Tag: 2022

Peggy

  By

★½
“Amateur hour and ten minutes.”

An early contender for widest gap between synopsis and reality in 2024. On the one hand, we have “After years of torment, Peggy finally gets revenge on all those who wronged her in the past.” On the other? A dumb, microbudget not-a-horror, not anything really. It’s probably most notable for the unexpected appearance of Tom Lehrer on the soundtrack. I guess the basic concept is there. Peggy (Van Dorn) is almost thirty, but still lives at home with her doting dad (Williams). Her main hobby is abducting and torturing those who “wronged her” – though quite what they did to deserve such punishment is never made clear, which makes it kinda hard to feel empathy for her.

Possibly even more irritating are… well, everyone else, to be honest, but I suspect the local cops are top of the list. Even when Peggy carries out a mass poisoning at the bar where she works, when a customer makes an off-colour remark (have the makers ever been in a bar?), they do basically nothing. Mind you, Dustin (Guiles) is picking up evidence at a murder scene with his bare hands, so there’s that. The victims, including former high school Queen Bee Rachel (Osoki), are slightly noxious. But again: nothing to merit death, unless you consider dropping the C-bomb a capital crime, as Rachel does on a couple of occasions. [If so, I’m in trouble: being Scottish, it’s locked in to my sweary vocabulary].

There’s no particular sense of escalation, development or anything much. Spoiler, I guess, but it ends with Peggy simply announcing she has decided to go on a road-trip. The end. Well, if you discount ten minutes of the world’s slowest end-credits, which live up to the term “title crawl”, despite including an alternate ending that adds nothing of note or interest to proceedings. Including this, it still barely reaches an hour and ten. But, you know what? I’m not even mad about it. Indeed, half a star is probably for the film appreciating the line from Hamlet: “Brevity is the soul of wit.” Though given the lack of wit here, the saying needs to be reworked as, brevity is the soul of brevity. 

Performances range from the acceptable (Van Dorn) to the “actor no-showed, but there’s a homeless guy hanging around outside the 7-11” level. There aren’t even any decent exploitation elements which might have provoked some interest, with no nudity and gore limited to the occasional squirt of red-tinged corn syrup. To be fair, I get that making movies is hard. Making good ones is more difficult still. Yet when I sacrifice part of my hard-earned day off to this low-grade nonsense, I feel I have earned the right to be moderately aggrieved by the waste of my time. I never did figure out about the “years of torment” allegedly suffered by Peggy. I sincerely doubt it was significantly worse than the hour of torment this inflicted on me.

Dir: Brandon Guiles
Star: Tiffani Van Dorn, Brandon Guiles, Brian Williams, Katie Ososki

Good Morning, Verônica: season two and three

  By

★★★
“Good afternoon and good night.”

I’ll treat these two seasons as one entity. Indeed, there’s a case to be made that you could include the first season as well, given the way they are inter-connected. However, it feels that the second and third are more directly linked. If you recall, the initial series had Sao Paolo cop Verônica Torres (Müller) looking into a domestic abuse case. However, this turns out not be as simple as it appears, with the abuser being protected by a mafia-like group, whose tentacles are embedded in a selection of power structures, including the police force. Series #2 and #3 take a broader scope, Verônica looking to take down elements of the group, and end their systemic abuse of women.

The second series focuses on Verônica’s efforts against a church run by sketchy and abusive faith healer Matias (Gianecchini). He has a line in inviting poor hurt souls – albeit only attractive, young women – to stay on the church’s property, where bad stuff happens to them. His wife is firmly beneath Matias’s thumb, and Verônica is now operating more less unofficially, though with tacit help from some on the force. Her only hope is to get to the daughter, Angela (Castanho), who is lesbian because Netflix. If she can convince Angela her father is not the saint his public persona appears to be, they might have a chance to expose his crimes. But doing so simply removes another layer of the conspiracy, with the shadowy “Doúm” remaining at large.

Which is where the third series comes in, as she finds Doúm to be horse breeder Jeronimo (Santoro). Initially, he seems on her side, which is remarkably naive of her, because he set my alarm bells ringing from the very start. Doesn’t help that he looks like a creepy combination of Liam Neeson, Kid Rock and Tommy Wiseau. And that’s before we learn about the questionable relationship with his mother, or that he grew up in the same abusive orphanage as Marias. Such concerns are very justified, because it turns out Jeronimo is not just breeding horses for fun and profit. He has his eye on both Angela and Verônica’s daughter, as the next brood mares, ready to be auctioned off to rich clients.

