Tag: m

My Day

  By

★★½
“Where the streets have no name.”

Sixteen-year-old Ally (Smith) is living her life very much on the fringes of society. Coming from a broken home, she is now homeless on the streets of London, relying on the dubious charity of questionable friends. Though Ally does have her limits as to what she’s prepared to do, she has no issue with occasional bits of work, delivering drugs for dodgy couple Carol and Gary. It’s this that gets her into trouble: a job goes wrong, after the customer tries to rape her, and Ally flees – without either the drugs or the money. Carol and Gary are bad enough. Yet even they live in mortal fear of their boss, Eastern European gangster Ilyas (Adomaitis). He wants his merch back – and Ally, as interest, for sale to his sex trafficking friends.

Ally ends up in Ilyas’s clutches, increasingly strung out on heroin. Luckily, help to escape comes from a couple of unexpected sources. First is Carol and Gary’s son Kevin (Jackson), who has bigger plans outside the estate on which he currently lives. Then there’s old age pensioner Frank (Kinsey – whom I remember from close to fifty years ago, playing a soldier on classic Brit-com, It Ain’t Half Hot Mum!), who has befriended Ally for his own reasons, is concerned by her sudden absence, and sets out to track her down. Are either of them prepared to cope with someone as morally bankrupt and brutally violent as Ilyas?

This is likely a fringe entry here, considering Ally spends much of the time lying on a squalid mattress, off her head. Yet there are likely just enough moments to qualify, and she has absolutely no aversion to using violence herself when necessary – beyond what any of her male allies can deliver. Although Ally is not a particularly likeable character, there is still enough of a moral code that I did find myself eventually warming to her. The problems here are more in the other cast members, who largely appear to be single-note descriptions, e.g. “kindly old codger,” with the actors not apparently given enough information to flesh them out by first-time feature director Miiro.

I did appreciate a slightly different view of London from the one often shown. Not least, it unfolds on the Western edge of the city, rather than the inevitable go-to when film-makers want to show deprivation, the East End (with an occasional foray Sarf of the river Thames!). Not that it looks notably different: still, it’s the thought that counts. The script somehow manages to end up both a bit too neat, and simultaneously leaving too many loose ends, which may be a result of this being an expanded version of the director’s earlier short. To be honest, it feels fractionally too earnest, in a Ken Loach kind of way, even if depicting a world where everyone is, to some extent, embedded in criminal culture. I suspect that was not the intended point, however…

Dir: Ibrahim Miiro
Star: Hannah Laresa Smith, Mike Kinsey, Karl Jackson, Gediminas Adomaitis

Das Mädchen Johanna

  By

★★
“It’ll be all Reich on the night.”

It’s basically impossible to separate this from the time and place in which it was made: that being Nazi Germany, just a few years before the outbreak of World War II. The portrayal of, not only Johanna/Joan of Arc, but the rest of the participants, has to be read in this light. It certainly explains why neither the English nor the French sides exactly come over as covered in glory. From the former camp, we have Lord Talbot, who is cruel to an almost cartoonish degree. On the latter we have King Charles VII (Gründgens), who is cynical to a fault, and has no qualms at all about using Joan when convenient, then discarding her when she isn’t.

While Johanna (Salloker) is certainly the hero here, her screen-time is surprisingly limited. She doesn’t show up until about the 25-minute mark, her appearance rescuing the King from a mob, who are about to tear him limb from limb for his decision to abandon Orleans. However, the only person who genuinely cares for her is Maillezais (Deltgen), and even he is powerless to stop her becoming a pawn, blamed for the outbreak of the Black Death, once she has outlived her usefulness to the French nobility. I was expecting this to be a parallel between Joan and Hitler, but it doesn’t quite seem that simple.

Admittedly, the film ends, 25 years after the war, with Joan’s reputation salvaged. No longer a heretic, the last lines proclaim “Joan’s memory forthwith as a memory to her who freed France from foreign rule, as a memory to the state’s most faithful servant, who had by her sacrificial death ended disastrous warfare and who gave glory and greatness to the country and peace to the people.” That sounds fairly Fuhrer-like – except for the awkward “sacrificial death” thing. It’s possible King Charles may be a better candidate as the Hitler figure, prepared to do whatever is necessary to save his country. To the latter end, he proclaims “I know the people. The dead Joan will be all-powerful. Inviolable. A thousand times stronger! And her death will engender new miracles.”

