Tag: revenge

Handgun

  By

★★★½
“The Equalizer”

Either by intent or accidentally – and we’ll get to that in a moment – this manages to be both an indictment of and an advert for, American gun culture. That’s quite a spectacular achievement, and it’s perhaps no coincidence that the writer/director is British, so brings an outsider’s balanced eye to a topic that’s often acrimonious in the States. Kathleen Sullivan (Young) is a teacher who has just moved from Boston to a small Texas town. She falls for local attorney Larry Keeler (Day), though is only interested in friendship, not a significant relationship. The initially-charming Larry eventually won’t take no for an answer, and date-rapes Kathleen. However, the circumstances and her attacker’s local reputation mean she gets no satisfaction from the police. The meek and mild Kathleen decides to take matters into her own hands, buying a gun and taking up combat shooting – at the very same club Larry frequents – with the aim of meting out her own brand of justice.

Director Garnett is a fairly outspoken Socialist, most well-known in film circles for his work with Ken Loach, and those left-wing beliefs appear to have informed his approach here. For example, he said in regard to this film, “America is built on genocide, has a macho culture and confuses owning guns with individual freedoms.” It doesn’t exactly make him a candidate for a film pointing out the positive elements of gun ownership. But it’s absolutely no stretch to read this as a Janie’s Got a Gun-style tale of empowerment through firearms. Yes, Larry uses his gun to coerce Kathleen into sex. However, we then see her use her gun to punish him when society fails to do so. There’s no doubt that weapons and the skills to use them are part of her transformative process, and the Kathleen we see at the end is a much stronger woman than the one to whom we are introduced. Guns, it appears Garnett is saying, are just a tool which can be used for good or evil – like any other. It’s when they become fetishized to a dangerous degree, problems like Larry arise.

This does lead to the film seeming rather ambivalent, though it’s hard to tell how much of this is due to studio interference. Garnett sold the film to the mainstream Warner Bros, and says, “I had to cut elements from the film that I now regret.” While slow-paced at times, it benefits from a good performance by Young, who is pretty without being perfect (the gap in her front teeth is a seriously eighties throwback), and can also sell the transformation believably into an angel of vengeance. Yet there’s one final twist at the end, with Kathleen stopping short of becoming what she despises, and it confirms this movie’s position as easily one of the more thoughtful films in the rape-revenge genre. You may or may not necessarily agree with what Garrett has to say, yet it’s hard to say he does a poor job of making his argument.

Dir: Tony Garnett
Star: Karen Young, Clayton Day, Suzie Humphreys, Helena Humann
a.k.a. Deep in the Heart

The Angel of Vengeance: The Female Hamlet

  By

★★★
“To be or not to be… NOT to be…”

Okay, the above is shamelessly lifted from The Last Action Hero, in which there’s a spoof trailer for Arnold Schwarzenegger as Hamlet. But it applies just as much to this, which is remarkably progressive considering its origins; 1977 Turkey was not exactly in the forefront of women’s liberation. Yet here we are, with a modernized and severely truncated version of Shakespeare’s story. This runs 86 minutes, compared to 242 minutes for, say, Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet. But it hits the main spots, even if only in passing: for instance, Hamlet’s soliloquy shows up, though “Alas, poor Yorick” gets short shrift.

In case you’d forgotten: Hamlet (Girik) returns home from drama school in America, after the cold-blooded assassination of her father by her uncle (Yurdakul), who has married Hamlet’s mother (Ferdag). After seeing her father’s ghost, Hamlet decides to feign insanity, in order to get to the truth. When she stages a play, The Murder of Gonzago, depicting what she believes to be the true events, and her uncle’s rapid, guilty exit, it’s time for Hamlet to take her bloody revenge, and consign her uncle to the same end to which he sent her father.

It all takes place against a strange soundtrack, which includes both Shostakovich’s score to the 1964 version of Hamlet made in Russia (officially sanctioned or not), and Silver Convention’s disco hit from a couple of years earlier, Fly Robin Fly. It has its share of surreal or even avant-garde imagery too, particularly when Hamlet is playing at being mad, such as conducting an imaginary orchestra – the instruments are there, just not anyone to play them – in the middle of a field. The play, meanwhile, comes over as a bizarre cross between A Clockwork Orange, Manos, Hands of Fate and an early Kate Bush video.

