She's my #1 Asian action star, and Hyomil's as well, and on Jim's top five, so I thought she deserves a thread of her own. Here's a list of her movies, with some information where I have it. What have you seen? Do you know anything about the others?

1. "Dai dey yan ching," ("Fatherland"), a tv series from 1980.

2. Jiao cha ling dan, 1981.

3. Xin shu shan jian ke, (Xu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain). Moon sparkles in Tsui Hark's flashy fantasy, but if I remember correctly, she doesn't have an action role.

4. Qi mou miao ji: Wu fu xing (Winners & Sinners). The movie belongs to Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung; I don't actually remember Moon Lee's role.

5. Geung si sin sang, (Mr. Vampire). Moon Lee plays the jiāngshī's lovely daughter in this terrific film, but again, I think her role is action-free.

6. Boh Ngau. A soccer movie.

7. The Protector. Forgettable Jackie Chan movie.

8. Xia ri fu xing (Twinkle, Twinkle, Lucky Stars). Another forgettable Jackie Chan flick.

9. Jin su xin zhong qing (Midnight Whispers). Judging from the cover, it looks like she only had a bit part, but that didn't stop the company from trying to cash in on her later celebrity.

10. Jiang shi xian sheng xu ji (Mr. Vampire 2). Moon tries, hard, to bring some energy to this atrocious sequel, but there's not much she and Lam Ching-ying can do when the director decided the film's real stars are cute kids dressed as hopping vampires.

11. Guo fu Sun Zhong Shan yu kai guo ying xiong (The Story of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen).

12. Fighting Madam, aka Iron Angels. Alongside Hideki Saijo, this was Moon's breakout role, establishing her action credentials.

13. Fighting Madam 2, aka Iron Angels 2. Alongside Elaine Lui.



14. Angel Enforcers. A Godfrey Ho movie. For those who don't know, Godfrey Ho is one of the campiest filmmakers of all time, often plagiarizing music and entire clips from other films.

15. Devil Hunters, aka Megaforce 2, aka Red Force 3, aka Ultra Force 2. Most notable for the fact that bad choreography left both Lee and costar Sibelle Hu with third-degree burns.

16. Killer Angels, aka Megaforce 1, aka Ultra Force 1.



17. Angel 3, aka Iron Angels 3.



18. Nocturnal Demon, aka Enter the Lady Kickboxer, aka Demon Intruder.

19. The Revenge of Angel. Lee plays a ghost doing kung fu in period costume.



20. Princess Madam, aka Under Police Protection. Another Godfrey Ho flick.

21. Fatal Termination. Lee doesn't really have an action-star role in this; after she loses her only fight, she needs her husband to rescue her. But there is an incredible chase/suspense scene leading up to that fight.



22. Master of Disaster. Possibly her only scenes might be recycled footage from The Protector.

23. Angel Force. Her first film with Yukari Oshima kicked off a series of winners. Also with Sibelle Hu.

24. Dreaming the Reality. Lee and Oshima are sisters raised to be assassins. Also starring Sibelle Hu.

25. To Catch a Thief.

26. Angel Terminators 2, aka The Best of Lady Kickboxer. With Yukari Oshima and Sibelle Hu.



27. Bury Me High. Odd film about a military leader and fēngshuǐ.

28. Angel Force, aka Mission Kill, aka Mission of Condor.

29. Kickboxer's Tears. My favorite Moon Lee film sees her enter ring combat against men, in some of the most grueling, intense fights I've seen -- and also classic minion mashes where she takes down a dozen guys without breaking a sweat. Terrific final battle against Yukari Oshima.



30. The Big Deal. With Sibelle Hu.

31. A Serious Shock! Yes Madam. With Cynthia Khan and Yukari Oshima. Unusual in that Lee plays the villain.

32. beauty Investigator.

33. Mission of Justice. With Yukari Oshima.



34. Inspector Wears Skirts 4. With Cynthia Khan.

35. Avenging Quartet. With Cynthia Khan, Michiko Nishiwaki, and Yukari Oshima.

36. Angels' Project. With Sibelle Hu.

37. Honor and Glory. A Godfrey Ho movie, with Cynthia Rothrock. May only have recycled footage of Lee.

38. Jing wang xiong feng.

39. Little Heroes Lost in China. A sad way to end a career. Lee plays den mother to a troop of kung fu kids, in an educational film produced by the government of mainland China.

40. Hero of Shanghai, aka Fist of Hero. TV series. I know nothing about this.

Looks like I've got some catching up to do! I must confess to not having seen most of these - but then, it looks like most of these are flawed in some way or another, e.g. supporting role, not an action character, directed by Godfrey Ho... :-) I remember being so disappointed by Avenging Quartet, which should have been an awful lot better than it was.

