Tag: USA

Aileen Wuornos: American Boogeywoman

  By

★★
“Till death do she part.”

Almost twenty years after her execution, Aileen Wuornos remains a cultural icon. A very rare example of a genuine female serial killer, she was killed by lethal injection in 2002, after being convicted of six murders, and confessing to a seventh. The following year, Charlize Theron won an Oscar for her portrayal of Wuornos in Monster, though for me, the film about the killer which is the best, is Nick Broomfield’s, Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer. It certainly deserves to be ranked among my favorite documentaries of all time, along with its post-execution follow-up, Aileen Wuornos: Life and Death of a Serial Killer. Any other version is going to have an uphill struggle in comparison, and this peters out into a trashy, tabloidesque tale, with perilously little connection to reality.

It does have an interesting structure, with a Broomfield stand-in (Sturgeon) interviewing Wuornos, the night before her execution. At this point, the killer is played by Ashley Atwood, and the make-up crew have done an amazing job, along with Atwood’s capturing of her target’s mannerisms. Wuornos then tells the interviewer the story of her short-lived marriage to yacht club president Lewis Fell (Bell), almost five decades her senior. During this, she confesses to several murders, including that of her brother, though the interviewer pulls her up, as her version doesn’t align with the known facts. This “unreliable narrator” element has potential, but is rapidly discarded – a shame, as what the film offers instead is rather pedestrian.

Overall, it’s not much more than a truish-crime take on pot-boilers like the Poison Ivy franchise, in which attractive young gold-diggers embed themselves in families, before revealing their murderous natures. Here, the young Wuornos (List), considerably more attractive than the Death Row version, charms her way into marrying Fell after just a couple of weeks, much to the concern and chagrin of his daughter, Jennifer (Hearst). We’ve already established Wuornos’s violent tendencies, and these escalate until she murders the family lawyer, who threatens to expose what he has uncovered about her past, unless she takes his cash offer and leaves town. It all builds to a late-night confrontation on a boat in a storm, which I’m fairly certain is entirely fictional.

Farrands has carved out a niche for himself in this kind of not-so-true crime movie, his previous subjects having included Ted Bundy, the Manson killings and O.J. Simpson. Maybe they are more than a shallow skim, with stories which are not largely made up, and provide more insight into their subjects. This has little to offer, and doesn’t have the enjoyably salacious elements of Poison Ivy, even when Aileen is consummating her marriage to her husband. If it had told the story of Wuornos’s whole life, especially with more from Atwood, it could have been worthwhile, especially if embracing the uncertainty around her version of events. Instead, the only real positive result was discovering the two Broomfield documentaries are on YouTube. Guess what I’m watching tonight.

Dir: Daniel Farrands
Star: Peyton List, Tobin Bell, Lydia Hearst, Hamish Sturgeon

Jungle Girl

  By

★★½
“You can take the girl out of the jungle…”

This is nominally based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’s 1932 novel of the same name, also known as The Land of Hidden Men. Though there’s very little beyond the title in common. The book was set in Cambodia, and told the story of explorer Gordon King, who finds a civilization which has been lost for a thousand years. This… isn’t. It is instead the story of Nyoka Meredith (Gifford), the daughter of a doctor working with the Masamba tribe in the middle of Africa. “Nyoka” is Swahili for snake, and she seems to spend most of her free time swinging through the forest on vines.

But there’s trouble in paradise, as ne’er-do-wells Slick Latimer (Mohr) and Bradley Meredith (Bardette) show up, hoping to get their hands on the tribe’s stash of diamonds. Their plan involves Dr. Meredith’s twin brother, who just got out of jail. They knock off the doctor, replacing him with his sibling, who feigns “amnesia” to explain the holes in his memory. They also team up with disgruntled witch-doctor Shamba, who was displaced from his tribal position by Western medicine. But Nyoka, along with Jack Stanton (Neal) and Curly Rogers, stand in the way of the villains. Though naturally, they will have narrowly to dodge death – I’m guessing, fourteen times, give or take.

