Tag: k

Kite Liberator

  By

★½
“Half a star deducted, for being only half a movie.”

KiteLiberatorAnd not a very good movie at that, suffering from such multiple personality disorder, it sometimes feels that two completely different anime were spliced together in some mad scientist’s laboratory. If so, he clearly got bored and drifted off while the project was half complete, because this ends in a way which doesn’t so much suggest another part, as demand it unconditionally. Six years on, that still hasn’t materialized, making this about as appetizing as a half-cooked chicken. Oh, and speaking of mad scientists, there’s one of those in here too.

We’re a decade on from the events of the original Kite, and it seems Sawa has – without explanation – morphed into Monaka (Inoue). In between tracking down and killing paedophiles, she has a regular identity as a klutzy waitress at a cafe, where he co-worker Mukai (Okamura) protects her from the sleazy patrons. Monaka’s father is an astronaut, who has been in space for years. His space-station is visited by Kōichi Doi, a researcher investigating ways to preserve bone density in zero-G. However, it appears a combination of factors such as radiation, results in the astronauts mutating into monstrous creatures. After a firefight, Doi and his team bail out as the station disintegrataes, but the monster that Monaka’s father has become, is also on their craft, which crash-lands – conveniently right in her neighbourhood. A cover-up ensues, despite a trail of corpses, and Monaka is given her next mission: to kill the monster, unaware that it’s actually her father.

Which is pretty much where it ends, after a first battle between Monaka and him. Really: WTF? On its own, this is such an entirely pointless release, you have to wonder what happened. Even up to that point, this is problematic in a bunch of way, not least that Monaka is almost a minor character, and it appears to be a sequel in little more than name. While I’m not normally one to criticize a film for a lack of sex, this also lacks the severely transgressive or original qualities which made the original infamous. This is mostly a monster mash, which we’ve seen any number of times before. There is some potential for a second half, but I doubt it will ever happen. This is like tearing a book in two, selling the first half and never publishing the rest. If I had actually paid any money for this, I would be righteously pissed.

Dir: Yasuomi Umetsu
Star (voice): Marina Inoue, Akemi Okamura, Masakazu Morita, Setsuji Satō

Killer Women

  By

★★
“Here lies Molly Parker, dead by a thousand clichés.”

And it didn’t take long for the fatal blow. The series was an American version of the popular Argentine crime drama Mujeres Asesinas, which had already been successfully transplanted to other Latin American countries. This edition was originally only given a trial run of sorts, with eight episodes bought, and scheduled after New Year as a mid-season replacement for another deceased ABC series. However, after miserable ratings for the first two episodes, the network cut the order to six shows, a mere ten days after the series premiere. Unaware of this, it caused us some confusion when we turned on #6, which was suddenly now #8, with the sixth and seventh having been reduced in their entirety, to “Previously, on Killer Women…”

The problem was clear: scripts unable to escape the tired and banal, going down well-worn paths over familiar from a thousand other shows, right from the opening shot of the Alamo, unimaginative director shorthand for “We’re in Texas.” As if the stetsons and cattle weren’t a giveaway there – WE’RE IN TEXAS. [The show doth protest too much: it was largely filmed one state over, in New Mexico] Another example: literally seconds into the establishing scene of one episode, Chris predicted the victim would be a star athlete, from the NFL, bludgeoned to death with one of his own trophies. Turned out he was from the NBA; otherwise, she was spot-on. This kind of painfully obvious was par for the course. Oh, look: the heroine is having a sexy relationship with hunky DEA agent Dan Winston (Blucas). Now she’s trying to get out of an abusive relationship with her politician ex-husband (Nordling). This apparently gives her an empathic relationship with other woman in similar situations. Kill me now.

It’s a shame, because the best thing about the show is Helfer, who plays lead Molly Parker with a winning charm that deserves much better material. There’s something of Geena Davis about her, both women being tall (Helfer is 5’11”, an inch less than Davis) and lanky, with smiles that can light up a room. Truth be told. the former model is probably a little too polished to be the Texas Ranger she plays here, but she does convey the multiple facets of her personality well, rather than being a one-dimensional crime-solving machine. Indeed, most of the performances are perfectly adequate. Blucas has previous experience playing the eye-candy boyfriend to an action-heroine, having been Riley Finn in season four of Buffy, and Nordling is suitably slimy as the husband who just won’t accept that it’s over.

