Tag: 2006

IWA Mid-South: Queen of the Deathmatch

  By

★★½
“Only women bleed…”

The Hardcore genre is denigrated by some pro-wrestling fans as “garbage wrestling,” but I’ve never quite felt that way. To be good, you still need many of the same skills necessary to be good at the more regular end of sports entertainment: ability to work the crowd, sell the offense of your opponent, put over a storyline, etc. It’s true, you don’t need much in the way of technical aptitude to let someone break a fluorescent light-tube across your head, but the willingness to do so is certainly worthy of undeniable respect (if coupled with questions about your sanity). The bottom line is, there are good “garbage wrestlers” and there are bad ones. We’ve seen both in our previous coverage of the genre, when we wrote about FMW: Torn to Shreds, where we saw Megumi Kudo and Shark Tsuchiya, who represent the two ends of the spectrum.

We’ve also spoken before about the gulf betwen Japanese women’s pro-wrestling and the largely pathetic excuse for it put out by the WWE, where two minutes of a glorified cat-fight passes muster as a title match. You need to abandon network TV and go down to the independent level if you want to look for anything comparable – in style, if not necessarily in quality – to joshi puroresu, and it’s there that we found this. The IWA Mid-South federation had been holding annual “King of the Deathmatch” tournaments for quite some time, the first being won by Ian Rotten, one of the most well-known/infamous garbage wrestlers (current WWE heavyweight champion, C.M. Punk was part of the 2004 event, in a non-deathmatch bout). But in 2006, they also staged a similar event for women wrestlers.

Of course, this being independent wrestling where the phrase “card subject to change” is a given, the eight women scheduled to complete ended up being seven and a man. MC Ian Rotten said that Delilah Starr had a car-crash on the way here, and another competitor, LuFisto, had broken her hand fighting another notorious garbage wrestler, Necro Butcher, in a Canadian Death Match tournament called “Bloodstock”. Taking advantage of the open spot was SeXXXy Eddy, a male wrestler with a long history of intergender matches, which his in-ring persona thoroughly enjoyed, as you can imagine from his name. The roster also included reigning IWA women’s champion Mickie Knuckles, Rachel Putski (grand-daugher of WWE Hall of Famer Ivan Putski), and two joshi wrestlers, Mayumi Ozaki and Sumi Sakai.

The first round got under way with a Staple Gun Match between Knuckles and Ann Thraxx: it was best of 13, so the first to embed seven staples in their opponent won. Knuckles was busted open immediately, but this was very much equal opportunity carnage: as the pic on top shows, the red, red blood contrasted nicely with Thraxx’s bleached blonde hair. The score was tied at six with a staple to Knuckle’s crotch, but she took the win by tacking a dollar bill on Thraxx’s nose. Next up was a disappointingly bland thumbtack match, with Putski taking on Vanessa Kraven in ring containing a small box of tacks: it was Kraven’s first death-match, and you could tell her heart really wasn’t in it. Add another skill to the list necessary to succeed as a garbage wrestler: commitment.

The third match was improved, though from a strictly aesthetic and visual sense, was hard to watch. Amy Lee – about as far from a WWE diva as it’s possible to get – took on SeXXXy Eddy, who was wearing what can only be described as a “banana hammock”. This was a “Four Corners Of Pain” bout, with the corners of the ring behind home to barb-wire/salt, mousetraps, fluorescent light-tubes and..,er, lemons? Life gives you lemons, you…stage a death-match. That said, this was mostly fun for Eddy’s antics, not least his epic selling of the mousetraps: though he won, he took care in the post-match interview to put Amy over, for which he deserves credit. The first round finished with Mayumi Ozaki taking on Japanese colleague Sumie Sakai, in a Barbed Wire Ropes and Boards match: this was basically a squash, Sakai taking all the damage, as Ozaki prevailed.

