Tag: m

The Millennium Trilogy

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★★★½
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

I think we know the exact moment we fell in love with the character of Lisbeth Salander, the central character both in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, and the Swedish films based on the books. It would be the scene in the first film where she goes back to see the man who had been sexually abusing her. Little did he know, on her last visit, she had recorded the whole event. This time, she knocks him out, ties her assailant up, forces him to watch the video and then engages in a spot of amateur tattoo work, leaving him with “I am a sadistic pig and a rapist” etched permanently across his torso. Yeah. You go, girl.

Salander is not your typical action heroine: she’s 5’4″, weighs maybe 90 lbs dripping wet, and anti-social to a degree that may be pathological. But she possesses a mind like a steel-trap, impressive computer hacking skills, a steely resolve and a zero-tolerance policy for anyone who abuses women [the Swedish title of the first book and film translates as “Men Who Hate Women”, and misogyny is something of a theme throughout the trilogy]. This was demonstrated very early: at the age of twelve, and fed up of seeing her father hurt her mother, she doused him in petrol and set him on fire. Like I said: “zero-tolerance”.

We first meet Lisbeth in Dragon Tattoo, using her skills to conduct surveillance on Mikael Blomkvist (Nyqvist), a journalist who has just lost a libel case and is facing prison as a result. As a result of her report, Blomkvist is hired by Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube), to investigate the disappearance, forty years previously, of his niece Harriet, who was also Blomkvist’s babysitter. It has been nagging at Vanger ever since, and he feels his time is running out to find the truth. Reviewing the evidence, Blomkvist finds names and numbers in Harriet’s bible, but it’s Lisbeth, helping ‘remotely’, who cracks the code, revealing them to be verses from Leviticus about punishing sinners. The two gradually peel away the years to reveal the truth, a serial-killer whose crimes go back to just after the war – a truth that proves very uncomfortable for some in the Vanger family.

To some extent, Lisbeth is secondary to that plot, but she also has her own concerns to deal with. After the incident involving her father, she spent most of her youth under psychiatric observation. Even after release, she is still effectively ‘on probation’, under the control of various court-appointed guardians. The latest, a lawyer named Bjurman (Andersson) is a truly slimy jerk, who abuses his position to extract sexual favours from Lisbeth. After all, she’s just a little girl – what could she possibly do? See the opening paragraph for specifics there, if you’d forgotten.

Dir: Niels Arden Oplev
Star: Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace, Sven-Bertil Taube, Peter Andersson

★★★★
The Girl Who Played with Fire

It’s in the second film, Fire, that Lisbeth really comes into her own. After a period traveling the world, she returns to Sweden, and pays a visit to Bjurman, who has been looking into tattoo removal – she warns him off doing that, threatening him with his own gun. However, she leaves the gun behind, and Bjurman then uses it to frame Lisbeth for the murder of two crusading journalists, who were working on a story exposing sex traffickers, and those using the women they provide, for Blomkvist’s magazine. With both the police, and the real perpetrators – the criminal gang who control the traffic – trying to track her down, Lisbeth is forced underground. Fortunately, Blomkvist is able to help, as Lisbeth turns the table and goes after the shadowy “Zala” who leads the crime syndicate.

There’s a number of very interesting aspects to the film, such as how Blomkvist and Salander don’t meet until the final scene – I can’t think of many other film where the two central protagonists do that [Heat comes close]. But it’s most memorable for the unstoppable force which Salander has become, utterly fearless, whether it’s taking on a pair of bikers or going into the heart of enemy territory. Even when you think it’s all over for her, she crawls her way back in a way which would make The Bride applaud. It’s curious, yet somehow entirely fitting, to see her as an updated, adult version of another Scandinavian literary and cinematic icon: Pippi Longstocking. Except, to steal a line from Romy and Michelle, she’s like a Pippi who smokes and says “shit” a lot.