Contemporary reviewers like Graham Greene (author of The Third Man) also drew parallels between the French King ridding himself of advisers he saw as treacherous, and The Night of the Long Knives, or the burning of Joan with the burning of the Reichstag. Me, I’m here purely to review it as a movie, and as such it’s quite lacklustre and plodding, concentrating more on the political machinations behind the scene. Salloker looks the part, especially when clad in her silver suit of armour. However, she rarely gets the chance to do much: the only significant bit of acting coming when she realizes she is about to die. Matters are perhaps not helped by the confusing way both the English and French speak German, and the battle scenes are no great shakes: certainly not as good as those in Joan the Woman, two decades previously. This is largely forgotten, for all the right reasons.

Dir: Gustav Ucicky
Star: Angela Salloker, Gustaf Gründgens, Heinrich George, René Deltgen

La merveilleuse vie de Jeanne d’Arc

  By

★★★★
“Merveilleuse is the word for it.”

I generally make it a rule not to review foreign movies without subtitles, simply because it’s difficult to judge them reasonably if you can’t understand them. I made an exception for this 1929 French film for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it’s silent, so comprehension is limited only to the intertitles: I can read the language better than I can understand it spoken. Also, it was approximately the eleven millionth version of the Joan of Arc story I’d seen in the past month:  I think I had a pretty good handle on the plot by this point. Boy, am I glad I did, because it’s the best silent film I’ve seen, albeit in my quite limited experience of them.

History has largely forgotten this version, in favour of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc. Both movies were produced concurrently, interest in the topic apparently having been spurred by the canonization of Joan at the start of the twenties, and the approaching 500th anniversary of the events in her life. However, delays during filming meant this adaptation was beaten to the cinema by Dreyer’s. It perhaps was also impacted commercially by the arrival of the new-fangled “talkies”, leaving silent movies like this looking old-fashioned. Half a century later, the film was eventually restored, and can be found on YouTube as well as the Internet Archive.

At over two hours long, it’s certainly epic, yet is almost constantly engrossing. Its main strength is Genevois in the role of Joan, who has an incredibly impressive face, which more than counters the lack of dialogue. She was only 15 when the film went into production, but already had a decade of experience in making films, including another silent epic, Abel Gance’s Napoleon. It was quite a stressful production, with the actress enduring heavy costumery. She said, “They made me a very light suit of armour, but I ended up with real armour. At the Battle of Orleans I had to wear a 22-kilo suit of chain mail. As soon as I finished a scene, they would lay me down and I would sleep on the ground because I couldn’t take the weight.”

Those battle scenes are extraordinary, especially for the time, overcoming the constraints of the 4:3 aspect ratio. The siege at Tourelles is a phenomenal set piece, involving 8,000 extras, largely recruited from the French army. There’s additional poignancy to the spectacle, Joan realizing the horrors of the battlefield, which have been unleashed as a result of her actions. While I’ve yet to see the Dreyer version (by most accounts, it seems rather talky for a silent!), it’s hard to imagine anyone improving on Genevois’s performance. Inevitably, things do become a bit of a slog during the trial; the dialogue heavy nature of those scenes are always going to be tough. Yet even here, there are moments of exquisite beauty; Joan sat, her head bowed, as her accusers file out past her.

Then there’s the burning at the stake, another scene which came uncomfortably close to historical accuracy for Genevois. “The moment the wood caught fire I yelled ‘It burns!’ [The director] Marco was so sure I was afraid, that he did nothing at all. All of a sudden the cameraman, Gaston Brun, shouted ‘She’s burning!’ and everyone ran towards me, because I was tied up and couldn’t budge. I was very frightened.” Even putting that aside, there’s no denying the emotional wallop it packs, particularly in the extended shot of Joan walking towards her death: Simone’s face, again, sells this in a way which left me genuinely distraught. This doesn’t happen often, and never before while watching any silent movie.

de Gastyme then simply stops the film. It’d seem an abrupt ending almost anywhere else; here, it acts as a force-multiplier for Joan’s death, letting it resonate in the silent darkness which follows. Finally, I have to give credit to the sadly unknown composer who provided the score accompanying the movie. It’s top-tier stuff, complementing and enhancing the on-screen action to great effect, whether rousing the blood during the battles, soaring to the heavens for her visions, or mourning the inevitable fate of the heroine. Over its 125 minutes, this hits all the expected moments with precision, and Genevois – who retired from movies at the ripe old age of 23! – deserves to be far better-known in ranks of actresses to have taken on the iconic role of Joan.

