[adrotate banner=”1″]The trailer for Legendary Amazons (杨门女将之军令如山) is here! Looks like most generic giant Chinese battle epics, though. But, every time Cecilia reacts, her hair goes flying up in the air! Red Cliff don’t got that!
[adrotate banner=”1″]Legendary Amazons (杨门女将之军令如山 AKA Lady Generals of the Yang Family) is an upcoming Frankie Chan Fan-Kei film about the real life story of the Yang family women generals, who took up fighting after the men in their family were slaughtered (some info here) Jackie Chan produces. This is a retelling of the same story from the Shaw Brothers classic 14 Amazons, and a 1960 film Women Generals of the Yang Family, plus probably others and several Peking Operas and tv series. If it is half as good as these awesome posters, it will be awesome.
Starring:
Cecilia Cheung
Cheng Pei-Pei
Yu Na
Jin Qiaoqiao
Chen Zihan
Liu Xiaoqing
Kathy Chow Hoi-Mei
Yukari Oshima (!!!)
Liu Dong
Simon Yam Tat-Wah
Here are a bunch of beautiful posters
aka Tian shi xing dong aka Fighting Madam aka Iron Angels aka Midnight Angels
1987
Directed by Raymond Leung Pun-Hei, Tony Leung Siu-Hung, and Ivan Lai Gai-Ming
Written by Teresa Woo
Angels has quite a laundry list of names. It is known in the UK as Iron Angels (as are the sequels), and the UK suffers from having a cut version of the film. Other names it has been released as include Fighting Madam, Midnight Angels, and the singular Angel.
Angels stands out from many of it’s imitators in several ways. One of the most noticeable is the fun montages set to music, complete with a bunch of quick cuts, that instantly introduce us to characters and tones. Moon Lee’s first appearance in the office is spectacular, showing her attempts to have fun and fit in with the office and work, but she still has to deal with an awful boss and is so eager to run off to shoot people she can’t wait. But those sequences aren’t as common as they should be, and with three directors running around, the film can’t become as good as it should be. That doesn’t mean it is bad or boring, just that there are brief moments of brilliance that are stifled by above averageness. If I could harness the power of wasted potential in the movies I watch, the world would never want for energy.
We know Yukari Oshima’s Madam Sue is evil because she’ll kill her coworkers to prove her point, and even kills her boss after he keeps her from getting her vision of revenge against the police force. Madam Sue laughs hysterically as cops are tortured in front of her, stopping only to lick off some blood that splatters on her. She’s having fun being the top dog of the underworld, switching cars, mocking the police who are chasing after her, even being sexually aggressive towards the DEA Agent Bill. Yukari is rarely presented as sexual in her films, and here she’s in a bathing suit, is sexually aggressive, and even has some body double nudity. Oshima embraces this role fully, and it’s among her best roles. It is a rare villain indeed that can keep up with just how evil and amoral she is.
So this version of Angels is a composite widescreen made from two different versions of the films, one edited for violence and one edited for nudity. So our copy is edited for nothing! The only drawback is it is still dubbed into English. But when a composite copy of Angels mysteriously ends up in your hands due to magic grouch fairies, you don’t look them in the mouth.
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aka Ng ye tin si
1990
Directed by Jonathan Chik Gei-Yee
Written by Abe Kwong Man-Wai
Masked female crimefighters used to populate Cantonese cinema like the buffalo used to inhabit the Great Plains. Then all the buffalo got shot, and all the female crimefighters stopped being popular after the Shaw Brothers helped eclipse Cantonese cinema. But in the late 1980s, Cantonese cinema came roaring back and by the early 90s, there were lots of action films being pumped out. So it only makes sense that there would suddenly be a masked female crimefighter film in the middle of the action fest, as the buffalo have come back. Sure, this analogy is a stretch, but just go with it!
Like many Hong Kong films from the 1990s, Midnight Angel has a billion titles, including Justice Women, Wu ye tian shi, Ng ye tin si, and The Legend of Heroism.
Our copy is an exciting VHS dub, complete with extra darkness and soft images. So don’t complain about the quality, because I’ll just ignore those complaints as that’s how we roll at TarsTarkas.NET.
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aka Xian fa zhi ren
1990
Directed by Godfrey Ho and Chris Li
A Hong Kong Girls with Guns film, starring mainstay Yukari Oshima as well as costars Dick Wei and Phillip Ko. Directed by the infamous Godfrey Ho (though there are rumors that this Godfrey Ho was just a pseudonym for Phillip Ko!) and some random guy named Chris Li. This film followed in the wake of the Angels films and is filled with lots of action thrown together with a cops and triads plot where women beat up and shoot lots of dudes. The fad produced a great deal of these films before the market moved on to other things. So here’s one of them. It’s not the best, it’s not the worst, it just is. And some days, isn’t that enough?
Angel’s Mission is also known as Xian fa zhi ren, as well as Born to Fight, Buddha’s Justice, Kicking Buddha, and Sin faat jai yan. Welcome to the world of renamed Hong Kong movies!
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aka Hong tian mi ling
1994
Directed by Godfrey Ho
In Manila, two female Hong Kong cops visit one’s cousin, only to find out he is an evil weapons dealer that targets them for death. They team up with supercop Eddie and take down their cousin as well as a bunch of other goons in a prime example of mid-90’s Hong Kong action films. We get lots of shootouts, lots of jumping stunts, kung fu mixed in the middle of gun battles, and things exploding all over the place. These films are miles beyond the current CGI/PG-13 garbage being spewed out by Hollywood, but for a Hong Kong action film of the era, it doesn’t really stand out. However, it has chicks with guns blasting people all over the place, so it fits right into our pseudo-theme month. This is a low-budget movie filmed in the Philippines to save on costs, more info is with the cast.
Female action stars have a long and glorious career in Asian cinema. Go read a book about them or something. Okay, just kidding. There was a big “Girls with Guns” fad in the late 1980’s/early 1990’s which is the focus here, and this is one of many entries that were low-budget but filled with lots of stunts. Many of the films had several of about six to eight actresses who were in the bulk of them, and we have two here, Yukari Oshima and Sharon Yeung Pan Pan, who both have a long resume filled with similar films.
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