The Rapist (1994)

For me, there are two kinds of Category III films, those that challenge and shock and those that are just soft-core bollocks. It goes without saying that The Rapist has rape sequences in it, some prolonged and unpleasant yet there remains a skill behind and in front of the camera that elevates it from pure gutter cinema. Basically the film is a fictionalized look at a real life serial rapist that haunted the apartment blocks of Tuen Mun in Hong Kong. A sordid string of assaults expanded into murders, with police seemingly hopeless to catch the man. He ended up caught in bizarre circumstances, police concluding that his actual victim count may be higher that thought.

The Rapist is never named in the movie and remains a cipher of sleaze and coldness, portrayed by Kar-Sing Lee as a damaged man-child who manages to be scarier than the usual gurning monsters in these films. In a fresh take, the cops work as cops, doing the sort of rolling shift shit work you imagine them doing instead of joking about tits as Danny Lee's officers always seem to do. Kwok Pong Chan is damn fine as the lead hard boiled cop, just given just a twist of humanity to make him a little more fleshed out. Kwok Pong Chan is an under-rated player, propping up some other lesser known Cat III flicks such as Gates Oh Hell. He seems to have an alias as Power Chan which is one hell of a name. 

At the end of the day though, The Rapist is a film concerning a rapist, told in a cold, clinical, sterile fashion, using harsh lighting and decayed urban settings along with icy synths. The film is directed with a steady hand by Cha Chuen-Yee, who is probably best known for his Triad Socity duology. Sometimes very ugly, it never feels exploitative when of course it totally is. Compare it with the Grand Guignol of similar movies and you are left with something approaching a linear, straight ahead cop movie that happens to feature extended sequences of sexual brutality. Whether or not people wish to take in The Rapist with its stark brutality is up to them but for those up for a challenging view, with a nod to a compelling true crime piece The Rapist is superior product of its type.

Dignified Killers 1991, Taiwan

                           

I have to confess I'm a little wayward with my blogging, I do try, I wander from rock writing to this and that but really I should focus on what I'm good at writing about, which is hard, violent asian pulp cinema. So I'm going to try harder. This takes us to the 1991 Taiwan film Dignified Killers. Taiwan gangster pictures of this era are even cheaper than the cheaper Hong Kong crime movies. They're usually laden with more violence and sleaze, along with louder clothing. They're also very hit and miss, some being so bad they're not worth reviewing (1988's War Of The Underworld). Thankfully today's feature is as enjoyable as they really get.

Dignified Killers is straight up action exploitation, nothing more and nothing less. Lean, crude violent pulp with guns that crackle like fire crackers and just as much broken glass as Jackie Chan's Police Story. Add in Chanbara Spurt hero Lam Wai and you're laughing.

Basically Dignified Killers follows a gang war until half way through when it turns into a revenge film with a team of hostesses turned silver suited karate killers. That is as much depth and analysis as the film deserves, it's all about the psychical action, of which there is plenty. The film starts with bloody knife battles, leans towards gun fights in the middle, then ends on hands and feet with skulls smashing on walls and backs breaking on stone staircases. Viva violence! Really it's a basic film that rattles along to cover as many pulp touchstones as it can, there's a sappy canto pop song plus montage with elephants, along with some rough sex for the dirty mac crowd plus a villain that laughs a lot. Yes, the movie is pretty crude, the gunfights especially suffering from a stiltedness to the staging but fuck it, it's all so much fun.

Dignified Killers exists as a decent vhsrip out there in torrent land, perfectly acceptable with burnt in english subtitles.

Yakuza Justice: Erotic Code Of Honour (Japan, 1973)

This film has several titles but I'm just rolling with Yakuza Justice m'kay. This is a flick that really surprised me, coming from a director of mainly pink films ,Tatsumi Kumashiro, it is a merging of crafted skin cinema with the brutality of a yakuza piece.

The story begins twenty odd years in the past when a monk fishes a dead pregnant lady out of a river. She gives birth to a baby who he takes to the monastery and is subsequently raised as a monk himself, gaining the name Seigen. He is a good monk until he rescues a young woman from some thugs and promptly shows he thanks by shagging him silly. This leaves Seigen rather confused.

Even more confused when he discovers her father, a mob boss, is his dad too by different mothers. This drives him nuts and he quits the monks, descending into a life of crime and vice. He fucks whores, kills gangsters, gets inked and broods about his half sister. All the while he is haunted by the monk that fished his mother out of the river and by endless sights of butterflies.

This is a brisk movie that is part sex, part violent crime drama and part theological art piece. Rife with symbolism of running water, butterflies, mountains and women nursing children you can easily not follow the meanings when you have no knowledge of Buddhism. That doesn't really matter as it just adds an enigmatic yet serene aura to a dirty, direct piece of 70s gang cinema. Seigen is a truly nihilistic prick, a capable killer with both gun and even a shovel.

Violence wise, this is chock full of the red stuff. Garish and bright red! There's an assassination in a bar set to a Japanese folk song, a knife fight in a wheat field and several beat downs along with a superb machine gun massacre. Oh my god! I loved it all!

