Category: Review

Soeurs D’Armes

  By

★★½
“Army dreamers.”

This suffers from being almost exactly the same story as the previous feature we reviewed about women Kurdish fighters going up against ISIS, Les Filles Du Soleil. Both focus on a woman who is kidnapped by ISIS after they sweep through her town, and gets sold into slavery by her captors. She escapes, and joins of the all-female units who are battling the jihadist occupation. Bur there is a family member – in Filles, the heroine’s son; here, her younger brother – who is still with ISIS and has become a child soldier for them. Even if you haven’t seen the earlier film, you’ll not be surprised to hear this plays a key role in the film’s climax. The similarities are so startling, I kept expecting to hear this was a remake. It just appears to be a carbon-copy.

There are some differences, the most notable feature being the multinational nature of the women’s group here. As well as local Yezidi Zara (Gwyn), there are two young Frenchwomen, Kenza (Garrel) and Yaël (Jordana), an American sniper (Nanna Blondell, who was in Black Widow), etc. The ISIS are similar: the chief “bad guy” is English, with a strong Northern accent – though I’ve been unable to take English jihadists seriously, ever since watching Four Lions. It’s no easy task for the women’s commander (Casar) to mesh all these different upbringings, experiences and personalities into a cohesive unit.

And extending the similarity to Filles, the film has the same main weakness, and ends up spreading itself too thinly across the multiple stories it wants to tell. None of them manage to acquire the necessary depth, and most of which are more or less obvious. Not helping, the film has an unfortunate tendency to sink into drippy feminism. The montage sequence of the women training, accompanied by a pseudo-empowering “I am woman, hear me roar”-type song, marked a particular low point. More successful in general is the technically impressive action. The film’s best sequence depicts a battle between the women and a platoon of ISIS troops who are chasing a group of fleeing refugees, which includes Zara. It’s beautifully shot and well-staged, with a genuine sense of tension.

Yet, there are other, almost embarrassingly naive moments, such as the women entering a town their side has just bombed, and standing in the middle of the street for a chat, without checking the area has been cleared. I’m not a soldier, but even I know that’s… not wise. Such gaffes aside, it’s mainly the hackneyed and trite storyline that stops this from achieving any real degree of success. There is certainly a fascinating story to be told in the Kurdish women’s battalions and their part in the war against ISIS.  But that’s now two efforts which appear to have barely scratched the surface, or gone beyond the obvious. Particularly here, they seem more interested in political, religious and gender-based point-scoring than telling a good story.

Dir: Caroline Fourest
Star: Dilan Gwyn, Amira Casar, Camélia Jordana, Esther Garrel

Zrada, by Lance Charnes

  By

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

Lance Charnes and I are Goodreads friends, and I’ve read and liked two of his earlier novels; so he offered me a free review copy of this newly-published book. (There wasn’t any guarantee that I’d also like this one, but he does know my tastes pretty well.) The opener for a projected new series, this tale spins off from the author’s DeWitt Agency Files, and Carson (no first name!), the protagonist here, is an important character in the opener for the first series, The Collection. (This review avoids spoilers for Zrada, but might have some for the former novel.)

The DeWitt “Agency” operates on the edge (and sometimes over the edge) of legality in the world of super-expensive art objects trade, a milieu with a decidedly dark underbelly, which the author has thoroughly researched. But, besides the change from a male to a female protagonist, where I classified the original series as crime fiction, I’d classify this one more as straight action-adventure. The emphasis here isn’t on art, the mechanics of art swindles, etc.; the art in the story is more of a McGuffin, with the emphasis on action, danger, derring-do, weapons and explosions. (This book is set in 2016, the same year the original book was published, and the author establishes that the events in the latter have already happened.)

Ex-cop Carson (she’s divorced, but still uses her married name) is a complex, thoroughly round and very distinctive character, and a highly private person with her share of secrets. (We get to know her here in much more depth than we do in The Collection, though she was also well-realized there.) Abrasive, prickly, potty-mouthed and tough as nails, she works as a mercenary for Allyson DeWitt, and also hires out, albeit reluctantly, as an occasional hit woman for a Russian mob boss, in order to protect family who are under his gun –though she does draw a firm line in the sand against harming innocents. As that suggests, there’s more moral depth to her than you might at first think; she’s actually a person of very real integrity and honor. She’s got a conscience that she listens to; her word’s her bond, and she cares about people, though she doesn’t trust or make friends easily.

