88 Films

[Finch]

Thank you both! The first Fight Back To School sounds like a fun; the sequels seem to be less successful.

[yoloswegmaster]

Coming to the U.S:

[dwk]

Hard Boiled 2 was a retitle for the UK VHS market, as this came out before Hard Boiled.

[yoloswegmaster]

It's funny how Wong Jing made a heroic-bloodshed film that apes John Woo's style and even features a lengthy action sequences set in a hospital.

[tenia]

Is it any good ? I have no idea what this one is.

[yoloswegmaster]

Is it any good ? I have no idea what this one is.

It's a typical HK action film, in which the action scenes are good but everything in-between is uninteresting and is a big step down in quality compared with Hard Boiled imo.

[Finch]

88 will be releasing A Blade in the Dark in the UK as per their social media.

[Finch]

A BR user has uploaded caps of the 88 BD of The Whip and the Body.

[M Sanderson]

WHIP & THE BODY looks really good on the screen grabs and seems promising indeed. I'm thinking I've never seen a good home video release of it, although there might have been an old German DVD that looked strong for its format. Recall a VCI dvd being way too dark, and a German dvd being more precise in its separation of colours and shadows.

Are we expecting it to sell out quickly, being Christopher Lee & a LE with nice packaging - is its one to rush out for?

[Finch]

I watched it yesterday and can confirm it does not have the day for night appearance and the overly blue tint of the Kino. The 88 is sourced from the French print. And yes the German EMS DVD was considered the best home video presentation up to this point. I'll have a read of the book sometime today.

[M Sanderson]

WHIP & THE BODY plays absolutely beautifully. This is a fine Blu-ray release, and I've never enjoyed the film so much.

What's the latest on 88 Films' upcoming releases of Franco's Dracula and also there was a tease, I believe, of Witchfinder General. Anything on new restorations or 4k releases?

[Finch]

Miami Vice is still happening. 88 told Blu-Ray.com that they were still waiting on assets. They also teased The Postman Fights Back on Instagram.

[Finch]

[yoloswegmaster]

Excited for the Long Arm of the Law duology!

[feihong]

Kind of surprised Long Arm of the Law III & IV aren't included here. Rights issues, maybe?

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

Part three wasn't co-produced by Golden Harvest and isn't part of the Fortune Star catalog. Part four is, but I strongly suspect Fortune Star will no longer license it out given the political content.

[Finch]

Very excited about Long Arm of the Law! Been on my have-got-to-see-it list for years.

[Mr Sausage]

I found Long Arm of the Law a meandering, aimless film with a fantastic final act and a perfect ending. It's worth seeing, but not quite a masterpiece.

[Finch]

What about the second one?

[M Sanderson]

Really pleased about the Walker set of horror films from new restorations.

Also didn’t realise Curse 2 had a following. One person on letterboxd said it felt almost like a “lost Brian Yuzna film” (admitting Yuzna had no involvement), due to the Screaming Mad George FX.

Intrigued by its Italian connection as well as Fulci was almost certainly influencing the material to a degree in the fine first film, which veered from grim kitchen sink dramatics, absurd comedy in which characters fail to correctly carry out domestic chores & scenes of farming industrial processes, to twisted leering close ups, canted, dramatic camera angles - & otherworldly lighting and collapsing sets, as well as people melting into pools of oozing, sentient slime. I do regard the original Curse as one of the remarkable Lovecraftian films, and am excited to finally check out the sequel (at least in name).

[yoloswegmaster]

The second Long Arm film deviates from the original in that it becomes the average action film that came after A Better Tomorrow but I would argue that it stands over the other action films from this time frame due to the great action sequences and how gritty it is.

[Finch]

Thank you both!

[Mr Sausage]

Here are my full reviews of both Long Arm of the Law and Taxi Hunter:

Long Arm of the Law (Johnnie Mak, 1984)

