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Entry tags:
Girls with guns films, "Angel" titled films
Lacking any better sorting method, I stuck all the "Girls With Guns" movies with "Angel" in the title (of which there were quite a few) into their own folder, and have now watched them all.
Things learned from this experience:
1. Cops have revolvers, criminals have uzis and AK-47s. Somehow it never occurs to the cops to break out heavier weaponry when they are shooting at the bad guys' HQ.
2. Every single time a criminal deal goes down, whether for the purchase of drugs, jewellery, counterfeit currency or guns, one or both sides will inevitably try to kill the other side so they can keep both money and valuables. This is usually done by having confederates jump out of hiding and mow down the other side with sub-machine guns. Sometimes instead someone just produces a machine gun out of hiding and mows down the other side. Yet somehow, despite every single purchase/sale of illegal goods inevitably leaving a room full of dead bodies, there seems to be no shortage of gang members willing to participate in such transactions.
3. If there is the slightest possibility of melodrama, then you can count on it being in there, dialled up to 11.
4. Gun jammed? Out of ammo? Then the obvious answer is to switch to kung fu. Gun knocked out of your hand? Don't bother trying to pick it up again, just switch to kung fu.
5. Early boss fights are only allowed to happen at construction sites, abandoned quarries, or derelict factories. Final boss fights either happen at one of those places, or they sometimes instead happen at a palatial mansion where the big boss lives.
6. *Everything* opaque is completely bulletproof - not just car doors, but also things like couches, the sliding panel doors in Japanese restaurants, and stacks of cardboard boxes all provide 100% safe cover for cops or bad guys to hide behind while the other side pumps a hail of bullets into the object in question.
7. Hong Kong cinema police tactics are even stupider than Hollywood police tactics, and involve a ton of anonymous officers stepping out into the line of fire and getting shot to death.
Angel Enforcers (1989)
This starts with a contraband transaction at a mariana that, astonishingly, doesn't involve treachery - possibly because a quartet of female police officers disrupts it before the crooks could start shooting each other. After kicking and shooting the crooks into the water, each of the four officers gets a "Charlies Angels" style hero shot where she takes off her cap, revealing her hairdo, while the character's credit line appears on the screen in Chinese. Then for the entire rest of the movie, two of those cops get almost no on screen time and almost no dialogue, which feels a bit of a cheat - instead of the promised quartet of girl cops, we actually only get a duo for most of the movie.
The two cops with actual screen time, Yvonne and Marianne, are assigned to provide security for an important transaction - someone is buying a diamond the size of a golf ball. Predictably, some criminals with guns show up to take it for themselves. In the ensuing chase/fight scene (down the stairs of an office tower, then on foot through the streets to an overpass), a ridiciouls number of cops get shot dead. At the end, one of the crooks kills his colleague before he can shoot Yvonne - turns out he was an undercover cop named Ben.
Ben's cover is blown, and he unfortunately did not learn the identity of the crime boss behind the attempted heist. A lot of the characters in this film don't have names, at least not ones that appear in the subtitles. Case in point, the crime boss is a woman but she's never named. She orders a trusty pair of hit men, also nameless, to murder the Ben. Ben's colleagues, in turn, have organized a trap with Ben as the bait. Hit man #2 turns off the alarm clock before it can wake hit man #1, and goes on the mission alone, where he succeeds in killing Ben but is killed by Marianne.
Cue the second bait and switch of the movie - while we continue to get some prefunctory scenes devoted to uncovering the crime boss's organization, nearly all of the focus now shifts to Hit Man #1, who has an overdeveloped sense of vengeance. No matter how many times the crime boss tells him that he needs to take a vacation, leave Hong Kong for a few months while things cool down, he refuses to obey and engages in the single minded pursuit of the cop who killed his friend.
As long as I didn't think about the plot or wonder why the story line kept abruptly veering off at oblique angles, this was fun, with some good fight scenes, and the surviving members of the quartet of cops do eventually get together to kick ass and exact vengeance at the end of the film, which was satisfying. Just don't get too attached to any of the characters because those that don't die unexpectedly will not get any screen time to speak of.
