Iron Angels

Teresa Woo San's 1987 Hong Kong film follows a three-person team working against a drug trafficking organisation. Built around women fighters, it is taken as one of the starting points of a subgenre in Hong Kong, the women's action film. Its value is in the choreography: Moon Lee and Yukari Ōshima are real martial artists and the sequences were shot without doubles. Ōshima's villain is what stays in the memory. The story is weak, the characters thin and the comic passages scatter the tone; but the raw energy of the fighting makes up for it. The production conditions were dangerous, and that shows on screen. Who it's for: viewers who like Hong Kong action cinema and women's fight films of the eighties. Who it's not for: anyone wanting a sound story, or avoiding violent content.