Tag: t

To Your Last Death

  By

★★★
“Death does a do-over”

Miriam DeKalb (Lennon) and the rest of her siblings are estranged from their arms dealer father, Cyrus (Wise), after their exposure of his dysfunctional nature ended his political career. Which is why it’s a surprise when they are all invited to his company’s headquarters. It doesn’t end well, with most of them murdered. and Miriam – found at the scene with an ax – tagged as their killer. However, she gets a second chance when visited in hospital by a mysterious figure called the Gamesmaster (Baccarin), who makes Miriam an offer. She’ll get to go back in time 24 hours, knowing what she does now. Will she be able to do better? For the GM runs an event on the astral plane (or somewhere), in which entities bet on the outcome of humans given a second chance at a pivotal moment, and Miriam is her latest subject. So can she change the outcome?

This is an interesting, if obviously entirely contrived scenario – not least for the Gamesmaster reserving the right to come in and tweak things, should she deem things not being sufficiently interesting for her players. For example, she arbitrarily decides that Miriam is not allowed to leave the building and contact the authorities. Effectively, it reduces the heroine to a piece on a board, whose actions and the resulting outcomes are constrained: there is no true “free will” to be found in this case. I also found the animation style somewhat off-putting: it looks very much the same approach as Archer. Particularly when people were talking, I found the mouth movements incredibly distracting, and it made me realize why most animation tends to keep it simple.

However, there is also a lot here that I enjoyed, not least the (literally) full-blooded approach taken. This is unashamedly gory and hard-R rated stuff, including Cyrus’s devices to dispose of his treacherous offspring, which appear to have strayed in from the Saw franchise. For instance, to handle a daughter with a fondness for cutting herself, she is strapped into device with a scale. This requires her to shed a certain amount of blood every minute, or her head will go snicker-snack. Chainsaws and axes are also put to enthusiastic and energetic use, by the heroine and others.

The story, too, ends up going in ways that I didn’t expect. Rather than being able to save her siblings in the do-over, they end up being perhaps the biggest threat to Miriam’s survival the second time. It’s from guaranteed that her go-around will end in a better situation than the first. Certainly, the pacifist scruples she espouses going into the evening – which largely caused her to reject her father and his business – prove to be utterly unsustainable, which is always nice. The message appears to be: sometimes violence is not just the solution, it’s the only solution, a philosophy which is certainly different. However, I can’t help wishing this had been a live-action gorefest; it’s one case where being animated definitely dilutes the impact.

Dir: Jason Axinn
Star (voice): Dani Lennon, Ray Wise, Morena Baccarin, Bill Moseley

Tomboys

  By

★★★½
“What happens in the barn, stays in the barn…”

Dark in literally every sense of the word, this Australian film unfolds in close to real-time. Five women, fed up with the abuse of a local sexual predator, kidnap him and take him to a building on a farm owned by one of them, to teach him a lesson. However, it’s not long before their revenge begins to go off the rails. Firstly, not everyone is quite as on board as with the plan. Kat (Day) is the most gung-ho, intent on exacting the most brutal flavour of retribution. But at the other end is Imogen (Hall): barely have things got under way, and she’s already having second thoughts, as the apparent weak link. Then, after the savagery has got under way, the women get a phone-call, from their intended target. Yep, they got the wrong victim. But is anyone really innocent? Or should they just do a twofer?

This certainly doesn’t feel it was made over a decade ago; its themes are right up there with a post-#MeToo world. On that basis, it was interesting to compare this to the woeful recent Black Christmas remake, watched the same weekend. which was also (at least in its early stages) about a group of women coming to terms with “rape culture”. Tomboys adopts a much more direct approach, yet is also rather more nuanced, offering a broader spectrum of opinions, even as it’s basically five chicks in a shed for an hour and a half. Which tells you a lot about the dismal failure of Christmas, I suspect. This, however, doesn’t shy from violence: not so much in an explicit depiction as in reactions and results, which are arguably just as horrific. You wonder how Cat could possibly justify the savagery in which she indulges. Then, towards the end, you hear her story, and it’s thoroughly ugly, repellent stuff. Never mind, Cat – please continue wielding that blow-torch…

