Tag: 2008

Ichi

  By

★★★
“Ichi the not-quite so much a killer as we hoped.”

This unofficial spin-off from the Zatoichi series had us wondering if there’s a Japanese studio version of The Asylum out there – the people who specialize in knockoffs of popular films, including such classics as Snakes on a Train and Sunday School Musical. We’ll cut the makers of this some slack, since we’re of the opinion that all action films are improved with a heroine in the lead. That’s the main switch here: Zatoichi becomes Ichi (Ayase), a blind swordswoman and entertainer, who is roaming the country in search of the man she believes is her father. She is quite capable of taking care of herself, but the resulting trail of bodies is blamed on travelling companion Tomo Fujihira (Ôsawa), who becomes bodyguard to a town under assault from a gang, led by Banki (Nakamura). Unfortunately, since he accidentally blinded his mother, Tomo is unable to pull his sword from its scabbard, and the Banki gang are ready to wreak revenge on him for the members killed by Ichi.

The main problem is that Tomo is the focus of the film more than Ichi. This is somewhat understandable, since Ichi takes “stoic silence” to much the same level as the corpses she leaves behind. We get some fragmentary glimpses of her past, and what makes her the way she is, but as far as her current personality goes, she’s never going to be accused of talking too much. Or at all. Making matters worse, during much of the climactic final battle between the Bankis and the townsfolk, Ichi is nowhere to be found. We’d been hoping for something like the climax of Azumi, with her slicing and dicing her way through a host of bad guys. Ichi had showed a nice economy of effort early on, maintaining a close to 1:1 ratio of slashes to kills (and never having as much as a hair out of place), but it turns out Banki has dealt with her style before, hampering its effectiveness.

On the plus side, it’s very-nicely shot, and as sidekicks go, Tomo is an amiable character, sliding from comic interest to love interest to tortured-hero interest with ease. This is as much a case of managing expectations as anything. It’s a solid samurai drama, and if it had been called Tomo, we would likely have been less disappointed in the way the film concentrates on him. Admittedly, if that had been the case, we probably wouldn’t have bothered getting a copy…

Dir: Fumihiko Sori
Star: Takao Ôsawa, Haruka Ayase, Shido Nakamura, Yosuke Kubozuka

Les Femmes de l’ombre

  By

★★★★
“Wartime derring-do with the Inglourious Bastardettes.”

It’s May 1944, and the imminent D-day landings by the Allies in France are imperiled, when a geologist, sent to check one of the beaches, is injured and ends up in hospital. A team of five Frenchwomen, from various backgrounds and led by Louise (Marceau), a trained sniper whose husband was recently killed by Ze Germans, is sent in to occupied territory to rescue the geologist before he is found by Colonel Heindrich (Bleibtreu), and forced to give up the location of the invasion, allowing the Germans to meet it head-on. However, that turns out to be just the start of their dangerous mission.

First off, the French title, which translates as “Women of the shadow”, is a good deal more evocative than the bland “Female Agents” one, and conveys much better the…well, shadowy nature of the enterprise. It feels somewhat of a cross between The Dirty Dozen and Inglourious Basterds, with the team cobbled together from irregular forces, such as Jeanne (Depardieu, Gerard’s daughter), a prostitute who faced the hangman’s noose for murdering her pimp, or Suzy (Gillain), who used to be Heindrich’s mistress. This could have led to caricature – the whore, the smart one, the devout Catholic – yet the film, largely avoids this. Even Heindrich is not a stereotypical Nazi, another aspect that reminded us of Basterds, though the Allied force here is far less brutal.

It’s a solid piece of action/drama, which managed to keep both of us awake, despite a session earlier in the evening at the “all you can eat” fish fry; normally, that requires 30,000 Volts to keep us from sliding into post-gluttony unconsciousness. I think Chris enjoyed the movie a little more: I was somewhat on the fence about giving it the seal, finding some of the plotting a little convoluted and occasionally implausible, but her endorsement of this as “great” provided sufficient impetus. Marceau is particularly good, exuding steely resolve to hold the team together, and Bleibtreu makes an excellent foil, coming across as equally smart and committed as Louise. Their conflict is the glue that binds the story together, and makes it one of the best efforts in the wartime heroine genre to date.

