★★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… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★½ “Just don’t ask what’s going on.” This ended up turning into an Internet investigation. The title above is the one by which it appeared on Tubi. But it’s clearly pasted onto the opening credits, and I ended up having to go through the IMDb credits for the one identifiable… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “Lost in translation.” I’m very cautiously giving this one our middest of mid-tier ratings, which I reserve the right to change in future. Because this one showed up on one of the… “less official”, let’s say Chinese movie channels on YouTube. While the likes of Youku and iQiyi make… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★ “Not so great…” I’m just going to begin by quoting the opening credit titles. Spelling, grammar and punctuation as received. “At the early stage of Republic of China, Yuan Hsi Hai wanted to rebel the democratic government & be the king. But there were 300,000 soldiers at Yuan Wan… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★★ “…and then there’s the ho.” Making movies based on a TV show is always fraught with danger. You’ve got to convince the audience to pay good money to see the same thing they can watch for free at home, yet you can’t stray too far from the central concept,… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★★ “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.… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★ “Neither protecting nor serving.” I get the idea of what this is trying to do: really, be a female-centric version of The Hitcher. Though to some extent, that franchise went there itself, in The Hitcher II: I’ve Been Waiting. Here, we have Bobbi Torres (Camacho) driving across New Mexico in… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★★ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆ Sloane Tarnish is not exactly your typical bounty-hunter. Indeed, she’s training for a medical degree when her shady uncle, Vin, talks her into helping out with a little job. Craving excitement, she agrees, and finds herself posing as the wife of a Fleet officer,… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “The reputation never dies.” I must admit, my initial reaction to this was, it is less than a film, than footage from a group of Viking LARPers (Live-action Role-playing). The resources on view here are… not great. But the deeper I went into this, the more I found myself… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★½ “It’s certainly an hour.” Not to be confused, in any way, with Zero Hour!, the 1957 Canadian film which was spoofed mercilessly in Airplane! This unfolds mostly over one night in a high-rise, where Ida (Hoover) is the last person left in the building, having taken over from best… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★½ “Surfing birds.” At the beginning of this, I wondered if I was watching a Godzilla film. Because it opens with atomic bomb footage, depicting French test in the Pacific. We know what this leads to: gigantic lizards with fiery bre… Oh, hang on: it’s actually a group of women,… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “Thoroughly lost in translation.” Well, this is a real roller-coaster ride of style and incompetence. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a Chinese film where the subtitles were quite so incomprehensible. Even though this one is on the YouTube channel for an official Chinese streaming service (iQiYi),… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★★ “God, faith, mayhem and a lot of blood” To be honest, I never read Boston Teran’s novel. I wasn’t aware of the story until this movie came out here on DVD – but then the book was also never released in my country. I’ve every intention to read it… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “Whip it good.” There can’t be many Westerns of the fifties where the Yankees are the bad guys. Yet here we are. In mid-19th century California, to be precise, just after it became part of the US. The new owners enthusiastically threw the existing, Mexican inhabitants off their lands,… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★ Kick-butt quotient: ☆ This is the second in the tetralogy of novellas originally marketed as the Sheriff Bride series, from the small press Lovely Christian Romance, and each written by a different author. It follows the fortunes of the four firearms-capable Hardin sisters; the first book explains… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
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Literary rating: ★★ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆ I don’t necessarily expect to understand a literary universe from the first page. These things take time: I get that. But I do expect that, as I go through the chapters, things will become clear. If I reach the end, and am still vague… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★ “More kill than craft.” There is potential in the idea here. It’s a shame it ends up feeling like two separate movies, both of which come out feeling under-cooked. The main focus is on Marina Delon (Loutsis), a teenage girl with the typical teenage girl problems, e.g. bickering parents,… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “Starring the two and only Jane Russell.” Or, to steal another line from Mr. Hope, “Culture is the ability to describe Jane Russell without moving your hands”. It’s surprisingly advanced for its 1948 era, with Russell playing Calamity Jane, who is busted out of prison to go undercover and… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
