The Wasp Woman (1995)

Directed by: Jim Wynors
Run Time: 84 minutes

Today's review is a remake of  Roger Corman's 1959 The Wasp Woman. Thought the lord of low budget B movies produced this one instead directing , it still has all the cheese one can expect of a B movie. Without further padding on to the review.

The story centers around Janice (Jennifer Rubin), a woman that created a successful cosmetics company, is the CEO of the company she made, and is the model of the product line. However declining sales and nervous investors are forcing her just to step down from being the company's model. Though not all hope is lost as Dr. Zinthorp has a plot convenient solution to Janice's age issue. Dr. Zinthorp, a disgraced medical researcher, has made a breakthrough in anti-aging by sciencing the  hell out of wasp stuff. He also is running low on research funds and is clueless on how to sell the research he has done so far.

This becomes painfully obvious when Janice meets Dr. Zinthorp in person and all he has as a presentation is a lot science jargon and no test results. Not wanting the next big thing in anti-aging to slip through her fingers Janice has Zinthorp test his serum on his cat. A few days later the cat reverts to a kitten and Janice wants to move to testing this serum on herself. A move that has nothing to do with the new young model that was hired to replace Janice. The doctor starts with a small dose to start the human testing phase of this serum. Though Janice may experience feelings of paranoia and have random hallucinations it will make her look younger in two or three months.

Playing it safe is not something Janice is willing to do and sneaks back into lab to increase her dosage.  This does have the effect of making her look like she is in her late twenties. It also makes her think that her boyfriend is romantically involved with other women and that she is turning into a human wasp monster. Back at Dr. Zinthorp's lab, the test kitty has mutated into a killer wasp cat. This monster cat then lures and kill Dr. Zinthorp in a near by service tunnel. Then is promptly forgotten.

Things get worse for Janice as well. Her paranoia has gone from annoying to dialed past eleven. She also starts seducing men that called her old, trying to destroy her business, and who betrayed her trust. This leads to her turning into a human wasp monster with bad nineties CGI effects. Followed by tame but horrific murder of the people in question. The third act see Janice sort of embracing her monstrous nature and forcing a final conflict between herself and the few surviving people left in her life.

At of the end of the day it's fun cheesy monster movie made for cable. Because it was made in the nineties for cable so there is more nudity and the killing is more graphic than the 1959 edition. There is not a lot to this movie outside of it being a fun monster movie. It's a fun movie if there is nothing on, the weather outside is crappy, or you can't sleep. If it shows up on cable or a streaming service give it a watch.

MVT: The monster suit is rather impressive for a low budget production like this.

Make or Break: Every time there was a office scene the background sound track included a nonstop ringing phone. At times it got on my nerves to the point I did yell out "Answer the fucking phone already."

Score: 5.9 out of 10

 

Angel on Fire (1995)

Security just ain’t what it used to be.  Sure, technology has advanced to the point that you can lock your doors and view closed circuit video from your cellphone, but the actual strategy of how to go about securing things has gone nowhere.  Part of the reason, possibly, is that honest people don’t or can’t think like a criminal.  Yes, the basics, like locking downstairs windows and so forth, are common sense, and would likely deter a normal smash-and-grab guy or a crackhead looking for a quick score.  But what of the super criminal or professional thief who simply must get their hands on your mint, vintage Star Wars action figure collection?  Here’s a person for whom the challenge is the fun, the reward worth any risk.  Could you prevent such a mastermind from clambering down your chimney like a maleficent Santa Claus with a series of trip wires and snares?  Would you go so far as setting up a web of death-dealing lasers in your living room?  No, most of us wouldn’t, because that would just be too much of a hassle, and, as we so very often delude ourselves, it can never happen to me.  This must be the logic behind the Shaolin monastery’s security at the opening of Philip Ko’s Angel on Fire (aka Die Xue Rou Qing aka Born to Fight 6 aka Only the Strong Survive).  These monks have a relic apparently worth a king’s ransom, and they leave it laying out on a table for people like May (Melanie Marquez) to just waltz in and steal.  Surely, this is the ultimate argument for all Shaolin temples to have more death traps. 

