Rape/Revenge is Back in Hong Kong

If you got into Hong Kong films in the last couple of years, you'd be forgiven (I guess) for not being familiar with the rape/revenge genre. These fine flicks, a staple of the late 80's and early 90's, traded in deliberately nauseating but stylish rape imagery, its grisly, traumatic aftermath, and the obligatory revenge. Usually, the revenge was far bloodier and more permanent than the rape itself. Traditionally, the rapist and his cohorts came to a sad end. If you want to get sticky with these beauties, I suggest a mini home movie festival. Be sure to include Red to Kill, Love to Kill, Her Vengeance, The Untold Story, Peeping Tom, The Rape After, Dr. Lamb, and Diary of a Serial Rapist. Most of these have been lovingly praised on this blog. I won't call them guilty pleasures as I experienced no shame enjoying them. Hopefully, you won't either. If you do, perhaps this blog is not in your future stars.

Juno Mak is a glutton for punishment in Revenge: A Love Story

If a return to Hong Kong-style rape-revenge gets your engine revving, please consider Ching-Po Wong's Revenge - a Love Story (Fuk sau che chi sei; 2010), a cracking, marginally improbably rape-revenge sickie with a generous helpings of perversion. Not surprisingly, I loved it. In addition to the traditional elements of this unfairly maligned genre, you get a Japanese porn actress (the mouth-watering Sora Aoi) leading the cast's vagina brigade, and you get a subplot involving fetus buns ripped from pregnant ovens. It would be spoiling matters to reveal the plot's specifics, but I'm going to step out on a limb and recommend this baby with minimal reservations.

As noted above, credibility does get its muscles strained towards the end, but my irritation faded when I wisely decided to accept that if you'd been stabbed and filled with bullets on several occasions, you'd still be capable of kicking rapist butt, anyway. You'd have a few minor abrasions and you'd limp like a three-legged mutt, but bullets and torture wouldn't prevent you from achieving your sociopathic goals.

 Actress Sora Aoi has a healthy adult film career in Japan

The film's lighting and post-grading are sensational thanks to the talented Jimmy Wong, who also shot the delightful Extreme Ecstasy: Sex and Zen, the 3-D must-see. Juno Mak, who plays the film's hero and victim by association, is superb in a physically demanding turn.  The film's fight choreography is solid, the gore is splashy, and the bad guy is one foul muthafucking see (c) you (u) next (n) tuesday (t). Where Revenge A Love Story rises to the upper ranks of its above-mentioned brethren is in its balls-to-the-wall portrayal of a sickeningly evil villain. This guy made me physically angry as he proposed raping a traumatized young woman and carried it out over and over again (in a police station, by Crikey!). Are the rape scenes full-on, you ask? They're not Red to Kill, but they're filmed to muster maximum outrage from the audience and they're lit like an expensive TV commercial for vomit.

Accolades must go to production company 852 Films and producers Andrew Ooi and Josie Ho for soldiering forth with yet another graphic horror pic that ignores China's recent influence on Hong Kong's movie production. Since the communists took back Hong Kong, their filthy, conservative influence has been felt in the colony, and films possessing the gruesome, lurid, graphic content that was once celebrated by the Category III rating have been as rare lately as penises at a lezbo gangbang. I reviewed 852's last film, Dream Home, in a recent blog, and, despite my admiration for it, had several reservations about its muddled structure. Revenge-A Love Story has no such structural deficits, and manages to unfold in a novel way thanks to a script that knows what it is and a director who squeezes maximum dramatic juice from its creative nipples.

 The Panorama Blu-Ray, recently released, sports a dashing, low contrast transfer (which suits the film's muted color scheme), and includes four mini movies centering on different aspects of the project.

I assume broader distribution is imminent. If it isn't, someone fucked up.

Some recent criticism that the film is hypocritical (rallying against violence while writhing in its excesses) is old news to me and predictable. Most rape-revenge thrillers are "guilty" of having it both ways. In fact, it's virtually impossible to make good exploitation without the moral outrage. The two have always gone hand in hand.  

Not Quite A Dream Home

 Technically, this is an accomplished Hong Kong horror film. The cinematography is slick and moody, the central performance by Josie Ho is strong, and the direction by Ho-Cheung Pang is solid (mostly). It's a Cat III flick, so the violence and gore are piled on thick. There are half a dozen jaw-dropping, super-inventive kill sequences that are blissfully free of restraint. This is not one of those pulled back Hong Kong horror films that is pandering to the more conservative Mainland censors -- and audiences.

So hats off to the producers Conroy Chan Chi-Chung,  Subi Liang, and Andrew Ooi for a job (technically) well done.

 A great film, however, is supported by a strong script. Unfortunately, the Dream Home script is an awful, schizophrenic mess. According to the rear sleeve of the Blu-ray, the film is about a Hong Kong woman (Ho) who buys an apartment in Hong Kong's insane property market. She can't make the payments, so she resorts to murder. Well, no, that's not why she resorts to murder, and she doesn't ever buy an apartment.

 The film mostly focuses on Ho murdering people in the years leading up to her near purchase of an apartment. It flashes back and forth between the murders, her childhood, and present day Hong Kong where she works two jobs in order to save extra pennies. The marginally important background we get on her is that she had an abusive loser of a father and a little brother. Occasionally, she got beaten, too. A present day addition to this mess is Ho's pointless relationship with a married man. She meets him in expensive hotels you rent by the hour and gets left with the tab. This relationship makes her character look like an idiot.

 It's not clear at all why Ho has become a murderer. At one point, her murders have lowered the value of an apartment she's eyeballing, but we never get a connecting line between her actions and intentions. We are not shown why someone who appears to be relatively sane turned into a serial killer at some point. And not a very good one, either. Her murders are sloppy, she hangs around after the corpses have hit the floor, and she skulks around hallways with blood on her face.

The film, ultimately, is nuts, and not in a good way. Either everything fell apart during the edit (the endless flashbacks and flash-forwards suggest that) or they went with a script that existed but was not ready to be filmed. Clearly, the priority here was violence, and there's lots of that to go around, but why is the screenplay (credited to Pang, Kwok Cheung Tsang and Chi-Man Wan) so bloody fragmented and illogical? There are bits and pieces of interesting threads everywhere, but nothing is expanded upon or dramatically explored. Once I reached the half way point, I couldn't help but contemplate what a missed opportunity it was. They had everything at their disposal except a script that made sense.  It's a great shame because I like Josie Ho a lot (I met her once and found her to be lovely), she has plans to make more films with these producers, and her sensibility is in the right place. Next time, I hope she'll take a closer look at the script and ask herself: What is this really about? And does its follow its theme through to the end in a clear and dramatic way?

 Finally, I called Pang's direction "mostly" solid above because a director's most important job is to make a story work dramatically. If it doesn't work on the page, it's not going to work on the screen. This doesn't work dramatically, so Pang didn't do that part of his job.

To be fair, it's good to see a Hong Kong flick that revisits, on a gore level, at least, some of the glorious excesses of the 80's typified by such classics as Love To Kill, Run and Kill, Underground Banker, and Her Vengeance.

Still worth seeing? I think so.