Alley Cat (1984)

Cinematic villains love to cackle, and few bad guys cackle more or better than those from Hong Kong genre cinema and English-speaking exploitation cinema.  Show me a martial arts film made anywhere from the Sixties up to about the year 2000 that doesn’t have one (usually either followed by or while simultaneously stroking a ludicrously long, stringy beard), and I’ll show you a cigar box full of four-leaf clovers.  American action films typically have a gang of lowbrow guttersnipes who all think things like rape and murder are the funniest things in the world.  I can’t tell you where this tradition started, but I know that it swiftly became a staple/cliché that carries through to today.  The idea is that the villains have a sense of superiority, and their haughty laughter shows this to their enemies and victims.  Likewise, it’s meant to show the audience that these characters are vile.  The things they find uproariously hilarious are things a normal human being finds odious and tragic.  It also removes the films further away from reality, because these guys are so heightened in their reactions to everything, they become cartoonish.  Take Edward Victor’s Alley Cat, for example.  The iniquitous Bill/Scarface (Michael Wayne, an actor who only appeared in this one film but could very easily have been the Anthony James of films that only had $1.22 to spend on casting) brays when he thinks of what he’s going to do to our heroine Billie (Karin Mani), and his underlings follow along, because being a scumbag is fun (conversely, this is also meant to be menacing for the same exact reasons).

Billie chases a couple of thugs away from her car with her Karate skills (and it should be said that either Mani actually knows martial arts or the stunt-doubling is impressive, maybe both), but their boss Scarface decides to teach her a lesson by stabbing Billie’s grandmother.  Billie decides to take this rather personally.

Alley Cat is a standard revenge film in every way, and that includes its philosophy of disproportionate responses.  Billie kicks the stuffing out of Tom (Tim Cutt) and Mickey, who run off crying to Scarface.  To show her who’s boss, these jerks follow Billie’s grandparents and assault them, leading to Grandma Clark being comatose and, eventually, dead.  The average man might have just forgotten about having their ass whipped by a woman, been thankful they didn’t wind up in the pokey, and gone about their felonious business elsewhere.  Not these guys.  Every affront must be met with five times the violence and viciousness.  Billie, however, is just like them.  Yes, she starts off defending her property and family or helping a stranger, but she quickly discovers that the adage about if you can’t beat them, join them, holds true when it comes to thugs.  Inevitably, she does to the bad guys what they tried to do to her, tracking them down and killing them (I assume; there’s only one definitive onscreen death).  Yet, we side with her because we repeatedly see her attacked (honestly, I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t give up jogging at night if they were assaulted even half as much as Billie is) for no real reason.  She goes from defensive to offensive, but morally, she’s correct.  The justice system we rely on also lives up to the rule of disproportionate responses.  After Billie rescues a woman from a rape using a handgun, she is arrested for a variety of crimes which she did violate, but that any decent cop would let slide, all things considered.  The judge who presides over every single case that Billie is involved in chucks her in jail for contempt of court (where she makes a few friends for life).

This leads to the idea of misogyny that pervades the film.  Every man in the film either hates women or is ineffective (read: a pantywaist).  All the men on the street want to have sex with every woman they see (willingly or not).  Billie is chased and set upon multiple times in the park, and the men who do this have nothing but sex and violence on their minds.  Scarface’s girlfriend is treated like the piece of meat she is.  He calls her “Miss Blowjob,” and the two are not above throwing things at each other.  He puts her down and reminds her constantly that she’s nothing but a warm hole.  She puts up with it likely because she’s been beaten down and is now simply inured to the fact that this is the way of things.  Boyle (Jon Greene), a beat cop, is the one who gives Billie a hard time about her need to carry a gun when she goes out at night.  He delights in handcuffing her and charging her with every single thing he can.  Boyle also has a hooker (Britt Helfer, whom you likely remember from Raw Force or the soap opera Loving, but, either way, is physically impressive, just to play my own pig card for a moment) he bangs while on duty (and, we can infer, without paying for her services).  The single male who isn’t a complete swine is Johnny, the cop Billie meets cute with at the hospital and who quickly becomes her boyfriend.  At first, Johnny is the paragon of virtue, standing up for the little guy and attempting to keep Billie out of danger while trying to bring the bad guys to justice by the book.  even he has a level of sexism about him, trying to show Billie how to do Karate without knowing she’s working on her black belt.  What Johnny finds out, however, much like Billie did just slower, is that to get justice one must get one’s hands very dirty.  You can’t clean up a Jell-O wrestler without getting some on you, so to speak.  As in all movies of this stripe, the system is moribund, if not five weeks gone, allowing the misogyny perpetrated on the streets to corrupt the decency it’s supposed to stand for.  The choice left for victims is surrender or vigilantism.