This time out, Carson’s mission is legally and ethically unobjectionable. Back in 2009, two valuable 15th-century paintings were stolen in a burglary at a German museum. Now, they’ve fallen into the hands of a Chechen fence, who’s wiling to return them to the legal owner –for 2 million Euros. If he made that exchange in any peaceful, law-abiding country with an honest and functional police force, he’d be arrested in minutes. So, he’s set up the meeting in the lawless, war-ravaged Donbass, Ukraine’s break-away Eastern region, and cut a cash-strapped (but well-armed) rebel militia into the deal as his partners. The DeWitt Agency is handling the swap. Our heroine’s job is to deliver the cash safely, act as bodyguard for the museum staffer who can authenticate the paintings, and bring both of the latter back intact, come hell or high water.

Besides being obviously combat-capable, she landed the assignment because she speaks both Ukrainian and Russian; though raised in Canada, she’s of Ukrainian stock (her maiden name was Tarasenko). As the book opens, she, the museum expert, and the Agency’s local “associate” and his two minions are pulling into the meeting place. Her nerves are on edge; a LOT of wealth is going to be on the table here, and she’s surrounded by hungry, desperate strangers (or people she knows to be morally dubious) for many miles around. (And readers who know Ukrainian won’t be reassured by the book title; it’s the word for “betrayal”….)

Here as in The Collection, Lance writes in the present tense; this takes a moment or two of getting used to if your mind is expecting past tense. But I’ve encountered this technique before in a number of books, so adjusted quickly; and it does create a sense of “you-are-there” immediacy. The plotting has its twists and turns, but it’s mostly quite believable; it’s also focused on one strand, though from different perspectives, and tautly compressed in time, occupying just nine days. Narration is in third-person, but in the vocabulary of whatever character is the current viewpoint one (usually Carson, if she’s present).

For me, it wasn’t a quick read; the author’s prose style is straightforward, but there are a lot of Slavic personal and place names (a character list and real-world map of the geographical setting is provided) and references to unfamiliar-to-me types of guns and military hardware to wade through, and I found myself reading more carefully to pick up details of description and action. However, it’s a very gripping, involving read which quickly engaged me emotionally. The narrative pace itself is quite fast, and while the action isn’t “non-stop” (any book in which it actually is would by definition be pretty shallow otherwise, which this one definitely isn’t!), there’s a lot of it, steadily punctuating the narrative. Vivid, realistic and well-realized action scenes are one of this author’s fortes.

An even more important one is development of nuanced characters who come to life as understandable people, on both sides of the country’s civil war. For instance, the militia characters are not cartoon villains, or necessarily “villains” at all, as such. Some characters definitely ARE villains (though not cartoonish ones), but even they may have an admixture of better qualities along with their sleaze. Fans of action heroines here will have the added plus of meeting another fighting female, ex-Ukrainian National Guard soldier Galina, who’s far from a Carson clone (she’s a developed, distinct character in her own right), but who can more than pull her weight in a combat situation.

There’s no sex here, just some passing references to past sexual activity (Carson’s trust issues and low opinion of marriage and males, which her one try at the former didn’t help, give her the ratchet towards commitment-free flings that you’d expect). A number of characters have foul mouths, often shaped by military culture (both Ukrainian and Russian have an exact parallel to the American f-word, which the author translates :-( ), but that’s realistic for the character types, and, refreshingly, not everybody does.

Despite the cruelty and greed often in evidence here, this is at its core a profoundly moral novel, whose messages (delivered by example rather than sermonizing) encourage readers to be kinder, less selfish, more honest and caring in their treatment of other people. My main quibble was with decisions by a couple of characters that, IMO, served the plot rather than being in character and/or very smart (and Carson’s not stupid!) But that doesn’t keep me from highly recommending this to action fans.