Moving on to the semi-finals, the first pitted Knuckles against Putski in a Taipei Death Match. In this, the wrestlers’ fists are taped, dipped into glue and then in broken and crushed glass, to turn their fists into nasty weapons – its use here may have been because the most infamously bloody of these was between tonight’s MC, Ian Rotten, and his “brother” Axl, at a 1995 ECW show. This one is not much less messy, especially when the two wrestlers set up on facing chairs, and take turns whaleing away at each other’s foreheads [a common target in this kind of wrestling, being an area not likely to incur permanent damage, but capable of generating plenty of the red, red kroovy, as A Clockwork Orange called it, running down the face]. Knuckles prevailed, but hard to say who lost more blood.

Osaki took on Eddy in a two out of three, light-tube log-cabin match. You’re wondering what a light-tube log-cabin is, aren’t you. Those are fluorescent tubes, taped together in a square, four to a side and maybe stacked four interweaved rows or so high. They make a very satisfying crunch when you drop your opponent through one, as we discover here. One thing wrestling fans know, is “two out of three” anything means the first two will inevitably be split, and that’s the case here: Ozaki gets backdropped through the first log-cabin, but comes back with a flying kick off a chair to send Eddy into the second. She takes the win after he tries a high-risk manoeuvre off the top rope, only to be grabbed by his banana hammock and flipped through the deciding log-cabin. Ozaki, again, appears to avoid significant damage.

The final, between her and Knuckles was officially described as a (deep breath!) “No Rope Barbed Wire Fans Bring The Weapons Electrified Lighttubes Cage Match”. Basically, pretty much anything went, inside a steel cage which came already furnished with a ladder, beer barrel, barbed-wire ropes, a host of other offensive shrapnel (barbecue fork, baking tray, and bizarrely, a light-up magic wand with a star on the end) and enough fluorescent light-tubes to illuminate Vegas – yes, some of which were plugged in and working, for added emphasis. It is, I think, the first wrestling bout I’ve seen where the referee wore eye-protection. Knuckles hadn’t even bothered to clean up after the last bout, coming to the ring still covered in dried gore from her semi-final.

This one was relatively brief, and must confess, I actually found it somewhat disappointing, especially considering it was supposed to be the grand final. It felt almost as if both women had been drained by the previous encounters, so (understandably) had little energy left for their third match of the night. There was some breaking of glass and some mild use of foreigh objects, but it lasted only a little more than seven minutes in total, before Knuckles kicked through one of the electrified light fixtures into Ozaki’s forehead, following up with a pin for a three-count and victory. She didn’t really get to enjoy her title for long, as LuFisto and Kraven came in, blindsided her and left Knuckles draped in a Canadian flag, obviously intended to set a grudge-match up for the next IWA Mid-South event,

This is not great wrestling, by any means: matches generally proceed at a sluggish pace, and the format offers little scope for any significant degree of technical skill. But I have nothing but total respect for the participants, who put their bodies on the line for the entertainment of the audience, with a cheerful lack of concern for safety. If they were getting paid tens of thousands of dollars, I could perhaps understand it, but the paying crowd here probably numbered a hundred or less, so the compensation for their efforts can have been little more than token. Such willingness to suffer for your art (and there is no doubt in my mind, that pro wrestling is indeed an art), can only be applauded.

Date/time: November 3, 2006 at the Capital Sports Arena in Plainfield, Indiana.
Participants: Mickie Knuckles, Mayumi Ozaki, Rachel Putski, Sexxxy Eddy
Available through Amazon, as The Best of Deathmatch Wrestling, Vol. 4: Queens of the Deathmatch.

Codename: Yin/Yang

  By

★★
“Just because you can make a movie, doesn’t mean you should…”

To the makers’ credit, they are perfectly up-front about this being made for pennies, with home video equipment and edited on a laptop. But even though I’m not averse to that – heck, I’ve been involved with films on such microbudgets myself – there’s still too much here that’s avoidably bad. For instance, if you are going to put the President of the United States in your film, be sure you have access to someone with a grasp of English that extends past “D+, must try harder”. If you don’t, then leave them out.

