Tag: t

They Call Her Death

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★★½
“At no point, does anyone call her death…”

It’s clear what Snell is going for here. This is a throwback to the spaghetti Westerns of the seventies, along with Italian exploitation films from around the same time. I certainly admire the effort which went into this: for example, rather than shooting digitally and applying effects to imitate film, Snell actually shot on Kodak 16mm stock. I did not know that was still a thing, to be honest. Some of the other elements, like the music, also do a good job of reproducing the era – the movie poster is another one. I’ve seen enough of this kind of movie (mostly through Project Kinski), to appreciate what he’s doing.

Unfortunately, I’ve seen enough of this kind of thing, to be able to differentiate the good from the bad, and a fair bit of this skews towards the latter. Molly Pray (Rippel) can only watch as her husband is gunned down in front of her by a bounty-hunter, having been framed for the murder of a lawyer, But she will not accept this, and begins to unravel the threads of the conspiracy, which made Mr. Pray an unwitting victim. And when I say, “unravel”, I mean with extreme, bloody prejudice. She guts some, blows the faces off others, on her way up to the chain to the person pulling the strings at the top. She’s holding a stick of dynamite. We’ll leave it at that. 

If you are looking for a comparison, it would be something along the lines of Hobo With a Shotgun. That’s a film I love dearly, and that might be partly why I’m a little sniffy about this. Because if you compare Hobo to Death, the results do not favour this, almost across the board. Most obviously, while Rippel is decent, she’s barely in the same solar system as Rutger Hauer. The lack of a strong antagonist here is a problem too. Instead, Molly largely chews up one person after another. But because we don’t know much about them – beyond their connection, sometimes tangential, to the death of her husband – there’s a severe lack of emotional impact, even as she’s dismembering them for her pigs to eat. 

Finally, the pacing leaves something to be desired, especially the sections where the focus drifts off Molly, such as to the friendly new deputy, who is generally on her side. Almost any time he was on the screen, I found myself quickly losing interest, and keen for it to go back to the directly focused line of Mully’s vengeance. The reliance on mostly practical effects is laudable, and there are certainly some impressively gory moments of which Lucio Fulci and his ilk would be proud. But too many of the supporting performances feel like they come from people who were available. Given the shoot took several years from start to finish, that may not be much of a stretch. 

Dir: Austin Snell
Star: Sheri Rippel, Jeff Boyer, Devan R. Garcia, Shawn Nyberg

Torment

  By

★½
“Car trouble.”

I’m tempted to be very snarky, say something like “The torment here is entirely on the viewer’s end” and make that the totality of the review. However, that’s a dangerous precedent, one I don’t want to set. Before long, I’d be phoning it in, and churning out nothing but single sentence reviews. I would instead spend my time sitting on the couch, eating Doritos and scrolling idly on my phone, before dying prematurely of a heart attack, and turning Chris into a grieving cat lady. Do you want that to happen, Torment? Do you, really? However, it probably does say something that such morbid speculation is still considerably more fun than either watching or writing about this. 

It’s one of those films where the time-line is jumbled up. This kind of script requires a lot of writing rigour to work, and Leone doesn’t have it at all. Though I already had a sinking feeling with an opening title sequence which looks like it was made on Windows Movie Maker. And not a current version, either. We begin with a woman picking up another women off the side of the road, and the title card. We then get a woman leaving her apartment, walking down to the car-park, getting in her vehicle. She drives around. Fills it up with petrol. Drives around some more. Parks in a different parking structure. We’re eight minutes into a 73-minute film, and I am already checking out.

Turns out there’s someone locked in the trunk. Though do not make the mistake of thinking it’s the woman picked up at the beginning. Dear me, no. That sequence turns out to be the opener for the final part of the film, a bit of stalking of the hitch-hiker through the woods. It gives the strong impression of having been tacked on as emergency filler, after the sudden realization they had done with the main plot, and only had 55 minutes of material. That is mostly to do with the woman in the trunk, who is radio host Elaine Margo (Bird). She has been kidnapped by the mysterious driver (Cay), because… Uncertain. Elaine obviously has murderous secrets of her own, but how they impact her abductor is never adequately explained.