“I would like to see every woman know how to handle guns, as naturally as they know how to handle babies.” This article was largely inspired by the grainy, less than thirty second film clip above. It shows Wild West heroine Annie Oakley in action, filmed by none other than… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★★ “Predatory lesbian.” In the modern, politically-correct era, it’s less common to see a film which has a sexual minority as an unabashed villain. Something like Basic Instinct got a lot of flak at the time, and would likely be rejected out of hand by gay-friendly Hollywood these days, as… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “Marsh ado about nothing.” One of the earliest films directed by Roger Corman, it’d be a major stretch to call this a good film, yet I can’t deny I found it entertaining. It definitely has better female characters than most movies of the mid-fifties. Four women break out of… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★½ “Amateur hour and ten minutes.” An early contender for widest gap between synopsis and reality in 2024. On the one hand, we have “After years of torment, Peggy finally gets revenge on all those who wronged her in the past.” On the other? A dumb, microbudget not-a-horror, not anything… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★½ “Legally blonde” The low score for this is partly not entirely the film’s fault. Despite the title, it’s actually the third entry in a series of TV movies – following First Daughter and First Target. All focus on blonde Secret Service agent Alex McGregor, charged with protecting the President… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★ “Not particularly on point.” Here’s a real obscurity. 18 years old, and yet still with a mere seven votes on the IMDb. There, I had to find it by going through the director’s name, as the title brought up nothing. To be fair, it’s not even the best-known film… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “Prairie dog pest control.” I keep hoping Carano will deliver an action film reaching the quality of her debut, Haywire. Results since then have been… well, let’s be charitable and call them uneven. The reasons for her departure from “traditional” Hollywood aren’t something I want to get into: but… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★½ “Justice is more than a match for evil!” This is not our first time here attending the Godfrey Ho rodeo. Indeed we wrote quite warmly about Lethal Panther., and Cynthia Rothrock vehicle Undefeatable had its moments. But this is our first experience on this side of the heady, WTF?… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “Zeroes to sheroes.” Twenty minutes into this, I was certain I had made a terrible mistake. These four young women were among the most grating and unpleasant characters I’d seen in a movie. I’m talking actively awful: crass, shallow and entitled. They head off to Thailand for a girls’… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “How to get punched in the face.” When you think of the martial art form known as Muay Thai, New Jersey is probably not the first place to come to mind. But it’s in the town of Toms River, on the Jersey Shore, that Prairie Rugilo set up an… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★½ “Olivia Newton-John not included.” I went into this braced for it to be terrible, having sat through the same film-makers’, largely irredeemable Bloodsucka Jones vs. The Creeping Death. Fortunately, this is considerably better. Still very cheap and flawed, yet is at least aware of its own limitations, and tries… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★½ “Woo’s the boss.” After enjoying The Kill List, I thought I’d dip my toe again into the new wave of Thai girls with guns films with this, and it’s another solid entry. As there, the main influence seems to be Hong Kong action cinema of the nineties; this in… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★★½ Luc Besson’s original contains all the necessary elements which would become standard for the field. A criminal is “killed” by the government, only to be resurrected into a new life as an assassin for the authorities. Initially resistant, she eventually embraces her new life, but a romance reminds her… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★½ “Dear diary: my teen angst bullshit has a body count.” Becky (Wilson) is the quintessential troubled teenager. Since her mother died, she has become increasingly estranged from her father, Jeff (McHale, replacing the original choice, Simon Pegg, who had to drop out due to scheduling conflicts), not least because… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
It’s always interesting to look back at the previous year’s entry in this series, and see what lived up to or even surpassed expectations, what didn’t, and what failed to show up entirely. The first category would include The Princess, the second is headlined by Bullet Train, which ended up… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “Jenny from the Glock.” It has been a very quiet year for big-budget action heroine movies so far. Here we are, more than one-third of the way through 2023, and this Netflix Original is likely the highest profile entry to date. There is a certain pedigree here, albeit of… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★½ “Women of Glow, not Women of GLOW…” This would be a creditable little film, if the makers could ever be bothered to finish it. Yeah, it ends in what is supposed, I presume, to be some kind of cliffhanger. But it botches the landing badly, first by leaping forward… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
