Tag: USA

9-Ball

  By

★½
“A load of balls.”

Oh, dear. There’s part of me which thinks this is what you get when you try and make actors out of pool players. For the star here, Barretta, is one of the top women cue artists in the world. She’s joined here by cameos from a couple of bigger pool stars i.e. people even I’ve heard of, in Jeanette ‘The Black Widow’ Lee and Allison Fisher, and you can’t really expect much out of any professional sportswomen, in terms of acting ability. However, she isn’t that bad, though this may just be relative to some of her fellow cast members. And, to be fair to the actors here, you could be an Oscar-winner, and still not be able to do anything with the wretched script, which is little more than a parade of cliches, when not being a shameless advert for the American Poolplayers Association and its leagues.

Gail (Barretta) is the daughter of a pool player, who saw Dad stabbed to death in the street in front of her house. Taken in by creepy Uncle Joey (Hanover), Gail has clearly inherited some of her father’s skills, and Joey makes her turn them to his benefit, hustling suckers for money in bars. But, of course, Gail has dreams of her own, meeting Nice Guy™ Mark (Kochanowicz), and wants to leave Joey to head out on her own as a professional player. Hence the largely pointless cameos by Lee and Fisher, advising Gail how to achieve her goal. Joey isn’t happy at the prospect of using his cash cow, and beats up Gail, who absconds with his “retirement fund”. Though initially sent to jail, he gets bailed out, and the time spent inside hasn’t exactly improved his temper.

I was really hoping for considerably more, and better filmed, pool. It’s  closer to being a Lifetime TVM with occasional interludes of the sport. And on the (sporadic) occasions we see Gail in action, we mostly see her striking the cue ball, or the target ball going into the pocket – hardly ever both in the same frame. What’s the point of having one of the world’s top players in your movie, if you rarely see them making their pro-quality shots?

It all builds towards an APA team tournament in Las Vegas, which at least. is a little better in this regard. Though that only shows up in the last ten minutes, leaving precious little room for any kind of tension to built. We gallop through it, to a final shot which don’t realize is the final shot, until after it has been pocketed. Even Joey’s subplot is hustled off-screen with an absolute minimum of excitement, despite him turning up at the event with a gun. There are possibilities in the idea, which I won’t deny: after all, pool is one of the few games where men and women can compete on equal terms. But they are painfully squandered by the wretched direction and script. As bar sports action heroine movies go, I guess we’ll have to wait for the Fallon Sherrock biopic.

Dir: Anthony Palma
Star: Jennifer Barretta, Kurt Hanover, Mark Kochanowicz, Jennifer Butler

Too Hot to Handle

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★★★
“If you can’t stand the heat…”

Director Schain had already worked with his wife Caffaro on the Ginger trilogy, in which she played (per Wikipedia), “a tough and resourceful bed-hopping private-eye and spy.” Here, the character isn’t too different, though her day job is rather more morally questionable, being a professional killer. “Samantha Fox” (Caffaro) is the identity she has adopted, as she works on a series of hits in the Philippines. On her trail is the local chief of detectives, Domingo De La Torres (Ipalé), who first views Samantha as a suspect, but their relationship quickly becomes more intimate. It feels almost like a precursor to Basic Instinct, in that there’s a cop obsessed with someone he’s supposed to be investigating, and really doesn’t care whether or not she’s a murderer.

The film does aim to make Samantha quite a sympathetic character, in that all the people we see her kill, as ones without whom society is better off. But there are a couple of moments where she seems clearly psychopathic, to Villanelle-esque levels. For example, she takes pleasure in sitting and watching her first victim slowly suffocate to death. This is not by accident. When Domingo takes her on a shooting trip, she states, “It’s much more of a turn on to watch something die slowly. Even then, the greater the distance, the less the fun.” It’s an attitude we see in action, at a cock-fighting event which is apparently her idea of a date night (I’m pleased to report Chris is perfectly happy with dinner and a movie). While watching animals fight to the death, she is simultaneously dreaming about having sex. This seems… not exactly normal.

Yet, Samantha is still depicted as nicer than her victims: it’s not as if her twisted fantasies hurt anyone else. Well, except for her victims, anyway. I did like the way she rarely used physical means to take them down, outside of a duel against an operative De La Torres sends to the boat where she lives. Mind you, that scene is functional rather than impressive, and so it makes sense for the film-makers to script it so that she relies on her smarts. She’s fond of disguises, whether it’s pretending to be an art journalist, or going full brownface as she pretends to be a local maid. Caffaro clearly also has no inhibitions about shedding her clothes, though her figure is on the lighter side for my tastes.

