Pen huo nu lang

I had the opportunity to sit down now in 2021 to watch the 1992 Hong Kong comedy "Pen huo nu lang" (aka "She Starts the Fire") for the first time.

Oddly enough, I've never heard about this movie prior to sitting down to watch it. But it being a Hong Kong movie that I hadn't already was sufficient to make me want to watch it. And the fact that the movie had Chingmy Yau on the cast list definitely helped sell the movie as well.

While "She Starts the Fire" was watchable, this was essentially your average run-of-the-mill early 1990s Hong Kong slapstick comedy, for better or worse. I found the movie to be adequately entertaining, but "She Starts the Fire" hardly proved to be a treasure of a movie that I had been missing out on.

The storyline told in "She Starts the Fire" was pretty straight forward, actually with little deviations from what you would expect. So it sort of felt like writers Gordon Chan and Jing Wong were just playing it safe, and letting director Lawrence Cheng essentially run on auto-pilot.

For a comedy then I found "She Starts the Fire" to be rather devoid of funny moments and situations. The movie made me smirk every now and again, but there weren't any laughs throughout the course of the movie.

"She Starts the Fire" is too generic and mundane, failing to stand out among others of similar genre and type back from the early 1990s.

My rating of "She Starts the Fire" lands on a very bland five out of ten stars.

The movie is somewhat like the Fire Starter starring Drew Barrymore in that a girl Wendy (Chingmy Yau) has amongst other powers, ability to start fire. Two great Hong Kong actors Chingmy Yau and Do Do Cheng carries this movie, but other actors are well..... terrible (including the director himself Laurence Cheng)!! If they just let these two ladies run the whole show, this movie would have been 100% better. There's this old lady (named Isabella) that tries to steal the show, but she does a real smelly job (she stunk badly) of acting and ruins the whole show. In the end she gets her comeuppance by having to drink a urine from a pitcher so she kind of gets what she deserves, but scene after scene she succeeds in messing up the flow of the movie.

Charles (Laurence Cheng) plays the love interest of Wendy, and because Wendy has telekinetic power, they succeed in making big money at the casino. Some guys who are into super natural power goes to great trouble to break the romance of these two, but it's not even clear why they had to do this.

If the story is little better and supporting actors are better, this movie would have been a good movie, because Do Do and Chingmy are great even in this movie. You can't hide a great talent, and these two ladies (who are gorgeous to boot) brings up the level of integrity every time they are placed at the center of the scene.

Something went wrong with the casting and production of this movie, and they never recovered from it.

This film is about Wendy, who can start fire as well as do other things due to a curse on her family. She has one surviving aunt, a nightclub worker nicknamed Big Beer, whom she goes to live with in Hong Kong. Her power is harnessed for certain things, good and greed. This slapstick comedy is nonsense but its pretty good nonsense. There is no morality play here, just a bunch of sight gags and all around silliness. Wendy is played by Chingmy Yau, who at times looks breathtaking in this film. You can't be too critical on a film like this, its aim is low and it hits its mark. If you like slapstick comedy, its not great but it will pass the time.