Hong Kong smut cinema had a flesh-filled flashback in 2008 with The Forbidden Legend: Sex & Chopsticks. Made on the cheap with Japanese porn stars for the racy scenes, Cash Chin’s sleazy ancient-times road movie pulled viewers back to theaters for ribald big-screen titillation. The local film scene had been devoid of sex pictures since stragglers like Electrical Girl limped out of movie houses in 2001, when video pornography took over and filmmakers targeted teen viewers instead. After such a long wait, perhaps it was nostalgia that pushed The Forbidden Legend: Sex & Chopsticks to decent box-office returns, its mostly middle-aged customers hoping for more debauchery in the vein of what came in 1990s forerunners like Sex And Zen, A Chinese Torture Chamber Story and Sex And The Emperor.
So how does The Forbidden Legend: Sex & Chopsticks follow up on those earlier classics? Just like its local skin-flick ancestors, the newcomer piles on the simulated sex and oddball eroticism, drops in goofy humor and leaves few fetishes unexplored. Lam Wai-kin leads the cast as a Lothario named Simon Qing, the rich son of a sexologist (Norman Tsui). His initiation to the carnal arts is an extreme one: in childhood scenes we catch the young boy peeping as his father drives his dying wife (Morikawa Yui) to orgasm after nipple acupuncture. Dad’s skills hit a nerve with the young boy, too, and soon the lad embarks on years of lovemaking training. Think studies of the tao of sex - and penis pushups.
When Simon grows up and loses his virginity in a gymnastic fling with houseguest Violetta (Uehara Kaera), he knows it’s time to hit the road and conquer more women. With assistant Bamboo (Samuel Leung) in tow, Simon makes his first stop at a nunnery, corrupting shaven-headed Moon (Wakana Hikaru) before he moves on to the small-footed sensation of village girl Lotus (Hayakawa Serina). The plot, penned by “Hermit Sage” and based on the Ming dynasty Chinese classic Jin Ping Mei, is largely immaterial by this point. Connoisseurs of the genre will recognize the explicit source novel’s material from other movies like 1974’s The Golden Lotus; other erotica buffs will be content with the parade of increasingly colorful sex scenes.
Not aiming for high art, director Chin plays up the original work’s fetishes as he tries for a reasonably classy look. Sometimes the filmmakers are hamstrung by the low budget, with props comically repeated and one actor playing a dwarf merely waddling around on his knees. But it’s all in the name of lewd, crude fun. Lead actor Lam is cheerily up for any sex scene he’s tasked with, and his busty younger co-stars from Japan undress with a frequency fans would approve of (foreign performers are a given when Hong Kong actresses won’t disrobe for the camera). The Forbidden Legend: Sex & Chopsticks can’t be faulted for being ambitious either: the story continues in a darker, chopsticks-free sequel that slinked into cinemas early in 2009. For most viewers, however, this first installment will offer plenty in the obscene odyssey, letting today’s cinemaniacs revisit historical kinky-sex antics missing from Hong Kong cinema for years.
Tim Youngs