Literary rating: ★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆½
I did get through this, but there were times when it was on thin ice, and it certainly didn’t work for me. At first, it seemed the heroine, Diana, was maybe eight or nine, going by the way she acts, and how her survivalist father treats her. [The first sentence is, “Diana Fellner stood over her suitcase, clutching a worn teddy bear”] Turns out, she’s actually 23. He abandons her at a roadside diner, for reasons that never become clear, and she is suddenly forced into adult life. With the help of a waitress at the diner, she ends up heading for Newark, and despite her lack of paperwork, gets a job in a shop. Then, all hell breaks loose, with a massive, coordinated series of terrorist attacks and subsequent riots, on what becomes known as Arbor Day. Diane turns vigilante, using the skills her father provided, and after the carnage, ends up joining what’s left of the police force. She has to overcome blatant sexism and a dangerous new world on the streets, as she finds herself – and also deal with her past catching up with her.
I think there was one particular moment where Diane jumped the shark for me. It’s on Arbor Day, when she basically executes a police officer, who has taken exception to her style of summary justice. The lack of real justification for the act, and any significant guilt or regret apparently felt by Diana after it, was rather troubling. Indeed, many of the events on that day themselves seem severely implausible. At the end of chapter 2, her father says, “I’ve got to teach you how to shoot,” for she has never fired live rounds, just a BB gun, before her abandonment. Yet she later proves capable of eliminating an entire mob of gang-bangers, virtually single-handed. Given she was brought up in a remote rural lifestyle, and kept almost in isolation, how did Diana become such an apparent expert in urban combat and pacification techniques?
The world-building is a bit spartan as well. There’s not even any theories offered as to who was behind the events of Arbor Day – maybe that proves relevant in further volumes? – and the sudden collapse of society into anarchy and chaos seemed more convenient than plausible. I remember 9/11 and the country actually came together after those attacks, rather than immediately descending into The Purge. Diana – who inexplicably changes her name to DianE at the end, as if that’s a radical change – doesn’t seem to be a very nice person, with an apparent zero tolerance for anyone else’s flaws. However, it has to be said, the supporting cast are more annoying than endearing, so the reader is left with, basically, no-one likeable in the book. That isn’t necessarily an impossible block to overcome. However, Johnson doesn’t have the ability to do so, and I was left with no interest in going further.
Author: Ethan Johnson
Publisher: Independently published, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 3 in the Diane Pembrook novel series.
Jesse (Finochio) is a Long Island cop on the edgeTM. Since losing custody of her kids, she has gone into a downward spiral of drinking, casual relationships and taking her anger out on any perps unfortunate enough to cross her path. She has driven her captain (Vario) to the edge of distraction, and is perpetually feuding with her mother and brother. The latter dies in a road accident – only his foot is found! – but when Jesse and Mom go to cash in his life insurance policy, they get a shock. The beneficiary has been changed to be Ralph Sirna (Trentacosta), a notorious local gangster. Suddenly, the accident seems rather less accidental, and nothing – not her boss nor Sirna’s “godfather”, Vince (Forsythe) – will be able to stop her.
Yang Yang (Yang) is an impetuous young policewoman, whose career is on thin ice after shooting the target of what was supposed to be a surveillance operation. Her superior officer – who also happens to be her uncle – is forced to re-assign her, and sends Yang to operate undercover as a student in a high school from which girls have been going missing. The leading suspect is an arrogant pupil who has recently been accused of sexually assaulting a classmate. Teacher Wu Xie (Zhou) is a witness in the case, so Yang is also tasked with making sure he isn’t pressured into changing his statement. Fitting in is going to be part of the problem for Yang – despite the help of Molly (Li), who takes the “new girl” under her wing.
