Tag: 2009

Run! Bitch Run!

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★★
“Grindhouse par excellence. Not convinced this is entirely a good thing, however.”

I can certainly appreciate where the makers are trying to go with this one. Two Catholic schoolgirls, selling Bible door-to-door to raise funds for their educational establishment. Unfortunately, they knock on the wrong door: this is actually a whorehouse, run by the psychotic Lobo (Tahoe), who has just killed one of his hookers. The two are kidnapped: one is killed, while the other (Lyone) is left for dead, naked, in the nearby woods. She is taken to hospital, but has only a single thought in her head: revenge. Stealing a nurse’s uniform, she checks out, intent on taking our her wrath on Lobo and his no-less depraved sidekicks.

Particularly if you’ve seen the (thoroughly NSFW) trailer, you’ll know where this is heading, and it’s not a pleasant place. While entirely successful at evoking the grindhouse atmosphere, with its mix of sleazy, ugly sex and grimy violence, it also succeeds at being remarkably.. Well, boring is the word I’d use, and that’s close to an unforgivable sin as far as exploitation cinema goes. The pacing just seems off: it takes too long to get to what we actually want to see, which is these low-life scum getting their come-uppance. While the film does eventually deliver (Lobo’s fate will have you shifting uncomfortably), I must confess, my interest had waned well before that point.

The main problem, I think, is there is no emotional connection with the heroine. While there is an attempt to build her character early on, it’s not successful. A film like this largely stands or falls on its central performance; while Lyone is laudably game, she doesn’t have the acting chops to get the audience over on her side, and so the torments she undergoes have little or no impact, and neither does her revenge. The best grindhouse flicks achieve that connection on an almost visceral level, taking you to dark places you generally don’t want to go, and this only brushes against the edges there, making its flaws all that more obvious.

That said, I am still somewhat interested in seeing Guzman’s next work. Whatever his talents may lack elsewhere, the man has an undeniable eye for a title, and this one may even lack the grammatical issues found here. Coming soon: Nude Nuns with Big Guns.

Dir: Joseph Guzman
Star: Cheryl Lyone, Peter Tahoe, Ivet Corvea, Johnny Winscher

Blood: The Last Vampire (live-action)

  By

★★★
“Half-human, half-demon takes on her own kind. Haven’t we seen this before?”

The animated version was one of the first reviews I wrote for the site, and I didn’t like it much – the fifty-minute running time allowed for hardly any development of scenario or characters at all. The feature fares a good bit better in these departments, though suffers from some horrendous editing styles and a couple of monsters which appear to have strayed in from a Playstation game (and I am not talking Playstation 3 here, either). The basic plot is retained. Saya (Gianna) is a half-demon with a grudge, intent on taking out Onigen (Koyuki), the one responsible for the death of her father. Working under the loose guidance of The Council, she is inserted into a school on an American air-force base in 1970 Japan. American girl Alice (Miller) has been added; Saya rescues her, and the two end up on the run, pursued both by Onigen and more regular forces.

This wasn’t as bad as the reviews led me to expect, and Gianna goes a good job of capturing the permanently-peeved expression of Saya. There are certainly lots of fights, with Corey Yuen doing his usual solid work, though the cutting of these early on, renders them almost incomprehensible. Seriously: you have almost no idea who is doing what to who. However, that seems to change in the second half; there’s a very solid battle in the forest between Saya, her mentor, and an endless horde of minions, and the final battle between the heroine and Onigen certainly doesn’t lack for spectacularity…er, -ness. Or something.

Going against this, Alice’s presence seems no more than a sop to the international market, because she serves little or no purpose to the film otherwise. There’s also a thoroughly unsatisfactory sequence where Saya fights a flying monster on a truck, perched precariously in a gorge: it’s both incoherent and very badly-rendered, a combination that would shame a SciFi original movie. That said, it kept me entertained and awake, which is more than some films (coughSnowbloodcough) have been able to do this month. If Gianna wants another stab at an action heroine flick, I wouldn’t object.

Dir: Chris Nahon
Star: Gianna, Allison Miller, Liam Cunningham, Koyuki

The Haunted World of El Superbeasto

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★★★★
“Suzi-X Marks The Spot.”