While this was the first serial in the sound era to have a female lead, it’s a little disappointing in this regard. It feels like, over the course of the 15 episodes, Nyoka is more rescued than rescuing, though it does work both ways. In terms of getting into the action, there’s more than one occasion where she just yells “Look out!”, then lets the menfolk get on with punching each other. However, Nyoka still has her moments, such as in Episode 5, where she dives into a gorge and goes hand-to-hand with a crocodile, in order to save a native child. I did appreciate the lack of any romance here. Despite the obvious candidacy of Jack, everyone is too busy narrowly dodging those deaths, I think, for emotional entanglements.

Considerably less progressive is the portrayal of the natives. I guess we should be happy Shamba is at least played by a non-American, Frank Lackteen being Lebanese-born. But the native boy saved from the crocodile? Born in Minnesota (the actor, Tommy Cook, was still active almost eighty years later, playing a senator in an episode of Space Force!). Even aside from the blackface, add patronising lines like “It took a white man to figure it out,” and there are a lot of elements which have not aged well, to put it mildly. Some of the plot threads are also a bit implausible, such as Jack and Curly building an impromptu refinery in the native village, to convert crude oil into airplane fuel. I’m fairly sure it’s not that easy.

One of the stunt co-ordinators on this was the legendary Yakima Canutt. He would go on to choreograph the chariot race in Ben-Hur, though there’s none of his renowned equine stuntwork here. Helen Thurston was the main double for Gifford, though for the scenes where she’s swinging from vine to vine, a male stuntman (David Sharpe) took over. Apparently, Gifford said he looked better in the costume than she did! The series was so successful it became the first Republic serial to be re-released, six years later. A lot of the action footage from this was reworked into 1955’s Panther Girl of the Kongo, but we’ll talk more about that in its own review.

Dir: William Witney and John English
Star: Frances Gifford, Tom Neal, Trevor Bardette, Gerald Mohr

American Zealot

  By

★★★
“Constitutional wrongs.”

As I write this, in December 2021, abortion is again a bit of a hot topic on the American political scene. I am, personally, fairly neutral on the topic. Or, at least, to the point that I’d need to spend the entire review outlining my position. Such nuance tends not to fly on the Internet, where you are either a baby-killer or want to turn America into The Handmaid’s Tale, and moderation is for pussies. On that basis, this film is a bit of a losing proposition, likely destined to satisfy no-one with its relative fair-handedness. These days, it feels like everyone just wants their echo chamber reinforced, rather than challenged, even in the mild way this offers.

It is, certainly, a fringe entry here. Lucy (Mackenzie, the director’s fiancée at the time, now wife) is a girl. Who uses a gun. So there’s that. An action heroine though? Not so much, at least in the genuinely understood definition. Like the topic of abortion, it’s complex. For Lucy is in her final year at a Christian high school, and is shocked to discover that her classmate and best friend, Rachel (Marie), has terminated her pregnancy, in defiance of everything Lucy holds dear. After a moral conundrum (basically, the trolley problem) is posed by a teacher, Lucy decides to save future lives by shooting the doctor (Carey) at the women’s clinic, using a gun belonging to the parents of a classmate, Ralph (Miller). However, does Lucy have the moral fortitude necessary to buttress her actions, or will her qualms about the act lead her down a different path?

Though Mackenzie is too old to make a convincing high-school girl (per the IMDB, she was 28 when this came out), it’s a good performance. You can see the way in which her beliefs lead Lucy down the path, to a point where her actions do not just make sense, they are almost required as a result of those beliefs. Less successful is the “de-programming” element, which largely consists of her teacher blustering, “You can’t sacrifice the minority to save the majority. That’s just not how good society functions.” Well, about that… Seems more like a problem with society, to be honest. It’s an angle which needed more effort applied to it, in order to be convincing.

