Category: Review

Bad Girls: season three

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★★★½
“Too much soap and not enough opera, but still entertaining.”

The third series hit the ground running, Michelle Dockley taking evil warder Jim Fenner hostage, after stabbing him in the stomach with a broken bottle (to loud cheers here), and Nikki Wade breaking into jail, having gone to see Helen Stewart. However, in the middle, Michelle and Denny headed to Spain, with Fenner’s help. After a really grim episode, in which they took Sylvia Hollanby and her husband hostage (it felt like Last House on the Left 2), the show seemed to lose impetus, and spent the second half spiralling round a series of love triangles: Nikki/Helen/Thomas, Di/Josh/Crystal, Di/Gina/Mark. Chuck in two “surprise pregnancies” and, while soap-opera has always been part of the show, this was overkill.

The loss of Michelle was particularly apparent. An attempt to introduce a new “evil slut” prisoner was a failure; Maxi, leader of the Peckham Boot Gang, simply came across as a pale imitation. However, there was still plenty to enjoy, and the series finished strongly, with the arrival and departure of Victoria O’Kane (a great guest spot for 70’s icon Kate O’Mara), Nikki’s appeal, plus Michelle and Denny’s Butch & Sundance moment in Spain. The end of this series saw a couple of major departures, and the show will have to work hard to fill the gaps in the roster – we look forward to seeing whether the makers are up to the challenge.

Stars: Mandana Jones, Simone Lahbib, Linda Henry, Jack Ellis

Azumi

  By

★★★★½
“No matter how much I try to escape, I can’t avoid it… I am forced to kill.”

The moment that I heard this female samurai pic was from the director of Versus, I started drooling uncontrollably. [See the Trash City review for why] And if the end product is a slight disappointment, it is only because it doesn’t quite replicate Versus‘ imaginative splatter. Sure, the body-count is massive – it makes The Bride vs. The Crazy 88’s look like Lilo and Stich – but I wanted, and expected, arterial spray. Lots of arterial spray. However, in every other way, this is excellent.

Azumi (Ueto) is one of ten orphans, raised by a warrior (Harada) for a mission to slay the warlords who have thrown Japan into chaos. At the risk of stating the bleedin’ obvious, this won’t be easy. Indeed, at one point, Azumi abandons her samurai ways and tries to be semi-normal, joining the sole survivor of a travelling circus. This doesn’t work out, needless to say, leading to the quote above.

Cutting to the chase; the action is excellent, with several sequences which would be fitting climaxes to any other movie. When you see this one’s finale, you’ll realise why they’re not: Azumi’s master is captured, and an entire town of sword-wielding rogues and assorted scum is in her way, plus villain #1, a rose-wielding psychopath who dresses in white (Odagiri). Settle back, and pass the popcorn. While the swordplay itself is mostly nothing special (save one Very Special decapitation), Kitamura captures it beautifully, the visual highlight being a full circle around two characters – vertically. The sound is also fabulous; you could close your eyes and just listen to the battles.

Especially early on, the pacing is kinda slow (it is a 143-minute movie), but Kitamura’s fabulous sense of style means you’re never bored. The villains, in particular, are all larger-than-life characters and enormous fun to watch – for example the Sajiki Brothers, who attack anyone even faintly resembling their target. Curious to know the budget: I’ve heard both “low” and “high”, without specific figures. Certainly, it looks amazing, every bit the equal of The Last Samurai, though I doubt it cost a fraction of $140m. If any 2004 Hollywood action heroine can match Azumi, I’ll be very, very impressed.

Dir: Ryuhei Kitamura
Stars: Aya Ueto, Yoshio Harada, Joe Odagiri, Masato Ibu

Legion

  By

★★
“Cheap TVM offers up its secrets before you even see it. Take them.”

Do not read the sleeve before watching this; idiotically, it gives away the whole thing, including stuff revealed in the last ten minutes. Also: yes, it is the Rick Springfield: Jesse’s Girl, Human Touch, and…er, that’s about it, in the most unexpected reappearance of an 80’s pop icon since a bloke from Bros turned up in Blade II. With these issues out of the way, the movie itself is set in the future, after six years of a war has led to stalemate. Agatha Doyle (Ferrell) leads a Dirty Dozen-ish group of criminal soldiers with nothing to lose on a mission to capture an enemy base. That part’s easy, as there’s no-one around – except for a pile of corpses. However, while they wait for reinforcements, someone/thing starts ripping our her troops’ throats.

