by ·Comments Off on Lifeline (1997, Johnnie To)

Mad Lau stars in a firefighting action film with choreography by Yuen Bun, whose Once Upon a Time in China sequel I just watched. Alex Fong Chung-Sun (The Iron Angels series) is the strict new boss feuding with his ex-wife. Ruby Wong is the female officer trying to put career first until her boyfriend starts poking holes in the condoms. And rookie Raymond Wong Ho-yin (Ruby’s fellow PTU cop) is just a rookie with an embarrassing dad. Mad tries to date suicidal doctor Carman Lee (hot traitor cop of Wicked City). Then all these personal dramas have to be set aside when the team, from a firehouse known for accidents and bad luck, is first on the scene to a massive warehouse fire set by arsonist Lam Suet, and the movie gets extremely, impossibly fiery.

by ·Comments Off on Once Upon a Time in China IV (1993, Yuen Bun)

Pre-credits scene has Vincent Zhao making some very un-Jet-Li awesome moves, then his name is splashed across the screen – good, they’re not trying to hide the new guy. It’s also the first sequel to start directly after the previous one – they’re still celebrating the end of the Lion King festival when friendly Governor Zhiwen Wang (currently of the Infernal Affairs TV series) shows up and they lion-dance together.

Foon, Clubfoot, and Yan are back in the mix, but 13th Aunt is replaced by (Katy guessed it) 14th Aunt: Jean Wang of Swordsman III and Iron Monkey the same year. New director Yuen doesn’t exactly revitalize the series here. The dubbing is bad, and despite having a subplot about a group using wires to appear to fly, the movie itself is full of unintentionally visible wires, especially in the heinous horse-punching scenes (yes, there’s more than one).

14th Aunt starts a newspaper but nobody in town knows how to read – so, technologically we’ve moved from still photography to motion pictures to the printing press. Anti-foreigner sword cult Red Lantern is menacing everyone, and the foreigners have equipped their lion suits with deadly weapons. The nice governor dies, it’s very sad, then Wong takes a measured bit of revenge before withdrawing to prep for the final(?) movie.

Chin Ka-Lok is angry, I’ve forgotten why:

Ze Germans:

by ·Comments Off on Blade of Fury (1993, Sammo Hung)

Due to my copy’s wonky subtitles and my general lack of historical context and, uh, my inability to pay close attention to plots and alliances in movies, I dunno what exactly happened, but I know they all died heroically in the end, for the future of China.

The Big Sword lays waste to the Japanese:

Wang Wu (Yang Fan) is our main furious swordsman, getting his entire Big Sword troop killed by the Japanese in the opening scenes. He meets young masters Ti Lung (A Better Tomorrow) and Cynthia Khan (star of a Yes Madam sequel/ripoff the same year), they team up with some government guys who are trying to “reform” the government (sword-involved reform).

Our Boy Sammo:

Plenty of wire jumps and trampolines, swordfights and beheadings, people getting shot in the face, Sammo over/under-cranking every action scene. Clearly made in the wake of the Once Upon a Time movies, with its mix of action and historical politics – and from the writer of parts II and III, and with a small role for Rosamund Kwan as a rich lady who thinks Wang is quite nice. Sammo gives himself one fight playing a prison guard – it’s great, but all the fights are great. Not sure where James Tien appeared – one of the camel riding raiders? – but this movie notably has the same ending as his Fist of Fury, which I should’ve seen coming from the title.

Nefarious Ngo (Master Wong’s dad in OUATIC3) loses to The Big Sword:

by ·Comments Off on Wicked City (1992, Peter Tai-Kit Mak)

Not good in almost any sense but absolutely a must-see for the bonkers imagination factor. Full of hilariously suggestive images, making a mockery of sex and religion. Tsui Hark cowrote/produced this anime remake, though it feels less written and more like it’s making up its rules as it goes along, with world-building ambition way beyond the league of the physical effects and baby computer graphics teams (there’s a cellophane blob and some mighty morphing). It’s impossible to dislike, or to imagine that we could do any better today.

The aliens invading Hong Kong in human disguises mostly take the form of hot chicks, and mostly they murder hot chicks… the movie is overall a big fan of hot chicks (this is apparently accurate to the original version).

