Category: Review

7 Women From Hell

  By

★★½
“Circling hell”

About the only review online I found for this, said it “may be the worst movie released in 1961.” I can only presume the writer of that statement has never seen The Beast of Yucca Flats. Even if I admit its weaknesses, Seven is nowhere near the same league of badness. Indeed, it starts off well, depicting the sudden invasion of Papua New Guinea by Japanese forces in 1942, with “enemy” civilians being herded into interment camps. The ones on the women’s side are a multi-national bunch, including Australian Grace Ingram (Owens), several Americans including Janet Cook (Craig), a German widow Ann Van Laer (Sylvia Daneel), Frenchwoman Claire Oudry (Darcel), and mixed-race nurse Mai-Lu Ferguson (Pilar Seurat). 

Initially, life is just about tolerable, with the camp commandant being mostly reasonable. But after he is killed in a bombing raid, his sadistic deputy takes over. When one of them knocks out a guard who tried to rape her, the women escape with the help of the camp doctor. But life on the outside is little better, especially with the Japanese in pursuit. Let’s just say, it doesn’t stay at seven women for very long. Without a compass, their odds of finding their way to safety are slim. Fortunately, they come across a downed American airman who has one. The bad news: he tells them their intended destination has already been abandoned. Then they meet the estate of German-Argentinean farmer Luis Hullman (Cesar Romero). Though is he as friendly as he initially appears to be?

It is important to realize this is very much a product of its era, when Hollywood was supremely disinterested in action heroines. We were still several years before even the arrival of Honey West on televisions, and there were few cases at the time where a female-led story-line would not be driven primarily by romance. It’s on that basis that the rating above has to be seen, cutting it some slack for the time in which it was made. By modern standards, sure, it’s fairly weak sauce. But the climax, where the women discover the truth about Luis and take action, feels progressive for the time. These women are – again, for the era – remarkably independent. They don’t need to be rescued by men: indeed, they’re the ones doing the rescuing of the airman.

The weakness is mostly on the character front, as outside of their nationalities, the protagonists are not given anything like an adequate amount of depth. The script doesn’t seem to know what to do with them once they are outside the confines of the prison camp either, at one point resorting to a bathing scene which had me rolling my eyes at the indignity of it all. Credit for not making the Japanese irredeemably villainous, though I’m not convinced the shooting location of Hawaii is an adequate stand-in for Papua New Guinea. Definitely not the worst movie released in 1961, by quite a considerable margin.

Dir: Robert D. Webb
Star: Patricia Owens, Denise Darcel, Margia Dean, Yvonne Craig

Date a Bullet

  By

★★★½
“Sympathy for the devil.”

Alright, this needs some background first, so I’ll try my best to give the necessary information. Date a Bullet is a two-part spin-off movie from Date a Live. This was originally a light novel series, that became a manga and then an anime series. The last-named started in 2013 and is currently in its fourth season: it also previously got a pair of OVAs and one movie. This is the second film, though is essentially two episodes that were put together, and released in cinemas as a movie, despite a very short length of 50 minutes.

Date a Live was (and still is) as bonkers a basic premise as anime shows can be. A catastrophe 30 years ago causes spirits to appear in our world – until now, always in the form of beautiful girls. What are the odds? If the spirit is stressed or aggravated, she causes earthquakes and natural disasters. A little advice from me: how about the defense services NOT attack at the very first sight of such a spirit? Just an idea… A secret organisation protecting mankind from them has figured out a new way of dealing with these girls. The young, naive student Shido has to approach them, built up confidence and go on a date with them. When he kisses them he “seals in” their powers by doing so. This usually results in the spirit stopping being dangerous and moving into Shido’s home (where are his parents?). For the remainder of the episodes he is busy, trying to cope with school, the emotional needs of the girls and cooking for them all.

I guess there’s something that show wants to teach young Japanese men how to deal with girls. The whole secret organisation’s spaceship team (lead by Shido’s younger sister?) is trying to figure out the best of three responses for Shido when talking to the girls, and usually chooses the worst possible. Hilarity ensues. But somehow I couldn’t feel anything for Shido except for pity, dealing with all these girls wanting so many different things from him. It can’t be easy to be one of those beloved students in what we call nowadays a “harem anime”. There are plenty more of these where this comes from! The show is based on the idea of a so-called dating-app or game that helps train your dating skills before going into the wild, where untamed femininity can overwhelm an innocent, anxious Japanese boy. The idea is not the worst: I could have used such a tool when I was younger!

