Tag: m

Mother’s Day (2023)

  By

★★★½
“Everybody has issues.”

I’d be the first to admit, those issues likely extend beyond the characters in the movie, and probably extend to the script writers, because there are certainly… well, let’s just say, some novel concepts here. The heroine is Nina Nowak (Grochowska), a former Special Ops soldier, who had to fake her own death and give her son Maks up to adoption, for both their security. She’s been keeping an eye on Maks (Delikta) from afar, but after he’s abducted at the request of a gangster Nina took down, she needs to become considerably more hands-on. Rescuing Maks, however, will bring her into contact with a number of rather odd  people, on both sides of the law.

In particular, there’s Igor (Delikta), her contact inside the establishment, who is divorced, and has a fragile relationship with his daughter that he desperately wants to repair. On the other side is the very strange Woltomierz (Wróblewski), a gangster who keeps the severed head of his father in a jar on his mantelpiece, and is known as “Volto” for his habit of tazing incompetent henchmen to death. Getting, and keeping, Maks out of his grasp is going to be a challenge for Nina. Although her bad-ass credentials are firmly established after she takes on a group of men outside a convenience store, armed with nothing more lethal than a six-pack of beer. Nina literally knocks one of them out of his shoes.

This is not to be confused with any of the other similarly titled films, not least the 2010 movie starring Rebecca de Mornay. Nor should it be confused with another recently released Netflix movie about a mother with special skills, looking for her abducted child, The Mother, starring Jennifer Lopez. With that said, the look and feel of this is impressive, the fight scenes in particular being well-staged and imaginative – though fair warning, do not expect realism. or anything approaching it. I’m unaware of Grochowska having any particular action background, yet she still delivers on that front.  Most notably, she stabs someone in the head with a pair of carrots: I’ve not seen that since the equally bonkers Clive Owen movie, Shoot ‘Em Up.

The whole film is lit in a sickly green palette, which does a great job of making the city in which it takes place, look like a terrible place to live. Less successful are the attempts at drama. The Nina/Maks relationship is flat and unconvincing, and the rest of the cast largely seem to be weird for weirdness’s sake. They’re not as interesting as the makers think they are. The best way to look at this is perhaps as a female-fronted version of Crank: a deliberately excessive action flick, clearly not intended to be taken seriously. As such, I think it is a better effort than Jolt, another Netflix movie which seemed to be aiming along similar lines. The ending hints at a sequel and, truth be told, I wouldn’t mind one.

Dir: Mateusz Rakowicz
Star: Agnieszka Grochowska, Adrian Delikta, Dariusz Chojnacki, Szymon Wróblewski

Magic Warriors

  By

★★★
“Lin-sanity rides once again.”

I am going to be entirely upfront, and state that any factual statements regarding the plot here will be entirely cribbed from other sources. Because, on my own, I have close to no clue as to the details of what was going. I got that some girl dressed as a guy, Little Flying Dragon (Lin, inevitably) was trying to protect Golden Boy (Chan) from a bunch of very strangely dressed weirdos with even more bizarre powers. They want Golden Boy for some nefarious purpose on behalf of an evil sorcerer type, who laughs maniacally. A lot. Everyone involved wears wigs which look like they were bought in bulk from Hair Metal R Us. There’s an acid pit, into which Golden Boy’s father is unceremoniously dropped. His mother is called “Evil Lady” in the subtitles, though she isn’t really. At one point, there’s a song whose lyrics according to the subs go, “Little Flying Dragon, Little Flying Dragon, change all the time, power breads everything.”

You will understand my confusion.

Actually, I’m not going to bother with a more coherent description of the plot elements, because in the final analysis, they don’t particularly matter. It’d be like spending 500 words discussing background to the 1998 Hell in a Cell match, when what actually counts, is Mankind getting thrown off the cage and through a table. Any story here is simply an excuse for the usual combination of high-flying action and low-brow humour. We’ve seen them present in earlier, similar Lin-powered entries such as Magic of Spell, yet it feels like the makers felt the need to one-up themselves here, in both departments. The kung-fu feels more well-assembled and, though still significantly wire-powered, there’s clearly no shortage of skill from the performers. On the other hand, you get a steady stream of jokes about urine, farts and excrement: Golden Boy seems to have got his name from the first of these. If you find someone mistaking pee for tea the peak of comedy, you’re going to love this.

