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Inspired though the alternate titling might be, the original title likely gives a better idea of the inspiration for this 1977 Shaw Brothers flick: think Charlie's rather than deadly. Three women, from Korea, Hong Kong and Japan, under the orders of The main problem is, this takes way to long to get to the action. Outside of a pretty decent training sequence, there's very little to speak of for the first hour. The film tries to make up in sex, what it doesn't deliver in violence, with plenty of nudity and coercive sex, but the only point of note is an impressive death by fire extinguisher, inflicted on a witness by the chief villain's main squeeze (Shaw Yin Yin, one of the decade's leading erotic actresses in Hong Kong). Things do perk up in the final reel, with a series of pretty decent battles, in which the girls take on a host of minions, with a little help from Li (Liu), whose father was the one who got "extinguished" (and who, like most Hong Kong martial artists of the time, appears to be trying to channel the very busy spirit of the late Bruce Lee). The agents also have some neat gadgets, such as a belt-buckle that become a spiked yo-yo kind of weapon, a folding cross-bow and a hair scrunchie which forms part of an explosive slingshot. More of these being put to use, and less of victims being slapped around, would have upped the entertainment quotient. You can see the influence this would have on 80's entries in the genre, but at this point, we're still talking "barely crawled out of the sea" in evolutionary terms. [January 2012] |
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