Motherland: Fort Salem, Season 1 (2020)

 

This series is set in an alternative United States where witchcraft is a real, genetic trait, with witches possessing special vocal cords that allow them to sing up magical effects such as hurling blasts of force, manipulating the weather, or speaking with the spirits of the dead.

In this reality, the Salem witch trials were still a case of hysterical persecution, but one where the victims actually had a means to fight back.  They were resolved by a landmark agreement: witches would be protected by the government, and in exchange, they would supply their magical powers to the military.  All witches must serve at least one tour of duty, or live out their lives in secret as "dodgers".

While the agreement ended formal persecution of witches, suspicion and resentment of those with the power is still common among normal humans.  Exacerbating this are the actions of "The Spree", a terrorist organisation of witches that commit magical acts of mass murder: the show in fact begins with one such attack, where a witch song causes dozens of people to commit suicide.

Raelle Collar, Abigail Bellweather and Tally Craven are three young witches all newly conscripted to the army, each with varying degrees of enthusiasm for the experience.  Compelled to work together as a squad, they must overcome their differences and unlock their full potential as witches.  Because as they gradually discover, there are threats in this world that they have not even imagined, and it is far from clear who can be trusted.

This first season of Motherland: Fort Salem is overall a fun bit of urban fantasy, though it is certainly not without its flaws.

Most of these flaws are to do with the writing.  While the main narrative is engaging and moves quite well, there are a lot of smaller scale issues.  For instance, decisions that should have severe, immediate consequences, frequently don't appear to have any real repercussions at all.  Also, for much of the season, everyone but the main trio - and maybe one other person - seems kind of awful. The Spree are mass-murdering terrorists, and the anti-witch activists are violent bigots, but on the other hand the authorities are callous and obsessed with their own power.  Hopefully the long term plan is that the main characters demonstrate a better way forward, but that remains to be seen.

Helping the show overcome these flaws are the casting choices, which are mostly very strong.  The 'core three' are very likeable and absolutely key to carrying the show past its flaws.  The show also demonstrates very diverse casting: we see a much wider variety of body types than are commonly depicted in TV shows, and there are a lot of non-white characters.

The one possible exception to the strong representation is that it does seem a bit odd that Raelle, who is explicitly called out as hailing from the Chippewa 'session', is a blonde white woman with her hair in cornrows. Now to be fair, Taylor Hickson is very good in the role, and I don't think Raelle as a character is intended to be of Native American descent, and in fact I believe there's in-universe some degree of exemption to conscription for Native American witches, but it's not very well explained.

Oddly, the program also depicts witch society as very hetero-normative, although also matriarchal and polyamorous: many female witches have multiple husbands, and sexual relations can enhance their power.  However, the show does at least demonstrate some awareness of the isolation this might cause for homosexual witches when it gives two gay characters a chance to gently mock one of the more overtly sexual festivities within Witch culture.

If you like urban fantasy, this is worth checking out thanks to the strong cast.  Just don't play a drinking game based on taking a drink every time a shot features "light streaming through windows".  Someone on the production team clearly loved this motif, and you'd get alcohol poisoning by about the third episode!

Haymaker (2021)

 

Moody, retired Muay Thai fighter Nick is working as a bouncer to make ends meet when he sees the club's singer for the night, Nomi, being hassled by a thug.  Nick steps in, using rather more violence than was perhaps required.

Fortunately for Nick's finances, the experience leaves Nomi feeling that she needs a bodyguard.  Nick, obviously, is her first choice for the job.

Adjusting to Nomi's jet-set lifestyle and hedonistic circle of friends doesn't come easy to the taciturn Nick, but over time he and the singer begin to grow close.  Friendship blooms, and perhaps something more, but the relationship is complicated by their conflicting approaches to life, as well as Nick's moodiness, and the siren call for him of stepping back into the Muay Thai ring.

