Lethal Panther

The movie is about two female assassins who got the job to kill each other.

This movie is typical Southeast Asia's movie from 90s which use to have lots of violence, killings, gang wars, double crossing, Erotic scenes but lacks good plot and script.

The characters have done the required hard work and some what did justice to their job.

Plot and script is the weakest part of the movie and so as the screenplay.

The movie has nothing to watch for apart from some erotic scenes.

A routine girls 'n' guns Hong Kong action flick from the 80s, Godfrey Ho's Deadly China Dolls has all of the right ingredients: sexy female assassins, machine gun toting bad guys, and faceless goons in suits and sunglasses ripe for the killing. Unfortunately, the unremarkable story and Ho's sub-par direction (think John Woo, but with barely a fraction of the panache and originality) mean that the film is, for the most part, rather tedious. However, the inclusion of several scenes of gratuitous nudity, some bloody battles, and the occasional martial arts moment makes it just about watchable for fans of bullets and babes mayhem.

The messy story revolves around the greedy nephew of a crime lord, who has his uncle bumped off so that he can take over the business. There are several silly plot threads which include his wish to also bump off the stepson of his dead uncle, and eliminate the assassins he hired (in order to tie up loose ends). Meanwhile, a cop (Sibelle Hu), is out to arrest any or all of the bad guys.

Ho litters his film with splattery squib spurting gunfights in which nearly everyone gets shot at least ten times, pausing occasionally to include a sleazy sex scene (featuring full frontal female nudity) to spice things up, but the result is a so-so addition to the genre which adds nothing new.

From the opening scene of CIA agent Sibelle Hu telling a counterfeiter that she will let him go if he can beat her in a fight (!) to the scene of a prostitute comparing her job with that of a hired killer and coming to the conclusion that "my job is safer, unless the men have AIDS" (!), "Deadly China Dolls" is a ludicrous mess. Nothing here is original, nothing is believable, and nothing makes sense (the bad guys want to kill the killers so that there are no witnesses, and where do they try to do it? In supermarkets and strip clubs, among other places!). The action is sub-John Woo, and most of the villains are pathetically lousy shots. Maria Jo and Miyamoto Yoko do a fair job, but they are not interesting or engaging. And I don't know what's wrong with Sibelle Hu, but she looks awful in this movie. (**)

Except a good time is not really what you will find when you sit down to watch the 1990 movie "Lethal Panther" (aka "Jing tian long hu bao").

I remember watching this movie on VHS back in the 1990s, and I was given the chance to sit down and watch it again here late in 2020. I couldn't remember the movie really, so I took the time to sit down and watch it once again. And it turns out that the movie was not particularly great. Perhaps that is why I had completely wiped it from my memory.

The storyline told in "Lethal Panther" was so random and almost not coherent at all. It seemed like director Godfrey Ho just made up things as he had an idea and as the filming of the movie progressed. There was just almost no existing red thread throughout the course of the movie. Needless to say that there was a lot of random fillers that served no purpose to the storyline, and the movie had some of the most cringeworthy sex scenes I have ever seen in a movie. I am seriously hard pressed to figure out just exactly what writers Simon Fong and Charles Ng were thinking when they concocted the script and storyline for "Lethal Panther".

The acting in the movie was dubious at best. So you are not going to be in for any particular grand Shakespearian experience when you sit down to watch "Lethal Panther". But then again, just looking at the movie's cover, who would be expecting such a thing. And it requires little imagination to figure out why the female leads were hired for the movie.

One thing that works well enough for the movie is the sheer amount of action sequences in the movie. Sure, many of them were corny and haven't withstood the test of time all that well. And the sound effects for the fighting, well, let's just say they tried.

I enjoy Asian action movies and martial arts movies, "Lethal Panther", however, is not a movie that ranks up high on the list of impressive action or martial arts movies. In fact, it was rather difficult enduring it again and making it through the course of the movie.

My rating of "Lethal Panther" ultimately has to land on a generous three out of ten stars. If you enjoy Asian action movies, skip on this one and put something else on. God knows, there are an abundance of readily more interesting and entertaining Asian action movies out there.

My respects go out to the actors and actresses for their commitment to the hard physical and mental work they put into this 1990 movie. The movie is beyond doubt, an intense action based work of filmography. Criticism comes to mind for the need of more suspense, or of a greater hidden complexity of the story line. If movies are about portraits, landscapes, and persona, then these attributes could have become more developed. I especially send my best wishes to Yoko Miyamoto, to Maria Jo, and to Sibelle Hui for their courage to reflect upon these persona. Also, my best wishes go out to them for their future work in filmography.