Sweet Karma (2009)

Anna Balint (Patricia Stasiak) the sister of mute Karma (Shera Bechard) thinks the nice gangster-looking people she's doing business with are going to fly her from Russia to a nice cleaning job in Toronto. Instead, she disappears into the rather less nice world of the sex slavery trade.

Karma is more than just angry about her sister's fate, especially once a newspaper article about a girl fitting Anna's description that has been found dead in a park in Toronto more than just half convinces her that Anna is dead. Karma sets herself just one goal: find the people responsible for Anna's fate and kill them.

At first, she is quite successful at her goal. Karma kills the slavers' Russian contact, and makes her way to Canada, where she continues her minor killing spree. The vigilante's life becomes more difficult once Karma's enemies have realized that someone is targeting them and become more careful. There is quite a bit of unpleasantness in our heroine's future, and if not for a helpful undercover cop who must have flunked the lesson in police school where they talk about not enabling serial killings and arresting murderers, she might not be able to see her plans through.

Many of the qualities Andrew Thomas Hunt's revenge flick Sweet Karma possesses can best be described by listing the mistakes it doesn't make. Saying a film succeeds more through avoiding bad decisions than making good ones is the sort of thing bound to make a film sound less interesting than it actually is, but there you have it: Sweet Karma is not dumb, it is straightforwardly plotted, it does not drag its feet for most of its running time, it contains action sequences that are cleverly shot and edited around the abilities of its actors without getting grating, it doesn't wallow in its sleazier moments for sleaziness's sake. It is, in other words, a serious exploitation movie in the classic mold.

Generally, serious exploitation films of this type have become few and far between, because most filmmakers interested in the style are either working the ironic re/de-construction circuit or just don't seem to have the chops or the money to make a straight revenge flick like this. Not that Hunt seems to have had all that impressive a budget, but he's milking comparatively simple camera set-ups and seedy locations for what they can provide if you just let them, namely the sort of (probably only seemingly, but I wouldn't know) authentic mood that makes a film's plot automatically more believable.

The camera work goes into the same, hyper-realist direction. Hunt uses grain and lots of handheld camera to further the believability of the motel parking lot world his film takes place in. Since the film evokes the sense and mood of a particular place and time as nicely as it does, it keeps its audience (well, at least me) more willing to go the places it wants them to go, and to buy the elements of its plot that are less easy to buy, like the particularly helpful undercover cop (admittedly, the film does at least try to explain his helpfulness a little, which is as much as one can ask from this sort of thing), or a plot twist that hinges on people not using modern communication devices like letters or telephones.

Unlike a lot of contemporary low budget films, Sweet Karma also features solid acting throughout. One might speculate that there's a reason Shera Bechard's character is mute beyond a nod in the direction of Thriller: A Cruel Picture, but the actress does quite a convincing job working through facial expression and body language alone, so those speculations might be more based on the bad feeling one gets when one reads an actress is Hugh Hefner's girlfriend of the week. The rest of the actors did equally good jobs at convincing me that yes, these people might in fact be Russian slavers.

When it comes to exploitational values, Sweet Karma is one of the milder examples of films containing rape scenes and shot off penises. It's not that the film is all that squeamish about showing us these things, or getting in a bit of female nudity, but Hunt's direction doesn't feel mean-spirited; the film's sympathy seems to lie squarely with the women, and it would need a very firm belief that showing something in your film is the same as approving of it to put Sweet Karma down as misogynist.

So, it's pretty much a film like half of the non-weird exploitation movies of the 70s.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: canadian movies,reviews,revenge,crime,andrew thomas hunt,shera bechard

When The Raven Flies (1984)

During the reign of Harald I in Norway, a Viking raid on the coast of Ireland leads to the death of the parents of young Gest and the abduction of his sister. Gest himself keeps his life only thanks to a (as it will turn out to be) rather ill-advised moment of compassion of one of the raiders.

Years later, a conflict with Harald has driven the Viking clans who were responsible for the deed into exile in Iceland. Their leaders, Erik (Flosi Olafsson) and Thor (Helgi Skulason) are blood brothers and are trying to eke out a living on the inhospitable island.