It is also perhaps a little too understated for its own good. The shooting of the doctor is so low-key, you could blink and miss it, when in many ways, it’s the most important moment in the movie, and should have been weighted in accordance with it. Still, given the budget here was just $11,000, this is no small accomplishment. It looks and sounds like a far bigger budget production, and credit is also due to both of the Mackenzies, for being prepared to take on a challenging topic in a way that tries (largely successfully) to avoid being judgmental. While many independent film-makers go the commercially easy route of genre movies, this is something more challenging. If not without flaws, it should succeed in provoking thought.

Dir: James Mackenzie
Star: Ana Mackenzie, Kendall Miller, Keana Marie, Kristin Carey

Everything Everywhere All at Once

  By

★★★½
“I’d have settled for two of three.”

This has been a long, long time coming. I’ve been a fan of Yeoh since seeing her Hong Kong starring debut, Yes, Madam, which came out all the way back in 1985. Over the years since, her career has had its ups and downs, including complete retirement after her marriage in the late eighties. She returned, and is the only actress to have appeared in two movies rated five stars here: Heroic Trio and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. But her career in Hollywood has been limited to sterling support roles, in both movies and television, encompassing everything from Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies through Star Trek: Discovery to Crazy Rich Asians. A starring role, appropriate to her talents, never seemed to come along. 

Until now. Thirty-seven years after Yes, Madam, and at the age of 59, this film finally puts Yeoh where she deserves to be: front and centre. Yet, perhaps partly due to how long I’ve been waiting for this, I must confess to being a bit disappointed this is not a classic to match the titles listed above. Oh, it certainly has its moments, and Yeoh is as good as expected. However, its 139-minute running-time feels more a curse than a blessing. The concept at its core is almost infinite in scope, and I did feel the movie was trying to include all of it. Less could have been more, with a targetted approach preferable to the relentless overload adopted by the makers, which left me feeling as if I was drinking from a fire-hose.

The multiverses here literally rotate around Evelyn Wang (Yeoh), who runs a laundromat teetering on the edge of failure, with her husband, Waymond (Quan). Their marriage is also failing, her relationship with her daughter, Joy (Hsu) is on rocky ground, and she has to go to an appointment with hard-ass IRS tax auditor Deirdre Beaubeirdra (Curtis). The last is where things kick off, as she is visited by a Waymond from an alternate universe, who tells Evelyn she is the only hope of foiling the evil Jobu Tupaki. That’s an alternate Joy, who has gone insane and created a black hole-like vortex which could destroy all the multiverses. Fortunately, Evelyn’s abject failings at life give her the ability to tap into all the skills and knowledge of the other, better versions of herself.

Like I said: almost infinite in scope. Apparently, co-writer/director Kwan was diagnosed with ADHD during the creative process: to be frank, it shows. While the imagination on view is admirable, the film bounces about between ideas at a ferocious rate, almost regardless of whether they deserve it. We spend an inordinate amount of time in a multiverse where everyone has long, floppy fingers. Yet there is also buttplug-fu, which is an example of the movie going places you’d never have expected could be so entertaining. Or a lengthy, surprisingly engrossing, scene in which two rocks in an otherwise lifeless multiverse have a conversation in captions. Because why not?

To the film’s credit, it never abandons its characters, and that helps keep it grounded. Albeit only just, on occasion the movie standing on its tippy-toes as it tries desperately to avoid being blown away by its own excesses. It’s perhaps telling that, despite all the film’s visual bluster, the most effective moment for me was among the simplest, one character telling another, “In another life, I would’ve been happy just doing laundry and taxes with you.” As such, Yeoh is the story’s heart, and gets to demonstrate her unquestionable acting talent. It has been fascinating to see the development of that, especially considering her lack of not just experience but any formal training. I mean, she first entered the field close to four decades ago, as a former Miss World contestant. How many of them eventually go on to get talk of an Oscar?

It’s as a result of this that I kept watching the film, because I genuinely cared what happened to Evelyn. I wanted to see her figure it all out and make peace with the various forces trying to tear her humdrum life apart. From that angle, it’s close to soap-opera, albeit an unusually effective one. Except, of course, the means by which that peace is potentially achieved, includes multiverse hopping, and fighting an evil version of your own daughter, who wields a gurgling plughole of doom. It’s the overlap between the mundane and bizarre where this finds its own voice. The problem is, it tries too hard to live up to the title. Sure, give us everything, everywhere. I’d just rather it hadn’t done so, all at once.

