Tag: TVM

Darklight

  By

★½
“Never has the chasm between idea and execution been quite so yawning.”

Great concept: Lilith, Adam’s first wife, condemned to immortality, is now an amnesiac in a minimum-wage job. But when a demon threatens to unleash a plague of biblical proportions on the Earth, she has to be shown her true nature and convinced to hunt down the enemy. Unfortunately, almost every aspect, from exposition through characters to the action and CGI-heavy effects, are awful. Not just bad: awful. The plot is contrived and relies on things like TV news to propel it, the main protagonists are Buffy/Watcher clones; Lilith’s “training” consists of one laughably short session; the action sucks because she’s clearly fighting thin air, and as for the final battle…I’ve seen better and more convincing computer graphics on a Game Boy Advance.

There are a couple of facets I quite liked; the concept of a religious group secretly protecting the world from demons and so forth is nice, and Appleby has some screen presence. However, most of the potential is screwed up with ruthless efficiency; the makers needed to watch Witchblade and see how to handle a heroine with a past [admittedly, they had an entire season to work with, not two-hours-minus-adverts]. The angst Lilith feels is nonsense. She’s been killing since time began, so has clearly come to terms with it, so why break down over one death? She’d have been better off as an ‘avenging angel’, without moral qualms.

The ending is, inevitably, left open for a sequel or a series, but there’s absolutely nothing here that would encourage me to watch it. The best one can say is that, at $2m, it wasn’t expensive, but the SciFi Channel could surely have found more worthwhile projects to fund than this poorly-made collection of bits and pieces stolen from better heroines.

Dir: Bill Platt
Star: Shiri Appleby, Richard Burgi, John de Lancie, Richard Gnolfo

Last Man Standing

  By

★★½
“Competently bland, as usual with Lifetime. “

Kinda odd to see Dickerson – cinematographer on a lot of Spike Lee’s movies, and Eddie Murphy’s Raw – directing this Lifetime original movie. It’s certainly not edgy, though that’s not what Lifetime is exactly about. You largely know what you’re going to get with their output. Something technically decent, usually with decent enough performances, but something that clings to the viewer’s comfort zone like a limpet. Is it wrong to criticize the channel for that, when it has absolutely no interest in pushing the envelope? It’d be a bit like coming down on Disney for making kids movies. It’s what they do: deal with it.

The heroine here is Abby Collins (Bell), a former soldier and technician who is now a soccer Mom with a veterinarian husband (Hall) and cute-as-a-button daughter. But, inevitably, dark forces loom, when she gets word a former army colleague has apparently committed suicide. Before she knows what has happened, her spouse has been kidnapped and someone is using that to force Abby to break into her colleague’s office and do some shady financial transactions. It’s up to her and another ex-soldier. Jeremy Davis (Phifer), to figure out what’s going on, the connection to her past, and rescue Mr. Collins: it’ll take all of Abby’s skills, both electronic and technical, before the “shocking” truth is revealed.

Quotes used advisedly, because I’d recommend a trip to the optician’s, if you can’t see the twist in the script (co-written by Bell’s husband I note) before it shows. There are other glitches in the story, such as the semi-cheating way in which Abby’s past is hidden from the audience for much of film. However, if you can forgive the utter predictability of it all, and the lack of discernible flavour, there are worse ways to pass an hour and a half. It’s a difficult task for any actress, managing to be convincing both as a home-maker and and an ass-kicker: Bell does a decent task on both, though the stunt-doubling for action purposes is often less than subtle. Compared to some of the stuff aired by Lifetime, this is by no means all that bad, though you don’t have to look far to find its flaws.

Dir: Ernest Dickerson
Star: Catherine Bell, Anthony Michael Hall, Mekhi Phifer, Ella Anderson

Killer K

  By

★★★★
“Nikita meets Alias, while on vacation in South Korea”

Let’s be clear, right out of the gate. There is really not much original about this Korean mini-series, which takes huge chunks, almost wholesale from Nikita and Alias, to the extent, for example, that we perpetually referred to one character as “Amanda”, since she reminded us so much of Melinda Clarke’s character from Nikita, right down to her fashion choices. However, as long as you’re not looking for anything startling in the way of originality, this is slick yet gritty, with characters that are interesting to spend time with, and a handle on the action that’s easily the match for its equivalent in the West. Let’s start with some significant plot exposition, because there’s quite a lot of characters and story crammed into the three one-hour (or slightly more) episodes.

