Hong Kong Cinema

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

Category III often gets slapped onto less crass films due to violence and nudity as seen in the films of Johnnie To or Wong Kar Wai’s Happy Together, but it has really built a reputation in recent years among the graphic tee, horror crowd for being the most extreme cinema Hong Kong has to offer.

Funnily enough Mad Detective is the only To film that earned a Category III for violence. All of his other Cat III films (Exiled and the two Election movies) earned it because they incorporate actual triad hand gestures, which are an automatic III. The HK theatrical release of Exiled removed the single shot at issue for a IIB, but it was reinstated for all of the video editions.

Category III films have always had that reputation for extremity; I remember HK Vidéo had an entire "Catégorie 3" line that included a lot of the films discussed here (Ebola Syndrome, Run and Kill, Red to Kill, etc.). The rating's been applied to a wide range of foreign films, but the vast majority of the local productions under the Cat III umbrella are definitely more in the exploitation vein. In Hong Kong it's equated with softcore porn more than anything else, and the hardcore variety is sometimes referred to as the non-existent "Category IV," kind of like how "XXX" was used in the U.S.

[Mr Sausage]

Tiger Cage (Yuen Woo-Ping, 1988)

Amazing how much melodramatic pap these high-octane action films can have. A police raid on a pair of drug selling brothers ends with one brother dead and the other on the loose, plotting a revenge that culminates in an officer being gunned down in front of his bride-to-be (for some reason in her wedding dress) on the eve of his own wedding. So begins a furious back-and-forth between cops and criminals, with crooked cops and foreign gangs coming out of the woodwork. It’s predictably plotted, with decent action that comes at frequent intervals. While Yuen Woo-Ping is the better fight choreographer, I’d say Cory Yuen is the more inventive director. Yuen Woo-Ping’s films lack the creative blocking and camerawork that distinguishes Cory Yuen’s best stuff and makes so many of his films classics. However frantic the action here, there’s a prosaic craftsmanship to the filmmaking that contrasts with the visual energy of something like She Shoots Straight. I’d rank this slightly below In the Line of Duty III and IV. Oh, and it’s just so hard to take Jackie Cheung seriously with that face of his.

Tiger Cage II (Yuen Woo-Ping, 1990)

This is more like it. The action is upped two-fold over the first, coming with ridiculous frequency and full of creative energy. Only nominally a sequel. The plot is unrelated and the cast is new except for Donnie Yen and Carol Cheng, who play different characters. Yen, thankfully, is the lead here, being a more believable action star than Jackie Cheung, while Rosamund Kwan gets saddled with the annoying, whiny female role. Action comedy is the vibe here, with Yen and Kwan forming a comic double act and many of the action scenes being structured around some comic device, like Kwan and Yen being handcuffed together, or Kwan having to escape while carting two unconscious guys at the same time. There’s one excellent bit where a guy hiding on the ceiling of a dark tunnel has his tie accidentally lit on fire and has to watch in panicked silence as it climbs ever upward while the gunmen below search for him. While some eyerolling juvenile nonsense is present, a good portion of the comedy really lands. Yen’s also improved as an action performer. His martial arts has always been exemplary, but in his early films, including the first Tiger Cage, he gave more an impression of showing off his moves than being in an actual fight. There was too much precision and posture to his movements. By this point he’d learned to be a performer rather than a demonstrator, and his fights have more weight and drama as a result. One of the best action films I’ve seen this whole project. Unreasonably exciting, with good humour and a real story properly told--this is great.

Tiger Cage III (Yuen Woo-Ping, 1991)

What even makes this a Tiger Cage film I don’t know. No returning actors, and none of the characters are regular cops but financial crime investigators on the trail of a rich asshole’s insider trading operation. The story has two acts, the first a straightforward cops and robbers film, nothing out of the ordinary except for some superb action scenes and a grim trajectory; the second is weirder, a noirish femme fatale plot mixed with a revenge drama with Phantom of the Opera/Beauty and the Beast overtones. The two acts do flow logically into one another on a plot level, but otherwise have very different aims and could almost be two different movies. More of a downer after the lighthearted fun of the second film. The heroes suffer endless grim setbacks, and secondary characters die at a rapid pace. How does this compare to the other two? The first is probably the better movie, but the strangeness and novelty of this one, plus the superior action, made me like it a lot more. So much of the first was routine, while this was often unpredictable. The second movie is still the best of the three, tho’, a wild and funny bit of energy that had both the best action scenes and the most interesting plot. If you’re going to watch any of these, make it the second; it stands with the best of the subgenre.

