Tag: assassin

Lethal Angels

  By

★★
“I preferred this the first time, when it was called Naked Killer.”

Winnie (Lee) has a grudge: against gang boss Bowen (Yuan) in particular, but also against just about any man who abuses women. She puts together a team of four underlings, such as Yoyo (Sum), whose family was killed by thugs, and uses them to take out anyone whose lustful desires overwhelm their common sense. Now, it’s time for the big one: Bowen. Winnie sends Yoyo in as an undercover nanny, to scope things out and obtain evidence of Bowen’s illegal dealings. However, once in, she finds out that Bowen is now largely reformed, and Yoyo also objects to Winnie’s plan to wipe out all of Bowen’s family, including his six-year old daughter. Meanwhile, she’s also being investigated by Jet (On), a cop who knew and almost dated her at college, and is on the case of the mysterious deaths of mob bosses at the hands of beautiful ladies.

This is just too restrained to work. There’s a striptease routine by one of the minor underlings at the start, but after that, it conspicuously fails to live up to its alternate title, of Naked Avengers. Lee is good value as the overlord, but if you think you’ve seen it all before, you probably have. Even the scene where one of the girls has to take on a chained pervert for training purposes is lifted, wholesale, from Naked Killer – except, rather than in a dungeon, it appears here to take part in a car-park or something. [There’s a prominent “keep left” sign in the background, whose looming presence reminded me of nothing more than the ending to a Monty Python sketch]

The action occasionally has its moments, but rarely gets above competent, and it’s only in the final battle, where the schisms in the group fracture and send it on a path of self-destruction, that things become somewhat interesting, and it’s a case of too little, too late. Instead, there’s too much time spent on Jet, who is a waste of space and screen-time, and his lacks of charisma means his relationship with Yoyo has as much chemistry as…as… a thing that doesn’t contain any chemistry. Man, I hate it when a simile falls apart, half-way through. Or is it a metaphor? That I was pondering such grammatical issues during the viewing, probably tells you more about the film than anything else. If there’s a single way in which Naked Killer isn’t clearly better, I think I missed it.

Dir: Steve Cheng
Star: Tin Sum, Andy On, Jewel Lee, Yuan Yuan

The Tournament (2009)

  By

★★★
“The exotic life of an assassin is all glamour and exotic places, e.g. all-expenses trips to Middlesbrough.”

Every seven years, thirty of the world’s greatest assassins gather together for a battle. The winner gets $10 million, while bettors view the action remotely and gamble on the duels, face-offs and bloodbaths which ensue. Each assassin has a tracker implanted, and has a scanner where they can see the location of any other contestants nearby. This time, it’s in Middlesbrough, England, with reigning champion Joshua Harlow (Rhames) returning after he it told the murderer of his wife will be taking part. One of the 30 dumps their tracker into an alcoholic priest (Carlyle), who is “surprised”, shall we say, to become the target for the other 29. Lai Lai Zhen (Hu) realizes he’s an innocent, and vows to protect him, while also trying to win the competition.

The concept is, of course, completely implausible, and if you can’t drive a bus and a tanker through holes in the plot, you’re not trying. There are far too many assassins, too: of the 30 listed, probably no more than half a dozen get any lines, so they’d have been better off shrinking the number and giving them actual personalities. What results is basically “kill porn”: a massive number of deaths, some impressive, a couple genuinely spectacular, but possessing no emotional content or resonance whatsoever. That said, this is by no means unentertaining. Hu (I have consciously got to stop myself from calling her “Cindy-Lou”) seems to be carving a niche for herself as a low-rent version of Lucy Liu, and the action here is decent, and undeniably copious.

It all builds to a massive chase on a motorway, which sees the bus driven by the priest, being chased by the tanker driven by Harlow, while Zhen fights off the parkour guy from Casino Royale, in, on and around the bus. Mann has clearly been watching all the right movies, and if he needs a trailer reel for a career as a second-unit director, then he should just pop the DVD in and leave the room for 90 minutes. The writers, on the other hand… It really took three of them to come up with this complete nonsense? What did they do with the rest of the beer-mat?

Dir: Scott Mann
Star: Kelly Hu, Robert Carlyle, Liam Cunningham, Ving Rhames

Angel of Death (2009)

  By

★★★½
“A star is born? Well, at least a potential one.”

