The Untold Story 2 - Not Really A Ripoff

Jan

10

The Untold Story 2 - Not Really A Ripoff

≡ Category: Category III, Comedy, Exploitation, Hong Kong, Horror, Recommended, Suspense |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

Country: Hong Kong
Genre: Category III/ Exploitation/ Comedy/ Suspense
Director: Andy Ng
Year: 1998

Rating:

TRASH CINEMA RECOMMENDED MOVIE

I confess that I didn’t really expect much of The Untold Story 2. After all, the events of The Untold Story didn’t lend themselves to a sequel. I figured some triad film producers decided that popping out a quick sequel on the cheap would be easy money, given the popularity of the first film.

Shockingly, the producers of The Untold Story 2 bothered with a script, a decent director and good actors.

Not so surprisingly, the sequel has little to do with the original, other than cannibalism and Anthony Wong appearing in both films.

In this one, impotent and spineless roast shop proprietor Cheung (Emotion Cheung) is married to hottie Kuen (Yeung Faan), who cuckolds her husband publicly and mercilessly. When Kuen’s cousin Fung (Pauline Suen) comes to visit from the Mainland, she initially seems kind and helpful, but she has a vengeful streak.

Only Officer Lazyboots (Anthony Wong) has a sense that something is not quite right about Fung, but everyone ignores him, including his superior (Melvin Wong).

The first thing to admire about The Untold Story 2 is the incisive character writing in the screenplay by Law Gam-Fai. Each character is distinctive and full.

Secondly, much of the acting is terrific.

At this point in his career, Anthony Wong was starting to phone in his performances, and given the provenance of this role, I expected him to do so here, but no. Wong gives a sly and deadpan comic performance that’s consistently amusing.

Yeung Faan has a fun time being bitchy as the castrating wife and she’s very easy on the eyes as well.

Helena Law is wonderful as a shrewd old biddy who mops floors at the roast shop. Her comic timing is flawless.

Emotion Cheung does well with the role of an essentially weak but not unkind character. I’m not sure that it was a good choice for screenwriter Law Gam-Fai to make the character of Cheung so namby. After awhile, we get so impatient with his lack of guts that the only character left to sympathize with is Fung.

Speaking of which, the standout performance of the film is given by Pauline Suen as the demented Fung. She segues effortlessly from kind to menacing to sexy to murderous and back again, but also creates as consistent a character as the script allows. She has a gentle, insinuating quality which makes her sex scenes erotic, a rarity in Hong Kong Category III flicks.

I should probably point out for the horndogs in my readership that the two women that show skin in this movie, Pauline Suen and Yeung Faan, are just gorgeous, and the cinematography by Ko Chiu-Lam shows off their luminous skin and dangerous curves to good advantage.

But alas, The Untold Story 2 is far from perfect. The movie is only 90 minutes long, but it still doesn’t move fast enough, especially given the paucity of twists and turns in the plot. Gorehounds will most likely be disappointed at the lack of truly transgressive imagery. Most damaging of all, the climax is over way too soon. I didn’t mind that the film was a slow burn, but it really needed a boffo, nutty climax, like the one in Raped By An Angel.

The ending is such a letdown that it cost The Untold Story 2 a full star in my ratings system.

Still, The Untold Story 2 isn’t bad at all for a cash-in sequel. It entertained me. Too bad the ending didn’t live up to the promise of the movie as a whole.