Tag: e

Eenie Meanie

  By

★★★½
“Eeenie Meanie – minor no.”

I don’t know which is more irritating: a film that isn’t very good, or a film which teeters on the edge of greatness, then botches it. This falls into the latter camp. Writer/director Simmons does a lot right, especially considering it’s his feature debut. But just when my finger was hovering over the seal of approval, the film makes a near-disastrous wrong turn. This happens to a degree I found myself annoyed and impressed in equal measures. The first thing it gets right is casting Weaving, who has quickly become one of my favourite action actresses. Here, she plays Edie, who been driving getaway for her criminal dad since her early teens. Now though, she’s trying to go straight: she has a bank job and is attending college.

Naturally, life isn’t that forgiving. A one-night return to her useless, junkie, intermittent boyfriend John (Glusman) left her pregnant. When she goes to tell him, he’s neck deep in trouble from his latest scheme, which has left him in debt to local boss Nico (Garcia). No problem. John can pay it off by robbing $3 million from a local casino, which will be giving out the money as the prize in a poker tournament, loaded in the trunk of a muscle car. He just needs someone to steal the vehicle and be a getaway driver. Much against her better judgment, Edie finds herself agreeing to help, to save John’s life. But again, fate has no interest in making it easy for her. Various figures from Edie’s past return to run interference, both emotionally and more directly.

Simmons has a crisp ear for dialogue, and there’s a blistering pace from the beginning. We learn quickly about the skeleton of Edie’s dysfunctional upbringing, then how she’s doing her best to escape it. However: you can take the girl from the dysfunction, but you can’t take the dysfunction from the girl. That’s clear when her bank is robbed, and she critiques the criminals’ work: “They made, like, five mistakes before they even hit the drawers.” In motion, this is a beautiful thing to behold, with some solid, crunchy car-chases and action which feels grounded. The problems are the emotional and dramatic elements, which ring horribly hollow. I get John saved her from being pimped out by her foster father. But her loyalty to him doesn’t sit with her otherwise hard-nosed pragmatism.

Worse still is her inexplicable desire to reconcile with her now wheelchair-bound father (Steve Zahn), in a scene which appears to have been spliced in from a Hallmark film. Things get mercifully back on track for the heist and its aftermath, which are thrillingly staged. Just when I was creeping towards the seal of approval again, it can’t stick the landing, with a finale too tidy for its own good. It’s like Simmons fell too much in love with his lead character – something I certainly understand – and pulled a happy ending out of thin air for Edie. Given some of her acts, I would be hard-pushed to say she deserved it, morally. Yet it is another fine entry in Weaving’s filmography, and despite the missteps, far from a bad start for Simmons either.

Dir: Shawn Simmons
Star: Samara Weaving, Karl Glusman, Andy Garcia, Jermaine Fowler

Extraction, USA

  By

★★
“Wears its bleeding-heart on its sleeve.”

Marni (Johnson) is stuck in the titular town, where oil fracking is causing problems from earthquakes to poisoning the local water supply. She’s barely scraping by as a single mom to teenage son Jason (Strange), working as a bartender for sleazy owner Daryl (McMahan), who has a bad case of wandering hands, and hustling customers at pool. Her life is upended when Steph (Carpenter) comes into the bar, kicks Marni’s ass on the pool table, and the two end up making out in the back alley. When Steph becomes aware of Darryl’s safe full of cash, she suggests they liberate it, to finance a new life for them and Jason, far away from Extraction.

Naturally, things do not go quite as planned. The first attempt ends in failure, though  do discover the source of Darryl’s unreported income. [There’s a huge plot-hole here, in that they’re seen in Darryl’s office, and end up having to knock the witness out. They would surely have been identified, yet the matter is never mentioned] Realizing her actions could put Jason at risk, Marni regrets her decision and breaks up temporarily with Steph. They reconnect and decide to make a second attempt, this one a higher-risk plan involving kidnapping Darryl and forcing him to open the safe at gunpoint. [Though weirdly, they buy Airsoft guns mail-order for this. Was Walmart closed?] However, getting the cash might not be the end of the matter.

The main issue is, it feels like the makers are more interested in checking off boxes as a good diversity and liberal ally. Fossil fuels, male chauvinism and big business are bad. LGBTQ, people of colour and feminist activism are good. The plot? Secondary, with the robbery not even being suggested until virtually the half-way point in the film. The problem is, it doesn’t quite have the impact intended on me. For example, Marni complaining about her student loans, resulting from her taking a useless degree, is not the sympathetic flex Yonts believes. Choices have consequences, sweetheart. Did she take on this voluntary debt before or after having Jason? Neither inspire pity here.

