Tag: 2013

The Heat

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★★★
“Warm, rather than hot.”

McCarthy appears to be Feig’s muse, having starred in his last four movies, from Bridesmaids through this, and then on to Spy and the Ghostbusters reboot. The results here, also fall somewhere in the middle: while decently amusing, this mis-matched cop comedy falls short of the unexpected glory which was Spy. Straight-laced FBI agent Sarah Ashburn (Bullock) is great at her job, but disliked by her peers for her officious attitude. In order to try and win a promotion, she accepts a case in Boston to locate an elusive and unknown drug lord, Simon Larkin. There, she immediately encounters and antagonizes a local cop, Shannon Mullins (McCarthy); Mullins is also a good law-enforcement agent, but the polar opposite of Ashburn, being loud- and foul-mouthed, and no respecter of authority. Inevitably, the two have to work together, and eventually develop respect and affection for each other, etc. as they solve the case. You know the drill.

The story here is incredibly hackneyed, and making the protagonists a pair of women is about the laziest twist imaginable by writer Katie Dippold. Mind you, she co-wrote the Ghostbusters reboot as well, so part of me wonders if her elevator pitches all consist of “(insert film name), but with women!” [Though for the record, she was not involved with the upcoming Ocean’s Eight] What salvages the film are the lead actresses, with both Bullock and McCarthy in equally fine form. The latter has that hyper-acidic persona down to a T, from the moment we first see Mullins, and she tells her boss, “I’ll be there sharply at go-fuck-yourself o’clock, if there’s no traffic.” Ashburn is at the other extreme, prissily tightly-wound, yet so inept personally, she has to kidnap a neighbour’s cat for affection since hers ran off. They’re a perfect match: Mullins doesn’t give a damn, because Ashburn gives them all.

It is at these two extremes when the movie is at its most entertaining, and that’s in the early going. As the film progresses, both of the characters drift towards the middle from the edges. They generally become less interesting as a result, though there’s still amusement to be had from Ashburn’s spectacularly incompetent attempts to be a bit sweary. There’s also a gloriously gory sequence, as she attempts to carry out a tracheotomy, having seen one on television. However, not all of the comedy works, and there’s absolutely no reason why this needs a running time of more than two hours. For example, the scene where they fight each other to go through a door first, goes on about three times as long as is either necessary or funny, and the scenes involving Mullins’s dysfunctional family left me entirely cold. They’d have been better off abandoning all efforts at the drug lord plot, and just given us 90 minutes of the central pair, at the Odd Couple counterpoints of their characters, and the resulting, delightful bickering.

Dir: Paul Feig
Star: Sandra Bullock, Melissa McCarthy, Demián Bichir, Marlon Wayans

Lizzie Borden’s Revenge

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★★★
“It’s just a bunch of hot chicks in their nighties, playing Truth or Dare.”

It would, certainly, be easy to look at the poverty-row production values here, and dismiss this contemptuously as a bad film. I mean, the very first shot supposedly sets the scene at the infamous New England house in 1892, where Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks. But take a look. I’m fairly sure the trash cans to the right of the house are not of 19th-century vintage. And I am almost certain the palm trees on the left are not native to Massachusetts either. Given this, the awful use of CGI blood, etc. if you were to dismiss the film as the kind of sloppy work that gives B-movies a bad name, I wouldn’t argue.

And, yet… The line of dialogue which is the review tagline above, shows impressive self-awareness, while  the storyline seems deliberately cheesy: A bunch of sorority sisters on campus lockdown stage a seance. As one of them says, “With a blood relative of Lizzie Borden sitting right in the centre of our circle, something is going to happen, I just know it!” No prizes for guessing what. To quote the film once more, “We conjured up the ghost of Lizzie Borden and now her lesbian ass is haunting our sorority house?” [This isn’t for titillation: okay, not just for titillation: one theory about Borden involves her relationship with actress Nance O’Neil]

It is at its most amusing when pushing this knowledge of horror tropes, such as when the dwindling band of sorority sisters refuse to split up, leading to a conga line through the house. The characters in question may be stereotypes – the bimbo, the nerd who spouts bizarrely incoherent lines such as “A statistically higher chance of probability”, the troubled one, etc. – but most of the performances are decent enough, and it’s all impressively gynocentric. [This movie would pass the Bechdel Test, though perhaps indicates once more the uselessness of that ludicrous metric.] The men are relegated to minor roles of no real importance, and are, if anything, even more two-dimensional than the women. They also don’t shed their clothes as much: at the risk of stating the obvious, I am fine with this.

