Tag: sport

Range Runners

  By

★★
“The loneliness of the long-distance runner”

Mel (Cooper) is engaged on a project of running the Appalachian Trail (or a convincing facsimile thereof), with some help from her sister, who meets her at various points to provide support and fresh supplies. Mel is currently on her own, starting an eight-day section of the hike where she’ll be out of contact. However, she bumps into a couple of suspicious characters, deep in the woods: Wayland (Leonard) and his partner, Jared (Woods). Initially, it seems like a creepy, but one-off random meeting. It turns out to be considerably more and subsequent encounters escalate, until Mel is sent plummeting over the edge of a drop-off, badly injuring her leg, but in possession of something very important to Wayland and Jared. Will she be able to escape her pursuers and make it to safety?

A good chunk of this effectively takes place inside the heroine’s head, as she pushes through the forest. There are flashbacks, in particular, to her youth when she was an athlete in training, being coached by her father. His approach was very much one of tough love, with the emphasis on “tough”, and a fondness for aphorisms, such as “[Your body] doesn’t tell you what to do, it’s the other way around.” It seems to have done the trick, giving Mel the mental toughness necessary to cope with the situation. However, it doesn’t exactly make for thrilling cinema, and considering the film runs 112 minutes, a little of this kind of thing goes a long way.

This is nicely photographed, it must be said, and the wooded location is used effectively, setting up a world in which a threat conceivably lurks behind every trunk and branch. The issues are much more with the plot, which fails on a number of levels. Not least, is the lack of motivation given to the villains, whose presence and actions are never well-defined, beyond being required in order for the plot to reach its (entirely predictable) conclusion. There are few if any surprises along the way. Even when the film tries to make you believe Mel has found sanctuary, anyone who has seen any wilderness survival films, will basically be waiting for that not to be the case.

By the time you filter out what’s unnecessary, and what doesn’t work, there’s probably not much more than 45 minutes of decent content to be found here. Rather than it being Mel vs. Wayland + Jared, it’s more a case of Mel vs. herself, or at least her own doubts and emotional baggage. The finale is decent, pitting our wounded athlete against the pair, and proves rather more satisfactory than most of what has been seen to this point. It’s an example of a film where the destination proves better than the journey to get there. Depending on your view, this may or may not be a suitable parallel to hiking the Appalachian Trail…

Dir: Philip S. Plowden
Star: Celeste M Cooper, Sean Patrick Leonard, Michael B. Woods, Sarah Charipar

Gripped: Climbing the Killer Pillar

  By

★★★
“Climb every mountain…”

Newbie climber Rose (Maddox) is on her first trip to do some “real” climbing, rather than on a rock wall at her local gym. There, she meets and falls for the insanely rugged good-looking Bret (Lyman, who appears to have strayed right off the cover of a romance novel entitled “Love in the Surf”). After a couple of successfully, but relatively simple climbs, the pair head to take on something more challenging: the infamous “Killer pillar” of the title. Half-way up, a hand-hold used by Bret breaks, sending him tumbling down the cliff-face. Though the rope stops the fall from being fatal, he suffers a torn shoulder and head injury, leaving him unable to lead, and unable to descend. As the poster tagline says, “The only way down is up.” So, it falls on Rose, despite her lack of experience, to take over and forge a route up the near-sheer escarpment, that Bret will be able to navigate in her wake.

The mountaineering stuff here is excellent, and it seems that everyone involved was doing their own climbing. While for much of the time, I suspect they probably weren’t too far off the ground, there are a few shots that should come with a trigger warning for vertigo sufferers. Particular kudos to cinematographer John Garrett, who captures the stunning landscapes of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California – and, I suspect, did his share of climbing to get some of the angles. It just feels like legitimate climbing, in contrast to the Hollywood stuff seen in movies such as Cliffhanger. I note the presence in the supporting cast of notable real climbers, such as Jacki Florine, who in 2006 became the first woman to climb fourteen 14,000-foot peaks in California in 10 days. Another mountaineer, Natalie Duran, whom we recognized from her appearances on American Ninja Warrior, also has a supporting role as a jealous fellow climber.

