Tag: c

Carnage Park

  By

★★½
“Goes off the rails, and not in a good way.”

There’s a very strong start here, and this makes the way it implodes at the end all the more disappointing. The film certainly hits the ground running. It’s 1978 in rural California, and ‘Scorpion’ Joe Clay (Hébert) is fleeing from the scene of a botched bank robbery. His wounded partner in crime is bleeding out in the back seat, and there’s a hostage, bank customer Vivian Fontaine (Bell), in the trunk. But when he pulls off the road to sort things out, freeing Vivian so she can help, we discover there are much worse things in the desert than scorpions. For Joe quickly gets his head blown apart. 

This is the work of completely insane Vietnam vet, former sniper Wyatt Moss (Healy). He lures people off the road, torturing and killing them, because… Well, because he’s a completely insane Vietnam vet. I will not be taking any further questions on the topic at this point. He has the tacit collusion of his brother (Ruck), the local sheriff, though even he has just about had enough of covering up for Wyatt’s madness. Vivian does manage initially to get the jump on the predator. However, she commits the fatal mistake, a common one in horror movies, of not making sure the killer is really dead. And guess what? He is not, leading to an extended chase sequence through the mines on the remote property. 

Which is where the problems occur. Keating mistakenly thinks that having things unfold in near pitch-darkness, save for the occasional flash from a muzzle, somehow enhances proceedings. He is incorrect in this case. Not least because it goes to such an extreme, and for so long, the only evidence I had that my TV wasn’t broken, was the subtitles I had fortuitously left on from the previous movie. When it literally emerges, blinking, back into the light, you get a couple of captions in lieu of a climax, before the end credits roll. I am in no way exaggerating, when I say that it ranks among the worst endings I’ve endured, over the more than twenty years I have been running this site. 

Although the early going is certainly derivative, most obviously of Quentin Tarantino, there’s no shortage of energy and surprises as we move through proceedings. We discover, for example, that Vivian is already having a bad day, and this may be a factor in her eventually having had enough, and fighting back. She staggers through the hellish landscape, encountering other victims – both alive and dead – trying to find a way out or help. Yet she ends up self-sabotaging these hopes, in the most unfortunate of fashions, leaving her entirely on her own. Such a shame the film decides not to give its heroine the finale she deserves, instead burying both it and Vivian in the darkness of an underground mine, and offering no satisfactory resolution to speak of.

Dir: Mickey Keating
Star: Ashley Bell, Pat Healy, James Landry Hébert, Alan Ruck

Circle of Bones

  By

★★½
“More of a semi-circle, really”

For whatever reason, I had a strong sense of deja vu while watching this, but I’ve been unable to track down any record of me having written it up. I may be confusing it with Blood Hunters: Rise of the Hybrids, which had the same director and star, or it may simply be the fairly generic nature of the story. This focuses on FBI agent Karen Wu (Chang), who travels to the Philippines to investigate a human trafficking ring. There, she’s met by local liaison officer Luciana Ramos (Torre), and they gradually uncover that the abductions and disappearances are tied to an occult group overseen by the mysterious Eduardo Vicente (Ignacio).

Originally, he was the leader of your basic hippie commune, until accidentally unleashing an entity known as Yawa, who had been trapped underground for centuries. This took over Eduardo, turned him evil, and started demanding human sacrifices from the surrounding area, the aim eventually being to give Yawa immortality. This is all recounted in flashback by Karen, who was found stumbling around in the jungle, covered in blood and saying “Yawa… Yawa…”.  After a period back in the United States, she has now returned to the Philippines, and the story is gradually prised out of her by local Detective Liz Fajardo (Victoria). She is piecing together the case after an attempted SWAT raid on another occult location goes horribly wrong, with the entire squad being wiped out.

There’s way too much creeping around shadowy facilities here, and there’s also a sense that English, the language in which most of this unfolds, may not be the language of choice for a number of the participants. Chang, I should stress, is fine: however, a number of the supporting cast are on considerably shakier ground. The plot is mostly humdrum and predictable: if you don’t see the big twist at the end coming, from more or less fifteen minutes in, then you need to be paying greater attention. In some ways, it feels like a throwback to the adaptations Hammer Films did of Dennis Wheatley’s Satanist books in the sixties, though this could definitely have used the gravitas of someone like Christopher Lee at its centre.

