Tag: l

Lust for Freedom

  By

★½
“Lust Highway”

lustforfreedomUndercover cop Gillian Kaites (Coll) needs a break from the force after an operation goes wrong, with her boyfriend and fellow cop being gunned down in front of her. She goes on a road-trip, but has the misfortune to go through a town where the local cops are in league with the prison to arrest fetching young ladies on fabricated charges. They can then be shipped off to jail and… Well, the script is kinda vague on the specific purpose behind this, clearly quite significant, operation involving a large number of people and no small effort. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, and presume the ends, whatever they may be, justify the means. Gillian ends up framed for drug possession, and has to survive against brutal guards, brutal fellow prisoners and matron Mrs. Puskar (Trevor) – in the interests of sustaining suspense, I will avoid revealing whether or not she is brutal. Eventually, the brutality on display becomes too much, and she leads the inmates in a revolt against their cruel captors. In other words: women in prison plot 3A.

It’s not a genre which naturally is at home here: whether it qualifies, depends on the approach taken with the heroine as much as anything. How pro-active and action-oriented is she? It’s really a judgment call, but in this case, Coll is physical enough to qualify, and there are a couple of other elements that just about push this into the fringes of our territory. Most obviously, is the lengthy pro-style wrestling match between two inmates, at the behest of Puskar. It’s notable, because one of the participants is actual pro wrestler Dee ‘Queen Kong’ Booher, who was part of the GLOW franchiseas ‘Matilda the Hun’ (a name shamelessly stolen from Death Race 2000), and at 6’4″, certainly deserves the name. Kaites also professes to possess some close-combat abilities, befitting her role as a cop – which she, curiously, never mentions during her incarceration – and uses these to defend herself.

The downside is, this isn’t very good in most aspects, ranging from the overuse of voice-over, clearly as a penny-pinching tactic to avoid the rigours of sync sound recording, through a godawful soundtrack consisting largely of two songs by eighties hair-metal band Grim Reaper (in the film’s defense, it actually was the eighties), to the performance of the lead. This is Coll’s only credit ever, according to the IMDB, and you can understand why. Compared to, say, the Female Convict Scorpion films which were my last dip into the field, it’s positively chaste, outside of a lesbian scene between scream queen Michelle Bauer and porn starlet Summer Breeze. So you have something which is neither tongue in cheek, nor excessive, nor well-acted or filmed. Kinda hard to work out what the point actually is. Great poster though…

Dir: Eric Louzil
Star: Melanie Coll, William J. Kulzer, Judi Trevor, Elizabeth Carlisle

Lucy

  By

lucy1★★★
“NOW there is a god…”

Besson has been making action heroine movies for almost a quarter-century, going back to Nikita, which remains one of the most iconic and influential genre entries. The Messenger and Angel-A are the most obvious members of his filmography, but even when they’re not strictly in our wheelhouse, they often contain those aspects, e.g. The Fifth Element or Leon. The prospect of him returning to the field was an exciting one, but the end result doesn’t quite live up to what I’d hoped. And that’s discounting the fact, trotted out by a lot of lazy critics, that the entire film is based on a shaky premise – the whole “we only use ten percent of our brains” things is pure myth. I have no real issues with that. There’s no evidence for the galaxy having guardians either, and the same premise was an integral part of Defending Your Life, currently 96% fresh at Rotten Tomatoes.

lucy4No, my main issue is a failure to unleash the potential of the idea (rather than the human brain). The initial set-up is interesting and slick. Lucy (Johansson) is trapped into acting as a drug mule for a Korean mob-boss (Choi), but the package inserted into her stomach is breached, causing the contents to leak into her bloodstream, and triggering the gradual activation of the remaining 90% of her brain. Initially, she becomes self-aware, but her skills then increase exponentially, first to manipulating her environment, then the very fabric of time and space itself, before she vanishes entirely from our world. Freeman plays Professor Exposition Samuel Norman, whom Lucy contacts to… Well, I’m not really sure exactly why. Something about him being the guardian of the knowledge she acquires as her mind expands. Waked plays a French cop, who helps her get the entire global supply of the drug, needed for her to reach 100%. We get a literal score of her progression in this department, tabulated on screen between scenes.

