Gunmen (1988)

Original title: 天羅地網

After he has returned from the Chinese Civil War (the part of it ending in 1936, I believe, but please correct me if you know better), Ting Kwan-pik (Tony Leung Ka-fai), his wife Cho Chiu (Carrie Ng) and their litter daughter make their way to Shanghai, where Ting becomes a policeman. Shanghai is a troubled place at the time, the French using the concession to make a mint in the opium trade, and a widely corrupted police force assisting criminal activity more than hindering it. Ting, of course, is incorruptible.

One man involved in the drug trade is Haye (Adam Cheng), who just happens to be an old enemy of Ting’s from the war, hoping to use his gains for further civil warring in the Northwest (which would make him a Kuomintang man, I believe).

Obviously, these two men will collide rather sooner than later, each eventually being responsible for the death of the other’s father figure. The film also finds time for Ting’s difficult love life, as well as a shouty new boss (Elvis Tsui!), to make matters more difficult for our hero.

At least, he’ll be able to re-team with his old war buddies Cheung (Waise Lee), Lau Fuk-kwong (Mark Cheng) and Cheung Cho-fan (David Wu) to do the appropriate manly violent things you eventually do in this kind of film.

Leave it to late 80’s Hong Kong cinema to pack the plot as well as all of the subplots of a 150 minute movie into 84. Not surprisingly, there’s a breathless quality to Kirk Wong’s Gunmen (produced by Tsui Hark, so who knows how much Wong actually had to say about anything here) that’s even more intense than usual for the city’s not exactly calm movie output from this golden era. Everybody here seems always on the verge of some sort of emotional or physical outbreak or breakdown, with momentous decisions taken at the drop of a hat, characters and their relations drawn and changed with great speed.

It’s somewhat exhausting to watch, but Wong actually has quite a bit of control over the intensity, going down from eleven to ten at the right moments, somehow managing to draw the proper melodramatic character relations with as much conviction as necessary, condensing the film’s huge amount of plot without it actually losing much of its effectiveness.

And really, despite being a bit rough around the edges, the film’s a highly effective machine, providing enough historical elements, melodrama, male bonding, and vengeance to fill two other movies, all the while filling every nook and cranny with the kind of insane action you expect from a Hong Kong movie from this era. Sure, there are much more extreme examples of the form, but there are still more mass shoot-outs with absurd body counts, chases through tight streets and properly nasty looking close combat sequences to make a boy woozy. Wong and action director Fung Hak-On seem to particularly love action that takes place in very tight spaces, giving many of the fights a claustrophobic edge. Eventually, everything culminates in a pretty incredible bloody finale that perfectly marries the violence with the melodrama of the plot; and uses a child in a way you really can’t see a film from the US ever doing.


For the connoisseur of Hong Kong cinema of the time, it’s also rather great to see Carrie Ng and Elvis Tsui in atypical roles as the always fully dressed wife in whose breasts the camera is not the least bit interested, and the shouty, possibly evil but potentially heroic new boss of Ting who is never involved in a horrifying sex scene or other. What more could I ask of a movie?

In short: Les nuits rouges du bourreau de jade (2009)

aka Red Nights

The paths of various characters - a Chinese model/perfume designer/bondage and torture loving serial killer (Carrie Ng), a French professional mistress who has just poisoned her lover (Frédérique Bel), and others - cross in Hong Kong in various attempts of buying or to selling or to double-crossing each other when buying or selling vial containing the poison of the executioner of the first Chinese Emperor. Said poison is supposed to provide not just death but also enhanced sensations during it, so it is just the thing certain people would kill for, even if there weren't a lot of money involved.

Julien Carbon's and Laurent Courtiad's movie is yet another attempt to create an intensified version of giallo aesthetics, in this particular case paired with the more strictly composed aesthetics of certain parts of 80s arthouse cinema, as well as Hong Kong cinema of the early 90s. Even better, it's a rather successful attempt, at least if you have the stomach for a film very much in love with turning the idea(l) of slow torturous deaths into something only hardly discernible from sex in some highly stylized and fetishist torture/murder scenes, and if you aren't turned off by a film whose plot is really beside the point when compared to its mood and the way its visuals are providing all the thematic resonance it needs or wants.

Carbon and Courtiaud have worked in Hong Kong's film industry for a bit, and so seemed to have acquired the appropriate contacts to shoot their film in the city. However, the film's Hong Kong isn't meant as a portrait of the real place but as the kind of idealized/stylized fantasy of it where French and Chinese criminals mingle under neon lights, and where all kinds of lusts and desires come to the surface in all imaginable degrees of decadence. One could accuse Les Nuits of Orientalism, if this view of Hong Kong wouldn't run through so much of Hong Kong's own cinema as well; in more than one CATIII film to a much larger and definitely sleazier degree.

The Hong Kong connection also provides Les Nuits with its special weapon in form of Carrie Ng, who does her typical "frightening sadistic female serial killer" role again, yet seems to go about it with particular relish here. Perhaps because her character really is the not so secret hero of the piece, perhaps because she is mostly (with an exception right at the film's end) coming up against women acted just as intensely yet not quite as predatory as her character is in nature, instead of the often rather light-weight men more than one of her Hong Kong films tended to pair her up with.

Les Nuits' attraction is at times seductive, at times of the type that makes one flinch while one still won't look away, and at times based on aesthetic convictions that can border on kitsch. Like a small and precious number of films made in the last few years, Les Nuits is trying very hard to reconnect with an idea of filmmaking as an art that is based on very aestheticized transgression, and of mood and style as substance. For my tastes, it succeeds quite admirably at it.

