Tag: s

Super Bitches and Action Babes, by Rikke Schubart

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Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: N/A

Subtitled, The Female Hero in Popular Cinema, 1970-2006, this is non-fiction, being a feminist – I guess, more post-feminist – analysis of action heroines over the time in question. It made for an interesting read, being considerably more dense than my typical reading material: Schubert seems to be aiming at an audience that already know what she means, with a good number of terms left unexplained in the text. Yet it was equally frustrating: for every section that had me nodding in agreement, there was one where I was at least raising an eyebrow, if not snorting derisively.Parts are incisive and smart. Others exemplify the worst excesses of ivory-tower academia.

The basic concept appears to be that action heroines fall into five archetypes: the dominatrix, the Amazon, the daughter, the mother, and the rape-avenger. Some may incorporate elements from more than one; Schubart makes the argument that The Bride from Kill Bill is all five, to some degree. To make her case, she looks at example of actresses who have made their careers in the genre, from Pam Grier through Michelle Yeoh to Milla Jovovich, and also specific entries such as Xena: Warrior Princess and the Alien franchise. There are some issues here: calling Pam Grier’s Coffy “action cinema’s first female hero,” is simply wrong. Even if you ignore silent heroines like Kathlyn Williams and Pearl White, who have admittedly fallen into obscurity, Cheng Pei-Pei is more deserving of the title for 1966’s Come Drink With Me. Schubart clearly knows of Hong Kong cinema, as her section on Yeoh indicates. So why no mention of Cheng?

Indeed, Grier is also called “the biggest, baddest and most beautiful of all female heroes in popular cinema.” While she undeniably deserves respect, I’d disagree with all three of those claims. There are some other gaffes as well, e.g. references to an Israeli fighting style called “krav manga“, which is presumably the art of hitting someone with Japanese comics. Or quoting Kill Bill as “Silly rabbit. Tricks are for kids,” and analyzing it on that basis. Perhaps Trix breakfast cereal doesn’t exist in Denmark? Or the assertion that Charlie’s Angels was guilty of “copying the martial arts wirework of The Matrix“. Um, wirework hardly started there, and in any case, that’s because they shared an action choroeographer in Yuen Wo-Ping? Other sections have not aged well, such as the blunt proclamation that “there is no historical evidence” as to the existence of genuine Amazons, and the analysis of Jovovich’s career as characters that “appear almost ugly with marked features, an androgynous appearance, and a hysterical behavior” does not stand up well from a current perspective.

On the other hand, Schubart is entirely willing to go against prevailing wisdom. For example, I can’t argue with her calling the much-derided Barb Wire “a shameless and witty remake of Casablanca” (though it gets scant coverage, considering its cover placement). She also defends Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, saying “My experience is that men who have enjoyed the ‘nauseating’ and ‘sickening’ pleasures of Ilsa have turned out to become quite normal social beings.” Guilty as charged. I must also agree – to the point that I’d like this on a T-shirt – when Schubart says, “A film is not better because it is politically correct, nor is it worse because it is politically incorrect.” In comparison to some academics, she seems utterly sane. She quotes one such scholar, the apparently borderline lunatic Richard Dyer, as saying “For the male viewer, action movies have a lot in common with being fellated.” Okay. Whatever, dude. Schubart, mercifully, largely avoids such excesses.

Largely, but unfortunately not completely, such as her claim that “Being a man is not an essence, but something which must constantly be tested and proved by, for example, raping women.” [Emphasis added] It is moments like that which do make it hard to buy into her analysis, since they appear to stem from a world-view incompatible with my own. Yet, Schubart would perhaps be fine with that, since one of the tenets of postfeminism she espouses, is a film can be read in different ways, depending on the reader’s experiences, and that all such readings have legitimacy. Seems reasonable to me: presumably the same applies to her book. That flexibility, and the five archetypes, are worthwhile elements here, which I’ll absorb going forward. “Men’s recognition of each other’s accomplishments rests on acts of violence”? Not so much.

