Hard Hunted involves a baddie named Kane--probably "Kaneshiro," but played by a new actor--who has a nuclear bomb triggering device hidden away in a mini jade sculpture. When Mika, one of our LETHAL Ladies, steals it, he sends Al Leong in a gyrocopter to get it back. Al kills Mika, but our hero, Donna Hamilton, and her partner Roberta Velasquez, get the jade and take it back to the rest of the agents in Hawai'i. Kane won't give up so easily though, and he kidnaps Hamilton, who tries to escape, but gets a nasty knock on the head that leads to a bout of amnesia. Now it's a race against time, as Velasquez, Bruce Penhall, and Cynthia Brimhall try to track her down before Kane and his baddies do. And who knows, maybe our lethal-est of LETHAL Ladies, will regain her memory. If that happens, the baddies won't know what hit them.
This might be my least favorite of these films, which doesn't mean I didn't like it, I just didn't like it as much as the others. The kidnapping and amnesia thing almost turns Speir's Donna Hamilton into more of a damsel in distress, and the part where one of the baddies convinces her that they were a couple, leading to their love scene, was uncomfortable. It may not have been a rape scene in a forced sense, but there was definitely a lack of consent there that put it along those lines. On the other hand, when Dona's character had her faculties, she was fantastic, which made it all the more frustrating when we lose it for that chunk in the middle. My favorite is when she's in the plane after she was kidnapped, and she tosses one of her captors out of the plane, then grabs a parachute and grenade. The pilot tells her "you don't have the stones," to which she says "I don't have the stones?" Then she pulls the pin and jumps out of the plane before it blows up. That's the kickass Speir we want. We also get Rodrigo Obregon back after missing him in the previous film. It's just not a LETHAL Ladies film without him, and he makes all of these better. Finally Al Leong and his gyrocopter were a great addition that added to the fun. While it may be my least favorite, it's still very entertaining.
With this film, Dona Speir now has 6 films on the site, which doesn't sound like much, but it ties her with Shannon Tweed and Jillian McWhirter for fourth most tags for a woman on the DTVC. Above her are Cynthia Rothrock, who has 42, and then a big drop down to Kathleen Kinmont at 8, and Lisa London at 7. We have one more LETHAL Ladies film that she was in, Fit to Kill, so that'll get her to 7, but after that it's slim pickin's, maybe a couple more that we could do, leaving her shy of 10. I don't know that it matters necessarily though how many she has, because the work she does in these as a female action lead, especially in the late 80s/early 90s, is most important. I'd say in comparing her to Cynthia Rothrock, this might be her Lady Dragon 2, only there Cynthia Rothrock is a more explicit damsel in distress, and her character is more overtly raped. I think with this one, the amnesia aspect might have just been a sign of a series that was running out of ideas, and they wanted to inject some intrigue into it, so this was what they came up with. As I mentioned above though, when Donna Hamilton has her faculties, she's fantastic, and gives us everything we want with her in a LETHAL Ladies film.
After Do or Die, which is the only post-Malibu Express entry in the LETHAL Ladies films to not feature Rodrigo Obregon, he's back with us now, fully scarred and eye-patched and chewing scenery. He's not the main baddie, we leave that to Geoffrey "RJ" Moore's Kane (more on him below), but what we get as sort of an intermediate baddie is fantastic. I remember in 2021 when I watched all of these films for the podcast episode with Mitch, my top actor for Letterboxd that year was Obregon, and my top director was Sidaris, a Holy Grail for a low-budget movie watcher like me--only topped in 2022 by both actor and director being Fred Williamson. For a movie series that's a lot of boobs, buttocks, and sex scenes, with shootouts and explosions mixed in, to have an actor like Obregon be one of the hallmarks is a testament to how great he is. Welcome back Mr. Obregon, we missed you.
Speaking of hallmarks, two of the hallmarks of the Fast and Furious films are one, no one ever really dies, and two, baddies become good guys in later films. Sidaris gave us the blueprint though on how that series should have done it. Ava Cadell plays an assassin in Do or Die, complete with a scene of her putting on her leather pants. She gets blown up, and that's it. Now that she's in Hard Hunted is there this whole story around how she survived the explosion and has been turned to the side of the Good Guys? No, she's just here now as new character who's part of the Good Team, helping them out by running radio station KSXY, through which she relays information to them. What about our baddie, Kane? In the previous film he was "Kaneshiro" and played by Pat Morita; now he's "Kane" and played by Geoffrey Moore. They even use footage from the previous film showing Carolyn Liu's Silk character creating the necklace that she gave Morita, and is now giving to Moore, through which the agency is able to track him. Does any of it matter to us, the fans of these films? Of course not, just like we didn't care that Erik Estrada was a baddie in Guns, and was a Good Guy as a totally different character in Do or Die. The Fast and Furious movies should've just relaxed and, instead of bringing people back from the dead, just had actors play new people. You like Jason Statham, but he was a baddie in Furious 7? Just have him play a whole new character in Fate of the Furious. It might actually be more fun for us--as these Sidaris films are more fun than the Fast and Furious films.
Finally, this is our 10th Al Leong film, which I think is a fitting one, because, while this isn't the best of his 10 films on the site, this might be his best performance. First off, I think he has more lines in this than all the other 9 combined. Second, he flies that fantastic gyrocopter, one of my favorite of all the Sidaris vehicles he uses in these films. The problem of course is, being a helicopter pilot and a baddie means he can only meet one end, and our hero Donna Hamilton was more than willing to send him there. Will from Exploding Helicopter talks about what he calls "Chekhov's Copter," which means a helicopter shows up for the sole purpose of being blown up in a later scene. In this case, we have Chekhov's Copter blown up by Chekhov's Gun, because what happens is, Al Leong is spraying our heroes with machine gun fire, hitting Bruce Penhall in the leg, forcing him to abandon his gun on the beach. Later, after our heroes have been disarmed, Donna Hamilton runs back to where the gun was left, and uses it to dispatch Mr. Leong in explosive fashion. With such fun devices being employed by Sidaris in these films, it's hard to stay angry with him for the whole Donna Hamilton amnesia thing.
And with that, let's wrap this up. This, like all the LETHAL Ladies films, are available on Tubi here in the States. While this might be my least favorite, it still has a lot of fun elements, and is worth checking out if you haven't seen it yet.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104391
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