★½
“Porn stars vs. Incels”
This poorly-conceived and even less effectively executed cheapo, starts off looking like a home-video recording of a movie, taken off late night TV. There’s a bikini-clad hostess, who introduces the film, and it might not have been a bad idea, had they actually run with it. Cut into the movie for spoof adverts, bad infomercials, further host segments, etc. Yeah, could have been fun. Instead, it’s completely forgotten until almost the end, when she pops back up… purely to showcase a trailer for the directors’ next film, Slash-lorette Party. Verily, the level of cringe is strong in this one. If it had even embraced the eighties aesthetic for which it is clearly aiming, that would have been a credible substitute. But outside of the synthwave score by the very wonderfully named “Vestron Vulture,” there’s hardly any effort put in there either.
Instead, what you get is porn star Mila Lynn (McKinney), who is about to quit the profession. Her boss, disgruntled by the news, delivers her up to a member of The Sword, a “men’s rights” group who have been abducting and torturing other adult entertainment stars, blaming them for causing addiction to porn. Mila manages to escape, beating her captor to death with a baseball bat, and sets up a vigilante squad, who will take the fight to the members of The Sword, and show them the error of their ways.
The above sounds considerably more interesting than the reality. I will say, that most of the actresses make thoroughly convincing porn stars – unfortunately, this is mostly in the way they can’t act their way out of a paper-bag. The pacing is also terrible. At 101 minutes, it’s at least twenty too long, and takes far too long to get to the meat of the matter. As a result, it commits the cardinal sin of grindhouse cinema: being boring. This is in part because it insists on being didactic, pushing its moral viewpoint to an obvious and rather painful degree. That’s another sin in which you never see good grindhouse flix indulge. I Spit on Your Grave didn’t need to spell out any obvious messages.
There’s a certain hypocrisy here, given the female nudity on view, frequently combined with things like the owners having their throat slit, New York Ripper style. None of the main actresses indulge, implying they are in some way “better” than that. It also fails to make a coherent argument against The Sword’s proposition – basically that, without porn, there’d be no porn addiction, and those who profit are no better than pushers. It’s just taken as “bad,” m’kay? Of course, the brutality with which Mila and her pals react, is morally little if any different from The Sword: an uncomfortable truth the film never dares address. All of which I could probably tolerate, if this was anything like fun to watch. It isn’t, and I couldn’t.
Dir: Paul Ragsdale, Angelica De Alba
Star: Delawna McKinney, Anthony Iava To’omata, Paige Le Ney, Daniel James Moody






This is the kind of film which makes for very uncomfortable date night viewing, simply because the situation presented is likely to lead to awkward conversations. Happily married architect Evan Webber (Reeves) has the house to himself for the weekend, his wife having gone with their two kids to the seaside, leaving him free to work on a project. A stormy night ensues, until a knock at the door, and he finds two lost young women, Genesis (Izzo) and Bel (de Armas), shivering on the doorstep. He can hardly make them stay there, so lets them in. Almost immediately, something is wrong, though initially this falls into the “Too good to be true” category. For they are nymphomaniac flight attendants, and inevitably – though after a credible struggle – Evan succumbs to their relentless charms.
There are times when I am bracing myself, going into a movie. Here’s the synopsis for this one: “A transgender teenage girl on summer vacation in Los Angeles fights to survive after she falls in with four queer feminist vampires, who try to rid the city’s streets of predatory men.” Given my long-standing aversion to message movies, this seemed like 90 minutes of my worst nightmare. What had I let myself in for? But this proved to be surprisingly accessible – even for those of us who are neither transgender nor queer, and are enrolled in the Camille Paglia school of feminism.
This was likely not going to qualify for inclusion here, until a twist in the final 15 minutes. Up until that point, it had been a largely irritating saga, that was considerably more horror than action heroine – and not even good horror at that. I’m still significantly unconvinced about the quality, but must grudgingly admit, this was a twist which I did not particularly see coming (though there is a large clue dropped near the beginning). Three gal-pals, Tamara (Betham), Maddy (Taylor-Compton) and Brooke (Allbright) head for a weekend’s lakeside R&R. On the way, Tamara’s car runs out of fuel, and she encounters the local creeps, but eventually arrives, and joins the other two in scamming drinks out of horny guys.
Four women run a charitable agency in Texas, helping single mothers track down and obtain child support payments from deadbeat dads. However, they don’t limit themselves to the simple serving of legal papers. The women adopt a more… hands-on approach, shall we say, first luring their targets in with the promise of sex, then threatening them at gunpoint, to make sure they pay up. For obvious reasons, the cops soon take interest in this string of unusual armed robberies. Meanwhile, the city’s white mayor, is dealing with a domestic crisis of her own, thanks to her daughter having had a child by (gasp!) a black man.
The above is the Polish for “seven”, and in the first half-hour, you’ll be forgiven for thinking that’s what you’re watching: a Polish knock-off of David Fincher’s Se7en. Homicide cop Helena Rus (Kożuchowska) is struggling to come to terms with life, after her boyfriend is killed by a drunk-driver and, for political reasons, the criminal is allowed to go free. A welcome distraction comes in the shape of a series of ritualistic murders: every day at 6 pm, a body turns up on the streets of Wroclaw. The victims have been killed in strange and unusual ways – the first, for example, is sewn inside a cow-hide, which shrinks as it dries, crushing the victim to death. Each has a word branded into their flesh, such as “Degenerate”.