Said President (Daubjerg) unleashes a zombie virus on Denmark, apparently confusing the country with Iraq [maybe this joke makes more sense in Danish?]. To finish the job off, he sends in Special Forces icon Bobo Moreno (Penstoft), to oversee the mop-up work. But against him are Yin and Yang (the other Penstoft and Louring), two opposing sides of the same lethal coin. One is dark, dresses in black and is an expert with firearms. The other is blonde, dresses in white, and wields a mean Samurai sword. They are Denmark’s last hope, and have to slice and dice their way through the zombies, to reach Moreno’s headquarters, where he and an amazingly over-acting mad scientist are holed up.

There are some elements of this which are not bad. Unfortunately, they do not include the acting, dialogue, action or pacing. The last-named is perhaps the worst offender, such as the scene where Moreno is basically reading the Yin/Yang dossier for what feels like 45 minutes. The girls certainly look the part, and since they get to do their acting in Danish rather than English-as-a-second-language, perhaps come off best. However, the fight sequences are poorly-staged and largely uninteresting, with very little being made of the light-side/dark-side which is carefully set-up, then almost ignored.

So, what does work? The zombie make-up is pretty impressive, and technically, it really isn’t as bad as I feared it was going to be. The soundtrack is strangely catchy, in an 8-bit games console kind of way, and the actual concept is…well, it was strong enough to lure me in, with its promise of hot chick-on-zombie violence. It almost entirely fails to deliver what it promises, but for all its faults, I can’t bring myself to hate this. The love for the genre and unpaid effort that went into it is obvious: if only the enthusiasm had been tempered with more skill.

Dir: Henrik Andersen, Bo Mørch Penstoft
Star: Line Penstoft, Sabine Louring, Bo Mørch Penstoft, Mads Daubjerg

Chai Lai Angels

  By

★★★
“If you only watch one Thai Charlie’s Angels knock-off this year…”

66% extra free! That’s the major difference here, as five, rather than three, little girls, who get their orders from an unseen “boss” and his faux Bosley, take on a variety of disguises and kick butt, in between romantic dalliances. Of course, with a budget approximately one-eightieth of the Hollywood version, certain economies have to be expected. But there are unexpected bonuses in the lunatic invention department, such as the when the villainous henchmen drops a cage, out of nowhere, onto four of our Angels, only for the fifth to come to their rescue, for no apparent reason either, in a tank. At moments like this, you can only laugh with the film.

The plot is a nonsensical as ever. They are assigned to protect little girl Miki, who knows the location of a pearl worth billions of bahts, which also maintains the balance of the oceans [See! It’s a film with an important message!]. When they fail to do so, they then have to rescue her from the evil Dragon, who intends to sell off the pearl to the highest bidder. He has an army of bumbling minions, the main one of whom is a thoroughly unconvincing transvestite, assisted by a cross-eyed underling whose aim poses more of a threat to anyone but the target. Yeah, the humour goes for all the difficult targets. It’s probably funnier to a Thai audience: one senses from the comic timing there are pauses for laughs where no Western audience will find any.

The action is plentiful, if occasionally wobbly. Ektawatkul, as Pouy-sian (Crown of Thorns), comes across best, as you’d expect from an actual Tae Kwon Do champion, but also doing her own stunts in a car-chase sequence. I did appreciate the editing, which manages to keep things coherent even when there are four or five separate fights going on – The Expendables could learn a lot there. Miki might have the best wire-assisted kung-fu moves; she’s a bit like Hit Girl without the swearing. There’s also a fight scene where the Angels are wearing towels, though this is strictly PG-rated. Like the rest of the film it’s harmless but entertaining fluff, at its best when it parodies the conventions of the genre, e.g. when one of the Angels only fires her gun in ridiculous poses, such as through her legs. While not quite enough to become Undercover Brother, it passes the time painlessly enough.

