Tag: 2019

The Lioness

  By

★½
“Yes, another strippers-on-the-lam flick.”

This will be rather shorter than my typical review. But then, the film is rather shorter than the typical movie. In fact, it only runs 46 minutes and 20 seconds between opening and closing credits. At first, I felt cheated. However, by the end, I was positively grateful for the makers’ economy in this department. A standard running-time, and I’d probably have been gnawing my own leg off to escape. It’s also an object lesson in not taking IMDb reviews at face value. There are currently eight for the movie: all very positive, averaging a score of 8.7. But when you look closer, you realize that every single reviewer has only reviewed this film, with all but one apparently signing up just before posting their reviews. That’s a red flag.

A bigger red flag is, the film sucks. That’s apparent right from the opening scene, where a trio of strippers are debating the stage name one of them, new arrival Megan (Hartselle), should pick. Approaching four minutes are spent on this, so we’re getting close to 10% of the movie’s effective running time in meaningless drivel. It ends with one suddenly proclaiming, “I heard that there’s this stripper, she goes from club to club, stays there a little bid, robs the place. No-one knows who the hell she is.” Cut to Megan looking extremely guilty, and I think a small piece of me died inside. This feeble effort on both script and performances continues the rest of the way, complete with Megan breaking the fourth wall repeatedly to speak to the camera. Which might have been okay if she had anything interesting to say.

Anyway, there’s an opportunistic crime in which another stripper, Goldie (Orebaugh), swipes the night’s takings and runs off, accompanied by Megan. Except, the haul turns out to be rather more than expected, due to the club being used as a front for money-laundering by owner Anna (Ivanova). Consequently, the resulting heat is also above expectations. Stuff subsequently happens, such as another employee, Linda (Gutierrez) wanting in on the take. but I will admit to having largely lost interest after it became clear these “strippers” were going to perform without ever taking their clothes off. They might as well have been nuns. It’s an appropriate summation of the movie: this lioness is more like a toothless moggie.

Dir: Richard Poche
Star: Lacy Hartselle, Gabriele Orebaugh, Giuliana Gutierrez, Desi Ivanova

36 Husbands

  By

★
“Save yourself!”

I have so many questions. Not the least of which would be, how the hell is this ranked a 7.3 on the IMDb? I do note a sharp division among the sexes: male voters gave it a 3.3, while women an 8,3. What can I say? I now know the meaning of the phrase, “Bitches be crazy.” It did, however, cause me to consider my opinion on one topic. There is a school of thought which says that films that intentionally try to be bad, cannot succeed. In the past, I’ve tended to disagree: the Sharknado franchise, for example, certainly has its moments. However, this is a good counter-argument; it’s not just trying to be bad, it strains towards its goal like a constipated elephant – and with much the same end result.

The problem here is, the makers seem to think that to make a parody, you simply have to be worse that what you’re parodying, and that’s where their invention stops. “Look at how shitty we are! Isn’t that funny?” No. No, it’s not. The target here appears mostly to be sixties spy-films, with three heroines (Pasch, Bianchini and Nourney) trying to stop – or at least, delay – World War III, through methods that are almost entirely unclear. Yet I’m really not sure tismakers have ever seen an example of what they’re supposed to be parodying. They possibly just suck at film-making, though I’m sure they and their pals had a fine time globe-trotting to make this.

I’m not sure which are the worst elements. A smugly self-indulgent script which is simply too damn meta for its own good. Line delivery from the three leads that could be improved by replacing them with a text-to-speech program. Or the cringeworthy musical numbers which seems to have escaped from open mic night at your local college coffee house. The makers appear to have a group called Bright Blue Gorilla, whose songs are about as terrible as you would imagine a group with that name to be.  Actually, my mistake. It’s the kung-fu. Definitely the kung-fu: feeble wet-noodle limb-waving, which makes Honey West look like like Michelle Yeoh’s greatest hits. And they don’t even have an ocelot here.

My brain shut down after 20 minutes and I had to physically step away. When I resumed, the rest was little improvement though I will say, the use of one actor to play triplets was surprisingly well-done. If only the rest of the film had remotely approached that standard. I gave serious consideration to simply bailing, and pretending the whole thing did not exist. But if the existence of this review manages to save one person from making the same mistake as I did, then my sacrifice will be worthwhile. So, I persisted, right through the eight-minute credit crawl, including what seems like a picture of every single person involved in the production. Further proof, as if any were needed, confirming the largely vanity nature of this project.

