Tag: c

Crawl

  By

★★★★
“The shark was otherwise engaged, torturing Blake Lively…”

I have to say, I’m neither an expert on that strange sub-genre of “animal horror,” nor am I a particular fan of it. I’m mainly looking for a movie that can give me a suspenseful time in the cinemas. This is becoming more and more difficult. Partly because in by my time of live, I have has seen quite a lot of movies, of all sorts; but also because I feel modern film makers have forgotten how to create real suspense and a feeling of slowly rising and constant terror in movies.

Mostly we are left with nonsensical pictures of man-killing animals that seem to have supernatural abilities. Usually it’s played for laughs because of all the silliness that comes with these kind of movies. That’s a pity. Sure, as a cinema-goer you can’t expect the greatness of classics like Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) or Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) an ymore. But is it really that difficult? Create a modicum of interest for the main characters; introduce the predator; put the future victims in an isolated spot with the animals; and play with the ambiguity of the question as to whether said territory is safe at the moment – or not! That’s not rocket science, folks!

But for that you have to take the movie and the characters of your story seriously and the timing of every scene is essential: You’ve got to know where you set up your “beats”. How long can you ratchet up suspense before you’ve got to deliver? Where do you put the shocks, without which you can’t do a good horror movie? Do you put in a little bit of humor and to what degree? When is it time to give some relief to the audience, e. g. with character or relationship moments which seem obligatory background for these kind of stories? Whom do you kill? Whom do you have survive? And should you kill off the family dog or not? 😉

Alexandre Aja is a French film-maker who has got to show his talents across very different horror movies. His great High Tension, a psycho-thriller produced by Luc Besson, was followed by a The Hills Have Eyes remake, the good but not great Kiefer Sutherland vehicle Mirrors and later the (consciously) ridiculous Piranha 3-D. After a good start, in recent years it seemed as if he had lost “it” a bit. So, the offer from producer Sam Raimi to film an original story by Michael and Shawn Rasmussen came at the right time.

While the script has a few humorous moments (if you’re looking for them), it plays its story straight and Aja also focuses on creating genuine suspense and danger. Yet he also delivers in the important categories of shock and gore – something not really that evident from the trailers. That makes sense: you won’t show your climaxes in a trailer of an action movie. I’ve to say my expectations were pretty low when going into the movie. As a fan you know the score, so can a film still get you? To my surprise and delight, this was not only able to do that but also surpassed my expectations by far. But let’s start with some background info on what I want in such a movie.

Though you never expect a character study, I’m always happy if the characters get enough backstory or character traits, that they don’t appear as totally bland, two-dimensional audience stand-ins. That’s definitively true for Crawl‘s main actors Kaya Scodelario and Barry Pepper. Neither had that much luck with past roles: Scodelario, I remember from the Maze Runner movies but hardly seemed to register anywhere else much. I think I saw Pepper last with a supporting villain role in the True Grit remake (2010). I also need predators I like and respect. Some animals won’t really work for me, e. g. bears are simply too sympathetic. But for my money reptiles of all sizes always deliver the goods. And I’ve got an enormous respect for crocodiles or alligators.

Next, the simple but effective story in a nutshell. Florida, hurricane time. Swimmer Haley Keller (Scodelario), who just failed in a swimming competition, receives a phone call from her sister She’s worried because she couldn’t reach their dad. Neither sister has had much contact with him, since their mother and father divorced; he was Haley’s former trainer, leaving their relationship no on the best of terms. The streets are beiing closed due to the dangers of the approaching hurricane and the rising water levels.

