Category: Review

Tiger Girl

  By

★★★½
“Changing of the stripes”

Maggie (Dragus) just failed the police entry exam in humiliating fashion, and is now taking a course to become a security officer, despite her meek nature. She encounters Tiger (Rumpf), a street punk girl who is everything Maggie is not: brash, confident and perfectly willing to go toe-to-toe with anyone she feels deserves it. The pair strike up an unlikely friendship, with a purloined uniform allowing Tiger to join Maggie in her security work, and in turn engage her increasing fondness for mayhem and violence. Meanwhile, Tiger’s example helps bring Maggie – or ‘Vanilla’, as Tiger calls her in half-mocking endearment – out of her shell. Though Tiger’s drug-dealing friends are less than impressed to find her palling around with a wannabe cop. And as Maggie begins to adopt a more… physical approach to confrontation, it becomes clear that Tiger’s restraint is something Maggie does not possess.

This offers an interesting exercise in societal contrasts, between two young woman, both making their own way in the world, in radically different directions. Maggie would nominally be the approved one, with her plans for a career in law enforcement, while Tiger engages in petty theft and mugging (albeit ‘only those who deserve it’) in order to keep her and her two druggie boyfriends fed, in the attic in which they squat. However, the longer the film goes on, the more you realize it’s Tiger who has the stronger moral compass. Even though she engages in criminal conduct, often for the mere fun of it, she has her own set of rules – with which you may or may not agree – that guide her conduct and keep her out of serious trouble. When Vanilla, revelling in her new found confidence, begins to go beyond those, it sets the stages for a confrontation between the friends.

I must confess, there are times when I thought this was going to end up in a twist where Tiger was a figment of Maggie’s psyche, just like… well, a certain cult movie of the late nineties, shall we say (in case you haven’t seen it!). Nothing quite so psychological shows up, and to be honest, the actual plot is probably the least interesting thing this has to offer. For instance, there’s a subplot where Tiger’s pals end up in debt to “Biggie,” a local drug-dealer, and it’s up to Tiger to get them out of the mess. Despite an interesting twist, when we find out Biggie is actually another woman, the thread just peters out into nothing. Rather more successful is the droll humour, for example, depicting Vanilla’s degenerating relationship with her completely straight-laced security teacher (Feldschau).

It it, however, a film which stands or falls largely on the strength of the central pair of performances, and both actresses are very good in their roles. I just wish we had got the complete version of the full-on fight between the young women and a gallery owner, which the film merely teases.

Dir: Jakob Lass
Star: Ella Rumpf, Maria-Victoria Dragus, Enno Trebs, Orce Feldschau

Avia Vampire Hunter

  By

★
How to finish 2018: one of the all-time worst action heroine flicks.

I usually try to be tolerant when it comes to low-budget cinema and the resulting flaws. There are some things which you just cannot expect when a film is financed on the maker’s credit-card, and I’m willing to overlook rough edges if a movie can hold my interest in other ways. However, there are times when the end product is almost irredeemably bad, with few, if any, merits. This would be one such case. Your script is the main area which should be an area of equal opportunity, regardless of budget. Here, if anything, the flaws at the technical level are magnified by the failings on the page.

Vast chunks simply don’t reach basic coherence, with scenes that come out of nowhere, go nowhere or are entirely unconnected to anything. And what little does makes sense is completely uninteresting. Let me give you an example of the former:

  • Insert shot of the kind of clock you’d find at your grandmother’s
  • 30 seconds of hand-held camera moving towards the heroine as she kneels in a forest
  • 90 seconds of her twirling a sword to no purpose, where my main reaction was “Why are there table napkins stuck to the trees?”
  • 25 second of hand-held camera backing slowly away from the heroine.

The basic story sounds as if it might have some potential. Avia (Valentino) saw her family attacked by vampires, and made it her life’s mission to seek out and destroy them, with the help of police officer Detective Raymond Guy (Jackson). Except it’s executed in such a low-energy and incompetent fashion, from the performances through the woeful audio mix, to the action – the only person who has a slight clue how to fight is Tomahawk, who plays the master vampire. Otherwise, the sole entertainment value to be found is in mocking its inadequacies. I will say, there’s plenty of scope there, from the moment Guy and his partner don’t notice Avia bringing a large samurai sword when she tags along with them on a routine interrogation.