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… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★½ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆ It’s funny. You wait ages for an action heroine novel set in Arizona, then two show up at once. Right on the heels of The Killing Game, we have this, which takes place almost entirely in this state’s most iconic location, the Grand Canyon. Unfortunately,… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★ “It’ll be all Reich on the night.” It’s basically impossible to separate this from the time and place in which it was made: that being Nazi Germany, just a few years before the outbreak of World War II. The portrayal of, not only Johanna/Joan of Arc, but the rest… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★½ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆½ On the surface, Scala City is an idyllic, hi-tech world of prosperity, peace and morality, albeit at the cost of omnipresent surveillance of its residents. But there’s a dirty little secret. The Blind Spot is an area where surveillance is barred, and where the… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★ “Some things never change…” Not to be confused with the clearly different Gangster Girls, which isn’t particularly gangster at all, or Gangsta Girls, which is Vietnamese, and especially not to be confused with the execrable Girls vs. Gangsters. Though confusion is understandable, and not helped by Tubi typoing the… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★½ “Too little, and much too late.” I feel the need to start with the IMDb synopsis, because it explains things considerably better than the film. “The Story of two former military criminals turned special sleeper cell Soldiers of Fortune by a secret agency called “The Order of the Black… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★ “Wings of desire.” The idea here is considerably stronger than the execution. Police detective Riley Parra (Hassler) works the scummiest part of town, which is ruled by mysterious and possibly legendary figure Marchosias (Landler). However, while working a murder case, Riley discovers the area is, in fact, Ground Zero… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “Bit of a test of stamina.” Coincidentally, I watched this the night after Sinners, another period piece which looks at the place of a specific culture in society. There, it was music in predominantly black society of the thirties; here, it’s professional wrestling in the overwhelmingly white society of the… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★½ “Ducks one set of cliches, walks right into another.” I wanted to like this more than I did, because the makers are aware of the tropes of the mixed martial arts genre, and in the first half, make a concerted (and largely successful) effort to avoid them. However, the… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★½ “More soap than opera.” In one of the odder remakes I’ve seen in a while, this is a repurposing of the French 2013 film, Les reines du ring, which translates as “Queens of the Ring”. The core concept is retained, but the location is changed from France to Mexico,… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★ “When you order À l’interieur on Wish…” The French film À l’interieur (a.k.a. Inside) is one of the most ferocious and intense of all action-heroine films. It’s the story of a pregnant woman who has to defend herself and her unborn child from an absolute psycho who turns up on the… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “Come to beautiful Scotland! And die!” Even though I haven’t lived there since the eighties, I remain a sucker for a Scottish film. This delivers, with no shortage of rugged mountain landscapes, beautiful lochs, a ceilidh band and trees. So. Many. Trees. The foliage is understandable, because most of… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★★½ “Some women will stop at nothing to have a baby. Whether it’s theirs or not.” The ‘final girl’ is a well-worn concept in horror: the last survivor, typically the “good” girl, finally fights back against the assailant in the movie’s climax. It is isn’t normally enough to merit inclusion… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★½ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆½ I don’t subscribe to the belief that authors need to be the same sex, race, religion or whatever as their characters. A good author can put you inside the head of their heroine, even if they’re a different species, an extra-terrestrial, or whatever. But… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★½ “Chastely sleazy.” There’s an interesting idea here, at least. As a young child, Elena (Ayala) has to watch as her mother and brother are killed by crime boss babe Maeve (McComb), after her father (Pardo) made the ill-advised decision to try and steal from her. It’s particularly awkward, since… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★½ “Light pink(y)” Made by Toei, this is very much a straightforward “pinky violence” film in concept, telling the story of the Wildcats and, in particular, their leader Maki Hyuga. What separates