Hey, let’s talk about my
feet! For as long as I can remember, my
feet have been grotesquely wide (around a triple E width, if that helps
any). The last pair of normal sneakers I
had were Welcome Back Kotter ones
when I was a kid (it said, “Up Your Nose with a Rubber Hose” and other snazzy
bon mots around the sides). I could
never wear Chuck Taylors, because my feet poured out over the tops of the soles
(but fuck if I didn’t try). My first
pair of Doc Martens were regular width (because that’s all that anyone sold,
and this was before they were available on every street corner in the world,
and they were expensive as all hell compared to the shoes I would normally
buy), and the breaking-in period was pure hell.
Since then, I’ve discovered companies that that specialize in wide width
shoes, but it’s still a crapshoot buying them, because you have to buy them
over the internet (the sneakers I have been buying this way have started giving
me corns, so now it’s back to the drawing board).
And then there’s the flatness of my
feet. I’m fairly convinced that I have
no arches to speak of, so, of course, I have to wear special arch
supports. The beauty of these babies is
that they’re made of plastic, so they tend to give you shin splints until you
get used to them. They also make it
sound like you’re walking on ducks, they squeak so much. To put it simply, footwear and I don’t get
along. I don’t even think the human
leather shoes of Wai On Chan, Cheng Chow, and Chiang-Bang Mao’s Horrible High Heels (aka Ren Pi Guo Zheng Xie aka Bloody Shoe) would fit me any better
than any others do. It doesn’t help that
I can’t walk for shit in high heels.
Lee Kang (Hung Fung) is the
proprietor of a small shoe cobbling business.
He’s also a degenerate gambler of the lowest order, and, after getting
knocked out during a row over his habit with young Sherry, he’s skinned alive
by a masked lunatic (whose identity is obvious, even before you meet him
without the mask). Lee’s son Tien (Lam Chak-Ming)
comes home from university with hoochie mama Wendy (Suen Tong), and he almost
seems to give a rat’s ass about finding his missing father. Wang, one of Sherry’s co-workers, finds a
cheap source for fantastically soft leather (have you guessed yet who the
murderer is?) and has some dealings with his nephew Ah-Nan (Siu Yuk-Lung), who
works for triad boss Kuen (Shing Fui-On), a man very interested in the
wholesale of women’s shoes. Is that
enough for you?
This film could have some
interesting things to say, and it almost does.
For example, there’s the aspect of mad love going on. Sherry pines for Tien (why is anyone’s guess,
as the man is blanker than a sheet of copy paper and has fewer sides), and the
entrance of Wendy makes her go a little crazy (there’s even a nice cat fight
just to prove this). Sherry goes to
extreme lengths to get Tien, naturally, because he’s the man she deserves, and
she was there first. Wang pines for
Sherry, and he also will go to extreme lengths to have her. He even has a photo of her at home with her
mouth cut out (you don’t have to wonder why; they make it excruciatingly clear
in the movie). I can’t imagine that
being in any way satisfying, and I can only cringe at the abrasions one could
incur with such a prop. However, Sherry
ultimately rejects Wang, which makes him go even crazier. But just being in Wang’s presence is enough
to infect Sherry with Wang’s insanity.
That she winds up as she does in the end stems not only from her
commiseration with this guy but also (and more importantly) from her abuse at
the hands of men in general. Sherry is
the embodiment of puppy love turned inside out and gone dark.
Then, there’s the idea of “skin
trades” (and not just in terms of animals, unless you count people as animals,
which is fair play) and how fashion feeds into it. Consumers and vendors love the human leather
shoes. Sherry and her fellow employees
love working with the leather, and the money they make off their sales thrills
them. During the first human skinning,
the killer exclaims, “I started my fortune with this leather.” As in films such as Eating Raoul, this guy discovers discover that not only are people
as easy to kill and use as animals are but they’re also cheaper and of a higher
quality. It’s just that this movie hasn’t
a humorous bone in its body.
Being a Category III film, Horrible High Heels does its level best
to fulfill the promise of that rating.
It opens, for no narrative reason whatsoever, in a slaughterhouse, and
we get to see cows being killed and cut up in graphic detail. That’s about as subtle as this film gets. There is plenty of rape for everyone, and
this is combined with humiliation (as if rape, in and of itself, isn’t
humiliating enough). One victim is
micturated on. Another is stripped,
beaten, made to walk on all fours like a dog, and forced to touch herself with
amputated body parts. This isn’t to say
that the consensual sex scenes are any more pleasant. They are as softcore as can be, leaving
nothing to the imagination (well, a little), and they are just as skanky as any
of the rape scenes. They have a grimy
aura to them, and the participants look dazed and sweaty. Even when the characters want to be having
sex, they still look like they couldn’t be further away.
The greatest fault of Horrible High Heels is that it’s incredibly
scattershot to the point that you can completely believe that this thing was
made by three directors, because it doesn’t follow any of its storylines
coherently. It also doesn’t really give
a shit about what’s going on in any of them.
The human tanning angle is dropped halfway through the film. The Ah-Nan/triad aspect doesn’t relate to the
rest of the film except by the thinnest of threads. The search for Lee that started this whole
thing comes up only sporadically and with as much gusto as a nonagenarian’s
exercise routine. The characters change
into completely different personalities at the drop of a hat. The cops are completely subplot material
until the end, when they suddenly become action heroes, just because (as does
Tien in one of the more amusing sequences of the film). With how salacious this movie is, it’s
astounding how stultifying it manages to be.
If nothing else, its title at least delivers on two things: There are
high heels in the film, and it’s horrible.
MVT: The gutter-level
sleaze. Come on, you were watching this
for some other reason?
Make or Break: The opening
scene in the abattoir may put some off their feed and spoil their libidos. Then again, it may kickstart others’ engines.
Score: 3/10
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