★½
“Snow good at all.”
Carla (Williams) and her boyfriend Daniel (Davis) are all set for a nice weekend in the mountains. Unfortunately, the snowmobile trip runs into difficulty, in particular coming in the shape of a pair of cartel assassins. What, you may ask, are a pair of cartel assassins doing half-way up a snowy mountain in [I’m guessing] the Colorado Rockies? Good question. I’m glad you asked. They are after a robber who made the ill-advised decision to rob a bar which was a front for their organization. He’s now hiding out, half-way up the aforementioned snowy mountain, in the belief he’s safe. Turns out not to be the case.
There’s a prologue which takes us back to when Carla was young, and was out hunting in the woods with her father. They wound a stag, and as they stand and watch it bleed out, we get ominous lines like, “Because when they’re fighting for their lives, sweet pea, they can be dangerous.” Just in case you missed the importance of this, we flash back to this flashback on repeated occasions during the movie. Because, it’s clearly Very Important. Except, it really isn’t. What it does, however, is help to drag things out before we get anything approaching action. It’s mostly people trudging around a mountainous landscape, very slowly, because one of the party has an injured ankle. This occupies much of the first fifty minutes – and we barely reach seventy before the end credits roll.
Carla is, above everything else, a very sensible heroine. She’s quite likeable as such, and comes over as smart, albeit cautious. The problem is, she simply does not get enough to do. These unrealistic expectations were based on a synopsis which reads, “With the killers stalking them through the bitter cold, Carla must use her survival skills taught to her by her father to ensure she’s the predator and not the prey in this bloody fight for survival.” The reality is something far less interesting, in that those skills are largely limited to her binding that ankle mentioned previously. This does not make for thrilling television. [It was made for BET, but feels like it would have been more at home on Hallmark, perhaps titled, The Wrong Mountain]
There’s certainly nothing particularly red about this winter. Except for the heroine, there’s nothing of merit or even, to be honest, real competence here. The script is meandering and unfocused, and most of the supporting characters fail to make an impression. A slight pass goes to Dante (Sanchez), the dominant assassin, who does have some presence. However, Daniel in particular is beyond useless. While this might have been deliberate, in an effort to make Carla look strong, it’s a flawed approach. You create a heroine by having her demonstrate strength, not others showing their weakness. That may seem obvious, but it’s apparently a lesson of which the makers here were unaware. Along with quite a number of others.
Dir: Steven C. Pitts
Star: Ashley A. Williams, Vernon Davis, Brandon Schaffer, Roberto Sanchez


At the age of fifteen, Madison Michaels saw her prostitute mother beaten and killed by Renegade (Cross), a vicious local pimp. His homicide goes unpunished. Ten years later, Madison (Linton) is a counsellor, trying to help drug addicts and hookers get off the streets. She discovers that Renegade is still abusing women, and gets no help from the police, with Detective Straker (Williams) saying he can do nothing based on her hearsay. Against the advice of her friends and sister Lydia (Jeffries), Madison hatches a plan to take the pimp down, and clean the streets of thus piece of scum. Naturally, it doesn’t initially go quite as planned, with the trap set for Renegade backfiring, followed by betrayal from an unexpected direction.
I went into this braced for it to be terrible, having sat through the same film-makers’, largely irredeemable
This is one where you need to take the era into account. Made in 1957, this was based on a short story from a couple of years earlier: “Petticoat Brigade” by Chester William Harrison. It’s very much an Audie Murphy movie – and understandably so, since the man was a bona fide hero, being one of the most-decorated American combat soldiers in World War II, before he became an actor. But the fifties was not a decade known for strong, independent female characters in Hollywood Westerns. We’ve covered a few:
We’ve written about Griselda Blanco before. In particular, we reviewed telenovela La Viuda Negra, which was loosely based on her life and
To my pleasant surprise, that’s not the case at all. Obviously, there’s a certain allure here, but it doesn’t needlessly glamourize or condemn its subject, and instead manages to do a good job of painting both sides, and depicting Griselda as a surprisingly complex character. This is particularly clear at the end, when her youngest son – named, amusingly, Michael Corleone – says of his mother, “Yes, it’s a legacy of violence. But she was a woman that had to become savage in a world that wasn’t made for her.” Then Detective Diaz, who headed the Miami task force charged with bringing her down, counters, “We have this bitch from hell who decides she wants to be meaner and more powerful than anybody else… Violence. Arrogance. Greed.
This one does take a while to reach the necessary threshold: probably only truly qualifies for the final twenty minutes or so, though it does talk a good game until that point. Also, it’s a decent enough combination of Western and home-invasion genres to that point, to pass muster. Nothing special, mind you. It just knows its limitations and is careful enough to work within them. It takes place in the Old West. whee Beth (Bernadette) and her twin children, Brian and Irene (Betsy) now live with her new husband, Robert (Krause). The trio appear to have escaped an abusive relationship, and it’s not long after a railroad surveyor pays a visit, before Irene is cheerfully telling him, she’s going to go back and kill her father some day.
Director LaBute is best known around these parts for his ill-conceived remake of classic horror The Wicker Man, which is generally regarded as spectacularly bad, and is probably best-known for spawning memes involving Nicolas Cage and bees. So expectations going into this were… not high, shall we say. On that basis, the three-star rating is something of a pleasant surprise, though most of the credit for this should got to its star, rather than the director. Tess (Q) is a veteran of the war in Iraq, who is struggling to reconnect to her two sisters. Rose is getting married, and is nice enough that Tess is willing to attend her bachelorette party at the family cabin, deep in the country. But Beth (Foster) is a straight-up bitch.
By coincidence, I watched this not longer after the not very good
I was going to go with “Tree’s company” as the tagline, before I realized I’ve actually used that in three separate, forest-set movies. So I decided to adjust it slightly, and what’s above is indeed very apt. There is a cast of three (3) and the entire thing unfolds in the woods. There isn’t a single set or interior shot in the whole film. Indeed, if you’d asked me, I’d have said this had all the hallmarks of a COVID-era project, designed to be shot with a small cast and in a nicely sanitary, outdoor location. Not so, even though Tubi dates it as 2020. There was a screening in April 2019, well before anyone had heard of Wuhan, and the IMDb gives it a year of 2017.
I had quite forgotten that Rose was part of John Wick: Chapter 2 in 2017. That