User Reviews

I have just seen the Unrated & (so called)Unedited DVD version of ANGEL OF DEATH starring stunt actress Zoe Bell in her first starring lead acting role, since Ms. Bell basically played "herself" in the Quintin Tarentino mini movie, DEATH PROOF, as part of the GRINDHOUSE double feature of 2007. While I consider Ms. Bell as the best stunt actress alive, her acting talents are still quite limited and is still a work in progress. The film which is really a compilation of mini episodes shown on the Internet based on a script by comic book writer, Ed Brubaker(Marvel Comic's Captain America)lacks a cohesive plot with credible and believable characters, especially the main female lead that remains as cyphers thruout the film, which really lasts only 78 minutes. The plot as it is, a combination of TV's ALIAS and LA FEMME NIKITA, has Bell as a hit woman working for a crime syndicate, who suffers an almost fatal blow in the head by a knife during a botched assassination attempt and then because of that blow, she suffers a change of heart in her profession and then decides to go after her bosses. The action scenes, especially with Ms Bell herself doing her own stunts & fight scenes, are quite good, but every time Ms Bell tries to act in the film with scripted dialogue, the film goes downhill, since she is obviously out of her league, especially acting with pros like Lucy Lawless(ZENA), Ted Raimi and Doug Jones(HELLBOY). Ms Bell here commits the same error as another favorite stunt actress/ martial artist Cynthia Rothrock,who is also great in her own fight scenes but can't act or deliver dialogue convincingly. It also streches credibility when the lead character suffers a knife blow to the skull with a seven inch knife, but suffers no serious motor trauma to the brain, except for some minor seizures. The film as directed as such, has a TV movie, made for video quality to it and doesn't work as a theatrical feature. The film just ends when it's reaching it's climax and leaves the door wide open for a sequel, but unlike Tarentino's KILL BILL, which this film unsuccessfully tries to emulate, the viewer doesn't have enough sympathy for Zoe Bell's character in the same way audiences felt for Uma Thurman's character or Anne Parillaud's character in NIKITA or Jennifer Garner's character in ALIAS. My sincere advice to Zoe Bell is to continue doing bit parts in film and TV to be able to fully develop her acting skills before trying another lead role in a film again or her career will end up just like Cynthia Rothrock and Mimi Lesseos doing Grade Z action flicks released straight to video.

I won't lie when I say that before DEATH PROOF I knew nothing of Zoë Bell . I can go on record now and say I love me some Zoë Bell! She's phenomenal in her fight scenes in ANGEL OF DEATH. Zoë Bell is someone I will look out for in the future no matter how crap the movies themselves are. She's physically marvelous and the way she moves through hired guns and assassins in ANGEL OF DEATH was a sight to behold. The film itself is utter sh#t, I'll get that point across immediately, and the plot is uninspired / derivative. Zoë Bell carries this flick on her shoulders, plain and simple..sure director Paul Etheredge toys around with a film style where scene to scene transfers often resemble those story blocks in comics, but the story and characters are weak and one-dimensional. I found the main villains hilarious..these siblings, spoiled brats, a brother and sister are bucking for the top position of their dying mob father's family. Well, the decision of which will gain control rests in the hands of an unlikely adversary..on of their own hit men, a woman named Eve(Zoë Bell).

Zoë Bell's this incredible assassin who gets a knife stuck in her head, literally, the handle is sticking out of her freakin' head! This happens during a routine hit where she's supposed to take out this rotund target, but during the process she accidentally shoots his 14 year old daughter. During the escape one of the target's goons stabs her in the head with a knife, and it affects her mentally..she sees the hallucinogenic image of the teenage girl she killed and is commanded by her to take out the mob family who had the 14 year old's pops assassinated. This sets in motion a whole series of unfortunate events for the Downes mob family for Eve will hunt each member(..and the hired goons paid to protect them), eliminating one after the other. That's pretty much it. Jake Abel is Cam(eron), the young man who wants to run the Downes family, but secretly his sister, Regina(Vail Bloom) is operating things..these kids are ruthless and the desire for power brings out the very worst in them. Cam loves using his straight razor to stab and slice people while Regina has the acting chops to manipulate her way out of dire situations where her life is in jeopardy. Justin Huen is Eve's boss(..and lover), Franklin, who is working in concert with the FBI. Franklin is in love with Eve, and vice versa, and is attempting to negotiate his ass out of major trouble when his best assassin begins murdering his employers. Lucy Lawless is Vera, Eve's Christian neighbor..she love snooping through Eve's clothes and this costs her dearly. I just want to make something perfectly clear..Ted Raimi fans should prepare for certain disappointment because he's in the film 10 seconds tops. Doug Jones is Eve's personal physician and Brian Poth is Franklin's other hit-man, Graham.

