Category: Review

Black Crab

  By

★★★
“Let slip the slogs of war…”

Rapace seems to be turning into a female version of Ryan Reynolds. By which I mean, it seems that hardly a month goes past without a new Netflix Original coming out starring her. Ryan had 6 Underground, Red Notice and The Adam Project. Noomi has given us What Happened to Monday, The Trip and, now, this. Still, much as with Reynolds, I’m happy to see her working regularly, and while the results may be a bit variable, they’re usually worth a look. This is no different, though I’m not sure whether its story, driven by a (largely generic) war in the Eastern half of Europe, is helped or hurt by its timing. On the one hand, it gives this a certain “ripped from the headlines” topicality. On the other, I largely watch movies to escape everyday life, not have my nose rubbed in it.

Rapace plays Caroline Edh, who was split up from her daughter in the war’s early stages and has never been able to find her in the years since, as the conflict has turned her homeland into a meat-grinder. Now a soldier, she gets talked into a perilous mission that could turn the tide of the war, with the promise that her child is on the far end of it. She’ll be part of a group of six, skating across a treacherous frozen archipelago in enemy territory, to deliver a package – with the usual, stern “Don’t dare open it” warnings – to a research facility.

I do wonder why they sent a group: it’s not as if the package is large. One person, the quickest skater going undercover, could potentially slide beneath the radar, when a platoon of soldiers attracts more attention. I suspect it’s simply so the various perils, of thin ice, enemy combatants and unfriendly locals, can thin the herd of the operation. Some of them are so thinly-drawn, the makers might as well have slapped a red shirt on them, and been done with it. However, it’s still an impressively filmed, brutal slog of a journey, across a hellish landscape, which will have you reaching for a warm blanket and cup of cocoa. This likely reaches its peak when the group stumble into an ice graveyard: it’s quite the imagery.

We are, of course, here for Rapace, who learned to skate and broke her nose during filming. Despite one of the ugliest hair-styles in her filmography, her performance, along with the visuals, keep things adequately interesting, when the plot and supporting characters often fail to do so. In particular, the last half-hour (though it runs 114 minutes, so there’s quite a lot before that point) is almost entirely predictable, with the big twist actually weakening the lead character, by making Edh seem too gullible for her own good. Consequently, the subsequent redemption feels a bit too much of an uphill struggle. And even a novice like me knows that skating uphill is a tough ask…

Dir: Adam Berg
Star: Noomi Rapace, Jakob Oftebro, Dar Salim, Ardalan Esmaili

Confessions of a Homicidal Prostitute: Demonatrix

  By

★½
“Nice title. Shame about the film.”

I must confess I have not seen Confessions of a Homicidal Prostitute, to which this is a sequel. It’s marginally possible, I suppose, that the character development, story and nuance were present there, and explain why these are all but entirely absent in its successor. I would not, however, be prepared to bet on it. I suspect the original was every bit as mean-spirited as this: and “suspect” is all I’ll ever do, because I won’t be making any effort to track it down. In fact, I probably wouldn’t watch it if my aged mother begged me to on her death-bed. Too harsh? Perhaps. Yet I don’t think I’ve ever seen a flat-out uglier film, in terms of largely repellent people being extremely unpleasant to one another, shot in a way that exacerbates its grimness. In its defence, that may be the point. Again: may. It could also just be torture porn of the lowest-rent kind.

From what I can gather, Lilith (Baun) is the titular hooker; I’m not sure if the weird contact lens she wears in one eye is a tribute to Christina Lindberg and her eye-patch in Thriller: A Cruel Picture? Anyway, she apparently got pushed over the mental edge by abuse, and responded to violence with violence. Here, she introduces gal pal and fellow prostitute Eve (Shenk) to the lair where Lilith carries out her torture and slaying. Eve is remarkably blasé about the whole, potential “accessory after the fact” thing, and politely declines to get involved, saying “I don’t think I could stomach it… Not for me!” This reluctance lasts about 30 minutes into the film, where she gets brutalized by the vicious Jackson (McGinnis). All of a sudden, she’s rather more gung-ho, a tendency encouraged by Lilith (“The empowerment you feel after you kill this bastard, will be indescribable”). After initially both being caught and tortured by Jackson, the pair are able to turn the tables on their captor, taking their revenge and sodomizing him with a metal pole.

