Tag: USA

The Archer

  By

★★
“An arrowing experience.”

Lauren Pierce (Noble) is an expert archer, leading her high-school team. However, after she rescues a friend from sexual harassment, she finds herself on the wrong side of justice, and is sent to “Paradise Trails”, an incongruously-named juvenile detention facility, where harsh discipline and indefinitely extended sentences are the order of the day. And wouldn’t you know it, the place is run by a former Olympic archer – Bob Patrice (Sage) and his creepy son, Michael (Terry). It’s not long before Lauren is plotting an unofficial departure, along with new friend Becky (Mason), who knows the truth about what’s going on behind the scenes. When they get evidence proving it during their exit, they become the hunted as Bob and Michael will go to any lengths to stop the truth from getting out.

Opening with a claim about being “inspired by true events,” apparently that means the “kids for cash” scandal from Pennsylvania. While there’s nothing wrong with that as inspiration, it’s probably a mistake for the makers, apparently to want to make a serious statement, while adopting the tropes of the juvenile delinquent and women in prison genres. Brutal wardens; sadistic guards; lesbian subtexts… This all makes it kinda tough to take seriously, whatever statement they’re trying to make. And even that’s kinda muddied, beyond “sending kids to jail for bribes is bad.” Not much to argue with there. Probably more questionable, is the way every man here is an utter bastard. It gets kinda tiresome.

The main problem, however, is simply taking too long to get anywhere. The final 20 minutes or so, have Lauren and Becky trying to get through the wilderness around the facility, with Bob and Michael in pursuit. It’s well-crafted and tense, even if it builds to the inevitable final, bow-powered confrontation between Lauren and Bob, which you can see coming from a long way off. Unfortunately… it’s the final 20 minutes. The first hour are a real slog to get through, particularly the chunk after Lauren’s arrival at Paradise Trails. The script doesn’t have any real idea about where it needs to go or what it wants to do, once the basic concepts are established. As a result, it and the characters simply rotate gently in the wind, as interest evaporates gently.

There’s not even any real logic in the concept. Lauren is supposedly a “straight A’s” student with no previous record. Could have fooled me, going by the hyper-aggressive way she beats up on her pal’s boyfriend. That shows experience in the kicking of ass. Been nice if her ability to defend herself had come into play in the facility a bit more. Except, acknowledging women’s ability to be violent might have gone against the narrative apparently being peddled here. In that light, even the heroine’s use of a bow seems like some kind of liberal cop-out to avoid giving her the far more effective force multiplier of a fire-arm.

Dir: Valerie Weiss
Star: Bailey Noble, Bill Sage, Jeanine Mason, Michael Grant Terry

Ring Girls

  By

★★★
“Punches above its weight.”

This dates back from 2005, before Carano was a household name in the world of mixed martial arts, or a somewhat successful actress. At this point, she was only involved in the sport of muay thai, which as it’s name suggests, is a martial art originating in Thailand. She was one of five girls training in Las Vegas under Toddy – a nickname given because the teacher’s real name of Thohsaphol Sitiwatjana was too unpronounceable to Westerners! The goal of both Toddy and his students was a trip to Thailand to take on the best local practitioners of the sport. This “documentary” covers both their training and the visit itself, climaxing with Carano’s battle against the Thai champion.

Quotes are used advisedly around documentary, because of two elements – neither of which help the film. The first is some kind of beef, I’m guessing entirely fabricated, between Toddy and his brother “Master A”, who is a muay thai trainer back in Thailand. Apparently Toddy brought disrespect to the country by teaching their skills to foreign devils or something. [I think this may have been lifted from the life of Bruce Lee?] It’s a bit silly and pointless, but at least it can easily be ignored. Worse are the fake sounds added to the fights, when punches and kicks land. They’re not even well done, and rather than enhancing things, make the contests seem fake.

