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Girls with guns films -- assassins
Most girls with guns movies cast their heroines as police officers. But there were so many about assassins that I set them aside in a folder, and I have now watched them all.
Things I have learned from watching too many Hong Kong movies about female assassins:
1. Nobody in the criminal underworld of Hong Kong has any idea how to hire someone to commit murder through cut outs so the assassin has no knowledge of their client. Movie after movie involves hit women being hunted down by thugs in the employ of the crime boss who hired them, because the hit woman "knows too much," or simply in order to cover their tracks by eliminating anyone who could finger them for the murder. How this is any different than just having your own thugs do the original murder for you is beyond me.
2. Assassination is such a big business that it pays to abduct small children and train them from near-infancy in the ways of murder. At the same time, highly skilled, well trained assassins are a dime a dozen and whoever is running Murder, Inc is perfectly willing to kill off some of their best talent at the whim of a client or the drop of a hat.
3. Crime bosses are always eager to have the trigger (wo)man bumped off to clean up loose ends and ensure that nobody talks, but it never, ever occurs to them to bump off the manager or handler with whom they actually conducted business and who actually knows far more than the trigger woman about who paid to have whom killed. In short, in Hong Kong cinema, only complete and utter idiots hire the services of professional assassins.
4. If the movie needs to establish that the hit woman is a nice person at heart and not really the cold blooded murderer that she seems to be, it shows her playing with a child, protecting a child from the assassins who are after her, or both.
5. While GWG movies about cops tend to be chaste, movies about assassins tend to be sleazy exploitation flicks. I guess part of it is wanting or needing to not denigrate or badmouth the HK police, but I am not sure what else is going on with this. Somehow, if a HK director wants to make an exploitation flick about a woman who can kick ass, the first thing they think of is to make her an assassin.
6. Also, spies are seriously under represented in the GWG genre. Aside from the three original "Angel" flicks, I don't think I've run into any movies from this era that featured girl spies.
The films, in mostly chronological order:
On the Run (1988)
In the 80's, many Hong Kong residents who had the means emigrated to places like Canada or the UK or the US, seeking to gain dual citizenship for themselves and an exit plan for their families in case of a brutal totalitarian crackdown after Britain handed the colony over to Red China in just ten years. This historical tidbit forms the bedrock of the movie.
Lo Huan is a narcotics cop, and she is getting divorced from her husband, a corruption squad cop, Hsiang Ming. Lo Huan is planning on leaving the force and emigrating to Canada with her mother and young daughter. Hsiang asks her to put off finalizing the divorce until he can emigrate with her. Does he really want to give up being a cop to become a dishwasher in Canada, she asks him - he says yes, because there's no future in Hong Kong for people like himself.
A few minutes after their meeting at a restaurant, Lo Huan is shot and killed by a female assassin. Hsiang's very bad day just gets worse as, once he has tracked down the assassin, they both become targets of Lo Huan's corrupt boss and lover, Lui Jun. Lui plans to frame Hsiang for the murder, then kill both him and the assassin (claiming they were resisting arrest or some such), leaving no loose ends.
Hsiang needs to run for his life while trying to solve the crime and figure out how to clear his name and kill the bad guys. Along the way, almost all of his friends on the corruption squad die, his mother in law and daughter die, and in general his bad day just keeps getting worse and worse. This is a dark, noir-ish movie with little room for happiness or levity.
All of this happens because Liu and his small group of cronies in the narcotics squad were skimming money and drugs and Lo Huan was close to catching them at it. Like Hsiang, Liu doesn't see much future for himself in Hong Kong, but he plans to buy his way out at the top rather than start over as a dishwasher in a new country.
Of course, this movie got on the list because of the assassin, Chiu. Once Lo Huan is dead, Liu and his cronies kill Chiu's (male) partner and manager rather than pay up, but it's quickly clear they made a horrible mistake in killing him first. She is by far the most competent person in the cast, shooting a bunch of corrupt cops in the head while handcuffed wrist-to-wrist to Hsiang, saving his life and the life of his kid over and over again while he struggles to keep up.
At first she helps him out of self-preservation, later out of disliking how he's being betrayed and framed, finally, after the daughter and grandmother end up dead, out of a shared desire for revenge. She doesn't get much to flesh out her character - she's from Thailand, she kills people for a living, she is displeased to have had her partner killed and she likes Hsiang's daughter - but the actor (Pat Ha) pulls it together. Her rapid switch in allegiances might have displeased some reviewers on the internet, but in the realm of betrayal/revenge movies, it worked for me.
This is not a martial arts flick. Nobody drops their gun and then switches to kung fu, and apart from the final confrontation where Hsiang and Yiu take on Liu and his cronies (leaving no survivors), there's hardly any unarmed combat. The violence is gritty and brutal rather than cartoonish, and every bit of it happens to propel the plot rather than for the fun of seeing people get shot. The story makes sense, the character motivations mostly work, and the storytelling and direction are tight and efficient. Most of the "girls with guns" movies I've been watching have been cheap sclock, this is pretty good cinema.
Lethal Panther (1990)
OK, most girls with guns movies recognize that there's something appealing about a woman who knows how to kick ass even if she's wearing sweatpants and a hoodie, and objectifying her body isn't necessary to keep the straight men in the audience interested. Sadly not all GWG movies are free of American-style male gaze exploitation. This one, for example, takes a fairly standard GWG crime drama and crams in as many sex scenes as it can get away with. What follows is based on a poorly dubbed version, with everyone given westernised names and God knows what plot details altered.
We're introduced to three women. In the US, Betty, a CIA agent (not the SS, not the FBI) is on the trail of a counterfeiting operation (research was not on the agenda of whoever wrote the script). After kicking the ass of a hapless minion in the organization, she discovers that she needs to go to the Philippines.
