Girls with guns films
Nov. 24th, 2018 11:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
glaurungEvery so often I get a hankering to watch women kick lots and lots of ass. Sadly Hollywood produces movies that fulfil this desire a few times a decade, if that. A few months ago, however, I remembered that there is a genre of Hong Kong films called "girls with guns." These were modern day martial arts/crime movies with female protagonists dating from the late 80's and early 90's. When Hollywood makes a film anything like this, it invariably seeks to make the woman who can kick ass be sexy, whether it's by sticking her in implausible lingerie (Resident Evil) or artificially inflating her bust size (eg, Angelina Jolie's Tomb Raider films). The Girls With Guns films, by and large, dressed their gun toting kung fu mistresses in soccer mom outfits and mostly refrained from objectifying them. Which can be incredibly refreshing.
Unfortunately, many of the films mentioned in recommendation lists of this genre got little to no distribution in North America. DVDs, when they exist, are out of print, hard to find and ludicrously priced. Subtitles tend to be amateurishly translated and not many seem to have been dubbed. The most affordable way to watch them is by searching for copies of the complete films on Youtube, and/or looking for DVD rips on bootleg download sites.
The genre kicked off with three films starring Michelle Yeoh.
Yes Madam! (1985)
Michelle Yeoh (credited as Michelle Khan) is a Hong Kong cop; Cynthia Rothrock is a cop from the UK. A UK agent carrying microfilm evidence is assassinated in his Hong Kong hotel room by a hit man. Coincidentally, just after he is killed, a trio of inept thieves ransack his room and steal the passport containing the microfilm. Now the cops and the hit man are both after the trio of thieves. Well over 50% of the film is devoted to forgettable and not very funny comedy scenes involving the misadventures of the three unlucky crooks. Nobody remembers the film for that half. But Rothrock and Yeoh's scenes, in which they punch and kick their way though crowds of bad guys as they track down the killer and his employer, have an intensity that galvanizes an otherwise forgettable movie.
Royal Warriors (1986)
Yeoh again plays a police officer (Michelle Yip) who teams up with an air marshal (Michael Wong) and an Interpol agent from Japan (Peter Yamamoto), all of whom happen to be in the right place at the right time to thwart the attempted jailbreak of a prisoner on an airliner. The prisoner and his would be rescuer are killed, and the airplane proves improbably bullet and grenade proof in the process. The crooks who die were two of four army blood brothers, so our trio of law enforcement heroes have to deal with first one, then another crazed killer out for vengeance. The fight scenes are spectacular, but the film is marred by the sexist asshole behaviour of Michael, who is constantly hitting on a disinterested Michelle. Things improve when he is finally thrown off a building to his death, which motivates Michelle and Peter to exact bloody vengeance on the final killer.
I'm not sure what it is about Hong Kong cinema with this propensity to name characters after the actors playing them - in addition to all the Jackie Chan films featuring a character named Jackie, here we have Michelle Yeoh playing Michelle Yip and Michael Wong playing someone named Michael Wong.
Magnificent Warriors (1987)
Set in the 30's, this is a tale of resistance to Japanese occupation. Yeoh's character, Fok Ming-Ming, is an obvious riff on Indiana Jones with a bit of Han Solo mixed in, a bullwhip cracking biplane pilot and arms smuggler who is tapped to meet up with a spy in a remote village on a mission to thwart Japanese plans to build a chemical weapons plant there. Things go wrong when the carrier pigeon intended for the spy ends up in the stew pot of a con artist, who wears the wristwatch the pigeon carried that's supposed to identify the spy to Ming Ming. Working with a mismatched group of villagers, including the con artist, Ming Ming kicks the Japanese out of the village. Reviews on the internet complain that the fight scenes aren't up to snuff, but I think that's missing the point - this is meant to be and succeeds as a fun, breezy romp, like the Indiana Jones films it's inspired by, and the sort of spectacular "dialed to 11" fight scenes that Yeoh had done for her previous two films wouldn't have worked thematically.
In the Line of Duty 3 (1988), 4 (1989), and 5 (1990)
With Yeoh temporarily retired, D & B films hired Yang Li-tsing and gave her the stage name Cynthia Khan (combining Rothrock's and Yeoh's names). They retroactively renamed Yes Madam and Royal Warriors as "In the Line of Duty" parts 1 and 2, and then made Khan the star of the next four installments, where she plays a policewoman named Rachel Leung (in the first installment) and then Leung Yai-Ching (in the next three).
In the first movie, Khan plays a policewoman whose uncle is her superior in the force. He keeps trying to assign her to safe jobs (desk duty, traffic ticketing, etc), and she keeps fighting to be allowed to work as a detective. The sexist/family conflict is, sadly, played for laughs, but doesn't take up too much of the film, and the rest is a serious crime drama pitting Khan against a male-female team of terrorist thieves who stage murderous high profile robberies (involving lots of machine gun fire into crowds of bystanders) in order to fund a terrorist organization in Japan.