Salander’s personality is abrasive, and she clearly has difficulty relating to people or showing them anything even approximating affection: the closest she gets is a bewildered silence. I think the only time we saw her give a genuine smile was in the third film, when she received news that someone she hated had been killed. And yet, people like Blomkvist warm to Lisbeth, initially pitying the circumstances in which she finds herself, yet eventually seeing the human beneath the multiple layers of defensive ice. Fiercely loyal to her (very few, admittedly) friends, and as lethal as a boxful of well-shaken, peeved rattlesnakes to her enemies, the second film proves her to be smart, and as quick with her fists as her brain.

Dir: Daniel Alfredson
Star: Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace, Yasmine Garbi, Paolo Roberto

★★★½
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest

The third film, like the second, has Blomkvist and Salander apart for almost the entire movie; they meet only right at the end, in a way which is as low-key and unobtrusive as an Ikea coffee-table, yet somehow feels entirely appropriate. This time, their separation is because Salanger is in custody for attempted murder, following the events at the end of Fire. The secret group in authority, whose activities are in danger of being exposed, intend to avoid the embarrassment of a trial by getting Salander certified as insane, so she can be locked up as mentally incompetent. This brings her back to confront Dr. Peter Teleborian (Ahlbom), the man in charge of the institute where Lisbeth spent two years. However, Blomkvist asks his lawyer sister, Annika (Hallin), to take up the case. Can they reveal the truth before Lisbeth is committed to Teleborian’s sinister care one more?

While undeniably a good end to the trilogy, tying up the loose ends and dishing out justice in a solid, satisfying way, it seems a shame to have Lisbeth locked up for 95% of the film. This is much more a purely-investigative thriller than the first two, which were more action-oriented. Here, there’s a fight in a restaurant for Blomkvist, and Salander’s only action is an admittedly impressive battle in a warehouse against an unstoppable force. Much as at the end of the first movie, she doesn’t actually kill the opponent herself, though here, that would be more due to a lack of ammunition for her impromptu weapon. While a nice final act by which to remember Salander, it’s not representative of her more passive role in this entry.

The trilogy of books have sold more than 50 million copies worldwide, though sadly, Larsson didn’t see their success, as he died in 2004, before they were published. The success of the films, which have grossed a total of more than $210 million worldwide – a phenomenal sum for any non-English language series – has led to the inevitable Hollywood remake. Pause for eye-rolling here… Except, the American Tattoo does have David Fincher at the helm, so I’ll wait until seeing it – while, naturally, reserving the right to administer a good kicking in due course. The first pictures of Rooney Mara as Lisbeth (right), don’t exactly inspire confidence, as she looks more like some kind of coked-up fetish supermodel than anything else. Daniel Craig plays the role of Blomkvist, which would seem to make him a bit more glamourous too.

I guess we’ll see, but Fincher and Mara will certainly have their work cut out. I can’t help thinking of the lukewarm remake of another, highly-lauded Scandinavian movie, Let the Right One In, and the overall history of such things is not cause for optimism. But even in a worst case scenario, we’ll still have the books and Noomi Rapace’s steel-cold portrayal. Wikipedia says that when Larsson was 15 years old, “he witnessed the gang rape of a girl, which led to his lifelong abhorrence of violence and abuse against women. The author never forgave himself for failing to help the girl, whose name was Lisbeth,” even though much of his life was spent fighting oppression, in various forms. But with his creation of a new style of heroine, one appropriate for the 21st century, Larsson has, unwittingly, perhaps achieved redemption.

Dir: Daniel Alfredson
Star: Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace, Annika Hallin, Anders Ahlbom

Mutant Girls Squad

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★★★★
“X-Men, as directed by Peter Jackson. And not LotR Peter Jackson. Brain Dead Peter Jackson.”

It makes sense that this stems from a drunken agreement between the three co-directors at a film festival, because this is the sort of film you would only make under inebriated terms, and it’s probably true to say that drunk is the best way to watch this. That’s not a bad thing per se, just that its loopy sensibilities and over-the-top antics would seem to go particularly well with a few beers. Rin (Sugimoto) hits her sixteenth birthday not too happy, being bullied at school. However, the bullies have a surprise in store, as it turns out Rin is half-human, half-Hiiko, with her father being from a mutant race with extraordinary powers. They have largely been hiding from humanity, but are now fed up of being persecuted, and under the leadership of Kisaragi (Sakaguch), are about to declare total war on us. Rin, along with Yoshie (Morita) and Rei (Takayama), are to lead the strikeforce, though Rin is less convinced over the need to target all of mankind.

