A note about the Chinese title: "Hongfen Kulou" literally means "Rouge Skeletons." "Rouge" in Chinese is a metonymy for women, similar in usage to the old term "skirts" in American English. The skeleton image appeared often in cartoon illustrations of that era to indicate something menacing, and someone in the presence of a skeleton was considered in great peril. So a 1950s Hollywood-style schlock title for this film might be something like "Deadly Dames."
Synopsis:
Hongfen Kulou (1922) 红粉骷髅 (Women Skeletons)
aka: Shi Zimei 十姊妹 (The Ten Sisters)
Xinya (New Asia), filmed by the Commercial Press Motion Picture Section. B&W. Silent. 10 reels.
Premiered May 10, 1922 at the Embassy Theater in Shanghai.
Direction and Screenplay: Guan Haifeng.
Cinematography: Liao Enshou.
Cast: Shen Zhengfeng (Huang Juying), Chai Xiaoyong (Bao Zongying), Lu Meiying (Pan Juanniang), Yin Xianfu (Huang Qian), Hong Jingling (drug dealer), Wang Guilin (chief thug).
A girl student, Huang Juying, is returning home on vacation from
school when she is struck by a car. In the hospital, she and her young
attending physician Bao Zongying gradually fall in love, and when he
proposes marriage she is impressed with his sincerity. After Juying is
released from the hospital, she makes a date to meet Zongying in a
park. He shows up early, and while waiting alone is approached by two
very attractive young women who lure the young doctor away and seduce
him. The women are part of a criminal organization called the
Insurance Gang, run by the crooked head of an insurance company. He
employs a gang of prostitutes called the Ten Sisters to prowl the
city’s clubs and parks where men look for women, luring these men with
easy sex and then robbing them. 
["Hi sailor, new in town?" Two of the gang's 'Ten Sisters' spot a potential mark]
When the gang learns that Bao Zongying has no money, the leaders
devise an alternate scheme to take out a large insurance policy on his
life and then gradually poison him for the indemnity. The young doctor
is so entranced by his carousals with the Ten Sisters he has no idea of
the danger. Meanwhile, Juying and her brother organize Bao’s hospital
co-workers for a wide-scale search. Following the clues, they at last
pinpoint the insurance company as being the gang’s headquarters. In
disguise, Juying and her brother infiltrate the gang, rescue Bao, and
then help the police round up the gang and bring their criminal
activities to a halt. The reunited lovers make plans to marry.
Production and release were well-timed: in the early 1920s,
detective movies from the West were very popular with Chinese
moviegoers, especially young people, both for their heroic characters
and their sensuality. In adapting the foreign novel for the screen,
writer-director Guan Haifeng, a veteran of the stage who had broken
into cinema by assisting legendary First Generation director Zhang Shichuan on "Victims of Opium"
transplanted the story to China. The movie featured both horror and
suspense (the doctor’s fate was in doubt almost to the end, and the
interior scenes set in the gang’s headquarters were shot in a gothic
old mansion, complete with stone walls and staircases, secret passages,
hidden rooms, a dungeon, etc.). In addition, the film made much use of
sex in showing how the male victims were lured and ensnared by the
gang.
[right, sneaking into the gang's redoubt to rescue her lover]
A newer fashion in China at the time was the form-fitting dress with high collar and slit skirt known as the "qipao" in Mandarin and the “cheongsam” in Cantonese, and when the female characters in this film wore this dress it touched off a fashion craze in Shanghai. "Women Skeletons" was a box-office success in Shanghai, Tianjin, Beijing and other Chinese cities, and was later exhibited in other Asian countries, including Japan and what is now Vietnam.
