Crisis
 
                    
Director: Gam Ming
Year: 1983
Rating: 6.0
Aka - Black Rose: The Hong Kong Tigress

At about the one-hour mark, Kurata Yasuaki finally shows up in this Taiwanese action film; dressed slickly in a white suit, a floppy white wide brimmed hat and a raspberry-colored shirt. Dressed to kill. Two of his underlings have messed up and are in bed having sex. He tells them we are going to the brick kiln. Probably words that should send you running. Brick kiln? In the middle of the night? Get dressed. This film is filled to the brim with something going on - fights, car chases, car crashes, motorcycle chases, necrophilia, stunts, whipping, killings by garrote, poison, broken necks, bullets, sword, falling down an elevator shaft and probably a few I forgot. And a bit of sex. Yet it still felt overly long to me. Just a bunch of action scenes strung together gets tedious if they are not first rate. And these are not. Not terrible, just nothing special. Whack whack whack. A smarter plot with fewer plot holes and dreadfully dubbed dialogue would have helped. Things such as one of the characters being hung up and whipped for ages and not a mark on his body are just needlessly careless. But I give the director Tommy Lee credit for throwing every idea he had into this. Lee is much better known as an action choreographer than a director.



It stars Lu Hsiao-fen, who had become a star two years earlier in the film The Lady Avenger, one of the Taiwanese Black film classics with its share of violence and exploitation. Here she is a karate instructor who gets a message that her father has died. She flies back to her old home - in such a hurry apparently that she forgot to pack any bras. Once home, the family gathers - her father's two mistresses, the lawyer and a few family friends. The lawyer tells them that the will can't be read till the morning when everyone brings their key. The safe needs four keys to be opened. The lawyer, the daughter and the two mistresses each have one. This sets all the shenanigans into motion. One of the mistresses tries to seduce the lawyer to the tune of Nobody Does It Better to get his key but takes a shower first - and finds he has been stabbed when she gets out.



A gang is after the four keys as well for reasons of their own and keep beating up people, chasing them, kidnapping them and so on. For the entire film. The head of this gang is played by Don Wong, the two guys who side with Lu Hsiao-fen are Chiu Ying-hong and Pan Rui-li, neither of whom I have heard of but they show some great acrobatic skills. The large way overweight killer (Cheng Fu-hung) is great - and does all these somersaults and flips - and after he has killed a woman - smiles and starts taking off his shirt. To his credit, Don Wong chastises him - "and what did you do after you killed her", "I just couldn't help myself boss", looking sheepishly.