Tag: USA

Bad Grandmas

  By

★★
“Near-dead.”

There is entertainment value to be found even in bad movies. Bad action, horror and SF are sometimes just as amusing as the good stuff. But bad comedy is almost irredeemable: that’s why Mystery Science Theater 3000 rarely go there. Bad comedy just… sits there, dull and unamusing, almost worthless. And that’s what we have here. It’s a somewhat interesting idea, with some potential. Unfortunately, the execution – mostly in the script and direction – are so woefully inept that even the brave efforts of Florence Henderson, in her final film, aren’t enough to salvage it. And wasting the talents of Pam Grier needs to be some kind of cinematic capital offense.

Mimi (Henderson) is trying to help out her friend Bobbi (Wall), who is being thrown out of her house by an evil son-in-law. She goes to confront the perp, only for him to end up dead. She and her senior citizenette pals dispose of the body, hiding it in a freezer. But this just brings them to the attention of Harry (Reinhold), the local loan-shark to who the son-in-law owed two hundred grand. He kidnaps Bobbi, demanding the house or the money; Mimi is having none of that, and when Harry sends over an associate to collect, the henchmen ends up similarly dismembered and in the deep-freeze. Meanwhile, the local sheriff (Batinkoff) is also sniffing around, initially having been investigating Harry’s financial dealings.

Henderson does her best with material which seems designed to destroy any audience sympathy. For example, her first victim isn’t killed initially, and Mimi immediately stabs him in the heart to finish the job. I remind you: this film is supposedly a comedy. If it wanted to go this “dark passenger” route [and it includes an explicit reference to Dexter], that might have worked better, and I’d have been fine with it. Make Mimi a retired serial killer, former CIA operative or something to explain her apparent psychopathic tendencies. For the ease with which she slides from genteel retirement into cold-blooded dispatch is jarring and at odds with the light-hearted tone for which the film is aiming (and, largely, falling short).

A far more egregious complaint would be putting one of the godmothers of action heroineism, Grier, in a timid, mouse-like role, beneath a poorly-considered blonde wig, and giving her next to nothing to do. I know she’s in her late sixties, but that never stopped the similarly-aged Helen Mirren from letting rip in Red. I just breathed a sigh of relief on checking Pam’s filmography to discover she had appeared in other films since. Bad enough this was Henderson’s swan-song, we didn’t need it also to be that of an unquestioned icon like Grier. I sense where this is trying to go – something similar to the Bad Ass franchise, with its similarly mature cast of Dannys Glover and Trejo. However, that knew what to do with its characters, and made much better use of them than this, a well-intentioned failure.

Dir: Srikant Chellappa
Star: Florence Henderson, Randall Batinkoff, Judge Reinhold, Susie Wall

Atone

  By

★★
“atone: make amends or reparation.”

I mention the above for two reasons. Firstly, because Chris wondered why the film was called “At One”. Secondly, because when it finished, I turned to her and said those four little words which mean so much: “I can only apologize…” Yes, to use it in a sentence, I’ll be atoning for picking to watch this low-rent “Die Hard in a church” offering, for some time to come. [Though the following night, I had to sit through her choice of Justice League: paid back in full, I’d say…] There were a couple of aspects here that weren’t terrible; unfortunately, the overall execution was painfully close to… well, god awful seems the appropriate term here.

Laura Bishop (Fleming) is a former soldier, struggling to adapt back to civilian life. Through her father, she gets a job as a security guard in a local megachurch which is about to open. And what are the odds, she hasn’t even been able to complete new employee orientation before a group of terrorists, led by White (Short) storm into the building and take the employees, in particular Reverend Mark Shaw (Rusler), hostage. Worse still, Laura’s little daughter is also in the building, so she has to find and take care of the moppet, as well as fending off the terrorists.

This seems to be teetering on the edge of being a faith-based action-heroine pic, which is a rate, although not quite unique entity – The Trail comes to mind. These aspects are not too badly-handled: despite the setting, they’re mostly played fairly light, and I actually found the motivation of the chief villain quite refreshing. I say this to make it clear that I’m not slagging this off for its beliefs. Especially not when there are plenty of other, perfectly credible reasons to slag it off. The entire subplot involving her daughter, for example, makes no sense, and she just kinda wanders out of an emergency exit, largely forgotten thereafter. There’s also the bizarre “street fight club” of which Laura is a member, which forms the opening scene, and is never mentioned again.