The main problem is that the dramatic aspects don’t kick in until after the 50-minute mark, and it borders on the tedious to that point. Lovely scenery can only take you so far, when the romantic relationship at the movie’s heart is thoroughly unconvincing. We don’t need to see the banal process of them getting together, or the development of their interactions. This could, and probably should, have saved time by being an existing couple; Rose could still have been a novice climber, making her debut in the big outdoors. That would even have added a personal motivation to her heroics, rather than it being to save some hunk she met two days ago. Whatevs. They made the movie they wanted too, and it’s not on me to list ways to potential improve it! I’d say you can pay attention here when they clip on their gear, and safely ignore just about everything else.

Dir: Benjamin Galland
Star: Amanda Maddox, Kaiwi Lyman, Megan Hensley, Bryce Wissel

Ride Like a Girl

  By

★★½
“Trots, when it should gallop”

This opens and closes with footage and photographs of the real Michelle Payne, who is the subject of the film. Part of me wonders if that documentary approach might have proved a more successful one, rather than the parade of sports drama cliches we get here. Admittedly, quite a lot of them are based in fact. Payne was the first woman to ride to victory in the Melbourne Cup – that’s Australia’s premier horse-race, roughly equivalent in prestige to the Kentucky Derby or Grand National in the US or UK respectively. This alone, is quite an achievement. But she did so as one of ten brothers and sisters, who largely had to bring themselves up after their mother died when Michelle was only six months old. Her father was a horse trainer, and no fewer than eight of his offspring became jockeys, including Michelle of course.

In this version, Palmer plays the heroine, with Neill the ever-tolerant father attempting to steer her career. It’s not easy, with Michelle having to deal with a racing establishment that still doubts women can be as good jockeys as men, before eventually convincing owner Darren Weir (Stapleton) to give her a chance. She also has to come back from an fall that left her with a fractured skull and bruised brain. Then, she almost lost the opportunity to ride her horse, Prince of Penzance, in the big race after being suspended for racing tactics perceived as dangerous, fairly or not. In other words: basically checking off all the obvious impediments, and the film adds little or nothing of note to them, though some of the racing footage is effective enough. [The film, probably wisely, glosses over post-Cup events. Prince of Penzance went lame and had to retire; Weir was charged with cruelty to animals; and Payne got another suspension for amphetamine abuse. Oops]

It works better when it’s remaining grounded, in a way only Australians can be. Neill does a good job of that as the long-suffering father, and it’s a shame he all but vanishes from the second half of proceedings. It does offer amusing moments like watching a posse of nuns (or whatever the collective term is for them!), marching into a bookmakers on Melbourne Cup Day to bet on Payne and her pony. Much credit is also due to the film-makers for letting Payne’s real-life brother, Stevie, who has Down’s Syndrome, play himself in the movie. But it does suffer from what is likely an inevitable problem given the source material: we know how it’s going to end, and how it’s going to get there as well. Given this, taking a few more risks with the approach or the portrayals of the characters might have been warranted. Instead, Griffiths seems intent on taking the safest route she can find between plot-points which are largely obvious. The results are, as you’d expect, little more than feel-good fodder.

Dir: Rachel Griffiths
Star: Teresa Palmer, Sam Neill, Sullivan Stapleton, Stevie Payne

Strider

  By

★★★½
“The loneliness of the long-distance runner.”

This is certainly a borderline entry for the site, in terms of “action”. There’s running. Lots of running, through the very scenic, beautifully photographed New England countryside. And that’s about it. if you’re expecting fisticuffs, gun-play or mayhem… look elsewhere. That, I must stress, doesn’t make this a bad film. Admittedly, it falls close to Generic Sports Movie 1.0.1. Teenager Jody Sue Brightwell (Friedman) is spotted by a “between jobs” track coach, Hannah Dalton (Alexander). as Jody Sue runs on the road, largely to escape the problems of her everyday life – such as an absent mother and her two, hell-spawned younger brothers. Hannah sees raw talent and agrees to take her on, with the goal of getting her ready for the Pinnacle Games, where a good performance could open the doorway to a professional career.

Of course, between here and there, various problems get in the way.  The doubts of her father (Lewis), who knows Jody Sue’s past history of giving up. The approach of Hannah to training, which gives no quarter to anyone’s feelings. Jody Sue’s new boyfriend, Tim (Schneider), who wants to support her, yet ends up being a potentially fatal distraction to her chances. Really, there are only two ways this can go at the end. Jody Sue can triumph in the Big Race, or not, and both are almost inescapably cliched. Either way, along the road (literally, in this case), relationships will be tested, lessons learned, and limits tested. If you’re looking for anything groundbreaking in the story… again, look elsewhere.

