Tag: 1990

The Inspector Wears Skirts series

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★★★½
The Inspector Wears Skirts

skirts1aSpun off from the popular Lucky Stars series, this takes Madam Wu (Hu), who had first appeared in Twinkle, Twinkle Lucky Stars, and branches out into its own saga. After an unfortunate incident involving a sheik’s wife, the local police decide to set up a special group of women officers, who can handle similarly sensitive missions. Wu is given the task of licking the candidates into shape, with the help of Interpol’s Madam Law (Rothrock), and despite the disdain of Inspector Kan (Fung), who is training a similar group of men. Needless to say, the male and female squad members compete, both for success and each other’s attentions, but both are called in to provide security for a showcase featuring priceless jewels. Will the ladies finally be able to prove they are worthy of serving alongside their gentleman colleagues?

If you want an example of the “kitchen sink” school of Hong Kong cinema, look no further, because Chin hurls everything he can think of at the camera. As well as the action – largely concentrated around whenever Madame Law is present – there’s drama (the inevitable cocky bitch among the women learns it’s a team job, misanthropy (two of the recruits discover they share the same boyfriend, and give him a brutal beating) and even a musical number. Oh, yes: and large slabs of broad comedy, particularly in the middle, with a lengthy sequence resulting after the two teams go on a mutual outing to a roller-skating rink. This isn’t subtle, but I’ll admit, I did laugh out loud on at least one occasion. The shifting between these approaches is rarely less than jerky, leaving the viewer with the vague impression they’re channel surfing HK television.

Still, the action, whenever it shows up, is as good as you’d expect from a film produced by Jackie Chan, and on which his world-famous Stunt Team was involved. Rothrock and Hu do much of the heavy lifting, but the rest of the cast don’t seem to get off lightly, Hui in particular. Bizarrely memorable, is the training sequence where Law encourages the recruits to run faster by having them chased by blazing trails of gasoline. [The Chan-esque out-takes at the end show you they clearly needed a couple of takes to get that right…] The final battle, against Western jewel thief Jeffrey Falcon is particularly impressive, and is embedded at the end of this review for your viewing pleasure. If only there’d been rather more of this – rather than, say, quite as much roller-skating – this could have been a classic. Instead, it’s excellent in short bursts, and merely acceptable for long spells.

Dir: Wellson Chin
Star: Sibelle Hu, Kara Hui, Shui-Fan Fung, Cynthia Rothrock
a.k.a. Top Squad

★★
The Inspector Wears Skirts II

skirts2For the first hour, this is among the most miserable of action heroine sequels ever to come out of Hong Kong. It’s right down there with Naked Killer II: Raped by an Angel, in terms of the gulf in quality and entertainment value separating it from the original. While Hu and Fung return, as leaders of the male and female squads respectively, outside of a minor battle in the lunch-room, there is almost no significant action to speak of, until the final 20 minutes. It’s almost as if the makers forgot entirely about this side of things until the last week of shooting, and were forced to make up for lost time. It’s certainly brisk and not badly put-together. However, if you’re anything like me, you’ll be ramming your head into the wall and praying for unconsciousness, long before all that shows up.

The main thing you’ll take away is an appreciation for the delicate balance between action and comedy managed in the first film. Where that juggled those two balls with some adroitness, the balance here is tilted heavily towards the latter, and I’m strongly inclined to put comedy in quotes. For the laughs are largely the product of things like new recruit Amy Yip’s large breasts – she cuts holes in her bullet-proof vest, because she doesn’t want it flattening her figure. There’s even a scene which makes heavy use of flaming excrement for comedic effect. Oh, hold my aching sides for I fear they may split. As in the original, there’s a lengthy “date night” sequence, set at a birthday party for Madame Wu, rather than a roller-skating rink, but still complete with a musical number. It manages to be even worse-staged than the original.

Things do improve somewhat in the second half. There’s a contest on an obstacle course, which emphasizes teamwork over individual success, then another rehash from part one, a “best out of three” martial arts match between the Banshee and Tiger squads. These could have been the most badly choreographed fights in the history of kung fu, and they would still have come as a blessed relief from comedic Peeping Tom-foolery and people smearing tofu on their own face. Have to say, the poster above (Vietnamese?) probably had rather more effort put into its creation, than most of the scenes in the actual movie. There’s an almost overpowering feeling this was little more than a hurriedly concocted cash-in on the success of its predecessor.