It is rather more action-oriented, with Chang doing a decent job there, operating both with her bare hands and with various weapons. It helps the cult members have no problem being used as cannon fodder, not least because, thanks to Yawa, death is barely an inconvenience. But it feels like the scope of the whole cult never lives up the early foreshadowing, when there’s talk of millionaires being involved and a hotel complex which has shades of Epstein’s island. I’d have liked a bigger conspiracy to appear, rather than it just being Eduardo and his acolytes. This is interesting only in spurts, and it needs a less cliched plot and some better performances, to wrap around its reasonably well-executed action.

Dir: Vincent Soberano
Star: Sarah Chang, Marella Torre, Jana Victoria, Ian Ignacio

Cold Hell

  By

★★★
“Hell is other people.”

This an interesting entry, with a complex lead character who is quite some way from being conventionally “likeable”. Özge Dogruol (Schurawlow) is a Viennese taxi driver, who is harsh, abrasive and has severe anger issues. Indeed, anger is arguably among the least of her issues. She practices Thai boxing as an outlet. Or did, until a sparring session goes wrong, and she ends up breaking her partner’s nose in two places. One night, from her apartment, she sees the dead body of a woman in the opposite building, and the killer (Sheik) standing over the corpse. Unfortunately, he also sees Özge. The police won’t provide protection, and soon after, her cousin is murdered, in an apparent case of mistaken identity.

For a variety of reasons – some valid, such as her abusive father, others more self-inflicted – Özge has burned all her other bridges, both with friends and family. Having nowhere else to turn, she consequently ends up staying with Christian Steiner (Moretti), one of the detectives working on the case, which spans killings in several different countries. He has problems of his own, having to take of his elderly father (von Thun), who has dementia. Özge and Christian begin a relationship (which seems a bit of a violation of police ethics – maybe things are different in Austria), and she vows to kill the killer. But will Özge be able to carry out her goal before he gets to her?

There’s a saying: you will meet assholes in your life, but if everyone you meet is an asshole… you’re the asshole. I kept being reminded of this by Özge, who definitely has an asshole problem. Yet, despite having so many characteristics which would, in reality, make her someone I would actively avoid, I still found myself somewhat rooting for her, in a Dragon Tattoo kind of way. Partly, this is because there aren’t many better people in the film. Christian is likely the closest. But even he is far from perfect – even discounting the whole “sleeping with the main witness in a case of multiple murder” thing. It does end up relying on some fortuitous coincidence, and as heroines go, Özge is remarkably flame-resistant, shall we say.

This plays into the killer’s philosophy. He skins and burns alive Muslim prostitutes because he wants them to experience what hell will be like. Özge has a Muslim background, though is hardly devout, and the film does lean a little heavily into the sexism, racism and anti-police angles, especially in the early going. It gets more nuanced in some areas as we get deeper in, though I’d be quite surprised if Özge actually learns any valuable life lessons. Although not all the choices here are successful, I do have to respect the effort to try and do something a bit different in the genre. I certainly won’t deny I found the ending highly satisfying, and appropriately fiery.

Dir: Stefan Ruzowitzky
Star: Violetta Schurawlow, Tobias Moretti, Sammy Sheik, Friedrich von Thun
a.k.a. Die Hölle

Cutthroat Island, by John Gregory Betancourt

  By

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

Made in 1995, Cutthroat Island was a pirate-themed historical action-adventure movie starring Geena Davis and Matthew Modine. (Before starting my read of this novelization of it, I’d never seen the movie, though I’d long been curious about it; but about 3/4 of the way through the book, after learning that the film could be watched for free on Tubi, I made time to view it so that I could compare it with the book.) The filmmakers didn’t strive for great cinematic art; they didn’t intend to offer anything but undemanding escapist entertainment. But even considering that fact, the widespread negative reaction by both fans and critics, which endures to this day, is remarkable (the film made it into the Guiness Book of World Records — as the worst box office flop in movie history!). I was aware of that going in, but was resolved to make my own assessment. As is sometimes the case, I landed in the minority; I like the movie well enough for what it is

Unlike some people, I don’t view movie novelization as inherently a trashy and illegitimate abuse of the fictional art. To my mind, it can be a perfectly legitimate artistic enterprise, adapting a story told in one medium to the possibilities afforded by a different one, with the intention of producing a retelling that offers genuine rewards to readers. Because it’s an adaptation, I think the adaptor should strive for as much fidelity to the original as possible, just as in the converse situation of novel to film. The novel format, however, offers the possibility of providing more explanation and clarification of areas that may be murky in the film because of the latter’s time (and other) constraints. Unfortunately, I’d have to say that Betancourt didn’t do as well as he could have on either of these points (and this novel generally suffers as a result). Some of its literary flaws and improbabilities, though, are already inherent in the original movie itself.

