Raped by an Angel (1993)

Raped by an Angel (1993)
AKA: Naked Killer 2
Chinese Title: 香港奇案之強姦
Translation: Hong Kong Crime Stories: Rape

Starring: Chingmy Yau, Mark Cheng, Simon Yam, Ng Suet-Man, Nick Cheung, Kingdom Yuen King-Tan, Dennis Chan, Cindy Yip, Fan Oi-Kit, Linda Cheung
Director: Andrew Lau
Action Director: Nicky Li Chung-Chi

Raped by an Angel is one of the more infamous titles in the Hong Kong filmography, not the least of which because the film spawned several sequels whose subtitles were even more outlandish. In some international markets, it was released as Naked Killer 2, probably due to the casting similarities and Wong Jing’s involvement as producer. Unlike the its predecessor’s ultra-stylish, every-scene-is-a-painting tale of sexy hitwomen, this is more of an erotic thriller-cum-rape revenge flick. Director Andrew Lau makes it look stylish most of the time, albeit not quite the way Clarence Fok had done his film. But it is also very tasteless and sleazy in a way that many viewers will need to take a shower after it’s over.

The film opens with a bang. And by “bang,” I mean that it opens with a woman coming home, being stalked by a man wearing a Jason mask, and then getting brutally violated by the guy. Psyche! Turns out the man, Chuck (Mark Cheng, of War and Tai Chi 2), is actually just really into rape roleplay and his girlfriend, May (Linda Cheung, of Last Hero in China), is fortunately (for him) willing to let him indulge in that particular kink. Although she worries that rape roleplay will one day result in him wanting to do the real thing, he assures her that doing it with her is enough to keep things channeled.

That is, until he turns on the TV and sees Chingmy Yau (High Risk and Naked Killer) in sexy soldier fatigues firing automatic weapons in a swamp. Turns out that Yau, playing a woman named Yau Yuk-Nam, a law student who makes ends meet doing commercials. The faux-Girls ‘n Guns film was actually a commercial for milk. Go figure.

Anyway, Chuck is immediately smitten and tracks her down to a nightclub where she’s celebrating the filming of her latest commercial with her crew. Chuck tries to put the moves on her, but her response of pouring her drink down his pants leaves him high and dry…or low and wet. So, Chuck sets his sights on Chu (Ng Suet-Man, of Martial Arts Master Wong Fei-Hung), Yuk-Nam’s best friend. He moves into the apartment next door to Chu—but not before ending his relationship with May by handcuffing her and, instead of having rough sex with her, having one of his friends do that instead.

But Chuck’s plans for Chu are arguably even worse. He gets into her good graces by informing her that as a high-powered lawyer, he knows the real estate agency good enough that he can find a place for her to buy that is just as big as her current pad, but much cheaper. He also puts the moves on Chu, but she shuts him down. Eventually, he just says “Screw it” and does the same to her, albeit with her consent. After a grueling session of sexual and psychological abuse, he leaves the damaged Chu in her apartment for Yau to find.

And where has Yau been all this time. For her law classes, she has been trailing a well-known Triad, Tso Tat-Wah (Simon Yam, of Killer’s Romance and Cyprus Tigers), whose legitimate filmmaking business has kept the authorities from discovering any possible illegal activity on his part. The two sort of form an unconventional relationship after surviving both a Triad hit and an attack from his ex-girlfriend, Pauline (Fan Oi-Kit, of Seven Sexual Maniacs and China Girls).

When Yuk-Nam discovers what happened to her friend, she convinces Chu to call the police and report what Chuck did. Chuck is immediately arrested and is taken before a judge to answer for his crimes. Unfortunately for Chu, Chuck managed to leave behind a series of planted evidence and public interactions to suggest that Chu was his girlfriend and that she was trying to extort money from him and then cover her tracks. Ultimately, the jury acquits Chuck of rape. But Chu’s trauma is about to get worse, as Chuck cannot believe that someone would ever commit him of a crime that he actually did commit…

On one hand, Raped by an Angel is very sleazy, with a number of uncomfortable scenes of sexual assault. Those scenes are the source for much of the film’s nudity. But on the same token, the sleaze is the purpose of the movie, although one would hope that the filmmakers would separate the titillation from the assault. But as far as I can tell, overlapping the two was the entire point of the exercise. And the film ends in a memorable, politically-incorrect manner that will probably explode the head of most progressives.

