(The) Devil’s Box (1984)

Original title: 鬼戰

Warning: there will be spoilers for the film’s resolution!

Commercial director Tong (Simon Yam Tat-Wah) is not terribly happy with his life, because he’s doubting the moral and artistic merits of the ad hawking biz. Much to the chagrin of his boss (Edwin Tsui Yuk-Wan), Tong finds so little joy in what his work is actually about, he’s shooting his ads as weird little short films in which the product he’s supposed to sell might have a three second guest stint.

Things become less existentially depressing and more supernaturally dangerous for our protagonist when he’s doing a location shot in some old, rather impressive looking empty building. Tong orders his crew to drag away a heap of garbage which includes a large chest secured with Buddhist amulets. The first guy to touch the chest is dangerously wounded by a fall in the very next scene. He isn’t the last victim of whatever supernatural force has been accidentally unleashed, though. Suicides and strange deaths surround Tong’s agency now, and Tong himself is haunted by threatening and dangerous dreams that seem to foresee various deaths. And that’s before he learns he’s suddenly suffering from a brain tumour.

Apparently, Tommy Chin Ming-Cheung’s Devil’s Box was shot some time around 1984 and shelved until 1991. It’s a bit of a shame, really, for this is such an atypical entry into Hongkong horror, it would have been interesting to see its influence on its actual contemporaries in the 80s – or rather, if it would have had one. Typically, HK horror is either nasty and brutal in the CATIII manner, or a bit goofy, energetic and surreal. Devil’s Box really doesn’t fall under any of these descriptions, and is rather an attempt at ambiguous horror, where the audience becomes increasingly unsure how much of what we see are the delusions of our main character and how much of it is real.

Even the movie’s ending doesn’t make things completely clear: did Tong commit all of the murders, or did the supernatural force take on his shape and act out his resentments and personal troubles? Or is Tong’s existential crisis the supernatural force, and he’s rather more aggressively doing what his painter buddy and friend in artsy existentialism does when he burns all of his pictures? The film isn’t telling, and it’s good enough at being ambiguous to get away with it instead of being frustrating.

In part, this works because Yam – looking incredibly young – is rather great at embodying this ambiguity and suggests Tong as a man who knows all of his frustrations but doesn’t seem to know why they are there or how to cope with them productively at all. Yam being Yam, he does so looking pretty as well.

Devil Box’s other big ace in the hole is Chin’s direction. There’s liberal use of the expected blue lighting and dry ice fog, dreamily slow camera movements to secure the proper air of unreal. Chin also demonstrates a productive eye for a kind of mild surrealism that fits the character going through it excellently – of course Tong is the kind of guy whose visions would show him the death of a friend on a television screen. Another character killing himself (or is he?) with a roll of film makes perfect sense in a metaphorical space centred around a film director as well. All of this creates a dreamy flow and vibe, yet one that feels clearly and surprisingly straightforwardly connected to the film’s central ambiguities surrounding Tong’s personal crisis.

It’s not at all the thing I usually expect from old Hong Kong horror, so Devil’s Box has turned out to be a bit of a surprise; even more so because the film is not just doing something uncommon for its time and place, but doing it rather well and thoughtful.

Mrs K (2017)

Mrs K (Kara Hui) lives what looks like a peaceful life with her gynaecologist husband (Wu Bai) and her daughter (Li Xuan Siow). Though, as a couple of very unlucky would-be robbers learn early in the film, Mrs K clearly has some experience with the gangster life and is a bit of a badass, when she needs to.

However, the good old shadows of the past come knocking, killing some of Mrs K former associates in violent and effective ways. As it turns out, a man (Simon Yam) our protagonist left for dead when she left the life (naturally with a whole lot of stolen money) wants his revenge, and he’s nearly crazy and broken enough for a Batman villain.