No, it’s the storylines that aren’t up to scratch here, starting with the central conceit, which sees Parker every week confronted by a murderous woman or women. Given that FBI stats have male murderers outnumbering their female counterparts by better than nine to one, this was stretching credibility a bit, and is a limitation which further hampers writers who have already demonstrated a lack of ability. The debut episode starts off promisingly enough, with a woman in a blood-red dress stalking down the aisle of a church and gunning down the groom. But what first seems like a straightforward crime of passion, turns out to be the result of blackmail by a Mexican drug cartel, and somehow ends with Parker and Winston carrying out a solo raid across the border to rescue the victims. I think I heard a snort of derision from my wife as this all unfolded, and sadly, she was largely justified.

There were a couple of stories which were potentially interesting: I liked the second episode more, but even that spiralled its way down into eventual implausibility, with the killer deciding Molly’s unwanted ex-husband is a suitable target for her next victim. The back story was little better, with her brother (Trucco) apparently cheating on his wife, but actually taking on “extra work” to help out his ranch financially. It doesn’t take a weatherman to figure out that this will end up blowing him into conflict with Winston. It probably says something that skipping episodes as the network did, had little or no effect on coherence. All told, this was on thin ice from the get-go, and its termination came as no surprise, sad though we always are to see any action heroine show bite the dust. Helfer will hopefully recover, and go on to better things. This will otherwise be quietly forgotten by all involved.

Creator: Hannah Shakespeare
Star: Tricia Helfer, Marc Blucas, Michael Trucco, Jeffrey Nordling

"The best thing about the show is Helfer, who plays lead Molly Parker with a winning charm that deserves much better material."

Karate Girl (1974)

  By

★★★
“Definitely not to be confused with the Rina Takeda film of the same name.”

This movie acquired some notoriety last year when a clip of a villain’s death went viral as “Worst death scene ever”, even though it had been edited and had extra audio added for “humourous” effect. Certainly, there’s plenty to mock in this 1974 Turkish revenge flick, which plays like someone heard second-hand descriptions of Thriller: A Cruel Picture and decided the world needed a PG remake. However, while aspects of the execution are without a question shoddy and laughable, it has an interesting story, briskly told, and with a good central character.

That heroine is Zeynep (Akin), a mute flower-seller who roams the streets of Istanbul with an apparently endless selection of cue cards through which she converses with customers. Her happy life is disrupted when five escaped convicts invade the home where she lives with her father, killing him and pawing her about, before stealing the money they have saved for a medical operation to return her speech. However, the trauma apparently had the same effect, Zeynep now being able to talk. She vows to track down those responsible and make them pay, with the help of a convenient passing transient, Murat (Hun, who’d go on to become an member of the Turkish parliament), who happens to be well skilled in shooting and martial arts, for reasons that do actually make sense eventually. Zeynap ends up joining the local police force to further her mission, which climaxes on a roof-top where the last member takes a baby hostage.

Apparently unreleased in the US or UK, this is available from the usual dubious sources, most commonly on a print dubbed into English, with French credits and Greek subtitles. Oddly, this adds to the whole package, which succeeds in being more entertaining than you’d expect, in a way best described as “barking mad.” Akin, who was one of the leading lights of Turkish cinema in the sixties and seventies, gives it her all, and certainly has the screen presence to pull it off, even allowing for some of the worst stunt doubling in cinema history – the wig used by her double is a completely different colour. The film manages to be both chaste and sleazy at the same time, with the latter best represented by the bad guys’ facial hair. No-one will ever mistake this for any kind of classic. However, I’ve been less entertained by many movies, and it’s enjoyable enough, for various reasons, that I found it relatively easy to overlook the undeniable flaws.

Dir: Orhan Aksoy
Star: Filiz Akin, Ediz Hun

Killing Car

  By

★★½
“Because ‘Killing Asian model of few words’ wouldn’t fit on the DVD sleeve.”

This is a surreal revenge thriller, which begins at a scrapyard where the bickering of a couple is interrupted by an Oriental woman (Tsang), who shoots them dead and takes a car. A series of similar encounters follows, which take a similar form: we are introduced to one or more characters; then the woman shows up, and kills them, leaving a toy car behind at the scene as a marker. This includes a photographer and her assistant; an antiques dealer and his girlfriend; the owner of a dance club, etc. Meanwhile, two cops are following the trail of corpses and Hot Wheels, and it gradually becomes clear that the woman’s actions are tied to a car accident the previous year, with which all her victims had a connection of some kind.