But this is a different beast, because it deals with the extraordinary character of Kurumi Tokisaki (Sanada), who is really different to all the other girls Shido met in the main show. Usually, meeting a girl spirit meant that, to cut a long story short, Shido would kiss the girl, or she, enchanted by Shido’s friendliness would kiss him – it has to be voluntarily. She’d join his harem, while they all crave his attention, everyone wanting a piece of him, his time, physical contact and so on. Not Kurumi. When she first appeared in the show, she seemed the girl spirit of this half-season, so to speak, but then quickly turned the tables.

While the other girls might be complicated and have problems, like feeling unloved, being shy and, in one case, not even being into men, there always was a solution. Kurumi is… different: Shido soon found out she was there to sexually arouse him, so she could “eat him”. We can argue about the not-so subtle subtext: male Japanese anxiety about a sexually demanding and active woman. In the very same episode, some boys make sexually charged comments about her, she lures them into the shadows… next the blood is dripping from the walls.

Yeah, cute-looking Kurumi in sexy red-black lingerie is a killer, a femme fatale and if I’m not mistaken (correct me if I’m wrong), falls into the popular category of the “yangires”, female psychotic anime characters that can go on a bloody rampage at the slightest provocation. She is the killer shark among Shido’s girl. But then, she never becomes part of his actual haremm because they never kissed. Innocent Shido would have been dead meat. There may be a hint of Kurumi being abused in her former life; it could just be me, trying to read between the lines.

In a show that follows the usual rules of harem anime, a character like this is almost a provocation, riding roughshod over those unwritten rules. Kurumi is a force to be reckoned with. Her left eye features the yellow dial of a clock: with her magical calling of “Zaphkiel”, an angel that can manipulate time and appears as a giant dial, she can actually turn time around. By shooting her gun into her own head she can replicate herself and create as many clones of herself as she wants. Magically she appears to be independent, she can appear wherever and whenever she wants.

For most of the show she has been the “punch clock villain”, someone you could expect to appear sooner or later in the show. Though she seems to soften her attitude to Shido, after her first encounters with Shido, where he unsuccessfully tried to reason with and find an emotional angle on her – that worked with the other spirits. In one episode, she goes on a date with him, only to be shot by a superior version of herself at the end, This clone was obviously trying to fulfill her supressed romantic desires. In a late season 3 episode, she even helped him travel back in time to prevent a catastrophe that would send one of his girlfriends on a later revenge trip against the other girl spirits.

Okay. On to Date a Bullet , which is exceptional in the Date a Live universe as it tells a story with Kurumi as the main character. There’s no Shido to be found here, none of the harem girls or supporting characters appear, It’s as if you took a bad Bond girl and gave her a solo movie. So, quite unusual! So, what’s the story? Kurumi finds herself in an alternate world where she is told she is in a battle royale. The winner gets a wish, and might even be able to return to her own world. As she is being told by a small girl who functions as comic relief, that the combatants are all “half-spirits”, Kurumi in her no non-sense manner declares her in quite clear terms that she considers herself a full spirit, not a half one. Then there is the character of the White Queen, an especially dangerous ghost she will sooner or later have to face.

The movie is well-made, though the DVD is definitely too expensive for just ran 50 minutes. It’s entertaining enough, though as expected, too short to build up much tension. But it also serves mainly to show that Kurumi has a heart, too. Flashbacks show a younger Kurumi when she was alive and in school with the one friend she had, Sawa Yamauchi, dreaming of how it will be when she will have a boyfriend. While you can easily guess who the White Queen is, Kurumi shows during the story how tough and no-nonsense she is. She is thankful for help, but this doesn’t mean she’s so naive as to trust you immediately. She has a softer side, too, saving a little cat that plays a special role in the story, and at the end seems to have found a pet that might accompany her in future. Though why she killed her best friend in the past, remains unanswered.

