Tag: cop

The Inspector Wears Skirts series

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★★★½
The Inspector Wears Skirts

skirts1aSpun 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?

If you want an example of the “kitchen sink” school of Hong Kong cinema, look no further, because Chin hurls everything he can think of at the camera. As well as the action – largely concentrated around whenever Madame Law is present – there’s drama (the inevitable cocky bitch among the women learns it’s a team job, misanthropy (two of the recruits discover they share the same boyfriend, and give him a brutal beating) and even a musical number. Oh, yes: and large slabs of broad comedy, particularly in the middle, with a lengthy sequence resulting after the two teams go on a mutual outing to a roller-skating rink. This isn’t subtle, but I’ll admit, I did laugh out loud on at least one occasion. The shifting between these approaches is rarely less than jerky, leaving the viewer with the vague impression they’re channel surfing HK television.

Still, the action, whenever it shows up, is as good as you’d expect from a film produced by Jackie Chan, and on which his world-famous Stunt Team was involved. Rothrock and Hu do much of the heavy lifting, but the rest of the cast don’t seem to get off lightly, Hui in particular. Bizarrely memorable, is the training sequence where Law encourages the recruits to run faster by having them chased by blazing trails of gasoline. [The Chan-esque out-takes at the end show you they clearly needed a couple of takes to get that right…] The final battle, against Western jewel thief Jeffrey Falcon is particularly impressive, and is embedded at the end of this review for your viewing pleasure. If only there’d been rather more of this – rather than, say, quite as much roller-skating – this could have been a classic. Instead, it’s excellent in short bursts, and merely acceptable for long spells.

Dir: Wellson Chin
Star: Sibelle Hu, Kara Hui, Shui-Fan Fung, Cynthia Rothrock
a.k.a. Top Squad

★★
The Inspector Wears Skirts II

skirts2For 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.

The main thing you’ll take away is an appreciation for the delicate balance between action and comedy managed in the first film. Where that juggled those two balls with some adroitness, the balance here is tilted heavily towards the latter, and I’m strongly inclined to put comedy in quotes. For the laughs are largely the product of things like new recruit Amy Yip’s large breasts – she cuts holes in her bullet-proof vest, because she doesn’t want it flattening her figure. There’s even a scene which makes heavy use of flaming excrement for comedic effect. Oh, hold my aching sides for I fear they may split. As in the original, there’s a lengthy “date night” sequence, set at a birthday party for Madame Wu, rather than a roller-skating rink, but still complete with a musical number. It manages to be even worse-staged than the original.

Things do improve somewhat in the second half. There’s a contest on an obstacle course, which emphasizes teamwork over individual success, then another rehash from part one, a “best out of three” martial arts match between the Banshee and Tiger squads. These could have been the most badly choreographed fights in the history of kung fu, and they would still have come as a blessed relief from comedic Peeping Tom-foolery and people smearing tofu on their own face. Have to say, the poster above (Vietnamese?) probably had rather more effort put into its creation, than most of the scenes in the actual movie. There’s an almost overpowering feeling this was little more than a hurriedly concocted cash-in on the success of its predecessor.

Dir: Wellson Chin
Star: Sibelle Hu, Sandra Ng, Shui-Fan Fung, Billy Lau

★★
The Inspector Wears Skirts III

Just about any effort at meaningful action is abandoned here, in favour of comedy which spoofs other movies, including Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, the Chinese Ghost Story series and, in the second half, Hong Kong classic, God of Gamblers. Actually, as a fan (to varying degrees) of all those, I didn’t mind too much: it’s a damn sight more successful than the dire attempts at humour which sank part II before it had left the harbour. Those boat metaphors are also appropriate, given this carries the sub- or alternative title, Raid On Royal Casino Marine. The main mission here sees the Banshee Squad going undercover on a boat, where Amy (Ng) has to take over as a syndicate’s top gambler, after the real person is unceremoniously dumped overboard. However, robbers have designs on the $200 million pot, and hijack the ship, so it’s up to Madam Wu (Hu) to parachute in to the rescue of Inspector Kan (Fung).

inspector3

Takes a while to get to that point, as it starts with We and Kan now married, and Wu apparently largely happy to be a home-maker. Kan is tasked with reviving the Banshee Squad, though his training methods are… somewhat different, shall we say. Yay for electrocuting tied-up women! They gain revenge by donning the hockey mask and knife gloves of Jason and Freddy Krueger, to terrorize him, then restaging an entire Chinese Ghost Story sequence. It’s all such a product of its time (1990) – but since that was when I was heavily into both schlock horror and Hong Kong fantasy, I can’t complain too much, and just wallowed in shameless nostalgia for a bit. However, whatever it may have gained on the comedy side, is entirely handed back in a lack of competent or interesting action. Jackie Chan and his team had clearly severed all connections with the series for this entry, and the results are entirely pedestrian, with hardly a single moment, let alone sequence, of note.

