Category: Review

Perils of Nyoka

  By

★★★½
“Serial thriller.”

After the success of Jungle Girl, Republic looked to repeat the process the following year. However, despite bringing back the heroine, they were able to avoid paying Edgar Rice Burroughs again, because Nyoka was not a character who appeared in the original novel. It may also be why she has a different surname here, and her father is missing, rather than killed. Republic used a different actress too: Kay Aldridge replaced Frances Gifford, who was unavailable. Aldridge had recently seen her contract with 20th Century Fox expire, though had some qualms: “I did it with the attitude we had in that day that to make a B-western or a serial was a comedown for a featured player at Fox. It was a comedown in one way, but it was a comeup in another way because I was the lead. They paid me about $650 a week, which was pretty good money at the time.” Still, it proved her most popular role, though she retired from acting just four years later, to get married.

With a title clearly nodding to 1914’s The Perils of Pauline, this operates at a particularly breathless rush, even by serial standards, over its 15 episodes. The main plot has Nyoka Gordon in search of the Tablets of Hippocrates, both because they offer a cure for cancer, but in order to help find her father, who vanished mysteriously in the African wilderness years previously. Well, I say “African”. There’s really no effort at all made to make Southern California look like anything other than Southern California. Anyway, she’s joined in her quest by Dr. Larry Grayson (Moore, best known as TV’s Lone Ranger) and other scientists, but opposed by the evil Vultura (Gray) and her native minions, who wants the tablets for herself. Actually, from a modern perspective, Vultura probably has more of a claim to the artifacts than the tomb-raiding Westerners, Nyoka’s protestations about them belonging to “humanity” notwithstanding.

This was the first serial I had watched since Zorro’s Black Whip, and I really appreciated the relentless pace with which things moved forward. There’s literally never a dull moment, despite the usual overlap: opening of each episode recaps the previous cliffhanger, then details how (usually) Nyoka gets out of the peril in question. These escapes were a bit varying in quality: some of them were clever, others were more or less cheats, e.g. falling from a great height into a pool of water that wasn’t there previously.

But the show never gives pause to consider such things, moving on to the next treachery, chase or fight sequence. Of particular note is the antagonist also being a woman, and Vultura is every bit as smart, driven and hands-on as Nyoka. There’s potentially an alternative version of this where she is the heroine. It’s definitely an improvement on the “ignorant savages” portrayed in Jungle Girl. Indeed, Nyoka v2.0 is also a clear upgrade on the original, being much more self-reliant, certainly the equal of the men.

Admittedly, the pace is maintained at the expense of just about everything else. When you have perhaps 15 minutes in which to cram a recap, escape, move the plot forward and then set up the next cliffhanger… there’s never going to be much chance to get in a lot of character development. Everybody here is more or less what they appear in episode one, and there’s hardly anything in the way of an arc for anyone across the four hours. Hard to complain though, since it is for understandable reasons. What matters here is not any backstory, it’s a simple matter of hooking the audience into coming back the following Saturday for the next episode. Having shotgunned as many as five episodes back-to-back, I can’t argue with its success on that front.

I also feel I should mention the animals. Fang, Nyoka’s dog, is perhaps the smartest canine I’ve ever seen on a show: to be honest, he’s more intelligent than some of the human characters, and does a remarkable amount, especially considering his lack of opposable thumbs. There’s also a little monkey, belonging to one of her sidekicks, who chips in, while Vultura keeps a pet gorilla. That, however, is a guy in a not particularly convincing suit. Though considering it gets into fisticuffs with Dr. Grayson, I can understand why they didn’t want to use a real primate for that! Their cute presence do make me wonder if this was aimed as much as kids as adults. Though given the amount of violence – there are corpses everywhere, albeit bloodless ones – it feels a little inappropriate for children by modern standards.

