Satin Steel (HK 1994)

Rating: ***
Cast: Jade Leung, Lee Yuen Weh (Anita Lee), Russell Wong

Jade Leung plays a suicidal cop with an attitude, and Lee Yuen Weh is her very pretty partner with a REALLY annoying boyfriend (who should have been cut out of the script or at least savagely beaten). Ms. Leung's and Ms. Weh's fighting abilities are only average, but they're still fun to watch. Ms. Weh looks like a toughened Vivian Chow and looks GREAT handling a gun. The action is fair, but plentiful (although the post production gun flashes get really annoying), and despite its shortcomings, the film is quite fun and enjoyable.

Notes on the Vietnam Blu-Ray: Clearly a bootleg with a cheap paper insert. The sound and picture quality are excellent and probably as good as you'll ever get from the source material. Unfortunately, the transfer suffers from nausea-inducing frame rate stutters, which makes it nearly unwatchable, and a time stamp shows up briefly at one point. The English subtitles are also poor and don't match the original translation. Some are clearly completely wrong, like "no" being translated as "both" on multiple occasions, and any exclamation like "shit", "damn", or "fuck" is translated to "the curse." But the strangest one is when Eileen says that she wants to be on top, it's translated to "You are like a bag from Prague." Huh? You're better off sticking with the original Hong Kong DVD.