Wanna-Be 's is a 1986 action sports sci-fi wrestling anime OVA directed by Yasuo Hasegawa and written by Toshimichi Suzuki. It features character design work done by manga artist Ken'ichi Sonoda and Yoshiharu Shimizu served as animation director. The voice cast features Eriko Hara, Miki Takahashi, Shūichi Ikeda, Akio Nojima, Eiko Yamada and Urara Takano. It also had metal music by Japanese band Seikima-II and an ending theme by Saori Saitō. Produced by Anime International Company, Wanna Be 's became a cult direct to video release among otakus, particularly because it took advantage of the Japanese wrestling craze of the time.
Miri and Eri are two female wrestlers known as the Wanna-Be's, who fight furiously in the ring against their local foes the Foxy Ladies. However, things get shady when the mysterious Kidou Corporation offers them a chance to better their capabilities. The girls begin to feel some strange and awkward changes in their bodies and uncover the company's nefarious hidden plans.
Considering that this was just a year after Dirty Pair, it's not strange to see a leading pair heavily inspired by them and with similar designs and personalities. The redhead with the short hair embodies a tomboyish attitude and her fiery nature, while the long haired girl with a less arresting color has elements that signal her calm demeanor and more "feminine" personality. The two have some chemistry and enjoy modernity through the futuristic lenses the show sets up, sharing a strong bond and a love for combat. The only difference is that the Wanna Be's don't cause a giant mess everywhere they go.
This OVA is quite awesome from the start, it goes right to the point and gives you the money shots you expect, it really grabs you from the start and never lets go, putting you on a short but very enjoyable roller coaster of wild wrestling action up to the science fiction brawl from the climax with all of it making perfect sense and never feeling out of place. I honestly wasn't expecting the turn it took around the half way mark but it was a very welcome surprise. The versatile genre elements it shuffles really do come together seamlessly.
As you might expect, we also witness some potent wrestling anime action, you can tell the animators and directors took their time and studied the different moves and maneuvers that were common at the time in the sport, having the girls perform them and be victims of them, arriving at some striking poses. The actual direction is also solid as the shots are dynamic, intense, well timed, edited smoothly and with the angles emphasizing the ferocity of the encounters. It's a shame we weren't gifted with even more matches or perhaps more characters in the ring. We have a good variety of bodies and colors in there, but it would have been cool to get more lady matches in there as a way to expand the world because the few that we see kind of make the world seem a bit narrow.
This is a radically deranged and out there anime OVA that mixes both sports fanservice with the imaginative thrills of a sci-fi monster anime of its time quite expertly.
Dark Match is a wrestling satanic horror action film written and directed by Lowell Dean, and starring Ayisha Issa, Steven Ogg, Sara Canning, and wrestling star Chris Jericho. The film generated mixed reviews and some scepticism among people who dislike movies that feature WWE stars but eventually it was released to some notoriety in the streaming service Shudder.
In the late eighties, Nicky (Ayisha Issa), known as Miss Behave in the ring and a female wrestler working for a small promotion company named SAW, travels to a weird little village for a private event where dangerous cult members, lead by a former wrestler known as The Prophet, are to attend. Things escalate and the cult members become bloodsthirsty, sacrifices are made hoping to bring the devil to our world and now Nicky, along with a manager who she had a troubled relationship with (Steven Ogg), and other companions, must escape and defeat the devil worshippers.
The film's biggest dealbreaker to me is the fact that it's never really committed to its craziness and potentially delirious storyline and tone, it's all hampered by the fact that everything feels halfway done. I don't know if it's a budget problem but the fight sequences never reach any overblown crescendo or kooky intensity one would expect from the director of films like Wolf Cop, it's all muffled and flavorless.
To add to its imperfections, Miss behave is sidelined for most of runtime since she steps back to let Steven Ogg drive the story for a fair amount of the duration. This is hardly a major flaw as Ogg is very enjoyable to watch but it's all at the expense of the heroine's agency and predominance in the narrative throughline. I really wish it wasn't as timid with its violence and its characters. Someone needed to up the ante and add a deranged energy that could help it.