This is right up there with Brain Dead in terms of the goriest movie ever, with fountains of blood, real and digital painting the entire screen, including the lens, though rarely affecting our heroine’s sailor-suit school uniform. Which, one assumes, is part of the joke, for everything about this is so amazingly excessive, it’s impossible to take any of it seriously, even as it is played completely straight-faced. The talents, for instance, include a waitress whose breasts each sprout a sword and a cheerleader, concealing a chainsaw in a place power-tools are not normally located. No explanation for any of this is ever given. It just is, and you either buy into it or you don’t. Yet there’s also a moment or two of poignancy, as Rin struggles to decide whether to align herself with a human race which has largely rejected her, or her new “family,” weird and incredibly ultraviolent as they may be.

While the gore is certainly present in buckets, as we’ve seen, that isn’t enough by itself to make for entertainment, and the insane imagination on view here is equally impressive. This is particularly true at the end, when Kisaragi reveals his final form. Let’s just say, breasts that squirt acid milk is one of the lesser of his talents. This kind of lunatic invention makes the film work, and while you undeniably need a large tolerance for arterial spray, and some of the FX are rubbery, to say the least, it is thoroughly fun schlock, unlike anything produced by even the most warped Western company.

Dir: Noboru Iguchi, Yoshihiro Nishimura, and Tak Sakaguchi
Star: Yumi Sugimoto, Suzuka Morita, Yuko Takayama, Tak Sakaguchi

Malibu High

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★★★½
“Student by day, hooker turned assassin by night. I kid you not.”

This one popped out of nowhere, on a box-set of discs called Drive-In Cult Classics: most of these were unremarkable double-feature fillers, and this started off looking the same way, Kim (Lansing) is fed up with life: she’s still in high-school at age 18, is about to flunk it, has no money, just lost her boyfriend (Taylor), her father hung himself and her mom’s a total bitch. Finally, she opts to use her natural resources (if you know what I mean, and I think you do) to resolve these issues – though when her mother suggested Kim get a job, I’m not sure she meant as a whore working in the back of a VW van for the ultra-sleazy Tony (Mann). Her ‘popularity’ there lets her move up to work for the slightly-less sleazy Lance (Howard). Which is where the film takes an abrupt right turn, as she discovers a taste for killing – not least on her former pimp – and starts work as, to use one of the movie’s alternate titles, a high-school hit girl.

In other words: exactly the sort of lurid exploitation we love. Kim is just such a spiky, unlikeable heroine, she could never come out of Hollywood [the words “wildly inaccurate” leap to mind when looking at the poster, right]. While her tan-lines need work, one can only admire her single-minded and logical approach to resolving her problems – a true self-starter, able to work without supervision. Perhaps the high point is when Kim triggers cardiac arrest in her principal by showing him her breasts, after having flushed his heart medication down the toilet. If that description has you keen to see the film, you won’t be disappointed. Of course, if you think that’s tacky and silly… Well, you’re spot-on there too, and it doesn’t help that some of the stock music used here would later be re-cycled by The People’s Court and SCTV.

Inevitably, of course, Crime Does Not Pay for Kim, and it ends in a foot-chase along the beach, with Kim’s ex-boyfriend in hot pursuit. It’s not the kind of film I could possibly recommend to a random stranger, but there’s a loopy individuality at work here, that I thoroughly enjoyed. It’s a movie intent in going its own direction, for good or bad, and doesn’t care what you think. A nostalgic reminder for what drive-in movies should be about, it’s something of a surprise that Lansing never apparently appeared in anything else, after this excellent piece of trash cinema.

Dir: Irvin Berwick
Star: Jill Lansing, Alex Mann, Stuart Taylor, Garth Howard

My Wife is Gangster 3

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★★★
“I guess The Daughter of a Business Associate is Gangster wouldn’t be quite as commercial.”