However, I was irrationally annoyed by the cinematic style, with Hill pushing the camera in too close, and also keeping the lighting at the dimmest level. I get why he opted for this approach, to create a claustrophobic intensity. It doesn’t mean I have to like it, however. For some reason, I prefer being able to see what the hell is going on when watching a film, and there are times here when I simply can’t. [The still, top, is considerably more well-illuminated than 95% of the film] Not sure we necessarily needed five female characters, either; Cat, Imogen and one other would probably be enough. Yet this remains solid where it matters most, in the story and performances. There were sufficient twists to keep me engaged, and the main roles were well-differentiated, despite the limited setting. This could very easily be a stage play, albeit one harkening back to the days of Grand Guignol. It’s a production I wouldn’t mind going to see.

Dir: Nathan Hill
Star: Candice Day, Naomi Davis, Sash Milne, Allie Hall

Touch of Iron, by Timandra Whitecastle

  By

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

Owen and Noraya Smith are twins, in a world where such siblings are looked upon as cursed. Brought up as charcoal burners, they leave their village so Nora can avoid an arranged and unwanted marriage, and have the forture – whether good- or ill- remains to be decided – quickly to encounter the party of Prince Basham. He is scouring the country in search of a magical artifact called the Living Blade, which will grants its wielder great power. Assisting him is the half-wight Telen Diaz, a pilgrim/fighter. Owen joins the party, hoping to become a pilgrim himself; Nora decides to return home, but that option is removed from her as the village has been taken over by bandits. Fortunately, Diaz has followed her and is able to lend assistance when necessary. Nora eventually becomes his student in the fighting arts, and they all head to the temple/brothel of Shinar where the immortal seer Suranna can provide insight to the blade’s location. But the cost of her information is perilously high, since she has plans for both Nora and Diaz.

I believe this is what’s called “grimdark” fantasy fiction, which is basically as it sounds: in its simplest terms, think Game of Thrones rather than Lord of the Rings. I’ve no problem with the resulting “mature” content. Much of it here does seem necessary to the plot, though the concept of a vast, hidden city in the middle of nowhere that’s a gigantic, all-encompassing pleasure palace does pose certain logistical queries. There was also something slightly creepy about teenage Nora increasingly crushing hard on eighty-seven-year old Diaz – even if half-wights, like half-elves, age very well. I have a couple of other nitpicks. An almost entirely untrained Nora is capable of going all ninja and taking out an entire platoon of brigands. And there’s an assault on the city that comes out of nowhere, and whose purpose and participants both seem ill-defined.

With the negatives out of the way, on the positive side, I really liked Nora. She has a very sharp character arc over the course of the novel, but always seems to have been a bit of a bad-ass, even as a charcoal burner. It’s clear there’s a very significant future in front of her, and I sense she and Suranna will end up facing off down the road. I appreciated the way the heroine largely doesn’t care about the Living Blade; such apathy is pleasantly refreshing, though I suspect that opinion is going to change before long. Whitecastle has a good eye for world-building as well, giving the reader enough of an impression, without getting bogged down in too many details. It appears future volumes may concentrate more on Diaz. As I found him about the least interesting of the major characters, that will stop me shelling out for more. Still, as a one-off this made for an entertaining enough read, though I felt the first half, before they arrived at Shinar, was stronger and more interesting.

Author: Timandra Whitecastle
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 3 in the Living Blade series.

Tribal: Get Out Alive

  By

★★★½
“You had me at homeless cannibals.”

The IMDb omits the colon from the title, making rather less sense. Though it’s not inappropriate, because sense is likely not this film’s strongest suit. Indeed, I’d be hard-pushed to call it a “good” film. It is, however, consistently entertaining, and a fine piece of B-movie making. Ex-soldiers Caitlin (Phythian) and Brad (O’Hennessy) are bailiffs… Wait, is that a thing outside the UK? Just in case it’s not, let me quickly explain: they are not quite cops, but are still legal officials who can, for example, impose evictions or collect debts.