this – in ways both good and bad – from the pack is that Maki is played by… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “A little heart goes a long way” I’ve mentioned before the general lack of action-heroine films for the pre-teenage crowd: The Golden Compass is a rare example of one which would play for that audience. This is another, though that is largely where the similarities end. This likely cost… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★ “Two minute penalty, unnecessary cliches.” Printed directly from the finest template of sports movie tropes, this is less a script than a bullet list of plot points you’ve seen a thousand times before. Struggling single mom (check) Paula Taymore (Gilsig) had to give up a promising ice hockey career… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★ “Wears its bleeding-heart on its sleeve.” Marni (Johnson) is stuck in the titular town, where oil fracking is causing problems from earthquakes to poisoning the local water supply. She’s barely scraping by as a single mom to teenage son Jason (Strange), working as a bartender for sleazy owner Daryl… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “Somewhat Expendable…” Credit to The Asylum for getting off their ass and actually making a female version of The Expendables, while every other producer to touch the idea, has so far been nothing but talk. Certainly, it’s a cast to die for, with some of the most renowned action… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★ “Falls off.” It’s kinda interesting to compare this to Mercy Falls. Both concern an ill-fated trip into a scenic wilderness – all trees and waterfalls – by a group of friends, which goes increasingly off the rails. The main difference is, in Mercy, the call was coming from inside the house,… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★ “Fast, loose and out of control” It feels as if South Korea is going through all the Olympic sports, making films based on each of them. Indeed, this film’s alternate title makes it a sequel to Take Off, about ski-jumping. I’ve seen two of the previous entries, covering archery… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★★ “Two Bitches in a Car.” But to quote one character in the movie, “Bitches from hell“… :-) Guess a spoiler alert is needed, though I suspect 90% of readers know how this ends. Better safe than sorry though. That said, it’s possible to pinpoint precisely the pivotal moment in… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “/snorts in Lola” If I were Ella Balinska, I’d be having a word with my agent. After seeing her major Hollywood career begin with the embarrassing failure of the Charlie’s Angels reboot, she then followed up with an even more dismal flop, the attempted reboot by Netflix of Resident… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “Emotionally chilly, and not as clever as it thinks, but well-acted and shot.” The French have a decent pedigree of action heroines, going back to Joan of Arc. Cinematically, the likes of Bloody Mallory, Adele Blanc-Sec, and one of the most influential of them all, Nikita, have kept the… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “Nice Thai, but not quite a cigar.” The easiest way to describe this is a Thai version of Wanted. You could make a case that the central character is not female. But like Wanted, there’s easily enough going on around him to qualify for this site. The similarities don’t stop there… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★ “DEI Hard.” Director Campbell recently appeared here with the entertaining Dirty Angels, and I was hoping for more of the same here. Sadly, I came away disappointed. There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, Daisy Ridley is not Eva Green. That’s OK. After all, only Eva Green… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “Naan but the brave.” This sequel to Mardaani sees Rani Mukerji return in the role of hard-edged police superintendent Shivani Shivaji Roy. She’s now on the hunt for a serial killer, who is brutally murdering and raping victims in her jurisdiction, the city of Kota in the northern Indian… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★½ “The calamari fights back…” Although almost a decade earlier than Lin Hsiao Lan’s slew of fantasy kung-fu flicks, this shares a lot of the same elements – not least an approach to narrative coherence best described as “informal.” This starts at the beginning, where we don’t even get introduced… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★½ “Dressed to kill.” For a TV movie, this is very impressive. When you hear that phrase, I usually think of something which appears on Lifetime or, worse still, Hallmark. But it seems that Thai television is made of sterner stuff. This plays much tougher, more like something you might… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★½ “More like undercooked. “ At the age of fifteen, Madison Michaels saw her prostitute mother beaten and killed by Renegade (Cross), a vicious local pimp. His homicide goes unpunished. Ten years later, Madison (Linton) is a counsellor, trying to help drug addicts and hookers get off the streets. She… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★½ “Meals on wheels.” The title here is used ironically, because “run” is the last thing the heroine can do. She is Chloe Sherman (Allen), a teenage girl who has been plagued by medical issues since birth, requiring full-time care from her mother, Diane (Paulson). She’s partially