Category: Review

Sinister: Unhallowed, by Christopher P. Young and John Logsdon

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Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆½

This seems to come from a subset of a whole slew of Paranormal Police Department series in which Logsdon is involved with various authors, e.g. NYPPD. I don’t believe you need to have read those, although I did feel a bit dumped in at the deep end here. Evangeline is a resident of a demonic realm and member of House Sinister, a group who are all but wiped out in a surprise attack. Key words: “all but”. The job needs to be finished, but before that can happen, Evangeline flees to the human world – Los Angeles in particular – taking over the body of a rich socialite who conveniently just died in a car crash, so is ripe for possession.

Evangeline shouldn’t be there at all, and consequently ends up press-ganged into the local Black Ops wing of the PPD. This basically makes her an assassin to order, of “certain criminal elements,” alongside her partners, the hellwolf Kayson and Q, a vampire. She’s fine with that, being a hellion herself. However, those who tried to take her out in the netherworld, are keen to complete the job. They send their own operatives to Los Angeles, to locate the fugitive final member of House Sinister, and end her life. She won’t go out easily: especially when her precious me-time is broken into by one such killer: “Never interrupt a woman who is about to eat dessert!”

This is a bit of a mixed bag. The overall setting isn’t bad, with a milieu which includes every kind of fantasy creature you can imagine, from pixies through succubi and were-bears to orcs, co-existing both in the human world and on their own turf (for some loose definition of “co-exist”, anyway). Evangeline is a “hellion,” and I’d have welcomed being told a bit more about what that is: “demons mixed with dragon blood,” is about all the explanation you get, and is not particularly helpful. She is a bit – okay, make that very – sex-obsessed, and this is written in a way that it comes across as if she was still an irritating teenager. Mature subject matter, discussed in an immature fashion, if you will. Not really my favourite approach.

However, it does end up gelling better than I expected. After feeling like a moderate slog in the early going, I ploughed through the last quarter in a single sitting. In it, Evangeline and her partners are trying to assassinate crime boss Macy Bale. while simultaneously being hunted by Moloch, the entity tasked with ending House Sinister. It’s almost non-stop action, with a particularly cinematic tone. Although there is not much in terms of a resolution – more a pause than a finish – I found myself curious where the story would go. More things coming to find Evangeline seems a fairly safe bet…

Author: Christopher P. Young and John Logsdon
Publisher: Crimson Myth Press, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 6 in the Black Ops Paranormal Police Department series.

Double Threat

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★★½
“2-for-1 is not always a great deal.”

If Ryan looks familiar, that’s because she is. She starred in Survivor – no, the other film by that name – and also 626 Evolution, making a fairly decent impression in the former, and let down significantly by the approach of the latter. There, she was billed as Danielle Chuchran: not sure if the name change is a result of marriage, or simply a realization that “Ryan” is a lot easier to remember. Whether you will want to is a different matter: she’s likely the best thing in this, and when it appears, the action is decent. There just isn’t enough of it, and the stuff between the set-pieces ranges from mediocre to cringeworthy.

It begins in a convenience store, where Jimmy (Lawrence, who a very long time ago, was one of the kids in Mrs. Doubtfire!) is chatting up the pretty clerk, Natasha (Ryan). Two armed mem show up: before Jimmy can blink, Natasha has killed them both, grabbed her bug-out bag and exited. A stunned Jimmy decides not to stick around, and drives off, only for Natasha to pop up in the back. Turns out the store was a front for the mob to launder money, and she had skimmed $600,000. They – in particular, the boss’s son, Ellis (Joy) and his top fixer, Ask (Olivieri) – are out to make an example of her. Yet there’s one big twist which might work in her favour: Natasha has a split personality. 

There’s Nat, the sensible, quiet one. Then there’s Tasha, the unrepentant bad-ass who can take very good care of herself. Jimmy has to try and figure out what to do, and with whom, when all he really wants to do is get to the ocean and scatter the ashes of his late brother. Meanwhile, Ellis is bickering with Ask, and being brow-beaten with his father. If this all sounds like a lot: it is. The film basically tries to do too much, and ends up doing little of it justice. It’s the male characters who drag it down: Jimmy is vanilla pudding, while Ellis is a whiny little puppy. Just pit Ask against Nat and Tasha, and be done with it.

