Hong Kong Cinema

[feihong]

I would say the movies that got me most excited about Johnnie To movies were The Mission and Mad Detective. Wouldn't you know it, both are relatively hard to see. The Mission had one good DVD release, in France––now long out of print (and without English subtitles, to boot). Mad Detective has a blu ray from Masters of Cinema, but the blu ray contains an international cut of the film which, though Johnnie To seems to prefer it, I think removes a really meaningful––even necessary––valence from the film. There is a Mei Ah blu ray which contains the HK theatrical cut of the film, which is, to my mind, a lot better. It is one of the earliest blu rays released in Hong Kong, so of course it's also long out of print.

Following those, my favorites are probably Sparrow, Vengeance, Drug War, PTU, The Fun, The Luck and the Tycoon, and Blind Detective. I like Triangle a lot, but that movie––a film in which Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam and Johnnie To each handle one of the film's acts, re-writing and renovating the movie as they each see fit, really shouldn't be anyone's second or third Johnnie To movie. It is a fascinating film, though, in that it goes quite far to clarify each director's style and interests in comparison to one another.

There's what I would call a sort of second tier, which are films I didn't connect with so personally, but which I thought were really good––Throwdown, Election I, Office, Exiled, Life Without Principle, Breaking News, Three, A Hero Never Dies, Running on Karma. And there are some terrible ones––Chasing Dream, Where a Good Man Goes, Fulltime Killer, and The Enigmatic Case.

Personally, I never cared much for the romantic comedies, but there are a couple of weird outliers which are pretty interesting––The Barefoot Kid, a martial arts movie set in a pre-republican era and focused surprisingly on the economic exploitation of a talented martial artist, and The Heroic Trio, which was probably more special before the worldwide takeover of superhero films. Back then, it was about the most comic-book-y movie one might ever be able to see. Now it still features some remarkable material you wouldn't see in other movies (Maggie Cheung dynamites a bunch of children, for instance) and a lot of fun visuals. In retrospect, it seems more of a Ching Tsiu-Tung film (he is the co-director) than a Johnnie To picture. The sequel, Executioners, is maybe more relevant now, with the same heroes in a sort of "after the bomb" fascist country where the stakes are much higher.

[therewillbeblus]

Riki-Oh/Story of Ricky: After a classic 80s B-action movie setup (complete with the repetitious 'dramatic' scoring), I became worried that this would be nothing more than a vacuous Takashi Miike inspiration, an indolent venture into the grotesque that didn't earn its perversity with any bearings beyond its Because We Can brutality. Despite the shaky start, where the violence escalated too far ahead of the investing camp elements and narrative engagement, I'm pleased to report that the film quickly established itself as a lampoon on general action cinema from the west and eat, particularly aiming its weapons inward at the superheroic protagonists in these features. Here is a film that -once it finds its footing and catches up to its own relentless pace vis unhinged donations to the macabre- basks in its roots and recalibrates the fascination with death and survival onto a wavelength that intersects cartoonish and vicious exhibitions of savagery, and destroys the limitations of our imaginations for how stupidly hard one can die and how stupidly hard one can resist death, concocting the imaginary utopian survivalist god.

What is particularly interesting about this film is how it doesn't establish itself right away as the kind of camp it finishes as, but chips away knowingly. That's not to say that it's ever operating in a mode of deceptive sincerity, but there's a hazier relationship between the harshness of tone and the harshness of violence earlier on. The tonal degrees of ludicrousness fall into step with the visual content in a rhythm that takes acclimation, before upping the ante to tip the scale from somewhat earnest disgust into catapulting satire. Especially with the introduction of the warden and his son and after a few Bond-inspired setpieces, the film ends in a giant wink, having built towards a confident self-consciousness each step of the way. It's a novel formula, and one that wouldn't have remained as involving had the film stated from the outset exactly what it wanted to do and asked us to take a backseat. Instead, Riki-Oh demands our full attention and curiosity.

[yoloswegmaster]

Irongod has hinted at an upcoming release of In the Line of Duty 1-4 from either Eureka or 88 Films. They also said that there is a good chance that we could be getting releases for Iron Angels (doesn't specify if it's just the first one or the entire trilogy) and Killer Angels.

[Mr Sausage]

Wing Chun (Yuen Woo-Ping, 1994)

Michelle Yeoh plays the legendary folk hero, Yim Wing-Chun, whose name is carried by the martial art style she purportedly created. It’s a kung fu comedy about gender, with Yim Wing-Chun facing trials for excelling in a male dominated arena and for her choice to wear male dress. The gender politics are not complicated or penetrating. They mostly resolve into insecure men challenging Wing-Chun on one pretext or another and getting beaten up, or her having to navigate situations where she’s expected to dress more feminine, or having to deal with the men who want to date her. There’s even a fight whose gag is the Freudian overtones of the baddy’s extra long spear. How refreshing, tho’, for a movie about a woman who acts outside gender norms to end without her having learned the value of traditional gender roles (true, she does the final fight in female clothing, but you’re never told why, and the whole thing has her and Donnie Yen switching gender roles). It's one of the oddities of HK films that a more conservative society could nevertheless produce and consume films where women not only were the central action heroes, but had their identities taken on their own terms, too, without any need to break them down into something more traditionally acceptable. Still, there’s a lot of bone-headed gender comedy. Donnie Yen is a childhood friend whom Wing-Chun agreed to marry when they were teens. Yen returns after years abroad looking to finally marry her, only to fail to recognize Wing-Chun in her new dress and muscular frame, instead mistaking the new sales girl in the bean curd shop for his old sweetheart. Waise Lee is the bumbling local official who has his eyes on Wing-Chun, but keeps accidentally getting involved with her aunt. The situation is right out of a romantic comedy, and relies on improbable conceits like people confusing Michelle Yeoh(!) for a man because she’s in pants. Yeoh seems unaware of what kind of movie she’s in, because unlike everyone else, who mug to the sky, she underplays her role as tho’ this were a serious drama. It’s a good performance and anchors the few dramatic scenes, but is at odds with the goofiness of most of the situations. Frankly her performance deserved a better script. Her physical skills are taken full advantage of, naturally, this being Yuen Woo-Ping. The fights bristle with energy and creative camera work. I love how the fights are composed not only in medium side-on shots, but with a camera that swivels to find new compositions amidst the intricate choreography, or tracks from one character to another in larger battles. The cinematography is effortlessly dynamic without losing the fundamental clarity of the action.

[feihong]

Irongod has hinted at an upcoming release of In the Line of Duty 1-4 from either Eureka or 88 Films. They also said that there is a good chance that we could be getting releases for Iron Angels (doesn't specify if it's just the first one or the entire trilogy) and Killer Angels.

This is probably the most exciting blu-ray news I've heard this year. Already looking forward to this!

