Kuei Chih-Hung’s Hex Trilogy (1980-1982)

(which is only a trilogy because the Shaw Brothers said so, but those are the rules of exploitation filmmaking.)

Hex (1980): The first Hex falls right into the middle of one of the Shaws’ small early 80s commercial renaissances, when suddenly, their black magic movies were a real commercial, centipede-filled proposition. Hex, though, particularly reminds me of a cross between Les Diaboliques and a Japanese kaidan, with only the last act that includes an incredible, beautiful and very very weird, colour-gel filled exorcism, going full on HK-weird when most movies would be starting to put their feet up for an epilogue.

Here, an abusive husband is drowned by his ill, long-suffering wife (Tanny Tien Ni not doing the femme fatale for once; I actually prefer her in this mode) and her new maid, only to apparently return as a ghost. There follow quite a few twists – even a few twists too many for my usual tastes, but Kuei (who also co-writes) times every reveal so well, I didn’t find myself caring about the implausibility and strained logic of certain “natural” explanations.

Visually, this is a deeply moody film, full of the darkest shadows, highly dramatically expressive weather, and drenched not only in rain showers but in all the colours of Hongkong horror, all of which fit melodrama as well as horror and the thriller form and its plot twists.

Hex vs Witchcraft (1980): So, following the success of Hex, the Shaws apparently felt the need to put a sequel out as quickly as possible. This went to cinemas only three months after the first film. How many centipedes had to die for the black magic needed to manage that magic trick? Apparently none. Instead, the studio got by simply renaming the next film Kuei was working on, a goofy gambler and ghost comedy in which a shiftless, luckless and deeply unlikable gambler (James Yi Lui) is pressed into marrying a female ghost who proceeds to wreak well deserved havoc on his life, and occasionally turns into a skeleton-faced ghost in a black widow’s dress that looks rather like a German Edgar Wallace krimi villain.

Apart from this having sod all to do with the first film – for obvious reasons – HvW also suffers from not being a great comedy. Now, it is true that comedy often doesn’t translate very well over language and cultural borders, so maybe there’s some great, clever wordplay here, or really funny dialogue. Though, given how much emphasis Kuei puts on “funny” noises on the soundtrack to remind the audience some bit of slapstick is supposed to be funny, I rather doubt the existence of hidden depths.

Be that as it may, physical comedy and slapstick do tend to translate well enough, and here, too, the film just falls flat. The timing of those scenes is off more often than not, and there’s also very little imagination on display when it comes to the set-up of the general physical goofiness. It’s all very bland and generic, and not even particularly interesting to look at.

Hex After Hex (1982): The final Hex keeps with the gambling and ghost comedy, but is an all around more accomplished film than its predecessor. Perhaps because our ghost Rosy’s (Nancy Lau Nam-Kai) new husband is portrayed by Lo Meng, whose martial arts training does give him a leg up in the realm of physical comedy (though you wouldn’t confuse him with Jackie Chan), or perhaps because the film generally has better ideas for its slapstick set-ups and includes a couple of the moments of copyright-smattering insanity so beloved of Hongkong cinema of this era – here, Rosy transforms first into a dime store yoda and then into a version of Darth Vader that has clearly studied magical girls anime – or perhaps because Kuei does at least from time to time display a bit of the visual imagination that makes his better movies so exciting.

This still isn’t a masterpiece, mind you, well, perhaps the climax is, but it is a marked improvement on the middle film of the not really trilogy.

The Five Venoms (1978)

aka The Five Deadly Venoms

aka 5 Deadly Venoms

The dying master (Dick Wei) of a kung fu clan known as the House of Venoms regrets the rather dark and dubious deeds he and many of his students have committed over the years. His final wish made to his last student, Yang De (Chiang Sheng), is for the young man to find his other surviving students, observe their virtue, and dispatch them if necessary. There are two problems here: even though his master has taught Yang De a smattering of all the techniques of the House – namely the styles of the Gecko, the Toad, the Centipede, the Snake and the Scorpion - the other students have all specialized, and he’ll not be able to stand against them in single combat. Making matters more difficult is the fact that most of the students have never actually met one another, so finding the people whose virtue Yang De is supposed to evaluate could turn out to be rather difficult. One suspects the master of the House of Venoms never had the time to learn of the power of the style of Drawing.

However, there’s another surviving member of the House of Venoms who has retired to a small town in the country. He has stolen and hidden away the clan’s treasure, and the master is convinced the other Venoms are bound to look for him and it. So Yang De really only needs to travel there and keep his eyes open, beat the villains he can’t beat without teaming up with a virtuous venom who may or may not exist, find the treasure himself, and give it to charity. Simple.

As it turns out, the Venoms are indeed all in town looking for the treasure – some committing increasingly horrible deeds of violence and betrayal while others do try to act noble.

Chang Cheh’s The Five Venoms is often overshadowed by the later films featuring its five leads. They were soon to be known as the “Five Venoms”, and consisted, besides Chiang, of Philip Kwok Chun-Fung, Sun Chien, Lu Feng, Lo Meng and Wai Pak. These five were great screen martial artists when working more in the background or alone, as they more often than not before this, but absolute magic when brought together. Later films do indeed provide even more opportunity to showcase their particular artistry.