Haymaker seems to be an earnest effort to put together a romantic drama where one of the pairing is transgender, while avoiding becoming "a transgender romance".  The film's best quality, I think, is that while Nomi being transgender is acknowledged, it is treated as another fact about her, no more different than the fact that she is of Puerto Rican heritage or that she is a brunette. It's refreshing to see a transgender character who is not defined by that aspect of themselves, and also not fetishised or othered.

Unfortunately, despite that earnestness, the movie doesn't really work.  There are a couple of reasons for that, I think.  Key is probably Nick himself.  As played by writer and director Nick Sasso, he's monosyllabic and uncommunicative, which leads to some of his actions never really being contextualised.

That lack of communication is a key challenge for the couple throughout the film.  This is tale of two people who take a long time to acknowledge the feelings between them, in large part because Nick never says what he is thinking or feeling.  Nomi's strategies to try and provoke him into expressing himself also seem a bit counter-productive: when you know the man has a temper, it's much more likely that flirting with other guys will make him storm off, rather than open up.

I also didn't like that the ending seems to require a lot more of Nomi than it does of Nick.  She's very much the one adapting her career to fit his needs, despite the fact that she earns a lot more, and that she'll probably have to cancel significant existing commitments to do so.  That's going to impact her career as well as potentially many fans and venues. Why can't Nick get on a plane with Nomi? It's not like he seems to have all that much tying him to his home: we just saw him spend several weeks in Thailand.

The film's brighter moments come courtesy of its female cast.  Real life pop star Nomi Ruiz is good in the on-screen role of her namesake, showing much more charisma than her co-star.  Stunt performer and actor Zoe Bell is also good in a minor role within the film, though sadly rather under-used.

I wanted to enjoy this more than I actually did.

Legion (1998)

 

In a dystopic 2036 where war rages across the Earth, Captain Aldrich is a former military hero, now convicted of desertion and languishing on death row.  

Aldrich is offered the chance at a pardon if he will join a special forces mission to infiltrate an enemy facility.  The mission will be led by the rather uptight and by-the-book Major Agatha Doyle, but otherwise the entire team will be death-row prisoners who have useful skills for the mission. All been offered the same deal as Aldrich.

The mission begins and the team soon gain access to the base. They face a surprising lack of resistance and upon further inspection discover their enemies bodies piled up in a storeroom. It is clear that someone - or something - has already rampaged through the base.  And while it may be an enemy of their enemy, that definitely does not make it their friend ...

This film is basically the Sci-Fi Dirty Dozen meets Predator in an Aliens environment.  There are plenty of echoes of each of those films in both the script and the direction.

Legion is much more cheaply made than those films though, with the lack of budget being conspicuous when it comes to the monster.  It is seen only briefly, right at the end of the film, and frankly it doesn't look very good when we do see it. Its attacks before that are all executed as yellow filtered POV shots - the Predator inspiration is pretty obvious - and essentially just consist of a sudden lunge at their target before the camera cuts away and we see other people react to the victim's screams. Which maybe works once or even twice, but when it's the only technique you've got, it rather robs the film of any kind of escalation or gear change. It's like a Friday the 13th film where you never actually see Jason kill anyone.

The cast is also clearly picked with the budget in mind.  There's a lot of name recognition without big name money demands crammed in here: Parker Stevenson, Terry Farrell, Corey Feldman and musician Rick "Jessie's Girl" Springfield.

Experienced stunt woman Tricia Peters is also featured in the movie in what was probably her most significant acting role as the near silent special forces soldier Goodis. The character's a fun one - especially in a film filled with obnoxious motormouths - but alas she goes out like a chump because this movie does not want us to have nice things.

Terry Farrell (who had just left Star Trek: Deep Space 9) plays Major Doyle as overly officious and frankly out of her depth - rather like Lieutenant Burke in Aliens - and a major subplot of the film is her coming to learn that sometimes you have to do more than just blindly follow orders.  It's nice to see something like this play out in a low-budget offering like this.  Not that there's anything especially novel about the way this sub-plot plays out, and it's also pretty heavy-handed in its execution.  Any half-alert viewer will probably be a couple of steps ahead of her.  But character development is by no means guaranteed in this kind of movie.  Certainly most of the other characters won't develop past a couple of formulaic traits!