Midnight Angel (1990)
Three sisters, Ying (a cop, engaged to another cop), Cherry (also a cop), and Rabbit (too young to be a cop). Ying's fiancée is seemingly killed attempting to bring down a crime boss. Rabbit goes out and witnesses a sexist jerk creeping on a woman on the bus, then beating his girlfriend. She puts on a feathered mask and beats the crap out of him, calling herself Cotton Flower.
For the next while, Rabbit does standard do gooder superhero stuff, rescuing babies from runaway prams, beating up sexist jerks, etc. She always leaves behind her calling card, a folded cotton flower. An old friend of her grandfather's teaches her how to fold the flowers.
Rabbit is inspired by a Robin Hood type hero from decades back who was never caught. The translation seems to think that the original Cotton Flower was female, but nobody blinks an eye when it turns out that it was the grandfather of the three sisters instead. Not sure whether this is poor plotting or poor translation.
It turns out Ying's fiancée did not actually die, although it's never explained how he escaped being killed when the car he was in exploded.
The cops investigating the Cotton Flower case think that she is actually Cherry. One of the cops woos Cherry in an attempt to get proof that she really is cotton flower. Meanwhile Rabbit is going after the crime boss. Ying puts on a Cotton Flower mask and helps Rabbit when she gets in over her head. The crime boss figures out who screwed up his major drug for arms deal and sends assassins to the home of the three sisters.
In the battle, Ying's fiancée dies again (for real this time), the grandfather is wounded, and Cherry's pseudo boyfriend is taken captive. Cherry learns that her sisters are both Cotton Flower, and all three sisters put on masks and go after the crime boss to save the (not actually a) boyfriend and get vengeance. In the final battle on a construction site, much criminal ass is kicked, and an absurd number of villains end up impaled on sharp metal things.
This would have been a lot more satisfying if not for the scenes with the cop trying to find out if Cherry is Cotton Flower, which are played for laughs and which went on at show stopping length.
Angel's Mission (Xian fa zhi ren) (1990)
Combine crappy translation with white, borderless subtitles burned into a low-bitrate VHS rip (making the subs barely readable in the best of circumstances and utterly unreadable in any scene with white at the bottom), and I have only the vaguest idea what this one was about. A martial arts instructor from Japan visits her mother, who manages a brothel that uses trafficked girls. Martial arts girl has been asked by Interpol to investigate girls leaving their home countries and not returning. Hong Kong lady cop is working the same case. Meanwhile a jewel thief (who deals with the inevitable treachery involved in selling stolen goods by bringing a grenade launcher and an heavy calibre machine gun to all his deals) is trying to get in touch with his sister, who, it turns out, is in the clutches of the sex traffickers. Sister kills herself just before her brother shows up, which coincidentally enough is also just before the two heroines show up. Between the three of them, they blow away every single sex trafficker in the mansion HQ, the end.
I'd be more inclined to try to track down a legible copy with proper subtitles except that the women seemed to be playing second fiddle to the brother thief.
Angel Force (Tian shi te jing) 1991
(Beware: there are two movies from the same year with the same English title).
This is a fine Moon Lee vehicle with some minor and one really major flaws that ruined my enjoyment. May (Moon) and Peter (Wilson Lam) are cops and partners. They're given a mission to go rescue an American being held captive by a major drug lord in Burma. For the first twenty minutes, May plays second fiddle to Peter - not just junior partner, but also she's the less confident, more insecure one. This is the annoying minor flaw. Peter lines up a bunch of mercenaries, several of them with shady backgrounds, to help them raid the drug compound and rescue the westerner.
Then, almost immediately after arriving in Burma, Peter gets shot in the chest in an attempted hit and has to spend the rest of the movie in a hospital. May takes over command of the mission, and we get treated to a ridiculous amount of machine gun fire in a straight up military commando raid movie for the next hour. 90% of the mercenaries die but they finally kill everybody in the drug HQ and get the hostage out.
