Tag: crime

Lila & Eve

  By

★★★★
“Loss + mother love = vengeance.”

lilaandeveDriven by a strong and intense performance from Davis, as Lila, a mother who has lost her son to a drive-by shooting in Atlanta, this offers a more thoughtful take on the “vigilante vengeance” genre. Feeling abandoned by the authorities, and not impressed with the forgiving approach of a support group, she finds companionship in another grieving parent there who feels the same way. Eve (Lopez) urges Lila to take action against those responsible, and together, they work their way up the chain of pushers and street-dealers, to find the man behind it all. However, their actions bring them unwanted attention, both from the detective investigating the resulting murders (Whigham) and the boss at the top of the ladder. It’s entirely possible that Lila’s thirst for revenge could cost her everything, not least her other son, Justin (Caldwell).

It’s a little hard to discuss this, since there’s one aspect which talking about would require a major spoiler, though it’s something I figured out early on: the clues are there, if you look for them. While important, it’s not something on which the film stands or falls, however, and I don’t think figuring it out early hurt my appreciation of this. I was a little concerned early that this was going to be sappy and sentimental, not least because of the presence of Lifetime Films as one of the producers. However, it isn’t that way at all: instead, this is a gritty and entirely credible look at deep personal tragedy, and the reaction to it, even if the final act topples over the edge into implausibility. Davis is key, and is particularly impressive: you can see the pain in her eyes, and how that motivates her to engage in violence which, in some ways, is arguably as senseless as the slaying of her son.

However, the other aspects are mostly solid as well. Lopez provides feisty back-up, egging Lila on whenever her drive falters, and even the cops are portrayed as credible characters, who behave intelligently, as far as their limitations allow them. This makes for a sharp contrast to some similar films I’ve seen, most recently Eye for an Eye, which were little more than a hymn to the joys of vigilante action. Here, you get the negative aspects as well, such as when the mother of one of Lila’s victims turns up to the support group, only to receive a rather mixed reaction. This moral muddying of the water shifts the tone into trickier waters, and as mentioned, I’m not sure Stone negotiates through these successfully to the end credits. However, Davis’s performance is damn near impeccable, and is mesmerizing throughout. If there were any fairness in Hollywood, this would be among the Oscar nominated performances for 2015; if I’m not holding my breath there, you still won’t see much better this year.

Dir: Charles Stone III
Star: Viola Davis, Jennifer Lopez, Ron Caldwell, Shea Whigham

Temptress of a Thousand Faces

  By

★★★
“Face-off?”

temptressThis loopy slice of sixties Shaw Brothers nonsense is best described as a bizarre combination of martial arts, 007 and Danger: Diabolik. The titular supervillainess has Hong Kong at her mercy, robbing at will due to her extraordinary disguise capabilities. The police, in particular detective Ji Ying (Chin-Fei), are aggravated, and matters are not helped by the local media sensationalizing things, realizing news about the Temptress sells a lot of newspapers. They are led by Molly (Ting Hung), who goes as far as fabricating stories entirely, which brings down on her the wrath of Ji Ying. The Temptress is similarly upset by Ji Ying’s public pronouncements condemning her as a threat to society and kidnaps the policewoman, bringing her to a secret lair purely to explain how the Temptress is doing to destroy Ji Ying’s life. This she proceeds to do, by carrying out subsequent robberies while wearing Ji Ying’s face, causing her to be arrested for those crimes. The cop escapes custody, and it seems the only way to prove her innocence is to capture the real Temptress.

There are so many aspects here that are utterly ludicrous; my favourite was likely the Temptress’s lair, which is exactly what I would build, if ever I become an evil overlord. It’s all dry ice, pillars and needlessly complex torture devices, though does at least have a pool, in which the Temptress occasionally lounges, being soaped down by pastie-wearing minions. I also enjoyed the way said henchmen, on the numerous occasions when they are sent to capture Ji Ying, will inevitably first try to defeat her in hand-to-hand combat, and only after failing, then resort to pulling out their guns. To offer an honest assessment, the Temptress needs to have spent more money on her recruitment policy and rather less on the facilities. And I haven’t even got to the glorious fight between Ji Ying and “Ji Ying”, when the cop bursts in on the Temptress, wearing her face and snogging her boyfriend. Coincidentally, they’re both wearing the same outfits, and the poor man has no clue which one is the real deal, adding to the scene’s utterly surreal quality.