The film helped understand the character a bit better and gave her the limelight she deserves. I wouldn’t say we know everything about Kurumi Tokisaki now though. The character stays interesting and as Date a Live with its funny situations and cute/sexy girls is something of a guilty pleasure for me, I look forward for a dubbed version of season four, and discovering what kind of role Kurumi will play in it.

Dir: Jun Nakagawa
Star (voice): Asami Sanada. Asami Seto, Kaede Hondo, Mariya Ise

The Woman Who Robbed the Stagecoach

  By

★★½
“A tale of daylight robbery.”

There are a couple of points to note going in. This was one of “12 Westerns in 12 months”, a project run by the director during 2020. It also proudly pronounces itself as the first ever Western feature to be shot entirely on an iPhone. Both of these do lead to limitations. The sheer speed involved obvious has an impact, and I can’t help wondering if a more measured approach would have been better for the end product. As for the iPhone… Well, on the plus side it looked perfectly watchable on my 49″ television, especially the outdoor scenes. However, the indoor sequences seemed almost too crisp. Especially for a historical production like this, I felt I was expecting a softer look, and I found that a bit of a distraction throughout.

It’s the story of Pearl Hart, a genuine figure from Arizona history, who achieved notoriety by being involved in one of the last stagecoach robberies, at the very end of the nineteenth century (May 30, 1899, to be precise). The movie covers both her life leading up to that point, and the subsequent arrest, trial, acquittal, re-arrest, conviction, escape, recapture, eventual release – according to some, because she managed to get pregnant in jail – and final disappearance into obscurity. Actually, the script basically feels like they took Pearl’s Wikipedia page, and used that as a synopsis. You can virtually tick off the incidents mentioned in it, as they happen during the film. With the character such a blank slate, and so little verifiable information, I’d like to have seen Mills give us something not taken from the first page of Google results.

The positives are mostly from the performances. Mills pulls double-duty as Hart’s accomplice, “Joe Boot”, about whom next to nothing is known. That does allow some freedom, and Root is made into a European miner, who is largely obsessed with Pearl and prepared to take the fall for the robbery on her behalf. I did like Etchell’s portrayal of Pearl, a woman who has been fighting an uphill battle almost her entire life, and tries to make the best of her situation – often by morally questionable means, albeit out of necessity. The film also shot in a lot of the locations around where events took place, such as in Globe, with the Yuma Territorial Prison standing in for Tucson’s jail.

It’s unfortunate that the limited time and budget are often all too apparent. In particular, there’s next to no scope here, with Mills largely forced to keep the camera in close, to try and disguise the paucity of sets, or things like a lack of extras. It really doesn’t work, although it remains a story that should be told, and I’m glad to have heard it. But the almost throwaway nature of the production, combined with the rote nature of the script, does the larger than life character of Pearl Hart a disservice. They should have chosen to print the legend instead.

Dir: Travis Mills
Star: Lorraine Etchell, Travis Mills, Kevin Goss, Michael Estridge

Hell Hath No Fury

  By

★★★½
“Grave consequences.”

I’m quite familiar with the work of director Jesse Johnson, mostly through his collaborations with Scott Adkins, who is probably the best action star you’ve never heard of. Some of their movies together have been top-tier, in particular Avengement, so I was very curious to see what he’d do with a film which – according to the cover – has a female lead. Well, that is slightly misleading in that the heroine does take a back-seat as far the action goes. But there’s still easily enough to qualify here, and she’s definitely not your typical character in a war-time setting like this.

To be blunt: Marie is a collaborator with the Nazis who occupied France. In particular, she was the mistress of S.S. officer Von Bruckner (Bernhardt), until their relationship goes pear-shaped (to put it mildly), and she’s shipped off to Ravensbruck concentration camp. Three years later, with the Allies sweeping through France, she is released and returns to her home-town. They haven’t forgotten her collaboration, so she has her head shaved and a swastika painted on her forehead. Marie is rescued from further indignity by Major Maitland (Mandylor) after playing her trump card, telling him she knows the location of a cache of gold in a local cemetery. However, on arrival there, it’s quickly clear they’re not the only ones after it. The gravedigger wants in, and Von Bruckner is also on his way back, hoping to collect the stash on his way out of the country.