After finding her father’s house abandoned, save for his dog, Haley drives on to their former family house which he was renovating. Following the sound of a radio, she descends into the derelict cellar where she finds Dave, her wounded father (Pepper), who tells her that two alligators have entered the cellar through the drain. While they have some sanctuary in the cellar, they have to make an escape, due to the rising water that is coming up through openings in the cellar floor…

This may sound maybe a bit dry (pun not intended). But, believe me, the screenwriters and Aja have used every trick in the book to push and pull us, the audience, emotionally through our seats, in the same way the alligators push and pull the two likable yet imperfect protagonists through their surroundings. I was very pleasantly surprised about the high level of suspense and tension here. But also how the important ingredients mentioned above were perfectly blended together. The movie really creates suspense and grisly anticipation – yet also doesn’t forget that audiences need moments of relaxation so they can breathe a little, before the next furious attack or moment of extreme danger arrive. It’s a very well-written and executed entertainment, showcasing a kind of story-telling we don’t see much any more.

That said, the movie doesn’t reinvent the wheel. I personally wouldn’t be surprised if the Rasmussens saw two other recent animal horror movies with female leads: Burning Bright (2010) told the story of a young woman, locked together with her autistic brother in a house with a wild tiger by her evil uncle during a hurricane. And, of course The Shallows (2016, is it really already that long ago? It feels as if I saw the film just a couple of weeks ago…), which showed us Blake Lively on a rock in the rising water off an unknown beach while a blood-thirsty shark circles. As a matter of fact, both of these movies would make for a good triple-bill with this. And once Crawl comes out on DVD, it will find its place directly next to them on my shelves!

What is it about all those young women fighting predators with large pointy teeth? I’m no psycho-analyst but I guess it has something to do with the re-integration of certain character traits into the female psyche. Whatever these may be. I do remember an early trailer when The Shallows came out that had a voice-over of what sounded like a life coach trainer, encouraging the Blake Lively character. I wonder if the idea of the father who trained his daughter to extraordinary achievements was inspired by that trailer?

Actually, this movie goes a different way from some recent action-heroine movies, that looked to discredit father figures or put them in a negative light. Haley may have felt betrayed by her parents divorce and her father “abandoning” her. Yet during the course of the story, she finds out that her parents were not as happy as she thought and that her dad, who always loved her and believed in her, is just a normal guy. [Though I must credit him for absolutely convincing me how every household needs a utility belt for hand tools!] Having to survive and fight for what is left of her family, with the support of her father makes Haley overcome her own anxieties, through facing more than one deadly situation. Certainly, crawling through the drain by which the reptiles came into the house evokes quite distressing birth trauma… That’s a very positive message. After so many negative portrayals of father figures and “family values”, I found this a highly sympathetic and, for 2019, unusually traditional depiction.

But it only has to work – and it does that very well. We are not immediately tossed into shock-infested seas, there’s a nice build-up, so when the gators appear they evoke the desired audience reaction.Haley and her father have enough back story that you are on their side and want them to survive, while at the same time worrying if they will make it. Despite being just that just 90 minutes, the movie is full of ideas of how the imprisoned father-daughter couple could get help from outside (which leads to an unpleasant looter-reptile encounter) or escape the cellar and the house. It really plays with giving you hope, just to take it away again. One of my favourite moments is when Haley and Dave make it to an escape boat outside, when the levees break and a wave of water throws them back into their house – only one floor higher. Well-timed elements of humor, such as Haley’s reaction when normal house spiders fall on her face, help make for very satisfying entertainment.

A fascinating side-fact is that the movie was shot in Belgrade, Serbia, which doubles for Florida perfectly. And a little “tidbit”: Scodelario’s and Pepper’s family name in the movie is “Keller”. For German cinema-goers that’s extremely funny as “Keller” is the German word for “cellar”. But one last question: will the dog survive? Watch the movie to find out! It gets four well-earned stars from me. Your mileage may vary, but honestly I think it’s on the same level as The Shallows, which also scored highly with me. So, if you enjoyed that, this should be right up your (flooded) street.

Dir: Alexandre Aja
Star:  Kaya Scodelario, Barry Pepper

Counterfeiting in Suburbia

  By

★★½
“Fake it till you make it.”

