Tag: USA

Naked Vengeance

  By

★★★
“In which we learn that small-town folk are dicks.”

nakedvengeanceWhile clearly knocking off I Spit on your Grave – not least in the underwater castration scene – this did at least have the good grace to wait for a bit, coming out seven years after Meir Zarchi’s infamous grindhouse pic. It’s one of the many pictures churned out by Roger Corman’s New World company, with the Philippines doing an admirable job of standing in for California, directed by Santiago, who’s no stranger to the GWG genre, with the likes of TNT Jackson and Ebony, Ivory and Jade also in his filmography.

The heroine is small-time actress Carla Harris (Tranelli), whose life is torn apart by tragedy, when her husband is killed after trying to intervene in an assault. With the law powerless to do anything, she heads off to the town where she grew up, to recuperate with her parents. However, the locals are unimpressed by her “big city” ways, in particular the men, after she rebuffs their crude advances. A drunken raid on her home, led by the local butcher (Garaz), ends in tragedy, and Carla in a catatonic state at the local hospital, apparently with no memory of the night’s events. Key-word there: “apparently”…

Yeah, it’s not exactly a spoiler that she’s soon tracking down those responsible, and disposing of them with extreme prejudice. It would have been cool – if, admittedly, fairly implausible – had she kept faking her illness and apparently remaining in hospital, while sneaking out to take her vengeance. But it’s only about two kills in before the ruse is discovered, and the rest of the film has her trying to complete the mission before the local cops, led by Sheriff Cates (McLaughlin) can track her down. I liked the pacing here: while it’s only about seven minutes in before Carla is burying her husband, the film then takes its time demonstrating the ineffectiveness of the police, and how she is now out of synch with the Neanderthal attitudes of the town where she grew up. Then: BANG. The assault is a nasty piece of work, but Santiago doesn’t linger too much there, before getting on to our leading lady’s retribution.

The problem is more one of plausibility, particularly in the second-half, where Carla seems about as indestructible as Michael Myers or Jason Vorhees. Car crashes, fires, impalement, all barely seem to slow her down with barely a scratch, and like those horror icons, she’s not interested in simply killing her victims, the stalk is just as important as the slash. Of course, it helps that her victims are equal idiots to the horny teenagers in Friday the 13th. I mean, that’s a woman you raped undressing and coming towards you. How much do you have to think with your pecker, for that not to set off all kinds of warning bells? Disengage your own brain’s higher-order functions here – and maybe your ears for the startlingly-bad theme song – and you’ll have a better time.

Dir: Cirio H. Santiago
Star: Deborah Tranelli, Bill McLaughlin, Kaz Garaz, Ed Crick

Inara, the Jungle Girl

  By

★
“The film that could only be made in South America, where hair-care products are cheap…”

inaraDear god. It has been a very, very long time since I have seen a film displaying such a degree of ineptness, in so many areas. About the only exception is the look of the film, which is nicely lush, allowing the makers to put together the trailer below. It’s a greater work of fiction than the movie itself, because the preview manages to give the impression that the feature its advertising does not entirely suck. In reality, trust me: it does. This is clear within the first 15 minutes, where we’ve had one burbling monologue of sub-Tarantinoesque proportions, two musical montages of absolutely no point, and the worst attempt by an actor to look drunk in cinematic history. I started looking up other reviews online at that point, and discovered, no, it wasn’t just me.

The plot is basically Avatar in bikinis. No, wait: that sounds a lot better than this actually is. Inara (Danger) has been raised by her father, after her mother was killed during a jungle operation by mercenary group Asguard. Dad killed the perp responsible – the one with a taste for long, droning speeches rather than action – and his son still bears a grudge against Inara, 18 years later. After her father’s death, Inara is recruited to join Asguard and return to the scene, but on the way there an entirely unexplained (and unshown: trust me, if this film can skimp on any cost, it does) crash leaves Inara the sole survivor. She joins a tribe of local “Amazons” – quotes used advisedly, since they are basically Caucasians with unlimited expense accounts for Target’s bikini department. Discovering the true meaning of life, our heroine switches sides, and joins the natives for a battle against Asguard. This clocks in at a brisk one minute, 40 seconds, or rather shorter than the average WWE Divas match.

