Pink Force Comando Review by YTSL

Ant interesting review of Chu Yen Ping's Pink Force Comando can be found here.
http://www.brns.com/pages3/femftl98.html

If there's one question I'm dying to ask Brigitte Lin Ching-Hsia, it's not "will you ever appear in a film again?", "how was it like to play Asia the Invincible?" or even "have you ever directed THE glare at your husband and/or children?" Instead, I'd love to know what possessed her to agree to grace more than one -- maybe even five -- of Chu Yen Ping's really weird as well as indisputably baaaad movies (and, relatedly, how the Taiwanese screen goddess and her fellow cast members managed NOT to dissolve into hysterical laughter when doing whatever they were asked to do by that demented -- if not permanently hallucigenically drugged out -- director). PINK FORCE COMMANDO puts the woman who went by the name of Venus Lin during this frankly odd portion of her twenty year career in the thick of: First, a bid to acquire a stash of stolen and hidden gold; then a quest for an impossibly large diamond; followed by attempts to acquire a valuable map and counter-attempts to prevent it from falling into the wrong (i.e., foreign) hands. For a while, the viewer is witness to a slew of fancy-dressed and -named folk appearing to pop up in all sorts of odd places (e.g., a beach, a casino) and engage in what seem like random fights (E.g., Sally Yeh plays a dynamite expert called Mascot who decimates what look like a bunch of characters -- including a Bruce Lee imitator and a Buddhist monk -- who have escaped from your stereotypical 1970s era kungfu movies a few seconds after they accidentally awaken her from her open-air slumber). Over the course of various and varied proceedings though, the good guys and (mainly) gals get distinguished from the evil characters by their turning out to possess patriotic and loyal as well as heroic streaks under their mercenary and materialistic tendencies. ...At least this is what I THINK I can determine as occurred in this truly bizarre film! To be sure, PINK FORCE COMMANDO seems to have a more coherent and straightforward plot than "Fantasy Mission Force" and "Golden Queen Commando" (AKA "Amazon Commando" and hawked by Xenon as "Jackie Chan's Crime Force"). However, anyone who knows anything about those two seriously surreal as well as hyper silly offerings -- which definitely share certain stylistic and budget limitations affinities with this one (not least that of their characters looking like they were costumed to appear in a whole bunch of different period movies) -- will understand that this really is not saying much at all. Alternatively, what is undeniable for this (re)viewer is that Brigitte Lin steals the show as Jackal: Who early on betrays her all female gang for a not particularly attractive betelnut-chewing and -juice-spitting love, and life as a rich and luxuriously attired woman; but redeems herself during an emotional re-encounter with a couple of her once (and future) comrades by cutting off her left arm with a samurai sword as penance for letting a man lead her astray. I must admit that the strangely amusing descriptions of this woman warrior character getting equipped with a replacement limb whose end is a working Gattling gun -- which also can be refitted to function as an electric drill! -- were what made me want to check out PINK FORCE COMMANDO. What came as a bonus though was the movie's star deigning to do quite a bit of serious acting -- some of which was actually so effective as to provide this generally absurd film with some unexpectedly moving moments (but others of which I did find funnier than they probably were intended to be) -- rather than just always hamming it up to the hilt (Something those who have viewed "The Eagle Shooting Heroes" know that she is equally able of doing). At this juncture, little doubt should remain of it being so that PINK FORCE COMMANDO is -- by normal standards and on most counts -- a stupefyingly terrible piece of work. Nonetheless, my own experience provides testimony that some pleasure can be derived from viewing what might be described as a female-dominated East Asian spaghetti western (If not for this all sounding majorly oxymoronic and the film's additionally featuring a black leather wearing motorbiker (Blackie Ko), black suited ninjas, villains dressed in white KKK-like robes and others in Nazi-type military uniforms along with a strong, clearly sensitive and largely silent Heart-Broken Man!).