The above makes it sounds rather less interesting than it is, even for someone like me, whose knowledge of Shakespeare is fairly limited. The main thing which it has working in its favor, is Girik, who was the veteran of literally hundreds of Turkish films in the sixties and seventies, before becoming the mayor of a district in Istanbul towards the end of the eighties. Even when the acting required here is nothing more than pulling faces (as quite often), she has sufficient charisma and delivers her (frequently ludicrous) lines with enough intensity to sustain the viewer’s interest.

The other tweaks resulting from the gender reversal have their moments too. For instance, Ophelia’s descent into madness takes on a rather different tone when she’s no longer a loony young girl. The same goes for Hamlet’s relationship with Rezzan and Gul, the female versions of Rosencrantz and Gildenstern, which feels something akin to a Turkish version of Sex and the City. In the end, I’m probably glad Erksan – best known in the West for Seytan, his knock-off of The Exorcist – opted for a brisk adaptation of the bard. While decent at its length, I strongly suspect that 242 minutes of this approach would have seemed considerably less rather than more.

Dir: Metin Erksan
Star: Fatma Girik, Sevda Ferdag, Reha Yurdakul, Orçun Sonat
a.k.a. Intikam Melegi/Kadin Hamlet

A Vigilante

  By

★★★
“The grubby truth about vengeance.”

Sadie (Wilde) has escaped from an abusive relationship with her husband (Spector), but at a terrible cost: the death of her son. In an effort to come to terms with her grief, and make use of the survivalist skills forcibly imposed on her, she becomes a vigilante. Responding to coded messages left on her phone, she travels around to confront abusers and prove that there is someone tougher, willing to stand up for the victims against them. But this doesn’t give Sadie the closure or peace that she seeks. Before she can help others, she’s first going to have to help herself, and confront the man who made her what she is.

There’s a grim, messy realism about this, which is plausible, and is both the film’s biggest strength and its greatest weakness. Violence, or the threat thereof, doesn’t really solve anything, and there’s precious little satisfaction gained by Sadie from it. Or anyone else: you could argue that, by robbing others of their agency, she’s doing more harm than good. But nor does this mundane approach make for great cinema. It’s one thing to rob vigilante violence of its adrenaline-powered rush, and the film consciously does that, even cutting away during the final confrontation between protagonist and antagonist. However, the film-maker needs to find something to replace it, otherwise you’re left with an empty experience. Admittedly, that may be the intended conclusion here. Yet if your point is the pointlessness of it all… what’s the point?

There is something to be said for the banality of the evil we see portrayed here, especially in the first case, when the well-dressed businessman is revealed to be an abuser. Yet, I can’t help noting the complete lack of any due diligence by Sadie. If a woman says she’s abused, well, that’s clearly good enough to justify a good helping of the old ultraviolence. A less polemic film might have leveraged that into its story, though again, perhaps her lack of interest in justice (despite her stressed reluctance to kill) is part of the flawed package she represents, along with a supreme disinterest in what happens to anyone after she has left the building.

The looming presence of her abusive husband is a little too convenient, especially in the way he suddenly pops up when dramatically necessary; some kind of foreshadowing would have helped. No denying the strength of Wilde’s performance though, and you get to see and feel every ounce of pain as she experiences it, in a way that becomes almost uncomfortable to watch. In the end, however, it doesn’t really tell us anything we didn’t already know. No matter how many “upbeat” vigilante movies I see, I enjoy them purely for the cathartic exercise, not as a primer. I don’t think I need a cinematic antidote like this, in order to be reminded that it’s actually not a good thing to take the law into your own hands.

Dir: Sarah Daggar-Nickson
Star: Olivia Wilde, Morgan Spector, Kyle Catlett, C.J. Wilson

In Darkness

  By

★★½
“Hard to see the appeal.”

I literally had to check at the end of this, to see if M. Night Shyamalan had been involved. Because rarely since the likes of Signs – or, worse still, The Village – has a final twist so completely derailed a movie. As soon as it happened here, I was immediately listing off the scenes previously which now made absolutely no sense at all. While it’s hard to provide more information without massive spoilerage, it turned a film which was doing not badly, into one which is a poster-child for poorly-conceived ideas.

Sofia (Dormer, who also co-wrote the script with the director) is a blind piano player, living in a London apartment. One night, she hears an argument in the flat above, and its occupant plummeting to her death. Turns out the victim was the daughter of an accused Bosnian war-criminal, Radic (Bijvoet), a man with a murky past and present, whose asylum status is being challenged. The hunt is then on for a USB drive containing incriminating evidence of Radic’s business dealings, with a brother and sister pair of “security consultants”, Marc and Alex, (Skrein + Richardson) heading the chase. Mark saves Sofia from Radic’s thugs, who believe she knows the location of the USB drive. But what is their agenda – and what is Sofia’s? For, as gradually becomes clear, her presence in the affair may be considerably more than coincidental.