This is unfortunate, as there’s otherwise a lot to like here. Even though an unknown at the time, you can see why the film focuses on Carano, who is clearly not just the best fighter, even to my amateur eyes, she is also the most charismatic. Sometimes, this works against it: we barely get to learn the results of the other four fights in Thailand. But it mainly helps, like a low-budget movie which lucks into starring a future Oscar winner [hello, Cyborg 2!]. And despite the post-audio’s relentless attempts to derail things, the fights are quite impressive, with the impact of the blows apparent purely from the visual side, such as the reaction of the punchee.

It all makes for a rather inconsistent blend of fact and fiction, and everyone involved would have been better served by deciding in which camp they stood. If fictional, develop a better narrative, with setbacks (at the risk of spoilering, I’m not sure we see any of the girls ever lose a match). Or go strictly factual, and use the time spent on things like Toddy’s family issues, perhaps to give us deeper background on the fighters. Heck, more info on the Thai women would have been welcome, too, comparing and contrasing life in Bangkok to Las Vegas. However, you should not let these criticisms put you off watching this (I stumbled across it on Amazon Prime), as it’s still an interesting insight into the tough world of women (or the world of tough women?) in martial arts.

Dir: Jennifer Ferrara + Thomas Weber
Star: Gina Carano, Master Toddy, Ardra Hernandez, Lisa King

Hostile

  By

★★★
“We are the monsters.”

After an un-specified global apocalypse, humanity is reduced to small bands of scattered survivors, who have to try and scratch out survival, while avoiding the attacks of “reapers”, mutated creatures which stalk the landscape, especially after dark. One of those survivors is Juliette (Ashworth), who is on a foraging mission in the desert when an accident throws her off the road, and leaves her with a badly-broken leg. She has to wait for help to arrive, fending off the reaper (Botet) which is prowling the area, with whatever she can find to hand. As she does so, she thinks about life before the apocalypse, where she escaped drug addiction with the help of her boyfriend, gallery owner Jack (Fitoussi) – only for happiness to be fleeting, and taken away from her when multiple tragedies strike.

Initially, the structure bugged the hell out of me. Just when tension was being ramped up, with Juliette in peril and having to cope with a host of issues, simply to survive, we’d suddenly flash back to mundane reality, and thoroughly unconvincing chat between her and Jack. This happened on multiple occasions, and I was left wondering what the relevance of it all was. Beyond her apparent issues with reading, there seemed to be little or no connection. Finally, at the end, you suddenly get the point. While it’s quite a touching revelation, and the ending in undeniably poignant, I’m not sure it was enough to counter all the irritation the approach generated earlier.

The other problem, is that Turi is considerably better at the action/horror aspects, than at relationship drama. It’s a while before we see the first reaper. Juliette’s first encounter with one takes place inside a caravan where she foraging; the camera remains outside and, brilliantly, we only see the impact of her battle with the creature on the caravan, as well as hearing it, of course. When we finally see one, it lives up to what our imagination has crafted, and is creepy as hell. That’s thanks mostly to Botet’s fine work as a “body actor,” along the lines of Doug Jones. In contrast, there’s little or no wallop packed by the scenes involving Juliette and Jack, which are closer to bad soap-opera.

As noted, you eventually understand why, yet I can’t help thinking there were better ways to handle it. While necessary exposition, front-loading all the set-up, rather than spreading it out through the film, and doing so more efficiently, would perhaps have helped. I’d rather have seen how we got there from here (“there” being the post-apoc world, in case it’s not clear), than rehash every detail of what’s clearly a doomed relationship. If we’d had the reaper stalking her over an extended period, that might also have helped credibility in terms of the final revelation, and a bit more likeability for the heroine would have been welcome. As is, the good here is really good; it’s unfortunately countered by a number of significant issues.

Dir: Mathieu Turi
Star: Brittany Ashworth, Gregory Fitoussi, Javier Botet

Immortal Fist: The Legend of Wing Chun

  By

★★
“So, is there, like, an anime convention in town or something?”

