh, running have been quicker?

There are some good guest appearances; Tim Thomerson plays a mercenary on the downside of his fame and career [think True Grit in ancient Greece], and we also see Karl Urban, who’d go on to play Bones in the Star Trek reboot. The best of these, however, is Bruce Campbell in “The Royal Couple of Thieves”. Show producer Rob Tapert was one of the producers of The Evil Dead, so has known Campbell for years, and used him to play Autolycus, the self-proclaimed King of Thieves. Xena demands his help to recover a potentially lethal religious relic, stolen from its owners, so the two have to pair up. The dialogue and coming timing here is great, and the same goes for “Warrior… Princess…” which sees Lawless play both Xena, and her look-alike, flighty princess Diana. It’s a startling demonstration of Lucy’s genuine talent as an actress.

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The best episode, however, is about as far from comedy as the show gets. I write a good deal more about it over on the forum, but it centers on Callisto, who watched her family die in a fire during a raid by Xena’s army, back when she was bad. Now, Callisto has set out to destroy Xena from the ground up. Featuring an amazingly psychotic performance from Hudson Leick as Callisto, it goes to prove that every great hero needs a great villain, and Callisto is the Joker to Xena’s Dark Knight. They play two sides of the same coin, Callisto pointing out that Xena has never been brought to justice for all her past crimes.

Callisto is much further gone into the insanity abyss, as this speech she gives to Xena shows. “You let me go, and I will dedicate my life to killing everything you’ve loved: your friends, your family, your reputation, even your horse. You see, I am being so honest with you, because the idea of your pity is worse than death for me. You created a monster with integrity, Xena. Scary, isn’t it?” The show builds to a great battle between the two (above), inspired by a similar fight Jet Li had in Once Upon a Time in China. Watching this again… Yeah, I see why I loved the show!

Season 1: Top 5 episodes

# Jim IMDB voting
1. Callisto Callisto
2. The Royal Couple of Thieves Prometheus
3. Warrior… Princess… Sins of the Past
4. Sins of the Past The Greater Good
5. Altared States Warrior… Princess…

Joan of Arc (1999)

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★★★★

joanofarcOne problem with history is that viewers likely know how it ends: if you want to surprise them, why bother making a historical drama? Joan of Arc knows this, so starts with her burning at the stake. It’s a bit of a double-edged sword: it robs the climax of its striking power, yet acknowledges without doubt, that this is a tragedy. The theme of manipulation is again strong here, with Joan discarded after having outlived her usefulness, despite an odd character change in the second half, where she drifts for a jarring moment into petulant bitch mode. It’s almost as if the makers hinted at a megalomaniacal side, crazed by power, and her fatalistic approach to her capture rings false – probably because it is nowhere near the truth. There’s more fabrication early on, with Joan an unwanted daughter who sees a friend (blind, no less) killed by enemy soldiers – must she always be some kind of post-traumatic stress survivor?

Once it hits its stride, however, there is rarely a wrong step, at least dramatically speaking – the French king again comes off as far more implicated in Joan’s death than evidence suggests. Neil Patrick Harris is convincing as Charles, who moves from self-doubt to certainty in his divine right to be king, then on to using that power against the one who put him there. Peter O’Toole too turns in a fine performance as Bishop Cauchon, though more facts are tampered with, allowing him to act as Charles’ spiritual advisor when he was actually always on the English/Burgundian side. That it’s a TV miniseries is apparent, with 15th century France populated by remarkably clear-skinned and straight-teethed people. There’s even hints of romance between Joan and her companion, Jean de Metz, which serves little purpose. The battle scenes, too, are all but bloodless – I wasn’t expecting the decapitations and arterial spurting seen in Besson’s film, but I didn’t really want the Middle Ages, sanitized for my protection. Even the guy dying of plague looks pretty good. [Chris noted a glaring continuity error at the end: on her way up to the stake, Joan is wearing shoes, but by the time she gets there, she’s barefoot!]

However, the main difference between this and The Messenger is that Joan of Arc is convincing. Perhaps with the advantage of having extra time (the DVD of the miniseries runs 189 minutes), they make the effort to show her interacting with other characters, and Sobieski’s calm, complete assurance is a striking contrast to Jovovich. The viewer can see why people would believe her, and it naturally follows they will too – Sobieski’s Emmy nomination was entirely well-deserved. Despite playing fast and loose with the facts (another example: Joan’s brother was not killed in battle, but lived to see her trial verdict overturned), this strong central performance holds the film together and, with the aid of the other fine actors, makes it eminently watchable. It may not be historically accurate, but it does a fine job of explaining why her myth is still honoured in the third millennium, without coming down in one camp or the other regarding the source of her visions. There are few TV miniseries worth watching, and fewer still worth owning, but this one comes highly recommended.

Dir: Christian Duguay
Star: Leelee Sobieski, Neil Patrick Harris, Peter O’Toole, Chad Willett

Velvet Gloves

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★½

This film is a 90-minute explanation of why Jade Leung’s star never took off. While some decisions Michelle Yeoh made might have been questionable, at least her films were rarely boring, and never down to the level of this piece of tedious dreck. It depicts the struggles of a class of policewomen (including Jade), to become part of the elite. The idea certainly has potential – the Inspector Wears Skirts series has a similar premise – but here, there is almost no character given to any of the girls; they all blur into each other, like a dozen GI Jane-wannabes.

