Tag: 2021

Yakuza Princess

  By

★★½
“Anyone for Brazillian sushi?”

The above odd combination is actually a fairly accurate assessment of what you have here. It’s a Yakuza action-thriller… but rather than being set in Tokyo or Osaka, is relocated to the Brazillian city of Sao Paolo. As an introductory credit helpfully informs us, this has the largest Japanese population of any city outside Japan. The story concerns two separate people’s quests for their pasts, which (to absolutely no-one’s surprise) turn out to be intertwined. One of these is Akemi (MASUMI), who as a young child was the sole survivor of a 1999 massacre of her Yakuza family back in Japan, was subsequently spirited away by allies and is now living in Brazil. The other is Shiro (Rhys-Meyers), an amnesiac who wakes up in hospital with no clue as to how he got there or his identity, except for a Japanese sword.

Also in the mix is Takeshi (Ihara), a Japanese mobster, who discovers Akemi’s location and heads to Sao Paolo to track her down. But what are his intentions? What are Shiro’s intentions? Indeed, what are anyone’s intentions? For this is a film which plays its cards very close to its chest, in a murky world where loyalty is hard to establish, and may not be what it initially seems. This makes for a rather frustrating viewing experience, since we are largely in the dark – along with the heroine, in all fairness. Still, Akemi and Shiro don’t even meet up until after 40 minutes have passed; up to which point, this has felt like two separate movies, taking place in the same location.

There’s also some stuff about the sword Akemi wields eating souls, though this can largely be ignored without impact. It all adds up to a rather excessive 111 minute running-time, and would likely have been helped by some choice editing. The action is occasionally not bad, but is definitely hampered by an editing style, which refuses to have the camera pointed in the same direction for longer than half a second. What the film does mostly have going for it, is solid cinematography, which makes Sao Paolo look like a side-street in Blade Runner. But outside of scraps of Portuguese dialogue, I didn’t get much Brazillian flavour, rendering the setting somewhat pointless.

There are some interesting or appealing moments, such as where Shiro sits down with a couple of veteran Yakuza to watch an old samurai flick, or Akemi’s escape with him over the roof-tops. However, there’s a lot of walking about and chit-chat, before we eventually get to the meat of the matter, and it’s not enough to sustain broad interest. I suspect it may have been better if the film had concentrated on either Akemi or Shiro, both in terms of providing greater focus, and in slimming down the running time. For what results here is something which seems a bit bloated, yet despite that, doesn’t imbue its characters with enough depth.

Dir: Vicente Amorim
Star: MASUMI, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Toshiji Takeshima

Suga Babies

  By

★½
“The drugs do work”

As usual, I begin with the normal disclaimer, that I’m about as far from the target audience as you could imagine. For this is an inner-city story about a drug war between three rival gangs in South Carolina: the Guardians, the Dynasty and the GeeChees. That said, however, there have been other films, with not dissimilar themes, which I have enjoyed. Most obviously, I am not the target audience for Pam Grier’s seventies output either. But those still kick ass. Even among the modern entries, there have been ones like Candy, which have felt authentic in their depiction of urban life. This, on the other hand, feels more like a no-budget hip-hop video.

About the main positive is that nobody makes a particular fuss about the Guardians being an all-girl gang, under the loose leadership of Naomi (Mott). They’re just part of the landscape, and everyone accepts that. The cause of the war is a new drug called sugar. In an odd twist, this actually makes people who take it better. We are told it literally cures cancer. I genuinely LOL’d at that. However, the interest of the authorities is limited to a spokesman for Big Pharma, who expresses concern at the street muscling in on “their” turf. It might have been interesting if it turned out Big Pharma had secretly released the drug to the GeeChees for distribution, as a test of its effectiveness. Sadly, not much is done with the concept, with this largely being an excuse for more black-on-black crime.

Indeed, that social crisis is expressly referenced during one of the multiple sequences of “The Buzz”, some chat-show. These really add very little, and the same goes for the supposed “courtroom” scenes. As well as being woefully unconvincing, I don’t think I ever worked out quite who was on trial, or for what. It’s all horribly disjointed, for example a lengthy scene that’s just multiple people picking up drugs from a motel room. Add in sequences which genuinely are no-budget music videos, and the dramatic pickings became painfully thin. There’s just one scene that has any impact. Mouse (McCoy) gets picked up by the Guardians and is found to be dealing sugar for the GeeChees. Her impassioned explanation that she did so because sugar helped her family, is certainly the movie’s emotional high-point.