Author: Lance Charnes
Publisher: Wombat Group Media; available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.
A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Night Witches in the Sky

  By

★★★
“Spirits in the sky.”

kinopoisk.ru

This was made in the early eighties, when the Soviet Union and United States were making loud, growling sounds at each other. Being a product of that era perhaps explains the way this feels almost like a propaganda film, made to inspire the population to be prepared to fight in defense of the motherland. Its closest cousin on this site is therefore the similar Chinese film, The Red Detachment of Women. The topic here is one we’ve covered before: the renowned “Night Witches”, the all-female air force squadron, who carried out reconnaissance and bombing missions against the Germans on the Eastern front, during the second half of World War II.

The two central characters are Galya Polikarpova (Druz) and Oksana Zakharchenko (Grushina). The former is recuperating from injury in hospital, but sneaks out against doctor’s orders in order to rejoin her colleagues on the front lines. The pair are hauled over the coals for this by their long-suffering commanding officer (Menshikova), but are able to escape punishment due to the shortage of fliers making operational needs more important. Thereafter… Well, to be perfectly honest, not a great deal happens, and the film comes in at less than 80 minutes.  At points, it almost feels like an edited-down version of a longer feature.

For instance, there’s one point where they are being harried by a Messerschmitt – then, suddenly, they’re landing in a field to sweep up an orphaned boy, Fyodor (Zamulin), who becomes an unofficial mascot of the squadron, despite efforts by the higher-ups to send him away. There’s also a long-distance romance between Galya and another soldier that didn’t do much for me.

However, one point about this production is particularly worth noting. Director Yevgeniya Zhigulenko was actually a “night witch” herself, having been a member of the 588th Night Bomber Regiment. Initially a navigator in May 1942, she became a pilot and eventually a flight commander. By the end of the war, she had flown close to a thousand sorties, and been awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. There can’t be many films from any country set in World War II, which were directed by someone who took part in the events depicted.

This was one of two features she made, and seems more functional than particularly artistic, though may have been constrained by its budget. Some of the flying sequences are… let’s say, not particularly convincing. But perhaps due to the director’s background, it does have a down-to-earth (pun not intended) approach which does occasionally work in the film’s favour. One example would be when the women are struggling to get their planes launched out of the mud, after heavy rain. But generally, the tempo is kept upbeat and patriotically optimistic, with only occasional nods to the heavy toll of life taken by the conflict. All told, a decent effort; I’d just give the edge to the TV series Night Swallows, whose greater length allows for more depth in its characterizations.

Dir: Yevgeniya Zhigulenko
Star: Yana Druz, Valentina Grushina, Dima Zamulin, Nina Menshikova
a.k.a. V nebe ‘Nochnye vedmy’

Marie

  By

★½
“A not-so fair cop”

After an incident where she shoots dead a woman armed only with a toy gun, Marie (DeCianni) quite the police force to become a housewife. However, her husband, Barry (Spadaro), has some dodgy friends, in particular, Nadi (Regina, who also co-wrote this), a man with ties to organized crime. Barry falls behind on payments, and an unfortunate car “accident” befalls him: a recent large life-insurance policy named Nadi as the beneficiary. It’s all very shady, as Marie’s old police captain (Session) admits. However, there is just not enough evidence for the authorities to take action. That’s not an issue for Marie, however, who decides to take revenge for the loss of her husband, against Nadi and his associates.

This is almost entirely terrible, to the point that I have to wonder whether it was actually some bizarre project by actual organized crime to launder money. If so, I’m just hoping that enough years have elapsed since its release, that the statute of limitations has passed, and so me mentioning this won’t send them round to make me an offer I can’t refuse. It’s mostly a scripting issue, with far too many scenes that serve no purpose, and a heroine whose actions make little or no logical sense. Such as storming a mob birthday party, complete with gratuitous strippers (really, right from the opening, it feels like every bad boob-job in the Tri-State area got a callback for a role somewhere in this), and taking her shirt off in order to blend in, so she can whack one of them.

If DeCianni isn’t terrible, Marie seems to take a delight in announcing her moves, in a way which would, in the real world, simply make it painfully easy for her targets to take her out. Well, if they were halfway competent, at least. And the Captain seems perfectly happy for her to continue on her vigilante ways, showing absolutely no regard for law and order. About the only moment of interest sees her going above Nadi’s head to his boss, in order to suggest a partnership that would be to both of their advantages. However, this is rapidly discarded, in favour of a climactic “surprise” that a) is entirely unsurprising, and b) makes as little overall sense as anything else in this dog.

