A young woman (Veronica Yip) who has been blinded in an accident is left alone at home while her husband is away on business. A strangerAnthony Wong in another successfully executed deranged role who has secretly been stalking her, attempts to befriend her in the interest of taking care of her while she is alone at the house. He eventually becomes hostile and refuses to leave. As they spend more time together, and after he has enslaved her, his agenda is revealed. He claims that her husband had an affair with his deceased wife, and is responsible for her murder. She must now fight for her life, with the madman’s rage set on revenge.
Mang nu 72 xiao shi
Retribution Sight Unseen
Wing-Chiu Chan
Veronica Yip, Anthony Chan, Fruit Chan, Alfred Cheung, Jamie Luk, Anthony Wong Chau-Sang
Hong Kong
This Cat III like film actually only received a Cat II rating, but I’m posting it under Cat III anyway.
Director Chan Wing Chiu also does an excellent job, maximising the space in the limited location with great use of camera angles, all of which helps to keep the suspense building. He also shows admirable restraint in allowing Yip and Wong to carry the movie without having to resort to cat III depravities to keep your attention. That isn’t to say the film is for everyone however, Yip’s assets are used to keep the viewers interest on numerous occasions with low cut tops and floaty dresses shot from fan service style angles.
As other reviewers have said, this is kind of a sexier version of “Wait Until Dark”, but the woman here is only temporarily blind from surgery, she has only a single male assailant, and the assailant’s motives may have something to do with her unfaithful surgeon husband who is away on a business trip.
I’m not sure if this is an actual Category III Hong Kong film, but if so, it is definitely one of the tamer ones I’ve seen. It does feature two Hong Kong film legends (and a third–Fruit Chan–has a small role as a thief and potential rapist). The main attraction is Eurasian heavy Anthony Wong from “The Untold Story” and “The Ebola Virus”, who plays the creepy stranger who shows up unexpectedly at the blind woman’s villa and befriends her before eventually revealing his true and much more sinister motives. Wong is much more restrained than usual, but he is also genuinely scary. The best scene is when he slips into the shower with the blind woman and silently pantomimes washing her nude body without quite letting on he’s there. It’s a scene that is both very creepy and funny. The other attraction is the beautiful Veronica Yip. Her role here doesn’t compare to her other Category III work in terms of sheer exploitation value. She may not wind up actually raped and/or murdered here, and her shower scene, while certainly very enjoyable, doesn’t compare in sheer gratuitousness to the 11-minute(!) shower scene she has in “Pretty Woman”. But she is positively stunning and certainly is given a lot more opportunity to act than in most her other films.
The end is a little prolonged and goes into the usual “indestructible psycho” territory, but it’s definitely a fun little film. It actually seems like kind of a missed opportunity that none of the countless American “erotic thrillers” of this era ever thought to mine the “Wait Until Dark” plot, but then I doubt the actors in those were talented enough to really pull it off anyway. But if you want to see a more erotic version of the Audrey Hepburn classic (even if it’s pretty weak tea for Cat III), this is your chance.
