Tag: b

Black Widow

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★★★★
“The name’s Widow. Black Widow…”

I said it in my review of Captain Marvel, but it probably bears repeating here. I’m basically completely unfamiliar with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Avengers: Infinity War? It may have become the biggest film in cinema history, but I’ve never seen it, and that’s par for the course. Of the 13 MCU films released since the beginning of 2015, I have watched just three. So if this required any prior knowledge, or information not present in the actual movie, I was going to be hosed. Another concern coming in, stemmed from one of those three movies: Captain Marvel. It was the epitome of the dumb comic-book film, and more a chore than a pleasure.

This had been long-delayed too, and that’s never a good sign, though it’s hard to blame the makers in this case. It was originally slated for release in May 2020, but of course, COVID-19 scuppered that, causing several reschedulings. The split release, simultaneously coming out in theatres and on streaming service Disney+, also came as a bit of a red flag. That’s because I’ve found films which debuted on streaming have largely been underwhelming. From Mulan through Wonder Woman 1984, as well as non-GWG entries like Godzilla vs. Kong and Mortal Kombat, the results haven’t impressed me. Could Black Widow buck the trend and deliver the summer box-office blockbuster which never happened last year? Well, if you counted the stars at the top, you’ll probably have worked out that it did, more or less avoiding the potential pitfalls. 

However, it has also become the first four-star film not to get our seal of approval. Put simply, while it delivered 2+ hours of very solid entertainment, I have no interest in seeing it again. To me, that is a key element in awarding a seal; the film must be one capable of getting (and standing up to) repeat viewings. This didn’t – though again, I want to stress I’d be more than happy to go see the future installments, which seem highly likely to follow. I think it was mostly a lack of emotional involvement which capped my appreciation for it. While a fine, well-crafted spectacle, that does work as a stand-alone film, I still felt like I had arrived in the middle of the show. For example, a relatively brief explanation of her origins in a nineties Russian sleeper cell is followed by “21 years later,” and that’s an awful lot of water under the bridge.

Clearly, a lot of significant stuff had happened in that time. Piecing the parts together, it appears the two “sisters” from the sleeper cell, Natasha Romanoff (Johansson) and Yelena Belova (Pugh), became part of the “Red Room” program to create super-soldiers. Natasha defected back to the West to become part of SHIELD, and killed Dreykov, the man in charge. But Yelena remained in the system, until an encounter with a gas that undid her mind-control. She sent a batch of the gas to Natasha, which brought her into the sights of Dreykov, who was not so dead as previously assumed. He is very keen to get the antidote to his programming back under control, but Natasha and Yelena decide to take the fight to him instead. However, they need to start by finding out the Red Room’s location, which will involve an awkward “family re-union” with their pseudo-Mom (Weisz) and crypto-Dad (Harbour).

I was talking to Dieter about the film, which he had already seen (in the cinema, the mad, impetuous man!). He said it resembled “a classical spy-ploitation movie, like Bond movies might look today, if there hasn’t been that strong change in style and towards more realism with the Craig era.” That raised an eyebrow for me, and certainly didn’t seem a typical Marvel film approach. But having now seen it myself, I can definitely see where that’s coming from. In particular, I felt that Dreykov (played by British heavy Ray Winstone) would have fitted right in as a villain from that ‘classic Bond’ era. His lair makes the one inside a volcano from You Only Live Twice look like a doll’s house, and he even makes the classic, “Now you are helpless in my power, let me over-explain things to you” mistake. Notably, there’s a scene early on where Natasha is watching Moonraker on her lap-top, so I very much suspect none of this is by accident.

A couple of other elements also seem to echo Bond. Natasha has a somewhat Q-like “fixer”, Mason (O-T Fagbenle), who keep her supplied and gets irritated by her more outrageous demands. Dreykov has a monstrous and hyperviolent sidekick; despite her gender, she’s not unlike Jaws, who appears in the Moonraker clip mentioned above.  Like him, she is won over to the side of good by kindness. There’s also a dry humour present, which does hark back to the days of Roger Moore. Much of this comes from Harbour’s character, but Yelena also has a self-effacing wit. For example, she rags on Natasha about her fight poses, though inevitably, subsequently finds herself in the same posture. After the dour Captain Marvel, a little appreciation of the underlying silliness which is embodied by the comic-book genre, goes a surprisingly long way.