Dir: Poj Arnon
Star: Jintara Poonlarp, Bongkoj Khongmalai, Supakson Chaimongkol, Kessarin Ektawatkul

Lethal Angels

  By

★★
“I preferred this the first time, when it was called Naked Killer.”

Winnie (Lee) has a grudge: against gang boss Bowen (Yuan) in particular, but also against just about any man who abuses women. She puts together a team of four underlings, such as Yoyo (Sum), whose family was killed by thugs, and uses them to take out anyone whose lustful desires overwhelm their common sense. Now, it’s time for the big one: Bowen. Winnie sends Yoyo in as an undercover nanny, to scope things out and obtain evidence of Bowen’s illegal dealings. However, once in, she finds out that Bowen is now largely reformed, and Yoyo also objects to Winnie’s plan to wipe out all of Bowen’s family, including his six-year old daughter. Meanwhile, she’s also being investigated by Jet (On), a cop who knew and almost dated her at college, and is on the case of the mysterious deaths of mob bosses at the hands of beautiful ladies.

This is just too restrained to work. There’s a striptease routine by one of the minor underlings at the start, but after that, it conspicuously fails to live up to its alternate title, of Naked Avengers. Lee is good value as the overlord, but if you think you’ve seen it all before, you probably have. Even the scene where one of the girls has to take on a chained pervert for training purposes is lifted, wholesale, from Naked Killer – except, rather than in a dungeon, it appears here to take part in a car-park or something. [There’s a prominent “keep left” sign in the background, whose looming presence reminded me of nothing more than the ending to a Monty Python sketch]

The action occasionally has its moments, but rarely gets above competent, and it’s only in the final battle, where the schisms in the group fracture and send it on a path of self-destruction, that things become somewhat interesting, and it’s a case of too little, too late. Instead, there’s too much time spent on Jet, who is a waste of space and screen-time, and his lacks of charisma means his relationship with Yoyo has as much chemistry as…as… a thing that doesn’t contain any chemistry. Man, I hate it when a simile falls apart, half-way through. Or is it a metaphor? That I was pondering such grammatical issues during the viewing, probably tells you more about the film than anything else. If there’s a single way in which Naked Killer isn’t clearly better, I think I missed it.

Dir: Steve Cheng
Star: Tin Sum, Andy On, Jewel Lee, Yuan Yuan

Alice in Wasteland

  By

★★
“Washing-up proved marginally more interesting.”

Ok, that brief is a little harsh, but it is true to say by the end, I had opted to double-task, and was watching this while I stood over the sink in the kitchen. It wasn’t as good as I expected: I was hoping for something along the lines of Faster, Pussycat, and instead got a turgid, over-extended crime drama. While it has all the right aspirations, the yawning chasm between that and its execution would require several days’ trip by mule to cross. Alice Wynn (Sondrup) is part of an armored-truck robbery, only to find herself double-crossed and left for dead by corrupt cop Jill Robbe (Beisner). Alice vows to recover the loot and take revenge on Robbe, and won’t let anyone – examples include her late mother’s boyfriend, psychotic pimp Ramrod or his Swedish assassin – stand in her way.

It’s not as good as it sounds, with the low-budget impediments and a largely amateur cast providing almost permanent blocks to success. About the only thing it shares with Faster, Pussycat is a complete lack of actual nudity – and unlike that, this doesn’t make up for that shortcoming in charisma. There are some amusing moments, such as adverts for a non-dairy product called “Pusé Whip”, or a film called Kill Jill, yet most of the individual scenes seem to solve little purpose except to get you to the next one – they’re just not very interesting on their own.

