Girls with guns films

Every 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) ( Read more... )

Royal Warriors (1986) ( Read more... )

Magnificent Warriors (1987) ( Read more... )

In the Line of Duty 3 (1988), 4 (1989), and 5 (1990) ( Read more... )

Angel (1987) Angel 2 (1988) (alternate titles included Iron Angels 1 and 2) ( Read more... )

I've got several more GWG movies in my queue, so there may be another post like this in the future.