Less effective in general is Ipalé, who became well-knows twenty years later, as Pharaoh Seti in The Mummy and its sequel. It feels as if he learned his lines phonetically, and he makes little overall impression here. I was more excited to see veteran Philippino actor Diaz as De La Torres’s lieutenant, for once getting to play a good guy. Overall, while nothing particularly special, this is reasonably entertaining, and considerably more twisted than I expected in terms of its protagonist and her psyche.

Dir: Don Schain
Star:  Cheri Caffaro, Aharon Ipalé, Vic Diaz, Corinne Calvet

Skull Forest

  By

★½
“Going Dutch can be a very bad thing…”

I think Len Kabasinski probably is the director with more  films reviewed here than anyone else, save perhaps Andy Sidaris. This is the fifth; the previous four have seem palpable improvement, from the near-unwatchable Warriors of the Apocalypse, to the reasonably competent Hellcat’s Revenge II: Deadman’s Hand. This, however, is one of his earlier efforts, and you have to peer pretty hard past the dreadful film-making style to see any worthwhile elements.

In particular, it feels as if it was made as a wager, after someone bet him he couldn’t make an entire film with the camera pointed at a 30-degree angle. The Dutch angle shot, in which the camera is tilted to evoke a sense of unease, is a well-known cinematic technique, used by the likes of Hitchcock. But it’s one that needs moderation. In a famous review of Battlefield Earth, Roger Ebert said of the director, “Roger Christian, has learned from better films that directors sometimes tilt their cameras, but he has not learned why.” The same is true here of Kabasinski, who appears to think every shot is better at 30 degrees off vertical. Or perhaps he was just drunk throughout filming. Then there’s the excessive close-ups and violent shaking of the camera. No. Just, no.

The story open with a quote from The Most Dangerous Game, and that’s what we get. Four women, on a weekend getaway, find themselves targeted by a group of rich hunters, and have to fight for their lives. That’s the entire plot, and I’m fine with that. The action is no great shakes, to be honest; a lot of something happening off-screen, then cut to a not-too-convincing make-up effect. The only sequence that succeeded in holding my attention, was when two women among the hunters had a falling out, and ended up fighting each other. Kabasinski plays another one of the villains, and I’m not sure which is more distracting: the single contact lens his character wears, or the bad English accent employed, for no apparent reason.

However, there is a surprising amount of nudity, so the film, clearly aiming at shallow exploitation (and I’m fine with that too!), does at least deliver on this score. Though it is a bit of a mixed bag; Playboy model Neeld looks the best, but Brooks has the most memorable (if not exactly erotic)  shot, clawing her way naked out of the shallow grave in which she was left for dead, and beginning her quest for vengeance. However, the impact of these and any other credible moments, are sucked away by the truly dreadful camerawork employed. It seems likely to induce motion sickness and/or a migraine. If he’d simply nailed the camera to a tree, it would have been an enormous improvement, and likely been worth close to another whole star. I guess this was early enough in his career Kabasinski was still experimenting. We should be glad it’s not a style with which he persisted.

Dir: Len Kabasinski
Star: Sara Brooks, Lisa Neeld, Pamela Sutch, Melissa Scott

HellKat

  By

★
“Contains far too much pussying about.”

Rarely has there been a bigger gap between expectations generated by a synopsis, and the underwhelming reality of the actual movie. The former: “A fallen MMA fighter must win a netherworld no-holds-barred death tournament against man, beast and demon to save her soul. ” While I guess it’s not technically inaccurate, you will be forgiven for expecting something like Mortal Kombat on ‘roids – and not the recent, fairly crappy remake. Instead, you get a film which dillies, dallies and faffs about for the first forty minutes. Considering it runs less than eighty in total, including the end credits, this is not a good thing. And the “netherworld no-holds-barred death tournament”? It’s a boxing ring lit by red lights, in which the heroine has a couple of fights against people in remaindered Halloween masks. You should now understand my palpable disappointment.

