Matching Escort
Starring and directed by: Chang Ling
a.k.a. Wolf Devil Woman 2
a.k.a. Venus: The Ninja
I don’t need to go into long paragraphs describing my adoration of
Taiwanese actress/director/kung-fu vixen Chang Ling, as I’ve already
done so a good deal in my Wolf Devil Woman review. Suffice to
say,
after seeing WDW for the first time, I had to search out the other
filmography of this maniacal near-genius. Sadly, the only film she’s in
that’s generally findable is Fantasy Mission Force, which she
didn’t
direct and is barely in (but it still manages to contain a hell of a
lot of the manic energy and utter lunacy one tends to find in Ms.
Chang’s work).
Naturally, WDW managed to attract attention. As a follow-up, Ling
reunited much of the cast from the first film to make a follow-up
called Matching Escort. It’s listed in many reference books as
a
«sequel» to Wolf Devil Woman, but I’d be
hard-pressed to
find any similarities between the two films beyond the cast. Though
some prints of the film still bear the title Wolf Devil Woman 2,
there
are no wolf-women in this film. Ling plays a completely different
character, and there are no references to wolves or lycanthropy or
bunny-killing at all in this particular film.
When we first join our heroine, she’s a preadolescent girl, and some
people are forcing her feet into lead-soled shoes. There follows a
brief montage of her growing up and learning to walk in them, until at
last she’s grown up and can tiptoe across sandcastles, using them as
stairsteps to pick cherry blossoms from trees in the courtyard.
Meanwhile, a prince is riding hard on horseback, fleeing a wedding
apparently. He’s accompanied by a manservant he calls Peanut. Peanut is
basically the exact same character as Rudy from Wolf Devil Woman.
Same
goofy facial expressions, same stupid hairdo, same whiny voice. But
he’s clearly played by a different actor, one who bears a striking
resemblance to Freddie Mercury! The unnamed (well, I didn’t catch his
name) prince is the same guy who played Young Master Rudolph in the
first film. I’ll just call him Prince, which is bound to confuse people
who speed-read, as they’re bound to think His Royal Purpleness is in
this film. No, this is not an exceedingly strange, wu-xia sequel to
Purple Rain. Indulge me, all right?
Anyway, Rudy Peanut, calls Prince «Young
Master»,
just like in WDW. This is at Prince’s request, you see, as he doesn’t
want anyone to know he’s a prince. Peanut’s whining about hunger, when
he spots a peach tree. He dismounts and decides to pick himself some.
Suddenly, he’s attacked by Ling (they don’t mention her name, either.
Damn, the folks who dubbed these films are sloppy!) who accuses him of
stealing from her property. They’re just about to come to blows when
Prince intercedes. Ling is obviously smitten with Prince. Things look
like they’re going to get interesting for her, when suddenly her dad
(the guy who played YMR’s dad in the first film, phony beard and all)
shows up and tells her to go inside. Which she does, pouting.
Dad asks Prince to leave. He does, but not before exchanging flirty
glances with Ling in between thunderclaps. (huh?) Cut to some shady
dealings in the rain and the dark, with a moustachioed guy wearing a
Ring Pop™ sitting in a sedan chair.
An establishing shot of sunrise lets us know a day has passed.
«Dad» is shouting angrily at some woman in a yellow dress.
It turns out that she’s the mouthpiece for Mr. Ring-Pop Sedan Chair.
What did he refuse them? We never find out, but Mr. Ring-Pop orders
Ling’s dad’s death. Soon, big-hatted, white-cloaked ninjas are leaping
about, stabbing and gutting everyone in sight and throwing red
Karo™
syrup splashing blood on the windows. «Dad» runs
into Ling’s
room to warn her, and tells her to use a trap door to escape. But she’s
stubborn and doesn’t want to leave. He leaves her with two pieces of
advice
1. Hang on to the jade amulet she wears
2. Take her shoes off and run like mad if ever she’s
in trouble.
Two sound bits of fatherly advice, if you ask me. Seconds later, Mr.
Ring-Pop bursts in, «hypnotizes» Dad with his rock-candy
«jewel» and stabs him fatally through the neck with his
sword. Ling witnesses this by peeping from her hiding place. It’s here
we first get a good look at Mr. Ring-Pop, who has red-and-black
tiger-striped hair! Anyway, his female lackey (henceforth: Lackey) says
that she and her men weren’t able to find Ling anywhere. Some other
underling finds the trapdoor and deduces that she must have escaped.
(Duh!)
Mr. Ring-Pop really wants that jade amulet, and orders Ling’s death for
its retrieval. Cut to Ling and her uncle, whom her dad sent to
accompany her, making their way through a tunnel. She still wants to go
back for her dead father, but he insists on getting her to safety.
