A surge in popularity for Hong Kong’s adult-oriented 'Category III’ cinema means that raincoat-clad audiences both at home and abroad, can look forward to more soft-core trash like Cash Chin’s sci-fi skin-flick 33D Invader. A puerile, high-pitched Terminator-meets-Porky’s, 33D Invader exploits its above-the-line talent to service its below-the-waist fixations; the veteran director (Sex and Zen II; The Forbidden Legend: Sex & Chopsticks) coaxes committed performances from his game cast, who bare all in the name of their 'art’.
Revisiting the most successful elements of his lasciviously-titled 1990s The Fruit is Ripe trilogy, Chin signals his intent from the very first shot of 33D Invader: we see the four lead actresses’ ample breasts, bouncing every-which-way as the girls frolic on the sand, before we see their faces. Jeana (Akiho Yoshizawa), Ceci (Chen Chih Ying), Mia (Lee Ko-Chu) and Jane (Monna Lam) have just moved into a beach house next door to three sexually-frustrated dweebs: Stephen (Tsui Ho Cheong), Danson (Andrew Kwok) and Felix (Justin Cheung). An over-extended series of ridiculous set-ups ensue, as the three jerks spy on the women (cue 'sudsy, slow-mo shower scene’) before making a ham-fisted attempt at seduction.
None of which sounds very 'sci-fi’. It takes what seems a long time before we meet our heroine, Future (Macy Wu). Sent from 2046 (Wong Kar-Wai’s film and career is referenced twice, rather incongruously) where sperm stocks are depleted, Future hones in on decent-guy Lawrence (Chen Jyun Yan) as the 'donor’ whose pristine sample will save future Earth. Two alien assassins – Xucker 1 (Kato Takako) and Xucker 2 (Hsueh Ya Wen) – pursue her for their own nefarious means; the planet will be theirs if they can rape her before Lawrence implants his seed.
You can do the maths: four up-for-it gals + three randy nerds + two rapists = one humanity-saving lustful coupling. Once established, Chin’s framework (however fragile) supports the film’s romp-after-romp raison d’ être: some comical (a professor interrupts a class-time oral indulgence), some graphic. For the endless parade of clenched, thrusting buttocks, there is no full-frontal male nudity, apart from one comically-enhanced protuberance, more vegetable than man (don’t ask); ladies, on the other hand, reveal all.
The film goes off the rails in one particularly coarse sequence centred around the gang-rape of the four girls (one of them a determined virgin); like Christopher Sun Lap Key’s blockbuster 3D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy, the film which reignited Hong Kong’s 'Cat 3’ genre and featured a similarly distasteful third-act tonal shift, Chin’s work goes unnecessarily dark when the filmmaker draws upon images of forced sexual acts and cruelty for crude titillation.
33D Invader never recovers from this bout of nastiness; the goodwill that Chin and his cast engender through their sheer energy dissipates and his bawdy, crude but not altogether-unlikable piece of fleshy silliness devolves into a darker, decidedly unpleasant final confrontation: a battle-of-the-boners (overseen by renowned action director Lee Tat Chiu), spiced up by some 11th hour splatter moments. Though technically proficient (effects work is first rate, even when designed to look suitably cheesy), 33D Invaders is little more than a mid-range Cat3 entry that provides the requisite T&A but never breaks free of convention.
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