[therewillbeblus]

Run and Kill (Billy Tang, 1993)

An exploitative riff on Strangers on a Train. A spineless, pathetic fat guy catches his wife cheating on him. He goes out, gets shitfaced, and while nursing his wounds and brooding on his cowardice, accidentally puts out a hit on his wife. Everything spirals into madness after that. As unpleasant as the movie is to watch, it does have a grimy gusto to it. Rather than gritty, fatalistic intensity, there’s a sense of the fantastic, a heightened emotional realm where a pile up of improbable situations capped off by some gleeful grotesquerie all shares the same organic absurdity. What I’m mostly reminded of is the cheerful excesses and wallowing in violence and despair of later Jacobean tragedy. Obviously a mean little exploitation thriller isn’t going to match the majesty of Renaissance poetry (its construction is best described as indifferent), but the performative extremity, the reveling in sleaze and gore while conjuring up bizarre dramatic complications, seems much the same thing. All that’s missing is the moralistic salve at the end.

This was obviously built around a willful charge to engage in shameless depravity, but the overstated comic edge really made all of it work wonders as a piece of absurdist art. This functions as a dark comedy in part from the relentless series of unexpectedly high-stakes social misunderstandings with cops and criminals, but would surely fail without Kent Cheng's incredibly diverse range within a seemingly one-note performance. His buffoonish persona succeeds in casual exchanges at the bar, intense interactions suffocated by demanding violence, slapstick visual gags with and without props, and really anything thrown at him. Cheng also sells the more somber edge of his predicament when the hazardous stack of gruesome activity induces trauma, resilient only in fight/flight mode but appropriately devolving into the pathetic character he is in the final frames.

I'm not sure if this is par for the course in these "category III" films, or if this is atypically drowning in winking gallows humor bordering on farce. Or.. if I'm just sick and the only one finding this movie a laugh riot...

[Mr Sausage]

I mean, you probably are a sicko, but you’re right about the absurd, farcical tone the film descends to. I was never outright laughing, but I did snort a number of times, like when Cheng accidentally knocks the head off of…you know. Or the endless spills he suffers in the final chase. Just the excessive bad luck set against the excessive cheeriness of the start, plus the ridiculous pile up of new ways of suffering for no reason. It’s amusement of a kind.

The other Category III films I wrote up share the same absurdist, inappropriate gallows humour. They revel in the comic side of human degradation—and that both makes them more watchable and more reprehensible. There are kicks to be had; it just depends on how much rape and child murder you’re willing to put up with.

[Mr Sausage]

The Iceman Cometh (Clarence Fok, 1989)

Demolition Man I guess lifted its plot from this one: two Ming Dynasty warriors fall into a crevasse while battling to the death, are frozen, then revived in modern Hong Kong. I say Ming Dynasty, but they’re really wuxia fantasy heroes and villains. This is a clash of genres, wuxia fantasy and the modern thriller, as much as historical periods. Good lord this movie is in bad taste. It introduces Maggie Cheung with triad members threatening her into enacting some rich guy’s rape and bondage fantasy in a limo. When the scientists defrost the combatants and find them frozen mid grapple, one intones, “it shows there was homosexuality in ancient times”, to which his colleague quips, “that means there was AIDS in ancient times, too.” One of the comic bits has Yuen Biao drinking water from a toilet bowl and complaining that it’s salty. There are some nice conceits amid the gross humour, like Yuen Biao learning of the fall of the Ming Dynasty from watching a historical drama on tv, but the comedy is just so hard to take, even if Maggie Cheung gives it her all. To be more positive, everything’s done with great energy and style, and the stunt work is sometimes so extreme the film will show certain stunts several times from multiple angles so there’s no mistaking it for trickery. Yuen Wah legitimately jumps across the roofs of moving cars with no safety harness, as you can see with his increasingly desperate attempts to keep his balance. Like Tiger on Beat I enjoyed the action tremendously when it came, but mostly endured the rest.

