The Heroic Trio (1993), part 1
Sat, Sep. 13th, 2008 12:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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rachelmanija and I were planning on watching more Romance of the Red Dust at first, we ended up renting The Heroic Trio, a low-budget Hong Kong movie about three female superheroes. Or, er, one female superhero (Tung, aka Wonder Woman), one morally ambiguous super-person (Chat aka Thief Catcher aka Number 7), and one supervillain who has lost her humanity (Ching aka Invisible Girl aka Number 3). Together, they save the world! Or at least protect it from evil archnemesises who attempt to take it over by stealing 19 babies!
When we were standing in line to rent it, Rachel exclaimed, "This is the one with the flying decapitator! Also the flying motorcycle!" The people behind us stared, possibly wondering why that garnered an "Awesome!" from me.
Tung is married to a cop, who demonstrates his cop-ly prowess by leaping from the second floor of the ramshackle house they're about to buy, grabbing a random and convenient vine, and swinging down to avert a car thief. But at night, she goes around to save babies as... Wonder Woman! Unfortunately, the cop's salary probably doesn't go very far, necessitating the construction of a superhero outfit out of tin foil, panty hose, and an extremely ragged and dirty bedsheet. Possibly the movie's costume department hoped that the dirty bedsheet would miraculously become a cape if the audience squinted hard enough, but I feel this would have been more easily accomplished had they not draped it over Anita Mui like a bad rendition of a poncho.
Anyhow, she rescues the babies kidnapped by Ching/Invisible Woman, who is invisible. The invisibility is a good thing, because it means we don't have to see Michelle Yeoh in a bright red bodysuit and a tartan cape/poncho/bedsheet. Or in black panty hose and metal wires going from her crotch to her breasts, complete with yet another bedsheet, this one in silver!
The hospital, by the way, seems to have been set up in an abandoned warehouse, given the decor, and it's entirely staffed by nuns. Well, we thought they were nuns, although they wore giant linen tableclothes over their heads instead of habits.
At this point, Rachel may have said, "Wait, maybe I was wrong about the flying motorcycles," as Invisible Woman's main mode of transportation was running alongside walls dripping blood and Wonder Woman's was bouncing from telephone wire to telephone wire.
But then, in came Maggie Cheung/Chat/Thief Catcher/Number 7 in a horrific eighties hairdo, goggles that I can't even describe and... a flying motorcycle! She's sort of awesome, as her motorcycle carries a sawed-off shotgun and possibly a bazooka. This was, by the way, to help the police out with a hostage situation in a completely random chemical factory. She leaps off her motorcycle and onto an empty oil can, throws an explosive inside, then uses that to fly all the way into the chemical factory! As one does.
Spoilers ride flying motorcycles! (You know you want to read it)
It turns out that Invisible Woman is helping Evil Mastermind kidnap babies because they are fated to be emperors. Evil Mastermind has the grand idea of taking over the world by raising the fated-to-be-emperors in birdcages draped with cobwebs, turning them invisible, making them into cannibalistic clones, then crowning one as the emperor of China, because "China needs an emperor." I feel it's a really bad idea taking over China with an emperor, particularly if you're a Hong Kong supervillain. This is, of course, ignoring the whole birdcage-cobweb-invisible-cannibal thing, which is always a bad idea.
Invisible Woman and Thief Catcher turn out to be mutual underlings of Evil Mastermind (who, by the way, is a crazed albino with fake horns, since all evil is telegraphed by bodies outside the norm). Invisible Woman's true love, the doctor (I don't think he ever gets a name, as he is The Girl), is slowly dying from the toxin byproducts that come about from him creating the invisibility cloak, and she is chained to Evil Mastermind to keep him alive. I'm sure it surprises none of you that he gets a tragic death scene. In fact, he gets about four, all of them with the tragic coughing of blood, tragic nose bleeds, and tragic bleeding through the ears—not as tragic as the first two, but possibly they ran out of ideas and/or orifices!
