Tag: USA

Last Man Standing

  By

★★½
“Competently bland, as usual with Lifetime. “

Kinda odd to see Dickerson – cinematographer on a lot of Spike Lee’s movies, and Eddie Murphy’s Raw – directing this Lifetime original movie. It’s certainly not edgy, though that’s not what Lifetime is exactly about. You largely know what you’re going to get with their output. Something technically decent, usually with decent enough performances, but something that clings to the viewer’s comfort zone like a limpet. Is it wrong to criticize the channel for that, when it has absolutely no interest in pushing the envelope? It’d be a bit like coming down on Disney for making kids movies. It’s what they do: deal with it.

The heroine here is Abby Collins (Bell), a former soldier and technician who is now a soccer Mom with a veterinarian husband (Hall) and cute-as-a-button daughter. But, inevitably, dark forces loom, when she gets word a former army colleague has apparently committed suicide. Before she knows what has happened, her spouse has been kidnapped and someone is using that to force Abby to break into her colleague’s office and do some shady financial transactions. It’s up to her and another ex-soldier. Jeremy Davis (Phifer), to figure out what’s going on, the connection to her past, and rescue Mr. Collins: it’ll take all of Abby’s skills, both electronic and technical, before the “shocking” truth is revealed.

Quotes used advisedly, because I’d recommend a trip to the optician’s, if you can’t see the twist in the script (co-written by Bell’s husband I note) before it shows. There are other glitches in the story, such as the semi-cheating way in which Abby’s past is hidden from the audience for much of film. However, if you can forgive the utter predictability of it all, and the lack of discernible flavour, there are worse ways to pass an hour and a half. It’s a difficult task for any actress, managing to be convincing both as a home-maker and and an ass-kicker: Bell does a decent task on both, though the stunt-doubling for action purposes is often less than subtle. Compared to some of the stuff aired by Lifetime, this is by no means all that bad, though you don’t have to look far to find its flaws.

Dir: Ernest Dickerson
Star: Catherine Bell, Anthony Michael Hall, Mekhi Phifer, Ella Anderson

Girls Against Boys

  By

★★★½
“Despite the director’s name, not really a chick flick. Thank you: I’ll be here all week.”

Shae (Panabaker) is not having the best luck with men. Her older boyfriend just dumped her, to try to get back with his wife, and a night where she drinks to forget ends up with her being raped in the stairwell of her apartment building. Fortunately, there to lend a helping hand is Lu (LaLiberte), a barmaid who turns out to have a dark side. A really dark side. As in, when Shae is reporting her rape. Lu takes the desk sergeant to a motel, handcuffs to the bed, sticks a gun into his crotch and pulls the trigger. When the authorities prove about as useful as they usually are in this situation, Lu helps Shae take revenge on the bastard who raped her. Then his friends. Then the ex-boyfriend. But when Shae finds a guy who might actually not be a total douche-bag, Lu is still thoroughly unimpressed.

Almost from the start, the film is playing, more or less openly, with the question of Lu. Is she real? A projection of Shae’s violent revenge fantasties? Or, in the end, does it matter all that much? This has been compared to Baise-Moi, which I haven’t seen, but the vibe I got from it was more Ms. 45. That’s true in several ways: the New York setting, the way the violence escalates from “legitimate” targets to the innocent, and even a key scene near the end, taking place at a Halloween party. Here’s it’s as if Lu exists to give voice to the situation, in a way Zoe Tamerlis’s character couldn’t voice. However, Panabaker isn’t generally as good in her role, and we really don’t sympathize with her as much, perhaps because her problems are, to a degree, of her own making.

Several things here do fall into the “very good to excellent” category. The throbbing electronic soundtrack, with added Joy Division and Donovan, is highly effective. LaLiberte is excellent in her role as the unfettered voice of violent rage, perhaps no better, than when she’s telling Shae the story of how her father started selling her for sex to his friends when she was five. And the cinematography is occasionally awesome: there’s one shot involving a mirror, near th end, which is simply breathtaking – to the point that I rewound it, purely so I could enjoy it once more. The story has been criticized for being thin, and that’s fair comment, since there is rather too much footage of the heroines going from place to place. However, if you can ignore the lurid advertising and largely misleading trailer, going in with few preconceptions of what to expect, it’s a decent, chewy piece of thought-provoking grindhouse.