Indeed, I would not mind if, as the post-credit scene implies, Yelena becomes Black Widow going forward. [Though that scene was all but entirely lost on me, I believe a change is needed, due to things which happened in films I haven’t watched… He said vaguely!] Pugh, whom we enjoyed seeing on this site in Fighting With My Family, brings a no-nonsense approach to her character that I really liked. Johannson may, despite her complaints, have been getting paid the big bucks here, but I’d rather see Pugh step into the PVC body-suit going forward. Admittedly, I’d also rather see more genuine stunt-work and less obvious CGI. While it’s understandable at some points, e.g. the climax, there were times where it felt like a character couldn’t walk down a corridor without it being rendered against a green screen. I think I may be shouting at clouds in this department, however…

All told though, it’s the first film I’ve seen in a long time which made me at least somewhat sorry I hadn’t seen it at the movies. It has been about 20 months since my last cinema outing, and I was beginning to wonder if I’d ever again miss the theatrical experience. Black Widow has proven otherwise, so we’ll see if this does translate into an actual movie-going experience down the road.

Dir: Cate Shortland
Star: Scarlett Johansson, Florence Pugh, Rachel Weisz, David Harbour

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The Bag Girls

  By

★★
“From bag to worse.”

Firstly, the cast names listed below are copied verbatim from the movie. I can only presume that “Megan Thee Stallion” was unavailable, but seeing those names pop up in the opening credits does make it difficult to take a film seriously. It’s like you’re watching little children playing dress-up, and a whole level of recursive nonsense, with the actors playing roles, apparently playing roles in the their “real” lives. In other news: kids, get off my damn lawn.

The core pair here are Nola (Ms. The Doll) and Dee (Ms. The Boss. Or Maybe Ms. Love the Boss? Who knows). The former is a stripper, the latter her best friend, who catches her husband cheating, only to be punted to the kerb in favour of the mistress. To extract revenge. the pair recruit Daisy (James) and Crystal (Mi’chelle) and rob the husband. Discovering that crime represents an easier source of income than, say, working for a living, they continue their efforts, gradually working their way up to bigger scores. Eventually, they get a tip-off about a big drug-buy about to go down, but are under strict instructions to take only the cash, and leave the dope. Naturally, Daisy doesn’t listen, and the Cuban owners of the drugs are very keen to retrieve their product.

There’s nothing here you haven’t seen in better films. The film-makers even have their characters openly acknowledge some of the most obvious inspirations at one point or other. This is either extremely brave or perilously reckless, since low-budget movies probably don’t want to be encouraging comparisons with their big siblings:
– What the fuck you think this is, Set It Off, Part II?
– Bitch, this ain’t no motherfucking movie.
Well, actually – yes, it is. Even the title of the film is a result of them referring to each other during their robberies, by designer handbag brands: “We can call each other code names like colors, like Ms. Pink, Ms. Yellow, like they did in Reservoir Dogs, the Quentin Tarantino movie.” I don’t know whether or not to be amused that the writer felt the need to explain who made Reservoir Dogs. But I am amused that the reaction to the suggestion is “Fuck Quentin Tarantino!” Truly a sentiment all right-thinking people can get behind, and I’m not ashamed to say that line was worth an extra half-star.

There’s not much sense of progression here, and far too much time spent on the trappings of lifestyle e.g. a Vegas trip that looks like nothing so much as a bad rap music video, rather than giving the characters or the scenario real substance. There’s the inevitable tension between the members of the gang, before the equally inevitable shootout with the Cubans. What there is not, is any sense of plausibility; I don’t know about you, but I’m fairly sure that, unlike Dee’s husband, I’d recognize my own wife if she tried to rob me, mask or not. Hopefully, I’ll never get to test that theory.

Dir: Wil Lewis
Star: Crystal the Doll, LA Love the Boss, Samantha “3D Na’Tee” James, Carmen Mi’chelle

Bad Girl Mako

  By

★★½
“‘Slightly naughty young lady Mako’ – more accurate, less catchy.”

