LADY BLOOD FIGHT

CONTAINS OUCH SPOILERS

Or, if you want to be facetious, Chickboxer. Chris Nahon's deeply moving tale of hot babes getting royally lamped is basically a vintage Jean-Claude Van Damme movie with fit (in all senses of the term) ladies instead of pumped, impressively sculpted blokes: they're still beating the living tar out of each other but they don't take their shirts off like JC used to do. Other than that it's the same old song, beat for beat, which isn't necessarily a bad thing if you happen to like that song regardless of who's warbling it.

Selected fighters, kill-crazed maniacs from round the world, and fresh young pupils of established martial arts trainers convene in Hong Kong for an all-girls Kumite tournament, in which the starting sixteen are whittled down through Mortal Kombat beatdowns to the final two for a no-rules fight to the death. Obviously, because they're the only ones we've spent any character time with, the Grand Finale is between the two pupils of rival trainers: one a local street kid with talent, the other an American whose father disappeared after a Kumite some years ago. In between, there's the friendly Australian one who's obviously doomed to be pulped in Round Two, the unstoppable Russian killing machine, lots of blows to the head and snapped bones....

Lady Blood Fight (it's three words on screen, whatever the IMDb or the artwork might suggest about it being Lady Bloodfight) is twaddle, quite obviously. But it knows exactly what it's doing and it does it efficiently enough for a simple beer and pizza rental. It's not innovative, it's not particularly surprising, it's not an era-defining cinema game-changer. It's a hundred minutes or so of wallops, thuds and shrieks of pain. If that's all you want from your streaming selections, then go for it. Switch your brain off, you won't be needing it.

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