Pink Force Commando
Reviewed by YTSL
If there's one question I'm dying to ask Brigitte
Lin Ching-Hsia, it's not "will you ever appear in a film again?", "how
was it like to play Asia the Invincible?" or even "have you ever directed
THE glare at your husband and/or children?" Instead, I'd love to
know what possessed her to agree to grace more than one -- maybe even five
-- of Chu Yen Ping's really weird as well as indisputably baaaad movies
(and, relatedly, how the Taiwanese screen goddess and her fellow cast members
managed NOT to dissolve into hysterical laughter when doing whatever they
were asked to do by that demented -- if not permanently hallucigenically
drugged out -- director).
PINK FORCE COMMANDO puts the woman who went by
the name of Venus Lin during this frankly odd portion of her twenty year
career in the thick of: First, a bid to acquire a stash of stolen
and hidden gold; then a quest for an impossibly large diamond; followed
by attempts to acquire a valuable map and counter-attempts to prevent it
from falling into the wrong (i.e., foreign) hands. For a while, the
viewer is witness to a slew of fancy-dressed and -named folk appearing
to pop up in all sorts of odd places (e.g., a beach, a casino) and engage
in what seem like random fights (E.g., Sally Yeh plays a dynamite expert
called Mascot who decimates what look like a bunch of characters -- including
a Bruce Lee imitator and a Buddhist monk -- who have escaped from your
stereotypical 1970s era kungfu movies a few seconds after they accidentally
awaken her from her open-air slumber). Over the course of various
and varied proceedings though, the good guys and (mainly) gals get distinguished
from the evil characters by their turning out to possess patriotic and
loyal as well as heroic streaks under their mercenary and materialistic
tendencies.
...At least this is what I THINK I can determine
as occurred in this truly bizarre film! To be sure, PINK FORCE COMMANDO
seems to have a more coherent and straightforward plot than "Fantasy Mission
Force" and "Golden Queen Commando" (AKA "Amazon Commando" and hawked by
Xenon as "Jackie Chan's Crime Force"). However, anyone who knows
anything about those two seriously surreal as well as hyper silly offerings
-- which definitely share certain stylistic and budget limitations affinities
with this one (not least that of their characters looking like they were
costumed to appear in a whole bunch of different period movies) -- will
understand that this really is not saying much at all.
Alternatively, what is undeniable for this (re)viewer
is that Brigitte Lin steals the show as Jackal: Who early on betrays
her all female gang for a not particularly attractive betelnut-chewing
and -juice-spitting love, and life as a rich and luxuriously attired woman;
but redeems herself during an emotional re-encounter with a couple of her
once (and future) comrades by cutting off her left arm with a samurai sword
as penance for letting a man lead her astray. I must admit that the
strangely amusing descriptions of this woman warrior character getting
equipped with a replacement limb whose end is a working Gattling gun --
which also can be refitted to function as an electric drill! -- were what
made me want to check out PINK FORCE COMMANDO. What came as a bonus
though was the movie's star deigning to do quite a bit of serious acting
-- some of which was actually so effective as to provide this generally
absurd film with some unexpectedly moving moments (but others of which
I did find funnier than they probably were intended to be) -- rather than
just always hamming it up to the hilt (Something those who have viewed
"The Eagle Shooting Heroes" know that she is equally able of doing).
At this juncture, little doubt should remain of
it being so that PINK FORCE COMMANDO is -- by normal standards and on most
counts -- a stupefyingly terrible piece of work. Nonetheless, my
own experience provides testimony that some pleasure can be derived from
viewing what might be described as a female-dominated East Asian spaghetti
western (If not for this all sounding majorly oxymoronic and the film's
additionally featuring a black leather wearing motorbiker (Blackie Ko),
black suited ninjas, villains dressed in white KKK-like robes and others
in Nazi-type military uniforms along with a strong, clearly sensitive and
largely silent Heart-Broken Man!).
Hence my awarding this crackpot affair a "top
of the "pretty awful" range" rating of: 4.