According to the IMDb, the director had made eight feature films since her first in 2020. That’s an admirable work ethic, to be sure. But I can’t help thinking that churning out fewer movies might lead to an increase in their quality, because this definitely feels rushed, in almost every aspect. Maybe this is what the target audience wants? But it would be patronizing to believe their standards can be satisfied with this kind of thing. On the other hand, this wasn’t even the worst thing I watched today (hello, Battered), at least reaching a bare minimum of technical competence. However, that’s scant praise for any movie.

Dir: Felicia Rivers
Star: Diamond Mott, Patrice Jennings, Shakeela Koffey Scott, Samantha McCoy

Battered

  By

★
“Of unsound mind.”

My first surprise here was that this clocks in at a crisp 44 minutes. That’s an awkward length for any film: too short to be a feature, but most festivals that accept short films will balk at a submission of that length, when the time could instead be used to accept three x 15-minute entries [as someone who runs a festival, this is definitely a consideration]. Quite how this got distribution, I’m therefore not sure; but there it was, sitting on Amazon Prime. However, less than two minutes into the viewing experience, I found myself thanking my stars the running time was so brief. Because this is hamstrung by the worst audio I’ve seen on any film in several years. When even an envelope being opened sounds like a burst of automatic gunfire, you’ve got a problem, and there’s hardly a scene here where this aspect is not bad enough, as to be an unbearable distraction.

It is something of a shame, since it has at least the germ of a decent idea. Piper (Paris) is in an abusive relationship, one that ends up with her being sent to hospital. On her release, she joins a support group for similarly battered women, who share video diaries, as part of the healing process. However, revenge eventually becomes part of their therapeutic activities, taking out their anger on the men who abused them, and these prove viral successes. There is potential for exploration here, not least in the way social media can create and inflame a lynch mob mentality – with the potential for it to spill over into the physical world too. Of course, for that exploration to work, you’d firstly have to be able to tolerate dialogue which sounds like it was recorded either in a wind-tunnel or a diving chamber. Not helping matters: characters that might harbour dreams of some day developing and blossoming into shallow stereotypes. And that’s just the women. Do not get me started on the men.

Then there’s a philosophical argument to be had here. We can all agree it’s wrong for men to beat up women. But this movie seems to make the claim – without much in the way of counterpoints being made – that it’s perfectly fine for women to beat up men. Because social justice. Or #MeToo. Or something, it’s unclear. This could be a viable approach, even without coherent and explicit debate, if the film engaged the lizard brain, and made the violence justifiable, even on a visceral level. Yet it fails to do that either. Instead we get a number of scenes which frankly border on the exploitative, offering a dubious counterpoint to the female empowerment narrative being pushed. Ugly camerawork and performances that, at best, do little more than propel forward the story, are other aspects which left me underwhelmed. It also ends in an abrupt and unsatisfying manner, as if Leslie eventually realized this was going nowhere. Shame it took him 44 minutes to reach that point.

Dir: Lewis Leslie
Star: Mia Paris, Paula Marcenaro Solinger, Carly Jones, Heath C. Heine

Claw

  By

★★★
“Jurassic dog park”

Yeah, the scale here is a bit smaller than the Spielberg classic, to put it mildly. As in… there’s precisely one (1) velociraptor. For reasons that are a bit unclear, this is roaming a deserted Wild West attraction on the road to Los Angeles. Heading to LA are wannabe stand-up comic Julia (Walker) and her flamingly gay best friend, Kyle (Rennie). An accident forces them off the road, and with – what a surprise! – no cell signal, they are forced to seek help at the previously mentioned attraction, where Ray (Mede) is the only inhabitant, and is acting a bit odd. Turns out, there’s good reason for this, with a large, carnivorous prehistoric reptile roaming the facility, the work of a mad scientist (Mertz). Will Julia ever make it to Tinseltown?

