Royal Warriors - Michelle Yeoh (1986) - Kai Tak Airport

Back in the late 80s, when I was studying my A-levels, years before Michelle Yeoh won an oscar and was still going by the name of Kahn, and Bey Logan was still editing "Combat" magazine, I had a like-minded (HK film fan) buddy called Marco who would enter the Combat "win a video" competitions every month by sending off about 10 entries, all with different addresses on (his relatives and neighbours as far as I can remember). Invariably he won a bunch of films* and one of them was the UK video release of Royal Warriors, then released under the name Police Assassins.

So here we are, 35 years later (give or take) and I have just rewatched it - the first time since then - and I have to say that, fashions aside, it holds up really well, probably helped by the fact that Hiroyuki Sanada has been kick-ass for a very long time (and still is!!).

Anyway, for those who haven't seen it, the film follows the tribulations of three police officers (Yeoh, Sanada and Michael Wong) who get snarled up in a plane hijack on the way from Japan to Hong Kong. A gang of criminals have conspired to help free their incarcerated buddy (Chan Wai-man) who is being extradited back to Hong Kong and all hell breaks loose. The rest of the film details how the remaining gang member tries to kill them in revenge for the ruined plan. As you would expect, the Hong Kong part of the story begins as the heroic trio's plane lands back in Hong Kong. Cue Kai Tak footage...

* This came back to bite him on the arse when we both attended a fan meet-and-greet, held in December 1990 in Birmingham (not far from our homes in Coventry) featuring Lau Ka-fai a.k.a Gordon Liu. In that event we got to hear from Mark Houghton, who claimed he had forgotten how to speak English but also did a good job of translating from Cantonese for Gordon, and we got to watch some of his career highlights on a projector. Anyway, we were all invited to put our names on a mailing list by Bey Logan and about 5 minutes later, Logan comes back into the room and says "Which one of you is Marco?". Marco, puts up his hand sheepishly and then gets a very stern telling off about his competition antics that Bey was aware of from an early stage. Fair play to Bey, even though he knew Marco was cheating (sort of) he still allowed him to win the tape if his name was drawn. Suffice to say, Marco stopped after that, but before he did he already had quite the haul.