Tag: 2017

Hunting Emma

  By

★★★½
“The Revenge knock-offs start here…”

Actually, that’s unfair. For this was released in its home country of South Africa in March 2017, six months before Revenge had its world premiere. But the timing of its US release, less than two weeks after Revenge, is… let’s say, “interesting”, given the strong similarities between the two films. While there are significant differences, which we’ll get to shortly, both depict the pursuit of a lone woman across a desert landscape, by a pack of men intent on making sure she doesn’t get out alive. She has to turn the tables on them, pushing past societal norms in the name of self-preservation.

Indeed, if I was the makers of Jagveld, I might be a bit miffed that they’re now faced to play catch-up in the US market. Revenge has swept in and grabbed all the plaudits, leaving their film feeling (even if it isn’t) like a mockbuster. It inevitably suffers from being second. If I hadn’t seen Revenge, this might well have got our seal of approval. Instead, it no longer feels as fresh, even if it’s by no means bad. It doesn’t have quite the same feminist subtext, bypassing the sexual assault angle. Instead, the trigger for the hunt is a car breaking down in the veldt, and while Emma (du Randt) is looking for help, she stumbles across Bosman (van Jaarsveld) and his gang, just as they’re shooting a policeman. This not being something to which they want a witness, the chase is on.

This is rather more restrained than Revenge: something of a double-edged sword, as its sibling’s excess was part of the gonzo charm. Most obviously, it’s far less gory, and also has a more prosaic explanation for the heroine’s savagery. Rather than peyote triggering a pharmacological resurrection, Emma’s dad (Meintjes) was a special forces soldier. His cynical view about the savagery of the world led him to train her in survival skills, an upbringing she rejects in favour of a career as a teacher and fervent pacifism – there’s a rather clunky subplot about her breaking up with a boyfriend because he defended himself in a fight. The lessons still stuck, and just as there are no atheists in fox-holes, there are no pacifists in desert warfare.

There’s something of the young Uma Thurman about du Randt, and the gang members offer an interesting range of characters, from the hardcore Bosman through to some of his minions, who would clearly rather be somewhere else. While they’re all meat for Emma’s grinder, some of the wounds are rather self-inflicted [even I know better than to drink untreated wilderness water, and I do not camp well…] The main flaw is its lack of a sense of escalation, something Revenge had by the crimson-coloured bucket. When I saw Bosman picking up his F-sized rifle, I was eagerly anticipating the moment it would be turned against him. At close range. By a thoroughly pissed Emma. No such luck, but I did appreciate what might be a nod to Ms. 45 in the use of an iron as a deadly weapon. Instead, it plateaus some time before the end, finishing on an “All right, I suppose” note rather than the necessary crescendo. Worth a look though. Especially if you haven’t seen Revenge yet.

Dir: Byron Davis
Star: Leandie du Randt, Neels van Jaarsveld, Tim Theron, Tertius Meintjes
a.k.a. Jagveld

ExPatriot

  By

★★★
“National insecurity”

Riley Connors (Kane) is a CIA analyst, who quits her job and blows the whistle on secret government surveillance programs. Having pulled an Edward Snowden, she hides out in Colombia, helped by the reporter who broke her story. Her peace is short-lived: a knock on the door proves to be a local cop, working in conjunction with Bill Donovan (Weber), her former CIA colleague and lover. He comes with a proposition. Help them take down a pair of shady Cuban banking brothers (Espitia and Browner) who are suspected of funding domestic terrorism, and she’ll be able to return to the United States, with the slate wiped clean. It’s a very risky proposition, even if her reputation as an enemy of the state might be the perfect “in” to the targets’ organization. But can Bill be trusted either?

Probably wisely, it avoids too much in the way of potentially lethal (and largely irrelevant) political commentary. Though the main twist, to be honest, is so obvious, I have to wonder what kind of vetting the CIA does for its employees, and also about the overall accuracy of the term “intelligence community”. Yet, in something of a contradiction, once this clown-sized narrative shoe finally drops, it makes for a more straightforward and effective narrative the rest of the way. Everyone’s true motives have been exposed, rather than the murky world of spy vs. counterspy which the first half of the film has largely inhabited. That section feels a little like an episode from Alias with Sydney Bristow going undercover, climaxing in Riley trying to transfer all the brothers’ ill-gotten funds out of their accounts, before one of them arrives in their office.