This starts off impressively enough, taking you into the world of a blind person living in one of the world’s biggest cities, with some particularly effective sound design. The script is very cautious with its release of information, depicting things that aren’t necessarily explained for some time. Who is sending Sofia notes in braille, that she burns after reading? Or what is the significance of her tattoos, which are not what you’d expect from a classical musician. It’s all quite intriguing, We’re deep into the film before her motives become clear, and it may be too late. For by that stage, we’re already passed the point where people are acting in ways necessary to the plot, rather than that make sense to the viewer.

It feels as if Dormer saw one too many of those awesome Korean revenge films, and decided she wanted to make one while on vacation from Game of Thrones [She, Skrein and James Cosmo, who plays Sofia’s mentor, have all appeared in that show]. She just apparently forgot, those inevitably possess a razor-edged script, in which what drives a character is always kept front and centre. Here, by the time you are given sufficient reason to care about Sofia, you have already waded through too many scenes that are dead weight. Sometimes, this is because you don’t have the necessary information yet; in others, it’s just because the makers thought they were needed. None of which excuses the revelation in the last shot; it’s been while since I’ve come as close to throwing something (remote control, coffee table, dog) at the TV set.

Dir: Anthony Byrne
Star: Natalie Dormer, Ed Skrein, Joely Richardson, Jan Bijvoet

Killing Joan

  By

★★
“Eating crow.”

Joan Butler (Bernadette) is an enforcer for mob boss Frank (Foster), with a zero-tolerance policy for those who disrespect her – whether they are on her side or not. When this eventually causes some of her gang to turn on Joan, she’s brutally beaten to a pulp, and apparently killed. However, she rises from the dead, now a figure who lives in the darkness, and one who has acquired the power to manipulate shadows. She sets about her mission of revenge against Frank and those who killed her. This is much to the distress of her on/off boyfriend Anthony (Celigo), a social worker. But her feelings for him and desire to protect the unfortunates with whom he works, puts them all at risk, when Frank realizes they represent her weak spot.

There are worse films to rip-off than The Crow, and Bartoo is far from the first person to have gone down this route, even in the girls-with-guns genre: see also Mohawk and .357: Six Bullets for Revenge, for examples of the vengeful resurrectee. The problem is, taking as your inspiration a film which is widely regarded as a cult classic: what you produce is, almost inevitably, going to suffer in comparison. That’s certainly the case here, with most of the flaws coming from a script which can’t be bothered to offer any more than the halfest-assed of explanations for her resurrection. It also provides no internal consistency. At times, the reborn Joan is returned to ethereal form by light; at others, not so much. Even the shadow tendrils which are her power, are inexplicably absent in the film’s opening scene, a flash-forward of things to come.

It’s a bit of a shame, since the version of Joan with a pulse is actually a somewhat interesting character, who takes no guff from anyone – especially men. This comes off as a natural trait, probably essential for survival in her line of work. Yet the sense of sisterhood hinted at in the early scenes is rapidly abandoned, in preference for a series of eyebrow-raising twists, where we discover half the people in the film have mystical powers. It builds instead to a disappointing battle against Frank’s sidekick, Donna (Katarina Waters, who wrestled in WWE as Katie Lea Burchill), which is more a showcase for mediocre visual effects and poor fight choreography than anything. Then we get a crappy “love conquers all” finale, that the film singularly fails to pull off – The Heroic Trio, this definitely is not.

Bernadette is probably the best thing about this, and is certainly the only performance to make any impression. Though thanks to the writing, even she can only move the needle from irredeemably tedious to largely uninteresting. Amusingly, she seems to be making a career out of revenge-seeking vigilantes, since the actress can also be seen in the recent sequel, I Spit On Your Grave: Deja Vu, playing the daughter of original victim Jennifer Hills.

Dir: Todd Bartoo
Star: Jamie Bernadette, Teo Celigo, Erik Aude, David Carey Foster

Two Graves

  By

★★★½
“Two? Half a dozen seems more likely.”