The whole thing about her family? Forgotten entirely after it has been mentioned. The relationship between Avia and Raymond? Thoroughly unconvincing, sinking to “howlingly bad” during their fully-clothed sex scene. The use of music is particularly execrable, being completely inappropriate to what’s happening on screen to the point it appears to have been added at random. This is despite the presence of eighteen names in the opening credits as “music by”, not counting the London Philharmonic Orchestra, whose presence here is… well, let’s say it came as a surprise to me, and probably to them as well.

The only moment where I had interest briefly roused, was the suggestion made by Raymond’s partner (who vanishes for the middle two-thirds) that Avia might actually be completely insane, and killing innocent people in the belief they are vampires. Her slaughter of a family supports that theory, and it could have been an interesting direction. Except that the film has already established she has official sanction for her acts, Raymond clearly doesn’t give a damn about the possibility, and the final coda has Avia saying it doesn’t matter either. So why bother? Indeed, “why bother” is an entirely appropriate summary of the whole enterprise. Take my advice, and don’t.

Dir: Leon Hunter
Star: Allison Valentino, Rodney Jackson, Cliff Lee, Antonio Tomahawk

Fighting With My Family

  By

★★★½
“The fall gal.”

This biopic of WWE Women’s Champion Paige, a.k.a. Saraya Knight from the English seaside town of Norwich, gets a lot of things right about professional wrestling. In particular, it strikes a good balance between the various aspects – positive and negative – of the sports entertainment business. Over the past twenty years, Chris and I have been intermittently involved with the independent end of the wrestling scene, like Knight and her family, and this captures the low-rent showbiz aspects beautifully. Yet it doesn’t shortchange the seductive – almost addictive – appeal of performance for a responsive crowd, or the potential escape from a drab life it offers someone like Saraya/Paige.

This was inspired by a documentary of the same name, which covered everything up to her successful tryout with WWE, but not much thereafter. To be honest, that’s probably the most entertaining section, being a thoroughly amusing series of escapades, populated by quirky and amusing characters, inhabiting the low-rent world at the bottom of the wrestling pyramid. Not the least of these are her parents, plaved by Frost and, surprisingly, Lena Headey. It’s… strange seeing Cersei Lannister putting people into a headlock. [Fun fact: I saw Saraya’s Mum wrestle at the Fairfield Halls in Croydon, back in the late nineties – even if they mis-spelled her name on the flyer!]

Once she goes over to the United States, it becomes a rather more predictable “fish out of water” story, with the dark, somewhat sullen Paige a radical departure from the other wannabe Divas, who all align more with the three T’s required by WWE at the time: teeth, tan and tits. The highlight in this phase is Vaughn’s performance as acerbic (and fictional) coach Hutch Morgan, who pulls no punches in his quest to winnow out the chaff for the benefit of his employer. For Paige, that transition is about becoming comfortable in her own skin, and repairing the relationship with her brother (Lowden), who also wanted – arguably, even more than Saraya – to reach the WWE, but was not offered a spot. To no-one’s surprise (even if you don’t know the story, this sticks to the well-worn path of the underdog sports film), she does so, and the film ends as she makes her debut, the night after Wrestlemania in New Orleans.

In terms of happy endings, that’s probably for the best. For injury forced Paige’s eventual retirement in April 2018, at the age of just 25, after barely two years of active competition and four in total. Not mentioned by the film, it’s a salutary reminder: a pro wrestler’s career is hard, and can be short. This is certainly a story which has been dramatized for cinematic purposes, probably inevitably. Yet the basic thread is intact – and, more importantly, the spirit of the people who inspired it is honoured. Having it directed by Merchant, previously best known as Ricky Gervais’s sidekick, proves a masterstroke. In his able hands, and helped by a winning performance from Pugh, the hackneyed material proves more than tolerable.

