Hong fen bing tuan

This film is not high art. This film was never intended to be high art. Its a popcorn movie and as such its scores at the top of the charts.

The plot of this gem has a bunch of women with various criminal skills thrown into prison during World War 2. They escape and proceed to head off to destroy a chemical lab in a well fortified valley.

What begins as a crime film, slips into a women behind film, then to a prison escape film, then a World War 2 secret mission film, onward into a western; there are ghosts, a James Bond spoof and everything you can think of except a musical number. This film almost (literally) has it all. And its all just serious enough to be interesting and silly enough to be enjoyable.

And whats a great film without some mind bending moments: the Japanese (I guess) villains all wear Nazi SS uniforms; the women all sport sunglasses and hair styles from the early 1980's, the prison guard tower spotlights are theatrical spotlights, the English dub has one of the girls a Southern belle and several of the men as dundering idiots. There's more, but I'll leave you to find it out.

This is the perfect film for those nights when you're not sure what type of movie you want to see. Its a low brow action film thats just meant to entertain, and thats what it does.

If you like exploitation style action films this is an absolute must see.

(A "sequel" is Pink Force Commandos)

One of the best worse movie I've ever seen.....didn't stop laughing once.It was like a cross between "The Dirty Dozen" (except it is with seven women) and "Enter the Dragon". The translation into English is what made it so great.

This is the nearest you'll find to a female Magnificent Seven (and Dirty Dozen, come to that). The direction and camera-work are OK but nothing special, and the story makes about as much sense as in those other films. I watched a dubbed version and the dialogue was pretty good. The brilliant Morricone score is no doubt pirated, but it's very well used. What's greatest here though is the well-acted characters. The women involved each get a separate and fun cameo intro, and their names, personalities and appearance are all distinct - not always the case in dubbed Chinese films.

The action scenes are not the greatest (and some of the shoot-outs are as silly as they are in James Bond films etc.) but they're competently done, varied, and always fun. I got as involved with this as with original-version M7 (and more than I ever did with D12) and I was as sad when one of these characters died, as I was with Coburn or Vaughan in M7.

2020 wasn't a great year for lots of reasons. One for me was I didn't see a whole lot of good movies. On the action side, it was mostly endless high-cost-CGI Avengers same-old and the like. This is the best I watched in the action genre, highly recommended, 90 minutes of fun entertainment.

The dubbing of this film deserves an honarary Oscar. From the terrible choices of English words to the insults and even the odd accents, this film has it all. The kommandant of the prison steals the show with his fearsome speeches including berating the prisoners ferociously as "all-time losers!". Add to this 7 hot Asian babes all with their own special skill and a requisite Fat guy and... voila a cinematic tour de force. Lately this movie has been packaged as a Jackie Chan movie. This is a shameless sales pitch as Chan only has a small part in it. Nevertheless a true work of genius to be savoured.

Directed by Chu Yen-Ping, but co-written by king of the 'cut and shut' ninja flick, Godfrey Ho, this is, rather unsurprisingly, a right mess of a movie, albeit an entertaining one. It begins as a women-in-prison film, turns into a prison break movie, becomes a 'women on a mission' adventure, throws in some strange comedy along the way, and ends in the cat-stroking villain's fortified lair much like a Bond movie. There's kung-fu, gun-play, sword-play, and bloody violence aplenty, meaning that it's never boring--just a bit dumb. No, make that very dumb!

Set in 1944, the film opens by introducing us to its seven main characters, sentenced to either death or a life sentence in a maximum security jail: traitor Black Fox (Brigitte Lin); warrior woman Amazon (Chun-Chun Hsu); gambler and sharp-shooter Black Cat (Hui-Shan Yang, looking like Jareth the Goblin King); drunken swordswoman Brandy (Hao-Yi Liu); murderous prostitute Sugar Plum (Joyce H. Cheng); cat burglar Quick Silver (Hsueh-Fen Peng); and explosives expert Dynamite (Sally Yeh). With their special skills, these seven young women are recruited for a dangerous mission to destroy a laboratory, meaning that they first have to escape.

What follows is a scrappy action/adventure (set to various stolen Morricone soundtracks) in which the 'Dirty Seven' break out of prison, shoot people and blow stuff up, avoid deadly booby-traps, get captured by forest bandits (who let them go after they win a series of challenges), battle an army of Japanese soldiers in Nazi-style uniforms, and enter the Valley of Death, where the Warlord and his cronies have built their laboratory. And As with most mission movies, not all of the main characters make it out alive.

None of this makes much sense (exactly where does Dynamite get her explosives? Similarly, where does Quick Silver hide her lock picks and wire-cutters?), but it's entertaining in a completely mindless manner. If anything, there's always Sally Yeh in a tiny pair of cut-off jean shorts...