They then begin a two-woman killing spree, washing the scum off the streets. There’s a montage sequence here, which is quite effective, and rescues the film from receiving the dreaded one-star rating. But otherwise, we’re dealing with content which is cheap and poorly-executed, and possesses little or no emotional impact at all. Weirdly, given the topic and grindhouse-oriented title, the only nudity present is extremely fake penises being abused. Otherwise, it’s remarkably chaste. Though, to be honest, I’m fine with the lead actresses keeping their clothes on. No worries there. I’m good. With special effects that are largely unconvincing, this doesn’t even work as a gore flick, and there’s no sense of development of plot or characters. I got to the end with no sense of.. well, anything. I was neither entertained, educated or appalled. Overall, it’s the kind of film where I wonder if I’ve spent more time writing this review, than was actually spent making the movie.

Dir: Emir Skalonja
Star: Casey Baun, Krystal Shenk, Paul McGinnis, Richard Ruiz

Banshee

  By

★★
“Blows a cylinder”

This one is slightly unusual among action-heroine films, in that it was both written and directed by women: Kirsten Elms and Kari Skogland respectively. Unfortunately, it’s not exactly an advert for their gender; after a brisk start, it falls apart, and becomes a ridiculously implausible movie, in a completely different genre from where it started. That’s a real pity, because where it started, had a lot more potential than where it ends up. It begins with Sage Rion (Manning), a young but highly-talented thief, taking a bet with her partner, as to who can boost a classic car quickest. She picks a 1966 Dodge Challenger, but inadvertently leaves her ID at the scene of the crime.

Back at her house, she finds a note telling Sage to return the car, or the owner will kill her partner, whom he has kidnapped. She does, even though this puts her in deep water with her employer, for having taken and returned the Dodge in defiance of his orders. And this is where the script goes, not just off the road, but through the crash-barrier and down an embankment into a ravine. For Sage is the recipient of a severed head, and gets framed for the murder of her partner. This forces her on the run, taking shelter in the apartment of hooker friend Brenna (Williams) as the police hunt her. However, rookie cop Fitz (Lombardi) thinks there may be more to it than that. Sage hunts down the owner of the Dodge herself, discovering in the end he is a mad DJ serial killer, who kidnaps and tortures his female victims for the sounds they make, which he incorporates into his mixes.

You may want to read that sentence again. Slowly.

What, pray tell, was wrong with the fresh idea of a young, cocky girl car thief, that it was deemed necessary to apply all this sub-Se7en nonsense to it? It was doing perfectly fine as is. She’d been established as a solid character, with some endearing quirks – for instance, she won’t sleep with any man, unless he first volunteers to cook for her. It would have been interesting enough, to see how she’d handle dealing with her irritable and prone to violence boss. Instead, that angle gets all but discarded when the movie moves on to the “lunatic disk-jockey”. It briefly re-appears, only to be ended in a largely ridiculous method of closure.

The other elements of the film are banal and by the book. You have Fitz and his grizzled partner, who suspects the worst of Sage, for no particular reason (I mean, they could easily figure out the head was severed elsewhere?). And the serial killer is little more than a walking set of cliches, who kidnaps Brenna in order to get to Sage, because… Oh, I dunno. I’d largely lost the will to live by that point in proceedings. So much potential here, only for it to be so completely wasted.

Dir: Kari Skogland
Star: Taryn Manning, Romano Orzari, Michael Lombardi, Genelle Williams

Sick Nurses

  By

★★★½
“Nurse Fetish will see you now…”

This is certainly an odd animal. It takes place in and around a Thailand hospital, where one of the physicians, Dr. Tar (Jarujinda), has a lucrative side-scam in selling bodies to… well, if it’s not clear who, there appears to be sufficient demand for them. He is in cahoots with a group of seven nurses, but one of them, his girlfriend Tahwaan (Wachananont), finds out he is having an affair with her sister, Nook (Rujiphan). After she threatens to go to the police, Dr. Tar and the other six nurses kidnap and kill Tahwaan. However, her spirit comes back from the grave, to take brutal vengeance on those responsible for her death. Naturally, the peeved ghost starts with the characters who bore relatively minor culpability, working her way up to Nook and the not-so-good doctor.

