★★
“You’ll probably need some drugs to get through this one.”
If you’re going to use a cover like this, you’d better live up to it, even if we can forgive the heels as artistic license. And while not a complete lie, this takes far too long to deliver, and comes up short of expectations. Holly (Kosaka) is a nightclub singer, separated from her husband, who got custody of their daughter due to a DUI Holly got, with the daughter in the car. On arrival at his house to pick up their child for a scheduled visit, she finds him missing – and a gun in the basement, along with a case of drugs. She calls the police, but ends up getting arrested after the police find her husband’s body, and her fingers on the murder weapon, which has mysteriously moved from the basement to the scene of the crime. The drugs have also vanished; while held in jail over the weekend, Holly gets a visit from their owner, who busts her out and insists she return with him and his thugs to the house to show her where they are. Can she escape their grasp, rescue her daughter and find out who the real murderer was?
Among the things we learn from the movie is that trees give off a shower of sparks when hit by bullets, there are only three cops per American town, and getting shot in the knee doesn’t slow you down. Yeah. I can forgive many things in low-budget films, but stupidity isn’t one of them, and too often, we were left rolling our eyes as the story developed. Kosaka isn’t bad in the lead role, and shows a commendable willingness to do stunt, not least being swept down some fairly nasty-looking rapids, as she tries to escape from her pursuers. It’s only then that the film develops any real energy, Holly developing in to a (somewhat) unstoppable force, prepared to go to any lengths to save her offspring.
If they’d adopted this approach from the beginning – hell hath no fury like a separated mother – this might have been salvageable, even on the low budget. They could even have lobben in her using the new drug mentioned here, Nexus – a mix between cocaine and ecstacy – to sustain her rampage. Just a thought. Instead, the script spends way too much time hanging around and chatting about things, instead of doing them, and the results are as pedestrian as you would expect.
Dir: Neil Coombs
Star: Grace Kosaka, Andrew Kraulis, Jefferson Mappin, Nick Alachiotis
The US border is all that separates El Paso, Texas, from Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, but the two cities’ ways of life are worlds apart. On the Mexican side, the bodies of women turn up, almost every week: sexually assaulted, with signs of torture and/or body parts missing. The police barely bother to investigate; the victims tend to be far from home, low-paid workers in the factories which drive Juarez’s employment. Into this comes police captain Blanca Bravo (de la Reguera), who vows to track down the perpetrators. But doing so pits her against the multinationals who could do without the bad publicity; against her commander, who says to her face that “women make good nurses, but lousy police officers”; and state politicians, who are uneasy about exactly what she might uncover.
In many ways, this is a shameless rip-off of a shameless rip-off, trying to recapture the success of the original. It’s not quite as successful, lacking the gleeful sense of energy which help its predecessor overcome its (obvious) limitations. Once more, Tweed plays action actress Sharon Bell, this time filming her latest work in Eastern Europe. She arranges for the film to do some location work in a gallery owned by sister, Bobbi (Heitmeyer), which is just about to open an exhibition, showcasing artefacts that were looted by the Nazis in World War II. The gallery is taken over by Eric Dane (Henriksen) and his crew, who seal the place off from the outside world, intent in stealing a lethal German nerve agent hidden in the base of one of the sculptures. Unfortunately, inside at the time are both sisters, along with the movie director Jack Terry (Payne), who is scouting the place out.
I think this really comes down to a question of managing expectations. Hearing this was a film based on the life of Monica Proetti, Canada’s premiere female bank-robber, responsible for 20+ hold-ups before being gunned down by the cops… Well, seems like plenty of potential for action, doesn’t it? The reality is less concerned with the robberies, than the events which lead up to them. Monique Sparvieri (Bonnier) lives in the Montreal slums, working part-time as a hooker, for fun and profit. Her first husband Michael (Schorpion), is a safe-cracker who vanishes after his planned robbery is snatched from under his nose. She then hooks up with Gaston (Huard), another member of the team, and begins her own life of crime. When he is sent to jail in the mid-1960’s, she is left with limited options to provide for her children, and goes full-bore into the banking business, with yet another lover, Gerald (Dupuis).
This teetered on the edge of a seal of approval, but didn’t quite make it. While there are some lovely moments, two great leads and the recreation of the pinky violence genre from the sixties and seventies, there’s just too much dead wood and pacing flaws, that leave it just short. Still certainly worth a look, with Asami (Asami) and Junko (Rena) going head-to-head as they battle each other for supremacy in the girl-gang world. Junko seems to have got the upper hand, leaving her rival buried for dead in the desert [or whatever passes for a desert in Japan]. But Asami is just warming up: she claws her way, literally, back from the grave, teams up with her old gang-members, and sets about extracting revengs on Junko and her crew.
Not to be confused, in any way with SexyKiller, this 1976 Shaw Brothers film is more of an unofficial remake of Coffy. Wanfei (Ping), a nurse by day, decides to go vigilante by night, after her sister falls victim to druglords and ends up brain-damaged and drooling. With most of the police force in the pockets of the dealers, Wanfei opts to go undercover as a drug-addict of loose morals, so she can make her way up the chain of command, to deliver justice on behalf of her sister to the sinister Boss (Hsia). This finds her an ally in Weipin (Hua), a childhood friend and honest cop whose hands are tied by pesky bureaucratic niceties, like “needing a search warrant”; she’s also encouraged by her pundit boyfriend (Wei), who has long taken a strong anti-drug stance.
