Women on the Run (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Apr 16, 2025
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
David Lai, Corey YuenRelease Date(s)
1993 (December 31, 2024)Studio(s)
Joe Siu International Film Ltd. (Vinegar Syndrome Archive)- Film/Program Grade: B-
- Video Grade: B+
- Audio Grade: B
- Extras Grade: B
Review
David Lai and Cory Yuen’s 1993 film Women on the Run exists at the uneasy confluence between Hong Kong’s “Girls with Guns” subgenre and the much harsher world of Category III films. The Girls with Guns genre was already well established at that point thanks to franchises like The Inspector Wears Skirts and In the Line of Duty (the latter of which had been launched by Yuen’s Yes, Madam!, although it was really a franchise in name only). When the Hong Kong government passed a censorship law in 1988, one of its new classifications was the Category III rating that was roughly equivalent to the original X rating that the MPAA eventually discontinued in favor of NC-17. Category III films were still softcore, but with the sex and violence dialed up such a level that no one under the age of 18 was allowed to view them. (Anything involving the Hong Kong Triads also usually carried a Cat III rating.) So, it was inevitable that Girls with Guns would end up meeting the relaxed standards of the Cat III rating, and meet they did in Women on the Run, with suitably gonzo results.
Women on the Run was at least partly inspired by the success of Thelma & Louise in 1991, but any resemblance between the two is purely cursory. Both films feature a pair of women who suffer at the hands of the male establishment and end up on the run, but that’s about the only similarity that they share. Yuen-Leung Poon’s script is more of a female-led 48 Hours, but even that is only at the most basic of narrative levels. In reality, Women on the Run mashes together ideas borrowed from multiple other films and genres, shaken and stirred into an uneasy whole that never quite coheres, although to be fair, it was never really intended to. With the freedom granted by the looser restrictions of the Cat III rating, Women on the Run shifts dizzyingly from comedy to tragedy and all points in between, rarely giving viewers enough time to catch up to where these particular girls with guns are heading. The narrative is constantly shifting as well, but here’s a vain attempt to summarize it:
Siu Yin (Tamara Guo) is a small-town girl with a penchant for martial arts who moves to the big city with her boyfriend. He ends up hooking her on drugs and forcing her into prostitution, but she gains her freedom (from sex slavery, anyway) and goes on the run into Hong Kong. There, she quickly runs afoul of the law and is coerced into teaming up with police officer Ah Hung (Farlini Cheung). Ah Hung’s boyfriend David (Wai-Tak Wong) sends the pair back to mainland China in order to track down drug lord King Kong (Won Jin, aka Yuen Jan), but there’s more going on with David and King Kong than meets the eye, so the duo end up disgraced and on the lam in Canada. After suffering repeated degradations while being pursued by King Kong’s henchmen, the duo vows revenge and returns to Hong Kong to get it. Women on the Run also stars Cory Yuen (in a cameo as a police officer), Adam Chung-Tai Chan, and a host of other actors playing the thugs who constantly harass Siu Yin and Ah Hung.
Women on the Run is indeed a Category III film, so those degradations include things like rape, gang rape, and more rape. There’s even an abundance of nude martial arts, because why not? (Leaving no stone unturned, a dog is also abused and killed.) What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, I suppose, but Lai and Yuen hammer home the first half of that equation in no uncertain terms. Still, this Hong Kong Thelma and Louise duo does get their revenge eventually, but even that comes at great personal cost. One of them explains that “Women were born to be lied to,” which sums up Women on the Run as much as anything else. It’s the equivalent of Louise’s “In the future, when a woman’s crying like that, she isn’t having any fun!” Siu Yin and Ah Hung certainly don’t have any fun in Women on the Run, which makes this particular Girls with Guns film a strange contribution to the genre. It’s entertaining enough, but it’s still not entertainment in any real sense of the term. That’s an irony that may or may not have been intentional, but regardless, Women on the Run exists as a reminder of the infinite possibilities of cinema, for good and for ill.
Cinematographer Bill Wong shot Women on the Run on 35mm film using spherical lenses, framed at 1.85:1 for its theatrical release. This version is based on a 2K scan of the original camera negative, digitally cleaned up and graded in-house by Vinegar Syndrome. There are still some minor scratches, dirt and other debris visible, especially during the opticals, like the step-printed slow-motion shots (although to be fair, those were probably baked into the opticals themselves). There are also a few stains and other major damage marks on display, and the opening credits demonstrate some instability. With all of that out of the way, the image is sharp and clear, with nicely resolved textures to the skin and costuming. Women on the Run isn’t necessarily the most colorful of Hong Kong films, but the colors all look accurate and the flesh tones seem natural. The grain remains smooth throughout, and there aren’t any compression artifacts of note. It’s a solid 1080p presentation of the film.