I felt it all got a little silly and excessive in the third season, with the plot requiring events which stretched plausibility to a breaking point. It’s likely a good thing it was only half the length of the second series, at three episodes rather than six. While it ends with Verônica looking to continue the fight for justice in her extra-legal capacity, the show was canceled, and I feel that’s wise given the steadily diminishing returns. There was a nice sense of circularity, series 3 ending in a suicide, the way the very first episode opened. However, the televisual cycle of abuse was becoming repetitive, although both the second and third seasons had some interesting revelations about Verônica’s family background. While Müller’s performance held things together, it’s likely better this stopped too soon, rather than too late.

Creator: Raphael Montes
Star: Taina Müller, Reynaldo Gianecchini, Klara Castanho, Rodrigo Santoro

Special Delivery

  By

★★½
“Good only in car parts.”

Based on the trailer, I was hoping for something like a Korean version of The Transporter. It seemed to promise this, with Jang Eun-ha (Park) playing a courier for Baekgang Industries, a company who will transport things – mostly people, it appears – from Point A to Point B, when regular delivery methods are not possible. For example, because the passenger in question is being chased by enemies, and needs to make a quick exit from the country before he’s found. Her latest mission involves baseball pitcher Kim Doo-shik, who has blown the whistle on a match-fixing scandal, so needs to escape before those behind it get hold of him and young son Kim Seo-won (Jung).

So far, so sprightly, especially after an enthralling early sequence which showcases Eun-ha’s mad driving skills in avoiding pursuers through the narrow streets of Busan. However, the attempted pick-up of Kim Sr. goes badly awry, as he’s being chased by Jo Kyung-pil (Song). Jo is a corrupt cop who is also behind the gambling ring involved in the match-fixing. Eun-ha ends up in possession of Seo-won, and… Hang on, didn’t we write about three different versions of this story in October 2022? Yeah, for much of the rest of the film is basically another take on Gloria. Brash, beer-drinking Eun-ha is lumbered with a kid whom she cannot initially stand, yet inevitably, comes to care for Seo-won over the remaining course of the film.

Now, this isn’t all that different from The Transporter, where Jason Statham was also lumbered with an unwanted human package, in his case Shu Qi. However, there, it was the jumping off point for some cool and generally entertaining action, e.g. the classic garage fight, involving a well-oiled Statham. Here, not nearly so much, even though Jo is keen to get hold of the kid, who has a computer dongle which is key to the recovery of $30 million. While this could have been the source of multiple exciting car-chases – and as the opening shows, technically, the makers were more than capable – it feels as if director Park is more interested in how suddenly enforced maternal responsibility changes his heroine. I can’t say I’m with him there.

The concept can work, but seems incredibly trite here, and doesn’t help matters that Seo-won is a very generic child, with little personality compared, say, to Newt in Aliens, or Mathilda in The Professional. Consequently, Eun-ha’s decision not to drop the child off at the nearest police-station seems contrived for plot purposes, rather than resulting from a natural release of suppressed nurturing emotions. It’s well-enough assembled that it never becomes unwatchable, yet proceedings remain just that: assembled. It’s not without merit, since both protagonist and antagonist make for interesting characters. But it the end, Chris described it as “cute,” and that’s borderline damning with faint praise in her vocabulary – one step above “interesting.” I can’t honestly say she was wrong in her assessment.

Dir: Park Dae-min
Star: Park So-dam, Song Sae-byeok, Kim Eui-sung, Jung Hyeon-jun

Giantess Battle Attack

  By

★★★
“…the harder they fall.”

I was expecting this to be a follow-up to the previous Giantess films, most recently Giantess Attack vs. Mecha-Fembot! But it isn’t. This is instead, a sequel to Attack of the 50 Foot CamGirl, which I haven’t seen. However, I doubt it matters. This is much the same mix of titillation, tongue-in-cheek comedy and B-movie campiness. I think it’s safe to say, if you liked the earlier movies (and, personally, I was amused more than their quality probably deserves), this will likely hit the right spot. Director Wynorski has been doing this kind of thing for over forty years, and has no illusions about it. He has a cameo in this, complaining about the gratuitous nudity, which ends with him being pied off. And why not?