Dir: Austin Chick
Star: Danielle Panabaker, Nicole LaLiberte, Michael Stahl-David

The Day

  By

★★½
“After the apocalypse, there will be blood. Oh, yes: there will be blood…”

There are times when not saying too much can work for a film; Night of the Living Dead is the classic example, and it works, because you don’t need to know why there are zombies. Just that they are. A similar approach is taken here: you’re dumped more or less into the middle of a post-apocalyptic scenario, with five people wandering the wilderness. They take shelter in a farmhouse, only to discover it’s actually a trap for a cannibalistic tribe living nearby. The group’s leader, Adam (Ashmore) believes Mary (Bell) deliberately led them into the house, but she convinces them she is a member of a different clan, with just as much reason to hate the cannibals. Knowing they would rapidly hunted down if they tried to make a break for it through the open countryside, the prepare to defend the house against those outside, who want to have them over for dinner. And I mean that, in the most literal sense of the term.

Bell, previously, best-known for playing a possessed girl in The Last Exorcism, is an effective and impressive bad-ass in this movie, gradually moving from the side to centre-stage. There’s also little no attempt to make her prettified: understandable, given the situation, but it always kinda irritates me when heroines are miraculously immune to damage, and always immaculately made-up and coiffured. Definitely not the case here. However, the lack of any significant explanation does damage proceedings, because it means things appear to unfold simply because they need to for the plot, without any other justification: there’s no scene-setting to make them logical. Why did these people turn to cannibalism? What happened to destroy civilization so completely? Unlike NotLD, these are relevant questions, that the film stubbornly refuses to answer. While cheaper aspects, such as the few sets and small cast, are explicable by the budget, more exposition would have been welcome.

I did like the visual style, which is muted, to the point of often almost becoming entirely black and white: there’ll be a single object painted in colour to stop you from getting up and adjusting your set. But rather than a fully-fledged movie, it feels like an single episode taken from a long-running TV series. While it’s one I’d be interested in watching, thanks largely to Bell, as a stand-alone feature, it doesn’t quite work, and feels like a good idea in need of significantly more development.

Dir: Douglas Aarniokoski
Star: Ashley Bell, Shannyn Sossamon, Shawn Ashmore, Cory Hardrict

Kill ‘Em All

  By

★★★
“Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start.”

Evil mastermind Snakehead (Liu) kidnaps eight of the world’s top assassins, and transports them to a bunker in his Bangkok lair, where he makes them fight each other to the death, laughing maniaally all the while. Why? Because he’s an evil mastermind, that’s why: it’s what they do for amusement, rather than watch reality shows or potter around in the garden. After the numbers have been whittled down, Som (Siripoing, who played the mother in Chocolate) blocks the gas system used by Snakehead to enforce discipline, and leads an escape from the killing chamber. However, Snakehead had a lot more minions who need to be defeated before she and Gabriel (Messner) finally get to the boss level.

If that plot summary is terser than usual, that’s because there is much less plot than usual, in what is not much more than a thin, if occasionally clever, contrived excuse to slap together a series of fight scenes. As such, logic doesn’t enter in to it much. For example, is there some kind of employment scheme to which evil overlords can subscribe, which provides faceless henchmen willing to go to their deaths in droves? And if so, why not just get them to fight each other for your entertainment? The motive which spurs Snakehead to spend considerable time, effort and money on his scheme – not, it eventually is revealed, for the first time – is completely opaque, and few of the assassins come over any better, with little time or effort put into their characterization. Case in point: Gabriel tries to commit suicide just before his kidnapping, but it comes out of nowhere so has absolutely no emotional impact.

No, this is all about the martial arts, and in this aspect, the film does deliver – albeit more in quantity than quality, without the level of invention seen in, say, The Raid: Redemption. The different styles on view from the participants do give a decent degree of variety, and The Kid (Man, who also did the fight choereography) showcases some impressive moves. There’s certainly no shortage of action, to the extent that this feels more like a video-game with occasional cut scenes to move the plot forward, than an action film with set-pieces of martial arts. However, while tasty enough during consumption, it still ends up being entirely unfilling, and is like a Chinese meal which leaves you hungry, 15 minutes after eating it.