High-schoolers Reilly (Albuquerque) and Erica (Wallace) have discovered a way to literally print money, forging hundred-dollar bills. They then use these to buy high-end fashion, and sell these ill-gotten gains on to their schoolmates for genuine cash. The more cautious Reilly wants to stop, but realizes she can do good by helping Karen (Butler), her aunt and guardian, who is in financial trouble. So when Erica is insistent they expand, Reilly goes along with it, and they use the school’s art-class resources to up their game, laundering the fake money through foreign exchange stores. However, this criminal empire comes under threat, after art teacher Tim Sylvester (MacCaull) discovers what they’re up to. Because by chance, he owes a large sum of money to some nasty people, and starts a relationship with Erica, to make sure she’ll keep working for his benefit.  Worse still, the Secret Service have been alerted to the flood of funny money, so are also investigating.

I have… questions. What made R+E get into counterfeiting to begin with? For when the film starts, they’re already printing out the Benjamins on their home printer. And where do you get the special paper? While there have been cases of people using inkjet printers for this purpose, it seems these involved wiping $5 bills, then reprinting them with higher denominations. [Googling to find this out has probably got me on a watch-list…] And while the film makes the point, especially in high-end stores, that most purchases using credit-cards means assistants are less familiar with spotting fake bills, this surely doesn’t apply to currency exchanges? As a credible piece of scripting, this ends up skipping most of the necessary check-boxes, and I doubt it’s based as much on a true story as claimed.

It’s not entirely without merit though. The underlying idea – teenagers gradually getting out of their depth, and not realizing it until they are too far in – is a decent one. The contrast between the two leads is effective as well: Erica is perpetually touting them as being like Thelma and Louise, and is unfazed when Reilly points out how that ends. There’s also a contrast in motives between the girls – though you wonder a bit why they’re friends, given their divergent natures. Reilly is entirely selfless, and is using her illicit income for what she perceives as “good” [though never quite considers the negative implications of her acts]. Erica, on the other hand, is apparently doing it for the thrill or the LOLs, and you’re never sure quite what this loose cannon might do.

By coincidence, this was watched the same weekend as Body of Sin, and the two films are similar. Both focus on two young women of disparate characters, whose decision to team up and go over the border of legality has severe consequences. Both also have severe problems in the script department. Body was perhaps better technically, but this gets the edge – simply for the sheer uselessness of the only sympathetic male character, which may arguably be more feminist than anything the women do. While some way short of great, it just about passes muster, if you’re in an undemanding Netflix mood.

Dir: Jason Bourque
Star: Larissa Albuquerque, Kayla Wallace, Sarah Butler, Matthew MacCaull

Curvature

  By

★★★
“Time out for fun.”

Helen (Fonseca) is struggling to come to terms with the sudden, unexpected death of her scientist husband, who was engaged on a top-secret project with his partner, Tomas (Morshower). Then things get truly weird: she experiences the mother of all blackouts, missing an entire week, and shortly afterward, Helen receives a phone-call warning her to get out of her house… from herself. It turns out, husband and Tomas had come up with a limited form of time-travel. As a result of this and subsequent events, there are now two Helens running around this point in. And future Helen appears to be considerably more militant. She leaves present Helen a sniper rifle as a gift, as well as stocking up on things like pressure cookers – and you can safely assume she’s not preparing a nourishing casserole. Present Helen decides future Helen needs to be stopped. But the more she uncovers, not least about the circumstances of her husband’s demise, the more she understands why future Helen is intent on carrying out her take on Project Mayhem.

I love me a good time-travel movie, and this is just that – a good time-travel movie, rather than a great one, like Retroactive or Run Lola Run. It manages to keep its two heroines in the air, revealing information at a decent rate, and also to balance brain and brawn. To the latter end, the heroine has to solve puzzles left behind by her other self to clue her in – without doing so to Tomas or the others seeking to shut the Helens down. On her side is work colleague Alex (Avery), though to be honest, he seems there mostly as a proxy for the audience, so Helen can explain stuff to him. Against her is Kravitz (Lanipekun), a crypto-federal agent – for it seems the defense industry has its own plans for the technology in question. That said, if it were really all that important, you’d think more than one guy might be sent in pursuit. Whatevs….