But this is absolutely one of those cases where the journey is more important than the destination. Crucially, the characters here all feel incredibly genuine. Thanks to both a solid script and performances that are all good or better, they speak and behave in ways which make them feel real. They’re all – well, with the exception of the Hell-spawn – nice folk, trying to do the best they can. There are no villains here, and while that does limit the scope for dramatic conflict, it makes for an engaging experience. These are people with whom it’s a pleasure to spend time, and that’s perhaps rarer than you’d think in cinema. Despite occasionally awkward gaps in the narrative – why, exactly, is Hannah apparently unemployable? – you should find yourself caring about them as events unfold.

Helping matters, the technical aspects are excellent. The film looks incredibly crisp, as mentioned above, with some great aerial photography work, and the soundtrack does a very good job of enhancing the overall experience. Finally, I actually watched the second half of this while getting in my daily miles on the elliptical in the living-room. It seemed appropriate to be running, while watching a film about running, right? But for whatever reason, I ended up cracking through more calories than I had for several months. I guess this can truly be considered an inspirational movie…

Dir: Mark Lewis
Star: Yelena Friedman, Maggie Alexander, Scott Lewis, Josiah Schneider
[The film is currently available on Amazon Prime]

Saand Ki Aankh

  By

★★★
“Grannies with guns”

It’s interesting to compare this with the recently reviewed Ride Like a Girl. Both are sports movies based on real events, and neither really do much story-wise, except trot out the standard tropes for the genre about overcoming obstacles on the way to triumph. Yet this succeeds somewhat better, likely because of the unusual central concept. Two Indian grandmothers, unable even to read, take up competitive shooting in their sixties, and end up becoming national heroines as a result. Tell me you’re not intrigued by that.

Chandro and Prakashi Tomar (Pednekar and Pannu) are part of a large extended family in Uttar Pradash. In this world, women do much of the work, while the men lounge around. If the film is to be believed, smoking hookah pipes and demanding snacks are their main occupations, viewing the woman as machines for pumping out babies. But things change when a local doctor (Singh) opens a shooting range. One of their grand-daughters goes along for a lesson, and the grannies – who initially attend for moral support – discover a natural talent for the sport. However, the family’s patriarch, Rattan Singh Tomar (Jha), would never permit them to travel to competitions, so deception needs to be carried out. But as the contests get bigger, so do the lies.

While the story does span several decades, it concentrates mostly on the characters in their later years, which makes it a little odd that the producers cast a pair of thirty-something actresses for the lead roles. Presumably the idea was that it was easier to make them up to be older, rather than making sixty-five year olds look thirty. I can’t say it always works. Indeed, there are points where they look closer to the Beatdown Biddies from GLOW than genuine senior citizens. At 146 minutes, it goes on too long as well. The makers could have significantly reined in the montage sequences, and the likely inevitable musical numbers add nothing to proceedings either, at least to this Westerner’s eyes. [I will admit, I’m not the intended audience there]

Despite this, is still manages to work, and the running time isn’t as much of a problem as I feared it would be when I started. It is one heck of an eye-opener to see what life in rural India is like, especially for women, and quite puts all our #FirstWorldProblems in perspective.  There’s a calm dignity about the two heroines which is effective, and it’s easy to see how that temperament transfers to their sport, even in the face of initial heckling by unconvinced audience members and opponents. It’s also about the first GWG film I’ve seen which looks at the purely sporting aspects of firearms – one of the few fields in which men and women can compete on an equal footing. The Indian title translates as “Bull’s-eye”; while I’d not claim the film scores to that degree, it hits its targets at least as often as it misses.

Dir: Tushar Hiranandani
Star: Taapsee Pannu, Bhumi Pednekar, Prakash Jha, Vineet Kumar Singh

The Furnace

  By

★★★
“Run Mary Run”

Two days after getting married, Mary Harris (Bernadette) is involved in a car accident which kills her new husband and leaves her barely able to walk. But she has one goal: to compete in the Furnace, an ultra-marathon race through the African wilderness, in which she and her late husband had been planning to take part. This aim goes strongly against the desires of her mother, but Mary won’t be deterred. With the help of her mentor (Dlamini, looking like a younger version of Morgan Freeman), nicknamed “Coffin” due to his day-job as a gravedigger, she claws her way back to fitness, and to the start-line. But is she prepared for everything the environment can throw at her, and make it to the finish? To do so, she’ll have to overcome not just the lethal heat, but also predators for whom she’d be a tasty snack, and poisonous scorpions whose venom induces disorienting hallucinations.