When you are a low-budget movie (actually, true for any level, but especially on smaller budgets), you typically need to hit the ground running, and grab your audience’s attention quickly. It’s okay if there’s a lull thereafter, but in today’s world of short attention spans and other entertainment alternatives, if you lose people, they’re probably gone forever. Unless, that is, they run a site devoted to action heroines in popular culture, and thus feel obligated to soldier on, for review purposes. Though even they maybe spend more time than is ideal checking their email, eating snacks, and wondering how in hell they are ever going to write 500 words about this.

In this case, it begins with ex MMA fighter Katrina (Cohen), who is on the road in murky circumstances. Her car breaks down, and she accepts a lift from a stranger, whom she ends up having to shoot. She then goes to a bar, and hangs out there for a bit, being paid in tequila for mopping up patrons’ puke. The customers are an unprepossessing lot, abusive to each other and to Kat, even though the barman (Bouchet) wields a sawn-off shotgun at the slightest provocation. Again, we get forty minutes of this before the Devil, or a representative thereof, turns up in the shape of the man who gave her a lift. He is Satanic fight promoter Jimmy Scott (Davies), who gets Kat’s signature on a contract and the tournament is finally under way.

It’s pretty obvious we’re not in the real world from the get-go, e.g. Scott possesses demonic teeth and doesn’t die after getting shot. A bar patron survives a shotgun blast to the head with nothing more than a bad attitude. The number of moons exceeds the customer “one”. Kat, however, is so oblivious that none of this makes any impression on her. Any of this would have been forgivable, had the fight scenes – when they show up – been solid and effective. They aren’t. There’s a couple of decent moments, and Cohen’s stunt double [yeah, it’s kinda obvious] is athletic enough. Then it’s back to the chit-chat once again. Nobody cares. If there is a hell, it probably involves watching this on endless repeat.

Dir: Scott Jeffrey, Rebecca Matthews
Star: Sarah T. Cohen, Ryan Davies, Serhat Metin, Adrian Bouchet

The Long Kiss Goodnight – 25 years on

  By ,

★★★
“We have a mommy who slays the monsters for her daughter – but the monsters are real.” — Shane Black“

As mentioned in my review of Kate, I was startled to discover I had never reviewed this, since it is one of the most well-known entries in the action heroine genre of its time. Since its time was almost exactly 25 years ago  – the movie was released on October 11, 1996 – now seems as good a point as any to rectify the omission. It was the second collaboration in our field between Renny Harlin and then-wife Geena Davis. The first was Cutthroat Island, a film whose troubled production and spectacular failure we have previously covered. But that did not dissuade either Harlin or studio New Line Pictures from trying again, albeit without the troublesome period setting and sea-going. As a result, the budget here was $65 million, a third lower than Cutthroat.

Some aspects were still not exactly cheap. Writer Shane Black was, at the time, a ‘rock star” screenplay author, having written Lethal Weapon – though subsequent efforts The Last Boy Scout and The Last Action Hero had not lived up to commercial expectations. Still, the script for this provoked a bidding war between New Line, Warner Brothers and Columbia Studios, eventually costing the first-named $4 million in July 1994, including a $500K producer’s fee for Black. That was a new record for a spec script, one which would last more than a decade, breaking the previous high of $3 million, paid to Joe Eszterhas for Basic Instinct. This was before filming on Cutthroat Island had even started, so production of Goodnight was put on the back-burner. Consequently, shooting did not begin until 18 months after the script was purchased.

It took place from January-May 1996 in Ontario, Canada, and the conditions posed many issues for the cast and crew. According to Harlin, “The coldest night was when we were working on the bridge in the end sequence. It was a night when the wind was blowing 70 miles an hour and it was minus 98 degrees with the wind chill.” Though it was probably Davis, who had to pretend she was unconscious and lie on the ground, who experienced the worst of it. Harlin had nothing but praise for her: “Geena’s particularly tough. She’s very athletic and very determined. So, if there’s anything she feels that she can’t do, she’ll put all her energies into making sure that she can learn it, and by the time it is needed, she can do it.”

Generally, however, production went smoothly – save for a historic location burning down.  But if you read Black’s February 1995 script, you can see the violence has been significantly toned down by the time it reaches the screen. For example, this line depicting a character, shot in the head in a diner: “Mr. Shotgun dies on his feet. Outgoing matter. Flung. Spattered on the grill where it sizzles along with burnt hamburger.” Ick. A test screening also triggered a significant change. Jackson’s character, private eye Mitch Henessey, was originally intended to die, but the audience reaction was so negative, that Harlin went back and shot additional footage. “That’s right! You can’t kill me, motherfuckers!” now crows Henessey, as he comes back from the dead.

