In short: Naked Killer (1992)

As regular readers of this blog know, I'm not an admirer of the horrible Wong Jing. The man's general attitude towards movie making, which can be summarized with "I don't care enough to make an effort", just rubs me the wrong way. Additionally, unlike the man, I don't think rape jokes are very funny.

But I've always made an exception for the Wong Jing written and produced Naked Killer, for it is a movie that shows what can happen when the frightful man does bother to apply himself. It's not as if the script for this one made that much more sense than anything else Wong Jing has written, but it does at least tell a story with a recognizable beginning, middle, and end, instead of playing out as what feels like random scenes from different movies haphazardly stitched together, which is the usual Wong Jing feel. Furthermore, while Naked Killer takes place on a planet where traumatized hero cops begin to puke whenever they touch a gun (and suffer from erectile dysfunction only looking at Chingmy Yau can cure, but let's not go there), other cops are named "Dickhead", where part of the killer training consists of getting locked up in a pop art cellar with a chained rapist, and where people dress in the awesome primary-coloured (remember when movies had colours?) things the actors wear here, the crazy for once does make just enough sense to be entertaining. It's like the adaptation of a men's adventure novel about a killer where all the testosterone-y men have been replaced by women. The audience of this sort of thing (hullo Mum!) does like after all two things the most: ridiculous violence and staring at sexily clad women; as Carrie Ng's character here would agree, there's no need at all to feature men at all. Though Naked Killer is at least trying to cover all its bases by also featuring a Simon Yam masturbation scene.

A lot of what's fun about Naked Killer - and it's really a very, very fun movie - I blame on director Clarence Ford. Ford has the early 90s HK aesthetic down to an art, featuring the expected mix of blue light, fast edits and Evil Dead-inspired camera work most directors working for Wong Jing always seem to bored or tired (now, what happens in Jing's production house, inquiring minds want to know) to use consistently or as exhilarating as Ford does here. If people aren't fighting, there is - of course - more footage of Ng, Yau, Yiu Wai and Yam in ridiculous poses that often look like an alien's idea of sexiness to me than any sane person could ask for, giving the film an overheated mood as if nobody involved could think about anything but sex, even when thinking of sex seems totally inappropriate in a given context. In part, we can thank a "no breasts" clause in Yau's, Ng's, and Yiu Wai's contracts for the film's ridiculous imagination when it comes to the sexiness; it is, it turns out, possible to turn anything into softcore.

Technorati-Markierungen: hong kong movies,in short,wong jing,clarence ford,chingmy yau,simon yam,carrie ng,yiu wai,action,exploitation

In short: Satan Returns (1996)

Original title: 666 Mo Gwai Fuk Wut

aka Devil 666

aka Satan's Return

aka Shaolin vs. The Devil's Omen

Hong Kong, 1996. A guy and host of a demonic entity subtly named Judas (Francis Ng) is desperately looking for Satan's daughter. He only knows that she must have been born on the 6th of June 1969, so he wanders around the city, "testing" the devilishness of women with the appropriate birthdate by cutting their hearts out. Satan's daughter, you see, would live on without one.

Fortunately, even the HK movie police realizes that the killings are the work of a serial killer, so they put the homicidal cop Nam (Donny Yen) and his band of incompetents on the case. Because she has grown up as an orphan under the tutelage of the Catholic church, internal affairs officer Chan Shou-Ching (Chingmy Yau) who was just starting an investigation into the dubious human rights record of Nam, is helping out on the case, which turns out to be especially useful when Judas activities begin to concentrate on her.

During the course of the investigation, Chan starts to suffer first from oh-so-mysterious nightmares, then from personality changes, and then begins to have little chats with the off-screen voice of Satan, who seems quite positive that she's his daughter and will soon awaken to her heritage. And he just might be right.

What happens to Chan does of course mean that the whole murder series the film's plot is based on makes no sense at all, and that all Satan's forces would need to do to win the day would be to just wait until their big daddy's daughter comes into her own, but what can you expect from a script written by Wong Jing? "Written" seems like a very strong word for this thing anyway. I suspect that the scriptwriting process consisted of Wong Jing taking the scripts of Seven and one or two of the movie's rip-offs, and those of a few Omen-style horror films, ripping out random pages, throwing them in the air and then randomly stacking them together again, adding scribbles like "add Donnie Yen's showcase #1 fight here", "add tit joke #353 here" and "needs more incompetence". On the positive side, he forgot to add his trademark rape jokes.

So yes, Satan Returns is hardly what one would call coherent (or, if one has a grumpy day "a movie"), but just a random conglomeration of crap that just happened to land in the same script and then got directed with distractible nervousness by a directorial non-entity named Lam Wai-Lun (who seems pretty excellent at self-sabotage and even manages to ruin Yen's two and a half theoretically awesome fight scenes by more obfuscating than staging them).

Fortunately for my mood, some of the crap the film consists of is pretty funny - I always love the HK interpretations of Christian theology - and/or so merrily insane that it's impossible to argue with the film's will to entertain. I mean, how many serial killer/satanist movies are there in which one of the cop's plans fails because they're distracted from watching a colleague playing decoy by the aftereffects of painful flirting attempts over the decoy's hidden microphone and the following shouting match with a colleague (I said these people are incompetent, right?). Plus, the grand finale has Donnie Yen crucifying the enthusiastically scenery-chewing Francis Ng. And if that's not a reason to watch a movie, I don't know what is.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: hong kong movies,in short,horror,action,chingmy yau,donnie yen,francis ng,wong jing