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Posted: **Sat Apr 23, 2022 10:39 pm**

I actually think Cynthia Khan is better in In the Line of Duty III than she is in IV––where here character gets downplayed a bit in favor of Donnie Yen. And that film is a lot more coherent to my eyes than IV is. Cynthia is definitely different than Michelle Yeoh––less flexible, but her taekwondo training shines through in these films. She hits harder, and she takes harder hits than Michelle Yoeh generally does. She's a bit of a one-note actress, with a few exceptions. Her best film is the comedy It's Now or Never, where she makes fun of her action film persona, as a teddy-girl who is constantly threatening people with her bogus "eagle-claw" kung fu. She's also decently good but under-used in Zen of the Sword, where her swordswoman has a slightly homoerotic relationship with Michelle Reis' character. Unfortunately, the film is a slog. In In the Line of Duty III she has frequent suspense and action scenes across from Michiko Nishiwaki which are really good to my eyes.

Posted: **Sat Apr 23, 2022 10:45 pm**

She does have a fight late in the movie down a cement stairway and into an elevator shaft that is magnificent and really shows off her physical skills. She can whip kicks at people for sure. And the van fight is crazy, especially since that's really her in a lot of shots. But otherwise she barely registered. I'll take your word for it re: part III.

Posted: **Sat Apr 23, 2022 11:59 pm**

I think the difference is partly in the action directors between the two films: Cory Yuen does action for ITLOD III, Yuen Woo Ping does the action for ITLOD IV. Cory Yuen tends to give more expansive and flashy scenes of action to women than Yuen Woo Ping does. I remember she has some cool fights in ITLOD IV, but that was yet another early showcase for Donnie Yen, and his fights are the ones I remember most. In ITLOD III, the Japanese guy who's playing a similar role to Donnie's is a scruffy gumshoe with a small pistol, who doesn't really do martial arts scenes, so Cynthia gets a lot more of a showcase. She's also good in more mediocre movies like Queen's High and Sea Wolves.

Posted: **Sun Apr 24, 2022 6:40 pm**

In the Line of Duty III (Arthur Wong & Brandy Yuen, 1988)

Thanks for the rec, fei hong. I skipped over it for the bigger names in IV, but this was a worthwhile Girls & Guns entry. A pair of Japanese radical communists pull off a string of bank robberies in Japan to finance their revolution. A Japanese officer chases them to Hong Kong, where Cynthia Khan’s ambitious rookie police detective gets involved. While I think Cynthia Kahn got a fair showing in the sequel, as the main action star here she doesn’t have to share time with other action stars, making her the focus of most of the action scenes. She still has no identifiable screen presence, but she’s an able fighter. Sadly the film has a dearth of fight scenes in the middle stretch. We could’ve used a big mid-film set piece instead of Cynthia Khan’s wooden acting and Hiroshi Fujioka’s sweaty Sonny Chiba impression. While fun in themselves, these pretty good actioners are also worth watching to appreciate the genius of stuff like She Shoots Straight and Royal Warriors. The action scenes, while often intense, never approach the level of kinetic madness in the genre’s best work.

Posted: **Mon Apr 25, 2022 2:31 am**

Shaolin Temple (Chang Hsin-Yen, 1982)

Jet Li’s debut. This period martial arts film about an orphan growing up in a Shaolin temple while nursing a desire to avenge his father’s death was apparently a gigantic hit in mainland China. I know it mainly from a section in Xiaolu Guo’s excellent memoir, Nine Continents: a Memoir In and Out of China, describing the effect the film had on the boys in her city. So inspired were they by Li and the martial arts in the film that they spent the ensuing months attacking both each other and the girls at school, leading Guo to remember the time as basically one of constant terror. So basically what parents in the mid-90s feared would happen when Power Rangers came out, only real instead of hysteria. I can’t figure out why this broke so many box office records in China. It’s an average martial arts film, by turns pious and earnest in its traditionalism and goofy in its childish humour. It’s livened somewhat by the beautiful location photography in and around an actual mountain temple, some terrific battles in the latter third, and by the young Li’s astonishing acrobatics (there are long scenes where he’s essentially giving a wushu demonstration for the camera). Maybe the fact that it was the first major co-production between HK and Mainland China and the first big film to use a cast of primarily mainland actors explains its overwhelming success. Otherwise, it’s less interesting and accomplished than the earlier, similarly-themed 36th Chamber of Shaolin, and nowhere near as exciting and creative as Human Lanterns from the same year. Ethically, the film’s a muddle: there’s a tension between its strong Buddhist pacifism and its need to be a violent revenge film (not to mention some real animal cruelty in a film where monks constantly extoll the sanctity of all life). The film tries to get away with it by setting up the rules and then having this or that character declare that, well, it’s ok to break them this time (which ends up being every time). The story is equally muddled, only making sense in the end due to its extreme simplicity. Jet Li would go on to better things.

