No Surrender Cinema: Lady Scorpions
First she was the Lady Dragon, now she’s a Lady Scorpion! The legendary Cynthia Rothrock is back in the spotlight in a new film courtesy of Tiger Style Media! Ready to find out what happens when the son of a crime lord decides to take an ass-kicking federal agent’s granddaughter hostage? Hint: it involves both the ass-kicking agent and her equally skilled daughter bonding while beating down the bad guys. Sound good? Because I just finished watching Lady Scorpions, and I’m ready to make my thoughts on it known in a new No Surrender Cinema!
(SPOILER ALERT: Longtime readers know the rules, but for you newbies, here they are. I try to keep spoilers on newer films like this one to a minimum, but something that you’d prefer to be a surprise may make its way into the column. If you’re the anti-spoiler type, please feel free to return to BulletproofAction.com and this column specifically once you’ve watched the film for yourself!)
Alena Moore (Rothrock) is an agent with a grudge against a crime boss named Lucien (Jeff Fahey, looking like a sinister version of Colonel Sanders). It’s a vendetta that has apparently had a negative effect on her relationship with her daughter Lacy (Caitlin Dechelle, who has quite the impressive resume as far as stunt work goes, having worked as Gal Gadot’s double in Wonder Woman, on numerous Marvel projects, and coincidentally enough Ninja Apocalypse, which I recently reviewed). We’re first introduced to Lacy as she’s fighting off a pair of would-be carjackers, which is actually just a training scenario. This establishes that Lacy is a badass, but she’s also a mom, and she’s got a daughter named Ariel at home who’ll be celebrating her birthday the next day. That’s when we find out that the calls to Grandma Alena usually go right to voicemail, and Lacy tries to set a low bar for Ariel’s hope that Alena will be there for her birthday.
If having an estranged grandmother wasn’t bad enough, things are about to get way worse for that young lady. As if the Moore’s family drama wasn’t enough, we’ve got some from the bad guy’s side of town too. From the looks of things Lucien’s son Sonny isn’t too happy with the way that dear old dad handles things (or in the case of the first encounter we see between Lucien and Alena, how he doesn’t handle things). Knowing that Lucien has a lot riding on a big deal that’s about to go down, Sonny takes it upon himself to take Alena out of the equation by threatening Lacy and Ariel. Lacy fights back, causing Sonny to get busted up while wearing a sweet blue and yellow Adidas tracksuit that I would totally buy, but with the assist of a few goons Lacy gets knocked cold and Ariel gets whisked away to one of the (apparently) many industrial buildings that Lucien and his mob use as hideouts. The kidnapping of Ariel has the exact opposite effect that Sonny was hoping it would have, because now Alena is all in on taking him down, and her daughter is right there with her to get revenge and get Ariel back home safe.
If you’re thinking to yourself that Lady Scorpions sounds like 100 other movies, you’d be correct, and that’s the path that it stays on from the opening minutes until the time the credits roll. The problem I had with it isn’t that it’s formulaic; that is, has been, and always will be one of the main reasons why action films are so easy to churn out. My gripes come with the fact that it includes so many tropes and so many nods to other things that it suffers from a bit of an identity crisis. Alena and Lacy’s quest to rescue Ariel feels like a buddy cop comedy at times, with Lacy in particular making these deer in the headlights, fish out of water faces even though we know she’s more than capable of handling herself in a fight. The long, drawn out monologues from Jeff Fahey had me write down “Monologue Mafia” in my notes, and it felt like the type of conversation that Quentin Tarantino would have one of the criminals in his film say. Speaking of Tarantino, there’s a pretty blatant lifting of the slow-mo walk from Reservoir Dogs too. I chalked it all up to inspiration, or maybe as a way to get Quentin’s attention, since he’s a well-known advocate for old school action flicks and B-movies…and it turns out that director Bruce Del Castillo actually worked on numerous Tarantino projects! This being his feature film directorial debut, I suppose he wanted to pay homage to Tarantino, because I have a feeling he wasn’t able to do so in the South Coast Toyota: Car Shopping Experience video that he was credited for back in 2017.
On top of all that, we get the requisite “bad guy with a heart of gold” who has his reasons for not wanting to hurt Ariel, we have the criminal son not listening to dad’s advice and causing more shit to come down on the family business, and we’ve got a backstory between the two leads that we actually get to see played out mid-film. This is the point where I was wondering if I sat on my remote and accidentally jumped over to another app, because what you see in that scene would be better suited for a Saw movie than what most people expect from your run of the mill martial arts beat ’em up. It’s one of the two grotesque scenes in the movie, the latter which comes as a bit of a surprise during a climactic fight between Alena and Lacy and two of Lucien’s hired guns.
The other thing about Lady Scorpions that threw me for a loop was the ending. Without divulging too much information about it, I will say that after everything that got built up in the hour and a half beforehand, the ending was rather abrupt. Scratch that, it was extremely abrupt! I know in action films once all the fighting is done we’re supposed to believe that everything has been wrapped up with a neat little bow. At least in China O’Brien we knew what the villain’s fate was before Richard Norton said they could discuss everything over a beer. Here in Lady Scorpions I felt shortchanged on learning one person’s fate in particular, only to have another curveball thrown at me before the film fades to black! Was Lady Scorpions intended to be the first of a Lady Scorpions franchise? Because I left my viewing experience feeling like I just saw a mid-season cliffhanger than a firm conclusion.
While there is certainly room for improvement if we do get another Lady Scorpions, there’s still plenty to like about this one. First and foremost, I’m glad we saw more than 5 minutes of Jeff Fahey here. I was fearing it would be one of those latter-day Bruce Willis movie situations where Fahey shows up for a few minutes, utters a few lines, and is never seen or heard from again. Though he doesn’t engage in any of the action with Rothrock despite being her blood rival, he remains a focal point through the duration of the film. Rothrock herself is always a welcome presence in my book, and it was nice to see her back in ass-kicking mode, even if watching her as a grandmother was a bit of a shock to the system (especially since I pride myself on being eternally 16 in my head). Dechelle had some great fight scenes, which shouldn’t surprise anyone when they find out that she’s won nearly 100 different martial arts titles in her life. My only problem with her portrayal of Lacy is that we’re introduced to her as a badass, but then there are those few times that I mentioned before where she feels like she’s being dragged into something that’s way over her head. I’m not saying she’s John Ritter in Real Men, but if this were my film I’d have had her just go balls to the wall in wanting to wipe out the bad guys. There’s a bit too much of the family drama for a film that’s supposed to be a throwback to the DTV glory days. Now I know how my buddy Chris The Brain must have felt when he first watched our man Charles Bronson in Donato and Daughter!
Does Lady Scorpions recapture the Rothrock DTV magic of yesteryear? If you go into it expecting Martial Law or Tiger Claws it doesn’t come close, but it’s still a fun little flick in its own right. Her fights may not be as athletic or intense as they once were, but Cynthia Rothrock kicking ass will never get old to me. I’d also like to see more of Caitlin Dechelle, especially if the way things wrapped up in this film is any indication. She’s clearly got the skill to be a mainstay in martial arts films, but I’d like to see how she’d fare with some better character development. Perhaps Tiger Style Media will show us what she’s made of in another film in the near future. Until then, action fans should get what they want out of this one, and Rothrock loyalists like myself will appreciate her being back in action. It may not be a full-fledged throwback to the glory days, but there’s a clear effort here from those involved. The end result is a film that’s never dull with some fun action sequences that should keep viewers entertained for its duration.
Lady Scorpions is now available to rent or buy on digital