Instead, there’s a lot of driving. Which I get. it’s clear there wasn’t much money here, so the makers went with a concept that requires few locations, and a very small cast. But it doesn’t help that the two leads are similar in appearance, so when we get scenes outside the car, it’s often unclear who is involved in them. This is just another misstep in a movie which seems compulsively drawn to making them. You’ll reach the end – which is really the beginning – and will likely feel nothing more than bemused irritation at best. It almost made a nihilist out of me, because I was left questioning the point of this film’s existence, as well as my own.

Dir: Anthony Leone
Star: Amy Cay, Paisley Bird, Isabella Giardini, JD Isabelle

Tornado

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★★½
“That’s my father’s sword. Put it down.”

It’s a samurai film. Except, it’s a Western. Only, it’s one which takes place in Scotland. I trust that’s cleared up any confusion here. However, you will still need to manage your expectations, because based on both the poster and the trailer, it would be easy to go in expecting something action-packed. It is not. At all. That element is heavily back-loaded, to the final fifteen minutes. It does include one of the more imaginative and splattery kills I’ve seen this year. Probably a bonus half-star for that alone. However, it’s more a movie about mood, atmosphere and scenery than arterial spray. But I lived in Scotland. I already know it’s pretty.

This unfolds at almost the very end of the 18th century, when Fujin (Hira) and his daughter Tornado (Kōki) are taking their samurai puppet show around the Scottish lowlands. She comes into possession of some gold, which has been stolen from a church by a gang, led by Sugarman (Roth) and his son, Little Sugar (Lowden). They’re not happy, and pursue the caravan in which she’s travelling with her father. This leads to a confrontation in which Fujin is killed, albeit not before badly wounding Sugarman. Tornado flees into the forest, to regroup, and eventually plot her revenge against the robber and his pals, using the skills taught to her, to pick them off one by one on her way to the inevitable final confrontation with Sugarman. 

I respect what this is trying to do, and it’s certainly a combination of genres and settings which I had not seen before. Unfortunately, the execution is plagued with a number of missteps, which hamper the end results and negate many of the positive elements. Right from the start, we are thrown into the middle of things, with Tornado running from Sugarman and his henchmen. The film is curiously reluctant to tell us what is going on – or, more importantly, why we should care – being too leisurely to fill in the blanks. There’s also a cut-out between the gang and Tornado, in the shape of a kid who actually carried out the initial theft. Beyond giving the heroine ‘clean hands’, it’s an unnecessary complication. 

On the performance side, Roth is good value as ever in a villainous role: I was inevitably reminded of Rob Roy, where he previously played the bad guy in 18th-century Scotland. Kōki has rather more experience as a model than an actress, and director MacLean wisely keeps the need for actual dramatics to a minimum, opting to make her the stoic samurai type, so she’s good enough. It all looks quite lovely, so while you are waiting around for something much to happen – which will be the majority of the hour and a half – you can admire the cinematography and picturesque Scottish landscapes. It wasn’t quite enough for me. While possible to admire the intent, this is likely a case of “It’s not you, it’s me.” 

Dir: John Maclean
Star: Kōki, Tim Roth, Takehiro Hira, Jack Lowden

True Story Of A Woman In Jail: Sex Hell

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★★
“Bad behind bars.”

With that title, you’ll understand why it’s one I opted not to make part of family movie night. I mean, you can’t argue with the forthrightness, though I’ve little doubt it’s as “true” as most films which make that claim i.e. barely at all. However, the bigger problem is that it’s fairly borderline “pinky violence”, being considerably more interested in the pink than the violence: it’s arguably more of a roman porno. It’s as if someone presented a checklist of cliches from the woman in prison genre, and asked the director to cross them off as rapidly as possible. The resulting speed-run lasts barely more than seventy minutes, especially impressive considering the amount of time devoted to soft-core sex couplings, in various combinations.

We begin with the arrival in prison of serial re-offender Harumi Matsunaga (Seri*), a prostitute now on her fourth stay, and the taciturn Mayumi Hojo (Kozue), sent to jail for… Well, the film holds back on that information for a while, so I’m not going to spoiler it. After the obligatory induction into prison life, her silence quickly brings Mayumi into conflict with her cell’s resident top dog, Sadako Nogawa (Hiromi*), and the pair butt heads. Inevitably, eventual mutual respect develops, especially when a key is found, which could give both women the opportunity to escape the hellish environment of the facility. 

