Category: Review

The Woman Prisoner No. 407 series

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★★½
“Cat’s entertainment.”

An apparent knock-off of Japan’s Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion and its sequels, there’s some uncertainty about the origins of this. I’ve seen it called Korean, Taiwanese or even from Hong Kong. While the cast suggest Taiwan, the director is from Korea, so that’s where I’m going to tag it. Indeed, it’s not quite clear how connected the two entries are: while they share a director and two leads, the plots don’t seem to connect up. Even the IMDb synopsis go to different countries. For the first, it says: “Kang-hie recalls from her cell how she was used by Japanese detectives to track down and destroy the Korean independence fighters. She manages to escape from prison during a break and proceeds to hunt down her former lover who was a Japanese agent.” The second? “Japan conquers China just before WW2 starts. Chinese women are captured and placed in concentration camps, where they are tortured and humiliated. Some try to escape incurring enormous risks, and death if they fail.” Insert shrug emoticon here.

Disentangling the plot for part one required me to deal with subtitles that barely even approach English, and were frequently vanishing off the side of the screen. I’m still not sure whether Don Wen Yue and Dwarn Tien Yu were the names of two different characters, or just sloppy mis-spellings of the same person’s name. Either way, the IMDb synopsis above seems rather inaccurate, unless you squint considerably. Don is an inmate at a Japanese prison-camp, where she is being harshly treated with the aim of making her give up a microfilm which her captors want to obtain. Her status as the daughter of a diplomat is of no help, apparently. However, help is on the way, as it turns out a newly arrived inmate has actually been inserted into the camp into order to assist Don in busting out – along with quite a few friends. Though escaping is only the beginning of their struggle for freedom.

The first chunk of this is painfully prosaic, with sadistic guards (though for a while I wondered if one of them was Yukari Oshima; certainly looks like her, but the era of the movie makes it unlikely). foiled escapes and generally the kind of shenanigans you would expect from the genre. There’s not much invention, and it’s hardly more than PG-rated. Things actually improve a bit once they escape, and it becomes a wilderness survival film. The women have to avoid the threats, not just of the guards in pursuit, but also crocodiles (or alligators, not that it matters) and even a killer plant which tries to wrap its tentacles around them. I’m a sucker for a good killer plant moment, and have to admit that this scene is likely responsible for about half a star of the rating above. There’s eventually an energetic battle on the beach after some betrayal, though it all feels too little, too late.

Moving onto part two, things have… changed. Part one ended with its sole survivor sailing off in a boat. This opens with its two heroines, Kuan Mou-Hua (Yip) and Kao Chuan Tze (Heo), back running through the jungle, apparently escaping from… something. I actually watched this part first, and initially presumed the specifics were all explained in the previous installment. I can now confidently state: nope. Like so much here, even down to the location, it’s unclear. Perhaps the untranslated captions shed light on this; the dubbing (the version I saw was in German with English subs!) certainly doesn’t.

Their bid for freedom is foiled, and they’re returned to captivity under their Japanese masters. Kuan is a bit of a flight risk, and the warden, Kato (Chen), decides the best thing to do is bump her off. However, rather than direct action, which would presumably cause too much paperwork, he’d rather she be killed in an “accident”. When plans to drop the pair off a cliff during their transfer fail, he tries to entrap them into escaping, drown them in a water tank, and finally burn them alive. [I guess the latter does at least prove somewhat successful, in that multiple prisoners are killed. Just not the ones they want]

With the aid of sympathetic guard , Kuan escapes – albeit without her friend, who commits suicide rather than going through further Japanese torture. Sorry: that probably merits a spoiler warning, I guess. Harried by their pursuers, Kuan and Lee make their way through the countryside – including probably the longest handcar chase in the history of cinema. So there’s that… Rather than slide into obscurity, her burning obsession is to take revenge on Kato. For he is about to escape punishment for all his crimes, including the death of Kao, being in cahoots with the judges. This burning quest to carry out vengeance, while relatively minor (it only plays a significant role in the last 15 minutes), is another element which echoes Prisoner Scorpion.