In Japan, Amy, our first assassin, has sex with a man, then stabs him in the chest with a short sword she had stashed under the nightstand. After washing off the blood, she tosses his body out the window, letting it fall to smash into the hood of his car waiting on the street below. A group of gunmen waiting beside the car say "she killed the boss" and rush upstairs: Amy casually guns them down as she strolls out of the building in a green trenchcoat and white high heels. So she's the bad one, got it.
In Hong Kong, Eileen, also an assassin, does an intense workout listening to headphones, then dresses in a black sweater, black pants, and white trench coat. Wearing black high heels, she straps two uzi sub-machine guns to her waist, goes to a Japanese restaurant, strolls to a private dining room and guns down everyone sitting at the table, then strolls back out.
After killing the roomful of men, Eileen drinks beer and remembers a firefight in Vietnam in which most of her fellow soldiers were killed. Her handler/manager, a fellow veteran of Vietnam and a former hit man himself, brings her an envelope with her next assignment, including an airline ticket to the Philippines. After he leaves, she reads a Christmas card from her little brother Tom, who is attending college in Paris thanks to her financial support. So she's the good one, thanks for making that overabundantly clear.
In Japan, Amy goes to a bus station locker and pulls out an identical envelope with an identical airline ticket. So I guess they both work for McMurder international, LLC?
In the Philippines, Betty is shown the dossier of the Wong crime family who are responsible for the counterfeit money. There's a scene of paterfamilias Charles Wong giving orders to his stepson and his nephew, Albert. The family is preparing for the wedding of Charles's only child, a daughter. There's a gratuitous scene of her having sex in the gazebo with her fiancée, and the two of them play absolutely no role in the rest of the film. We learn that while the stepson is good, Albert is slime.
Betty launches a sting operation, which ends with spraying a lot of bullets from sub-machine guns and a lot of dead minions but no usable info.
Wedding day, and both assassins are there to kill the father of the bride. Betty shows up to posture and let the Wongs know that despite not yet having any evidence she can use against them, she's still on their case. Amy's assassination plan appears to involve driving up on a motorcycle and blasting away at the crowd with an automatic pistol, then driving away at high speed while hoping she is not hit by any of the bullets sprayed in her direction by the dozen or so armed gangsters attending the wedding. Result: several wounded wedding guests and a wounded crime boss. Eileen's plan evidently involved shooting at the father and other random guests with a sniper rifle from a nearby rooftop, then when he is wounded but not dead, dashing across the roof to fire a rocket propelled grenade at the car being used to rush him to the hospital. Result: one thoroughly dead crime boss. So, we get it, Eileen trumps Amy in the badass hit woman competition. Betty spots Eileen and dashes up to the rooftopfor a senseless kung fu fight to attempt to apprehend the murderer. After a brief kung fu battle, Eileen gives her the slip using the old "slide down a fire hose to a lower floor" trick.
For those not paying attention, we learn that Albert had decided to expedite his inheritance by putting out a hit on his uncle. Why he hired two assassins instead of one is never explained. He tells the representative of McMurder, LLC that he doesn't want the assassins to talk. The rep says no problem, dead women tell no tales. And guess what? Amy and Eileen both get new assignments from their handlers: each is to kill the other.
In order to make sense of the next few scenes, I have to assume that in a segment that was inadvertently cut from the final movie, the stepson ordered his minions to find and kill the assassins, they used their highly advanced crime family intelligence network to track down both women, and sent out some assault teams to finish them both off.
The next scene intercuts Amy blowing away a half dozen assassins in a rooftop battle, and Eileen first playing with a young girl in a supermarket, then protecting the girl from becoming collateral damage when the stepson and several other minions come into the market to kill her, and finally showing her escaping the market on a motorcycle after blowing away several minions (but not the stepson).
Why, exactly, the rep from McMurder LLC is so quick to dispose of two of his top killers, how in hell the stepson's minions figured out so quickly who to target and where to find them, and all other questions of plot logic are never addressed.
It's been a while at this point since the last bit of irrelevant and gratuitous nudity, so we see Eileen sitting in a booth alone at a strip club, drinking beer and watching the floor show. Betty arrives and confronts her - they point their guns at each other and spar verbally. Despite showing no interest to this point in arresting anyone instead of blowing them away, Betty asks that Eileen please stop killing members of the Wong gang so that she will have someone left alive to arrest. Before their confrontation can get any more illogical or violent, Amy shows up, intending to kill Eileen. All three of them shoot, and all three end up with shoulder wounds. How Amy and Betty both knew to find Eileen at the strip club is never addressed. Maybe a little bird told them both.
That must have been one hard working little bird, because next, a half dozen goons from the Wong gang show up to shoot at everyone with uzis. We don't see Betty again for a while, but Amy and Eileen escape from the club, just barely, and, after gunning down the machine gun wielding maniacs who are trying to kill them, they get down to the serious business of trying to kill each other.
Except they both are too badly wounded and after pointing their guns at each other and trading a few barbs, they both fall unconscious on the palatial lawn of Sylvia, a highly successful prostitute who must have been a field medic in a former life, because she who pulls numerous bullets out of each of them and treats their wounds.
On the home stretch, the movie shambles into what passes for high gear. Amy and Eileen bond a bit as they recover. Albert hires a new hit man to kill the stepson, because he wants it all and he's slime, plus the stepson says he will not rest until he finds who killed his father and exacts vengeance. Finally, the leader of McMurder, LLC orders the handlers for each lady assassin to kill their respective girl, because that's what the client wants. By this point, the Wong gang has lost well over a dozen soldiers trying to kill the two lady assassins. Self preservation must not be a common instinct among Wong soldiers, however, because we get another half dozen of them storming Sylvia's home (The CIA, Mossad, and KGB should really all just go out of business and hire the Wong crime family to do all their spying for them).
Sylvia dies (not before a nasty bit of gratuitous nudity and rape). Soon all the goons are dead and Sylvia gets a nice melodramatic death speech before dying in Eileen's arms. Amy's handler kills Eileen's handler because he hasn't followed orders (never mind that Amy's handler hasn't fulfilled his assignment yet either). There's a confrontation between Amy and her handler/lover, in which Amy fails to be ruthless enough and gets shot. Then Eileen shows up and shoots him dead before he can finish Amy off.
