Tag: b

Beautiful Wrestlers: Down for the Count

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★★★
“Ring of dishonour.”

This is probably a good one and a half stars more than I expected, based on the synopsis and screen shots, which made it seem considerably more like porn with a minor wrestling subplot. Okay, it is not exactly fun for all the family, to put it very mildly – if that wasn’t implied by the poster, the NSFW alternative should make abundantly clear what to expect. But it is, at least, closer to wrestling with a porn subplot, and managed to surpass those expectations in a number of ways. One of these was the plot, though less the central thread, than all the weird stuff around the fringes.

For its core is fairly cliched: wannabe wrestler Megu (Yamamoto) has a feud with Shinobu (Ada), a student at another school who keeps stealing Megu’s boyfriends. Inevitably, this ends in a tag match between the two schools as Megu and the good girls of the Delta Dolls, take on her nemesis and her allies in the Black Whores. It is your standard, garden variety “sports heroine overcomes adversity to triumph” narrative, we’ve seen a thousand times before. However, there are elements which suggest sly parody rather than anything taken seriously. Most obviously, Megu’s secret super strength power, which is activated… any times she uses a tampon. This is why, during the final battle, her boyfriend is running around the crowd outside, asking women if they can give him a tampon. Used or not.

Yeah, you need to have a fairly robust set of sensibilities, to get through what’s a thoroughly lecherous endeavour. However, again, the film opts to embrace this aspect, with a Greek chorus of men who watch the training and yell out statements like, “Look, you can see all their camel-toes!” Oh, the training in question, consists of the students assuming the crab position, while being prodded with large dildos. I am just reporting this stuff, I had no hand in making any of it up. There’s also a good amount of soft-core sex, this being a “roman porno”, out of the Nikkatsu stable, who along with Toei were the premier purveyors of Japanese adult entertainment in the period.

But it’s miles better than I feared. Genuine production values help, no least being shot on 35mm rather than video. While nobody is going to mistake Yamamoto and friends for Manami Toyota, they are clearly doing most if not all of their own action, and the action is comparable enough to what we saw in GLOW. The final match is actually decent; I’ve seen less impressive bouts involving supposed pro wrestlers. Admittedly, it is probably a good thing Chris was not about, for the level of her disdainful snorts would likely have reached toxic levels. Yet, despite the ludicrous elements, also including both Megu’s novel way of extinguishing a camp fire, and her boyfriend’s unfortunate genital condition, everyone takes this Extremely Seriously. It’s the only way this can possibly work, and helped this to soar way past my preconceived notions. 

Dir: Hiroyuki Nasu
Star: Natsuko Yamamoto, Kaoru Oda, Makoto Yoshino, Naomi Hagio

Black Crab

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★★★
“Let slip the slogs of war…”

Rapace seems to be turning into a female version of Ryan Reynolds. By which I mean, it seems that hardly a month goes past without a new Netflix Original coming out starring her. Ryan had 6 Underground, Red Notice and The Adam Project. Noomi has given us What Happened to Monday, The Trip and, now, this. Still, much as with Reynolds, I’m happy to see her working regularly, and while the results may be a bit variable, they’re usually worth a look. This is no different, though I’m not sure whether its story, driven by a (largely generic) war in the Eastern half of Europe, is helped or hurt by its timing. On the one hand, it gives this a certain “ripped from the headlines” topicality. On the other, I largely watch movies to escape everyday life, not have my nose rubbed in it.

Rapace plays Caroline Edh, who was split up from her daughter in the war’s early stages and has never been able to find her in the years since, as the conflict has turned her homeland into a meat-grinder. Now a soldier, she gets talked into a perilous mission that could turn the tide of the war, with the promise that her child is on the far end of it. She’ll be part of a group of six, skating across a treacherous frozen archipelago in enemy territory, to deliver a package – with the usual, stern “Don’t dare open it” warnings – to a research facility.

I do wonder why they sent a group: it’s not as if the package is large. One person, the quickest skater going undercover, could potentially slide beneath the radar, when a platoon of soldiers attracts more attention. I suspect it’s simply so the various perils, of thin ice, enemy combatants and unfriendly locals, can thin the herd of the operation. Some of them are so thinly-drawn, the makers might as well have slapped a red shirt on them, and been done with it. However, it’s still an impressively filmed, brutal slog of a journey, across a hellish landscape, which will have you reaching for a warm blanket and cup of cocoa. This likely reaches its peak when the group stumble into an ice graveyard: it’s quite the imagery.

