Boasting a title only 90s Hong Kong cinema could conjure up, The Holy Virgin Versus the Evil Dead is both enticing and misleading, yet tenuously sums up the basic premise of what could be thinly labelled as a plot. Everything comes thick and fast. Opening with a Bond-esque title sequence, we are under little illusion of what to expect. A gratuitous mix of sex, violence and martial arts, the film is dumb, messy and loaded with excessive nudity, but if you can get past the cack-handed execution, you'll find yourself in for a wild ride. Director Lu Chun-Ku delivers plenty of bright colours and hyperactive camerawork with a vigorous exuberance to the proceedings that ensures the film never sits still long enough to be boring, no matter how confusing the story gets. The film just careens through a half-dozen genres, like a priest with a short attention span, delivering a delirious mess of supernatural sleaze, wire flying action and sexploitation horror; the balance is very askew. I don't think the filmmakers were inept, just horrifically misguided to the point of hilarity. The cast ultimately end up losing out to all the boobs and gore, so I don't really blame some of them for phoning it in. Donnie Yen, Ben Lam and Ken Lo do get the opportunity to show off, however fleeting it might be, while Sibille Hu is around for about ten minutes, mostly to complain and swear a lot. Ultimately, it doesn't matter what I say about The Holy Virgin Versus the Evil Dead, even if it doesn't contain any of the latter part of its title; it's worth the price of admission for said title alone. It's stupid enough fun to forgive its glaring shortcomings with enough stylistic flourishes here and there, plus copious amounts of boobage, to keep an otherwise low-budget production from falling apart at the seams.