Clearly, you have to understand that this is a low-budget entity, and not expect the kind of spectacle provided by larger dinosaur movies. That said, if you stick with it – and the 30 minutes it takes for the lizard mayhem to kick in, seems a lot longer – this isn’t without charm. Once it gets going, there is a fairly non-stop degree of energy, and there’s an interesting role reversal to the typical dynamic of couples in these movies. Kyle is the one who spends much of the time cowering in a corner; it may be stereotypical in its portrayal of homosexuality, but not gratingly so, and it allows Julia to become a bit more pro-active than normal.

If she is not exactly Ellen Ripley, to be sure, we are starting from a considerably lower level to begin with, and that does make her a bit more relatable. Most of what she does, is stuff that you or I could do (okay… probably just you. Getting out of bed is a battle, personally!), rather than any kind of superhuman feat. Between the writing and the performances, the film does a good job of making the characters seem like real people, to a better degree than most cheap B-movies. There’s a lengthy coda, after the film basically ends not past the hour mark, with several unnecessary scenes apparently added to reach feature length. It is probably just worth staying around, purely to hear Julia perform her velociraptor-themed stand-up routine.

The dinosaur is mostly CGI, and is integrated adequately enough into proceedings, though its actual interaction with any physical people or things, is limited to put it mildly. On the other hand, it manages to avoid the frequent pitfall of movies shot at night, where most of the action here takes place. You can actually tell what’s happening, without straining your eyes to peer into an underlit darkness. This positive is less common than you might think. Again, I cannot stress enough that it offers small-scale carnage, at best. However, I was still entertained more than I expected, and was left willing to give this the benefit, of the more than considerable doubts I had going in.

Dir: Gerald Rascionato
Star: Chynna Walker, Richard Rennie, Mel Mede, Ken Mertz

Burn It All

  By

★★
“Ashes to asses.”

I will say, I did actually enjoy this rather more than the rating above indicates. For pure entertainment value, it’s a 3 to 3½-star entity, when watched as a brutal parody of new feminism. The problem is, I don’t think those involved with it were making a parody. As a serious statement about gender, it’s almost impossible to take seriously. Alexandra Nelson (Cotter) is at the end of her tether, when she gets a call that her long-estranged mother is dying. Driving home to pick up the body, she finds it being hustled out the back of the crematorium. Turns out to be part of an organ harvesting scheme, run by the local crime bosses. This gives Alex something to live for, and she begins a one-woman campaign to take down the perpetrators. But that’s a mission which will drag in her estranged sister, bikini barista Jenny (Gately), into peril as Alex’s targets respond to her actions.

There’s a decent idea here, and in stuntwoman Cotter, a lead actress capable of delivering the necessary brutality. The action is pretty good, with an impact in excess of the usual low-budget entries. The problem is a genuinely terrible script, with Alex going from suicidal to unstoppable avenging angel at the drop of a mother she hasn’t talked to in years. It also needs more background for her remarkable ass-kicking than a spell in basic training, in order to justify the ease with which she takes down multiple opponents, close to double her weight. But then, if they’d done that, then Alex’s lifetime Gold Level membership in the Victim Club would have been jeopardized; why submit to the patriarchy in every avenue of life, when you could just have beaten it up? Because the story needs her to be both victim and victor – an awkward contradiction it fails miserably to address. Though even this could have been worked around, if she’d let her actions do the talking.

However, Alex is a mouthy bitch, to put it mildly. No fight is complete, unless preceded by a lengthy debate with her male target, which inevitably ends in them getting angry at her speaking “truth to power”. All the men in this are sexist pigs. Every. Single. One. Even the toddler, or the random guy passing her car on the freeway. It’s a ludicrously shallow approach, which you know will be lacking in nuance from the moment someone unironically uses the word “libtard.” After repeated comparisons of guns to penises, hysterical laughter is the only credible reaction when Alex comes out with arguably the most supremely cheesy pseudo-feminist line of all time, snarling, “Anything you can do, I can do bleeding”. I’m sure there are viewers, likely those who live on Twitter and Reddit, who might believe this to be a documentary. Anyone with an ounce of sense though, may well wonder how much its heroine’s obvious hair-trigger caused, rather than solve, her many issues.

Dir: Brady Hall
Star: Elizabeth Cotter, Emily Gateley, Ryan Postell, Elena Flory-Barnes

Violet

  By

★★
“Love the poster. The film? Not so much.”

