Tag: w

Women of Devil’s Island

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★★★
“Tubi or not Tubi? NOT Tubi.”

I actually ended up watching this one twice. The first time, on Tubi, was one of the worst prints I have ever seen. It was cropped and the color was so washed-out I could barely tell it wasn’t in black and white. However, the film itself was decent enough to get me hunting for a better copy. YouTube for the win: I found on there a glorious ‘scope version, with tints that fairly pop off the screen (compare and contrast) – and fifteen minutes longer, too. It’s a genuinely good-looking movie, and I don’t mean the copious quantities of attractive continental actresses. Well, not just them, anyway. This Italian-French co-production is an early example of the European women in prison genre, here with a historical bent.

An opening caption tell us this takes place at the end of the 17th century. Though that doesn’t quite fit with other elements, which seem around the French Revolution. Regardless, the government ship off their female prisoners to an island near French Guiana. There, they pan for gold, indulge in community sing-alongs and get eaten by alligators. The latest arrivals include Martine Foucher (Mercier), a noblewoman imprisoned for political reasons. There, she’s reunited with her sister, Jeanette (Ranchi), although she has assumed the identity of another, deceased prisoner. It’s a rough life. The only respite is if you sleep with the sleazy governor, Lefèvre (Muller), or his guards. Martine gets involved in an escape attempt, plotting to take some of the gold with them. It does not go well.

However, things look up with the arrival of new prison boss, Henri Vallière (Madison), who is much more compassionate towards the inmates, telling the staff, “They are not here to be tortured”. However, he is an impostor, not actually the naval officer he’s pretending to be. For Henri is a pirate, planning to stage a heist and steal all the gold. So he doesn’t truly care for the prisoners initially, though proves to be a dab hand at wrestling large reptiles. Key word: initially. Naturally, he develops feelings for Martine. This still leaves the inmates unsure of whether to turn Henri in, or throw their lot in with him. 

They eventually decide to fight alongside Henri and his men, in exchange for a shot at winning their freedom. To be fair, this does only occupy a few minutes towards the very end of the film. After Henri’s plan gets revealed, the brisk and entertaining pace the movie had maintained to this point slows considerably. Instead, there’s a bit too much relationship shenanigans: I much preferred the earlier sections, where the women were actively engaged and had agency. For obvious reasons, given this was the early sixties, don’t expect nudity, although there is cleavage, and I concur with another reviewer who noted the similarity of Margaret Rose Kiel to Brigitte Bardot. Better than expected, providing you can find the decent print. 

Dir: Domenico Paolella
Star: Michèle Mercier, Guy Madison, Paul Muller, Federica Ranchi
The good YouTube print is embedded below.

The Warslayer, by Rosemary Edghill

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Literary rating: ★★★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆

This review requires a sad preface: “Rosemary Edghill” (there’s some uncertainty about her actual name) died of sepsis on April 7 of this year, at the age of only 69. But on a positive note, with 91 distinct works listed on Goodreads, she left behind a considerable body of speculative fiction; and judging by what I’ve read of it so far, it’s a legacy in which she could take genuine pride.

Published in 2002, this stand-alone novel draws significant inspiration from the popular TV series Xena: Warrior Princess, which ran from 1995-2001. (I was a fan myself back in the day –or as much of a fan as my work schedule allowed for TV viewing– and I’d surmise that Edghill was as well.) Our protagonist here, Glory McArdle, plays Vixen the Slayer, star of a wildly popular (fictional) TV show now wrapping up its first season, which has a lot in common with Xena, including a fervent international cult fan base, and a six-foot-tall heroine hailing from Down Under. (Lucy Lawless, who played Xena, was from New Zealand.) There are some differences; for instance, The Incredible True Adventures of Vixen the Slayer (“TITAoVtS,” for short) is set in Elizabethan England, and incorporates some qualities of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and unlike Lawless, Glory –who got her role after going to an audition as an extra in the shooting of a pilot for a different series– was a former Phys Ed teacher, and before that a member of the Aussie Olympic gymnastics team. But the Xena parallels are significant; and just as real-life author Greg Cox wrote the real book Battle On! An Unauthorized, Irreverant Look at Xena: Warrior Princess, here he’s said to have also written the (imaginary) book Vixen the Slayer: The Unofficial Journeys.