Y’know, I always thought “legion” meant more than one. Not in this, which looks as if it were made for the Sci-Fi channel; just the one enemy, and most of the time all you see is his POV, looking like that of the raptors in Pitch Black. There’s much wandering around corridors, as numbers get whittled down to the inevitable survivors (identities also given away by the sleeve). It’s a minor shame, as the team are an amusing bunch of cliches, led by Corey Feldman as a computer hacker; the doctor (Audie England) was also entertaining, with loony lines such as, “The Angel of Death is my superior officer.” Otherwise, this gets less entertaining as it goes on, and while Farrell makes a good first impression, she’s swiftly reduced to bickering with her (steadily declining) force. On the whole, best cancel my first statement in this review: read the sleeve, and save yourself 95 minutes.

Dir: Jon Hess
Star: Terry Farrell, Parker Stevenson, Corey Feldman, Rick Springfield

Hooded Angels

  By

★★★½
“Clumsy plotting damages interesting idea and decent acting.”

hoodedangelsAt the end of the Civil War, marauding gangs rage through Texas, raping and killing. The victims of one such raid fight back; three years later, they have become the Hooded Angels, a notorious and feared group of bank robbers led by Hannah (Stander). But on their tail is Wes (Johansson), whose father was an innocent victim in their original battle. He and his friends catch up with the women in a town where they’re plotting their next raid and, with painful inevitably, love blossoms between Wes and Hannah.

This mixes the highly-effective, and the embarrassingly crass and badly-written. The “three years later” comes as a surprise; worse still is the shock when you find out one character is another’s daughter. Credibility explodes entirely when Wes and Hannah go at it like knives, immediately after she reveals she killed his father, and isn’t sorry in the slightest. On the other hand, this is a Western without villains; both sides are portrayed with sympathy, yet without soft-pedalling the brutality, in particular when the women ambush a posse that is following them.

A clear leader in that category is Ellie, an insecure, psychotic lesbian, beautifully portrayed by Venter, avoiding the obvious cliches. Amanda Donohoe, another member of the gang, also turns in a good performance. Stander and Johansson are less effective: one scene will work, while the next will seem stiff as a board. Could certainly have been much better, yet in the end – at least, until the end, which struggles through gymnastic convolutions in order to make Wes come out clean – this has enough memorable moments to justify its existence.

Dir: Paul Thomas
Star: Chantell Stander, Paul Johansson, Juliana Venter, Amanda Donohoe

Twins Effect

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★★★★
“Vampires using mobile phones, with TV screens in their coffins? What is the world coming to…”

For something crafted largely as a vehicle for its two female, pop-singing stars (the titular Twins), this is much better than you’d expect – compare, say, any Mary-Kate and Ashley film. Sure, it’s dumb. Sure, it’s loaded with cheesy romance and totally unnecessary celebrity cameos. But it also has more fun with the vampire genre than any movie since the original Buffy, and the action, directed by the hugely under-rated Donnie Yen, is far superior.

Vampire-hunter Reeve (Cheng) loses his partner (an impressive Josie Ho) to a newly-arrived evil Euro-vampire after a brutal battle in a railway station. Her replacement is Gypsy (Chung), who has idolized Reeve for years. But meanwhile sister Helen (Choi) meets and falls in love with Kazaf (Chen – yep, all four leads’ names begin with Ch. You can add a Jackie Chan cameo too), a good vampire who won’t suck blood from unwilling victims. The evil vamp need Kazaf’s essence in order to walk in daylight, and it’s up to…oh, everyone else, to stop him.

The action movies in fits and starts; a great opening battle, an amusing Gypsy/Helen spat over a teddy-bear early on, which shows where this movie’s tongue is; and an extended final duel with the pair as our last hope, and which gained the film our seal of approval. It’s clear neither girl is an experienced martial artist, but 95% of the time, you can easily overlook this; the ever-wonderful Anthony Wong, as Kazaf’s butler Prada, helps keep the film grounded and outweighs the fact that Helen is an immensely irritating character. To quote Lars Von Trier, “Take the good, with the evil”, and here the balance is firmly for the former.