While not the disaster at the box-office which was Cutthroat Island, it wasn’t a great success. In its opening weekend, it came in at #3, well back of fellow new release The Ghost and the Darkness, and even behind The First Wives’ Club, in its fourth week out. By the end of its run, it had taken $33.4 million, though did better overseas, with $56 million. Still, that $89.4 million was not much more than the production budget and after promotion and other costs, profits will have been slim to non-existent. Was it a hang-over from Cutthroat? Poor marketing? Or simply having an action heroine? Black reckons “It might have made more money” with a male lead. That all said, how does it stand up, a quarter-century later?

Truth be told, I’ve seen this several times over the years: it always feels I should like it more than I do, and I come away feeling a little disappointed. Especially now, it is a product of its time, and certainly, pales in comparison to not dissimilar spy movies since, such as Salt or Atomic Blonde. The pacing feels particularly leisurely, with it being close to an hour before Samantha Caine (Davis) gets fully in touch with her inner assassin, “Charly” Baltimore. Charly suffered amnesia after a fall on a mission eight years previously, and had become happy housewife Samantha, complete with boyfriend and adorable little moppet. But a blow to the head reawakens Charley – much to the concern of a number of people, not least of whom are her former employers, to whom she could now become an embarrassment.

Firstly, what is it with Black and hyperviolent Christmas film? Like Die Hard, and much of his output, this takes place over the festive season because… I guess it’s a counterpoint to that hyperviolence. That aside, this is mostly the journey of Charly to rediscover her past, but the terrorist mission she was targeted with disrupting, is about to happen in a couple of days – what are the odds? – as a CIA false-flag operation, under Assistant Director Leland Perkins (Malahide). As leverage against her, Perkins’s minion (Bierko) kidnaps the moppet. Big mistake. Charly storms in and rescues her daughter, before having to stop the planned attack. I must say, the moppet is remarkably resilient, surviving being thrown through a hole in the wall of her house, and a hellacious tanker crash, with barely a scratch.

It might have been more fun to have sustained the housewife/spy duality for longer e.g. having Charly turn up at the PTA, or deal with the thousand and one microaggressions of everyday suburban life. Instead, we get rather too many scenes of her driving round with Henessey. These are kinda fun – there’s an entire film to be made about the shady PI, with his sideline in blackmail – yet in a movie that’s two hours long, feel like needless padding. The bad guys are basically stupid, wasting any number of opportunities to take care of the problem i.e. Charley, and go about their plot in a way that… well, let’s be charitable and say, maybe it made sense in the mid-nineties. That is not the only aspect to have dated poorly. The whole “false flag” thing now has the distinct scent of conspiracy nut to it, since we’ve heard this claimed for virtually every attack since 9/11.

It’s certainly not all bad though. Davis is great on both sides of her split personality, eventually merging them into a whole which feels comfortable. There’s no denying her derring-do, and on several occasions, Harlin shoots things so you feel certain it’s a stunt double assembling a gun, or ice-skating, only to pan up and show – nope, it was Geena. The final explosion at Niagara Falls is as spectacular a giant fireball as you could hope to see, and the action scenes in general are top-notch stuff, from a time before you assumed CGI was always involved. However, I think I preferred Cutthroat, not least due to its more consistent tone. Black always wants to seem both hard-edged and jokey; he doesn’t get it right here, leaving each side pointing a finger at the other, in accusatory fashion.

Both Jackson and Harlin speak fondly of the film. Jackson calls Long Kiss the favorite of his own films to watch, and Harlin agrees. Despite the initially underwhelming return, its cult status has helped to feed discussion of a sequel over the years, though Davis – long divorced from Harlin – would not be involved. The director said it would be about Jackson’s character crossing paths with an adult version of Davis’s daughter. Harlin now lives in China, where the film is apparently well-regarded and said that “Several people, producers and financiers, here in China have talked to me about doing either a Chinese remake or doing an English-language sequel.” As of June 2021, he still wants to make a second part.

Will it ever happen? Only time will tell, though given how long since the original movie, it seems doubtful. But we’ll always have that, and the moderate yet violent delights of Geena Davis as a home-maker turned lethal operative.

