Sex and Zen (1991)

Sex and Zen was released by Golden Harvest in 1991 and it is one of the more notorious Hong Kong Category III movies.

Category III was a censorship rating introduced in 1988, similar to the American NC-17 rating. No-one under 18 was allowed to see such films. The NC-17 rating never worked because in the U.S. distributors and exhibitors conspired to wreck the commercial prospects of any film unlucky enough to get such a classification. The Hong Kong Category III rating worked because it was a genuine and honest attempt to allow filmmakers to deal with grown-up subject matter with a reasonable degree of freedom.

Category III movies usually had both graphic violence and explicit sex and nudity. Sex and Zen concentrates on the sex. It’s a wild insane sex comedy.

Mei Yeung-Sheng (Lawrence Ng) is a scholar who believes that what really matters in life is the pursuit of erotic pleasure without reference to conventional rules of morality. This has led to a clash with the wise monk known as the Sack Monk who has tried to persuade him to embrace the virtues of self-denial.

The wise old monk assures the young scholar that no matter how clever you might be the pursuit of other men’s wives will lead to disaster. Retribution is a certainty. Mei Yeung-Sheng refuses to listen.

Mei Yeung-Sheng marries Huk-Yeung (Amy Yip), the daughter of a rich and powerful man known as Master Iron Gate. Huk-Yeung thinks sex is shameful. Their wedding night might not be a total success for the young couple but it provides a great deal of amusement for the audience.

Mei Yeung-Sheng continues his pursuit of women aided by cat burglar Choi Kun-Lun (Lo Lieh). His ability to break into homes and pick locks will be useful - Mei Yeung-Sheng will use the most unscrupulous methods in pursuit of sexual pleasure.

Choi Kun-Lun persuades Mei Yeung-Sheng that his problem with women is that his equipment is not adequate for the job. He needs a hardware upgrade.

The movie now becomes steadily more crazy and outrageous. The young scholar finds a surgeon who can perform the upgrade. The operation should go smoothly as long as it doesn’t rain - this surgeon gets very jumpy when it rains.

And as long as the horse co-operates.

The scholar is only too anxious to find out if the upgrade has been successful. He doesn’t get any complaints from the ladies.

Mei Yeung-Sheng embarks on an erotic spree which gets him into a certain amount of trouble.

After their marriage his wife Huk-Yeung (Amy Yip) had quickly discovered that sex isn’t disgusting after all. In fact she likes it very much indeed. But her husband is away most of the time. She finds some very imaginative ways to provide pleasure to herself but it’s just not the same. She needs a man. She needs a man real bad.

She finds one, in the form of the gardener. Which leads to complicated and unfortunate results. For just about everybody.

Sex and Zen is based on Li Yu’s seventeenth-century erotic novel The Carnal Prayer Mat.

The sex scenes are frequent, very imaginatively shot and very very explicit. And at times very kinky. If you are easily shocked or offended you might want to keep right away from this movie.

Sex and Zen might not be for the faint-hearted but on the other hand it really is very funny and it’s wild and crazy. Highly recommended.

Umbrella’s Blu-Ray release offers a lovely transfer. The main extra is an interview with the director.

Illicit Dreams (1994)

Illicit Dreams is a 1994 erotic thriller starring Shannon Tweed.

Over the past couple of decades quite a few disreputable film genres have been rehabilitated. Even 1970 British sex comedies, once the most despised genre of all, are now available on Blu-Ray, fully restored ad loaded with extras. But there is one film genre that is still regarded as being beyond the pale and totally unworthy of even the smallest respect - 1990s direct-to-video erotic thrillers. You’re still not only allowed to sneer at those - you’re expected to sneer at them.

Shannon Tweed was the queen of the direct-to-video erotic thriller and she’s also regarded as fair game for snarkiness.

Which brings us to Illicit Dreams. Is it really that bad? In my view, no. But it does depend on what you’re expecting from it. We’ll get to that later.

Moira (Shannon Tweed) is married to Daniel Davis (Joe Cortese). He’s a hard-driving rich businessman with powerful political connections. He might wear well-tailored suits but he is really just a slick smooth thug. He treats Moira as a slave. He hits her. He bullies her.