Now it's time to ratchet up the melodrama to 11 or maybe even 12. Eileen's brother Tom shows up. Turns out he's the assassin who was hired to kill the stepson and who is now tasked with eliminating our two lady assassins once and for all. He's lurking in Eileen's hotel room. Eileen brings Amy to her room and starts treating her serious but nonfatal wound. Amy sees Tom and throws herself in the path of the bullet, saving Eileen's life and getting shot in the head. Tom makes a rather nonsensical speech about how horribly the French treated him at school that is supposed to explain why he is now a hit man. Before their confrontation can come to its logical end, however, a final team of Wong family goons shows up and sprays the hotel room with Uzi fire. All thoughts of killing each other are set aside as they cooperate in obliterating the goons (fortunately Eileen is well prepared for this sort of thing and has a couple Uzis and an AK-47 equipped with a grenade launcher in her closet). The rule we discussed last time about how all opaque objects, no matter how flimsy, are 100% bullet proof in these movies is in full effect here.
Eileen and Tom give Amy a burial at sea and then head out to kick some Wong family ass. Tom dies in the final battle, so when Betty finally shows up belatedly, there's nobody left alive for her to arrest except Eileen.
Why Eileen and Tom didn't go after the head of McMurder LLC as well is yet another logic hole that is never addressed. At this point I've lost track of how many unfilled plot holes have shown up in the script, but it's a lot. I'm pretty sure that the producer did not actually stitch this movie together from two completely unrelated films, one a reasonably good GWG flick and the other a sleazy sexploitation thing, but that's the impression it gives. The fight scenes and gun battles were worth watching, the rest, not so much. Sadly, while this easily takes the cake as the most illogical assassin themed GWG movie I've encountered, it is nowhere near the sleaziest, although it did try very hard to win that second trophy.
Dreaming the Reality (1991)
I despise boxing and cannot stand movies about blood sports. I also find that 99% of what passes for comedy in Hong Kong cinema is not actually funny and is often instead offensive to me. So, I basically fast forwarded through the 50% of the first hour of the movie that's devoted to the misadventures of a skilled but not too bright kick boxer (Rocky) and his extremely smart, extremely sharp tongued sister who bosses him around (Lan). There were far too many boxing ring fights that went on for far too long, and in between those, a lot of the rest were played for laughs. Suffice to say that Rocky has not obeyed his (Triad affiliated, so not at all nice) manager, which was unwise. Also, when they aren't at the boxing venue, the two of them run a pub.
The other half of the first hour of the movie is far more interesting. The very first scene concerns two young girls shooting automatic pistols (that are far too big for them to hold properly in their tiny hands) at some bottles. Cut to a rabbit nosing around on the lawn, it gets blown away by a boy about the same age, upsetting one of the girls who regarded it as a pet. A middle aged man approaches and they all stand at attention, eyes averted, addressing him as "uncle" (I've learned that in Hong Kong, Uncle and Auntie are honorifics for adults who, regardless of any actual blood relationship, have taken on a parental or caretaking role towards the person speaking). He scolds them for giving a damn about the rabbit, and reminds them that if any of them disobey him, he will kill them, then orders them to go back to practising with their guns. Nice guy.
Fast forward several years, and we meet the same three kids all grown up. The two women blow away small red circles on man-sized targets with great precision, while the man gazes off into the distance and toys with a lighter. He gets essentially zero character development aside from his name, Scorpion, which tells you right away he's one of the bad guys.
The women are Silver Fox (a bit femme) and Kat (a bit butch). The movie can't quite commit to having them be lovers, instead making them crypto-lesbians -- two women who never have any on-screen PDA, but share the same bed, have a butch/femme presentation, and have exchanges like:
Fox: "Sister, what will you do if one day I die?"
Kat: "Die with you."
Very quickly, we're given the plot driver for the rest of the movie, when a hit against a drug lord inadvertently results in the destruction of a school bus full of children. Kat is sorrowful but gets over it, Fox is hit a lot harder, and begins to question whether she wants to continue in the career Uncle has forced upon her.
Their next assignment is to retrieve a floppy disk from a man in Thailand. The disk contains incriminating evidence that could send Uncle to prison, so he wants it at all costs. A few days later at the airport in Thailand, the hit goes more or less as planned, but while Kat makes a clean getaway from the hundreds (!) of military police chasing after them, Fox gets hit on the head and suffers a bout of amnesia. She still has the attaché case containing the floppy disk handcuffed to her wrist, but she can't remember what's in it, who she is, or what she does for a living. In this state, she stumbles into Lan's pub.
From this point on, the movie is finally firing on all cylinders. Lan and Rocky shelter Fox from the cops and give her a job helping out in the pub. The boxing manager is very displeased with Rocky for missing scheduled fights. He sends thugs with baseball bats to beat him up. Lan retaliates by crashing his home and threatening him with a (fake) hand grenade, which was a mistake since soon thereafter, the manager comes to the pub with goons toting AK-47s. They shoot the place up, but in the chaos, Fox remembers who she is and what she did for a living, grabs up a fallen handgun, and soon all the goons and the manager are dead. Rocky and Fox flee to a house in the country while Lan fields questions from the cops.
Meanwhile, Uncle, assuming that Fox has betrayed him, orders Kat and Scorpion to find her at all costs, retrieve the disk, and, if she won't come back to him right away, mete out his only punishment for traitors: death. They find Fox, who declares she's quitting the murder business. While Fox survives the confrontation, Rocky and Kat both die at the hands of Scorpion. Lan and Fox vow revenge, and there's a final battle in which Uncle and his minions are quite satisfactorily defeated.
This would be on my list of "will want to see again" films if not for the kickboxing scenes. The fight scenes and gun battles are well done, and the parts of the movie that aren't about kickboxing are dramatic, not too illogical, and enjoyable.