There’s something quite Sergio Leone about this. The cemetery treasure idea is clearly taken from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, along with the three-way stand-off at the end, and the way Marie tries to play the two sides against each other reminded me of A Fistful of Dollars. This isn’t as stylized, the cinematography is nowhere near as sublime, and it’s largely restricted to the single location of the cemetery. Yet it’s solid enough, and the lack of traditional “good guys” (or girls!) – another similarly to the spaghetti Western genre – is quite refreshing in the context. Everyone here is driven strictly by one imperative: getting the gold for themselves, by any means necessary: no-one is the slightest bit interested in returning it to its rightful owners.

Alliances are formed and dissolved as the Americans, French, Germans and Marie all look to come out on top, though there are nasty surprises for everyone as things unfold, and the Nazi forces arrive on the scene. This leads to an extended gun-battle around the tombstones, and eventually, the stand-off mentioned. I can’t say I felt the ending was entirely satisfying: it didn’t make sense, considering all that had gone before. Giving Marie more to do, rather than simply manipulating her way towards the gold, would have been nice. However, the journey to get there was briskly entertaining, and the freshness of the characters in this particular scenario, also helped sustain my interest with relative ease to the end credits.

Dir: Jesse V. Johnson
Star: Nina Bergman, Louis Mandylor, Daniel Bernhardt, Timothy V. Murphy
a.k.a. Ave Marie

Betsy

  By

★★
“Dog People”

On her way home one night, Betsy (Ryan) is attacked by a mystery assailant and badly injured. While she recovers, she’s traumatized by the events, with nightmares that even her attendance at a support group can’t help. She is also increasingly plagued by violent outbursts against her supportive but increasingly concerned roommate Kayte (Osborne), and physical changes. If you are at all familiar with horror movies, you’ll know the symptoms: Betsy’s attacker was a werewolf, and she’s now in the process of becoming one. This throws a spanner in her growing relationship with Sam (Miller), made worse because he’s a policeman, investigating the recent spate of “animal attack” murders around town.

There’s seems to be a strong inspiration from Paul Schrader’s remake of Cat People here, not least in that it’s sexual activity which seems to bring out the beast in Betsy, rather than the phase of the moon. Her first transformation occurs after a sexual assault, and another after a session of love-making with Sam. It’s never quite clear whether she needs, as in Cat People, to kill in order to regain her human form: there’s no-one here who can tell her the rules by which she is now operating. Indeed, nor is it clear what happened to her original attacker, who seems to infect her, then leaves the film entirely. But this will suffer in any comparison with Cat People. With all respect to Ryan, she’s no Nastassja Kinski, and its transformations are far superior. Sure, that had a much bigger budget: it also predates this by 35 years.

This isn’t entirely without merit, though it is definitely in the slow-burn category – we’re about half-way through before the heroine’s feral instincts properly kick in. In fact, the best thing about this might be the scene tucked away in the (lengthy – after all, there are 28 producers of one kind or another to thank!) closing credits, in which we discover that Betsy is no longer alone. I definitely wanted to see where it might have gone from there. Trimming minutes from her early group therapy sessions, etc. would have offered scope to develop that, and helped this feel more like its own beast, if you see what I mean.

However, I’ve definitely seen far worse low-budget horror. Director Burkett also wrote and edited this, and seems to know where to point the camera and how to capture audible sound. These are skills not to be pooh-poohed in the field, and it’s also to his credit that the film usually is aware of its limits, and doesn’t over-stretch itself. An interesting twist is using a different actress to play Betsy, post-transformation. perhaps making this also influenced by another horror classic, Dr. Jekyll. While the flaws here are too hard to ignore, there are quite a few positives as well, and I’m interested in seeing what Burkett could do with a larger budget, and perhaps a more original idea.

Dir: Shawn Burkett
Star: Erin R. Ryan, Josh Miller, Marylee Osborne, Justin Beahm

Crimson, by Arthur Slade

  By

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

The world of Illium has enjoyed a millennium of peace under its powerful queen Servilia. Though “enjoyed” might be the wrong word, since it has come at the cost of freedom, and harsh justice. A victim of the latter is 15-year old Fen, who four years previously, had her hand lopped off for stealing a trinket from a merchant’s stall. Worse follows, as she wakes up to find her hair has turned red, the sign of a “wildmage” – someone who has magical powers, an ability Servilia seeks to extinguish before it can pose a threat to her rule.