As such, it does take a fair amount of disbelief suspension. Would any group of shady bankers employ an ex-spook as a security consultant – particularly one who was too morally high-minded for the CIA? Inevitably, one of the brothers falls for her, causing some friction between her and Bill, who still blames her for walking out on him, yet simultaneously still carries a flame for Riley. I think the latter half works better, showcasing some above-average location work, in and around Bogota, ending up on top of Mount Monserrate with its giant status of Christ [when I first saw this, I though we were in Rio!]. Oddly, this is the second film I’ve recently seen which was filmed there, for no particular reason, after The Belko Experiment.

Kane was also familiar to me, having played the ex-girlfriend of serial killer Paul Stagg in The Fall, though is rather different here, to the point I didn’t recognize her. It makes for solid, if unspectacular, entertainment which site a couple of F-bombs away from being a decent TV movie. While predictable, it’s well-enough constructed, and Riley makes for an interesting character, one whose scruples could end up being the (literal) death of her. There is a certain amount of bait and switch here, in that the Snowdon-esque escapade of the opening, ends up not being particularly relevant to the main plot: I can see how it could have been eliminated without much tweaking of the plot. However, what the film gains from this, likely balances out any losses, although it probably helps I had no fore-knowledge of the specifics. I see a sleeve with a girl and a gun, it goes on the list…

Dir: Conor Allyn
Star: Valene Kane, Charlie Weber, Mario Espitia, Andres Ogilvie Browne

Fighting Belle

  By

★½
“Hell is belles.”

Oh, dear. A misbegotten concept – Sweet Home Alabama crossed with Rocky – doubles down with shaky execution, and a non-stop parade of painfully obvious cliches in both characters and plot, to startlingly poor effect. As evidence of the first, imagine a film about a man, dumped by his girlfriend, who decides that beating her up is appropriate revenge. This would not exactly be anyone’s idea of comedy gold. But the makers here think that, simply by reversing the genders, it becomes so. They are very much mistaken. I believe I laughed once.

The heroine is southern belle Delilah (Harthcock), veteran of many a beauty pageant: we can tell, because virtually every scene sees her wearing a “Miss Mint Julep” sash or similar. Yeah, guess I’ll quote the master of sarcasm, Edmund Blackadder: “I thank God I wore my corset, because I think my sides have split.” Anyway, she is jilted at the altar by asshole fiancé Kelvin (Czerwonko), and decides to get back at him by challenging her ex, a former pugilist, to a boxing match. She goes to the local gym, convinces the sceptical Tandy (Cook) to train her, and…

Well, you can guess the rest. Trust me: the previous statement isn’t critical hyperbole. You could literally write down ten plot points that have been done to death in this kind of film, and I’d wager at least seven of them would be delivered here. Family opposition? Check. Delilah falls for Tandy? Check. Befriends the gym’s tough girl, Slice (Pierre)? Check. Heart-warming finale? Double-check. That this manages to take an hour and fifty-one minutes to get there, however, is testament to some impressively meandering story-telling. It likely doesn’t help that you can see the eventual destination coming, from a very long way off.

The budget here was reportedly $15,000, and it shows. This is especially true in the department which is the bête noire of low-budget film-making, audio. It’s echoey in one scene, muffled in the next, and the incidental music score often cuts abruptly at the join, making the transitions more abrupt instead of smooth.  It’s some credit that Harthcock’s performance manages to overcome these problems, at least to some degree, and the perky Delilah is generally the best thing the film has to offer [the sole time I laughed, as mentioned above, was when she spat out a taunt, along the lines of “Why aren’t you married yet? Wasn’t your brother available?”]

However, it’s a performance which sticks out like a sore thumb when put beside the rest of the cast, with Tandy in particular so understated, he should be checked for a pulse. The vast bulk of the attempts at comedy fall painfully flat, the romance between the two leads is sadly lacking in chemistry, and the efforts at portraying the boxing and Delilah’s training are 95% unsuccessful. There are any number of potentially interesting directions this could have gone: instead, the script sticks to a painfully well-travelled path, and ends up going down for the count.