The second instalment is the best one. It teams Khan up with Yat Chor Yuen, who plays a dock worker who witnessed the murder of police officers by drug smuggling CIA operatives. Now the CIA wants him dead, and they have one of Khan's colleagues in the police force on their payroll. The script can't quite seem to decide if Khan is a cop from Seattle or a cop from Hong Kong, but otherwise the plot makes sense and the fight scenes are quite satisfying. Khan is the protagonist with her male co stars in supporting roles, as they should be. The sexist uncle and the comic subplots are nowhere to be seen. Again we have characters named after the actors portraying them - Leung's colleagues are played by and named Donnie Yen and Michael Wong.
The third instalment has a muddled plot involving stolen US military secrets being sold to the highest bidder. Khan's brother is in the US military and his roommate on base is part of the spy ring, and so naturally the brother is accused of being a spy himself. Khan takes a vacation and goes with her brother to Korea to smash the spy ring (led by a woman) in order to clear his name. The fight scenes are good, the story is kind of a mess.
There was a fourth instalment (1991) which made Khan play second fiddle to two boys, it is best avoided.
Angel (1987) Angel 2 (1988) (alternate titles included Iron Angels 1 and 2)
While D&B films cranked out stories about police women, writer/director/producer Teresa Woo made three films about a mysterious "Angel Organization" - spies for hire who solve problems Interpol cannot. Unapologetically ripping off the "Charlie's Angels" concept, the Angel Organization appears to consist of a male boss and three operatives, two women and one man. Instead of police women with revolvers who know kung fu, you have secret agents with submachine guns and hand grenades who know kung fu. The series was so successful that there were a slew of unrelated movies released in the next few years with the word "Angel" in the title.
In the first, Interpol burns poppy fields in the Golden Triangle, and the Triad gang that owned those fields starts assassinating Interpol agents in retaliation. After 14 cops have died, the Angel organization gets called in to fix things. With three kick ass women (two Angels and one chief bad guy), it's fun in a "things that go boom" sort of way. And yes, once again you have actors playing characters with the same names as their stage names - Moon Lee and Elaine Liu star as Angel agents Moon (hypercompetent secretary by day, badass superspy by night) and Elaine (glamorous model by day, etc).
In the second, the same team of Angels goes on vacation, only to discover that the male Angel's long time BFF and palm oil tycoon is secretly running a gun smuggling operation and plotting a coup against the Thai government. Much angst ensues as the boy Angel is forced to kill his best friend, while his teammates blow up a small army of insurrectionists. Despite the larger role for the male Angel, it's still enjoyable.
The third movie, Angel 3 (1989) has only one kick ass woman, who plays second fiddle to a bunch of boy Angels and who doesn't even appear in the final battle. It's best avoided.
I've got several more GWG movies in my queue, so there may be another post like this in the future.
Unfortunately, many of the films mentioned in recommendation lists of this genre got little to no distribution in North America. DVDs, when they exist, are out of print, hard to find and ludicrously priced. Subtitles tend to be amateurishly translated and not many seem to have been dubbed. The most affordable way to watch them is by searching for copies of the complete films on Youtube, and/or looking for DVD rips on bootleg download sites.
The genre kicked off with three films starring Michelle Yeoh.
Yes Madam! (1985)
Michelle Yeoh (credited as Michelle Khan) is a Hong Kong cop; Cynthia Rothrock is a cop from the UK. A UK agent carrying microfilm evidence is assassinated in his Hong Kong hotel room by a hit man. Coincidentally, just after he is killed, a trio of inept thieves ransack his room and steal the passport containing the microfilm. Now the cops and the hit man are both after the trio of thieves. Well over 50% of the film is devoted to forgettable and not very funny comedy scenes involving the misadventures of the three unlucky crooks. Nobody remembers the film for that half. But Rothrock and Yeoh's scenes, in which they punch and kick their way though crowds of bad guys as they track down the killer and his employer, have an intensity that galvanizes an otherwise forgettable movie.
Royal Warriors (1986)
Yeoh again plays a police officer (Michelle Yip) who teams up with an air marshal (Michael Wong) and an Interpol agent from Japan (Peter Yamamoto), all of whom happen to be in the right place at the right time to thwart the attempted jailbreak of a prisoner on an airliner. The prisoner and his would be rescuer are killed, and the airplane proves improbably bullet and grenade proof in the process. The crooks who die were two of four army blood brothers, so our trio of law enforcement heroes have to deal with first one, then another crazed killer out for vengeance. The fight scenes are spectacular, but the film is marred by the sexist asshole behaviour of Michael, who is constantly hitting on a disinterested Michelle. Things improve when he is finally thrown off a building to his death, which motivates Michelle and Peter to exact bloody vengeance on the final killer.