This wasn’t quite what we expected. In fact, replace “quite” with “at all”. It starts off as looking like some kind of revenge porn, with pathologist Margaret Powers (Tyson) kidnapping Finnbar (Ward), the man she’s certain murdered her son. Finnbar was apparently able to get away with it, because he was the son of a notorious local criminal, Tommy O’Neil (Hayman). She wants Finnbar to confess to his crime, and recruits her son’s ex-girlfriend, Zoe (Jarvis) to help in getting her vengeance. Initially, the capture goes well, with the two women then holing up in an abandoned warehouse by the docks, to begin the interrogation. However, this is where the film starts to diverge from the expected, as it turns out Zoe’s intentions are not in line with Margaret’s, as they initially appeared.

It’s probably best if I don’t say too much more, but things gradually and relentlessly spiral out of control from there. Others gradually become involved in what was intended to be a private party, including nearby security guards, Tommy and his wife, and the local cops (of dubious morality themselves), while the truth about the murder which started it all is eventually revealed. Not that there will be many people alive to hear it. For the title – based off the proverb, “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves” (mis-attributed here to Confucius) – severely underestimates the body-count resulting from this particular quest for vengeance.

Director Young was previously the writer of another vigilante pic, Harry Brown starring Michael Cain, and like that the two things which largely drive this are the performances and the script. No different from any movie, but they seem particularly outstanding here. Tyson was something of a star back in the eighties, in things like Mona Lisa, but I can’t say I heard much of her since. She’s great here though, and gets particularly good support from Jarvis and Hayman. Even the not very nice characters (which, to be honest, are probably the majority here) generally have a humanity to their portrayal, that helps you understand their action. The script does a great job of pacing, delivering twists with the accuracy of an eye-dropper, and has no qualms about disposing of apparently important characters when necessary.

There are a couple of issues though. Quite why Margaret and Zoe opt to choose this location is questionable. Surely a well-soundproofed cellar would have worked better than some bits of plastic hung up in the middle of a very echo-y dilapidated building. The noise, such as the screams of your victim resulting from your amputation of a finger, seem highly likely to draw attention. That’s a rare mis-step though, and overall this was a pleasant surprise to find on Netflix, with little or no promotion. The low budget was no detriment, with the production knowing its limits and working well within them. It’s the kind of thing more film-makers should be doing, when they don’t have a lot of resources.

Dir: Gary Young
Star: Cathy Tyson, Katie Jarvis, Neal Ward, David Hayman

Assassination Nation

  By

★★★½
“Girls just wanna have fun…”

I don’t often get political here. Really, I watch movies to escape from that kind of thing. But in this case, since the movie itself is basically a cinematic manifesto, I’m going to wade a little bit out into the cesspool of contemporary politics. You have been warned. :)

There’s something called “The paradox of tolerance” which I’ve been hearing about a lot over the past couple of years. This says that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant will eventually be destroyed by the intolerant. This is frequently used by the left, for example, to justify punching Nazis (or those they say are Nazis): if you don’t stand up to the intolerant, it will destroy you. However, there’s a reason it’s called a paradox – because it makes no logical sense. To me, it is hypocrisy in action, demanding tolerance for the people you say deserve it, while refusing it to those you consider unworthy.

That’s what you have here. One cast member called it, “A war on toxic masculinity, at all costs.” The moral problem is, the cost shown here is little if any better: toxic feminism, if you like. The heroines are four teenage girls: Lily (Young), Sarah (Waterhouse), Bex (Nef) and Em (Abra), living in the town of Salem. Someone starts leaking the private data of citizens, beginning with the homophobic Mayor, who turns out to be thoroughly gay himself. He ends up committing suicide at a press conference, Budd Dwyer-style. That’s just the first case: half the townspeople are similarly exposed, and when the evidence points at Lily as the culprit, the witch-hunt goes into top gear, in a style more reminiscent of The Purge. If the girls are going to survive the night, they’ll need to fight fire with (gun)fire.

There are moments where the style overwhelms the substance. Sometimes, this isn’t a bad thing. A single take of a home invasion, shot from outside the house, and swooping around, up and down, is quite amazing and incredibly effective – it reminded me of Dario Argento at his best. On the other hand, a party where Levinson uses split-screen implodes into incoherent confusion. Truth be told, most of the scenes with the girls interacting with each other or their contemporaries, are a bit of a mess. This is far more on point when it offers a scathing critique of social media, and there are moments when it is refreshingly incorrect. For example, the introduction features a litany of “trigger warnings”, for everything from transphobia to the male gaze.