After making an undeniable impact strapped to a car bonnet in the second-half of Grindhouse, Zo…Hang on, let me find the right key on the keyboard… Ah, there we are… Zoë gets to do some actual ‘acting’, rather than playing a stuntwoman called Zoë Bell [Way to go, Tarantino!] Thios started as a web-based series of ten episodes, but is now available on DVD, which is how we watched it. Bell plays Eve, an assassin whose personality radically changes after she is stabbed in the head. She starts to see one of her victims – a young girl – and as a result, decides to go after those who ordered the death. Needless to say, her manager and handler Graham (Poth) is not impressed by this sudden burst of morality, and neither are those who have now become her target, including up-and-coming gangster boss Jake Abel, who sends his minions out to take care of her before she takes care of him.

As an action actress, Bell is unquestionably better at the “action” part than the acting. Not that she sucks at the latter, but one senses she needs more experience with regard to the thespian side of things. This is her first time having to carry a film while playing a character, and thst sometimes is obvious – it’s particularly interesting to contrast Bell and Lucy Lawless, who turns up in a supporting role as Eve’s next-door neighbour. The script also fails to make a convincing case why she makes the switch – maybe it’s the head-injury, but that’s a bit too deus ex machina to work well, and as this barely runs 70 mins, it’s not exactly something they needed to cut out.

Still, this is all redeemed by some excellent action, with Bell (obviously) doing all her own work. She has a short, compact fighting style that looks great on the camera, and there’s a real sense of hardcore energy to it, that makes them fun to watch. Having seen her start off by getting stabbed in the skull, and literally walking away, establishes Eve nicely as an unstoppable force, who can take a licking and keep on ticking. Wisely, Etheredge appreciates that without a stunt-double, there’s no need for quick cutting, and gives the viewer a chance to appreciate her skills. The result is an entertaining B-movie that will hopefully lead to bigger and better things for Bell, who might just become a genuine star down the road.

Dir: Paul Etheredge
Star: Zoë Bell, Brian Poth, Jake Abel, Justin Huen

Contract Killers

  By

★★
“If they come out with the pilot episode, I wouldn’t mind seeing it, but otherwise, I don’t think I’ll tune in next week.”

This feels more like a mid-season episode of Alias than anything else, and not much more than a filler episode at that. I say this, because so little effort is put into developing the characters, it’s as if the makers reckon everything had already been established in the previous seven installments. And since there are no such episodes, this leads to a very low level of interest in the proceedings as they unfold. It centers on “Jane” (Farrell), a CIA killer who finds herself on the receiving end of a burn notice, and forced on the run, as she tries to find out why she’s been targetted for elimination by her boss. This takes her Trinidad, where she finds an unlikely partner in the vacationing Lars (Willis), and hunted by another hired hitman, Pernell (Giles, for whom we have a soft spot, from his days working with infamous B-movie mayhem merchants, The Asylum).

Technically, it’s competent enough. If nothing too stunning, the action is fairly frequent and reasonably well-filmed, and Farrell does bring a certain hard-edged competence to her character. The main problem is that the script gave me absolutely no reason to care about her, or anyone else who taking part. The only element of backstory provided for Jane, is 30 seconds of exposition thrown away somewhere in the middle; it doesn’t result from anything, tie into anything, lead into anything and is ignored for the rest of the movie. It wouldn’t necessarily have taken a great deal of effort; I’m not demanding her entire lifestory, just some quirks to suggest there was actually a human being present, not simply an asset being pushed from scene to scene by the director. Almost exactly the same problem affects the other characters: no depth, no humanity, no purpose.

On the positive side, there’s some nice use of locations, and a certain sense of paranoia, even if that might be because the central purpose of the bad guys (it involves a software program they’re going to use to attack the financial markets) is never entirely clear. Or maybe I’d given up paying attention by this point, the movie having finally lost its battle for my attention. Maybe it could be rescued with 15 minutes of “Previously, on Contract Killers…” at the start. Wouldn’t bet on it though.

Dir: Justin Rhodes
Stars: Frida Farrell, Christian Willis, Rhett Giles, Nick Mancuso

SexyKiller

  By

★★★★
“Being the adventures of a young womman whose principal interests are fashion, ultra-violence and Cindy Superstar.”