I think this would have benefited from a more measured approach, rather than a headlong rush toward Lucy’s divinity: the journey is more fun than the destination. There’s a certain point here, perhaps half-way through, where she becomes entirely invincible, and that’s where this turns into an intellectual exercise, because no-one – least of all a bunch of Korean gangsters – is a credible threat any more. I would have had Lucy get a little taste of the drug, then spend most of the film exploring what life is like as a super-enhanced bad-ass, using her talents to acquire more of the drug. Perhaps have the film end as she cranks the proceeds into her veins, and only then quickly go all 2001 on the audience, as Besson does at much greater length here. That’s closer to what I was expecting, and may be the result of  publicity that seemed to set this up as an action flick with existentialist aspirations, when it’s really an existentialist flick with action aspirations.

lucy3While I’d have enjoyed the former more, there are no shortage of aspects to admire. Besson’s films are generally a lot of fun, and this delivers the level of visual style and polish we’ve come to expect from all his works, both directed and produced – the car-chase is particularly Bessonesque. Johansson is also good in the role, though Freeman seems faintly embarrassed to be there, as if he should instead be off narrating another Science Channel documentary. Credit is due too, for making an action movie which is not only R-rated, but with a heroine, a combination which has been a difficult sell in the past e.g. Haywire. Lucy has arguably become the first such to pass $100 million at the US box-office, depending on how you view T2, and I’m more than happy to see it succeed, even if any sequel resulting from its profitability is going to be answering some difficult questions!

Watching this, I was left with a frequent urge to yell the line at the top of the review, which is taken from a famous SF short-short story by Frederic Brown, about the perils of unfettered technology and artificially constructed deities. Lucy is the human equivalent, though according to Besson, “A simplified summary, which will conjure up the images in as few words as possible,” was that “The beginning is Leon: The Professional. The middle is Inception. The end is 2001: A Space Odyssey.” This overview probably explains why my entertainment level diminished as things went on, because I love Leon and regard 2001 as one of the most over-rated pieces of tripe in cinema history, containing spectacular visuals, but little or no heart. That’s what Lucy is sadly missing: you can see Johansson deliberately dialing back her humanity, the higher her percentage of brain function becomes. It makes sense, but you’re left with little reason to empathize with her; it’s like nothing so much as watching Superman being super, and there is no kryptonite in sight here to bring her back to the level of the audience.

Re-reading the above, it seems perhaps unnecessarily harsh. Make no mistake, this was a fun ride, and I was never bored. It may be a case of managing expectations here: if you’re happy with a film which builds to having the heroine sit on a chair for 20 minutes, before going all Neo on us for a finale, then this will be fine. But given Besson’s pedigree, combined with a trailer which made this seem more like the Black Widow film we’ve been promised than anything, I was anticipating something rather different. It’s not often I criticize a film for being too much brains and not enough brawn, yet this might be one such case.

Dir: Luc Besson
Star: Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Amr Waked, Choi Min-sik

lucy5

Legend of the Poisonous Seductress: Female Demon Ohyaku

  By

★★★
“I’ll no longer be a man’s toy, even if it kills me. I’d like to kill all men who abuse women with power and money.”

female-demon-ohyakuWell, you can’t argue with a title like that, can you? This proto-pinky violence film has many of the elements later developed more fully: a wronged woman is sent to prison, only to escape and seek retribution on those responsible for putting her there. In this case, it’s a period setting with part-time circus performer, part-time prostitute Ohyaku Dayu (Miyazono) finally getting the courage to break away from her sordid lifestyle, with the help of honourable thief Shinkuro (Murai). He’s planning a raid on the local mint, to steal the raw gold they use, and punish corrupt local officials.

