User Reviews

"Karate, Küsse, blonde Katzen" or "Yang chi" (and there exist several English-language titles too for this one, is a collaboration between Hong Kong and West Germany from 1984, so this one is already over 40 years old. I cannot say I am familiar with any of the Asisn people who worked on this film, no matter if behind or in front of the cameras, but the name of director Ernst Hofbauer sure rings a bell and certainly not a positive one. He worked on many German films that were a mix of comedy and soft core porn, but the quality was always very low. The girls weren't that hot and the writing of the story and comedy was abysmal for the most part. And things look similar here in this pretty unusual collaboration. The film runs for slightly under 90 minutes and is about a bunch of young European women who are brought to Asia as slaves for a master who is very influential and owns a big company. Of course, there are also Asian girls for audiences with a more exotic taste. The story is about virginity, greed, loyalty and many other aspects, but the heart and should here is of course once again the mix of nudity and comedy. The women are trained as martial arts fighters to oppose their captors and so it is also somehow a story of survival, even if it is pretty much impossible to take the film seriously from that perspective. After all they are always topless during the fighting sequences. Enough said. I personally don't believe this is among Hofbauer's worst as the Asian influence and the general weirdness of this culture clash adds quite some (un)intended humor. But it's by no means a good film either. I just cannot recommend the watch. Thumbs down.

I discovered this film by accident in the summer of 1978 in New York City, roaming Manhattan with some time to kill and a few dollars in my pocket. In those days the 42nd St district was alive with adult entertainment unlike today's sanitized, Disney-ized fare. In a lot of ways this film was the grand-daddy of female exploitation. The original title was "The Virgins of the Seven Seas" or "Enter The Seven Virgins" (take that, Bruce Lee!). Hot western (German) girls are kidnapped into slavery in order to please their eventual owners but wait!!! They secretly train in martial (not marital) arts to defeat the male pigs who would own them. Of course they do this in the most humiliating and degrading way while clad in their colorful and scanty underwear. Tarantino surely must have seen this film in his youth and turned it into Kill Bill. The bad dubbing, obvious wigs but credible (and sexy) fight scenes only added to my enjoyment of this over-the-top action comedy. I only wish it was available in some format these days so that I could own a copy. Still, I'll never forget how much fun this movie was.