Tag: USA

The Vigilante

  By

★★★
“The Noise of Freedom”

Not to be confused with A Vigilante, this is rather more downmarket and straightforward. It’s likely less thought-provoking, yet probably works a bit better as entertainment, albeit being so basic as to border on the simplistic. Marine Jessica (Jandreau) comes back from a tour of duty in the Middle East with PTSD, following an encounter with a kid wearing a suicide vest. Almost immediately on her arrival, however, her 13-year-old sister, Aimee (Timmons) is kidnapped by sex-trafficker Frank (Cesario), who plans to sell her off in the vilest of ways. It’s a race against time for Jessica and her army buddy and tech wizard Dan (Pierce) to track down those responsible before… [/gestures vaguely] y’know…

If this feels like it has a certain similarity to an unexpected hit in cinemas this summer, you’re probably right. In the movie’s defense, this has been in the pipeline for five years or more, so it can’t be called a quick cash-in – though The Sound of Freedom goes back even longer. Interestingly, director Whittaker worked on Freedom as a stunt co-ordinator, part of a career in that field which goes back to the early nineties. He brings that experience to The Vigilante and it shows, with the action probably the film’s best element. There are a couple of undeniably impressive fights for Jandreau, in particular the final one after she has located the house in which Aimee is being held by her kidnappers.

The other elements are a bit more variable. It begins with an earnest recitation of facts about sex trafficking, with voice-over from (real?) victims detailing where and at what age they were ensnared. But the concept of Frank literally ploughing into the car in which Aimee is a passenger, in order to kidnap her to order out of the wreckage, is hugely, almost ludicrously, implausible. The reality of sex-trafficking is considerably less dramatic: like murder, it’s far more likely the perpetrator is someone known to the victim, rather than a complete stranger. Some of the other elements also don’t feel like they ring true, and the sheer number of shots of underage girls in white underwear had me expecting Chris Hansen to pop out of my closet.

Another weak spot if quite what Dan is doing to locate the trafficking houses which Jessica and he then hit. It’s only vaguely explained, in tech-speak of the least convincing kind. However, there are times where the film does still hit the mark, such as the line said by one of the girls with almost chilling off-handedness: “The first time is the worst. Then you simply go numb.” You sense any creepiness is entirely deliberate, although it is undeniably playing up the more sensational aspects for the viewer. Nothing new there, of course. In many ways, The Vigilante is simply a spiritual successor to the white slavery movies which date back well over a century to the silent era, and titles like Traffic in Souls. As such, this is no better or worse; it succeeds well enough, despite low ambitions.

Dir: Lee Whittaker
Star: Jet Jandreau, Eric Pierce, Jamie M. Timmons, Julien Cesario
a.k.a. Aimee

Phoenix

  By

★½
“Tubi or not Tubi? NOT Tubi…”

Much though I love the streaming service, even I have to admit that “Tubi Originals” are a bit of a mixed bag, to put it mildly. For every Mercy Falls, an entertaining enough B-movie that punches above its weight, there is also… Well, things like this, which is filled wall-to-wall with non-actors trying to act, among a plethora of other, poor choices. Both heroine and villain are former WWE employees, being known there respectively at Eva Marie and Vladimir Kozlov. The latter comes off better, largely because he doesn’t have to do much more than be a menacing thug in his role as Maxim Vasiliiv, head of a Russian crime syndicate in Miami.

He’s involved in the death of Everett Grant (Couture), which is a bad move, since the corpse’s daughter, Fiona “Phoenix” Grant (Marie), is a combat trainer in the US Army, and does not believe her father killed himself. You can probably figure out the rest of the story without me needing to explain it. To be honest, my notes on the topic would not trouble a cigarette paper, such is the shallowness of the plot. The acting is no great shakes either. A lot of the supporting cast is filled out by people who are clearly more familiar with the inside of a gym, rather than the Actor’s Studio. Consequently, they look the part (even if it’s “Menacing Thug #4”), only for the illusion to be shattered when they deliver lines.

There are a couple of minor exceptions, though the real actors only show up the deficiencies elsewhere. Neal McDonough plays Fiona’s commanding officer, and the always welcome Bai Ling appears as a rather weird role, missing from her IMDb entry, most notable for lipstick and make-up which leaves her looking as if she came right from a booking as a kid’s party clown. All of which would be acceptable, if the film delivered copious amounts of over-the-top mayhem – as you’d expect given the two leads’ histories. The reality is, it’s almost forty minutes before you get Phoenix doing anything of significance. We do first get a shopping montage with her Aunt Grace (Camacho – a former cop who appeared on Survivor, apparently). So there’s that.

