Tag: d

The Deadly Angels

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★★½
“At the risk of repeating myself, poster not necessarily representative of movie contents.”

Inspired though the alternate titling of The Bod Squad might be, the original title likely gives a better idea of the inspiration for this 1977 Shaw Brothers flick: think Charlie’s rather than deadly. Three women, from Korea, Hong Kong and Japan, under the orders of Bosley Scotland Yard’s Miss Eve (Kraft, known to cult fans from Mighty Peking Man), go undercover in a night-club. Girls from there have been recruited to smuggle out of Hong Kong the proceeds from a series of brutal jewel robberies – the previous couriers all turn up stabbed to death after delivering the goods. However, the agents turn out to be a bit crap at the whole undercover thing, and the bad guys are none too happy to discover undercover operatives in their midst.

The main problem is, this takes way to long to get to the action. Outside of a pretty decent training sequence, there’s very little to speak of for the first hour. The film tries to make up in sex, what it doesn’t deliver in violence, with plenty of nudity and coercive sex, but the only point of note is an impressive death by fire extinguisher, inflicted on a witness by the chief villain’s main squeeze (Shaw Yin Yin, one of the decade’s leading erotic actresses in Hong Kong).

Things do perk up in the final reel, with a series of pretty decent battles, in which the girls take on a host of minions, with a little help from Li (Liu), whose father was the one who got “extinguished” (and who, like most Hong Kong martial artists of the time, appears to be trying to channel the very busy spirit of the late Bruce Lee). The agents also have some neat gadgets, such as a belt-buckle that become a spiked yo-yo kind of weapon, a folding cross-bow and a hair scrunchie which forms part of an explosive slingshot. More of these being put to use, and less of victims being slapped around, would have upped the entertainment quotient. You can see the influence this would have on 80’s entries in the genre, but at this point, we’re still talking “barely crawled out of the sea” in evolutionary terms.

Dir: Hun Choi, Hsueh Li Pao
Star: Nancy Yen, Dana, Liu Yang, Evelyn Kraft

Delinquent Girl Boss: Blossoming Night Dreams

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★★
“Not very delinquent, and certainly not much of a boss.”

This was my first true vintage “pinky violence” movie, though I had bumped against some fringe entries in the genre before e.g. Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41, which I enjoyed and really must get round to reviewing for here some time. This one…not so much. It focuses on Rika (Oshida), who gets out of reform school, and gets a job as a ‘companion’ at a bar, where most of the girls have a similarly troubled background. The local Yakuza boss is sniffing around, and his path crosses Rika’s after she (semi-unwittingly) helps a colleague steal some drugs from them. As a result, the house mother/bar owner, is on the hook for three million yen, plus interest.

It’s hard to say exactly why I found this so disappointing. I did like Oshida’s performance, as she has a kind of breezy delinquence that carries the film. However, most of the other characters (particularly the men) are little more than caricatures: witness the comic-relief gay character, while the Yakuza boss could have strayed straight from a Victorian melodrama, if only he had twirled his moustache a bit more. The plot doesn’t go anywhere interesting, capping itself off with a battle in a pachinko parlour 0 and even here, the owner has to call on male help, in the shape of the man who murdered her father, but is now very, very sorry about it…

Including action sequences that are largely lamely staged and executed (the director would do a lot better when he got someone who could actually fight, like Sue Shiomi), plus just enough nudity to make Chris tut disapprovingly, without actually providing any cheap thrills, this looks and feels every one of its forty years. I suppose this might be the point, for a certain audience. But it fell far enough short of expectations that I was left suddenly rethinking my plans to have an entire section of the site dedicated to pinky violence.

Dir: Kazuhiko Yamaguchi
Star: Reiko Oshida, Tatsuo Umemiya, Yukie Kagawa, Bokuzen Hidari
a.k.a. Tokyo Bad Girls

Delinquent Girl Boss: Worthless to Confess

  By

★★½
“Not very violent, and certainly not pink.”