[Mr Sausage]

More Category III Lunacy


Naked Killer (Clarence Fok, 1992)

A trashy, ridiculous, sometimes imaginative erotic thriller that gained a reputation for itself on the international exploitation circuit in the early 90s. I know it mainly from a still of Chingmy Yau topless with a machine gun belt covering her breasts, part of the collage of film stills on the cover of Sex & Zen and a Bullet in the Head, an HK film book I read over and over in high school. The plot’s convoluted, but basically it’s a La Femme Nikita riff with some Basic Instinct thrown in. A cop who shot his brother by accident some months before and now vomits whenever he sees a gun (and has become impotent for some reason) is on the trail of a serial killer castrating shitty men. He falls into a romance with young woman who has no problem stabbing men in the genitals when they, er, beat up their pregnant girlfriends in public. After his new girlfriend’s father is killed by her step mom’s lover, she raids said lover’s office, shoots him full of holes, and is secreted away by a mysterious woman who inducts her into a cabal of lesbian assassins who kill shitty men. There is plenty of cheap titillation, breakneck action, and the juvenile gallows humour that seems to pervade Category III exploitation. Despite some gleeful craziness only Hong Kong can deliver, the movie drags severely in the second act, and much of its erotic moments are shot with all the visual cliches of the era’s music videos and a lot of what’s best described as passionless petting. The movie ended up being duller than its reputation would suggest. I’m guessing that to those with only a passing familiarity with Hong Kong cinema, this would’ve seemed far wilder and more off the rails than it actually is. The movie pushes at some boundaries and does at times show a manic creative spirit; but it’s often inert, not especially erotic, and is too sparing with the action.

Dr. Lamb (Danny Lee & Billy Tang, 1992)

Simon Yam is a serial killer who prowls about in a taxi looking for female victims in scenes shot and scored in the manner of Taxi Driver. Once he kills his victims, he returns home to molest the corpses and perform amateur dissection on them. The movie follows the pattern of Lee‘s earlier The Untold Story, with the bulk of the movie focussed on the police investigation, and the details of the crimes (allegedly based on real events) withheld til the end where they’re shown only flashbacks as part of the killer’s confession. The tone of the first act is more gritty and serious, more focussed on the techniques of police work, than The Untold Story, as if this had ambitions to be a serious police drama. Weirdly, once the kills show up after the first hour, a fair amount of tasteless black comedy rears its head, in an effort I’d guess to provide the audience with some relief from the intensity. Simon Yam gives an odd Jekyll and Hyde performance, effectively underplaying his scenes with the police to create a creepy, understated performance. But when it gets to the kill scenes, he goes broad in his usual way, giving a performance of over-the-top lunacy in which he screams, howls, bays, and becomes literally covered in flop sweat. A bizarre, tasteless movie that, admittedly, achieves a genuine intensity. Visually, the style is not only atmospheric, but occasionally artistic, especially in a few scenes where Yam’s bloodlust is being activated. You don’t expect to see such care and attention married to such low-rent aims. The film takes itself quite seriously as a film, while at the same time having nothing but prurient aims and defenseless motivations. Cheap, low-rent material like this you feel ought to have a similarly cheap, low-rent look, not a moody, expressively lit, carefully constructed visual style. I don’t know how Lee and Tang divided up directorial duties, but the visual extravagances here share more with Tang’s Run and Kill than The Untold Story, which Lee also co-directed (with Herman Yau). Maybe Lee directed his own scenes and left Tang to do his thing with the murder and gore scenes.

Red to Kill (Billy Tang, 1994)

Starts with an immediate double header of nastiness, intercutting the murder/suicide of a woman and her mentally challenged son with a maniac raping a woman (complete with lingering closeup of the victim’s pudenda). Sad to admit, the rape scene made effective use of architecture and space to construct some arresting images. The plot’s about a mild-mannered worker in a care home for the mentally disabled who turns into a slavering rapist whenever he sees women wearing red. He rapes one of the patients in his care, a young mentally challenged woman who recently lost her father, sending the young woman’s social worker on a path of revenge. So, yeah, the presence of the mentally challenged offers the movie endless opportunities for gross insensitivity, which it takes full advantage of. There’s plenty of insensitivity disguised as sensitivity, of the ‘we’re really exploring this social issue—no, really!” variety, where the social commentary is patently inauthentic and all the energy goes into the prurient content. Ebola Syndrome has the bigger reputation for offensiveness, but I thought this one was much worse, what with so much condescension and violence being directed at a vulnerable population. Still, like every other Category III shocker I’ve seen, everything is so over the top and excessive it’s hard to muster any genuine offense (tho’ one scene in particular severely tested that). It’s a gross, lurid film without question, but its extremity borders on the comical. It’s not as knowingly absurdist as Untold Story or Ebola Syndrome, but just as hard to take seriously. Still, it’s the most unenjoyable of the Category III exploitation junk I’ve seen.

[yoloswegmaster]

'Yes, Madam!', 'In the Line of Duty 3 + 4', 'Twin Dragons', and 'City on Fire' are going to be released on blu-ray in Germany by a label called Cargo Records. Apparently 'City on Fire' has been confirmed to have English subs, and most of the announced titles look to be sourced from 2K and 4K restorations (not sure what Twin Dragons is being sourced from).

[Orlac]

THE KILLER METEORS (1976)

Besides being hardly anyone's favourite Jackie Chan film, THE KILLER METEORS was an odd introduction for me, and likely a fair few fans, to Jimmy Wang Yu. Instead of his usual basher antics with lenghty tournaments, we get a wu xia mystery, likely cashing in on the interest in Shaw Brother's recent Gu Long adaptations by getting the author to pen what I think was a new script.

Jimmy is The Killer Meteor, who appears to be some sort of boss of a gang of crooks OR a government agent - it really isn't clear which. He is hired by a rich man, Hua Wu-Bin (jackie Chan), to obtain the antidote for a rare poison, said poison having been inflicted on Hua by his wife, Madame Tempest.

I'm not really sure what Lo Wei was going for here (not for the first time am I thinking this). Wang Yu is rather limited by the more acrobatic choreography, and the frequent wirework and doubling gives the impression to many a novice of him being a phoney. Frustratingly, the film sets up four martial experts for him to fight, and he deals with them in mere seconds - to a certain extent this makes him appear a bad-ass, but it also suggets no-one wanted to risk him getting clobbered for real by Phillip Ko Fei. Giving Wang Yu TWO lovely women to fawn over him also highlights his inability to convery adequate emotion.

And yet, I'm a fan...

Oh right, Jackie is in this! For three scenes, and 10min max. Most of which he spends sitting down, in a role likely intended for an older actor. The sight of Jackie cackling evily is strange in retrospect, but he does look rather dashing and probably could have pulled off a career in wu xia better then Wang Yu.

The finale, taking place on a pit of pillars and spikes, is pretty damn good, except it cops out with Wang's "Killer Meteor", the silliest solution to a kung fu film...ever, I think

And the KING KONG music is in this too!

The transfer on the 88 Films release looks very good, revealing some interesting use of coloured lights that were less evident on the old VHS release. And it's always nice to see people having conversations without the frame pan'scanning rapidly to keep up.