[Mr Sausage]

Long Arm of the Law (Johnnie Mak, 1984)

An early heroic bloodshed action movie in which a group of mainlanders sneak into Hong Kong to pull off a robbery. This isn’t a heist movie, more a grim crime film of desperation and fatalism--ostensibly, anyway. There are bizarre, tonally incongruous flashbacks to romantic memories with cheesy music laid over top and numerous comic scenes. I guess it’s meant to give us a tonal break, but it disrupts the rough and ready feel of the movie, with its eye for the poverty, social stratification, and oppressive urban atmosphere of Hong Kong, all filmed on location on the real streets, slums, malls, and nightclubs. There’s a degree of authenticity that grounds the melodrama and carries the movie through its somewhat stop-and-start plot structure and thin characterization. The film is more potential than realisation; there’s a lot that could’ve been done with the story given a more talented director and writer. It can be intense and exciting, and, again, the location shooting and cinema verite techniques lends great atmosphere. Otherwise, the film doesn’t sustain the right narrative propulsion and sweaty desperation, having no clear through-line and often getting hung up on minor comic scenes that go nowhere. The film doesn’t really get started until 50 minutes in, when everything starts going wrong. But the finale, starting on the hills and moving into the claustrophobic maze of the Kowloon walled city, is exemplary, a masterpiece of sustained intensity. And it finds a note to end on that’s so perfect and bleak that you could almost be convinced the movie is a masterpiece.

[Mr Sausage]

Crime Story (Kirk Wong, 1993)

A change of pace for Jackie Chan, a serious police thriller with a minimum of clowning and acrobatics. Chan, a police officer dealing with the trauma of being involved in a violent shootout, is assigned to protect a businessman from kidnap. Kent Cheng is a police officer leading the group of would-be kidnappers. I appreciated the relative lack of comedy; I don’t think I could’ve taken more Cantonese clowning. There are still some classic Jackie Chan bits, including some fine comedy action during a chase atop bamboo rafters or a Rube Goldberg-esque gauntlet of punishment in the bowels of a ship. The climax, shot in Kowloon’s Walled City right before its scheduled demolition, is insane, an endless series of explosions, each more hair raising and death defying, culminating in the filmmakers legitimately blowing up an entire building complex. The problem with the movie is that while it has definite pleasures, those pleasures are in a diluted form: it has fewer stunts, comedic fights, and crazy set-pieces than your regular Chan film, but it’s also not as intense and driven, action-wise, as a Jet Li or Donnie Yen thriller. It rides a pleasant middle ground where you’re satisfied but not impressed. I’d rather watch Police Story or In the Line of Duty IV overall, but I enjoyed myself here.

[Mr Sausage]

So Close (Corey Yuen, 2002)

Made the same year as The Transporter, an unsatisfying American action film Yuen co-directed with Louis Leterrier. Despite some occasional slick choreography and light wire-fu, that film didn’t much resemble a Hong Kong film. In returning to his Girls With Guns roots with So Close, you'd expect Corey Yuen to show that American production how it's done, just like Chan did when he made Police Story in response to the American bungling of The Protector. Yuen even brought with him Shu Qi, the damsel in distress in The Transporter, and made her the badass action hero. And yet So Close is no return to form for Yuen. It’s goofy and eye rolling with uninspired action, replacing the fury and creativity of Yuen’s 80s/90’s work with slower, show-offy stylizations relying on bad CGI. The inspiration is less the Girls With Guns style Yuen pioneered and more McG’s Charlie’s Angels, a film inspired by The Matrix which was itself inspired by Hong Kong action. So Close is Hong Kong cannibalizing itself at two removes. I shouldn’t’ve been surprised; Yuen had spent the early part of the decade as Jet Li’s action choreographer in Hollywood. Tho’ better edited, the action scenes here are unmistakably early 2000s Hollywood. The film is also a light romance (knowingly, as one character sometimes reads aloud from romance novels). I’m not as familiar with Hong Kong films from the 2000s, and I’m having trouble articulating it, but the film has the unmistakable feel of Chinese light romantic dramas, a kind of flowery, cutesy tone and a photography style that favours slow motion, immaculate dove whites, and a certain crisp, manicured look to everything, actors especially. Again, hard to articulate, but I pegged it immediately even without being that familiar with the genre--it just has a particular feel to it. I don’t know if it’s the romantic element or a change in social mores in Hong Kong, but the film is more overtly sexualized. 80s & 90s HK action films tended to treat sexuality with immaturity, as something for laughs, but the actresses here are photographed as erotic objects, and many of their fight scenes have a poised, low-impact choreography meant to dampen the impression of pain or injury and maintain their model-perfect looks. A far cry from the heyday of Michelle Yeoh and Joyce Godenzi. I only sought this movie out because I watched The Transporter 2 last night (where Yuen was downgraded from co-director to simply action director) and was dissatisfied enough to want to see the real thing. But I guess Hong Kong action had changed as well upon entering the new decade, if this is anything to go by. I know Tsui was still going for the crazy, balls-out action style in stuff like Time and Tide, but Corey Yuen was taking his cues from elsewhere. There are a couple bright spots, tho': Karen Mok gives a charming comedic performance, and the inclusion of queer themes is welcome (tho’ puzzling as I thought depicting homosexuality was banned in China).