The above quote does suggest that the makers here appreciate how ridiculous the entire thing is. And that self-awareness may be the main thing which saves this from being largely cringeworthy. Just because you can make a fantasy kung-fu film with no budget, and largely filmed in a Californian park, doesn’t mean you should make a fantasy kung-fu film, etc. etc. Kaya (Caminiti) is your normal high-school girl. Except for being adopted, parents unknown. And the recurring dreams about martial arts battles. And the four mystical guardians who follow her around. And, it turns out, that she’s the great-granddaughter of the original Wing Chun (Bennett), and her last surviving descendant. Evil forces are intent on ending the bloodline; the guardians try to stop them, while attempting to convince Kaya to… er, get her arm cut off so she can claim her mystical birth-right and resulting mad skillz.

There are some interesting ideas here, such as the notion we live in some kind of Matrix-styled VR multiverse. But there are just too many mis-steps – and ones which would have been easily avoidable, and are unrelated to the lack of resources. For instance, why the guardians take the form of young, thoroughly non-Asian Americans, could have been explained away with a quick line or two about adopting the best shape to blend in to modern society. Nope. There are way too many loose ends that go nowhere as well, such as Kaya’s school pals. This is all the more irritating, because the film ends with absolutely nothing of significance having been resolved: it’s an attempt at delivering a cliffhanger, which is staggeringly unsatisfying.  I hate that nonsense when books pull it, and it’s no better here. Especially as this runs only 73 minutes, even including all those superfluous loose ends. Tighten it up, and give us a proper, complete story. If we want a sequel, we’ll let you know: don’t tell us.

However, I actually quite liked the performances here: Caminiti is a winning heroine, with a dry reaction to the increasingly bizarre situation in which she finds herself. The guardians, led by Tai Fong (director Beyer), have an amusing mix of personalities, but it’s Bennett as Wing Chun who manages to steal the film, despite only having a few scenes – she’s taking proceedings far more seriously than they probably deserve, and elevates the whole thing as a result. Technically, it’s not bad, with some interesting use of filters and colour in the “other” realm. In the end, this is not much more than a glorified fan film, with aspirations clearly well in excess of its ability to deliver. As an apparent first feature, there’s something to build on, yet I suspect it might have been better released as a web series. This could have helped address some of the more obvious flaws, and perhaps found the cult following to which it seems to aspire.

Dir: Lon Beyer
Star: Silvana Caminiti, Lon Beyer, Josh Fesler, Elle Bennett

Terminator: Dark Fate

  By

★★½
“She’ll not be back”

If you went back in time, and told James Cameron on the set of the original Terminator, that 35 years later, it would have spawned six movies and a TV series, he probably wouldn’t have believed you. It’s not a story which screams “Franchise,” being entirely self-contained. The first sequel justified itself with a sea-change in digital effects which marked a massive shift in the way popular cinema would work thereafter. Everything beyond that? Almost entirely superfluous. And I speak as someone who liked Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines considerably more than most people.

I can certainly see why this flopped though. It comes on the heels of Salvation and Genesys, both of which were commercially dubious and critically disastrous, to the point that Cameron decreed them to have happened in alternate universes, effectively retconning them out of existence. This set Dark Fate up as a direct sequel to the franchise’s most successful installment, which also happens to be one of the greatest action films of all time (it’s likely in my top five, and not the only James Cameron film there either). Comparisons were never going to be kind to Dark Fate.

Then, Miller opens his film with footage from T2, in which an amazingly intense Sarah Connor describes her vision of Judgment Day. Rather than trying to build the movie’s own universe, the audience is immediately reminded of just how damn good its predecessor was. I turned to Chris and whispered, “We really must watch T2 again.” This is not something you should be thinking, thirty seconds into a sequel. It’s just the first in a number of missteps which end up burying the franchise once again, rather than resurrecting it.

The main problem is, we’ve seen it all before. The story is basically the same as Terminator. Or Terminator 2. Or Terminator 3. Robot gets sent back in time by future self-aware AI to kill a human it deems is a threat. Pro-mankind asset gets sent back in time to protect the target. They fight. A lot. There are a couple of wrinkles here. The protector (Davis) is actually an “augmented” human herself, albeit still short of the levels of her enemy (Luna). And Dani Ramos (Reyes) isn’t the mother of someone who’ll save humanity. But it feels less a sequel than a reboot, as we still have to watch Dani going through the whole explanatory process and “Five stages of being a Terminator target” thing.