An early heroic bloodshed action movie in which a group of mainlanders sneak into Hong Kong to pull off a robbery. This isn’t a heist movie, more a grim crime film of desperation and fatalism--ostensibly, anyway. There are bizarre, tonally incongruous flashbacks to romantic memories with cheesy music laid over top and numerous comic scenes. I guess it’s meant to give us a tonal break, but it disrupts the rough and ready feel of the movie, with its eye for the poverty, social stratification, and oppressive urban atmosphere of Hong Kong, all filmed on location on the real streets, slums, malls, and nightclubs. There’s a degree of authenticity that grounds the melodrama and carries the movie through its somewhat stop-and-start plot structure and thin characterization. The film is more potential than realisation; there’s a lot that could’ve been done with the story given a more talented director and writer. It can be intense and exciting, and, again, the location shooting and cinema verite techniques lends great atmosphere. Otherwise, the film doesn’t sustain the right narrative propulsion and sweaty desperation, having no clear through-line and often getting hung up on minor comic scenes that go nowhere. The film doesn’t really get started until 50 minutes in, when everything starts going wrong. But the finale, starting on the hills and moving into the claustrophobic maze of the Kowloon walled city, is exemplary, a masterpiece of sustained intensity. And it finds a note to end on that’s so perfect and bleak that you could almost be convinced the movie is a masterpiece.

Taxi Hunter (Herman Yau, 1993)

Falling Down refracted through a Hong Kong lens. Anthony Wong, a meek company man, has an increasingly comical amount of run ins with asshole taxi drivers that culminates in his pregnant wife being dragged by a taxi and killed. So, clad in office shirt and tie like Michael Douglas, he takes up a weapon and begins a campaign of vengeance against taxi drivers while the movie indulges in social satire. What’s bonkers about the movie is that the lead, the man we’re to sympathize with, is essentially a serial killer. I think they were going for a Death Wish vibe, but Charles Bronson was killing people trying to violently assault him. Anthony Wong is just murdering rude taxi drivers. Maybe taxi drivers were a real social problem in Hong Kong at the time and this was all gleefully cathartic, but absent any context the movie is a piece of ethical insanity—a violent revenge fantasy against the annoying and inconvenient. The movie isn’t exactly a satire, but neither is it especially serious. It’s more a burlesque of a serious, socially aware thriller--a piece of rib-poking social provocation. That the movie works at all is down to Anthony’s Wong’s strange performance. He chooses to play his taxi hunter without aggrandizement, giving him the same quiet, mild-mannered demeanor whether he’s talking to his boss or torturing taxi drivers to death. It’s precisely his mildness that makes him so nuts. The movie isn’t especially interesting or creative aside from that. There’s more baffling nuttery in HK movies trying to play things straight.

[feihong]

I was really into the first Long Arm of the Law. I'd agree with Mr. Sausage's review entirely, just that I probably appreciated the sort of melodrama/authenticity balancing act more and felt the film was a little more sustaining of my interest than Mr. Sausage perhaps felt. Not that much different an appreciation, just that I felt like I was being steered towards the climax more surely, and I was really, really moved by the film's climax, by the way in which the film's luckless, amoral heroes become almost graceful and resourceful as they become increasingly resigned to a violent end.

The second movie abandons all pretense towards the original's docu-drama approach, going for far more exaggerated HK new wave violence, and making movie stars of its leads, including Elvis Tsui (maybe his intro to HK film?), Pauline Wong, Alex Man and Ben Lam (a sort of more earnest, more versatile, less charismatic version of Leon Lai). The first movie is blissfully straightforward in its plotting, and it's easy to follow. The second movie is a blizzard of different triad characters, different parlays and tense standoffs, where it's almost impossible to follow who's who and what anyone wants. It was just really hard to track what the stakes were in any given situation, and the result was that the film was, for me, more than just a little disappointing. There are several lengthy planning sessions around an armored car robbery which seems like it will be the climax of the movie, but then the climax unfolds before the armored car robbery we've seen rehearsed several times over ever gets a chance to unfold. The action is hardcore, but this kind of convolution makes the film a bit of a letdown.

The third movie is, I think, more appealing than the second one, with Andy Lau coming across very well (especially for an early Andy role––by and large he's an actor who improves with age), and Max Mok gives a very good, straightforward performance. The film has gone full violent HK new wave melodrama by this third one, and I think the film is tonally a lot better resolved than in the second film. The action is still incredible.

I haven't seen the fourth film, though I have it somewhere around. Kind of lost steam on the series. Each installment I saw had a lot to recommend, but, like Mr. Sausage says, they don't quite feel like masterpieces. I would say that, in retrospect, the first one does edge towards that feeling more than the others. I have a stronger feeling of wanting to rewatch the first movie than I do for the other two I've seen.

[M Sanderson]

Has the original Curse been "cancelled" due to Will Wheaton's unhappy claims in which he dismisses the film as rubbish, something that killed his career, and complained about terrible working conditions (including being thrown in actual cow shit and his sister having chickens thrown at her by Fulci)?

Or is it just a rights issue keeping 88 Films from releasing them together?