However, one of the strengths of Five Venoms as a movie is that it is particularly willing to put its martial arts – though there’s still a lot of it, all of it great and often highly imaginative – aside for a bit to mirror Chang’s generally dark, pessimistic and woman-less – one can’t help but suspect a connection there - world view not only in rather dark ideas about the nature of many people but also a mood of the Chinese gothic. The use of torture and cruel, non-martial killing methods used by the evil Venoms does slot into Chang’s taste for a bit of on-screen cruelty, but combined with some choice shadows draped over some well-known Shaw sets and camera work that suggests more than a passing acquaintance with Italian Gothic horror (or similar ideas about how to suggest dread and decay visually), it does sometimes suggest that this particular version of ancient China is situated somewhere in the neighbourhood of Witchfinder General, if not locally, then spiritually.

Because two genres aren’t enough for Chang and the writer of more movies than many people have seen in their lives, Ni Kuang - who is of course on script duty here - this is also a bit of a classic murder mystery concerning at first an investigation by observation into the moral nature of the Venoms and then one about the identity of the elusive final Venom, Brother Scorpion, a cruel, sociopathic manipulator of the highest order, complete with red herrings.

It’s a combination I find irresistible, particularly when it is held together as well as it is here – philosophically, on a plot level, and aesthetically.

Men From The Gutter (1983)

In jarring contrast to movie cops everywhere else, Hong Kong policemen have to work more than one case at once, so HK cops Qiu Zhenming (Michael Miu) and Sergeant Zhao (Lo Meng) have to be able to cope with two problems at once. Their life is certainly not made easier by the fact that the two men can't stand each other. Zhao thinks Qiu is too soft, while Qiu takes Zhao to be so ruthless and violent that he does more harm than good. In a bizarre turn towards believability, both men won't learn to respect and love each other.

Not that the cases they are working on are leaving them much time for any of that sort of business. Firstly, there's a luckless group of ex-convicts lead by Wang Guangtai (Parkman Wong) planning an armed assault on a jewellery transport for the policemen to cope with. How luckless are they? Wang shoots a police officer even before they have done anything more illegal than buying weapons.

The second case regards the quite single-minded Zi Jian (Jason Pai Piao), a gangster who has come to Hong Kong to take bloody (and he means bloody) vengeance on gangster boss Xu Wen (Wong Yung) for trying to kill him.

Where Wang and his friends are just your typical losers trying to escape poverty and desperation, Zi Jian is a one-man army, and sure enough, the latter will turn out to be a much larger problem for the police than the former.

In 1983, the Shaw Brothers studios were in the beginning of their death throes. Many of their films of this and the following two years were somewhat desperate seeming attempts at becoming relevant to their audience again, at times leading to confoundingly weird films or, like in the case of Men From The Gutter, to films that neither look nor feel like earlier Shaw Brothers movies at all, even if they are part of genres the studio had a lot of experience in, like the "based on a true story" exploitationer.

The film's director Ngai Kai Lam/Lam Nai-Choi is today better known for his weird-o-fu fantasy film The Seventh Curse and the absurd violent thing that is Story of Ricky, but he also had quite a hand for grim and brutal crime films with a helping of HK New Wave hyper-realism like this one.

Men From The Gutter is related to the ripped-from-the-headlines brutalism that would a few years later become a staple of CATIII cinema and stands in marked aesthetic contrast to the pop sensibility the Shaw Brothers news exploitation movies of the 70s exhibited. Where the old films were all artificial colours and stylish ugliness, Lam's movie goes for a less stylish version of the grimy (that is of course just as artificial as the older model, but puts a lot of its artifice into not showing it), all dirt and grime and beautifully photographed poverty.

The film looks at the people running and shouting and killing before that background with cool, distanced sympathy, taking no sides and making not much of a moral judgement on anyone (except Xu Wen, who is obviously too rich to deserve anything more in characterization than "proper bastard"), be he or she cop or robber, but still shows the carnage everybody's life here descends into with a slight undertone of sadness for humanity. Neither this sympathy nor this sadness let Lam forgot that he is supposed to make an action film here, and so much of the film's running time consists of the sort of sharp, short, fast edited, and quite brutal looking violence the director does so well in those of his films that don't include fights against aliens or Fan Siu-Wong punching through someone's body.

The sense of real physicality surrounding the action here is of course typical for the new wave of Hong Kong action of the time, but Lam's film does not share the slightly chaotic feel which is also part of that tradition. Instead, even the most heated sequence of events here (and especially Zi Jian's final fight is as heated as they come) is shown in a way that seems coolly controlled by the director. Again, the film shows a marked friction between the intensity of the things happening on screen and the distance with which director and film seem to regard them; it's as if Lam would like his audience to feel uncomfortable with what he's showing as much as he wants them to enjoy it in his own version of the classical exploitation dilemma of needing to wallow in what one criticizes.

Men From The Gutter is not at all a film I would have expected as part of the late period Shaw Brothers' output, but it's as nice a surprise as I could have wished for.

 

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