Naked Killer (1992)

Naked Killer (1992)
Chinese Title: 赤裸羔羊
Translation: Naked Lamb

Starring: Chingmy Yau, Simon Yam, Carrie Ng, Yiu Wai, Madoka Sugawara, Ken Lo, Hui Siu-Hung, Dick Lau Tik-Chi, Chang Tseng
Director: Clarence Fok
Action Director: Lau Shung-Fung

This is one of the more infamous films to come out of Hong Kong, often coming close to being the ne plus ultra of Category III filmmaking. To the uninitiated, Category III refers to a film rating in Hong Kong that corresponds to a very hard ‘R’ or ‘NC-17’ in the United States, or ’18’ in the United Kingdom (and Brazil). The movies are often extremely violent, sexual, and profane in nature. But unlike NC-17 films in the States, Hong Kong theaters are not loathe to show them and sometimes they can even be financially successful. NC-17, on the other hand, has gained the reputation of “porn with a plot” and thus theaters will simply refuse to show them and major studios will try to cut them to get an R rating and thus theatrical distribution.

There was a period in the early and mid-1990s when Category III films were popular. There were a series of hyper-violent films, some of which were based on true crime stories, that were popular in Hong Kong (or at least with HK cinephiles). Things like The Untold Story; Dr. Lamb; and Red to Kill, among others were the notorious examples of the excesses of the Category III rating. Heck, in our day and age, a tasteless exploitation piece like The Ebola Syndrome can get a classy Blu-Ray release over here. And then there is this film, which got released on VHS in the States by Tai Seng in the 1990s and later multiple DVD releases, one of which I believe was cut and this one—released by Tai Seng—was uncut, but with some of the worst dubbing on record.

Naked Killer opens with a elegantly-dressed woman being followed home by some guy who has something impure in mind. The man follows her home and to her bathroom, where she is taking a shower. Before he can do anything, the woman (Carrie Ng, of Cheetah on Fire and Crystal Hunt) unleashes a barrage of GYMKATA!!!! on the poor sap before smashing in his temples with a pair of dumbbells and shooting his cock off with a pistol.

The next day, the police are investigating the murder, including a detective named Tinam (Simon Yam, of Mission Kill and Ip Man). Tinam is a psychological wreck since accidentally shooting and killing his brother six months before. The emotional damage is so extensive that he is not only impotent now, but he cannot even look at a gun without getting sick to his stomach and throwing up. But for all of his issues, Tinam is not an idiot. He quickly realizes that the killer is a woman—his boss immediately writes off his theory—and that it may be the same woman who has been committing a series of similar killings that leave the male victim with his limbs broken and his manhood removed in some way.

Later that week, Tinam is getting a haircut when he witnesses an episode from some womanizing jerk named Tommy, his pregnant ex-girlfriend, and Tommy’s new paramour, a pager operator named Kitty (Chingmy Yau, of City Hunter and Kung Fu Cult Master). After Tommy knocks down his ex and kicks her in the tummy (man…dude…what the heck?), Kitty grabs a pair of scissors and stabs him in the crotch. Tinam can’t overlook that—although he somehow could overlook the domestic violence that preceded it—and runs after her. Kitty initially thinks he’s a pervert, but warms up to him when she learns that he’s not only a cop, but a damaged one, too.

The two start a relationship of sorts—kicked off by his leaving his pager behind and she using it to track him down to the police station—but that is interrupted by fate. Her dad (Chan Tseng, of The Red-Tasseled Sword) is a humble street vendor whose Mainland wife is too materialistic for her husband’s job. When dad catches Kitty’s stepmom in bed with a Triad boss (Ken Lo, of King of the Sea and Stage Door Johnny), a fight breaks out between the cuckold and the lover. The Triad pushes the old man down the stairs, causing him to accidently stab himself in the chest. A distraught Kitty walks into the building the next day and starts blowing everybody away, including her dad’s murderer. However, there is only so much an untrained marksman can do against an army of Triads.

She is saved by the intervention of Sister Cindy (Yiu Wai), a female assassin who is looking for a new student. Cindy takes Kitty under her wing, slices off her finger prints, and starts teaching her how to seduce and kill. Cindy even kidnaps local perverts, chains them up in the basement, and locks Kitty in there with them so she can have something to practice her skills with. Uhh…okay.