But, it should be stressed, these hardly detract from the entertainment value to be had here, even if many of them were apparently intended to be taken far more seriously at the time (which would be 1969) than they deserve. The heroine and villainness make for a fine pair, and given the era, it’s especially refreshing that just about all the men involved are incompetent and/or background figures. Accept that you will probably be laughing at the film as much as with it, and you’ll find an enjoyable 76 minutes of nonsense to be had here. [Tip of the hat to Dieter for pointing me in the direction of this one!]

Dir: Chang-hwa Jeong
Star: Tina Chin-Fei, Liang Chen, Pat Ting Hung

Bait

  By

★★★
“Tea and no sympathy.”

baitBex (Smurfit) and Dawn (Mitchell) are partners in a market-stall selling coffee and cake, and have dreams of opening a “proper” coffee-shop, but lack the necessary funds to do so. Traditional sources of money, such as banks, turn them down, so when Dawn’s new boyfriend, Jeremy (Slinger) turns out to be an angel investor, it seems too good an opportunity to be true. Which, of course, is exactly what it is, because Jeremy turns out to be the acceptable face of a very brutal loan-sharking operation. Even though they actually refuse his money before accepting it, he insists on them paying for his time, an amount which rapidly escalates out of control. It’s clear Jeremy will stop at nothing to extract payment, and demonstrates exactly that savagery, on both women, as well as their loved ones. Gradually backed into a corner, there’s only one way out for Bex and Dawn; be every bit as ferocious and merciless.

It probably helps that Smurfit and Mitchell have been friends since their drama school days, and their easy relationship comes over as entirely natural – though non-native British speakers may occasionally want to opt for subtitles! [Hell, I found myself straining my ears on occasion, having clearly been out of the old country for too long…] It’s very much a long, slow descent into hell, with the women on the receiving end for more than 80% of the movie before – and I trust this isn’t much of a spoiler here, given the film opens with a blood-stained Dawn slumped by a bath – finally getting to unleash their fury in a gore-drenched finale.

While certainly satisfying on a visceral level, this comes over as somewhat far-fetched, with neither woman having demonstrated any real tendencies for aggression; the “defending the family” approach only goes so far, not least because it’s the child-less Bex who goes furthest. Not that Jeremy doesn’t deserve it; Slinger comes over as a psychotic version of Simon Pegg, and it’s crucial that the film creates a villain who is both monstrous and believable. Be sure to stick around after the credits for a spectacularly splattery bit of claymation from maverick film-maker Lee Hardcastle, which is just glorious; it almost suggests a sequel where Bex and Dawn turn into a hardcore, British vigilante version of Thelma & Louise.

Must admit, I’d probably have preferred to see that, with the set-up here taking longer than necessary – for example, is there any reason we need to see quite so many scenes of Jeremy and his sidekick extracting payment? Still, the final payback is fully deserved, and gleefully shot by Brunt, leading into a coda which suggests a new, steely determination and “take no shit” attitude as a result of the hell through which the heroines have gone. It suggests an almost Nietzschean fable is being told, that what does not destroy you, in the end will make you stronger and help you achieve your goals. Seems more than slightly morally questionable, although maybe it’s just me!

Dir: Dominic Brunt
Star: Victoria Smurfit, Joanna Mitchell, Jonathan Slinger, Rula Lenska
a.k.a. The Taking

Momentum

  By

★★★
“Momentum runs out.”

momentumAlex Farraday (Kurylenko) is part of a gang of jewel thieves, who have just pulled off a very successful heist in South Africa. Unfortunately, along with the diamonds, they have also acquired a flash drive which contains the plans of a rogue Senator (Freeman), to stage another 9/11 in order to generate wealth for him and his buddies. Needless to say, he’s not happy about it, and sends his minion, Mr. Washington (Purefoy), to retrieve the incriminating hardware and tidy up the loose ends – consisting of Alex and her associates.

That’s certainly a terser synopsis than usual, yet it’s more than enough, because this is a film that does not care too much for complexities of plot. It is a cinematic shark, in that whenever it stops moving, the audience’s interest dies. The good news is, particularly in the first half, that never happens, with Alex being pursued and harried by Washington and his minions [sub-henchmen?] from hotel room to the house of her former boyfriend and not-so-former partner, where a disgruntled wife is most unhappy by Alex’s unexpected phone-call, and on from there to an abandoned warehouse. This section is thoroughly entertaining, unfolding at a breathless and non-stop pace, and Kurylenko lives up to the action potential she showed in The Assassin Next Door, surviving on pure adrenaline, as well as her smarts and combat skills – for, it turns out, she has a long, shadowy past of such things.