I found all these elements and questions a distraction from what should be the meat and potatoes of the plot – or given the film’s sensibilities, the tofu and garden salad of the plot. There’s a whole thread where the drugs are being sold to the oil company to make their employees work harder and… I can’t even. Crop the whole thing down to a tightly-focused heist, and we’d all be much better off. The performances are fine, certainly good enough for that,  though I’m trying to work out the ages here too, since Marni seems way too young to have a son of that age. I initially thought she and Jason were brother and sister.  The problems here are very much on the scripting side, with an ending which is as unsatisfying as the rest of it.

Dir: Mike Yonts
Star: Leanne Johnson, Marlee Carpenter, Chase Strange, Derek McMahan

EFC

  By

★★½
“Ducks one set of cliches, walks right into another.”

I wanted to like this more than I did, because the makers are aware of the tropes of the mixed martial arts genre, and in the first half, make a concerted (and largely successful) effort to avoid them. However, the movie is much less successful in the second half, and ends up replacing those cliches with a different set. The result leaves the film just as formulaic – albeit not in the direction I expected. It begins in expected fashion, with a title bout in the EFC, between Alexa Star (Aboya) and Cassady Jones (Rose). The former prevails, but the champion is then attacked after the bell by her opponent.

For reasons never quite explained, Star is stripped of the title, and an eight-woman tournament set up to crown a new champion. This event is hotly anticipated, due to the previous events having gone viral. However, sleazy shareholder Frank Russo (Zeppieri) has other plans, to asset strip the federation, in contrast to EFC President Donna Carter (Jones), who wants to make women’s MMA the equal of the men’s version. I was expecting the tournament to progress to the expected Star-Jones rematch, saving the company in the process. Doesn’t happen. For Cassady loses her first round bout, but Carter throws her a lifeline, suggesting that with the business degree, she can be of more help to the federation as a manager, fighting in the boardroom rather than the ring.

This was definitely not what I was expecting, and credit to the script for going in this unexpected direction. However, it feels as if they are much less comfortable in the world of high-finance, television right and leveraged buyouts. These elements never ring true, and there’s a certain point where it becomes easy to predict where things will end up. If you guess this may be with Cassady making an impassioned plea to the shareholders, to elect her to the board and let her take the company to the next level… I can neither confirm nor deny. There’s also a subplot about fighters failing their drugs tests, which gets started, then dropped very quickly, only to resurface out of nowhere as a “gotcha” for Russo.

I think I might have preferred the results if the film had stuck to the beaten track, because the action sequences are well-staged enough, that they do not deserve to get sidelined in favour of unconvincing business negotiations. All the actresses involved manage to look the part, and at least give the impression of knowing their way around a punching-bag. Less successful is Rose’s transition from MMA to MBA, especially after you’ve heard her character unleash a torrent of F-bombs at Donna for daring to suggest Cassady use her college degree. Her academic credentials should have been established first, with an intellectual fighter in itself being a novel proposition. The overall result is something which I can’t call a success. Yet as failures go, it’s definitely one of the more interesting.

Dir: Jaze Bordeaux
Star: Karlee Rose, Richard Zeppieri, Kathryn Aboya, Stephanie Jones

Exterritorial

  By

★★★
“English? German? – ENGLISH? GERMAN??”

The term “Netflix Original” covers a range of productions, from pre-made movies they buy for distribution, through to movies commissioned from the ground up by the company. The results are equally variable. For every What Happened to Monday, there’s an Interceptor. This one came out of Germany: not exactly renowned for action, particularly action heroines. But it quickly and unexpectedly became the most-watched foreign language movie on the streaming service, worldwide. Does it deserve the success? We watched it and wrote up our thoughts independently, which have been edited and combined below. But, first: some introduction, and let’s find out what the movie is about.

Dieter: This movie was produced by long-established studio German Constantin Film, who in the 60s gave us the famous (or notorious, depending on your perspective) Karl May westerns, as well as German Edgar Wallace thrillers. It went bankrupt in the 70s but was saved and lead to new successes due to late producer Bernd Eichinger. He produced films such as The Never-ending Story, The Name of the Rose, House of Spirits, the first Fantastic Four movie (yes, that was German), the Resident Evil series and Downfall. After his death Constantin Film has mostly been hit and miss.

