Tag: b

Brenda Starr

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★★½
“A bit lacking in Starr quality.”

No, not the eighties version of Brenda Starr: that is well known, and justifiably much derided, to the point it didn’t even reach the necessary level for inclusion here. But neither was it the first version of the comic-strip to reach the screen. Well, at least the small screen. There had previously been a 1945 series, Brenda Starr, Reporter, though some reports describe this as nearly action-free. But the late seventies saw two television efforts: as well as the one under discussion here, three years later in 1979, there was an unsold television pilot movie (now apparently lost) in which Sherry Jackson played the intrepid girl journalist. In contrast, this appears to have been intended as a stand-alone from the get-go. While I’m sure ABC wouldn’t have minded had this been successful enough to become a franchise, it suffers from much the same problem as all the other adaptations, with a heroine that’s too passive to pass muster

However, as TV movies go, this isn’t terrible. It hits the ground running, with Brenda (St. John) investigating the case of reclusive millionaire Lance O’Toole (Buono), who arrives in Los Angeles and goes straight to hospital, apparently being taken down by voodoo magic. Starr is tussling for the scoop with her nemesis, fellow reporter Roger Randall (Buono), though he’s a mere TV anchor, and so the subject of her disdain. Meanwhile, other rich people – including her paper’s owner – are getting blackmail letters demanding $5 million, after the death of O’Toole. Brenda gets a tip and heads for Brazil, the apparent source of the voodoo practices (though let’s be honest, this is one of the least convincing depictions of South America you’ll see!). There, she finds that, things aren’t quite as they seem. O’Toole is far from dead, and in fact is working on creating a new world order, with Ms. Starr scheduled as his queen. Randall is also hot on the tail of the story, though he is arguably even less action-oriented than Brenda.

About the peak of the action is St. John – or, more accurately, her stunt double – climbing out of a bedroom window and down the shrubbery to the ground. However, there was a surprisingly high body-count; we were perplexed by the rather callous way in which the heroine quickly abandoned one deceased travelling companion, without even the courtesy of checking him for a pulse. While she’s no Lara Croft, I didn’t mind St. John’s performance, and that just about kept me watching. The plot feels like something cribbed from a lesser Bond movie of the time – this may be a positive or a negative, depending how you feel about the Bond movies of the time. But Buono, probably best known as King Tut in the sixties TV version of Batman, chews the scenery in suitably agreeable fashion opposite the heroine. At barely 75 minutes (did they have a lot more commercials in those days?). this can’t be accused of outstaying its welcome, even if 75 minutes more is likely long enough for it to be forgotten again.

Dir: Mel Stuart
Star: Jill St. John, Jed Allan, Victor Buono, Joel Fabiani

Ballerina (2023)

  By

★★★
“It is very chilly in Korea.”

I should be clear, this is not to be confused with next year’s action movie about a female killer called Ballerina. That one will be part of the John Wick universe. This South Korean film isn’t. Indeed, it’s very much its own creature – perhaps too much so. It feels like a hit-woman film directed by Nicolas Winding Refn: it’s all neon lights and understated emotions, to the point of coldness. For some reason, it feels as if everything past getting out of bed is a chore for the characters here, with almost every action feeling as it it were preceded by an imaginary sigh. The ennui is overpowering, to steal a line from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galazy.

The heroine is Okju (Jeon), a bodyguard whose best friend Min-hee (Park) kills herself after being abused by serial predator and sex trafficker, Choi Pro (Kim). Okju makes it her own, personal mission to take revenge on Choi. It’s a difficult job, due to the protection he’s afforded by being part of a larger criminal enterprise, run by Chief Jo (Kim). Min-hee realizes edged weapons aren’t enough, and needs a firearm – something which proves considerably more difficult to obtain locally, than in your typical action movie. On the other hand, Jo is increasingly tired of Choi’s attitude, as he becomes more trouble than he’s worth. Still, giving up a member to an outsider isn’t something any gang leader does casually.