It’s a very chilly piece, with a central character about whom we know almost nothing for the great majority of the film, making it difficult to empathize with her murderous rampage. Meanwhile, it doesn’t take long before we realize that just about everyone else to whom we’re introduced, is going to get shot, so there’s no point in getting attached to, or even caring about them. The role is one that was written for Tsang, who never appeared in anything else, as far as I can tell: that probably says more than anything else. She’s not bad, and has a certain cold charisma that’s appropriate, but there just isn’t enough on which to hang any criticism of her performance. Certainly, despite a willingness to shed her clothes, she’s nowhere near as good as Brigitte Lahaie was in the other Rollin flick we’ve reviewed here, Fascination – interestingly, that appears to be explicitly referenced in one scene here, with a scythe being wielded in a very similar way.

It does remind me somewhat of Ms. 45 too, with a lead character who lets her violent deeds speak louder than her words, though the motive there was a good deal clearer, and placed up front. The highlight is probably an early gun-battle in an almost deserted fairground, which has an eerie, suspenseful quality that’s quite effective, and it’s interesting to see a Rollin movie which does not include female vampires, a staple of his work. However, on balance, I think a few more fangs, perhaps accompanied by a less willfully-misleading title, might not have been a bad thing.

Dir: Jean Rollin
Star: Tiki Tsang, Frederique Haymann, Jean-Jacques Lefeuvre, Karine Swenson

Kill ‘Em All

  By

★★★
“Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start.”

Evil mastermind Snakehead (Liu) kidnaps eight of the world’s top assassins, and transports them to a bunker in his Bangkok lair, where he makes them fight each other to the death, laughing maniaally all the while. Why? Because he’s an evil mastermind, that’s why: it’s what they do for amusement, rather than watch reality shows or potter around in the garden. After the numbers have been whittled down, Som (Siripoing, who played the mother in Chocolate) blocks the gas system used by Snakehead to enforce discipline, and leads an escape from the killing chamber. However, Snakehead had a lot more minions who need to be defeated before she and Gabriel (Messner) finally get to the boss level.

If that plot summary is terser than usual, that’s because there is much less plot than usual, in what is not much more than a thin, if occasionally clever, contrived excuse to slap together a series of fight scenes. As such, logic doesn’t enter in to it much. For example, is there some kind of employment scheme to which evil overlords can subscribe, which provides faceless henchmen willing to go to their deaths in droves? And if so, why not just get them to fight each other for your entertainment? The motive which spurs Snakehead to spend considerable time, effort and money on his scheme – not, it eventually is revealed, for the first time – is completely opaque, and few of the assassins come over any better, with little time or effort put into their characterization. Case in point: Gabriel tries to commit suicide just before his kidnapping, but it comes out of nowhere so has absolutely no emotional impact.

No, this is all about the martial arts, and in this aspect, the film does deliver – albeit more in quantity than quality, without the level of invention seen in, say, The Raid: Redemption. The different styles on view from the participants do give a decent degree of variety, and The Kid (Man, who also did the fight choereography) showcases some impressive moves. There’s certainly no shortage of action, to the extent that this feels more like a video-game with occasional cut scenes to move the plot forward, than an action film with set-pieces of martial arts. However, while tasty enough during consumption, it still ends up being entirely unfilling, and is like a Chinese meal which leaves you hungry, 15 minutes after eating it.

Dir: Raimund Huber
Star: Ammara Siripong, Johnny Messner, Gordon Liu, Tim Man

Killer K

  By

★★★★
“Nikita meets Alias, while on vacation in South Korea”

Let’s be clear, right out of the gate. There is really not much original about this Korean mini-series, which takes huge chunks, almost wholesale from Nikita and Alias, to the extent, for example, that we perpetually referred to one character as “Amanda”, since she reminded us so much of Melinda Clarke’s character from Nikita, right down to her fashion choices. However, as long as you’re not looking for anything startling in the way of originality, this is slick yet gritty, with characters that are interesting to spend time with, and a handle on the action that’s easily the match for its equivalent in the West. Let’s start with some significant plot exposition, because there’s quite a lot of characters and story crammed into the three one-hour (or slightly more) episodes.

Spoilers Episode 1. Cha Yeon-Jim (Groo) is having a bad day – she just got expelled from school – and it’s about to get an awful lot worse. Hanging out by the docks, she and her friends get into a confrontation with some workers, only for things to be interrupted by a scripture-quoting hitman, Jang Se Wook, who shows up and starts shooting everyone, on both sides. Cha escapes, but when her friend is killed, as he tries to report what he saw to the police, she realizes she’s in deep trouble. Policeman Choi Tae Young (Baek), who was also at the scene, tries to track her down, but Jang is also after Cha. He wants her to return a flask of green liquid she took in the confusion, and kidnaps her mother to force Cha into compliance. At the handover, Mom is impaled by Jang’s sword and Cha is gunned down and left for dead.

