BRING ME THE HEAD OF THE MACHINE GUN WOMAN

This new wave of grindhouse is a funny thing (and I'll just leave the term 'rewindhouse' here and say no more, yeah?) It's a bit like buying pre-distressed denim; a lot of care and consideration is taken to make brand-new films appear old and skeezy, bypassing the conditions which made the old films look that way out of a sheer love of the aesthetic. Perhaps the strangest/most interesting thing (delete as appropriate) about these movies, though, is that the nostalgia belongs to someone else. Sure, it's affectionate – but most of the filmmakers involved won't remember this stuff the first time around, and their target audience certainly won't, either. We seem to have a minor genre now which emulates cinema itself emulated by Tarantino and Rodriguez, and a lot of these newbie flicks owe at least as much to those guys as to films which would have hit the fleapit circuit back in the day.

That's not to say that the new wave can't be fun, of course. Get the OTT formula at least half right, and you have ample justification for overblown action, overblown characterisation, lots of gore and lots of skin. So, how does Chilean effort Bring Me The Head Of The Machine Gun Woman fare?

For starters, it understands the importance of a punchy opening sequence, and we meet our gal, dressed for battle in just her undies and knee-high boots (saves washing the blood out I suppose), coming out tops in a pitched gun battle on the mean streets of modern-day Chile. We're also introduced to one of the film's key visual tics – as the relative street bounties of each character flash up on screen as they either enter, or leave, the proceedings. ("It's just like GTA," someone says early on; oh yes, it is. More anon.) Soon thereafter, a local DJ and a wannabe gangster, Chago, is unfortunate enough to get caught listening in on a scheme to bring about the lady's murder, as being discussed by head honcho Che Sausage (who, like A Boy Named Sue, would have had to get tough or die, one suspects). To save his own skin Chago says that he'll be the one to bring her in; amused by the suggestion, the gangsters let him go to try and do just that. Soon, Chago is caught up in a world of bad guys as he tries to do what he needs to do in order to keep his family safe. And then there's the small matter of catching up with the Machine Gun Woman herself...

Well, what to say about this movie? The first thing, really, would be to say that it's as daft as a brush. The filmmakers evidently started from the winning idea of having a heavily armed woman in lingerie and then worked back from that point towards drafting the plot she appears in, but that doesn't really matter. They aren't the first, and they certainly won't be the last. The end result here is definitely tongue-in-cheek, with some nasty moments thrown in for good measure – it avoids being boring, but its biggest sticking point for me was its slightly schizophrenic style. Is it a film? Is it a game? As mentioned, the movie wears its heart on its sleeve with regards the obvious influences from video games, the GTA franchise in particular, with the name-dropping very early on. However, the text flashing up on screen to advise us of bounty levels, 'Mission Accomplished' or 'Mission Failed' and the sheer amount of GTA-alike camera-following-car shots wore pretty thin pretty quickly. I suppose I wondered what this was meant to add, and thought that maybe the team responsible thought that GTA was a good bridging point between old grindhouse and the modern day, but the end result was a little distracting.

However, one thing which this format does provide is the short, sharp shock style which punctuates GTA et al as the player undertakes a sequence of short missions. Bring Me The Head...does that too, and it does keep the pace moving along quickly. Despite the way things jog along, I found time to rather like our central guy and gal, too; although the nameless woman isn't on screen all that much, she has lots of charisma and you can't argue with the way she handles heavy weaponry, and Chago is believably naïve in his role as a little fish in a big, more and more unfriendly pond.

There is, then, a fair amount to recommend this film. It's slick-looking, by and large plays to its strengths, and checks a few boxes for excess. Could it ever live up to the promise of its trailer or its opening reels, though? Well, perhaps for all the fake crackles and deliberately muted colours, what the new wave of grindhouse really has in common with its predecessors is that they never quite deliver all the insanity you felt you were promised. If this one does well, mind you, who knows? We may yet see a sequel in the offing...

Review by Keri O’Shea