Fridae

The original cut of Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy runs 129 minutes. The version you’ll see in Singapore’s cinemas runs 102 minutes. The Hong Kong version runs 118 minutes while the Australians get to see 113 minutes of what the director intended for his audience. I’m not going to comment on the Singapore film classification board and the local distributor’s curious insistence that Singaporeans are getting the uncut “International release” version, but I’ll say that there’s no way you can shrink an erotic film by almost a quarter without losing most of its eroticism, coherence, or continuity.

As the legendary video rental shopkeeper Albert Odell is long dead, I’ll leave his intellectual heirs to release a painstaking list of every single detail that was edited out for the Singapore release. You can read one of these efforts for yourself at http://gssq.blogspot.com/2011/07/what-they-cut-in-3d-sex-and-zen-extreme.html and http://gssq.blogspot.com/2011/07/what-they-cut-in-3d-sex-and-zen-extreme_22.html.

A remake of the original Category III softcore film based on the 17th century novel The Carnal Prayer Mat by Li Yu, Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy is a return to the cheeky, ridiculously campy erotic escapades of 1990s Hong Kong film. But the more I watched this film, the more I felt this was a far cry from the original Sex and Zen series that I snuck into cinemas to watch as a junior college student in Singapore. Then I looked at the list of edits and knew what had happened: most of the sexual play or indeed most of the sex has been edited out for the Singapore release.

If you feel that erotica is dreary, repetitive, boring, and consists of mostly missionary sex and breast fondling and an inordinate amount of corny monster dick sight gags, that’s because everything that makes erotica fun (like foreplay, role play, and kinky sex) was snipped out – or as I put it, sextectomised. Even the cornerstone orgy scene of this film has been cut out completely.

Hong Kong reviewers complained that the moral of the story (“you don’t need sex if you have true love”) seemed tacked on but viewers in Singapore will have no difficulty swallowing this canard especially when there’s really nothing exciting or interesting about what little sex and debauchery they see in the film.

I must congratulate the local distributors for releasing Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy in this state. Perhaps they could try their prowess on gems like Caligula and turn it into a film about a paranoid Roman emperor who was cruel to his political rivals, regularly humiliated his nobles, and was quite mean to his servants. Or how about Salo, or 120 days of Sodom? They could re-edit it into a film about a bunch of high society leaders who beat up peasants and servants while behaving badly during a week-long wedding feast. The possibilities are endless!