We are, of course, here for Rapace, who learned to skate and broke her nose during filming. Despite one of the ugliest hair-styles in her filmography, her performance, along with the visuals, keep things adequately interesting, when the plot and supporting characters often fail to do so. In particular, the last half-hour (though it runs 114 minutes, so there’s quite a lot before that point) is almost entirely predictable, with the big twist actually weakening the lead character, by making Edh seem too gullible for her own good. Consequently, the subsequent redemption feels a bit too much of an uphill struggle. And even a novice like me knows that skating uphill is a tough ask…

Dir: Adam Berg
Star: Noomi Rapace, Jakob Oftebro, Dar Salim, Ardalan Esmaili

Banshee

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★★
“Blows a cylinder”

This one is slightly unusual among action-heroine films, in that it was both written and directed by women: Kirsten Elms and Kari Skogland respectively. Unfortunately, it’s not exactly an advert for their gender; after a brisk start, it falls apart, and becomes a ridiculously implausible movie, in a completely different genre from where it started. That’s a real pity, because where it started, had a lot more potential than where it ends up. It begins with Sage Rion (Manning), a young but highly-talented thief, taking a bet with her partner, as to who can boost a classic car quickest. She picks a 1966 Dodge Challenger, but inadvertently leaves her ID at the scene of the crime.

Back at her house, she finds a note telling Sage to return the car, or the owner will kill her partner, whom he has kidnapped. She does, even though this puts her in deep water with her employer, for having taken and returned the Dodge in defiance of his orders. And this is where the script goes, not just off the road, but through the crash-barrier and down an embankment into a ravine. For Sage is the recipient of a severed head, and gets framed for the murder of her partner. This forces her on the run, taking shelter in the apartment of hooker friend Brenna (Williams) as the police hunt her. However, rookie cop Fitz (Lombardi) thinks there may be more to it than that. Sage hunts down the owner of the Dodge herself, discovering in the end he is a mad DJ serial killer, who kidnaps and tortures his female victims for the sounds they make, which he incorporates into his mixes.

You may want to read that sentence again. Slowly.

What, pray tell, was wrong with the fresh idea of a young, cocky girl car thief, that it was deemed necessary to apply all this sub-Se7en nonsense to it? It was doing perfectly fine as is. She’d been established as a solid character, with some endearing quirks – for instance, she won’t sleep with any man, unless he first volunteers to cook for her. It would have been interesting enough, to see how she’d handle dealing with her irritable and prone to violence boss. Instead, that angle gets all but discarded when the movie moves on to the “lunatic disk-jockey”. It briefly re-appears, only to be ended in a largely ridiculous method of closure.

The other elements of the film are banal and by the book. You have Fitz and his grizzled partner, who suspects the worst of Sage, for no particular reason (I mean, they could easily figure out the head was severed elsewhere?). And the serial killer is little more than a walking set of cliches, who kidnaps Brenna in order to get to Sage, because… Oh, I dunno. I’d largely lost the will to live by that point in proceedings. So much potential here, only for it to be so completely wasted.

Dir: Kari Skogland
Star: Taryn Manning, Romano Orzari, Michael Lombardi, Genelle Williams

Battered

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★
“Of unsound mind.”

My first surprise here was that this clocks in at a crisp 44 minutes. That’s an awkward length for any film: too short to be a feature, but most festivals that accept short films will balk at a submission of that length, when the time could instead be used to accept three x 15-minute entries [as someone who runs a festival, this is definitely a consideration]. Quite how this got distribution, I’m therefore not sure; but there it was, sitting on Amazon Prime. However, less than two minutes into the viewing experience, I found myself thanking my stars the running time was so brief. Because this is hamstrung by the worst audio I’ve seen on any film in several years. When even an envelope being opened sounds like a burst of automatic gunfire, you’ve got a problem, and there’s hardly a scene here where this aspect is not bad enough, as to be an unbearable distraction.

