Tag: revenge

Killer K

  By

★★★★
“Nikita meets Alias, while on vacation in South Korea”

Let’s be clear, right out of the gate. There is really not much original about this Korean mini-series, which takes huge chunks, almost wholesale from Nikita and Alias, to the extent, for example, that we perpetually referred to one character as “Amanda”, since she reminded us so much of Melinda Clarke’s character from Nikita, right down to her fashion choices. However, as long as you’re not looking for anything startling in the way of originality, this is slick yet gritty, with characters that are interesting to spend time with, and a handle on the action that’s easily the match for its equivalent in the West. Let’s start with some significant plot exposition, because there’s quite a lot of characters and story crammed into the three one-hour (or slightly more) episodes.

Spoilers Episode 1. Cha Yeon-Jim (Groo) is having a bad day – she just got expelled from school – and it’s about to get an awful lot worse. Hanging out by the docks, she and her friends get into a confrontation with some workers, only for things to be interrupted by a scripture-quoting hitman, Jang Se Wook, who shows up and starts shooting everyone, on both sides. Cha escapes, but when her friend is killed, as he tries to report what he saw to the police, she realizes she’s in deep trouble. Policeman Choi Tae Young (Baek), who was also at the scene, tries to track her down, but Jang is also after Cha. He wants her to return a flask of green liquid she took in the confusion, and kidnaps her mother to force Cha into compliance. At the handover, Mom is impaled by Jang’s sword and Cha is gunned down and left for dead.

Episode 2. Chief Min Ji Young (Park) comes on the scene, and saves Cha, faking her death. Min works for the same company as Jang, the Mirae Corp, a medical company run by Kwon Do Hwan. They are engaged in some shady experiments involving stem-cell research, and in particular the creation of artificial humans for organ harvesting, with the protection of high-up government ministers. To protect their company secrets, their division SS1 operates ruthlessly: Min recruits Cha as a new killer, not telling her Jang is simply another arm, but training her as an assassin, with the lure of eventually tracking down and taking revenge on the man who killed her mother. Cha’s initial targets are those who pose a threat to her employers, but Min has her own agenda, and when Jang has eventually proven to have outlived his usefulness, she has no compunction about turning her two killers on each other.

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Episode 3. Choi accidentally bumped into Cha in part two, under her new identity, and now teams up with Yoo Sung Ho (Kim), who used to be part of SS1, but bailed with his lover, Cha’s mother, and went into hiding – he was replaced by Chief Min. They are seeking evidence that will let them bring down Mirae and expose their human experiments. Cha wants to leave the organization, having fallen for Go Young Min, a boy at school. Min initially requests “one last hit” – so you know that’s going to work out just fine… In the process, Go sees Cha standing over the corpse of her target, holding the murder weapon, and as a result has to be terminated by Chief Min. That, and the discovery that her schoolmates have been used as guinea-pigs turns Cha against Mirae, and she links up with Choi, as Kwon prepares to reveal his latest plan. End spoilers

Phew. Plenty going on there, with enough for a full 13- or 22-episode order of most series, between all the twists, turns and revelations e.g. turns out Cha’s relationship to Chairman Kwon is rather more personal than she is aware. Given how much gets crammed in, the opening installment is a bit of a slow start. The entire first episode is more or given over to setting up the scenario, with Cha showing very little of the skills she has developed later on. She’s semi-competent in basic martial arts, which is perfectly fine when it comes to beating up fellow pupils. But we soon find out that this level of skill is far from enough, when she comes up against Jang and the other professional killers of SS1. Early on, it’s Choi who is most entertaining, portraying a dutiful and dogged cop whose superiors refuse to give him more than a gas pistol which is, similarly, pretty useless in the clutch.

 It’s the second part where things really take off, as events jump two years forward; the show takes Cha’s training largely as read, save for a quick montage. Instead, her new cold-bloodedness is amply demonstrated in the opening sequence, where we see her sniping out her target at a wedding, despite the presence of children which makes Chief Min call off the hit. It’s clear that this is a new, focused girl, with skills to match. Of course, as is standard for the genre, she still has to deal with everyday issues, since she has been sent back to school [which, conveniently, also offers a suitable tower from which to carry out missions, as can be seen above]. From there, through to her final confrontation with Cha and his minions, it’s an excellent bit of TV, one of the most intense action-heroine episodes I’ve seen in any genre, with the heroine taking obvious damage, both mentally and physically, as things proceed.