Ricci, who plays Lizzie’s descendant Leslie, is an adult star of some renown, yet is perfectly adequate here. Overall, I’ll confess this kept me considerably more amused than I expected from the early going, when the performance of the actor playing Mr. Borden almost had me reaching for the off button (it may have been saved by the always welcome presence of cult icon and scream queen Brinke Stevens, playing his wife). Certainly, you have to get past the shoddier, cringe-inducing aspects; having a taste for the trashy end of cinema is also necessary. However, director Devine is a veteran of horror as well as exploitation genres, and inserts enough sly nods to its conventions and cliches, that I was entertained. 

Dir: Dennis Devine
Star: Veronica Ricci, Shanalynne Wesner, Jenny Allford, Mindy Robinson

La Banda de los Bikinis Rosas vs Cobras Negras

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★★
“Banda on the run.”

It has been a while since I’ve scraped the bottom of the barrel of Mexploitation cinema: all those telenovelas don’t count, generally being well-produced and with reasonable production values. Just how reasonable is brought home by comparing them to this… Admittedly, I had to cope with it being entirely in Spanish with no subtitles. I kinda hoped that watching north of four hundred episodes of Hispanic TV would magically instill in me the ability to speak Spanish. Turns out, this is not the case. Who knew? But I think I am on fairly safe ground in declaring this a bargain basement comedy-action cross, which exists to provide PG-rated titillation as much as thrills or laughs. 

I’m informed this is the second in a series, which has reached at least three entries (though only this one can be found in the IMDb), so there appears to be sufficient of a local market to justify its existence. It seems to start with the good girls – Los Bikinis Rosas, who do indeed wear pink bikinis – celebrating with their boss after another successful mission. But it’s not long before they are called into action again, going up against the bad-girl gang, the Cobras Negras, for possession of a microchip which… presumably can do something or other of importance. That bit was lost in translation (or lack thereof). No prizes for guessing what shade of bikinis are preferred by the Negras.

This colour co-ordination is probably a good thing, since the four women on each side are almost entirely interchangeable in appearance. The Rosas have a token blonde, while the Negras have a girl in glasses, who is presumably the evil nerd of the bunch or something. [I was basically making up my own plot there.] As appears semi-customary, a masked wrestler shows up, in this case the Rosas getting their training from Huracán Ramírez. Which is impressive, since he died seven years prior to this film’s 2013 release. This would not have fazed the Mexican audience. Luchadors, particularly the masked ones, tend to be near immortal, with characters being passed down the generations, sometimes as “el Hijo de” (the son of), or simply by taking over the mask, as appears the case here.

It’s not very interesting, and has horrible pacing. For example, the Negras seem to have their headquarters located in a basement below a food court at the back of a mall. So, we get to see them – apparently in real time – going through the mall… taking the elevator to the basement… and walking from there to the room in question. It’s a sequence even more gratuitously padded than the characters’ bras. The same goes for the lengthy aerobic exercise training sequence, during which the camera appears fixed, with dedication that’s border-line impressive, on the actresses’ chests and butts. The action is not great either, though is likely stellar in comparison to the stabs at comedy, which appear mostly to consist of a flamboyant homosexual.

Half a star of this is credit for my shortcomings in Spanish, which are likely responsible for some of the issues. While her translation skills may have been helpful, I just couldn’t bring myself to inflict this one on Chris, even though her derisive snorts would have been truly epic to behold.

Dir: Julio Aldama Jr.
Star: Julio Aldama Jr., America Ramírez, Julio Zaizar, Coco Rojo

Night Swallows

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★★★
“Flying tonight…”

This week, we’ve been focusing on Soviet military heroines of World War II, and as well as Spies, I also found this Russian TV series, about the female biplane pilots, known to the Germans as the “Night Witches”. Here, their name has been changed for the series title – a tad unfortunately, in some regards – and this falls short of Spies in terms of emotional wallop and overall coherence, among other angles. It’s still worth a look though.