When Rika (Oshida) gets out of reform school, she goes to visit her friend Midori (Katayama), and gets a job working in the garage belonging to Midori’s father Muraki (Ban), even though Midori is estranged from him – except when she needs money to pay off her boyfriend’s gambling debts to the local Yakuza under Boss Ohya (Nobuo Kaneko). Another friend of Rika’s is working in an “art studio”, doing nude modelling to support her sick husband, and still others are hostesses at the Ginza Girls cabaret, a dance-hall which Ohya’s gang are also extorting for protection money. After Muraki has to take a loan using the garage as collateral to pay Ohya, Rika tries to offer herself as an alternative to the boss. This goes about as well as you’d expect, though there’s a genuinely cool twist in which we find someone isn’t quite who we seem. There’s a tragic fatality, which sets the scene for all the girls to get together and take on Ohya’s gang.

As you can tell, there’s no shortage of plot going on here. However, the overall result is more like an overwrought Japanese soap-opera, with a lack of much delinquence, or indeed, real action of any kind from the girls, up until the last ten minutes. Indeed, there’s very little exploitation present at all, with a surprising lack of nudity as well, though personally, this is less a concern. Reading various reviews elsewhere, there is a broad spectrum of opinion as to whether this makes it the best or the worst in the series. I tend to be somewhere in the middle: while I can appreciate the dramatic elements, and the two lead actresses are good in their roles, it’s not what I expected at all, being too worthy, and completely lacking any sense of excess of transgression.

I’m definitely uncertain where the poster image comes from, although that may be because I had to look at it twice, since the first time I thought she was holding a yo-yo. Must have been some kind of residue from Sukeban Deka, I guess.

Dir: Kazuhiko Yamaguchi
Star: Reiko Oshida, Yumiko Katayama, Junzaburo Ban

Death Row Girls

  By

★★
“Despite the poster, more WiP than GwG.”

Misaki (Hoshino) is in prison for stabbing a policeman to death, but is taken from her jail to a remote island. There, she joins the rest of the hand-picked prisoners, who are there to be trained by a mysterious government organization, and moulded into operatives who can be used to protect national security. Most of the inmates just want to make things easy, sleeping with the guards in exchange for privileges, but Misaki is made of tougher stuff, and won’t buckle down to the authorities. While she begins plotting how to escape the island, she needs to overcome a number of problems, not least having no idea about where it is, and whether the small boat they stumble across will be capable of getting them to any other land.

There’s definitely elements of Nikita here, not least the sequence where Misaki tries to take the facility head hostage. Except that, where that breezed through the training inside 25 minutes, it is, more or less, the entire focus of proceedings here. Hoshino snarls nicely as an independent and feisty bad girl, yet neither she nor any of the other residents are in the slightest bit convincing. I’d normally avoid using a phrase like “runs like a girl” as unnecessarily demeaning… except here, where it’s entirely accurate. I can see absolutely no chance – zero, zip, nada – that any credible group would select her, or the rest of the inmates, as potential trainees.

The film does deliver the expected helpings of gratuitous nudity and moderate violence, as things bumble along towards the climax, where Misaki has to battle her jail friend, to the death. Winner gets to leave, loser…well, will be dead, so shouldn’t worry themselves about it. It’s not exactly the best knife-fight you’ve ever seen, and the ending leaves a good deal to be desired in terms of tying up the loose ends as well. The 84 minutes passed reasonably enough though, and it’s reasonably competent, albeit by the genre’s fairly-low standards.

Dir: Sadaaki Haginiwa
Star: Aki Hoshino, Emi Kitagawa, Ren Suzuki, Ami Natsui
a.k.a. Female Prisoner 1316

Dirty Weekend

  By

★★★
“This is the story of Bella, who woke up one morning and decided she’d had enough.”

So opens this rare example of British grindhouse. We don’t generally do that genre – it’s just not us, all that violence. But there are odd exceptions, and this would be one. It’s the story of Bella (Williams), who relocates from London to the genteel seaside town of Brighton after splitting up with her boyfriend. However, her flat is overlooked by a window belonging to Tim (Sewell); he begins a series of increasingly-vile phone-calls to Bella, who is terrified at what might happen. A chance encounter with an Iranian clairvoyant (Ian Richardson – yeah, about that…) changes her ‘from a lamb to a butcher’, and she visits Tim in the middle of the night, smashing his head in with a hammer. Galvanized by this, Bella moves on to further “sanitation”, cleaning the not-so mean Brighton streets of other male scum. Meanwhile, a serial killer who preys on young women is gradually moving towards her location.