I did quite enjoy the two leads, with both Sondrup and Beisner surpassing the minimum necessary “Oomph” for their roles – the final scene together is perhaps the best thing about the movie (save the Swedish assassin). However, I don’t come into films expecting “the minimum necessary,” and when the other aspects largely fall short of even that mark, I have to confess that disappointment, and a resulting decision to get on with some housework, were the result. I’m left with the feeling that some things are perhaps best left to the professionals.

Dir: Lasse Jarvi and Peter Schuermann
Star: Roxane Sondrup, Michelle Beisner, Major Mandolin, Adam Ryan Villareal

The Witches Hammer

  By

★★★½

“Hammer time!”

If never quite escaping its low-budget roots, or producing enough compensations or fresh imagination to make you forgive them, this is a robust enough vehicle and a decent entry in a sadly-small sub-genre: British girls-with-guns. It’s perhaps closest to the 1998 movie, Razor Blade Smile – which I really should get round to covering here, except it was pretty freakin’ awful. Similarly, Hammer involves a vampire assassin, though you can also lob in a shedload of other influences, conscious or otherwise, from Buffy, through Nikita to Bloody Mallory. If originality is not the movie’s strong suit, it is at least stealing from some of the best action heroines.

Rebecca (Coulter) is resurrected from the dead by a secret (government?) program, Project 571. They turn her into a vampire, giving her enhanced speed, reflexes, strength, agility, etc. – with the downside that she’s explode into flames if she goes out in daylight. After one assignment, she discovers her handlers have been killed, but is contact by Madeline (Beacham), who runs the imaginatively-named Project 572. Together with sidekick Edward (Sidgwick), she is sent to retrieve a mystical tome a the necessary first-step to slay the head vampire, Hugo (Dover), who… Ok, I’m somewhat hazy on the specifics, but he’s the bad guy, alright? Rebecca has to martially-art her way through an ever more dangerous series of witches, vampires and self-replicating ninjas (I assure you, it’ll make sense when you see the movie, to the point where you’ll probably go, “Oh! Self-replicating ninjas! That’s what Jim meant…”) until the final encounter with what a certain action heroine would certainly call The Big Bad.

Pluses? It’s actually shot on 35mm – while HD video has become the staple of low-budget cinema, it still doesn’t have quite the same feel as film, and the atmosphere here benefits as a result. Stephanie Beacham is magnificent, possessing a calm assurance that is marvellous to watch: she breezes through her scenes like a galleon at full sail, befitting her status as a genre icon. And the little and large duo of vampire, Oscar and Charlotte, are entirely endearing – their moments of comic relief work very nicely. [The idea of a midget vampire has been used before, as anyone who saw the truly appalling Ankle Biters will know.] The digital effects are nicely done too, with the vampires collapsing into a shower of glowing sparks, in a way that would also gladden the heart of Sunnydale’s favourite slayer.

Minuses? There’s a certain unevenness of tone which doesn’t quite work. At various moments, the film wants to be exciting, poignant, self-aware, slapsticky and dramatic: these individual moments work with varying degrees of success, and the combination, with the frequent gear-changes which result, occasionally seem clunky. Camp also needs to be played completely straight to work, and that isn’t always the case here. Hayes is over-fond of flashbacks: there are at least four here, and that’s probably three more than are necessary, with the only truly significant back-story belonging to Kitanya, the Russian witch who supposedly wrote the Malleus Maleficarum, the magic book which everyone seeks. As noted above, Eaves doesn’t really bring much new to the show: if you can find a review that doesn’t mention, say, Blade, your Google-fu is stronger than mine, and it is a very obvious comparison.

Coulter is acceptable in the central role – she reminded me most of Yancy Butler from Witchblade. She just doesn’t have quite the right attitude for a supposedly ruthless killer: Olivia Bonamy, in Bloody Mallory, brought the appropriate level in such things, such as her gloves with FUCK EVIL on them. Coulter is a shrinking wallflower in comparison, and this is shown in a sequence where she’s rescued from a morgue by one of her Project 571 colleagues. Rebecca clings on to the sheet with an obvious death-grip, rather than showing any skin, almost keeping it up to her neck. Hard to imagine a stone-cold assassin caring too much about nudity in front of another woman, and a less coy approach would perhaps be more appropriate.