Dir: Sean Riley
Star: Jessica Harthcock, Noah Cook, Ryan Czerwonko, Donnie Pierre

Bancroft: season one

  By

★★★½
“The thin grey line.”

When young detective Katherine Stevens (Marsay) gets assigned a batch of cold cases by her boss, Clifford Walker (Edmondson), it seems a task of little interest. The batch includes the brutal stabbing murder of a young woman, 27 years previously – coincidentally, the first cop on the scene, Elizabeth Bancroft (Parish), is now a senior officer. Indeed, she’s competing with Walker for the job of soon-to-retire Detective Chief Superintendent, and bringing down local crime boss Athif Kamara would all but guarantee her the job. So, nothing will be allowed to stand in Bancroft’s way. Not Walker, and certainly not a rookie detective, poking her nose into cases which should stay closed. Because three decades of forensic advances mean that the murder Stevens has re-opened may no longer be quite as insoluble as it was…

The fact that the show’s title is Bancroft, and not “Stevens”, tells you where the focus is here, on the villainess – or, you could perhaps argue, anti-heroine. Perhaps the closest comparable show I can think of is Dexter, particularly in that both shows have a central character who hides their true nature in the police force. In Bancroft’s case, the murderous tendencies have also been very deeply buried; however, it comes out again when her position is threatened by Stevens’s investigation. Yet there’s plenty of evidence of her generally “flexible” morality, shall we say. For instance, she brokers an agreement with Athif’s younger brother, letting him take over, in exchange for information on his sibling and a tacit agreement to co-operate with her in future. The logic is pure pragmatism: someone you know, and can control, is better than a wild-card. It makes for fascinating viewing.

Bancroft is also very manipulative, as can be seen in her relationship with the impressionable Stevens. At least initially, the younger police officer looks up to her as a role-model, and that makes it easy for Bancroft to twist Stevens to her ends, such as withholding evidence discovered from Walker. But over the arc of the four 45-minute episodes which form the first series, Stevens shows dogged persistence and determination as well, and gets a crash course in maturity. As well, perhaps, as one in striking a balance between your career and your personal life, something with which Bancroft appears always to have struggled.

The main thing preventing this from getting a higher rating, and likely our seal of approval, is the unsatisfactory final episode, which simply leaves too many loose ends dangling – not least the one resulting from the picture above. The show has been renewed for a second series: fortunate, because if it hadn’t, the inadequate conclusion offered would have caused us to join the large mob with torches, marching on the producers’ building.  To be honest, the four-part arc was likely too short to tell the story they wanted to, and it might be fairer to judge this after the next batch of episodes. But in its title character, there’s plenty to appreciate, offering the kind of woman still rarely seen on television, and is alone enough to ensure we’ll be tuning back in.

Creator: Kate Brooke
Star: Sarah Parish, Faye Marsay, Amara Karan, Adrian Edmondson

Revenge

  By

★★★★½
“Women always have to put up a fucking fight.”

This French rape-revenge movie is the most blood-drenched GWG film I’ve seen since Kill Bill, Volume 1, and is not for the faint of heart. However, the good news is, it’s not the rape part of the equation which is hard to watch: this is depicted with admirable restraint, occurring mostly off-camera. The director has stressed that the story isn’t about the rape, and I’m delighted with that: it has always struck me as the least interesting element. It’s a plot device, to kick-off what matters. Focusing on it, as some films have done, seems to me like focusing on turning the ignition key, instead of driving the car. This, instead, offers a road-trip to remember.

The victim is Jen (Lutz), a young girl having a weekend in the Moroccan desert with her rich, married boyfriend, Richard (Janssens). He’s also there to do a spot of hunting with his pals, Stan and Dimitri (Colombe and Bouchède). They four have a night drinking and dancing, but the next morning, when Richard heads off to make travel arrangements, Stan rapes Jen. On Richard’s return, he tries to smooth things over. Jen is having none of it, and storms off. Knowing that any legal complaint would destroy his marriage, Richard fakes calling for transport out, then pushes Jen off a cliff. Her landing is… not a soft one. Convinced the problem is solved, the men leave disposing of the body until later. Except, Jen isn’t dead, and when the trio go back, she’s not there. Helped by some impressively strong peyote – in this case, the drugs clearly do work – she patches herself up, and turns the hunters into the hunted.

