Tag: c

A Certain Scientific Railgun – S

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★★★★
“Bigger, stronger, faster, better!”

Have you ever had this experience? There is a series you see and the series is fine, okay, solid. But without you noticing, you connect with these characters subconsciously, on an emotional level. As you watch them regularly, you get accustomed to them (though they are totally fictional) and don’t realize it until something happens, and you suddenly feel how much you have gotten attached to them. It’s not a new experience for me. It happens from time to time, but not often enough I would call it a rule, every time I watch a new TV show. Usually, I just passively experience the respective episodes and don’t waste much thought on it, least of all any kind of emotional investment.

It’s strange – at one point, when you started watching movies and series, you felt a strong emotional connection to everything, but today, it seems mostly gone. This does not only has to do with becoming a grown-up and seeing a lot more, but maybe also filmmakers and storytellers having forgotten the art of getting you emotionally involved in their plots and characters. But I have to say: A Certain Scientific Railgun got me, despite initially thinking I didn’t care much at all for the series. The show had been a satisfying, quite well told combination of “Slice of Life”-episodes, with some action-filled SF-arcs.

While for some. these “SoL” eps were unnecessary annoying filler episodes, I didn’t mind them. They provided additional colour to the big picture. I also was well aware I might not be the target audience: the Index series is the one supposed to be for the boys. Also, I went in without any specific expectations, always an advantage. Principally, I liked what I had seen, so had no problems with paying for another season. While sometimes things were maybe a bit too kawai for me, and the antics of a character like Kuroko Shirai could get on one’s nerves, the series was overall well thought-out, put attention into the details, and I enjoyed the emotional dispositions of the four girls, who all had their own character.

The next season arrived and… was even better?! Sure, it’s a subjective opinion, but I personally think the emotional investment I already had in the show paid off. The new season (from 2013, three years after the first was released) seemed to start like its predecessor: The girls going to school, spending time in their company, Kuroko abusing Mikoto… same old, same old, one might say. If one likes a season of a show, a new season is like meeting some good old friends again after a while. Then, the story starts to develop slowly… First in tiny steps that are hardly remarkable. There is a special art in storytelling when you are able to build up a story-line from small events to a big pay-off, when something finally can come to fruition and blossoms in a big climax.

People like Hitchcock, or some of the best action directors, know how to do that, but today I think it is virtually secret knowledge. I would certainly not have expected to find it in a Japanese anime, where you can be happy if one’s intelligence simply isn’t being insulted too much! It begins relatively harmlessly. Somebody claims to have seen Mikoto Misaka (our title-giving “scientific railgun”, thanks to her coin trick), but Mikoto wasn’t there at all. Then it happens again which leads to the girls talking about having a doppelganger, and eventually to the very interesting question, which forms the premise of this season: “What would you do, if you had a clone?”

Another strange thing occurs. Somebody is leaving envelopes containing money in small, dark side-streets, leading to people going on their own treasure hunt, and Mikoto & Co. try to find out who’s doing that and why. The story constantly builds and you slowly realize that you are paying much more attention to the show then you ever did before.  When Mikoto finally meets her doppleganger, it’s initially almost a shock. It leads to questions: who is the girl, why is she behaving so strangely, and where does she come from? Mikoto indeed has “sisters”. Actually, a lot of them. And these girls are part of an unethical and inhuman experiment.

The series really managed to grab me here totally, and part of it is due to the way the story is constructed, something I mentioned when reviewing the previous season. We grow attached to Misaka over time, and care for what she is going through emotionally. I don’t know what I would do if I met my clone, but I guess I would be quite angry about somebody stealing my identity and misusing my genetic map, which is something Misaka also feels. But there is something unexpected happening. While the Misaka clones appear a bit strange and speak about themselves in the third person, they are instantly likable and cute, it’s shattering to find out what kind of role they have to play in an on-going “experiment”. It was quite a shock, at least for me who came along with no idea of the evil hiding in the shadows (I’m not spoiling that here!).

Again, much of the effect of the series lies in its careful combination. On the one hand, you have cute school-girls doing harmless girly stuff: studying, social services, sitting in cafés, mocking each other, searching together (as happens in one episode) for a four-clover-leaf in a green field. Then, suddenly, a hole of darkness opens where very evil people do very evil things, with hardly any remorse or justification for their acts. The contrast makes this story shocking: in another darker show, it would have been your typical, average stuff. Here, I almost got the feeling I’d watched an anime written by the Brothers Grimm! While we have seen much worse, it’s the combination of different elements that makes this work so well.

Unfortunately, our protagonist makes the decision to play Batgirl and solve the problem alone, without her friends, which I found a bit questionable. The climax of the previous season had shown how effective these four girls are when working together, and this can also be seen at the beginning of this season. But I guess as the so-called “sister-story-arc” was also already featured, albeit briefly, in A Certain Magical Index, the writers here were bound to how events played out in that series. It doesn’t look good for our little railgun: She experiences fear, despair, helplessness and pain. It’s quite some time since I saw so many relatable and believable emotions in an animated character.

It’s always nice when a powerful character is “cut down to size”: it adds realism to any story. Fantasy and SF stories should have rules and powers should have limits. And 5-level esper Mikoto, who in the past was not above bragging about her incredible electro-talents, experiences these, physically as well as emotionally. We look differently at our protagonists when they are not the strongest kid on the block anymore. Here, we meet megalomanical, sadistic villain Accelerator, who is more than a match for Mikoto. But then, Misaka is not totally alone; for there is still Touma Kamijou, the protagonist of A Certain Magical Index, the boy who wanted to protect Misaka previously and whom she challenged to a power-fight. Maybe he can help?