The director – whoever they may be, since the credits were all in Chinese, and the Internet offers limited assistance either – also seems to believe that if two minutes of the ladies taking on an assault course is good, ten minutes must be better. Another example is the seven-day forced march, which feels like it was filmed in real time, and screws up the most obvious opportunity for tension. It does lead to a somewhat interesting sequence, where three of the women have to last two minutes fighting martial-arts instructors, to avoid getting kicked out. But there is no flow to the plot at all – it lurches from set-piece to set-piece without cohesion or progression. All of which would be tolerable if the action elements weren’t handled in such a lacklustre fashion, but there’s nothing here to write home about, except in a “PS. Obvious stunt doubling” kind of way.

For some strange reason, this film appears to be unavailable on DVD – should you want to see it (and if you do, I’ve clearly failed in my mission here), you’ll have to see the VCD, with its illegible subtitles and a plot synopsis which shakes hands and parts company with the truth after the first sentence. It opts to visit the land of Wild Fabrication instead, continuing: “Before graduation, the team is called to handle a hostage situation in a jewelry expo. Afterwards the girls are assigned to as the bodyguard of the first lady of a small country. But the first lady’s own rebellious guard kidnaps her and executes one of the girls…” There’s not a single word of truth there: the movie finishes – abruptly – on graduation day, after yet another training mission.

But if you know what film that synopsis actually describes, do let me know, because it’s almost certainly far more interesting and entertaining than this one. It may not be the worst action heroine film I’ve ever seen, but it’s probably the worst ever to come out of Hong Kong, which usually does such things with a certain degree of invention, enthusiasm and energy. None of these are visible here, in any amount.

Dir: Billy Chan Wui-Ngai
Stars: Jade Leung, Bobby Au, Farini Cheung, Zhang Fengyi

The Messenger: the story of Joan of Arc

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★★★
“Joan’s eminent originality was her common sense”

messengerThis was the the very first sentence of Michelet’s classic biography, published in 1853, but you’d be hard pressed to recognise the same person in Besson’s portrayal. A more accurate summary of this Joan would be the line spoken to her as she languished in prison: “You didn’t see what was, Jeanne – you saw what you wanted to see…” Besson comes down firmly in the school of thought which has Joan as a mentally deranged religious loony. While this is a viable theory, it doesn’t work as played by Jovovich – all twitchy, rolling her eyes and staring off into the distance – since it becomes impossible to see why anyone would have followed her. Unless we assume the 14th century French population were entirely gullible, she should have spent her life quietly as some village’s idiot. This cripples the film irreperably, since we feel little or no sympathy for a heroine depicted as a frothing zealot.

Historically too, it gets off to a bad start – an entirely fabricated incident in which Joan sees her sister first killed, then raped by an English soldier. This provides a spurious ground for Joan to hate the invaders, when contemporary accounts tell of her concern being almost equal for both sides. Also made-up is her finding a sword in a field, and there is a sudden leap, with Joan arriving to an audience with the King – in truth, she talked her way up the hierarchy. A rather lurid scene (missing from the US theatrical release) where Joan’s virginity is verified, marks the end of a troubling first act. Once her campaign begins, though, the film improves drastically, with excellent (if somewhat implausible – did they really use something resembling helicopter rotors as weapons?) battle scenes, that are at once enthralling and grim. It’s understandable when they unhinge Joan’s sanity even more; another of the themes seems to be that her mission was really non-Christian, in that it led to the deaths of so many people. Something about “thou shalt not kill”, though given the bloody history of Christianity, singling her out seems somewhat unfair. Tcheky Karyo delivers a fine performance as the leader of Joan’s army, facing the difficult task of balancing her expectations, with prosaic things like, oh, not getting killed.

Joan’s capture, trial and execution are fairly close to the truth, though in reality, the King was less involved and more concerned for Joan than shown. It certainly is reasonable to suggest that a naive innocent such as Joan would have been used for political ends. Once she’d outlasted her usefulness – and with the king on the throne, she quickly became more a hindrance than a help – she would have needed to be disposed of. Must confess, I quite like the concept of Joan as a medieval version of Lee Harvey Oswald. Dustin Hoffman’s appearance as Joan’s conscience is another neat touch, and his sarcasm works well. Indeed, the film is one good performance from being excellent. The bad news is, it’s Jovovich who is the culprit (a messenger who deserves to be shot?), though Besson and co-writer Andrew Birkin perhaps warrant most of the criticism for twisting facts and characters in order to fit a predetermined goal. Their Joan is so far from the historical record, they’d have been better off placing their character in an entirely fictitious setting.

Dir: Luc Besson
Star: Milla Jovovich, John Malkovich, Faye Dunaway, Tcheky Karyo

Satin Steel

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★★★½

This fast, furious, largely daft movie was Jade’s immediate follow up to the two Black Cat films. If they were based on Nikita, the inspiration here is clearly Lethal Weapon, with Leung as a headstrong cop (also named Jade Leung!) who believes in shooting first and asking questions…oh, somewhere between eventually and never. With her sensible partner (Lee), she chases evil weapons broker Mr. Fowler and his gang from Singapore to Indonesia. It eventually ends above a volcano, with Jade clinging desperately to a helicopter.

The elements here are hugely variable: Leung and Lee have great chemistry, but Lee’s boyfriend Paul (Chan) may be the most irritating bastard in cinema history – his every appearance provoked a strong desire to throw things at the TV, and we cheered loudly when he was gunned down, particularly since it shut him up for a bit. In contrast Russell Wong is more sympathetic as Fowler’s naive lawyer, though since we know what happened to Jade’s first husband, this relationship might as well be wearing a sweatshirt marked ‘Doomed’. One also wonders why an international arms dealer would employ a troupe of native dancers as henchmen.

