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ColonelHetzer217
Reviews
Christina's House (2000)
Psycho tricks up house for the family's "benefit".
Pros: Fairly reasonable thriller for the youngsters to chew on.
Cons: Despite the many suspects the film throws up, it does go for a strange & implausible payoff.
Perfect Audience: Millennials & lovers of cheapjack DTV thrillers.
WARNING: Plot spoilers present.
The Story:
Construction foreman James Tarling moves his teenage daughter Christina & younger son Bobby to a run-down house close to the sanatorium where their disturbed mother is located. James has hired a handyman named Howie to fix up the house while he is away on his worksite, leaving the kids in charge of the house. As they settle in, Christina begins to experience strange occurrences where her diary goes missing only to return to its original position when she checks for it, strange noises coming from the attic & her friends begin to go missing. What she doesn't know is that somebody close to her has been stalking her every move & by the time she finally learns who it is, the trap has already been set.
This was an example of the many, many low budget horror films & thrillers that wound up haunting the direct-to-video (DTV) market of the late-1990s / early-2000s & pretty much made a modest impression on some of those who saw it. It served as the debut of young actress Allison Lange, who would later go onto a modest DTV career starring in cheap sequels to other classic thrillers.
As far as things go, Christina's House is an average thriller hokum feature, nothing more, nothing less. It showcases some decent acting from all involved although Brad Rowe does go from slightly creepy handyman to full-blown psychotic in the finale where it is revealed that his employer's deranged wife sent him to stalk the employer's family & have his way with the young adult daughter (Lange) with her blessing. To this end, he has singlehandedly modified the house into having a hidden structure with which he can slip through & even plastered tough plastic sheets over the windows (the revelation of this particular modification is a pretty effective jolt) & a hidden master lock on the front door & death trap in the basement right under the front door's threshold. While the first two thirds make a mystery out of who the stalker could be, by the time the final third arrives, the payoff goes into deranged territory considerably. Millennials might like stuff like this & the film does do its job with a workmanship that is admirably slick but it doesn't quite have that spark that would recommend it as anything other than a routine DTV thriller product of the era.
Violence & Gore: Some killings by the psycho where people are strangled or have their necks snapped; a man falling into a razor trap but surviving whereas the psycho also fall into & crushed with a wooden dresser; a sheriff narrowly missing being hit by a falling hammer. Not really any gore seen.
Sexuality & Nudity: No sex although Allison Lange's boyfriend seems to have an obsession to get into her pants. He fails. On that point, what is with having Lange almost shown naked when she goes into the bath? Although Lange was clearly not a minor when the film was shot, but her character was a high school student. This kind of almost crosses the line when you almost see her breasts in the bathtub. I'm glad director Gavin Wilding didn't cross the line otherwise he would have had a serious problem on that front.
Mommy's Day (1997)
Killer mother gets another chance but is being set up
Pros: Better handled than the original film was; also still worthy of a family-friendly viewing.
Cons: The director is still not exactly able to pull off the film too well.
Perfect Audience: Fans of cheapjack crime thrillers & Patty McCormack.
The Story:
Granted clemency right after she attempts an escape from the execution chamber, Mommy Sterling is given an implant that will curb her violent behaviour & told to stay away from her daughter (an order she ignores anyway). But somebody is going to the trouble of framing Sterling for a new series of murders & Sterling tries to prove her innocence, but the implant is making things difficult while her sister's husband seems to want her to fail so he can make another best-selling novel off her plight. As the bodies of those who despised her begin to pile up, Sterling must fight to clear her name & to win back custody of her daughter.
While the original Mommy was a cheapjack & amateurish DTV thriller that was nevertheless suitable for family viewing, this sequel ends up beating it & also making Patty McCormack into something of an antihero character. This time out, Max Allan Collins has managed to learn some much needed tips on how to stage his films better although there is nothing in Mommy's Day that will prevent viewers from seeing the film for the cheap sequel that it is. Still, with its predecessor's villain turned into something of a hero here & the mystery angle being an excuse to showcase more creative murders, the film proves to be passable enough. Patty McCormack, Brinke Stevens & young actress Rachel Lemieux still make a good team of sorts & the payoff is a lot more interesting than what you would originally consider a film like this to reveal. Best viewed as part of a double bill with the original film & safe enough for kids to handle.
Violence & Gore: Some creative killings but no gore seen.