Let’s pause for breath before we hit the finale. One thing we noted was that Korean rules regarding what can be broadcast on TV are apparently a good deal laxer than in the US. This was, apparently, a late-night series, and it’s not clear if this was “over the air” or cable; there’s apparently advert breaks, but that could still make it something like FX or AMC. [Edit: CGV channel is “a movie cable channel”, so SHOtime or HBO would be closer parallels] The violence is generally crunchy and squibby, but it’s the female nudity that’s an unexpected pleas… er, particularly striking. :) There does also appear to be some confusion over the title of the show, which I’ve seen called several different variations of the letter K, as noted above. Here, I’ve gone with what appears on the intro screen in English for each episode.

We were kinda wondering where things might go in the last episode, with Cha having apparently sorted things out. Never mind: a whole new catalog of problems raise their heads, as the removal of her justification for assassination leaves her seeking a return to the normal life, one Chief Min is none too keen to offer. With its emphasis on discovering the truth about SS1 and the organization behind it, this episode reminded me of Alias after Sidney Bristow discovered. Meanwhile, dealing with boy issues was a throwback to early Buffy. However, the human experimentation thread was a fresh ingredient, and the episode didn’t pull from the darkness, with a subplot involving a Mirae whistleblower and SS1’s efforts to hush it up. Even if Cha and Min suddenly can’t hit the side of a barn in their final confrontation, the threads are satisfactorily tied up down the stretch, with an ending pilfered shamelessly from My Wife is Gangster 2, that hopefully hints at more to come down the line.

As noted, most of the content is material with which most genre aficionados will already be extremely familar, but there seems always to be room for another “faked death assassin” – Nikita alone has already led to three movies and a pair of television series. It’s the execution(s) that matter here, and this is easily the match of Western action heroine productions of late. I wouldn’t be surprised if this ends up heading over to the West in some form or other, most likely a remake, as has been the case for some many Korean, Japanese and HK movies in recent years. If so, they’ll have to do sterling work to match up with this original.

[Thanks to Hyomil for most of the pics. Killer K can be enjoyed in a subbed version online, through sites such as viki.com, albeit with a somewhat irritating sous-title commentary, which makes watching the show like sitting in the theater with a bunch of chatty teenagers. Still, better than nothing!]

Dir: Kim Jong Hyun
Star: Han Groo, Park Hyo Joo, Baek Do Bin, Kim Jung Tae
a.k.a. Girl K, Little Girl K, Killer Girl K

Sasori

  By

★★★
“The Story of Ricky meets Saviour of the Soul.”

While sharing the heroine’s name with the renowned Female Convict Scorpion series, it’s not clear how much of an official remake this is: it’s supposedly based on a manga series, which I don’t quite recall being the case with its predecessors (it was a while ago I saw the original, though – must get round to re-viewing it for the site at some point soon). The concept is not dissimilar, however: Sasori (Mizuno) is sent to prison, where she is brutalized, but eventually escapes, and seeks vengeance on those who were responsible for putting her inside to begin with. However, it’s really poor at providing motive or explanation: for example, after Sasori is left for dead, her body is dumped outside the prison, where a corpse-collector (HK veteran, Simon Yam) rescues and revives her, before training her in the ways of top-end martial arts and sending Sasori on her way. Why? Who knows. Similarly, the reason why our heroine is in prison at all, raises more questions than it answers.

It’s a movie of two halves: the first sees her struggling to survive in a prison, where the warden makes the inmates fight each other, in a muddy pit naturally, for his amusement; Sasori ends up battling the evil jail queen, Dieyou (Natsume), and that’s where the Story of Ricky comparisons come in, though without quite the same level of hypergore. But outside the prison, it’s a much more chilly and stylized production, taking place in a city where there’s almost no-one around, except the main characters: that’s where it reminded me of Saviour much more. The fights are a similarly odd mix of wire-fu with ground ‘n’ pound, that are not badly put together: Mizuno occasionally looks the part with a fair degree of conviction, but there’s just too much which doesn’t so much defy expectation, as simply gets none at all.

On the plus side, this isn’t anywhere near as sleazy as some of the entries, which are more “women in prison” than “action heroine”. Despite the mud wrestling, and some costumes that definitely lean towards the exploitative, this is definitely in the latter camp. It’s not particularly outstanding, yet is worth a look if you’re feeling in a forgiving mood.