Evidently, Mrs K’s director Ho Yu-Hang looks back fondly at Hong Kong genre cinema of decades past. Since quite a few actresses and actors who had their heyday in the 70s to 90s are still working away admirably, it’s a pretty obvious thing to make a movie with them. Ho certainly isn’t the first director who went back to this particular well of talent – and who would blame him? – but he’s just as obviously not aiming at making a normal nostalgia throwback kind of movie. This is rather a more idiosyncratic film that shifts shape and form despite always just keeping inside of the borders of genre tradition.

So there are only a couple of action scenes in what one would on first encounter expect to be either a martial arts version of Taken or a traditional if belated heroic bloodshed film. Instead, the film shifts from a slasher-like beginning that shows Yam’s character killing Mrs K’s old associates to moments of sometimes calm, sometimes playful domestic content, goes to psychological tension, a bit of torture, some comedy, keeping what sounds like disparate elements as parts of a whole, while also demonstrating an air of playfulness. There’s even a scene where the ghosts of her old companions appear to Mrs K to the sound of a rousing Spaghetti Western trumpet to get her back into the fight.

In part, the film’s success as a whole instead as a series of disjointed scenes has a lot to do with an acting ensemble that portrays the different tone of any given scene as aspects of one story and one group of characters, understanding the way human identity shifts depending on the company we are in, and even more so how Mrs K’s identity must shift even more to be who she was and who she has become. The film as a whole seems very concerned with the concept of identity, particularly the shifts in identity brought by violence and trauma. Simon Yam’s villain was once a cop who ran with robbers to betray them to the cops but also betrayed the cops for money, has lost his identity and his memory once shot by Mrs, starts to live a new life as the member of a ship crew that becomes his family, only to lose this new family to violence that gives him back his memory as well as a lust for vengeance and that great changer of identity, insomnia. As with Mrs K, he might have built a new identity, but the old one, or really, old ones, are always just below the surface waiting for a reason to return. That Yam’s fantastic as this sort of thing should be a given.

It is an absolute joy to watch Kara Hui as the main character of a movie again, and her ability to project warmth, good humour, competence and a steely determination in desperate moments alone would be reason enough for that; she also seems to present a healthier alternative of learning to live with one’s past self than Yam does. Or perhaps, when you look at it from his perspective, she’s just been too lucky before he came back.


So, even though, or really rather because, Mrs K is not a nostalgia fest as much as a film that appreciates the very real talents of the people working in front of its camera and trusts them to not just repeat the things they always did (unlike the characters they play, perhaps), it should be of highest interest for anyone interested in Hong Kong's cinema past, present and future (even though this is – depending on the source – a Malaysian film or a Malaysian/Hong Kong/Russian co-production).

Past Misdeeds: Run and Kill (1993)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

"Fatty" Cheung (Kent Cheng) is not the luckiest of men. He might have a solidly running business selling gas, a doting mother, a loving little daughter and a pretty if costly wife (Lily Lee), but he's bound to lose all of it faster than he could have expected.

When Cheung comes home early on his wedding anniversary, he finds his wife having a bit of adulterous fun with a decidedly thinner and younger man than himself. Cheung is not the kind of man prone to violent outbursts, so he just protests limply that the couple really shouldn't do it in his living room and skitters away to get drunk.

That wasn't Cheung's best idea. When he's so drunk he really doesn't know what he's saying anymore, a girl named Fanny (Esther Kwan) talks him into getting a little payback on his wife. She knows the right man for the job, too.

Said right man is a member of a Vietnamese gang, and - showing the low standard of customer service in the gangster business - for him, a mumbled "she should be dead" by a drunk guy lying puking and crying in the gutter is an assassination order. He takes all of Cheung's cash as an advance payment and gets on his way.
Some time in the morning, Cheung, of course not remembering a thing, stumbles home only to find his wife and her boyfriend still at it. They're not doing it for long anymore, though, because a bunch of Cheung's gang "friends" break into the apartment, rape and kill the wife, kill the boyfriend and leave Cheung alive and ready to be arrested.