Sexuality & Nudity: Sarah Jane Miller goes into a shower naked but nothing sensitive is shown & when she is electrocuted, the bottom part of her breasts are briefly visible. Collins took a slightly higher gamble on this one but still plays it safe.
Mommy (1995)
A killer mother wants nothing but the best for her daughter
Pros: A thriller that is somewhat suitable for family viewing.
Cons: Really amateurish in both concept & execution.
Perfect Audience: Fans of cheapjack crime thrillers & Patty McCormack.
The Story:
After her teacher is found dead in her classroom after having an argument with her tightly-wound & highly ambitious mother, Jessica Ann Sterling begins to believe that her mother could be a serial killer.
Max Allan Collins is a writer who specialises in true-life crime novels, TV shows & even trading cards. In the early 1990s he decided to become a filmmaker, taking the decision to adapt one of his short stories into a feature film. For the title role, he picked none other than Patty McCormack, the actress who as a young girl played eleven-year-old serial killer Rhoda Penmark in the 1956 classic The Bad Seed. Thirty-four years later & McCormack is back doing what she does best - playing somebody who is nice on the outside but a mean & ruthless mother on the inside.
Despite the amateurish nature of the production (if this was left in the hands of a much more professional & seasoned director, it would have been a minor classic), McCormack pretty much rules the show as the ruthlessly determined Mommy Sterling, conquering all before her with her sociopathic performance & Brinke Stevens, one of the classic 1980s Scream Queens & a capable actress herself, plays the counterpoint as McCormack's plain-Jane sister. While I had some doubts about the decision by Collins to give young Rachel Lemieux dialogue that is too advanced for somebody her age to handle (it makes her sound like a teenager or young adult) without losing credibility, the story is a fairly serviceable one & Collins succeeds in making an interestingly average thriller that is somehow also suitable for family viewing... Who would imagine something like that?
Violence & Gore: Some killings that are basic - teacher falls off a ladder, a janitor electrocuted, a shooting - without any gore being displayed.
Sexuality & Nudity: Nothing like that here.
Rise (2007)
At least this doesn't have any of that Twilight nonsense in it - more like a vampire Death Wish.
Pros: A stylish & cool-to-the-touch vampire version of Death Wish.
Cons: The "unrated" version seen here is differently structured than the theatrical version & some plot details don't necessarily make sense.
The Story:
After writing an article on the Los Angeles Goth subculture, magazine reporter Sadie Blake learns that one of her sources for the article - Tricia Rawlins - has been found murdered, her body drained of blood. Trying to track down the killers, Sadie is abducted by the killers - a gang of vampires - raped, drained of all her blood & left for dead. But she manages to come back as a vampire, breaking out of the morgue. After being trained by a rogue vampire in Mexico who gives her a crossbow pistol & information on where to locate the vampires she plans to target, Blake is initially arrested but then teams up with Tricia's detective father Clyde in order to avenge Tricia's death & take down the vampires.
Serious vampire horror films weren't exactly a dime-a-dozen during the 2000s, a decade in which dozens of zombie films & horror remakes were ruling the horror market. Thanks to the insidious evil of the tween vampire romance flick Twilight & its sequels, which came out during the mid-2000s, the vampire genre was effectively neutered to the point that finding a serious vampire horror film from this period was almost futile. But lo & behold, Rise: Blood Hunter is a rare example of the good old-fashioned stuff coming out during this dark time for the vampire genre.
Rise: Blood Hunter is a vampire version of the Charles Bronson vigilante classic Death Wish, where Bronson played the vengeful vigilante who avenges his wife's death & daughter's rape by shooting random muggers with a revolver. Rise transplants this plot to the vampire genre by having the Bronson role played by Lucy Liu, one of the Charlie's Angels from the late 1990s film adaptation & an underrated actress who can switch from action scenes to dramatic acting with an uncommon ease, despite her diminutive stature. Doing the directorial duties is Sebastian Gutierrez, who had also written the Hollywood remake of the Hong Kong ghost story Seeing Ghosts (under the film's English market title of The Eye) a couple of years after this & the film was released by Ghost House Pictures, a minor studio that was headed by Sam Raimi with the purpose of mounting decently-budgeted genre films such as the American remake of Ju-On: The Grudge & its sequels. Rise: Blood Hunter was surprisingly given a very limited release in the US & dumped to the DTV market elsewhere.
