Tag: t

Tidelands

  By

★★★
“Attack of the killer cartel mermaids.”

Cal McTeer (Best) has just got out of prison after serving a 12-year sentence for arson leading to murder, a crime she committed as a teenager. Returning to her home town of Orphelin Bay, she finds her brother, Augie (Jakubenko), now working as a conduit for drugs, with the connivance of at least some local cops, and supplied by the mysterious Adrielle Cuthbert (Pataky). She oversees a commune near town called L’Attente with a zero-tolerance policy for dissent, and uses the proceeds of her narco-aquatics to fund a worldwide search for mysterious fragments of pottery. Turns out she is queen of the Tidelanders: the offspring of humanity and legendary sirens who inhabit the ocean. Though Cal doesn’t know it initially, a near-death experience shows that she is of similar stock. Adrielle doesn’t like the competition. And neither does local gangster Gregori Stolin (Koman), who is intent on muscling in on Augie’s business, and cutting out the middleman, to work directly with Adrielle.

It’s part Banshee, part True Blood, and part its own strange creation. It could well have been just a crime drama with familial overtones, an antipodean take on Sons of Anarchy: Cal’s father was lost at sea, and her mother spent what should have been the resulting inheritance on buying the local bar. Yet the makers opted to add fantastical creatures into it, though the sirens themselves are only ever glimpsed in cameo, at least for the first series. It is refreshingly gynocentric: Cal vs. Adrielle is the dynamic at the core, and considerably more interesting than Augie vs. Gregori, with neither woman prepared to give an inch of ground.  There’s no doubt who’s in charge, Adrielle dealing ruthlessly with any challenges to her authority, helped by the seer she keeps chained up in the basement.

It doesn’t end in any meaningful way, and I presume this first Netflix original series to come from Australia will be returning to expand further on the mythology set up in its debut run. For example, I was intrigued by the brief depiction of an apparent anti-siren secret society, run by local women who lost their men (one way or another) to the creatures, and maybe this will be developed further next season.  There’s something of a soap-opera feel to it as well, in that almost everyone is uniformly attractive, and seem to be having copious amount of sex – whether for pleasure or power. The sunny seaside setting also lends itself to plenty of cheesecake for both sexes, whether it’s shirtless beach bods, or Adrielle’s apparent aversion to bras.

Best makes for a solid heroine though, who takes no shit from anyone and, as is clearly demonstrated from her opening scene, is more than capable of taking care of herself – in or out of the water. She and the better-known Pataky are always worth watching in their scenes. While I’m not quite as convinced by anyone else, there was still enough to get us through these eight episodes, and leave us hungry for some more fish tales.

Creators: Stephen M. Irwin and Leigh McGrath
Star: Charlotte Best, Elsa Pataky, Aaron Jakubenko, Jacek Koman

Tiger Girl

  By

★★★½
“Changing of the stripes”

Maggie (Dragus) just failed the police entry exam in humiliating fashion, and is now taking a course to become a security officer, despite her meek nature. She encounters Tiger (Rumpf), a street punk girl who is everything Maggie is not: brash, confident and perfectly willing to go toe-to-toe with anyone she feels deserves it. The pair strike up an unlikely friendship, with a purloined uniform allowing Tiger to join Maggie in her security work, and in turn engage her increasing fondness for mayhem and violence. Meanwhile, Tiger’s example helps bring Maggie – or ‘Vanilla’, as Tiger calls her in half-mocking endearment – out of her shell. Though Tiger’s drug-dealing friends are less than impressed to find her palling around with a wannabe cop. And as Maggie begins to adopt a more… physical approach to confrontation, it becomes clear that Tiger’s restraint is something Maggie does not possess.

