Naked Killer (1992)

Naked Killer is a 1992 Hong Kong action thriller. It’s a Category III movie. It’s not overly extreme but it does have some disturbing moments.

This is not a rip-off of Luc Besson’s highly influential La Femme Nikita but it clearly derives some inspiration from that source. Black Cat is another Hong Kong movie made about the same time that really is a La Femme Nikita rip-off albeit a very good one. The influence of Besson’s movie can also be seen in the superb 2001 anime TV series Noir.

What’s great about Hong Kong cinema is that even gritty urban crime thrillers contain elements that you normally expect in other types of Hong Kong movies. For example there’s a lot of kung fu in Naked Killer.

The movie opens with a killing. The killer is a naked woman.

There have been a number of killings with a similar MO. The Hong Kong cops do not believe a woman could have carried out such a killing but detective Tinam (Simon Yam) disagrees. He is certain that the killer was a woman.

Tinam has personal problems. He killed his brother. His brother was a cop. Tinam shot him accidentally. It was a complete accident and nobody blames Tinam, except that naturally he blames himself. Now he’s impotent and he also can’t even hold a gun steady much less shoot it. But he’s still a good cop.

Mayhem breaks out in the police station. Which is how Tinam meets Kitty (Chingmy Yau). He doesn’t know what she does for a living, which is just as well.

Kitty has met Sister Cindy (Wei Yao). She’s the top hitman (or hitwoman) in the Colony. Sister Cindy is going to teach Kitty to be a top assassin. Kitty is already a pretty dangerous killer.

Kitty will have to change her identity. She becomes Vivian Shang.

Sister Cindy and Kitty/Vivian develop a complex emotional mentor/pupil relationship (a bit along the lines of the 1972 hitman classic The Mechanic).

Sister Cindy’s previous pupil, Princess (Carrie Ng), is going to be a problem. Princess is the number two assassin in the business. She aims to be number one. That means that she has to dispose of Sister Cindy. Princess is a lesbian. She has a new girlfriend/protégé, Baby (Madoka Sugawara).

Tinam encounters Kitty again. At least he’s almost certain it’s Kitty but now she says she’s Vivian.

The cops, in a desultory kind of way, are hunting the female assassins. Sister Cindy has always been a hunter but now she’s finding out what it’s like to be the hunted. But those who are hunting her might also be about to find out how it feels to be the hunted.

All the cast members are good. Simon Yam is excellent as Tinam, a hero with some huge weaknesses but basically decent guy. But this movie belongs to Chingmy Yau. She’s amazing.

Although it’s a Category III movie there’s not a huge amount of gore. It’s more that it deals with gruesome ideas. There’s no graphic sex and not a great deal of nudity, but the lesbianism and the unhealthy nature of some of the sexual obsessions probably bumped it into Category III. And the eroticism does get a bit steamy.

There’s an abundance of action and relentless mayhem. There’s also comedy, some if it pretty broad and some it pretty dark.

You have to accept that this film adheres to some of the conventions of Hong Kong action cinema. The good guys carry automatic pistols that appear to be equipped with 200 round magazines. A few dozen goons with machine-guns are no match for a feisty heroine with a handgun. The good guys can leap through the air as if they’re in a kung fu movie because this is a kung fu movie as well as being lots of other things. Hong Kong filmmakers did not stress too much about genre.

Director Clarence Fok adopts a wildly flamboyant visual style and the movie is supercharged with energy. Jing Wong’s script (he also produced) isn’t especially coherent but he knows how to pack his story with audience-pleasing ingredients and if things get confusing then that to some extent reflects the fact that the protagonist, Tinam, has no clear idea what is going on most of the time.

Naked Killer powers along and it has as much style and panache as any reasonable person could ask for. This is a wild ride and it’s highly recommended.

Naked Killer has not had a Blu-Ray release which is scandalous. It is still available on DVD.

Hawk the Slayer (1980)

Hawk the Slayer is a sword-and-sorcery movie but it’s definitely one of the more lightweight movies in that genre.

The setup is pretty standard. There are two brothers. One brother, Voltan (Jack Palance), is evil. The other, Hawk (John Terry), is good. We never find out why one brother is 30 years older than the other. Voltan kills their father. He wants his father’s magic sword so he can do evil deeds. The brothers also have a falling-out over a woman. Voltan has vowed to destroy his brother.