Yeah, if you’re into nurse uniforms, this is pretty much an all-you-can-eat buffet of attractive young women wearing these. Even outside that, there are plenty of scenes of them wearing less clothes than everyday expectations. Though, in line with general Thai morality, there’s no actual nudity – even when one of the victims takes a lengthy shower, she does so with her clothes on. Kinda weird, and the “grindhouse” tag here should be read as referring to violence rather than sex. For the meat of the film are extended stalk and slash sequences, in which Tahwaan – or, at least, a malevolent entity taking her form, with darker skin – pursues her targets relentlessly.

Sadly, the final dispatch is typically off-screen, a contrast to Western horror where the kill typically provides the money shot. Here, there is instead good, twisted imagination shown in the lead-up to those points, such as her ability to “control” her victims, or strangle one with her hair. The peak moment is likely the sequence4 where one woman’s lower jaw drops off, then her tongue falls out and is eaten by her cat, a scene which definitely upped the grade here by an extra half-point. Whatever you say about Tahwaan, she has clearly put some effort into planning the demises of those who wronged her.

To some extent, this is just a variation on the common Asian trope of the long-haired ghost girl. The twist here is that we are on Tahwaan’s side, especially once we find out the truth behind her death. It’s definitely a novelty to have someone seeking revenge for their own murder, rather than the more common in our genre, some kind of sexual assault. The plot is clearly nonsense; nobody notices any of the earlier victims are missing, for example, and I’ve no clue what the “13 o’clock” stuff was about. Yet I can’t deny, I found myself having an increasingly fun time, as things escalated, growing more bloody and twisted. Nook shows some fight before eventually allowing the “heroine” to reach her inevitable final target of Dr. Tar. It’s likely no spoiler to say, the confrontation doesn’t end well for him, though perhaps not quite as I wanted.

Dir: Piraphan Laoyont, Thodsapol Siriwiwat
Star: Chol Wachananont, Wichan Jarujinda, Chidjan Rujiphun, Kanya Rattanapetch

Wild Justice, by Kelley Armstrong

  By

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

With this 2013 novel, Armstrong brings her original Nadia Stafford trilogy to a satisfying conclusion (although the two later novellas carry on the story in a rewarding way). Again, six months have passed since the previous installment, so our chronological setting is the latter part of October, 2007.

By the end of the second novel, Nadia had recognized that her true romantic feelings are for Jack. But she also concluded that her taciturn and seemingly unemotional mentor didn’t return them (although readers might be less sure of that). So in the intervening months since, she and Quinn have added a sexual component to their long-distance relationship (they get together about once a month). For readers who view sex as expressive body language for a total self-giving in life-long love and fidelity, it’s not hard to predict that introducing it into a situation where both parties profess no hurry to be committed (and one is in love with someone else) is likely to end in emotional disaster.

That’s what happened here, about a month ago,with Quinn wanting to move in the direction of engagement and marriage and Nadia not willing to, leading to a messy breakup that left him very hurt and her “feeling like [vulgarism deleted].” :-( On top of that stress, when this book opens, she’s in rural Michigan on a job (of the kind that she doesn’t advertise). That quickly results, though through no fault of her own, in a traumatic event which has her on the point of meltdown. But before long, she’s in for a moral and emotional ordeal which will make her present distresses look relatively mild.

Both previous novels have made us aware of the formative event of Nadia’s life, which happened when she was only 13. That was the night she and her beloved 14-year-old cousin Amy (with Nadia along because, as usual, she was trying to keep the headstrong older girl out of trouble) got taken to a lonely woodland cabin by a budding psychopath in his early 20s named Drew Aldritch. Nadia was able to escape and run for help, but Amy still ended up raped and killed. At the trial, Nadia wasn’t called to testify; and it didn’t help that Amy was a bit of a “wild child” with a reputation as a flirt.

The defense exploited that to claim that the sex was “consensual,” and that Aldritch strangled his victim to death “accidentally.” So the jury acquitted him. (Yes, this is fiction; but sadly, even in real life, there are jurors who would actually be that idiotic.) He left town immediately; and Nadia hasn’t seen him since. But the horror of the tragedy, and the survivor’s guilt, has stayed with her for 20 years, shaping her into the adult woman she became, and leaving her with intermittent nightmares from which she still wakes up screaming.

