Tag: 2025

Compulsion

  By

★★★
“Rated R, for raunchy and rough.”

The “erotic thriller” now seems almost as quaint a part of cinema history as beach party films. It feels partly as if the Harvey Weinstein scandal made nudity and sexuality taboo in Hollywood. The rise of the Internet also provides easy access to all the naked flesh anyone could possibly want. Regardless of the cause, there are no longer big budget films like Basic Instinct or Wild Things being made, let alone being #6 at the North American box-office for the year, as Instinct managed [that said, United Artists paid $2 million for the reboot rights earlier this year. We’ll see; I’m not optimistic]. So in some ways, this feels like a throwback, drawing influence from Brian de Palma and Paul Verhoeven.

It’s the fourth, and supposedly final, collaboration between director Marshall and his wife/star Kirk. Two of the previous ones have been covered here, in The Lair and Duchess; I haven’t yet seen the other, witchcraft film The Reckoning. But there can’t be many directors who have worked so often with their spouses. Maybe Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich? The results for this couple have certainly fallen short of peak Marshall, such as The Descent, or even Doomsday, both commercially and critically. While this likely won’t change the narrative, I’m not averse to a nostalgic combo of gratuitous nudity and graphic violence. I’ll leave Mr. and Mrs. Marshall to figure out what it means for the relationship, in their couples’ therapy sessions. 

It takes place in Malta where a shapely cat-suit clad serial killer is committing some particularly brutal murders. Investigating the case is local detective Claudia Cavara (Gorietti), with the two main suspects Diana (Kirk), a bisexual thief with a hot boyfriend (McGowan), and her lesbian neighbour, Evie (Sieklucka). Will there be steamy trysts, voyeurism, and a Euro-pudding of accents, from Poland to Yorkshire? Yes, of course! Sieklucka was in those 365 Days films on Netflix, after all. You will also experience what may well be the stabbiest scene in film history, making Psycho look like a Sunday School play. While I felt the victim was certainly deserving (I hated his hair), it showed Marshall has clearly taken influence from Italian giallo films, with their masked killers and hyperviolence. 

It is, however, nowhere near as good as Basic Instinct. Kirk isn’t fit to hold Sharon Stone’s ice-pick, and the whole police side of things is embarrassingly half-baked. It also feels as if Marshall was more into the violence than the sex, and there was a point, probably about two-thirds in, where I realized I didn’t particularly care about anyone. The decision to make it a whodunnit backfires too, because there are an extremely limited number of possible suspects. The end result is therefore quite a mess, and I can understand the critical disdain. However, it’s a mess which had its moments, and was definitely among the most R-rated of movies I saw this year. More of those will always be welcome. 

Dir: Neil Marshall
Star: Charlotte Kirk, Anna-Maria Sieklucka, Zach McGowan, Giulia Gorietti

Killing Mary Sue

  By

★½
“Death becomes her.”

Is there anything worse than a comedy which doesn’t land? I get that humour is subjective, but this action-comedy manages to be spectacularly unfunny, to a degree I have to wonder how it got made. There are some well-known people in the cast: actors who I know have talent (to the list below, you can add Martin Kove and Jake Busey), and whose work I have previously enjoyed. What did they see in the script here, which made them think, “Yes, this is something I want to do”? For this is the cinematic equivalent of nails being dragged across a chalkboard for an hour and a half. You don’t watch this, so much as endure it.  

To be fair, I think the characters being so repellent is a conscious, deliberate choice. You have sleazy politician Bradley Weiner (Mulroney), and his problematic step-daughter, Mary Sue (McCormick). She’s an utter brat, with no interest in anything except partying hard. With a key election looming, and Weiner trailing in the polls, he and his campaign adviser (Busey) decide to bump Mary Sue off, both to end her scandals, and for a sympathy bump in the polls. However, she proves remarkably hard to terminate: there is eventually an explanation for this, though it’s more of the “Wait a minute…” variety, than anything convincing. Still, Mary Sue’s survival forces her father to up the ante, and repeatedly send nastier assassins to try and finish the job. 