Ryan does know how to handle herself in action. The best sequence has her taking on two thugs in hand-to-hand combat, while Jimmy fails to figure out how to operate a gun. This is imaginative and well-done, using her agility, speed and flexibility to counter their strength. On the other hand, then there’s the bit where she steals a bow and a horse from some LARPers and… Sorry, I’ve lost the will to type it out. The film needs to pick a tone and stick to it, Stanley not being able to pull off the shifts necessary. That’s even aside from qualms about the glib use of mental illness as convenient plot device, Nat or Tasha showing up exactly when needed. I hope Ryan can find a better vehicle for her talents, since she deserves better. 

Dir: Shane Stanley
Star: Danielle C. Ryan, Matthew Lawrence, Kevin Joy, Dawn Olivieri

Veronica

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★★★
“Teaching moment”

Veronica (Beltrão) is a teacher in a Rio de Janeiro school. One day, nobody comes to pick up one of her pupils, Leandro (de Sá), so she accompanies him back to his house in the Rio slums known as favelas. Only, on arrival, she finds out his parents have been shot dead by gangsters. His father had been playing a dangerous game as an informant to the cops, and it had finally caught up with him. However, that morning, he had given his son a thumb drive containing a bombshell video, and his former employers are very keen to get it back. And, it turns out, so are the police, some of whom are in cahoots with the criminals. This leaves Veronica in a difficult position, with nobody she can be sure is trustworthy – including even her ex-husband, Paulo. a police officer himself.

In terms of action, the picture on the right is more the exception than the rule, if truth be told. Veronica spends more time avoiding those are seeking to harm her and/or Leandros; there’s considerably more running than shooting, shall we say. But she’s still an action heroine, brave enough to face enemies whom any normal person would think twice about going up against [or several more times, if they’ve seen the brutal reality of favela life and police corruption which is the awesome Elite Squad]. Even more impressive, it’s not for anyone related to her by blood, just a kid in her class. I dunno about your primary school teachers, I’m not sure many of mine would have put their lives on the line against a posse of well-armed gangsters for my sake. :)

Is it just me, or does this feel a bit like Gloria, with a woman having to protect a young boy from gangsters, over incriminating evidence? I did enjoy the setting though, with a side of Rio being a very long way from the more glossy aspects which the tourist board want you to see e.g. Mardi Gras and Christ the Redeemer. The city shown here seems considerably more alive, yet with that energy comes a perpetual undercurrent of menace, with violence present just below the surface. This begins with the opening scene, in which the gangsters hang out on a roof with an impressive (or disturbing, depending on your point of view!) amount of weaponry. It does a good job of establishing the threat here, and that then informs much of what follows.

The relationship between Veronica and Leandros is key to the movie, and it’s a bit of a mixed bag. At times, it seems very genuine, yet at others, Leandros has the usual issue with child actors, where their performance is obvious, instead of feeling natural. I will confess the climax also felt a little disappointing, with the heroine having to rely on the actions of others. The previous 90 minutes had shown her as being self-reliant and full of initiative, and I’d rather have seen this continue through the end. So, some way short of perfect, yet there are positives as well, and this still felt like a worthwhile experience.

Dir: Maurício Farias
Star: Andrea Beltrão, Matheus de Sá, Marco Ricca, Giulio Lopes

Fight for Survival

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★★
“Suffering from a bit of an identity crisis.”

This Taiwanese kung-fu potboiler just about manages to sustain interest for an hour, before losing the plot (literally, and such as it was to begin with) down the stretch. It begins with ten martial arts masters stealing an omnibus edition of fighting manuals from the local Shaolin temple. Trying to get entry, and failing, because they won’t admit women, is Shi Fu Chun (Kwan). With the help of former head priest Lin Chiu (Chan), who still lives nearby, she is taught a slew of skills, and ends up assigned the task of recovering the purloined books, and restoring the temple’s honour. Oh, except the “positive kung-fu” learned is causing Shi Fu to transition into a man. So she/he (inexplicably, the 1977 film does not provide us with preferred pronouns…) needs to find and learn some “negative kung-fu” stat, to counter the process. 