The problems are much more in the second half, when Campanelli abandons a shamelessly breathless and kinetic approach, replacing it mostly with scenes in which heroine and villain banter awkwardly, while the latter threatens to inflict unspeakable tortures on her. This, needless to say, is rather less interesting and the film dissolves into a disappointing series of expected shenanigans, for which the drive is a MacGuffin. It doesn’t help that the whole “Senator” subplot is so woefully under-developed – I believe Freeman took on the role as a favour to the director – they really shouldn’t have bothered, instead just leaving both the contents and the shadowy owner unspecified.

I did enjoy Kurylenko, who also handles her action sequences creditably, with occasional upticks into impressive, though just about everyone else in the cast is more or less forgettable, and there isn’t enough new in the script to make it worthy of note. Campanelli is a long time cameraman, known in particular for his work with Clint Eastwood, and he apparently had to quit American Sniper to make this, his directorial debut. If the early going shows a great deal of promise, it appears he ran out of steam and ideas thereafter. Rather than building on its solid foundation, this is a film that seems content to stop any ascent there, admire the view for a bit, and coast downhill thereafter without expending significant further effort.

Dir: Stephen Campanelli
Star: Olga Kurylenko, James Purefoy, Morgan Freeman, Jenna Saras

Angel Terminators 2

  By

★★★★
“Angels of death”

angelterm2I have not seen Angel Terminators, so cannot comment on its merits or flaws. However, it does not appear that this impacted my thorough enjoyment of this slice of early 90’s Hong Kong goodness, and nor did the mangled subs which leave me a little vague on some details. The two heroines are Chitty (Lee) and Bullet (Oshima), who are… Cousins? Sisters? Not sure. Bullet has just got out of prison, having turned to delinquency after blaming her policeman father for the death of her mother. He and his partner (Hu) – who adds to the confusion because everyone calls her Big Auntie – try to achieve a reconciliation, but Bullet is unimpressed. She goes to her former gang boss for money, having taken the fall and gone to jail for him, but he just wants Chitty to become a hostess. The fight than ensues, kicks off a chain of events which leads to Bullet stealing some jewels belonging to the boss, who unleashes the accurately-named Brother Mad (Wong).

Will there be mayhem? Yes. Will there by fisticuffs and much gunplay? Yes. Will there be people strung up from lamp-posts like some kind of novelty Chinese lanterns? I’m not saying: I’ll let the film retain some element of surprise. But for all its broad strokes of characterization, it manages to deliver a relatively-even tone, without any of the slapstick and comic interludes which sometimes plague other entries. Indeed, it does become progressively darker, with a kidnapping forcing action that then goes horribly wrong, setting up even further death and violence. This is all accompanied by high-quality action, right from the get-go, starting with Hu leading an assault on criminals holed up in a restaurant, before quickly bringing you a battle between Lee and the leaders of another training squads in a gym, then escalating from there through to a bloody finale.

It’s easy to become somewhat jaded, particularly when you’re watching films because of their genre, without applying any quality control. But then you find a movie like like this, which looks like just another generic action heroine flick, yet instead delivers everything you could want from low-budget action, easily making up for in energy what it may lack in polish. With Lee, Oshima and Hu, you have a hand of three aces, and the film is only a couple of Khans (Cynthia and Michelle, a.k.a. Michelle Yeoh) from having the best cast ever in a HK action heroine film. Unlike some (hello, Avenging Quartet), it lives up to that.

Dir: Lau Chan + Chin-Ku Lu
Star: Moon Lee, Yukari Oshima, Chi Yeung Wong, Sibelle Hu

Lady Avenger

  By

★★½
“Big hair, big sunglesses and a little budget.”

ladyavengerDeCoteau gave us one of the all-time worst GWG films, in American Rampage. Made the same year, 1989, this is surprisingly… Well, while I wouldn’t go so far as to say “good,” it looks like Citizen Kane beside Rampage; let’s settle on “surprisingly semi-competent.” The heroine, Maggie (Sanders), is serving time in jail, when she is let out on furlough to attend the funeral of her murdered brother. Maggie escapes, and sets about tracking down those responsible, working her way up the chain of command, wielding everything from a baseball bat to a flamethrower(!), and with a fetching line in 80’s wraparound shades, which she wears even when exploring a dimly-lit warehouse. Hey, it was the eighties, man – the decade that gave us Miami Vice! How you looked was at least as important as what you did… The trail of those responsible ends up a good deal closer to home than is comfortable; the character in question is not exactly unexpected, so that doesn’t count as much of a spoiler.