When it comes to horror movies, the line between clever and too clever is often a thin one. While a certain degree of self-awareness is good in the horror genre, it’s easy to topple over into smugness, where you stop working with the genre, and end up laughing at it with a self-superior attitude. SexyKiller manages to avoid this fate: director Marti and writer Paco Cabezas both have a love for the genre, that shines through in just about every scene. It centres on Barbara (Gómez), a medical student at a college being terrorized by the Campus Killer, a murderer who is taking out the trash in spectacular ways. It’s giving nothing away to say that Barbara is said psychopath, but no one-believes her. Even her bare-faced statement to the police, when they knock on her door looking for the killer – “You’ve found her” – gets nothing more a droll laugh from the officer in question.

Her career of beautifully-accessorized slaughter is eventually put on hold, thanks to fellow student Tomas (Camino), for whom Barbara falls, mistakenly believing him to be a fellow psycho. He has also invented a machine to read thoughts, and it’s turned onto some of her victims, in an effort to find out their last memory – presumably, of who killed them. As this, it’s not entirely successful. But what it is very good at, is bringing them back from the grave, though with a minor side-effect. Involving flesh-eating. Yes, from being a blackly humourous serial-killer flick, it’s now a zombie movie, and it’s not long before the campus Halloween party is under siege, and Barbara’s unique skill-set becomes extremely useful. Mind you, her sociopathy is still an issue, and she has absolutely no qualms about feeding those she dislikes to the undead horde.

Interestingly, in the IMDB ratings, it currently scores more than two points higher among women than men – while the sample size is still small, that’s rare for the genres of serial-killer or zombie flicks. I just loved the unashamed nature of it all: Barbara is perfectly comfortable with who she is, and is in no need of redemption, by Tomas or anyone else. The fourth wall is continually broken, and Marti uses a whole bunch of tricks, from flashbacks to musical numbers, to get his point across and make his anti-heroine sympathetic, in which he succeeds marvellously. Even if Gómez occasionally looks a bit too much like a pissed-off version of Mena Suvari, and the sex and violence quota are not quite as high as they could have been, this is a great way to start the New Year. [Seen at the Phoenix Fear Film Festival]

Dir: Miguel Martí
Star: Macarena Gómez, César Camino, Alejo Sauras, Ángel de Andrés

Malibu High

  By

★★★½
“Student by day, hooker turned assassin by night. I kid you not.”

This one popped out of nowhere, on a box-set of discs called Drive-In Cult Classics: most of these were unremarkable double-feature fillers, and this started off looking the same way, Kim (Lansing) is fed up with life: she’s still in high-school at age 18, is about to flunk it, has no money, just lost her boyfriend (Taylor), her father hung himself and her mom’s a total bitch. Finally, she opts to use her natural resources (if you know what I mean, and I think you do) to resolve these issues – though when her mother suggested Kim get a job, I’m not sure she meant as a whore working in the back of a VW van for the ultra-sleazy Tony (Mann). Her ‘popularity’ there lets her move up to work for the slightly-less sleazy Lance (Howard). Which is where the film takes an abrupt right turn, as she discovers a taste for killing – not least on her former pimp – and starts work as, to use one of the movie’s alternate titles, a high-school hit girl.

In other words: exactly the sort of lurid exploitation we love. Kim is just such a spiky, unlikeable heroine, she could never come out of Hollywood [the words “wildly inaccurate” leap to mind when looking at the poster, right]. While her tan-lines need work, one can only admire her single-minded and logical approach to resolving her problems – a true self-starter, able to work without supervision. Perhaps the high point is when Kim triggers cardiac arrest in her principal by showing him her breasts, after having flushed his heart medication down the toilet. If that description has you keen to see the film, you won’t be disappointed. Of course, if you think that’s tacky and silly… Well, you’re spot-on there too, and it doesn’t help that some of the stock music used here would later be re-cycled by The People’s Court and SCTV.

Inevitably, of course, Crime Does Not Pay for Kim, and it ends in a foot-chase along the beach, with Kim’s ex-boyfriend in hot pursuit. It’s not the kind of film I could possibly recommend to a random stranger, but there’s a loopy individuality at work here, that I thoroughly enjoyed. It’s a movie intent in going its own direction, for good or bad, and doesn’t care what you think. A nostalgic reminder for what drive-in movies should be about, it’s something of a surprise that Lansing never apparently appeared in anything else, after this excellent piece of trash cinema.

