Review: 3D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy

3D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy

Reviewer: Harry Davenport
Rated: 18 (UK)
Release Date: 2nd September 2011
Director: Christopher Sun Lap Key
Cast: Hiro Hayama, Leni Lan, Saori Hara

Question: Who wants to see a long, poorly made Chinese costume drama with lots of naked breasts? A lot of people apparently. 3D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy is making a lot of money in Hong Kong and Australia. People are flocking to see this childish, cheap and not in the slightest bit titillating movie. Sex and Zen is a truly awful experience.

I was, to a degree, looking forward to the movie. The notion of eroticism in 3D is humorous and intriguing, but this is a film that looks as if it was made by a 14 year old boy, in both script and production value terms. It attempts to be funny, erotic, exciting, and moving, and fails at everything. It is a dire 110 minutes.

There have been three Sex and Zen films, and this is, we are told, the most serious one yet. Very loosely based on the classic Chinese novel The Carnal Prayer Mat, it is basically an excuse to see a lot of naked women moaning. Our protagonist, played by Hayama Go, has to be one of least likeable characters in film history. At the start of the story he is a painter who marries a woman he loves. His big dilemma is that he doesn’t last very long in bed and so takes up an offer to become a helper/slave of a powerful man, with the promise that he can sleep with a woman who has the power to let a man delay his orgasm. Once this gift is his he sleeps with endless prostitutes and his wife leaves him. He then, due to the size of his penis, replaces his cock with that of a donkey. The ridiculous plot goes on forever until it ends in a climax of bad fight choreography and torture.

The film’s characters are basically martial artists but instead of fighting skills they have “sex tricks”, as they call them, which are basically stupid sexual powers, mostly involving big penises. Not one character is interesting, likeable or watchable and as the bloody ending begins we do not care at all.

People might want to see this film for four reasons; the erotic moments, the action, the humour and the 3D. Not one of those work. The erotic moments simply consist of naked women looking as if they are having a terrible time, and the movie seems to have been made by someone who has never had sex or even seen a woman. The sound of balloons filled with water when one woman plays with her breasts, and the noise I can only describe as being similar to that of a Kansas pie eating competition when a man goes down on a woman, are bizarre choices. The action is simply appalling. The poor quality of the fighting and swordplay are a joke. It is impossible to know who is on whose side and what they are doing.

The humour in the film could only appeal to a pubescent teenager. The jokes tend to revolve around penises. The moment our protagonist’s small penis is revealed the laughter seems to be endless … “Look at his tiny penis. Ha ha ha ha ha. What a small thing. Ha ha ha ha ha. How small is it? Ha ha ha ha ha.” In fact the filmmakers seem obsessed with penis size, lending credence to my belief that this must have been written by someone with a minuscule member. The film really should have Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla tagline; “Size does matter”.

Now the 3D. What can I say about it? Well, for starters, reading subtitles which seem closer to you than the film means that you have to focus on them and then back to the images, making it particularly difficult. You would think that they would have a lot of naked women’s bits popping out at you, but no: instead, most of the 3D seems to involve weapons flying out at one. All the production values are bad. We spend a lot of time in one rocky corridor, which is clearly used over and over again with the intention of representing different areas of the villain’s underground palace. The CGI is like that of a children’s show aimed at under tens. It seems as if no effort was put into it at all.

In essence, Sex and Zen suffers because it doesn’t know what it is. It is simultaneously trying to be serious while having the humour from a 70s British erotic comedy. Indeed this could have been called Confessions of a Chinese Painter. It goes from being a boring sex comedy to rather nasty torture porn in the last third. Women are raped, tortured in horrible ways and many people have their penises hacked off. Most confusing of all is a scene where a woman tries to seduce a monk. As she rubs her breasts in his face he looks as though he is in pain and there is dramatic music. After using a potion to sleep with him, the monk kills himself and this is supposed to tragic. In fact this is the only funny thing in the film and it appears to be unintentional.

Outrageously the film’s message is that love is more important than sex. By the end this view is rammed into us like the protagonist’s donkey cock up our arses and becomes the most offensive thing of all. The painter’s wife and he get back together and live happily ever after, even though he no longer has a cock. The whole film is based on the wonder of sex and then to turn around at the end and say, “No, love is the important thing,” is a joke, especially as our main character is such a nasty man.

Sex and Zen has bad 3D, childish humour and, in context, a ludicrous message in a cinema experience that aims to entertain through 3D breasts and rather a lot of torture and castration. An awful film that makes Caligula look like a masterpiece.

Movie Rating: 1/5