Dir: Michael Glover
Star: Christa Pasch, Roberta Bianchini, Nadine Nourney. Dominic Anglim

Abigail (2019)

  By

★★½
“In Soviet Russia, sorcerers stone you…”

There’s a battle in the middle of this, where the rebels and the authorities engage in a street-fight, and its absolutely beautiful to watch. Their weapons leave black smoke-trails criss-crossing, and the camera swoops and dives through the mayhem in truly lyrical fashion. Sadly, it’s over too soon, and when the characters open their mouths, it’s all ruined, thanks to clichéd lines like, “We can only win if we believe in what we’re fighting for.”

This Russian movie’s setting is dark steampunk, a walled city living in perpetual fear of an lethal, incurable disease. Inspectors monitor the population and at the first symptoms, the infected are spirited away and humanely euthanized. Ten years ago, the father of Abigail Foster (Dalakishvili) was one such victim. But she stumbles across evidence he may still be alive, which brings her into contact with the resistance and, eventually, the truth about the disease. She wants to find out what happened to her father. However, they, under leader and romantic interest Bale (Bochkov) are only interested in pushing forward with their previously scheduled rebellion.

The story is particularly poor, feeling like a hodgepodge of elements from a slew of YA fiction, most obviously Mortal Engines and Harry Potter. It feels very rushed, too, with Abigail going from outsider to at the core of the rebellion in about five minutes. I suspect a TV series might have been a better way to go, giving the ideas here – of which, admittedly, there are no shortage – room to breathe and be explored. Though, in general, the whole “chosen one” trope, in which the central character discovers their hidden gift, and it then blossoms to world-changing effect, is little more than a cinematic dead horse these days.

Not helping matters is the puzzling decision by the makers apparently to shoot in English, yet still post-sync most of the dialogue. This gives all the problems of a dubbed film, with no apparent benefit. It’s no surprise that the only non-synced actor, Eddie Marsan as Abigail’s father, easily comes off best among the performances. Yet even he pales beside the quite wonderful visuals, running from the first frame to the last. These are certainly comparable with the best Hollywood can produce, both in imagination and execution. Throw this on in the background when you’ve something else to do, and it’s near-perfect.

Dalakishvili is…okay as the heroine. She initially seems very resourceful and courageous, yet these traits seem to get submerged after she joins up with the resistance, with Bale doing more of the actual battling than I wanted to see. We do get resolution as to the question of her father, and I have to say, it was probably the film’s most effective moment emotionally, with some genuine poignancy. Coming as it does, with about five minutes left, it was the very definition of too little, too late, and this can only be filed in the box marked “Meaningless eye-candy.”

Dir: Aleksandr Boguslavsky
Star: Tinatin Dalakishvili, Gleb Bochkov, Rinal Mukhametov, Artyom Tkachenko,

A Call to Spy

  By

★★★
“Life during wartime”

There’s no denying the extraordinary bravery shown by female agents in Britain’s Special Operations Executive during World War 2. Largely operating in occupied France, they coordinated sabotage activities, ran communications and generally did everything their male counterparts did. The risks they ran were certainly no less, with about one in three not surviving. We’ve previously had a few articles about them, both fictional depictions such as Wish Me Luck, and more factually oriented accounts, like Enemy of the Reich: The Noor Inayat Khan Story. This occupies a middle ground. The characters are real: SOE agents Khan (Apte) and Virginia Hall (Thomas) – an American with, I kid you not, an artificial leg – and Vera Atkins, the woman who recruited and ran them. But it takes a dramatic rather than a documentarian approach. 

I think my knowledge going in probably slightly weakened my appreciation for the film. Knowing the stories of Khan and Hall, and their eventual fates, largely robbed this of much tension. However, there is still a good deal to enjoy. This may run 124 minutes, but it never drags, maintaining a solid pace throughout. Indeed, perhaps too solid; you could argue for a lack of escalation, the film having nothing identifiable as a climax. That doesn’t stop it from being consistently entertaining, anchored by a trio of good performances. Katic, sporting an impressive English accent, is perhaps the stand-out as Atkins. She has to deal not just with the chauvinism inherent in the era, but also having her loyalty questioned due to her background as a Romanian Jew. Anti-semitism at the time was not confined to the continent.