Post-heist, May meets up with her partner Rocks (Philip Ko), but quickly betrays him and the Syndicate they both work for in order to keep all of the money from the sale of the relic for herself.  Inspector Lee (Waise Lee) sets his two best cops, Wong Li (Pan Pan Yeung) and Mai Lei (Cynthia Khan), on May’s tail.  Action ensues.

Angel on Fire is a film wholly and purely about a MacGuffin.  Not unlike the suitcase in Kiss Me Deadly or the statue in The Maltese Falcon, everyone and their brother associated with the Underworld wants this thing, but none of them could probably tell you anything about it outside of its worth (which is also indeterminate).  Consequently, this makes May another MacGuffin, since she holds the relic, and everyone is searching for her like Waldo (she is much easier to spot).  The entire movie, then, is little more than a chase between various factions (the Syndicate, Tony’s [Lee Chun-Wa] gang, and Interpol [which itself is split into two groups who never confer with each other or work together, strangely enough adding a hint of verisimilitude to some ludicrous goings on]).  Every scene revolves around May showing up somewhere, being attacked/pursued, and ditching her assailants.  One might think that in the hands of a good director this could make for an exciting movie.  This film leaves us with the twin dilemma of believing that Ko is not that talented a director and that sometimes even simplicity still needs a bit more detail to be compelling.

May is not only an international super thief but also an international super model (what luck!).  On the surface, this is an interesting idea.  Here’s a woman for whom the glamour of super modeling isn’t enough.  Like a magpie, one of the only non-mammalian animals that can recognize itself in its own reflection, May sees herself reflected in her dual worlds, but those worlds are only a hair apart.  Both worlds require a give and take.  As a model, she gives her image for adulation (and it should be mentioned, we never see her do any modeling; I’m running with the surface concepts here).  As a thief, she gives her skills for a high monetary return.  Both callings also trade on May’s beauty, though, honestly, one of them really shouldn’t.  She is capable, I’m sure, of insinuating herself into certain places because of her physical charms.  Yet, one really has to question the efficacy of making oneself up like they’re just about to shoot a spread for Vogue when infiltrating a monastery (I am not against the thigh-high leather boots she sports, incidentally) or trying to hide from people who want you dead.  I would say that May hides in plain sight, but she makes no effort to hide at all.  I would like you to note how much of May’s capabilities it is left for the viewer to determine.  This is because Ko in no way capitalizes on this aspect of the character.  He simply uses Marquez as a good-looking antagonist, nothing more.  She struts across the screen and does some fighting, and that’s about it.

This wasted potential is the calling card of Angel on Fire in toto, and the reason for this waste has to do with the film’s ambition.  Ko and company set out to craft a wall-to-wall action film.  In fact, the last third of the movie is an extensive series of set piece sequences, including an airplane chase and a great many explosions.  This is all well and good, except for three things.  One, the way the film is shot and edited is sloppy at best.  It is not enough to just keep moving the camera and then cut it all together.  There needs to be a sense of geography and an action/reaction approach to the events onscreen.  Ko gets neither of these right with characters just throwing arms and legs or shooting guns.  There is no connection between these moments, so they’re just action images that keep repeating over and over again.  Even the hand-to-hand fights don’t tie together.  I constantly felt like I had missed just enough between cuts for none of this to match up properly.  Two, the characters are paper thin and uninteresting.  Obviously, we don’t need to know every want or need from these people to find their adventures compelling, but they should be more than just warm bodies.  Mai Lei and her cabbie friend Harry (Ronnie Ricketts) come closest to making this work.  Khan carries it off with her natural beauty and charm, and Harry is the most honest taxi driver in the world (of course, they’d make great partners!).  Third, and worst, is that the film has no story aside from the basic setup.  As I stated, the picture is only concerned with the MacGuffin, and that’s kind of opposite the entire point of a MacGuffin.  Thus, Angel on Fire is nothing other than a collection of scenes, with no development and no purpose besides action (which is not well-handled).  Wong Li is introduced early on then forgotten about for large swaths of the film, occasionally popping up to remind you that she exists (and that you don’t care whether she does or not).  For someone who is hiding out, May is incredibly easy for absolutely everyone to find.  Characters pop up, just because, as if they’re instant coffee spokespeople.  You can watch a collection of film stunts and come away with the same experience as this film.  And the collection of stunts would likely make more narrative sense.