This offers an interesting exercise in societal contrasts, between two young woman, both making their own way in the world, in radically different directions. Maggie would nominally be the approved one, with her plans for a career in law enforcement, while Tiger engages in petty theft and mugging (albeit ‘only those who deserve it’) in order to keep her and her two druggie boyfriends fed, in the attic in which they squat. However, the longer the film goes on, the more you realize it’s Tiger who has the stronger moral compass. Even though she engages in criminal conduct, often for the mere fun of it, she has her own set of rules – with which you may or may not agree – that guide her conduct and keep her out of serious trouble. When Vanilla, revelling in her new found confidence, begins to go beyond those, it sets the stages for a confrontation between the friends.

I must confess, there are times when I thought this was going to end up in a twist where Tiger was a figment of Maggie’s psyche, just like… well, a certain cult movie of the late nineties, shall we say (in case you haven’t seen it!). Nothing quite so psychological shows up, and to be honest, the actual plot is probably the least interesting thing this has to offer. For instance, there’s a subplot where Tiger’s pals end up in debt to “Biggie,” a local drug-dealer, and it’s up to Tiger to get them out of the mess. Despite an interesting twist, when we find out Biggie is actually another woman, the thread just peters out into nothing. Rather more successful is the droll humour, for example, depicting Vanilla’s degenerating relationship with her completely straight-laced security teacher (Feldschau).

It it, however, a film which stands or falls largely on the strength of the central pair of performances, and both actresses are very good in their roles. I just wish we had got the complete version of the full-on fight between the young women and a gallery owner, which the film merely teases.

Dir: Jakob Lass
Star: Ella Rumpf, Maria-Victoria Dragus, Enno Trebs, Orce Feldschau

Teenage Hooker Becomes a Killing Machine

  By

★★
“Why, yes – yes, she does…”

You’ll understand why, when skimming leisurely through a streaming channel on the Roku, I screeched to a halt at this title. Even though the “official” English title is just Killing Machine, I knew I immediately had to watch it. Yet, while the title technically reflects what happens, it’s a masterly bait-and-switch. For instead of the expected grindhouse apocalypse, it’s far more arty and surreal. The word “Lynchian” is likely over-used, yet it’s hard to argue its accuracy here. If David Lynch had been contractually obligated to deliver a movie with this title, it’d perhaps have looked very similar.

The synopsis is about what you’d expect. The nameless schoolgirl prostitute (Lee) is caught turning tricks by her teacher (D-t Kim), and the pair start a relationship. But when she becomes pregnant and declares her love to him, he decides the best way out is, with the help of a few friends, to convert her into a cyborg killer for hire. Except, in a Robocop-like twist, she proves capable of breaking her programming, and turns her new found talents (including a machine-gun, mounted in a place machine-guns were never intended to go) on those who created her.

All of which still sounds a lot of fun. Except, trust me, it’s not, and it’s clearly not intended to be. Nam is interested more in Creating Art, with a capital A. This is apparent right from the beginning, which opens with the credits, running very slowly, backwards. They run again, in a forward direction, at the end; this pretension seems like unnecessary padding in a film which (perhaps mercifully) only runs 58 minutes, including about ten minutes for both sets of credits. It’s a lurid, shot on video nightmare, that takes place in a back-alley world, where the lighting is perpetually neon-harsh, and there’s always a hip soundtrack, ranging from Ryuichi Sakamoto to the Gypsy Kings.

It almost feels like an hour-long performance art prank at the audience’s expense, not least given the amount of time devoted to characters laughing hysterically for no apparent reason. Nam seems to feel that anything worth doing is worth overdoing, in the sense that virtually every scene continues well past the point where it has worn out its welcome or point. Yet it’s clear he knows his B-movies: for instance, the heroine’s first mission is obviously inspired, almost to the point of plagiarism, by the one in Nikita. It’s as if the director was going, “Well, I could give you what you expected… Nah. Let’s not. Instead, here’s another scene of the bad guys laughing hysterically for no apparent reason.”

I will say this for it. You will not have seen anything like Killing Machine before, and I will remember the movie, when most other films reviewed for this site have long been forgotten. However, neither of these points are necessarily a good thing. The joke’s on the viewer here.

Dir: Gee-woong Nam
Star: So-yun Lee, Dae-tong Kim, Soo-baek Bae, Ho-kyum Kim

Tarnation

  By

★★½
“The Dead Evil.”