It’s all blandly forgettable: I watched it on Saturday, and by Monday, I’d forgotten so much, I couldn’t remember enough to write about it, until a swift re-view at 8x speed. This second screening largely confirmed its mediocrity, and the movie is in significant need of more, across the board. In particular, more energy: especially in its central performances, which wants someone like Meiko Kaji, around whom the plot can be anchored. Though I won’t lie, more sex and violence might have been no bad thing either, as it’s almost impressively tame. It has plenty of opportunities for nudity, right from an opening gratuitous swimming scene – it just chooses to pass them by. Viewers would likely be best off doing the same to this movie – and to be honest, perhaps the entire series.

Dir: Shin Sang-Ok
Star: Karen Yip, Heo Jin, Bong-jin Jin, Chen Hung-Lieh
a.k.a. Girl in the Tiger Cage and Revenge in the Tiger Cage

The Dawns Here are Quiet (2015)

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★★★
“Back to war”

While initially released as a film, what’s reviewed here is the extended cut, screened as four 45-minute episodes on Russia’s Channel One in May 2016. This is easily available, on both Amazon Prime and YouTube with English subtitles, so seemed more appropriate. However, it’s likely the case that your reaction will be determined largely by how familiar you are with the 1972 version. Having seen and reviewed that recently, this felt solid, but almost entirely superfluous, offering not enough in the way of a new spin on proceedings. But if you haven’t seen its predecessor, then this is potentially a little more accessible. Stemming from the post-Soviet era means it can be more cynical, and does play slightly less obviously as propaganda.

The story is almost identical. War-weary soldier Fedot Vaskov (Fyodorov) is invalided out to an anti-aircraft battery well behind the front lines. After complaining about the drunken and ill-disciplined soldiers under his command, he gets replacements – an all-female platoon. After being initially shocked, he realizes that they, under their leader Junior Sergeant Rita Osyanina (Mikulchina), are actually competent at their job. When one of them spots a couple of Nazi paratroopers in the enormous forest nearby, Vaskov takes Osyanina and four other soldiers into the woods to hunt the Germans down. Only, they discover there were actually considerably more than two, and the hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned Russians have to try and prevent the enemy from reaching their saboteurial objective.

If you’ve seen the earlier adaptation of Boris Vasilyev’s novel, there will be absolutely no surprises here. In terms of plot, this is almost point-for-point identical, and for me, that did rob the film of much tension, since I knew exactly where it was going to go, and who was going to survive. Again, though: that shouldn’t particularly be taken as a knock on this version, and the performances, especially from the two leads are equally as good. The differences are mostly stylistic: while both do use flashbacks in order to tell us about the women’s lives before the war, the ones here feel considerably more grounded, compared to the dream-like sequences in the seventies version. They are also notably harsher about life in Stalin’s Russia, such as one woman’s family being ruthlessly exiled to Siberia.

There are a couple of sequences of gratuitous, albeit entirely innocent, nudity, which I didn’t expect in a TV series. I’ll leave it up to you to decide, whether this is a recommendation or a warning. Personally, I had no complaints. However, I would definitely have preferred it if the makers had been a little more inventive in their adaptation. While going down the same path as the earlier, well-loved movie was probably the safer approach, it renders the entire thing largely pointless. Well-made and still entertaining, don’t get me wrong. But carbon copies [Kids! Ask your parents!] are always going to feel inferior, to the source which they are imitating.

Dir: Renat Davletyarov
Star: Pyotr Fyodorov, Anastasia Mikulchina, Evgenia Malakhova, Agniya Kuznetsova

Lovely But Deadly

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★★★
“No, no! Not the chopped liver!”

After her brother drowns while high on drugs, Mary Ann “Lovely” Lovitt (Dooling) goes undercover at his school, Pacific Coast High, in order to root out the dealers responsible for his death. She discovers that the problem is far larger than is admitted, with those involved, and includes not just some of the most revered pupils e.g. star players on the football team (and, on more than one occasion, their jealous girlfriends!). A number of adults are also culpable, including leading school boosters, all the way up to leading local businessman ‘Honest Charley’ Gilmarten (Herd). Fortunately, Mary Ann is an expert in martial-arts, so proves more than capable of defending herself when attempts are made to dissuade her from investigating further.

