Daughter of Darkness (1993)

Ah, Category III Hong Kong cinema; How does one sell this onscreen depravity to the uninitiated?  Perhaps, determining if you’re already a fan of trash cinema from other regions of the world is the best place to start.  Specifically, films from Italy and Japan during the 1970’s & 80’s.  If you’re a fan of films such as The New York Ripper, Night Train Murders, White Rose Campus, and Rape! 13^th Hour then Category III films are the next logical step in your education of trashy world cinema.

The Category III film Daughter of Darkness from 1993 is not a bad place to start, but probably not as infamous as say Red to Kill or Ebola Syndrome.  Daughter of Darkness may not reach the heights, or depths depending on your perspective, of those films but it certainly delivers the violence and debauchery that they’re known for.

Viewers going into Daughter of Darkness for the first time expecting extreme sex and violence right from the jump may be confused for the first half an hour or so, as it kind of plays out like a twisted, slapstick sex-comedy.  We are introduced to an overly animated and extremely pervy police detective played by the always entertaining Anthony Wong.  Right from the start, Wong is giving a completely over-the-top performance with extremely animated facial expressions that would make Jim Carrey blush.  When a young girl named Fong enters the police station claiming that she has discovered her entire family murdered in their home, our story is set in motion and it’s going to be a wild and shocking ride to the end.

It's during the beginning of Wong’s murder investigation where we get the majority of the comedic bits.  Wong’s character is a Chinese Mainland detective and there’s some less than subtle commentary going on with his very goofy performance.  He enters the crime scene like a bull in a china shop; walking directly through blood, posing for pictures with the bodies, and just generally disrupting the crime scene and destroying evidence.  We also get to see what an absolute pervert Wong’s character is and his fascination with breasts during these opening scenes!  The character of Officer Lui is setup as a morally corrupt buffoon but he eventually shows that he’s a fairly effective investigator and a somewhat likable character by the end.

Once Officer Lui gets around to questioning Fong about the massacre of her family, he quickly realizes that her story doesn’t add up.  At this point in the film it becomes kind of a wacky procedural with Lui getting himself into some silly situations as he interviews the locals about Fong and her family.  Lui eventually learns that a fellow police officer named Kin is somehow involved in this crime and that’s when the story starts to turn dark.  It’s discovered that Kin and Fong are romantically linked and that they had planned to run off to Hong Kong to get married and escape the abusive home life that Fong was experiencing with her family.  When Lui presses Kin on his involvement and the fact that the bullets used in the murders come from a police issued gun, Kin confesses to the crimes.  This, however, doesn’t sit well with Lui.  So, he decides to once again interrogate Fong to find out what really happened that fateful night.

Like other Category III films, such as Dr. Lamb and The Untold Story, the horrific details are told through flashback, and boy are they horrific!  Fong’s home life with her family is a living nightmare!  She is verbally and emotionally abused by her mother and siblings and physically harmed by her father (possibly step-father (?)).  Rape, incest, and torture playout on screen before we reach the ultra-violent demise of this foul family.  One can never hear the song “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” the same after witnessing this shocking and appalling scene.  This entire sequence is definitely where the film earns its Category III status.  The whole thing ends tragically and will leave you with a feeling of hopelessness.  No doubt, this is an exploitation film, first and foremost, but there is a halfhearted attempt towards social commentary concerning Mainland China, specifically their judicial system and the way everything concludes with the case at the very end of the film.

Daughter of Darkness is a very solid exploitation film and a prime example of what some of the more infamous Category III films have to offer.  It’s a bit uneven in terms of the tonal shift that the film makes about a third of the way through, but that’s also what makes the film interesting.  I would probably recommend something like Run and Kill or The Untold Story to those looking to dip their toe into the cesspool of Category III, but this isn’t a bad place to start either.

MVT: Anthony Wong and William Ho as the sadistic father are both entertaining to watch, but both characters are a bit one note.  Lily Chung as Fong shows a bit more diversity and really earns the MVT.  A brave performance that isn’t simply a victim in this film.

