Victim (1999)

Original title: 目露凶光

Warning: you can’t talk about this one without spoiling large parts of the plot!

Manson Man (Lau Ching-Wan), a businessman fallen on hard times thanks to the financial crisis is suddenly kidnapped by gangsters. It’s a bit of strange case – Man’s girlfriend Amy (Amy Kwok Oi-Ming) clearly doesn’t understand what’s going on at all. There’s after all no money at all to be had from them. The police, particularly Detective Pit Kwan (Tony Leung Ka-Fai), are rather sceptical about the whole affair, even more so when they discover that Man had gotten heavily in debt with some gangsters. Though, as Amy tells it, they managed to pay it all off, so there shouldn’t be any reason coming from that side either.

Man is set free after a while, without any money having flown, but there’s something really strange about the situation: he’s left for the pick-up in a house supposedly haunted. During the police rescue, enough very peculiar things happen to suggest to Detective Kwan as well as to Amy that there may be something supernatural going on.

Particularly since Man acts very strangely after his release, in ways not terribly typical of someone who has gone through a traumatic event. It is more as if he were another person completely. Why, one might think he’s possessed by a spirit.

Though, and here come the spoilers, if the central character of Ringo Lam’s Victim is possessed by a malevolent force, it’s the spirit of capitalism rather than anything supernatural. As it will eventually turn out, Man’s not possessed, he has just turned into a very human monster. As portrayed with expected and perfectly appropriate intensity by the great Lau Ching-Wan, Man was clearly a true believer in the promises of a highly capitalist society, and suddenly had to learn that you can play by the rules you’ve been taught are the right ones all of your life, and still lose everything for no fault of your own. Which simply breaks him, and makes him willing to do absolutely anything to become rich again, leaving scruples, Amy’s love for him and basically everything that makes him human behind to plan a rather impressive crime and double-cross that needs to involve quite the bloodbath. Even before bad luck and bad partners turn parts of the plan even more bloody than Man must have thought they needed to be.

There’s really no other reading for the film than this strong and angry kind of capitalism criticism as delivered through a pretty singular mixture of horror and crime movie. This desperate scrabbling for loot of course is a thematic angle than ran through many a crime movie from Hongkong during the 80s and the 90s, when making lots of money to escape the City as long as it was still British seems to have been a central goal in the place’s culture at large. Only the body count by gun shot wounds is dramatized.

Lam in his mode of brutal realism – he can do operatic as well, but often chooses not to – is the perfect filmmaker to tackle this kind of material. He provides the film with an angry energy that from time to time explodes outwards in short and brutal shoot-outs and beatings. In these moments, the film is as kinetic as Lam’s older, classic movies in the genre, but there’s a desperate quality here the film shares with Man.

Victim’s realist approach also works well when it pretends to be a supernatural horror movie instead of a moral one. At that point in the movie Manson’s seeming possession and irrational behaviour are provided with extra heft by how grounded his surroundings feel, as well as by how much stock the clearly reasonable Kwan as well as Amy, who believes she knows Man much better than she actually does, put in it as an explanation. In the end, and rather ironically, a supernatural force driving Man to his deeds would have been the friendlier and less desperate explanation. In the Hongkong of Victim, evil ghosts are just too friendly an explanation to be real.

Gunmen (1988)

Original title: 天羅地網

After he has returned from the Chinese Civil War (the part of it ending in 1936, I believe, but please correct me if you know better), Ting Kwan-pik (Tony Leung Ka-fai), his wife Cho Chiu (Carrie Ng) and their litter daughter make their way to Shanghai, where Ting becomes a policeman. Shanghai is a troubled place at the time, the French using the concession to make a mint in the opium trade, and a widely corrupted police force assisting criminal activity more than hindering it. Ting, of course, is incorruptible.

One man involved in the drug trade is Haye (Adam Cheng), who just happens to be an old enemy of Ting’s from the war, hoping to use his gains for further civil warring in the Northwest (which would make him a Kuomintang man, I believe).

Obviously, these two men will collide rather sooner than later, each eventually being responsible for the death of the other’s father figure. The film also finds time for Ting’s difficult love life, as well as a shouty new boss (Elvis Tsui!), to make matters more difficult for our hero.

At least, he’ll be able to re-team with his old war buddies Cheung (Waise Lee), Lau Fuk-kwong (Mark Cheng) and Cheung Cho-fan (David Wu) to do the appropriate manly violent things you eventually do in this kind of film.

Leave it to late 80’s Hong Kong cinema to pack the plot as well as all of the subplots of a 150 minute movie into 84. Not surprisingly, there’s a breathless quality to Kirk Wong’s Gunmen (produced by Tsui Hark, so who knows how much Wong actually had to say about anything here) that’s even more intense than usual for the city’s not exactly calm movie output from this golden era. Everybody here seems always on the verge of some sort of emotional or physical outbreak or breakdown, with momentous decisions taken at the drop of a hat, characters and their relations drawn and changed with great speed.

It’s somewhat exhausting to watch, but Wong actually has quite a bit of control over the intensity, going down from eleven to ten at the right moments, somehow managing to draw the proper melodramatic character relations with as much conviction as necessary, condensing the film’s huge amount of plot without it actually losing much of its effectiveness.

And really, despite being a bit rough around the edges, the film’s a highly effective machine, providing enough historical elements, melodrama, male bonding, and vengeance to fill two other movies, all the while filling every nook and cranny with the kind of insane action you expect from a Hong Kong movie from this era. Sure, there are much more extreme examples of the form, but there are still more mass shoot-outs with absurd body counts, chases through tight streets and properly nasty looking close combat sequences to make a boy woozy. Wong and action director Fung Hak-On seem to particularly love action that takes place in very tight spaces, giving many of the fights a claustrophobic edge. Eventually, everything culminates in a pretty incredible bloody finale that perfectly marries the violence with the melodrama of the plot; and uses a child in a way you really can’t see a film from the US ever doing.


For the connoisseur of Hong Kong cinema of the time, it’s also rather great to see Carrie Ng and Elvis Tsui in atypical roles as the always fully dressed wife in whose breasts the camera is not the least bit interested, and the shouty, possibly evil but potentially heroic new boss of Ting who is never involved in a horrifying sex scene or other. What more could I ask of a movie?

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?

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