This is mostly standard stuff, with the novice being trained by the master, before going out into the world and putting her skills to the test. Except it feels like the movie was edited down from a four-hour version, as the story jumps from Shi having about three of the ten parts, to her heading back to the temple with them all. The heads of the ten clans then show up, and it all becomes almost incomprehensible. About the only part that I am certain about, had them forming what looked disturbingly like a kung-fu version of the Human Centipede [now, that’s a movie I would… if not perhaps pay to see, certainly consider downloading from a dodgy website]. I think one of the clan leaders tries to fight his way into the temple, defeating various occupants in different styles, leading up to a fight again Lin. He faked his own death to get Shi accepted, and since then, has apparently been sitting around the temple, covered in gold paint, because that’s what they do to dead ex-leaders.

There are a couple of bits which are kinda cool, such as Shi having to accept the branding of the temple, carried out through her carrying the red-hot cauldron depicted on the poster. One of her skills involves the ability to extend her arms and legs to remarkable length, which leads to some interesting fights. However, the old gender re-assignment plot may well reach new depths of implausibility. Somehow, this is repeatedly mistaken for a man. Another weirdness (at least, to contemporary Western viewers) is the good luck symbol on the clothing worn by the heroine and her allies. Yep, it’s the ol’ Buddhist swastika. Beyond such trivial concerns, the main problem though, is that most of the fights are pedestrian and uninteresting. The makers even bring Judy Lee in, and don’t allow her to get into action. This shows a severe misunderstanding of how things should be done, and if you pass on this, you’ll not be missing much.

Dir: Cheng Hou
Star: Polly Shang Kwan, Chan Wai-Lau, Che Chi-Sang, Judy Lee
a.k.a. Lady Wu Tang or Shaolin Tamo Systique

Sisters Apart

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★★
“A phony kind of war.”

There seem to have been quite a few movies out of Europe over the past couple of years, about the female soldiers fighting in Kurdistan for independence with the PKK and related groups. French films Les Filles du Soleil and Soeurs D’Armes both covered similar territory. It seems fertile territory, offering an inbuilt contradiction between the general perception of how Islam treats women, and them taking part in front-line action, in a way well beyond what “liberal” Western democracies typically allow. Oddly, it feels as if most of the stories being told, involve a search for relatives, and I’m a bit ambivalent about this. It feels slightly lazy writing, as if there’s no other reason a woman could want to take up arms in order to defend her homeland.

This does at least somewhat sidestep that issue with its set-up. The heroine here is Rojda Xani (Bagriacik), a Kurd refugee now living in Germany, and a citizen of the country who has joined their army. Her mother comes to join her, but does not bring Rojda’s sister, Dilan (de Haas), as previously arranged. Indeed, Danil seems to have dropped off the grid almost entirely, a situation which causes Rojda increasing concern – as if trying to get her mother to adapt to life in Germany wasn’t stressful enough. Despite qualms of those around her, Rojda decides to apply for the post of interpreter with the Bundeswehr who are deployed to Kurdistan, training soldiers there. On arrival, she finds a possible source of information about her sister’s location, but getting her to talk won’t be easy. The harsh reality of the conflict also brings into focus Rojda’s (largely selfish) reasons for being there.

This is almost entirely low key – likely too much so for its own good. That’s particularly so at the ending, where things don’t so much end, as peter out in a largely unsatisfying way. It is perhaps “realistic”, in that life is rarely tidy or follows a three-act structure. However, if I wanted real life, I’d watch a documentary. Rojda does make for an interesting heroine, one trying to balance between her own family culture and the standards and practices of her new home. She’s certainly far from dumb, speaking at least three languages, but is also fairly impenetrable, emotionally. Much of the time, it’s hard to be sure what she’s feeling. I’m not sure if this was deliberate – it would be in line with the film’s understated approach – or a shortcoming, either in writing, direction or performance.