In this case, they and their team are sent to clear a farm which was used as a camp by homeless people, with the permission of the former owner. He has now died, and his son, Richard Kenning (Dodd), wants them chucked off the land. Except, turns out dear old dead Dad was more than a bit of a mad scientist, and was using the tenants for his experiments to create a serum that would enhance human strength and speed – though reducing them to little more than animals. Caitlin, Brad and their colleagues are about to discover that, since his death, the subjects have escaped and have formed a brutal community in the tunnels below the farm. And they have no intention of leaving peaceably – or letting the bailiffs leave at all.

It’s great to see Phythian get the lead in a feature; we’ve been a fan ever since Kung Fu Darling, back in 2016. If the material here is a little basic, it does eventually give her the ability to show what she can do, albeit after a bit too much creeping around dimly-lit tunnels in the first half. Still, there’s a certain British sensibility on view here, which comes over in characters behaving more intelligently than is typical for the horror genre, and also in an unexpectedly pleasant volume of sarcasm. O’Hennessy, whom you may recognize from Game of Thrones, provides solid support, and overall, the film feels like a decent copy of Dog Soldiers. There’s the same plot core of a force finding themselves trapped and out of their depth, though Routledge isn’t able to manipulate the tension as expertly as Neil Marshall did there.

Britain also seems to be putting out some decent martial arts movies of late; perhaps the lack of guns there makes such things more plausible. Scott Adkins, probably the best screen fighter you’ve never heard of, is leading the way, but on the evidence here, Phythian and her trademark cheek-bones may become Britain’s answer to Zoe Bell. The tone is set early, after she and her partner stumble across a drug deal, and the second half has plenty of good action, building up to her confrontation with a serum-enhanced Kenning. There is a plot thread about her suffering from PTSD, though this can safely be ignored as irrelevant. Just crack open an alcoholic beverage or six, ready the popcorn, and sit back to watch Phythian kick arse.

Dir: Matt Routledge
Star: Zara Phythian, Ross O’Hennessy, Rachel Warren, Thomas Dodd

Truck Stop Women

  By

★★★
“Blood is thicker than water. But gasoline is thicker still.”

Ostensibly, Anna (Dressler) runs a New Mexico truck-stop, catering to drivers and ensuring they are kept fed and watered as they run their rigs across country. However, she has several more lucrative businesses. It seems that a majority of her waitresses, for example, moonlight as hookers in the brothel Anna runs. But the key side-line of work is sending her gals out to lure in unsuspecting truckers, typically with an alluring combination of fake breakdowns and tight shorts. When the truckers stop, their vehicles are hijacked, the contents stolen and the trucks themselves repainted and sold on.

It’s this which brings Anna to the attention of the East coast mafia, who send over a couple of goons to muscle in and make Anna an offer she can’t refuse. Not helping matters, Anna’s daughter, Rose (Jennings), is tired of being Mom’s servant, and wants her independence, so hooks up with Smith (Martino), one of the goons. When Anna gets word of a truck carrying bearer bonds passing through her territory, she starts to plan her biggest heist ever. But can Rose be trusted to play her part? Or will she be prepared to sacrifice her own family, in order to exchange roadside life in New Mexico for the bright, big city lights of Las Vegas?

This is generally a brisk, breezy film, which managed to beat Convoy to the punch by four years. The soundtrack is pure country-and-western cheese, songs about the joys of trucks and trucking, and relentlessly upbeat [performed by Bobby Hart, at the time Claudia Jennings’s boyfriend]. This becomes horribly inappropriate at the film’s end: without spoiling it, there’s the death of one major character, and we immediately cut to the end credits, playing out over yet another relentlessly upbeat song about the joys of trucks and trucking. Ouch. In general though, this is entertaining nonsense. It’s particularly notable for the way it portrays working class Southern rednecks in a generally positive way. Ok, outside of the whole “career criminal” thing. For they are depicted as smart – Anna especially –  and certainly more moral than the mob muscle, who are trigger-happy from the very opening scene.

Things are spearheaded by the presence of B-movie queen Jennings, already present on this site for The Great Texas Dynamite Chase, Unholy Rollers and ‘Gator Bait. Though getting less screen-time than her mom,. Rose is the highly watchable centre around which the plot revolves. For you’re never quite sure where her loyalties lie, right up until the final scene. Is she passing information from Anna to the mafia? Or the other way round? Or both? Throw in a healthy amount of female nudity (not least notably from Russ Meyer favorite Uschi Digard) and you’ve got a film which, if unable to spell the word “subtlety”, couldn’t be much more drive-in if it tried.

