We love you Weng Weng
Words cannot describe how much beautifully demented joy D'Wild Wild Weng brings me, an utterly deranged Kung-Fu Western featuring Tribal Dwarves, Mexican Banditos, and even a detachment of ninjas for Weng Weng to murder. It's just as gloriously chaotic as the two Bond parodies that make up the heart of his tragically limited filmography. Naturally, Weng is magnetic, spending the film up to his usual antics, employing his diminutive stature in ever more inventive ways before sliding across the floor and kicking a bad guy in the balls, but this time he gets to serenade a young lady too, and it's magical. Surprisingly, the most unusual thing is the comedy relief sidekick because he can't talk. There are obviously a number of conceptual problems associated with the character who can't talk; certainly, giving him most of the exposition was a mistake. The bigger issue is the potential for irritation, but on balance, it's seldom more annoying than it is fascinating, so I'm on board all the way, especially when things start to get weird. Sadly, it seems the holy grail of Weng Weng adventures is currently being withheld from us mere mortals, but for what it's worth, there isn't anything better than watching Weng mowing down enemies with a Gatling Gun.Was this review helpful to you?
An ode to artistry and perseverance
For a film which revolves around sex, Viva Erotica doesn't feel the least bit sleazy or grimy, instead offering an electrifying meta-filmic takedown of both the absurdity and sensationalism of the world around Category III filmmaking. It throws out the window any typical expectations you have, delivering a provocative satire that pokes fun at the film industry while celebrating the people who keep it running. It certainly helps that the film has a tremendous spirit of style with some wonderful direction and photography, plus a terrific sense of humour, with its tongue firmly in cheek, featuring witty dialogue, cheeky references, and guest cameos that ground the film in a slightly offbeat existence. The different styles reflecting different moments, within its realm of porn, there's a lot more colour and movement, but it slows down when it's brought back to reality. It dips into the classic retrospection of filmmakers, moving flawlessly from moment to memory and back again, while thriving on capturing the typical heart of low-budget indie cinema, just with extra nudity and sex thrown in. Leslie Cheung gives a great performance, tackling his role with abandon, embodying the turmoil an artist endures when his ideal must be compromised to meet the reality of the market. He's flawed, but in a very natural and relatable way, as people can't always make the right decision at every turn. All the while, Shu Qi is doing a parody of bad porn acting, resulting in cinematic gold. It helps that they're backed by a fantastic support team, a mix of different personalities who all have something to add, originally out digging into artistic integrity but evolving into becoming a family and together, trying to create something great. Although at times, Viva Erotica seems precisely like the soft-core sex flicks it's trying to skewer, starting with a literal bang with one of the most enthusiastic bonking scenes ever witnessed, yet it all comes together in a surprisingly heartfelt examination of filmmaking, artistic compromise and the struggle to survive in a commercial entertainment industry.Was this review helpful to you?
A Shaw Bros Spaghetti Western
With the dusty, fatalistic vibe of a spaghetti western disguised as Shaw Brothers swordplay and blessed with an incredible black-and-white opening sequence, you'd be forgiven for thinking that The Flying Dagger would be a rape revenge tale lead by a female swordswoman; what you get instead is Lo Lieh wandering into town like a wuxia Clint Eastwood, throwing knives with absurd accuracy and looking cooler than everyone else in the room. It's certainly an impressive bait-and-switch, opting instead to deal with the internal struggle between good and evil that exists within all of us, where honour and chivalry often carry little weight in the world. Chang Cheh's direction already shows his growing fascination with violence, sacrifice and masculine heroism, hallmarks of his later works. The action is relatively brief but frequent, often punctuated by the deadly precision of thrown knives and colourful villains. Lo Lieh is always a great watch, dominating the screen with his effortlessly charming if not entirely noble persona, Yeung Chi Hung makes for a wonderfully nasty villain, cackling wildly and throwing daggers with absolute precision into his foe's limbs or torso as he sees fit, while Cheng Pei-Pei, who, despite headlining, unfortunately takes a backseat, barely getting a chance to break into action, is shackled to the tortured woman in love stereotype. It means that the third act is bogged down when the romantic sub-plot takes precedence over the film's main drive of loneliness, belonging and redemption. Still, the stylish camerawork and snappy pace mean that The Flying Dagger soon gets back on track, delivering just the right kind of heroic sacrifice and blood-soaked righteousness you'd expect.Was this review helpful to you?