Dir: Irvin Berwick
Star: Jill Lansing, Alex Mann, Stuart Taylor, Garth Howard

The Deadly Females

  By

★★½
“Tea, polite conversation and cold-blooded murder, British ’70’s style.”

An intriguing premise is ground into the dirt, with execution which could hardly be more tedious. An agency of hit-women are run by an antiques dealer (Reed), taking on clients from all walks of life, who can use the skill-set of her assassinettes. Flaky business partner? No problem. Trapped in an unloving marriage? Will that be cash or charge? It’s imbued with a curious degree of social commentary, as the scenes are intercut with newspaper front-pages, intended to convey the impression that 1976 society is on the edge of collapsing into predatory carnage, anarchy and chaos. Which, in the post-9/11 world, really seems more quaintly ironic than remotely threatening.

The main problem is pacing which takes the simplest scene and stretches it far beyond the point of relevance, or even interest. The killers are clearly in absolutely no hurry to carry out their tasks: for example, one poses as a student carrying out a survey on housewives to gain entrance. Which would be fine, except that we then have to sit through a whole spiel on the survey, the target’s daily routine, a cup of tea and a tour of the house before the hit-lady appears suddenly to remember why she’s there, karate-chopping the victim and dropping her down the stairs. Similarly, the “nurse” who turns up to give a massage…actually does give the massage. And then a bath, all depicted in much more detail than remotely necessary.

It’s less a story, than a series of unconnected clients. The only real linking influence is an Italian assassin, whose weapon of choice is poisoned cigarettes. She shows up right at the start, and then vanished for almost the entire movie: it’d have been fun to have seen two “killer companies” fighting it out for business. That lady is played by Rula Lenska, a genuine Polish countess who achieved further 70’s fame in the UK TV show Rock Follies, and was the US spokeswoman for VO5 shampoo. I suspect most of the other people in this may be recognizable from British horror of the period, though perhaps more Amicus and Tyburn than Hammer. It would certainly have benefited from the presence of someone like Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee.

While the violence is mostly understated, on the exploitation front, there’s plenty of softcore flesh – and even some male full-frontal nudity, though it’s not what you’d call erotic. This is in part because people seem to spend an awful lot of time lounging around in bed, chatting with each other – or, more often, bitching at each other. This does not exactly present a flattering portrayal of British men; as Chris put it, “My god – how did you ever come out of such a place?” But it remains such a unique and cynical animal that I found myself unable to do anything but keep watching, even as this continued to plod on, in its mostly-tedious vein.

Dir: Donovan Winter
Star: Tracy Reed, Bernard Holley, Scott Fredericks, Heather Chasen

Wanted

  By

★★★★
“Girls just wanna have guns.”

This is probably a borderline Girls With Guns flick, but Angelina Jolie is the nearest thing we have to a legitimated action-heroine superstar: Lara Croft, Mr. and Mrs. Smith and now this, where her character, the uber-assassin Fox, is certainly the most interesting in the film. Office drone Wesley (McAvoy) discovers his true heritage is in The Fraternity, a group of killers who surgically remove bad elements from society, as their names come up encoded in a cloth woven by a mystical loom. However, one of their number has gone rogue, and Cross (Kretschmann) is now taking out his former colleagues, one by one. Recruiting, training and using Wesley, is the only hope they have to stop the renegade.

Based on a comic-book. That phrase covers a whole spectrum of results, good and bad. Here, this means hyperkinetic action scenes with only a tenuous connection to reality. If you’ve seen the director’s previous work – such as Night Watch and its sequel Day Watch – you’ll know what to expect, and he gets to crank it up here, with a significantly-bigger budget, and a better cast. There are some brilliant set-pieces, not least the sequence where Fox rescues Wesley, and also a fabulous sequence on a high-speed train. It plays like a high-octane remix of Office Space and The Matrix: not, perhaps, up to the brilliant levels of either, yet an interesting hybrid that is still a great deal of fun, in a highly-caffeinated way.

Less well known, this is not Tikmanbetov’s first piece of Girls With Guns cinema, as before coming to Hollywood’s attention with Night Watch, he also did The Arena, a remake of a Roger Corman movie. The original had Pam Grier – the remake, didn’t, and let’s leave it at that. Fox is rather different from the incarnation in the comic [closer there to Halle Berry than anything], yet still has more backstory than Wesley, on her tattooed arms alone; while a sequel seems likely, it looks unlikely to involve her, and that’s a shame. Still, when you see Jolie climbing out on the bonnet of her high-performance sports-car, and blazing away like a heavily-armed hood ornament, you’ll understand exactly why it qualifies here.

