Tag: USA

Double Threat

  By

★★½
“2-for-1 is not always a great deal.”

If Ryan looks familiar, that’s because she is. She starred in Survivor – no, the other film by that name – and also 626 Evolution, making a fairly decent impression in the former, and let down significantly by the approach of the latter. There, she was billed as Danielle Chuchran: not sure if the name change is a result of marriage, or simply a realization that “Ryan” is a lot easier to remember. Whether you will want to is a different matter: she’s likely the best thing in this, and when it appears, the action is decent. There just isn’t enough of it, and the stuff between the set-pieces ranges from mediocre to cringeworthy.

It begins in a convenience store, where Jimmy (Lawrence, who a very long time ago, was one of the kids in Mrs. Doubtfire!) is chatting up the pretty clerk, Natasha (Ryan). Two armed mem show up: before Jimmy can blink, Natasha has killed them both, grabbed her bug-out bag and exited. A stunned Jimmy decides not to stick around, and drives off, only for Natasha to pop up in the back. Turns out the store was a front for the mob to launder money, and she had skimmed $600,000. They – in particular, the boss’s son, Ellis (Joy) and his top fixer, Ask (Olivieri) – are out to make an example of her. Yet there’s one big twist which might work in her favour: Natasha has a split personality. 

There’s Nat, the sensible, quiet one. Then there’s Tasha, the unrepentant bad-ass who can take very good care of herself. Jimmy has to try and figure out what to do, and with whom, when all he really wants to do is get to the ocean and scatter the ashes of his late brother. Meanwhile, Ellis is bickering with Ask, and being brow-beaten with his father. If this all sounds like a lot: it is. The film basically tries to do too much, and ends up doing little of it justice. It’s the male characters who drag it down: Jimmy is vanilla pudding, while Ellis is a whiny little puppy. Just pit Ask against Nat and Tasha, and be done with it.

Ryan does know how to handle herself in action. The best sequence has her taking on two thugs in hand-to-hand combat, while Jimmy fails to figure out how to operate a gun. This is imaginative and well-done, using her agility, speed and flexibility to counter their strength. On the other hand, then there’s the bit where she steals a bow and a horse from some LARPers and… Sorry, I’ve lost the will to type it out. The film needs to pick a tone and stick to it, Stanley not being able to pull off the shifts necessary. That’s even aside from qualms about the glib use of mental illness as convenient plot device, Nat or Tasha showing up exactly when needed. I hope Ryan can find a better vehicle for her talents, since she deserves better. 

Dir: Shane Stanley
Star: Danielle C. Ryan, Matthew Lawrence, Kevin Joy, Dawn Olivieri

Swamp Women

  By

★★★
“Marsh ado about nothing.”

One of the earliest films directed by Roger Corman, it’d be a major stretch to call this a good film, yet I can’t deny I found it entertaining. It definitely has better female characters than most movies of the mid-fifties. Four women break out of jail and head into the swamps, in search of stolen diamonds which were previously hidden in the Louisiana swamps. Except, one of them is an undercover police officer, Lee Hampton (Mathews), who had been inserted into prison to join the gang and lead the escape, in the hope of recovering the loot. After the car breaks down, they hijack a boat owned by an oil prospector, Bob, and his girlfriend, taking them hostage as they head deeper into the bayou.

Things unfold more or less as you’d expect, though not exactly how Lee would have planned. There’s dissension in the ranks, fighting between the women for the attentions of Bob, encounters with native wildlife, and copious amounts of stock footage. The last is both of Mardi Gras in New Orleans and expensive elements like helicopters, helping pad the running-time, though it still comes in on the underside of seventy minutes. By all accounts, there was hardly a corner which Corman left uncut, such as the women doing their own stunts. Mike Connors, who played Bob, said, “The girls in that picture had it much worse than I did… They had to trudge through the mud, the swamps, pulling this rowboat, and I was sitting in the rowboat high and dry.”

Characterization beyond Lee is largely limited to the colour of the women’s hair – blonde, brunette, or redhead – though Josie (Marie Windsor, the star of Outlaw Women) is effective as the de facto leader of the group. It is nice there’s no attempt made to give them boyfriends or husbands. They make their own decisions, and follow through with them, entirely on their own terms. This brand of mid-fifties feminism results in more than one instance of them rolling around in the swamp, cat-fighting each other. Somehow, their hair, clothes and make-up miraculously seem to escape any kind of damage in these brawls, and return to pristine condition for the next scene.