There are interesting aspects here. Do super-powers make you susceptible to arrogance, because you start subconsciously to feel superior to everyone else? It’s something the powerless Saten worried about in the first season before meeting Mikoto. The character of Kongou, a level 4-esper is like that (though she becomes more sympathetic this season), as is another level 5-esper introduced at the beginning of this series. You calso remember the many, many times when Mikoto used her powers carelessly in the past. To paraphrase Francis Bacon’s famous sentence: if power corrupts, do then superpowers corrupt…um, superly?

It’s a thought, albeit never directly articulated here, and is definitely evoked when watching this story. We also get a brief look into Accelerator’s past: he has a reason why he does what he does. Once again, the show manages to give us some understanding as to the villains’ motives. It delivers a much more layered approach than just telling us, as so many stories across so many media do: this guy is bad, and has to go! It makes the show more well-rounded, the stories much more satisfying, characters more ambivalent and therefore – if I may use the word – realistic. Also, kudos to the writers of these stories for applying the laws of physics in a logical, and well-considered manner!

After this very well-built, suspenseful story arc, running from episode 2 until episode 16, I can understand why some felt the remainder of this season was a bit of a letdown. While we get another arc, the new one can’t quite compete with what happened before, though is decent on its own merits. For a while, we go back to small stories of the girls getting together and the usual jokes like e. Saten pulling up Uiharu’s skirt to embarrass her. Yes, that’s a thing. It’s alright by me. After you have clashed with the Big Bad, it’s absolutely fine to have another episode where your heroines are in a hurry to bring a cake to a meeting, where they drink tea and say goodbye to a friend who is moving away. It’s the “slice of life” aspect: if you are in for the meal, you have to eat the vegetables, too!

This season is not perfect; nor was the previous one. A possible flaw is it becomes almost a one-girl show with Mikoto on her own and her friends reduced to side characters e.g. Kuroko constantly worrying what is up with Mikoto and where her best friend spends her nights. Fortunately, this is corrected in the second story arc, dealing with Febri, a little girl who is the subject of an experiment herself. Mikoto finally learns she not only has good friends, but to take help when it’s offered. The power of friendship can even deal with very well-equipped forces of the dark and shady “underworld” in Academy City. These little lessons of morality integrated into the show, definitely leave a feel-good-feeling at the end.

Finally, we even learn about the motivations of some of the villains in the background. In a city where all those highly-enabled people are the focus of everyone’s attention, the “normal” people, regardless of how ingenious they may be or how hard they work, have hardly a chance of ever getting their spot in the limelight. Being constantly neglected can make you do very terrible things. But again: not everyone working on the side of the bad guys is necessarily an enemy and Mikoto gets her “Will Graham vs. Hannibal Lecter”-moment, so to speak! Once again the arc is well-built and develops the sensitive, emotional touches which make the show more than the usual action.

It ends in a very satisfying finale which sees almost everyone, including second-tier characters, join Mikoto’s final battle against the evil scientists’ group. There’s still a deadly satellite in orbit that could destroy Academy City unless Mikoto and Shirai get up there and blow it up in time. Shouldn’t be a problem for Mikoto, the city’s famous railgun, right? Watching this series felt for me a bit like seeing Kim Possible in an X-Files plot, spiced up with some great action from a Hollywood blockbuster. Though I could have done without the show’s main musical theme playing, once again, over the battle scenes during the finale. Here the producers really should have invested in some action music!

Some questions remain. What exactly will happen to the almost 10,000 “sisters” of Misaka? Are there other powers in the shadows we have not seen yet? Or is Academy City now free of big criminal-scientific organisations? Will Misaka get together with Touma? Probably not, since in his own series he has quite a harem of female followers. And what is with her obsession over that frog? Stay tuned, for J. C. Staff, the studio behind the show, also produced a third season, which came out a good seven years after this one. At least something good that came out of that terrible year! So, let’s continue…

Dir: Tatsuyuki Nagai and others
Star (voice): Rina Satō, Satomi Arai, Aki Toyosaki, Kanae Itō

A Certain Scientific Railgun

  By

★★★
“Beware level 5-espers when they point their fingers at you!”

Have you ever noticed, when you are consciously looking for things that fall into a certain category, you find more and more of them? You may have seen it in action yourself after you discovered the “girls with guns” genre. Compare it to the time before you knew about it, how few movies/series there seemed to be there, and how much you realized were actually available after this site drew your attention to the specific genre. I have started to experience the same thing since I started to look into anime, and in particular the specific target of entries belonging to the GWG genre, that go beyond your usual Miyazaki-Ghibli production.

But then, anime seems like a bottomless pit; I recently saw a video by a German anime fan and publisher, who said there are thousands of anime being produced each year. For the year 2017 he spoke of 3,400 (!). I don’t know if that’s true: but considering, for example, how many Hong Kong martial arts movies I found when I really was looking for this specific kind of entertainment, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was true. Of course, he also admitted most of these anime series are garbage, get ignored and vanish as fast as they appeared. The Japanese manga and anime market is every bit as focused on turning an idea into a highly profitable product (including action figures, OVAs, soundtracks, etc.) as your average Hollywood franchise.