The retro grindhouse grainy and dirty style with colorful lighting and unclean visuals add a ton of atmosphere and convey the exploitation-like throwback attitude the film wants to portray and be faithful to but it doesn't properly elevate the insanity that a satanic wrestling movie should most likely contain to deliver the goods. No amount of color can save the plain and empty scenarios and sets. Barely any real gore, no sleazy nudity and it hardly rejoices in its filthiness enough to make it stand out in the sea of faux grindhouse flicks out there.
The wrestling ladies and their manic matches are fun and it has a funny ending (that also cops out) but otherwise Dark Match is a highly unremarkable horror/slasher movie that it's probably just a rental or a casual watch if you can stream it for free.
I have a classic one for you today. Golden Queen´s Commando is a 1982 Taiwanese action movie directed by Yen-Ping Chu, prolific director known for this movie, its companion piece titled Pink Force Commando (1982), Fantasy Mission Force (1983) and several other entries in the genre. It was co-written by the infamous Godfrey Ho, who did movies such as Undefeatable (1993), Honor and Glory (1993), Princess Madam (1989), Lethal Panther (1990), Angel´s Mission (1989) and the previously reviewed Angels Enforcers (1989).
Like a lot of these asian action movies Queen´s Commando is known by several alternate titles such as Hong fen bing tuan, Queen´s of the Pink Commando, Seven Black Heroines, Amazon´s Commandos and Jackie Chan´s Crime Force (it has nothing to do with Jackie Chan). Also, most copies online have a terrible picture quality, so don't expect HD versions of this one.
At its core, it's a rag-tag movie about a bunch of women in a deadly secret mission, think female Dirty Dozen, Guns of Navarone or any other movie with that storyline but the execution sets this one apart.
It could be best described as four or five movies in one, the ultimate genre pastiche, particularly in the action woman category. It begins as a character roll call (that in itself encompasses many genres), it turns into a women in prison movie, then into a war film, a western and finally into a (wo)men in a mission movie, it's also a comedy, an action film and a seedy grindhouse movie.
The roll call goes as follows:
1- Black Fox
The leader of the group, played by Brigitte Lin (Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain, The Bride with White Hair, Dragon Inn, The Maidens of Heavenly Mountains, Fantasy Mission Force), this eyepatched assassin gets herself thrown in jail in order to recruit the rest of the warrior girls, who aren't surprised to see her there because of her reputation.
2- Amazon
Played by Chun-Chun Hsu (Pink Force Commando), she is a fur bikini wearing strongwoman who murders enemies with her hatchet and bare hands. The muscle of the group, gifted with great strength and a ferocious attitude. She murders her opponent during a Mongolian wrestling match and is jailed because of it. Being Mongolian and an expert warrior and wrestler she reminds me of the real life princess Khutulun to some extent.
3- Black Fox
Played by Hui-Shan Yang (Phoenix the Raider, New Pilgrims to the West, and the previously reviewed films Woman Revenger and Deadly Silver Angels), she is a talented gunslinger carrying a black bible and a trickster who murders a man after winning against him in a card game, possibly by cheating.
4-Brandy
Played by Hao-Yi Liu (Pink Force Commando, Shaolin Chastity Kung Fu), she is a drunken master, a trope that began with the popular 1978 film of the same name, which means that she's a fantastic martial artist but only when she is drunk, as her body becomes more fluid and loose in that state. She is introduced in a reenactment of a scene in Rio Bravo, she gets abused and harassed by some drunk military guy but once she gets her hands on some alcohol she kicks his ass, cuts off his hand, slashes some other soldier´s face and then beheads another military guy.
5-Quick Silver
Played by Hsueh-Fen Peng (Pink Force Commando), Quick is a young thief who is caught stealing a great amount of money from the french consulate. She even snatches a watch from the guards on the way to her cell.
