Category: Review

The Tiger Woman

  By

★★½
“A leopard which changes its spots.”

Am I the only person irrationally annoyed by the title of this 12-episode serial? It takes place in South America, where the only tigers are in captivity. And look at the picture of the heroine. LOOK AT IT. In what universe is that a tiger? I mean, the ears are a nice touch, but it’s very obviously not tiger stripes. Though it has been pointed that in its location, the jaguar is known as el tigre. Which might make sense if there was any other jot of Hispanic culture to be found here. [GWG readers: “Get on with it!”] Oh, alright… if you insist.  

As mentioned, we’re in South America, where two competing oil companies are seeking to establish their territory. The Inter Ocean Oil Company are the current occupants, and have been working in association with the indigenous population, under their white queen (Stirling), known as the Tiger Woman. But if they don’t strike oil soon, their franchise will expire. A predatory, far less friendly (but unnamed) company, is standing by, to make sure that doesn’t happen, allowing them to take over. But Inter Ocean has sent top troubleshooter, Allen Saunders (Rock Lane), to work with the Tiger Queen and block their enemy’s attempts. Those get more desperate as the deadline approaches and Inter Ocean appear to be succeeding. Complicating matters is the Tiger Queen’s original identity as missing heiress, Rita Arnold, something her enemies want to use to their advantage.

The heroine is something of a step forward from Jungle Girl, with Rita/Ms. Tiger at least making an occasional effort to get involved in the fisticuffs (copious, to the point half the oil company’s profits must have gone on replacement furniture). However, it’s rare for this to last more than a few seconds, and it seems she’s as fragile as cut crystal. Run into a wall? Knocked out. Trip on the carpet? Knocked out. Looked at askance by a bad guy? Probably knocked out. I swear, there are times where it feels like she spends half her screen time unconscious.However, as in Jungle Girl, there are odd moments which rise above, though I’m not sure the aeroplane spin would be a move familiar to white goddesses from the sky.

She does have a regal presence (perhaps due to Sterling’s background as a model, before she turned to acting), even if her throne looks a bit like it was built out of banana boxes. Ms. Tiger is also reasonably brave, always willing to put herself in danger when necessary for her tribe – or, probably more relevantly, necessary for cliff-hanger purposes.  I was less impressed with the plotting, especially the shenanigans of the villains, which seem almost random, rather than well-conceived to their particular aims. For instance, they’re supposed to kill Rita, then get someone else to impersonate her and claim the inheritance. If that’s the best plan you can come up with… you need to bring in some kind of outside consultant. Again, it feels as if everything they do is for cliff-hanger purposes, not as a means to an end. It gets kinda repetitive after a while.

Still, this was a big hit, and led to Republic fast-tracking another vehicle for Sterling. Only a few months after this was released, production started on Zorro’s Black Whip, in which she would get to be more of a proper lead.

Dir: Spencer Bennet and Wallace Grissell
Star: Linda Stirling, Allan Lane, Duncan Renaldo, George J. Lewis
Subsequently re-released in 1951 as Perils of the Darkest Jungle, and in a cut-down TV version in 1966 as Jungle Gold.

Shut In

  By

★★
“Woman who talks through doors”

After Run Hide Fight, this is another film produced by political outlet The Daily Wire. This inevitably leads to reviews which are as much concerned with the leanings of the production company, which is annoying, albeit understandable. If the Huffington Post got into the movie business, I imagine the same thing would happen. But it also ignores the fact that you would have to look hard here, to find much indication of a political agenda. A considerably bigger issue is that it’s quite dull, with a heroine who spends much of the time living up to her apparent Native American name given above. Certainly, I hoped for more from this synopsis: “When a young mother is barricaded inside a pantry by her violent ex-boyfriend, she must use ingenuity to protect her two small children from escalating danger while finding an escape.”

