One of the unsung female exploitation filmmakers makes a bid for martial arts stardom as LADY STREET FIGHTER, on Blu-ray from AGFA.

Upon her arrival in Los Angeles from Amsterdamn, call girl Linda Allen (Renee Harmon, NIGHT OF TERROR) is nearly killed by a pair of thugs trying to steal a stuffed toy dog from her belongings. When she learns from pimp Lem that her sister Billie was mistaken for her and murdered, she wants to discover who was responsible. She makes a date with FBI agent Rick Pollitt (Jody McCrea, BIKINI BEACH) who was looking for her sister. Little does she know that he is after a master list of the thousands of agents on the payroll of Assassins Incorporated for which Billie was tortured and killed. Linda and Politt separately infiltrate a toga party given by Assassins Incorporated middle man Max Diamond and escape together when a game of Murder turns up a real dead body. It soon becomes apparent that no one can be trusted, not even Politt when Linda realizes that she may have inadvertently discovered the location of the master list.

Although director James Bryan had already helmed a couple softcore films, LADY STREET FIGHTER changed the direction of his directorial career in pairing up with writer/producer/actress Harmon, a German war bride who had married an American colonel and had become a Los Angeles area acting teacher. Although an atrocious actress, Harmon was an enterprising businesswoman behind Bryan's THE EXECUTIONER, PART II, HELL RIDERS, and RUN COYOTE RUN as well as Frank Roach's FROZEN SCREAM which shared more than its score with Bryan's slasher DON'T GO IN THE WOODS. The film feels more or less thrown together, and the commentary reveals that Harmon funded it by getting her own students to pay for roles in the film and then wrote scenes around them (with cutaways to Liz Renay's strip act). Overcranked car crashes, some aerial work, and an explosion do not production value make, but they are diversions in what may be the longest seventy minutes committed to film (thanks in part to the elevator muzak score).

"I'll try not to put you to sleep," says one of the agents of REVENGE OF LADY STREET FIGHTER, the unreleased sequel promised in the first film's end credits as RETURN OF LADY STREET FIGHTER; and viewers will struggle to stay awake during this resequencing of the entirety of LADY STREET FIGHTER in flashback form as a series of FBI agents make the case to the captive audience that is Linda's niece Wendy AKA Wanda (Ruth Peebles) that her aunt is a dangerous woman who has racked up a high body count and has information they want. The ninety minute running time requirement has been met by the end of the flashbacks, so we never really know why the FBI thought it necessary to kidnap Wendy and tell her all these things (especially since they seem to have grabbed the file Linda passed on to her niece before vanishing). Lengthy sequences have been lifted in whole from the first film with original audio and cutaways like Renay's strip act irrelevant to the flashbacks at hand; but the story of the first film is really no clearer here than it was originally. Had this been a direct to video production with filmed or videotaped new footage bookending flashbacks, it might have made sense but one cannot imagine this ever going well in theaters. That one of the closing credit cards from the first film is recycled here actually makes sense since there is enough of the original footage for them to still take credit.

Produced in 1974 and finished sometime in between that date and its 1981 theatrical release through IFI/Scope III, LADY STREET FIGHTER languished (perhaps deservedly) on the video shelves with Unicorn Video's tape release and made no waves as a Rareflix DVD release in a three-disc set with NINJA STRIKES BACK and REVENGE OF THE BUSHIDO BLADE. Mastered from a 2K scan of the only surviving theatrical print, AGFA's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.78:1 widescreen Blu-ray transfer looks largely clean and colorful apart from some intermittent scratches – some from projection and archiving while others appear to have occurred in the camera – while the DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track sports clear dialogue and music over a layer of constant hiss that presumably could not be fully cleaned digitally. Optional English SDH subtitles are only selectable via remote. REVENGE OF LADY STREET FIGHTER's original footage is derived from the original 35mm camera negative while the recycled footage came from the 2K scan AGFA struck of the original film (suggesting that the editing was never finished). The DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track is clean during the original footage and subject to the same hiss during the recycled scenes. Optional English SDH subtitles are also available.