This was among the very last of the “pinky violence” films made by the Nikkatsu studio. Their popularity had been waning, and the company, under its president Takashi Itamochi, opted to move in a different direction. They began making what would be known as “roman porno”, leaving the action field open for their rivals at Toei, who picked up Meiko Kaji after her “defection” from Nikkatsu where she had made the Stray Cat Rock series.

I mention all the above, largely because it’s a hundred or so less words I have to write about this, which is one of the more forgettable of their “bad girl” films. While made competently enough, you sense that the heart of the director, making his feature debut, wasn’t particular in it, and title actress Natsu is a poor substitute for Kaji. It begins briskly enough, Mako and her girl gang pals beating up a guy at a bowling alley after he welches on a bet. While visiting a disco, she meets and pretends to fall for Hideo (Okazaki), in what’s really the set-up for a robbery. However, it turns out he has a gang of his own, and thus begins an escalating conflict.

Things are exacerbated by Mako’s brother, Tanabe (Fuji), being a member of the local Yakuza clan, the Yasuoka-Gumi – y’know, the real criminals in town. So for example, after Hideo gets a knife in his leg, he and his mates pay a visit to a Yasuoka-Gumi brothel, and liberate some of their workers. But Mako is also falling for Hideo, a relationship which might as well be wearing a neon sign flashing “doomed”, because he continues to incur the wrath of her brother and the Yakuza bosses. If you manage to predict that the film will end on a close-up of Mako’s face, until a single tear rolls down her cheek, give yourself two points.

It’s a rare moment of artistry in what is, by and large, a rather pedestrian production. From our viewpoint, it needed to concentrate more on Mako, and less on the tit-for-tat shenanigans between Tanabe and Hideo. While she kicks off that storyline, she then largely gets sidelined for much of the picture, until the deaths of various characters (of both sexes) bring her back into play for the final 15-20 minutes. In her absence, the film doesn’t have much to offer, except for low-level thugs snarling at each other, though some of the seventies style on view, in both music and fashion, is not unamusing.

I saw a review of this which said it was, “Obviously a political allegory about the tragic end of the Japanese student movement in the 60s.” Ah. That explains a lot. It being a topic about which I know precious little and care considerably less, would likely go a long way towards determining why this one left me largely underwhelmed.

Dir: Koretsugu Kurahara
Star: Junko Natsu. Jiro Okazaki, Tatsuya Fuji, Joe Shishido

Braid

  By

★★½
“Uncomfortably numb”

For most films. I’ve usually got a fairly good idea of what is likely to be the final review grade, inside about 30 minutes. It may drift half a star up or down, but it’s relatively rare for there to be more variation than that. This would be one such case, which started off as underwhelming, went through a brief surge of “Oh, yeah – I get it!” in the middle, before returning to the mediocrity from whence it came. At various points, this could have been anywhere between ★½ and (although briefly) ★★★★. Well done, I guess?

It’s the story of two young women who are drug dealers: Petula (Waterhouse) and Tilda (Hay), though the former’s name is pronounced as “PET-chu-la” rather than “Pe-CHU-la. Which irritated me, for some reason. Anyway, a police raid leaves them eighty grand in the hole to their supplier. To fix this little issue, they resolve to visit and rob a strange little friend from their childhood, Daphne (Brewer). After the death of her parents, this thoroughly weird girl lives in a decrepit old mansion where there is, apparently, a safe full of cash, hidden somewhere on the property. Finding it will require Tilda and Petula to play along with Daphne’s very strange games of “Let’s pretend”. These are carried forward from their childhood days together, and the dealers will have to become Daphne’s child and a visiting doctor respectively.

As things progress, we gradually discover more about the trio’s earlier relationship. During that time, Daphne fell from a tree-house, perhaps a factor in her current idiosyncrasies, shall we say. But it also slowly becomes apparent that her guests may not be entirely stable either, especially after a cop (Cohen) comes calling at the house in search of them. The question of who is using who becomes increasingly blurred, and Daphne’s unbreakable house rules also start to look very ominous:  everyone must play, no outsiders are allowed, and nobody leaves. This is a world in which everything is uncertain, both for the characters and the viewer, and the dilapidated nature of the property reflects its owner’s grip on sanity.

