Tag: g

G.I. Jane

  By

★★★½
“The training Jane stays mainly in the pain…”

The opening hour of this must be great entertainment for sadists, watching Demi Moore get pummelled, ground-down, chewed-up and beaten into a bloody pulp by the war machine, as part of Navy SEAL training. The first woman to go through it, she could open the door for others if she succeeds – which is exactly why the stops are pulled out to ensure she fails. While the most obvious face of this is Master Chief Urgayle (Mortensen – his character here would eat Aragorn for lunch), her political mentor Senator DeHaven (Bancroft) also finds the pressure coming down to pull the plug on this social experiment. But Jan…er, Jordan O’Neil (Moore), won’t give up at any cost, demanding absolutely equal treatment. Of course, after what seems like a 75-minute training montage, she wins the respect of her colleagues, overcoming the Senator’s intervention thanks to a peskily imperfect fax machine.

An eye-poppingly brutal look at what our soldiers go through (leaving me with even more respect for them), it’s the second half where the movie kicks into life. Their final training mission has the SEALS diverted to Libya to help recover a device containing weapons-grade plutonium. This “no man left behind” would be revisited by Scott – and cranked up to the max – in Black Hawk Down, but the restraint he shows here is a lot more effective. To me, showing ability in a combat situation, as our heroine does, would seem a better way of obtaining the admiration of your fellow soldiers – rather than telling Urgayle to “Suck my dick!” But, hey, I’m a civilian, and very happy to be one, so what do I know? It’s a shame there wasn’t a resulting franchise; as the last hour shows, there is a lot of potential for development, with O’Neil kicking butt in a variety of exotic foreign locals. However, at 43, Demi Moore is perhaps too old these days. What’s Jessica Alba doing?

Dir: Ridley Scott
Star: Demi Moore, Viggo Mortensen, Anne Bancroft, Jason Beghe

La Guerrera Vengadora 2

  By

★★½
“Schoolmistress by day…crawls through impressively large air-ducts by night.”

Chagoyan is perhaps the nearest thing Mexico has to offer to an action heroine. She best known for her role in Lola la Trailera (‘Lola the Trucker’), in which, she played the daughter of a haulier – she takes over his business and goes out for vengeance, after he’s gunned down for refusing to assist a drug-cartel. Almost a decade later, that director’s son would helm this, in which Chagoyan plays a teacher who moonlights as a crime-fighting vigilante. Not having seen part one isn’t much of a problem; presumably it explains her origins, and perhaps how she gets to spend so much time away from her job. All we see here is one class, before she and her midget sidekick take on a gang who kill one of her pupils (with a surprising amount of blood, it has to be said). Then, when she’s blamed for kidnapping the daughter of the police chief, she has to find the real culprits and clear her name.

This swings wildly from surprisingly decent to laughable, as far as action goes. The explosions and stuntwork are credible. However, to call Chagoyan “unconvincing” is putting it mildly, not least the opening sequence where she rides into a hostage situation on her motorbike and saves the day – see Heroic Trio for how it should be done. But there are occasional moments (the crossbow bolt through the hand) that made us sit up and take notice, tiding us over the dumb comedic interludes. [Though any film with a flour-covered midget will always find a special place in our hearts.] There’s a lengthy finale in an underground labyrinth, pitting our heroine and her explosive-tipped crossbow bolts against evil minions with flamethrowers, before coming back above ground to answer the age-old question, which is better: a helicopter or a rocket-launcher? If that has ever kept you up nights, this is the film for you.

Dir: Raul Fernandez Jr.
Star: Rosa Gloria Chagoyan, Rolando Fernandez, Edna Bolkan, Jorge Vargas

Girlfight

  By

★★★★
The story of a girl who “didn’t make the cheerleading team”.

The opening shot zooms in on Rodriguez with her head down; slowly, she raises her head, and stares into the camera with ferocious intensity. If this renders the rest of the film largely redundant, it’s not really anyone’s fault. In Michelle Rodriguez, the makers have the perfect person to play Diana, a pissed-off, troubled/troublesome) teen, who finds that violence does solve problems after all. Okay, that’s not perhaps the message the authors intended, but when Diana finally lays into her father, it certainly seems that way.