Jack knows something about the baleful influence of teenage trauma (and we’ll learn something, in the course of this book, about his past and how it shaped him –our leading lady here isn’t the only character with painful baggage). Early on, Jack discloses that, on his own initiative, he’s tracked Aldritch down to where he’s now living in Ohio under his latest alias, and working, of all things, as a small-town cop –and there’s good reason to believe that his behavior and proclivities haven’t changed for the better in the ensuing decades. So Nadia now has to decide what to do with this knowledge. Whatever happens, this trip down Memory Lane is not going to be a pleasant stroll; and it will prove to be a dark, harrowing, twisty and dangerous one, with more than one major surprise.

As usual, there’s a genuine mystery (actually, more than one) at the heart of this tale; and solving it, and surviving to the point of solving it, will be a challenge. (Luckily, Nadia’s tough and resourceful.) In terms of style, this book is much of a piece with the preceding ones in most respects, including the language issues. Again, there’s no explicit sex, but there is some unmarried sex that takes place, and some scenes are steamier than some readers might want. Romance, and related angst, doesn’t take over the plot, but it plays a more important role than it has up to now, and there will be a significant development in that area. (The books definitely are best read in order.) At one point, a character imparts a crucial piece of information that later developments show that he wouldn’t have known, but that’s the only logical slip; in the main, the plotting is impeccable. For any readers who liked the first two books, this one has to rank as a must-read; and I don’t believe any of them will be disappointed with it!

Author: Kelley Armstrong
Publisher: Penguin Group; available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.
A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

El Monstro del Mar!

  By

★★★
“Catch of the day.”

I could have sworn I’ve seen this before, but a search of the reviews suggest otherwise! This is an Australian pastiche of a couple of different things. Perhaps the most obvious influence is Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, in that it’s the road misadventures of a trio of delinquent women – two brunettes and a blonde. The leader, Beretta (Scarlet) looks something like a cross between Tura Satana and Bettie Page. We’re less than ten minutes in before their psychopathic nature is revealed, in the brutal killing of two men who stop to offer them roadside assistance – I did like the way the film, shot in black-and-white to that point, explodes into full colour when the violence starts.

They turn out to be hitwomen, hiding out in a beachfront house after completing their latest job, where they cross paths with – further nods to Pussycat – a grumpy old misogynist in a wheelchair, and an innocent young girl, Hannah (Capri). But where it diverges significantly from the Russ Meyer classic is… Well, as you’d expect from the title, the presence of a sea-monster, whose hunger has been impacting the town for decades (including Hannah’s parents).. Yeah, I don’t remember one of them in Pussycat. Then again, that did take place in the desert. It doesn’t actually get any screen time until the half-way point, and the film is quite chat-heavy to that point, save one blood-drenched flashback sequence.

While it’s undeniably a low-budget creature across the board, the atmosphere, assisted by some good use of filters and colour in general, has a Lovecraftian feel to it that was unexpected and well executed. In the second half, there is an increasingly gloomy and oppressive feeling, as the trio stumble across a series of body parts, eventually losing one of their own to the monster, while Hannah rebels against her grandfather. Inevitably, it all ends in the surviving duo taking the fight to the monster and its many tentacles, assisted by Hannah, after they learn the truth about what has been going on. It’s a very moist battle, with body fluids flying on both sides, though I was a bit disappointed we never get to appreciate the full scope of the beast.

It does make for a rather awkward combination, with the two halves of the movie never quite meshing. I kept expecting the fact they were hitwomen would show relevance, but it never amounts to anything: they could simply have been tourists on a seaside vacation. The same goes for the apparent wild swings in era; the cars at the start look sixties vintage, but have very eighties cassette players in them. and any period feel is all but discarded on arrival by the water. However, even if the elements here never go together as you feel they should, they work well enough on their own. If you’re in the mood for a genre fondue, which throws everything into the same pot, you could do worse. Scarlet may not quite be Tura Satana, but then – nobody is.

