Episode 128: Hellbent for Hong Kong: CAT III films with Ryan Smith- PART ONE

Hi, I'm S. A. Bradley and welcome to Hellbent for Horror, a podcast devoted to all things related to horror, where I remind you that you used to love horror movies and you secretly still do. One of the things I genuinely believe is that culture shapes our movies and movies shape our culture, and I'm not just talking about the art film. On the contrary, I believe that our horror and exploitation films are full of social commentary, just maybe not the kind that society wants us to promote.

I believe that our horror and exploitation films give us a painfully accurate look at who we are, what we love, what we hate, what we're afraid of, what our hang-ups are, and who we think our monsters are at any given moment. These movies lived and died on whether they can provoke people to spend their money on something shocking, so I say that if you really want to know what drove the culture crazy at any given time, look at the exploitation horror movies.

And you know how you know when movies are hitting too close to the bone? The powers of B start to ban the movies or create some new kind of regulation. In the UK we had the video Nasty List, which was an outright ban on certain movies. The United States explicit sex and violence got us the NC-17 rating, which restricted where the movies could be shown.

Those two acts of suppression are fairly well known, even to a casual movie fan, but there's another one that isn't as well known, and it should be. It was a new rating created for Hong Kong cinema in the late 80s, and it tried to tame some of the wildest, most unhinged, goryest, sexiest, weirdest, and unpredictable errors in cinema history. Category 3 films. They were known as Cat 3.

They showed us things we never expected or imagined we could ever see, and the new rating had an effect nobody expected or imagined. Instead of killing business, the rating system created a thriving industry. My guest today to talk about the Cat 3 universe is Ryan Smith. Ryan works at the legendary Dream Haven books and comics in downtown Minneapolis, and he is one of the most knowledgeable people on this subject.

He is also one of the most passionate and generous fans I've ever met, someone who really wants everyone to experience these films. Ryan, thanks so much for talking with me. Hey, thanks for having me out. I really appreciate this. When I first met you, it was obvious that this was a person who had a fascination with what we're going to talk about, and also a lot of integrity. You really stood up for the movies and you were generous with your time on it.

There's a question I always ask people when they come on. What was your first kiss with horror? What was the first movie that just excited you, made you want to do this forever? I would say watching things on TV when I was a kid, when that was really the only way you could see some of the things. Probably the universal and hammer films is really things that I watched on TV that I really enjoyed.

I would say that without a doubt, the movie that changed me into a horror fan for life was The Howling in 1981. Nice. I saw the commercials on TV. I begged to go see it and was lucky enough to go check that movie out and it really just changed everything. It's one of the great ones. There was a little bit of crazy special effects before that, but once we get to the Howling and American Werewolf in London and the Thing, everything kind of takes off.

That's another place where when the effects started to get a little bit too much, that people started pushing back in the higher ranks. They were essentially saying that movies like The Thing were kind of porn. It's interesting to see where we're going to talk about today, cap 3, how instead of it being a negative, like John Carpenter's The Thing kind of disappears overnight. In this case, things really heat up for it.

You're a fan of all kinds of horror, action, exploitation, but you are wonderfully obsessed with the Cat 3 films. What is it about Cat 3 that keeps you so into it? I guess I've always been trying to search for that next thing. Even back then, I would grew up in a tiny town. Even in the tiny town of 300 and some people, we had two places we could rent movies. I was trying to find anything that was extreme. The Fulcis zombie, we were going to eat you. That was one of the first rents.

That was like, okay, that's easy. I'm getting that. But it wasn't until, really, I moved down here to the Twin Cities where I started to really search for these things and happened to meet a fellow at a video store called Discount Video. It was a great store. There was a guy that worked there who was also one of the early players in the comic book scene here in the Twin Cities in the early 70s. His name was Bob Selvig. He really was kind of a mentor to me, not just me, but a lot of people.

He helped me work my way through the Italian stuff. At the time, I was super obsessed with the Japanese stuff. He helped me go through that. I felt like I was getting to the end of that. He's like, well, you haven't watched this Chinese films yet. He knew everything already before the books. There were some fanzines and things like that. But this guy knew everything already. I still can't believe he knew all this. He was so far ahead of the game, he really helped me.

