Movie Review: The Forbidden Legend: Sex & Chopsticks I&II/金瓶梅 I&II

The Forbidden Legend: Sex & Chopsticks/金瓶梅 is a throwback to the 90s Cat III sex romps that some of us fondly remember.

Hey, fondle your own member, you freak.

I watched it in the cinema when it was released.

Part of me was looking forward to seeing a Cat III sex movie in a theater in Hong Kong.

Not the part you think.

Once the movie started… I have never missed my remote so much.

And not for rewinding purposes.

How good can a movie be when one of it’s best scenes is an homage to A Chinese Torture Chamber Story?

The best thing about these movies is often their promotional material.

Or Pauline Chan. But she’s dead.

I found a lot of the supposedly ‘best’ parts of the movie tedious; I guess I don’t have the requisite appreciation for large Japanese breasts that played such a big (!) role.

I realized that one draw for this film may be Hong Kong men’s first chance to see these actresses without mosaics on their pubes.

Still, at least one of them was, to me, soundly unattractive, and not just because she appeared essentially prepubescent.

Besides, the first woman to get butt-@ss naked had a big scar from a navel piercing gone bad.

Continuity, people…

Not to mention that their (dubbed) verbal ministrations sounded so much like whining that I half expected to hear a demand for a Gucci purse in there somewhere.

The idea that a man would get excited by a woman sounding like she’s extremely uncomfortable… makes me extremely uncomfortable.

But I won’t make those noises.

I always felt that the best part of these films was their comic aspect, because you can make jokes in Cat III that you can’t make anywhere else.

There were a few good laughs in this movie, like the recurring injury of Samuel Leung Cheuk Moon.

Sometimes if you beat a dead horse long enough, it’s still damn funny.

It also features an incredibly disturbing father-and-son training montage.

And you have to give it up for any movie that features everybody’s favorite actor who doesn’t have to act when he’s playing a gangster, the long-lost Frankie Ng Chi Hung.

He plays a somnambulant dwarf, which he carries off simply by walking on his knees.

Then again, maybe his character walked on his knees.

If you think that’s weird, it gets better.

Worse?

He looks like a cross between Mo Howard and Adolf Hitler.

And that wasn’t the only thing that left me more than slightly queasy.

Which is not always an easy thing to do without shellfish.

So to speak.

Maybe breastupuncture [sic] is an ancient Chinese medical practice.

But that doesn’t mean I have to look at it.

He’s just trying to give her one last organism.

During a scene where the male protagonist is kissing a woman’s ‘bound’ feet, she is obviously foot-doubled by a child.

The sight of this guy putting half a 6 year old’s foot in his mouth made me nauseous.

It was gross.

It almost approaches the revulsion I get from Woody Allen for essentially the same transgression.

But at least Woody did it with a female’s foot.

The only children in this movie are boys.

They’re supposed to be girls in the movie, but they’re not girls.

And neither are their feet.

That’s f@#$in’ gross.

Which you can actually say about Part 2 of Sex & Chopsticks.

The first movie was silly (if guilty) fun. The second half just gets weird and ugly.

It’s puerile, indulgent, and insincerely didactic.

Kinda like me.

Whereas part 1 is light-hearted fluff, part 2 is just… mean.

The characters, the sex scenes, the story… all of it.

Just like Sex and Zen 3D, part 2 of The Forbidden Legend: Sex & Chopsticks/金瓶梅 II ends up wallowing in some of the more unsavory areas of Category III-land.

I like sex. I like violence.

I even like violent sex, as long as both parties concur. And we’re wearing helmets.

And that’s not a euphemism.

I don’t like sexual violence.

It’s not titillating, it’s not entertaining, and it sure as f@#$ isn’t sexy.

But hey, what do I know about movies?

I know this: 

I’ve never missed Elvis Tsui so much before in my life.