THE NEWEST LOOK. THE OLDEST LAW. An eye for an eye…WARNING!! Due to the constant action/violence depicted in this picture, the producer requests that persons under 17 be accompanied by an adult. Watch out for Judy Lee. She will rip your eyes out !!

Yes, grindhouse posters in the U.S. went nuts for Queen Boxer, also known as The Avenger. The story is classic: don’t mess with the wrong family territory. Our protagonist is a kickboxer who returns home to find her brother has been murdered by a local crime lord. A guy who, naturally, has a penchant for gouging out people’s eyes. She teams up with a fellow fighter who’s tired of shaking down for protection money, and together they wage a one-woman (and one-man) war against a literal army of axe-wielding goons. It’s a relentless, bloody climb through the Shanghai underworld that culminates in one of the most brutal, sustained punch-a-geddon finales in the history of the genre.

Directed by Florence Yu Fung-Chi, a rare female force in the male-dominated 70s HK industry, this was the only real shot she and her production company, Fung Ming, ever got, and they were desperate to make it count.

When the film was released, their marketing tried to sell Judy Lee as Bruce Lee’s actual sister. It was a complete fabrication and one that Lee eventually had to publicly apologize for, but it put butts in seats. But forget the marketing lies; the woman had the goods. With years of intensive Peking Opera training under her belt, Lee’s physicality is undeniable. She wasn’t just posing; she was throwing hands and feet with a ferocity that makes most of her contemporaries look like they’re doing a dance recital.

If that doesn’t make you laugh at the PR stunt for this movie, they also tried to sell it as a sequel to Boxer From Shantung.

It starts with Ma Yu Chen rolling into a restaurant looking to settle a debt with the local crime boss, Lee Ying, and his gang of thugs. He cleans house, but gets ambushed and ends up dead in a particularly nasty fashion. See, this crew belongs to the infamous Axe Gang, the kind of psychos who don’t just kill people. They massacre entire families. They thought they had left no loose ends, but they forgot about Ma Su Chen, his sister.

She hits the streets of Shanghai to the tune of the Shaft theme and hooks up with Fan Kao To (Peter Yang Kwan), a local rice bun shop owner who’s had enough of the Axe Gang’s protection racket. When Kao To stops paying, Su Chen steps in to deliver some instant dentistry to the goons who show up to collect. One thing leads to another, and this dynamic duo turns the city into a war zone to settle the score with the Big Boss. 

This was an 18-day quickie, and it shows. The camera angles are often tilted to the point of inducing vertigo, the editing is frantic, and the gore is surprisingly heavy for the era. The producers clearly didn’t give a damn about copyright, so you’ll hear iconic riffs from Shaft and various James Bond themes ripped straight from the studio masters and slapped onto the soundtrack. But this is arguably one of the few Hong Kong action films from that era directed by a woman, which lends the vengeful woman tearing through patriarchy a bit more bite. 

You can watch this on Tubi.