paralyzed, unable to… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★★ “One of the all-time classics of the women-in-prison genre.” This archetypal “women in prison” film is lifted above its colleagues in the genre, most of which are little more than crude exploitation, by being pretty damn sophisticated exploitation. The two main factors are Ito’s great sense of visual style,… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆½ This is written by a husband and wife duo, which is a nice idea. I wonder how Chris would react if I suggested writing a novel to her? Unfortunately, the results are a little disappointing. It feels like the execution is better than the… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★★½ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆½ This is a solid, no-nonsense combination of spy and science-fiction. Though, to be honest, it is skewed towards the former genre, with the latter mostly window-dressing. It wouldn’t take much to change the setting from a solar system whose ownership is disputed by a… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★½ “Death sentence.” Zombies and jail aren’t quite as new an idea as you might think. The Walking Dead had a major arc which took place at a prison, the facility’s fences now more useful for keeping things out than in. And back in 2005, The Asylum released the (surprisingly… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★★½ Kick-butt quotient: ☆½ When the apocalypse comes, if popular fiction is any guide, it’s going to be undead and craving brains. But not far behind in terms of literary popularity, appears to be an EMP. This is a high altitude nuclear detonation, which would unleash an electromagnetic… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★½ “All in, all out!” When I reviewed Russian fencing film On the Edge, I said, “I just need to find a synchronized swimming movie.” While this is a documentary, with all the positives and negatives of that genre, this fits the bill until Hollywood produces something more narrative. It… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
It has been a very quiet year for action heroine films. Here we sit, entering the sixth month of the year, and the only one of the top 100 movies in 2023 at the North American box-office I’ve reviewed here is Everything Everywhere All at Once – and that actually… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★½ “Pop-up on the infield.” And if the above phrase doesn’t make any sense – it’s basically an underwhelming outcome during a baseball game – then you are probably not the target audience for this sporting drama. After almost a quarter-century living in America (much of it spent running a… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “Better red than dead?” It has been forty years since the first crack at adapting the Marvel comic series, in turn inspired by Robert E. Howard’s character, Red Sonya of Rogatino. The first stab, released in the wake of Conan, starred Brigitte Nielsen, and was pretty bad. There have… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Inspired by Jim’s impressive research and writing on all things Joan of Arc, this is my attempt to try out something similar concerning Martha Jane Canary (or Cannary, since the spelling seems to constantly change, depending on who is writing about her) – better known as Calamity Jane. This is… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “Ground and pound.” Chinese kung-fu movies took off in the early eighties, after the success of Shaolin Temple, starring an unknown teenager called Jet Li. Over the years that followed, a slew of imitators followed, with varying success. Where these largely differed from their Hong Kong counterparts, were in… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★½ “Nun-conformist” I think it’s safe to say you’ll probably be able to decide within a few minutes, whether or not this is your cup of tea. The opening scene is set in a strip-club where the next act on the main stage is dressed as a nun. After a… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★½ “Well, that’s different.” The title above is the one by which it appeared on Tubi, though everywhere else calls it Aggression. I guess both are appropriate, in different ways. Neither shed a great deal of light on proceedings here. Then again, you could argue, the film itself is largely… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★★ Kick-butt quotient: ★★★ Bold is an incredibly prolific author, whose site lists eight separate series of novels, with a total of sixty-four books between them. The series are mostly named in the format, “ FBI thriller”, which does suggest a certain production-line quality to them. I wonder… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★½ “Talk is cheap, and so is this.” Reviewing director Profitt’s filmography on the IMDb is an interesting experience. He seems to have started off in the paranormal, drifted through pseudo-reality TV with titles like Untold Undercover Police Stories, and has now found a niche in the low-budget urban gangster… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★½ “Failed to sustain my undivided attention” We begin with the usual disclaimer for films of this kind: middle-aged white guys like me are not the target audience. However, I think it’s fair to say that concepts like story-telling and character development are not limited to any particular race, colour… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★½ “Black