One day, the merchant ship that connects them with what one hardly wants to call civilization, brings not only the usual load of goods and slaves with it, but also a young man (Jakob Por Einarsson) who soon turns out to be the grown-up Gest, out to find his sister (who is now Thord's wife and mother of his son) and out for revenge.

The revenge part of his mission works out nicely, thanks to his adept use of throwing knives and the total lack of empathy Gest shows towards his enemies (or, for that matter, the man who once saved his life). Erik, Thord and their men are still too many to take them on all at once, but cunning use of the distrust and barely controlled hatred the two Viking clans harbor for each other and some rather mean games with Thord's religious convictions will see their numbers whittled down soon enough.

 

Most sources on the Internet seem content with calling this a "Viking film" and comparing When the Raven Flies with the sagas of its cultural context, which is stating the obvious, but failing to detect the other (and let's be honest, just as obvious) reference point of the film: the Spaghetti Western. I'd even go so far and call it a "Viking Western", a film that uses the aesthetics of the Spaghetti Western to tell a story about medieval Iceland in the same way the Spaghetti Western tells a story about the Old West. When the Raven Flies seems just as disinterested in historical accuracy as its Italian counterparts are - it's all about defining a mood, showing a lot of unwashed people who don't like to talk much, and wallowing in lots of mud (some of it of the metaphorical kind).

Director Rafn Gunnlaugsson's film doesn't have to hide from the better representatives of its sister genre - technically, it might be a little raw, but this rawness only strengthens its grim mood. Gunnlaugsson has a way of making Iceland's landscape say the things his characters are just too taciturn to say.

It is also very much one of those revenge movies which are as much about the terror lying at the core of revenge as about the revenge itself. Gest has good reasons for the things he does, but the unflinching gaze of the film is clearly conscious of the fact that its anti-hero's deeds are just as bad as what has been done to his family. The film's ending is less about revenge fulfilled as about revenge perpetuated.

Additionally, there is a very Italian sounding soundtrack that gives the film a certain kind of rhythmic backbone I always like in my movies.

I'd recommend When the Raven Flies for it's "Spaghetti Western in Iceland" conceit alone, but it's a film that uses this potential gimmick as a starting point for something much more harrowing and quietly intense that is worth experiencing.

 

Technorati-Tags: viking western,icelandic movies,hrafn gunnlaugsson,revenge flick,reviews

The Machine Girl (2007)

High school girl Ami (Minase Yashiro) lives alone with her younger brother Yu (Ryosuke Kawamura) since their parents have committed double suicide when they were accused of murder. All seems to go rather well for them. Alas Yu and his friend Takeshi have trouble with Sho Kimura, the bullying son of a yakuza boss (Kentaro Shimazu) who traces his family line back to Hattori Hanzo himself and still holds with old traditions like the art of the ninja and killing one's staff for the slightest error.

At first Sho and his gang (The High School Ninja Gang, of course) blackmail the boys for money, but it becomes very clear very fast that they mostly are sadistic little pricks looking for reasons to hurt people. When Sho and Takeshi try to defend themselves, the gang murders them.

Ami, who knew nothing about all of this is as angry about the deaths of her brother and his friend, which soon are declared suicides, as she is heartbroken. Then she finds a notebook in which her brother helpfully laid out the names of his tormentors.

She tries to show the notes to the parents of one the gang members and convince them to go to the police with her. What Ami doesn't count on is that these people (the father even a cop) not only don't care about what she tells them, but are as mad as the nice serial killers next door.

Our heroine barely escapes from the ensuing fight and a cooking related violent incident that nearly costs her an arm.

After nightfall she returns. This time she is armed and ready and in short order decapitates the son, kills the mother and baptizes the father with blood squirting out of his dead son's torso. Having done the first part of her job, she continues her vengeance with an assault on the Kimura Family Mansion. Sho,his mad father and mother (Honoka) and their yakuza-ninja bodyguards together are too strong for even an (ex-pacifist) single bad-ass fighter like Ami. She loses the fight and gets caught.

