Tag: h

Hunting Jessica Brok

  By

★★★★
“What a silly hunt.”

This is a rough, to the point of savage, piece of cinema. If you do not like seeing people get their head blown apart, you should stay away, because that happens more then once here. The provider thereof is Jessica Brok (Jones), who was once part of a black ops operation which went across the border from South Africa into Angola, in search of a poaching ring, only to find far worse. The subsequent ambush wiped out most of her team, though she was able to kill the brother of the poacher’s leader. Over a decade later, she is finished with the business, and living quietly with her young daughter, under a new identity. The business, however, is not finished with her. 

For the leader, Lazar Ipacs (Lukunku), has been harbouring a grudge against Jessica, and has finally tracked her down. With the help of a former colleague, Daniel (Berning), he lures her into a trap and prepares to make her regret… Absolutely everything. But Daniel has second thoughts, throwing Jessica a lifeline which lets her escape. The hunt is on. The only question is, who is the hunter and who is the hunted? After a few lower-tier henchmen are taken out, Lazar’s wife Sherri (Mboya) discovers Jessica has a daughter, and Lazar kidnaps her, intending to use the child as leverage. If you’re thinking that might be a bit of a poor decision, give yourself two points. 

The best thing I can say about this is, while running comfortably over two hours, it doesn’t feel like it at all. There’s not much of a lull: a brief period of peace depicting Jessica’s new life working on a wildlife sanctuary is as quiet as things get. Once she is kidnapped, there is little pause for breath thereafter. It is fair to say that the action here is more inclined towards the comic-book, rather than the realistic. Jessica, for example, takes more damage than any normal human could be expected to survive. She takes an arrow right through the thigh, and basically shrugs it off, while stepping on a grenade booby-trap leaves her with little more than slight tinnitus. However, the same goes for Lazar and Daniel. 

Taken in that spirit, I enjoyed this a great deal, and it’s the first film I’ve watched in 2026 to merit our Seal of Approval. The characters here are broadly-drawn, yet no less effective for it. Credit especially to Lukunku and Mboya, who make a spousal pair who are the stuff of your worst nightmares. The script doesn’t do anything particularly new – especially obvious, the way Lazar and his men spurn opportunity after opportunity to kill Jessica, to the point it begins to feel like a deliberate running joke. Yet it feels like its simplicity leaves the film stripped-down and lean, rather than underwritten. I suspect director/co-writer Orr might be a big fan of Revenge. I am too: there’s much worse from which to take inspiration.

Dir: Alastair Orr
Star: Danica De La Rey Jones, Richard Lukunku, Clyde Berning, Hlubi Mboya

Hot-Blooded Angel

  By

★★
“Luke-warm vigilantes.”

Watching this one, I had a very strong sense of deja-vu, to the point I started looking for a previous review. Turns out, none such existed, because I think my previous encounter with it was on one of those dodgy, “pirate” YouTube channels, under the different name of Scarlet Strike. I skipped writing about it, since I wasn’t able to determine any information off that, such as cast and crew. Because, it turns out, that wasn’t its real title. A month later, I watched this official copy one morning, while Chris was taking our new cat to the vet to be neutered. There were points where I suspect the cat had the better day. 

Ok, it was not quite that bad, but coming the morning after Lamb Game, the gap in quality was palpable. It takes place in Chinatown, so I guess… not in China? A dubious businessman, Mr. Ba is seeking to knock down all the small businesses and family homes for the usual property development reasons. Standing against him are a pair of orphan sisters (Feng and Sun), who run a sweet shop, as well as the “Guardian Angel” (Xu), a masked vigilante who keeps the area safe from predators of all kinds. Basically, it ends as a team-up, especially after Ba decides to kidnap one of the sisters for use as leverage. The other sister and Guardian Angel then have to go rescue her from his headquarters. 

From a technical point of view, it’s competent enough. However, the characters all seem the epitome of blandness. There is what appears to be an effort to inject some kind of romantic interest in the shape of honest cop, Officer Wu (Huang). However, there’s absolutely no chemistry between him and any of the three female leads, so I’m not sure why they bothered. There are also a series of confusing flashbacks to childhood, though I’m uncertain to which character they refer. I’m still trying to work out whether the Guardian Angel is intended to be a long-lost sibling. Between her and Ba’s pair of minions, it appears Chinese orphanages may be a hot-bed of martial arts training. 