Lead actress Danger appears to be a star of fetish sites like RingDivas.com, which offer services such as filming of “custom wrestling matches,” and that may explain why there is little acting demanded of her. However, the rest of the cast are tasked to no greater extent, by a script consisting largely of scenes that begin nowhere, end nowhere and, in between, serve no purpose in developing story or characters. Now, every film might have a couple of these: here, they crop up with such regularity, it begins to feel that Desmarattes is playing some kind of surreal joke, making a native warrioress version of My Dinner With Andre. Sadly, I think it’s pure incompetence. Any time the film has a choice, and can go either towards being interesting or boring, it’s always the latter. And if you’re watching in the hope of some nudity or action, forget it: this fails to deliver anything of note in either category. I don’t use the phrase “worst movie ever” lightly, and have seen plenty of truly terrible offerings, but this certainly deserves to be in the conversation, for both its breadth and depth of awfulness.

Dir: Patrick Desmarattes
Star: Cali Danger and other people. Names redacted: they’ll thank me later.

Violet and Daisy

  By

★★★★
“Hanna turns eighteen. Not what you’d expect from the writer of Precious.“

sealvioletdaisyThis opens with two young women, Violet (Bledel) and Daisy (Ronan), peeved because their favourite singer, Barbie Sunday, has cancelled an upcoming concert, to which they’d been looking forward. Their conversation continues as they approach an apartment, curiously dressed as nuns, and delivering pizza. However, curiosity will likely turn to bewilderment: when the door is opened, the girls both pull out hand-guns, and a brutal gun-battle erupts. Welcome to the surreal, yet oddly heart-warming world of Violet and Daisy, two hit-women who are talked out of a planned holiday with the promise of a job, offering them enough money to buy their hearts’ desires: clothes from Barbie’s Sunday’s fashion line. Except, their target, Michael (Gandolfini), seems bizarrely happy to see them. I mean, as well as him helpfully telling them where to get additional bullets, after their misguided attempt to shoot him with their eyes closed, none of their other victims have ever baked them cookies before…

From there, things are gradually revealed about the participants and their various issues. Violet, the older assassinette (Bledel was almost 30 while shooting this), acts as a mentor to Daisy, who has just turned 18, and hasn’t yet come to terms with the violence required for the job. It’s an interesting contrast to Ronan’s younger, somewhat similar, yet far more callous character in Hanna. Meanwhile, lurking in the background is Iris (Jean-Baptiste), the number one killer, who is intent on ensuring that Violet + Daisy don’t feel too much sympathy for their intended victim, and back out of the job. Michael, meanwhile, is keen for them to get on with it, because a pair of more unpleasant fates are also coming towards him. It’s nicely nuanced, shifting from blackly-comedic – check out V+D’s “internal bleeding dance” – through to poignant and emotional, the latter enhanced by the death, earlier this year, of Gandolfini.

There seems something almost Tarantino-esque about this: more than the hefty body count and a generally whimsical style, definitely a surprising choice as the directorial debut of the man who gave us the bleak urban coming-of-age story which was Precious. Like QT, Fletcher, who wrote the story too, has an excellent ear for dialogue, though fortunately lacking the more egotistical aspects, and the movie also jumps back and forth in time; so, as in Pulp Fiction, some scenes don’t make sense immediately, until the blanks are filled in later. Throw in cult icon Danny Trejo in a cameo role, and Orphan Black herself, Tatiana Maslany, as Michael’s estranged teenage daughter, and you’ve got one of the most unexpectedly pleasant surprises of 2013 overall. It’s an engaging and effective action heroine film too, and one which doesn’t rely purely on adrenalin and cleavage. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course…