The show proved popular enough to be re-released a decade later, under the rather confusing title, Nyoka and the Tigermen. A few years further down the road, it was converted into a 100-minute TV movie, Nyoka and the Lost Secrets of Hippocrates. Normally, hacking out such a large amount of content would render any cinematic product incoherent. But I can see how it would be possible here, though I dread to think how adrenaline-crazed that end product might be!

Dir: Bill Witney
Star: Kay Aldridge, Clayton Moore, Lorna Gray, Charles Middleton

Shadow Eclipse: Voyage, by E.M. Gale

  By

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

After a brisk and entertaining start, this gets increasingly bogged-down in its own universe as it goes on. And, boy, does it go on. At a thousand pages in the print version, this became a severe slog, and ends in a unsatisfactory way. A second novel seems promised, but this came out in 2019, and has yet to be forthcoming. Maybe the writer got bored of the whole thing too?

As mentioned, it opens promisingly. Florentina Clarke (who hates her first name so much, she insists everyone just calls her Clarke) is having a really bad day. First, she has been turned into a vampire. Then, she and her grad student friends are thrown through time and space when an experiment misfires. They end up two hundred years in the future, on a far-off planet, and have to learn how to come to terms with a whole new way of life. Clarke is best-suited, and ends up getting them passage on a smuggling ship, where helped by her new vampire skills, she becomes part of the mercenaries who defend the ship. However, it turns out her future self – vampires being immortal – is rather famous and/or notorious, and she finds herself having to cope with that, and the resulting threats to her life.

Which all sounds considerably more exciting than it is. There’s a lot, and I mean a lot of agonizing over whether or not to look herself and her pals up in the history books, to see their fates. It’s a painfully responsible approach to time-travel  which really doesn’t do much for the reader. The same goes for her relentless angst about whether or not to tell her friends about her vampiric status. Do or don’t, then move on. Matters aren’t helped by a clunky structure in which it fells like every conversation becomes a three-way dance with Clarke’s internal thoughts chiming in after every single sentence. A long way before the end of the book, I was mentally screaming “STFU!” at her inner monologue.

The action components also seem to decline over the course of the book. There’s a point where the ship – which may not be quite what it initially appears – seems to be under almost constant attack, keeping Clarke and her merc colleagues very busy. However, this fades away and a vampire duel is about all it feels like the second half has to offer. I did like Gale’s world-building, with different races kinda-somewhat getting along, and some thought has clearly gone both into the vampires and the time-travel aspects. However, it’s not clear what Clarke’s eventual place in the universe is going to be, and her friends are also rendered increasingly irrelevant as the story progresses. It ends with her vampire boyfriend getting the chance for revenge he has been seeking, though this felt almost painfully foreshadowed and doesn’t provide much satisfaction in terms of tidying up the threads. Can’t say I’m too bothered whether or not volume 2 ever appears.

Author: E.M. Gale
Publisher: Lightbulb Works, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of, uh, 1 in the Shadow Eclipse series.

Aileen Wuornos: American Boogeywoman

  By

★★
“Till death do she part.”

Almost twenty years after her execution, Aileen Wuornos remains a cultural icon. A very rare example of a genuine female serial killer, she was killed by lethal injection in 2002, after being convicted of six murders, and confessing to a seventh. The following year, Charlize Theron won an Oscar for her portrayal of Wuornos in Monster, though for me, the film about the killer which is the best, is Nick Broomfield’s, Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer. It certainly deserves to be ranked among my favorite documentaries of all time, along with its post-execution follow-up, Aileen Wuornos: Life and Death of a Serial Killer. Any other version is going to have an uphill struggle in comparison, and this peters out into a trashy, tabloidesque tale, with perilously little connection to reality.

