Three Films Make A Post: Insert Clever Title Here

Mojin: The Lost Legend aka 鬼吹燈之尋龍訣 (2015): A trio of traditional-official tomb raiders return from dubious retirement in America to China to rob a particularly mysterious tomb. This high on very digital looking effects adventure directed by Wuershan (and based on one part of a long and complicated sounding series of novels) is a whole lot of fun if you like this kind of blockbuster at all.

It’s like a Chinese Indiana Jones with more supernatural action, some surprisingly snarky remarks towards the Cultural Revolution (though it isn’t called by name), and quite a bit of the sense of anything goes that made Hong Kong cinema so enticing but not generally translated to mainland China cinema like this. This really has everything and the kitchen sink in it: romance, zombies, Shu Qi, Shu Qi cursing a lot, complicated mechanical traps, a weird cult, bizarre humour, Shu Qi, and more good and bad ideas than most film trilogies.

Mojin: The Worm Valley aka 雲南蟲谷 (2018): And three years later this happened: none of the actors nor the director of the original return, and with them also leaves the spirit of fun of the first film, as well as parts of the budget. There’s something rote and mechanical about the whole affair – this is pretty much the empty and lifeless spectacle too many people pretend all blockbuster style cinema is, lacking in fun, joy, and the ability to actually deliver the promised rollercoaster ride as a rollercoaster ride.

Deadful Melody aka 六指琴魔 (1994): Welcome to 90s wuxia land. Various martial world weirdoes attempt to steal a magical lute that also happens to be the most powerful weapon this side of your favourite magical sword, while a mysterious, sometimes cross-dressing woman played of course by Brigitte Lin Ching-Hsia takes bloody vengeance for the death of her family. Also featured are a not terribly young Yuen Biao as the young hero and Carina Lau Ka-Ling as his love interest and comic relief.

The rest of the film mostly consists of a breathless series of shots of people flying, making shit explode with their Qi, a lot of twirling and a good amount of flying body parts, blue fog, blue light, blue everything, all presented by director Ng Min-Kan with the manic energy of Joel Silver on a real coke binge. This is absolutely awe-inspiring if you enjoy this wuxia revival as much as I do, and aren’t afraid of headaches.

Love Massacre (1981)

Original title: 愛殺

The film takes place among a group of Hong Kong expat students living in the United States. Joy (Tina Lau Tin-Lan), who appears to suffer from a psychosis, attempts suicide when her boyfriend Louie (Charlie Chin Chiang-Lin) decides to move to New York without her.

Louie – who isn’t a complete tool - and their friend Ivy (Brigitte Lin Ching-Hsia) really don’t know how to help Joy anymore, so they ask Joy’s brother Chiu Chung (Chang Kuo-Chu) to fly in from Hong Kong to help hi sister somehow. At first, the plan seems to work out well enough, but once the married Chiu Chung and Ivy start an affair, Joy’s getting even worse than before, and finally goes through with killing herself.

Chiu Chung is understandably hit hard by this and deteriorates much further than anyone could have expected, for he really is mentally just as unwell as his sister was, he’s just better at hiding this in front of strangers. He returns to Hong Kong, but does not become more stable there. In fact, he murders his wife (his former psychiatrist no less!) to then return to the USA and start stalking Ivy and murdering every woman in her closer surroundings he deems “uncooperative”.

Patrick Tam Kar-Ming is one of the less sung heroes of Hong Kong’s New Wave cinema. Given the quality of those of his movies I’ve managed to see (I don’t trust my old, negative, review of his The Sword anymore in this context), I suspect this has rather more to do with their bad availability than their quality.

Love Massacre is a case in point. At once a cool, serious but not compassionless, exploration of an extreme of mental illness and eventually a pretty brutal thriller of great formal strength and cold beauty, this is the kind of film that would normally put a filmmaker on the map of the greats. However, the best way to see Love Massacre at the moment is a Laser Disc rip with decidedly not great subtitles (though not as bad as some for Hong Kong films), so there’s only talk about it at all among those movie fans actually looking for this sort of thing and knowing where to find it, instead of the somewhat larger audience of more strictly law-abiding connoisseurs it deserves.

The washed out colours of a Laser Disc aren’t particularly wonderful in a film as strictly and meaningfully colour composed as this one either, but even so, there’s an intense cold power to Tam’s strict use of clearly separated colours, as is to his just as strictly composed use of the frame. In the latter, Love Massacre shows some visual kinship to the best works of Dario Argento, yet where Argento does tend to get emotionally involved in the acts of violence and the more grotesque elements of his films, Tam watches them with a cooler and more distanced eye that does get increasingly disquieting the longer the film goes on, and the more unpleasant the violence gets exactly because it seems so dispassionate.

Still, despite the cold eye, when there isn’t violence on screen, there is also a feeling of thoughtful compassion running through it, or at least a genuine human interest in its characters. Tam does show this for killer and victims and those in-between alike, which makes the whole affair’s distanced visual beauty a particularly interesting and individual decision. An artistically risky one, as well, but one that makes Love Massacre particularly worth watching.