[Note: The film is loosely – very loosely – based on Lisé de Baissac, who did operate undercover in France during the second-half of the war. However, there’s little or no evidence of any mission that parallels the one depicted in the film. In the time leading up to D-day, she was doing reconnaissance work in Normandy, scouting out holding grounds for airborne troops.]

Dir: Jean-Paul Salomé
Star: Sophie Marceau, Julie Depardieu, Marie Gillain, Moritz Bleibtreu
a.k.a. Female Agents

Chanbara Striptease

  By

★★★
“If you ever wanted to see topless swordfighting, you’ll be in heaven.”

Lili is a devotee of Sayama Hashinryu, a deadly form of swordsmanship passed down from woman to woman. She goes through the initiation rite, which involves being blindfolded and given a drink which knocks her unconscious. She comes to, about three hundred years in the past, in feudal Japan, naked. When she gathers her senses, she rescues a local village-girl from some ninjas, but to cut a long story short, discovers in the process that when Lili exposes her breasts, they emit a pinkish glow, and she becomes far better at swordplay. Turns out the poor villagers are suffering extortion from the evil Lady Okini (Asa), so Lili turns into the Magnificent One [or Magnificent Two, if you know what I mean, and I think you do], while also falling for Hikoichi (Matsuda), the brother of the girl she rescued. However, it turns out that Lili is not the only one in possession of a supernatural bosom; Lady Okini is also so equipped. Battle cleavages are thus drawn…

It says something about this film that I am still not sure who actually plays the heroine in it. The DVD has no credits to speak of – though Manga Video did bother to translate the closing song lyric – and the IMDB doesn’t list anyone playing Lili. So, if it’s not Akanishi – and I think it may not be, from what I can tell on a quick Google Image search – then I’ve no idea [Hooray! Reader A.R. comes through, confirming it is Ruru Anoa who plays Lili]. Anyway, it’s every bit as silly as it sounds, and made all the more palatable by being played dead-serious by all concerned. Despite the copious nudity, it’s mostly very innocent, though there are a couple of sex scenes which do bring the film to a bit of a halt – the lead actress isn’t even all that pretty, in my opinion, though Asa has a nice “bad girl” thing going.

The action is fairly basic, but edited in a decent way, hiding the limited skills of those taking part, and it barely runs an hour – likely a good thing, as one suspects much more of this could be outstaying its welcome. Incidentally, “Chanbara” basically means “sword-fighting movie”; the original title translates as “Breast Chanbara,” which is certainly closer to the truth than the Manga title, as the film contains no striptease whatsoever. The same creators had previously done two Chanbara Beauty films, about a bikini-clad zombie-killer, based on a video-game; I think I’ll be fast-tracking those for future consumption, and may even be able to watch them with Chris!

Dir: Akira Hirose
Star: Ryo Akanishi, Ruru Anoa, Yôichi Matsuda, Mina Asa, Sasa Handa

Hard Revenge Milly

  By

★★★★
“In which the ongoing problem of high blood-pressure in Japan apparently reaches epidemic proportions.”

In the near(ish) future, Japan has become a post-apocalyptic wasteland in which only the strong survive. Initially, that does not include Milly (Mizuno), who is tortured by the Jack brothers and their gang: her baby is set on fire, while she has her breasts sliced off and is left for dead. However, she survives, albeit in a partially-mechanical form, and has now devoted her life to revenge on those responsible. Her artificial enhancements include a shotgun leg, a sword up her sleeve and a chest that… Well, that has to be seen to be believed, let’s just leave it at that, shall we? That’s Hard Revenge Milly, the first of the two films on the Western release DVD.