It does have an interesting structure, with a Broomfield stand-in (Sturgeon) interviewing Wuornos, the night before her execution. At this point, the killer is played by Ashley Atwood, and the make-up crew have done an amazing job, along with Atwood’s capturing of her target’s mannerisms. Wuornos then tells the interviewer the story of her short-lived marriage to yacht club president Lewis Fell (Bell), almost five decades her senior. During this, she confesses to several murders, including that of her brother, though the interviewer pulls her up, as her version doesn’t align with the known facts. This “unreliable narrator” element has potential, but is rapidly discarded – a shame, as what the film offers instead is rather pedestrian.

Overall, it’s not much more than a truish-crime take on pot-boilers like the Poison Ivy franchise, in which attractive young gold-diggers embed themselves in families, before revealing their murderous natures. Here, the young Wuornos (List), considerably more attractive than the Death Row version, charms her way into marrying Fell after just a couple of weeks, much to the concern and chagrin of his daughter, Jennifer (Hearst). We’ve already established Wuornos’s violent tendencies, and these escalate until she murders the family lawyer, who threatens to expose what he has uncovered about her past, unless she takes his cash offer and leaves town. It all builds to a late-night confrontation on a boat in a storm, which I’m fairly certain is entirely fictional.

Farrands has carved out a niche for himself in this kind of not-so-true crime movie, his previous subjects having included Ted Bundy, the Manson killings and O.J. Simpson. Maybe they are more than a shallow skim, with stories which are not largely made up, and provide more insight into their subjects. This has little to offer, and doesn’t have the enjoyably salacious elements of Poison Ivy, even when Aileen is consummating her marriage to her husband. If it had told the story of Wuornos’s whole life, especially with more from Atwood, it could have been worthwhile, especially if embracing the uncertainty around her version of events. Instead, the only real positive result was discovering the two Broomfield documentaries are on YouTube. Guess what I’m watching tonight.

Dir: Daniel Farrands
Star: Peyton List, Tobin Bell, Lydia Hearst, Hamish Sturgeon

Jungle Girl

  By

★★½
“You can take the girl out of the jungle…”

This is nominally based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’s 1932 novel of the same name, also known as The Land of Hidden Men. Though there’s very little beyond the title in common. The book was set in Cambodia, and told the story of explorer Gordon King, who finds a civilization which has been lost for a thousand years. This… isn’t. It is instead the story of Nyoka Meredith (Gifford), the daughter of a doctor working with the Masamba tribe in the middle of Africa. “Nyoka” is Swahili for snake, and she seems to spend most of her free time swinging through the forest on vines.

But there’s trouble in paradise, as ne’er-do-wells Slick Latimer (Mohr) and Bradley Meredith (Bardette) show up, hoping to get their hands on the tribe’s stash of diamonds. Their plan involves Dr. Meredith’s twin brother, who just got out of jail. They knock off the doctor, replacing him with his sibling, who feigns “amnesia” to explain the holes in his memory. They also team up with disgruntled witch-doctor Shamba, who was displaced from his tribal position by Western medicine. But Nyoka, along with Jack Stanton (Neal) and Curly Rogers, stand in the way of the villains. Though naturally, they will have narrowly to dodge death – I’m guessing, fourteen times, give or take.

While this was the first serial in the sound era to have a female lead, it’s a little disappointing in this regard. It feels like, over the course of the 15 episodes, Nyoka is more rescued than rescuing, though it does work both ways. In terms of getting into the action, there’s more than one occasion where she just yells “Look out!”, then lets the menfolk get on with punching each other. However, Nyoka still has her moments, such as in Episode 5, where she dives into a gorge and goes hand-to-hand with a crocodile, in order to save a native child. I did appreciate the lack of any romance here. Despite the obvious candidacy of Jack, everyone is too busy narrowly dodging those deaths, I think, for emotional entanglements.

Considerably less progressive is the portrayal of the natives. I guess we should be happy Shamba is at least played by a non-American, Frank Lackteen being Lebanese-born. But the native boy saved from the crocodile? Born in Minnesota (the actor, Tommy Cook, was still active almost eighty years later, playing a senator in an episode of Space Force!). Even aside from the blackface, add patronising lines like “It took a white man to figure it out,” and there are a lot of elements which have not aged well, to put it mildly. Some of the plot threads are also a bit implausible, such as Jack and Curly building an impromptu refinery in the native village, to convert crude oil into airplane fuel. I’m fairly sure it’s not that easy.

