Tag: crime

The Spree

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★★
“Xinia, Burglar Princess, learns that crime does pay.”

Good films about women burglars are hard to come by, for some reason. Mind you, good films about male burglars are also kinda thin on the ground; need I say any more than Hudson Hawk. This isn’t quite as bad (at least they don’t burst into song at any point), but falls well short of something like License to Steal, and comes closer to The Real McCoy territory. Xinia (Beals) is a burglar, who falls in love with snake rancher, Bram Hatcher. Bad news: he turns out to be an undercover cop. Good news: he wants a new career…as her accomplice.

This simple tale of infatuation, inevitably, turns out to be not so simple. The problem is, it’s still pretty simple-minded, with only one real twist, which is so unsurprising, it probably fails to count as a twist. Tommy Lee Wallace (Halloween III) handles the burglary scenes nicely, in particular an opening which has the heroine progressively more cornered in a house. She ends stuck in a bathroom, behind a shower curtain, with the owner in the room and about to have a shower; her escape is audacious, but it’s all downhill from there.

Could have done without the frequent sex scenes too; the use of a double for Beals is laughably obvious (breasts and face never seen together), while Boothe was 47 when this was made, and really should know better than to flash his ass. Rita Moreno, who won an Oscar for West Side Story, also turns up as Xinia’s mother – should probably have given Beals some dialogue coaching, as her accent wavers between doubtful and AWOL. Your interest will likely do the same.

Dir: Tommy Lee Wallace
Star: Jennifer Beals, Powers Boothe, Garry Chalk, John Cassini

Coffy

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★★★½
“The godmother of blaxploitation’s debut in the field.”

Neither star Grier nor director Hill were exactly strangers to the world of exploitation when they made this, but their combination here created a whole new subgenre, crossing action heroineism with black cinema. Following her would come Foxy Brown, Cleopatra Jones and the rest, but let it be said, Coffy was the first of any significance.

It’s a robust tale – or at least one reused frequently since with minor changes. Nurse Coffy (Grier) goes after those she sees as responsible for leaving her kid sister a drug-addled vegetable, be they low-level pusher, high-level supplier or the politician in cahoots, who just happens to be her lover. There’s no hanging round here; almost before the credits have finished, we get someone’s head being blown off with a shotgun, and Hill brings a hugely gleeful air to the violence. This is perhaps exemplified best by a marvellous and justifiably classic catfight in which Coffy, razorblades hidden in her hair, takes apart an entire escort agency’s worth of hookers.

Dramatically, it’s less successful, with neither the supporting characters nor the plot holding your interest. It often borders on the painfully obvious; when her cop friend turns down a bribe, you just know he’s going to end up hooked to one of those hospital machines that goes “Beep”, and inside five minutes, yep, there he is. Beep. He then vanishes from the film shortly thereafter, though it’s never clear whether he dies or not. At least this does mean we don’t get the even more painfully cliched “flowers on the grave” sequence. But as a Pam Grier vehicle, it’s fine, and if little more than a vehicle for sex ‘n’ violence, with questionable morality and a hackneyed storyline, it is at least done enthusiastically enough to pull you along with it.

Dir: Jack Hill
Star: Pam Grier, Booker Bradshaw, Robert Doqui, William Elliott

Trapped

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★★★
“Hell hath no fury like a mother separated from her daughter.”

Karen and Will Jennings have an idyllic life – money, a really nice house and Abby, the sort of six-year old daughter only ever seen in Hollywood films. That is, it’s idyllic until Joe Hickey (Bacon) and his family enter, kidnapping Abby for ransom, just after Will has left for a conference. Their scheme of terror has proven effective several times before, and the Jennings have just 24 hours to save their daughter.

This film is a contrast between the Jennings and the Hickeys, and in particular Karen Jennings (Theron) and Cheryl Hickey (Love), who are polar opposites in looks, lifestyle and background, but share a fierce dedication to their families – especially, their daughters. Both are prepared to go to any extreme, even violence, to right what they perceive as an injustice [if the preceding sentence sounds awkward, it’s because I’m waltzing around a spoiler!], and I defy you to watch the scalpel scene without a twitch.