Voltan is holding an abbess to ransom. Hawk is determined to save her but he will need to get hold of a lot of gold. He steals it from a slaver.

He gets assistance from a good witch. She tells him that he will have to get a team together, which he does with her magical help. The team is the giant Gort (Bernard Bresslaw), the dwarf Baldin (Peter O’Farrell) and the elfin archer Crow (Ray Charleson). He already has Ranulf (W. Morgan Sheppard) who is in the service of the abbess’s sisterhood.

There’s lots of action and mayhem. At times Voltan gets the upper hand but then Hawk and his men turn the tables.

Voltan has to get regular magical treatment for a serious face wound which doesn’t serve any plot purpose but it allows Jack Palance to wear a cool sinister helmet that hides half his face.

All the right ingredients are there for a great sword-and-sorcery movie. There’s nothing original to the story but it’s perfectly serviceable.

So what went wrong?

The answer is, everything.

As a director Terry Marcel is completely incompetent. Everything manages to be rather dull when it should be exciting.

It’s visually uninteresting. The special effects look like a lame attempt to ape Star Wars. Or a disco laser light show.

The matte paintings look totally like matte paintings. That’s actually one of the things I do like in the movie - I like matte paintings that look like matte paintings. It’s something that actually works because it gives the film very much an artificial fantasy film look but it’s rather at variance with everything else in the movie which seems to be aiming for grittiness.

John Terry has zero charisma and his performance is totally lifeless.

Bernard Bresslaw was a gifted comic actor but he feels out of place here.

None of the cast members seem to know what’s expected of them.

The fight scenes mostly just don’t quite work.

Jack Palance may be the greatest bad actor in history and he at least provides some entertainment.

There’s a total absence of humour, whether intentional or unintentional. The movie takes itself rather seriously. Bernard Bresslaw could do comedy but plays it very straight. Even Roy Kinnear plays things very straight in his brief appearance. There’s no indication that Marcel was aiming for camp or a tongue-in-cheek approach, or perhaps he simply had no idea how to achieve such a feel.

It could be said in the movie’s defence that sword-and-sorcery was a brand new genre (John Boorman’s Excalibur came out out the following year and Conan the Barbarian followed in 1982) so that the template for the genre was not yet established. But the formula for making adventure movies had been known since the 1920s. And The Land That Time Forgot, from 1975, displayed a perfect knowledge of what was required. My suspicion is that Terry Marcel just had no idea how to approach the subject matter.

A movie like this can work if it’s silly fun but Hawk the Slayer is just not much fun. Not really worth bothering with.

The Bride from Hades (1968)

The Bride from Hades is a 1968 gothic horror movie from Japan’s Daiei Studio and based on one of the most famous of all Japanese ghost stories, Peony Lantern (Botan-dôrô). The story exists in multiple versions and it has been filmed several times.

It is necessary to keep in mind that ghosts in Japanese and Chinese folklore are not like western ghosts. They are corporeal. They can eat and drink. You can touch them. You can even have sex with them although it may not be advisable to do so. You can become emotionally involved with a ghost. 

And it can be almost impossible to tell if someone is a ghost.

The setting is clearly sometime during the Tokugawa Shogunate.

Zenjiro, the ambitious second son of an important lord, married the daughter of a shogunate elder. It was a very advantageous match. Sadly Zenjiro died in an accident soon afterwards. Now the family has to decide what to do with his young widow. They do not want to give up the connection to the shogunate. The ideal solution would be for her to marry Zenjiro’s younger brother Shinzaburô. It would be a fine marriage for the young man. Shinzaburô does not seem to see it that way.

At a religious festival he encounters a young lady and her maid. Later they come to visit him unexpectedly. The maid, Oyone, unfolds a strange tale.

Her mistress Otsuyu is a high-born young lady but as a result of family misfortunes she was sold into a geisha house. She claims that she is still a virgin. Given the very complicated nature of the institution of the geisha that might be plausible. Either way she is being put under unbearable pressure to surrender her virginity to a customer.

Otsuyu also goes under another name in her professional life, a name taken from a species of beetle that changes its appearance dramatically in different lighting conditions. Perhaps this is a clue that Otsuyu’s story should not necessarily be taken at face value.

Then Shinzaburô makes an unnerving discovery. Otsuyu and Oyone have both been dead for a year. This is particularly unsettling in view of the fact that he’s had sex with Otsuyu. Having sex with a ghost is generally considered to be unwise.