Despite being directed by the same man as part one, this is only tangentially-connected to the first two films. The most obvious difference is no Shin Eun Kyung, who was the glue that held those movies together. Instead, as noted above, there is no wife at all: Shu Qi stars instead, as Lim Aryong, a mobster’s daughter forced to flee Hong Kong after her apparent involvement in murdering the leader of a rival gang. She goes to Korea and is put under the protection of Ki-Chul (Lee), a fairly crap mobster whose sole qualification for the job is a few words of Chinese. However, his star begins to rise and he develops a tough-guy rep: it’s really Lim who is responsible, but the local criminals would rather credit Ki-Chul than admit they got their asses kicked by a girl. Eventually, her hiding-place becomes known, and a team of vengeful assassins is dispatched to Korea to take care of Lim.

Similarlu to the previous entries, it’s a somewhat sporadic mix, with the humour generally working better than the action. There’s too much obvious doubling of the heroine in the latter, though for the former Lee’s expressive eyes are a nice contrast for Qi’s deadpan cool. Possibly beating both is Hyeon, as the translator hired to interpret: she starts of by saying what Ki-Chul wants to hear, before realizing the potential in her new friend, and the interplay among the trio provide most of the film’s high-lights. On the other hand it is undeniably too long, and especially towards the end, begins to drag considerably. The love that blooms between hero and heroine is, frankly, implausible: yet, since the entire concept is fairly flimsy, this doesn’t hurt the overall feel of the movie too badly. While we certainly mourn the loss of Shin, who is missed, much like its predecessors, this has no ambition beyond being light, frothy entertainment, and as such, doesn’t embarrass itself or the series.

Dir: Cho Jin-Gyu
Star: Shu Qi, Lee Bum-Soo, Hyeon Yeong, Oh Ji-Ho

Marujas Asesinas

  By

★★★
“Marriage can be murder.”

This tale of a Hispanic wife whose sanity disintegrates, beginning with the murder of her husband and ending with…well, you have to see it, had me shifting somewhat nervously, as my Hispanic wife sat beside me. “These are your people,” I said. Chris disavowed all knowledge, being Cuban rather than Spanish – while I can see her point, still… Azucena (Asensi) is unhappy in marriage to a greedy builder (Resibes), but his money keeps her family afloat, so she tolerates it, finding love with his hunky employee, Pablo. However, when the money looks like drying up, she hatches a lethal plan – which would probably go better if she didn’t hire the local retard [Non-PC that may be, there’s no other way to describe him; he agrees to do the murder for 1,000 pornos and a VCR]. However, that’s just the start: Pablo has a nasty surprise, and Azucena soon finds others needing disposal. And did I mention her TV is now talking to her?

Things take a bit of time to get going, and for a while it looks like it’s going the tiresome, Almodovar route of “All men are bastards.” Fortunately, it starts to develop its own style, and Asensi is great in her role; you can see while the individual choices make sense, even if the end result is disastrous in every way. The director does a nice job mixing a number of genres: telenovelas [the Spanish soaps], black comedy and horror – particularly the final scene. Credit also to Karra Elejalde as the imbecile Lalo, who manages to bring humanity to a role which could easily no more than a stereotype. There is some unexplored potential in the idea of the heroine getting advice from her television, and that could easily have been expanded. Mind you, at 105 minutes, it is somewhat over-stretched too, and tightening of the early portions would have helped. Overall, though, the time passed quickly enough, even if I will be keeping Chris away from sharp objects for a while. :-)

Dir: Javier Rebollo
Star: Neus Asensi, Antonio Resines, Nathalie Seseña, Pere Ponce

The Machine Girl

  By

★★★★
“If the Black Knight scene in Holy Grail was just too restrained in its use of arterial spray…”

nullIf you enjoyed Planet Terror, you’ll likely get a kick out of this, which also combines elements of The Evil Dead, Kill Bill and Tetsuo the Iron Man into what has got to be the bloodiest movie of 2008. The life of Ami (Yashiro) is turned upside down when her brother and his friend are killed by school bullies under the control of a local gangster’s son (Nishihara). Ami sets out for revenge on all those responsible for the killings. But the Yakuza don’t take kindly to this and Ami finds herself with a count of functioning limbs that ends at three. Does that stop her? Of course not. Teaming up with the late friend’s mother Miki (Asami), whose husband happens to be an ace mechanic, Ami gets fitted with a machine-gun and the pair of vengeful vixens head off for a return match.

