James continues his guide to the notorious Cat III films of Hong Kong…
The True Face of Category III
As noted, ‘True’ category III films are exploitation cinema at its purest, those whose chief reason for being is to serve up graphic sex and violence, with all other concerns being secondary at best. Such films tend to be instantly recognisable from their posters or DVD covers, the rating often displayed front and centre, and the artwork generally lurid and suggestive. Also helping viewers to differentiate these films is the fact that their titles usually contain words like ‘beast’, ‘sex’, ‘naked’, ‘rape’ or ‘evil’ (or in some cases a combination of these words, grammar rarely being a consideration with their literal English translations).
Sex
Within this, two broad sub-types can be identified, the first of which is the sex film. Sub-pornographic (though often going beyond what would be acceptable under an 18 rating in the UK or even NC-17 in the US), these films are primarily characterised by their frequent, and usually very lengthy scenes of sexual content, with up to half of their running times being taken up with sequences of copulation of one kind or another. What distinguishes these films from the other type of category III discussed below is the fact that whilst undoubtedly exploitative and sexist, pandering to immature male fantasies, they do on the whole lack sadism or sexual violence, with wilful misogyny taking a back seat. Indeed, a fair number of such films treat their sexual content with frivolity or even comedy, and do generally feature a narrative or plot of sorts – of course, there are some more seriously minded category III rated sex films, though these tend to fall more under the banner of attaining the certification incidentally. Thanks to this, these films on the whole can be seen as relatively harmless, bawdy fun, with directors at times adding to the amusement factor by working in some truly bizarre and imaginative set pieces and money shots.
Historical settings are common for this type of film, invoking classics of ancient erotic Chinese literature such as the notorious Ming Dynasty text Jing Ping Mei (variously translated into English as The Plum in the Golden Vase or The Golden Lotus), or simply taking other famous stories and inserting sex scenes. This kind of period sex film has proved enduringly popular to this day, and has provided category III cinema with some of its biggest hits, from Lam Ngai Kai’s Erotic Ghost Story in 1987 and Michael Mak’s Sex and Zen in 1993 (both of which featured pneumatic cult favourite Amy Yip) during the boom, through to more recent successes like the 2008 Sex and Chopsticks and its 2009 sequel, both directed by category III veteran Chin Man Kei (Sex and Zen 2, The Eternal Evil of Asia) and produced by the one and only Wong Jing.
Sadism
The other kind of category III cinema combines sex with violence, more often than not resulting in extreme misogyny and degeneracy, and it’s these films which unsurprisingly have earned the most notoriety.
These films tend to revolve around a handful of different themes, one of the most common seeing a maniac of some description stalking, torturing and mutilating his victims who, when female (as they inevitably mostly are) are usually subjected to rape or some form of sexual abuse. While on a basic level this might not be too different from the slasher and torture porn films of the west, the category III films from Hong Kong during the glory days of the form took thing several steps further, attaining at times jaw-dropping levels of offensiveness, perversion and depravity being the order of the day.
Such films can be seen to distil the category III form to its most basic and base level, many of them being very hard to justify as actual entertainment, often being made up of little more than a thinly-linked series of leering rape and murder sequences. Though cartoonish, the villains go about their business with maniacal glee and relish, taking their time in tormenting their victims, everything about their behaviour and crimes being over the top. Where these films really become distasteful is in the way that the rape scenes are shot in a similar fashion to the sex scenes, leaving it very obvious that titillation is the main aim – it’s hard to see such films and not come away with an impression of hatred of their female characters, or at best their extreme objectification. A prime example of this is The Peeping Tom, directed in 1997 by genre specialist Ivan Lai (also responsible for Ancient Chinese Whorehouse, The Imp and other category III nasties) following a pantomime psychopathic rapist who has a nasty habit of chopping off the legs of his victims and keeping them as trophies.
To be fair, there have been a handful of such films which have gone down a somewhat more serious route, combining their sleaze and brutality with an attempt to explore the mind of their maniacs. For all its Grand Guignol gore and necrophilia, Dr Lamb is a case in point, Simon Yam’s compelling performance helping to lift the film up several notches in terms of quality, as well as making it all the more disturbing. The 1999 Leung Siu Hung directed, Anthony Wong-starring A Lamb in Despair similarly aims for a more psychological spin on the usual formula, and though it does feature graphic rape and murder, it does at least boast an actual narrative of sorts and a few genuine stabs at suspense.
