Instead, it’s morphed into a whole new animal showing greater stability and strength than its pre- 1. Too many bad movies and bad production practices resulted in a woozy hangover compounded by the 1. Asian Economic Crisis that caused most of Southeast Asia’s film markets to evaporate overnight. Deprived of one of its major sources of revenue, the Hong Kong industry hit the skids hard, with critics and fans prematurely proclaiming its death. At the last minute a short- term infusion of dot com money got it back on its feet, and now it’s stronger than ever. Romantic comedy films are of interest to fans, students of cinema, and scholars. These books provide an understanding of the tradition that can. Production levels are lower, and thus more sustainable and realistic. Talent is getting courted by Hollywood on a regular basis, and content- hungry entertainment conglomerates are paying bottom dollar for film libraries (which is better than the no dollars they were getting before). Hong Kong’s industry is rigorously local these days, with its biggest grossing hits being made- in- Hong Kong products that emphasise the city and its quirks, rather than treating it like an anonymous backlot providing regulation- free shooting space for international productions. Through all of these post- ’9. The Chinese horror movie tradition reaches back to the ’3. In the ’7. 0s, England’s Hammer studios introduced Shaw Brothers to the idea of the gross- out horror flick with the Shaw/Hammer co- production Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires (Roy Ward Baker, 1. Shaw took this grody trend and ran with it in the ’7. In 1. 98. 7, Tsui Hark (who’d tried and failed to make a sickie with his cannibal kielbasa We’re Going to Eat You . But in 1. 99. 2 the sick flicks became true crime gut- crunchers and rapidly hit the point of no return, burning out by 1. Romantic ghost stories modernised, however. Hong Kong isn’t one for innovation, but in terms of adaptation it’s tops. By 2. 00. 2 the romantic ghost movie, mutated by exposure to The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyalaman, 1. The Ring (Hideo Nakata, 2. While there is no general agreement upon the greatest film, many publications and organizations have tried to determine the films considered the best.Tracking Hong Kong horror production year- by- year is nutritious in the sense that it forces one to leave out high- minded theory and focus on what each director and producer was doing. As a caveat, it’s nearly impossible to see every horror movie each year, and it’s almost as hard to get an accurate count of how many were made. The following are one writer’s impressions and they are most likely wrong. A lot of things died in Hong Kong in 1. With takings down 3. Hong Kong’s distribution chains closed, leaving the city with only three film distributors. However, evil genius Wong Jing, director/cinematographer Andrew Lau, and producer/talent scout Manfred Wong chose that year to form their Bo.
B (Best of Best) production company and dash out the ultra- cheap triad boyz movie, Young and Dangerous. By year’s end the movie would have three sequels with a collective take of $6. B- movies were making). Gay, Lesbian, Transgender Studies: Videotapes in the Media Resources Center, UC Berkeley. The History of Sex in Cinema: Movie Title/Year and Film/Scene Description: Screenshots: 2014 was no different than the three previous years - boundary-pushing. Trying to find Sci-Fi anime? Discover more Sci-Fi anime on MyAnimeList, the largest online anime and manga database in the world! The cast became famous, and the Young and Dangerous movies became a mammoth franchise. That year also saw the first Milkyway Image picture, Beyond Hypothermia (Patrick Leung). Johnnie To and Wai Ka- fai’s production company would be a creative dark star during Hong Kong’s film crisis of the late ’9. No Exit mindset, resulting in film noir’s post- ’7. Starting with this film, To and Wai applied horror movie tactics to action films turning them into claustrophobic mantraps. In Beyond Hypothermia, A sense of dread hangs over the proceedings and many of the paranoid night sequences take on the stalk- and- slash tension of a slasher flick. Herman Yau brought one era of his career to an end. A loosey- goosey director of bottom- billed genre flicks, Yau shot the ultra- gross- out movie Untold Story (1. A queasy mix of comedy, social criticism, and gore, the movie starred Anthony Wong as a real- life serial killer who murdered a restaurant owner and his family, diced them up into pork buns and served them to his customers. It was a genre high, and Wong won a Best Actor award for his relentless performance. Yau and Wong reunited in 1. Ebola Syndrome. A blood- smeared grin with gristle stuck between its teeth, Ebola is pure chaos. Wong again plays a short- tempered everyman who flees Hong Kong after committing a crime and hides out overseas where he can give rein to his every sick appetite. Whereas in Untold Story the original crime was beating and burning alive a man to whom he owes a gambling debt, the stakes rise exponentially in Ebola when Wong flees Hong Kong for South Africa after castrating his boss, ripping out his mistress’ tongue, and trying to set a little girl on fire. A lurid combination of Outbreak (Wolfgang Peterson, 1. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (John Mc. Naughton, 1. 99. 