In our first chapter, Glory (who’s in Hollywood taping a short MTV promotional for her series) gets an unexpected knock on her trailer door, while she’s waiting in costume for another take. Her visitors are three rather short people in fantasy-world costume. But they’re not, as she initially thinks, actors, or fanatical fans dressed up and acting out a fantasy. They really are mages from another dimension. You see, in their world, 1,000 years ago the great mage Cinnas the Warslayer chained an evil entity called the Warmother; but now she’s been loosed, and is wreaking havoc. To save their people, they’ve scoured all the other worlds they can reach for a “hero” (like the writers of the Xena series teaser, they don’t grasp the grammatical distinction of hero/heroine, but I digress), and been turned down by all the prospects. Having read Cox’s book, their last hope is Vixen the Slayer. Sensing that these poor deluded people genuinely believe what they’re saying, Glory’s trying to explain that the book is fiction; but when a sudden burst of uncontrolled magic sends all four of them back into her visitors’ world, that attempt might be a bit moot….

The cover blurb/Goodreads description creates the impression that this is a light exercise in humorous fantasy; and it actually does have a lot of humor (I read it to my wife, and she laughed out loud in several places). Both TITAoVtS and Xena are shows that offer mostly action-oriented entertainment without a lot of serious content, which might also lead readers to expect the same here. However, The Warslayer has its unexpectedly deep and serious side. Glory can deliver a fair amount of wry humor; but we’ll also see her bleed, vomit, and cry. While there’s some intense physical combat going on here at times, the battles aren’t all going to be physical, and the author has some really important things to say. (I’m not going to try to summarize them, because the story is the message, and you need to experience it the way she wrote it.) Her plotting here is not at all predictable. (But it’s deeply satisfying!)

There’s no sexual content here, and no obscenity (and no use of the f-word; Glory started to say it on one occasion, but stopped herself). There is, though, a certain amount of vulgar and profane language, used by Earth natives (it’s not a feature of native culture in the fantasy world). While she’s a likable young woman with a kind heart and good instincts, Glory tends to have an earthy and irreverent speaking style; she was raised on her dad’s Outback sheep station, a milieu where speech isn’t very refined (and some of the Aussie slang here that I’m not familiar with might be expressions I’d rather not have translated!). The worldview here is not Christian per se, but like Glory herself, though she’s basically secular-minded and God-shy, it’s not anti-Christian or anti-theistic either. Trigger warnings are in order for brief descriptions of the ravaged corpses of a pony and a dog (the Warmother and her playmates aren’t nice entities!); but the biggest problem here is the improbability that all of the non-Earth natives converse in fluent English. (I deducted a half-star for this in my rating, but rounded up.)

As an added feature, the opening few pages of Greg Cox’s imaginary book on Vixen are “quoted” as a kind of prologue here, and as an appendix, we’re given his supposed “Episode Guide” to the 17 episodes of TITAoVtS. (I’d guess that none of this is written by him, but that he gave his permission for the use of his name.) The deadpan humor of this material is a hoot; and as a suggestion to any TV producers who may read this, if anybody actually ever tried to make a real-life incarnation of this series, I’d be interested in checking it out. :-)

Author: Rosemary Edghill
Publisher: Baen, available through Amazon, only as a physical book
A stand-alone novel.

We Already Have a Woman We Like: My Life in the CIA, by Lucy Kirk

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Literary rating: ★★
Kick-butt quotient: ½

I suspect the issue here is partly my own expectations. When I read a memoir of somebody who spent more than three decades working for the Central Intelligence Agency, I was half-expecting a life somewhere between Salt and Atomic Blonde (ok, the latter was technically MI-5, but the concept remains valid). This is… not that. It is, of course, perfectly understandable that real life would not be as exciting as a Hollywood film. But given how long the author worked there, I would have expected more entertaining, amusing or even interesting anecdotes. The peak is probably right at the end, with her struggles to pass a lie-detector test when she tried to go back into the Company after 9/11.