The Hong Kong police's Inspector Man (Danny Lee doing a guest stint in his usual role, but strangely abstaining from hitting anyone with a phone book) is sure that there's something fishy about the affair, but he can't prove anything, and Cheung isn't talking, so he lets the man go.

The police will turn out to be the least of Cheung's problems anyway. Turns out that the gang is rather enraged about his being in the apartment when they did the deed. They are even less pleased that Cheung can't pay what he owes them. Blowing up Cheung's gas business seems like a fine way to show that displeasure.

At that point, Cheung decides to go into hiding in a house he owns somewhere in what goes for the country in Hong Kong. As bad luck will have it, he finds it occupied by a gang of mainland Chinese gangsters. Those guys at least aren't too mean to him, though. As a matter of fact, Wah, the youngest of them, eager to distinguish himself as a hard guy like his brother Ching Fung (Simon Yam), even promises to help Cheung out with his problem with the Vietnamese.

Unsurprisingly, Wah's intervention doesn't end too well, leaving some of his colleague's dead, and Wah, Cheung and Fanny in the hands of their enemies. Ching Fung comes slaughtering to the rescue a bit later, but at that point, Wah is nearly dead from torture.

A bit later, he truly is dead, and Ching Fung is very, very angry and also quite insane. This can't end well for Cheung or his family.

Billy Tang has directed quite a few of these ripped-from-the-headlines Hong Kong CAT III crime films with a nasty bend, with Red to Kill probably his best known film. At first, I thought Run and Kill would be one of the more harmless films of its type, with just enough of sex and violence to give it Hong Kong's adult rating, but it turned out that the film's slow and harmless beginning was just Tang's way to produce an adequate drop height.

The further the film goes along the nastier its tone gets. It really isn't the way the violence itself is depicted that gets to you here, it is the nature of the violence itself. What happens to Cheung's daughter Pinky is one of the more shocking things I've ever seen in a film, even for the usually not very friendly world of CAT III cinema.

Much of the film's harsh emotional effect has to do with Tang's immensely tight direction. Apart from an absolutely useless scene with Lee that exposits about plans of the mainland gangsters which will have no import at all on the rest of the movie, Run and Kill wastes no time with scenes that have no importance for the growing sense of doom and desperation that permeates it.

The film is bathed in the typical cold blue of a 90s Hong Kong production, a cold light that is to the film and others of its kind what shadow is to the American noir.

In a sense, the noir seems like an apt comparison for Run and Kill and other of the more ambitious CAT III crime films. Tang's film and Hollywood's noirs share a sense of absurdity, a love of coincidences (or the believe in a malevolent universe) which make bad situations worse. And how noir is the film's basic story about a seemingly happy man losing everything through a mixture of his own stupidity and sheer bad luck?

Of course, there is one thing that divides a CAT III cinema like this and noir quite harshly: it is the way they relate to violence.

Where the Hollywood movies only imply violence and often use their thick shadows to hide it, the Hong Kong films go all out with it, sleazily wallowing in it. Sometimes this is surely out of pure exploitational instinct, but at other times, like in Run and Kill's particular case, I can't shake the feeling that this is very much a difference born out of a more honest nihilism in the Asian films. In a sense, the Hollywood noir wouldn't let go of a concept of morality (in part surely out of reasons of censorship, but only in part), admitting to the darkest sides of humanity and the world itself, yet still judging them as if there were a moral instance to be judged by and hoping as if there were something better to hope for.

CAT III has given up on that. You can't show a father having to watch his little girl burned to death and later running around cradling her charred remains and try to put a moral bend on it,  and Run and Kill never does. The film's nihilism runs much too deep to still put trust into a concept of hope. The still humanist "Look, isn't is sad and terrible?" of the noir has transformed into the simple command to LOOK.

In short: Tales from the Dark 1 (2013)

Even in the rather sad state it is in right now, Hong Kong cinema can sometimes still offer positive surprises. Case in point is the anthology movie Tales from the Dark 1, which features three independent yet thematically connected horror stories by different directors (Simon Yam Tat-Wah in his directorial debut, Lee Chi-Ngai and Fruit Chan), all based on the stories of Lillian Lee Pik-Wah.