A bonus point is awarded for gratuitously casting Linda Hamilton in a small role as Helen’s former mentor. For, of course, Hamilton was part of the original “Going to the past to save the future” franchise: Terminator. Here, she doesn’t get to do much; it’s still a nice nod to one of the film’s influences. However, it feels as if the film couldn’t quite work out how it wanted to use time-travel. There’s a nice get-out which explains why future Helen didn’t come back and prevent her husband’s death. But beyond that, it’s more mildly engaging than deeply engrossing, as one Helen gradually closes in on the other Helen, and Kravitz closes in on them both. To be honest, I’d rather have focused on future Helen, since she seems the one actively involved in changing the world, rather than reacting to it, as present Helen does. Though scripting that version might have caused too many headaches – both for the writer and the viewer.

Dir: Diego Hallivis
Star: Lyndsy Fonseca, Zach Avery, Glenn Morshower, Alex Lanipekun

Chase Step By Step

  By

★★★
“Chase what matters.”

A solid if unremarkable Taiwanese kung-fu film, it’s set in 1887 and focuses on a mission to deliver a thousand taels of gold, which are intended for use in drought relief by another province. (Presumably) To avoid attracting unwanted attention, the delivery is kept very low-key. In fact, only two people are assigned as security for the gold: circus acrobats Lin Ying (Hsu) and Sao Wu (Chow). However, word apparently leaks out, and on their journey, they’re almost perpetually under attack.

These attempts range from the straightforward – two guys they meet at a rest-stop try and run off with their cart – to the more subtle. The wife of an inn-keeper attempts to seduce Sao, for example. Or in the most complex, an incident is staged in which our hero and heroine rescue a young girl. She then invites him to dinner, gets him drunk and… Step 2. ? Step 3. PROFIT. Yeah, it’s a bit vague, since it’s not as if Sao is carrying the thousand taels of cold on him. Anyway, even when they reach their destination, the relief aid isn’t safe, since there are greedy local eyes, intent on diverting it into private hands.

It’s very much a two-hander, with Lin and Sao portrayed as equals, though the poster would indicate Hsu is the star (she’d go on to become a successful producer, including on the Oscar-nominated Farewell My Concubine). Less clear is quite what the relationship is between the pair: Sao seems to take the lead, but Lin is the smarter, and has to rescue her colleague more than once, in part due to his eye for the ladies. Fight-wise, Chow is the better: he gets the final battle against the man bad guy, while Hsu is battling the two minions who are absconding with the gold.

It’s a bit of a shame they don’t make more of the pair’s supposed circus and acrobatic background. This is the focus of the scene behind the opening credits (though quite what the dog tricks have to do with it, I’m uncertain!), then only intermittently references these skills thereafter. There’s a scene where the two have to escape by crossing a chasm on a tightrope, pushing a hand-cart, and a rather cool scene where Sao fights the bad guys while on a pair of impromptu stilts. That’s about it.

Lin does get the movie’s most memorable moment, however. Her opponent hurls a knife as she’s on the ground, which pins down her pigtail. With one flick of her head, she returns it to him, burying it in his chest. [Here’s the animated GIF] They say there’s nothing new under the sun: that kind of lethal hair-fu shows they’re wrong. In comparison, the rest of the film is not as memorable, and offers hardly much in the way of an inventive story-line. Yet it proceeds at a decent enough pace to sustain interest, and Hsu’s facial expressions sell her talents well – perhaps better than her talents do.