The mom in question is Jessica (Qualley, the daughter of Andie McDowell), a recovering drug addict who is preparing to get out of town, and start a new life with adorable little moppet, Lainey (VanDette), and her toddler, Mason. Unfortunately, her plans are derailed by a troublesome door, and the arrival of her skeevy ex-boyfriend and father of Lainey, Rob (Horowitz), who is still very much under the control of his meth habit. Dodgier still is his skeevier pal, Sammy (Gallo, making his return to features after close to a decade), who has a very poor reputation, to put it mildly. An argument with Rob leads to Jessica being nailed inside the pantry, with her two children outside, Rob storming off promising to return when she has learned her lesson. Worse follows, with Sammy sleazing his way back. As a storm erupts, he poses an unspeakable threat to Lainey, who now also has to take care of Mason, under Jessica’s increasingly fraught instruction.

Especially in the first half, this means a lot of Jessica shouting through a door, and Lainey whining “I am hungry/am scared/need the toilet” in repetitive order. It gets old very quickly. Even though Gallo certainly makes for a slimy villain, the reality is that the film has locked itself in a confined space, along with its lead character. Neither of them are going anywhere for about the first hour. Caruso attempts to ramp up the tension by having everything threatening happen out of sight of both his heroine and the audience, but I never felt particularly concerned. This is a case where it felt like we needed a more direct approach to the threat. There’s also a weird religious subtext, which is neither prominent enough to be significant or objectionable. So I was left wondering what the point of it was.

Things do pick up, at least somewhat, for the final reel, where things are allowed out of the closet. Had the script worked on that basis from the start, this might have had a chance. Instead, it’s the very definition of “too little, too late.”

Dir: D.J. Caruso
Star: Rainey Qualley, Jake Horowitz, Luciana VanDette, Vincent Gallo

Huge Shark

  By

★★★
“Girls with flare-guns”

Over in my non-GWG life, I’ve been on a bit of a kick of Chinese animal attack movies lately. These are kinda their version of SyFy original movies, though usually do have slightly better production values. I mean, how can you resist titles like The Bloodthirsty Bees or Big Octopus? Most are disposable fun, but I was surprised to find this one qualified for inclusion here. Two reviews out of one viewing? I’m fine with this. Especially, as initially it didn’t look particularly relevant, or even interesting. Four people on a boat trip, all of them ending up (largely through a series of poor choices) in the water. There’s the title creature in the area, so they opt to head for a nearby small boat, left abandoned because its occupants became a shark appetizer.

I didn’t like this very much at the start, with 3/4 of the characters being far more irritating than anything else. I was expecting the only man, Zhou Tianming (Huang), to be the focus. But, in a pleasant surprise, the film does not hang around, and disposed of him quickly. Indeed, barely by half way (although at only 68 minutes, this is never going to outstay its welcome), we are down to just one person left. The good news is, it’s the only non-irritating human, Shen Xin (Zhao). She’s a doctor and also comfortable in the water, being a good surfer and swimmer. These skills will be helpful, and the rest of the film is a marked improvement.

It is obviously inspired by things like The Shallows, particularly in the way Xin ends up stuck on a small, rocky outcrop. But I particularly liked the way the director did not feel the need to jazz things up thereafter, with flashbacks or the heroine bonding with a passing seagull. There’s nobody for Xin to speak to, so the rest of the film has almost no dialogue, and the silence adds to the tension. That’s especially the case during the night scenes, which are lit just well enough to make it seem that shadows are lurking everywhere around the rock, without requiring a pair of night vision goggles. 

It’s not hard to figure out where it’s going, especially after she gets her hands on a can of petrol and a flare gun. Though the kicker at the end – there’s usually a final moment in these films, where you think the creature is dead, then see its eggs or whatever – was definitely an unexpected treat. Overall, there’s half a good movie here, with Zhao making an effective and appealing heroine, once she gets the chance to be (translation: once everybody else in the film gets eaten). I understand the need to demonstrate the threat the shark poses. But I would really not have minded in the slightest, if they’d cut out all the soap-opera stuff about Tianming dumping his girlfriend, in favour of showing more from Xin’s battle for survival.

Dir: Huang Zhaosheng
Star: Zhao Yihuan, Huang Tao, Hong Shuang, Luan Mingyuan

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