"Pink Force Commando(s)" is one of those films that defies logic and is silly beyond belief but yet remarkably still manages to be entertaining in an almost surreal way. To explain the story is near impossible as it is set in a fantasy realm where cowboys co-exist with Chinese thugs, Arabian swordsmen, Nazi soldiers, hooded Ku Klux Klansmen and spandex wearing superheroines. Beautiful Brigette Lin is "Jackal", a renegade mercenary/soldier of fortune who betrays her gang to her Nazi Commander lover and steals a cache of gold. A year later her gang reunite under the leadership of Cat (Elsa Yeung), a golden costumed swordswoman. Among the "Pink Force" include tight jeans wearing cowgirl and dynamite expert "Dynamite Sally/Suzie" (Sally Yeh) and Elegant French Dress wearing thief and rapier wielding "Angel" (Silvia Pang). They try to retrace the location of the gold cache but find that a small western resort town has been built on its location by Jackal and her lover. They confront Jackal over her betrayal. Guilt-ridden, she severs her arm as payback. Jackal convinces the team to join her lover's gang as they attempt to steal the legendary "Sun Diamond". Jackal and her team are again betrayed by the sly lover and his new lover, a female Ninja (Hao Yi Liu) and Jackal is left near dead. She is found by a "man with no name" known as the "Heart Broken Man" who nurses her back to health and even gives her a "gun arm" to replace her missing limb. Jackal goes back to save her friends and together with an Arabian Princess (Teresa Tsui) they battle against the greedy lover and his "army of evil" comprised of Communists, Ku Klux Klansmen, Mexican Desperados, Nazi Soldiers and assorted Foreign Thugs). Director Yen-Ping Chu's (AKA Lawrence Full in the English Dubbed version) madcap film is sheer madness as he seems to throw caution in the wind to bring us a story that mixes genres to create an almost comic book adventure. It is a silly film but surprisingly entertaining and much of that credit goes to the comely cast of cuties that make up the "Pink Force". Brigette Lin and Sally Yeh are the standouts and their characters are pure joy to watch. The American Dubbed version is almost impossible to watch as it inexplicably inserts footage of the sequel "Golden Queen Commandos" into the film in an attempt to pad out the film. One can either admire Yen-Pin Chu's inventive and offbeat film or dismiss it as a goofy and messed up exploitation film. I for one liked it for its sheer audacity.
4 Reviews
Bizarro Spagetti Western/Fantasy film that entertains as much as mystifies...
jmaruyama22 March 2009
Warning: Spoilers
Very good sequel to an exploitation classic makes very little sense but is still a great deal of fun to watch
dbborroughs21 September 2006
Sequel to Golden Queen's Commandos is just as action packed, though much more nonsensical.
The plot of the film begins with a band of women surrounded in an isolated farm house. They have stolen a large horde of gold which the military wants back. They decide that some will make a run for it with the gold while others remain behind. Any survivors will meet back at that spot in a years time to split up the money. Things don't go as planned and the story spirals out into three or ten different directions until we get to the final shoot out.
A sequel in that the same cast plays similar characters to the first film, but with different names. Also not everyone is on the same side, nor does everyone have as large a part. This film is further tied to the first by the use of footage from the first film to give a kind of background on some of the characters (also to signal which character is suppose to be which from the early film since costumes and appearances have changed).
Very good in a psychotronic sort of way, this film has a plot that makes almost no linear sense what so ever. The plot jumps from gold, to diamonds, to a map, to revenge, to about eight other things depending upon the minute. There is almost no continuity to the whys and wherefores things just sort of happen and people just sort of show up. Its never boring, but it does bend your mind since any attempt at making things make sense is a lost cause. Its so demented that even the giving of one's self over to it only barely reduces the damage, this movie is just too weird.