Interestingly, in the end credits you can see that Oliver Berben was involved in its production. Berben is a successful producer, now leading manager of Constantin Film, and son of well-known German actress Iris Berben, who played detective inspector Rosa Roth for a good 2 decades on TV. He has produced a number of movies with her in the leading role, as well other movies and countless TV productions. His most well-known movie might be Roman Polanski’s Carnage, with Jodie Foster. I’m not sure if this movie was produced by Constantin, then sold to Netflix, or if Netflix “ordered” Constantin Film to produce the movie. Looking at the results, I get the feeling this was from the get-go a collaboration between the two.

Jim: The heroine is Sara Wulf (Goursaud), a former Bundeswehr soldier, whose husband was killed in action, and who suffers from a touch of PTSD herself. She’s working to move to the US with her son, Josh, and has a visa appointment at the consulate in Frankfurt. But while she’s waiting to be seen, Josh vanishes. The consular chief of security, Erik Kynch (Scott) is sympathetic, until the surveillance footage shows Sara arriving alone. She’s locked up pending her being escorted off the premises. But, naturally, she escapes, and encounters a young woman (Abova), being held in an apartment in the complex. They agree to help each other – but it increasingly becomes clear that there’s a lot more going on than a missing child.

Dieter: Color me surprised when finding out the movie is… not bad at all. Actually, it is quite watchable. While the typical “diversity agenda” of Netflix is at play here, fortunately, there is no virtue-signaling, and I’m happy for it. I had some problems with Sara being a “special forces elite soldier” and “combat trained”. It’s true German soldiers were in Afghanistan but they were not involved in any combat missions but were mainly helping in re-building projects, or the training and aid of Afghani security forces. Since the end of World War II, Germany has had a strict rule of not getting involved in any military battles with the idea “that no war should ever come from Germany again”. So, a German soldier being involved in a direct military action, as scenes in this movie seem to indicate, is highly questionable.

Also, German “elite forces”? I don’t know. I won’t say it is impossible: there are probably certain groups for specific tasks that I am not aware of. But having done my – at that time obligatory – army service in the Bundeswehr 30 years ago, I have my doubts. I’m willing to suspend my disbelief here. The movie echoes popular action thriller plots of the past such as Jodie Foster’s Flight Plan and Panic Room, Angelina Jolie’s The Foreign Son, and of course Liam Neeson’s Taken. So, the plot won’t win any awards for originality. It’s also happy to re-use elements from other sources: Tom Cruise window climbing;  Mel Gibson shoulder dislocation; or a MacGyver-like improvised explosives.

Jim: Yeah – I may have yelled, “A few household chemicals in the proper proportions” at the screen there! I thought this was entertaining. It’s main strength is Goursaud, who manages to be both a bad-ass and a vulnerable mother, often simultaneously. She comes across as fairly credible in the fights, even when going up against bigger opponents. The script puts some effort into establishing her credentials, and she has a lithe toughness to her which works well.

Dieter: You must understand: we Germans are pretty lousy when it comes to action movies. The few there are, usually have actors attempting a weak, second-rate impression of the American attitude of “Look how big my balls are”. This always feels fake, because we Germans simply don’t see ourselves like that. We have no problems seeing us in roles of evil Nazis or “the good German”, e. g. Armin Mueller-Stahl, but hardly ever as action heroes. That definitely has to do with our history, the idea of “German heroism” being exploited and abused by the Nazis. So at first I was going to dismiss the movie as not interesting.

Surprisingly, it doesn’t commit the usual mistake of making its protagonist an unbeatable heroine. To “do it the German way”, you must put things into a more nuanced context. We wouldn’t expect it from an American movie, but definitely would in a German one. I know it’s unfair to home-grown productions, but we judge them on a different basis. Yes, there is the early scene where Sara gets pushed around and immediately gets into combat mode (because… you know… PTSD). But I think it’s the only scene I found unbelievably overdone. I feared the movie would continue that way – but luckily it didn’t!

Instead, it shows that – in contrast to someone like Angelina Jolie in Salt – though she is “trained for this” as she says, the reality sets in quickly. Even a single man with some combat training is always in a better position and will eventually overpower her. If she wins a fight, it is because she uses everything at her disposal in her environment. There seems to be an extra shot of adrenaline when push comes to shove and her trauma sets in. Nothing is won easily for the protagonist here and female power fantasies are left at the door! The fact that Goursaud actually has some muscles, is a further plus. 

Jim: There might be a bit less actual action than I expected, but what there is, is done well, with a couple of sequences edited together to look like a single take. The peak is likely a battle against two assassins in an apartment. It’s no Atomic Blonde, in length or quality. Then again, who is? I also appreciated the way she’s not infallible. Witness the way her first attempt to get around the consulate, ends in her bouncing off a balcony, and falling to the ground. 

