Cheapo DVD Review : Huntress ..Her Name Is Cat (1998)

When a mysterious, beautiful woman intervenes in a  gunfight between Hong Kong police and Triad gangsters, policeman John Cannon suspects that she may be the assassin who's been knocking off mobsters lately.

He begins trailing her, hoping to discover her secrets.

What he doesn't know is that the lethal "Cat" Yin Ying has become interested in his life too.

My expectations were low for "Huntress". To begin with, the cover has gun-toting star Almen Wong in a leather bikini.

As a general rule of thumb, this is producer shorthand for "We know this film is crap, so we hope you'll buy it for the boobs."

Secondly, I never really got on with Category III films. For a while they were the hot property on the video scene:  lot's of sex, lots of violence, lots of gorgeous women and foreign therefore exotic and cool. I tried watching a couple and wasn't impressed. Yes, the fights were pretty cool, but the storylines always seemed to have gaps in narrative and there was some decidedly dodgy shit going on. The one where two women are forced at gunpoint to rape one another with a baseball bat sticks in my mind. I'm pretty certain that's the point where I lost interest.

  I must confess that I came very close to giving up on this particular film during the delightful scene when Cat tells lover Na Chuen she's carrying his child...
And he proceeds to punch her repeatedly in the stomach until blood starts trickling down her leg. He's kissing her while he does it, just to really push home how utterly fucked-up this is.

  Let's quickly change the subject.

Let's talk about the noodles. Lots of noodles.

 Cat has a definite thing about noodles. During the aforementioned opening gunfight Cat casually ignores the lead flying all about her until she's finished her bowl of noodles. She breaks out the noodles at several points during the movie and, in fact, her secret Assassin's lair has several catering sized crates of noodles stacked up alongside the obligatory hardware and personal gym.
 As personal quirks go, it's ...curiously mundane.

  Thing is,  "Huntress..." can't quite work out what it wants to be. Is it a film about an assassin? Is it a film about two people on different sides of the law getting inside each other's heads? Is it a love story?

 The end result tries to be all of the above and while I'm sure there are some film-makers who could pull it off , the result here is somewhat uneven. Some scenes are desperately trying to be cool and fall flat, especially the bit where Cat sticks a handcuffed John in the shower, rips off his trollies and gets a good grope on. I think that was supposed to be erotic. Nope.

  There are things I can wave a positive finger at. The action is decent -  a short, vicious scrap in a burning building being something of a highlight -  and the climactic gun/kung-fu fight might be fun for those of you who fancy a game of "Spot the John Woo ripoff."   Plus Almen Wong (Cat) and Michael Wong (John Cannon) do manage to make their characters sympathetic. Or as sympathetic as the writing will allow, at any rate

How much did this cost: £1.50
Was it worth it: I'm not entirely sure. Some bits were OK but could have been done better. At least one scene made me slightly queasy and the sequence with the gimp, the sprinklers, the coke-snorting mobster and Cat eating ****ing noodles (again) was a bit peculiar and nowhere near as cool as it sounds.
 I kept finding myself zoning out and flipping through a book about Hurricanes instead.  That probably does not constitute a positive opinion, does it?