Once I got on to the Chinese films, I became obsessed and luckily was able to be in a metro area that was big enough. We had lots of Asian video stores. We don't have a centralized Chinatown or anything here. They were kind of spread out all over the cities, but there was plenty to go through and dig through. I went through hundreds of VCDs, VHS tapes, laser discs, and that kept going. Once I started working at DreamHaven 95, maybe a year or two later, we ended up getting a Tyson account.

That just fueled the fire even more because I could buy the tapes easily. I would get the new catalogs. What was Tyson, by the way, for those that don't know? That was one of the big video marketing companies. They were one of the big players in the US here for VHS tapes and laser discs. That was an amazing experience to be able to communicate with them back then personally, really. We would call there.

There literally was Frank Shang entering the phone and he would take our orders and he sent some catalogs that were just amazing. That's so crazy when you think about that time period when it's just like, everything was a much more analog. You didn't have as much in the way of ordering like you do with Amazon at these points. You literally had to talk to somebody there. I'm laughing about you saying that you had all these different stores for us here in the Bay Area.

What I had to do is I drove about 20 miles down to San Jose. That was really my connection for laser discs. They had all the crazy laser discs there. I had Hannibal Farochs and Kat and the brain. I walked in and I'm going, oh my God, these are on laser discs. I was a huge laser disc junkie at that point. I just needed to get everything that there was.

One of the movies that we're going to talk about today was one of the laser discs that I brought home and it was kind of my introduction to what I would consider Kat 3. It was an experience to fall into that. One of the things I did want to say real quick before we go any further for the audience, we are going to be, there's a public service. There's going to be a couple of public services here because of the nature of these movies.

We're going to be looking at films that they don't just touch on taboos and subjects. These were our reveled in. We are going to dance in the problematic today and they were problematic when they first came out and they're problematic now. We're going to discuss these movies within the context of their audaciousness. I'm going to look at why this group of filmmakers decided to break these taboos at that time because there is something about context.

There's a difference between just having things be weird and obscene. Then there's also the idea of understanding the context of the times of what's going on there. So we're going to call stuff out when it's super problematic, but we're still going to appreciate the punk rock attitude of defiance of a huge culture change that was coming in the form of China. We also are going to have to have spoiler alerts, folks.

One of the main reasons the cat 3 fascinates us is because of how out there and extreme they can get. That means sometimes there's no way to discuss the movie without revealing some of the more insane stuff. We're going to try our best to tell you about this upcoming, any upcoming spoilers. We're going to try and tell you about those upcoming spoilers before we get there.

Of course, I'm hoping as well, Ryan, the fount of knowledge that he is, is going to let us know where some of these movies might be available so you can get a chance to see them. Ryan, the list that we have right now are all of these movies available in some form? Yes, for the most part, a lot of these have seen new releases, but there are a few on the list that the best versions of them are still Laserdisk, are a VHS in maybe one case.

For the most part, we're seeing re-releases of these films, but there's a few that I had to include on the list. It was hard to make to not include certain films on the list, but we had to have the heavy hitters. I tried to include a few other things in there that might be of interest to people. Ryan is going to talk to us about a counterculture essentially of movies that has quite a few titles behind it, but we're going to be giving you a primer.

Hopefully, if we prime the pump with these movies, these are like the heavy hitters, these are the must-sees. This will get you to want to run down and do that rabbit hole search to find these other movies. And there's also someone in the United States that if you get in touch with them, they may be able to press you and push you in the right direction. He got me going in the right direction. So we want to see what we've never seen before. What was the first cat three movie that hooked you?

What was the scene that set the stage that you said, oh, I got to have more of this? Well, it was that same friend I was talking about Bob and he, one of the times I went into discount video, he came running over and was like, you got to see this new category three film. He was like, what? The first time I heard the term spoken aloud, it was the untold story. I'm trying to remember if that was before, I think they did have the VHS tape there.

Well, anyway, I got a copy of that and took it home and my wife and I watched it. It was unbelievable. I don't know if I'd seen anything quite like that up to that point. There's the scene at the end with the family and that was the scene that I was just like, I don't know if we would see a scene like that here that anybody would have the balls to show that here in the US because it's, oh my God, it's a crazy thing.