Her friend Melinda (Michelle Johnson) is pushing Moira to divorce Daniel. Melinda means well but it hasn’t occurred to her than Daniel might in fact be genuinely dangerous. Very dangerous.

It’s her dreams that keep Moira going although they also disturb her because they seem so real. She keeps dreaming of a particular man. He’s good-looking and kind and very sexy. She’s never met him, she doesn’t know if he exists, but she loves him.

What Moira doesn’t know is that across town Nick (Andrew Stevens) is having similar dreams, about a woman. The sort of woman he would love to meet. He’s never met her, he doesn’t know if she exists, but he loves her.

The man Moira has been dreaming about is of course Nick. And the woman Nick has been dreaming about is Moira.

Then they meet by accident.

You know that Daniel will find out and that things will get dangerous and nasty. From this point on the movie becomes a fairly straightforward although well-executed erotic thriller. The paranormal elements that make the first half of the movie so interesting get shunted aside. But as an erotic thriller it has some fine suspense and it does get quite tense and exiting towards the end.

And then there’s the ending. I’m not going to risk spoilers by saying any more, except that it left me wanting to hurl a brick at the screen.

Shannon Tweed isn’t the world’s greatest actress but she’s quite good and she’s likeable and sympathetic. Andrew Stevens is a bit dull but he’s OK. Joe Cortese goes way over the top and he’s certainly a memorable and creepy villain.

This was obviously a low-budget movie but it’s slick enough and professional enough and it has a few reasonably effective spooky visual moments.

This is not Citizen Kane. It’s not ground-breaking. It won’t redefine your understanding of cinema. It’s not trying to do any of that. It’s just offering an hour-and-a-half of fairly decent entertainment.

There is some nudity and some sex fairly graphic sex scenes but overall the erotic content is far from excessive.

You might assume that moves such as this, thrillers with added T&A, were aimed mostly at male audiences. Illicit Dreams is however essentially a romance. It’s a paranormal romance. A paranormal steamy romance. Which means that in actuality we’re in serious Chick Flick territory.

Mostly I enjoyed Illicit Dreams, apart from that ending. Recommended, with that caveat.

It’s available on a double-header DVD (paired with another Shannon Tweed flick, Indecent Behavior 4). The transfer is pretty decent. I also highly recommend Shannon Tweed's 1993 movie A Woman Scorned.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004)

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is writer-director Mamoru Oshii’s sequel to his 1995 masterpiece Ghost in the Shell. 

Both take Masamune Shirow’s brilliant manga as a starting point.

This 2004 film is a sequel. I’m not going to reveal any spoilers for the first film here but you absolutely must watch the earlier film first. Not because of the plot but because of something very very important involving one of the main characters that happens in the first movie.

Gynoids (female androids) have been running amok and killing their owners. That’s disturbing. What’s really worrying and puzzling is that often the gynoids then commit suicide. That’s something that androids do not, and cannot, do.

Batou is assigned to the case. Togusa is now his partner, the Major Motoko Kusanagi being (for very complicated reasons) unavailable for duty. They’re initially puzzled that this case should have been handed to Section 9. Section 9 usually deals with much more overt threat to public security.

The gynoids are personal servant androids but the first thing that Batou and Togusa find out is that the gynoids causing the problems are a special type of gynoid. They’re sexbots.

The various branches of the Ghost in the Shell franchise all deal with the intersection of the human and the digital worlds. The blurring of the lines between man and machine. In this future cyborgs and androids are ubiquitous. Batou is a cyborg and there’s not much of him left that is entirely human. Motoko Kusanagi is entirely a cyborg. The only human element to Motoko is her Ghost. But of course the Ghost is the most important thing of all. Cyborgs have human brains and cyberbrains. The Ghost resides in the human brain. It comprises our memories and it’s our memories that make us human.

This is obviously the kind of territory that has been extensively explored in cyberpunk fiction and cyberpunk movies such as Blade Runner and Total Recall. The Ghost in the Shell franchise takes a deep dive into this territory.

Batou and Togusa are making progress, or so they think. That’s assuming that the things they have found are true. They may be trapped in a web of illusions and lies.