They may perhaps be even more calculated. The business is a highly competitive one, with studios opening and closing every year: they only stay in the business for as long as they produce successful series, and a lot of underpaid animators work free-lance. As enjoyable as this stuff can be, the production background is merciless. It’s maybe better to ignore it, especially as most of these series on DVD are just too expensive (though I never bought bootlegs, but if the Anglo-American territory offers a cheaper alternative, why should you buy over-priced German-dubbed volume boxes?).

But onto the subject of this review. This is a spin-off of another anime series, A Certain Scientific Index, which preceded Railgun. I’m not reviewing the original show, or its other spin-off, A Certain Scientific Accelerator, but would like to stress that while Index is a good show, Railgun is much better. All these series are based on the manga and light novels of author Kazuma Kamachi. He, obviously, is continuously working on his own fictional universe. There are so many volumes of the respective series out there, people on YouTube are making videos on what series to read/watch, and in which order, to get into it without having to consume everything that is on the market. The three seasons of the show I review here have alone already reached 69 episodes.

Index deals with a male character, Kamijou Touma, who has to solve problems of girls and other people, that are either of a magical or a supernatural (read: scientific) nature. Railgun puts a supporting character from Index, middle-school girl Misaka Mikoto, and her female friends to the center of the viewer’s attention. While Railgun might have been created to cater to a female audience, it may have become more popular for a general audience, similarly to how Xena overtook Hercules in popularity. Part of the reason may be Misaka Mikoto’s cuteness, for the Japanese love everything that is “kawaii”.

Misaka is an esper of the highest degree, level 5. And while she is one of only seven level-5 espers in Academy City, this is not as unusual as it may sound at first. For the whole city is filled with students that Charles Xavier would probably have called “extraordinarily gifted”! They are all learning to develop and use their abilities at school, though for what purpose I still have not found out; is there a job market for those kind of abilities? Still, given their powers it’s a very sensible thing to do, since otherwise the students might easily misuse their powers.

It’s understandable if this sounds a bit like your typical X-Men animated show from the late 90s. But those shows were primarily concerned with showcasing the abilities of these supernatural beings and adapting the most well-known comic book story-lines. Railgun is a bit different. Heck, it may not even really belong to the same genre as the X-Men, and very often puts its focus elsewhere. It may be the reason this series originally was of minor interest for many. While the girls from time to time show what they are capable of, the main narrative is telling nice little stories about the girls’ everyday life. Getting to know each other, their own little (or bigger) problems and oddities, going out in their spare time and… yeah… Occasionally solving some crimes and blowing things up!

This kind of tale is called “a slice of life story” and is its own genre in Japanese manga and anime. While we have that in the West too, I never noticed and probably would categorize this mainly as “drama”. But then this genre can obviously encompass more, as it is in part a social drama about girl friendships, part sitcom and (here) part superhero story. What to make out of this is, I think, up to individual taste. I can absolutely understand that, for many in the West, this kind of story is unusual; those expecting an ongoing superhero saga will likely be disappointed by this kind of storytelling. I personally found it charming and fresh, even though there certain elements did astonish me. The closest thing to this kind of show in the West might be something like Smallville.

The girl group here consists of the following. Misaka, who is able to control, and more importantly unleash an enormous amount of electricity. Her room partner, Kuroko, who is a teleporter and has a very painful-to-watch crush on Misaka. Uiharu, whose power is somewhat vague, but it is indicated that she can control the temperature of things. And finally, her best friend Saten, who surprisingly has no superpowers at all. Which actually comes in very handy at the end of the story, because sometimes having such a talent can be your Achilles heel.

Other characters include, Konori, a normal teen working for “Judgement”, kind of a social service which Kuroko and Uiharu also join. These teens maintain order on the streets, ranging from helping find a lost bag up to preventing innocent people being harassed or beaten up by outcast rowdies. Then there’s the school director who regularly seems to break Kuroko’s neck (or at least it sounds like it!), when she and Misaka use their powers on school property. The strange Doctor Kiyama who turns out to be the local legend known as “The Undresser”. This means she regularly takes her clothes off without any embarrassment, for minor reasons like it being too hot. No, I’m not making this up, I swear. It’s part of the story.

In the beginning Uiharu and Saten get to know Misaka who, much to the astonishment of Saten, isn’t arrogant at all, as most high-level espers seem to become. Misaka is a cool, sympathetic girl, constantly angered by… the affections of Kuroko, whose feelings for her are definitely more than platonic. It’s kind of shocking sometimes for me, when behavior we would probably label as bordering on sexual assault, is depicted in an animated show, largely targeted towards teen girls. But then this is anime and we all know it operates with different parameters from Western entertainment! Also, the show never takes itself too seriously. Except when it actually does, but more on that later.

Misaka sees through all Kuroko’s attempted manipulations and when Kuroko goes too far, you can expect Misaka to throw her (virtually) out or use her electro-powers on her. The pair remind me in their strange “dog-cat-relationship” of DC’s Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy, with the difference that the Japanese versions are the good gals! It’s just natural that hotheaded tomboy Misaka is the leader of the group. Though she mainly keeps her powers in check, she may from time to time break the rules, such as by duping the public vending machine or when hunting an evil-doer. You know something not so good is coming your way, when she tosses a coin with enormous power in your direction.

While she has a temper on the outside, she is a sweetheart on the inside, caring very much for her friends and the people around her, and is definitely in the process of learning to trust others and to open her heart. Her most beautiful moments are when she is emotionally touched and doesn’t know how to articulate what she feels. It grounds this over-powered character and makes her more human. Indeed this “over-poweredness” was the reason why Kazuma Kamachi originally wanted to make Kuroko the main character, but the publishers saw it differently. Mikoto is not perfect despite all of she is being able to and that makes her so relatable.

