Tag: b

Birds of Prey (TV series)

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★★★½
“Wing and a prey-er.”

2002 should have been a great time to start a TV series based on a popular comic book – the biggest box-office hit that year was Spiderman, and with a host of other high-profile movies in the pipeline, comics had their highest profile in a long time. So what happened? Why was the show cancelled before Christmas, limping lamely along to the conclusion of its 13-episode run, the finale sacrificed against American Idol and The Bachelorette?

Weak writing, would seem to be the main reason – Jordan Levin, entertainment president of The WB, producers of the show, said, “We really could not find someone who could write that show”, describing its cancellation as the biggest disappointment in eight years. Certainly, the central concept was sound, and appealing, going by the decent ratings for the premiere: 7 1/2 million viewers, twice what the channel had for the same slot in 2001. But by the fourth episode, more than a third of those had been lost, and they kept falling – at the time of its demise, it was ranked 107th out of 118 prime-time shows.

The show did perhaps have an excess of back story to cope with. There’s Barbara Gordon (Meyer), who used to be Batgirl until she was paralysed by the Joker, and now calls herself Oracle. Then there’s Huntress (Scott), a.k.a. Helena Kyle, who was the daughter of Batman and Catwoman. There’s Dinah – no secret identity – the daughter of Black Canary, another character from the comics. Oh, and Huntress’s psychiatrist, played by Mia Sara, is really the chief villainess who runs crime in the town, though this thread was underwritten and never explored as it could have been. She all but vanished from the second half of the series, before an impressive return in the finale.

It seems almost the law that any series with action heroines must have three; see Charlie’s Angels and She Spies for further examples. Why this is, I don’t know, but it can cause problems with dynamics. I’d have been happy with just Huntress and Oracle since, personally, I felt the main problem with the series was Dinah. Never felt her role was really necessary as a recurring character (any similarity to Dawn in Buffy is, I’m sure purely coincidental) – in most episodes, she was little more than a spare wheel, with bratty tendencies which were more irritating than endearing.

It’s a shame, as both the other two were interesting and well-rounded characters, portrayed with skill and charm. Meyer, perhaps best known for her role in Starship Troopers does particularly well, given she is confined to a wheelchair for most of the show. Credit must also be given to Scott, who has to handle the majority of the action, and does so fluidly – the fight sequences are certainly well above average for network television, and hopefully those responsible will find work elsewhere.

The show was at its best playing with the conventions of superhero TV; I particularly remember a discussion over secret identities and whether you could have one without a mask. But the same episode also featured – like the WWE, just without the chocolate pudding – a fight club where evil men watched as women fought. Given part of the appeal of the series itself was exactly this, it was shooting the audience in the foot, and illustrates the apparent schizophrenia of the show.

It fell uncomfortably between stools, neither camp like the original Batman, nor dark and gothic like the comics, save for the last episode when death revealed its sting. Even if it had gone either way, it was hardly likely to appeal to fans of Dawson’s Creek, the show preceding it. This, and some vicious competition in the time slot, likely doomed it. In the end, though, Birds of Prey never became compelling TV. We’d watch one episode, then forget all about it for a week; there wasn’t the same sense of anticipation that better series create in viewers.

We also hated the shameless plugs for the music, though was thoroughly amused to see infamous Russian teen pseudo-lesbians t.A.T.u. provide the song for the final battle. Still, it deserved a happier fate than effectively being replaced by another one of those cheapjack reality show, High School Reunion. Anybody up for a movie in which a disgruntled actor storms a television station and kills the producers responsible for all this low-quality dreck? Pretty sure Dina Meyer would be interested…

Star: Dina Meyer, Ashley Scott, Rachel Skarsten, Shemar Moore

Blood: The Last Vampire (animated)

  By

★★
“Buffy goes East – and gets out of bed on the wrong side.”

Don’t believe the running time: listed at 83 minutes on the DVD sleeve, this is actually under 50, a nasty piece of marketing to make you think you’re getting a full-length movie. Not sure whether an extra 25 minutes would help or harm here: there is certainly room for development, but equally, there is an awful lot of slack which seems designed only to show off whizzy digital animation. Saya is a vampire. She’s also a killer, tasked by…well, it’s never quite made clear who, but she hunts down bat-like monsters who can take human form. The only way to kill them is to make them lose a lot of blood. Very quickly. Being trapped forever in her teenage years, she’s ideally placed to go undercover at a school and investigate mysterious occurrences there.

