Average
Verdict
With even less action and more comedy than in the previous entries, The Inspector Wears Skirts 3 manages to stay interesting and fun at just the right amount before it becomes tiresome. This Police Academy with girls-type zany adventure is pretty standard-issue, but I’ve got to say that it’s better than the recent Exped4bles, which had a very similar plot and execution.
Plot: The spunky SKIRT squad takes a mission on a casino cruise ship.
Review: The original SKIRT police squad leader Madam Wu (Sibelle Hu) has retired, but her husband Inspector Kan (Shui-Fan Fung) is still employed with the Hong Kong police department, but obviously is still living in Wu’s indomitable shadow. When some terrorists hijack a casino cruise that has high tech weapons and a possible nuclear bomb aboard, Kan has to whip Wu’s old squad back into shape to undertake an undercover covert mission to board the ship, posing as tourists, but it will be quite the task to get these misfit girls back into fighting condition. The new squad member seems to be the “ugly” duckling Amy (Sandra Kwan Yue Ng) who has terrible luck with men, but as it turns out she’s quite a crackerjack at gambling and poker. Other squad members such as Susanna (Amy Yip) use their “assets” to disarm men to get the upper hand. When the girls are finally ready to board the ship, they spread out and get to work to take control of the situation before the terrorists are able to accomplish their mission of terror, using seduction, sex, fake pratfalls, and all around ingenuity and SKIRT skills to win the day.
With even less action and more comedy than in the previous entries, The Inspector Wears Skirts 3 manages to stay interesting and fun at just the right amount before it becomes tiresome. There are some fun bits here and there, and I actually enjoyed the climactic poker game between Yu Ng and a bloodthirsty gangster who requires fingers and hands and feet (and even a head) as collateral instead of poker chips and bucks, and there was a wild, out-of-nowhere nightmare sequence with Jason Voorhees, who jumps out of a television set while someone is watching a Friday the 13th movie on TV, which fans of Jason lore will certainly appreciate and need to see. I’m not sure how they were able to get the rights to do that whole sequence, but it goes on to show Jason with a machete terrorizing a guy through a house and my goodness: Jason has never moved so fast! It’s a Friday the 13th trivia tidbit that needs to be seen to be believed. Other than that, this Police Academy with girls-type zany adventure is pretty standard-issue, but I’ve got to say that it’s better than the recent Exped4bles, which had a very similar plot and execution. From director Wellson Chin.
88 Films has just released a Blu-ray edition of The Inspector Wears Skirts 3 (they also just released part 4), and it comes in a nice, crisp 2K remaster wth an audio commentary by a Hong Kong film expert, a deleted scene, a trailer, reversible cover art, and a slipcover if you act fast and order it now.