Probably the main hook, however, is the presence of both Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger, re-united for the first time since T2. Cue another misstep: if their appearances had been unexpected twists, they would both have come as delightful surprises. And the way they are filmed, makes it feel like that may have been the original intent. For instance, when Sarah Connor makes her entrance, we see her feet getting out of the car, the mysterious saviour only eventually revealed. The same is true when the T-800 arrives. Except those bullets were already fired by marketing, with them both showing up, full face, in the trailers. And it’s never explained why a 100% artificial creature like the T-800 has aged 35 years, nor how it’s getting the information with which it helps Sarah.

The familiarity of the plot would be bearable, if the execution was up to much. After all, T2 recycled its plot to a not dissimilar degree. However, it pushed the spectacle to 11, and was superior to the original as a result. This… Did not. Indeed, I was shocked by how ropey much of the CGI and digital work was, for a $190 million budget. Not so much the new Rev-9 model Terminator, which is a slick, oily creation like an intelligent pool of tar. But the meshing with the actors is poor, especially when one or other is made to fly through the air.

Maybe this kind of thing works in superhero films like Miller’s Deadpool. Here, it falls well short of the physical impact we saw in T2, or even T3, where the bathroom brawl felt like it had a bone-crunching realism to it. The low-point here is a battle on a plummeting plane, which is so poorly shot, edited and even lit as to be entirely incoherent. You literally have no idea which was is up, and I was simply left waiting for it to be over, and figure out what happened based on who walks away from the wreckage. [Spoiler: it’s everyone]

The entry isn’t entirely without merit though. While Dani is no Sarah Connor v2.0 (and her brother is worse still, quickly triggering a Chris whisper to me, “I hope he dies soon…”), Sarah 1.0 has a tired cynicism which is endearing and understandable. Maybe if they’d made the film entirely about Connor, spending her life going from place to place, hunting and destroying Terminators? There could then have been a whole slew of styles of opponent, making it the Godzilla: Final Wars entry in the franchise. Arnie, too, possesses a charisma which is mostly notable by its absence from the rest of the cast, though Davis makes a better impression than I feared.

There’s also a brilliant sequence set thirty years ago, depicting a young Sarah and John Connor, which is so well done, I was left wondering if this was unused footage from T2. Again, I’m left to wonder if they should have embraced that wholeheartedly and had the entire film take place in that era. We might then have avoided the SJW beats e.g. Border Patrol = bad, though at least these are relatively light compared to some recent Hollywood product. Well, save the clumsy way Dani becomes the future messiah, which triggered derisive snorting from my direction.

It would be a stretch to say we were storming the box-office, demanding a refund. We don’t see many films at the cinema, and despite my criticisms, this did not feel like we wasted our time or our money. It does deliver, as a cinematic spectacle, and is certainly an improvement over Salvation and Genesys, both of which triggered actual sleep. Yet I was reminded of a definition of insanity: repeating the same actions, over and over, hoping for a different result. It appears making Terminator sequels potentially qualifies.

Dir: Tim Miller
Star: Natalia Reyes, Mackenzie Davis, Linda Hamilton, Gabriel Luna

Handgun

  By

★★★½
“The Equalizer”

Either by intent or accidentally – and we’ll get to that in a moment – this manages to be both an indictment of and an advert for, American gun culture. That’s quite a spectacular achievement, and it’s perhaps no coincidence that the writer/director is British, so brings an outsider’s balanced eye to a topic that’s often acrimonious in the States. Kathleen Sullivan (Young) is a teacher who has just moved from Boston to a small Texas town. She falls for local attorney Larry Keeler (Day), though is only interested in friendship, not a significant relationship. The initially-charming Larry eventually won’t take no for an answer, and date-rapes Kathleen. However, the circumstances and her attacker’s local reputation mean she gets no satisfaction from the police. The meek and mild Kathleen decides to take matters into her own hands, buying a gun and taking up combat shooting – at the very same club Larry frequents – with the aim of meting out her own brand of justice.