Karen has to handle the ever-dangerous Joe, while Will (Stuart Townsend) is kept occupied by Cheryl, and Joe’s cousin (Pruitt) looks after Abby, who turns out to be severely asthmatic. The cutting back in forth is designed, partly to increase tension – it does – but perhaps more importantly, cover some dodgy plot elements. As with all kidnappings, how do the criminals expect to collect the ransom? This is never made quite clear, and as the film goes on, it unravels to a frankly implausible finale involving a light aircraft, a logging truck and a mile of busy highway.

Which is a shame, since the actors involved are good, even if none of the roles are much of a stretch: Courtney Love playing a white trash slut doesn’t exactly show imagination in the casting department. Still, if you want a Discovery channel documentary about a mother bear defending its cub, in human form, this is effective. I just wish they’d developed that side more, and the usual thriller aspects less. Hell, who wouldn’t want to see Theron in a 2 Days in the Valley-style catfight with Love? :-)

Dir: Luis Mandoki
Star: Charlize Theron, Kevin Bacon, Courtney Love, Pruitt Taylor Vince

Femme Fatale

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★★½
“Stylishly-shot but largely uncredible thriller, with a lame twist befitting bad soap-opera.”

Odds are you won’t see the key twist here coming, but on the other hand, it renders the preceding hour almost redundant. This sums up the entire film: as an exercise in technical style, few directors are as good at camerawork as De Palma, yet little here withstands scrutiny, despite an abundance of smoke, mirrors and Romijn-Stamos. She plays Laure, a jewel thief who cons her partners out of $10m in diamonds, then is lucky enough to fall into another identity. Seven years later, they get out of jail, still miffed, and she’s now married to the American ambassador. When paparazzi Bardo (Banderas) exposes her identity, she instigates a complex plan to play her various problems off against each other.

You have to admire De Palma’s guts: large chunks are without dialogue, and what’s spoken is mostly in subtitled French. It’s almost as if he wanted to piss off a typical American audience, not least in a finale so audacious, it almost invites you to come and have a go, if you think you’re hard enough. However, too often the style is pointless – a split-screen, except nothing of significance occurs on either side – and the twist remains a copout on every level.

While at best a borderline entry in the action heroine genre, femme fatales have a long, dishonourable history, going back to before women got to kick butt. Pointedly, the film opens with Laure watching Double Indemnity; both psychologically and mentally, she punts Bardo’s ass into 2008. This isn’t great art, and neither Banderas nor Romijn-Stamos were unjustly overlooked for Oscars, but any film where the heroine says, “You don’t have to lick my ass, just fuck me” has guilty pleasure potential.

Dir: Brian De Palma
Star: Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Antonio Banderas, Peter Coyote, Gregg Henry

Golgo 13: Queen Bee

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★★★★
“A tale with plenty of sting, but too much sexual bee-haviour.”

Four stars but no seal of approval? That’s because this is about the most wildly variable animated film I’ve seen. The story and characters are great, but the frequent sex scenes are incredibly tedious and clearly put in solely for the teenage male fan (all pneumatic breasts and moaning). It’s rare for me to say this, but they are genuinely gratuitous, and the film could have coped fine without them.

Between times, there’s certainly plenty going on in terms of plot. Ultra-taciturn hitman Golgo 13 is hired to kill narco-terrorist Queen Bee, who has been sending threatening letters to a presidential candidate. From here an entire web is spun (sorry, failed to come up with a bee analogy!) of deceit, double-dealing and death. The anti-heroine comes across rather better than the anti-hero, since you see more about her background, and she’s certainly a fascinating personality, even in a grim world where no-one is innocent.

The animation uses every trick in the book to mixed effect, with some of the violence particularly well-executed. The tape I saw was dubbed, which is another reason to deny it the seal, though the voice acting here is largely painless (it helps that Golgo 13 has about five lines!). It may yet make it: I’ll likely pick up the subtitled DVD sometime, with a director’s commentary, apparently revealing that the candidate and his adviser were shown as gay lovers in a deleted scene. Frankly, I’d have been happy to trade that for one of the heterosexual encounters.

Dir: Osamu Dezaki
Star (voice, English dub): Denise Poirier, Carlos Ferro, Dwight Shultz, John Dimaggio

Gunsmith Cats: Bulletproof

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★★★★
“Fast, hardware-heavy fun in Chicago, Japanese-style!”