The Mike Leeder/Arne Vernera commentary is their first Wang Yu one (they were absent from both ONE-ARMED BOXER and CHINESE BOXER) and though you won't learn much specific about the film, there are some corking Wang Yu anecdotes. As ever, I'm a bit baffled by their pronunciation of Lo REI...and ammusingly they fail to recognise the KING KONG music, saying they think the score might be original.

Dudes, you need to watch KING KONG, it's my favourite film!

[Orlac]

In the Line of Duty IV (Yuen Woo-Ping, 1989)

Hong Kong production companies just did whatever the fuck. Michelle Yeoh’s first two starring vehicles, Yes, Madame and Royal Warriors, a pair of unrelated action films, were repurposed after the fact into a film series called In the Line of Duty, no films of which carried that title until the third film (unseen by me).

All the films in Chinese are linked by the Wong Ga title, referring to the Police Women. The English titles on the Chinese prints are distinctly different, but the International Versions were linked under the In The Line of Duty banner. So the HK English titles for the first two films were YES MADAM and ROYAL WARRIORS, but they were released elsewhere under the banners of both IN THE LINE OF DUTY and POLICE ASSASSINS.

[yoloswegmaster]

Spectrum Films will be releasing 'Run and Kill' on bluray in France, and it will be sourced from a 2K restoration. Wouldn't be surprised if someone like VinSyn were to release it stateside.

[joshua]

Spectrum Films will be releasing 'Run and Kill' on bluray in France, and it will be sourced from a 2K restoration. Wouldn't be surprised if someone like VinSyn were to release it stateside.

Error 4444

[Mr Sausage]

Pedicab Driver (Sammo Hung, 1989)

Jesus Christ this film is brutal for a kung fu comedy. A guy is murdered in front of his pregnant wife as she gives birth, and the mob boss/pimp leading it tells his lackies: “If the baby’s a boy, drown it. If it’s a girl, take it to the brothel.” Not that I wasn’t expecting left field tonal swings—it’s Sammo Hung, after all—but that one’s a lot. This presages the surprising brutality in the third act, made all the more unexpected because it follows a solid 45 minutes of full-on romantic comedy. This has maybe the most extreme switches in tone of any Sammo Hung film I’ve seen. Compensating for the extremity in tones is some of the best fight scenes and stunt work ever put to camera. Sammo’s fight with Billy Chow rivals the masterpiece Chow put on with Jet Li in Fist of Legend.


Kill Zone (Wilson Yip, 2005)

A crime film/morality play that for some reason breaks out in incredible fight scenes every so often. Simon Yam, a police inspector caught in a long-time dance with a triad boss, Sammo Hung, discovers he has an inoperable brain tumour. Proving like so many movie cops (or just cops) that his dedication was never to law but to his own private morality, he begins an extra-judicial campaign against the triad boss now that he’s free of personal consequences. He says at one point he respects the job so much he can’t spare any respect for his superiors—which is a funny line, but not true in the slightest. He hates the job because it doesn’t let him do whatever he sees fit, something he confuses for morality. Enter Donnie Yen, the cool, badass cop for whom violence is the first and only answer. He becomes Simon Yam’s secret tool in his war against Hung’s triad boss. It’s interesting how the style of HK films changed in the 2000s. A greater sense of traditional craft and steady, controlled style replaces the freewheeling, seat-of-the-pants extravagance and rough-and-ready filmmaking techniques. Some of that is budget, I’m sure. They can afford crane shots now, so why not pan over top a few carefully constructed tableaus? The rest is likely a change in ethos, an attempt to attract a wider Chinese audience with the professional sheen of Hollywood filmmaking. Judging by Wilson Yip’s work here and in Ip Man, this makes for films with greater craft but less visual creativity. The ethos that made HK films so startling and vital in the 80s and 90s has been abandoned for the most part. Where it remains is in the action. Donnie Yen after all grew up in the heyday of HK action, and he composes the action scenes with whizbang energy and relentless speed. The direction and editing of his choreography, tho’, is slightly calmer, keeping to clarity with a minimum of framerate manipulations, camera wizardry, or elliptical editing choices that favour speed over spatial logic. So the action scenes are well in advance of anything Hollywood could muster at the time--are indeed exemplary--even if they’re are shot with more basic Hollywood filmmaking (minus what Hollywood always gets wrong, like cutting on every movement in a fight or shooting in closeups). I really enjoyed this movie. In spite of its conventions, self-seriousness, and at times sentimental or lugubrious tone, this was good fun with splendid action, an unflagging pace, and a willingness to follow through on some really dark plot logic. I’ll take it over mid-2000s martial arts crime films like The Transporter, Romeo Must Die, or Exit Wounds.


Flash Point (Wilson Yip, 2007)

Another throwback of sorts to 90s HK action from Yip and Yen about another police officer with an unrepentant tendency to horrific violence against suspects. At least in Kill Zone he felt a bit of remorse for the brain damage he caused one suspect, but not enough to stop fucking guys up at a moment’s notice. Here he’s one of those cops who berates the police review board for targeting cops over criminals and wasting time that could be spent solving cases. Like Yip- and Yen’s Ip Man and hundreds other HK and Chinese movies, there’s a strain of xenophobia here, as the bad guys, who of course are much worse than the OG Chinese gangsters still around, naturally are immigrants (from Vietnam here). Reminds me of how the bad guys in the latter two Detective Dee movies were foreign elements trying to destabilize the glorious Chinese empire, something I find bizarre and unfortunate given that Tsui is himself an immigrant to Hong Kong (from Vietnam) and gave the issue of immigrants a sensitive portrayal in the otherwise mediocre Better Tomorrow III. But I digress. The movie is otherwise good fun in the same manner as Kill Zone. The action is intense, as expected, and it has a great bit of suspense with a bomb in a rotisserie chicken. Interesting to see Yen’s choreography evolve to include grappling more often seen in MMA bouts, including wrestling take downs and judo throws and trips with judo/jiu-jitsu choke holds and arm locks. There’s even orthodox boxing and muy thai in the stand up, again like MMA. Seems an attempt to give the movie a more grounded feel. These techniques were there a little bit in Kill Zone, but have a larger presence in this one. The action scenes are again exemplary; there’s a chase/shootout in a field of tall grass that’s as good as anything you’ll see. I miss the HK craziness of the 90s, but appreciate how well made and exciting these Wilson Yip crime actioners can be.


