HUANG MAO GUI REN
(“Yellow-Haired Freak”)
Production: Hong Kong, 1962
Director: Wong Fung
Category: Martial Arts/Horror
Pulp Cantonese cinema from the early 60s, the last and most outlandish in a series of films, which started in 1959, featuring the character of Wong Ang the Flying Heroine Bandit, who first appeared in the 1940s pulp novels of Siu Ping. As in all of the films, Wong Ang is played by martial arts queen Yu So-Chow, but here is joined by rising starlets Connie Chan (just fifteen at the time) and Chan Ho-Kau as her feisty sidekicks.The plot of Huang Mao Gui Ren involves a crazed scientist who creates the monster of the title using orangutan blood, and plans to make it invincible by next weaning it onto human haemoglobin. The film also has corpses dissolved in acid, a ghost and a vampire, rape, murder, betrayal and revenge. Connie Chan went on to star in scores of films, perhaps most notably in the “Jane Bond” genre of girl-angled pulp costume spy thrillers such as Chor Yuen’s Hei Meigui (“Black Rose”, 1965), Cheung Wai-Gwong’s Nu Zei Hei Ye Mao (“Female Thief: Black Wildcat”, 1966), and Kangshi Mu’s Nu Shashou (“Female Killer”, 1966); Jane Bond cinema was a mid-60s HK phenomenon of which the Wong Ang films can be seen as a significant precursor.
Posted by Lady Belladonna