Dir: Renny Harlin
Star: Geena Davis, Samuel L. Jackson, Patrick Malahide, Craig Bierko

Babysitter Must Die

  By

★★★½
“The babysitter, murders”

Josie (Scott) is a babysitter, though her real interest is her work as a leader in the Girl Guide-like “Mustard Seed” summer camp. In this she mentors young girls, and accumulates some nifty skills of her own. This is relevant, due to her current situation.  She’s taking care of Sophie (Hazen), the youngest daughter of the Castillo family. The father is a rich music mogul, and they live in a remote mansion, deep in the Utah mountains. The family come back early, but before Josie can leave – she’s playing hide and seek with Sophie – there’s a home invasion by three people, under the leadership of The Woman (Yeaman). They’re no regular burglars, but members of a Satanic cult, intent on retrieving artifacts hidden in the house by its previous owners. These can then be used to sacrifice the inhabitants, and open a portal for… something not very nice to enter our world. 

It’s quickly made clear that the new arrivals have no problems with killing anyone who attempts to interfere with their mission. But they don’t initially know about Josie’s presence. You can probably work out how the rest of the movie goes from there – and you’ll be more or less right. Josie gets caught, escapes and taps into her inner warrioress, to ensure at least Sophie survives the night. She picks off the intruders, one by one, before eventually facing off against The Woman. 

While there’s not an enormous amount new or special in the execution, there are enough wrinkles to lift this above average for the “home invasion” sub-genre. Firstly the heroine is unusual enough to be interesting. She’s a quiet, understated type, who’d rather spend the night babysitting, than go to a party with her friends. Her background in the Mustard Seeds provides a justification for some of her abilities, though it’s an angle I’d like to have seen used more. Maybe, given the Christmas setting,  thrown in some Home Alone-style improvised defenses? The other main strength is the antagonist being a woman too, and Yeaman delivers the necessary level of intensity to pull off the role. The apocalyptic motivation is also a fresh one, and there’s enough background dropped in over the course of proceedings, to give this more depth than “because cultists”.

There are some holes in the plot. For example, at one point when Josie is fighting one of the cultists, things get a bit noisy – but the other two seem completely oblivious. There are also points where Josie’s actions seem illogical, or at least where her motivation is unclear. However, Glass keeps things moving forward with sufficient energy to overcome any issues. Credit is also due to cinematographer Neil Fernandez, who does a good job of capturing the isolation, from the opening shot as Josie drives up with her Mom to the mansion. An early game of hide-and-seek both foreshadows subsequent events, and gives us a good look at the home’s interior. For a small-scale, relatively low-budget production this was a pleasant surprise. At 76 minutes, it does what it needs to, and in a lean, efficient way.

Dir: Kohl Glass
Star: Riley Scott, Melinda Yeaman, Nic Fitzgerald, Scarlett Hazen

Wilderness Survival for Girls

  By

★★★
“Just because we’re girls, why do we have to be afraid all the time?”

Three teenage girls, Ruth (Brox), Deborah (Henning) and Kate (Humiston) head off to the remote mountain cabin owned by Kate’s parents for a weekend away. Initially, it’s an overdose of teenage drama bullshit in various flavours, as they drink, smoke weed, talk about sex and so on. But their soap-opera idyll is interrupted by the unexpected return of Ed (Morrison), who has been squatting in the cabin. The girls capture him, using the gun he left behind, with the intent of taking him down the mountain to the police the next day. But as the night goes on, the tensions between the three young women begin to fracture their friendship. There’s also the question of Ed: is he the innocent drifter he claims to be, or is there a connection to a long-buried trauma in Kate’s history?

If you’re hoping for definitive answers to at least some of the questions asked by the film, you’re going to come away disappointed. Ed is almost a MacGuffin in human form. He exists largely to propel the rest of the film forward, and act as a force which will cause the girls to reveal their true nature over the course of events. They are three very distinct personalities, to the point that I wondered if (and not for the first time) they were intended to represent the three aspects of the psyche: id, ego and super-ego. While my recent knowledge of teenage girls is strictly limited to parental experience – and thus not that recent – if there’s one thing I know, it’s that they tend to congregate with those like them. The disparate trio we get here wouldn’t last 10 minutes in high school before tearing themselves apart. Though I guess that is what happens for a good chunk of proceedings here.