First, let me address the improbably-resilient elephant in the room. Yes, her survival and pursuit is implausible, with a couple of large holes. Literally: one of the film’s two highly cringe-inducing pieces of self-surgery shows Jen patching up a hole in her stomach. Yet there must, of necessity, be an even larger one in her back. What happened to that? To be honest, they didn’t need this aspect at all: simply surviving the fall would have been hardcore enough. She also goes barefoot through the entire film, without a whimper. In the Arizona summer, I can’t take the garbage out barefoot without leaving singed skin on the drive. One shot of her pulling the shoes off her first victim would have fixed that.

It’s a shame, albeit a minor one, because virtually everything else is perfect. The transition of Jen, from the stuff of Richard’s fantasies, to that of his nightmares – he’s the one who delivers the tagline above – is impeccably handled. Even her good looks transform. At the beginning, it’s a shallow and utterly conventional prettiness – which she has exploited into a weekend getaway to a luxury location. By the end, she has paid a terrible price for this. Yet even as she’s missing minor body parts, disfigured, drenched in blood (both hers and others) and covered in desert grime… she’s glowing. Her inner beauty shines through, increasingly illuminating the bad-ass bitch she has become over the course of proceedings.

For a film lauded for its supposed up-ending of the male gaze, this feels a bit odd, since it could be read as the sexual assault triggering Jen’s blossoming: rape as psychological therapy. She should thank her attackers! [The image of a rising phoenix branded into her skin, due to her impromptu first-aid, is not exactly subtle in its imagery. Then again, the entire film is not exactly subtle, and proudly defiant as such] If that reading is on shaky ground, it’s also amusing to note Revenge utterly fails the dreaded Bechdel Test, despite being brutally empowering, to a degree rarely seen. More evidence – as if it were really needed – of how shitty the Bechdel Test is at evaluating films.

The good thing is that the feature’s entertainment value in no way relies on any kind of Identity Politics 1.0.1. to work. It functions perfectly well as a stripped-down pursuit, which neither asks for, no offers, any kind of quarter on behalf of the participants – for their genders or any other reason. There’s a steady, relentless escalation to proceedings from the moment Jen takes flight, to a final confrontation which redefines “paint the walls blood-red”. That’s a jaw-dropping pursuit round the house where things began, and includes proof that cling film, like duct tape, has a thousand and one uses.

The director says the only previous example of the rape-revenge genre she watched was Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left. Though if true, the proximity of names for the heroine here and in the genre’s most infamous entry, I Spit On Your Grave, is a striking coincidence. That aside, it’s interesting to note that the only other female-directed entry, Baise-moi, was also from France. And in tone, this has almost as much in common with À l’interieur (Inside), which was just as blood-drenched, and similarly gave absolutely no fucks. Much credit to Fargeat for this “take no prisoners” attitude, and delivering a thoroughly uncompromising piece of cinema; kudos for all of her cast as well, in particular Lutz, who go all-in to no less a degree.

I’ve been watching extreme films for thirty years or so, and let’s be honest, you get a bit desensitized to it all. We went to see this one at a local art cinema, and from their reactions, it was clear that most of the audience were, let’s say, not as “experienced” in the ways of savage cinema as Chris and I. Their responses merely added to the fun: I’d kinda forgotten how audience reaction can enhance a film (their goddamn rustling of snacks… not so much, but let’s move rapidly on). At the end, after all was said and done, one of the other attendees blurted out loud, “Best ten bucks I’ve ever spent.” I’m not inclined to disagree. Despite its flaws – which I acknowledge and embrace – if 2018 offers a film which packs a bigger punch, I can’t wait to see it.

Dir: Coralie Fargeat
Star: Matilda Lutz, Kevin Janssens, Vincent Colombe, Guillaume Bouchède

Negative

  By

★★½
“a.k.a. We’ve Got a Drone And We’re Gonna Use It”

This is a very cunning title. For when you Google “Negative film review”, all you get are a lot of articles about Bright. Hohoho. [In five years time, people will probably have to Google “Bright” to understand this reference] Actually, it refers to a photographic negative, casually taken by Rodney (Roché) in the park. What he doesn’t realize at the time, is that he has accidentally captured the face of Natalie (Winter), a former MI-5 agent who is on the run. She turns up on his doorstep, demanding he turn over the photo to her, but before she can leave, the two Colombian assassins after her, also show up, and she has no choice but to take (the thoroughly confused and largely unwilling) Rodney with her. Together, they head for Phoenix and a safe house owned by Natalie’s former associate, Hollis (Quaterman), with the Colombians in pursuit.

