Tag: s

Set It Off

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★★★★
“Even-handed blaxploitation, mixes brawn and emotions to good effect”

After a couple of less-than-perfect entries in the ‘robbery girls’ subgenre, this came as a refreshing blast, with decent characterisation and a storyline that goes past the painfully obvious. Mind you, the moral remains the same – crime doesn’t pay – but at least the road taken to get there is interesting and complex. These women all have their own reasons for wanting to rob banks: getting back at society for perceived injustice, supporting a child, or simply for kicks. Interestingly, you can see both their point of view and society’s, the latter most clearly in a surprisingly sympathetic cop, Strode (John C. McGinley). The results are more a product of tragic circumstance than anything else.

We’ve seen elsewhere this can easily slip into cliche; for the most part it doesn’t, despite a lack of character development. Only Stony (Pinkett) and her relationship with a bank executive really counts – and if you can’t see where that’s going, you’re not paying attention. Still, there’s plenty to admire, not least a delightful homage to The Godfather. One way or another, we care about everyone, from extremely out lesbian Cleo (Latifah) to the brains of the gang, Frankie (Fox). The action isn’t ignored either, most notably the whirlwind event that is their first robbery; at the end, I discoved I’d been holding my breath. Despite dialogue which sounds occasionally as if it was in a foreign language, this definitely goes beyond a black audience.

Dir: F. Gary Gray
Star: Jada Pinkett, Queen Latifah, Vivica A. Fox, Kimberly Elise

Sugar & Spice

  By

★★★
“Bring it On crashes head-first into Set It Off.”

“Get ready to cheer for the bad girls,” goes the tag-line, and despite an exterior fluffier than candy-floss, the message here is actually extremely subversive: crime does pay. This sets it apart from most other crime-chick flicks, which almost inevitably end in death, destruction and more conventional morality. Guess being a comedy allows you a certain latitude in such things. Head cheerleader Diane (Shelton) gets pregnant courtesy of jock Jack (Marsden); finding it impossible to make ends meet, she takes inspiration from Point Break and convinces her friends to rob the bank where she works. But they’re witnessed by Lisa, a girl on the B-squad…

Written, produced and directed by women, this fully hits its stride only after the robbery. There’s one shot of the team walking down a school corridor in slo-mo, while their fellow pupils, fully aware of their exploits, scurry to get out of the way. Backed by Juno Reactor’s entirely appropriate Pistolero, it’s fabulous, and you wish they’d developed the post-crime scenario further, not least because the ending is extremely limp. Before the raid, it’s a hit-and-miss satire with some excellent jabs, but too much shallow emoting and hugging. Though award bonus points for casting Sean Young as a jailed mother, and the character quirks keep it from becoming too dull.

Certainly not the best high-school studio satire ever (Heathers or Election), it’s likely the only one post-Columbine to feature semi-automatics, albeit in watered-down fashion. According to Mena Suvari, “It was really frustrating, because the movie we all signed on to do was very dark and very offensive, and while the finished movie is still that to a degree, it’s completely different.” One can only imagine what the original would have been like.

Dir: Francine McDougall
Star: Marley Shelton, Mena Suvari, James Marsden, Rachel Blanchard

The Spree

  By

★★
“Xinia, Burglar Princess, learns that crime does pay.”

Good films about women burglars are hard to come by, for some reason. Mind you, good films about male burglars are also kinda thin on the ground; need I say any more than Hudson Hawk. This isn’t quite as bad (at least they don’t burst into song at any point), but falls well short of something like License to Steal, and comes closer to The Real McCoy territory. Xinia (Beals) is a burglar, who falls in love with snake rancher, Bram Hatcher. Bad news: he turns out to be an undercover cop. Good news: he wants a new career…as her accomplice.

This simple tale of infatuation, inevitably, turns out to be not so simple. The problem is, it’s still pretty simple-minded, with only one real twist, which is so unsurprising, it probably fails to count as a twist. Tommy Lee Wallace (Halloween III) handles the burglary scenes nicely, in particular an opening which has the heroine progressively more cornered in a house. She ends stuck in a bathroom, behind a shower curtain, with the owner in the room and about to have a shower; her escape is audacious, but it’s all downhill from there.

Could have done without the frequent sex scenes too; the use of a double for Beals is laughably obvious (breasts and face never seen together), while Boothe was 47 when this was made, and really should know better than to flash his ass. Rita Moreno, who won an Oscar for West Side Story, also turns up as Xinia’s mother – should probably have given Beals some dialogue coaching, as her accent wavers between doubtful and AWOL. Your interest will likely do the same.

Dir: Tommy Lee Wallace
Star: Jennifer Beals, Powers Boothe, Garry Chalk, John Cassini

She

  By

★★★
“She may be the face you can’t forget…the film, too, has its moments.”

Proof positive that a lack of narrative coherence is no barrier to a good time, She makes about as much sense as you’d expect from a film where the soundtrack veers wildly from Rick Wakeman to Motorhead. It’s post-apocalyptic sword and sorcery, with Bergman as She, the immortal goddess ruling a tribe of Amazon warriors. For reasons which are never explained, She ends up tagging along with hero Tom as he searches for his kidnapped sister. Hey, even Immortal Goddesses need some time off, I guess.