★★★½
Salander is not your typical action heroine: she’s 5’4″, weighs maybe 90 lbs dripping wet, and anti-social to a degree that may be pathological. But she possesses a mind like a steel-trap, impressive computer hacking skills, a steely resolve and a zero-tolerance policy for anyone who abuses women [the Swedish title of the first book and film translates as “Men Who Hate Women”, and misogyny is something of a theme throughout the trilogy]. This was demonstrated very early: at the age of twelve, and fed up of seeing her father hurt her mother, she doused him in petrol and set him on fire. Like I said: “zero-tolerance”.
It’s in the second film, Fire, that Lisbeth really comes into her own. After a period traveling the world, she returns to Sweden, and pays a visit to Bjurman, who has been looking into tattoo removal – she warns him off doing that, threatening him with his own gun. However, she leaves the gun behind, and Bjurman then uses it to frame Lisbeth for the murder of two crusading journalists, who were working on a story exposing sex traffickers, and those using the women they provide, for Blomkvist’s magazine. With both the police, and the real perpetrators – the criminal gang who control the traffic – trying to track her down, Lisbeth is forced underground. Fortunately, Blomkvist is able to help, as Lisbeth turns the table and goes after the shadowy “Zala” who leads the crime syndicate.
There’s a number of very interesting aspects to the film, such as how Blomkvist and Salander don’t meet until the final scene – I can’t think of many other film where the two central protagonists do that [Heat comes close]. But it’s most memorable for the unstoppable force which Salander has become, utterly fearless, whether it’s taking on a pair of bikers or going into the heart of enemy territory. Even when you think it’s all over for her, she crawls her way back in a way which would make The Bride applaud. It’s curious, yet somehow entirely fitting, to see her as an updated, adult version of another Scandinavian literary and cinematic icon: Pippi Longstocking. Except, to steal a line from Romy and Michelle, she’s like a Pippi who smokes and says “shit” a lot.
The trilogy of books have sold more than 50 million copies worldwide, though sadly, Larsson didn’t see their success, as he died in 2004, before they were published. The success of the films, which have grossed a total of more than $210 million worldwide – a phenomenal sum for any non-English language series – has led to the inevitable Hollywood remake. Pause for eye-rolling here… Except, the American Tattoo does have David Fincher at the helm, so I’ll wait until seeing it – while, naturally, reserving the right to administer a good kicking in due course. The first pictures of Rooney Mara as Lisbeth (right), don’t exactly inspire confidence, as she looks more like some kind of coked-up fetish supermodel than anything else. Daniel Craig plays the role of Blomkvist, which would seem to make him a bit more glamourous too.
Ji-Won (Lee Yo-Won) and her friend So-Hyun (Kim) make a trip to the seaside, borrowing a car from a friend. However, the auto turns out to have a couple of guns in it, lost by a gangster and cop in a poker game. The weapons come in handy when the girls need to escape from some assailants, but when they are joined by a manic waitress with no sense of gun-control, the now-trio find themselves on the run from police. A clothing-store owner with a grudge, completes the quartet, as they try to make their way back to Seoul – and they are pursued not only by the cops, also by the previous owners of the guns, who need to get them back to prevent issues of their own. Conversely, their exploits and subsequent media attention are getting them fans of their own, with the titular website (it stands for Adoring Four Revolutionary Idols Korea Association) extolling their virtues and provoking copycat crimes.
Ok, that brief is a little harsh, but it is true to say by the end, I had opted to double-task, and was watching this while I stood over the sink in the kitchen. It wasn’t as good as I expected: I was hoping for something along the lines of Faster, Pussycat, and instead got a turgid, over-extended crime drama. While it has all the right aspirations, the yawning chasm between that and its execution would require several days’ trip by mule to cross. Alice Wynn (Sondrup) is part of an armored-truck robbery, only to find herself double-crossed and left for dead by corrupt cop Jill Robbe (Beisner). Alice vows to recover the loot and take revenge on Robbe, and won’t let anyone – examples include her late mother’s boyfriend, psychotic pimp Ramrod or his Swedish assassin – stand in her way.
With B-movie entrepreneur Roger Corman getting honoured at the Oscars earlier this month, it seems appropriate to pop on one of his classic productions, starring Dickinson, who was just about to become a star in one of the first shows with a female law-enforcement lead, Police Woman. The truth is, however, that this doesn’t have much more to offer beyond Dickinson: while she holds the film together with her steely resolve, and proves that sexy doesn’t stop at 40, the rest of it offers nothing as substantial. It’s a basic enough plot: she plays Wilma McClatchie, a single mom bringing up her two teenage daughters in Depression-era rural America. They fall into a life of crime, in part because they happen to be trying to cash a fraudulent check in a bank when it gets robbed by Fred Diller (Skerritt). They also team up with gentleman con-artist William Baxter (Shatner), but things go awry when they pull of their last big heist, kidnapping the daughter of a millionaire.