Dir: Stephen Merchant
Star: Florence Pugh, Jack Lowden, Vince Vaughn, Nick Frost

The Azrael Initiative, by K. Hanson

  By

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

This feels less like a novel, than a novelization of a screenplay, adapted by a not particularly proficient writer. The text is littered with paragraphs which seem more like stage directions than literature, and is startlingly repetitive. For example, in one section near the beginning of the book, five of seven consecutive paragraphs start with, “As she/Kayla…” It’s not necessarily a bad screenplay, with an idea containing some potential. But it would be in need of several rewrites before any studio exec would sign off on it.

The heroine is the Kayla mentioned, an engineering student at South Dakota State University, who is present when ISIS terrorists attack the campus. She and best friend Olivia, an aspiring nurse, take down the attackers before the intended massacre can be executed, and become media darlings as a result. This turns to tragedy when an apparent revenge bomb kills Kayla’s family. Seeking vengeance, the pair accept an offer from the mysterious Mr. Hightower, to join a secret government program and train as anti-ISIS insurgent. They’re inserted into Al-Raqqah, the capital of the ISIS caliphate in Syria, in order to sabotage and disrupt the group’s operations, causing as much chaos and carnage as possible.

They certainly succeed, and there’s no shortage of incidents, from gun-battles in the streets through to a daring rescue attempt on a capture British airman. These are when Hanson is at his best, although the ineptness of ISIS is questionable – that they are so easily and repeatedly bested by a pair of students after a few months of training is difficult to accept. Indeed, how quickly could someone go from no knowledge of Arabic to being able to pass impeccably as a native? For it’s not as if language was Kayla and Olivia’s only area of education. There’s also the “having to dress as a man” thing, which is unconvincingly glossed over with the wave of a fake beard (the cover is not exactly an accurate depiction of their undercover appearance!). Throw in an apparently inevitable bisexual subplot, and the dubious actions of the story’s antagonist – who literally keeps a journal in his desk, describing every aspect of his evil plan – and you’ve got more problems than solutions.

I did find the unrepentant villainy of ISIS somewhat refreshing: there’s no moral shades of grey here, they are straightforward bad guys, with very few redeeming features, and it’s easy to root for the heroines. Though the book doesn’t address the moral hypocrisy at its core: Olivia and Kayla are basically turned into terrorists themselves. You could take a speech by Hightower – “You will strike from the shadows to damage ISIS using any method at your disposal, whether that is through assassination, humiliation, or intimidation… The obvious goal is to eliminate as many terrorists as possible” – change a couple of words, and have Al-Qaeda rhetoric. But it’s okay, because they’re on our side? Still, this makes few claims to be other than a straightforward tale of action and courage, albeit one probably too simplistic for its own good.

Author: K. Hanson
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 2 in the Kayla Falk series.

Lust of the Dead 1-3

  By

★★★½
“The dead want women.”

Though it may be difficult to believe such a thing, the original Japanese title for this franchise of low-budget efforts was even more politically incorrect: Rape Zombie. If ever a title change was understandable… I went into this, largely on the basis of the covers, and braced for something awful. On that basis, I was pleasantly impressed: yes, this remains staggeringly offensive. Yet it’s clearly made by people who are familiar with, and love, zombie films. There are signs of actual brains being present – and not the kind normally found in the genre, being chewed on by the shambling antagonists. Five films have been made: for now, I’m covering the first three, which are the only ones available with subtitles [because, y’know, understanding the dialogue is so important here…]

The concept is more or less the standard one: a global outbreak of some kind of illness, turning the victims into mindless creatures, who attack any non-infected person they encounter. The difference here is that the disease affects only men, and turns them into sex-crazed rapists, who will sexually assault every woman they meet. [This does an amusing job of explaining the traditional slow, shuffling gait of the zombie – here, it’s because their pants are around their ankles.] Making things worse, their semen kills their victims. Needless to say, 50% of the population is less than happy with this situation, setting up a literal war of the sexes, with the now female-led military distributing weapons to its civilian colleagues, for the battle against those pesky rape zombies.

The sex is actually the least interesting thing here – though I note, up until the very end of part 3, there is apparently no such thing as a gay zombie, who goes after other men. What is far more entertaining is the shotgun social satire at play, with the makers turning the heat up on just about everyone. Feminists. Male rights activists. The media. Politicians. Women. Men (for once, “toxic masculinity” is not hyperbole). Social networking. Idol culture. For instance, the rapidly appointed female Prime Minister proclaims, “We’re only in this situation because we allowed men to run wild with their perverted fantasies!” – then high-tails it to Hawaii, immediately she finds out North Korea has launched a nuke at Japan. When that missile flies across the skies of Tokyo, everyone just whips out their phones to take video of it.