Dir: Raimund Huber
Star: Ammara Siripong, Johnny Messner, Gordon Liu, Tim Man

Crusade of Vengeance

  By

★★★½
“Look! Beneath the cheap silliness, some decent performances lurk…”

It’s easy to dismiss this, for its low production values, sometimes laughable dialogue and wildly-implausible plot – and I could hardly argue. Yet we still enjoyed this, thanks largely to performances which sustained us through the bad matte paintings, clunky lines, and mediocre action scenes. Of course, to use a pro-wrestling term, we’re huge Rutger marks, so seeing him as evil medieval warlord Grekkor is a big plus, harking back to his work in Flesh + Blood for Paul Verhoeven. Pacula is a “crusader mom” (for want of a better word), back from the Holy Land where she vowed to go after making a deal with God to let her son survive. However, she returns just after Grekkor and his sidekick (Vosloo) have swept her boy off with them. She goes to rescue him, teaming up with three other women on the way, as she heads towards the inevitable confrontation with Grekkor.

Despite a weird Scandinavian accent that seems out of place in what’s supposed to be England (and is actually Lithuania), Pacula does well, bringing the right intensity to her ‘wronged mother’ role. Hauer is fab as we expected, while Vosloo gets to act more than in either Mummy movie, and is actually good. They help hold up a film that occasionally wobbles between uncomfortable rape scenes, silly humour and Culver’s costume, that resembles a fur coat which has gone through a shredder. Between that and her height, she looks more like the model she was, than a forest huntress, but does kick butt in an efficient manner. While the story goes almost exactly as you’d expect, this is one of those cases where you will be entertained, if you allow yourself to be. If no-one will mistake this for a classic, cut the movie some slack, and work with the film, rather than picking holes in it. Especially for those still mourning the death of Xena, the payoff will be more than adequate for a rental on a midweek night.

The film was released by MTI Home Video on January 24th. See their site for more details.
Dir: Byron W. Thompson
Star: Joanna Pacula, Arnold Vosloo, Rutger Hauer, Molly Culver
a.k.a. Warrior Angels

Blubberella

  By

★★
“Not quite the wholesale disaster this might seem…”

This will only make sense, or be in any way entertaining, if you’ve seen Bloodrayne 3: The Third Reich: because it’s basically the same film, with a really fat chick (Hollister) replacing Natassia Malthe. And when I say, “the same film,” I mean the same storyline, same actors playing the same roles, and same scenes in the same locations. Really, I suspect this must have been made at the same time, with Boll simply swapping out Hollister for Malthe every other take. As there, the heroine is a half-human, half-vampire, who finds herself involved in a Nazi plan to take the powers of vampirism and turn them to their own ends. Except here, it is, of course, a spoof – and one so extremely broad, the makers of those Epic Movie flicks would have been cringing on occasion. Fat jokes, gay jokes, Nazi jokes… No easy target is left unstoned, paved with deliberate anachronisms like Segways and Internet dating.

And yet, even if it took us two sessions to get through this, I can’t bring myself to hate it, not least because of Hollister, who goes at things with gusto. It’s clear this is an actress who does not get to play the lead often, least of all in an action flick (though for obvious reasons, the action can kindly be described as “limited”). Even if this is a parody of one, both her and Boll deserve credit for breaking down one of the taboos seen everywhere in body conscious Hollywood. There are moments here which are just surreal, such as a dream sequence where Blubberella plays a game of Risk with Hitler (played by the director!) and Fletcher in blackface. WTF? No, really: WTF? There’s also a lengthy scene parodying Precious, which is unsurprising, considering it’s about the only other film I can think of where a morbidly obese woman is the heroine.

I probably have a higher opinion of Boll than most people: when he avoids making video-game films, the results can be really good [Darfur and Rampage both kick ass]. However, comedy really isn’t his forte, and too much of this ends up missing its mark, most often through being over-played in one way or another. Rather than a shot-for-shot remake of a film that wasn’t exactly a huge success, Boll and co. might have been better off with a broader spoof of superhero films, which would have given them a bigger palette for their unsubtle satire. That said, I will admit that I did laugh, and laugh out loud, more often than I expected, and it’s a hell of a lot better than Boll’s last attempt at “offense humour,” Postal.

Dir: Uwe Boll
Star: Lindsay Hollister, Brendan Fletcher, Michael Pare, William Belli

Wonder Woman (Unaired TV Pilot)

  By

★★★
“Nowhere near as bad as you might think.”

