Whilst these pages have mostly featured films emanating from the Bombay production line there was until recent times an equivalent industry in Pakistan. Films from here are colloquially known as coming from Lollywood.  Sadly Lollywood appears to be in terminal decline. There are many factors for this but surely excruciatingly bad acting, repetitive banal storylines and poor production values are partly responsible.  Together with the encroachment of Western film there appears to be little hope for large scale Lollywood film. For devotees of the Girls and Gun genre though this is in fact quite sad news. Yes the film stock is of half speed VHS quality or worse and there are only so many times you can view the same actors hamming their way through corny actioners and melodramas but Lollywood has never been reticent in giving the girls a piece of the action in both good girl and bad girl roles.

To list the actors and actresses who appear in Lollywood films during its heyday would not be arduous. Barely any film made in the late 80's to the early 2000's would fail to feature either Anjuman, Saima, Reema, Meera, Babra Sharif or a combination thereof. Together with the stock male actors of the period the relationship between them all is nearly incestuous. Fortunately most of the actresses were capable of doing the numerous gun girl roles required with panache even if the action scenes were nowhere in the same league as a Hong Kong movie. The problem with the action scenes is that they are frankly ludicrous. Whilst it is a film convention that the bad guys cannot hit a barn door in the final scene of a film the mass slaughter which the good guys are inflicting is by comparison ridiculous and the bad guy always seems to give a bellicose speech of intent and then deliver nothing. And this happens EVERY film (or so it seems). Regardless, watching Saima decimate anyone who stands in her way is always worth a few hours of anyone's time and her film roles in which she does this are far too numerous to mention. Being an Islamic country the impression is that acting is not really considered a suitable profession for a woman but actresses like Saima seem to have overcome this obstacle - at least if her massive output of film and popularity is to be considered.

Lollywood has few problems depicting the female avenger - the main reason being that there is only a few major actresses who gets cast to do these roles - the most notable being Saima or Anjuman if you look further back in history. Since the genre is/was extremely popular in Pakistan it is easy to get a Saima overdose. In fact it might be harder to find a film where Saima is NOT a gun toting avenger than one where she is. However she has real presence on screen so is never really miscast especially as she has the physique, looks and attitude e to play a no nonsense action heroine.

With the near extinction of the Lollywood movie factory we have probably lost the ISC's richest vein of action girl movies. Most people won't mourn too much as the production quality of the movies was with few exceptions quite low, the acting melodramatic and turgid in the extreme and the storylines dreadful . However as somebody who has a soft spot for regional cinema it does seem a pity that these films which in many respects are a throwback to American cinema from decades ago are now a rarity. A few films are still being produced of a general higher quality. Sadly we are unlikely to see the plethora of low quality films starring the finite pool of Pakistani actresses first singing and dancing (often under waterfalls of course) and then becoming gun toting action girls again.