It is something of a shame, since it has at least the germ of a decent idea. Piper (Paris) is in an abusive relationship, one that ends up with her being sent to hospital. On her release, she joins a support group for similarly battered women, who share video diaries, as part of the healing process. However, revenge eventually becomes part of their therapeutic activities, taking out their anger on the men who abused them, and these prove viral successes. There is potential for exploration here, not least in the way social media can create and inflame a lynch mob mentality – with the potential for it to spill over into the physical world too. Of course, for that exploration to work, you’d firstly have to be able to tolerate dialogue which sounds like it was recorded either in a wind-tunnel or a diving chamber. Not helping matters: characters that might harbour dreams of some day developing and blossoming into shallow stereotypes. And that’s just the women. Do not get me started on the men.

Then there’s a philosophical argument to be had here. We can all agree it’s wrong for men to beat up women. But this movie seems to make the claim – without much in the way of counterpoints being made – that it’s perfectly fine for women to beat up men. Because social justice. Or #MeToo. Or something, it’s unclear. This could be a viable approach, even without coherent and explicit debate, if the film engaged the lizard brain, and made the violence justifiable, even on a visceral level. Yet it fails to do that either. Instead we get a number of scenes which frankly border on the exploitative, offering a dubious counterpoint to the female empowerment narrative being pushed. Ugly camerawork and performances that, at best, do little more than propel forward the story, are other aspects which left me underwhelmed. It also ends in an abrupt and unsatisfying manner, as if Leslie eventually realized this was going nowhere. Shame it took him 44 minutes to reach that point.

Dir: Lewis Leslie
Star: Mia Paris, Paula Marcenaro Solinger, Carly Jones, Heath C. Heine

Burn It All

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★★
“Ashes to asses.”

I will say, I did actually enjoy this rather more than the rating above indicates. For pure entertainment value, it’s a 3 to 3½-star entity, when watched as a brutal parody of new feminism. The problem is, I don’t think those involved with it were making a parody. As a serious statement about gender, it’s almost impossible to take seriously. Alexandra Nelson (Cotter) is at the end of her tether, when she gets a call that her long-estranged mother is dying. Driving home to pick up the body, she finds it being hustled out the back of the crematorium. Turns out to be part of an organ harvesting scheme, run by the local crime bosses. This gives Alex something to live for, and she begins a one-woman campaign to take down the perpetrators. But that’s a mission which will drag in her estranged sister, bikini barista Jenny (Gately), into peril as Alex’s targets respond to her actions.

There’s a decent idea here, and in stuntwoman Cotter, a lead actress capable of delivering the necessary brutality. The action is pretty good, with an impact in excess of the usual low-budget entries. The problem is a genuinely terrible script, with Alex going from suicidal to unstoppable avenging angel at the drop of a mother she hasn’t talked to in years. It also needs more background for her remarkable ass-kicking than a spell in basic training, in order to justify the ease with which she takes down multiple opponents, close to double her weight. But then, if they’d done that, then Alex’s lifetime Gold Level membership in the Victim Club would have been jeopardized; why submit to the patriarchy in every avenue of life, when you could just have beaten it up? Because the story needs her to be both victim and victor – an awkward contradiction it fails miserably to address. Though even this could have been worked around, if she’d let her actions do the talking.

However, Alex is a mouthy bitch, to put it mildly. No fight is complete, unless preceded by a lengthy debate with her male target, which inevitably ends in them getting angry at her speaking “truth to power”. All the men in this are sexist pigs. Every. Single. One. Even the toddler, or the random guy passing her car on the freeway. It’s a ludicrously shallow approach, which you know will be lacking in nuance from the moment someone unironically uses the word “libtard.” After repeated comparisons of guns to penises, hysterical laughter is the only credible reaction when Alex comes out with arguably the most supremely cheesy pseudo-feminist line of all time, snarling, “Anything you can do, I can do bleeding”. I’m sure there are viewers, likely those who live on Twitter and Reddit, who might believe this to be a documentary. Anyone with an ounce of sense though, may well wonder how much its heroine’s obvious hair-trigger caused, rather than solve, her many issues.

Dir: Brady Hall
Star: Elizabeth Cotter, Emily Gateley, Ryan Postell, Elena Flory-Barnes

Brides of Satan

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★½
“Cool poster though.”