While it likely made more sense at the time, I can safely say it certainly hasn’t stood the test of time very well. I think it’s probably best to say no more and move on to the final entry. Otherwise, I’ll probably have spent longer writing this review, than they spent on creating the entire movie…

Dir: Wellson Chin
Star: Shui-Fan Fung, Sandra Ng, Billy Lau, Sibelle Hu
a.k.a. Raid On Royal Casino Marine

★★★
The Inspector Wears Skirts IV

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.

Madam Lee (Lee) is struggling with the latest bunch of female recruits in the Banshee Squad, to the point where her boss Supt. Hu (Fung Woo), might have to close down the group entirely. For another officer, Madam Yang (Khan), has founded a “gilt-edged” women’s task force, which has been getting glowing reports. To try and recover, Lee and her assistant, Ann (Tse) go in search of some of the former members, now in civilian life, to see if they will come back and help restore the Banshee Squad to its former glories. Which is how we get the return of Amy (Ng) and May (Kara Hui), who have become a single mother and nuttier than a fruitcake respectively.

It’s certainly not elevating the wit: mental illness and date-rape jokes, toilet humour and crotch whacks are very much the order of the day here, right up to the final shot, the film freeze-framing on an excrement gag (perhaps literally!). But there are occasions where it works, such as the misfiring of a pair of jet-propelled shoes, which feels like it could have come out of a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. Someone even gets fired from a cannon. There are also things parodying the bus chase from Police Story [remember, Jackie Chan was a producer on the first Skirts film], Once Upon a Time in China, and probably a whole bunch of other stuff which has gone under the bridge of memory over the past 28 years.

Eventually, we get to the action-oriented main course, which sees the bad guys taking the commissioner’s son hostage in his school. Naturally, Madams Lee and Yang have to team up with each other, as part of the anti-terrorist forces. Even though the fights seem more than a little sped-up, they’re entertaining and well-staged, especially the final battle against a superkicker, whom I’ve seen identified as  Chui Jing Yat, which goes on for what seems like ever, in and around the school. It likely makes me view this slightly more kindly than it deserves, and this is not going to be a film in either Khan or Lee filmographies that will be ranked near the top. But if you’re going to go out, go out on a high note, I say.

Dir: Wellson Chin
Star:Moon Lee, Wan-Yee Tse, Cynthia Khan, Sandra Ng

The Fatal Raid

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★★★
“Back in black”

“Guess who’s back, back again. Jadey’s back, tell a friend…” Okay, that’s as close as you’re ever going to get as a rap from me. But I was genuinely delighted to see this stared Jade Leung, who was perhaps the final top-tier member of the Hong Kong Girls With Guns club. I thought she had gone the way of Cynthia Khan and Yukari Oshima, vanishing off the radar entirely. It turns out, she had been making TV series and stuff. Leung returned to big-scale movies in 2016’s Special Female Force (review coming in due course), and followed up with this. It was, apparently, originally intended as a sequel to Force, though that notion appears to have quietly been forgotten, perhaps due to SFF‘s less than stellar box-office returns.

She plays Madam Fong, who was part of a botched clandestine operation by Hong Kong police in nineties Macao, which led to several deaths. However, due to the off-book nature of the op, this means no compensation could be paid to the officers’ families. This has sat very badly with another party to the operation, Inspector Tam (Tam), over the decades since. Finally, he gets the chance to do something, as Fong, along with policewoman Alma (Ho) and Interpol agent Zi Han (Lin) are sent to Macao to protect a high-ranking Hong Kong official. They come under target from a group of drug-crazed anarchists… yet there may be more going on to this than meets the eye.

It’s all kinda okay. The action sequences are solid, starting with a stakeout which turns hyper violent, and building through some severely intense gun-battles. There is also some flippy, spinny stuff which looks like a cross between lucha libre and MMA, and is rather impressive. The problem is mostly the stuff between the action, with a plot that doesn’t really make much sense, and characters that I frequently had trouble distinguishing from each other. Admittedly, the latter may partly be a result of the story’s failure to hold my interest. By the end, I was more or less checked out, only truly paying attention when the sound of gunfire brought me back in. To the film’s credit, there was quite a lot of that, and some seriously heavy weaponry to boot.