Following the events of CamGirl (I guess, anyway), the gigantic Beverly Wood (Smith) is now working in a quarry. She is trying to pay off all the damage she caused in the first film, with the help of loving boyfriend and quarry foreman Mike (Gross). A chance to escape her debts comes in the form of a $50 million PPV catfight against Anna Conda (Max), who is going to be supersized for the battle. But Beverly wants to go the other way and return to normal dimensions. Meanwhile, an extra-terrestrial threat looms, in the shape of Spa-Zor (Hall) from the planet Buxomus. She saw footage of Bev’s rampage, and travels to Earth to find an opponent who can match her size and skills.

There is, apparently, a whole giantess fetish thing. It’s not something I’m into. However, I was still amused enough over the brief (sixty minute) running time. It’s clearly not intended to be taken seriously, from the opening scene on Buxomus featuring a very terrestrial doorbell sound, and lines lifted shamelessly from Star Trek. That sets the lighthearted tone, and the film does a decent job of sustaining it thereafter. Even the obligatory sexual content is an improvement on Mecha-Fembot, played in a way closer to a fifties nudie-cutie than contemporary smut. It feels as if the cast and crew are all on the same page, pulling together, and for me, this helps paper over the obviously limited resources.

Naturally, it ends in a three-way fight, pitting Beverly and Anna against Spa-Zor at an oil refinery, which comes over like a fever dream version of a Godzilla finale. This is never going to be mistaking for high art or great cinema, and it’s certainly not for everyone. I wouldn’t argue if you said it was terrible – and, I suspect, neither would Wynorski. However, hand on heart, I was more entertained by this than The Marvels, which felt like a soulless commercial item, created purely for profit. While I’m under no illusions – a goal here was to make money – it feels like that was not its only purpose. I’d argue this is therefore closer to being true art. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off for a nice lie-down in a dark room. 

Dir: Jim Wynorski
Star: Ivy Smith, Brian Gross, Masuimi Max, Kiersten Hall

Hunt Her, Kill Her

  By

★★★
“Tabling the argument.”

This is fairly sparse, unfolding entirely in the single location of a furniture factory, over the course of a single night. The central character is Karen (Terrazzino), a single mother who has just taken on the job of a cleaner and overnight security guard at the premises, in order to provide for her young daughter, who is ill on the night Karen has to start work. These issues quickly pale into insignificance – though not irrelevance – when a group of masked men enter the building, looking to hunt down and kill her. With the doors chained from the outside and the phone lines cut, Karen is entirely on her own against the bigger and stronger, but fortunately not smarter, intruders.

That’s basically it, and this is definitely not one if you’re looking for complex themes or nuanced characters. It’s straightforward survival horror, with the first half closer to stalk ‘n’ slash territory, consisting mostly of Karen being chased around the labyrinthine building, hiding out and being discovered. Things do become more action-oriented the deeper we get into things. There is a certain element of fortune in the ways she defeats some of her opponents, although this is probably necessary given the size disparity, and there’s a chaotic messiness to them which is effective. The one which stands out is the death by toilet plunger (no, the other end), which is drawn out to the point where it becomes almost blackly humourous.

That said, I did still roll my eyes at some elements, most obviously when Karen disguises herself as one of the predators. It’s an unnecessary push of believability, which would have been best forgotten. On the other hand, it is nice that the damage isn’t all one way. By the time Karen gets down to the final assailant (Oakley), she’s certainly far from uninjured, and this only escalates during their battle. If you likely will not be surprised in the slightest by the identity of the last man standing, it brings a deeply personal edge to the fight, and in addition, certainly gives Karen additional motivation. The result is considerably more of a brawl than anything, neither party giving or receiving quarter, and using whatever is nearby to their advantage.

The scripting here is so bare-bones as to be positively anorexic. For example, the backstory for Karen is put over in a way which you could either call “tersely efficient” or “laughably negligible,” depending on how charitable you might be feeling. While I lean somewhat towards the former, I’d prefer it to have done so in order to get to the meat of the matter faster, in lieu of the extended game of Hide ‘n’ Seek which occupies the first half. However, the film makes good use of its setting, and once things kick off, there’s precious little slack there either. Terrazzino gives a better physical performance than a dramatic one, but given the circumstances, that’s probably the way you want it to skew.

Dir: Greg Swinson and Ryan Thiessen
Star: Natalie Terrazzino, JC Oakley III, Trevor Tucker, Hunter Tinney

Operation Kick-ass

  By

★★★½
“Just don’t ask what’s going on.”