to very basics.” We return to the prolific well of Jeff Profitt, last seen here with Keisha Takes the Block. And by prolific, I mean that the IMDb lists now fewer than thirteen upcoming projects he is slated to direct. Fortunately for my backlog, most of these do… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★½ “Bleeding terrible, innit?” It is possible to do Lovecraft on a low-budget and make it work. Earlier this year, I was introduced to the delightful films of Lars Henriks, who did a whole trilogy of micro-budget movies, loosely in the Lovecraft universe. Taken in the right spirit, they’re quite… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★½ “Robbed of two hours of my life.” I’ve seen worse films, to be quite clear. Technically, this is perfectly acceptable, with an apparently reasonable budget, put to decent use. But I don’t think I’ve seen one which has been more annoying. It manages to hit that sweep spot of… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★ “I only see eight girls…” The rather salacious title is actually a direct translation of the original Yugoslavian one: it seems to be hinting at an adult movie whose name was A Girl and 19 Sailors. The reality is, naturally, rather different. It’s a war movie, set in the… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★★½ “Dog eat dog” Director Tjahjanto gave us one of the best action films of the last decade in The Night Comes For Us, a gory and relentless assault of jaw-dropping hand-to-hand mayhem. Follow-up, The Big 4, was a little underwhelming, but I was still stoked to hear about this,… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★½ “Not even worth it as scrap.” This should be right up my alley. For it’s a grungy, post-apocalyptic story of revenge, which is heavy both on the carnage and the nudity. Throw in disapproving reviews containing lines like, “Downright nasty movie that takes all the worst bits of exploitation… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★½ “Trash of the highest order.” Do not mistake the above rating for suggesting that this is a “good” movie. By most normal standards, it would hardly qualify. But what we have is a throwback to the glory days of exploitation, in particular Filipino women-in-prison flicks like The Big Doll House or Black… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★ “Once more: why we don’t camp.” Three generations of a family take a trip into the woods in their mobile home. There’s grandfather Stan (Ward), his somewhat neurotic daughter Helen (Ayer), whose life has been falling apart around her, and Helen’s teenage daughter, Emily (Spruell), for whom a weekend… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “Save a horse, ride a cowgirl.” I’m slightly grading this on a curve, because this is likely the best of the low-budget modern blaxploitation movies I’ve seen, by some margin. By “normal” standards, that still falls some way short of Oscar-winning, with the limited resources still being obvious at… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “Everything that goes up, must come down again.” Note: Watching season 1 or at least reading Jim’s review of it is highly recommended. Spoilers will follow! I never played the MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) video game League of Legends. But I guess this was the case for many… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★ “Just about skates by.” There’s no doubt that women’s sports very much plays second fiddle to their male equivalent, though the gap varies from sport to sport. The WNBA is experiencing a surge of popularity, though the NBA is still a financial behemoth. This documentary focuses on ice-hockey, and… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★★ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆ Not many novels come with a ringing endorsement from a former director of the CIA, but Gina Haspel calls this “A thoroughly enjoyable, engrossing thriller.” Argue with her, and she’ll send you an exploding cigar, or something. While it certainly isn’t bad, the rating… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★½ “…but no cigar” Rapace appears to be aiming for a niche in the straight-to-video (or, at least, straight to Netflix) action market, this coming on the heels of Unlocked and What Happened to Monday. The results thus far have been rather uneven, and this seems unlikely to move the… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “Angelic Upstarts” Eden Murphy (Miller) has a problem. She desperately wants to get into Pembroke College, but is currently on the wait list. However, classmate Barrett Schroder (Heller) has a congressman for a father, a letter from whom would surely push her application forward. Barrett isn’t exactly helpful, so… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “A girl walks home at night…” This is not exactly subtle in terms of its messaging, or the underling metaphor. But to be honest, I kinda respect that. I’d probably rather know what I’m in for, from the get-go, rather than experiencing a film which thinks it’s going to… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★½ “Grave encounters.” I’ve followed director Cummings since we screened her debut feature Berkshire County, at our film festival. Here, we reviewed the impressive She Never Died in 2019. Both films were distinctly horror-tinged, so it was a bit of a surprise to see her attached to what seemed a Western period… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