Dir: Geoffrey S. Fletcher
Star: Saoirse Ronan, Alexis Bledel, James Gandolfini, Marianne Jean-Baptiste

Nude Nuns With Big Guns

  By

★★★
“If you liked the party scene in Ms. 45, you’ll love this…”

Surely one of the great B-movie exploitation titles of all-time, this inevitably can’t live up to the expectations that generates, though in the early going, it makes a half-decent effort. Certainly, it’s more entertaining than Guzman’s previous Run! Bitch Run!, though it does suffer from some of the same mean-spirited unpleasantness. The heroine is Sister Sarah (Ortega), who has been a long-term victim of the Catholic Church, which is portrayed here as the embodiment of just about every evil imaginable, being neck-deep in drugs, prositution and other equally-dubious activities, with their partners, the Los Muertos biker gang. Finally, Sarah has a vision from God, telling her it’s time to clean house: she starts at the bottom, and works her way up to Chavo (Castro) and Father Carlittos (D’Marco). Along the way, yes, there is no shortage of nude nuns – or other women – though, to be honest, the guns aren’t actually all that big…

Given the title, you have a certain obvious set of expectations. This kind of thing can be enormous fun, as the likes of Machete or Hobo with a Shotgun prove. This doesn’t quite reach the same level of gleeful abandon, and while Ortega holds her own (admittedly in a role that doesn’t require much in terms of emotional breadth), the rest of the cast are acceptable at best, and painfully wooden at worst. After a high-octane and hugely-promising start, the middle section struggles much harder to keep the audience’s attention with anything other than the gratuitous nudity – it’s entirely obvious where things are heading. As in Bitch, the filling here includes some stuff which edges precariously close to rape fantasy, and if you’ve read much of this site, you’ll know that when it comes to rape-revenge movies, I like them to be firmly weighted toward the latter. There’s one particularly dubious and pointless scene of an elderly nun being assaulted, that came close to offending even my broad palate.

However, once the vengeful aspects return to being the focus, rather than Chavo, the film improves again. Though I do feel the villains could have received rather more comeuppance: their fates seem almost trivial, in comparison to what they have dished out over the course of the movie. Ortega does make an impression, and a title like this is, in many ways, entirely review-proof: anyone complaining it is sleazy and tacky, can’t have been paying much attention when they decided to watch it! At least it can’t be accused, like many B-movies, of not delivering on the sleeve’s promise.

Dir: Joseph Guzman
Star: Asun Ortega, David Castro, Aycil Yeltan, Perry D’Marco

Naked Fear

  By

★★½
“The Naked Prey”

The concept of “hunting humans” has been popular cinematic fodder for over 80 years, since The Most Dangerous Game came out in 1932. This isn’t the first specifically to target women – the Roger Corman produced The Woman Hunt did so in the seventies – but the prey in that needed male help to accomplish much, which isn’t the case here. The heroine is Diana Kelper (DeLuca), whose new dance job turns out not to be quite as expected – she’s more or less coerced into working as a stripper, unable to leave until she pays off the debts to the man who brought her in. The only way to do that is to turn tricks on the side, but her first client is Colin Mandel (Garfield), who is interested in a longer-term relationship. Specifically, one where he can take his female victims into the remote wilderness, where they wake up, unclothed and eventually on the wrong end of a crossbow bolt or bullet. However, with Kelper, he may have bitten off more than he can chew.

It’s a good concept for a movie – all the more striking when you discover real-life serial killer Robert Hansen basically did the same thing for real, up in Alaska – and much credit to DeLuca for a performance which retains her character’s dignity, more than you’d imagine from the pretty lurid plot-line. The problem is mostly the script. The two obvious flaws are, firstly, it takes too long to get to the interesting stuff (from both exploitative and less prurient views), instead, meandering around pointless subplots such as a new local cop (Shiver), who has suspicions about all the missing persons reports, but blah blah blah. And secondly, way too much idiocy is required by Diana for reasons of plot. For example, at one point, she completely has the drop on her tormentor, having knocked him out with a rock. Obvious things to do would include, keep on smashing his skull, taking his weapon, or at least removing his boots and clothes for your own use, since you are buck-naked. Nope: she just runs off. Really?