There’s a decent idea here, and an attempt to add some new wrinkles to that old reliable, the rape-revenge genre. Unfortunately, there are too many problems and missteps to make this a worthwhile entry. Violet (Winkler) is an aspiring actress, whose dreams are shattered when she falls for a fake audition. She is lured into a basement, raped, and the resulting footage posted on a highly-dubious website. She’s clearly broken by the trauma, to the increasing worry of her mother (Burns). But hope is present in her growing relationship with Josh (Crowe), a young man she met at the lake where Violet likes to sit, trying to find some measure of peace. However, how will he react when he finds out about her other life, in which she is making those responsible for the assault, pay.

The main theme this seeks to illustrate, appears to be the proverb about revenge and digging two graves. There’s not much uplifting about the process through which Violet goes, and you’d be hard pushed to argue that, at the end, she finds herself in a better place. She may have made her attackers regret what they did, in no uncertain fashion. [Ironically, she posts the resulting videos on the same site, and acquires a bit of a cult following as a result.] However, it doesn’t fix the problem: her thespian ambitions, for example, can never be restored to what they were. Indeed, there turns out to be a high price to be paid, though it has to be said, this results from one of the more unlikely plot twists I can remember.

That development is just one of the problems with this, which managed to keep taking me out of the narrative, just when it seemed to be pulling me in. For example, Violet’s “mother” looks, acts and sounds about three years old than the 21-year-old heroine, and is so unconvincing in this role, she sticks out like a sore thumb. The extended chit-chat between Josh and Violet also rarely surpasses the level of of his self-composed poems. At least they nailed the bad teenage verse aspect: I literally LOL’d at his rhyming of “shoulder” with “boulder”.

I’m not sure about Winkler’s performance, which is hurt by inconsistency. There are points when she seemed thoroughly believable, selling the pain of her experiences. Yet, two minutes later, it was as if a switch had been flipped and no trace of the trauma could be seen. While that may have been a deliberate dramatic choice, it feels false. I did appreciate, however, the decision to leave the rape almost unportrayed. We see only a fraction of the resulting video on the Internet, and I’m fine with that. I’ve always been about the revenge, and that doesn’t feel any less justified as a result of that choice. Overall though, it doesn’t mess sufficiently well to deliver the necessary impact.

Dir: Samuel Vainisi
Star: Alyss Winkler, Jason Crowe, Ember Burns, Keith Voigt Jr.

Locked In

  By

★★½
“Die Hard in a storage facility? Hardly.”

I am old enough to remember when Suvari was playing jailbait in American Beauty. It is therefore a bit disturbing to find her here, taking on the role of the mother of a seventeen-year-old daughter. Where has the time gone? But then, it has now been approaching 23 years since Beauty came out. This realization is probably more chilling than anything this technically competent, but almost entirely lacklustre thriller is able to deliver. It starts off with an interesting premise, and even has some not commonly-seen elements in its heroine. But the longer this goes on, the more it feels rote and by the numbers, without enough to differentiate it from other, better entries in the (more or less) Die Hard knock-off sub-genre.

Maggie (Suvari) is a single mom, struggling to make ends meet after her husband is sent to prison. She and daughter Tarin (Polish) cross swords frequently, and Maggie is also teetering on the edge of being evicted from their apartment in an unsavoury neighbourhood. She works at a storage facility, becomes aware that her boss is up to something shady, and stumbles across a box of cash – the proceeds of his side-hustle, renting out space to store stolen goods. Tempted to take some of the money to solve her financial issues, she decides not to. But she then sees over the facility’s CCTV cameras, her boss being killed by Mel (Fahey) and Ross (Perez), who have come to retrieve a stash of diamonds, the proceeds of a robbery. Complicating matters, Tarin is also in the building.

The heroine has some interesting traits, and it’s a shame these aren’t leveraged more. For example, she’s a Christian, reading passages from the Bible to Tarin. She also falls short of being particularly competent, and is easily cowed in the face of aggression. Right at the start, it’s also established she suffers from claustrophobia; that seems like a particularly obvious plot-point, yet at least the film doesn’t overplay that hand. The film’s issues are more on the other side of the coin, with far too much camera time given to the villains of the piece. They are about the least effective thing the movie has to offer, with Fahey and Costas Mandylor getting characters straight out of stock casting.