It’s certainly a change of pace for Bernadette, who has previously been seen on this site in Killing Joan and All Girls Weekend, as well as the largely woeful I Spit On Your Grave reboot, Deja Vu, not reviewed here. This is a film heavy on the F-word – by which I mean “faith”. Its religious overtones may be enough to write it off for many, but even as someone who possesses no real commitment there, it still worked well enough as a story about fighting through and triumphing over adversity. The race itself is the most effective section, with a constant stream of problems to overcome, and fortunately that does represent the majority of the film’s running-time. I must admit, I guessed the truth about her running companion, Raphaella (Linn) well before the film revealed it, and that angle is perhaps one where the faith-based elements become more than a little overwhelming.

Exhaustive research i.e. five minutes of Googling, couldn’t locate any race comparable with the Furnace, and it does seem a highly perilous endeavour, even with a GPS attached to participants. “If you’re stationary for more than seven hours, you’re disqualified, and we come pick you up,” says the organizer. Shouldn’t that be “If you’re stationary for more than seven hours, you’ve been eaten by hyenas, and we come pick up whatever is left in a bucket”? It’s certainly not my idea of a challenge to which I aspire, but there are people like Mary who seek to push their limits, so it’s not that far-fetched. Throw in decent cinematography and animal work and you’ve got something that  entertained me rather more than I perhaps expected, though Coffin’s voice-over does become a little superfluous in places. It’s not a film which an atheist is likely going to be able to appreciate, yet dammit, even I found myself getting fractionally emotional for the final scene. I’d probably be more inclined to credit Peters’s performance for that, rather than any kind of divine intervention.

Dir: Darrell Roodt
Star: Jamie Bernadette, Luthuli Dlamini, Laura Linn, Thandi Puren

Tomboy

  By

★★½
“Female empowerment! (And boobs)”

Crown International were an independent movie studio, who operated from the sixties through the eighties: we’ve covered some of their work before, such as Policewomen and Malibu High. While specializing mostly in drive-in fare, they did occasionally break out, and this was one of their bigger hits: it reached #5 in the box-office on its opening weekend [during Beverly Hills Cop‘s run of thirteen straight weeks at #1; it was a different theatrical universe then!]. Which is kinda odd: it’s a frothy concoction that’s both ahead of its time, in a no-nonsense heroine who takes crap from nobody, and remarkably retro in its gratuitous (and inevitably female) nudity.

Russell plays Tomasina “Tommy” Boyd, the daughter of an astronaut, who is great at sport, and works as a car mechanic. Nobody particularly takes her talents seriously, and if there’s a theme here, it’s of Tommy having repeatedly to prove herself in the facing of those who doubt her. One of the customers at the garage where she works is millionaire scion Ernie Leeds Jr. (Douglas, Kirk’s son), whose family sponsors racing driver Randy Starr (DiNome). Tommy has long had a crush on Randy, but discovers he can be a bit of a dick, and certainly won’t accept she’s every bit as good as him on the track – unless she can prove it by beating him

It takes quite some time for that plot to show up, and until it does, the scenes of Tommy getting one up on the local male chauvinist sleazeballs are lightly amusing, although possess all the weight of a soap-bubble. These angles are a bit at odds with the nudity, mostly courtesy of Tommy’s ditzy friend, Seville (Somers), who wants to be a movie star – though her career here appears to consist of not much more than a donut commercial. Russell’s most memorable contribution to the exploitation, is when she falls into a river on a date with Randy. She changes her top in front of him, with a complete lack of self-consciousness that’s as much laudable as erotic.

This has got to be one of the flimsiest theatrical vehicles I’ve ever seen, and criticizing it is like trying to punch a cloud of steam: “fluff” doesn’t even begin to do justice to its lack of weight. I’ve no clue who was the intended audience here. Tommy’s arc of self-confidence and personal discovery would be suitable for something on the Lifetime Channel – or even Disney. Yet the gratuitous flesh is aimed right for the wheel-house of a teenage male audience, who would presumably not exactly be captivated by the more empowering aspects. Maybe this makes it the ultimate date movie, with something for both halves to appreciate?

