CHINESE TORTURE CHAMBER STORY (Man qing shi da ku xing)
Hong Kong. 1994. Director - Bosco Lam. Production Company - Wong Jing's Workshop Ltd.
Plot: After a man is discovered having been given an aphrodisiac so strong it caused his penis to explode, his wife and a scholar are dragged before a judge, both protesting their innocence, and charged with adultery and conspiring to kill the husband. But unknown to them it is the judge's own son and the scholar's wife who added the aphrodisiac to a medicinal prescription and the judge now conspires to frame and torture the two innocents into confession.
The title may give the mistaken impression that this is either a film about sadomasochism or a study in human degradation along the lines of `Salo or 120 Days of Sodom'. But in fact it is neither - what it is is a rather funny Hong Kong sex comedy, along the lines of the recent body of films that popped up following the success of `Sex and Zen' (1991). Hong Kong sex comedies are, like all Hong Kong films, nothing at all like their Western counterparts. They show as much upfront as do any of the likes of `Basic Instinct' or `91/2 Weeks' but there is a remarkable lack of either the seriousness or underlying puritanical guilt that lurks beneath most Western erotic films. Hong Kong sex films are able to balance onscreen erotic set-pieces and comedy with an effortlessness that Western directors have so far failed to find. The (pardon the pun) climax of the film here involves the heroine masturbating her husband's ankle-length member to a deadly ejaculation that showers her in blood and kills him, a set-piece that manages to be both hysterically funny and quite tender at the same time. The film is much ruder and cruder than the delightful `Sex and Zen' was but when it is funny it is very funny. There is a highly amusing sequence parodying the likes of `The Tai Chi Master' and the `A Chinese Ghost Story' and `Swordsman' films which routinely have martial arts combatants flying through the air and bouncing of trees, with a married couple whose connubial couplings competitively take place in mid-air, bouncing off trees and adapting impossible martial maneuvers. Even the scenes of torture in the film manage to be more comic and disarming than they do disturbing.
Screening at the Christchurch 1998 Incredibly Strange Film Festival Reviewed by Richard Scheib
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