Author: Rikke Schubart
Publisher: McFarland, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book

Stressed to Death

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★½
“Definitely a stress test.”

The concept here is intriguing. It’s just the execution – and the script in particular – which is bad. A robbery at a convenience store ends in the death of David, the husband to Victoria Garrett (Aldrich). She blames the paramedic on the scene, former soldier Maggie Hart (Holden), for the loss of her spouse, though the incident hits Maggie equally hard. She quits her job, raising daughter Jane (Blackwell) with her husband, commercial real-estate agent, Jason (Gerhardt). But Victoria hasn’t moved on – in probably the film’s most memorably loopy elements, she feeds her husband’s ashes to a pot-plant she calls David, to which she chats. She’s also clearly a believer in that saying about revenge being served cold.

For she waits a whole ten years after the incident, before putting into motion a plan for revenge, hiring a pair of thugs to kill Maggie’s family in front of her. Fortunately for her target, they’re two blithering incompetents – or maybe the script just makes it seem like they were acquired through the ‘Help Wanted’ section of Facebook Marketplace. Adding spice to the situation, she has hired Jason as her subordinate, and Jane turns out to have a crush on Victoria’s son. Complicating matters further is Maggie’s PTSD, which is naturally the movie-friendly version, only kicking in when required by the plot. It can also apparently be cured by violent trauma: specifically, someone hiring a pair of thugs to kill your family in front of you. What are the odds?

Even by the low standards of Lifetime movies, this is bad. It’s not just the script that is sloppy, the production includes a bike helmet suddenly appearing on Jane’s head, and a knife that teleports from the floor into Maggie’s hands. But let’s not kid ourselves: it’s mostly the script. I lost count of the points at which I sighed heavily. Probably peak sigh was achieved at the sequence where Maggie and Jane have been captured. The thug doesn’t just leave them alone, he falls asleep in the next room, allowing them to escape. Guess that whole thugging thing really takes it out of you. Worse, after the mother and daughter get away, they show no urgency at all, wandering around while chatting casually about Jane’s crush. Oh, look: they get caught. Again.

This all builds to a ridiculous excuse for a climax in a motel room, which ends with the police describing what happened to the chief thug. The only things that saves this from total disaster are performances generally better than the story deserves. Holden, in particular, does a decent job with her character, and actually, the chief thug is surprisingly sympathetic, when telling Maggie about his abused childhood. Or something. I expected better from Brian Skiba, an Arizona native who co-wrote this, and whose films Chokehold and .357: Six Bullets for Revenge have previously been reviewed here. While they weren’t great, they look like Oscar-winners beside Stressed to Death. I think I’m the one coming down with a case of PTSD after sitting through this.

Dir: Jared Cohn
Star: Gina Holden, Taylor Blackwell, Sarah Aldrich, Jason Gerhardt

The Supergirl of Kung Fu

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★★
“For some very loose definition of super.”

This is another one of an apparently infinite series of kung-fu films, set during the Japanese occupation of China that took place just before World War II. The heroine is Little Flower (Lee), who gets given a death-bed mission by her martial arts master father: return to Shanghai, and lead his students at the Ching Wu Men school against the occupying Japanese forces. Except, on arriving, Flower finds the school disbanded by force, and its disciples scattered to the winds. She begins to hunt the top students, Rock (Yang) and Mercury – the latter has gone particularly deep into hiding after having killed twenty Japanese soldiers in one night. But Flower’s own activities, protecting the poor, bring her to the attention of the Japanese authorities, because they think she’s part of the rebels, as well as a local Chinese cop (Heung).

Sadly, it’s almost entirely dull, though in the film’s defense, the particularly poor presentation does not do it many favours. The dubbing is terrible, and the slightest movement by any of the characters is accompanied by the same, loud, whooshing noise. To say this gets old quickly, is putting it mildly. It might be forgiven were the action any great shakes: it’s not. While there are a reasonable number of fights, they are generally slow and unimaginative. The final boss is armed with a stick that must be fifteen foot long if it’s an inch. This is an impressive looking weapon, yet in order to render it effective, everyone he faces has to avoid using the obvious tactics against such an oversized monstrosity, which hardly lends itself to swift action. Still, I did genuinely laugh out loud at one point, where he catches Little Flower on the end of it, and whirls her around in the air for a bit, like an act combining plate-spinning and acrobatics from the Chinese State Circus.