On the way to the finale, Vera (Garland) tries to sneak off with both the jewels and Bob, paying the price for her treachery. The authorities manage to lose track of the group, and Josie grows increasingly suspicious of Lee’s resistance to violence. The leader eventually orders Lee to kill Bob; the shots fired in the ensuing fracas are enough, conveniently, to attract the search party, while Vera and Lee battle through the forest and – inevitably, into the water. It’s all entirely ridiculous, and the scope for parody makes it easy to understand why it was MST3K‘d. Yet even at this early stage, Corman clearly understood that the worst crime a B-movie can commit it is to be boring. For all its flaws, Swamp Women is never that.

Dir: Roger Corman
Star: Carole Mathews, Marie Windsor, Beverly Garland, Jill Jarmyn

My Sisters

  By

★
“Sisters that’ll have you crying for mercy.”

This felt oddly familiar, like I had watched it before. One scene in particular – a maintenance man comes to replace a light-bulb, only to become an apparent threat – had me certain I had seen this. But no review of it existed, either here or Film Blitx, my non-GWG site. [For, make no mistake, its credentials here are fringey at best.] My working theory is that I probably fell asleep and missed so much, I deemed it impossible to review, then forgot about it entirely. Yet here we are. I managed to stay awake for an adequate amount of time this viewing, though full disclosure: I did have to pause it about 15 minutes in. I’m still reviewing it  – mostly so I don’t go round the loop a third time.

The hook here is that the whole thing was filmed in 24 hours, something touted by, it feels, every member of the cast and crew during the end credits. On the one hand, it is quite an impressive achievement, considering even the quickest of quota quickies would still need several days [Though 24 hours would be an eternity for Rendez-vous, shot using one take, the first, and thus filmed in under two hours] To the movie’s credit, technically it looks pretty good. The audio is a little ropey in places, however. My question would be: why film it in one day? What did this add to the film? For it seems no more than a pointless gimmick.

Not least because it feels as if the script was also tossed together in a day, easily representing the movie’s weakest element, and bouncing back and forth in time like a meth-crazed ping-pong ball. I’m unsure whether the tedium it induces is a result of its lack of coherence, or if it would have been just as dull with a more conventional narrative. The basic idea is a women’s support group, who decided to become vigilantes, helping their “sisters” who are trapped in abusive relationships by targetting their abusers. [It’s odd that I watched this the same day as the similarly themed Ride or Die. At least that admitted to the psychosis in its vigilante.]

This leads them into conflict with a shadowy men’s support group, the Freemen Society, who don’t take kindly to the women’s actions. The film does a particularly poor job of defining its antagonists, who remain a nebulous threat for the bulk of the running time, and are bad because we are told they are. Yet we discover at the end that one of the women has been an unreliable narrator all along, lying even to the rest of the support group. We are given no particular reason to care about them: there is far too much talk, and the dialogue consists of little more than a series of buzzwords that, presumably, made more sense back in 2020, during the white heat of people giving a damn about #MeToo. That concept has aged like Amber Heard’s milk, and combined with mediocre execution and flat-out terrible writing, these are sisters who need to be doing it to themselves.

Dir: Adam Justice Hardy
Star: Sara Young Chandler, Shanera Richardson, Nadia Marina, Diana Sanchez

Ride or Die

  By

★½
“Die, please.”

This is not to be confused with the rather higher profile i.e. it’s available on Netflix, Japanese film with the same title, made the same year, and covering a not dissimilar theme. Both are about a woman who is prepared to commit murder, in order to save their best friend from an abusive relationship. However, after the killing in question, the films take divergent paths. The Japflix version becomes a road-trip movie, with the killer and her friend going on the run. This, however, focuses heavily on the killer, whose already fragile mental state falls apart completely, after she discovers that things weren’t quite as she had been led to believe. It’s not her first time at the homicide rodeo either.

