by ·Comments Off on The Butterfly Murders (1979, Tsui Hark)

Not sure it’s worth recounting the whole Scooby Doo story of Hark’s debut feature – there’s so much of it. Flipside of the King Hu movie, pulling off as much plot and action and as many cool compositions in under half the runtime. Sean and Jake are saying the same thing, and they’re both saying it better than I could’ve.

The initial team:

Multiple clans unite to solve the killer butterflies mystery, including Green Shadow (who’d return in We’re Going to Eat You!). They arrive at a castle, where the Lord is the dad from A Brighter Summer Day and the Lady was in the same year’s Magnificent Butcher. Soon, the Three Thunders arrive – including Magic Fire, who would be in a few Johnnie To films and The Bride With White Hair. Now Scholar Fong (villain of the Chinese Ghost Story series) knows the mysterious leather mask-man who controls the butterflies is the castle lord and gets the heck out of there, also knowing everyone is gonna kill each other.

Mouseover to unmask the mysterious armored man:
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Ladies and gentlemen… The Magic Fire Crow:

by ·Comments Off on Accident (2009, Soi Cheang)

Sourfaced Louis Koo leads a hitman squad, staging deaths as accidents, along with older Uncle, female Woman, and Lam Suet. They pull off their latest job – electrocution via kite string – but Uncle is losing his marbles, then an out-of-control bus plows into Lam Suet. Louis starts tailing people involved with the job, convinced his team is being taken out by a rival. He thinks Woman is against him so he kills her, then their final client falls from a window. Gorman: “Master of the surveillance state goes crazy when the apparatus is turned against him, then has an epiphany about the cruel vicissitudes of pure chance.”

Koo between the Election movies and Breaking/Romancing. Woman was Anthony Wong’s wife in Motorway. Lam Suet was Lam Suet. Uncle was a Sammo/Jackie Lucky Star who died last Halloween. Next year we should have a Devil’s Vendetta / Ghost Snatchers double-feature in his honor.

by ·Comments Off on Full Contact (1992, Ringo Lam)

A few groups of ultimate badass killer burglars get into death feuds with each other because nobody can act professional for just a few seconds at a time. A couple of love triangles here: hot dancer Mona is dating extreme badass Chow Yun-Fat (in his extreme badass era, same year as Hard Boiled) then when he disappears she bounces to sniveling ponytail weenie Anthony Wong. And Wong bounces from his best friend Chow to gay magician Simon Yam, falling in with Yam’s gang of villains (a girl named Slut and a guy who I just saw Riki-oh kill).

Injured Chow rescuing a dog:

Chow is supposedly killed on a job in Thailand, so everyone’s upset when he comes back around and starts using traitor Anthony as a spy. Didn’t feel as distinctive as the last Ringo Lam movie I saw, just a 90s actioner, the actors giving it as much life as they can until it’s time for the finale when twenty cars blow up while Chow and Yam have their monologues and shootouts. That’s not to say I didn’t have a great time watching these psychos torment and kill each other.

by ·Comments Off on Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky (1991, Lam Nai-Choi)

Movie opens with Ho Lik-Wong going to prison, chest full of bullets, getting on everyone’s bad side… that’s right, according to my version’s perverted subtitles, the lead guy in Riki-oh: The Story of Ricky is not even named Ricky.

The local toughs try to set the new guy straight, but Ricky beats the absolute hell out of them, quickly escalating matters to the higher toughs – there are so many toughs in this prison, really brutal dudes, and Rick One-Punch-Man‘s most of them into gory blood fountains. Somebody has Dead Alive‘d Brawl in Cell Block 99.

The assistant warden has a nice library of pornographic videotapes:

Of course Ricky has a flashback flute that triggers his backstory, and of course the toughs have various alliances and secret weapons and side plots. “The warden is the best kung fu fighter of a private prison,” so he transforms into a beast then is quickly crammed into the meat grinder by invincible Ricky, who sadly got no sequels. Ricky would go on to Supercop 2, some Donnie Yen movies, and Flying Swords of Dragon Gate. Eighteenth-billed Lam Suet would go on to twenty of my favorite Johnnie To films. Wouldn’t be a bad idea to watch the director’s other movies: a Maggie Cheung skeleton-fighting jungle curse adventure, a cat from outer space, something about opening the gates of hell, and one called Erotic Ghost Story.