[knives]

The Transporter is actually French, not American.

[Mr Sausage]

The Transporter is actually French, not American.

Oh yeah, it’s one of those Luc Besson deals, isn’t it. Even tho’ technically French it’s still wholly American.

[Michael Kerpan]

It's been many years since I last saw So Close (probably on VCD), but I retain fond memories of it -- largely due to the performances of the actress trio. Not sure I can even play VCDs anymore (except maybe with VLC on my computer -- not anything I've tried to do for more than 10 years).

[hanshotfirst1138]

The Transporter is a Luc Besson joint; filmed in English because there’s more money, but with a French crew and a Hong Kong fight team.

Brand new restored versions of Royal Warriors, Tiger on the Beat, and Full Contact are being released on Blu in Germany. Full Contact is an interesting one as I thought that was among the stack of major titles that were being held by Golden Princess.

I don’t know why they included English subtitles, but God bless them for it.

Oh, and there’s a “company” out there called Hong Kong Rescue. They sound too good to be true and they are. It’s one person running the entire operation, and not only is it all bootleg, but you never, ever receive what you order.

[feihong]

Brand new restored versions of Royal Warriors, Tiger on the Beat, and Full Contact are being released on Blu in Germany. Full Contact is an interesting one as I thought that was among the stack of major titles that were being held by Golden Princess.

I don’t know why they included English subtitles, but God bless them for it.

Koch Media has been releasing a lot of Shaw Bros. movies on blu-ray over the last few years, and they have started to quietly include English subtitles on the discs. Maybe that bumped their sales enough for other companies to consider this. There's also another German company called TVP, I think, that has had English subtitled blu-rays of The Savage Five, Delightful Forest, and The Crippled Avengers out for year, too. I think some of the German companies have been making this choice for a while now––though I have to say, most Koch releases, including their deep spaghetti western library and their blu-rays of Joint Security Area, The Isle, Branded to Kill, Lady Snowblood, etc., have not had English subs on the discs.

While it's true I never received a physical copy of the last disc I ordered from Hong Kong Rescue, up until now, the guy always shipped everything. It would often take a very long time for the discs to arrive. There are other options for his work now besides physical media, which makes it all easier for people tired of waiting. But in the past it was not a scam on the customer.

[Mr Sausage]

Devil Hunters (Chun Ku-Lu, 1989)

