ROBOTRIX [1991]

Robotrix (1991)
Directed by: Jamie Luk
Written by: Jamie Luk, Man Sing So
Starring: Amy Yip, Billy Chow, Chikako Aoyama, David Wu

AKA NU JAI ZIE REN

HONG KONG

RUNNING TIME: 101 mins

REVIEWED BY: Dr Lenera

Mad scientist Ryuichi Sakamoto is unhappy that an oil sheik won’t let him into the Enter The Future World robot convention, so he transfers his mind into a robot, kidnaps the sheik’s son and kills his bodyguard, policewoman Selena Lin. The sheik wants to use a robot invented by Dr. Sara, dubbed the Eve-27, to help get his son back, but it would stick out undercover. However, Sara reveals that her assistant Anna is also a robot despite not at all looking and acting like one, so Selina’s mind is transferred into a newly constructed robot body, and Selina and Anna set off on the track of Ryuichi, who’s raping and killing prostitutes….

By the way I’m not making up the plot synopsis above. I just thought I’d make that clear before we begin the review proper. In some ways you couldn’t get a better primer in Category 3 [adults only] Hong Kong cinema than Robotrix, and because of its flaws just as much as its qualities. It’s widely said that many Hong Kong films were shot without a finished script and pages would be given to actors just before shooting each morning. We all know how Jackie Chan would think up action beats on set, so it’s likely that scripts were often subject to a lot of changes, but I sometimes wonder if the claim about scripts not being anywhere near finished has been exaggerated somewhat. Still, it certainly still applied to some films, and this barmy Robocop meets Terminator done as a Category 3 sleaze fest seems like it was shot that way even if it wasn’t. The viewer is likely to do a lot of laughing, at both the intended humour plus chuckles that probably weren’t intended at all, though these exist alongside some bloody violence and nasty rape in a film whose tone rapidly goes back and forth, which is one thing that got us old school Hong Kong movie fans hooked because we often had no idea what was going to happen next or indeed even what genre the next scene would belong to, but which will be hard to take for some newbies. At times it almost does seem like we’re watching a collection of scenes randomly strung together, and don’t expect things like a deep examination of what it’s like to be a robot [or indeed a human] either, though its schoolboy fascination with the sexual side of things is actually rather refreshing in today’s squeaky clean – not to mention staid – climate, and that classic Hong Kong movie energy is definitely present in spades.

Writer/director Jamie Luk was approached by Golden Harvest to script and helm Robotrix, which they gave him the plot outline for. Casting happened while he was still hurriedly writing the screenplay. Luk claims that shooting went smoothly, but Vincent Lyn, who played the sheik’s bodyguard, said differently: “Now that was one wild shoot. The cast and crew were all over the place and you were lucky to find out what you were doing before the cameras rolled. I spent more time laughing on the set than anything else”. No doubt the latter was enhanced by Once Upon A Time In China being shot on the soundstage next door. Many scenes were done in just one take because there wasn’t time for any more. Robotrix did decent box office domestically but sold very well overseas. As is sometimes the case, the Taiwanese and Singaporian version featured some scenes not in the Hong Kong version and vice versa. Exactly six and a half minutes of sex and nudity were removed, with five minutes fifty-three seconds of new footage put in. These were a new opening with Joe dropping Selina off and then talking to his co-worker Puppy about her, plus two comic scenes involving Puppy and the other investigators. Was Kui Chung [Puppy] very popular in Taiwan and Singapore at the time? The Missing In Action UK video version was by just under three minutes and twenty three seconds removing not just the two rape scenes but two gory moments. In 2013 the Medium Rare DVD was also cut, with two minutes fourty five seconds removed, restoring the previously cut gore shots and a tiny amount of the first rape. 88 Films’ version is the UK uncut release of a film that also had a lot of censorship trouble in other countries.

You know this is a pretty low budget film when it opens with foggy, almost blurry, stock aerial shots of Hong Kong, though as we go through what may well have been stock shots, an effort has clearly been made to emphasise the cold, jagged nature of some of the architecture, which immediately brings me to the fact that we’re given no date as to when the events of this movie are taking place. I guess we’re supposed to assume it’s the future, but no attempt has been made to differentiate it from the present. Now we meet the sheik, walking down a corridor flanked by several beauties whom he then proceeds to frolic with in a swimming pool for some time, the wet of the water allowing us to glimpse some breasts. Yes, this is Category 3, which often meant blatant titillation, so if it’s not your bag then I’m not sure you should be carrying on. His bodyguards all watch and are clearly jealous, except for the one female among them Selena who just finds it tiresome and leaves the room. Suddenly everyone is knocked out by gas and in comes Ryuichi to carry off the sheik and shoot Selena. Her boyfriend, Officer Jo, is understandably distraught, while Ryuichi is seen on a video stabbing himself, then putting his mind into a robot dressed in campy disco gear which looks just like him, though all we see are electrical charges and the robot shaking a lot. Meanwhile at the robot convention a sexily dressed [why?] Dr. Sara is there with Anna, a lady clad in leather and PVC [and who then enters a laboratory wearing the same outfit] who soon turns out to be a robot that Anna’s made. A German guy proudly introduces his robot which easily defeats a human challenger, but then an American cries that his robot is better, so the two cyborgs battle on stage before the American one goes bananas and starts attacking attendees. Then another robot, clad in a really cheap variant of medieval armour, saves the day, wrapping the other robot in chains and hanging him up. This is the amazing Eve-27, the most advanced cyborg yet!