From the director of the controversial Death Wish, it’s as if Winner said, “Hah! You though that was bad? I’m going to make the heroine female and turn it into a war of the sexes, with every man a sleazy caricature. And it’ll include the Man from UNCLE as a perverted dentist!” It certainly turns your typical British film conceits upside-down, yet still retains that undeniable character: when Bella first sees Tim spying on her, she simply draws the curtains. Her transformation from mouse into avenging angel is impressively put-together, and no doubt Winner was influenced by Ms. 45, with Bella pulling on her stockings and acting out a gun-battle.

But the problem in this case is, Bella’s transformation doesn’t make a difference. In Ms. 45, the interesting moral dilemma was, that our initial sympathy for the central character proved misplaced, as she moved towards killing innocent men. Here, it’s just an ongoing series of repugnant, shallow stereotypes, and attempts to give them depth e.g. with McCallum, are a miserable failure. [Amusingly, one of the thugs she takes out in an alley would go on to greater things: Sean Pertwee has become a genre mainstay, in the likes of Dog Soldiers and Doomsday. Another, Christopher Ryan, was Mike in The Young Ones and has since carved a niche playing Sontarans in Doctor Who!] The subplot with the approaching serial-killer is a complete mis-fire too, and after achieving potential cult-classic level in the middle, it falls short. Still, it’s better than you might think, and is certainly one of a kind.

Dir: Michael Winner
Star: Lia Williams, Rufus Sewell, David McCallum, Michael Cule

Double Dare

  By

★★★★½
“Zoë Bell, you’re our heroine. Never change.”

The day after watching this documentary, I was clearing out the shed in preparation for our house move. I twisted my back, and thought about giving up, but soldiered on until the job was done – because that’s what Zoë Bell would do. It’s now my life philosophy: WWZD? She’s the main focus here, from working as Lucy Lawless’s double on Xena in New Zealand, through an unsuccessful attempt to break in to Hollywood, and on to a second try, where she’s hired to stand-in for Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. Paralleling this, it looks at Jeannie Epper, a veteran stuntwoman who shadowed Lynda Carter in Wonder Woman. Now nearing her 60th birthday, Epper is still active and seeking work, fighting against the problems of being a female in an extremely male-dominated industry.

The thing that comes over is how delightfully un-Hollywood Bell is, innocent almost to the point of naivety – she’s blissfully unaware of the need, for example, to have head shots, and drops F-bombs with a marvellously casual air. The cameras are rolling when she gets the call telling her she’s got the Kill Bill job, and her obvious, genuine delight at the news, brought a huge grin to our faces, and is completely endearing. It’s to be hoped that Hollywood doesn’t change her in the slightest, and Zoë remains the same, down-to-earth, well-grounded person shown here, who is now even more solidly entrenched among our favourite contemporary action heroines.

I have some concerns there, based on Epper; her contemplation of plastic surgery and liposuction at her age is more sad than anything else, as is watching Jeannie working the phones, basically begging for work, even though she’s a legend in the business. There’s a good heart beating in there (Epper donated a kidney to a friend, for instance), but she has clearly been ground down by her decades in the film industry, and become a lot more cynical and battle-weary as a result. That’s no wonder, when you witness her struggles trying to get equal treatment for women at the annual awards ceremony. It’s a somewhat grim reality-check, warning of the potential perils ahead for Bell in her career.

But aside from the contrast in the two heroines, this is a fascinating study in a side of the business that doesn’t get anything like the recognition it deserves. As one comment I read elsewhere said, “If you liked Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, Zoë Bell is the reason why,” and that sums up the shadows in which stuntwomen work. This film shines a light into that darkness, and both Epper and Bell deserve enormous respect and admiration for putting their bodies on the line, in the name of our entertainment. And while I’m not really a big Tarantino fan, if he turns out to be responsible for bringing Bell to a wider audience, then it’s perhaps the biggest gift his career will have given us.

Dir: Amanda Micheli
Star: Jeannie Epper, Zoë Bell

Double Duty

  By

★★½
“Action? Comedy? Romance? The Jill of all trades, proves master of few of them.”

After 20 years in the Marines, MJ (Lesseos) returns to civilian life, but finds it somewhat hard to adapt to life as a civilian. Her old college friend Sophie (Duerden) helps her adjust – somewhat – and introduces her to Craig (Sizemore), a designer who is perhaps rather more feminine than MJ. Sophie is working on a charity auction, not realizing her assistant Carl (Freeman) is planning to steal the top item, a Faberge egg. Meanwhile, hypnosis has given MJ the ability to get in touch with her inner woman – but the problem is, every time someone snaps their fingers, she switches between her two personas. There is that of the rough, tough and gruff Marine, and then there’s the other, a giggling girlie for whom breaking a nail would pose a deep, personal crisis. Which will win out when the chips are down?