However, a treacherous colleague betrays them, for a bureaucratic promotion, and Ohyaku is sent to prison – and, not even a women’s prison. It’s a men’s prison, that doubles as a gold mine. Fortunately, she falls under the protection of Bunzo the Iron Barbarian, which keeps her safe until she can work her wiles on the warden and his bisexual wife (Mishima), the latter of whom is obsessed with getting to tattoo Ohyaku, Our heroine chooses the Hannya demon as the subject – for good reason, as she eventually escapes jail to set about her revenge, and also complete Shinkuro’s raid.

The first and last third of this are truly effective, doing an excellent job of setting up the characters and resolving all the plot threads respectively. You can’t help but empathize with Ohyaku, her predicament and the steely resolve, maintained through some extreme tribulations, to take revenge for her lover – who is nicely drawn as well, Murai coming over as both charismatic and moral, despite his chosen profession. However, it sags badly in the middle third, from her arrival at the prison until her escape; it’s a section which either should have been shortened considerably, or needed more to happen.

Despite being made as late as 1968, it’s shot in black-and-white, which gives it a retro feel. It’s certainly a lot tamer, particularly in terms of nudity, than the technicolor tidal-wave that would be unleashed a couple of years later. Still, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, enhancing the impact of things like a trickle of blood down Ohyaka’s forehead. Some of the torture on view is certainly imaginative, such as being hung by the neck, with your feet just touching a metal plate enough to stop you from strangling. Then a fire is lit under the plate… Damn. Also of interest, the presence of the legendary Tomisaburô Wakayama, best known as the hero of the Lone Wolf and Cub series (a.k.a. Shogun Assassin), as a sympathetic gang boss.

The first in an apparent trilogy, this manages to overcome the weak middle section and leave me interested in following Ohyaku’s subsequent adventures. Miyazono may not have the impact possessed by some of other other pinky violence stars, yet the better-than-average script helps balance that out, and this has stood the test of time better than many of its era.

Dir: Yoshihiro Ishikawa
Star: Junko Miyazono, Kunio Murai, Koji Nanbara, Yuriko Mishima

Loves Her Gun

  By

★
“A cautionary tale. And you’re cautioned not to watch this movie.”

lovehergunPerhaps surprisingly, given the nature of this page, I’m not inherently averse to the idea of gun control. I lived in Britain until I was in my thirties, which seems to work fairly well without the whole “right to bear arms” thing. It probably made sense in 1776, but certainly wouldn’t be high on my to-do list if I was writing the constitution now. However, I now live in a country with 300 million guns or so, and I’m pragmatic enough to accept that the genie is out of the bottle here: any attempt to impose it at this point, would only impact law-abiding citizen and weaken their ability to defend themselves against criminals who would still have their weapons. Gun control works – but only if you already have it. Anyway, I mention all this to establish that I’m not averse to a movie which makes a well-reasoned argument against guns. Unfortunately, this is about as far from well-reasoned as imaginable. The facile scaremongering here leaves this mild-mannered Brit, who has touched a gun once in his life, with a strong wish for the makers of this, some day, to find themselves in need of some well-armed help.

Walking back to her Brooklyn apartment, Allie (Dunn) is the victim of a swift but brutal mugging. It’s the last straw for her, and she bails out of the city the next day, hitching a ride to Texas with a touring rock band and its “charismatic” leader, Clark (Barrero). She stays in his house, and gets a job working alongside local landscaper Sarah (Bisagni), but it unable to shake the PTSD caused by the attack. Sarah introduces Allie to the joy of firearms, eventually leading to her purchasing her own weapon for personal defense. However, the presence of the gun turns Allie into a raging Charles Bronson, as we see when she charges into a local domestic dispute, all a-firearmy. From here, it’s painfully if illogically obvious where this is going to end up. Oh, look: Allie getting her hands on a gun turns out to be A Bad Idea, in an incident a third-grade English teacher would mark down as poorly considered. This is my unsurprised face.