Fen is forced to leave her family, and seek sanctuary in the forest of Helwood which provides the only area outside the queen’s control. She meets another wildmage, Ithak, with the talent of invisibility, who brings her to the legendary Mansren, who lives in the centre of Helwood. History had told her he was evil incarnate, overthrown by the queen after a violent war, a thousand years earlier. But how accurate is that version? For he offers to help Fen free her sister from Servilia’s dungeon, if she helps him become whole again. But is the reward worth the cost – both personally to Fen, and for Illium?

This is a well-written page-turner, which I found myself looking forward to reading each night. It poses some interesting more dilemmas, without ever getting bogged down in them, such as the limits of personal responsibility, the veracity of the past (as Ithak says, “Those who win wars write the histories”) and the balancing of evils against each other. Fen is initially prepared to do anything to rescue her sibling; however, she gradually realizes that by doing so, she may have unleashed a more destructive force on the entire world. For Mansren’s mind has been imprisoned by Servilia in the middle of a lava lake for centuries, which hasn’t exactly improved his state of sanity, charming and eloquent as he may be.

I will say that the means by which the dilemma is resolved is perhaps a little bit of a stretch. Perhaps a greater emphasis on the powers locked within Helwood, and how Fen taps into them, might have been better. The setting also appears to be Chinese, though I’m not sure why; I was quite surprised when this suddenly cropped up. I certainly wouldn’t have guessed this from the cover, and it’s little more than window-dressing. However, the story does a lot of things right, bringing us along with Fen on her heroic arc, as she grows into her powers and learns that everything she has been told may not necessarily be the truth. Though she’s “just” a teenager, there are few of the obvious trappings of YA fiction, and it’s the better for it.

It is a little restrained on the action front, with Fen largely refusing to use her abilities against others, and in the final act, being more an observer up until the very end. However, these moral restraints help her character from becoming over-powering, and on several occasions, there’s a genuine sense of threat. With this being a stand-alone book, it is entirely possible it could end in her being forced to make a heroic sacrifice, and Slade handles that aspect particularly well. I was actually quite sad there are no further volumes, but it’s also nice to have a story which is entirely wrapped up in a fully satisfactory way. I’ll have to make do with perhaps checking out some of Slade’s other works.

Author: Arthur Slade
Publisher: Dava Enterprises, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book

Knucks

  By

½
“Knucks sucks.”

I’m tempted to leave my review at that. But there’s a famous quote by critic Roger Ebert, going off on Bruce Willis flop, North: “I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.” I was always impressed, and hoped one day to find a film capable of producing a similar reaction. This is… close. It is, let’s be clear, utterly terrible, with almost no redeeming qualities. Yet it’s either not bad enough, or more likely, too bad to generate such a reaction. That would be giving it more power and credit than this deserves. 

Why are we here? This is less an existential question than a desire to explain why I’m writing a review. It’s because of this synopsis: “Two women attempt to come up after beating their drug dealer to death.” That was good enough to get it on my radar. However, within a couple of minutes, it was clear I had made a terrible mistake, and was about to be in for the longest 66 minutes of my life. Here’s another quote, from the BBFC, explaining the 15 rating: “There are scenes in which a child is abducted by two men, but it is not clear what their intentions are.” The two words “not clear” are the best way to summarize the misbegotten art-wank which I endured, substituting pointless video manipulation for plot, characterization or any positive aspects.

It’s as if the makers had obtained a list of all the elements I despise most about pretentious movies, and had treated it as a request list. Random colour filters. Check. Strobe effects. Check. Shitty heavy metal soundtrack. Check. Obtuse dialogue. Check. Scenes unfolding in murky near-darkness. Check. Shaky, hand-held, extreme close-up camerawork. Check, check and, in no uncertain terms, check. The basic plot, and I use the word in its loosest way, is mostly ripped off from True Romance, with heroines and sisters Kathleen (Leidy) and Taylor (Harlan) attempting to sell a bagful of drugs obtained from the dead dealer, to someone who looks like a Kid Rock impersonator.