What’s worse is that he has fallen in love with her.

But what does Otsuyu want? Ghosts in Japanese (and Chinese) folklore are not necessarily evil in a straightforward sense but consorting with them can be dangerous in various ways.

Japanese ghosts can fall in love with the living - is Otsuyu in love with him? She is certainly giving him that impression.

Shinzaburô also does not know the exact circumstances of Otsuyu’s death, and that could be important.

Shinzaburô already has a difficult choice to make, a choice which he considers to be a moral one.

A good gothic horror movie with a period setting should have a slightly other-worldly look and feel. Japanese gothic horror has a certain distinctive feel and Daiei’s movies in this genre have a very impressive visual style. The Bride from Hades is a great looking movie.

This is horror that relies mostly on creating an atmosphere of unease and a rather melancholy mood.

The makeup effects are restrained, and deliberately so. This movie is not trying to gross out the viewer but rather to be slightly creepy and unnerving.

Kôjirô Hongô is very good as Shinzaburô, a man who is a bit of an innocent. Miyoko Akaza is excellent as Otsuyu - seductive but in a way that makes us uneasy from the start.

The Bride from Hades is top-notch subtle gothic horror. And nobody does ghost movies better than the Japanese. Highly recommended.

This film is included in the must-buy Daiei Gothic Blu-Ray boxed set from Radiance Films.

Black Cat (1991)

Black Cat is a 1991 Hong Kong action movie although it was actually a Hong Kong-Canada co-production. It was shot in Canada, Hong Kong and Japan. Stephen Shin directed.

This is very very obviously a rip-off of Luc Besson’s La Femme Nikita (1990). The premise is identical. Besson’s is the better movie but Black Cat is not without its virtues.

In a roadside diner somewhere in the U.S. a Chinese girl named Catherine (Jade Leung) has a run-in with a trucker. Catherine explodes into extreme violence and mayhem ensues. The cops arrive but taking Catherine into custody involves more mayhem and leaves a cop dead.

A very big very butch female guard at the local lock-up decides to give Catherine a beating. Catherine beats the daylights out of her. Catherine makes a daring escape which involves the expenditure of hundreds of rounds of small-arms ammunition before she is finally gunned down.

But Catherine isn’t dead. She’s been rescued. By the C.I.A.. They have a use for her. She’s an ultra-violent uncontrollable vicious sociopath but she’s a formidable killing machine. All they have to do is put a chip in her head so they can control her and they’ll have a super-assassin.

C.I.A. agent Brian (Simon Yam) will train her and be her controller. Her name is now Erica. Her code-name is Black Cat.

So yes, so far it’s a direct copy of La Femme Nikita.

Erica has been saved from what would have been about 80 years in prison but she is now a puppet. She’s an efficient assassin but in the past she has aways killed in the heat of the moment. In the heat of battle so to speak. Killing in cold blood isn’t quite so easy. But she learns how to do it.

The C.I.A. are very much the bad guys. As in real life most of their activities are in fact criminal. They’re like an organised crime syndicate but with fewer ethical scruples.

Then Erica falls in love. She had almost forgotten that she was a woman. But having a relationship is awkward when you’re a professional killer, especially for an outfit as sinister as the C.I.A.

Her early missions go smoothly. Then something goes wrong. Maybe it was bad luck. Maybe there was a leak. Maybe she was set up. Maybe it’s all part of a hopelessly complicated C.I.A. operation. In this world of paranoia you can never tell if you’re betrayed or not.

And while Erica gets lied to she does her share of lying as well.

There are some rough edges. The early scenes are supposed to be in America and everyone speaks English but the English dialogue was clearly written by someone who was not a native English speaker. It all just sounds bizarrely wrong.

The uneasy relationship between Erica and Brian lacks some of the subtlety and complexity of the equivalent relationship in La Femme Nikita.

The action scenes are superb. They’re wildly unrealistic. On her first mission Erica is up against about 140 bodyguards armed with machineguns. Naturally they don’t have a chance against one girl with a handgun. When she is pursued by the cops early on the cops are just wildly spraying gunfire in her general direction with no concern at all that dozens of innocent bystanders could get hit. But this is Hong Kong action cinema so you just accept it.

What matters is that the action scenes have hyper-kinetic energy and a real sense of urgency. Overall the visuals are impressive, creating the right mood of twistedness and paranoia.

Jade Leung does a fine job. Erica is a strange girl and she gets that across.