Right from the opening scene, this makes no bones about its point: to spray as much of the red stuff over everything in sight, be that characters, the walls or even the camera itself. I never realised high blood-pressure was such an epidemic in Japan, but almost the slightest nicks here result in fountains of gore that continue far beyond what a normal circulatory system should generally produce. There’s no doubt that it’s all complete nonsense, and is intended as such, with the heroines having to fend off attacks from the Super Mourner Gang and the Junior High Shuriken Gang. And that’s before they get to the Drill Bra. That said, you will either find all of this ridiculous and stupid, or gleefully embrace this as highly entertaining excess. No prizes for guessing into which camp we fall.

Yashiro’s background is in…well, what could politely be described as ‘bikini videos’, not action movies, but her performance here is respectable enough. Probably more impressive are Asami, and Honoka, who plays the wife of the Yakuza boss. They both, too, come from the adult industry, possessing an impressive feral intensity which reminded me of Brigitte Lahaie in Fascination, and is entirely in keeping with the grindhouse feel of the entire enterprise. You could argue that the trailer contains everything you need to see, in a more concentrated form, and I wouldn’t argue with that, or if you said this was no more than a porn variant, where nothing matters except the money shots of body fluids getting sprayed everywhere. Still, we had a blast, and the film fully lives up to the sleeve description, delivering the “One-Armed Ballistic Assault Heroine” it promises, in spades.

Dir: Noboru Iguchi
Star: Minase Yashiro, Asami, Nobuhiro Nishihara, Honoka

Ms. 45

  By

★★★★★
“Dark Angel.”

Abel Ferrara is one of the most interesting of American film-makers, with an uncompromising vision that has seen him almost entirely shut out of mainstream cinema: the closest he’s come to a Hollywood movie was his Invasion of the Body-Snatchers remake, which was a failure on just about every level. Instead, he’s been on the outside, looking in, with films that range from the brilliant to the near-unwatchable. You never know what you’re going to get. It can be something raw and amazing, like Bad Lieutenant, or it can be a garbled, self-indulgent mess, such as his attempt to adapt William Gibson’s New Rose Hotel.

Ms. 45 falls firmly into the first category, held together by an amazing, luminescent performance from the then 17-year old Zoe Tamerlis [a.k.a. Zoe Lund], whose character Thana is entirely mute – except for one word, whispered in the final scene. She works in a garment factory, run by sleazy owner Albert (Sinkys): one day, she is raped on the way home. Worse follows, as when she stumbles in to her apartment, another intruder is there, and violates her again. However, with the aid of a convenient domestic appliance, she kills him – and now possesses his gun, with which she can take on, single-handed, the men she now perceives as threats.

As Thana’s mental state disintegrates, however, her action gradually shift away from justified. While the viewer initially sympathizes with her, and cheers her on, it slowly becomes apparent that she has become entirely unhinged, paranoid and delusional. She goes from reaction to pro-action, dressing up and going out with the specific intent of luring men in and killing them. In many ways, Thana ends up worse than those who triggered her rage, spiralling down into what are basically random acts of violence: Tamerlis had, allegedly, been a victim of rape the previous year by a professor at Mount Holyoke College, and did not report it. As Ferrara put it, “Women are brought up in a male dominated society. You’re being raped every day, one way or another. That is the metaphor of the film.”

Hmm. While I can acknowledge the political subtext in Thana’s muteness [especially since it appears largely to be psychological, going by the last scene], I’m not quite sure how seriously I take this claim overall, given Ferrara actually plays one of the rapists, and a large percentage of the time is spent objectifying and fetishizing his lead actress, to the extent where Chris felt she looked like a supporting actress in a Robert Palmer video. Perhaps the most memorably instance of this is Thana, dressing up as a nun – but one that also wears stocking and suspenders – before heading out to a Halloween party. With her blood-red lipstick, she kisses each of the bullets before loading them into her gun, a sequence which tells us much about Ferrara’s repressed Catholicism [also apparently rampant in Lieutenant, where both Ferrara and Lund worked on the script], as well as paying homage to the other great New York street-sweeper, Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver.

