Cheap Sex and Zen (DVD) (Lawrence Ng, Amy Yip) (Michael Mak) Price

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Customer Reviews of Sex and Zen

This film is based on the classic book 'The Prayer-Mat of Flesh'. And it follows our main characther who is a scholar whose only pursuit is that of a carnal nature. He marries the most powerful man in the area's daughter so that he may have protection from the husbands of married women he carries on with. As his marriage begins, his wife is a virgin whom he introduces to sex, and as he wanders she has a desire for it that grows as well with longing while he's gone. Our dear scholar befriends the best thief in the land, and learns another secret to seduction...that being one that involves genetalia. So our hapless scholar enlists the help of a crazy doctor to transplant a horse phallus in the place of his own. With the operation finished, our scholar dallies around the land with a few different women, including the wife of a silk merchant, and the wife of a noble, and her sister in law. Meanwhile, our lovely young wife (played by the beautiful Amy Yip), is left home alone with only her desires.

She ends up being seduced by the silk merchant who was earlier shamed by our scholar, and sold to the biggest brothel in the province. Our scholar eventually escapes the noble's wife and sister in law, and ends up at this brothel, in an attempt to regain his eyesight (you need to see what happens to him to understand), where he runs into his wife, where our story twists again.

Despite it's comedic take on things, this story does have a very good and solid moral, along the lines of 'be careful of what you do unto others, as it may be done unto you.' It's by far not the best film I've ever seen, but it is definitely one of a kind, and as I said portrayed in a comedic erotic nature. The sequal to this film, was very different and much darker. Out of the two I would recommend Sex & Zen to anyone who wants to see some erotic humor.

What a thoroughly bizarre film.
Going solely by a few reviews here, I bought this film with the assumption that it would be a steamy comedy. While there are some very steamy scenes indeed, the "comedy" is so low-brow as to not even raise a chuckle.

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While a couple of the sex scenes are very good, there is one that is basically a violent rape of a battered woman, and another that is very close to rape (although the women of course end up enjoying the experience, naturally.) There is also a forced abortion, and a woman being forced into slavery, some things I wouldn't expect to find in a comedy at all.

There are a couple of Buddhist sentiments tossed in at the beginning and at the end, but by and large, this is just soft core porn - the story line makes little sense, and is just a cheap way to get from one sex scene to the next. I'd expect that in flat-out pornographic films, but in something trying to pass itself off as something else...well, I was disappointed.

Some of the colors, fabrics and textures are very lovely, but it's obviously a low-budget film. The actors and actresses are generally attractive, and if all you want is some soft-core porn to pass an hour or so, this might just be your movie.

Bear in mind that it's subtitled, although with the level of diaglogue that's present, you might just as well leave it off.

Overall, very disappointing.

Chinese Baroque Commedia del Arte
Loosely based on the 17th Century erotic literary classic, *The Carnal Prayer Mat*, this film is at once an erotic, picaresque tale of adventure, and a Ch'an Buddhist morality play (of sorts).
Set in the late Yuan Dynasty (think: Kublai Khan), the film is a reasonably funny, and often very amusing farce, as well as a biting satire both of the manners and mores of a certain epoch in China. The film conjures up the cultural decadence at the tail-end of an age of great creative and imaginative vigor and growth...

The depths of degradation, despair and delusion are explored; ignorance, lust and aggression (the Three Poisons of classical Buddhist teaching) are present in abundance. Hallucinatory surreal scenes vie with ordinary profane reality; realism is set beside bizarre unorthodox fantasy in a mixture which recalls elements both of the Golden Ass and Don Juan, to use some (admittedly imprecise) Occidental points of reference.

In the end there is (an almost Christian) message of repentance (by the film's three principle rogues), forgiveness and redemption, but there is an equivocal sardonic irony in the message, as well.