Me, not so much, and again, I find myself unable to figure out the target audience here. For every element which seems squarely targeted at a nine-year-old audience, there’s one which seems heavily inappropriate, such as Evil Lady projectile vomiting blood into a lake. Maybe the Taiwanese pre-teen audience is just considerably more resilient? It’s still not quite my cup of tea (or pee, I guess), with the more childish elements not to my taste. However, I think I did enjoy this one a bit more than Spell, with what felt like better pacing and a particularly rousing finale in the villain’s lair. I’d not be willing to take a test on the plot, what with people changing sides at the drop of a small child. Yet this is one of those cases where you simply need to, in the words of the great philosopher Adele, “Let it go, let it go…”

Dir: Yan-Chien Chuang, Tso Nam Lee
Star: Hsiao-Lao Lin, Chan Yin-Yu, Alexander Lo Rei, Chen Shan

Magic of Spell

  By

★★½
“Spell-ing B-movie”

The best way to describe this, is perhaps to say that if I was nine years old, I would think it was the greatest movie I had ever seen. And I would likely be right, at the time. With the benefit of [redacted] more years, and several thousand additional movies under my belt… Not so much. Oh, it’s excessive, insanely imaginative and high energy, to be sure. However, it is also slapdash, incoherent and juvenile. Never mind appealing to nine-year-olds, it often feels like it was made by nine-year-olds. This explanation could be the most logical way to explain how the film manages to misspell its own name in the opening credits, calling itself Magic of Stell.

Let me attempt to summarize the more sane elements of the plot, as best I can. An evil wizard (Chen) seeks to reclaim his youth. This involves bathing in childrens’ blood, and eating the Ginseng King, who is played by a little kid dressed up to look like the herbal root in question. Out to stop him is Peach Boy (Lin, doing her usual unconvincing male character shtick), with the help of a bunch of friends, led by… some randomly wandering dude (Ku). Both sides are populated with bizarre characters, sporting even more bizarre abilities. For example, Peach Boy can summon a giant fruit which he can use like bowling-ball, and that occasionally shoots lasers out at her opponents.  Or one of his allies has an arm, which turns into an aggressive chicken on occasion and pecks peoples’ eyes out.

There are moments here which are “I can’t believe I just saw this.” If you saw the Indian film RRR, you’ll know the kind of thing I mean. Except, there is good reason why this has remained an underground item, rather than generating Oscar buzz. For there are also moments in this which appear to have strayed in from your local community theatre pantomime. I mean this in a number of ways: the quality of the performances, the juvenile humour, and the way you have both men playing women and women playing men. Not all of it works, to put it very, very mildly, and I’ve no idea who the target audience might have been.

Matters are likely not helped by the VCD release, which has the Cantonese audio track coming out of one speaker, and the Mandarin out of the other (how they used to do multiple-language media). So you’re listening to two different languages, simultaneously, and they are not in sync either, adding to the overall insanity. I think “exhausted” is the best single word for how the whole endeavour made me feel. It’s the cinematic version of a run-on sentence which lasts for 80 minutes, making copious use of the words “and then…” While I can appreciate the invention on view here, it doesn’t excuse an approach that seems to involve spraying the audience with a fire-hose, and hoping it slakes their thirst.

Dir: Chung-Hsing Chao
Star: Hsiao-Lao Lin, Chen Shan, Pao-Ming Ku, Mei Fang Yu

Marilia, the Warlord, by Morgan Cole

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

This is a fairly classic “rise from nowhere” story, yet is well-executed and done in a world which is interesting for its differences. The heroine is – surprise! – Marilia, whom we first meet on the battlefield, about to face an opponent of superior numbers. We then flash back to her childhood, growing up in a Tyracian brothel. Her mother was one of the “painted ladies,” but after she dies, Marilia and her brother Annuweth are on increasingly thin ice. Their effort to run away is unsuccessful, yet does bring them a chance at a new life. While it’s here that Marilia discovers her tactical savvy through board games, it’s not without its downside, the siblings being split up after Marilia enters an arranged marriage in another territory.

Yet that, too, has its pluses, for her new home of Svartennos is a little more liberated in terms of gender equality. This matters, especially after her husband dies and she inherits his responsibilities, which include war. There’s also a somewhat convenient prophecy about their warrior queen Svartana: “That someday, when the island is in peril… the spirit of Svartana will return in the form of another, to lead out people to victory and save the island.” No prizes for guessing, this is something which Marilia can leverage to her advantage, especially when combined with her genuine tactical wits.

