Cold Steel on the outside… ALL woman on the inside!

Ooh boy this kinda has my motor running if you know what I mean, fellas.  Policewomen is about a lady cop (as pictured on the poster to the left), who has a skirt on, some stockings, and boobs, taking on a gang of lady criminals – they, too, probably in the boob and skirts market.  I bet they also like to carry around guns and point them and shit!

HOLY JEEZ, GUYZ!  LADIES AND GUNS!  WOOHOO!

Ahem…  Sorry, everyone.  Not sure what got into me there.  Anyway, I should also point out that this is another movie featuring some sweet martial arts action.  I mean, why not?  Let’s turn this month into a balls-to-the-walls kung fu month, eh?!?

I should probably also mention that this movie is titled awkwardly, and there is a story behind that.  First of all, this movie only follows a single police lady – or police woman.  However, the title of the movie is pluralized.  Why’s that?  Well, right around the same time this movie was slated to release, a TV pilot by the name of Police Woman was airing.  So, the makers of this movie decided to make the woman women and then cram the two words together into one, hence Policewomen.

What’s the movie about?  Well, as I’ve already mentioned above it’s about a lady cop (played by The Hangover’s Sondra Currie) infiltrating a gang of all lady gold smugglers.  I honestly don’t know much more than that.  And martial arts.  Amazon promised me some martial arts.  They also promised that the bad girls are “femme fatales”.  I will be the judge of that!

Okay, I’m going to go ahead and start the movie.  I’ve rambled on this preamble too long.

You know you’re off to a good start when you learn this is a Crown International Picture.  These guys are solid purveyors of the not-so-good.  But anyway, we meet Lacy Bond, our titular (heh) Policewoman.  She’s leading a newly nabbed lady criminal to a holding cell (or possibly jail jail).  When she opens up the cell and goes to uncuff the criminal, the others bum rush her and try to escape.  Lacy begins karate kicking the chicks in the fucking box and gut punching them left and right.

Guys…  I’ve made the proper choice for tonight’s entertainment.

Holy shit there is so much punching and kicking going on.  It’s like Lacy against 400 women.  They keep coming and coming and she keeps punching and kicking.  It’s wonderful.  So the ladies that Lacy couldn’t catch hold up the possessions locker where the normal clothes e are kept.  The escapees strip down, because this is 1974 and butts and side boob is a must in any movie that holds a solid 3-star rating on Amazon, while Lacy and the male cops try to get in to take care of these bitches.  But they are able to escape thanks to some gas bombs and a fucking grenade that they use to try to blow up them pigs!  The trio of ladies (a brunette, a blond, and, the sorta-leader, a black lady with a bitchin’ fro) blow open one of the windows and attempt to repel down the side of the building.  Lacy catches up to the blonde and stops her.

Cut to a sweet ass title sequence featuring Lacy posing in her uniform, and doing awesome poses with guns, and doing a little cheesecake posing in her bikini, and some fashion shots in a dress or a coat (and nothing else)…  Wait..  What?

Whatever, I’m into it.

Lacy goes to see a trio of detectives who heard about how she handled herself during the jailbreak – Inspector Martell, Detective Peterson, and Detective Mitchell.  We learn that she desperately wants to work the beat like the other male cops.  However, her request to transfer is constantly turned down.  She’s asked so often, that it turns out she’s a bit of a “troublemaker”.  You know, because she’s just a frail, hot, young thing.  She shouldn’t get her hands dirty and whatnot.  That’s a man’s job!  That said, a couple of the cops think Lacy’s the right girl for a job, but Mitchell isn’t so sure it’s the right thing to ask her to do.  She doesn’t care and wants the assignment no matter the danger involved.  They tell Lacy they need her for the assignment because of a sharp increase in crimes committed by women perpetrators.  They need her to go undercover and infiltrate a group of gold smugglers.

They run her through some tests at the academy and she proves herself to be a crack shot with an automatic rifle.  She’s an ace driver.  Then, they test her acumen in fuckin’ karate.  The department’s black belt…  Do police stations have in house black belts?  I mean, I guess they do for hand-to-hand combat practices and such, but I’m guessing this is something that doesn’t exist anymore – because 70s.  Anyway, he tosses her around a bit and she asks to go full speed because she can’t compete with someone who weighs so much more than her.  So, she kicks him in the balls.

Be still my heart.