Dir: Stuart Simpson
Star: Nelli Scarlet, Kyrie Capri, Karli Madden, Kate Watts

Loss Prevention

  By

★★★½
“Missing this would be your loss”

After a series of recent films which… well, let’s just say, left a little to be desired, it was a real palate-cleansing pleasure to encounter this. Oh, make no mistake: this is no classic. But, considering the budget was supposedly under $20,000, this operates within its limitations very nicely. The makers sticks to what they can do, and what it does, it does more than adequately. In particular, the movie is populated with a good number of interesting characters, that are fun to watch. The central one is Nik (Uhl), a young woman who dropped out of college and is now scraping by, working behind the bar at The Soggy Weasel, the pub belonging to her father (former wrestler Snow).

However, her slackerish lifestyle is rudely interrupted when one patron drinks too much, and has to be separated from his keys. Unfortunately, the key-chain also holds a flash drive of industrial espionage data, which he was supposed to hand over to Boland (Wells), the operative of a rival company. Boland is unimpressed, and will go to any lengths to retrieve it, providing the bottom line is deemed sufficiently profitable. Fortunately for Nik, also on hand is Brooke (Albert), a thoroughly competent operative of the company who is the data’s rightful owner, and she takes on the defense of Nik and her father. Not that Nik is averse to getting her own hands dirty, as things turn out.

It does take a little while for things to kick off, as we get introduced to the characters. Nik is more than slightly sarcastic, so can only be respected as such, and also a thoroughly unrepentant lesbian – both combine in an entirely unrepeatable comment about breath mints. But Hollywood could learn a lot about depicting sexual identity from this, which makes absolutely no attempt at moral posturing in this area. Instead, it’s far too busy providing a fast-paced gallop around the city of Louisville, ending up in Brooke and Nik mounting an assault on the headquarters where Boland is holding her father hostage. Yet there’s a twist or two to come, with things not quite ending in the massive firefight you’d expect – another way in which this manages to confound expectations.

In its depiction of corporate warfare, this is rather sophisticated for a low-budget action flick. In particular, Boland’s actions are entirely determined by an accounting of the expected profits and loss. For instance, is it cheaper to buy someone off, or kill them, with all the resulting collateral expenses? It absolutely is not personal with him, just a question of what will balance the books most profitably. The same is true, to a slightly lesser degree, for Brooke – if I heard a late line of dialogue correctly, her surname in the film is Shields! This is an approach which plays into the unexpected finale, when Nik comes up with a solution which satisfies everybody. Well, almost everybody… This has not one, but two, action heroines who are fun to watch, and was considerably better than I expected

Dir: Brian Cunningham, Matt Niehoff
Star: Abisha Uhl, Al Snow, John Wells, Lauren Albert

Suga Babies

  By

★½
“The drugs do work”

As usual, I begin with the normal disclaimer, that I’m about as far from the target audience as you could imagine. For this is an inner-city story about a drug war between three rival gangs in South Carolina: the Guardians, the Dynasty and the GeeChees. That said, however, there have been other films, with not dissimilar themes, which I have enjoyed. Most obviously, I am not the target audience for Pam Grier’s seventies output either. But those still kick ass. Even among the modern entries, there have been ones like Candy, which have felt authentic in their depiction of urban life. This, on the other hand, feels more like a no-budget hip-hop video.

About the main positive is that nobody makes a particular fuss about the Guardians being an all-girl gang, under the loose leadership of Naomi (Mott). They’re just part of the landscape, and everyone accepts that. The cause of the war is a new drug called sugar. In an odd twist, this actually makes people who take it better. We are told it literally cures cancer. I genuinely LOL’d at that. However, the interest of the authorities is limited to a spokesman for Big Pharma, who expresses concern at the street muscling in on “their” turf. It might have been interesting if it turned out Big Pharma had secretly released the drug to the GeeChees for distribution, as a test of its effectiveness. Sadly, not much is done with the concept, with this largely being an excuse for more black-on-black crime.

Indeed, that social crisis is expressly referenced during one of the multiple sequences of “The Buzz”, some chat-show. These really add very little, and the same goes for the supposed “courtroom” scenes. As well as being woefully unconvincing, I don’t think I ever worked out quite who was on trial, or for what. It’s all horribly disjointed, for example a lengthy scene that’s just multiple people picking up drugs from a motel room. Add in sequences which genuinely are no-budget music videos, and the dramatic pickings became painfully thin. There’s just one scene that has any impact. Mouse (McCoy) gets picked up by the Guardians and is found to be dealing sugar for the GeeChees. Her impassioned explanation that she did so because sugar helped her family, is certainly the movie’s emotional high-point.