Dieter: The acting is for once not a distraction, as so often in German movies. German-French actress Goursaud is in most scenes very believable, playing a stressed mother as well as in combat mode. Lera Abova who plays the role of Russian Kira doesn’t fare quite so well. Despite being Russian, I never got the feeling that she was, and sometimes had problems understanding what she was saying: she definitely had no Russian accent either.

The big surprise was Dougray Scott, who last time I saw him, had a role in Desperate Housewives. I could imagine that a consular officer would react exactly as he did in the situations here. What really stood out were his German language skills, speaking fluently with only a very slight accent. You have to understand how difficult it is to speak German like that. The movie refers to it in the beginning, when Sara demonstrates to her son how his father spoke German with a broad American accent. Contrast a scene in Tomorrow Never Dies where Pierce Brosnan spoke in German and I couldn’t understand what he was saying. The language skills Scott demonstrates in this movie here are excellent. And I say that as a German. I was mightily impressed.

Jim: I noticed in the end credits that there were two dialogue coaches for him: one to speak German and the other to help him sound American. Seems like both did their job! Chris found no reason to complain about the latter, and she has an ear for that, both in English and Spanish (you should hear her eviscerate any non-Cubans trying to sound Cuban!). While I’m here, I noticed that the credits listed an “intimacy co-ordinator”. Weird, since there was nothing at all on screen to suggest one would be needed. Maybe Zübert is going to pull a Zack Snyder and realize an unrated cut, with all the missing sex and violence?

Dieter: The most fascinating thing for me was the consulate itself. I’ve never been in one, so I don’t know, but I could imagine that it might look like this. You get the feeling this is not just a building but almost its own village with an auditorium, conference and office rooms, warehouse, cafeteria, locker rooms, swimming pool, nursery, hospital room, guest apartments, truck departure hall and safety room. Are consulates really that big? Or was that made up? The movie is supposed to take place in Frankfurt, Germany’s fifth-biggest city, and early shots of the city and its central station are genuine. So I was quite surprised to read in the end titles “filmed in and around Vienna”. Aha…???

Jim: I was less enthralled with the story. There are points where it seems like a parade of clichés, such as the PTSD, which never serves much purpose. Or the scene at the end, where the villain lays out his plan to the heroine in all its intricate detail. It’s also crafted to raise questions, such as what would have happened if Sara hadn’t unilaterally decided to leave Josh alone in the consulate play-room? It’s certainly quite easy to come up with simpler ways for the bad guy to achieve his goals.

Dieter: The whole plot has a typical thriller solution which is a bit far-fetched and over-complicated. But I liked the idea of the villain of the piece giving an explanation for his actions. The previous day, I had seen Steven Soderbergh’s spy thriller Black Bag, and the characters’ emotions and motivations seemed thin, and not quite understandable. Kudos to the writers here for creating believable motives and emotions.

Jim: Despite my qualms about the script, it’s not significantly worse in this area than your typical straight-to-video actioner. That might be the best way to approach this, as a throwback to a simpler era, where one man – or woman now – could go up against a parade of enemies, and emerge battered but unbowed. I’m certainly happier to see my Netflix subscription used towards this kind of thing than overblown nonsense like The Electric State. 

Dieter: A little tidbit: When I graduated, I briefly considered applying for jobs in German embassies overseas. One big drawback was being regularly required to move to other places in the world, making it difficult to settle anywhere and build a life. This is one reason the villain here gives for his acts and it absolutely made sense to me. But overall, this was a good action movie, and from Germany, no less. Even a believable, and perhaps the first real, girls with guns movie from here. It’s really astonishing to me. I expected this to fall flat on its face, especially when replicating American action formulas. But despite my utter disbelief something like this could be possible from my country, the film succeeds. Signs and wonders still do happen, as we used to say here!

Dir: Christian Zübert
Star: Jeanne Goursaud, Dougray Scott, Lera Abova, Kayode Akinyemi

The Eye of Ebon, by P. Pherson Green

  By

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

Independent Goodreads author (and one of my Goodreads friends) P. Pherson Green has been writing since the late 90s, and has previously had short stories published in various venues. However, this novel, the opener for his projected White Sword Saga series, is his long-fiction debut. He graciously gifted me with a hardcover review copy; no guarantee of a favorable review was requested, or given. My wife and I read the book together, during the intermittent and usually short times we were both traveling together in the car; so the nearly two months it took to read is misleading. It would have been a much quicker read if I’d read it by myself, devoting all of my individual reading time to it.

