Lady Reporter aka The Blonde Fury

 

Blonde Fury Road

Lady Reporter 
aka The Blonde Fury
aka Shi jie da shai
Hong Kong/USA 1989 Directed by Hoi Mang
Golden Harvest/88 Films Blu Ray Zone B

Next up in my Cynthia Rothrock watch is Lady Reporter, or The Blonde Fury as it is known in some territories. It’s noted for being the first (and quite possibly the last) Hong Kong action film to have a US actor receiving top billing... so that’s really something. 

This one has Madam Rothrock playing an FBI operative named Cindy, summoned to Hong Kong to go undercover as a female photojournalist... at a paper whom they suspect are printing forged bank notes. So she stays with her friend Judy (payed by Elisabeth Lee), whose father is the prosecutor trying to put the mob boss organising the counterfeiting behind bars. Well, the reporter job only lasts one day as she quickly confirms that the faked money is being printed at the newspaper (but can’t yet prove it... it all ends in a fight after day one, as you would expect from this kind of movie). So, it has to be said, since she’s only a reporter for about ten minutes of the film, the Lady Reporter title is maybe much less of a fit than The Blonde Fury Rothrock becomes, when she’s kicking bad guy ass in this. 

Other stand out actors in this one include Siu-Ho Chin, Hoi Mang and Roy Chiao (who many may remember as the Chinese mob boss of 1935 Shanghai in the opening scenes of Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom).They’re all pretty good in this and quite entertaining in their own ways. 

Now, if you’re not used to watching these kinds of early to late 80s Hong Kong action vehicles, I should probably shout out again that the humour in these is quite broad and often slapstick. This one is no exception although, I would have to say it’s a little less annoying here than in most of these movies... so this one may be a good jumping on point for some. One point that did make me laugh is when, after the prosecutor, played by Chiao, has gone mad through a nefarious deed of the villain but is kidnapped back from hospital by Cindy and her friends to fake a photo shoot of his having regained his senses so he can prosecute the villain again, they glue eyes over the sleeping patient’s eyelids and hold up his limbs to make it look like he’s awake. At the end of the scene we pan around to another wall where it becomes obvious that the eyes have been cut out of a poster of Bruce Lee. 

The action scenes and choreography are great in this, as you would expect and, like the majority of movies shot there, the actors and actresses were certainly not discouraged from performing their own stunts on these things. Luckily, a hard working talent like Cynthia Rothrock manages to pull it off and make it look relatively easy. Some highlights would be where, in the middle of a fight, she lands on top of a ladder and then turns it around while balancing on it to reface her opponent... and another wonderful moment where she ‘Donald ‘O `Connor’s’ it, running midair around the two walls of a corner to carry on her fight... similar to O’ Connor’s gravity defying moments performing Make ‘Em Laugh in Singin’ In The Rain except... here she’s doing it in high heels. There’s even an action scene where the main part of the fighting takes place up and down some bamboo scaffolding work which, made me wonder if this film was part of the ‘inspiration’ for a similar fight in Marvel’s relatively recent movie Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (reviewed by me here). 

My understanding is that in the scene where she was required to jump off a second story building and land on boxes while holding a fake baby... and then filming it again from a slightly lower height so she could be seen landing on her heels... it all took its toll on the actress for those two days of filming and a doctor gave her a load of pills because, in his opinion, she’d ‘jumbled up’ her internal organs.

Whichever way you cut it though, Lady Reporter aka The Blonde Fury is a pretty entertaining slice of Hong Kong action where Rothrock truly gets to shine, as much as an actress as she is a martial arts performer, I would say. I quite liked this one and even the droopy, synth-pop influenced soundtrack in parts didn’t distract me from the quality of the final product, despite the many noted continuity errors which occurred from reshoots. This certainly won’t be the last of this lady’s films I’ll be reviewing for the blog.