The tale opens in 1688. In the movie, the opening scenes are on, or just off, the coast of Jamaica; in the book, they’re moved inexplicably to Tortuga, off the northern coast of Haiti, and we then move to Jamaica in one day (which I doubt is actually possible for a wind-driven sailing ship). But we soon learn some crucial backstory. In 1619, a pirate captain named “Fingers” Adams captured a Spanish treasure ship loaded with “the richest cargo ever to leave the Americas;” but his ship was subsequently wrecked on the uncharted titular Cutthroat Island, with Adams as the lone survivor. He secreted the treasure there; but after returning to civilization, instead of mounting a retrieval expedition, he contented himself with making a map to the treasure’s location. (Apparently, pirates didn’t steal their booty to do anything like selfishly spend it; they just liked to leave it for posterity.) He divided the map into three parts, bequeathing one piece each to his three in-wedlock sons, all pirate captains in their own right. A fourth son, pirate captain Douglas Brown, nicknamed Dog or Mad Dog (Betancourt always affects the spelling “Dawg,” though that wouldn’t be pronounced any differently) was left out because he was born out of wedlock.

Brown didn’t appreciate this slight, so when our story begins, he’s embarked on a campaign of tracking down and murdering his half-brothers to get their pieces of the map. (This isn’t a close family.) Why he waited until 1688 is never explained. By now, he’s got one piece, and he’s making captured Adams sibling Black Harry “walk the plank” while simultaneously demanding that he reveal the location of the second piece. (Okay, nobody ever said Brown was intelligent.) But Harry’s 20-something daughter Morgan (her exact age is never given), herself raised as a member of his pirate crew, comes to his rescue amid a slew of murky unexplained details and convenient improbabilities, though he’s mortally wounded in the process. Before he dies, he reveals that he had a copy of his part of the map tattooed to his scalp (where he couldn’t possibly refer to it; so no, intelligence doesn’t run in this clan). Morgan’s mission (whether she chooses to accept it or not) is to get herself elected captain in his stead, join up with her surviving uncle, and beat Brown to the treasure, while staying alive in the process. Oh, and find somebody literate in Latin, since that’s the language used on the map. Swashbuckling action-adventure ensues.

There are some significant historical errors here, one already in the movie script itself: in the 17th century, in English law (which applied in Jamaica the same as in England), the punishment for any theft worth more than 12 pence wasn’t being sold into slavery; it was a mandatory sentence to death by hanging. (And it has to be said that main male character William Shaw’s idea of crashing the governor of Jamaica’s ball uninvited, claiming to be a physician when he’s not, swiping jewels off of his dance partners while they’re distracted by his flattery, and transparently lying about what ship brought him to the colony, while having no exit strategy except trying to casually walk out of the building, puts him in the running for the title of most stupid character here, though the competition is fierce.)

And governors of Jamaica did not serve without pay; they were actually paid quite handsomely by 17th-century standards (though the expenses of their station were also steep, and they generally did resort to wangling extra fees and cuts, and sometimes outright corruption). Betancourt also introduces significantly more bad language, nudity and sexual innuendo into this version; the original movie doesn’t have much of any of these, and no real nudity. (It also doesn’t have any reference to Brown having sexually molested Morgan when she was a child, though that claim is made here.) He drops a character arc for one character that’s in the movie, but rather improbable; but he invents two others that are just as improbable compared to their previous behavior.

On the more positive side, the author does develop Morgan’s character better than the filmmakers do, and shows a bit more growth on her part, and more believable development of romantic feelings on the part of the two main characters, than what’s brought out in the movie. He also inserts a short dialogue between Shaw and teenage pirate Bowen (who’s said here to be an orphan taken in by Harry after his parents died) that offers some explanation for how the pirates view their lifestyle; when Shaw points out that Bowen’s a criminal, the latter replies, “We don’t see it that way, since the whole world is crooked, and we’re making the best of it we can.” Morgan’s an interesting, nuanced character, a strong and athletic woman who’s been raised in a rough, kill-or-be-killed milieu (her mother’s never mentioned, in either the movie or the book), who has no qualms about taking human life in combat or in rescuing endangered shipmates, and doesn’t consider reforming and adopting a different career as an attractive possibility. But she’s also capable of kindness and a protective stance, and has a well-developed sense of duty, courage, loyalty, and fairness. (Unlike Brown, she’s not a murderous psychopath; and when she’s pitted against him, she’s not hard to root for.) This read has a lot of action, and there’s never a dull moment.