Pure exploitative vindication
Pure exploitative vindication. Possibly one of the worst pieces of shit I've ever had the displeasure of viewing, Bruceploitation was already a subgenre I had a huge discomfort with, but Bruce Lee and I has taken that to a whole different level. An intimate portrait of Betty Ting Pei's illicit love affair with Bruce Lee, told from the perspective of the world's neediest sympathy sponge, it's a downright sickening production. Cheap at every turn, it's a sleazy mix of gossip, melodrama and outright fabrication; every scene is designed to exploit Lee's fame rather than celebrate what made him such a magnetic screen presence in the first place. It's only really worth a vague glance to see Danny Lee as Bruce Lee; other than that, we'd be better off burning every available copy. I feel no sympathy for Betty.Was this review helpful to you?
Old-school wuxia comedy with a glossy post-handover makeover
An old-school wuxia comedy with a glossy post-handover makeover, The Duel bounces between political conspiracies, mistaken identities, romance, comedy and increasingly absurd action sequences with enough CGI and star power to light up Victoria Harbour. It's less like a straight martial arts film than a variety show built around the promise of a sword fight that never comes. It's very much a hybrid effort, and the comedy is ill at ease with the heavy drama that occurs later on, but credit to Director Andrew Lau because, for the most part, the film is utterly gorgeous with plenty of soft colour and wonderful scale. The uneven silliness and fluid fight choreography are ultimately a victim of the incomprehensible editing, and unfortunately, it all kind of falls apart when paired with the comedic writings of Wong Jing and the hyper robotic leading performance from Nick Cheung, looking fairly ridiculous with dreadlocks and a pencil moustache. He lacks a well-defined comic persona, coming across as more annoying than entertaining, but here his presence is strangely welcome as it looks like he is at least enjoying lampooning the straight-faced drama. Andy Lau is always a welcome presence, and I kinda love Vicki Zhao, but, for the most part, The Duel is a rather middling but glossy affair. Messy, overstuffed, but reminiscent of other early nineties wuxia comedies.Was this review helpful to you?
Fear, hope and disillusionment
A sequel from an entirely different genre and taking the gritty bleakness of the series into overdrive, Long Arm of the Law IV is cut from a completely different cloth, abandoning the robbery-centred plots of earlier instalments and instead acting as a highly incendiary response to the Tiananmen Square massacre. There's a reason this hasn't seen a re-release since its VCD, one I ultimately imagine is down to a narrative based on Operation Yellowbird, the extremely bold use of footage of the Tiananmen Square protests, and it's far from subtle recreations of the events with a horrifically high body count to boot. Rather than thriving on momentum and carefully orchestrated chaos, Director Michael Mak instead goes for restless, messy but ultimately ambitious storytelling, and I respect him for that. It's an exceptionally bold piece of filmmaking, even if it feels as if they've had to make a compromise to avoid the Category III rating. There's a genuine sense of displacement and uncertainty, portraying characters caught between political realities and the false promise of escape. Hong Kong is no longer the glamorous refuge it might appear to be from across the border; it's another hostile landscape where survival comes at a cost. The action scenes are effective, though they're not the main attraction. What lingers is the atmosphere, the paranoia, the exhaustion and the sense that every character is running toward a future that may not exist. Bolstered by some outstanding performances and Joseph Chan's incredible music, Long Arm of the Law IV remains a highly compelling action thriller, not because it delivers bigger action or higher stakes than its predecessors, but because it captures fear, hope and disillusionment with a brutal honesty, ending the saga on a deeply pessimistic note.Was this review helpful to you?
Commercial action spectacle over gritty realism
The first two Long Arm of the Law films built their reputation on grit and desperation, with their criminals trapped by circumstance. Long Arm of the Law III takes a drastically different route. It's bigger, louder and far more of a star vehicle that certainly plays to Andy Lau's strengths as both a charismatic hero and romantic leading man. Although it loses the vicious edge, it remains a strong piece of engaging melodrama where one moment it’s a tragic romance about displaced migrants chasing a better future; the next it’s a brutal crime thriller packed with betrayals, gunfights and ruthless gangsters. It sits in a sort of unhappy middle ground where it’s too romanticised to be a full-blown neo-noir, not quite a heroic bloodshed and too glossy to be a hard-edged crime thriller. However, returning director Michael Mak still delivers plenty of grit and determination; his action sequences are excellent, with a climactic stretch, in particular, offering a barrage of bullets, double-crosses, and body counts that feel determined to top everything that came before it with a heist final heist that feels straight out of the Michael Mann playbook. The trade-off is that some of the social realism and bleakness of the earlier films gets diluted with the script occasionally relying on coincidence, broad villainy and emotional manipulation. Yet there's something undeniably entertaining about the film’s emotional excesses, an energetic slice of Hong Kong cinema in its heroic-bloodshed prime. Lau's charisma undoubtedly helps sell the film, but equally is his wonderfully goofy relationship with Elizabeth Lee. The rest of the performances are all pretty great, with highlights from Elvis Tsui, Kirk Wong, Max Mok and a pre-Liu Kang Robin Shou. Although it very much feels like the point where the series fully embraced commercial action spectacle over gritty realism, Long Arm of the Law III is a wonderfully messy and violent slice of fun.Was this review helpful to you?