One of the stunt co-ordinators on this was the legendary Yakima Canutt. He would go on to choreograph the chariot race in Ben-Hur, though there’s none of his renowned equine stuntwork here. Helen Thurston was the main double for Gifford, though for the scenes where she’s swinging from vine to vine, a male stuntman (David Sharpe) took over. Apparently, Gifford said he looked better in the costume than she did! The series was so successful it became the first Republic serial to be re-released, six years later. A lot of the action footage from this was reworked into 1955’s Panther Girl of the Kongo, but we’ll talk more about that in its own review.

Dir: William Witney and John English
Star: Frances Gifford, Tom Neal, Trevor Bardette, Gerald Mohr

Beautiful Wrestlers: Down for the Count

  By

★★★
“Ring of dishonour.”

This is probably a good one and a half stars more than I expected, based on the synopsis and screen shots, which made it seem considerably more like porn with a minor wrestling subplot. Okay, it is not exactly fun for all the family, to put it very mildly – if that wasn’t implied by the poster, the NSFW alternative should make abundantly clear what to expect. But it is, at least, closer to wrestling with a porn subplot, and managed to surpass those expectations in a number of ways. One of these was the plot, though less the central thread, than all the weird stuff around the fringes.

For its core is fairly cliched: wannabe wrestler Megu (Yamamoto) has a feud with Shinobu (Ada), a student at another school who keeps stealing Megu’s boyfriends. Inevitably, this ends in a tag match between the two schools as Megu and the good girls of the Delta Dolls, take on her nemesis and her allies in the Black Whores. It is your standard, garden variety “sports heroine overcomes adversity to triumph” narrative, we’ve seen a thousand times before. However, there are elements which suggest sly parody rather than anything taken seriously. Most obviously, Megu’s secret super strength power, which is activated… any times she uses a tampon. This is why, during the final battle, her boyfriend is running around the crowd outside, asking women if they can give him a tampon. Used or not.

Yeah, you need to have a fairly robust set of sensibilities, to get through what’s a thoroughly lecherous endeavour. However, again, the film opts to embrace this aspect, with a Greek chorus of men who watch the training and yell out statements like, “Look, you can see all their camel-toes!” Oh, the training in question, consists of the students assuming the crab position, while being prodded with large dildos. I am just reporting this stuff, I had no hand in making any of it up. There’s also a good amount of soft-core sex, this being a “roman porno”, out of the Nikkatsu stable, who along with Toei were the premier purveyors of Japanese adult entertainment in the period.

But it’s miles better than I feared. Genuine production values help, no least being shot on 35mm rather than video. While nobody is going to mistake Yamamoto and friends for Manami Toyota, they are clearly doing most if not all of their own action, and the action is comparable enough to what we saw in GLOW. The final match is actually decent; I’ve seen less impressive bouts involving supposed pro wrestlers. Admittedly, it is probably a good thing Chris was not about, for the level of her disdainful snorts would likely have reached toxic levels. Yet, despite the ludicrous elements, also including both Megu’s novel way of extinguishing a camp fire, and her boyfriend’s unfortunate genital condition, everyone takes this Extremely Seriously. It’s the only way this can possibly work, and helped this to soar way past my preconceived notions. 

Dir: Hiroyuki Nasu
Star: Natsuko Yamamoto, Kaoru Oda, Makoto Yoshino, Naomi Hagio

Filibus

  By

★★★
“The first action heroine?”