Yeah. One of the things that I think is a great surprise that people will have if they're watching these movies is we're kind of conditioned to have movies that feel as if they're going to be a little bit transgressive. They're going to push you towards a hint and flirt that they're going to go somewhere and you're like, oh God, they're not going to do that. And you're kind of sure they're not and most of the time they don't. The thing on cat three is they're not going to hit the brakes.

These movies are just going to continue to barrel right through. And you know, it interests me that in the 80s, we had different responses across the world to extreme cinema. I mentioned before, we had 72 movies on the original video Nassie's Listen England. The United States were created at NC17 because of Henry and June, an art film. We also had warning labels on music CDs. And in Hong Kong in 1988, they created a cat three designation for movies.

Now interestingly, in Western cultures, these new labels are used as punishment, right? Bands people from being able to be seen at all. It keeps people from being able to book, keeps people from making money. But Hong Kong, the audiences in the film industry turned it into a hit subgenre. So what is it about the culture of Hong Kong in your opinion that is or their film industry? That made them react differently to the increase in transgressive cinema.

What made them go, yeah, we want more of the more? I think that there was a built-in audience for this sort of thing because over the years, there had been at least a couple sort of waves of these types of films before there was a rating system. We would have seen something like that in the 70s and probably in the 60s too, or Shabra Sanders was definitely a part of a couple of these. There's this really good book that came out quite a few years ago called Fear with Frontiers.

And it's basically World Horror Cinema is the theme of the book. And there's a film historian, there's a couple quotes I would like to say from a couple different books. There was a film historian named David Bourdwell and he says that the introduction of the rating system had the effect of creating a new safety zone hospitable to exploitation items. And that sums it up pretty well where they really just went hog wild with it.

And a lot of these films were successful in the box office as well, right? Long-sides like the bigger budgeted action films and things like that. So I find that really interesting that these films were good box office too. Yeah, and then there's a French category three book. It was very difficult to get a hold of. It took me a while to find one. And now we're lucky where we can look at a printed page with our phone and translate it basically on the spot. So I can finally read this book.

The guy's name I hope I'm pronouncing this. Julian Sevill I think. And he's got an interesting quote in there at the beginning of the book that says, category three is the final point of resistance of a cinema and a people confronted with more than uncertain future. The angry expression of a population incapable of controlling its future. A violent cry of despair coupled with a desperate attempt to save the beautiful life before a dark future.

Which basically is in reference to the coming handover in 97. So that I would say in some cases, that's another reason why we saw so much of this cinema as they were trying to do this while they could essentially. Yeah. And probably feeling the anxiety of it. So the idea was that Britain was handing Hong Kong over to China, returning Hong Kong to China in 1997. And it's interesting. You mentioned a few things.

Of course, in case people thought that cat three was just a type of movie, it really is a rating. But it's a short cut way to talk about extreme cinema that comes out in Hong Kong. So we call it cat three. They didn't know they were inventing cat three. They just happen to suddenly have all of these movies come out that were perfectly suited as that first quote said to exploitation films and they found a happy place to go.

They also mentioned a name that many people know if they know Hong Kong cinema, the Shah brothers. But we usually know them for the sword and sorcery kind of movies that they were pretty big on. But can you tell a little bit about what the Shah brothers brought to Hong Kong cinema and why their work was so important to where we end up with cat three? I think one of the things is the long staying power of the Shah brothers.

Of course, they quit doing these films in like, oh, maybe 85 or 86, they switched completely over to TV, but they had a long run of being the number one studio. And there was over a thousand films. A lot of the earlier stuff would be dramas, comedies, those kinds of things. But like you were saying before, the 60s and 70s is when we started to see them doing the Wushua films and the Kung Fu films that most people I think that have heard of Shah brothers would associate with the studio.

But I mean, they literally touched every genre that you could. And like I said before, they were involved in a couple of different waves of these sort of exploitation, erotic sort of films. There was a quote by a run run shot. And he said, when the markets not doing well, it's time to make erotic films. In 88, I feel that at least from what I've read that the market was sort of soft around that time. And this sort of kick started it again.