It feels as if, for every step forward this takes, there are two back. Farrelly, better known as WWE’s Sheamus, shows up as one of the bad guys, and crosses himself every time he kills someone, which is the kind of endearing quirk that works. He and the heroine have a decent bathroom brawl. But then there are amateur digital effects, poor continuity and no sense at all of escalation, as well as villains who fall astonishingly short of even basic competence. The explanation about why Lauren has her PTSD, is held back until the very end, far too late for the viewer to care one whit. It’s all a jumbled, and worse, largely boring mess. They say the devil has all the best tunes. On the basis of this, he can likely also lay claim to the best girls-with-guns films as well.

Dir: Wes Miller
Star: Jaqueline Fleming, Robert Rusler, Columbus Short, Stephen Farrelly

Sheba, Baby

  By

★★★
“Neither claim on the top left of the poster are accurate.”

After the success of Coffy and Foxy Brown, Pam Grier continued her career with this not dissimilar blaxploitation flick, albeit one of a more restrained approach. Indeed, this received a ‘PG’ rating at the time of its release in April 1975, something modern ears would likely find shocking, considering the copious use of certain racial epithets deployed here. She plays private detective Sheba Shayne, who returns to her home town of Louisville from Chicago, after getting a telegram from her father’s business partner, Brick Williams (Stoker). He warns that her father (Challenger) is taking on some rough customers who are trying to force him into selling his company. Sheba, naturally, is having none of it, and when the police refuse to do much, starts working her way up the food-chain of scumbags, to the apex predator of The Man, who in this incarnation is Shark (Merrifield).

There’s not much here which could be described as particularly new or exciting. Indeed, I almost passed on the movie entirely, thinking I’d already seen it, but it appears I was confusing this with Friday Foster. That’s the thing about Grier’s career: she received only limited opportunities to break out from the ghetto of blaxploitation, and to some degree, her output is much of a muchness. Though at this point, there were precious few other areas of English-speaking media which allowed women to kick butt in the way she did. We were still in the era before Charlie’s Angels and Wonder Woman, albeit just – WW started the November after Sheba came out, and CA the following year.

For now, Grier was ploughing her own furrow in the vanguard of action heroines, and despite the generic nature of this offering (it was the final movie of Pam’s contract with American International Pictures), still represents okay value for money. It does gloss over the fact that Sheba’s Dad is little more than a kinder, gentler loan-shark, operating what appears to be a payday finance company, of the kind often described as “predatory” these days. It’s not even clear quite why Shark is so keen to take over the business. Fortunately, before becoming a Chicago PI, seems Sheba was a local cop. She still has some of the connections from that time – as a bonus, without having to worry about niceties like ‘due process’ or ‘police brutality’.

Even with the relatively low-key sex ‘n’ violence allowed by the PG rating [which would be “almost none” and “light”, compared to Grier’s previous offerings], it’s still fun to watch her in action. The highlight is likely her encounter with a “street entrepreneur” wearing a suit which looks more like an optical illusion. After he runs off, rather than answer her questions, she simply gets into the back of his pimpmobile and waits for him to return. It builds toward her sneaking onto Shark’s boat, jumping off it, sneaking back on, getting caught, escaping, and eventually chasing him through the Southern bayou on a jetski. It seems to have strayed in from Live and Let Die, and the cops seem remarkably unfazed by Sheba behaving in a manner more befitting Moby Dick, shall we say.

As noted at the top, this falls short of Grier’s best work, though is still better than Foster. It’s workmanlike, rather than impressive, and the restraint necessary for the certificate probably works against it. The words “family-friendly” and “blaxploitation” are clearly better off kept apart from each other, I suspect.

Dir: William Girdler
Star: Pam Grier, Austin Stoker, Rudy Challenger, Dick Merrifield

Johnnie Mae Gibson: FBI

  By

★★
“Not-so fair cop”

This 1986 TV movie was the first film made about an FBI agent while they were still active. Gibson was the fifth black female agent in the bureau’s history: she broke new ground by being the first such assigned to the Fugitive Matters department in the Miami branch, and was also the first to reach a supervisory level within the FBI. That would, however, be well after the story told in this film. It covers how she came to join the FBI, and her first major undercover operation, taking down a gun-running ring operated by ex-NFL star, Adam Prentice (Lawson). However, Gibson starts to find the lines between real-life and undercover work blurring, and begins feeling genuine affection for her target. This doesn’t sit well with her partner, TC (Rollins). If it sounds all very by the numbers… It is.