Martial Arts of Shaolin (Lau Kar-Leung, 1986)

The third entry in a loose trilogy of mostly unrelated films starring Jet Li as a young Shaolin monk. Unlike the first Shaolin Temple, which was a Hong Kong production using mainland talent in front and behind the camera, this is a pure Hong Kong production helmed by the legendary Lau Kar-Leung. The film is more identifiably HK in style, much to its benefit. The first film was stiff and ill-stitched. This is a more fluid and cohesive action movie. It has also stopped even nominally trying to square its Buddhist philosophizing with its violent content. The earnest attempts to philosophize on the Buddhist idea of the sanctity of life have become in this film merely grist for various comic scenes, and the battles include a lot more casual killing. The comedy is even broader and more exaggerated, the brief cross-dressing scene in the first film, for example, becoming an excruciating scene of Jet Li dressed as a country girl screeching and mincing and throwing a tantrum. Still, a colourful, quickly paced martial arts film with some terrific set-pieces.

Posted: **Mon Apr 25, 2022 3:05 pm**

Mr Sausage wrote: Mon Apr 25, 2022 2:31 amI can’t figure out why this broke so many box office records in China. It’s an average martial arts film, by turns pious and earnest in its traditionalism and goofy in its childish humour.

I imagine an average martial arts film would seem pretty incredible if you hadn't seen any martial arts films, which was the case for most viewers in China⁠—Hong Kong films were almost never imported and video halls didn't exist yet, so there had been no prior opportunities to see them. More broadly, China went through a wushu/Shaolin craze in the early '80s as people rediscovered aspects of traditional culture that had been suppressed during the Mao years, and the film was deliberately positioned to take advantage of that.

Posted: **Mon Apr 25, 2022 6:48 pm**

therewillbeblus wrote: Thu Apr 21, 2022 9:30 pm It's A Drink! It's A Bomb! (David Chung)

Before he directed a composed Michelle Yeoh in two action-packed adventure films, Chung helmed this madcap crime comedy revolving around three idiotic social misfits who get roped into a dangerous conspiracy to find a soda can bomb. A 'wrong man' narrative of serial misunderstandings along a sprawling chase of cat-and-mouse commences, but the real treat here is the colorful cast of characters played by George Lam, Maggie Cheung, and John Shum, and their vibrant interplay is what will make this film either soar or plummet for viewers.

The film is comically self-aware of its breezy genre limits, starting with the ridiculous character introductions. Lam comes in as a motorcycling passerby who is brought into the chaos without consent- though he's more than up for the task! As the inconsequential man-on-the-run who triggers the events begins to explain the plot, Lam shushes him to respond that he doesn't care and only needs to know if this man is "a good guy or a bad guy," and then proceeds to get really into the action, taking the commanding role in telling the double agent on the chase not to worry so much- reversing the expectations of roles in typical wrong-man pics! Lam is the smartest of the central trio, but right away we have this offbeat sense of an adrenaline junkie’s go-with-the-flow attitude seeking thrills even at the risk of trumping self-preservation, a man so eager to assert his dominance over a situation that it clouds judgment. He's also the most effectively silly one, who doesn’t get as many opportunities to go full-unhinged, but when he does, completely nails it (like the wildly unnecessary, theatrically aggressive ploy to manipulate a stingy gas station attendant into letting them use his phone. After seeing Lam most recently give a sincere perf in Boat People and a vapid one in Easy Money, it's heartening to see him absolutely kill this somewhat-measured humorous role. It's the toughest part in the film to pull off, not to mention the one that anchors the success of its many moving parts, and he really shows versatile acting chops here, rising to the challenge with gusto.