Eventually, a completely random person decides to break into the hospital to kill all the babies... with hedge clippers! Amazingly, none of the nun nurses notice that he has giant hedge clippers on his cart, or if they do, they pass it off as a normal surgical instrument. This leads to a fateful meeting between Tung and Ching, who later meet again to fight over one of the kidnapped babies.
ME: Why is she bleeding?
RACHEL: It's probably Invisible Woman dripping blood from the roof.
ME: But what about the bloody nail on the floor?
TUNG walks in to the hospital, holding the back of the baby's head, which is bleeding.
ME and RACHEL: OMG! Did they actually let the baby's head fall on a nail?!
DOCTOR: I'm sorry, he didn't make it.
ME and RACHEL: OMG! They killed the baby!
More to come! Bed for me now...
Although before I go to bed, I just have to mention that Evil Mastermind's henchman, Number 9, will pick his severed finger off the floor and eat it, completely disregarding the five-second rule. And if you let loose a flock of birds around him, he will proceed to leap about, cram the birds into his mouth, and slobber with feathers plastered over his face. Oh, and Evil Mastermind breathes methane.
rachelmanija and I were planning on watching more Romance of the Red Dust at first, we ended up renting The Heroic Trio, a low-budget Hong Kong movie about three female superheroes. Or, er, one female superhero (Tung, aka Wonder Woman), one morally ambiguous super-person (Chat aka Thief Catcher aka Number 7), and one supervillain who has lost her humanity (Ching aka Invisible Girl aka Number 3). Together, they save the world! Or at least protect it from evil archnemesises who attempt to take it over by stealing 19 babies!When we were standing in line to rent it, Rachel exclaimed, "This is the one with the flying decapitator! Also the flying motorcycle!" The people behind us stared, possibly wondering why that garnered an "Awesome!" from me.
Tung is married to a cop, who demonstrates his cop-ly prowess by leaping from the second floor of the ramshackle house they're about to buy, grabbing a random and convenient vine, and swinging down to avert a car thief. But at night, she goes around to save babies as... Wonder Woman! Unfortunately, the cop's salary probably doesn't go very far, necessitating the construction of a superhero outfit out of tin foil, panty hose, and an extremely ragged and dirty bedsheet. Possibly the movie's costume department hoped that the dirty bedsheet would miraculously become a cape if the audience squinted hard enough, but I feel this would have been more easily accomplished had they not draped it over Anita Mui like a bad rendition of a poncho.
Anyhow, she rescues the babies kidnapped by Ching/Invisible Woman, who is invisible. The invisibility is a good thing, because it means we don't have to see Michelle Yeoh in a bright red bodysuit and a tartan cape/poncho/bedsheet. Or in black panty hose and metal wires going from her crotch to her breasts, complete with yet another bedsheet, this one in silver!
The hospital, by the way, seems to have been set up in an abandoned warehouse, given the decor, and it's entirely staffed by nuns. Well, we thought they were nuns, although they wore giant linen tableclothes over their heads instead of habits.
At this point, Rachel may have said, "Wait, maybe I was wrong about the flying motorcycles," as Invisible Woman's main mode of transportation was running alongside walls dripping blood and Wonder Woman's was bouncing from telephone wire to telephone wire.
But then, in came Maggie Cheung/Chat/Thief Catcher/Number 7 in a horrific eighties hairdo, goggles that I can't even describe and... a flying motorcycle! She's sort of awesome, as her motorcycle carries a sawed-off shotgun and possibly a bazooka. This was, by the way, to help the police out with a hostage situation in a completely random chemical factory. She leaps off her motorcycle and onto an empty oil can, throws an explosive inside, then uses that to fly all the way into the chemical factory! As one does.