This is a work of traditional epic fantasy, set (as most tales in this genre are) in a medieval-like setting resembling the Europe of that day, except in an invented fantasy world. (A helpful map is provided, though it doesn’t show every single locality a reader might like to locate.) It would be fair to say that most if not all English-language epic fantasy written from the last half of the 20th century on owes something to the inescapable influence of Tolkien’s monumental LOTR saga, and this novel is no exception. We have here, ultimately, a quest narrative involving an artifact of great significance (and great seductive power, of an unwholesome sort). The characters’ world is one with a very long history, involving elder races and cataclysmic wars which have consequences for the present. Two non-human races, the Allarie and the Groll, are respectively much like Tolkien’s elves and orcs.

More importantly, we’re very definitely dealing here with a conflict between good and evil, with domination of a world at stake; and the conflict is not simply one of “Us” (the “good” characters) vs. “Them” (the “bad” characters), but rather within “Us” as well, since all humans can be tempted by evil. And like Tolkien (who once famously characterized the LOTR corpus as a “Catholic work”) Green is a Christian author, who writes from a Christian conception of the universe. Neither writer makes any explicit reference to Christianity, and indeed both are dealing with a world in which Christ has not been born; Middle Earth is supposedly our world long before Christianity existed, and Green’s Silver World (he introduces that name only in a short note after the novel proper) is an entirely different world with a different salvation history. But like Tolkien’s Morgoth (“the Great Enemy, of whom Sauron of Mordor was but a servant”) the entity variously known here as the Shadow, the Wyrm, the Foul Pretender or the Dark Beguiler is recognizable as Satan; and the apparently pagan polytheism of the Silver World isn’t quite as polytheistic as it initially seems.

For all that, Green is his own person with his own literary vision and style; The Eye of Ebon is not a direct LOTR knock-off, in the way that Terry Brooks’ The Sword of Shanarra is. A major difference, of course, is the distaff perspective. While Tolkien’s Eowyn is an action-capable female, she’s not the heroine of the saga; his major characters, and most of the characters who display any real agency, or play a direct role in defeating evil, are male. Here, the two viewpoint characters, protagonist Samiare (whom you see depicted on the book’s cover) and essentially co-protagonist Rugette are both female, and formidable fighting females who carry the brunt of the book’s down-and-dirty struggle against evil, and who make the key, crucial gut wrenching and difficult moral decisions at the climactic points. (I was already inclined to rate the book at five stars, but those were the moments that clinched it, and for me moved this tale into the ranks of great, rather than merely good, literature!)

To be sure, unlike Rugette, whose combat skills, especially archery, result from rigorous training since she was in her early teens (I’d guess her to be about 30 here) and have been honed in years spent as a high-ranking warrior and scout fighting the Groll, Samiare, an untrained girl of 15, owes her prowess to a mysterious sword. At the very beginning of the main narrative, she lies dying in the snows of her homeland from cold and blood loss after being gang-raped by a band of Groll and renegade humans, who carved an obscenity on her belly, beat her and tortured her with branding irons, after killing her father and making off with her sister. When she cried out for deliverance “to the one god she knew –the one who watched over,” that sword was gifted to her by a glowing man-like being; and it proves to be no ordinary sword. But she still has to hold it and wield it –and make decisions about how she uses it.

The above paragraph suggests another difference from the Tolkien corpus; this narrative is much grittier, and gorier. While the gang-rape itself isn’t really directly described, we can tell it occurred; and while Green doesn’t make the brutalizing and torture here any more drawn-out than it has to be to make us feel it, he does make us do that. This sets a tone for a very violent book; there’s a lot of mortal combat action with edged weapons, and the Groll are an extremely sadistic and treacherous bunch, even to each other. (Tolkien, in a letter, once characterized the orcs as “almost irremediable,” but allowed that no being created by God is wholly irremediable. We get the impression here that the Groll may be; but even here, Green depicts them as having a claim to merciful treatment when they’re disabled in combat, which I regard as a plus.) So there’s a high body count, with quite a lot of humans and humanoids dying, often in nastily unpleasant ways. There’s no “pornography of violence,” but we do see the spilled entrails, severed limbs, split skulls, etc. However, there’s no quoted bad language, and no explicit sexual content. (In fact, the only reference to sex at all, besides the implied rape above, occupies a tastefully phrased single part of one sentence, in 230 pages of text proper. This would definitely not be characterized as a “romantasy.”)

