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
Literary rating: ★★★★★ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆ A. W. Hart, the nominal “author” of the Avenging Angels series of western adventures featuring a twin brother-sister pair of bounty hunters in the post-Civil War West, is actually a house pen name; the books are all really written by different authors. (The writer… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★½ “One tough mother.” Bec ‘Rowdy’ Rawlings is an Australian mixed martial-artist, who fought in the UFC for a bit, and then became the first woman to win a bare-knuckle boxing world title. This documentary covers her life, from growing up as a teenage tearaway, through motherhood transforming her character,… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★½ “Inside out.” You could accuse this film of pulling a bait-and-switch. The first thirty minutes are set up to point emphatically towards one scenario. It then goes off in a completely different direction for much of the final hour – one very clearly inspired by French New Wave of… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★ “Bad behind bars.” With that title, you’ll understand why it’s one I opted not to make part of family movie night. I mean, you can’t argue with the forthrightness, though I’ve little doubt it’s as “true” as most films which make that claim i.e. barely at all. However, the… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “Not a bomb.” To some extent, Sonia (Arnezeder) is the very antithesis of an action heroine here. For she spends the vast bulk of the ninety minute running-time, sitting in the driver’s seat of her car. Admittedly, this is for good reason, because somebody has wired an anti-tank mine into… 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
★★★★ “ScandiNoir – made in Germany…” Murder by the Lake is a TV crime series co-producted between the second public German TV channel ZDF and the public TV channel of Austria ORF. It started in 2014 with a 90-minute long TV movie, followed by a further movie each year until… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
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★½ “Red, white and blew” I want to like Rose, who seems to be making a concerted effort to become an action heroine. It hasn’t always worked out – see The Doorman – but she keeps plugging away. It’s against that background I watched this, which I knew going in ranked… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “Rock out, with your cox out.” Rowing is not a pastime to which I’ve ever given much thought. It’s the backdrop for this, and is based (to some extent) on writer-director Hadaway’s experiences of the sport at college. Her cinematic background is in sound editing, where she worked on… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★½ “Could have been a contender.” Yeah, I think if I’d seen this under the alternate title of On the Waterfront, I might well have passed it by. Though that is probably a slightly more accurate description of the contents here, even allowing for the complete absence of Marlon Brando.… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★ “It’s like Die Hard, in a… building?” Kitamura is one of the few people to have made two films given our seal of approval: Azumi and Sky High. Throw in the amazing (just not heroine oriented) Versus, plus Godzilla: Final Wars, and there’s a case that in the first… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★½ “Hell hath no Furies…” Not to be mixed up with Furie, The Furies or even Furies – the last of which also showed up on Netflix recently. Confusion seems almost inevitable (and I’m not helping, by largely recycling the tagline for Furie). However, those three are all films –… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★ “Can’t spell Ballistic without balls…” You know you’re in for a slice of stinky, nineties action cheese from the opening sequence. Undercover cop Jesse (Holden) has just taken down a sleazy yuppie drug-dealer, and a homeless woman tells her, “You know what you are, sweetie? You’re ballistic!” We probably… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆½ Somebody really liked Killing Eve… If you’re going to write a story about an amoral female assassin, working for a shadowy group, who becomes involved with a woman she’s supposed to kill, then you are basically inviting such comparisons. These are unlikely to be… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “Wait Until After Dark” Yeah, as the above might suggest, this owes a rather large debt to Wait Until Dark, with its central theme of an attractive, blind protagonist threatened by home invaders. It is not the first to have gone down that road (see also In Darkness), and I must… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “The Beast is yet to come…” Debate raged over this one. Chris reckons lead actress Shimamura was, at some point, a man. I’m not quite so convinced, but the mere thought certainly gave the sex scenes here an added edge of creepiness. Given the lengthy such sequence which occurs… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★½ “Family values.” If you described this as a dark spoof of Hanna, you might not be so far away. Since the death of her father, Kim Noakes (Williams) has been brought up off the grid by her controlling, survivalist mother, Tina (Clifford). She makes a trip to civilization to… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “‘Roids and rage.” In a trans-continental coincidence, both Dieter and I ended up watching and writing our own, independent reviews of this. At least we agreed on the three-star rating! Well, you might or might not like the way this ends… However, you certainly will remember it. Credit director/co-writer… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★½ “#SquadGoals: Try not to suck.” I was braced for this to be terrible, based on IMDb user comments which were either