Beauty Investigator
Director: Lee Tso-nam
Year: 1993
Rating: 7.5
Dubbed (badly)
from an old Tai Seng dvd
In the realm of Hong Kong's Girls with
Guns genre, the two actresses who are most acclaimed were Moon Lee and Yukari
Oshima. In the film Angel in 1987 they kicked off the genre and loads of
other similar films soon followed and lots of actresses joined in the fun.
This spurt of kick-ass female empowerment only lasted a few years though
before it collapsed under the weight of terrible scripts, negligible budgets,
fly by night production companies and just an onslaught of these films. But
they still have a big fanbase that appreciates what all these women did.
Moon and Yukari were together in nine
films - usually on opposite sides of the law with Yukari being Japanese generally
cast as the villain - till she became so popular that they had to make her
the hero in some films. One was a dancer, the other a trained martial artist
and it is always a bit special when they are paired together in a film.
If someone were to make a compilation of their best death defying stunts
and fights, it would be rather amazing. Of the nine films they were in together
five in my opinion are pretty good - Angel, Angel Terminators 2, Dreaming
the Reality, Kickboxer's Tears and A Serious Shock! Yes Madam (in which
Moon goes against type and plays a psycho). You might notice that I didn't
include Beauty Investigator (1992) in that list. For good reason.
It is a strange hybrid - a Girl's with
Guns Comedy in which we get a decent share of action with an excellent finale
but you have to wade through a lot of silly comedy to get there. Whether
one enjoys the film (and from some reviews I saw it doesn't seem many did)
is probably dependent on how much you like Moon being adorably cute. Because
we get a lot of that. If she was any cuter, the earth would be in danger
of stopping its rotation. A lot of pouting, expressions of annoyance, caps,
silliness and eye-rolling goes on here. I eat that up like melting ice cream
but I can quite understand those that don't. Of course, they probably kick
their dogs too.
She and her female partner (Gam Chi-gei)
are the worst cops on the Hong Kong police force. But that doesn't stop
them from keeping their jobs - they just put on the pout to the Captain
(Melvin Wong) and look downcast and he forgives them. At one point in a
car chase Moon blows up every car on the street with a shotgun except the
one she is aiming and decapitates their car driving under a crane at and
the Captain just says do better. The two of them are called into a case
of hostess girls getting tortured, raped and strangled and upon seeing the
dead body Gam vomits all over it. This must be common in the HK police force
as it happens multiple times in the film Red Shield that I just saw.
Being women and attractive ones at that,
Wong of course has them go undercover at a hostess bar where men paw at
them like a bear with honey but Wong tells them they should not have sex
with a customer. If they can help it. Another plot that eventually intersects
is about a gang leader who knocks off all the people above him in the food
chain but also betrays the Yakuza. He calls in a Japanese assassin to do
his dirty deeds - Yukari (credited as Cynthia Luster in the American version)
with a lethal blow dart and a garroting wire. It is a rogues gallery of B
film bad guys - Billy Ching, Billy Chow, Peter Yang, Choi Jeong-Il, Shum
Wai and Chung Fat. Yukari's fight with Chung Fat was a lost opportunity -
he is a terrific martial artist but their fight only lasts a minute or two.
Yukari's fight with Sophia Crawford (who does a nude shower scene for some
reason) fares better. So not a great film or by most people's thinking a
good one, but it is Moon and Yukari so the time passed pleasantly enough
for me.