Rob Zombie has had an interesting career, to say the least. From the early days as the front-man of heavy-metal band White Zombie, through his own solo work [heavily influenced by B-movies], and then on into his movies. That started with the fairly-crap House of 1000 Corpses, then the better Devil Rejects, and then his remakes of the first two Halloween movies, which were ok, as remakes of horror classics go. And then there’s The Haunted World of El Superbeasto, an animated feature which I stumbled across on cable. Well, actually, Chris did: “I Tivo’d a movie for you,” she said. And, surprisingly, she stayed for the entire thing, and appeared to enjoy this animated feature. Which is odd, because it has much the same gleeful, excessive insanity as Bitch Slap, which she walked out on.

Based on a comic-book series, the focus is, at least, theoretically, El Superbeasto (Papa), a masked luchador and part-time exploitation film-director, whose opinion of his own talents is certainly not modest. Superbeasto gets involved with the the evil plans of Dr. Satan (Giamatti), who kidnaps foul-mouthed stripper Velvet Von Black (Dawson), because if he marries her, he’ll get all the powers of the devil. El Superbeasto and his sister Suzi X (Moon Zombie) have to stop Dr. Satan, before he can destroy the world. And it’s thanks to the latter that this film effortlessly slides into GWG territory. Imagine a soft(ish) porn version of those insurance ads with Erin Esurance kicking butt. Except, with far larger breasts, much more gore and a sidekick of a horny, transforming robot. Er, ok: not really like those insurance ads at all, then.

Zombie was responsible for the Werewolf Women of the SS faux-trailer in Grindhouse, and brings much the same gleeful approach to proceedings here. Indeed, we first see Suzi-X kidnapping the head of Hitler, which is kept alive in a jar (as in They Saved Hitler’s Brain), and then has to escape by fighting her way through a massive pack of Nazi zombies (that’d be from Shock Waves). Carnage ensues, as it pretty much does, any time Suzi-X is on the screen, which is a lot – she gets far more of the action than El Superbeasto does. Proceedings culminate in a lengthy, slo-mo catfight, entirely necessary to the plot, between her and Von Black, while the soundtrack cheerily informs us that “It’s OK to jerk off to cartoons – the Japanese do it every day – so rub one out for the USA…”

Yeah, the soundtrack. By comic due Hard ‘n’ Phirm, it’s certainly worthy of note, providing a sardonic commentary throughout. Witness the play-by-play as Suzi-X takes on the Nazi zombies, or as it bemoans the shameless ripoff of Carrie which is the finale. An appreciation of genre – particularly, horror movies – of the past eighty years or longer, will also help, as will as realizing this is not to be taken at all seriously. It’s definitely not for kids, or the easily offended: copious female nudity, violence, swearing and generally questionable attitudes. It reminded me of Ralph Bakshi cartoons, such as Fritz the Cat, just much more tongue-in-cheek.

If anything, it may be a little too hyper and frenetic. We ended up taking a break in the middle, and chilling out with coffee and muffins before returning for the second-half. Throwing together everything but the kitchen sink as far as style, content and approach goes, it remains a thoroughly entertaining piece of trash cinema. While the supposed hero is actually not very interesting, and largely unlikeable, Suzi-X is a fabulous action heroine, whom I’d enjoy seeing more of [not that there’s much you don’t see of her here, if you know what I mean, and I think you do…] Check out the clip below for some idea of what to expect.

Dir: Rob Zombie
Star (voice): Tom Papa, Sheri Moon Zombie, Paul Giamatti, Rosario Dawson

Whiteout

  By

★½
“CSI: Antarctica. Only, without the actual, y’know, interest…”

“Oh, look,” I said to Chris. “Whiteout is just starting. It’s about a US marshal investigating a murder in Antarctica. Let’s take a look, shall we?” And, of course, the first thing we see is Kate Beckinsale bending over in her underwear, as she undresses to take a shower. I haven’t heard her eyes whirring as they rolled in her skull like that, probably since the first 20 minutes of Bitch Slap. I’ll have to sit through a few Ghost Whisperer episodes to make up for that. God forbid, maybe even stay awake for one. The sad news is, that was probably the most memorable moment in a film which, on balance, is marginally less interesting than the weather phenomena name-checked in the title.

