Tag: fantasy

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

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★★★★½
“The wind rises.”

After the enormous critical, if not commercial, success of Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro, Miyazaki was commissioned to create a manga series for Animage magazine, with a potential film adaptation attached. Publication began in early 1982, but it would take a dozen years, albeit of intermittent publication, before that story was complete. When the series’s popularity among Animage readers was established, work began on the film adaptation, covering the early portion of the manga. Since this was before Miyazaki’s own Studio Ghibli was founded, an external company, Topcraft, were commissioned to create the animation. The budget was only $1 million, with a mere nine-month production schedule leading up to its release in March 1984.

It takes place on a post-apocalyptic world, a thousand years after the near-mythical “Seven Days of Fire”, pushed humanity to the edge of extinction. Since then, nature has taken over much of the planet, covering it in an expanding toxic jungle where the very air is poisonous in a few minutes. It is populated by equally lethal creatures, at the top being the “ohmu”, gigantic insectoids capable of destroying anything in its path. The human race is reduced to clinging on to the fringes, such as the small kingdom of the Valley of the Wind, in which a never-ending breeze keeps the toxins at bay. There, the king’s daughter, Nausicaä (Shimamoto), is one of the few brave enough to enter and explore the jungle, and has developed a mutually respectful relationship with its strange inhabitants.

The balance is destroyed when a plane from the kingdom of Tolmekia crashes. In its cargo is an enormous “God Warrior” – one of those which carried out the Seven Days of Fire – recently dug out from where it had been buried. Tolmekia and their rivals, Pejite, are wrestling for control of the warrior and the power it wields, and the crash drags the Valley of the Wind into their conflict. In particular, Princess Kushana of Tolmekia (Sakakibara) intends to use the warrior to destroy the jungle and restore mankind’s dominion over the planet. Nausicaä is ferociously opposed to this scheme, especially after discovering that the jungle is actually purifying the atmosphere and soil, absorbing the toxins from the apocalypse. She’ll do anything to stop Kushana, including being willing to sacrifice her own life if necessary.

There’s a lot going on here, as you can see. It’s somewhat understandable why, when initially shown in the West (one of the first examples of anime to receive a theatrical release), 22 minutes was cut out, in order to market it as a children’s film, retitled Warriors of the Wind. The problem is, like almost all of the director’s work, it is not a children’s film. This is not a uncommon mistake – presumably based on them having a child as the central characters, and because they’re animated, which still largely equates to Disney in many people’s minds. But they’re more about that age capturing an innocent and idealistic mentality. This is undeniably mature and thoughtful cinema. In just his second feature, and first original film, Nausicaä establishes several themes which would run through almost all of Miyazaki’s future work, in varying degrees: the joy of flight, concern for the environment, and a strong female presence.

Miyazaki’s father ran an airplane parts company in World War II, and even his film company, Studio Ghibli, was named after an Italian plane. Almost every one of his movies includes a flying sequence, and Nausicaä certainly has plenty of them, whether its the heroine skimming across the desert on her one-person glider, or gigantic warships looming, threateningly, in the sky. Despite the imperfect animation, a result of the limited resources, the sense of wonder and awe is undeniable. If you don’t want to take to the skies after seeing these scenes, you might want to check for a pulse. Similarly, there’s no denying Miyazaki is firmly on the side of nature, with his heroine believing all life to be sacred, and humanity deserving no special place above any other species. If mankind can’t live in harmony with the world, the movie suggests, it’s mankind which needs to change. Bending nature to our will is always going to backfire.

But it’s with the depiction of womankind that the film truly succeeds. In Nausicaä and Kushana, you have two fully-formed characters that are not just among the best in animated film, they could stand beside the protagonist and antagonist of most live-action movies. The latter, in particular, demonstrates Miyazaki’s skill at depicting those who would be flat-out villains in less nuanced films, instead being given motivation and depth. While you may not agree with Kushana resurrecting the God Warrior, you can understand what she is trying to accomplish. Her actions stem from a genuine belief that what she is doing is best for the future of mankind. She just has a military-industrial approach to that, in sharp contrast to the one emphasizing ecological science and harmony, preferred by Nausicaä. Interesting to note that, in the 2005 Disney English-language dub, Kushana was voiced by Uma Thurman.