The first thirty minutes of this are startlingly entertaining, which was a real shock. Sure, Dooling’s fighting skills leave a little to be desired… okay, a lot to be desired, yet her opponents sell the moves with surprising effectiveness. It feels almost like a parody of high-school films, made in the Philippines as a sly comment on President Duterte’s war on drugs, though the soundtrack appears to have strayed in from a Bond film. That applies especially to the title song, I believe sung by Marcia Woods, with its classic lyrics, such as “So low, so low, so low/How low, how low can they go?” And how could you go wrong with a film where, ten minutes in, the heroine force-feeds a dealer his own supply, while telling him a story about an old possum? Or where Mary Ann and her friend (O’Leary) are chased through the school by a pack of people in fencing uniforms?

Unfortunately, it can’t sustain this loopy energy, and loses its way badly in the middle. At least the scene where Honest Charley hits on our heroine is less creepy than you might imagine: Dooling was 27 at the time this came out, so was not exactly a convincing high-school student. She’s not the only one: school football star ‘Mantis’ Manigian is played by Rick Moser who, far from school, was actually a member of the Pittsburgh Steelers at the time. There are still sporadic moments of interest in the rest of the film. The costume party that turns into a cat-fight, leading to the immortal line at the top of this review. Or the extended climax at the docks, where Lovely is helped out by the rest of her kung-fu class, all fetching clad in their matching, zebra-striped karategi.

However, for every one of these, there are two or more scenes of tedium, such as the subplot involving Mary Ann’s boyfriend and his ambitions to be a singer (the actor involved ended up producing David Hasselhoff albums, which should be penance enough for anyone). In the end, while likely remaining more entertaining than most of its ilk, this (probably inevitably) falls short of its alternative tag-line, “James Bond couldn’t… Bruce Lee wouldn’t… They can’t do what Lovely can!!”

Dir: David Sheldon
Star: Lucinda Dooling, Michael O’Leary, John Randolph, Richard Herd

Gears of a Mad God, by Brent Nichols

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

Early 20th-century pulp-fiction author Howard Philips Lovecraft created a substantial corpus of writing, mainly in the short story format and mostly in the form of horrific science fiction which in many ways reads like classic supernatural fiction. The most enduring body of his work has been the novellas and stories making up what has come to be called his Cthulhu Mythos, based on the premise that the prehistoric Earth was dominated by the Great Old Ones, or Elder Gods, malevolent and repulsive, but very powerful and dangerous, alien beings who were ultimately dethroned by another alien race, and whose hidden remnants want to regain their past dominance. A number of Lovecraft works present the idea that these beings have an evil and often murderous cult of human worshipers, handed down from the dawn of mankind, who seek to further their return to power. Numerous later writers have been inspired by HPL’s example to create their own pastiches and spin-offs of the Mythos. Brent Nichols’ self-published Gears of a Mad God novella series (there are six in all), of which this book –set in Canada in May 1921, mainly on Vancouver Island– is the opener, is one of these spin-offs. One of my Goodreads friends gave this one a favorable review; and since I’m a Lovecraft fan and the novella is free for Kindle and relatively short at 98 pages, I downloaded it.

An important point to note is that, while HPL’s Mythos supplies the premise here, Nichols’ prose style is nothing like the older writer’s “purple prose;” his diction is modern, straightforward and direct, with no stylistic embellishment and a minimum of description. Another is that the focus here is exclusively on the cultists of the Great Old Ones, and the effort to counter them; the sinister objects of their devotion are strictly off-stage. (For all that we see here, the Great Old Ones could just as well be figments of the cultists’ imagination.) Also unlike Lovecraft, even though there are a couple of instances here of characters driven mad by exposure to the cult’s secrets, Nichols eschews existential pessimist sermonizing and “morals of the story,” and doesn’t harp on the idea that unvarnished exposure to reality would actually be enough to drive virtually anybody insane. Of course, our protagonist/viewpoint character here is female, something which is never found in HPL’s own work. So despite the inspiration, the effect of reading this is much different from the works of the original Cthulhu canon. The title also misuses the term “steampunk” (it features a heroine who’s mechanically oriented, but that doesn’t make it steampunk!), and the phrase “Gears of a Mad God” makes no particular sense –some machinery here has gears, but they aren’t owned by any Elder God, mad or sane, and they aren’t focal to the story.