There’s probably only one person in the cast you’ll recognize, and you have to be a B-movie aficionado even for that – scream queen Bauer (under her name at the time, Michelle McLellan) shows up as Maggie’s two-timing friend, who delivers a copious amount of entirely gratuitous nudity and lingerie, to liven things up. Sanders was the Playboy Playmate of the Month for January 1990, which tells you just about all you need to know regarding her acting ability. Wisely, the script opts not to test the limits of her thespian ability, giving her a bit of low-tier emoting early on, as she gets told of her brother’s demise and attends her funeral, before she heads into stone-faced machine of vengeance mode. The villains are a curiously preppy-looking bunch of drug-dealers, all white, mostly with nice teeth, and many wouldn’t seem out of place at a frat party.  Still, they all go down like ninepins, though the action is of widely varying quality; some of the car chases are pretty good, yet on the other hand, the less said about the grenade sequence, the better.

Given how much I was braced for something irredeemably bad when I discovered who had directed this, I will confess to being pleasantly surprised. This is, however, at least as much a result of my low expectations, as any reflection of the film’s quality, and you’d be well-advised to follow suit. If you’re looking for a slice of cheesy, straight-to-video 80’s goodness, from a time in history not long after the question “VHS or Beta?” was still being asked, and with a lurid sleeve to match, this and a couple of beers will represent a throwback to a more innocent era. The trailer below offers a perfect appetizer for it.

Dir: David DeCoteau
Star: Peggy Sanders, Tony Josephs, Jacolyn Leeman, Michelle Bauer

Survivor (2015)

  By

★★½
“Run Milla Run”

I have low standards for Milla Jovovich movies. If they exist, I am more or less okay with them, providing they contain a modicum of her kicking ass. She has gained enough goodwill from the Resident Evil series and Ultraviolet, that she gets some slack with regard to other projects. On that basis, when I say this is… alright, I suppose, those with less tolerance for Jovovich should probably take it as a warning. She plays security expert Kate Abbott, recently transferred to the US Embassy in London, where she detects a strange pattern of a co-worker taking over specific cases involving issuing visas to scientists. At a birthday dinner for said worker, while waiting for him to arrive, she pops out to get a present, thereby narrowly dodging a bomb blast that kills her colleagues. In the aftermath, she encounters the man responsible, an international assassin known as the Watchmaker (Brosnan), who has been engaged to cover up the tracks. Blamed for the explosion by the authorities, Kate is forced underground, and is left with the usual option in such cases: find the real perpetrator and ensure they don’t get to complete their nefarious plan to commit a terrorist attack in New York and profit from the ensuing financial instability.

survivorProbably the best thing about this is seeing a lot of London locations with which I’m deeply familiar, but when an action film’s most memorable moment is “Hey, we’ve seen movies in that cinema!”, it’s rarely a good sign. There is an awful lot of running around, Kate scurrying from one location to the next, with the Watchmaker, her embassy colleagues and British police in more or less hot pursuit. Though funnily, despite the frequent shots from security cameras, Kate doesn’t make the slightest effort to change her appearance. At least buy a frickin’ hoodie, for heavens sake: I can only presume the makers decided against this, because it would rob audiences of Milla’ finely-chiselled cheek-bones. Seems legit. The script is just as contrived in other areas, and if either US or UK authorities were half as competent as the Watchmaker appears to be, this would have been over in 15 minutes. Which might not be such a bad thing, and would certainly have saved us from a spectacularly contrived finale on top of a skyscraper near Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

Do not expect copious amount of butt-kicking from Jovovich, either, though she does at least get plenty of aerobic exercise. A couple of quick fight scenes are about all there is, and don’t even expect gunplay, since as soon as she gets her hands on a gun (above), she dumps it into a trash-can. The only action moment to stick out the restaurant bomb-blast, which is quite hellacious in terms of impact, and frighteningly well-staged. Otherwise, there is little or nothing here we haven’t seen often before, and even given the low bar I have for Millamovies, this one struggles to meet expectations.