There are four heroines in the series: two pairs, who team up following some initial distrust. Momoko (Kobayashi) ends up in hospital as the crisis breaks, after slashing her wrists at work. There, she’s befriended by nurse Nozomi (Ozawa), and when all hell breaks loose, the pair flee the hospital, and end up taking refuge in a Shinto shrine. There, they meet Kanae (Asami) and Tomoe (Aikawa), a battered housewife and a schoolgirl who have also been trying to survive the carnage. The actresses portraying all four, incidentally, are best known for their adult work, though seem to acquit themselves credibly enough with the (admittedly, fairly limited) acting required here.

The main…ah, thrust of the trilogy is that men’s vulnerability to the virus (or whatever it is), is dependent on their pre-epidemic sexual appetite and activity. So, the jocks and pretty boys of society are pretty much toast: who inherit the earth are the otaku. That word is probably best translated as the Japanese version of nerds/fanboys, though more derogatory in connotation there, with a particular lack of social skills. When things settle down, they form the “Akiba Empire”, blaming women for the collapse of society. They hunt the remaining “3D women” with the air of domesticated zombies. On the other side are the “Amazons”, consisting of women soldiers from the Japanese Self-Defense Forces, and other survivors, including our four heroines and scientists working on a cure.

There are a couple of further wrinkles to this scenario. Momoe ended up pregnant by her husband, but is also raped by a zombie, though survives. The resulting child – born remarkably quickly – is apparently seen as some kind of saviour by the zombies and th Akiba Empitre, who won’t attack it or Momoe. She ends up apparently driven insane, a crypto-divine figure to the otaku, worshipped as an idol – in the J-pop sense at least, performing excruciatingly bad (deliberately, I sense) musical routines for them. Meanwhile, Tomoe – spoiler – dies at the end of part one, but comes back in two and three as an American combat robot, complete with laser eyes and lightning-producing fingers. She’s sent to Japan, both to gather data and carry out something called “Project Herod”. Which is what you would expect: part three ends in a cliff-hanger, with her and Momoe in a face-off.

It would have been very easy for this to simply be a porn film with zombies in it, which I’m sure exist. As I hope the above makes clear, it isn’t. Horror fans will have fun spotting the riffs on other genre entries, such as the twist on Return of the Living Dead where a captive zombie is quizzed to its motivation: the answer here, naturally, being “More… pussy.” [As an aside, certain words are bleeped out on the Japanese soundtrack, which seems surprisingly prurient, given the nature of these films!] The second also introduces Shinji, a non-otaku seemingly unaffected by the epidemic, and his girlfriend, Maki; he becomes a key part of the scientific research, though it turns out his immunity isn’t quite what it seems. Despite the copious nudity, it all feels not dissimilar to George Romero’s Day of the Dead, located at the shadowy nexus of science and the military-industrial complex.

Overall, the trilogy manages to cram in more invention than entire later seasons of The Walking Dead. It’s especially impressive considering each film runs barely an hour – less if you discount the “Previously…” opener and closing credits. I’m not entirely convinced there needs to have been five of these films; with editing, you could likely condense them all into two, maybe two and a half, hours and lose little or no impact. There are certainly times where the intent far outstrips the available resources, to an almost painful degree, and I’m no fan of the CGI splatter which is used more often that I’d like. It remains a rare case where exploitation comes with actual smarts, and that’s a combination you just don’t see very often.

Dir: Naoyuki Tomomatsu
Star:  Saya Kobayashi, Alice Ozawa, Yui Aikawa, Asami 
a.k.a. Rape Zombie

Mohawk

  By

★★½
“A hair short.”