While the plot and characterisation leaves a little to be desired in originality and execution, the action is plentiful and energetic. Of particular note is the previously-mentioned helicopter sequence – at first, we suspected heavy stunt doubling, but later on, there are a couple of shots which give pause for thought, and Jade deserves greater credit. It’s just a shame it ends so abruptly. Jade’s battle against the dancers is also pretty cool, and Lee has a good fight at a train station, culminating with a leap in front of an oncoming engine that merited an immediate rewind and rewatch.

There is, however, something obviously cheap and apparently rushed about the whole endeavour, and it feels like one of the later entries in Cynthia Khan’s filmography – particularly, Angel on Fire, which also had two policewomen from different lands, travelling to a third (and presumably, cheaper to film in!) country to find the villains. One suspects Jade was under pressure to make another movie while her star was still rising, regardless of the end product’s quality.

Dir: Tony Leung Siu-Hung
Stars: Jade Leung, Anita Lee, Russell Wong, Kenneth Chan

Women Who Kick Butt box-set

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★★½

Ten movies in a box for $17.99 – how can you possibly go wrong? And yet…I have this nagging feeling that there’s a reason you’re paying $1.80 per flick. But, hey: if there are two good films in the set, I’ll have got my money’s worth. Any more, and I’ll be delirious happy. So, we’ll be temporarily abandoning our usual ratings for a more financial one as we attempt to discover, are these films worth $1.80? Looking at the titles on the back, I’m not overly optimistic. There’s only about three I’ve heard of, and they seem to be ordered like a baseball line-up, with the strongest at the top, right down to total obscurities. Not to be coerced by such a transparent ploy, we naturally started off with #10.

Death Run to Istanbul

Dir: Rachel Gordon.
Stars: Fallon, Bill Ballis, Dean Thomas

Now at the plate…batting 0-for-13…a 1993 film so obscure it doesn’t even have an Internet Movie Database entry. This may be because it is utterly dreadful; my 14-year old stepdaughter makes films with her friends on weekends, and they are far superior. Doesn’t help that the synopsis given is almost entirely fictional:

  • Fantasy: “When ‘The Committee’ kidnaps a former cop’s sister, they didn’t stop to think about the big brother factor! A former police lieutenant and marine, Gary calls on his old kickboxing buddy Jason to go deep into the underworld with him…”
  • Reality: A junkie (Thomas) loses a suitcase of drugs belonging to a crime boss, so gets snatched off the street by the villains. His sister (Fallon) goes in to rescue him.

Sheesh. Woefully inept in every way. Example #1: the heroine’s blonde sidekick escapes from captivity…yet is next seen being interrogated by the chief villain (Ballis)…before vanishing from the movie entirely. It’s as if someone put the reels together in the wrong order – except it’s shot on video. Example #2: right at the climax, the heroine’s martial arts teacher is shot dead. The movie cuts to her laying flowers on his grave, presumably after the police investigation, autopsy and funeral. Did every other character take those days off? Example #3: they forget to add sound effects to one fight.

I could go on, and fill the entire page with precise details of how appalling this is. The fights are largely tedious, the cast can’t act (or overact horribly) and have no charisma, and there are huge chunks where nothing is happening at all. As for Istanbul? It gets mentioned once; the film never leaves Venice Beach. The only slightly interesting character is a very scary evil henchwoman, who turns up briefly. She is the sole reason this possesses any value at all, and we’re only talking about $0.10.

T.N.T. Jackson

Dir: Cirio Santiago.
Stars: Jeannie Bell, Stan Shaw, Ken Metcalf, Pat Anderson

Feeling in need of escape, we sprinted to the front of the DVD-box for the top-billed movie. Getting the bad news in first: the sound and vision suck. The print looks like it’s 70 years old, and we had to fiddle to get any audio at all – and that came from the back speakers only. It’s also horribly dated, in every way, from the fashions through to the dialogue.

…and yet, curiously, it’s fun. Chris remembers seeing this in Times Square on a double bill with Superfly, and that would have been a real hoot. Bell has attitude in abundance as the titular heroine (best line, “Yeah, and I’m Snow White with a case of sunburn”) who goes to “Hong Kong” i.e. the Phillipines, to look for her missing brother, only to fall in with bad drug dealers. “Titular” is perhaps appropriate given the gratuitous topless-fu scene involving the former Playboy playmate, yet it’s less exploitative than you might expect. The ethnically diverse cast generally acquit themselves well, with a script co-written by cult actor Dick Miller, a regular for both Roger Corman and Joe Dante.

Action-wise, the doubling for Bell is a little too obvious, but she has a nice line in gory arm-snapping which we wanted to see more of. Pat Anderson also makes an impression as an undercover cop, and has a good battle with the heroine in a graveyard. The end result is schlock entertainment with hardly a dull moment in its 73 minutes, that leaves us not averse to getting a better copy (and as I write, Chris is surfing Ebay for Super Fly!). Several marks off for print quality, yet still a solid $4.00.

Flight to Danger

Dir: Sara Matthews and Gina Jourard.
Star: Sara Matthews, Gina Jourard, Barbara Minardi, Lynn Eglash Reynaud

Knew we were in trouble when I saw ‘Vista Street Entertainment’; yes, it’s from the same company that brought us Death Ride to Istanbul. It’s supposed to be about an “all-women’s martial arts team” in Paris, but when sod-all had happened after twenty minutes, I cut my losses and hit the ‘Eject’ button. If it seemed perhaps a little more technically competent than DRtI, it was even more astonishingly tedious. While I might have been slightly amused to see how the sub-poverty row Vista Street tried to fake Paris, life’s too short. I do this for fun, not my living. Value: $0.00.