According to the IMDb, the director had made eight feature films since her first in 2020. That’s an admirable work ethic, to be sure. But I can’t help thinking that churning out fewer movies might lead to an increase in their quality, because this definitely feels rushed, in almost every aspect. Maybe this is what the target audience wants? But it would be patronizing to believe their standards can be satisfied with this kind of thing. On the other hand, this wasn’t even the worst thing I watched today (hello, Battered), at least reaching a bare minimum of technical competence. However, that’s scant praise for any movie.

Dir: Felicia Rivers
Star: Diamond Mott, Patrice Jennings, Shakeela Koffey Scott, Samantha McCoy

Wentworth

  By

★★★★
“Sheilas behind bars.”

Back in the eighties, there was an Australian women-in-prison soap opera called Prisoner Cell Block H. [It was called Prisoner on its home turf, but was renamed in the UK and US, to avoid confusion with The Prisoner] It ran for eight seasons, totalling 692 (!) episodes, and achieved a fair bit of cult status, mostly through late-night screenings on TV. Much of its reputation was based on “so bad it’s good” elements, such as the wobbly sets; a review calls it, “one of the most bizarre, violent, lesbian-fetishy-heart-warming dramas ever created.” The show concluded its run in 1986, but was never forgotten.

More than 25 years later, the concept was rebooted in 2013 as Wentworth, and enjoyed a renaissance. While also running for eight seasons, rather than trash (not that there’s anything wrong with that, mind you!), this version proved to be remarkably well made. It likely helped that the remake’s production schedule here was rather less frantic, ending at exactly 100 episodes last October. The show is currently ranked by the IMDb in the top 250 TV series of all time, and was sold to over 90 countries, achieving a worldwide audience, thanks in part to its distribution on streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime.

It spawned local remakes in a number of countries. The Dutch was the most successful, running for four seasons, but Belgium, Germany and Turkey also took the show and recreated it. [Here is as good a place as any to mention that back in 1982, there was a male spin-off of the original show called Punishment. Though it lasted only one season, the cast included some guy called Mel Gibson…] Indeed, the Turkish one, known on Netflix as The Yard, was reviewed here in August 2020. That review began, “I really must get round to reviewing Wentworth.” And eighteen months later, here we are…

It’s a show I’ve thought about covering on a number of occasions over its run, but now that it’s finished, I feel I can finally do it justice. I definitely can’t argue with the acclaim it has received. For Wentworth features a slew of extremely strong female characters, including one of the most memorable villainesses in TV history, and maintained a high degree of dramatic quality from beginning to end. That’s rare for a series; even classics like Buffy dropped off after a certain point, with commercial motivations typically surpassing artistic ones. Not so here, with the eighth series virtually as strong as the first.

One element, which it does share with its predecessor, is that the setting is the “star”, rather than any performer. I think this certainly helped contribute to its longevity, and sustained the show’s freshness. If one of the actresses began to feel jaded, and wanted out, their character could be replaced by another. The prison scenario meant there were always new arrivals potentially coming in, and scope for departures too, without excessively disrupting the overall structure. If you look at many of the ultra-long running shows, e.g. Dr Who or the many incarnations of Law and Order, they have a similar ability to rotate their cast seamlessly.

Not to say there weren’t main characters – many of them with the names and/or backgrounds as their “ancestors” in Cell Block H. But they tended to have arcs across three or four years; few lasted the full eight, mostly on the guard side. This timeframes was long enough to allow for fulfilling development, without getting stale. The first such was Bea Smith (Cormack), who arrives at Wentworth after attempting to murder her husband, following years of abuse. She becomes involved in the struggle for “Top Dog” status – the role of the most powerful prisoner – between two existing inmates, only to end up becoming Top Dog herself. However, it’s a lonely position, where you always have to watch your back, and allies can suddenly become enemies.

One such was the character mentioned above: Joan Ferguson (Rabe), known as ‘The Freak’ (left). She joined the show as the new governor of Wentworth in season 2, and was, to be blunt, a clinical psychopath, devoid of empathy and incredibly manipulative. She was also very smart, a lethal combination. However, it’s not enough to save her from ending up a prisoner in the jail herself. The first episode of season 5, where Ferguson is released into the general population was, for me, peak Wentworth, and one of the best 45 minutes of television I’ve seen, in any genre.