This ended up turning into an Internet investigation. The title above is the one by which it appeared on Tubi. But it’s clearly pasted onto the opening credits, and I ended up having to go through the IMDb credits for the one identifiable actress to find it there – where it appears under another title, with some promo materials giving it a third name. The end credits are entirely in Chinese, and provide absolutely no information as to who is playing who. So that also had to be pieced together. But least helpful of all, were subtitles that may be generated by a drunk AI, operated by a seven-year-old

Seriously, I’ve only the vaguest idea of what’s going on. Do not take what follows as more than my best guess, and it may be wrong in any number of ways. It seems to be a battle between two groups: the good guys (and gals) of GWS, under Uncle Liao (Zhang), versus the bad guys (and gal) of Alpha, run by cartoon villain Davis, who frequently sounds like he is being dubbed by Borat. Are these two factions industrial organizations? Agencies of rival governments? Criminal gangs? No idea. They’re clearly both very well-funded, and are fighting over a computer program called “Blue Sword and Shield”, which can be used to blackmail the rich and powerful. Key to this is a programmer (Wei), whose loyalties are… flexible.

But it becomes personal for GWS’s top agent, Chen You (Li), after Alpha kill her friend and colleague, Merrill Lynch. Yes, that’s what those subtitles assure me is a character’s name. Maybe this was a not-so subtle form of product placement. More likely, it’s just another example of how this is a grab-bag of elements taken from elsewhere. Most obviously, in its basic structure of “three women with an older, male boss” is Charlie’s Angels, though this is considerably less fluffy. Put it this way: Uncle Liao will have some recruiting to do by the time the movie is over. But there is clear influence from old-school Hong Kong girls-with-guns movies as well, such as Naked Weapon, and also the John Wick franchise. 

At less than seventy minutes, it doesn’t have time to hang around, and the action is pretty decent as well. Although sometimes it is a little over-edited and CGI’d, it’s always stylishly shot and imaginative. The highlight is probably the knife fight between Chen and Davis’s lieutenant (Zina Blahusova), with the two women going at each other hard: by this point it’s very personal for Chen. I would like see more of both actresses. It’s just a shame the presentation, in both sub and dubbing, is so slipshod. Had it not been, this could well have been looking at a seal of approval. While I get these films are not intended for a Western audience, with a little more care, they could be; the quality elsewhere is there.

Dir: Liu Bayin
Star: Mengmeng Li, Shuangli Zhang, Wei Chen, Zhang Dong
a.k.a. Action team overlord flower or Secret Agent Dangerous Flowers.

Kobanê

  By

★★★
“It’s clearly no Nirvana…”

Yes, let’s get the obligatory Kurt Cobain joke out of the way quickly and painlessly. This is instead about the Kurdish city, located in northern Syria, which came under assault from forces belonging to the Islamic State (ISIS) in 2014-15. The defenders eventually repelled the attack in what has been called the Kurdish version of the Battle of Stalingrad. Even before that, we had covered how groups such as the YPJ put Kurdish women on the front-line, in a way rarely seen in modern warfare. One such woman is the focus of the film, Zehra (Arin), who is forced into a commanding role after backup is refused, and the city is cut off by the advancing ISIS army.

What follows is basically your traditional war movie, with a small group of defenders coming under attack from a numerically superior opponent. We’ve seen this often enough, in the likes of Zulu, Saving Private Ryan, 300, etc. But making the central character female is certainly unusual, and better still, the film ignores her gender entirely. Seriously, I don’t recall a single time it was so much as mentioned. Any Hollywood film would surely make an obvious point of it, with a male character questioning her competence, or worse still, shoehorning in a cringeworthy, Avengers: Endgame,”She’s got help” moment. Here, everyone is far too busy trying to survive to indulge in that kind of nonsense, and if you want an up-close street fighting experience, this certainly delivers.

However, there are issues. At a whopping 159 minutes, it’s overlong, and there are also times it feels you need a Wikipedia crash course on the complicated situation involving the Kurds, Turks and Syrians. For instance, there’s a point at which the defenders are set up for betrayal. Perhaps the logic of this makes sense if you know the situation, but it felt like I had to take the logic on trust. It’s also worth remembering that this is, at heart, a piece of propaganda, and sometimes it’s not exactly subtle about it. The ISIS soldiers feel as if they strayed in from a Disney class in villainy, and there are times when the story resorts to equally blatant emotional cliché.