To be honest, this is more of a thriller than an action movie. Tarin needs to outwit her enemies, and figure out who she can trust, more than taking them down, John McClane style. However, the scenario, especially with her having to defend her child (who is Annoying Teenager 1.0.1, in the same way as we get Bad Guys 1.0.1.), is what makes it qualify here. While first-time director Gutierrez tries to use the single location to amp up the tension, I can’t remember off-hand a single moment where this worked to the film’s advantage.  Then again, I can’t remember very much about it overall; considering I watched it less than 24 hours ago, that’s not a good sign…

Dir: Carlos V. Gutierrez
Star: Mena Suvari, Jasper Polish, Jeff Fahey, Manny Perez

Unchained

  By

★★
“Needs a short leash”

This likely suffered, having been watched the day after Boyka: Unleashed which, while not an action heroine film by any stretch of the imagination, is a near-perfect demonstration of how brutal, no-holds barred fights should be filmed. I can only guess that “Raphaello” never saw Boyka: Unleashed. And since he also co-wrote, co-produced, shot and edited this thing, pretty much all the blame for its shortcomings has to be laid at his feet. I say this, since the performances, if hardly Oscar-winning, are likely the least of the film’s worries. Even if Eric Roberts may have literally phoned, or these days, Zoomed in his role, straight from his living-room couch, as the story-telling father of the heroine.

She is Aella (Mulroney), an ex-soldier who is now desperately seeking work to fend off the bills that are piling up. She goes to audition for a role in a movie about an underground fight club, only to be bopped on the head, and wake up in – what are the odds! – an underground fight club. There’s she is forcibly trained by The Warden (Andrews, looking like the resurrected corpse of Lemmy from Motorhead) and his sidekick Regina. The latter is played by Valkyrie – that’s not her real name, she’s a pro wrestler whom we remember from Lucha Underground,  and is married to the more well-known John Morrison. From here, things progress more or less as you’d expect, with Aella and her fellow captives fighting each other, while plotting a break for freedom.

It is, as noted, the technical aspects which are woefully inept here. “Raphaello” seems incapable of holding the camera steady and pointing it in the same direction for more than two seconds during the fight scenes, which are borderline unwatchable as a result. Mind you, the participants appear largely unfamiliar with how to throw a punch; odd consider Aella’s supposed military background. Not helping matters are the tedious training montages, terrible soundtrack, and resources which fall well short of the high-end operation supposedly taking place, where women are sold for six-figure sums. I’m pretty sure the entire film did not cost anywhere near six figures. Then there’s the ending, where a giant fireball kills all the bad people, while the heroine escapes unscathed… by turning her back on it. I kid you not.

If more a disaster movie than an action one, in the sense of being a disaster, I will say, I did keep watching. As noted earlier, this is mostly due to decent performances. Mulroney has about the right mix of resilience and insolence for the role, while both Andrews and Valkyrie are cut from suitably villainous cloth. In better hands – such as the people behind Boyka: Unleashed – the actors and actresses could have been part of something entertaining. As is, it largely goes to prove that, no matter how many hyphens “Raphaello” may string into his credentials, there’s no substitute for talent. 

Dir: Raphaello
Star: Mair Mulroney, Larry L Andrews, Taya Valkyrie, Maricris Lapaix

Cold Blooded Killers

  By

★★
“In severe need of warming up.”

A confusing mess with some redeeming features, we first see the titular assassin – in either title – Rose (Rose) taking out an entire family in their home. This is notable in two ways. First, how the wife keeps an arsenal of weapons under the sink. Second, how Rose kills the young daughter, after the little girl vows to take revenge when she grows up. This is, unfortunately, as good as it gets. Before long, coherence is left by the wayside. The basic plot involves Rose’s sister Misty, being kidnapped by Hank (Sheridan), in revenge for her killing of his brother. She heads out, accompanied by her sister’s boss Becky (Williams), in search of Hank and Misty.

