Raze

Time for cinematic Choose Your Own Adventure! PAGE 1: You enter a room and find a DVD with the following blurb on the back: This movie features abducted women who are forced to fight each other with their bare hands. Do you put the DVD down and leave the room (turn to page 2) or put the DVD in the player and watch it (turn to page 3)? PAGE 2: You go home and watch Citizen Kane. The end. PAGE 3: You watch a movie featuring abducted women forced to fight with their bare hands. Stop complaining.

Talking about kickboxing gets girls to make out with you confirmed. Wish I'd known before now. Sorry, just rambling. Movie is interesting premise-wise, but its execution is fairly boring, and nonsensical. This is apparently what passes for "female empowerment", made meaningless by stupidity. Girls are trapped and made to fight because reasons, please have feels. Character development? Nah. Acting? Pfft. Not like there aren't interesting moments. But nothing you can't get elsewhere... and better.

Zoe Bell and several other butch looking women get dropped into a pit two at a time where they fight to the death. The dribs and drabs of story you get in between the killings are ridiculous garbage that barely try to make sense, but who am I kidding? The only draw here is the aforementioned butch women throwing down, and there's plenty of that. Some of the scraps are brutal affairs indeed, with decent enough choreography to satisfy action fans...but a couple of the fights are real stinkers.

Holy hell the editing during the fight scenes ruined every fight, how annoying. To be fair the camerawork in general was kind of shitty as well. Too repetitive to be fun especially when I could rarely see the action due to the edits and camerawork. Disappointing.

The whole opening segment is surprisingly strong, brutal and emotional-rollercoaster-y. It also contains all of the elements that the remainder of the movie keeps repeating instead of adding to, with lessened effect each time. A shame it's too predictable to make effective use of its horror angle. Still, not as dire as the scores led me to believe.

There's only so many times I can see the "bunch o people forced to fight each other or they die" plot before it becomes unwatchable. I know this is supposed to different because now it's women and blah blah blah but it's not different enough. Effective in a few scenes just for brutality but it's nothing new, nothing exciting

A women in prison film -- starring Tarantino's stunt woman -- for the UFC generation. Which means: this is bad.