Customer Reviews

Butterfly Murders [VHS]

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The video pictured is "Butterfly Murders" from 1984, directed by Yang Dao/Cheng Chun Kan, and is about a woman who, mentally scarred by rape, takes to seducing and then viciously killing lewd men. I've seen this film, which is slow and uninteresting. If you look at the Tai Tseng website (they are the distributor) they have the correct info for this film. This is not the Tsui Hark film of the same name. I have no idea where that film can be found on video.

"Butterfly Murders" is actually a Tsui Hark film. Pretty cool, especially if you're into the 70s kung fu stuff.

I have a very low opinion of Tsui Hark. I think he is generally incompetent as a director, and a contagious disease as a cultural phenomenon, with movies ranging from the decent but forgettable (the best Wong Fei Hong films, starring Jet Lee) to the unbearably bad (*The Blade*). Shot in 1979, *Butterfly Murders* belongs to the latter category: it is one of those totally inept movies with a distinct Third World flavour (the kind where they seem to relish killing animals in front of the camera), characterized by an incomprehensible script, amateurish and pretentious camerawork, a cast devoid of any trace of charisma and no cinematography to speak of. I wouldn't even have deigned to review it (let alone been curious enough to rent it), if *Asia Weekly* had not listed it as one of the greatest 100 Chinese films of the twentieth century, along with King Hu's *Touch of Zen* and *Dragon Gate Inn*.

Such comparisons are an injustice to geniuses like King Hu, and I personally consider it a disgrace that Tsui Hark's films should be so widely distributed when Hu's masterpieces have been unavailable for years.