The second, Hard Revenge Milly: Bloody Battle, has Milly being sought by some colleagues of the Jack brothers, led by Ikki (Tsujimoto), a flamboyantly gay psychopath with an attitude. “That’s why I hate bisexuals,” he says, after crushing one minion’s head into a wall for making a sexual advance on a female hostage. However, Milly now has a sidekick: Haru (Nagasawa), who wants Milly to help out with her own mission of revenge, tracking down whoever is responsible for the death of Haru’s lover. However, it turns out that her and Milly’s missions may be rather more directly aligned than initially seems the case.

If you enjoyed The Machine Girl, then this should be right up your arterial alley, as it has much the same gleeful, fire-hose approach to the carnage, at times literally painting the camera lens red. This isn’t quite as good, mostly because the pacing is off, especially in the first movie, which has too much of Milly wandering about an abandoned factory that serves as the main location. The low-budget is occasionally painfully obvious, particularly for one CGI decapitation which is less convincing than any latex head could ever be. The overall plot is also just a bit too close to Kill Bill for its own good,

The pacing is less of a problem in Bloody Battle, where the post-apocalyptic world is more fully drawn, and the production values seem to be significantly higher. The addition of Haru provides something of a mirror in which Milly can see herself – there’s an interesting question raised as to whether her revenge may be an artificial construct, and the villains are also given a bit more depth. However, you will not be watching these for subtle characterization, and Mizuno acquits herself admirably as an action actress in both installments, showing solid martial-arts and swordplay skills. While unquestionably not for the faint of heart, there’s energy and inventiveness to spare, and it’s certainly unlike anything coming out of the West.

Dir: Takanori Tsujimoto
Stars: Miki Mizuno, Nao Nagasawa, Mitsuki Koga, Kazuki Tsujimoto

Contract Killers

  By

★★
“If they come out with the pilot episode, I wouldn’t mind seeing it, but otherwise, I don’t think I’ll tune in next week.”

This feels more like a mid-season episode of Alias than anything else, and not much more than a filler episode at that. I say this, because so little effort is put into developing the characters, it’s as if the makers reckon everything had already been established in the previous seven installments. And since there are no such episodes, this leads to a very low level of interest in the proceedings as they unfold. It centers on “Jane” (Farrell), a CIA killer who finds herself on the receiving end of a burn notice, and forced on the run, as she tries to find out why she’s been targetted for elimination by her boss. This takes her Trinidad, where she finds an unlikely partner in the vacationing Lars (Willis), and hunted by another hired hitman, Pernell (Giles, for whom we have a soft spot, from his days working with infamous B-movie mayhem merchants, The Asylum).

Technically, it’s competent enough. If nothing too stunning, the action is fairly frequent and reasonably well-filmed, and Farrell does bring a certain hard-edged competence to her character. The main problem is that the script gave me absolutely no reason to care about her, or anyone else who taking part. The only element of backstory provided for Jane, is 30 seconds of exposition thrown away somewhere in the middle; it doesn’t result from anything, tie into anything, lead into anything and is ignored for the rest of the movie. It wouldn’t necessarily have taken a great deal of effort; I’m not demanding her entire lifestory, just some quirks to suggest there was actually a human being present, not simply an asset being pushed from scene to scene by the director. Almost exactly the same problem affects the other characters: no depth, no humanity, no purpose.

On the positive side, there’s some nice use of locations, and a certain sense of paranoia, even if that might be because the central purpose of the bad guys (it involves a software program they’re going to use to attack the financial markets) is never entirely clear. Or maybe I’d given up paying attention by this point, the movie having finally lost its battle for my attention. Maybe it could be rescued with 15 minutes of “Previously, on Contract Killers…” at the start. Wouldn’t bet on it though.