The story here builds to a stellar climax, in which a massive herd of ohmu are lured into a stampede towards the valley, while simultaneously the God Warrior is unleashed by Kushana, to horrific effect. [The animation for the latter was done by a young Hideki Anno, who’d go on to become a master of the genre himself, best known for Neon Genesis Evangelion. In a 2006 Japanese poll, Evangelion was the only anime ranked ahead of Nausicaä as an all-time favourite] Our heroine puts herself in harm’s way in an effort to stop the carnage, and… Well, I won’t spoil it in detail; Miyazaki manages to pull off an ending which could easily have come off as contrived or ridiculous, and is instead emotionally satisfying. With even the Tolmekians forces humbled by nature, as environmental messages delivered by teenagers go, it’s certainly a great deal more effective than an angry Scandinavian shrieking “HOW DARE YOU!” at the audience.

Dir: Hayao Miyazaki
Star (voice): Sumi Shimamoto, Gorō Naya, Yōji Matsuda, Yoshiko Sakakibara

Princess Mononoke

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★★★½
“Princess Die”

To some extent, this was the film which “broke” Miyazaki in the West, being his first feature to receive an unedited theatrical release in America. It wasn’t a huge commercial success, taking only about $2.4 million in North America. But it was very well-received, Roger Ebert listing it among his top ten films of 1999. It likely opened the door for the success of Spirited Away, which would win Miyazaki the Oscar for Best Animated Feature at the 75th Academy Awards. But if I’m being honest, I don’t like it as much as many of his movies. While there’s no denying the imagination and enormous technical skill here, it doesn’t resonate emotionally with me in the same way. I think it’s probably the central character, who is relatively bland and uninteresting, even compared to other characters in the movie.

Firstly though: no, there’s no-one called “Mononoke” in this. It’s not a name, but a Japanese term describing a supernatural shape-shifting creature. Though even this seems ripe to cause confusion, because there are no shape-shifting princesses to be found either. And despite the title, the protagonist is Ashitaka (Matsuda), a prince of the Emishi tribe in medieval Japan, whose arm becomes infected after an encounter with a demon-possessed wild boar. As happens… Seeking a cure before the rest of his body follows suite, despite the superhuman strength it gives him, Ashitaka heads into the Western lands, and straight into the middle of an ongoing battle.

On one side is Lady Eboshi (Tanaka), the ruler of Irontown, a progressive and industrial settlement, in need of the resources which can be found in and under the nearby forest. On the other is San (Ishida), a young woman raised by wolves, who has vowed to protect the woods and their inhabitants, including the Great Forest Spirit. It’s their conflict which is really the core of the film, with Ashitaka’s quest to get his demonic arm fixed, taking a back-seat for most of the (lengthy, at 133 minutes) running-time here. Probably for the best, since he is, as mentioned, perhaps the least charismatic or engaging protagonist in the entire Miyazaki canon. His arm is easily the most interesting thing about him – and that keeps wanting to strike out on its own. When your own limb wants to go solo, you might be the problem… To quote Lady Eboshi, “I’m getting a little bored of this curse of yours, Ashitaka. Let me just cut the damn thing off.” #ImWithTeamEboshi

But enough of him. Let’s focus on what works here, which would be San and Eboshi. The first time we see San, her face is smeared in blood which she has sucked up and spat out, from a wound in the side of a gigantic white wolf. [This is certainly the most hardcore of Miyazaki’s films, with decapitations and limbs being lost at a rate closer to an entry in the Lone Wolf & Cub franchise.] She’s relentlessly aggressive in attitude, going so far as to stage a one-woman assault on Irontown in an attempt to assassinate her enemy. She tells Ashitaka, “I’m not afraid to die. I’d do anything to get you humans out of my forest.” That said, she’s still considerably less creepy than the forest apes who want to eat him.

Eboshi, on the other hand, is a complete contrast to the near-feral San, and remarkably progressive, especially considering the era and location. Her town is a haven for the disenfranchised and those society considers “untouchables”, including both lepers and prostitutes, the latter whose contracts she bought out and who now work in her iron mill. Her citizens and their welfare are what she cares about, above all, and she’s completely fearless about who she has to go through for that purpose. “She’s not even afraid of the gods, that woman,” says one of Irontown’s residents about their ruler, admiringly. They aren’t wrong, for she subsquently tells her warriors, “I’m going to show you how to kill a god, a god of life and death. The trick is not to fear him.” It’s remarkably easy to envisage a version where the roles are reversed, and she is the heroine. The fact she’s a gun enthusiast, is just a bonus!