Maggie Cheung’s introduction is also bizarre, trading weird insults and brow-raising insinuations with her grandfather, who goes to great lengths to provoke her around being unattractive while she kinda-sorta frames him as a suitor (the bit where she bikes next to his car is so strange), yet both are amicable throughout this nonchalant boundary-crossing exchange. Cheung plays a total ditz, and she's not given quite as much breathing room to profess her charisma amidst the two large male personalities resembling polarized forms of recklessness, but she's a welcome addition to the crew all the same. And then there’s Shum's cabbie with premeditated provocative road rage (or, just, rage).. a total hothead and the loudest and most impulsive imbecile of the bunch. When they finally get together their darkly comic re-enactment of a murder for the lead detective is hysterical, and the eccentric and endlessly entertaining social dynamics don’t let up from there. It’s not as impressive on the action front as Chung’s next couple of outings in the director’s chair, but it’s very engaging and economical paced, with slapstick action and intelligently-constructed farce.

The film plays a bit like Dumb and Dumber, only in a trio with more fully-formed personalities detailing each principal’s idiosyncratic social deficits, which are revealed in reference to the other counterparts. Such smart screenwriting reminds me of The Apartment's character introductions, only, you know, goofy and shallow and directed purely at how to gain the biggest laughs from interpersonal relations. The script and actors know exactly how to collaborate with one another’s energies and quirks to maximize lunacy and concoct impressively elaborate gags with confidence. There are a couple of hysterically inane scenes where they prepare to face the bad guys in a standoff on the road at twilight, or when they taunt each other when kidnapped to passive-aggressively force ideas of ante-upping torture methods into the minds of their captors! This is the kind of film where the central trio of idiots defy the internal logic of their own idiocy- recognizing a mole in the police force because he believes the parts of their zany narratives even they realize are stupid… but after they spent an exhaustively inventive scene of verbal sparring trying to convince a policeman sitting in the very same chair of the validity of their claims, offended at his doubt! And the film culminates in a service of horseplay action with soda can MacGuffins that goes on far longer than it should, yet manages to work as the filmmakers stuff various costume ideas they just couldn't bear to leave out, sticking the landing that's totally in step with this shaggy dog tale. Fun stuff!

This was a blast. I can hardly add anything to your terrific post, but I loved how the film applied the logic of HK action cinema to comedy, creating a given situation and then with endless madcap energy finding every avenue or variation to run it through (that set piece in the house! I'm still chuckling thinking about the Mexican stand off, with George Lam and Elvis Tsui blowing the remnants of the feather duster back and forth, or Maggie's attempts to end it). This is the only HK comedy I've ever found consistently amusing. David Chung is an underrated talent in HK cinema. I'd love to know more about his working relationship with Tsui and what he added specifically during productions. He seems to've learned a lot from Tsui working as his cinematographer, but he doesn't just copy and paste Tsui's style like Ching Siu-Tung. Chung's got the speed and energy, but he doesn't push it towards abstraction, nor does he ever lose track of the narrative. He can do the tonal mishmashing when he wants, but he can sustain a consistent and pleasing tone all through a movie as well, no matter how freewheeling, which is definitely not the Tsui (or even HK) style. Weird that he seems to've dropped out of the film industry in 1995. Wonder if the impending take over played a part in that.

Posted: **Mon Apr 25, 2022 7:17 pm**

Speaking of HK action films’ illogically disconnected material repurposed as comedy, I’m not sure if I missed some kind of connective tissue, but I loved how the formerly-standoffish-turned-scared gas station attendant randomly decided to help Lam in a critical late getaway. I expected him to be a bystander or even assist the bad guys, but he risks his life to latch the door! Perhaps he thinks Lam is still the bigger threat as a crazed murderer, but the other guys have lethal weapons on hand and are in his shop- no matter which way this goes it won’t be good for him! So wild, for a character to be introduced as thinly selfish, self-preserving, and then in his next scene totally relinquishing those qualities to demonstrate allegiance and growth.

