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Fantastic!

Absolutely Fantastic

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Since the director is Qiu Litao, the plot is still guaranteed. The biggest attraction of this film is Wen Bixia, whose sexual intercourse with Ren Dahua are quite ornamental.

ALL OF A SUDDEN (dir. Herman Yau) Although the film delivers a fairly innovative storyline, the production values and stagecraft skills are abysmal. The film opens with a man drunk driving through a metropolitan area looking for women to pickup, and he rear-ends another automobile. Suddenly, and without warning, a naked woman falls from an upper floor of an adjacent apartment building and lands on the roof of his car. All of this occurs within the first five minutes of the movie. No one in this opening scene is important to the story except the naked and very dead woman. The plot becomes inexplicably convoluted and slightly far-fetched, but the film evolves into the story of a man who is seeking retaliation for his wife's infidelity. She (the naked woman) was having an affair with her boss, and her husband is looking for retribution. Unfortunately, the script is nearly unintelligible because the subtitles seem to be interpreted by someone with only a passing knowledge of the English language. These subtitles are ridiculously and absurdly inexact and provide an unintentional comedic subtext to the film. Also, the text is difficult to read, takes up far to much of the screen, and the Mandarin translation is presented first, and then the English . This might have been a passable 'Potboiler Noir', but the overall execution is just too clumsy and unconvincing to take the finished product very seriously.

From every review I've read, I thought this would be a soft-core porn clinker, but with the exception of one topless scene and a fairly tame love-making scene featuring the ultra-gorgeous Irene Wan, I'd say it was PG-13/borderline R-rated by US standards. A bit of violence, but nothing ultra violent, either. The film was interesting, but the subtitles were difficult to follow because there were two--Mandarin on top and English on the bottom--and they were often white on a very light background, but if you pay attention you can follow with no problems. Especially interesting were the couple of plot twists and the bit of a surprise ending in the film. Although it's a bit hokey, all-in-all the film was interesting and enjoyable and a good film for a novice Asian film fan to check out before proceeding to the more graphic ones.

Upon its release this movie caused a minor sensation as it was the first time that Irene Man a Hong Kong television actress had appeared nude on the screen. Herman Yau, the director of 'The Untold Story', grabs our attention from the first scene as the body of a woman comes crashing down onto the roof of a car and this sets the scene for a powerful psychological mystery. Although rated only a cat IIB movie there are scenes of sex and violence and I am surprised that it did not get a cat III rating. Be warned that there two scenes of violence which may prove disturbing.