The action is solid, if generally short of spectacular. There doesn’t seem to be much doubling of Coulter – or if there is, it’s not obvious. She get to use a selection of weapons, which adds a nice sense of variety; from swords through staffs to the F-sized rail-gun pictured top left (even if the cartridges being ejected were rather too obviously digital), Kris Tanaka was the action choreographer, and also appeared as one of the vampires near the end; it’s clear he knows his stuff. I’m not quite so sure Eaves does, as the editing of the sequences – for which he is also responsible – seems to be choppy and occasionally difficult to follow, though not to the level of MTV-style editing, the bane of my life as a viewer.

This was probably better than I expected it to be. The low-budget is not often obvious, and there are enough moments of charm to tide you over the less successful elements and make up for a certain lack of genuine freshness. Finally, despite the director’s protestations to the contrary, I’m still fairly sure there’s an apostrope missing from the title, which would only be grammatically correct in a context such as “The witches hammer at the door.” Eaves claims the apostrophe-less version is an accurate translation of Malleus Maleficarum, let’s just say, Wikipedia begs to differ. It probably doesn’t matter as much as I find it does, but while we can expect apostrophically-chalenged titles from Hollywood (I’m looking at you, Two Weeks Notice), good grammar costs nothing. ;-)

Dir: James Eaves
Star: Claudia Coulter, Jon Sidgwick, Stephanie Beacham, Tom Dover

My Wife is Gangster 3

  By

★★★
“I guess The Daughter of a Business Associate is Gangster wouldn’t be quite as commercial.”

Despite being directed by the same man as part one, this is only tangentially-connected to the first two films. The most obvious difference is no Shin Eun Kyung, who was the glue that held those movies together. Instead, as noted above, there is no wife at all: Shu Qi stars instead, as Lim Aryong, a mobster’s daughter forced to flee Hong Kong after her apparent involvement in murdering the leader of a rival gang. She goes to Korea and is put under the protection of Ki-Chul (Lee), a fairly crap mobster whose sole qualification for the job is a few words of Chinese. However, his star begins to rise and he develops a tough-guy rep: it’s really Lim who is responsible, but the local criminals would rather credit Ki-Chul than admit they got their asses kicked by a girl. Eventually, her hiding-place becomes known, and a team of vengeful assassins is dispatched to Korea to take care of Lim.

Similarlu to the previous entries, it’s a somewhat sporadic mix, with the humour generally working better than the action. There’s too much obvious doubling of the heroine in the latter, though for the former Lee’s expressive eyes are a nice contrast for Qi’s deadpan cool. Possibly beating both is Hyeon, as the translator hired to interpret: she starts of by saying what Ki-Chul wants to hear, before realizing the potential in her new friend, and the interplay among the trio provide most of the film’s high-lights. On the other hand it is undeniably too long, and especially towards the end, begins to drag considerably. The love that blooms between hero and heroine is, frankly, implausible: yet, since the entire concept is fairly flimsy, this doesn’t hurt the overall feel of the movie too badly. While we certainly mourn the loss of Shin, who is missed, much like its predecessors, this has no ambition beyond being light, frothy entertainment, and as such, doesn’t embarrass itself or the series.

Dir: Cho Jin-Gyu
Star: Shu Qi, Lee Bum-Soo, Hyeon Yeong, Oh Ji-Ho

Day Night Day Night

  By

★★★½
“Is it live, or is it Semtex?”