Things perk up somewhat thereafter, at least when those involved are kicking and punching each others. These sequences may not make a lot of – read, any – sense, yet they’re preferable to the makers’ feeble efforts in other departments. The scene where Fiona and Maxim have dinner and trade lscklustre barbs, may be the low-water point in this department, though any flashback involving Everett (“It’s Christmas Eve and Dad still hasn’t shown up – or called!”) is probably going to be ranked. When I saw the trailer for this, I was surprised by how little action it seemed to have. Turns out, the answer is definitely “not enough,” and the final ten minutes are not enough to rescue the situation.

Dir: Daniel Zirilli
Star: Natalie Eva Marie, Oleg Prudius, Jessie Camacho, Randy Couture

Heart of Stone

  By

★★
“Entertainment: Impossible”

The Great 2023 Void of Action Heroines continues on. The closest thing we’ve seen to one as a mainstream hit in the cinemas is… um, Barbie. Yeah. Not going there. I was looking at the box-office chart for the year, and excluding movies which were actually released in 2022 e.g. Everything Everywhere All at Once, there is only one single film in the top two hundred we have covered here. Polite Society sits outside the top hundred, at $1,.5m [We will get round to The Wrath of Becky in a bit. It’s #181, with a gross of $168,109.] Last year, we had Everything and The Woman King in the top thirty. 2021 gave us Black Widow; 2020, Birds of Prey and Wonder Woman 1984. The complete lack of tentpole heroines this year is disconcerting.

There has been no shortage of female supporting characters who have kicked butt. We already wrote about the The Women of Mission: Impossible, while John Wick 4 also delivered in this category, among quite a few other successful movies. But if you want to see a GWG take centre-stage, you will not find it in the movies. In some ways, it’s more convenient, to be able to sit at home, in your own comfy chair, with a choice of reasonably-priced snacks, and simply push a button on your remote control. But, it has to be said: quality wise, there’s often a good reason most of these films have gone straight to a streaming service. We’ve already covered a number here. The Mother. Furies. Mercy Falls. True Spirit. Some were decent. Yet none have achieved a seal of approval.

This one certainly won’t, barely reaching the level of acceptable entertainment, and sadly, continuing Gal Gadot’s streak of swings and misses. She blazed onto the scene in Wonder Woman back in 2017, and seemed set to take over the mantle as one of the top action actresses in Hollywood. But she has singularly failed to build on that foundation. She lost a lot of public goodwill for her tone-deaf Imagine video in the pandemic. WW84 was a flop, Red Notice was a quickly-forgotten Netflix Original, and her turn in Death on the Nile was widely-panned, becoming a meme. This, however, was a chance to correct course, putting her front and centre in a movie which, it was clearly hoped, would kick-start a franchise and become the female version of Mission: Impossible.

Ain’t gonna happen.

Two minutes in, Chris turned to me and said, “Is this a movie or a TV series?” and I can see her point. Having watched this just a couple of weeks after the undeniably cinematic Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, the difference is obvious. Harper directed The Aeronauts, which was decent enough, but it seems he is incapable of scaling things up from a balloon basket, to the much larger scope needed here. Part of the problem with the action sequences in particular, is the VR enhancement gimmick the heroine wears, allowing her to get real-time updates from her handler. This too often leaves everything looking like it’s a video-game, and it rubs off on other sequences, such as her parachute jump, which feels thoroughly unconvincing.

The plot is perhaps an even greater weakness, a confusing and unengaging mess. Rachel Stone (Gadot) works for a group called Charter, who use hi-tech surveillance for good (yeah… about that…). She’s embedded as an agent in MI-5, for reasons that are never made clear. Wouldn’t you know it, one of the people on her team, Parker (Dornan), turns out to be plotting to steal The Heart, the super-computer on which Charter relies for their surveillance – and use it, presumably, not for good. He has teamed up with talented young hacker Keya Dhawan (Bhatt) to this end, and only Stone can stop them, recover The Heart, and save her colleagues at Charter, including Stone’s boss Nomad (Okenedo).

