Tag: r

The Runner

  By

★★½
“Run Gal Run”

Poor Gal Gadot. Her career since Wonder Woman has basically been one downhill slalom after another. From the disaster which was Wonder Woman 1984, through Heart of Stone, and now this. It feels like everything has been a critical and/or commercial disaster. Even when not the star, she has been catching strays, such as Red Notice and the misconceived (to put it mildly) live-action Snow White remake. It’s at the point where her presence in a project is almost more a warning. The reviews for this could be a new low. Worse than Heart of Stone? Surely not. I was braced though. And while I found this less actively annoying, it still certainly isn’t good.

It’s a script which would barely trouble the back of a beer-mat. On the day prosecutor Maia Marten (Gadot) is scheduled to appear in court for the trial of a crime boss, her son Noah (Wilmot) is kidnapped. Unless she does exactly what she’s told by a voice on the phone (Lewis), Noah will die. The end game is Maia shooting the key witness in the hotel where he is sequestered. But to get there, she must run across London, this being contrived required so that the kidnapper can monitor her. He has also hacked her phone, so she is unable to call for help. There’s also some stuff about Maia’s mother having murdered her father. It doesn’t serve much purpose, and can safely be ignored.

This is the perfect movie, if you’re interested in spending eighty minutes, watching Gadot in motion, slowly getting sweatier and more dishevelled. To be honest… There are probably worse things to look at. Heart of Stone and Wonder Woman 1984, to name but two. As someone who lived in London for more than a decade, I also enjoyed trying to work out exactly where they were. This was challenging, given I left twenty-five years ago, and quite a lot has changed since. Still, I got the lie of the land, and unlike some films (Sherlock Holmes having its hero run from Tower Bridge to the Houses of Parliament in two minutes, requiring a sprint speed of 60+ mph), the geography here seems generally to make sense. 

But the fact that I was more interested in tourist landmarks, than the plot or the characters, is significant. You may even spend more of the film thinking of easier, less complex ways, for the voice on the phone to achieve the same end goal. For this is very much an example of an Amazon Prime streaming movie. You don’t need to think about the plot, or even pay attention to it. Everything is clear inside ten minutes, and the last five tidies everything up nicely, with a twist you will likely see coming – at least, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. In the middle? Running, taunting of Maia by the voice on the phone, and problem-solution on repeat. As Saturday night entertainment, it was… okay, I guess? Never going to watch it again though. 

Dir: Kevin Macdonald
Star: Gal Gadot, Damian Lewis, Alfred Enoch, Rory Wilmot

Robber Girls

  By

★★
“Desperate Living”

There’s a moment here which is probably a good litmus test for how you’ll react to this overall. The heroine, princess Emily (Bühlmann), opens a locket to look at the picture of her dead father. Only, it’s actually John Waters. If you do not know who that is, this film is probably not for you. If you do know who he is, understand why he is called the ‘Pope of Trash’, and have a limited tolerance for his kind of movies, it is probably not for you either: I fall into this category. I was at least forewarned by the synopsis: “A castle maid-turned-fugitive joins a group of sex workers to create a gang of female bandits that fight against the sexually deviant patriarchy.”

The maid thing is a little confusing. For Emily does bring along her maid Trizi (Muller), after she discovers her family is going to marry her off to an ugly aristocrat for financial purposes. But Trizi is ancillary to proceedings. They take refuge in the woods, and engage in some light highway robbery, before seeking refuge in a brothel which, I must say, is staffed by the most collectively ugly group of hookers I’ve seen. At least one of whom is male. Her mother (Prusa, who may be the best thing about the film) captures her and forcibly brings her back to the impending wedding. Only for her new friends to interrupt the ceremony with a heavily-armed objection to the nuptials.