This takes place in upstate New York during the 1812 war between Britain and America, when combatants are courting the Mohawk tribe to join forces with them. The natives are suspicious of both, and won’t commit to either. Working for the British is Joshua (Farren), who is in a slightly odd, three-way relationship with Mohawk warrioress Oak (Horn) and fellow native Calvin (Rain). On the other side is Hezekiah Holt (Buzzington), and his small band of Americans, who are out for redcoat blood. When they blame the Mohawk for murdering some of their number, their violence quickly extends to encompass Oak and Calvin, as well as Joshua. After Oak is left all alone, she goes on the war-path to take revenge on Holt and his men.

Low-budget period pieces are always on shaky ground, because creating genuine period atmosphere typically costs money. This sidesteps the issue by largely taking place in the middle of the woods, thereby limiting costs to a selection of uniforms and other costumes. It is a slightly obvious swerve, and I was also distracted by the sizable presence of WWE wrestler Luke Harper (under his real name, Jon Huber) as one of Holt’s platoon. The main problem, however, is the abrupt switch over to a supernatural theme for the final act. After the film has been thoroughly – and gorily – grounded in reality for more than an hour, it suddenly turns into a native American version of The Crow.

This is a shame, as the story to that point had taken some standard tropes and twisted them in interesting ways. While I’ve classified this as a “Western,” it’s more of an Eastern in terms of its location on the continent, and dates from an earlier era than usual as well. It could easily have become a scenario painted in black and white; instead, it’s considerably murkier, with motivations largely kept under wraps, especially those of Joshua and Oak. The latter, in particular, spends a good chunk of the movie lurking in the woods, with the focus on Holt and his dwindling crew. They’re in particular trouble after their tracker is picked off, giving a decisive advantage of terrain to their enemies.

As noted, it’s enthusiastically messy and brutal, as appears to be a recent trend in the more revisionist of Westerns (hello, Bone Tomahawk). But I was probably expecting more emphasis on Oak rather than Holt, which doesn’t happen until after the shift in tone also mentioned earlier. Horn does deliver a powerful performance, very much quiet and understated, and I’d like to have seen more of it. Given this inner strength, it didn’t seem logical to me for Oak to be bailed out by help from the spirits of her ancestors or whatever, in order to carry out her vengeance. Leaning on this as the story does (and where were these spirits when everyone else was being massacred?), seems a bit of an unnecessary cop-out. Not by any means terrible, yet could certainly have been better.

Dir: Ted Geoghegan
Star: Kaniehtiio Horn, Eamon Farren, Justin Rain, Ezra Buzzington

Hanna (TV series)

  By

★★½
“More is less.”

I was quite surprised to hear about Amazon taking up Joe Wright’s 2011 movie of the same name, and turning it into a TV series. There didn’t seem to be an enormous amount of point: the film was perfectly self-contained as it was, and didn’t appear to need expansion. Having now watched the eight 50-minute episodes from the first season… I’m still not sure of the point.

The first three are more or less a stretched-out version of the original movie, beginning with Hanna (Creed-Miles) and her adoptive father Erik Heller (Kinnaman) living completely off the grid in the middle of a European forest. They are re-located by the CIA black operation which had attempted to turn Hanna into a super-soldier, under the control of Marissa Wiegler (Enos – amusing to see her and Kinnaman on opposite sides, since they were partners on the American remake of The Killing), and from which Erick had freed her. Hanna is kidnapped, and taken to a secure facility, though escapes and has to make her way across Europe, solo, in order to be re-united with her father.

So far, so adequate, though the knock-off Chemical Brothers electro-noodly score served mostly to remind me of how good the original was, and we could certainly have used more of Hanna in action. It’s in the middle section that this completely loses its way. If you’ve seen the film, you’ll know on her trans-continental journey, the heroine is befriended by a British family and their daughter, Sophie (Barretto). Here after they part ways, Hanna takes a detour to Britain, hangs out with Sophie, and spends the middle episodes being a teenager, with all the annoying brattiness that entails. Was there anyone who wanted to see this? Certainly not me, and this very nearly went into the “Did not finish” pile as a result, because it’s extremely annoying.