Spoilers Episode 1. Cha Yeon-Jim (Groo) is having a bad day – she just got expelled from school – and it’s about to get an awful lot worse. Hanging out by the docks, she and her friends get into a confrontation with some workers, only for things to be interrupted by a scripture-quoting hitman, Jang Se Wook, who shows up and starts shooting everyone, on both sides. Cha escapes, but when her friend is killed, as he tries to report what he saw to the police, she realizes she’s in deep trouble. Policeman Choi Tae Young (Baek), who was also at the scene, tries to track her down, but Jang is also after Cha. He wants her to return a flask of green liquid she took in the confusion, and kidnaps her mother to force Cha into compliance. At the handover, Mom is impaled by Jang’s sword and Cha is gunned down and left for dead.

Episode 2. Chief Min Ji Young (Park) comes on the scene, and saves Cha, faking her death. Min works for the same company as Jang, the Mirae Corp, a medical company run by Kwon Do Hwan. They are engaged in some shady experiments involving stem-cell research, and in particular the creation of artificial humans for organ harvesting, with the protection of high-up government ministers. To protect their company secrets, their division SS1 operates ruthlessly: Min recruits Cha as a new killer, not telling her Jang is simply another arm, but training her as an assassin, with the lure of eventually tracking down and taking revenge on the man who killed her mother. Cha’s initial targets are those who pose a threat to her employers, but Min has her own agenda, and when Jang has eventually proven to have outlived his usefulness, she has no compunction about turning her two killers on each other.

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Episode 3. Choi accidentally bumped into Cha in part two, under her new identity, and now teams up with Yoo Sung Ho (Kim), who used to be part of SS1, but bailed with his lover, Cha’s mother, and went into hiding – he was replaced by Chief Min. They are seeking evidence that will let them bring down Mirae and expose their human experiments. Cha wants to leave the organization, having fallen for Go Young Min, a boy at school. Min initially requests “one last hit” – so you know that’s going to work out just fine… In the process, Go sees Cha standing over the corpse of her target, holding the murder weapon, and as a result has to be terminated by Chief Min. That, and the discovery that her schoolmates have been used as guinea-pigs turns Cha against Mirae, and she links up with Choi, as Kwon prepares to reveal his latest plan. End spoilers

Phew. Plenty going on there, with enough for a full 13- or 22-episode order of most series, between all the twists, turns and revelations e.g. turns out Cha’s relationship to Chairman Kwon is rather more personal than she is aware. Given how much gets crammed in, the opening installment is a bit of a slow start. The entire first episode is more or given over to setting up the scenario, with Cha showing very little of the skills she has developed later on. She’s semi-competent in basic martial arts, which is perfectly fine when it comes to beating up fellow pupils. But we soon find out that this level of skill is far from enough, when she comes up against Jang and the other professional killers of SS1. Early on, it’s Choi who is most entertaining, portraying a dutiful and dogged cop whose superiors refuse to give him more than a gas pistol which is, similarly, pretty useless in the clutch.

 It’s the second part where things really take off, as events jump two years forward; the show takes Cha’s training largely as read, save for a quick montage. Instead, her new cold-bloodedness is amply demonstrated in the opening sequence, where we see her sniping out her target at a wedding, despite the presence of children which makes Chief Min call off the hit. It’s clear that this is a new, focused girl, with skills to match. Of course, as is standard for the genre, she still has to deal with everyday issues, since she has been sent back to school [which, conveniently, also offers a suitable tower from which to carry out missions, as can be seen above]. From there, through to her final confrontation with Cha and his minions, it’s an excellent bit of TV, one of the most intense action-heroine episodes I’ve seen in any genre, with the heroine taking obvious damage, both mentally and physically, as things proceed.