There are some points where this does come to life. For example, her new colleagues quizzing her about life in Germany – can girls there sit next to a boy in the cinema? Again, this demonstrates the weird double standard (to Western eyes) by which these women live. Or there’s the bafflement of her commanding officer (Letkowski) when he’s told the Kurdish women have nobody in a similar role: “Sometimes she gives orders, sometimes I do.” I wish there had been more of these moments, which render the near passivity of the rest, all the more infuriating.

Dir: Daphne Charizani
Star: Almila Bagriacik, Zübeyde Bulut, Christoph Letkowski, Gonca de Haas
a.k.a. Im Feuer

Decoy: The first American policewoman

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“Down the line, you name it, we’ve done it. Today, tomorrow, next week, we’ll pose as hostesses, society girls, models – anything and everything the department asks us to be. There are 249 of us in the department. We carry two things in common wherever we go: a shield, called a potsie, and a .32 revolver. We’re New York’s finest. We’re policewomen.”
   — Patricia Jones, Episode 1

If you asked people what was the first American TV show to feature a policewoman, I suspect not many people would get the answer correct. Some might go with Cagney and Lacey. Others might be able to dig a little further back into their memories, and come up with either Get Christie Love! or Police Woman. Maybe some would include The Mod Squad. But the actual pioneer dates back more than fifteen years before Angie Dickinson began patrolling the streets of Los Angeles. The honour goes to Beverly Garland, the star of Decoy. While now largely forgotten, the show ran for 39 episodes on syndicated television, from October 1957 through the following July. It was also one of the first shows to film on location around New York, and the footage of those scenes is a remarkable time-capsule of life in that era.

Garland was already a well-established actress, her career having started with a role in 1949’s noir classic, D.O.A. She was Emmy-nominated for for her work on 1955’s Medic, and  around the same time, was employed on a number of occasions with B-movie legend Roger Corman. Two of those films have already been covered here: Gunslinger and Swamp Women. I will not, however, be covering their work together on It Conquered the World… She later said of Corman, “Roger was always very professional, except when it came to putting us up in a good hotel or giving us a decent meal.” On that basis, the humdrum tedium of a television series might have come as a welcome break, albeit with a punishing schedule that offered little slack. She fell ill one week, during the filming of episode “Across the World”, and rather than pause filming, the script simply was rewritten to minimize her involvement.

With a lot of voice-overs, the style feels reminiscent of Dragnet, which had been a very popular show for most of the fifties. Each episode opens with a stern reminder: “Presented as a tribute to the Bureau of Policewomen, Police Department, City of New York,” and centre on the cases worked by Patricia “Casey” Jones (Garland). As the title suggests, most of them involve Jones going undercover in some guise. That covers an extremely broad range of assignments, from a photographer to a junkie, a nurse to a blackmailer, a high society girl to a prisoner. However, some of the episodes do not require such subterfuge, though there is a tendency for these crimes she is given for investigation to be fairly gynocentric, e.g. trying to find a delinquent father.

As well as the voice-overs, Jones would quite frequently break the fourth wall and address the audience directly – the quote at the top of the article is one such monologue. It feels quite groundbreaking, and is definitely helped by Garland’s commitment to delivering lines which, in other hands, could potentially seem cheesy. I was also genuinely impressed how gritty and, on occasion, dark the stories were, especially considering the era. Death is a frequent visitor, and the topics concerned get heavy, including drug abuse, mental illness and domestic abuse. While everything more or less ends up all right in the end, in that the guilty receive their just deserts, there is considerably more moral gray than I expected. Considering each episode is typically only 24 minutes long, they pack a lot in, and still manage to achieve a considerably emotional wallop on occasion.