Make or Break Scene: Opening – Anthony Wong’s entrance to the crime scene.  Goofy antics amongst a bloodbath of a murder scene.

Score: 7/10

Horrible High Heels (1996)

Hey, let’s talk about my feet!  For as long as I can remember, my feet have been grotesquely wide (around a triple E width, if that helps any).  The last pair of normal sneakers I had were Welcome Back Kotter ones when I was a kid (it said, “Up Your Nose with a Rubber Hose” and other snazzy bon mots around the sides).  I could never wear Chuck Taylors, because my feet poured out over the tops of the soles (but fuck if I didn’t try).  My first pair of Doc Martens were regular width (because that’s all that anyone sold, and this was before they were available on every street corner in the world, and they were expensive as all hell compared to the shoes I would normally buy), and the breaking-in period was pure hell.  Since then, I’ve discovered companies that that specialize in wide width shoes, but it’s still a crapshoot buying them, because you have to buy them over the internet (the sneakers I have been buying this way have started giving me corns, so now it’s back to the drawing board). 

  

And then there’s the flatness of my feet.  I’m fairly convinced that I have no arches to speak of, so, of course, I have to wear special arch supports.  The beauty of these babies is that they’re made of plastic, so they tend to give you shin splints until you get used to them.  They also make it sound like you’re walking on ducks, they squeak so much.  To put it simply, footwear and I don’t get along.  I don’t even think the human leather shoes of Wai On Chan, Cheng Chow, and Chiang-Bang Mao’s Horrible High Heels (aka Ren Pi Guo Zheng Xie aka Bloody Shoe) would fit me any better than any others do.  It doesn’t help that I can’t walk for shit in high heels.

Lee Kang (Hung Fung) is the proprietor of a small shoe cobbling business.  He’s also a degenerate gambler of the lowest order, and, after getting knocked out during a row over his habit with young Sherry, he’s skinned alive by a masked lunatic (whose identity is obvious, even before you meet him without the mask).  Lee’s son Tien (Lam Chak-Ming) comes home from university with hoochie mama Wendy (Suen Tong), and he almost seems to give a rat’s ass about finding his missing father.  Wang, one of Sherry’s co-workers, finds a cheap source for fantastically soft leather (have you guessed yet who the murderer is?) and has some dealings with his nephew Ah-Nan (Siu Yuk-Lung), who works for triad boss Kuen (Shing Fui-On), a man very interested in the wholesale of women’s shoes.  Is that enough for you?

This film could have some interesting things to say, and it almost does.  For example, there’s the aspect of mad love going on.  Sherry pines for Tien (why is anyone’s guess, as the man is blanker than a sheet of copy paper and has fewer sides), and the entrance of Wendy makes her go a little crazy (there’s even a nice cat fight just to prove this).  Sherry goes to extreme lengths to get Tien, naturally, because he’s the man she deserves, and she was there first.  Wang pines for Sherry, and he also will go to extreme lengths to have her.  He even has a photo of her at home with her mouth cut out (you don’t have to wonder why; they make it excruciatingly clear in the movie).  I can’t imagine that being in any way satisfying, and I can only cringe at the abrasions one could incur with such a prop.  However, Sherry ultimately rejects Wang, which makes him go even crazier.  But just being in Wang’s presence is enough to infect Sherry with Wang’s insanity.  That she winds up as she does in the end stems not only from her commiseration with this guy but also (and more importantly) from her abuse at the hands of men in general.  Sherry is the embodiment of puppy love turned inside out and gone dark.  

Then, there’s the idea of “skin trades” (and not just in terms of animals, unless you count people as animals, which is fair play) and how fashion feeds into it.  Consumers and vendors love the human leather shoes.  Sherry and her fellow employees love working with the leather, and the money they make off their sales thrills them.  During the first human skinning, the killer exclaims, “I started my fortune with this leather.”  As in films such as Eating Raoul, this guy discovers discover that not only are people as easy to kill and use as animals are but they’re also cheaper and of a higher quality.  It’s just that this movie hasn’t a humorous bone in its body.    

