Golden Venom
Golden Venom
aka 金蠶降
1991
HKMDB Link
Directed by Lam Yee-Hung
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Throw your hands in the air, and crystal ball like you just don’t care!
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Golden Venom is a kung fu fantasy with laser beams shooting out of people that turns into gross out horror as two families feud in non-game show format. It’s pretty uninspired at times, and I’m not sure what the real point of it was, because it isn’t enough of a gross out film to satisfy the gross out fans, but it’s not enough of a good wuxia type film to satisfy those fans, either. It’s a halfway effort that fails everyone. The only reason I watched Golden Venom is because characters were wearing crazy colored wigs and doing magic kung fu moves, but the overall plot was disappointing, the villains are generically evil, and even though I like the goofy effects, the rest of it is boring.
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Gingers do so have souls!
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Saying Golden Venom is not fond of women would be an understatement. Every female character except one is killed, many are sexually degraded, and most are just quickly killed and tossed aside. The only real strong female character is Skeleton, and she’s evil and crazy!
The only real cool thing are the villains and how outlandish they are. The almost cartoonish look seems inspired by the Golden Light Puppets, much like many of Pearl Cheung Ling’s films and other Taiwanese fantasy flicks seem to feature goofy wigs more than other countries. Even though the bad guys look like kids fantasy characters, with the nudity and grossness I doubt this is intended to be a kids flick.
The “Golden Venom” from the title is the name of the mouth laser beams. It’s poisonous and comes in different flavors unique to each family’s secret recipe. Each family also has cures, which can’t be made without the help of the family.
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Welcome to Comicon!!
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The presentation is okay, though in this print the subtitles keep changing the names of the characters. This is only a problem because some of the names are cooler than others.
Golden Venom is flawed and is too mean-spirited for my taste. I generally hope for a fun kung fu adventure, not a film walking the line towards being pure exploitation but afraid to pull the trigger. Director Lam Yee-Hung also directed a bunch of terrible Category III flicks before disappearing into the ether. After seeing Golden Venom, I’m wondering why it took so long.
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I see Starbucks has brought back the pumpkin spice latte…
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Categories: Movie Reviews, Ugly Tags: Charlie Cho Cha-Lee, Gam Chi-Gei, Hong Kong, Jue Gwan-Yeung, Ku Feng, Lam Yee-Hung, Lau Shun, Mark Cheng Ho-Nam, martial arts, Siu Yam-Yam
The Eight Hilarious Gods (Review)
The Eight Hilarious Gods
aka Siu baa sin
1993
Directed by Jeffrey Chiang Gu-Jun
Hong Kong does their take on Hakkenden, the tale that gave us Legend of Eight Samurai and Message From Space. Except it is a pure comedy and no one marries a dog. That’s good, as this film is about as related to the traditional Japanese story as Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter is to the Gospel of Luke. It does have some recognizable Hong Kong stars (even to Western audience members only slightly familiar with Hong Kong cinema) and some nice fantasy fights for a comedy, but isn’t afraid to dwell in the poop jokes or to murder children just so the audience can go “WTF?” So let’s all go “WTF?” together!
This version of the film comes from one of those double-VHS tapes, found in the double-size VHS boxes that old-school video stores had. The only video store I know by name that still carries those is Le Video in San Francisco, but some of the old-school Chinatown rental stores have this as well. The double-tape explains why there are numbers after the title, because there are two title screens, one for each tape. Old school is the best school, baby! There ain’t no forced commercials here like on DVD. Sure, the picture quality isn’t the best, but it’s not like this film is begging for a remastered DVD. It should be remastered.
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