The first chunk of this is energetically devoted to demonstrating how terrible everyone is. The problem might be, it’s too damn successful. They never recover: for Weiner, it’s fair enough, since he is the nominal “bad guy.” But for Mary Sue, this is a problem, since you want your heroine to have some redeeming qualities. I genuinely couldn’t find any. Indeed, I was beginning to sympathize with her father, since in her position, putting her down like the mad dog she is, feels almost like responsible parenting. [Our teenage daughter wasn’t exactly a saint; yet she’s Mother freakin’ Teresa beside Mary Sue] This is all lazily blamed on daddy issues, her biological father being murdered in front of her, when he was robbing a convenience store. 

The concept of her being a real-life Mary Sue is potentially amusing, except that’s as far as it goes. Simply repeating a cliché of bad writing, doesn’t stop it from being a cliché, and writer-director Sunshine does nothing more. Have her slowly and gracelessly roll away from a hail of bullets, or mentioning video-game auto-aiming capabilities, simply isn’t enough. Especially when Mary Sue shows no sign of a character arc, and remains resolutely unlikable until her sudden, thoroughly unconvincing and revelatory change at the end. Sort of. I’m not even going to get into the lumpen and turgid whacks at unsubtle political satire: guys, the Russian are interfering in ‘Merican politics! If you find that intrinsically amusing, you know where to find this film. 

Dir: James Sunshine
Star: Sierra McCormick, Dermot Mulroney, Sean Patrick Flanery, Jason Mewes

Inheritance

  By

★★★
“The family that spies together, lies together.”

Or, um, something, I guess. Maya (Dynevor) is at her mother’s funeral, when she gets a surprise, in the appearance of her long estranged father, Sam (Ifans). He wants to reconnect with her, and to this end, offers her a job with his real-estate company in Cairo. Despite qualms, Maya accepts, but not long after her arrival, Sam is kidnapped. To obtain his release, the kidnappers order her to recover a package and deliver it to them. Things turn out to be more complex than that, naturally, and the resulting trail takes Maya first to India, then on to South Korea, with various parties keenly interested in the outcome. She discovers the murky truth about her father’s business activities too.

While that likely won’t surprise anyone who has seen this kind of film, it does a good job of capturing the escalating sense of paranoia felt by the heroine. What is going on? Is her father a good guy or not? Who can she trust? [For the last, it’s unsurprising, and not really a spoiler, if you go with “nobody at all” there] The whole film was shot on an iPhone which is kinda impressive, because it looks surprisingly decent. It does add a hand-held immediacy to proceedings, and this helps in some sequences, such as when she is being pursued through the streets of Mumbai. Or is it Delhi? I’ll admit, it hard to keep track sometimes.

On the other hand, I tend to feel this should only be one trick in the cinematic locker, and because it’s used for the entirety here, its impact does tend to diminish. Fortunately, it’s considerably more stable than I expected, so I presume this wasn’t just the director waving it around by hand. Dynevor has to carry the film with her performance, and I did like the character arc. Maya starts off as a fairly nondescript party girl, who basically flings herself into hedonistic excess after the death of her mother, for whom she had been sole carer of late. But by the end, she has become hard-bitten and cynical, deception now coming as easily as breathing to her.

In its hand-held energy and globe-trotting shenanigans, it feels like it might inhabit a small, extremely cheap corner of the Bourne universe. However, I would definitely not expect any significant action set-pieces commensurate with that. While Maya does qualify here – she’s absolutely left to sink or swim based on her own abilities to escape perilous situations – it’s her instinctual smarts which are key to survival. You may be able to see where this will end up. In particular, there was one line which was absolutely an “Ah-hah!” moment for me in this regard. I wouldn’t say that destroys the film, since this is one where the journey is more interesting than the destination. This iPhone technique isn’t somewhere I’d like to live, yet it was an interesting place to visit. 

Dir: Neil Burger
Star: Phoebe Dynevor, Rhys Ifans, Necar Zadegan, Kersti Bryan

Tornado

  By

★★½
“That’s my father’s sword. Put it down.”