Fighting fire with fire
Fighting fire with fire, although it never quite escapes the shadow of the original, Long Arm of the Law II is a slicker but no less brutal follow-up that's just as tense, cynical and morally corrosive. It's dog-eat-dog, where violence is simply a routine fact of survival, self-preservation takes precedence when you're in over your head, stuck in increasingly dangerous limbo, where neither fully criminals nor fully accepted by the authorities they serve. It all feels like a decidedly glossier affair, losing the raw unpredictability but retaining the dirty, pessimistic attitudes; it feels lived-in and authentic, aided by some wonderful location shooting and a visual style that often resembles reportage more than conventional genre filmmaking, but with Michael Mak taking over directing duties, it doesn't stop the film from being almost as breathtaking as its predecessor. Shootouts are messy, brutal affairs; panic and desperation are the de facto settings when everything goes wrong. Yes, it does occasionally rely on overly familiar undercover-cop conventions, with the storyline getting a little muddled in the middle due to a surfeit of subplots, but the film delivers absolutely thrilling firepower amid all its barbarity, even stopping for a karaoke number. The cast, led by Alex Man, Elvis Tsui and Ben Lam, gives the film much of its emotional weight, teaching us the ultimate lesson when it comes to being an undercover cop: it sucks, it contributes wonderfully to the film's sense of realism and desperation. Their characters, fish out of water introduced into a capitalist society, this time with a touch more levity, are not idealised heroes but trapped men trying to navigate systems that view them as expendable. Complimented by the usual Hong Kong lax standards when it comes to stunt safety and a fantastic musical score, Long Arm of the Law II is a gritty, unsentimental and relentlessly tense concoction of bombastic firepower and fallout that's certainly not for the fainthearted.Was this review helpful to you?
Brutally visceral
Brutally visceral from beginning to bloody end, Long Arm of the Law speaks volumes about its people and society, exploring how Mainland Chinese in the Bamboo Curtain era desperately desired better opportunities in the colonial-ruled Hong Kong, even if it came at the cost of losing their lives. Everyone has their own personal issues to work through, but this isn't a feel-good, fuzzy film about redemption and ultimate reconciliation. The characters are stymied or even undone by their disassociation with Hong Kong; their success and/or failure hinges on who they are. In the end, they don't affect the situation; it affects them. Every decision pushes the gang deeper into danger, and every attempt to regain control only accelerates their downfall. They are not glamorous antiheroes, but poor, opportunistic men chasing a fantasy of quick wealth, observed with a mixture of sympathy and brutal honesty. Arriving just shy of the heroic bloodshed boom that would soon dominate the landscape, many of the genre's defining traits are already here: desperate criminals, fractured loyalties, explosive violence and a city that seems determined to grind everyone down. Seriously, how on earth has Johnny Mak only ever directed this?! He paints Hong Kong not as a neon playground but as a crowded, chaotic landscape filled with cramped apartments, back alleys, cheap hotels and criminal middlemen. Favouring confusion, panic, and sudden eruptions of violence where gunfights are messy and frightening, while chases feel improvised and desperate. It's utterly mesmerising. Above all, the casting is the major key; from top to bottom, the actors are mainly amateurs, but their performances are starkly real, no doubt helped by the improvisational attitude to some scenes that lend them all a beautiful authenticity. There are no heroes here. There's only a society that loses. A tense, cynical, and deeply atmospheric portrait of men chasing a dream that was doomed from the start, few films feel as raw, influential, or unsettling as Long Arm of the Law.Was this review helpful to you?
