Last night I had the pleasure of attending the second convening of Bastard Keith's Movie Club, the debut of which I missed due to the horrible bad planning of being somewhere other than New York City. The Bastard is a very serious cineaste and tends to keep the company of very good-looking women who have a hard time keeping their clothes on, so attendance at one of these things is basically fucking mandatory if you have any kind of taste or upbringing. Especially when the picture that's screening is Naked Killer.
My first introduction to international cinema was by way of Hong Kong, in the form of the handful of Bruce Lee classics at first and then John Woo's heroic bloodshed pictures when I was in junior high. Being 13 and discovering the early 90s Hong Kong film industry was basically like being seven feet tall and being handed a basketball, it was the absolute most logical avenue to explore under the circumstances. They still make some cool stuff, but things are a little different post-1997 return of Hong Kong to Chinese control (not as different as people were afraid beforehand, but still, shit's a little more buttoned-down now). Back then, though, the action was deliriously, spectacularly over-the-top, the heroes thunderous badasses, the logic optional. And, of course, the sex was just as mysterious and weird as 13 year olds think it is. Which brings us, for the second paragraph in a row, to Naked Killer.
Naked Killer is particularly violent, over-the-top, and illogical, even by Hong Kong standards. It's about the relationship that develops between a young woman named Kitty (Chingmy Yau) with a penchant for doing bad things to dudes' genitals when they act sexist, and a cop named Tinam or Tom depending on which set of subtitles you're watching (the inimitable Simon Yam) who's haunted by having accidentally shot his brother, and now throws up whenever he sees a gun and can no longer get an erection (SYMBOLISM!!!!!!!!) They meet when Kitty puts out a lit cigarette in a dude's face and crushes his nuts, with Timtam Tom right there going “ahuh ahuh ahuh she's pretty ahuh ahuh . . . oh wow, she just basically committed attempted murder in front of me, maybe I should go follow her, ahuh ahuh ahuh.” So he follows her, she threatens to accuse him of raping her unless he lets her go, which he does, but she steals his pager and forces him to take her out on a date, holding the rape accusation of Damocles over his head the whole time, getting him to buy her wicked hawt thigh high boots and showing off her legs and ass in all kinds of cool camera angles that end up curing Simonyam Tom's impotence, but she won't shtup him in spite of wantonly leading him on, so it's basically a lateral shift from limpdick to blue balls.
At this point, Kitty comes home to find that her stepmom (who looks like she's basically the same age as her) is screwing some asshole, and wants to offer Kitty's patsy dork dad a “deal”: give me 20 grand and I'll run away with your wife. Dad doesn't think this is much of a deal, and they fight, and the stepmom's asshole boyfriend kills Dad. Kitty, desiring revenge, acquires one of those amazing Hong Kong automatics that never runs out of bullets that Chow Yun-Fat used in his radical henchman herd-thinning experiments in John Woo movies, gets dressed up in baggy black clothing and about a tenth her usual amount of makeup and goes into the asshole boyfriend's office and starts plugging motherfuckers. After a fair bit of attempted rape and balletic gunplay, Kitty encounters a very well-dressed cougar in an extremely impressive hat named Sister Cindy (Wai Yiu), and Kitty takes Sister Cindy hostage to escape the building, only when they get to the parking garage, Sister Cindy loses the foofy clothes and starts jumping around in a black leotard and kills a car full of villainous males with some kind of garrotte/slingshot/boomerang thing and a whole bunch of acrobatic dance-fu.
It turns out that Sister Cindy is a professional assassin—who was probably, by a massive concidence, there to kill the same shithead Kitty was—and a lesbian, though she's fairly repressed about it, content to just grope Kitty's tits a bit and whisper to her and stuff. She teaches Kitty how to be an assassin, that there are so many rapists prowling the streets of Kowloon that one can simply bag one or two and chain them up in one's basement for kung fu/target practice, and how to coordinate all the flowy gauze and fruit in the bowls in one's mansion with the outfit one happens to be wearing that day. They team up and kill a bunch of dudes, one of whom they decapitate in full view of everyone on the dance floor after re-enacting the hilarious bad dancing nightclub scene from Basic Instinct (director Clarence Fok Yiu-leung claims Mario Kassar offered him the chance to direct the sequel, which judging by Naked Killer might not have been a bad move at all).
