Just the Ticket #191: Snow White & The 7 Samurai
a.k.a. The Mockbuster.
The new Samurai Week continues, Ticketholders!
You were probably expecting the Grimm Fairy Tales 2012 Giant-Size Edition today, but I didn't feel like Samurai Week had enough samurai in it, so I changed things up after writing my Elusive Samurai review and decided that something fairy tale-inspired should still be featured in the Wednesday slot.
This year's live-action remake of Snow White got a ton of negative publicity and critical attention from the anti-woke grifter crowd and legitimate critical voices alike. The former group trashed Rachel Zegler for not being white enough and a girlboss, taking a side in the perpetual Israel/Palestine conflict, and publicly hating on her own film and denouncing the Disney Princess stereotype, trashed the movie itself pre-production for inclusive/representative casting, and trashed Gal Gadot for also taking a(n opposing) side in the aforementioned conflict, among other socially questionable, quality-irrelevant gripes. On the legitimate critical side of public opinion, Snow White (2025) was savaged for its bad attempts at socially aware writing, unwillingness to commit fully to representative production (which is how we got the Seven Dwarves Of the Uncanny Valley in bad CGI and the crew of seven, normal-sized human bandits cluttering up the plot), general production value relative to the budget, and bad acting by its two female leads, especially Gadot.
I have no interest in seeing it because of its toxic overexposure, but the explanation of the plot and the aforementioned cast clutter gave me what I thought was an original idea (as original of an idea as one can get with a genre mashup of a live-action remake of a Disney movie based on a German folk tale, anyway): combine the Dwarves and bandits into one group of seven and give them skills or magic powers based on their Disney names (Happy the morale-booster, Grumpy the berserker, Dopey the strategist, Sleepy the drunken master, Sneezy with super-breath, Bashful the stealth expert, and Doc the healer), and have Snow White seek them out to help her defeat the Evil Queen's army and reclaim her kingdom in a take on Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai/The Magnificent Seven/Burn Notice: The Fall Of Sam Axe.
But little did I realize that mockbuster kings The Asylum beat me to it with today's movie up for review.
Directed by Michael Su (whose best rated movie on IMDB—because Snow White & The 7 Samurai doesn't have a Wikipedia entry—is the viral slasher, Death Count from 2022), its actual star is Fiona Dorn (mostly known for short films, voice acting, and motion capture in video games) as Anya "The People At the School I Go To But We Don't Have the Budget For Call Me 'Snow White' Because My Father Is A Known Drug Lord" Voight, the straight-laced but plucky daughter of crime boss Joseph Voight (go-to, "shit movie needs a phoned-in evil asshole" actor Eric Roberts, whom I learned from the Gubtodi Reviews YouTube channel, also played Snow White's father in the unrelated Snow White: Curse Of the Axeman).
It's basically the plot of the Snow White fairy tale with a low-budget Daredevil atmosphere, as far as the plot goes. Joseph is assassinated by someone who's clearly female, and at the reading of his will, the lawyer (TV and adult film "that guy," Robert Donavan) reveals that Joseph's cash assets are to go to his wife (the Evil Queen analogue and slutty gold digger trope of the movie, played by Tomb Invader star Gina Vitori) and his fellow "Four Pillars" (of which there are three now that the Eric Roberts budget has almost been spent and his character died from lung disease brought on by a hairline paintball contusion because the blood effects in this movie are laughably inconsistent), whose names aren't important because they're going to die ten minutes later, but they're played by Mariana Jaccazio (or Jacazzio, depending on which of her four short film, telenovela, or this movie's credits you look at), frequent mockbuster actor/producer Anthony Jensen, and prolific Ukrainian actor Alex Veadov (who is woefully underutilized and too good for this movie to even make an effort, and I'm not sure if I mean that as a compliment or an insult). These four are..."reasonably" shocked when the lawyer also reveals that the remaining bulk of Joseph's empire and assets will rest with Anya, divested from his criminal ties as a promise to her. So of course, the wife sends her huntsman (Jackson) to kill Anya and begin her campaign to monopolize control of the Pillars' criminal enterprises.
Through the power of Asylum bullshit, smelling salts, and experimental folk medicine, Anya survives three deep (but barely visible because this movie was made on an Asylum budget, after all) stab wounds to the neck and back, and wakes up in the care of the Seven Onimusha (not that one), a small group of mostly white women and two actual Asians who dress in the kind of stock leather outfits you'd find in a twenty-plus-year-old Saturday afternoon show like Mutant X, Mortal Kombat Conquest, or Beastmaster, and fight mostly hand-to-hand or with guns or ninja stealth despite self-identifying as an endangered clan of modern samurai.
However, given all of the expected, Asylum-esque flaws (the limited locations, the stock sound effects, the stilted-to-pornographic-to-Broadway acting, the almost nonexistent gore effects, the beyond-dated wardrobe choices, the sometimes confusing scene-to-scene continuity, etc.), I cannot say I hated Snow White & The 7 Samurai, or even that it was particularly bad (it is bad, but enjoyably, forgivably so). In its way, the movie delivers what it promises on the tin, Eric Roberts actually gives a decently dimensioned, sympathetic performance outside of the opening death scene (the flashbacks Anya has throughout the reasonable runtime are where he shows the most emotion and competence as an actor), the plot made sense enough, the characters we were supposed to root for were likable (if mostly expendable), Anya's character growth was engaging for a movie of this expected quality, and with a few exceptions (Vitori devolves into what I'm calling "Struggling Woman Style" a couple of times even though her character is a SPOILER, and Rampage doesn't get to fully show off his MMA background), the fight choreography is surprisingly good and not edited to death. Am I disappointed that the Seven didn't get more definition (Luna—Lalaloopsy prop designer Sunny Tellone—is the leader and Doc parallel, the mute Heidi—Geena Alexandra, Transmorphers: Mech Beasts—is the shy, stealthy one and obvious Bashful parallel, and Kiki—Narisa Suzuki, Prisoners Of the Ghostland—is the stern warrior type, so maybe a Grumpy parallel? But the other four women aren't utilized as much so we don't get a sense of their specialties or personalities because, like the Pillars, they don't last long enough to matter)? Were the twists childishly easy to figure out ahead of time? Yes, and yes. But was the movie kind of fun with a sweet ending, and of a better quality than one might associate with The Asylum? Also yes.
C+
Tomorrow, I'm throwing it back to 1954 with a review of the actual Seven Samurai instead of my usual TBT '25 retro push, so Stay Tuned and as always, please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have opinions about, help out my ad revenue as you read so I can maybe hire seven tech badasses to help me defeat the internet, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.
Mockbuster,
Hi-ho,
Hi-ho,
Off to watch a three-and-a-half-hour movie I go.
Off to watch a three-and-a-half-hour movie I go.
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