Girls with Guns: a Hong Kong cinema staple of a bygone era
The armed-and-dangerous women genre of the 1980s and 90s was a rollicking roller-coaster during Hong Kong’s silver screen heyday
The Hong Kong film industry’s output in the 1980s and 90s was kinetic, breathtaking, bursting with innovation and energy. Films of the era insisted on packing everything possible into the run time, as if they knew something we didn’t: the city’s economy was booming and filmmakers enjoyed the kind of artistic freedom and backing that was, like the period itself, never going to last forever.
For a decade, these films provided their audience with some of the craziest movie experiences available anywhere, and the rise and fall of the genre, along with the reasons behind both, provide a glimpse into the workings of the wider industry at the time.
Hong Kong cinema of the 80s never met a rule it wouldn’t break, and the old aphorism of “there’s no reason to ever hit a woman” carried no weight in the industry’s freewheeling heyday. Whether that violence was documentary or exploitative, there were many times a female character was punched or kicked and sent flying across a room or through a table, and that same woman would, in the best action-film tradition, stand up, dust herself off, and give it right back to her attacker, more often than not emerging bloodied but victorious. For their time, these scenes could even be seen as progressive. They helped define the cinematic potential for female characters and should be thought of as the predecessors to today’s female action stars.
The genre’s films show little narrative variation. There are women. They have guns. They fight, and they shoot. Then they shoot and fight more. They break things. They break people. Sometimes they win, and sometimes they die. No one watches a Girls with Guns movie for the plot.
What makes Girls with Guns so exciting are the breathtaking stunts, filmed in ways that assure the viewer they are seeing the actors, not stunt doubles, take very real risks. Even children weren’t spared their share of death-defying stunts. A car chase in 1990’s Fatal Termination, starring Moon Lee Choi-fung, infamously features a young girl dangling outside a moving car, a terrifying scene created by dangling an actual child outside a moving car. There was a steel beam and cables involved, but the asphalt and gravity were real. In the same sequence, Lee clings precariously to the bonnet of the car, with little evidence of any similar safety measures.