Naked Killer (1992), Naked Weapon (2002), Naked Soldier (2012)
Where Dreaming the Reality hinted at lesbianism, and Lethal Panther flirted with the stereotype of the "black widow", these three exploitation flicks (all by the same director, who seems to repeatedly remake a lot of his own material) are "all in" on having women in slinky outfits fuck men before murdering them, with a fairly large dollop of blatant lesbianism tossed in for good measure.
In Naked Killer, Kitty is a young woman who helps out her friends by beating up their no-good boyfriends and stabbing them in the genitals. When her father catches her mother sleeping with a gangster, there's a fight and her dad dies. Kitty proceeds to storm the gangster's offices with a revolver, eventually shooting him and stabbing him dead. Things look grim for her, as hordes of gun toting gangsters are between her and any hope of getaway. But she is saved by an older woman named Sister Cindy, who just happens to have been in the office building, and who cuts through the minions with a hat bomb and a set of daggers on wires that she flings around with deadly accuracy. Turns out Cindy is a hit woman who sees potential in Kitty and takes her on as a protégé and lover. Matters are complicated, however, by Cindy's former student, now business rival, Princess, who has decided to bump off Cindy because reasons. So it's hired killer vs hired killer as Kitty and Cindy face off against Princess and her girlfriend. Naturally the lesbian characters are not allowed to survive to the end of the film, although Kitty, who falls for a male cop at some point in there, survives (because she was only experimenting. Eye roll)
Expect tons of extremely stylish costumes, very strinking visuals, and gigatons of odious sexist bullcrap about using your body as a lethal weapon, disarming men by having sex with them so they are easier to kill, etc ad nauseum.
Naked Weapon takes the exact same steaming wheelbarrow full of sexist bullcrap and mates it to the "children trained from a young age to be killers" idea from Dreaming the Reality. Madame M picks up orphaned and runaway girls from slums, takes them to her isolated island training camp, and subjects them to a sadistic and brutal decade long training regimen (exercises include "kill your nearest classmate and bring her body outside the barracks").
Normally the camp produces one graduate per decade (this seems an extremely expensive way to produce hit women - either Madame M takes a decade long break in taking commissions whenever she loses one of her stable of hit women, or she has a schedule that's just jam packed 24/365, and is likely immortal or one of several identical twins, but nevermind), this time around there are three graduates, best friends who have bonded over their hideous treatment and they... promptly proceed to become employees of Madame M, killing whoever she tells them to kill, because female agency is not something the director knows very much about. So once they're all grown up and have become sexy super assassins, there's a plot of sorts that happens, which I can't recall and am not going to re-view the video to find out what it was, although it involves a male detective that one of the assassins falls for (just like the previous film) and someone with an overdeveloped sense of vengeance whose friend Madame M should not have had killed no matter how lucrative the contract.
Naked Soldier takes the exact same setup as Naked Weapon, only tailored for the Mainland China market (which censors sex, nudity, and disrespect of authorities - the result is a film that's almost worth watching). A cop's family is attacked and murdered. The evil villainess (wearing a PVC little black dress and dominatrix high heels) who masterminded the attack steals the cop's little girl and subjects her to a VR headset brainwashing device to make her forget her family. Fast forward 15 years and the stolen daughter has become one of the villainess' sexy super assassins. The cop, who survived the attack that wiped out his family, gets assigned to the case of a string of murders which turn out to have been done by his long lost daughter. Turn up the melodrama dial to 11, add in the cop's new foster daughter (who naturally knows lots of kung fu), and you get an ending that's actually reasonably satisfying (the surviving family gets back together, the villainess is defeated, etc), for a movie whose bones are deplorable sexism mixed with cheap and sleazy exploitation.
So Close (2002)
Someone who saw The Matrix and thought the slow motion CGI special effects in it were super cool, and who also was fond of the "Birds of Prey" comic book series published by DC, decided they wanted to get all nostalgic and produce a "Girls With Guns" movie like people used to make back in the 80's or early 90's. Somehow this person got an American studio to give them a ton of money for expensive costumes, elaborate sets, and loads and loads of CGI. The result looks very pretty and has a lot of fun bits in it but the thing just doesn't gel.
Two orphaned sisters use the spying technology invented by their dead father to set themselves up in the assassination business. This magical spying tech lets them hack into any CCTV installation anywhere in the world and see what the cameras are seeing, and/or feed whatever video they want into a CCTV system in place of what's actually happening. The movie spends exactly zero seconds considering the horrible abuses that such a technology would enable.
So, Lynn goes out and does the actual murdering (while wearing incredibly stylish outfits), while her little sister Sue stays at home, watches things on CCTV (she has dozens of LCD screens surrounding her computer desk) and hacks into shit, providing, through Lynn's earpiece, all the live, real-time info Lynn needs to take out the target and get away without getting shot by security guards. Sue isn't disabled, but otherwise the parallels to the hacker + fighter team up featured in the "Birds of Prey" comic are pretty obvious.
Meanwhile Hung, a hyper-competent forensics specialist cop with photographic memory, encyclopedic knowledge and elite kung fu skills, is on the case of the sisters' latest hit. Hung's investigation goes too well and the junior partner in the megacorp who (naturally) arranged the assassination of his boss, decides that all three women need to die. As usual in these kinds of films, he has badly underestimated how easy that will be.
If the women were wearing spandex instead of extremely fashonable outfits, then this thing would have felt exactly like a comic book superhero movie. Sadly it's dragged down by an utterly irrelevant and leaden romance plot between Lynn and her ex boyfriend from several years back, which gets an inordinate amount of screen time for something that never goes anywhere and feels tacked on. The amount of fake looking CGI in the fight scenes doesn't help matters (lots of stunts were done in the computer instead of on camera, and lots of broken glass flying everywhere was digitally added). The result is in some ways disappointing compared to the pre-cgi productions of the 80's and 90's that it's paying homage to. On the other hand, it has sisterhood and girl power to burn, and is enjoyable enough if you just tune out the nonsensical romance bits.