Ashitaka’s role is largely to act as a middleman between the two worlds: somewhat more than human, yet less than divine. That remains the case even at the end, as he agrees to spent part of his time in the forest with San, and part of it working alongside Lady Eboshi in Irontown. It’s potentially an awkward and unsatisfying compromise, storywise, yet Miyazaki makes it work better than you feel it should.  But there are a couple of perplexing missteps too. For one, when the animals of the forest are talking, there’s zero effort to make their lips synch up. It’s bizarre and distracting. And in the Japanese version, the voice of San’s wolf mother, Moro is a man. Someone known in Japan as a drag queen, admittedly – but a man none the less, a weird choice which confused the heck out of me [score one for the dub, at least, which had Gillian Anderson as the character]

The overall result is undeniably beautifully animated, and epic in its scope and invention. As ever, Miyazaki excels at creating a world which is like our own, yet simultaneously completely alien. However, it all gets rather wearing, especially at the length depicted here. My attention simply ran dry during the second half, as the multiple different factions began hacking or gnawing away on each other, with the personal and intense quality of the Eboshi/San conflict getting lost in the bigger picture. It’s in putting over the intensely personal elements of large stories, that Miyazaki is unsurpassed – never mind just in animation, among film-makers as a whole. This isn’t the best demonstration of his talents in that area.

Dir: Hayao Miyazaki
Star: Yōji Matsuda, Yuriko Ishida, Yūko Tanaka, Kaoru Kobayashi

The Sisterhood

  By

★★★
“Many Mad Maxines.”

This one may be the origin of the meme, “After the apocalypse, food, water and gasoline are in short supply – but hair-spray will still be plentiful.” For there’s no denying the absolute silliness of this slab of post-apocalyptic nonsense. But it’s still imaginative and energetic enough that my interest was largely sustained. We’re apparently long enough after World War III for it all to have become the stuff of almost-forgotten legend. In the aftermath, the world is now occupied by roaming bands, mostly of men. However, certain women are gifted with special powers, and they have banded together into the titular group, under their reverend mother, and are feared by most as witches.

After her settlement is attacked by Mikal (Wagner, looking like a low-rent Chuck Norris), and her brother killed, Marya (Johnson) hits the road, seeking revenge. She meets two members of the Sisterhood, Alee (Holden) and Vera (Patrick), and when they discover Marya’s gift, the ability to communicate with her pet hawk, they allow her to join them. Vera is abducted by Mikal, who then heads off to add her to the collection of Sisterhood members, being held in one of the few remaining cities. Alee and Marya follow, until a shortcut into the forbidden zone of radiation and mutants lets them stumble across a pre-apocalypse arms dump. Now armed with automatic weapons and a tank (!), they are thoroughly well-equipped, first to rescue Vera, and then storm the city and liberate the rest of their sisters.

Made in 1988, the debt this owes to the Mad Max trilogy (which had finished with Beyond Thunderdome, three years earlier) is apparent to the point of being blatant. There’s a lot of whizzing around in a quarry, with giant fireballs going off just to the side of the target. For, while it’s remarkable the heroines are able immediately to drive their tank, their talents clearly do not extend to aiming the guns accurately. This is all highly mockable, not least that it’s apparently set in the far-distant future of… er, the year 2021. Yet those involved play it all entirely straight, and eventually I found this seriousness rubbing off on me. There were occasional moments which, if not making me go “Wow!”, did extract a somewhat-impressed “Huh.”.

Director Santiago should be well-known to readers here, having also given us Angel Fist and The Muthers; he brings much the same combination of female empowerment and exploitation here. Because, for all the strong female characters, they also seem to spent a inordinate amount of time either chained up or getting their tops ripped open – and, occasionally, both. But Holden and Johnson manage to rise above the low-rent production values with their dignity intact – even if nothing remotely like the video sleeve is to be found in this one! By the admittedly low standards of the genre, this is likely well-above average. And we only have to wait two years for it all to come to pass…

Dir: Cirio H. Santiago
Star: Rebecca Holden, Chuck Wagner, Lynn-Holly Johnson, Barbara Patrick

She Never Died

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★★★★½
“Angel of vengeance”

This is neither a prequel nor a sequel to He Never Died, but is clearly related, and takes place in the same universe. Like its predecessor, it was written by Jason Krawczyk, who hands the directorial reins over to Cummings for this. And it probably works better as a result. I tend to think having a separate writer and director allows each to build on the other’s talents, while countering the weaknesses. In particular, He, which starred Henry Rollins, didn’t have quite enough plot to sustain it. That isn’t an issue here, resulting in improved pacing. Combine this with the ultimate “give no damns” performance at its core, and you’ve got one of the best action heroine films of 2019.