It was quite easy to see how it could have been a sequel to Special Female Force. That similarly opened with a mission that went savagely wrong, and also had a character who was the daughter of someone killed in the incident. But it definitely has a less comedic tone, veering considerably closer to the “heroic bloodshed” sub-genre. I must confess, it did get a bonus half-star for the very last shot, which, out of nowhere, promised a potential reboot of the Black Cat franchise. I likely got considerably more excited about that, than anything else this had to offer. Still, it was just nice to see Leung again, almost regardless of quality.

Dir: Jacky Lee
Star: Jade Leung, Patrick Tam, Jeana Ho, Lin Min-chen

Soni

  By

★★
“A policewoman’s lot, is not a happy one…”

This takes place in the Indian city of Delhi, and despite the title and the poster, is really about two policewomen, almost equally. Title billing goes to Soni (Ohlyan), a young  officer who is coming to terms with life after divorce from her husband, Naveen (Shukla). She is also the possessor of a fierce temper, which repeatedly gets her into trouble because she’s unable to keep her cool with suspects. Forced to play clean-up is her boss, superintendent Kalpana Ummat (Batra), who seems to see something of her younger self in Soni, as well as appreciating the junior cop’s potential. But there’s only so far she can protect Soni from the consequences of her outbursts.

Ayr is going for a documentary feel here, using a lot of hand-held camera and single takes, which makes it seem as if the movie is following the characters, rather than them acting as directed. The problem is that there just isn’t enough in the script to sustain interest: we are not, for example, following Soni through the investigation of one particular case which could have acted as a common thread, tying things together. Instead, we get a series of semi-random incidents, which are more or less the same. Soni gets involved in an incident. Soni loses her temper after a man says something bad to her. Soni hits the man. Her superior officer has to deal with the aftermath. There are at least three cycles of the above, which is probably two too many. She literally can’t even go to the bathroom, without a fight breaking out.

That said, the policing aspects are still quite interesting, and I don’t envy either of the women, doing what has to be a thankless job; if this depiction is correct, Indian society is still inhabiting the Stone Age as far as gender equality is concerned. But even that aside, you’re picking the bones out of cases which are rarely clear-cut. For instance, one alleged sexual assault here might be nothing more than a dispute about rent, as Soni suspects, or may be legitimate, as Kalpana reckons. Figuring out the truth in these situations is as much an art as a science, and it’s here, as well as in negotiating the shoals of political influence, where the movie works best.

Unfortunately, it’s dragged down heavily, by the weight of the two women’s personal lives, which are tedious and uninteresting. Soni’s ex-husband keeps trying to get them back together; Kalpana has to deal with a husband, also a police officer, who outranks her, and a mother-in-law who is demanding grandchildren. This is all sub-telenovela rubbish, and doesn’t seem to add any informative or enlightening angles to either character. It also becomes more than slightly monotonous in its gender depictions, with men shown almost inevitably as lecherous, venal, corrupt or, at the very least, blindly indifferent. The lack of any true conclusion may be “realistic,” yet instead provides a final nail in the coffin.

Dir: Ivan Ayr
Star: Geetika Vidya Ohlyan, Saloni Batra, Vikas Shukla, Mohit S. Chauhan

Dispatch

  By

★★½
“Please continue to hold. Your call is very important to us.”

Christine McCullers (Gubelmann) is a new cop, out on patrol with her father, a long-time veteran of the force. A poor decision involving a robbery suspect leaves Dad dead and Christine crippled. Re-assigned to dispatch, things go from bad to worse, when she gets a call from a kid, which she takes to be some kind of prank. It’s very real, and the caller’s friend ends up murdered as a result. Crucified by social media – not least due to her popping of painkillers to deal with her injury – she’s suspended from duty. Believing the killers are not the victim’s parents as her colleagues think, Christine begins her own investigation to try and achieve redemption through finding the real murderer.

I liked the central character, precisely because she’s not the cookie-cutter, saintly heroine you’d probably expect. She’s severely flawed, easily angered and prone to jump to conclusions which may or may not be justified. Likeable? No. But certainly a bit more interesting than the usual Lifetime angel. Indeed, she has so many flaws, she feels closer to the heroine of a Nordic noir series. The plot, however, is nowhere near as structured or well-considered. Right from the start, the case against the parents is so weak as to be laughable, being based entirely off previous domestic abuse. It’s highly doubtful the cops would pounce in the manner necessary for the plot. Meanwhile, Christine is using her dead father’s badge and gun to continue her own investigation, something which would surely bring down the wrath of internal affairs, regardless of the evidence collected (and I’ve doubts about its resulting admissibility, too).