6-Sugar
Played by Joyce H. Cheng (Pink Force Commando, Golden Doll, The Cabbie, Country of beauties), she is an ambitious prostitute who always asks for more money, when a guy doesn't want to pay she stabs him in the back. She's obviously taken to jail because of it.
7-Dynamite
Played by the prominent Sally Yeh (Peking Opera Blues, I Love Maria, The Killer, Pink Force Commando), she is a bomb expert who asks for her piece of a presumed robbery she helped a gangster with, when the gangster doesn't wish to give her the money, she blows them up.
Cool girls dont look at explosions.
Actually, not only does the film have alternate titles but it also has a few different cuts, the fullest version is the original Mandarin version as far as I can tell, it opens up with the introduction of Black Cat. The version titled Jackie Chan´s Crime Force opens with soldiers escorting a prisoner and then changes into the Mongolian wrestling scene with the Amazon lady. The Mandarin version is 91 minutes, while the Crime Force cut is 86 minutes.
I can't recommend the original version because the subtitles are hard to read but you are gonna have to put up with the typically dreadful dubbing these movies have in the english version, it doesn't really ruin the fun but it's still something to consider.
The girls are taken to prison, where they meet each other and engage in different shenanigans like smuggling cigarettes into the prison, stealing from inmates and finally having a food fight that gets them locked together for starting it. It was all planned by Black Fox who recruits the girls in order to put their special skills to good use: a suicide mission that involves destroying a chemical lab.
Using their special skills to beat up the guards and wear their uniforms, the gals escape the facilities by horse and they are attacked by some paramilitar group and taken to their camp, where they engage in more cheeky tests, which they beat in ingenious ways.
Brandy humiliates some warrior men.
Skilled knife-thrower
After the girls leave the group, the independent guerrilla is attacked by enemy soldiers and they defeat everyone but the leader, who seeks the aid of the Golden Queen ́s Commando. They realize that one of them is a traitor, Black Fox can't bring herself to eliminate the vain Sugar, so Black Cat takes a shot at it, literally.
The girls then face off against the mounted enemies in an extended action sequence that steals the music piece Ecstasy of Gold from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
Brandy is shot down right after the battle ends. After the funeral, they move on to the chemical lab section of the movie. They enter a secret facility and defeat more bad guys, by the end of the movie, none of them survive. Making it one of the few movies of it´s kind where the suicide mission actually lives up to the name.
The spit of victory.
The film succeeds at presenting nonstop action set-pieces filled with charisma and ingenuity, not only do we see a lot of shootouts and fights (which are very dynamic and stimulating) but they are also executed with tons of personality, making the characters react according to their characterization and employ their special skills while battling, something a lot of the other movies in the subgenre forget about altogether since often the girls in these groups are kind of interchangeable.
The quick shifts in tone and the disjointed structure that incorporates different sections with a completely dissimilar objective and setting actually work really well here. In any other movie of this kind, these would be deviations that are there to fill time because Joseph Lai had another movie he added footage to in order to make it more marketable, but here the eclectic sections set up one inventive set-piece after another, the film develops swiftly and with ease, always in constant movement and focusing on astounding spectacle, mini-vignettes that charm you with their simple creativity.
Endlessly entertaining, Golden Queen´s Commando is one of the high points of the dirty, ultra low budget, asian action flick field, offering amazing fights and gunplay, sort of a messy story overall but it's all in service of pacing, rhythm and potent images. Totally check it out if you are even slightly interested.
I remember reading back in the day that apparently Quentin Tarantino was influenced by this movie to create Kill Bill (2003-2004) but I dont think thats a fact, seems like the person writing that was mostly speculating because you can say the same thing for Lady Snowblood (1973) and The Doll Squad (1973) which are pretty much confirmed. However, Quentin has referenced more obscure movies, I do believe he has at least seen Queen´s Commando.
At any rate, this is probably a cult film that needs a cleaner home media release in order for it to fully become the classic it was meant to be.