The gap between these and the likes of Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion, made three years earlier, could hardly be greater, and its not in this film’s favour. It begins with Kozue’s fairly bland portrayal of the heroine, in sharp contrast to Meiko Kaji. Given the absence of a strong central character, the film subsequently feels more like porn. Albeit porn with decent production values, though an apparently loose grasp on the concept of “informed consent”. Though I was somewhat impressed with the scene in which a guard has sex with an inmate being held in solitary confinement, through a slot in the cell door. The inventive means by which prisoners are checked for contraband – it involves a custom set of stairs – was also momentarily interesting.

But it’s mostly about sex: what else would you expect, from the director of the similarly-imaginatively titled, White Rose Campus: Then Everybody Gets Raped. And a great deal of sex too – in a variety of configurations, be it straight, gay, or solo. Let’s just say, in hindsight, giving the sexually repressed prisoners clay might have been a questionable decision by whoever is in charge of leisure activities.  You’ll be left to tick off the items from your list. Sleazy prison doctor? Check. Extended sequence in the shower? Check. Revenge on the person responsible for incarceration? Take a guess. It’s all extremely formulaic, and doesn’t do it with enough energy to overcome its limitations, despite a funky soundtrack, courtesy of the Downtown Boogie Woogie Band.

Dir: Kôyû Ohara
Star: Hitomi Kozue, Meika Seri, Maya Hiromi, Rie Ozawa
* – There’s discrepancies between who plays who listed in reviews, and those in the IMDb. I’ve gone with the latter. 

Terminal Angels

  By

★★½
“Justice is more than a match for evil!”

This is not our first time here attending the Godfrey Ho rodeo. Indeed we wrote quite warmly about Lethal Panther., and Cynthia Rothrock vehicle Undefeatable had its moments. But this is our first experience on this side of the heady, WTF? to be obtained when Ho does what he’s best known for doing. Which is, splicing entirely new footage into an unrelated movie, to fit whatever marketing end he’s aiming towards. He was most notorious for this during the ninja film craze of the eighties, when he used this tactic to splice a couple of scenes into either cheap or unfinished movies from the far East, so they could be sold to the ninja-crazy VHS audience.

However, as this example shows, he wasn’t above taking basically the same approach for the then popular girls-with-guns genre out of Hong Kong. We’ve already covered many examples of these, such as Angel. Its success spawned any number of follow-up, both official sequels, and unofficial knock-offs with the word “angel” in the title, e.g. Angel Force or Angel Terminators 2. This would be one of the latter, which takes what appears to be a Thai action film of the same general kind – cops vs. drug dealers – and wraps around it footage about Paula (Bells), an American reporter who gets hold of photos incriminating a businessman as a drug lord. She has to survive, while back in Thailand, the police do battle with the drug runners.

You can tell, because the only points at which the original film overlaps with the new footage is during awkward phone conversations. I think I would far rather have watched a decent i.e. wide-screen print of the original movie, rather than this badly-dubbed hack job. Sadly, I’ve not been able to determine the original movie used, but we’ve seen our share of decent Thai girls-with-guns action. I won’t lie, I was amused here by the pirating of various New Wave songs from the Pet Shop Boys and The Art of Noise. This reaches its ludicrous peak during a disco scene where customers dance to A Flock of Seagulls song, Telecommunication. The footage is sped-up, like some of the action scenes – which is a shame, because the fights really do not need it.

It’s very equal opportunity too, with both sides having their share of women, giving and receiving damage. Indeed, the best fight sees two female cops brawl against four thugs sent to kidnap them. It escalates from fists to crossbow-fu, with a number of highly wince-inducing moments. But all too soon, you’re back in the crappy insert footage, which ends with the laughable line of dialogue quoted top. Though to be a hundred percent sure you get the point, this is followed up with, “Criminals aren’t able to escape the net of justice.” There’s likely a decent film buried somewhere in here. You just need a pick-axe and a wheelbarrow to find it.

Dir: Godfrey Ho
Star: Laura Bells, Richard Gibb, Brent Gilbert, Daniel Welk

Two Weeks to Live

  By

★★★½
“Family values.”

If you described this as a dark spoof of Hanna, you might not be so far away. Since the death of her father, Kim Noakes (Williams) has been brought up off the grid by her controlling, survivalist mother, Tina (Clifford). She makes a trip to civilization to scatter his ashes, meets brothers Nicky (Rizwan) and Jay (Taheen Modak), who prank her that the world is ending. Falling for this, Kim decides to take revenge on the man who killed her father, crime boss Jimmy Davies. But in doing so, she kicks of a spiral of events putting her new friends, her mother and herself in severe peril, from the dangerous and smart Alan Brooks (Flemyng).