It’s probably significant that the opening credits of the film talk about the bands and the whiskey company involved. Any mention of the actual actresses taking part, is relegated to a secondary sequence, 15 minutes into the film. That seems to indicate where the priorities lie: if you told me the whole thing was made up to get freebies and as a showcase for the director’s mates, I’d have no problem believing you. Another warning sign is the way every post-production visual trick you can imagine is thrown in there; this often indicates an attempt to paper over flaws in other areas. There’s no doubt the film is certainly trying. However, Bizarro simply tries far too hard, and it’s not long before it becomes simply trying on the viewer instead.

It’s the story of Mary (Robinson), who takes her fiance to the Dirty Bird strip-club as a treat, only for both to be kidnapped by a trio of Satanists, led by Sidney Zero (McMunn). They sacrifice him, towards their goal of summoning the a demon and she only barely escapes with her life. Mary is rescued from the side of the road by down-and-out Lenny Lester (Troyer), who has previously had encounters with the same trio. He trains her in the art of violence – both physical and mental – so that she can take revenge on Zero and her crew. It’s a pretty thin storyline, and with precious little depth there, or for any of the characters. This is why we end up watching extraordinarily shitty variety acts in lieu of anything particularly interesting.

It’s told in a series of chapters, another pretentious touch which annoyed me irrationally, far more than it should. But it’s only in the final chapter, which starts about three minutes before the end credits roll, that the promised revenge particularly shows up. Prior to that, Mary gets to test-drive her skills on a gang of street punks loosely affiliated with Sidney… and that’s about it. Instead, there’s a lot of sitting about, chatting, flashbacks, and the previously mentioned dreadful “alternative” entertainment. Indeed, much of this reeks of the side of alternative culture which is all “Look at meeee!”, in lieu of significant talent.

Even the sleaze is curiously front-loaded, with an opening sequence which drives home the grindhouse philosophy for which Bizarro is apparently aiming… before then all but forgetting it for the rest of the movie. When the demon does eventually show up, it is disposed of with such ease, it feels as if the makers realized they didn’t have the resources to deliver much more than a Halloween mask, and decided to write the whole thing off as quickly as possible. They should likely have extended that realization to the rest of the movie, as outside of a semi-decent performance from Troyer, this has nothing much to offer past an admirably punk attitude. It deserves an A for effort, and an F in just about every other area.

Dir: Joe Bizarro
Star: Mindy Robinson, Malice McMunn, John Troyer, Joanna Angel

Brutal

  By

★★★
“Certainly lives up to its title.”

No-one does low-budget hyperviolence like the Japanese. Whether it’s pseudo-snuff like Guinea Pig: Flower of Flesh and Blood, or more fantastical entries such as Mutant Girls Squad, there have likely been more memorable entries from that country than any other. Note my use of the word “memorable”, as distinct from “good”, since they aren’t the same. I’d be hard pushed to recommend this to anyone, unless I knew they were predisposed to microbudget horror of a particularly savage type. I probably won’t ever watch it again. But I have to say this: I will remember it. As will Chris, who came in for the denouement, and was literally jaw-dropped by what she saw. I’m not going to spoil it, so apologies if some of what follows is a little vague.

The film is divided into three sections, and after the first one, called “Man”, you’ll be wondering what the hell it’s doing here. For it is a look at the work of a male serial killer (Butch), who kidnaps and tortures women. That’s basically it, for twenty minutes, and the director believes in getting as up close and personal as possible here, with many of the shots being literally “in the face” of either perpetrator or victim. This certainly enhances the claustrophobic intensity, though I could have done without the shaky-cam attempt to establish its cinema verite credentials. “Do you understand what I’m doing?” he demands of his prisoners. Sadly, the correct answer of “No, because you’re a loony” is never given.

Things get more interesting and relevant in the second section, “Woman”, where the roles are reversed. An unnamed woman (Ayano) honey-traps men back to her room, where she kills them. She has a particular fondness for repeated and enthusiastic stabbings in the crotch, which had me shifting uncomfortably on my chair. She’s also rather more psychologically inclined, conversing with her victims, rather than interrogating them. Though eventually, she brings home someone (Nishina) who is aware of her murderous intentions, and is intent on stopping her. The result is a bloody battle – again, shot in close-up – which swings one way then the other, before our “heroine” [quotes rarely used more advisedly] eventually prevails.