Dir: Yu Min Sheong
Star: Hsu Feng, Chow Chung-lim, Ma Cheung, Nam Wan

Hell on Route 666, by Dan Leissner

  By

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

At the very end, of the characters says to Cat, the heroine, “Will someone PLEASE tell me what this was all about!” I can kinda sympathize with them: I think it’s safe to say this defied expectations, though I must stress, in a good way. It’s close to 12 years since we were first introduced to Cat; not sure what Dan has been doing in the interim, but I was delighted to find a second volume had finally arrived. Re-reading our review, I probably should have been less surprised: the original managed to have a plot combining “black militants, white supremacists and aliens from outer-space.” I had managed to forget the last, so was expecting merely another funky escapade of seventies style, sex and violence.

Yes… and no.

Initially, it seems almost like a cross between Dennis Wheatley and Russ Meyer, with Cat investigating and infiltrating a Satanic cult based around heavy metal group 666, whose teenage fans are being mind-controlled into committing increasingly heinous crimes in the name of the Devil. But the further on we go, the more outrageous things get. 666 are entirely discarded, with a Devil-worshipping rock-band becoming positively mundane. We end up heading for territory that’s more like the Book of Revelations adapted by H.P. Lovecraft – oh, yeah, and throw in a demonic version of Bumblebee from Transformers, because… Well, just because. Except, Lovecraft wouldn’t have a kick-ass heroine like Cat, breaking limbs and hearts with equal confidence. Or an all-girl commando platoon. Or quite so many pairs of tight jeans, inevitably worn low on the hips…

I did have some issues in the opening third, mostly because Cat wasn’t all that likeable, to be honest. Not sure if I’ve changed, she’s changed or the world has changed, in the twelve years since the first novel. Probably a bit of each. She seems to spent an inordinate amount of time stoned, dressing/acting to attract the male gaze, yet simultaneously resenting it. “Jeez! What a bunch of low-lives,” is a sentiment she expresses at one point; “Shit! Just look at them… bunch of no necks and beer-bellies. God, I hate this crap!” at another. Apparently, she’s the only one allowed to overtly express any sexuality. She certainly has no qualms about seducing a boy of “barely 16”. Reverse the genders there, and it would play rather differently, to be sure.

It was only later, I realized, perhaps this might be deliberate – expressing a darker side to Cat may be why the Satanists were so keen to bring her over to their team. However, I prefer my heroines a bit less… whiny! Still, even in this difficult first third, Leissner packs a wallop, particularly with his chilling descriptions of the mind-controlled terrorism. And the deeper we get, the more Cat relies on her actions to define her. That, and the continually escalating apocalypse make for a real downhill avalanche of a read, one that eventually becomes entirely unstoppable. Dan promises we won’t have to wait until 2031 for the next installment. He’d better live up to that, or I’ll be swinging past to know the reason why.

Author: Dan Leissner
Publisher: Midnight Marquee Press, available through Amazon, for now only as a paperback. I received a review copy in exchange for an honest opinion.
Book 2 of 2 in the Cool Cat series.

Cassidy Red

  By

★★½
“Better red than dead. Albeit, only just.”

Josephine “Joe” Cassidy (Eiland) is promised in marriage to Tom (Jenkins), the son of the area’s richest rancher, but her heart actually belongs to Jakob (Grasl), the Indian who is Tom’s adopted brother. The two lovers consummate their relationship when Tom is away, but  the spurned fiancee hatches a long-term plan to get revenge. Years later, after becoming the local sheriff, he uses these connections to frame and execute Jakob for murder. Word of this reaches Joe, who conveniently for the plot is handy with a firearm, because her father (Cramer) was a renowned bounty-hunter, and passed on the necessary skills to her. Dying her hair red – hence the title – she sets out to take revenge on Tom, only for him to reveal that Jakob is not dead… Not yet, anyway.

The structure here is quite convoluted – rather needlessly, I’d say. Not only does it unfold in several different eras, the entire thing is enclosed in wraparound sections, where the story of Cassidy Red is being told, for inspirational purposes, by a piano-player in a brothel to one of the working girls. It’s definitely a case where less feels like it would have been more, with a straightforward chronological timeline working to the film’s benefit, instead of characters dropping in and out. Perhaps the director felt that might have been too simple, for once you peel away the trapping, this is indeed a very straightforward tale of revenge. Is that necessarily a bad thing, though?