Despite its mediocre box office performance & lack of reputation, Rise: Blood Hunter is a surprisingly decent vampire film, mainly by dint of taking itself seriously & not having the usual Twilight romantic vampire crap that was infecting the genre at the time. Lucy Liu's quest to avenge her friend's death & her own siring by teaming up with said friend's cop father to hunt down the vampire gang is an interesting story with some humour thrown in to please genre fans & while not being a solid story exactly, the film does prove itself watchable enough to pass the time & for some people warrant a rewatch. While the pace is a little too low-key & muted, it does come with a decent modest atmosphere to lure the viewer in & some good plot twists & cool nudity helps things well enough. The mismatched buddy dynamic between Liu & Michael Chiklis (who is always dependable in these sorts of roles) is an interesting thing to watch & they make a good team. The only problem with the film is that two versions of the film exist - the theatrical version & the "unrated" version that is essentially a reedited longer version with the entire story reorganised to make it more complex, an unnecessary move. I have only seen the longer version & it detracts by having its narrative hampered by the superfluous plot shuffling.
Reign in Darkness (2002)
Interesting but ultimately too cheap to fully work, as well as being annoyingly inept.
Pros: An interesting concept that would make for a good film one day.
Cons: But this low budget flick is certainly not it.
The Story:
Molecular biologist Michael Dorn is working on a top-secret project, harnessing a little-known but highly lethal virus known as K-17 to craft a special bioweapon that has the potential to cure HIV. While on a field test to infect a hobo subject with the new virus (RVK-17), Dorn accidentally gets himself infected & thus has to flee from his security operative Lance Bates while coming to terms with his new life as the RVK-17 bioweapon also has the primary ability to turn its victims into near-unstoppable vampires. As Dorn's employers - a council of the world's last remaining original vampires - send Lance & a vampire-human crossbreed junkie named Gage to capture Dorn & bring him in to be studied (an order that does not go down well with Lance, who wants revenge for being wounded by Dorn), Dorn decides to take the fight to the Council & wipe them out.
As an Australian, I don't particularly like my country's film industry as it stands now - the producers of the Australian film studios seem stuck with the mentality created by the Mel Brooks classic The Producers where they believe that they can make more money from a flop than a hit, mainly by putting out stupidly-plotted comedies that use the stale Australian yobbo clichés with titles that don't provide any relevance to the film (good examples include You & Your Stupid Mate, which was the nadir of the Australian comedy genre, & the recent at-the-time-of-review comedy The Merger, about an amateur rugby club forced to accept refugee players in order to gain much-needed funds - a prime example of this country's ridiculous obsession with playing sports) or putting out pretentious dramas that don't do anything profound & about as boring as The English Patient. On the bright side, there are quite a few filmmakers out there who do see the potential to challenge the status quo with low-budget but worthwhile sci-fi & horror films, most notably this country's only major genre franchise, the Mad Max films.
In the case with Reign in Darkness, a low-budget vampire flick made by novice Melbourne filmmakers Kel Dolen & David Allen (who multitask easily & both make acting appearances here), what we get is another Australian B-grade horror film (quite a few of them around) that seems to be have been made for peanuts & which seems to be an Australian version of the American vampire actioner Blade. Reign in Darkness is obviously low-budget (the common problem of not keeping day-night shots straight also appears here, although the directors made inventive use of colour grading to disguise this) & has been widely pilloried by the world's Internet genre critics for its lack of resources. While I personally don't entirely agree with the majority of critics - the film might be low-budget but it does have an interesting idea at its core that would make for a pretty decent film if more budget was put for it. Dolen & Allen put in an impressive (for the limited budget) array of ideas, but what nearly kills the film is the lack of real drive to the film - the film's pace is very much on the slow side, making this the only vampire actioner where you're liable to fall asleep while watching - and some really stupid scripting oversights that prove unintentionally amusing (a good example is the fact that Dolen's character of the vampire hero is practically unstoppable & certainly naturally immune to bullets but wears a customised body armour vest for much of the film). The acting can be pretty bad at times - Chris Kerrison, who plays the bounty hunter Lance Bates, handles himself passably well, but he has been overdubbed by somebody who provides a really bad American accent, Kel Dolen's constant narration is tedious & some of the fight choreography is extremely sloppy. It is perhaps telling that the film's best moment is the opening production studio logo animation at the very beginning with the wildly over-the-top animation for Rapidfire that has been reputed to receive applause during several test screenings.
Love Bite (2012)
British Lad Culture meets the horror genre... yet again!
Pros: Best suited for young British viewers as the humour is tailored for their tastes.
Cons: Everybody else will be switching off at this kind of British Lad Culture humour.