Dir: Marco de Gastyne
Star: Simone Genevois, Fernand Mailly, Georges Paulais, Jean Debucourt
a.k.a. Saint Joan the Maid

Maid of Baikal, by Preston Fleming

  By

Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆½

I have always been intrigued by alternate histories. These are bits of speculative fiction, which are based on a “What if…?” premise. For example, what if Napoleon had won the Battle of Waterloo? Or what if John F. Kennedy’s assassination had failed? Creators speculate on the way the world might have changed, in ways big and small. I find such creations endlessly fascinating, giving me a strong suspicion that, at certain points, history teeters on a razor’s edge, where a seemingly insignificant event can have an impact far beyond its scale. Here, it’s a single person who changes the course of history. For what might have happened, had Joan of Arc turned up, not in medieval France, but in Russia, during the aftermath of the 1917 revolution?

Naturally, it’s not Joan per se. But it’s still a teenage girl, Zhanna Dorokhina, guided by “voices” from God, who becomes a rallying point for one side in the battle between the Bolshevik revolutionary, and their opponents, the White Russians. She has an almost miraculous ability both to divine the correct tactics, and also avoid fatal injury, even as she rides into the thick of battle. Yet in so doing, she becomes a target for the opposition, who plot to get rid of her, by whatever means are necessary. The White Russians are supported with resources from a number of Western nations, and the story is told through the eyes of Captain Edmund du Pont, an American who is helping set up and manage a wireless network when he encounters Zhanna. Initially attracted to her, he eventually is convinced by her righteous passion for her cause. 

It is very much taking the elements of Joan’s story, and transplanting them to Russia in 1918-19. There is the same initial struggle to be taken seriously, working her way up the chain of command. Then her growing army of followers, snowballing into success after success. Just as inevitably, if you’re familiar with her French predecessor, is her betrayal, capture by the enemy, and – I trust this is not a spoiler – tragic death, before her mission from God can be fully completed. Yet Fleming does a generally good job of weaving these into the established historical narrative, so they feel an organic whole.

If I had to pick a flaw, it might be that the film spends to much time with Captain du Pont. I would have preferred more about the Maid, rather than his romantic entanglements. However, this does give a sense of observing history, rather than being part of it. As such, perhaps the most effective part is the epilogue, which looks back over events of the 15 years since the White Russians took Moscow. Which, as even casual observers should know, is not quite how things unfolded in reality. Though it appears, the Maid only delayed, and perhaps slightly changed the flavour of, the dictatorship which ended up ruling the country.

Author: Preston Fleming
Publisher: PF Publishing, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book.
Stand-alone novel.

Mermaid Team

  By

★★★
“Ariel assault?”

This feel like it could easily have come out of the nineties, with the distinct whiff of a throwback to the golden age of Hong Kong “girls with guns” movies. That is, of course, not a bad thing. However, this is not really golden. It’s probably not even bronzey. High-quality PVC perhaps? I think the main difference is probably that the classics starred the likes of Moon Lee, Cynthia Khan and Yukari Oshima, who could kick ass in a convincing fashion. The actresses here are largely limited to gun-play, and most of them look like they would be soundly defeated by a stiff oncoming breeze. However, I can’t knock the production values here: this is slick, well-made and looks very nice.