For that to work, it needs to have a convincing relationship at its core, and this fails miserably on that level. Ashley (Allen) may be willing to do anything for Mandy (Brooks), but we are never shown why this might be the case: just told it, and expected to accept this at face-value. It’s less credible than the BFFs in Jennifer’s Body, and that is a low bar indeed. It doesn’t help that Brooks is, to put it bluntly, one of the worst actresses I’ve seen given a major role in a movie for a very long time. Yet she’s not ever the worst in this movie: that goes to the “grandmother” who recites her lines from off-screen. My granny would have delivered them with greater conviction, and she has been dead for approaching forty years.

Allen is, at least relatively, watchable, with a smokey voice which makes her resemble a young version of Yancy Butler. The film did manage to hold my attention for about 20 minutes. This began with Ash shooting the abusive boyfriend (Rehman) in the face, and having to deal with an unexpected witness (Blundon), and runs through the revelation that upends Ashley’s worldview. However, the movie singularly fails to do anything significant with it, and all the hallucinatory nonsense thereafter, with Ash being visited by her victims, was completely unable to re-ignite my interest. There is zero development, and too many strands are painstakingly set up, only to go nowhere, e.g. the nosy waitress, another performance which it would be kind to call thoroughly wretched.

The complete lack of any official interest in the killing spree is understandable, the budget clearly not stretching to any forces in authority. Yet this does not excuse the second half degenerating into dull scenes of Ashley driving around, mindless chit-chat or PG-rated lesbian canoodling with more people who can’t emote their way out of a moist paper-bag. In (marginal) defense, they are not helped by a number of scenes apparently being re-dubbed in post, or a musical score that doesn’t so much complement the on-screen action, as compete vigorously with it for attention. It’s a race to the bottom there, and neither aspect gets out of here alive.

Dir: Aly Hardt
Star: Vanessa Allen, Hannah Brooks, Celeste Blandon, Raavian Rehman

Where We Disappear

  By

★★★
“A chilly tale of isolation”

It’s the end of World War II in Russia, and Anastasia (Haig) is at the station to welcome her husband home from the front. Except, realizing he is still the same abusive jerk he was, she stabs him dead. This gets her an extended stay in a Siberian gulag, as a guest of HM Stalin’s government, a situation for which she is entirely unsuited. As soon as she arrives in the remote prison, the first cabin-mate she meets comments on the softness of her hands, and she’s told she won’t survive a week. The biggest threat, however, may not be the Arctic conditions, but the other inmates. In particular, Masha (Andersen), who has taken over as leader after previous top dog, Lubov (Isabelle), suffered an “accident”. The question is, what is Anastasia prepared to do, and how far will she go, in order to survive?

Although this lasts only 73 minutes, end-to-end, it feels longer. That isn’t particularly a bad thing, since it’s mostly a reflection of the near-constant tension. There’s a perpetual sense of menace here, with violence and abuse – physical, mental or spiritual – always lurking just beneath the surface, whether from guards or other prisoners. That tends to make for a stressful experience for the viewer, as they can never relax. The pace is relentless. Things unfold not quite in real time after Anastasia’s arrival, but it does take place over her first night there. Another prisoner escapes, and the women have to decide how to handle that, especially with Lubov, who has a “cozy” relationship with one of the guards, now indisposed. Fresh meat Anastasia and her soft hands is the obvious replacement; not a task she’s willing to take on. Eventually, she’s coerced into the task, which doesn’t unfold as anyone expects.

This was based on Arthur M. Jolly’s stage play, A Gulag Mouse, and its origins in the theatre are frequently clear, both in the limited locations and importance placed on  dialogue. It might have been nice had Fink taken greater advantage of the freedoms afforded by cinema, but I imagine the claustrophobic atmosphere generated is entirely intentional. I must confess to being rather confused by the final act, which seems to throw the hard realism in which the rest of the picture is grounded, completely out of the window. By the end, I was far from clear how much of what I’d witnessed previously, had taken place in any subjective reality. It could be virtually any number from zero to a hundred percent, and I found its unwillingness to commit somewhat aggravating.

However, the performances are well-executed, each drawing the different aspects of their characters well. Andersen perhaps stands out, as a woman whose presence in the gulag is due to something far darker than the “stealing an apple” to which she blithely confesses. There’s enough potential generated in the first hour for a 13-episode series, and it’s a bit of a shame that the ending proves incapable of doing it justice.