Mouseover to punch your way right out of prison:
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by ·Comments Off on Out of the Dark (1995, Jeffrey Lau)

Parody of The Professional, I think, but instead of a hit man Leon (Stephen Chow) is a crazy guy who sees ghosts. Blondie from Fallen Angels is there, and Sammo Hung-reminiscent police captain Lo Hung (apparently no relation). A very silly movie – not really sure how it escalates into cops getting chainsawed to death, it’s not important, nor should we interrogate why the survivors make magic hats out of newspaper and fly safely away from the evil ghost at the end.

by ·Comments Off on Running Out of Time 2 (2001, Johnnie To)

Returning from part one are determined detective Lau Ching-wan (suddenly listed as Sean Lau online) and incompetent commissioner Hui Siu-Hung. Not returning is criminal mastermind Andy Lau, who wasn’t faking his fatal illness. In his place we get impossibly suave and brilliant magician-thief Noodle Cheng (the 2001 Zu Warriors), who keeps assaulting the police and playing mind games (is this where the Now You See Me movies came from?). You don’t think of Johnnie To cops & robbers movies as having CG-crud animal companions, but Noodle’s got a bald eagle, and Lau’s men track him down with help from some eagle-tracking ornithologists. Kelly Lin (Sparrow) is a boring important businessperson whose company is being blackmailed by art thief Noodle, and Lam Suet a gambling-addict cop who the thief is personally tormenting. The point of the thief’s scheme was to robin-hood the money from the company to charity, or some such thing. It’s all beautifully shot by the usual crew, Stephen Chow’s regular composer working extra hard on the score. A collapsing-bicycle race joins To’s pantheon of perfect nighttime street scenes along with Throw Down‘s dollar-chase and tree-balloon, Don’t Go Breaking My Heart‘s headlight-silhouette, Sparrow‘s finale, and half of PTU.

by ·Comments Off on Eastern Condors (1987, Sammo Hung)

Chinese prisoners are dropped into Vietnam days after the US pulled out of the war to destroy a weapons cache before it falls into enemy hands. Kind of a Dirty Dozen plot, but these guys are not soldiers, and the first one dies tragicomically because he doesn’t open his parachute in time due to a stutter when counting to twenty. But the USA was counting on the idea that all Chinese people know kung fu (true), and that losing comrades one at a time over the course of an arduous Vietnam mission in a 1980’s movie will turn one of them into Rambo, and this happens to Sammo, who completes the mission. By the end he’s killing people using tree leaves as missile weapons – it’s acting like a serious war movie, the action scenes short and brutal (and sometimes astounding), but with the kinds of moves you’d expect from a parody.

Thin-mustached colonel in charge is Lam Ching-Ying of Mr. Vampire and all the Bruce Lee movies. Yuen Woo-Ping is Mouse (loses his legs during a machine gun bridge crossing) and Original Foon Yuen Biao is Weasel, but various translations refer to both men as Rat, so overall the cast is hard to figure out. The commando girl who sticks with them is Joyce Godenzi (the future Mrs. Sammo Hung), and the evil giggling general (Criterion: “like a eunuch villain from a King Hu film transported to the present”) is Yuen Wah of Kung Fu Hustle.

The movie’s final words still resonate today:

by ·Comments Off on Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (2024, Soi Cheang)

I think the notes I took while watching this can stand on their own:

Girl Fishball’s prost mom gets beaten to death
He’s trying to save up for a fake ID but gets into gambling with the boys
Music is too big but maybe that’s the 1980s setting
This is 1986?

Raymond is the “employed cop” (?) of Detective vs. Sleuths
Cyclone’s doctor is looking for dead Jim’s son to kill his whole family
Chau is the doc, Lui killed his family, Jim was Lui’s killer who seems modeled after Daniel Day Lewis in Gangs of NY
Jim is Koo’s Throw Down costar

Boss Tiger lost an eye to Jim, Boss Chau his family, and Cyclone killed Jim
Cyclone was secret friends with Jim and smuggled his family out of town after killing
Our guy is Jim’s son, whitehair doc Chau is pissed
They spent a billion dollars recreating the neighborhood for this film, but needed these guys to play different ages in the 1960s and 1980s and threw some talcum in their hair
Gravity-defying fights, not going for realism despite the kowloon recreation

AV is guy with underwear mask
It uses the godzilla (??)
They all butcher each other while Lok is incapacitated
Some of the goofiest action moves since Dragon Inn
Almost everyone is dead and the cops have Lok

Sammo’s sunglasses guy King uses this fight to move in and take over
King kills his boss Sammo after killing Cyclone
King’s deal is that he is physically indestructible
The action is too choppy, but decently cool
I saw a lady for a few seconds, must have been a mistake

by ·Comments Off on Painted Skin (1992, King Hu)

I’m no King Hu expert, but his final film feels flabby and dated, not so much a late masterpiece. Horny Wong (Adam Cheng, played twins in Zu Warriors) falls for hot Joey Wong (the year before she was White Snake) who is actually a gross ghost wearing a human mask while trying to escape from the limbo-cult she’s been trapped in. The energy decidedly picks up when monk Sammo Hung takes up her cause in the last half hour.