I'm not sure what it is about Hong Kong cinema with this propensity to name characters after the actors playing them - in addition to all the Jackie Chan films featuring a character named Jackie, here we have Michelle Yeoh playing Michelle Yip and Michael Wong playing someone named Michael Wong.
Magnificent Warriors (1987)
Set in the 30's, this is a tale of resistance to Japanese occupation. Yeoh's character, Fok Ming-Ming, is an obvious riff on Indiana Jones with a bit of Han Solo mixed in, a bullwhip cracking biplane pilot and arms smuggler who is tapped to meet up with a spy in a remote village on a mission to thwart Japanese plans to build a chemical weapons plant there. Things go wrong when the carrier pigeon intended for the spy ends up in the stew pot of a con artist, who wears the wristwatch the pigeon carried that's supposed to identify the spy to Ming Ming. Working with a mismatched group of villagers, including the con artist, Ming Ming kicks the Japanese out of the village. Reviews on the internet complain that the fight scenes aren't up to snuff, but I think that's missing the point - this is meant to be and succeeds as a fun, breezy romp, like the Indiana Jones films it's inspired by, and the sort of spectacular "dialed to 11" fight scenes that Yeoh had done for her previous two films wouldn't have worked thematically.
In the Line of Duty 3 (1988), 4 (1989), and 5 (1990)
With Yeoh temporarily retired, D & B films hired Yang Li-tsing and gave her the stage name Cynthia Khan (combining Rothrock's and Yeoh's names). They retroactively renamed Yes Madam and Royal Warriors as "In the Line of Duty" parts 1 and 2, and then made Khan the star of the next four installments, where she plays a policewoman named Rachel Leung (in the first installment) and then Leung Yai-Ching (in the next three).
In the first movie, Khan plays a policewoman whose uncle is her superior in the force. He keeps trying to assign her to safe jobs (desk duty, traffic ticketing, etc), and she keeps fighting to be allowed to work as a detective. The sexist/family conflict is, sadly, played for laughs, but doesn't take up too much of the film, and the rest is a serious crime drama pitting Khan against a male-female team of terrorist thieves who stage murderous high profile robberies (involving lots of machine gun fire into crowds of bystanders) in order to fund a terrorist organization in Japan.
The second instalment is the best one. It teams Khan up with Yat Chor Yuen, who plays a dock worker who witnessed the murder of police officers by drug smuggling CIA operatives. Now the CIA wants him dead, and they have one of Khan's colleagues in the police force on their payroll. The script can't quite seem to decide if Khan is a cop from Seattle or a cop from Hong Kong, but otherwise the plot makes sense and the fight scenes are quite satisfying. Khan is the protagonist with her male co stars in supporting roles, as they should be. The sexist uncle and the comic subplots are nowhere to be seen. Again we have characters named after the actors portraying them - Leung's colleagues are played by and named Donnie Yen and Michael Wong.
The third instalment has a muddled plot involving stolen US military secrets being sold to the highest bidder. Khan's brother is in the US military and his roommate on base is part of the spy ring, and so naturally the brother is accused of being a spy himself. Khan takes a vacation and goes with her brother to Korea to smash the spy ring (led by a woman) in order to clear his name. The fight scenes are good, the story is kind of a mess.
There was a fourth instalment (1991) which made Khan play second fiddle to two boys, it is best avoided.
Angel (1987) Angel 2 (1988) (alternate titles included Iron Angels 1 and 2)
While D&B films cranked out stories about police women, writer/director/producer Teresa Woo made three films about a mysterious "Angel Organization" - spies for hire who solve problems Interpol cannot. Unapologetically ripping off the "Charlie's Angels" concept, the Angel Organization appears to consist of a male boss and three operatives, two women and one man. Instead of police women with revolvers who know kung fu, you have secret agents with submachine guns and hand grenades who know kung fu. The series was so successful that there were a slew of unrelated movies released in the next few years with the word "Angel" in the title.
In the first, Interpol burns poppy fields in the Golden Triangle, and the Triad gang that owned those fields starts assassinating Interpol agents in retaliation. After 14 cops have died, the Angel organization gets called in to fix things. With three kick ass women (two Angels and one chief bad guy), it's fun in a "things that go boom" sort of way. And yes, once again you have actors playing characters with the same names as their stage names - Moon Lee and Elaine Liu star as Angel agents Moon (hypercompetent secretary by day, badass superspy by night) and Elaine (glamorous model by day, etc).
In the second, the same team of Angels goes on vacation, only to discover that the male Angel's long time BFF and palm oil tycoon is secretly running a gun smuggling operation and plotting a coup against the Thai government. Much angst ensues as the boy Angel is forced to kill his best friend, while his teammates blow up a small army of insurrectionists. Despite the larger role for the male Angel, it's still enjoyable.
The third movie, Angel 3 (1989) has only one kick ass woman, who plays second fiddle to a bunch of boy Angels and who doesn't even appear in the final battle. It's best avoided.
I've got several more GWG movies in my queue, so there may be another post like this in the future.