However, that’s typical of the honesty the film shows: uplifting, without sugar-coating the harshness of life or the toughness of training. Though it’s hard to remember a time when Rodriguez’ stare wasn’t a cliche (see S.W.A.T.), the rawness of her emotion shines out, and getting someone with little screen experience turns out brilliantly in the end, even if it could have backfired badly, and completely sunk the picture. Rodriguez certainly puts the fear of God in me, that’s for sure. While the rest of the cast are much lower-key, and barely memorable, they do their jobs adequately, in roles that are little more than cliches e.g. ex-boxer turned trainer.

However, by making Diana’s boyfriend a boxer too, it adds a significant spark, even if the “Gender Blind” boxing tournament that pits them against each other for the climax, is contrived, ludicrous, and can be found nowhere in the real world, AFAIK. Yet the film brings you along so well, that it’s easy to take that final step, which provides more than adequate closure for Diana – if not necessarily anyone else.

Dir: Karyn Kusama
Star: Michelle Rodriguez, Jaime Tirelli, Paul Calderon, Santiago Douglas

Gun Crazy, Volume 1: The Woman From Nowhere

  By

★★★½
“Muroga reclaims for Japan, what Clint and Sergio borrowed in the 1960’s.”

If the inspiration for this one wasn’t clear, Goro Yasukawa’s score will soon enlighten you: Sergio Leone. A character with a mysterious past and equally obscure agenda comes into a lawless town, and kicks ass. For The Man With No Name and his horse, read Saki (Yonekura) and her Harley. Given that Leone basically ripped off Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo in A Fistful of Dollars to begin with, the irony is satisfying. She has come to Tsuson – surely a nod to Tucson, less than two hours down the dusty Arizona I-10 from where I write this – to take on Tojo (Tsurumi), the local mob boss, who commits his crimes with impunity from the safety of an American Air Force base. She gets his attention when she interferes with his robbery of a wages truck, and takes the money herself. The two had met previously, though Tojo doesn’t recognise Saki; you’ll probably work out the basic circumstances long before the film reveals them, but it does add a couple of unexpectedly nasty twists of the knife.

The Okinawan setting is interesting, given tension between US forces there and the locals, dating back to a 1995 incident when three servicemen raped a 12-year old girl. Hence, the scene where Yuki demolishes two leering US soldiers has an additional level of resonance for local viewers, and the tolerance of the Americans to a brutal thug on their territory become somewhat more explicable. Yonekura is impressive in her role, and Muroga wisely doesn’t bother to introduce any love interest; the film is barely an hour long, so there just wouldn’t be room. The inevitability of the final Suki-Tojo faceoff is perhaps only exceeded by its ludicrousness – the heroine expands the definition of “unarmed” to include other limbs too. However, for an obviously low-budget work, it’s busily energetic, and rarely slides much below entertaining.

Dir: Atsushi Muroga
Star: Ryoko Yonekura, Shingo Tsurumi, Takeshi Yamato, Takashi Ukaji

Gang of Roses

  By

★★
“Hip-hop feminist revisionist Western is entertaining mostly for fans of bad movies.”

This comes across less like a Western, more like a feature-length rap promo – with every bit as much emotional depth or historical accuracy. The idea that a gang of ethnic gun-toting women could ever ride into town at the turn of the century, and get served at the local saloon with little problem stretches credulity to near-breaking. It then snaps entirely when faced with their always-immaculate clothes and hair, even as the ladies sleep rough. The group of former bank-robbers return to the fray after the sister of one is killed by outlaws, under the control of the one-eyed Bobby Brown. Insert Whitney Houston joke here. He and his gang have taken control of a town, from a sheriff with a startlingly Australian accent, as part of their search for treasure supposedly buried locally.

With cameos by Mario Van Peebles and Macy Gray, the characterisations never pass the obvious: the revengeful one (Calhoun), the mercenary one (LisaRaye), and then there’s the ho – Lil’ Kim, of course. Despite dialogue about a hundred years later than the period, and an odd subplot that sputters out lamely, about a mysterious figure who seems to be stalking the girls, the directing manages somehow to be worse than the script. Case in point: the innumerable scenes of our heroines riding through the landscape, which serve no purpose whatsoever. The cliches come thick and fast, to the point where you wonder if this is supposed to be a parody – if so, however, it isn’t funny.

What it often is, is bad enough to be entertaining; otherwise, it’s bad enough to be utterly forgettable, and why this got an ‘R’ rating beats me entirely. The writers of another screenplay, Jessie’s Girl, sued the makers, claiming the story here was stolen from their work: in their shoes, I’d have kept very quiet. Must say though: the beautifully colour co-ordinated costumes, below, are fabulous, and the designer thereof deserves an award. Writer/director Lamarre, on the other hand, should be firmly discouraged from carrying out any more ‘reimaginings’.

