Tag: 1994

Lady Punisher

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★★
“Lan, our relation is abnormal.”

lady punisherThis obscurist Hong Kong revenge flick is a little different, mainly because the couple at the heart of the film are lesbians. Admittedly, this is largely for crass, exploitative purposes: the dialogue quoted above, pretty much confirms the makers want to tut-tut disapprovingly at the love that dare not speak its name, while simultaneously depicting it in salacious detail. Such is the nature of Cat III in the mid-90’s, this seems to want to be something like Naked Killer, released two years earlier to this in 1992, but just doesn’t have the desire to go for the full delirious insanity, necessary to pull the concept off. Particularly in the middle section, it drags horribly, with the story diverting off into the usual triad drug-smuggling, betrayal and cop investigations that we’ve seen a million times before.

Quite what our heroine (Yi – some sources call the actress Tsui Man Wah, who may or may not be the same person!) is doing during this time isn’t clear. She initially seems all gung-ho for it, after her girlfriend is raped and murdered during a holiday in Thailand, and even takes out a pimp, whom she sees smacking around one of his employees. But then, she seems to forget all about her vengeance, until one of the perps comes strolling into the dress shop she runs – looking to make a bulk purchase, bizarrely. She lures him back to her apartment with the promise of dressmaking tips or something (okay, it’s more the something), and kills him. To help with the rest of the gang, she enlists the services of a female neighbour, who has been courting her with flowers, creepy phone messages and generally behaving more like a problem than a solution. But, whatever. This is a Cat III movie, and people exercising common sense is not something to expect. Especially where lesbians are concerned.

Down the stretch, this does finally manage to generate some energy, with a final confrontation which is not unimpressive. However, it’s definitely a case of too little, too late, and this is one of those “forgotten films,” where you can understand exactly why it ended up on the discard pile. I’m in agreement with history on this one.

Dir: Tony Liu
Star: Sophia Yi, Tommy Wong, Gong Hiu-Hung, Shing Fui-On

Angel of Destruction

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★★★½
“If you thought Showgirls really needed more kung-fu…”

angelofdestructionMake no mistake. By few objective standards could this be described as a “good” film. It is, however, one I found entertaining as all get-out, in a “WTF were they thinking?” kinda way. The main story has Hawaiian cop Jo Alwood (Ford) hunting sleazebag psycho mercenary Robert Kell (Broome), He killed Jo’s sister, among a slew of other women, just after she had accepted a position as bodyguard to bisexual S/M pop star Delilah (Mark), who is his final target. If this sounds a bit familiar, it’s a remake of 1992’s Blackbelt, by the same director, which starred Don ‘The Dragon’ Wilson as the cop. Ford isn’t as good as martial arts, but makes up for this shortcoming by the frequency with which she takes her top off. Heck, she even combines the two, and does martial arts clad only in a thong, which reminded me of another Roger Corman Philippino production, Angel Fist, from the previous year. Rumour has it, the original star, Charlie Spradling, refused to do the scene, so was relegated to the role of the murdered sister.

If that weren’t enough, Kell kidnaps Delilah’s sidekick/lover, and as ransom, demands that Detective Ford take a starring part in Delilah’s show. Even more bizarrely, she agrees, though I doubt any red-blooded male [and, let’s face it, that’s 95% of your target audience] is going to care about logic, considering the pay-off. That’s an area in which it feels a lot like an Andy Sidaris flick, though he actually shot in Hawaii, rather than as here, trying to fake it with the less salubrious areas of Manilla. He also left the hand-to-hand stuff up to his male leads, but Ford (and her stunt double) does credibly enough there, and is made to look semi-competent. Oh, I almost forgot the largely irrelevant subplot where Delilah’s manager is trying to kill her for the insurance money. Though since this does lead to the thong-based martial arts mentioned above, I’m not complaining too much.

It’s perhaps telling that the male leads – not just Broome, but Bacci as Alwood’s partner – never seems to have appeared in anything else, before or since, and it seems fairly clear that instruction came down from Corman Towers to make this all about the ladies. I’ve seen much less fun films, that didn’t need to be rewritten half-way through: Ford deserves enormous credit for plunging into this with an appropriate level of devil-may-care, and going where Charlie Spradling feared to tread.

Dir: Charles Philip Moore
Star: Maria Ford, Jessica Mark, Jimmy Broome, Antonio Bacci


Sorry: not available in the US. Well done, New Horizon, for helping suppress something promoting your own movie!