MVT:  Cynthia Khan is cute as all get out.  So, there’s that.

Make or Break:  There is a cab chase which ends with one of the vehicles just breaking down.  This was around the point that my patience did the same.

Score:  4/10           

Prisoner Maria: The Movie (1995)

Prisoner #206 (in a clear homage/ripoff of the Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion series), the titular Maria (Noriko Aota), is employed by her warden to take out bad guys.  Meanwhile, an insane doctor gets involved with Taiwanese gangsters in a scheme to control the minds of people for fun and profit.  Who will Maria’s next target(s) be?

Yes, Shuji Kataoka’s Prisoner Maria: The Movie follows in the footsteps of Toei’s fantastic, Meiko-Kaji-starring franchise.  It also owes tons to the films of John Woo (and just about every action film director to come out of Hong Kong), Luc Besson’s Nikita, the Pinky Violence and Women with Guns genres, and comic books in general.  Given its title, I don’t know if it is an adaptation (I could find nothing regarding this information, but then my fluency in Japanese is crap), however two manga writers worked on it (Keiji Nakazawa and Shigeru Tsuchiyama).  The problem is that this film takes all of these elements, regurgitates them across the screen, but adds nothing of its own.  It can be argued that its more bizarre elements are what distinguish it, and that’s a fair statement.  Yet, the film is so disjointed, wanting to be so stridently unoriginal, that it becomes little more than a pile of hand-me-down clothes, more disappointing to sift through for its sameness than any gems that may hopefully be hidden at the bottom (one can only own so many “vintage” Hawaiian shirts or whatever; this point is, of course, up for debate).  The first scene has Maria pulling a hit on a gangster which involves a nice throat-slashing, a great many bullets, and camera angles that make you want to stand on your head.  Maria sequesters herself in her concrete apartment when she’s not sequestered in her concrete cell.  She has a mini-arsenal under her bed that she seems to be proficient in, although in practice she’s not nearly as smooth as we expect her to be.  She meets a cop, Igarasi (Tetsuo Kurata), with whom she naturally falls in love, despite their being at cross purposes.  And so on, and so on.  If this is an adaptation of a manga or a novel, it’s less like a side by side comparison than like staring at a stack of pages which may or may not be in order, but the result would be the same.

Prisoner Maria is an absolute sleazefest, but rarely to any effect other than being skanky.  For example, a young serial killer ties up a woman in his home operating theater.  He cuts her clothes off with a large hunting knife.  He runs the blade across her breasts and crotch.  He sucks on her nipple for a second.  Then he slices her torso open, and we get to watch the life fade from her eyes.  Fair enough.  This scene works in setting up the level of evil Maria must oppose.  Compare it with the scene where the Taiwanese gangster kidnaps a brother and sister.  Before taking them away, he has his men haul out some anonymous Taiwanese woman, and the baddies double team her in front of everyone.  Why?  The victims already know what’s in store for them.  This is sleaze for the sake of sleaze.  I guess there’s a place for that, but as I was watching the film, the word “gratuitous” kept flashing across my mind.  To me, then, it’s more distraction than necessity, either as genre or narrative requirement.  After all, formless pornography is readily available elsewhere, even back in the 90s when this was made.  Surprisingly, Aota’s sex scene is chaste.  Considering the film it’s surrounded by, this sticks out like a sore thumb.  Perhaps its modesty is meant to highlight some emotional involvement between the two characters.  Unfortunately, their chemistry is more like a sparkler than a roman candle.

