|
Available on DVD! To buy, click on link(s) below and help keep this site afloat (commissions earned) |
Always make sure of DVD-compatibility!!!
|
|
|
|
|
Dr Wong (Jess Franco) is a Fu
Manchu-style Oriental villain, but he is so successless that
he has decided to commit harakiri. Only his daughter Tsai Ming
(Lina Romay) can prevent that, as she has a new plan to improve their dire
financial situation: They invite Wilfred Summers (Robert King) and his
daughter Rita (Rachel Sheppard) to their virtual reality club - which is
actually little more than a porn-show, but not live, only seen with
special virtual reality glasses - and while Wilfred is distracted by the
sex going on, they will have no problems kidnapping Rita - and that they
do, and successfully too.
But Wilfred, having no desire to pay the ransom (one million Dollars)
hires Nelly Smith (Lina Romay again) and her assistant Petry (Peter
Temboury) - shades of famous Fu
Manchu-hunters Nayland Smith and Doctor Petrie here - to get
back his daughter.
Before entering Wong's lair though, Nelly turns to Cagliostro (the late
Howard Vernon in snippets from 1972's The
Erotic Rites of Frankenstein), where he gives her special virtual
reality glasses to outwit Wong.
Wong meanwhile sits in his headquarters, practising his final line
("The world will hear from me again, soon !"), but never seems
to get it quite right. Then Nelly and Petry enter the place, and while
Petry is soon put out of commission being thrown into Wong's virtual
reality, Nelly switches the virtual reality glasses Wong hands her for her
own - and puts Wong and company out of order. End.
Intended as a (sleazy) parody of Edgar Wallace- and Sax Rohmer-stories
and their movie adaptations (for several of which Jess Franco himself was
responsible), Dr.Wong's Virtual Hell has its moments of great
comedy, like Chinese baddie Wong wanting to commit Japanese harakiri, and
in a hammy manner, too, or him practizing his final lines well before the
end of the movie but never getting them quite right "("The World
will hear from me again ... maybe ... aw no !), or he asking his assistant
(Analia Ivars) why she constatnly runs around bare-assed, and when she
answers "because you ordered me to", he replies "what a
dirty mind I have." Also, Jess Franco's wholly unconvincing
performance as a Chinese and Lina Romay's mock Mandarin dialogue add to
the comical effect, as well as many sequences that seem to come right out
of comicbooks, including thought-balloons.
Yet the film is not all that good, mainly because Jess Franco tries to
achieve too much on a miniscule budget and time and again totally loses
sight of the plot. The first half of the film it seems contains little
more than Analia Ivars and Lina Romay rolling around in the semi-nude and
nude, under a layer of computer effects that make little sense, which
somehow takes the drive out of the film before it has really started ...
which really is a pity, because this one really had possibilities to
become a great nonsense comedy in style of Franco's underrated Mari-Cookie
and the Killer Tarantula from 1997.
|