Dir: Joe Ma
Star: Miki Mizuno, Dylan Kuo, Emme Wong, Nana Natsume
a.k.a. Female Convict Scorpion

Angels’ Brigade

  By

★★½
“Charlie’s Magnificent 7 Angels.”

After her brother is severely beaten by a drug dealer, Las Vegas lounge singer (!) Michelle Wilson (Kiger, Miss January 1977) is visited by his teacher (Cole), who knows the location of the cartel’s drug warehouse. Wilson puts together a team of women who have reason to want to take the dealers down, including a stuntwoman (Anderson) and an undercover cop (Grant). There’s also a martial-arts instructress, a model and, tagging along, one of the teacher’s pupils. They build a heavily-armed van, train in the ways of war, and rip off a bunch of militia types for weaponry, before staging a successful raid that destroys the warehouse. However, the mob (led by veteran actors Peter Lawford and Jack Palance) are not prepared to let them get away with it.

This is best known through its use – in a severely truncated form – on MST3K, and I suspect that’s where most of the 1,200+ votes on the IMDB come from [it’s more than, say, the rather better-renowned Black Mama, White Mama]. The unedited version is less worthy of derision. I wouldn’t call it great cinema, but it heads from Point A to Point B in a brisk fashion, and the practical effect – stunts, explosions, etc. – are decent enough. Of course, there’s little or no characterization to speak of, on either side, it’s clearly ripped off from Charlie’s Angels, and there’s a weird unevenness of tone that is hard to handle. For instance, the militia types are incredibly incompetent, bumping into each other at the drop of a swastika, but then the girls seriously consider dropping a truck on the head of an informant.

However, I couldn’t bring myself to hate this to the level its former position in the IMDB Bottom 100 would project. There’s something almost charmingly naive about such a simplistic approach, and it’s also refreshingly free of any romantic angles to slow things down. At a few points, I even found myself contemplating the remake potential. If the discussed all-female version of The Expendables ever comes to pass, it might not be too dissimilar to this, though hopefully with more originality.

Dir: Greydon Clark
Star: Susan Kiger, Sylvia Anderson. Jacqulin Cole. Robin Greer

Hoodrats 2: Hoodrat Warriors

  By

★½
“And no: neither of the actresses on the cover actually star in the film, as far as I can tell.”

When Chino (Rodil) beats up his woman, Lucia (Sparagna) decides it has happened for the last time, and accompanied by her two friends, Celia (Mortel) and Miriam (Cho), she gives him a dose of his own medicine, with a baseball bat. This turns out to be a clear case of thinking without acting, because it turns out he’s a big kahuna in one of the local gangs, and is now out for revenge on the trio. After a drive-by cripples their vehicle (a ghettomobile with the amusing personalized plate, ‘ICUHATN’), they are stuck deep in enemy territory, with a lot of unfriendly people looking for them. And even if they make it out alive, what then?

I like the idea a lot: it could have become a Latina take on The Warriors, an urban nightmare journey pitting the heroines against a range of city low-lives, as they battle their way back across Los Angeles. And, perhaps surprisingly, the acting is not terrible: I was expecting something sub-amateur, but the three ladies are competent, and Rodil is actually more than adequately unpleasant as the villain. Arellano knows where to point the camera too – and, as an aside, you do not appear to need any knowledge of his previous Hoodrats. Two things, however, undo all the positives, and send this heavily into the red.

Firstly, the script is really badly written, with any number of scenes that outstay their welcome or are simply unnecessary. I’ll describe a couple of the worst offenders. Late on, two of the women are captured; the third just wanders off, bumps into a complete stranger and has an irrelevant conversation, resulting in her grooving out to some tunes. What? That, however, is a masterpiece compared to the scene where they seek help from the local king pimp, the inexplicably-British Baron of New Orleans. He looks like Simon Pegg, sounds (dubbed?) like Russell Brand, and must have been an investor in the film, because there is absolutely no justification for the seemingly endless minutes of screen time allocated to his vapid burblings.

The other problem is the fights, which are largely predictable, uninteresting and completely fail to be hard-hitting. For instance, the enemies met by the three women as they head home, are inevitably…three women, and the sluggish cartwheel move Lucia uses, apparently inspired by capoeira, doesn’t improve with repetition. I’ve seen films where my attention drifts away, except during the action scenes: here, however, it drifted away more during the action. It builds to a finale in what could well be a school gym, that is ludicrous in its implausibility, though is a fitting end to an inept work.