Dir: Justin Rhodes
Stars: Frida Farrell, Christian Willis, Rhett Giles, Nick Mancuso

The Baader-Meinhof Complex

  By

★★★

Director Edel is probably best known in the West for the embarrassing Body of Evidence, though would rather be remembered for the much better, if incredibly depressing, Last Exit to Brooklyn. This is certainly nearer to the latter, depicting the rise and fall of the Baader-Meinhof group, also known as the Red Army Faction, the terrorist gang whose actions sent Germany into a state of nervous anxiety in the late 70’s. They started off at the end of the sixties, when Europe was in a state of political flux, but became more radical, engaging in bank robberies to fund their activities and then escalating to bombings, assassinations and kidnappings. The leaders were eventually caught – and I trust this isn’t much of a spoiler – dying mysterious deaths in jail, officially called suicide, but suspected by some as being extra-judicial execution.

It’s a generally interesting, but also flawed, approach to the subject matter, because it tries too hard to be even-handed, both humanizing the group, while also being sympathetic to the establishment they sought to bring down. It’s hard to do this, while still generating much emotion, because the viewer is left not really knowing for whom they should “root”. In addition, former journalist Ulrike Meinhof (Gedeck – the picture, above, is the real Meinhof) is initially the focus of the movie’s attention, but the way things unfold (and I’m manfully avoiding any spoilers there) mean that things inevitably have to shift away from her in the latter stages. The movie also faces the inevitable problem of any film based on actual events: reality rarely, if ever, follows a three-act structure, and as a result, either the facts or the drama have to suffer – here, it seems to be the drama, with the story not so much building to a climax as petering out.

That said, the performances are good, particularly Wokalek as Gudrun Ensslin, who has been described as the intellectual head of the RAF. What makes it suitable for inclusion here is the way that both Meinhof and Ennslin are depicted as the driving forces, the engine-room of the Red Army Faction. Andreas Baader (Bleibtreu – who was also the ineffectual boyfriend in Run Lola Run) is depicted as a hot-head, and something of a hypocrite, with a taste for fast cars. It’s clear that Ensslin and Meinhof are the ones that run the group – Baader was, in fact, a high-school dropout and one of the few RAF members who did not attend university. I have vague memories of hearing reports about the group as I grew up; while it was good to have the large blanks in my knowledge filled in, this felt more like a Discovery Channel re-enactment of the RAF’s history, rather than offering anything truly cinematic.

Dir: Uli Edel
Star: Martina Gedeck, Moritz Bleibtreu, Johanna Wokalek, Nadja Uhl

SexyKiller

  By

★★★★
“Being the adventures of a young womman whose principal interests are fashion, ultra-violence and Cindy Superstar.”

When it comes to horror movies, the line between clever and too clever is often a thin one. While a certain degree of self-awareness is good in the horror genre, it’s easy to topple over into smugness, where you stop working with the genre, and end up laughing at it with a self-superior attitude. SexyKiller manages to avoid this fate: director Marti and writer Paco Cabezas both have a love for the genre, that shines through in just about every scene. It centres on Barbara (Gómez), a medical student at a college being terrorized by the Campus Killer, a murderer who is taking out the trash in spectacular ways. It’s giving nothing away to say that Barbara is said psychopath, but no one-believes her. Even her bare-faced statement to the police, when they knock on her door looking for the killer – “You’ve found her” – gets nothing more a droll laugh from the officer in question.

Her career of beautifully-accessorized slaughter is eventually put on hold, thanks to fellow student Tomas (Camino), for whom Barbara falls, mistakenly believing him to be a fellow psycho. He has also invented a machine to read thoughts, and it’s turned onto some of her victims, in an effort to find out their last memory – presumably, of who killed them. As this, it’s not entirely successful. But what it is very good at, is bringing them back from the grave, though with a minor side-effect. Involving flesh-eating. Yes, from being a blackly humourous serial-killer flick, it’s now a zombie movie, and it’s not long before the campus Halloween party is under siege, and Barbara’s unique skill-set becomes extremely useful. Mind you, her sociopathy is still an issue, and she has absolutely no qualms about feeding those she dislikes to the undead horde.