Let’s pause for breath before we hit the finale. One thing we noted was that Korean rules regarding what can be broadcast on TV are apparently a good deal laxer than in the US. This was, apparently, a late-night series, and it’s not clear if this was “over the air” or cable; there’s apparently advert breaks, but that could still make it something like FX or AMC. [Edit: CGV channel is “a movie cable channel”, so SHOtime or HBO would be closer parallels] The violence is generally crunchy and squibby, but it’s the female nudity that’s an unexpected pleas… er, particularly striking. :) There does also appear to be some confusion over the title of the show, which I’ve seen called several different variations of the letter K, as noted above. Here, I’ve gone with what appears on the intro screen in English for each episode.

We were kinda wondering where things might go in the last episode, with Cha having apparently sorted things out. Never mind: a whole new catalog of problems raise their heads, as the removal of her justification for assassination leaves her seeking a return to the normal life, one Chief Min is none too keen to offer. With its emphasis on discovering the truth about SS1 and the organization behind it, this episode reminded me of Alias after Sidney Bristow discovered. Meanwhile, dealing with boy issues was a throwback to early Buffy. However, the human experimentation thread was a fresh ingredient, and the episode didn’t pull from the darkness, with a subplot involving a Mirae whistleblower and SS1’s efforts to hush it up. Even if Cha and Min suddenly can’t hit the side of a barn in their final confrontation, the threads are satisfactorily tied up down the stretch, with an ending pilfered shamelessly from My Wife is Gangster 2, that hopefully hints at more to come down the line.

As noted, most of the content is material with which most genre aficionados will already be extremely familar, but there seems always to be room for another “faked death assassin” – Nikita alone has already led to three movies and a pair of television series. It’s the execution(s) that matter here, and this is easily the match of Western action heroine productions of late. I wouldn’t be surprised if this ends up heading over to the West in some form or other, most likely a remake, as has been the case for some many Korean, Japanese and HK movies in recent years. If so, they’ll have to do sterling work to match up with this original.

[Thanks to Hyomil for most of the pics. Killer K can be enjoyed in a subbed version online, through sites such as viki.com, albeit with a somewhat irritating sous-title commentary, which makes watching the show like sitting in the theater with a bunch of chatty teenagers. Still, better than nothing!]

Dir: Kim Jong Hyun
Star: Han Groo, Park Hyo Joo, Baek Do Bin, Kim Jung Tae
a.k.a. Girl K, Little Girl K, Killer Girl K

Amazons (1984)

  By

★★½
“Almost 30 years later – despite binders full of women – this is still politically advanced for its day.

This made for TV movie first aired in January 1984, and was likely fairly topical at the time, with Geraldine Ferraro then on her way to becoming the VP behind Walter Mondale. It’s still just her and Sarah Palin as far as major party tickets in American history go. Her candidacy is foreshadowed by this piece of masculine paranoia. Stowe plays Dr. Sharon Fields, a doctor who is sued for malpractice after her hospital patient, a leading Congressman, had an unexpected psychotic episode, which leads to him playing in traffic. She finds a series of similar deaths linked by trace elements found in autopsies, all of men, whose deaths benefit women, in general or specifically. Turns out they are assassinations, carried out to the orders of an ancient, matriarchal cult: they now have their eye set on the leading presidential candidate – who just happens to have picked a woman as his running mate.

It’s an impressive cast. As well as Stowe (now lording it over the rich and famous as the matriarch in guilty pleasure Revenge), there’s Stevens as cult member Kathryn Lundquist, and Dobson as Rosalund Joseph, another hospital worker – the two faced off previously, in Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold – while Scalia plays the cop whom Fields has to try to convince. Behind the cameras, the cinematography is by Dean Cundey, who did the Back to the Future trilogy, The Thing and, er, Ilsa, Harem-Keeper of the Oil Sheiks; the music is from Basil Poledouris (Robocop); and it’s the directorial debut, outside the series, of Starsky [as in “…and Hutch”], three years before he did The Running Man. Solid stuff, and from a technical level, this makes for a pretty decent TVM, both in performances and production values.