It’s all heavily and deliberately anachronistic: the setting is almost traditional fairy-tale, but littered with modern technology, and copious amount of contemporary sexual freedom, which is portrayed as being the path to happiness. With the exception of Emily’s poor but noble boyfriend, Jozef (Althaus), who is utterly subservient and completely useless, men are evil swine, typically slaves to their sexual deviancies. Mind you, women aren’t much better: indeed, the feminist collective set up in the woods quickly starts to fall apart over ideological differences. I have to respect the way Monti seems thoroughly cynical about… well, everything. Going by the way things unfold, she seems generally to be in agreement with Chairman Mao: “Power grows out of the barrel of a gun”

The presence of Waters makes sense, because he would appear to be the spiritual father here, as much as he’s depicted as Emily’s actual father. In particular, this is consciously attempting to press the viewer’s shock buttons. Realizing this, largely negates the effort, and in the main, it ends up feeling like an exercise in trying far too hard. I kept expecting Udo Kier to show up; that might have helped a bit. Though as novel ways of death go, being killed by slipping on a severed penis, falling backwards from a window and getting impaled on a gravestone crucifix, certainly scores points for imagination. Again, how you react to the last sentence is a good indication of whether or not to bother with this. It’s probably less fun and more didactic than that makes it sound. 

Dir: Carla Lia Monti
Star: Nina Bühlmann, Myriam Muller, Alexandra Prusa, Nils Althaus
a.k.a. Räuberinnen

Revolver

  By

★★★½
“Speak softly, but carry a big stick.”

You need to be patient with this. Both in terms of its plot and, more generally, its attitude. This isn’t exactly action-packed. Yet the heroine – and I used the word loosely – is an unstoppable force of nature. Just more like a glacier than a tornado. She never rushes in, always having a plan, and rarely raises her voice. Yet woe beside anyone who tries to get in her way. She is Ha Soo-yeong (Jeon D-y), whom we first meet as she is being released from prison at the end of her sentence. Turns out she was a policewoman, busted for corruption in a scheme also involving her cop boyfriend. 

Ha agreed to take the fall, in exchange for post-prison consideration: a large cash sum and an apartment. But by the time she serves her time, the world has moved on. Her boyfriend killed himself, the apartment was given away, and the gangster who promised to take care of her, Andy (Ji), is no longer part of the organization. Ha just wants what she feels she is owed. When her polite requests for this are rebuffed, she is unwilling to take no for an answer and move on with her life. No longer constrained by the chains of official justice, Ha sets about finding someone who is willing to pay up, with the help of Jeong Yoon-seon (Lim), and others with various interests in the outcome. 

Naturally, there are those who are not keen to have the awkward situation they thought they had covered up, brought back to attention. Whether it’s the detective still on the beat, or Grace (Jeon H-j), the woman now in charge of the criminal operation, Ha represents a potential problem, which must be solved. While the movie is part of the ever-popular Korean revenge genre, it does provide a different twist. The wrong for which Ha seeks payback is largely a result of her misplaced trust – and after all, she is still a corrupt cop. Yet, courtesy of Jeon’s excellent performance, I still found myself rooting for her. Her calm demeanour is certainly a refreshing change from the more emotive heroines we typically get.

The viewer will need to accept the film is going to unfold at its own, relatively leisurely pace. Yet if you can, I’d say the payoff should be more than adequate, not least in one of the more unusual central characters we have covered on the site. That said, rather than the titular weapon, Ha proves capable of wielding a mean extendable baton. She beats seven kinds of manure out of Andy after he tries to fob her off with drugs, instead of promised money. For if violence may not be her first choice, it always remains a viable option. I might have preferred a little more of it, considering how many disreputable characters she comes across. This, incidentally, does not apply to Grace, who might be the smartest person here. She at least knows when to cut her losses.