An adrenaline-fueled, low-budget Girls With Guns film. The action is furious and outlandish in the exact way I like, but the overcranking sometimes makes things a bit Keystone Cops. The plot’s all over the place, there are too many characters, the heroes can jump out of the way of any bullet ever created, a woman is tortured by having locusts thrown at her, and I’m pretty sure Ray Lui was using Robocop’s gun. Which is to say, I had a blast. The film is infamous for having no ending. A mistimed explosion engulfed the three lead actors in flame, burning them severely and shutting down production. Rather than a real ending, the film shows the insane failed stunt several times before putting up a text card praising the actors and wishing for their speedy recovery, followed by a real newspaper clips of the aftermath. It’s in astonishing bad taste. The stunt is insane to watch, and, yeah, over 30 years makes this ancient history. But you’re still watching these actors endure horrific injuries that no doubt left permanent scars (how Sibelle Hu avoided severe facial scarring I don’t know) while the film capitalizes on it for more ticket sales. I’m often left in giddy joy at Hong Kong’s death-defying stunts, and while that final scene is transfixing enough I replayed it several times, the whole thing leaves me conflicted. One of the craziest things I’ve ever seen, but also exploitative of real human suffering.


The Stunt Woman (Ann Hui, 1996)

An episodic semi-autobiographical film about Yeoh’s experience in Hong Kong film industry. Yeoh plays a stunt woman known for taking on risky assignments. She starts out as a casual day laborour on film sets, but through a willingness to endure enormous pain without complaint, quickly becomes a valued member of a stunt team led by Sammo Hung in a performance far outside his norm and, I’m guessing, more true to his actual offscreen nature. The movie has a documentary fascination, giving an inside look at the production of Hong Kong movies, the techniques they use to produce the insane stunts, and the casual, loosely controlled environment it all happens in. That people weren’t dying regularly is surprising. A fascinating look at an industry and also an attitude. Stunt performers as jobbing tradesman in a demanding industry. A portrait too of loneliness, identity, the need for fulfillment. One of the latter sections is interesting since, from what I can gather, it mirrors one of Yeoh’s unhappiest times directly: how she married and was pressured into leaving the industry to be a good housewife, only for neglect and adultery to drive her into divorce and a big return to film. The most troubling section of the film is the last, where the movie ceases its careful, quiet focus on small human dramas and becomes like the action films it had previously been about. It’s strange, but I’m not convinced it wasn’t deliberate. It’s my first Ann Hui, so I’m at a disadvantage when it comes to interpreting her methods. Is she attempting to marry the commercial concerns of Hong Kong cinema with her interest in small human dramas? Appropriately, sadly, Yeoh nearly died filming a fall from a bridge. Footage of her injury is shown over the credits, but unlike the exploitative use of the same in Devil Hunters, the impression the footage gives is of the enormous care and concern all the other stunt performers have for Yeoh as they rush to her aid. It is, by accident, a real life demonstration of the mood and themes of the movie itself.


Angel Terminators (Lieh Wei, 1992)

Another low budget shoot ‘em up brought to life by the excellence of the Hong Kong stunt industry. Good lord, the big battle ending the first act outdoes the climaxes to most action films, culminating in an incredible stunt where a guy is knocked from a platform, bounces off the upraised digging bucket of an excavator, and then plummets fifteen feet to the ground. The rest of the film, despite some amazing scenes, never quite matches it, either, tho’ a late film plummet onto a telephone wire is mind boggling and leads to a grimly poetic final shot. Plot wise, the movie is a mess. There are a number of plot strands that aren’t well explained. Essentially, a mob boss is back in town, the police are after him, a gambling cop and his wife with a past are drawn into the mob boss’ web, it all ends in massive death and destruction. The outline is easy enough to follow; it’s the endless incidents in between that turn it into a jumbled mess, including the fact that two of the main characters aren’t introduced until 2/3 of the movie has elapsed. I’d forgotten Kara Hui was even in this until she turns up randomly. A movie impatient of plot and character and in a hurry to get to the next creative bit of action. I can’t find much to say that I haven’t said about countless similar films in the thread, but for fans of frenetic and illogical Hong Kong action, this is a good choice.


Angel Terminators 2 (Lau Chan & Chun Ku-Lu, 1992)

A sequel in name only. It stars Sibelle Hu, Moon Lee, and Yukari Oshima, ie. the queens of low budget gun fu of the late 80s and 90s. They seem to have a huge fanbase among lovers of these sorts of films, and while the former two didn’t leave much impression on me in Devil Hunters, I found the three to be fun presences here. Lee combines a wide-eyed pixie girlishness with impressive fighting and stunts, and Oshima has a moody, punk attitude along with some serious martial arts abilities (and rocks a pair of pants with “slut” written all over). They’re a fun team. The film has less of the visual creativity of the more prestigious fare, but the stunt and action design is impossibly good and the actors are fun. The plot is all over the place. It’s just a series of things happening to the characters, sometimes logical developments, often not. It’s the same thing as always: the bad guys get so bad that everyone finally bands together to murder them. Not in the top echelon, but a great example of the second rank.


