Tag: l

License to Steal

  By

★★★★½
“Thieves Like Us.”

This is an largely over-looked gem, featuring the future Mrs. Samo Hung (Godenzi – they married in 1995) in a role and performance which are so excellent, as to make you wonder why she apparently quit the cinema the following year [though she does have a cameo in Mr. Nice Guy, appearing in the cooking show audience]. She first came to attention in Eastern Condors and, despite a lack of training, developed a graceful, fluid style of action that works well. Her best known vehicle is She Shoots Straight, but for my money, this is even better.

She plays Hung, one of three sisters who are the business end of a family of thieves. Their guardian decides to pass the clan on to Hung, but another sister, Ngan (Aurelio, also from She Shoots Straight) wants control – she fixes a job so that Hung is captured, then takes over operations, using brute force and murder rather than skill and agility on their robberies. Three years later, Hung’s sentence is ended, but her sister immediately frames her again: to avoid jail, Hung agrees to co-operate with the police and work towards capturing her sister. She discovers Ngan has been hired to steal Napoleon’s death-mask, and the film climaxes with the two sisters battling each other inside the warehouse where the treasure is guarded.

This is almost two plots for the price of one, as on the police side, you have the investigating cop (Ng), who has to keep an eye both on his new partner (Ngai Sing) and a swordplay-novel obsessed nephew (Yuen Biao), who both want to help, but together are as much a distraction as an assistance. This lends itself to the usual goofy and unsubtle HK comedy – for example, Ng stripping to his boxers after believing there’s a bomb hidden in them – though these aspects don’t grate nearly as badly as I’ve seen elsewhere. There are also a bunch of cool moments to the plot which are probably unnecessary, in the larger scheme of things, but are thoroughly satisfying, and suggest someone actually thought the script out, again something not always the case in HK action cinema.

Godenzi is great, putting over a great combination of coolness and charisma, with a confident attitude that’s wholly justified. It’s established in the first scene that she knows how to push her sister’s buttons, and this comes back into play right at the end. Aurelio, a Filipina powerlifting champion, is a little less adept at acting, but is well-cast as the villainess, with a good sneer. There’s one amazing, politically-incorrect exchange between the characters, when they meet for the first time after Hung’s release from jail. Ngan sneers, “You look plump,” to which Hung replies, “Better than you, with sunburn like a nigger!” Ah, the 1990’s…

But this one is less about offensive banter, than action scenes which are top-notch, from the opening practice duel between the sisters, through to the final battle – this time for real. It’s particularly inventive as, early on, the sisters have to fight each other without making a sound, to avoid alerting the guards The highlight is, however, probably an amazing fight in a car-park – one of the top locations for mayhem in HK films, right up there with restaurants and warehouses – where everyone bar Aurelio gets involved. Her role as top villain there is delegated to Billy Chow, who went toe-to-toe with Jet Li in Fist of Legend, and he’s one hell of a formidable opponent. The action choreography is credited to Lee King-chu, but I suspect producer Samo Hung had more than a little involvement.

There is little or no depth here, only really what Godenzi brings to the table. But there is, equally, little or no intent of depth either: this was created purely as entertainment, nothing more, and on that level it succeeds admirably. It’s a real shame Godenzi chose not to follow a career as an action actress since, on this showing, she could well have ended up as big a star in the field as Michelle Yeoh.

[A note on spelling. The sleeve says ‘LicenCe’, but the print goes with the S. The former is also grammatically inaccurate, so I’ve gone with the S spelling throughout this article.]

Dir: Billy Chan
Stars: Joyce Godenzi, Agnes Aurelio, Richard Ng, Alvina Kong

Lady Jayne Killer

  By

★★★
“Unquestionably flawed but cheesily energetic fluff.”

Memo to self: don’t tell your wife the star of a film was in Playboy. Chris’s interest, already somewhat on thin ice, evaporated entirely, pretty much the moment I made that mistake, and I almost had to handcuff her to the bed to prevent a sudden trip to the supermarket. The concept here is kinda cool: Mom Emily (Eleniak) vs. anti-Mom Jayne (du Page). The latter is a hitwoman for the Mob, with 20 kills to her credit when she decides to abscond with a million in cash. She ends up hitching a ride beside Emily and her 16-year old son Kerry (Lelliot) on their way to San Antonio, with the former owners of the money in hot pursuit. And the cops. And the FBI. Then Kerry – when not fantasizing about Eleniak in the shower [cue Chris’s neo-departure!] – decides to solves Mom’s financial problems with thievery of his own.