After getting the Western hostage out of Burma, which seems like the climax of the film, we still have 20 minutes of movie left, as May and Peter determine that someone in the police force tipped off the drug lord, leading to the attempted hit on Peter. Naturally the snitch is their boss, and there's a second climactic battle, this time between May and Peter and their corrupt boss.
The major flaw occurs in one of the preliminary battles in Burma when the chief mercenary captures a woman and starts to rape her until May stops him. Since the movie treats the chief mercenary as one of the good guys and makes May be very distraught when she thinks he has died in the final battle of the commando raid, I spent the final half hour of the movie quite thoroughly disgusted with the scriptwriters, the director, and the characters.
Angel Terminators (made 1990, released 1992)
This doesn't even seem to have an IMDB entry, yet it exists on blu ray. It's a straight up action drama with no comedic elements, but the tragic ending is a serious downer, and the misogynistic content is a turn off. Despite that, it's well done and one of the better Girls With Guns movies I've seen.
Ida and Hong are cops and partners. Hong's brother, Lieutenant Kim, is their supervisor. Their friend, Carrie, is married to Kim, but years ago she was the mistress of a crime boss, Sawada. Sawada was forced to flee Hong Kong for several years, but now he's back and very vengeful - all the rival gangs and underlings who ratted him out to the cops back then must now die. After an opening scene where Ida and Hong show how awesome a team they make by taking down some heavily armed robbers holding a kindergarten hostage, Hong goes on vacation to Scotland for most of the movie.
Ida and her officers bust some drug deals being done by Sawada's gang. At one, Sawada's lieutenant gets killed by Ida. Sawada and his surviving lieutenant are now out to get the cops. Meanwhile Kim has a gambling problem and is deeply in debt. He sells information on Ida's investigation to Sawada's gang. Simultaneously, Carrie begs Sawada to cancel her husband's debt - he demands she sleep with him in exchange. Reluctantly, she agrees.
Sawada, being a total asshole, happily takes payment for the debt twice. Cue some extremely disturbing scenes where Sawada unleashes his inner misogynist on Carrie, beating and humiliating her. Sawada also kills Kim and frames Ida for the murder (he's a busy guy). By the third act, Ida and Carrie are in a cell on Sawada's basement, and Ida is hooked on heroin.
Carrie dies giving Ida a chance to escape. With the help of one of her snitches, Ida goes into hiding until she recovers from her addiction, then teams up with Hong, and the two of them storm Sawada's HQ seeking vengeance. After a lot of gunfire and kung fu, Sawada shoots Ida, but before she dies, she slits his throat; roll credits as Hong mourns.
Angel Terminators 2 (1993)
In Hong Kong cinema, numbered sequels don't necessarily have anything whatsoever to do with the original beyond being vaguely similar in genre and theme and released by the same company. Case in point, this film is utterly different from the previous year's Angel Terminators. With all the drama of the first installment but none of the brutal mysogyny and with a more upbeat ending, this is one I may be keeping in my library.
Bullet, Chitty, and May are three young women who, with their male sidekicks, like to party hard and get in street fights. Bullet is also the daughter of a cop. Father's partner on the force (who nobody calls by name) is the fourth female lead in this film.
A few years prior, Bullet worked for a triad. For refusing to rat out her boss, she was sentecned to prison time. As the film begins, she is released, but spurns her father at the prison gates and instead gets a ride from her old party buddies.
While out clubbing, May meets someone who claims to be able to put her in a movie. Turns out to be a scam and she gets drugged, then raped on camera. After much prompting, May finally tells her friends what happened to her, and Bullet, Chitty, and the gang descend on the house where the assault took place, beating up everyone until they get the videotape back. On the way out the door, Bullet sees some jewelry on a table and takes it.
Unfortunately, the jewelry belonged to her former boss, who wants it back very badly. This sets off an escalating series of fights and a growing body count - May, Bullet, Bullet's father, and most of the male sidekicks die before the final battle. In the end, Chitty (with a revolver) and the lady cop (with a shotgun) take on a boat house full of gangsters (with submachine guns and grenade launchers) and kill them all. The film ends when Chitty gets out of prison and they go off to run a Mah Jong establishment together.
