SYNOPSIS:
Three beautiful young women must
abstain from carnal pleasures for thirty days in order to become
spiritual beings. Everything’s
going fine until trouble arrives in the form of a handsome young
scholar, and lickety-split! Before
the girls can figure what’s going down, they have a very
large problem on their hands indeed…
HEROIC-CINEMA'S REVIEW:
I’m not entirely sure which came first – Erotic Ghost
Story’s (relative)
infamy or its constant repeat screenings on late night television,
but in the end I don’t think it really matters.
The fact that it plays every six months on SBS (and now
every six weeks on cable) would suggest that it continues to reach
some kind of
audience, right? The
are other, more famous examples of the ‘genre’ that Erotic
Ghost Story is more or less
responsible for creating (primarily Sex and Zen),
but none so widely viewed in this country at least.
In the early
nineties there was a move to legitimatise Category III soft-core
by beefing up the production values with some kind of
formal-historical element – think Caligula without Peter
O’Toole. Hong Kong
cinema was coming into vogue with Western cineastes at more or
less the same time, and it was sucked right up accordingly.
Here was a chance to justify the watching of pornography on
cultural grounds…because it’s in Cantonese!
Admittedly Erotic Ghost Story
is a little milder than what followed (A Chinese Torture
Chamber Story features, among
other things, a wire-fu sex, and after Sex and Zen
you’ll never look at a calligraphy brush the same way again),
but porn is still porn. The
legitimate angle must have stuck though, because here we are
thirteen years later…
Don’t let
any of that put you off. MildER,
not MILD. Erotic
Ghost Story is Cat. III for a
reason, so despite its historical pretensions, the traditional
costumes don’t…costume very much and it does star Amy
‘psycho hose beast’ Yip.
Ultimately, this isn’t a
particularly sensible film to review because you’re either going
to watch it or you’re not, and that decision can more or less be
made on the title (even if the film switches gear in the last ten
minutes so that the ‘Ghost’ bit actually means something).
If demons, nipples, etc. are your bag then by all means, go
for it. Otherwise
I’d recommend it only if you want to give (a)moral support to
the quiet subversion of our national television standards and make
sure it’s on again in another six months!
Rating: My conscience
isn’t going to let me attach a number to this one, because
whether I give it a 1 or a 10 I’m not sure I’d be entirely
honest with you. That
said, I’m a big fan of cheap laughs, so this time Erotic
Ghost Story scores a pair…I
mean, two…oh, forget it.
Reviewed by Jonathan McCoy
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