After an incident in which she blasted her dirty-cop partner out of a high window, Carrie Stetko (Beckinsale) takes refuge in a post at the South Pole. A body is found out on the remote ice, and turns out to be part of a research team – though their camp is nowhere in the area. Stetko gets a call from one of the remaining members of the team, and goes to meet him at a remote station, only to find him dead and be attacked by a masked figure with an ice-axe. Shortly afterwards, she meets UN security agent Robert Pryce (Macht); initially suspicious, it turns out they have to work with each other and find out what is going on, as a massive storm heads towards their base, forcing the early evacuation of everyone else on it.

Memo to the makers. A crap, non-thrilling “thriller” doesn’t get any better because it’s dumped in a frozen wasteland, even if that means you can add interminable sequences of people shuffling between buildings while holding on to ropes. Chunks of this make little or no sense: after Stetko is attacked by the ice-axe wielder, she inexplicably fails to investigate at all, even though he must still be on the base, as there’s nowhere much else to go. This kind of logical flaw plagues the film, and wastes what might have been a good idea – especially if they’d gone with two female leads, as in the comic-book which inspired it. The whole thing is entirely forgettable. Unfortunately, I suspect Chris probably won’t let me do so for quite a while…

Dir: Dominic Sena
Star: Kate Beckinsale, Gabriel Macht, Columbus Short, Tom Skerritt

Angel of Death (2009)

  By

★★★½
“A star is born? Well, at least a potential one.”

After making an undeniable impact strapped to a car bonnet in the second-half of Grindhouse, Zo…Hang on, let me find the right key on the keyboard… Ah, there we are… Zoë gets to do some actual ‘acting’, rather than playing a stuntwoman called Zoë Bell [Way to go, Tarantino!] Thios started as a web-based series of ten episodes, but is now available on DVD, which is how we watched it. Bell plays Eve, an assassin whose personality radically changes after she is stabbed in the head. She starts to see one of her victims – a young girl – and as a result, decides to go after those who ordered the death. Needless to say, her manager and handler Graham (Poth) is not impressed by this sudden burst of morality, and neither are those who have now become her target, including up-and-coming gangster boss Jake Abel, who sends his minions out to take care of her before she takes care of him.

As an action actress, Bell is unquestionably better at the “action” part than the acting. Not that she sucks at the latter, but one senses she needs more experience with regard to the thespian side of things. This is her first time having to carry a film while playing a character, and thst sometimes is obvious – it’s particularly interesting to contrast Bell and Lucy Lawless, who turns up in a supporting role as Eve’s next-door neighbour. The script also fails to make a convincing case why she makes the switch – maybe it’s the head-injury, but that’s a bit too deus ex machina to work well, and as this barely runs 70 mins, it’s not exactly something they needed to cut out.

Still, this is all redeemed by some excellent action, with Bell (obviously) doing all her own work. She has a short, compact fighting style that looks great on the camera, and there’s a real sense of hardcore energy to it, that makes them fun to watch. Having seen her start off by getting stabbed in the skull, and literally walking away, establishes Eve nicely as an unstoppable force, who can take a licking and keep on ticking. Wisely, Etheredge appreciates that without a stunt-double, there’s no need for quick cutting, and gives the viewer a chance to appreciate her skills. The result is an entertaining B-movie that will hopefully lead to bigger and better things for Bell, who might just become a genuine star down the road.

Dir: Paul Etheredge
Star: Zoë Bell, Brian Poth, Jake Abel, Justin Huen

Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li

  By

★½
“Street-fighting Tears”

I usually have no problem going on about GWG movies at some length. Hell, I even managed 750 words on DOA: Dead or Alive, and for that one, I had to re-read my review to remember what it was about. But when I got to the end of Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, my first thought was, “What the hell am I going to write about this?” It seemed likely the only way I’d get to 750 words, would be by repeating the title one hundred and twenty-five times. For the film is ill-conceived, poorly cast, badly written and directed by the man who managed to make Jet Li look bad, not once but twice, in Romeo Must Die and Cradle 2 the Grave.