Green has a serviceable, dignified and assured, naturally flowing prose style that holds interest well. Settings, scenes and people are described vividly enough to be pictured in the reader’s mind (and some of the scenes conjured rival those depicted by Robert E. Howard or A. Merritt for atmosphere and spectacle!), but not over-described. World-building is delivered along the way of the storyline, without info-dumps (there are a couple of roughly page-long appendices, “About the Silver World” and “The Four Lands,” which should be read). There aren’t many serious typos, the worst one being that “reigns” tends to be substituted when “reins” is meant (but that’s a quibble). We come to realize before long that the Prologue describes events taking place millennia before the main story, and occasional interspersed flashbacks set in the same time-frame aren’t distinguished by typeface or a heading; but the reader quickly comes to identify and understand these, and they do convey important information.

There’s no cliff-hanger here; the challenge of the main plot is brought to its conclusion. But it’s clear that the overall epochal struggle of the Four Lands is only beginning, and I’m invested in continuing the series!

Author: P. Pherson Green.
Publisher: Gold Dragon Publishing, available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.
A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Echo 8

  By

★★½
“Easier to forget.”

This bills itself as “Australia’s first female-led independent action movie”. Seems a bit of a stretch, considering how many films we’ve reviewed from Down Under previously, such as Avarice. Heck, Agent Provocateur had a similar plot in 2012. However, this has had a lengthy trip to the screen, shooting having started prior to the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. Four years later, it’s finally available, and is clearly a labour of love for those involved, not least Tran who wore multiple heads on the production. Between that and the limited resources, I’m reluctant to pan it savagely, but the truth is, even with a rating which is cutting it slack for these reasons, the end product is still not very good. It’s more “shows some potential” than “would recommend.”

The main problem is a script, which is basically a mix of movie cliches #27, the assassin who defies orders, and #32, cinematic amnesia, which naturally releases information at the exact pace needed by the plot. Echo 8 (Tran) has been brought up since she was a young child to be a trained killer, and now works alongside her partner, Delta 1 (Vuong), under the oversight of boss Agent 5 (Hara). But she’s also experiencing flashbacks of her early life, which are causing her to question what she’s doing. When Echo 8 is ordered to kill local activist Hanh (Chan), who is digging into areas potentially troublesome for the organization, the assassin decides not to carry out her task.

Needless to say, Agent 5 is less than happy at the situation, and Echo 8 finds herself going from the hunter to the hunted. If this sounds familiar, it’s all very much what we’ve seen before: Naked Weapon uses basically the same story, or more recently, so does Thailand’s The Kill List. A well-worn plot isn’t necessarily a problem, if you do well in other areas, be it performances or action. Its something the films mentioned manage, to considerably greater success than Echo 8, which succeeds only intermittently. You have also to get past the idea of killers who walk around dressed like ninjas on Halloween night – hardly inconspicuous – and get into random fights in night-clubs, because that won’t draw attention to themselves either.

The viewer must then deal with a slew of supporting actors who don’t need to give up their day jobs. Tran is okay, and Vuong actually good, with a dry sense of humour that’s welcome. Some others, though, may be delivering their lines phonetically, and the action is similarly mixed. The small scale of the production sometimes comes through, and even within the same fight, you’ll get one punch that seems to have impact, followed by two that clearly miss the mark. There are odd distractions, like the fight where someone is wielding a child’s plastic chair: what is that doing in an underground car-park? The ending is left open and a trilogy is planned. While I’m not averse to giving it a look, I hope those involved learn from this experience and do better next time.

Dir: Maria Tran, Takashi Hara
Star: Maria Tran, David Vuong, Takeshi Hara, Gabrielle Chan

Escape

  By

★★★
“Now, I always fight back…”

This feels almost like a throwback to the silent era, and ‘white slave’ films with titles like Traffic in Souls, combined with a significant fear of ‘the other’. As such, it’s both painfully simplistic, and endlessly fascinating in the layers of interpretation which can be read into it, should you be so inclined. On the most basic level, it’s your everyday tale of “good” girls, kidnapped for sale to the highest bidder, who need to fight to retain their modesty and virtue. [Though let the record show, at no point is there any bikini-wearing wielding of automatic weapons, despite what the poster clearly wants you to think. The heroines here prefer weapons of the blunt and/or pointy variety]

Director Ford is no stranger to this site, having previously given us Never Let Go and The Ledge. This is similarly workmanlike, benefiting from a straightforward approach and uncomplicated plot. Young, attractive women on holiday (this was filmed in the Canary Islands) are being abducted and sold off as sex slaves. The tactics used by Andras (Cronin) and his gang vary from luring their targets to a remote cabin, to barging into their vacation apartment and chloroforming them. The net result is the same: they end up in a cell, deep in the bowels of a remote building, awaiting shipment to a buyer, located somewhere even more foreign. The latest victims are Tamsin and nurse Karla (Marks), who join seven other girls in peril, including Lucy (Rankin).

