Snow White and the Seven Samurai (2024)

Snow White and the Seven Samurai (2024)

Starring: Fiona Dorn, Gina Vitori, Sunny Tellone, Quinton 'Rampage' Jackson, Eric Roberts, Jessica DeBonville, Narisa Suzuki, Geena Alexandra, Liana Ramirez, Sof Puchley, Samantha Long, Mariana Jaccazio, Anthony Jensen, Alex Veadov

Director: Michael Su

Action Director: Shaun Charney, Kouryou Ngin, Veto Swarn

“Look! It’s Snow White! Heiress to daddy’s cocaine empire!”

And thus opens yet another Asylum mockbuster, this one meant to cash in on the “hype” surrounding Disney’s live-action Snow White film, before it pushed its release date back by a year because…well…nobody wanted to see the seven dwarves replaced by seven “diversity hires.” Although, the CGI dwarves we’ve seen in the trailer have been maligned to the point that people think they’re scary. And I won’t even open the can of worms that is Rachel Zegler opening her big mouth. I’m now confident that the definitive live-action Snow White film was Mirror, Mirror, starring Julia Roberts and the gorgeous Lily Collins.

But where was I?

Back to the quote from above, “daddy” is Joseph Voigt (Eric Roberts, of too many other Asylum films). He runs a drug empire known as the Four Pillars alongside three other kingpins (Mariana Jaccazio, Anthony Jensen, Alex Veadov). Why does Los Angeles have so many German people running the drug trade? I swear they all German names and speak with thick Eurotrash accents. Joseph’s daughter, Anya (Fiona Dorn), wants him to go straight. But before he can do that, he is shot to death in his home by an unknown assailant.

After his funeral, his three fellow drug lords, his daughter, and his widow, Quinn (Gina Vitori, who was in an episode of “Ahsoka”), convene for the reading of his will. Quinn gets twenty million dollars so that she’ll (theoretically) be set for life, while Anya receives all of her dad’s companies on the condition that she legitimize them. This angers Quinn, who wants to stay in the drug business. She has her enforcer, whom I’ll call Ghost Dog (MMA fighter Quinton “Rampage” Jackson, whose movie career never really took off after the A Team remake), murder the Voigt family attorney and steal all the documents related to Jospeh’s will. He also assaults Anya and stabs her in the back, although she is rescued by Luna (Raze’s Sunny Tellone).

Luna is the leader of the Onimusha, a band of female samurai vigilantes who have fought for truth and justice since time immemorial. As of late, the Onimusha have been fighting the Four Pillars and have been killed off to the point that there are now only seven members left: her, Jun (Jessica DeBonville), Kiki (Narisa Suzuki), Heidi (Geena Alexander), Skylar (Liana Ramirez), Kat (Samantha Long), and Gabriella (Sof Puchley). The Onimusha agrees to take Anya on as their newest member and train her in the martial arts (hand-to-hand combat, kenjutsu, and the bo staff) and pistol shooting.

Meanwhile, Quinn asserts herself as the new “Fourth Pillar,” which the other three drug lords oppose to. First, they send a hitman named Axl to kill Quinn, but she bests him. Then they send a bunch of hooded hitmen (there will be a lot of those in this film) to storm her mansion. Quinn and Ghost Dog are able to fight them off and if you’re a drug lord, you probably shouldn’t be waiting unarmed in a car outside of the place your thugs are raiding. It could go bad for you if your men are unsuccessful. About that time, Anya convinces the Onimusha that now is the time to strike against her…wicked stepmother! Muhahaha!

As a film studio, The Asylum is capable of doing two things right: making decent posters/DVD covers and cutting a good trailer. Practically everything beyond that, especially when it comes to actually making movies, displays a general incompetency in the most basic aspects of understanding what entertainment. Much of that problem stems from low budgets and ultra-quick shooting schedules—this film was made in 7 days—which lends itself to budgetary overreach when it comes to mockbusters of Hollywood tentpole films. The few films where they actually splurge on the budget—Age of Dinosaurs and the Sharknado films—manage to be entertaining because of their everything-but-the-kitchen sink approach. But most of the time their films are turgid affairs characterized by people standing in rooms talking for 80 minutes, marked by a couple of minutes of mediocre CGI footage, only a few seconds of which portray anything interesting happening.

This becomes even more problematic in a film like Snow White and the Seven Samurai, where you need time to shoot a decent action sequence. It’s one thing to make Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus and hire your actors to stand at desks and in front of computer screens for a few days and then do all the monster stuff in post. But in an action movie where a good set piece requires time to stage, train, choreograph and execute, a seven-day shooting period will rarely get you anything worth watching. Oh sure, there were probably a handful of chop-sockey films in the 1970s that had shooting schedules like that. But they also employed casts of Peking-Opera trained stuntmen who had enough experience that they could do pull something off on such short notice—one of the greatest fights of all time, Jackie Chan vs. Benny “The Jet” Urquidez in Dragons Forever, was filmed in 24 hours. This one had about six stuntmen—no more than three of whom were onscreen at any given time—and a bunch of actresses of whom only a couple had any real action movie experience. You cannot hope to make a good action movie under those conditions.

As a result, you have fight sequences that are on par with a Z-grade direct-to-video film from the 1990s. The gunplay is not imaginatively staged or photographed. And these Onimusha girls are so bereft of strategy that it’s no wonder their numbers have been reduced so much. MMA champion and professional wrestler Quinton Jackson spends the film wearing a hoodie (thus the Ghost Dog reference) and mumbling his few lines, when he’s not shooting people or using some basic MMA moves. There is some swordplay here and there, but nothing fancy: you’ll get better katana work in Steven Seagal films like Into the Sun and Against the Dark than you’ll get here. Anya’s training sequences feel like they filmed the opening minutes of her pre-production training sessions and spliced those into the film.

There is nothing really worth watching here. It might have been interesting if they had brought Lauren Parkinson back and made this a sequel to the Avengers Grimm movies. But as a low-budget urban actioner, it collapses under the weight of a paper-thin (even by genre standards) plot, underacting from most of the cast, uninteresting action sequences, and just an overall feeling of amateurishness to the proceedings.

This review is part of Fighting Female February 2025