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Audio Format: DD 2.0 Stereo Video Format: Widescreen 1.85:1 Languages: Cantonese, Mandarin Subtitles: English, Korean Region Code: 3 Year Made: 1993 Running Time: 80
The Bride With White Hair is easily one of the greatest Hong Kong action movies. It steam rolls over Western expectations of what an action movie should be by giving us a movie that encompasses obsessive love and erotic fantasy, while taking the form of a big-scale epic, with loads of violent sword play and astonishing battle scenes where warriors glide through the air.
The sequel, The Bride With White Hair 2, unfolds as a smaller story. Much of the epic scale is gone. Instead, we get a story about a small group of friends who must confront the terrible Lien Ni Chang, a magical warrior jilted by her lover and now exacting a horrible vengeance on his family and relatives. Whereas the first film gave us a sweeping tale of love and betrayal, the sequel gives us a tightly plotted action movie where the friends must confront and destroy Lien Ni Chang--or die. And the entire story is told in only 80 action-packed minutes. These are two very different movies, and if you expect Part 2 to create the same mood as Part 1, you'll probably be disappointed. But judged on its own terms, Part 2 is an amazingly entertaining adventure yarn where a group of friends must band together to fight the terrible witch.
The Bride, Lien Ni Chang, now lives inside of Moon Lake with a coven of man-hating followers. She says, "Men. I see one, I kill one." She lives like a queen, sitting on a white throne while her female army sits at her feets. With eyes that open wide in a penetrating gaze that's filled with hatred and long white hair that unfurls like thousands of knife blades, she sweeps down on the village of Wu Tang, slaughters a wedding party, grabs the bride, and takes off for her lair, leaving only a handful of survivors.
Brigitte Lin returns as the Bride and Leslie Cheung returns as her lover. At the end of Part 1, Leslie Cheung waited on an icy mountain top for a special flower to bloom. If Cho Yi Hang can pick the flower when it blossoms and give it to Lien Ni Chang, her hair will return to its original color and her evil ways will cease. Unfortunately for him, however, the wait takes a decade. And that's where Part 2's story begins, but this movie isn't really about Cho Yi Hang; in fact he only makes a small appearance near the end of the movie. Instead, the movie focuses upon the small group that lays siege to the witch's lair.
Sunny Chan stars as the newlywed husband who must reclaim his wife. Richard Sun plays the little brother who must help his brother fight the witch. Joey Memg plays the kidnapped wife. And Christy Chung gives a tomboyish performance as a woman warrior who secretly pines for Sunny Chan.
Director David Wu makes liberal use of footage from Part 1 to link the two movies together. We get several flashbacks that recount the events and help explain the characters. But still, it's difficult to imagine anyone seeing Part 2 without having first seen Lien Ni Chang and Cho Yi Hang fall in love in Part 1 and battle the terrible brother/sister back-to-back Siamese Twin creature and its vicious cult.
The Bride With White Hair 2 is an astonishingly beautiful movie that's filled with stunning camerawork. Forests are filled with shadows and occasional brilliant shafts of light. Mount Shin Fung is a forbidding and barren world of swirling snow and rocky precipices. The witch's lair glows with a teasing hint of soft-focused, soft-core porn. And the battle scenes are filmed in an impressionistic blur of slow-motion and bone-jarring editing.
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