The Hong Kong movie industry of the 80s and 90s was one that was willing to create a bunch of action comedy horror films, with Sammo Hung serving as almost the martial arts film equivalent to Dan Ackroyd on Ghostbusters. I’ve covered one of the films of this era in the past with Mr. Vampire. Now it’s time for another, one starring Mr. Hung himself, with Close Encounters of the Spooky Kind.
Read moreThis week I’m taking a look at Ringo Lam’s undercover-cops-and-robbers crime thriller, City on Fire.
City on Fire is available from Amazon.com (Affiliate Link): https://amzn.to/4oGSqt2
‘Solecism’ by Scott Buckley – released under CC-BY 4.0. www.scottbuckley.com.au
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When I was in Middle School, I discovered Hong Kong martial arts films through researching the wuxia genre on the Internet after watching Big Trouble in Little China, and the first I sought out was Bruce Lee’s The Big Boss. So, I’ve always known that Bruce was one of cinema’s greatest film performers, and I’d assumed he could do no wrong. That there was no such thing as a mediocre Bruce Lee film. It turns out there is, and it’s called Way of the Dragon.
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I’m not a fan of Auteur Theory. Movies, television, and video games have so many people involved in the process of creating them that putting all the weight of a work’s success on a single person weakens the contributions of everyone else in the project. That said, a good director can make a world of difference on a film, not because of their sole artistic vision, but because of the other contributors who they can ask to take part in the project because of their own past experience. Such is the case with In The Line of Duty 4, which has Yuen Woo-Ping in the director’s chair, which in turn makes a world of difference.
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The In The Line Of Duty series of films is kind of odd as far as film series go. It’s not like the Zombi or the Italian House series – where you had a bunch of directors taking a bunch of desperate films with common elements (zombies or horror films regarding a house respectively), and sticking the label of an existing series of films on them, making for a bunch of films based around a thematic link instead of a narrative link. The first two films in the series – Yes, Madam and Royal Warriors had a thematic link (women police investigators), and a cast link (Michelle Yeoh), but no character linkage, and otherwise did not share a common brand. However, over the course of re-releases and alternative titles, both of those films were re-branded as being the first part of a series of films known as “In The Line of Duty” – with In The Line of Duty 3, from 1988, being technically the third part of that series, but the first to codify the “brand”.
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It’s been a while since I reviewed Royal Warriors, the second installment in the retroactive “In The Line Of Duty” series of films – so now it’s time for me to take a look at the first film, and the starring debut of Michelle Yeoh and Cynthia Rothrock, 1985’s Yes, Madam.
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Silver Hawk is a film that feels a lot like it’s part of various SE Asian countries (not just Hong Kong, but also Taiwan) film industries’ making their own attempts to follow in the footsteps of the superhero films of the early 2000s – X-Men, the Spider-man movies, and the Blade films.
Read moreThis time I’m reviewing a Golden Harvest film featuring Jiangshi.
Read moreThis week I have another martial arts film review, as I’m taking a look at Golden Harvest’s Feng Shui fueled adventure film, “Bury Me High”
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I love martial arts films – particularly those from South East Asia (starting with Hong Kong but expanding over time to Thailand, Korea, and Malaysia), thanks to role-playing games – with two, in particular, starting me down this path.
The first was Dragon Fist by Chris Pramas, which seeded my love for wuxia. The other was Feng Shui, which expanded my love to the entire Ur-genre. However, when trying to sell people on Feng Shui, I had to downplay why the game had that title – the concept of a variety of factions from through history, past and future, doing battle over “Feng Shui Sites” – places of great magical power where those who hold them can shape the flow of destiny. If I had seen Bury Me High, I would have had a lot more confidence and just told people to watch this instead.
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Before Quentin Tarantino made Reservoir Dogs (or, for that matter, Kathryn Bigelow made Point Break), Ringo Lam made City on Fire. Read more
Magnificent Warriors is another of the early films in Michelle Yeoh’s career – made a little before Royal Warriors. As with Royal Warriors – the film has Michelle Yeoh in the lead, along with another male co-lead in a similar action role, and the third male lead being a comic relief character. However, that’s pretty much where the similarities end. Read more
I’m a fan of the films of Michelle Yeoh – I generally thought she was super-cool back when I first saw her in Tomorrow Never Dies when I was in High School, but unfortunately very few of her movies had become particularly accessible in the US. Supercop got a wide release, as did Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but the rest of her filmography required hunting online, requiring you to hunt down DVDs through Amazon or other services.
Netflix made some of those films accessible on disks, but as those disks fell out of print (and were not returned to Netflix), it became harder to find some of those films. Thankfully, some of those movies have become available again through streaming services like Amazon Prime and Netflix Instant, such as the film I’m reviewing this time, Royal Warriors. Read more
Jackie Chan, as a performer, is frequently compared with Buster Keaton and, as I’ve mentioned in my own review of Police Story at Letterboxd, Charlie Chaplin.
Well, Mr. Vampire, a martial arts horror-comedy film produced by Jackie Chan’s friend and fellow member of the Five Little Fortunes, is what I’d probably describe as the Hong Kong equivalent of the Abbott and Costello Meet… movies. Read more
Johnny To, as a director, has two extremes. On one end is gritty crime thrillers like the Election duology – which may have an action scene or two, but which otherwise are generally grounded in the real world. On the other end is Exiled, a film which has a fight scene early in the film where several characters in a firefight cause a table to flip and spin end over end with their bullet hits, but ultimately both come out of the fight uninjured. In the middle lies The Mission. Read more