There’s some discussion over the ending: some have said it feels tacked on, but I liked it, and felt it pointed towards a potentially more-interesting sequel, with Diana swapping roles and becoming the hunter rather than the hunted. But it isn’t quite enough to salvage the overall movie, with the weaknesses noted above enough to negate the more positive elements.

Dir: Thom E. Eberhardt
Star: Danielle DeLuca, J. D. Garfield, Arron Shiver, Joe Mantegna

Teenage Bank Heist

  By

★★★
“Solidly acted and directed TVM, but the script definitely holds everything back.”

Recent high-school graduate Cassie (Cobb) works at a bank alongside her mother (Quinlan), bickering about the usual things, such as whether to go to college or not. This mundance existence is suddenly interrupted by a robbery: Cassie is stunned to realize the raiders are actually some of her school friends. When they realize this, the girls are forced to take her along, and she discovers the cause of the crime – the father of one (Thomson) has been kidnapped while on business in Mexico. Meanwhile, Mom is tracking down her kidnapped daughter, FBI agent Mendoza (Blasi) is also on the hunt, and one of the girl gang has her own plans for the ill-gotten gains, which doesn’t involve any ransom.

I wavered between 2.5 and 3 stars for this, but finally opted for the latter, because of the sheer volume of strong female characters: only one of the seven main characters is male, which is a rarity. The pacing is good, the film hitting the ground running from an intriguing opening scene, before flashing back to the lead-up to the robbery, and there pretty much isn’t a dull moment thereafter. Obviously, the TVM format imposes certain limitations on content, but the movie works within these fairly well, and the performances avoid most of the usual pitfalls and make the girls into fairly well-rounded, rather than irritating characters. Credit particularly Augie Duke as “bad girl” Marie, who has a fiery intensity that’s fun to watch.

So, why was I being indecisive, all the way down in the 2.5-3 star range? It’s the plotting, with a number of elements that are utterly implausible, particular with regard to the crime and how the FBI would handle circumstances. For instance, after getting surveillance footage of a crime, would they allow a witness unsupervised access to it? Do agents meander off to follow said witness out into the desert on little more than a hunch? There are a bunch of similar moments, where it’s necessary to suspend disbelief for plot reasons, not least the ending, which certainly had me raising a sardonic eyebrow and going “O RLY?” If these don’t damage the movie irreparably, they certainly weaken its impact significantly. And that’s a shame, as its strengths still certainly make it worth a look.

Dir: Doug Campbell
Star: Abbie Cobb, Maeve Quinlan, Cassi Thomson, Rosa Blasi

Darklight

  By

★½
“Never has the chasm between idea and execution been quite so yawning.”

Great concept: Lilith, Adam’s first wife, condemned to immortality, is now an amnesiac in a minimum-wage job. But when a demon threatens to unleash a plague of biblical proportions on the Earth, she has to be shown her true nature and convinced to hunt down the enemy. Unfortunately, almost every aspect, from exposition through characters to the action and CGI-heavy effects, are awful. Not just bad: awful. The plot is contrived and relies on things like TV news to propel it, the main protagonists are Buffy/Watcher clones; Lilith’s “training” consists of one laughably short session; the action sucks because she’s clearly fighting thin air, and as for the final battle…I’ve seen better and more convincing computer graphics on a Game Boy Advance.

There are a couple of facets I quite liked; the concept of a religious group secretly protecting the world from demons and so forth is nice, and Appleby has some screen presence. However, most of the potential is screwed up with ruthless efficiency; the makers needed to watch Witchblade and see how to handle a heroine with a past [admittedly, they had an entire season to work with, not two-hours-minus-adverts]. The angst Lilith feels is nonsense. She’s been killing since time began, so has clearly come to terms with it, so why break down over one death? She’d have been better off as an ‘avenging angel’, without moral qualms.