Fun fact: this film played a role in wrecking the presidential aspirations of Texas senator Phil Gramm in 1995. It came out that  in the seventies he had become “interested in investing in what he called ‘sexploitation’ films after a private viewing of the film.” Yeah, Jennings had that effect on a lot of people.

Dir: Mark L. Lester
Star: Lieux Dressler, Claudia Jennings, Dennis Fimple, John Martino

Trauma

  By

★★★½
“Parental advisory, to put it mildly.”

This is not an easy film to watch. The easily-offended should stay away. Indeed, even the hard to offend, which include myself, may find it rough going. To give you some idea, the opening scene is set in a 1978 Chilean torture chamber where a political dissident is being interrogated. When she won’t talk, her son is drugged and forced to rape his own mother. It actually goes on to get worse still, but that’ll give you some idea. In terms of disturbing opening scenes, I can’t think of many equivalents.

Fast forward to 2011, and four young women are on their way for a quiet weekend in a country house owned by one’s uncle. An unfortunate stop for directions in a local dive-bar puts them on the radar of Juan (Antivilo) and his son, Mario (Ríos). The former was the teenage boy of the opening sequence, and was clearly broken beyond repair by those and other events. He has passed that damage on to Mario, and the pair now form a father-son duo of staggering repugnance. When they subsequently show up on the doorstep, our four heroines are in for a very, very unpleasant night. But when they learn Juan has turned his attentions to pre-pubescent local girl, Yoya, they decide something must be done, and take the fight to Juan and Mario.

It’s brutally unpleasant stuff, with some (literally) mind-blowingly gory effects. But it’s acted and assembled well enough that it can’t be written off as mere torture porn, and some radical switches in tone actually work in its favour. For example, after the opening scene, we cut to some intense lesbian canoodling, provoking cinematic cognitive dissonance which is disturbing yet effective. And importantly, it’s not without a point. In that area, it’s like A Serbian Film, which used its cinematic atrocities as a parable about the break-up of Yugoslavia. I’d actually say this was rather more successful in terms of getting its message over, about the impact of the tyrannical Allende regime of the seventies and its impact over the decades.

The carnage likely reaches its peak near the middle when everyone returns to the bar, for a fight of disturbing savagery, even by this movie’s standards, which also affirms Juan’s status as completely above the law in the local community. The final battle, I have to say, did come across as rather confused in comparison, likely hindered by lighting which barely reached the level of murky. As a result, on more than one occasion, I went “Hang on, aren’t they dead already?” Considering how coolly clinical Rojas’s camera was in capturing the previous unpleasantness, this was disappointing.

If there’s a message here, it’s the one written by Edward Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Or women, in this case, with Andrea (Martin) taking the lead. She’s an interesting character, with a certain standard of morality: for instance, she doesn’t like her sister’s girlfriend, though it’s unclear whether this is because of gender or personality. It’s Andrea who increasingly occupies centre-stage as events unfold, and occupies the film’s final frame. Though let’s just say, it’s not exactly what you would call a happy ending, even if there is some degree of catharsis to be found. It’s probably even harder to forget than to watch.

Dir: Lucio A. Rojas.
Star: Catalina Martin, Daniel Antivilo, Macarena Carrere, Felipe Ríos

Tiffany Jones

  By

★★½
“Immodesty Blaise.”

Fashion model Tiffany Jones (Hempel) finds herself dropped into the middle of international intrigue, after President Boris Jabal (Pohlmann), leader of the Eastern European state of Zirdana, takes a shine to her during a state visit to Britain. It’s supposed to be a trade negotiation, but is really to allow Jabal to broken an arms deal with some shady Americans. Her meeting the President brings her to the attention of two factions of Zirdanian rebels.