Running out of Time (Johnnie To, 1999)

My first proper Johnnie To movie. A gangster with only months to live orchestrates an elaborate game with a hot shot police negotiator. The fun of the movie, besides the ever-ratcheting tension, is discovering what the game is even about. The movie has a playfulness to it, a sense of black fun as you watch the cop and robber match wits and develop an uneasy camaraderie. There’s a playful humour to even the tensest moments. This is a cinematic game, something you watch, aware it’s constructed, and colluding with the filmmaker to make it all work. It’s very enjoyable.


School on Fire (Ringo Lam, 1988)

A grim, chaotic look at school life in triad infested Hong Kong. What’s so disturbing is the sheer irrationality of the world of the film. All power exercised in the film, legitimate or illegitimate, legal or criminal, is both petty and forcefully misdirected. Institutional authorities like schools and the police are inadequate against the triads, but will overexercise authority against those it feels are really in its grasp, ie. the innocent. The police scream and shout at the kids they drag in as tho’ they were criminals and not scared witnesses, but will essentially cooperate with the triad bosses to keep the situation level. The teachers are no better, with the more committed among them hamstrung by rules and the need not to make waves on the one hand, and bullied by their triad students and the bosses on the other; the rest patently ignore misbehaviour by the connected students, but when it comes to the unconnected, are swift and indiscriminate with punishments and unconcerned with fairness or justice. Then there’s the id-driven emotionality of the triad members, who wield the most direct and persuasive authority, but are unable to govern either each other or themselves. Within this hell of frustration and stasis, innocents suffer pointlessly. Chu Yen-Fong, the protagonist, is caught in a nightmare of absurdity and illogic in which every avenue fails her. A fight breaks out, ostensibly over her, tho’ she speaks all of three words, and a student is killed in the melee. She and every other bystander are dragged in as witnesses. Despite knowing the same as every other bystander, she’s singled out by the triads and ordered to say nothing, but then bullied by the police, threatened with arrest for obstruction, if she doesn’t. The police are uninterested in her safety; her dad, a former triad member, reaches out to a boss to resolve the matter, but that ends up in a huge restaurant brawl as the gangsters show gradeschool levels of interpersonal skills. It’s a terrifying mess in which there are no good options, no freedom, and the punishments are swift and severe. A strong portrait of social despair, one that uses a casual, increasingly frenetic style to take an essentially melodramatic setup, the victimization of an innocent school girl, and turn it into a grounded, persuasive social critique without an ideological lens. That such grim subject matter can become so engrossing and entertaining is a testament to Lam’s skills as a filmmaker. He can navigate between complimentary tones so smoothly that you don’t even notice the transition from jumbled realism to heightened expression to kinetic action and back. Of the six Lam films I’ve seen, this is without question the best.


Taxi Hunter (Herman Yau, 1993)

Falling Down refracted through a Hong Kong lens. Anthony Wong, a meek company man, has an increasingly comical amount of run ins with asshole taxi drivers that culminates in his pregnant wife being dragged by a taxi and killed. So, clad in office shirt and tie like Michael Douglas, he takes up a weapon and begins a campaign of vengeance against taxi drivers while the movie indulges in social satire. What’s bonkers about the movie is that the lead, the man we’re to sympathize with, is essentially a serial killer. I think they were going for a Death Wish vibe, but Charles Bronson was killing people trying to violently assault him. Anthony Wong is just murdering rude taxi drivers. Maybe taxi drivers were a real social problem in Hong Kong at the time and this was all gleefully cathartic, but absent any context the movie is a piece of ethical insanity—a violent revenge fantasy against the annoying and inconvenient. The movie isn’t exactly a satire, but neither is it especially serious. It’s more a burlesque of a serious, socially aware thriller--a piece of rib-poking social provocation. That the movie works at all is down to Anthony’s Wong’s strange performance. He chooses to play his taxi hunter without aggrandizement, giving him the same quiet, mild-mannered demeanor whether he’s talking to his boss or torturing taxi drivers to death. It’s precisely his mildness that makes him so nuts. The movie isn’t especially interesting or creative aside from that. There’s more baffling nuttery in HK movies trying to play things straight.

