A routine girls 'n' guns Hong Kong action flick from the 80s, Godfrey Ho's Deadly China Dolls has all of the right ingredients: sexy female assassins, machine gun toting bad guys, and faceless goons in suits and sunglasses ripe for the killing. Unfortunately, the unremarkable story and Ho's sub-par direction (think John Woo, but with barely a fraction of the panache and originality) mean that the film is, for the most part, rather tedious. However, the inclusion of several scenes of gratuitous nudity, some bloody battles, and the occasional martial arts moment makes it just about watchable for fans of bullets and babes mayhem.The messy story revolves around the greedy nephew of a crime lord, who has his uncle bumped off so that he can take over the business. There are several silly plot threads which include his wish to also bump off the stepson of his dead uncle, and eliminate the assassins he hired (in order to tie up loose ends). Meanwhile, a cop (Sibelle Hu), is out to arrest any or all of the bad guys.Ho litters his film with splattery squib spurting gunfights in which nearly everyone gets shot at least ten times, pausing occasionally to include a sleazy sex scene (featuring full frontal female nudity) to spice things up, but the result is a so-so addition to the genre which adds nothing new.

My respects go out to the actors and actresses for their commitment to the hard physical and mental work they put into this 1990 movie. The movie is beyond doubt, an intense action based work of filmography. Criticism comes to mind for the need of more suspense, or of a greater hidden complexity of the story line. If movies are about portraits, landscapes, and persona, then these attributes could have become more developed. I especially send my best wishes to Yoko Miyamoto, to Maria Jo, and to Sibelle Hui for their courage to reflect upon these persona. Also, my best wishes go out to them for their future work in filmography.

From the opening scene of CIA agent Sibelle Hu telling a counterfeiter that she will let him go if he can beat her in a fight (!) to the scene of a prostitute comparing her job with that of a hired killer and coming to the conclusion that "my job is safer, unless the men have AIDS" (!), "Deadly China Dolls" is a ludicrous mess. Nothing here is original, nothing is believable, and nothing makes sense (the bad guys want to kill the killers so that there are no witnesses, and where do they try to do it? In supermarkets and strip clubs, among other places!). The action is sub-John Woo, and most of the villains are pathetically lousy shots. Maria Jo and Miyamoto Yoko do a fair job, but they are not interesting or engaging. And I don't know what's wrong with Sibelle Hu, but she looks awful in this movie. (**)

This movie belongs to the bunch of those who owe a lot to Luc Besson's `Nikita'. Two tough-as-hell female killers are fighting against each other, but have a common enemy in Albert, a young gangster played by Lawrence Ng, who had his uncle killed to become the new big boss himself - and he doesn't want witnesses afterwards. If Peckinpah got a copyright on gunfights filmed in slow motion, he'd have been rich after this movie ;-). "Lethal Panther" is stylish, it's got more class than you'd expect (watch more movies from the same director, and you see what I mean), and I'd rank it among the top 20, yet not top 10 Asian thrillers I've seen. Too many fights following each other give this movie tremendous speed, but it is dangerously close sometimes to become irritating because characters do not get explained enough - they are just firing bullets every time they get on the screen. Did I already mention one of the 2 ladies is proud owner of a rocket thrower? Apparently she doesn't just want to kill the villain, she's out for total annihilation. "Lethal Panther" goes over the top in respect of violence, using more than required for the narration, but that's what happens in the B pictures every so often. The occasional sex scenes I didn't mind, sleazy or not, because as we all know since "Basic Instinct", they don't take the suspense away. One quiet scene at the shore uses John Carpenter's Halloween theme on the soundtrack - which is totally out of place in broad daylight.