Exposed to Danger / Breakout from Oppression / Sha Chu Cong Wei (1982/1985) -**
What were the fucking odds that there might exist two totally unrelated Chinese movies called Breakout from Oppression in English? While doing preliminary research for my reviews of Challenge of the Masters and Executioners from Shaolin, I learned that that was the name— or at least a name— of Lau Kar-Leung’s first film as a director (although Lau was just one of three people involved in helming the film in question, which would furthermore sit on the shelf for five years before anyone would bother to release it). And since I recognized the title from one of my skuzzier DVD box sets, I figured I had the perfect opportunity to extend my discussion of Lau’s early directorial career all the way back to the beginning. But even before the opening credits had wrapped up, I had the feeling that something wasn’t right. For starters, the Breakout from Oppression playing on my TV screen had a plainly contemporary setting, whereas I was under the impression that Lau’s Breakout from Oppression was some manner of period piece. Secondly, the esthetics of the film struck me as being a decade late— early 80’s instead of early 70’s. And although looks can certainly be deceiving in this department, nothing about the withdrawn, haunted-eyed woman clearly being set up as the movie’s protagonist suggested a mistress of Wing Chun or the Shaolin Crane style or whatever. Sure enough, the penultimate credit caption attributed direction not to Lau, but to someone named Karen Yang. What the hell was I watching here? The short version is that it was an opportunistic rebranding of a Taiwanese picture that originally bore the English-language title Exposed to Danger; it would seem that its Hong Kong distributors, IFD Films & Arts Ltd., were hoping other people would make exactly the mistake that I did. The long version is that a door had just opened onto a whole new cinematic journey that I hope I’ll have occasion to undertake someday.
Eight years ago, at the age of nineteen, Fonda Chu (Lu Hsiao-Fen, from The Lady Avenger and The Pawned Wife) fell in love with exactly the wrong guy. Stephen Lo (Wa Lun, of Ghostly Beauty and Mid-Night Wolf) was young, handsome, successful, and very, very married. He had a nine-year-old daughter, too, and his wife (Yueh Ling, from Devil Returns) was the kind of woman who responds to emotional upset with acts of self-harm. No way in hell was this guy going to break up his family in order to pursue a relationship with a teenaged girl. As it happened, though, Stephen’s long-term unavailability was the least of Fonda’s problems. One night, while leaving her apartment following an assignation, Lo was waylaid in his own car by an assailant armed with a kitchen knife. Stephen died in Fonda’s arms, and what was worse, she quickly found herself accused of murdering him. The court found her guilty just as fast, and Chu was sentenced to twelve years in prison. Although she was released four years early for good behavior, her tenure behind bars was a psychically scarring experience, even leaving aside the injustice of it all. Now that she’s a free woman again, Fonda wants only to slip as unobtrusively as she can back into life on the outside. She’s caught at least one lucky break in that direction, too, because the publisher of a major Taipei newspaper has sent her a letter of invitation offering a job as an assistant editor at one of his branch offices. I’m genuinely curious whether that sort of thing is normal in Taiwan, or if domestic audiences would have found it as suspicious as I did.
A strange state of affairs greets Chu at the newsroom to which the publisher’s letter instructed her to report. For one thing, the position Fonda was offered is already occupied, and the woman who currently holds it (Tang Chi, from Iron Petticoat and Vengeance of Snow Maid) is incensed at the suggestion that her ultimate boss wants her replaced. Simon Chang (Alan Tam Wing-Lun, of Once Upon a Time a Hero in China and Till Death Do We Scare), the managing editor, assures the older woman that her job is safe, but reckons he’d best hire Chu to do something. In the hope of keeping both the publisher and the assistant editor happy, he gives the newcomer a job lower down on the editorial totem pole, basically making her his assistant’s assistant. Besides, Fonda is a good-looking woman, and it’s always nice to have a few of those around the office, right? Perhaps, but the circumstances of the new girl’s arrival guarantee that the assistant editor will have it in for Fonda for the rest of time. Also, Chu’s peculiar letter of invitation entangles her in a larger and more ominous mystery, insofar as it’s the only communication the newspaper staff— including even the editor-in-chief (Tai Ping-Kang, from Unsung Heroes of the Wilderness and Monkey King with 72 Magic)— has had from the man in weeks. He’s just up and disappeared, and Fonda finds herself barraged with questions that she has no idea how to answer.
The publisher’s vanishing act is a subject of which Chu wants no part whatsoever. For one thing, getting involved could provoke her coworkers to start digging into parts of her own background that she wants to keep well hidden. And on a more prosaic level, Fonda has more than enough to manage already between an immediate boss who wants to fire her, an overboss who wants to fuck her, a mistrustful landlord (Li Hsiung-Kuo, from Pink Thief and On the Society File of Shanghai), and a brand new teenaged frenemy in the workplace. The latter is a girl named Sheena (Lona Chang Fu-Mei), who seems to function as a sort of general office lackey. Although she welcomes Fonda with extravagant warmth on her first day, Sheena also plainly resents Simon’s attraction to Chu, and she can toggle between the two moods completely without warning. But one afternoon, when Fonda visits Sheena at home on an errand for photographer Joe Chan (Jacky Lin-Tsai Pei, of The Woman Who Eat People and Killer Rose), she sees something downright disturbing. In addition to the senile, wheelchair-bound grandmother (Ying Ying, from Tai Chi Shadow Boxing and The Legend of Mother Goddess) for whom the girl acts as caretaker, Fonda also spies through one of the basement windows a 60-ish man (process of elimination suggests that this might be The Sexy Lady Driver’s Sam Chung) whose uncomfortably supine posture suggests that Sheena has him tied up down there. Worse yet, Chu recognizes the old guy from photographs she’s seen around the newsroom. He’s the missing publisher! So much for not getting involved, huh?
