Sex and Zen

Really, the final shot of Sex and Zen tells you all you need to know about this film: it's a freeze frame of two newly-penitent monks clinging to each other while their wizened master looks on approvingly. Superimposed over this rather ridiculous scene are the words “Recommended by PENTHOUSE.” As Spy magazine's monocular Walter Monheit might say, “Ooof!” I can see, however, where the taste-impaired Gucciones might be coming from on this one: with its intrusive use of soft-focus lenses and soft-core pornography (or “eroticism,” depending on how one looks at it), Michael Mak's interpretation of this 17th-century Chinese tale is at once borderline sexy and unrepentantly silly. It's awash in horrible crumbs of broadly played comic relief and repetitive scenes of unconventional carnality: the Kama Sutra as done by Russ Meyer. Liberally adapted from an actual Chinese sex manual, the film follows the exploits of a youngish, upper-class Casanova (Ng) intent on deflowering as many maidens as possible. When he's told he's not up to the task due to the diminutive size of his member, he takes it upon himself to visit a “sex surgeon” who lops off the offending hanger-on and replaces it with a more suitable organ freshly removed from an anesthetized stallion (in the meantime, the doctor's pet mongrel makes off with the original penis, but that's neither here nor there, I suppose). Thus endowed, this Asian Don Juan begins a series of romantic liaisons with the women of his province only to find himself, toward the end, a victim of what must be syphilis -- he's half-blind and falling apart at the seams, but still resolutely, um, horny. No wonder Penthouse fell in love with this film. Granted, the lavish set pieces are beautiful, and there really is quite a bit of amusingly acrobatic coupling going on, but in the end, it's extremely hard to fight down the giggles you'll find swelling inside you. It's all so relentlessly goofy, it makes you long for the early Eighties antics of Traci Lords, or The Dark Bros.