Get ready for severe depression, as you are tossed head first into a scalding pit of misery! During the credit sequence a home for horribly deformed children sets the tone as they desperately try to figure out puzzles and fix your coffee just the way you like it. I hear this is how they train child Baristas in Hong Kong! One child named Doggie is the rejected offspring brother to Shu Ya (played by Wai Man Chun), the high fashion model protagonist in our feature tonight.
Watch out for loose fingernails in your latte |
Her sleazy boss Mr. Mo (Melvin Wong) tries to get her liquored up enough for the dirty deed (as fake Blade Runner music emits from the soundtrack). His house is filled with masks, ancient artifacts and a goblin dwarf statue that springs to life and sexually assaults her as she sleeps. Her breasts receive similar invisible hand prints seen in The Entity and in the book, they mention Asian ghosts attacking and raping Carla Moran. I'm guessing that some of those aspects inspired The Rape After.
pardon me Mr. Troyer but you are needed on the set of The Love Guru 2 |
It turns out the evil goblin artifact that raped her was stolen from a grand master (who looks like an Asian Sherman Hemsley). Shu Ya has a miserable existence, she comes home to find out that her mother killed her father for cheating and gave her syphilis, which was passed on to her brother Doggie. The corpse is still rotting in the apartment with rats infesting its insides and falling out of his mouth!
I could eat a million of these Kentucky Fried Rats! |
Meanwhile another pretty girl named Li Ting Ting (Hing Yue Chang) is sent to track down the diabolical statue and ends up working for Mr. Mo, who most likely wants to get in her pants. Later that night, Mo takes his ex girlfriend to a Frankenstein abortion clinic in a creepy old house and tries to vacuum out the unborn mutant fetus, but supernatural forces destroy all the surgeons!
Mo and Li start getting serious and he spends his days with her, but his nights are ruined by his old girlfriend, who thinks he's the father. Mo is a complete bastard and after getting in a car wreck with Shu Ya, he escapes and lets her burn to death! After her corpse is on the slab, some medical students perform a cesarian on her dead body and the living fetus pops off the doctors head!
A Buddhist monk is brought in the help out and Mo stupidly brings an even worse fate to his new girlfriend's family. There's a food chopping scene that would make Andrew Zimmern squirm in his khakis! All the cesarians and supernatural upsetting the natural world is very Macbeth, as birds and flaming rats attack the old monk.
It all ends on a right to life note as Shu Ya and some mutant kids return from the grave!
Ho Meng Hua is a Shaw Brothers veteran director who's responsible for some of the most incredible images and films in Asian cinema history like Black Magic and The Oily Maniac, any project with his name attached is definitely worth seeking out! Here the atmosphere is totally void of the usual dark sarcasm that permeates his other features, making this film extremely grim. All the vomiting, maggots and sorcery, those Shaw Brothers Meng Hua staples are back with a vengeance. Moon-Tong Lau, the screenwriter also wrote the original Chinese Ghost Story.
The Rape After is a special film, a jaw-dropping gorefest that doesn't come around that often!
Highly Recommended!
The Rape After is a special film, a jaw-dropping gorefest that doesn't come around that often!
Highly Recommended!
I surely miss those splattery Hong Kong films and their Category III counterparts that made both the late 80s and the first half of the 90s offer such compelling and twisted genre fare.
ReplyDeleteMe too there's just no comparison, any films we've missed you like to see reviewed?
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