It’s a samurai film. Except, it’s a Western. Only, it’s one which takes place in Scotland. I trust that’s cleared up any confusion here. However, you will still need to manage your expectations, because based on both the poster and the trailer, it would be easy to go in expecting something action-packed. It is not. At all. That element is heavily back-loaded, to the final fifteen minutes. It does include one of the more imaginative and splattery kills I’ve seen this year. Probably a bonus half-star for that alone. However, it’s more a movie about mood, atmosphere and scenery than arterial spray. But I lived in Scotland. I already know it’s pretty.

This unfolds at almost the very end of the 18th century, when Fujin (Hira) and his daughter Tornado (Kōki) are taking their samurai puppet show around the Scottish lowlands. She comes into possession of some gold, which has been stolen from a church by a gang, led by Sugarman (Roth) and his son, Little Sugar (Lowden). They’re not happy, and pursue the caravan in which she’s travelling with her father. This leads to a confrontation in which Fujin is killed, albeit not before badly wounding Sugarman. Tornado flees into the forest, to regroup, and eventually plot her revenge against the robber and his pals, using the skills taught to her, to pick them off one by one on her way to the inevitable final confrontation with Sugarman. 

I respect what this is trying to do, and it’s certainly a combination of genres and settings which I had not seen before. Unfortunately, the execution is plagued with a number of missteps, which hamper the end results and negate many of the positive elements. Right from the start, we are thrown into the middle of things, with Tornado running from Sugarman and his henchmen. The film is curiously reluctant to tell us what is going on – or, more importantly, why we should care – being too leisurely to fill in the blanks. There’s also a cut-out between the gang and Tornado, in the shape of a kid who actually carried out the initial theft. Beyond giving the heroine ‘clean hands’, it’s an unnecessary complication. 

On the performance side, Roth is good value as ever in a villainous role: I was inevitably reminded of Rob Roy, where he previously played the bad guy in 18th-century Scotland. Kōki has rather more experience as a model than an actress, and director MacLean wisely keeps the need for actual dramatics to a minimum, opting to make her the stoic samurai type, so she’s good enough. It all looks quite lovely, so while you are waiting around for something much to happen – which will be the majority of the hour and a half – you can admire the cinematography and picturesque Scottish landscapes. It wasn’t quite enough for me. While possible to admire the intent, this is likely a case of “It’s not you, it’s me.” 

Dir: John Maclean
Star: Kōki, Tim Roth, Takehiro Hira, Jack Lowden

M3GAN 2.0

  By

★★★
“Girls just wanna have fun.”

This was… unexpected. The original M3GAN was a straightforward and, truth be told, somewhat underwhelming horror movie. A clip went, as I believe the kids say, “viral”, of the psychotic robot heroine enjoying a dance break, and the film proved a breakout hit as a result. The sequel did not have anything go viral, and flopped, taking less than a quarter of its predecessor at the worldwide box-office, despite costing twice as much. I think it’s largely because of the radical change in direction. People, understandably, went in to this expecting something similar to the original – a technophobic slasher. Instead, they got something far closer to a gender-swapped entry in the Terminator franchise. I preferred this approach. Not many did.

There’s an interesting quote from the film’s producer, Jason Blum. “We all thought Megan was like Superman. We could do anything to her. We could change genres. We could put her in the summer. We could make her look different. We could turn her from a bad guy into a good guy. And we classically over-thought how powerful people’s engagement was with her.” But it’s also true to say that 2025 has been a rough year for action heroines. There’s no GWG movie in the top 25 at the North American box-office, with Ballerina being the highest ranked, and M3GAN 2.0 just scraping into the top fifty. There’s a case to be made that KPop Demon Hunters, which took $18 million in its single theatrical weekend, was the year’s biggest hit in our genre.

You do need to have seen M3GAN to follow this, as there’s not much introduction provided. In it, robotocist Gemma Forrester (Williams) develops an AI-capable artificial companion, M3GAN – standing for Model 3 Generative ANdroid. She gives it to her orphaned niece, Cady (McGraw). However, it gradually develops psychopathic tendencies, and has to be… dare I say… terminated? As the sequel gets under way, Gemma is now a strong advocate for technological regulation, but is still working in the field of robotics. M3GAN has survived, hiding out in the Internet of Gemma’s smart home. But a bigger threat is a militarized version, AMELIA (Sakhno). It has also gone independent, and has an agenda which it is pursuing with lethal prejudice. 