You should probably be forgiven for having strong reactions to them: my instant dislike of Kate, turns out to be not unjustified, considering the ease with which she embraces her inner psychopath. Deborah, meanwhile, is a little too one-dimensional and obvious for my tastes, so it’s left to Ruth to do a lot of the dramatic heavy lifting. Brox does well enough in that task to keep the movie interesting; at least, once it gets past a rocky opening 20 minutes, and the thriller aspects come into play, more than the “teen angst” ones. I will confess to being somewhat disappointed by the ending, which seems contrived in such a way as to achieve closure, without any of the participants having to take personal responsibility for their actions. There are also any number of poor choices made by the trio, in order to reach that point. Though, against speaking from my parental experience, that’s probably about par for the teenage girl course. There was just about enough here to sustain its brisk 78 minute running-time, and going much longer would likely have been a mistake.

Dir: Eli B. Despres, Kim Roberts
Star: Jeanette Brox, Megan Henning, Ali Humiston, James Morrison

The Super Femmes

  By

★★
“Hardly super, thanks for asking…”

Running a crisp 58 minutes in its omnibus edition, this is a bit like Kung Fu Femmes. Both were originally web series, but have now made their way on to Amazon Prime, which is where I stumbled across them. This is rather less grounded, taking place in a world where superheroes and supervillains exist, doing battle in the usual manner. While not technically based on a comic-book, it might as well be – the poster makes that abundantly clear. The IMDb description calls it “filled with satire.” I’m not so sure, and think we probably need to have a talk about what “satire” actually is. Creator Garris seems largely to believe that simply repeating the cliches of the genre passes the bar. He’s wrong. There needs to be exaggeration of these tropes, and that’s largely missing here. Its absence leaves this mostly a bad comic-book, rather than being a parody of one. For example, adding visual effects like “POW!” to punches is hardly inventive, and certainly not satire.

The heroine is Cat Nips (Vanelle), who is investigating the mysterious disappearance of another superheroine, Smash Mistress (Caruana). She has been kidnapped by malevolent genius Mad Mort (Gordon), who has a machine which can absorb her powers, and inject them into his short-lived clones of Smash Mistress, which do his evil bidding. Not helping matters, the local superheroes group, led by The Smoking Cape (Paris), have gone on strike, to protest budget cuts proposed by the city’s mayor – who is actually their leader, in his daytime identity. What’s up with that? There’s also a guild of supervillains, though not everyone in it is happy at Mad Mort’s plans to take things over.

Occasionally, it does work, mostly when Garris pushes the boat out beyond the cliches into more imaginative territory. There’s the Golden Goddess, a retired superheroine now reduced to selling “magical” headbands on line. And some of the villains are entertainingly crap, such as Pasta Fingers and White Rapper Kid – not exactly useful powers. Things get thrown for a loop at the end with the unexpected arrival of a superheroine from the future, who states, “I’ve come from season three.” That’s the kind of self-referential nonsense which the series needs more of. It’s on considerably less solid ground when trying to take right-on jabs at, for example, the portrayal of women. Considering the costumes of the ones here, this comes off as empty cant.

The production here is low-end, but solid enough in most regards. That also applies to the performances, few of which are memorable in either direction. And that might be part of the problem: it’s all rather too low-key. If you think of comic-book movies, the characters which stand out e.g. the Joker (whether played by Jack Nicholson or Joaquin Phoenix, tend to be those that are over-the-top. But the delivery here skews more toward the prosaic, and character names like – and I wrote this down – “Sharon MaBooty” don’t go far enough towards making up the difference.

Dir: Dean Garris
Star: Vanelle, Leah Caruana, Roger Paris, Robert Gordon

Alone

  By

★★
“Getting away from it all.”

Jessica (Willcox) is making a break from her new life, packing up her possessions and driving away from her home and family in the big city. However, it’s not long before her journey through the countryside begins to hit bumps in the road. Specifically, in the shape of another driver (Menchaca), whose actions against Jessica veer between the aggressively hostile and the creepily over-friendly. The two encounter each other on a number of occasions, the incidents escalating until he finally drugs and kidnaps her. She wakes to find herself locked in the basement of a remote cabin, and needs to find a way to avoid a fate which, it appears, others before her have suffered.