Loosen up, realise this bears effectively no relation to the H.Rider Haggard novel (previously filmed by Hammer, with Ursula Andress in the Immortal Goddess role), and you may find this fun, albeit the dumb kind. I should warn you that the first 20 minutes suck, make little sense and are remarkably tedious. Once we get moving, things perk up, because on their travels, Tom and She encounter a wild range of wacky adversaries: chainsaw-wielding lepers, mad zookeepers, vampires and someone doing a convincing impression of Robin Williams at his most irritating. None of these could hold an entire movie, and Nesher realises this, wisely whizzing them past at high speed, despite the resulting random air, like a D&D adventure written by a rank novice.

The action is competent, if obviously cheap, though surprisingly, Bergman is outdone by her sidekick (Kessler). Tom rescues She, She rescues Tom, repeat with minor variations until it all ends in a pitched battle against the bad guy and his army of, oh, say 30 soldiers. Whatever its shortcomings (and space is too short for a listing), lack of imagination is not one of them. Many less inventive movies are out there – thus, this one can only be applauded.

Dir: Avi Nesher
Star: Sandahl Bergman, David Goss, Quin Kessler, Harrison Mueller

Silk

  By

★½
“Beware: Silk pulls the wool over your eyes.”

One of the primary rules of exploitation cinema, is never to trust a movie with painted box-art. And, verily, no scene like the picture at right occurs in the film. Indeed, the whole film is sold on sizzle rather than steak, and will probably leave you feeling more than a little hungry. Verrell looks the part, though her slicked-back hair is rather too cliched and obvious, and she does appear to be doing her own action. Her lack of acting ability is painfully obvious, however, and Santiago is wise to keep her dialogue to a minimum.

Silence on the subject of the plot would have been well-advised too; it’s particularly woeful, involving drug smugglers and vigilante cops. Large chunks aren’t clear, and the sections which are, don’t capture the interest. The box tries to hype things up, with an amusing line in superfluous verbiage – another rule of exploitation is to beware blurbs with four adjectives in the same sentence (“…a chain of spectacular action footage, from screeching car chases to raging gun battles and blazing explosions of firepower.”) – but it’s a lost cause.

Special mention must be made of the appalling soundtrack, in particular the theme song, and although the setting is supposedly Hawaii, I strongly suspect the Phillipines is closer to the truth. But as the box art proves, this is not a film that can be relied upon to deliver what it promises. One can only wonder what Claudine St. James though of this adaptation inspired by her work.

Dir: Cirio Santiago
Star: Cec Verrell, Bill McLaughlin, Fred Bailey, Joe Avellano

Silk 2

  By

★★½
“She’s back! Except, thankfully, she’s not – it’s someone different.”

Was the world really crying out for a sequel? I guess Silk proved profitable enough for Gabrielle to replace Verrell as the titular cop, three years later and without any explanation. I’ve liked Gabrielle since her barnstorming double role in Deathstalker II, but even I have to admit she’s not really well-cast here, with her voice inappropriate for a supposedly tough crimefighter. Mind you, anyone would have problems with cliched aphorisms of the “Crime doesn’t pay” kind demanded by the dialogue.

After an opening third which is pretty dull and pointless, things do liven up – you get the impression someone actually thought about the script, rather than just spending an hour in Blockbuster, cribbing it off the back of other movies. The goods at the centre of things here are a set of Japanese scrolls which were guarded by a sect of warrior monks; on loan to a “Hawaiian” art-gallery (looks like the Philippines once more), they are switched for a set of fakes. The shenanigans that follow are not perhaps a surprise, yet they are carried out with sufficient energy to keep an uncritical viewer content.

I should point out that, as in the first film, the picture at right does not actually occur anywhere in the movie. Gabrielle does get one surprisingly decent fight sequence however [and I’m not saying that because of her loose-fitting robe, or the wildly gratuitous shower scene which precedes it]. More of such action would have helped – instead, this ends up as a passable, if not exactly memorable, waste of time.

Dir: Cirio Santiago
Star: Monique Gabrielle, Peter Nelson, Jan Merlin, Maria Clair

The Swordswoman in White

  By

★★
“Dubbing proves most entertaining facet of otherwise sporadic hack job.”

Arriving on a DVD of such poor quality, it has been shorn entirely of both opening and closing credits, but hey, I paid $4.99, so can’t really complain. The heroine – named Charlene for most of the film – helps her father run the White Lotus, a rebel group fighting the government in 18th-century China. They have to avoid capture, while simultaneously looking for her long-lost mother (who is in her turn, looking after them), and further diversion is caused by a subplot involving an evil landlord trying to marry a young girl against her will.