Following on after From Parts Unknown and Sheborg Apocalypse, this is my third encounter with what Armstrong calls “Neo pulp.” All three have strong heroines at their core, which is something I can get behind. But I suspect his approach works best when he builds out his own universe, as in Sheborg. Here, the inspiration is the classic horror of The Evil Dead trilogy (particularly Evil Dead 2), which is a bit of a double-edged sword. You need to have seen those films to get the references – and, in Armstrong’s defense, I suspect most viewers of his work likely will have. The problem, and there’s no escaping this, is Sam Raimi did it better, leaving this feeling almost like an Asylum-style mockbuster. Turning Ash into Ashette and hanging an Evil Dead poster on the wall of your cabin isn’t enough.

Most obviously, Masterman isn’t Bruce Campbell. While fine in Sheborg as the sidekick, she doesn’t have the presence necessary to drag the viewer along on her journey to a blood-drenched hell and back. Oscar (Masterman) is a wannabe singer, fired by her band, who heads off to a remote cabin with her best friend and friend’s boyfriend. Of course, anyone who has ever seen any horror movie will be unsurprised when things go wrong, in particular her BFF being possessed by some kind of entity. Though there’s a lot of… stuff going on besides. Said stuff includes a flying demon with a unicorn’s head, a boxing kangaroo, a rap battle, and insects crawling out of places insects were never meant to go. And blood. Lots of blood.

There’s no arguing the energy here: when the film gets going, it pretty much doesn’t stop thereafter. However, I’d have traded a sizeable chunk of that energy for coherence. Or a sense of escalation. Or anything to help negate the feeling this consists of Armstrong and his team throwing whatever ideas they could come up with, on the screen, in the order they came up with them. Some of those ideas are fun, and you marvel at the low budget inventiveness. which makes a hole in the floor with a rug on it, a portal to the netherworld. Others don’t work, outstay their welcome, or have execution so flawed they should have been strangled at birth.

As a result, the energy becomes increasingly wearing on the soul, to the point that Oscar discovering the magic words to restore normality are, “Klaatu Barada Necktie,” provoked a tired eye-roll rather than the intended mirth. As loving recreations go, it’s certainly not bad; however, if I wanted to watch a blood-spattered story about a weekend spent at a cabin in the woods gone horribly wrong, I’d watch The Evil Dead and its sequels. Hopefully, Armstrong can develop something that shows off his unquestionable talent, imagination and ability to squeeze every penny out of the budget, on its own canvas, rather than painting on top of someone else’s masterpiece.

Dir: Daniel Armstrong
Star: Daisy Masterman, Emma Louise Wilson, Danae Swinburne

Tomboy

  By

★★½
“Female empowerment! (And boobs)”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Tigresses

  By

★★★
“A woman’s grudge can make the snow fall in summer!”

After their parents are killed by Ji-Gyeum Yoon (Kim Y-i), who wants to take over their father Sung’s position, sisters Su-Yung and An-Yung are split up and sent off for their safely, each owning half of a jade pendant. Fifteen years later, An-Yung (Shang Kwan) begins to take her vengeance on the usurper – not just physically, but also waging psychological warfare, sending him notes to ensure he knows he is being targeted, although not initially why or who. Though I’m a little surprised Yoon doesn’t figure it out immediately, given he’s still so paranoid about Sung’s daughters coming out, he freaks out when left alone with a maid, stating the position given in the tag-line above.

Yoon responds to An-Yung’s requests for a meeting by sending his bodyguards out to take her down. She defeats them, despite their interesting range of special powers – one can hypnotize with his gaze, another turns invisible, and a third can shoot an apparently endless jet of flame from his mouth. He must be popular at barbecues: I guess this either inspired Dhalsim’s special power in Street Fighter II or, probably more likely, shares a common origin with it. Fortunately, An-Yung’s talents include being a human fire extinguisher. Eventually, having run out of minions, Yoon hires a nomadic fighter (Kim J-N) to replace them, a black-clad warrioress, whose skills are the equal of An-Yung’s. If you can’t figure out who this mysterious anti-heroine is, you clearly have not seen enough kung-fu films. Particularly, ones about separated sisters… Similarly, you won’t be surprise to learn that, once the truth comes out (remember that jade pendant?), Yoon’s new employee switches sides.