However, will certainly have to track down Kickboxer's Tears, as your description of it certainly sounds like it's worth a look. And that Fatal Termination chase is insane; without even clicking, I knew exactly what scene it was going to be. Hugely impressive use of CGI and green screen, to give the flawless impression that they really were dangling a kid out the window of a speeding car... [Look, just let me live with my happy illusions, ok?]

大地恩情. No subs or fansubs on DVDs. Reviews don’t mention her or which episodes she was in. She was in a number of other series before Girls with Guns took off (Wikipedia entry), but I haven’t seen any that were subtitled.


To Sir with Trouble aka 交叉零蛋. Non-action role. Review. Can’t find this anywhere except Chinese auction site taobao.


(6/10).


(8/10).



From AsianDVDClub: “There is a much better-looking remastered Japanese DVD out, but i did not get it yet.”


(4/10). Agreed, and her role non-action and very small.


Haven’t seen it, but it looks like a subtantial (non-action) role from the So Good… review, View from the Brooklyn Bridge review, and trailer:


AsianDVDClub.


aka 国父傳. I found what I’m pretty sure is this movie on tudou (opening sequence in the video displays the correct English and Chinese titles) and scanned through it thoroughly, but didn’t see Moon Lee anywhere. Maybe she was an extra in the background that I missed, but it couldn’t have been a significant role. Doesn’t look like a movie I want to see to find out, but FLKCinema.com has a version.


(10/10). The fight at the end with Yukari Oshima is one of the best.


(6/10). mechodownload has widescreen DVDRip with Cantonese audio and English subs. AsianDVDClub has CZ DVD, but it has no subs.

Trailer:



Moon Lee likely has only a cameo, as she's not listed in the credits at HKMDB, HKC, or AsianDVDClub--only on IMDb and Cinemasie.
AsianDVDClub has an uncut LDRip with Cantonese audio and English subs. Some shimmering on the picture, but not bad.


Action role. Good PQ custom DVD at AsianDVDClub with German and English audio, but no Cantonese audio or English subs. VCD at mechodownload does have them, but picture quality is horrible. FLKCinema version is subbed but fullscreen.


Action role. AsianDVDClub has CZ widescreen DVD with good PQ but only German and English audio and no English subs. Also a Mandarin-dubbed version with hardsubs.


Action role. AsianDVDClub has CZ widescreen DVD, but it has no subs. Couldn’t find any elsewhere, but there’s a fullscreen DVD with subs on a thread at asia-team (bottom post).


Action role. AsianDVDClub has it, but no seeders. YesAsia "Enter the Lady Boxer" is the title of the English dub. The FLKCinema version is at AsianDVDClub, but its field-blended.


mechodownload has a VCD with subs, but there’s a lot of macroblocking. Don't know if FLKCinema version would be better because they simply list the PQ as "Good" (when there's Excellent and Re-mastered above that).


Action role. Far East Flix version


(7/10). AsianDVDClub.


aka New Kids In Town aka New Killers in Town aka初到贵境
Action role. New Kids in Town DVD at AsianDVDClub sample I looked at isn't anything I saw in The Protector, but it does have 4:3 aspect ratio. FLKCinema version doesn't say what the aspect ratio is.


Cantonese and English audio on R1 DVD, but no subtitles.


Action role. Saw a lot of good reviews for this one.
The 687 MB VHSRip of this available on mechodownload and elsewhere is poor quality and has very distracting continuous color flickering. The DVD on AsianDVDClub is far better.


契媽唔易做. AsianDVDClub has it. Or YesAsia

via HKMDB

Trailer:



Action role. Another one with good reviews. mechodownload has ok-quality widescreen VCD with subs. AsianDVDClub has DVD, but no seeders. Source is FLKCinema, where it can still be ordered, but, unlike the VCD, its a Mandarin dub.


AsianDVDClub. Joy Sales release has slightly higher bitrate.


Action role. Best call it Mission of Condor like Hong Kong Cinemagic to avoid confusion with Angel Force, especially since they both came out the same year (1991). Version at cinemageddon is combo VCD with Cantonese but no subs and a poor-quality VHS version with subs. Also a FLKCinema version.


R1 DVD is English audio only. FemFightsVideo


(4/10). Action role. This review pretty well sums it up: View from the Brooklyn Bridge. Basically, a tedious and empty comedy with a few ok scenes. Said to be funnier if you’ve seen the actors’ previous movies, as it parodies them.


