So Close is the movie that McG’s Charlie’s Angels should have been. It’s slick, it’s cool, it’s three girls kicking ass who — and this is the big difference — are not braying-donkey annoying. Shu Qi (The Transporter) and Zhao Wei (Shaolin Soccer) are two siblings who have been working as an assassin-for-hire team ever since their parents were brutally murdered. Wei sits at home with a super-decked-out, eye-in-the-sky, satellite-linked computer spy system, feeding Qi info as she carries out the actual hits.

The opening sequence is a stunner, with Qi carrying out a hit on a wealthy computer CEO and shooting her way through the enormous office building as a Carpenters-soundalike version of Burt Bacharach’s “Close to You” plays over the structure’s PA system. If this doesn’t suck you in to the film’s offbeat charms, nothing will.

Hot on their trail is cop Karen Mok (Black Mask), which results in a couple of great chase scenes. But to further complicate matters, Qi’s falling in love and Wei’s taking a liking to pulling triggers, something her big sis does not want her to do.

Directed by Hong Kong choreographer Cory Yuen (The Transporter), the high-tech flick takes some surprising turns and doesn’t follow the usual formula that your standard Hollywood action movie would, especially one with a female-led cast. The three leads are all engaging — particularly the sister act of Qi and Wei — proving that sometimes, women can do these things better than the men. So Close, so good! —Rod Lott

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Meet Nick Gunar (Dolph Lundgren), a former mercenary who wears a palooka beret and drinks from a flask. He’s approached by two yuppie maggots about going to the tiny island of South China Sea and making the native give up their mining rights.

Because his former superior tells him that “The art of war is the art of life” or whatever, Nick assembles of team of expendables from all over the nation to stick the business end of their guns, rocket launchers and other weapons in the faces of the islanders to convince them to give up what’s theirs. Of course, they encounter resistance, but what really sways Nick’s soul and mind to the other side are the terrific bared breasts of Charlotte Lewis (The Golden Child). That’ll do it.

Directed by actor Perry Lang (Spring Break), Men of War also features Catherine Bell of TV’s JAG as part of Nick’s team. Unlike Charlotte, she doesn’t take off her clothes. However, this may be a good thing, because here she looks like a man. In fact, her role is so butch, my genitals wept.

Shit blows up in this Thai-shot actioner. And by “shit,” I mean people, mostly. There’s even a bad guy with a burnt face who has what looks like a vulva where his right ear should be. What it lacks in story, it makes up for in mindless violence and Dolphitude. Judging from the credits, I believe the crew may have been locals forced to work for free, under threat of Dolph. Just look: Special effects assistants? Lek, Niphon and Kob. Electrician? Jakkrid. Dolly grip? Meng. —Rod Lott

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Let’s get one thing straight: my penis Despite the plural title of Policewomen, Crown International Pictures’ playful drive-in actioner is really about a singular police woman, and it’s not Sgt. Pepper Anderson. It’s Lacy Bond (Sondra Currie, star of Al Adamson’s rape-revenge Western, Jessi’s Girls), and after thwarting a prison riot, she’s recruited to bring down a gold-smuggling operation run by an old racist coot (“Who’s the black?”) and comprised of babes in bikinis.

The cops give Lacy some gadgets that would make Q semi-erect, and in she goes, using her martial-arts skills to kick various baddies into submission (and one ally in the balls, just for fun). All the while, she rarely wears a bra, but does squeeze her curvy hips into a pair of very 1974 pants whose pattern presages the AIDS quilt.

Speaking of STDs, writer/director Lee Frost (The Black Gestapo, The Thing with Two Heads) packs in some loose love scenes for Lacy, including a partner who post-coitally orders her when the shit starts to hit the fan, “Get me some white pants!” This is actually the flick’s second-best line, behind the aforementioned coot’s insistence that “Nobody gives a shit what happens to an old Volkswagen!”

But they do give a shit about Policewomen. At least I do. It’s hard not to when the screen is set ablaze by Currie’s ridiculous, redheaded hotness. —Rod Lott

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Sadly, Yo-Yo Girl Cop is one of those flicks adorned with a totally awesome title to which it can’t possibly live up. You roll the dice and hope it can, please please please … snake eyes, sucker.

Japanese pop singer Aya Matsuura fills the title role of a no-good street ruffian recruited by the authorities to assume the identity of Asamiya Saki and infiltrate a local high school, where exists an underground student-terrorist movement to blow up places and, thus, overthrow the country.

To do this, she dons a schoolgirl uniform and has a metal yo-yo strapped to her thigh for a weapon. This is the stuff of many a socially isolated man’s masturbatory fantasies, but also a long-running manga (1976-1982) on which this tired actioner is based.

A romance angle further slows things down, but things pick up in the final scenes, particularly where a leather-clad Asamiya uses her mad yo-yo skillz to do battle with the school’s bitchiest girl, also clad in leather. You understand. —Rod Lott

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Charles Bronson is Joe Martin, a happily married Army vet whose black-market/ex-con past comes back to haunt him when a former associate breaks into his home. Joe shoots him dead, but he and wife Fabienne (Liv Ullman) have trouble getting rid of his corpse the same way Batman does oceanside bombs.

Before long, bigger trouble arrives in the form of Joe’s other criminal comrades, led by the gruff Capt. Ross (James Mason in a Gilligan hat) who’s come to get what they’re owed. Ross takes a shine to Joe’s boat, which Joe doesn’t like, so they kidnap Fabienne and their daughter instead. Joe doesn’t like that, either.

You know how this all will end, because the first two words in this review are “Charles Bronson.” But hell, it’s fun watching all that come down. Plus, you’ve just gotta hear Mason enunciate “Indochina.” It’s classic, and so is Bronson’s real-life wife (Jill Ireland) as a free-spirited hippie who burns reefer on the open highway, telling him she likes “to smoke what I like, to ball who I like.” To each his own, right?

Given this French-lensed flick can be found on many a public-domain collection, you’d expect it to suck, but really, it’s pretty action-packed. After all, the director is Terence Young, who’d just come off helming three of the first four James Bond films. Most notably, Cold Sweat climaxes in a life-or-death car race against time topping out at over 140 mph — watch a poor cyclist run off the road do a head-over-handlebars front flip — and takes the energy straight to the final moments. —Rod Lott

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