Ladies and gentlemen, we appear to have a new record holder for the earliest action heroine feature film. Dating from all the way back in 1915, and thus pipping Joan the Woman by a year, comes this silent Italian movie. It’s about Filibus (Creti), an infamous thief whose exploits have become legendary, to the extent that one of her victims offers a large reward for her capture. Filibus, in one of her alternate identities, Baroness Troixmonde, visits the victim, asking if she can put her amateur investigation skills to the test. There, she meets Detective Kutt-Hendy (Spano), who is on her trail, and decides she’s going to frame him for her crimes. Drugging him, she obtains his fingerprints, and uses these as some of the evidence against Kutt-Hendy, implicating him in the theft of a pair of valuable diamonds.

There’s a lot of remarkably cool stuff here, considering the era, such as the airship by which Filibus travels, allowing her to drop silently into any desired location. Kutt-Hendy does his best to catch his target, e.g. using a tiny hidden camera to catch her in the act. But she always manages to be one step ahead of him: with the aid of some more drugs and her minions, the gadget only catches the detective apparently red-handed (right). Kutt-Hendy begins to believe he may actually be Filibus himself, visiting a doctor who wonders if his patient may be committing crimes in his sleep. The tables are eventually turned after the cop figures out how to stop being left unconscious. However, Filibus has the last laugh, escaping and leaving a note that suggests they may meet again.

There had been earlier serials with female protagonists, such as 1914’s The Perils of Pauline, and also occasional movies, e.g. Protéa. with supporting characters who were “heroine adjacent” for want of a better phrase. But it feels as if Filibus could be transplanted wholesale into the modern era, with little or no modification. Indeed, the way she uses another alternate identity, Count de la Brive, to court Kutt-Hendry’s sister, Leonora (Ruspoli) has been seized upon enthusiastically by some, calling the heroine a champion of transgenderism, even though this plot thread never goes anywhere significant. It exists purely to get Filibus close to her target, and there’s no evidence her interest is genuine.

Let’s be clear though: if surprisingly modern in story, the production values on this are as primitive as you’d expect from the era. Production company Corona Film were a short-lived and low-budget studio, and compared to Joan, this is a considerably less impressive spectacle. You also never get any real sense of emotion from the lead actress: Creti was almost unknown, even at the time. This contrasts with Spano, who does act to good effect, particularly his angst at apparently being a criminal. It’s on YouTube, though you have to find your own subs for it, and it’s entirely silent there – I’d suggest providing your own soundtrack when viewing. But as an example of something that is arguably a century ahead of its time, it is worth a watch.

Dir: Mario Roncoroni
Star: Valeria Creti, Giovanni Spano, Filippo Vallino, Cristina Ruspoli

Justice High

  By

★★★
“Be cruel to your school.”

This is as much about the philosophical underpinnings of karate, and how it can be used for personal growth. The instigator in this case is Chae-yeong (Jung), a teenage girl who has just transferred to a new school after issues at her previous educational establishment. Her long-suffering father, a karate master has barely registered her there, when trouble finds Chae-yeong. She uses her skills to rescue a student, Jong-goo (Oh), who is refusing to help some bullies cheat in an upcoming exam. This turns out to get her an unwanted high profile, as the school is basically a gangsters’ paradise.

Protection rackets and other schemes are being run under the control of student president Jin-hyeok (Kim), who is eyeing a postgraduate career in the local mob, and needs to fund the necessary initiation fee. But his pal, Hae-seong (Son) has had enough of the bully lifestyle and is seeking a new direction for his life. He and Jong-goo convince Chae-yeong to let them sign on at her father’s dojo. There, they learn both the physical and mental skills that are part of karate, the latter embodied in pithy aphorisms such as “Justice without power is hollow. But power without justice is merely violence.” Hae-seong’s quest for independence, Jong-goo’s growing ability to fight back, and Chae-yeong’s refusal to bow down, put them all on an increasingly direct collision course with Jin-hyeok and his minions. 