It does feel like this is very much a case of style over substance. After an opening which sees Okju utterly unfazed when wandering through a convenience store robbery in progress, you will have quite a while to wait for the next slice of action. That takes place after she has convinced Choi to take her to a seedy motel, after she has discovered the horrific truth about his activities. The subsequent set-piece illustrates an odd tendency for the film to shift into comedy, as someone attacks Okju with a chainsaw, only for an unfortunately timed door opening to derail the attack. More successful is the later scene where she buys weapons from a travelling husband and wife, which has a quirky charm that’s endearing. I’d watch Adventures of the Gun-Running Van.

The rest is occasionally successful, and occasionally not. The action is over-sharply edited, though does stay on this side of coherence. However, there just wasn’t sufficient emotional connection for me. Admittedly, this may have partly been deliberate. It felt we were never given much reason to get on board with Okju’s guest for vengeance: her revenge seems more of a job than a passion project. She shows up, does what’s necessary, then clocks out and goes home, to stare blankly off into the distance, illuminated by a pastel glow. I’m hopeful 2024’s Ballerina – the title here refers to the best friend, incidentally, not the protagonist – will be more memorable than than this well-crafted piece of neon fluff.

Dir: Lee Chung-hyun
Star: Jeon Jong-seo, Kim Ji-hoon, Park Yu-rim, Mu-Yeol Kim

Born of War

  By

★★
“Warn of bore”

While technically solid, and occasionally looking quite good, this may be the laziest scripting I have seen in a movie for a long time. I feel I may have lost actual IQ points through the process of watching it, such is the degree of stupidity which this provides. The heroine is Mina (Black-D’Elia), a college student whose life is upended when she and her little sister narrowly escape a home invasion by Arab terrorists, in which both her parents are killed. She’s rescued by intelligence agent Olivia (Leonard), who tells her she’s the only heir of an Afghani warlord, Khalid (Arditti). Her mother betrayed him, and had to change her identity: he finally caught up with the family, and wants his daughter back.

As protection, Olivia assigns her to private contractor Simon (Frain), who helps teach her certain skills. When further attempts to kidnap her follow, Mina has had enough of running, and agrees to be handed over to Khalid, after having a tracking device implanted. This will allow the military to locate the terrorist leader, and take him out, giving Mina her revenge. Except, things are not at all what they initially appear. There’s a whole hidden agenda, involving an oil company with designs on the region, duelling warlords and members of the intelligence community who appear to be operating without formal sanction from the government. To survive, Mina will need to stab someone with a CD, and carry out impromptu surgery. With a rock.

Yeah, it’s like that. I lost track of the number of times I rolled my eyes, snorted derisively or shook my head in annoyance. Sometimes, more than one of these in combination. I think it began with the home invasion, where a single, completely untrained (at that point) college student was able repeatedly to get the drop on a trio of hard-core fanatics. You just cannot get the quality terrorist minions these days. The same incompetence litters the path of the movie throughout. For instance, if they had once searched their captive, they’d have found the CD she broke and later used as an improvised weapon. Even after Mina finds the truth out and becomes disposable, multiple opportunities to do just that – dispose of her – are wasted.

The same writer-director pairing, of Jewson and husband Rupert Whitaker, was also responsible for Close, which at least had Noomi Rapace in it. This does not, and Black-D’Elia isn’t an adequate replacement. Her broad American accent is another point of pain, with the script’s explanation for it, more of a token gesture, really. The film does look sharp, and if you have this on in the background – say, if you are doing the ironing – it could conceivably pass muster. However, any attention to detail might well peel off the thin gold-plating of competence. A film which relies on two people bumping into each other entirely by coincidence, in a large city, is definitely one with major problems.

Dir: Vicky Jewson
Star: Sofia Black-D’Elia, James Frain, Lydia Leonard, Philip Arditti

The Blind Spot, by Michael Robertson

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Literary rating: ★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆½

On the surface, Scala City is an idyllic, hi-tech world of prosperity, peace and morality, albeit at the cost of omnipresent surveillance of its residents. But there’s a dirty little secret. The Blind Spot is an area where surveillance is barred, and where the citizens of Scala City go to blow off their sordid steam. Its residents have cybernetically enhanced bodies, something rejected by Scala City, and a zero-tolerance policy for any kind of monitoring. It’s run by Wrench, who has kept his daughter Marcie Hugo under strict control since the death of her mother. However, like all teenagers, the 16-year-old Marcie is seeking to spread her wings, and has been making covert excursions into Scala City, with the aim of moving there some day soon.