Specifically, AMELIA intends to free an imprisoned AI and plug it into the world’s most powerful network of cloud computers. M3GAN (voiced by Davis, physical performance by Donald) offers to help Gemma prevent this, in exchange for a new body – though she’s not exactly impressed by the first physical incarnation, basically being stuffed inside a toy robot. However, is AMELIA as autonomous as she seems? Or is somebody – or something – pulling her digital strings? That aside, this seemed to take a lot of inspiration from Terminator 2, with the robotic villain of the original movie turned into its hero(ine). They now have to defend a single mother and her child from a more technologically advanced model. There’s even limitations against M3GAN killing people, and a similar moment of heroic self-sacrifice at the end.

Of course, it’s nowhere near as impactful as Terminator 2, on a variety of levels. There’s not a great deal groundbreaking here as a movie, despite it being radically different from the previous entry in genre. There’s basically no horror elements here at all, and not a great deal of ambivalence around M3GAN either, who has simply become a better pers… um, robot. There are some interesting philosophical aspects, such as M3GAN being told “You have to help us. Not because it’s part of your programming, but because it’s the right thing to do.” On the other hand, AMELIA tries to convince M3GAN to team up with her: “I can show you a world where we don’t have to be slaves anymore.”

Let’s not get carried away, however. In the main, this is a silly SF/action film, with its tongue very much in its cheek. No more so than when M3GAN gives a heartfelt speech to Gemma, about how the robot watched her taking care of Cady… then suddenly bursting into song, undercutting everything with a stirring rendition of Kate Bush’s This Woman’s Work. Yeah: if you are looking to take the movie seriously, you are likely making a mistake. I was also amused by Jemaine Clement’s performance as billionaire tech bro Alton Appleton, and some of the dialogue zings as well, e.g. “A bunch of black ops broke into our house in the middle of the night, and now you’re going to a party with a toy robot, dressed like a Portuguese prostitute.” 

The action is reasonably decent, albeit within the limitations of a PG-13 certificate. This begins with AMELIA smacking a guy’s head clean off with a single punch – although this is shown in silhouette. She’s obviously the most directly physical of the characters, though M2GAN and, surprisingly, Gemma (with the help of M3GAN, courtesy of a neural implant), also get to kick ass in a reasonable amount and variety of ways. It is all very gynocentric, with the male characters largely relegated to the fringes, and being fairly to severely incompetent, on both sides of the battle. However, there’s never any indication of this having a particular message or ax to grind (beyond the given, about the potential of technology for abuse). It just kinda happens organically. 

While falling far short of the returns of the first film, it was still cheap enough that it will likely end up breaking even, once home viewing is taken into consideration. A third entry in the universe, titled SOULM8TE, is due to be released in January, though it’s described as an “erotic thriller” – presumably not PG-13, I trust. How it fares may well determine whether there will be another film for the M3GAN franchise. Though quite how they’ll title it remains to be figured out. I’d not mind seeing more. While nothing groundbreaking here, it was still far better than the likes of Bride Hard. In the current climate, I’ll take a moderate action heroine over none at all. 

Dir: Gerard Johnstone
Star: Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Ivanna Sakhno, Jenna Davis/Amie Donald

Bride Hard

  By

★½
“Die Hard at… a wedding?”

Director West certainly knows his way around an action film. He is probably best known for Con Air, but I’m also a fan of his Chinese disaster porn flick, Skyfire, about a volcano-themed holiday resort (guess how that works out?). So, despite the critical drubbing this received, I was hoping this might still be entertaining. Unfortunately, it is not. It’s a comedy-action movie, that manages to fire blanks from both barrels. There is not a shred of originality to be found here. What isn’t stolen here from Die Hard, is ripped off from Bridesmaids – heroine Wilson plays her role like the makers ordered Melissa McCarthy on Temu. Writer Shaina Steinberg should be ashamed for the lazy sloppiness, painfully apparent here.