It all progresses, exactly in the way you’d expect. There is pleasure to be had in watching McCullers charging on through suspects like a (suspended) bull in a china shop. Director Moss was responsible for creating the Bad Ass franchise, starring Danny Trejo as a senior citizen vigilante, and there’s something of the same energy here. It’s certainly more entertaining than the tedious romance with a fellow cop (Fuller). And don’t get me started on the way Christine’s injury, which we learn at the beginning will take two further years to heal, is barely a factor. She tosses her walking aid away in a fit of pique, after being mimicked, mockingly, by a colleague, and is then all but miraculously healed.

There’s no surprises as to who the killer ends up being. Not least because they make the kind of clumsy mistake which only seem to be made by killers in TV movies. What would have been interesting, might have been if the parents had ended up guilty as charged, and McCullers was completely wrong all along, going off on a prescription drug-powered paranoid trip. That’d have been very Nordic noir. Just not very Lifetime, however, and this is instead as safe, basically competent and largely forgettable as most of its ilk.

Dir: Craig Moss
Star: Fiona Gubelmann, Drew Fuller, Scott Bailey, John Lee Ames
a.k.a. 911 Nightmare

Prime Suspect: Tennison

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★★★½
“Before she was famous…”

Origin stories are all the rage, it appears. Though it’s probably just coincidence we watched this prequel to Prime Suspect the same week that Joker came out. It’s not quite as successful in terms of reinventing an iconic character, or shedding light on how they became who they are. This is largely because lead actress Martini is not Helen Mirren. Though it would unfair to hold that against her – because, let’s face it, who is? While I found it interesting to see some of the early influences which turned Jane Tennison into who she is, what she became is more notable than how she got there. It’s probably more enjoyable if you can separate them, and just enjoy this on its own terms, as a period police procedural.

It’s 1973, and we join the 22-year-old WPC 517, Jane Tennison (Martini), as she tries to find a footing in her first posting, to Hackney Police Station in East London. There, she has to cope with a time where women police officers were largely sidelined to making tea and taking messages. However, one of the detectives there, D.C.I. Len Bradfield (Reid) takes her under his wing, as the investigation begins into the murder of a prostitute, found strangled with her own bra. Meanwhile, long-term criminal Clifford Bentley – against whom Bradfield has a grudge – has barely got out of jail, before he and his family are planning a new robbery. But Jane is about to discover that things are not always as cut and dried as she’d like, and that the law and justice can be different, too.

It’s when the heroine is forced to confront these dilemmas that the show is at its most interesting. For example, when Tennison witnesses a colleague roughing up a suspect in the murder, actions which could allow them to go free. Should she speak up or keep silent? There are no easy answers, and depicting the dramatic tension is where Martini is at her most effective, along with trying to deal with her “helicopter mother”, who doesn’t appreciate her little girl is all grown up. [As an aside, there’s no denying the actress does bear more than a slight resemblance to a young Helen Mirren. Compare the pic on the right to this one of Mirren, from 1972, a year before this takes place]

Of course, if you’ve seen the episodes with Tennison all grown up, you’ll not be surprised by much here. There’s no way, for example, that Jane and Len are ever going to end up happily ever after. That said, the double-whammy in which this is accomplished was undeniably effective. It goes some way to explaining her aloofness in middle-age, as the scars of her early experiences. Being able to hang more personality trains on FutureJane, in a similar way, would have helped link this to what was to come. Instead, it’s just a little too disconnected, though on its own merits, we still were solidly entertained.

Dir: David Caffrey
Star: Stefanie Martini, Sam Reid, Blake Harrison, Alun Armstrong
a.k.a. Prime Suspect 1973

Sisters in Law

  By

★★½
“Law and disorder”

This is exactly the kind of “mismatched cop” film in which you’d expect to see Melissa McCarthy, if it was ever remade by Hollywood. Though since two decades later, McCarthy would star in The Heat, they probably don’t need to bother. Here, the trope of tough, world-weary cop Jacky, is played by Ng – inexplicably, the subtitles repeatedly call her Joan, which confused the heck out of me for a bit. She gets an unwelcome new partner in the shape of idealistic and by-the-book Mary (Chan). Of course, there’s the inevitable friction before the pair come to respect each other.