I am not a difficult man to satisfy, especially in the area of Hollywood action heroine flicks. I’m so pleased they are making the effort at all, that as long as it is in focus, and the dialogue largely audible, I am generally a happy camper. Not so here, because SF:TLoC-L [I trust you appreciate how I am not gratuitously padding my word-count?] commits the cardinal sin for the genre. It’s boring – to the extent that I actually dozed off for a bit about two-thirds of the way in. So, full disclosure: this review is based on only about 90% of the movie. It’s possible the ten minutes I missed were sublimely good, so amazing they redeemed the entire rest of the movie. However, I would be inclined to bet against that outcome, as somewhat unlikely.

I think my major issue is that the movie seems to be aimed at a mentally-challenged eight-year old. There’s way too much voiceover, which is usually the sign of a director who can’t trust the script or his skills to put over the necessary content or emotion. And it also insists on Spelling Out Everything For The Audience, which is equally irritating. Case in point. Chun-Li (Kreuk) helps a guy being beaten up on the subway: he has a mysterious cobweb tattoo. Then, later, when she’s going through Chinatown searching for someone to translate a scroll, she encounters a man in the street with the same tattoo. Not two minutes later, the same design shows up on the scroll, but Bartkowiak insists on flashing back to both the subway and street guys and their tattoos. Well, duh…

The plot starts with Chun-Li growing up, and her father is abducted by Bison (McDonough) to help with his plans for… whatever. World domination, prob’ly. As an adult, Chun-Li is now a pianist, though the scenes of her in concert are incredibly badly-faked. The arrival of the mysterious scroll has her heading off to Bangkok, where she links up with Gen (Shou), who completes her training. Conveniently, Bison has just returned to Bangkok, where he grew up, and is now planning to take over a large swathe of the city, regardless of the views of the inhabitants. Interpol agent Nash (Klein) and local cop Maya (Moon Bloodgood) are out to stop him, and find Chun-Li’s presence as much a distraction as a help.

And I believed Street Fighter II was a fighting game. Silly me. It’s far too talky: all mouth and no trousers, to borrow a good ol’ British phrase. The fights themselves, choreographed by Dion Lam, aren’t bad, though the welding of some of the Street Fighter moves into the game doesn’t work – Chun-Li’s Spinning Bird Kick, for example, just looks silly. But otherwise, they aren’t awful; there’s a nice brawl in a bathroom between our heroine and Bison’s henchwomen. However, particularly in the first hour, there just aren’t enough of them, and what should be a fast-paced slugfest becomes bogged down as Chun-Li meanders her way, with a somewhat concerned expression, around the slums of Bangkok [which actually look surprisingly liveable. You want real slums, try Mumbai].

However, the casting executive who thought a member of the Black-Eyed Peas was suitable to play Vega should be taken out and flogged mercilessly. This is not sarcasm. It’s not someone who looks like a member of the Black-Eyed Peas. It is a member of the Black-Eyed Peas. His martial arts skills are almost as unconvincing as Chun-Li’s piano-playing. Almost. Klein is equally inept as Nash – the witty banter between he and Maya hits the floor with a resounding clunk, due to the complete lack of chemistry between the two actors. Similarly, McDonough has none of the charisma necessary for Bison. Say what you like about the Van Damme Street Fighter movie, and the venom is probably dripping from your lips there, it did at least have Raul Julia.

In fact, this movie pretty much makes the original look Oscar-worthy in most ways. The best depiction of the game still remains the manic sequence in Jackie Chan’s City Hunter where he and Gary Daniels went toe-to-toe in a variety of epically-silly costumes. Chan made a much better Chun-Li than Kreuk could ever hope to, and any future list of “10 Crappiest Video-game Adaptations of All Time” (admittedly, the main issue here is stopping after just ten) will be judged largely on how highly this ranks. Is that 750 words yet?

Dir: Andrzej Bartkowiak
Star: Kristin Kreuk, Chris Klein, Neal McDonough, Robin Shou

Bitch Slap

  By

★★★★
“Smack my bitch up.”