Dir: Oh Seung-uk
Star: Jeon Do-yeon, Ji Chang-wook, Lim Ji-yeon, Jeon Hye-jin

The Red Peri, by Stanley G. Weinbaum

  By

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

This 1935 novella is only the second work I’ve read by pulp-era American SF author Stanley G. Weinbaum (the other is his first and best-known short story, A Martian Odyssey, which is included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, 1929-1964). But despite dying at the age of 33, in his meteoric writing career (which spanned only about 18 months), he produced dozens of short stories and two posthumously published novels. (A number of the stories were published posthumously as well.) He earned a place in Sam Moskowitz’s Explorers of the Infinite: Shapers of Science Fiction (1974), and his stature in the genre’s history remains high more than 50 years later.

Though born in Louisville, Kentucky, as a child Weinbaum moved with his parents and sister (the family was ethnically Jewish, but to my knowledge there’s no indication that he was ever religiously observant) to Milwaukee, and lived there for the rest of his short life, except for study at the Univ. of Wisconsin at Madison from 1920-23, where he first majored in chemical engineering and then switched to English literature. (He left without graduating, after being caught taking an exam for a friend on a dare.) After his marriage in 1926, he worked at a variety of odd jobs, but began writing seriously in the late 1920s and submitting his work to magazines. A Martian Odyssey, published in July 1934, was his first sale, and brought him immediate acclaim in the small SF fandom of that day.

American SF between the World Wars was a sort of literary ghetto, disdained by critics, and found mainly in a handful of small-circulation niche magazines, dominated by editors committed to the genre’s “hard” tradition, in which the speculative element is strictly based on extrapolation from known science and scientific accuracy is a paramount concern. (Literary matters like character development, well-crafted prose, and original plotting, in that era, was sometimes of less concern.) Weinbaum, like many of the genre’s writers in his generation, had the scientific background and interest to write hard SF, but his English literature education/interest also gave him stylistic skills superior to those of a lot of his contemporaries. Both qualities are evidenced in this short work.

The Red Peri is set partly in space but mainly on Pluto (which had been discovered relatively recently, in 1930), in a future era in which humans use rocketry to travel to the planets of the solar system, but mostly to Venus and Mars; a small town on the Jovian moon Titan is as far out as their settlement goes, and the outer planets are rarely visited at all. (No date is actually given in the text, though the cover copy gives 2080; I’m not sure where that’s derived from.) Trade between these three middle planets is lucrative, but bedeviled by space pirates; and none of the latter are more feared than those of the pirate ship Red Peri. (Peri is Persian for imp or elf.)

25-year-old Frank Keene, our American viewpoint character and co-protagonist, a radiologist and physicist, has a brief run-in with a red-haired pirate (you can’t see much through a space-suit visor, but he did see that) when the freighter he’s traveling on is robbed by the Peri. A year later, he and an elderly fellow scientist, researching cosmic radiation in deep space, have to make an emergency landing on Pluto. That very cold world proves to hold a couple of secrets, one of which being that it’s the lair of the Peri –and it’s no real spoiler to reveal that “The Red Peri” is also the moniker of the pirate captain, who happens to be a very attractive young lady.

A Dr. Mike Goldsmith provides a reasonably spoiler-free page-and-1/2 Introduction and about five and a half pages of footnotes to this Grammaticus Books re-print. As this added matter reveals, despite Weinbaum’s determination to write “hard” SF, this book has its share of scientific inaccuracies (though it also exhibits some solid science as well in places). Some of these are simply the result of the limited scientific knowledge available in 1935: for instance, not much was known then about Pluto (and Weinbaum’s depiction of it was plausible at the time), and nobody back then realized that the range of radio signals is practically infinite. But (though Goldsmith doesn’t pick up on it), the author makes a MAJOR scientific error which his entire plot depends on, and which was clear to me even with my weak background in science. There’s also an “insta-love” factor going on here that’s not really credible (at least, to me). But on the plus side, our main characters are vital, nuanced and well-drawn, and Weinbaum creates a thought-provoking, morally complex situation which engages both the reason and the emotions of these characters, and of the readers.