Interestingly, in the IMDB ratings, it currently scores more than two points higher among women than men – while the sample size is still small, that’s rare for the genres of serial-killer or zombie flicks. I just loved the unashamed nature of it all: Barbara is perfectly comfortable with who she is, and is in no need of redemption, by Tomas or anyone else. The fourth wall is continually broken, and Marti uses a whole bunch of tricks, from flashbacks to musical numbers, to get his point across and make his anti-heroine sympathetic, in which he succeeds marvellously. Even if Gómez occasionally looks a bit too much like a pissed-off version of Mena Suvari, and the sex and violence quota are not quite as high as they could have been, this is a great way to start the New Year. [Seen at the Phoenix Fear Film Festival]

Dir: Miguel Martí
Star: Macarena Gómez, César Camino, Alejo Sauras, Ángel de Andrés

Fight Night

  By

★★★½
“You’ve got the balls, you’ve got the skills, and unlike most female boxers, you don’t look like an ugly man-hater.”

Michael Dublin (Ortis) is a wheeler-dealer, swinging between fixing underground fights and selling dodgy auto parts as need and opportunity arises. When the latter goes wrong, causing the car to explode rather than go faster, he is rescued from a beating by Katherine Parker (Neuenswander), a girl who easily disposes of the attackers, giving Dublin an idea. Instead of rigging the bets by getting good fighters to take a dive, what about winning with someone like Kat, who can win straight-up, but on whom no sane gambler would ever wager? Initially, things go as planned, despite her qualms about being labelled “Kid Vixen”. But Dublin’s reputation precedes him, and he is requested by Richter (Hanover), who runs the underground ring, for his fighter to lose a bout. Ok, “requested” might be the wrong word there. However, Kat is having none of it, leaving her manager with a very difficult choice to make, and choices have consequences.

The problem is the script, which doesn’t so much avoid the usual boxing cliches as play join-the-dots with them. Both Dublin and Parker have murky pasts and honest ambitions. There’s a steady climb up through opponents until the “boss-level” one against Richter at the end. He beat Kat to a pulp early in her career, yet still resorts to any manner of nefarious schemes to make sure he wins – even threatening Dublin’s life should Kat not go down. And the ending poses a greater danger to the audience’s teeth than anything. That said, I’ve seen worse. Much worse. Here, the other elements of the movie definitely help paper over the cracks in the story, though you need some suspension of disbelief that Parker inevitably KO’s opponents twice her size.

Not beat them, however, since Neuschwander is quick and powerful, her background in taekwondo (where she was a world sparring champion in 2000) clearly apparent, lending the fight scenes a legitimacy perhaps missing from, say, Million Dollar Baby. Acting-wise, she’s surprisingly impressive, given this appears to have been her film debut; she and Ortis have an interestingly-spiky relationship, with their verbal sparring almost as intense as the in-ring bouts. [Credit to the make-up artist, incidentally, for a vivid depiction of the damage Kat takes, which is so nasty as occasionally to be distracting] All told, the strengths outweigh the weaknesses, the performances and direction giving this one a victory on points.

Dir: Jonathan Dillon
Star: Chad Ortis, Rebecca Neuenswander, Kurt Hanover, John Wilson
a.k.a. Rigged

Crazy Girls Undercover

  By

★★
“If you thought Showgirls was ok, but really needed more terrorists – have I got a film for you.”