Alley Cat has some good things going for it.  Being an exploitation film, it is loaded with beautiful women who don’t mind doffing their clothes onscreen.  There are action scenes every few minutes.  There is a layer of grime all over it; you can almost feel the grit on the characters and smell their b.o.  What it gets wrong is that it is unfocused.  Did we need the lengthy sequence of Billie in prison?  Did we need the lengthy sequence of Johnny tormenting the Helfer character for information?  Did we need the random jogging assault attempts that have nothing to do with the main story?  No, to all.  Yes, they each satisfy for this type of film, but they are all extraneous.  You could argue that they are necessary as illustrations of systematic misogyny, but they distract from the main narrative.  Maybe that’s the point?  Maybe the filmmakers wanted to do a more holistic approach to a Woman’s Revenge film?  It’s possible.  But, at eighty-two minutes, the tangents drag down the pacing, and they made me think that the filmmakers simply didn’t have enough story to fill out that time frame.  Fair enough, because the distractions do what distractions are supposed to do.  But they also remind the viewer that time is dragging by.

MVT:  Mani can keep a movie together and handle physical action, and, with a better script and some better direction, I believe she could have been a genre luminary.

Make or Break:  The finale drops what scant subtleties the film had and digs into its genre trappings full bore while displaying exactly what Billie has become.

Score:  6/10       

They Call Me Macho Woman (1991)

Seeing the chintzy, but charming, cardboard city skyline accompanied by the words “A Troma Team Release” is something that can send paroxysms of anxiety through even the stoutest film lover’s heart.  Troma built their brand from the ground up, and they did it through the most blatant of hustling.  Lloyd Kaufman is a man who knows the value of getting something for nothing.  If Roger Corman is lauded for stretching every dollar he ever spent on his films, then Kaufman can pinch a penny into a piece of copper wire for his, and should be equally applauded.  I admire Kaufman’s particular brand of hucksterism.  He sells every film he puts out like it was “The Citizen Kane Of” whichever genre.  I’m quite certain he has no illusions about the level of quality in the movies he produces.  They are what they are, they are made (usually) with some heart, and they are typically exploitative as all hell.  Yes, the humor is normally not above the level of a twelve-year-old trying to light a fart.  Yes, the effects would make Ed Wood wince.  Yes, the acting lacks the subtlety of, well, it lacks subtlety entirely.  These are the things that attract their fans.  

Troma has also released films they had no role in producing, and this is where the nervousness about seeing their logo at the start of a movie arises.  For example, they were involved in the re-release of Dario Argento’s The Stendhal Syndrome as well as the distribution of Joel M Reed’s Bloodsucking Freaks.  While one could argue the merits of either of these films, one would have to agree that they are almost nothing like the stuff that Troma actually produces and distributes (although Bloodsucking Freaks comes close).  In other words, when you see the Troma logo, you know you’re in for a crap shoot.  This brings us to Sean P Donahue’s They Call Me Macho Woman (aka Savage Instinct), a movie Troma co-produced.  If the lack of resemblance between the woman on the box cover art and the film’s star (Debra Sweaney) doesn’t tell you you’ve entered Tromaville, nothing will (and maybe they’re both Sweaney, but I’ll be damned if they don’t look worlds apart to my eye).  And like the majority of Troma’s output, your mileage will most definitely vary in terms of enjoyment, depending on your threshold for uncut schlock.

Widow Susan Morris (Sweaney) and her realtor Cecil (Lory-Michael Ringuette) are en route to see an out-of-the-way property for Susan to purchase.  A chance auto mishap puts Susan in the crosshairs of Mongo (Brian Oldfield) and his kookie gang of drug dealers.  Now, she’ll have to man up if she wants to survive.