This is one of those which split the panel here. Chris was thoroughly unimpressed with its lack of a well-defined conclusion: “I knew it,” she muttered, “As soon as I saw this had a woman writer/director.” Certainly, if you are looking for a clear, structured thriller, this won’t be for you. Explanations are notable by their absence, as we learn about a young girl, preparing to stage a suicide bombing in Times Square. Who is she? Why is she doing this? What group is helping her? We never really learn explicitly. There are occasional clues, such as an Islamic-themed backdrop in front of which she is carefully posed for the traditional video, but as we never get to see the video, it’s inconclusive. We get hints of family trauma: she says her parents are dead, but later on, calls them from a payphone, and the only possession she wants to keep is a photo of a kid brother. But “Leah Cruz” – the woman whose identity she adopts, and on which she is relentlessly quizzed by the cell commander (Weinstein) is basically a blank canvas, onto which you can project whatever you want. “I have only one death and I want my death to be for you,” she says at the start; that’s as much of an explanation as you’ll get.

It is a cop-out, no question about it, and I can’t blame Chris for being annoyed: it’s both lazy story-telling and bad film-making to make the audience do all the heavy lifting, as Loktev does here. However, I tend to think it occasionally does the brain good to give it a workout, and let’s be honest, the Girls With Guns genre isn’t usually the place to find such an exercise. That doesn’t excuse the maddeningly unfinal ending, however, that is the film’s weakest moment. If Loktev had delivered a genuine conclusion – one way or the other, it doesn’t really matter – she would have been on much firmer ground. Up until then, I was willing to give the film the benefit of the doubt, with Williams providing a surprisingly strong core: excruciatingly polite, yet bent on committing the most awful destruction through her 40-pound backpack [“It’s mostly nails,” says one of the cell, helpfully].

The devil is very much in the details: she clips her toenails and requests a pizza, behaving more like a college girl than someone preparing to carry out mass murder. But would any terrorist group allow its human bomb to wander the streets aimlessly, rather than heading straight for the target? Surely every minute increases the risk of capture and failure? It’s in aspects such as this that the hyper-realistic feel – no incidental music, for example – breaks down, and you are reminded that what you’re watching is just as much cinematic contrivance as 24 or Vantage Point.

Dir: Julia Loktev
Star: Luisa Williams, Josh P. Weinstein

Leila Khaled: Hijacker

  By

★★★
“Terrorist? Freedom fighter? You decide…”

Khaled became internationally famous in 1969, for hijacking a TWA flight from Rome to Athens, diverting it to Damascus, where it was blown up – after everyone had been taken off [this was a kinder, gentler era of terrorism]. She then underwent plastic surgery to conceal her identity, and the following year tried to hijack another plane. However, air marshals shot her colleague and captured Khaled, who was taken into custody in London, only to be released soon afterwards as part of a prisoner exchange. She returned to the Middle East, her sky-piracy career at an end, but became an icon of the Palestinian movement, and remains active in it to this day, despite travel restrictions. The Guardian wrote of Khaled in 2001,

She flamboyantly overcame the patriarchal restrictions of Arab society where women are traditionally subservient to their husbands, by taking an equal fighting role with men, by getting divorced and remarried, having children in her late 30s, and rejecting vanity by having her face reconstructed for her cause… “I no longer think it’s necessary to prove ourselves as women by imitating men,” she says. “I have learned that a woman can be a fighter, a freedom fighter, a political activist, and that she can fall in love, and be loved, she can be married, have children, be a mother.”

A fascinating and complex character, it can’t be said that much of the complexity – both hers, and the entire Middle East situation – comes across in this documentary, less than a hour long. You get a quick romp through her early history, her family’s departure from then-Palestine just after World War II, both hijackings, and then we leap forward to the present day, where she’s a mother and works for a political group. There are some interesting moments, such as where she draws a line between what she did, and the 9/11 hijackings: “I don’t agree with the murders of civilians, no matter where in the world”, and she’s been consistent in expressing that. More probing questions would have been welcome: instead, Makboul – brought up in Sweden by her Palestinian parents – admits to having been basically a fan. She interviews others involved in the hijacks, such as a stewardess and the crew, and follows Khaled on a trip to the Chatila refugee camp in the Lebanon, but the film ends abruptly, just as she asks Khaled about the negative image of Palestinians as terrorists that she helped create.