Yet, similarly, it leaves an awful lot of potential on the table. Why is kung-fu virtually the only talent Evelyn uses? Tap into a universe where she’s a cab driver, and give us an epic car-chase. Or the one where she’s a cat-burglar, for heist purposes. It’s not hard to come up with a dozen such threads. Perhaps the makers were constrained by their budget, a relatively cheap $25 million – less than Crazy Rich Asians. They do an admirable job of squeezing value out of it; again, the sheer pace probably helps, with your brain trying so desperately to keep up, it’s hard-pushed to pay attention to any of the finer details.

But I’m glad I won’t go to my grave with my final paid cinematic experience being Terminator: Dark Fate. [Though the two Neanderthals beside us, talking loudly and checking their phones throughout, really make me think we are done with theatres] The Daniels deserve credit for the obvious invention displayed, and this is the kind of original property I’m happy to support, over another sequel and/or shitty comic adaptation. I also must mention the supporting cast, who are uniformly great, particularly Hsu as both aggravated daughter and multiiverse threatening villainess [There’s also a cameo by another eighties Hong Kong action actress, Michiko Nishiwaki. Maybe she’ll get her own movie next?]. That it stars one of the most under-rated actresses in Hollywood, finally getting the opportunity she deserves, is alone reason enough to see this. Just don’t expect too much.

Dir: Dan Kwan, Daniel Scheinert
Star: Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Jamie Lee Curtis

Resilience and the Lost Gems

  By

★★
“Lost and found”

I certainly admire the aim here; there’s aren’t enough action-heroine films which are aimed at a family audience, especially with a young protagonist. We’ve had The Golden Compass, Enola Holmes and Abigail, but they are pretty rare. This is a considerably lower-budget entry than those, though make no mistake, it still certainly qualifies here. Its 11-year-old heroine, Resilience O’Neil (Finn) – known for obvious reasons as Rizzie – has no apparent fear, whizzing around the Utah desert on her mini-bike, until a flash flood separates her from her parents and younger brother. She then has to survive on her own, fending off wolves, haboobs and a pair of predatory creeps, while making her way back to civilization to get help for her family.

What’s weird is, the titular gems are all but irrelevant. In the opening twenty minutes, there’s a lot of talk about them, and their loss 150 or so years ago. But apres le deluge, they are almost entirely forgotten, and what we have instead is a straightforward wilderness survival story. To be honest, this is a considerable improvement over the thoroughly unconvincing historical re-enactments in the beginning, complete with sepia tinting and fake film scratches. The flood is staged surprisingly well, to the point I was convinced everyone concerned was sure to be dead. Finn seems to do a lot of her own stunts too, and not just on the bike. There’s a sequence of her clambering down a rockface which had me looking up the number for Child Protective Services. Decent dronework and the pleasant Utah scenery also stopped me from turning this off entirely.

For much, much worse are both the script and the performances. There’s hardly a line here which doesn’t seem forced and/or unnatural, and as noted above, the lost treasure thread is set up at painful length, before being abandoned for an hour. Then there’s the stuffed chicken carried around by one of the villains, who in addition are so incompetent as to pose no credible threat at all. I will give Kiara a pass; it’s her debut, and few actresses her age would be able adequately to put over the emotions necessary here, after the apparent loss of her family. [Natalie Portman in Leon remains the gold standard]

However, none of the adults are any better, either engaging in wild over-acting or resorting to a dull monotone when delivering their dialogue. It doesn’t help that there are issues with some of the audio, which varies wildly in quality, and is occasionally indecipherable. As a result, you’ll find yourself gritting your teeth just about every time anyone opens their mouth. This is probably the first time I’ve felt that a movie would have been better off, filmed as a throwback to the silent era – just pit Rizzie against the natural world, without chit-chat. I admit it would have been considerably more challenging as a project. Yet even if unsuccessful, I think I’d have preferred that approach.