Technorati-Markierungen: hong kong movies,french movies,belgian movies,in short,thriller,horror,giallo,julien carbon,laurent courtiaud,frédérique bel,carrie ng,carole brana

In short: Naked Killer (1992)

As regular readers of this blog know, I'm not an admirer of the horrible Wong Jing. The man's general attitude towards movie making, which can be summarized with "I don't care enough to make an effort", just rubs me the wrong way. Additionally, unlike the man, I don't think rape jokes are very funny.

But I've always made an exception for the Wong Jing written and produced Naked Killer, for it is a movie that shows what can happen when the frightful man does bother to apply himself. It's not as if the script for this one made that much more sense than anything else Wong Jing has written, but it does at least tell a story with a recognizable beginning, middle, and end, instead of playing out as what feels like random scenes from different movies haphazardly stitched together, which is the usual Wong Jing feel. Furthermore, while Naked Killer takes place on a planet where traumatized hero cops begin to puke whenever they touch a gun (and suffer from erectile dysfunction only looking at Chingmy Yau can cure, but let's not go there), other cops are named "Dickhead", where part of the killer training consists of getting locked up in a pop art cellar with a chained rapist, and where people dress in the awesome primary-coloured (remember when movies had colours?) things the actors wear here, the crazy for once does make just enough sense to be entertaining. It's like the adaptation of a men's adventure novel about a killer where all the testosterone-y men have been replaced by women. The audience of this sort of thing (hullo Mum!) does like after all two things the most: ridiculous violence and staring at sexily clad women; as Carrie Ng's character here would agree, there's no need at all to feature men at all. Though Naked Killer is at least trying to cover all its bases by also featuring a Simon Yam masturbation scene.

A lot of what's fun about Naked Killer - and it's really a very, very fun movie - I blame on director Clarence Ford. Ford has the early 90s HK aesthetic down to an art, featuring the expected mix of blue light, fast edits and Evil Dead-inspired camera work most directors working for Wong Jing always seem to bored or tired (now, what happens in Jing's production house, inquiring minds want to know) to use consistently or as exhilarating as Ford does here. If people aren't fighting, there is - of course - more footage of Ng, Yau, Yiu Wai and Yam in ridiculous poses that often look like an alien's idea of sexiness to me than any sane person could ask for, giving the film an overheated mood as if nobody involved could think about anything but sex, even when thinking of sex seems totally inappropriate in a given context. In part, we can thank a "no breasts" clause in Yau's, Ng's, and Yiu Wai's contracts for the film's ridiculous imagination when it comes to the sexiness; it is, it turns out, possible to turn anything into softcore.

Technorati-Markierungen: hong kong movies,in short,wong jing,clarence ford,chingmy yau,simon yam,carrie ng,yiu wai,action,exploitation

In short: Sex Medusa (2001)

A masked, flame-thrower using group of Hong Kong snake exterminators terminates a nest of their chosen victims (including exceedingly large eggs) in the city's sewers.

While her peers burn in an unnecessary case of real animal violence, a CGI snake escapes and transforms into a naked girl (Nomoto Miho), who will later be christened Fong. The traumatized snake woman falls asleep right in front of the house of Cheung Yung-Choi (Elvis Tsui). Cheung thinks Fong is an illegal immigrant from the mainland, and decides to put her up. Soon, tender bonds of love begin to develop between the two, but the universe doesn't smile on their sweet, sweet interspecies love, and disturbs their relationship through various problems.

Firstly, Cheung feels guilty for the accidental death of his wife and has been impotent and deathly afraid of cats ever since, while Fong needs to procreate to help her species survive, which leads to great awkwardness. At least she's a snake woman and not a cat woman. Secondly, Cheung's cousin Marco (Vincent Wan) has made debts with a loan shark to finance his gambling debts and his girlfriend's (Carrie Ng) research into some gland stuff that will help destroy "vermin" like snakes once and for all. Marco is Cheung's sole heir and is even willing to kill his only relative to pay off the debt.

So it doesn't look good for love or the survival of Earth's eco system.

Despite a title that promises sleazy sex and violence, CAT III style, Tommy Law's Sex Medusa is a bit dull and harmless, except for a handful of moments of real animal violence which are bad enough to watch, yet not that extreme for the standard of Hong Kong movies featuring snakes. In fact, online sources are divided if this is a HK movie at all, the HKMDB says it's Taiwanese, which would explain why it is this low on exploitational values, while the IMDB thinks it's from Hong Kong. Sex Medusa also isn't a CAT III film, and turns out to be a comparatively slow fantasy melodrama with a bit of horror and sex mixed in.

The film's main problem is how lackluster it is. It has all elements set up for an entertaining ninety minutes, but then doesn't make enough use of them. An interspecies love between a snake woman and an impotent man should be entertaining (or at least very very funny) even without buckets of gore or other bodily fluids, but the love story part never really goes anywhere. The thriller elements for their part only appear too late in the movie and are - again - just not developed enough.

As is the "sex medusa" element of Fong's characters. It seems as if having one sex scene in which two CGI snakes poke out of a woman's hair is nowadays enough for a film to make titular promises it just isn't going to hold up. When I was younger, we still knew what a real sex medusa looked like. 

However, Sex Medusa has a few things going for it: Nomoto Miho is nice enough to look at and has that expressionless stare of a good snake done pat. I also found it quite nice to see Elvis Tsui playing completely against his usual character type of "sleazy sex maniac". That guy's got range! He's also hilarious when frightened to death by a very cute cat. Happily, he doesn't have to live to witness the cat infestation known as the Internets.

I also approve of the idiotic science Ng sprouts and of the rainbow coloured clown snake style Nomoto has when she's fully snaked out.

It's not much, but it was enough to get me through the whole film without falling asleep or having to turn it off. That's certainly something.

 

Technorati-Tags: hong kong movies,taiwanese movies,in short,elvis tsui,nomoto miho,carrie ng,fantasy,melodrama,horror