When they reach the ship things get seriously weird. Reality starts to fragment. In a world of virtual reality and artificial intelligences is there any actual reality? If everybody is permanently connected to digital networks and everybody has a cyberbrain would you be able to tell if you were real or not?

There’s plenty of violent mayhem but this is a very cerebral movie. This is not a cool sci-fi action movie. It’s cool, but it’s cool in an incredibly complex and philosophical way. Western sci-fi movie-makers (and makers of TV sci-fi) will flirt with really complex ideas but it’s the Japanese anime makers who are prepared to take those ideas to the limit.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is visually stunning but it looks nothing like the first movie. It’s moving into entirely new aesthetic territory. And it’s tonally quite different.

In western cinema the advent of digital technologies, CGI and the like, had mostly disastrous results. That was not the case with anime. In an anime movie such as this one what matters is having people who can use these techniques as something more than a crutch. Or a gimmick. And these techniques can be blended seamlessly into animated movies. In live-action movies they seem like they’re shoe-horned in.

You do need to watch the 1995 Ghost in the Shell movie first. Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is a very different movie in many ways. It’s different thematically and stylistically. But to fully appreciate it it helps to have seen the first movie and it helps to have read the original manga. That makes it easier to understand why Mamoru Oshii chose not to make a straightforward sequel.

The extensive Ghost in the Shell franchise has a complicated history. It began as a manga by Masamune Shirow. Then came the first movie in 1995, directed by Mamoru Oshii and written by Kazunori Itô. Then in 2002 came the excellent Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex TV series. It does not follow on directly from the movie and may possibly take place in a slightly different timeline. In 2004 there was a second series of the TV series. And also in 2004, the second movie. In 2006 came the movie Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex - Solid State Society. There have since been other iterations. It’s been a spectacularly successful franchise.

You could argue that it’s not a franchise in a conventional sense but rather a complex web of interrelated works.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is strange and moody and surreal and it’s very highly recommended.

Robotrix (1991)

Robotrix is a 1991 Hong Kong science fiction movie which lifts its central idea from RoboCop but it cannot be regarded as a mere RoboCop rip-off. It’s a wildly different story.

While RoboCop is about corporations and governments out of control Robotrix is more of a traditional mad scientist movie (with the twist that the mad scientist is both a Dr Frankenstein and a Frankenstein’s monster in one). This might make it seem less interesting than RoboCop but Robotrix simply has other fish to fry.

Salina (played by Japanese actress Chikako Aoyama) is a tough Hong Kong police detective. An Arab oil prince has been kidnapped by a brilliant but deranged Japanese scientist, Ryuichi Sakamoto (Chung Lin). Sakamoto has transformed himself into a cyborg. His motivation seems to be revenge for the mockery his work had attracted.

In the course of the kidnapping Salina is killed but her story is far from over. Another genius scientist (and Sakamoto’s arch-rival) Dr Sara (Hui Hsiao-dan) uploads Salina’s personality into a robot.

Dr Sara has a beautiful female assistant, Ann (Amy Yip), who is in fact a robot. Ann is a pure robot while Salina is a cyborg, with a human personality.

While RoboCop is troubled by the fact that he is no longer either man or machine but a bit of both and looks like a monstrous robot Salina’s problem is that she looks entirely human but is no longer sure if she’s a machine or a woman. And I think it’s fair to assume that this would be an even bigger issue for a woman than it would be for a man. Salina has been dating Joe (David Wu), a member of her squad. She needs to know if she is still capable of love now that she is no longer exactly human.

Sakamoto, now an incredibly powerful cyborg, goes on a murderous rampage.

Prostitutes are being murdered, the police believe this to be linked to Sakamoto and the police have set a trap. It doesn’t work out the way they had hoped.

All their attempts to apprehend Sakamoto seem destined for failure, even with a formidable lady cyborg and an equally formidable lady robot on their side. Lots of incredibly violent mayhem ensues, with unpleasant consequences for both Salina and Dr Sara. It will of course lead to a violent showdown.

While Robotrix engages with some serious issues along the way it’s essentially an adrenalin-charged action romp and it doesn’t take itself too seriously. At times it is extremely funny, and deliberately so.