But this doesn’t really show up until the final fifteen minutes. Until then, we get meaningless flashbacks to their abusive childhood (of course!), in which their film-maker father seems to be involved in porn and snuff. I am not exaggerating when I say either of these would likely be more entertaining. Things come to a head, when the original owner of the drugs shows up, burbles threateningly for a bit, before keeling over. It ends in much the same way as the previous hour has unfolded: an incoherent mess. I was genuinely relieved by the short running-time, though if it had been much longer, it might well have been a rare cinematic “did not finish.” The terminally slow end credit crawl was easily the best thing about this. Largely because it indicated the end was mercifully nigh.

Dir: Gage Maynard
Star: Dasha Leidy, Hedley Harlan, Mindy Robinson, Alan Bagh

Stressed to Death

  By

★½
“Definitely a stress test.”

The concept here is intriguing. It’s just the execution – and the script in particular – which is bad. A robbery at a convenience store ends in the death of David, the husband to Victoria Garrett (Aldrich). She blames the paramedic on the scene, former soldier Maggie Hart (Holden), for the loss of her spouse, though the incident hits Maggie equally hard. She quits her job, raising daughter Jane (Blackwell) with her husband, commercial real-estate agent, Jason (Gerhardt). But Victoria hasn’t moved on – in probably the film’s most memorably loopy elements, she feeds her husband’s ashes to a pot-plant she calls David, to which she chats. She’s also clearly a believer in that saying about revenge being served cold.

For she waits a whole ten years after the incident, before putting into motion a plan for revenge, hiring a pair of thugs to kill Maggie’s family in front of her. Fortunately for her target, they’re two blithering incompetents – or maybe the script just makes it seem like they were acquired through the ‘Help Wanted’ section of Facebook Marketplace. Adding spice to the situation, she has hired Jason as her subordinate, and Jane turns out to have a crush on Victoria’s son. Complicating matters further is Maggie’s PTSD, which is naturally the movie-friendly version, only kicking in when required by the plot. It can also apparently be cured by violent trauma: specifically, someone hiring a pair of thugs to kill your family in front of you. What are the odds?

Even by the low standards of Lifetime movies, this is bad. It’s not just the script that is sloppy, the production includes a bike helmet suddenly appearing on Jane’s head, and a knife that teleports from the floor into Maggie’s hands. But let’s not kid ourselves: it’s mostly the script. I lost count of the points at which I sighed heavily. Probably peak sigh was achieved at the sequence where Maggie and Jane have been captured. The thug doesn’t just leave them alone, he falls asleep in the next room, allowing them to escape. Guess that whole thugging thing really takes it out of you. Worse, after the mother and daughter get away, they show no urgency at all, wandering around while chatting casually about Jane’s crush. Oh, look: they get caught. Again.

This all builds to a ridiculous excuse for a climax in a motel room, which ends with the police describing what happened to the chief thug. The only things that saves this from total disaster are performances generally better than the story deserves. Holden, in particular, does a decent job with her character, and actually, the chief thug is surprisingly sympathetic, when telling Maggie about his abused childhood. Or something. I expected better from Brian Skiba, an Arizona native who co-wrote this, and whose films Chokehold and .357: Six Bullets for Revenge have previously been reviewed here. While they weren’t great, they look like Oscar-winners beside Stressed to Death. I think I’m the one coming down with a case of PTSD after sitting through this.

Dir: Jared Cohn
Star: Gina Holden, Taylor Blackwell, Sarah Aldrich, Jason Gerhardt

Ever After

  By

★★½
“Off-centre, not dead centre”

This is not your normal action heroine film. Nor is it your normal zombie apocalypse film. While it certainly nods in both directions, it seems entirely committed to going in its own direction. My mental jury is still out on whether or not this was a good thing or not. I think if I’d perhaps been prewarned what to expect, I might have been better equipped to handle this. It takes place after the outbreak of a plague, with the dwindling number of survivors now holed up in two cities: Weimar, where infection is an immediate death sentence, and Jena, reported to be trying to research a cure. 

The mentally fragile Vivi (Kohlhof) tries to do her part by volunteering on the fences surrounding Weimar, but a brutal incident on her first day sends her into a state of shock. She tries to head for Jena on the automated train which runs between there and Weimar. On it, she meets Eva (Lehrer), who is considerably more versed in the ways of survival. When the train breaks down, the two young women have to set off on foot across country. Which is where things get increasingly odd, as they bump into characters such as the Gardener (Dyrholm), who is running a market garden in the middle of the apocalypse. The zombies themselves also begin to mutate, such as the one on a wedding dress, whose face is half plant. Is nature healing? Or is a human apocalypse not necessarily such a bad thing from the perspective of the rest of Earth’s species?

