Yang chi

Virgins of the Seven Seas offers an ideal combination of period Eurotrash and the attractions of Hong Kong genre movies. Paradoxically, however, the film will irritate fans of exploitation flicks, who won’t tolerate the childish naïveté of kung-fu fighting and absurd training sequences. But for lovers of cinematic brutishness and for adolescent boys, or old men who preserve their childish view of the world through movies, Virgins is a diamond in the rough. Slapstick tastelessness is combined here with attractions from Spencer and Hill flicks, but instead of two Italian tough guys, the blows are dealt by scantily clad European beauties, who find themselves in the world of Chinese pirates depicted through the excessive aesthetics of genre movies from the Shaw Brothers studio. The legend of Hong Kong film production joined forces with the equally internationally ambitious West German company Rapid Film, which was behind not only the famous Schulmädchen-Report series of erotic pseudo-documentaries and variations thereof, but also the video nasty Bloody Moon and Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron. Founded by Wolf C. Hartwig, the company had previously used the exotic locations of Hong Kong to enhance the appeal of its genre B-movies. Thanks to the fact that it is a direct co-production with Shaw Brothers, however, Karate, Küsse, blonde Katzen, also known as Virgins of the Seven Seas, turned out to be a unique intermingling of the two production companies’ aesthetics. The film is thus formalistically reminiscent of the rather wild ADHD (before it was cool) style of Shaw flicks with frantic zooms, goofy acting and wu xia trampoline choreography. The German contribution, besides the choreography of some of the fight scenes, is evident primarily in the haphazard dubbing, which, due to its stylistic complexity and verbal expressiveness, bears comparison to the creations of the live-dubbed screenings at the Shockproof Film Festival. (28.03.2022)