The group of the title consists of six young women, under the leadership of Yang Yi/Moman (Xu) – the subtitles say one thing, the credits another – who go after drug dealers and related bad guys. It’s the usual group of individuals, each with their own special skills. For instance, Qi Xia (Zhou) appears to be the smart girl of the group. Well, she wears glasses and sucks a lollipop, anyway: her intelligence never has much relevance. Similarly, Sha Lv, which I have no idea how to pronounce, is the team’s sniper, and so on. None of them make much of an impression, save for Moman, who is also the one lucky enough to receive a dramatic arc, since her sister was killed during the escape of a captured villain. Or was she?

This runs barely an hour long in the version officially released on YouTube, – maybe there’s a director’s cut somewhere? There did definitely seems to be edits. It’s not so much slim as positively anorexic, with not much room for development of story or characters. Moman and her team work their way up the chain, with some light action, though there is a surprising amount of death on the way. Let’s just say, Mermaid Team will be placing a ‘Help wanted’ advert. I did like Zhu, who plays Mi Lai, a henchwoman to one of the bad guys, and has an appropriately wild-cannon vibe to her. I was hoping for a final battle between Mi Lai and Moman; however, this seems almost totally disinterested in hand-to-hand action.

Not that it’s by any means bad, just competently forgettable, with a lack of many memorable elements – in either good or bad direction. I don’t know what the budget was on this. I suspect, like many Chinese films, it was relatively small by Hollywood standards, yet Ma certainly does a good job of squeezing every ounce of production value out of the price, and the images pop off the screen too. I must confess though, given the title, I was expecting at least some aquatic shenanigans, but these mermaids remain resolutely land-dwelling. On the other hand, while Googling the title, I did learn there is apparently a World Mermaid Championship. Never say this site is not informative…

Dir: Ma Hong-Wen
Star: Xu Zi-Lu, Zhang Da-Ke, Zhou Jing, Zhu Jue

Matching Escort

  By

★★
“No sense nonsense.”

I was pleasantly surprised when this random kung-fu film found Tubi (under the Silver Fox title) turned out to be by the creator of Wolf Devil Woman. which was batshit crazy, but at least quite entertaining. This is, unfortunately, only half of that – and worse, it’s the insanity which is delivered, with the entertainment being only sporadic in nature. I will say, in the film’s defense, the presentation is likely not helping. There’s no subbed version I’ve been able to find, and the English language one is badly dubbed, cropped visually and is likely also cut (either that, or the editing is worse than terrible).

All that said, I didn’t feel this was up to the same level of quality as WDW, which at least had a novel story. This, is just your basis revenge item, no matter how much the trappings insist otherwise. Pearl – I’ve no clue about her character’s name, I’m not sure it’s ever used in the entire film – is brought up as part of a martial arts family, whose training methods consist of strapping heavy shoes to her feet. Just as she reaches adulthood, the other 73 (!) members of her clan are killed by a rival, in search of a jade amulet that’s the source of their power. But, naturally, Pearl escapes with the amulet, and goes into hiding.

She’s taken under the wing of the rather weird Silver Fox (Ying), who teaches her his advanced kung-fu techniques, up until he is also brutally killed. This triggers Pearl, who goes after both his killers, and those responsible for slaughtering her family. There may be a connection. There is also a roaming nobleman (Meng) and his comic relief sidekick (Seng), but up until the end, they are largely irrelevant and so can safely be ignored. The main issue is, the film sits around in Silver Fox’s underground lair for far too long: it feels as if the movie spends twice as long on the training for the revenge, as the actual revenge. While it’s a somewhat loopy environment, it gets old quickly and my interest largely died during this middle section.

Things do perk up down the stretch, with some insane battles, not least the bit where Pearl stabs a guy in the top of his head with her sword, and he then turns into a geyser of blood for a bit. This is is the kind of insanity for which I am here. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel there was enough of this, and I found the herky-jerky editing approach close to inducing a migraine: the stabs at comedy have much the same effect. The IMDb says it was written by Godfrey Ho, and I’ve seen enough of his dreck to make it seem plausible he was involved here. It’s an underwhelming kind of revenge for Pearl too, and leaves the ending falling painfully flat. Closure, it would appear, is for other people.

