Oh, how you've waited for this day. Maybe. It's been years since that former staple of Hong Kong Cinema - the ancient costume Category III sexploitation flick - has reared its soft-focus head, but the wait is now over. The Forbidden Legend: Sex & Chopsticks returns that hallowed genre to Hong Kong Cinema, bringing with it the fleshy beauties, questionably attractive leading men, softcore couplings, and game silliness that have so enchanted midnight movie audiences worldwide. Action, crime, and arthouse films have more international cachet, but do audiences in Europe and North America care more about opulent softcore pornography than a well-written, acted and directed romantic comedy? I'm guessing that they do, and thanks to the geniuses(?) at My Way Films, those people and their raincoats can head back to the cinemas. A round of beers and high-fives for everyone.

Hold on a sec - this isn't typical softcore sleaze. Nope, this is wannabe classy stuff, since it's based on Jin Ping Mei, a.k.a. The Plum in the Golden Vase, a famous 17th century novel considered to be among the major classical novels of Chinese literature, right next to a little book called The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Thanks to both Sex & Chopsticks and Red Cliff, 2008 is now the year that the classics have returned to Hong Kong Cinema. Okay, that's a bit of an overstatement - as is comparing Sex & Chopsticks director Chin Man-Kei (Sex and Zen 2) to John Woo - but seeing this film get theatrical play does feel a bit nostalgic. Back in Hong Kong Cinema's heyday (i.e., the time they used to release 200+ movies per year), you'd be guaranteed a few of these films per year. That's not the case now, with the industry suffering so completely that even a film that's considered a hit can't earn its budget back at the box office. In today's rough moviemaking climate, movies like Sex & Chopsticks are now a welcome event.

But is this a quality event? Well, yeah, if you rate quality according to the amount of flesh, silliness, and surprise that the movie doles out. Historically, Sex & Chopsticks may be a welcome development, but it doesn't belong to a genre that's exactly renowned for its artistic quality. Sex & Chopsticks can't match up to the standard bearers of the genre (Sex and Zen and A Chinese Torture Chamber Story, to mention two), but manages to qualify as simple, solid softcore with a smattering of action, dirty humor, and some decent production values to shore things up. It's still a cheap production; the film gets really grainy every time a visual effect shows up, and one large prop is conspicuously reused. Also, when the film takes a detour to a nunnery, all the nuns - save the main female actress - are played by young boys, with their master played by an old bald man! They're all dubbed with femme-sounding voices, but the rationale here isn't comedy, it's budget. Seriously, does anyone think the filmmakers had the money to pay a dozen girls to shave their heads? Obviously not, so they paid only one, and spend less than five minutes at the nunnery so things don't get too disturbing. The filmmakers get an "A" for fiscal responsibility.