These powers are what gave her in the previous Index show the name of “Railgun”- in her words, “because even objects of a minor size can generate an enormous power when thrown with enough energy in one’s direction”. She also comes across Touma, the main character of Index, who embarrasses her when he tries to rescue her from the company of some teenage boys. Unfortunately for him, she takes his well-meant help as a personal insult, which leads her to constantly challenge him to a fight. Unfortunately for her, his special power is that the talents of others don’t really function when he holds up his hand. Hilarious scenes ensue.

It’s a good show in the GWG anime genre, though in my book no match to highlights such as Black Lagoon, Canaan or Mirai Nikki. If you are in the mood for something a bit different, that shouldn’t be taken too seriously, this might be something for you. It’s sometimes light as a feather, followed by solid SF action and intriguing plots, while still retaining its own certain charm. It may not sound like too much, but having recently watched the dense and sometimes difficult to understand Bakemonogatari, I actually enjoyed this much more.

The series consists of a nice mixture of stand-alone episodes and a very slowly building story-arc. I like that very much, as it gives time to build each of the characters, their relationships to each other and emotional connective moments for us, the audience. This kind of structure also did remind me a bit of the old X Files show with its single episodes, in contrast to today’s series, which tend to have a constantly developing story arc. You miss a few episodes and you’ve got problems catching up, and trying to understand what’s happening again.

That’s not the case with Railgun. The series initially takes its time, with the girls and their everyday life the focus of attention. Then, to my surprise, it moved to a bigger story with unethical experiments performed on helpless esper kids, and dark forces lurking in the background. It’s almost shocking, since the place we have been shown here mostly seemed sunny, funny and enjoyable. The biggest problems the girls ever faced, was how to deal with personal little insecurities. But where there’s light, there must be shadow, too! Local urban legends of a “level-upper”, a device said to improve or increase one’s esper abilities, make the rounds and while investigating these seem a harmless leisure activity for the girls, the outcome is much bigger than anyone could have foreseen in the beginning.

After a big climax it looks to go back to square one, and we return to small “what did XYZ today” stories. But then a new girl appears and so-called “poltergeist activities” happen around her, leading to another, much bigger challenge which also includes a twist. Not everyone you think must be put behind bars is evil; not everyone you trust is trustworthy; and sometimes the one with the least powers can be the savior of the day.

What I especially liked was that each of the girls is their own character and acts differently. They are not just bland copies of each other with only differing abilities. While I don’t think many people will ever get to know this series if they are not deep into anime, I especially enjoyed the way it structured its story. We in the West may have had our Kim Possible, the Japanese post-Sailor Moon have this. I liked it well enough to invest time and money in the second season, A Certain Scientific Railgun – S, which will also be reviewed here.

Dir: Tatsuyuki Nagai
Star (voice): Rina Satō, Satomi Arai, Aki Toyosaki, Kanae Itō

Calamity Jane

  By

★★★
“Calamity Plain.”

Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok are two of the most well-known names in the culture of the Wild West, though the reality of both individuals is almost impossible to separate from the myths which surround them. So it’s kinda pointless to complain about historical accuracy in films which focus on them. Better just accept them as effectively being fictional entities, which can be used for whatever purpose a filmmaker desires. Here, it’s the death of Wild Bill (Stephen Amell, best known as TV’s Arrow) in a poker game, which sets his girlfriend Jane (Rickards, also from the same series) off. She goes on the trail of Jack McCall (Allon), the scumbag responsible, who has understandably opted to depart Deadwood. 

Complicating matters is that Jane is in custody herself, having been brought to the frontier town by Sheriff Mason (Rozen), to stand trial for murder. She escapes his custody – as Chris pointed out, Mason is a bit crap at the whole law enforcement thing – and heads off after McCall and his equally scummy brother. Mason assembles a (again, rather feeble and unimpressive) posse to go after the two suspected killers. Most of the second half is an extended pursuit through some very scenic landscapes, it must be said. There are a fair number of moderate diversions before the inevitable and entirely expected confrontation between Jane and Jack, as she seeks to get vengeance, or perhaps justice, for her murdered lover.

I think I like the characters here most. Rickards gives a winning portrayal as Jane, despite an unnerving similarity to one of the members of Bananarama (perhaps that’s just me though), and the supporting cast also do a good job of inhabiting their roles. It is fairly straightforward: black hats and white hats, with not much grey in terms of morality. In this way, it feels like a throwback to an earlier time. Along similar lines, while the language is fairly ripe, with a good number of F-bombs, the violence is very restrained by comparison. I feel if a film is going to have an R-rating, the makers need to embrace that artistic freedom fully, yet outside of the cursing, this would likely merit only a PG. 

Among the supporting cast, the best is Abigail (Faia), who is entirely mad, and all the more entertaining for it. She boasts of the multiple people she’s killed, keeping a count with scars on her arms – I’d love to see a film of her back-story. She and Jane end up in a very nasty brawl, likely the action highlight of the film, with everything else being gunfights of the “Bang-bang, you’re dead” variety. While it’s all well enough assembled, there isn’t much indication of ambition or desire to tell a new story, or even an old one from an interesting direction. As a result, this only intermittently catches fire, preferring mostly to meander along safely, well within the speed limit and with its seat-belt securely fastened.