Being a Category III film, Horrible High Heels does its level best to fulfill the promise of that rating.  It opens, for no narrative reason whatsoever, in a slaughterhouse, and we get to see cows being killed and cut up in graphic detail.  That’s about as subtle as this film gets.  There is plenty of rape for everyone, and this is combined with humiliation (as if rape, in and of itself, isn’t humiliating enough).  One victim is micturated on.  Another is stripped, beaten, made to walk on all fours like a dog, and forced to touch herself with amputated body parts.  This isn’t to say that the consensual sex scenes are any more pleasant.  They are as softcore as can be, leaving nothing to the imagination (well, a little), and they are just as skanky as any of the rape scenes.  They have a grimy aura to them, and the participants look dazed and sweaty.  Even when the characters want to be having sex, they still look like they couldn’t be further away.

The greatest fault of Horrible High Heels is that it’s incredibly scattershot to the point that you can completely believe that this thing was made by three directors, because it doesn’t follow any of its storylines coherently.  It also doesn’t really give a shit about what’s going on in any of them.  The human tanning angle is dropped halfway through the film.  The Ah-Nan/triad aspect doesn’t relate to the rest of the film except by the thinnest of threads.  The search for Lee that started this whole thing comes up only sporadically and with as much gusto as a nonagenarian’s exercise routine.  The characters change into completely different personalities at the drop of a hat.  The cops are completely subplot material until the end, when they suddenly become action heroes, just because (as does Tien in one of the more amusing sequences of the film).  With how salacious this movie is, it’s astounding how stultifying it manages to be.  If nothing else, its title at least delivers on two things: There are high heels in the film, and it’s horrible.

MVT:  The gutter-level sleaze.  Come on, you were watching this for some other reason?

Make or Break:  The opening scene in the abattoir may put some off their feed and spoil their libidos.  Then again, it may kickstart others’ engines.

Score:  3/10 

Naked Killer (1992)

Princess (Carrie Ng), a ruthless professional assassin, kills some random thug (who wears a denim vest with one football shoulder pad on it, apropos of nothing) by smashing his head with a couple of dumbbells and then shooting him in the junk.  Detective Tinam (Simon Yam), a cop who accidentally shot and killed his own brother causing him to vomit whenever he draws his gun or has a gun pointed at him but is okay just being around guns (which makes you wonder how he gets ready for work in the morning), is on the case.  He meets violently cute with Kitty (Chingmy Yau) at a salon, and falls in love with her.  Kitty, in turn, is taken under the wing of Sister Cindy (Wai Yiu) and trained to be a killer.  But Princess and her own protégé/lover Baby (Madoka Sugawara) come into inevitable conflict with Sister Cindy and Kitty, and it’s pretty much game on.

Clarence Fok Yiu-leung’s Naked Killer (aka Chik Loh Go Yeung) is a Category III film that, from what I’ve been able to gather, has been plagued by censorship issues ever since it was produced.  In fact, I had to watch two versions of it to get a whole idea of what was going on in it.  Both of these versions are available on Youtube, but the quality is garbage, so be advised should you decide you want to check it out from that source.  The shorter version I saw (about sixty-nine minutes, fittingly enough, though the video is listed at around one hundred minutes, but all it does is restart the movie from the beginning for that last half hour) contains a couple of scenes that bond Sister Cindy and Kitty together, but it cut out all of the sex scenes and some of the violence.  It’s a real butcher job.  The longer version I saw (about eighty-nine minutes) contains the sex and violence, but it inexplicably cut the aforementioned scenes between Sister Cindy and Kitty.  The funny thing is, I enjoyed both versions immensely.  Sure, the shorter version is exceedingly difficult to follow, but it maintains the kinetic, imaginative camerawork of the longer version.  The camera whips around during the action scenes.  Often, Dutch angles are used, imbuing the film with a comic book atmosphere.  The stuntwork is top notch, with characters flipping and yerking thither and yon through the frame.  Both versions also have a charm that rests largely on the shoulders of Yau, who is adept at being sexy, mean, and coquettish, all at the same time.  The rest of the female cast are up to the task as well, don’t misunderstand.  But it’s Yau’s acting in combination with Yiu-leung’s direction that raises material which is both run-of-the-mill and offbeat and could as easily have been a disaster as anything else (I’ll theorize here that the same could be said for just about every Category III film).