While the ending of the tale wraps up the immediate plot here effectively, readers will probably want a continuation to the narrative; and Weinbaum in fact intended to write more about these characters. Sadly, that wasn’t to be. Less than a month after the story was published, he was dead of lung/throat cancer, brought on by his heavy smoking (and initially misdiagnosed as tonsilitis, resulting in a misguided tonsillectomy that just added uselessly to his pain). So readers will have to use their own imaginations to project future developments!

Author: Stanley G. Weinbaum
Publisher: Grammaticus Books; available from Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.
A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come

  By

★★★★
“Let the games begi… uh, continue!”

Despite a slightly clunky title, I enjoyed this a little more than the original. It helps that there’s no need for build-up or explanations. We join things immediately after the end of part one, with Grace MacCaullay (Weaving) staggering outside the mansion where she battled and beat the Le Domas family. Understandably, she ends up in hospital and handcuffs, where her sister Faith (Newton) shows up. But it turns out the Le Domas family were just one part – albeit the head – of a larger, Satanic organization, the Council. The remaining families now need to determine a successor. Whoever kills Grace gets to take over, so the siblings are quickly abducted and taken to the Council’s country club complex.

Grace refuses to take part, but using Faith as leverage, they compel her participation. The siblings must battle for survival and, again, try to survive to dawn against a litany of more or less competent adversaries. This was one my main criticisms about part one: the Le Domas members were so inept as to be no threat. While, in some ways, this is true again here, the film does at least lean into the humourous possibilities. The peak is likely reached when Grace has to face off against Francesca, her late husband’s ex. There’s some rocket launcher incompetence, followed by some pepper sprayage, which leaves the two adversaries thrashing about like blind squid, while an 80’s classic tune plays. It’s awesome. 

There is a bit of a lull thereafter, because Faith is again used against her sister. This compels Grace, once more, to don bridal attire, as a means of avoiding further bloodshed. Well, “postponing” might be closer to the truth. The ceremony goes off about as well as a typical wedding held by a professional wrestling federation – though with considerably more blood than even the most hardcore fed. It’s all a lot of fun, with the Council families providing a slew of fun characters, in addition to its lawyer (Wood). It provides an interesting contrast in family dynamics between the MacCaullays and the Danforths, represented by Ursula (Sarah-Michelle Gellar – and, yes, there are some potential Buffy references) and her psycho brother, Titus (Hatosy).

I liked the fact that it kept any actual social commentary very much secondary. What makes the Council evil is not particularly race, class or money. It is that they are freakin’ Satanists. The film’s other main strength is Weaving, who cements her position as perhaps the best of the next generation for action heroines. She runs through the whole gamut of emotions here, and it is extremely easy to root for Grace. But let’s be honest, the actress would be forgiven if she had simply worn a “not this shit again” expression for one hundred and ten minutes. While the poor box-office here means it’s unlikely we’ll see a part three, long may Weaving’s shotgun continue to smoke. 

Dir: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett
Star: Samara Weaving, Kathryn Newton, Shawn Hatosy, Elijah Wood

Razor Days

  By

★★
“Just not sharp enough, I’m afraid.”

This was certainly not what I expected. That, in itself, would not have been a problem – I’m quite used to, and indeed do not mind, films which confound my preconceptions. I respect what this is attempting to do as well, which is a different take on the revenge movie. The problem here is fumbled execution: more on the directorial, writing and technical fronts, though in some of the performances too. Even allowing for the obviously limited resources this had to play with, by the end, it was definitely a struggle to get through, with a lack of narrative thrust in particular, meaning it failed to hold my attention. That’s a bit of a shame. Only a bit, mind you.

There are three central characters here: Anita (Best), Jessamay (Rochon) and Rena (Monahan). Two of them have severe cases of post-traumatic stress disorder, resulting from their kidnapping and savage treatment at the hands of a rural family, the Logans, who may have cannibalistic tendencies. Jessamay, in particular, suffered brutally, losing an eye and being left with a badly-scarred face. Rena, meanwhile, has largely retired from society. But with the reluctant help of Anita, Jessamay tracks her down and convinces Rena to join them as they head to the Logan farm. As Jessamay puts it, “Time to tell God that he can’t fuck with us and not have any repercussions.” But this does not exactly have the healing consequences for which the trio were hoping. 