The climax involves Chingmy Yau being chased around her apartment by Chuck, who has found a way to get Simon Yam’s character out of the picture. Despite Yau’s fighting back with bear traps and baseball bats(!), Chuck eventually manages to overpower her and have his way with her. Psyche! In fact, the final victim, who willingly gave her body to the case, was in fact Cindy, one of Yuk-Nam’s friends, who had only recently discovered that she had contracted HIV from a philandering boyfriend. Yes, you read that right.

There are quite a few sex scenes, only a few of which are consensual. We also get far too much of Mark Cheng’s naked body, including some random scene of him walking back and forth in his apartment with his willie flopping around. Thanks, Andrew Lau…we really needed that. There is also a scene that brought to mind the infamous sequence from Last Tango in Paris, except that it’s consensual and, instead of butter, whipped cream is used as a lubricant. In the nudity department, we get three pairs of bare breasts and one almost pair. Plus Kingdom Yuen (Wing Chun), playing Yuk-Nam’s raunchy friend, talking about a kung fu B.J. technique involving ice cubes in one’s mouth.

Despite Nicky Li Chung-Chi—member of the Sing Ga Ban and go-to choreographer for many of the late Benny Chan’s films—being credited as the action director, there is only one fight sequence and that’s an attempted Triad hit at a barbershop involving machetes and baseball bats. It’s nothing special, however.

People who pick this film up based on any of its infamous VHS or DVD covers will probably be disappointed. For reference, one shows Chingmy Yau and Ng Suet-Man in army shorts and midriffs (that expose underboob) holding machine guns (a reference to the commercial they’re in); Another one shows gun-toting Chingmy in a slutty black leather dress that opens down the middle all the way to belly button; and the DVD cover showed Simon Yam in a lawyer’s wig with Chingmy wearing a bra, panties, and lace stockings and kneeling before him. Yau doesn’t do any nudity and her sex scene is implied, not shown. But she does do a sexy dance in her underwear near the end, for all you Chingmy fanboys out there. Just don’t expect her to expose as much skin as her colleagues, tough.

The Robin Shou "Action" Series (from Tai Seng)

Eastern Heroes (1991)
Aka: Fury in Red
Chinese Title: 轟天龍
Translation: Roaring Sky Dragon

Starring: Ben Ng Ngai-Cheung, Robin Shou, Conan Lee, Jo Jo Ngan, Newton Lai Hon-Chi, Ngai Suet, Lee Chun-Wa, Yau Gwok-Keung, Mark Houghton, Vincent Lyn
Director: Chong Lei
Action Director: Hung San-Nam, Tony Tam

Strange modern-day action produced by Phillip Ko Fei, with top billing given to Conan Lee and Robin Shou, even though both men disappear from the entire first half of the film after their initial introduction. The movie was part of Tai Seng's "Robin Shou Collection" in the late 1990s, alongside Fatal Chase and Interpol Connection (aka Hard to Kill).

The movie opens with gangster Hawk (Robin Shou) getting released from prison (in Los Angeles) and reconnecting with his boss, George (George Cheung, of The Amsterdam Connection). Hawk swears revenge against the cop who put him in jail, John (a white guy). John's wife is a Chinese woman named May, who is pregnant. May's brother, Roy (Conan Lee, of Tiger on the Beat), is John's partner.

After that introduction, we switch to Hong Kong, where we meet CID officer Steve Mak (Ben Ng, of Phantom War and Daughter of Darkness II). Steve is Roy and May's brother, and he's married to Jo Jo Ngan (of Brave Young Girls and City Warrior), who is also pregnant. Yeah, nothing good can come out of that. After an explosive introduction involving Mak taking down some bank robbers (including female Taiwanese bodybuilder Tu Kuei-Hua), Mak is assigned to handle the kidnapping of a successful businessman named Yau (Lee Wah-Kon).

Yau was kidnapped by a Vietnamese gang led by Vincent (Vincent Lyn, of Blonde Fury and Operation Condor), who in turn was contracted by the head of a rival company (Chang Ging-Cheung). The companies had been in a bidding war for a lucrative piece of property in the States and Yau had won, but if he's not around the sign the contract, then the rival gets the deal. Things are going swimmingly for the rival company until Vincent gets greedy, upping the price of the kidnapping (when the boss asks Vincent to murder Yau) and simultaneously negotiating a ransom with Yau's daughter.