Street Angels. ‘A Vista Str…’ Not tonight, thank you. We’re running to the front of the box, in the hope of finding something not shot on video.

The Firing Line

firinglineDir: John Gale.
Stars Reb Brown, Shannon Tweed, Kahlena Marie

Supposedly set in South America, Brown is a ‘military adviser’ (read, CIA spook) who swaps sides and signs up with the opposition after the rebel leader he brought in for trial is executed. Tweed plays the exercise equipment saleswoman (!) who gets involved, and gradually becomes a gun-toting revolutionary (!!) – though let’s get one thing straight, the DVD cover on the right below bears no relationship to her character, or indeed the movie at all. Indeed, Tweed is surprisingly chaste, with one skinny-dip and a love scene with Brown, both PG-rated.

There are some interesting ideas here, such as the good guys being Communists (or at least, described as such by the ruling party); in a Hollywood movie, this counts as amazingly radical. It’s also laudable that the rebel’s leader is a woman (played effectively by Kahlena Marie). However, the action sequences are over-long and, frankly, extremely boring, with perhaps only the last one having any significance in the larger scheme of things.

Tweed’s transition to a gung-ho fighter is glossed over with a bit of target practice; it’d have been far more interesting if she’d really been an undercover CIA operative. Or a government agent, sent to discover the rebel’s hideout. Or…well, make up your own improvements here, as there’s plenty of room. It’s not worthless, certainly – after Vista Street Entertainment, I’ve revising my definition of the term – but not particularly worthful, either. Call it $1.50.

Street Angels

Dir: George Phillip Saunders.
Stars: George Phillip Saunders, Dee Hengotler, Gwen Somers, Honey Lauren

Well, get out the crayolas and colour me surprised. Vista Street Entertainment in competent film shock. We’re not talking Oscars, but it isn’t fifteen minutes of plot extended to 90 minutes through gratuitous dancing, the actors have a clue, it’s directed and shot with some ability, and the fight scenes are decently staged. This is a lot more than I expected, and after the previous two atrocities, is a breath of only slightly stale air. A cop loses his partner to The Phantom, and frees three women from jail to act as an extra-judicial counterforce against this mysterious villain and his henchmen. It’s pretty cliched – the women, one dark-haired, one blonde and a redhead, used to be [yawn!] a cop, a marine and a gang girl – but is done with enough energy to pass muster. The hero comes across somewhere between Kurt Russell and a foul-mouthed version of Philip Marlowe, though the heroines do less butt-kicking than I hoped.

It’s all serviceable enough, though it still isn’t wise to try lines like, “Street Angels? It sounds like a really bad, no-budget B-movie!”, when it’s painfully obvious that you are a moderately bad, no-budget B-movie. Witness the scene right at the start, where a villain tries to break a bottle for use as a weapon: it takes four attempts, and he’s left with something half an inch long and entirely unthreatening. There’s also an odd homoerotic subtext – the villain is blatantly bi, while at the end the hero goes off with his arm around, not the girls, but a young boy rescued from the Phantom. Kinda dubious, but this is still adequate, and I’d be happy to have paid $2.50 for this.

Get Christie Love

Dir: Willam A. Graham.
Star: Teresa Graves, Harry Guardino, Louise Sorel, Paul Stevens

Based on a novel by Dorothy Uhnak, Graves (like Goldie Hawn, an alumni of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In), is the titular black policewoman, trying to track down the ledger of a drug importer. She knows his girlfriend is the key, and has to find a lever to use on her, in order to find the information she wants.

Due to the TV-pilot origins, this movie is rather more restrained in its sex and violence than ‘proper’ blaxploitation films, but what it lacks in grit and realistic urban feel is largely made up for in plot and character. Love comes across as a detective more than a fighter, though isn’t averse to necessary roughness. There’s also an inter-racial romantic angle hinted at, between the heroine and her boss, which was probably hugely daring for the time, but more is made of Love being a female cop than a black one, though she still possesses a certain style and a hot VW convertible. In contrast, check out the Amish-giant looking dude, in possession of what is perhaps the worst jacket in cinema history.

The TV show, also starring Graves, ran for one season on ABC in 1974-5; in April 1997, there were reports that Whitney Houston had signed up to do a remake for Danny DeVito’s Jersey Films but – perhaps fortunately – nothing ever came of it (Quentin Tarantino would have wanted to direct, having been a fan as a kid). The movie, while certainly dated, is a little more thoughtful than most entries in the genre, and if the print here has seen better decades (several of them!), you can peer through the tinting to find a decent effort, worth $3.00 of anyone’s money.

getchristielove

High Kicks

Dir: Ruta K. Aras.
Star: Tara Lee-Anne Roth, Dennis Swarthout, Sandy Kay, Kevin Knotts

Think this might have strayed in from the Women Who Work Their Butts collection by accident, as this has more gratuitous aerobics than any film since that Travolta/Curtis “classic”, Perfect – the presence of an ‘aerobics choreographer’ in the end credits is relevant here. The heroine (Roth) owns an aerobics studio, and when she gets raped by the local street gang, turns to a passing sailor (Swarthout) and his mates for help.

