Tag: d

Daughter of Don Q

  By

★★★
“No relation to Maggie, presumably.”

Lorna Gray, the lead here, had been the villainess in Perils of Nyoka, but graduates to the role of protagonist. This is notable for its contemporary, urban setting, without any of the “jungle girl” trappings of previous Republic serials. Heroine Dolores Quantero  (Gray, although now billed as Adrian Booth) is a thoroughly modern woman, who happens to be proficient at jiu-jitsu, and also no mean hand with a longbow. The former is of rather more importance than the latter, which only really crops up during one episode. Perhaps this feistiness is genetic, since Dolores is a descendant of Don Quantero, a heroic historical figure [the title of this may be a nod to 1925 silent film, Don Q, Son of Zorro, starring Douglas Fairbanks].

Another member of the family, Carlos Manning (Mason) becomes aware of a land grant given to their ancestor by the Spanish crown, which will allow him to claim ownership of large tracts of property. However, the rights would be divided among all the Don’s descendants, so Carlos decides to start bumping off other family members. The process begins with the attempted theft of a heirloom from Dolores’s house which details the Quintero genealogy. This alerts her to the plan, and along with journalist Cliff Roberts (Alyn), she looks to protect her relatives and get to the bottom of Carlos’s scheme, dodging retaliatory efforts to lop her off the family tree.

While I liked the modern scenario, it’s a bit of a mixed bag, both in terms of story and in Dolores’s character. Even by the low standards of serial villainy, Carlos’s plans seem both ridiculous and ill-conceived. I was particularly unimpressed by the attempt to have Dolores shot with a harpoon gun while dangling in a net, apparently because it would look like a “vendetta killing.” Yeah, between two gangs of whales. The serial even seems to have a bottle episode consisting largely of footage taken from previous parts, with the heroine and hero describing their previous brushes with death. Considering there are only 12 chapters to begin with, this recycling of previous peril is disappointing, as is the apparent inclusion of action footage from earlier serials, such as The Masked Marvel.

However, some of the more imaginative elements do work, such as Dolores going undercover as the target in a knife-throwing act, and some of the supporting characters are surprisingly memorable. That the heroine knows and uses martial arts may also be close to a first for Hollywood, even if it’s a few basic throws at most. Despite this, she does still have a tendency to fall unconscious too easily, and sit back when things kick off – though we’ll give her the benefit of the doubt for the fight where she takes a chair to the face! While overall entertaining, the finale is particularly disappointing in terms of her passivity, with Cliff speeding to her rescue, as the crate she’s tied up in, is about to be thrown off a high bridge. I’d rather she had rescued him, or at least herself. I guess jiu-jitsu and archery was as far as Republic were willing to go, in the way of female empowerment.

Dir: Spencer Gordon Bennet and Fred C. Brannon
Star: Lorna Gray (as Adrian Booth), Kirk Alyn, LeRoy Mason, Roy Barcroft

Debt

  By

★★
“In need of repossession.”

This is one of those cases where you can see what a film is trying to do. It just isn’t very good at doing it. In this case, the central character is Gina (Killips), who works as a collector of debts for the mysterious and reclusive “Max”. This is for reasons that become clear towards the end – yet, like a lot else in the film, it doesn’t actually prove to be of much significance. Her latest job involves locating a very large sum of money which went missing from his organization. Suspicion falls on Myles (Orille), and Gina is tasked with finding out whether he was indeed responsible and if so, what he did with the loot. To this end, Gina inserts herself into Myles’s life and comes under increasing pressure from her boss, Simon (Rumley), to get results for Max. But Gina is increasingly disenchanted with her profession, and also increasingly convinced of Myles’s innocence.

What this is aiming at, is depicting a “realistic” portrayal of an enforcer like Gina. This means meaningless chit-chat about whether Gina will or will not be able to make it to a neighbourhood barbecue. Guess what? We. Just. Don’t Care. It’s the kind of thing which could have been put over by a better film-maker in a couple of shots, without the need for characters actually to have a conversation about it. Still, this is what you expect from a man making his first feature, and also choosing not only to direct, but also write and edit the thing as well. Oh, yeah: while also acting as location manager and stunt co-ordinator. That’s spreading yourself perilously thin. Of all those areas, I’d say the editing comes off best, assembled together things in a way that’s coherent and does the most with what Fairman the director has given Fairman the editor.

