8 Female Action Films You Probably Haven't Seen

A graduate of Sonny Chiba’s Japan Action Club (established by the actor to improve the martial arts skills of his co-stars), eighteen-year-old Etsuko “Sue” Shiomi had barely a half-dozen credits on her resume when she was chosen for the lead role in Sister Streetfighter.

A last-minute replacement for Angela Mao (Enter The Dragon), Shiomi was the natural choice for the role, having previously played bit parts in The Streetfighter and Karate Inferno. You wouldn’t think that this doe-eyed innocent would be capable of climbing walls in a single take, dodging bullets or defeating hordes of bizarrely-garbed henchmen, but she does. And then some.

In a plot so generic it also served as the basis for TNT Jackson that same year, Shiomi’s search for her missing brother takes her to Hong Kong, where she learns he has gone undercover to infiltrate a dope smuggling ring. Sent to Yokohama to meet a fellow agent named “Fanny Singer” she gets into a fight, which she then does every five minutes for the rest of the movie.

Director Kazuhiko Yamaguchi also directed Shiomi in two sequels, after which she seemed to lose herself in an array of uninteresting supporting roles in equally uninteresting films. Upon her marriage to singer/actor Tsuyoshi Nagabushi in 1987, she retired from at the ripe old age of thirty-one.