After Kitty finishes her training, her and Cindy go to Japan to kill a Yakuza—which involves the two women dancing suggestively in a nightclub and then slicing off his head with a thin wire. The Japanese then hire Princess—the lady from the opening scene—and her lover, Baby (Madoka Sugawara, of Rape in Public Sea), to kill the women responsible for their boss’s death. And it just so happens that Sister Cindy was Princess’s teacher, too. And the closer that Princess draws to Kitty, the more she starts to fall for her. And Tinam eventually crosses path with Kitty again, thus testing her new loyalties…

Naked Killer is a very stylish movie. From a technical standpoint, the film looks great. The photography is kinetic. The set design is garish and colorful. The costumes are over-elegant, but they fit the over-the-top nature of the film and complement the cinematography to a ‘T’. There are certain films where critics say that composition—sets, costumes, lighting, and angles—is such that you could take every frame of the movie, blow it up, frame it, and place it on the wall. That applies to Bride with White Hair. It applies to Naked Killer, too. Almost every scene could placed in a photobook, albeit maybe one put together by Dian Hanson.

It goes without saying that Naked Killer is also a very sleazy film. As expected from a Wong Jing film, the word “rape” gets tossed around rather casually, which will definitely offend some sensibilities. That said, there is also a lot of talk of forcibly castrating men and a lot of “doohickies” get sliced, shot and smashed over the course of the film, so maybe that balances things out. Chingmy Yau has a long sex scene with Simon Yam—she is the only one who can cure his impotence—although the camera always shies away from showing her nipples. The actual nudity is provided by Japanese actress Madoka Sugiwara, playing the female plaything of lead villainess Princess. Princess, as played by Carrie Ng, is portrayed as a predatory lesbian and she has two love scenes with the character of Baby. I’m going to guess that the explicity lesbian sex is what really gave this film the Category III rating.

Being a Wong Jing film, one may expect some broad, out-of-place humor in an otherwise serious film. Wong Jing, who both wrote and produced this, actually keeps his worst comic instincts under control for the vast majority of the film’s running time. In fact, the only real joke is a gross-out gag involving a policeman who unwittingly eats a severed penis after mistaking it for an uncooked sausage. Really, Wong? Really?

There is some action in the first and last thirds of the film, staged by Lau Shung-Fung. Lau cut his teeth in the genre by working with Corey Yuen and Yuen Tak in films like Prince of the Sun and Saviour of the Soul. This was one of his earliest films as the main action director and he does pretty good job with the set pieces. The best scene is the shootout at Ken Lo’s office that becomes a hyper-stylized bullet ballet in a parking garage, complete with a knife at the end of an elastic cord that can do all sorts of things. Near the end, we get a kung fu fight between Princess, Baby and Sister Cindy. The choreography is very balletic in a way that recalls Ching Siu-Tung’s work in The Heroic Trio—the two men worked on the same team to choreograph Legend of the Liquid Sword. The finale features more kinetic gunplay and some brief fighting between Kitty and Princess.

Naked Killer inspired two remakes: Naked Weapon (2002) and Naked Soldier (2012). That is a perfect “every ten years” scenario, unfortunately derailed by the slow death of Hong Kong cinema and the COVID pandemic. Where is my Naked Assassin, people? There is another film, Raped by an Angel, also starring Chingmy Yau, that was promoted in some markets as Naked Killer 2. They are unrelated, and Raped by an Angel inspired its own set of unrelated sequels, generally involving women who get violent revenge against the men who raped them. There are six films that particular series, with two of them purporting to be Raped by an Angel 5, which is just…so…Hong Kong, I guess.

Mission Kill (1991)

Mission Kill (1991)
Aka: Mission of Condor
Chinese Title: 禿鷹檔案 
Translation: Bald Eagle Files

Starring: Moon Lee, Max Mok, Simon Yam, Wong Yee-Kam, Kwan Hoi-San, Eddie Ko Hung, Fujimi Nadeki, Ken Lo
Director: Lee Chiu
Action Director: Ho Wing-Cheung, Douglas Kung

One of my less-ambitious movie watching goals—something of a subset of the goal to watch as many Hong Kong-Mainland-Taiwanese martial arts and action films as humanly possible—is to watch all the movies that Tai Seng released as their three-movie “series” on VHS back in the 1990s. The movies were often unrelated, even within their own sub-genre, like the “Shaolin Classic Series” that featured one old school film and two obscure 1990s wire-fu movies; or the Asian Connection series, which were HK action films set in other Asian countries (Thailand, Laos, The Philippines); etc.

