
Here’s the exciting news Cynthia Rothrock (The Last Kumite, Fyre Rises) is back in a new film called Lady Scorpions. Here’s the issue, it’s from Tiger Style Media, the same company that put out the uninspired Art of Eight Limbs and The Lockdown. The good thing for all of you is that I am prepared to take a bullet, or a kick to the head to see whether the third time is indeed the charm for them.
Lacy (Caitlin Dechelle, Chinese Zodiac, Furious 7) is attacked by a couple of thugs on her way to her car, who she dispatches rather easily. Not that she was in any trouble, it was just an exercise for her self-defense class. Calling her mother Alena (Cynthia Rothrock) is far less fruitful, especially since she calls just to let her know that Ariel (Sofia O’Brien), her granddaughter, is celebrating her birthday tomorrow.
Maybe that’s because she is a Federal Officer looking for a clip of Jose Manuel Dispatched the Fist of the Condor, as he is attempting to bully some Russian mafia. She has been exposed and has to defend herself from various bodyguards until Lucien Jeff Fahey the long night the lawnmower man appears on the scene. Lucien only needs to make one last deal and then he is ready to quit, but things keep changing and becoming worse for Sonny’s father. He tells her this while they are conversing about parenthood. Then, idiotically instead of just killing her, he and his handlers just leave her in the middle of a desert and drive away.
Lady Scorpions marks the first feature-length film by Bruce Del Castillo who served as a grip in films like Kill Bill and G.I Joe The Rise of Cobra. The film’s plot, Stephen Carolan wrote it together with him, who also wrote it. There is also a writer’s credit for H. Daniel Gross who is associated with so many projects but this is the story of the original, and so he cannot do the damage here as he has done in Tiger Style Media’s previous films.
But Castillo and Carolan don’t need any assistance in making the rest of us trot out the cliches. To distract Alena, Sonny storms into Ariel’s birthday celebration and kidnaps her. Like we don’t know that’s pretty much a guarantee that her mother and grandmother are going to stop bickering over whom to kill first as they plow through a mob and a bunch of politicians on their mission to rescue her.
While the storyline is rather clichéd, Lady Scorpions has certain sequences for which it seeks to be distinctly different. The first time that Lucien and his men get on screen is quite epic and resembles something straight out of 70s Westerns. One of our heroines shoves a funnel in a man’s mouth, and the screen cuts to the other side, where he is stabbing a woman in the eye with hot sauce, which is somehow accompanied by overly cheerful music. Unfortunately, too many of these kinds of factors are absent for them to be considered anything more than gimmicks.
Lastly, the score composed by Joe Wong (Carol & The End of the World, Ballmastrz Rubicon) could be probably the biggest weakness of the film. It’s mostly just the same few synth notes played over and over for long stretches of the movie, which is pretty annoying because it’s quite loud. To make matters worse, the last act includes a pop song which does nothing but worsen the situation.
However, Lady Scorpions does improve with respect to its fight scenes compared to earlier versions. Nice fight scenes some of which include sword fighting are delivered by Angel G. Brophy (Eggshells, Blackout) and the director of photography Ernesto Lomeli (Muse, Stan Lee) among other gunfire and torture scenes. Sadly there are many more things that go wrong than more things that go well in Lady Scorpions. This is also the reason why Alena’s character has so much motivation for destroying Lucien’s empire that it’s difficult to comprehend. True, it makes sense, but after you understand it, it makes his permission to her to be alive at the beginning even more inexplicable.
There again, if you simply want to revel in Cynthia Rothrock pummeling a couple of people, this may be the one for you. But then again, practically everything else surrounding the action scenes leaves a lot to be desired, including the rather anticlimactic last shot. Lady Scorpions can be found on Digital Platforms thanks to the low-cost distributors for Paramount, and Republic Pictures.
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