There are some films which I like, and where if you don’t agree with me, you are an idiot – such as Shaun of the Dead. However, there are movies where I can see, understand and accept why people dislike them, even if I may strongly disagree. Bitch Slap would be one of the latter. Looking at the the IMDb ballot results, the top number of voters have given it one out of ten. However, the next-most have given it 10/10. Between them, those two extremes represent more than 40% of the total votes. Much the same thing – albeit to a somewhat less rabidly-partisan degree – happened here in GwG Towers.

Chris has a certain firmness of opinion. When she has made up her mind about something, it’s pretty hard to get her to change it. She will purse her lips, fold her arms and stick to her guns. You could argue whether this strong will is a character quality or a flaw, but it certainly led to her early exit from Bitch Slap. Here’s an approximate timeline of the comments from the seat on the couch next to me:

  • 5 minutes: “Would you rather watch this alone?”
  • 5:30 minutes: “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather watch this alone?
  • 10 minutes: “Is this a porno?”
  • 20 minutes: “Could this get any more stereotypical?”

It was not long after this – I think it was when the lesbian canoodling started – she suddenly remembered she had a vitally-important task to perform elsewhere. Judging by the sounds emanating from our office, that task appeared to involve Facebook poker.

Of course, to me, complaining about the film being stereotypical is missing the point. It’s supposed to be a frothy melange of cliches, thrown into the cinematic melting-pot and the heat turned up to ‘High’. The opening credit sequence, with its clips of “bad girls” such as Tura Satana and Christina Lindberg, gives you some idea of what to expect, and it hardly pauses thereafter, growing increasingly more breathlessly frenetic. Not often have I seen a movie suffering from a more chronic case of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Diso… Ooh, look! Shiny, pretty things!

Speaking of which, it centers on three women, with about as divergent personalities as it’s possible to imagine. There’s Hel (Cummings), a con-artist with a secret identity; the psychotic Camero (Olivio), who starts off the movie insane, yet somehow manages to get even more loopy as things progress; and, finally, Trixie (Voth), the “innocent” one, whom you’re not quite sure about. The heroic trio end up out in the desert, with Gage (Hurst) tied up in their trunk, seeking… Well, part of the plot revolves around that issue, so I’ll leave that out of the summary. From there, the story of how they reached that point is told in flashback, and event also unfold moving forward, as they try to locate their obscure object of desire before the infamous, deadly “Pinky” shows up.

Of course, it’s not as simple as that. Others are after the same prize, such as Hot Wire and his GoGo Yubari clone (Japanese, schoolgirl, killer yo-yo), Kinki (Minae Noji). There’s also a good deal of tension, sexual and otherwise, between the three heroines: are any of them quite what they seem? I imagine my usage of the phrase “secret identity” above might have given some of the game away there. It hardly counts as a spoiler either, to say that it all ends (eventually) in a brawl between Camaro and Hel, in the middle of a desolate wasteland, which has become steadily more wasted and bullet-ridden over the course of the movie.

The Laydeez of Bitch Slap

Director Jacobson certainly has a solid pedigree in the action-heroine world, at least at the televisual end of the spectrum. His resume includes episodes of La Femme Nikita, Cleopatra 2525, Xena: Warrior Princess and She Spies, a good number of which have a similarly self-parodying approach to their subject matter as seen here. However, while the excess is somewhat greater, this only really extends to some potty-mouth lines and digital blood. Despite all the tension and canoodling mentioned earlier, Cummings shows a lot more skin for Jaconson as the hero’s wife in Spartacus: Blood and Sand. If you’re going for camp excess, as appears to be the case, you need to be a good deal more…well, excessive.

The main weak link is the leads, who don’t have the chops – physical or acting – to pull this off. I to wonder whether it might have been a good deal better if stunt co-ordinator Zoe Bell, Lucy Lawless and Renee O’Connor had been the stars of the film, rather than merely cameos. They have all previously shown the necessary combination of martial ability and screen presence necessary for the parts here. Not that the actresses here are “bad”: however, when you’re spitting out Satana-esque lines like, “Ram this in your clambake, bitch cake!” you’d better have the F-sized volume of charismatic fire-power to pull them off, and they fall short of the level needed for this to achieve classic status (Olivo probably comes closest to the necessary level of conviction, spitting our her dialogue with a perpetual sneer).