Audio is offered in Cantonese 2.0 mono DTS-HD Master Audio with removable newly-translated English subtitles; English-dubbed 1.0 mono DTS-HD Master Audio with optional English SDH subtitles; and Mandarin-dubbed 1.0 mono DTS-HD Master Audio with English subtitles. Regardless of which version that you choose, the post-synced dialogue doesn’t integrate well into the soundstage, but it’s always clear enough to be comprehensible (although unsurprisingly, the Cantonese track still has the edge). The synthesized score doesn’t strain the edges of the frequency response, and the limited dynamic range means that the sound effects are loud but not necessarily impactful. (Note that there are a few anomalies in the subtitles, at least for the Cantonese track—for example, at 51:55, it reads “strongly condone” when the context clearly called for “strongly condemn.”)
Vinegar Syndrome’s Blu-ray release of Women on the Run is part of their Vinegar Syndrome Archive collection, so it includes a double-sided foldout poster and comes with a bottom loaded VHS style rigid spot gloss slipcase, with new artwork designed by Sean Longmore. It’s strictly limited to 4,000 units, and while it’s possible that there may be a standard edition at some point down the road, Vinegar Syndrome says that there probably won’t be one—so wait and see at your own risk. (As of this writing, there are 1,396 units remaining.) The following extras are included, all of them in HD:
- Audio Commentary by Travis Woods
- Hong Kong’s Thelma & Louise (16:46)
- What You See Is What You Get (22:50)
- Corey Yuen and Girls With Guns (12:30)
- Original Trailer (3:08)
The commentary features Travis Woods, contributing editor to the Bright Wall/Dark Room website, and frequent contributor to a variety of different publications. He also sees Women on the Run as a gender-flipped version of 48 Hours viewed through a Cat III lens, and states up front that he wants to use his commentary as a way of honoring the late Cory Yuen—although he offers plenty of honor for Tamara Guo as well, who he considers crucial to the success of the film. Actually, he offers plenty of praise for Women on the Run, full stop, so this is as much of a fan appreciation as it is an analysis of the film. He covers its radical shifts in genre and tone, and also the way that it marked a transformation in Cory Yuen’s flirtations with the Girls with Guns subgenre. If you’re looking for negativity, look elsewhere, but if you love Women on the Run and want to listen to someone sing its praises, then this is the commentary for you.
Hong Kong’s Thelma & Louise is an interview with co-director and producer David Lai, who talks about moving from television into feature films during the early Eighties, and his work with Cory Yuen. They always intended female action movies like Yes, Madam!, Royal Warriors, and Women on the Run to appeal to international audiences. That’s one reason why Thelma & Louise ended up cross-pollinating with what they had been doing in Hong Kong. He also covers the training that Tamara Guo and Farini Cheung underwent, Yuen’s way of shooting action scenes, and more.
What You See Is What You Get is an interview with line producer Shan Tam and production manager Michael Parker, who marvel at how they were able to pull off the kinds of action scenes that they did without modern safety equipment. They offer some insights into their backgrounds and how they ended up working on Women on the Run. They also tell plenty of stories about the production, including the challenges of shooting some of the more intense scenes.
Cory Yuen and Girls With Guns is a visual essay by author and film historian Samm Deighan, tracing the evolution of Yuen’s career from his Seven Little Fortunes days at the Peking Opera to his involvement in developing the Girls with Guns subgenre starting with Yes, Madam!. Even though he didn’t continue with the rest of the official (and unofficial) In the Line of Duty series, he still kept returning to female action heroes, even in his later films that embraced the post-Matrix CGI bullet time world, like So Close.
Regardless of how you may feel about the film, Women on the Run is another great release from the Vinegar Syndrome Archive collection, which is dedicated to rescuing films like this from obscurity. There aren’t any missing extras from previous releases, because Women on the Run has barely had any on home video—this is its debut on the Blu-ray format, at least for the North American market. Any fan of the Girls with Guns subgenre or of Category III films should definitely add it to their collection.
-Stephen Bjork
(You can follow Stephen on social media at these links: Twitter, Facebook, BlueSky, and Letterboxd).