Episode 2. Chief Min Ji Young (Park) comes on the scene, and saves Cha, faking her death. Min works for the same company as Jang, the Mirae Corp, a medical company run by Kwon Do Hwan. They are engaged in some shady experiments involving stem-cell research, and in particular the creation of artificial humans for organ harvesting, with the protection of high-up government ministers. To protect their company secrets, their division SS1 operates ruthlessly: Min recruits Cha as a new killer, not telling her Jang is simply another arm, but training her as an assassin, with the lure of eventually tracking down and taking revenge on the man who killed her mother. Cha’s initial targets are those who pose a threat to her employers, but Min has her own agenda, and when Jang has eventually proven to have outlived his usefulness, she has no compunction about turning her two killers on each other.

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Episode 3. Choi accidentally bumped into Cha in part two, under her new identity, and now teams up with Yoo Sung Ho (Kim), who used to be part of SS1, but bailed with his lover, Cha’s mother, and went into hiding – he was replaced by Chief Min. They are seeking evidence that will let them bring down Mirae and expose their human experiments. Cha wants to leave the organization, having fallen for Go Young Min, a boy at school. Min initially requests “one last hit” – so you know that’s going to work out just fine… In the process, Go sees Cha standing over the corpse of her target, holding the murder weapon, and as a result has to be terminated by Chief Min. That, and the discovery that her schoolmates have been used as guinea-pigs turns Cha against Mirae, and she links up with Choi, as Kwon prepares to reveal his latest plan. End spoilers

Phew. Plenty going on there, with enough for a full 13- or 22-episode order of most series, between all the twists, turns and revelations e.g. turns out Cha’s relationship to Chairman Kwon is rather more personal than she is aware. Given how much gets crammed in, the opening installment is a bit of a slow start. The entire first episode is more or given over to setting up the scenario, with Cha showing very little of the skills she has developed later on. She’s semi-competent in basic martial arts, which is perfectly fine when it comes to beating up fellow pupils. But we soon find out that this level of skill is far from enough, when she comes up against Jang and the other professional killers of SS1. Early on, it’s Choi who is most entertaining, portraying a dutiful and dogged cop whose superiors refuse to give him more than a gas pistol which is, similarly, pretty useless in the clutch.

 It’s the second part where things really take off, as events jump two years forward; the show takes Cha’s training largely as read, save for a quick montage. Instead, her new cold-bloodedness is amply demonstrated in the opening sequence, where we see her sniping out her target at a wedding, despite the presence of children which makes Chief Min call off the hit. It’s clear that this is a new, focused girl, with skills to match. Of course, as is standard for the genre, she still has to deal with everyday issues, since she has been sent back to school [which, conveniently, also offers a suitable tower from which to carry out missions, as can be seen above]. From there, through to her final confrontation with Cha and his minions, it’s an excellent bit of TV, one of the most intense action-heroine episodes I’ve seen in any genre, with the heroine taking obvious damage, both mentally and physically, as things proceed.

Let’s pause for breath before we hit the finale. One thing we noted was that Korean rules regarding what can be broadcast on TV are apparently a good deal laxer than in the US. This was, apparently, a late-night series, and it’s not clear if this was “over the air” or cable; there’s apparently advert breaks, but that could still make it something like FX or AMC. [Edit: CGV channel is “a movie cable channel”, so SHOtime or HBO would be closer parallels] The violence is generally crunchy and squibby, but it’s the female nudity that’s an unexpected pleas… er, particularly striking. :) There does also appear to be some confusion over the title of the show, which I’ve seen called several different variations of the letter K, as noted above. Here, I’ve gone with what appears on the intro screen in English for each episode.

We were kinda wondering where things might go in the last episode, with Cha having apparently sorted things out. Never mind: a whole new catalog of problems raise their heads, as the removal of her justification for assassination leaves her seeking a return to the normal life, one Chief Min is none too keen to offer. With its emphasis on discovering the truth about SS1 and the organization behind it, this episode reminded me of Alias after Sidney Bristow discovered. Meanwhile, dealing with boy issues was a throwback to early Buffy. However, the human experimentation thread was a fresh ingredient, and the episode didn’t pull from the darkness, with a subplot involving a Mirae whistleblower and SS1’s efforts to hush it up. Even if Cha and Min suddenly can’t hit the side of a barn in their final confrontation, the threads are satisfactorily tied up down the stretch, with an ending pilfered shamelessly from My Wife is Gangster 2, that hopefully hints at more to come down the line.