After being accidentally involved in a jewellery heist, they get to investigate the case. The robbery was actually staged by the gems’ owner, Hanks Lee (Kong) for insurance purposes, which is why the robbers start turning up dead. Jacky and Mary have to locate the last survivor, with the unwilling help of his girlfriend (Hung), before the loose end he represents can be tidied up. Complicating matters is the growing relationship between Jacky and Hanks, to the concern of her partner. While in her own sub-plot, Mary has issues with her widowed mother’s new boyfriend, because he’s a supposedly reformed gangster.

It’s so incredibly generic, it’s hard to think of a time when this would have seemed the slightest bit original – even back in 1992, when this was made. There are no surprises at all to be found in the plot or characters, save perhaps the caricatured male colleagues who get their come-uppance at the end… by being assigned to the Gay Crimes department. Laughter all round! Every aspect of that angle is incredibly nineties, and so impossible to imagine in a modern film, it becomes kinda refreshingly incorrect. On the other hand, safe to say it’s probably not the element which the makers most wanted to stick in the viewer’s memory. The two leads do have a nice chemistry though, and that keeps things chugging along pleasantly enough, covering over the paper-thin nature of the story.

Still, it’s one of eighteen films listed in the IMDb for Ng this year, and you certainly get the sense this was something put together and churned out with no great regard for quality. There isn’t even that much action, save for the jewel robbery. Things do perk up at the end, after they locate the last robber in a closed amusement park – only for Jacky unwittingly to spill the beans on his location to Hanks, leading to him sending his posse there. Fortunately, Mary’s impending father-in-law is there, to draw on his old, very particular set of skills. It’s quite energetic and well-staged, though falls some way short of doing enough to move the needle far. There’s no doubt that just about everyone involved has been part of significantly better films. Though if you are in the mood for something entirely undemanding and light, this would probably pass muster.

Dir: Andy Chin
Star: Sandra Ng, Charine Chan, Kong Wa, Catherine Hung

Shadow of the Lotus

  By

★★
“Give the man a hand!”

We know very well that, on low-budget films, people have to wear many hats. Hell, my IMDb entry began when a film I was supposed to be helping my wife produce, had an actor drop out. You can only respect those who can turn their hands to multiple jobs. And, yet… There’s a point at which it become self-defeating, because nobody can be good – or even competent – at so many positions. Lotus appears to have set new records in this area, with Jeff L’Heureux having his name listed in the end credits at no fewer than thirty different points, from director to make-up artist. That’s wearing an entire department store’s worth of hats, most apparent in the running time. For this is an 85-minute movie which runs for 124 minutes. L’Heureux the editor desperately needed to have had a word with L’Heureux the director and L’Heureux the writer about that.

There are two crime triads: the Black Lotus and the Red Dragons. Sarah (Huang) works for the former, but when she attempts to leave the organization, is shot, set ablaze and left for dead [Memo to self: if ever I become an evil overlord, I will not set my enemies on fire within easy rolling reach of the Pacific Ocean…] Naturally, she’s still alive, and comes back to begin disrupting the somewhat precarious plans of her former gang to form an alliance with the Dragons – I guess with the goal of forming some kind of super-triad under Gensho Woo (Geoff Wong). In the process, she encounters and subsequently teams up with local cop Claire (Neale), who has been trying to work things from the legal end. Sarah, needless to say, has no such limitations…

As noted, this is desperately in need of severe trimming, with hardly a single scene which does not go on for too long, where not altogether superfluous. This is particularly apparent in the early stages: it feels like an hour before things actually get going, with endless chit-chat between the players that’s blandly uninteresting. Things do improve in the second half, even if I found myself irrationally irritated by the way Sarah held her gun sidewise, like an amateur gangsta wannabe. The main plus is former colleague Jade (Macalino), who gets the chance to unleash her inner psycho. You could perhaps argue her performance is rampant over-acting, yet it’s still a heck of a lot of fun to watch, and the film is the poorer for Jade’s eventual departure.

L’Heureux is clearly inspired by, and trying to reproduce, the style of classic Hong Kong cinema from the likes of John Woo. That’s laudable enough an aim. Though the action is competent, it does fall short of these lofty goals, mostly lacking the passion and intensity which Woo’s actors brought to his films. This was never a function of their cost – admittedly, having Chow Yun-Fat was just a slight help to him there – though in defense of this, it appears to have been the director’s first feature. Plenty of room to improve next time, especially if he gets the help he needs to avoid spreading himself thinner than margarine on toast.

Dir: Jeff L’Heureux
Star: Vicky Huang, Melanie Neale, Alex Law, Candice Macalino

Okay, S.I.R.

  By

★★★
“Two Angels for Europol?”

