Saturday, January 8, 2011

Cleopatra Wong (1978)


Cleopatra Wong is an agent for INTERPOL. Called off her vacation to track down a source that is flooding five Asian countries with near perfect money. The trail takes her from the Philippines, to Hong Kong, Singapore and then back to the Philippines where she ends up donning a nun's habit to enter a monastery that seems to be the source of the bogus cash.

This movie doesn't make a great deal of sense but it does move along at a great clip. I don't think during the first half of the film more than three minutes pass with out some one getting beaten up by Wong. Its amazing, and amazingly fun, so much fun you don't care about the lack of sense. Unfortunately once Wong has found the source of the bad bills the film slows down as we are taken inside the operation and shown whats really going on. This is not a good thing since we start to think about how nothing is making sense and the film never fully recovers the momentum lost, even with a 20 minute long shoot out that ends the film (its a great guilty pleasure).

I liked the film a great deal. I dislike the slow fifteen minutes in the middle, but as an action candy this is one heck of a guilty pleasure. Action junkies are advised to track this film down. I also can recommend it to anyone with a high tolerance for tongue in cheek action films.


(FYI: I've read, though I'm not sure its true that the final shoot out got the film in hot water in the Philippines since the Catholic Church objected to people in nuns habits firing shot guns and automatic weapons, and considering the number of people in habits, its not surprising)

This was recently released on DVD on a double festure disc.

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