Speaking of those other characters, he team's complete lack of discipline during the mission is rather problematic. I know they are all military prisoners and therefore by definition not model soldiers, but they are also explicitly told that they are being monitored during the mission and that only a good performance will save them from execution.  In those circumstances, it seems odd that most of them make so little effort to not act like screw-ups.

It's true that most of them aren't going to need to worry about going back to death row, since they don't make it out of the mission alive, but they don't know that, and should perhaps act like "not being executed" is an actual motivation for them.

The denouement of the film is also rather weak.  While the revelation of the monster's identity is actually halfway good (even if it looks rubbish), pretty much nothing else about it works.  The villain's only motivation for the climactic scene even happening appears to be "I must deliver an evil monologue".  Which goes about as well for him as you might expect, particularly after he falls prey to a bit of grade-school level deception.

If like me you're an inveterate fan of such low-budget SF fare, then you might find that Legion has a kind of naff charm.  Everyone else should definitely stay away.

Scorched Earth (2018)

 

In the not-too-distant future, the world is ravaged by brutal climate changes, colloquially known as the Cloud Fall. The combination of pollution and relentless mining of Earth's resources through industrialism has left the environment nearly unlivable and extremely hostile to human habitation. Humanity is forcefully reverted to a simpler lifestyle, relying on barter for the two most valuable resources now: Water purifiers, called tabs, and silver, ground up to line the interior of breathing masks, to keep out a painful and fatal airborne disease known as Black Lung.

Outlaw gangs plague the trade routes and threaten the settlements of this future world, just as they did in the American West of the 19th century.  As a consequence, bounty hunting has become a lucrative, if dangerous, business.  One of the most successful hunters is a woman named Gage.  Hearing of an unusually ambitious outlaw named Jackson, who is building a whole town for criminals, Gage decides to adopt the identity of a criminal she's just killed, and infiltrate Jackson's organisation.

Of course, not every bandit in this town is welcoming of newcomers, even  ones they believe to be criminals like themselves, and for Gage, as a successful bounty hunter, there's the added risk that she will bump into someone who recognises her.  

Whether Gage can keep her real identity a secret or not, it seems inevitable that this is going to end in blood.

There's quite a lot of overlap in the structure of post-apocalyptic narratives and westerns; both tend to feature isolated enclaves of civilisation, gangs of thuggish, predatory hoodlums, and one or more dangerous drifters who decide, sometimes reluctantly, to protect the former from the latter.  Like the 1980s offering Steel Dawn, which basically re-used the plotline of Shane, this film leans heavily into the obvious parallels.  Scorched Earth basically is a western; it has gunslingers, outlaws and horse-based transport, and the settlements of the future look like they're straight out fo the Old West as well.  I wouldn't be surprised if co-opting the western sets and costumes saved the production some money, or at least made production easier, so it's not an idea without merit.

The film itself, though, has issues.

First things first, Scorched Earth stars former MMA fighter and noted transphobe and anti-vaxxer Gina Carano in the leading role.  I almost didn't watch or review the film because of her involvement, but ultimately decided to let it through on the basis that the movie was made before she publicly revealed her unpleasant and dangerous beliefs.  If her presence is a red line for you, I respect that.

The non-Carano cast is better than you might expect for low-budget fare like this.  For instance, perennial science fiction TV stalwart Ryan Robbins (from Sanctuary and Continuum, as well as recurring roles in a host of other shows such as Arrow, Riverdale and Falling Skies) turns up as the primary antagonist. I'm used to seeing him in more sympathetic, likeable roles, so it was interesting to see him portray a would be criminal tyrant.  I don't think he quite had the necessary menace to be truly compelling in this portrayal, but he was decently fun to watch.  Jackson's a fairly good villain: educated by the standards of the setting, a thinker and planner. He's more than just a thug. He does goes out like a total chump, though, which rather undercuts the film.

