★★★
“Hell hath no fury?”
This had a fair number of decent and well-done elements. However, it very much feels like these are balanced by the aspects which fall short of adequate. How you react to this will likely be determined by your ability to overlook the latter, and appreciate the former. The basic idea is lean and mean. Sisters Jas (Purvis) and Laura (Pauley) are on a country weekend, when they encounter a car-load of men led by the particularly sleazy Randy (North). This leads to a home-invasion, a dead Laura, and Jas going on a rampage of revenge through everyone Randy can throw at her. Fair enough there, with enough brutal violence to leave the most blood-thirsty satisfied.
But I have questions. So many questions. Why does one sister have an American accent? Why are the villains so utterly incompetent? I mean, they can’t even tie Jas up for ten seconds – never mind taking advantage of the many, many opportunities to dispose of her entirely. Don’t even get me started on the gas canister scene: hello, throw it through the window? How does Jas, who has never been in the area, magically know the location of their headquarters, and so can head straight for it? Where did she acquire that very particular set of skills? All we get is a passing reference to her having taken a self-defense class – all I can say is, these lessons must have been given by John Wick.
Because Jas goes from zero to stabbing someone in the neck, in about thirty seconds after finding the body of her sister, and takes more damage than a crash-test dummy, without flinching. As for calling the authorities? It’s vastly over-rated. This really leaves her character with nowhere to go for the rest of the film: a slower escalation would probably have been more satisfying. None of the above flaws are necessarily show-stoppers by themselves. The damage criticism, for example, could equally be levelled at the heroine in Revenge. However, they all combine to chip away at this film’s overall entertainment value, in effect leaving it doing the Hokey-Pokey: one step forward, one step back.
This is before we get to specific elements, like the performances. These are similarly over the place, particularly among the villains. Fortunately, North – who likely has most acting to do, since Purvis’s performance mostly requires screaming – makes for a pleasantly hateable bad guy. There’s some spectacularly bad CGI fire; the practical stuff is fine, with energetic blood spatter, and everyone selling each bit of damage with the enthusiasm of someone auditioning for the WWE. This momentum is sufficient to paper over some of the flaws, though it would be optimistic to say it covers them all, or anywhere close to that. But I am a simple man, with simple needs. Consequently, I’ll always look somewhat kindly on a movie which possesses zero pretensions and a large bucket of red-coloured corn syrup.
Dir: Rebecca J Matthews and Michael Hoad
Star: Megan Purvis, Aaron-Jon North, Hannah Pauley


This one is fairly fringey, in terms of qualifications for the site. But I do feel, any film where a woman picks up and wields a chainsaw with bad intentions… Yeah, that’s pretty much a golden ticket to inclusion. You will have to be quite patient though. Very patient. It begins with a car crash which leaves Magda (De Mol), very much the worse for wear and badly concussed, in a gully off the road. She is rescued by Guy (Breck), an elderly gentleman who lives nearby, and who insists on nursing Magda back to health. However, matters are complicated by some rather dubious people, including Justin (Mills), who are after Magda and/or something in her possession.
We have written about some of the women who worked behind enemy lines for British intelligence during World War II. Names like
This is a nasty and grim piece of work, after which you will probably feel like taking a shower. However, I actually mean this in a (grudgingly) complimentary fashion, because it’s clear that director and co-writer Hyett was aiming for exactly that. Well done, I guess. Doesn’t mean I have to like it though, and this is not a film I have any interest in revisiting. It takes place in an unnamed part of the Balkans (though my money is on somewhere in Serbia), during the ethno-religious wars which tore apart the region in the late nineties. All manner of highly unpleasant things went on: here, it’s a brothel in which kidnapped women are forced to service militiamen.
This is Broomfield’s second documentary around the topic of Aileen Wuornos, having previously made Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer. It’s a glorious doc – one of my all-time favorites – but is more tangential, being about those around Wuornos, seeking to exploit her situation for their own personal gain. He thought he was done with the topic, but he was called as a defense witness during Aileen’s final appeal against the multiple death sentences, largely because among those exploiters was her lawyer at the time, Steve Glazer. But around appearing in the witness box, Broomfield decided to make a second documentary, this time focusing on the woman at the centre of proceedings, all the way up to her execution by lethal injection in October 2002.
What I love about Broomfield’s work is, he goes where the story leads him. Some documentarians – and I’m looking at
There’s an interesting idea here, which somewhat works. But it’s perhaps a little too grounded for its own good. It starts in a London flat, where senior citizen Anna Marshall (Walter) ambushes an intruder, handcuffing him to a radiator. Turns out he’s not just a burglar. He knows about her past, and wants the truth. So she tells him a story… At the very end of World War II, her identity was Brana Brodskaya (Vega). She was one member in a small group of Russian soldiers, who have been given a very important task: transport a box back from Berlin to Moscow. Oh, and bury it every night. Inevitably, their curiosity overcomes them, and the box is opened, to reveal Hitler’s corpse inside.
I was quite startled to read some of the scathing reviews this received. For I genuinely enjoyed it, to the point it likely came one element (which I’ll get to) from a seal of approval. Sure, it’s nothing particularly new overall. However, I found it consistently enjoyable, to the level I felt no desire to look at my phone at any point. These days, that’s high praise indeed. It takes place in a slightly alternate London, where gang bosses Frasier Mahoney (Charles Dance) and Mrs. Christina Vine (Krige) are on the edge of a war for control of the city. There’s also a rogue element, in the Mushka Gang, who have turned an East End estate into a no-go area.
The “erotic thriller” now seems almost as quaint a part of cinema history as beach party films. It feels partly as if the Harvey Weinstein scandal made nudity and sexuality taboo in Hollywood. The rise of the Internet also provides easy access to all the naked flesh anyone could possibly want. Regardless of the cause, there are no longer big budget films like Basic Instinct or Wild Things being made, let alone being #6 at the North American box-office for the year, as Instinct managed [that said, United Artists paid $2 million for the reboot rights earlier this year. We’ll see; I’m not optimistic]. So in some ways, this feels like a throwback, drawing influence from Brian de Palma and Paul Verhoeven.
And, unfortunately, in this case, it’s not messy in a good or even interesting way. It’s messy in a “What the heck is going on?” way, with a large side-order of, “Can somebody please explain this to me?”, and a garnish of “Anyone? Hello?”. To say this film poses more questions than answers would be incorrect. Because that would wrongly imply it offers any answers at all. I’m just glad the version I saw ran a mere 84 minutes, because the IMDb cites a running time more than half an hour longer. Maybe the thirty-five minutes removed for this cut were all of the explanation. Though I suggest it’d be improved by removing about the same again.