There are a number of other threads woven into the plot, such as her relationship with her brother, and their joint passion for revenge on the warrior, Sethyron Andres, who killed their (absentee) father. That he’s known as “The Graver” gives you some idea of what to expect, and awkwardly, he’s now part of the forces on their side for the war. The resolution of this will bring them both back to Tyrace, and the very house where they grew up. This provides one of the rare bits of meaningful action for Marilia. While she is well-practiced with the sword, she discovers there’s a big gap between that and the hellish realities of the battlefield: it’s something Cole does not soft-pedal, to good effect.

I was quite surprised to realize the book is almost five hundred pages long, as it feels considerably shorter: I’d call this a good sign. It does take some time to get going, with the second half definitely moving at a quicker pace, compared to the first, which is more concerned with Marilia’s upbringing. Turns out, she’s gay – not that the book makes anything out of it, and even the heroine doesn’t quite know what she is (I’m guessing the culture doesn’t acknowledge it). It’s just a “Why do I want to spend my time with that woman?” thing. The first volume offers a nicely self-contained story, without many dangling elements, except the ultimate fate of The Graver. I suspect I may well end up finding out what happens there, in due course.

Author: Morgan Cole
Publisher: Self published, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 4 in the Chrysathamere Trilogy series.

Mercy Falls

  By

★★★
“Come to beautiful Scotland! And die!”

Even though I haven’t lived there since the eighties, I remain a sucker for a Scottish film. This delivers, with no shortage of rugged mountain landscapes, beautiful lochs, a ceilidh band and trees. So. Many. Trees. The foliage is understandable, because most of it takes places in the woods, where Rhona (Lyle) and her friends are looking for a cabin, deep in the wilds, which belonged to her late father. To help find it, they enlist the help of local Carla (McKeown), whom they meet down the pub when they have a pre-trip planning get-together. She initially seems fun to be with. But once they’re away from civilization, a shocking incident proves she… has issues, shall we say. And might not be the only one in the party.

The “trip into the woods goes wrong” subgenre of horror has been a staple of the industry for decades – not least because, it’s cheap to do. Why bother with expensive sets, when you can just run around a forest for the bulk of your running time? [Though from previous conversations with Scottish film-makers, the dreaded blood-sucking local insects know as midges, might make that choice of location a decision to regret!] There’s not a lot new in this incarnation of it. Having the threat come from inside the party is a moderate twist, as is having both leads being women. But horror, generally, isn’t something which requires innovation. It’s considerably more about the execution. Or, perhaps, the executionS.

There, this film is a bit of a mixed bag. If the supporting characters aren’t much more than stock characters: the slut, the jackass, the nerd (that would be the guy reading Homer in the woods!), they serve their purpose, which is mostly to die at the hands of Carla. The effects are limited, but I’d say, respectable enough. One extended impalement is likely the highlight, helped by the victim’s enthusiastic selling of their injury. The script is perhaps the weakest element, with a few moments which had us rolling our eyes, in particular the “we might be going to die, so let’s go ahead and have sex” scene. At 103 minutes, trimming might be warranted, as this stretches the material a bit thin. On the other hand: did I mention the lovely scenery?

It all builds as you’d expect, to a somewhat decent face-off between the heroine and villainess. It is somewhat problematic, in that the latter’s background should give her such an edge, as to be able to wipe the floor with Rhona inside ten seconds. Something like handicapping Carla with an injury could have helped make the playing field feel less one-sided. However, we were still reasonably invested in things by this point, and McKeown definitely makes for a convincing nemesis, capable from flicking an internal switch and going from friendly into “you are all going to die” mode in a moment. Nobody could accuse this of ambition, yet it does what it does well enough to entertain us.

Dir: Ryan Hendrick
Star: Lauren Lyle, Nicolette McKeown, James Watterson, Layla Kirk
Mercy Falls is available now on Tubi.

