Lily Chung Movies

The push and pull of familial bonds and clashing cultures sets the stage for the comic drama Chutney Popcorn. Renna (Nisha Ganatra) is a young woman of Indian descent living in New York, where she works as both a photographer and a body artist who creates henna tattoos. Renna is also a lesbian, which does not please her mother, Meenu (Madhur Jaffrey), who prefers to dote on her more traditionally minded (and happily married) daughter Sarita (Sakina Jeffrey). One day, Renna gets some bad news from Sarita: While she and her husband have been trying to have a baby, her doctor has informed that her she is infertile and will never bear a child of her own. Renna volunteers to serve as surrogate mother for Sarita; she wants to help her sister and hopes this will smooth some of the rough spots in her relationship with her mother. But Renna starts to have second thoughts, as her lover Lisa (Jill Hennessy) feels left out of the loop, and Meenu thinks both Renna and Sarita are making a mistake. Nisha Ganatra co-wrote and directed Chutney Popcorn and also plays Renna; the film was enthusiastically received in its screening at the 1999 Los Angeles Independent Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Hong Kong filmmaker Man Kei Chin's outrageous style is already well-known to viewers of his cult fantasy Sex and Zen II, and in this softcore Category III horror-comedy, he takes some particularly kinky liberties with the magical horror subgenre. A group of friends takes a trip to Thailand some time in the 21st century and runs into a mighty sorcerer, whose sister they accidentally kill. When they get back to Hong Kong, the sorcerer's curse follows them and they begin to die in peculiar and flamboyant ways. One is victim of the Hungry Ghost Hex, and begins cannibalizing diners at a restaurant before eating his own arm, another butchers his family with a meat cleaver before jumping off a building and being impaled on a neon sign, and poor Kong (Tsui Kam-Kong) has his head turned into first a penis and then a pincushion. Julie Lee has an entertaining aerial sex scene, veteran Lo Mang appears in a cameo as a Taoist priest, and Yuen King-tan plays yet another hysterical hair stylist. Eventually, besieged heroine May (Ellen Chan) turns to her best friend Mei (Lily Chung), a Thai sorceress, to save her and Kong from the curse. Chan Kwok-pong co-stars with Ben Ng in this romp that is strictly for adults only. ~ Robert Firsching, Rovi

This mean-spirited category III thriller from Hong Kong filmmaker Ivan Lai was a smash-hit at the box office and spawned two sequels, despite (or perhaps because of) its offbeat mixture of bathroom comedy and brutal sexual violence. Lily Chung stars as Mak Wei-fong, the sole survivor of the Mak family's vicious murder. Gruff police Captain Lui (Anthony Wong) believes that Wei-fong's boyfriend Kin (Hugo Ng) is responsible for the crimes, but Wei-fong insistently claims culpability herself. It doesn't take Lui long to rule out Kin and accept Wei-fong's version of events, which is borne out in an extended and gruesome flashback detailing the violent sexual abuse she underwent at the hands of her insane stepfather (William Ho), and the silent complicity of her other relatives. The distasteful events are exacerbated rather than leavened by Lui's crass attempts at humor, and the entire thing has the air of one of the more extreme Japanese Nikkatsu "roughies" transplanted to Hong Kong. Nevertheless, it was quite successful with audiences, leading most of the surviving cast to return for Brother of Darkness, which in turn led to Daughter of Darkness II. ~ Robert Firsching, Rovi