Dir: Edgar Arellano
Star: June Marie Sparagna, Donnabella Mortel, Arden Cho, Neal ‘Xingu’ Rodil

Warrior Queen (2003)

  By

★★★½
“Rates much better as a drama than for historical accuracy.”

Probably best to approach this with few expectations of this being a factual representation of the time; more than once, it felt clearly like the writer was using the Roman occupation of Britain, and Boudica’s rebellion, as a metaphor for American’s involvement in Iraq. There are certainly enough anachronisms, particularly in the dialogue (the Roman Emperor chatting informally away with the leader of a British tribe, and references to “terrorists”), that it seems deliberate. The basic story is the one well-known of legend: after her husband’s death, and the raping of her daughters by the invading Romans, Boudica (Kingston) led her tribe in an initially successful revolt, only to be stopped when the full force of the Empire was turned on them.

There’s a lot of familiar faces here, most obviously Kingston, who is well-known (in this household, at least) as River Song from Doctor Who – I kept expecting Boudica to enter a scene and say, “Hello, sweetie!” But there’s also Potts, as a deeply creepy Emperor Nero, well before we knew him a nerd in Primeval, and Blunt, as one of Boudica’s daughters, has gone on to significant Hollywood fame. The performances are really what keeps this interesting: Kingston brings the right level of steely resolve to her role, and is particularly convincing when rousing her troops to battle. Equally as good is Michael Feast, as Roman general Suetonius, who is there because of a combination of “professional pride” and the Emperor’s whims, and puts across exactly the right sense of battle-weary experience.

What doesn’t work as well are the battles, in part because the budget for this falls well short of what we’re used to seeing in terms of the approximate period, e.g. Gladiator, 300. There are some moments of spectacle, such as a burning Roman encampment, or a plain covered with corpses, but the shortage of live extras is often embarrassingly obvious. They’re not well-shot either, with an irritating strobing effect which serves no purpose, and Boadica doesn’t do much actual fighting, mostly waving her sword from the back of a chariot [without spiked wheels, I was disappointed to note. Look, if you’re gonna play fast and loose with historical accuracy, you might as well include the coolest thing about the queen…]

Still, I can’t say we were bored, and the solid acting more than made up for the occasionally-shaky production values, though it is definitely important to go in to this, not expecting a Discovery channel documentary. Instead, this is Exhibit A, proving that when cinematic necessity and historical facts collide, the latter will almost always come off worse.

Dir: Bill Anderson
Star: Alex Kingston, Hugo Speer, Emily Blunt, Andrew Lee Potts

Hannah’s Law

  By

★★★
“A straightforward tale of revenge, Western style.”

In 1866, the young child Hannah Beaumont (Canning, best known for her role in The Vampire Diaries) watches as the rest of her family is slaughtered by outlaw Frank McMurphy (Pyper-Ferguson). Twelve years later, Hannah is now getting her long-awaited revenge. Having been trained to shoot, ride and collect the bounty on wanted men by Isom Dart (Danny Glover in a small role), she is now reeling in the members of McMurphy’s gang, one by one. When McMurphy hears about this, he gathers up his entire posse and rides to Hannah’s base in Dodge City to finish off what he started, a decade before. Can Hannah – with the aid of the town’s deputy marshal, Wyatt Earp (Holt) and her other friends, come out on top?

Well, there’s really not much doubt about that, this being a Hallmark Original Movie. Which means, as well as good winning out, there will be no sex or bad language, and severely restraint is exercised on the violence front. That said, knowing this going in will help defuse much sense of anticipation, and if you can get past the feeling this belongs to a far kinder, gentler age of cinema, it’s not a bad time-passer. Canning doesn’t quite look the part, being too willowy to be convincing, but that really only attracts the attention during the occasional hand-to-hand scene – firearms are a great equalizer for size and strength. She does manage to exude the required amount of steely determination, which is likely more important for this role.

Director Talalay’s name may be familiar to GWG fans; she directed the flop Tank Girl back in 1995. From the IMDB list, this looks to be her first return to the action heroine field since, and she has her moments, not least the first encounter between McMurphy’s gang and the very alone Hannah in Dodge City. Credit also to Kennedy, who plays Doc Holliday by shamelessly channeling Val Kilmer from Tombstone, yet still comes across as a memorable character. However, the presence of both Glover and Kimberly Elise as black gunslinger Stagecoach Mary, imply a racial blindness to the era that one suspects is more based on modern hopes than historical accuracy. Still, while the net result is not particularly memorable, and is clearly more interested in fulfilling expectations than confounding them, it succeeds in reaching its modest goals, in a way that some previous entries in the genre could only envy.