Dir: Brian Finn
Star: Kiara Finn, Don Shanks, Adam Johnson, Gisi Hong
a.k.a. Resilience and the Last Spike

Omega1

  By

★½
“Motion without emotion. “

It probably didn’t help that I watched this the same day as I finished off the slick, well-animated and occasionally downright beautiful Arcane. This is… not any of those. Well, that’s a bit unfair. The artwork in this “motion comic” is actually not bad (the cover, right, is certainly striking, if not exactly representative!). But being taken off the printed page diminishes the impact considerably, especially when combined with some genuinely terrible voice acting. The setting here is… let’s be honest, it’s Johnny Mnemonic, a good cyberpunk novel by William Gibson that became a not-so-good Keanu Reeves movie. In both worlds, data is now transferred in the heads of human couriers, this being deemed safer than online methods which are vulnerable to hackers. Megan is one such courier, capable of defending her cargo with extreme prejudice.

Except, it turns out there’s considerably more to her past than even she knows, as becomes clear after a client tries to assassinate her. Thereafter, things get increasingly complex, with a host of friends, enemies, enemies pretending to be friends, and a slew of Alphas, which are clones based on the DNA of Meg, a.k.a. Omega. It’s all a) rather confusing, and b) not very interesting. Though it’s a bit of a vicious cycle. b) triggers an attention deficit, which acts as a force multiplier on a), then this feeds back into b). I actually did give up about two-thirds of the way through. But much like Battered, the short running time (53 mins here) was its saving grace. Realizing there were barely 15 mins left, I put it back on. Though I will not be taking questions on plot developments in that final section. 

The structure here is also off-putting, with the story separated into episodes, no longer than five minutes, which interrupts the flow in an annoying and pointless fashion. Just tell the damn story. But my biggest gripe was the voices, though Andrei as Omega isn’t the problem. It’s a supporting cast who could, almost universally, be replaced by a speech-to-text program, with positive results. And that’s not even mentioning the bad, fake foreign accents, e.g. Russian (or maybe it was French. Hard to tell) and Spanish. Considering there’s not even lip-synching to consider, in this unanimated format, it’s a poor effort indeed.

Maybe it’s just me. Perhaps I need to watch one of these every few years, to be reminded of how crappy the motion comic concept is. For on the basis of this, it seems to combine the worst elements of both comic books and animation. However, it may not be fair to judge the whole medium, on the basis of what seems a badly executed example. There were a couple of moments where the conversion process was reasonabe, and the effect of the comic panels came through as adequately realized. But overall, this was a poor excuse for entertainment. The “To be continued” caption at the end, seemed more like a threat than a promise. 

Dir: Mark Edward Lewis
Star (voice): Alina Andrei, Mark Edward Lewis, Jan Shiva, Teresa Noreen

The Sword of Monte Cristo

  By

★★★
“Raiders of the Lost Monte Cristo Ark”

This 1951 movie is a bit clichéd. But then one has to consider that a lot of these weren’t clichés at the time the movie was made. That said, you will find everything here that you might expect from such a movie: A good king, his evil scheming brother who wants his throne, a dashing captain who has his way with the ladies, revolting citizens, a hidden treasure and a beautiful lady.

Though, and this is where the film diverts from the usual formula, said lady is actually the hero. Countess Christianne (Corday) is supporting the oppressed farmers and citizens against the dictatorship of King Louis Napoléon (the II. or the III.? I don’t know.) in 1858. But truth is Louis (David Bond) is not the real villain here, he was placed in the position of the king due to his brother, Charles LaRoche (Kroeger), because only someone named Napoleon was entitled to become king. LaRoche is the one who’s actual actions terrorize the people.

In secret, LaRoche is planning to overthrow Louis’ government and replace his ministers with people who serve and obey him. Lady Christianne wants to use the famous treasure of the Count of Monte Cristo (who was a friend of her late father) to finance the revolution, since the citizens and farmers have no means to buy weapons. When LaRoche finds out about that treasure, he imprisons Christianne’s uncle and tries to find out the secret code (embedded in Monte Cristo’s famous sword) that will lead him to the treasure.

