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Lady Reporter: The Blonde Fury
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray B - United Kingdom - Eureka Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (29th June 2023). |
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The Film
 When the FBI discovers that the major influx of trade flow capital into the country's major cities comes from counterfeit cash printed in Hong Kong, they believe that a newspaper called the Asian Post is a front for the operation (especially because its major staff have more martial arts than journalism credentials). Without the official support of the Hong Kong police, the FBI sends in San Francisco cop Cindy (Yes Madam's Cynthia Rothrock) nicknamed "Chinatown Moe Cheung" due to her specialty in Chinese crime to infiltrate the paper as a reporter. Arriving in Hong Kong, Cindy moves in with her old friend Judy (Long Arm of the Law: Part 3's Elizabeth Lee Mei-Fung) and easily lands a position at the paper paired with go-getter Chung (Vampire's Breakfast's Kwan Chiu-Chung). Cindy cannot help but do her real job when they go to cover a fire at a brothel and she jumps from an upper floor to save a baby, and the act is photographed by Hai (Legacy of Rage's Mang Hoi) from a rival tabloid run by his uncle Ma (A Chinese Ghost Story's Wu Ma). Trailing Cindy, Hai discovers that her roommate is the daughter of Prosecutor Yu (Game of Death's Roy Chiao Hung) who is pursuing a case of tax evasion against the Asian Post's editor Huang Te (Ronny Yu, director of Bride of Chucky) and witnesses the man being abducted and dragged into another car. When Yu suddenly suffers a psychotic episode in court, Huang Te's case is dropped and the prosecutor is institutionalized. Although Cindy has been warned off the investigation by police superintendent Melvin Wong (Eastern Condors' Melvin Wong) after being caught snooping around the Asian Post offices, she believes that Huang Te has something to do with Yu's breakdown and tries to keep her investigation a secret not only from Judy but also from a shifty insurance investigator (Fist of Legend's Chin Siu-Ho); that is, until bumbling Hai is caught spying on them and provides them with evidence that Yu's breakdown may have been induced. One of only two directorial efforts by actor Mang Hoi and the only one starring Rothrock with whom he was in a relationship at the time Lady Reporter was a notoriously troubled production that, depending on who you ask, paused production either because of a serious injury Rothrock suffered kneeing herself in the head during repeated takes of her building jump or because she was also contracted to do the back-to-back American Golden Harvest co-productions China O'Brien and its sequel. Whatever the case, when Rothrock returned Corey Yuen was in the director's chair and the film was radically-altered with the continuity errors involving Rothrock's changing hairstyles being the least confusing element. In some scenes, Rothrock is the "lady reporter" as originally intended while in others she is an FBI agent it makes more sense that Judy would be ignorant of her reporter friend secretly investigating counterfeiting than if she knew that Cindy was in law enforcement Hung is either a prosecutor or a judge, Ma is either Hoi's uncle/boss or his father, Siu-Ho never gets a proper name despite having a romantic subplot with Judy, and Hai mysteriously disappears from the new climax (presumably Police Story's Tai Bo who plays Hai's buddy had more to do in the original cut or at least the original script). While plots were generally glorified McGuffins to justify a lot of fight scenes or, in this case, fight scenes and Hoi working out his fetishes with bathtub-splashing exposition scenes between Cindy and Judy, Cindy having her dress and blouses torn before stunts and fights, and a number of stunt set-pieces involving Cindy's high heels kicking or impaling male opponents this one is so confusing as to be distracting.  The fight scenes, both those originally directed by Hoi and the newer ones directed by Yuen, are all quite exhilarating; particularly because here more so than others due to an emphasis on the pain of both those on the receiving and giving ends of certain blows as well as keeping in what are either extremely painful mistakes by the stunt people or at least intended to look painful like poor Fat Chung (Millionaires' Express) running around with alive rat in his mouth, Cindy repeated kicking the knee of an uncredited Thai boxer after she has pierced it with her heel, Taekwondo expert Billy Chow (High Risk) striking his head against a metal railing a shot that could have been faked but really looks like it should not have happened freestyle fighter Richard Brothers (Six-String Samurai's Jeffrey Falcon) bending his ankle and doing a near split while trying to kick Cindy in a narrow gap between shipping containers, and Vincent Manuel (Operation Condor's Vincent Lyn) getting a groin kick from Cindy in an image that was the highlight of some of the film's international advertisement imagery. The new climax involved a fight on a massive spider web-like cargo net and a final fight on a moving cargo truck that seems almost as though it is going into The Hitcher territory with Cindy hanging upside down in the path of kicked up gravel with cackling Ronny Yu behind the wheel with predictably explosive results.
