Kung Fu Chauvinism
In action movies, you don’t usually have a scenario where a man’s main enemy is a woman. This is ironic when you consider how chauvinistic that the film industry used to be. Originally, Cynthia Rothrock was going to be the final person who Jackie Chan fought at the end of Armour of God (1986) but I think that it would have been better had she played the evil cult leader instead of Ken Boyle. Another idea for a movie would be to do an action take on a divorce-themed film where a man has to wrestle custody of his child from his evil wife. With a different screenwriter, Righting Wrongs (1986) could have been a male versus female film with Cynthia Rothrock as a corrupt policewoman fighting Yuen Biao’s lawyer (although they still get to fight anyway).
There are a lot of evil women on this planet; there have even been female serial killers, so film stories shouldn’t necessarily have to be politically correct by having a woman taking on another woman. There has always been kind of a polite formality with martial arts movies in that a man will automatically drop his weapon so that he can engage his unarmed opponent in a fair fight. “Man versus woman” has been the eternal argument, and I can imagine that there was a lot of rivalry between male and female martial arts movie stars.
For example, Ted Thomas claimed that Chinese actors were jealous of Bruce Lee, so it was difficult for him to make friends with people other than the stuntmen. A soft butch actress like Polly Shang Kwan could easily have played an antagonist but she preferred playing heroines. Even Cheng Pei-Pei was okay with being decimated by Chow Yun-Fat at the end of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). Back to Bruce, there was an imitator named Bruce Le who fought Lita Vasquez at the end of Bruce and The Shaolin Bronzemen (1977).
If an actress can be okay with participating in a scene where she’s smacked by an evil man then there’s no reason why she couldn’t be okay with participating in a scene where she is beaten by the hero for being the villainess. An old-fashioned man like Sean Connery would probably have been all too thrilled to be in an action movie where he gets to smack an evil woman around. Jimmy Wang Yu had a similar mindset as he showed that he was okay with fighting Hsieh Chin-Chu at the end of Knight Errant (1973). If an actress can be okay with playing a horror movie victim then she should be okay with suffering a nefarious fate as the chief baddy. When it comes to gender dynamics, it’s usually a case of a heroic woman fighting an evil man at the end instead of vice-versa.
Despite American film culture being more sexist, it would have been unthinkable to have someone like Jean-Claude Van Damme beat Cynthia Rothrock to a pulp even though she did play the antagonist in Corey Haim’s Fast Getaway (1991). It’s a curious double standard when you consider that Cynthia was willing to play a rape victim in Lady Dragon 2 (1993). It would have been quite something to see a ‘90s B movie where a strong woman like Kathy Long or Karen Sheperd plays an unhinged ex-girlfriend who has to be defeated in order to the protect the current girlfriend of Don Wilson or Daniel Bernhardt. Even if that had transpired, the ending would not have been as surprising like the end of Seven Men of Kung Fu (1978) where Doris Lung played the final fighting foe as she later did in Shaolin Heroes (1979).
The number one misogynist of martial arts cinema is Sammo Hung. Encounters of the Spooky Kind (1980) ends with Sammo’s character pummelling his evil wife but she isn’t a martial artist. In My Lucky Stars (1985), Sammo doesn’t so much fight bodybuilding champion Michiko Nishiwaki as he does knock her down with one punch as if he’s Bruce Lee. In Armour of God, Jackie appears to be wanting to one-up Sammo by fighting four black women in the finale. He already wanted to best Sammo since the latter fought Cynthia Rothrock in The Millionaire’s Express (filmed in 1985), but she wasn’t the main adversary.
In Return of the Deadly Blade (1981), David Chiang has a sword fight with Flora Cheung because (besides being a swordplay movie) it’s less misogynistic to use a weapon when fighting a woman who is also armed. Having weapons automatically makes it a fair fight, as is the case with Finger of Doom (1972), The Devil’s Mirror (1972) and (to a lesser extent) The Lost Swordship (a 1978 film where the identity of the woman is made clear after the removal of her mask). That said, John Woo never made a gunplay movie where a heroic man shot to death a villainous woman. However, he did make a martial arts movie where James Tien fought Ina Ryoko. This was The Dragon Tamers (1975).