The bulk of the drama comes from the other two, and the contrast in personalities could not be more marked. Khan has the near-perpetual look of a deer caught in headlights, while Hall, in her cover as a journalist, possesses a calm assurance. However, they both prove to be equally good at buckling down and getting the job done, dodging danger and almost certain death, in the form of the Nazis, on an almost daily basis – something the film certainly puts over. Stylistically, in some ways it almost feels like a two-hour long montage; there are not many extended scenes to propel the narrative, with instead, sequences cutting together the two women’s lives in occupied France.

It’s still effective, and may have been needed to work around the need for some tampering with timelines. It’s not obvious that less than four months passed between Khan landing and being captured, while Hall spent more than fifteen months in action, before having to flee over the Pyrenees into Spain (not the easiest of treks, given her disability). These and other cinematic conceits are forgivable, and all told, this is respectable enough, and very respectful of its heroines. I tend to think though, that this may be a case where the facts are more impressive than any fiction could ever be,

Dir: Lydia Dean Pilcher
Star: Sarah Megan Thomas, Stana Katic, Radhika Apte, Linus Roache

Assassin’s Target

  By

★★
“Tolerable only in small doses.”

There’s an interesting tweak to the situation here. While it is the usual “hitwoman agrees to go on one last mission” plotline, Rosa (Gala) is an assassin who has adopted poison as her weapon of choice. I think it’s the first time I’ve seen this, and it’s interesting because women are, in reality, considerably more likely to kill in that way [Per the Washington Post, “Women are seven times as likely as men to choose poison as their murder weapon”] Her choice dates back to Rosa’s childhood, when she killed her abusive father and complicit mother with belladonna berries from their own garden, and has gone on to choose this as a career, working for… Well, it’s a bit vague. Some kind of British intelligence group, I think, with her boss being Henry Crowford  (Giblin).

Rosa’s latest mission takes her to Barcelona, where someone recently hijacked all the TV channels, to broadcast a message of peace and love. Needless to say, the authorities aren’t having that, so send Rosa – who is keen to retire – to track down and eliminate this threat to the established order. Helping her is Will Gray (Vinnicombe), a former army intelligence officer turned fixer. But as Rosa tries to get closer to the pirate of the high frequencies, things get considerably murkier, as it appears that he is another spook, supposedly killed in action. Meanwhile, Crowford’s boss (Charles) is getting increasingly antsy about her lack of progress, and sends another operative after her, to tie up the loose end she increasingly appears to represent.

Retitled from The Vibe, for entirely understandable commercial reasons, this is also known as – and you’ll be forgiven a derisive snort at this – Impossible Mission. But I’m going by the title under which I saw the movie on Amazon Prime. It starts promisingly enough, and does a good job of capturing the complex and paranoid worlds of both intelligence activities and conspiracy theorists, in which no-one can be trusted. However, it has no clue what to do with its concepts, and gets increasingly bogged down in far too much chit-chat. Not helping matters here, is the number of people, led by Gala, who are clearly not speaking their mother tongue, e.g. pronouncing “arsenic” as “ar-SEN-ic”.

Rosa does very little in the way of spycraft, and doesn’t put her toxic talents to any use in pursuit of her target. Certainly, the cover is entirely inaccurate, since I don’t recall her even picking up a gun. By the end, writer-director Gambino has painted himself into such a corner, there’s apparently no way to escape, and the film simply ends, without any of the major topics, least of all Rosa’s status, achieving resolution. I did keep watching, though must confess this was partly due to the over-enthusiastic closed captioning (which I turned on, since I was treadmilling at the time, and hence wheezing loudly). It describes the soundtrack in terms including “vexed music”, “maleficent music” and, my personal favourite, “dreadful music”. That this was the most consistent source of entertainment throughout, tells you everything you need to know.

Dir: Gilles Gambino
Star: Jimena Gala, Ben Vinnicombe, James Giblin, Leslie Charles
a.k.a. The Vibe

The Spy

  By

★★★½
“Don’t expect any applause. That doesn’t exist in our line of work.”

