Birth of an attitude
Brigitte Lin's Badass Stare is one of the most deadly kungfu styles of 1990s Hong Kong cinema.
She is not amused: the deadly "Brigitte Lin Icy Stare of Death"
But a year before Lin started experimenting with a stare to make brave swordsman pee on themselves, back when Lin's claim to fame was not
stone cold heart-stopping, but countless hearts-and-flowers films with titles like "Love Under A Rosy Sky", Lu Hsiao-Fen's stare
was scaring scum off Shanghai's mean streets, and kick-started the new film craze for Ladies Kickin' Butt that rerouted the trajectory of
Lin's screen persona towards the fiercer end of the emotional spectrum, that's usually reserved for male leads. While she sometimes assumed
the guise of a man to play in this arena, this is where Lin became a film legend.
Lu Hsiao-Fen's Icy Stare of Death
This ain't no party
Unlike most of its follow-ups, this is actually an engaging and carefully constructed story that touches on many issues: some of historic
interest (e.g., the social, familial, and personal upheaval of the Cultural Revolution), and some that are still controversial (e.g.,
China's corruption and princelings, treating women as property passed from father to husband, rape and sexual/domestic abuse). A grim watch,
that gets more disturbing with each viewing, and even deprives the viewer the comfort of self-righteous judgment of villains, as the viewer
becomes a collaborator in the cruelty, via viewer's role as voyeur.
When Lu Hsiao-Fen tears open her shirt and bears her breast, it's as if she were chiding her titty-focused fans:
Is this what you're waiting to see? There! Now can we get serious and pay attention?
Let us now bow our heads for a moment of silence, in memory of the countless VCR tape heads that were savaged by fatal rewind-OD
as a result of these scenes.