Dear god, I almost lost consciousness merely typing the previous paragraph. Reviewing the previous work of writers Greg Rucka and Allison Schroeder, what stands out is an almost complete lack of action movies. Rucka has worked mostly in comics (including the one which became The Old Guard), while Schroeder did, um, Christopher Robin and Hidden Figures. The lack of experience shows. Never mind not having written an action movie, it feels as if neither of them had seen an action movie. If so, they might have realized Stone’s handler flicking VR screen around by gesture, was done twenty years ago in Minority Report. The good ideas here are all like that, things you’ve seen elsewhere, and done better, while the ones the movie can call its own are uninspired in concept and/or execution.

It doesn’t help that the supporting cast are mostly bland. If Gadot does still have reasonable charisma, Dornan is completely forgettable. Bhatt is a thoroughly unconvincing hacker – I might trust her to reset my account password, and apologize for the inconvenience. That’s about it. The most irritating character though, is probably her handler. I get what they were going for, but almost every time he’s involved, it leaves the heroine feeling not much more than a meat-puppet, removing a significant degree of agency from her. I will say, some of the action set-pieces aren’t too bad. There’s a good car-chase through Lisbon, for example. But any secret organization which fills its airship with hydrogen, is certainly not going to remain secret for very long. That’s the level of idiocy we are dealing with in the writing here.

Long before the end, I had mentally checked out, as the film globe-trotted manically from [checks notes] the Alps to London to Portugal to Senegal to Iceland. There’s no denying there was a significant amount of resources expended on this production, though Netflix is notoriously tight-lipped on specific budgets. However, the film doesn’t so much jump the shark, as use it for a 3000-metre steeplechase, when the MI-5 spies have a dance break. Read the sentence again. Roll it around your brain. That it’s to a Lizzo song – unfortunate timing, that – makes it considerably worse. Everything thereafter feels like a waste of those resources, as well as the variable talents of those involved.

Dir: Tom Harper
Star: Gal Gadot, Jamie Dornan, Alia Bhatt, Sophie Okonedo

Panther of the Border

  By

★½
“A load of panths.”

There are times when I can look at a failure of a movie, and kinda see how the various elements could have been arranged to better effect. That’s the case here, where a poverty-row, Spanish-language (but made in Texas) production about rape, revenge and narcos, could potentially have worked. Except, it absolutely doesn’t. It’s the story of Carla Mendoza (Verastegui), who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, working for her boss, Pedro Camargo (Palomo), blissfully unaware he is a cartel leader. As a result, she’s arrested, and ends up spending seven years in prison, while daughter Nina is taken care by her grandmother.

On getting out, Carla vows to take revenge on everyone she considers responsible, which is not a short list. Beyond Camargo, who tried to have her put away for life, it also includes her previous boss (Soberón), who raped and then fired her; Camargo’s rival, La Cobra (played, according to the IMDb, by “La Cobra de Tamaulipas”, though my Internet sleuthing suggests she’s actually called Caty Gutiérrez); Camargo’s wife, who dissed Carla just before the arrest; and, quite probably, the doctor who doesn’t quite exhibit a top-tier beside manner, after Nina is shot when Camargo tries to take Carla out. Our heroine holds grudges like an elephant with a Rolodex (Kids! Ask your parents!), and has taken lessons in the necessary skills to exact payback from those on her list.

Unfortunately, the execution is terrible. The script is a complete mess, at one point repeating the entire sequence of events leading up to Carla’s arrest, which simply confused the hell out of me. Motivations for most characters are unclear, with things happening for no reason, out of thin air, or not at all, being simply described to us. For instance, Nina mounts an assault on La Cobra’s men, which we only hear about third-hand, through a report given to Camargo. This isn’t surprising, since the production values are woeful, with the “police station” and “hospital” battling it out, for the title of Least Convincing Facility. They’re still not as bad as Carla’s combat skills: my grandmother could do better, and she’s been dead for 40 years.

It feels as if the makers ran out of money or script pages, the film ending with Nina miraculously going from coma to 100% well again, followed by Verastegui giving a rousing karaoke rendition of the film’s theme song in a nightclub, before a crowd charitably numbering in double-digits. Even by the low standards of the Mexploitation films we’ve seen previously, this is bad. Yet as mentioned, arranged differently… I actually liked La Cobra, who genuinely acts like I feel a cartel leader would. If the whole film had been her against Carla, for some reason, it would have been on considerably stronger ground. Indeed, the performances in general are okay: most would not feel out of place in my narconovelas. Every other element though, ranges from poor to flat-out terrible.