In lieu of writing anything more about this painful experience, I will instead note that a decade later, Carpenter and Regina would make Jesse, in which “Police detective Jesse turns vigilante as she investigates her brother’s murder and enters into a world of crime, corruption, and shocking deception.” Save swapping husband for brother, that seems perilously close to what we got here, not least because an IMDb review says the brother “got involved with a mafia loan shark and couldn’t repay the thousands that he owed.” Another review hints at the same twist we get here. Hmm… Maybe they did better second time around? I’m not inclined to bet on it.

Dir: Fred Carpenter
Star: Donna DeCianni, Paul Regina, Charles Sessions, John Spadaro

Rogue

  By

★★★
“Because females are the true killers.”

Megan Fox may not exactly be the first name which comes to mind when you think “battle-hardened mercenary leader.” But if you can get past your preconceptions, she’s definitely not the worst thing about this. We’ll get to what is, a little later. She plays Samantha O’Hara, leader of a group or mercs who have been hired by the governor of an African province to rescue his daughter from the Muslim group who kidnapped her. The mission initially goes well, but problems arise. First, the daughter isn’t the only woman kidnapped, forcing Sam to take along multiple civilians. Then, their evac chopper is shot down. Finally, the abandoned house in which they hole up while awaiting extraction turns out to be home to some large, toothy predators of the feline variety, leading to the quote above. Between fending off them and the pursuing kidnappers, Sam and her crew have their work cut out to survive the night until rescue arrives.

I was reminded of the series Strike Back in a number of ways, and it’s no coincidence. Director Bassett worked on the show and Winchester was one of the stars. But there’s also a similarly frantic pace and exotic location, as well as a love of giant fireballs. I’m down with all of those, even if the characterizations here are definitely on the shallow side; the film clearly feels this would be time wasted, which could be better spent on those giant fireballs. Fox is fine, though I’d say definitely should have been made to look less glamorous. There’s barely a shot here, where she doesn’t look as if she wandered onto the African veldt, right off a fashion runway: perfect hair and make-up, with not evern a smudge of dirt on those cheek-bones. However, she hurls herself about with some abandon, and I can’t fault her willingness to go outside the comfort zone of her usual roles.

No, a far bigger problem here is the CGI used for the lions, which is flat-out terrible. I don’t know what the hell happened, but any time it’s properly seen, the flaws are glaringly obvious, and severely detract from proceedings. Which is a shame, because they’re used quite well. We get an attack seen through night-vision goggles that is genuinely chilling, and there’s also the best “out of nowhere” moment since Samuel L. Jackson got sharked in Deep Blue Sea. I suggest looking at the big cats out of the corner of the eye, and they might pass muster. The film ends with an explicit pro-conservation message from the director, which seems a bit odd, given they’ve spent the previous hour and three-quarters showing us what terrifying beasts lions are. But it’s apparently okay, because they had reasons. I don’t see many people sticking around for the morality show: you’re here for Fox in khaki and the maulings. Providing you can get past the ropey CGI, this delivers adequately enough on both counts.

Dir: M.J. Bassett
Star: Megan Fox, Philip Winchester, Greg Kriek, Brandon Auret

Ravage

  By

★★½
“Harper’s bizarre.”

Wildlife photographer Harper Sykes (Dexter-Jones) is out in the wilderness of the “Watchatoomy Valley” [fictitious, but apparently located somewhere in the Virginias], when she stumbles across a group of men brutally attacking a victim. She snaps a few pics before fleeing the scene, but her attempts to report the incident to the authorities backfire immediately, and she quickly finds herself at the mercy of their leader, the appropriately-named Ravener (Longstreet). He explains the victim was a scout for big business, whose predations would destroy the natural environment, and so had to be stopped. Now, Harper is next in line. However, she is not the innocent and helpless victim they think. Even when she has the chance to escape, Harper decides to stay in the valley, and take vengeance on Ravener and the rest of his clan.