Male power trip and rape fantasies clearly make up the film’s raison d’etre.  Maria’s warden plays like the Niles Caulder of the story.  He emotionlessly flings Maria into situations with little-to-no information.  He withholds and/or just doesn’t update his operative with new data that would facilitate her work and reduce the risk level to himself.  He coerces Maria’s participation by keeping her from her son (who doesn’t seem to miss his mother at all, when we do get to see him).  In other words, the warden is a dick who can’t even bring himself to work in his own self-interest.  The other men in the film who are not Igarasi exercise control over women, by will or by force.  Women are meat to them, and their white slavery/prostitution/mind control racket confirms this.  There are very few women in this movie who aren’t bound, gagged, or drugged at some point or another.  Dr. Kito’s mind control experiments are the ultimate display of this desire to erase women’s minds and keep their bodies as literal receptacles for sex.  He believes himself to be God (that’s not an analogy), forming and casting off people as it pleases him.  

Despite the surface differences between the bad guys and Igarasi, he is just as much of a male power fantasy, simply tilted toward the more benevolent end of the spectrum.  He’s clearly smarter than Maria (but the way she’s written, just about everyone is), since he effortlessly follows her trail and tracks her down.  Worse than that, for as talented as Maria is supposed to be, and for as good as Aota looks all kitted out in her leather hitwoman outfit, she’s given very little opportunity to kick some male chauvinist/misogynist ass.  She gets thrown around and has the tables turned on her almost constantly, her victories occurring more by accident than skill and planning.  To that point, Igarasi shows up more than once in the nick of time to save her bacon, robbing her of any true sense of empowerment, and it’s only through his largesse that she escapes in the end.  Like every other woman in the film, Maria is just another object to be used.  Prisoner Maria: The Movie thwarts every moment for its protagonist to shine until one begins to wonder why she’s the protagonist at all?  Possibly because she’s not meant to have agency in this world, a powerless cog that thinks she’s the motor driving her life?  Her disenfranchisement and oppression are inescapable.  She’s serving a life sentence as a prisoner in more ways than one.  I’d like to believe that this is what the filmmakers were going for, as it would bestow the film with a darkly cynical outlook on the unchanged place of women in a male dominated society, given the illusion of power and hope to keep them in their place.  But from the evidence of the film’s construction and prurient attitude, I tend to think the people behind this just didn’t care about the film and its characters.  So, neither did I.

MVT:  Aota shows some talent, and she has the potential to carry an action film.  She just doesn’t get her shot to do so here.

Make or Break:  The first female victim’s torture and death is about as blatant a sign post for what this film is as you can get, for better or worse.

Score:  5/10

Tough and Deadly (1995)

Most people into genre cinema know and love James Karen for his role as Frank in Dan O’Bannon’s zombie masterpiece, Return of the Living Dead.  I first came to know him as the affable, always suited shill for Pathmark Supermarkets.  His commercials touting that week’s specials popped up on New York/New Jersey stations, and since I was watching those channels on Saturday afternoons for Kung Fu and Horror movies, he became a welcome sight.  He seemed like a nice guy.  When I finally saw Return, I had one of those “Hey, I know that guy!” moments.  It’s similar to how I used to see Zohra Lampert selling Goya beans (“Oh boy-a!”), and it wasn’t until I saw her on an episode of Law and Order that it occurred to me that she did other things (including working with John Cassavetes in Opening Night).  It’s ironic with Karen that I hadn’t heard of him before either the commercials or the movies, since he was born about twenty miles away from me.  Ah, well.  It was nice, then, to see him pop up in Steve Cohen’s Tough and Deadly (and it should be noted that Cohen directed an episode of Law and Order, though neither Karen nor Lampert appeared in it), doing what he does best: selling what he’s got. 

CIA agent Monk (Billy Blanks) drives all the way out to the middle of nowhere in “France” to talk to Austrian intel broker Reichtman (Ronald House) and be attacked by Richard Norton and his crack team.  After a car accident puts Monk in the hospital and makes him amnesiac, he attracts the attention of skip tracer Elmo Freech (Roddy Piper) as a possible bounty.  The two team up to take down crooks and figure out Monk’s past (but mostly the former), which also involves taking down more crooks, just not for money.