The rest? Well… not so much. The fights are unimpressive at best, in particular a woeful one where Gina faces a drunk guy behind a bar. This, being the opening demonstration of her talents, should have established her bad-ass credentials. It looks like the result of five minutes of preparation, and even if nothing else is quite as poor, you only get one chance to make a first impression. On the location front, I was amused by the way the fights were very careful staged to avoid property damage; you’d think they could at least have brought their own coffee-table to go through. The script, as noted, tries to do too much, especially at the end, where it attempts a double-twist, but doesn’t stick the landing. The main positive is, I think, Killips. She hits the appropriately world-weary note for the character of Gina, and manages to handle even the chattier scenes in a way which kept them just interesting enough.

Credit is also due to Fairman for getting out there and actually making a feature, especially one with a strong heroine. Hopefully, next time, he’ll get the help he needs to deliver a more polished product.

Dir: Dave Fairman
Star: Ashley Killips, A.J. Orille, Phil Rumley, Eric Hergott

Dead Shot by Ethan Johnson

  By

Literary rating: ★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆½

I did get through this, but there were times when it was on thin ice, and it certainly didn’t work for me. At first, it seemed the heroine, Diana, was maybe eight or nine, going by the way she acts, and how her survivalist father treats her. [The first sentence is, “Diana Fellner stood over her suitcase, clutching a worn teddy bear”] Turns out, she’s actually 23. He abandons her at a roadside diner, for reasons that never become clear, and she is suddenly forced into adult life. With the help of a waitress at the diner, she ends up heading for Newark, and despite her lack of paperwork, gets a job in a shop. Then, all hell breaks loose, with a massive, coordinated series of terrorist attacks and subsequent riots, on what becomes known as Arbor Day. Diane turns vigilante, using the skills her father provided, and after the carnage, ends up joining what’s left of the police force. She has to overcome blatant sexism and a dangerous new world on the streets, as she finds herself – and also deal with her past catching up with her.

I think there was one particular moment where Diane jumped the shark for me. It’s on Arbor Day, when she basically executes a police officer, who has taken exception to her style of summary justice. The lack of real justification for the act, and any significant guilt or regret apparently felt by Diana after it, was rather troubling. Indeed, many of the events on that day themselves seem severely implausible. At the end of chapter 2, her father says, “I’ve got to teach you how to shoot,” for she has never fired live rounds, just a BB gun, before her abandonment. Yet she later proves capable of eliminating an entire mob of gang-bangers, virtually single-handed. Given she was brought up in a remote rural lifestyle, and kept almost in isolation, how did Diana become such an apparent expert in urban combat and pacification techniques? 

The world-building is a bit spartan as well. There’s not even any theories offered as to who was behind the events of Arbor Day – maybe that proves relevant in further volumes? – and the sudden collapse of society into anarchy and chaos seemed more convenient than plausible. I remember 9/11 and the country actually came together after those attacks, rather than immediately descending into The Purge. Diana – who inexplicably changes her name to DianE at the end, as if that’s a radical change – doesn’t seem to be a very nice person, with an apparent zero tolerance for anyone else’s flaws. However, it has to be said, the supporting cast are more annoying than endearing, so the reader is left with, basically, no-one likeable in the book. That isn’t necessarily an impossible block to overcome. However, Johnson doesn’t have the ability to do so, and I was left with no interest in going further.

Author: Ethan Johnson
Publisher: Independently published, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 3 in the Diane Pembrook novel series.

The Devil to Pay

  By

★★★★

“The hills have eyes. And hands, apparently.”