Some films take the rape angle even further, forming perhaps the most distasteful subgenre in category III, with the focus being firmly on sexual abuse – the likes of the Raped by an Angel series (which managed five entries between 1993 and 2000, including Wong Jing’s ludicrous Raped by an Angel 4: The Raper’s Union in 1999), Steve Cheng’s 1998 Rape Trap and others perform exactly as their titles suggest. Doubtless the most reprehensible of all is Billy Tang’s 1994 Red to Kill, in which a madman stalks a home for the mentally challenged, raping any female residents unfortunate enough to be wearing the colour red. A veritable catalogue of outrages, though rather shabby and ridiculous, the film really is quite single-minded in its pursuit of offensive nastiness, proving Tang to be one of category III’s true maestros.
True Crime and Miscellaneous Madness
Other films of the extreme sex and violence type take the true story route, being based on salacious stories torn from the headlines – The Untold Story, Bloody Buns (Tin Chun, 2002) and others based on the ‘Eight Gods Restaurant Murders’ illustrate this, along with Human Pork Chop (Benny Chan Chi Shun, 2001) and the afore-mentioned There is a Secret in My Soup, based on the horrific 1999 drug-fuelled ‘Hello Kitty’ crime, in which a prostitute was tortured and killed, her head later being found stuffed into a doll, cannibalism proving a very popular taboo with category III film makers. Unsurprisingly, the basic tactic of such true crime thrillers, as they might loosely be termed, is to take a murder, torture, rape or kidnapping case and to fill in the blanks with as many lurid details as possible, as seen in Cheng Kin Ping’s 1992 Suburb Murder, loosely based on the true story of Hong Kong’s Braemar Hill murders, Daughter of Darkness and its sequel Brother of Darkness, directed by category III kingpins Ivan Lei and Billy Tang in 1993 and 1994 respectively, which depict a young woman killing her abusive family. While their faithfulness to the truth is questionable, these films do benefit from a certain grit and believability, which some film makers like Herman Yau have succeeded in utilising for even greater shocks.
Unsurprisingly, the quest for new shocks and gimmicks took category III cinema to some pretty strange places towards the end of the boom period with sex and violence being pushed to weird extremes to win over audiences who by then had seen it all. This resulted in a number of category III films that are bafflingly hard to pigeonhole, including Boso Lam’s 1994 Chinese Torture Chamber Story (which features a masturbatory nod to the Hollywood supernatural romance Ghost that has to be seen to be believed), Run and Kill (in which overweight Kent Cheung gets involved with homicidal terrorists after getting drunk and accidentally hiring a hitman to kill his cheating wife – directed in 1993 by the prolific Billy Tang), and best of all, Chin Man Kei’s 1995 The Eternal Evil of Asia, which kicks off with a scene warning viewers not to take young children into the toilets at cinemas, before going on to pack in flying black magic sex, lashings of gore, and a man whose head is turned into a giant penis which urinates when he gets nervous.
One film which deserves special mention is Horrible High Heels, a truly amazing rollercoaster of incomprehensible plotting, random atrocities and gonzo insanity – so much so that it took three directors, Wai On Chan, Cheng Chow and Chiang Bang Mao to bring it to the screen in 1996. Perhaps taking its cue from The Untold Story, the film follows a madman who, rather than making buns from his victims instead flays them and makes shoes from their skin, which are praised by customers for their comfort and stylishness. The film misses no chance to offend or surprise, featuring murder, torture, rape and even the sexual abuse of a most unfortunate goose, all carried out by a cackling villain who prances around in a worryingly small pair of leopard skin underpants, wearing a bag on his head with impractically placed eyeholes. As if this weren’t enough, the film later lurches drunkenly and without warning into martial arts and triad thriller territory, leaving any sane viewer utterly baffled as to exactly what they’ve just witnessed.