The Story:
In a small Scottish seaside town, four teenage boys are trying desperately to lose their virginity, but the advice that their so-called 'expert' Kev is hopelessly bad. One of them, Jamie, runs a B&B with his pothead mother & dreams of going out with one of their guests, the mysterious American tourist Juliana. But at the same time, a series of disappearances of local youths has been occurring & another of Jamie's guests - the eccentric Sid, who claims to be a werewolf hunter - has attributed these to a werewolf hunting virgin flesh & claims that Juliana is a werewolf. Jamie ignores the claims but with his continued inability to get laid & some of his friends starting to vanish, he begins to fall for Juliana's charms despite growing evidence that she is not who she claims to be.
In Britain, there exists a social disease that has infected the vast majority of British male youth. It is called "Lad Culture" & is a mix of boorish stupidity, mild misogynistic sexism, pro-alcoholism & all-round general jackassery that makes them do stupid things & cause several kinds of trouble without ever learning from their mistakes. This kind of 'humour' started in the 1990s with several British men's magazines that deliberately put out this kind of content but masked it with a false humorous context that is designed to deflect indirect criticism.
Love Bite, a 2012 Scottish B-grader from Andy De Emmony, is a pretty good example of what to expect from this kind of 'humour' (I keep putting that term in quote marks because it is being used in an abstract manner to show that the humour in this film is not good humour). The film is a British version of American Pie but without the rampant sexuality that the source material is known for & filled with the British Lad Culture content that several youth-related films from this location are known for, coupled with a horror story about a virgin-eating werewolf.
As it stands, Love Bite is mildly interesting as a tale of a young virgin who can't get laid (probably as a result of his timidness & the bad luck of having a circle of friends who all get their relationship advice from a young 'expert' who clearly has no idea of how to get laid, instead spouting all sorts of chauvinistic advice that is offensive to anybody who actually has a brain) & who does fall for a mysterious American girl who might actually be involved in the disappearances of several of his friends (but not in the way you think). The idea of a werewolf preying on virgins is interesting but is not a consistent concept with traditional werewolf lore & is badly applied here - the werewolf is not terribly fussy about who it kills & in the end the revelation of the werewolf's identity seems to be arbitrarily applied to make up for the fact that we can't seem to guess who it is. However, I did like the way the film ended, with the hero & his American girlfriend (who is actually a werewolf hunter) both being infected with the werewolf affliction & losing their virginity while being werewolves (featuring a funny image of them going at it doggy-style) & a blackly humorous end coda. As for the acting, Jessica Szohr gives a professional performance as the mysterious American tourist whose secret identity provides the counterpoint to the story. Ed Speleers is good enough to carry the show while Timothy Spall is amusing as the hapless werewolf hunter & Kierston Wareing provides some interest as the cop's sexually promiscuous daughter.
Howling V: The Rebirth (1989)
A slightly underrated but still poor exercise in werewolf mystery crapola
Pros: Some mild atmosphere on a tight budget & better acting than the previous entry...
Cons: ...but the same tight budget & a poorly written story ruin the whole show.
The Story:
A castle in Dark Ages Hungary is struck by an evil curse. In order to stop it, the patriarch of the afflicted family wipes out his entire family then stabs himself with his own sword. As he lies dying, he realises that his baby grandchild is still alive. Five hundred years later, the same castle is being reopened to the public after being left untouched for the past five centuries. An enigmatic count has invited several people through careful screening - a doctor, a photographer, a couple of actresses, a professor & several others - to stay the night in the castle & perhaps find out more about the mysterious events that prompted its closure. As a wild blizzard surrounds the castle, the guests begin to disappear one by one, their bodies found afterwards with their throats torn out. The count then reveals that he is a member of an ancient order dedicated to hunting down the last descendent of the child who survived that massacre & to kill them before they turn into a werewolf.
The Howling was one of the undisputed horror classics of the early 1980s & by far one of the very best werewolf films in history. But the success of the film, partly due to its jokey yet serious story & also due to the awesome werewolf transformation effects it featured, meant that the film became the victim of a curse where each sequel that came out was considered mediocre or even terrible. The Howling II: Stirba, the Werewolf B***h was pretty trashy but despite its badness, it earned plenty of fans for its sleazy atmosphere & hilariously bad effects. The next two films fared even worse - nobody claims to be a fan of The Marsupials: The Howling III or Howling IV: The Original Nightmare. After Howling IV bombed out of the box office but made back its meagre budget due to the fast-growing video rental market, producer Clive Turner sought to make another sequel in order to try to milk as much money as he could. But his lack of a proper budget meant that despite starting the production in record time - Howling V: The Rebirth came out about six months after Howling IV's release - the film's resources were even lesser than the previous ones, which surely says something about Turner's single-mindedness for destroying the Howling franchise.