If stretched a little beyond the material at 112 mins, I was generally kept occupied. There’s less action than I would have wanted, but what there is, isn’t bad. Chae-yeong has a particularly terse and efficient approach, which fits her character’s lone-wolf attitude. The narrative is largely driven by the friendship between the three young leads. There were points I felt things were about to topple over into a romantic love triangle; fortunately, it largely avoided this. Instead, about the peak level of emotion is reached in a rather touching scene where Hae-seong explains how he ended up as the second in command to a gangster schoolmate. That criminal angle is a bit startling. I’ve seen many films and shows set in Japanese schools where education appears… a lower priority, shall we say, e.g. Sukeban Deka. This is the first Korean entry with such rampant lawlessness in a contemporary setting, and where adult guardians are notable by their absence, save for Chae-yeong’s father. 

A tighter hand on the script would have been helpful, with a few threads that could have used more detail. There’s also an odd subplot where Chae-yeong’s Dad has stomach troubles. We never get any payoff for this, though I was kinda glad, dreading what the punchline could have ended up being. To be honest, I did have some difficulty telling certain male characters apart, largely due to them sporting Korean Haircut #3. However, the main story is an acceptably entertaining work, helped by decent performances from the trio of leads.

Dir: Johnny Chae
Star: Jung Da-Eun, Oh Seung-Hoon, Son Woo-Hyun, Kim Tae-yoon

Sin, by J.M. Leduc

  By

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

Sinclair O’Malley, known to everyone as Sin, is a bit of a wild card. She was initially an FBI agent, but was released by the agency, largely for her refusal to stay within the lines. In particular, she went off-book to end a human trafficking ring in Nicaragua. She is the kind of person whom we first meet interrupting a funeral, by rolling up to it late, on a Harley. But this is just the book’s first misstep. For rather than demonstrating her bad-ass credentials, it just made me feel she was a selfish and egocentric narcissist, shrieking “Look at meeeeeeee!” everywhere she went. Subsequent actions did little to disavow me of this belief.

Anyway, inexplicably, the agency now desperately want her back. For a number of their agents have turned up dead, after being sent to investigate the corpses of young Latin American girls, which have turned up along the coast from Florida to Louisiana. The bodies showed evidence of torture and sexual assault. But Sin in particular is needed, because the agents were found near Tumbledown Bay, the small community in the Florida Keys where she grew up – and which she, quite deliberately, left. Convinced to return, in part due to her father being terminally ill with cancer. She discovers the community has fallen under the thrall of a sleazy preacher, the Reverend Jeremiah Heap. He just happens to have opened an orphanage, catering to Latin American girls. Might this be connected?

Oh, of course it is. There’s a paedophile/snuff movie ring, streaming their acts over the Internet to an elite clientele. Quite why they bother importing children from South America (to borrow an infamous movie tagline, “where life is cheap”) rather than… Oh, I dunno, streaming from there to begin with, is never clear. But then, the international criminal masterminds here are basically brutish thugs. The rule here in Tumbledown Bay is: the stupider and uglier you are, the more likely you are to be involved in the ring. Sin is neither, to be fair. But I found most of her character traits thoroughly off-putting. This quote resonated: “Some of us can change, Sin. And some of us are still the bitter, nasty-mouthed, bitch they were seven years ago.” That’s your heroine, folks.

It’s clear the kind of persona Leduc is aiming for. A take-no-nonsense woman, prepared to do whatever it takes, and unconcerned about whose toes she might stomp on in the process. But it needs more finesse and balance; there’s nothing, for instance, to explain her dedicated squad, who leap to her every need. Why do they have such loyalty to her? ‘Cos she’s hot? Might as well be. There’s also a pacing problem: the storming of the orphanage feels like it should be the climax, yet the book rattles on for a further twenty percent, tidying up loose ends. These should probably have been shifted into a further volume, this one ending with the line, “I am the Pearl Angel of Death, she thought, and I will hunt and find each and every one of those people.” Instead, it’s all downhill from there.

Author: J.M. Leduc
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 3 in the Sinclair O’Malley Thriller series.

