Hong fen you xia

they don't make movies like this anymore, and frankly I'm surprised that they ever did. One of a sort of trilogy of films that came out that year this movie is full of action, thrills and beautiful women. It is also just plain weird and completely over the top in terms of action and bizarre larger than life characters. I haven't seen colourful people like this since "Switchblade Sisters". This is one of my favorite flicks and I heartily recommend it to anyone who loves asian action at its best cool, cool, cool characters and a plot that only makes sense if you don't think about it...at all. Just go find it!

With direction, sequencing, cinematography, scene writing, and characterizations so astoundingly poor, it's all but miraculous that one is able to make any sense of what is going on in this. Effects, stunts, and action scenes at large are executed well, but senselessly, with no apparent rhyme or reason - the cinematic equivalent of kids playing in a field and pretending this, that, and the other thing are happening both all at once and out of order. Preposterous as it is, I can accept for the sake of the narrative that every romanticized stereotype, trope, and type of action hero, and their villainous counterparts, coexist contemporaneously in the same world. I can accept that there will be no explanation forthcoming for any of these elements, and they simply Are in a story that has been cobbled together. I have a harder time accepting the absolute randomness of every single element to greet us; there is only the flimsiest, most vague through-line of a plot to weakly, loosely string everything together, and even that is deeply unconvincing. Very rarely have I ever seen another feature for which ideas were so obviously just thrown at a wall, and all tossed in willy-nilly. The difference is that any nearest point of comparison has been earnestly well made.

'Pink force commando,' or 'Gong fen you xia,' is all over the place. The most rudimentary, essential aspects of film-making seem to represent only the crudest form of competence: those behind the scenes knew how to operate their equipment, but not how to meaningfully use them to create a film. As far as one is able to discern, there are some genuinely good ideas in the writing - elements of the overall plot, and of the scene writing - but the characters are scattered nonsense, and the dialogue is sometimes altogether pointless or empty. Whether one wishes to reasonably blame the screenwriter, or just as reasonably those responsible for the above suggested facets, the scenes and plot as they present are chopped up so badly, practically mincemeat, that the value has been all but entirely stripped from them. From one moment to the next the proceedings come across as flagrantly disordered, almost haphazard; there is little if any elucidation at any time of what, exactly, is happening in a scene, of who the various characters are, or of the precise course of events as each single component is lobbed at us as heedlessly as possible. The cast? Well, they sure are in front of the camera. It's difficult to particularly assess their performances for the the fact of how utterly shoddy the construction of the picture is otherwise.

I suppose the costume design is well done, and the hair and makeup work. The sets are fine, and props and weapons. The score is decent enough even as it pointedly borrows from spaghetti westerns and fantasy flicks of years past (literally borrowed; we've heard no few of these themes before, from Ennio Morricone, Basil Poledouris, and others). Once more, I do think effects, stunts, and bursts of action are great in and of themselves; would that there were any intelligence in how they were directed, applied in a scene, or fit into the story. And so it goes for the title at large. For what very, very, very few parts of this were approached with a modicum of care, I'd love to say I like this more than I do. For the sheer paucity of such, quality, however, and furthermore the unremitting ineptitude represented in the vast preponderance of the feature, I wonder if I'm not being too kind in my remarks as it is; 'Pink force commando' is less than ninety minutes long, but it manages to feel far longer. I hope someone enjoyed making this. I hope someone, somewhere, enjoyed watching it. I just don't know how they could. This film is a godawful mess whose best ideas are rendered almost completely inert by near-total failures of fundamental movie-making and profound inadequacies throughout the writing. Since those best ideas can be found elsewhere, the only possible worth of 'Pink force commando' is as a dubious cinematic curiosity. That's enough, perhaps, for some viewers - but not many.

Sequel to Golden Queen's Commandos is just as action packed, though much more nonsensical.

The plot of the film begins with a band of women surrounded in an isolated farm house. They have stolen a large horde of gold which the military wants back. They decide that some will make a run for it with the gold while others remain behind. Any survivors will meet back at that spot in a years time to split up the money. Things don't go as planned and the story spirals out into three or ten different directions until we get to the final shoot out.

A sequel in that the same cast plays similar characters to the first film, but with different names. Also not everyone is on the same side, nor does everyone have as large a part. This film is further tied to the first by the use of footage from the first film to give a kind of background on some of the characters (also to signal which character is suppose to be which from the early film since costumes and appearances have changed).

Very good in a psychotronic sort of way, this film has a plot that makes almost no linear sense what so ever. The plot jumps from gold, to diamonds, to a map, to revenge, to about eight other things depending upon the minute. There is almost no continuity to the whys and wherefores things just sort of happen and people just sort of show up. Its never boring, but it does bend your mind since any attempt at making things make sense is a lost cause. Its so demented that even the giving of one's self over to it only barely reduces the damage, this movie is just too weird.

Like the earlier film this film is a mixture of genres, though to be honest this film is basically a western but with other things placed inside it. (I do have to report that this film does have the musical number the first film didn't have) I liked this film, I didn't love it. The problem is that its scatter-shot approach makes it much more difficult to love than the earlier film. This doesn't mean you shouldn't see it, you should, especially if you're a fan of the wild films that have come out of Hong Kong of the years or an action nut who doesn't care if everything makes sense.