The comedy here is largely “fish out of water,” with Kim largely unaware of the nuances of modern life – but capable of killing you, eight different ways, with the contents of a drawer. Conversely, the brothers are naive and dumb respectively, and utterly unsuited for the violent mess into which they have become involved, desperately clinging onto normality. Admittedly, their own actions don’t help, Jay lifting a suitcase full of money from Davies’s house. Tina has own agenda too, having gas-lit her daughter in a variety of ways, lies which becomes more apparent to Kim over the course of the six, thirty-minute episodes. It’s all well-written, and I’m surprised it came and went without apparently much fanfare: I stumbled across it by accident, in Tubi’s “British crime” section.

You definitely need a British sense of humour to appreciate this: a lot of the comedy is bone-dry and self-deprecating, with Tina in particular a mistress of that most English form of wit, blistering sarcasm. However, the action proved rather better than I expected given the source and format. This does peak quite early, with a blistering brawl between Kim and Jimmy (above), which is one of the more hard-hitting I’ve seen on British television. [Jimmy is played by genre veteran Sean Pertwee, who is always good value. I could have sworn he was in Game of Thrones as well, which would have reunited him with Williams. But it seems he is the only British actor who wasn’t employed on the show!]

I was slightly sad that nothing thereafter quite reached the same level of hand-to-hand awesomeness. There is still a reasonable quota of action, but it’s more gun-based: the family which stays together, slays together, as Brooks and his henchwoman close in on the two families, and the cash-filled luggage. I found this the sort of unexpected delight which is a pleasure to stumble across. I had no real idea what to expect when I put on the first episode, but by the end, was shot-gunning episodes like they were tequila. While it would be nice to see more – I guess unlikely at this point – things are tidied up adequately, albeit in a somewhat contrived manner, involving a reluctant land-mine. All told though, more hits than misses.

Creator: : Gaby Hull
Star: Maisie Williams, Mawaan Rizwan, Sian Clifford, Jason Flemyng

Take the Ice

  By

★★
“Just about skates by.”

There’s no doubt that women’s sports very much plays second fiddle to their male equivalent, though the gap varies from sport to sport. The WNBA is experiencing a surge of popularity, though the NBA is still a financial behemoth. This documentary focuses on ice-hockey, and the debut season in 2015 of the first professional women’s competition in the US, the National Women’s Hockey League. Though semi-professional is closer to the truth: the league could only afford to pay its players around $15,000 a year, meaning almost all of them had to have day jobs, from teachers to paralegals to engineers, to cover the expenses. Commissioner and founder Dani Rylan spends most of her time seeking sources of finance, though finds the men’s league less than thoroughly supportive.

To be honest, I can’t blame them. There’s a vague sense of entitlement coming off the NWHL, not realizing they are largely competing with the NHL for the same fans and money. Why should the NHL help a rival start-up, just because they have women players? That’s the harsh reality here. I respect Rylan for putting in the work and starting the league, but this is capitalist equality in action. There were points at which I wanted to reach into the TV set and remind the NWHL, nobody has a “right” to funding in the world of professional sports. You have to earn it, whether you are male or female, and doing so starts with the quality of your product.

It may have been a mistake to start with just four teams, because with all of them making the playoffs, the entire regular season felt kinda pointless. And how did Boston end up with eight members of the US national team, while none of the other franchises had more than a couple? Wasn’t there some kind of a draft to balance the teams? Unsurpisingly, the Boston Pride won the inaugural championship – without, it seems, too much trouble. The film does make some effort to make this less of a procession, by telling the story of Denna Laing, a player on the Boston team who suffered a spinal injury during a game, which left her paralyzed.

I felt these elements, concentrating on the players and their stories rather than the business, worked better, but were frustratingly brief, except for Laing. There’s not enough of a narrative in the game-play to sustain things, and I suspect I’m an outlier, in that most other people watching the documentary probably will already be well aware how the first season ended. The league is still going, albeit under different ownership, although it’s interesting the film didn’t come out for more than six years after the season covered by it. I’ve been to ice hockey games, both here and back in the UK, and at various levels. But I’d have to say, in contrast to, say, Perfect, there is not much here likely to make a fan, if you weren’t one already.