Bonnie Blackwell (Lesseos) is a battered wife, whose husband, Zach (Bottoms), eventually goes too far, putting her in hospital. He gets a spell in prison, and she decides to take control of her life and become a police officer. However, the scars of her abuse run deep, and she finds herself initially “freezing” when faced with potential threats, due to the PTSD resulting from her abusive relationship. Encouraged by colleague Bill Starr (Douglas), she eventually manages to work her way past that, just in time for Zach to be released from jail without her knowledge. She discovers that he had been running a human trafficking operation, bringing in Vietnamese mail-order brides, and sets out to take him down.
After an incident where she shoots dead a woman armed only with a toy gun, Marie (DeCianni) quite the police force to become a housewife. However, her husband, Barry (Spadaro), has some dodgy friends, in particular, Nadi (Regina, who also co-wrote this), a man with ties to organized crime. Barry falls behind on payments, and an unfortunate car “accident” befalls him: a recent large life-insurance policy named Nadi as the beneficiary. It’s all very shady, as Marie’s old police captain (Session) admits. However, there is just not enough evidence for the authorities to take action. That’s not an issue for Marie, however, who decides to take revenge for the loss of her husband, against Nadi and his associates.
I’m not sure how much this is an official remake of The Inspector Wears Skirts, the 1988 franchise-launching action comedy which we covered earlier this month. It is certainly very close in both content and tone, but I’ve not seen a formal acknowledgement of this from anyone involved. While I’m obviously happy to see a reboot of one of the pioneers of the Hong Kong girls-with-guns genre, I just wish they hadn’t also rebooted the weaknesses as well as the strengths. In particular, they could have left all of the lame comedy in the eighties, and I’d have had no complaints at all.
The above is the Polish for “seven”, and in the first half-hour, you’ll be forgiven for thinking that’s what you’re watching: a Polish knock-off of David Fincher’s Se7en. Homicide cop Helena Rus (Kożuchowska) is struggling to come to terms with life, after her boyfriend is killed by a drunk-driver and, for political reasons, the criminal is allowed to go free. A welcome distraction comes in the shape of a series of ritualistic murders: every day at 6 pm, a body turns up on the streets of Wroclaw. The victims have been killed in strange and unusual ways – the first, for example, is sewn inside a cow-hide, which shrinks as it dries, crushing the victim to death. Each has a word branded into their flesh, such as “Degenerate”.
Spun off from the popular Lucky Stars series, this takes Madam Wu (Hu), who had first appeared in Twinkle, Twinkle Lucky Stars, and branches out into its own saga. After an unfortunate incident involving a sheik’s wife, the local police decide to set up a special group of women officers, who can handle similarly sensitive missions. Wu is given the task of licking the candidates into shape, with the help of Interpol’s Madam Law (Rothrock), and despite the disdain of Inspector Kan (Fung), who is training a similar group of men. Needless to say, the male and female squad members compete, both for success and each other’s attentions, but both are called in to provide security for a showcase featuring priceless jewels. Will the ladies finally be able to prove they are worthy of serving alongside their gentleman colleagues?
For the first hour, this is among the most miserable of action heroine sequels ever to come out of Hong Kong. It’s right down there with Naked Killer II: Raped by an Angel, in terms of the gulf in quality and entertainment value separating it from the original. While Hu and Fung return, as leaders of the male and female squads respectively, outside of a minor battle in the lunch-room, there is almost no significant action to speak of, until the final 20 minutes. It’s almost as if the makers forgot entirely about this side of things until the last week of shooting, and were forced to make up for lost time. It’s certainly brisk and not badly put-together. However, if you’re anything like me, you’ll be ramming your head into the wall and praying for unconsciousness, long before all that shows up.
While still packed with crappy humour, this was at least crappy humour that occasionally made me laugh, rather than roll my eyes. The fourth and final installment went out on a relative high. It demonstrates that it helps when making an action-comedy, to have actors who know their way round the action part. Here, that’s Lee and Khan, both of whom were veterans in the Hong Kong GWG field, and the martial arts here are pretty close to the quality we saw in the first installment.