It is an interesting idea. Frequently in the horror genre, the character arc is of the “final girl”, who only resorts to violence when finally pushed too far. That certainly isn’t the case here: indeed, Harper actually fires first, gunning down one of Ravener’s henchmen as soon as she steps from her truck. Yet there’s a reason the trope of the final girl exists, because it pulls the audience along with her. Here, Harper’s actions are unexpected enough they could well disengage much of the audience, coming as they do before we’ve established much sympathy for her. Another problem is her decision to stay and actively look for her revenge isn’t well-enough defined: I was left wondering for quite some time, why she didn’t leave. Some explanation of why she’s so skilled might have been nice: not much, just a quick reference to time in the military, or a survivalist Dad, would have been fine.

The structure is also a tad problematic, with the film being told in flashback, a heavily-bandaged Harper recounting her story to a disbelieving state trooper from her hospital bed. So, we know she will survive, and the early explanations also remove much other tension from subsequent proceedings. If you’ve seen more than, roughly, two of this kind of movie, you’ll also fail to be surprised that the kindly individual to whom the heroine turns for help, ends up being anything but. I could perhaps have done without the lengthy digression into medieval torture techniques and bovine anatomy. Though both do prove at least tangentially necessary to the plot, and the latter in particular, leads to a grisly payoff.

Dexter-Jones does a good job of selling her role, and Harper generally has no compunction about acting, e.g. blowing one of her target’s brains out at point-blank range. Yet, this is at odds with some of her other actions. She literally throws up after watching the initial savagery, and the sight of a dead body later makes her shriek like a little girl. It’s all maddeningly inconsistent, and left me rather annoyed, with too much the potential here wasted through sloppy execution.

Dir: Teddy Grennan
Star: Annabelle Dexter-Jones, Robert Longstreet, Michael Weaver, Bruce Dern
a.k.a. Swing Low

Kat, by K.L. McRae

  By

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

Firstly, I’m still trying to figure out the relevance of the cover (right). With a heroine named Kat, why is there a dog pictured? It’s not as if she even owns one at any point. The “size of the fight” line… well, tenuous at best. I should probably have listened to my instincts and skipped this frankly implausible tale, about a teenage girl who is smart, attractive and a black-belt martial artist with 34E breasts. Yet she ends up having to get work as a stripper, a job at which she is naturally brilliant (thanks to adopting a pseudo-Xena persona), in order to keep her alcoholic mother out of debt. She breaks the arm of a particularly unpleasant customer, Alex, an act which gets her the attention of Alex’s business partner. He runs McKenzie Personal Security, and offers Kat a job as a trainee bodyguard.

She and the boss, a black Scotsman who is terminally ill, end up falling in love, while Alex, who had been set to inherit the business until Kat showed up, plots against her with his cronies. This ends in a nightmare gang-rape, setting up Kat to take vengeance. Oh, and the all-powerful MPS has a “black” division, which kills pedophiles and the like for money. If you are not going, “Wait, what?” at multiple points during the above synopsis, you’re a more tolerant reader than I. So much of this sounded like dubious sexual fantasy, I was genuinely surprised to discover the author is a woman. I mean, it could still be dubious sexual fantasy; I just tend to expect that kind of thing more from male writers.

The structure is all over the place. After she is attacked, Kat’s actions seem completely bizarre and pointless, and the book fast-forwards through a couple of years, until a later explanation that falls some way short of convincing. Meanwhile, neither Alex nor his allies come over as any kind of credible threat: in particular, their assault on her rural farmhouse is portrayed as painfully inept. Which, I concede, may be part of the point. As the book says, “vile bullies…might have some skills but put them up against someone who really knows their stuff and the only chance they had was blind luck.” During this, Kat sits back in her stronghold and lets her allies take care of the threat, bringing the villains to her like a Christmas present for her amusement. She certainly spends more time training in martial arts, than actually putting her skills into practice. In fact, she probably spends more time attending karaoke nights than being an action heroine. I was somewhat surprised Kat did not turn out to be a classically-trained opera singer, while she was at it.

All told, sadly, this book turned out to be a bit of a dog. I guess the cover was representative enough, after all.

Author: K.L. McRae
Publisher: Little Silver Publishing Ltd, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 2 in the Kat series.

Grand Theft Auto Girls

  By

★★
“Preferred this when it was called Counterfeiting in Suburbia.”