Naturally, when you have female assassins in a film the emphasis on sex, specifically as it pertains to how the hitwomen are displayed, is amplified, something films about male assassins never have (at least to my knowledge, although I guess something like Crying Freeman may be an exception).  This philosophy is perfectly summed up in two scenes between Sister Cindy and Kitty.  In the first, Cindy admonishes Kitty for taking too long to kill a pedophile, stating that a woman’s body is as much a weapon as a gun or a knife.  In the second, she proves this ethos by seducing a pair of perverts and then snapping their necks. 

The film’s sexuality works in several ways.  First, there is its usage as retaliation against misogynists.  When we first meet Kitty, she stabs a male hair stylist for beating his pregnant girlfriend (he even kicks her in the stomach, just in case we might accidentally sympathize with him).  Soon after, she murders the man who cuckolded and killed her father, even stabbing his penis with a pencil at one point (I think it was a pencil).  Princess and Baby make a habit of mutilating their male victim’s genitals, and while Kitty has been known to mess with men’s wedding tackle, for her this is borne out of anger; for Princess and Baby, it’s sadism.  Kitty and Cindy, while acting in their professional capacity, kill men violently, but it’s not personal; it’s just business with style.  Second is the relationship between Kitty and Tinam.  Kitty feels bad for Tinam because of his newfound aversion to gun violence.  As the two come together (quite literally), they heal each other (sort of), and this relationship gives Kitty a heteronormative path to what happiness she is allowed within the story.  

Which brings us to the third and most important point.  The females in this film, with the exception of Kitty, are lesbians, and there is a sharp line drawn between this lifestyle and that of heterosexuals.  Princess and Baby have sex that is cold in every way but the physical.  They do it in a swimming pool filled with one of their victim’s blood, for example.  This is transgressive while also playing to the audience’s prurient interest (remember, this is still a Category III film).  The division between homo- and heterosexuality is best depicted in an intercut sex scene, featuring Tinam and Kitty on one side and Princess and Baby on the other.  The shots of Tinam and Kitty are well-lit, almost glamourous, with lots of closeups, and the two are sharing in each other’s bodies, committing to each other.  The shots of Princess and Baby are in a dark, dank setting, with the bed at an odd angle to the camera’s lens, and the camera itself at a distance from its subjects.  There is no true intimacy here.  It is also unsatisfying for both of them, because the two cannot connect on a human level.  Sister Cindy lies somewhere in the middle.  It is clearly implied that she had a sexual relationship with Princess (they share a significant smooch later in the film), but we can assume that their breakup had something to do with Princess’ predatory, cruel worldview.  Cindy’s relationship with Kitty is different.  She feels a sisterly/motherly connection with her young charge, and the two discuss things openly.  It is possible that Cindy wants an amorous relationship with Kitty, but she won’t force it, and she is just as happy (probably moreso) in their platonic, teacher/student kinship.  Even though the film leans more toward heterosexuality being the acceptable form of love, Sister Cindy helps balance the scale by being able to exist in both worlds.  She is the most stable of the women, being a lesbian but not a rapacious one like Princess while also being a friend and mentor to Kitty, who could certainly use the guidance.  Sure, Sister Cindy still wants to kill Tinam, but it’s in the service of professionalism rather than jealousy.  And isn’t that what friendship is all about?

MVT:  The four women in this film are fantastic, in my estimation.  As talented physically as they are astoundingly attractive, each of the actresses gives their character a strongly defined personality, and this really aids Naked Killer in separating itself from the crowd.

Make or Break:  The opening assassination sets up everything the film needs to get moving, being stylish, sexy, hyperviolent, and ridiculous simultaneously.

Score:  7.25/10