One of them was the humorously-named “Yam Can Kill” series, a riff on the then-popular PBS program “Yan Can Cook,” something you watched when you wanted your mouth to water over creative Chinese cuisine. They were three of Simon Yam’s lesser-known action films, most of which came out either before he hit it big with Bullet in the Head or immediately after. One of the movies was Killer’s Romance, which was low-budget take on “The Crying Freeman” manga at about the same time Clarence Fok and Tsui Hark were doing their bigger-budgeted Dragon from Russia. The second was Cyprus Tigers, which is dismissed as an inferior copy of Tango & Cash. And then there is this one.

Mission Kill is ostensibly a Girls-With-Guns films and comes across as a low-rent riff on Angel, also starring Moon Lee. The film opens with a drug deal between an Asian gang and a Caucasian gang led by Angel Terminators’ Bruce Fontaine. The deal is broken up by the police, including Inspector Rose Wong (Moon Lee, of Angel II and Princess Madam). Following the bust, Bruce’s higher-up in the hierarchy, played by Jonathan Isgar (the guy in Once Upon in Time in China who says “Who is this Wong Fei-Hung? The Devil?”), contracts the services of an assassin named Lion (Simon Yam, of SPL and Bad Blood) to eliminate four officials. Three of them are the top brass in Operation Condor (snicker), the HKRP-Interpol operation meant to bring down the drug dealers. The fourth is Rose Wong for having busted Bruce.

The first three men are eliminated very quickly—this goes back to my opinion that it does not pay to be a witness or the like in Hong Kong: you have no one protecting you from getting off’d. The American F.B.I. gets involved—since the Caucasian drug dealers are apparently from Puerto Rico—and sends Stephen (Max Mok, of Once Upon a Time in China 2 and Holy Flame of the Martial World) to help protect Rose. Why Stephen? Apparently he’s the only member of the F.B.I. who speaks Cantonese. Really, people? Of the 10,100 special agents in the F.B.I.’s employ in 1990, only one was Chinese-American? I call shenanigans on that.

Almost as soon as Stephen arrives in Hong Kong, he is met by Rose and her cousin, Lily (Wong Kee-Yam, of Eagles Alert), who is also a cop. Rose is almost shot to death immediately afterward, with the gunman being the psychologically-unstable Bill (Eddie Ko Hung, of Hitman in the Hand of Buddha and The Executioners), one of Lion’s enforcers. The police take the opportunity to fake Rose’s death—she was wearing a bulletproof vest—and even change her record to deceive Bill when he sneaks into the police station to look over her file (just like one of the killers in Angel). Bill is ultimately captured and kept prisoner in the same safe house where Rose, Lily and Stephen are holed up.

Lion and his men, including the kickboxing Panther (Ken Lo, of Drunken Master II) and Wild Cat (Crystal Hunt’s Fujimi Nadeki), eventually find out where Bill is being held—thanks to a traitor—and send a small army to free (or kill) him and everybody in the safe house. The action ramps up as Stephen, Rose and Lily decide to take Lion head on, even as they begin to suspect that someone involved in the case is a traitor. After all, how did Lion’s men know about the location of the safe house?

Mission Kill is a fairly average, run-of-the-mill Girls-with-Guns flick with a strong cast and good action. It suffers from some pacing issues, especially after the first 15 or 20 minutes, when almost a good 25 minutes pass without much of interest happening. The movie picks up in the second half starting with the raid on the safe house, which is a huge gunfight with some good kickboxing from Moon Lee and the knife-wielding Nadeki—the two also fought in Killer Angels and Angel Force. This leads to a fight between Max Mok and Ken Lo at a hospital (the latter shows up to finish off Eddie Ko’s character), a raid on Simon Yam’s home, and a finale at…you guessed it…a warehouse. In the mix is the revelation of the identity of the traitor and some mutiny between the traitor and Simon Yam’s Lion.