On the positive side, the tale is fast-paced, held my interest, and is frequently exciting and suspenseful; I felt that Nichols handles action scenes well. There is a clearly-drawn moral dimension to the conflict; Colleen makes choices that involve putting protection of others before self-interest, and her moral struggles with lethal force are realistic for a young woman with no combat training or experience. She does pick up fighting skill by use, and her mechanical ability is a nice touch (though clock-making and repair actually isn’t as credible a source of physical strength and knowledge of large-scale mechanical processes as say, auto repair would have been).

The plot is linear, with no particular twists (I actually envisioned one I was sure was coming, and was quite surprised when it didn’t materialize!). On the negative side, the character development is not deep (Colleen is the best-developed character, but she’s still not very fully realized), there’s not a lot of texture, and I wouldn’t say there’s a strong sense of place either in her native Toronto or in Victoria. (I did learn that Vancouver, British Columbia is NOT on Vancouver Island –but Victoria is!) But unlike one reviewer, I didn’t find the U.S. Bureau of Investigation agents and their Canadian liaisons ineffectual; and I didn’t have a problem with squaring the arrival of characters on the island with the ferry schedule –I made the assumption that their appearance in the story was not necessarily always virtually identical to their landing time. (But I did have a quibble with the idea that the U.S. President had contacted the Canadian Prime Minister “last year” –the President in 1920 was Woodrow Wilson, who was then pretty much non-functional due to his physical and nervous breakdown.) IMO, the emphasis on the boyfriend’s “antediluvian attitude” (to quote one review) near the end was necessary to set up a significant choice by the heroine.

Overall, I liked this tale. But even though it’s obviously only the beginning of a larger story arc, and the ending, while not a cliff-hanger as such, is clearly meant to lead into further confrontation with the cult, I’m still not captivated enough by the characters or the story to invest in buying the sequels.

Note: There’s no sexual content (Colleen and her boyfriend, at one point, lay down on a bed with their clothes on and get some needed sleep, but they don’t do anything else), and no bad language beyond a d-word and two h-words.

Author: Brent Nichols
Publisher: Self-published; available through Amazon, both for Kindle (free!) and as a printed book.
Book 1 of 6 in the Gears of a Mad God Book series
A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

A Good Woman is Hard to Find

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★★★★
“Hammer time!”

2020’s first seal of approval goes to this uber-gritty Irish film, starring Sarah Bolger, whose most familiar to us from Into the Badlands. While her GWG creds there are overshadowed by the likes oE Emily Beecham, safe to say Bolger makes up for lost time here. She plays single mother Sarah Collins, who is struggling to come to terms with the recent, unsolved murder of her husband. Barely managing to make ends meet, her life is upended when entry-level criminal Tito (Simpson) breaks in, seeking sanctuary. He has stolen some drugs belonging to top boss Leo (Hogg), and offers Sarah a cut of the proceeds if she’ll act as his safe-house. Very reluctantly, she agrees. Needless to say, it doesn’t go as they plan.

And that’s putting it very mildly. I won’t spoiler it, but there’s a reason she ends up visiting a hardware store, and weighing up whether an axe or a hack-saw is better suited for her “project” [the correct answer, it appears, is both…]. Yet, the character arc from mild-mannered mother who basically won’t say “Boo!” to a goose, into someone capable of going about with a bowling-bag of highly unpleasant content, is remarkably plausible. Because it’s almost all driven by fierce maternal love for her two children, one of whom has been traumatized into muteness by witnessing his father’s murder. Sarah will do anything to protect and provide for them, and as motivation for taking up a criminal lifestyle, it’s a far sight better than we got in the similarly themed Widows or The Kitchen.