Looking at the poster, it’s either generated by AI or bad PhotoShop. The former would make sense, if only because the script could be from the same source. The action is rarely better than mid-tier, and there’s a lengthy section in the middle where it vanishes entirely. Instead, we get some genuinely bad attempts at comic relief, and it’s at that point I would have happily swapped places with the house feline. A brief spurt of fighting towards the end briefly reawakened interest. However, we suffer through a poorly-conceived finale involving a device, not previously mentioned, that can decrypt Mr. Ba’s hard-drive, and a coda which feels longer than the one at the end of Return of the King. This one certainly coughs up a hair-ball. 

Dir: Jin Xin
Star: Xu Dong Dong, Feng Yan Yan, Huang Tao, Sun Wen Xue

Hole

  By

★★★½
“Tree’s a crowd.”

Well, this is unusual. We’ve never had a movie from Slovenia here before, a country I know almost entirely due to art-rock band Laibach. This seems to be barely known either, with a mere 26 votes on the IMDb at the time of writing. But it’s decent, and doesn’t hang about: at 75 minutes, there is not a lot of slack. Indeed, it’s a rare occasion where I would not have minded if this had been 15-20 minutes longer. It is certainly spare in terms of actors, with only three roles of significance. Mia (Cok) and Kevin (Plantan) are a couple of confidence operators, who prey on rich women: Kevin seduces them, and Mia robs them. Their latest mark is Ema (Krhin). 

Things go pear-shaped when Mia believes Kevin is getting too cosy with their target, and in a fit of jealousy, bludgeons Ema to death. To dispose of the body, they drive out into the woods [the only other Slovenian movie I have seen, horror movie Hillbillies, had a similarly rural setting]. However, while they are bickering about who should dig the grave, the corpse escapes, because Ema was merely unconscious, rather than dead. Mia and Kevin begin the hunt, knowing they’d be in real trouble if Ema makes it back to civilization. Kevin makes the ill-advised decision to snort some coke, followed by the consumption of some mushrooms he finds in the woods. That basically marks the end of his role as an active participant in the film. 

Thereafter, it’s the two women facing off, and this is where I would have liked to have seen things extended. It’s clear that both women are seeking to tap into their inner feral nature, and more of it (along the lines of Revenge, perhaps) would have been welcome. Mia and Ema appears to be under the protection of dark and light angels respectively – perhaps representing vengeance and survival? I dunno, I’m just speculating: it’s another angle which might have merited additional explanation. Though what we get in lieu of development is still fun: Mia may be the most foul-mouthed female character of the year, spraying F-bombs about, at a rate which would make Dexter Morgan’s sister blush. 

While the topic is clearly one which would lend itself to horror, events here play out as much in a vein of black comedy. For example, when Ema is wounded, she uses a sanitary pad as an impromptu Band-Aid. Hey, soaking up blood is soaking up blood, am I right? There are other moments which seem almost deliberately surreal, such as Mia hallucinating Kevin having sex with a tree. [Please read that sentence again, because it’s not one I expected to write when I got up this morning] It’s almost as if she was the one who had eaten the magic mushrooms. If there’s a lesson here, that’s probably it: when you go into any Slovenian woods, be sure to bring your own picnic. 

Dir: Dejan Babosek
Star: Lea Cok, Darja Krhin, Marko Plantan
a.k.a. Jama

No trailer I could find, but the clip below shows the final fight. Probably a spoiler :)

Helsing: Demon Slayer, by Liane Zane

  By

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

Full disclosure at the outset: the author kindly donated me a paperback copy of this book in return for an honest review.

In the climactic novel of the author’s Elioud Legacy trilogy, The Draka and the Giant, former U.S. Army Ranger Ryan Helsing, a decorated and physically formidable veteran of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, was introduced as a relatively minor character (I didn’t remember him until I read this book; it’s been a couple of years since I finished reading the trilogy). And as I recall from the prequel series, Unsanctioned Guardians, it was mentioned in the first book there, The Covert Guardian, that title character (and major figure in both series) Olivia Markham had a younger sister. These two people serve as co-protagonists of this new novel, intended as the opening volume of The Dragon’s Paladins, a projected spin-off series from the original trilogy.