The end credits proudly proclaim that the dialogue was largely improvised, which might be okay, if it didn’t seem they also made the story up as they went along too. There are a number of interesting ways this could have gone. Unfortunately, the film chooses none of them, preferring to drive a path through Austin’s hipster scene, populated by “wacky” people, apparently expelled from Portland for being too smug and self-centred. Marslett seems more interested in them than his lead and her story – Dunn is actually not bad in the role, her character at least not leaving me with violent urges. So, we get lengthy, pointless scenes of a tubing trip down the river, or a party where people write their hopes and dreams on pieces of paper, stuff them into a Yoda piñata and sets fire to it. Very deep. Perhaps worst of all, Clark’s band, The Karate Kids, perform behind mannequins posed into the crane-kick move from the film. Was that idea improvised as well? Because I can’t think of any other explanation for it being such complete shit. Hang on: turns out it’s the director’s band. Explains a lot…

So much of the running-time here is completely wasted on these self-indulgent excuses for film-making, of interest only to Marslett and his cronies in Austin’s scene. The net result, is that Allie’s transformation from scaredy-cat into vengeful vigilante is so fast as to be utterly implausible. They needed to establish the more problematic side of her personality earlier, rather than making it seem as if purchasing a gun immediately causes psychosis since that’s what guns do. There’s a brief spell, where Allie is taken shooting by Sarah, that does catch fire, capturing something of the awe-inspiring power firing a gun can create, but it’s soon forgotten – because we have to go to the Yoda party! Even to a neutral in the debate like myself, this is a facile and simplistic approach to a subject which deserves a far more complex exploration, from people who aren’t fascinated by an aimless, slacker lifestyle that’s entirely uninteresting or noteworthy.

Dir: Geoff Marslett
Star: Trieste Kelly Dunn, Francisco Barreiro, Melissa Hideko Bisagni, Ashley Rae Spillers

Lady Punisher

  By

★★
“Lan, our relation is abnormal.”

lady punisherThis obscurist Hong Kong revenge flick is a little different, mainly because the couple at the heart of the film are lesbians. Admittedly, this is largely for crass, exploitative purposes: the dialogue quoted above, pretty much confirms the makers want to tut-tut disapprovingly at the love that dare not speak its name, while simultaneously depicting it in salacious detail. Such is the nature of Cat III in the mid-90’s, this seems to want to be something like Naked Killer, released two years earlier to this in 1992, but just doesn’t have the desire to go for the full delirious insanity, necessary to pull the concept off. Particularly in the middle section, it drags horribly, with the story diverting off into the usual triad drug-smuggling, betrayal and cop investigations that we’ve seen a million times before.

Quite what our heroine (Yi – some sources call the actress Tsui Man Wah, who may or may not be the same person!) is doing during this time isn’t clear. She initially seems all gung-ho for it, after her girlfriend is raped and murdered during a holiday in Thailand, and even takes out a pimp, whom she sees smacking around one of his employees. But then, she seems to forget all about her vengeance, until one of the perps comes strolling into the dress shop she runs – looking to make a bulk purchase, bizarrely. She lures him back to her apartment with the promise of dressmaking tips or something (okay, it’s more the something), and kills him. To help with the rest of the gang, she enlists the services of a female neighbour, who has been courting her with flowers, creepy phone messages and generally behaving more like a problem than a solution. But, whatever. This is a Cat III movie, and people exercising common sense is not something to expect. Especially where lesbians are concerned.

Down the stretch, this does finally manage to generate some energy, with a final confrontation which is not unimpressive. However, it’s definitely a case of too little, too late, and this is one of those “forgotten films,” where you can understand exactly why it ended up on the discard pile. I’m in agreement with history on this one.