At its worst, this is self-indulgent nonsense, in near-perpetual danger of vanishing up its own tree-house. At its best – probably the sequence backed by “Largo al factotum” from The Barber of Seville – it showcases some gorgeous cinematography and captures a glimpse into what experiencing being insane might feel like. The balance, unfortunately, is tilted toward the former, and it doesn’t help that there’s hardly a sympathetic angle to be found for any of the characters. I get the feeling there’s some deep symbolism intended here, such as each of the women being intended to represent aspects of a single personality, i.e. id, ego and superego. There may in reality be three girls, one or even none: perhaps the entire world in a fabrication of Daphne’s young mind after her accident. I don’t know. But, guess what? I find it kinda hard to care either.

Dir: Mitzi Peirone
Star: Madeline Brewer,  Imogen Waterhouse, Sarah Hay, Scott Cohen

Bad Policewoman

  By

★★★
“School’s out… for ever.”

Yang Yang (Yang) is an impetuous young policewoman, whose career is on thin ice after shooting the target of what was supposed to be a surveillance operation. Her superior officer – who also happens to be her uncle – is forced to re-assign her, and sends Yang to operate undercover as a student in a high school from which girls have been going missing. The leading suspect is an arrogant pupil who has recently been accused of sexually assaulting a classmate. Teacher Wu Xie (Zhou) is a witness in the case, so Yang is also tasked with making sure he isn’t pressured into changing his statement. Fitting in is going to be part of the problem for Yang – despite the help of Molly (Li), who takes the “new girl” under her wing.

The idea of cops being sent undercover to school is hardly a new one, best known in the West through 21 Jump Street. Originally a TV series starring Johnny Depp, this was recently revived as a movie franchise, with a lighter tone. However, in much of the East, the touchstone is 1991’s Fight Back to School, with Stephen Chow as the policeman. It became Hong Kong’s all-time top-grossing film to that point, and foreshadows the comedic approach of the Hollywood movie. Those are some enormous boots to fill, and it’s hardly any kind of surprise that Yang is no Stephen Chow in terms of comedic persona or timing.

That said, it isn’t too bad. The lead actress actually looks like she could still be at school, which is an immediate leg-up over the thirty-something Channing Tatum, who was the least convincing high-school student since Olivia Newton-John. Even her “bad policewoman” attitude isn’t entirely inappropriate, though the film does have an unevenness of tone which is quite frequently awkward. The juxtaposition of a jokey approach with the sexual assault charges has not travelled well to the West [and while I’m at it, why is this apparently Chinese film set in Singapore?]

The action is a bit up and down, too. The best bit is a lighting-fast fight between Yang and someone out to ensure Wu doesn’t make it to court. This contains a sequence where they’re repeatedly throwing the same knife back and forth, snatching it out of the air before returning it in the opposite direction. It’s like a pointy version of badminton, up until the moment where Yang, apparently bored with the whole thing, catches the blade in her teeth. The rest isn’t on the same level, and proceeds in almost exactly the way you would expect. For example, Yang gradually falls for Wu, creating a scandal at the school, and which brings her into conflict with another student who has a pre-existing crush. However, after a run of really bad movies on Amazon Prime, I was delighted to latch onto something capable of reaching the dizzy heights of artistic competence. Sometimes, you just have to take what you can get.

Dir: Kai Jiang
Star: Yang Zou, Zhuo Wen, Mengmeng Li, Naisen Hou
a.k.a. Bad Cop

The Barista’s Guide To Espionage, by Dave Sinclair

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

Eva Destruction – and, yes, that is the legal name of the character – is an Australian expat who owns a coffee shop in Central London. But when we first meet her, she is making a hasty exit off a rapidly-exploding tropical island, somewhere in the Pacific. How she gets from point A to B, is the saga which unfolds in flashback over the course of this book, as she tells her history to the disbelieving American navy officers who rescue her off the island.