scathing, or came from accounts with one review – a sure sign they were astroturfed. On that basis, I guess I was pleasantly surprised. Don’t get me wrong:… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★★½ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆ Having watched both versions of the film, I followed up by reading the book on which they were based. Despite my general fondness for horror, I haven’t read very much Stephen King: this is only the second novel of his, after Salem’s Lot. First… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★½ “A load of panths.” There are times when I can look at a failure of a movie, and kinda see how the various elements could have been arranged to better effect. That’s the case here, where a poverty-row, Spanish-language (but made in Texas) production about rape, revenge and narcos,… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★ “Interesting premise, incredibly bland execution.” I liked the idea of this. A gang of five thieves, four women and Liev, give up the game after a robbery goes wrong and Liev gets arrested. He doesn’t give up his accomplices, who include his pregnant girlfriend Willa (Banus), and goes to… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “Stripper’s 11.” Make no mistake, this is a cheap and tawdry excuse to show nekkid women, which may well leave you with a more cynical view of human nature. But if you’re going to watch a cheap and tawdry excuse to show nekkid women… You could probably do a… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★★★ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆½ “What I need is stories where men get kicked in the chest. Stories where guns only run out of ammo for dramatic effect. I need pulp. I need exploitation. I need fun.” I used to read a lot of comics, before moving to America.… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★★ “Happy ends are for losers!” Spoilers will follow! At one point, Scandinavian noir, was a genre mostly well-known only in Europe and to die-hard crime novel readers. But the ground-breaking female characters who have made the genre recognized worldwide in the past two decades consists of a trio. In addition… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★★ “All teeth and claws.” My wife is a big fan of Sandra Oh, for her long-time work on soapy medical drama, Grey’s Anatomy. This is about as far from that as imaginable. It’s a gloriously mean-spirited “comedy” [and I used the quotes out of reverence, not in a bad… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “It’s not just Harlin and Anderson that work with their spouses.” In various places, the title for this is “a Lady”or “the Lady” fighter: I’m going with what’s firmly stated on the opening credits of the print, ungrammatical as that may be. It’s a Filipino product, but unlike the… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★½ “Still a better movie than Wonder Woman 1984.“ This Taiwanese production takes place on an island where women have been separate from men for 23 generations, developing more or less your stereotypical Amazonian society. Men are rejected, male babies tossed out to see to sink or swim (typically the former)… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “And Then There Were None – with vampires” SPOILER WARNING FOR THIS REVIEW: ESPECIALLY IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE TRAILER! Trailers can do a lot of damage to a movie’s impact, and is definitely the case here. If the trailer hasn’t outright told us the idiot gangsters had kidnapped… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★½ “In Soviet Russia, sorcerers stone you…” There’s a battle in the middle of this, where the rebels and the authorities engage in a street-fight, and its absolutely beautiful to watch. Their weapons leave black smoke-trails criss-crossing, and the camera swoops and dives through the mayhem in truly lyrical fashion.… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★½ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆ a.k.a. Lethal Redemption War correspondent Kiera Hunter goes out of her comfort zone, to try and solve a decades-old mystery related to her grandfather. He was a CIA pilot, on one of the last planes to get out of Saigon in 1975, but it… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★★½ Kick-butt quotient: ☆½ If you’re even slightly familiar with the Star Trek universe, you’ll be aware of the Prime Directive. While never explicitly stated, it’s the rule which prohibits interfering with the development of less technologically advanced civilization, in particular those that are not capable of space… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★½ “Tubi or not Tubi? NOT Tubi…” Much though I love the streaming service, even I have to admit that “Tubi Originals” are a bit of a mixed bag, to put it mildly. For every Mercy Falls, an entertaining enough B-movie that punches above its weight, there is also… Well,… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★½ “What the title says.” Martha Jane Cannary Burke, a.k.a. “Calamity Jane” (1852-1903) was a lot of things. But most of all she was the inventor of her own legend. By the end of the 19th century, dime novels based off her alleged adventures already sold very well. Unfortunately, the… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★½ “Issues of trust” The relationship between Mykah (Leason) and Jameson (Chandler) is quickly heading for the rocks, as the honesty between them has evaporated. He suspects her of lying to him and having an affair: and he’s half-right. For Mykah is misleading him about the reason for her odd… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “Calamity Plain.” Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok are two of the most well-known names in the culture of the Wild West, though the reality of both individuals is almost impossible to separate from the myths which surround them. So it’s kinda pointless to complain about historical accuracy in… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★½ “Certainly no calamity.” Calamity Jane is one of the larger-than-life figures who populated the Wild West in its later days, as it was gradually becoming civilized. The truth about who she was is hard to determine, with verifiable facts hard to come by. But like Robin Hood, this just… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★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… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “Puts the ‘able’ in disabled.” This is certainly something of a novelty and/or a gimmick. But it’s none the less reasonably effective for it. Templeton – who is a woman, despite her first name, given to her after the character of Christopher Robin in the Winnie The Pooh books… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “Mostly hit, and several misses.” Well, after taking ten years to get from the third film to the first, the gap between first and second is considerably shorter. I think this probably works the best of the trilogy, not least because there are a few good GWG to be… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★½ “As the crane flies.” We begin with the murder of a family, with the sole (apparent) survivor being a small child, Fung Lin-yi (Li), who is able to escape. Rescued by – and stop me if you’ve heard this one before – a kung-fu master, she is rigourously trained… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★½ “Is there such a thing as whiteface?” I ask, because this film, made in Mexico City and starring mostly Mexicans, seems to be trying to take place in America. It’s not doing a good job of it. The heroine is Martha (Mazarrasa), a single mother running a shop in… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★½ “Schoolmistress by day…crawls through impressively large air-ducts by night.” Chagoyan is perhaps the nearest thing Mexico has to offer to an action heroine. She best known for her role in Lola la Trailera (‘Lola the Trucker’), in which, she played the daughter of a haulier – she takes over… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★½ “Dubbed to death” This is another in a recent burst of Thai action heroine movies, including The Secret Weapon. But it’s less successful, although the deficit is not entirely the movie’s fault. The only version I could find was a dubbed one on YouTube: over the years, I have… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★½ “Better late than never” Well, that only took… twenty-one years. Back in 2003, I watched and reviewed El Jardinero 2, with the help of Chris, because it came on a Mexican DVD with no English subtitles. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I booted up Tubi the other day, and… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★½ “Peak women-in-prison.” This may not be the best women-in-prison film, but it’s pretty much iconic. It certainly stamped the template from which almost all would follow. Carol Henderson (Blair) is sentenced to a relatively short 18 months in prison, for her involvement in a fatal car accident, only to find… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “Better the devil Kenau…” This feels a little like a Dutch cross between the stories of Joan of Arc and William Wallace. It’s a couple of centuries later than either, taking place (as the non-Dutch title states!) in the 16th century. The Spanish armies of the Catholic King Philip… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
½ “Knucks sucks.” I’m tempted to leave my review at that. But there’s a famous quote by critic Roger Ebert, going off on Bruce Willis flop, North: “I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
½ “Amateur hour and a quarter.” Incompetent on every level, this proves there’s a section of cult fandom which would praise a dog turd to the heavens, if told it had a “feminist” message. The title is probably – scratch that, certainly – the best thing about this, suggesting a… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
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
★★ “Battle Royale, with cheese.” This is a film with a really interesting idea; unfortunately, it’s one where the execution (and, indeed, the executionS) is not good enough to do it justice. There are just too many missteps to consider it successful, in more than intermittent spurts. These begin with… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “Punches above its weight.” Always a pleasure to cross another country off the map, and this is the first movie we have ever reviewed here from Nigeria. Indeed, entries from anywhere in Africa have been very limited, and in general, I found this a pleasant surprise. In some countries,… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★★ “Calor blanco” This is far from the first time we’ve covered films, series or documentaries about Griselda Blanco, the drug boss who ruled Miami with a lead fist in the eighties. There was Colombia narconovela La Viuda Negra. Lifetime TVM Cocaine Godmother, starring the not exactly Colombian, Catherine Zeta-Jones.… 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