Dir: Tony Liu
Star: Sophia Yi, Tommy Wong, Gong Hiu-Hung, Shing Fui-On

Lady Street Fighter

  By

½
“Legitimately terrible, among the worst films I’ve ever seen.”

lady_street_fighterLet me start off by repeating myself, in case you missed it, because I want to be absolutely clear on these points. This is legitimately terrible. This is among the worst films I’ve ever seen. And I speak as someone with over 25 years of watching really bad films. That half-star is solely for amusement to be gathered from how bad this is, because there are basically no redeeming features here at all, and I speak as someone who will tolerate almost any pile of shit with an action heroine in it. This movie is largely responsible for the addition of the word “almost” to the previous sentence, despite being mercifully brief at a mere 72 minutes in length. The half-star is simply because I did reach the end without gnawing a limb off to escape. I think I deserve some kind of Internet prize for that.

The problems start with the lead actress, Harmon, who is barely intelligible in English, to the extent that in her conversations, you largely have to listen to whoever she’s speaking to, and try to figure out what she said from their responses. Her acting talents are almost non-existent. but are probably better than her martial arts skills, which… just aren’t. Gives mean celery fellatio, however. Trust me, you don’t want to know. She plays Linda Allen, flies into the movie to investigate the death of her sister, apparently killed by the villains because she had a stuffed toy containing incriminating information. Ok, let’s pause here for a disclaimer. Please take the word “apparently” as read for the rest of the review, because this film does such a godawful job of explaining things, I’m not prepared to vouch for the accuracy of any plot point. I’m not even sure from which decade this dates. The IMDb says 1985, but the fashions are pure seventies, and judging by the near-sampling, the soundtrack was written when The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was still in theaters.

Allen is in trouble almost as soon as she arrives, with someone trying to stop her, though their efforts to silence her are woefully inept. There’s FBI agent Rick Pollard (McCrea), who may be undercover, may be crooked, and has thing for our heroine; John Verdes, who runs an escort agency; and Max Diamond, who is into drugs as well as “harder things,” (specifically, has an assassin for hire business), and has a foot fetish which would make Quentin Tarantino snort derisively. He holds parties which are the height of 60’s/70’s/80’s/whatever decadence – except for the guys incessantly chanting “Toga! Toga! Toga!”, who appeared to be on loan from Delta Tau Chi. It’s kinda hypnotic, in a “passing a multiple pile-up” kinda way; you find yourself guiltily wondering what horrors will be present around the next bend. The same goes for most of the film as it evolves, and Linda makes her way up the chain to find the truth about her sister’s death, with the help or otherwise of Pollard – it appears she particularly needs help, when clambering over any barrier above knee-high.

Awful on every conceivable level, I was unsurprised to discover the director was also responsible for one of the worst horror movies of all time, Don’t Go in the Woods and also, The Executioner Part II, which likely rivals this one for title of worst action film of all time. Such a broad scope of diverse talent can only be admired. If you can admire it from a distance, without actually having to watch any of his work, so much the better.

Dir: James Bryan
Star: Renee Harmon, Joel D. McCrea

Little Rita of the West

  By

★★½
“Killing off the Western musical, almost a decade before Paint Your Wagon.”

I came into this almost entirely blind, watching it based on the title and the first three minutes off YouTube. You can understand my surprise, after Rita (Pavone) and her German sidekick (Dalla) take out a gang of stagecoach robbers, finishing off by gunning one down in the back, as he lies dazed on the ground, when they… burst into song? Yep, what I didn’t know was, this is actually a musical, designed around the talents of Ms. Pavone, who was apparently a huge pop-star in Italy in the sixties. Hence the songs. Okay, that makes a bit more sense. But it’s still an extremely odd beast, swinging from obvious spoof to apparent seriousness at the drop of a catchy tune.

The plot has Rita “liberating” gold from various bad guys, in conjunction with her Indian chief partner (Mitchell), with the intention of destroying it, believing it’s the root of all evil. That brings her into conflict with “Ringo” – sharing the same of a popular spaghetti Western character, but really a thinly-disguised Man With No Name – and “Django,” a not-at-all disguised copy of that iconic character, down to him dragging a coffin containing a machine-gun, and possessing broken hands. But she then meets and falls for another outlaw, Black Stan (Hill), who ends up sentenced to death after he tries to run off with Rita’s stash of gold awaiting destruction.