On the other hand, the most woeful moment is probably when an arriving shipload of arms is blown up by the rebels. This takes place entirely off-screen, with the authorities simply hearing the sound of its massive explosion. There’s no particular sense of closure at the end, with the film going from the fight against the final boss, to “The End” credit in such an abrupt way, it feels like everyone involved must have had a very pressing engagement elsewhere. Again, however, this may be due to the lack of care in the presentation. Or perhaps not, given how lacking in particular energy or talent most elements of this appears to be. While you can’t entirely extinguish the talent of somebody like Lee, this certainly does a good job of diminishing it. The story spins off a number of threads that never seem to go anywhere, and even as someone entirely unfamiliar with 1930’s Shanghai, I wasn’t exactly convinced by its depiction here. One for Judy Lee completists only.

Dir: Min-Hsiung Wu
Star: Judy Lee, Charles Heung, Yang Lun, Cliff Ching Ching

Seventh Son

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★★★
“Son of a witch…”

Despite generally terrible reviews, this is definitely not, by any means, a terrible movie. It is, admittedly, a fairly generic sword-and-sorcery flick, in which a hero must rise from a common background to save the world from a terrible magical threat. But it looks spiffy – the hundred million dollar budget is on the screen. If the central performance has its issues, there’s enough around the fringes to make both for an adequately entertaining experience, and also merit the existence of a review here. In particular, the main antagonist is the evil witch Mother Malkin (Moore). She escapes from the prison to which she had been confined years ago by Gregory (Bridges), now the last survivor of his order of witch-hunters.

Malkin seeks revenge, but only succeeds in killing Gregory’s apprentice, Jon Snow [okay, it’s just Kit Harrington, but this works well enough as a Game of Thrones side-quest]. With just a few days before Malkin’s powers are fully unlocked, he needs a replacement, stat. That is pig farmer’s son, Tom Ward (Barnes), whose lineage provides him with the necessary talents to help fight Mother Malkin. Maybe… Things are, naturally, complicated on the fringes, by Tom’s growing relationship with half-witch Alice (Vikander), for she is also Malkin’s niece, and if uncertain loyalties. On the other hand, Tom owns the Umbran Stone, which his mother – at the time an acolyte of Mother Malkin – had stolen from her mistress, and which multiplies the abilities of any witch who possesses it.

In other words, a smorgasbord of Young Adult fantasy tropes, and there are a few plot-holes, e.g. why doesn’t Malkin just hole up for a few days to acquire her full powers? However, the execution of things here has some positives, in particular the energetic commitment of both Moore and Bridges [It’s a Big Lebowski reunion: I leave it to you to write your own joke there]. The former delivers a no-holds barred approach, getting good support from Antje Traue as Malkin’s sister, Bony Lizzie.  The witches depicted here are certainly independent, strong women. They’re just not very nice. Meanwhile, Gregory has a clear zero-tolerance policy for witches, something which brings him into conflict with Tom, and Bridges’s mumbling feels a bit reminiscent of his performance in True Grit. Once you get used to that, it’s a far bit of fun to watch. 

I think Bodrov’s lack of Hollywood experience may have been the main issue. While Bridges and Moore are experienced enough not to need much direction, the same isn’t true of Barnes, despite his previous fantasy role as Prince Caspian. Tom is simply bland and uninteresting. If the movie had concentrated on Gregory and Malkin, I’d probably have liked it a lot more. As is, whenever the hero is on-screen, I tended to find myself admiring the pretty backdrops and production design instead. Though I’ve not read the book by Joseph Delaney on which this was based, we did review the later series entry, I am Grimalkin. Done properly, I’d certainly not mind seeing that made into a film. However, the tepid response to this killed any hopes for a franchise: Grimalkin will likely have to remain a creature of my imagination.

