Devil Cat
Director:
Chow Cheung
Year: 1991
Rating: 4.0
A few spoilers but no one is ever going to watch
this film.
This Hong Kong film feels like it was stitched
together by nine blind men in different rooms. I am not sure if I just watched
one film or two films or maybe even three. All squashed together in a meat
grinder. Hong Kong films are known for occasionally doing that especially
around this period when low budget action films were being rushed out and
often the producers ran out of money and the film was never finished. Then
directors like Godfrey Ho would splice them on to one of his films. Waste
not, want not. This isn't Godfrey Ho but Chow Cheung who went on to
direct Big Circle Blues, City on Fire (no, not that one), Fatal Love (no,
not the Ellen Chan one that came out in the same year) and Horrible High
Heels. And that was the last anyone ever heard of him. Horrible High Heels
does sound tempting I have to admit. Now this might be one film - it has
a credited script writer - but if so what were they thinking. It is filmmaking
at its worst and yet and yet it has Yukari Oshima as a cat. And that was
enough for me.
Not just a cat but the Queen of Cats. Hundreds
of years old and in a battle with a demon dog. They both can take on human
form of course like any self-respecting cat can when we are not around. The
dog - in human form - tells Yukari in human form, "I have been trying to
marry you for 500 years and you have refused me. Now I am going to drink
your blood and eat your meat". Well, first of all I think a dog wanting to
marry a cat is a good sign for everyone. Love is all around. But Yukari is
a cat. Cats are finicky lone creatures who just prefer licking themselves.
They fight and Yukari sends him packing. 500 years later they are back at
it again and she defeats him again. But she gets hurt and lays wounded in
the woods until a male in the form of Alex Fong comes along and tends to
her. The two of them had starred in the breakout Girls with Guns film Angel
in 1985 and now six years later they are in this. Alex goes to get her a
bottle of water and when he returns she is gone and so is the fish he caught
with only bones left behind. A girl later says, "She must be Japanese" and
she was right.
This is a pretty great beginning. Yukari
makes a very cute cat. And I am curious where this will go. Not where I expected
as it switches to a totally different story of two refugees from the Mainland
(Shum Wai being one) dreaming about their new life and how wonderful it will
be. It turns into a nightmare in which hospital bills forces her to work
as a bar hostess and where she is raped by her boss. She kills herself and
Shum Wai is run over by the boss. That is about 40 minutes of the movie.
Then story three takes over. A female witness sees Shum Wai being killed
and runs away. The boss and his cronies try to kill her. Her boyfriend is
Alex Fong! He is back in the movie. And he has a cat.
The Queen of Cats. Yukari has taken a licking
to him and when he sleeps, she turns human and rubs him. My kind of cat.
When the villains come for the girlfriend, Yukari as a cat says "not my business"
when they toss her into a sack and take her away. But then changes her mind
and beats them up and drags the sack with girlfriend inside up a few flights
of stairs. How did I get back here, she wonders. When they attack later,
she gets all the neighborhood cats to attack them. And when a baby
is kidnapped she gets the baby carriage back and flies with it like Mary
Poppins. At another point in the film the boss turns into a vampire and rapes
and kills a girl in a car. From a different movie? Maybe. I don't know. I
just know I liked Yukari as a cat.
Watched on a very poor quality VCD.