Allowing for the fact this was more or less a rough-cut – you can still see the wires as the heroine throws villains around – this actually is far from the atrocity you expect, going from the pre-production fan loathing. The story avoid the whole “origins” thing, hitting the ground running by having Wonder Woman/Diana Prince (Palicki) already fully-active, and busting crime around Los Angeles. Her extra-legal activities, with the local cops’ complicity, bring her to the attention of the federal authorities. Meanwhile, she’s tussling with the board of her company over the merchandise that funds her crime-fighting, objecting to the size of the tits on her action-figure – and, yes, they actually say “tits”, to my surprise. Finally, the villainess (Hurley) is performing illegal medical experiments with steroids and such, to create super-soldiers, and it’s up to Wonder Woman, her plane (wisely, no longer invisible), bullet-deflecting bracelets and lasso which may or may not be of truth (it’s unclear from this episode) to stop her.

Yeah, there’s probably too much going on, as it establishes that Prince is not just an action heroine, but also a business mogul, being the CEO of Themyscira Industries, and a woman: y’know, with needs. They each have their separate identities: it’s a nice touch, though not all of this needed to be put across in the pilot I think. They might have been better off bringing the other angles in down the line. What does work, surprisingly well, is Palicki, who both looks the part – a particular surprise, given the heat the costume took – and manages to hit most of the dramatic points necessary. However, I can see how fans of the comic books would probably still hate it, since there’s barely any acknowledgment of her ancestry as the princess of an all-female tribe from a remote island.

I particularly liked the hard-edged “neo-vigilante” approach of Wonder Woman, who has no aversion to violence and at one point, flat out kills someone by driving a pipe through his neck. Don’t recall Lynda Carter doing that: The Dark Knight has a lot to answer for. On the down side, the script does have its fair share of cliches, from the grieving mother through to the romantic interest. But, really: you can turn on the television any night of the week and see far less interesting or well-considered excuses for series, which somehow managed to get themselves green-lit. It has potential to be, if not great, at least half-decent: given the lack of action heroines on TV these days, it’s a pity this one received the televisual equivalent of a wire coat-hanger.

Dir: Jeffrey Reiner
Star: Adrianne Palicki, Elizabeth Hurley, Carey Elwes, Tracie Thoms

The Last Rites of Ransom Pride

  By

★★★
“Well, at least it’s different…”

Though nominally a Western, this perhaps has more in common with the surreal works of Alejandro Jodorowsky, in particular El Topo, with mystical elements and downright weirdness. Ransom Pride (Scott Speedman, from the Underworld series) is killed in a gun-battle while trying to broker an arms deal with the locals. His corpse is kept by the local bruja, or witch (de Pablo), because her brother also died in the fight, shot by Ransom. That doesn’t sit well with his lover, Juliette (Caplan), a half-breed who has been raised in blood since slitting the throat of the Mexican general who killed her parents, while still not yet a teenager. She returns to Ransom’s home, and recruits his brother (Foster) to help recover the body, on the way back to Mexico, meeting a bevy of strange characters and situations. Their mission doesn’t sit well with the Pride patriarch (Yoakam), a gun-fighter turned preacher, who sets loose a pair of hunters, but is prepared to get his own hands dirty in pursuit of that “whore of Babylon.”

In terms of visual style, it seems almost as if the appeoach was to try and irritate the hell out of the viewer, with frequent interruptions of scenes with a few frames takes from other sequences, past or yet to come. It certainly keeps the audience on their toes, but is both overused and outstays its welcome. That’s a shame, as there are other elements worthy of credit, not least the overall look, which has a bleached tone that is quite effective. Caplan is undeniably impressive, as is de Pablo – both come over as women with whom you do not want to mess. That’s impressive given both are probably best known previously, for fairly bland TV fare. Here, they are genuinely disturbing, and it’s a mix of the generally decent performances, and weird sense that anything could happen, that kept me watching.

On the downside, as well as the opaque visual sense, the audio is not infrequently as muddied as the picture, though it’s harder to say whether or not it was deliberately so. The script also has a tendency to drift off into areas that are probably not necessary – there’s too much backstory involving Ransom and his brother, when the film should instead have been moving forward. Finally, the editing during the action scenes is disappointing fractured, to the extent that you largely have to wait for the dust to settle and see who’s still alive. The negatives and positives end up just about balancing, and the end result is something that you don’t mind watching, yet will likely not have much interest in seeing again.

Dir: Tiller Russell
Star: Lizzy Caplan, Jon Foster, Cote de Pablo, Dwight Yoakam

Amazons (1984)

  By

★★½
“Almost 30 years later – despite binders full of women – this is still politically advanced for its day.

