Why so much hype?

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

A Hong Kong romance, in which a young man, Miao Wei, is raped in jail, and to free his mind of the abuse he thinks of making love with a beautiful, innocent girl from home, Wenny (Vivian Hsu). When he's released from prison and married to Wenny, however, he finds he can't make love with her—the memory of the brutal rape is too fresh in his mind and too closely knit with his thoughts of her. He tells Wenny only that he has loved her too long and too deeply, which renders him unable to consummate the marriage, and she tells him gravely that she only hopes he will love her less. Wei drinks too much and has torrid sex with the woman who owns the bar where he works. Meanwhile, a frustrated photographer spots Wenny on the beach with her niece and wants to feature her as a model. She declines, but after she's discovered Wei's frequent infidelity with the other woman and he mocks her and runs away, eventually Wenny calls the photographer. A brief, swift rise to model stardom, and one fevered bout of sex on the beach at sunset. Then she's pregnant and has found Wei working at an ice house in another town, and he spurns her. But after he meets the photographer who makes vulgar comments about her and he fights the man, and after he has a bad dream about killing a rat (the symbol of bad prison flashbacks), and after his uncle urges him to live his life, he goes back. The baby is fuzzy headed and adorable, and Wei and Wenny finally make love. In the last shot the prison door opens and a voice says to Wei, "You can go home now." I guess this is at once a romance with a sexual frustration component, and a model exploitation movie that allows the beautiful Ms. Hsu to be half naked and play the part of a woman frustrated and then fulfilled, and partly a fable of psychic fragmentation and sexual healing. Not terribly good, cinematically, but Ms. Hsu is exceptionally beautiful and she does well as well as an actress can do with a somewhat amateurish and limited screenplay. Almost comically bad English subtitles.

I thought that Angel Heart was a great movie. It is the story of a man that was abused in jail and when he was freed, he would still have those images of jail while making love to his beautiful young, virgin wife played by the lovely Vivian Hsu. He begins to have an affair as the marriage falls apart since he cant have sex with his wife without horrible images of jail flying into his head.I thought that the acting in this movie was very moving and believable. Fuji TV comedian Vivian Hsu was excellent in a dramatic role. Her range is very good. Her male counterpart, played by Tony Lau I believe, the same who starred in Devil Angel with Vivian was also very good as a tortured young man. Excellent movie and highly recommended.