Having got those criticisms out of the way, the rest of the film is very solid entertainment – providing, as noted above, you can get your brain lined-up with what it’s trying to do (and if you can’t, which is understandable, it’s basically unsalvageable). Alcohol will probably help the neurons go in the correct direction, as will an encyclopaedic knowledge of pop culture, and tolerance for trash at an industrial concentration. The litmus test is probably the slow-motion water-fight which breaks out among the three laydeez early on: if you greet that with a smirk of guilty pleasure (as charged, m’lud), rather than, oh, bailing for the Facebook poker lobby, you’ll probably be fine.

Jacobsen also does a good job with the visual style, providing a perfect match for the lurid, frenetic approach of the script and character. There’s a lot of green screen work, which lends proceeding a hyperreal feeling, and the pace means that there’s hardly a dull moment. Not sure the storyline makes a great deal of sense, I admit, and it feels as overstuffed as a giant bean burrito (you know the kind, the ones you regret buying about one-third of the way through, but just can’t stop yourself from finishing). The fractured plotline has been compared to Tarantino, but personally, there’s a good deal less annoying self-indulgence than Quentin usually inflicts on the audience: for example, Camero doesn’t bring things to a grinding halt, just to witter on about comic-books.

All told, it’s refreshing to see something which is so avowedly politically-incorrect, and proud of it. The film is at its best when wallowing in the gutter, unashamedly down and dirty, and with a broad grin upon its face – credit to all those involved for having the guts not give a damn about the nay-sayers and one-voters. It’s not going to trouble the more-evolved areas of your brain very much, and will tug on the heartstrings even less, but for the times when you don’t want anything more than the cinematic equivalent of a one-night stand, this will certainly do the job perfectly well. Certainly the most full-on, and arguably the best, of the genre to come out of Hollywood in the past five years.

Dir: Rick Jacobson
Star: Julia Voth, America Olivo, Erin Cummings, Michael Hurst

"Certainly the most full-on, and arguably the best, of the genre to come out of Hollywood in the past five years."

Double Duty

  By

★★½
“Action? Comedy? Romance? The Jill of all trades, proves master of few of them.”

After 20 years in the Marines, MJ (Lesseos) returns to civilian life, but finds it somewhat hard to adapt to life as a civilian. Her old college friend Sophie (Duerden) helps her adjust – somewhat – and introduces her to Craig (Sizemore), a designer who is perhaps rather more feminine than MJ. Sophie is working on a charity auction, not realizing her assistant Carl (Freeman) is planning to steal the top item, a Faberge egg. Meanwhile, hypnosis has given MJ the ability to get in touch with her inner woman – but the problem is, every time someone snaps their fingers, she switches between her two personas. There is that of the rough, tough and gruff Marine, and then there’s the other, a giggling girlie for whom breaking a nail would pose a deep, personal crisis. Which will win out when the chips are down?

To be fair, the actors and their characters are not the problem here. The concept of a marine having to return to civilian circumstances has enough in it to power a movie, and Lesseos is believable as a soldier, in a way that many actresses wouldn’t be [see Mena Suvari in the Day of the Dead remake as a counter-example]. Still looks pretty good, given she’s… Well, let’s just say, I was surprised. Sizemore is playing against type – the star of Black Hawk Down and Saving Private Ryan is usually the one who’s in the military – yet is none the less effective for it. However, the entire film is almost stolen by Karen Black, who plays the adviser called in to help MJ become a lady; this unfolds complete with a My Fair Lady reference, at which I must confess I did laugh out loud.

The problem is that the rest of the film falls flat. Lesseos in feminine mode is much less amusing, and does not improve with repetition, shall we say. Some of the comedy is startlingly unfunny, such as the scene where MJ takes on a drunken biker-chick in a bar – I felt embarrassed for all those concerned, just watching it. Although that low point is never quite matched, the bar is set low, and it’s also the kind of film where people only get shot in the arm [that happens three times in about twenty seconds at the climax]. The moments of the heroine kicking butt with some style are sadly few and far between, and I was left with the definite feeling that Lesseos deserves a better vehicle for her talents.

Dir: Stephen Eckelberry
Star: Mimi Lesseos, Tom Sizemore, Susan Duerden, Alfonse Freeman