REVIEW: ‘Angel with the Iron Fists’ (1967)

Years before femme fatales like Moon Lee and Yukari Oshima established themselves as some of Hong Kong’s leading martial arts and gun-totting heroines, Shaw Brothers attempted to marry the 1960s trend of leading ladies in martial arts roles with the wildly popular James Bond franchise. ANGEL WITH THE IRON FISTS is anything but a happy marriage, however.

Screen beauty Lily Ho, best known for her deliciously vampy role in INTIMATE CONFESSIONS OF A CHINESE COURTESAN, stars as a female undercover agent sent to infiltrate a secretive criminal organization known as the Dark Angels. Their aim, besides the usual murder of undercover agents and general villainy, is to engineer and distribute an age-reducing drug that will further fund their nefarious schemes. They have everything an evil genius could ever want, a futuristic secret lair filled with traps (at least by ’60s STAR TREK standards), attractive and lightly dressed young ladies armed with guns, and fashionably color-coded attire complete with blue Converse sneakers. Along the way Lily charms a male Dark Angel (Tang Ching), battles Dark Angel thugs with her karate-styled hand-to-hand skills and employs a small array of gadgets, including a purse that shoots bullets and magnetic mini bombs.

This description definitely reads as more exciting than the movie actually plays out. The pacing is horrid, the script threadbare, characters extremely underdeveloped, and the production cheap all around. Director Lo Wei, who helmed Bruce Lee’s first two martial arts movies and makes a nondescript appearance as Lily’s boss, takes the James Bond theme at its most superficial level. Beyond this, Lo’s direction is below his straight martial arts films of the era and the script shows a general ignorance of the spy genre.

The title suggests that our heroine is a martial arts dynamo and we might expect a fair amount of action. Put those thoughts out of mind. Throughout its overlong running time, the film’s simplistic fisticuffs and gunplay are spread thin, while the camera lingers over dull scenes of Lily sneaking around the secret lair or modeling swimwear for no real reason.

ANGEL WITH THE IRON FISTS is just what it sets out to be, a cheap and uninspired knock off that creaks along with a sloppy and lumbering stride to finish with an under-whelming bang. It’s quite poorly executed in most regards with nothing of any real interest to warrant even a passing glance. Any camp value, admittedly bolstered by one nasty death trap, is mitigated by a story so devoid of life or creativity as to make one wonder how the cast and crew could have mustered the energy to even come into work.