Dir: Martin Palomo, Luis Antonio Rodriguez
Star: Carla Verastegui, Martin Palomo, La Cobra de Tamaulipas, Héctor Soberón
a.k.a. La Pantera de la Frontera

Iron Jawed Angels

  By

★★
“Largely unable to get out the vote.”

There’s a fascinating story to be told about the struggle by American women to get the vote. Unfortunately, this isn’t it. Rather than being content to tell the story of the battle and those who fought in it, von Garnier (a German director who gave us Bandits)  seems to want to force these women from the 1910’s into modern feminist configurations. This position is set out particularly clearly in a deliberately anachronistic soundtrack, which at times makes the story feel more like Hamilton. And to be clear, that’s not a good thing. The focus is campaigner Alice Paul (Swank), beginning in 1912 when she returns from England, her passions set on fire by the work there of Emmeline Pankhurst, as documented in the rather better Suffragette.

Alice initially seeks to work with the leading American group, the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association, led by Carrie Chapman Catt (Huston), only to find their methods not radical enough for her tastes. This eventually causes her to form her own group, and begin protesting against President Woodrow Wilson, including a daily picket of the White House. Matters come to a head after the United States enters World War I, with such protests being seen as unpatriotic. This leads to Paul and other women being arrested on dubious charges, and after beginning a hunger strike in protest, the women are force-fed. Eventually, Wilson is convinced to support their cause, with the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote, being passed in 1920.

My main problem is that Paul never feels an authentic character. She comes over more like a 21st century woman transplanted to the time, which as result, makes her story feel almost like a bad episode from the current incarnation of Doctor Who. It chooses to manipulate history purely for dramatic purposes, such as shoehorning in a romantic relationship with a newspaper cartoonist. Yet for all the obviously liberal credentials inherent in the story, according to the film, only one black woman supported the suffrage movement – and just for a minute or two, before exiting the film. Awkward, that.

Despite the above, and the film in general being a stylistic mess, you’d have to try particularly hard to screw up the underlying story, which is generally an empowering and rousing one. You’d have to be a colder heart than I, not to feel aggrieved by the treatment Paul and the other women suffer in pursuit of their cause, and the film does manage to do these elements justice, simply by reining back in the attempts to jazz things up. I was amused (and slightly pleased) by the disdain of NAWSA towards their bomb-flinging sisters across the Atlantic, who were rather keener on direct action. Though the main moment which amazed me was the scene where President Wilson walked out of the front gate of the White House, tipping his hat to the protestors as he passed them. Truly a different era.

Dir: Katja von Garnier
Star: Hilary Swank, Frances O’Connor, Julia Ormond, Anjelica Huston

Injun

  By

★½
“I Spit on Your Movie.”

I never thought I’d find a film which would leave me yearning for the subtle and understated pleasures of the original I Spit on Your Grave, but here we are. 35 years on, and this cringeworthy copy was made, transplanting events to the old West. A further decade later: with a couple of re-titlings which jostle each other for inappropriateness, it’s out on a number of free movie streaming platforms. I’m here to tell you, not to bother. Even in the low-rent neighbourhood which is rape-revenge movies, you could close your eyes, pick a random entry, and be almost guaranteed to find something with a better script and general execution.

It begins on a bizarrely integrated farm, I’m guessing at some point after the end of the Civil War. Comanche adopted white girl Ana (Sawyer) lives there with her native American husband and their son, plus a Hispanic woman, a black guy and a geezer in glasses. Their names are not important. For onto the ranch ride six escaped convicts, led by former Confederate officer Jeb (Herrick). After some ominous banter with geezer in glasses, they kill everyone – told you their names weren’t important – except for Ana who is merely gang-raped, staked out and left for dead. Fortunately for her, she’s rescued by a conveniently passing man called Barfly (Neff). Nursed back to health over what must be a period of several hours, she sets out for revenge against the six escapees, who inexplicably decided to hang around the ranch.

