Another Girls with Guns review roundup
Apr. 12th, 2022 10:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
glaurungI wrote these reviews over a year ago but never got around to posting them. think I've pretty much run out of GWG films worth talking about. From worst to best:
Fox Hunter (1995)
This gets high praise in various places, but I absolutely cannot see why. Girl Cop is assigned to work in a hostess club to snare a mob boss, in cooperation with the manager of the club, an imformer who the subtitles call a pimp. She gets raped (mercifully offscreen), and in pursuit of vengeance kidnaps the informer and makes him take her to the mobster's mainland base of operations. The mobster shows a remarkably strong desire to kill her and the informer with machine guns. Fortunately for our heroine, Uzis and AK-47s in this movie have a remarkably poor ability to hit anyone except bystanders. The movie becomes rather repetitive, with the mobster taunting the heroine to come after him. She does, but fails to kill him, because everyone in this movie is a very bad shot. Lots of bullets get fired, the location gets trashed, she and/or the informer escape death by the skin of their teeth, repeat.
Instead of seeing a heroine who was good at her job, this movie consisted of seeing a heroine repeatedly terrorized and nearly killed by a sociopath who she is trying to hunt down despite lacking the skills necessary for the job. Best avoided.
Outlaw Brothers (1990)
This starts out as a buddy film about two brothers, James and Bond, who steal expensive cars for a living. There's an incredibly high-energy fight scene that is worth the price of admission all by itself (Jackie Chan worked as action director for this, and it definitely shows). Then, about half an hour in, we meet the heroine, Tequila, a cop assigned to investigate the car thefts. There's also a complication involving a bunch of mobsters who have been importing drugs hidden inside expensive sports cars, who naturally want their stolen car, or at least the merchandise that was in it, back. More fight scenes ensue, until the end when James and Tequila battle the mobsters in (you guessed it) a warehouse.
Sadly the above synopsis leaves out the middle half of the movie in which James woos Tequila and there is a ton of not-actually funny comedy, and also leaves out the final ten seconds in which the satisfactory conclusion of the battle is undercut by a return to comedy. The fight scenes are worthwhile, the rest was not so good.
The Godfather's Daughter Mafia Blues (1991)
A gangster film. Wai and Nam, recent immigrants from the Mainland who learned kung fu in the army, find themselves entangled in gang-related events and begin working for Lee Wah, a gang leader with one foot in the world of legitimate business. Lee's Japanese business partner Tetsuya, who he got along with very well, dies, and Tetsuya's son Kuyama is not nearly as nice a person. Kuyama launches a hostile takeover of Lee's business, buying up a majority share of the stock. Lee tries to buy back control, but doing so will require him to go deep in debt and call in every penny he and his lieutenants can scrape together.
Meanwhile Lee's daughter Amy returns from studying abroad. Amy knows lots of kung fu and is a bit of a hot head. Lee assigns Wai and Nam to keep her out of trouble. But Amy goes after Kuyama upon learning of the trouble her father is in, scarring his face. Which causes Kuyama to switch modes from "I will push my enemies to financial ruin" to "I will slaughter my enemies and dance on their graves."
Amy's father is soon dead, and Amy and Wai are forced to fight a final battle against Kuyama and his goons. The fight scenes are quite good, the story takes a while to get going but makes sense, but for most of the movie Amy plays second fiddle to Wai, so I won't be keeping this one around.
Queen's High (1991)
Every version of this I could find was saddled with borderless white, poorly translated subtitles that often became invisible against light backgrounds, which left me rather confused for the talky and intrigue-laden first half of the film.
After an opening scene of a woman in a bridal gown machine gunning a bunch of hitmen in a church yard, we meet the woman a few months earlier: Kwanny is an ordinary young woman engaged to be married, but she's also the daughter of a mobster. One of her father's former associates is released from prison, and that event seems to trigger a series of escalating tit-for-tat assassinations. First Kwanny's dad dies in a seeming car accident, then Kwanny and her brother arrange for someone else to be killed in retaliation, and so on.
Then we finally get to the wedding, in which Kwanny's brother and her fiancee are killed, and she unleashes her rage upon the hit men. It's at this point that the movie stops clearing its throat and gets down to it. Everyone expects Kwanny to step back and let her stepbrother take over, but instead she takes the reins of the family business herself. After a few more unsuccessful assassination attempts against Kwanny, she learns who is responsible for killing her family members, and there's a final fight in a warehouse, in which Kwanny kills every last one of her enemies.