The ending is, inevitably, left open for a sequel or a series, but there’s absolutely nothing here that would encourage me to watch it. The best one can say is that, at $2m, it wasn’t expensive, but the SciFi Channel could surely have found more worthwhile projects to fund than this poorly-made collection of bits and pieces stolen from better heroines.

Dir: Bill Platt
Star: Shiri Appleby, Richard Burgi, John de Lancie, Richard Gnolfo

Angel of H.E.A.T.

  By

★★
“That whirring sound you hear is Andy Sidaris, spinning in his grave.”

After some hi-tech computer chips go missing, government agents Samantha (Woronov) and Mark (Johnson) are assigned to go undercover at the electronics plant. But also investigating is Angel Harmony (porn star Chambers), with whom Samatha has crossed swords before, and #1 agent one of a group called The Protectors, “international vigilantes, outlaws in the service of peace and freedom” as the introductory title card calls them. Eventually teaming up, they discover the missing chips were only the tip of an iceberg created by a thoroughly-mad scientist (Jesse), who is planning to use high-pitched sound and his army of androids (which have, charitably, been given sex drives!) to take over the world and… Oh, y’know: the usual mad scientist stuff, I guess.

This is, to be charitable, total bollocks, right from a title sequence, which features Chambers doing nekkid kung-fu in fluorescent strobing, while a lounge singer warbles a song that gives a bad name to elevator music. However, it just about manages to skate by on the charisma of the two leading ladies and, when he eventually shows up, Jesse, who chews the scenery to such an extent that it’s actually fun. However, there’s neither enough thought put into the thin script, nor effort put into the execution, to make it successful: instead, you’ll be rolling your eyes at some aspects, such as the really bad post-production explosion, when a speedboat inexplicably blows up after running into a buoy. Intended as the first in a series – it’s introduced as “Book #1” – you can see exactly why it was one and done instead.

Obviously, it’s not intended to be taken seriously. That’s made clear by the ninja, played by another porn star, the obviously Caucasian Randy West, who speaks badly-accented English captioned in English, written in a Japanese font; while an actual Asian plays kung-fu master “Hans Zeisel”, who sounds exactly like his name suggests. But the gulf between “funny” and “trying way too hard to be funny, and failing miserably,” is largely where this resides, along with clunkily obvious product placement for a casino location and, for no readily apparent reason, lengthy mud-wrestling footage. However, as noted, Woronov and Chambers keep it just about watchable: if you’ve seen David Cronenberg’s Rabid, you’ll know Chambers can hold her own as an actress, and Woronov could do this kind of thing in her sleep. And, apparently, did here. A curio, of interest only if your sensibilities are feeling in a fairly generous mood.

Joan the Woman

  By

★★★½
“The first second* action heroine?”

I don’t watch many silent films: it’s such an entirely different experience, obviously, much less driven by dialogue and more by gestures, leading to a style that can look extremely over-theatrical to the modern viewer. My efforts to enjoy the likes of Nosferatu, for example, have usually ended in my providing an accompaniment of snoring, to be honest. This was much better. Despite a running time of over two hours, this 1916 DeMille epic successfully held my interest, as it told the story of Joan of Arc. The framing device uses the then-contemporary World War I, and an English soldier (Reid) finds Joan’s sword in the trenches, the night before a dangerous mission [Interesting how the English are the enemy in the back-story, but the good guys “now” – at the time of release, America was still several months from entering the war, on the British side]. He then experiences a flashback vision, taking him to medieval France, where he is an English soldier saved by Joan (Farrar) in her milkmaid days. We follow her for the story you know, becoming the inspiration for the French army to defeat the English, before her capture, trial for heresy and – I trust I’m not spoiling this – burning at the stake.