Mak suspects that the rival businessman is involved and follows him around until the latter is ready to hand over the money to Vincent, which results in a three-way gunfight between the gang, the businessman's flunkies, and the police. When Yau's daughter tries to pay the ransom, the police step in and kill several members of the gang. At this point, the surviving members call George in the USA to help the, who sends Hawk to terrorize the Mak family and get revenge for his incarceration while he's at it...

The problem with Eastern Heroes is two-fold. First, it really does feel like two different movies stitched together. Not quite in the IFD/Filmark type of way, but after the introduction of Robin Shou's and Conan Lee's characters, the film spends the rest of the first half focusing on Steve Mak and the kidnapping. When the Vietnamese gangsters call George, which is where the film remembers that they had Robin Shou and Conan Lee in the cast, it becomes a completely different movie. And unfortunately, that new movie is extremely unpleasant, culminating in a long and explicit gang rape and mutilation of Jo Jo Ngan's character. And I guess this is the film where Conan Lee was making such a pest of himself on set that they finally blew his character up without telling him they would.

The action was staged by Hung San-Nam and Tony Tam. The former got his start as a stuntman in Venom Mob films and later went on to choreograph films like Vampire vs. Sorcerer and Escape from the Brothel. Tony Tam was one of the Baby Venoms (arguably a better kicker than Sun Chien himself) and later a member of Donnie Yen's team. There are only a handful of short fights dispersed throughout the movie, with the rest of the action being some well-staged gunfights. The finale gives us a shapes fight between Mark Houghton (playing an annoyingly smug FBI agent) and bodybuilder Lee Chun-Wa (Drunken Master), which is almost comic and clashes with the tone of the other fight going on. And that would be a feral, knock-down, drag-out brawl between Ben Ng and Robin Shou. Not a lot of neat-looking moves, just two men taking turns wailing on each other and kicking the other while they're down.

Fatal Chase (1992)
Chinese Title: 執法威龍
Translation: Law Enforcer

Starring: Robin Shou, Phillip Ko Fei, Waise Lee, Dion Lam, Yukari Oshima, Cheung Chi-Tak, Shing Fui-On, Jason Pai Piao, Ronnie Ricketts, Gabriel Romulo, Rachel Lobangco
Director: Phillip Ko Fei
Action Director: Dion Lam

Another movie that had been included in Tai Seng's "Robin Shou Action Series" back in the 1990s (God bless VHS). This one teams Robin Shou teams up with Yukari Oshima and Phillip Ko Fei in what comes across as a low-budget version of Ridley Scott's Black Rain, only with more kung fu.

After a gang boss (Jason Pai Piao, almost unrecognizable in his cameo here) is gunned down in public by a Filipino gang, the police (led by Wing Chun's Waise Lee) put Officer Dragon (Robin Shou) on the case. Dragon tails the gang leader, Torres (Dion Lam), who seems to be in league with a corrupt cop, Sai Gwai (Cheung Chi-Tak, of Cyprus Tigers). Torres sends his men to attack Dragon--they tie him up to his Filipina maid in a compromising position with a bomb next to them. Waise Lee tails Sai Gwai to a big drug deal between Torres and a local dealer (Shing Fui-On, in a cameo). Bullets fly and in the end, both the drug dealer and Torres are arrested.

Dragon (who was rescued offscreen) is assigned to take Torres back to the Philippines to be tried for his more extensive local crimes. Joining Dragon is a special investigations inspector, Cynthia (Yukari Oshima, of Avenging Quartet and Ultracop 2000). Dragon and Cynthia hand Torres over to the police, only for the real police show up several minute later, led by Sergeant Franco (Phillip Ko Fei). Ah ha! They have been bamboozled! Torres is now free and back with his boss/godfather, Tiger (Subas Herrero, of Guardian Angel and Asian Cop - High Voltage).

Tiger and Torres have a beef with another local gang leader, Tang (Franco Guerrero, of Warriors of the Apocalypse and Dynamite Johnson). Tang is meeting with some American gangsters to purchase some currency plates to make counterfeit currency, but Torres decides to steal them. This alerts Franco's old partner, Billy (Ronnie Rickets, of Angel on Fire), who is able arrest a member of Torres' gang. Tiger hires a pair of assassins to kill the guy before he can testify and then Billy as well. Meanwhile, Torres kills Cynthia in a scene not too unlike the one in Black Rain in which Andy Garcia gets offed. Dragon decides to defy orders and stay in the Philippines and team up with Franco to bring Torres, Tiger, and even some of the corrupt cops in their pockets to justice...