The nice is led by Prince Salvator (Thomas), the ruler in exile. The not-so-nice are a more aggressive faction, operating out of a restaurant kitchen. Both wonder what Tiffany is doing with Jabal, and are keen to use her to achieve their ends. Which is fine by her, since she has no love for the authoritarian regime which controls Zirdana. So Tiffany agrees to a plan where Jabal will be distracted, preventing from seeing the arms dealers, and a substitute will take the meeting in his place.

Walker is better know for his S&M horror films, with titles such as House of Whipcord, and it’s safe to say saucy comedy like this is not his strong suit. There’s no shortage of sauce, to be sure. It’s reported that Hempel (now known as Lady Weinberg, through marriage) bought up the rights to the film, as well as her work with Russ Meyer, Black Snake, for showing rather too much of her. And that’s before we get to the garden party she throws for Jabal, populated by a flock of 1970’s dolly-birds, who shed their clothes enthusiastically at the drop of a cocktail napkin. The whole thing – a plot to get sexually compromising material on a visiting foreign leader – does still have contemporary resonance…

It’s the comedy angles which are a horrible failure, with virtually every attempted joke falling flatter than Hempel’s chest [quite how she ended up in a Meyer film escapes me, given his fondness for the more-endowed end of the feminine spectrum. Then again, he said later of Hempel, “We had a stand-in for the tits and wouldn’t let her speak.”] It’s not just the passage of time, for the Carry On films of the same era have endured very well: I suspect this was simply not very funny to begin with, and appears to have tanked at the box-office. Like Modesty Blaise, it was based on a British newspaper comic-strip, which ran from 1964-77. Unusually for the era, it was created by two women, Pat Tourret and Jenny Butterworth, though I suspect the newspaper version was likely less salacious.

The main redeeming aspect here is Hempel, who has a lovely, breezy charm which manages to sail above the leaden material, almost redeeming it. She portrays Jones with an endearing mix of savviness and innocence, as she dodges the (literal) grasp of President Jabal, and the more fanatical of his opponents, while working to help the Prince regain his throne. Probably wisely, the morality of replacing an absolute, unelected leader with another absolute unelected leader, simply because the latter is younger and cuter, is never addressed. Hempel is not quite enough to rescue this, and it’s perfectly understandable why this vanished into obscurity, with or without the lead actress’s help.

Dir: Pete Walker
Star: Anouska Hempel, Eric Pohlmann, Damien Thomas, Susan Sheers

Terminator: Dark Fate

  By

★★½
“She’ll not be back”

If you went back in time, and told James Cameron on the set of the original Terminator, that 35 years later, it would have spawned six movies and a TV series, he probably wouldn’t have believed you. It’s not a story which screams “Franchise,” being entirely self-contained. The first sequel justified itself with a sea-change in digital effects which marked a massive shift in the way popular cinema would work thereafter. Everything beyond that? Almost entirely superfluous. And I speak as someone who liked Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines considerably more than most people.

I can certainly see why this flopped though. It comes on the heels of Salvation and Genesys, both of which were commercially dubious and critically disastrous, to the point that Cameron decreed them to have happened in alternate universes, effectively retconning them out of existence. This set Dark Fate up as a direct sequel to the franchise’s most successful installment, which also happens to be one of the greatest action films of all time (it’s likely in my top five, and not the only James Cameron film there either). Comparisons were never going to be kind to Dark Fate.

Then, Miller opens his film with footage from T2, in which an amazingly intense Sarah Connor describes her vision of Judgment Day. Rather than trying to build the movie’s own universe, the audience is immediately reminded of just how damn good its predecessor was. I turned to Chris and whispered, “We really must watch T2 again.” This is not something you should be thinking, thirty seconds into a sequel. It’s just the first in a number of missteps which end up burying the franchise once again, rather than resurrecting it.

The main problem is, we’ve seen it all before. The story is basically the same as Terminator. Or Terminator 2. Or Terminator 3. Robot gets sent back in time by future self-aware AI to kill a human it deems is a threat. Pro-mankind asset gets sent back in time to protect the target. They fight. A lot. There are a couple of wrinkles here. The protector (Davis) is actually an “augmented” human herself, albeit still short of the levels of her enemy (Luna). And Dani Ramos (Reyes) isn’t the mother of someone who’ll save humanity. But it feels less a sequel than a reboot, as we still have to watch Dani going through the whole explanatory process and “Five stages of being a Terminator target” thing.