Things learned from this experience:
1. Cops have revolvers, criminals have uzis and AK-47s. Somehow it never occurs to the cops to break out heavier weaponry when they are shooting at the bad guys' HQ.
2. Every single time a criminal deal goes down, whether for the purchase of drugs, jewellery, counterfeit currency or guns, one or both sides will inevitably try to kill the other side so they can keep both money and valuables. This is usually done by having confederates jump out of hiding and mow down the other side with sub-machine guns. Sometimes instead someone just produces a machine gun out of hiding and mows down the other side. Yet somehow, despite every single purchase/sale of illegal goods inevitably leaving a room full of dead bodies, there seems to be no shortage of gang members willing to participate in such transactions.
3. If there is the slightest possibility of melodrama, then you can count on it being in there, dialled up to 11.
4. Gun jammed? Out of ammo? Then the obvious answer is to switch to kung fu. Gun knocked out of your hand? Don't bother trying to pick it up again, just switch to kung fu.
5. Early boss fights are only allowed to happen at construction sites, abandoned quarries, or derelict factories. Final boss fights either happen at one of those places, or they sometimes instead happen at a palatial mansion where the big boss lives.
6. *Everything* opaque is completely bulletproof - not just car doors, but also things like couches, the sliding panel doors in Japanese restaurants, and stacks of cardboard boxes all provide 100% safe cover for cops or bad guys to hide behind while the other side pumps a hail of bullets into the object in question.
7. Hong Kong cinema police tactics are even stupider than Hollywood police tactics, and involve a ton of anonymous officers stepping out into the line of fire and getting shot to death.
Angel Enforcers (1989)
This starts with a contraband transaction at a mariana that, astonishingly, doesn't involve treachery - possibly because a quartet of female police officers disrupts it before the crooks could start shooting each other. After kicking and shooting the crooks into the water, each of the four officers gets a "Charlies Angels" style hero shot where she takes off her cap, revealing her hairdo, while the character's credit line appears on the screen in Chinese. Then for the entire rest of the movie, two of those cops get almost no on screen time and almost no dialogue, which feels a bit of a cheat - instead of the promised quartet of girl cops, we actually only get a duo for most of the movie.
The two cops with actual screen time, Yvonne and Marianne, are assigned to provide security for an important transaction - someone is buying a diamond the size of a golf ball. Predictably, some criminals with guns show up to take it for themselves. In the ensuing chase/fight scene (down the stairs of an office tower, then on foot through the streets to an overpass), a ridiciouls number of cops get shot dead. At the end, one of the crooks kills his colleague before he can shoot Yvonne - turns out he was an undercover cop named Ben.
Ben's cover is blown, and he unfortunately did not learn the identity of the crime boss behind the attempted heist. A lot of the characters in this film don't have names, at least not ones that appear in the subtitles. Case in point, the crime boss is a woman but she's never named. She orders a trusty pair of hit men, also nameless, to murder the Ben. Ben's colleagues, in turn, have organized a trap with Ben as the bait. Hit man #2 turns off the alarm clock before it can wake hit man #1, and goes on the mission alone, where he succeeds in killing Ben but is killed by Marianne.
Cue the second bait and switch of the movie - while we continue to get some prefunctory scenes devoted to uncovering the crime boss's organization, nearly all of the focus now shifts to Hit Man #1, who has an overdeveloped sense of vengeance. No matter how many times the crime boss tells him that he needs to take a vacation, leave Hong Kong for a few months while things cool down, he refuses to obey and engages in the single minded pursuit of the cop who killed his friend.
As long as I didn't think about the plot or wonder why the story line kept abruptly veering off at oblique angles, this was fun, with some good fight scenes, and the surviving members of the quartet of cops do eventually get together to kick ass and exact vengeance at the end of the film, which was satisfying. Just don't get too attached to any of the characters because those that don't die unexpectedly will not get any screen time to speak of.