In the Appalachian Mountains, the residents are fiercely, even ferociously independent. They live by their own rules, known as the Creed. It’s a harsh, Old Testament version of law, which replaces conventional society. The lifestyle is well explained in a quote from a census taker which opens the film: “They want nothing from you, and God help you if you try to interfere.” It’s in this world that Lemon Cassidy (Deadwyler) lives with her young son on their smallholding. Her husband has gone off, but this seems not abnormal. At least, until Lemon gets a summons from Tommy Runion (Dyer), matriarch of her clan. Turns out Mr. Cassidy had owed her, and agreed to carry out a task in payment. His disappearance means the debt falls on Lemon, and if she won’t do Tommy’s bidding… Well, see the film’s title. 

The deeper Lemon gets, the more apparent it becomes she is not intended to get out alive, becoming the patsy in a long-running feud between the Runions and another mountain family. Escaping the fate intended for her will require guts, tenacity, a commitment to violence (when necessary) and the unlikely help of a local religious cult, who are… A bit different, even by the high standards of that term in Appalachian society. We have seen this kind of society before, such as in Winter’s Bone. However, what we have here is so alien, it almost beggars belief that this forms part of the contemporary United States of America. Indeed, some elements, such as the cult, are so out there, it’s positively distracting, taking attention away from the core storyline and characters. I must admit, there were several points where I felt additional explanation – in a format suitable for foreigners like myself – would have been quite welcome. 

The husband and wife duo of the Skyes also wrote Becky, one of 2020’s most effective works, and the script here is similarly impressive. It avoids the typical hillbilly stereotypes; while these people may be different to us city folk, they are clearly not idiots. But the key to the film’s success is Deadwyler, who is extremely good in her role. She’s black, and initially I did have qualms about this; given the setting, I wondered how much her character would be defined by her race. The answer? Not at all, and no-one else even mentions it, the material again choosing to avoid the easy route in its source of conflict. This is simply a non-issue, which you quickly forget about entirely,  and the film is all the better for that. Plaudits must also go to Dyer. She only has a few scenes, yet crafts a scary presence in a woman who can go from discussing the finer points of biscuit making, to threatening to bury you alive in a sentence or two. It’s a casual approach to violence, which makes it all the more frightening. 

Dir: Lane Skye, Ruckus Skye
Star: Danielle Deadwyler, Catherine Dyer, Jayson Warner Smith, Adam Boyer
a.k.a. Reckoning

Dead Sushi

  By

★★½
“A fishy tale”

Perhaps I just expected more from the combination of martial artist Takeda (High-Kick Girl, Karate Girl) and Iguchi (Mutant Girls Squad, The Machine Girl). While this has its moments, it falls well short of the best works of either star or director, delivering neither the action nor the insanity, of which I know both are capable. The set-up is fine. Takeda plays Keiko, the daughter of a sushi master, who leaves home after being told by her father she’ll never amount to anything. She gets a job working in a Japanese hot springs inn, and isn’t much good at that either.

A pharmaceutical company are having a get-together there, but Yamada, a disgruntled employee is also in attendance. His invention which rejuvenates dead cells was successful, but had side-effects, for which he was blamed and arrested. So he has taken revenge by using his creation to animate the sushi being served to the company. Oh, and this is not only infectious, transmitted by the sushi’s bite, it makes them capable of flying. And breeding. It is, of course, up to Keiko and a few hardy allies to fend off the killer delicacies.

It’s mostly the stuff around the edges which is effective here. There’s a little egg sushi, looked down on as inferior by its fish-flavored relatives, who becomes a valuable ally to Keiko. Oh, and it sings. Yes, folks: adorable, singing sushi. You’ll never eat nigiri again. Some of the lines are also ludicrous enough to make me laugh out loud; here are a few examples.

  • When you hurt a sushi chef’s pride, his next dish is death!
  • Sushi has a pecking order too.
  • It is my duty to tell the boss we are under siege by man-eating sushi.
  • The sushi are mating!

However, there’s not much in the way of escalation or progression. Once you’ve seen one plate of attack sushi, you’ve more or less seen them all. About the only other thing the film has to offer isn’t until the end, when Yamada turns himself into a gigantic man-tuna and there’s a battleship made of fish eggs. While I will admit to not having seen either of those before, the imagination seems very sporadic otherwise, though I did like Keiko’s briefly-used sushi-nunchaku. This being a Noboru Iguchi movie, we do get multiple fart jokes, of course.