Outside of Garland, there were no real “regulars”. The IMDb lists the next most frequent actors, such as Frank Campanella, who played Lieutenant Cella, as appearing in only three episodes. However, there were a lot of faces who made guest appearances, that would go on to more significant roles later in their careers. Those include Ed Asner, Peter Falk, Larry Hagman, Diane Ladd, Al Lewis and Suzanne Pleshette. They helped the show receive warm reviews, Billboard praising Garland in particular: “Aided by a versatile acting range – and a camera-soothing face which combines the high-cheekboned femininity of Greer Garson with the sexiness of Sophia Loren – she manages to be simultaneously a convincing New York City cop and the kind of girl who would make a charge account at Cartier’s worthwhile.” They proclaimed, “Not since Marilyn’s famed walkaway in Seven Year Itch has the camera ogled such a distracting New York pedestrian.”

It’s difficult to be sure whether or not the show was a success, operating as it did outside of the traditional network in the syndicated marketplace. The pre-sales appear to have been brisk with one bulk pre-release sale covering half of the $1.2 million cost for the entire 39-episode run. However, in May 1958, as production was drawing to a close on the first season, the plug was pulled on further episodes, allegedly because producers lacked sufficient funds to continue. The concept of a series about a policewoman would go back into the vaults for years, but Garland would continue her career over the coming decades, both in television and movies. She eventually became the go-to actress when a mom was needed, filling that role in My Three Sons, The Scarecrow and Mrs. King and Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.

Her legacy in this show stands the test of time surprisingly well. While it may feel dated in a number of aspects (there’s so much smoking!), the character of Casey feels decades ahead of its time. There’s no fluff, in the sense of romantic liaisons: indeed, we know very little about Jones’s life outside of the force. The short-form approach just doesn’t have time to mess around with extraneous filler like that. While it frequently deals with moral issues, the show doesn’t use itself as a platform to lecture the viewer: you’re left to draw your own conclusions. Certain recent works could learn a thing or two there. She’s respected by her colleagues, and it’s no surprise Garland would say that women often told her she inspired them to join the police force. It’s a show that deserves more recognition than it has received, and with many of the episodes in the public domain, is ripe for rediscovery.

No Honor in Death, by Eric Thomson

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Literary rating: ★★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆½

This SF novel takes place in the future where the human Commonwealth is engaged in a brutal space war against the militaristic Shrehari Empire – imagine Klingons on krack, perhaps. They have superior technology, but humanity’s ability to think outside the box and improvise has helped level the playing field. Siobhan Dunmoore has just survived  – emphasis on “just” – a battle against the Imperial cruiser Tol Vakash of Captain Brakal, forcing him to retreat by attempting a kamikaze crash of her badly-damaged craft into his. As a “reward”, she is assigned command of the Stingray, a craft with a bad reputation. Its previous captain is now facing a Disciplinary Board, and the crew are barely even trying. It seems Dunmoore has been set up to fail, and she’ll need to overcome resistance from enemies both domestic and alien, as well as overt and covert, before she can even think about going another round with Captain Brakal.

I felt the most interesting section of this was following Dunmoore as she attempted to lick her crew and the Stingray back into a shape, where they could survive an encounter with the Shrehari. Both of them are in need of a lot of work. The former are utterly demoralized after events under the previous captain (including a number of suspicious deaths), and the latter has been short-changed on supplies and resources, to the point it’s largely held together with sticks and wire. Fixing them require their new captain to use a lot of psychology, both in order to get the crew to trust her, and extract the necessary materials from the Commonwealth and its bureaucracy. It works almost as a “how-to” manual for aspiring leaders, and even if that’s not exactly me, still makes for an engaging read. I also liked the very final face-off between Dunmoore and Brakal, their two ships edging round the perilous environment of an asteroid field, where Stingray‘s manoeuvrability gives it an edge. 

However, in between the Stingray taking off and the last battle, the book struggles with its descriptive passages. There is a large chunk taking place in hyperspace, and Thomson never manages to make clear the rules which apply here, resulting in the discussion of “jumps” and “bubbles” failing to make sense. Worse, this brings the pace of the book to a halt, with entire pages you find yourself barely skim-reading. There’s also rather too extended of a coda after the battle, as the book tries to tie up a lot of loose ends – mostly ones we never particularly cared about to begin with. On the other hand, I did appreciate the effort put into making Brakal an interesting adversary, with his own set of motivations. He and Dunmoore represent the book’s greatest strengths, and it’s at its best when concentrating on them. If subsequent volumes do that, I’d be tempted to try them.