The sex scenes are brief and hard, only problem is an annoying black bar that appears to cover bums and fannies. This film really hits all the right notes, makes me wish that the category III era of Hong Kong movies could have produced this kind of artful blend of gang vice and violence. I'm definitely delving more into the pink violence world if there is anything else out there that comes close to this sleazy little bugger.

The Clones Of Bruce Lee (1980)

Might aswell return to blogging with a bad taste big bang. Ah ol' Brucesploitation, the exploitation martial arts cinema experience devoted to raping the legacy of Bruce Lee. Now, Clones Of Bruce Lee is special. Why? Three Bruce Lees! Wow. Three fucking CLONES OF BRUCE LEE! Plus a lookalike from thailand, Bruce Thai! I had long ignored this movie, dismissing it as a crude enterprise in psychotronic bilge. Was I ever fucking wrong, yet oh so right.

Now this was presumably filmed in the late 70s and released in 1980 but it resembles a kung fu basher from the mid 70s. Clones to look at is all bare interior sets or makes use of rugged coastal areas or even some Thailand family's back garden for its locations. The fighting itself is kinda rough but is non-stop. All hench men utilise flailing basher moves whilst the leads have more real Lee pastiche with the odd late 70s shape work thrown in. There is a whole lot of fighting going on. In between the fighting it is really insane. Three Bruce Lees are produced from the corpse of Lee by some whacko in a white coat. They are all referred to as Bruce Lee but numbered. One clone, played by Dragon Lee, is sent on a mission to foil a gold smuggling outfit run of a a film studio. Here the film tries to break the fourth wall with real life Lee references but it has all the delicacy of a brick to the head.

The other two clones, one is Bruce Le and some other guy, are sent to Thailand were another mad boffin is making steel men to conquer the world with. These steel men are hilarious, they are just Thai stuntmen in underpants painted silver. When they get hit the soundtrack goes BONG! The way the clones figure out how to beat the steel men is fucking hilarious. HAS TO BE SEEN TO BE BELIEVED! Missions complete, the clones get back together only discover their inventor is a fuit loop and wants to use them for evil means.

The last fifteen minutes are the best bits of the film, it's all martial ats showdowns with mini bosses and laser traps and mind control and some random zombie guy who comes out of nowhere. I have no idea who he was or where he came from! One of the bosses is good ol' Bolo. He flexes his man boobs and throws Dragon Lee around. Woo! There isnt a lot to take apart with Clones Of Bruce Lee. Its enjoyable madness with cackling villains, mad scientists, furious fighting, crash zooms, bad dubbing, pointless random nudity, stolen music and four Bruce Lee lookalikes. Priceless entertainment.

The Night Comes For Us (2018)

An introduction is due. This movie epitomizes everything I love about a certain strain of cinema, what this resurrected blog is all about. Bare knuckle, in your face asian genre cinema. The no holds barred, what the fuck Hong Kong or wherever experience! I will hold no candle to politically correct nonsense, I will cover movies that contain dubious comments and acts that may offend. Panty-Hose Hero is a classic in my house but so is Beautiful Boxer from 2004. Expect yakuza, triad, Korean melodrama and kung fu. I will have a special emphasis on the forgotten and the unknown, who needs yet another review of Drunken Master? Anyway, on with the show...

Straight out of Indonesia, The Night Comes For Us is an ultra violent gangster fable in which see the return of Joe Taslim and Iko Uwais from in their 2011 breakout film The Raid, only this time the setting is gangsters, not cops, within the drug trade. Taslim is Ito, a mob enforcer, who gets cold feet when he is supposed to shoot a kid, but instead shoots his compatriots, flees with the kid and shit ensues. Uwais is a former pal who is sent Ito's way to sort shit out.

The Night Comes For Us is directed by Timo Tjahjanto, a director whose main background is horror. You can tell as the blood flows in this flick like milk from a dairy cow. Blood splats, bones snap, heads break. The initial fight strewn carnage scene is set in a butcher shop and fuck me if it's not something amazing. Hooks, slabs of meat, gristle flying, bullets, everything hits the fucking wall and slides down the screen. Utter madness. PUNCH. KICK. GOUGE. KILL. Believe me, people die in this, it makes the Raid movies seem like Carry On Screaming.

Yet beyond the carnage there is a flicker of melodrama, the kind that connects me to old school Hong Kong cop flicks like Tiger Cage. The kind that makes you root for a character, however slight their personality is portrayed. Like so many Hong Kong flicks or Japanese titles, it's not about the story but shit that goes down, and oh boy does shit go down. Brawls, martial arts, knifing,shootings, it's all in here. You even get a pair of weird female hench-women, the kind Cynthia Khan would have kicked the shit out of in 1991. Only this time it falls to Julie Estelle, who really needs to star in her own vehicle. The absolute pinnacle of modern action cinema in my opinion.

White Boy Bobby for Prime Minister!