(10/10). Action role. mechodownload has ok-quality widescreen VCD. DVD at AsianDVDClub is just an upscale of that.


Action role. R1 DVD is English audio only. FLKCinema version has subs.


(7/10). Action role. Pretty inept movie, but the kind you can laugh at, with the exception of a gratuitous rape scene. Also with Carrie Ng in a beret looking ridiculous trying to seem commanding as a military leader.
mechodownload has ok-quality VCD with Cantonese and English subs. Both DVDs on AsianDVDClub are Mandarin audio only. FLKCinema version only lists "Chinese" audio.


AsianDVDClub. Or eastwestdvds


(10/10). Action role. R1 DVD has Cantonese audio and English subs. Rentable at Netflix. Don't recall having any particular dislike of this one except the abrupt ending.


AsianDVDClub. Or FLKCinema.


Secret Police (1992) (aka Dragon Angel aka 警网雄风) . Action role. mechodownload has a Mandarin dub, but there’s no subs that I could find.



VCD on Cinemageddon with English subs, but there's significant macroblocking and the picture is intermittently shaky. If you had some kind video stabilization program, you could run it through that to improve it. FLKCinema version lists quality as "Very Good" but English audio only.


Action role, but no subs or fansubs. She doesn’t appear until halfway through the series. Action clips:





41. Iron Fist (1995) (aka Fist of Power aka Power Fist aka南拳北腿)
Action role. 2-disc set rentable from Netflix, but its a condensed form of a series. Review. Music Video 1, Music Video 2. Full series (no subs) available from Goudou.

42. Dragon Get Angry (2005)
TV movie based on the Fist of Hero series. DVD with Mandarin audio and no subs: Moviehours

43. Only the Way (2008)
DVD with subs: YesAsia Looks non-action from the trailer:

Wow, thanks for the amazing post, Hyomil! I use asianDVDclub, but I'd never even heard of mechodownload. I'll be checking that out. Do you use asiatorrents or cinemageddon?

All those on mechodownload I mentioned (and a few others with Yukari Oshima and Sibelle Hu) are collected in one Girls with Guns thread. They're all hosted on Rapidshare, so you can use JDownloader if you don't have a Rapidshare account. Most are VCDs with Mandarin in the left stereo channel and Cantonese in the right. If you play them on your computer, you can probably mount those that are images, or you can extract them to folders with a program like UltraISO and play the .dat files with a player like Media Player Classic - Home Cinema, where, under Options > Internal Filters > Audio Switcher, you can configure the Cantonese play in both channels.

VCD picture quality is inherently limited by its resolution being lower than DVD, but some of these VCDs may be the best versions available, as I've read that sometimes the DVD versions, if there are any, are simply upscaled VCDs, and thus slightly worse in quality. Only a few are really bad, like Devil Hunters (which is quite stunning with the colors being way off and having lots of blurriness, macroblocking, and ghosting) or The Revenge of Angel. The Direct Line (1992) with Yukari Oshima has stuttering due to frame repeats.

I just started using torrents recently for some custom DVDs that can't be bought. I haven't tried asiatorrents or cinemageddon; they're invite-only trackers. If you have invites, I can research these movies there if you think that would be a good source. I already ran searches for all the akas on rutracker and didn't find any good versions. emule is said to be a good source for Chinese movies.

Cinemageddon is flipping INCREDIBLE, if you're willing to put in some serious effort and follow its arcane rules. (I was threatened with banning once, despite a good ratio and respectful etiquette, because I posted a question in the wrong place.) Its regular collection of films is good, maybe even excellent, but if you earn enough points, you can start making requests. And this is where CG is second to none.

Thus far I've only made a few requests, but all of them have been fulfilled. CG is full of collectors from all over the world, and if there's some obscure flick from 1978, someone might have an old VHS tape they'll rip for you. If you've earned enough points, you can also request upgrades to existing rips -- you can ask if anyone is willing to post that bootleg DVD they bought in Thailand two years ago, and you just might get it in DVD quality.

So yeah, I'd be happy to send you an invitation, but it DOES take significant work to keep your ratio up and earn points (though I can send you some points if your ratio drops too low at first, which is very, very easy to have happen).

I like Asiatorrents a lot -- I check it every day to see what's new there -- but I've never had the kind of "good-lord-I-can't-believe-it" reaction there that I've gotten from CG. I have seven invites left to Asiatorrents, if you'd like to give it a spin.