Certainly, Tamerlis’s reading of the film is rather different. [Spoiler alert] “No, Ms. 45 is not about women’s liberation, any more than it is about mutes’ liberation, or garment workers’ liberation, or your liberation, or my own. Notice that her climactic victim is not a rapist in the clinical sense. He is her boss. The real rapist. Our real rapist… Ms. 45 presents a humble, yet well-crafted metaphor for rebellion of the any-sexed oppressed. But the gun was put in a woman’s hand. A woman carried that universal message, and so it was all the more powerful. It made us shiver. Male and female. Different timbres and temperatures of shiver, but shiver all round.”

Running counter to that, or perhaps lending it an additional depth, is that the one who stops Thana, in effect betraying her, is one of her own. It’s a woman and a fellow garment worker, her former friend Laurie (Stuto), who stabs her in the back, literally – a metaphor that I’m certain was not accidental, any more than the phallic positioning of the knife at Laurie’s crotch. [End spoilers] The subtext there seems to be that the oppressed can not be trusted to stick together in their battle against the oppressor, even though Laurie is a strong-enough personality in her own way. She certainly has no problem responding in kind to the barrage of verbal harrassment she and Thana suffer as they walk home from work. Our heroine, meanwhile, has ‘victim’ written all over her in the early stages of the film, though the strength she eventually finds and displays, is clearly in a radically different and anti-social direction.

There are certainly holes in the plot logic. Where is Thana getting all the bullets from, and why is she such a crack-shot, despite presumably having never having handled a gun before? Yet these are in step with the pitch-black tongue-in-cheek humour the film contains: witness the long, rambling monologue inflicted on Thana by a guy she meets in a bar [her muteness making her the ultimate good listener]. I laughed like a drain at the sequence where Thana tries to get her landlady’s dog run over in traffic, as its nosiness concerning the severed body-parts round her appartment poses a threat. And when disposing of said parts, there’s surely nothing that you want to hear less, than for someone to shout after you, “Hey, lady! You dropped your bag!”

Chris, who lived in the Big Apple during the early-80’s, can also attest to the attitudes and dialogue as being authentic Noo Yawk, and the film does an excellent job of portraying the city as a predatory jungle, with a threat lurking behind every corner, especially for someone as attractive as Thana. Of course, “threat” is relative, and by the end, our heroine is the biggest threat – albeit only to those with a Y-chromosome, and the question of whether they deserve it or not is, to some degree, debatable. Still, in the words of the great philosophers, Paul Cook, Steve Jones and Ronny Biggs, “No-one is innocent.” Particularly in these days of movies produced by bean-counters, it’s refreshing to see a film that eschews a black-and-white approach in favor of an arc that takes us with a character as they journey into somewhere very dark and unpleasant, without needing to resolve things in a manner best described as, “…and they all lived happily ever after.”

[The pics and quotes here largely come from zoelund.com, a tribute site apparently run by Zoe’s ex-husband.]