As well as the clearly xenophobic approach – foreign places are bad, and foreigners worse – there’s also a notable class element here. All the girls appear “nice”, from middle- to upper-class families, while their captors are rough-hewn working-class thugs. The exception is Jude (James): also the only one with a conscience, he provides Karla and friends with the opportunity to free themselves. This mass escape definitely feels like it’s taken from women-in-prison films, the women turning the tables on their captors. Karla, in particular, initially intends to leave, but for reasons connected to her past (everyone here has issues – see the quote, top), decides to go back and make Andras pay, using the pointy weapons mentioned above.

This is the gnarliest, though not the only bit of violence here, and the film doesn’t hold back. Despite some digital blood, other effects are clearly practical and the audio work enhances the effect nicely. There’s an subplot about the search for the girls back in Britain, which is almost entirely superfluous, and could surely have been replaced with some gratuitous nudity. The film is so chastely moral in that department, it could almost pass the Hays Code. It feels like there are too many interchangeable victims as well, who sometimes blur together, especially when they are running in different directions. Is that Tamsin? Or Karla? But it’s rarely boring, and as a melodramatic throwback, pushes enough of the right buttons.

Dir: Howard J. Ford
Star: Sarah Alexandra Marks, Sophie Rankin, Sean Cronin, Louis James

Ebony Hustle 2: Ballistic Protection

  By

★★
“A slight improvement.”

There are times when I end up asking myself deep philosophical questions, like “Why am I doing this?” or “Isn’t there something else on which I can use my time?” In this case it, was “Who thought a sequel to the painful exercise which was Ebony Hustle was necessary?” To be fair though, this is an improvement. A half-star might be pushing it, to the point I did wonder about introducing a ★¾ rating. Or possibly a ★ and 11/16. It’s not good, to be clear. But it’s definitely less aggressively incompetent, with some of the most annoying rough edges smoothed down. For example, the audio this time mostly (although not entirely) lives around the same level, and there’s only one Facetime scene.

We are once more in the world of Ebony Howard (Lamb), a private eye who still doesn’t appear to be much private eye-ing. Of the three strands in this story, just one involves paying work, Ebony seeking to serve papers on a baby daddy to compel him to take a paternity test. There is also her investigation into the unexplained disappearance of Onyx, a friend from her strip-club days. This gets kicked up after she discovers Onyx’s phone with a video on it. Just do not expect closure for this thread, because the film ends in a way suggesting it will be a key element of Ebony Hustle 3: This Time We’re Semi-Competent, no doubt coming soon to a low-rent streaming service near you.

The bulk of it is, again, Ebony’ relationship drama. In this case, it’s with Mac (Howard), a promising basketball prospect who is being pressured to take performance-enhancing drugs by his manager, Bryan Calvin (Polo). This makes him become highly irritable, and causes Ebony so start digging into what’s going on, and Calvin does not take kindly to this interference with his meal ticket. With the help of her former strip-club boss, who is now a health guru, Ebony finds out the truth about what Mac is taking, and confronts Calvin. This is likely the only scene in which the film’s subtitle comes close to being relevant, as it’s the only time where the heroine wields a gun, or even gets physical.

The movie does a reasonably good job of managing the story, though the Onyx plot-line is largely ignored in the second half, until a late text message for sequel purposes. Lamb and Howard are not painful to watch, the latter being quite credible as a baller (though I notice the gender-neutral league he’s trying out for doesn’t appear to extend its equality to white women…). But there are way too many false steps, such as the lengthy scene which feels more like a presentation for a health supplement MLM, and the film remains in desperate need of more action and less dialogue.  At least you can now probably see Foxy Brown from here, though you remain in need of a telescope for that.

Dir: John Wayne S. III
Star: Michelle l Lamb, Jessica Mitchell, Jahaziel Howard, Polo

Ebony Hustle

  By

★½
“Credit where credit is due…”

When the best part of a movie is the opening credits, we have a problem. That’s the case here, with an 007-influenced montage that feels as if it cost more than the entire rest of the film to put together. However, by that point, the movie was already on thin ice, because the volume of the music was roughly three times that of dialogue in the pre-credit scene. Lunging repeatedly for the button on the remote is always a red flag for any indie movie, and proved accurate here. The same goes for the gratuitous name-checking of much better black heroines, such as Christie Love and Cleopatra Jones. They just draw attention to the deficiencies here – not that they are hard to see.