Somehow, though, it did find an audience, taking $14.1 million, over $36 million in 2018 prices – not bad for a film, which rather obviously didn’t cost a great deal to make (for comparison, Brazil, released the same year, took just under $10 million). This is certainly one of those cases where you can say, “They don’t make ’em like this any more.” Whether that’s a bad thing or not, I’m less sure.

Dir: Herb Freed
Star: Betsy Russell, Jerry DiNome, Kristi Somers, Eric Douglas

12 Feet Deep: Trapped Sisters

  By

★★½
“Drowning, not waving.”

There aren’t many films which will be reviewed both here and on aquaticsintl.com, a site offering “Commercial swimming pool and waterpark industry news” [their opinion: a “woefully inaccurate portrayal of pool technology”]. But then, if you see only one film about sisters trapped underneath a swimming-pool cover this year… Yeah, it’s highly likely to be this one. Eskandari deserves some credit for taking a paper-thin and highly dubious premise and almost stretching it out to feature length. But even he eventually runs out of steam at about the hour mark, and derisive snorting will take over from there. 

Siblings Bree (Noone) and Jonna (Park) are the victims, after trying to retrieve the former’s engagement ring from the bottom of the pool. Lackadaisical pool manager (Bell, recognizable to horror fans from the Saw franchise) closes the giant fibreglass pool cover on them – though I defer to the experts at aquaticsintl.com, who said, “There is no way that would possibly ever meet any ASTM standards for pool safety covers used in the U.S.” Having flagrantly disregarded ASTM standards, he then locks up shop, leaving the pair trapped underneath over a long holiday weekend. Their only hope is the pool’s cleaner, Clara (Farr), but she’s not long out of prison, and the felon sees Bree and Jonna as a moist, trapped meal ticket. Her demands to free them begin with the PIN for Bree’s phone, and escalate from there, as the sisters strive for their own escape.

This feels like a descendant of 47 Meters Down, which was the spawn of The Shallows, which called back to Open Water, all using drowning as the main threat. At least here, “being eaten” isn’t on the menu, and the story has to contrive a number of other elements to stretch things out. Thus we (eventually) get the truth about the death of Brie and Jonna’s father, and the latter’s jealousy about the former’s engagement leads to significant quantities of sibling bickering. Jonna initially comes across as quite the bitch, though we eventually discover there are reasons for her being a curmudgeon. Oh, and did I mention that Bree is a diabetic, who needs an insulin shot, like now?

Supposedly “based on true events” – I can hear derisive laughter from acquaticsintl.com as I write – you’d probably need an especially forgiving nature to get past the “I’m so sure” moments here, such as why they bother to tread water for much of the film, when they could just head to the shallow end and stand there [as well as getting much better leverage for their breakout efforts]. In the first half, things are executed with enough energy as to paper over the cracks, and the series of unfortunate events by which the two women end up trapped is more plausible than I expected. However, I can’t helped thinking it would have been much improved, had Bell returned as his Jigsaw character at the half-way point, and released some sharks into the pool.

Dir: Matt Eskandari
Star: Alexandra Park, Nora-Jane Noone, Diane Farr, Tobin Bell

Forever the Moment

  By

★★★
“Women with balls.”

Every four years, when the Olympics arrive, we fall in love with handball. What is handball, you might be asking. Basically, think seven-a-side soccer, except (obviously), played with the hands rather than feet. It’s an amazing sport, all but unknown in the UK and US, and deserving a far wider audience – a YouTube search for “Olympics handball” will get you sorted. Which is why we were fascinated by the idea of a film focusing on it, specially, the story of the 2004 South Korean women’s team. What they did was roughly that country’s equivalent of the 1980 ‘Miracle on Ice’. The once-dominant Korean team had fallen far from grace, and barely qualified for the Athens Olympics. But they reached the final, against the Danish side, which went into double overtime, and then a penalty shootout.

Yeah, much of this is a compendium of sports cliches, right down to the requisite training montage. The fact it’s largely based on true events does not exonerate the movie from criticism here, though I was impressed how closely the depiction of the final match did mirror the real thing, still regarded as an all-time classic contest. Thus, you get tropes such as the veterans, brought back for one last crack at glory, such as Han Mi-sook (Moon), who is now working in a grocery store to try and make ends meet, after her husband is defrauded by his business partner. They inevitably butt heads, both with the younger players, and new coach Ahn Seung-pil (Uhm), who is not only the replacement for interim coach Kim Hye-gyung (Kim J-e), but also her ex. There may eventually be bonding. I won’t spoil that.