That performance is Adeliyi’s portrayal of “Lacey”, whose real name we learn at the end, and which will make some sense to students of Biblical lore. Like Rollins’s character, she plays an immortal being, doomed to wander the planet for eternity, sustained only on human flesh. However, she operates on a code, eating only scumbags. This still brings her to the attention of local authorities, in particular the thoroughly world-weary Detective Godfrey (MacNeill). But when he discovers Lacey’s nature, he makes the ill-fated decision to weaponize her, and points her in the direction of a sex-trafficking ring run by Terrance (Danby), which he has been unable to take down by more formal methods. Complicating matters is the gang’s victim, Suzzie (Madeira), whom Lacey encounters during her first mission, and who becomes something of her acolyte.

Lacey is potentially among the most taciturn bad-asses of the genre, a woman of few words, whose remarkable healing powers allow her to take a baseball bat to the head, and then discuss the mild irritation of having to wait for a detached retina to repair itself. No wonder Suzzie is confused, wondering “Are you just a jacked-up lady blitzed out of her mind? Or a government experiment on the lam? Robot? Zombie? Vampire? You sound like a vampire.” The contrast between the pair, one hyper almost to the point of manic, the other deader than deadpan, is a joy. Seeing Adeliyi in action is another. This film doesn’t shortchange her diet, and Cummings background in horror is apparent. About the only person who can half-stand up to Lacey is the person in charge of the traffickers – which makes me wonder if they, too, may be more than human.

It’s one of the intriguing questions which this poses. Particularly at the end, after things appear to have been tied up nicely, the story opens an entire case of cans of worms, with both Godfrey and Lacey having encounters that’ll leave you going “Hmmm…” And that’s not even including the Bikers of the Apocalypse. While it’s definitely not necessary to have seen He Never Died, the cross-over of information may slightly enhance your information of both. I’m wondering if it’s all pointing towards a third entry – They Never Died?- in which the characters from these two films team up. If so, where do I start the queue?

Dir: Audreey Cummings
Star: Olunike Adeliyi, Peter MacNeill, Kiana Madeira, Noah Danby

Screened at Phoenix FearCon 2019

The Witch Files

  By

★★★
“The Breakfast Coven.”

If John Hughes directed a film about witchcraft, it’d probably end up like this. For you have five stereotypical high-school girls in detention: Brooke the rich bitch (Ziolkoski); Greta the jock (Adrienne Rose-White); M.J. the timid mouse (Robinson); Jules the goth (Flatmo); and Claire the nerd (Taylor), who isn’t actually in detention, just doing a report on it for the school TV channel. [90% of the film is the ‘found footage’ she shoots of subsequent events, a conceit for which I usually don’t have much time… and here is no different, occasionally requiring pretzel-like contrivance.] Jules mysteriously triggers the fire-alarm to get them all out early. After she reveals this no big thing was part of her witchy skills, the other four enthusiastically agree to take part in a ceremony binding them together, into a coven.

At first, it’s remarkably easy: they basically just chant whatever they want, and it shows up. Life becomes a bowl of free designer clothes and undeserved ‘A’ grades. But, inevitably, there’s a price to pay, and the young women start to find that minor physical ailments are accelerating at a highly disturbing rate. [This is nicely tied into the historical portrayal of witches as wizened crones, explained as a result of the magical energy expended] While some of the girls want to stop their dabbling in occult practices, others have become addicted to their new-found powers and refuse to stop. Given the previous binding, this is a problem. Additionally, the town’s past offers a long association with witchcraft, and a recurring pattern of strange events, taking place every seventeen years. As in almost every American high-school horror film since Carrie, this builds to a showdown at a school party.

This over-familiarity is likely the main problem, with both characters and story-line coming over decidedly as nothing you haven’t seen before. Even if you never watched Charmed or The Craft (or Swedish take on the same, The Circle), the tropes in question will be entirely recognizable, and the film offers few if any surprises. Credit is due to the actresses, however, who take their two-dimensional characters and do a good job of bringing them to life. This keeps the film rolling along, when on occasion it threatens to stall out completely. Ziolkoski probably does best, helping the audience understand the allure of mystical power, though the entire ensemble gel together nicely.

