American Chinatown (1996)

When I lived in Philadelphia, my roommate and I were heavily into Hong Kong cinema (or, at least, we thought we were; there were enthusiasts who eclipsed us, then and now).  The Western world was just getting on the Woo, Lam, etcetera bandwagon, and we were no different.  Of course, we had both seen plenty of martial arts films when we were young (giving us an appreciation and a love for the works of filmmakers like Chang Cheh, Lau Kar-leung, and so on), but these new(er) films were something altogether different.  Sure, the plots and characters were relatively the same.  The difference lay in the technical aspects.  The camerawork was kinetic and inventive, while still clearly telling a story, and the stunt work was on another level.  They felt insane and viscerally real at the same time.

Now, I had heard of Keith Li’s Centipede Horror from one of the grey market VHS catalogs I had sent away for (remember those?), and it seemed right up my alley.  After all, it was a horror movie, no?  It’s right there in the title.  My roommate and I went on down to Chinatown and opened an account at a small, Chinese video/grocery store (around the area of the Trocadero on Arch Street, but I’m not totally clear on the exact location, not that it matters all that much).  The first two tapes we rented that day were Stanley Tong’s Swordsman 2 and Centipede Horror.  We both loved Swordsman 2 (despite those weird scenes of the characters singing like they were doing whip-its all day long), but I don’t think we made it more than thirty minutes (if that) through Centipede Horror before we popped the tape out.  The film was grotty and dumb and made little to no sense.  See, we were used to only a portion of Asian cinema, and this was everything that was not.  Having now immersed myself a bit more in the multitude of Asian cinema offerings, I’ve always meant to revisit Centipede Horror to see if there’s anything redeeming about it.  I do not, however, need to ever rewatch Richard Park’s (aka Woo-sang Park) American Chinatown because I now know how little redemptive value it has.

Lily (Liat Goodson) is the victim of an attempted gang rape, but the cholos attempting it are thwarted and roughed up by Yong (Tae-joon Lee, billed here as simply Taejoon, as if he were Taimak or Gerardo [both apt descriptors]).  As their love sort of blossoms, Yong goes about his gang business under the leadership of fellow one-time orphan (what is with Park and orphans, anyway?) Eric (Robert Z’Dar).  But Yong’s twin paths come into direct conflict with each other, and only one can be followed to happiness (or something, in theory).

Park’s Miami Connection is a film which has recently been rediscovered, resurrected, and regaled by hipsters, cult cinema lovers, and trash junkies the world over.  It’s fun because, even when it’s being serious, there’s a level of naïve optimism (sure, the members of Dragon Sound were all “orpans,” but they were also the members of Dragon Sound, a band whose enthusiasm and subject matter make The Wiggles look like G.G. Allin) that’s infectious.  The same cannot be said for American Chinatown.  This film is self-serious and cloyingly melodramatic while toying with the tropes of badass cinema (most particularly Heroic Bloodshed films) which it doesn’t completely understand.  Yes, there are plenty of fights, and these, at least, are handled well enough in the choreography department.  Park, thankfully, also shoots many of these scenes wide enough to see what’s going on and to appreciate the physical talents of the performers.  Where Park fails is in creating empathy for his characters and in crafting believable (even for a film like this) interpersonal moments and relationships between said characters (not good in a movie which relies upon them so heavily).  Some examples of the choice dialogue.  “You don’t want a guy like me!”  “College frat boys don’t turn you on anymore?”  “Why are you doing this to me?”  “You’re my only hope and dream.”  All of this is delivered with the conviction of a dish rag (though Z’Dar does an admirable job working with nothing, as usual).  I should stop there.  I don’t want people to get the wrong idea and want to see this movie (I suspect there are those who would want to, regardless).