Windy and Daishu:

Human cop Leon Lai likes lightsaber alien Windy (they play the killer and his agent in Fallen Angels) after they save each other’s lives. Half-alien cop Jacky Cheung (lately Bucktooth So in OUATIC 1) likes human traitor cop Orchid (Carman Lee Yeuk-Tung of Burning Paradise and Detective vs. Sleuths), but Sgt Yuen Woo-Ping keeps them apart. Alien boss Daishu is captured by the cops and kept magnetically captive (this is movie royalty Tatsuya Nakadai, star of Harakiri, apparently game for anything) while his evil son Roy Cheung (one of The Mission boys, also City on Fire) runs rampant in the city, plotting to hook the whole city on a drug that will simply kill them in a couple days. As the movie’s nonsense intensifies, the son ends up juiced to death by a jet engine, and the aliens’ vacuum powers reverse the flow of time and a psychokinetic police force lands a plane atop a skyscraper.

Sgt Yuen Woo-Ping orders all men in this movie to wear glasses:

and sometimes glasses get dirty:

by ·Comments Off on Dragon Inn (1992, Raymond Lee)

I realized that Tsui Hark wrote/produced this Dragon Inn remake between Once Upon a Time in China movies, and I proceeded to watch it with the wrong soundtrack selected, wondering why everyone was so badly dubbed, damn it. Beautiful action film, with more people twirling through the air holding swords than I’ve ever seen in a movie before.

Tall Tony 2 is protecting the children of his late superior from the power-mad evil eunuch’s forces. He meets up with fellow fighter/girlfriend Brigitte Lin at the desert inn run by Maggie Cheung, a mercenary whose chef serves previous guests for dinner. They spend half the movie looking for the secret exit door and when they finally escape through it after defending a massive attack on the inn, they only get a three second head start over president eunuch Donnie Yen due to a scarf mishap – they might as well have walked out the damn door. Maggie and her chef choose the righteous side and help the others defeat Donnie during a sandstorm. I saw Iron Vest in there somewhere, guess he did not survive.

Mouseover to see what happens when you hold your battle pose for too long:
image

by ·Comments Off on Executioners (1993, Johnnie To & Ching Siu-Tung)

A quickie follow-up to Heroic Trio codirected by the Chinese Ghost Story guy. Nothing but commercial fluff. I’m not angry about it – Criterion can do whatever they want, and I got to see another Johnnie To movie in nice HD.

In the post-apocalyptic future, Maggie Cheung is a water thief and bounty hunter, Michelle Yeoh is working with the mad scientist trying to revive the supply of fresh water, and Anita Mui is retired with a kid and a politician husband (Paul Chun of Peking Opera Blues). But when the idiot police bring a freshly-captured killer to a press conference with the President (Guan Shan of A Better Tomorrow II) without checking him for bombs first, Anita’s husband is murdered and she’s thrown in jail. Maggie takes care of the kid – the two whiniest characters adventuring together with her rival Mad Detective, who she decides she loves ten seconds before he’s crushed by an underwater gate. Takeshi Kaneshiro’s debut as a charismatic pretty boy used as an expendable publicity tool for the mad scientist. Anthony Wong can’t be seen in this movie since he died so hard in part one, so he plays every deformed masked character. Anita finally breaks out of jail, regaining her powers, and takes on the evil inventor Kim, who was really hoarding fresh water while pretending to be providing it. He accidentally blows up his own iron-fisted superfighter with a grenade crossbow, then extremely kills Yeoh, then gets blow’d up.

Lau “Mad Detective” Ching-wan and Maggie:

Yeoh:

R. Emmet Sweeney for Metrograph:

With Executioners, Ching and To pivot from postmodern comic book to survivalist Mad Max paranoia. They turn the fears and anxieties over 1997 up to 11, detonate a nuclear bomb, and let the trio live in a post-apocalyptic state where most of the drinking water has been poisoned by radiation and survivors are at war for what remains. To claims the sequel was only made to cover the cost overruns of the first movie: “The reason why we produced the second one was because the budget for the first one was very high and we needed to make two films to cover the whole production cost.” Executioners is perhaps more of an accounting trick than a movie, but though it is heavy on exposition it also features moments of crazed creativity — such as Anthony Wong’s unhinged performance as an operatically depressed monster who conspires with the police to hoard water and who keeps the severed head of his unrequited lover (Takeshi Kaneshiro) in a sumptuously appointed leather box.