Dir: Wellson Chin
Star: Sibelle Hu, Sandra Ng, Shui-Fan Fung, Billy Lau

★★
The Inspector Wears Skirts III

Just about any effort at meaningful action is abandoned here, in favour of comedy which spoofs other movies, including Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, the Chinese Ghost Story series and, in the second half, Hong Kong classic, God of Gamblers. Actually, as a fan (to varying degrees) of all those, I didn’t mind too much: it’s a damn sight more successful than the dire attempts at humour which sank part II before it had left the harbour. Those boat metaphors are also appropriate, given this carries the sub- or alternative title, Raid On Royal Casino Marine. The main mission here sees the Banshee Squad going undercover on a boat, where Amy (Ng) has to take over as a syndicate’s top gambler, after the real person is unceremoniously dumped overboard. However, robbers have designs on the $200 million pot, and hijack the ship, so it’s up to Madam Wu (Hu) to parachute in to the rescue of Inspector Kan (Fung).

inspector3

Takes a while to get to that point, as it starts with We and Kan now married, and Wu apparently largely happy to be a home-maker. Kan is tasked with reviving the Banshee Squad, though his training methods are… somewhat different, shall we say. Yay for electrocuting tied-up women! They gain revenge by donning the hockey mask and knife gloves of Jason and Freddy Krueger, to terrorize him, then restaging an entire Chinese Ghost Story sequence. It’s all such a product of its time (1990) – but since that was when I was heavily into both schlock horror and Hong Kong fantasy, I can’t complain too much, and just wallowed in shameless nostalgia for a bit. However, whatever it may have gained on the comedy side, is entirely handed back in a lack of competent or interesting action. Jackie Chan and his team had clearly severed all connections with the series for this entry, and the results are entirely pedestrian, with hardly a single moment, let alone sequence, of note.

While it likely made more sense at the time, I can safely say it certainly hasn’t stood the test of time very well. I think it’s probably best to say no more and move on to the final entry. Otherwise, I’ll probably have spent longer writing this review, than they spent on creating the entire movie…

Dir: Wellson Chin
Star: Shui-Fan Fung, Sandra Ng, Billy Lau, Sibelle Hu
a.k.a. Raid On Royal Casino Marine

★★★
The Inspector Wears Skirts IV

While still packed with crappy humour, this was at least crappy humour that occasionally made me laugh, rather than roll my eyes. The fourth and final installment went out on a relative high. It demonstrates that it helps when making an action-comedy, to have actors who know their way round the action part. Here, that’s Lee and Khan, both of whom were veterans in the Hong Kong GWG field, and the martial arts here are pretty close to the quality we saw in the first installment.

Madam Lee (Lee) is struggling with the latest bunch of female recruits in the Banshee Squad, to the point where her boss Supt. Hu (Fung Woo), might have to close down the group entirely. For another officer, Madam Yang (Khan), has founded a “gilt-edged” women’s task force, which has been getting glowing reports. To try and recover, Lee and her assistant, Ann (Tse) go in search of some of the former members, now in civilian life, to see if they will come back and help restore the Banshee Squad to its former glories. Which is how we get the return of Amy (Ng) and May (Kara Hui), who have become a single mother and nuttier than a fruitcake respectively.

It’s certainly not elevating the wit: mental illness and date-rape jokes, toilet humour and crotch whacks are very much the order of the day here, right up to the final shot, the film freeze-framing on an excrement gag (perhaps literally!). But there are occasions where it works, such as the misfiring of a pair of jet-propelled shoes, which feels like it could have come out of a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. Someone even gets fired from a cannon. There are also things parodying the bus chase from Police Story [remember, Jackie Chan was a producer on the first Skirts film], Once Upon a Time in China, and probably a whole bunch of other stuff which has gone under the bridge of memory over the past 28 years.

Eventually, we get to the action-oriented main course, which sees the bad guys taking the commissioner’s son hostage in his school. Naturally, Madams Lee and Yang have to team up with each other, as part of the anti-terrorist forces. Even though the fights seem more than a little sped-up, they’re entertaining and well-staged, especially the final battle against a superkicker, whom I’ve seen identified as  Chui Jing Yat, which goes on for what seems like ever, in and around the school. It likely makes me view this slightly more kindly than it deserves, and this is not going to be a film in either Khan or Lee filmographies that will be ranked near the top. But if you’re going to go out, go out on a high note, I say.

