Rating: **
Review Date: 7/24/99
Director: Tommy Liu
Unbelievably bad. Irresponsible cheesecake filmmaking at its worst (or best, depending on your criteria). A mysterious woman rescues a handful of damsels in distress and enlists them in her all female anti-terrorist squad. Naturally, the official uniform of the anti-terrorist group consists of tight white tank tops and khaki short-shorts. The film wastes no time in getting to where it wants to be - within five minutes the cast is assembled and they're ready to start their training. Then it's a full hour and ten minutes of combat training exercises and slumber party shenanigans as the girls go through their daily routines. Of course there are practical jokes, catfights, water fights, inane giggling, and a wide variety of sexual humor and breast jokes. You know you're in trouble when the refrain of the movie's theme song is "Big-breast girls are coming for you..." Oh my god, kill me now. Then, in a desperate attempt to wrap the film up, the girls finally go on a mission in the last ten minutes of the film. They raid a warehouse full of bad guys and shoot them all dead. The end. Of course, we've seen this all before in films like the "Inspectors Wear Skirts" (1988) series, "Five Lady Venoms," and especially "Lunatic Frog Women" (1989). Yet, for as awful as it is, it manages to maintain a level of quality that I've rarely seen in this genre (hence the two star rating). The girls are all nice to look at, and although exploitive and gratuitous in intent, it's reserved and almost tactful in execution. The tasteless camera work and pointless nudity so common to these kinds of productions is surprisingly absent, which I found refreshing. (that doesn't mean that the film itself isn't pointless and tasteless...)
Eastern Heroes gets a big brown turd award for their release of this film. Like always, they've renamed the film and obscured any trace of its origin - I had a horrible time trying to figure out the original name of the film and when it came out. Second, it's blatantly marketed as a Category III film when it quite clearly isn't. The box boldly states "WARNING - THIS FILM CONTAINS SCENES OF A VIOLENT & SEXUAL NATURE," when in actuality there is no sex, no nudity, no swearing, and nothing particularly violent in the film whatsoever. They don't even squib the bad guys! (I've seen more sex and violence in old re-runs of "T.J. Hooker") Now that I think of it, the film reminds me more of an aerobics workout tape than anything else...