Director Garnett is a fairly outspoken Socialist, most well-known in film circles for his work with Ken Loach, and those left-wing beliefs appear to have informed his approach here. For example, he said in regard to this film, “America is built on genocide, has a macho culture and confuses owning guns with individual freedoms.” It doesn’t exactly make him a candidate for a film pointing out the positive elements of gun ownership. But it’s absolutely no stretch to read this as a Janie’s Got a Gun-style tale of empowerment through firearms. Yes, Larry uses his gun to coerce Kathleen into sex. However, we then see her use her gun to punish him when society fails to do so. There’s no doubt that weapons and the skills to use them are part of her transformative process, and the Kathleen we see at the end is a much stronger woman than the one to whom we are introduced. Guns, it appears Garnett is saying, are just a tool which can be used for good or evil – like any other. It’s when they become fetishized to a dangerous degree, problems like Larry arise.

This does lead to the film seeming rather ambivalent, though it’s hard to tell how much of this is due to studio interference. Garnett sold the film to the mainstream Warner Bros, and says, “I had to cut elements from the film that I now regret.” While slow-paced at times, it benefits from a good performance by Young, who is pretty without being perfect (the gap in her front teeth is a seriously eighties throwback), and can also sell the transformation believably into an angel of vengeance. Yet there’s one final twist at the end, with Kathleen stopping short of becoming what she despises, and it confirms this movie’s position as easily one of the more thoughtful films in the rape-revenge genre. You may or may not necessarily agree with what Garrett has to say, yet it’s hard to say he does a poor job of making his argument.

Dir: Tony Garnett
Star: Karen Young, Clayton Day, Suzie Humphreys, Helena Humann
a.k.a. Deep in the Heart

Rattlesnake

  By

★★★
“A tale without enough to rattle you”

This occupies a rather odd middle-ground between a meditation on what it means to take a life, and a violent thriller. I’m not sure it manages to pull either off entirely successfully, yet some striking imagery helped sustain our interest. Katrina (Ejogo) is driving from Phoenix to Oklahoma City, with her young daughter, Clara (Pratt), to start a new life: it’s hinted that there may be an abusive partner in the rear-view mirror. The route takes her across the Texas Panhandle, and in an effort to avoid a traffic jam, she hits the back roads. This turns out to be mistake, as she first gets a flat, then Clara is bitten by a rattlesnake.

Fortunately, there’s a trailer nearby, where Katrina is able to get help; by the time mother and daughter reach the nearby hospital in Tulia, there’s no indication of any snakebite. But a stranger turns up in their room, demanding payment for the emergency assistance, and not the kind covered by their health insurance: a “soul for a soul”. If Katrina doesn’t kill someone by sundown, Clara’s life will be forfeit. After the validity of the threat is confirmed, Katrina seeks a victim, and seems to find one in another abusive man, Billy (Rossi), whom she encounters in a local bar, taking out his anger on his wife, Abbie (Greenwell). But even when her own daughter’s life is at risk, can Katrina find it in herself to go against all her morality, and take another person’s life?

It does pose an interesting question: how far would a mother (or anyone, I guess) be prepared to go in defense of their child? As we learn, Katrina is prepared to sacrifice whatever might be necessary, but it’s a bit of a process to get there. For example, she spends rather too much time hanging around the hospital, hoping for a chance to smother an already-dying patient, conveniently nearby. And Billy is similarly convenient, a character so unpleasant, the resulting moral dilemma becomes massively diluted. It would have made for greater drama if there hadn’t been an easy candidate, and Katrina was forced to choose between her child and someone decent.

Hilditch has a good eye, however, and there are some striking scenes where the heroine experiences visions, reminding her of her task, and that time is running out. A priest spontaneously combusts; a little kid engages in equally self-destructive acts. These help create an unsettling atmosphere, which keep the film’s head above water, when the plot struggles to do so. Ejogo is also decent in the central role, making it relatively easy to put yourself in her shoes. But I’d have like to have seen more of the background filled in here. Katrina does some light Googling, which suggests she is far from the first person to have found themselves in debt. Yet this angle is severely under-explored, and the net result is something which almost feels more like a series pilot.

