This extremely questionable specimen may or may not be the only existent ‘lizard rape’ film. Lewd Lizard is Wai Wang’s only film as a writer-director, but you may recognize him from his troublingly prolific acting career (Mini-Skirt Gang, Oily Maniac, Oriental Playgirls.) Auspicious beginnings. The film, perhaps rightly, has never made the leap from obscurity to notoriety. But I’m here to tell you what you’re missing.
LEWD LIZARD
Hong Kong, 1985, Wai Wang
Then Shan Shan’s ex, David, comes to town, under the impression that he is now going to marry Shan Shan. When a friend explains the situation, David wants to beat her up, but has to settle for drowning his sorrows at a topless bar. Then he wanders into Shan Shan, professes his love, is rejected, beats her up, and is beaten up by her new lover and his pals inside thirty seconds.
Then he gets beaten up and robbed again on the way home.
There is something compellingly Godardian about the batshit crash-zooms spattered throughout Lewd Lizard. Sometimes the focus of the zoom is a face giving a reaction, but other times it’s… two porcelain deer, with a heart and chain shackling them together? I can promise you that, in context, this doesn’t make any more sense.
Now you’re probably wondering: what about the lizards? What abut the… lewdness? I’m getting there, I promise.
The first time we get on-screen sex is also the moment the subtitles cut out completely, which really gives the game away. The sex segues into a montage in which David, the spurned lover, collects (steals) women’s (moist) panties. He then exposes the lizards to the lady-juices, and injects them with a mysterious compound that makes them… well, restless. After this point, the lizards have to be transported in a glass vial (a precautionary measure, you understand) and once released nothing can stop them from wiggling their way into the nearest, um, warm dark place.
The subtitles provide some of the “fun,” as when David screams, while holding a vile of squirming rape-lizards: “This won’t make you comfort!” The signature “lizard rape” music can only be described as dial-up noise processed into muzak.
But just who is this David? Who is the hero of Lewd Lizard? He’s a complex fellow. He was unceremoniously dumped, and now he’s out to punish all of woman-kind by raping them with doped-up reptiles. He takes no small joy in this, and is seen laughing maniacally in close-up for approximately… half the running time.
If you don’t think there’s anything amusing about lizard-rape, the film’s really not for you. On the other hand, I should mention that the women only apparently suffer for a few moments before lapsing into sexual ecstasy. Eventually they die (how is unclear) but they’re definitely enjoying themselves. You’d also think that this might ruin the whole thing for David but, no. With lizard rape, there truly are no losers.
It’s hard to say, but I think I watched an entire “comic relief” sequence in which a sting operation (with the wrong man at the end of it) results in hilarity when the word that refers to the rape-lizard-canister becomes a double entendre for the imagined culprit’s flaccid penis: I know.
I’m loathe to count, but the number of lizard-rape sequences must exceed 10, none of them having anything much to distinguish them from the other 9 (although one does occur on: a boat.) Some will be comforted by the presence of huge number of sizable Hong Kong breasts, but there’s a lot to get past in the appreciation of Lewd Lizard’s nudity. The soundtrack, at its sexiest, devolves into a single (endlessly) repeated refrain from Cream’s Sunshine of Your Love. It’s enough to make a grown man beg for the lizard-rape muzak.
Those who make it to the end of this lost anti-gem will be rewarded with an appropriately insane conclusion, in which Shan Shan offers to rape herself with lizards. This, after a climax that consists mostly of various characters screaming “David!”
I will leave you with some poetry from one of Lewd Lizard’s finest musical montages. The lyrics go:
“But we could sail together/ there must be waves at times! If we could only work hard, only one faith, and don’t miss our good!”
Cue the electric glockenspiel solo.