I guess the moral here is that things aren’t necessarily as they appear, and the truth can take quite some time to come out. After World War II, Norwegian actress Sonja Wigert was largely shunned, her career going downhill because she was seen as having fraternized with the German forces that had occupied Norway. She died in 1980, largely forgotten. But in 2005, it was revealed that Wigert (Berdal) had actually been operating as a spy on behalf of the Swedish government, who were very much concerned the Nazis had their country next on the list for invasion. Her “collaboration” was actually the actress using her fame to get close to high-level officials like Reichskommissar Josef Terboven (Scheer), and get information from them. This film is her story.

However, these already murky matters are complicated by several further factors. There’s an agent, ‘Maria’, working for the Nazis, and passing them information, who must be identified and stopped; Sonja’s “real” relationship, with Hungarian diplomat, Andor Gellért (Chapelle); her father’s incarceration at the hands of the Germans; and, last but not least, Terboven’s request that she become a spy for the Nazis, feeding them information on Sweden. After some early wobbles, the film’s script does a good job of keeping all these elements in play, without collapsing into the over-complex mess sometimes seen in the spy genre. It’s also nicely nuanced, with Wigert initially trying to remain neutral, until circumstances, in the shape of her father’s arrest, force her into getting off the fence.

There begins a very dangerous game – though as an actress, used to playing a role, Sonja seems well-equipped to it. [I was reminded of John Le Carre’s The Little Drummer Girl, which also saw a thespian recruited into becoming a spy] Berndal, who previously made a good impression here as the villainess in Escape (Flukt), does another good job in a rather more sympathetic role as a reluctant secret agent. I’d like to have seen rather more about the tradecraft involved in her work. There are times when her actions seem almost to be too easy, with the security of the Nazis being close to non-existent, as she swans in to offices, and takes snaps of documents. I know a pretty face opens doors, but still…

There are points where it seems to be considerably more concerned with the relationships between the characters: the spy thriller as soap-opera, perhaps? In particular, the Sonja and Andor thread perhaps gets a bit more time than I’d like it to have received. However, it still managed to hold my interest, rather better than those couple of sentences might sound! The performances and period detail both have a ring of authenticity to them, and it’s a sobering reflection of a time where people sometimes had to make sacrifices without recognition. [Sonja’s handler says the lines at the top to her near the end] Sometimes, secrets go to the grave with those who hold them.

Dir: Jens Jonsson
Star: Ingrid Bolsø Berdal, Damien Chapelle, Alexander Scheer, Rolf Lassgård
a.k.a. Spionen

Range Runners

  By

★★
“The loneliness of the long-distance runner”

Mel (Cooper) is engaged on a project of running the Appalachian Trail (or a convincing facsimile thereof), with some help from her sister, who meets her at various points to provide support and fresh supplies. Mel is currently on her own, starting an eight-day section of the hike where she’ll be out of contact. However, she bumps into a couple of suspicious characters, deep in the woods: Wayland (Leonard) and his partner, Jared (Woods). Initially, it seems like a creepy, but one-off random meeting. It turns out to be considerably more and subsequent encounters escalate, until Mel is sent plummeting over the edge of a drop-off, badly injuring her leg, but in possession of something very important to Wayland and Jared. Will she be able to escape her pursuers and make it to safety?

A good chunk of this effectively takes place inside the heroine’s head, as she pushes through the forest. There are flashbacks, in particular, to her youth when she was an athlete in training, being coached by her father. His approach was very much one of tough love, with the emphasis on “tough”, and a fondness for aphorisms, such as “[Your body] doesn’t tell you what to do, it’s the other way around.” It seems to have done the trick, giving Mel the mental toughness necessary to cope with the situation. However, it doesn’t exactly make for thrilling cinema, and considering the film runs 112 minutes, a little of this kind of thing goes a long way.

This is nicely photographed, it must be said, and the wooded location is used effectively, setting up a world in which a threat conceivably lurks behind every trunk and branch. The issues are much more with the plot, which fails on a number of levels. Not least, is the lack of motivation given to the villains, whose presence and actions are never well-defined, beyond being required in order for the plot to reach its (entirely predictable) conclusion. There are few if any surprises along the way. Even when the film tries to make you believe Mel has found sanctuary, anyone who has seen any wilderness survival films, will basically be waiting for that not to be the case.