Dir: Timur Bekmambetov
Star: James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie, Thomas Kretschmann, Morgan Freeman

Pistol Opera

  By

★½
“Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?”

I don’t think I have ever been quite so flummoxed by a girls-with-guns film. To say it’s not quite what I expected is an understatement, but it’s also my first experience of Seijun Suzuki, who is one of the icons of Japanese cinema. The basic plot centers around Stray Cat (Esumi), the current #3-ranked assassin; there’s a guild who decide such things, but they are on the edge of anarchy and Cat gets the assignment from her manager (Yamaguchi) to target the #1, Hundred Eyes. However, there are a lot of people with their own agendas, not least Sayoko (Han), a young girl who wants Cat to teach her the ways of murder.

On the basis of this, I’d file Suzuki somewhere between David Lynch and Guy Maddin, for large chunks of this make no sense. Characters deliver long, rambling monologues of no real significance to the camera [one particularly vague one involves flags], in front of a surreal landscape that is as much self-consciously artificial as it is realistic. It is apparently a reworking of the director’s own Branded to Kill, except with a female protagonist. More than 30 years – plus, it would appear, a truckload of drugs and a severe case of Alzheimer’s – passed in the meantime, and it’s clear Suzuki did not spend it working on the plot.

Sure, it looks lovely, but the girls-with-guns experience is not founded upon Art with a capital A. It’s something that should head directly for the lizard-brain, to deliver a heady payload of taboo-breaking violence. I have no objection to the artistically surreal in cinema generally [Peter Greenaway is a personal favourite]. However, there still needs to be something coherent and interesting behind it, otherwise you might as well just eat a large pizza and go to sleep – the imagery will be just as good, and it’s a better use of your time. In 1968, Suzuki got fired by major studio Nikkatsu, who said that they “could not afford to cultivate a reputation for making films understood only by an exclusive audience,” and that his “incomprehensible and thus bad films would disgrace the company.” Frankly, I’m in full agreement with the studio.

Dir: Seijun Suzuki
Star: Makiko Esumi, Sayoko Yamaguchi, Mikijiro Hira, Yeong-he Han

Rosario Tijeras

  By

★★★
“The film that could only be made in South America – where life is…very, very grim.”

Antonio (Ugalde) and Emilio (Cardona) meet the gorgeous Rosario (Martinez) at a nightclub in Medellin, Columbia, and both form a relationship with her – Emilio, a physical one; Antonio, a platonic but perhaps more deeply felt attachment. While information on Rosario is limited, not least from herself, they soon discover that she has a dark past (Tijeras isn’t her surname, it’s Spanish for “scissors”. Let’s leave it at that, shall we?) and a dark present (among the many rumour swirling around is that she has killed 200 or more, in her role as a hitwoman for the local drug cartels). Nor is the forecast for her future sunshine and rainbows, since the first scene has Antonio carrying a badly shot-up Rosario into a local hospital, with the rest of the film told in a series of flashbacks.

Medellin used to be a credible contender as murder capital of the world. During 1991, this city of about two million people saw over seven thousand homicides – there were less than seven hundred in all of England and Wales the same year. That may go some way to explaining the casual approach towards live, love and death shown by most of the characters here; why think about tomorrow when it might not arrive? Rosario’s job is more hinted at than actually depicted: while we do see her kill a couple of people, it’s far more for personal reasons, and despite the cover, this is less an action film than heavily-armed drama.

It’s a good performance from Martinez, however, and the hidden aspects of her character pull you in, to see what’s going to be revealed. Make no mistake though; this is downbeat material, through and through, with an unexpected cameo by Alex Cox [director of Repo Man] one of the few lighter moments. Otherwise, if you can think of something bad that might happen, odds are it will. Rosario’s psychology is also a little too conveniently pat – it was absolutely no surprise to discover she was abused as a child, even if the gap between that and mob killer seems to require more explanation. On the whole, this is solid and worthy, though it’d be something of a stretch to describe it as entertaining.

Dir: Emilio Maillé
Star: Flora Martínez, Manolo Cardona, Unax Ugalde