Enter the Fat Dragon (Kenji Tanigaki & Aman Chang, 2020)

In 1978, Sammo Hung made a spoof of the Brucesploitation industry called Enter the Fat Dragon. He played a Bruce Lee nut who was fat, of course. It had pretty good comedy, some impossibly good fights, and is regarded rightly as one of Sammo’s best. This new Donnie Yen version is about a cop with a failed career and broken engagement who emotionally eats until he’s obese, then fights crime in Japan. That’s it. It’s just Donnie Yen doing Donnie Yen things in a fat suit. There is no relation to the Sammo movie, and the Bruce Lee connection is so tenuous it amounts to Donnie watching Way of the Dragon when he’s depressed. It’s all pure exploitation, but exploitation that’s 45 years out of date. What’s the audience they’re hoping to exploit here? Bruce Lee junkies thus far unconvinced by Donnie Yen’s 40-year career? Old Sammo fans who haven’t realized Sammo is still making his own films? Weirder is the sense that the movie knows it’s a Donnie Yen movie. There are clips from Flash Point used as flashbacks, tho’ Donnie is playing a different character with a different name; plus the famous alley fight in Kill Zone is replayed for laughs, with Donnie beating Wu Jing with the bag of money after the latter slips on a banana peel(!) instead of the regular knife/baton fight. The film is mostly a broad relationship/cross-cultural comedy. Modern Chinese comedy is as tedious as the old Cantonese comedy, and with just as much bad taste. Nothing like watching a woman get horrifically beaten and her clothes torn off while comedic music plays like it’s supposed to be funny or lighthearted. Maybe that’s the Sammo connection? Great fights punctuating awful broad comedy? Speaking of the fights, they are predictably excellent, but they just made me wonder about the point of the fat suit. Sammo Hung’s weight made his fights all the more amazing because he was really doing the acrobatic moves. There’re no stakes in a fit, athletic guy doing his usual stuff in a fat suit. It’s not any more impressive, and it undercuts the drama since the character’s sudden weight gain has no physical effect on him. You could take out the fat suit and the movie would be unaffected. I guess it’s nice to see Donnie Yen doing something besides Ip Man sequels, but I was mostly annoyed here. The comedy sucks and the premise cheapened the action. Plus all the xenophobia. Turns out America isn’t the only nation fond of making films where foreign cops go to Japan and find it’s blatantly, openly corrupt.


The Millionaires’ Express (Sammo Hung, 1986)

A variety show of genres: western, comedy, adventure, kung fu, romance, heist film, espionage thriller—whatever can entertain, the movie does it. Basically, a train full of rich passengers is set to travel through a broken-down frontier town full of every type of person imaginable. It’s less a plot than an opportunity for vignettes among the enormous cast of characters played by name actors. I’m here for the stunts and action, which are typically superb, with some maniacal stunts happening so casually you don’t know what’s more incredible, the stunt itself or that the movie would use such a show stopper for a throw away gag. The comedy, while often broad and sometimes cliched, is so varied it ends up working more often than not, especially a lot of the silent comedy inspired visual gags. There are long sections in the spirit of Keaton and Lloyd. I enjoyed this far more than I was anticipating, given what happened the last time Sammo Hung made a comedy western.

[Mr Sausage]

Women on the Run (Corey Yuen & David Lai, 1993)

A crass, exploitative Category III action crime film from Corey Yuen and co-director David Lai. It's a buddy film where a female cop and a drug addict pair up in an incoherent drugs and guns plot. Has the expected gross insensitivity towards topics like rape, addiction, poverty, prostitution, and abuse, using them only to indulge in audience-grabbing sleaze. I wish the movie’d had less of that and more of the astonishing action Yuen is so well known for. Tho’ it does allow for one totally insane conceit, where the co-lead needs a hit of opiates, Popeye-like, in order to fight. I had no idea who the lead actresses were (looks like this is the first film for both), but they have good martial arts skills and screen presence. Their talents deserve better than long gang rapes and leering naked fight scenes photographed so the kicks show off their vulvas. I didn’t expect something so cheap and low-rent from Corey Yuen. It’s his attempt, I’d guess, to cash in on the success of Naked Killer.

I had a dreary enough time that I'm going to take a break from Hong Kong for a bit, watch some blockbusters or something. See what Cynthia Rothrock was doing back in America maybe. I dunno. Something else, anyway.

[yoloswegmaster]

Full specs for Dr. Lamb:

[therewillbeblus]

Ebola Syndrome (Herman Yau, 1996)

An infamous Category III movie. I first heard of it in high school, where my reaction was much like when I was a preteen wandering the horror aisles at Blockbuster gazing at the covers, intensely curious about the movies they contained but afraid of what I’d see if I ever put one on. I’ve probably seen every horror movie whose cover fascinated me as a kid, but never made it around to this thing. It begins much like The Untold Story, with Anthony Wong murdering people in Hong Kong and having to flee, this time to South Africa, where he again works in a restaurant. He rapes a dying African woman in the bush, contracts Ebola, and being mostly immune begins to spread Ebola around, first accidentally then deliberately. Also, what is it with these movies and humans being turned into pork buns? Much of this movie repeats the basic plot of The Untold Story, only with more complications and even more offensive content, believe it or not. A movie so cheerfully awful and transgressive it achieves an almost comic outrageousness. I couldn’t take it seriously enough to be genuinely offended.

I haven't seen as many Category III films as you, but what seems to be the key variable in elevating them from offensive and pointlessly repulsive shlock into.. potentially worthwhile excessive perversity(?) is spending time and energy crafting its central principal as a complete moron and generally devalued being. Only by dehumanizing him as thoroughly as they do, are we allowed us to disengage from the material's tangible hostility enough to laugh through an objective gaze, condescending to the pathetic and immoral target. I feel that these kinds of films that revel in extremist violence (Noe, for instance) often keep themselves contained with a sense of sincerity that bars the necessary distance we demand from the film's world and its characters to examine the stimuli without losing focus for where our sympathies should lie. We are disgusted but aware we are watching a movie, and that attention goes completely onto victims of sexual assault and trauma survivors whilst confidently retaining our moral fiber and permits us to 'enjoy' the mockery of sociopathic monsters via feeding our own drives to witness nasty artificial activity. Otherwise I think we often feel uncomfortable in the wrong way, or for the wrong reasons; a filmmaker coercing us into feeling bad and so we are left feeling bad for ourselves, or defensive in being confronted with our complicity through manipulation, rather than feeling for the characters or the real people who suffer.

I don't know. But I do know that Category III films seem to have found a 'safe' way to ingest this content. I particularly love how they operate with a darkly comic approach to the absurd found in everyday extremely-frightening human psychology, because the films carry an urgency and yet maintain securely shallow ambitions. They also dare to be rigidly antihumanist, and as a radical humanist I love that, because such a worldview is totally valid. I get to have my view due to my privilege and yet there's a strong argument that some people have lost their right to be given equal dignity and worth. It's an outlook that's worth entertaining when it comes to people like Anthony Wong here, and only possible to mine the richness of grotesque ideas on display through multidimensional study that diagnoses a foolproof alienation from him as a surrogate. The film takes its sweet time establishing how much we should hate this guy. Okay, so the opening moments show him to be an idiot who also breaks important moral commandments. But when he kills, at least it's self-preservation.. at least until he goes after the kid, though even that could be argued as a survivalist move. But then, the film takes ample space to detail how annoying, conceited, dispassionate, oblivious, and immoral he is- like, to absolutely ridiculous degrees. So by the time the actual 'plot' kicks in, we're already in the second act and know this person as well as we ever want to know him, but also as well as we 'need' to know him, which is pretty well, in order to satisfy the wry anthropological lampooning that follows.