American Zealot

  By

★★★
“Constitutional wrongs.”

As I write this, in December 2021, abortion is again a bit of a hot topic on the American political scene. I am, personally, fairly neutral on the topic. Or, at least, to the point that I’d need to spend the entire review outlining my position. Such nuance tends not to fly on the Internet, where you are either a baby-killer or want to turn America into The Handmaid’s Tale, and moderation is for pussies. On that basis, this film is a bit of a losing proposition, likely destined to satisfy no-one with its relative fair-handedness. These days, it feels like everyone just wants their echo chamber reinforced, rather than challenged, even in the mild way this offers.

It is, certainly, a fringe entry here. Lucy (Mackenzie, the director’s fiancée at the time, now wife) is a girl. Who uses a gun. So there’s that. An action heroine though? Not so much, at least in the genuinely understood definition. Like the topic of abortion, it’s complex. For Lucy is in her final year at a Christian high school, and is shocked to discover that her classmate and best friend, Rachel (Marie), has terminated her pregnancy, in defiance of everything Lucy holds dear. After a moral conundrum (basically, the trolley problem) is posed by a teacher, Lucy decides to save future lives by shooting the doctor (Carey) at the women’s clinic, using a gun belonging to the parents of a classmate, Ralph (Miller). However, does Lucy have the moral fortitude necessary to buttress her actions, or will her qualms about the act lead her down a different path?

Though Mackenzie is too old to make a convincing high-school girl (per the IMDB, she was 28 when this came out), it’s a good performance. You can see the way in which her beliefs lead Lucy down the path, to a point where her actions do not just make sense, they are almost required as a result of those beliefs. Less successful is the “de-programming” element, which largely consists of her teacher blustering, “You can’t sacrifice the minority to save the majority. That’s just not how good society functions.” Well, about that… Seems more like a problem with society, to be honest. It’s an angle which needed more effort applied to it, in order to be convincing.

It is also perhaps a little too understated for its own good. The shooting of the doctor is so low-key, you could blink and miss it, when in many ways, it’s the most important moment in the movie, and should have been weighted in accordance with it. Still, given the budget here was just $11,000, this is no small accomplishment. It looks and sounds like a far bigger budget production, and credit is also due to both of the Mackenzies, for being prepared to take on a challenging topic in a way that tries (largely successfully) to avoid being judgmental. While many independent film-makers go the commercially easy route of genre movies, this is something more challenging. If not without flaws, it should succeed in provoking thought.

Dir: James Mackenzie
Star: Ana Mackenzie, Kendall Miller, Keana Marie, Kristin Carey

Everything Everywhere All at Once

  By

★★★½
“I’d have settled for two of three.”

This has been a long, long time coming. I’ve been a fan of Yeoh since seeing her Hong Kong starring debut, Yes, Madam, which came out all the way back in 1985. Over the years since, her career has had its ups and downs, including complete retirement after her marriage in the late eighties. She returned, and is the only actress to have appeared in two movies rated five stars here: Heroic Trio and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. But her career in Hollywood has been limited to sterling support roles, in both movies and television, encompassing everything from Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies through Star Trek: Discovery to Crazy Rich Asians. A starring role, appropriate to her talents, never seemed to come along. 

Until now. Thirty-seven years after Yes, Madam, and at the age of 59, this film finally puts Yeoh where she deserves to be: front and centre. Yet, perhaps partly due to how long I’ve been waiting for this, I must confess to being a bit disappointed this is not a classic to match the titles listed above. Oh, it certainly has its moments, and Yeoh is as good as expected. However, its 139-minute running-time feels more a curse than a blessing. The concept at its core is almost infinite in scope, and I did feel the movie was trying to include all of it. Less could have been more, with a targetted approach preferable to the relentless overload adopted by the makers, which left me feeling as if I was drinking from a fire-hose.