The two lead characters are Galya Shevchenko (Nilova) and Zhenya Zvonareva (Arntgolts), members of the 46th Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment, founded to take advantage of an untapped resource of women pilots, navigators and engineers. Except, the former has been grounded after going off-book and bombing a German convoy for reasons more personal than military. It takes intervention by legendary flier and regiment founder Marina Raskova for Galya to dodge a court-martial, and that sets the tone, with Galya the wild-card, working with the more restrained Zhenya, under their long-suffering commanding officer.

It seems the makers didn’t think the straightforward bombing missions would generate sufficient drama to propel the series, and I can see how that might be a little limited in scope. They tack on various other plots, such as the efforts by their CO’s assistant to get the women in trouble – it’s a bit more gender mixed than the real 46th. The main thread is their work in support of an undercover team, operating behind German lines, run by Alexander Makeev (Nikiforov). For example, the regiment provide air cover for a raid on a convoy carrying important military documents, or a mission to recover technology from a downed plane – the latter, also used in Spies. [Sidenote: I always thought night vision wasn’t invented until, maybe, Vietnam. But the series has it used by the Germans in WW2, and Wikipedia confirms this]

This approach does make it somewhat fragmented; there’s less flow, and also less sense of character development, than Spies managed. Must say though, it’s all rather too glamorous to be convincing: the four lead actresses all appear to have arrived straight out of Supermodel Flight School. It almost feels as if the Soviet Air Force recruited mostly from Robert Palmer’s backing dancers [Kids! Ask your parents!]; in reality, flying ability was valued over how good you looked doing it, and the regiment covered the full spectrum of attractiveness. The horrors of life during wartime here are largely limited to some cute smudges of grease now and again, rather than the reality of life described by one pilot: “We were filthy, exhausted and hungry. We were just trying to survive.”

If you don’t get much feeling of the women being part of a larger battle – in part because there’s no updates  on the ebb and flow of the war elsewhere – the individual episodes are generally fine. The best is probably one where the regiment and Makeev’s team have to infiltrate a German chemical weapons testing ground, which is using Russian civilians as the subjects. It’s chilling, and reminded me a little of a similar element in Wonder Woman. Speaking of chilly, the bleak, snow-covered landscapes are a fittingly frosty backdrop, against which the cold-hearted conflict of the Eastern front can unfold, and the cinematography is effective, making the most of the landscapes. However, the flight aspects are a bit up and down: some scenes work very well, yet others are obviously composites and/or shaky CGI.

I’d perhaps have been more impressed if I’d seen this before Spies, which set the bar really high in terms of quality. Compared to that, this is a little disappointing, if decent enough. While other attempts to tell the Night Witches story have foundered, I’m simply pleased to see anything that covers the topic, even with room for improvement. The entire 8-episode series is available on YouTube, with English subs, so you can give it a shot easily enough.

Dir: Mikhail Kabanov
Star: Tatyana Arntgolts, Elizaveta Nilova, Denis Nikiforov, Evgeniy Ganelin
a.k.a. Ночные ласточки and Nochnye lastochki

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Spies

  By

★★★★
“Red spies delight.”

I stumbled across this Russian TV series on Amazon Prime during our annual freebie month, but not until the final weekend, so wasn’t able to watch it there. Happily, I discovered the entire show has been uploaded to YouTube – embedded below, complete with English subtitles – and it’s well worth a watch. It’s set during World War II, and tells the story of two young women, from diverging backgrounds, both of whom are recruited in 1941, somewhat unwillingly. to act as intelligence operatives, during the early day

The first is Arina Prozorovskaya (Ivanova), a party girl – as in Communist Party, being a true believer whose idealism is tested after her father is accused of activities against the state. Then there’s Zoya Velichko (Ustinova), a criminal who is Nikita‘d out of prison by the spy group’s commander, Major Egorievich Vorotynnikov (Vdovichenkov). Adding to the tension between them: Zoya was involved in a robbery that went wrong, leading to the death of Arina’s mother at the hands of Zoya’s then-boyfriend. The pair end up being the top students in the class, even though training is cut short due to the German invasion. When Vorotynnikov needs two women for a mission, it’s therefore Arina and Zoya who are dispatched to risk everything, on the first of a number of dangerous jobs behind enemy lines.