The Moderator

  By

★½
“Falls far, far short of reaching moderate”

Oh, dear. Where to start? Let’s get the positives out of the way. This looks reasonable enough, and clearly was not a poverty-row production. The central idea isn’t bad either: while a vigilante killer taking out misogynistic online sexists is a fairly ludicrous concept, if you squint a bit, you can see how it could have become an acerbic comment on the toxicity of social media. And that’s all I’ve got. For any potential is ruthlessly exterminated by staggeringly feeble execution. We’re there inside two minutes, when an unnamed Russian supermodel wakes, to get a video message from two pals vacationing in Morocco, then turns on the TV immediately to see a news report about them being executed by ISIS, with the video online for all to see. Wait, what?

Ms. Supermodel then visits a shadowy character who gives her a small rucksack telling her it contains everything she needs, including her new identity as “Mya Snik”. This is only the second-dumbest name, because later on we hear of somebody called, I kid you not, Dr. Akula. No, really. The rucksack also contains a scorpion, for no reason ever made clear. Mya then heads off on a somewhat ruthless pursuit of random Internet trolls, leading up to serial rapist and shitty white rapper, Vance Wilhorn (Lane), who is in Morocco too, abusing any young woman stupid enough to hang out with him. And we are talking very, very stupid, as shown by this stunningly terrible piece of dialogue:
    “Do you want to get raped or what?”
    “Oh, come on – don’t start that again…”

Once more, this might all have been tolerable, had it focused on Mya giving scummy perverts their comeuppance. Instead, there are meandering subplots about the Interpol pursuit of her, led by agent Bourdeau (Dourdan), and local cop Selma (Azzabi). The latter lets Mya go after capturing her, because her prisoner recites crime statistics at her, apparently boring the policewoman into hypnotic compliance or something. We hardly ever see Mya even lightly kick significant butt, and her talents evaporate entirely at points. One minute, she’s efficiently taking down security personnel in a resort (albeit to no real purpose). The next, she can’t beat a fat Moroccan tour-guide, who can barely waddle away. I’m not impressed.

There are few things worse than a film which clearly wants to make an earnest point (as evidenced by the quoting of statistics), yet is incapable of doing anything except repeatedly shooting itself in the foot. We’re given no reason to root for or care about the heroine, or anybody else in the picture for that matter. The action is largely feeble, though I did have to laugh at the Interpol agents chasing on foot after Mya’s motor-cycle, which then conveniently falls over. And if you want to see attractive Moroccan scenery, you’d be better off with a Tourist Board promo video. Definitely a candidate for worst movie of the year.

Dir: Zhor Fassi-Fihri
Star: Irma Lake, Michael Patrick Lane, Gary Dourdan, Soraya Azzabi

The Mother

  By

★★★
“Jenny from the Glock.”

It has been a very quiet year for big-budget action heroine movies so far. Here we are, more than one-third of the way through 2023, and this Netflix Original is likely the highest profile entry to date. There is a certain pedigree here, albeit of the direct-to-streaming variety, with director Caro having also helmed the (considerably more expensive) live-action remake of Mulan, which went straight to Disney+. Lopez has dabbled in the action field before, including the likes of Anaconda and Enough, but this is certainly her first full-on entry into our field. The results are workmanlike, and occasionally reasonably impressive, but there’s nothing outstanding or original enough here to make much impression.

Lopez plays an unnamed former soldier – “The Mother” is all even the credits call her – who gets involved with a pair of arms dealers, then betrays them to authorities. In revenge, one of them, Adrian Lovell (Fiennes) finds her and stabs her heavily pregnant belly. The resulting baby daughter survives, but the mother is convinced to give her child up for adoption, and vanishes off the grid herself. 12 years later, she’s told by FBI agent William Cruise (Hardwick), whose life she previously saved, of am impending kidnap attempt on her daughter, Zoe (Paez). The mother comes out of hiding to protect Zoe, though re-establishing any kind of relationship proves difficult. Not least, because Lovell is still intent on getting his revenge. Still, bonding over wilderness survival training salves all emotional wounds, apparently.

It’s all fairly straightforward, and you can likely predict where the film is going to head, at any given point. At 117 minutes, it feels somewhat too long, and there’s a split in focus as far as the antagonist goes, with Gael García Bernal playing arms dealer Héctor Álvarez. I wonder if merging his character with Lovell would have made more sense. There’s also too much time spent on the relationship between Zoe and her mother, along with a painfully obvious metaphor in the shape of a wolf bitch and her offspring, which teeters perilously close to dead horse territory much of the time. It doesn’t help that Paez has a severe case of Resting Teenager Face, and I found it almost impossible to care about her.