Overall, it’s a frustrating documentary, raising as many questions as it can be bothered to answer. It only scratches the surface of an icon from whom a line can be drawn to modern-day female ‘martyrs’ such as Wafa Idris, but leaves me eager to learn more: she wrote an autobiography, entitled My People Shall Live, published in 1973, so I may have to try and track that down. She certainly stands alongside Patty Hearst and Ulrike Meinhof in the ‘Hall of Fame’ for female terrorists; having had a song written about her by The Teardrop Explodes merits some extra cool points. But if you’re interested, here’s a probably better – less disjointed, certainly – interview with Khaled, carried out in 2000 by, ironically enough, the magazine Aviation Security. Leila notes the black humour there, saying she’s “looking forward to finding out what you wanted to know from me about the security of aviation…”

Dir: Lina Makboul

Offside (2006)

  By

★★★★
“Come and have a go, if you think you’re hard enough.”

Being an action heroine is a rebellious, possibly revolutionary, act against society: what counts, depends entirely on how your society views women. Going to a soccer game, for example, would not qualify you in the Western world – but as in Ancient Greece, sporting events in Iran are strictly male-only, and a woman who attends one and gets caught, will find herself handed over to the Vice Squad. It redefines requirements somewhat, to say the least. The film tells the story of a number of women, who dress as men to sneak into a crucial 2005 World Cup qualifier between Iran and Bahrain, only to find their disguises imperfect. They’re held in an area, just out of sight of the game, by a group of soldiers, who really have better things to do themselves.

There’s a beautiful documentary feel; Panahi fooled the authorities into letting him film at the stadium, during the game depicted, by submitting a fake synopsis to authorities (this might have partly led to them refusing permission for the movie to be shown in Iran) and let the outcome determine the end of his film, which may partly explain the somewhat lacklustre ending, feeling in need of a more definitive conclusion. Filmed with non-professional actors, we don’t even know the names of the women, but quick, expert strokes, still give them character, from the tomboy to the wallflower to the one who plays football herself; their only connection is a love of the game and their country, which has led them to break the law. Yet the film is also sympathetic to the provincial soldiers, who would rather be watching the game themselves, and despite the radically-different society, the humanity of everyone involved is Panahi’s main concern.

Particularly outstanding is Irani’s tomboy, who becomes the de facto leader of the group, and continually hassles the guards. The film has a surprising amount of straight-faced humour, such as her riposte when asked if she’s a boy or a girl: “Which do you prefer?” Or one girl’s response when told they can’t go in because the men will be cursing: “We promise not to listen.” Similarly, when another needs to use the bathroom, this poses problems, since naturally there are no women’s facilities. The solution involves the impromptu conversion of a poster into a mask, though this hardly resolves things. Obviously, it’s not a traditional genre piece, and it’s this inaction which stops it from getting a seal. It is, however a fine piece of cinema, regardless of whether you appreciate football or not.

As for why it’s here, the director describes the women as having “entered a forbidden space before the law has given them permission to do so. They don’t have that permission yet, but they’ve gone ahead and entered the territory anyway. They’ve overturned the rules.” That’s what lifts this film into inclusion on this site: it’s about women, refusing to conform to subservient roles enforced on them, and whose behaviour confounds such expectations. Earlier in 2005, seven people were killed in an accident at the same stadium, after a game against Japan: the newspapers only published six photos, and it’s rumoured the seventh was a woman who had snuck in to the game. You can certainly argue, but in their own way, those depicted here are ‘action heroines’ every bit as much as Sarah Connor or Ellen Ripley.

Dir: Jafar Panahi
Star: Shima Mobarak-Shahi, Safar Samandar, Shayesteh Irani, Ayda Sadeqi