As reader’s of the latter know, Zane’s premise is that, from antediluvian times on down to the present, there have been some sub rosa matings between angels (mostly fallen ones, but occasionally celestial ones as well) and humans, and that the children of these unions walk among us, sometimes aware of their heritage, sometimes not. These Elioud have (latent, or more developed) super-human abilities from their angelic genes; and in the ongoing cosmic strife between God and Satan, they may be knowingly enlisted on one side or the other, or just imagine that they can ignore spiritual realities and be neutral. (This premise is taken for granted in the present novel, which should definitely be read after at least the original trilogy, if not necessarily the prequel; the reader needs that to fully understand the situation and to really know some of the important characters.)

Our main setting is the Balkans, in the very near future, about six months after the final events of the Draka and the Giant. Dianne Markham is now a 29-year-old “social media marketing consultant” (and yes, that’s an actual job). Secular-minded and not very close to her sister, in the past she’s been something of a playgirl type, and cultivated a loose lifestyle along that line; but more recently, she’s been aware of her biological clock ticking, and been feeling (and even acting on) some impulses towards a more serious and mature outlook and more responsible behavior. She has no clue about her family’s bloodlines, or that Olivia and her husband, Mihail Kastrioti, are two of the Archangel Michael’s top warriors and commanders.

But they are; and Olivia, warned of danger by her “spidey sense” (which we’ve come to recognize as Divine prompting) is taking measures to gather her birth family into the relatively greater safety of the Kastrioti fortress compound in the Albanian mountains. When we first meet Dianne, she’s on an Adriatic cruise, now winding down, with a bevy of her shallow “friends” (though Germaine Grimes is one she reckons as an actual friend). However, Olivia has sent our title character to secretly watch over her sister on the voyage, and to bring her to Olivia as soon as they dock in the Croatian port city of Split. That may be a long and dangerous trip (especially after the registering of the largest EMP phenomenon in history), and their interpersonal dynamics may get interesting….

In its stylistic and other qualities, this book has a lot of the same trademark characteristics the author displays in her six preceding books. Narration is in third-person, past tense; the H/h alternate as viewpoint characters, with occasional scenes from other viewpoints as needed. While this is definitely in the supernatural fiction genre, centering on combat between demons and demi-angels and their human pawns or allies, much of it also reads like descriptive fiction action-adventure or an espionage thriller (and Zane’s prequel trilogy actually is in the latter genre). This entails a lot of physical action and use of high-tech weaponry and communications. The development of nanotechnology here, and its tie-ins with “harmonics,” the energy frequencies underlying all reality and all living things, including people, which angels and their descendants can perceive but ordinary humans usually can’t, is in the realm of the science-fictional (and probably already was in at least the last two books of the first trilogy, though my knowledge of nanotechnology isn’t great enough that I could tell that on my first reading).

Zane sets a very brisk narrative pace, with a gripping intensity that makes this a real page-turner (I read it in less than two weeks, despite the 353-page length, which is fairly quick for me; and I always hated to put it down when I had to.) As in all of her work, she displays a detailed grasp of the settings and real-life locations, derived partly from Internet research and partly from her own travels. Given the cover art, it’s no surprise that Ryan Helsing is a highly capable action-hero; Dianne (who’s depicted on the back cover, but just with her face) doesn’t start out combat-trained, but she’s got guts and determination, and grows naturally into an action-heroine role. Both characters are developed well, in three-dimensional fashion. Their romance (that’s not a spoiler –Zane’s imprint is Zephon Romance, after all!) develops very quickly, but being thrown together closely and continuously under mortally dangerous and stressful conditions that demand constructive responses will bring out people’s mettle very quickly, and make it both easy and natural to assess and appreciate personal worth in a comrade-in-arms. Romance enhances the story and is a big part of it, but doesn’t swallow it whole.

Demonic possession of humans is taken seriously in the New Testament as an actual reality (borne out in other nonfiction literature on the subject), but the biblical writers don’t present us with a detailed theology of it. It’s a major plot element here; but here (as in some of the other books), how it works is a bit murky, and that’s probably my major quibble here. It’s sometimes suggested, plausibly, that the possessed are usually willing vessels of evil, or that all those outside the actual protection of Christ through faith are under some risk for it (and there are New Testament texts that could indicate that). But we also have a case of apparent possession of a human who doesn’t fall in those categories; and just as the St. Michael medals worn by some good characters here and in the other books have protective qualities, the demonically-cursed physical talismans here worn by some characters exert a malevolent spiritual influence.