There is a fair amount going on here to unpack, and it feels like the kind of party to which you have to bring your own booze. For the film offers no easy answers; indeed, I’m not necessarily certain what are the questions it is asking. At times it felt like there was a religious aspect with the Gardener being the snake in Eden. Yet at others, it is more about the different ways Vivi and Eva come to terms with the traumas they have experienced. Vivi shuts down, emotionally and mentally, while Eva adopts a hard shell, prepared to do whatever is necessary to survive. Also of note: there are almost no male speaking roles, though it’s subtle enough not to matter [The crew are also largely women]

There are still the required moments of threat, heroic sacrifice, etc. familiar from the genre. However, these feel almost perfunctory, as if imposed on the director in some kind of contractual obligation. The film might have been better to avoid the standard beats entirely, as these feel out of line with the rest of the movie. On the other hand, if it had gone full art-house, it’s possible I would not have bothered watching it, and almost certainly wouldn’t be reviewing it here. Still, it’s an approach to the zombie film I’ve definitely not seen before. Even if this wasn’t what I expected – or wanted, to be honest – that has to be worth something. 

Dir: Carolina Hellsgård
Star: Gro Swantje Kohlhof, Maja Lehrer, Trine Dyrholm, Barbara Philipp
a.k.a. Endzeit

Never Back Down: Revolt

  By

★★★½
“The women are revolting!”

The “underground fighting” subgenre is among the most macho of action films, so it’s interesting that this entry doesn’t just feature a female protagonist. It’s also written and directed by women, with the lead villain also from that gender. It’s a particularly novel twist, considering the previous three installments in the Never Back Down franchise were, by most accounts, competent yet entirely generic, male-dominated movies. I say “by most accounts,” since I’ll confess to not having seen them. This is both a positive and a negative, I think. It means I can go into this with no preconceptions or expectations. On the other hand, it also means I can’t compare it to the rest of the series.

The latter is perhaps less important since it seems to be a sequel in name only, without any characters or story-line carrying forward. The heroine is Anya (Popica), a Chechen refugee now living in London with her brother, Aslan (Bastow), who takes part in those underground fights. After failing to throw a fight, he finds himself thirty grand in debt to some very nasty people. But Anya, who’s no novice with her own fists, gets an offer from swanky promoter Mariah (Johnston) to help pay off the arrears with a trip to Italy. Naturally, it turns out to be a front for “fight trafficking”, with the female participants held against their will, and shipped off to Albanian brothels, when they can no longer battle for the amusement of rich patrons. The title tells you the rest of the plot.

Madison isn’t without an action pedigree, having directed rather good short, The Gate, starring site favourite Amy Johnston. That’s currently being shopped around to become a feature; fingers crossed that happens. In the meantime, this would appear to match its predecessors in being competent, yet entirely generic. Everything unfolds exactly as you would expect, if you’re at all familiar with this kind of thing. It’s the kind of film where you can pop into the kitchen for 10 minutes without pausing it, make a sandwich and a cup of coffee, and return, safe in the knowledge that you’ll still be able to follow the plot perfectly well. I can neither confirm nor deny having done exactly that.

While predictable, it’s never dull though. Popica doesn’t appear to have any particular martial arts background, yet is decent enough to pass muster (even if you wonder what someone like Amy Johnston might have done in the part). There’s a laudable and complete lack of romance here, just the sibling relationship. I could probably have used some more action, even if the quality of what there is, is decent. I particularly liked the fate meted out to the chief guard. The size issue, inevitably present in mixed-gender fights, is overcome by having him held down by two women in a bath, while a third shanks him very enthusiastically. In comparison, Ghislaine Maxwell Mariah seems to get off easy, just when I was looking forward to her getting her just deserts. Still, solid enough to leave me anticipating what The Gate feature might be like.

Dir: Kellie Madison
Star: Olivia Popica, Tommy Bastow, Brooke Johnston, Nitu Chandra