The series does somewhat redeem itself over the final couple of episodes. We discover that the project from which Hanna was spawned, is still operating – and this comes as much of a shock to Marissa as anyone. Hanna and Erik head towards the complex which houses it, with the aim of liberating all the other proto-Hannas, pursued both by Wiegler and the combined forces of the military-industrial complex. However, not everyone necessarily wants to be rescued… The series ends on an open note, and Amazon recently announced there will be a second season. To be honest, you couls get caught up by skipping the first six episodes entirely, and just watching the movie, then parts 7-8.

The series does fill in much more of Hanna’s back-story, in particular how she became part of the project, and I also did like the way Wiegler’s position shifts over the course of the show. It will be interesting to see where she goes in the next season, since her position is now little less precarious than Hanna’s [and as we see at one point, Marissa has some skills of her own!]. On that basis, I’m not prepared to write this off yet, since it will now have to find fresh earth to till. Hopefully Farr does a better job there with original ideas, than of transforming his own work for the small screen.

Creator: David Farr
Star: Esme Creed-Miles, Joel Kinnaman, Mireille Enos, Rhianne Barreto

Death Angel December

  By

★★
“Liable to provoke hibernation.”

Marginally competent, and just not very exciting, this low-budget offering is the story of December (Kurishingal). As a young girl, she watched as the rest of her family was slaughtered by Law (Ramsey) and his villains, the result of a debt owed by her father. A decade or so late, she has grown up and taken to the streets as a vigilante, seeking vengeance on those responsible. Or, until she finds them, any other perpetrators she comes across during her night-time ramblings through the mean back alleys of the city. Helping her mission, is that she now works for the police, which puts her in a prime position to ensure, for example, that any evidence pointing in her direction goes “missing”.

The main problem here is the lack of any significant progression in story or characters. Once the basic concept is established, it’s more or less clear where this is inevitably going to end: in December confronting Law – who, miraculously, looks exactly like he did when killing her family a decade previously – and his minions. Little of interest happens during the eighty minutes in the middle to escape from the cinematic rut which this ploughs, save perhaps a brief interlude where one of her colleagues on the force mistakes her nocturnal activities for something else, and consequently thinks she’s moonlighting as an escort. They have a good laugh about this confusion, needless to sa… Nah, who am I kidding: she rips open his chest and pulls out his heart.

That’s actually one of the highlights – it helps that it is largely realized through physical effects, rather than the crappy CGI, of which we see rather too much in the rest of the film. The old nemesis of low-budget cinema, bad audio, also rears its ugly head on occasion, most notably a scene shot in a foyer, which sounds as if it was recorded inside a toilet bowl. Re-recording dialogue in post is an actual possible thing, y’know: given the copious voice-over, the makers would seem to know this. Not helping is the painfully inept nature of the fights, especially true for the final battle, which appears to have been filmed in a public park, using swords made of tin-foil.

On the positive side, Kurishingal has a striking appearance that makes for a great poster, and director Woodell does know what to do with the camera. Between the two of them, they manage to stop things from collapsing entirely, even if my interest was sorely taxed at times. The IMDb tells me this was apparently a remake of a short film the pair made two years earlier, called Scarlet Widow. That ran about a quarter of the length, and may well have been a more appropriate running-time for the content. The additional 70 minutes here feels almost like needless padding, with a script in need of significant additional development in order to sustain itself over the length of a full feature.

Dir: Bennie Woodell
Star: Leena Kurishingal, Will Cummings III, Chad Meyer, Charles Ramsey
a.k.a. The Long December

Naam Shabana

  By

★★★½
“Four for the price of one?”

If you took four different films, by four different directors, and edited them together into a single entity, you might end up something similar to this. Oh, make no mistake: I still enjoyed most of this. It just doesn’t feel like a coherent whole, perhaps because it is a spin-off involving some of the same characters from an earlier film, Baby. For at least three-quarters of it, however, not having seen its predecessor shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

The first chunk is perhaps the weakest, introducing us to the heroine, Shabana Khan (Pannu), a college student and judo expert, with something of a quick temper. She has just started going out with a new boyfriend, when they get into an altercation with some cat-calling men, which ends with him dead in the street. It’s all rather unconvincing, not least the early incident which does a very poor attempt to establish Shabana’s zero tolerance for harassment.