In fact, though, Fonda doesn’t say a word to anyone about what she saw at Sheena’s house. It sounds mad, but maybe it’s fair to ask whether the same legal system that mistook a witness for a murderess eight years ago can be trusted not to mistake a witness for a co-conspirator now— especially in light of that letter of recommendation, which can only have been written when the publisher was already in Sheena’s clutches. What remains crazy any way you spin it, however, is Chu’s passivity toward the question of why Sheena would not only kidnap the tippy-top man in the whole organization of her workplace, but then induce him to offer a job to some random ex-con. Obviously Sheena has to be playing at something extra-nefarious, but what? Despite Fonda’s lack of urgency regarding that question, it will indeed become steadily more urgent as Sheena begins framing her for a variety of new heinous crimes, including kidnapping Simon, killing Joe Chan, and distributing spring rolls tainted with ground glass at the annual company picnic. Sheena even manages to get Chu confined to a hospital’s psych ward when the idiot cop (Pang San, from The Crippled Masters and Thrilling Bloody Sword) investigating the bizarre crime wave revolving around the newspaper doesn’t move fast enough to suit her. Nothing in the two women’s current relationship seems adequate to explain such a baroque program of persecution, but you might start groping in the direction of Sheena’s true motive if you consider that neither one of her parents seems to be in the picture anymore, and take a moment to compute the girl’s age eight years ago, when Fonda had her first brush with murder.
Exposed to Danger feints— or, less charitably, wanders— in all sorts of directions at various points during its first and second acts. The flashbacks to Chu’s incarceration early on seem to imply that it’s destined to become a women’s prison movie. Other elements suggest that a revenge picture is in the offing, especially when it seems like Sheena might really get Fonda locked up again. And from time to time, there are even hints that we’ve got a prototype erotic thriller on our hands, although the censorship regime of early-80’s Taiwan put a pretty low ceiling on what the filmmakers could get away with in that direction. Eventually, however, Exposed to Danger resolves itself into something much more surprising than any of that. Ultimately, it’s the closest thing you’re ever likely to see to a Chinese giallo. Remarkably, the resemblance extends even to the way 1980’s gialli were beginning to reflect the recursive influence of American slasher movies, for the final showdown between Fonda and Sheena shamelessly apes the climactic duel between Alice and Mrs. Voorhees in Friday the 13th. Indeed, Exposed to Danger’s climax is so shamelessly ripped off that I was downright disappointed when Sheena’s by then oft-invoked but little-seen mom didn’t lunge out of the water to grab Fonda in a shock coda that might or might not have been a dream sequence. Exposed to Danger is too clumsy, disjointed, and nonsensical in all the things that it attempts to be really satisfying, even on the level of cinematic dumpster-diving, but it’s such a strange and unexpected artifact that I don’t regret a moment of the time that I wasted on it.
Mind you, a significant share of that goodwill stems from my excitement over what Exposed to Danger brought to my attention, rather than from any merit possessed by the movie itself. It turns out, you see, that there’s plenty more where this came from! For a handful of years beginning with the release of The First Error Step in 1979, Taiwan enjoyed a short but intense flowering of sleazy exploitation movies designed to leverage the relative laxness of censorship in the Hong Kong export market to explore themes and subject matter at the extreme outer limit of what would fly back home. In much the same way as British horror was able to thrive in the 50’s and 60’s thanks to the American market, Taiwanese producers during this period could cater to local audiences’ pent-up taste for forbidden fruit by using Hong Kong as a profitability backstop. These “black movies” (the term seems to echo the original, pejorative use of “film noir” by reactionary French critics in the 1930’s) cast an extremely wide net, too. There were brutal rape-revenge pictures. Savage prison melodramas that hid sharp critiques of Taiwan’s authoritarian government behind unprecedented displays of graphic violence. Gangster movies financed and distributed by actual gangsters, and seemingly crafted principally to appeal to same. A whole little mini-genre, unique to early-80’s Taiwan so far as I can tell, about gambling at mahjong and dominoes. And as we’ve just seen, at least a few thrillers that strayed into the outskirts of horror thanks to the weird depravity of their villains’ schemes. What’s especially interesting to me, given how I stumbled into the realm of Taiwanese black movies in the first place, is that Karen Yang and Lu Hsiao-Fen each seem, in their respective ways, to have been among the biggest and most important players on this overlooked scene. I have no idea how much of this stuff is still available, or was ever available in English-language presentation, but you may be certain that I’ll be keeping my eyes open for more of it going forward.
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