Once we got past a weirdness about its presentation (we’ll get to this in a moment), both Chris and I thoroughly enjoyed this. The two Svetlanas make their heroines multi-faceted characters, who have fascinating arcs over the dozen 50-minute episodes. Arina becomes far more cynical, largely due to the treatment she and her husband, a member of the Red Army, suffer at the hands of authorities. Conversely, Zoya’s hard exterior, where the only person that matters is her young daughter, gradually softens. She falls for Vorotynnikov’s deputy, Captain Nikolay Petrov (Pronin) – really the first person to have shown genuine affection in her adult life – which helps her become a strong, loyal and fearless agent. Credit is also due to a solid supporting cast:  Vdovichenkov is outstanding as a man forced to navigate between his loyalty to the state and to those under his command, as well as Irina Apeksimova in the role of spy teacher Matilda, a role apparently influenced by Jeanne Moreau’s in Nikita.

It is a little fragmented in the early going, and not initially clear where the focus of the show will lie. However, once it settles on Arina and Zoya, it gets into a very good rhythm. Each mission takes place over a couple of episodes, allowing them to develop without feeling rushed. They’re varied enough to avoid repetition, showcasing different facets of espionage, from reconnaissance and infiltration, through to Arina becoming a “red sparrow”, and having to overcome qualms about being faithful to her husband.  There’s a sense of danger almost every moment (enhanced by my experience of Russian novels, where everyone usually dies tragically!).

This is most apparent in an episode where Zoya helps a badly-injured Petrov through a forest, only for a dramatic reversal at the end, which ranks among the most impactful “bait and switches” in our TV viewing history. This is just one of the memorable moments that will stick in our mind. Another is Arina’s “honey-pot” target, who initially seems decent enough… until he describes to her an incident where his Luftwaffe squadron attacked a civilian target, killing Russian women and children, after he over-rode the objections of his men. The expressions that flicker across Arina’s face as he tells the story, and she is clearly struggling to suppress the urge to stab him repeatedly on her throat, are quite awesome.

In the YouTube version at least (I can’t speak for the Amazon Prime edition), there is an oddity whenever characters speak any language but Russian – mostly German, as in the scene mentioned above. As well as the English subs, that dialogue is also over-dubbed into Russian, and all characters, male or female, get the same male voice. While I believe this is standard practice in that country, it takes a bit of getting used to, especially when it’s two women who are conversing! However, it certainly didn’t significantly interfere with our entertainment.

By the end, Chris and I were completely engrossed and on the edge of our seats as to whether Arina and Zoya would make it out alive. I won’t spoil that, though have to say we felt it was entirely appropriate, and left us emotionally satisfied. If this is in any way typical of Russian television, we’ll have to see what other hidden gems might be out there for us to find.

Dir: Felix Gertskhikov
Star: Svetlana Ivanova, Svetlana Ustinova, Vladimir Vdovichenkov, Evgeny Pronin
a.k.a. Разведчицы

The Five

  By

★★★½
“Live organ donor.”

A chance encounter in a convenience store destroys the life of Go Eun-ah (Kim). For her young daughter accidentally sees serial killer Oh Jae-wook (On) abducting his next victim. Realizing he has been spotted, Jae-wook carries out a brutal home invasion, killing both the daughter and Eun-ah’s husband, and leaving her permanently paralyzed. But he has reckoned without Eun-ah’s fortitude. She devotes the rest of her life to tracking down her attacker, and puts together a team of four to help her. All need transplants, for them or their family. So Eun-ah has promised that once Jae-wook has been captured, delivered to her and killed, she will give them her organs. Damn. That’s what I call “fully committed”… But when Jae-Wook realizes he is being hunted, he turns his attentions on the hunters.