Like the earlier film this film is a mixture of genres, though to be honest this film is basically a western but with other things placed inside it. (I do have to report that this film does have the musical number the first film didn't have) I liked this film, I didn't love it. The problem is that its scatter-shot approach makes it much more difficult to love than the earlier film. This doesn't mean you shouldn't see it, you should, especially if you're a fan of the wild films that have come out of Hong Kong of the years or an action nut who doesn't care if everything makes sense.
The plot of the film begins with a band of women surrounded in an isolated farm house. They have stolen a large horde of gold which the military wants back. They decide that some will make a run for it with the gold while others remain behind. Any survivors will meet back at that spot in a years time to split up the money. Things don't go as planned and the story spirals out into three or ten different directions until we get to the final shoot out.
A sequel in that the same cast plays similar characters to the first film, but with different names. Also not everyone is on the same side, nor does everyone have as large a part. This film is further tied to the first by the use of footage from the first film to give a kind of background on some of the characters (also to signal which character is suppose to be which from the early film since costumes and appearances have changed).
Very good in a psychotronic sort of way, this film has a plot that makes almost no linear sense what so ever. The plot jumps from gold, to diamonds, to a map, to revenge, to about eight other things depending upon the minute. There is almost no continuity to the whys and wherefores things just sort of happen and people just sort of show up. Its never boring, but it does bend your mind since any attempt at making things make sense is a lost cause. Its so demented that even the giving of one's self over to it only barely reduces the damage, this movie is just too weird.
Like the earlier film this film is a mixture of genres, though to be honest this film is basically a western but with other things placed inside it. (I do have to report that this film does have the musical number the first film didn't have) I liked this film, I didn't love it. The problem is that its scatter-shot approach makes it much more difficult to love than the earlier film. This doesn't mean you shouldn't see it, you should, especially if you're a fan of the wild films that have come out of Hong Kong of the years or an action nut who doesn't care if everything makes sense.
A wild hodgepodge of awful film-making and woefully inadequate writing
I_Ailurophile18 February 2023
With direction, sequencing, cinematography, scene writing, and characterizations so astoundingly poor, it's all but miraculous that one is able to make any sense of what is going on in this. Effects, stunts, and action scenes at large are executed well, but senselessly, with no apparent rhyme or reason - the cinematic equivalent of kids playing in a field and pretending this, that, and the other thing are happening both all at once and out of order. Preposterous as it is, I can accept for the sake of the narrative that every romanticized stereotype, trope, and type of action hero, and their villainous counterparts, coexist contemporaneously in the same world. I can accept that there will be no explanation forthcoming for any of these elements, and they simply Are in a story that has been cobbled together. I have a harder time accepting the absolute randomness of every single element to greet us; there is only the flimsiest, most vague through-line of a plot to weakly, loosely string everything together, and even that is deeply unconvincing. Very rarely have I ever seen another feature for which ideas were so obviously just thrown at a wall, and all tossed in willy-nilly. The difference is that any nearest point of comparison has been earnestly well made.
'Pink force commando,' or 'Gong fen you xia,' is all over the place. The most rudimentary, essential aspects of film-making seem to represent only the crudest form of competence: those behind the scenes knew how to operate their equipment, but not how to meaningfully use them to create a film. As far as one is able to discern, there are some genuinely good ideas in the writing - elements of the overall plot, and of the scene writing - but the characters are scattered nonsense, and the dialogue is sometimes altogether pointless or empty. Whether one wishes to reasonably blame the screenwriter, or just as reasonably those responsible for the above suggested facets, the scenes and plot as they present are chopped up so badly, practically mincemeat, that the value has been all but entirely stripped from them. From one moment to the next the proceedings come across as flagrantly disordered, almost haphazard; there is little if any elucidation at any time of what, exactly, is happening in a scene, of who the various characters are, or of the precise course of events as each single component is lobbed at us as heedlessly as possible. The cast? Well, they sure are in front of the camera. It's difficult to particularly assess their performances for the the fact of how utterly shoddy the construction of the picture is otherwise.