Posted: **Mon Apr 25, 2022 7:26 pm**

therewillbeblus wrote: Mon Apr 25, 2022 7:17 pm Speaking of HK action films’ illogically disconnected material repurposed as comedy, I’m not sure if I missed some kind of connective tissue, but I loved how the formerly-standoffish-turned-scared gas station attendant randomly decided to help Lam in a critical late getaway. I expected him to be a bystander or even assist the bad guys, but he risks his life to latch the door! Perhaps he thinks Lam is still the bigger threat as a crazed murderer, but the other guys have lethal weapons on hand and are in his shop- no matter which way this goes it won’t be good for him! So wild, for a character to be introduced as thinly selfish, self-preserving, and then in his next scene totally relinquishing those qualities to demonstrate allegiance and growth.

Same! I thought I'd checked my phone and missed a scene or something. Maybe all those notes Maggie and Shum were writing indicated a plan they'd worked out for Lam to follow, and the 7/11 guy was in on it? Who knows.

Posted: **Tue Apr 26, 2022 3:08 am**

Some Chow Yun-Fat today:

Tiger on Beat (Lau Kar-Leung, 1988)

A buddy action comedy. Was Chow Yun-Fat trying to shake up his image? Only two years out from A Better Tomorrow, and within ten minutes of this movie he gets taken hostage, pisses himself, and faints while the other cops look on in disgust. There’s also a lot of gross physical humour involving him drinking a dozen raw eggs then hiccupping so hard he splashes water all over himself. Like, what are they going for? Mr. Cool as the lazy joke next to hard man asshole Conan Lee, apparently. A big drug deal goes south, the trafficker ends up dead, and our odd couple police partners are on the case. The comedy is…something you put up with. And the long scene where the two essentially torture a woman for information is excruciating. What you’re here for is the bonkers action. And it is bonkers for sure. I’ve never seen anything like some of the stuff they come up with here, like a novel approach to shotgunning bad guys hiding around corners. Plus Conan Lee and Gordon Liu have a hectic fight with chainsaws that finally lives up to the promise never quite delivered on in films like Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and Mandy. If the film had dropped most of the comedy and had more of that stuff, it’d be a classic. It’s rather like Chan’s Police Story for me: astonishing set pieces at the beginning and end, tedium in the middle.

Prison on Fire (Ringo Lam, 1987)

In the late eighties, Lam made a series of hard hitting thrillers and social dramas, all titled …On Fire. The content here is expected: prison is brutal and dehumanizing, the system capricious. After so much whiz-bang style this past week, it was bracing to get something more raw. The story is episodic, structured around the customs, politics, and daily grind of HK prisons. Tony Leung Ka-Fei is the newbie, in for manslaughter and unsuited to prison life. Chow Yun-Fat is the likeable, humourous inmate, knowing that survival depends on canny maneuvering and not being too serious. Complicated prison politics brings things to a head, and Chow’s façade of carefree good humour will be tested severely. Prison movies are not about novelty; the content is circumscribed by the uniform nature of prison life. Prison on Fire works because of the charisma of its actors and the energy of its narrative. This is not a misery fest or an endless parade of brutality. It rides a line between tension and despair on one side, and joking and camaraderie on the other. The movie knows when to be subdued, and when to ratchet things up and go more baroque, especially in a brawl late in the film that works as a long-coming psychic breakdown for both a character and the film itself. This was consistently entertaining; it kept my attention no matter how familiar the tropes, and never felt cliched or hackneyed.

Posted: **Tue Apr 26, 2022 3:09 pm**

I’m really surprised to see the love for It’s a Drink! It’s a Bomb! It’s been about three years since I last saw it, but remember specifically being annoyed by John Shum in this one. He’s not one I associate with room volume voices, but recall him being too much for me in this one. Granted, I may have been Shummed-out from having seen the My Lucky Stars and Pom Pom films shortly before. What I do recall is how breezy George Lam handles his role and how good Maggie Cheung is as a clutz. The thing that stood out most to me was the bizarre villian who’s dressed like a keyboardist for Prince and the Revolution.

Maybe it’s just differing taste because the comedy in something like Tiger on Beat does work for me. The cartoonish, low brow gags of Conan Lee strutting around in underwear and Chow Yun Fat unsimulated egg drinking works very well in balance with some of the most over-the-top action ever seen in a Hong Kong film. The chainsaw fight with Gordon Liu is still to me one of the high points of shocking HK cinema and Chow’s shotgun-yo-yo being one of the most inventive uses for a gun I’ve seen in a film.