This made for TV movie first aired in January 1984, and was likely fairly topical at the time, with Geraldine Ferraro then on her way to becoming the VP behind Walter Mondale. It’s still just her and Sarah Palin as far as major party tickets in American history go. Her candidacy is foreshadowed by this piece of masculine paranoia. Stowe plays Dr. Sharon Fields, a doctor who is sued for malpractice after her hospital patient, a leading Congressman, had an unexpected psychotic episode, which leads to him playing in traffic. She finds a series of similar deaths linked by trace elements found in autopsies, all of men, whose deaths benefit women, in general or specifically. Turns out they are assassinations, carried out to the orders of an ancient, matriarchal cult: they now have their eye set on the leading presidential candidate – who just happens to have picked a woman as his running mate.

It’s an impressive cast. As well as Stowe (now lording it over the rich and famous as the matriarch in guilty pleasure Revenge), there’s Stevens as cult member Kathryn Lundquist, and Dobson as Rosalund Joseph, another hospital worker – the two faced off previously, in Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold – while Scalia plays the cop whom Fields has to try to convince. Behind the cameras, the cinematography is by Dean Cundey, who did the Back to the Future trilogy, The Thing and, er, Ilsa, Harem-Keeper of the Oil Sheiks; the music is from Basil Poledouris (Robocop); and it’s the directorial debut, outside the series, of Starsky [as in “…and Hutch”], three years before he did The Running Man. Solid stuff, and from a technical level, this makes for a pretty decent TVM, both in performances and production values.

However, the concept and the script appear nothing more than a Robin Cook medi-thriller laced with a large helping of delusional male chauvinist nonsense, portraying women – and, in particular, those who want to achieve political, social or economic power – as literal man-haters, who have absolutely no qualms about poisoning or killing by other means, any man unfortunate enough to get in their way. Admittedly, it’s not carried out with the level of hysteria one might think; in some ways, it’s fairly sympathetic to the Amazons. But it makes little or no sense (I mean, this cult has been around for thousands of years and has achieved exactly what?), and there’s no detectable irony, despite the absolute daftness of the central concept. Surely the eighties weren’t as naive as all that? Actually, looking at the hairstyles and fashions on view here, I think they were.

Dir: Paul Michael Glaser
Star: Madeleine Stowe, Jack Scalia, Stella Stevens, Tamara Dobson

Angels’ Brigade

  By

★★½
“Charlie’s Magnificent 7 Angels.”

After her brother is severely beaten by a drug dealer, Las Vegas lounge singer (!) Michelle Wilson (Kiger, Miss January 1977) is visited by his teacher (Cole), who knows the location of the cartel’s drug warehouse. Wilson puts together a team of women who have reason to want to take the dealers down, including a stuntwoman (Anderson) and an undercover cop (Grant). There’s also a martial-arts instructress, a model and, tagging along, one of the teacher’s pupils. They build a heavily-armed van, train in the ways of war, and rip off a bunch of militia types for weaponry, before staging a successful raid that destroys the warehouse. However, the mob (led by veteran actors Peter Lawford and Jack Palance) are not prepared to let them get away with it.

This is best known through its use – in a severely truncated form – on MST3K, and I suspect that’s where most of the 1,200+ votes on the IMDB come from [it’s more than, say, the rather better-renowned Black Mama, White Mama]. The unedited version is less worthy of derision. I wouldn’t call it great cinema, but it heads from Point A to Point B in a brisk fashion, and the practical effect – stunts, explosions, etc. – are decent enough. Of course, there’s little or no characterization to speak of, on either side, it’s clearly ripped off from Charlie’s Angels, and there’s a weird unevenness of tone that is hard to handle. For instance, the militia types are incredibly incompetent, bumping into each other at the drop of a swastika, but then the girls seriously consider dropping a truck on the head of an informant.

However, I couldn’t bring myself to hate this to the level its former position in the IMDB Bottom 100 would project. There’s something almost charmingly naive about such a simplistic approach, and it’s also refreshingly free of any romantic angles to slow things down. At a few points, I even found myself contemplating the remake potential. If the discussed all-female version of The Expendables ever comes to pass, it might not be too dissimilar to this, though hopefully with more originality.

Dir: Greydon Clark
Star: Susan Kiger, Sylvia Anderson. Jacqulin Cole. Robin Greer