Dir: Jean-Claude La Marre
Star: Monica Calhoun, LisaRaye, Lil’ Kim, Marie Matiko

GLOOW: Hovember to Remember

  By

★★½
“Someone, someday will run a serious US women’s wrestling federation. GLOOW is not that group.”

I keep buying DVDs like this, hoping against hope to strike gold. Not to say it doesn’t have the occasional guilty pleasure, but knowing the name used to stand for “Gorgeous Ladies of Oil Wrestling” (the second O eventually became “Outrageous”), should give you a rough idea of what to expect on this DVD, filmed in November 2002 at the Pennsylvania National Guard Armory. If not, then bouts such as the Battle of the High School Virgins or Hardcore Bra and Thong Match should provide a clue, and explain why Chris was rolling her eyes at the prospect.

However, she’d probably admit it wasn’t quite as tacky as feared – no actual titties, and I definitely saw her smirking in the tag-team battle featuring midgets Little Louie and King Sleazy (and who’d disagree?). Nor could she deny that ‘Prime Time’ Amy Lee vs. Riptide, who cuts a great promo, was also a damn fine brawl. Though you couldn’t tell by moronic commentators Jeffrey J. James and Eric Garguilo, who give teenage humour a bad name, but at least the sound quality on the DVD was mercifully poor and their drooling frequently inaudible. Oddly, for a women’s fed, they had a man (Greg Matthews, from Tough Enough) wrestle champion G.I. Ho for the title. This was okay too, despite a cop-out ending that demonstrated another problem – watching this in isolation, you had no idea of the storylines leading up to it, or who half the characters were.

While GLOOW seems to have died, many of them are now part of Women’s Extreme Wrestling. It was from their Ebay seller, soprovideo, that I got this double DVD set, though buyers should beware: the discs took six weeks to arrive, were DVD-R (with the title written in Sharpie), and the second one refused to work in the player, and had to be nursed on the PC. Still, I only paid $6, not the $29.95 price on the site. Needless to say, that’d be far too much to pay for one memorable bout and a lot of juvenilia.

Golden Queens Commando

  By

★★★
“One title for each heroine. And each plot element too, probably.”

I’m going with the title on the print – your opinion may differ. As it likely will for this insane distillation of The Magnificent Seven and The Dirty Dozen, complete with music lifted from both Western and War genres. It certainly isn’t dull: incoherent and dumb, maybe, but you expect that in an early work from the director of Flying Dagger, one of the maddest Asian movies ever. Lin, credited as “Venus”, plays the fetchingly eyepatched Black Fox, who breaks out of jail with six associates, and convinces them to help destroy a chemical weapons plant in occupied Manchuria.

This task occupies only the last ten minutes of the film: the rest covers life in prison, how the women got there, a dumb subplot where the ladies get captured and take part in goofy contests (such as spaghetti-eating) to win their freedom, etc. Calling these “of variable interest” is being very kind, yet when not diverted, the film works well; the heroines, each with different skills, are strong and well-defined. I was able to recount their individual fates the next day to Chris, who’d fallen asleep – in defense, she’d been sinusy and on the Robitussin. But without saying too much, the heroic mortality rate here is higher than in either Magnificent or Dirty…

Shame the print is badly cropped: a caption reading “tan Plate” is presumably “Tibetan Plateau”. While the production is often as clumsy as the presentation, it’s one of the first girls-with-guns films to come from Hong Kong, so respect is due. And given sufficient leeway and appropriate expectations, this is stupid fun on its own terms.

Dir: Chu Yin-Ping
Star: Brigitte Lin, Elsa Yeung, Sally Yeh, Sylvia Pang
a.k.a. Amazon Commandos [BRNS.com]
a.k.a. Golden Queen Commando [Alex-in-Wonderland.com]
a.k.a. Golden Queen’s Commando [IMDB.com]
a.k.a. Golden Queen’s Commandos [HKMDB.com]
a.k.a. Jackie Chan’s Crime Force [Arena Video title]
a.k.a. Seven Black Heroines [BrigitteLin.com]

Gun Girls

  By

★★★
“You must think I’m a cheap floozy – but I’m not. Not really…”

Based on the director’s novel, Girls on Parole, this prime slice of Juvenile Delinquent nonsense remains endlessly fascinating for students of “bad” movies, not least for its schizophrenic approach. It manages to combine moralistic doctrine – most notably from a parole officer who speaks Entirely In Headlines – and exploitation, with the heroines stripping down to their foundation garments (hey, this was 1956, whaddya expect?) about every ten minutes.