Mr. Sausage: curious to what you’ll think of Ringo Lam’s other films. Prison on Fire is relatively light in comparison to the far more grim School on Fire. And despite Full Contact being sort of dampered by the caricature of a flamboyant gay man as portrayed Simon Yam, something about the violence in that film and the senselessness of some of it makes it feel like one of Lam’s darkest films.

Posted: **Tue Apr 26, 2022 4:35 pm**

The Elegant Dandy Fop wrote:Mr. Sausage: curious to what you’ll think of Ringo Lam’s other films. Prison on Fire is relatively light in comparison to the far more grim School on Fire. And despite Full Contact being sort of dampered by the caricature of a flamboyant gay man as portrayed Simon Yam, something about the violence in that film and the senselessness of some of it makes it feel like one of Lam’s darkest films.

I saw City on Fire back in highschool. I remember liking its noirish fatalism, but I don't remember much else besides the repeated image of Chow dancing in the streets in slow motion and the third act that Tarantino lifted for Reservoir Dogs. I saw Full Contact on VHS around the same time, but was lucky enough to see again on the big screen at the Fantasia Film Festival a couple years ago. It's a grim and tasteless masterpiece. Despite its cartoonishness, yeah, I'd easily say it's a darker film than the more grounded social realism of Prison on Fire, the latter having a less despairing view of human nature. School on Fire I have not been able to get a copy of, tho' my library system has endless rarer and less known things. Who knows.

The Elegant Dandy Fop wrote:I’m really surprised to see the love for It’s a Drink! It’s a Bomb! It’s been about three years since I last saw it, but remember specifically being annoyed by John Shum in this one. He’s not one I associate with room volume voices, but recall him being too much for me in this one. Granted, I may have been Shummed-out from having seen the My Lucky Stars and Pom Pom films shortly before. What I do recall is how breezy George Lam handles his role and how good Maggie Cheung is as a clutz. The thing that stood out most to me was the bizarre villian who’s dressed like a keyboardist for Prince and the Revolution.

Shum is overly loud, but after an initial irritation I found a groove with it and the movie clicked. It's a nice early role for Cheung, yeah. I don't think she'd figured out how to be an actress yet (she'd only been in the industry a couple years I think, having being pulled from beauty pageants), but her natural charm carries her through the movie. I'll remember Elvis Tsui's weird ass get-up until the day I die. Who came up with that?

Posted: **Tue Apr 26, 2022 5:29 pm**

Mr Sausage wrote: Tue Apr 26, 2022 3:08 am Some Chow Yun-Fat today:

Tiger on Beat (Lau Kar-Leung, 1988)

A buddy action comedy. Was Chow Yun-Fat trying to shake up his image? Only two years out from A Better Tomorrow, and within ten minutes of this movie he gets taken hostage, pisses himself, and faints while the other cops look on in disgust. There’s also a lot of gross physical humour involving him drinking a dozen raw eggs then hiccupping so hard he splashes water all over himself. Like, what are they going for? Mr. Cool as the lazy joke next to hard man asshole Conan Lee, apparently. A big drug deal goes south, the trafficker ends up dead, and our odd couple police partners are on the case. The comedy is…something you put up with. And the long scene where the two essentially torture a woman for information is excruciating. What you’re here for is the bonkers action. And it is bonkers for sure. I’ve never seen anything like some of the stuff they come up with here, like a novel approach to shotgunning bad guys hiding around corners. Plus Conan Lee and Gordon Liu have a hectic fight with chainsaws that finally lives up to the promise never quite delivered on in films like Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and Mandy. If the film had dropped most of the comedy and had more of that stuff, it’d be a classic. It’s rather like Chan’s Police Story for me: astonishing set pieces at the beginning and end, tedium in the middle.