Dir: Rachel Talalay
Star: Sara Canning, Greyston Holt, John Pyper-Ferguson, Ryan Kennedy

Cherry Bomb

  By

★★
“More bomb than cherry.”

Cherry (Julin – yep, that appears to be her surname) is a stripper, whose life takes a turn for the worse when she is assaulted by five customers in a private room at the club where she works. The cops aren’t able to do anything, so she takes the law into her own hands, with the help of her brother (Rodriguez), who accidentally kills one of the perpetrators when he goes to demand help with Cherry’s medical bills – no prizes for guessing how that request goes. As the others realize someone is out to get them, and who that someone ins, they hire Bull (Hackley), a gigantic hitman, to stop Cherry before she gets to them.

It’s clearly attempting to re-create the grindhouse era, but wimps out on most levels – for example, Cherry is a stripper who never shows any significant flesh. That’d perhaps be forgivable, if Julin’s performance hit the required notes elsewhere, but it wobbles uncertainly from giggly schoolgirl, incapable of forming any kind of plan to violated bitch, capable of ramming a vehicle into someone’s head (in probably the film’s most impressive moment). The other performances are similarly shaky, with the possible exception of Manning as the club owner, who captures the necessary tone for his role. Hackley is so shamelessly channeling Samuel L. Jackson from Pulp Fiction it goes beyond irritating into amusing – then past that, back into irritating again [Chris wondered if it was a white guy in blackface, it’s so clichéd!]. The action is equally as mixed a bag, swerving from well-staged to sloppy, occasionally even within

The overall impact is occasionally effective, with a couple of scenes that deliver the necessary wallop. But too often, it feels half-hearted, like they had a vague interest in resurrecting the grindhouse era, rather than a passion or drive, and it’s certainly all but lacking the “grind.” While I’m all in favour of emphasizing the “revenge” over the “rape” aspects of the story, the latter is so toned-down and muted – the assault itself is barely shown here – that the justification for the former is almost non-existent. That makes it difficult for the audience to get on board, when the ends don’t appear to justify the means.

I’ll Never Die Alone

  By

★★½
“Will cross rural Argentina off the list of holiday destinations, in much the same way that Deliverance did for North Georgia.”

I have no problem with rape/revenge movies, providing the balance is skewed more towards the revenge than the rape. Ms. 45, for example, has about five minutes of rape and 60 of revenge. This is fine by me. I am all about the revenge, which should be nasty and brutal, exactly what sexual predators deserve. Actually, so should the rape be, because portraying it any other way is very, very questionable. But that’s something which hardly needs depicting: I’m quite happy taking it as read, thank you very much. Here, the depicted brutalization of four young women goes on far longer than necessary to serve any point.

They appear to be heading home from college – it’s a bit vague – when they see a girl lying beside her bike, injured at the side of the road, and some men with guns nearby, who might just be hunters…or might not be. The women load her into the car, only for the victim to die before they reach the next time. They report it to the two-man police force, who seem less that enthusiastic about investigating. As they leave town, they find themselves being chased by the hunters’ truck, and it’s soon very apparent that their intentions are very, very unpleasant.

To be honest, I largely tuned out the middle portion of this, for reasons explained earlier. That said, when the tables are finally turned, it is certainly satisfying, especially in the final moments of vengeance. Bogliano takes his time in all aspects, which is a double-edged sword: some scenes benefit from the unflinching approach, such as the filling in of a grave, which unfolds in real time and is chilling viewing. However, others are simply dull and pointless, for example, the one where one of the girls goes into a bathroom, smokes a cigarette, changes her shirt and leaves. Really. That’s it. There’s a serious lack of characterization as well, to the point that it’s hard to care too much about the victims, as you’ve been given no reason to do so, or insight into their characters.

The film does improve markedly in the final reel, though this may be as much due to my personal prejudices as any actual change in the direction. But the revenge is certainly memorable, in particular the use of a strand of barbed-wire, in another sequence where Bogliano’s unblinking camera lens comes out as a positive. Much credit is due to all the actresses involved, for going to hell and back in the name of their cinematic art, and the overall impact is certainly better than some of the entries in the genre, as linked below. However, it may simply be too brutal, and the tuning-out mentioned above is something likely to be experienced in an even greater degree by viewers that are more sensitive than I.