Nearly every scene in American Chinatown could (and maybe should) start with a title card reading, “Suddenly…!”  The movie opens like a case of whiplash with the three cholos (I kept thinking of Mike Muir from Suicidal Tendencies; Sorry, Mike) already well into their assault on Lily.  Suddenly…!  Yong appears out of nowhere to save the day.  Suddenly…!  Yong battles two urban samurai types and a kabuki guy.  For no reason I could discern and with no impetus for this encounter.  Yong is stabbed in the guts.  Suddenly…!  He’s living on a boat somewhere, and God only knows how much time has passed.  Yong beats villain Wong (Sung-Ki Jun).  Suddenly…!  He’s attacked by two other henchmen (this is not the order in which things are done, Mr. Park), who may be the samurai guys he fought before, maybe not.  The entirety of this film is just pieces thrown together like this.  But if I want to watch random stuff for a couple of hours, I can go on Youtube.  At least there I could get suggestions for other videos that might be of interest.

The males in this film are very, very male, indeed.  Yong always kicks first, asks questions later.  He always wears sunglasses, indoors and out, day or night.  He’s meant to be a real cool cat, but he comes off like a flipping jerk.  Eric talks and acts like a kid playing at tough guy.  He’s also wishy-washy, though this isn’t because he’s volatile; the writing is just bad.  Wong and his goons are as unmemorable as you can get.  They show up every few minutes for a fight scene, and that’s it.  Jim (Bobby Kim) comes close to having something to do as a mentor to Yong and a foil for Eric, but he, too, ultimately plays like just another sad sack.  And then there’s poor Lily.  Jane (Kathy Collier) in Miami Connection was an ancillary character (think the Daphne to Dragon Sound’s Scooby Gang), but she was still a more active part of that film than Lily is here.  Lily exists solely to look good, be sexually assaulted by men, and be saved by Yong.  There’s one excruciatingly implausible “subplot” involving her “sisterly” relationship with Eric (and how in the hell do Yong and Lily not realize that they both know Eric if they’re both supposed to be so goddamned close to him?), but it blows in the wind like everything else interesting in this film might have done but didn’t.  It’s tough for me to decide what’s worse, watching American Chinatown or watching a mouthful of centipedes spew out of people’s mouths.  But I definitely know which way I’m leaning.

MVT:  The fight scenes are okay.  And plentiful.

Make or Break:  The opening scene is jarring, confusing (at first), and surreal in the suddenness with which everything happens.

Score:  4/10

Maniac Cop (1988)

I thought about being a police officer for a brief period of time.  I’m sure that, much like how the amount of FBI applicants rose when The X-Files became popular, this desire sprang from a love of shows like Beretta, Starsky And Hutch, and Hunter.  Unlike the sexier private detective characters , police (on television) most likely wouldn’t be roughed up and intimidated by polyester-clad goons.  No, they would do the roughing up, because that was life on the streets, baby, and you had to be tough as nails.  And that’s when it dawned on me: tough as nails, I ain’t.  Watch any detective show, and the crap these guys go through looks inordinately painful (if not at present then certainly the day after).  There was also the requirement of being able to run after perps in uncomfortable-looking footwear.  I have wide, flat feet, and just finding the shitty New Balance sneakers I wear around was a task and a half.  I’d hate to see how far I would have to go to get an agreeable pair of work kicks for walking a beat in the naked city.  Naturally, I don’t think most cops on the job go through anything even remotely approaching the level of action of Hawaii Five-O.  As a matter of fact, I tend to imagine that, in reality, there is a ton of paperwork to fill out.  I’m pretty good at paperwork, ironically enough.  I don’t love it, and I would rather be leaning on suspects, but all things considered, it’s probably safer than getting shot at.  Okay, I definitely should not be a police officer.

As Cassie (Jill Gatsby) is walking home from work one night, she is attacked by a pair of vicious muggers.  No shrinking violet, Cassie manages to fend them off long enough to make a break for it.  Spotting a policeman across a dark playground, Cassie darts for him, but her ersatz rescuer lifts her by the throat and snaps her neck.  As detective Frank McCrae (Tom Atkins) investigates, the victims of the Maniac Cop (Robert Z’Dar) continue to pile up.