The problem is, an escalating series of terrorist attacks have been occurring in the city, which it appears someone is trying to blame on the Blind Spot, in order to trigger a war between them and the city. After one of Marcie’s trips is caught on camera, the heat gets turned up, and she – along with the Blind Spot’s most infamous computer hacker – becomes the only person who can prevent a conflict that could lead to the destruction (at least in a digital sense) of both sides. She believes the perpetrators may have help from inside the Blind Spot, suspecting in particular a close accomplice of Wrench, who also happens to be the father of her best friend.

The world-building here is solid enough. As well as Marcie, events unfold through the sad eyes of Nick, an overweight and largely unloved Scala City resident. He’s addicted to the Wellbeing App, which records only the positive things people say about each other, sharing it with them. This is…scarily plausible, to be honest, though the split focus is a little unwieldy. No connection between this pair of story lines is established until about two-thirds of the way through the book, although they work well enough on their own terms. The idea of a city with a Jekyll and Hyde personality is also well-executed.

A bigger problem, for me, was the sudden reticence on Marcie’s end. Initially, we experience things through her eyes, knowing everything she knows. Then, at a certain point, we get cut out of the loop, from a narrative point of view, as she and her hacker pal begin their plot to track down and expose the real terrorists. We’re left on the outside, not knowing what’s going on – and when we do find out, there naturally being a grand reveal, it’s not very satisfying. It relies too much on the “all-powerful hacker” trope, and the identity of the traitor in their midst is also unconvincing. The story ends up being a swing and a miss, though with the book being free on Amazon, I probably can’t complain. Though it’d have to be at the same price point to get me to go any further into the series.

Author: Michael Robertson
Publisher: Self-published, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 6 in the Neon Horizon series.

The Wrath of Becky

  By

★★½
“Did we learn nothing from John Wick?”

Don’t mess with someone else’s dog. This is a good rule of thumb in most cases, but especially so when the owner is an unhinged teenage psychopath, with the both the talent and desire to inflict carnage in retribution. The last time we saw Becky (Wilson), she had disposed of a gang of neo-Nazis who had invaded her house in search of a key, and killed her father in the process. Now, a couple of years later, she is a waitress in a diner, and renting a room from Elena (Burse). Three more individuals with, um, alternative political opinions enter the diner. This is not going to end well.

In response to their rude behaviour, she pours coffee on the crotch of their leader. The response leaves Elena dead and, worse, they kidnap Becky’s dog. She tracks them to the home of their group’s leader, Darryl (Scott). You know that messy mayhem is going to follow, and will not be disappointed. The film does address the gloomy murkiness which plagued the first one, allowing its gory murders to unfold in the full light of the sun. However, in most ways it falls short of its predecessor: the sequel has seen a new writer-director pair come on board, and the results very much have an air of “second verse, same as the first – just not as good” air to them.

The differences are on both sides. Becky is harder to empathize with, being little more than a teenage psychopath now. Sure, she had issues in the original movie. Yet the trauma she went through meant her reactions were understandable. Here, from the outset she seems a bit of a dick, callously treating foster parents for her own benefit. On the villainous side, it’s a mixed bag. The film repeats the trick from the first film of putting an unexpected actor in the role of the lead villain (there Kevin James) and Scott does well. But the frequent idiocy of his underlings is too convenient. They’re not a credible threat, and Darryl’s failure to secure Becky at a key moment undoes much of the good work that has gone before.

However, don’t take the above criticism as an indication there’s no fun to be had here. You just need to be aware this is a considerably more mean-spirited affair, and it’s probably only the kills that will stick around in your mind. I did laugh out loud more than once, for example when one of the gang reveals his son’s name to Becky, sealing his own fate [though again: why not just lie, dude? It isn’t hard…] The ending sees the CIA recruit Becky, because they are now apparently responsible for domestic counter-terrorism. Wait, what? Oh, well. If they’re going the Nikita route for further sequels, I suspect the authorities have bitten off more than they can chew. Maybe next time Becky can go after Antifa.

Dir: Matt Angel, Suzanne Coote
Star: Lulu Wilson, Seann William Scott, Denise Burse, Jill Larson

The Bleeding Game

  By

★½
“Bleeding terrible, innit?”