Tough and Deadly follows in the long tradition of action films that pair a couple of characters who are disparate on the surface but essentially the same underneath.  Also like so many action films down through the ages, the main characters are either lawmen or ex-lawmen.  Elmo was a cop who punched a superior officer out (for not the greatest reason in the world), and now he’s a bounty hunter/private dick.  He still hunts down bad guys, he just does it on his terms.  Like so many private eyes, Elmo also has issues with cash flow, always behind on bills and always hustling for a way to make a buck.  He has a sassy secretary/assistant, Moe (played by Lisa Stahl), who acts like she doesn’t care, but really, she does.  Monk works within the system.  In fact, he’s so deep in the system, he’s been removed from it.  He’s legally dead and doesn’t exist on paper.  Monk’s sole purpose in life is also to hunt down the bad guys, but there has to be something more personal in it for him.  That’s the only reason he would allow his identity to be wiped out.  By teaming up, the two experience law enforcement from a different perspective.  Elmo gets to feel like a real cop again.  Monk gets to do his job without the restraints the system placed on him.

This plays into the film’s issues of identity.  Monk loses his memory.  He becomes the more literal ghost (just not in the supernatural sense) he was while working for the CIA.  He needs to re-discover the man he was, and this leads him to the man he will become (a resurrection, if you will).  Elmo helps by bringing him into a world similar to the one he already knew.  Elmo also gives Monk a name (John Portland) in true Elmo Freech fashion (he throws a knife at a map).  Monk’s name doesn’t matter for his identity (he has three: Monk, John Portland, and Quicksilver), but the multiplicity of them points to the identity crisis through which he has to work.  The thing about the film is that Monk’s memory recovery doesn’t tie in with the film’s plot.  He just remembers things, and then they move on.  There’s no direct connection between the two story threads as they progress, which is surprising, as that’s the typical template for storylines like this one (and its lack proves why it’s the standard).  The story ties together by happenstance.  I can’t say that it’s a subversion of a trope in this case.  It simply feels like the filmmakers didn’t do it.  No reason.

It's with that in mind that I want to address the film’s story.  From the set up, the audience expects Elmo and Monk to embroil themselves in the case which robbed Monk of his memories.  Nope.  What we get instead is Monk and Elmo bounty hunting, rough housing, working out, and so on.  It’s purely coincidental that any of this leads back to Monk’s origin and the film’s inciting incident.  In fact, the film is loaded with coincidences to the point that the whole thing is just implausible (some scuzzy little jerk the guys pick up just so happens to be related to the drug kingpin who just so happens to be tied in with Monk’s and Elmo’s past).  Further, the story is a straight line with no twists, turns, or big reveals to any of it.  I would suspect that this (some would call it) simplicity is because the producers (this was one of the final efforts from the Shapiro-Glickenhaus Entertainment gang) just wanted enough story to get us from one action scene to the next.  On that level, it works.  On just about every other, not so much.  We never really care whether Monk remembers anything, because there’s nothing to the character before, during, or after his amnesia.  We’re given a hint that Moe and Elmo may have unspoken feelings for each other, but the moment passes after about a second with no follow up.  The CIA, for all its hand wringing over what Monk’s up to, makes a half-assed effort to get him and then just kind of lets him go do his thing.  The action itself is okay.  Honestly, I expected it to be pulled off slicker and more clearly than it is.  The use of handheld camera and some sketchy editing truly detracts from the only thing that makes the film worthwhile.  Both Piper and Blanks do what they do well enough, but that’s pretty much the sum total of Tough and Deadly: well enough.

MVT:  Piper brings what charms he has to the film, and the man knew how to sell a fight for the camera.

Make or Break:  The training montage (aside from being difficult to swallow based on where in the movie it happens) gives the audience a glimpse at the chemistry that Blanks and Piper could have had onscreen but don’t quite.  

Score:  6.25/10