Yuk po tuen: Tau ching bo gam

This is a Category Three film from Hong Kong, and it is explicit in its nudity, carnal desires and all around perversion. What sets it apart from similar films is the production values. The cinematography is very good, the movie is vividly colorful. The film has a general good rhythm to it. It is unabashedly erotic, both with the male and female characters. At the time, this film had to be a revelation, but it still holds up today as a sexually charged drama/comedy. The rating I gave can be anything, meaning it all depends on what you're looking for in this genre. Suffice to say, everyone looks great (especially the beautiful Amy Yip) and the film was a deserved success when it was released. If you're adventurous, check it out.

While I have a great fondness for this awful gem, I just don't buy that bit. Two women? In that position? With a flute? There's just no way.

The first thing that sold me on this movie was the flying medieval thief guy. Everyone knows that any film is made intrinsically better by the inclusion of an amusing flying thief. ;) The amusing preparation of the young scholar's wife for her first sexual experience was the second. Especially, the look on Our Hero's face as he attempts to deal with it!

This movie is very silly and surprisingly strenuous in sections; two memorable scenes include a rampant, gymnastic almost-rape among bolts of hanging silk, and an incredible cardiac workout underwater.

If you like silly martial arts movies and sex, you will probably enjoy Sex and Zen. It is softcore, so you don't really see anything more than breasts or the odd bum. The subtitles are unfortunately a little hard to read, but the entertaining action speaks for itself.

"Sex and Zen" is trully a gem. It combines beautifully good looking women with gorgeous bodies, humor, plot, and ending with a moral. I think it inspired after copycat movies to follow, but then none that came after it could achieve the climax "Sex and Zen" had achieved.

Without giving too much away, watching "S&Z" is like watching a Hong Kong swordsplay movie but this is on the topic of sex. A trully unique experience that can only come out of Hong Kong movies.

A 8/10 on my book.

There's no Zen here, which someone slapped on the English title, just the sex. A needy imperial scholar goes around trying to have lots of it. We see areolas rubbing together. Two women in all fours share a flute. Calligraphy brushes, whips and chains, some bondage. It has proper decor and costumes, a sense of plot. It's still Emmanuella stuff.

The same thing grates as in all the other skin flicks. Is sex just two bodies slathering together? In a teenager's mind maybe or if sexy means seeing a boob. Or is it a matter of context you inhabit, in which you change someone? More proper to call it sexual or erotic, it has started long before you enter the room and glows long after. Women know about this more than we do. Mind blowing sex is always with someone you know or can harness yourself in a context in which you do; the rest is monkeying around to extinguish a boner.

So what's sexy about a thing like this? What's deviant or risky? Cardboard characters who we don't know in the slightest go around rubbing themselves on each other. One pretends to be ravished, another pretends to be aroused at being whipped. It's like fake bondage for a Penthouse spread.

I wonder what the original title "Yu pu tuan zhi: Tou qing bao jian" means, but the English title "Sex and Zen" sums the movie up nicely, if you translate Zen as "you know, Asian stuff: drinking tea, silly daggers, eating rice, kicking the stuffing out of your opponent". Sex and Zen is an interesting and genuine Asian twist on your average softcore / erotic skin flick, a tasty offering of steamy sex scenes which are loosely tied together by an story. For my taste, the storytelling was a bit too loose and erratic as I'm a big fan a of plot, narration and development. I found myself wondering somewhere in between the rape scene in the fabrics warehouse and the calligraphy-by-shoving-a-brush-up-your-unspeakables segment how it all fits together. Overall it's well worth a viewing, but because of the surreal and incongruent storytelling it didn't really grab me.