Thereby hangs the problem with this film, in that it’s the sailor who kicks most butt. Only in the last five minutes does the heroine stop standing at the side; up until then, she’s been largely in need of rescuing. There are a couple of potentially interesting angles; her revenge becomes almost gleeful, but neither this, nor the rivalry between her and one of her customers for the sailor’s affections, go anywhere. The film could have shed interesting light on the psychology of retaliation and the cycle of violence. Alternatively, she could have used her new martial-arts skills to kick her rival’s ass from here to Hollywood. Instead, it does nothing but roll out the cliches.

Right from the interminable opening credits – three minutes of sod-all happening – there is hardly a scene which isn’t twice as long as necessary. Some of the fights aren’t bad, even if one of the good guys bears a disturbing resemblance to Jean-Claude Van Damme. But much like the rest of the film, they offer nothing new or interesting. You could probably burn up a few calories doing aerobics along with the cast; for the more sloth-like among us, it has very little to interest. You’d probably be hoping for change from $1.00.

Emanuelle, Queen of the Desert

Dir: Bruno Fontana.
Star: Laura Gemser, Angelo Infanti, Gabrielle Tinti, Giovanni Brusadori

You might be asking, what’s an Emmanuelle film doing, in a Women Who Kick Butt box-set? Good question, partly answered by the spelling: check it out, there’s only one M in this Emanuelle, to avoid copyright suits. This one is played by Laura Gemser, who appeared in a slew of 70’s/80’s Italian soft- and hard-porn films, chiefly for Joe D’Amato.

This one, also known as La Belva dalle calda pelle and Dirty Seven, is based on a novel by director Fontana. It starts promisingly enough, with Gemser as a mysterious avenging angel who sets about destroying a troop of soldiers, using her womanly wiles to turn them against each other in revenge for… Well, this is where the film falls down, in an amazingly lengthy flashback sequence which documents every detail of the events leading up to… something that most viewers will already have worked out, making the whole process tiresomely redundant.

This is a shame, as Gemser makes a great predatory femme fatale (see also another porn star, Brigitte Lahaie, in Jean Rollin’s Fascination) and the destruction of the troop from the inside is a potentially great idea. The wild landscape, in which urban man is clearly out of his depth, is also reminiscent of Walkabout. In the end, however, it’s largely a tedious flick about a bunch of soldiers – most of them possess few redeeming features, and in the main, neither really does the film. Call it $2.00, most of it for Gemser.

Sister Streetfighter

Dir: K.Yamaguchi.
Star: Sue Shiomi, Sonny Chiba, May Hayakawa, Sanae Obori

sisterstreetfighterfz2Jackpot! Finally – nine movies in – we hit one which stands a good chance of being watched again. Having recently endured the awfulness which is Dragon Princess, I wasn’t expecting much, but was delightfully impressed by the imagination on view here – not to mention the non-stop violence. The plot is similar to TNT Jackson, with Shiomi seeking her brother who has vanished into the Japanese underworld, adding a large dose of Enter the Dragon for good measure. The film is totally berserk, to the point where I suspect half an hour has been randomly edited out. At one point, the heroine is thrown hundreds of feet down from a bridge; when she returns, no explanation of her miraculous survival is forthcoming.

At another point, we get a catalogue of the bad guy’s collection of killers (some people collect stamps – others, psychotic assassins with interesting weaponry); one teasingly described as “Eva Parrish – Karate champion of Australia”, vanishes from the movie, never to be seen again. This is a pity, because we were eagerly anticipating a full-on east-meets-west catfight. What’s left is still fabulous – not least because it’s a good print, and even letterboxed. The villain, who keeps his dark glasses on during sex, and decries cop shows as being “too violent”, before smacking his bitch up. The henchmen, wearing what appear to be black wicker waste-paper baskets on their head. The guy who fires a blow-dart into a caged bird – here at GWG, we welcome any excuse for a recreation of Monty Python’s Parrot Sketch. Then there’s Shiomi herself, who is great, killing flies to make her point, and equally good wielding sai, nunchakus or simply her fists. It’s grand entertainment for a Friday night, and even $9.99 would be well worth it.

Leaving Scars

Dir: Brad Jacques.
Stars: Lisa Boyle, Robin Downs, Jonathan Slater

Sister Streetfighter had taken the tension away, as if your team had scored a couple of late goals to break open a close game. And a good thing too, since Scars, despite the presence of star Lisa Boyle large on the cover of the box set, fits least in with the theme, and really shouldn’t be here at all. It’s a sleazy (and perhaps accurate) portrayal of Hollywood life, with slimebags, scumballs, scuzz-buckets and much drug-taking, centred around a floppy disk which the heroine, an aspiring actress, has given to her by a soon-to-be-murdered friend. The usual seeking activities ensue.

Apart from convincing me I do not want my step-daughter to pursue an acting career, there’s very little to recommend this. Certainly, Boyle does almost none of the promised butt-kicking, save one spray from an automatic weapon – very careless of those gun-runners to leave the merchandise around like that, fully loaded ‘n’ all… There’s a fair bit of nudity, though I should warn you the silicone is obvious, and the production values are obviously low-rent.

What gives this any value at all is the commentary track – yep, a commentary track – in which the producers talk about making the film, and as an insight into low-budget cinema, it’s rather more interesting than the product itself. A total surprise to find this, since there is no mention of it anywhere on the box, it roughly triples the value if we were talking about the movie alone, to $1.50.

