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?

Evil Cat (1987)

For four-hundred years, the male members of the Cheung family have battled the same evil cat spirit every fifty years, reducing it to the last of its nine lives by virtue of their special males only magic and kung fu.

It's good that the cat is on its last life, too, for there's only one male descendent of the Cheung's still alive. Master Cheung (Liu Chia-Liang) has only been able to produce a daughter (boo! hiss!), TV reporter Siu-Chuen (Joann Tang Lai-Ying) before his wife died, and will now have to face the evil cat all by himself, unless he finds a pupil and adherent to teach his technique too. No, I don't understand why a random pupil would be enough when the film's always going on about descendants, but then, this was written by Wong Jing.

When evil Kitty re-awakens, it kills a few people and possesses the body of Hong Kong entrepreneur Mr. Fan (Stuart Ong), making Cheung's job all the more difficult. After all, who will believe an older gentleman of doubtful sanity that a local rich guy is possessed by a murderous cat spirit? Fortunately, Kitty itself isn't much for secrecy, and shows its demonic nature to Fan's chauffeur Long (Mark Cheng Ho-Nam) by jumping into Fan's private fountain and eating a fish while making cat noises. Afterwards, Kitty tries to kill Long and his mother, but only manages to drive Long into the arms of Cheung (who had already met Long in a moment of Wong Jingian random chance).

Cheung's pretty happy with that part of the situation, because now he has a willing pupil and a potential husband for his daughter all in one person. Now there's only the problem of destroying the cat spirit forever while trying not to get arrested by the cop investigating the cat killings, Handsome Wu (hide your daughters! It's Wong Jing in person!).

With Evil Cat, horror and exploitation specialist director Dennis Yu joins forces with the horror known as Wong Jing, and somehow manages to squeeze a watchable film out of the anti-master's script.

Yu is helped by the surprising state of Wong's script, namely that it's not quite as terrible as the man's usual written output. That's not to say that Wong produced something all that coherent or sensible, it rather means the film makes somewhat more sense than the writer/producer/director/actor's usual output. The relative (there is a bit more randomness and people acting like idiots than I like in the film) dearth of random, lazy short cuts in the film's plot might even hint at the unthinkable - Wong Jing may actually have been trying.

Of course, Wong Jing being Wong Jing, his mere presence on and off screen also means that Evil Cat contains a handful of scenes of perfectly humourless humour - in something that may be irony all including Wong Jing as an actor -, a bit of vomiting, some minor (again, for Wong Jing) misogyny and the completely inevitable rape scene when the evil cat has to seek a new host in form of Mister Fan's personal assistant. Well, at least this time around the rape is committed by a blue cartoon swirl, and not played for laughs, which lets it beat eighty percent of all Wong Jing rape scenes for tastefulness.

If I'm leaving the impression here that (to put it mildly) I still don't care for Wong Jing's work at all, that's absolutely true. But hey, unlike with ninety-nine percent of the guy's other films, I actually enjoyed watching Evil Cat, though most probably for the elements Dennis Yu and Liu-Chia Liang added.

Liu-Chia Liang's contribution is twofold. Firstly, he's upstaging his younger, mostly horribly bland acting colleagues, by the virtues of screen presence, charisma and dignity even when he's acting silly in each and every scene he's in, and makes these scenes magically three times better than they were without him. It's quite fortunate that he's in most of the film.

Secondly, the veteran is also responsible for the film's action direction, providing a bit of elegance and excitement and bringing out the true spirit of weird fu from time to time. I also have to say that Liu himself looks incredibly fit for a man aged 51 in his fights.

Dennis Yu's direction is mostly pretty inconspicuous here, not distractingly bad, not overtly exciting, but at least the director does provide his audience with some excellently ridiculous monster effects and cartoon swirls, and that's exactly what the film needs.

Say what you will about me, but never let it be said I'm not appreciating a director who has no compunction against repeatedly showing us actors acting possessed by crouching on all fours, baring their teeth, jumping around and making pathetic attempts at cat noises, or using something I'll just have to call cat fu.

And that's before the cat spirit's final transformation comes into play: hair metal cat, a creature so absurd that I found it utterly impossible to dislike the film it's appearing in, Wong Jing or not.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: hong kong movies,reviews,horror,comedy,dennis yu,wong jing,liu chia-liang,joann tang,mark cheng,chui suk-woon