I am such a fan of that uniquely Hong Kong film genre termed Girls with Guns that I will buy anything that looks remotely like it falls into that category. Yes, it had its zenith back in the 1980’s to early 1990’s but every now and then something will come along limping like a three-legged dog and present us with a DVD cover of good looking lithe women holding guns. That is all I need. It was the case here when I was in Hong Kong recently and came across this film on some dusty shelf and grabbed it like a child does a Snickers Bar on Halloween. But with much fewer expectations of it being any good.


As the film opens at a Thai resort and the police women are lying around a pool all in bikinis taking in the sun waiting for a police operation to begin, I silently groaned. This was going to be bad. They looked as if they had been recruited at a local Hooters and were waiting for a customer to tip them. Silly conversation passes between them like a poorly exchanged currency. Time painfully passes. Yes, this was going to be bad on the level of Brush Up My Sisters or Hot Cop in the City if anyone had the misfortune of getting suckered into seeing those. And then the bad guy and his crew show up and the top cop yells action – and holy shit – a really good and brutal fight ensues. I mean rough and hard in which nearly all these lovely women are killed. Damn. I wasn’t expecting that. I was just getting to appreciate their cleavages. The bad guy called The President and his two psychotic child assistants escape and I thought what a nice surprise that was but what now? Well, jump ahead twenty years.


Basically Inspector Wears Skirts is what happens next. The first in a series of Inspector Wears Skirts films was in 1988 and was one of the best in the genre with a group of terrific female actors with a sprinkling of true martial artists among them go through training to become police women. The training part is basically comedic with no opportunity missed to objectify their figures and looks - and fine they are - but then action. Some good solid action. Before I get anyone’s hopes up, these women do not come close to matching up with those in that film – hell that one had Cynthia Rothrock, Kara Hui, Sibelle Hu, Sandra Ng and Ellen Chan in it and the Jackie Chan Stunt team. This one has only one actress that I have ever heard of and I expect none of the others have had martial arts training. But they try. Six of them are grouped together to either survive the training or have to drop out. All the losers. Honey (Joyce Cheng) takes on the Sandra Ng role of being the unattractive one who is the comedy relief, the well-endowed Anita Chui is a stand-in for Amy Yip who was in later films in the series – Anita has been in such classics as SDU: Sex Duty Unit and Love Detective. Jade Leung is the fill in for Rothrock as the instructor (who was the lone survivor of the attack 20 years ago) and she must have been thinking you young whippersnappers, when I was your age I was the Black Cat. She is nearly 50 years old now. Man those 30 years since her fame went by quickly but she still looks good.


The training part goes as expected – not very funny – some poorly manipulated pathos – and so on. You might bail. Don’t. Two more large action set pieces are on their way choreographed by Chin Kar-lok who has a cameo as an ex-Yakuza teacher. Choreographing actresses who have no training (as far as I know) and making it look good and somewhat realistic has to be a tough job – knowing what each of them is capable of doing. He does a nice job here mainly doing gunplay but some physical combat as well and though nowhere near the quality of a Cynthia Rothrock, who could chew any of these girls up and spit them out, it isn’t bad. And since the film has already established the fact that they don’t mind killing off female cops there is a bit of suspense. The final set piece is 20 minutes long in a Malaysian airport and it is crazy. There is no fair comparison between this and the old Guns with Girls films when you had women literally risking their lives and an attitude of anything goes – those days are gone – but they give it a decent shot here and for that I am thankful. Too much goofy comedy here but I will take whatever I can get.