It also does not soft-pedal its violence. The extended sequence where Sarah goes over the edge and becomes a killer for the first time, at one point almost teeters into farce with her first choice of weapon. But the further it goes on – to the point of death and beyond, the grimmer it gets. I was reminded of the line spoken by Macbeth: “I am in blood stepped in so far that should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er.” This is made clear from the opening scene, which sees a gore-drenched heroine taking to the shower, setting the scene for its subsequent savage tone. We only find out the source of the blood later, and it won’t be the last time it gets spilled.

It’s a spectacular performance from Bolger, portraying a woman who is ground down to almost nothing, before finding fate presenting her with an opportunity – albeit one which comes with a frightening cost in terms of her humanity. Yet her portrayal manages to take the audience along with the character on that journey. The rest of the cast pales in comparison, though it probably doesn’t help that non-British audiences may need subtitles for some of the dialogue; even I was going “What?” at some points, particularly for Tito’s lines. Still, neither that nor some suspiciously convenient skill with a firearm (likely a necessary contrivance) are sufficient to derail a thoroughly successful slab of Irish noir.

Dir: Abner Pastoll
Star: Sarah Bolger, Edward Hogg, Andrew Simpson, Jane Brennan

Mind and Machine

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★½
“Circuit bored.”

Intelligence without morality to govern it, is psychopathy. So what happens when you create an intelligent machine, but deliberately avoid installing any kind of moral compass? It’s an interesting idea for a film. Not that you’d know it from this unconvincing effort, which sucks the potential out of it. In this near-future – it’s set in 2024, close enough to now, no actual work is required on the part of the makers – androids have become part of everyday society in many roles. Crime boss Isaac Lynch (Restegar) orders technician Leo Cameron (West) to make one without a conscience, so that it can be used as an assassin, saving those pesky hitman fees. Only Leo crafts the robot, Maya (Guerra), in the image of his late wife. On the plus side: he gets to see his wife again. On the other hand: she’s an amoral killer. Didn’t think that through too well, did he?

And that’s the problem here: not much of this makes sense. Not Leo’s actions. Not the way nobody else came up with the idea first; most obviously, the military would be all over this in reality. Not how Isaac’s entire criminal organization consists of about three people, yet is still capable of pushing technological innovation into uncharted territory (and he also kills a customer, rather than letting him pay their debt). Not even the way Maya – and this is so obvious, it’s not a spoiler – eventually rebels against Isaac’s orders. It seems like writer/director Humphrey decided where he wanted the film to end up, but couldn’t be bothered to figure out how it could logically reach that point.

I’ll give Guerra credit for her portrayal of Maya, which is credibly lacking in emotion. Though again. there’s no consistency there, nor any explanation for her decision to revolt, after being made to torture an undercover agent. Why is killing unproblematic for this machine, yet torture represents a breaking point? And the lead actress’s reluctance to disrobe does lead to one of the most embarrassingly unconvincing body doubles I’ve ever seen: Guerra’s hair is black and straight, while that of the woman standing in for her, is brown and wavy. If you can’t do it well, Humphrey should have written it out of his script, since it’s not as if it was necessary to the plot.

Maybe he needed it for running-time purposes. Because this barely qualifies as a feature, lasting a mere 70 minutes, and that includes a slow, slow end credit crawl. It certainly feels considerably longer, and my interest steadily waned, as it failed to provide any interesting answers, or ask any interesting questions. A slowly-developing self awareness and independence, and more focus on Maya, rather than (the thoroughly uninteresting) Leo and Isaac, might have been the way to go. But then, that was Ex Machina, wasn’t it? This is a poor imitation thereof, and one which sporadic bursts of low-rent violence can do nothing to rescue.

Dir: Brock Humphrey
Star: Ariana Guerra, Oryan West, Sal Rastegar, Bobby Hernandez

Prime Suspect: Tennison

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★★★½
“Before she was famous…”

Origin stories are all the rage, it appears. Though it’s probably just coincidence we watched this prequel to Prime Suspect the same week that Joker came out. It’s not quite as successful in terms of reinventing an iconic character, or shedding light on how they became who they are. This is largely because lead actress Martini is not Helen Mirren. Though it would unfair to hold that against her – because, let’s face it, who is? While I found it interesting to see some of the early influences which turned Jane Tennison into who she is, what she became is more notable than how she got there. It’s probably more enjoyable if you can separate them, and just enjoy this on its own terms, as a period police procedural.

