It should be titled Queen of Revenge since it stars Chen Ping in this Shaw
Brothers bit of trash. Nobody did revenge better than Chen in the 1970s with
a series of films - The Kiss of Death, Big Bad Sis, The Vengeful Beauty,
The Sexy Killer and Lady Exterminator. She has a grievance against men and
it plays out in a psychotic burst of violence - a primal scream of excess.
Chen Ping had an interesting career for Shaw Brothers as she went back and
forth between mainstream films and the exploitation films that bubbled up
from the mire during this period. This one falls squarely into exploitation
but the director Chang Tseng-chai (the not so classic films Sex for Sale
and Bar Girls) makes a mess of it. He somehow makes sex, gambling and violence
quite dull. The sex is creepy, the gambling goes on too long and the
action is too abbreviated. Chen does all she can to liven it up but it is
so poorly plotted and moves along so slowly that there is little she can
do but show her breasts - which she does plenty of. This guy would have trouble
directing himself out of a phone booth.
Yang Lishan (Wang Hsieh) runs a casino and has trained his female dealer
Fenni (Terry Lau) to be able to deal him the card he wants by touching a
part of his face and then speaking a certain number of words. This allows
him to pull the oldest scam there is. This goes back to when they played
for rocks. He lets a wealthy customer get on a winning streak - makes him
feel this is his night and continues to up the bets till the big hand comes
up and Yang and Fenni do their thing and the customer is crushed. In this
case it is He Xing-fa (veteran Yang Chi-ching) who loses everything and goes
home and jumps out the window. A high window. Leaving his daughter Ming-zhu
(Chen Ping) grief stricken. She is a good girl with a boyfriend (Danny Lee)
and a fine job. That is all about to come to an end.
She can't pay her father's debts so they take it out by raping her. Something
inside her breaks and she decides she will do everything she has to in order
to revenge her father and make them pay for raping her. So naturally she
becomes a mistress to a wealthy very unattractive large breasted man (Pang
Pang) and also a high class prostitute to raise cash. Lots of it. She
seduces and kills. And in one case castrates (poor Tin Ching). But there
is no flair, no imagination to her kills. She tells her benefactor that she
wants to learn how to gamble and do martial arts but we never see if she
does. A finale is a huge let down. Soggy and short. It is so badly
directed that at one point she is looking for her now ex-boyfriend and is
told that he left the city a year ago - what? - there was no sense that this
amount of time had passed. A wasted opportunity.
