Ahaie Tengwar Angulócello

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) ( Read more... )

Lethal Panther (1990) ( Read more... )

Dreaming the Reality (1991) ( Read more... )

Naked Killer (1992), Naked Weapon (2002), Naked Soldier (2012) ( Read more... )

So Close (2002) ( Read more... )