Uncle Exposition explains what’s going on, Dad was the head of a
kung-fu clan but was betrayed by their members, and now their new
leader (guess who) is out for his blood.
Naturally, the thugs catch up with them and a big fight scene follows.
Uncle Exposition, having served his purpose, can now conveniently die.
Now surrounded, the bad guys tell her she’s going to die. She asks to
take her shoes off as a last request.
They scoff at her and allow her to remove her shoes. The shoe removal
goes on for what seems like an eternity (no film wasted here) until at
last she leaps up and is ferried from tree to tree on wires…Er, um, I
mean…she flies!
The white-clad bad guys return to their master’s lair. This is a Chang
Ling film, so naturally the bad guy’s lair has lots of braziers,
chalices of dry-ice fog and blinking red LED’s. Why? Because it looks
cool, silly! What more do you need? The coolest part of the whole place
is, of course, Mr. Ring-Pop’s throne, which is framed by a giant green
dragon head (which looks like it’s lovingly crafted out of construction
paper) with blinking red LED eyes! Anyway, the idiot white-clad
flunkies are promptly killed by a raging Mr. Ring-Pop, who with Lackey
formulates his next plan of action. Which is, basically, find Ling and
kill her.
Before you know it, Ling finds herself in a town, only to see posters
of her own face posted around. Horrified, she hides her face in furs
and slinks away. Then by a sylvan riverside, she tries ineptly to wash
her face and then cuts her hair with a sharp rock. Cut to a strange
woman being leaped upon by a quartet of would-be gang rapists in
brightly coloured clothing. Prince and Peanut just happen to also be
nearby, so Prince leaps into action to aid her. He beats the crap out
of them with his fan and, to add insult to insult, Peanut gives ‘em a
final whack with his hobo sack. As thanks…the woman pulls a knife on
them! Huh? Then she promptly coughs up blood and dies. Prince deduces
that it’s a trap, and that someone is after him. Again, duh!
Back at an evil lair which looks suspiciously like Mr. Ring-Pop’s evil
lair, blinking-eyed dragon and all, Mr. Ring-Pop reports to his
overling, Master Juan (well, that’s what it sounds like to me!
At least
someone in this film has a name, even if it is Spanish!), a man
with a
big black basket over his head which hides most of his face.
All this is part of Master Juan’s evil plan to tyrannize the land. OK,
so he’s basically the ancient Chinese equivalent of a Republican.
We catch up with Ling, who apparently is sleeping off a big meal, which
belonged to a bunch of beggars. They’re not too pleased that their
hard-fought meal has been eaten, so they awaken her by tickling her
face with bits of straw. When that fails, they dump her onto the
ground. When that likewise fails, they seize her arms and legs with
bamboo poles and interrogate her. The King of Beggars (the oldest one)
demands that she kiss his feet as penance. Understandably, she doesn’t
really feel like doing this, but they try clubbing her with the poles
to get her to submit. She kicks over a pot of boiling water into the
fire, using the resulting steam to buy her time to get her shoes off. A
wacky, acrobatic fight scene follows. She thinks she has them all taken
care of, and tries to escape by flying through the wall of straw.
Only it turns out there’s a solid wall behind the straw. Oops!
She’s dazed just long enough for the beggars to seize her a second
time. So we get a lovely scene of the skanky old man wiggling his
fungusoid toes in front of Ling’s face. I could have lived without
seeing that! Again, Prince comes to the rescue. The next fight
ends in
an amusing contrivance of acrobatics that ends with Peanut on top of a
dog-pile of beggars. Prince asks Peanut to give the beggars some money
so they can get a meal and leave Ling alone. She’s embarrassed to see
them, now that she’s all bedraggled and has been mistaken for a beggar.
She refuses their charity and runs off, in fear of being recognized.
But she runs right into Mr. Ring-Pop’s men. They chase her up to the
edge of a cliff. She falls off the edge and into a well, splashing in
the pool at the bottom.
It’s awfully bright at the bottom of this well. And the décor is
rather Early Sid & Marty Krofft, with giant plastic flowers,
construction-paper aspidistras, papier-maché mushrooms,
screeching monkeys and more of that ubiquitous dry-ice fog. A
hunchbacked old man with a long white beard and a headband lumbers
forward to pull Ling out.
The hermit nurses Ling back to health. The first thing he does when she
awakens is bitch and moan at her for damaging his herb garden. They
take turns whining about which of them has the more pathetic life, then
the hermit starts laughing sarcastically as Ling starts having a
psychedelic freakout, full of wildly zooming camera motions and
kaleidoscopic swirling effects. Suddenly, she starts trying to butter
him up and asks to be his disciple. As an answer, he does a backflip,
ending in a rather disturbing pose lying on his side.
Huh?
