Navigation

Naked Poison (2000)

Dir:Man Kei Chin

Min (Samuel Leung Cheuk-moon) is your typical sex obsessed geek , whose Grandpa is a local herbal remedy Doctor, who gets his kicks by spying on the neighbours having rough ‘rape’ sex and taking ‘peeping tom’ photos of unsuspecting women. He is also treated like a child by his Family, is abused at work and is basically fed up with his lot.
Even meeting a girl at work who actually likes him, Chan Mei-ling (Gweenie Tam), does nothing for his lustful addictions.

His Grandfather refuses to bring Min into the medicinal business because of mysterious past events where he suspected Min of poisoning people. But after the old man dies in an accident Min has free reign over the shop’s medicines.

Brewing up a snake venom aphrodisiac (that also wipes out the victims memory of events) Min uses it on various women to have sex with them. Min also uses the venom on his nasty boss’s arrogant, bitchy secretary/mistress Winnie (Sophie Ngan) .
But it turns out that the concoction has some nasty side effects! The people infected become very tired and weak and need regular fixes of the antidote or else they die a very slow and nasty death!

As events get out of control, and Min becomes more and more drunk on the power he now wields over people, things get very dark and nasty indeed……..

 

Any film that opens with a man masturbating to a porn flick ,edited into a sequence of a naked woman in the shower, HAS to be an Exploitation winner right? Well, yes and no with the empthasis sadly more on ‘no’.

If there looks rather a lot of exposition above, that goes pretty far into the movie‘s running time, the slow build up to the main plot idea rather dictates the need unfortunately.
The film is far too slow in getting to the real meat of the plot you see, which is a shame as the last 30 minutes up the pace, as well as adding a few typically nasty CAT III moments.
But much of the first hour is made up of the unlikeable Min and his ‘seen it all before’ sexual encounters, which may deliver the essential, gorgeous, fully naked, Chinese ladies but are the same over the top moaning and wild bucking set-ups CAT III films have been giving us for years, there is simply nothing here that really grabs the attention, aside from the less than subtle ‘squishy’ noises that accompany each penetration and thrust!
And as this is a Hong Kong movie and not a Japanese one we are treated to many welcome pubic hair shots.
The best sex sequence is actually the slower, far more realistic, love making between Min and Chan Mei-ling (with Gweenie Tam looking truly lovely) that ditches the over the top aspects of the other sex scenes and comes across as a far more erotic experience because of it.

As with far too many Hong Kong CAT III films there is an unwelcome bad comedy element addec to the script (not helped by some of the English subtitles it has to be said), but at least it’s not too in your face or damaging and simply gives the film the odd case of either unintentional laughs or very lowbrow intentional ones that simply annoy more than anything else.
A Police Detective character ,who appears very late in the film, is another weird bit of semi-comical intrusion as he is as camp as a row of tents for no good reason! But at least we have an obviously homosexual character leading a criminal case, which is actually better treatment than most ‘camp’ characters get in Hong Kong movies.

Samuel Leung Cheuk-moon (normally a support actor) is actually very good as the increasingly crazed Min and does a nice and nasty turn during Min’s more extreme moments. The real fault is that Min is never likeable or sympathetic and so the film loses that effective ‘ill-treated nice guy goes too far and becomes a monster’ tragedy aspect that benefits many ‘geek’ revenge films. In fact out of all the characters, only Chan Mei-ling comes across as even remotely pleasant and even she has obviously dubious taste in men!

The expected ‘nasty’ moments are your usual rape scenes (slightly trimmed for the CAT III rating, but a double rape/triple murder sequence is still pretty unpleasant), messy green hued/frothing at the mouth poisoning victims, captive sex slaves, and the odd beating. But it’s pretty tame stuff on the whole compared to many CAT III movies and only the abrupt finale delivers any bloodshed.
We are given a nice (if actually implausible) twist at the end, but it’s all pretty much too little too late.

So we have lots of flesh on display, lovely looking women getting down and dirty, the odd bit of nastiness and an effective lead performance, but ultimately the film is too tame for too long, has uninteresting and mostly dislikeable characters and is far too bogged down in covering the least interesting aspects of the plot whilst ignoring the more extreme and interesting elements.
Below average CAT III shenanigans I’m afraid and certainly not as provocative as it’s cover art!