full-on, balls-to-the-walls wuxia fantasy
Some titles evoke worlds of wonder, others are dull and inspire confusion, but The Battle Wizard brings about very specific expectations of a magically adept sorcerer casting furious spells. What you ultimately end up with is giant snakes and fighting monkeys mixed with a claw-hand firing neanderthal and laser beams. A full-on, balls-to-the-walls wuxia fantasy, thanks largely to its lightning pace, crazy costumes and vicious bloodshed. Directed by Pao Hsueh-Li, the film delivers an avalanche of bizarre imagery and a candy-coloured explosion of artificiality. The pacing is chaotic, characters appear and vanish abruptly, while emotional stakes often get buried beneath the aesthetics of a psychedelic fairy tale that barely pauses long enough to make any form of sense. The rather inventive choreography mixes martial arts with supernatural gimmicks that constantly escalate the insanity. One duel might involve acrobatics and elegant staff fighting; the next involves a villain firing invisible force waves, while another summons venomous creatures. It never settles into repetition because the film keeps trying to outdo itself. Undoubtedly uneven and featuring some extremely questionable choices in its execution, nearly everything about The Battle Wizard feels like a nightmarish fever dream, where imagination is the name of the game and lunatic energy rules the day, embracing its own excess with contagious enthusiasm.Was this review helpful to you?
Bloodthirsty to the brink of insanity
Soaked in a nihilistic air of dread and foreboding, Killer Constable trades flashy heroics for a grim exploration of loyalty, desperation and moral decay. Imbued with dark, rainy atmospherics that mix the look and feel of the Japanese Chanbara classics with the craftsmanship of the Shaw Brothers hits, it's a wonderful feeling to have finally found a film by Director Kuei Chih-Hung that I can at last call good, and of course, it's the only wuxia he ever made. It's a stark, fatalistic and sobering tale where everyone is exhausted to the depths of their souls, every swordsman is a sadist, and every blade has to be bathed in blood before it's put away. It's not one to shy away from violence, covering the film and even the camera in contrasting splashes of bright red arterial spray as the brutally bloody swordplay dominates the runtime. Often shot in a way that's akin to a horror film, complete with spooky settings and moody lighting, all the while leaving us constantly haunted by increasingly surreal depictions of abject poverty and futile warfare. Despite moments of grandiosity overshadowed by sullen melodramatics and some deeply unsympathetic characters, where even the titular constable is cold-blooded and heartless, the performances of the film's cast shine. Chen Kuan-tai illuminates the screen with fighting skill and emotional passion, out-grimming the Grim Reaper as nothing stands in the way of his mission, not women, children or even his friends. At the same time, Ku Feng, as his equal, plays an especially homicidal robber-chief who thinks nothing of throwing all his men at their relentless pursuer; ethics of right and wrong become increasingly blurred, with only Yu Tsui Ling being the only cheerful performance in a sea of despair. Unfolding over a series of black, smoky, impressionistic wastelands, Killer Constable can be a deeply depressing experience just as much as it can be an incredibly thrilling one, a film that's both blessed and cursed by its unique style, downbeat, gloomy and bloodthirsty to the brink of insanity.Was this review helpful to you?
Understands the cost of violence and isn't afraid to sit with it
Filled with an ominous mixture of brotherhood and pessimism, The Avenging Eagle treats guilt and identity not as passing motivations, but as burdens that shape every decision we make. The well-worn narrative hooks of a killer seeking redemption are treated in a compact and free-spirited way, with a persistent sense of inevitability, almost fatalistic, hanging over the proceedings, but equally jumping from the present to the past with an energetic free spirit. Sun Chung is a director fully in control of the action, with a beauty in his scale and framing. It's definitely one of the prettiest Shaw Brothers productions around, thanks to its exquisite colour palette and extensive use of actual locations, rather than the more studio-bound productions. The action is certainly sharp and purposeful, never feeling gratuitous, with some relatively impressive flow and choreography. However, it can be exceptionally gimmicky with its overuse of choppy slow-motion and unintentionally hilarious freeze frames to emphasise moments of tension. However, this can be easily overlooked thanks to the dynamic performances of the three main cast members, Ti Lung and Alexander Fu Sheng command the screen as consummate warriors united in tragedy, while Ku Feng provides a suitably wicked foe for the pair; they certainly give the lyrical script a lease of life. Offering a careful balance of melancholic, reflective and occasionally bleak storytelling, The Avenging Eagle understands the cost of violence and isn't afraid to sit with it, a lean, mean story of vengeance and redemption that offers a dark and punchy treat.Was this review helpful to you?