But there are also a slew – far too many for the script to handle, truth be told – of other assassins, on Rose’s tail, working through some kind of phone app for hitmen. It’s difficult to keep track of them all, and even the movie can’t manage it. For example, at one point, another killer is clearly introduced as Anita, but the on-screen caption calls her Marilyn. I read reports there were issues in production, with control being taken away from the director, and all manner of extra footage shot. That would go some way to explain this jumbled mess, and why it wasn’t released until three years after the initial shoot had finished. Though, of course does not excuse it.

I will say, the final battle is somewhat amusing. Albeit, more for Becky going berserk with a chainsaw, than Rose firing hundreds of bullets at her target, who drops with a feeble three or four blood squibs on his chest. If the film had concentrated on that pair, it might have amounted to something, as their scenes have a rough edge to them that is entertaining to watch. And, let’s face it, the amount of cleavage on view from both is not exactly a detriment. I’ll also acknowledge the presence of legendary scream queen Brinke Stevens, which is never a bad thing, even in little more than a cameo, as here. 

However, the flaws are considerably more numerous. Even though our heroines are fun, we’re never given any real reason to care about either of them. The same goes for the other characters: Hank’s impact is almost entirely limited to his facial hair, and Anita/Marilyn to her costume choices. There is little or no structure, with the grand finale coming out of nowhere, and delivering a twist which neither was a surprise, nor made much sense. I’m also not a fan of copious CGI, which appears to have been used for a lot of the gunplay, and in a sloppy way at that. The end result is something which would probably make a very good trailer, yet would leave any viewer of said trailer, hugely disappointed. For this is 10 minutes of decent content in a 90-minute movie.

Dir: Rickey Bird Jr.
Star: Felissa Rose, Dave Sheridan, Caroline Williams, Steven Chase
a.k.a. Killer Rose

Bruised

  By

★★★★
“Packs a surprising punch.”

Halle Berry was born the same year I was. There is, however, just one of us that is capable of convincingly playing the role of a mixed martial artist. To give you another yardstick, the lead in this was originally going to go to Mrs. Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively (The Shallows and The Rhythm Section), who is more than 20 years younger than Berry. I will admit, Chris did raise one of her sardonic eyebrows at the scene where Halle’s character buys Tampax, and the idea of her having a six-year-old son is perhaps a bit of a stretch. But if you didn’t know the actress has been AARP-eligible for over five years, you’d simply never guess.

This is probably the best movie yet made about women’s combat sports, though that’s not exactly going up against strong competition. The script is probably the only weak element, never escaping the standard clichés; there are very few surprises in its 138 minutes. But just about every other aspect is excellent. The heroine is Jackie Justice (Berry), a former UFC fighter, whose promising career fell apart four years ago. She just lost her job as a cleaner, and is pretty much at rock-bottom. Her boyfriend/”manager”  Desi (Canto) takes Jackie to an underground match, where she is provoked into beating her opponent into a pulp. That gets the attention of a local promoter, who gives her one last shot, a bout against undefeated champion, Lucia “Lady Killer” Chavez (Valentina Shevchenko, the current UFC Women’s Flyweight Champion, whose fight face is genuinely scary!).

Of course, even to reach that point, she has to overcome the inevitable slew of obstacles. Desi’s domestic abuse, the doubts of her trainer, Buddhaken (Atim); and in particular, having her son Manny (Boyd) dumped on her, after the death of his father. Naturally, Jackie is able to rise above them all, and get her moment in the sun. Really, there’s only two possible outcomes – she wins or she doesn’t – and neither are exactly novel. Still, it’s all so earnest that you can’t help be pulled in. Berry sells the tropes with the conviction of her performance, and there are particularly good supporting roles from theatre veterans Atim, and Adriane Lenox as Jackie’s mother.

It’s worth pointing out that this is also Berry’s directorial debut, and it’s a very assured first feature. It never feels long, and about the only thread which felt superfluous was the romantic entanglement with her trainer. The resulting lesbisn canoodling seemed a bit gratuitous and out of sync with the gritty, down to earth feel from the rest of the movie. Fortunately, there are more than enough powerful and excellent scenes, and it’s very easy to get behind the heroine in her quest for redemption. Jackie is a character who comes with a lot of baggage, yet it all just makes her struggle seem all the more real. A shame this, Berry’s portrayal in particular, will likely be overlooked come the Oscars.

Dir: Halle Berry
Star: Halle Berry, Sheila Atim, Danny Boyd Jr, Adan Canto