This was submitted for Knudsen’s thesis at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film, and Television, which perhaps explains some of the issues here: on occasion, it certainly does feels as if it was an academic requirement with an earnest Message (capital M used deliberately), rather than wanting to tell its story. The best section is likely the one where Joe is being taught the mechanics of gun-fighting by her father, which is very well written, performed and edited. The result is a sequence that sheds genuine light into the mindset of someone who, for survival, has to be permanently ready to shoot to kill. Given the limited budget here, credit is due for production values which are generally good. It was filmed largely on location at Old Tucson Studios, and that adds authenticity to the 19th-century Arizona setting, which some films wouldn’t have bothered with. 

Other parts, unfortunately, fall short of that, and some are flat-out unconvincing – the scene where Jakob is taken on board as a foster son, for example, seems entirely inexplicable, and they just shouldn’t have bothered, since it’s not something the audience needs to see. It’s a shame, since the central performance is good: however, the two male leads both struggle to be more than forgettable, and that leaves the end result feeling unbalanced on the dramatic level. This sporadic quality is perhaps the biggest problem: there seems a general unevenness of tone and approach, resulting in a film which takes two steps forward, then one back.

Dir: Matt Knudsen
Star: Abigail Eiland, David Thomas Jenkins, Jason Grasl, Rick Cramer

Contract: Snatch by Ty Hutchinson

  By

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

Sei is a former assassin, who quit the industry after getting pregnant, then having her daughter stillborn. She has taken up a quiet life in the Belgian countryside, when she’s brought out of retirement by a shocking offer she received over the deep web. Her prospective employer says Sei’s daughter is not dead, and offers information in exchange for carrying out a job: breaking another assassin, the notorious Black Wolf, out of the Turkish prison where he is being held. After confirming with the doctor who was present that the claim of her daughter’s survival is true, Sei accepts the mission. However, it turns out she was set up as a patsy, and finds herself also incarcerated in conditions which seem not have improved much since Midnight Express.

It’s a little odd that Sei is described as an assassin, yet doesn’t actually do any actual… assassinating here. Sure, she certainly kills a lot of people, mostly members of Turkish law-enforcement (as well as a wild boar) – just not for money. Might have made more sense to begin by establishing Sei’s credentials in this profession; as is, the reader has to accept her skills on faith. Perhaps the vague hints of back-story should have been fleshed out more. There’s also a large debt to Kill Bill in the driving force of the story here: specifically, the end of Volume 1, when Bill says, “One more thing, Sofie. Is she aware her daughter is still alive?” To my great surprise – sorry, can’t find the sarcasm font – this element is left entirely unresolved at the end of the volume. Indeed, she’s little if any closer to finding the truth than when she leaves the doctor.

While I’ve qualms about the overall structure here, I did actually enjoy the meat of the sandwich more than the bread. That would be the mission to Turkey, including her initial attempt to free the Black Wolf, then Sei’s subsequent escape from incarceration and flight across the country, with evil prison governor, General Rakin Demir, leading an extremely hot pursuit. It’s a crisply paced saga of action sequences, that have an interesting variety to them, from her compromised attempt to free the Black Wolf, through to a climactic race from Cesme across the Chios Strait to Greece. While she’s mostly a solo operator, who prefers to rely on stealth, she ends up teaming with Kostas, a Greek who… well, let’s just say, his connections come in handy, and I predict, likely will do so again in future volumes.

As the review to this point should make clear, I’m in two minds about whether I’ll be going further, because certain elements I liked and others I didn’t. Sei’s a good character, and I appreciated the almost complete lack of romance to get in the way of the “good stuff.” But I get the feeling the saga of her daughter is going to be stretched out beyond the point of tolerance, to deceased equine level. Probably one of those cases where I’ll wait for volume two to be available at a discounted price.

