Wednesday 9 April 2014

Breakout from Oppression (1982)



This Chinese thriller is blessed with some truly awful dubbing.  I say 'blessed' because awful as it is, it's kind of amusing in its terribleness.  Cut-price voice actors with hopelessly mismatched accents spout mangled lines with vigor, it not exactly skill.  Compared to the soporifically dull dubbing of The Nameless, it's a big improvement.

Plot-wise, this also seems to be a step up from that other film, though of course there's no guarantee that the English-language plots of these movies is all that close to their respective originals.

Fonda is newly released from jail after serving eight years for the murder of her married lover.  She's been offered a job by the president of a newspaper, though when she arrives at the company the man in question is away on business.  Despite this, the paper's editor has no qualms about finding her a job: probably because he's clearly smitten by this pretty young lady.

Not everything is going to go so smoothly for Fonda, though.  She has numerous flashbacks to her time in prison, and it soon starts to seem like someone has it in for her, as 'accidents' keep happening.  Thanks to the wonders of being the audience, we know who is behind this, and soon enough, also why.  Because the nutty bad guy of this film - though nutty and a bad guy - does actually have a motivation.

Ultimately Fonda will face her persecutor, in a climactic battle that is clearly modelled on that of the original Friday the 13th.

This was a surprisingly enjoyable bit of schlock, really.  Not actually good enough that I'd recommend it, even on a qualified basis, but certainly not the worst thing I've watched in this box set.

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