Wing Chun

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★★★½
“Half kick-ass fights, half zany bedroom farce”

wingchunWing Chun is the name both of the school of martial arts, and the woman whom legend has it was responsible for its creation – which, in itself, is pretty cool. Tradition says Yim Wing Chun was an 18th-century figure, to whom a warlord proposed (rather forcefully, one imagines) marriage: she developed the style and used it to beat him, thereby escaping wedlock. This movie is a very loose depiction of her life: Yim and her wily but unloved sister, Abacus Fong (Yuen) run a tofu shop in a town plagued by raids from local bandits. Yim rescues a beautiful woman, Charmy (Catherine Hung) from them, and Charmy’s allure brings crowds of customers – well, at least male ones – to the store. Yim’s former sweetheart, Leung Pok To (Yen) shows up, determined to woo her again, but mistakes Charmy for Yim. Meanwhile, bandit leader Flying Chimpanzee (Chu) has had enough of Yim humiliating his men, and kidnaps Charmy to lure the martial arts mistress into their fortress.

You’ve got Yeoh, the greatest kung-fu actress of all time, in my opinion. You’ve got Yen, who’s the greatest kung-fu actor of the modern era, in my opinion (Bruce Lee, and Jackie Chan in his prime, might be slightly better). You’ve got veteran Cheng Pei Pei, who’d find fame five years later in Crouching Tiger, as Yim’s teacher. And you’ve got Yuen, the greatest kung-fu director – I’m not even going with “in my opinion” on that one. So, why isn’t this a solid gold, five-star classic? Simply because, while the fights are awesome, the stuff between the fights is nearer to awful, focusing far too heavily on slapstick of the British, “Whoops! Where are my trousers?” comedy school. Not, I should stress that I’m averse to that per se: it just isn’t what I want in my action movies. Here, people leap in and out of bedroom windows, fall over themselves at Fong’s “stinky tofu” breath, and repeatedly, somehow manage to mistake Yeoh for a man. None of this is the slightest bit interesting, and it’s even less amusing.

Indeed, it’s a tribute to how good the battles are, that I was prepared to endure comedic stylings apparently crafted by an unsophisticated eight-year-old, to get to the next confrontation. Take your pick of which is best. The one on the docks? The battle over a tray of tofu? The encounter in an inferno? We haven’t even mentioned Yim vs. Flying Chimpanzee, which is the duel so good, they had to do it twice [and I was impressed Yeoh retained her position at the heart of the movie, not stepping aside to make way for Yen]. Without exception, these are all imaginative, inventive, varied, fluidly shot and edited: practically a master-class on how fight sequences should be filmed. The trailer below – which wisely removes just about everything else apart from the martial arts – will give you some idea. It’s just a shame their grace and beauty isn’t in the service of anything more memorable than dumb humour.

Dir: Yuen Wo Ping
Star: Michelle Yeoh, Donnie Yen, Kingdom Yuen, Norman Chu

Iria – Zeiram the Animation

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★★★½

Though released several years later, this is a prequel to the two Zeiram movies, telling the story of the first encounter between Iria (Hisakawa, who was also Sailor Mercury) and Zeiram. At the time, she was an apprentice bounty-hunter, working alongside her brother Gren. They take a mission to rescue a VIP and recover the cargo from a stranded space-ship. However, once there, they discover the “cargo” is actually the alien Zeiram, which a corporation is interested in using as a weapon. The result leaves her brother apparently dead, and Iria now the target for the corporation, who want to hush up their thoroughly-dubious plan, by any means necessary. Fortunately, as well as her own skills, our heroine has the assistance of former rival bounty-hunter, Fujikuro (Chiva), endearing urchin Kei (Kanai), and Bob (Ikeda), a colleague whose consciousness has been turned into an AI.

The six-episode (about 25 mins per part, by the time you skip the opening and closing credits) series worked, for me, a little better than the live-action, simply because of the nature of animation: there’s no need for restraint. There were times in the movies where you could see where Amamiya wanted to, but has to restrain his imagination for budgetary reasons. Here, there’s close to a fully-fledged universe, with content which would likely be well beyond the budget of anyone not named James Cameron. There’s also a nice character arc for Iria: initially, she is probably too big for her boots, with an over-inflated sense of her own skills. When she meets Zeiran, she soon discovers she isn’t quite the cat’s whiskers, at least, not to the extent she thinks.