Dir: Sergei Bodrov
Star: Ben Barnes, Jeff Bridges, Alicia Vikander, Julianne Moore

Spoor

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★★★
“Call of the wild”

Janina Duszejko (Mandat) is a former engineer, who now lives in a small rural Polish town. She has a deep love of nature and animals. This is a belief not shared by many of the local population, who treat animals as a resource, put there for their benefit – an attitude which brings them into conflict with Duszejko. After her two dogs disappear, she goes to the authorities, but they blow her off. However, the man she suspects most, turns up dead – just the first in a series of mysterious deaths, that may be related to Jaroslav Wnetzak, a local businessman with a finger in a number of shady pies. Subsequent corpses include the police chief, who owes Wnetzak money.

With the help of Dyzio (Gierszal), an IT consultant working for the police, Duszejko is able to investigate things. She also begins a romantic relationship with visiting Czech entomologist Boros Schneider (Krobot), after he discovers Wnetzak’s body in the forest, months after the businessman had disappeared. Things come to a head when Duszejko is arrested following the death of the mayor, having been the last to have seen him alive. But what exactly is going on? Is this those shady business dealings gone wrong? Or are the animals taking revenge on those who have hunted them? While I can’t say much more, you can probably get some kind of hint to the situation, simply from the fact that it’s being reviewed here. And perhaps the poster.

Holland is a veteran director, with over 40 years of features in her native Poland, plus episodes of US shows including The Wire, The Killing and House of Cards. You can tell, since this is confident and assured, as well as providing some truly beautiful and atmospheric shots of the countryside, imbuing it with a mystical quality. Animals loom out of the mist, almost like prehistoric creatures [hey, wild boar were driven extinct in Britain during the 1600’s], and the humans may not be that much more evolved. The lines are deliberately blurred at a couple of points, such as in Wnetzak’s brothel, where the women are dressed as cats, bunnies, etc. or at a costume ball which Duszejko attends as the big, bad wolf.

She makes an interesting character: clearly smart, yet her fierce devotion is certainly a weakness, and perhaps her undoing, especially when the police, etc. blow her concerns off.  However, at 128 minutes, there feels too much slack. The subplot involving the entomologist in particular, seems to bring things lurching to a halt in the middle, just when the mysterious deaths ramp up, and should begin driving things forward. I’d have moved this element towards the beginning, part of establishing Duszejko’s character. It doesn’t serve any essential part in the main plot, requiring it to be in the position where it takes place. However, the majority of the film still works, and represents a thought-provoking and well-crafted entity for the majority of its length, that does a decent job of mixing in its message.

Dir: Agnieszka Holland
Star: Agnieszka Mandat, Patricia Volny, Jakub Gierszał, Miroslav Krobot

Senora Acero: Season three

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★★
“Third time’s the harm”

Halfway through the final installment, Chris came in. She paused, watching for a moment, then said, “They spend far too much time talking, and not enough time killing.” Just a shame she waited 93 episodes to express so succinctly one of the main problems with the series. For, even if the final arc had its share of bloodshed, if you average it out per show, it’s about the level of a mid-strength nosebleed. It certainly put the novela into narconovela. Though the problems began at the start – or, rather, the end of the second series where heroine Sara Aguilar was apparently gunned down. This being a show where escape from death was common, I spent the first 20 episodes waiting for her to return. Spoiler: she doesn’t.

Instead, attention turns to Vicenta “La Coyote” Rigores (Miranda), who turns out to be part of the Acero family. This brings her into conflict with all the Acero enemies, including Indio (Zárate), and Governor of Chihuahua, Chucho Casares (Goyri), who also runs an arms trafficking group. But she has allies on her side, including ICE agent Daniel Phillips (Franco), and some familiar faces from the first two seasons. That’s a very high overview. As you can imagine, with about 62 hours of episodes in this season to fill, there are a lot of threads being weaved (So. Many, Pregnancies) and chit-chat necessary to explain them all, as loyalties shift with the breeze.