This sets up the third and final act, probably inevitably titled “Man and Woman”, in which the two killers cross paths. She follows him to his flat, apparently aware of his tendencies – how is never made clear. Barely have they crossed the doorstep before battle is joined. And if you thought the previous fight was vicious… Hoo-boy. This ends in a double-whammy of revelations, which make sense in one way – they’re clearly perfect for each other – but count among the more batshit crazy things I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen some things. While it is somewhat poignant, we know so little about any of the people involved (how could we learn much, given it’s barely an hour between opening and closing credits), the emotional impact is limited. Brutal though? Definitely.

Dir: Takashi Hirose
Star: Butch, Ayano, Takashi Nishina, Katrina Grey

Bruised

  By

★★★★
“Packs a surprising punch.”

Halle Berry was born the same year I was. There is, however, just one of us that is capable of convincingly playing the role of a mixed martial artist. To give you another yardstick, the lead in this was originally going to go to Mrs. Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively (The Shallows and The Rhythm Section), who is more than 20 years younger than Berry. I will admit, Chris did raise one of her sardonic eyebrows at the scene where Halle’s character buys Tampax, and the idea of her having a six-year-old son is perhaps a bit of a stretch. But if you didn’t know the actress has been AARP-eligible for over five years, you’d simply never guess.

This is probably the best movie yet made about women’s combat sports, though that’s not exactly going up against strong competition. The script is probably the only weak element, never escaping the standard clichés; there are very few surprises in its 138 minutes. But just about every other aspect is excellent. The heroine is Jackie Justice (Berry), a former UFC fighter, whose promising career fell apart four years ago. She just lost her job as a cleaner, and is pretty much at rock-bottom. Her boyfriend/”manager”  Desi (Canto) takes Jackie to an underground match, where she is provoked into beating her opponent into a pulp. That gets the attention of a local promoter, who gives her one last shot, a bout against undefeated champion, Lucia “Lady Killer” Chavez (Valentina Shevchenko, the current UFC Women’s Flyweight Champion, whose fight face is genuinely scary!).

Of course, even to reach that point, she has to overcome the inevitable slew of obstacles. Desi’s domestic abuse, the doubts of her trainer, Buddhaken (Atim); and in particular, having her son Manny (Boyd) dumped on her, after the death of his father. Naturally, Jackie is able to rise above them all, and get her moment in the sun. Really, there’s only two possible outcomes – she wins or she doesn’t – and neither are exactly novel. Still, it’s all so earnest that you can’t help be pulled in. Berry sells the tropes with the conviction of her performance, and there are particularly good supporting roles from theatre veterans Atim, and Adriane Lenox as Jackie’s mother.

It’s worth pointing out that this is also Berry’s directorial debut, and it’s a very assured first feature. It never feels long, and about the only thread which felt superfluous was the romantic entanglement with her trainer. The resulting lesbisn canoodling seemed a bit gratuitous and out of sync with the gritty, down to earth feel from the rest of the movie. Fortunately, there are more than enough powerful and excellent scenes, and it’s very easy to get behind the heroine in her quest for redemption. Jackie is a character who comes with a lot of baggage, yet it all just makes her struggle seem all the more real. A shame this, Berry’s portrayal in particular, will likely be overlooked come the Oscars.

Dir: Halle Berry
Star: Halle Berry, Sheila Atim, Danny Boyd Jr, Adan Canto

Backstreet Justice

  By

★★½
“V.I. Boreshawski”

It’s difficult to put a finger on exactly what makes this so flat and uninteresting. The individual elements are fine – or, at least, don’t stand out as being particularly troublesome. However, the end product failed to hold my attention, particularly over the second half. It may be a case of the whole being considerably less than the sum of the parts, though if there was a single factor, I’d have to point at the story. This is probably too complicated for its own good, especially in a 90-minute movie: less would likely have been more.