Simon Yam's story sees a half-crazed impoverished man played by Yam finally touching a spirit world he has always been closer to than he expected when he attempts to steal and ransom some urns. Lee Chi-Ngai's second story concerns an aging fortune-teller's (Tony Leung Ka-Fai) last job before his retirement and his attempt to get back together with his wife, shown in a very low key - at least for Hong Kong - comedic manner. Finally, Fruit Chan's story concerns the folk sorcery tradition of villain hitting (a link worth following, I think) and ghostly vengeance.

All three stories are moodily filmed, with Simon Yam showing himself as a director able to really get into a capital-w weird mood, and as the kind of actor you can actually put behind a camera without horrible consequences. Why, he's even rather subtly hiding away certain elements of his plot in plain sight. Everyone behind the camera is clearly well versed in the technological the state of the art of filmmaking without feeling the need to show off.

So far, so competent. What makes Tales from the Dark 1 interesting, particularly as a Hong Kong movie, is how little it tries to follow the expectations its prospective audience will carry towards horror cinema from the city. There's barely a single centipede on screen, the gore is not at all plentiful (only Chan's episode is interested in being gruesome at all), and where Hong Kong horror generally likes to wallow in cynicism and misery, all three stories here are connected by quite a different thematic angle. These are all stories about letting go (even if it means dying, or not committing an act of vengeance), about accepting change and endings, and because they are also all stories that don't pretend life as such is necessarily nice or fair, they are quite a bit more convincing at making their points than you'd expect, generally avoiding a kitschy feelgood vibe while also keeping away from mere cynicism. For a film with so much death and sadness in it, Tales' basic feeling is one of hope.

Even though I've always been a fan of Hong Kong horror's extreme nastiness, I find the approach of Tales from the Dark towards horror and the ghost story a rather enticing one, suggesting that there's still quite a bit of life in the old lady Hong Kong, at least today.

And who'd have thought to ever see a horror movie from the city that finds a ghost stopping her vengeance because she feels compassion?

Technorati-Markierungen: hong kong movies,in short,horror,simon yam,lee chi-ngai,fruit chan,tony leung ka-fai

In short: Naked Killer (1992)

As regular readers of this blog know, I'm not an admirer of the horrible Wong Jing. The man's general attitude towards movie making, which can be summarized with "I don't care enough to make an effort", just rubs me the wrong way. Additionally, unlike the man, I don't think rape jokes are very funny.

But I've always made an exception for the Wong Jing written and produced Naked Killer, for it is a movie that shows what can happen when the frightful man does bother to apply himself. It's not as if the script for this one made that much more sense than anything else Wong Jing has written, but it does at least tell a story with a recognizable beginning, middle, and end, instead of playing out as what feels like random scenes from different movies haphazardly stitched together, which is the usual Wong Jing feel. Furthermore, while Naked Killer takes place on a planet where traumatized hero cops begin to puke whenever they touch a gun (and suffer from erectile dysfunction only looking at Chingmy Yau can cure, but let's not go there), other cops are named "Dickhead", where part of the killer training consists of getting locked up in a pop art cellar with a chained rapist, and where people dress in the awesome primary-coloured (remember when movies had colours?) things the actors wear here, the crazy for once does make just enough sense to be entertaining. It's like the adaptation of a men's adventure novel about a killer where all the testosterone-y men have been replaced by women. The audience of this sort of thing (hullo Mum!) does like after all two things the most: ridiculous violence and staring at sexily clad women; as Carrie Ng's character here would agree, there's no need at all to feature men at all. Though Naked Killer is at least trying to cover all its bases by also featuring a Simon Yam masturbation scene.

