BODY WEAPON is a bizarre mix of the incredibly perverse and sleazy with the kind of dumb, slapstick humour better known from Hong Kong productions like the Lucky Stars series. It's a real oddity, and anything but an entertaining film. Sadly, Hong Kong Legends saw fit to release it under the pretence of it being a martial arts film, but action fans will be disappointed as the movie contains hardly any fight scenes.Things kick off with an awful rape/murder sequence which was heavily cut by UK censors (having read about it, I can understand the thinking behind this piece of censorship). The villain is a sadistic guy in a gimp outfit, heavily indebted to that infamous scene in Tarantino's PULP FICTION, no doubt. Right away the film cuts from that to some light comedy among the police officers who make up the movie's leads, and half an hour goes by with the same kind of useless shenanigans and pointless drivel.Then the film realises it's meant to be a thriller and throws in another rape scene, along with lots of unnecessary sex clearly designed for the purposes of titillation. By this stage, I was ready to turn it off, but as a completionist I waited out till the end. I wish I hadn't bothered: there are a few fight scenes thrown into the mix, but they're largely pointless and they certainly don't make up for the film's many deficits.Chiu Man Chuh is heavily featured on the UK release but it soon becomes apparent that his role in the film is relatively minor, with much of the running time given over to newcomer Angie Cheung, whose acting is nothing to write home about. One unintentionally hilarious aspect of the film is the whodunit angle involving the main villain, which will be immediately obvious to all and sundry as soon as the guy is introduced without his suit on. The film also manages to be completely offensive to gay people in the process. Nope, nothing's going to get me to like this useless movie, a truly silly attempt to create something unsavoury which falls flat on its face from the outset.

What a total waste of Vincent Zhao! He should NOT have done this movie! I daresay this one killed his movie career, relegating him to TV for a decade! Yes, that is how bad this movie is. The people behind this movie should be glad that Vincent Zhao got to do True Legend after a ten year break from the big screen. If he didn't, that would have seriously damaged their karma.This thing called Body Weapon is everything a movie should not be. It's a sleazy, cheap, totally offensive cringer of a career killer.If you enjoy seeing poor Vincent Zhao embarrassing himself, if you want to see HK cinema fail, if you hate decent films, then by all means watch this movie! If not, then do yourself and Vincent Zhao the favour of NOT watching this 'thing'!

Misleadingly (but cannily) titled and packaged as an action thriller with a tough female lead (she only gets to use her body as a "weapon" twice in the entire film, and even then not in the way you probably imagine), "Body Weapon" is a total disappointment. I wonder if the filmmakers knew what they were going for, because they try lots of different things, none of them done well; the movie is by turns hokey (those sound effects!), sleazy, plodding and sentimental, never finding its tone. The heroine says at one point that she wants to transform herself into "a woman that any man would die for"; she never gets there. (**)

I was hoping for some great displays of Wu Shu from Chiu Man Chuk - I was sadly disappointed. This is a shame because although there were glimpses of his talents, he was severely restricted by this material. This "material" involves an opening gang-rape scene which leaves an unpleasant aftertaste in the mouth. This refuses to go away throughout the film.I could go into further depth about why this film is crude, nasty, voyeuristic and exploitative (in an amateurish way), but due to the shallowness of its premise and its flimsy plot, it doesn't deserve a fuller review.This is a sub-standard HK Category III film and should be avoided by martial arts fans at all costs.