Wicked Priest

Saw Wicked Priest (thanks, Lea!) It was a fairly obscure martial arts film. The film is shot in an extremely stagey way. The opening fight scene takes place with everyone standing shoulder-to-shoulder like birds on a wire, as though they were on a stage that was one foot deep. When characters die, it's always the greatest tragedy and in fight scenes there's great splashes of blood but no wounds on the actors. The film feels very abrupt and arbitrary at parts. There's an idiot side-kick who is introduced and then never shown again until the very end. Bad guys become good guys with no redemption scenes. It's like they just stopped being evil. Unusual.

Anyway, the plot is this: the titular Wicked Priest starts out the film being exiled from his temple for fighting. In exile, he drinks and gambles and whores it up with a heavy emphasis on the whoring. This is whoring is portrayed by the film as absolutely no big deal and indeed almost everyone in the film is revealed to be shacking up with someone eventually. I like the film's approach to sexuality and to the act of sex which it treats as a great humanizer and leveler, however it also takes this approach to far less savory sexual matters. One of the early scenes in the film is a gang of three boys and a 10-year-old girl menacing a woman, clearly about to rape her. "Don't resist or they'll hurt you!" sings the little girl. This gang becomes one of the Wicked Priest's side-kicks, one eventually nobly sacrificing his life to defend some women. Presumably they just get sick of treating women badly. One of the main protagonist's jobs is to seduce women into a life of prostitution. At first we hate him, but then it's revealed that he's doing it to get money... to save his girlfriend from a life of prostitution. It's really weird. The whole film is also kind of lumpily paced. After the climactic fight-scene, for example, there's one last fight scene which I guess gives closure to the characters but is really fairly unnecessary.

All of that said, I enjoyed this film. It's really ridiculous and strange and often would make me laugh when it didn't intend to. It's not quite "so bad it's good", more "so odd it's fascinating." I suspect this is the sort of film Tarantino would love. It's sexy and in kind of bad taste and is kind of a scattered mess. Interesting though and a good waste of an afternoon.