Just as a disclaimer, I DO buy the DVDs whenever they're available from legitimate sources, and I recommend everyone else to do the same. Often the fan-made subtitles are better than the official ones, so I'll download the video AND buy it, and sometimes I'll download a film or TV show that hasn't been released yet, and make a point of buying it if and when it receives an official release.

Oh, and also, if you're new to torrenting, I recommend doing all your bittorrents on an external hard drive. Torrents cause the disk to spin and shorten its life -- you probably don't want that to happen on a drive where your precious material is stored, or to a laptop's internal drive. I use a $70 1-terabyte external drive, expecting it to last a year or less, but I'll have burned all the most important contents to DVD before it dies.

Ok, PM me, and I'll run all the searches there. I'm using a seedbox now (since my ISP caps my bandwidth), so ratio won't be a problem, and I'll read the rules first.


I noticed that you can search Asiatorrents without being a member, so I just ran all the searches and got few hits, none of which were worth posting. But you might PM me that invite, too, if there's sometimes good stuff there. AsianDVDClub had most of the titles, just not many seeders, so it looks like searching multiple trackers is needed. FYI, you can search multiple sites at once with the Web Search Pro addon for Firefox.


I try to as well, but they don't make it easy. Even using Web Search Pro to search multiple stores like YesAsia, Play-Asia, HKFlix, Sensasian, renchi, DVDAsian, DDDHouse, Buyoyo, amazon.cn, or Goudou, much of the time I can't find the titles or they're listed as "Out of Print." I also wonder how to know which of these sites are legitimate and whether my money is actually supporting the filmmakers or just pirates. Which legitimate sources do you recommend and how do you keep track of when official releases occur?


If I do any uploads, I'll keep that in mind, but my understanding is, while heavy use shortens the lifespan, external drives typically fail because of overheating, unless they have a fan blowing on them. I just have a few internal drives with fans cooling them, and their being inside my case reduces the noise.

Also, after burning over 300 DVDs, I decided it just wasn't worth it and now buy 2 TB hard drives off eBay (Would move up to 3TB, but they can have compatibility issues unless they're external.). If I want to watch or check something, its too much trouble to dig through a pile of discs and wait while they copy to a hard drive. And you can back up your hard drives automatically to one or two other hard drives using parity with the free software RAID program FlexRAID. Then any one drive can fail and you'll be able to restore its data once you get a new one.

I agree about Cinemageddon, which is quite the mother-lode of obscure flicks. I was struggling to find enough content for the site, up until I joined there: you've probably noticed the ramping up from three titles a month to five or six! GWG.org's future is now secured for the foreseeable future. :-) As well as Moon Lee, they've got a ton of Yukari Oshima films; there's an unofficial project to build a complete set.

AsiaTorrents and its sister site euTorrents are also very useful, given CG's somewhat "esoteric", shall we say, rules for inclusion. New stuff will typically show up there well before CG. Just make sure you have AdBlockPlus or something similar enabled, as I find AT/ET almost unnavigable otherwise.

My approach is somewhat different: I don't keep much. I treat it more like having a set of friends with very large DVD libraries, who loan me stuff! This realization came about because we've moved twice in the past 18 months, and I realized just how many DVDs we have, that we have only watched once. [Seriously, bookcases full of 'em] Now, I download something, view it, and typically will delete it after a bit; if I ever want to view it again, I'll download it again. [Another of the "problems" on CG is, for the obscurer stuff, seeding it back to 1:1 can take forever].

That's probably why I've been fine with a 150 Gb internal drive, though it is wheezing a bit. I am contemplating an external drive, just to relieve the pressure [courtesy of tv-vault.me, CG's sister site for TV shows, which take up a LOT of space] Hadn't thought about the hard-disk wear and tear issue, it's a good point. I don't do more than a couple of movies per week, and stick to private trackers, so our ISP doesn't seem to mind - though they did temporarily disconnect us after they found our son sharing...I can't hardly bring myself to say it ...Eureka. :-( How embarrassing! Seriously, I'm out there seeking out obscure 80's action flicks, and he'd d/ling SyFy Channel series. Sheesh. Where did we go wrong?

Hyomil, it looks like AT's invitation system has been disabled for the moment; I don't know when it will be back up. Are you sure CG requires an invitation? I couldn't find how to send one. Do you know anything about that, Jim?

I think AT may be open sign-up right now? Try here...
http://www.asiatorrents.com/index.php?page=signup
On CG, only superfans and up get invites. I'm merely a lowly power user right now. Your best bet is to go here:
http://cinemageddon.net/signup.php
As dead accounts are pruned every half an hour, opening up slots for new signees. Obviously, your best bet is off-peak hours. Took me a while to get in, but it's worth the effort!