Revenge seems to have been a strong theme in the Korean cinema we’ve covered here – Lady Vengeance, Princess Aurora and perhaps most closely, Monster. This perhaps falls a little short of the best of those, but is by no means a bad movie: it’s executed with plenty of style, and the twists and turns keep coming from beginning to end. This was Jeong’s first feature, not that you’d know it, and is based on his own web-comic. This has a very strong concept, and though it may seem implausible, the set-up is done with great care, putting together the elements in a way that it all seems credible. And even though confined to a wheel-chair, Eyn-Ah’s place here is secure, from the scene where she believes she spots Jae-Wook in the street, and wheels herself after him frantically, a long knife in her hand.

The first half is particularly good, explaining why Eyn-Ah came to such a desperate place, and how she linked up with others who are equally desperate in a different direction. It’s certainly consistent in tone, and if you’re looking for some frothy entertainment, you should stay well away: there isn’t much light to be found in this darkness [though I did laugh at the guy Eyn-Ah captures during her investigation who protests, dead-pan, “Madame, two Tasers in one day!” Ok, you probably had to be there…]. This is especially true of the ending, which I must admit, I found the weakest part of the film. It could have been considerably more satisfying, both in the consummation of Eyn-Ah’s revenge and her eventual fate.  At one point it feels as if her old skills – early on, we see her creating a wonderful Rube Goldberg machine for her daughter’s birthday – are going to prove gloriously relevant, and it’s a shame they aren’t.

However, perhaps this is the point. As Eyn-Ah is told by the (very Christian) caregiver, who initially takes care of her on release from hospital, “Revenge may feel sweet before you do it, but he’ll haunt you forever.” Maybe Eyn-Ah’s entire scheme is a way of avoiding this guilt. If so, I can’t deny its ultimate success.

Dir: Jeong Yeon-shik
Star: Kim Sun-ah, On Joo-wan, Ma Dong-seok, Shin Jung-geun

A Deadly Game

  By

★½
“An arrow escape.”

Winner of the “Most misleading DVD cover of the year” award, the gap between expectation and reality has rarely been wider. It starts off promisingly enough, with young woman Kayla (Fairaway), carrying a bow and running away from a man in a car. She’s rescued by a passing motorist, but they are run off the road by their pursuer. There’s then a flashback, to explain how these events came about. Which would be fine, except for the flashback lasting close to an hour and a quarter of thoroughly mind-numbing chit-chat, before anyone even picks up a bow in anger. It’s not exactly the Hunger Games wannabe the sleeve is trying to suggest.

One of the alternative names, Deadly Spa, is far more accurate, even though it’s a title more likely to raise a smirk than a rush of adrenaline-charged excitement. Kayla is at the spa in question – ‘The Source’ with her mother, Dawn (Pietz), having convinced Mom she needs a break. At first, the place seems beyond perfect: all meditation rooms, power food breakfasts, toxin-cleansing saunas, and of course, no cell-phones allowed. Though Kayla has a yearning for a cheeseburger, which she guiltily admits to sympathetic (and hunky!) spa employee, Brett (Werkheiser).

Like most things in Lifetime TV movies which seem too good to be true, this is too good to be true. In particular, spa owner David James (Whitworth) has more in common with David Koresh than his customers should expect. He takes a shine to Dawn, and successfully pulls the wool over her eyes. Kayla is nowhere near so easily convinced, not least because she has seen David’s more psychotic side. When her mother finally sees the light as well, the two try to escape, planning to divulge David’s dirty little secrets to the authorities. If you’re well-read on cult leaders like Jim Jones, you’ll know that, to David, it makes them a problem. The solution initially involves tying Kayla up in an attic and inflicting low-rent brain-washing techniques on her. It doesn’t take. This is my unsurprised face. 

Eventually – and, boy, do I mean “eventually” – this brings us back to where we came in. It takes so long, that I was beginning to feel I was the one held captive against my will, though unfortunately without any of that nice Stockholm syndrome kicking in. [And the sooner the PTSD kicks in and erases the whole movie from my memory, the better] First mom, and then the daughter, use their archery skills, miraculously picked up after little more than two arrows, to defend themselves. It’s just enough content – along with Mom’s miraculous and unannounced judoka talents, allowing her to flip one of David’s henchmen off a cliff – to allow this to qualify for the site. However, this review should be considered far more of a warning, than any kind of endorsement. I’m sure the place will be getting a one-star review on Yelp as well.