Simon Yam is very good also. From the start he’s a bit sinister but we’re not quite sure just how sinister he might turn out to be.

Compared to La Femme Nikita this movie is much more cyberpunk. It’s not the high-tech stuff (we never find out what the chip in her head actually does) but it’s more of a cyberpunk feel.

Black Cat isn’t as good as La Femme Nikita but it’s exciting and action-packed and it’s highly recommended.

The 88 Films Blu-Ray looks great and includes a bunch of extras.

Here's the review I did of La Femme Nikita a while back.

Jennie: Wife/Child (1968)

Jennie: Wife/Child, released in 1968, is a prime slice of hicksploitation. Robert Carl Cohen and James Landis are the credited directors with Landis writing the screenplay.

Things are pretty tense down on the Peckingpaw farm. Albert Peckingpaw (Jack Lester) is a sour bad-tempered old man and he’s convinced that his cute 20-year-old wife Jennie (Beverly Lunsford) is not to be trusted where men are concerned. He’s probably right. In fact he’s definitely right.

Of course it would help if he showed Jennie a bit of affection and allowed her to have a social life and have some fun. That might have satisfied her.

Now she’s got her eye on the Peckingpaws’ hunky young farmhand Mario Dingle (Jim Reader). Mario is terrified. He wants nothing to do with her. He knows that she’s trouble.

But Jennie wants some lovin’ and she’s determined to get some.

Mario is as dumb as a rock but it’s not his brain that interests Jennie.

Jennie is not just starved of carnal pleasures. She’s starved of affection. She’s also sick of not having pretty things. She’s become more reckless in her flirting with Mario.

And she becomes enraged when she discovers that Mario visits a whore regularly.

It’s more and more difficult for Jennie and Mario to keep their hands off each other, with Jennie being the one pushing the issue more energetically.

They think they’re being discreet but they’re not discreet enough. And maybe Albert is a bit sharper than they’d thought.

You know where things are certainly going to go from here but that’s not quite how it plays out. James Landis’s script is a bit cleverer than you might expect.

There are some quite neat slightly unexpected plot twists, and the characters behave in the unpredictable irrational ways that real people behave, rather than like characters in a cheap exploitation movie.

The acting is quite effective. Jack Lester as Albert is not as cartoonish as one expects. He’s menacing but there’s some nuance here.

Beverly Lunsford as Jennie is as cute as a button but her performance is also not too bad. She doesn’t make Jennie too sympathetic but nor does she make her too unsympathetic.

It’s worth pointing out that Jennie is no in fact a child. She’s twenty. She’s a grown woman, although emotionally she is perhaps a tad immature. She’s been married to Albert Peckingpaw for four months so she never was a child bride.

By 1968 sexploitation movies were becoming considerably more risqué but this movie is very tame with just some brief mild nudity. It’s not really sexploitation. There’s not much violence. It’s more of a hicksploitation movie aimed at the drive-in circuit.

Although it’s a sound film it uses intertitles, presumably to enhance the melodrama flavour. There are also songs interspersed throughout the action which give an odd but interesting feel.

Most online reviewers start from the assumption that movies such as this are junk that can only be appreciated as “so-bad-it’s-good” or camp which says a lot about the inability of most online reviewers to comprehend anything offbeat or truly unconventional. Jennie: Wife/Child does have an offbeat vibe but it’s clearly intentional rather than the result of incompetence. It’s an overcooked melodrama but with a darker rural noir edge.

It’s also a very competently made movie with some nice cinematic sequences. The cinematography is by the great Vilmos Zsigmond which is another reason not to dismiss this film as junk.

One should always try to approach movies with an open mind. This movie is a case in point. This is actually an extremely good extremely interesting movie with an ending that is not at all what you’re going to be expecting. Highly recommended.

Something Weird paired this film with the swampsploitation potboiler Common Law Wife (1961) and the two movies do have a similar feel. They’re fairly close in feel to the swampsploitation classic Louisiana Hussy (1959) and they have some affinity with Russ Meyer’s southern gothic hicksploitation masterpieces Lorna (1964) and Mudhoney (1964).

The Something Weird DVD actually includes three movies - Common Law Wife, Jennie: Wife/Child and Moonshine Love (1969). All three are worth seeing, making this one of Something Weird’s best-ever DVD releases. Common Law Wife and Jennie: Wife/Child have since been released on Blu-Ray by Film Masters.