It is an an eye-opener, in a couple of ways. Firstly, I kinda thought the CIA simply were not allowed to operate on American soil – that was the territory of the FBI. But based on this book, it appears that’s not the case, with Kirk being based domestically for a number of positions. These mostly involve gathering intelligence from friendly American assets who had foreign connections, and seem to involve being up-front about this being on behalf of the CIA. However, it’s hard to be sure, because a lot of specifics are omitted. This isn’t the author’s fault: an introductory note says, “As a retired CIA employee, I am obligated to present any writing I do to the Prepublication Classification Review Board… Places I served and lengths of time are notably absent per PCRB guidelines.”

This means you’re left with no real sense of place and time, whether she’s serving at home or abroad, and the specific details of what she was working on, are also very limited. In lieu of that you get a lot of complaints about chauvinism and flat-out sexism in the profession. What can I say? It was the sixties. I’m not sure what she thought life would be like, but a degree from Wellesley College might perhaps create certain, unrealistic expectations of life in the outside world. Some of her criticisms do appear justified: there’s no real reason why women couldn’t operate as case officers, just as well as men. But there’s a certain point beyond which I found myself rolling my eyes and quietly mouthing, “We get it”. I mean, she stayed there for thirty years. How bad could it be?

The other thing I took away is how banal and humdrum most intelligence work is – in sharp contrast to every depiction of it in fictional books, movies and television shows. It feels as if Kirk spent more time fighting with bureaucracy than Communism. In this way, it’s no different from any other big business, with the bosses at the top severely disconnected from those on the front lines. I certainly will admit to having learned things here. Those things, however, are just not particularly interesting. I’ll be sticking with the fiction, thank you very much.

Author: Lucy Kirk
Publisher: BookBaby, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Stand-alone memoir

Women’s Prison

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★★★
“Innocence behind bars.”

It’s always interesting to watch these early entries in the women-in-prison genre, and see the elements which are still staples of the genre, close to seventy years later. Well, some of the elements anyway: this dates from 1955, so is obviously tamer than a kitten on Valium in terms of sexual content. No strip searches. No prison showers. And when it’s revealed that one of the inmates is pregnant, it’s almost as much of a surprise to the audience as it is to the authorities. But it’s still recognizable as an ancestor, thanks to things like the sympathetic prison doctor, new inmate who shouldn’t be there, and the sadistic warden who rules things with an iron fist.

It is an ensemble piece, whose focus shifts throughout. Initially, it seems likely to be the story of “fresh meat” Helene Jensen (Thaxter), who is doing time for vehicular manslaughter, and has a tough time adjusting to life inside. Then it shifts to Joan Burton (Totter), an accomplice to her robber husband, Glen, who is doing time in the men’s prison next door. He has something vital to tell her, and makes repeated attempts to sneak across the border to visit Joan. On the other side of the bars is the power struggle between the warden, Amelia van Zandt (Lupino) and jail physician Dr. Crane (Duff). Her methods are anathema to Crane, who flat-out calls van Zandt a psychopath. He may have a point.

Despite the lack of salacious elements, this is still entertaining fodder. There are a lot of amusing characters among the inmates, from cheerful fraudster Brenda Martin through to black inmate Polyclinic Jones – named after the hospital where she was born! She’s played by Juanita Jones, who’d be Oscar nominated a few years later. Interestingly, despite this being years before the Civil Rights era, the prison is not segregated: the black inmates have their own cell, but otherwise mix freely with the white prisoners. Race is never even mentioned here. There’s an impressively meta moment too, when two guards are discussing a cinema trip. “They never get things right in prison pictures,” muses one, and is told, “I know, but I like to pick out the flaws.”