And that’s the point: revenge is not clean or cathartic. Indeed, part of the message here seems to be that it can end up turning you into the monster too. To quote Friedrich Nietzsche, “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” If someone optioned that line and made a movie of it, you’d probably end up with this. Which works for Rochon’s character, because she has the necessary acting chops to pull it off. Despite her reputation as a “scream queen”, she has always been a cut above that in her talent. The others though? Not nearly so much.

Not helping: bad audio, which will either have you leaping for the remote or, in my case, turning it almost all the way down and relying on the subtitles. There are interesting ideas for a revenge film, such as that we don’t see the victims’ ordeal until after the revenge – and even then, it’s through Jessamay’s dreams, an unreliable narrator if ever there were one. Unfortunately, the execution is sloppy and dilutes the points the movie is trying to make. It’s an interesting contrast to the recently reviewed Undercover, where the story was nothing new, but it did it brilliantly. Here, there’s no shortage of innovation, but Watt doesn’t know how to go about getting them off the page and onto the screen. 

Dir: Mike Watt
Star: Amy Lynn Best, Debbie Rochon, Bette Cassatt, Jeff Monahan

Revenge of the Witch, Books 2-5, by Aubrey Law

  By

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

I previously reviewed the first volume in the series, Demon Hunter. and mentioned there I’d picked up a discounted collection of the first five volumes in the series. Well, here we are, having now read Demon Slayer, Demon Destroyer, Demon Punisher and Blood Moon. You may be noticing a theme there. To quickly recap, it’s the story of Annis, a Black Witch who in the Middle Ages was hanged for sorcery and spend several centuries in the fiery pits of hell. She has managed to escape, and is now out of revenge on… well, just about everyone she considers her enemy – which is just about everyone. But in particular, her mother Amelia, the even more powerful witch, who killed Annis’s father.

Annis is currently occupying the body of a young woman who had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Despite her moral darkness, Annis is feeling increasingly guilty about it, having previously believed that she only killed those who deserved it. Is this the start of a genuine morality developing in our anti-heroine? We’ll find out over the course of these books, climaxing in the Blood Moon, when the Earth is in perpetual darkness and under the control of the much-hated vampires (as well as a lot of other monsters, some spectacularly large). Will Annis make the sacrifice necessary to bring light back to the world?

The additional four volumes improve over the original one, simply by Annis having a genuine character arc. Though I’m not convinced this is entirely a good thing. One of the series’s appeal was having a lead who driven almost entirely by hate of various flavours. That’s certainly a novel choice (pun not intended), but over the course of the narrative here, Annis does seem to develop genuine emotions towards other people. This does not always end well, to put it mildly, but at the end she’s closer to a conventional heroine, albeit with a a massive, industrial-strength dark side. Which is less unique, to the point I likely won’t bother with the remaining two books in the series. 

However, this provides no shortage of action, Annis going up against a slew of creatures from the small (goblins) to the very, very large Leviathan. The battle against Amelia was a little underwhelming: I expected it to be a knock-down, drag-out magical slugfest, but it was over in only a few pages. However, there are plenty of other battles, against angels, vampires, bounty hunters, high priests and even Satan himself – whom we discover has a certain connection to Annis. Much as in the first part, I’d be hard-pushed to call this great literature, yet I was amused enough that I went through the approaching seven hundred pages quicker than I expected. Sometimes, a fast-food snack is really all you want to eat.

Author: Aubrey Law
Publisher: Independently published available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1-5 of 7 in the Revenge of the Witch series.

Redhead

  By

★★
“Better dead than redhead.”

