Some of the sequences on display are breathtaking in their eroticism – like the sequence where a woman places morsels of food inside herself and masturbates the hero with a loaf of bread; or that of the hero’s wife painting Chinese characters using a paintbrush placed inside her vagina; and in one extraordinary sequence two women pleasing themselves together, humping buttock to buttock using a flute placed in their mutual vaginas.

Moreover, the film has the courage to balance its erotica out with humour. This comes in the frothy, dizzy style characteristic of Hong Kong cinema. The penis transplant sequence is an hilarious comedy of mishaps – the difficulties in knocking the donkey out in time, the doctor accidentally anaesthetising his own hands, a storm coming that turns the doctor into a maniac, the severed donkey’s penis being sent flying and impaling itself in the servant’s mouth, the dog eating the hero’s penis after it has been removed. With its free and light-hearted attitude, Sex and Zen has a lack of self-consciousness in its erotica that easily puts the guilt-ridden sensationalism of American contemporaries such as Basic Instinct (1992) and Color of Night (1994) to shame. The film does lecture the hero about the Buddhist cycle of karma at the end for his selfish ways but the tone is clearly unserious.

There was a sequel Sex & Zen II (1996) but this fairly much abandoned connection to this film, becoming a much more overtly fantastical film with characters facing demonic sex-changing chameleons. This was followed by a further unrelated entry Sex and Zen III (1998), which contains no fantasy elements and is regarded as the weakest of the series. The series was rebooted several years later with Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy (2011), which is in fact a remake of this film.