Black Cat

Distributed by Made In Hong Kong

Cert: 18

Running time: 92 minutes

Year: 1991

Pressing: 1996

Sides: 2 (CLV)

Chapters: 31 (15/16)

Cat.no: HK 036L

Sound: Mono

Widescreen : 1.85:1

Cantonese language with English subtitles

Price: £29.99

Extras : None

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Directors:

Dicksoon Poon and Stephen Shin

Cast:

Catherine : Jade Leung (Black Cat 2 : The Assassination of President Yeltsin)
Also starring Simon Yam (Killer's Romance, Naked Killer, Return Engagement) and Thomas Lam

Black Cat stars Jade Leung as Catherine, a young girl who has come from living on the streets to working in a diner somewhere in America. One night, as the sole diner trys to touch her up, she picks up a fork and stabs him in the hand. She gets thrown out of the diner and her job. Outside, the same diner tries to rape her, but as she fights back both outside and back inside the diner, her last line of defence becomes the gun suddenly produced by the owner trying to stop the madness.

After the carnage, the police arrive. Startled, Catherine shoots at the first person she sees, a cop, killing him instantly, and then being taken straight to the police station. She manages to escape after being given more than a rough time by one of the female police officers, only to be brought back in a way she didn't expect, and the next time she'll open her eyes, she'll be in a white bed in a white room in a white corridor, being told that she has been certified dead, and is now the property of the United States government, with a microchip inside her brain so she is at their command, and she is codenamed, Black Cat.

If all this sounds rather familiar to fans of Luc Besson's Nikita, that's because it's a remake, albeit with a different beginning which soon finds its way back to the roots of the original. It also has more action packed into five minutes than most directors can pack into a whole film. Don't get me wrong, I do like the original, but by comparison I don't have a lot of time for the other remake, The Assassin (released in the USA as "Point of No Return" from director John Badham.

I'm happy to report that with this remake, the directors have chosen to bring new scenarios into the film for our heroine to exercise her new skills, rather than simply rehashing old ones used in "Nikita" a la "The Assassin"

Even for those who don't like subtitles in a film, this one being set in the USA, doesn't have as much Cantonese dialogue. For those scenes which do, subtitles appear in the black bar under the widescreen image.

Picture quality is fine although the print does have a number of white specks on it and one or two picture jumps. However, this is sort of thing that one tends to expect from a Hong Kong film from time to time. The mono soundmix does the job, although it would have been nice if the film had been in stereo or surround. The only gripe with the sound is that it tends to fall behind slightly with the picture, so when Jade Leung is beating the hell out of a prison guard, it does seem a little weird.

The chapter breaks are perfectly adequate with 31 spread over the 92 minutes of the film. However, as side 2 only lasts 34 mins, it would have been nice to have had side 2 mastered in CAV.