Something else that rather undercuts the entertainment value of the movie is that all of the characters in the film, and the narrative itself, seem very determined to be unpleasant.  Gabe's an awful person.  So is almost everyone else, but most of them aren't the supposed protagonist.  Worse, the one time Gabe shows a moment of generous spirit, the decision nearly gets her killed. It all works out in the end, because the bad guys do the stupid bad guy thing, but it's hard not to read the film's philosophy as 'altruism is a weakness'.  

Even if Carano's politics aren't a red line for you, you're betting off skipping this.

Queen Crab (2015)

 

Dr Miller is a scientist experimenting with grapes that he has genetically engineered with enhanced growth properties.  Unbeknown to the good Doctor, however, his daughter Melissa has been feeding these grapes to her 'best friend', a crab that lives in the local lake.

Unfortunately, Melissa and her buddy are soon separated: a laboratory explosion kills both her parents, and she is sent to live with relatives.

Twenty years later, Melissa returns to her childhood home, and something huge begins to stir beneath the waters of the lake ...

So yeah, what we have here is your basic 'girl meets crab, girl accidentally turns crab into giant monster' scenario.

Now, you might well look at this film's title and immediate write it off as yet another minimum effort Asylum creature feature, but it's not actually from the cinematic bottom-feeders.  Instead it comes from writer-director Brett Piper, who has been offering up low budget SF since the 1980s.

And let's be clear: this is definitely low budget SF.  You might expect this to be most obviously demonstrated by the film's effects, but these prove a surprisingly mixed bag.  There's definitely some cheap and unconvincing CGI on display, but the production team have used a mixture of other techniques, including real crabs, practical props, and even stop motion.  I love a bit of a well-executed stop motion, and the work here really isn't too bad at all.  Especially for the effort required.  While I wouldn't ever call the results "realistic", I do think it looks pretty good.

It is in fact the film's acting that is the most obvious symptom of the low budget.  It's a bad sign that the kid playing Melissa-as-a-child is one of the most convincing performers on your roster, but that's absolutely the case here.

Of course, even with dodgy effects and even dodgier acting, a film can still be fun - I do adore nonsense like Hawk the Slayer and Starcrash, after all - but does Queen Crab manage that achievement?

To some extent, yes.

Piper clearly had his tongue somewhat in his cheek as he wrote the script; the State Wildlife department has procedures for mutations, mad scientists and genetic bombs, for instance, and I really don't think people can get away with assaulting sheriff's deputies the way they all do in this movie. Even if the deputy does deserve it.  I also don't think that "this local guy has a fully functional World War 2 tank" is something the local sheriff would give a nod and wink to, the way we see here.

But really, this is all just part and parcel of everything in the film being over-the-top; each and every human character is apparently completely lacking in impulse control - and in many cases, also lacking in the ability to say anything that isn't unnecessarily hostile.  It's fair to say that you probably won't mourn too many of the crab's victims.

Importantly, the giant crab rampage that is the film's finale is actually rather good fun.  I especially liked the scene where it tears apart a shack to get at the person hiding inside.  It's pretty well conceived and executed.

Queen Crab is cheap schlock, but it's surprisingly well-done cheap schlock. I'd only recommend it to people for whom that's a selling point, but if you're in that cohort, maybe give it a try.

La La Land (2016)

 

Aspiring actress Mia Dolan and jazz pianist Seb Wilder, both of whom are struggling to find success in their careers, have several brief but somewhat acrimonious encounters.  Months later, they meet at a party and become aware of strong chemistry between them.  After a couple of false starts, this leads to a romantic relationship in which they are each other's strongest advocates and supporters.  Seb encourages Mia to write and produce a one-woman show, while Mia argues against Seb's decision to join a pop music style Jazz fusion band.  She feels he is abandoning his dream for the prospect of financial security.

This young couple face a lot of challenges, both professional and personal: is the love they feel for each other enough to overcome them?

Normally when I end a plot summary with a question, it is rhetorical, because it's a movie and we all know how movies tend to go.  This is an exception to that rule: La La Land is a film about romance and relationships, but it is not "a romance" and certainly not a romantic comedy.  This is actually my favourite thing about the movie.  While I am a sucker for the optimistic charms of a more traditional narrative like Singin' in the Rain, I appreciated encountering a work of popular fiction that explores the value of relationships in a more nuanced way.  