Dir: Sze Ma Peng, Pearl Chang
Star: Pearl Chang, Fei Meng, Shih Ying, Sek Fung
a.k.a. Fury of the Silver Fox or Venus the Cavalier or Wolf Devil Woman 2

Mr. and Mrs. Smith, by Cathy East Dubowski

  By

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

This book is the official novelization of the 2005 movie of the same name, starring Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. I don’t share the idea that movie novelizations are by definition trash, devoid of any possible literary quality. Like movies based on books, they take a work in one art form and endeavor to translate it (hopefully faithfully!) into a different one. Whichever direction the translation goes in, it requires genuine artistry to do well; IMO, either way, it has the potential of creating something worth watching or reading, and even something that’s seriously good artistically. Each attempt ought to be judged individually, on its own merits.

That said, in this case, neither the original movie nor its novelization are ever likely to be viewed by many people as stellar achievements in either of their respective forms. I thought that the film had significant gaps in logic, which I hoped the novelization might address. In fact, it doesn’t; the plot holes, logical problems and murky areas in the original are as glaring, illogical and murky here. That’s the primary reason that my rating for this book isn’t higher.

As most readers will know going in (and the cover copy will tell you that much, if you don’t!), our title characters here are both professional assassins. Neither of them knows that fact about the other. As it happens, they work for unnamed organizations, both seemingly U.S.-based (the main setting appears to be New York City), which are hostile to each other for totally unexplained reasons (did I mention “murky?”). They’ve been married 5-6 years (a running gag is that they can’t agree on which), having met in Bogota, where they’d both been sent to carry out hits on various local malefactors. At the time, they were strongly drawn to each other, quickly forming a deep emotional connection, and married after a whirlwind courtship. Since then, however, their marriage has deteriorated to the point that they’re hardly communicating at all, and are just going through the motions, nursing various unexpressed grudges and frustrations. Not far into the book, they’re both assigned by their respective organizations to dispatch the same mark. The resulting confrontation will set the stage for the ensuing developments.

Cathy East Dubowski is a professional writer, who apparently specializes in both YA and grown-up movie novelizations. This is apparently her best-known one (and my only exposure to her work). To her credit, she attempted a fresher approach here than simply re-telling the screenplay in third person. The movie used the frame device of the couple’s visits to a marriage counselor. Here, the author begins the book with the counselor’s notes and transcripts from his initial sessions with the Smiths, both together and separately; the main body of the story is their alternating journal posts which the counselor asked them to write, without necessarily showing the text to anyone else. IMO, this works well; we get inside both their heads, and understand them and their feelings. (One reviewer complained that the technique makes for “repetition,” but I didn’t find this to be a problem. While they’re often describing the same events, their different perceptions of them are very revealing, and as such anything but boring.)

Dubowski follows the movie fairly well (I could spot some minor differences, but though my memory of the film isn’t as sharp now as it was right after watching it seven years ago, I could also recall a good many scenes and lines of dialogue). The main difference is that the bad language in the book is much worse than in the original. There, I don’t recall it as very noticeable (and I would have picked up on that sort of thing), though the PG-13 rating is in part for “brief strong language.” Here, it’s not brief, and there’s a lot of it, including the f-word and religious profanity; I found most of this gratuitous. (Otherwise, the content issues aren’t problematical; there’s implied –actually, stated– sex, some of it premarital, but nothing explicit, and while the violence level is through the roof, it’s not really gory and is so over-the-top it’s hard to take seriously.

The same could be said for both the movie and the book in general.) A lot of plot points aren’t really credible; it’s difficult to go into detail without spoilers, but I didn’t think any of the decisions by the couple’s superiors were believable, Benjamin Danz’s role didn’t logically make sense, and I couldn’t imagine any real-life assassins reacting to the situation of discovering another hitter targeting the same mark the way this pair did. Also, the carnage in the highway chase scene would have resulted in police attention long before it concluded; and I thought the ending was way too pat. The causes of the couple’s estrangement over the years also aren’t really brought out and explained.