That's a bit of a rant, and I'm not sure it makes sense written out. Hopefully it does to somebody. All I know is that when we see a corpse's face get cut off in real time, it's incredibly amusing, because we don't have to watch this guy do awful stuff for a second, and because we've acclimated to a tone where walking, talking, breathing Evil spreads Death, and that just makes sense in the most fantastical and simplistic way. That he does it with such nonchalant awareness in disguise, flat affect and all, runs counter to every shred of empathic instinct we possess as audiences, so we can laugh at the humor inherent in this dissonance yielding a spotlight on social absurdity and broadly appreciate the subversion of Wrong Man-on-the-run pics with a Right Man one.

The other aspect that works here is that by becoming desensitized to the protagonist's de-humanized status, 'other'ing him from our context of dignified beings, we're also watching someone who is like and unlike us: A "real-life" desensitized being. Here is someone who actually acts out his desires without cognizance, while we safely watch through a screen. Haneke et al. might argue that we're one in the same and make us feel shame about it, but this film does the opposite. It's going, 'Look at this alien being, he's like us but commits actions that we only want to see in artifice- and the film knows these are different things, because it's spent so much energy drawing a dangerous character that we could not possibly identify with less, even if he's behaving in a manner that produces violent results we want to see. Some other characters in the film engage at an in-between level of desensitization, like the scientists who are describing ebola without any labile mood, and scoff at the woman in the room who has a genuine response of disgust. Now, they're not as bad as this guy is, but it's a demonstration that there's a spectrum of sensitization, and we, they, and Anthony Wong are all on it. We can relate to being desensitized to some degree- we're watching this after all!- but we also recognize and are validated in acknowledging that we are a far cry from Wong's type of processing. And I'm speaking for Normal People who watch this crazy shit and can sleep at night, not the one-in-a-million dude who is inspired by it to do the real thing.

Although, he does take a 'domesticated' turn in the last act that most audience members can probably identify with in its tenderness(!)- but the film has the good faith to disrupt his false sense of normalcy with a minimal trigger of rejection to prompt an impulsive return to erratic and violent behavior. After all, the entire conceit of that narrative arc is to forge a superficial identification with the situation and, using our breadth of information about the differences between us and him, take this as further evidence that any person who can evade moral conscience via escape into 'normalcy' is even worse, whether or not we relate to such a spell or encourage his hiatus from raping and killing.

[feihong]

Also, what is it with these movies and humans being turned into pork buns? Much of this movie repeats the basic plot of The Untold Story, only with more complications and even more offensive content, believe it or not.

The pork bun fascination evidently came from an urban legend surrounding the Eight Immortals Restaurant murders:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_Imm ... a%20Mutya.

As for the popularity of these stories on film in the 1990s, I think they reflect tensions about the imminent 1997 Handover, and the sense––which is prevalent in a lot of the more extreme HK movies of the era––of a society spinning out of control. John Woo once laid out his inspirations for making Hard Boiled: the crime sprees of mainland Chinese demobbed soldiers, doing daring daylight raids of banks and jewlers, with military weaponry, and then disappearing back into the mainland––where no extradition was possible––and a story Woo read about a sociopath injecting poison into baby food at the supermarket. "And you read these things and you just get so mad," he said. So for him the hero of Hard Boiled had to be a figure who could stand up to this sense of more expansive urban crime. The hospital at the end of Hard Boiled is Woo's metaphor for the people of Hong Kong, isolated on their island, prey to a larger political struggle which stands to potentially devour their way of life...and with nothing they can do about being in the line of fire. You actually frequently see these mainland robbers in 80s and 90s films like Big Bullet, Expect the Unexpected, and, of course, in Long Arm of the Law, and in these films there is frequently that sense of a defenseless Hong Kong, vulnerable to this violent invasion (Long Arm of the Law is a little different in that respect, but a lot of the same lessons hold for that film regardless). But the Cat. III films offer something a little more extreme––a usually local social outcast, pressurized and moving past the point of what's socially acceptable, driven by...what? This isn't usually a gangster, as in the HK New Wave films where they want us to respect and romanticize the sociopath's behavior (noble knights, just looking for that "Better Tomorrow"), but rather someone from the working class, a sociopath or psychopath who is frequently moving amongst us until something snaps within them––often there's a sense of their dignity being besmirched, or their outsider status being rubbed in their faces one too many times. Frequently there seems to be the subtle or not-so-subtle implication that their desensitization has been learned, rather than something they're born with, or that it's a suppressed feature of their personalities being brought out because of specific social circumstances. The casting of Anthony Wong often stands in as shorthand for this sort of social dislocation and othering; in the firm majority of his films before The Mission (and after his debut as a sort of louche lover in My Name Ain't Suzie), his Eurasian looks are often used to "other" his characters (Wong has talked extensively about the racism he has felt as a Eurasian man in Hong Kong, but you can see it used frequently in the films to make him seem "weird" or "scary," as in An Eternal Combat, his performance as a literal ogre in The Heroic Trio, another literal demon in Erotic Ghost Story II, his oppressed outsider in Full Contact, etc.), and it's often intended, I think, for audiences to make of him both a victim and a victimizer as a result of the implied "otherness" of his experience. There's often a sense that the police on the other side of the equation are lame, venal, or idiots, buying into a society that they don't thoroughly examine. And the films so often involve the sociopath for some stretch of time after the crime pretending to be normal, by doing a regular, working-class job. So often the character seems to just blend into the background; it's the guy serving you a meal at the restaurant. It's the taxi driver taking you home. The idea that outrageous crime erupts from the commonplace like this is, I think, the inherent hook for the audience in so many of these films: see how the world is falling apart around us. You wouldn't believe what the police found in the pork buns at that restaurant! That might be a little simple, but that's the way I see all of this. HK films in general get markedly more bloody in the 90s, as the Handover approaches (then a bit lighter on the gore in the years following, as budgets decline and the delirious action slowly starts to recede from these films)––the human pork buns even show up in more mainstream movies, like Tsui Hark/Raymond Leung's King Hu remake, Dragon Gate Inn (which in its original had no cannibal cook character). The pork bun guy is even one of the heroes of that film, stripping the flesh of the villainous eunuch the way he strips a carcass in the kitchen. And there's that other Cat. III movie where Dr. Lamb is one of the heroes? I can't remember the name of that one. I think Lawrence Ng plays him there.