I also think the comparison to Singin' in the Rain is particularly apt, because it - and other films like it - were obviously a significant influence and inspiration for La La Land.  This movie's colours are bright and saturated, given it is very 1950s Cinemascope look, and it features several scenes that feature direct allusions to that era's musicals in their set design and dance routines.  The dream sequence where the two main characters imagine an alternative evolution of their relationship smacks heavily of the same kind of the lengthy, abstracted sequences that Gene Kelly musicals (such as Singin' in the Rain itself) often featured, for instance.

One thing those classic musicals had that I think this movie lacks, however, is killer musical numbers.  Seb and Mia's relationship signature tune "City of Stars" is okay, but to my mind the catchiest original song is the pop-style number that the script wants us to see as a betrayal of Seb's principles.  I also don't think the vocal performances in general are at the same quality as in the classics (with, again, the one exception of the "bad" song).  As a musical, I consider La La Land something of a failure, but as a film, I think it is more of a success.

And ultimately, that's why I am giving the film a qualified recommendation: I like the narrative's exploration of hopes and ambitions and how these may go fulfilled or unfulfilled, and whether the latter is automatically and irrevocably "bad", but I also recognise that that sort of story won't be to all tastes.  If the musical side of the film had been stronger, that might have  enough to make me recommend it even to those looking for a more escapist, completely feel-good experience than the more complex outcomes that La La Land depicts.

Overall, though, I am glad the film was made and that I took the time to see it.

Looper (2012)

 

By 2074, surveillance and tracking technology has made it almost impossible to dispose of bodies undetected.  Crime syndicates have found an elegant if implausible solution: they send their bound and gagged victims thirty years back in time to be executed there (and 'then') by hitmen known as "Loopers".

Being a Looper pays good money, but it comes with an in-built end date: either you died before 2074, or you'll be picked up and sent back to be executed by your younger self.  When this happens, it is always a Looper's final job, and it pays big.  Failing to follow through, on the other hand, costs big: you become an object lesson that ensures most Loopers follow through.

Joe is a 25-year-old looper whose final job hits a big snag: his future self isn't bound and gagged when he comes back through time, and that allows "Old Joe" to escape.  Now the younger version must hunt down the older one, while trying to stay ahead of the syndicate enforcers who are after his head.

That is, of course, all a lot easier said than done.

Looper is a solidly entertaining film.  The script mostly does a good job of avoiding what I call "time travel waffle": that is, the moment in a time travel movie where everything comes to a stop as they try to explain what can and can't be done with their version of time travel.  This film smartly has characters give just enough explanation of these rules to provide context to scenes and to justify certain plot developments, without letting those explanations bog down the plot's momentum.

The movie is also consistent in having things work in the way they are explained and also in having them play out by the same rules for multiple characters.  There's still some "wait, how does that work?" stuff to it, because 

This does not mean the script avoids paradox; it doesn't. It is a movie with time travel after all, and time travel by definition breaks the usual rules of cause and effect.  But I can at least say that once Looper says "this is how time travel breaks the rules of cause and effect", it sticks to what it has said.

Being a movie with time travel in it, Looper has more freedom - and thematic justification - for playing around with the order in which it portrays events.  It smartly uses that deal opportunity to structure itself in ways that keep the audience engaged with the story and unsure about what will happen next.

Or what will happen at the end, for that matter.  The movie followed a different narrative path than I expected it to, and reached a climax I had not anticipated.  I think I enjoyed it all the better because of that. While unexpected, the ending was appropriate, and - given other events leading up to that point - avoided some issues that I definitely would have had if they had gone with the more 'traditional' ending I was expecting.

So do I have any complaints about the film?  Well, just two, really.  I wish they'd given Emily Blunt more to do, and I do feel that the script (possibly unintentionally) presents the rather problematic sophistry that "If time travel is illegal, only the criminals will have time travel".  There are some unfortunate real world parallels there that should be obvious to most readers.