The multiverses here literally rotate around Evelyn Wang (Yeoh), who runs a laundromat teetering on the edge of failure, with her husband, Waymond (Quan). Their marriage is also failing, her relationship with her daughter, Joy (Hsu) is on rocky ground, and she has to go to an appointment with hard-ass IRS tax auditor Deirdre Beaubeirdra (Curtis). The last is where things kick off, as she is visited by a Waymond from an alternate universe, who tells Evelyn she is the only hope of foiling the evil Jobu Tupaki. That’s an alternate Joy, who has gone insane and created a black hole-like vortex which could destroy all the multiverses. Fortunately, Evelyn’s abject failings at life give her the ability to tap into all the skills and knowledge of the other, better versions of herself.

Like I said: almost infinite in scope. Apparently, co-writer/director Kwan was diagnosed with ADHD during the creative process: to be frank, it shows. While the imagination on view is admirable, the film bounces about between ideas at a ferocious rate, almost regardless of whether they deserve it. We spend an inordinate amount of time in a multiverse where everyone has long, floppy fingers. Yet there is also buttplug-fu, which is an example of the movie going places you’d never have expected could be so entertaining. Or a lengthy, surprisingly engrossing, scene in which two rocks in an otherwise lifeless multiverse have a conversation in captions. Because why not?

To the film’s credit, it never abandons its characters, and that helps keep it grounded. Albeit only just, on occasion the movie standing on its tippy-toes as it tries desperately to avoid being blown away by its own excesses. It’s perhaps telling that, despite all the film’s visual bluster, the most effective moment for me was among the simplest, one character telling another, “In another life, I would’ve been happy just doing laundry and taxes with you.” As such, Yeoh is the story’s heart, and gets to demonstrate her unquestionable acting talent. It has been fascinating to see the development of that, especially considering her lack of not just experience but any formal training. I mean, she first entered the field close to four decades ago, as a former Miss World contestant. How many of them eventually go on to get talk of an Oscar?

It’s as a result of this that I kept watching the film, because I genuinely cared what happened to Evelyn. I wanted to see her figure it all out and make peace with the various forces trying to tear her humdrum life apart. From that angle, it’s close to soap-opera, albeit an unusually effective one. Except, of course, the means by which that peace is potentially achieved, includes multiverse hopping, and fighting an evil version of your own daughter, who wields a gurgling plughole of doom. It’s the overlap between the mundane and bizarre where this finds its own voice. The problem is, it tries too hard to live up to the title. Sure, give us everything, everywhere. I’d just rather it hadn’t done so, all at once.

Yet, similarly, it leaves an awful lot of potential on the table. Why is kung-fu virtually the only talent Evelyn uses? Tap into a universe where she’s a cab driver, and give us an epic car-chase. Or the one where she’s a cat-burglar, for heist purposes. It’s not hard to come up with a dozen such threads. Perhaps the makers were constrained by their budget, a relatively cheap $25 million – less than Crazy Rich Asians. They do an admirable job of squeezing value out of it; again, the sheer pace probably helps, with your brain trying so desperately to keep up, it’s hard-pushed to pay attention to any of the finer details.

But I’m glad I won’t go to my grave with my final paid cinematic experience being Terminator: Dark Fate. [Though the two Neanderthals beside us, talking loudly and checking their phones throughout, really make me think we are done with theatres] The Daniels deserve credit for the obvious invention displayed, and this is the kind of original property I’m happy to support, over another sequel and/or shitty comic adaptation. I also must mention the supporting cast, who are uniformly great, particularly Hsu as both aggravated daughter and multiiverse threatening villainess [There’s also a cameo by another eighties Hong Kong action actress, Michiko Nishiwaki. Maybe she’ll get her own movie next?]. That it stars one of the most under-rated actresses in Hollywood, finally getting the opportunity she deserves, is alone reason enough to see this. Just don’t expect too much.

Dir: Dan Kwan, Daniel Scheinert
Star: Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Jamie Lee Curtis