“Brussels: home to many European authorities. This one is new. It’s an international combination of security forces from European countries: EUROPOL. For a long time the criminal underworld hasn’t respected borders, and continually develops new techniques. So crimes are often committed for which the usual police methods are not enough. In such cases, Europol has trained employees who are out of the ordinary. Unconventional cops, with unconventional methods, like us. Biggi. Conny. And our boss is a lady! Her name is S.I.R. – S for ‘Sicherheit’ (security), I as in ‘Information’, R for ‘Recht’ (justice).”

What sounds like a mid-60s promotion intro to The Avengers (John Steed + Emma Peel, not the other ones!) is indeed a spoken monologue. And it leads into one of the strangest oddities in the “girls with guns”-subgenre, which still can surprise me when I dig out something new. Now, I don’t want to summarize the whole of German film-making history, but I think a couple of words would actually be quite helpful in this case, before we get under way.

Early German movie-making had a very high interest in the fantastic film genre. Indeed, you could actually say the fantastic film was born in Germany with such early and successful cinematic efforts as Der Golem (1920), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), the Doctor Mabuse films, Metropolis (1927), Die Nibelungen (1924) and Nosferatu (1922). With the rise of the National Socialists in the 1930s such topics suddenly became problematic. No oppressive regime ever likes people to be able to dream. The fantastic genre is a kind of escape no dictatorship can control, and that’s why they hate these things. However, the mindset stayed prevalent for a long time in Germany after World War II.

As a result, things such as comics or science fiction literature were usually seen as suspicious in the 1950s. Germany only slowly rediscovered its ability to dream on film and TV in the 1960s, during that beautiful period that gave us Karl May westerns, the Spessart Ghost comedies, new Doctor Mabuse movies and the Edgar Wallace series. It was really a very productive time in the German film industry. Then, suddenly, in the late 60s – not just here but worldwide – films seemed to hit a roadblock due to a stronger focus on politics than on popular culture by the younger generation. In Germany the old movies were abandoned as “Papas Kintopp” (“father’s cinema”). The young generation which discovered the Nazi era was being glossed over in their history classes, rejected what that generation offered, and went on to create their own movies in the 70s, very often politicized and dealing with “real life issues”.

And while American cinema gradually got its mojo back, as film makers like Spielberg, Lucas and others fully reinvented the fantastic film, that never happened to Germany. It initially suffered from state-funded “author’s cinema”, resulting in very boring movies, mostly forgotten today. But it mainly degenerated into very average and (in my personal opinion, mostly lame) TV-crime shows. They lacked the wonderful mixture of over-the-top, unambiguous heroes and villains, uncanny horror-like atmosphere and outlandish plots of the Edgar Wallace movies of the 60s.

“Krimis” suddenly became some kind of social dramas, that were more about the depiction of society’s flaws and personal backgrounds of criminals then about the creation of suspense and imagination. The kind of crime drama the German public TV channels would usually co-produce, became as exciting as a visit to a tax office. They guaranteed “realism” and rejected as childish any depiction of outlandish things. When I look at today’s German TV programs, nothing has changed since then.

Given that, I was surprised to find this little campy gem of German TV-series. Produced between 1971-72, and shown on German TV between 1973 74, the series depicts two investigators Biggi (Anita Kupsch) and Conny (Monica Peitsch). [Quick aside: “Biggi” and “Conny” were also the names of two well-known German girl-comics in the 80s] They work for a mysterious lady (Anneliese Uhlig) who seems to have no real name and works under the alias of “S.I.R,” as discussed in the intro. She lives in a luxurious villa with candlesticks, a library and what we today would probably call a prototype version of a computer.

Upon closer inspection, I get the impression the makers of this show must have been inspired by shows from abroad. In the mid-60s, the Steed/Peel Avengers enjoyed great success on German TV screens. There was the similar themed Department S and I’m quite sure the original Mission Impossible series also ran on TV in the early 70s. Though, Okay, S.I.R. can’t for a moment compete with these much better shows, it is by German standards a miracle such a series was produced at all. The 70s in Germany still weren’t a time when anything fantastic would be embraced. Heck, when the first Star Wars came out, that movie was heavily lambasted by critics as “fascism in space” and “fantastical nonsense” that would spoil the youth.

In this TV series, the two good-looking girls usually get called to a new investigation by means of a beeping ring. They meet up with S.I.R., who comes across like a female “M”, 22 years before Judy Dench arrived on the scene. They’re then sent off to investigate strange occurrences. These usually turn out to be the machinations of criminals, using strange gadgets or methods that would make any John Steed-Emma Peel screenwriter happy.

