Movie Notes: The Deadly And The Beautiful

January 9th, 2009

0 stars
So Bad It’s Good Rating = –10 stars

Starring Nancy Kwan, Ross Hagen, Maria De Aragon
Directed by Robert Vincent O’Neill

Synopsis

Dr. Tsu (Nancy Kwan) leads a deadly team of female martial artists that harvest athlete’s brains for elderly millionaires. Insurance man Mike Harber (Ross Hagen) is sent to the Philippines to this travesty. Also titled Wonder Women, Chinese Puzzle, or Women Of Transplant Island.

The Good

N/A.

The Bad

• The first ten minutes lack dialogue, making me wonder if the whole cinematic ordeal would be mimed.
• Truly horrid soundtrack. Funk-porn waka waka theme song, and a particularly atrocious Wonder Women tune.
• Some interest in the early seventies Philippine location. Must have been a cheap place to film.
• Dated seventies topics: women’s liberation, black power (one woman operative has a particularly huge afro) and a James Bond-like plot of an evil mastermind with utopian but deeply flawed plans. But it’s really all an excuse for tame, seventies style raunch of heavily armed women in bras and swimsuits.
• Laboratory scenes contain red and green lights leftover from some psychedelic concert hall, strange analog synth warbles, and men and women in tubes covered in plastic. The operating outfits resemble translucent rain suits purchased from the nearby Manila 99 cent store. The top off is a secret hideout tour with complete mumbo-jumbo scientific explanations, brains in fish tanks, body parts in a refrigerator, and creatures in jail cells — actors likely pulled from the local Manila night club. You think I’m making this up.
• A Chinese fellow named “Won Ton Charlie.”
• Ross Hagen looks bored throughout, except when ogling long legs of the women he fights against.
• The “kung fu” fighting — if you could call it that — is exceptionally awful. Fast editing, and flailing limbs, and much hand waving and tumbling. All the women were obviously chosen for hotness and not martial arts training.
• Said women traipse through the jungle armed to the teeth but dressed in the most inappropriate clothing: pastel bathrobes.
• “Brain sex.”
• There’s a mustachioed guy in an Austin Powers type blue suit and cane for reasons that completely escape me.
• The ending is as slick as can be, a chess game between Mike and a dorky blond is rudely interrupted by some pretty operatives. If you were expecting a hot sex scene you’d now be asking for your money back.

Conclusion

This movie is such an egregious piece of garbage but is often sloppily entertaining. Add it to your list of comedies — if you dare.

IMDB: Wonder Women