Remember the first wave of Hong Kong cinema to hit American movie screens in 1972? Bruce Lee was transformed into an international superstar after the release of The Big Boss and Fist of Fury and other martial arts masters like Jimmy Wang Yu and Lieh Lo developed cult followings for films such as One-Armed Boxer and Five Fingers of Death. Most of these movies were the product of a male-dominated film industry but, as early as the mid-sixties, female heroines begin to emerge in the genre as witnessed by Cheng Pei Pei in King Hu’s Come Drink with Me (1966). Others would follow like Angela Mao in Deadly China Doll (1973) and Kara Hui in My Young Auntie (1981).

The Hong Kong movie business became even more diversified in 1988 after a new censorship ordinance created a rating system: Category I (general viewing), Category II (parental guidance) and Category III (adults only over 18 years of age). That third category quickly became notorious for an anything-goes-approach to the depiction of sex and violence on-screen. A major turning point was 1991 when Michael Mak’s Sex and Zen, Robotrix starring Amy Yip, and Black Cat with Jade Leung in the title role were among the first to push these boundaries to extremes in Hong Kong cinema. Martial arts actioners got even more outrageous the following year with the release of Chik Loh Goh Yeung (English title: Naked Killer (1992), in which a pair of lesbian assassins terrorize the male scumbags of Hong Kong before squaring off against a rival duo of lesbian hired killers.