It is possible to do Lovecraft on a low-budget and make it work. Earlier this year, I was introduced to the delightful films of Lars Henriks, who did a whole trilogy of micro-budget movies, loosely in the Lovecraft universe. Taken in the right spirit, they’re quite charming. Then, there’s this… I think I can safely say, it’s neither delightful nor charming, regardless of spirit. The best I can say is there is a non-terrible core concept here.  Mr. Temple (Bolton) wants occult power, and feeds on blood, so summons a trio of Shoggoths, mystical minions who possess a sleazy businessman, a metalhead, and a rent boy. They prey on the women who frequent his bars, bringing their essence back to their master. Arrayed against him are three sisters (one adopted), the Proctors: Aida (Mixter), Flo (Bland) and Lizzy (Alison), who come from a family of white magicians. When the corpses of the Shoggoth’s victims start piling up, they seek to stop first them, then Temple, from continuing their dark harvest.

I should have recognized the director’s name: I’m presuming he’s the brother (or something) of Sean-Michael Argo. That is the Argo who gave us one of the worst ever action-heroine films in Iconoclast. He shows up here as The Grin, an Oracle-like figure to whom the Proctor sisters turn for advice. His relative Ian is, at least, able to tell a coherent story, so that puts him well ahead of his relative. However, there are still way too many problem present for this to be successful, even by the low-standards of incredibly cheap horror. The audio is inconsistent from scene to scene, varying from muffled to incredibly echoey. The pacing is terrible, with scenes that serve no real purpose, and the backstory involving their father is murky, at best. Though I was quite amused by the way that shotguns are basically more effective than any traditional tools, and there is a half-decent impalement.

My biggest complaint, however, was the flat-out terrible British accents sported by the Shoggoths. I’m not sure why being taken over by a demonic entity causes the victims suddenly to channel Dick Van Dyke from Mary Poppins, but here we apparently are. I feel personally attacked by this blatant example of Britwashing, not least since it’s an accent that serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever, any more than the top hat sported by one Shoggoth. The film is at its best least worst when they aren’t speaking on screen, simply because I no longer had a rising desire to put my fist, the living-room table or our cat through the television. Even writing this paragraph is sending my blood pressure spiking. The sisters don’t bother with fake accents, and occasionally border on being interesting characters: looks like two of them have an on/off sexual relationship, though we cut away from ever seeing anything there. Like the rest of the film, that demonstrates its disappointing failure to deliver.

Dir: Ian Argo
Star: Whitney Mixter, Shey Bland, Alison Tussey, C. Jason Bolton

Black Site (2022)

  By

★★★
“Better Red(box) than Net(flix).”

This has a fair amount in common with the disaster which was Interceptor. Both films were produced for streaming companies, and are about a sole woman in a remote military location, that is attacked by a terrorist or groups of terrorists. She then has to survive, take on the threat, deal with treachery on the inside, and handle a ticking clock scenario. It is fairly basic storytelling, occasionally dumb, and there’s nothing of note in either, we haven’t seen a hundred times before, with male or female leads. However, this is significantly more watchable, perhaps because it doesn’t push the envelope. One problem with Interceptor was its #MeToo messaging. There’s no such soap-box concerns here, and Black Site is better for it.

The heroine is Abby Trent (Monaghan), a CIA analyst whose husband and daughter were blown up in a terrorist attack on an “Istanbul” hospital. I use quotes, because when the camera zooms out to a satellite view, Istanbul has apparently relocated, from Turkey to somewhere down the Red Sea in Saudi Arabia. It’s not the last time the film’s geography is shaky. Anyway, Abby devotes her life to tracking down “Hatchet”, the man responsible, and is currently working at a secret interrogation facility in the Jordanian desert. Two things about it made me go “Hmmm.” Firstly, it doubles as a data storage location: that’s a no from me in IT. Second, a Mossad (Israeli intelligence) agent is wandering about. Seems unlikely.

Anyway, #2. Hatchet (Clarke) is captured and sent to the facility, only to escape almost immediately. A lockdown is put in place, but comms get cut off, and the rules – at least in this movie – are that after an hour, they’ll be deemed compromised, and a drone strike will wipe everyone out. Abby has to figure out Hatchet’s agenda, deal with insubordination and flat-out double-agents on her side, and discover the truth about the hospital bombing before the clock runs out. Despite the various idiocies noted above, it is all kept moving forward at a decent pace. Once things kick off with Hatchet’s Houdini-like escape and particularly vicious stabbing of his first two victims, there’s little slack or down-time until things go boom.

