Naked Poison
Director: Cash Chin Man-kei
Year: 2000
Rating: 6.0
The big tease is
over. Send up the balloons. Light the torch. Tell your friends and neighbors.
After fruitlessly buying a number of vcds with Sophie Ngan outrageously and
libidinously displayed on the cover art only to find nothing comparable
inside, my patience has finally paid off. Big time. Sophie revealed. Was
it worth it? Oh ya!
In many ways this film has “low budget” proudly sprayed across it like psychotic
multi-colored glow in the dark graffiti, but it seemingly and even more so
unseemly proudly wallows in its low brow aspirations like a drunk in a tub
of cheap rot gut wine. The film smothers you like a sticky odious sheen from
someone else’s nightmarish and overly ripe wet dream. The film spins and twists
a story of unrelenting perversity like a slow dark crawl through a fetid
claustrophobic sewer. It is trashy, explicit, vile and rather fun!
Pasty and callow looking like a sleepy eyed albino cockroach, Samuel Leung
crawls silently through the world – unnoticed and uncared for – but often
unmistakably aroused (which the camera enthusiastically focuses on) while
voyeuristically watching another couple have kinky sex or fantasizing in the
privacy of his own mind. One evening he chortles happily as he watches his
herbalist grandfather die from a snakebite – as he can now fiddle around and
experiment with potions to his loins content.
At work Samuel is belittled by his boss and humiliated by the boss’s mercenary
secretary/mistress Sophie Ngan. He experiments first on his female neighbor
– slips a little potion into her soup – and then the next thing you know she
is overheating – her hormones literally multiplying like a runaway virus -
and she needs to be sexually pleasured. Samuel is only too happy to comply
– and even better – after they are finished she forgets the whole incident.
But like love, this drug is deeply addictive and if not supplied daily the
person will soon wither away like a leper in a Ben Hur movie. Soon the neighbor
is a love slave, chained on a leash and sleeping under his bed while waiting
for her next fix.
Next up is the deliciously nasty Sophie Ngan and soon she is writhing around
on Samuel’s lap like a snake on a hot grill and she is soon shedding her clothes
like an uncomfortable outer skin. Samuel should be a very happy man
– but he continues to push the limits of his powers and soon things get a
little out of control. Gweenie Tam is the love interest (pictured on the cover
wearing a snake as a fashion accessory) who begins to realize her boyfriend
just might not be Mr. Right.
Utilizing queasy colors, distorted close ups and askew angles, director
Cash Chin Man-kei creates a sense of being trapped in an iron coffin with
decaying body parts. Samuel Leung is quite good at bringing out not only
his character’s pulsing perversions but also manages to evoke a lost sense
of his humanity that makes him somewhat sympathetic.
My rating for this film: 6.0 for the film, 10
for Sophie Ngan’s charming performance