As with most animation of the time, it’s not going to be confused with Miyazaki, and it would be silly to expect otherwise. However, there remain weaknesses. Most obviously, and surprisingly – because it’s the same issue as in the live-action version – is the diversion of time to secondary characters, in particular Kei and sidekick, the latter of whom is there for one purpose only (too spoilerific to discuss in detail; I’d say it falls into the category of “surprising, but almost entirely pointless”). That’s true for much of the plot, which feels over-similar to the Aliens series, and at times, the conspiracy angles just seem to be there to fill in time, before we get to the inevitable final battle between Iria and Zeiram. It did generally keep my interest, overall; but I can see why it hasn’t exactly been remembered as a classic of the medium.

Dir: Tetsuro Amino
Star: (voice) Aya Hisakawa, Shigeru Chiba, Mika Kanai, Masaru Ikeda

Bandit Queen (1994)

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★★★
“Not quite Bollywood.”

If you’ve seen Bollywood films, you might expect the same here – a light, breezy romp, interspersed with gratuitous musical numbers. Wrong, on every conceivable level. It’s an almost unrelentingly grim portrayal of the life of Phoolan Devi (Biswas), sold off by her family at the age of 11, abused by her husband (Shrivastava) as well others in the higher-ranked Thakur caste, and basically treated worse than an animal. She’s eventually abducted by a gang of bandits, whose lieutenant Vikram (Pandey) is sympathetic to her: when the leader tries to rape her, Vikram shoots him in the head, and takes over, making Phoolan his co-chief. However, after the group’s true leader is released from prison, he’s none too happy, and sets out to teach Phoolan a lesson than will make her earlier misfortunes seem like paradise.

How much of this is true, is open to debate. Devi was supposedly so upset by the film, she threatened to set herself on fire outside a cinema if the film weren’t withdrawn, but the depth of her anger can be questioned, since she ended up being paid off by the producers. The basics do seem true, and it’s a remarkable story, centred on a performance from Biswas that leaves nothing in the locker. It’s also entirely unlike any other Indian movie I’ve ever seen, being foul-mouthed, brutal, and even contains some full-frontal nudity – though that is far more unsettling than anything else. However, in depicting the hellish life of low-caste women, it goes beyond the eye-opening to the stage where you almost find yourself thinking, “Oh, look: she’s being raped again.” Less would be substantially more, in terms of impact.

It’s definitely more drama than action, with her gang’s raid on a village the main set-piece in this area. Another thing that doesn’t quite work is Biswas being a full decade older than the character she’s playing. In reality, Devi’s rise to bandit infamy and eventual surrender to authorities was all over, while she was still a teenager, which is quite stunning. The movie certainly exposes a side of Indian life unlike one you’ll have seen, even if probably not one you’ll want to see again. But it certainly shows that someone is pushed far enough, they will push back.

Dir: Shekhar Kapur
Star: Seema Biswas, Nirmal Pandey, Aditya Shrivastava, Saurabh Shukla

Exorsister

  By

★★
“Not so much ass-kicking, as ass-licking…”

exorsisterDo not, under any circumstances, confuse with the similarly-titled episode of The Simpsons where Lisa gets possessed by the spirit of Madonna. Because this is basically a live-action version of infamous tentacle-porn series, Legend of the Overfiend. Just what the world needs, you’re probably thinking, but compared to most of the genre, Overfiend had an epic sprawl to go along its obscene imagination, and with modern FX, there’s no reason it couldn’t be done. [Shouldn’t, perhaps…] They could make the heroine as cool as the one here: a motorbike-riding, cigarillo-smoking huntress with a wide-brimmed hat and a switchblade crucifix, taking on demons whose means of entry to Earth involves schoolgirls and sex.

Unfortunately, this fails on two counts. Firstly, the minor, largely forgivable matter of budget; instead of tentacles, for example, we get what appear to be vacuum-cleaner hoses on strings. If you can’t afford to stage interdimensional battles…don’t. Secondly, the lengthy sequences of hardcore (even with the pixillation of genitals required in Japan), for this is, first and foremost, a porn flick, make no mistake about that; I should perhaps mention, the schoolgirls are all clearly in their 20’s. This is simply dull, bringing the film to a grinding halt for about half the running-time, which is a shame; there’s enough imagination to suggest the idea has potential.

I believe four episodes were made. The second is supposed to be the best, and it’s in our unwatched pile, though I think part one has already tried Chris’s patience sufficiently for this week! Nakano also went on to make Sumo Vixens, starring Kei (Weather Woman) Mizutani, which (unlike the Exorsister series) has received an official American release, and would appear to be exactly what it sounds like.

Dir: Takao Nakano
Star: Karin Tsuji, Kaoru Nishida, Kazuki Taniguchi