I’d like to have seen Monaghan given more to do on the action front. There is a decent fight against the in-house traitor; otherwise, she is largely limited to creeping about corridors with a gun. There are subplots, such as the team member who thinks his active experience puts him above taking orders from Abby, which ends with him taking on Hatchet hand-to-hand in a decent battle, albeit with an entirely expected outcome. Indeed, the same can be said for the film as an entity. There are no surprises, yet the action is handled in a professional manner, and this helps paper over the obvious flaws. Director Banks does solid work, considering this was her first feature, so we’ll see where she goes from here.

Dir: Sophia Banks
Star: Michelle Monaghan, Jason Clarke, Jai Courtney, Pallavi Sharda

Bae Wolf

  By

★★
“LARPing for all.”

There is certainly room for reworking of the tale of Beowulf and Grendel, and making the heroines of this version female is what got me interested in it. However, the warning signs were out very quickly. Opening titles which said “Denmark… 500 AD… (-ish)” are a good sign of what to expect, for it’s clear that the makers were not happy to leave their changes at that. Indeed, they consciously embrace anachronism, especially in the dialogue, which is thoroughly modern, and could not be further from the epic poetry of the original if they tried. And I suspect they did try: congratulations on erasing one of the main reasons the story has survived down the millennia.

The basic story is, at least, largely unchanged. The land of Queen Walchtheo (Petsiavas) is under attack from the monstrous Grendel (Kern), and she sends her daughter, Princess Freawaru (Renew) out to find someone who can slay the beast. Freawaru finds a party of Danes led by Beowulf (Hill), who is disgruntled about the legends making her male: “As if you need balls to hold a sword.” They are commissioned for the job, which is where it gets murky, in a variety of ways. The Danes are a bit sketchy, in terms of delivering the contractually required slaughter; Grendel has mommy issues; and the princess falls for Beowulf, because this is 2022, and everyone has to be gay for no particular reason.

This was apparently shot at a Live-Action Role-Playing (LARP) camp, and to be honest, it shows. This is very much at the “running around in the woods” level of fantasy cinema, and at no point even remotely approaches selling its time and place. It leaves the film precariously perched between two stools, neither historically authentic nor modernizing the story. It drops contemporary characters, attitudes and dialogue into the 5th(-ish…) century, and the results don’t typically work, unless you’re playing for comedy. They can’t quite commit to that either, with a jokey tone, that simultaneously feels like it wants its opinions on gender and sexuality to be taken seriously. The net result at points feels like a political lecture delivered by someone wearing a pink pussyhat.

Yet I couldn’t bring myself to dislike this as much as I might. Beowulf and Grendel are both given more complex characters than in some other adaptations, and are helped by decent performances from the leads. I will also admit, the final confrontation between Beowulf and the much-feared dragon is a great example of how you can genuinely yank the carpet from under your viewer. Let’s just say, very little in this world is as it seems, and the film works best when playing on this line between myth, legend and the facts, along with the way they mutate into each other. If they could have developed this aspect more, in lieu of the less successful elements, the obviously low budget and clunky writing would perhaps not have been so glaring.

Dir: David Axe
Star: Morgan Shaley Renew, Josh Kern, Jennifer Hill, Rachel Petsiavas

Ballistic

  By

★★
“Can’t spell Ballistic without balls…”

You know you’re in for a slice of stinky, nineties action cheese from the opening sequence. Undercover cop Jesse (Holden) has just taken down a sleazy yuppie drug-dealer, and a homeless woman tells her, “You know what you are, sweetie? You’re ballistic!” We probably need to explain why the film is titled that way, because there’s really not an enormous amount of great action here to justify it. Jesse is your typical, no-nonsense cop, who has just transferred from homicide to the Urban Crime Taskforce, where she is meeting resistance from her new colleagues. She is also trying to help her father (Roundtree), a former cop now doing 20 years after being framed with kilos of coke.