In terms of content issues, as noted above, there’s more occasional bad language here (in the form of profanity, cuss words and vulgarisms, though not obscenity) than in the movie, but probably far less than we’d have been apt to hear on an actual pirate ship. Violence is pervasive, and Brown is a sadist, but for the most part, neither the movie nor the book make it more graphic than it has to be. (The book is the more graphic of the two, but that’s mostly just in one place, and stops short of being “pornography of violence.”) No sex acts take place in the book itself, though it’s clear that one took place just before it begins. In order to rescue Harry, Morgan’s rousted out of a bed she’s been sharing with a French naval officer who was planning to arrest her after using her; but she’s way ahead of him, and his subsequent discomfiture doesn’t earn him much pity. (She also later poses briefly as a prostitute.) We can infer that she’s honestly been raised with no conception that sex is anything but casual recreation, and she acts accordingly; though there’s an indication at the end of the tale that she might be on the cusp of discovering what it’s actually intended for.)

I actually did like this yarn (though the enjoyment might be characterized as something of a guilty pleasure). It can be recommended to readers who like action-oriented historical adventure, especially with a pirate mystique, and who aren’t put off by the very real flaws noted above.

Author: John Gregory Betancourt
Publisher: Tor Forge; used copy available through Amazon, but only as a printed book. It is available to borrow through the Internet Archive. 
A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads. 

Convoy 48

  By

★★½
“Derailed train of thought.”

I guess this is a slightly different take on the typically heroic stories to come out of Russia concerning their battles against Germany in World War II. Rather than focusing on members of the military, it’s the story of civilians – many with little or no previous experience – who were brought in to keep the railway supply line to Leningrad open. These wee crucial to the city’s survival, as the Nazi blockade threatened to starve the city into submission, being responsible for thee-quarters of the resources going into the city. Naturally, the German forces wanted to cut this off, so subjected the tracks and trains to a relentless bombardment, from artillery, mortars and planes, placing those operating the trains in near-constant danger. 

With a severe shortage of engineers and staff, it’s very much a case of all hands available. Which is how Masha (Tsibizova) and Sonya (Smirnova-Katsagadzhieva), barely out of school, find themselves assigned to the 48th Locomotive Unit, after the most basic of basic training in how to operate a train. This comes courtesy of Georgi (Alekseev), one of the few people around with relevant experience. The otherwise novice crew have to handle dangerous terrain and the ever-present threat of German attack, as they ferry supplies in to the besieged city. Things get murky, when they evacuate orphans out in a Red Cross train: but there are those in the Soviet administration who want to take this opportunity to piggyback on to this, a considerably less humanitarian mission.   

It’s alright, I suppose. But it’s largely predictable, with elements such as the burgeoning romance between Masha and Georgi being straight out of the usual playbook. It’s also so unremittingly heroic as to feel like it might have been a product from the Soviet Ministry of Propaganda, in the later stages of the war. There are a couple of interesting touches: the nearest we get to seeing the enemy is a pilot who bails out when his plane is shot down, and is immediately beaten to death with shovels. Otherwise, the closest to an antagonist is one of the crew who turns out to be a saboteur. It does mean there’s not much sense of direct conflict, with no specific “villain”.

There’s a lot of train stuff here, to the extent that it feels occasionally to border on railway porn. If you are not a train spotter, this could feel overdone, and at a hundred and forty minutes, there feels like a lot of time to fill. Our heroines do get more back-burnered than I would prefer, in favour of their mail colleagues in the second half, though the climactic run, involving the orphan-laden train, requires full commitment from everyone. And, to my complete lack of surprise, no shortage of heroic and ultimate sacrifice. By this point, however, I’d gone beyond my capacity for footage of trains going through the forest, and I’d be lying if I said I cared more than on the most superficial of levels. 