Dir: James McTeigue
Star: Milla Jovovich, Pierce Brosnan, Dylan McDermott, James D’Arcy

Death Shadow

  By

★★★
“Stylized beyond belief.”

deathshadowsWhile made in 1986, you’ll frequently find yourself thinking this could be from a decade or two earlier, though to be honest, the style in this samurai-revenge-crime-whatever film is as all over the place as the plot. Some of that works well. Having the heroine’s sword turn into a ribbon, which she then twirls artistically, is more successful than it sounds. However, the multiple breaks for little disco-dance sequences, involving dry ice and flashing lights… Not so much. The set-up is great. Three condemned men are recruited, Nikita-style, to become shadow agents, working for the government. One of them manages to have a wife and a daughter, but has to leave them for their own safety.

Ten years later, he’s working a case when he meets his daughter, Ocho (Ishihara) employed by the man he’s investigating, Denzo. The end results is, the case blowing up, the death of both he and Denzo, and Ocho’s recruitment by his boss as a replacement. She can avenge her father by getting the evidence that will bring down the whole syndicate, in particular, a fake license hidden in the sash of a kimono. Unfortunately, this sash is now evidence in a murder investigation, and is in the hands of the police. And Denzo’s mistress, Oren (Natsuki), is out for her own revenge, on the woman she blames for his death.

Plenty of scope here, certainly. Unfortunately, the potential is frittered away after that blistering first twenty minutes, becoming bogged down in a welter of male characters who tend to look the same, act the same and sound the same. It’s a constant stream of corruption, lies and deceit that becomes quite wearing: the yakuza are corrupt, the cops are corrupt, even the local priests are corrupt, their grave-robbing antics being what kicks the quest for the kimono sash off. But it’s all too meandering, and Gosha [who also directed The Yakuza Wives] seems to be much more in love with these subsidiary characters than they deserve. Ocho and Oren are fine – the latter, in particular, is a memorably slimy creature, who is not as weak as she appears. There just isn’t enough of them.

Occasional moments here do work: mostly, when the two female leads have not been shunted off to one side, making way for macho grunting by top-knotted sword-wielders. I don’t have a problem with films like this, that take a different approach to familiar material. However, style alone isn’t enough, and what’s left here is infuriatingly flawed. There’s the basis of a great storyline, and a pair of superb central characters; that’s a foundation many movies would kill for, and on which Gosha could have built. Rarely have I seen such solid ground wasted as badly as occurs in this film.

Dir: Hideo Gosha
Star: Mariko Ishihara, Mari Natsuki, Masanori Sera, Takuzô Kawatani
a.k.a. Jitterna. There’s also some question over whether it’s Shadow or Shadows. The IMDb goes for the former, the DVD sleeve the latter.

Guardian

  By

guardian★★★½
“A coherent plot. It’s vastly over-rated…”

How you react to a film isn’t always a logical exercise. I’m a great proponent of “guilty pleasure” films: movies that, by objective standards, are generally not very good, yet still manage to be, on one level or another, thoroughly entertaining. Barb Wire is one: as soon as you realize it’s a post-apocalyptic sci-fi version of Casablanca, it’s totally awesome. Add this Indonesian movie to the same pile: it contains many things which, on their own, I loathe; yet here, for whatever reason, the whole ends up being a great deal more entertaining that you’d expect from the sum of its woeful parts.

Let’s start with that plot. Which is certainly a great deal more than the film does. Seriously: it takes 50 minutes for anything approaching a meaningful plot element to show up. It opens with a man driving home, being ambushed and stabbed to death. His wife and young daughter find him. Fast-forward ten years, and some thugs attack the house with what may be the longest single burst of automatic weaponry in cinema history, followed up, for no particular reason, by two rounds from a rocket launcher. Cue mother Sarah (Diyose) and pouty teenage daughter Marsya (Camesi) going on the run: Mom has clearly been anticipating this for a while, and has a hideout, stash of weapons and martial arts training. Turns out, there are two factions at play here: the one seeking to kill the family is led by corrupt cop Captain Roy (Fernandez), while playing defense is Paquita (Carter, best known for her role in Falling Skies), who… Well, you will find out eventually. Just don’t hold your breath.

