ARMAGEDDON (1997)
This film was so disappointing. It starts with a SWAT team breaking into a
Church and confronting a scary monk who cunningly defends himself by exploding. The rest
of the film is nothing like that. Instead, you get half-baked metaphysical
mish-mosh, and handsome HK film stars walking around in Prague (Prague, fer chrissakes!
What were they thinking?). The plot is all about HK's brightest scientists being knocked
off as some precursor to the end of the world, but when the coming of the Antichrist is
explained as the arrival of Saddam Hussein, you just want to crawl under your seat and
die. All in all, it could have done with less of the thinly disguised metaphor for the
Handover, and more of the exploding monks. More's the pity, Andy Lau is really
good as the stoic scientist, Anthony Wong is really good as
the seedy cop, and Michelle Reis is really good as Andy's
girlfriend who gets hit by a bus. (She's dead before the film starts, so stop whining that
I'm giving the plot away.) It's enjoyable enough while it's passing, but so utterly fails
to deliver that when it's over you wonder why you bothered watching it and why they
bothered making it. However, the Hong Kong Film Critics Society call it "A fantstic
rendition of Hong Kong's global role and a bold reaction to the challenge of Hollywood
with an original blend of mysticism and science fiction", so what the hell do I know?
Available
on Chinatown Video.
BEAST COPS (1998)
Modern cop drama with Anthony Wong playing the mildly corrupt cop who
keeps a lid on things, Michael Wong as the uptight straight cop
who'll gun down a criminal regardless of the danger to the hostage, and Sam
Lee as the skinny cop who always gets the goss. Most of Beast
Cops is
concerned with the interaction between the three cops, and the conflict between their way of
walking the beat. Roy Cheung plays the local Big Brother who has an
understanding with the police, but when he is forced into hiding, the rules change.
This film looks, breathes and is Hong Kong - real Hong Kong, where folks
squabble and scrimp and just get by, not the tuxedoed Hong Kong of the
1980s crime films. The
big showdown with the young replacement Big Brother (Patrick Tam Yiu Man) at the
end is truly gruesome, and the real and visceral nature of the violence
comes as a raw jolt after the jocular story (even with the crazy surf music soundtrack that
accompanies the final fight). But enjoyable stuff, one of the best late
90s crime films, and Anthony Wong
is superb (doubly confirmed when he picked up Best Actor for his role in
this, also awarded Best Film of 1998).
Available
on Chinatown Video.
CASINO (1998)
This biopic of Macau gangster Broken Tooth was funded by the man himself. Apparently,
he's a non-smoking, non-drinking philosophy-spouting man whose only vices are a twin
passion for dancing and for singing the Once Upon a Time in China theme in
karaoke nightclubs. As you can guess, this is a very silly movie, but an entertaining one.
Simon Yam is incorrigible as Broken Tooth, who will do anything
for his buddies (especially the one with the incurable lung disorder) but is a sworn enemy
to his foes. His greatest sin is that he fails to visit his wife in hospital after the
birth of their son. (She leaves him, but we're hard pressed to notice, as she was barely
in the film to begin with.) We follow the rise of our saintly gangster from a small potato
to the leader of a faction hundreds strong. This is just as well, as the other faction is
hundreds strong too, leading to many scenes of motorcades of hire cars and scooters with
their hazard lights flashing on their way en masse to rough up the other guys' turf. The
fighting is in the style of modern HK cinema, with not much martial arts but with a whole
lot of baseball bats, crowbars, sledgehammers, and the odd garotting with a shower
curtain. The framing device for all of this history is a spurious interview with a trendy
HK reporter, who treats Broken Tooth as a sort of pop star, which you probably would if he
was a real life Triad who was funding the production. That's the key to the film; much of
the enjoyment comes from the outrageous and spurious blending of fact and fiction. It's
dumb fun, but don't tell Broken Tooth I wrote that. His buddies swing a mean sledgehammer.
