Top Fighter 2 (1996)

Touches You

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

TOP FIGHTER 2: DEADLY FIGHTING DOLLS is a great documentary that celebrates the wealth of female fighters who were dominating Hong Kong action cinema at the time. This was made by Toby Russell, a martial arts film expert and son of famed director Ken. The film is mainly made up of clips which understandably show off the fighting talents of pretty much every female fighter ever to grace Hong Kong cinema, along with a few contemporary interview clips with some of the actresses themselves.The clips utilised tend to be quite poor quality, understandable given the lack of high quality DVD prints of many of the films at the time. My only complaint is that they fail to identify the films shown so if you end up liking a fight scene you'll have no idea where it comes from. Many of the films shown seem to be quite rare and some of them are jaw-dropping, like the nude fight with the western actress; I have no idea where that came from.The interview footage is very interesting and reveals many insights about the workings of Hong Kong cinema. Moon Lee, Michelle Yeoh, Yukari Oshima, and Cynthia Rothrock are all very verbose and engaging. TOP FIGHTER 2 goes back to the beginning by looking at the careers of Cheng Pei-Pei and Angela Mao before moving to the wealth of girls 'n' guns thrillers of the 1990s with Elaine Yui and Moon Lee covered extensively. It's great fun and hard to dislike.

Review: This is a decent documentary, about the old school Kung Fu ladies, who really kicked butt. It did look a bit cheap and the narrating wasn't that great but there are some decent interviews with the athletic ladies, who didn't have the advantage of special effects or string action, so they really had to show there top skills in the low budget martial arts movies that they made years ago. You do get to see some top class action throughout the documentary but some of the fighting is really slow and not that great, which was expected in some of the older movies. From big names like Cynthia Rothrock and Michelle Yeoh to Angela Mao and Kathy Long, it's definitely worth a watch if your into you Kung Fu movies and it's a deep insight into a world, were women risked there life's to entertain. Enjoyable!Round-Up: I can't help but think that this documentary would have been much better if they had some money behind it. The director, Toby Russell, has made 9 documentaries, mainly about martial arts, which include 2 films on Bruce Lee, so he's not new to the game. You can definitely see that he had a low budget, because of the terrible camera work during the interviews and the bad editing but the archive footage was enough to keep me entertained.I recommend this movie to people who are into their action/documentaries starring Jackie Chan, Sophia Crawford, Cynthia Rothrock, Michelle Yeoh, Pei-Pei Cheng and Angela Mao. 5/10

....and that problem is that it doesn't tell you which movie each clip is coming from. I recognized quite a few of them, but that's not the point - it couldn't have been so difficult to have a title card at the start of each clip, just like they have for each person that appears on the screen. And this time, the titles aren't even mentioned during the closing credits. Thankfully, what "Top Fighter 2" lacks in informativeness it makes up for in sheer enjoyability. Practically all the big names of HK female action cinema get their screen time - and some smaller ones as well (like the underrated Sharon Yeung). And most of the women interviewed are extremely charming - I think I just fell in love with Judy Lee. But my favorite segment is easily the one devoted to the very sexy musclewomen Sophia Crawford and Michiko Nishiwaki: their interviews are shot in a gym, where we can also see them work out and spar with each other, and we also get to see parts of Sophia's incredible nude fight scene that has been cut from most copies of "Escape From The Brothel". I won't say this compilation is worth getting just for that - it's worth getting anyway - but it's certainly a nice little bonus. (***)

Better not watch this one with your parents around, kiddies.I kid. 'Top Fighter 2: Deadly Fighting Dolls' starts off a little risqué, with the first segment trying to convince us that Amy Yip is representative of female action stars. Apart from that, 'Top Fighter 2' is an action-heroine version of 'Top Fighter'.Essentially, this is just a list of (predominantly Asian) female action stars, complete with video clips and the odd interview. While it uses the same formula as 'Top Fighter', I must say that 'Top Fighter 2' is a better documentary. While 'Top Fighter' showcased a lot of now-famous stars, most of the women in 'Top Fighter 2' don't enjoy the same fame as their male counterparts, and so we get to learn more about these women and see more of their work.Michelle Yeoh, one of my favourite actresses, is interviewed and a clip of her kicking arse is shown. Although she is well-known now for roles in 'Tomorrow Never Dies' and 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon', when 'Top Fighter 2' was done in 1996, Michelle would have probably been a virtual unknown outside of Asia. Cynthia Rothrock gets her share of screen-time. After those two, 'Top Fighter 2' is a showcase for a lot of talented actresses from Hong Kong and Japan who may not be that well known at all. I was a little disappointed that someone like Amy Yip was shown while Etsuko Shihomi was left out completely.'Top Fighter 2' is a nice documentary, and a little better than the first. I reckon any fan of martial-arts movies should check it out - 7/10