Dir: Zak Hilditch
Star: Carmen Ejogo, Theo Rossi, Emma Greenwell, Apollonia Pratt

The Sisterhood

  By

★★★
“Many Mad Maxines.”

This one may be the origin of the meme, “After the apocalypse, food, water and gasoline are in short supply – but hair-spray will still be plentiful.” For there’s no denying the absolute silliness of this slab of post-apocalyptic nonsense. But it’s still imaginative and energetic enough that my interest was largely sustained. We’re apparently long enough after World War III for it all to have become the stuff of almost-forgotten legend. In the aftermath, the world is now occupied by roaming bands, mostly of men. However, certain women are gifted with special powers, and they have banded together into the titular group, under their reverend mother, and are feared by most as witches.

After her settlement is attacked by Mikal (Wagner, looking like a low-rent Chuck Norris), and her brother killed, Marya (Johnson) hits the road, seeking revenge. She meets two members of the Sisterhood, Alee (Holden) and Vera (Patrick), and when they discover Marya’s gift, the ability to communicate with her pet hawk, they allow her to join them. Vera is abducted by Mikal, who then heads off to add her to the collection of Sisterhood members, being held in one of the few remaining cities. Alee and Marya follow, until a shortcut into the forbidden zone of radiation and mutants lets them stumble across a pre-apocalypse arms dump. Now armed with automatic weapons and a tank (!), they are thoroughly well-equipped, first to rescue Vera, and then storm the city and liberate the rest of their sisters.

Made in 1988, the debt this owes to the Mad Max trilogy (which had finished with Beyond Thunderdome, three years earlier) is apparent to the point of being blatant. There’s a lot of whizzing around in a quarry, with giant fireballs going off just to the side of the target. For, while it’s remarkable the heroines are able immediately to drive their tank, their talents clearly do not extend to aiming the guns accurately. This is all highly mockable, not least that it’s apparently set in the far-distant future of… er, the year 2021. Yet those involved play it all entirely straight, and eventually I found this seriousness rubbing off on me. There were occasional moments which, if not making me go “Wow!”, did extract a somewhat-impressed “Huh.”.

Director Santiago should be well-known to readers here, having also given us Angel Fist and The Muthers; he brings much the same combination of female empowerment and exploitation here. Because, for all the strong female characters, they also seem to spent a inordinate amount of time either chained up or getting their tops ripped open – and, occasionally, both. But Holden and Johnson manage to rise above the low-rent production values with their dignity intact – even if nothing remotely like the video sleeve is to be found in this one! By the admittedly low standards of the genre, this is likely well-above average. And we only have to wait two years for it all to come to pass…

Dir: Cirio H. Santiago
Star: Rebecca Holden, Chuck Wagner, Lynn-Holly Johnson, Barbara Patrick

She Never Died

  By

★★★★½
“Angel of vengeance”

This is neither a prequel nor a sequel to He Never Died, but is clearly related, and takes place in the same universe. Like its predecessor, it was written by Jason Krawczyk, who hands the directorial reins over to Cummings for this. And it probably works better as a result. I tend to think having a separate writer and director allows each to build on the other’s talents, while countering the weaknesses. In particular, He, which starred Henry Rollins, didn’t have quite enough plot to sustain it. That isn’t an issue here, resulting in improved pacing. Combine this with the ultimate “give no damns” performance at its core, and you’ve got one of the best action heroine films of 2019.

That performance is Adeliyi’s portrayal of “Lacey”, whose real name we learn at the end, and which will make some sense to students of Biblical lore. Like Rollins’s character, she plays an immortal being, doomed to wander the planet for eternity, sustained only on human flesh. However, she operates on a code, eating only scumbags. This still brings her to the attention of local authorities, in particular the thoroughly world-weary Detective Godfrey (MacNeill). But when he discovers Lacey’s nature, he makes the ill-fated decision to weaponize her, and points her in the direction of a sex-trafficking ring run by Terrance (Danby), which he has been unable to take down by more formal methods. Complicating matters is the gang’s victim, Suzzie (Madeira), whom Lacey encounters during her first mission, and who becomes something of her acolyte.