Dir: Fedor Popov
Star: Svetlana Smirnova-Katsagadzhieva, Artem Alekseev, Anastasia Tsibizova, Igor Yasulovich

The Cost of Something Priceless

  By

★½
“The Price of Something Worthless”

I think it was the start of the closing credits where I realized why I disliked this so intensely. The film describes itself as, “A Flick by Adam ‘Ace’ Silva.” There’s hardly a part of that which does not make me cringe. Having the nickname “Ace” is one thing: it should only apply if you’re a sixties test-pilot. But putting it in your film is… yeah. Then there’s calling your movie a “flick”. No. Just no. It’s an attitude which, in hindsight, infuses the entire production. But what do you expect, when Silva didn’t just direct it. He also wrote it, edited it, did the cinematography and composed the music. All one hundred and eleven minutes of it. 

The story is about as much of a mess as the movie poster, with a lot of ideas, and woefully little idea of how to put them into a coherent structure. The heroine is Carmen (Maya), whom we first meet ripping off a former boyfriend for some drugs and money, leaving him for dead in the street. Key words, “leaving him for”. He’s not actually dead, and nor is he happy about it. Naturally, retribution is on his mind, and from this spirals off a slew of violent incidents and kooky characters, such as a weird, bald assassin with a foot fetish. Meanwhile, Maya attempts to make her way through the carnage and be re-united with her long-lost daughter, alongside somewhat faithful sidekick Tobias Anderson (Swain).

It’s not so much a question of being unable to figure out what’s going on, and more a case of finding myself unable to give a damn. Carmen isn’t a nice person to begin with. Had we, for example, been given an indication of her maternal leanings early on, that would have been something on which we might have been able to hang our empathy. Instead, we are repeatedly told how she doesn’t care for anyone else, although this is painfully apparent from the get-go. Rather than developing other characters, the film flings them at us, quickly getting bored and moving on the next. Some do have potential, such as the double-act who refer to themselves as Jack and Jill. Don’t expect much more.

I will say, there is plenty of the old ultraviolence. But the execution leaves a lot to be desired, with some of the worst digital muzzle-flashes I’ve ever seen. The last 20 minutes are a parade of completely unconvincing gun battles, with no noticeable damage to property at all. The fisticuffs are better, simply because they don’t need to have digital garbage pasted on top. Carmen does kinda look like the sort of person who would kick your butt: both she and Jill (Krueger) seem to do a fair amount of wandering around in their bras, which is not unpleasant. However, it all becomes a chore, long before an ending which came as more a relief than anything else.

Dir: Adam Silva
Star: Lina Maya, Davone Swain, Steven Staine Fernandez, Jessica Krueger

Code Name: Tiranga

  By

★★★
“Moderately spicy.”

This Indian movie flopped at the local box-office, and comes limping onto Netflix with an IMDb rating of just 3.2. Reviews there are largely scathing, calling it “unrealistic.” Oh, sure: but people bursting into song for elaborate musical numbers – that totally happens in Mumbai. To be clear, I love the likes of RRR. But realism, or anything in that solar system, is pretty low down on the list of reasons I watch Bollywood films. This is… well, serviceable, is what I’d call it. It is too long for the material, at 137 minutes, but again – length goes with the territory, it’s more a question whether the film is capable of filling it adequately. Here, not so much, at least in the second half.

The heroine is Durga Devi Singh (Chopra), an Indian spy whom we first meet honey-trapping Dr. Mirza Ali (Sandhu) in Afghanistan, in order to set a trap for terrorist leader, Khalid Omar (Kelkar). The trap fails, but Durga feels bad at having betrayed Mirza, for whom she has genuine feelings. A subsequent mission sees her sent to kill a captured operative, to prevent him from spilling secrets to the Pakistani intelligence agency. She ends up rescuing him instead, but is hurt in the process, which brings her back into the company of the good doctor. During the rescue attempt, Omar’s wife is also killed, a death for which the terrorist blames Durga, and is now prepared to go to any lengths for revenge on her.

As spy stuff goes, it’s all fairly generic, with other threads such as the presence of a mole inside the Indian spy service. There is not much novel or exciting here, but it is carried out with an adequate degree of skill, and really only one particularly gratuitous song, when Mirza goes all karaoke at a wedding for what seems like half an hour. The camerawork is nicely scope, with a lot of exotic locations, and while Chopra won’t be winning any awards for her action, she functions decently. It’s just pleasing to see a genuine Bollywood action heroine in this genre: things like the YRF Spy Universe are typically so macho, they’re in danger of choking on their own mustaches.