Part of the problem is, how little of it has any impact. Another part is, as a legal immigrant to America, I am fiercely resistant to a heroine who smuggles people across the border – and that was even before the not-so veiled references to American politics. The two main ICE characters, Phillips and his boss Indio Cardena, are both depicted as corrupt – even if, in the former’s case, it’s a “good” kind of corruption, becoming sympathetic to migrants and their plight. Though on the evidence of this show, based on who’s crossing the border illegally, Trump may have had a point when he said Mexico weren’t sending their best… Say what you like about Sara Aguilar, she at least largely operated in her own country.

Another problem. Writing about the second series, I described supporting character Tuti as “our most “love to hate” character. Not just in the show, or narconovelas generally, but perhaps the history of our TV viewing.” Guess who gets an expanded role in season three? Nails on glass, people. There are some new characters I liked – hell, Cardena, until she went rogue – but it wasn’t enough. I was amused by how narconovela weddings go wrong with about the inevitability of pro wrestling weddings. Whether raided by ICE or the bride getting gunned down in her dress, while her groom is involved in a fist-fight, they never take place as intended.

With about 20 episodes to go, I came to the conclusion this would be the last season I would watch. While the action component did ramp up somewhat down the stretch, it wasn’t enough to make me second-guess my decision. With a further two seasons, totalling 146 more episodes, I was hard-pushed to see the show coming back, and so am content to draw a line under the Acero dynasty after this series.

Creator: Roberto Stopello
Star: Carolina Miranda, Luis Ernesto Franco, Jorge Zárate, Sergio Goyri

Shut In

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★★
“Woman who talks through doors”

After Run Hide Fight, this is another film produced by political outlet The Daily Wire. This inevitably leads to reviews which are as much concerned with the leanings of the production company, which is annoying, albeit understandable. If the Huffington Post got into the movie business, I imagine the same thing would happen. But it also ignores the fact that you would have to look hard here, to find much indication of a political agenda. A considerably bigger issue is that it’s quite dull, with a heroine who spends much of the time living up to her apparent Native American name given above. Certainly, I hoped for more from this synopsis: “When a young mother is barricaded inside a pantry by her violent ex-boyfriend, she must use ingenuity to protect her two small children from escalating danger while finding an escape.”

The mom in question is Jessica (Qualley, the daughter of Andie McDowell), a recovering drug addict who is preparing to get out of town, and start a new life with adorable little moppet, Lainey (VanDette), and her toddler, Mason. Unfortunately, her plans are derailed by a troublesome door, and the arrival of her skeevy ex-boyfriend and father of Lainey, Rob (Horowitz), who is still very much under the control of his meth habit. Dodgier still is his skeevier pal, Sammy (Gallo, making his return to features after close to a decade), who has a very poor reputation, to put it mildly. An argument with Rob leads to Jessica being nailed inside the pantry, with her two children outside, Rob storming off promising to return when she has learned her lesson. Worse follows, with Sammy sleazing his way back. As a storm erupts, he poses an unspeakable threat to Lainey, who now also has to take care of Mason, under Jessica’s increasingly fraught instruction.

Especially in the first half, this means a lot of Jessica shouting through a door, and Lainey whining “I am hungry/am scared/need the toilet” in repetitive order. It gets old very quickly. Even though Gallo certainly makes for a slimy villain, the reality is that the film has locked itself in a confined space, along with its lead character. Neither of them are going anywhere for about the first hour. Caruso attempts to ramp up the tension by having everything threatening happen out of sight of both his heroine and the audience, but I never felt particularly concerned. This is a case where it felt like we needed a more direct approach to the threat. There’s also a weird religious subtext, which is neither prominent enough to be significant or objectionable. So I was left wondering what the point of it was.

