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[Updated with an updated trailer.]
It seems that every year there is at least one film that hits the TIFF Midnight Madness program seemingly out of nowhere. Julien Carbon and Laurent Courtiaud's Franco Hong Kong co-production Red Nights is one of those films. Here's how programmer Colin Geddes describes it:
It seems that every year there is at least one film that hits the TIFF Midnight Madness program seemingly out of nowhere. Julien Carbon and Laurent Courtiaud's Franco Hong Kong co-production Red Nights is one of those films. Here's how programmer Colin Geddes describes it:
Got your attention? The trailer will.A pulpy, fetishistic thriller, Red Nights marks the startling directorial debut of Julien Carbon and Laurent Courtiaud, best known as the screenwriting team behind Hong Kong director Johnnie To's thriller Running Out of Time. Red Nights also boasts the long-overdue return of Hong Kong starlet Carrie Ng, famous for her sexy and deadly presence in such films as Naked Killer and Sex and Zen. Here she revels in her role as the jade-clawed Dragon Lady, equal parts seductress and psycho-sexual killer.
A box containing a white jade seal rumoured to have belonged to China's first Emperor falls into the hands of Catherine (Frédérique Bel), a mistress who takes the valuable artifact to Hong Kong in the hopes of selling it. In Hong Kong, Carrie (Carrie Ng), a wealthy patron of the arts, mounts a production of The Jade Emperor - the tale of the first Emperor's executioner, who used a deadly poison to paralyze his victims while simultaneously enhancing their sensations. Carrie is single-mindedly obsessed with finding this ancient poison. When it becomes apparent that the white jade seal contains a vial of the elixir, Catherine finds herself caught in Carrie's sadistic web, where bliss and pain are blurred into a twisted, forbidden ecstasy.
Ah, the twitch hosted trailers never play. darn it.
The trailer looks very good, especially considering it's the product of the people who wrote the extremely weak THE TOUCH and the almost impossibly horrible BLACK MASK 2. These guys have apparently been out of commission for a while now so I'm willing to give this new effort a fair shake. I'm a bit apprehensive that something that looks as good as this does has apparently been sitting around finished since last year without anyone having heard of it - but as any American fan of Asian cinema can tell you, an extended stay on the shelf is no reliable indicator of a film's quality - if anything it's more often the dreck that makes a beeline to store shelves, while the cream of the crop rots away unreleased.