Remarkably, she didn’t just survive this reversal of fortune, but thrived. She took over as Top Dog. until an escape plan misfired, ending in her being buried alive by long-serving prison officer Will Jackson (Robbie Magasiva)). But you can’t keep a good villainess down, though it appeared the trauma led to amnesia, with Ferguson subsequently using a different name and with a completely different personality. Was this genuine, or another of her ruses? I couldn’t possibly reveal that. What I will do though, is laud a glorious performance by Rabe, who at six feet tall, has a remarkable physical presence, backed up by ferocious intensity. She’s Cersei Lannister on steroids. And without the incest.

In general, it’s perhaps less exploitative than you might expect, with nudity only when genuinely necessary to the plot, rather than for titillation purposes. On the other hand, the show does not soft-pedal the brutality of prison life, with violence and death a common occurrence. Inmates tend to handle their own infractions internally, the Top Dog having the ability to impose punishments for theft, deceit or, perhaps the worst offense of all, “lagging” i.e. talking to prison authorities. It would definitely be rated a hard R, purely for its authentically no-holds barred language. Boy, do the Aussies love themselves a good c-bomb – even more than us Scots!

There were, admittedly, times where the story-lines seemed to get away from the creators. A few threads did appear to be ended, rather than properly resolved. But considering the 70+ hours of television the show represented, such misfires proved remarkably few. The writers definitely had a talent for juggling multiple plot threads and keeping them all moving forward simultaneously. In the end though, it was the actresses (and actors) who made this show what it was, and which kept us coming back for the best part of a decade. If not our favourite show ever on Netflix, it’s definitely up there with the very best.

Creators: Lara Radulovich and David Hannam
Star: Danielle Cormack, Pamela Rabe, Kate Atkinson, Katrina Milosevic 

Battered

  By

★
“Of unsound mind.”

My first surprise here was that this clocks in at a crisp 44 minutes. That’s an awkward length for any film: too short to be a feature, but most festivals that accept short films will balk at a submission of that length, when the time could instead be used to accept three x 15-minute entries [as someone who runs a festival, this is definitely a consideration]. Quite how this got distribution, I’m therefore not sure; but there it was, sitting on Amazon Prime. However, less than two minutes into the viewing experience, I found myself thanking my stars the running time was so brief. Because this is hamstrung by the worst audio I’ve seen on any film in several years. When even an envelope being opened sounds like a burst of automatic gunfire, you’ve got a problem, and there’s hardly a scene here where this aspect is not bad enough, as to be an unbearable distraction.

It is something of a shame, since it has at least the germ of a decent idea. Piper (Paris) is in an abusive relationship, one that ends up with her being sent to hospital. On her release, she joins a support group for similarly battered women, who share video diaries, as part of the healing process. However, revenge eventually becomes part of their therapeutic activities, taking out their anger on the men who abused them, and these prove viral successes. There is potential for exploration here, not least in the way social media can create and inflame a lynch mob mentality – with the potential for it to spill over into the physical world too. Of course, for that exploration to work, you’d firstly have to be able to tolerate dialogue which sounds like it was recorded either in a wind-tunnel or a diving chamber. Not helping matters: characters that might harbour dreams of some day developing and blossoming into shallow stereotypes. And that’s just the women. Do not get me started on the men.

Then there’s a philosophical argument to be had here. We can all agree it’s wrong for men to beat up women. But this movie seems to make the claim – without much in the way of counterpoints being made – that it’s perfectly fine for women to beat up men. Because social justice. Or #MeToo. Or something, it’s unclear. This could be a viable approach, even without coherent and explicit debate, if the film engaged the lizard brain, and made the violence justifiable, even on a visceral level. Yet it fails to do that either. Instead we get a number of scenes which frankly border on the exploitative, offering a dubious counterpoint to the female empowerment narrative being pushed. Ugly camerawork and performances that, at best, do little more than propel forward the story, are other aspects which left me underwhelmed. It also ends in an abrupt and unsatisfying manner, as if Leslie eventually realized this was going nowhere. Shame it took him 44 minutes to reach that point.

Dir: Lewis Leslie
Star: Mia Paris, Paula Marcenaro Solinger, Carly Jones, Heath C. Heine