The film is considerably better when the characters stop speaking and begin chasing, stabbing and shooting each other instead. Even if the action sequences are sometimes over-edited, they are decently staged, I particularly enjoyed a chase, involving the Mother using her feet, a motor-cycle and a car, through the streets of “Havana” (actually Las Palmas in the Canaries). Now and again I could believe that Lopez was not just sitting in her trailer, letting her stunt double do all the work. Like most Netflix Originals e.g. The Old Guard, this will pass muster as entertainment, before vanishing off the front page of the streaming service, and heading into long-term obscurity, forgotten by most who saw it.

Dir: Niki Caro
Star: Jennifer Lopez, Lucy Paez, Omari Hardwick, Joseph Fiennes

Mercy

  By

★★
“Die Hard in a hospital.”

I’m almost tempted to leave it at that, because there are points where it feels like writer Alex Wright left it at that as well. Heroine Michele (Gibson) gets down to her vest? Check. Takes a walkie-talkie off a bad guy? Check. At one point, she even lost a shoe. If she’d gone crawling through an air-duct, I’d have flipped a table. Anyway, Michele is a former military doctor, now working in a civilian hospital. Rushing in one day is an FBI agent with Ryan Quinn, son of an Irish crime family, who was shot in an ambush after agreeing to flip on his relatives. Not far behind is family boss Patrick (Voight) and Ryan’s brother, Sean (Meyers), the latter intent on finishing the job.

The resulting hostage situation unfolds more or less as you’d expect, especially after you’re introduced to Michele’s son, Bobby (Bolognese) – and wouldn’t you know it, today is his birthday! That’s one of a few moments where your eyes will be forgiven for rolling enthusiastically. I think we reached peak ocular orbital velocity when Michele heads across the hospital roof, and the cops below pause to salute her. No, really. Quite why she’s on the roof at all, escapes me, and it’s very much a case that for every step the script takes forward, it tends to take two back. The film is a bit better when simply engaging in crunchy violence, and reaches adequate levels in this department now and again.

What probably stops things from collapsing are a decent cast, who are mostly much better than the script deserves. Voight and Meyers in particular, have a very good dynamic, their relationship gradually becoming more fractured, especially after Patrick realizes it was Sean who shot Ryan. The pair are fun to watch, and in Sean we have a particularly nasty villain, with absolutely no qualms about cold-blooded murder. Even here though, the story manages to screw things up, with a ludicrous brawl between father and son. Jon Voight is eighty-four years old, people. When I reach that age, I’ll be satisfied simply to be walking without assistance, and will not be fighting anyone. Trust me.

There might be a bit less of Gibson in this than I expected, with the movie occasionally appearing to forget about her. The army background does give a solid base to explain her hand-to-hand skills: she wasn’t “just” a medic, shall we say. There’s a largely unnecessary prelude which throws in a dead husband and apparently gives Michele bomb-disposal skills, courtesy of the ghost of her husband. Ok, while I made the last bit up, it probably makes as much sense as what the finale provides. It’s the kind of film where I feel a bit sorry for the leads; I can’t help feeling they deserve better material.

Dir: Tony Dean Smith
Star: Leah Gibson, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Jon Voight, Anthony Bolognese
The film is released in select theatres on May 12, on digital May 19, and is available On Demand from June 2.

My Sisters

  By

★
“Sisters that’ll have you crying for mercy.”

This felt oddly familiar, like I had watched it before. One scene in particular – a maintenance man comes to replace a light-bulb, only to become an apparent threat – had me certain I had seen this. But no review of it existed, either here or Film Blitx, my non-GWG site. [For, make no mistake, its credentials here are fringey at best.] My working theory is that I probably fell asleep and missed so much, I deemed it impossible to review, then forgot about it entirely. Yet here we are. I managed to stay awake for an adequate amount of time this viewing, though full disclosure: I did have to pause it about 15 minutes in. I’m still reviewing it  – mostly so I don’t go round the loop a third time.

The hook here is that the whole thing was filmed in 24 hours, something touted by, it feels, every member of the cast and crew during the end credits. On the one hand, it is quite an impressive achievement, considering even the quickest of quota quickies would still need several days [Though 24 hours would be an eternity for Rendez-vous, shot using one take, the first, and thus filmed in under two hours] To the movie’s credit, technically it looks pretty good. The audio is a little ropey in places, however. My question would be: why film it in one day? What did this add to the film? For it seems no more than a pointless gimmick.