As noted, most of the content is material with which most genre aficionados will already be extremely familar, but there seems always to be room for another “faked death assassin” – Nikita alone has already led to three movies and a pair of television series. It’s the execution(s) that matter here, and this is easily the match of Western action heroine productions of late. I wouldn’t be surprised if this ends up heading over to the West in some form or other, most likely a remake, as has been the case for some many Korean, Japanese and HK movies in recent years. If so, they’ll have to do sterling work to match up with this original.

[Thanks to Hyomil for most of the pics. Killer K can be enjoyed in a subbed version online, through sites such as viki.com, albeit with a somewhat irritating sous-title commentary, which makes watching the show like sitting in the theater with a bunch of chatty teenagers. Still, better than nothing!]

Dir: Kim Jong Hyun
Star: Han Groo, Park Hyo Joo, Baek Do Bin, Kim Jung Tae
a.k.a. Girl K, Little Girl K, Killer Girl K

Kite

  By

★★★½
“Leon, if Matilda had been adopted by Stansfield, instead of Leon.”

Concerns about some content here means Kite has had a tortuous release in the West. First time out, in 1998, it was shorn basically of all explicit sexual content: given the potentially underage nature of the animated heroine, Media Blasters didn’t want to be hit with a kiddie porn charge – laughable though that may seem for a “cartoon”! – and played it very safe. Subsequent releases over the next six years restored first much, in the “Director’s Cut”, then all (“Special Edition”) the footage, but the OAV* might just work better without the sex. It’s hardly as if I finished it and thought, “Y’know, what this really needs is some sequences of the heroine getting molested.”

Because the story is interesting enough on its own. Sawa is a teenage assassin, basically mind-controlled by her foster father, Akai: he’s a cop who uses her to mete out vigilante justice to paedophiles, etc. [This is ironic given their relationship, the nature of which even the edited version makes fairly clear.] She meets a young man, Oburi, in much the same situation, and their growing relationship threatens to disrupt the status quo of everyday slaughter. And, “slaughter” is the word, since Sawa’s weapon of choice is bullets that first penetrate the victim, then explode. Cue more irony: in America, even animated teenage sexuality is entirely verboten, but teenage, paint-the-walls-blood-red carnage? Bring it on.

The action is certainly intense, well-animated and directed, though perhaps excessive. Even after falling from a building, through the road, down to the subway – then being blown up, flying back into the air and blasted through an apartment window, some BandAids are apparently all the medical attention Sawa requires. This conflicted badly with the gritty realism of the story, and I also hated the doodling sax soundtrack, which sounded like something rejected by Abel Ferrara for Driller Killer. Otherwise, though, it’s generally impressive and stylish, with a downbeat approach that is refreshing, as well as some spectacularly messy violence.

* = Original Animation Video, a common “straight to video” anime format. It’s only 50 minutes, about standard length for such things. A live-action version, directed by Jorge + Javier Aguilera, produced by Rob Cohen & Anant Singh, was announced earlier this year, but no release date has been scheduled. And No Doubt’s video for Ex-Girlfriend borrowed heavily from Kite – the bathroom assassination is re-staged, almost shot-for-shot, as this video shows.

Dir: Yasoumi Umetsu
Star (voice): Kotomi Naruse, Shingo Oyamada, Goro Shibusawa, Tatsuo Matoba

Kunoichi: Lady Ninja

  By

★★
“What?”

A combination of the seventh and eighth in the series, I believe it’s the first entry (I don’t think there’s any connection to Lady Ninja: Reflections of Darkness) to get Western distribution so far, and boy, it shows. I can only presume it makes sense if you’ve seen the preceding six, because it sure as hell doesn’t on its own. A group of seven nuns decide to take revenge for an attack on their convent by becoming ninjas, and acquiring skills like “Nipple Shock Wave”. Which is exactly what it sounds like, even if most of the actual arterial violence is carried out by their ally, a one-eyed swordsman called Yagyu Jubei (Ozawa).

It fails to make sense on a whole variety of levels. Individual scenes are barely coherent; neighbouring ones don’t connect with each other; and the overall result could be imitated by channel-surfing a series of ninja-based TV stations. Mind you, Friday the 13th Part VII would make no sense if it was your first exposure to the series, and if you’re prepared to waive your constitutional right to know what the hell is going on, there’s still moderate fun to be had here – as long as your definition of “fun” encompasses large amounts of spurty dismemberment.