Lacy’s given some gadgets, like a compact that has a radio in it, a transmitter that poses as a lighter, and…  That’s it.  She’s given two ways to communicate with a full compliment of cops to come busting in guns cocked.  It’d be real nice if Lacy Bond could have some real secret weapons like Q gives James Bond, but whatever.  I’m sure it’s enough.  Lacy’s skilled in the karate and kung fu.

Before Lacy can even be installed into the field, she spots a suspicious car pulling up to a house they are parked outside of.  Lacy knows the cops probably shouldn’t just be standing out there in the broad daylight like that, and, sure enough, the suspicious lady driver of the suspicious car speeds away.  Lacy follows, but the chase ends with the suspicious car going off an embankment and exploding (because 70s car chase), killing the driver.  Peterson is a fucking pig (er… well…  he’s a pig who also happens to be a fucking pig) and tries to get her tossed off the case because of her going off half-cocked after the possible perp.  However…  I will say that her outfit definitely has me three-quarters cocked:

At this point, we meet Maude, the main villainess of the movie – Maude.  She runs a cabal of lady thieves and smugglers.  The two ladies who escaped jail at the beginning of the movie meet with her.  The black escapee is new to the outfit and Maude is impressed with her ingenuity to get a gun and break out of prison.  However, an Asian lady at the compound is super racist and they get into a good old fashioned brawl.  Naturally, the Asian lady uses the kung fu while the black lady just punches, tackles and uses kicks to the face.  She beats that Asian chick’s ass hard.

Soon, we meet Doc, Maude’s shockingly young husband.  He basically stands around without his shirt on and does weights.  He tells Maude about the chick Lacy chased and ended up dead.  This guy is perhaps one of the worst, and best, actors I’ve ever seen on this blog.  He spouts off about how these “cunts are nuthin’ but trouble!” and is freaking out about having to deal with all these dumb broads.  Maude, tough old broad that she is, sets him straight in a hurry.  In the meantime, though, he’s shouting and freaking out and it’s truly awful.

Worse, we have to hear him hit on Maude and feel bad for him when she turns him down due to having a headache and a sore throat.  EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW.

Ew.

Even worse, we watch Doc shower and be hit on by a super hot redhead.

Thankfully, we turn our attentions to Catalina Island where Lacy Bond and Mitchell posing as a couple doing tourist things.  When they arrive, she’s wearing a tiny bikini, as previously teased in the opening credits.  On the island, they seemingly wander about while cute little romantic music plays and they seem to be getting along real nice and cozy like.  However, they go on dates, and walk around, and ride horses, and go to the swimming pool, but it doesn’t seem like they do much police work.  At least they fuuuuuuuuuuuck.

Oh, and I guess we learn about how both Lacy and Mitchell got where they are today.  It’s mostly bullshit, but I guess if we’re going to be halfway through the movie, we should at least learn some backstory to our main characters.

The next day, Mitchell and Lacy spot some of Maude’s girls and decide to find out more about what they might be up to.  They follow by way of boat out into the ocean.  Lacy knows that even though they can barely see them, they can be spotted by binoculars which means the girls will likely split and not do a drop.  Mitchell says he’s going to handle everything and it’ll all be super cool.  Lacy busts his balls a bit.  Ya see, Mitchell is a bit of a fucking moron because the girl he recognized best for all the times he busted her while on vice squad knows exactly who the fuck he is.  So much so, that this former hooker is going to try to ram their boat and get rid of them so the girls can complete the gold drop for Maude.

Good one, Mitchell.

Anyway, like an idiot, Mitchell tries to handle the girls by hopping onto their boat.  He gets his ass handed to him when the girls all pummel him with oars and various other equipment.  So, Lacy jumps over there and karate kicks them all into submission.

Lacy convinces Martell, against his wishes, to allow her to be directly placed into Maude’s gang.  She figures this is the best way to figure out where the last gold drop is going to be and Maude is going to be in need of girls what with the five they got on the boat now in custody.  Lucky for everyone involved, Maude goes to Catalina (where Lacy and Mitchell are) with some of her girls to sort out what happened to the gold drop.

Lacy goes in as someone who found the boat adrift.  When she returns it, she gets beaten up by Doc and questioned about where the girls were that were on the boat.  She claims she doesn’t know anything, but Maude and Doc ain’t buying it.

Admittedly, I’m kind of lost on the plan here.  I thought Lacy was going to insert herself into the operation, but how’s she gonna do that nursing all the bruises and cuts from her questioning?  Is she going to somehow figure out what the plan is?  Is she going to convince them she can be useful to them?

