★★★½
“…dig two graves, Thai style”
As a child, Oo-yi came to Thailand with her mother as a migrant worker. They had the misfortune to work for the cruel Madam Bussara (Kingpayome), who had a particularly nasty habit of pimping out young girls to her lawyer, Methi. When she tried to do the same to Oo-yi, Mom stood up for her – and was beaten to death for her pains. Oo-yi was able to escape, and raised by Ni Wai (Sirikul). Now, an adult (Luevisadpaibul), she is set on vengeance, and intent on destroying Madam Bussara’s life. To do so, she becomes Thicha, “accidentally” bumps into Bussara’s son, Phatchai (Chirathivat), and begins cultivating a relationship with him. But that’s the story of revenge: it’s messy. Since her feelings for him start becoming genuine.
On the one hand, it might seem rather soapy, and I won’t deny the melodramatic nature of things. But it is held together by a pair of great performances from Luevisadpaibul and Kingpayome. The latter, in particular, is close to an all-time villain. I’m not sure what happened to her husband, but it probably wasn’t good. Witness this monologue: “No one understands just how thrilling it is to watch a living being fight for its life. When it’s someone who always thought they were invincible, it’s even more entertaining. And if that desperate fight for survival is caused by my own hands? It’s almost as good as an orgasm.” Yeah: not somebody you want to mess with.
When her son shows up with Thicha, she knows instinctively that something is not right with his new girlfriend. From there, through the eight x 45-minute episodes, unfolds a slew of twists, revelations, nastiness and questions. Thicha is pregnant! Or is she? Phatchai discovers her deceptions! What will he do? Thicha’s informant inside Bussara’s house is exposed! How will she survive? It all builds to a rather brutal battle between Thicha and Madam, on the very spot where her mother was buried, years before. I was about to apply a demerit for Thicha having to be rescued by Phatchai there, until… Well, it doesn’t end exactly like that, this being a case where the pursuit of vengeance is not a rewarding and cathartic experience.
It is a little distancing. While Madam is a right c… not very nice person, it’s perhaps Methi who is in direst need of drastic punitive action. I feel it would have been more satisfying if he had been the bad guy from the start, rather than a peripheral villain. However, there’s a good sense of escalation, with each episode ending at a point which lures you forward into the next installment. It’s the scenes where Thicha and Bussara face off – be that verbally or (eventually) physically – where the series comes to life, and I found myself holding my breath more than once. If it does take a while to reach the final payoff, I’d be hard pushed to call it unsatisfactory.
Dir: Ekkasit Trakulkasemsuk
Star: Pimchanok Luevisadpaibul, Metinee Kingpayome, Pachara Chirathivat, Penpak Sirikul


And, unfortunately, in this case, it’s not messy in a good or even interesting way. It’s messy in a “What the heck is going on?” way, with a large side-order of, “Can somebody please explain this to me?”, and a garnish of “Anyone? Hello?”. To say this film poses more questions than answers would be incorrect. Because that would wrongly imply it offers any answers at all. I’m just glad the version I saw ran a mere 84 minutes, because the IMDb cites a running time more than half an hour longer. Maybe the thirty-five minutes removed for this cut were all of the explanation. Though I suggest it’d be improved by removing about the same again.
I wonder if this film was made as some kind of bet. How many tropes and clichés can
I get the idea of what this is trying to do: really, be a female-centric version of The Hitcher. Though to some extent, that franchise went there itself, in The Hitcher II: I’ve Been Waiting. Here, we have Bobbi Torres (Camacho) driving across New Mexico in her sweet muscle car, and when she stops for fuel, has an awkward encounter with Sheriff Bilstein (Schwab). Things get worse when she gets back on the road, and is quickly pulled over by the officer for speeding, which gets her a thousand dollar ticket she is unable to pay. Thanks to a prologue, we know Bilstein has a psychopathic fondness for tormenting and killing young women. This ain’t gonna end well.
At the beginning of this, I wondered if I was watching a Godzilla film. Because it opens with atomic bomb footage, depicting French test in the Pacific. We know what this leads to: gigantic lizards with fiery bre… Oh, hang on: it’s actually a group of women, looking for a place reputed to have particularly gnarly (if my knowledge of beach-speak doesn’t fail me, and it probably does) waves. There are three surfers, plus photographer Sarah (Galloy), who has been out of the game since an accident which wrecked her confidence. The island they find isn’t on any map, so it must be good, and not a death-trap waiting to happen to them. Right?
For a good while, this struggled to retain my interest, and when it did, the problems outweighed the positive aspects. Fortunately, after a solid hour of faffing around in ways that provoked mostly rolling of my eyes, the film found its stride. That’s funny, because it’s a running reference. Ok, not very funny. Down the stretch it both figuratively and literally pushes the pedal to the metal, in quite an impressive manner. My reaction was divided. Part of me wondered, where the heck this was earlier on? However, rather than petering out like a sad trombone, there’s no question it’s better for a film to finish strongly, and give the viewers something positive to take away with them.
Marni (Johnson) is stuck in the titular town, where oil fracking is causing problems from earthquakes to poisoning the local water supply. She’s barely scraping by as a single mom to teenage son Jason (Strange), working as a bartender for sleazy owner Daryl (McMahan), who has a bad case of wandering hands, and hustling customers at pool. Her life is upended when Steph (Carpenter) comes into the bar, kicks Marni’s ass on the pool table, and the two end up making out in the back alley. When Steph becomes aware of Darryl’s safe full of cash, she suggests they liberate it, to finance a new life for them and Jason, far away from Extraction.
I’ve seen worse films, to be quite clear. Technically, this is perfectly acceptable, with an apparently reasonable budget, put to decent use. But I don’t think I’ve seen one which has been more
Bec ‘Rowdy’ Rawlings is an Australian mixed martial-artist, who fought in the UFC for a bit, and then became the first woman to win a bare-knuckle boxing world title. This documentary covers her life, from growing up as a teenage tearaway, through motherhood transforming her character, her discovery of mixed martial-arts, a disastrous and highly toxic first marriage, and escaping that to become eventually the Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship federation’s Women’s Featherweight World Champion. Phew. That’s quite a lot to get through in less than eighty minutes. The film does a decent job of covering its bases, through interviews with Bec, and her family and friends, plus no shortage of archive footage of Rawlings, both in and out of the ring.
What’s unusual here is that, allow this is an American production, the cast and crew are almost entirely of South Asian origin. Which is fine, except that writer/director Gil has an imperfect grasp of English. Witness the opening voice-over, which I present verbatim: “There are three wants which can never be satisfied. That of the mastermind who want more, that of the peddler who pray for more, and that of the whistle stopper who don’t know when to say enough.” Um, yes? Fortunately, it’s not too dialogue-heavy, and the plot is mercifully basic, albeit needlessly cluttered up with jumps around in time of weeks, months or days, which a more skilled creator would have avoided.