Bring Me the Head of the Machine Gun Woman

The exploitation genre gets a video-game makeover in Chilean writer/director Ernesto Díaz Espinoza's exuberant action movie. Santiago (Matías Oviedo) is a slacker still living at home who spends his time playing violent shoot-'em-ups when he's not DJing at a club run by an Argentinian gangster. A badly timed trip to the toilet finds him overhearing the mobsters discussing a planned hit, and the only way Santiago escapes with his life is by volunteering to do what they've failed to do: stop vengeful killer the Machine Gun Woman. From there, the movie descends into a live-action Grand Theft Auto, complete with mission chapters, as the timid Santiago must perform all the criminal activities he can do so well virtually, only for real. With its tongue firmly in its cheek (check out the one-man-band assassin), this is less like the Sam Peckinpah film the title references and closer to the early, mayhem-strewn bullet-fests of Robert Rodriguez. Sure it's grimy, gimmicky and over all too quickly, but Fernanda Urrejola's title killer - an impossibly sexy, semi-clad, bullet-spraying fury - is a creation assured cult-icon status.