Three “teenage” girls – quotes used advisedly, since they’re about as convincing as Olivia Newton-John was in Grease – graduate from muggings to robbery, using guns bought from a leering fence (Timothy Farrell, narrator of Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda). Of course, I’m giving little away to say that it all goes horribly wrong, this being the era when criminal behaviour inevitably led to tragedy. Also, I’d be the first to admit that the acting, direction and production values are about what you would expect. But how can you not like a film with lines like the one atop this review or, “C’mon, Dora – let’s conceal these weapons”? For despite many, obvious flaws, this still managed to entertain us, and at a mere 67 minutes, doesn’t hang around. You should know that the print quality on Something Weird’s release does leave a bit to be desired though.

There was a happy ending, at least for one of the actresses. Despite our suspicions that none of the trio would ever work again, Eve Brent, who played Joy (under her real name, Jean Ann Lewis), went on to a long, surprisingly reputable career including The Green Mile. I guess crime does pay, after all.

Dir: Robert Detrano
Star: Jeanne Ferguson, Jacquelyn Park, Timothy Farrell, Jean Ann Lewis

Gladiatrix

  By

★★★½
“Proof that the female action heroine’s appeal is at least a couple of millennia old.”

This sculpture, found at Halicarnassus, in what is now Turkey, depicts two woman, Amazonia and Achillea, fighting each other. It’s one of the prime pieces of evidence for female gladiators.

This intriguing piece of archaeological detective work began with the discovery of an opulent grave in the paupers’ section of a Roman-era cemetery in London. Piecing together the clues, the conclusion was reached that, while it could have been a follower of Isis, this was most likely a gladiator’s grave – which was something of a shock, as the occupant was female…

From here, we head into a discussion of how Roman life centred round the amphitheatre and how the gladiatorial games developed. While there wasn’t a great deal of new information here, it was interesting to see a connection made between the rise of the female participant linked to Boadicea’s revolt, which had taken place a decade or two earlier. This would have no doubt opened the Roman mind to the possibilities of broads with swords. Similarly, in Rome, the absorption of the Amazonian legend (originally a Turkish story) could have led to the introduction of the gladiatrix.

Narrated by – who else? – Lucy Lawless, the documentary is hampered by an over-enthusiastic visual style during the battle recreations. At times, these were so hyperactive as to convince me that I was watching clips from the 2001 version of The Arena. While understanding the need to avoid becoming a sequence of talking heads and shots of ruins, the attempts to jazz the inserts up prove more of a distraction than an enhancement. I’d have welcomed more speculation on the life of the gladiatrix too. Still, great to hear a little about the ancestors of Michelle Yeoh and Pam Grier!

Dir: Jeremy Freeston
Discovery Channel documentary, December 2001

‘Gator Bait

  By

★★★½
“Swamp saga is buoyantly sleazy, but sinks at the end.”

Between being Playmate of the Year in 1970, and her death in a car accident at the end of the decade, Jennings appeared in a slew of action/exploitation flicks which earned her the title “Queen of the B’s”. Despite unlikely casting as Desiree, an alligator poacher – with perfect hair and make-up, even in the Louisiana swamps – this film comes within an ace of getting our seal of approval, falling short only at the finale.

Desiree finds herself in trouble when she’s involved in the death of a local cop. His family, a bunch of half-breeds of hugely dubious morals (witness the immortal line, “What’re ya tryin’ to do, ya horny little bastard? That’s yer sister!!”), get on her trail, dragging the more or less unwilling police chief with them. But the bayous and backwoods are home turf (the title comes from her father’s habit of dragging her behind his boat as a lure!) and after her sister is murdered in truly repellent fashion, mercy is in short supply.

Rather too much speedboat footage slows the second half down, but it’s an interesting twist on the Deliverance nightmare, with rednecks being hunted rather than the hunters. Jennings doesn’t have many lines (kid bro’ is mute, so there are few chances for conversation), which is perhaps wise. However, she carries herself well, whizzing through the swamps, blazing away with her shotgun – it’s unfortunate she has to rely on assistance to finish things off, a weakness in character which is hugely disappointing.

Dir: Ferd and Beverly Sebastian
Star: Claudia Jennings, Sam Gilman, Doug Dirkson, Clyde Ventura