★★
“S’no good.”
Look, I tried. I really did. When I found my attention had drifted away from watching the film, in good faith, I rewound the film to the point where I’d lost interest, and took up the movie again the following day. After all, maybe it was me. But when I still could barely bring myself to finish this leaden lump of poorly-crafted revenge-fu… No, having gone above and beyond the required effort, it’s really not me. This is lacklustre stuff, to put it mildly, even by the generally low standards of Taiwan.
The heroine (Chen), seems only to be referred to as the Snow Maiden, and is an orphan, brought up in the mountains by the Snow Woman (Tiu); I kept wanting to call her Mrs. Narwhal, due to her striking snaggletooth, which is remarkably distracting. When the Snow Maiden discovers the truth about her orphanness – namely, that her pregnant mother was betrayed and abandoned by her father – she vows vengeance on the man responsible. While she’s looking, she adopts a “Robin Hood” like persona, rescuing the oppressed and making the oppressors pay for their crimes, in a range of (usually) non-lethal ways.
She eventually finds the family responsible: in about the film’s only interesting twist, her father is old, feeble, and largely filled with regret about having abandoned Maiden’s mom, which does present her with a bit of an ethical dilemma. Complicating matters further, his son (Wu) falls for Ms. Maiden; despite trying to keep herself emotionally distant, so that she can carry out her mission, she begins to have feelings for him too. So, will love triumph over vengeance? And, more importantly, will anyone care? At the risk of spoiling this for anyone, I can reveal the answer to the second question is a fairly conclusive “No”.
Chen isn’t a bad heroine, with a reasonable degree of screen presence – at least when standing still and glowering at people. And she does this a lot – about the only thing there’s more of in this movie is probably maniacal laughter, which appears to sit just behind Mandarin as the preferred method of communication. However, the novelty of this wears off rapidly, and the feeble excuse for martial arts this offers is a long way short of an adequate replacement. Neither the ability nor the quantity of action is acceptable, and any quality there may have been in the performances is destroyed by terrible dubbing, including atrocities such as the son being given a posh British accent. I would have been better off to cut my losses and not bother, after my first attempt to watch this failed.
[Worth noting, there was a movie released the following year, Vengeance of a Snowgirl – a very similar title to the alternate here. Don’t confuse them: while both are about orphans seeking revenge, the other was the last movie Lo Wei directed for Shaw Brothers, and has a crippled heroine who can’t use her legs. Not that this stops her, naturally…]
Dir: Chou Hsu-Chiang
Star: Chen Chen, Wu Chia Chi, Tiu Shut,
a.k.a. Vengeance of Snow Maid