The Bride With White Hair II

Finally, a Hong Kong sequel that lives up to its precursor's premise (sort of). The titular bride of the first film, Lian (Lin) has gone completely mad this time around, rampaging through the province and slaughtering members of the Eight Lineages with her dreaded snowy locks: snaring, choking and impaling the hapless warriors with the ferocious abandon of a witch-woman scorned. (You may remember that her one, true love, Zhou, left her at the end of the first film to wait for the blessed Immortality Flower to blossom atop the sacred mount, or something like that.) When Zian disrupts the wedding ceremony of Kit and Kam, massacring the Lineage members on hand, Zhou returns from the mountain put a stop to her rampage. That may not sound like much (or, perhaps, too much) to the uninitiated, but directors Yu and Yeung pack every bit of their filmmaking prowess into The Bride with White Hair II making it a powerful, affecting entry into the Hong Kong swords and sorcery genre. Bursting with gorgeous cinematography and stunning set pieces (the fiery, tragic climax puts you in mind of the final moments of John Woo's The Killer), the film is a powerhouse feast for the senses, and a passionate, albeit blood-drenched, love story to boot. This is what Hong Kong filmmaking can be when all the stops are pulled. Forget the moldering Once Upon a Time in China series, this is the real McCoy.