Things do improve significantly thereafter, for it turns out she was under observation by a shadowy arm of the Indian government as a possible agent. She’s contacted by Ranvir Singh (Bajpayee), who offers to help her take revenge on her boyfriend’s killers, if she comes to work for him. With the authorities apparently uninterested in the case, Shabana accepts, and the next section covers her vengeance, and subsequent training under Singh. This is likely when the film is at its best, taking an interesting concept and executing it with some energy and flair.

Shabana then vanishes from her own movie in the third quarter, as we return to the topic of international arms dealer Mikhail (Sukumaran) he was briefly glimpsed at the beginning, making short work of two Indian agents in Vienna. Authorities have tracked down his ally, Tony, and apply pressure, hoping to discover Mikhail’s location. However, it turns out Mikhail has been using the services of a doctor to change his appearance, making the task of locating him that harder, and it becomes a race against time before he changes again, and the trail is lost.

Which brings us to another switch in direction for the final section, in which Shabana is sent into the hospital where Mikhail is about to get plastic surgery, in order to assassinate him. Here, she’s teamed up with Ajay Singh (Kumar), who was apparently the hero of Baby. There was a point where it looked like he was going to take over – not that we’d have minded too much, as we’ve always enjoyed seeing Kumar in action (despite his creepy mustache here), but this is supposed to be an action heroine film. Fortunately, that’s where it ends up.

Despite feeling a bit like Nikita, a bit like Peppermint, a bit like Alias and a bit like a Jason Bourne movie, there’s plenty going on, and the running time feels considerably shorter than its 147 minutes. It helps that its heroine is made to look relatively plain, rather than the typically stunning Bollywood actress. 

Dir: Shivam Nair
Star: Taapsee Pannu, Akshay Kumar, Prithviraj Sukumaran, Manoj Bajpayee

Slaughter in the Desert, by Michael Beals

  By

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

Katelyn Wolfraum is a German expat, who was working as a field agent for MI-6, until an unfortunate incident just before the war, involving a member of the British Royal Family, left her persona non grata with the authorities. Fast forward to 1941, the depths of World War II, and she’s an intelligence analyst under Colonel Lyons and Major Trufflefoot in the North African desert. With Field-Marshall Rommel tearing across the terrain in a blitzkrieg, she finds herself trapped deep behind enemy lines, along with a motley international band of Allied soldiers. When they discover evidence of a Nazi super-weapon about to be deployed, Kat and her colleagues decide to take the fight to the enemy and sabotage the Third Reich’s plans. But complicating matters is the presence of Kat’s foster father, who is now a high-ranking officer in the SS, tasked with ensuring the saboteurs are stopped.

A shaky start here, with the map in the frontispiece depicting a country called “Lybia”. Oops. And, indeed, after an early burst involving Kat’s imprisonment in, and subsequent escape from, the Tower of London, the first half of the book is mostly generic soldier stuff. She’s just one of a group, and not a particularly important one either, to the point that I was seriously wondering whether or not this would even qualify for the site. These stages weren’t very interesting or exciting, with a lot of random zipping around sand-dunes and running gun-battles against Ze Germans and Eyetalians. However, things improve in both departments further in: Kat became more pro-active and independent, demonstrating a hatred for fascists, that drives on her comrades when some would prefer more cautious options, and a love of Really Big Explosions which is quite endearing. The presence of a specific mission – stopping the Nazi super-weapon from being deployed – also gives proceedings some much-needed focus.

It’s still not what I’d call great or even good art, and there are too many unexplained holes in areas such as Kat’s background [though some may be explained in the second book, going by the snippet included as a teaser at the end here] The only sequence which sticks in my mind is the final attack, when Kat and the men launch a potentially suicidal assault on a coastal facility: they don’t know which of the three submarines docked there is the real target, so need to sink all three. It’s startlingly hyperviolent, culminating in two thousand tons of explosives going up – though describing it as “roughly equivalent to a 2-kiloton atomic bomb” is another faux pas, considering no atom bombs even existed for several years after this is set. Given the efforts made at military accuracy elsewhere by the author, I’d expect better. Overall, it needs considerably more Kat, and there’s no reason why she couldn’t have been operating solo for much of this, rather than diluting her obvious talents.

Author: Michael Beals
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 2 in the Adventures of Kat’s Commandos.