Set in 1966 for only one tangentially-connected reason, you’re never given enough information to care about Saya or any of the other characters. Mystery is one thing; obscurity another. She is perpetually pissed-off, which while initially appealing, does wear thin before long. I liked how some people spoke English, others Japanese, though this did have me fiddling with the DVD remote, since I thought I was watching a wretched dub. The Western characters seem horribly drawn; was this deliberate, or perhaps our faces just don’t suit anime style? As a standalone item, this is unsatisfying, despite some spectacular gore that will make you sit up and take notice. Give it another five episodes, and you could probably edit a decent feature out of this, but as it stands, it’s worth no more than a rental.

Dir: Hiroyuki Kitakubo
Star (voice): Youki Kudoh, Rebecca Forstadt, Joe Romersa

Beyond the City Limits

  By

★★
“Promising concept gets bogged down in man-hating chick-anery.”

“It was a nightmare to shoot: the producer and director were constantly fighting… It was completely unorganised. Alexis [Denisof] was also in it and he and I would go into each other’s trailers and go, “We’ve made a huge mistake, this is the worst thing ever!” It just went terribly, terribly wrong.” So says Hannigan: wouldn’t say it was that bad, but it certainly ain’t good, either.

After the girlfriends (Hannigan & Kinski) of two Russian crooks get dumped, they sabotage a casino heist as revenge, then take it on themselves, with the security manager’s assistance. This crime is easily the most interesting part of the film, as things go awry and must be dealt with. Wish it had turned up an hour earlier, instead of the “men are utter bastards” whining that occupies the first two-thirds. The presence of Sophie B. Hawkins, both on screen and the soundtrack, doesn’t reduce the irritant factor any.

Why do they need police assistance? Why the random voice-overs? Why is Esposito’s cop ex-husband (Field) suddenly chased by other officers? This film doesn’t so much finish, as end, and most of the cast, save Russian psycho Brian McCardie, act as if drugged – perhaps literally in Hannigan’s case, since she plays a junkie. [Just like in American Pie, she seems keen to leave Buffy far behind, though she’s bisexual here too]. The US retitling is obviously intended to invoke Set It Off: that such a lame ploy is deemed necessary is all you need to know.

Dir: Gigi Gaston
Star: Alyson Hannigan, Nastassja Kinski, Jennifer Esposito, Todd Field
a.k.a. Rip It Off

Barbarian Queen

  By

★★★
“Not exactly family viewing, yet energetic in a dumbly fun way. Lana Clarkson, RIP…”

With the untimely death of Lana Clarkson (legal advisers suggested we not use “murder by a crazed record producer”), this takes on a certain poignant quality, especially when she uses lines like, “I’ll be no man’s slave and no man’s whore.” Clarkson pioneered sword-swinging feminism well before Xena, and while no-one is going to mistake this for high art, it gallops along at a fine pace – lasting barely 70 minutes, it could hardly do otherwise.

Clarkson plays Amathea, whose wedding day is rudely interrupted when her village is burned and groom (Zagarino) captured into gladiatorial slavery. She sets out to rescue him, along with sidekick Estrild (Shea, who’d go on to direct Poison Ivy), and traumatised sister Taramis (Dunlap). Sneaking into the villain’s city, she teams up with the local rebels and convinces the gladiators they have a chance at freedom. They also get get caught and tortured. A lot. Chuck in numerous rape scenes and you wonder what audience it’s aimed at. But the heroines are better than you might expect; despite some 80’s hair, there are some convincing bits of action, in particular a fight by a river. Amathea’s method of convincing the torturer to free her is also unique in cinematic history, as far as I’m aware (if I’m wrong, please, let me wallow in my ignorance).

Producer Corman continues his ability to find cheap talent, though the “destined for greater glory” name is heard and not seen – the music comes from Christopher Young, who’d go on to score films such as The Shipping News. James Horner’s Battle Beyond the Stars work also crops up, but when you write for Corman, you expect this kind of thing.

Dir: Hector Olivera
Star: Lana Clarkson, Katt Shea, Dawn Dunlap, Frank Zagarino

Backflash

  By

★★★
“Interesting characters, in search of a better setting.”

Harley (Esposito) comes out of prison, and links up with timorous video store owner Ray (Patrick), who must impersonate her boyfriend in order to collect $2m stashed in a safe-deposit box. The cash was swindled from mob money-shuffler Gin (Meaney) – understandably he’s keen to get it back before his boss notices. You will not be surprised to hear that hardly anyone in this film is quite what they seem.