Dir: Simon Fink
Star: Georgina Haig, Jolene Andersen, Katharine Isabelle, Vera Cherny

Ballistic

  By

★★
“Can’t spell Ballistic without balls…”

You know you’re in for a slice of stinky, nineties action cheese from the opening sequence. Undercover cop Jesse (Holden) has just taken down a sleazy yuppie drug-dealer, and a homeless woman tells her, “You know what you are, sweetie? You’re ballistic!” We probably need to explain why the film is titled that way, because there’s really not an enormous amount of great action here to justify it. Jesse is your typical, no-nonsense cop, who has just transferred from homicide to the Urban Crime Taskforce, where she is meeting resistance from her new colleagues. She is also trying to help her father (Roundtree), a former cop now doing 20 years after being framed with kilos of coke.

Jesse inevitably makes enemies: she comes under suspicious when a witness is killed on her watch, and is then suspected of the murder of the other cop who was in the safe-house. In reality, it’s all a plot by “respectable businessman” Braden (Jones), who inevitably is a dealer in both drugs and illegal weapons. He runs illegal fights in a warehouse lined with cardboard boxes: his top henchman, the person who killed the cop, is actually a woman, Claudia (the impressive looking body-builder Corinna Everson), and we get a small role from Michael Jai White, who would go on to considerably better things than this. As would the movie’s composer, Tyler Bates, and the cast also includes veteran cult actor Charles Napier as Jesse’s superior.

Despite a relatively good cast, it’s largely dull, often almost painfully so, with the action scenes suffering from a particularly brutal style of editing. Holden comes at at six foot even in height, towering over some of her male co-stars even when not wearing high heels, and does have a degree of film presence. It’s just that Bass, making his directorial debut, does not appear to have any idea of how she should be used. Early on, she’s treated as not much more than a slice of cheesecake, e.g. the opening credits feature Jesse showering in slo-mo, for no reason beyond titillation. The sex scenes with her boyfriend (a character which serves no purpose) are little better, and you could make the case Claudia is actually treated more seriously than the heroine.

The film does at least have the courtesy to give us a fight between the two women, though like much of the rest, the results are far from overwhelming, with them lazily snapping kicks toward each other, at a glacial pace. That’s about the peak as far as Jesse is concerned, with the movie’s climax thereafter largely involving a lot of running round the warehouse by everyone involved. It’s difficult to believe this kind of feature would ever have passed muster, even in the days of straight to video schlock. Though given this was the effective end of Holden’s career as a leading lady, perhaps it didn’t.

Dir:  Kim Bass
Star: Marjean Holden, Sam J. Jones, James Lew, Richard Roundtree
a.k.a. Fist of Justice

Catch the Fair One

  By

★★★
“Down for the count.”

Quite often, in films featuring women who are supposed to be boxers, they simply do not look the part. Safe to say, this is not an issue here. That is apparent from the opening scene, in which Kaylee (Reis) is preparing for a fight. As she warms up with her trainer, the speed and power of her punches is clear, and not cinematic trickery. It’s unsurprising, since Reis is, at time of writing. the current WBA, WBO and IBO light-welterweight world champion. It’s just a shame this movie chooses not to make more use of her undoubted talents in the combat field, and is a tad too earnest to be value as entertainment.

Kaylee falls into a downward spiral after her sister Weeta (Borrero) vanishes, and is barely scraping by, but then receives information that Weeta was abducted by a sex trafficking ring. With the authorities unwilling to do anything – the number of indigenous women who suffer this fate, or are flat-out murdered is startling – it’s up to Kaylee. She infiltrates the ring run by Bobby (Henshall), only to find it’s a lot harder to get out than in, and that he isn’t necessarily the man in charge. If I may trot out a tired boxing cliche, she’s in for the fight of her life, as she seeks the truth about what happened to her sister, and whether Weeta is alive or dead.

Reis is the best thing this has going for it, and the makers know it. There’s a raw intensity which is utterly convincing, as she throws herself into a terrible situation in pursuit of Weeta. Though you do have to wonder why she apparently waited so long before trying to track down her supposedly beloved sibling, leaving the trail close to stone-cold. I mentioned “value as entertainment” above, and that should probably be stressed. This isn’t a Taken-style popcorn audience pleaser. It’s more of a descent into hell, which will leave neither Kaylee nor those with whom she crosses paths unscathed, to put it mildly. The heroine was already badly damaged going in: she sleeps with a razor-blade tucked in her mouth for defense purposes, a note that goes nowhere except as a character trait.