Dir: Dante Lam
Star: Ekin Cheng, Charlene Choi, Gillian Chung, Edison Chen
a.k.a. The Vampire Effect

China O’Brien

  By

★★★
“Bad, but in a good way. Mindless, harmless fun.”

There’s something charmingly naive about this film. It inhabits, and expects us to believe in, a world where a villain can blow up the sheriff and his deputy with car-bombs, yet federal authorities take no interest. Nor do they apparently care when an election rally is machine-gunned. Mind you, in this same world, a new sheriff is elected five working days after the incumbent dies, but that’s still enough time for a massive parade down main street to be organised by a candidate.

In this kind of milieu, Cynthia Rothrock’s acting fits right in, as China, the daughter of a sheriff who returns to her home town after shooting a kid, only to find home has been taken over by Summers (Kerby) and his mob of gangsters. When they kill her father, she runs for the position, which needless to say does not sit well with Summers. Luckily she has ex-Special Forces dude Matt (Norton, making no attempt to hide his Aussie accent) and crippled Indian Dakota (Cooke) on her side, and the touching loyalty of local high-school kids, willing to follow her into gunfire.

This is, as we say in Britain, bollocks. However, it is at least entertaining bollocks, which is more than can be said for most of Rothrock’s American movies. She, Norton and Cooke all know how to fight, and director Clouse puts these talents to frequent use against a broad variety of Jerry Springer candidates. Despite reusing some shots, particularly at the finale, Clouse falls some way short of replicating his Enter the Dragon work. This is mostly because Rothrock lacks Bruce Lee’s charisma; remarkably, in Lainie Watts (as barfly Patty), they found an actress who makes Cynthia look Oscar-calibre. For a Friday night, this does the job, providing equal portions of genuine entertainment and opportunities for sarcasm.

Dir: Robert Clouse
Star: Cynthia Rothrock, Richard Norton, Steven Kerby, Keith Cooke

Armitage III: Poly Matrix

  By

★★½
“Why’d they create me?” Seems a valid question to this viewer…

As a rule, we don’t watch dubbed anime, finding it a painful experience; unfortunately, this version, which compacts four OAVs into a feature, is only available in English. However, it’s not too awful, helped considerably by Sutherland’s comfortingly flat tones – in the seven years since this was originally released, his career has been revived, courtesy of 24 [co-star Berkeley, meanwhile, is still struggling to overcome her starring debut in Showgirls]. What does seem to have hurt, is the editing down, which leaves the storyline struggling for cohesion.

Chicago cop Syllabus (Sutherland) arrives on Mars and is immediately thrown into the investigation of a series of “murders”. Quotes used advisedly – what’s being systematically killed are “Thirds”, robots that are almost indistinguishable from humans. He’s paired with local officer Naomi Armitage (Berkeley), who has an aggressive approach and is a Third herself; the two have to solve the case while coming to terms with their own prejudices (Syllabus) or self-esteem, heritage and sense of being (Armitage).

In other words, the usual robot angst found in anime, such as Ghost in the Shell and Battle Angel. And this is really the problem, with little here we haven’t seen, and animation that is nothing special. There’s some imagination in the setting, and interesting hints at political conspiracy, but the detail has apparently been discarded in the race to get everything over in 90 minutes. The full-length, original language version is almost certainly a better place to start.

Dir: Takuya Sato
Star (voice): Kiefer Sutherland, Elizabeth Berkeley, Dan Woren, Wanda Nowicki

El Jardinero 2 (The Gardener 2)

  By

★★½
“Mexican lady mob boss runs out of steam, if not of costumes.”

Not seen part one? Never fear! Thanks to the magic of flashback, we see that Lilia Gallardo (Herrera) killed her husband, shot his son Pablo, and has now taken over their drug business. This is to the dismay of his men who, with typically Mexican machismo, feel a woman is unsuited to the role, and also Pablo, who is not dead, but is now recuperating on a nearby ranch, waiting his opportunity for revenge.