C'EST LA VIE, MON CHERI
(1993)
[THAT'S LIFE, MY DEAR]
Kit (Lau Ching-wan) is the poor but proud song-writing boyfriend of
rich Canto-pop star, Tracy (Carina Lau). Unable to endure being a kept
man any longer, he sets off to make his own way, which seems to consist of living in a
scungy apartment, eating a steady diet of cup noodle and struggling with song-writer's
block. Ah, Pop, you fickle muse. He befriends Min (Anita Yuen) who sings
opera and classics songs in her family's market tent, but secretly dreams of being a
Canto-pop star just like Tracy. She is expert at faking the voices of big name stars for
dodgy bootleg cassettes.
Kit writes a song for her, and introduces her to his contacts, but Min refuses the
offer when she realises that the only way she can succeed is without him. Instead, he
sends the song to his ex-girlfriend (in a kind of musical menage a trois), and she soon
has another hit on her hands. Then comes the plot twist -- all this time Min was in
remission from terminal cancer, and her time has just run out. Another superb mix of
light-hearted romantic comedy and tragedy, C'est la vie, mon cheri is saved from Love
Story-style bathos by terrific performances from Lau Ching-wan and Anita
Yuen, supported by an excellent cast.
Anita Yuen is a complete knock-out in this role, summing her
character's exuberance and love of life -- and her anger and heartache. Lau
Ching-wan is great too, as he stoically attempts to keep up a manly facade while
struggling with deep feelings. Together they are unbelievably young and fresh. Older faces
include Petrina Fung and Paul Chun Pui in touching
performances as Min's tough-love mum and feckless uncle. The scene where Min's mother
returns to the tent to sing because the family needs money for Min's medical bills, while
Min is dying in hospital, is a tour-de-force.
WARNING: After seeing this movie, you will never be able to eat red bean cake again.
Reviewed by Penelope Love.
CHEAP KILLERS (1998)
An elevator opens to reveal a man who has been hacked in half. A machete fight ends
with the loser's knife hand severed at the forearm. A man pulled up at traffic lights
rolls down his window and sticks his head out to have it split open by a brutal overhead
slash. A young gangster gets impaled with a speargun and reeled in like a marlin. A close
range shotgun blast blows a man's leg to bloody pieces, and a follow-up head shot at
point-blank sprays the killer's face with blood and random pieces of quivering scalp. A
man pierced through the leg with a steel rod takes out his switchblade to cut himself
free. Another machete fight, another severed forearm. Welcome to the wonderful world of
Cheap Killers. If it can be shot, chopped, maimed, pierced, scalded or dropped from a
great height you can bet your bottom prawn cracker that director Clarence Ford goes for it
in this gleefully gory Hong Kong film noir.
This is a film with a message, summarised thus by Sam Cool (Alex Fong):
"You can never trust a woman". The woman in question is Ling (Kathy Chow),
who does a Postman Always Rings Twice-style seduction on Sam's suave silk-shirt
wearing killer partner Yat-Tiu (Sunny Chan). (I don't think the slow
cascade of water from a garden hose was in the James M. Cain original, but it does the
trick.) Ling's husband is Ma, an ugly old arms dealer, and he takes violent exception to
being cuckolded, forcing Yat-Tiu to sort him out with the sharp end of a pair of garden
shears. It's just the first bad step on a bloody road that will soon see Sam Cool and
Yat-Tiu fall out with their old boss, the splendidly named Doctrine King (you can tell he
is evil by the way he smokes a cigar - oh, I guess his paedophiliac boasts around the card
table are also a bit of a giveaway). Our heroes rapidly go from being stylish
sportscar-driving hitmen to half-crazed low-rent killers on the run. Yat-Tiu goes
completely mad (one witness describes him as "Running like a nuts!"), but you
would be too if you had been on the receiving end of a Deliverance-style scene in
which an evil one-eyed gweilo named Blonde issues the unforgettable command "Okay 14
brothers, let's pork this pig!"
