All this and “heinous” dialogue, too! What more could you ask for? Well, what if I said you can get a second, equally-unbelieveable Bobby A. Suarez action film for the price of one here? Yes, that’s right: it may have taken almost twenty years for the brave souls at Dark Sky Films to finally re-release The One Armed Executioner on DVD, and they’ve sweetened the deal by including Bobby’s 1978 policewoman epic, They Call Her...Cleopatra Wong, as a companion piece.
They Call Her...Cleopatra Wong also focuses on an Interpol agent. This time, though, it’s the badass, tough-as-nails girl cop named Cleopatra Wong (Marrie Lee — who actually reprised her role in two other Suarez films) who takes the lead. Darting across the metropolises of Southeast Asia, Cleo is hot on the trail of a ring of dangerous counterfeiters who are threatening to destroy the entire world’s economy with phony currency. A film aplenty with motorcycles chases, a convent full of captive nuns, and a lot of ass-kicking in general ensues — to wit actress Lee performs all of her own stunts. Why, we even get to see another stellar performance by Franco Guerrero, too!
Not only does my hat go off to Dark Sky Films for releasing both of these movies on DVD, but I’d even be tempted to remove other articles of clothing for them thanks to the fact that they included a few bonus materials for us fans. There’s a retrospective featurette about the making of The One Armed Executioner with cast/crew members Franco Guerrero and Joseph “Heinous” Zucchero; an interview with actor Nigel Fogge (who plays the film’s villain); a still gallery and the US trailer.
Now, despite the fact that it had been nearly twenty years since I last saw the film, I noticed that there was missing scene or two in The One Armed Executioner — which my current friends attributed to a faulty memory. Turns out I was right: Filipino censors had cut out two of the more “violent” scenes from the original negative, so they don’t appear in the main feature. Thankfully, the two missing scenes appear on the DVD (culled from the old Paragon Video transfer, no doubt), which allowed me to say “Boo-yah” to my colleagues (they were impressed — really, they were).
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