★★★½
“Couldn’t put it better than the tagline: Apocalypse Meow!”
After civilization’s collapse, men have regressed to the level of Neanderthals, while women live in clans decided by their hair colour, with names like the FayWrays, Satanas and Tempests. Clothing is in short supply: lingerie, it would appear, is not, and nor are large, automatic weapons. Unsurprisingly, this leads perhaps to the finest opening five minutes in girls/guns cinema ever – “My name is Rachel, and I am a blonde. Blondes are extinct” – as our heavily-armed, suspender-and-stiletto clad heroines stagger round a post-apocalyptic landscape. This looks fabulous, and totally belies the fact that it cost $16,000 and was made in sixteen days.
Once the story kicks in, it’s less satisfactory, with a rambling tale involving brunette Naomi’s search for a long-lost stag film starring her grandmother. There are also a couple of utterly interminable musical numbers; whatever McCarthy’s talents (and he has a great visual sense), Rodgers and Hammerstein he most definitely is not. Mind you, it didn’t help that the actress playing Rachel quit two days in – as a result, McCarthy fabricated an “insanity” subplot, and used no less than seven different women to play the role.
In the end, 68 minutes is a blessing rather than a problem; this would likely have been intolerable at full feature length, despite great use of locations and (mostly b/w) photography. Instead, it’s a quirkily mad project that strongly suggests too much watching Russ Meyer films and hanging round strip-clubs – as one femme fatale says, “I pop pills like I pop culture.” Any similarity to how I mis-spent my own youth, is purely coincidental.
Dir: John Michael McCarthy
Star: Helen Heaven, Gina Velour, Kerine Elkins, Rita D’Albert
Okay, ‘godlike genius’ is stretching it a 
I’m still trying to work out what the title actually means; it certainly bears no relevance to the film. More generaly, the biggest point of interest is its similarity to Blade 2, which took the basic concept (hunt for the carrier of a virus that turns its victim into bald, psychotic bloodsuckers) and did a lot more with its Eastern European setting. Henstridge is Delon, a policewoman who has her partner dismembered while they search a house, and Lambert leads the backup team – they follow their target into some vents which connect to an old prison, and where they rapidly become the prey. All this is set just outside a post-apocalyptic (plague, specifically) Boston – though the cop cars have ‘POLICIA’ on them. There’s also a subplot about Delon’s son, and a black-market passport she bought for him, which is of no significance whatsoever, and is probably there only to get the running time up to feature length (and at 76 minutes, only barely!).
Shot in what looks like four rooms, it’s up to director Pyun to make the most of a higher-profile cast than he usually manages – unfortunately, he fails, though I liked the snap-zoom technique applied to bullet hits. This is straightforward ‘spam in a tunnel’ cinema, with little tension, character, or anything else that might elevate this above the mundane. Henstridge, bless her, does what she can, and comes over like a grubby version of Lara Croft; her undeniable action heroine potential has so far been wasted in stuff like this or the lame She Spies. Partly shot in the capital of Herzegovina, Mostar, the “just-bombed” look is likely genuine, from a conflict that only ended the previous year; it may be exploitative, but at least Pyun brought employment to the locals. I imagine he’s now scouting locations in Kabul and Baghdad.
Though I hope 80’s hair 
Though the lead actress, body-builder Sue Price, looks nothing like the cover pic (right), credit is due for choosing someone who defies conventional standards of female beauty. However, take all the points away, and then some, for pretending she does; having her spend half the film naked is something both Chris and I could very easily have lived without. She is, frankly, scary. That’s a shame, as while the budget here was obviously tiny, it’s put (mostly) to good use, with an interesting script.
When I picked up this DVD, I could 
While one might question Pam’s acting talents, she is backed by a sterling cast of character actors: Steve Railsback, Xander Berkeley, Clint Howard, Udo Kier and Temuera Morrison. Each one hits the mark in their role, delivering lines with the correct level of enthusiasm. Kier, as usual, steals the show (his presence definitely helped soothe Chris’s eye-rolling), though Berkeley’s sleazy cop is perhaps the biggest surprise, especially if you’re only familiar with him as Jack Bauer’s boss in the first two seasons of 24.
I admit, you could argue the entire story is irrelevant, and this is nothing more than an indefensible cocktail of eroticized violence. But those who live in such a moral vacuum as to require Hollywood to fill in the gaps, have got much bigger problems than Pamela Anderson’s breasts. If you can get past the first five minutes (which even I will say seem a lot longer), there’s no denying the effort expended here – albeit mostly on sex and violence, aimed at the lizard section of the viewer’s brain.
Proof positive that a lack of narrative coherence is no barrier to a good time, She makes about as much sense as you’d expect from a film where the soundtrack veers wildly from Rick Wakeman to Motorhead. It’s post-apocalyptic sword and sorcery, with Bergman as She, the immortal goddess ruling a tribe of Amazon warriors. For reasons which are never explained, She ends up tagging along with hero Tom as he searches for his kidnapped sister. Hey, even Immortal Goddesses need some time off, I guess.