Sunday 5 December 2010

NAKED WEAPON

PHWOOOOAAAR! OH, AND SPOILERS.

Phwoooaar indeed! It's a sexy exploitation movie with hot Asian women killing scummy villains and fighting each other! With a bit of lesbian action thrown in! Guns! Machetes! Martial arts! Boobs! (Well, not much in the way of boobs - it's only in Hong Kong's Category IIB rather than the steamier, sleazier, nudier Category III, but it's still an 18 over here.) Still, how couldn't it be a trash masterpiece? In truth, it isn't great but it's a reasonably enjoyable night's rental: fun while it's on but nothing to trouble any awards jury on Earth.

The basic idea of Naked Weapon is that a fiendish mastermind is kidnapping dozens of young girls and keeping them all as prisoners on a remote island where they are trained as top assassins: the culmination of their years of training is to kill each other until there are only a handful left, and these survivors will then become the best and most highly priced killers in the world. They will also be the most glamorous and seductive (how else will they be get close to their targets?) as well as the most ruthless, with no regard for their own feelings, as any sense of personal emotion has been ripped out of them in one of the most repulsive and callous rape sequences imaginable. On the trail, however, is a CIA agent who won't let go of his long-standing investigation into the missing children....

So it's a bit like Battle Royale, and a bit like (La Femme) Nikita, in which gorgeous women kick scumbag arse, fire lots of guns, blow things up and go one-on-one in unarmed combat. It's silly, trashy, throwaway, completely implausible and unbelievable, but still, particularly when away from the island prison, it's enjoyably stupid and I kind of liked it. Not quite as full-on deranged as Naked Killer, and morally questionable, but generally it's all right.

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