Movies : Alan & The Girls

Two more films starring Alan Tam but very different...

Girl With A Gun (HK 1984)

Yin Hsia plays an unfortunate girl, orphaned and now mute who is raped on the way home. And when she gets home she disturbs a burgular who rapes her again, but she grabs an iron and clobbers him. Then she cuts his corpse up and puts it in the fridge as you do. She grabs his gun and begins a one-woman crusade against anything male... No its not a comedy.

The action is furious, the shootings are rather unrealistic (she doesn't seem to aim very well but shoots them stone dead every time), especially in the gang fight scene which borrows heavily from the 2nd best film of all time The Warriors. The action even takes place in a fair ground (but its not Coney Island).

As she progresses with her shooting spree she updates her look from mousey seamstress to 80s hot babe (and wow is she hot!) To a soundtrack of great tracks like Ghostbusters and Like A Virgin she hunts down bad men (women beaters, players, punters) and puts them away with her .45. Its very 80s of course and hugely enjoyable for that.

Alan Tam plays her boss and at the end she is invited to a party which involves ...er... limbo dancing. A hamsup lo takes her to a room... but when he pulls up her dress he finds something rather unexpected tied to her thigh. Bang! Another dead un!

But by now the police are on her trail as her land lady got suspicious and investigated her apartment and found something rather ewww in the fridge. Best not tell her though that Yin Hsia had already fed her cat human meat. Burp!

And Yin Hsia ends up in the asylum. She doesn't utter a single word throughout the entire film.

A Girl Without Sorrow (Taiwan 1982)

Whereas the first film was all thrills and excitement this is a rather dull love drama that doesn't get out of second gear. However has slightly less gore.

Alan Tam plays a good-for-nothing rich man's son who falls in love with Joan Lin. Unfortunately Joan likes her men to have virtue and be hard working. So Alan, with the help of his friend, creates a new persona for himself as a hard-up painter. It does the trick but what happens when Joan finds out the truth?

And so on, not very exciting film. I was not in a state of grippability. Alan Tam has a remarkable similarity to Alan Partridge in this film, bizarre i know.