This happens just before another familiar element: the prisoners riot and take over, after being pushed too far. In this case, it’s van Zandt’s brutal interrogation of Burton which proves the tipping point. Or at least, “brutal” by fifties standards; it’s not much more than a bit of light slapping around. The rebellion leads to tear-gassing and hostage taking, as the women seek to make van Zandt pay, plus Glen roaming around with a pistol. Really, the men’s side need to look into their security protocols, I reckon. For all its innocence in many ways, bordering on naivety, there are still moments which have an emotional impact; I found the death of one inmate surprisingly affecting. Released in Germany as Revolte im Frauenzuchthaus, which I only mention, as “frauenzuchthaus” may be my new favourite German word.

Dir: Lewis Seiler
Star: Ida Lupino, Howard Duff. Audrey Totter, Phyllis Thaxter

Wildcat

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★★★½
“She’s got claws.”

I was quite startled to read some of the scathing reviews this received. For I genuinely enjoyed it, to the point it likely came one element (which I’ll get to) from a seal of approval. Sure, it’s nothing particularly new overall. However, I found it consistently enjoyable, to the level I felt no desire to look at my phone at any point. These days, that’s high praise indeed. It takes place in a slightly alternate London, where gang bosses Frasier Mahoney (Charles Dance) and Mrs. Christina Vine (Krige) are on the edge of a war for control of the city. There’s also a rogue element, in the Mushka Gang, who have turned an East End estate into a no-go area.

Ada (Beckinsale) doesn’t have much to do with this, until her brother Edward (Hardiker) gets deep in debt to Mahoney. He kidnaps her daughter to ensure the money gets paid back. This forces Ada to carry out a heist on a jewellery store run by Vine, which is only the start in a series of problems. She does have assistance, in the shape of former lover Roman (Tan), who can help fence the product. Meanwhile, Ada is trying to get Mahoney blamed for the robbery, to start an inter-factional war that can cover their escape. Meanwhile meanwhile, we discover Ada and Edward’s past, and encounter a number of colourful characters, such as the foul-mouthed Galloway (Tom Bennett, channeling Budget Nick Frost).

There are a lot of moving parts, but Nunn keeps things clear. He has plenty of action experience, including the wonderful Scott Adkins vehicle One Shot, which was my favourite movie of 2021. This isn’t quite as relentlessly kinetic, yet keeps a good pace throughout. Tan actually gets as many action scenes as Beckinsale, and this brings me to the issue mentioned above. While she still looks the part – and very good for 52 – there’s an awful lot of shots from behind, strongly suggesting heavy stunt doubling. And it’s not subtly done. They might as well just have hired Laura Vörtler, Beckinsale’s stunt double, to play the part and been done with it. Still, despite clearly more limited resources, I preferred this to her last couple of actioners, Canary Black and Jolt.

It helps to have the likes of Krige and Dance in the supporting cast. The latter is barely seen until the end, though makes up for lost time with a blistering anecdote about his late wife. I really enjoyed Krige, whose character can go from comforting a grandchild troubled by bad dreams, to torturing an employee for information, without more than a blink. There are some elements which feel underdeveloped, such as a weird club which seems little more than a flimsy excuse to tie Beckinsale up. But overall, I enjoyed this, and particularly appreciated the bone-dry British humour peppered throughout. Although the lead may not have many more action films in her, Nunn continues to prove his credentials. 

Dir: James Nunn
Star: Kate Beckinsale, Lewis Tan, Rasmus Hardiker, Alice Krige

Woman at War

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★★★★
“Feel the electricity in the air.”

This was a real and pleasant surprise. I wasn’t even sure if this would qualify for the site, or if it would end simply being too gentle. Whole it’s not going to get any awards for hard-core action, it does fit in here. More impressively, it managed to make my empathize with someone whose views are ones I’d generally disagree with. It takes place in Iceland, where Halla (Geirharðsdóttir) is a middle-aged, single woman, waging a near one-person campaign of sabotage against heavy industry, mostly by disabling the power-lines which supply electricity to it, disfiguring the landscape and exacerbating climate change. It’s a game of cat and mouse, with the authorities keen to stop the eco-terrorist from dissuading foreign investors.

