A Queens Ransom
Director: Ting Shan-hsi
Year: 1976
Rating: 5.0
Another re-watch
from a film I last saw decades ago. My review then wasn't very positive
- 2.5 - and it still isn't. It doesn't help that I needed a telescope to
read the English subs on my vcd but all the faults are still there. A better
plot than I recalled but the missed opportunities are like a knife in the
back.
They are coming to kill Queen Elizabeth
of England in Hong Kong. Spoiler Alert. They fail and some 45 years later
she is still around and kicking. The Queen in fact did visit Hong Kong in
1975 and stock footage of that is used. I was hoping the Queen would get
to use her famous Buckingham Punch on them but no such luck. This is a pretty
deadly crew of assassins. One is an explosive expert, another a diving expert,
a shooting champion, a boxing champion (Bolo Yeung), the black guy is of
course called Blackie, a member of the Red Army who planned the 1972 massacre
at the Israeli airport (the Lod Airport Massacre - a real thing), a blonde
(Judith Brown) whose specialty seems to be bedding men, a Viet Cong guerilla
expert (the great Jimmy Wang Yu) and heading it up is the man who didn't
want to get stuck playing Bond forever - George Lazenby.
And Angela is back for this one and that
is where my main complaint about the film comes from. They bring Angela
on who at the time was the top female action star in the China's and then
basically forget she is on the set. She sits for most of the film or just
isn't in it. She hardly speaks a word. I don't get it. I never will. Why
didn't they make her a cop or something useful. She plays a Cambodian Princess
with a dot on her forehead.
My other complaint is that with this roster
of stars there isn't much action. The first fight of note doesn't occur
till about half way in and then a few small ones till the big fight at the
end. The rest is the planning of the assassination on one side and on the
other side the cops are watching them. On the cops side is Ko Chun-hsiung
and Charles Heung, who later went on to run much of the movie business in
Hong Kong and whose brother Jimmy was a bonafide triad member.
One of the gang goes out for a fun night
and ends up going back to the room of bar girl Tanny Tien and she looks
through his wallet when he passes out and sees the plans to kill the Queen.
Being a good citizen she goes to the cops and gets Heung as a bodyguard.
The police try and persuade the Queen not to come but Queen's are used to
getting their way and she refuses. She should have sent Charles in her place.
In what seems for most of the film to
be a completely separate thread, Angela and much of the remaining Cambodian
army have transported all their gold to Hong Kong. Cambodia was in the process
of falling to Pol Pot who took Phnom Penh in 1975. They have the boxes of
gold out in the boonies waiting to sell them. A local neighbor Ducky played
by Dean Shek - being normal for a change - takes her on a tour of Hong Kong
and she finally gets to mix it up a little - very little - she beats the
hell out of one gang member, Peter Chan Lung, and trades a few punches with
Bolo. Two minutes of Angela in motion. The film has a nice twist or two that
I didn't see coming, but the ending made me throw my shoe at the TV. Fortunately,
I wear slippers inside. An awful stupid ending. Did they really not know
who Angela Mao was? Well, certainly the director Ting Shan-hsi did as he
was from Taiwan and had just directed 800 Heroes, the classic war time film
with Brigitte Lin, Sylvia Chang and Ko Chun-hsiung. A mystery. Probably
Wang Yu, the jerk.