Objectively, given all of these shortcomings, in terms of its literary worth the novel doesn’t deserve more than two stars. Three was a gift; but it’s one I’m subjectively willing to give, just because I honestly did like the book, to a degree. The reason I did is for the strength of its depiction of a couple who honestly do love each other, and who are willing to fight both external dangers and their own inner anger and misunderstandings, in order to hang on to and recapture the bond that drew them to each other in the first place. And it’s made clear that a big part of doing that is learning to be honest with each other, to be themselves without playing a role, to communicate and give your entire commitment to the relationship. That aspect of the book, even though the story is told with a significant leaven of humor, is in itself as serious as can be, and applies to all marriages, whether the partners both happen to be contract assassins or not. And despite their faults, I had the sense that both main characters were essentially decent human beings, whom I did care about and want to see succeed in their married life.

Author: Cathy East Dubowski
Publisher: Harper; available through Amazon, currently only as a printed book.
A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Mayday

  By

★½
“Send help.”

Yes, this is one of those cases where the title is the review, because I suspect many viewers will be signalling enthusiastically for help before reaching the end. I would start off by saying something snarky, like “That’s an hour and a half of my life that I’ll never get back.” But this would imply the film actually held my attention for an hour and a half, which would.. not be entirely correct. I was in the same room where it was playing. My eyes were open. I am not prepared to commit to much more than that. I also note that at the North American box-office, it took a grand total of $4,382, including a whopping $209 over its second week of release. I trust everyone involved in the production learned a valuable lesson from this.

This is a “war of the sexes” picture thinly disguised as fantasy, which throws elements from Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and Lord of the Flies into a blender, in the belief that doing so makes for some kind of feminist statement. It doesn’t. Not even when you burden the cast with lines like, “You’ve been in a war your whole life, you just didn’t know it,” or “You need to stop hurting yourself and start hurting others.” It begins with downtrodden waitress Ana (Grace Van Patten) crawling through an oven in the hotel where she works, and emerging onto a vaguely WW2-era shoreline. There, she bonds with a group led by Marsha (Goth), who lure male soldiers to the beach using fake Mayday signals, sniping dead any who make it past the turbulent conditions. Because all men are predators who deserve to die, right?

It plays like an “Is caffeine-free Pepsi alright?” version of Sucker Punch, with Ana crawling into her own headspace, trying to escape the traumas of everyday life, in a world with repurposed characters. For example, Marsha is the same, reluctant bride Ana comforted in the bathroom shortly before her break from/with reality. The only element of interest was Ana’s refusal to go down the same murderous path of intent as her colleagues. though this does lead to a feeling the movie doesn’t quite know what message it’s trying to send. At least Paradise Hills, which occupied similar territory, had a gorgeous visual sense to paper over the weaker plot elements. Here, there’s no such distraction.

This is not quite the worst “young women trapped in a surreal landscape” movie I’ve ever seen. That would be the near irredeemable awfulness of non-GWG film, Ladyworld. However, that I found myself consciously comparing this to it, is not a parallel to any movie’s credit. If there’s a lesson to be learned from Ana’s eventual fate, it’s that the cure for what mentally ails you, apparently involves a psychotic break, along with some quality girl time spend living on the beach alongside a crew of Aileen Wuornos wannabes. I guess it probably works out as cheaper than therapy.

Dir: Karen Cinorre 
Star: Grace Van Patten, Mia Goth, Soko, Havana Rose Liu

Mistress Killer

  By

★★★
“Mistresses cannot be exterminated!”

To my surprise, when I begin researching this film, it appears actually to be based – at least, somewhat – in reality. I give you this story from 2016. “Zhang Yufen, 58, is known in Henan province, as the “Mistress Killer” for her unusual hobby, which involves spying on her clients’ partners before confronting their lovers in public with vicious and humiliating attacks. She set up her agency, the Alliance Against Mistresses, in 2003 after her own husband admitted to having to having an affair in the 90s and left her and her son for his lover, clearing their joint bank account after 16 years of marriage… She receives around 100 calls a week in her mission to “ruthlessly exterminate those men” — and says police turn a blind eye to her assaulting other women in public.”

Unsurprisingly, the local film industry pounded on the idea, quickly popping out the Chinese equivalent of a quota quickie, running a brisk 67 minutes before the credits roll. Naturally, the film version of the vigilante, Lv Xia (Li Mengmeng), is considerably more photogenic, but the concept is the same – she busts in on men having extra-marital affairs and humiliates them and their lovers, for the benefit of their wives. The story here has the “Scandal Chaser” being seen and photographed by journalist Chen Dong (Qi). But after discovering her mission, he agrees to withhold the proof of her identity, and work with her instead. However, Liu, a businessman who had been one of Lv’s targets, doesn’t take kindly to her actions, and sends his assassin (Chen) to put a stop to her brand of justice.