Author: Eric Thomson
Publisher: Sanddiver Books, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 7 in the Siobhan Dunmoore series.

Agent Girls

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★
“Badly broken China”

I have seen bad movies before. I have seen Chinese movies before. But I have never before seen such a bad Chinese movie. Really, their action films are usually at least somewhat competent: even the dreadful work of the notorious Godfrey Ho usually had something of… well, interest, if not perhaps quality to offer. This, however? Utterly appalling, with close to no redeeming features. One anecdote should give you some idea of what I mean. When our daughter was 12, she and her little friend borrowed the camcorder and made a 10-minute action movie, mostly taking place in the garage. I am 100% serious when I say it had significantly better fight choreography than this, and the other elements which go into the film are of little if any higher standard.

The heroines are a group who have apparently just graduated from college. Though before we get to that, there’s a prologue involving a (stock footage) war between China and Vietnam, which somehow led to the establishment of “an International Evil Eye Organization”. One of the members was Xiao Lishan, who went off and did AIDS research. Pause for the first of many poorly-conceived scenes, of the girls wondering what to do with their lives, which is neither interesting nor informative. This is mercifully interrupted by Xiao Fei (Ling) getting a phone-call from Mom, telling Fei her father has committed suicide. It won’t be long before viewers will be considering similar action, as a means of escape from this viewing experience.

Fei can’t believe he’d take his own life, and the suspicious actions of a delivery driver increase her doubts. So after the police close the case, she and her group of gal pals begin their own investigation, seeking the culprits and to make them pay. This will eventually take them back to Hanoi – I’m assuming that’s the “H city” referred to. Though the budget extends to nothing more jet-setting than a random shot of a plane taking off, without even any of the usual “exterior shots” used in low-budget cinema to establish an exotic location. This is just one of the many technical flaws, also apparent in quite terrible audio work, ranging from the tinny and echoey, to the basically inaudible. Even though this was subtitled, it remained an annoyance.

But this is positively Oscar-calibre compared to the action. It builds to an assault in search of a USB drive, where they are supposedly going up against “commandos”. All I can say is, the Chinese Army is vastly over-rated, though I was amused by the way they wear ski-masks for no apparent reasons. It is painfully clear nobody here has had any kind of martial arts training at all, or is remotely familiar with the business end of a firearm. Combine this with the woeful ineptness present in almost every other level, from the writing through the performances to the direction, and you’ve got something that is a couple of credible drone shots away from being a contender for the worst action heroine film of all time.

Dir: Xiao Ju-Shi
Star: Ling Yu, Zhang Mu-Qing, Pang Cheng-Yu, Maidina Paluk

Swamp Women

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★★★
“Marsh ado about nothing.”

One of the earliest films directed by Roger Corman, it’d be a major stretch to call this a good film, yet I can’t deny I found it entertaining. It definitely has better female characters than most movies of the mid-fifties. Four women break out of jail and head into the swamps, in search of stolen diamonds which were previously hidden in the Louisiana swamps. Except, one of them is an undercover police officer, Lee Hampton (Mathews), who had been inserted into prison to join the gang and lead the escape, in the hope of recovering the loot. After the car breaks down, they hijack a boat owned by an oil prospector, Bob, and his girlfriend, taking them hostage as they head deeper into the bayou.

Things unfold more or less as you’d expect, though not exactly how Lee would have planned. There’s dissension in the ranks, fighting between the women for the attentions of Bob, encounters with native wildlife, and copious amounts of stock footage. The last is both of Mardi Gras in New Orleans and expensive elements like helicopters, helping pad the running-time, though it still comes in on the underside of seventy minutes. By all accounts, there was hardly a corner which Corman left uncut, such as the women doing their own stunts. Mike Connors, who played Bob, said, “The girls in that picture had it much worse than I did… They had to trudge through the mud, the swamps, pulling this rowboat, and I was sitting in the rowboat high and dry.”

