Item #: 6424 Category: MATURE AUDIENCE Format: VHS MPAA Rating: X

Woolly Rating: 5/10 (190 votes)

MEMBER COMMENTS ON THIS VIDEO

jd	Jan 18, 2006 @ 14:45:1

<[:-} "is everyone happy?"
SPOILERS! from something weird video's "frank hennenlotter's sexy shockers from the vaults" series, "devil woman" is marinated in a pungent sleaze. in the philippines, a young woman, "manda," is born with poisonous snakes for hair. her disgusted father wants to kill her even before the umbilical cord has been cut, but her mother stops him. the community is very unsympathetic to their plight. as a young girl, the other girls tease her cruelly, and they goad a boy into humiliating her by yanking the scarf off her head. a strand of her hair responds to this rude intrusion by biting him. he dies, and torch carrying villagers kill the parents and burn the family out. later "lupo" and his evil giggling gang come upon the adult manda, grown into a fatal beauty, skinny-dipping. they steal her clothes. unabashed, manda walks up to lupo, tells him that he is now her bitch, and that he and his droogies now work for her. her ability to use poisonous snakes like sheep dogs, cutting off the fleeing droogies and corraling them into a neat herd, quickly rids him of his smirking contempt. when he is told his mission will be revenge murders, he laughs with relief and says "no problem!" soon we see manda sitting with a supremely indifferent attitude on her throne in her cave as drunken droogies rape the women who tormented manda when they were children. it is a hellish scene of screams, stark shadows, desperate struggles, and piteous pleas. (around the corner, in even deeper shadow, one couple embraces tenderly. love will find a way.) manda asks lupo, "is everyone happy?" "[laughing] ah, you bet they are!" in the final, climactic scenes, the chinese hero, "shu wen," bruce lees lupo's entire gang repeatedly, but lupo himself lasts quite a while one-on-one, in the conventional way. with lupo out of the way, it is the face off between shu and manda that really goes off the rails. snakes fly like arrows. she commands tham to "use fire!," and they become flying firebombs. shu wen's macho invincibility causes manda to become dewy eyed (though still resentful) and slowly back away from him. the expectation of a romantic resolution ends abruptly when manda backs over the edge of a cliff. "devil woman" (1970, philippines / hong kong) is referred to in pete tomb's magnificent "mondo macabro" book. dubbed into english for this release, the original language was cantonese. (to confuse the issue, imdb lists another "devil woman" released the same year, in tagalog / filipino, with a very similar sounding plot summary.) the character "shu wen," a chinese tourist, is not only the hero, but also the only truly sympathetic male figure. the phillipine women are beautiful, but the men are ineffectual, cowardly, or evil. obviously intended for a chinese audience, "devil woman" cops a highly offensive, chauvinistic attitude toward the philippines the way older american movies did toward africa or asia, and as they do toward rural america in more recent movies such as "deliverance," "just before dawn," and the spectacularly insulting "wrong turn." inbreeding is commonplace and ancient evil still survives. in a subplot concerning the beautiful but helpless "tina," her cousin "waldo" is a spurned suitor who betrays her family's compound to the droogies in exchange for help in kidnapping her. her cowardly, comic relief servant is modeled on the insulting "feets don't fail me now" servants in 30s & 40s american movies. trying to rescue her, he is so scared of waldo that he closes his eyes, unable to even look at waldo, and hits tina in the head instead. he runs off, circles around ahead of and above them, and drops a very large rock down on them, closing his eyes again, but is lucky enough this time to nail waldo. we see him lifeless on the ground and see a very large blood stain on the rock. the more recent (hong kong distributed) thai film "snaker" shares the medusa theme and some of the consequences of intolerance hooks used in "devil woman," but the two movies are otherwise widely divergent in plot.

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