Grace Lam and Sophie Ngan in "Hooker's World"

“Hooker’s World” has its problems. It was shot and cut as if the director and editor learned their craft from watching American soap operas—there are lingering close-ups that end almost every scene and actors who always look vaguely troubled or perplexed. There are very few sets and the ones they have look cheap and flimsy. The costumes looked like the actors simply showed up in their casual clothing and didn’t change—the lovely Grace Lam for example, wears a T-shirt with a small Batman logo for most of the film. This is a very static movie, with little movement within the frame—actors sat or stood and talked to each other. Not even the make-up was done well or even correctly. Grace Lam used a lot of glitter in her eye shadow and mascara so there were little flashes of light whenever she blinked—an interesting and most likely unintended effect.

The picture on the DVD cover would have gone a long way in redeeming "Hooker's World" if it had been part of a scene but it wasn't.

The script is a puzzle of crooked cops, righteous pimps and whores with hearts of gold On one side there is a pimp who lives with five of his prostitutes and his mother (Teresa Ha Ping) in an apartment. The pimp Luke (Ronnie Cheung Ho-Lung) is a real gentleman, the hookers are cooperative and friendly with each other and mom stays in the kitchen cooking for the crew. The other side is the anti-vice unit of the police force. One of their operatives, played by Simon Loui Yu-Yeung, is also an enthusiastic consumer of services offered by hookers. He has terrible timing—he was the last customer of one of Ronnie’s girls shortly before her murder. Grace Lam plays on both teams—she is an undercover officer sent to infiltrate Luke’s operation, not as a sex worker but as his girlfriend from the Mainland.

Grace Lam with a gun and then looking concerned

Two scenes show are emblematic of the trouble with “Hooker’s World”. In the first Grace Lam Nga-Si is shown folding clothes. There is a THIRTY-SIX second scene with two shots of her taking blouses from hanger and putting them into her suitcase. She is very efficient and looks lovely while folding but there is simply no reason to watch her.

Tilted Grace Lam

The second scene is ONE MINUTE AND FIFTY-THREE SECONDS of Simon Loui sitting in his apartment dialing a number on a cell phone and not getting through. He called about five times, paced a bit, then lit a cigarette and turned on the television—and did nothing else. It was one of the most astonishingly uncinematic two minutes of screen time I have ever seen.

Sophie Ngan trying to figure things out

There are actors who could make stuff like that interesting. If Maggie Cheung was filmed folding and putting away every costume in the Shaw Brothers wardrobe department I would be first in line to buy a ticket. I would love to see a movie of Juliette Binoche dialing every number in the Paris phone book and not reaching anyone. Grace Lam and Simon Loui simply aren’t able to pull it off.

Teresa Mak in "The Peeping"

“The Peeping” is a political thriller uneasily mixed with softcore pornography, essentially a mystery with a twist ending interrupted by scenes of extremely attractive people simulating sex often but not always in very dark sets that kept the naughty bits properly obscured. Teresa Mak and Grace Lam were in two other films together, “Electrical Girl” and “Tortured Sex Goddesses of the Ming Dynasty” in which they were the actresses who kept their clothes on. Here they eagerly throw off their clothes and jump into bed while being watched on the cameras of surveillance expert Daniel Wu. There are plenty of twists and turns in the plot, some which make more sense than others.

Grace Lam shows up in Daniel Wu's seedy Hong Kong private detective office with an offer that is so good he almost has to refuse it--one million (Hong Kong) dollars to place audio and video devices in the apartment of a Taiwanese councilor played by Teresa Mak, record everything that happens and get the original tape with no copies made to Grace. This is an easy job for someone of Wu's skill so most of the fee must be for something besides bugging the apartment.

We are never far from the next torrid encounter between Teresa and Grace or Teresa and Daniel or even a (clothed) breast size comparison between Teresa and Daniel's girlfriend played by Yum Kong-Sau. Both lead actresses look their most erotically enchanting though when simply looking at us through the camera:

Things don't improve from here, though. The seduction/sex scene between Teresa and Grace starts out clumsily and is shot and edited more to keep everyone's breasts covered than for an erotic punch so (astounded as I am to be writing this) it simply drags to an ending.

Here Teresa might be about to tell Grace to stop standing on her toe:

Since both are experienced and talented actresses the scene gets a bit steamier as it progresses:

There a some odd scenes that seem to be thrown in to insure both an adequate running time and the requisite amount of female flesh including this one in which Daniel's girlfriend, played by Yum Kong-Sau, who is jealous of the time Daniel spends mooning over the feed from the apartment, confronts Teresa in a restroom using what she thinks is her best weapon--her breast size. Teresa wins this round although it is hard to tell why since both women are wearing lingerie that could serve as a breastplate for Queen Boadiciea:

Things go seriously awry late in the film when the characters played by Teresa Mak and Grace Lam double cross each other. One result is shown here--Daniel Wu is in the background wondering why he passed up his chance to go to law school while Grace Lam wonders why the duct tape confining her is so loose.