Takeda’s talents are also sadly underutilized. I don’t know whether Iguchi couldn’t be bothered to get anyone decent for her to fight, or if it’s more that the concept allows limited scope for karate to blossom. With the attack sushi being largely CGI, there’s only so much flailing at thin air anyone can do. Iguchi regular Asami has a supporting role here: while she has shown some solid action skills elsewhere, it’s indicative of something, that she and Takeda look to have about the same level of fighting talent. I was certainly hoping for better from Takeda, and the film in general.

Dir: Noboru Iguchi
Star: Rina Takeda, Kentarô Shimazu, Takamasa Suga, Takashi Nishina

The Dublin Hit, by J.E. Higgins

  By

Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆½

What’s most unusual about this book is its heroine. For many years, Sauwa Catcher operated as a killer for the racist South African government during the apartheid years, hunting down their enemies at home at abroad, and gaining the justifiable nickname ‘Angel of Death’ as a result. Yeah. This is not exactly the kind of person with whom you should expect to sympathize. Indeed, generally someone like this would be the villain of the piece, yet Higgins manages to make it work, far better than you would expect.

This takes place not long after the fall of that regime in the nineties, when South Africa set up a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission”, to come to terms with the crimes previously committed. Catcher had been operating in the UK, and with her support network gone, accepts a commission from a Northern Irish paramilitary group, the Ulster Volunteer Force. In exchange for funding Sauwa’s vanishing off the grid, they want her to assassinate a leading Republic of Ireland police officer, who has been feeding intel to the UVF’s mortal enemies, the IRA. But doing so will bring down not just the wrath of the Irish police, but also the IRA. Additionally, her South African past is trying to catch up with Sauwa, as one of the most notorious tools of the old government, and a team has been sent over to bring her to justice. They’re in for quite a hard task.

So, how do you make the tool of an infamously racist regime sympathetic? Mostly, it’s by carefully crafting her background. Sauwa in not South African, but came from Rhodesia, now known as Zimbabwe. That country had its similarly racist government replaced with something arguably worse, in the shape of dictator Robert Mugabe, and she saw her family slaughtered in the wholesale violence which followed. Sauwa became a refugee, moved to South Africa, and vowed to do whatever she could to prevent the same thing happening there. That started her down the current career path. It’s a case where you may not agree with the character’s decisions, yet you can see the logic in them. Even the black soldiers hunting her, former “terrorists” themselves, know where she’s coming from, and are similarly haunted by their experiences. One of them says, “I feel more akin to her – another fighter in the trenches.”

It also helps that Sauwa only kills when necessary. Though, of course, her definition of “necessary” is perhaps different to yours and mine! There is only one extended action sequence, a night battle between Sauwa and an IRA unit on a beach. That’s mostly because she is simply better than everyone else in terms of experience and tactics, that while there are other conflicts, they are over pretty quickly. Her behaviour is as much about, for example, being aware of her environment and making sure she is not walking into a trap.  Here, Higgins’s military experience does seem to prove useful, and strikes a nice balance between not enough explanation and over-burdening the reader with unnecessary detail. I’m very much interested in seeing where the story goes from here.

Author: J.E. Higgins
Publisher: Mercenary Publishing, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 3 in the Sauwa Catcher series.

Destiny Lost, by M.D. Cooper

  By

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

This is the second book from Cooper here, after Outsystem, and has some of the same characters. Initially, it seemed to have a shot at being considerably better, with a first half which was impressive. Unfortunately, it couldn’t sustain this, and ended up dropping back to a similar level and for similar reasons. If you’re interested in SF which is so hard, you could use it to cut glass, this is for you. But I’m not typically a fan of books which need to include a twenty-page appendix of “Terms and Technology” at the back. Especially when half of them don’t help much, e.g. “A CriEn module is a device which taps into the base energy of the universe, also known as zero-point, or vacuum energy” – glad that’s cleared up. And some of the rest are superfluous: any fan of SF won’t need to be told what “FTL” travel is.