First things first. I was startled to learn some people apparently still take pictures on film requiring an actual darkroom to develop it: personally, this left the movie already feeling like a throwback to the eighties, about as out of time as Phone Booth is now. [References to The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy don’t exactly help there] Moving past that, it all feels rather too understated. Apart from some blood-spatter, we don’t get any real evidence of Natalie’s qualifications as a bad-ass until an hour into the movie – she’s more about evasion than confrontation, save for a drunk guy at a motel. This may have been a function of a relatively small budget – only $100K, and to the credit of Caldwell and its crew, the overall look generally doesn’t show it. [There are some interesting interviews with the director online, explaining how this was possible. They’re worth a read, since he seems a smart guy]

Resources may also explain why it’s pretty dialogue-heavy: two people in a car is about as cheap as it gets. Though the dialogue isn’t terrible, it just isn’t good enough to carry the film, which it needs to do. As the tag-line above suggests, you could play a drinking game based on the number of drone shots: it got the the point where, on more than one occasion, we accurately predicted the next such showing up. And the “Phoenix” the film depicts… Well, let’s just say, there were rather too many palm trees, and not enough cacti for that aspect to ring true. It offers little or no sense of place, with generic suburbia and desert, which feel like they could be anywhere West of the Rockies. 

Everything progresses much as you’d expect, if you’ve seen this kind of film before, eventually reaching the expected gun-battle against the Colombians. This unfolds at night, and it’s tough to figure out what exactly is going on. There’s likely a bigger problem though: by the time you reach it, I still hadn’t quite been given a real reason to care. While I’d like to see more from Winter (the story of how her character got to this point, might potentially have been more interesting than the one actually told), the film likely works better as a technical exercise than an emotional experience.

Dir: Joshua Caldwell
Star: Katia Winter, Sebastian Roché, Simon Quarterman

12 Feet Deep: Trapped Sisters

  By

★★½
“Drowning, not waving.”

There aren’t many films which will be reviewed both here and on aquaticsintl.com, a site offering “Commercial swimming pool and waterpark industry news” [their opinion: a “woefully inaccurate portrayal of pool technology”]. But then, if you see only one film about sisters trapped underneath a swimming-pool cover this year… Yeah, it’s highly likely to be this one. Eskandari deserves some credit for taking a paper-thin and highly dubious premise and almost stretching it out to feature length. But even he eventually runs out of steam at about the hour mark, and derisive snorting will take over from there. 

Siblings Bree (Noone) and Jonna (Park) are the victims, after trying to retrieve the former’s engagement ring from the bottom of the pool. Lackadaisical pool manager (Bell, recognizable to horror fans from the Saw franchise) closes the giant fibreglass pool cover on them – though I defer to the experts at aquaticsintl.com, who said, “There is no way that would possibly ever meet any ASTM standards for pool safety covers used in the U.S.” Having flagrantly disregarded ASTM standards, he then locks up shop, leaving the pair trapped underneath over a long holiday weekend. Their only hope is the pool’s cleaner, Clara (Farr), but she’s not long out of prison, and the felon sees Bree and Jonna as a moist, trapped meal ticket. Her demands to free them begin with the PIN for Bree’s phone, and escalate from there, as the sisters strive for their own escape.

This feels like a descendant of 47 Meters Down, which was the spawn of The Shallows, which called back to Open Water, all using drowning as the main threat. At least here, “being eaten” isn’t on the menu, and the story has to contrive a number of other elements to stretch things out. Thus we (eventually) get the truth about the death of Brie and Jonna’s father, and the latter’s jealousy about the former’s engagement leads to significant quantities of sibling bickering. Jonna initially comes across as quite the bitch, though we eventually discover there are reasons for her being a curmudgeon. Oh, and did I mention that Bree is a diabetic, who needs an insulin shot, like now?