Meanwhile, Prince is visited by two identical twins. Except one of them
is an albino with stark white hair, and the other is black! These guys
are cool! They bring an invitation from their master, but they won’t
tell who he is. Due to his skepticism, they decide to bring the party
to him. Servants appear from nowhere, flying in bearing tables full of
food and drink. Soon their mistress appears, and lo and behold, it’s
Lackey, fanning herself with a peacock feather. The two of them enjoy
small talk, then she pours some tea. Peanut, seeing the score,
intercedes, spilling the cup all down his face and shirt front. He then
eats some of the chicken and is poisoned. Prince responds by clobbering
the heck out of everyone and making his escape.
Prince offers money to some guy for his assistance. «Wow! Such a
wad!» is his priceless response.
I’ll definitely be taking that out of context in the
near future!
He then proceeds to remove the toxins from Peanut’s body. This involves
the usual weird hand-motions in these kinds of films, as Peanut hangs
from his ankles and coughs up blood.
Meanwhile, at the bottom of a well, Ling tries on a new outfit while
the old hermit works at grinding herbs. She goes over to a
ragged-looking tree and bites into an obviously poisonous-looking
black-blue apple. Predictably, she immediately starts gagging and
retching. The hermit tosses her an antidote and lectures her. After
she’s done eating the antidote, she falls into a spastic fit, which
involves coughing up blood some more!
If you have a fetish for coughing up blood, man, have I got the film
for you!
On second thought, maybe I don’t want that sentence in my review. I
don’t wanna know if someone has that fetish!
As she spazzes out, the old man notices her jade amulet, and
immediately demands to know her identity. She tells of her father
dying, blah blah blah. He decides then and there that he will teach her
kung-fu. Then he tells her a story (complete with brief flashback) of
some guy who betrayed him while he was drunk, pushing him off a cliff
and crippling him, leaving him in this well where he’s lived for the
past twenty years or so. We also learn that Master Juan is the hermit’s
own twin brother.
Cut back to Master Juan’s new, more palatial and, yes, less
cool-looking throne room. Come on, man, blinking LED’s never go
out of
style! He’s just received the annoying news that Prince hasn’t been
caught, so he kills the messenger by decapitating him with his
weird-looking flying glove. When some other guards try to flee in
panic, he goes on a killing spree, slitting their throats with ease.
Back to training with Ling. She meditates in a beam of blue light, then
her master dopes her up with some psychotropic substance (well that’s
what it looks like, anyway) spread on the blade of a scalpel, which he
scrapes under each of her eyes. I guess this makes her hallucinate an
enemy, as she starts throwing punches and open air and spells out
something in the wall. The hermit grows so impressed with her ability
to deflect his sword with her bare fingers that he gives it to her. Her
ability to summon coloured smoke with her swords is likewise impressive.
Flash-forward to the hermit on his death bed, with Ling weeping over
him. A long death scene follows, ending with the hermit transferring
the last of his energy to Ling.
At last, Ling leaves her caverny abode and seeks stripey-haired
revenge. The final reel is one wild fight scene after another, with a
brief break on Prince’s palatial raft/hideout. Interspersed, there are
bad guys with tridents, an aquatic battle incorporating Ling skipping
on water, a zany poison double-cross and, of course, lots of violently
spurting blood. As well as, naturally, lots of costume-changes for
Ling. The main bad guys’ deaths are particularly gruesome. This film
might not have the sustained violence of Wolf Devil Woman, but
the
violent scenes are almost disturbing in their grotesqueness.
My description of this film doesn’t do it justice. I blame the dubbers,
frankly. Had they not done such an incompetent job, the film probably
wouldn’t have been quite so incomprehensible. I imagine the film was
probably somewhat edited as well. A box set of fully restored Chang
Ling films in widescreen with Chinese dialogue would be most welcome.
Because as incomprehensible as the storyline becomes through the veil
of bad dubbing, the arresting imagery and clever filmmaking come
through. I was quite impressed by Ms. Chang’s direction this time
round, she was clearly trying for something beyond the realms of Wolf
Devil Woman with this particular film. Just check the many images
of
twins and look-alikes that run throughout the film, right down to the
painted jade amulet she wears, depicting two birds facing each other in
a mirror-image of one another. She managed to make the most of her low
budget to create imagery that would stick in one’s head for a long
time; witness the hermit’s psychedelic herb-garden, the bad guys
blinking-eyed lair and the prince’s floating fortress.
A lot of folks are bound to think that my appreciation for Chang Ling’s
work is ironic. Nothing could be further from the truth. Any woman who
can write and direct a slick-looking feature film on a shoestring
budget, appear before the camera swinging a mean sword and doing
acrobatic backflips and manage to look good the whole time commands
respect. There’s a number of other films she’s made that I’d be dying
to see.
Second opinions: I guess they pulled down the review at Teleport City!
Oh well!
IMDB Entry for Matching
Escort
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©2004 by Progbear