The action set pieces are often breathtaking as Zoë Bell shows her prowess in hand to hand combat against her foes, with plenty of punches and blows connecting in an unforgiving fashion. In particular is an amazing showdown between Eve and a made man(..who has a relationship with the Downes family) in the claustrophobic confines of a bathroom. How Eve settles a fight with an Asian martial artist(..a mobster's enforcer) by putting him through a window, the roof of a car breaking their fall, is quite impressive. The director shoots the more violent acts off screen, depending on sound effects(..probably a blade stabbing or slicing into melons)to add impact when the use of Cam's razor blade or Eve's hunting knife cut into victims. You could see how Etheredge wanted to emulate Tarantino, it blatantly shows throughout the film. Director Etheredge shamelessly leaves open the conclusion in cliffhanger fashion as Eve stares down her next conquest, a crowned mobster she plans to destroy.

This movie was written by comic book scribe Ed Brubaker and it really does look and feel like a modern comic. Some of the surface elements like dialog, attitude and characterization are okay. The storytelling fundamentals that lie underneath all that, like plot, theme and story structure, are outright terrible. Angel of Death never gives you a reason to care about anything that happens in it and has so little to say that it starts repeating itself before it's half over.

Eve (Zoe Bell) is an assassin who murders a young girl and gets stabbed in the brain when an assignment goes wrong. She begins seeing visions of her young victim, commanding her to start killing bad people. Not all the bad people, though. Eve's lover/handler Prescott (Brian Poth) and Eve's nearly pre-pubescent assassin partner Franklin (Justin Huen) are never threatened by Eve's visions, even though they are just as evil as anyone else in the movie. Instead,s he sets her sights on a couple of generically undefined mob bosses and…well, it gets a bit hard to describe after that.

Not that Angel of Death is all that complex. It's simplistic on just about every level but there's less and less logic to the film as it goes along, in the sense of point A leading to point B leading to point C. Characters are introduced that serve no purpose. Other characters that are important don't show up until the film is halfway over. The plot so completely runs out of steam it has to manufacture three separate reasons for why Eve should want to kill out of revenge, even though the whole point of the story is that she isn't seeking personal revenge.

Now, an action movie can get by with a cruddy plot if it keeps cranking up the intensity as it goes along, but Angel of Death screws that up. The best action scene take place before the film is half over and nothing that comes after is even close to being as energetic or violent. Intensity-wise, this thing climaxes way too early and then lies flaccid on the screen till it peters out with a conclusion that seems to happen about 15 minutes before the story should actually finish. By that time, however, you're just glad it's over.

I knew this film was going to suck from the very start, when it tried to tart up Eve in sexy clothes and a wig. Zoe Bell is a somewhat handsome woman with a tough charisma, but she's no beauty and when she's glammed up, she look less like La Femme Nikita and more like a transsexual. Putting their lead actress on screen in a way that makes her look as bad as she can told me these filmmakers didn't know their ass from a hole in the ground. That assumption was only confirmed by the rest of the movie.

Like most modern super-hero comics, Angel of Death has an intriguing concept and some of the individual moments of the story are well pulled off, but the tale as a whole is a mess that goes nowhere with no aim. There's also no nudity, relatively little profanity and most of the violence is on the tame side. Leave this one alone.

Zoe Bell is possibly the best female action star at the moment: she has a powerful yet feminine and sexy body, and the expertise to use it in a lethal way. "Angel Of Death" has some brutal, hardcore woman vs. man (or men) fight scenes, and it is competently directed, masking its low budget pretty well. But while it mimics the extreme, graphic violence of early Tarantino, it has very little of his wit or humor; and without those qualities, it sometimes comes across as cheap exploitation, just as the bad language comes across simply as bad dialogue. I would like, however, to note the performances of Jake Abel and Vail Bloom - they make a convincingly twisted brother-and-sister team of psychos. ** out of 4.