Supposedly “based on true events” – I can hear derisive laughter from acquaticsintl.com as I write – you’d probably need an especially forgiving nature to get past the “I’m so sure” moments here, such as why they bother to tread water for much of the film, when they could just head to the shallow end and stand there [as well as getting much better leverage for their breakout efforts]. In the first half, things are executed with enough energy as to paper over the cracks, and the series of unfortunate events by which the two women end up trapped is more plausible than I expected. However, I can’t helped thinking it would have been much improved, had Bell returned as his Jigsaw character at the half-way point, and released some sharks into the pool.

Dir: Matt Eskandari
Star: Alexandra Park, Nora-Jane Noone, Diane Farr, Tobin Bell

Blue Line

  By

★★½
“Behind the masks”

Small world. Well, small-ish. I used to work for the same online media company as one of the scriptwriters of this, though our paths there never crossed in any meaningful sense. That’s probably about as interesting a factoid i.e. “not very”, as this film. Indeed, outside of some gratuitous strip-club breasts, it feels like it could have strayed in from a slow weekend on Hallmark. Battered wife Lindsay (Ladd) teams up with longtime stripper friend Nicole (Moore), and commit a string of armed robberies around their local area in Connecticut, their identities hidden with Halloween masks and voice-changers. They’re building up towards a big score, which will involve relieving Lindsay’s abusive husband, Seth (DeNucci) of a crisp $1.8 million dollars in cash. But increasingly, sniffing around the robberies is Detective Broza (Sizemore), a city cop who has recently been transferred to the town: Nicole starts a relationship with him, ostensibly to see how the investigation is going. But is that her real motive?

There’s not very much logic to the script here. If the women are going to get away with $1.8 million, why are they bothering to hold-up convenience stores, especially since they torch the loot. Is this supposed to be some kind of practice? It’s entirely counter-productive, since all it does it bring down the full force of local law enforcement (which admittedly, is not much!), and puts potential targets on their guard. From the get-go, beginning with the raid on the store, and progressing through their  robbery of a private poker game (one of whose participants is, amusingly, former WWE and nWo star, Kevin Nash!), these appear to be there simply to try and enliven the cinematic proceedings, rather than because they make sense. Much the same goes for Nicole’s day-job as a stripper. This exists, purely for titillation (and not very much titillation at that; if Moore herself actually got naked at any point, I must have blinked and missed it).

I can, at least, see where the makers were trying to go with the relationship between Lindsay and Nicole: aiming for a twisted version on the “Thelma & Louise” partnership, with two contrasting personalities which have bonded, in part through common adversity. Ladd plays the quieter and more cautious member of the pair, clearly wounded by the dysfunctional relationship in which she’s trapped. Moore is, however, a bit more fun to watch, clearly perfectly willing to manipulate anyone necessary, including both her partner and Det. Broza. But the two items never quite gel with that T&L synergy, this duo eventually ending up as rather less than the sum of their parts. It might have been better if they’d concentrated on one or the other, combining the effective aspects of each character into one truly captivating person, rather than the slightly interesting ones, who struggle to hold the viewer’s attention, especially fighting to escape the gravitational pull of the more doubtful plot elements.

Dir: Jacob Cooney
Star: Jordan Ladd, Nikki Moore, Tom Sizemore, Tom DeNucci
a.k.a. The Assault

Kidnap

  By

★★
“Car troubled.”

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. And considering Halle Berry’s last appearance on this site was for Catwoman, that’s saying something. This is so dumb, I genuinely felt I could feel my IQ slowly sliding away as I watched the movie. Even now, simply remembering it has me feeling more stupider by the sentence. If this review ends up sounding like Beavis & Butthead by the end, that will be why. Its plot is beyond simplistic. Karla Dixon (Berry) has her child abducted from a New Orleans park while she’s on the phone, by husband and wife kidnappers Margo (McGinn) and Terry (Temple). Losing her cell in the process, she takes off after them in hot pursuit, and nothing will get in her way for the next 80-odd minutes.

Which is 75 minutes longer than it would have lasted, had anyone behaved smartly. The six-year-old kid is likely the smartest person in the whole movie, and he spends most of it whimpering in the back of a car. Fortunately for him, the only thing dumber than the box of rocks which is his mother, are the two boxes of rocks which are Margo and Terry. Or possibly the entire pallet of rocks scriptwriter Knate Lee must have in his head, for thinking this procession of poor decisions and eye-rolling developments could possibly pass muster. At least, with any audience not consisting of fellow six-year-olds.