Anthony:

by ·Comments Off on Once Upon a Time in China (1991, Tsui Hark)

Wong Fei-hung is trying to run his martial arts school while the master is away and fulfill their dream of expelling the foreigners, along with his men – strong Porky Wing, stuttering bilingual So, and guy without qualities Kai – but everyone keeps getting mad at him. Scarface and his Shaho gangsters terrorize the town, burn down the school, and kidnap Wong’s young 13th Aunt to sell to the Americans. After causing much trouble Scar ends up thrown in a furnace by his kidnappees. The British and Chinese governments want Wong arrested. Then mercenary superfighter Iron Vest Yim comes to town, gains a disciple in fired theater worker Foon, and keeps challenging Wong. He ends up shamed for his hidden knife technique, roundly defeated in ladder combat, then murdered by the whites. The Brits have their own kung fu champ, who takes a Wong-thrown bullet to the brain – victory.

Our series stars: Jet Li, who wasn’t anybody until this came out, and Rosamund Kwan, who’d been in the Jackie/Sammo/Lucky Stars group. I didn’t realize the disciples wouldn’t be regulars – Porky Wing (Kent Cheng Jak-Si of Sex & Zen and Crime Story) will return in part 5. Jacky Cheung, in the middle of his WKW era, had better prospects than playing Bucktooth So. Yuen Gam-Fai (Kai) continued playing guys without qualities, hitting the height of 7th-billed-in-Burning Paradise. Iron Vest Yen Shi-Kwan is the evil master of Heroic Trio. His boy Foon is Yuen Biao, also from the Lucky Stars gang. And Scarface would appear in a Charlie Chan action-mystery called Madam City Hunter.

Porky, Kai, So, Jet, Rosamund:

The signage… it’s trying to tell us something:

Tony Rayns: Hark returned to HK from NY, made his three angry young man films (ahem), those made no money and he reinvented himself as a family entertainer in early 1980s with Zu and some comedies. Chose Jet Li from the mainland for his action skills and old-fashioned dignity. OUATIC is the English title, original is just Wong Fei-hung, and OUATIC2 is called Wong Fei-hung 2: A Man Must Rely on His Own Strength.

Ladderdance:

Hairknife:

by ·Comments Off on Fallen Angels (1995, Wong Kar-wai)

Minimal story, all vibes – and they’re mid-90’s post-Pulp Fiction hitman-in-sunglasses fisheye-lens trip-hop vibes. Stories spun off from Chungking: crazy dude Takeshi Kaneshiro meets crazy chick Charlie Yeung (a Tsui Hark regular), and hitman Leon Lai (A Hero Never Dies) wants to quit the business so his lovestruck partner Michelle Reis (Flowers of Shanghai) sends him on a fatal job. Stephen Chow costar Karen Mok shows up in both sections as man-thieving Blondie.

Two decades into the Blog Era and probably a decade since Katy turned a Fallen Angels poster-turned-giftwrapped-box into a permanent decoration in our house, I’m finally rewatching this (in the re-colored, re-framed Criterion edition). Sadly for my loyal fans I got nothing in the way of analysis or screenshots today, just happy I got around to it before the 20+ hour Blossoms Shanghai comes out in English.

by ·Comments Off on Detective vs. Sleuths (2022, Wai Ka-Fai)

Pairs well with Mad Fate – another potentially insane lead character, this time Lau Ching-wan, playing another Mad Detective. He’s now an ex-detective, living on the street but still solving crimes, pissed at the employed cop (Raymond Lam of P Storm) botching the cases, drawing interest from pregnant cop Charlene Choi (The Goldfinger). Things get convoluted as a young group called The Sleuths – Lau’s daughter and the children of crime victims and the wrongly-accused – uses Lau’s research for a revenge campaign, killing off criminals. Some traitor sleuth cops are pulling the strings, getting cops and sleuths killed. After a covid-delayed open, this got nominated for every HK award, so hopefully we’ll get a sequel.