Unsurprisingly, this film is rather talky, jumping back and forth between multiple sets of characters. The action comes in fits and spurts, staged by Dion Lam (Spider-Man 2 and The Storm Riders). The fighting is rather uneven. When Phillip Ko Fei throws down with the female assassin (Rachel Lobangco, Lethal Panther 2 and Guardian Angel), the scene is undercranked and over-edited, which suggests that Ms. Lobangco wasn't a real martial artist. Shou's fight with her partner, played by Gabriel Romulo (the main villain in Ultracop 2000), fares better...until the fight inexplicably becomes comic (in an otherwise serious movie) with lots of intentional undercranking played for "comedic" effect.

The gunplay is mainly uninspired, although it gets a little better in the climax. Shou has a neat fight with Dion Lam at the very end, although it's a little too short. Don't expect much from Yukari Oshima: her role is essentially an extended cameo. She gets one fight alongside Robin against a room full of assassins disguised as baseball players. She throws some good kicks, but she's done much better work elsewhere. Not terrible, but I expected a lot more.

Interpol Connection (1992)
aka: Hard to Kill
Chinese Title: 至尊特警
Translation: Supreme Special Agent

                                                          

Starring: Robin Shou, Yukari Oshima, Simon Yam, Phillip Ko Fei, Lee Kwok-Leung, Lee Chun-Wa, Gabriel Romulo, Leung Yuen-Jing
Director: Phillip Ko Fei
Action Director: Dion Lam

The third and final movie in the "Robin Shou Action Series" that was released by Tai Seng back in the 1990s. This is another Phillip Ko-action fest starring Robin and Yukari and set in the Philippines. It's also not very good, once you get down to it.

The movie opens with a Hong Kong drug dealer played by Phillip Ko Fei arriving in the Philippines for a big heroin deal. The deal is interrupted by the arrival of the police, including the klutzy King Kong (Lee Chun-Wa, the muscular chef from Drunken Master). We know he's the Odious Comic Relief because he's the only member of the police force who doesn't wear a uniform: he's always decked out in a Hawaiian shirt, khaki shorts, and a Panama hat. The police manage to arrest Phillip Ko and that is that.

Back in Hong Kong (or at Interpol headquarters in Hong Kong), tough-as-nails Robin Shou is tasked with going to the Philippines and bringing Phillip back. He arrives in Manilla, where he's picked up by King Kong and the become friends of sorts, despite the fact that King Kong is a mostly ineffective boor. During transport to the airport, Phillip Ko is rescued by his men in a huge shootout. Robin and King Kong torture some suspects to find out what nightclub Phillip hangs out at, which culminates in a scene where a sex show involving Asian girls in bikinis lathering themselves in soap try to do the same to King Kong onstage, only to discover that he's wearing a bra, too...WTF?

Robin Shou follows Phillip's lover to his hideout, where Phillip gets the drop on him. Both he and King Kong are saved by the last-minute interference of Yukari Oshima, who shows up for no reason. At one point, Phillip and his men storm the hotel where Robin is staying and try to kill him, leading to another shootout. And finally, Robin, King Kong, and Yukari team up to take down Phillip at his next drug deal.

Despite the film's reasonably short running time, not a lot actually happens in this movie. And thus it feels slow and boring between most of the action scenes. I will admit that I watched this without subs, so I'm still not entirely sure what Yukari's role was supposed to be, though it seems she had some connection to Phillip Ko's lover--she even briefly fights Robin when he tries to shoot the other woman in the back. Much of the film revolves around King Kong acting stupid, which gets old very quickly.

The action was once again staged by Dion Lam, although he himself doesn't show up. Most of the action is gunplay--Robin gets to blow a number of stuntmen to pieces with a ginormous revolver. Yukari Oshima doesn't show up until about 50 minutes in, but has a nice one-on-many fight against Phillip Ko's men. At the end, Yukari has a nice fight against Ko's bodyguard, played by Fung Wai-Lun. It involves lots of kicking and staff fighting, plus the only time where an over-the-shoulder kick is used as a defensive counter to a jump kick. Meanwhile, Robin has a shorter-but-decent scuffle with Gabriel Romulo. The final fight between Robin and Phillip is a letdown, though.