Video
Lady Reporter received a theatrical release in the U.K. in 1989, and the title "The Blonde Fury" and the eighty-seven minute running time suggests that it was the Hong Kong version (or a retitled and BBFC-trimmed variant of the eighty-nine minute export cut) while the subsequent VHS releases were titled "Above the Law II: The Blonde Fury" forging a false connection to the previous Rothrock vehicle Righting Wrongs which received the export title "Above the Law" and the running time of the VHS releases suggest it was the export version. According to the LaserDisc Database, the Hong Kong laserdisc went against the grain and used a print without burnt-in English and Chinese subtitles, so a fully English-friendly version of the film was unavailable stateside until Deltamac's Hong Kong DVD which was imported over here before it was ported over in 2003 for Tai Seng's DVD edition. Fortune Star's remaster did not make an appearance stateside and most of the European territory DVDs were not English-friendly apart from last year's German DVD from Phoenix Distribution replacing the earlier video-mastered German-only edition while retaining that territory's title "Born to Fight" on the cover and we presume since that edition was DVD-only that it was not HD-mastered.  Eureka's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray features new 2K restorations of both the Hong Kong theatrical cut (87:29) with the onscreen subtitle "The Blonde Fury" and the "Lady Reporter"-titled export version (89:36). Whereas the Hong Kong and export versions of titles like Yes Madam and In the Line of Duty 4 featured additional or alternate scenes, the two minutes of footage between the two cuts of this film are down to the tighter editing of all of the Hong Kong cut's fight scenes (so the Cindy/Judy bathtub scene was not too racy and just juvenile enough for local audiences). While the Hong Kong version is recommended particularly because poor Rothrock and Lee are dubbed to sound like bimbos on the export version it is nice to have both cuts to see what was offered up to the rest of the world. Both versions look very similar in appearance, with the title sequence opticals and the underlying guerilla shots of New York by night looking a bit grainier and flatter while the bulk of the film looks bright and clean, the Yuen-shot action set-pieces benefit from better lighting and the extra money infused into the production, while some shots during the action scenes shot by both directors have a "good enough" feeling to the take used in terms of minor moments of blurriness that are likely focus issues rather than noise reduction.
Audio
The Hong Kong cut features the original Cantonese mono track in LPCM 2.0 and the export cut features the original English mono track in LPCM 2.0. Both are post-dubbed with only a few of the supporting actors dubbing themselves (Mang Hoi is dubbed by the performer who was Sammo Hung's regular dubber until Hong Kong adopted sync sound in the nineties). Only the Hong Kong cut has optional English subtitles.
Extras
The Hong Kong cut is accompanied by an audio commentary by actor/martial arts director Vincent Lyn, moderated by Asian film expert Frank Djeng (NY Asian Film Festival) in which Lyn who has since become a close friend and travel buddy of Rothrock's reveals that all he had for padding when she kicked him in the groin was a roll of toilet paper taken off the cardboard roll and crammed into his pants, that he has no idea about the current whereabouts of Falcon who was hired alongside him for the reshoots, and he is the first of three people who worked on the film who are unable to put a name to the Thai kickboxing champion who figures into what was intended to be the original climactic fight scene. Djeng discusses how the film performed in the box office, the open secret that was the relationship between Rothrock and Hoi neither of whom mention it in their interviews tries to sort out the original shoot from the reshoot and what can be inferred about the original story, some of the word play used to get around censorship, as well as some information on performers not as well-known to foreign viewers including TV personality Chiu-Chung who was one of the first Hong Kong celebrities to die from AIDS during a time when Hong Kong was not the most politically correct regarding the disease, and Melvin Wong who tended to be typecast not only in police roles but also as characters with his own name! The export version is accompanied by an audio commentary by action cinema experts Mike Leeder & Arne Venema who compare the cut and paste editing style of the film to an IFD production, note its tangential relationship to the "girls and guns" sub-genre, and titter over Hoi's depiction of female friendships revolving around bubble baths, and note the film's realistic depiction of shameless tactics of Hong Kong's tabloid magazines of the time (the nickname of which translates as "bitchy magazines"). They also puzzle over the original story and the alterations, including a blink and you'll miss it appearance by James Tien (The Big Boss), a brief appearance late in the film by Chung which is obviously from the original shoot since the rest of the film has already established during that time that he is in the hospital, and also puzzle over why Siu-Ho the last discovery of prolific director Chang Cheh (Disciples of Shaolin) did not become a bigger star.  Next up is a select-scene audio commentary by actress and martial-arts movie icon Cynthia Rothrock, moderated by Frank Djeng (17:45) focusing solely on the film's big fight scenes, with Rothrock noting how her hair changed between the two shoots, being dropped into a basket without a bottom during the scaffold fight, her head injury during the building jump, working with both Hoi and Yuen, as well as the cargo rope fight in which one stunt performer ended up paralyzed. Rothrock also appears in "The Blonde Fury: Cynthia Rothrock on Making Lady Reporter" (16:04) in which she notes that the film was the first Hong Kong production with a western female lead, fighting in high heels, and fighting with Chow and Lyn, but is either unintentionally or intentionally vague on the any tension between Hoi and Yuen. In "Mang Hoi on Lady Reporter" (8:53), Hoi blames the lower budget of the original shoot for much of its problems, reveals that Yuen was brought in to work with him but directed the climax on his own (it was also Yuen's idea to hire Ronny Yu). The disc closes with the Hong Kong theatrical trailer (2:33) and the English export trailer (3:49). 
Packaging
Not included for review were the two-thousand copy-limited limited edition O-Card slipcase featuring new artwork by Darren Wheeling or the set of facsimile lobby cards while we were able to source a lo-res PDF copy of the equally-limited fifteen-page collectors booklet featuring new writing by James Oliver in which the author notes that the film is a seminal work despite its outrageous disregard for continuity (a U.K. screening was apparently turned into a "spot the error" drinking game).
Overall
Cynthia Rothrock's first lead role - and, indeed, the first lead role for a Westerner in a Hong Kong film - Lady Reporter is a cut-and-paste mess of mammoth proportions that still remains entertaining.
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