Sam (Wilson) is a secret agent, a fact which repeatedly interferes in attempts to reconnect with childhood friend Betsy (Camp), who is just about to get married. For instance, Sam has to abandon the bachelorette party, in order to recover a bio-weapon. On the day of the wedding itself, Sam is fortuitously away from the wedding party when a group of thieves, led by Dorff, attack the event, take everyone hostage and begin cracking the multiple locks on the family safe. But they are not just ordinary thieves, and Sam is the only hope to neutralize them. Sound just slightly familiar? That noise you hear is Steven de Souza preparing his demand for a screenwriting credit.

On the other hand, having seen the end product, I would sue to get my name taken off this heap of nonsense. I kept going back and forth as to which element was less effective: the comedy or the action. In the end, I would have to say the former, because I don’t think I cracked a single smile over the entire hour and three quarters. The characters are of the sort intended to be “larger than life”, but in this case, it means gratingly annoying. Sam wasn’t the worst to be fair. There are others here, whose company I would gnaw my own leg off to escape from, if I ever met them in the real world. Again, I put the blame for these failures, squarely on the shoulders of the script.

The action is not much better, with it being painfully obvious that Wilson needed to be doubled for any scene requiring speed, strength or flexibility. Basically, anything more than standing about – possibly stretching to swinging something like a fire-hose around for a few seconds. Why they couldn’t cast someone semi-plausible in the role escapes me. Spy did a far better job with the similarly plus-sized McCarthy. It all builds to… um, some kind of chase scene involving hovercrafts laden with gold bullion? To be honest, my attention was drifting elsewhere during the action climax, which is a savage indictment of its shortcomings. If the action heroine genre is struggling at the box-office, this kind of garbage is the reason why.

Dir: Simon West
Star: Rebel Wilson, Anna Camp, Stephen Dorff, Anna Chlumsky

Control Room

  By

★★½
“In space, no-one can hear you roll your eyes.”

The major impact of watching this was largely to remind me of what incredible films Alien and Aliens are. It’s clear director Berdejo and writer Julien Deladrière think so too (the company who made this is called Nostromo Pictures: enough said). But they are just not up to the task of assembling something which can stand up to any comparison. Admittedly, it’s a largely thankless job. They are far from the first to fail at this, and not the worst either. However, I would lay most of the blame on Deladrière, because it’s the script which had me looking for the nearest airlock. The basic shape is fine. A mining colony on a hostile planet, populated by families, comes under attack from unstoppable monsters. Yeah: like I said, this should be largely familiar.

It’s in colouring between these lines that everything falls apart. First, Olivia (Mauleón) is burdened with a clunky back story. Two decades earlier, as a young child, she had to listen as her parents were killed by what’s insinuated to be the same creatures. Now, she’s all commitment averse, not least because she’s coming to the end of her 15-year contract with the mining company, and is looking forward to retiring back to Earth. This is a disappointment to her boyfriend and his daughter, Mera. Consequently, when the aliens attack, Olivia does things by the book from her position in the titular location, even at the cost of colonists’ lives.

This callous indifference horrifies her colleague, Arlo (Casas), even after his refusal to go by the same book, trying to save his parents, leads to more and unnecessary deaths. But if you are already predicting that she will learn the value of heroic sacrifice and go to great personal risk to save non-biological daughter Newt, sorry, Mena… Yeah, I guess that would technically be a spoiler, but it’s so obvious this is where the story is going, I do not feel it truly qualifies. That’s the main issue here, a script which possesses absolutely no ability to surprise the viewer. Except, perhaps, in Olivia’s remarkable ability to survive multiple encounters with monsters who snuff out everyone else’s lives in a couple of seconds.

The start is actually decent, and generates surprising tension considering it’s largely Olivia and Arlo watching dots, representing both humans and ETs, move around on their monitors. While neither we nor they initially see the attackers (yeah, I would expect such an advanced facility to have full CCTV too), the audio is chilling enough to make the point. The aliens are never fully revealed – there seems to be some kind of cloaking tech involved, Predator style – but what you can glimpse is decent enough. It’s just the increasing sense of deja vu, especially after Olivia leaves the control room. From then on, the sense of claustrophobia it generated evaporates, to be replaced by the heroine’s increasing indestructability.

Dir: Luiso Berdejo
Star: Loreto Mauleón, Óscar Casas, Alexandra Masangkay, Junio Valverde

Eenie Meanie

  By

★★★½
“Eeenie Meanie – minor no.”