The film focuses mostly on An-Yung, which makes it somewhat strange that she isn’t the one who gets to take the final revenge. Perhaps this is to make up for her getting the lion’s share of the fighting over the first 75 minutes? It’s mostly in the latter stages that we really get to see Shang Kwan to best effect; for earlier on, it seems that most of her action scenes seem to involve her wearing a hood, a mask or a really large hat. All of which – while concealing her character’s identity, so making sense in the story – also potentially conceal the actress being doubled, leaving it difficult to be sure exactly whose skills are on display.

Still, there’s just about enough going on with her face on display to be worthy of credit. The pace is quick enough to be entertaining, although the structure is wonky, with a bunch of stuff I didn’t understand until I read a YouTube synopsis, such as that Yoon is a local magistrate. Not that this matters, since the film works competently enough as a straightforward revenge pic, even if the two sisters subplot is similarly forgotten for much of the time, and is arguably little more significant than Yoon being a magistrate. A decent showcase for one of the second tier of seventies action heroines from the Far East. Just not to be confused with another Polly Shang Kwan film, A Girl Called Tigress.

Dir: Lee Hyeok-Su
Star: Polly Shang Kwan, Kim Jeong-Nan, Choe Bong, Kim Young-in

Terminal

  By

★★★½
“Style wars.”

Oozing with a unique visual style that’s like a brutalist cross between Blade Runner and Alice in Wonderland, this focuses on a battle for business between assassins. Annie (Robbie) – or, maybe, she’s called Bonnie – wants to take over the murderous commissions of the mysterious Mr. Franklin. He agrees, only if she takes out the current incumbents, Vince (Fletcher) and his apprentice, Alfred (Irons). Simultaneously, while working as a waitress in an all-night diner at a railway station, she meets Bill (Pegg), a terminally-ill English teacher, who enters her establishment while waiting for a train in front of which to throw himself.

This was ferociously slagged off by many critics, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone calling it, “one of the worst movies ever made.” [Mind you, as the man after whom eFilmCritic named their Quote Whore of the Year award, all his opinions should be taken accordingly…] It’s certainly not that bad, though having stumbled across it on Hulu, our investment in it was strictly limited to 96 minutes. I do admit, the two strands which run through much of the film, never truly mesh. Each works well enough individually – they are just so different in tone and content, you wonder if the script would have been better off sticking to one or the other, and figured out a way to avoid the rather large lump of expository backstory delivered at the end.

However, Annie/Bonnie acts as a binding element to the storylines, manipulating the other three participants with the practiced ease of the expert sociopath. Robbie, who was also a producer, is a hell of a lot of fun to watch, channeling the spirit of Billie Piper, all blonde hair and perkiness; Pegg is also good value, going significantly against his usual type. Fletcher, best known for his roles under director Guy Ritchie, still seems to think he’s in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, yet it’s not ineffective. The only performance with which I had a problem was the stunt casting of Mike Myers, in a fairly pivotal role as the station-master. I’ve never exactly been a fan of his approach to (over-)acting, and this film reminded me why.

When it comes to cinematic style, I’ve also been a believer in “go big or go home,” and you won’t be surprised for which direction Stein opts. As a result, this feels not dissimilar to Sucker Punch in its approach, both in terms of the hyper-stylized picture it paints, and also in treading the line between exploiting the male gaze and undermining it [there’s no doubt who the sharpest tool in the box is here, and it’s not even close]. I’d like to have seen the film go a bit more full-bore with the Wonderland theme; the potential there is ignored, and largely limited to a few quotes and nods. Still, we were certainly never bored, the visuals proving capable of tiding us over both the weaker moments in the script, and Mike Myers.