Characterization beyond Lee is largely limited to the colour of the women’s hair – blonde, brunette, or redhead – though Josie (Marie Windsor, the star of Outlaw Women) is effective as the de facto leader of the group. It is nice there’s no attempt made to give them boyfriends or husbands. They make their own decisions, and follow through with them, entirely on their own terms. This brand of mid-fifties feminism results in more than one instance of them rolling around in the swamp, cat-fighting each other. Somehow, their hair, clothes and make-up miraculously seem to escape any kind of damage in these brawls, and return to pristine condition for the next scene.

On the way to the finale, Vera (Garland) tries to sneak off with both the jewels and Bob, paying the price for her treachery. The authorities manage to lose track of the group, and Josie grows increasingly suspicious of Lee’s resistance to violence. The leader eventually orders Lee to kill Bob; the shots fired in the ensuing fracas are enough, conveniently, to attract the search party, while Vera and Lee battle through the forest and – inevitably, into the water. It’s all entirely ridiculous, and the scope for parody makes it easy to understand why it was MST3K‘d. Yet even at this early stage, Corman clearly understood that the worst crime a B-movie can commit it is to be boring. For all its flaws, Swamp Women is never that.

Dir: Roger Corman
Star: Carole Mathews, Marie Windsor, Beverly Garland, Jill Jarmyn

My Sisters

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★
“Sisters that’ll have you crying for mercy.”

This felt oddly familiar, like I had watched it before. One scene in particular – a maintenance man comes to replace a light-bulb, only to become an apparent threat – had me certain I had seen this. But no review of it existed, either here or Film Blitx, my non-GWG site. [For, make no mistake, its credentials here are fringey at best.] My working theory is that I probably fell asleep and missed so much, I deemed it impossible to review, then forgot about it entirely. Yet here we are. I managed to stay awake for an adequate amount of time this viewing, though full disclosure: I did have to pause it about 15 minutes in. I’m still reviewing it  – mostly so I don’t go round the loop a third time.

The hook here is that the whole thing was filmed in 24 hours, something touted by, it feels, every member of the cast and crew during the end credits. On the one hand, it is quite an impressive achievement, considering even the quickest of quota quickies would still need several days [Though 24 hours would be an eternity for Rendez-vous, shot using one take, the first, and thus filmed in under two hours] To the movie’s credit, technically it looks pretty good. The audio is a little ropey in places, however. My question would be: why film it in one day? What did this add to the film? For it seems no more than a pointless gimmick.

Not least because it feels as if the script was also tossed together in a day, easily representing the movie’s weakest element, and bouncing back and forth in time like a meth-crazed ping-pong ball. I’m unsure whether the tedium it induces is a result of its lack of coherence, or if it would have been just as dull with a more conventional narrative. The basic idea is a women’s support group, who decided to become vigilantes, helping their “sisters” who are trapped in abusive relationships by targetting their abusers. [It’s odd that I watched this the same day as the similarly themed Ride or Die. At least that admitted to the psychosis in its vigilante.]

This leads them into conflict with a shadowy men’s support group, the Freemen Society, who don’t take kindly to the women’s actions. The film does a particularly poor job of defining its antagonists, who remain a nebulous threat for the bulk of the running time, and are bad because we are told they are. Yet we discover at the end that one of the women has been an unreliable narrator all along, lying even to the rest of the support group. We are given no particular reason to care about them: there is far too much talk, and the dialogue consists of little more than a series of buzzwords that, presumably, made more sense back in 2020, during the white heat of people giving a damn about #MeToo. That concept has aged like Amber Heard’s milk, and combined with mediocre execution and flat-out terrible writing, these are sisters who need to be doing it to themselves.

Dir: Adam Justice Hardy
Star: Sara Young Chandler, Shanera Richardson, Nadia Marina, Diana Sanchez