Chow was actually pretty well-known for this type of comedy in Hong Kong at the time––it's a sort of an ahistorical vision we have based on what films were available to us in the rest of the world that his image in HK film was mostly "cool." In the immediate years before he was in 100 Ways to Murder Your Wife, My Will I Will, The Seventh Curse, The Romancing Star, Spiritual Love, and An Autumn's Tale. In the same year as this, he did The Greatest Lover, The Eighth Happiness, The Romancing Star II, Fractured Follies and The Diary of a Big Man. All of these were comic roles, and Chow's particular approach to comedy is the same kind of goofiness you see in Tiger on Beat (combined also with a lot of 4th wall-breaking, which Chow does in a lot of these movies without warning). At the same time, he appeared in a bunch of triad movies and a bunch of romantic melodramas––and a year later he'd be in God of Gamblers, carving out a weird seriocomic vein in his work––so the image of Chow for Hong Kong cinema fans during this era––which was probably the height of his exposure in the HK film world, was like a multiple exposure photograph, with different figures for different kinds of fans. Probably his original image was as a romantic figure in series like The Bund and in early movies like Last Affair and Love in a Fallen City. Point being, though, that Chow's brand of comedy was already successful in Hong Kong in the years immediately before this. It's taken me literally decades to appreciate this kind of comedy, but I have to say I kind of enjoy it now––especially from Chow, who does it with a self-effacing charm and a kind of desperation to entertain that I don't see in the more vain and exasperating Stephen Chow.

Posted: **Tue Apr 26, 2022 5:50 pm**

Thanks for the historical background. I will say, I did like Chow's comic clowning in Prison on Fire, where he plays the loquacious jokester. That he combines this with a ferocious intensity that builds to a gut punch slow motion image of him spitting blood into the air at the climax shows his versatility as an actor. Tiger on Beat was too much, tho'.

Posted: **Tue Apr 26, 2022 5:53 pm**

Mr Sausage wrote: Tue Apr 26, 2022 4:35 pm
The Elegant Dandy Fop wrote:I’m really surprised to see the love for It’s a Drink! It’s a Bomb! It’s been about three years since I last saw it, but remember specifically being annoyed by John Shum in this one. He’s not one I associate with room volume voices, but recall him being too much for me in this one. Granted, I may have been Shummed-out from having seen the My Lucky Stars and Pom Pom films shortly before. What I do recall is how breezy George Lam handles his role and how good Maggie Cheung is as a clutz. The thing that stood out most to me was the bizarre villian who’s dressed like a keyboardist for Prince and the Revolution.
Shum is overly loud, but after an initial irritation I found a groove with it and the movie clicked. It's a nice early role for Cheung, yeah.

As I mentioned before, I think George Lam really serves as the anchor for the film- his more grounded, yet idiosyncratically-unhinged performance functions as an effective counterpart for Shum's louder, intentionally-obnoxious character, quieting him at times, and in others taunting him in a manner that forces his erratic behavior to become more grounded and pointed around a focal point of a comic idea. Cheung's role is less flashy, but she serves as the ultra-naive and dumb mediator between the two, and this helps dilute a lot of the friction in their toxic interplay that may have boiled over too often without her lackadaisical presence. It's an incredibly fruitful trio dynamic, with so much that could go so wrong down the drain of eyerolling coercive comedy, yet manages to find the exact right collaborative timing for optimal outcomes.

The more I reflect on this film, the more I realize how many risks are taken and how much confidence must have played into the players' choices to nail what could have so easily failed in a tailspin of flat-jokes.

Posted: **Thu Apr 28, 2022 12:55 am**

Butterfly & Sword (Michael Mak, 1993)

This movie is bonkers. The first four minutes here would be the first twenty of any other movie, it’s so manic and crazed. Faces slashed off, bodies exploding, men propelled through the air by their own bows, vast political machinations just glided over. It’s like a cocaine fever dream. This is a delirious wuxia fantasy. It has a hell of a cast: Michelle Yeoh, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Joey Wong, Donnie Yen. What it doesn’t have is a plot. You just stare open mouthed at the screen as one bizarre thing after another speeds by. Scenes of impossible violence smash cut to scenes of gentle beauty without warning. Characters fly into scenes without introduction and leave as quickly. The camera tilts, whirls, tracks in and out, and otherwise declines to shoot anything normally. Dreams within dreams; long, baffling flashbacks given without set up; lingerie advertisements(?!); Freddy Kruger gloves. This is not sober, considered cinema. Butterfly and Sword is exactly what I want from 90s wuxia. A piece of perfect craziness.

A Chinese Ghost Story III (Ching Siu-Tung, 1991)

Apparently compensating for part II leaning more heavily into the creature feature aspect, part III puts more emphasis on the romance. Joey Wong reprises her character from the original (or one exactly like it) after playing a different character in part II, while Leslie Cheung is replaced with Tony Leung as a wandering monk who falls in love with a ghost. Jackie Cheung is also back, but as a different character from part II. These movies are less sequels than variations. I didn’t love the first two, but they could be fun and they had plenty of creativity. This is a lusher, more erotic movie, but it’s run out of ideas. The main pleasure is getting to luxuriate in the Tsui style.