It’s not a bad idea, though the way it’s developed is largely predictable, such as how Lv and Chen fall for each other. The fighting is mid-tier at best – and not often at that – but there are some quirky moments which helped sustain my interest above the Lifetime movie to which this largely aspires. I liked how Lv wears a V for Vendetta mask while in action, and was amused to hear Liu berating his minion, “Do you really think you are Leon in that movie?” The businessman has a point: “Leon” is indeed a bit crap, as company hitmen go, Lv typically disposing of him with ease.

Things did perk up in the final twenty minutes, when someone formulates a plan to capture Lv and take revenge. At first, I thought this was the humiliated mistresses getting together; it turns out to be for rather more prosaic, capitalist reasons, involving the hostile takeover of a corporation by female tycoon, Wu Yan-Mei (Li Man-Yi). She’s good as the evil villainess: she has a great laugh a slew of henchwomen, and some details of her scheme to turn the tables on Lv, are elegantly malicious. If only she’d shown up sooner. The tables end up turning, albeit in a somewhat clunky fashion and a slo-mo mass cat-fight, before one final twist. Still, I’d not be averse to a sequel, or a remake with more punch.

Dir: Geng Lei
Star: Li Mengmeng, Qi Ling, Li Man-Yi, Chen Xing-Yu,

El Monstro del Mar!

  By

★★★
“Catch of the day.”

I could have sworn I’ve seen this before, but a search of the reviews suggest otherwise! This is an Australian pastiche of a couple of different things. Perhaps the most obvious influence is Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, in that it’s the road misadventures of a trio of delinquent women – two brunettes and a blonde. The leader, Beretta (Scarlet) looks something like a cross between Tura Satana and Bettie Page. We’re less than ten minutes in before their psychopathic nature is revealed, in the brutal killing of two men who stop to offer them roadside assistance – I did like the way the film, shot in black-and-white to that point, explodes into full colour when the violence starts.

They turn out to be hitwomen, hiding out in a beachfront house after completing their latest job, where they cross paths with – further nods to Pussycat – a grumpy old misogynist in a wheelchair, and an innocent young girl, Hannah (Capri). But where it diverges significantly from the Russ Meyer classic is… Well, as you’d expect from the title, the presence of a sea-monster, whose hunger has been impacting the town for decades (including Hannah’s parents).. Yeah, I don’t remember one of them in Pussycat. Then again, that did take place in the desert. It doesn’t actually get any screen time until the half-way point, and the film is quite chat-heavy to that point, save one blood-drenched flashback sequence.

While it’s undeniably a low-budget creature across the board, the atmosphere, assisted by some good use of filters and colour in general, has a Lovecraftian feel to it that was unexpected and well executed. In the second half, there is an increasingly gloomy and oppressive feeling, as the trio stumble across a series of body parts, eventually losing one of their own to the monster, while Hannah rebels against her grandfather. Inevitably, it all ends in the surviving duo taking the fight to the monster and its many tentacles, assisted by Hannah, after they learn the truth about what has been going on. It’s a very moist battle, with body fluids flying on both sides, though I was a bit disappointed we never get to appreciate the full scope of the beast.

It does make for a rather awkward combination, with the two halves of the movie never quite meshing. I kept expecting the fact they were hitwomen would show relevance, but it never amounts to anything: they could simply have been tourists on a seaside vacation. The same goes for the apparent wild swings in era; the cars at the start look sixties vintage, but have very eighties cassette players in them. and any period feel is all but discarded on arrival by the water. However, even if the elements here never go together as you feel they should, they work well enough on their own. If you’re in the mood for a genre fondue, which throws everything into the same pot, you could do worse. Scarlet may not quite be Tura Satana, but then – nobody is.

Dir: Stuart Simpson
Star: Nelli Scarlet, Kyrie Capri, Karli Madden, Kate Watts