Author: Ty Hutchinson
Publisher: Gangkruptcy Press, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 5 in the Sei Assassin Thriller series.

Code Name: Griffin, by Morgan Hannah MacDonald

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

A painfully clunky mix of spy and crime thrillers, this really needs to decide which it wants to be. Alexandria Kingston – code name Griffin, in case you hadn’t guessed – was an abused child, with the good fortune to be rescued and brought up by Margaret Murphy, the head of Irish organized crime in Boston. Though to avoid Alex being targeted for leverage, she was never acknowledged to be part of the family. As an adult, Alex joined the CIA and became a top field agent, jet-setting over the globe on demand. But when her foster mother suffers a stroke, she returns to Boston to find herself in the middle of a war for control of the turf. The rival Killeen clan, sensing an opportunity, pounce. It’s up to Alex and her brothers to defend the family – and then take the battle to the Killeens.

It’s all utterly implausible. Apparently, the CIA don’t bother doing any kind of background check on their employees, and have no problem recruiting and giving security clearance to people with close ties to organized crime. Alex, meanwhile, wobbles uncertainly between remarkable proficiency and incompetence, as necessary to the plot. She can reel in a member of the Killeen family by simply ordering a whisky, yet this top-notch spy inexplicably can’t form sentences when faced with her former childhood sweetheart. I admit her latter burbling is actually kinda endearing, but c’mon: have some consistency in your lead character. And, of course, the Murphys are an almost saintly crime family. By which I mean, they still do prostitution and human trafficking, they just do them the right way. Yeah. About that…

This still might have made for an interesting detour in an established series, if we were already fully convinced of her talents as a CIA operative, with an unrevealed past. Instead, we get barely a handful of pages at the beginning to establish her credentials, with no real context: she exists in a vacuum. There’s also a fondness for the kind of florid consumerist prose I thought had gone out of style with Bret Easton Ellis culminating in this remarkably superfluous description of Alex’s perfume: “The sensuous bottom notes of Sri Lankan sandalwood and Indonesian patchouli were mixed with high notes of Bulgarian rose and citrus to add a feminine touch that was irresistible to the opposite sex.” I swear, I literally rolled my eyes at “high notes of Bulgarian rose”.

I can’t knock the action too much. There is a steady stream of set-pieces throughout the book, and MacDonald does describe these with a clear eye, and no shortage of savagery. [You wonder what, exactly, Boston law enforcement are doing while all this is going on, since Alex does not mess around, and the pile of bodies left in her wake is considerable. It just needs to be in the service of a much better constructed plot.

Author: Morgan Hannah MacDonald
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 2 in the Griffin series.

Critical Salvage, by Steve Richer

  By

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

This is briskly functional rather than particularly memorable: by which I mean, I read the book in fairly short order… only to discover, when I finished it, that I didn’t remember very much about it. Not even the heroine’s name. Mallory? Mindy? Miley? Definitely an M word… Ah, yes: Melody Cale. She’s an agent for the Geirty Solutional Diversity Group, a murky government organization – also known as the Get Shit Done Group – who “do what the CIA couldn’t… without having politicians, or reporters, looking over their shoulders.”

In this case, it’s cleaning up after a CIA operation goes wrong, and a plane goes down in the Nicaraguan jungle. The cargo, code-named “Woodland Kaiser”, needs to be recovered before it falls into the wrong hands. Which would be these of The Homestead, an equally murky group of unknown origins and motives. They contract out the search to murky [yeah, it’s like that…] Latin American drug-lord, Rojas. The GSDG send Melody, and she teams up with Owen Wright, a British ex-soldier whose father was killed by one of Rojas’s minions, and who is much more interested in revenge than a salvage operation.