The key player in that, and Eva’s transformation from barista to secret agent, is her boyfriend Harry. For he actually turns out to be Horatio Lancing, a cross between Elon Musk and Edward Snowden, a hi-tech idealist with unlimited resources and an agenda. Initially, it’s apparently benign: applying pressure to governments around the world to “do the right thing” and act on behalf of the people they supposedly represent. But Eva eventually finds out, his end-game is considerably less altruistic. Due to her connection to Harry, she comes to the attention of the British intelligence services, who recruit and train Eva through unrepentant chauvinist Charles Bishop, in an effort to use their relationship to help stop Harry. And they’re not the only ones out to do so.

The resulting adventure globe-trots from London to Iceland and Prague, before ending on Harry’s secret island lair. By the end, Eva proves to be as capable of whipping up improvised munitions as a double-shot latte, even if her prowess with firearms allegedly comes mostly from the somewhat unlikely source of Virtua Cop II. She is, unquestionably, very much an archetypal Aussie girl, with all that implies – both good and bad. She’s brash to a fault, and can curse like a sailor, but is fiercely loyal to her friends. Interestingly, that applies even to Harry, with whom she stays well past the point I think I’d have noped out of there. She also suffers some angst, when Eva realizes she has abandoned all her feminist ideals for a jet-setting lifestyle and a castle, effectively becoming “an exceptionally high-priced hooker.”

It’s all entertaining enough, if thoroughly disposable and largely implausible, with the important people miraculously surviving against all odds. It is the kind of plot which is probably impossible to read with any seriousness, so it’s fortunate that the author and his heroine embrace this. Even if that does make it difficult to care, when it’s all being taken very lightly by everyone involved. Sinclair does have a good way with action, both in a hellacious chase through Prague, and the eventual, very Bond-like climax on the island. At least the relationship between Eva and Harry does go some way to justifying the “Before I kill you, let me tell you my entire plan” trope. I probably won’t be actively seeking out subsequent volumes. But I’ll tell you this: I wouldn’t mind a movie adaptation either.

Author: Dave Sinclair
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 4 in the Eva Destruction series.

Bit

  By

★★★½
“The Lost Girls”

There are times when I am bracing myself, going into a movie. Here’s the synopsis for this one: “A transgender teenage girl on summer vacation in Los Angeles fights to survive after she falls in with four queer feminist vampires, who try to rid the city’s streets of predatory men.” Given my long-standing aversion to message movies, this seemed like 90 minutes of my worst nightmare. What had I let myself in for? But this proved to be surprisingly accessible – even for those of us who are neither transgender nor queer, and are enrolled in the Camille Paglia school of feminism.

It reminded me of We Are The Night, about a similar group of female “party vampires” who embrace a newcomer to their ranks. Though as the tagline above suggests, I guess both movies owe a large debt to The Lost Boys. To be honest, if I hadn’t read the synopsis, I wouldn’t know the heroine, Laurel (Maines) is intended to be transgender. There is discussion of some previous trauma before she leaves home after graduating, but it’s never her defining characteristic. Her new pals are relentlessly feminist, to the point of misanthropic. According to their leader, Duke (Hopper), the prime directive is: “You never, ever turn a man. Men can’t handle power. They have it already, and look what they’ve done with it.”  Yet her own handling of power is highly questionable: she admits to using it for “indiscriminate” killing, and compares their group to terrorists. By the end, Laurel is openly challenging that unbreakable rule – as she should.

Their two performance are the glue which holds this together, in particular as it depicts the slowly developing conflict between Laurel and Duke. The script also plays a part, revealing the truth about Duke’s origins and powers – and the more we learn, the more questionable the leader becomes. Yet there are also moments of dry humour, which stop this from becoming a grim fairy tale. For instance, Duke telling Laurel, “The first rule of Bite Club…” When this triggers little more than a derisive snort from the new recruit, one of her lieutenants pipes up, dead-panning, “Juggalos was taken.” This kind of thing fits in: I suspect in such a scenario, the vampires would not take themselves entirely seriously.

The flaws tend to be when the film does occasionally topple over into self-importance. The worst offender is probably Vlad, the master of their species. While the film opens with some snarky comments about Twilight, his performance is far more hammy than anything delivered in that franchise. There’s a badly underdeveloped plot about vampire-hunters, which is little more than “Boys are stupid”. I could also have done without a soundtrack which appears to be the writer-director’s iPhone on random, or the gratuitous Death Valley Girls concert [I can only presume they’re pals of his, given some free publicity in the movie]. All told though, this was considerably better than my prejudices would have had me believe going in. The lesson here appears to be, don’t judge a film by its synopsis.