Related to this, although like all of the author’s books, this one has a strong good vs. evil orientation which is explicitly understood in Christian terms of God vs. Satan, there’s not a strong note of necessary personal decision to repent of self-will and turn to Christ in salvation. (Granted, Christian conversion is typically a gradual process of internal changes in response to moral and spiritual influence; but there does come a distinct tipping point in which personal loyalty flips Christ’s way. We don’t get a real sense of that here; Dianne starts out as essentially a heathen, albeit one who’s having a bit of a moral awakening; but insofar as she changes spiritually, the change appears to be more about her relationship to Ryan than to Christ.)

Some of this is probably influenced by the author’s Roman Catholic faith, though none of her books harp on denominational distinctives; Catholic (and Orthodox) sacramental theology attributes real spiritual influence to physical objects or actions, where other Christian believers wouldn’t go that far, and the former traditions place less stress on an actual, real-time decision for Christian conversion. (Many Christians, myself included, also wouldn’t consider the whole idea of modern-day demi-angels fighting physical battles against demons as really plausible; but it has to be recognized that the author isn’t necessarily claiming that it is. We should just regard the premise here as a fictional literary conceit that serves metaphorical functions, or allows the author to spin an imaginative story, not as a serious theological treatise.) It could also be argued that the climactic resolution of the conflict is too easy, though I didn’t consider that a serious flaw.

Even though both Ryan and Dianne use a certain amount of bad language (realistically, given their backgrounds) there’s no profane abuse of divine names nor actual f-word use here, and there’s also no explicit nor implied sex. (There’s no doubt that our H and h are strongly attracted to each other physically, but there’s also a sense that the attraction is also, and more importantly, to each other’s qualities of character.) Like the original trilogy, this can be recommended to readers who like clean romance (if they don’t mind what movie reviewers –and this would make a great movie!– would call “some sensuality”) and those who like action adventure, both male and female. It can also appeal to supernatural fiction readers who like the angels vs. demons theme, but the appeal wouldn’t be confined to Catholic (or general Christian) readers; I think many secular readers could enjoy it as well.

Author: Liane Zane
Publisher: Zephon Romance, available from Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.
A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Huntress

  By

★½
“Ze German WW2 Chainsaw Massacre”

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was fairly notorious in Britain in the eighties and nineties, being famously banned on video. Naturally, this meant I had to see it, and… I was initially underwhelmed. However, I’ve gradually come to appreciate its raw intensity over the years. If I ever doubted its merits, watching this largely shameless knockoff should act as a reminder. Because it shows how flat and uninteresting the premise can be, when executed poorly. This relocate things from seventies Texas to Germany in the last days of World War II. A medevac team is trying to get injured and grumpy officer, Colonel Franklin (Christian) to a hospital before his leg falls off from sepsis.

Along for the ride are nurses Ellie (McDowell) and Annie (Sarah Hawthorne), a pacifist medic, Will (Sohns), and a couple of GIs to provide protection. It’s not long before they run into trouble and out of fuel. Fortunately – or so it seems initially – they encounter friendly, and attractive local, Helga (Savage) who gives them her homemade sausages and says she has plenty of gasoline at her house, just over this way a bit. If you have read the opening paragraph, you’ll be able to work out where the rest of the film is going. Let’s just say, the moral of the story is: do not accept smoked meats of unknown provenance, from strange women in the middle of woods. Truly, words to live by.

Yeah, turns out she is the acceptable face of a family of psychos, along with sister Greta and mother Ursula. Or maybe it’s the other way round, I forget. Naturally, the convoy members enter the house in easily disposed of ones and twos, with an utter disregard for military protocol. For example, another moral might be, don’t drop your guard in order to slow-dance with mysterious veiled women, in the middle of large, spooky houses during wartime. Only bad things can come of it. The consequences are, a great deal of slowly creeping about corridors, which the makers mistakenly think generates tension. It actually generates tedium. I mean, Colonel Franklin has an excuse, having been shot in the leg. Everyone else? Not so much.

