The Lady Assassin (1983)

Original title: 清宮啟示錄

The Qing emperor (Ching Miao) has come to his final years and is beginning to think about his successor. His favourite for the role is the 14th Prince (Max Mok Siu-Keung). Fourteen is young, he’s inexperienced and, as events will show, more than just a bit of a shallow idiot, whose more interested in looking righteous than the difficult business of actually being it. But least, he appears to not be actively malevolent. This can’t be said about the 4th Prince (Lau Wing) – he’s a man deeply in love with himself, palace intrigue and more often than not being evil for evil’s sake. Four has gotten wind of who his father plans to make his successor, and is not at all against murdering his own brother (well, half-brother, one hopes for the women involved).

The 4th Prince’s problem when it comes to assassinating his rival is that his brother has a very capable bodyguard and advisor in form of virtuous and highly efficient martial arts expert Tsang Jing (Norman Tsui Siu-Keung) – coming pre-packaged with his two female servants/martial arts students/probably lovers Jade (Yeung Ching-Ching) and Pearl (Daisy Cheung King-Yu) – and Tsang Jing isn’t just making the 14th Prince look like a better man than he actually is, he’s also easily thwarting most assassination attempts.

Eventually, the 4th Prince will acquire his very own martial arts expert in form of the ambitious Min Gen Yiu (Jason Pai Piao), but even then, a successful assassination seems doubtful and risky. So much so, the 4th Prince seeks out the help of Han revolutionary leader Lui Liu Liang (Ku Feng), promising him to get rid of the laws that suborn the Han Chinese under their Manchu conquerors. If, that is, Lui Liu Liang, or rather, his redoubtable martial artist niece Lui Si Niang (the incredible Leanne Lau Suet-Wah) help him access the decree in which is father has set down his designated successor.

Of course, helping out a man like the 4th Prince might not turn out as happily as one would want.

And that’s only about half of the plot of Tony Lou Chun-Ku’s breathless Shaw Brothers palace intrigue/wuxia mix The Lady Assassin, a film that somehow manages to run breathlessly through an amount of narrative that would provide for three or four seasons of a modern streaming TV show, features about a thousand different fights, yet still has room for rather a lot of complicated characterisation.

In most wuxia films, Lau Wing’s villain would be a one-note moustache twirler, but here, the guy’s abhorrent but also much more nuanced than you’d expect. As an example, the scene in which he convinces Lui Liu Lang and his family to throw their lot in with him by perfectly emulating a man of honour and conscience is a perfect portrayal of the kind of narcissist who always appears to believe in his own lies and empty promises a little (if you’ve never seen such a thing in real life, I can’t recommend the experience), and always finds a bad excuse for not acting on them he also appears to believe, however untrue it may be. Still, enjoying his own ability to pretend to be an honourable man, he will even try to implement his promises, until he gets the tiniest pushback. Then, he folds like the utterly weak man he is at his power-grubbing core.

As a whole, this is one of those wuxia where the most honourable characters – Tsang Jing and Lui Si Niang are genuinely good people – find themselves tied to the will and plans of characters whose nature is abhorrent to them once revealed, and can only break free from obligations, rules, and lies through acts of insane violence. Being in any contact with power can apparently only be cleansed through blood and vengeance.

Speaking of acts of violence, the martial arts choreography by Poon Kin-Kwan is absolutely insane – fast, vicious and only occasionally totally fantastical, this is all about speed and movement. Director Lou stages the fights – like everything else in the film – exclusively in angles and shot compositions of maximalist dramatic impact. There’s not subtlety to the direction, but as Lou uses his hammer here, everything doesn’t just look like a nail but indeed is one. It’s pretty incredible, as is how powerful much of the acting is – Lau Wing is a particular standout, but the burning fierceness of Leanne Lau’s gaze, or the dignity only slightly marred by the cynicism of permanent defeat of Ku Feng’s performance, are just as impressive.

To my eyes, The Lady Assassin is an absolute classic of the late period Shaw output, a film as perfect as its final freeze frame.

Hell Has No Boundary (1982)

Original title: 魔界

On a camping trip with her brother Cheung (Derek Yee Tung-Sing), Hongkong cop May Wong (Leanne Lau Suet-Wah) has a curious nightly encounter with a mysterious voice, a wind so strong it literally blows her away and green lights. After that incident, the formerly mild-mannered woman changes her behaviour rather quickly: she not only begins to act a lot more confidently than before the encounter but also displays a reckless, cruel and somewhat murderous streak. To wit, she nearly drowns a little boy she believes has stolen a can of coke from her and her brother (a reaction that’ll actually make sense as something apart from its obvious wrongness once we’ve learned the backstory), and is only held back from it by Cheung. Why, you might think May’s possessed by an evil spirit of some sort.

