Perverse Permission – Details, episodes & analysis

For the inaugural episode of Perverse Permission, Samm and John are diving right into the deep end of Japanese pink films. This is the first of a two-part episode exploring the legendary Angel Guts series based on Takashi Ishii’s manga of the same time. All the films loosely follow a woman called Nami and various iterations of her tortured relationship with a man named Muraki. These visually stunning films are often intensely erotic, but also explore the effects of trauma and sexual violence with surprising depth. This episode covers the first four films in the series, Chusei Sone’s Angel Guts: High School Co-Ed (1978) and Angel Guts: Red Classroom (1979), Noboru Tanaka’s Angel Guts: Nami (1979), and Toshiharu Ikeda’s Angel Guts: Red Porno (1981).

Perverse Permission is back with the second part of Samm and John’s discussion of Japanese pink films and the Angel Guts seres, based on Takashi Ishii’s manga of the same name. The first episode covered the first four films in the series and this continues with Angel Guts: Red Vertigo (1988) and Angel Guts: Red Flash (1994), both directed by Ishii himself, and two unofficial though no less incredible entries in the series, Hiroyuki Nasu’s Rouge (1984) and Junichi Suzuki’s Red Rope Until I Die (1987). Again, these are films that deal explicitly with sexual violence, though they bridge the worlds of exploitation movies and art house cinema through their transcendent explorations of trauma, desire, and fantasy.

Thanks for the enthusiastic response to our first episode and please follow Samm and John over at Patreon for more!

Samm and John are about to embark on a long series covering the first few decades of the career of a Hong Kong legend: Wong Jing. Producer, director, writer, actor, and professional hater, Jing helped shape Hong Kong cinema in the ’80s and ’90s. In this first episode in the series, we’re diving in to his early work as a screenwriter on martial arts classics like Magnificent Butcher (1979), Dreadnaught (1981), and The Prodigal Son (1981), and then we discuss his first few action films as a director with Shaw Brothers: his wonderful gambling comedies Challenge of the Gamesters (1981) and Winner Takes All (1982), and the explosive Mercenaries from Hong Kong (1982), an important influence on the emerging heroic bloodshed subgenre.

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We’re back for part two of our Wong Jing series, this time exploring the early romantic comedies Jing directed… so you don’t have to. Our discussion begins with Hong Kong Playboys (1983), where the wonderful Alexander Fu Sheng stars as a wealthy playboy whose mother has decided it’s time for him to get married. We also discuss Prince Charming (1984), a riff on The Prince and The Pauper starring Kenny Bee; more importantly, it’s Maggie Cheung’s debut film and she superglues a man’s ass to a toilet seat. Next is the nonsensical Fascinating Affairs (1985), one of Jing’s first non-Shaw Brothers films, which follows a rich heiress (Cherie Chung, who stars in most of the movies we discuss in the episode) trying to get revenge on her philandering husband (the great Chor Yuen, who also co-directed), but runs into trouble from a pushy cop (Tony Leung Chiu-wai, in one of his first roles), a serial killer, a triad gang, and other shenanigans. We end with the delightful Girl with the Diamond Slipper (1985), a madcap spin on Cinderella with Maggie Cheung as an aspiring TV actress who gets invited to a ball and caught up in a diamond theft. Maggie can do no wrong.

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For Halloween season, John and Samm are taking a break from Hong Kong to visit the autumnal cemeteries and crumbling castles of France. We discuss the career of French fantastique director Jean Rollin, broadly covering his vampire films and key tropes before plunging into his work as a director of soft and hardcore sex films. Rollin was often forced to take on these kinds of work for hire projects to make a living as a director, so we also talk a lot about the limitations that shaped his career, what was going on with European cinema at the time, trends in horror and erotic films, etc. We also get a bit, er, loose in this episode, so fasten your seatbelts and enjoy the phantasmagorical ride!

If you’re in or around Chicago, John is screening Rollin films every week this month at the Alamo for Terror Tuesday.