Midnight Angel (1990)
Three sisters, Ying (a cop, engaged to another cop), Cherry (also a cop), and Rabbit (too young to be a cop). Ying's fiancée is seemingly killed attempting to bring down a crime boss. Rabbit goes out and witnesses a sexist jerk creeping on a woman on the bus, then beating his girlfriend. She puts on a feathered mask and beats the crap out of him, calling herself Cotton Flower.
For the next while, Rabbit does standard do gooder superhero stuff, rescuing babies from runaway prams, beating up sexist jerks, etc. She always leaves behind her calling card, a folded cotton flower. An old friend of her grandfather's teaches her how to fold the flowers.
Rabbit is inspired by a Robin Hood type hero from decades back who was never caught. The translation seems to think that the original Cotton Flower was female, but nobody blinks an eye when it turns out that it was the grandfather of the three sisters instead. Not sure whether this is poor plotting or poor translation.
It turns out Ying's fiancée did not actually die, although it's never explained how he escaped being killed when the car he was in exploded.
The cops investigating the Cotton Flower case think that she is actually Cherry. One of the cops woos Cherry in an attempt to get proof that she really is cotton flower. Meanwhile Rabbit is going after the crime boss. Ying puts on a Cotton Flower mask and helps Rabbit when she gets in over her head. The crime boss figures out who screwed up his major drug for arms deal and sends assassins to the home of the three sisters.
In the battle, Ying's fiancée dies again (for real this time), the grandfather is wounded, and Cherry's pseudo boyfriend is taken captive. Cherry learns that her sisters are both Cotton Flower, and all three sisters put on masks and go after the crime boss to save the (not actually a) boyfriend and get vengeance. In the final battle on a construction site, much criminal ass is kicked, and an absurd number of villains end up impaled on sharp metal things.
This would have been a lot more satisfying if not for the scenes with the cop trying to find out if Cherry is Cotton Flower, which are played for laughs and which went on at show stopping length.
Angel's Mission (Xian fa zhi ren) (1990)
Combine crappy translation with white, borderless subtitles burned into a low-bitrate VHS rip (making the subs barely readable in the best of circumstances and utterly unreadable in any scene with white at the bottom), and I have only the vaguest idea what this one was about. A martial arts instructor from Japan visits her mother, who manages a brothel that uses trafficked girls. Martial arts girl has been asked by Interpol to investigate girls leaving their home countries and not returning. Hong Kong lady cop is working the same case. Meanwhile a jewel thief (who deals with the inevitable treachery involved in selling stolen goods by bringing a grenade launcher and an heavy calibre machine gun to all his deals) is trying to get in touch with his sister, who, it turns out, is in the clutches of the sex traffickers. Sister kills herself just before her brother shows up, which coincidentally enough is also just before the two heroines show up. Between the three of them, they blow away every single sex trafficker in the mansion HQ, the end.
I'd be more inclined to try to track down a legible copy with proper subtitles except that the women seemed to be playing second fiddle to the brother thief.
Angel Force (Tian shi te jing) 1991
(Beware: there are two movies from the same year with the same English title).
This is a fine Moon Lee vehicle with some minor and one really major flaws that ruined my enjoyment. May (Moon) and Peter (Wilson Lam) are cops and partners. They're given a mission to go rescue an American being held captive by a major drug lord in Burma. For the first twenty minutes, May plays second fiddle to Peter - not just junior partner, but also she's the less confident, more insecure one. This is the annoying minor flaw. Peter lines up a bunch of mercenaries, several of them with shady backgrounds, to help them raid the drug compound and rescue the westerner.
Then, almost immediately after arriving in Burma, Peter gets shot in the chest in an attempted hit and has to spend the rest of the movie in a hospital. May takes over command of the mission, and we get treated to a ridiculous amount of machine gun fire in a straight up military commando raid movie for the next hour. 90% of the mercenaries die but they finally kill everybody in the drug HQ and get the hostage out.
