Three Films Make A Post: Blood is Coming

Revenge Ride (2020): With a female director in Melanie Aitkenhead and omni-present genre movie actresses like Pollyanna McIntosh involved, I suspected this “female biker gang on a rape revenge ride” movie to be a bit more interesting than your usual entry into this genre. It has a couple of moments you probably wouldn’t see in a male-centric film of the type, and it’s certainly not going for exploitative rape scenes (thankfully), but otherwise, most of the film is just terribly tepid.

In fact, this doesn’t play at all out like the subversive version of the rape revenge movie you’d hope for, nor as a clear-cut exploitation movie, but feels like a melodramatic TV movie with neither emotional nor intellectual depth enough to be able to allow itself to be this bland as a piece of exploitation filmmaking.

Crime Hunter – Bullet of Range (1989) aka クライムハンター 怒りの銃弾: This V-cinema action film directed by Toshimichi Ohkawa is apparently the first film in a long-running series. In typical V-cinema style, this is barely an hour long and still manages to pack an actual plot, copious action scenes and a handful of mildly crazy ideas in.

The film follows the attempts of a cop (Masanori Sera) in Little Tokyo, USA to avenge the (too early) death of his partner (Riki Takeuchi!) while hopped up on very strong painkillers. Also involved are a gun-toting Catholic nun (Minako Tanaka) who does undercover stripper work (no actual nudity involved though), as well as a criminal with pretty awesome hair (Seiji Matano). There’s much shooting, manly wearing of sunglasses and a finale with a really high body count, all shot with rather impressive efficiency. If that sounds like low praise for Ohkawa, I don’t mean it that way: there’s an art to pack an actual film, even one with a simple plot like this one has, into a runtime this short and still make it feel like a movie instead of a series of random scenes, and Ohkawa does this perfectly.


Daguerréotypes (1976): This is a relatively early long-form documentary by the great Agnès Varda, portraying the predominantly elderly small shop keepers on the street she lived on for decades. At first, the film does seem to border on the cute a bit too much, until you realize that Varda has looked at these seemingly very bourgeois people and found people marginalized in their place and time, country people and immigrants having come to the city decades ago, now suggesting a part of Parisian life – and a way of life - that’s coming to an end. And because this is Varda, she treats her subjects with kindness and compassion, not setting out to make fun of them, or reveal their hidden depths in a dramatic fashion, but looking at them and consciously seeing them as something different than the quaint background to other people’s lives.

Three Films Make A Post: SHATTERING ADVENTURE THAT BOLDLY EXPLORES THE JUNGLES OF THE HEART!

Infini (2015): As you know, Jim, I do love me some SF horror, so this Australian low budget film directed by Shane Abbess already has one thing going for it. It also has sparse yet convincing production design (in the Alien tradition of grubby, lived-in looking spaces – in space), a calm and effective soundtrack, decent acting, and a script that actually knows what it wants to do and isn’t willing to throw everything away for a dumb final twist, going for it. Sure, the film does perhaps feature a few too many scenes of crazed people bellowing at each other while the camera shakes and the editing finger wobbles, and its first two thirds do follow the genre expectations perhaps a bit too closely. However, it also has an unexpected and emotionally (perhaps even philosophically) resonant ending that’s not at all par for the course in its sub-genre, and is a film that really makes its low budget work, as well as a plot that actually works without everyone involved being an idiot.

Let Us Prey (2014): Despite clearly being a film made with great conviction and technical acumen, and far above your James Wan produced mainstream horror piece or your amateur gore movie, I didn’t really warm to Brian O’Malley’s film. It’s a temperamental thing, I think, an incompatibility between me and a film that, whenever it has to decide between a subtle and an unsubtle way to go about things, always takes the loud approach (quite effectively one has to say), which leads to something I surely can appreciate and respect but not really love. It may be I’m not its ideal audience in other regards either, the film’s exclusive interest in old testament based religion more than just a little suspect to this liberal atheist. The ending’s a bit problematic too, seeing as Liam Cunningham’s character calling themselves a mere observer is utter nonsense, unless you want to believe small towns on the British Isles have a psychopathic killer percentage of about eighty percent of the population, making the final decision of lead character Pollyanna MacIntosh really difficult to swallow. It might just be me, though.

Cowboys vs Dinosaurs aka Jurassic Attack (2015): Here, on the other hand, it’s most definitely not me, because everything about this thing is bad: the acting, the irony, the special effects, the score – you name it, it’s terrible. Which of course still leaves the decades old space for a movie about cowboys fighting dinosaurs that’s actually any good wide open. Though honestly, after having gone through this thing, I’ve finally developed much more of an appreciation for the fine filmmaking art and the love that went into The Valley of Gwangi.

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