Yat-Tiu (slang for ten bucks) cops the porking as the result of his hubris, but Sam
Cool sticks by him, partly because he's a loyal old school gangster, but perhaps mostly
because writer Wong Jing obviously decided "I've had it with
homo-erotic subtext in triad movies - let's get it out in the open". Sam cares for
Yat-Tiu day and night, calms him down when he remembers the gal that did him wrong, cleans
him up when he piddles himself, cuddles him when he can't sleep - everything short of an
actual kiss, and it's all genuinely tender and beautifully played by Alex Fong, who
manages to pack macho and mothering into one performance. Sam also gets to deliver the
film's most noirish line as he is bundling his wounded buddy into a taxi. The driver asks
"Mister, where do you want to go?", and Sam replies "As far as you can
go". Straight down the line, baby.
I've probably given too much away, but if you are thinking of checking this one out,
and I suggest you do, don't say I didn't warn you. (And while I'm in a warning mood,
here's a tip for English speakers: the subtitles don't kick in until about 2 minutes into
the movie, so don't rush out for that refund right away.) This film swipes what it needs
and charges on, knives flashing and arteries spurting. A little Hard Boiled here,
a little Better Tomorrow 2 there, a dash of Naked Killer, some Godfather
to taste, about a hundred gallons of blood, set on High for 99 minutes, and serve in
a Chinatown Cinema for an audience of 30 people who are only watching it as part of a
double bill before the feelgood romance Love Generation Hong Kong. They'll never
be the same, and neither will you.
Available
on Chinatown Video.
CONMAN, THE AKA
GOD OF GAMBLERS 1999 (1998)
Wong Jing created the stuff of Hong Kong cinema legend with his films
starring Chow Yun Fat as the God of Gamblers, the man who always smiled,
never lost, and dressed to kill. In this unrelated sequel, it seems that the Asian
economic crisis has brought out a less mythic breed of gambler. King (Andy Lau)
is a sharper whose maxim is "If you don't cheat, you are never guaranteed to
win". The downside of cheating is getting caught, and when a mobster takes exception
to King's technique the resulting melee leaves two dead. King goes to jail for five years,
and loses his partner, his wife and the child he's never seen. All he gets in return is a
head of grey hair and a mournful harmonica soundtrack.
Eventually he's back on the streets and takes on a new partner, the incorrigible Little
Dragon (Nick Cheung). Together they rescue Dragon's sister Ching Ching (Athena
Chu) from a swindler and then set out to make their first billion, a task which
involves a lot more Computing Logical Systems and a lot less hair gel than Dragon had
expected. When he complains, King asks him "Would you rather be a happy loser or a
boring winner?" Things get far from boring when the malevolent Handsome (Waise
Lee) blackmails King into taking on the legendary Macau Mon (Jack Kao)
in a fifty million dollar game for his money and his life.
If you're not used to Hong Kong's no holds barred cinema, "The Conman" may
not be for you. Distressingly, director Wong characterises not one but
all of his bad gangsters and corrupt cops by their violence to women, both threatened and
real. In fact, the women in the film are all either victims or wallpaper (and often both).
This sits uneasily in the same film that has a highly comic scam involving a faked
broadcast of the World Cup. King's range of skills have no consistent pattern, moving from
trickster to pool shark to cheater to statistician, making for an entertaining series of
vignettes but nothing approaching consistent characterisation.
Luckily, the movie is saved by the audacity of the scams, the wickedness of the gags,
the fast pace of the plot and the some very stylish cinematography. Nick Cheung's
enjoyable performance as the always-optimistic Dragon is worth the price of admission, and
Wong's own cameo as a crooked TV director called Squirrel is a hoot. It's
also great to see Waise Lee in action again - those 1980s actors sure do
look like original gangsters when they hit the screen. All in all, it's a dodgy but
entertaining piece of fictional gambling - even when it's as sordid as this, it's still
more exciting than the real thing.