I certainly don’t blame them for changing the title from the amazingly bland original – though suspect a colon got lost somewhere on route… And this is contrived: with a cellphone, and more than enough ready cash, Jayne could easily hire a limo – or even take a cab to San Antonio. So why use Emily – then hang around, even after their car breaks down? That sound you hear is the film whistling loudly and putting its fingers in its ears. And despite a strict and straight-laced parent, underage Kerry still sports a Superman tattoo on his arm. This kind of sloppy attention to production detail damages a film which is sometimes smarter than it may appear.

For instance, Emily’s line that her son is knows about every woman who has appeared in Playboy is nicely self-aware, given Eleniak’s familiarity with the staples therein. :-) But she stays dressed here, leaving the lingerie to Du Page, and Kerry’s interaction with the babe dropped into his life are amusing – hey, in his shoes and at his age, I’d be a gibbering fool too. The plot twists its way, albeit predictably, towards the final battle between Mom and anti-Mom. As a time-passer, I found it by no means awful: while it’d have been nice if Emily had snarled “Get away from him, you bitch,” when she found Jayne holding a gun to Kerry’s head, I guess you can’t have everything.

Dir: Mark L. Lester
Star: Erika Eleniak, Julie du Page, Jeremy Lelliot, James Remar
a.k.a. Betrayal

The Last Man on Planet Earth

  By

★★★½
“After World War III, there will be no more long queues for the restroom.”

You’ve got to admire any film – particularly a TV movie – that provokes diverse reviews. This, then, not only “was obviously written and made to appeal to a lesbian slumber party,” it’s also a “manifestation of heterosexual panic.” Such even-handedness can only be applauded. Of course, as usual, the truth falls somewhere in the middle. After an errant bioweapon kills almost all the male population off during WW3, the survivors decide that for humanity to survive, the “man” must be taken out, and use cloning techniques to end male childbirth. However, renegade scientist Hope Chase (Bowen) creates one (Francis) without those nasty violent tendencies. But when he escapes and finds his way to Washington, the authorities, led by FBI Agent Hastings (Tomita), are ordered to hunt him down, as a threat to the new world order.

There are some painful clunkers here: calling the man “Adam”, dodgy model FX, and an ending that, far from the “shocking climax” promised by the sleeve, was correctly (and in detail!) guessed by Chris with half an hour to go. It would also benefit from more thought beyond the obvious: what about Earth outside the US? And what would such a world really be like? [Here, it’s almost unchanged – I suspect for budgetary reasons] But if it only has half a brain, that’s still more than most TVMs manage, and bonus points are due for predicting both terrorism on American soil and war in Afghanistan – and this back in 1999, when most people thought Al Qaeda was the guy running the local 7-11.

Tamlyn Tomita comes out best as the FBI agent; she gets nice lines like, “I bet you’re one of those closet heteros, aren’t you?” and manages to avoid the usual stereotypes – or, at least, twist them in interesting ways. Bowen is less effective, but DeYoung is entertaining as the scruffy rebel, ranting against the “Lesbian Conspiracy” that has sent the male sex packing. Overall, this isn’t great SF, or great TV, but it’s edgier than I expected – and as the opening reviews suggest, is likely to peeve both the politically correct and incorrect about equally.

Dir: Les Landau
Star: Julie Bowen, Paul Francis, Tamlyn Tomita, Cliff DeYoung

The Lost Angel

  By

★★
“If Dirty Harry had a daughter…with issues.”

The daughter of Clint does her best in this police thriller but, despite one decent twist, and a couple of half-decent scenes, this collapses under the weight of too familiar a storyline and some rampant overacting. Inspector Billie Palmer (Eastwood) is assigned to catch a killer who has promised a victim a day for 20 days, and is living up to their promise. Events centre around a local deaf priest (Rhys-Davies), but she also must deal with a disgruntled suspect whom she shot, a traumatic incident in her past, and a suspiciously knowledgeable informant. Oh, and a laughably gratuitous sex scene that appears out of nowhere, 80 minutes in.

It’s as if the film-makers didn’t believe any single thread would hold our interest, and decided instead to shovel them on without real logic – hey, if you don’t like this plot, don’t worry, there’ll be another one along in a minute. Which is a shame, since a couple of the ideas have potential, and if better developed, could have made for a decent movie. However, there’s no way any police officer, special crimes or not, would get away with behaving the way Palmer does; in particular, her method of interrogating Goth red herring, C.Thomas Howell (chewing every bit of scenery within reach), is not in the manual, except perhaps at Club Lapdance.