Well, this is definitely not an adaptation of the Count of Monte Cristo novel by Alexandre Dumas as the title claims. As a matter of fact, it just uses the famous name, probably hoping to dupe audiences into believing they would see something based on the literary source. Casual name dropping is so much fun (e. g. Lady Christianne has a very big dog that she calls “Richelieu”!). It’s of course a typical product of its time, somewhere between the pirate movies, that were already on their way out of Hollywood, and before the glut of biblical epics that would soon invade the silver screens.

In Germany we call that genre “coat and sword“, I think in English it’s being called “cloak and dagger“? [Jim: I think those are more like spy movies: these would be… swashbucklers?] At that time these kind of historical adventure movies were very much en vogue. In 1948 The Three Musketeers with Gene Kelly had come out, and in 1952 Stewart Granger cemented his star status with Scaramouche. What makes this film stand out (and qualifies it for inclusion on this site) is the already mentioned fact that “Countess Christianne“ is the main hero here. In dark garb, she rides through the night, persuading the citizens who have almost given up on their revolt to continue the good fight, and appears with her large black hat and mask like a female version of Zorro.

Yes, the movie can’t entirely escape the attitudes of its time: There is the dashing charming Captain Renault (Montgomery) who, in a running gag, can’t for the life of him remember the name of the bar maid, with whom he obviously once had an affair. He seemed to have had quite a number of them. And of course, he’s attracted to Lady Christianne.

When he enters her private rooms, after she has just redressed as her normal self again, he takes – unasked – a seat and puts his shoes on the table. He also forces a kiss on Lady Christianne. When she snaps, “You don’t behave like a gentlemen should!“ he answers, “Well, you don’t behave like a woman should!“ You are left a bit baffled wondering how women in 1951 were supposed to behave when being kissed involuntarily, by an unknown stranger, who just entered your home through the window? But then even her nanny seems to agree (“A young lady shouldn’t run away from a man, she should catch one!”). How things have changed since that time!

Though, the Captain (to whom Lady Christianne is of course attracted to) is not really on the side of evil LaRoche. He is just bound by duty and will, in the end fight, and kill LaRoche as you expect from a man in love with the beautiful lady. So there is hope for this guy! The movie’s budget and time must have been very limited. Essentially, the feeling is you have just 4-6 locations, with one being the local pub, another the home of Christianne and her uncle, and one some grass fields with a bit of woods between those. But the movie never gets boring. Though it’s from 1951 it has enough movement, dynamic and intrigue to keep your interest through its short 76-minute run time.

Countess Christianne does enough riding, fencing and chandelier-swinging to be rightfully included in the genre of female action heroines. Yes, she is not alone: Captain Renault comes across like a second-class Errol Flynn, supporting her and hinting as to her “true motives“ for cross-dressing and fighting (“You don’t fight against the king! I think, you are fighting against your female nature!“). Though Renault kills the big bad, she still has a mind of her own, riding with the Royal dragoons and killing off LaRoche’s right-hand man, Major Nicolet (Conrad).

I don’t know any of the actors in this historical adventure movie: Rita Corday was only in movies for a short time, from 1943–1954. On the other hand, Montgomery (of whom I’ve also never heard) had a very long movie career from the early 30’s to somewhere in the 80s. The only actor I recognize is William Conrad (playing the supporting role of Major Nicolet) who would later become a well-known TV-star thanks to his many series (Cannon, Nero Wolfe, Jake & McCabe). Here he is quite young but appears in good form when fencing.

Overall, Sword of Monte Cristo is a nice little classic movie that doesn’t hurt, yet isn’t a “must-see“. But considering the era it was produced in, it’s noteworthy: how many genre films do you know from this time where a female would be the main character? Though, it’s still no match for Anne of the Indies, which came out the same year.