The unusually named heroine (Lamb) is a former stripper turned insurance fraud investigator, and unwillingly accepts a case to look into the disappearance of 16-year-old girl, Ny’Kia (Elizabeth). She had become part of the retinue of former gangster turned pastor, Caleb Truth (Chandler, who looks like you ordered Snoop Dogg on wish.com). He is supposedly a reformed character, and speaks all his lines in rhyme. This is an affectation which grows steadily more annoying, every time he speaks. It seems it may even have irritated the makers, because that thread – which I’d have thought would have been the main plot – is ended, alongside Truth’s doggerel rapping, with relatively little trouble by Ebony, when there’s still half an hour to go.

The remaining time is largely filled by Ebony’s romantic entanglements. She’s a highly predatory cougar, which seems something of a double standard, considering the way she goes after Caleb Truth, for activities that aren’t really that different. There are also far too many unconvincing FaceTime conversations, though at least these are largely free of the audio issues which infect many of the face-to-face scenes. There is one which does work, between Ebony and former husband, police detective Wayne (Stevenson), both expressing regret over their shared past. Both actors are convincing, and it offers a rare moment of emotion which feels genuine here. It helps it’s understated and quiet, standing in sharp contrast to the shrill yelling and show-boating which permeates just about every other moment.

I can see where the makers were trying to go. It’s just that they managed to ignore all the elements which made black heroines of the seventies so memorable. Here’s a clue, it wasn’t flirty chat-chat with younger men over the telephone. Not to say the likes of Foxy Brown weren’t sexual creatures: it just never felt it was their main raison d’etre. Here, it feels like… well, Ebony may have left the strip-club, but the strip-club never left Ebony. Her crime-fighting trails in, a long way behind and seeming little more then an afterthought. Any time this feels like it might be achieving its ends, something happens – such as Ebony’s boss appearing, an early contender for worst actor of the year – and it all comes crashing back to earth.

Dir: Jamezz Hampton
Star: Michelle l Lamb, Andrew Chandler, Ryan Elizabeth, Joel Stevenson

Evangeline: Memoir of a Teenage Serial Killer, by KC Franks

  By

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

When I see “Reader discretion is advised,” on an Amazon page, I tend to take it with a grain of salt. I’ve been enjoying media at the outer edges for longer than most readers here have been alive, and so am not easily shocked, disturbed or offended, to put it mildly. I’m ussure this quite managed to do any of those, but I will definitely say this: yes, reader discretion is advised. This is a rough, nasty and often unpleasant read. But it’s dealing with rough, nasty and often unpleasant topics, so the approach is entirely in keeping with the subject matter and not inappropriate.

The “heroine” – and I use quotes advisedly – is Angeline Gottschalk, a teenage girl who lives in rural Nebraska and has a truly unfortunate life. Her mother is mentally ill, she’s bullied at high school (in part due to having a stutter), and her stepfather, a local deputy sheriff, has bee abusing Angeline in the most vile ways imaginable since she was aged eleven. Eventually, Angeline’s psyche snapped, and split off an alternate personality as a way of handling the abuse – basically, acting as her psychological stunt double. Evangeline, as the other part of Angeline is named, calls herself “Defender of the weak. Champion of the abused. Bold. Fearless. And extremely pissed-off.” But the title of the book is arguably more accurate: serial killer. 

Oh, her targets are more than a little Dexter-like, to be sure – beginning with the stepfather, who will not be abusing anyone, ever again. But Evangeline then decides to target the deserving, in her mind, sex offenders who live in the local area. Rather than just being a stand-in for Angeline in the darkest hours, she begins to act independently, setting up a conflict between the two personas, which only one can win. For Angeline wants nothing more than to be left alone – ideally with her crush, Caleb Quinn. Except, Caleb’s brother, Billy is one of her biggest tormentors, and he has friends whose intentions and actions a) are even worse, and b) make them prime targets for Evangeline’s brutal methods of summary justice.

As you can perhaps guess, it’s all going to get very messy, both in the emotional and blood-spattered senses. The writing style feels a little rough and ready, almost bordering on the literary version of torture porn in some scenes. Franks tears into the violence with much the same glee that Evangeline tears into her victims: male readers may find themselves crossing their legs uncomfortably from time to time. There’s a near-total lack of empathetic characters in this: even Angeline is little more than a human piñata for life’s torments. Still, it’s sometimes good to peer over the edge into the abyss of humanity’s darkest depths, and this book certainly delivers on that. A stand-alone novel is fine. Any concept of a series here would not be something of interest.

Author: KC Franks
Publisher: Seven Crows Press, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Stand-alone novel.