Indeed, Melody appears more interested in finding out the identity of Rojas then recovering the target. It’s not long before she has abandoned the search for Woodland Kaiser entirely, not to mention the entire American continent. She is instead hob-nobbing with the rich and famous, jetting off to the Cannes Film Festival, for reasons which remain – all together, now! – murky. This is particularly dubious since, it turns out, when Owen puts his mind to it, he’s able to locate the crash site in about a page. You didn’t think it would be that easy, did you? You know, for a second there…

If you put issues of logic and common sense aside, this works much better, and it’s ideal beach material: a slick page-turner, in which bullets fly and the villain has a seaside lair nicknamed “The Aquarium”, with one glass wall below the water-level, looking out into the ocean. [Memo to self: if ever I become an evil overlord, and construct anywhere nicknamed “The Aquarium,” I will be sure to use bullet-proof materials…] This is involved in the best section, forming the book’s climax, when the stronghold is stormed by Melody, with the assistance of Adriana Tiscareno, a businesswoman she initially suspects of being “Rojas”.

The heroine is something of a cypher. It might have been nice to have learned more about her origins, and how she became such a hard-ass. For comparison, the blurb claims “Fans of Atomic Blonde, Nikita and Alias will love Critical Salvage” – two of those three did explain how their heroines came to be, and those were important parts of the story. While this ties up all its loose ends nicely, and works perfectly well as a stand-alone, it perhaps feels more like a third or fourth book, rather than an introduction. But if I’m in need of some holiday reading down the stretch, future volumes would merit consideration.

Author: Steve Richer
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon as an e-book or paperback
Book 1 of 1 in the Mercury Cale series.

Cold November

  By

★★★
“Deer Florence…”

If you think children are of one mind with regard to the gun debate, thanks to the zealots of Marjory Stoneman, the alternative view portrayed by this movie will feel amazingly transgressive and almost alien. The world it depicts is one where schools will actually teach kids how to use guns safely, handing out gun permits, and a teenage girl can receive a treasured family heirloom, in the shape of a .30-30 rifle, passed down the generations. Hunting is a way of life, and an important resource, with a particularly strong matriarchal tradition, in which three generations of women will be going into the woods together. For 12-year-old Florence (Abas), it’ll be her first excursion: in a not-too-subtle parallel, she also gets her first period.

This is a very sober film, which takes guns and the culture around them extremely seriously, and that includes hunting, which is depicted in unflinching fashion. This is likely not a film for the committed vegan, in particular when Florence has shot her first deer and, in the absence of any immediate adult help, has to dress it. This is foreshadowed earlier, Florence’s aunt Mia (Fellner) teasing her when the young girl gets a bit squeamish about menstrual blood (and in particular, its uses in hunting): “You think that’s gross? Wait until you get elbows deep inside a deer.” As someone who tends to encounter raw meat only on polystyrene trays in the supermarket, it’s quite a shock – albeit also refreshing – to be reminded from where it comes.

On the other hand, the naturalistic approach eventually hampers the film, simply because so little of note actually happens. Up until the end, when Florence finds herself alone in the woods for a bit, virtually the sole bit of excitement is a small fire breaking out in the tree stand. This is not exactly an adrenaline rush. In Jacob’s defense, it’s clearly not intended to be: according to the director on the film’s Kickstarter page, “I noticed how the power of taking a life, butchering an animal, and meditating through the act was empowering. It changes you. It seemed clear that those who had not lived through this change have a fundamentally different experience of life.” However, quite what that “change” might be for Florence is not clear. How is her life “fundamentally different” as a result? We don’t really know.

The main difference seems to be that Florence is no longer visited by the ghost of Sweeney, her late sibling. This is another time the film’s opacity is a bit irritating: it’s suggested that Sweeney’s death was tragic, and perhaps even firearm-related. But would it have been too much to ask, for the film-makers to be a little clearer, on what appears to be an important point? Despite these criticisms, while it’s probably not a film I’d watch again, I didn’t feel it was 90 minutes wasted. Very much understated, this provides a glimpse into an environment not often depicted by Hollywood, one where guns are a tool, and not a threat.

Dir: Karl Jacob
Star: Bijou Abas, Anna Klemp, Heidi Fellner, Karl Jacob