Random notes

  • Tamerlis used to show up to some screenings of the film [above, outside the Nuart theater in Los Angeles] and discuss the social and political implications of the movie afterwards with the audience.
  • Which must have been interesting, as even the grindhouse theaters that were the movie’s natural home found it difficult viewing. In Cult Movies 2, Danny Peary says of the film, “Never has a 42nd Street theater been so quiet and disciplined as when Thana went through her rounds and murdered every offensive male who crossed her path… Unexpectedly, the men who had whooped all through Amin and the obscenely gory previews of Dr. Butcher, whimpered worrisomely “Oh, my God” and slumped in their seats and shut up.”
  • It’s still unavailable in the United Kingdom except in a version where the rape scenes are cut by one minute, 42 seconds. Even the 2000 US DVD was re-edited: the cuts include changes to the first rape featuring Ferrara’s cameo, which is split by an insert shot from a later scene, the second rape omits a line “This oughta make you talk, huh?” and the climatic shoot-out removes an on-screen murder, which now occurs off-screen.
  • The film inspired a song by L7, with the same title: “She’s got a gun, just make her day: don’t fuck with her, she’ll blow you away. She walks the streets at night and they think she is a whore. She’s gotta deal with you – she’s gonna even out the score.” The less well-known Dandi Wind also wrote a song called Ms. 45: “Today I bought a gun, Now I’m dressed just like a nun.”
  • “According to Tamerlis, her performance in Angel of Vengeance provoked a sniper attack on her in New York, wounding her.” — 1983 Virgin Film Yearbook
  • While Tamerlis experienced some success as a screenwriter and actress [Larry Cohen’s Special Effects is certainly worth checking out], she was a long-time drug user first of heroin and then cocaine. This contributed to her death of heart failure in Paris, in 1999.

Dir: Abel Ferrara
Stars: Zoe Tamerlis, Albert Sinkys, Darlene Stuto, Helen McGara
a.k.a. Angel of Vengeance

Movin’ Too Fast

  By

★★★
“It’s like Thelma and Louise. Meets The Hitcher. In Wolf Creek.”

Yes, while there may not be a lot new here, the combination is at least somewhat interesting, and it’s put together solidly enough. Two students, Nina (Alexander) and Melissa (Terry) are on a cross-country drive, when they get stopped for speeding. Melissa makes a pass at the cop, but it’s an encounter that goes badly wrong, and she ends up beating him up with his own night-stick. When the duo get back on the road however, they find themselves being pursued by a police-car, which clearly has very bad intentions: with gas running low and – inevitably – no cellphone service to be found, can they survive?

Despite the lack of names in the cast, there was clearly some significant cash involved in this project; some fairly brutal destruction of automobiles, and helicopter footage too, help give this a sense of quality. We were rather less contrived by the dialogue, which sometimes seemed so artificial and contrived as to be utterly forced. There were a few moments when the plot had us rolling our eyes too, such as when the girls, wandering around in the middle of nowhere, stumble onto a house that happens to be…well, let’s just say, “What are the odds against that?” The villain, for reasons necessary to the plot, remains entirely anonymous and that makes him a far less scary adversary that, say, Rutger Hauer in The Hitcher, who gave absolute evil a very human face.

Still, when things get rolling, especially in the final third, there’s a good sense of momentum and “anything can happen”, which overcomes many of the shortcomings. The final showdown would seem a bit of a cheap ripoff from Death Proof…except that Movin’ dates back to 2005, so actually pre-dates Tarantino’s grindhouse homage. Which is interesting, given QT’s fondness for wholesale thievery in the plot department. Indeed, that also means it pre-dates Wolf Creek, though you don’t deserve a free pass just because your movie failed to find distribution for two years. Overall, though, not too bad, and despite some eye-rolling, we were entertained enough.

Dir: Eric Chambers
Stars: Marquita Terry, Layla Alexander, Matthew Glave
a.k.a. Lost in Plainview

Mr. Hell

  By

★★
“Twenty-five minutes too long, despite some nice concepts.”

Sometimes, you just have to sit back and let the DVD sleeve do the talking. “The notorious serial killer, Harry Eugene Loveless AKA Mr. HELL roamed from town-to-town and job-to-job, brutally murdering his victims, with the demonic intention of removing the ‘windows to the soul’ – their eyes! Mr. HELL mutilated Dr. Karl Matthews at a government laboratory where biological weapons were secretly being developed. The daughter’s precocious daughter, Tyler, who discovered her father’s body with his eyes missing, was then pursued by Harry through the lab’s subterranean tunnels. During the chase, Harry was accidentally destroyed by toxic industrial acid, and his remains flowed into a storage container. Was this the end for Mr. HELL?