It’s not a terrible idea, and the performances are largely serviceable. However, the parallels to Texas become more blatantly apparent, the deeper we get, all the way until a final shot which is utterly a gender reversed clone of that in TCM. But rarely does this come anywhere close to capturing the same sense of unfettered insanity. If you’re going to try and ape a stone-cold horror classic, you have to bring your A-game, because otherwise, the comparisons will do you absolutely no favours. Instead, I was more left wondering how people go from running along a corridor in one shot, to being chased through the woods in the next. This one is a nightmare, alright. Just in all the wrong ways.

Dir: Matthew M. Howe, J. Christian Ingvordsen
Star: John Christian, Braxton Sohns, Maggie McDowell, Violet Savage

Hunting Day

  By

★★
“I am very confused.”

I like to think I am not an idiot. I can assemble words into a coherent order, perform fairly complex mental arithmetic with reasonable accuracy, and recently connected a printer to my wife’s computer on the first attempt. So, when I tell you I did not understand this film… I really did not understand this film. I’ve seen movies before, where I may be unclear on some points. But I could still provide a reasonably detailed synopsis. Here? I am utterly at sea, beyond the most basic level, to the point I’m wondering how the heck I will be able to reach my standard five hundred words. How many can I spend describing my bemusement?

I do have to admire the fact the film unfolds entirely without dialogue.  Not a single word. It’s the kind of brave artistic choice which deserves respect. However, I have to say, it likely hurts the film more than it helps, and ends up feeling like an artistic conceit. Going by the IMDb, co-writer/director Patrice has no other credits beyond being executive producer, on a film currently in post-production. Yet this kind of gimmick movie screams out for someone with experience and a firm grasp of cinematic language. Somebody with a proven capacity for telling a story with dialogue. You need to work up to this kind of thing, otherwise you will potentially be leaving both yourself and, more importantly, the viewer, adrift and confused.

The IMDb synopsis is: “Deep in a threatening forest, Sarah faces off with the brutal hunter who killed her sister. Its a cat and mouse fight for survival.” No argument there. It’s just the large amount of stuff going around the edges, from which my confusion stems. For example, not long after Sarah (Huet) arrives in the forest, she starts seeing a young girl in a sheep’s head mask. Is that supposed to be her sister? If so, does this indicate Sarah is barking mad? In turn, would that mean nothing else we see or hear is trustworthy? Not least at the end, things spiral off into a resolution which is not, followed by a post-credit moment that then throws everything into doubt.

It all simply left me with too many questions, though other elements were fine. This is nicely photographed, and Huet does as much as she can, without words to express herself. The same goes for Duez as her (dead?) sister, and Bardoul, in the role of the hunter. But another seeming misstep is Patrice’s decision to tell the story out of chronological order. I’m unclear what he was trying to achieve with this, but the net result was another element coming between the audience, and any emotional reaction to events as they unfold. I tried. I really did, to the point I watched this twice (at a 72-minute running time, it could have been worse). In the end though, I’m convinced of one thing: I’m not the problem here. 

Dir: Julien Patrice
Star: Clothilde Huet, Cloe Duez, Steve Bardoul

Hacked Into The Game, by Saul Tanpepper

  By

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

The literary rating is mostly down to the sluggish way in which this gets going. Though having subsequently discovered this is the first in a fourteen volume series, it’s perhaps understandable if the author decided to slow-play things in the early stages. Still, as a standalone read, it definitely takes a while to get to the good stuff. By which I mean, human vs. zombie action. This takes place well after the zombie apocalypse, with the epidemic having been contained, and indeed, commodified, Zombies are kept in a formerly infected area of Long Island, now cordoned off to the public, where a company called Arc Entertainment allows the very rich to control them through implants, and fight to the (un)death.

There are other elements too, though these don’t have a significant role in this volume. For instance, everyone is mandated to have a “kill switch” fitted in their head, for use by the government if there were to be another outbreak. Or, after death, you can be resurrected as a zombie and conscripted into the military, or other public service. I presume these will come into play in later volumes. Here, it’s the story of Jessie Daniels and her friends, moderately disaffected young people who decide to break into the restricted zone on Long Island, for a variety of reasons, from boredom to a desire to hack the game from the inside. Needless to say, the expedition does not go smoothly.