Much the same is true of her boxing talents, which never particularly come to the forefront, leaving me wondering why they made them part of the film. I did have to admire its relentlessly grim tone: there’s hardly a moment of light here, until the very end of the movie. Even then, the carpet of comfort is brutally yanked out from underneath the feet of the viewer with the final shot before the credits roll. I’m not sure if Reis has any future as an actress – or even whether she has an interest in such. However, if this proves to be the beginning and end of her career on-screen, it will still be better than many more accomplished actresses manage.

Dir: Josef Kubota Wladyka
Star: Kali Reis, Daniel Henshall, Kevin Dunn, Mainaku Borrero

Steele Wool

  By

★★★
“Puts the ‘hard’ in hard of hearing…”

Daphne Wool (Varela) has finally had enough of her abusive husband, so has killed him, chopping up the corpse and keeping it in a storage locker. Which actually is a good thing, because it turns out he was wanted by the Mob, and there was a price on his head. For their “help” in carrying out the hit, Daphne and pal Tony Steele (Cappello) are rewarded, but things go further. Daphne becomes a full-time assassin for the gangsters, learning to kill with everything from a paper-clip up, while Tony acts as her facilitator. However, they quickly become a liability to the organization, and are given a “poison pill” contract, being sent to kill weapons inventor Vincent McCabe.

The approach here is very much light in intent. Witness how Daphne’s training is largely watching movies like La Fille Nadia [sic], or the way in which she does, in fact, use a paper-clip as the instrument of one target’s demise. The film does a decent job of countering this with an awareness that this is a dirty and unpleasant business, as when she visits (from a distance) the widow of a target and their now fatherless child. It is a difficult balance for a movie to strike, and I’m not convinced Cappello gets it right, resulting in some awkward lurches in tome from the comedic to the supposedly heart-felt. Both come off a bit flat: I never got past a wry smile, and was never completely engaged.

This is not Varela’s fault, nor that of her character. Daphne is played gloriously against all the tropes of the female assassin: it’s no coincidence her most effective undercover disguise is an estate agent. Add to this, Varela is deaf: this element affects, yet does not define, her character and that’s exactly the way disability should be portrayed. It is even worked nicely in to the plot, with one of McCabe’s weapons in development being a sonic cannon. However, I’d like to have seen more of her in action; perhaps for budgetary reasons, this is limited, or perhaps Cappello just wasn’t interested in that aspect.

This brings me to the other issue: Cappello the director is too much in love with Cappello the actor. The latter wears out his welcome well before riding to the rescue of the supposed heroine, in McCabe’s underground lair. This is a shame, since Daphne is such a gloriously unconventional character, the reverse should have happened. Tony is never interesting to begin with, the script (also by Cappello, naturally) forgetting to give him any particular reason to exist, beyond Daphne needing someone to talk to. Having him become the hero for the finale, feels forced and unnatural. This is not enough to derail an excellent concept, or negate what I think is likely only the second disabled action heroine on this site, after Ready, Willing and Able. Yet it’s definitely a pity.

Dir: Frank A. Cappello
Star: Cami Varela, Frank A. Cappello, Nicholas Ontiveros, Arina Manta

Fountaine and the Vengeful Nun Who Wouldn’t Die

  By

★★
“Jack of all trades, master of nun…”

You will probably understand why the title more or less rocketed to the top of my watch-list, especially when accompanied by the poster (right). Naturally, it was almost inevitable that it could not possibly live up to either: the question was mostly, how far short it would fall. The answer is, “a fair bit, yet not irredeemably so,” even if the first half if considerably duller than I wanted. Indeed, it’s also rather confusing, in terms of what’s going on. As well as I can piece things together, Mary (Stern) is a nun who gets sent to an asylum after losing her sister, though it turns out to be less a mental-care facility than you’d expect.

There, she meets and falls for another nun, Lee (Tripp), and the pair escape. Mary eventually falls in with a vigilante group, intent on taking down the criminal empire of Fountaine, while Lee is abducted by the same group. With the help of trusty sidekick Sam (Clower), who was also Lee’s adopted brother, Mary acquires the set of special skills necessary, in addition to a fetching zebra-striped eye-patch and a very pointy Samurai sword This leads to storming Fountaine’s headquarters, in order to rescue her love. I think that hits most of the main points, though I accept no responsibility if I’m wrong. To be honest though, this is not really plot-oriented, being a collage of elements from exploitation cinema over the last fifty years.