Despite this, ah, no-nonsense approach, which extends to most aspects of her detective work, there’s a reason this one has been sitting on the shelf for the past couple of years. Eastwood does have some of her father’s presence, but needs to make a significantly better choice of material if she is to reach the same level of stardom.

[This film was released by MTI on DVD, April 26th – for more details, visit their website]

Dir: Dimitri Logothetis
Star: Alison Eastwood, Nickolas Celozzi II, Judd Nelson, John Rhys-Davies

Lipstick & Dynamite

  By

★★★★
“Lives up to its subtitle: The First Ladies of Wrestling”

I first heard about this film last spring, at the Cauliflower Alley Club convention in Las Vegas, a get-together for retired wrestlers and their fans. Two attendees, Banner and Martinez, talked about their part in the film, and we were immediately intrigued; a year later, I’m pleased to say this largely lives up to expectations. It takes you back to a time before pro wrestling was synonymous with the WWE, and the characters here are fabulous. They’re led by Gillem, now in her 80’s, occasionally difficult to understand (they subtitle her comments) but with a life that went from the ring to lion-taming. She’s merely one example, and the results are fascinating.

That’s not to say this is perfect film-making. There’s too little structure – a vague thread about an upcoming reunion is about all – and the film jumps about in history with little apparent purpose. There’s a vaguely misanthropic bent too, in that almost all men are rapists, abusive fathers or cheating husbands; it’d also have been nice to have the women wrestlers better located, culturally, in the era of which they were part. We get some priceless What’s My Line? footage, and we’d love to have seen more of this. Instead, it’s mostly talking-heads, and no matter how interesting, this eventually gets old . Much of the actual footage of bouts comes off the Wrestling Women USA DVD from Something Weird, and there’s also chunks from Pin Down Girl, neither of which are memorable.

But in the end, the subject is an inspired choice, and the film certainly does the topic justice. You’re left with profound respect for ladies who went against the mores of popular society and stepped into the ring, often sacrificing their health – and in one case, their life – for our entertainment. This documentary is a fitting tribute to these marvellous women.

Dir: Ruth Leitman
Star: Gladys Gillem, The Fabulous Moolah, Ida May Martinez, Penny Banner

Lady Terminator

  By

★★★
“She came from the past, to destroy your future. Or something like that.”

Watching the unstoppable female killing machine in this 1988 Indonesian film might make Terminator 3 seem less original – except most of the concept here, as well as entire scenes and exact lines of dialogue, come directly from the original Terminator. There are admittedly twists, such as the incorporation of local folklore figure, the Queen of the South Seas. She gets miffed at her lover, and vows vengeance on his descendants. A century later, a scuba-diving anthropologist (who reminds us with lines like, “I’m not a lady, I’m an anthropologist”), gets possessed, and goes after a great-granddaughter (Rademaker).

However, it’s amazing how close 80% of this is, as said unstoppable female killing machine (Constable) runs amok, with no concern for collateral damage and apparently infinite ammo. Heroine defended by macho human (Hart)? Check. Assault on a cop station? Check? Impromptu eyeball surgery and “Come with me if you want to live”? Check x 2. Admittedly, Arnie never bit anyone’s dick off with his vagina, and most of the special effects here are primitive, to say the least. Hence, the rating above is a composite: fans of wacky, weird cinema will love it, those expecting sophistication or polish will hate it, and there’s not likely to be much middle ground.

Mondo Macabro’s DVD does full justice to the film, with a good-quality print, an amazing trailer (under its alternate title, Nasty Hunter) and background info including a fine 25-minute documentary on the region’s exploitation films. Having reviewed Indo-“classic”, Special Silencers in 1991, it’s nice to see the rest of the world catching up, and appreciating the delights – take that how you want – of Indonesian cinema. Though given recent events, the footage of huge waves crashing on the shore is perhaps the most horrific thing in the whole endeavour.