However, Eve-27 is far too conspicuous to aid the police in tracking down Ryuichi, so its creator has another idea, and boy is Dr. Sara able to make a robot body that’s the double of Selena quickly, though we’re not told much on how she’s able to do this anyway, and similarly Ryuichi. In this movie, people can just do things, we just need to accept it. Ryuichi has now become a sex murderer and needs to be caught, so our two lady cyborgs and our lady scientist-turned-cop Sara are put into action, along with a group of other cops who, of course, have sex on the brain except for Joe – well, he’s interested in sex too but only with Selena, he having no idea that she’s a robot, even when in bed. Now I’m not sure that would be the case really, but then I’m not knowledgeable about robot sexuality. The other cops lustfully rush over to the three women but are quickly put in their place. Now comes the film’s most bizarre plot element. It’s decided that Anna will go undercover as a prostitute in an area of the red light district with signs saying things like THE GENUINE BUSTY QUEEN to trap the killer, and Anna’s fine with it. “I want to find out how it feels like to be a prostitute anyway” she says. Well, she is a cyborg.  However, she proves to be such a great shag that a lengthy queue of men forms outside her door. The comedy hijinks, in which Chung plays a major part despite the editing down of his part, doesn’t significantly slow down the pace unlike in some other Hong Kong films with lengthy humorous sections, and some of it is pretty funny unless you really don’t find things like somebody saying “You’re a f****** scumbag, think I won’t blow your head off?” to a severed head whose body is a few feet away. There’s a mild twist and another use of the idea that what somebody sees just before their death remains imprinted and can therefore be visualised by a machine, though here only if the person died from “excitement or fear”.

At one point Ryuichi enters a bar and is picked up by a prostitute, stroking her leg with a money note and quickly dispatching another potential client, which leads to a nasty bit of business. No matter the position, Ryuichi, being a robot remember, can’t seem to come, and he becomes increasingly dominant, eventually raping her standing up against a wall, even when she’s dead while blood pours out from between her legs. This is quite strong meat and some will find it overly cruel despite its fantastical nature, but the scene certainly serves its purpose in showing how awful Ryuichi is and making us scared of him. Maybe a later sequence involving rape wasn’t necessary as we’ve already seen what Ryuichi gets up to, even though the victim is a major character. I can’t work out if it’s poorly staged deliberately to get laughs or is just poorly staged. Hopefully the latter. Some may be disappointed that the first hour is light on action, but it’s followed by plenty of it, things winding up as a series of fights between Ryuichi and the cyborgs Selena and Anna, sometimes aided by others, alongside some vicious kills. The brawls, which take place in a variety of settings, are nowhere near the best, but the environments are well made use of, and actually none of the participants are trained martial artists and usually acted in movies which didn’t require them to fight. With that knowledge, one can see that they do a decent job, especially Amy Yip [Anna] who moves really well, while Billy Chow as Ryuichi projects a calm power so we can believe it when he quickly climbs up and down the side of a building, smashes a hole in a wall, punches holes in stomachs, hurls somebody out of a window so she crashes bloodily onto a car windscreen, throws a rock so it crushes a head, and even – okay maybe this is a bit too silly – decapitates someone with the lid of a wicker case. He also uses a drill twice on people and on the first occasion he does it just for fun.

On the sexual side of things Chikako Aoyama bares all a few times while Chow gets his cock out, something that must really have surprised Hong Kong audiences seeing as penises were hardly ever seen on the screen. Yip, after her turn in Erotic Ghost Story, decided that nudity wasn’t something she was comfortable with and opted to tease thereafter, giving birth to what became known as the “Yip Tease”. Therefore she wears a lot of sexy outfits, we see a back view of part of one breast, and she takes part in some sexual scenes – and gets away with it, largely because, I suppose, she’s a reasonable actress. In fact her reticence probably added to her being the most popular of the Category 3 female stars, even if she then struggled to get the roles she felt she deserved because such actresses were regarded as porn stars by many. She and Wu get to do a very lengthy sex sequence on a bed surrounded by and shot through silk curtains, which takes us through most of the cliches of ’80s love scenes yet still comes across as tender and genuinely loving even if Wu doesn’t always look fully comfortable [well, would you be fully comfortable having sex with a robot?]. Indeed we’re invited to care about the relationship of these two, and that’s something that we do end up doing. We expect to feel some sadness at the end, but then a happy coda comes along which looks like it was tacked on just to provide a happier ending. At times looking good, such as the bits of Ryuichi in his lair, and at times not looking very good at all, Robotrix is especially hampered by a truly poor and bland music score by Jim Yeung, who’s also credited with the cinematography, and Sui Hung Yeung; it seems like they barely tried at all in this department. It also sometimes teases that it’s going to become a serious look at some of the issues it raises before going back into juvenile dirty mode, and the potential is there in the story for it to do that. Yet in the end I’m rather glad that it’s the way that it is, partly because it would be unlikely to get made today – at least like this.

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