Hooptober... And Then There Were Nine

61st Kill

It just feels wrong to see that Golden Harvest logo come up and then get thrown into a torrid rape revenge tale. It's not as if 80's rape revenge cinema is generally characterised by much sensitivity or class, but Hong Kong exploitation cinema does nothing with much subtlety, and the opening act in which our protagonist is set upon and violated by a gang of scumbags, while not necessarily as graphic as it could have been, is still something to be endured, not enjoyed. But that comes with the territory, I suppose.

This movie does take a long fucking time to get itself moving after this. Chieh Ying (Pauline Wong) is right back at work the next day and putting a brave face on it. In fact, her ability to physically shrug this all off is a bit off-putting. However, although about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the nose, the film really does revel in painting the men of late 80's Hong Kong as a pack of bastards. Her first visit to the doctor results in him telling her she has AIDS. I'm assuming this wasn't some major error of translation in the subtitles, because it's pretty clear later on that she doesn't, and I don't think you can diagnose AIDS by examining someone's genitals for like ten seconds. I believe it is just showing this doctor as being as exploitative as the crooks - he even threatens to call the police when she tearfully leaves the surgery. But Chieh Ying's ongoing suffering from gonorrhea becomes something of a plot point, which feels a little exploitative, but then again, it's interesting in how it remains as a physical manifestation of her feelings of shame and unworthiness. You really do feel this character's pain, regardless of how thick the cheap melodrama is laid on.

Patience will be rewarded if you can last through the turgid middle act. When Chieh Ying starts to track her attackers down, we get a couple of isolated revenge killings - not really as graphic as I was expecting - but the main show here is the final showdown. Teaming up with her estranged brother-in-law, Hsiung (the great Lam Ching-Ying in yet another film - he seems to be in every HK movie I've ever seen!), who is now consigned to a wheelchair, and who only decides to join the fight when her sister is horribly murdered in a counter-revenge act by the gangsters, the stage is set for a brutal and quite hilarious final scene. Hsiung first gets an incredible sequence where he performs a bizarre training montage in his wheelchair on top of a building, including some victimisation of a cockroach. Following this, the two of them set up a range of booby traps in his bar (involving crossbows and lots of fish hooks) and then await the final confrontation. It does NOT disappoint.

Best Kill (may contain traces of spoiler)

It's all left for the final scene. Hsiung fights like a wheelchair-bound wolverine. On his last legs (sorry, stumps) he sacrifices himself, hanging on like a bull terrier to hold the bad guy steady while Chieh Ying fires a wheelchair-spoke through his head. If you want to see this incredible sequence without having to make it through the whole film first, well... that's cheating, but here you go anyway