Dir: Marita Grabiak
Star: Amy Pietz, Tracey Fairaway, Johnny Whitworth, Devon Werkheiser
a.k.a. Zephyr Springs and Deadly Spa

I Spit On Your Grave 2

  By

★★★
“Model prisoner.”

This sequel is almost entirely unrelated to the original, beginning with a new, fresh character who will be tortured within an inch of her life, before escaping and roaring back for revenge. However, it manages to be a little more coherent, even as it replaces the redneckophobia of the original, with much more straightforward xenophobia.

The victim here is Katie Carter (Dallender), a wannabe model who takes advantage of a free photography portfolio session, offered by sleazy, Eastern European cameraman Ivan (Absolom) and his assistant, Georgy (Baharov). The latter becomes obsessed with her, and won’t take no for an answer. When Katie’s screams alert her apartment building’s caretaker, he’s stabbed by Georgy, leaving Ivan to clean up the mess. Still, it’s nothing that a large crate, stamped “Bulgaria”, can’t solve… When Katie discovers what’s awaiting her in Sofia, she’ll wish she’d been the one left in a pool of blood.

The narrative here is a bit more coherent. For instance, an early scene establishes that Carter is no shrinking violet, being a Midwest girl who knows a thing or two about hunting vermin. We also get to see more of the period between her escape, and her returning to take action – she survives with the help of a kindly local priest. He’s about the only Eastern European character here who is not an utter scumball, and in that aspect, I was reminded a fair amount of the first Hotel movie.

Initially, I thought it was going to spend the entire film in New York, and that might not have been a bad thing. Monroe is good at capturing the “urban jungle” aspect of the city, in much the same way as Abel Ferrara. There are a number of elements early on that brought Ms. 45 to mind, with that classic of the rape-revenge genre also having a sequence in a photographer’s studio. Dallender has the kind of willowy steel look as Zoe Tamerlis, too. It’s a shame it didn’t retain that approach, instead of becoming some kind of cautionary tale about foreign travel.

Once it leaves that setting, however, and scurries off to Sofia, the film becomes less interesting, more or less going down the same path as the original. Indeed, some of the beats are exactly the same, e.g. the heroine appears to find sanctuary in an authority figure, only to have that yanked away from her. Some of the resulting unpleasantness is hard to watch – please note, I’ve seen more than my fair share of cinematic nastiness, so I do not squirm easily – and that applies on both sides of the brutality. But its impact is never more than a visceral shudder. To be truly effective, it needs to pack an emotional punch as well, and in the main, that’s not present. It’s technically solid, and that may be part of the problem; it perhaps should be a little less polished, and rougher around the edges, in line with the content.

Dir: Steven R. Monroe
Star: Jemma Dallender, Yavor Baharov, Joe Absolom, Aleksandar Aleksiev

.357: Six Bullets for Revenge

  By

★★
“As the crow lies…”

It wasn’t until the end, when the credits ran and I saw someone’s name I knew, that I realized this was actually a local production, shot here in Phoenix. Maybe I should have been paying more attention, or maybe that just speaks to the bland lack of place present in this low-budget Crow knock-off. For, despite the poster which is obviously riffing off another comic-book movie, this one is clearly inspired by Alex Proyas’s cult classic. I am, however, pleased to report that the lead star here did actually make it through the entirety of production with a pulse, so they come out ahead of their inspiration in that department.

On their wedding night, Eric – yes, as in Eric Draven – and Jade (Love) have their nuptials rudely interrupted by a gang of thugs belonging to Lyle Barnes (Ames), due to Eric having skipped out on them with Jade and, more importantly, fifty grand. He is killed; she is brutally assaulted and wakes up the next morning beside his corpse, with one though on her mind: vengeance. She trades her wedding ring for a gun at a pawn shop, and with the assistance of a mysterious stranger, Hammer (Williamson), begins a relentless pursuit of those responsible for her husband’s demise, all the way up the chain of command to Barnes.