However, the concept and the script appear nothing more than a Robin Cook medi-thriller laced with a large helping of delusional male chauvinist nonsense, portraying women – and, in particular, those who want to achieve political, social or economic power – as literal man-haters, who have absolutely no qualms about poisoning or killing by other means, any man unfortunate enough to get in their way. Admittedly, it’s not carried out with the level of hysteria one might think; in some ways, it’s fairly sympathetic to the Amazons. But it makes little or no sense (I mean, this cult has been around for thousands of years and has achieved exactly what?), and there’s no detectable irony, despite the absolute daftness of the central concept. Surely the eighties weren’t as naive as all that? Actually, looking at the hairstyles and fashions on view here, I think they were.

Dir: Paul Michael Glaser
Star: Madeleine Stowe, Jack Scalia, Stella Stevens, Tamara Dobson

Running Delilah

  By

★★
“Cast better than the material, in female version of Robocop.”

Agent Delilah (Cattrall) is undercover investigating arms dealer Alec Kasharian (Voyagis), and his connection to Palestinian terrorists [this was 1993, when people were concerned about such things]. At the behest of her handler Paul (Zane), she copies a floppy-disk containing vital information [I repeat, this was 1993, when an entire arms dealer’s business would apparently fit on a floppy!], but she’s discovered, shot multiple times, and left for dead. Paul drags her Swiss cheese-like body back to a secret government lab, where she is repaired, upgraded and generally enhanced in terms of speed, power and other abilities.

Initially, this is the subject of some emotional trauma, as she is understandably shocked to discover a Terminator arm where her own used to be. So she breaks out, roaming the streets, and proving to be a nasty surprise for sleazy low-lives. Though her creators probably need to work on the insulation thing, since her arm seems to short-circuit in the rain. That’s government work for you. Naturally, she eventually gets her act together, and the agency boss (Rigg) sends her and Paul out, to bring Kasharian to the justice he so richly deserves. This being a TV movie – or perhaps a pilot, it’s not clear – there are no prizes for guessing how this pans out.

And that’s the problem. No prizes, no surprises either, and precious little in the way of invention or inspired execution that could lift this up above the humdrum, with director Franklin (best known for Psycho II) unable to add enough impetus to proceedings. The only thing that redeems this are the decent performances from the leads, who manage to give this more impact than the material deserves – it was particularly cool to see Rigg, who played one of the prototypical action heroines. Emma Peel, in the mid-60’s. Any scenes that are memorable, such as Delilah shattering all the windows in a hotel, make absolutely no sense, and the parts that make sense, aren’t exactly memorable.

Dir: Richard Franklin
Star: Kim Cattrall, Billy Zane, Yorgo Voyagis, Diana Rigg

Taking the Heat

  By

★★½
“Because the more accurate, Taking the Luke-warm, wouldn’t exactly fly off the shelves.”

Michael Norell (Goldwyn) sees mob boss Tommy Canard (Arkin) whacking a debtor, but won’t admit it to the cops. However, when they look at the credit-card transactions, the truth comes out and Detective Hunter (Whitfield) is sent to retrieve the witness; Canard, thanks to a mole, also finds out and send his top hitman to ensure Norell never reaches the courthouse. A heatwave has simultaneously hit New York, leading to blackouts, gridlock and a breakdown in communications, so it’s down to Detective Hunter, back on her old stomping ground, to negotiate her way through the traffic jams and dodge the killers out to get Norell.

The IMDB states this 1993 film is a TV movie. Some language and one brief nude scene seem to argue against that, but with some minor trims, it could certainly play on television, and there are some aspects, such as the Patrick Williams original score, which appear straight out of TV-land. The story is hardly novel – Midnight Run is perhaps the best-known example of the ‘Protect the irritating witness’ thriller, and if you’re looking for a distaff version, In the Line of Duty IV has more martial-arts, courtesy of Cynthia Khan and Donnie Yen, than you could possible want. This isn’t up to the level of either of these, and barely scrapes by as an acceptable way to waste ninety minutes on a wet weekend.

The film does occasionally get away from the pedestrian, but the potential inherent in the scenario, as the city swelters and boils in the heat, turning into an urban jungle, is largely wasted. There are some moments which work quite nicely, such as Hunter and Norell picking their way through a booby-trapped drug den, but it’s largely predictable stuff, with the heroine and her charge initially bickering like cats and dogs, then – over the course of a mere few hours – falling for each other. For most of this, I couldn’t help thinking, Whitfield is no Pam Grier – though in her defense, few people are, and she does well enough, I suppose. If there’s nothing else on TV, it’ll do.