Of course, it isn’t as smart as it thinks it is, being a one-sided argument, apparently largely formed in a bubble of Occupy Democrat Facebook posts and /r/politics. I’ll admit, I rolled my eyes at things such as it taking place in Salem – ‘cos witch-hunts, y’get it? –  and that’s often the level of subtlety you get here. Still, this complete lack of nuance can only be admired, especially when it results in heroines who watch Delinquent Girl Boss: Worthless to Confess for fashion inspiration, as shown above. Politically, it may be highly problematic – though it had its moments, such as a trans character who is not used as a banner of the film-maker’s progressive attitudes. And it’s not so overbearing that I couldn’t appreciate its merits. Even from the point of view of my impeccably “male gaze”, it remained entertaining trash, though if you take any of it seriously, you’re probably making a huge mistake.

Dir: Sam Levinson
Star: Odessa Young, Suki Waterhouse, Hari Nef, Abra

Bad Grandmas

  By

★★
“Near-dead.”

There is entertainment value to be found even in bad movies. Bad action, horror and SF are sometimes just as amusing as the good stuff. But bad comedy is almost irredeemable: that’s why Mystery Science Theater 3000 rarely go there. Bad comedy just… sits there, dull and unamusing, almost worthless. And that’s what we have here. It’s a somewhat interesting idea, with some potential. Unfortunately, the execution – mostly in the script and direction – are so woefully inept that even the brave efforts of Florence Henderson, in her final film, aren’t enough to salvage it. And wasting the talents of Pam Grier needs to be some kind of cinematic capital offense.

Mimi (Henderson) is trying to help out her friend Bobbi (Wall), who is being thrown out of her house by an evil son-in-law. She goes to confront the perp, only for him to end up dead. She and her senior citizenette pals dispose of the body, hiding it in a freezer. But this just brings them to the attention of Harry (Reinhold), the local loan-shark to who the son-in-law owed two hundred grand. He kidnaps Bobbi, demanding the house or the money; Mimi is having none of that, and when Harry sends over an associate to collect, the henchmen ends up similarly dismembered and in the deep-freeze. Meanwhile, the local sheriff (Batinkoff) is also sniffing around, initially having been investigating Harry’s financial dealings.

Henderson does her best with material which seems designed to destroy any audience sympathy. For example, her first victim isn’t killed initially, and Mimi immediately stabs him in the heart to finish the job. I remind you: this film is supposedly a comedy. If it wanted to go this “dark passenger” route [and it includes an explicit reference to Dexter], that might have worked better, and I’d have been fine with it. Make Mimi a retired serial killer, former CIA operative or something to explain her apparent psychopathic tendencies. For the ease with which she slides from genteel retirement into cold-blooded dispatch is jarring and at odds with the light-hearted tone for which the film is aiming (and, largely, falling short).

A far more egregious complaint would be putting one of the godmothers of action heroineism, Grier, in a timid, mouse-like role, beneath a poorly-considered blonde wig, and giving her next to nothing to do. I know she’s in her late sixties, but that never stopped the similarly-aged Helen Mirren from letting rip in Red. I just breathed a sigh of relief on checking Pam’s filmography to discover she had appeared in other films since. Bad enough this was Henderson’s swan-song, we didn’t need it also to be that of an unquestioned icon like Grier. I sense where this is trying to go – something similar to the Bad Ass franchise, with its similarly mature cast of Dannys Glover and Trejo. However, that knew what to do with its characters, and made much better use of them than this, a well-intentioned failure.

Dir: Srikant Chellappa
Star: Florence Henderson, Randall Batinkoff, Judge Reinhold, Susie Wall

Maria

  By

★★★½
“Jean Wick.”

Proof that a lack of originality is not necessarily a bar to being an entertaining movie, this pulls together elements from all over the place, but probably most notably, The Long Kiss Goodnight and John Wick. You have the “former assassin now leading an idyllic family life, until her past catches up with her” of the former. And the “Oh, they’re surely not going to kill tha… Hoo-boy. The hero/ine is going to be VERY angry with them” of the latter, among other elements.

In this case, we have Maria (Reyes), formerly Black Rose assassin Lily, who is now married with a young daughter, until a chance encounter with ex-colleage Kaleb (Padilla). He is still highly miffed at her betrayal, and sets his minions on her – and, worse still, her family. Maria takes the fight to Kaleb with the assistance of her mentor, Greg (Lazaro, probably the best performance in the film); he helped her escape by faking her death, yet still has ties to her old employers. Meanwhile, the chaos resulting from their actions do not impress Kaleb’s boss, Ricardo de la Vega (Webb, looking like the Filipino version of Alan Ford, Bricktop in Snatch), who turns to Kaleb’s brother, the even more vicious – and, worse, considerably more competent – Victor.

