Iron Angels (1987)

Iron Angels is one of the more popular of the Girls ‘n Guns movies from Hong Kong and rightfully so. It features some jaw-dropping scenes of squibs and pyrotechnics action as well as some great displays of martial arts. The Angels, Saijo, Moon, Alex and the clumsy, thoughtless and apparently attractive Elaine are hired when a group of gangsters, led by Madame Yeoung (played villainously by Story of Ricky‘s Yukari Oshima) take homicidal revenge on the police after a raid results in their opium crops being destroyed. The Angels are kind of like Charlie’s Angels in that they’re a group brought in to work outside of the law to defeat villains, but unlike Charlie’s Angels, there’s four, two of them are blokes, they kill a lot of people and this movie is actually worth watching. So I guess they’re not really like Charlie’s Angels at all.

In most things I have seen about this film it is called Angel. But being that the DVD I have is titled, Iron Angels, that is the name I will be going with for today. Here in Australia, Iron Angels was refused classification back when it was released for being excessively violent, and was later re-released with cuts. I watched the Hong Kong DVD which is mostly uncut, apart from a shot of a breast that can be seen in the Dutch DVD according to moviecensorship.com. Details are here for all you movie pedants like myself: http://www.movie-censorship.com/report.php?ID=2350220

Iron Angels has an at-times muddled feeling storyline, but I feel that may be in-part a result of the occasionally poor subtitling in the version I watched. It also contains moments of that childish HK slapstick comedy, that some love and most love to hate, though it is fairly minimal compared to a lot of other films from the 80s. Most of the “laughs” are derived from the foolish antics of the Elaine character (in fact the movie closes with a freeze frame on her slipping on a banana peel as the credits roll) but like I said they are minor and more emphasis is put on setting up the awesome action sequences. And action is what we are watching Iron Angels for.

Below is the trailer for Iron Angels. I often find HK trailers insufferably long and misguiding, but this one really does show off what the film has to offer in terms of bang-for-your-buck. So, without further ado, I give you Iron Angels, or Angel, as it is called in the trailer…