I suppose the costume design is well done, and the hair and makeup work. The sets are fine, and props and weapons. The score is decent enough even as it pointedly borrows from spaghetti westerns and fantasy flicks of years past (literally borrowed; we've heard no few of these themes before, from Ennio Morricone, Basil Poledouris, and others). Once more, I do think effects, stunts, and bursts of action are great in and of themselves; would that there were any intelligence in how they were directed, applied in a scene, or fit into the story. And so it goes for the title at large. For what very, very, very few parts of this were approached with a modicum of care, I'd love to say I like this more than I do. For the sheer paucity of such, quality, however, and furthermore the unremitting ineptitude represented in the vast preponderance of the feature, I wonder if I'm not being too kind in my remarks as it is; 'Pink force commando' is less than ninety minutes long, but it manages to feel far longer. I hope someone enjoyed making this. I hope someone, somewhere, enjoyed watching it. I just don't know how they could. This film is a godawful mess whose best ideas are rendered almost completely inert by near-total failures of fundamental movie-making and profound inadequacies throughout the writing. Since those best ideas can be found elsewhere, the only possible worth of 'Pink force commando' is as a dubious cinematic curiosity. That's enough, perhaps, for some viewers - but not many.
'Pink force commando,' or 'Gong fen you xia,' is all over the place. The most rudimentary, essential aspects of film-making seem to represent only the crudest form of competence: those behind the scenes knew how to operate their equipment, but not how to meaningfully use them to create a film. As far as one is able to discern, there are some genuinely good ideas in the writing - elements of the overall plot, and of the scene writing - but the characters are scattered nonsense, and the dialogue is sometimes altogether pointless or empty. Whether one wishes to reasonably blame the screenwriter, or just as reasonably those responsible for the above suggested facets, the scenes and plot as they present are chopped up so badly, practically mincemeat, that the value has been all but entirely stripped from them. From one moment to the next the proceedings come across as flagrantly disordered, almost haphazard; there is little if any elucidation at any time of what, exactly, is happening in a scene, of who the various characters are, or of the precise course of events as each single component is lobbed at us as heedlessly as possible. The cast? Well, they sure are in front of the camera. It's difficult to particularly assess their performances for the the fact of how utterly shoddy the construction of the picture is otherwise.
I suppose the costume design is well done, and the hair and makeup work. The sets are fine, and props and weapons. The score is decent enough even as it pointedly borrows from spaghetti westerns and fantasy flicks of years past (literally borrowed; we've heard no few of these themes before, from Ennio Morricone, Basil Poledouris, and others). Once more, I do think effects, stunts, and bursts of action are great in and of themselves; would that there were any intelligence in how they were directed, applied in a scene, or fit into the story. And so it goes for the title at large. For what very, very, very few parts of this were approached with a modicum of care, I'd love to say I like this more than I do. For the sheer paucity of such, quality, however, and furthermore the unremitting ineptitude represented in the vast preponderance of the feature, I wonder if I'm not being too kind in my remarks as it is; 'Pink force commando' is less than ninety minutes long, but it manages to feel far longer. I hope someone enjoyed making this. I hope someone, somewhere, enjoyed watching it. I just don't know how they could. This film is a godawful mess whose best ideas are rendered almost completely inert by near-total failures of fundamental movie-making and profound inadequacies throughout the writing. Since those best ideas can be found elsewhere, the only possible worth of 'Pink force commando' is as a dubious cinematic curiosity. That's enough, perhaps, for some viewers - but not many.
praise,praise.praise!
arlomyst16 February 2001
they don't make movies like this anymore, and frankly I'm surprised that they ever did. One of a sort of trilogy of films that came out that year this movie is full of action, thrills and beautiful women. It is also just plain weird and completely over the top in terms of action and bizarre larger than life characters. I haven't seen colourful people like this since "Switchblade Sisters". This is one of my favorite flicks and I heartily recommend it to anyone who loves asian action at its best cool, cool, cool characters and a plot that only makes sense if you don't think about it...at all. Just go find it!
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