You know me: I’m not exactly one to complain about questionable stereotypes. But even I had to wince on a number of occasions. It might have been Jeb’s Mexican sidekick, Chico (Venture), who sports an F-sized sombrero and droopy mustache. It might have been Ana’s squaw cosplay and whooping war-dance. It might have been the original title, with its even more dubious poster and tagline: “Payback’s an Indian bitch!” I’m all in favour of political incorrectness in order to make a point, or even simply to trigger certain folk. I get the feeling though, that everything here was done out of sheer ignorance. As such, this is no fun at all.

If you’re going to knock off I Spit on Your Grave so blatantly (down to there being a mentally-challenged member among the rapists), then you really need to put more effort into it. The rape here is a scoop of vanilla ice-cream compared to the intensity of the original. The revenge has almost no impact either, with third-rate special effects: the “scalping” is particularly unimpressive. Oh, hey: rather than cutting someone’s genitals off, she sets fire to them. That’s what passes for imagination and innovation here. The performances just about pass muster: indeed, there’s likely too much of them, especially with the gang sitting around the farmhouse and jawing, as their numbers steadily shrink. Your interest and attention will likely suffer a similar fate.

Dir: Bob Cook
Star: Amanda Elizabeth Sawyer, Robert Herrick, Tony Venture, Greg Neff
a.k.a. Scalped! or I Spit on Your Tombstone

Run Sweetheart Run

  By

★★★
“/snorts in Lola”

If I were Ella Balinska, I’d be having a word with my agent. After seeing her major Hollywood career begin with the embarrassing failure of the Charlie’s Angels reboot, she then followed up with an even more dismal flop, the attempted reboot by Netflix of Resident Evil. Now there’s this, which eventually seeped out on Amazon Prime, in a re-cut form, almost three years after premiering at Sundance. This either doubles down on the loony feminist claptrap of Angels, or is a deadpan parody of that kind of nonsense. For the sake of my sanity, and for humanity in general  I’m going to presume it’s the latter, and the grade above reflects this. If it was intended as serious social commentary, slice the grade in half, and God help us all.

Cherie (Balinska) is a wannabe lawyer, toiling away in a Los Angeles legal firm, and suffering all the slings and arrows the patriarchy can hurl at a single black mother. In particular, her boss (Gregg) asks her to stand in for him and take a client, Ethan (Asbæk). out to dinner. He’s handsome, charming… and a demonic entity of some kind, who then proceeds to hunt Cherie through the LA night, after telling her, she’ll be free if she can last till dawn. Turns out she’s far from his first victim, and Cherie’s only hope of help is a mysterious woman called the First Lady (an effortlessly movie-stealing Aghdashloo), who knows a thing or two…

It’s a perfectly fine premise, and as well as Aghdashloo, Asbæk also seems to be in on the joke, over-acting enthusiastically and to good effect. There are moments when this is supremely self-aware, such as when Ethan follows Cassie into his house, then turns and gestures to stop the camera from following. Or the 72-point font exhortations to “RUN!” splattered on the screen at appropriate moments. Yet it feels as if Feste doesn’t understand the genre in which she’s operating. Horror is about confronting fears head-on (albeit in a safe environment), not avoiding them. By pointing the camera away, she’s missing the point. For instance, when Ethan reveals his true form, all we see is Cassie’s reaction, and Balinaka’s pulling of faces is nowhere near a good enough performance to sell it. 

Despite what I said above, unfortunately, it does appear the film intends its feminist message to be taken seriously, and at times this drowns the entertaining elements in cringe. Peak levels are reached after Cherie is rescued from an obnoxious alpha male at a party by three sisters, who unironically spout nonsense like, “We desperately need the female brain.” The whole movie is spattered with badly-written dialogue and action along similar lines, rather than letting its meaning flow naturally from events as they happen. Such moments derail what was a promising B-movie. Indeed, if it had been more Ethan vs. First Lady, with Cassie reduced to the annoying footnote she deserves to be, it could potentially have been a classic.

Dir: Shana Feste
Star: Ella Balinska, Pilou Asbæk, Clark Gregg, Shohreh Aghdashloo

I’m Your Woman

  By

★★★★
“Taking action”

Hearing that James Gunn, new head of the DC movie department at Warners, just recently announced David Corenswet and Rachel Brosnahan as the new actors to play Superman and Lois Lane in the next “Superman”-movie, I felt the need to find out more about these new actors. For Brosnahan I chose the movie I’m Your Woman, an Amazon Prime production from 2020. For one thing, she played the main role, and secondly a two-hour movie is much quicker to watch than a series like The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel. Sure, for that series she got two Golden Globes, one Emmy and two Screen Actors Guild Awards – but my time is a bit limited. Also, I prefer gangster movies over a dramedy show.