Fortunately Mister Kimura holds to the old ninja tradition of torturing imprisoned enemies to death in epically protracted sessions, so at first Ami only loses most of an arm, and intent on keeping the rest of herself fit to take further revenge, escapes by breaking the neck of a yakuza who really shouldn't have looked under her skirt.

Wounded and tired she loses her consciousness on the steps of the garage of Miki Sugihara (Asami; the name of M.S. is of course a friendly nod in the direction of the sukeban actress of the same name), the mother of Yu's equally dead friend Takeshi, who up until now was too struck by her grief to do much else than blame Yu for Takeshi's death. She and her husband tend to Ami's wounds. When the now one-armed Ami regains her consciousness, she and Miki have a little fight to clear the air between them. Ami of course shows such incredible spirit that the impressed Miki swears to help her in their relative's vengeance.

Miki trains Ami in the art of fighting one-armed and dragging heavy things around, while the husband constructs a few helpful artificial limbs, including a chainsaw arm and an oh so practical gatling gun arm Django would have been proud of.

On the day the gatling arm is nearly ready, Miki makes a fatal mistake - while learning the cowardly Kimuras have fled their old mansion, she is spotted and followed by one of their goons.

The High School Ninja Gang attacks the garage in full red Adidas ninja costumes, Miki is painfully hurt, her husband cut to pieces and Ami experiences for the first time the awesome power of her gatling arm.

The two women on a mission grab the only yakuza survivor of the massacre and convince him with their loving and caring ways (and some nails in his head)to tell them of Kimura's new hide-out.

There, an unpleasant surprise awaits them. Mister Kimura hasn't been idle during the last few scenes. He somehow trained and upgraded the dead Ninja High School Gang's parents to the Super Mourner Gang, wearing photos of their dead loved ones on the chests of their post-apocalyptic football dresses.

And even if Ami and Miki survive this fight, there are still Mister Kimura and his flying guillotine, Misses Kimura and her drill bra and three young and innocent hostages standing between them and their revenge. Who will survive? And who will be cut into how many funnily formed pieces?

There are two kinds of people in this world. Those that greet a film featuring a Japanese school girl with a machine gun arm shooting (and sometimes cutting) yakuza and ninja into bloody pieces with hardly suppressed screams of joy and glee, and those that just run screaming out of the room. If you belong to the latter kind of people, I'm not really sure what you're doing reading this, if to the former I can tell you this much - this movie is as entertaining as expected.

One could of course complain about not very competent acting (although Asami makes a swell classic style sukeban), script holes and so on, but those aren't things one should look for in a film like The Machine Girl anyway.

Instead I'd like to praise some of the film's virtues. Greatest among them are the gloriously bloody (and gutty) fight scenes complete with enough absurd (and absurdly cool) choreographed moments to fill two or three other films. The special effects are mostly practical, with a few solid moments of CGI and are as completely over the top as I dreamt of when first reading about this film. There just isn't much that won't happen to a body here - realism thankfully be damned.

The script doesn't try to chain the absurd fights with too much earnestness and plays mostly as a weird comedy, possibly even an affectionate parody of the revenge flick.

A few scenes look like quite effective attempts at subverting parts of the film's own genre to me, especially Ami's continuous refusal to let herself be raped like a good revenge flick heroine. She instead opts for kicking her would-be rapists' asses. There is also the concept of the Super Mourners - how many other revenge flicks do you know which say right out that revenge can be a nearly unending circle, even in a blink or you'll miss it moment like it is done here? And do I see a critique of the culture of public mourning here?

Late in the film we also have a just-barely-not-a kiss scene between Ami and Miki, a scene usually played out between our manly male hero and his useless girlfriend or someone of that kind, here transformed into something way more interesting by making it into a scene between two women who are both determined to die for their respective revenge, but unwilling to let the other one die.

All in all The Machine Girl features more hidden complexity than expected in an over the top gore movie. Plus the gore. This must be what love feels like.

 

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,gore,action,revenge flick,reviews