Dir: Brad Michael Elmore
Star: Nicole Maines, Diana Hopper, Zolee Griggs, James Paxton

Beyond Fear

  By

★★
“Carry on camping.”

Former WWF star Lesseos, where she was known as the Fabulous Mimi, carved out a small career for herself in low-budget action films, mostly in the mid-nineties. Though the ones we’ve covered before, such as Double Duty and Pushed to the Limit, aren’t exactly classics. This, unfortunately, continues that trend, with far too much sitting around campfires, and not enough action. Put another way, it’s a movie which is in tents, instead of intense. [Thank you, I’ll be here all week…] Lesseos plays wilderness guide and former mixed martial-arts fighter Tipper Taylor, who has been contracted to take a bunch of noobs out for a few days of camping. Unfortunately, one of them, Vince (Axelrod), happens to witness and videotape a murder at a campsite. The two perpetrators need to recover the incriminating footage, and set about stalking the party through the wilderness, abducting Vince in an effort to get him to hand over the cassette.

This eventually leads to what is largely the film’s sole redeeming feature: a fairly lengthy and not badly-staged rural brawl between Tipper and Boar (Bower), the most brutal of the villains. The key word, unfortunately, is “eventually”. Because, to reach that point, you have to sit through well over an hour of the most mind-numbing chit-chat you could possibly come up with. It feels as if the original script was some kind of ensemble relationship piece, onto which the makers decided at the last moment to bolt on some fisticuffs. This feels most obvious during our first exposure to the heroine’s talents, in a thoroughly clunky scene where she literally pulls over to try and break up a fight between two vagrants. Instead, everyone is given a deeply uninteresting back-story. For example, Vince and his wife are lottery winners, now working through problems with their marriage, and Tipper is feeling guilty over her final MMA fight, which left her best friend paralyzed.

None of which has anything to do with the main plot, and so can entirely be ignored. Though I can’t over-stress just how much of this nonsense there is. If you’re looking for an open-air soap-opera, this should be your jam. Which is a bit of a shame, as Lesseos brings an easy, likable charm to Tipper, making her someone for whom you want to root. Her fighting style is stiff –  though I should clarify, this is intended in the pro wrestling sense, meaning hard-hitting, It’s clear that’s where her background lies, with moves like drop-kicks not typically being part of the martial arts armoury! The problems here lie elsewhere, with a plot which just doesn’t foreground its action elements, never manages to set up Boar and his ally as any kind of credible threat, and all but entirely fails to explain why Vince never bothers telling anyone – least of all the authorities – about the snuff movie he recorded. Though I must confess to having laughed at the line in the trailer, “Mimi believes in women’s rights… lefts and uppercuts,” it’s all remarkably poorly thought-out, and I couldn’t help feeling that Mimi deserves better.

Dir: Robert F. Lyons
Star: Mimi Lesseos, Verrel Reed, Robert Axelrod, Wayne Bower

Becky

  By

★★★½
“Dear diary: my teen angst bullshit has a body count.”

Becky (Wilson) is the quintessential troubled teenager. Since her mother died, she has become increasingly estranged from her father, Jeff (McHale, replacing the original choice, Simon Pegg, who had to drop out due to scheduling conflicts), not least because of his new girlfriend, Kayla. Dad arranges a weekend away for everyone at the family cabin to try and repair things. However, relationship problems rapidly become the least of everyone’s concerns. For a quartet of escaped Aryan Brotherhood convicts, led by Dominick (James, going completely and effectively against type), have turned up, seeking a key they had hid on the property. Not too happy to find an inter-racial family, they capture everyone except Becky, who had stormed off in one of her huffs.