Jesse inevitably makes enemies: she comes under suspicious when a witness is killed on her watch, and is then suspected of the murder of the other cop who was in the safe-house. In reality, it’s all a plot by “respectable businessman” Braden (Jones), who inevitably is a dealer in both drugs and illegal weapons. He runs illegal fights in a warehouse lined with cardboard boxes: his top henchman, the person who killed the cop, is actually a woman, Claudia (the impressive looking body-builder Corinna Everson), and we get a small role from Michael Jai White, who would go on to considerably better things than this. As would the movie’s composer, Tyler Bates, and the cast also includes veteran cult actor Charles Napier as Jesse’s superior.

Despite a relatively good cast, it’s largely dull, often almost painfully so, with the action scenes suffering from a particularly brutal style of editing. Holden comes at at six foot even in height, towering over some of her male co-stars even when not wearing high heels, and does have a degree of film presence. It’s just that Bass, making his directorial debut, does not appear to have any idea of how she should be used. Early on, she’s treated as not much more than a slice of cheesecake, e.g. the opening credits feature Jesse showering in slo-mo, for no reason beyond titillation. The sex scenes with her boyfriend (a character which serves no purpose) are little better, and you could make the case Claudia is actually treated more seriously than the heroine.

The film does at least have the courtesy to give us a fight between the two women, though like much of the rest, the results are far from overwhelming, with them lazily snapping kicks toward each other, at a glacial pace. That’s about the peak as far as Jesse is concerned, with the movie’s climax thereafter largely involving a lot of running round the warehouse by everyone involved. It’s difficult to believe this kind of feature would ever have passed muster, even in the days of straight to video schlock. Though given this was the effective end of Holden’s career as a leading lady, perhaps it didn’t.

Dir:  Kim Bass
Star: Marjean Holden, Sam J. Jones, James Lew, Richard Roundtree
a.k.a. Fist of Justice

Breath

  By

★★
“The hole story”

Lara Winslet (Daigh) is a vulcanologist, who is on the side of a mountain in Italy, taking samples, when the ground gives way beneath her, and she falls into an underground pit, damaging her leg in the process. Help isn’t going to come, so with limited resources (not to mention a count of functioning limbs that stops at three), she is going to need to cope with the situation on its own, and figure a way out of what could easily become a fatal scenario. Meanwhile, on the outside, her father (Cosmo) is becoming increasingly frantic. This is erhaps because if Lara doesn’t come back, he’s going to be stuck permanently with her kid (Di Mauro). That would be my reaction, anyway…

There may be ways to make this kind of thing exciting. I imagine 127 Hours must have been able to manage it, though not having seen it, I can’t be specific on the techniques it used. Breath could have used some help, as there isn’t a great deal of adrenaline pumping through the veins of this situation. To try and generate some, it keeps flashing back to sequences set earlier and off the mountain, covering things like Lara’s affair with fellow scientist Adam (Chupin), or her more or less abandoning her daughter for the sake of career advancement in the name of scientific discovery. While this does provide some fill-in colour for her character, we eventually go back to her sobbing in a literal pit of despair.

I can’t really complain about the performances, and the photography does generate a decent sense of claustrophobia. I get the message that there are times when you can’t rely on anybody else, and have (again, more or less literally) to pull yourself up. Though I tend to feel that most life-threatening situations like this require more than a stern self-talking to, in order to get out of them: that is, however, what we get here. Lara’s leg seems injured only when necessary to the plot, and while being buried underground does bypass the usual cellphone issue, I can’t help wondering why she didn’t lob it (and its GPS) out of the pit – the hole wasn’t that deep. Or eat the nutritious, if not delicious, snake sharing it with her.

In the end, it’s just too simplistic a story: it’s almost binary, with the heroine either being in the pit or out of it. A more stepped approach, e.g. overcome the issue of her leg; figure out the water situation; try and attract attention, etc. would perhaps have done a better job of sustaining interest. Hell, even her background as a geologist never comes in useful, and it could have been anyone ambling around that mountainside. There’s a near-complete lack of ingenuity needed. In the end, it purely comes down to brute strength, as to whether or not Lara can make it out. Dare I say it, this was hole-y unremarkable.

Dir: John Real
Star: Rachel Daigh, James Cosmo, Neb Chupin, Alba Di Mauro