[Mr Sausage]

Ebola Syndrome (Herman Yau, 1996)

An infamous Category III movie. I first heard of it in high school, where my reaction was much like when I was a preteen wandering the horror aisles at Blockbuster gazing at the covers, intensely curious about the movies they contained but afraid of what I’d see if I ever put one on. I’ve probably seen every horror movie whose cover fascinated me as a kid, but never made it around to this thing. It begins much like The Untold Story, with Anthony Wong murdering people in Hong Kong and having to flee, this time to South Africa, where he again works in a restaurant. He rapes a dying African woman in the bush, contracts Ebola, and being mostly immune begins to spread Ebola around, first accidentally then deliberately. Also, what is it with these movies and humans being turned into pork buns? Much of this movie repeats the basic plot of The Untold Story, only with more complications and even more offensive content, believe it or not. A movie so cheerfully awful and transgressive it achieves an almost comic outrageousness. I couldn’t take it seriously enough to be genuinely offended.

I haven't seen as many Category III films as you, but what seems to be the key variable in elevating them from offensive and pointlessly repulsive shlock into.. potentially worthwhile excessive perversity(?) is spending time and energy crafting its central principal as a complete moron and generally devalued being. Only by dehumanizing him as thoroughly as they do, are we allowed us to disengage from the material's tangible hostility enough to laugh through an objective gaze, condescending to the pathetic and immoral target. I feel that these kinds of films that revel in extremist violence (Noe, for instance) often keep themselves contained with a sense of sincerity that bars the necessary distance we demand from the film's world and its characters to examine the stimuli without losing focus for where our sympathies should lie. We are disgusted but aware we are watching a movie, and that attention goes completely onto victims of sexual assault and trauma survivors whilst confidently retaining our moral fiber and permits us to 'enjoy' the mockery of sociopathic monsters via feeding our own drives to witness nasty artificial activity. Otherwise I think we often feel uncomfortable in the wrong way, or for the wrong reasons; a filmmaker coercing us into feeling bad and so we are left feeling bad for ourselves, or defensive in being confronted with our complicity through manipulation, rather than feeling for the characters or the real people who suffer.

I don't know. But I do know that Category III films seem to have found a 'safe' way to ingest this content. I particularly love how they operate with a darkly comic approach to the absurd found in everyday extremely-frightening human psychology, because the films carry an urgency and yet maintain securely shallow ambitions. They also dare to be rigidly antihumanist, and as a radical humanist I love that, because such a worldview is totally valid. I get to have my view due to my privilege and yet there's a strong argument that some people have lost their right to be given equal dignity and worth. It's an outlook that's worth entertaining when it comes to people like Anthony Wong here, and only possible to mine the richness of grotesque ideas on display through multidimensional study that diagnoses a foolproof alienation from him as a surrogate. The film takes its sweet time establishing how much we should hate this guy. Okay, so the opening moments show him to be an idiot who also breaks important moral commandments. But when he kills, at least it's self-preservation.. at least until he goes after the kid, though even that could be argued as a survivalist move. But then, the film takes ample space to detail how annoying, conceited, dispassionate, oblivious, and immoral he is- like, to absolutely ridiculous degrees. So by the time the actual 'plot' kicks in, we're already in the second act and know this person as well as we ever want to know him, but also as well as we 'need' to know him, which is pretty well, in order to satisfy the wry anthropological lampooning that follows.

That's a bit of a rant, and I'm not sure it makes sense written out. Hopefully it does to somebody. All I know is that when we see a corpse's face get cut off in real time, it's incredibly amusing, because we don't have to watch this guy do awful stuff for a second, and because we've acclimated to a tone where walking, talking, breathing Evil spreads Death, and that just makes sense in the most fantastical and simplistic way. That he does it with such nonchalant awareness in disguise, flat affect and all, runs counter to every shred of empathic instinct we possess as audiences, so we can laugh at the humor inherent in this dissonance yielding a spotlight on social absurdity and broadly appreciate the subversion of Wrong Man-on-the-run pics with a Right Man one.

The other aspect that works here is that by becoming desensitized to the protagonist's de-humanized status, 'other'ing him from our context of dignified beings, we're also watching someone who is like and unlike us: A "real-life" desensitized being. Here is someone who actually acts out his desires without cognizance, while we safely watch through a screen. Haneke et al. might argue that we're one in the same and make us feel shame about it, but this film does the opposite. It's going, 'Look at this alien being, he's like us but commits actions that we only want to see in artifice- and the film knows these are different things, because it's spent so much energy drawing a dangerous character that we could not possibly identify with less, even if he's behaving in a manner that produces violent results we want to see. Some other characters in the film engage at an in-between level of desensitization, like the scientists who are describing ebola without any labile mood, and scoff at the woman in the room who has a genuine response of disgust. Now, they're not as bad as this guy is, but it's a demonstration that there's a spectrum of sensitization, and we, they, and Anthony Wong are all on it. We can relate to being desensitized to some degree- we're watching this after all!- but we also recognize and are validated in acknowledging that we are a far cry from Wong's type of processing. And I'm speaking for Normal People who watch this crazy shit and can sleep at night, not the one-in-a-million dude who is inspired by it to do the real thing.

Although, he does take a 'domesticated' turn in the last act that most audience members can probably identify with in its tenderness(!)- but the film has the good faith to disrupt his false sense of normalcy with a minimal trigger of rejection to prompt an impulsive return to erratic and violent behavior. After all, the entire conceit of that narrative arc is to forge a superficial identification with the situation and, using our breadth of information about the differences between us and him, take this as further evidence that any person who can evade moral conscience via escape into 'normalcy' is even worse, whether or not we relate to such a spell or encourage his hiatus from raping and killing.

A couple interesting...variations? complications? on what you're talking about is Dr. Lamb and The Untold Story. In the former, the film starts off generating a lot of sympathy for the killer, with the assumption that this'll grow when he starts confessing and we get a deeper look into his feelings--only for the opposite to happen. The longer the film goes on, the more any sympathy the film might've built up drains away and is focussed instead on to the killer's family and victims while the killer becomes increasingly, terminally remote as his cruel and consuming fantasies receive their fullest expression. In the latter, the process with Anthony Wong's character is the same as Ebola Syndrome, with the bizarre twist that the movie gets you to sympathize with him in the latter half through sheer brute force means, only to turn that into a total middle finger by shoving your face into the character's depravity in the big confession scene. It's as cheap as Haneke, but without the pretense to artistry.

The idea that outrageous crime erupts from the commonplace like this is, I think, the inherent hook for the audience in so many of these films: see how the world is falling apart around us. You wouldn't believe what the police found in the pork buns at that restaurant! That might be a little simple, but that's the way I see all of this.

Some Category III films recognize this to the point they make it text. For example, Dr. Lamb, where the killer's night time rampages show him contorting and sweating and howling with such emphasis that it seems to be figuring him as a werewolf. Or Red to Kill, which takes its cues from both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Incredible Hulk, with the rapist's mild mannered exterior hiding not only the broad girning and slavering of a psycho, but a completely different, unexpected physique underneath all those trappings of social respectability. The transformation is meant to be read as a physical one, an outward projection of the psycho's bifurcated consciousness.