Adding up all the above figures, we get a total of $25.59 for the box set as a whole, which should label it as a hit. However, Sister Streetfigher alone is responsible for almost 40%; adding in TNT Jackson and Get Christie Love and you’ve got virtually two-thirds of the value, because there is just way too much filler in this box. Better to buy the four film Savage Sisters set, which includes the three above and (the admittedly worthless) High Kicks, but can be found for $8.98 or less and will take up half the space on your shelves.

Witchblade: season two

  By

★★★½
“Girls with gauntlets.”

Much as in the first season, the second series of Witchblade brushed against greatness. Unlike the first, where you can point at the final episode as the key weakness, this time round it is a chronic rather than acute malaise that prevents it from getting the seal of approval. When it was great, it was fabulous – it just seemed that for every full, satisfying episode, there was a lame clunker to compensate. Particularly at the start of the season, there seemed to be precious little imagination on view.

Before we get to that, however, there was the little matter of heading forwards once again, Sara having effectively wished the entire first season into a plot-hole. To the writers’ credit, everything went forward in a completely different direction, from the moment Sara and her partner opted not to go into the theatre where, in the first series, everything had begun. Things diverged so rapidly from here that by the end of the double-length first episode, Kenneth Irons was dead, though as previously seen, this is only a minor inconvenience in the Witchblade universe. As Gabriel says in the finale, “Death is a revolving door.” I profess myself quite satisfied with how this was handled – it was the next few episodes which were distinctly ho-hum, with little in the way of memorable moments. Oh, look: there’s a new drug in town; Nottingham hires assassins to kill Sara; multiple personalities. And I had to cheat and look up synopses elsewhere to glean this much information, since they were notable largely for the lack of impression they made on me. I do recall being immensely irritated by the strobe-lit fight scenes, however, the sort of thing you do when you’re trying to hide ineptness.

Things probably reached their nadir in Nailed, in which a stereotypical, drooling paedophile kidnapped Danny’s niece. The Witchblade, with an impressively convenient sense of dramatic timing, revealed his location just in time for them to rush to the rescue, in what was otherwise little more than a lame rip-off of Cape Fear. Fortunately, I missed this episode when it aired (being off getting married!), and only caught up with it during the marathon. Otherwise, I might well have given up on the show. Which would have been a terrible shame, as things started to perk up thereafter. I always enjoy episodes where external mythos enter the show, and Lagrimas mixed the Wandering Jew fable in beautifully, with its cursed immortal, seeking death at the hands of the Witchblade. Hierophant was a little too Keyser Sose-ish for my tastes, but Veritas probably ranks as my favourite episode to date. Oddly, the legend it utilised, while much more recent, didn’t seem out of place in the slightest. We were largely one step ahead of the story, but only in an “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?” way, and I suspect the Powers That Be will rear their ugly heads again in season three.

The finale, Ubique, also has to rate highly, for sheer perversity at the very least – Nottingham reaches new levels of creepiness in his final scenes with Lucrezia. Throw in a kicking soundtrack (Lords of Acid!), some spectacular deaths, and we’ll forgive a central plot device teetering curiously close to the main premise of feardotcom, which opened in cinemas the very same week. Among the interesting themes on view are the way both Pezzini and Nottingham both struggle to come to terms with the loss of their fathers, albeit temporarily in the latter’s case. This may be linked to one of the unresolved issues carried forward; who is the guy with wavy grey hair who always seems to be lurking round Sara? Indeed, the whole Nottingham/Pezzini relationship had perhaps more depth than any other in the show; veering between love, hate and obsession, with never a dull moment.

Season 3 looked like it might have some stiff competition for Sara’s favours, particularly with Concobar (rather less irritating this time round) lurking in a coma. Add in Gabriel’s little kiss in the finale, and it seemed like time for all applicants to take a number and form an orderly queue. On the other hand, couldn’t see why they keep both Jake and Danny in the show, as their roles overlapped far too much. A permanent, irrevocable death would have made people sit up and take notice – my vote in this department goes to Jake… Despite the second season, overall, rating the same as the first, I reached the end of this one with more optimism in Witchblade‘s future. However, TNT didn’t share this confidence, in part perhaps because of Yancy’s inability to keep out of bars, and the series wasn’t renewed. This may have been wise – on January 3rd, 2003, Butler was arrested after allegedly punching her father, punching and attempting to bite her uncle, and head-butting a police officer. For the moment, Sara Pezzini is in limbo, but really, a better fate is deserved for one of the more innovative series to hit the airwaves in the past couple of years.

Star: Yancy Butler, David Chokachi, Eric Etebari,  Will Yun Lee

Lara Croft, Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life

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★★
“Tomb for two, please.”

tomb2aThe first problem with the film is its title, a clunky mess apparently lacking in any punctuation – I’ve taken my best guess at what it should be above, even if it doesn’t line up with the first movie. But hey, new director, new grammar… Interestingly, Steven E. De Souza gets a screenplay credit this time round – he was one of the people who wrote a rejected script before the original film was made, and I wonder how much has been recycled here.

Certainly, a lot of what was said about the first film applies equally to the sequel; despite much affirmation that, this time, they’d really got hold of the character, the potential remains largely unfulfilled. Instead, we get something that (ironically, in the light of previous comments) nicks large chunks from Indiana Jones, adds a flavour of Mission: Impossible 2 and loses most of the more interesting elements from first time round.

The plot here concerns the search for what is, effectively, Pandora’s Box, which turns out to be a genuine artefact containing a deadly plague. Evil overlor…sorry, industrialist Jonathan Reiss (Hinds) wants possession, in order to sell it to the highest bidder as a biological weapon, and use the antidote to control who’ll be allowed to populate the post-plague world.