It’s 1973, and we join the 22-year-old WPC 517, Jane Tennison (Martini), as she tries to find a footing in her first posting, to Hackney Police Station in East London. There, she has to cope with a time where women police officers were largely sidelined to making tea and taking messages. However, one of the detectives there, D.C.I. Len Bradfield (Reid) takes her under his wing, as the investigation begins into the murder of a prostitute, found strangled with her own bra. Meanwhile, long-term criminal Clifford Bentley – against whom Bradfield has a grudge – has barely got out of jail, before he and his family are planning a new robbery. But Jane is about to discover that things are not always as cut and dried as she’d like, and that the law and justice can be different, too.

It’s when the heroine is forced to confront these dilemmas that the show is at its most interesting. For example, when Tennison witnesses a colleague roughing up a suspect in the murder, actions which could allow them to go free. Should she speak up or keep silent? There are no easy answers, and depicting the dramatic tension is where Martini is at her most effective, along with trying to deal with her “helicopter mother”, who doesn’t appreciate her little girl is all grown up. [As an aside, there’s no denying the actress does bear more than a slight resemblance to a young Helen Mirren. Compare the pic on the right to this one of Mirren, from 1972, a year before this takes place]

Of course, if you’ve seen the episodes with Tennison all grown up, you’ll not be surprised by much here. There’s no way, for example, that Jane and Len are ever going to end up happily ever after. That said, the double-whammy in which this is accomplished was undeniably effective. It goes some way to explaining her aloofness in middle-age, as the scars of her early experiences. Being able to hang more personality trains on FutureJane, in a similar way, would have helped link this to what was to come. Instead, it’s just a little too disconnected, though on its own merits, we still were solidly entertained.

Dir: David Caffrey
Star: Stefanie Martini, Sam Reid, Blake Harrison, Alun Armstrong
a.k.a. Prime Suspect 1973

Prospect

  By

★★½
“Get the little things right, but…”

Coming in on a wave of hype, e.g. “The Best Indie Science Fiction Movie Since Moon“, I guess I should have listened – because I didn’t think Moon was all that great either. Here, there’s a great job done of creating a universe, and even the two lead characters are interesting enough. It’s just an abject failure to fill the world with a decent story. Still: that world… It’s a grubbily lived-in and analog future version of space, controlled with retro-styled switches, and where the beauty of the cosmos is largely glimpsed through undersized, dirty spaceship windows.

Resident in it are teenage girl Cee (Thatcher) and her father (Duplass), barely scratching a living by mining resources out of alien creatures on the surface of a planet with a toxic atmosphere. Fortune beckons, however, because he has got word of a mother-lode which will set them up for life. Unhappily, their attempt to reach it is derailed by an encounter with Ezra (Pascal) and his partner, two other prospectors of dubious morality. One thing leads to another, and Cee suddenly finds that her survival is dependent on forging an extremely uneasy alliance with Ezra.

There’s definitely the feeling that this is intended to be a space Western, with a lot of the characters seeming like they come off the range, wearing space-helmets instead of Stetsons. The weapons wielded, though hi-tech rail-guns, operate more like a Winchester Model 1873, and there’s additionally a sense of lawlessness, with the planet being a wild frontier. If you want justice – as Cee certainly does – she will have to administer it herself, because no-one else is going to do so. True Grit feels like an influence there. On occasion, the scope suddenly broadens out too, with a wide, magnificent landscape – only one with an F-sized planet hanging low in the sky.

This is all quite lovely. The problem is a incredibly underwhelming script, not helped by dialogue which often seems to border on gibberish. For example, “We have three cycles for the job before we have to catch the slingback.” What happens if you don’t catch the slingback? Is that a very bad thing? And is three cycles a lot? Hours? Days? Weeks? We never know, because Cee’s watch tells the time in some bizarre foreign language. The same obtuseness goes for much of the plot: too often, we’re never clear who’s doing what and to whom, or for what purpose. Perhaps the original short film fared better on this front?