Turns out that The Asylum are not the only company who makes mockbusters. As its alternate name makes clear, this Lifetime TVM is clearly a knock-off of the title mentioned above, down to the same, basic plot. Two teenage girls begin doing crime, largely for the excitement. A teacher becomes aware of their exploits and decides to blackmail them for his own benefit, by making them escalate their activities. This brings them increasingly under the scrutiny of both authorities and criminal elements, not to mention parental disapproval, eventually leading to a climax where all these aspects cross paths. As my review of Counterfeiting mentioned, it wasn’t even a particularly original idea there. As you can imagine, a second-generation copy is not an improvement, even if the idea of a knock-off of a movie about forgery possesses a certain irony. 

The main twist here is that instead of counterfeiting, the crime in question is car theft. Emily (Belkin) is being brought up by her mother, after her father died in a car accident, and is working to restore her late dad’s muscle car, a task which has helped give her certain car skills, including hot-wiring them. She has teamed up with classmate Max (Helt), to boost cars, purely for joy-riding purposes, but the pair decided to make a commercial endeavour out of it, and sell the vehicles to a local chop-shop they know. Their shop teacher, Mr. Curnow (Hynes) finds out about their work, and decides to use them to start stealing high-end cars, to provide seed money for his own business involving exotic sports vehicles. This doesn’t sit well with the chop-shop owner, the cops are beginning to close in, and worst of all, Emily’s Mom is growing increasingly suspicious. When she pays Curnow a visit at his home, she is held hostage to ensure Emily completes one final task, stealing a Hummer belonging to a well-connected local club owner.

This is so painfully bland, it should have been called Barbie and Friends Do Crimes. Admittedly, I was hoping for something like a female version of a Fast and the Furious movies. As I soon as I realized this was a Lifetime TVM, all hopes of that evaporated, but it could still have avoided having less edge than a rusty butter-knife. It shoehorns in a hot teenage boy delinquent (Manley) on whom Emily can crush, largely as a means of filling time, since he serves no real plot purpose. Even the car-stealing scenes, which could have generated tension, are feeble: witness in particular the example which consists largely of one girl starting intently into her handbag, waiting for a light to go green. Hitchcock is turning in his grave. It did manage to leave me yearning nostalgically for a film which only got 2½ stars, so that’s a new experience.

While I have already written more about this than it deserves, I just discovered there is still another TVM going down the same furrow: Smuggling in Suburbia. I’ll just leave its synopsis here. mostly as a warning that the possibilities appear, sadly, endless: “Joanie gets recruited to travel with other girls to exciting cities delivering camera lenses to photographers–and falls in love with Tucker, a partner in the courier business. When she searches the camera case she’s carrying and finds diamonds hidden inside a lens, Joanie realizes she is part of an illegal smuggling ring! She just needs to pay for her brother’s cancer surgery that would otherwise bankrupt the family.” Yeah, I’m good, thanks.

Dir: Jason Bourque
Star: Zoë Belkin, Samantha Helt, Tyler Hynes, Jake Manley
a.k.a. Hotwired in Suburbia

Riddle Story of Devil

  By

★★★
“This class is a killer…”

Another example which illustrates the difference between Western and Japanese approaches to education. For here we have “Class Black”, a group containing a baker’s dozen of female pupils, eleven of whom have been tasked by a mysterious group to assassinate the twelfth, with the person who does it being given absolutely anything they want by the organizers. Yeah, it’s not quite Beverley Hills 90210, is it? Of course, nor is it quite that simple. One of the candidates, Tokaku Azuma (Suwa), is the daughter of a legendary and long-standing family of assassins, but has had enough of her enforced role. Inspired by her mother, she has decided to rebel, and so switches sides. Instead of targeting the intended victim, Haru Ichinose (Kanemoto), she vows to protect her from the other students.