In this world, that faster-than-light breakthrough allowed humanity to occupy a swathe of the galaxy, but the resulting wars triggered a dark age from which we are now only just recovering, in the ninth millennium. Sera is a transporter-for-hire, who’ll move anything, anywhere for the right price. But when one commission brings down unexpected heat, she cracks open the package, and is startled to find it contains Tanis Richards. She was a colonist from Earth, whose ship set off over five thousand years ago and is only now reaching its destination. While events overtook them,  her ship, the Intrepid – its construction was the subject of Outsystem – carries long-lost technology, on which everyone, from pirates to stellar alliances, wants to get their hands.

One such pirate, Rebecca, kidnaps Sera, seeking to swap her for Tanis and access to her tech. But both Sera and her crew, helped by the colonist, are made of sterner stuff. Through this section is when the book is at its best, combining interesting characters with a conflict which is taking place on a personal level. All seems lost for Sera and her trusty AI, when she’s secreted away in Rebecca’s headquarters, hidden in the depths of dark space, outside our normal universe. Yet, through grit and determination, she manages to return to her allies, then prepares to take the fight to Rebecca, as well as reunite Tanis with her crew. It’s a very good, gripping read. Unfortunately, after that is where things go a bit pear-shaped.

For once everyone arrives at the star-system of Bollam’s World, the hard SF elements really kick in, as if Cooper wanted to make up for the time lost earlier. It becomes more like watching a gigantic game of three-dimensional chess, with vessels of various kinds moving around and firing weapons at each other, for lengthy sections. Rather than technology enhancing the human elements in the story, it threatens to overwhelm the characters entirely, and even a (not exactly surprising) revelation about Sera’s origins couldn’t stop this from becoming laborious by the end. Quite a few typos, such as a reference to a “grizzly task” when no actual bears were involved, don’t help matters. I’ll not be going further in this series.

Author: M.D. Cooper
Publisher: The Wooden Pen Press, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 13 in the Orion War series.

Don’t Cry Mommy

  By

★★½
“And the first shall be last”

I say that, since this Korean film appears to have been at least a partial inspiration for not one, but two Bollywood films which were recently reviewed here: Maatr and Mom. And, indeed, Thai telenovela Revenge also has something of the same theme: a mother who seeks vengeance against those who raped her daughter. If I’d seen this first, it would probably have had a greater impact. As is, even though not the film’s fault, it feels over-familiar. What is the film’s fault is a tone which appears engineered to be as depressing as possible, by any means possible. While fair enough in some aspects – you can’t argue it’s inappropriate for the material – this reaches its peak in an unforgivably melodramatic moment where a cake shows up with the title of the film on it. I’m fairly sure that eye-rolling and a derisive snort was not the intended reaction.

It does possess a couple of minor twists. When daughter Eun-Ah (Nam) is assaulted by a gang of fellow scholars, they videotape the attack. The threat of posting this is then used to blackmail her into further humiliating acts. It’s not really much of a surprise when this eventually triggers further tragedy. To the film’s credit, it’s not very interested in the assault, which is depicted in just a few seconds; it’s certainly not emphasized or stressed in the way some entries in the rape-revenge genre do. However, neither does it seem particularly interested in the revenge side, which is crammed into the last 20 minutes or so, in an almost perfunctory fashion. There’s no sense of catharsis to be found for Yoo-Lim (Yoo Sun), and by extension, not for the audience either. Which may be the point –  yet it doesn’t make for much… “fun”. Not that it’s impossible for a depressing film to be worthy, from Grave of the Fireflies through to Requiem For a Dream. However, it’s really not why I’m a fan of the girls with guns genre.

But the main problem is, it’s all too predictable, by no small measure. This was apparently based on a real Korean case, but in that, the perpetrator was herself raped at the age of nine, and waited twenty-one years before killing her attacker. I can’t help thinking that, while it might have been more difficult to turn into a screenplay, it would definitely have been a take with which I’m not familiar. Instead, this offers just another parade of predictable developments, ticking off boxes as it goes. If I’ve seen one scene in the courtroom where a group of smirking assailants get off with little or no punishment, I’ve seen half a dozen. It has gone beyond a trope, and the execution here does nothing to alleviate the severely cliched nature of the sequence. It is a pity, as I can’t fault either lead actress for their performance, which put over no shortage of emotional anguish. I just wish it had been in the service of a better story.