0) viewers rub their eyes in disbelief as Wong rapes a dying African tribeswoman who vomits on him mid- coitus, passing on the titular flesh- eating virus. Wong’s a carrier, not a victim, however and after sexual intercourse with a variety of meat products, a couple of murders, and some gratuitous sex, he winds up back in Hong Kong, death flowing in his wake like a big trail of stink. If a movie this repugnant doesn’t cause the earth to open up and swallow mankind whole, nothing will. It’s the last gasp of Hong Kong’s Cat III true crime pictures: a movie that’s not completely true, but is completely criminal. Wellson Chin also wrapped up his . Starting with Thou Shall Not Swear (1. The Third Full Moon (1. The Day that Doesn’t Exist which, while being the best of the series, made the point that Hong Kong horror was running out of ideas. Grossing only half what its predecessors had, it still did better than its follow- up, July 1. Chin would go into hibernation until 2. One of Hong Kong’s best horror directors, Ivan Lai, was also ending his horror career in 1. Director of 1. 99. Daughter of Darkness 1 and 2, Lai is a cheapie director who seems to occasionally catch fire. An assistant director on Ronny Yu’s Ur- horror film The Imp back in 1. Lai directed an in- name- only remake of The Imp in 1. Diana Pang and Mark Cheng head up to Shao Guan China to film an aboriginal ritual for TV. Their crew bunks in a decaying hotel with infinitely unfurling tenebrous corridors and an oversexed owner who comes complete with a mute, hunch- backed assistant. Ivan Lai makes the material more than his, as his signature squirm- inducing voyeuristic setpieces degenerate into medical appliance bondage scenarios right out of a Japanese fetish mag. This would be it for horror from Lai, who went on to direct nothing very good. Hong Kong movies continued to drop off through 1. Directors brought segments of their careers to an end, and although Young and Dangerous and Milkyway Image proved something new could still spring up at the box office, people expected things to get worse. And in 1. 99. 7, they did. As if it wasn’t bad enough that box office takings were down 2. October the Asian Economic Crisis swept Southeast Asia. Hong Kong businesses weren’t hit so badly, their currency being pegged to the US dollar, but foreign businesses with offices in Hong Kong laid off their workers, overseas investments crashed, and overseas markets for Hong Kong films disappeared in the blink of an eye. In the midst of all this strife, the handover took place, transforming Hong Kong from a British colony into a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. The July 1 ceremonies were notable for their monotony and the whole thing seemed to pass like a boring dream which caused, at worst, a great deal of inconvenience. More acute was the damage caused by Titanic (James Cameron, 1. Hong Kong, pulling in $8. For a foreign film to do so well while the local industry withered on the vine was a deep shock to industry morale and one had the feeling that many producers were trying to dump their cheapest products on the market so that they could make a few bucks before they went out of business. Tsui Hark remade his Chinese Ghost Story movies as A Chinese Ghost Story: The Tsui Hark Animation. Cobbling together a Hong Kong feature film animation industry from the ground up, the movie is slicker than it should be and has accomplished character design. Eminently watchable, it’s also eminently forgettable and misses the hand- cranked romantic charm of the original series. Without real actors, the whole endeavour feels pointless. The big event of the year was the debut of the Troublesome Night series which initially looked as cheap as anything else on the market. Horror anthologies are a Hong Kong tradition, dating back at least to Tung Shan- si’s 1. Blood Reincarnation, and 1. But the TN series were in a class of their own. Produced by Ringo Lam’s writer, Nam Yin, and directed by Herman Yau, the Troublesome Night series uses the anthology film format to spotlight a different industry in each installment and they all feature the same main cast. Although the series reached nineteen films by 2. Troublesome Night 1 is directed by Herman Yau, Steven Cheng, and Tam Long- cheung. Herman Yau would return as sole director for episodes 2- 6. Steve Cheng would go on to direct six other horror films in the next five years (1) all of which were, at the very least, interesting. Tam would go on to do absolutely nothing that any English- speaker can detect. Troublesome Night 1 includes three stories loosely linked by their connection to the movie industry, and looks like something cobbled together by some production assistants with a few spare lights; the lead characters spend 9. Though all the pieces are there, TN 1 is best viewed after watching later, better installments. Troublesome Night 2 features the same cast but this time they’re motorcycle- riding radio DJs who host a call- in show. Balancing morbid action with treacly pop songs this one knows it’s playing for something better than a couple of late night screenings and a quick life on pirate VCD. Yau is directing alone this time, and he still doesn’t have the mix right between emotion, humour and horror, but there’s the feeling that the actors and crew are working for the pure pleasure of it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
January 2017
Categories |