No less stereotypical are the other black men in Gibson’s life. Most notable are her sternly disciplinarian father, who thrashes Johnnie after she accepts a Thanksgiving gift on a surplus turkey from some white folks, and Marvin (Young), the husband she meets at college. The latter is thoroughly unimpressed when she announces – in a staggeringly clunky fashion, showing up in full uniform – that’s she going to join the police force. You can imagine his reaction to her becoming an FBI agent, and his perpetual whining is perhaps the film’s most annoying aspect. Though it has to be said, when it comes to caring for their daughter, Gibson is very much the absent mother.

All the background stuff is bounced over so quickly as to be little more than a parade of cliches. Yeah, we get it: she had to overcome some obstacles. Though based on the evidence here, racism wasn’t really one of them, and the way sexism is depicted has some flaws, for example when a fellow trainee at Quantico kicks her ass repeatedly in hand-to-hand training. For this begs an obvious question: would a criminal in the field go easy on an FBI agent trying to arrest them, because they were a woman? Of course not. From that viewpoint, this incident was actually less sexism than a reality check. It could have been welcomed as such, showing Johnnie she needs to use her brain rather than brawn, rather than a simplistic message of The Man Keeping A Woman Down (literally).

The undercover case is not much better in this department, trotting out the usual tropes before suddenly exploding into a gun-battle at the end, which even Gibson, in interviews at the time it was shown, noted was entirely fictional. The TV movie seems particularly guilty of trying to cram too much in, and would have been better served by focusing either on its subject’s journey to becoming an agent, or on her work thereafter. By attempting to cover both, it succeeds in covering neither adequately. While the subject is undeniably worthy, I can’t say that this treatment feels as if it does her justice.

Dir: Bill Duke
Star: Lynn Whitfield, William Allen Young, Howard Rollins, Richard Lawson

Bubblegum and Broken Fingers

  By

★★½
“Pap fiction.”

Outside of Kill Bill, I’ve never been a fan of Quentin Tarantino. But this film did give me some appreciation for him. Because it’s only when you see Tarantino done badly, that you realize the aspects he does well. It undeniably takes some skills to keep a story-line involving multiple sets of characters in the air, especially when centered on a Macguffin like a suitcase whose contents are never revealed. Jackson tries to do exactly the same thing here, and the result is, frankly, a mess, where you’re left caring little or nothing about any of the participants.

It starts with two low-level henchmen on their way to make a deal outside Las Vegas, swapping a large quantity of cash for the suitcase in question. This ends with the opposite side dead, and the pair on the run. They come across two German pedophile tourists, who have kidnapped Heidi (Daly) along with a mute girl, Tiny (Tyla). However, turns out Tiny isn’t the innocent she appears, and she takes the suitcase, being part of a all-female criminal cabal herself. They’re being pursued by a variety of law enforcement agencies, who have their own agendas. It’s as if the writer (also the director) had only one solution to any story issues: introduce more characters, rather than developing the ones already present.

It’s the script which is the glaring weakness. The performances are fine, Jackson makes good use of locations in and around Las Vegas, and there’s a particularly impressive sequence told without dialogue. Indeed, having a major participant who can’t speak – except through an electronic text-to-voice synthesizer – is navigated well, when it could easily have been a disaster, bringing things to a grinding halt any time she appeared. But the pattern soon becomes obvious. Introduce some characters. Start to develop those characters. Abandon them, leaving them (in some cases, literally) dead at the side of the road. Rinse & repeat for an hour or so, until your audience can no longer be bothered to care about anyone.

You’re presumably intended to keep your eye on the suitcase. Yet we never learn what is in the case, capable of triggering all the carnage and corpses. How annoying. It could be argued that it doesn’t make any difference. Unlike Pulp Fiction though, it feels as if it matters, because this is clearly the focus of everyone’s efforts, rather than a supporting act to the sideshow, as in the Tarantino film. As we seem to have said quite a lot lately, I suspect this is a result of having the director film his own script, leaving him too close to the project to spot its flaws. Jackson has good technical abilities, and it’s certainly possible to imagine a version of the same story, with the pieces re-arranged, some expanded and others excised, where this became a Bitch Slap-esque gem. Instead, it’s a struggle to pay attention, through an ending that has little to offer except more dead bodies.

Dir: Sean Jackson
Star: Camme Tyla, Mandy Williams, Brenna Daly, Jason Nious

Destroyer

  By

★★★
“Bad Madam Lieutenant.”