The first half of the movie drags on tediously, it's hard to tell how much due to poor plotting and how much due to my not being able to follow what was happening very well. The mayhem in the second half was well done, though. I might keep a copy of this one.
Fox Hunter (1995)
This gets high praise in various places, but I absolutely cannot see why. Girl Cop is assigned to work in a hostess club to snare a mob boss, in cooperation with the manager of the club, an imformer who the subtitles call a pimp. She gets raped (mercifully offscreen), and in pursuit of vengeance kidnaps the informer and makes him take her to the mobster's mainland base of operations. The mobster shows a remarkably strong desire to kill her and the informer with machine guns. Fortunately for our heroine, Uzis and AK-47s in this movie have a remarkably poor ability to hit anyone except bystanders. The movie becomes rather repetitive, with the mobster taunting the heroine to come after him. She does, but fails to kill him, because everyone in this movie is a very bad shot. Lots of bullets get fired, the location gets trashed, she and/or the informer escape death by the skin of their teeth, repeat.
Instead of seeing a heroine who was good at her job, this movie consisted of seeing a heroine repeatedly terrorized and nearly killed by a sociopath who she is trying to hunt down despite lacking the skills necessary for the job. Best avoided.
Outlaw Brothers (1990)
This starts out as a buddy film about two brothers, James and Bond, who steal expensive cars for a living. There's an incredibly high-energy fight scene that is worth the price of admission all by itself (Jackie Chan worked as action director for this, and it definitely shows). Then, about half an hour in, we meet the heroine, Tequila, a cop assigned to investigate the car thefts. There's also a complication involving a bunch of mobsters who have been importing drugs hidden inside expensive sports cars, who naturally want their stolen car, or at least the merchandise that was in it, back. More fight scenes ensue, until the end when James and Tequila battle the mobsters in (you guessed it) a warehouse.
Sadly the above synopsis leaves out the middle half of the movie in which James woos Tequila and there is a ton of not-actually funny comedy, and also leaves out the final ten seconds in which the satisfactory conclusion of the battle is undercut by a return to comedy. The fight scenes are worthwhile, the rest was not so good.
The Godfather's Daughter Mafia Blues (1991)
A gangster film. Wai and Nam, recent immigrants from the Mainland who learned kung fu in the army, find themselves entangled in gang-related events and begin working for Lee Wah, a gang leader with one foot in the world of legitimate business. Lee's Japanese business partner Tetsuya, who he got along with very well, dies, and Tetsuya's son Kuyama is not nearly as nice a person. Kuyama launches a hostile takeover of Lee's business, buying up a majority share of the stock. Lee tries to buy back control, but doing so will require him to go deep in debt and call in every penny he and his lieutenants can scrape together.
Meanwhile Lee's daughter Amy returns from studying abroad. Amy knows lots of kung fu and is a bit of a hot head. Lee assigns Wai and Nam to keep her out of trouble. But Amy goes after Kuyama upon learning of the trouble her father is in, scarring his face. Which causes Kuyama to switch modes from "I will push my enemies to financial ruin" to "I will slaughter my enemies and dance on their graves."
Amy's father is soon dead, and Amy and Wai are forced to fight a final battle against Kuyama and his goons. The fight scenes are quite good, the story takes a while to get going but makes sense, but for most of the movie Amy plays second fiddle to Wai, so I won't be keeping this one around.
Queen's High (1991)
Every version of this I could find was saddled with borderless white, poorly translated subtitles that often became invisible against light backgrounds, which left me rather confused for the talky and intrigue-laden first half of the film.
After an opening scene of a woman in a bridal gown machine gunning a bunch of hitmen in a church yard, we meet the woman a few months earlier: Kwanny is an ordinary young woman engaged to be married, but she's also the daughter of a mobster. One of her father's former associates is released from prison, and that event seems to trigger a series of escalating tit-for-tat assassinations. First Kwanny's dad dies in a seeming car accident, then Kwanny and her brother arrange for someone else to be killed in retaliation, and so on.
Then we finally get to the wedding, in which Kwanny's brother and her fiancee are killed, and she unleashes her rage upon the hit men. It's at this point that the movie stops clearing its throat and gets down to it. Everyone expects Kwanny to step back and let her stepbrother take over, but instead she takes the reins of the family business herself. After a few more unsuccessful assassination attempts against Kwanny, she learns who is responsible for killing her family members, and there's a final fight in a warehouse, in which Kwanny kills every last one of her enemies.
The first half of the movie drags on tediously, it's hard to tell how much due to poor plotting and how much due to my not being able to follow what was happening very well. The mayhem in the second half was well done, though. I might keep a copy of this one.