Like John Wick, the generally straightforward nature of this works in its favour. There’s not much standing between Maria and kicking ass, with frequent bursts of solid action. Sonny Sison also choreographed the other recent Filipino action heroine film on Netflix, BuyBust, and it has a similarly gritty feel. The hotel run by Greg also is more than a little reminiscent of a similar establishment for assassins from John Wick 2. Though there’s an odd bit where Kaleb’s right-hand woman goes there, looking for Maria, beats up a few people and… just leaves? We’ll let them off with a warning, since they do later have a rather nice brawl, wearing high-heels, in a night-club bathroom.

Reyes is an actress who learned fighting, rather than the other way round. Yet, she looks the part, and Lopez throws in some stylistic flourishes, such as shooting from overhead, which keep things interesting. Overall, this teeters on the edge of achieving our seal of approval, but a couple of things leave it fractionally short. The first is the unconscionable failure of Kaleb, Victor or Ricardo de La Vega at any point to say, “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” I mean, the line positively writes itself. The other issue is an ending, which is way too open, pointing directly towards Maria 2 in a way I haven’t seen since the end of Kill Bill: Volume One. And that was, of course, originally intended as a single entity. There is a slight degree of closure, yet is largely unsatisfying: more like finishing a level of a game than defeating the final boss. If there ends up never being a sequel, I’m going to be annoyed…

Dir: Pedring Lopez
Star: Cristine Reyes, Ivan Padilla, Freddie Webb, Ronnie Lazaro

Vengeance of a Snowgirl

  By

★★★½
“Revenge, truly served cold.”

The elevator pitch version of this sounds like a million other kung-fu films: Shen Ping Hong (Li) seeks revenge on the people who killed her parents and left her crippled. But there’s rather more going on beneath the surface, and shades of grey on both sides. One of her targets, Lord Kao Hung, regrets what happened and wants to help Shen regain the use of her legs. But Shen only agrees to let his son Tien-Ying (Yueh) help, in the belief that it will make her mission of vengeance easier. It feels almost like she’s a mad dog, lashing out at anyone who tries to help; keeping the severed heads of her victims in jars is a clue there. Meanwhile, Kao’s associates – and Tien-Ying’s ex-girlfriend (Chiao) – think he’s helping because he wants to get Shen’s jade sword for his own ends, and are intent on getting their revenge in on her first.

Let the record show, Chris wandered in half-way through this, glanced at the screen and said, “Is that Sammo Hung?” Knock me down with a feather if it wasn’t Sammo, in a minor supporting role as a villainous henchmen. This is why I love my wife: her ability to spot martial arts legends in 1971 cameos. Er, well… Not just that. Anyway, this would be massively overshadowed by the release, just two days later, of another Lo Wei film, his first for fledgling studio Golden Harvest. The Big Boss would put both studio and its star, one Bruce Lee, on the map, and Snowgirl would be all but forgotten.

In particular, the way it twists the usual “You killed my _____ and must die!” tropes are what makes this stand out, along with a second half which turns into something resembling a series of video-game side quests. Because the spring where Shen can heal her legs is so frigid, you need a magic pearl to survive near it for more than a few seconds… The pearl is in the belly of a volcano, reaching which requires a suit of flame-resistant armour (looking remarkably like a fireman’s uniform)… This is held in the treasure house of a remote prince, who will only agree to lend it out, if Shen can beat his champion… And there’s not a save point in sight.

The fights are decent, rather than spectacular, and we never get the hoped-for face-off between Shen and the disgruntled ex-girlfriend, who has skills of her own. On the other hand, Li does a good job of working round her character’s disability – though her ability to fly, makes me wonder why she bothers walking anywhere! Lo, who also makes a brief appearance as the heroine’s father, shoots good, long takes which help enhance his lead actress’s talents, and if nothing else, the ending will likely stick in your mind for its unexpectedly downbeat example of altruism and self-sacrifice. It mostly looks very nice, except for a thoroughly unconvincing “volcano”, and all told, it’s a shame this isn’t more well-known.

Dir: Lo Wei
Star: Li Ching, Yueh Hua, Ku Feng, Lisa Chiao