Not least because it feels as if the script was also tossed together in a day, easily representing the movie’s weakest element, and bouncing back and forth in time like a meth-crazed ping-pong ball. I’m unsure whether the tedium it induces is a result of its lack of coherence, or if it would have been just as dull with a more conventional narrative. The basic idea is a women’s support group, who decided to become vigilantes, helping their “sisters” who are trapped in abusive relationships by targetting their abusers. [It’s odd that I watched this the same day as the similarly themed Ride or Die. At least that admitted to the psychosis in its vigilante.]

This leads them into conflict with a shadowy men’s support group, the Freemen Society, who don’t take kindly to the women’s actions. The film does a particularly poor job of defining its antagonists, who remain a nebulous threat for the bulk of the running time, and are bad because we are told they are. Yet we discover at the end that one of the women has been an unreliable narrator all along, lying even to the rest of the support group. We are given no particular reason to care about them: there is far too much talk, and the dialogue consists of little more than a series of buzzwords that, presumably, made more sense back in 2020, during the white heat of people giving a damn about #MeToo. That concept has aged like Amber Heard’s milk, and combined with mediocre execution and flat-out terrible writing, these are sisters who need to be doing it to themselves.

Dir: Adam Justice Hardy
Star: Sara Young Chandler, Shanera Richardson, Nadia Marina, Diana Sanchez

Mad Heidi

  By

★★★
“Pure cheese.”

I’d been aware of this movie for some time, through its innovative crowd-funding approach, which raised $3 million to cover the cost of production. After COVID hit, there were doubts it’d ever see the light of day, but here it is: the first “Swissploitation” film [If not quite the case, it’s certainly the first one with a seven-figure budget, as well as the first Swiss movie covered on this site] And it’s not bad: if you’re familiar with similarly crowd-funded spoof, Iron Sky, this is along similar lines of broad parody. It covers almost every genre of cult from kung-fu films through Starship Troopers to women-in-prison films, e.g. there’s an Asian prisoner sporting inmate number #701. It doesn’t all hit, yet safe to say, the more you’re a fan of B movies, the more you’ll get out of it.

The film takes place in s dystopian version of Switzerland, where the authoritarian government are the only ones allowed to produce cheese, under “very Swiss leader” President Meili (Van Dien, making the Troopers spoof propaganda film which opens proceedings, all the more amusing). They crack down harshly on black-market cheese dealers, and this includes shooting dead the boyfriend of Heidi (Lucy) in spectacularly gory fashion, blowing up her grandfather (Schofield) and imprisoning Heidi, under the tender care of warden Fraulein Rottweiler. The heroine eventually escapes, learns martial arts from two nuns and Helvetia, which I am guessing is the spirit of Switzerland. She then takes revenge, Gladiator style, on Meili’s second-in-command, Kommandant Knorr (Rüdlinger), and finally the big cheese himself.

There is a standard by which all nostalgic attempts at recreating grindhouse cinema are measured, and that is the near-perfection of Hobo With a Shotgun. I think the main area in which this falls short is the lead actress. While it’s almost unfair to compare anyone to Rutger Hauer, Lucy simply doesn’t make the same impression as the likes of the original #701, Meiko Kaji, Tura Satana, or even Dyanne Thorne. Although I cannot fault her effort, I was never fully convinced Heidi was the bad-ass necessary to the plot. However, the supporting cast are solid, led by Van Dien hamming it up to thoroughly entertaining effect.

It looks slick, with every cent squeezed out of the budget, and some startling bits of violence. Could have used more nudity, I’d say: the main source is Swiss performance artist Milo Moiré, who has quite the resume. I think I was hoping for it to be more outrageous. Operating entirely outside the confines of the studio system, it feels rather too safe. Yet I will admit to genuinely laughing out loud on occasion, and some of the sequences are fabulously deranged. For example, a prisoner is tortured with cheeseboarding – it’s like waterboarding, except with melted cheese – then finished off by being impaled through the head with a Toblerone, sorry, for trademark purposes, a generic, triangular bar of Swiss chocolate. Whether that concept has you appalled or intrigued, is likely a good guide as to whether or not you should watch this.

Dir: Johannes Hartmann, Sandro Klopfstein
Star: Alice Lucy, Max Rüdlinger, Casper Van Dien, David Schofield