I’m Your Woman takes place in the 1970s. Although a year is never specifically mentioned, the dresses, suits, hair styles and the ugly interior design speak for themselves. Jean (Brosnahan) plays the wife of gangster Eddie (Bill Heck). She knows that he’s a gangster but not what he exactly does. In material terms, while there is everything that she could wish for, she is obviously unfulfilled, as she would have liked to have a child – but it didn’t work out. A big change in her life happens when Eddie one day brings home a baby, declaring that it is now theirs. Jean is more than a little over-burdened with the new task, for taking care of anything or anyone, least of all a baby, is something she never had to do.

Very soon her life changes even more dramatically, when one night Eddie doesn’t come home. Instead, she is given a large amount of money and told to go with Cal (Kene), a friend of Eddie’s. She is not told what has happened, so her subsequent escape and isolation in a foreign house remains a mystery to her for quite some time.  As one can probably already guess from the above, the movie is not excessively an action movie with a whole lot of bang-bang. That said, it nevertheless earns its place in the “girls with guns” category, even if this element shows up quite late in the game. For most of the movie, the heroine (and by extensions we, the audience) are left in the dark concerning the why, what and how. Only slowly are we given that information, with light eventually being shed on the background of what happened and the fate of Eddie.

I think this makes it quite an unusual movie as – in contrast to many other movies – we are not immediately brought up to speed with an info-dump, so that we tie ourselves emotionally to Jean. As a result, the fear and tension she experiences are really palpable to us, too. We don’t know who Cal is and why he is helping her, or why people are after Jean. In my opinion, the movie is particularly successful in showing a female perspective, as part of something that would otherwise potentially have been just an ordinary gangster story. In the beginning, Jean does whatever she is told, while at the same time also trying her best to be a good mother to the little baby, even if her knowledge in this respect is also just rudimentary.

It’s only when she realizes that, unless she leaves behind the passive role that she has occupied for such a long time and becomes active, the hunt for her will never end. After that, she is able to change her life and save her new found friends, including Cal and his family. In that respect – and I know how this sounds – this movie can actually be called an emancipation drama. For once this is real, in contrast to the kind of what many modern movies understand under that expression. Also, the story can be seen as offering a historical comment on 1970s paranoia, and in particular how everything seemed to be chaotic at this time. Jean has to come to terms with the notion that those people who try their best to protect her, might have just as little a clue as she has.

I liked this movie, filmed in Pittsburgh, very much. The inherent tension can be felt for the entirety of the movie and it always feels and sounds like the 1970s. Wikipedia tells me the movie was only in theatres very briefly before Amazon Prime released it online. Rachel Brosnahan gives a first-class performance here though the whole production is top-notch. I regret that, too often, quality content like this flies under the radar, while we are distracted with yet another of these big dumb blockbusters Hollywood is constantly pouring over us. I feel Brosnahan is an actress of whom I would like to see more. That appears not to be problem, with plenty more of her work apparently available on Prime.

Dir: Julia Hart
Star: Rachel Brosnahan, Marsha Stephanie Blake, Arinzé Kene, Jameson Charles

The Bleeding Game

  By

★½
“Bleeding terrible, innit?”

It is possible to do Lovecraft on a low-budget and make it work. Earlier this year, I was introduced to the delightful films of Lars Henriks, who did a whole trilogy of micro-budget movies, loosely in the Lovecraft universe. Taken in the right spirit, they’re quite charming. Then, there’s this… I think I can safely say, it’s neither delightful nor charming, regardless of spirit. The best I can say is there is a non-terrible core concept here.  Mr. Temple (Bolton) wants occult power, and feeds on blood, so summons a trio of Shoggoths, mystical minions who possess a sleazy businessman, a metalhead, and a rent boy. They prey on the women who frequent his bars, bringing their essence back to their master. Arrayed against him are three sisters (one adopted), the Proctors: Aida (Mixter), Flo (Bland) and Lizzy (Alison), who come from a family of white magicians. When the corpses of the Shoggoth’s victims start piling up, they seek to stop first them, then Temple, from continuing their dark harvest.