Things I have learned from watching too many Hong Kong movies about female assassins:
1. Nobody in the criminal underworld of Hong Kong has any idea how to hire someone to commit murder through cut outs so the assassin has no knowledge of their client. Movie after movie involves hit women being hunted down by thugs in the employ of the crime boss who hired them, because the hit woman "knows too much," or simply in order to cover their tracks by eliminating anyone who could finger them for the murder. How this is any different than just having your own thugs do the original murder for you is beyond me.
2. Assassination is such a big business that it pays to abduct small children and train them from near-infancy in the ways of murder. At the same time, highly skilled, well trained assassins are a dime a dozen and whoever is running Murder, Inc is perfectly willing to kill off some of their best talent at the whim of a client or the drop of a hat.
3. Crime bosses are always eager to have the trigger (wo)man bumped off to clean up loose ends and ensure that nobody talks, but it never, ever occurs to them to bump off the manager or handler with whom they actually conducted business and who actually knows far more than the trigger woman about who paid to have whom killed. In short, in Hong Kong cinema, only complete and utter idiots hire the services of professional assassins.
4. If the movie needs to establish that the hit woman is a nice person at heart and not really the cold blooded murderer that she seems to be, it shows her playing with a child, protecting a child from the assassins who are after her, or both.
5. While GWG movies about cops tend to be chaste, movies about assassins tend to be sleazy exploitation flicks. I guess part of it is wanting or needing to not denigrate or badmouth the HK police, but I am not sure what else is going on with this. Somehow, if a HK director wants to make an exploitation flick about a woman who can kick ass, the first thing they think of is to make her an assassin.
6. Also, spies are seriously under represented in the GWG genre. Aside from the three original "Angel" flicks, I don't think I've run into any movies from this era that featured girl spies.
The films, in mostly chronological order:
On the Run (1988)
In the 80's, many Hong Kong residents who had the means emigrated to places like Canada or the UK or the US, seeking to gain dual citizenship for themselves and an exit plan for their families in case of a brutal totalitarian crackdown after Britain handed the colony over to Red China in just ten years. This historical tidbit forms the bedrock of the movie.
Lo Huan is a narcotics cop, and she is getting divorced from her husband, a corruption squad cop, Hsiang Ming. Lo Huan is planning on leaving the force and emigrating to Canada with her mother and young daughter. Hsiang asks her to put off finalizing the divorce until he can emigrate with her. Does he really want to give up being a cop to become a dishwasher in Canada, she asks him - he says yes, because there's no future in Hong Kong for people like himself.
A few minutes after their meeting at a restaurant, Lo Huan is shot and killed by a female assassin. Hsiang's very bad day just gets worse as, once he has tracked down the assassin, they both become targets of Lo Huan's corrupt boss and lover, Lui Jun. Lui plans to frame Hsiang for the murder, then kill both him and the assassin (claiming they were resisting arrest or some such), leaving no loose ends.
Hsiang needs to run for his life while trying to solve the crime and figure out how to clear his name and kill the bad guys. Along the way, almost all of his friends on the corruption squad die, his mother in law and daughter die, and in general his bad day just keeps getting worse and worse. This is a dark, noir-ish movie with little room for happiness or levity.
All of this happens because Liu and his small group of cronies in the narcotics squad were skimming money and drugs and Lo Huan was close to catching them at it. Like Hsiang, Liu doesn't see much future for himself in Hong Kong, but he plans to buy his way out at the top rather than start over as a dishwasher in a new country.
Of course, this movie got on the list because of the assassin, Chiu. Once Lo Huan is dead, Liu and his cronies kill Chiu's (male) partner and manager rather than pay up, but it's quickly clear they made a horrible mistake in killing him first. She is by far the most competent person in the cast, shooting a bunch of corrupt cops in the head while handcuffed wrist-to-wrist to Hsiang, saving his life and the life of his kid over and over again while he struggles to keep up.
At first she helps him out of self-preservation, later out of disliking how he's being betrayed and framed, finally, after the daughter and grandmother end up dead, out of a shared desire for revenge. She doesn't get much to flesh out her character - she's from Thailand, she kills people for a living, she is displeased to have had her partner killed and she likes Hsiang's daughter - but the actor (Pat Ha) pulls it together. Her rapid switch in allegiances might have displeased some reviewers on the internet, but in the realm of betrayal/revenge movies, it worked for me.
This is not a martial arts flick. Nobody drops their gun and then switches to kung fu, and apart from the final confrontation where Hsiang and Yiu take on Liu and his cronies (leaving no survivors), there's hardly any unarmed combat. The violence is gritty and brutal rather than cartoonish, and every bit of it happens to propel the plot rather than for the fun of seeing people get shot. The story makes sense, the character motivations mostly work, and the storytelling and direction are tight and efficient. Most of the "girls with guns" movies I've been watching have been cheap sclock, this is pretty good cinema.
Lethal Panther (1990)
OK, most girls with guns movies recognize that there's something appealing about a woman who knows how to kick ass even if she's wearing sweatpants and a hoodie, and objectifying her body isn't necessary to keep the straight men in the audience interested. Sadly not all GWG movies are free of American-style male gaze exploitation. This one, for example, takes a fairly standard GWG crime drama and crams in as many sex scenes as it can get away with. What follows is based on a poorly dubbed version, with everyone given westernised names and God knows what plot details altered.
We're introduced to three women. In the US, Betty, a CIA agent (not the SS, not the FBI) is on the trail of a counterfeiting operation (research was not on the agenda of whoever wrote the script). After kicking the ass of a hapless minion in the organization, she discovers that she needs to go to the Philippines.