Though most of the film is concerned more with the struggle for possession of an amber orb, which points to the location of Pandora’s Box. This contest takes the participants from Greece to England to Kazakhstan to China to Hong Kong to Taipei and finally Kenya, though there’s so little local flavour it feels more like an episode of Alias, quickly establishing itself with stock exterior footage, before switching to an obvious sound-stage.

While Barrie and Taylor return as Lara’s sidekicks, they get given very little to do, which is disappointing, since their characters were entertaining elements first time up. Instead, Lara gets a sidekick, Terry Sheridan (Butler), a dubious character who first needs to be taken from a central Asian jail, and who was romantically entangled with Croft in the past. His fate is obvious.

Indeed, so is much of the movie, save the opening sequence, which instead opts to be so ludicrous as to defy belief. Lara lures in a shark with her own blood, then turns it into a jet-ski, before being picked up by her own personal F-sized submarine. Even for a video game, this is stretching it, and the sound you hear, is most of the movie’s credibility, heading shame-faced for the exit as it mumbles something about another appointment. What little is left, gets swamped in an orgy of product placement that rivals recent Bond movies.

tomb2bIt does give you plenty of time to wonder about little things like the wisdom of instigating a shoot-out in a germ warfare laboratory, how many years have passed since someone parachuting off a tall building ceased to be exciting, and the failure to make Sheridan a credible opponent for a fist-fight with Lara Croft. The finale does feature some interesting CGI creatures, though any explanation of their presence, lust for human flesh, or ability to melt into solid rock is notable by its absence. Jolie still is Lara Croft, to an almost uncanny degree, but even her Oscar-winning talents can do little when faced with a script of such limited means.

Director De Bont can direct action, as was shown in Speed – since then it’s been downhill. Twister, Speed 2, The Haunting, and now this, which has almost nothing worth mentioning as far as thrills go. It’s nice to see Hong Kong veteran Simon Yam as a smuggler, and his fight with Croft in a cave full of terracotta warriors is kinda cool, but the rest is distinctly mediocre, relying too much on doubles or CGI. The film desperately needs a tent-pole sequence to make you go “Wow!”, like the training robot or bungee-ballet from part one.

Not the worst big-budget, girls-with-guns pic of the summer (that’d be Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle), but it’s significantly below the first film, which was flawed enough in itself. The harsh truth is, there is nothing here that justifies keeping the franchise going, and that’s really sad.

Dir: Jan De Bont
Star: Angelina Jolie, Gerard Butler, Ciaran Hinds, Noah Taylor

Alias: season one

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★★★★
“Run Sydney Run”

“My name is Sydney Bristow. Seven years ago I was recruited by a secret branch of the CIA called SD-6. I was sworn to secrecy, but I couldn’t keep it from my fiancé. And when the head of SD-6 found out, he had him killed. That’s when I learned the truth: SD-6 is not part of the CIA. I’d been working for the very people I thought I was fighting against. So, I went to the only place that could help me take them down. Now I’m a double agent for the CIA, where my handler is a man named Michael Vaughn. Only one other person knows the truth about what I do: another double agent inside SD-6. Someone I hardly know…my father.”

“It’s everything you want, and more.” That was Chris’s opinion – I was kinda stuck for the right way to start, and as always, she delivered. As, indeed, Alias pretty much delivers, with a crunchy-yet-chewy first series that juggled drama, action and comedy to fine effect, twisting the plot frequently. One problem in TV drama is that you must allow viewers to tune in at any point and rapidly work out what was going on, and former Felicity scribe J.J. Abrams does so in less than 150 words – see above for the heroine’s monologue which opens each show.

The 22 episodes cover a struggle for control of medieval technology, Nostradamus-style prophecy, and other organizations (good and bad), plus Sidney’s missing mother, ongoing relationship with her father, and perpetual struggle to keep her friends from suffering the same fate as her late fiancee. Each episode contains elements of major and minor story arcs, propelling them alone, yet also stands up well on its own.

After a breathless start in which it seemed that Abrams used every conceivable plot device inside three episodes, he wisely moved into new territory. In particular the introduction of Rambaldi, perhaps the show’s most interesting character, who has actually been dead for several centuries. A Da Vinci-esque inventor, he left pieces of his inventions, and clues to their operation, hidden around the globe, and SD-6 are now on a scavenger hunt to find and utilise these, with Sydney their main operative. The CIA are doing exactly the same, also using her to stay one step ahead of SD-6.

alias1Garner is a good choice to play Sydney, a no-nonsense character who is never one to sit back when confronted with problems. She comes across as a well-rounded person with her own fears and doubts, rather than some kind of Bond-esque superspy. But perhaps the show’s greatest strength is the spectrum of supporting actors, who give the show depth when it could easily become a disjointed series of Lara Croft-like escapades. Marshall, SD-6’s “Q”, provides gadgets and geeky humour, while especial kudos are due to Ron Rifkin as SD-6 head Arvin Sloane. The man who orders the death of Sydney’s fiancee could easily have been a two-dimensional bad guy, but by the end of the show, you feel a great deal more sympathetic to his problems.

The influences are plentiful and obvious, most plainly Nikita and the (let’s be honest, rather lame) TV series which subsquently followed. There’s also a helping of Run Lola Run in there; creator Abrams listened to the soundtrack “almost incessantly” while writing the show, and has said, tongue in cheek, that he demands one scene of his heroine running in every episode. He certainly gets it, even if this does become a little predictable. The action quota generally is variable, but usually well-staged, with Garner doing more action than you might expect. And anyone that gets to beat up guest-star Quentin Tarantino wins my approval (at least it took him away from making more dire films!).