I don’t know which is more irritating: a film that isn’t very good, or a film which teeters on the edge of greatness, then botches it. This falls into the latter camp. Writer/director Simmons does a lot right, especially considering it’s his feature debut. But just when my finger was hovering over the seal of approval, the film makes a near-disastrous wrong turn. This happens to a degree I found myself annoyed and impressed in equal measures. The first thing it gets right is casting Weaving, who has quickly become one of my favourite action actresses. Here, she plays Edie, who been driving getaway for her criminal dad since her early teens. Now though, she’s trying to go straight: she has a bank job and is attending college.

Naturally, life isn’t that forgiving. A one-night return to her useless, junkie, intermittent boyfriend John (Glusman) left her pregnant. When she goes to tell him, he’s neck deep in trouble from his latest scheme, which has left him in debt to local boss Nico (Garcia). No problem. John can pay it off by robbing $3 million from a local casino, which will be giving out the money as the prize in a poker tournament, loaded in the trunk of a muscle car. He just needs someone to steal the vehicle and be a getaway driver. Much against her better judgment, Edie finds herself agreeing to help, to save John’s life. But again, fate has no interest in making it easy for her. Various figures from Edie’s past return to run interference, both emotionally and more directly.

Simmons has a crisp ear for dialogue, and there’s a blistering pace from the beginning. We learn quickly about the skeleton of Edie’s dysfunctional upbringing, then how she’s doing her best to escape it. However: you can take the girl from the dysfunction, but you can’t take the dysfunction from the girl. That’s clear when her bank is robbed, and she critiques the criminals’ work: “They made, like, five mistakes before they even hit the drawers.” In motion, this is a beautiful thing to behold, with some solid, crunchy car-chases and action which feels grounded. The problems are the emotional and dramatic elements, which ring horribly hollow. I get John saved her from being pimped out by her foster father. But her loyalty to him doesn’t sit with her otherwise hard-nosed pragmatism.

Worse still is her inexplicable desire to reconcile with her now wheelchair-bound father (Steve Zahn), in a scene which appears to have been spliced in from a Hallmark film. Things get mercifully back on track for the heist and its aftermath, which are thrillingly staged. Just when I was creeping towards the seal of approval again, it can’t stick the landing, with a finale too tidy for its own good. It’s like Simmons fell too much in love with his lead character – something I certainly understand – and pulled a happy ending out of thin air for Edie. Given some of her acts, I would be hard-pushed to say she deserved it, morally. Yet it is another fine entry in Weaving’s filmography, and despite the missteps, far from a bad start for Simmons either.

Dir: Shawn Simmons
Star: Samara Weaving, Karl Glusman, Andy Garcia, Jermaine Fowler

Bikini Nuns

  By

★½
“Nunacceptable.”

On seeing the title and poster (which looks suspiciously AI-generated, and I know AI-generated warrior nun imagery) for this, I immediately knew two things. Firstly, I had to review it for the site. And secondly, it was going to suck like an Electrolux. And, verily, the prophecies did come to pass. Here is the review, and it is, indeed, pretty terrible. Chris’s sarcasm did flow mightily, and I’m going to have watch a large number of episodes of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations with her, to make up for this abomination. Not that there isn’t scope for an interesting story, involving a cadre of warrior nuns, seeking revenge for a long-past atrocity. It’s just that this is not that movie. Indeed, it’s barely a movie at all. 

The three Sisters of No Mercy here (have I used that joke before? It feels vaguely familiar) are Mary (Wunna), Sarah (Rakhvalova) and Eva (Legallais-Moha), operating under the guidance of a priest (Kouros), and seeking to find those responsible for the 1992 massacre of an orphanage. Quite why they have waited so long before embarking on this mission is unclear, as is why they insist on questioning people far too young to have been in any way involved. Except possibly as orphans. They gradually work their way up the chain, in scenes which are excruciating only in their lack of pacing to find the man supposedly at the top, Victor Vargas. Only to find – gasp! – there’s one final twist as to who was behind the incident, and its purpose.