It would be very easy for this to topple over into sentimental cliche, yet the strength of the performances generally help it stay just in bounds. Director Im seems particularly interested in developing her characters, and they come across as especially real, as they progress from a sparsely-attended opening game to the cauldron of the Olympic gold medal match. Especially memorable is the feisty Song Jung-nan (Kim J-y), who won’t back down from any confrontation, most notably when some of the other athletes at the Korean training complex try to bully some of her team-mates. Weightlifters or judokas, all learn quickly not to get in her way.

I should mention, you don’t need to know much about handball, since it’s largely self-explanatory. Though even our relatively untrained eye could detect the difference between the actresses playing the game, and their opponents who are the real thing, being actual professionals from a Danish handball club. For the Korean audience, there won’t be any surprises in the eventual outcome; that’s an area where the movie perhaps had a greater impact on us. Im handles the final moments particularly deftly, not even showing the final shot, just the reactions to it, and finishing with archive post-game interviews from the real participants. These do an excellent job of bringing home the reality of what happened.

At a length of over two hours, we could likely have done with more handball and less personal drama (not to mention the unfounded suggestion of biased officiating). Yet I’d be hard-pushed to consider the time wasted, and it was nice not to have to wait until 2020 to have our love of the game rekindled once more.

Dir: Im Soon-rye
Star: Moon So-ri, Kim Jung-eun, Kim Ji-young, Uhm Tae-woong

Beach Volleyball Detectives

  By

★★★
“So, illegal underground beach volleyball matches?”

The above line of dialogue is a perfect litmus test for what you’ll think of this. If your reaction is a derisive snort, this pair of hour-long items – I have qualms about calling them anything as high-minded as “feature films” – is probably not for you. And I cheerfully admit, snorting is probably the default, and understandable, reaction. If, on the other hand, you are giddy with anticipation at the very thought, then I probably cannot recommend it highly enough.

It’s one of those cases where the title pretty much explains the basic idea. Three young, photogenic members of the Foreign Affairs Department, led by Haruka, get paired up with Wakana, a equally young and photogenic visiting policewoman from Hawaii, after they discover blueprints for a mini-nuke, capable of wiping out everything in a 100-mile radius. To find those behind the scheme, the four law-enforcement officials have to go undercover at the training camp for an international volleyball tournament, and figure out which of their opponents – Chinese, Russian or Indian – are after the blueprints.

This manages to be incredibly tacky, while also remaining remarkably chaste. There is no actual content here which would be worse than PG-rated. But it’s all shot in a way that resembles Russ Meyer in heat: focusing on the actresses’ erogenous zones, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else in the frame. Which makes sense, considering the director’s filmography includes what I can only presume are far more explicit titles, such as her debut, Chronic Rutting Adultery Wife. And who can forget Miss Peach: Peachy Sweetness Huge Breasts? Meanwhile, the writer is Takao Nakano, who gave the world – and this site – Big Tits Zombie.

It also turns out that, much like the Force and duct-tape, beach volleyball has a light side and a dark side. These are, respectively, White Sand Beach and Black Sand Beach. This mystical philosophy may help explain the superpowers on display here. For instance, the Indian team can levitate, the Russian player can turn into multiple mirror images of herself, and the Japanese and Chinese have a whole slew of super-powered moves, up to and including “Intercontinental Ballistic Missile No. 1”. I should mention, all these different nationalities are played by Japanese ladies, though in deference to her cultural heritage, the “Russian” does wear a headscarf. The Chinese are defined by their frequent spouting of Socialist dogma, such as “Go ahead and vote on it, you silly democratic people.”

The execution is woefully inept, The matches play like a low-rent version of Shaolin Soccer, right down to the ball turning into a dragon, a result of the appropriately named “Dragon Spike” move. Except, here, the CGI might barely have passed muster in the 1980’s. What passes for “combat” is hardly any better, if at all. Yet this incompetence actually becomes part of the trashy charm, and there’s a surprising amount of plot here. Our heroines have to handle not just their enemies, but also betrayal from within, and jealous fights between Haruka and Wakana over the attentions of their coach, with the help of a Yoda-esque monk, Harlequin. It’s all undeniably goofy, yet I was amused and entertained – likely more than I should probably admit…

Dir: Yumi Yoshiyuki
Star: Arisu Kagamino, Sakurako Kaoru, Chihiro Koganezaki, Kaori Nakamura