Dir: Maurice Geraghty
Star: Rita Corday, George Montgomery, Berry Kroeger, William Conrad

Goodbye Honey

  By

★½
“Trucking terribly written.”

There is a good concept here. Unfortunately, rarely have I seen an idea so conspicuously derailed by dreadful execution. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves though, and begin by focusing on the positives here. Dawn (Morgan) is a truck driver who is on a cross-country route, and pulls off the road into a remote, wooded location for an obligatory rest stop. Barely has she come to a halt, when a terrified young woman, Phoebe (Gobin), shows up outside her cab, demanding help. She claims to have been abducted, and been held nearby. But she managed to escape from her kidnapper, who is now hot on her heels, with evil intentions. However, is the new arrival speaking the truth or is she dangerously deranged?

It’s safe to say, you have my attention with this set-up, and Morgan is nicely unarchetypal as an action heroine, both in her middle-age, and a world-worn appearance which is about as unglamourous as you could imagine. She’s likely the best thing about this, and her performance was good enough to stop the whole thing from imploding entirely. This matters, because the script appears almost intentionally crafted to wreck any suspense or interest, resulting from both the premise or the lead performance. Within a few minutes of Phoebe’s arrival, Dawn has lost the keys to the truck and had her phone broken. Given the character is intended to be a highly competent, no-nonsense sort, this just doesn’t work. 

There are then two major mis-steps in terms of story-telling. A pair of stoner dudes show up, and the film grinds to a halt as Dawn has to deal with them. It’s painfully obvious they have nothing at all to do with Phoebe’s situation, and it’s embarrassing how shallow the writing for them is. Then, after they have mercifully departed the film, we get a lengthy, entirely superfluous flashback, telling us in detail how Phoebe was abducted, and what life was like in the cellar where she was kept for months. Guess what? We don’t care. It doesn’t matter, and adds nothing at all to the situation at hand. The final straw is the revelation of a connection between Dawn and the kidnapper, Cass (Kelly), which completely defies belief. I may have snorted derisively.

Inevitably it leads to him showing up and a confrontation between him and Dawn, where we learn the truth about Phoebe’s claims. Guess what v2.0? By this point, I didn’t care about then either. The film was on the screen, and I was looking in its general direction. But it would be a stretch to say I was paying any kind of attention, There is something to be said for a low-budget film cautiously writing its story within the limitation of what can be afforded: here, that’s a truck and a forest. However, the failure to convert that into anything meaningful or interesting thereafter, must also be laid at the door of the writers. 

Dir: Max Strand
Star: Pamela Jayne Morgan, Juliette Alice Gobin, Paul C. Kelly, Peyton Michelle Edwards

The Assault

  By

★★★★
“Assault on Shelter 13”

This was a very pleasant surprise. I wasn’t expecting much from this, especially after seeing Wynorski’s name – let’s be honest, he is best known for bargain basement soft-port. That said, he does occasionally hit one out of the park, such as the sublime Deathstalker II. This is definitely one of his better entries, even if it is, by and large, a low-budget version of Assault on Precinct 13.

Lisa Wilks (Ryan) witnesses the murder of her boyfriend by mob boss Blade, but is too scared to testify. Stacie (Randall), a detective on the force. is told to take care of her, and when Lisa says she’s too scared to go home, takes her to an isolated women’s shelter run by Stacie’s sister, Cindy (Dobro). However, Blade is intent on making sure Lisa doesn’t change her mind and sends his minions to storm the shelter and terminate the threat. However, he reckons without the pluck and resilience of the residents, bolstered by Stacie, as well as ex-army maintenance man, Mike (McCoy).

This has its share of questionable moments. The firing of a good twenty bullets from a hand-gun without reloading would be one, and then’s there’s the supposed two-minute countdown to the climactic explosion, which takes closer to six minutes to happen [I know, because I rewound and timed it]. But there’s a breezy energy which I found highly enjoyable, and the characters, if briefly sketched, are effectively drawn. For example, Toni (co-writer Melissa Brasselle) plays a Latina with a grudge against Stacie, for putting her boyfriend in jail. Or there’s Sandahl Bergman from Conan the Barbarian, as a paranoid schizophrenic, convinced the government is out to get her.