In the end though, there isn’t sufficient here to set it apart from those which have gone before. It doesn’t help that the magical battles in the final third are well beyond the capacity of the budget to depict. The optical/digital effects unfortunately mostly feel like they were copy-pasted in from an eighties Full Moon Features project. There is one nice bit of vehicular mayhem, though even there, Final Destination did it better. If you haven’t ever seen a film about teenage girls and witchcraft, you could certainly do a lot worse. But there can’t be many of you out there.

Dir: Kyle Rankin
Star: Britt Flatmo, Holly Taylor, Alice Ziolkoski, Tara Robinson

Miraculous Flower

  By

★★★
“Flower power”

Another solid Pearl Chang movie – despite being mis-labelled as Wolf Devil Woman 3, it is in now way related to that super weird entry. This is closer to The Invincible Swordswoman, though is not without its strange aspects. Pearl plays May, who gets an annoyingly cryptic mission from her dying mother – I mean, if I was about to shuffle off, my last words would be considerably less vague than, and I quote, “I’ve put a very important thing in a box… You will find out about a great, great secret. From that, you will see the task that you have to perform.” She then drags said sick parent round the countryside for a bit, not even noticing for a while that she’s now pulling a corpse [like I said: not without its strange aspects].

She befriends a roaming scholar (Tsung), who has a secret identity as a vigilante, and after helping fend off a home invasion, is adopted by his family. The whole “mission given by her dying mother” thing appears largely forgotten by May at this point. Eventually – and it could be weeks, months or years, since time-frames are not this movie’s strong suit – she remembers about it, and heads out on the road again. Suddenly stricken with guilt, she’s about to fling herself into a gorge when she’s stopped by the Happy Fairy (Gua), so named because her grin achieves Joker-like levels of permanence.

She increases May’s stock of skills, adding to those picked up from the vigilante scholar, though her training methods involve literally spit-roasting May, as well as turning her into a living snow-woman [again: strange aspects]. It all makes sense after the Fairy tells her a story about a bloody massacre from which there was only one survivor. May inexplicably fails to grasp the deeply-personal connection this anecdote has, well after the audience has figured it out. But this sets in motion the final act, where she turns into the Miraculous Flower – yeah, I was wondering when that was going to become relevant, too. She sets about obtaining her revenge, leaving a white blossom on the scene as her calling-card. Though it’s not as straightforward as that (let’s face facts: it never is), with the secateurs of May’s justice ending up cutting perilously close to her life before becoming the vengeful flora.

Not much is known about the director of this, but he seems to have had a serious thing for heights. The movie certainly makes the most out of Taiwan’s mountainous scenery: as well as the gorge mentioned above, we get battles on the sides of mountains and a particularly memorable one on a waterfall. The story isn’t more than a series of cliches, and definitely tries to stuff too much into its 86 minutes, while the lifting of the theme from The Twilight Zone is particularly blatant. Yet, I’d rather have a movie with too much imagination, rather than not enough: and you’d certainly be hard pushed to claim this fell into the latter category. I was more than adequately entertained.

Dir: Fong Ho
Star: Pearl Ling Chang, Tsung Hua, Gua Ah Leh, Wang Hsieh
a.k.a. Phoenix the Ninja

Blades of Magic by Terah Edun

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

Seventeen-year-old Sarah Fairchild and her family have become persona non grata after her father’s execution by the Algardis Empire. He was a renowned fighter and commander, so his alleged desertion makes no sense to Sarah. Regardless, his wife and daughter are now pariahs to the local community. Even with Sarah’s unparalleled fighting skills, both natural and magical, her employment opportunities are limited, to say the least.

Which is how she ends up acting as the guard at a warehouse full of shady artifacts, owned by the even shadier Cormar. There, she meets the scholarly Ezekiel Crane, who helps Sarah as she begins to search for the truth about her father’s fate – facts which someone is keen to cover-up, at savage cost to our heroine. Finding out what happened requires her to join the Mercenaries’ Guild, and head with them into the teeth of a ferocious battle being waged by Algardis against a rebel group, led by eight high-powered mages.