Now, don’t expect Joan to go hand-to-hand with the English army here. Still, she’s no nominal figurehead, instead leading her forces from the absolute front, as they break the siege at Orleans. She’s first into the breach, waving the standard to encourage them on, until she takes an arrow in the shoulder. Certainly, there’s no denying her heroic credentials: she’s portrayed as brave and committed to doing the right thing. The film probably does a better job of establishing her as a credible leader than the Luc Besson adaptation: you can see why people would follow her, and it plays the religious elements relatively soft. And the action sequences demonstrate why DeMille’s reputation for epics is well-deserved, with the battle for Orleans impressively-staged, capturing the chaos of war, without needing to resort the the blender-style editing or shaky camerawork, too often seen in modern war movies.

It’s a shame there isn’t more of that. Instead, after Orleans, the rest of her war campaign is covered in a caption, and the film is, understandably, less successful, when it comes to the more talky aspects of her life. In particular, Joan’s trial and incarceration becomes a lengthy sequence of meaningful stares and dramatic flailing. Still, I liked the way it all wrapped around, Joan’s story giving the soldier the courage to go on his mission, though the ending is more mournful than I expected. All told, for something approaching its one-hundredth birthday, this certainly didn’t feel like it, and DeMille deserves credit for laying some foundations for film-makers to come.

Dir: Cecil B. DeMille
Star: Geraldine Farrar, Wallace Reid, Raymond Hatton, Theodore Roberts
* = I’ve since discovered a 1915 Italian film, Filibus, which predates this. A review is here.

Spitfire

  By

★★
“Imagine Tonya Harding playing Jason Bourne. Yep, it’s like that.”

This can only be described as a mess, albeit a crappily entertaining one, with a leading lady in Phillips, who almost made it to the Olympics, being described as “the next Mary-Lou (Retton)”, before trying her hand in low-budget action. She plays an international-level gymnast and martial-arts expert, whose parents are, unknown to her, involved in a plot involving the launch codes for Ukrainian missiles. The mother is killed by villainous Brit, Carla Davis (Douglas – apparently Jenny Agutter was unavailable. Or, more likely, too expensive), who wants to get her claws on the codes for some reason. Hey, she’s a villain: what more does she need? She captures Dad (Henriksen), but not before he has given his daugher the first in a series of clues which will lead her and investigative journalist Rex Beechum (Thomerson), apparently with an unlimited expense account, around the globe from Rome to Kuala Lumpur to Hong Kong and Athens, bumping into various unexpected siblings along the way.

One senses this globe-hopping was largely funded by Pyun’s frequent flier miles, and he makes sure that we see enough of the actors that we know they were actually there – I suspect Henriksen was excluded, as he is never shown in anywhere that couldn’t be faked outside a studio, nor is he ever on-screen at the same time as Thomerson. Despite an opening credit sequence which is clearly trying to channel a seventies Bond flick (not least in the jet-pack with which Henriksen escapes the bad guys), this plays more like a distaff version of Gymkata, with significantly poorer production values, though at least Phillips doesn’t need to be doubled for the gymnastics scenes. There’s a bizarre subplot involving evil Romanians, which also appears to have strayed in from a Cold War era, and many, many chase sequences, which pause briefly for exposition, or Phillips to demonstrate her mediocre martial-arts skills. There’s certainly no shortage of things going on, even if the interest level of these often remains questionable. However, I’ll admit, I did laugh at the running joke which sees Beechum perpetually being knocked out by someone or other.

Thomerson and Henriksen could do this kind of thing in their sleep, and apparently did so here, though still lend the film an air of quality that it largely lacks otherwise, and Douglas makes for a decent villainess. Phillips is more problematic: after Betrayal, it was the second film of the day where we had a lead actress who wasn’t actually an actress, and it shows. I’m now fairly convinced that some kind of test should be required of anyone starring in a movie, and if you don’t pass, your artistic license gets revoked. Phillips, wisely, retired from acting there after, saving the world from further punishment – if, unfortunately, not further Albert Pyun movies.

Dir: Albert Pyun
Star: Kristie Phillips, Tim Thomerson, Sarah Douglas, Lance Henriksen