Victim of a dangerous serial rapist
This emphasis on Athena's sexiness, consecutive to her new collaboration with Wong Jing, found its ultimate embodiment in the infamous Raped By An Angel film series. The first Raped By An Angelbelonged to the Category III trend that hit the British colony from 1991 to 1994. With Athena under Wong's management and her good popularity as well as her willingness to act sexily, the influent producer decided to give Raped By An Angel a sequel. In order to limit the risks, this new feature was given a minimal budget. The entire story, and the promotion focused on Athena, on this idea that she MAY appear naked… Of course, the star was too conscious of the harm such an extreme move could do to her career. Examples of actresses such as Rachel Lee before her are still vivid and, after all, her career is not doing really bad to justify such desperate measures. Consequently, Raped By An Angel 2 is an erotic movie with very limited eroticism and even less work made on the script and the characters. So, let's make things clear: The film's only interest lies on the young actress performance! Not the actual acting, as the extremely weak script didn't allow it, but the sheer level of sexiness Chu displays. Playing with her uniforms or under the threat of a serial rapist (!), Athena made the show! But when she was not there, goodbye everybody… Even Francis Ng or Aman Cheung's efforts couldn't hide the mediocrity of the script, the lack of character development or the obvious lack of time and money invested in the whole production. Still, the flair of Wong Jing should never be underestimated as well as the attractive power a pretty girl can have on male audience and Raped by an Angel 2 was finally quite a success, gathering a bit more than 10 million $HK.
Despite this surprisingly good box office result, Athena Chu was careful not to be typecast as an erotic actress and didn't explore much further the exploitation/category III path.
Athena tracking serial rapists in Raped By An Angel 4
Consequently, her participation to the fourth instalment was mostly symbolic and probably as a favor for Wong Jing himself, so as to have a big name on the poster and to guarantee minimum grossing. This was quite a good move from the actress given the utter mediocrity of the final piece! |