I was impressed by the technical aspects, with a sense of destruction – they found a lot of razed city blocks – and deaths where people get shot, sit down, and slowly pass away. Reportedly, a lot of the cast were genuine fighters who took part in the siege: that’s a bit of a mixed blessing, as sometimes the lack of acting experience shines through. I’m not sure if Arin is among them: her IMDb listing has no other roles. But she’s fine, with a face which simply feels as if has been through a lot. The film is helped significantly by Mehmûd Berazî’s score, and I think it does work better that similarly-themed features such as Soeurs D’Armes or Sisters Apart, feeling more grounded and “real.”

The makers have put the whole thing up on YouTube with subtitles, below – and if it’s imperfect, I’d say it remains worth a look.

Dir: Özlem Yasar,
Star: Dijle Arin, Awar Eli, Reger Azad, Nejbir Xanim

The Swimmers

  By

★★
“Sink or swim.”

This is the story of Syrian sisters Yusra Mardini and her sister Sarah, played by real-life sisters Nathalie and Manal Issa. Growing up, they were trained by their father, a professional swimmer himself, and had the goal of reaching the Olympics for their country. The (still ongoing) Syrian Civil War led to the sisters leaving their homeland, and this is mostly the story of their journey, through Turkey, across the Mediterranean in a very flimsy dinghy to Greece, then across Europe to Germany. It’s a journey fraught with peril, on which predators looking to scam migrants (or worse), lurk at every turn. However…

I don’t typically like to get political here, but when a film explicitly does, I will go there. I have every sympathy for refugees, who want safety. But once you leave your home country and reach a safe destination, that’s it. If you then decide to move on – making a beeline for a country where lax immigration laws let you pull the rest of your family with you – you’re not a refugee, you’re an economic migrant. My sympathy for you drops a whole order of magnitude. It’s like if your house burns down, I feel sorry for you. It doesn’t give you the right to move into the neighbourhood’s swankiest residence. Most of the film’s attempts to pull on my heartstrings failed due to this. As soon as the sisters left the Turkish beach, they were 100% responsible for putting themselves back in danger.

Rant over. What about the film? It’s a bit of a mixed bag. Having sisters playing sisters definitely works. Especially at that age, this is the kind of relationship which is hard to simulate for teenage actors. There’s a genuineness here, for obvious reasons, which makes the family devotion at the film’s core, easy to see and appreciate. Less successful is the apparent random switching between languages. Many conversations occur in a hodge-podge of English and Arabic. While I can’t speak to the authenticity of it, as a viewer, it was jarring to switch repeatedly from listening to reading subtitles. I ended up basically tuning out the dialogue and sticking with the subs.

I appreciate the necessity of bending the facts to fit a cinematic narrative, but this probably goes too far. It’s one thing to have Yusra overhear snark from other competitors about how she doesn’t deserve to be there. But maybe avoid this when the movie then omits to mention the only swimmers she beat were, basically, other charity cases? The Olympic Selection Time was 60.80 seconds. Mardini finished in 69.21, and even her personal best is more than five seconds off the OST. The awkward truth is, she really did not deserve to be there, but few are greater at virtue-signalling than the IOC. It all feels like there are probably better refugee stories which could have been told. All the gloss this applies to its tale. can’t disguise that it is uncomfortably close to well-made propaganda.

Dir: Sally El-Hosaini
Star: Nathalie Issa, Manal Issa, Ahmed Malek, Matthias Schweighöfer

Giantess Attack vs. Mecha-Fembot!

  By

★★½
“The bigger they come…”

The first Giantess Attack! movie was an unexpected guilty pleasure: while obviously low budget, it had no pretensions and an undeniably goofy charm that, at least for me, helped paper over the cracks and microscopic resources. The end of it teased this very movie, and most of the main players have delivered on that promise. Can lightning strike twice? The answer is… not quite. Even at a crisp 67 minutes, it still feels like there is a lot of padding, with recycled footage and elements that go on, after their amusement value has expired. That said, it ends in another impressive giant battle, and still contains some genuinely amusing moments.