Let me give you some examples. A computer which can hypnotize people; a club for people who enjoy stolen paintings; an artist who steals a woman’s hair; fake nuns that create fake relics, and so on. One episode features a female gang who use subliminal influence through television, in order to put women in top company positions. They do this to gain access to financial means and further feminism: I guess some things never get old! ;-)

The budget can’t have been high. Considering that these two investigators work for a European authority in Brussels, it’s strange how the series usually takes place in and around Munich – with the few exceptions when the show allowed them to look into a case in Italy! It has to be said, the girls don’t really go in with guns blazing. Usually they take weapons from the villains or their goons, to gain the upper-hand. Though it isn’t too difficult, since the villains in these 25-minute episodes are not so smart, and make mistakes that really make you shake your head. Mind you, the girls are not exactly subtle in their investigative technique either…

The series is mainly what we would call “camp” today. It’s a very odd TV relic from the early 70s, though I had a lot of fun watching the series. Just to see the hairstyles, fashion, cars or interior designs of that time is always a marvel to behold for me! The girls themselves… truth is, they both lack a bit charisma. One would wish for them to have some good banter, clever lines of dialogue, tongue-in-cheek humor – or at least some slightly believable fighting choreography, like Miss Peel in The Avengers.

But I can’t really judge such a series negatively on the basis of a comparison to British TV series, considering it essentially stands alone in German TV history [there were a couple of other series at the time that flirted with the fantastic, but as far as I know, this was the only one with female leads]. And as German TV of the time, they are sympathetic nevertheless, Biggi usually playing the decoy with her female charms. She’s a bit too confident of her appeal, but of course that’s entirely subjective.

I personally preferred Peitsch’s Conny, who sometimes also gets into a criminal group’s business, disguised and/or with an alias. Especially in the beginning, the stories unfold quickly, sometimes so quickly you wonder if they make much sense at all, or if some important explanations has been forgotten. It gets better as the series progresses. There is often a reward for the girls at the end of an episode, though for a number of reasons they aren’t allowed to take it, and S.I.R. invests it back into the organization.

Anita Kupsch, a Berlin theatre actress, would become more well-known at the end of the 80s when she played the secretary of Günther Pfitzmann in medical series Praxis Bülowbogen. I only know Monika Peitsch due to her damsel-in-distress role in Edgar Wallace movie The Hunchback of Soho (1966), which also featured Anneliese Uhlig, the S.I.R. of the series. The real famous name in the cast is music composer Klaus Doldinger, who would go on to compose soundtracks for movies such as Das Boot and The Neverending Story. There are also quite a number of well-known German actors guest-starring over the 32 episodes of the show, though none of international renown.

While today’s viewers may look, with some amusement, down on this strange German attempt at being different, at the time it was produced this was groundbreaking. The idea of women taking over the investigator’s job was absolutely unthinkable for Germany at that time. It would take five more years, until 1978, before the first female police inspector would appear in Tatort (an extremely long-running and realistic crime investigation series, still being made today). That would eventually help lead to a lot of TV-Krimi series of female police investigators in the 1990s.

Meanwhile, these two heroines very often worked “undercover”, used fake identities to get close to the baddies, had their own cars, flirted without marrying (yes, I know: scandalous!) and being… what we would call today a normal single woman. It’s easy to to forget how unusual such a life-style used to be, not that long ago. As ridiculous as this series may appear, it came out 3 years before Charlie’s Angels and 8 before Cagney & Lacey. At the time, it was quite unnatural for a “normal” TV show to feature women in this kind of position. Though, admittedly, British shows such as The Avengers, as well as American ones like The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. and Honey West had been there before – albeit with a much higher budget and often not having to deal with a 30 minutes limit for every episode. 

Also, at the time of the series’ release (1973) the whole idea of “Europol” was indeed Science Fiction: In reality the decision to create this organization was made as late as 1992 and the authority didn’t became a reality until 1999. So, yes, one can actually call this series kind of prophetic! Overall, I give Okay, S.I.R. three stars. One for being ahead of its time, one for the wonderful weird campiness of the 70s style and one for trying to emulate the style of shows like The Avengers and Mission Impossible – even if they were, admittedly, better able to pull it off.

Undercover Law

  By

★★½
“The law of declining returns.”

This one had a good deal of promise, to the extent that even Chris expressed an interest in watching it [she bailed on discovering it was 60 episodes in length!]. However, it almost completely fails to go anywhere much: what you see in the first ten episodes is, by and large, what you get over the remaining fifty. It’s the story of four women, all of whom work as agents in the Colombian police, and are trying to take down the local drug cartel. This had been run by a man called Lerner, before he was killed by the authorities; now, his son Junior has taken over the business. The women seek to infiltrate various parts of his operation, from the jungle manufacturing arm, through the distribution side to the money laundering and finance wing, and discover the identity of the mysterious “Bluefish”, who heads the cartel from the shadows.