Dir: Wellson Chin
Star:Moon Lee, Wan-Yee Tse, Cynthia Khan, Sandra Ng

Maniac Nurses

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★★½
“Nurse! The screens!”

That this Belgian flick starts off with a dedication to Ilona Staller (a.k.a. Italian porn star, Cicciolina), artist provocateur Jeff Koons, and Traci Lorde, likely tells you it should not be taken too seriously. Certainly, the amusement to be found largely requires the viewer to be aware of the genres to which this is a homage. This is best exemplified by the Ilsa trilogy, yet there are also aspects borrowed from women-in-prison and Naziploitation in general. The more you’re familiar with those, the more you’ll get out of this: if you’re not, this will seem just a bad movie. A really bad movie.

The plot, such as it is, takes place in a facility of indeterminate, yet likely medical, purpose overseen by the evil and sadistic Ilsa (Brown) – actually, let’s just take “evil and sadistic” as read for the rest of the characters, since it applies to pretty much everyone. There’s her second-in-command, Greta (Farago), who is increasingly jealous of the attention Ilsa pays to the younger, prettier Sabrina (Makay), who spends her time reading poorly-drawn comic books when not engaging in random acts of carnage.

Thinking about it, the latter element also applies equally to everyone else here. As does Sabrina’s fondness for lingerie. Anyway, when not hijacking cars on the nearby roads, or hunting those unfortunate enough to camp in the woods, these maniac nurses are torturing their victims. Yet Greta’s jealousy eventually leads her to reveal the (not very) shocking truth about Sabrina’s origins. This triggers the most casual of rampages by the latter, in which she wanders round the facility at a moderate pace, gunning down everyone in her path.

The most notable artistic element here though, is the narration – something which may have been added by distributor Troma, since he is not mentioned in the film’s credits. If you’ve seen the opening of Faster Pussycat, this is basically that kind of over-ripe exposition, yet goes on for virtually the entire duration. It’s surreal, borderline insane and likely further evidence this is intended as a thoroughly self-aware pastiche of cult, B-movies, whose incoherent narrative is a deliberate stylistic choice. As such, it’s almost bulletproof, critically speaking. When a film is intended to be terrible, saying it is, doesn’t have much impact.

While the actresses here are certainly easy on the eye, their performances are virtually non-existent – although in their defense, they could have been Meryl Streep, and would still probably not have survived the dubbing. Again: this is quite possibly intentional. Yet, even as I certainly got the joke, it was one which out-stayed its welcome. The genres in question are ripe for parody – and I speak as a fan of them, more or less. If done right, you get the glory of something like Reform School Girls, which had energy, invention and Sybil Danning. This needs more of all three. Particularly Sybil Danning.

Dir: Leon Paul De Bruyn [as “Harry M. Love”]
Star: Susanna Makay, Hajni Brown, Celia Farago, Nicole A. Gyony
a.k.a. Maniac Nurses Find Ecstacy

Night of the Living Dead (1990)

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★★★½
“Better head(-shot) than dead.”

Important to note the year here, because the original Night of the Living Dead, for all its massive influence (without it, there’d be no The Walking Dead or World War Z) was very, very far from an action heroine film. Though it started off focusing on its female lead, Barbara, after she reaches sanctuary in the farmhouse, she spends virtually the rest of the movie in a near-catatonic state, and the film switches focus to Ben, who becomes the film’s hero. The change for this remake is one of a number of alterations, which are likely both necessary and helpful: when you are redoing a film widely regarded as a classic, you’d better bring something new to the party. That’s something largely forgotten by many horror remakes.

Even to non-horror fans, the plot likely doesn’t need much description. On a visit to her mother’s grave with her brother, Barbara (Tallman) finds herself the target for first one, then multiple, crazed attackers. She takes refuge nearby, along with others seeking shelter. They include Ben (Todd), a no-nonsense type, who repeatedly and at increasing volume crosses swords with Harry (Towles) over whether or not everyone would be better off sheltering in the cellar. As the zombie hordes congregate, various escape plans are formulated and tried – but tensions continue to rise, and the biggest threat to collective survival may not be the undead, banging on the doors.