Dir: Tom Mankiewicz
Star: Tony Goldwyn, Lynn Whitfield, Alex Carter, Alan Arkin

La Femme Musketeer

  By

★★★
“The Four Musketeers: The Next Generation.”

While not the first film to give D’Artagnan a daughter – the fairly self-explanatory D’Artagnan’s Daughter got there a decade before, with Sophie Marceau in the role – this is still entertaining enough, though at 171 minutes, probably too long. Valentine (Amy) heads to Paris to join the King’s guards, only to find herself framed for murder after coming into possession of a letter that could bring down the monarch. Fortunately, the other Musketeers also had children who followed in their father’s footsteps, so she has help as she tries to thwart the evil plans of Cardinal Mazarin (Depardieu) and his henchman Villeroi (Pirae).

If its origins as a two-part TVM are largely apparent, there’s enough fun to be mined from the experience here to keep things going, not least Michael York reprising the role of D’Artagnan, which he played in the 70’s classic movies. Their offspring are similarly nicely-drawn caricatures, and Amy has a feisty quality about her that’s fitting, though quite how she is mistaken for a man escapes me. The film does try to do too much, plotwise; believing the letter isn’t enough to sustain it, the script also throws in a Spanish princess, travelling to Paris to meet with King Louis, and perhaps stop the war between the two countries. This requires much searching of the French countryside [actually, Croatia] and drags things out to no great purpose. On the other hand, the lack of any serious romance to bog things down any further, came as a pleasant surprise.

Amy holds her own in the swordfights, even if Boyum is overly fond of playing with the film speed, and often needs to move the camera back a bit further. We were looking forward to a nice catfight between her and Nastassja Kinski, who plays another one of Mazarin’s minions, with a nice line in poisoned hatpins. Don’t get your hopes up; instead, the climax pits Valentine against Villeroi. The accents on display are also all over the place: Depardieu is the only one who sounds French, obviously – except, his character is actually Italian! If you can cope with that, and the inherently nonsensical nature of the central concept, you should be okay with this.

Dir: Steve Boyum
Star: Susie Amy, Marcus Jean Pirae, Gérard Depardieu, Casper Zafer

Princess of Thieves

  By

★★
“The Middle Ages – sanitized, for your protection.”

Back before Pirates of the Caribbean made Knightley a household name, and even before Bend It Like Beckham made her an obscure name, as a fifteen-year old she shot this Disney TVM, which rewrites history wholesale from the very start. It begins in 1184, claiming this is the reign of Richard the Lionheart – this must come as a surprise to Henry II, since he didn’t die until 1189. It also introduces Philip, Richard’s supposed illegitimate son, out to replace the evil King John; in reality, Philip may not have existed and certainly left no mark on history. However, the film needs a romantic lead, so there you go. Of course, the whole Robin Hood mythology is more a block of clay, that writers and film-makers have seen fit to mould as they wish.

Here, when Robin is arrested trying to link up with Philip (Moyer), it’s his daughter, Gwyn (Knightley), who puts together her own band of merry men, with the aim of both rescuing her father and putting Philip in his rightful place on the throne. Archery contests and the Sheriff of Nottingham (McDowell) ensue, until Philip, under an assumed name, joins her posse, and the inevitable romantic attraction begins. This is much to the chagrin of Froderick (Synnott), Gwyn’s longtime companion from when she grew up in a monastery [her dad being off crusading with Dick]. However, since he has a crap haircut, it’s clear Frodork doesn’t have a chance with the perfectly-complexioned Gywn and her immaculate teeth.

It is largely bland, unthreatening and unsatisfying, yet not entirely unwatchable. Knightley – only 15 when she made it – clearly has star potential, and her archery experience must have come in handy for her later role in King Arthur. Early on, there is an almost Mulan-like feel, with Gwyn defying her father and dressing as a boy. However, the more the film proceeds, the more she is shuffled off to the side in favor of Philip, who is much less interesting a character, especially from this site’s point of view. McDowell is as reliably evil as ever, while Jonathan Hyde does his best Alan Rickman impression as King John, yet, inevitably, comes off as a poor imitation. If this isn’t worth paying money for, as a Saturday afternoon diversion on TV, it’s tolerable.