In Japan, Amy, our first assassin, has sex with a man, then stabs him in the chest with a short sword she had stashed under the nightstand. After washing off the blood, she tosses his body out the window, letting it fall to smash into the hood of his car waiting on the street below. A group of gunmen waiting beside the car say "she killed the boss" and rush upstairs: Amy casually guns them down as she strolls out of the building in a green trenchcoat and white high heels. So she's the bad one, got it.
In Hong Kong, Eileen, also an assassin, does an intense workout listening to headphones, then dresses in a black sweater, black pants, and white trench coat. Wearing black high heels, she straps two uzi sub-machine guns to her waist, goes to a Japanese restaurant, strolls to a private dining room and guns down everyone sitting at the table, then strolls back out.
After killing the roomful of men, Eileen drinks beer and remembers a firefight in Vietnam in which most of her fellow soldiers were killed. Her handler/manager, a fellow veteran of Vietnam and a former hit man himself, brings her an envelope with her next assignment, including an airline ticket to the Philippines. After he leaves, she reads a Christmas card from her little brother Tom, who is attending college in Paris thanks to her financial support. So she's the good one, thanks for making that overabundantly clear.
In Japan, Amy goes to a bus station locker and pulls out an identical envelope with an identical airline ticket. So I guess they both work for McMurder international, LLC?
In the Philippines, Betty is shown the dossier of the Wong crime family who are responsible for the counterfeit money. There's a scene of paterfamilias Charles Wong giving orders to his stepson and his nephew, Albert. The family is preparing for the wedding of Charles's only child, a daughter. There's a gratuitous scene of her having sex in the gazebo with her fiancée, and the two of them play absolutely no role in the rest of the film. We learn that while the stepson is good, Albert is slime.
Betty launches a sting operation, which ends with spraying a lot of bullets from sub-machine guns and a lot of dead minions but no usable info.
Wedding day, and both assassins are there to kill the father of the bride. Betty shows up to posture and let the Wongs know that despite not yet having any evidence she can use against them, she's still on their case. Amy's assassination plan appears to involve driving up on a motorcycle and blasting away at the crowd with an automatic pistol, then driving away at high speed while hoping she is not hit by any of the bullets sprayed in her direction by the dozen or so armed gangsters attending the wedding. Result: several wounded wedding guests and a wounded crime boss. Eileen's plan evidently involved shooting at the father and other random guests with a sniper rifle from a nearby rooftop, then when he is wounded but not dead, dashing across the roof to fire a rocket propelled grenade at the car being used to rush him to the hospital. Result: one thoroughly dead crime boss. So, we get it, Eileen trumps Amy in the badass hit woman competition. Betty spots Eileen and dashes up to the rooftop
For those not paying attention, we learn that Albert had decided to expedite his inheritance by putting out a hit on his uncle. Why he hired two assassins instead of one is never explained. He tells the representative of McMurder, LLC that he doesn't want the assassins to talk. The rep says no problem, dead women tell no tales. And guess what? Amy and Eileen both get new assignments from their handlers: each is to kill the other.
In order to make sense of the next few scenes, I have to assume that in a segment that was inadvertently cut from the final movie, the stepson ordered his minions to find and kill the assassins, they used their highly advanced crime family intelligence network to track down both women, and sent out some assault teams to finish them both off.
The next scene intercuts Amy blowing away a half dozen assassins in a rooftop battle, and Eileen first playing with a young girl in a supermarket, then protecting the girl from becoming collateral damage when the stepson and several other minions come into the market to kill her, and finally showing her escaping the market on a motorcycle after blowing away several minions (but not the stepson).
Why, exactly, the rep from McMurder LLC is so quick to dispose of two of his top killers, how in hell the stepson's minions figured out so quickly who to target and where to find them, and all other questions of plot logic are never addressed.
It's been a while at this point since the last bit of irrelevant and gratuitous nudity, so we see Eileen sitting in a booth alone at a strip club, drinking beer and watching the floor show. Betty arrives and confronts her - they point their guns at each other and spar verbally. Despite showing no interest to this point in arresting anyone instead of blowing them away, Betty asks that Eileen please stop killing members of the Wong gang so that she will have someone left alive to arrest. Before their confrontation can get any more illogical or violent, Amy shows up, intending to kill Eileen. All three of them shoot, and all three end up with shoulder wounds. How Amy and Betty both knew to find Eileen at the strip club is never addressed. Maybe a little bird told them both.
That must have been one hard working little bird, because next, a half dozen goons from the Wong gang show up to shoot at everyone with uzis. We don't see Betty again for a while, but Amy and Eileen escape from the club, just barely, and, after gunning down the machine gun wielding maniacs who are trying to kill them, they get down to the serious business of trying to kill each other.
Except they both are too badly wounded and after pointing their guns at each other and trading a few barbs, they both fall unconscious on the palatial lawn of Sylvia, a highly successful prostitute who must have been a field medic in a former life, because she who pulls numerous bullets out of each of them and treats their wounds.
On the home stretch, the movie shambles into what passes for high gear. Amy and Eileen bond a bit as they recover. Albert hires a new hit man to kill the stepson, because he wants it all and he's slime, plus the stepson says he will not rest until he finds who killed his father and exacts vengeance. Finally, the leader of McMurder, LLC orders the handlers for each lady assassin to kill their respective girl, because that's what the client wants. By this point, the Wong gang has lost well over a dozen soldiers trying to kill the two lady assassins. Self preservation must not be a common instinct among Wong soldiers, however, because we get another half dozen of them storming Sylvia's home (The CIA, Mossad, and KGB should really all just go out of business and hire the Wong crime family to do all their spying for them).
Sylvia dies (not before a nasty bit of gratuitous nudity and rape). Soon all the goons are dead and Sylvia gets a nice melodramatic death speech before dying in Eileen's arms. Amy's handler kills Eileen's handler because he hasn't followed orders (never mind that Amy's handler hasn't fulfilled his assignment yet either). There's a confrontation between Amy and her handler/lover, in which Amy fails to be ruthless enough and gets shot. Then Eileen shows up and shoots him dead before he can finish Amy off.