By the time you filter out what’s unnecessary, and what doesn’t work, there’s probably not much more than 45 minutes of decent content to be found here. Rather than it being Mel vs. Wayland + Jared, it’s more a case of Mel vs. herself, or at least her own doubts and emotional baggage. The finale is decent, pitting our wounded athlete against the pair, and proves rather more satisfactory than most of what has been seen to this point. It’s an example of a film where the destination proves better than the journey to get there. Depending on your view, this may or may not be a suitable parallel to hiking the Appalachian Trail…

Dir: Philip S. Plowden
Star: Celeste M Cooper, Sean Patrick Leonard, Michael B. Woods, Sarah Charipar

Eye for an Eye (2019)

  By

★★
“The little engine that couldn’t.”

Stacey Anderson (Sturman) is an agent for the CIA. When an operation in Tunis goes bad, she is blamed, and the intelligence which was supposed to have been collected – a complete list of Russian assets – goes missing. Stacey is disavowed by the organization, and dumped out, with a new identity. Five years later, she’s a saleswoman for a PR company, and her boyfriend, Ken (Haymes) has just proposed, when Stacey’s old life comes back to haunt her. An assault on her workplace shows that someone clearly believes she knows more about the list than she admitted. She is forced on the run, with Ken, while she tries to figure out whether it’s the Russians, or a rogue faction within her former employers. Fortunately, this wasn’t entirely a surprise, and Stacey is quite well-prepared. Less expected: having to take her new fiance along with her.

The script here is actually quite good, with a number of twists and turns I did not see coming, particularly at the end. However, this is one of the cases where a film has aspirations which are massively beyond what it is capable of delivering. This is clear from the get-go, when the drone strike which almost kills our heroine in Tunis, is depicted with really bad digital effects. Unfortunately, that sets the tone for what is to follow, with the production unable to deliver a convincing version of the explosions, gun-battles or blood squibs necessary to the plot. Even some of the rooms appear to have been done with green-screen work which fails to convince. The non-digital stuff is nothing to write home about either, and the makers perhaps should have gone with a stunt woman for the lead. Sturman gives it her all, bless her heart, but considering the frequent need for physicality in the role, it’s a character which really needs somebody like Amy Johnson or Zara Phythian.

The pacing also seems to lag badly in the middle. The opening set-up is, for all its flaws, put together quite effectively (though do the CIA really have formal “disavowal” speeches?”), and as mentioned, the ending delivered some sharp twists in regard to Stacey, not the least being her background. In between those though, it didn’t seem to know what to do with itself. This is the kind of movie that I really wanted to like, since it seemed a project made with some passion, rather than a by-the-numbers studio product. However, there is only so far that passion and heart can take you. The technical aspects – such as audio in some sequences which sounds like it was recorded underwater – are a very significant distraction from its entertainment value. It may have worked better if they had cut their cloth to fit their resources; sitting on the shelf next to far more polished productions, the comparisons are obvious and not to this movie’s benefit.

Dir: Stephen Lambert
Star: Alex Sturman, Clayton Haymes, David Chattam, Shirley Dalmas
a.k.a. Patriot: A Nation at War 

Spare Parts

  By

★★½
“Somewhat more than pure junk.”

All-girl punk band “Ms. 45” – and I’m awarding half a star purely for that name – are on tour, though things threaten to fall apart due to the bitching between members Emma (Alatalo) and Amy (Argyris), despite them being sisters. Driving away from their latest show (which turned into a bit of a bar-room brawl), they are run off the road by stalker fan Sam (Rouse). The local cops are kind enough to arrange for a tow to a nearby scrapyard. Except, there, the four woman are drugged, and wake up to find themselves each missing an arm, and forced to fight in gladiatorial combats for the pleasure of the Emperor (Richings), Sam’s father and his devotees. But Sam has taken a shine to Emma, and has an eye on using her to replace his Dad, while Emma and her friends only want to escape.