Dir: Terry Miles
Star: Emily Bett Rickards, Tim Rozon, Primo Allon, Priscilla Faia

Call Her King

  By

★★½
“Tries hard to be Trial Hard“

After the impressive surprise which was Jericho Ridge, I figured I should try out another BET Original movie and see how it fared. As the grade above should tell you, the answer is comparatively poorly. While technically adequate in most departments, it’s one of the more implausible Die Hard knockoffs I’ve seen. In a world where No Contest exists, that takes some doing. The high concept here is “Die Hard in a court-house” with Judge Jaeda King (Naughton) about to pronounce sentence in the trial of convicted murderer Sean Samuels (Mitchell). Barely has she said “death”, when the court is stormed by a force led by Sean’s brother Gabriel (Gross), a.k.a. “Black Caesar”.

King escapes the initial onslaught, along with Sean, his defense attorney, and Stryker (Messner), one of the courthouse guards. Gabriel, however, is not just interested in freeing his brother. He also puts the prosecuting attorney on trial in a kangaroo court, designed to prove the flaws and biases inherent in the system. Much of the film is therefore split between King and her group trying to figure out how to survive, as well as escape, and the courtroom side of things, where nasty little secrets are revealed, such as the prosecutor’s relationship to King having been more than professional. I will say, Miller does a good job of keeping both sides of the story moving forward. It would have been easy for the chattier portions to bring things to a halt: that doesn’t happen.

This aspect is certainly helped by a strong performance from Gross, who manages to avoid the obvious tropes of such a situation, and comes over as smart, well-spoken and committed. He’s no Alan Rickman of course; then again, who is? I found myself, if not quite on Gabriel’s side, at least seeing his point of view and his grounds for extreme action. The main problem is a failure to set King up as credible opposition. Before things kick off, there’s no reason to view her as an action heroine: all we see is her being easily beaten by her martial-arts teacher. Then, suddenly, she – or, rather obviously, Naughton’s stunt double – is kicking butt and spraying bullets around like a grizzled Army Ranger.

Okay, Naughton is far better than Anna Nicole Smith, though that’s a low bar for anyone to clear. She does okay with the dramatic side of things, though the script occasionally gives her little to work with. The broken relationship with her spouse feels like another element poorly lifted from Die Hard, and things like her overhearing another judge go full racist were so obvious as to trigger an eye-roll. Miller does have a nice visual eye, e.g. the shot of the attackers marching towards their target was a genuine stand-out, and there’s enough competence to stop it from being actively annoying. However, its script needed more work, and perhaps a better central concept, to succeed in an over-crowded field.

Dir: Wes Miller
Star: Naturi Naughton, Lance Gross, Jason Mitchell, Johnny Messner

Cascade

  By

★★
“Falls off.”

It’s kinda interesting to compare this to Mercy Falls. Both concern an ill-fated trip into a scenic wilderness – all trees and waterfalls – by a group of friends, which goes increasingly off the rails. The main difference is, in Mercy, the call was coming from inside the house, as it were. Here, the threat is definitely external. The target is four friends, just finished high school and about to enter the world at large. Jesse (Oulette) will work as a mechanic; his girlfriend Alex (Waisglass) wants to leave their small town and go to college, but hasn’t plucked up the courage to tell Jesse yet. Making matters more complex, her father is part of the Dark Saints, a biker gang and generally criminal enterprise. 

This matters, because the Dark Saints just lost a shipment of drugs, the plane carrying it having crashed in a remote region of a nearby national park. Their minions are on the hunt for it, but – what are the odds? – Alex and her friends are first to stumble across it. A discussion ensues about what to do, but it’s all rendered moot after they cross paths with the minions. Before you can say, “implausible plot line,” Jesse has broken his leg and he, plus another of the quartet, pregnant pal Em (Laflamme-Snow) have been captured by the bad guys. It’s up to Alex to figure out what to do, as the only member of the group left able to operate freely.

Which is fortunate, since she’s also the smartest of the people wandering in the woods, and it’s not even close. Let’s just say, pond life would likely rate second or third place among these people, and I’m including both the hikers and the minions in those rankings. Seeing her mental wheels spinning as she out-thinks and outmanoeuvres her enemies is one of the few pleasures this offers. But it’s like watching a grand master playing chess against a pigeon. The only genuine and credible threat is her Dad and the Dark Saints, and they don’t show up until the very end of proceedings. With Alex’s witless friends, dumb and/or unlikable, the ones in peril, the stakes here aren’t enough to engage the viewer either. 

I will say, the film does look half-decent, with Diego Guijarro’s cinematography popping nicely off the screen, and the Canadian backdrop is scenic. But too often, the film pulls its punches, whether it’s a character leaping off the waterfalls, depicted with them simply vanishing out of sight, or a pivotal car crash in which it appears no vehicles were actually harmed. This might as well be a TVM, with only the potty-mouths of some inhabitants meriting more than a PG rating. It’s all blandly innocuous, and despite Waisglass’s best efforts, it never gels. Things like Em’s pregnancy, for instance, feel like an afterthought, which goes nowhere and seems like nothing more than a cheap ploy to get audience sympathy. Memo to the film-makers: it didn’t work. 