Certainly, it feels as if Cee gives up her quest for revenge here rather too easily. Though she still has a somewhat interesting character arc. Forced to come out from under the protection of her father, and fending for herself, especially given the hostile environment, is no piece of cake. Focusing on that aspect, rather than the vaguely-defined efforts to reach the buried treasure and/or get safely off the planet’s surface, might have proved more effective.

Dir: Zeek Earl and Chris Caldwell
Star: Sophie Thatcher, Pedro Pascal, Jay Duplass

Underwater

  By

★★★
“Beneath the sea, no one can hear you scream…”

You know the story: A team of experts in a closed contained space, having to deal with ugly monsters and struggling to survive. The blue-print of this variation on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (better known as: Ten Little Indians) was obviously the classic Alien (1979) that introduced us to one of the defining girls with guns, Ellen Ripley. This format was then repeated endlessly by Hollywood, as well as anyone else.

A special sort of subgenre of this story formed in the late 80s, when studios came to the idea of exchanging outer space for the inner space of the (deep) sea. That resulted in usually trashy but mostly entertaining movies such as Deep Star Six, Leviathan, Virus, Sphere or Deep Rising. Heck, even AlienS director James Cameron created a more positive version of the usual underwater interaction, with friendly aliens, in “The Abyss” (1989). But as far as I can see this genre faded with the 90’s. Recent watery efforts were more shark- or crocodile-focused!

The Alien franchise seemd to be stuck in the hands of Ridley Scott, who wasn’t willing to give anyone else a shot at the series, He said, before Alien: Covenant and about Prometheus, “I thought we should move on. I thought the aliens were done.” Well, if what you deliver is worse than what we got before, why bother? And if you think like that, maybe you shouldn’t cling on to ownership of the franchise. Audiences usually wont the same experience they had last time and if you don’t deliver, will be disappointed. Here’s another pearl of wisdom: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! So 20th Century Fox came up with the idea of resurrecting this subgenre under water. And it has to be said, while Underwater is hardly original, and definitely derivative if you know the Alien movies, it is better and certainly more entertaining than the last two Alien entries from Scott. It never drags, and the “idiocy level” that too often comes with this genre and its tropes, is credibly low.

The story in brief: Deep sea engineers are faced with a sudden accident, after water has flooded their facilities, destroying a large amount of the installation and probably killing off many of the workers who didn’t manage to get to the escape pods. A couple of survivors who find each other must go on an obstacle course deep, well… under water to reach these pods. Okay, that plot probably wouldn’t trouble a match-box, but that does not necessarily have to be a negative. I’ve found in the past, that very often those movies with a simpler, more straighforward premise are the ones which are the most efficient in delivering the goods.

So it proves with this. Yes, we all have seen it before – but not necessarily better. When I look at the list above of “underwater horror movies”, most of them were not good at all. And what the Alien franchise itself delivered, starting probably with David Fincher’s life-less Alien 3 (1992) and ending with Scott’s efforts “to move in a new direction,” was also not very satisfying. Considering that, Underwater is actually quite decent. There is no long build-up with character presentations that have tended to fall flat in recent films of this ilk. The movie goes into action almost immediately, hardly giving Kristen Stewart (with her short-cut blonde hair bearing a strange similarity to 90’s Lori Petty) the chance to finish brushing her teeth.

And it continues at quite a brisk pace, within an economic and more restrained than usual running-time of 95 minutes. We get action, tension, deep sea monsters attacking and reducing the crew, some decent character interaction, a tiny droplet of blood and rather too much of T. J. Miller joking and Jessica Henwick screaming while running around. I’ve seen worse. Much worse, and recently. Indeed, if you are just looking for some good horror survival action and a distraction from your daily routine, this film may do it for you.

Stewart herself seems to have some bad luck. After years making indie-movies in a post-Twilight wilderness, the hope was obviously to return to big Hollywood movies. But this seems to be even more of a financial failure at the box-office than her recent “woke” Charlie’s Angels remake. Though this is actually good entertainment, and free of the usual agenda that has sadly become commonplace nowadays in Hollywood movies. That may have to do with the fact that the movie was already finished – like the upcoming The New Mutants from Fox – in 2017! For reasons I don’t know it was kept back. Did Scott exercise some power to distance it from Alien: Covenant, which also came out in 2017? Did they want to wait until Covenant had squeezed out all possible financial revenues?