You know what’s the most insanely lucky thing that happened for Lacy?  The two escapee girls she tried to bust at the beginning of the movie comes in and recognize her.  However, they don’t recognize her as a cop.  Nope!  The black girl recognizes her as a former inmate from Chicago.  Wowzers, that is lucky, but it gets even better a bit later.  Anyway, the black chick convinces Maude that Lacy’s cool beans, and Maude just buys it and says, “Alright, let’s just assume she’s good, and let’s assume the other girls weren’t arrested and simply ditched, cool?  Cool!”

However, things almost go to shit because the other escapee chick goes to dinner with the black chick and Lacy.  She reveals that she knows Lacy is a cop.  That also gets accusation tossed onto the black chick.  So the two escapees fight.  The white chick slips off a cliff and falls to her death.  The black chick reveals to Lacy that she’s secret service and that she was covering for her back at the house when she first saw her.  Wowzers.  That’s really lucky for Lacy!

I’ve not mentioned this up to this point, but this movie is all about two things.  Number one, Lacy is about the luckiest chick on the police force.  First, she happened to be able to be part of this whole sting operation in the first place.  I’ll give a pass to that just because she did do the right thing and proved herself.  However, if the karate teacher dude at the academy didn’t want to go full speed with her, she would not have been able to prove her toughness.  Then, all these shenanigans with the black chick.  Number two, this movie is loaded with chick fights.  I don’t think the movie goes five minutes without having some sort of chick fight or something.  It’s insane.

One might say this is both a super dumb AND super awesome movie at the same time.

Alright, so here we are at the big climax.  Maude, Doc, and the girls go out onto the ocean to get the gold drop.  Apparently there’s a fucking submarine out there that fires a buoy out and they pick up the thing and that’s all there is to it.  A fucking submarine was involved in this plan.  Holy shit.

So when Doc gets the buoy, Maude sets course back to the mainland… not Catalina as Lacy expected and instructed the fuzz to meet her.  You see, Maude is no dummy.  She’s down six girls (the five on the boat that got arrested and the one that got herself killed).  She can’t help but connect the dots back to some of the recent events and people involved in those events.  So yeah, black chick and Lacy are not looking all that trust worthy…  Even if they are looking very, very foxy in their little boat attire.

Okay, so on shore, Doc unloads the gold.  They take the gold to a group of army trucks.  Maude says, and it’s pretty smart thinking too, “Ain’t nobody ever stopped an army convoy.”  She gives the plan, and as she does, Lacy sets off her radar.  However, Lacy’s luck runs out because Doc, testing the walkie talkies, notices there is interference.  He finds the transmitter.  She takes off running and Doc catches her.  He ends up punching her out.  Maude puts both black chick and Lacy in the back of one of the trucks and holds them at gunpoint.  Like a good supervillain, she does not shoot them instead opting for the cliffs they are going to drive near to toss them over.

Naturally, Doc is going to rough up Lacy and toss her out which leaves black chick (I honestly don’t know her name in this movie – maybe it’s Pam?) able to lunge for Maude to grab the gun.  They commandeer their truck and Lacy jumps to the truck ahead and take that one over.  Using the trucks as weapons, the girls run the lead car off the road to the driver’s eventual horrible crushing death, and then capture the other girls, but not before having a kung fu fight with the Asian girl that got her ass handed to her earlier in the movie.  So.  Much. Kung.  Fu…

This movie was pretty awesome.  Sadly, they sequel-bait with showing Mitchell and Lacy going off to another assignment and Maude telling Doc that, when they get out, she’ll set up a new operation that will make them richer than shit.

Admittedly, I did learn what the black chick’s real name is.  I recognized her for sure from the very onset of the movie, and I know why…  It was Jeannie Bell who played TNT Jackson in the movie of the same title.  Not only that, but we’ll be seeing her again soon because, two years later, she was the star of another 70s classic – The Muthers.  To find out  more about that movie, come back on June 22.

That does it for this week.  I’m definitely on a pretty good streak of fairly good and/or insane martial arts movies.  So, that said, let’s roll the dice one more time next week as I take a look at a more recent entry in the martial arts/blaxploitation genre with 2016’s Kung Fu Brother!

(In the meantime, I see Sondra Currie made another movie in 1974 called Mama’s Dirty Girls.  I think I am going to see if I can’t track that one down too because I am a fan.)