I suppose I have to give props to the production crew for managing to make the most out of their tight budget - the castle setting is pretty decent for the type of film made here, giving some modest atmosphere & the actors give better performances overall than the likes of the previous three sequels put together. The mystery angle is interesting enough to sustain the interest if you like mystery films & the final revelation of the werewolf's true identity at the very end is quite an effective surprise.
But despite saying that, I have to agree that the film is almost a complete junker. What kills it is the very thing that it omitted - this is the only Howling film that doesn't feature any transformation effects (what's more is that the film crew was operating on such a tight budget that they had to reuse one of the werewolf suits from the previous films, disguising its origins by only showing it in extreme closeups & never more than a partial glimpse). Joe Dante, the director of the original film, once famously quipped "Howling V? Isn't that the one with a bunch of people running around in a castle & nothing happens?" & the lack of action here pretty much justifies the comment. I suppose that by featuring a werewolf transformation in this film would kill the mystery angle, but the lack of such an effect pretty much ruins the film.
But by far the worst thing about the film is Clive Turner's pathetic logic when it comes to script writing. He manages to fumble the ball here more badly than the previous film. The concept of the ancient order trying to track down the recipient of the curse is filled with bad plotting wherever you turn to look. Suppose that the baby who survived that original massacre five hundred years ago was smuggled out of the castle & went on to have children of their own & each descendent went to different parts of the world, the very logistics of tracking down each descendent & find a means of luring them to the castle in order to kill them are immense to the point of being almost totally impractical. There's also the fact that the two World Wars might have meant that some descendents would have been caught up in the wars & being killed or that some descendents might have survived without ever having a record of their existence. The werewolf might have been killed or not ever showed up to the castle opening (in real life, the werewolf would have seen the castle opening as a trap & decided not to apply to go there) so this whole operation was impossible to complete. The result is a film that has a story which doesn't make any sense when applied to real world physics & as a result fails to mount a convincing story. Not to mention the little thing of the werewolf being in two places at once in several scenes. The reasonable acting & mild atmosphere might make this a better film than the previous two sequels but it still cannot shake off the crap sequel curse.
Howling IV: The Original Nightmare (1988)
A werewolf version of your average Scooby-Doo cartoon
The Story:
Novelist Marie Adams suffers a near-breakdown from seeing hallucinations, prompting her husband to take her to a remote town in the Californian wilderness to recover. But as soon as they move into the town of Drago to recover, Marie begins to hear howling at night & see strange visions in her rented cottage. Along with the help of a defrocked lesbian nun who is trying to uncover the secrets of the Drago townsfolk, Marie soon discovers that the entire town of Drago is populated solely by werewolves.
After French-Australian arthouse twat Philippe Mora had nearly destroyed the Howling franchise with a pair of formidably bad films (although Howling II had its fair share of fans, the same could not be said for The Marsupials: The Howling III, which was just plain bad), the rights to the franchise were sold off to a different company which then used the services of writer Clive Turner to create what is now known as the worst entry of the franchise so far (with the exception of the seventh film Howling: New Moon Rising which is not so much a Howling sequel as an excuse by Turner to completely flog the franchise to death with an astoundingly abysmal film).
With Howling IV: The Original Nightmare, Turner, producer Harry Alan Towers & director John Hough (who had been a fine director in his earlier days - the likes of The Legend of Hell House stands tall in the haunted house genre, second only to the original The Haunting) decided to do two things. First, they would not try to reinvent the werewolf film wheel, instead opting to do a much more faithful remake of the original Howling novel than what the first film did (which shows just how boring the original novels were) & second to shoot in South Africa, which was at the time ruled by the white minority apartheid regime & was subject to international sanctions, making the production semi-illegal. Both these choices were questionable at best, resulting in a film so dull & witless that it makes Mora's earlier sequels look interesting by comparison.