Frida (Riley) and Diedre (Tacosa) have split after the events of the first film: the latter has vowed never to become a giantess ever again, and has retreated to her “Fortress of Immeasurable Guilt” to build popiscle-stick models. Frida pays her a visit, and they end up in what can only be described as a cat-fight version of the famous brawl from They Live, over Diedre’s refusal to put on glasses. However, the main threat is the surviving Metaluna twin (Nguyen) from the first movie, who is plotting revenge on Earth. To that end, she kidnaps a scientist, miniaturizes him and forces him to make the mecha-fembot of the title, which goes on the rampage through LA. The only hope is our two heroines, though before they can save the city, the duo first need to reconcile.

There can’t be many movies which open with a Katey Sagal impersonator, but here’s one. It follows with a brutal parody of those cloying, guilt-ridden Sarah McLachlan ASPCA commercials, which is spot on, and resurfaces as a bit of a running joke thereafter. Then, however… the film kinda loses its direction and energy for much of the first half. The sequence where the scientist ends up in Metaluna’s lair, for example, is excruciatingly over-stretched. The same goes for Frida’s ascent up to Diedre’s fortress, where the sole element of humour is that she goes mountain-climbing in go-go boots. Some sequences definitely feel more aimed at the fetish crowd, of whom I am not one.

Once the robot is built – I confess, I did laugh at the supposed method of activation – and unleashed, things become a lot more fun. For we get what we came for, which is cheesy, OTT and completely ridiculous F-sized action. It’s a mix of model work, CGI and green-screen, all done with more enthusiasm than actual resources, yet remains the kind of film-making for which I have an odd affection. Much of Los Angeles is, indeed, destroyed, and our heroines are sentenced to 9,000 hours of community service as a result. Naturally, a third entry is teased, accompanied by the outrageously English accent of the eye-patch wearing “Nicky Fury”. Even if this sequel was a little weaker, I still cannot stop myself from looking forward to: Giantess Attack… In Space!

Dir: Jeff Leroy
Star: Tasha Tacosa, Rachel Riley, Christine Nguyen, Vlada Fox

Red Winter

  By

★½
“Snow good at all.”

Carla (Williams) and her boyfriend Daniel (Davis) are all set for a nice weekend in the mountains. Unfortunately, the snowmobile trip runs into difficulty, in particular coming in the shape of a pair of cartel assassins. What, you may ask, are a pair of cartel assassins doing half-way up a snowy mountain in [I’m guessing] the Colorado Rockies? Good question. I’m glad you asked. They are after a robber who made the ill-advised decision to rob a bar which was a front for their organization. He’s now hiding out, half-way up the aforementioned snowy mountain, in the belief he’s safe. Turns out not to be the case.

There’s a prologue which takes us back to when Carla was young, and was out hunting in the woods with her father. They wound a stag, and as they stand and watch it bleed out, we get ominous lines like, “Because when they’re fighting for their lives, sweet pea, they can be dangerous.” Just in case you missed the importance of this, we flash back to this flashback on repeated occasions during the movie. Because, it’s clearly Very Important. Except, it really isn’t. What it does, however, is help to drag things out before we get anything approaching action. It’s mostly people trudging around a mountainous landscape, very slowly, because one of the party has an injured ankle. This occupies much of the first fifty minutes – and we barely reach seventy before the end credits roll.

Carla is, above everything else, a very sensible heroine. She’s quite likeable as such, and comes over as smart, albeit cautious. The problem is, she simply does not get enough to do. These unrealistic expectations were based on a synopsis which reads, “With the killers stalking them through the bitter cold, Carla must use her survival skills taught to her by her father to ensure she’s the predator and not the prey in this bloody fight for survival.” The reality is something far less interesting, in that those skills are largely limited to her binding that ankle mentioned previously. This does not make for thrilling television. [It was made for BET, but feels like it would have been more at home on Hallmark, perhaps titled, The Wrong Mountain]

There’s certainly nothing particularly red about this winter. Except for the heroine, there’s nothing of merit or even, to be honest, real competence here. The script is meandering and unfocused, and most of the supporting characters fail to make an impression. A slight pass goes to Dante (Sanchez), the dominant assassin, who does have some presence. However, Daniel in particular is beyond useless. While this might have been deliberate, in an effort to make Carla look strong, it’s a flawed approach. You create a heroine by having her demonstrate strength, not others showing their weakness. That may seem obvious, but it’s apparently a lesson of which the makers here were unaware. Along with quite a number of others.

Dir: Steven C. Pitts
Star: Ashley A. Williams, Vernon Davis, Brandon Schaffer, Roberto Sanchez