Written and produced by the man behind the ‘Crazy Girls’ topless revue at the Riviera in Las Vegas. Really, that’s about all you need to know: much like most Vegas shows, it’s quite shiny and glossy, but if you look behind the surface, it doesn’t have any real heart and possesses no brain at all. It centres on Damon Archer (Robertson), a freelance CIA operative whose day-job is running said revue – I dunno, but I always thought these shows consisted of more than five women [mind you, all I know about such things was learned from Paul Verhoeven’s epic]. They are investigating shady arms-dealer Hamid Marzook, a man with terrorist links who, it turns out, was previously responsible for the death of Archer’s wife and child. So, it’s personal as well as national security being at risk, with the terrorists seeking to detonate a bomb on Las Vegas Strip [though let’s not get involved in why Archer calls it a “chemical bomb”. Merely containing chemicals – half a ton of nitrates – does not make it a chemical bomb. Anyway…]

There are a number of ways this could have been a lot more entertaining; an awareness of its own silliness would have been a big help. I mean, the CIA operates out of a bar, and the girls’ undercover base is apparently reached through a closet in their dressing-room. This kind of lunacy abounds: as one review on the IMDB put it, “Is traveling in a motorcade of yellow motorcycles and Hummers the best way for undercover strippers to sneak up on a truck?” If they’d embraced this – something Andy Sidaris, despite his flaws, is good at – then this could have been a charming little guilty pleasure. Instead, the eye-candy, while easy enough viewing, feels almost as gratuitously plugged in as the endless mentions of the Riviera and other Vegas venues. In its defense, the film looks good, and things do get some kind of energy towards the end, albeit never above a poor episode of 24. However, if you’re looking for action, of either kind, then you’re mostly in the wrong place.

Dir: Chris Langman
Star: Clive Robertson, Nikki Ziering, Simona Fusco, Charles Fathy

Ninja Cheerleaders

  By

★★
“B-movie rule of thumb: “ninja” in the title in never a good sign…”

Probably half a star should be taken off if you’re not a fan of really bad movies like us, for this is a bad movie. Really. Let me begin with a straight-faced recap of the plot. Courtney, April and Monica are junior college students who are trying to earn the quarter-million bucks necessary for them to go to an Ivy League college. They earn this by go-go dancing at a strip-club, Their plans are thrown into disarray when the owner of the club (Takei), who has been looking after their savings, is kidnapped by the mob. Fortunately, he is also their martial arts sensei, and they just qualified as ninja. Can they rescue him, get their cash back and make it to the All-City Strip-Off?

Yes it’s every bit as silly as it sounds, and unfortunately not as entertaining. Nor even as potentially full of flesh, since they’re go-go dancers, not strippers they keep their clothes on – which seems odd since it’s not as if Cannatella is exactly a shrinking violet. [Link NFSW, if you hadn’t guessed] How exactly they are supposed to have raised 250 grand in six months doing that is unclear. In a lame attempt to compensate, Presley splices in occasional footage of nekkid boobies, presumably to avoid the PG-rating this would otherwise deserve.

There’s definitely scope for humor in the goofy concept – students by day, ninjas by night, or something like that. However, the movie rarely succeeds in mining any of the potential. Occasionally, Takei appears to realize how ridiculous it all is, and I did laugh at one scene where the girls are questioned by a cop, and feign innocence with the kind of stupidity familiar to anyone who has raised teenagers. Otherwise, however, it’s mostly guilty either of trying too hard or not trying hard enough. Natasha Chang playing the evil henchwoman Kinji is probably the most memorable character, with an odd quirk of referring to herself in the third person. This alone, probably gives her as much personality as the heroic trio; they’re otherwise just not very interesting, despite McConnell’s resemblance to Hilary Swank.

The action isn’t exactly breathtaking either, with the ninja costumes used to conceal body-doubling [save in Takei’s case, where it’s pretty damn obvious]. As a result, it’s never exactly convincing; while there are a couple of fights where the girls have to take on various low-level Mafia people, it’s only at the end, when they face Kinji, that things are interesting. And it’s kinda odd to have the bad girl outnumbered three-to-one by the heroines, which just doesn’t seem fair. Overall, it just about scrapes by if you find it as a freebie on cable. Spending any more than ninety minutes of your time on this is probably not recommended.

Dir: David Presley
Star: Trishelle Cannatella, Ginny Weirick, Maitland McConnell, George Takei