A lot of what's fun about Naked Killer - and it's really a very, very fun movie - I blame on director Clarence Ford. Ford has the early 90s HK aesthetic down to an art, featuring the expected mix of blue light, fast edits and Evil Dead-inspired camera work most directors working for Wong Jing always seem to bored or tired (now, what happens in Jing's production house, inquiring minds want to know) to use consistently or as exhilarating as Ford does here. If people aren't fighting, there is - of course - more footage of Ng, Yau, Yiu Wai and Yam in ridiculous poses that often look like an alien's idea of sexiness to me than any sane person could ask for, giving the film an overheated mood as if nobody involved could think about anything but sex, even when thinking of sex seems totally inappropriate in a given context. In part, we can thank a "no breasts" clause in Yau's, Ng's, and Yiu Wai's contracts for the film's ridiculous imagination when it comes to the sexiness; it is, it turns out, possible to turn anything into softcore.

Technorati-Markierungen: hong kong movies,in short,wong jing,clarence ford,chingmy yau,simon yam,carrie ng,yiu wai,action,exploitation

Black Ransom (2010)

A series of kidnappings of mid-level triad bosses is being committed in Hong Kong. The perpetrators are a group of ex-cops led by Sam (Michael Miu), a man with a character-defining trauma so generic I refuse to explain it here and see themselves as doling out some sort of vigilante justice while making a lot of money before killing their chosen victims. The kidnappers count on the fact that the families of their victims will rather pay a princely sum to get their loved ones back than go to the police as well as the fact that the police won't look too hard for disappeared gangsters.

Sam's plan works well enough until someone does go to the police with a kidnapping in progress. At first, his tight-knit gang has no trouble dealing with the attention, but after a major fiasco, the new Chief of the Organized Crime Unit, Madame Koo (Fala Chen), puts her trust into the aging cop Mann (Simon Yam). Mann hasn't been allowed to carry much responsibility for a long time now. The cop liked his relegation to the back ranks because it afforded him time to nurse his own character-defining trauma, but once he has gotten on Sam's trail, he proves himself to be exactly the man Madame Koo has hoped for.

Little does he know that his character-defining trauma and that of Sam are the responsibility of the same man, and little does the film try to explain what the motives of the gangster responsible for inflicting said traumata were. After all, this is a Wong Jing movie, and ridiculous coincidences are much easier to come up with than proper plot development.

Black Ransom was shot in 2008 but only came into Hong Kong cinemas at the beginning of this year, very atypical for a movie made in the city. At first, this factoid frightened me a little. How bad, I thought to myself, must a film be so that Wong Jing doesn't want to see it released? The film's first thirty minutes seem to suggest that a film must be solid and watchable to achieve this special sort of treatment by the producer/director/writer/fan of rape jokes, but the threat of a film that is actually good in the way people less inclined to follow the ways of pain in a movie than I am use that word dissolves soon after. A bit later, and every major development in the film's plot begins to depend on pure, mindnumbingly idiotic chance and/or the utter stupidity of its characters. The latter is especially problematic when one keeps in mind that Yam's and Miu's characters are supposed to be genius level cops and robbers.

I wouldn't complain too loudly about its non-script if the film was trying to be a silly, fast action movie that lives by its ability to produce visceral thrills, but for some reason Wong Jing seems to think he's making a film about the moral and intellectual duel between two intellectual manly man who have more in common than they would ever admit (and where oh where have I heard that one before?). In this context, much of the film's plotting and characterization has the stink of a laziness that tries to hide behind melodramatic posturing, as if emotional weight could be won simply by telling the audience it's there.

This notwithstanding, I can't say I didn't feel entertained by Black Ransom. It might have been the very un-Wong-Jing-like absence of rape "jokes" and rape sequences, or Simon Yam's highly ironic (or is it post-ironic?) performance as a cop seemingly based on the Alec Guinness version of Obi Wan Kenobi, or the increasing absurdity of the script's refusal to do anything beyond heaping stupid coincidence on even more stupid coincidence, or it might even have been the pretended gravitas of it all, in any case I spent most of my time watching Black Ransom giggling like a loon.