Available
on Chinatown Video.
THE DEMON'S BABY (1998)
"Are you ready to give birth to the evil baby?" If you are,
you're probably also ready for this cheerful cheesy cheapo schlocko low-rent horror flick.
This one's a romp, kids. It's the kind of film where you can tell a character has turned
evil because all of a sudden she has garish make-up on, where a cute little puppy dog is
only introduced if it is about to meet a grisly death several seconds later, where wronged
corpses hop for vengeance and where nothing stops a demon in its tracks like a mouth full
of beancurd.
The General (Elvis Tsui) has four wives and has his eye
on a fifth, his servant Little-Fish (Annie Wu), but she has her eye on
the cook, Day-Six (Emotion Cheung). True love might run its rocky course
were it not for the fact that the General has inadvisably installed five potted demons in
the living room (all the best houses have them). Quicker than you can say "It's messy
- I think something has gone wrong", the head servant Lee is hawking the special gold
buddha that keeps the demons pot-bound, thus letting them loose to possess the General and
impregnate his wives. Here's a step-by-step guide to filming a demonic possession: (1)
shine a green light on the actor's face, (2) make the soundtrack go wibble and (3) get the
actor to bug his eyes a bit. Presto, you're off to the races, or to the bedchamber(s) as
the case may be. What threatens to be a gross demonic possession rape scene (complete with
green light and wibble) is actually shot as a goofy overhead courtyard cam of the General
rushing in one red lanterned door after another. Soon enough the gals are bringing up a
brood of evil infants, all of whom hunger for the flesh of the living. It starts with
livestock ("Master, the dog you love most has just been eaten by Madam"), but
soon enough they're pushing servants head-first into their toothsome bellies. It all looks
like a job for the ghostbuster Ching Hoi (Anthony Wong), who hauls out
his hand-held demon-detector and gets cracking.
What I'm saying is, this movie is a hoot, and refreshingly without trace
of sadism or malice - the effects are just too much of the latex-and-ketchup school to be
taken seriously at any stage. It's kooky, funny and witty - the whole parody of Raise
the Red Lantern is a scream (once the women have all turned to evil, they get on
fine!). If you liked the flying killer rubber fetus in The Seventh Curse, you'll
howl as The Demon's Baby goes one step further - flying killer rubber fetus
football. Director Kant Leung shoots and scores with this wacky horror
comedy. Two malformed thumbs up.
EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED (1998)
This is one of the bleak new wave of post-Handover HK crime films which
include Full Alert, Beast Cops and A True Mob Story. Like those films,
the characters here are very Hong Kong, but in a Hong Kong the place sense rather than a
Hong Kong the movie myth sense. The opening is dynamite. Three inept Mainland robbers
botch a jewel store holdup. One of them flees into a nearby apartment building,
inadvertently leading the police to the hideout of a second gang of criminals who are much
more hardcore than the bumbling Chinese thieves. Serious arms fire ensues. The rest
of the film follows four cops as they track the surviving members of both gangs. Simon
Yam plays the hardbitten sergeant, and Lau Ching Wan plays his
unorthodox lieutenant. A love triangle develops between them and key witness Mandy (Yo
Yo Mung), just to provide a little light dating action between car chases, in
that uniquely HK blend of whimsical romance and teeth-grinding violence.
Tonally, the film is similar to the Hollywood flick Seven, with
the cops usually arriving after the villains have left. The evil gang in this film use
home invasions to establish hideouts, and target the homes of single women. One crime
aftermath in particular is perhaps the most disturbing thing I've seen in film, purely by
the implication of the events that have transpired.
Expect the Unexpected is proof that there's still life in the
Hong Kong film industry. Pacing, acting and script are all superb. The title holds the
truth. You can try to expect it, but you won't. I guarantee it.
H E R O I C * C I N E M A
http://www.heroic-cinema.com