They Call Me Macho Woman (by the way, no one in the film ever calls Susan “Macho Woman”) falls into the category of movies that tell us, quite clearly, that, no matter where you go, trouble will find you.  Susan wants to get out of the city and fulfill the dream she and her husband had of moving to some place quiet and peaceful before a drunk driving accident took his life.  Solitude, however, is an impossibility.  The menace of city life expands to the countryside.  If it isn’t rapey, drug-addled thugs in the urban jungle, it’s rapey, moonshine-addled/inbred hicks in the woods (or, alternately, rapey, shitkicker cops).  In exploitation cinema, true peace is elusive, but it can be earned through violence.  The protagonist is broken down only to be built back up (by their own ingenuity) into a figure more frightening than those who threaten him/her.  To be at the top of the heap, to win the right to live as they want, they must sink to the level of savagery with which they are opposed.  And then top it.  Susan is handy from the start.  When their car gets a flat tire, Cecil proves worthless.  It’s Susan who has the know-how to change it, having been schooled by her brothers.  Eventually, she kits herself out with all manner of makeshift weaponry (while also taking the time to polish her mini-axes to a mirrorlike sheen; fashion and function).  Every situation in which Susan finds herself, she has to dig deeper and deeper into her primal core.  She has a cat fight with a predatory lesbian that ends with Susan tackling her opponent off a hay loft.  She seduces one of her attackers (I mean, he was going to rape her anyway, but still…) and impales his head on a nail.  She stabs a gang member in the ear with a stick (leading to a rather funny running joke for the rest of the film).  By the end of the movie, Susan can not only kill another human being, but she can do so brutally.  The question becomes, has Susan gained her freedom or lost her humanity?  Are the two the same?

Every person in this film is a shithead.  Mongo (who looks like a larger version of Nick Cassavetes) growls at everyone, and he isn’t above allowing his gang members to die in order to keep more of their illicit gains for himself.  He also kills people with a spiked bit of fetish headgear instead of, oh, say, shooting them.  With the exceptions of Mongo, Cecil, and Mr. Wilson (J. Brown), there is not a man or woman who doesn’t attempt to sexually assault Susan.  This even stretches to a trio of guys who could have been her saviors.  She flags down a car and is picked up by Geno (Paul Roder) and his mates.  They quickly pull off to the side to get some, cackling, drinking beer, and basically being assholes.  Things don’t go well for them.  Hand in hand with this omnipresent shitheadedness is the fact that every character says whatever is on their mind every moment of the film (typically consisting of calling their associates “idiots,” etcetera).  None of them has either ever heard the mantra that silence is golden, or they simply never paid it any mind (but mostly, let’s just blame Donahue, who is also the screenwriter).  This might not have been quite so bad if they didn’t all speak and relate on the level of eighth graders (one could imagine them trading spitballs with ease).  This is illustrated and/or compounded by the constant use of the term “bitch.”  In fact, its usage is so prevalent, you could easily make a drinking game out of it.  And that’s the territory in which They Call Me Macho Woman exists.  It is tiresome in its drudging repetitiveness.  It is not well-written, shot, or acted.  It is not even especially satisfying in its resolution.  Nonetheless, it is a singular cinematic experience that distinguishes itself by its insistence on trying to be as generic as possible.  A sort of failing upward, I suppose.

MVT:  The premise is solid enough.  That’s why it’s so well-worn.

Make or Break:  The fate of Geno and his crew is nicely executed.

Score:  6.5/10

Blowback 2: Love and Death

Joe (Riki Takeuchi) and Baku (Takashi Matsuyama) are on a bus riding through the Philippines countryside with a briefcase of money (which has no backstory to it at all) when they’re set upon by a band of guerillas led by the villainous Yamaneko (Mike Monty).  Baku is killed, and Joe is left for dead, but he crawls back, and, with the aid of local bar owner Rei (Mie Yoshida) and local bounty hunter Ratts (Shun Suguta), he takes his revenge.