Posted: **Thu Apr 28, 2022 1:55 pm**

The Inspector Wears Skirts (Wellson Chin, 1988)

I thought this was a Girls and Guns actioner, but it’s more a slapstick comedy produced by Jackie Chan. It does have a couple amazing action scenes at the beginning and end with the exact frenetic imagination and perilous stunt work we’ve all come to expect, but they account for maybe 15 minutes of the 95 minute run time. The rest of the movie is given to loosely connected vignettes of the most interminable slapstick comedy. This is a gender comedy, where women are hired to be an elite police unit, but spend most of their time in hijinks, dating, and dorm room bullshit. The film resembles an 80s sorority comedy as much as anything. The cadets even go to a roller rink, and there’s a long do-wop song and dance number. If you’re into jokes about men slapping women, welcome to your new favourite film. The end credits may be the best thing; they're Jackie Chan style outtakes, and it turns out one of the bat shit training methods was a very real, utterly insane fire stunt in which one of the lead actresses and a stuntman accidentally caught fire. Holy shit.

Posted: **Sat Apr 30, 2022 9:29 pm**

I've been watching some various HK titles sparingly without a lot say about many of them, so a slapdash combo-writeup is what they get, though all ranged from good to great. Swordsman II has very impressive choreography, and the gender-bending perversity works at taking a fantastical idea and translating it into 'realistic' emotional stakes, but it didn't leave me dumbfounded as the impressionistic tonal artpiece that I anticipated it to be. That said, the comedy, action, romance, and contained-epic elements transition into one another and overlap effectively, and I wouldn't fault it for anything. The same goes for Fong Sai-yuk, which was a lot of fun, if lighter and less tonally diverse than Swordsman II.

And then there's Zu Warriors, Tsui Hark's reimagining of his earlier masterpiece for the new millennium, which was expectedly audaciously exotic insanity. However, while I admired the film for retaining the liberal flux of idea collages the first film exhibited, its loose hold on the material occasionally left me uninvolved and disinterested in the phantasmagoric stimuli-overload being unleashed upon me. Overall, the creative juices and commitment to uncompromising imaginative flow paved a path for more positive connotations, though it didn't hold a candle to the original. Perhaps I need my campy HK mayhem to exist in the 80s without updated CGI and 'modern' cinematography that sheds necessary cartoonish artifice, a juxtaposition that doesn't quite work for me when action is shot candidly with a docu-sharpness but infused with so much weird visual aids to negate that precedent...

Having said all that, the hybrid of raw naked exposition and hyperkinetic style worked wonders in The Blade, which was a gut-churning desaturated version of the previous decade's comparatively dolled-up crowdpleasing revenge tale. Here those two elements complemented one another to cultivate a grounded sense of brutal naturalism in form, which becomes the film's ethos in Hobbesian helplessness. feihong already wrote this up well, but I too thought the best aspect was the tertiary narrator's tragic role, with the final denouement's fatalism of futile wishing in isolation serving as a perfect manifestation of the deterministic disconnect and the mirages of catharsis from rehabilitation or fleeting successes populating this film, clarifying that there is no hope for sturdy supports.

Butterfly & Sword may be my new favorite 90s wuxia film though- with manic energy transmitted at such a rapid speed that I thought my head would spin around twelve times over. The forest battle scene's editing could trigger an epileptic seizure, and the relentlessly inventive final flying fight is overflowing with the most engaging technical skills, martial arts choreography, and random variables introduced for both amusement and awe-inspiring dramatic potential I've seen yet from a post-80s HK movie. Like, I'm totally cool with you inventing some fire thing to cause this star-power couple to have a 'moment' just before obliterating their opponent (who declares his true identity in a manner that suggests no one gives a single fuck about what he actually 'is', since it's so irrelevant to what came before or to frenetic skirmish about to take place and fizzle out in a no-blink-contest blaze) into gory smithereens in a ping-pong of moods to match its stylistic chaos. This '93 masterpiece feels cut from the same cloth as the '83 Zu, and if folks just just keep making films that look and feel like these, I'll keep watching them.