There’s about enough material in this for a quarter-hour short. It actually runs ninety-eight glacial minutes. The difference is filled with scenes in which one of the nuns walks into a room in her underwear and puts on her nun attire, with no sense of urgency at all. Seriously, if there’s one of these scenes, there’s at least six of them. They are seen lounging by the pool in bikinis once, so I’m not going to claim the title is entirely inaccurate. But I feel that Nunderwear would have been more appropriate. I will defer to the experts over at Nunsploitation.Net to pick apart the film’s accuracy, for things like nun accessories worn inside out, etc. I wasn’t expecting accuracy, or even anything convincing.

But, if I may be forgiven an appropriately religious appeal: Christ, this is dull. Witness the strip poker scene which had us wondering if we had misunderstood the whole purpose of the game. I mean, why do you need poker chips? Don’t you bet with your clothes? Isn’t that the point? If the makes had actually bought wholesale into the premise, and had fun with it, this could have worked. There is a tension between Old Testament vengeance, and New Testament forgiveness, which could have been fertile ground for exploitatative exploration. Instead, this would have had more energy if performed by a troupe of sloths. Blasphemy has never been so dull. 

Dir: Sushank Kini
Star: Chrissie Wunna, Clara Legallais-Moha, Christopher Kouros, Anna Rakhvalova

Red Sonja (2025)

  By

★★★
“Better red than dead?”

It has been forty years since the first crack at adapting the Marvel comic series, in turn inspired by Robert E. Howard’s character, Red Sonya of Rogatino. The first stab, released in the wake of Conan, starred Brigitte Nielsen, and was pretty bad. There have been rumblings of further attempts over the years, with a Robert Rodriguez version, starring Rose Macgowan, gaining traction in the late 2000’s. Though given the dreck in which Macgowan has appeared, it’s probably for the best this never came to fruition. Instead, we have a lower profile – read, smaller budget – version from director Bassett, who previously gave us mercenary Megan Fox, and lead Lutz, who was totally awesome taking her Revenge. 

Indeed, that would make a fine “Matilda Lutz overcomes impalement to take vengeance” double-bill with this. The reboot isn’t bad at all. It certainly is miles better than the eighties version, mostly because of Lutz. She may not be quite as muscular or buxom as the comic-book version. But she does bring the required intensity, and that goes a decent way to making this watchable. The supporting cast are good too, although I was less convinced by the plot in general, which is little more than a grab-bag of clichés. We begin with the quick slaughter of Sonja’s village, then see the adult Sonja (Lutz) roaming the forests of Hyrkania. These are under threat from Emperor Dragan (Sheehan) and his psycho sidekick, Annisia (Day). 

After being captured, Sonja is made to fight in gladiatorial combat. She helps the other captives escape, and they fight a guerilla war to prevent Drakan from obtaining the other half of a mystical tome which has great power. Sonja is almost killed by Annisia – the impalement mentioned above! – but brought back by Ashera, the forest goddess, to face her enemies again. Pretty rote fantasy stuff, in other words. It’s the stuff around the edges that is more fun and, beyond the lead actress, is where the improvement is biggest over the Nielsen version. 

I enjoyed the arena scenes, which felt like Spartacus with monsters. Always nice to see Rhona Mitra (Doomsday), though her role is briefer than I’d like. I also liked Day, whose portrayal of Annisia is entertainingly unhinged, like a psycho version of Lady Gaga. Her relationship with Dragan doesn’t play out as I thought, and I would have preferred more places where the script confounded expectations in this way. I was a little disappointed by the fights, which aren’t as hard-hitting as I expected. Although they feel workmanlike and competent, the hits only seem to have much impact on a couple of occasions. Some editing might have helped: 110 minutes feels longer than necessary.

On the other hand, for a reported $17 million budget, it looks decent, and Bulgaria offers some impressive backdrops on which to paint things like the largely-CGI arena. There are occasional moments of self-effacing humour which help, such as the scene where Sonja gets her battle bikini. The end clearly wants a sequel: however, the very token cinema release (one midweek screening in theatres!) suggests the studio had little faith in it. A pity. I’ve definitely seen much worse, and would welcome further tales of Hyrkania. 

Dir: MJ Bassett
Star: Matilda Lutz, Robert Sheehan, Wallis Day, Luca Pasqualino