Product Details

• Actors: Jade Leung, Simon Yam, Lam Joe Fai
• Directors: Stephen Shin Gei Yin
• Format: DVD Region, NTSC, Restored, Letterboxed, Subtitled
• Subtitles: English, Cantonese, Mandarin Chinese
• Region: All Regions
• Number of discs: 1
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Studio: Joy Sales (HK)
• Run Time: 92 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B001452BZC
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #154,241 in Movies & TV (See Bestsellers in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Catherine, a pretty but rebellious girl, who has committed her crime of killing a policeman. She has sentenced death penalty or she has to become an CIA trainer with a code Black Cat, whom will implant a micro chip into her brain in order to increase her physical power and train her up to be a cold-blooded killer. Finally, she accepts the training. After training, Catherine is transferred to Hong Kong and covered up as a journalist. She meets Allen, a scientist in a wild life reservation zone. Allen makes her to get to know about the real life from killing. At the time being, they decide to flee when Catherine's trainer appears with killing request...

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Hong Kong crime thriller par excellence, July 6, 2008

By	Brian Camp (Bronx, NY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

BLACK CAT (1991) is a prime example of the kind of over-the-top action thriller that made Hong Kong cinema famous worldwide in the early 1990s. An uncredited remake of Luc Besson's LA FEMME NIKITA (1990), it's actually a much more inspired film as it tells the story of an out-of-control young woman who falls into the hands of a special CIA unit which trains and programs her to be a highly efficient assassin, only to watch helplessly as she falls in love and starts to resist her programming. In the early scenes, she's a psychotic, unstoppable force who cuts a bloody swath through the Pacific Northwest that leaves at least three people dead and many more wounded. In the next stage, her wild impulses and erratic emotions block the early efforts of the CIA trainers to tame her. Finally, when the seeming kindness of her handler touches hidden reserves of humanity in her, she plunges into a love affair in the final section of the film with the same fierce energy and passion she'd shown in her other actions.

Through it all, Jade Leung, the model-turned-actress playing the role of Catherine, later renamed Erica by her trainers, displays the kind of unrestrained physicality and emotional range that would scare off more accomplished actresses. Whether she's fighting back against abusive police guards with raw fury, screaming at her handler (Simon Yam) for what she thinks is an act of betrayal, or making adoring love to the boyfriend (Thomas Lam) she meets in Hong Kong, Ms. Leung never fails to completely inhabit her character and make every shift and transformation she undergoes thoroughly believable. Even though it's her own willful act of violent aggression at the very beginning that provokes the horrible chain of events, she somehow manages to win our sympathies throughout. And even though the actress is doubled for the toughest stunts, she still seems to take an awful lot of risks.

There are plenty of audacious action scenes you would never find in a Hollywood counterpart, starting with Catherine's vicious brawl at a roadside diner with a trucker who's gotten rough with her and her battles with police guards while under arrest, and moving on to the killings she performs on assignment, including one jaw-dropping shooting at an outdoor wedding party and one clever maneuver at a Hong Kong construction site where her target's change in plans requires some quick thinking and agile legwork on her part as she climbs up a giant crane high atop the city to improvise a last-minute method of execution. All while her boyfriend is sitting in a movie theater waiting for her to come back to her seat.

It's not for the faint of heart. The violence in the opening 20 minutes is reckless, messy, bloody and brutal, the way violence generally is. We don't get the more stylized choreographed setpieces until midway through the film and the outdoor wedding scene where over a dozen guests suddenly pull out automatic weapons and begin firing at the fleeing assassin and chase her into the woods. The subsequent hits in Hong Kong and Japan are all quite imaginatively staged.

If you're already a Hong Kong action fan and you haven't seen this, you owe it to yourself to get this great new edition from Fortune Star's Legendary Collection line. It was followed by a sequel, BLACK CAT 2: ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT YELTSIN (1992), that was equally over-the-top in its action scenes, but didn't quite have the heart of this film. The sequel is also out on DVD now.

1.0 out of 5 stars Disappointed - no english subtitles, March 18, 2009

By	Jen "ctwmn6988" (Greenwood, IN United States) - See all my reviews

I knew this was a foreign movie when I bought it, but I thought that it would at least have english subtitles since I'd read english reviews that remarked at how good the movie was.

I am a huge fan of the USA network's series, La Femme Nikita, that was popular many years ago. I've seen the French movie, Nikita, (that included subtitles, mind you) which was the mother of the series and the other movie knock-offs, including this one and the American version, Point of No Return, starring Bridget Fonda. I thought this version would be a nice addition to my collection. I tried watching it, but couldn't understand a word since it's all in Chinese - even the Americans in the movie speak Chinese.

So, I'm disappointed. No english subtitles. The movie was over-acted. The beginning scene of the movie was a big mess - just didn't make any sense (even with english subtitles this scene would have been very hokey). The sound quality was bad, too.