Now it's time to ratchet up the melodrama to 11 or maybe even 12. Eileen's brother Tom shows up. Turns out he's the assassin who was hired to kill the stepson and who is now tasked with eliminating our two lady assassins once and for all. He's lurking in Eileen's hotel room. Eileen brings Amy to her room and starts treating her serious but nonfatal wound. Amy sees Tom and throws herself in the path of the bullet, saving Eileen's life and getting shot in the head. Tom makes a rather nonsensical speech about how horribly the French treated him at school that is supposed to explain why he is now a hit man. Before their confrontation can come to its logical end, however, a final team of Wong family goons shows up and sprays the hotel room with Uzi fire. All thoughts of killing each other are set aside as they cooperate in obliterating the goons (fortunately Eileen is well prepared for this sort of thing and has a couple Uzis and an AK-47 equipped with a grenade launcher in her closet). The rule we discussed last time about how all opaque objects, no matter how flimsy, are 100% bullet proof in these movies is in full effect here.
Eileen and Tom give Amy a burial at sea and then head out to kick some Wong family ass. Tom dies in the final battle, so when Betty finally shows up belatedly, there's nobody left alive for her to arrest except Eileen.
Why Eileen and Tom didn't go after the head of McMurder LLC as well is yet another logic hole that is never addressed. At this point I've lost track of how many unfilled plot holes have shown up in the script, but it's a lot. I'm pretty sure that the producer did not actually stitch this movie together from two completely unrelated films, one a reasonably good GWG flick and the other a sleazy sexploitation thing, but that's the impression it gives. The fight scenes and gun battles were worth watching, the rest, not so much. Sadly, while this easily takes the cake as the most illogical assassin themed GWG movie I've encountered, it is nowhere near the sleaziest, although it did try very hard to win that second trophy.
Dreaming the Reality (1991)
I despise boxing and cannot stand movies about blood sports. I also find that 99% of what passes for comedy in Hong Kong cinema is not actually funny and is often instead offensive to me. So, I basically fast forwarded through the 50% of the first hour of the movie that's devoted to the misadventures of a skilled but not too bright kick boxer (Rocky) and his extremely smart, extremely sharp tongued sister who bosses him around (Lan). There were far too many boxing ring fights that went on for far too long, and in between those, a lot of the rest were played for laughs. Suffice to say that Rocky has not obeyed his (Triad affiliated, so not at all nice) manager, which was unwise. Also, when they aren't at the boxing venue, the two of them run a pub.
The other half of the first hour of the movie is far more interesting. The very first scene concerns two young girls shooting automatic pistols (that are far too big for them to hold properly in their tiny hands) at some bottles. Cut to a rabbit nosing around on the lawn, it gets blown away by a boy about the same age, upsetting one of the girls who regarded it as a pet. A middle aged man approaches and they all stand at attention, eyes averted, addressing him as "uncle" (I've learned that in Hong Kong, Uncle and Auntie are honorifics for adults who, regardless of any actual blood relationship, have taken on a parental or caretaking role towards the person speaking). He scolds them for giving a damn about the rabbit, and reminds them that if any of them disobey him, he will kill them, then orders them to go back to practising with their guns. Nice guy.
Fast forward several years, and we meet the same three kids all grown up. The two women blow away small red circles on man-sized targets with great precision, while the man gazes off into the distance and toys with a lighter. He gets essentially zero character development aside from his name, Scorpion, which tells you right away he's one of the bad guys.
The women are Silver Fox (a bit femme) and Kat (a bit butch). The movie can't quite commit to having them be lovers, instead making them crypto-lesbians -- two women who never have any on-screen PDA, but share the same bed, have a butch/femme presentation, and have exchanges like:
Fox: "Sister, what will you do if one day I die?"
Kat: "Die with you."
Very quickly, we're given the plot driver for the rest of the movie, when a hit against a drug lord inadvertently results in the destruction of a school bus full of children. Kat is sorrowful but gets over it, Fox is hit a lot harder, and begins to question whether she wants to continue in the career Uncle has forced upon her.
Their next assignment is to retrieve a floppy disk from a man in Thailand. The disk contains incriminating evidence that could send Uncle to prison, so he wants it at all costs. A few days later at the airport in Thailand, the hit goes more or less as planned, but while Kat makes a clean getaway from the hundreds (!) of military police chasing after them, Fox gets hit on the head and suffers a bout of amnesia. She still has the attaché case containing the floppy disk handcuffed to her wrist, but she can't remember what's in it, who she is, or what she does for a living. In this state, she stumbles into Lan's pub.
From this point on, the movie is finally firing on all cylinders. Lan and Rocky shelter Fox from the cops and give her a job helping out in the pub. The boxing manager is very displeased with Rocky for missing scheduled fights. He sends thugs with baseball bats to beat him up. Lan retaliates by crashing his home and threatening him with a (fake) hand grenade, which was a mistake since soon thereafter, the manager comes to the pub with goons toting AK-47s. They shoot the place up, but in the chaos, Fox remembers who she is and what she did for a living, grabs up a fallen handgun, and soon all the goons and the manager are dead. Rocky and Fox flee to a house in the country while Lan fields questions from the cops.
Meanwhile, Uncle, assuming that Fox has betrayed him, orders Kat and Scorpion to find her at all costs, retrieve the disk, and, if she won't come back to him right away, mete out his only punishment for traitors: death. They find Fox, who declares she's quitting the murder business. While Fox survives the confrontation, Rocky and Kat both die at the hands of Scorpion. Lan and Fox vow revenge, and there's a final battle in which Uncle and his minions are quite satisfactorily defeated.
This would be on my list of "will want to see again" films if not for the kickboxing scenes. The fight scenes and gun battles are well done, and the parts of the movie that aren't about kickboxing are dramatic, not too illogical, and enjoyable.