This starts in fine, trashy style. Lilia is bleached blonde, collagen-lipped, and has wildly inappropriate outfits from Sluts R Us. Her approach to treacherous henchmen is fully hands-on, not to mention fully-automatic, and transcends the lack of English subs on the DVD. The sexist bitching lends an authentic edge to the idea of a woman operating in a man’s world – and if you’re wondering, credit to Chris who translated for me, while rolling her eyes at Lilia’s clothes. Particularly the three-inch wide miniskirt…

Unfortunately, it gets bogged down and talky as things progress; the heroine recruits an assistant of somewhat alcoholic bent, and also gets involved with a South American Mr. Big. Meanwhile, Pablo is growing fond of the rancher’s daughter (Bernal), but she witnesses a shootout, and is captured by Lilia’s men. It’s all rather more plot than I wanted to see, and the hoped-for face-off between Bernal and Herrera fizzles, despite what seems like significant setting-up. You know it’s all heading towards a Pablo-Lilia showdown, and it’s giving nothing away to say that’s exactly where it ends, though even this comes off as something of a damp squib. Still, think we’ll be keeping an eye open for its predecessor.

Dir: Enrique Murillo
Star: Lorena Herrera, Eleazar Garcia, Claudia Bernal, Luis Reynoso

Don’t Play With Fire

  By

★★★½
“A grim cinematic road-accident; hard to watch, yet harder to stop watching.”

This bleak, nihilist view of 1980’s Hong Kong ran into severe trouble with local censors, for its depiction of the colony as populated solely by violent brutes. Leading these is Pearl (Lin), a teenage girl who redefines the term “troubled”, and whose brother (Lo) is a cop with a short fuse. She witnesses a hit-and-run accident and browbeats the three kids involved into joining her in a relentlessly-escalating series of violent escapades. When they find themselves in possession of 800 million yen belonging to gun-smugglers, you just know things are going to go wrong. And they do: pointedly, Hark finishes the film with photos taken during the 1967 riots in the colony. Make of that what you will…

Right from the start, with Pearl sticking pins in the head of a mouse, the film doesn’t shy from depicting cruel behaviour, particularly towards animals, and there’s hardly a sympathetic character in the film. Pearl does at least have some justification for her lack of morality, and her attempts to weld her new “friends” into something like a team, or even a family are touchingly pathetic. At one point she suggests they’ll escape to Canada and live happily ever after, which is definitely not going to happen. However, the film swerves wildly around, leaping from plot to plot with little coherence, though censorship may explain why certain threads, such as the bombing campaign, seem especially underdeveloped.

Whether robbing a gang of Japanese tourists, or taking revenge on a banker who gave them bad information, Pearl is the lynch-pin who keeps the movie focused, and when she departs, the interest level drops noticeably. Still, if you’ve only seen Tsui’s subsequent, more fantastic films, the venomous realism will be a shock. Keep an eye out for him in an uncredited role as a toilet attendant(!), as well as fellow directors Ronnie Yu and Stephen Shin.

Dir: Tsui Hark
Stars: Lin Chen-chi, Lo Lieh, Albert Au, Paul Che
a.k.a. Dangerous Encounters of the 1st Kind

Monster (2003)

  By

★★★½
“Powerful portrayal by Theron, but tells us little we didn’t know already.”

monsterGot to give Theron the credit she deserves here, especially since the biggest previous impression she made was probably her 2 Days in the Valley catfight with Teri Hatcher. Safe to say her performance here will lend that scene an extra chill, as she plays Aileen Wuornos, America’s best-known female serial killer, a roadside hooker who killed seven men before being caught and executed. The film depicts her life, from when she meets lesbian-wannabe Selby (Ricci), with both women looking desperately for affection of any kind. The two fall into a downward spiral; initially, Wuornos kills to escape a brutal client, but by the end, she’s doing it simply to get money and a car.

Despite Theron’s remarkable transformation – both psychological and physical – the movie seems hollow at its heart, not least because Ricci seems wildly miscast, stumbling around behind Wuornos like a bumbling puppy. Oddly, Wuornos’ real lesbian lover was a strawberry-redhead called Tyria Moore, so the film is clearly well off complete accuracy. This is perhaps for legal reasons: the dead can’t sue; the living can, and frequently do. While the film effectively ends with her capture, Nick Broomfield’s jaw-dropping documentary covers the later period of the case perfectly well.

The two central characters operate in a vacuum; there’s hardly anyone with more than one scene. As a result, the movie makes Wuornos out to be the victim of an incredibly hard life, yet an unexplained gulf still remains between that, her general hatred of humanity, and her multiple murders. While Theron’s performance is certainly worthy of praise, for a better look into the abyss, watch Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.

Dir: Patty Jenkins
Star: Charlize Theron, Christina Ricci