To be fair, the actors and their characters are not the problem here. The concept of a marine having to return to civilian circumstances has enough in it to power a movie, and Lesseos is believable as a soldier, in a way that many actresses wouldn’t be [see Mena Suvari in the Day of the Dead remake as a counter-example]. Still looks pretty good, given she’s… Well, let’s just say, I was surprised. Sizemore is playing against type – the star of Black Hawk Down and Saving Private Ryan is usually the one who’s in the military – yet is none the less effective for it. However, the entire film is almost stolen by Karen Black, who plays the adviser called in to help MJ become a lady; this unfolds complete with a My Fair Lady reference, at which I must confess I did laugh out loud.

The problem is that the rest of the film falls flat. Lesseos in feminine mode is much less amusing, and does not improve with repetition, shall we say. Some of the comedy is startlingly unfunny, such as the scene where MJ takes on a drunken biker-chick in a bar – I felt embarrassed for all those concerned, just watching it. Although that low point is never quite matched, the bar is set low, and it’s also the kind of film where people only get shot in the arm [that happens three times in about twenty seconds at the climax]. The moments of the heroine kicking butt with some style are sadly few and far between, and I was left with the definite feeling that Lesseos deserves a better vehicle for her talents.

Dir: Stephen Eckelberry
Star: Mimi Lesseos, Tom Sizemore, Susan Duerden, Alfonse Freeman

The Deadly Females

  By

★★½
“Tea, polite conversation and cold-blooded murder, British ’70’s style.”

An intriguing premise is ground into the dirt, with execution which could hardly be more tedious. An agency of hit-women are run by an antiques dealer (Reed), taking on clients from all walks of life, who can use the skill-set of her assassinettes. Flaky business partner? No problem. Trapped in an unloving marriage? Will that be cash or charge? It’s imbued with a curious degree of social commentary, as the scenes are intercut with newspaper front-pages, intended to convey the impression that 1976 society is on the edge of collapsing into predatory carnage, anarchy and chaos. Which, in the post-9/11 world, really seems more quaintly ironic than remotely threatening.

The main problem is pacing which takes the simplest scene and stretches it far beyond the point of relevance, or even interest. The killers are clearly in absolutely no hurry to carry out their tasks: for example, one poses as a student carrying out a survey on housewives to gain entrance. Which would be fine, except that we then have to sit through a whole spiel on the survey, the target’s daily routine, a cup of tea and a tour of the house before the hit-lady appears suddenly to remember why she’s there, karate-chopping the victim and dropping her down the stairs. Similarly, the “nurse” who turns up to give a massage…actually does give the massage. And then a bath, all depicted in much more detail than remotely necessary.

It’s less a story, than a series of unconnected clients. The only real linking influence is an Italian assassin, whose weapon of choice is poisoned cigarettes. She shows up right at the start, and then vanished for almost the entire movie: it’d have been fun to have seen two “killer companies” fighting it out for business. That lady is played by Rula Lenska, a genuine Polish countess who achieved further 70’s fame in the UK TV show Rock Follies, and was the US spokeswoman for VO5 shampoo. I suspect most of the other people in this may be recognizable from British horror of the period, though perhaps more Amicus and Tyburn than Hammer. It would certainly have benefited from the presence of someone like Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee.

While the violence is mostly understated, on the exploitation front, there’s plenty of softcore flesh – and even some male full-frontal nudity, though it’s not what you’d call erotic. This is in part because people seem to spend an awful lot of time lounging around in bed, chatting with each other – or, more often, bitching at each other. This does not exactly present a flattering portrayal of British men; as Chris put it, “My god – how did you ever come out of such a place?” But it remains such a unique and cynical animal that I found myself unable to do anything but keep watching, even as this continued to plod on, in its mostly-tedious vein.