I suspect the problems here are mostly related to reading this as a one-off. For example, the entire first half of the book, with Sarah working for Cormar, serves absolutely no purpose except to introduce her to Ezekiel. Now, I’m thinking it’s quite likely there is a payoff further into the series, with the artifacts he collects eventually proving to be useful in the battle against the mages. But for the purpose of this book, it’s a complete dead-end. If a story is going to be crippled in this way by dividing it into four parts, maybe it shouldn’t be divided into four parts? It certainly does nothing to encourage me to pick up the three subsequent volumes.

When Sarah enlists, in order to find the man she believes holds the key to her father’s death, it does improve. There’s a nice dynamic at play between her abilities, which are almost at the superhero level, and her need to remain below the radar. I was impressed by the final battle, though it’s less a battle, than a rout, with the enemy wizards using the magical equivalent of drone strikes against the mercenaries. And I also liked the “sun mage” Sarah encounters: she is basically the occult equivalent of a nuclear weapon, and may be even more bad-ass.

At the end though, I was left unsatisfied. I appreciate it’s a difficult balancing act, when you offer a cheap introduction to a series, because you need to lure people in to buy the next part. Although not alone in this, Edun doesn’t apparently realize that the best way to accomplish this is simply to give the reader the best book you can. Baiting them with set-ups left unrealized and a story that just ends, rather than coming to a natural finish, is more likely to lead to a sense of unfulfilled dissatisfaction. And that’s no way to get anyone to fork over more money.

Author: Terah Edun
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 4 in the Crown Service series.

Killing Joan

  By

★★
“Eating crow.”

Joan Butler (Bernadette) is an enforcer for mob boss Frank (Foster), with a zero-tolerance policy for those who disrespect her – whether they are on her side or not. When this eventually causes some of her gang to turn on Joan, she’s brutally beaten to a pulp, and apparently killed. However, she rises from the dead, now a figure who lives in the darkness, and one who has acquired the power to manipulate shadows. She sets about her mission of revenge against Frank and those who killed her. This is much to the distress of her on/off boyfriend Anthony (Celigo), a social worker. But her feelings for him and desire to protect the unfortunates with whom he works, puts them all at risk, when Frank realizes they represent her weak spot.

There are worse films to rip-off than The Crow, and Bartoo is far from the first person to have gone down this route, even in the girls-with-guns genre: see also Mohawk and .357: Six Bullets for Revenge, for examples of the vengeful resurrectee. The problem is, taking as your inspiration a film which is widely regarded as a cult classic: what you produce is, almost inevitably, going to suffer in comparison. That’s certainly the case here, with most of the flaws coming from a script which can’t be bothered to offer any more than the halfest-assed of explanations for her resurrection. It also provides no internal consistency. At times, the reborn Joan is returned to ethereal form by light; at others, not so much. Even the shadow tendrils which are her power, are inexplicably absent in the film’s opening scene, a flash-forward of things to come.

It’s a bit of a shame, since the version of Joan with a pulse is actually a somewhat interesting character, who takes no guff from anyone – especially men. This comes off as a natural trait, probably essential for survival in her line of work. Yet the sense of sisterhood hinted at in the early scenes is rapidly abandoned, in preference for a series of eyebrow-raising twists, where we discover half the people in the film have mystical powers. It builds instead to a disappointing battle against Frank’s sidekick, Donna (Katarina Waters, who wrestled in WWE as Katie Lea Burchill), which is more a showcase for mediocre visual effects and poor fight choreography than anything. Then we get a crappy “love conquers all” finale, that the film singularly fails to pull off – The Heroic Trio, this definitely is not.

Bernadette is probably the best thing about this, and is certainly the only performance to make any impression. Though thanks to the writing, even she can only move the needle from irredeemably tedious to largely uninteresting. Amusingly, she seems to be making a career out of revenge-seeking vigilantes, since the actress can also be seen in the recent sequel, I Spit On Your Grave: Deja Vu, playing the daughter of original victim Jennifer Hills.

Dir: Todd Bartoo
Star: Jamie Bernadette, Teo Celigo, Erik Aude, David Carey Foster

Forgotten Gods by S. T. Branton

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

Vic Stratton is a woman on a mission. She’s seeking out Rocco Durant, the New York mobster who was responsible for the deaths of her parents five years ago. With the cops unable to do much, she turns vigilante, and is finally on the brink of taking her vengeance when…Well, things get cosmically weird: specifically, “something both large and seemingly on fire blotted out the whole skyline across the river with its brightness.” She ends up fishing a man out of the river, who was carrying a glowing sword which makes fast work of Durant’s henchmen. Turns out, the man, Marcus, is a former Roman legionary: centuries ago, he became a guard in Carcerum, a realm to which a selection of unpleasant deities were banished by King Kronin.