[Elizabeth Corday]

I’m surprised to see you’ve landed on category III films. I purposely collected these types of films for years and although the most outrageous ones are among the most tasteless films ever made, the pure ostentaciousness and grotesquerie make them tremendously fun to view. Even a bad one is often worth watching as you’ll likely be confronted with an idea or visual you’ve never seen in a movie before.

That said, I avoided seeing category III films for a few months after watching Run and Kill. It seems to have a pretty big reputation online, but found the whole plotting so joyless and clumsy that by the time you get to the finale, I was wiped. I openly admit I don’t know much about Jacobean tragedy, so I lack that frame to reevaluate it from. My view on it was that the story almost worked on a surreal level as Kent Chang’s cartoonish cowardice and cuckoldry sends him into an endless spiral of his life getting worse that felt suppressive, inescapable, and frustrating. But I’m also one to get frustrated with illogical elements of horror films, so I may just be no fun! Error 4444 announced they’ll be releasing it on Blu-ray, so I’m curious to revisit it once it comes out on HD.

Out of Billy Tang’s works, I much prefer the absurdity of Dr. Lamb. And for pure tasteless, Red to Kill felt more entertaining. About a decade ago, it was up on Amazon Prime streaming, but can’t imagine many distributors being interested in touching this one outside of a company like Massacre Video and maybe Vinegar Syndrome due to its insanely insensitive portrayal of people with mental health disabilities.

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. And once you see things like the three films you saw, Robotrex, Daughter of Darkness, or Chinese Torture Story, there’s a reason why. I’ve seen some intense Italian genre stuff or incredibly violent pink films, and few rarely are as extreme as these.

I can't believe I'm asking this but I was actually pleasantly (don't judge me) surprised to see naked male backsides in Happy Together. I imagine there are not many Chinese films with gay themed nudity in them? (This is the only one I know of that Leslie did)

[andyli]

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.

I enjoy this film a bit more than you. Just finished watching it on the crappy Hong Kong blu-ray in anticipation of 88 Films' rumored release (hopefully with a 2K/4K scan) and I think that this film is one of the hidden gems in Hong Kong's action cinema.

(spoilers alert!)

You're absolutely right in identifying the two leads as wu xia fantasy hero and villain, rather than actual Ming Dynasty characters. Often placed in a real period setting, personalities in wu xia literature and cinema nevertheless transcend the time that bounds the story, representing at once something very traditional (millennia-old Chinese morals and Confucian teachings) and something extremely modern (such as love affairs that break social boundaries and women's participation in a society). A time-traveling plot that drops the 300-year-old warriors into a modern Hong Kong, therefore, provides an appropriate stage to foreground the conflict. Indeed, "wu xia in a modern society" is such a popular concept it's almost got a sub-genre of its own in Hong Kong cinema. Iceman Cometh does a good job delivering humorous ironies usually found in this sort of films (even the best kung fu cannot beat guns), as well as some fresher ones (in a surprisingly brief turn of event, a simple modern gastric lavage could quickly restore the hero's otherwise hopeless condition that results from taking the worst poison possible in wu xia convention, one that makes all your kung fu disappear). Evolving gender dynamics take the center stage as well, when Maggie Cheung told Yuen Biao that "time has changed," and the present time Hong Kong is a place where "women give orders," showing him a woman's head on a local coin. Throughout the film one can observe that Yuen is confused with his perception of women around him. When Yuen Biao meets Maggie he mistakes her feigned groaning as a desperate call for help. In another scene, he interacts with a porn actress on television, first scolding her for being seductive, then quickly drops the issue and prepares to rescue her out of her "misery" when another actor approaches her in a seemingly violent fashion. The scene serves as a premonition of what goes on between Yuen Biao and Maggie Cheung later. Throughout the film, he keeps getting torn between his loyalty to his emperor and love for the deceptive local girl. In the end he resolves his inner conflict with perfect wu xia logic, naming a sword after his love interest, while cutting her completely out of the final battle (and his way back home).

The action scenes are top-notch. The two Yuens are pitted against each other and fight hard core battles (also choreographed by them) from the beginning to the end. The repetitive showing of some highly dangerous stunts with multiple angles is actually a signature of the movies involving the Jackie Chan Stunt Team. Other than fight scenes, the camerawork in general is energized and inspired. There are some very Hong Kong-y visual jokes. A slow-motion sequence of people moving through a crowded bar that anticipates Wong Kar-wai. A horse chasing a car in a place called Racecourse Cemetery. I particularly like the shot of a airplane soaring by the two protagonists taking a sword-fighting stance. And how else would you have designed the death of a lecherous male villain?

Some jokes are in bad taste, but not particularly out of line by Hong Kong cinema's standards. Maggie Cheung had been in this mode for so long, before she switched to an entirely different gear under Wong Kar-wai's direction, and the local audience would be quite used to seeing her performance such as this. The homosexual joke is also fitting for the film's theme of temporal and cultural disorientation. It goes to show how a historical act could be misinterpreted in a modern circumstance. At times, the script is indeed having its fun and flushing decency down the toilet. But there's also a certain degree of seriousness (even bleak nihilism) in it. The modern society is deemed as "yam gaan" (underworld) at the hero's first glance. The local royal cops were almost absent except for providing comic relief, while letting the hero, a sort of royal palace cop himself, run around pasting ancient-style wanted poster. And what's Yuen's stubborn loyalty to a long-gone regime for? What's the point of going back to a doomed past after all this bloodshed? All in all, the story strikes a fine balance between the wild fun and a morbid tone. The only flaw I pick in the story is Yuen Wah's time-traveled villain getting sidelined for too long before suddenly being reinserted into the plot. If we are shown more of his adaptation in a modern surrounding we would have an interesting parallelism to observe.

Interestingly, there is a political-cultural subtext to this film. The film has some very subtle things to say about the tension between China and Hong Kong, not counting the blatant reference to the single biggest political incident in China happened right before the film was made. When Yuen Biao arrives in Hong Kong, he instantly defines Hong Kong as a "faan bong", a derogatory term used by Chinese people believing their own country as the superior, heavenly empire and all the rest as barbaric. At the same time, the Hong Kong people, including Maggie Cheung's character, dismiss the less-informed Yuen as "remote uncle", a term used to mock Chinese immigrants/refugees' provinciality. This seems to represent the typical ways the two parties regard each other at the time. Thus, a temporal discord translates into a spatial (cultural) one. They are immigrants by time and space. And if Yuen's cluelessness in a modern capitalistic society comes as a familiar trope, his doppelgänger Yuen Wah's bitter confession that he too is discriminated by the locals and life in Hong Kong isn't worth it speaks of a rejection that even the better adapted and more resourceful immigrants face. What's most interesting to me, though, is Yuen Wah's reaction to this hostility. He apparently plans to give up the luxury life from all the modern goods and convenience of capitalism, and chooses to travel back in time, smuggling newly acquired firearms to help him live as an emperor in a less developed past. Does that sound suspiciously familiar from today's perspective?