Dir: Jalil Jackson
Star: Barbara Anne Constable, Claudia Rademaker, Christopher J. Hart

Last Stand

  By

★★½
“The godlike genius of Lloyd Simandl strikes again…”

Okay, ‘godlike genius’ is stretching it a lot, but if you arrive at this unofficial Escape From New York remake knowing what to expect (low budget, mild sleaze, lame action, recycling of footage from other movies), it’s still entirely possible to enjoy it. After America breaks into feudal states, escaped drug lord Kragov (Matacena) runs Washington DC, rounding up women of breeding age and shipping them to Utah(!). Though our capital appears now to be populated entirely by middle-Europeans, with not an African-American in sight (like a lot of Simandl’s work, it was filmed in the Czech Republic).

Into this comes Kate Major (Rodger), a soldier doing time for killing her CO. [The prison footage looks very like that in Fatal Conflict, made by Simandl the same year. Damned if I’m gonna check though!] Krakov has found the nuclear football, giving him access to all US missiles, so she must switch it into safe simulation mode before he can work out the codes, and also rescue the head of the UN’s son (Barker), who leads the resistance – all ten of them. It’s complete nonsense, of course. Krakov violates many ‘Evil Overlord’ rules (if I become an Evil Overlord, anyone who has something to tell me, and me alone, will be made to do so via CCTV) and Major should simply kill him. There’s also no reason why Major – released from 20-to-life hard labour – doesn’t just head off in the opposite direction at top speed, rather than putting her life at risk.

Luckily, the villains, Kragov and sidekick Tanya (Brozova) are a good deal of fun, even if Kragov’s lines are often unintelligible; Brozova would be great as Ilsa if they ever revive She-Wolf of the SS. Barker is unforgivably bland, but Rodger does have a certain spark and presence, though gets little chance to show it here. The sum of all this is undeniable trash; you may, or may not, regard that as any kind of endorsement. As an aside, keep an eye out for the graffiti on the walls, including comments like ‘Give Idaho Back to the Serbs’…

Dir: Lloyd Simandl
Star: Kate Rodger, Josh Barker, Orestes Matacena, Katerina Brozova

Legion

  By

★★
“Cheap TVM offers up its secrets before you even see it. Take them.”

Do not read the sleeve before watching this; idiotically, it gives away the whole thing, including stuff revealed in the last ten minutes. Also: yes, it is the Rick Springfield: Jesse’s Girl, Human Touch, and…er, that’s about it, in the most unexpected reappearance of an 80’s pop icon since a bloke from Bros turned up in Blade II. With these issues out of the way, the movie itself is set in the future, after six years of a war has led to stalemate. Agatha Doyle (Ferrell) leads a Dirty Dozen-ish group of criminal soldiers with nothing to lose on a mission to capture an enemy base. That part’s easy, as there’s no-one around – except for a pile of corpses. However, while they wait for reinforcements, someone/thing starts ripping our her troops’ throats.

Y’know, I always thought “legion” meant more than one. Not in this, which looks as if it were made for the Sci-Fi channel; just the one enemy, and most of the time all you see is his POV, looking like that of the raptors in Pitch Black. There’s much wandering around corridors, as numbers get whittled down to the inevitable survivors (identities also given away by the sleeve). It’s a minor shame, as the team are an amusing bunch of cliches, led by Corey Feldman as a computer hacker; the doctor (Audie England) was also entertaining, with loony lines such as, “The Angel of Death is my superior officer.” Otherwise, this gets less entertaining as it goes on, and while Farrell makes a good first impression, she’s swiftly reduced to bickering with her (steadily declining) force. On the whole, best cancel my first statement in this review: read the sleeve, and save yourself 95 minutes.

Dir: Jon Hess
Star: Terry Farrell, Parker Stevenson, Corey Feldman, Rick Springfield

Lady Battlecop

  By

★★
Tired and dull Robocop clone. But after all, “women were made for tennis”…

At least, so claims one of the songs in this largely ineffective movie, about professional tennis starlet Kaoru – Anna Kournikova will be in the Hollywood remake, no doubt – who is transformed into a crime-fighting machine. This takes place after she is killed by the Cartel, a crime syndicate bent on taking over Japan, despite apparently having about seven members. They do, however, have a “psychic robot” called Amadeus, which is probably the sole original thought in the entire film, and the whole thing gets kicked up a notch during his battles. The interesting question of where he came from (apparently a NASA creation), is never explored. This is a shame, since it’d be rather more interesting than almost anything the film actually offers.