Watching this dubbed was, for once, viable since despite its Japanese origins, it’s firmly set in and around Chicago. So we did sit through some of it in English, but the accents were woefully Cal-girl and thus we’d recommend sticking with the Japanese, even more unlikely though it might be. That out of the way, this is an action-packed romp, in three episodes but effectively one story. Rally Vincent and May Hopkins, one a crack marksman, the other an explosives expert, own a gun store, but are blackmailed by the ATF into helping nail an arms ring. It’s not as simple as it seems, since the perps have connections at a high level, and the services of a former Soviet Special Forces hitwoman.

The episodic structure means there’s never a dull moment and you effectively get three climaxes for the price of one, with the car chase in #2 perhaps my favourite. If it occasionally teeters on the edge of cheesecake – Rally gets her blouse shot open – it’s made clear early on that the heroines have little time for romantic dalliance. Indeed, there’s little time for anything much, including character development, but the story charges on at a great pace, so it’s not as if they’re wasting time.

You can see why Sonoda set it in America, since handguns are illegal in Japan, and the crowded streets would likely impair the auto quotient. Creator Kenichi Sonoda’s fondness for fast cars was apparent in his earlier work, Riding Bean, and by the end of this, Chris had decided she wants a Shelby GT Cobra, just the like the one Rally drives. Drool. :-) A lot of effort went into reproducing Chicago and wiser heads than mine (who have actually been there!) say it’s accurately detailed. Though undeniably great fun, perhaps the most amusement we got was from pretending the opening song was the theme to Saturday Night Live, to which it bears a spooky resemblance…

Dir: Mori Takeshi
Star (voice): Michiko Neya, Kae Araki, Aya Hisakawa

Perdita Durango

  By

★★★½
“The two greatest pleasures in life are fucking and killing.”

perdita_durangoDespite flaws, this merits your attention simply because of the title character, even if describing her as a “heroine” would necessitate a wholesale redefinition of the term – the quote above is entirely typical of her attitude. When she teams up with bank-robber Romeo Dolorosa to traffic a truckload of foetuses to Las Vegas (as you do…), it’s like putting a lit match to fuel. You just know there’s trouble ahead.

Romeo is into Santeria, and Perdita convinces him to perform a human sacrifice; to this end, they kidnap a slumming young WASP couple (Cross and Graham – and yes, it is Heather’s sister, though notably less well-endowed), and the film goes into nightmare mode. You get the horrible feeling that absolutely anything could happen, and de la Iglesia shows that he has no problems pouring on both sex and violence. [I should mention at this point that you should track down the German DVD, which is the only uncut version currently available, AFAIK] It’s difficult viewing – and Rosie Perez always seemed so nice. You certainly won’t sustain that view afterwards.

The film does run out of steam when this extremely menacing section is completed, and ends up petering out somewhat, as the focus moves off the couple and more onto Romeo – Perdita is pushed into the sidelights, and she deserves a much better fate. If there’s also a sense of deja vu, it’s because the story comes from the same writer as Wild at Heart, and both depict a twisted love-story/chase. Despite this, there’s enough perverted nastiness here to satisfy the most jaded palate.

Dir: Alex de la Iglesia
Star: Rosie Perez, Javier Bardem, Harley Cross, Aimee Graham

The Black Angel

  By

★★½
“Promising start to gangster revenge, but goes off rails badly.”

The first half of this is quite excellent. A young girl, Ikko, daughter of a Yakuza boss, sees her parents murdered on the orders of her step-sister but is rescued by the Black Angel (Takashima), a female assassin, and escapes to America. 14 years later, she returns (Hazuki), calling herself the Black Angel and starts wreaking revenge on those responsible – who retaliate by calling in the real Black Angel. The potential here is huge, not least because the original is now an alcoholic junkie, at one harrowing point reduced to licking drugs from broken glass.

Then it all goes horribly wrong for the viewer. The dividing line is the eight-minute, one-take shot of Ikko wandering around a building trying to escape while being taunted by thugs. It is incredibly pointless, overlong, and sucks the energy out of the movie like a vampire. After that, it just collapses in on itself like a balloon, and has very little more of interest to offer – both Chris and I dozed off at various points. There’s much pointing of guns at each other, and one final twist, but it was nothing you won’t see coming, and of absolutely no significance by that stage, since we had long ceased to care. A spectacular crash.