Gripping from its vertigo-triggering beginning to heart-stopping end
For a film that won three Japanese Academy Awards and helmed by the man who finally killed Godzilla, Abduction sure has fallen into almost complete obscurity, one that I've been after for a very long time. Taking the classic crime thrillers that dominated 60s Japan and filtering them through a deeply melancholic yet utterly gripping 90s lens, the film excels in its quiet desperation of people caught in a crisis, no surprise given director Takao Okawara's impressive line-up of Godzilla films to his name. It's the only one of his directorial efforts not to feature heavy special effects work, no guys in monster suits, no miniature cities being levelled; instead, there's a visceral urgency to the action, with plenty of slick images and an atmosphere rich with tension. Though the story seems simple enough, there's more to the titular abduction than meets the eye, consistently twisting and turning, all coming together in a beautifully executed narrative, confidently guided by Okawara's hand, often leaving us with a gnawing hunger to find out what happens next. The pacing is steady, sometimes even dry, but deliberately so, mirroring the slow, frustrating reality of an investigation where leads don't pan out and time is always slipping away. Everything about its production is so thoroughly absorbing, from its razor-sharp editing to its sumptuous photography. Even the musical score by Takayuki Hattori, despite having never been a huge fan of his work, especially his Godzilla scores, delivers some absolutely enchanting cues, all rounded out by truly exceptional performances from its cast, headed by the Tokyo Drifter himself, Tetsuya Watari. Being Okawara's penultimate film, Abduction is truly amazing, gripping from its vertigo-triggering beginning to heart-stopping end, a real shame that he has remained absent from the director's chair ever since the turn of the millennium.Was this review helpful to you?
Definitely one that should have been left in the Shaw Brothers vaults
An almost desperate attempt to stay relevant during Hong Kong's emerging 80s New Wave movement, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star is a seemingly Frankenstein'd fever dream of sex, sci-fi and ill-advised musical numbers. A serial farce that, even with logic and reason relegated to afterthoughts, the weirdness that shows up here is mystifying in its inanity. It feels like each of the six writers was separately sequestered and asked to write fifteen minutes' worth of material each before being thrown together in a blender; the result is a pretty risible sex comedy with incredibly poor jokes ranging from suicide and impotence to rape and fame, all delivered by a cast of petty, venal, tantrum-prone characters. Granted, there are some interesting enough production values, the special effects scenes are brief, but eye-catching: a giant spaceship made of stars, shuttle bays cribbed from Battlestar Galactica, a Millennium Falcon look-alike swoops across the night sky, while the vast sets are beautifully lit in swathes of orange, blue and gold. Director Alex Cheung was clearly more at home with his crime dramas, because when he turned his hand to the nonsense on display here, which is close to a full-on cinematic disaster, the energy is manic, the cast match it, but the sped-up slapstick quickly wears thin. Despite an amusing pseudo-lightsaber/nunchuck battle against a Darth Vader-clone towards the end, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star is undoubtedly one film more geared towards the self-punishing crowd, a truly one-of-a-kind exercise in confusing entertainment. Definitely one that should have been left in the Shaw Brothers vaults because a few more layers of dust wouldn't have made much difference.Was this review helpful to you?
The cinematic equivalent of a coma
The cinematic equivalent of a coma, the story behind Fearless Hyena II is more well-known than the film itself. A patchwork disaster that barely holds together, but how on earth Lo Wei managed to convince Jackie to do a nude scene is truly beyond me. Originally set to be Jackie's first film under a new contract with Wei, the story of how he avoided getting killed by the triads and returned to Hong Kong to become a megastar is the stuff of legends. Ultimately, Lo Wei supervised a reshoot of the uncompleted film, mainly by taking the footage from the 1980 shoot, incorporating some used and unused scenes from Chan's previous films, and hiring a double to bridge the gaps created by his former star's departure; Lo was able to assemble some form of sequel which, to his credit does manage to cover for it's lack of main star until the climax when Chan's absence becomes blatantly obvious. The premise is almost exactly the same as the original film, aside from the awful Jackie Chan lookalikes who play his "relatives" that never existed before, with the most outrageous wigs and fake beards you’ll ever see. The direction is laughable, carrying a definite Lo Wei vibe throughout, which ultimately makes the film feel more like a film from the 60s than one from the 80s, while Austin Wai's protagonist does the film no favours, although to be fair, there is at least some competently staged fights in places. Ultimately, Fearless Hyena II is nothing more than a simple novelty, only really worth the watch to see the smattering of scenes Chan shot prior to his departure, because the film has nothing else going for it… Game of Death was a better-made film than this.Was this review helpful to you?