A fine, almost unrecognizable performance by Kidman succeeds in maintaining interest, despite a script which appears to regard time less like an arrow, and more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff. Deeply troubled cop Erin Bell (Kidman) wakes up in her car, apparently badly hungover, looking like ten pounds of crap in a five-pound bag. Not far away, her colleagues are poring over a newly-discovered murder scene: a body with a dye-stained hundred-dollar bill on the corpse. And that’s about the last time when I was quite certain of the timeline.

For everything thereafter unfolds in non-sequential order, going all the way back to Bell’s involvement in an undercover operation, two decades earlier. The target was a gang of armed robbers under the leadership of Silas (Kebbell). She and fellow officer Chris (Stan) successfully infiltrate the gang. But when the time comes for the planned heist, they come to a fateful decision, which misfires badly, and has haunted Erin ever since. At least that aspect is fairly clear, mostly due to the rather naff nineties hair-do Erin is wearing. [She’s a bit less credible playing an innocent twenty-something sheriff’s deputy] What’s less apparent – and kinda matters – is that some things apparently depicted as happening after the corpse is found, actually occur before it. Or maybe I was just being dumb?

To be honest, this is the kind of Tarantino-esque film-making which annoys the hell out of me. Because there’s no real purpose to the cut-up approach: it doesn’t add anything to our understanding of Bell’s character. Indeed, you could argue the lack of explanation – for instance, we don’t discover what happened on the heist until deep into the movie – dampens our sympathy for her, such as her struggles to connect with a rebelliously bratty teenage daughter (Pettyjohn). Similarly, we don’t know why she is so obsessed with Silas for much of the film. Also on the negative side is the near-criminal waste of Tatiana Maslany, as Silas’s druggie girlfriend Petra, and it’s perhaps a bit too obvious in its nods to Abel Ferrara/Harvey Keitel powerhouse, Bad Lieutenant, such as both cops’ fondness for baseball.

It’s director Kusama’s third entry on the site, after the well-regarded Girlfight and the not-so well-regarded Aeon Flux movie (though I never felt it deserved to be a box-office disaster) – as well as the entirely awful Jennifer’s Body. Still, you can’t argue she has not made interesting choices of projects, and this is never less than watchable, almost hypnotically so, due to Kidman’s performance. We witness Bell crumbling, yet also not giving a damn about police procedure or “civil rights” – witness her locking Petra in a car trunk! – in her relentless pursuit of Silas. It’s a toss-up, whether or not she’ll fall apart entirely before her mission is accomplished, and it’s this which sustained my interest. The other elements, not so much, yet I can’t consider the time completely wasted. Unlike Erin. :)

Dir: Karyn Kusama
Star: Nicole Kidman, Sebastian Stan, Toby Kebbell, Jade Pettyjohn

Avia Vampire Hunter

  By

★
How to finish 2018: one of the all-time worst action heroine flicks.

I usually try to be tolerant when it comes to low-budget cinema and the resulting flaws. There are some things which you just cannot expect when a film is financed on the maker’s credit-card, and I’m willing to overlook rough edges if a movie can hold my interest in other ways. However, there are times when the end product is almost irredeemably bad, with few, if any, merits. This would be one such case. Your script is the main area which should be an area of equal opportunity, regardless of budget. Here, if anything, the flaws at the technical level are magnified by the failings on the page.

Vast chunks simply don’t reach basic coherence, with scenes that come out of nowhere, go nowhere or are entirely unconnected to anything. And what little does makes sense is completely uninteresting. Let me give you an example of the former:

  • Insert shot of the kind of clock you’d find at your grandmother’s
  • 30 seconds of hand-held camera moving towards the heroine as she kneels in a forest
  • 90 seconds of her twirling a sword to no purpose, where my main reaction was “Why are there table napkins stuck to the trees?”
  • 25 second of hand-held camera backing slowly away from the heroine.

The basic story sounds as if it might have some potential. Avia (Valentino) saw her family attacked by vampires, and made it her life’s mission to seek out and destroy them, with the help of police officer Detective Raymond Guy (Jackson). Except it’s executed in such a low-energy and incompetent fashion, from the performances through the woeful audio mix, to the action – the only person who has a slight clue how to fight is Tomahawk, who plays the master vampire. Otherwise, the sole entertainment value to be found is in mocking its inadequacies. I will say, there’s plenty of scope there, from the moment Guy and his partner don’t notice Avia bringing a large samurai sword when she tags along with them on a routine interrogation.