Success of Category III
Although playing to a more select audience and often going straight to the home market, some category III films did achieve genuine mainstream success, such as Yeung Chi Kin’s 1991 Pretty Woman (not to be confused with the Hollywood romantic comedy of the same name), The Untold Story, Chinese Erotic Ghost Story and Chinese Torture Chamber Story all performing well at the box office despite their explicit content. Whether on the big or small screen, the popularity of the category III film and its importance to the Hong Kong film industry can be seen in the sheer number of productions during the 1990s which boasted the rating – reportedly during some periods as many as half of all films released in Hong Kong were rated category III, the total number shot during the boom coming in at well into the hundreds.
Whilst in the west exploitation films and those with extreme content go largely ignored by the mainstream press, category III films during their heyday were in general more engaged with by the media and critics in Hong Kong. Though this is not to say that most were not dismissed as trash, a few did win acclaim – as seen in Anthony Wong Chau Sang’s landmark wining of Best Actor at the 1994 Hong Kong Film Awards for his amazing performance in The Untold Story. The victory was a huge step in legitimising the form, and as such is perhaps comparable to Anthony Hopkins Oscar win for The Silence of the Lambs.
The importance of category III films to the Hong Kong industry can also be seen in the way that the form provided a rich pool of actors and actresses who later ‘graduated’ to mainstream and even international roles. Anthony Wong is again a great example of this, who went from such depraved gems as Daughter of Darkness to the likes of the Infernal Affairs trilogy and other high profile Chinese films, as well as Hollywood productions such as The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. Simon Yam followed a similar career path, and is now one of Hong Kong’s most respected and acclaimed veteran actors, having moved on from an early career as the ‘gentleman of category III’ (Yam was apparently known as such due to his polite treatment of actresses during potentially compromising scenes) in Dr Lamb, Terry Tong’s 1994 Gigolo and Whore and others. However it’s perhaps Shu Qi whose career has seen the most remarkable transformation, the award winning and incredibly popular star of films like Hou Hsiao Hsien’s The Assassin having long since left behind her association with sleaze epics such as Sex and Zen 2.
The Category III Revival
By the end of the 1990s the category III boom had well and truly run its course, film makers having run out of exploitation materials, audiences having had their fill and now having easier access to extreme genre films from Japan and other countries, and with the post-1997 handover to China having caused shifts in the cinematic landscape of the territory.
The lull didn’t last too long, however, and category III sex films arrived back in the spotlight with Chin Man Kei’s 2008 hit Forbidden Legend: Sex and Chopsticks, another Jing Ping Mei adaptation. Very much an old fashioned throwback, the film gave fans exactly what they’d been missing, serving up plenty of sex and sleazy goings-on, with enough odd touches to keep things interesting, and its success saw a sequel following in 2009. The next few years saw a mini resurgence of sorts, with 33D Invader in 2011, again directed by Chin Man Kei, Mark Wu’s Due West: Our Sex Journey in 2012 and, most notably, Christopher Suen’s 2011 3D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy keeping the category III spirit alive. Thanks to its air of cheerful craziness, good-looking cast and 3D gimmick, the Sex and Zen remake in particular drew in the crowds, both in Hong Kong abroad, achieving the not inconsiderable feat of being released in UK cinemas, albeit in cut form.
Whilst this new wave of category III has mainly been based around fairly harmless sex films, all of which are relatively free of the kind of misogyny which marred so many 1990s offerings, there have been a handful of more violent productions, with Herman Yau returning to the form in 2007 with Gong Tau, a delightfully gruesome black magic thriller, followed recently by the horror The Second Coming in 2014. Added to this has been the odd serial killer tale such as Wong Pak Kei’s 2015 Guilty, though these have tended to be more seriously minded affairs that despite some hints of extreme content are worlds away from the likes of Dr Lamb or The Untold Story.
Is there a category III revival on the cards? Sadly, it seems not. Although the occasional sex film will quite possibly find success at the box office, the days of Hong Kong exploitation cinema are over, the industry having changed irrevocably. Needless to say, extreme sex and violence don’t go down very well with the Chinese censors, and without financial support from Mainland investors or returns from Mainland audiences, options for film makers are limited. As such, any category III films in the truest sense are likely to be lower budget independent productions, and while this in itself is perhaps no bad thing, it does mean that anyone willing to admit a taste for the dubious joys of Hong Kong trash will for the most part have to stick to the glory days of two decades ago.
About the author
Nice you examine both the high profile and less known that still complete the picture of the sexy, sleazy, violent boom at hand here.