Dir: Adrián García Bogliano
Star: Gimena Blesa, Magdalena De Santo, Andrea Duarte, Andres Aramburu
a.k.a. No Morire Sola

Bandit Queen (1994)

  By

★★★
“Not quite Bollywood.”

If you’ve seen Bollywood films, you might expect the same here – a light, breezy romp, interspersed with gratuitous musical numbers. Wrong, on every conceivable level. It’s an almost unrelentingly grim portrayal of the life of Phoolan Devi (Biswas), sold off by her family at the age of 11, abused by her husband (Shrivastava) as well others in the higher-ranked Thakur caste, and basically treated worse than an animal. She’s eventually abducted by a gang of bandits, whose lieutenant Vikram (Pandey) is sympathetic to her: when the leader tries to rape her, Vikram shoots him in the head, and takes over, making Phoolan his co-chief. However, after the group’s true leader is released from prison, he’s none too happy, and sets out to teach Phoolan a lesson than will make her earlier misfortunes seem like paradise.

How much of this is true, is open to debate. Devi was supposedly so upset by the film, she threatened to set herself on fire outside a cinema if the film weren’t withdrawn, but the depth of her anger can be questioned, since she ended up being paid off by the producers. The basics do seem true, and it’s a remarkable story, centred on a performance from Biswas that leaves nothing in the locker. It’s also entirely unlike any other Indian movie I’ve ever seen, being foul-mouthed, brutal, and even contains some full-frontal nudity – though that is far more unsettling than anything else. However, in depicting the hellish life of low-caste women, it goes beyond the eye-opening to the stage where you almost find yourself thinking, “Oh, look: she’s being raped again.” Less would be substantially more, in terms of impact.

It’s definitely more drama than action, with her gang’s raid on a village the main set-piece in this area. Another thing that doesn’t quite work is Biswas being a full decade older than the character she’s playing. In reality, Devi’s rise to bandit infamy and eventual surrender to authorities was all over, while she was still a teenager, which is quite stunning. The movie certainly exposes a side of Indian life unlike one you’ll have seen, even if probably not one you’ll want to see again. But it certainly shows that someone is pushed far enough, they will push back.

Dir: Shekhar Kapur
Star: Seema Biswas, Nirmal Pandey, Aditya Shrivastava, Saurabh Shukla

War Cat

  By

½
“Time to put this cat out, permanently. “

There aren’t many times I agree with censorship, but the British Board of Film Classification rejected this movie entirely when it was submitted in 1987. I’d like to thank them for saving the public from this appalling piece of dreck for 25 years, even if I think they were probably confusing it with Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45, which was also known as Angel of Vengeance in the UK. I can’t believe they actually watched this, as it’s so entirely harmless, the only threat it could have posed to the public at large would have been from the wholesale gnawing off of limbs, by viewers desperate to escape the ordeal.

I’ve seen a few Mikels movies now, in and out of our genre here: none have been great, few have even reached acceptable, but this was truly the bottom of the cinematic barrel. In Mikels’ defense, it was a troubled production, to say the least, with original director Ray Dennis Steckler being fired two days into shooting. Producer Jeff Hogue “came up with new ideas almost every day,” according to Mikels, and the cast included Poynter, who had been a cocktail waitress at a Las Vegas casino wuth no acting experience at all. It’s remarkable anything ended up getting released at all.

The story, such as it is by the time all this was endured, focuses on a militia group out in the desert, under Major Hargrove (O’Hara), and to a significantly lesser degree, on Tina Davenport (Poynter), who is writing a book on her deceased father, who just happened to be a soldier. This attracts the attention of some of the more brutish members of Hargrove’s survivalists, who end up kidnapping Tina and taking her out to the camp. Hargrove is annoyed by this, having recently spent a significant chunk of the running-time killing a biker gang, but agrees to Tina’s proposal to give her a chance. Rather than killing her outright, he lets her go, to provide a training exercise for his men, by hunting her down. Of course, her military background means they’re in for a nasty surprise.

It’s nowhere near as interesting at that may sound, not least because the hunt only takes place in the last 30 minutes or less of the movie, and is so badly put-together and executed as to suck any life out of the concept. Up until then, you’ve got to endure an endless stream of scenes that redefine “turgid,” and don’t develop storyline or character. Not even entertainingly bad, just incredibly boring: avoid, at all costs.

Dir: Ted V. Mikels
Star: David O’Hara, Jannina Poynter, Macka Foley, Carl Irwin
a.k.a. Angel of Vengeance