The Phantom Empire (1988)

 

An idyllic family picnic being interrupted by an attack from a hideous, cannibalistic mutant humanoid would be a noteworthy event all by itself. When said mutant proves to have a necklace made of uncut diamonds, however, that's really going to get people's attention.

The particular people in question for this film are the somewhat shabby salvage company run by Cort Eastman, an aging would-be ladies man, and his foul-mouthed female stevedore, Eddy. They're hired by Danae Chambers, the daughter of a renowned scientist, who believes the creature holds the key to getting out of her father's professional shadow ... and also of course there's the small matter of the source of those gems!

Accompanied by an archaeological intern and a mineralogist, the trio venture into the cave system from which the creature emerged. They have visions of returning to fame and wealth. Pretty soon, of course, circumstances will force them to amend their goals to "hoping to return alive" ...

Based on the image on your screen, you may expect The Phantom Empire to be a sleazier version of Red Sonja. You would be wrong, because the image is a bare-faced - or perhaps bare-fleshed? - lie. While there is a little nudity in the movie, everything about the film is rather more threadbare and modest than the epic fantasy artwork suggests.

Viewers familiar with other works by writer-director Fred Olen Ray will probably not be surprised by the words "threadbare and modest". Ray was a prolific producer of shamelessly low-ambition movies, frequently shot in a matter of days on the absolute minimum of budgets. It was a formula that worked for Roger Corman, after all!

The Phantom Empire is a particularly "Corman-esque" offering from Ray, in fact. He apparently conceived the idea for this film while shooting another movie, wrote the script in a weekend, and filmed the two pictures back to back with the same cast and crew. That's very similar to the story behind the production of several of Corman's film.

Alas, Fred Olen Ray is no Roger Corman. Despite his opportunism and trenchant disdain for spending money, Corman had an eye for talent. Ray, on the other hand, seems to massively over-estimate his own abilities. Because let’s be clear: almost all of the film’s issues can be traced to the script, direction and production, and Ray’s name crops up in all three.

It’s certainly not fair to blame the cast for the film’s failures. They do their best with the material at hand. Special mentions here got to prolific B-movie actor Jeffrey Combs, who is entertainingly weird and awkward as usual, and to Dawn Wildsmith for her turn as Eddy. Her character did not sign up for craziness like this, and is not shy about saying what she thinks of the situation.

There’s only so much the cast can do, though, given the shortcomings of the script. Ray wrote the script in a very little time, and it shows. Most notably in how often it tells us things that are not at all supported by what actually happens. For instance, the characters talk a lot about how dangerous the journey into the caves will be, but then when they go, they all treat the expedition like it's an everyday camping trip, evincing almost no concern for any kind of safety. The film also loudly tells us – and frequently makes us of the fact - that the 'cannibal mutants' can't handle light … but the mutants’ camps are filled with torches and other light sources. Of course they are, the cast and the audience need to be able to see. But still, don’t tell me the mutants can’t stand light when they’re literally standing it very well right now in front of me!

The writing does a lot of “X now happens, because I need X to happen” kind of stuff, to be honest. For instance, it has the group get captured. Ray needs someone to escape, so he has Danae and Eddy do so … by just not following the guards who are leading them to their cell. Even Bond villains don’t have security this lax.

The film is also full of technical shortcomings, such as the set spotlights that occasionally drift into shot, or the action scenes, which are hysterically inept. They’re all just people kind of milling around and occasionally throwing themselves on the floor. Or there’s the attempt to use forced perspective to make a model spaceship look big. The emphasis here is on 'attempt'. They do manage to make it look bigger than it is, I admit. I could conceivably believe it might be as much as six feet long. Unfortunately, I think it’s meant to be about sixty.

The best technical elements are the stop motion dinosaur effects. These are all recycled from the 1977 film Planet of the Dinosaurs, however, so I can’t really give this movie much credit for them.

I recommend you steer as clear of The Phantom Empire as the film’s characters should have done.