And it was a really wild run of Hong Kong cinema, not just category three stuff, but all the other action films, comedy stuff that was coming out at the time. It's just, it's really an amazing time in that country's history for cinema. What was the movie that the Shah brothers put out that had all the snakes, when they threw people in pits of snakes and stuff and they were really snakes? Killer snakes. Of course.

Yeah. I mean, they, before there was category three, I mean, a lot of these probably would be retroactively rated category three, but just as an example, you know, they were doing things like black magic, you know, black magic two, seating of a ghost, those all three black magic films. The bamboo house of dolls that you mentioned killer snakes, lassoles, um, spirit of the race, curse of evil, killers on wheels.

I mean, there was a couple really good directors that kind of worked this field, especially like Kwai Chi Heng and Ho Meng Huah. They were like, I would say those were the two I would consider the best of the horror exploitation directors in the Shah brothers stable. Um, I would also mention because of the category three films that are inspired by the true crime, you know, real life headlines. And this is a one that is sadly we have not seen good releases of is the five film criminals series.

Hmm. You know, really legitimately, I've only think they've had a VCD release, which isn't that great. Other than that, the best way to see him is on the Zai Eagle, Shah box from Malaysia, the hard drive that's got all on that's the best way to see them. But I find those ones interesting too, just because they were kind of predecessors to the, because they were so anthologies, but they were supposedly ripped right from the headlines.

So kind of a precursor to these, the ones we're going to get into here soon. That's pretty hilarious because I ripped from the headlines. I think when I was doing some research on this and looking at different documentaries and stuff, they were talking about how there were like two active serial killers in Hong Kong history in the time period that there were a cat three and before that. And there were several movies made out of those two and kind of changing them around a little bit.

But there's a lot of stuff that feels like they're following Western tropes, but they're doing them completely differently, right? Because there's a lot of crime movies. There's a lot of detective movies like it starts as a police procedural in a way and then it gets absolutely crazy with people on fire and all this madness that you'd never see and a dark ending, which I think is another thing that we see a lot. Now are there like visual tropes that define cat three?

You know, like if you look at Jalow, you have the black gloves and the JNB. And do you see anything that repeats in cat three movies? Oh, without a doubt. You've got the, I would say overcrowded living, low income housing, shady and or brutal police tactics, bumbling keystone cops, triad behavior, language, science, rituals, really off color attitudes and jokes towards homosexuality and AIDS. Oh, God. Crazy juxtaposition of extremely 16s, and then followed by slapstick comedy scenes.

That's one of the craziest parts of this. There were a couple of moments where I had that feeling of like somebody just threw a drink in my face. I almost turned into almost like a musical comedy at some point. It's absolutely, absolutely insane. Oh, yeah. One other one I would like to mention is government criticism that is set outside of China, Taiwan, Macau. Yeah. So it's okay to criticize if it's not actually China. Yeah, they do the old Shakespeare thing.

That's one of the things that when we are learning Shakespeare in college, the teacher said, have you ever noticed, you know, all these things are happening in Scotland, they're in Rome and all this stuff. He's really criticizing the king, but you'll get your head cut off, you go and say criticize the king. So we're going to get into the movies now. And you mentioned 1988. And that's what I hear most people that are scholars of this say is when when cat three officially starts.

Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to also talk a little bit about reviews. I'm going to read some reviews from a book that you recommended to me, which is the new essential guide to Hong Kong movies by Rick Baker and Ken Miller. And I recommend that to anybody who's listening who wants to get a little bit more about this, but they are hilarious at times.

And so I'm going to introduce the first movie, which I believe most people consider the first cat three film men behind the sun from 1988 director T.F. Moo and producer Fushi. I believe I hope I didn't tear that completely apart. But it stars Wang Gang. I'm going to kill all of these Wu Da Yu and Wang Run Shen. And here's the review of this. This bio movie tells the story of a Japanese biological experiment camp that was an occupied China at the end of World War II.