Which would be fine, if the show had actually concentrated on this aspect of their lives. Unfortunately, it doesn’t. Each of them have their own soap-drenched subplots, typically involving family members, love lives, or some combination thereof. For example, one has a child whose parentage is uncertain. Could the father be her police partner? Or could it even be Lerner himself? I hope you care, because this storyline is stretched out over the entire duration of the series. Other elements which are similarly used include a junkie sister and her daughter; the search for a long-lost father; and a troubled marriage resulting from the commitment required to be an undercover officer. At times, the whole policing thing seems almost to be forgotten.

Being undercover is clearly going to limit the opportunities for overt action: when you’re pretending to be a cook, a nightclub owner’s wife or a fitness instructor, you’re not going to be kicking down doors and blowing away the bad guys. I understand this. But the characters – and the writers – need to decide what’s important: their personal lives or their work. Too often, the story instead resorts to cliché. For example, when a character gives an impassioned speech about getting out of this dangerous job and settling down, it’s absolutely no surprise they’re killed in a gun-battle, immediately afterward. [Admittedly, this remains one of the show’s few genuinely memorable sequences] Similarly, I’ve seen enough telenovelas to know that when a character is supposedly dead, unless you see their corpse, there’s about an even chance they will return.  And weddings never go off smoothly and without a hitch.

It’s a bit of a shame, since most of the central performances are solid, just deserving better material with which to work. And the commitment to focusing on the side of law, rather than glamorizing the lives of criminals, is laudable. Yet it’s so poorly-written, even the identity of the gang’s “mole” in law enforcement is an opportunity for tension, squandered to the point of being almost completely wasted, and the revelation of “Bluefish” was absolutely no revelation at all. Maybe it suffered by comparison, being watched in the same period as the far superior Netflix series set in Colombia, Narcos. Or maybe it just isn’t very good.

Star: Valeria Galvis, Juana del Rio, Viña Machado, Luna Baxter

Sendero, by Max Tomlinson

  By

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

When you think of drugs, terrorism and South America, Colombia probably comes first to mind, thanks to Pablo Escobar and his cartel pals. However, it’s far from the only country in the region with a troubled history. Peru has had its fair share of strife: it produces virtually as much cocaine, and the Marxist guerillas of the Shining Path movement fought a long, bloody war against the government through the eighties. It’s during this time that the novel begins. Young girl Nina has her father killed by soldiers hunting the guerillas in her rural village, and her brother Miguel vanishes to join the Shining Path.

More than two decades later, Nina has grown up to become a cop in Lima, with the dirty war against the Shining Path apparently over – the terrorists have now, effectively, merged with the drug traffickers. She encounters Malqui, the former village priest who spent eight years in prison for protesting the murder of Nina’s father, and mentions knowing someone who had recently met Miguel. However, before she can get any more information, Malqui is picked up by the authorities and vanishes into the dark network of secret prisons. For it seems the dirty war is not as over as is publicly stated. To rescue Malqui – and perhaps be reunited with her long-lost brother – Nina is going to have to get her own hands dirty as well.

I must confess, I confused the title with “sicario,” the drug cartel term for hit-man. Between that and the cover, I was expecting something… different. Turns out, sendero is Spanish for “path” – and those who support the guerillas. Quite whether this includes the heroine is an interesting point. After the death of her father, it seems odd for her to end up as part of the government authorities, yet she becomes part of the “resistance” as she seeks to locate and free Malqui. Though by the end of the book, it’s clear that the remnants of the Shining Path are no more the solution either, with their morality little if any less problematic. The entire novel could be printed in various shades of grey: even Nina is prepared to do bad things for what she perceives as a good end.

As such, it’s a very thought-provoking read, and opened my eyes to the history of a country about which I had never known much previously, and its social and political struggles. If there’s a weakness, it’s probably the way in which Nina ends up taking a seat in the second half, with the story’s focus shifting to Miguel and his colleagues in the Shining Path [though among them, Comrade Inez does partly fill in for the lack of Nina]. It’s a shame, for Nina is an excellent heroine: one who never forgets either where she came from, or where she wants to be, and is willing to risk everything for others, in a highly altruistic manner. Hopefully, the second book is all Nina, all the time.

Author: Max Tomlinson
Publisher: Sendero Press, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 2 in the Sendero series.