But hell hath no fury like a pissed-off teenage girl. Especially once Dominick starts torturing her father, the one person about whom Becky truly cares. Naturally, you do need to be able to accept that a 13-year-old – even one as unquestionably highly-motivated and vindictive as Becky – can take out hardened criminals, especially largely without the equalizer of a firearm. Yet the script does a fairly good job of overcoming this, setting up scenarios that allow her to use the tools at hand to her advantage. It helps some of her adversaries aren’t exactly the sharpest tools in the box, stupidity being a significant factor in their deaths by impalement and outboard motor.

The script also does a good job with villains Dominick and the 7-foot tall Apex (former WWE wrestler Maillet), who are respectively smarter and given greater depth than the bad guys usually receive in this kind of film. The latter, in particular, gets more of a character arc than anyone else bar Becky, becoming a surprisingly sympathetic character for a neo-Nazi. This development definitely helps the movie, when Becky is not extracting her furious, bloody vengeance [For instance, we could have done without the flashbacks to Becky playing the ukulele for her terminally ill mother. No, really]. Though it’s Dominick who provides the film’s most insanely hardcore moment, involving a scissors and an eyeball.

However, there is a fatal mis-step by having the movie’s climax take place after dark. This leaves the audience peering into the gloom, trying to figure out what’s going on. I’m still not sure what was being pulled behind the ATV on which Becky rides into her final battle. Going by its effect, I’m guessing at some kind of industrial strength earth-tilling equipment… This shadowy coyness is at odds with the in-your-face energy the film had shown up to that point, and which had it contending for a spot in Top 10, of any genre, for 2020. In the end, it probably falls just short, yet is still an enjoyable slice of brutal, hormonal savagery. As the end credits rolled, my mind drifted off to visions of a Hanna vs. Becky crossover story. Hey, we can all dream, can’t we?

Dir: Jonathan Milott, Cary Murnion
Star: Lulu Wilson, Kevin James, Joel McHale, Robert Maillet

By Night’s End

  By

★★★
“Bad decisions = poor consequences.”

There are lessons to be learned here. In particular: should you gun down a home invader in the middle of the night… just call the cops. Even if they have offered you ten thousand dollars to let them walk away, immediately before their untimely demise… just call the cops. Of course, Heather (Rose) and Kurt (Yue) have issues, which make their decision to do otherwise understandable, if not wise. They’re teetering on the edge of financial carnage, and figure that if the intruder was willing to pay them that much, whatever he was after in their house has got to be worth a lot more. Therefore, they postpone alerting the authorities for a bit, choosing to look for the target of the search.

Have these people never seen Shallow Grave? Do they not know that when valuable property falls into your lap in shady circumstances, its real owner inevitably comes looking for it. And that’s exactly what happens here. Polite, hat-wearing villain Moody (Milligan) soon shows up to establish his property rights, and when the couple finally get round to calling the police, the poor officer who turns up simply doubles the quantity of corpses with which Heather and Kurt have to deal. There’s only one way to get through the night, and that path goes through Moody. Fortunately, there is some good news: it turns out Heather used to be in the military, and still has the skills. Bad news: she’s on shaky emotional turf, due to her PTSD, among other things.

This is on most solid turf when it’s in motion. Rose is a stunt-woman, and gets a number of opportunities to put those skills into good use. There’s one particularly good brawl through the house, where she leaves a literal dent in the wall when her body crashes into it, and it’ll make a similarly lasting impression on the viewer. The film is less successful when it’s digging for emotional depth. For example, knowing they recently lost a young child is probably enough. We don’t really need to see the husband wife and staring at one of their drawings, or clutching a toy, respectively: it’s way too obvious. Similarly, the details of precisely why Heather has PTSD are superfluous, and add little or nothing.

Indeed, they may be counter-productive, as they slow the film down, at just the point when it probably needs to be accelerating towards a final confrontation. It does get there, and proves adequately satisfying; it just feels like some opportunities were left on the table to do more. The movie does a decent job of reversing the obvious roles in the marriage, and also of making its single location work for it, rather than seeming a limitation. The film even takes place at Christmas, which could even be considered a small-scale homage to Die Hard, especially when Rose is roaming the house, trying to stay out of the reach of Moody and his men. It’s nowhere near as good, of course. Then again, very few movies are – so no blame should be attached for that!

Dir: Walker Whited
Star: Michelle Rose, Kurt Yue, Michael Aaron Milligan, Carlos Aviles