The subtitle for this could be "How to get me to watch a movie, even if I know it's probably not going to be good". Spoilers: It's not good.
Hong Kong's category III films are a little bit of their own subgenre. Basically, it's just an age-rating system, equivalent to NC17 or the UK's 18 rating. But when people talk about cat-III films they're probably referring to the exploitation films put out by Hong Kong's movie industry from the late '80s to the early oughts*.
This movie falls squarely under the exploitation banner, and is one of a few cheap-ass, thinly conceived movies Donnie Yen did in South Eastern Asia before hitting it big with Once Upon A Time In China II. It's not even the best of them.
No false advertising here, at least. It kicks off with a cheesy title sequence that includes some bloody footage from the movie along with a topless girl artlessly jumping around, like the shittiest, sleaziest possible Bond intro.
From there we're introduced to Yen's character, Professor Shiang, who plays a professor enjoying a picnic with five female students. Not sure what the ethics are, but while they're all flirty, it seems platonic enough. Then the moon turns red (they pretty much just use a filtered spotlight for the moon throughout), there's one of those explosions following by a guy high-jumping takes that older HK films are so fond of, and the film's main villain, the Moon Monster (the ubiquitous Wai-Kwong Lo, AKA Ken Lo), makes his entrance. The newcomer handily beats up Shiang in a quick fight (this is the sort of movie where everyone knows martial arts - this is a good thing), and then rips the five girls apart and feeds on their blood. Like Dracula, but only if Dracula had to completely strip his victims naked before feeding off them.
As the only survivor, the police fixate on Shiang, the sole, blood-splattered survivor, as the culprit. This leads to the film's most memorable creation: Sergeant Hu, AKA fire match - a ridiculously belligerent, profane police officer played with hammy abandon by Sibelle Hu. She even quits the police force in a huff later; Sadly, she's only in a couple of scenes. The film could do with a lot more of her.
Shiang engages in some tiresome, mostly ineffective investigation with the aid of a "comedy" sidekick (Te-lo Mai) who calls himself Chow Yun-fat, har har, a librarian/possible love interest (Kathy Chow), and the sympathetic police officer (Ben Lam) who's been busy stealing Shiang's wife (!). They find out that the supernatural menace has something to do with a sacrifice-hungry mustachioed goddess (I swear, I couldn't make this shit up if I wanted to) in Cambodia. So they decide to go down to that country to protect Shiang's... I guess ex-wife now, because the Goddess has chosen her as her next victim.
Then the film abruptly cuts to a tribe in Cambodia where Princess White (the beautiful Pauline Yeung) - the titular Holy Virgin - fights off a suitor with a turd emoji painted on his back. It turns out the tribe are the ancient enemies of the Moon Monster, and they send her with a magic sword to wage war on him.
She catches up to him and they fight, mixing martial arts, wire-assisted leaps and hand-animated magic bolts (I love that shit). White wins, but the beast escapes. She later teams up with Shiang's crew to assault the compound of a dude that had barely appeared before who's apparently the main bad guy and the mastermind behind trying to invoke the Moon Goddess. Or something; Sandman, this ain't. At least this development allows for some (weak) gunplay and a few more (slightly better) martial arts fights.
This is -objectively- not a good movie. It reeks of a project everyone clearly saw as disposable from top to bottom, based as it is on a script that barely feels like notes from a brainstorming session before a first draft was put together. The acting is terrible (yes, even Donnie), the filmmaking looks like ass, the production values are shit, it's rarely sexy despite featuring very frequent gratuitous nudity, and the gore is mild and very, very basic - people do wave around out some gubbins fresh off the butcher's block, but there's very little in the way of prosthetics or makeup effects.
On the plus side, the fights at least are fun, but with a couple of exceptions they're disappointingly short and their choreographies are kept simple. The pyrotechnics-and-hand-drawn special effects, cheap as they are, are pretty cool too.
The story doesn't flow at all, but given the amount of weird choices and jarring tonal changes, it's at least kind of entertaining: so bad it's kind of just OK.
It's the weird details that make it worthwhile. The Moon Beast's tendency to launch into some hilariously naff wire-assisted spurts of flight, Sgt. Hu's whole bizarre character, who gets a complete 'loose cannon' arc that's outrageously extraneous to anything in the movie, or a weird digression where they get a gweilo police doctor to drop some forensic science - and I'll reproduce most of it because it is glorious:
"Human hair can be divided into three main categories. The first is curly, belonging to the African race. The second type is wavy, which belongs to the typical Europeans and Americans." The third type is... well, I'll let the man tell you himself:
And what about the sex-maniac's hair found at the scene of the crime, the reason for this insane bit of exposition? Well, it belongs to...
You will notice that the guy has wavy hair; QED. Not that the hair sample makes any impact to the plot whatsoever, other than maybe helping convince the police officer something weird is afoot. I mean... If I didn't know any better, this would come off as an attempt at some subversive type of anti-humour, like Snuff Box or something. (It's not).
As with all of these films, it's impossible to write this up without making it seem more fun than it ends up being. And to be fair, it's at least kind of daftly charming in its I-don't-give-a-fuck tossed-off-ness. But there's a bit that really soured it for me.
For the grand finale, there's a parade of women that proceed to disrobe for the camera to ogle at. One of them, after dropping her frock, quickly covers her breasts with her arms, looking at the camera with distaste before resignedly uncovering herself again. I might be - I hope I am! - misinterpeting, or projecting, or whatever, but it really gave me pause.
You know what they say, you got to break a few souls to make a boob omelet. OK, that doesn't work at all - how about you can't have exploitation without exploiting? Hell, I don't want to take this silliness more seriously than it needs to, but it's not like that bit didn't broke a spell, because there wasn't a spell to break in the first place. It's not something this movie can survive; I'm not going to pretend that other, similar sleazy films I go to bat for don't have that sort of crap going in the background, but it's rare (and heartbreaking) to see it surfacing as clearly. My hypocrisy has limits, dammit!
Things you could watch instead: Donnie Yen made a far better cheap-ass nonsense movie just before this one (Crystal Hunt), which at least properly shows off his physical skills. Or you could just skip a couple of years ahead to Iron Monkey, that's a stone-cold classic. For sleazy horror-adjacent weirdness, I can't recommend Boxer's Omen enough. And if it's the confluence between Kung Fu and Boobage you're after, go with Erotic Ghost Story and its sequel.
*: Stuff like Raped by an Angel 1-5(!), Sex and Zen and so on. But a lot of classics, too - it's easy to see why some got slapped with the Cat III tag (Lust, Caution). Others (Bullet To The Head, or the SPL films)... not so much.
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