Spoilers ride flying motorcycles! (You know you want to read it)
It turns out that Invisible Woman is helping Evil Mastermind kidnap babies because they are fated to be emperors. Evil Mastermind has the grand idea of taking over the world by raising the fated-to-be-emperors in birdcages draped with cobwebs, turning them invisible, making them into cannibalistic clones, then crowning one as the emperor of China, because "China needs an emperor." I feel it's a really bad idea taking over China with an emperor, particularly if you're a Hong Kong supervillain. This is, of course, ignoring the whole birdcage-cobweb-invisible-cannibal thing, which is always a bad idea.
Invisible Woman and Thief Catcher turn out to be mutual underlings of Evil Mastermind (who, by the way, is a crazed albino with fake horns, since all evil is telegraphed by bodies outside the norm). Invisible Woman's true love, the doctor (I don't think he ever gets a name, as he is The Girl), is slowly dying from the toxin byproducts that come about from him creating the invisibility cloak, and she is chained to Evil Mastermind to keep him alive. I'm sure it surprises none of you that he gets a tragic death scene. In fact, he gets about four, all of them with the tragic coughing of blood, tragic nose bleeds, and tragic bleeding through the ears—not as tragic as the first two, but possibly they ran out of ideas and/or orifices!
Eventually, a completely random person decides to break into the hospital to kill all the babies... with hedge clippers! Amazingly, none of the nun nurses notice that he has giant hedge clippers on his cart, or if they do, they pass it off as a normal surgical instrument. This leads to a fateful meeting between Tung and Ching, who later meet again to fight over one of the kidnapped babies.
ME: Why is she bleeding?
RACHEL: It's probably Invisible Woman dripping blood from the roof.
ME: But what about the bloody nail on the floor?
TUNG walks in to the hospital, holding the back of the baby's head, which is bleeding.
ME and RACHEL: OMG! Did they actually let the baby's head fall on a nail?!
DOCTOR: I'm sorry, he didn't make it.
ME and RACHEL: OMG! They killed the baby!
More to come! Bed for me now...
Although before I go to bed, I just have to mention that Evil Mastermind's henchman, Number 9, will pick his severed finger off the floor and eat it, completely disregarding the five-second rule. And if you let loose a flock of birds around him, he will proceed to leap about, cram the birds into his mouth, and slobber with feathers plastered over his face. Oh, and Evil Mastermind breathes methane.
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Sat, Sep. 13th, 2008 07:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Sat, Sep. 13th, 2008 06:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Sat, Sep. 13th, 2008 09:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Sat, Sep. 13th, 2008 08:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Sat, Sep. 13th, 2008 11:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
Sat, Sep. 13th, 2008 11:50 am (UTC)Haven't even read your post yet, I just got excited at the title because I LOVE LOVE LOVE The Heroic Trio!. Though I am not as fond of the sequel.
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Sat, Sep. 13th, 2008 06:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Sat, Sep. 13th, 2008 12:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Sat, Sep. 13th, 2008 05:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Sat, Sep. 13th, 2008 08:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Mon, Sep. 15th, 2008 09:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Sat, Sep. 13th, 2008 09:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Sun, Sep. 14th, 2008 01:25 am (UTC)lustlove with Anita Mui, Michelle Yeoh, and Maggie Cheung. (OMG I could barely recognize Maggie Cheung in more recent movies because she's gone all slim and willowy.) We recently rewatched it because we desperately needed brainless entertainment, and OMG it's still great. I love the hospital -- it's sort of a bizarre fusion of the end hospital scene in Dangerous Liaisons and Metropolis. Weirdly cyberpunk.I also own the sequel, and watched it once 12 years ago, but have blocked out pretty much everything except that it was postapocalyptic and they killed one of the leads and that made me sad. But it didn't suck nearly as much as the sequel to The Bride With White Hair.
(no subject)
Mon, Sep. 15th, 2008 09:37 pm (UTC)Also, I watched all of the sequel to Bride just to see the two leads together again arrrrgh. I feel it should be overwritten with fanfic.
(no subject)
Mon, Sep. 15th, 2008 01:15 pm (UTC)