A remake of Swedish film Gone, the major failing here is not enough happening to sustain the running time. The story needs to spend significantly less time on the build-up; for example, by cutting out the background stuff about exactly what it is, that Jessica is escaping from. We are given no reason to care, and it has little or no relevance to the movie’s central conflict. Similarly, there are likely too many encounters between her and him, before he finally abducts her. We get the picture after virtually the first one – and I have to say, the sensible thing for anyone to do thereafter, would have been to reject any further attempts, rather than engage in additional contact.

Of course, logic and common sense tend to be anathema to this genre, though there are times here where Jessica does behave credibly. For instance, her method of getting out of the basement is genuinely smart. I also liked the scene where, after her escape, she finds a hunter in the woods – only for the man to show up, and claim she’s his mentally-ill sister (an idea made plausible by her understandably hysterical reaction). But for every one of these positives, there are two negatives, such as her getting hold of his phone and calling… his wife, to let her know she’s married to a predator. While I admire the spirit of sisterhood there, I’d have suggested self-preservation might have been a better use of those cellphone minutes.

Eventually, we get to a finale, which has some more credibility speed-humps. Firstly, the coincidence that, in this gigantic forest, he buries a body right next to where she is hiding. And secondly, that when someone attacks you from the back seat of your car, you will immediately accelerate away which simultaneously fighting them, driving at top speed down a narrow forest track until the inevitable accident. Okay… This does lead to a half-decent brawl between them, on the scorched earth of a patch of cleared forest, with the crash having acted as a nice equalizer (despite the apparent lack of seat-belts!). It is, however, very much the definition of “too little, too late”, and can’t rescue this from the multiple missteps which have preceded it.

Dir: John Hyams
Star: Jules Willcox, Marc Menchaca, Anthony Heald

Till Death

  By

★★½
“Women don’t sweat, they glisten.”

I kinda agonized, for far longer than I should have, over whether this was a 3-star or 2½-star film. It’s probably 2¾. Or perhaps 2 5/8. No, 2 11/16. In the end though, it doesn’t matter. It’s just another in Megan Fox’s attempts to become the next Angelina Jolie, following in the footsteps of the similarly okay but not exactly memorable Rogue. Indeed, I initially thought this was by the same director, but turns out it’s a different director who uses initials in lieu of a first name. Anyway, with this one now available on Netflix, it will likely raise Fox’s action-actress profile. In terms of current rankings, she probably moves ahead of Ruby Rose in the rankings. Though that’s not exactly difficult.

The problems here are mostly pacing, with the movie being too slow to get to the main course. Emma (Fox) is unhappily married to Mark (Macken), an over-controlling lawyer, and is having an affair with one of Mark’s colleagues. After an excess of scenes belabouring these points, e.g. Mark orders her dessert after she has declined it (what a bastard!), on their 10th anniversary, Mark takes her out to a remote lakehouse. She wakes the next morning to find herself handcuffed to him, and Mark then blows his brains out. Turns out, his life was about to fall apart, but he has a plan to wreck Emma’s life from beyond the grave. This involves sending two thugs (Mulvey and Roth) to the house, one of whom has a beef with her, due to Emma having cost him his eye.

Our heroine, therefore, has to elude the home invaders while chained to a 180-lb (literal) dead weight, in a house from which all sharp objects have been carefully removed. This is kinda distracting, as I found myself figuring out alternative methods of separation, such as slamming the corpse’s wrist repeatedly in a car-door. But that’s perhaps for the best, as a distraction from too many shots of Emma dragging Mark’s body around the house, using her wedding-dress as a tarp (I’ll take “Over-obvious symbolism” for $400, please, Alex). Naturally, this unwanted connection lasts only until the plot decides it needs to be discarded, when it becomes a more standard home-invasion thriller.

It does perk up on the arrival of the villains, and there are some reasonably clever twists thereafter. To be honest, Mark’s warped imagination was almost impressive. Though if I was going to such lengths to extract revenge, I’d probably want to be there to see it. Where’s the fun otherwise? Fox does put in the effort, even if as Chris noted, Emma remains remarkably shevelled (as opposed to dishevelled) over the course of proceedings. Her hair and lipstick remain almost pristine despite crawling across grubby floors and snowy landscapes. I’m reminded of the old line quoted at the top; if you can still look hawt when drenched in blood and brains, your make-up artist deserves some kind of award.

Dir: S.K. Dale
Star: Megan Fox, Callan Mulvey, Jack Roth, Eoin Macken