However, Halla has issues of her own, beyond the net closing in on her property destruction. A long-dormant adoption request is suddenly approved, and she can’t risk further criminal acts, as a conviction would bar her from proceeding. She intends to go out with a declaration of her manifesto, literally flung from the Reykjavik roof-tops, and a final act, stealing Semtex to blow up a key electricity pylon. Her accomplice, government employee Baldvin (Ragnarsson) is increasingly concerned about the “one last job” trope, and twin sister Ása (also Geirharðsdóttir), a yoga teacher, threatens to put a spoke in the adoption process too, by vanishing off to India for two years to live with her guru.

It’s charming, quirky and rather subversive, all at the same time. It could easily have toppled over into preachiness, but is leavened with enough humour to keep the messaging secondary to the medium. For example, there’s a poor Spanish tourist (Estrada), who is perpetually getting blamed for the attacks, simply by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, leading to his tent getting SWATted. There’s also the soundtrack, which shows up on screen as a three-piece band, and a trio of singers, who play whatever music is needed to accompany the scenes. Every character is a pleasure, not least the farmer (Johanson) who becomes Halla’s leading accomplice. I will say, any wannabe eco-warriors might well get some helpful tips here, such as the best place to hide your explosives…

But it’s Geirharðsdóttir’s film, in both of her roles. She has a quiet yet absolute commitment to her cause, and it’s thoroughly convincing, even to someone like me who thinks “Earth First” means, “We can strip-mine the other planets later.” I still found myself rooting for her, as she scurried across the Icelandic moors, using low-tech means to counter the authorities with their drones and thermal imaging cameras. For what’s as much a comedic drama as anything, these sequences pack their share of tension, and I was left wondering how it would get resolved. It is a bit of a cheat – are the Icelandic authorities that incompetent? I’ll let it pass, since this demonstrates the way message movies should be executed.

Dir: Benedikt Erlingsson
Star: Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir, Jon Johanson, Juan Camilo Román Estrada, Jörundur Ragnarsson

[A modified version of this review first appeared on Film Blitz]

Who Cares!

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★★½
“Hop to it!”

I would have sworn I had seen every example of Hong Kong girls-with-guns movies from the eighties. But this one had managed to escape my attention completely for 35 years, until accidentally stumbling across it on YouTube. It’s perhaps partly because it never seems to have received any kind of post-VHS release, being unavailable on DVD or streaming sites. Which is a little surprising since it combines two genres that have been quite popular in the West: not just GWG, but also hopping vampires, as in the Mr. Vampire franchise. It’s a rather awkward combo, and there’s definitely significant potential wasted. Yet I’m fairly certain it’s going to be unlike anything you’ve seen before.

It begins with a gang robbing a mausoleum of antiques for their boss, Yiang Wei (Wei). However, included in their haul is a pearl, which was the only thing keeping a traditional Chinese vampire (Kwai) pinned down. It’s now free to roam the land, terrorizing the possessor of the pearl, who is the only person that can see it. Meanwhile, a special police squad has been set up to investigate the ring behind the recent slew of antique thefts. In charge of it is Sergeant Wang Wai Shan (Hu), who follows the evidence to Wei, after one of his minions turns up dead, a victim of the vampire. Wang and her mostly-female team then find themselves having to take on both the hopping undead and the criminals.

The results are kinda decent, but it’s not hard to think of ways it could have been better, particularly from the perspective of this site. I was expecting to get a final battle pitting Wang against Wei. Doesn’t happen. I did like how the cops find a way to control the vampire, and I was thinking it was then going to end up as Wang + vampire against Wei. Doesn’t happen either, with Wang entirely sidelined, and replaced with a climax which is simply villain versus vampire (before an ending which is… certainly an ending, and that’s all I can say). Hu deserves better, and so does Sophia Crawford, who is one of Wei’s minions, and gets almost nothing to do. Admittedly, it was only Crawford’s second film.

