glaurung | Entries tagged with girls with guns

I 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)

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Outlaw Brothers (1990)

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The Godfather's Daughter Mafia Blues (1991)

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Queen's High (1991)

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I realized there was another list of GWG movies (in a paper book on HK cinema, rather than a website), and I found a few that I hadn't seen yet. Only the first of these is really any good.

Princess Madam (1989).

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Mission of Justice (1992)

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A serious shock! Yes Madam! (1993).

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The Avenging Quartet (1993)

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Madam City Hunter (1993).

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It's been an interesting journey, watching all these old HK movies. Looking back, one thing that really stands out is that Chinese comedy does not translate well. None of the movies that were supposed to be funny and none of the funny interludes in otherwise serious movies worked for me at all. It doesn't help that I am allergic to sexist humour.

And here we go with the last batch of reviews. No rhyme nor reason to these, they were ones that I obtained late or that didn't fit into any of the other themed posts. In chronological order...

Easy Money (1987)

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The Inspector wears skirts (1988)

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Killer Angels (1989)

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Blonde Fury (1989)

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Licence to Steal (1990)

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She Shoots Straight (1990)

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Black Cat (1991)

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Beauty Investigator (1993)

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Women on the run (1993)

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Satin and Steel (1994)

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Taking into account all the bad movies, all the movies with jarring shifts between light and dark themes, and all the movies with offputting attempts at (often sexist) comedy inserted into an over the top action drama, there are very few Girls With Guns movies that I'd recommend to a friend. Here's my short list of ones that I'm keeping on my hard drive for the time being:

In the Line of Duty 3, 4, & 5, Angel & Angel 2, Angel Terminators 2 (all reviewed in previous posts), and Killer Angels (reviewed above).

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)

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Lethal Panther (1990)

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Dreaming the Reality (1991)

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Naked Killer (1992), Naked Weapon (2002), Naked Soldier (2012)

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So Close (2002)

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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)

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Midnight Angel (1990)

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Angel's Mission (Xian fa zhi ren) (1990)

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Angel Force (Tian shi te jing) 1991

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Angel Terminators (made 1990, released 1992)

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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.

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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)

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Royal Warriors (1986)

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Magnificent Warriors (1987)

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

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

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

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Ahaie Tengwar Angulócello

Rants From the Dragon

Another Girls with Guns review roundup

Another round of "girls with guns" movies.

Final round of Girls With Guns films.

Girls with guns films -- assassins

Girls with guns films, "Angel" titled films

Girls with guns films

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