These begin with the cloying opening montage of baby pictures, proceed through a lengthy sequence of Karla at her day job – yes, you get to watch nothing except a harried waitress serving customers – and finish with the phone-call informing her of an upcoming custody battle with her ex-husband. The movie has just wasted its first 15 minutes on entirely inconsequential irrelevancies, since none of the preceding have the slightest significance during the rest of the film. Then there’s the chase itself, which relies far too much on happenstance, with Karla repeatedly losing contact with the kidnappers, only fortuitously to bump into them again: I guess Louisiana must be about the size of Hyde Park. It’s full of other ludicrous moments, like Karla trying to run Terry over, only to stop for no apparent reason, or her trading down from a shotgun to a knife.

The sole saving grace is Berry, and it’s a significant one, since she is on-screen in virtually every shot. She puts over a raw passion and drive which goes some way – albeit, not far enough – toward salvaging the woeful material. You can see how she was an Oscar-winning actress, even when spitting out cringe-inducing, sub-Taken lines such as, “Let me tell you something, as long as my son is in that car, I will not stop. Wherever you go I will be right behind you.” You do get the sense Karla is an utterly irresistible force of nature, prepared to do absolutely whatever is necessary, including wrestling with Margo while the car careers through a (suspiciously-empty) tunnel. Enjoy and appreciate this intensity: forget absolutely everything else.

Dir: Luis Prieto
Star: Halle Berry, Chris McGinn, Lew Temple, Sage Correa

Demon Hunter

  By

★★★
“Hey-ho… Let’s go!”

Behind a remarkably generic and forgettable title sits an entirely reasonable slice of low-budget Irish action-horror. It’s clear creator Kavanagh knows what has gone before, and if the resources here don’t allow her to reproduce them on anything approaching the same scale, she knows her limitations and works well enough within them. Besides, who can resist a film that works a Ramones lyric into its dialogue? Taryn (Hogan) feels responsible for the death of her little sister, abducted and killed on the way home from school. She gets a chance to do something about it, when approached by the mysterious Falstaff (Parle) after her sister’s funeral. He reveals a secret world of demons and sacrifices – Taryn’s sister being one of the latter – and offers Taryn a chance for revenge, if she’ll come and work for him.

We don’t actually learn much of the above until some way into this. We start with the heroine stalking and enthusiastically decapitating one such demon, only to be arrested by the local cops. They’re peeved she won’t reveal where the severed head of the victim is located – not least because she insists this is necessary to ensure he stays dead. Falstaff, meanwhile, has not intention of letting his minion remain in police custody, and informs them there will be a fresh murder every 24 hours they do not let her go. For, it turns out, Falstaff has an entirely separate and significantly less helpful agenda with regard to Taryn, and has simply been using her towards his own ends.

The main asset this film has is Hogan, whom production kinda lucked into, after the original actress pulled out two weeks before shooting started. For Hogan is a third-degree black belt in Shotokan karate, with a slew of titles both national and international. The physicality her experience allows her to bring to proceedings can’t be learned at drama school, and bumps up the action credibility several notches. Given this, it’s a shame that we don’t get see more of her: after the opening head-removal, Taryn is then locked up in custody for the rest of of the first half, and we also have to go through the flashbacks explaining how she became a demon hunter. It might have been better for the makers to figure out whether they wanted to tell an origin story or subsequent tale: this is a little of each, and both likely suffer as a result.

The lazy comparison would be Buffy, but that can be applied to virtually anything where a young woman is battling supernatural creatures. Bloody Mallory is probably closer, with its heroine who is more surly and aggressive than frothy and ironic, and the dark tone here has echoes of The Crow as well. Kavanagh was working on the project for close to a decade before it reached the screen. The struggle to find funding is apparent in some rough edges, and her lack of experience in a story that can’t sustain itself for the full duration. Yet it’s still remarkably polished for not just a first feature, close to Kavanagh’s first narrative film of any kind, with her background being mostly in music videos.  I’m looking forward to seeing where she (and Hogan) might go from here.

Dir: Zoe Kavanagh
Star: Niamh Hogan, Alan Talbot, Michael Parle, Aisli Moran