Things do pick up, at least somewhat, for the final reel, where things are allowed out of the closet. Had the script worked on that basis from the start, this might have had a chance. Instead, it’s the very definition of “too little, too late.”

Dir: D.J. Caruso
Star: Rainey Qualley, Jake Horowitz, Luciana VanDette, Vincent Gallo

Shadow Eclipse: Voyage, by E.M. Gale

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

After a brisk and entertaining start, this gets increasingly bogged-down in its own universe as it goes on. And, boy, does it go on. At a thousand pages in the print version, this became a severe slog, and ends in a unsatisfactory way. A second novel seems promised, but this came out in 2019, and has yet to be forthcoming. Maybe the writer got bored of the whole thing too?

As mentioned, it opens promisingly. Florentina Clarke (who hates her first name so much, she insists everyone just calls her Clarke) is having a really bad day. First, she has been turned into a vampire. Then, she and her grad student friends are thrown through time and space when an experiment misfires. They end up two hundred years in the future, on a far-off planet, and have to learn how to come to terms with a whole new way of life. Clarke is best-suited, and ends up getting them passage on a smuggling ship, where helped by her new vampire skills, she becomes part of the mercenaries who defend the ship. However, it turns out her future self – vampires being immortal – is rather famous and/or notorious, and she finds herself having to cope with that, and the resulting threats to her life.

Which all sounds considerably more exciting than it is. There’s a lot, and I mean a lot of agonizing over whether or not to look herself and her pals up in the history books, to see their fates. It’s a painfully responsible approach to time-travel  which really doesn’t do much for the reader. The same goes for her relentless angst about whether or not to tell her friends about her vampiric status. Do or don’t, then move on. Matters aren’t helped by a clunky structure in which it fells like every conversation becomes a three-way dance with Clarke’s internal thoughts chiming in after every single sentence. A long way before the end of the book, I was mentally screaming “STFU!” at her inner monologue.

The action components also seem to decline over the course of the book. There’s a point where the ship – which may not be quite what it initially appears – seems to be under almost constant attack, keeping Clarke and her merc colleagues very busy. However, this fades away and a vampire duel is about all it feels like the second half has to offer. I did like Gale’s world-building, with different races kinda-somewhat getting along, and some thought has clearly gone both into the vampires and the time-travel aspects. However, it’s not clear what Clarke’s eventual place in the universe is going to be, and her friends are also rendered increasingly irrelevant as the story progresses. It ends with her vampire boyfriend getting the chance for revenge he has been seeking, though this felt almost painfully foreshadowed and doesn’t provide much satisfaction in terms of tidying up the threads. Can’t say I’m too bothered whether or not volume 2 ever appears.

Author: E.M. Gale
Publisher: Lightbulb Works, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of, uh, 1 in the Shadow Eclipse series.

Sin, by J.M. Leduc

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

Sinclair O’Malley, known to everyone as Sin, is a bit of a wild card. She was initially an FBI agent, but was released by the agency, largely for her refusal to stay within the lines. In particular, she went off-book to end a human trafficking ring in Nicaragua. She is the kind of person whom we first meet interrupting a funeral, by rolling up to it late, on a Harley. But this is just the book’s first misstep. For rather than demonstrating her bad-ass credentials, it just made me feel she was a selfish and egocentric narcissist, shrieking “Look at meeeeeeee!” everywhere she went. Subsequent actions did little to disavow me of this belief.

Anyway, inexplicably, the agency now desperately want her back. For a number of their agents have turned up dead, after being sent to investigate the corpses of young Latin American girls, which have turned up along the coast from Florida to Louisiana. The bodies showed evidence of torture and sexual assault. But Sin in particular is needed, because the agents were found near Tumbledown Bay, the small community in the Florida Keys where she grew up – and which she, quite deliberately, left. Convinced to return, in part due to her father being terminally ill with cancer. She discovers the community has fallen under the thrall of a sleazy preacher, the Reverend Jeremiah Heap. He just happens to have opened an orphanage, catering to Latin American girls. Might this be connected?