The whole thing about her family? Forgotten entirely after it has been mentioned. The relationship between Avia and Raymond? Thoroughly unconvincing, sinking to “howlingly bad” during their fully-clothed sex scene. The use of music is particularly execrable, being completely inappropriate to what’s happening on screen to the point it appears to have been added at random. This is despite the presence of eighteen names in the opening credits as “music by”, not counting the London Philharmonic Orchestra, whose presence here is… well, let’s say it came as a surprise to me, and probably to them as well.

The only moment where I had interest briefly roused, was the suggestion made by Raymond’s partner (who vanishes for the middle two-thirds) that Avia might actually be completely insane, and killing innocent people in the belief they are vampires. Her slaughter of a family supports that theory, and it could have been an interesting direction. Except that the film has already established she has official sanction for her acts, Raymond clearly doesn’t give a damn about the possibility, and the final coda has Avia saying it doesn’t matter either. So why bother? Indeed, “why bother” is an entirely appropriate summary of the whole enterprise. Take my advice, and don’t.

Dir: Leon Hunter
Star: Allison Valentino, Rodney Jackson, Cliff Lee, Antonio Tomahawk

Mohawk

  By

★★½
“A hair short.”

This takes place in upstate New York during the 1812 war between Britain and America, when combatants are courting the Mohawk tribe to join forces with them. The natives are suspicious of both, and won’t commit to either. Working for the British is Joshua (Farren), who is in a slightly odd, three-way relationship with Mohawk warrioress Oak (Horn) and fellow native Calvin (Rain). On the other side is Hezekiah Holt (Buzzington), and his small band of Americans, who are out for redcoat blood. When they blame the Mohawk for murdering some of their number, their violence quickly extends to encompass Oak and Calvin, as well as Joshua. After Oak is left all alone, she goes on the war-path to take revenge on Holt and his men.

Low-budget period pieces are always on shaky ground, because creating genuine period atmosphere typically costs money. This sidesteps the issue by largely taking place in the middle of the woods, thereby limiting costs to a selection of uniforms and other costumes. It is a slightly obvious swerve, and I was also distracted by the sizable presence of WWE wrestler Luke Harper (under his real name, Jon Huber) as one of Holt’s platoon. The main problem, however, is the abrupt switch over to a supernatural theme for the final act. After the film has been thoroughly – and gorily – grounded in reality for more than an hour, it suddenly turns into a native American version of The Crow.

This is a shame, as the story to that point had taken some standard tropes and twisted them in interesting ways. While I’ve classified this as a “Western,” it’s more of an Eastern in terms of its location on the continent, and dates from an earlier era than usual as well. It could easily have become a scenario painted in black and white; instead, it’s considerably murkier, with motivations largely kept under wraps, especially those of Joshua and Oak. The latter, in particular, spends a good chunk of the movie lurking in the woods, with the focus on Holt and his dwindling crew. They’re in particular trouble after their tracker is picked off, giving a decisive advantage of terrain to their enemies.

As noted, it’s enthusiastically messy and brutal, as appears to be a recent trend in the more revisionist of Westerns (hello, Bone Tomahawk). But I was probably expecting more emphasis on Oak rather than Holt, which doesn’t happen until after the shift in tone also mentioned earlier. Horn does deliver a powerful performance, very much quiet and understated, and I’d like to have seen more of it. Given this inner strength, it didn’t seem logical to me for Oak to be bailed out by help from the spirits of her ancestors or whatever, in order to carry out her vengeance. Leaning on this as the story does (and where were these spirits when everyone else was being massacred?), seems a bit of an unnecessary cop-out. Not by any means terrible, yet could certainly have been better.

Dir: Ted Geoghegan
Star: Kaniehtiio Horn, Eamon Farren, Justin Rain, Ezra Buzzington

Hanna (TV series)

  By

★★½
“More is less.”

I was quite surprised to hear about Amazon taking up Joe Wright’s 2011 movie of the same name, and turning it into a TV series. There didn’t seem to be an enormous amount of point: the film was perfectly self-contained as it was, and didn’t appear to need expansion. Having now watched the eight 50-minute episodes from the first season… I’m still not sure of the point.