Written, directed by, and starring husband and wife team Sam and Johnna Hodge, this is the kind of film it would be easy to deride as poverty-row garbage from the bottom drawer. There’s precious little plot, some of the performances are painfully amateur, and it seems to exist mostly as a show-reel for spraying around corn syrup with red food colouring in it. And yet… If Chris and I made a movie – something we have discussed – it might well end up being not too dissimilar to this. On the other hand, if we had a spare $55,000 lying around – the budget here, according to the IMDb – we’d probably go on a nice holiday instead. 

Autumn Blacksmith (Hodge) survived being abducted and tortured by infamous psychopath Oscar Sawyer (Stinnett), finally escaping after killing him. However, the experience left her severely traumatized, and the slightest unfortunate interaction with any man is sufficient to push her over the edge into a murderous rage. Cue the corn syrup. Rinse, repeat for 90-odd minutes, until the end credits roll. Occasional hallucinations of Sawyer returning from the grave to haunt her, and a brief attempt by her therapist (Holland) to check in, offer a small touch of variety. The West Virginia cops, led by Detective Rogers (Robinson), are not exactly Sherlock Holmes. Then again, locals are remarkably chill about Autumn’s spree. The bartender where she kills her first victim says of him, “He was always an asshole.”

I was reminded of Michael and Anne Paul, another husband and wife film-making duo. They made Roman’s Bride, where the red-headed wife also goes on a killing spree. I think that worked a bit better, because its lead actress had an innocence about her, that provided an interesting contrast to her savagery. Here, Autumn is more blatantly mad, to the point you wonder why any man would try to chat her up. As a viewer, you’re never brought along on the journey into insanity. The way some of the local community end up assisting with, or even active participants in, her murders could have been used to provide another twist to the narrative. Nah. Open another bottle of Karo instead. 

Technically, it’s okay: the camera gets pointed in the right direction, it doesn’t succumb to underlit scenes, and the audio is fine. The soundtrack, also by Sam Hodge (not a surprise), has a nice throwback vibe, sounding like it was ripped off an eighties video nasty. But there is no real sense of progression or development, and the ending feels particularly sudden, going to the end credits immediately after she has disembowelled her final victim, a peeping Tom. We’re very little forward from where we were after her first murder. A sequel is in production though, so it appears there was enough of a market for this kind of thing. Will I watch it? [Sighs heavily] Yeah. I suspect I probably will.

Dir:Johnna Hodge, Sam Hodge
Star: Johnna Hodge, Ashley Stinnett, Will A. Holland, Travis Robinson

Run Baby Run

  By

★★★
“Don’t run before you can walk.”

For a good while, this struggled to retain my interest, and when it did, the problems outweighed the positive aspects. Fortunately, after a solid hour of faffing around in ways that provoked mostly rolling of my eyes, the film found its stride. That’s funny, because it’s a running reference. Ok, not very funny. Down the stretch it both figuratively and literally pushes the pedal to the metal, in quite an impressive manner. My reaction was divided. Part of me wondered, where the heck this was earlier on? However, rather than petering out like a sad trombone, there’s no question it’s better for a film to finish strongly, and give the viewers something positive to take away with them. 

The story is relatively simple. Diana (Leira) is out running on a forest trail, when she finds herself being stalked by a mysterious figure in a hooded sweatshirt (Cowell). That, basically, is that. And it is probably both the film’s greatest strength and its biggest weakness. There’s some stuff around the edges, such as Diana being deaf. This is never particularly relevant – yet I liked that it wasn’t, because it never became her defining characteristic. The nature of the story also means there’s relatively little dialogue. It’s probably a good thing, since this Spanish film is in English (and, oddly, French), with some line-readings fairly clunky as a result. It also means the music has to do a lot, and sometimes, it’s guilty of trying too hard. 

The main problem though, is the story, which is embarrassingly obvious to anyone familiar with the wilderness survival genre. For example, when Diana stumbles across some abseiling equipment and decides (apparently randomly!) to rappel down a cliff face. you just know that her stalker is going to appear at the top, when she’s midway through the descent. Similarly, accepting a lift from a truck driven by a large, hairy man… Yeah, surely there’s no possible way that could end badly. Cue the eye-rolling. Yet, it’s from then on the film begins to succeed, embracing the increasing insanity. For example, Diana also has to fend off a mad, old French woman, with incredible strength, who keeps a teddy-bear in a cage. 