Fourteen years later, we find a grown-up Tyler, now a security guard at the lab soon scheduled for demolition. during the lab’s closing process, incompetent waste removal workers unwittingly release Harry’s toxic essence. Mr. HELL is back, and on the hunt! Complicating matters, a group of mercenaries led by Dominique Horney, invade the laboratory to steal a hidden vial of deadly bacterium to sell to terrorists. This small private army may be prepared for a few security guards, but not for Mr. HELL! As for Tyler, will she survive the band of professional killers and defeat, once again, the diabolical butcher, Mr. HELL?!”

Phew. Enough going on there for two films at least. And that’s the problem: they’d have been better off dealing with the entire first half in a five-minute flashback, but it drags on and on – Chris bailed for the Land of Nod before the mercenaries turned up. I stayed conscious…well, mostly, but it was a struggle, not least because of the horrible performance by the grown-up Tyler (Morris), who is thoroughly unconvincing. Scoggins is better, and there are a number of other, decently-strong female characters, for which the makers deserve credit – it’s nice to see the heroine in a horror film not needing to be rescued. However, just about every other aspect is inadequate, from the special effects through dialogue which is far too often trying to be clever, rather than genuinely smart to an atonal score that grates horribly for the vast majority of the time.

Most low-budget horror films do keep their running time as short as possible; cheaper that way. Mr. Hell run 102 minutes, which is positively epic for the genre. They should have let Mr. Hell – sorry: Mr. HELL – loose on the script to slice ‘n’ dice it, as it’s in serious need of tightening. The ‘deadly bacterium’, for example, is no more than a Macguffin, thrown away for the benefit of a poor ‘melt’ effect at the end. With better writing, and a better lead actress, this could have lived up to the potential of the synopsis. Unfortunately, it only does so very sporadically, and despite our love for the genre, I can’t recommend this overall.

Dir: Rob McKinnon
Star: Amy Morris, Jett Texas Elliott, Larry Cashion, Tracy Scoggins

The Modern Amazons: Warrior Women on Screen, by Dominique Mainon and James Ursini

  By

★★
“Less an investigation into the genre, than a poorly-conceived freshman term paper.”

While it’s nice to see our favourite topic here getting some printed love, I can’t say I was impressed with this end result, which struggles to be all things to all women, and ends up not being very good at any of them. There’s no denying the breadth of coverage here, with everything from Sailor Moon to Ilsa getting covered – though they appear rather too willing to stretch the bounds of the term, “Amazons”. I mean: Pippi Longstocking? The coverage is grouped into various areas: monster killers, super-sleuths, fur bikinis, etc. along with additional essays on more specific themes, such as the representation of women as felines. It’s a somewhat lumpy distinction, which occasionally makes for strange bed-fellows, but occasionally comes up with some thought-provoking nuggets.

My biggest qualm is the almost entire lack of any criticism; there’s entirely too much description, and the plot synopses flow like free beer. While it is mentioned that Catwoman was a massive flop, the writers seem to have no interest in analyzing the reasons why. An entire chapter could easily be written on the failures, and looking at why they bombed, but these aspects are ignored. Certainly, there are worthwhile aspects [I must get round to seeing Hannie Caulder], but these are countered by lurid sensationalism, such as “the practice of Japanese schoolgirls selling their panties to old men on the street” – which makes it sound as if, like Starbucks, there’s one on every corner. Generally, the volume has no stance on differentiating the good of the genre from the bad, instead just throwing examples at the reader. A more subjective approach – and perhaps fewer, mostly pointless, black and white pics – would be much preferred.

I also hated the lack of any useful index. Want to see what the authors think of, say, Dark Angel? You’re out of luck, because there’s absolutely no index by title. The only one is ordered by actress – and even after you find Jessica Alba, you are uselessly directed, not to any specific pages, but to multiple chapters; two, six and seven in this case. Somewhere in the hundred pages covered by those three sections, you’ll find it. Have fun with that. In the end though, it’s simply impossible to take seriously any volume that decides The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is worth about five times as much space as Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, and which can apparently find no room at all for Dirty Pair, Sybil Danning or Cutthroat Island. A sadly-wasted opportunity.

By: Dominique Mainon and James Ursini
Publisher Limelight Editions, 2006. $24.95