Now, Kronin is dead, killed by his oldest ally, Lorcan, and Marcus needs to find a hero, worthy of carrying the Gladius Solis, the only weapon capable of keeping the gods in check. However, they are beginning to make their presence felt on Earth, and Vic isn’t the only person to have made a new friend following their dockside encounter. Durant has become an underling to Lorcan, and has picked up some disturbing new talents and character traits. For Lorcan is planning to put together an army of the undead, and is using Durant and his contacts to further that end, creating a “vampire factory.” Durant is vampire #1.

I enjoyed this. It doesn’t hold any surprises in terms of where the first volume ends – the cover pretty much gives that away! But the ‘odd couple’ relationship pairing of Vic and Marcus works well, and is occasionally surprisingly poignant. Vic’s original misgivings seem justified, when Marcus is unable to grasp the concept of an “actor”, but the two end up needing each other more than it initially seems. He needs her as a guide through the very different modern world. While as well as learning the art of fighting, she needs him to break opens the scar-tissue of deep cynicism, with which she has increasingly been affected since her parents were killed.

I’d call this first volume mostly set-up, and it’s only at the end where Vic comes into her own. In particular, she kicks into high gear when she has to rescue Marcus from a truly hellish situation in the vampire factory. The resulting sequence, involving a pit of vampires in production, is messy, to put it mildly. It demonstrates Vic’s take no prisoners attitude: she has had that since the beginning, and when combined with Marcus’s training and the Gladius Solis, eventually make for a powerful heroine. The journey there is entertaining though, and this was very much one I “watched” as much as read, the story playing out in my mental cinema. [The ‘gangster turned vampire’ aspect reminded me of Innocent Blood] Further volumes in the series have been marked for potential purchase.

Author: S. T. Branton
Publisher: LMBPN Publishing, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 4 in the Forgotten Gods series.

Sword of Order, by S. Mays

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

Book 0 in the series? It seems a little odd, as this obviously leads in to the “first” book – Curse of Souls, published in September 2017 – yet Sword came out just three months later. Reading the synopsis, it seems as if Curse may be focused on a different character: college student Sverre Walker, who encounters Jessica Luvkrafft, warrior for the Order of Mankind. Sword is the story of how Jessica became that warrior.

The Order is a massive, ancient, extremely well-funded and completely covert religious organization which, more less, fights for humanity against things that go bump in the night. Vampires, werewolves, ghosts, elementals… They’re all real, and the Order is in the front-line of making sure the threat they pose does not overwhelm the human race. As Jessica’s father Jake puts it, “We are the Sword of God. We were put here to eliminate the evils and abominations that seek to overrun our world.” To do so, the Order uses all the technology they can, much of which is developed in house, and not available even to the military.

Jake is a former field operative who now does R&D at one of the Order’s bases. His wife, Abigail, was killed on a mission, leaving him to take care of their daughter Jessica, who is aged 12 when the book starts, and in training. What’s supposed to be a simple mission ends up in the death of the Order member in charge (he was, to put it mildly, a bit of a dick). Even though Jessica was culpable in the fatality, by order of the Council of Overseers, she is fast-tracked to be his replacement. Getting there will require her overcoming her guilt, undergoing some brutal training, and passing a test where the price of failure is both death and her immortal soul.

That’s just the start, and it does feel a bit of a weakness that the book tries to cram in an entire decade’s worth of action. By the end, as mentioned above, Jessica is old enough to go undercover at college and there are a couple of points where it seems multiple years are skipped over with the wave of a paragraph. It also lacks a proper antagonist, with no-one showing up to fit that role until 70% of the way through. On the positive side, it’s a world with almost infinite potential, and I liked the way religion is incorporated into the book in a non-judgmental way.

It does end at a satisfactory point, with Jessica being given the mission that will form Book 1. If it didn’t appear that she’s a co-star at best in that, I’d be more inclined to read it. Despite the flaws and jerky pacing (as well as a cover that’s rather… different to the techno-warrioress we actually get!), Mays has laid the groundwork for a decent heroine in Jessica, and the prospect of her eventually going up against Countess Bathory is an intriguing one.

Author: S. Mays
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 0 of 2 in the Warrior of Souls series.