One of the wildest Hong Kong horror fests from the eighties, which believe you me is saying A LOT! Featuring statue rape, an undead fetus, zombies and demonic possession, it’s a striking film, though also an obnoxiously scatterbrained one.
THE RAPE AFTER (YIN ZHONG; 1986) was a standout, if largely unheralded, entry in the mini-flood of trashy horror movies that emerged from Hong Kong in the 1980s. Inspired by the success of the Shaw Brothers production BLACK MAGIC and its sequel, these films included SEEDING OF A GHOST, BRUTAL SORCERY, THE BOXER’S OMEN and dozens more. Nearly all of them, I feel, are worth a watch, if not several.
The aspiring model Shu Ya spends her days taking care of her severely deformed younger brother and ailing mother. The latter killed Shu Ya’s father one night after he tried to molest her, and left his corpse to rot in her basement.
Mo is a commercial photographer who collects odd artifacts. One night he brings home Shu Ya, who is raped by one of Mo’s artifacts, an especially monstrous sphinx statue that inexplicably comes to life and assumes human dimensions. The statue, we learn, was stolen from a nearby temple, and contains the ashes of a murdered human fetus within it.
Following the rape the statue comes into the possession of Mo’s newest conquest: the luscious young Li Ting Ting, an aspiring designer. Shu Ya, meanwhile, finds herself pregnant, and is persuaded by Mo to have an abortion. Before the procedure can go ahead, however, a tentacled something kills the abortionist. Not that Shu Ya is long for this world herself, as shortly after the aborted abortion she burns to death in a car accident—before she dies, however, Shu Ya vows revenge on Mo.
In the local morgue Shu Ya’s horrifically charred corpse is examined by coroners, who are shocked when a fetus crawls out of the womb. The sounds of disembodied children are heard by Mo and his relatives, while the world around them goes mad with killer birds, self mutilation, an ear-ripping zombie and a shit monster that yanks a guy into a swamp—into which he’s just taken a dump!
Wild and crazy THE RAPE AFTER may be, but streamlined it’s not, incorporating as it does a deformed young boy who figures heavily in the opening scenes (but sits out much of the rest of the film), numerous undead critters and much miscellaneous gore and slime. This makes for a film that’s difficult to follow and often downright incoherent, particularly toward the end.
Yet the directors Meng Hua Ho and Tom Lau Moon-Tong demonstrate great audacity, and pull off some stylishly lensed visuals, while the stunningly gruesome special effects—which include rats crawling from a decayed corpse’s mouth, lingering close-ups of Shu Ya’s charred cadaver and a burning face—would have done Lucio Fulci proud.
Offsetting those virtues are the problems inherent in the Ocean Shores VHS, in which form this film is most widely available on home video. Those problems include a muddy fullscreen video transfer that appears to have been censored in places (including the titular monster rape scene, which cuts off too soon) and grammatically incorrect—sometimes hilariously so—subtitles (“Let’s give him a hard!” “I feel like something is gonna to happen!“). Listen also for the many music cues lifted from successful Hollywood productions, including STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE and others.
Vital Statistics
THE RAPE AFTER (YIN ZHONG)
Nippon Herald Films
Director: Meng Hua Ho, Tom Lau Moon-Tong
Screenplay: Tom Lau Moon-Tong
Cast: Cheng-you Chang, Tsui Sul, Yau Hau Chan, Hing Yue Chun, Ping Ha, Robert Hung, Yung-sheng Pan, Yu Shangguan, Melvin Wong, Yat-Fei Wong