Of course, it is a ridiculously contrived scenario, even given the rules which are laid down at an early “orientation”. The series (twelve x 25-minute eps, plus a bonus one) seems occasionally to be aware of this. It shows up in elements such as the class’s teacher (Sakurai), who is depicted as barely noticing three-quarters of his class has “transferred out” in about a week. But these are strictly assassins who act as necessary to the plot. For example, one attempt consists of strapping a bomb around Haru’s neck… but then giving Tokaku 24 hours to find the four-digit code necessary to disarm it. If I had the promise of whatever I wished, I’d not be as generous. I’m just sayin’…

Admittedly, when the truth is finally revealed over the final couple of episodes, it turns out things aren’t quite as they initially appeared. There are clearly far larger forces at play, pulling the strings from behind the scenes, which help explain some (though not all) of the machinations. I also like the slow reveal of information over the course of the series. We gradually learn about both Tokaku’s own background, and those of her ‘competitors’, which range from professionals to your average or garden psycho killers. Their styles of attack are equally varied: as well as the explosive devices mentioned above, there’s poison and even scissors attempted as methods of dispatch.

I was, frankly, a bit uncomfortable with the depictions of these fifteen-year-old girls. While there’s no actual nudity, the makers seem intent on coming as close as possible. That’s especially true of the bonus episode, in which the class is stranded on a desert island for a Battle Royale-style (though non-lethal) contest. Swimsuits-a-go-go. I’m on happier ground with the action – there’s some of that in just about every episode after the first – and the lack of romance (in part no doubt related to the lack of male characters) is also a plus. In the end, it’s a light enough entry to merit viewing, though I’m less sure about repeat value. It’s perhaps telling that I only finished watching it yesterday, and I already had to look up the heroine’s name.

Dir: Keizō Kusakawa
Star (voice): Ayaka Suwa, Hisako Kanemoto, Yoshino Nanjō, Takahiro Sakurai

The Huntress: Rune of the Dead

  By

★★
“Can’t see the wood for the trees. SO. Many. Trees…”

In 9th-century Scandinavia, teenage girl Runa (Stefansdotter) lives deep in the woods, with her mother, Magnhild (Idah), blind grandfather Ragnvald (Beck) and younger sister Bothild (Lyngbrant). Father Joar is notable by his absence, having gone off on a Viking raid to seek fortune for the family, and is now well overdue. However, he did at least train Runa to be a markswoman with the bow. Problems start when she finds a wounded warrior, Torulf, lying in the forest, and brings him back to their cabin, much against Magnhild’s wishes.

Torulf turns out to be a colleague of Joar’s, who tells a tale of the raiders looting a burial site – only to find vengeance coming out of the grave after them. He and Joar are the only two survivors. And when Joar returns shortly afterward, his arrival puts the whole group in peril, because of what’s inexorably following him. It’s only really at this point – two-thirds of the way in – that the film remotely begins to entertain. Up until this point, there has been a lot of sitting around the woods, and the director appears never to have heard of the maxim “Show, don’t tell.” Witness Torulf’s lengthy and frankly, boring, description of the situation, which would fit better into a Nordic saga recital than any cinematic retelling.

If the makers had gone for a siege type of film from the beginning, with the family barricaded in their cabin, and trying to fend off an unstoppable horde of barrow wights, this might have worked. It’s what I was expecting going in, and what I was waiting to see. And waiting. And waiting, while slow-moving coming of age family drama unfolded instead. I actually liked Stefansdotter in the lead role. Indeed, most of the performances are solid enough, and the same goes for the technical aspects. There was clearly some effort put in – the score, for example, is nicely done – and the forest provides a lushly appropriate backdrop against which any number of entertaining things might have unfolded. In a different, more interesting movie, anyway.

We finally do get the hand-to-hand (and hand-to-bow) battles for which we have been waiting. But only after a point by which the end credits would already be rolling on better-paced features. Even there, it is a bit on the dark side – though after my issues with Immortal Wars, the bar of what qualifies as “a bit on the dark side” has been raised considerably. This is nowhere near as bad, and you still can tell what’s going on, with a bit of peering. There’s a rough energy here which works, although the main impact is to make you wonder where the hell it has been for the rest of the movie. The makers should have sat down to watch the not-dissimilar Flukt, and built on what worked there, such as its steady flow of tension, instead of offering us 90 minutes of meandering around the woods.

Dir: Rasmus Tirzitis
Star: Moa Enqvist Stefansdotter, Yohanna Idha, Viva Östervall Lyngbrant, Ralf Beck