The central idea behind William Lustig’s film is really simplicity itself.  In fact, it’s all right there in the title, and this is one of the big appeals of the film: It is plain in its intentions.  This is a quasi-Slasher about a maniac cop.  It has all of the puzzle pieces it needs, and it puts them all down in the proper order, so the audience never completely has time or reason to question the sillier aspects of anything that’s going on.  Add to that, good performances from solid character actors like Atkins, Bruce Campbell, and William Smith, and the film becomes a nice bit of comfort viewing.  Like a quiche at twenty-four frames-per-second.  

Of course, part of the simplicity of why the film works also leads to its more interesting facets.  At this point in time, the idea of the vigilante cop and vigilantes in general were still very popular in cinema.  The year before this film was released saw the fourth installment in the Death Wish series of films, and the same year as its release, the final Dirty Harry film, The Dead Pool, came out, just for two examples.  But what Maniac Cop does is turns these premises on their heads.  Our antagonist still kills with impunity, but he’s not cleaning up the streets from the scum of the Earth.  No, he’s killing innocent people, and inexorably he will turn on the brotherhood of which he at one time counted himself a member.  So, he’s sort of a vigilante for evil (isn’t that a contradiction in terms?).  Okay, you say, so he’s like every other Slasher antagonist, hacking up people left, right, and center?  Well, yes and no.  He has the physical traits of a standard slasher (imposing physique, seeming imperviousness to harm, relentless tenacity), and his kills are set up and executed like vignettes with a gruesome payout.  But his initial victims are completely unconnected and innocent.  There is no punishment of characters for having unmarried sex.  There is no punishment of characters for violating his territory.  Cordell’s victims are strictly victims.  But what they feel like in the terms of the film is practice for what is coming.

**POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD**  

This kind of leads into another element of the film.  It is very much concerned with ideas of betrayal.  One of our ostensible heroes is caught cheating on his estranged wife (Victoria Catlin) with our female lead (Laurene Landon).  He is then accused of being the maniac cop, thus creating a faux betrayal of the brotherhood of police.  Cordell’s friend Sally (Sheree North) actually does betray the police, though she initially has good intentions in what she does.  Cordell himself is a victim of betrayal by the police he had counted as his brothers (though he was reputedly a bit of a gunslinger even before his ordeal).  But more than all that, at its core, Maniac Cop is about the betrayal of the public trust (see how it’s all right there in the title?).  This is developed a bit in the story with a scared citizenry shooting first and asking questions later (what Cordell was accused of by some of his higher ups and colleagues).  Yet, the filmmakers never take it all the way to its logical conclusion, perhaps because of budget constraints, perhaps because of genre constraints, I can’t say.  

But it gets at a deeper concern many people have.  Can we really trust the people with whom we’ve placed our security?  Who, after all, will guard the guards themselves?  And how can you trust those guardians?  Ideas of police brutality are tossed around, and while the movie at the very least raises the questions, it also never really answers them.  Partly this is because to do so would make a very good Action/Horror film into a pedantic philosophical discussion.  Partly this is because I think Lustig, along with screenwriter/producer Larry Cohen, has enough faith in the audience to either know their feelings on the subject and even whether or not they would care to consider it.  Consequently, they give the viewers the ingredients and the instructions and leave the actual cooking up to the individual (another quiche reference?  How droll).  Using straightforward direction as well as some unobtrusive but still very impressive cinematography by Vincent J. Rabe (who only shot one other film, unfortunately), the filmmakers produced an entertaining little film that has something of a brain underneath, if you’re so inclined to dig that deep.  But you don’t have to in order to enjoy it.

MVT:  Lustig has always had a very unpretentious hand behind the camera, and his direction works because it doesn’t put on airs while simultaneously acknowledging that there is some thought at play.  It doesn’t pretend that it’s more than it is, but it also doesn’t pretend it’s dumb.

Make Or Break:  I think the first kill scene does a fantastic job of setting up the premise and the tone.  It has an edge to it, some unexpectedness (Cassie’s more of a badass than one would think at first blush), and a nasty little ending.  What more could you ask of a film titled Maniac Cop?

Score:  7.25/10