After getting the Western hostage out of Burma, which seems like the climax of the film, we still have 20 minutes of movie left, as May and Peter determine that someone in the police force tipped off the drug lord, leading to the attempted hit on Peter. Naturally the snitch is their boss, and there's a second climactic battle, this time between May and Peter and their corrupt boss.
The major flaw occurs in one of the preliminary battles in Burma when the chief mercenary captures a woman and starts to rape her until May stops him. Since the movie treats the chief mercenary as one of the good guys and makes May be very distraught when she thinks he has died in the final battle of the commando raid, I spent the final half hour of the movie quite thoroughly disgusted with the scriptwriters, the director, and the characters.
Angel Terminators (made 1990, released 1992)
This doesn't even seem to have an IMDB entry, yet it exists on blu ray. It's a straight up action drama with no comedic elements, but the tragic ending is a serious downer, and the misogynistic content is a turn off. Despite that, it's well done and one of the better Girls With Guns movies I've seen.
Ida and Hong are cops and partners. Hong's brother, Lieutenant Kim, is their supervisor. Their friend, Carrie, is married to Kim, but years ago she was the mistress of a crime boss, Sawada. Sawada was forced to flee Hong Kong for several years, but now he's back and very vengeful - all the rival gangs and underlings who ratted him out to the cops back then must now die. After an opening scene where Ida and Hong show how awesome a team they make by taking down some heavily armed robbers holding a kindergarten hostage, Hong goes on vacation to Scotland for most of the movie.
Ida and her officers bust some drug deals being done by Sawada's gang. At one, Sawada's lieutenant gets killed by Ida. Sawada and his surviving lieutenant are now out to get the cops. Meanwhile Kim has a gambling problem and is deeply in debt. He sells information on Ida's investigation to Sawada's gang. Simultaneously, Carrie begs Sawada to cancel her husband's debt - he demands she sleep with him in exchange. Reluctantly, she agrees.
Sawada, being a total asshole, happily takes payment for the debt twice. Cue some extremely disturbing scenes where Sawada unleashes his inner misogynist on Carrie, beating and humiliating her. Sawada also kills Kim and frames Ida for the murder (he's a busy guy). By the third act, Ida and Carrie are in a cell on Sawada's basement, and Ida is hooked on heroin.
Carrie dies giving Ida a chance to escape. With the help of one of her snitches, Ida goes into hiding until she recovers from her addiction, then teams up with Hong, and the two of them storm Sawada's HQ seeking vengeance. After a lot of gunfire and kung fu, Sawada shoots Ida, but before she dies, she slits his throat; roll credits as Hong mourns.
Angel Terminators 2 (1993)
In Hong Kong cinema, numbered sequels don't necessarily have anything whatsoever to do with the original beyond being vaguely similar in genre and theme and released by the same company. Case in point, this film is utterly different from the previous year's Angel Terminators. With all the drama of the first installment but none of the brutal mysogyny and with a more upbeat ending, this is one I may be keeping in my library.
Bullet, Chitty, and May are three young women who, with their male sidekicks, like to party hard and get in street fights. Bullet is also the daughter of a cop. Father's partner on the force (who nobody calls by name) is the fourth female lead in this film.
A few years prior, Bullet worked for a triad. For refusing to rat out her boss, she was sentecned to prison time. As the film begins, she is released, but spurns her father at the prison gates and instead gets a ride from her old party buddies.
While out clubbing, May meets someone who claims to be able to put her in a movie. Turns out to be a scam and she gets drugged, then raped on camera. After much prompting, May finally tells her friends what happened to her, and Bullet, Chitty, and the gang descend on the house where the assault took place, beating up everyone until they get the videotape back. On the way out the door, Bullet sees some jewelry on a table and takes it.
Unfortunately, the jewelry belonged to her former boss, who wants it back very badly. This sets off an escalating series of fights and a growing body count - May, Bullet, Bullet's father, and most of the male sidekicks die before the final battle. In the end, Chitty (with a revolver) and the lady cop (with a shotgun) take on a boat house full of gangsters (with submachine guns and grenade launchers) and kill them all. The film ends when Chitty gets out of prison and they go off to run a Mah Jong establishment together.