Not quite the review

As the title imply these are my random thoughts on the current four releases from Wicked City Girls.
First of all I have to say that I'm impressed by what I've seen so far, these releases show a consistent improvement in terms of quality and effort, which is all the more impressive considering how close these productions are to each other. Also, what I like most is that these productions don't seem to fall into the trap of being intentionally intense. As Castor highlighted a few days ago in another topic, there's a habit from many indipendent film-makers to try to make their works as intense and dramatic as humanly possible, without much regard for the subject. So far WCG is intense, but in a way that feels natural to the story, which a great plus to me.
Also, I have to praise the continuous improvement in delivering the superpowered scenes, a lot of them are not only very creative, but also very well executed.
Okay, on with the show:

Judgment Girl: Revelation
Well, the opening movie does its job pretty well, setting up some of the major players and providing hints of the upcoming meta-plot. While I don't think that the sepia tones filter helps the effect or the narrative. For me the sepia is appropriate for flashbacks and/or moments of irreality (see Mamuro Oshii's "Avalon" for a reference) having the main scenes in sepia was very strange. The main drawback of this is how the action plays. No offense to Jess, but she really didn't play her strengths here. If anything the Youtube short proved that Jess can play the superpowered badass, but she has a real knack for black comedy and this is completly absent from this work, which hurts the final result, since Judgement Girl came out as a less interesting character than she can be in my eyes. Same with Alannah Hofmann as Alicia, I like the fact that she's clearly the underdog, but she keeps fighting. Still, there's something in how the action is delivered that makes me wonder if she is really trying.
Overall a good start, but pales quickly.

Nemesis

From the trailers Nemesis was the one I was most interested to see, mostly because it seemed that Callie was a very conscious character and she is, to a point. The story is a very solid origin story, this is its strength, but also its limit. The story unfolds at a very slow pace, especially for a 16 minutes long video, but doesn't deliver anything but the most basic information. On one hand this provides ample room to develop Callie in future releases, on the other it makes the first half of the video very dull to watch. Nemesis is a very strange beast: it start at the beginning whereas all the other releases start "in medias res", which might gave it an extra boost as an ongoing product, but as a stand alone product hurt it a bit.

Silencer

This is in many ways the perfect comparison piece to Nemesis. Pretty much everything that Nemesis does, Silencer does the opposite. Charlie is presented as a fully developed character, the meta-plot is very present but not overwhelming and the sepia is gone . I think that what sold this is the action, it's copious and it's well delivered, it reminded me of some high budget movie where things happens in such a quick sequence that you don't have time to think about them and you just keep watching.
Katrina Rene is really good at playing an apparently carefree character and I really appreciate the fact that her character is more interesed in the 'whys' rather than simply going on superpowered rampage, this shows a concern that isn't apparent in her attitude and gave a nice depth to the character.



Wild Card
This release takes full advantage of the extra time in areally good way. It strikes a nice balance between action and story development, giving a bit more information than the others, while maintaing the same amount of action. Diana Salinas really sold her act as a character that is fully conscious of what she can do and what is at stake, giving this release the potentially most interesting plot. There's not much more I can say, clearly this release got the most in terms of development and it really shows, I can only hope that this will set the new bar for all the future releases.