The part of the story that had me scratching my head was Lion’s gang. When we meet Lion, the Caucasian drug dealers are paying him to eliminate the bigwigs behind Operation Condor, which suggests that he is a professional assassin with a few underlings working beneath him (like Panther, Wild Cat, and Bill). Later on, we see him meeting with the Caucasians again, who want him to sell their new product (which the traitor wants to avoid, since it will kill addicts a lot quicker and force them to strive to find new users). So, does that mean that Lion is not a professional assassin, but just the head of another drug gang? Was it his gang that got busted in the opening action sequence? Or was he an assassin who was looking to get into the drug game and the opening bust created a vacuum for him to fill? I wish the film had been a little more explicit in that explanation, since my attention waned as I trying to figure it out.

The shoot-outs are pretty generic: a character fires a Mac-10 sub-machine gun (or Uzi) in the bad guys’ general direction, and three or four men fall over. None of the stylishness or choreography of the best Heroic Bloodshed films. But the fights, staged by Ho Wing-Cheung (A Punch to Revenge) and Douglas Kung (King Boxer), are generally of a solid caliber. The choreography isn’t quite so crisp as that of the Angel films, but everyone looks good on screen, including Simon Yam. I do have to question the believability of Moon Lee and Max Mok having to team up to defeat Simon Yam, but whatever. I think the best fight is the one early on where Moon Lee and Lily have to beat up a bunch of Interpol agents posing as hired killers in order to test their skills for Interpol. Ken Lo also looks great in his limited fights and really deserved more action.

All things considered, Mission Kill is middle-of-the road, but with enough solid fisticuffs to compensate for the ugly clothes (orange and yellow blazers? Really?) that Max Mok wears and a lethargic second quarter.

Widow Warriors (1990)

Widow Warriors (1990)
Aka: 虎膽女兒紅
Translation: Tiger Gallant Daughter Red

Starring: Tien Niu, Elizabeth Lee, Kara Hui Ying-Hung, Wang Lai, Wong Aau, Michiko Nishiwaki, Cheung Suen-Mei, Ha Chi-Chun, Eliza Yue Chi-Wai, Alex Ng Hong-Ling, Shek Kin, Michael Chan Wai-Man, Phillip Chan, Ken Lo, Ngai Jan, Winnie Lau Siu-Wai, Chan Ging-Cheung, Walter Tso Tat-Wah
Director: Johnny Wang Lung-Wei
Action Director: Sun Chien, Johnny Wang Lung-Wei

Widow Warriors stands out among the Girls n’ Guns movies as being a bit stronger on the character development and story than a lot of the other entries, which generally pit our female fighters against generic gangsters, drug dealers, and arms traffickers. Actor-turned-director Johnny Wang Lung-Wei directs another strong film based on a script by Manfred Wong, who later became a legend for both his work on the popular Young and Dangerous films and adapting the “Feng Yun” comic into a screenplay for The Storm Riders. His work here would serve him well for the later Young and Dangerous franchise. This film in particular plays almost like a Triad version of the 14 Amazons, or an “other side of the law” inversion of She Shoots Straight.

Liu Lung (Shek Kin, of Enter the Dragon and From China with Death) is the aging head of a Hong Kong triad, which has largely gone legit in the past few years. I mean, there is probably some crime going on behind the scenes and he still employees armed men to deal with rivals, but the bread-and-butter of his empire is pretty honest. Liu Lung has an equally-elderly wife (Wang Lai, of Hong Kong Emmanuelle and Fist of Fury III) who is an honest and pious woman who constantly worries about what karma her husband’s lifestyle will bring. Together they have five children: Liu Chuan-Hau (Phillip Chan, of Bloodsport and Double Impact); Liu Ma-Yee (Michael Chan Wai-Man, of Spirits of Bruce Lee and Shaolin Handlock); Liu Yong (Ken Lo, of Crystal Hunt and Mahjong Dragon); Ann (Wong Au, of A Bloody Fight and Thunder Cops II); and the youngest, Ching Ching (Elizabeth Lee, of Sword Stained with Royal Blood and Blonde Fury).