[therewillbeblus]

Wicked City (Peter Mak Tai-Kit, 1992)

Holy shit, Tatsuya Nakadai’s in this! Tsui Hark is a huge manga and anime devotee, and so wrote, produced, (and according to Michelle Reis, sometimes directed) this adaptation of the titular manga. This movie is wild. It’s about cops hunting down shape-shifting, tentacle sprouting, eye-glowing demons called Raptors in the months leading up to the 1997 handover. The film is all excess style. Endless unmotivated whip pans, canted angles, track ins/outs, slow motion. Heavy greens, red, and blues saturate every scene. The film amps up the trademark Tsui visuals to create a dynamic comic book feel. Tsui would try for the same thing in the two Black Mask films, to varying success, but this is the most unrestrained example of it. A textbook case of how to make a bad movie good through sheer creative effort and imagination. The fact that nothing is properly set up turns this into one long experience of narrative and visual novelty. I had no idea what to expect from one minute to the next and loved every bit of it.

I watched the first 20 minutes of this, loved it, and then did some research and discovered it has a blu ray release! So I’m going to hold out for that to arrive- but that prompted me to wonder: which of these bonkers-fun HK movies have English friendly blu ray releases outside of the obvious labels of 88 and MoC? If there are any more movies in this vein with proper physical copies, I’ll happily blind buy them ASAP

[Michael Kerpan]

Mr Sausage -- Glad to see you have now become acquainted with my two favorite HK directors -- Ann Hui and Johnnie To. I think I've seen pretty much everything by both these directors -- and I like most of what I've seen (and love quite a bit).

Alas, most of Ann Hui's work is not readily available these days (and very little is represented on blu-ray). Stunt Woman was quite interesting. To me, it felt like 3 short related films (sort of like some of those Rohmer ones). I think her films vary in the extent they are "commercial" or more personal. She typically tends to get quite good performances from her actors -- and usually shows pretty good visual sense. But not sure right now of any defining stylistic characteristics.

Running Out of Time is a good intro to JT. A very entertaining, very well-constructed film -- wioth great lead performances. Its sequel is decent enough -- but nowhere near the level of the first film.

Hope you strengthen your acquaintance with both...

[Mr Sausage]

Any suggestions on where to go next with To?

[Michael Kerpan]

PTU, Throw Down, Exiled, Blind Detective might all be good. For more offbeat stuff -- Wu Yen (Anita Mui playing a scummy emperor , with Sammi Cheng as heroine, and Cecilia Cheung as a masquerading fox fairy) and Running on Karma (sort of a modern day Buddhist action adventure film, pretty eccentric, maybe a bit controversial -- my intro to JT, which made me a fan). For romance, maybe Needing You.

[knives]

It’s not a typical film of his, but my favorite so far is the Don’t Go Breaking My Heart series which also works as a nice in to Chinese rom coms.

[Michael Kerpan]

Well, romances make up a significant subset of To's films. Some are dramas, while others are comedies (though most are a mix).

[knives]

Let me rephrase, it’s not typical of what Americans receive from him.

[Michael Kerpan]

Let me rephrase, it’s not typical of what Americans receive from him.

That's true. We get a tiny subset of To's full range.

[YnEoS]

Just to echo some other suggestions here, I definitely recommend not neglecting his rom coms. Needing You, Throw Down, Exiled, and Don't Go Breaking My Heart are some of my favorites of his. Running on Karma is maybe not fully cohesive or successful as some of his other works, but it has some of my favorite moments of his and its kind of a grab bag of genres/styles from his other films.

[Michael Kerpan]

YnEoS -- What do you think of Wu Yen? Am I odd in having such devotion to this rather "weird" film?

[YnEoS]

I haven't seen it yet, but it looks like the kind of thing I'd enjoy. I'll make a point to check it out when I get the chance.