The problem with being such an obvious copy, from the page-flipping opening credit sequence, to the black, feathery wings worn by Jade as she goes about her business, is you’re inevitably going to be measured at every step against your inspiration. And when you are going up against an undeniable cult classic, it’s unlikely to be a positive comparison. If this had taken the same basic elements, but gone in its own direction, I’d likely have been more tolerant of its flaws, most notably fight scenes which are ploddingly assembled – apparently from flat-packs with an Allen wrench. And a low budget is absolutely no excuse for the apparent lack of originality, which is the main problem here.

Fred Williamson’s presence helps elevate things, but it’s clear they only had him around for a couple of days, and his character’s departure from the film is every bit as abrupt as his arrival [though I was amused by him being called Hammer, that basically being what Fred calls himself!] If he had lurked in the background for the entire movie, providing motivation and guidance, it would have been better. William Katt, playing a sleazy pawnshop guy, also stands out, but Love’s performance isn’t enough to overcome an ill-considered costume, which feels like it came off the remainder rail at Hot Topic. The grindhouse aspects offer a welcome dose of grime, and is perhaps the one area where this does manage to surpass its predecessor, with the film offering copious female nudity (from just about everyone bar the heroine, who may have been body-doubled). This probably isn’t quite enough to justify it as a viewing experience.

Dir: Brian Skiba
Star: Laurie Love, Brian Ames, Krystle Delgado, Fred Williamson

Huff

  By

★★★
“Brings home the bacon.”

A modern-day update of The Three Little Pigs, this works better than you might think. The wolf is “Huff” (O’Connell), a really warped individual whose interests appear to be religion, drugs and molesting his three step-daughters. Bit of an odd combination. Their mother, Lorelei (Elina Madison), is a largely absent stripper, who seems not to care too much that her boyfriend’s attention have now turned from her oldest daughter, Brixi (Bollinger), to the youngest one, Shay (Stefanko). But when Huff prepares his big score, using cash “borrowed” from his mistress’s ex-husband (or something like that – the relationships here are so complicated, you need a chart to keep track), Lorelei sees her opportunity, sending the three girls away with the money. That leaves Huff in serious trouble, and he’s soon after them, intent on retrieving the cash. Huff is indeed going to puff… on his asthma inhaler.

Yeah, that’s a bit of an over-reach, and you feel it might have worked better, had the makers not apparently felt obligated to stick so close to their source. Contrast, say, Freeway, which was a similarly modern version of a fairly tale, specifically Little Red Riding Hood – but had no qualms about discarding elements that didn’t fit, and was all the better for it. Here, even the daughters’ names are clunkily shoehorned in to the narrative; as well as Brixi and Shay, there’s Styx. Okay, I think we get the concept: even for a stripper mom, those are a bit much. Fortunately, when it’s not being incredibly contrived, this is a decent enough slab of trashy fun, located right at the bottom of the social pecking order – although everyone has far better teeth, and are generally much more attractive than you’d expect. This is a compromise I’m happy to live with, since it is clearly not intended to be Winter’s Bone.

O’Connell was The Batchelor in the show’s seventh series, in 2005, so guess it’s a bit of a change in pace and content here. He certainly makes for an ultra-evil villain, right from the get-go when he’s telling his (at that point, extremely young) daughters a particularly sordid tale from the Bible. Indeed, it’s kinda remarkable that the sisters have managed to survive with any fragment of their morality intact. Yet, on more than one occasion, Brixi is prepared to imperil herself to protect her siblings – a cooler head might have considered saner options. If you know the fairy-tale, you’ll already know how things progress, and the story follows its inspiration closely, up to the point where Huff and Brixi face off. It’s a finale that really doesn’t deserve the coda it receives, which seems to render much of what has gone before pointless, or close to. But as a tacky grab-bag of low-life scumminess, where an unpleasant death is never far away, it appears more than happy to wallow in the mud along with its “little pigs”. It does so adequately enough to be a guilty pleasure as a result.

Dir: Paul Morrell
Star: Marie Bollinger, Charlie O’Connell, Jenna Stone, Elly Stefanko
a.k.a. Big Bad Wolf