Not to say that Wei is a slouch. I simply preferred earlier scenes, such as Wang and her squad battling the largely invisible vampire around her father’s apartment, with a range of improvised weapons, from crosses – would those really work on a Chinese vampire? – to flamethrowers. It’s fairly refreshing how nobody really mentions the fact a woman is in charge, with everyone apparently accepting Wang’s role, and there’s not too much in the way of dumb slapstick, which can derail proceedings. As horror, it’s certainly light in tone. Perhaps it might have benefited from sticking to one genre or the other, instead of trying to be two things at once, and coming in as largely forgettable in both departments.

Dir: Chiu-Jun Lee
Star: Sibelle Hu, Dick Wei, Kara Ying, Kwai Po Chun

Women Rescuers of WWII, by Elise Baker

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Literary rating: ★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆

With the somewhat accurate and rather clunky sub-title of “True stories of the unsung women heroes who rescued refugees and Allied servicemen in WWII”, this is a book whose idea I liked rather more than the execution. The core is six chapters, each devoted to a woman or pair of women, who operated before and around World War II, mostly helping refugees to escape the Nazi regime as it swept across Europe. Every chapter has the same structure. Each begins with ‘The Threshold’, describing how they came to take on that role; then ‘The Move’, covering their heroic activities; and finally, ‘The Close’, detailing what happened to them afterward.

These stories are all worth telling, though perhaps not to the same degree. A couple appear more like glorified bureaucrats, and while their roles in facilitating emigration of refugees were important, you don’t get much sense they were in genuine danger. Others, however, such as Irena Sendler, was clearly risking her own life in smuggling Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto, being captured and brutally interrogated by the Gestapo. The same goes for Andrée de Jongh, who ran the Comet Line which allowed Allied soldiers trapped behind enemy lines in occupied Europe, to make their way back to friendly territory. She ended up in Ravensbruck concentration camp: that’s “real” heroism, putting yourself at personal risk, and definitely deserves to be better known.

However, the desire to cram in too much here works against the book. Each chapter typically covers only 20-25 pages, and as a result, you get not much more depth about each woman, than you would find in a well-written Wikipedia article. These are more like an appetizer, and you’ll probably be left hungry to know more about the likes of de Jongh. Baker has an odd tendency to shift from factual descriptions to what reads like dramatic restagings of scenes, an awkward shift that she does not manage to pull off. Rather than letting the stories speak for themselves, she tends to belabour her point about sexism being responsible for suppressing these stories.

It’s somewhat questionable, since many male heroes of WW2 are arguably more unsung: de Jongh, for example, was awarded decorations by multiple countries, including the George Medal, Britain’s highest civilian honour. That’s not “unsung.” I’d rather Baker had used the pages she spends on making such points, to tell the reader more about the women’s stories.  I will admit, I did learn things here, and if you’re looking for a primer – a Cliff Notes on wartime heroism – this and the other books in the series are probably worth a look. But it feels like Baker is only skimming the surface, and the subjects would have been better served by a more in-depth recounting, rather than trying to cover so many different candidates. Sometimes, less is definitely more, and this would be a good example. 

Author: Elise Baker
Publisher: Intrepidas Publishing, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book Part of the Brave Women Who Changed the Course of WWII series.

We Kill Them All

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★½
“Kill me too. Please”

It generally makes sense for a film to escalate over its duration. The problem here is, what escalated was my annoyance. It began as irritation, but by the end I was deeply peeved, because the stupidity is strong in this one. It begins with two different strands. In one, former desperado Lee Hughes is visited in his mountain resort by ex-colleague Jimmy Montague (Fafard) and his minions. They want to know the location of two million in proceeds from a previous crime Lee and Jimmy pulled. In the other, lesbian couple Lane (Newton) and Megan (McClay) are busy being lesbionic with each other, because they’re lesbians. Did I mention they are a same-sex couple?

These two threads link up because Megan is Lee’s daughter. When she and Lane head up to visit him, they discover only Jimmy and his henchmen, Tweedledum and Tweedledumber. They think Megan knows where the loot is. And this is where the idiocy becomes industrial strength. I’m not sure who is worse. The bad guys, for repeatedly allowing their captives to escape. Or Megan and Lane, for repeatedly allowing themselves to get recaptured. It doesn’t help the script ties itself in knots, trying to keep any firearms out of the wonens’ hands before the very end. Yes, the liberal agenda™ here seems to extend to gun control. Until it finally gives up and admits that they are, in fact, the best equalizer in a home invasion scenario. 