Dir: Yong-han Kim
Star: Yoo Sun, Nam Bo-ra, Shin Dongho, Yu Oh-seong

Dragon Age: Dawn of the Seeker

  By

★★★
“A polit-thriller in Fantasy-land”

I have to start off with an important confession: I am not a gamer. I’ve never really been one. I might have played… two computer games in my entire life: “Tomb Raider 2” and “No-one Lives Forever 2”. That very special thing computer gamers experience when in front of the consoles? I’ve never felt it, it never got me. But then, I was born in the mid-70s, and this could be the territory of another generation. So maybe I’m not even qualified to evaluate a movie which was based on a computer game. On the other hand, I’m not reviewing a game here, but a film – and I think I know a fair bit about them! Hopefully, I get the details right.

Dragon Age: Dawn of the Seeker is based on the fantasy computer game franchise by Canadian computer game label BioWare. The series started in 2009. In 2012 – to probably the surprise of everyone – it received a movie version. Released in the West and co-produced by American anime label Funimation, it tells a separate story that ties in with the second released game “Dragon Age 2” (2011).

The story takes place in a land called Ferelden, where knights secure the freedom and which is governed by a religious organisation known as “the Chantry”. This is similar to a medieval church with, for want of a better description, a female Pope called “the Divine” at the top. Among the knights are the Seekers; they seem to be the superiors of the knights and hold a special place, reporting directly to the Chantry. There are tensions between the knights and blood magicians who seem to follow (as far as I understand this universe!) their own agenda.

When one of the knights, Byron, leaves the castle with a girl that the Seekers had just rescued from mages, his young colleague Cassandra (Kuriyama) gets in his way, demanding an explanation. Byron is her mentor and a father figure to her, but shortly after he gets killed in an attack. Before dying, he is able to tell Cassandra there is intrigue brewing in the Chantry, and that this was the reason he wanted to secure the girl, who obviously has magical abilities (she looks very much like an elf to me).

Regalyan D’Marcall (Tanihara), a mage whom Cassandra finds on the scene, turns out to be an ally of Byron who wanted to help him expose the intrigue. But having previously lost her brother to mages (there was a decapitation incident), Cassandra is suspicious of him. Still, together, the unlikely duo search out who’s behind all of what’s going on, and in the nick of time, also prevent an assassination attempt (with a dragon!) on the Divine at a jubilee celebration.

First off, the story moves quite quickly and never gets boring, coming in at a viewer-friendly runtime of 90 minutes. Personally, I am really happy to see, once in a while, a fantasy movie that sticks to the length I had been used to in the 80s, before all these Lord of the Rings, Hobbit and Harry Potter movies with their 2½-hour running times. The visual style is something the viewer will have to make up their own mind about. You will either like it or you won’t. It’s not total CGI. It looks as if people were acting, then motion-captured into the computer and their image re-worked. It looks similar to the science fiction movie Vexille that the same director had made earlier. For my personal tastes, I didn’t really embrace this style. Also, I thought for much of the time the movie looked too dark with regard to its colour palette.  But then, fantasy seems to be going through a “dark phase” right now, so maybe it’s unfair to count this as a real negative.

The story was smarter than I thought it would be, having ordered the used DVD to a low price, and knowing virtually nothing about the “Dragon Age” universe. To be honest, I still don’t know much about it – but you don’t need to be Albert Einstein to figure out the basics. Interestingly, I believe the character of Cassandra Pentaghast was a side character in the second computer game but was such a well-received badass, the developers decided to make her the main character in the first movie. (Also in 2011, there was another, live-action movie put together from a series of webisodes with the title Dragon Age: Redemption, about an Elvish assassin Tallis, starring Felicia Day. I haven’t seen it, as it’s too difficult/expensive to get here in Germany.)