Howling IV: The Original Nightmare is pretty much a Scooby-Doo mystery serial in nature - you keep expecting the Mystery Machine gang to pop up & for the werewolves to suddenly take their masks off & reveal themselves to be criminals trying to scare people off so they can cover up their crimes. But that doesn't happen. Instead, we have the mystery-solving dream team of a second-rate novelist & a lesbian former nun to uncover the truth about the nature of the people of Drago, a truth that really didn't need to be solved by them since it becomes obvious to anyone who is watching the film what they really are - with the Howling word in the title, everyone expects there to be werewolves & plenty of them. Hough had been responsible for plenty of good films in his time but by the end of the 1980s had fallen to hard times & solely making cheap B-fodder such as this. I remember watching another of Hough's films years ago called Incubus, which was about a demonic rapist & which was in my memory looking way more interesting than this junker. The story is stock full of clichés & the climax is so stupid - the dyke nun sacrifices herself to summon the werewolves in the town to the old church & the writer heroine sends a burning SUV into the church to blow it up (although the yield of the explosion is more consistent with a kilo of C4 rather than an ignited fuel tank, but I digress).
If there was something positive to say about Howling IV: The Original Nightmare, it would be that the film features the series' second best werewolf transformation & one of the weirdest moments in 1980s horror - the heroine's husband (Michael T. Weiss, who became a minor TV star in the early 1990s with the TV series The Pretender about a man who was trained to be the world's best con artist - an operative who could assume any identity & perform any task with sufficient conviction to impress anyone) gets bitten during sex with a werewolf artist & gets initiated by literally melting down to the bone into a puddle of goo then reconstituting as a werewolf, a scene that is so weird that it makes you laugh your head off. As things stand, this film was a complete waste of celluloid but that transformation is probably the only thing that seems halfway watchable in this junker.
Lucía y el sexo (2001)
Pretentious Spanish version of the Emmanuelle films.
Pros: Plenty of real sexual activity & nudity to please softcore fans.
Cons: Otherwise this is even more pretentious than the Emmanuelle franchise.
The Story:
After receiving a phone call from the police about her boyfriend's car accident, Spanish waitress Lucia quits her job & makes her way to a strange remote island where she has several strange encounters, many of which border on the fantasy side of things, some of which are erotic.
With Sex & Lucia, Spanish director Julio Medem made a surprisingly successful Spanish softcore fantasy that made a healthy profit & earned several awards. Which is pretty surprising given that this film is essentially the cheapjack Spanish version of the infamous French softcore series of Emmanuelle, only a good deal cheaper & more pretentious than its source material. Sex & Lucia is the type of film that those pretentious socialist arthouse types like to watch & get thrilled by while the rest of us real folk like action & horror films. Those same socialist types decry action & horror films as garbage that rot people's minds while not being capable of realising that the real mind-rot comes & decline in morality comes from watching boring romantic comedies & films like Sex & Lucia, which has about as much watchability as the ridiculously popular & utterly trashy content-free garbage TV show Keeping Up With the Kardashians, although if I were to choose between the two, I'll go with Sex & Lucia purely because it has plenty of nudity in it (that shot of Paz Vega walking along a beach totally starkers is a masterpiece of softcore fantasy shots) & at least you know what you're getting yourself into. We normal folks are excited by violence while the arthouse crowd are excited by sex - indeed Sex & Lucia is pretty much their version of something like First Blood, only with Sly Stallone replaced by some feisty Spanish broad with a great body.
The story of Sex & Lucia is pretty much non-existent, as well as being filled with more flowery nonsense than the entirety of the Emmanuelle series put together but with a Spanish flavour to it. All it is consists of a woman who thinks that her boyfriend is dead & therefore quits her job & moves to some mysterious island where weird things happen. Along the way, she discovers herself, blah, blah, blah. Truth be told, I only sought this out for the nudity & at least in that respect I wasn't disappointed - probably because I fast-forwarded through the boring parts (of which there are many) & stopped only at any shot of the drop-dead-gorgeous Paz Vega in all her birthday suit glory. There is a scene of Vega & her boyfriend stripping in front of each other while dancing at the same time to a dirty song that is hilarious to watch, as is the dream sequence where Vega strips off all her clothes & lies down on a muddy beach next to a mud-covered man who promptly covers her in mud. On a technical standpoint, the film is crudely shot on what appears to be a cheap camcorder - the colour balance is sometimes out of whack, as well as being washed out most of the time - and the soundtrack has the occasional wind shear to it. This isn't an intellectual picture by any means & the lack of a real plot makes the film hard to follow for much of the running time but if you want cheap gratuitous nudity but are not in the mood to rewatch the Emmanuelle series again, then try it.