I don't think that was the reaction Wong Jing had in mind, but it's the one he got out of me.

 

Technorati-Tags: hong kong movies,in short,action,crime,simon yam,wong jing

On WTF: Run And Kill (1993)

Sometimes, a cult movie fan just needs to watch a really unpleasant and deeply nihilist Hong Kong CAT III movie.

Sometimes, this cult movie fan finds that film, but also finds a better film than he expected. Read about this fascinating case in my write-up on WTF-Film.

 

Technorati-Tags: hong kong movies,billy tang,simon yam,kent cheng,crime,reviews,other places

Sparrow (2008)

Kei (Simon Yam), Bo (Lam Ka Tung), Sak (Law Wing Cheong) and Mac (Kenneth Cheung) are a team of pickpockets in Hong Kong. They're not the kind of hardened squinting criminals one usually meets in the films I watch; they're rather modern and urban variations on the charming rogue archetype, getting by through dexterity and wit instead of violence.

If you ignore the bickering of people who spend way too much time with one another, the quartet leads a rather charmed life. Their carefreeness ends when a mysterious woman (Kelly Lin) "accidentally" encounters each of them, leaving the sort of impression one usually expresses through rather idiotic grinning.

Cynical people could think she is setting the gang up for some sort of trap. And she is, in a way, but not in the way you would expect.

To say more about the plot would be a cruel thing to do, so I'll just leave it at that.

 

Don't get me wrong: I may be very much in love with the films of Johnnie To, but I would never steep so low as to say he is unable to make a bad movie; perhaps even two. This is definitely not one of those, though. In fact, I'd call it one of To's best films, leading to the logical conclusion that Sparrow is one of the best films I know.

Sparrow is a comedy, at least if your definition of comedy does include films that are not made to make you laugh out loud, but rather to make you smile with joy, perhaps even a little glee; films that have a lightness in touch and outlook without ignoring the existence of darkness, instead letting the hoary old cliché about there being no light without darkness and so on and so on look downright deep.

Sparrow really does work some magic on the most cynical of hearts (mine) and it looks oh so very easy how it does this.

There's a sense of rhythm to every gliding movement of the camera and every step of the actors that - combined with the brilliant score by Fred Avril & Xavier Jamaux (who are also responsible for the soundtrack of To's Mad Detective) - nearly turns the film into a musical.

I expected Yam to suddenly break into song or slowly start to dance in more than one scene and could never shake the feeling that the film itself wanted to transform into a musical (or a bird) any minute now. A French musical to be more specific; a French musical made by a former Nouvelle Vague director to be even more specific. Or what the film calls a sparrow.

The acting is of course great. You should know most faces from many other of To's films, an ensemble of actors most directors should be jealous of.

Does the film have any flaws? I am honestly not sure. As an experience it left me kind of drunk, kind of exhilarated, both no states of mind useful for the search for errors, flaws, mistakes, pimples or rashes.

And you know what? I don't know many better things to say about a work of art than "I don't care if it has flaws.". It's a little like with people you love.

 

Technorati-Tags: reviews,raves,comedy,johnnie to,simon yam,hong kong movies

In short: Horoscope 2: The Woman From Hell (2000)

What is worse than a Hong Kong black magic CATIII movie? A film like Horoscope 2 that uses the well-known basic plot of the sub-genre adds a very stupid twist to the ending and tries to be just not sleazy enough to get a CATIII rating.

The trouble with this way of doing things is obvious: most people I know watch this kind of thing for their sleaziness and their bloody-minded outrageousness. If you subtract the outrageousness but add nothing like characterization or suspense or interesting visuals to replace it, you don't have much of a movie.

The only things of note here are a slumming Simon Yam (who doesn't even try to act), a lot of worms, a little puke and two interesting facts: 1.) Powdered dead babies are good for your health (or not) 2.) Don't mess with sports archers

 

Technorati-Tags: in short,hong kong movies,horror,simon yam