Maybe it’s just the lead actress’s name, but as the tag-line above suggest, I was getting a distinct vibe of V.I. Warshawski from this. That film, starring Kathleen Turner, came out a few years previously, though wasn’t a big success. Still, there’s something similar here, with a female private eye who cracks wise, in a chilly Northern city (here, Pittsburgh; there, Chicago). The main difference is the heroine here, Keri Finnegan (Kozlowski), is burdened by the death of her father. He was a cop who died in the line of duty, but with a severely tarnished reputation, having apparently been on the take. This has hung over his daughter ever since.

As the film begins, she is on the hunt for a serial killer whom the local cops seem unable to catch – initially, it seems he may be a member of the force. However, it increasingly appears not to be some random psycho. Keri uncovers evidence suggesting it’s part of a plot to make the area undesirable; this will then drive down property prices, allowing a local speculator to come in and pick up a bargain. And this isn’t anything new. The evidence points to this kind of thing happening for a very long time – indeed, it appears increasingly like there may be a connection to her father’s death. Needless to say, there are a lot of people who have a very strong vested interest in keeping the past buried.

Kozlowski, best known for her role in Crocodile Dundee, does a decent job as Keri, and seems to embrace the physical aspects of the role, with a fair amount of running, jumping and mild to moderate fisticuffs. The rest of the cast aren’t bad either, though few of them escape the obvious characters typically present in such things. I just didn’t find myself caring enough (read: at all) about what was happening. There wasn’t much of a sense of threat, despite a heroine who has to engage in some Perils of Pauline-esque narrow escapes, e.g. lobbing an explosive device out of the window, just before the timer reached zero. I think it may be that the nature of the threat is kept nebulous and hidden for too long. But the time it became concrete, it provoked little more than a shrug of my shoulders, and I then went back to surfing idly on my phone. It’s all far too forgettable.

Dir: Chris McIntyre
Star: Linda Kozlowski, Paul Sorvino, Hector Elizondo, John Shea

Boundary Crossed, by Melissa F. Olson

  By

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

After returning from her time in the Middle East with the military, during which she almost died, Allison Luther – now going by her army nickname of Lex – has difficulty readjusting to civilian life. She’s working nights at a convenience store in Boulder, Colorado, and still troubled by her experiences over there. Things change dramatically, when two low-lives with a baby enter the store, for Lex recognizes the child as her niece, Charlie. The resulting confrontation is highly strange, and opens the door for Lex to an utterly different life. In this world, vampires and witches exist, largely unknown to normals, with their struggle for power going on beneath the surface.

It turns out Lex is a powerful “boundary witch”, one who can see and – with training – manipulate the energy of life and death. Her near-death experience had awakened that ability. Meanwhile, her niece is a “null”, someone whose presence suppresses the magical talents of of both witches and vampires. It’s a very valuable talent, and why Charlie had become the target of a pair of vampires. But who were they working for, and what would they have done with her? Seeking protection for Charlie, Lex agrees to work for Boulder’s head vampire, Itachi, who operates out of a coffee-shop. This puts her in a rather odd place, as a witch working for a vamp – and her skill-set doesn’t make her any friends either.

What we have here is fairly standard Urban Fantasy, with the obligatory hawt vampire, Quinn, both attracted to and worried about the heroine, while she has to learn to come to terms with her equally obligatory powers. However, if there’s nothing particularly new here, it is still executed reasonably well. While there’s clearly a lot of scope in the concept, the author doesn’t over-reach herself by trying to cram too much in. Especially in a first volume where there’s always going to be a fair degree of set-up and exposition anyway, it’s wise to focus on Lex and her desire to make sure Charlie is kept from danger. There is stuff around the outside which does feel a bit superfluous – at least in this first volume. Examples include her feelings for Charlie’s father, and a dead sister turning up as a ghost. Yet they never interfere too badly with the main plot, which is solid and keeps moving forward.

Being a former soldier, Lex certainly knows how to handle herself, and is willing to mix it up in defense of Charlie, even with vampires whose state gives them enhanced strength and speed. Though as the book proceeds, her metaphysical skills become more relevant than her physical ones, and they’re a bit less exciting to read about. For instance, “pressing”  – her mind-control talent – is not exactly cinematic, and is a tad convenient, truth be told. Not a bad read, all told, though Olson will need to be careful her heroine doesn’t end up becoming obnoxiously over-powered in future volumes.

Author: Melissa F. Olson
Publisher: 47North, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 5 in the Boundary Magic series.