Dir: Donovan Winter
Star: Tracy Reed, Bernard Holley, Scott Fredericks, Heather Chasen

Dirty Pair Flash, Mission 3: Random Angels

  By

★★★

The final – to date – installment of Dirty Pair adventures on the screen, is a bit of a mixed bag. Of the five episodes here, two are pretty good, one mediocre, and two are more than a tad creepy, thanks to the level of, from what I recall of my days in anime, used to be called ‘fan service’. There is an entire episode centered around beach volleyball, which is nothing more than a flimsy excuse to see Kei and Yuri in a variety of miniscule costumes, bordering on the fetishistic. Now, I just don’t find cartoons sexy – no, not even Jessica Rabbit – and given both of them are technically under-age, it all gets a tad sleazy. Things get worse in the fourth episode, when an even younger boy, rich and clever, but very weird, builds a mechanical replica of Yuri and falls in love with it.

That’s the bad news. The good news is, when they keep on track, the show has the right mix of goofy humour and collateral damage that we love. Witness the second installment, where our pair find themselves being hunted by Monica De Noir: someone younger, deadlier and with an even more saccharine approach to life, whose weapons include things like a giant killer teddy-bear. That’s got some nice jabs at the Sailor Moon school of anime, though since Flash takes some aspects of that show on-board, it does count as biting the hand somewhat. Also enjoyable was the final episode, where Berringer, a villain in a military hard-suit who was jailed thanks to Chief Poporo, lays siege to WWWA headquarters, with vengeance atop his list of priorities. It’s kinda Die Hard crossed with The Terminator, and I was sorry to see that one finish. Completing the set is an episode where Kei has to nurse a baby through a hostile landscape; emphasis on a) ‘nurse’ and b) ‘hostile’, which is also kinda odd to Western eyes. Having always preferred Yuri to Kei, this was never going to be one of my favorites.

All told though, it is a significant improvement on the dire previous series, returning the focus to what made the Dirty Pair entertaining, in a cheerfully destructive way. It certainly feels something of a mis-step to separate Kei and Yuri, as in a couple of the pieces: the interaction and character contrast between them is part of the show’s appeal. However, when they’re together and working in synch, they still represent one of the best double-acts in anime history, and I hope there will perhaps be more Dirty Pair available down the road.

Dir: Takahito Kimura
Star (voice): Rika Matsumoto, Mariko Koda, Shigezou Sasaoka, Mika Kanai

Dirty Pair Flash, Mission 2: Angels at World’s End

  By

★½

Where are Kei and Yuri, and what have you done with them? That might be the anguished cry of the Dirty Pair fan after watching these five episodes, most of which eschew any efforts at high-octane action, in favour of generally unamusing comedy and tedium. All five parts are set on World’s World, a theme-planet that recreates 20th-century life for tourists. Our heroines are sent there because the computer is virus-infected, to bodyguard the network engineer Touma (Ono) who is going to fix it. Their presence becomes necessary, as it’s soon clear someone is out to stop Touma from doing his job. That only occupies the bookend episodes: the middle three are, while still set on the same planet, largely unconnected. In them, Kei and Yuri must look into ghostly goings-on at a girls’ school, help Touma with his love-life and bring a con-artist to justice.

Wow, this is bland and forgettable. Two of the episodes are closer to shaggy-dog stories, with twists in the tail that might as well open with flashing neon signs indicating their presence. This is not the Dirty Pair I signed up for. I signed up for the ones with the large weaponry, capable of taking out entire cities with a shrug of denial and an oversized weapon. Not these…bimbos, more interested in the romantic dalliances of a feeble supporting character than in a bit of the old ultraviolence. Really, the direction taken in this slate is a good example of why I started to lose interest in anime after the mid-90’s: a dumbing-down and kiddification of the medium, that largely removed everything that attracted me to it to begin with. I blame Pokemon.

The setting has a lot of scope: the creators could potentially have thrown Kei and Yuri into any era and any location [can you imagine them in, say, the Wild West or feudal Japan?]. Appreciating that, dumping them into modern era Tokyo demonstrates a dearth of imagination that borders on the sad. There are occasional flashes of what you would expect from the series, such as the final episode, which becomes a moderately-rousing chase after the perpetrator behind both the computer virus and the attacks on Touma. That just simply throws the failings inherent in the rest of the episodes into even sharper relief. I never previously thought that the Dirty Pair could ever be boring; I guess I have this set of OAVs to thank for convincing me otherwise, as I spent far too much of them wondering how much longer there was to go.

Dir: Takahito Kimura
Star (voice): Rika Matsumoto, Mariko Koda, Kenichi Ono, Akio Ootsuka