Lane, in particular, is entirely useless for the great bulk of proceedings. Until she is not, suddenly able to escape from being tied up with barbed wire – albeit the kind of barbed wire which leaves no marks in her flesh – and left entirely alone while Jimmy and Megan wander off. Again. Megan does, at least, have some guts. But, really: you are in a kitchen, and the best impromptu weapon you can find is… A chopping board? Meanwhile, the purpose of the whole lesbian thing is revealed. It’s cheap heat, so the bad guys can get all homophobic. Being bad is not, apparently enough. [The film really needs to take lessons from What Keeps You Alive in the department of lesbian relationships]

I honestly feel the whole endeavour would be improved by dubbing Three Stooges sound effects over the top of it. The first half is meandering and not very interesting. The second half does at least have things happening. It’s just that they range from the weakly plotted down to the flat out ludicrous. With little or no reason to care about the characters, who seem entirely defined by their bedroom habits, I was left with no interest in their fate. This, incidentally, ends up being exactly what I expected at the mid-way point. I want to stress, this isn’t a bad film because the heroines are lesbians. There are a lot of perfectly good, unbigoted reasons to find this well below average. 

Dir: Jeremy Drummond
Star: Chloe McClay, Emma Newton, Leo Fafard, Michasha Armstrong

Wyvern Awakening, by Joanna Mazurkiewicz

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Literary rating: ★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

There are reviews which are easy to write, because – good or bad – the subject generates a lot to talk about. This is not one of those. It’s a bland slice of semi-urban fantasy, which just… sits there, the literary equivalent of a bowl of vanilla pudding. It’s not good, nor is it bad enough to be memorable. It merely exists, remarkable mostly in how unremarkable it is. Put it this way, I finished it less than 24 hours ago, and I can’t even remember the heroine’s name, so little impression was made. Instead of writing, I find myself almost preferring the Star Trek musical episode Chris is watching next to me. And I don’t really like Star Trek. Or musical episodes. 

It starts off feeling like a Harry Potter knockoff. Heroine (checks notes) Astrid was orphaned after her parents were killed by a powerful mage, leaving her with a facial scar, when she defended herself with her own innate arcane talent. She’s then sent to live with some nasty relatives, who treat her badly, almost to the point of abuse. Yeah, it’s all very J.K. Rowling. She has a dream where she suddenly realizes the Mage was Duke Jorgen, the city’s ruler. She vows to take revenge, and fortunately, the Duke is having a contest to find a new assistant. Astri, who is the last of the wyvern shape-shifters, joins the competition and goes through the resulting trials.

Yet, the closer she gets to Jorgen, the more confused she becomes, because he hardly seems like the parent-murdering type. He is, of course, far too attractive to be evil. Read that sentence with as much sarcasm as you wish. So, if you want every encounter to be overflowing with unresolved romantic tension, here you go. The problem is, there’s no consistency in Astri’s approach. One minute, she is about to get all kissy-face with him, the next she’s leaving him to be tortured by rogue shifters. She’s supposed to be a strong, independent heroine, yet is frequently neither. And what are the rules of this contest anyway? They seem to be made up as the trials progress. 

There are some decent elements. I was amused by the her scabrous pair of pocket pixies – named Jetli and Lenin, because reasons, I guess. There’s also a sense of bigger forces at play beyond Astri’s personal problems. The last trial brings these particularly into focus. But the final revelation has been telegraphed from almost the very beginning, and is as thoroughly unimpressive as I feared. I suspect this might be aimed more at a YA audience. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that, except there are YA books that can still work for an adult audience. Then we have this, which does not. To be honest, I suspect even my 13-year-old self might have found it severely deficient, in a number of areas. 

Author: Joanna Mazurkiewicz
Publisher: Self-publshed, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 4 in the Mage Chronicles.