Much of this clearly isn’t intended to be serious, such as Rita’s rocket-propelled grenades which clip on to her gun, the local sheriff (Pavone’s husband and manager Teddy Reno) who’d rather be a lumberjack hairdresser, and the frequent references to “frontier humour,” whenever anyone makes a bad joke. But the confrontations with Ringo and Django are played more or less straight, and Little Rita (who is indeed little, at barely 4’10”) is actually made to look something of a bad-ass, punching above her weight. There are actually some genuinely impressive bits of satire, too, such as one victim asking to die “American style,” which means he gets to tell his life-story before the final breath, unlike “Indians and Japs.” The finale, too, needs to be seen to be believed, and is an absurdist breaking of the fourth wall.

However, for every smart and witty moment, there are probably two really stupid ones, while most of the performances would get their actors fired from Benny Hill for excessive comedic mugging. And the songs don’t help: I’m not averse to the concept (I’m a big My Fair Lady fan, and we’ve also seen enough Bollywood films to be able to cope with sudden jumps into musical numbers), but these are damn near irredeemably-awful. The result often finds its way into lists of the worst spaghetti Westerns ever made: if I can certainly see why, I’ll confess I was generally entertained, if only by the sheer “WTF?”-ness of proceedings. It’s more or less unlike any other GWG film you will ever see, and I’ve not seen any other spaghetti Westerns with a female lead either: for such originality alone, I can’t condemn it entirely.

Dir: Ferdinando Baldi
Star: Rita Pavone, Lucio Dalla, Terence Hill, Gordon Mitchell
a.k.a. Crazy Westerners

Libertarias

  By

★★
“More like sitting through an earnest lecture in Politics 1.0.1, at a college of dubious merit. “

Like most civil wars, the Spanish one was a nasty, brutal affair that split families as well as the nation. Not that you’d know it from this, which suggests the citizens were entirely behind the anarchist forces: odd how the opposing Fascist forces not only prevailed, but then held power for close to 40 years. You don’t do that without significant popular support. Putting that aside (for the moment), this is the story of Maria (Gil), a young nun ‘liberated’ from her convent as the Civil War gets under way, amid a wave of anti-religious fervour. Initially just trying to get home to Zaragosa, she’s escorted by militant militia woman Pilar (Belen), and eventually decides to join their female fighting force and take up arms against the Fascists. That puts them at odds not just with the men in charge, but many of their own sex, who would rather see them doing laundry and providing ancilliary support, rather than in the front lines.

Actually, I can see from this why they lost, because this comes across as a bunch of idealistic anarchists, playing at soldiers, and going up against the real thing. The results were hardly surprising (and I also note the hypocrisy on view, in a society which professes the equality of men and women, while actively discriminating against the latter). It’s not an area of history with which I’m all that familiar, and the lead actresses did a good job with what were really paper-thin characters – oh, look, it’s a prostitute with a heart of gold. When it sticks to the central group, it’s a lot more successful than when it tries to broaden things out, for example by the inclusion of a former priest with the hots for Maria. It’s also way too heavy-handed with the politics and political symbolism, and the final section, while certainly an effective illustration of the brutality present in armed conflict, comes out of nowhere and jars badly with the tone set by the rest of the film.

There are a few moments which do stand out, such as Maria lecturing the Fascist troops with Anarchist propaganda through a megaphone – that goes about as well as you’d expect. But the bulk of its over two-hour running time is a chore, with a story that feels built around and forced into making its political points, and is only loosely masquerading as entertainment.

Dir: Vicente Aranda
Star: Ariadna Gil, Ana Belen, Victoria Abril, Blanca Apilanez

Last Man Standing

  By

★★½
“Competently bland, as usual with Lifetime. “

Kinda odd to see Dickerson – cinematographer on a lot of Spike Lee’s movies, and Eddie Murphy’s Raw – directing this Lifetime original movie. It’s certainly not edgy, though that’s not what Lifetime is exactly about. You largely know what you’re going to get with their output. Something technically decent, usually with decent enough performances, but something that clings to the viewer’s comfort zone like a limpet. Is it wrong to criticize the channel for that, when it has absolutely no interest in pushing the envelope? It’d be a bit like coming down on Disney for making kids movies. It’s what they do: deal with it.