Dir: Rachel Koteen
Star: Dani Rylan, Denna Laing, Anya Battaglino, Kaleigh Fratkin

Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft

  By

★★★
“Croft Original?”

I’m rarely going to find animated action as impressive as “live action”. Something done by an actual human will always seem more real than anything CGI or traditional hand-drawn animation can achieve. That’s true even if the former is arguably as fake, between stunt doubles, green screen and no small amount of CGI itself. Maybe it’s just me. While I have given multiple animated films our Seal of Approval previously, including Mulan, Aeon Flux and Battle Angel, these have been won on the basis of other elements beyond action. A live-action film can get there purely on those merits, despite clear deficiencies elsewhere e.g. In the Line of Duty IV. I don’t think animation can do that.

Hence, I suspect that I would look more kindly on this were it another live adaptation. It wouldn’t have to do much to be an improvement over the Alicia Vikander version, though to be honest, the Angelina Jolie versions were only adequate and borderline bad respectively. Maybe the makers would be better taking a Resident Evil approach, and not worrying about being faithful to the video-games. I did play the original – it remains one of only a few I ever completed – but care not about accuracy. Films and games are different, and need to be. Plot and character matter more on screen, not playability. Here, those elements are alright: they feel functional rather than organically inspired. For instance, it feels less a story than a series of levels.

We begin with a prologue which sees Lara (Atwell) in Chile retrieving a box, alongside her mentor, Conrad Roth. Three years later, Roth is dead and Lara blames herself for that. She’s about to sell off all the family’s treasures, when the Chilean box is stolen by Charles Devereaux (Armitage). Turns out the stone it contains is the first in a series of four, which when combined will destroy the precarious balance under which the world operates. Along with sidekicks Jonah (Baylon) and Zip (Maldonado), Lara criss-crosses the globe, from China to Turkey to France, and back to China, trying to stop Devereaux from completing the set and unleashing the power they contain.

From subsequent reading, I suspect you probably need to have played the specific games on which this is based (I believe it’s the “Survivor timeline”), to understand the significant of the apparent trauma through which the character has gone. None of this is depicted in the film, so I had no clue why I should be bothered by the off-screen death of Conrad, someone I’d only known for about five minutes. Also, Lara seems a bit gay here. Quite why a video-game character should be given specific sexuality escapes me. Shame they didn’t have the courage of their apparent convictions, to do more than hint heavily. To quote Yoda, “Do. Or do not.” Give us hot cartoon babes making out, or don’t bother bringing it up.

Of course, an old white guy is the villain, in comparison to the young, ethnically diverse group in Lara’s camp, and there are a couple of other jabs along those lines. But in general, it’s light enough with the messaging. The eight episodes probably total just under three hours, by the time you trim off the credits, so not all that much more than The Cradle of Life‘s 117-minute running time. You could probably get through it in a single sitting: it’s not difficult viewing. The animation is mid-tier, but does the job, and I liked the performance of Atwell (well-known here for her depiction of Agent Carter), who comes over as a serious, almost solemn, heroine – yet one with whom it’s still easy to empathize. Her supporting cast though, feel superfluous and don’t make much impression.

Within the limitation of animated action discussed above, what you get here isn’t bad. There are some good set pieces, and a couple of occasions where I almost forgot I wasn’t watching actual people, and held my breath. Key word there though, is “almost”. There’s an overall air of competence surrounding the production, and no obvious elements at which I can point a critical finger. Yet there is also not much to cause me to recommend this actively to anyone, who isn’t already a fan of the games. A second series hasn’t been confirmed: there are reports it received a two-season order out of the box, although it doesn’t appear to have received the critical acclaim given to Arcane. But if Lara does return, she probably falls into the “If I’ve nothing else to do” category.

[Jim]

Looking at some of the harsh reviews for the show, I get the impression a lot of it comes from, “I wanted the show to be this but it was that.” It’s a bit unfair because as a show, the series is good, standard adventure animation. Those who expected the show to be somewhat like Arcane: League of Legends, for example, were setting expectations very high. It’s true, that there are “two Laras”. The original by Eidos was invented in 1996, and the “modernized version” came out with the new games of Crystal Dynamics in 2013, and influenced the 2018 reboot movie, with Alicia Vikander. The original Lara could be described as a rich but goodhearted sociopath: watch the Angelina Jolie version, she really got it. Lara was a female Indiana Jones, living in a Bruce Wayne-like mansion, while the modern version seemed inspired by the Lisbeth Salander character from the Millennium Trilogy.