Though Sydney occasionally has romantic dalliances, she is somewhat unlucky in love – these men have an unfortunate tendency to die suddenly, and in one case, at Sydney’s own hands. This is probably a good thing, since I’m no fan of Unresolved Sexual Tension, finding it gets in the way of more important elements. Want romance? Go read Mills & Boon! This is an action series, after all, and I’d rather have Sydney kicking ass than going all gooey-eyed over, say, CIA handler Vaughn (Vartan). Their relationship is the subject of much fan fiction, but the ending of the first series would appear to have put the dampers on that department. [If you saw the finale, you’ll appreciate the particular viciousness of this comment]

Season one ended on a dramatic high with four characters potentially biting the big one, though no actual corpses were seen. Given this, and the twisty nature of the show in general, I think it’s safe to say a number of them will find a way to come back in the next series. I’m already looking forward to it.

Star: Jennifer Garner, Victor Garber, Michael Vartan, Ron Rifkin

Witchblade: season one

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★★★½
“Witch watch.”

The summer season of TV is usually characterised by repeats and re-runs, with little to stimulate interest beyond speculation over the fall schedule. This year, however, a dark horse emerged, from the surprising source of TNT, with their adaptation of Top Cow’s Witchblade series, with Yancy Butler in the title role. Over thirteen hours of episodes, including the two-hour pilot, it chronicled the adventures of Sara Pezzini, a New York detective who acquires a bracelet with remarkable powers, not the least of which is its ability to transform into an industrial-strength sword. This brings her into conflict with people like mysterious power-broker Kenneth Irons, and her own captain. She loses partners, lovers and friends on the way to what is unfortunately one of the worst twists in any TV series, since Bobby stepped out of the shower in Dallas. Serious spoiler alert for the following, folks, though this may be a good thing, since it’ll let you get your disappointment out of the way early.

Put simply, having killed of most of the cast (a refreshing change from more cowardly shows, which refuse to let any characters die), our heroine decides she doesn’t like what’s happened, and rewinds time back to just before her partner was killed, way back in the pilot episode. The rest of the season is deemed stricken from the record, and not even Pezzini has any recollection of it. It’s a little like Run Lola Run, except that film actually delivered a beautiful elegy on the role of chance in our affairs, something I suspect Witchblade will not come within a million miles of doing.

The main question is where can the show go from here? I can see how they can move the series in another direction now, with her (now-surviving) partner taking on a larger role, but while none of the characters may know anything, the audience’s memory is still intact. We know, for example, that Jake McCarty is an FBI agent, and are aware of the roles of most of the characters and their relationships. Watching the cast rediscover all this again – as they surely must – is going to be like watching a rerun.

However, maybe they can pull it off, since up until that final ten minutes, the writing on the show was actually very impressive. I confess to no familiarity with the comic-book at all – save for a vague awareness of covers featuring improbably-proportioned heroines – and so can’t comment on how accurately it follows them, but on its own merits, it works well. Several overlapping story arcs were contained in the series, but even if you missed some episodes, there was little trouble picking up on them – another mark of good writing. After the pilot, we kinda forgot about the show for two months (it was on TNT, after all!), and only caught up with the ones we’d missed when the channel aired an all-day marathon. There were plenty of potential angles for future exploration – we were particularly intrigued by the Vatican angle exposed by demonic priest Roger Daltrey, where the Catholic church had the Witchblade for centuries before giving it to Hitler.

witchbladeAbout the only angle that didn’t work for us was the love story between Pezzini and Concobar, her Irish bard. Pardon me if we yawn: Irish people are far too often either Guinness-swilling songsters who’ve kissed the Blarney Stone or terrorists, and the series gave us both. Beyond filling in some interesting sidelight on the history of the Witchblade – a concept worthy of a series in itself – there wasn’t much to this beyond Pezzini getting a shag, though even this didn’t seem to improve her humour. Yancy Butler, despite not having much of a pedigree (she’s perhaps best known for playing opposite Jean-Claude Van Damme in John Woo’s American debut, Hard Target), provides a strong central perfomance as Pezzini, striking the right balance between confusion, strength and sarcasm. Could perhaps do with slightly-less use of the sardonic eyebrow though – if she’s not careful, it’ll demand its own spin-off series. She seems to have come on in action terms as the series progressed; early on, the stunt-doubling was painfully obvious, but in later episodes, she appeared to be taking on more of the work herself, which can only be encouraging for the next series.

Most of the subsidiary characters come across as well-rounded, even the likes of Ian Nottingham, Irons’ enforcer, who gradually falls in love with Pezzini and reveals a softer side. This is in sharp contrast to his replacement – Nottingham v2.0, or Nottingham ME, as we call him – who was simply Very Scary. Her first partner, Will, although dead from the pilot on, continued to appear in a nicely-handled fashion, with mostly only Pezzini able to see him. Oddly though, he makes his presence known to McCarty when it proves suitably dramatic, without any explanation of why he can suddenly do so. Maybe it’s normally too straining on his ectoplasm or something. If it wasn’t for the climax, the show would certainly have deserved our Seal of Approval. As it is, any such award is placed on hold pending future episodes, and we see how they resolve the problems posed by the ending of this year’s batch.

Star: Yancy Butler, Anthony Cistaro, David Chokachi, Eric Etebari