The whole concept of cheating death by uploading your personality into a computer or a robot is not as simple as it sounds. You’re dead. There is now a copy of your personality in the robot, but you yourself are dead. This is glossed over in most science fiction stories but there is a tantalising hint that the writers, Jamie Luk and Man Sing So, were aware of this problem. There is a moment when Joe fears that Salina has been killed again and Ann tells him, “Joe, Salina has been dead for a long time.” This aspect is not developed because that would have made this a totally different movie.

This is a Category III movie (roughly the equivalent of a US NC-17 rating) and there’s some very graphic violence and some very graphic sex. There’s some very graphic sexual violence but while this is to some degree added as an exploitation element it does serve a purpose. There is a danger that we might feel come sympathy for Sakamoto, that we might see him as a tragically misguided genius scientist capable of redemption. His brutalisation of a prostitute and of one the central female characters ensures that we feel no sympathy for him whatsoever. It is necessary for the audience to see Sakamoto as a monster who must be destroyed.

There’s also a romantic sex scene between Salina and Joe. Salina has to know not only if she can still enjoy sex in a physical sense but more important whether she can still enjoy it emotionally. This is a movie that jumps from serious moments such as this to broad comedy. It’s all over the place and while this would be a flaw in most movies this is a Hong Kong movie and it works.

The action scenes are impressive.

The ending is magnificent. And then there’s an epilogue which is quite perfect as well.

The 88 Films Blu-Ray looks terrific and there’s an audio commentary.

Robotrix does have superficial resemblances to RoboCop but it’s also an interesting anticipation of Ghost in the Shell. The Ghost in the Shell movie did not come out until 1995 but the Ghost in the Shell manga was published in 1989.

Robotrix is total insanity but it’s inspired insanity and it’s bursting with energy and it’s very highly recommended (although it is perhaps not for the faint-hearted).

Wolfen (1981)

Wolfen (1981) is a horror movie based on Whitley Strieber’s 1978 novel The Wolfen.

You’re probably going to assume that this will be a werewolf tale. It certainly has some affinities with the werewolf genre. Just as he took a very unconventional approach to the vampire genre in his 1981 novel The Hunger Strieber took an equally unconventional approach to the werewolf genre in The Wolfen. Not everybody likes Strieber’s fiction but I’m a big fan.

And the movie Wolfen is a long way from being a routine werewolf story. Some major plot changes were made but the clever central idea is retained.

A billionaire industrialist and his wife are murdered in Manhattan. Not so much murdered as butchered. They were under constant surveillance by an ultra high tech security and surveillance company but it didn’t help them.

Dewey Wilson (Albert Finney) is a police detective who has been slowly putting himself back together after a crack-up. He has a reputation for being a bit odd but for getting results.

The favoured theory is that this double murder was an act of terrorism. Dewey finds himself with a partner, counter-terrorism expert Detective Rebecca Neff (Diane Venora). Dewey doesn’t really buy the terrorism theory but he’s happy enough to work with Rebecca. She’s a good cop and she’s easy to get on with.

There are a couple of slightly puzzling things about the murders. And then a body, badly butchered, is found in the South Bronx. There is one very surprising common element. Two hairs. The hairs are not human.

From the title of the movie the viewer will guess that wolves of some kind are involved, but are they werewolves or actual wolves? Could it be a psycho with a wolf obsession? Or an elaborate attempt to mislead the police? But until a very late stage Dewey and Rebecca have no idea what they’re dealing with.

Although it takes a long time for Dewey to get on the right track this is not a slow-moving film. Right from the start there are graphic murders, and gore. But they’re filmed in such a way as to ensure that we don’t see what is really happening. Which is as it should be. This movie relies to a huge degree on an atmosphere of spookiness and weirdness. The fact that we don’t know what’s going on makes it all much more unsettling.

There are so many things that I love about this movie. And so many things that I intensely dislike. I love the urban devastation - this is like a city being consumed by a wasting disease. I love the slow reveal of the truth. I love the optical effects which really do make us feel that we’re seeing many of these sequences through the eyes of someone or some thing definitely not human. These sequences really are spooky and menacing. I love the central premise.