Eve (Bell) is a hitwoman in L.A. On one of her missions, during the course of a fight, she receives a head injury. Although she recovers, she begins seeing visions of a young girl who got caught in the crossfire. While trying not to get too distracted by this, she begins her revenge mission against the underworld mafia types who become the target of her ire. Meanwhile, she has to juggle the needs of certain people in her life, like her co-worker Franklin (Huen), her neighbor Vera (Lawless), her doctor, Rankin (Jones), among others. Not to mention there are enemies on her tail and the law wants to catch up with her. Is Eve the ANGEL OF DEATH for the baddies?



We really liked Zoe Bell in this. She especially shines in the fight scenes, and those are well-executed and fun to watch. There perhaps should have been one or two more of them, but the bathroom fight scene is definitely a highlight. The movie around her, unfortunately, is not that great. There's a certain heartlessness to it. There's a lot of stupid, mindless dialogue and the plot is nothing you haven't seen before. It reminded us of The Contract (1999) or Bounty Hunters (2011). It's not quite a Tarantino Slog, but it certainly has Tarantino Slog-esque tendencies.





Because it was originally a web series that was edited into movie form, the running time is only 77 minutes, which we greatly appreciated. More movies should have that length. And because Ed Brubaker, who apparently is well known in the comics world, has a credit of 'Written and Created By', there is a definite comic-bookiness to the visuals. This comes out most obviously in the panels that we sometimes see. The score is Hendrix-like blues rock guitar and it more or less suits the film.

Ted Raimi has a cameo and Lucy Lawless has a small role as well. Both were involved with the TV series Ash Vs. Evil Dead - could there be a connection from that to this? Or is it just a coincidence? In other casting news, both Eve's boss and the main villain were both Fugitive Champion-esque twerps. It was hard to tell them apart because not only did they look alike, the baddie wasn't at all scary or threatening. He tried to be, but it just seemed like he'd be late for his high school classes. I guess it's all part of the experience.



All in all, Angel of Death could have - and should have - been better (especially in the writing department), but Bell is engaging as usual and she helps to keep things afloat. It's sort of a "cheap, quick, and dirty" type production, and there are worse ways to spend 77 minutes.

The plot line of this movie is that a female assassin working for an organized crime group is stabbed in the head with a dagger and shoots a 14 year old girl. As a result, she develops a conscience, and decides to turn her skills towards ridding the world of this organized crime group, in the process sustaining several more crippling injuries she is able to shake off within hours.

Remarkably, this organized crime group is a Mafia with no Italians in it. You see, it's one of those political correct things, like terrorist groups with no Arabs, because we wouldn't want to offend anyone. But anyway....

Kind of fun to watch, if you put your sense of logic and credulity on the shelf...

I knew Brubaker from his Marvel comics tenure and from the "independent" work he's done with Sean Jenkins after that. Those later stories (aside from a tendency to write a little too much about writers and comic book creators as protagonists) are very good for what they are...especially the "Criminal" collections.

So I saw his name and Zoe Bell's attached to this, and I wanted to like it a lot more than I actually do. But I did like it.

Part of the problem is, of course, that Brubaker writes comics for a living. It's what he knows, and what he does. Any film project he is involved in is going to have some of that feel to it. Doing a comics influenced film requires a director with special talent to make that medium's approach work in a movie, even a heist/crime thriller. This director tries mightily to shoehorn the one into the other and he mostly makes it work where a lot of others might bobble the material. So, kudos to him.

The movie also has Zoe Bell to draw on, with the advantages and limitations that come along with it. She's handsome and photogenic and physical in a way very few female actors can match, and she can hold her own in front of a camera.

So there you have it. Some talented people put a lot of time and work into making a noir thriller with a ridiculous premise, visceral fight scenes, and a world weary cynicism that you've seen a thousand times before.

So will you like it? If you go into the movie determined to enjoy because of the names associated with it, you probably will. If you come across this cold, I really can't predict what your reaction will be. "Chinatown" or "The Big Sleep" it ain't.