Angel of Vengeance
Director: Liu Sung-pai
Year: 1993
Rating: 5.0
This Yukari Oshima
vehicle gets off to a great start, but then veers off the road into some
very unseemly and truly brutal scenes. It’s unfortunate because the action
scenes with Yukari are quite good – but another plot thread goes from light
comic moments to really distasteful scenes that had my stomach churning.
It feels as if a manic-depressive was directing this film. It begins
in fine revenge fashion when a vicious gang leader kills a father right in
front of his two little girls. One of the girls bends down over her father,
but instead of crying looks up with a gaze of pure hatred. You just know
that little girl is going to grow up as Yukari Oshima – and sure enough she
does!
But when Yukari
is all grown up she isn’t really looking for revenge at all. Instead she
is looking for her missing sister who she suspects the killer of her father
has kidnapped. She barges into his house and has a wonderful and acrobatic
fight with his men – then escapes, but gets badly wounded.
The movie then jumps into another plot thread
when it follows a young woman – Betty - who is doing her dissertation on
women in brothels. It turns out her mother is a small brothel owner and Betty
keeps disguising herself as a man so that she can sneak into the brothel
and interview the girls. This is all fairly comical, but then the film takes
a nasty turn when she discovers that many girls are being kidnapped and sold
into service. Some scenes of these girls being raped or brutalized are shown
and you wonder if you have suddenly taken a wrong turn and walked into one
of those exploitation films such as Escape from Brothel.
Though this story thread does intertwine
on occasion with the story of Yukari looking for her sister, most of the
film follows Betty’s story and only cuts back to Yukari from time to time.
Fortunately, nearly every time it does cut back to Yukari she is involved
in a fight. At her side is also Alex Fong and the two of them do eventually
take on the killer of her father and some of the action is fairly decent.
Yukari has a few of her patented flying kicks and on two occasions she does
this other nifty move. She is picked up by a much larger opponent and thrown
backwards – but while she is flying backwards she unleashes a powerful kick
to their midsection. There just isn’t enough of Yukari (is there ever?)
and the other story becomes a real nightmare that has an exploitation element
that was not at all pleasant or intriguing or consistent with most of the
film. Still Yukari has a couple lengthy fight scenes and looks very good.
