NAKED KILLER 2

CONTAINS SOME SPOILE

First off, despite having at least two of the same cast members and the same writer and producers, this movie is entirely unrelated to Naked Killer, which was a surprisingly forgettable piece of HK Category III sleaze/action (I can't recall a thing about the plot and I only saw it last year - and looking it up on the IMDb doesn't ring any bells). Secondly, it's had more than six minutes cut out by the distributors after the BBFC had twice rejected it, and over four more minutes taken out afterwards in order to get an 18. Thirdly, it's a nasty, sleazy, uncomfortable piece of work, and the loss of the graphic scenes of sexual violence does nothing to lessen the bad taste.

Naked Killer 2 (also known as Raped By An Angel) concerns a sadistic rapist named Chuck (Mark Cheng) who targets model Chu (Jacqueline Ng): not only in terms of a violent and disgusting rape ordeal but in his elaborate construction of an alibi. He convinces people Chu is his girlfriend and they're very much in love - but once the case comes to court the planted and manufactured evidence suggests she was blackmailing him. Inevitably he's acquitted and immediately sets about getting revenge on her....except that once she's disappeared, her best friend and fellow model Yau, along with her new Triad boyfriend (Simon Yam) arrange a righteous revenge of their own.

The film seems to start out as some kind of light girlie comedy, with the models sitting around chatting about sex and how rubbish men are, until Chuck shows up: Sex And The City with rape scenes. In fact, it seems more in the mould of American trash exploitationers like Savage Streets, a film which similarly claims to be decrying rape while showing it to us at great length: almost revelling in it and using it as nothing more than justification for some crowd-pleasing ass-kicking in the final reel. It's a lot glossier and slicker than I Spit On Your Grave or The Last House On The Left but it's playing to that same gallery. Admittedly I kind of knew what it would be like going in, but you never know - it would have been nice to be proved wrong.

John Waters said that there is good bad taste and bad bad taste, and Naked Killer 2 really does feel like the latter. And I suspect it would feel even worse if around eleven minutes hadn't been removed from the film, including a subplot in which the poor girl is also raped by a handicapped boy (who no longer appears in the film at all). This is a film I genuinely didn't like: the tone varies too much, with comedy bits that don't sit easily with the suggested sexual sadism. Very hard to recommend.

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