There is some promise here and what action there is, is actually not bad, with the heroine handling herself well. However, far too much time is spent sitting around discussing action, rather than actually carrying it out. While this long-winded chatting is taking place, all there is to sustain your interest is a wildly anachronistic dub which includes references to deep-pan pizza (with anchovies!), Ed McMahon and swap-meets as well as a startling off-key rendition of Amazing Grace. But if I wanted to watch What’s Up Tiger Lily?, I would do so, and it’s not so bad a film as to deserve the MST3K treatment.

In some ways, it feels more like the middle of a long-running TV series, not least because of the sudden start, and a final caption which tidies up everything that would presumably have happened next episode. And would it be churlish to point out Charlene actually spends more time wearing red than white?

Dir: Zhang Xua-Xun
Star: Your guess is as good as mine…

Steel and Lace

  By

★★★
“Rape, revenge and robots, cheap and cheerful.”

Inside ten minutes, we’ve had heroine Gaily Morton (Wren) raped and her attackers acquitted in court, not to mention her subsequent leap off a roof-top to her death – this isn’t a film which hangs around, boys and girls. Luckily, her brother is a NASA boffin (Davison – you might recognise him as the Senator from X-Men), who builds a robot in her image, in order to wreak gory revenge on the perpetrators five years later. Cleaning up behind are a cop (Naughton) and his ex-girlfriend, a courtroom artist (Haiduk) who joins the dots.

This was a notch or two better than I expected, with Wren managing to bring a surprising degree of emotion to her role as the robo-revenger. Despite obviously not being a large budget movie, most of the deaths are impressive (one meriting a spontaneous round of applause from the GWG viewing panel) and the android effects are decently realised. The plot holds few surprises – actually, the count probably falls short of two; while that one certainly nailed me, Chris did spot it – though the whole brother/sister thing had a nice, creepy and unhealthy edge.

If the main plot works, the cop/courtroom artist thing doesn’t, and the two characters are largely superfluous. There’s no chemistry to speak of, and their sole purpose appears to be occupying screen time between the killings. When they’re on screen, the movie dies – yet much like the heroine, it keeps coming back, until the perfectly executed ending which is sudden, memorable and fitting.

Dir: Ernest Farino
Star: Clare Wren, Bruce Davison, David Naughton, Stacy Haiduk

The Silencer

  By

★★½
“Soft gun-porn with hidden depths. Probably too hidden.”

This is an odd little film; heroine Angel (Walden – by some reports now a ski-lift attendant) is an assassin, ordered to take out the leaders of a white slavery ring. After the first killing, she finds solace in the arms of a random guy, and you think you know where this is going: a killing, then a sex scene, for the rest of the movie. Yet this first is also about the last, from then on, the erotic thriller angle is largely ignored, in favour of her former partner George (Mulkey), who takes out any man with whom Angel forms a relationship. It’s almost like she’s working for SD-6.

The film may be all the better for this avoidance of the obvious, and certainly improves as it goes on – though after an opening credit sequence that appears to have been shot directly from the screen of a ZX Spectrum, it could hardly be otherwise. [It’s also the distinctly cheapskate method by which Angel gets her orders] Morton Downey Jr. makes a cameo, and the movie even brushes against self-reference, when one of Angel’s hits takes place on the set of a girls-with-guns movie.

Walden certainly looks the part, and there was one major surprise at the end. But the surreal, dreamy approach for which Goldstein appears to be aiming, comes off more as if the whole cast were dosed up on ketamine. Is there any reason why George is able to follow Angel’s entire life on the screen of an arcade game? It’s a rare genre entry, in that it was directed by a woman; however, it did take her eight years to make another movie. Read into that what you like…

Dir: Amy Goldstein
Star: Lynette Walden, Chris Mulkey, Paul Ganus, Jaime Gomez

Supreme Sanction

  By

★★½
“Alias kicks back with a martini and some valium.”

Director Terlesky starred in one of my favourite guilty pleasures, Deathstalker II, but this shows he still has much to learn about directing and, particularly, scripting. There just isn’t enough going on here to sustain attention, with too many scenes taking twice as long as necessary. Swanson plays Jenna, assassin for a government counter-terrorist agency which is now creating incidents in order to get increased funding. She switches sides and protects TV journalist Jordan McNamara (Dukes), whom she has been ordered to kill – her handler Dalton (Madsen) must now take her out.

Subsequent events have given this 1999 film a creepily prescient air, and I’m always up for a good conspiracy. But neither Swanson nor Madsen ever provide the necessary energy, which we know the latter at least can deliver (though he gets the best moment, shooting the journalist, then offering him a BandAid). Faison makes a mark as Marcus, Jenna’s gadget man who avoids the usual stereotypes, but Dukes is so irritatingly whiny, it’s hard to see why Jenna chose to save him.

There are moments proving the ideas have potential, such as Jenna and Marcus disguising themselves to penetrate the enemies’ base. More of this invention would have helped enliven what is instead just marginally acceptable entertainment. The climax also relies on chief villain Ron Perlman willingly confessing all to his “helpless” captive. Guess he must never have seen any Bond films.

Dir: John Terlesky
Star: Kristy Swanson, Michael Madsen, David Dukes, Donald Adeosun Faison