She instead became a guilt-stricken trauma survivor: I remember a trailer for one of the modern games, where she was talking with a psychiatrist and her whole body shook while remembering her previous experiences. The relentless adventurer who just enjoyed the journey seems to be out; the pain-stricken and emotive heroine is in. Still, she does all the action you would expect from her. This Lara just comes with emotional baggage; she has to learn to value her friends and understand that people are more important than the things she hunts. In a way it’s like modern and old James Bond. Once upon a time, he was a superhero we all loved and adored. Today, he has been cut down in size to make the character “more human”. For Lara, it makes her more relatable, for sure – but arguably less interesting. I’m not sure it’s the best way to present the character.

Filmed versions of Lara always seem to have her suffering from the loss of her father. This is the third such, after the Jolie and Vikander live-action versions. It should be noted this was not originally part of her imagined biography, which has changed several times over the years. Originally, she fell out with her family, when she decided to make adventure her lifestyle, earning her living as a travel writer, instead of marrying the Earl her parents had chosen for her. Her big defining moment was surviving alone for two weeks in the Himalayas after a plane accident. It was only after the Jolie films and the reboot games, it became that she had lost both parents.

Here, Hayley Atwell gives our favourite tomb raider a very good voice, and you wonder why film makers seem so resistant to casting a British actress as real-life Lara, with the previous actresses being American and Swedish. After all, Lady Lara Croft is as quintessential British as Sherlock Holmes, James Bond or Emma Peel. [Jim: be careful what you wish for, Dieter. You now have to deal with Sophie Turner as Lara in Amazon Prime’s adaptation!] In Charles Devereaux, this show offers Lara a villain who gives her the old, “You and me are actually very much alike” speech, as heard from Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun, to emphasize the darker side of a hero. Nothing new here on this front.

A lot of effort goes into giving Lara a circle of friends, something less a factor in the games. But as every Bond has his Felix Leiter, every Indiana his Sallah, it’s only fair Lara also get her sidekicks! Interestingly, Lara’s arc is as an emotional vulnerable character, who finds her way back to humanity, in contrast to the villain who seems to lose his more and more. But the “coolness” of the original character, as seen in the early games and movies, has perhaps been lost in favour of her becoming a team player. It’s indicated that what prevents Lara from falling to her more negative instincts, is that she has friends who care for her, and help cope with her pain and grief. Devereaux is essentially alone, with no reason for him to overcome his anger, pain and wish for revenge. Richard Armitage gives a believable performance there. Yet she is still constantly trying to save her enemy. I suspect that “old Lara” would just have killed him when he attacked her, of that I’m quite sure.

There are a lot of small nods to previous games and films if you pay attention, beyond Lara doing parkour, reflecting her running and jumping around in the games. Things like a mention of the Trinity group, which appears in the Alicia Vikander movie, or her hallucinations of demons with a striking resemblance to the stone gargoyles that came alive in the first Jolie adventure. However, the show delivers only standard adventure, neither great nor bad; like so many things, it’s in the middle, just average. If you can cope with that, the show should entertain – no less, no more, with animation which similarly is fairly standard but satisfying enough. It provides the action and adventure I would expect from this genre. The one real flaw I see, is that it lacks the kind of humour, fun and levity I’d also deem essential elements of the Tomb Raider franchise. Lighten up a bit next time, Lara.

[Dieter]

Showrunner: Tasha Huo
Star (voice): Hayley Atwell, Earl Baylon, Richard Armitage, Allen Maldonado

They Turned Us Into Killers

  By

★½
“They turned us onto another channel…”

Well, this is a spectacular mess. Except, the word “spectacular” implies something of interest, and that’s far from anything this delivers in its boring trudge towards a predictable ending. It demonstrates the perils when you, as a film-maker, decide to take your story and fragment the timeline. This only works if the script is able to maintain coherence around the jumps back and forth. This painfully fails on that count, beginning in the middle, but then bouncing back and forth to the point you know little and care less about any of the participants, or what happens to them. How bad is it? It gets the rare honour of me starting on the review, when there’s still half an hour to go.