In addition to his wife and kids, Liu Lung took on a second wife about 17 years prior—that would’ve been about 1973, although the practice of polygamy was banned in Hong Kong in 1971. His second wife, or “concubine,” is Aunt Nan (Tien Niu, of The Brave Archer and Lackey and the Lady Tiger), whose teen rebellion lead to all sorts of debauchery before the “man of her dreams” knocked her up and left her with a baby, Wai (played as a teenager by Winnie Lau, of Future Cops and Dragon Heat). Wai is going through a rebellious stage similar to that of her mother, probably because she is only barely tolerated by step-siblings and the staff of the Liu household.

As this is the Hong Kong equivalent of Bella Mafia, all of the men have their own companions, too. Chuan-Hau is married to a lady whose name we never really learn, played by Eliza Yue (of Angel’s Mission and Satanic Crystals), but who is always fighting with her husband because of his unrepentant infidelity. Ma Yee is married to Kara Hui Ying-Hung (of My Young Auntie and Lady is the Boss), and the two are the kung fu fighters of the family. Liu Yong has a Japanese wife named Chieko (Michiko Nishiwaki), who is a karate champion herself. And Ching Ching, whom daddy has always shielded from the uglier parts of his profession, has just returned home from studying abroad with a new husband in tow: Shek Chi-Au (Ngai Jan, of Mr. Canton and Lady Rose and Devil’s Vendetta).

I spent three paragraphs just describing the family dynamics, since there are initially a lot of characters to follow and it’s easy to get the relationships confused. So, the plot itself revolves around a rival gang of Triads led by the Yim brothers who have someone on the inside. They want to put Liu out of commission and take over his business and whatever territory he may be controlling, too. With the help of the mole, they are able to stage an ambush at a traditional Peking Opera presentation with results in the deaths of most of the men—Ah Hau is murdered by his mistress, who was also in the Yims’ employee. Once the men are out of the picture, all of the underlings (including Kickboxer’s Dennis Chan) are unsure of what to do, since Liu Lung was the heart and brains of the operation. Thankfully, Aunt Nan spent a lot of time accompanying her husband’s Triad meetings and has enough street smarts from her earlier years that she is able to take the reins. Meanwhile, Kara’s character—whom everyone refers to as “sister-in-law”—suspects that the Ching Ching’s new husband may be the traitor in their midst.

The first half of Widow Warriors is largely a family drama, setting up all the characters, their relationships, and the external conflict of the Yim brothers trying to edge the Liu Clan out of the business. There is a brief fight sequence early on with Michael Chan beating up some guys for hitting on his wife and sister. But beyond that, it is mainly the different interactions between the members of the Liu family, with both Ching Ching and Aunt Nan being the emotional anchors and foils—the sheltered Ching Ching and the more seasoned (but still sensitive) Aunt Nan. The first half is closed out by the aforementioned massacre of the Liu men.

The pace then picks up the second half, as the women take charge and gear up for revenge. This results in some fight sequences involving Kara Hui and Michiko Nishiwaki, which were staged by both director Wang Lung-Wei and Venom alumni Sun Chien. The highlight is a lengthy two-on-one duel between Kara Hui (whose skills steal the show) and a pair of fighters: a kicker (Shaw Brothers veteran Jackson Ng) and a musclehead (Yang Hsiung, another Shaw vet). Before that, Michiko has a weight room throwdown with Ha Chi-Chun, who also did some fighting in Brave Young Girls. Those two duke it out with a shirasaya katana and a weight bar (used as a staff), respectively. The choreography in these sequences that I'm disappointed that Sun Chien didn't evolve his craft into a better career as an action director after the death of the old school film.

The movie then veers into Godfather territory as the women start executing their enemies one by one, including all the traitors. This culminates in a big Girls-with-Guns finale at a junkyard, where the women compensate their lack of gunplay skills with by using both the element of surprise and the altitude advantage. Lots of blood is spilled before the girls finally get their revenge against the remaining Yim brother, played by Stephen Chan. And even then, all of the women are battered and bloody by the time the smoke clears…that is, those who are not dead. They may be Widow Warriors, but they are not Immortal Warriors, or Bulletproof Warriors (the Brazilian title of Once Upon a Time in China). In the tradition of the best Hong Kong movies, nobody has plot armor and everyone is subject to violence and physical suffering (not just the overwrought emotional suffering that follows each death scene). Fight fans should keep their expectations in check: there isn’t a whole lot of martial arts, but what you see is of a high standard. And with generally strong performances and a stacked cast, you can’t go wrong with this one.