User reviews

Having caught this movie late one night on cable, I had to see it again just to check if it was as bad as I remembered. It was actually worse. Big Zapper is an attempt to cash in on the 'Kung Fu' craze & also the U.S female action sleaze of Pam Grier & Cheri Caffaro which fails miserably.

Linda Marlowe stars as Harriet Zapper, a private eye who is targeted for elimination by a gangland boss. Ms Marlowe has absolutely no martial arts skills, and the inept director Lindsay Shonteff in the days before CGI has no means of disguising this. - usually she kills her inept opponents with a single limp punch!.

The film features plenty of action, but it's all badly done & the director can't seem to make up his mind whether this is a comedy or a thriller!. One minute she is punching her enemies through walls like a WB cartoon character, the next she's bloodily skewering a guy with a knife.

If the action is badly done, the comedy is even worse, her sidekick being a moron who spends the whole film trying to get her to have sex with him. Big Zapper is 70's British cinema at it's very lowest - the acting and cinematography are laughable & it's a film so bad it isn't even unintentionally funny. Shonteff was also responsible for a couple of equally bad spy spoofs featuring actor Nicky Henson & Gareth (New Avengers) Hunt .

If you are a fan of female action cinema, this has to be seen to be believed, just to make one appreciate Hong Kong cinema & U.S grindhouse even more!.

This has to mark a low point for the British film industry; it is cheap, slapdash, sleazy, painfully unfunny but, most unforgivably, totally dull. Most of the actors look embarrassed to be involved with the exception of Gary Hope, as Kono, who throws himself into the part with such vigour that he reaches a crescendo in the first scene and has nowhere to go from there. The tone lurches unevenly from one scene to the next: the film opens with the brutal murder of a young girl (naked, of course)after which we are treated to Zapper getting dressed, explaining in a monotonous Marlowe-style voiceover how her boyfriend, Rock Hard, keeps pestering her for a whipping session. From here on the violence is fairly comical, at least I assume the kung-fu scenes are supposed to be funny.

Naturally all this "action" is bogged down by shots of Zapper driving around London, so Shonteff tosses in gratuitous nudity every so often to perk up the interest. When we eventually reach the climax, so to speak, the ending is so abrupt as to be almost non-existent, thus denying those who have had the fortitude to sit through the whole thing the bonus of a payoff.

The concept of a female private eye, along with spoofing James Bond and so on, is a reasonable one; but what these films need more than anything else is a strong visual style and this effort is completely lacking in any style, visual or otherwise. The sets are dismal, as are the locations; the costumes are tacky and the theme music repeated throughout. I thought Shonteff's 'Devil Doll' was bad, but I suppose everything is relative.

As the female version of Dirty Harry and one of the most vicious comic book adaptations Big Zapper is a cult favorite that lives on! After Sin City it has become even more acceptable and one can see that it was just ahead of it's time!

It's an unbelievable mixture of surreal sex scenes and nasty slap stick violence and the cynical attitude of the main character is absolutely unbelievable! Plus the way the goofs are saved by the voice over like "I had time just to change my clothes" when Zapper's outfit is changed in the middle the scene!

Absolutely great work!

The fearsome and paid swordsman challenges Zapper. His head flies through the air and lands in the arms of his boss. The head says to the boss 'Sorry boss' and then is silent. Zapper undresses in front of the bad guy. Instead of the beaver You see a flashing star, blinding the bad guy. Everything is played by the actors as if it was Shakespeare, but it isn't Shakespeare - it's far better than that! This isn't pretentious society-glorification. Taken to its maximum (or minimum?) or, in any case, to its extreme, this movie proves that society cannot be taken seriously and especially not entertainment and sex. A film for all those, who have seen enough of main-stream entertainment.