Probably the main hook, however, is the presence of both Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger, re-united for the first time since T2. Cue another misstep: if their appearances had been unexpected twists, they would both have come as delightful surprises. And the way they are filmed, makes it feel like that may have been the original intent. For instance, when Sarah Connor makes her entrance, we see her feet getting out of the car, the mysterious saviour only eventually revealed. The same is true when the T-800 arrives. Except those bullets were already fired by marketing, with them both showing up, full face, in the trailers. And it’s never explained why a 100% artificial creature like the T-800 has aged 35 years, nor how it’s getting the information with which it helps Sarah.

The familiarity of the plot would be bearable, if the execution was up to much. After all, T2 recycled its plot to a not dissimilar degree. However, it pushed the spectacle to 11, and was superior to the original as a result. This… Did not. Indeed, I was shocked by how ropey much of the CGI and digital work was, for a $190 million budget. Not so much the new Rev-9 model Terminator, which is a slick, oily creation like an intelligent pool of tar. But the meshing with the actors is poor, especially when one or other is made to fly through the air.

Maybe this kind of thing works in superhero films like Miller’s Deadpool. Here, it falls well short of the physical impact we saw in T2, or even T3, where the bathroom brawl felt like it had a bone-crunching realism to it. The low-point here is a battle on a plummeting plane, which is so poorly shot, edited and even lit as to be entirely incoherent. You literally have no idea which was is up, and I was simply left waiting for it to be over, and figure out what happened based on who walks away from the wreckage. [Spoiler: it’s everyone]

The entry isn’t entirely without merit though. While Dani is no Sarah Connor v2.0 (and her brother is worse still, quickly triggering a Chris whisper to me, “I hope he dies soon…”), Sarah 1.0 has a tired cynicism which is endearing and understandable. Maybe if they’d made the film entirely about Connor, spending her life going from place to place, hunting and destroying Terminators? There could then have been a whole slew of styles of opponent, making it the Godzilla: Final Wars entry in the franchise. Arnie, too, possesses a charisma which is mostly notable by its absence from the rest of the cast, though Davis makes a better impression than I feared.

There’s also a brilliant sequence set thirty years ago, depicting a young Sarah and John Connor, which is so well done, I was left wondering if this was unused footage from T2. Again, I’m left to wonder if they should have embraced that wholeheartedly and had the entire film take place in that era. We might then have avoided the SJW beats e.g. Border Patrol = bad, though at least these are relatively light compared to some recent Hollywood product. Well, save the clumsy way Dani becomes the future messiah, which triggered derisive snorting from my direction.

It would be a stretch to say we were storming the box-office, demanding a refund. We don’t see many films at the cinema, and despite my criticisms, this did not feel like we wasted our time or our money. It does deliver, as a cinematic spectacle, and is certainly an improvement over Salvation and Genesys, both of which triggered actual sleep. Yet I was reminded of a definition of insanity: repeating the same actions, over and over, hoping for a different result. It appears making Terminator sequels potentially qualifies.

Dir: Tim Miller
Star: Natalia Reyes, Mackenzie Davis, Linda Hamilton, Gabriel Luna

The Tiger and the Flame

  By

★★½
“The kitten and the candle”

This is the edited and English-dubbed version of the first Indian film released, to have been shot in Technicolor. While becoming a rare example of an Indian movie given a Western release, it was severely cut down, going from its original running time of 148 minutes to a mere 96. Much of this was accomplished by trimming the musical numbers, with all that’s left being the titular ballet, put on by the King of Jhansi (Mubarak) – a bit of an odd scene to leave in. Most of the rest is a reasonably accurate biopic of his wife, Queen Lakshmibai, covering her marriage at a very early age to the King, subsequent widowing, and eventually becoming the local leader at the head of the rebellion against the British in the late eighteen fifties.