Indeed, even the places aren’t what they appear. The second half is set in Williams, Arizona which, by obscure coincidence, I visited three days before discovering it was in this movie. Or rather, a substitute that in no way resembles Williams. Okay, 99% of viewers wouldn’t notice, but it shows a lack of attention to detail; see also the motel where Ray’s smoking room clearly has a “No smoking” sign on the door. Must try harder, folks.

This borderline entry lacks action, though the heroine’s demolition job on a henchman is brisk and brutal. It’s her attitude which qualifies it for inclusion here, creating an underlying sense that things are always about to go off. The plot provides the expected twists, though Jones cheats by editing to hide information from the viewer. What really rescues the movie are the characters, who all have their quirks, most notably Meaney’s gangster with a Christmas fetish. Chuck in Melissa Joan Hart as a fake mortician, and Michael J. Pollard playing a bank security guard, and these are people worthy of your time. Shame the same effort wasn’t applied elsewhere in the film.

Dir: Phil Jones
Star: Jennifer Esposito, Robert Patrick, Mike Hagerty, Colm Meaney

Black and White

  By

★★★½
“Training Day meets Basic Instinct”

Gina Gershon showed previous action heroine potential in Face Off; here, she moves a little further up that line with an effective whodunnit in which she plays a thoroughly unconventional homicide cop with a shady past. Cochrane is her rookie partner, who begins to suspect she may be the serial killer who is taking out the local garbage. There’s almost inevitably a sense of disappointment in twisty thriller like this one; when the film-makers reveal the real culprit, the viewer tends to feel let down. Black suffers less from this than most, though still requires some suspension of disbelief. The script, by the director and (one assumes, his brother) Leon Zeltser, crackles along nicely, with convincing dialogue and good pacing, revealing information at just the right rate to keep the audience guessing.

Must confess, seeing Gershon play a heterosexual takes some getting used to – c.f Bound and Showgirls – but she does an excellent job here, even if her best line remains the sexually ambivalent “Is there anyone in this room who doesn’t want to fuck me?” The rest of the cast back her up well, in particular, Ron Silver, as Mr. Internal Affairs (and ex-lover), delivers his usual slimy turn, while Cochrane hits the right notes of bewilderment. Gershon’s character comes over more as a coiled spring than a loose cannon. Even sitting at a bus-stop, she looks primed to explode, but never really does. This lack of action is about the only thing stopping this from getting the seal of approval – otherwise, for the most part, this is a solid and effective thriller.

Dir: Yuri Zeltser
Star: Gina Gershon, Rory Cochrane, Ron Silver, Alison Eastwood

Blood Games

  By

★★★
“A Deliverance of Their Own“

I guess Blood Sport was already taken? It’s softball beauties vs. rednecks after: a) the visiting ladies thump the home side 17-2, b) the team owner has to extract his fee at gunpoint, and c) the gals resist – forceably – the crude advances of the locals. Before you can say, “duelling banjos”, they’re being pursued through the woods, and picked off one by one.

This 1990 movie starts slow; any viewer will know exactly where this is going, yet they still take half an hour to get there. It’s not as if the time is spent on characterisation either; most of the softball team were clearly chosen for their appearance, while the yokels are straight from Cliched Casting, Inc. Yet if they’re stereotypes, they are undeniably creepy ones, well-portrayed by Cummings and Shay. Rosenberg uses them with enough skill to make you wonder why she never directed again, and ones things get going, she keeps the film going, without much slack.

Playing Babe, daughter of team owner Ross Hagen, Laura Albert is about the only one of the girls to make any impression as a character; she’d go on to become a stuntwoman, working on the like of Starship Troopers. The rest of her colleagues take showers, get assaulted (a sequence verging on the nastily gratuitous), die, turn psycho and take revenge, all without exhibiting any significant personality traits. Quite an achievement in itself. Another one of those movies which will put you off going to rural, Southern parts of America.

Dir: Tanya Rosenberg
Star: Laura Albert, Gregory Cummings, Luke Shay, Shelly Abblett

Bubblegum Crisis

  By

★★★
“Hardsuits, rogue mecha and day jobs.”

Worthy of note as one of the first pieces of anime made available to an English-speaking audience, (not long after its original 1985 Japanese release), BGC is set in 2032, when Tokyo has been rebuilt, post-earthquake. The Genom corporation are fiddling with Boomers, biomechanical robots of immense strength but with a nasty tendency to run amok. Standing guard are a mysterious team, the Knight Sabers, with their own technological strengths, who alternate between merc work and more altruistic concerns.