The first half definitely works better, with the plot consistently moving forward. The movie feels, from an action point, that it peaks too early, and then lumbers its way through the final hour, before the inevitable face-off between Durga and Khalid, which goes about as you would expect. Things then continue to run on, as the mole’s identity is revealed, and the story rehashed in flashback to that end. I may have been hunting for snacks in the cupboard by this point. There’s a truly weird sequence where the film inexplicably goes into first-person shooter mode for an extended period, which had me trying to figure out if it was entirely CGI. They likely should not have bothered, yet it’s a rare blatant misstep, in a film which seems to pride itself on aggressively mediocre competence.

Dir: Ribhu Dasgupta
Star: Parineeti Chopra, Harrdy Sandhu, Sharad Kelkar, Rajit Kapur

Cloak Games: Thief Trap, by Jonathan Moeller

  By

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

I previously reviewed Moeller’s Ghost in the Cowl, which comes from a different series, and enjoyed this every bit as much. Indeed, I think the premise here is better, rather than the fairly generic (if well-executed) fantasy of Cowl. However, in terms of action, the heroine here is second banana, and just as with Cowl, this consequently falls fractionally short of Seal of Approval. In this case, Earth has been conquered by a race of elves, whose High Queen has taken over and now rules with an iron fist. They had been booted off their home world, and traveled the Shadowlands, the path between the worlds, before breaking the seal to Earth.

Doing so allowed magic to come with them, though elves are largely the only ones allowed to practice it. The human race is now effectively indentured servants or worse. Which brings us to our heroine, Nadia Moran. To save her little brother Russell from a lethal disease, she agreed to work for an archmage called Morvilind. But now, she’s his slave, constrained both by him being the only one keeping Russell alive, and his magical skills which can kill her at any time. He trained her in certain areas, in order to become his personal thief, liberating magic artifacts, antiquities, art, etc. This included spells, of use in these jobs. But she’s not happy about it, wanting freedom for her and Russell.

Her latest task is particularly tricky, stealing an Assyrian tablet from a human industrialist. She’s not given the whole truth about either the object or its current owner, and it becomes apparent someone else is interested in him too. The someone else is Corvus, a sorta-human (it’s complicated…) who has abilities of his own, and handles the action elements here. They eventually agree to team up to help each other’s overlapping goals, but will face threats both temporal and almost indescribably Lovecraftian, emanating out of the Shadowlands. It makes for highly entertaining reading, and at only 180 pages, I raced through it very quickly. For ninety-nine cents, it’s fine, but I would hope further installments offer a little more bang for your $3.99. 

There were a couple of bits of world building which didn’t quite gel. The conquest happened in 2013, and we’re now three centuries past it. But it feels like technology is unchanged: Nadia still drives a sedan, for example. If you consider how radically different life was three centuries ago, it’s odd: maybe the High Queen dislikes innovation? It’s a minor, albeit niggling, glitch in what’s otherwise a fun scenario, with a well-constructed heroine who offers plenty of room for development. And with eleven books to come, that’s certainly necessary! By the end of this one, she has an ally in Corvus, some additional talents of which Morvilind is unaware, and appears slightly closer to achieving her eventual goal of freedom. I’m looking forward to that journey. 

Author: Jonathan Moeller
Publisher: CreateSpace, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 12 in the Cloak Games series.

Compulsion

  By

★★★
“Rated R, for raunchy and rough.”

The “erotic thriller” now seems almost as quaint a part of cinema history as beach party films. It feels partly as if the Harvey Weinstein scandal made nudity and sexuality taboo in Hollywood. The rise of the Internet also provides easy access to all the naked flesh anyone could possibly want. Regardless of the cause, there are no longer big budget films like Basic Instinct or Wild Things being made, let alone being #6 at the North American box-office for the year, as Instinct managed [that said, United Artists paid $2 million for the reboot rights earlier this year. We’ll see; I’m not optimistic]. So in some ways, this feels like a throwback, drawing influence from Brian de Palma and Paul Verhoeven.