Largely done for financial reasons – creator George A. Romero made very little from the original, despite its success – this works unexpectedly well. Right from the start, it adjusts the story in small ways that will surprise those familiar with the original, on its way to an ending which twists sharply away from the source, not once but twice. However, it’s the change in Barbara which probably represents the largest shift. Initially, it looks like she’s going the same route, and will spend much of the film suffering from shock. However, she snaps out of it, and rapidly becomes the most sensible member of the group: her suggestions are credible, and she doesn’t engage in the bickering which threatens to tear the group apart, instead firing back, “You can talk to me about ‘losing it’ when you stop screaming at each other like a bunch of two-year-olds.”

She’s well ahead of the curve in terms to figuring things out, too. Witness the scene where there’s still some uncertainty about what they’re facing: she fires several shots into a zombie’s body, asking repeatedly, “Is he dead?”, before finishing the creature off with the archetypal bullet to the brain. No further questions. At the end, while still having some moral qualms – “We’re them and they’re us” – she is capable of putting them aside, and become a bandolier-wearing bad-ass. In the event of a zombie apocalypse, this version of Barbara is one of the people you’d most want beside you; she’s smart, ruthless and takes absolutely no shit from anyone, human or zombie.

Dir: Tom Savini
Star: Patricia Tallman, Tony Todd, Tom Towles, McKee Anderson

Robo-CHIC

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★
“Overdrawn at the comedy bank”

robochicDr. Von Colon (King) has completed his life-work, a female robot called Robo-CHIC (Shower and/or Jennifer Daly – we’ll get into the logic of this later), the second half of her name standing for Computerized Humanoid Intelligent Clone. At the same time, nerd terrorist Harry Truman Hodgkins (Ward) has planted a dozen nuclear bombs around the United States, times to go off at regular intervals. While he’s easily arrested, he is busted out during transit to the federal pen, falling under the control of evil overlord Quentin Thalian, who decides that if he holds Hodgkins hostage, he’ll then hold the nation hostage. And his demands won’t stop at getting girls to like him: he’ll also demand the police stand down so he can do whatever he wants. An unguarded remark by the Doctor – more or less along the lines of “somebody needs to do something!” – sets Robo-CHIC in pursuit of Hodgkins, along with TV reporter John Kent (Baker), and they have to resolve all this mess before any more stock footage of nuclear explosions occurs. And I haven’t even mentioned the biker gang, Satan’s Onions. They should be Satan’s Minions, but there was a screw up with their jackets. This does, however, provide a good indication of the extremely low-hanging comedic fruit at which this film aims.

Even given this, it misses more of than it hits, in particular with Dr. Von Colon, who comes over as some bizarre cross between Albert Brooks and Lloyd Kaufman – and not the good aspects of each, either. The only two people who have the right approach are Ward, and Rita Gonstodine as stunningly stupid newscaster and colleague of Kent’s, Bambi Doe. Those offer about the only times you laugh with the film, rather than cringing at it. Then, you have the fact that two entirely different actresses play the heroine during the film. It appears Shower, despite receiving a production credit, bailed on the production midway through shooting, but it was decided to replace her and keep shooting, on the basis the audience either wouldn’t notice or wouldn’t care. The blonde, curly wig worn by both helps, and it’s not as blatant as, say, Bela Lugosi in Plan 9, yet they also decided this was a story which needed to be told at a length of more than 100 minutes. Even if this was now a sunk cost, the correct decision when the lead actress left, would have been to shoot the bare minimum necessary with the replacement to qualify as a feature. Trust me, future generations of viewers would have thanked you.

This is so lacklustre, it barely qualifies as an action film. However, this is also so unfunny, it barely qualifies as a comedy, and long before this reaches its climax, your attention will be sorely taxed, because it feels perilously close to an idea rejected by Troma. And given the films Troma did make the same year this came out (1990) included Sgt. Kabukiman N.Y.P.D. and A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell, that would set the bar so low, a limbo-dancing midget would encounter problems. Avoid, at all costs.

Dir: Ed Hansen + Jeffrey Mandel
Star: Kathy Shower, Ranson Baker, Kip King, Burt Ward