Dir: Egidio Coccimiglio
Star: Sara Waisglass, Joel Oulette, Sadie Laflamme-Snow

C.A.T.S. Eyes

  By

★★★
“The not-so Gentle Touch”

This was a sequel to hit series, The Gentle Touch, which had finished its run after five series in November 1984. Police detective Maggie Forbes (Gascoine) has quit the force, but had been recruited by Nigel Beaumont (Warrington) to join a somewhat unofficial Home Office group called Covert Activities Thames Section a.k.a. CATS, along with two other women. Their cover is the “Eyes” detective agency – hence the show’s title. They investigate various crimes and cases, mostly but not exclusively those which pose a threat to British national security. It ran for three series, covering thirty episodes, from April 1985 through June 1987, and was apparently fairly successful in the ratings. 

The obvious inspiration is Charlie’s Angels, in that you have a female trio, of different styles, solving crimes under the loose supervision of a man. However, the differences may be more significant than the similarities. While they do have different personalities, the clearest distinguishing trait in the British show is class, rather than hair colour. There’s working class Fred Smith – short for Frederica (Ash) – middle class Maggie, and upper class Pru Standfast (Rosalyn Landor), replaced after the first season by equally posh Tessa Robinson (Ward). It’s more grounded as well. Although the trio here do sometimes go undercover, it’s not an excuse for cheesecake, with them taking on the roles of women in prison, roller derby girls, etc. The CATS ladies are more likely to be barmaids or hotel workers in the line of duty.

You can also play “Spot the British actor”, with a near-constant stream of guest stars who you might recognize from other places, past or future. As well as Warrington, who’d go on to be the Caribbean commissioner in much-loved Brit-show, Death in Paradise, they include Ray Winstone, Lionel Jeffries, Charles Gray, Marina Sirtis, Peter Capaldi, Anthony Head, James Cosmo, Alan Ford, Ronald Lacey, Penelope Wilton and Alfred Molina. The last-named actually ended up marrying Gascoine in 1986, after his appearance. So that’s nice. The episodes are a bit more of a mixed bag. Some do a good job of capturing the murky world of intelligence, where expedience determines outcomes as much as justice. Other seem frankly implausible. 

Unlike The Gentle Touch, where the work/family balance was a key part of proceedings, we get very little about the trio’s life outside their work. That may be for the best, since Gasgoine is the most effective actress of the three, and things elevate whenever she gets the chance to do her dramatic thing. Action wise, it’s… reasonable. The sponsorship of the Ford Motor Company is kinda obvious, in that almost every episode contains several unnecessary scenes of them driving to or from places, but it’s certainly more credible and genuinely liberated than Charlie’s Angels. While certainly a time-capsule of the eighties (not least the hair!), it has generally stood the test of time reasonably well, and indeed, some aspects may have more resonance now. We watched the show on Sunday mornings, and that may be the best way to approach them.

Creator: Terence Feely
Star: Jill Gascoine, Leslie Ash, Tracy Louise Ward, Don Warrington

Daisy’s Run by Scott Baron

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

By the time I reached the end of this, what stood out most is how far we had come from the initial scenario. We start way out in deep space, where the crew of the Váli are awoken from their cryo stasis after the ship suffers significant damage as a result of a hull breach. By the end, everything has changed dramatically. The situation back on Earth, the mission of the Váli, and the very nature of the heroine, 25-year-old comms and electronics specialist, Daisy Swathmore, are are all radically different from what they initially seem to be. It’s basically a dramatic arc for the entire human race.

It begins with Daisy adjusting the setting of her neuro-stim. It’s designed to allow learning while the wearer sleeps. But she disables the firewalls which are there to stop the brain being overloaded. She becomes a lot more knowledgeable and skilled – but also incredibly paranoid, believing the cyborgs and enhanced human colleagues are plotting… something. Daisy is already prejudiced against those who are not entirely human, but are her concerns the result of mental illness, or is there something genuinely going on? She eventually decides to go AWOL, hiding out in the bowels of the ship as she digs for the truth, becoming a one-woman human resistance, before leaving in a shuttle and making her own way back to Earth. Where things are certainly not as she expected to find them.

Baron does an excellent job of engaging the viewer from the very first page. The opening line is, “Should we wake them? I mean, the ship is on fire, after all,” and if that doesn’t get you interested in reading on, I don’t know what to say. It’s an interesting exercise in reverse world-building, in that it starts out at the small and personal level, only gradually opening up to reveal what’s going on in the universe at large. Getting there involves going along on the heroine’s paranoid journey, and in the middle I was increasingly convinced that her fears were justified. They are. And they aren’t. That’s a tricky task to pull off, but the author manages it.

The neuro-stim is a nice Macguffin, which allows Daisy to have the necessary talents for the plot, but Baron doesn’t just rely on that as a crutch. For example, this allows her to build a scanner that will tell her which crew-mates are human and which are cyborg. However, just as tricky is then having to get them to pass through it. The book occasionally feels like the text of a space-based adventure game, with a cycle of problem > solution > progress > problem. Yet this keeps the narrative moving forward, and we learn alongside Daisy the truth about the situation. While ut comes as much of a shock to this reader as it does to her, the facts seems to fit the preceding elements. Well done, Mr. Baron. I think we’ll be revisiting Daisy down the road.

Author: Scott Baron
Publisher: Self-published, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 6 in the Clockwork Chimera series.

Country of Beauties

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★★½
“Still a better movie than Wonder Woman 1984.“

This Taiwanese production takes place on an island where women have been separate from men for 23 generations, developing more or less your stereotypical Amazonian society. Men are rejected, male babies tossed out to see to sink or swim (typically the former) and they have build a giant, albeit largely unconvincing, statue of their founding ruler, which fires cannonballs out of its eyes. This is not inappropriate, since the current occupant of the throne, Queen Nadanwa (Yeung). has a harsh line in anti-male rhetoric (“All men are dangerous!”), accompanied by castration. Her subjects dress either in flimsy white robes or shiny battle armour, and engage in gymnastic or circus-related forms of entertainment.