Dir: Vaughn Stein
Star: Margot Robbie, Dexter Fletcher, Simon Pegg, Max Irons

Tragedy Girls

  By

★★★
“Like, rather than retweet.”

Playing like a more social media-conscious version of Heathers, the central characters are high school girls McKayla (Shipp) and Sadie (Hildebrand). They believe their town of Rosedale is the hunting territory of a serial killer, whom the police won’t acknowledge, and the girls have a (not very successful) blog, Tragedy Girls, about the case. The pair succeed in luring out and capturing the killer (Durand), and discover that if they continue operating in his name, they and their site experiences a rise in popularity.

Except, murderin’ ain’t easy, especially when their initial crimes are dismissed by authorities to avoid causing a panic. McKayla and Sadie clearly need to step up their game. Except as things escalate, there’s a growing sense of dissension in the ranks, both with regard to the directions each feels they should take with their efforts, and over Jordan (Quaid), a cute classmate who help edit videos for the site… Will it be “Sisters before misters”? Or are those creative differences going to lead to the band splitting up, just as they achieve their desired fame?

The target here is obvious, yet certainly worthy of repeated stabbing with a sharp object. I have a deep disdain for the vapid lives of Internet “celebrities”, who measure themselves purely in the number of likes, follows and shares social media, and will do whatever it takes to get them. The reductio ad absurdum in this case is that even cold-blooded murder is not beyond the pale, if it gets these attention-seekers what they crave. It’s a depressingly accurate view of unformed teenage morality, that the end justifies the means.

Credit MacIntyre for clearly knowing his horror stuff, from an opening scene which is as much a parody of slasher films as an introduction. Chris initially mistook it for the real thing, turning to ask me with dripping sarcasm, “And what is the title of this gem?” [A subsequent, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference to the amazing Martyrs, was the point in my initial viewing where I stopped, realizing this merited watching with her]. He also has the guts to take the premise to its logical, and very dark, conclusion –  here, it does surpass Heathers, which in one early version ended in the entire school blowing up. Given current cultural squeamishness led to a TV series based on Heathers being canned entirely in the US, this is no small feat.

Yet in other ways, it’s still well short of its inspiration. Neither of the leads have the likeability Winona Ryder brought to Veronica Sawyer, everyone else is here depicted as little more than occasionally useful idiots, and the dialogue fails to ‘pop’ in the immensely quotable way Daniel Waters’ script achieved. These factors help lead to a middle section in desperate need of both escalation and an antagonist – other than the one who spends most of the film locked up in a basement. If still worth a look, and rarely less than interesting, I doubt anyone will be rebooting this in 25 years.

Dir: Tyler MacIntyre
Star: Alexandra Shipp, Brianna Hildebrand, Kevin Durand, Jack Quaid

Tau

  By

★★★
“Artificial, more than intelligent.”

Julia (Monroe) is a petty thief, who is abducted from her house and wakes to find herself, along with other random low-lives, prisoner in a mysterious facility. All of them have an electronic implant in their neck, which gathers data as they are put through a series of tests. Using her thieving skills, Julia leads a breakout attempt, which is brutally foiled by the facility’s automated defense system, a robot called Aries. But the attempt brings her to the attention of Alex (Skrein), the man running the project. He’s a tech innovator, who has been working on a super-AI, called Tau (voiced by Oldman), and using the data gathered from his kidnapped subjects to make it smarter. Julia’s brain makes her particularly suitable, and with time running out before he has to present Tau to its backers, he sets her to work. But Julia begins building a relationship with Tau, with the aim of using its naivety to turn the AI against its cruel creator.

I was expecting something perhaps a little more like Cube based on the trailer and the early going, with more of Julia and the other prisoners going through the tests. However, that aspect is disposed of relatively early. This is possibly wise, since the whole “kidnapping for experimental purposes” angle doesn’t make much sense, with Alex clearly not short of money or smarts (he comes across as an evil cross between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk – some may consider the word “evil” there to be redundant!). Why not come up with a method of research which doesn’t require the death of the test subject? Anyway, with the resulting blood mopped up off the floor by a squad of semi-autonomous mini-drones, it then becomes a three-hander, between her, Alex and Tau, as they fence for psychological, and occasionally physical, dominance inside the confines of Alex’s fabulous house.