The heroine here is Abby Collins (Bell), a former soldier and technician who is now a soccer Mom with a veterinarian husband (Hall) and cute-as-a-button daughter. But, inevitably, dark forces loom, when she gets word a former army colleague has apparently committed suicide. Before she knows what has happened, her spouse has been kidnapped and someone is using that to force Abby to break into her colleague’s office and do some shady financial transactions. It’s up to her and another ex-soldier. Jeremy Davis (Phifer), to figure out what’s going on, the connection to her past, and rescue Mr. Collins: it’ll take all of Abby’s skills, both electronic and technical, before the “shocking” truth is revealed.

Quotes used advisedly, because I’d recommend a trip to the optician’s, if you can’t see the twist in the script (co-written by Bell’s husband I note) before it shows. There are other glitches in the story, such as the semi-cheating way in which Abby’s past is hidden from the audience for much of film. However, if you can forgive the utter predictability of it all, and the lack of discernible flavour, there are worse ways to pass an hour and a half. It’s a difficult task for any actress, managing to be convincing both as a home-maker and and an ass-kicker: Bell does a decent task on both, though the stunt-doubling for action purposes is often less than subtle. Compared to some of the stuff aired by Lifetime, this is by no means all that bad, though you don’t have to look far to find its flaws.

Dir: Ernest Dickerson
Star: Catherine Bell, Anthony Michael Hall, Mekhi Phifer, Ella Anderson

The Last Rites of Ransom Pride

  By

★★★
“Well, at least it’s different…”

Though nominally a Western, this perhaps has more in common with the surreal works of Alejandro Jodorowsky, in particular El Topo, with mystical elements and downright weirdness. Ransom Pride (Scott Speedman, from the Underworld series) is killed in a gun-battle while trying to broker an arms deal with the locals. His corpse is kept by the local bruja, or witch (de Pablo), because her brother also died in the fight, shot by Ransom. That doesn’t sit well with his lover, Juliette (Caplan), a half-breed who has been raised in blood since slitting the throat of the Mexican general who killed her parents, while still not yet a teenager. She returns to Ransom’s home, and recruits his brother (Foster) to help recover the body, on the way back to Mexico, meeting a bevy of strange characters and situations. Their mission doesn’t sit well with the Pride patriarch (Yoakam), a gun-fighter turned preacher, who sets loose a pair of hunters, but is prepared to get his own hands dirty in pursuit of that “whore of Babylon.”

In terms of visual style, it seems almost as if the appeoach was to try and irritate the hell out of the viewer, with frequent interruptions of scenes with a few frames takes from other sequences, past or yet to come. It certainly keeps the audience on their toes, but is both overused and outstays its welcome. That’s a shame, as there are other elements worthy of credit, not least the overall look, which has a bleached tone that is quite effective. Caplan is undeniably impressive, as is de Pablo – both come over as women with whom you do not want to mess. That’s impressive given both are probably best known previously, for fairly bland TV fare. Here, they are genuinely disturbing, and it’s a mix of the generally decent performances, and weird sense that anything could happen, that kept me watching.

On the downside, as well as the opaque visual sense, the audio is not infrequently as muddied as the picture, though it’s harder to say whether or not it was deliberately so. The script also has a tendency to drift off into areas that are probably not necessary – there’s too much backstory involving Ransom and his brother, when the film should instead have been moving forward. Finally, the editing during the action scenes is disappointing fractured, to the extent that you largely have to wait for the dust to settle and see who’s still alive. The negatives and positives end up just about balancing, and the end result is something that you don’t mind watching, yet will likely not have much interest in seeing again.

Dir: Tiller Russell
Star: Lizzy Caplan, Jon Foster, Cote de Pablo, Dwight Yoakam