Nadanwa’s antipathy initially seems not wrong, as the island is raided by rapist pirates, who are barely fought off by the women. However, it turns out there is another island nearby, occupied only by men – the survivors of the sea-dispatched male babies mentioned above. They’re more chill, and just want to get back to both sexes living in harmony. The ruler’s sister Chung Ah (Fong) has been having a secret affair with their leader, Lu (Wong). Needless to say, queenie is not going to be happy about this. However, she does eventually realize that some men might just have their uses, such as increasing the power of her eyeball cannons, in order to defend her realm from the pirates.

You may be thinking this could perhaps go through male rape for comedic purposes, a hunt for treasure, light lesbian canoodling and end in a mass battle between the Amazons and the buccaneers, with the island of men coming in to save the day. This will, in all likelihood, be accompanied by an upbeat and poppy soundtrack, which could not possibly be more eighties if it was sporting AquaNet and leg-warmers. Well, I’m not going to spoil it for you. Nadanwa also keeps a tiger as a pet, which fits with her general philosophy, I guess. Though it must be said, these Amazons do seem weirdly incompetent, needing male help not just in the armaments category, but when giving birth. You’d think they might have figured out the basics after 23 generations. 

There are some reasonable moments of scale here, though things like the battles against the pirates are more notable for the number of participants than their combat ability. The problem is mostly one of tone, and it’s hardly alone there, in Taiwanese productions from this decade. A lot of the attempts at comedy have not aged well, if they were ever funny to begin with. In a movie which also includes wholesale child genocide, sexual assault of both genders, and genital mutilation, you’re not exactly looking for light relief. Although Yeung is her usual reliable self as a leader, this falls short of the likes of Golden Queens Commando., and only just scrapes over the bar set at a height of “acceptable entertainment.”

Dir: Yang-Ming Tsai
Star: Fong-fong Fong, Don Wong, Elsa Yeung
a.k.a. Island Warriors

The Covert Guardian, by Liane Zane

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

Liane Zane’s Elioud Legacy trilogy, all three books of which I’ve previously reviewed, is supernatural fiction, written by a Roman Catholic author, and premised on the fictional conceit that matings between angelic beings (both fallen and unfallen) and humans have been going on since before the Flood, producing mixed-race offspring who are physically human but have certain heightened physical or even latent supernatural abilities. That trilogy focused on three strong and courageous young women, who when it opened were completely unaware of their angelic genes, and all of whom were both serving in the intelligence services of their various countries, and collaborating with each other on the side in a covert alliance to provide some special protection for the victims of sexual assault and trafficking. The Covert Guardian is the first volume of a projected prequel trilogy, set a few years before the opening of the previously-published one, which will tell the “origin story” of their friendship and alliance. Here, our protagonist is Olivia Markham, the trio’s unofficial ringleader, and we learn how, as a 20-year-old college pre-med student, she unexpectedly came to join the CIA. Unlike the first trilogy, this one really has no supernatural elements. Readers who’ve read the former will suspect, from certain subtle clues, that a couple of secondary characters here may also be Elioud, and will remember the St. Michael medal (a gift from her sensei) that Olivia wears, which feels strangely warm at times; and she has a sort of instinctive sixth sense for approaching danger that her then-boyfriend rather snidely dismisses as her “spidey sense.” But none of this is obviously paranormal nor impossible to explain naturalistically. I’ve classified the book as straight-out, descriptive action-adventure and espionage fiction, and it will definitely appeal to fans of those genres whether they have any liking for supernatural fiction or not. The previously-published books mentioned, as a painful experience in Olivia’s past, the murder of her cousin Emily when the two girls were 16; they were close, and the tragedy was a formative factor in shaping Olivia’s deep desire to protect the innocent victims of brutality. In the modern U.S., the wheels of the justice system grind very slowly, so the killer’s trial was delayed until the summer before Olivia was to become a junior at Brown Univ. (She’s New England born and bred, living with her family in a suburban town outside Boston.) When our tale opens, soon after testifying, Olivia’s been talked by her boyfriend into joining him in a vacation on Ibiza, a real-life Mediterranean island off the coast of Spain which is a popular tourist destination, as a supposed opportunity to rest and heal from the re-lived traumatic experience. Even at this stage in her life, she’s strong, physically fit and athletic, smart, brave and quick-thinking; and since Emily’s murder, she’s been taking serious martial arts training. (And then there’s that “spidey sense” I mentioned….) These qualities will stand her in good stead when, just four pages into the narrative, a squad of Islamist terrorists hit the beach, bent on slaughtering the revelers. Fortunately, a CIA counter-terrorist strike force is nearby; but by the time the action is over, Olivia’s displayed enough mettle to get their attention. (As they’ll soon learn, it also doesn’t hurt that she’s fluent in several languages, and qualified for the U.S. Olympic team in archery while still in high school.) Before the summer is over, she’s training at a CIA-run camp in North Carolina, and she feels that she’s found her true calling. And as luck would have it, an attractive female college student might just fit the mission profile for getting close to a wealthy young playboy type suspected of funding global terrorist activities. But chicanery, corruption, and betrayal of the U.S. aren’t necessarily things that only go on outside of the CIA, and our heroine’s path to joining the Company may not be an easy cake-walk. Although the books of the Elioud Legacy trilogy are all thick, at just 155 pages, this one is more novella length, and a quick read. Like the former books, though, it moves around geographically, in this case to locations on three different continents; and the author’s knowledge of the physical geography of all of these settings is impressive. She’s a skilled wordsmith, seasoned in the novelist’s craft and able to immerse the reader in the story, and there are some surprises up her sleeve. For readers who want danger, tension, and well-depicted action scenes, this yarn definitely delivers. It’s not characterized by profound ethical dilemmas or deep spiritual, philosophical or political content, being more straightforward in those areas (in the context of the espionage genre, Zane is more in the tradition of Manning Coles or Alistair MacLean than, say, John LeCarre’), but I don’t view this as is any sense a fault, nor will most genre fans. What readers –genre fans or not– do want in fiction, more than action and danger, is the human element, a central character(s) we can like and feel invested in enough to care about the action and danger in the first place. That test is amply met here. Olivia is a winsome, dynamic protagonist whom we get to know and appreciate, and this is a character-driven tale of her growth and maturation in various ways in the crucible of a testing ordeal. As I’ve said before in reviewing this author’s work, it’s fiction written by a Christian, rather than the kind of commercially “Christian fiction” the book trade markets as such. Olivia’s a basically kind and ethical-minded person, and cares about right and wrong as she understands them; but by her own statement, here she’s still “not really a believer.” Bad language is a hair more prominent here than in the first trilogy, though it’s actually more prominent in the first few pages here than it is in most of the book. College-age Olivia herself is capable, when she’s angry, of thinking or saying some pretty bad words, including obscenity (in a couple of languages). And though there’s no explicit sex, we know that an unmarried sexual encounter takes place at one point. The author makes us completely understand the psychology behind it; it’s a case of allowing the character to be who she realistically is, and possibly to grow through all of her decisions, both the good and the misguided ones, into the person she’s finally becoming. (That’s what good authors do.) Finally, a worthwhile question might be, does a reader need to have read the Elioud Lagacy books before reading this one? My answer would be no; having read those books will allow you to better appreciate some adumbrations of the future you can see here, but it’s not essential, and no knowledge of them is presupposed here. You could begin with this book as an appetizer for the corpus as a whole. Author: Liane Zane Publisher: Zephon Romance; available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book. A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Casey Jones Mysteries Vol 1-3 by Katy Munger