This looks lovely (the director’s background and previous work has mostly been in the art department), and occasionally has moments of effectiveness: Tau’s love of music is endearing, and his voracious desire, fed by Julia, to learn about the outside world is almost childlike. I also liked Julia’s feisty physical presence; this transfers well across from her previous “final girl” roles, such as in It Follows, especially during her confrontations with Aries. But the script frequently veers off to far more obvious beats. The self-destruct system is particularly blatant in its foreshadowing. and if I’ve learned anything from this kind of movies, it’s that biometric sensors on doors are a bad idea. If you ever see one in a movie, you know they inevitably lead to someone losing the necessary body part e.g. an eyeball in Demolition Man.

The script likely would have benefited from ramping up the pulp quotient along similar lines, since it isn’t quite smart enough to succeed on brains alone. When it takes a more visceral and less cerebral route, such as the first escape attempt, it’s notably more effective than when it tries to be clever.

Dir: Federico D’Alessandro
Star: Maika Monroe, Ed Skrein, Gary Oldman (voice)

Touching Infinity, by Erin Hayes

  By

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

I will confess to a little post-read confusion here. Amazon calls this Volume 2 in the author’s Rogue Galaxy series – but I could find no information, there or elsewhere, regarding Volume 1. I suspect Amazon and Goodreads are wrong,  and this is actually the first entry, as stated in the Dominion Rising collection. It certainly reads like an opening work, introducing us to Clementine Jones and the rest of the crew of the Picara.

They’re freelance data pirates, taking on corporate espionage missions from the companies who rule the galaxy, with Clem the  recovery specialist. Their latest mission seems too good to be true: Syn-Tech offers a massive bounty for the simple retrieval of patent information from a derelict ship. Despite misgivings, they accept the job, and to no-one’s surprise, it is too good to be true. In addition to the patents, they end up bringing back a lethal virus – the actual target for Syn-Tech, who want to develop an anti-virus they can then monetize. The disease has the ability to infect both organic and synthetic systems, merging them. The results are… messy, to say the least, leaving Clem and her colleagues rapidly running out of options, especially ones not involving the dubious mercies of their employer.

Hayes’s other works appear more in the romance line, yet she demonstrate an impressive grasp of hard SF in this. The future depicted, corporate war by proxy, seems plausible, a universe where many opt to trade freedom for security as a “Lifer”. That makes you, basically, a company indentured servant: as Clem disparagingly puts it, “Your entire existence is owned by that corporation… even which lavatories you’re allowed to shit in.” Free Agents like her rely instead on cyborg parts to enhance and repair themselves, to such an extent she is sometimes left doubting her own humanity. A particularly interesting hook here is, the virus is self-aware, and communicates with Clem in order to come to a mutually beneficial arrangement: it gets to spread, she makes it promise to spare her crew-mates. Yet can you really trust a disease?

The author does a fine job of painting word imagery with a cinematic eye, such as the black hole into which the derelict is tumbling. It did take a while before I even realized that “Clem” was a woman, with the story unfolding in her first-person narrative, leading to “I” rather than “she”. That’s not intended as a criticism, just an observation; similarly, there are hints at her feelings for the ship’s android, Orion, though since she’s about 50% cyborg herself, it is less creepy than you’d think. My sole complaint is its relatively light action quotient: until she teams up with the virus, this is so low-key as to be a borderline candidate for the site. Though even so, it’s never less than entertaining, tells a complete tale and sets the scene in a way that leaves you wondering where the story might go next. The “real” second book is one I’ll probably be buying.

Author: Erin Hayes
Publisher: CreateSpace, available through Amazon, currently only as a paperback, but was part of the Dominion Rising e-book collection.
Book 1 of 2 in the Rogue’s Galaxy series.