These are simple traits, yet prove entirely usable for plot purposes. We don’t need or want much more than this – it’d only get in the way of the action. There’s certainly no shortage of that, with wave upon wave of faceless minions storming the house, as the inhabitants try to board it up and repel any who make it through their barricades. At points, it feels almost like Night of the Living Debbies, with the thugs playing the role of the zombies. This being a Wynorski movie, there is the contractually obligated strip-club scene. However, showing unexpected restraint to keep its PG-13 certificate, the employees go no further than their undies, and are even strippers necessary to the plot, as that’s where we first meet Stacie, working undercover to expose a protection scam.

You do have to take as read the casual approach for the authorities, the first hour spent dispatching a apparently procession of cop cars into the area, who then either fail to notice anything, or vanish off the grid – because they’ve been mown down. Blade’s tactics, too, seem a bit questionable, especially considering how out-gunned the women are. But as a PG-13 actioner, I found this thoroughly entertaining, moving relentlessly forward, and making the very most of its limited resources.

Dir: Jim Wynorski
Star: Stacie Randall, Matt McCoy, Carrie Dobro, Leslie Ryan

Confessions of a Homicidal Prostitute: Demonatrix

  By

★½
“Nice title. Shame about the film.”

I must confess I have not seen Confessions of a Homicidal Prostitute, to which this is a sequel. It’s marginally possible, I suppose, that the character development, story and nuance were present there, and explain why these are all but entirely absent in its successor. I would not, however, be prepared to bet on it. I suspect the original was every bit as mean-spirited as this: and “suspect” is all I’ll ever do, because I won’t be making any effort to track it down. In fact, I probably wouldn’t watch it if my aged mother begged me to on her death-bed. Too harsh? Perhaps. Yet I don’t think I’ve ever seen a flat-out uglier film, in terms of largely repellent people being extremely unpleasant to one another, shot in a way that exacerbates its grimness. In its defence, that may be the point. Again: may. It could also just be torture porn of the lowest-rent kind.

From what I can gather, Lilith (Baun) is the titular hooker; I’m not sure if the weird contact lens she wears in one eye is a tribute to Christina Lindberg and her eye-patch in Thriller: A Cruel Picture? Anyway, she apparently got pushed over the mental edge by abuse, and responded to violence with violence. Here, she introduces gal pal and fellow prostitute Eve (Shenk) to the lair where Lilith carries out her torture and slaying. Eve is remarkably blasé about the whole, potential “accessory after the fact” thing, and politely declines to get involved, saying “I don’t think I could stomach it… Not for me!” This reluctance lasts about 30 minutes into the film, where she gets brutalized by the vicious Jackson (McGinnis). All of a sudden, she’s rather more gung-ho, a tendency encouraged by Lilith (“The empowerment you feel after you kill this bastard, will be indescribable”). After initially both being caught and tortured by Jackson, the pair are able to turn the tables on their captor, taking their revenge and sodomizing him with a metal pole.

They then begin a two-woman killing spree, washing the scum off the streets. There’s a montage sequence here, which is quite effective, and rescues the film from receiving the dreaded one-star rating. But otherwise, we’re dealing with content which is cheap and poorly-executed, and possesses little or no emotional impact at all. Weirdly, given the topic and grindhouse-oriented title, the only nudity present is extremely fake penises being abused. Otherwise, it’s remarkably chaste. Though, to be honest, I’m fine with the lead actresses keeping their clothes on. No worries there. I’m good. With special effects that are largely unconvincing, this doesn’t even work as a gore flick, and there’s no sense of development of plot or characters. I got to the end with no sense of.. well, anything. I was neither entertained, educated or appalled. Overall, it’s the kind of film where I wonder if I’ve spent more time writing this review, than was actually spent making the movie.

Dir: Emir Skalonja
Star: Casey Baun, Krystal Shenk, Paul McGinnis, Richard Ruiz