Dir: Peter Hewitt
Star: Keira Knightley, Stephen Moyer, Malcolm McDowell, Del Synnott

Nightmare at Bitter Creek

  By

★★
“Made for television, and no better than you’d expect from that.”

Nita Daniels (Wagner) and her three girlfriends take a horseback trip up the mountain, expecting to meet their husbands at the top. However, the trip becomes a nightmare, as four members of the ‘Aryan Survivalist Brigade’ are holed up there, and decide to take out the women and their alcoholic guide, Ding (Skerritt). Initially, Ding takes the fore, but when he is injured it’s up to Nita and her pals to fight back. This TVM struggles, largely because of the lack of justification for the white supremacists: the entire party they attack are about as Aryan as they come, so why, exactly, should they be targeted for elimination? It would have been far more plausible had the party been ethnically-mixed, or even their guide been black – or, heck, Jewish.

Instead, the threat here is…well, a bit crap, really. They’re all but entirely faceless, clearly no good at marksmanship, and even the biggest of them is no match for a hungover Ding. Understandable, the TV-movie limitations restrict how “nasty” they could be shown, but there’s no sense of threat. It probably doesn’t help that the best actor in the film is Buster the dog, probably because his motivations are the most clear. The four women rarely get beyond the most shallow of caricatures, without any background to make you care for them – but I must admit, things do pick up significantly in the last twenty minutes, as the heroines find themselves trapped in a canyon, and Allison (Cassidy) needs to grow a spine if she’s to save her friends.

It’s not a terrible concept; this just needs to be executed with more conviction, and the medium of the television movie is probably not the right one for the story. That doesn’t permit the necessary level of dread, which would be something no TV company would want to show, especially back in 1988, when this was made. Finally, a small note on truth in advertising. Of all the facets depicted on the sleeve (right), there are certainly no bears and no lynchings. Nor is there any mention of the Confederacy or the Ku Klux Klan. Skerritt and Wagner, I will give you, but I’m not quite sure what the middle image on the right is supposed to depict.

Dir: Tim Burstall
Stars: Lindsay Wagner, Tom Skerritt, Constance McCashin, Joanna Cassidy

Wendy Wu: Homecoming Warrior

  By

★★★
“Into every third generation, a slay..ah, warrior is born.”

It’s kinda sad to say, but the action in this Disney TV movie kicks the ass of, not only most TV shows, but a credible number of Hollywood films. Then again, behind the fights here is Koichi Sakamoto, who is also responsible for Drive, among the best American martial-arts films of all time. And while obviously “Disneyfied”, this is still sprightly and engaging, with a couple of very decent fight sequences. It is, however, extremely influenced by Buffy: an unwilling heroine (Song) destined to face down evil on the night of a major school event, under the care and tuition of a mysterious guardian? Joss Whedon should have a word with his lawyers. However, the Chinese cultural twist is nice, not least the Shaolin Soccer riffs, though neither lead actually is Chinese.

This does pose problems, the film trying hard to be culturally “sensitive”; Wendy struggles between wanting to be a “normal” American girl, and her Chinese heritage. This is clunkily handled and does drag the middle of the film down, as the whole Homecoming Queen plot-thread is simply not very interesting, and adds nothing of significance to the film. Things do perk up again, when her teachers get taken over by monk spirits, to assist with her training. It then heads to the finale in a deserted museum where Wendy and her “watcher”, Shen (Koyamada), must face an possessed-schoolmate and a host of terracotta warriors. I stumbled on this by accident, in an advert break during a baseball game on a neighbouring channel, and enjoyed it, despite being about three times the target audience’s age. Some more action would certainly have been preferred, but between this and Kim Possible, Disney have as good a claim to being the home of action heroine TV as any channel.

Dir: John Laing
Stars: Brenda Song, Shin Koyamada, Justin Chon, Andy Fischer-Price