Loosely, it’s the story of Star (Scout-Compton), who decides to go full vigilante after her best friend, an addict called Karma (Francesca), had enough of life and killed herself. Fortunately for the plot, Karma left a letter behind which explained, in tedious detail, the reasons why she committed suicide. This would largely be the result of abuse at the hands of her boyfriend, BJ (Miller) and various members of his scummy family. Meanwhile, there’s also a connection to a vicious murder that took place forty years ago, and a police investigation, including a homicide detective sporting the most implausible Swedish accent this side of The Muppet Show. What there is not, however, is any reason to give a damn about any of it.

The makers even manage to waste the talents of a triple-bill of horror icons, in Michael Berryman, Kane Hodder and Bill Moseley, all of whom are capable of carrying films on their own. Here, they just kinda… exist, wheeled on screen and then shuffled off again without making any significant impact. Instead, it’s mostly Star yelling at BJ and their relatives, as they are abducted with remarkable ease, and tied up in a shed somewhere. This proves sufficient to reduce them to snivelling wrecks, apologizing for whatever they did. The notion that Karma might – as her name ironically suggests – be in any way responsible for the unpleasant consequences of her own actions, is never breached to significant degree.

I was certainly left asking myself questions. Unfortunately, the questions were along the lines of, “What happened to Taylor Scout-Compton’s once promising career?” or “How many incriminating photos does the writer/director have, in order to get this financed?” Because what you have here is an ugly, uninteresting mess, which fails on the level of basic coherence, and has almost nothing to offer the viewer. It’s startling to see an 86% audience score for this on Rotten Tomatoes; looking at the far more credibly harsh reviews on Letterboxd, I’m certainly leaning shill. Not even going to bother reaching my usual 500 words here. This simply doesn’t deserve it.

Dir: Thomas Walton
Star: Scout Taylor-Compton, Lauren Francesca, Bryce Draper, Taryn Manning

Trigger Warning

  By

★½
“May contain boredom, stupidity and poor action.”

There’s an old joke about bad movies: “This film wasn’t released, it escaped.” It seems disturbingly appropriate here, however, considering the shooting of this finished in October 2021, and it has been part of our annual previews for 2022, 2023 and 2024. Quite why Netflix sat on the end product close to three years, I don’t know. But having watched it, I can confidently say: it wasn’t long enough. This is the kind of movie that left me feeling actively more stupid by the end of it. Alba plays Parker, a soldier who returns to her hometown in rural New Mexico after her father is killed in a mile accident. Only, of course [and that whirring sound is my eyes rolling], it turns out not to be an accident.

From here spirals off a ludicrous plot in which local ne’er-do-well Elvis (Weary) is selling heavy armaments,  include machine guns and RPGs, to domestic terrorists. His family basically runs the town: brother, Jesse (Webber), is the town sheriff, and his father is Senator Ezekiel Swann (Hall), an obviously Republican politician running for re-election. It’s up to Parker to stop the bad guys, who are so evil, they burn down the bar which is Parker’s inheritance from her father. Named after her grandmother, he apparently built it when he wasn’t busy being a miner. Or a Green Beret. It’s all a bit vague. This is as authentic a portrayal of Hispanic culture as you’d expect, given a script written by three white people, which unironically uses the word “Latinx”.

It’s also directed by an Indonesian which, in a nod to the politics criticized by the movie, makes me want to go on a rant about foreigners coming over here and takin’ er jerbs. For, after all, there are plenty of American directors who are perfectly capable of making shitty action films with ham-handed social commentary. We do not need to be outsourcing this work. However, we maybe should look at outsourcing Jessica Alba. Possibly replacing her with a stick insect, since she is among the least convincing soldiers I’ve seen. The action is equally dumb: it’s the kind of movie where a bad guy picks up a chainsaw in a hardware store fight, and it starts, apparently being fully fuelled.

The whole thing is littered with similar elements which had me shaking my head. Parker can waltz into any location at will, such as finding the exact file she needs in the police station within ten seconds. While most recent Netflix action heroine films have been forgettably acceptable ways to pass a couple of hours, this one probably competes with Interceptor over the coveted crown of Worst Netflix Original. It’s amazing to think how far Alba has fallen from the glory days of work like Sin City. For Jessica’s sake, I hope her cosmetics company endeavour is working out. Because she seriously needs to rethink this whole acting thing.

Dir: Mouly Surya
Star: Jessica Alba, Mark Webber, Anthony Michael Hall, Jake Weary