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

While omnibus editions of series are often a good way to pick up a large volume of content for a discounted price, they do have their downside. Especially for someone like me, who is basically bloody-minded and regards the dreaded Did Not Finish as a badge of failure. So even when a book is not that entertaining, I still find myself slogging on: and when there are three volumes in one, its a process which naturally takes that much longer. I think if I’d had just the one story here, I’d perhaps have looked upon this with a kinder eye. Three was tough, not least because the final story was the longest, occupying a solid forty percent of the set, and is also the least entertaining of the trilogy.

The heroine is a private detective – albeit rather unlicensed, due to a previous felony in another state – operating out of Raleigh, North Carolina. Because of her status, she works under Bobby D, a 360-pound eating machine in PI form, though it seems that Casey is a little on the well-built side herself. For example, one of her breakfasts is itemized as “A pound of grits and butter – never mind the fried eggs, sausage and biscuits,” or she describes herself as “chubby at first glance, and stocky at second.” This does not seem exactly to be reflected on the book cover (right), and gluttony isn’t the only one of the seven deadly sins of which she’s fond either. She has quite the wandering eye, and at times it feels as if there’s hardly a man who crosses her path – be they cop, suspect, witness, or merely a convenient to hand bar-tender – about whom she does not have carnal thoughts, to some degree. I mean, it’s a legitimate part of her character, but I’d prefer to have seen the same effort put into delivering action.

There too, the cover’s accuracy must be questioned, offering a level of gun-toting that’s never quite achieved.  Though at least in the first couple of volumes, the plot is decent. #1, Legwork sees a political campaign derailed when a corpse shows up in the driveway of one candidate’s house, for whom Casey has been working as a bodyguard. This job gets upgraded to finding the killer, which gets her involved in a murky conspiracy of real-estate corruption. It could easily have toppled over into needless complexity, yet Munger manages to keep everything clear and moving forward. Part two, Out of Time, has her trying to clear a woman who is on Death Row for murdering her detective husband, and there’s a similarly tangled web here, this time involving police misconduct. It does actually have a meaningful and reasonably exciting climax, in which Casey is hunted through the woods by a corrupt cop.

Then there’s the third part, Money to Burn, and that’s where scenario fatigue really set in for me. It’s perhaps also where the fact these are almost period pieces nowadays (the first volume was originally published back in 1997) hurt the books most, with a slew of elements which felt particularly anachronistic to a modern reader. A tobacco company scientist is murdered, opening the door to a mess of corporate shenanigans, rich familial strife, a serial rapist and a far too long description of the heroine’s attendance at some kind of debutante ball, about which I cared not in the slightest. There’s almost a class struggle subtext here too, with Casey repeatedly feeling her low origins when operating in the world of high society. It’s an unengaging mix between Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous with The Jerry Springer Show. I persisted, yet am now completely burned out on Ms. Jones. Wild horses probably could not drag me into reading parts 4-7.

Author: Katy Munger
Publisher: Thalia Books, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1-3 of 7 in the Casey Jones Mystery series.