Posted: **Sat Apr 30, 2022 11:38 pm**

Swordsman II probably benefits from coming to it first. It really popularized a style of wuxia that so many other directors would push further and further into an impressionistic whirlwind madness, culminating in the melancholic dreamscapes of Ashes of Time. If you come to it after becoming familiar with what it spawned, it probably won't seem quite as wild or arty. What makes the movie for me is less the craziness than its passionate emotional landscape, especially Invicinble Asia's physical and emotional transformation and the trajectory of her relationship with the Jet Li character. I've always found the film moving, helped along by Brigitte Lin's nuanced performance. It's the quieter moments, like Invincible Asia trying on make up for the first time, or her and Li flying through the falling petals, that stick with me--plus the calm, slightly sad ambivalence of her fighting moves during the finale, contrasted with Jet Li's emotional confusion. All those things punch the movie up above the sometimes crazier, but less affecting wuxias I like. It's not quite an art film ala Wong Kar-Wai, true, but it has a complex emotional tone I love.

If you're looking for something wilder and more delirious, don't hesitate to grab the sequel, The East is Red. It's less a story than a fantasia on the themes of love and transformation and madness. It tends not to be regarded as highly as Swordsman II, but I think it's underrated.

Posted: **Sun May 01, 2022 6:47 pm**

Some Category III Madness.

The Untold Story (Herman Yau, 1993)

Anthony Wong brutally murders a man he owes money to, flees Hong Kong for Macau, and sets up shop as the proprietor of a meat bun shop. Meanwhile, a bagful of human limbs washes up on the beach and the cops start investigating. The two strands naturally collide. Anthony Wong is one of those brilliant, crazy actors who seems to specialize in playing scumballs and psychopaths. He gives an unhinged, totally committed performance as this heinous rapist and murderer. The film has two parts: the serious, sleazy, intense sections featuring Anthony Wong’s psycho, and then the goofy comedy involving Danny Lee’s detective (who shows up with a new prostitute on his arm every scene) and the childish detectives he leads. The two strands don’t even pretend to overlap. Sometimes the humour seems to fit, turning the movie into a black comedy that’s congruent with the ridiculous violence and depravity, but much of the time it’s out of an 80s frat boy comedy. The second half of the movie descends into utter cynicism. The main character is irredeemable, and yet the movie has the police torture him relentlessly to get a confession from him, including injecting water beneath his skin to form painful blisters. This is also the second movie after Vengeance is Mine where I’ve seen someone piss on their own hands to wash blood off. An exercise in sustained grotesquerie. It’s hilarious this movie’s on Kanopy.

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.

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.

Posted: **Mon May 02, 2022 2:00 am**

Is there an unwritten rule somewhere that if you're an HK director wanting to make your first Hollywood movie, you have to cast Jean-Claude Van Damme? John Woo, Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam--even Cory Yuen, way back in 1986. Van Damme wasn't famous yet--hadn't even had a starring role yet!--and still Cory Yuen couldn't escape this weird rite of passage.

Posted: **Mon May 02, 2022 2:26 am**

Van Damme is a huge HK fan and sought out these directors for his movies. He was the one bringing them over. They probably wouldn’t have come over in most cases without nudging from him.

Posted: **Mon May 02, 2022 3:34 am**

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.

Posted: **Mon May 02, 2022 3:54 am**

Admittedly, the whole Jacobean tragedy thing probably only occurred to me because there's a scene in The Revenger's Tragedy where the main character carts his dead girlfriend's skeleton on stage and starts having jokey conversations with it, to the jaw-dropped stupefaction of everyone else (you can guess what in Run and Kill made me think of that). Right after, he tricks his enemy into kissing the skull, which has been covered in poison, melting the guy's lips off, after which he pins the guy's eyelids open so he can watch his own wife cuckold him, and then follows that up with pinning his tongue to the table with a knife to keep him from talking, causing the man's agonizing death. Pretty Category III, I'd say.

Posted: **Mon May 02, 2022 12:18 pm**

Cinemas Underbelly did an interesting video on The Untold Story along with its sequels and spin-offs (including the direct remake Bloody Buns!).

I'm still working up the nerve to watch Ebola Syndrome!

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