China Chow

(In French, On Cable TV, June 2022) As I accumulate decades as an avid film-watcher, it’s interesting to look at the careers of a few people, and see whether (and how) they made it or didn’t. I was rather charmed by China Chow’s debut performance in the forgotten 1998 Mark Wahlberg action comedy The Big Hit, for instance – and thought she’d go on to have a decent follow-up career: after all, wasn’t she cute, funny and young? Well, it turns out she became Wahlberg’s girlfriend following this film, and apparently wasn’t all that interested (or interesting) enough in acting to stick it out: As of today, her filmography as an actress barely stretches over ten titles in the decade following The Big Hit, with a few other assorted odds and ends since then. That happens! As unbelievable as it may seem to non-cinephiles or filmmakers, not everyone means to be a big movie star. Aside from The Big Hit, her other noteworthy film is Frankenfish, and it’s not much of a highlight – a rather standard creature feature in which mutated fish terrorize a dwindling cast of characters in the Louisiana Bayou, it’s the kind of horror film that seems made for casual consumption and immediate forgetfulness. Chow shows up for half the film and gets a horribly striking death scene (she’s not the final girl) but otherwise there’s not a lot more to say. Some of the English-language dialogue is amusing, but you wouldn’t know it from the French dub. The scenery is above average for a film of that type, although the CGI is clearly cheap and from the mid-2000s. Even for those rare filmgoers still curious about Chow, there’s not a lot to recommend here – Frankenfish is more or less what anyone would expect from the stock premise and budget level.