Sean Akizuki's East Asian Drama and Movie Blog

So I am always a holder of many unpopular opinions but I will vocalize them every now and then, especially that I like Huadu Chronicles which was a box office flop.  Maybe it's because I'm a fan of Twins.  Now I would try to understand the symbolism of the film and what it may be a commentary of.  For starters, the story is all about gender imbalance.  The emperor's once love interest had become the empress of China, has taken women's rights to the extreme and she has become a Feminazi in her own bizarre way to the point she has also banned any form of love.  Any woman caught in the act of loving a man was already declared an outcast. The main antagonist is your wicked Empress Fei who has gotten bitter. Well maybe, the men of her day were all pigs so I can't blame her in part for what happened to her.  The backstory between the empress and her twin sister (both played by the same actress) was their love for the emperor.  The emperor slept with her i...

While it is being called the Twins Effect II but it is NOT a sequel to Twins Effect I to which involved vampires so don't expect any of those bloodthirsty creatures here.  So where do we go?  So we travel all the way back to ancient China where Jaycee Chan makes his first big role as the naive hero Charcoal Head and his sidekick Block Head (acted by Wilson Chen) where they are set in a dystopian Chinese society ruled by a cruel Empress (Qu Ying) who has destroyed the gender balance by making all men outcasts and women ruling over women.  Pretty much like the Amazons of Greek mythology but she's got one huge reason to hate women. I would say this movie has insane amounts of kung fu more than the first one and a lot I mean a lot of swords and wire fu.  So the Empress is worried that the Star of Rex will appear, which "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" (played by Donnie Yen) declares that both genders will be balanced once more which the queen dreads.  The story of...