Curious deaths and accidents begin happening around May too. For example, the two female colleagues (going by the most excellent monikers of “Lady Killer” and “Bad Sis”, suggesting how much trust the loving public will have towards them in the wilds) who are competing against her for a sergeant position and are right mobbing bullies about it have a bit of a fall with an elevator; a blind soothsayer specializing in the interpretation of his clients’ bone structures first regains his sight and then grows mad and falls down a flight of stairs while trying to kill his wife.

Her new self and the concurrent reckless behaviour do displease May’s direct superior, Inspector Wong (Yueh Hua), before the change her greatest non-sleazoid fan on the force, so much he’s now trying to block her promotion. Alas, an imaginary Doberman and a just as imaginary snake get in the way of that, as does May’s ability to magically change a written recommendation. On the plus side, Wong doesn’t die from the attack but only has a bit of a minor breakdown that hardly sets him back for more than a day.

Wong also has an aunt, one Madame Chi (Teresa Ha Ping), well-versed in the ways of exorcism and the lore of spirit possession. Madame Chi’s certainly trying to get rid of the troublesome ghost, though it might eventually fall on Cheung and the photographer Koo (Kent Tong Chun-Yip) – who photographed something very strange concerning May and gets a bit obsessed by the whole plot – to solve the spirit trouble.

And at this point, we’re barely halfway through Richard Yueng Kuen’s pretty fantastic Shaw Brothers horror film Hell Has No Boundaries, with a flashback that discloses a pretty horrible back story to the possessing spirit as well as the reason for its killing spree, and many scenes of increasingly heated weirdness still to come.

As you’ll probably know when you’re reading this, at this late point in the history of the Shaw Brothers, sinking commercial success had found the company replacing its typical visual house style of the previous decades with whatever seemed to have potential commercially. Films like Hell do certainly still stand visually in the tradition of the ripped from the headlines exploitation fare that was part of the Shaw Brothers’ output in the 70s, but there’s a very early 80s kind of modernism to Kuen’s approach to the form, as seen in much quicker editing and a direction style that usually seems to go for mix of the documentary and semi-naturalist intensity. Which stands in marked and highly effective contrast to all the wonderfully artificial green lighting, dry ice fog and general peculiarity of the supernatural sequences, and provides Hell with a wonderfully strange mood all of its own, contrasting the strange and the quotidian very well indeed.

Though – and this is certainly not atypical for the way horror throughout various countries in Asia does this in general – most characters here do have at least one foot in a very matter-of-fact approach to the supernatural that treats it as very real indeed. So it is not at all strange for the world of the film that a down to Earth cop like Cheung takes his sister to a bone-reading soothsayer when she’s acting weirdly, or that an Inspector’s aunt just happens to be in the exorcism business. Which sort of grounds the strangeness here in practical reality.

I say “sort of” because the supernatural parts of the film become increasingly insane, the possessed May apparently having a particular fondness of building very complicated murder illusions, including Wong’s ultra-sleazy boss (not surprisingly played by Lo Yuen) getting castrated by a crustacean and then telekinetically wrapped up in blue toilet paper like a very sad mummy, or a fake visit to the very green land of the dead (a place of the ickiest culinary habits) for Koo. Also in the film are an incredible sequence in which a character has MacGyver-ed his car into an exorcism trap, an awesome remote duel between Madame Chi and May, and a pretty incredible doppelganger sequence. The film’s set-pieces certainly never become boring.

There are obviously some rather exploitative elements involved in the film, as well, but Kuen, particularly when you keep in mind that this is the director who also brought us the somewhat infamous Seeding of a Ghost, mostly films the truly nasty (unlike the fun nasty) stuff with a certain distance. So he’s not wallowing in the exploitative possibilities of a backstory that involves the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, a sold little girl, murder, a horrific smuggling operation and cannibalism, but looking at it with a colder eye I wouldn’t exactly call “classy” but certainly more dignified than you’d expect.

The grimness of the backstory – as well as an ending as 70s downer as any film from the 80s had – does stand in marked contrast to the general sense of fun Hell Has No Boundary’s set pieces display, but they’re not overwhelming the film, nor does the fun horror most of the movie is involved in ever seem to be making light of the exploitation version of seriousness of the backstory, leaving this a very fun example of Hong Kong horror indeed. Unless you’re the actor having to eat maggots, of course.