Naked Killer (1992), Naked Weapon (2002), Naked Soldier (2012)
Where Dreaming the Reality hinted at lesbianism, and Lethal Panther flirted with the stereotype of the "black widow", these three exploitation flicks (all by the same director, who seems to repeatedly remake a lot of his own material) are "all in" on having women in slinky outfits fuck men before murdering them, with a fairly large dollop of blatant lesbianism tossed in for good measure.
In Naked Killer, Kitty is a young woman who helps out her friends by beating up their no-good boyfriends and stabbing them in the genitals. When her father catches her mother sleeping with a gangster, there's a fight and her dad dies. Kitty proceeds to storm the gangster's offices with a revolver, eventually shooting him and stabbing him dead. Things look grim for her, as hordes of gun toting gangsters are between her and any hope of getaway. But she is saved by an older woman named Sister Cindy, who just happens to have been in the office building, and who cuts through the minions with a hat bomb and a set of daggers on wires that she flings around with deadly accuracy. Turns out Cindy is a hit woman who sees potential in Kitty and takes her on as a protégé and lover. Matters are complicated, however, by Cindy's former student, now business rival, Princess, who has decided to bump off Cindy because reasons. So it's hired killer vs hired killer as Kitty and Cindy face off against Princess and her girlfriend. Naturally the lesbian characters are not allowed to survive to the end of the film, although Kitty, who falls for a male cop at some point in there, survives (because she was only experimenting. Eye roll)
Expect tons of extremely stylish costumes, very strinking visuals, and gigatons of odious sexist bullcrap about using your body as a lethal weapon, disarming men by having sex with them so they are easier to kill, etc ad nauseum.
Naked Weapon takes the exact same steaming wheelbarrow full of sexist bullcrap and mates it to the "children trained from a young age to be killers" idea from Dreaming the Reality. Madame M picks up orphaned and runaway girls from slums, takes them to her isolated island training camp, and subjects them to a sadistic and brutal decade long training regimen (exercises include "kill your nearest classmate and bring her body outside the barracks").
Normally the camp produces one graduate per decade (this seems an extremely expensive way to produce hit women - either Madame M takes a decade long break in taking commissions whenever she loses one of her stable of hit women, or she has a schedule that's just jam packed 24/365, and is likely immortal or one of several identical twins, but nevermind), this time around there are three graduates, best friends who have bonded over their hideous treatment and they... promptly proceed to become employees of Madame M, killing whoever she tells them to kill, because female agency is not something the director knows very much about. So once they're all grown up and have become sexy super assassins, there's a plot of sorts that happens, which I can't recall and am not going to re-view the video to find out what it was, although it involves a male detective that one of the assassins falls for (just like the previous film) and someone with an overdeveloped sense of vengeance whose friend Madame M should not have had killed no matter how lucrative the contract.
Naked Soldier takes the exact same setup as Naked Weapon, only tailored for the Mainland China market (which censors sex, nudity, and disrespect of authorities - the result is a film that's almost worth watching). A cop's family is attacked and murdered. The evil villainess (wearing a PVC little black dress and dominatrix high heels) who masterminded the attack steals the cop's little girl and subjects her to a VR headset brainwashing device to make her forget her family. Fast forward 15 years and the stolen daughter has become one of the villainess' sexy super assassins. The cop, who survived the attack that wiped out his family, gets assigned to the case of a string of murders which turn out to have been done by his long lost daughter. Turn up the melodrama dial to 11, add in the cop's new foster daughter (who naturally knows lots of kung fu), and you get an ending that's actually reasonably satisfying (the surviving family gets back together, the villainess is defeated, etc), for a movie whose bones are deplorable sexism mixed with cheap and sleazy exploitation.
So Close (2002)
Someone who saw The Matrix and thought the slow motion CGI special effects in it were super cool, and who also was fond of the "Birds of Prey" comic book series published by DC, decided they wanted to get all nostalgic and produce a "Girls With Guns" movie like people used to make back in the 80's or early 90's. Somehow this person got an American studio to give them a ton of money for expensive costumes, elaborate sets, and loads and loads of CGI. The result looks very pretty and has a lot of fun bits in it but the thing just doesn't gel.
Two orphaned sisters use the spying technology invented by their dead father to set themselves up in the assassination business. This magical spying tech lets them hack into any CCTV installation anywhere in the world and see what the cameras are seeing, and/or feed whatever video they want into a CCTV system in place of what's actually happening. The movie spends exactly zero seconds considering the horrible abuses that such a technology would enable.
So, Lynn goes out and does the actual murdering (while wearing incredibly stylish outfits), while her little sister Sue stays at home, watches things on CCTV (she has dozens of LCD screens surrounding her computer desk) and hacks into shit, providing, through Lynn's earpiece, all the live, real-time info Lynn needs to take out the target and get away without getting shot by security guards. Sue isn't disabled, but otherwise the parallels to the hacker + fighter team up featured in the "Birds of Prey" comic are pretty obvious.
Meanwhile Hung, a hyper-competent forensics specialist cop with photographic memory, encyclopedic knowledge and elite kung fu skills, is on the case of the sisters' latest hit. Hung's investigation goes too well and the junior partner in the megacorp who (naturally) arranged the assassination of his boss, decides that all three women need to die. As usual in these kinds of films, he has badly underestimated how easy that will be.
If the women were wearing spandex instead of extremely fashonable outfits, then this thing would have felt exactly like a comic book superhero movie. Sadly it's dragged down by an utterly irrelevant and leaden romance plot between Lynn and her ex boyfriend from several years back, which gets an inordinate amount of screen time for something that never goes anywhere and feels tacked on. The amount of fake looking CGI in the fight scenes doesn't help matters (lots of stunts were done in the computer instead of on camera, and lots of broken glass flying everywhere was digitally added). The result is in some ways disappointing compared to the pre-cgi productions of the 80's and 90's that it's paying homage to. On the other hand, it has sisterhood and girl power to burn, and is enjoyable enough if you just tune out the nonsensical romance bits.