It’s the fourth, and supposedly final, collaboration between director Marshall and his wife/star Kirk. Two of the previous ones have been covered here, in The Lair and Duchess; I haven’t yet seen the other, witchcraft film The Reckoning. But there can’t be many directors who have worked so often with their spouses. Maybe Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich? The results for this couple have certainly fallen short of peak Marshall, such as The Descent, or even Doomsday, both commercially and critically. While this likely won’t change the narrative, I’m not averse to a nostalgic combo of gratuitous nudity and graphic violence. I’ll leave Mr. and Mrs. Marshall to figure out what it means for the relationship, in their couples’ therapy sessions. 

It takes place in Malta where a shapely cat-suit clad serial killer is committing some particularly brutal murders. Investigating the case is local detective Claudia Cavara (Gorietti), with the two main suspects Diana (Kirk), a bisexual thief with a hot boyfriend (McGowan), and her lesbian neighbour, Evie (Sieklucka). Will there be steamy trysts, voyeurism, and a Euro-pudding of accents, from Poland to Yorkshire? Yes, of course! Sieklucka was in those 365 Days films on Netflix, after all. You will also experience what may well be the stabbiest scene in film history, making Psycho look like a Sunday School play. While I felt the victim was certainly deserving (I hated his hair), it showed Marshall has clearly taken influence from Italian giallo films, with their masked killers and hyperviolence. 

It is, however, nowhere near as good as Basic Instinct. Kirk isn’t fit to hold Sharon Stone’s ice-pick, and the whole police side of things is embarrassingly half-baked. It also feels as if Marshall was more into the violence than the sex, and there was a point, probably about two-thirds in, where I realized I didn’t particularly care about anyone. The decision to make it a whodunnit backfires too, because there are an extremely limited number of possible suspects. The end result is therefore quite a mess, and I can understand the critical disdain. However, it’s a mess which had its moments, and was definitely among the most R-rated of movies I saw this year. More of those will always be welcome. 

Dir: Neil Marshall
Star: Charlotte Kirk, Anna-Maria Sieklucka, Zach McGowan, Giulia Gorietti

Calixta: The Vanquishers of Alhambra, by Omayra Vélez

  By

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

Subtitled “A grimdark fantasy,” if you are expecting this to be packed full of sex and violence, as a result… Well, you might be a little disappointed. While the lead character, Calixta Harlow Carlyle, is an “Exotic” – a highly-trained prostitute – she doesn’t seem to do all that much… um, prostiuting. We’re about half-way through before she goes to bed with anyone. The violence isn’t particularly brutal or copious either. It is, I guess, somewhat dark, and certainly not a young adult book. But anyone who watched (or read) Game of Thrones will not exactly require the services of a fainting couch to get through this.

Calixta ends up dying, trying to protect one of the girls in the brothel she runs. However, that’s just the start, because the powers that be in the afterlife inform our heroine she’s actually a Vanqusher. These are people with magical talents who act as guardians against the forces of evil, currently massing as they prepare to take over the world. Vanquishers are supposed to have guides from birth, who train them. But Calixta never had that benefit, instead being sold into slavery and trained as an Exotic. She’s sent back to life – much to the shock of her employees – and told to find the other three Vanquishers. But the evil Jadro wants to ensure Calixtra dies permanently, before she can come into her true abilities, and stand against him.

She’s forced into going on the run, with three friends who are even less suited to survival. This involves an escape through the sewers which is about the nastiest sequence in the book (straying uncomfortably close to fetish for my tastes), although they are then rescued by Dreyden, another Vanquisher. Together, they go on a quest to awaken another of their kind, Calixta learning how to control the battle-mage skills she has been given, which allow her to summon and manipulate the element of fire, both offensively and for protection. This talent is very much a work in progress, hence the lower score for action – Dreyden likely does more of the heavy lifting in that department. I suspect she may improve in future installments.

There are several points where the writing does come off as somewhat clunky, and points at which it feels like characters are saying things which are more needed for the plot than anything else. It did also feel that things were unfolding at a leisurely pace: this is approaching four hundred page long, and by the end, we’re not particularly far on from where we were. There’s a lot of travel. However, it is an interesting pantheon, with virtues like Justice, Wisdom and Hope taking human form under a deity they call “Father”. It has occasional moments of genuine emotion too, such as in regard to Calixta’s unborn child, which proved surprisingly poignant. I suspect it’ll end up being fairly straightforward good vs. evil, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Author: Omayra Vélez
Publisher: Self-published, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 4 in the Vanquishers of Alhambra series.