Dir: Takashi Ishii
Star: Riona Hazuki, Reiko Takashima, Kippei Shiina, Yoshinori Yamaguchi

Day of the Warrior

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★★

Andy was back on the helm for this one, but appears to have opted to go beyond subtle self-referential digs into full-blown camp, and I tend to think this takes away from the overall experience. The intent is clear when we are brought into the office of Willow Black, the head of L.E.T.H.A.L. (The Legion to Ensure Total Harmony and Law), and find her exercising on a treadmill in an outfit more suited for an exotic dancer. Which makes sense, because if you’re a female agent of LETHAL, you can bet you’ll be going undercover as a stripper or a porn actress – not quite the empowering government job one might expect. It also appears that breast enlargement surgery is required for all such operatives.

The target this time is the Warrior (Bagwell, who was a fixture in WCW at the time), a former agent turned professional wrestler(!) turned liberator of ancient artefacts and runner of a range of dubious business enterprises, ranging from bootleg films to diamond smuggling. LETHAL have several agents undercover, but someone hacks into their computers (which seem strangely retro from this viewing point). So the spies have to be brought in from the cold by Tiger (Sidaris newcomer Marks) before their cover is blow, including Cobra (Smith), the aforementioned undercover stripper – though there’s not much of her under cover. There is also, for no readily apparent reason, a Chinese Elvis impersonator (Gerald Okamura), though I have to say, he is kinda engaging.

The problem is, when it’s obvious the makers aren’t taking this seriously – and that’s clear from the handicap wrestling match which is the climax, between Willow and Elvis Fu on one side, and the Warrior on the other – why should the audience bother? And though the tone is clearly intended to be light-hearted, it’s not actually very funny: the comic hamming of the Warrior’s surfer-dude sidekicks is particularly dreadful. There also seems to be a lot of padding, such as stock-footage shots of Las Vegas, which go way beyond anything necessary or interesting, and you get far more uses of “I need to get something off my chest,” than are in any way amusing.

And if ever I become an evil overlord, I will instruct all my minions on the perils of hiding out in a shack with “Fuel Supply” spray-painted on the side, especially when the opposition has access to an explosive-tipped crossbow… It can never end well for those seeking cover.

Dir: Andy Sidaris
Star: Shae Marks, Julie K. Smith, Marcus Bagwell, Kevin Light

Enemy Gold

  By

★★★

While containing many of the same elements as usual e.g. boobs and bombs, this does at least throw in a new angle, in the shape of some Confederate gold buried in the woods since the Civil War – I can only presume Sidaris must have befriended a Civil War re-enactment battalion. Out enjoying a bit of off-road action, amusingly-named federal agent Becky Midnite (Simpson) and her two co-workers stumble across a diary written by one of the soldiers transporting the gold. However, their plans to search for the treasure are disrupted by efforts to kill them, courtesy of mob boss Santiago. He is upset after they shut down his operation that involved shipping drugs in hollowed-out watermelons. Fed up with the ineptness of his minions, he hires even more amusingly-named assassin Jewel Panther (Strain) to carry out what they have failed to do.

There’s a loopy insanity to elements of this that are kinda endearing, such as with Strain’s bizarre topless sword routine, which comes out of absolutely nowhere, or her costume when she meets a couple of park rangers, which is not your usual hiker’s attire, shall we say. No-one but Strain could probably pull that off, and she’s fun to watch as usual. However, after a prelude which explains the gold, the first half abandons it entirely, and goes off in a totally different (and not very interesting) direction, involving the raid which get Midnite and her squad suspended, amid political shenanigans and an agent who’s secretly working for Santiago. The final showdown between the various parties concerned is, quite possibly, the worst ever committed to celluloid, even allowing for the fact that Santiago is apparently a “hands on” criminal overlord, who believes that if you want a job done well, you should do it yourself.

The action around the forest is well-staged, with a decent vehicle chase whose danger is enhanced by the lack of helmets worn by the participants, and you’ve got to love the crossbow whose bolts explode three seconds after embedding in the target. The sole purpose of this delay seems to be in order for the target to get a “Wile E. Coyote” moment of horrified realization before exploding. Hey, I laughed…

Dir: Drew Sidaris
Star: Suzi Simpson, Bruce Penhall, Tai Collins, Julie Strain