You'd think a professional assassin would avoid killing all her victims in a readily identifiable fashion, but no, all the guys Sister Cindy and Kitty kill have their genitals mutilated, crushed, or missing, and the haunted, vomiting (and only non-impotent with Kitty) detective Simon Yam catches each body, with his goofus partner, whose name is either Jerky or Dickhead depending on your subtitles, and who unknowingly eats the severed dick of one of the victims in a bit of “comic” business (to quote the great Joe Bob Briggs: “Hong Kong fisticuffs are great. Hong Kong comedy sucks.”)
Eventually, a contract is put out on Sister Cindy by the yakuza, who are pissed about one of the guys she and Kitty killed, and the contract is taken by Sister Cindy's protege, the even more lesbian-y lesbian Princess (you can tell she's more lesbian-y because she's groping someone's tits in every scene instead of just once every twenty minutes of screen time or so), who not only wears really big hats like Sister Cindy, she also smokes cigars, in the movie's 90 billionth bit of phallic imagery.
A whole bunch of homoerotic tension ensues, Simon Yam takes like half an hour to figure out that Sister Cindy's stylish young ward is Kitty even though she still looks exactly the same (I mean really, she's not even wearing glasses or a ponytail) and Kitty decides Simon Yam is Simon Yummy and she renounces lesbianism—which leads Sister Cindy to proclaim her obsolete as an assassin—right when Princess kills Sister Cindy with lipstick that turns into poison when you drink wine.
So the endgame is, Kitty has to kill Princess, and Princess' lunatic sub Baby. She goes about this by seducing Princess, even though Princess totally knows she's only doing it to get revenge for Sister Cindy, so they grope each other's tits for a bit and then go flying out the window into the swimming pool while Baby sulks (or something) and then Simon Yam shows up and guns start going off and a whole bunch of male henchmen appear from out of nowhere even though Princess had had the same two stupid faggots answering her phone and lapdogging for like the whole movie and no other staff other than Baby. And Kitty uses the same poison lipstick method to kill Princess, but also takes poison herself (the reasons why are unclear), so Simon Yam, not wanting to live without her, detonates the house (which has been rigged to explode), and that's the end of the movie.
Now. Making the argument that Naked Killer is a good movie would be unwise. But it is unimpeachable as a piece of feverish, kinky entertainment. It kind of seems like the filmmakers are trying to make a “feminist” action movie (the guys are literally invariably either pussies, rapists, or clowns, and often all three) except they overdo it and end up with softcore femdom s/m porn. This, of course, is why it was the perfect movie to have narrated by burlesque performers and fetish models in the middle of a big crazy DUMBO art space with a well-stocked bar.
The effect couldn't help but recall Mystery Science Theater 3000, and not in a bad way. The panelists—Bastard Keith, his wife Madame Rosebud, Darenzia, and Neil O'Fortune—all had sharp, well-timed observations on the movie and kink in general (Rosebud's delight that Kitty “extorted a cop for a pair of thigh-high boots” was memorable, and in keeping with the spirit of the movie and the evening, as was her terrific pre-screening burlesque performance).
Naked Killer works more as an artifact, demonstrating the kind of bizarre shit that results when a studio system cranks out hundreds of movies a year without complete oversight, than it does as a movie. It also works wonderfully in the context in which it was presented at Galapagos last night, and if this foretells the kind of picture the sick, twisted bon vivant Bastard is planning on screening at his Movie Club, all New Yorkers are recommended to keep their ear to the ground for updates on the next screening. But leave the kids and all your hangups at home. This shit's for grown folk.
Oh, and I also won a DVD of some fucking lunatic Japanese movie called Blood (gotta dig the straightforwardness of the title, and the fact that it costars a guy named “Guts Itsimashu”) by answering a trivia question right, so I imagine I'll be posting about that at some point. Good times. And remember kids, you can't spell “exploitation” without “awesome.” Wait . . . shit . . . you can. Fuck you, leave me alone, it's raining out.
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