Some changes in the game character were made to make Cassandra look a bit more feminine, e. g. she gets longer hair here. They also give her a backstory about why she hates mages so much, explaining why she treats the mage Regalyan with strong suspicion. He has to earn her trust: while that underlying subplot doesn’t make the story Shakespeare, it gives the characters enough emotional layers to come across as more than just one-dimensional. That doesn’t lead to a big love story, as would typically have been the cast. but lightens what could otherwise have been a very bare storyline, and leads to a satisfying end. At least he gets a little kiss on the cheek for helping her. Obviously, she is becoming soft, considering how quickly she has been drawing her sword over the entire movie! 😉

There are some surprises along the way, though I wouldn’t call them earth-shattering. There are steady, regularly appearing action sequences, between escape and investigation scenes and a grand finale showing that, while a female knight may not alone be able to prevent an assassination, she can at least deal with a gigantic dragon. But we all need a little help from our friends, right? There are some gory scenes, so this is not for kids, though nothing really shocked me. Admittedly, 8 seasons of Game of Thrones may have desensitized me in regard to the depiction of bloody fantasy violence. If you need them, they’re in here; if you don’t like gore, there aren’t too many to distract you from an otherwise entertaining enough, and comparatively short, fantasy movie.

The end seems to indicate another story will follow. But if that happened, it was probably in the form of another computer game, as the movie didn’t get a sequel. Overall, I think it’s safe to say that the movie can serve as a quick fantasy fix, if there is nothing else for you out there right now. Entertaining enough without being extraordinary, it has some nice developments and the main character is layered enough so that she doesn’t bore you. I give it 3 stars for acceptable, though hardly ground-breaking, solid fantasy entertainment. A fan of the franchise may value it higher or lower; as I’m not in the know about an extended universe that also features several books and comics, I will not presume to decide that for them!

Dir: Fumihiko Sori
Star (voice): Chiaki Kuriyama, Shōsuke Tanihara, Hiroshi Iwasaki, Kaya Matsutani 

Darlin’

  By

★★★½
“Mother of all predators”

This strange little film probably makes more sense if you’ve seen The Woman, in which a feral cannibalistic woman, played by McIntosh, was captured and kept in the basement of a dysfunctional family. While this features McIntosh in the same role, it does work as a standalone film: its predecessor may help explain some of the background. Here, the woman drops off her equally uncivilized teenage daughter (Canny) at a hospital. Unsure of quite how such an unusual child should be handled, Darlin’ – called that, because of a bracelet spelling that out which she is wearing – is handed over to the Catholic church.

In particular, to St. Philomena’s Home, a dubious institution run by an even more dubious Bishop (Batt). He sees in Darlin’ the chance for his parish to make a name for itself by “redeeming” their new ward in the name of the Lord, which would help them stave off an impending financial crunch. But when the Woman returns to the hospital, and finds her daughter is no longer there, it quickly becomes clear that she will go to any lengths to recover Darlin’ and punish those who are trying to exploit her. And even though the teenager is no longer quite the wild child she was, as the saying goes: You can take the child out of the woods, but you won’t necessarily take the woods out of the child…

McIntosh is probably best known for her work on The Walking Dead. But on this site, we adore her for Let Us Prey, and her directorial debut is little if any less savage. However, it is probably fair to say that the script – also written by McIntosh – tries to cram too many things into its pages, and comes up short as a result. Not to say there aren’t moments of supreme effectiveness. Just that they are diluted by the film’s desire to go in so many different directions. For example, despite the Woman’s apparently inexorable quest for Darlin’, she vanishes for much of the second half, instead just hanging round a homeless women’s encampment to no particular purpose. It’s a shame, as I don’t think I’ve seen a more genuinely scary female character in a film for a very long time. [Though Darlin’ doesn’t fall far from that tree, at least initially]

The rest is more hit or miss. Going after the Catholic Church for child abuse is… Well, it feels kinda obvious, though there’s a righteous anger here which does at least seem honest. And the civilized version of Darlin’, despite now being able to communicate through speech rather than growls, seems less interesting, as if she had lost much of what separated her from any other teenage girl. Neither of these really work so well, as the more linear concept of a mother prepared to do absolutely anything to reclaim her daughter, which is when the film is at its best and most memorable.

Dir: Pollyanna McIntosh
Star: Lauryn Canny, Bryan Batt, Nora-Jane Noone, Pollyanna McIntosh