★★★½
“On Her Insurance Company’s Secret Service”
Roger Corman’s New World Pictures weren’t the only ones using the Philippines as a factory to churn out B-movies in the seventies, as this 1973 entry, from Arthur Marks’ General Film Corproration shows. Dr. Tsu (Kwan) and her posse of henchwomen are kidnapping athletes, the not-so-good doctor having perfected the ability to do brain transplants. She’s now selling this as a service to rich, old people, who can become young again. However, after kidnapping a jai-alai star, the insurance company on the hook for the half million dollar policy hires Mike Harber (Hagen) to investigate. As he starts nosing around and making waves, first the local gangster boss, then Dr. Tsu, send their minions out to stop him. Needless to say, this is of limited success, and he is soon on his way to the remote island where Tsu operates, to take down her operation.
If this feels like a low-budget Bond ripoff, you’re just about right on the money, down to the “let me tell you all my plans before I kill you” scene – at one point, I expected Tsu to yell, “No, Mr. Harber – I expect you to die!” But it is highly refreshing to have a female mastermind, especially one that excels in the areas of medicine and technology, traditionally a male evil overlord preserve: I’m hard pushed to think of any equals of Dr. Tsu, particularly from the era. Maybe the closest parallel would be Rosalba Neri, in Lady Frankenstein from two years earlier? Back that up with her multinational, all-female associates and she’s definitely decades ahead of her time, socially as well as technologically. In comparison, Harber comes over as a bit of a Neanderthal, whose solution for pretty much everything involves shooting at it, hitting it over the head – or occasionally hitting it over the head with his gun.
In the supporting cast, de Aragorn gets the best role, as lead henchperson Linda, who gets to brawl with Harber, destroying a hotel room, before leading him in a car chase through the streets of Manilla – again, something you didn’t see women doing very often at all in the 1970’s. And it’s a heck of a chase, with any number of moments that suggest the makers pretty much blew off niceties like closing streets or obtaining official sanction for the sequence, and just shot around whatever happened to be going on. Mention also due to cult veteran Sid Haig, who shows up as what appears to be Dr. Tsu’s accountant, and decides at the end to get out while the going is good, after another quirky character performance. Accompanied by Carson Whitsett’s funky score, the net result is something that’s not actually much, if at all, less fun than the same year’s Live and Let Die, and treads a nice line between self-parody and self-aware.
Dir: Robert O’Neill
Star: Ross Hagen, Nancy Kwan, Maria de Aragorn, Roberta Collins
a.k.a. The Deadly and the Beautiful
Life in the old West was tough. It was particularly tough if you were a woman, such as Sarah Ramírez (Jones), struggling to make an honest living with her farmer husband Miguel (Noriega), having escaped life as a prostitute. This movie shows it to be especially tough, after Miguel has had his throat slit by batty preacher Prophet Josiah (Isaacs) – it doesn’t help he has the hots for Sarah, apparently taking the “love thy neighbour” line very literally, and runs the local area as if it were his own personal fiefdom. Fortunately, she has an unusual ally in Sheriff Jackson (Harris). The lawman shows up, looking for two people who disappeared on a journey which took them right across Josiah’s territory, and is about the only other person willing to stand up to the lunatic religious fringe. Finally, Sarah has had enough, and embarks on her vengeance against, not only Josiah, but anyone else who has wronged her, such as the shopkeeper who spied on her in his changing-room.
I can see why, purely for reason of brevity, the title above was preferred to the full one of The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent, even though the latter is more accurate. For the Sea Serpent has a supporting role here, met once on their way in, and again on the way out – it’s much more about what happens in the middle. Three years after their men left, the women of the Stannjold clan leave their shores under the command of Desir (Dalton), trying to find out what happened to them. Encounter #1 with the monster leads them to be shipwrecked on the same shores of the Grimault tribe as their menfolk, whose king, Stark (Devon), has set them to work as slaves in his mines. After initially appearing to welcome the women, it becomes clear that Stark has plans for the new arrivals as well. Viking high-priestess Enger (Cabot) has her own agenda, however: having set her eyes both on Desir’s husband and, for more immediate and pragmatic reasons, Stark, she sabotages Desir’s first attempt to free the men.
Star Jill Kelly is an adult actress. I mention this, because it seems highly likely that most of her 300+ other works – perhaps The Butt Sisters Do Philadelphia or Sodomania: Slop Shots 5 – are likely better scripted, filmed, edited and generally well-made than this dreadful piece of crap. I should have known, given Donald G. Jackson’s involvement – he’s probably the worst film-maker I’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter, and I speak as someone fully familiar with the works of Ed Wood, Andy Milligan, J.P. Simon and Uwe Boll. They are all pretenders beside Jackson, and even though this barely runs an hour, your patience will be sorely tried. And by “tried”, I mean at the level where gnawing a limb off to escape will seems credible.
The character of Catwoman has had a mixed history over the years in other media than the printed page. TV has had the Julie Newmar & Eartha Kitt versions, a nod in Birds of Prey, and a teenage version of the character can be seen in the Gotham series which premiered last month. In film, we had Lee Meriwether in the sixties incarnation then, perhaps most famously of all, Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman Returns [albeit only after Annette Bening, Nicole Kidman and Demi Moore all were linked to the part]. Then, there was Halle Berry’s Catwoman, still talked about in hushed tones as perhaps the worst comic-book adaptation of all time, and which arguably did more damage to action heroines than any other big-budget movie in history. Despite the massive success of the Batman reboot, it took eight years before the character would appear in another film, Anne Hathaway playing Selina Kyle in The Dark Knight Rises.
I first became aware of this novel through an article back in February about MMA champion Ronda Rousey and 
In the slasher genre of horror, the perpetrators seem almost exclusively male: Michael Myers, Jason Vorhees, Freddy Krueger, etc. Women can play an important role, and we’ve covered some of them here before – but it’s much more often as the “final girl”, than the one wielding the machete. However, it’s often forgotten that, in the original Friday the 13th movie, the killer was not Jason, but his mother, so there is some precedent for the female antagonist. See also Nurse 3D, American Horror Story: Coven or perhaps best of all, 
While twice as long as the first series, at 12 episodes rather than six, I can’t say it’s actually any better. Indeed, I think the dilution of the main element which was so much fun the first time round – the relationship between the two, disparate hitwomen, Roxie (Osment) and Veronica (Chriqui) – leaves this season less entertaining. Yes, it’s bigger and more exotic: but it feels spread thinner, to the detriment of the core aspects. The story takes up shortly after the events of the first series, with V+R in the Caribbean, waiting to get their share of the money from Eileen (Missi Pyle) and Mother (Gershon). But instead, an assassination squad is sent to get them, kicking off a reunion with Veronica’s “parents”, a deranged killer who thinks Roxie is his dead wife, a rogue CIA operative who sends Frank Barnes (Arquette) after Mother, and so on. It builds to a climax where Veronica, previously injected with a lethal nanobot virus that’s about to go off, takes part in an underground death match at a cockfighting arena, to prove her love for the deranged killer. I shit you not.