guardian2.jogFor before you reach that point, there follows alternating scenes of ludicrous excessive gun-battles, and Marsya whining “What’s going on? Make it stop? I said, WHAT’S GOING ON? I want an ice-cream!” [I may have imagined the last, I’m not sure] Normally, this kind of thing would be incredibly grating. But let’s face it, she’s basically echoing what the audience is thinking, so it’s okay.  Throw in Kardit’s style of action, which consists of jerking the camera back and forth while simultaneously zooming in and out, and you’ve got the recipe for a headache-inducing exercise, about as far from fellow Indonesian flick The Raid as possible [seriously, if you haven’t seen The Raid, go do so now. It’s the best action movie of the past decade. You can thank me later.].

And yet… If you can handle the fact that the ratio of bullets to reloading scenes is several hundred to one, cope with not knowing what the hell is going on for half the movie, and tolerate characters that are basically a procession of shallow genre tropes, you’ll have fun. Against the odds, I did: there’s at least four women here with no qualms about kicking ass in industrial quantities, and both Divose and Carter bring the necessary intensity to their roles [there’s one awesome shot where Paquita is chasing after a car on foot and is just screaming at it]. There’s a chunk at the end where all three leading ladies are simultaneously fighting for their lives, and that’s a good deal more progressive than you’d get to see in most Western films. For all its many, copious flaws, I was kept entertained – as much by the daft insanity on view, as in spite of it. In the right hands, this could have been awesome: Kardit clearly is not those hands, yet it’s still more fun than I expected.

Dir: Helfi Kardit
Star: Dominique Diyose, Belinda Camesi, Sarah Carter, Nino Fernandez

Traitors

  By

★★★½
“Punk’s not dead.”

traitorsWhat counts as an “action heroine” is dependent on culture. As was saw in Offside, if you’re Iranian, something as apparently normal as going to a football game can be a dangerously transgressive act. The heroine here, Malika (Ben Acha), has a little more freedom, living in Morocco, but it’s hardly an oasis of feminist freedom by Western standards. Still, she’s pretty out there, being the lead singer in a punk band, the titular Traitors, and also a dab hand with a monkey wrench, working intermittently in her father’s garage. It’s the former that she sees as her ticket out, and a door opens when a producer expresses interest in the band, and offers to help them record a demo. The catch? They have to pay for the studio time themselves: that’s several months’ wages, and it doesn’t help that Malika has just been fired. But a garage customer (Zeguendi) offers her a solution: a one-night job doing a little driving for him.

She’s under no illusions about the reality of what she’s driving, but on the journey from the mountains to Tangiers, she talks to her fellow “mule,” the veteran Amal (Issami), and discovers the unpleasant truths about those she’s working for – worse still, the people above them – as well as that leaving the organization will probably be a lot harder than joining it. When Malika finds out that Amal is pregnant, she hatches a plan that’s either very brave or extremely foolhardy (not that these things are mutually exclusive), to allow her colleague the change to escape. However, doing so will certainly bring down the wrath of her employers, who have a track record of not tolerating employee disloyalty with a forgiving eye.

This is one of those films that is on the fringes of qualification for the site. Malika doesn’t wield a gun or kick anyone’s arse,  but there’s an exchange between the two young women which convinced me of its worth, and that in spirit at least, the heroine is part of the sisterhood we cover here.

Amal: “There was a proverb my mother used to say: if you are the nail, you must endure the knocking.”
Malika: “That’s only half of the proverb. The other part is: if you are the hammer, strike.”

I want that on a T-shirt, and it exemplifies Malika’s attitude perfectly: she’s a hammer made flesh, like her hero, the late Joe Strummer. Of course, the downside of that is, when you’re a hammer, everything else starts looking like a nail. However, Ben Acha does a good job of making a character that could easily have been obnoxious and abrasive, sympathetic instead. The film’s biggest weakness is a script that seems to run out of steam before the end, without anything like a satisfactory climax; instead, it peters out in a not very satisfactory and largely unconvincing manner. Perhaps this is related to this feature being developed out of a short film featuring the same character? Still, it’s a unique little item, and who knew there was such as thing as Moroccan punk – even if it’s every bit as shitty as much of the Western variety!

Dir: Sean Gullette
Star: Chaimae Ben Acha, Soufia Issami, Driss Roukhe, Mourade Zeguendi