Unfortunately director/co-writer Michael Wadleigh added some additional elements to the story and these additions are not just tedious, they seriously undermine the central premise. The political subplots is not too much of a problem. It adds an interesting red herring for the cops to deal with and it’s not intrusive. The hippie-dippie mystical stuff is however a major problem. The movie would have been a whole lot better with all that stuff cut.

There’s also a particular point about the nature of the killers which is stressed in the book but somewhat overlooked in the movie, and this does lessen the impact a little.

These things are annoying but happily they don’t quite succeed in sinking the movie. There are still the cool visuals and the weird menacing atmosphere and some great suspense and some genuinely very good ideas.

Albert Finney is pretty good. He wisely doesn’t try to make Dewey too eccentric or too odd. It’s an effective restrained performance. Diane Venora is a reasonably likeable female lead.

Wolfen has some major flaws but it’s sufficiently interesting and unusual to still be very much worth seeing. It remains one of the most intriguing horror movies of the 80s. In spite of those flaws, highly recommended.

The Warner Archive Blu-Ray is barebones but looks great.

I’ve also reviewed the Whitley Strieber novel, The Wolfen.

The Running Man (1987)

If you’re going to talk about post-apocalyptic science fiction movies then The Running Man, released in 1987, cannot be ignored. It was one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s early hits. It’s another movie inspired partly by Richard Connell’s 1924 short story The Most Dangerous Game.

It was directed by Paul Michael Glaser, Yes, Starsky from Starsky and Hutch.

It’s based on a Stephen King novel. King had a knack for writing mediocre novels that could be turned into excellent movies. Steven E. de Souza wrote the screenplay. It bore a sufficiently close resemblance to Yves Boisset's 1983 film The Price of Danger to allow the producers of that French film to successfully sue for plagiarism.

This is a post-apocalyptic story but in this case it was an economic apocalypse. This resulted in most people getting a whole lot poorer but of courser the elites became a whole lot richer. It also resulted in social chaos.

The country is now a police state. The populations is brainwashed and terrorised into submission. The policy is to offer them bread and circuses. The circus is in the form of a TV show called The Running Man.

This is perhaps not a pure post-apocalyptic movie. This is not a wasteland in the mode of A Boy and His Dog (1975). The collapse of society has not been total. But it is very much a dystopian movie and the post-apocalyptic and dystopian genres do overlap.

Ben Richards (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is a cop who is ordered to massacre unarmed civilians. He refuses and ends up in a labour camp. He makes a daring escape. He finds that his brother’s apartment where he hoped to find shelter is now occupied by Amber Mendez (Maria Conchita Alonso). He is recaptured, but this time falls into the hands of Damon Killian (Richard Dawson), the sleazy producer and host of The Running Man TV series. Amber turned him in to the cops but when she sees the TV newscast report that claims Ben killed several people during his escape attempt she figures out that people are being lied to. She knows that he did not kill anyone. Maybe Ben will now have an ally.

Whether he likes it or not Ben is now going to be a contestant on the show.

In the show there are Runners and Stalkers. The Stalkers hunt down and kill the Runners much to the delight of the folks watching at home. Ben is going to be a Runner, along with his two buddies from the labour camp and Amber.

Their aim is not just survival but to destroy the show by hooking up with the Resistance.

Much mayhem will ensue.

Maybe Schwarzenegger isn’t the world’s greatest actor but he’s quite competent, this is well within his range and the man has serious charisma. He even copes with some truly cringe-inducing dialogue.

Richard Dawson is delightfully and outrageously evil and slimy.

The action scenes are fine although they’re not as varied as they might have been.

This is obviously a satire on television. A satire with all the subtlety of a baseball bat to the back of the head.

I saw this movie many years ago and thought it was trashy and reasonably exciting. Seeing it again I still think it’s trashy and reasonably exciting but today I have a bit more tolerance for 80s trashy excess.

It’s not particularly original. There are striking similarities to Lucio Fulci’s Warriors of the Year 2072 (1984), made a few years earlier. I think Fulci’s is the better film. It also bears some very slight resemblance to the very underrated Australian movie Centrespread (1981), which is a much much better film. But The Running Man is entertaining and it’s recommended.

The Blu-Ray is barebones but looks good.