As it is, it quickly gets tedious after the first time we see Lady Battlecop walk unharmed through a hail of bullets. [When the Cartel find a weapon that actually hurts her, this behemoth of evil can apparently afford only one of them] Keita Amamiya, who’d later go on to direct better films of his own, such as the two Zeiram movies, designed the suit, and it’s not bad – I liked little touches such as the dangling ear-ring and what may be turn indicators – but either it or the actress are incapable of moving above walking pace. Or performing martial arts, stunts, or indeed, anything else that might provide much-needed entertainment.

Many scenes and even dialogue will strongly remind you of Paul Verhoeven’s classic, but where Robocop was sharp and satirical, this is bland and vacuous. There’s little attempt made to make the characters interesting, and the Cartel’s enforcers come across with more depth, even if they never do much beyond sneer and rant. The good guys (and gal) here are left to dream of getting emotive depth.

Dir: Akihisa Okamoto
Star: Azusa Nakamura, Keisuke Yamashita, Masaru Matsuda, Shiro Sano
a.k.a. Lady Battle Cop

Lara Croft, Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life

  By

★★
“Tomb for two, please.”

tomb2aThe first problem with the film is its title, a clunky mess apparently lacking in any punctuation – I’ve taken my best guess at what it should be above, even if it doesn’t line up with the first movie. But hey, new director, new grammar… Interestingly, Steven E. De Souza gets a screenplay credit this time round – he was one of the people who wrote a rejected script before the original film was made, and I wonder how much has been recycled here.

Certainly, a lot of what was said about the first film applies equally to the sequel; despite much affirmation that, this time, they’d really got hold of the character, the potential remains largely unfulfilled. Instead, we get something that (ironically, in the light of previous comments) nicks large chunks from Indiana Jones, adds a flavour of Mission: Impossible 2 and loses most of the more interesting elements from first time round.

The plot here concerns the search for what is, effectively, Pandora’s Box, which turns out to be a genuine artefact containing a deadly plague. Evil overlor…sorry, industrialist Jonathan Reiss (Hinds) wants possession, in order to sell it to the highest bidder as a biological weapon, and use the antidote to control who’ll be allowed to populate the post-plague world.

Though most of the film is concerned more with the struggle for possession of an amber orb, which points to the location of Pandora’s Box. This contest takes the participants from Greece to England to Kazakhstan to China to Hong Kong to Taipei and finally Kenya, though there’s so little local flavour it feels more like an episode of Alias, quickly establishing itself with stock exterior footage, before switching to an obvious sound-stage.

While Barrie and Taylor return as Lara’s sidekicks, they get given very little to do, which is disappointing, since their characters were entertaining elements first time up. Instead, Lara gets a sidekick, Terry Sheridan (Butler), a dubious character who first needs to be taken from a central Asian jail, and who was romantically entangled with Croft in the past. His fate is obvious.

Indeed, so is much of the movie, save the opening sequence, which instead opts to be so ludicrous as to defy belief. Lara lures in a shark with her own blood, then turns it into a jet-ski, before being picked up by her own personal F-sized submarine. Even for a video game, this is stretching it, and the sound you hear, is most of the movie’s credibility, heading shame-faced for the exit as it mumbles something about another appointment. What little is left, gets swamped in an orgy of product placement that rivals recent Bond movies.

tomb2bIt does give you plenty of time to wonder about little things like the wisdom of instigating a shoot-out in a germ warfare laboratory, how many years have passed since someone parachuting off a tall building ceased to be exciting, and the failure to make Sheridan a credible opponent for a fist-fight with Lara Croft. The finale does feature some interesting CGI creatures, though any explanation of their presence, lust for human flesh, or ability to melt into solid rock is notable by its absence. Jolie still is Lara Croft, to an almost uncanny degree, but even her Oscar-winning talents can do little when faced with a script of such limited means.

Director De Bont can direct action, as was shown in Speed – since then it’s been downhill. Twister, Speed 2, The Haunting, and now this, which has almost nothing worth mentioning as far as thrills go. It’s nice to see Hong Kong veteran Simon Yam as a smuggler, and his fight with Croft in a cave full of terracotta warriors is kinda cool, but the rest is distinctly mediocre, relying too much on doubles or CGI. The film desperately needs a tent-pole sequence to make you go “Wow!”, like the training robot or bungee-ballet from part one.

Not the worst big-budget, girls-with-guns pic of the summer (that’d be Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle), but it’s significantly below the first film, which was flawed enough in itself. The harsh truth is, there is nothing here that justifies keeping the franchise going, and that’s really sad.

Dir: Jan De Bont
Star: Angelina Jolie, Gerard Butler, Ciaran Hinds, Noah Taylor