★★½ “Death Wish, Bollywood style.” For the first hour and forty minutes, you may well be wondering why this is here. You will need to be patient: it gets there… eventually. However, to start with, it’s the story of the battle between crime boss Nikka Shaitan (Grover) and dogged cop… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★½ “Daddy issues.” This seemed considerably better in the trailer, which makes it look like quite an action-packed extravaganza. The reality is much less interesting, with a murky and confusing plot, and what action there is, is often filmed in a murky and confusing way. It begins with an agent,… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★ “Tolerable only in small doses.” There’s an interesting tweak to the situation here. While it is the usual “hitwoman agrees to go on one last mission” plotline, Rosa (Gala) is an assassin who has adopted poison as her weapon of choice. I think it’s the first time I’ve seen… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★½ “Did we learn nothing from John Wick?” Don’t mess with someone else’s dog. This is a good rule of thumb in most cases, but especially so when the owner is an unhinged teenage psychopath, with the both the talent and desire to inflict carnage in retribution. The last time… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★½ “Initially hits the bull, ends up firing blanks.” Margo Crane (DelaCerna) has been brought up by her native American father, since her mother walked out on them several years ago. Under his guidance, they have become self-sufficient, and Margo has become a crack shot. However, her creepy uncle ends… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★★½ Kick-butt quotient: ☆ It’s often forgotten that America didn’t join World War II until almost three years after it started. In the early days, there was a strong isolationist movement, which saw the conflict as other countries’ problems, from people like aviator Charles Lindbergh and broad groups… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★½ “Have you ever been in a Turkish prison?” I really must get round to reviewing Wentworth. The Australian women-in-prison drama certainly deserves coverage here, and has provided some of the best television we’ve enjoyed in the 2010’s. I keep intending to do so, but suspect that will now likely… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “Not your usual women-in-prison film…” This takes place in 1919-20, when Korea was under occupation by the Japanese [there seems to be quite a lot of this about; I’ve seen a bunch of Chinese movies set when that country was occupied by Japan as well]. Even demonstrating against the… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★½ “Bloody hell.” Tubi TV has become a goldmine of obscure, weird and, very occasionally, wonderful content for me. When I say “obscure”, I mean their selection includes films like this, about which the IMDb has only the barest of information. No external reviews; no user reviews; not even a… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
“Down the line, you name it, we’ve done it. Today, tomorrow, next week, we’ll pose as hostesses, society girls, models – anything and everything the department asks us to be. There are 249 of us in the department. We carry two things in common wherever we go: a shield, called… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★½ “Once upon a time, there were three little girls…” I suppose my main surprise is how pedestrian this was. Action? Hardly anything to speak of at all, despite the credit sequence which shows them training as police officers. The story has them going undercover at a vineyard, whose owner… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★½ “That whirring sound? Akira Kurosawa, spinning in his grave.” I added an extra half-star here out of how much I was entertained by this. Although this was more a result of us yelling things at the screen than any intrinsic merits. The idea is kinda cool, but if you… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “We have a mommy who slays the monsters for her daughter – but the monsters are real.” — Shane Black“ As mentioned in my review of Kate, I was startled to discover I had never reviewed this, since it is one of the most well-known entries in the action… 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
★★★½ “Probably the second-best thing to come out of Newcastle that isn’t in a bottle.” We Brits don’t do girls-with-guns movies: too busy drinking tea and arranging matchsticks, I imagine. This is a rare exception, and works not badly, combining a striking ‘Italian’ hitwoman in Maria (Torgan), with the bone-dry… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★★ “When Irish eyes are smiling.” I stumbled across this entirely by accident, Tubi’s autoplay feature putting it on after watching some World Cup highlights. But the start was intriguing enough to keep me watching, and turned out to be a really good documentary, even if the story is a… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★ “Not really very savage at all” This is one of those films where the same person wrote, directed and starred in it, and once again, the results illustrate the problems with such an endeavour. Almost any project will benefit from an external perspective which can offer constructive criticism, but… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★ “A wing and not much prayer.” Netflix describes this as “Charlie’s Angels meets Lupin, with a dash of Killing Eve.” Um. About that… While I haven’t seen Lupin, I can confidently state any similarity to the others is tangential at best. For example, the only thing this really has in connection… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★★ “This sister is still doing it for herself.” I’ve not seen the original Orphan. I suspect this does not matter very much, since what we have here is a prequel. I will admit to having been lured in by the barking mad central idea. It does justice to the… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
★★ “The spirit is willing…” This is another example of someone simply trying to do too much on their movie. For Linch not only starred in, produced and directed this, she also edited it, did the sound design and was the colourist. It’s not hard to predict her talents are… 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
★★★ “Pure cheese.” I’d been aware of this movie for some time, through its innovative crowd-funding approach, which raised $3 million to cover the cost of production. After COVID hit, there were doubts it’d ever see the light of day, but here it is: the first “Swissploitation” film [If not… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