One particularly interesting aspect is the way Modi (who produced the film, as well as directing and starring in it) brought on board a significant amount of Hollywood talent to work on the project. These were led by cinematographer Ernest Haller, who won an Oscar for his work on Gone With The Wind. Certainly, in this Westernized version, it plays like a thoroughly solid Hollywood biopic, even if rather more authentic in its ethnic casting. Well, at least in one direction; the British roles are also played by Indians. I’m a bit surprised it was a commercial failure in its home territory, especially considering it was released only 5½ years after the country gained its real independence from Britain. You’d think that would have made its topic resonate well with a local audience.

However, with the obvious caveat that I’m going off the abbreviated, dubbed version, I can perhaps see why. It’s an impressive spectacle – with a couple of battle sequences which are particularly impressive. However, it comes over as the fifties equivalent of disaster porn, being empty visuals without any real emotional content. And, say what you like about Bollywood movies, it’s the emotional content which typically powers them. Local viewers were also apparently unimpressed by the lead actress – not coincidentally, the director’s wife – being in her mid-thirties and thus too old to play the heroine.

Personally, I didn’t feel that was too much of a problem. However, I didn’t get any sense of the characters involved. Lakshmibai is very much a figurehead, rather than an active participant, whose activity is largely limited to giving mildly stirring speeches to her soldiers. Admittedly, we have to bear in mind both the era and the source. But if you consider that Anne of the Indies pre-dated this by two years, it’s clear the era was not an absolute impediment. That does a much better job of mixing history and sword-play, while still giving you reason to care about the people wielding the weapons. This is closer to a pretty costume drama than a heroic tale of rebellion, and offers little insight into how Lakshmibai was able to lead an army.

Dir: Sohrab Modi
Star: Mehtab, Mubarak, Sohrab Modi, Sapru
a.k.a. Jhansi Ki Rani

Two Graves

  By

★★★½
“Two? Half a dozen seems more likely.”

This wasn’t quite what we expected. In fact, replace “quite” with “at all”. It starts off as looking like some kind of revenge porn, with pathologist Margaret Powers (Tyson) kidnapping Finnbar (Ward), the man she’s certain murdered her son. Finnbar was apparently able to get away with it, because he was the son of a notorious local criminal, Tommy O’Neil (Hayman). She wants Finnbar to confess to his crime, and recruits her son’s ex-girlfriend, Zoe (Jarvis) to help in getting her vengeance. Initially, the capture goes well, with the two women then holing up in an abandoned warehouse by the docks, to begin the interrogation. However, this is where the film starts to diverge from the expected, as it turns out Zoe’s intentions are not in line with Margaret’s, as they initially appeared.

It’s probably best if I don’t say too much more, but things gradually and relentlessly spiral out of control from there. Others gradually become involved in what was intended to be a private party, including nearby security guards, Tommy and his wife, and the local cops (of dubious morality themselves), while the truth about the murder which started it all is eventually revealed. Not that there will be many people alive to hear it. For the title – based off the proverb, “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves” (mis-attributed here to Confucius) – severely underestimates the body-count resulting from this particular quest for vengeance.

Director Young was previously the writer of another vigilante pic, Harry Brown starring Michael Cain, and like that the two things which largely drive this are the performances and the script. No different from any movie, but they seem particularly outstanding here. Tyson was something of a star back in the eighties, in things like Mona Lisa, but I can’t say I heard much of her since. She’s great here though, and gets particularly good support from Jarvis and Hayman. Even the not very nice characters (which, to be honest, are probably the majority here) generally have a humanity to their portrayal, that helps you understand their action. The script does a great job of pacing, delivering twists with the accuracy of an eye-dropper, and has no qualms about disposing of apparently important characters when necessary.

There are a couple of issues though. Quite why Margaret and Zoe opt to choose this location is questionable. Surely a well-soundproofed cellar would have worked better than some bits of plastic hung up in the middle of a very echo-y dilapidated building. The noise, such as the screams of your victim resulting from your amputation of a finger, seem highly likely to draw attention. That’s a rare mis-step though, and overall this was a pleasant surprise to find on Netflix, with little or no promotion. The low budget was no detriment, with the production knowing its limits and working well within them. It’s the kind of thing more film-makers should be doing, when they don’t have a lot of resources.

Dir: Gary Young
Star: Cathy Tyson, Katie Jarvis, Neal Ward, David Hayman