Liu Sung Pai’s Angel of Vengeance is two films rolled into one: a revenge thriller where Yukari Oshima looks for her sister with the help of Alex Fong and Alexander Lo Rei, only to find she’s been sold to a brothel by a mob boss played by an unhinged Chung Fat; and a rapesploitation drama in which a student writing a thesis on “love and lust” decides to research life in a brothel (operated by her mother) by dressing up (unconvincingly, of course) as a man. The two subplots are connected by the fact that Yukari’s sister has been sold to the same brothel that the student is trying to infiltrate. Unfortunately, the revenge subplot, which opens the film with two excellent fights where the Japanese action queen fights off a dozen henchmen, and closes it with a ridiculous but entertaining action finale where Chung Fat and his formidable blind henchwoman (played by Tu Kei Hua) start flying and moving at the speed of light and Alex Fong pulls a bow and arrow out of nowhere (in what has been, so far, a grounded and realistic film) only gets a third of the film’s runtime, with the rest spent on the implausible and exploitative ‘brothel research’ subplot. And there’s a series of gratuitous rape scenes, scored sometimes with jaunty music, other times with melodramatic music, and other times yet with horror music. What an ugly little film. *