2 Capsule Reviews - The "Yam Can Kill" Series

The Cyprus Tigers (1990) 

Starring: Simon Yam, Conan Lee, Collin Cheung, Phillip Ko Fei, Joey Wong, Robin Shou, Luk Chuen, Winston Ellis, Sophia Crawford
Director: Phillip Ko Fei
Action Director: Luk Chuen (Yasuyoshi Shikamura), 

Released on VHS in the late 1990s as part of the "Yam Can Kill" series--the others being Mission Kill and Killer's Romance (see review below). I've yet to read anything remotely positive about this film, from Asian Cult Cinema to "View from the Brooklyn Bridge". So, I took it as a challenge.

On the island of Cyprus, the local police force employs a trio of Chinese immigrants, who are known on the force as "The Cyprus Tigers." They are: Rick (Simon Yam, of Bullet in the Head and Hitman); Bob (Conan Lee, of Tiger on the Beat and Ninja in the Dragon's Den); and Alan, or "Kid" (Collin Cheung Chi-Tak, of Angel's Mission and Fatal Termination). They are the both the biggest hotshots and goof-offs of the force. The film opens with them foiling a hostage situation by having Bob taking their own police chief hostage and confusing the bad guys.

Anyway, after a few random asides involving a nude beach (lots of bare breasts here) and a gag involving an attempt to get Bob to pay for everyone's expensive dinner (makes sense in context), the film settles down for a story, such as it is. The three are assigned to a case to bust some counterfeiters, who are working for the town's stand-out citizen, Mr. King (Phillip Ko Fei, of The Fearless Dragons and too many low-budget films of the 1990s). They lose the counterfeit plates during the bust, which gets the chief on their back. They try to bust Mr. King's bodyguard (Winston Ellis, of Operation Condor), but that leads to Rick and Bob being held at gunpoint and ordered to undress each other--which leads the bad guys to take the security tape and release it as a bestselling gay porno movie.

Rick and Bob are suspended. Rick goes back to Hong Kong to try to patch things up with his ex-wife, Joey (Joey Wong, of A Chinese Ghost Story and The East is Red). Bob gets in trouble with the law when Mr. King's men murder some tart whom he'd gone home with and frame him for the killing. Mr. King overplays his hand when he sends his girlfriend (Sophia Crawford, of Beauty Investigator and U.S. Seals II) to Hong Kong to (unsuccessfully) eliminate Rick. Rick goes back to Cyprus and convinces his boss to let Bob out in order to bust Mr. King and find evidence of his counterfeiting activities.

Most of the film is very dumb comedy, like watching Conan Lee and Collin Cheung walk around the police station with baseball caps that have a mouth with a tongue on it and one with female breasts sculpted on it, respectively. The bad guys are not intimidating, even when they bring in a pair of supposedly crazy Japanese criminals (action director Luk Chuen and a young Robin Shou) to help his operation. The Japanese characters are depicted as being racist against blacks (i.e. Winston Ellis). Conan Lee's hothead cop is annoying and basically unlikeable. And the subplot involving Joey Wong is more filler than anything else.

Some of this may be forgivable if there was more and better action. The fight choreography was provided by Luk Chuen (aka Yasuyoshi Shikamura, whose action direction credits include A Boxer's Omen and Bamboo House of Dolls). It's actually not all that bad, but the problem is that the fights are all short and tend to end before they even begin. Among the fights, we get: Conan Lee vs. Winston Ellis and a roomful of goons; Robin Shou vs. Winston Ellis; Simon Yam vs. Sophia Crawford; Conan Lee vs. Luk Chuen; Simon Yam vs. Robin Shou; Simon Yam vs. Winston Ellis; Conan Lee vs. Robin Shou; and Simon Yam vs. Phillip Ko. It is pretty clear that Simon Yam is being doubled for much of his fights. His throwdown with Winston Ellis is undercranked (purposely) to the point of absurdity. The final throwdown between Robin Shou and Conan Lee is disappointingly one-sided in favor of the latter.

The film's ending is surprisingly somber given the film's tone overall. But all things considered, this is only for completists of the filmographies of Conan Lee, Simon Yam, or Robin Shou.

Killer's Romance (1990)

Starring: Simon Yam, Joey Wong, Phillip Ko Fei, Luk Chuen, Lau Siu-Ming, Foo Wong-Tat, Ishida Kenichi
Director: Phillip Ko Fei
Action Director: Luk Chuen (Yasuyoshi Shikamura), Wong Coh-Wah

Phillip Ko's low-budget action films--well, mainly Final Run, seemed to do well enough around the turn of the 1980s that he was able to scrounge up enough money to film abroad. One of those was the dire Cyprus Tigers, which wasted a great cast on unfunny comedy and an unlikable lead (Conan Lee). Surprisingly, it did okay at the box office. Then there is this film, the low-budget answer to Clarence Ford and Tsui Hark's Dragon from Russia: a loose adaptation of the popular manga "The Crying Freeman".