Lacey is potentially among the most taciturn bad-asses of the genre, a woman of few words, whose remarkable healing powers allow her to take a baseball bat to the head, and then discuss the mild irritation of having to wait for a detached retina to repair itself. No wonder Suzzie is confused, wondering “Are you just a jacked-up lady blitzed out of her mind? Or a government experiment on the lam? Robot? Zombie? Vampire? You sound like a vampire.” The contrast between the pair, one hyper almost to the point of manic, the other deader than deadpan, is a joy. Seeing Adeliyi in action is another. This film doesn’t shortchange her diet, and Cummings background in horror is apparent. About the only person who can half-stand up to Lacey is the person in charge of the traffickers – which makes me wonder if they, too, may be more than human.

It’s one of the intriguing questions which this poses. Particularly at the end, after things appear to have been tied up nicely, the story opens an entire case of cans of worms, with both Godfrey and Lacey having encounters that’ll leave you going “Hmmm…” And that’s not even including the Bikers of the Apocalypse. While it’s definitely not necessary to have seen He Never Died, the cross-over of information may slightly enhance your information of both. I’m wondering if it’s all pointing towards a third entry – They Never Died?- in which the characters from these two films team up. If so, where do I start the queue?

Dir: Audreey Cummings
Star: Olunike Adeliyi, Peter MacNeill, Kiana Madeira, Noah Danby

Screened at Phoenix FearCon 2019

The Witch Files

  By

★★★
“The Breakfast Coven.”

If John Hughes directed a film about witchcraft, it’d probably end up like this. For you have five stereotypical high-school girls in detention: Brooke the rich bitch (Ziolkoski); Greta the jock (Adrienne Rose-White); M.J. the timid mouse (Robinson); Jules the goth (Flatmo); and Claire the nerd (Taylor), who isn’t actually in detention, just doing a report on it for the school TV channel. [90% of the film is the ‘found footage’ she shoots of subsequent events, a conceit for which I usually don’t have much time… and here is no different, occasionally requiring pretzel-like contrivance.] Jules mysteriously triggers the fire-alarm to get them all out early. After she reveals this no big thing was part of her witchy skills, the other four enthusiastically agree to take part in a ceremony binding them together, into a coven.

At first, it’s remarkably easy: they basically just chant whatever they want, and it shows up. Life becomes a bowl of free designer clothes and undeserved ‘A’ grades. But, inevitably, there’s a price to pay, and the young women start to find that minor physical ailments are accelerating at a highly disturbing rate. [This is nicely tied into the historical portrayal of witches as wizened crones, explained as a result of the magical energy expended] While some of the girls want to stop their dabbling in occult practices, others have become addicted to their new-found powers and refuse to stop. Given the previous binding, this is a problem. Additionally, the town’s past offers a long association with witchcraft, and a recurring pattern of strange events, taking place every seventeen years. As in almost every American high-school horror film since Carrie, this builds to a showdown at a school party.

This over-familiarity is likely the main problem, with both characters and story-line coming over decidedly as nothing you haven’t seen before. Even if you never watched Charmed or The Craft (or Swedish take on the same, The Circle), the tropes in question will be entirely recognizable, and the film offers few if any surprises. Credit is due to the actresses, however, who take their two-dimensional characters and do a good job of bringing them to life. This keeps the film rolling along, when on occasion it threatens to stall out completely. Ziolkoski probably does best, helping the audience understand the allure of mystical power, though the entire ensemble gel together nicely.

In the end though, there isn’t sufficient here to set it apart from those which have gone before. It doesn’t help that the magical battles in the final third are well beyond the capacity of the budget to depict. The optical/digital effects unfortunately mostly feel like they were copy-pasted in from an eighties Full Moon Features project. There is one nice bit of vehicular mayhem, though even there, Final Destination did it better. If you haven’t ever seen a film about teenage girls and witchcraft, you could certainly do a lot worse. But there can’t be many of you out there.

Dir: Kyle Rankin
Star: Britt Flatmo, Holly Taylor, Alice Ziolkoski, Tara Robinson