The most obvious influence is probably Kill Bill, which was itself a patchwork assembly, so we’ve got to the point where exploitation cinema truly is eating itself. The other angle is clearly the nunsploitation genre of sinful sisters, though it has to be said, this is remarkably chaste in comparison. I think there is only one pair of breasts and zero full nudity in the whole thing, a tally at which Jess Franco would laugh patronisingly. It isn’t even close to being the first “retro grindhouse” entry that harks back to the style, trailing a decade behind both Nude Nuns With Big Guns and the recently reviewed Sister Wrath (a.k.a. Nun of That), the latter in particular doing a better job at being more than a third-gen photocopy of the genre.

Instead, it concentrates on the violence, though to mixed results. When it concentrates on practical effects, it’s not bad and occasionally reaches impressive. However, bad CGI is something you would never have seen in the seventies, and its presence here is equally unwelcome and unsatisfactory. The other problem is the lead actress falling short of the charismatic heroines in the films which inspired this. Pam Grier. Tura Satana. Dyanne Thorne. Meiko Kaji. Christina Lindberg. Stern will not be joining them in the pantheon of greats any time soon. And good retro grindhouse is capable of being entertaining, even if you have no knowledge of the genre’s history. I’m rather less than certain that’s the case here.

Dir: James Dean
Star: Mallory Stern, Ron Clower, Jaclyn Tripp, Zera Lynd

Sister Wrath

  By

★★★½
“Nun-conformist”

I think it’s safe to say you’ll probably be able to decide within a few minutes, whether or not this is your cup of tea. The opening scene is set in a strip-club where the next act on the main stage is dressed as a nun. After a couple of minutes, she pulls out an unfeasibly large weapon from under her clerical garb, and guns down the mobsters present, in gory fashion. Thereafter, you can expect more of the same, along with extremely savage jabs at organized religion. Catholicism is the main target, but Judaism and Hinduism get their share of jabs: for example, Gandhi is a martial arts teacher. Or there’s a Yiddish hitman, Viper Goldstein (Lavallee), who practices the art of “Jew Jitsu”. If you just roll your eyes at that, this is likely not for you. However, if you roll your eyes and also laugh, then you, like me, may be the intended target audience.

The heroine is Kelly (Nicklin) an aspiring nun with a bad temper, who ends up enrolled, not entirely willingly, in the Order of the Black Habit – though surely Order of the Bad Habit would have been an even better name? Whatever… They are a group of fighting nuns, each named after one of the seven deadly sins. Unsurprisingly, Kelly becomes Sister Wrath, and joins her colleagues, such as Sister Pride (Cipolla), in taking down the criminal empire of Momma Rizzo (Tretheway, shamelessly channeling Shelley Winters in Bloody Mama). Momma isn’t going to sit back and let that happen, however. After her own goons prove not up to the task of taking on the Black Habit, she brings in Goldstein and his Ninja Throwing Stars of David, to escalate the war. With the help of a mole inside the church, he kidnaps Sister Pride, in order to lure Wrath and the rest of the nuns into a trap.

There’s a lot of glorious invention here, not least the remarkably catchy musical number in heaven, which rivals the one at the end of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. [In one of the film’s rare subtle moments, the same actor is here playing both Jesus Christ and the Devil] It’s gory and foul-mouthed, though for whatever reason, remains remarkably chaste: the stripper in the opening scene is wearing pasties. Likely only a lack of the necessary gratuitous nudity prevented this from getting a seal of approval, because the rest of it is right in my wheel-house of poor taste. Cameos from Debbie Rochon and Lloyd Kaufman – again, if you don’t know who they are… – only add to the sense of fun. The latter plays the Pope, who shows up late to absolve everyone of their sins. If not quite reaching the dizzy heights of post-grindhouse classics like Hobo With a Shotgun, it’s one of the rare cases where a B-movie genuinely lives up to the promise of its poster.

Dir: Richard Griffin
Star: Sarah Nicklin, Alexandra Cipolla, Rich Tretheway, David Lavallee Jr.
a.k.a. Nun of That