Any similarity to Blade Runner is entirely deliberate; the heroine is called Priss, and sings with a band called The Replicants. She, and her three colleagues (Nene, Linna, and Sylia) moonlight from their various day-jobs as the Knight Sabers, each with their own special abilities. The eight episodes in the series combine multiple plot arcs and standalone stories, with mixed effectiveness, though the later ones tend to work better. There’s not much background on the characters, save Sylia, and a tendency to gallop through towards the final fight in a number of the OAVs. There’s a lot of emphasis on the music, but I’m no J-Pop fan, so they needn’t have bothered.

The animation looks a little creaky now, as you’d expect from a show of its age, but also seems to improve as the series progresses – the artists learn what works and what doesn’t. I confess to preferring secondary characters such as Nene, to supposed heroine Priss; when we get to see their lives (as in #8, which has Nene acting as “babysitter” to a teenage girl on a quest to photograph the Sabers), it’s a more fully satisfying experience. Followed by two sequels, Bubblegum Crash and Bubblegum Crisis 2040.

Dir: Various
Star (voice): Kinuko Ohmori, Akiko Hiramatsu, Michie Tomizawa

Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever

  By

★★
To quote Marshall Fine: “Kaos would have saved everyone a lot of time and money by simply eliminating the stars and the story and releasing Ballistic as Giant Fireballs, Vol. 1.”

Despite the title, this movie rarely pits Ecks (Banderas) vs. Sever (Liu). The two spend more of the film teamed, up taking on the evil duo (Henry and Park) who killed Sever’s family and have kidnapped Ecks’ son – perhaps a spoiler, but anyone who didn’t see that one coming, was probably run over on the way to the cinema.

The film raises a number of interesting issues. Unfortunately, they stem more from the cinematic process, such as wondering why no-one taking part in the car-chases ever appears to drive faster than the speed limit. I know it’s Canada, but these are supposed to be characters living on the edge, not concerned with getting traffic tickets. And speaking of Canada, why are so many American government agencies operating in the open, blowing things up and shooting anyone in range, with barely a whimper from the locals?

The other problem is that no-one in the movie can act – we should perhaps exempt Liu, since she has barely a dozen lines. The scenes of Banderas and his wife (Soto) are woefully lacking in chemistry, and Ray Park is simply dreadful, despite looking so much like Oz from Buffy, that I kept expecting a full moon and a transformation. The plot is equally inept, tacking on an entire chunk about microscopic robotic assassins which is almost totally redundant. It’s nice that the studio changed Sever from male to female, but the results are…well, at time of writing, the Rotten Tomatoes review score runs 64-0 against the movie, which must be some kind of record. [Update, December 2013: Try 110-0!. Which is, indeed, the worst ever.]

There is one great sequence, when Sever is ambushed at a library, in which she mows down an entire army, picking up their weapons and turning them against their owners. This culminates in a fabulous shot from above of a victim dropping onto a car which you keep thinking is going to cut away – it doesn’t. That, however, is it, and despite such brief flashes of potential, this is largely lame, tame and full of unfulfilled possibilities. Ten years ago, it might have been a Hong Kong movie starring Simon Yam and Yukari Oshima – on the whole, that would have been much more entertaining.

Dir: Kaos
Star: Antonio Banderas, Lucy Liu, Gregg Henry, Ray Park

Big Boobs Buster

  By

★★
“Does exactly what it says on the tin.”

As you can probably surmise from the title, this is most emphatically not a gentle and touching saga of four women who laugh, cry and grow together. Instead, it’s about a schoolgirl, traumatised by rejection due to her small chest, who adopts a secret identity in order to make silicone moulds of her larger-bosomed schoolmates. I’m tempted to claim it’s based on an Oscar Wilde short story, but your credulity is already under enough strain.

Instead, I’ll start by pointing out to any lurking breast-fetishists that the Japanese definition of “big boobs” is, shall we say, not as expansive as ours. Still, less-demanding deviants should just about find enough to keep them entertained in lines like “Damn your raunchy bra!”, especially in a fine opening quarter. With a school full of perverts, it’s a concept with scope for Kekko Kamen-style parody – unfortunately, it peters out when mammorially-challenged heroine Masako (Harumi Kai) joins the track team instead. This is full of the usual tough training cliches, and is thus generally uninteresting.

The tape also includes ten minutes of Masako falling off her bike, plus other wondrous footage from behind the scenes. Wonder what the makers, including respected anime creator Taro Maki as executive producer, did with the rest of their weekend…?

[This review originally appeared in Manga Max]

Creator: Hisashi Watanabe
Star: Harumi Kai, Maruki Itsuki