The first three are more or less a stretched-out version of the original movie, beginning with Hanna (Creed-Miles) and her adoptive father Erik Heller (Kinnaman) living completely off the grid in the middle of a European forest. They are re-located by the CIA black operation which had attempted to turn Hanna into a super-soldier, under the control of Marissa Wiegler (Enos – amusing to see her and Kinnaman on opposite sides, since they were partners on the American remake of The Killing), and from which Erick had freed her. Hanna is kidnapped, and taken to a secure facility, though escapes and has to make her way across Europe, solo, in order to be re-united with her father.

So far, so adequate, though the knock-off Chemical Brothers electro-noodly score served mostly to remind me of how good the original was, and we could certainly have used more of Hanna in action. It’s in the middle section that this completely loses its way. If you’ve seen the film, you’ll know on her trans-continental journey, the heroine is befriended by a British family and their daughter, Sophie (Barretto). Here after they part ways, Hanna takes a detour to Britain, hangs out with Sophie, and spends the middle episodes being a teenager, with all the annoying brattiness that entails. Was there anyone who wanted to see this? Certainly not me, and this very nearly went into the “Did not finish” pile as a result, because it’s extremely annoying.

The series does somewhat redeem itself over the final couple of episodes. We discover that the project from which Hanna was spawned, is still operating – and this comes as much of a shock to Marissa as anyone. Hanna and Erik head towards the complex which houses it, with the aim of liberating all the other proto-Hannas, pursued both by Wiegler and the combined forces of the military-industrial complex. However, not everyone necessarily wants to be rescued… The series ends on an open note, and Amazon recently announced there will be a second season. To be honest, you couls get caught up by skipping the first six episodes entirely, and just watching the movie, then parts 7-8.

The series does fill in much more of Hanna’s back-story, in particular how she became part of the project, and I also did like the way Wiegler’s position shifts over the course of the show. It will be interesting to see where she goes in the next season, since her position is now little less precarious than Hanna’s [and as we see at one point, Marissa has some skills of her own!]. On that basis, I’m not prepared to write this off yet, since it will now have to find fresh earth to till. Hopefully Farr does a better job there with original ideas, than of transforming his own work for the small screen.

Creator: David Farr
Star: Esme Creed-Miles, Joel Kinnaman, Mireille Enos, Rhianne Barreto

Death Angel December

  By

★★
“Liable to provoke hibernation.”

Marginally competent, and just not very exciting, this low-budget offering is the story of December (Kurishingal). As a young girl, she watched as the rest of her family was slaughtered by Law (Ramsey) and his villains, the result of a debt owed by her father. A decade or so late, she has grown up and taken to the streets as a vigilante, seeking vengeance on those responsible. Or, until she finds them, any other perpetrators she comes across during her night-time ramblings through the mean back alleys of the city. Helping her mission, is that she now works for the police, which puts her in a prime position to ensure, for example, that any evidence pointing in her direction goes “missing”.

The main problem here is the lack of any significant progression in story or characters. Once the basic concept is established, it’s more or less clear where this is inevitably going to end: in December confronting Law – who, miraculously, looks exactly like he did when killing her family a decade previously – and his minions. Little of interest happens during the eighty minutes in the middle to escape from the cinematic rut which this ploughs, save perhaps a brief interlude where one of her colleagues on the force mistakes her nocturnal activities for something else, and consequently thinks she’s moonlighting as an escort. They have a good laugh about this confusion, needless to sa… Nah, who am I kidding: she rips open his chest and pulls out his heart.

That’s actually one of the highlights – it helps that it is largely realized through physical effects, rather than the crappy CGI, of which we see rather too much in the rest of the film. The old nemesis of low-budget cinema, bad audio, also rears its ugly head on occasion, most notably a scene shot in a foyer, which sounds as if it was recorded inside a toilet bowl. Re-recording dialogue in post is an actual possible thing, y’know: given the copious voice-over, the makers would seem to know this. Not helping is the painfully inept nature of the fights, especially true for the final battle, which appears to have been filmed in a public park, using swords made of tin-foil.

On the positive side, Kurishingal has a striking appearance that makes for a great poster, and director Woodell does know what to do with the camera. Between the two of them, they manage to stop things from collapsing entirely, even if my interest was sorely taxed at times. The IMDb tells me this was apparently a remake of a short film the pair made two years earlier, called Scarlet Widow. That ran about a quarter of the length, and may well have been a more appropriate running-time for the content. The additional 70 minutes here feels almost like needless padding, with a script in need of significant additional development in order to sustain itself over the length of a full feature.

Dir: Bennie Woodell
Star: Leena Kurishingal, Will Cummings III, Chad Meyer, Charles Ramsey
a.k.a. The Long December