This is the plot for Atsushi Muroga’s Blowback 2: Love and Death (aka Blowback: Love and Death), which I assume was labeled as a sequel for two reasons: one, so as it not be confused legally with Marc Levin’s Blowback released the same year, and two, to ride the coattails of Marc Levin’s Blowback, for whatever that may be worth (I’m thinking very little), but probably more the former than the latter.  This film was produced by Japan Home Video, and it appears to have been produced specifically for the home video market, not that this alone makes it an inferior effort.  In fact, it has all the elements it could possibly need to be an entertaining, successful revenge/action film.  And, ironically, that’s its main fault.  It has a personal motive for vengeance (aren’t they all, though?).  It has a MacGuffin in the form of the money that was taken from Joe (which seemed to me was completely forgotten about after the opening shoot out).  It has a broken angel archetype in Rei, who, of course, will become the great love of Joe’s life.  It has a dark stranger who helps out for mercenary reasons of his own.  It has an army of faceless (but still colorful) henchmen.  It has a reptilian bad guy with a distinguishing feature for Joe to focus on as he tracks him down (here a wildcat tattoo that, honest to God, looks like it was drawn in three seconds with a ballpoint pen [and likely was]).  It has a metric ton of gunplay and things exploding left, right, and center.  

If John Woo showed us anything, it’s that these basic components can be combined in intriguing, stylish ways to give us action films with flair and a modicum of emotional resonance (no matter how contrived), and Blowback 2 uses all of them.  There is slow motion out the wazoo (sometimes motivated, sometimes not).  There are freeze frame dissolves galore to the point that they simply stand out (notice how I’m making note of them?).  The characters are all emotionally walled-in by the bad ass roles they inhabit (the exception being Rei, who gets a few moments to shine, but otherwise does a thankless job in service of Takeuchi’s character arc).  There are double handguns being fired at the same time.  Sergio Leone and Spaghetti Westerns in general also get a lot of play in the film.  The opening credits and music harken back to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.  Baku carries a pocket watch that chimes, and this chime will, invariably, come into play in the film’s climactic showdown, a la For a Few Dollars More.  There’s a chaotic character who likes to toss TNT around as a first resort, as in Duck, You Sucker!.  There is the coffin toted around that hides a nasty surprise, like in the original Django.  The initial glimpse we get of Joe, he’s wearing a cowboy hat.   

Nevertheless, Muroga just slaps these ingredients together and throws the plate on the table.  Blowback 2 is too by-the-numbers.  Oh, it makes a valiant effort, to be sure.  It’s jam-packed with violence and action and mayhem, and it even goes for the throat in its gonzo moments, like when Ratts saves Joe and Rei by hurling dynamite at them, or when Joe picks up an M-60 and mows down the baddies, or when Joe whips out a Vulcan cannon and mows down the baddies.  But none of it is attached to anything else in the film aside from the tangential needs of the wafer thin plot.  This is all sound and fury, and you can guess what it signifies.  You would get the same fulfillment by watching Youtube clips of the same actions/things/events being depicted, because you would have the same level of involvement with them (read: none).  It’s all so detached and constantly happening, it quickly descends into numbed overkill.  This is what Martin Scorsese described as a modern film where there’s a climax every two minutes, and it was produced twenty-five years ago.  The more things change…

There are a few attempts at themes outside of the revenge facet.  For example, the main characters are all foreigners in a foreign land, and this land is hostile to them.  As Joe and Baku travel along, Joe comments that you could be murdered for your shirt here.  Rei is a Japanese bar owner in the Philippines, but we’re never told why she moved.  Slums and the living conditions of the common folks are shown throughout, but it’s all just background, as the protagonists plow through anything and everything in pursuit of their goals.  In addition is the idea that money is freedom.  Joe and Baku talk about what they’re going to do with their case of money (turns out, not much).  Ratts is out for the bounty on Yamaneko’s head.  Rei thinks that money will mend her soul (“money can heal most heartaches”).  That said, this is all just tinsel on a Christmas tree made up entirely of ornaments.  Make of that what you will.

I realize that I’m slagging off on Blowback 2 pretty hard, and perhaps that’s because it gave me exactly what I wanted, just in the wrong proportions.  I wanted some ambitious action setpieces, and I got far too many.  I wanted some reason to compel me to follow these characters through their journey, and I got just about none.  This is the definition of mindless action, and for some that may be the exact balm they require.  Hell, had I been drunk enough while watching this (I was stone cold sober, incidentally) or been in a different frame of mind, I may have loved it for what it is.  That’s the trick.  This film needs to be accepted at face value, because that’s all it really is.  Consequently, I kept finding myself distracted by what was happening in the real world of my life while watching, and that’s simply no good for watching a film.  For folding laundry, though?  Sure.

MVT:  Funny enough, the action is the sum and substance of Blowback 2.

Make or Break:  The finale takes everything the film has built up to, and it pays it off the only way it can.

Score:  5.5/10