It’s not a bad idea, though the contemporary American setting is poorly considered. Make it a Central American shithole, post-apocalyptic wilderness or something similar; as is, it’s ludicrously implausible, and outside the first five minutes the musical angle is completely irrelevant too, bar a couple of axe jokes. It’s more than similar to Kiss Kiss, which had four women, kidnapped and made to fight in a rural American setting. Admittedly, their count of functioning limbs passed three, though here, it’s never less than obvious that the makers just slapped a weaponized glove on top. There’s no Imperator Furiosa level effects here, and you wonder why they bothered, rather than just handing the women their tools. Though the arm-flamethrower was appealing. It’s not as if I use my right arm for much…

If you liked Gladiator, but felt that it needed more punk rock, this is perhaps for you. I was moderately amused, even though there are only about three actual fights over the ninety minutes, and while those are decent, much of what goes on between them isn’t particularly exciting. You’ve got Sam’s plotting against his father, and there’s a trainer type who seems to be quite an interesting character. Otherwise, it’s kinda meh, especially since the members of Ms. 45 got off on the wrong foot with me, by being cringeworthy stereotypes. I cared little or nothing for their fates thereafter.

In concept, this feels like something out of Japan, perhaps by the creators of The Machine Girl. It just doesn’t have the necessary sense of gonzo, go for broke-ness, save for a couple of nice uses of an arm-chainsaw. Richings seems to be the only one who is truly buying into it, giving the Emperor a sense of insane omnipotence that’s a lot of fun to watch. The other performances need to be equally larger than life, in order to sell what is, let’s be honest, a difficult concept – and in most cases, they weren’t enough to hold my interest. Never a good sign, when the ending seems to point to a better movie than the one you just watched.

Dir: Andrew Thomas Hunt
Star: Emily Alatalo, Michelle Argyris, Jason Rouse, Julian Richings

To Your Last Death

  By

★★★
“Death does a do-over”

Miriam DeKalb (Lennon) and the rest of her siblings are estranged from their arms dealer father, Cyrus (Wise), after their exposure of his dysfunctional nature ended his political career. Which is why it’s a surprise when they are all invited to his company’s headquarters. It doesn’t end well, with most of them murdered. and Miriam – found at the scene with an ax – tagged as their killer. However, she gets a second chance when visited in hospital by a mysterious figure called the Gamesmaster (Baccarin), who makes Miriam an offer. She’ll get to go back in time 24 hours, knowing what she does now. Will she be able to do better? For the GM runs an event on the astral plane (or somewhere), in which entities bet on the outcome of humans given a second chance at a pivotal moment, and Miriam is her latest subject. So can she change the outcome?

This is an interesting, if obviously entirely contrived scenario – not least for the Gamesmaster reserving the right to come in and tweak things, should she deem things not being sufficiently interesting for her players. For example, she arbitrarily decides that Miriam is not allowed to leave the building and contact the authorities. Effectively, it reduces the heroine to a piece on a board, whose actions and the resulting outcomes are constrained: there is no true “free will” to be found in this case. I also found the animation style somewhat off-putting: it looks very much the same approach as Archer. Particularly when people were talking, I found the mouth movements incredibly distracting, and it made me realize why most animation tends to keep it simple.

However, there is also a lot here that I enjoyed, not least the (literally) full-blooded approach taken. This is unashamedly gory and hard-R rated stuff, including Cyrus’s devices to dispose of his treacherous offspring, which appear to have strayed in from the Saw franchise. For instance, to handle a daughter with a fondness for cutting herself, she is strapped into device with a scale. This requires her to shed a certain amount of blood every minute, or her head will go snicker-snack. Chainsaws and axes are also put to enthusiastic and energetic use, by the heroine and others.

The story, too, ends up going in ways that I didn’t expect. Rather than being able to save her siblings in the do-over, they end up being perhaps the biggest threat to Miriam’s survival the second time. It’s from guaranteed that her go-around will end in a better situation than the first. Certainly, the pacifist scruples she espouses going into the evening – which largely caused her to reject her father and his business – prove to be utterly unsustainable, which is always nice. The message appears to be: sometimes violence is not just the solution, it’s the only solution, a philosophy which is certainly different. However, I can’t help wishing this had been a live-action gorefest; it’s one case where being animated definitely dilutes the impact.

Dir: Jason Axinn
Star (voice): Dani Lennon, Ray Wise, Morena Baccarin, Bill Moseley