I should have recognized the director’s name: I’m presuming he’s the brother (or something) of Sean-Michael Argo. That is the Argo who gave us one of the worst ever action-heroine films in Iconoclast. He shows up here as The Grin, an Oracle-like figure to whom the Proctor sisters turn for advice. His relative Ian is, at least, able to tell a coherent story, so that puts him well ahead of his relative. However, there are still way too many problem present for this to be successful, even by the low-standards of incredibly cheap horror. The audio is inconsistent from scene to scene, varying from muffled to incredibly echoey. The pacing is terrible, with scenes that serve no real purpose, and the backstory involving their father is murky, at best. Though I was quite amused by the way that shotguns are basically more effective than any traditional tools, and there is a half-decent impalement.

My biggest complaint, however, was the flat-out terrible British accents sported by the Shoggoths. I’m not sure why being taken over by a demonic entity causes the victims suddenly to channel Dick Van Dyke from Mary Poppins, but here we apparently are. I feel personally attacked by this blatant example of Britwashing, not least since it’s an accent that serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever, any more than the top hat sported by one Shoggoth. The film is at its best least worst when they aren’t speaking on screen, simply because I no longer had a rising desire to put my fist, the living-room table or our cat through the television. Even writing this paragraph is sending my blood pressure spiking. The sisters don’t bother with fake accents, and occasionally border on being interesting characters: looks like two of them have an on/off sexual relationship, though we cut away from ever seeing anything there. Like the rest of the film, that demonstrates its disappointing failure to deliver.

Dir: Ian Argo
Star: Whitney Mixter, Shey Bland, Alison Tussey, C. Jason Bolton

Gangsta Grrlz

  By

★★
“Some things never change…”

Not to be confused with the clearly different Gangster Girls, which isn’t particularly gangster at all, or Gangsta Girls, which is Vietnamese, and especially not to be confused with the execrable Girls vs. Gangsters. Though confusion is understandable, and not helped by Tubi typoing the title to the slightly more correct spelling of Gangsta Girlz, and adding an unrelated poster. So, we all sorted on that? At first, I thought this was a remarkably accurate period piece, starting proceedings off in 1998 Philadelphia, an era of large wigs and even larger mobile phones. I kept expecting it to jump forward to the present day: never happened, and that’s because it turns out, this was actually made in 1998. All the retro trappings were actually of the time.

This does include nineties video quality, and audio that leaves room for improvement in some scenes. However, I’ve endured worse in both departments. It tells the story of Ninea Ranks (Smith), whose boyfriend brought her along on a drug deal that goes wrong, leading to her shooting a man. He takes responsibility, dies in prison, and she decides to embrace a life of crime. This is all explained in voice-over, presumably for budget purposes, and she now has an all-female organization, because she doesn’t trust men. That includes lieutenant T (Gaston), and new recruit Glitter (Jones). There’s a beef with rival leader Dion (King), who would like nothing better than to see Ninea behind bars and unable to compete. However, he faces dissension from within his own ranks, by a disgruntled henchman, Razor.

What stands out is probably how little the genre has changed in the 25 years since this came out. This offers much the same mix of unconvincing drama, guns held sideways and relentless hip-hop by the director’s pals, as any of the more recent entries in the modern Blaxploitation field. There’s no surprises at all to be found as things develop, unless you consider the abrupt conclusion, with a caption which succinctly informs the viewer, “Ninea left town to lay low in 1999. But don’t get too comfortable fellas… She’ll be back.” A quarter of a century later, we’re still waiting, and I’m beginning to wonder if we might have been ghosted by her.

The only scene which stands out is Razor chatting to his loyal friend, Curtis, about being fed-up of Dion’s leadership, and deciding to betray their boss. It’s shot and staged simply, and feels all the more authentic for it. Otherwise, what I’ll remember most is likely the spectacular selection of wigs owned by Ninea, whose last name really should have been “Business” [I’ll wait… Forever, if necessary] Characters and plot threads drift in and out without achieving even the caption level of resolution offered to the anti-heroine, such as the police officers who show up for a couple of meaningless scenes. While the performances aren’t bad, they deserve to be in the service of a script which offers the actors considerably more.

Dir: Randy Williams
Star: Keya Smith, Tamura Gaston, Tyrone King, Dawn Jones