Tag: t

They Will Kill You

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★★★
“Ready or Not 3.”

There’s no denying that this is considerably weakened by coming in the wake of Ready or Not 2. There’s just too much similarity for it to be otherwise. A woman having to fight her way through a bunch of Satanists, in order to save her kid sister? Yeah, there’s a strong sense of deja vu, in its most literal meaning. Yet it would be unfair to write this off as some kind of mockbuster. While the “elevator pitch” may be similar, the details and the approach taken are different. This skews considerably more towards the horror elements. Many reviews cite Sam Raimi and Quentin Tarantino as influences, and that’s not wrong. To the point I might have used fewer homages, to be honest. 

The heroine is Asia Reaves (Beetz), who is jailed after trying to protect her sister, Maria (Myha’la) from their abusive father. Ten years later, she gets out of prison, and seeks to be reunited with Maria. The trail leads to The Virgil,  a massive apartment building. Asia gets a job there as a maid, using an assumed identity, under the oversight of building supervisor Lilith Woodhouse (Arquette). It turns out, the building is home to a cult of Satan worshippers, who trade human sacrifices for immortality. But after a decade in the penal system, Asia has the skills to defend herself, and won’t let anyone – or anything – get in the way of her mission to rescue her sister.

Save Kill Bill, I’m not a huge fan of Tarantino. It appears Sokolov is, going by the number of jarring needle-drops and, to be honest, shots of women’s feet. There are points where the style seems to be more important than the substance. However, there are some excellent sequences as well. The use by Asia of a fiery axe is top-tier carnage, and the near-unlimited ability of her opponents to take damage leads to some spectacular gore. They may be immortal: they still spray blood like enthusiastic geysers. When one has her head reduced to the consistency of porridge, one eyeball continues to operate on its own, independent basis.

I do think the immortality thing is a double-edged sword. It robs the fights of much impact, because decapitation is barely an inconvenience. Naturally, there is a solution, and I figured it out, more or less, as soon as it was mentioned. Beetz makes a fierce and unstoppable heroine, no mistake about it. You will also see things you have not witnessed before, especially during a thoroughly unhinged ending. It consequently makes Ready or Not 2 seem positively down to earth and realistic, so the stabs – word chosen advisedly – at social commentary consequently feel misplaced, even more than usual. I note Sokolov’s previous (non-GWG) film was called Why Don’t You Just Die! I’ve a feeling there may be a theme running through his work. Suspect I will still end up checking it out, hoping for the pure and undiluted carnage I didn’t quite get here.

Dir: Kirill Sokolov
Star: Zazie Beetz, Patricia Arquette, Myha’la, Tom Felton

Take the Shot, by J.T. Skye

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Literary rating: ★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

To a certain extent, this feels like two separate novels joined at the hip, albeit sharing the same protagonist. The first half takes place on the planet of  Hoganth, which is a gritty urban dystopia, with teenage heroine Rishi Tremayne trying desperately to survive, as she is ruthlessly hunted by a powerful family with ambitious aspirations. The second, however, largely takes place in outer space, as she becomes the weapons operator on a ship piloted by Earthman Derek Hamilton, as they try to shutdown the plot. There are a lot of space battles, and I have to say, I found it rather more generic, and consequently less interesting. But let’s rewind.

With her mother and brother too sick to work, Rishi is the family sole provider, and even that is on shaky grounds. However, she has found work as a data processor, looking for space junk which could potentially be recycled. She finds what appears to be a giant asteroid, and dutifully files a report. Except, it’s actually a two-kilo long spaceship, secretly being built by House Forsythe in preparation for a coup attempt against the Empress. They’re not happy about its discovery, and send forces to wipe out everyone who knows about it, which includes a drone bombing Rishi’s apartment. Fortunately, a retired warrioress, Aun Twil, lives nearby and comes to Rishi’s rescue – except, this puts her on the Forsythe radar too.

It’s this section which is the most entertaining, Aun using her skills to help Rishi avoid meeting the same fate as her employers. This initially involves trying to get out of town, avoiding or defeating the Forsythe agents sent, with increasing aggression, to finish the job. It takes a while before Rishi is able to figure out why she’s being targeted for elimination. When she does, the goal becomes to get Rishi to someone who can act on what she knows, and Aum is able to use her contacts to get the young woman into the Empress’s inner circle. It’s a little implausible a street rat like Rishi would be accepted, rather than (at best!) thanked for the information and sent on her way, while the adults solve the problem. 

She does manage to hang around, and weirdly, the assassination attempts continue: seems a bit pointless by this point, and although there’s the death of a significant character, it has weirdly little emotional weight. Still, Rishi has to stick around, for her role in a climax which might well remind you of a certain well-known SF movie, also requiring an “impossible” shot to destroy a massive superweapon… It certainly did me. On the positive side, the lack of much romance beyond an odd passing attraction is appreciated, and the world-building here is decent. But by the end, I was getting rather bored of dogfights in space, where I felt I needed a chart to keep track of proceedings.

Author: J.T. Skye
Publisher: Self-published, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Stand-alone novel, though part of the Trigellian Universe.

Top Female Force

  By

★★★
“Teamwork makes the dream work.”

If there’s absolutely nothing new here, it still manages to do what it does, fairly well. In the main, it’s light and fluffy, to be sure – though it has the capability to switch gears in an instant. For example, while this is by and large a Die Hard knock-off (from the “team edition” subcategory), I’ve not seen many films in that genre where a villain bludgeons a hostage to death with a hammer, because she reminded him of his mother. Just do not ask me to identify any of the players. This is another one of those films with the credits entirely in Chinese, very limited information available online, and subtitles which left a lot to be desired. Coherence, especially.

The basic premise sees two duelling groups of special ops: the all-male Flying Tigers, and the all-female Farewell Flowers. Look, that’s what the subtitles call them. I’m not arguing. There’s a fierce rivalry between the groups. But both are sent to protect renowned Hong Kong businessman Li Xuchang, after a tip-off is received that terrorist group XSA intend to kidnap him at a birthday party he’s giving for his son at his private club. The attack in question does indeed come to pass, though it turns out to be not quite the simple abduction attempt expected. To absolutely nobody’s surprise, the Tigers and the Flowers will have to overcome their differences and work together, to defeat the evil threat posed by XSA.

It is fairly clear that most of the actresses concerned were chosen for their roles on the basis of looks, rather than fighting ability, or even credible musculature. There’s almost as much cheesecake (and some beefcake, too) as fighting. But the action choreographer, cinematographer and editor do a decent job of shooting round the limitations of the cast. You’ll still need to be in a forgiving mood, and I could have done without the obvious attempts at unresolved sexual tension, some of which require stupidity in the extreme. A terrorist letting his hostages tie themselves up? What could possibly go wrong. There are other points where moderate competence on the part of the criminals, would have lead to a very different outcome.

Yet, I was still adequately entertained, and occasionally impressed. The villains have a tendency to pit the hostages against each other in contests, brutally killing the loser (a tactic used in real life by Mexican cartels), so it’s certainly not all fluffy and light. Or there’s the chief evil henchwoman, who strips down in front of the hostages in order to go from evening dress to her battle corset. It’s a striking power move. However, there’s rarely any threat to the main characters: an unpleasant fate for one or two of them would have helped up the tension. But then, we wouldn’t have got a final scene where everyone has apparently forgotten the carnage, laughing and squirting each other with water-pistols, would we?

Dir: Lin Jianwei
Star: Alycia Yuen-Hang Chan, Kabby Hui, Cheung-Ching Mak, Shirley Yeung

They Call Her Death

  By

★★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

  By

★★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

  By

★★
“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