The movie opens with Jeffrey (Simon Yam, of Sha Po Lang and Exiled) coming back to London following the murder of his father (Foo Wang-Tat, of A Better Tomorrow III and An Eye for an Eye). His dad was one of the heads of the Yamada Gumi crime syndicate, which means that violent revenge is an acceptable response. According to his dad's top lieutenant, Yoshikawa (Luk Chuen, of City Cops and Ninja Over the Great Wall), his dad was murdered by the Chinatown triads of London, under the command of Ma Tin (Lau Siu-Ming, of Swordsman and A Chinese Ghost Story).

So, Jeffrey goes on a mission of revenge, killing the top three leaders of the gang, including Ma Tin himself. While committing one of the murders, he is witnessed by Paula (Joey Wong, of A Chinese Ghost Story III and An Eternal Combat), a dance student in London who is also an amateur photographer. She manages to photograph Jeffrey and becomes mildly obsessed with him. They (coincidentally) run into each other after another killing, which leads to both the police, represented by a Chinese detective (Siu Yuk-Lung), and the Triads to think that Paula is in cahoots with Jeffrey.

The Triads, now led by Charlie (Phillip Ko Fei, of Eight Diagram Pole Fighter and Shaolin Intruders), show up at Paula's house and a huge gunfight breaks out. Paula is injured and Jeffrey goes into hiding. Meanwhile, we learn that both Charlie and Yoshikawa had Jeffrey's father killed so that he would wipe out Charlie's bosses and the two could rise to the top of their respective gangs. The only loose ends left are Jeffrey and Paula, and sooner or later the latter will lead the bad guys to the former.

I'm admittedly not familiar with the source material for "The Crying Freeman" or its accompanying anime--I've only seen Dragon from Russia and that very well may have been unsubbed, too. That said, I'm not really sure what the similarities are between Killer's Romance and the manga. Perhaps it deals with Japanese assassins and mobsters and a guy is supposed to kill a female witness to his activities, but falls in love with her instead? I'll let more educated people school me on that.

The movie was shot entirely in London--or at least it looks to have been, so I'm guessing that ate up much of the budget and left less money for explosive action sequences. It does feel more like a real movie than a lot of low-budget Phillip Ko opuses (opera?), with a beginning, middle, and end, a greater emphasis on characters, and a decent attempt to add genuine stakes to the action. It is also brutal and unforgiving, even to characters who might normally hold plot armor if Hollywood tried to do the same thing. So, I will applaud attempts to be legitimately dramatic over some of the lulls in story.

Simon Yam plays his character with limited dialog. Not John Wick level of "limited," but there are a lot of scenes where he does more acting with his eyes and facial expressions than with his mouth. Joey Wong is Joey Wong: lovely, adorable, and someone you just want to give a SMOOSHY hug to. And despite the unlikelihood of a normal girl falling for a sociopathic killer, one only need to remember the worldwide popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey to know how popular that sort of thing is. I would say that Phillip Ko often overplays his Charlie character, especially during a scene where he's getting a bullet extracted from him, in a way that takes away from the film's otherwise serious tone.

The action was choreographed by Luk Chuen (Yasuyoshi Shikamura) and Wong Coh-Wah (billed as "Panther Wong"). Much of the action is made up of gunplay, which is fairly well staged. The big shootout at Charlie's house is a definitely highlight, with all the carnage and "shooting guns in the air" that we would expect from a vintage John Woo movie. I'm just surprised that, given the size of the pistols that Simon Yam uses in that scene, he wasn't taking off entire heads and limbs with those babies.

The martial arts are limited to the last 20 minutes or so. There is a nice fight between Simon Yam and some Japanese assassins sent to take him out, led by Ishida Kenichi (Final Run and Drugs Fighters). Ishida is an excellent kicker--he even recreates the jump-over-the-table spinning side kick that Casanova Wong did in Warriors Two--and I wish we could've seen more of him in Hong Kong cinema. The film ends with an extended, two-part sword fight between Jeffrey and his fellow Yamada Gumi members, capped off with very good throwdown (with katana) between Simon Yam and Luk Chuen--this was included in the now-defunct Wasted Life's Top 100 Fight Scenes of All Time. I'm not sure I'd go that far, but it goes a long way to justify the film's earlier pacing issues.

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.