As noted, it takes a while to get there. In fact, they don’t even reach Long Island before the 62% mark (all hail Kindle readers!), with much of the opening two-thirds taken up with interpersonal relationship, prep work for the expedition, or world building. It’s not dull, but for a franchise called Zpocalypto, I was expecting rather more… well, pocalypto, I guess. Or, indeed, more Z, with the first one we encounter in real-time, again, not showing up until they’re swimming through the tunnel to Long Island. To be frank, I was seriously wondering if this would qualify for inclusion here to the eighty percent (hail Kindle!) point, hence the low K-BQ.

However, it then goes from 0-60 in about two pages, and basically doesn’t let up thereafter. Jessie and her expedition “buddy” Jake find themselves cornered in a gas station, from which they first have to extricate themselves, reunite with the rest of their party, and head back to the mainland. None of which is easy. Fortunately, she had received some weapons training from her grandfather when Jessie was young, and that certainly comes in handy against the hordes of undead who have suddenly popped up. That in itself poses questions, which I imagine are answered… at some point over the thirteen subsequent volumes. Yeah. While I get the need for an author to pace themselves, Tanpepper (a fabulous pseudonym, incidentally) needs to do a better job of grabbing the audience’s attention out of the gates.

Author: Saul Tanpepper
Publisher: Independently published, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 14 in the Zpocalypto series.

Hope

  By

★★
“Hope isn’t necessarily good.”

Hope (Larkin-Coyle) is an aspiring vlogger, though has not yet figured out how to make it pay sufficiently to quit her grindingly dull day job, for a boss who perpetually questions Hope’s commitment. She’s not wrong, because Hope’s heart definitely lives in the outdoors, not at a desk or in a Zoom meeting. Her particular niche of content creation is in wilderness adventures, whether that’s going up mountains, diving underwater or – as in this case – scaling a cliff-face. She then posts the videos online, so that others can live vicariously through her experience. She’s excited for her next trip, which will take her back to a part of Ireland by the ocean, which was a favourite haunt of her late mother.

However, a moment’s inattention leads to disaster, with Hope sent plummeting to the rocks below. When she regains consciousness, she finds her shin bone shattered and sticking out of her leg. With (inevitably!) no cell signal, she is thrown back on her own resources, and will have to make her way out of an increasingly precarious situation, entirely by herself. As you can imagine from this synopsis, it puts a lot of weight on the shoulders of the lead actress, and it’s all a little contrived. Initially, I expected there to be much more of her speaking to the camera, documenting events for her online followers. But the film doesn’t really go that way, favoring a more general voicing of Hope’s inner monologue.

In the main, to be blunt, you are basically watching a woman crawl across rocks for an hour, and I’m probably stating the obvious when I say that this is of limited appeal. There are some inconsistencies which seemed annoying at the time, almost as if whole scenes had been removed. One second, Hope is on a beach. The next, she’s swimming in the water – broken leg and all. Then she’s suddenly marooned in a cave. There’s also character stupidity, such as Hope’s ignorance or wilful disregard for basic survival protocols. However, there’s a third-act twist which, to be fair, goes a long way to explaining what had gone before. On the other hand, you’re left wondering if perhaps the film-makers have sabotaged the entire point with it.

A more definite problem is the sense that there simply is not enough happening here. The fall, presumably for budgetary reasons, is a simple fade to black accompanied by a scream. I will say, the sounds Coyle makes when exploring her wound are legitimately harrowing, and help sell her injury as much as the small but effective effects work on her leg. That takes care of about five minutes, leaving… 93 others, which fall well short of possessing the same degree of intensity. It feels as if the makers were looking to paint a psychological portrait, using the frame of a wilderness survival story. As someone who was expecting a genuine wilderness survival story, I’m left feeling distinctly short-changed, and a little bit cheated.

Dir: Bobby Marno
Star: Sadhbh Larkin Coyle

High Heat

  By

★★★½
“Now we’re cooking.”

Reading other reviews, this seems like an exercise in managing expectations. It is, very much, a tongue-in-cheek entry in the action genre. If you’re expecting something serious or even marginally realistic, I can certainly see how you’d be disappointed. But as a dry satire, I found it worked more often not. It takes place on Opening Night at the Etoile Rouge restaurant, where Ana (Kurylenko) is beavering away as head chef in the kitchen, while husband Ray (Johnson) glad hands things in the front of house. Except, both have a secret. Ray’s is that he ran up over a million dollars in gambling debts to Dom (WWE star Page). His creditor now intends to burn down the restaurant and make Ray collect the insurance. 

