★★
“More kill than craft.”
There is potential in the idea here. It’s a shame it ends up feeling like two separate movies, both of which come out feeling under-cooked. The main focus is on Marina Delon (Loutsis), a teenage girl with the typical teenage girl problems, e.g. bickering parents, generally sullen demeanour, etc. Except, her dad Thomas (Paré) is actually an assassin, working for the very strange Poe (Oberst). This has contributed to the marital strife, because his work is why mom is in a wheel-chair – and is not happy about it, to put it mildly. However, things are up-ended after Thomas is killed on a job, and Marina decides to take over the family business.
Thee are a few interesting directions this could perhaps have gone. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take any of them. Instead, things rumble vaguely on, with Marina doing not very exciting murders for hire, sometimes with the help of her Gother than thou BFF Freya (Eggleston), and to varying success. Such as trying to kill the estranged wife of a gangster, which only results in a bit of flirty chit-chat with the target’s son. Communication with Poe is entirely through dead-drops, so he has no idea his assassin is now a teen girl, until his boss informs him descriptions of the killer no longer resemble Michael Paré. Poe decides to tidy up the loose ends, by terminating what remains of the family.
Why it feels like two films, is mostly because the director can’t seem to commit to whether it should be Marina’s story or Poe’s. It could have been both, adopting a Leon-esque approach of Poe taking her under his wing. However, the two barely share a few seconds of screen-time before the final shootout. Instead, we get unconvincing family drama, e.g. Marina being upset her father isn’t attending the recital at which she is unconvincingly playing the violin, or even weirder stuff such as Poe digging up the grave of his dead mother. I’d actually have been fine with more of the latter – few do unrepentantly weird better than Oberst [he has done a one-man stage show adapting Edgar Allen Poe stories, incidentally, giving resonance to his character name here], and he’s much better an actor than Loutsis.
For whatever reason, I kept expecting some dramatic twist, such as Freya being a figment of Marina’s imagination. I mean, we first meet the pair digging animal graves behind her house, which sets an odd tone for the film from the beginning. The fact Marina and Poe both… have issues, is another way this could have developed. But once we’ve established Marina is taking over – and with remarkable vagueness on the details there – the film more or less grinds to a halt, dramatically and thematically. With action sequences which are no more than competent, despite some gore which is occasionally amusingly excessive, this is one you can afford to miss, despite Oberst’s best efforts.
Dir: Mark Savage
Star: Sanae Loutsis, Isis Eggleston, Michael Paré, Bill Oberst Jr.


If I see a more relentless and brutal film in 2025, I’m going to be quite surprised. This doesn’t let up, with people being eaten alive, impaled, decapitated and slitting their own throats when they realize the horror of… Well, let’s leave that to the film to divulge, shall we? I must say, you should probably read the first sentence of the Wikipedia synopsis, because there is a lot there, which the film does not explain. Admittedly, this is in part because it contains almost no dialogue, and there are a number of elements which feel near impossible to show, rather than tell. You don’t need to know them to enjoy this. But they will certainly answer some questions.
What the film has is a mute woman, Azrael (Weaving) and her boyfriend, Kenan (Stewart-Jarrett), getting captured by an equally silent cult in a forest. The time and era is uncertain, but they do have working cars, so it seems fairly contemporary. They want to sacrifice her to dark, humanoid creatures which inhabits the woods, but she is able to escape back into the wilderness. She attempts to return, so she can rescue her boyfriend, and encounters the group’s spiritual leader, the pregnant Miriam (Sonne). After failing to save Kenan, and narrowly escaping from the dark creatures more than once, as well as getting buried alive, Azrael vows to take bloody and fiery revenge on the cult, and also discovers the true nature of Miriam’s pregnancy.
This low-budget Western does a lot of things right, but is not able to tie up all the loose ends in the final act. Most of which are ends that never needed to be loose in the first place. It takes place in 1890’s Oklahoma, when the gang of George ‘Bittercreek’ Newcomb (Henry) is trying to head back home. The gang includes a female outlaw, Rose Dunn (Butala), who is perhaps a little more moral than some members of the gang e.g. Tom, played by veteran villain Michael Ochotorena, this time covering up his impressive face tattoos. The situation comes to a head after Rose rescues a saloon girl, Ellie (Mattox), who just shot a man dead.
I guess it’s equality at work. This film, written by, starring and directed by women, proves that they are every bit as capable as men… Of knocking out vaguely competent, forgettable, low-to-mid tier action films, anyway. #GirlBoss This is another in the ongoing series of Tubi Originals I’ve reviewed here, including
I only remembered about this when looking at our preview for last year, and realizing I’d not heard anything more about it. Turns out it was released on April 26th, to what was apparently “limited theatres,” the same day it hit on-demand. I must have missed the memo. So, here we are, and it’s very much a bit of a mixed bag. The scenario is interesting, if vague. Initial tension building is well-done, but the further it went on, the more it struggled to hold my interest. It’s a post-apocalyptic scenario, with the oxygen level of the atmosphere rapidly depleted to a lethally low percentage. This wiped out almost everyone – though where all the corpses went is one of many unanswered questions.
I’m slightly grading this on a curve, because this is likely the best of the low-budget modern blaxploitation movies I’ve seen, by some margin. By “normal” standards, that still falls some way short of Oscar-winning, with the limited resources still being obvious at some point. But compared to some of the other entries I’ve sat through, this is a palpable improvement, avoiding many of the worst cliches of the genre, in favor of a story which has had some attention given to it. It’s not an African-American knockoff of Scarface, like so many others, and does not entirely rely on a soundtrack of bad rap songs by the director’s pals. That alone puts it ahead of the pack.
Reed calls in her top assassin, Sam (Whishaw), to protect Helen, fearing she might also be targeted. He has a history with Helen, dating back to before the birth of her children with Wallace. Things spiral out of control, involving the suspicious death of the Chinese ambassador, his missing daughter, a previous hit Sam botched, and Helen’s relentless pursuit of revenge, while trying to keep her family life intact. It’s a lot of balls to keep in the air, but the script does a fine job of avoiding confusion, with the wrap-up proving particularly admirable in its clarity. While I’ve read complaints about it being implausible, I have definitely seen worse. There’s room for both this, and more grounded spy shows like Slow Horses.
Director Bamford has certainly had himself a year. This is the third film of his in 2024 to be reviewed on this site, following
It’s important to realize that this is a throwback to movies from an earlier, simpler time. One when action movies could consist largely of a red-blooded American hero, killing evil furreners in spectacularly violent ways. And it didn’t matter much whether the person playing the hero was actually a foreigner themselves i.e. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Thirty years later, we are supposed to be more tolerant, and watch films where nuance has replaced shallow stereotypes. We have met the enemy and he is us, or some similar guff. Dirty Angels cares not one whit for such niceties. Its sole concession to ‘progress’, is a hero with a vagina. Who is still actually a foreigner, Eva Green being French.
Cynthia Rothrock is 67 years old. That is considerably older than I am, and I consider it a victory if I manage to get out of bed in under ten minutes. I am certainly not kicking and punching my way through a slew of bad guys, in moderately convincing fashion. While this certainly has its flaws, it’s hard not to be impressed, especially for anyone familiar with Rothrock’s long career in action movies. Personally, I’m just glad she has moved on from the “erotic thriller” period of her career. Sixty-seven