Oh, of course it is. There’s a paedophile/snuff movie ring, streaming their acts over the Internet to an elite clientele. Quite why they bother importing children from South America (to borrow an infamous movie tagline, “where life is cheap”) rather than… Oh, I dunno, streaming from there to begin with, is never clear. But then, the international criminal masterminds here are basically brutish thugs. The rule here in Tumbledown Bay is: the stupider and uglier you are, the more likely you are to be involved in the ring. Sin is neither, to be fair. But I found most of her character traits thoroughly off-putting. This quote resonated: “Some of us can change, Sin. And some of us are still the bitter, nasty-mouthed, bitch they were seven years ago.” That’s your heroine, folks.

It’s clear the kind of persona Leduc is aiming for. A take-no-nonsense woman, prepared to do whatever it takes, and unconcerned about whose toes she might stomp on in the process. But it needs more finesse and balance; there’s nothing, for instance, to explain her dedicated squad, who leap to her every need. Why do they have such loyalty to her? ‘Cos she’s hot? Might as well be. There’s also a pacing problem: the storming of the orphanage feels like it should be the climax, yet the book rattles on for a further twenty percent, tidying up loose ends. These should probably have been shifted into a further volume, this one ending with the line, “I am the Pearl Angel of Death, she thought, and I will hunt and find each and every one of those people.” Instead, it’s all downhill from there.

Author: J.M. Leduc
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 3 in the Sinclair O’Malley Thriller series.

Scorching Sun, Fierce Wind, Wild Fire

  By

★★
“May the fierce be with you.”

The first thing which will hit you about this 1979 Taiwanese co-production is the utterly shameless way it hijacks John Williams’s soundtrack to Star Wars. 93 minutes later, as the end credits roll, accompanied by more unauthorized liftage… That’s probably still going to be the main element of this you will remember. For the rest is largely a confusingly-plotted and not very well executed bit of chop socky. Despite Angela Mao’s presence, second on the list of participants, she is a long way behind the main character, in terms of both screen time and action.

It’s supposed to be set in the 1920’s, though at least one of the vehicles on display looks extremely post-war. At the time, it appears China was divided into a lot of territories, ruled over in a feudal fashion by warlords. One such man is having a problem with a rebel who goes by the nomme de guerre of “Violet”, and he is desperate to find out who is disrupting his operations. In particular, his plan to acquire some heavy weaponry from Japan, that will end all rebellions. Seems Violet had stolen the guns’ firing-pins, rendering them useless. The cause of his angst is a great deal closer to home than he things, because Violent is actually his daughter (Mao), in a hat and veil. Other plot elements include a pair of escaped convicts, a treasure map which has been split into two halves, and the warlord’s right-hand man, Second Master (Yi), who is plotting a coup.

Unfortunately, it’s much more  the movie of Pai Tien Hsing  (Peng), whose character has an ambivalence a little like Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name. He initially appears to be on the side of the warlord, and insists on Violet putting her skills to the test against him. However, the further into proceedings we get, the more aligned he is with her, until the final battle, where they both go up against Second Master and his poisoned knives. I must say, they have a very gnarly effect on the victim, though it’s likely no spoiler to say, the film operates in line with the kung-fu version of the old pro wrestling adage: “He who sets the table, gets the table…”

The fights are only occasionally up to much, and mostly feel like they date from a picture made a decade or more previously. Mao is her usual, reliable self, and shines in the moments she has; there just are not enough of them, and they don’t last for long. There’s a horribly cropped and dubbed version on Amazon Prime, as Dragon Connection, which I got three minutes into before discovering the letterboxed, subbed version on YouTube. Mind you, that had its issues too, not least referring to a mute character on multiple occasions as “a dump.” One for the Mao completists only. Having checked it off the list, let us never speak of it again.

Dir: Sheng-Yuan Sun
Star: Peng Tien, Angela Mao, Yi Chang, Tao-Liang Tan
a.k.a. Dragon Connection or Any Which Way You Punch