Ana is not willing to stand by and watch her life’s work go up in smoke, which is where her secret comes in. For she is a former KGB agent, and is more than capable of taking out the low-level goons Dom initially sends in. That forces the gangster to up his game, and hire some bigger guns (literally, even if the mercs demand a catered lunch should the job takes more than four hours). However, Ana has resources she can call on as well, in the shape of former fellow spy Mimi (Doubleday). Though Mimi may not be entirely pleased to get the call from Ana, given the way they previously parted company. Their unfinished business also needs to be resolved. 

Initially, it’s hard to tell this is parody, but it plays not dissimilar to Cat Run. I had my suspicions from the facile way Ray accepts his wife was a Soviet asset. But the comedic aspects really kick in with the arrival of Mimi, her sniper husband and their daughters who feel like teenage versions of the twins from The Shining. They’re as intent on working through their relationship issues – mostly through bickering – as much as helping Ana. The rest of the supporting cast are along the same lines. Larger than life caricatures, yet ones that are amusing to encounter, such as Gary the masseuse, who would rather be anywhere else than storming a restaurant occupied by a pissed-off chef.

Kurylenko still carries herself very well, both looking the part and cracking heads with some style. It’s mostly firearm action until the end, when there’s an extended brawl that offers a decent payoff. Not all of the humour works: Mimi and her husband are a distinctly mixed bag. The structure is also kinda sloppy. Initially, Dom is set up to be the big bad; by the end, he has become almost an afterthought. Yet it’s still a breezy bit of fun. I could have sworn I’d written about this before: however, I’m damned if I can find my review. I’d definitely heard of it, and can’t figure out why it slipped through the net. Although it may have taken two years, I’m glad to have finally caught up with it.

Dir: Zach Golden
Star: Olga Kurylenko, Don Johnson, Dallas Page, Kaitlin Doubleday

Hunt Her, Kill Her

  By

★★★
“Tabling the argument.”

This is fairly sparse, unfolding entirely in the single location of a furniture factory, over the course of a single night. The central character is Karen (Terrazzino), a single mother who has just taken on the job of a cleaner and overnight security guard at the premises, in order to provide for her young daughter, who is ill on the night Karen has to start work. These issues quickly pale into insignificance – though not irrelevance – when a group of masked men enter the building, looking to hunt down and kill her. With the doors chained from the outside and the phone lines cut, Karen is entirely on her own against the bigger and stronger, but fortunately not smarter, intruders.

That’s basically it, and this is definitely not one if you’re looking for complex themes or nuanced characters. It’s straightforward survival horror, with the first half closer to stalk ‘n’ slash territory, consisting mostly of Karen being chased around the labyrinthine building, hiding out and being discovered. Things do become more action-oriented the deeper we get into things. There is a certain element of fortune in the ways she defeats some of her opponents, although this is probably necessary given the size disparity, and there’s a chaotic messiness to them which is effective. The one which stands out is the death by toilet plunger (no, the other end), which is drawn out to the point where it becomes almost blackly humourous.

That said, I did still roll my eyes at some elements, most obviously when Karen disguises herself as one of the predators. It’s an unnecessary push of believability, which would have been best forgotten. On the other hand, it is nice that the damage isn’t all one way. By the time Karen gets down to the final assailant (Oakley), she’s certainly far from uninjured, and this only escalates during their battle. If you likely will not be surprised in the slightest by the identity of the last man standing, it brings a deeply personal edge to the fight, and in addition, certainly gives Karen additional motivation. The result is considerably more of a brawl than anything, neither party giving or receiving quarter, and using whatever is nearby to their advantage.

The scripting here is so bare-bones as to be positively anorexic. For example, the backstory for Karen is put over in a way which you could either call “tersely efficient” or “laughably negligible,” depending on how charitable you might be feeling. While I lean somewhat towards the former, I’d prefer it to have done so in order to get to the meat of the matter faster, in lieu of the extended game of Hide ‘n’ Seek which occupies the first half. However, the film makes good use of its setting, and once things kick off, there’s precious little slack there either. Terrazzino gives a better physical performance than a dramatic one, but given the circumstances, that’s probably the way you want it to skew.

Dir: Greg Swinson and Ryan Thiessen
Star: Natalie Terrazzino, JC Oakley III, Trevor Tucker, Hunter Tinney