The problem with the heroines is mostly their poorly-defined characters; it’s hard to tell any member of our magnificent seven apart. They look similar, dress the same, and possess few distinguishing features. Overall, I can’t say how much blame lies with the film-makers, and how much with distributors Media Blasters for skipping the first six parts; either way, this isn’t recommended any more than halfheartedly.

Dir: Hitoshi Ozawa
Star: Yuko Moriyama, Hitoshi Ozawa, Non, Momoka Saeki
a.k.a. Kunoichi ninpô chô Yagyû gaiden: Edobana jigoku-hen

The Killing Club

  By

★★★½
“Girl-power, through accidental death and penguins.”

When Jamie (Bowen) accidentally kills her unpleasant boyfriend, it seems her life is over. Luckily, the first person on the scene is Laura (Lords), a latent psychopath who seizes the chance to fulfill her lifelong ambition: killing men who treat women badly. As she says, “Ridding the world of irredeemable men is what I was born to do.” Neither Jamie nor the third initiate into their little secret, Arlene (Maxey), are quite as enthusiastic, but despite this, Laura sets to work with a vengeance, and things start spiralling out of control.

As a black comedy, this works pretty well, even if it’s more a mid-grey than true black; it tries to have its cake and still keep Jamie sympathetic. The necessary convolutions weaken things substantially, and you can’t go at the genre anything less than full-throttle. There is one glorious moment, involving penguins, which reaches the necessary level of dark absurdity; otherwise, Lords is the only one to grab onto her part and go for it with the necessary gusto. She delivers even the most banal lines, such as ordering food in a diner, with remarkable zest, though I leave readers to consider the irony inherent in a former underage porn starlet playing someone out to kill abusive men…

And, make no mistake: the men here are shallow and loathsome. I think writer Amy Kiehl (who cameos as a waitress) must have had some very bad experiences with the male sex; one character goes from his introduction, to us yelling, “Die! Die!” at the TV, to his demise in under five minutes. If why Jamie hasn’t genuinely murdered her boyfriend is never explained, a certain amount of comedic exaggeration is par for the course in this kind of film. It’s a pleasant diversion, rather than anything more or less satisfactory.

Dir: Antoni Stutz
Star: Julie Bowen, Traci Lords, Dawn Maxey, Neal McDonough
a.k.a. You’re Killing Me

Killing Time

  By

★★★½
“Probably the second-best thing to come out of Newcastle that isn’t in a bottle.”

We Brits don’t do girls-with-guns movies: too busy drinking tea and arranging matchsticks, I imagine. This is a rare exception, and works not badly, combining a striking ‘Italian’ hitwoman in Maria (Torgan), with the bone-dry sarcasm of Guy Ritchie – at least, before he started making movies starring his missus, Madonna. Maria is brought in by Newcastle cop Bryant (Fairbrass) after the local crime lord (Leach) leaves a fellow policeman nailed to Bryant’s front door. Only, Bryant can’t afford to pay her, so blackmails some local thugs, led by Charlie (Thirkeld) to kill her after she’s done the job. Needless to say, things don’t quite go as planned, and the dead bodies start to accumulate, in a most non-British way.

The least convincing aspects of this are actually the action – it seems that everyone in Newcastle has a gun, but no-one could hit a barn if they were standing inside it, and a lengthy gunfight in the main railway station attracts no attention from police or bystanders (actually, the film has no bystanders. Everyone in the movie, is in the movie…). That aside, and the tinny, synthesized soundtrack, the dialogue alone is worth your attention; it’s almost Tarantino-esque, though comes off with far less pretension But I note, with interest, the presence on the video cover of the same Trek quote used to open Kill Bill, Volume 1…and, also, the credits containing the classic Godard quote about a movies, a girl and a gun.

Fairbrass has been in some real cinematic stinkers, such as Beyond Bedlam, but this is much better, with memorable characters and situations, not to mention the same setting as the best British gangster film of all time, Get Carter. Obviously, this isn’t in the same league, but if you’re in need of…well, Killing Time, there are many worse ways to go about it. Co-writer Neil Marshall would go on to write and direct other pics reviewed here, including The Descent and Doomsday, and if you enjoyed those, track this one down too.

Dir: Bharat Nalluri
Star: Kendra Torgan, Craig Fairbrass, Nigel Leach, Stephen D. Thirkeld