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Our Wong Jing series continues with a discussion of the last films he made for Shaw Brothers as a director, a blend of comedy, action, and fantasy. This includes: Wits of the Brats (1984), co-directed by Alexander Fu Sheng, about a spoiled brat who wants to become a martial arts master; I Love Lolanto (1984), where Natalis Chan’s reign of terror lives on in this romantic comedy about how he crosses paths with a mentally challenged woman; and The Flying Mr. B (1985), with Kenny Bee as a high school sports coach whose luck changes when he finds a potion that gives him super powers. We also discuss one of Jing’s first true bangers as a director, the action-fantasy classic The Magic Crystal (1986), where Andy Lau and Cynthia Rothrock team up against a KGB supervillain (Richard Norton) in search of an alien crystal.

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For this special, spooky episode of our Wong Jing series, John and Samm explore the horror comedies Wong Jing made in the late 1980s as a director, writer, and actor. We discuss films he wrote and acted in, like Lam Ngai-kai’s The Ghost Snatchers (1986), about a high rise building haunted by the ghosts of Japanese soldiers from WWII; Evil Cat (1987), about a demonic cat entity that must be defeated at all costs; and Ghost Busting (1989), about office workers who have to learn to fight off the ghosts swarming their building. We also dive into his directorial efforts like Mr. Possessed (1988), where Kenny Bee is tormented by a ghost who doesn’t want him to find a girlfriend; Ghost Fever (1989), where Wong Jing plays an asshole who cheats on his pregnant wife and is terrorized by angry ghosts as a result; and the insane Haunted Jail House (1989), part women-in-prison film, part sex comedy, and part horror movie.

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John and Samm are running the gauntlet of some of Wong Jing’s late ’80s comedy series, so you don’t have to! This episode, we’re discussing The Romancing Star trilogy (1987-1989), about a foursome trying to find love while working in an auto shop (among other places), and The Crazy Companies (1988) double feature, where a former actor competes with his nefarious brother over the future of the family business. These films unite actors like Chow Yun Fat, Andy Lau, Natalis Chan, Stanley Fung, Eric Tsang, Shing Fui-on, and others for a series of over-the-top gags, subplots about frustrated romance, plenty of workplace shenanigans, and lots of off color jokes that could only come from Hong Kong ensemble comedies in this period.

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In this Thanksgiving episode, John and Samm are running the gauntlet through three of Wong Jing’s gambling and crime films from the late ’80s: Born to Gamble (1987), yet another tale of a gambler (Natalis Chan) deceiving his prospective love interest (the divine Joyce Godenzi) to try to win her heart; Doubles Cause Troubles (1989), where two cousins (Maggie Cheung and Carol Cheng) are forced to live together for an inheritance, but they get swept into a plot involving gangsters, a secret code, and crooked cops; and Casino Raiders (1989), where Andy Lau and Alan Tam play two professional gamblers on the wrong side of the law who are forced to contend with nefarious Japanese businessmen as one of them falls in love with a wealthy heiress (Idy Chan). While Born to Gamble and Doubles Cause Troubles are comedies, Casino Raiders is more of a melodrama, but all three represent variations on how some of Jing’s common themes developed throughout the ’80s… which we are thankfully almost finished with.

Our suffering is legendary, but it is for you, dear listeners. This also isn’t really a Thanksgiving episode, but we wanted to give you something to play loudly to get your relatives out of the house.

Thanks for listing and please follow Samm and John over at Patreon for more!

For this next episode in our Wong Jing series, writer and critic Will Sloan joins John and Samm to talk about Jing’s God of Gamblers trilogy: God of Gamblers (1989), starring Chow Yun-Fat as one of the world’s greatest gamblers, who gets amnesia; God of Gamblers II (1990), starring Stephen Chow as a gambler with super powers who teams up with the God of Gamblers’ protege (Andy Lau); and God of Gamblers Part III: Back to Shanghai (1991), where Stephen Chow’s super powers accidentally send him back in time to Shanghai in 1937. for gambling, musical numbers.

Will Sloan is a Toronto-based writer, critic, and cohost of The Important Cinema Club. His book, Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA is out now!