Whatever the reason, it became part of Disney when the mega-conglomerate bought 20th Century Fox. And obviously, Disney didn’t really care for the welfare of this movie, so they just threw it out there, with what felt like hardly any marketing. Which is a pity, because it’s a nice bigger-budget horror movie that could have attracted more people in cinemas. I personally guess it might get a second life on Netflix or the new Disney online streaming service later.

The film also stars Vincent Cassel who was the only other actor I knew of the underwater crew, apart from Stewart. Mind you, you are not spending much screen time with most of them. Nevertheless there are some interactions that, if not really going deep, give enough of an emotional connection at least to wish they will get out of this unfortunate situation alive. But mainly it’s a showcase for Kristen Stewart who – and I really have to stress I don’t typically care for her much at all – gives a good and credible performance here.Though you’ll have to deal with the fact that she is playing a deep sea rig engineer here, a role I would probably have associated with a muscle-bound man!

I personally wish the last two Alien films by Scott would have been something like this. It could have been a lot more satisfying than the time we had to spend with David, the Fassbender-android. That said the Alien formula – like the Terminator one – seems to have had its day, thanks to having been exploited what feels like a few hundred times. It’s really time for Hollywood to come out with some new ideas. Therefore only 3 stars from me, albeit well-earned ones!

Dir: William Eubank
Star: Kristen Stewart, Vincent Cassel, Jessica Henwick, John Gallagher Jr.

The Chinese Woman: The Barbados Conspiracy, by Brian N. Cox

  By

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

Though just called “Brian Cox” on the book, it’s probably wise to begin by distinguishing the author here from his more famous namesakes, both the actor and the “rock-star physicist.” That said, this is a brisk if not particularly memorable spy novel. The main outstanding feature is that the heroine is neither American nor British, but Chinese. Rather odd to be reading this very positive portrayal of Communist state security personnel, during the protests in Hong Kong.

She goes by a couple of different names in the book. As a 12-year-old kid, she’s Zhen Xiaomei, and watches her mother and family get brutally slain by gangsters Wu Xing and Meng Hong, due to an unpaid debt. [If you’ve seen Kill Bill Volume 1, you’ll be aware of how this is going to work out for them…] A quarter century later, she works as an agent for the Ministry of State Security, Second Bureau, when she is given a mission to travel to the United States and bring back a fugitive to stand trial in China. Initially, Xiaomei is reluctant – but her tune changes, when she discovers the fugitive is Wu Xing.

Under the guise of PhD student Li Mei, she begins trying to track Wu down in Seattle, by befriending his girlfriend Han Xia. She also encounters FBI agent Sean McNamara, and begins a relationship with him – initially as a source of information, but it’s never that simple, is it? Complicating matters further is the titular plot, in which a rogue faction of hawks in the Taiwanese and American military, are plotting to launch a nuclear missile at Taiwan, and blame it on China. A jaunt to the Caribbean? Don’t mind if Li Mei does. Though it’s kinda awkward when she bumps into Sean there.

These plots never quite mesh, and it would probably have served each of them better, if they had been handled in their own volume.  There’s also a thread about a serial killer, which doesn’t appear to serve much purpose, and the split of the story between Xiaomei and Sean sometimes makes it feel like the author was uncertain who was really his central character. Cox also tends to go overboard on the descriptive aspects of his characters, beyond what is necessary, and certainly what is interesting. A couple of well-written facets are more effective than a head-to-toe description: we don’t need to identify them in a police line-up.

The main positive is the heroine, who is a strong and effective agent, smart and thoroughly competent in her actions. Her background makes her considerably more interesting than McNamara, and I was left wanting to know more about her further adventures. While not a great work of literature, it is an entertaining one, and I ripped through it quickly. The second volume is free, through a link in #1, in exchange for your email address. At that price, I’m almost tempted to sign up.

Author: Brian N. Cox
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 4 in The Chinese Woman series.