[feihong]

Some Category III films recognize this to the point they make it text. For example, Dr. Lamb, where the killer's night time rampages show him contorting and sweating and howling with such emphasis that it seems to be figuring him as a werewolf. Or Red to Kill, which takes its cues from both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Incredible Hulk, with the rapist's mild mannered exterior hiding not only the broad girning and slavering of a psycho, but a completely different, unexpected physique underneath all those trappings of social respectability. The transformation is meant to be read as a physical one, an outward projection of the psycho's bifurcated consciousness.

Having watched a boatload of Lam Ngai Kai films over the last week, I'm also wondering now whether one of the big influences on a lot of the Cat.III films was the anime coming out at the same time in Japan? I'm thinking of films and series like Wicked City and Demon City Shinjuku, or maybe Mad Bull 34, or Violence Jack, or even Akira? A lot of Lam's films especially seen to be visualized with framing and editing more redolent of those darker anime films, and they share that taste for sex and gore which films like Wicked City really embrace. Of course films like Peacock King have the sense of horror/fantasy common to some of the darker theatrical and OAV anime from the 80s, but even films like Her Vengeance have a similar visual conception and the same thematic/content preoccupations.

[dwk]

Marc Walkow tweeted that Ringo Lam's Burning Paradise is getting releases in the US and UK (from different labels) soon.

[feihong]

That makes sense. There's been a pretty-OK Hong Kong blu ray of the film for a while now.


Looks like the German Vision Gate blu ray of Royal Warriors came out in April. Reviews on the Bullets n Babes forum say the disc is, unfortunately, an upscale. A real shame, because the company has a slate of in-demand HK titles coming up, with English subtitles and alternate English dub tracks––all with what looks to me like a new naming convention. So "Royal Warrios" becomes "Ultra Force," "Yes, Madam" becomes "Ultra Force 2," "Full Contact" becomes "Cover Hard," "City on Fire" is "Cover Hard 2," "Tiger on Beat" is "Born Hero 2," "Once a Thief" is "Killer Target," and "In the Line of Duty IV" is "Red Force." They're also "Peace Hotel," which gets renamed "John Woo: Never Die," and another company in Germany has a blu ray of Hapkido coming next year. They all are advertised as having "2k remasters," except for "Yes, Madam"––excuse me, "Ultra Force 2," which say it'll be based on a new 4k restoration. Maybe that one will turn out better?

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

A real shame, because the company has a slate of in-demand HK titles coming up, with English subtitles and alternate English dub tracks––all with what looks to me like a new naming convention. So "Royal Warrios" becomes "Ultra Force," "Yes, Madam" becomes "Ultra Force 2," "Full Contact" becomes "Cover Hard," "City on Fire" is "Cover Hard 2," "Tiger on Beat" is "Born Hero 2," "Once a Thief" is "Killer Target," and "In the Line of Duty IV" is "Red Force." They're also "Peace Hotel," which gets renamed "John Woo: Never Die"

Those are the original German release titles for those films. (The first Born Hero was Legacy of Rage.) Some other German retitlings for HK films:

Fong Sai-yuk → Der Vollstrecker ("The Executor")
Fong Sai-yuk 2 → Iron Tiger (Iron Monkey was released in Germany between the two, so they rebadged this as a cash-in)
Wheels on Meals → Powerman
Twinkle, Twinkle, Lucky Stars → Powerman II
Heart of Dragon → Powerman III
My Lucky Stars → Tokyo Powerman
The Young Master → Meister aller Klassen ("All-Around Champion")
Spiritual Kung Fu → Meister aller Klassen II
New Fist of Fury → Meister aller Klassen III
Once Upon a Time in China → Die schwarzen Tiger von Hongkong ("The Black Tiger of Hong Kong")
Once Upon a Time in China II → Last Hero
Once Upon a Time in China III → Once Upon a Chinese Fighter
Once Upon a Time in China IV → Last Hero II
Just Heroes → Hard-Boiled II
Loving You → City on Fire (!!!)

[feihong]

A real shame, because the company has a slate of in-demand HK titles coming up, with English subtitles and alternate English dub tracks––all with what looks to me like a new naming convention. So "Royal Warrios" becomes "Ultra Force," "Yes, Madam" becomes "Ultra Force 2," "Full Contact" becomes "Cover Hard," "City on Fire" is "Cover Hard 2," "Tiger on Beat" is "Born Hero 2," "Once a Thief" is "Killer Target," and "In the Line of Duty IV" is "Red Force." They're also "Peace Hotel," which gets renamed "John Woo: Never Die"

Those are the original German release titles for those films. (The first Born Hero was Legacy of Rage.) Some other German retitlings for HK films:

Fong Sai-yuk → Der Vollstrecker ("The Executor")
Fong Sai-yuk 2 → Iron Tiger (Iron Monkey was released in Germany between the two, so they rebadged this as a cash-in)
Wheels on Meals → Powerman
Twinkle, Twinkle, Lucky Stars → Powerman II
Heart of Dragon → Powerman III
My Lucky Stars → Tokyo Powerman
The Young Master → Meister aller Klassen ("All-Around Champion")
Spiritual Kung Fu → Meister aller Klassen II
New Fist of Fury → Meister aller Klassen III
Once Upon a Time in China → Die schwarzen Tiger von Hongkong ("The Black Tiger of Hong Kong")
Once Upon a Time in China II → Last Hero
Once Upon a Time in China III → Once Upon a Chinese Fighter
Once Upon a Time in China IV → Last Hero II
Just Heroes → Hard-Boiled II
Loving You → City on Fire (!!!)

That's bizarre. I assumed they were recent names for the films, since they kept lumping unrelated films under the same title series. I can't believe Loving You gets City on Fire as a title. That hardly seems fair.

[andyli]

That makes sense. There's been a pretty-OK Hong Kong blu ray of the film for a while now.


Looks like the German Vision Gate blu ray of Royal Warriors came out in April. Reviews on the Bullets n Babes forum say the disc is, unfortunately, an upscale. A real shame, because the company has a slate of in-demand HK titles coming up, with English subtitles and alternate English dub tracks––all with what looks to me like a new naming convention. So "Royal Warrios" becomes "Ultra Force," "Yes, Madam" becomes "Ultra Force 2," "Full Contact" becomes "Cover Hard," "City on Fire" is "Cover Hard 2," "Tiger on Beat" is "Born Hero 2," "Once a Thief" is "Killer Target," and "In the Line of Duty IV" is "Red Force." They're also "Peace Hotel," which gets renamed "John Woo: Never Die," and another company in Germany has a blu ray of Hapkido coming next year. They all are advertised as having "2k remasters," except for "Yes, Madam"––excuse me, "Ultra Force 2," which say it'll be based on a new 4k restoration. Maybe that one will turn out better?

What Royal Warriors blu-ray came out in April? I presume you mean Tiger Cage (whose German title was confusingly Ultra Force - Teil 4) ? The real Royal Warriors (In the Line of Duty II) was only released this month by the same company. Words I receive are it's from a genuine 4k master, which bodes well for the other two releases from the series in the coming months.