This perilous situation is eventually followed by a lengthy car chase through the countryside – I guess it’s the engines that are doing the running there. That’s funny, becau… Oh, never mind. It’s actually very well-staged, with a genuine sense of speed and danger. that I found effective. Things are tied up with acceptable neatness, although I wouldn’t have quite done what Diana does at the very end [he said, vaguely, to avoid spoilers]. The final twenty-five minutes or so demonstrate a laudable level of energy – ironically, it’s the section of the film where the heroine does the least amount of running. Given it’s also the most entertaining, I’m not inclined to carp about the accuracy of the title.

Dir: Toni Andújar
Star: Catuxa Leira, Cody Cowell, Muriel Halloint, Oscar Foronda

Red Sonja (2025)

  By

★★★
“Better red than dead?”

It has been forty years since the first crack at adapting the Marvel comic series, in turn inspired by Robert E. Howard’s character, Red Sonya of Rogatino. The first stab, released in the wake of Conan, starred Brigitte Nielsen, and was pretty bad. There have been rumblings of further attempts over the years, with a Robert Rodriguez version, starring Rose Macgowan, gaining traction in the late 2000’s. Though given the dreck in which Macgowan has appeared, it’s probably for the best this never came to fruition. Instead, we have a lower profile – read, smaller budget – version from director Bassett, who previously gave us mercenary Megan Fox, and lead Lutz, who was totally awesome taking her Revenge. 

Indeed, that would make a fine “Matilda Lutz overcomes impalement to take vengeance” double-bill with this. The reboot isn’t bad at all. It certainly is miles better than the eighties version, mostly because of Lutz. She may not be quite as muscular or buxom as the comic-book version. But she does bring the required intensity, and that goes a decent way to making this watchable. The supporting cast are good too, although I was less convinced by the plot in general, which is little more than a grab-bag of clichés. We begin with the quick slaughter of Sonja’s village, then see the adult Sonja (Lutz) roaming the forests of Hyrkania. These are under threat from Emperor Dragan (Sheehan) and his psycho sidekick, Annisia (Day). 

After being captured, Sonja is made to fight in gladiatorial combat. She helps the other captives escape, and they fight a guerilla war to prevent Drakan from obtaining the other half of a mystical tome which has great power. Sonja is almost killed by Annisia – the impalement mentioned above! – but brought back by Ashera, the forest goddess, to face her enemies again. Pretty rote fantasy stuff, in other words. It’s the stuff around the edges that is more fun and, beyond the lead actress, is where the improvement is biggest over the Nielsen version. 

I enjoyed the arena scenes, which felt like Spartacus with monsters. Always nice to see Rhona Mitra (Doomsday), though her role is briefer than I’d like. I also liked Day, whose portrayal of Annisia is entertainingly unhinged, like a psycho version of Lady Gaga. Her relationship with Dragan doesn’t play out as I thought, and I would have preferred more places where the script confounded expectations in this way. I was a little disappointed by the fights, which aren’t as hard-hitting as I expected. Although they feel workmanlike and competent, the hits only seem to have much impact on a couple of occasions. Some editing might have helped: 110 minutes feels longer than necessary.

On the other hand, for a reported $17 million budget, it looks decent, and Bulgaria offers some impressive backdrops on which to paint things like the largely-CGI arena. There are occasional moments of self-effacing humour which help, such as the scene where Sonja gets her battle bikini. The end clearly wants a sequel: however, the very token cinema release (one midweek screening in theatres!) suggests the studio had little faith in it. A pity. I’ve definitely seen much worse, and would welcome further tales of Hyrkania. 

Dir: MJ Bassett
Star: Matilda Lutz, Robert Sheehan, Wallis Day, Luca Pasqualino