A group of boys are sent to camp to learn how the Chinese are nothing but fodder for experiments for the Japanese. This film is grim, serious, well made and contains some sickeningly real effects. Some of them are a little bit too harrowing dimension here. Well, we'll try and get around that and see if far too convincing to be done purely on special effects. This is only for the strongest stomach and how they love how they end it. If you're prone to spew, don't view.

And so what was your experience with men behind the sun? Well, I was able to rent the VHS tape before I got my own hard copy of that VHS tape. And I'd heard through the grapevine a little bit about it, but it's a really powerful thing. It really took me by surprise because it felt very Mando-like, especially the Jakob Petty and Prosper, Italian Mando films. I really got that feeling of it. It's a tough thing to watch. There's some really brutal stuff about it.

Yeah, it's really an interesting movie because it takes itself as a historical document, right? And that's definitely where it reminds me a little bit of the early Mando's. So it shows itself almost like an educational video at certain points of all the atrocities that can happen to a body. But it's also got this story behind it where we're seeing these young Japanese recruits come into this, I guess you can call it a laboratory, but it's really a prison. And they're experimenting on everybody.

And they call the Chinese Maruta. And the Maruta are less than human, so they can do whatever they want to. But these kids are our eyes. And T.F. Mow really messes with us because he gives us a few moments of hope, which he then tears apart because we have these side characters that we start to really care about. And it is interesting because the movie itself is really a propaganda film. I mean, it's a movie that was made not in Hong Kong. It's actually a Chinese film, correct?

Yeah. He went, he researched this for a long time and was working on this for a long time. And he got approval from the Chinese government. And I don't know if it was just one investor or multiple investors, but it was mainland Chinese invested. So definitely technically not a Hong Kong film. But it starts all of this, right? They saw this and they went, holy God, we need to go already before someone gets into trouble.

I believe it was Herman Yao interview that I read where he said that this rating system was being talked about as early as 85, I say. So I think they were working on it already. But I mean, I don't know if you could have picked a better Chinese film to be the first does it get it the first? Oh my God. It really is strong medicine. I mean, I've watched the Mondo films and the faces, death and all that stuff.

And there are moments in here that kind of rival that that make me question what I'm looking at. And this was the movie that I got introduced to cat three unwittingly. I went down to that laser displace that I talked about and I saw the cover and I'm like, Oh man, this looks amazing. And by the end of it, I'm like, Oh, is that legal? Are they okay for them to have that on the shelves? I mean, that kind of felt like it was really, really disturbing.

If I remember correctly, there's a lot of stuff that's kind of problematic about this movie in how it was made. Like I think they used actual cadavers at certain points, didn't they? You know, that is a really good question and I wish I could give you a definitive answer. You know, I don't mood doesn't seem to say, Oh, yeah, those are corpses. But man, they certainly look like it, don't they?

Yeah, I mean, there were a couple interviews where depending upon who you're talking to, it sounds like I forget who it was. It was the art director or something where he was asked to go to the more. And he said, you know, we needed to find a young girl. And he said, the horror was the guy said, Oh, yeah, go through that door. And there's like all these bodies. And they're just like, yeah, if you need to use something like that.

So it makes me go holy shit that some of these people weren't method acting. Like there's a character in there that is working the the furnace. He's like burning the bodies. And he's drunk all the time. And I was like, man, if I was on a movie set where I'm not sure if that's a prop or that's real, I think I might be drinking a lot too. Because there's some stuff.

I mean, the thing that if anybody knows this movie at all, they usually talk about the arms, the woman who has her arms slowly frozen solid out in the air out in the winter. And they're pouring water on her and all this stuff. And then they just take like a stick tour and just tear the flesh right off. And that looks like super real because it doesn't look good, right? It doesn't look like a major special effect. It looks like something real.

Well, and yeah, and that's and that's after they basically took her baby from her and killed the baby and she lost her mind. And then they decided to freeze her arms. It was just, yeah, that seems really wild. I think when I first sat where I was just like, holy crap, was the scene of the guy in the pressure chamber, which really looks realistic. Now they say that that is coming up from the floor. Yeah. But I don't know. Yeah, I have no idea.

But I would love to believe in a wonderful world of rainbows is that that is something like a fake intestine coming up from the floor between these guys legs. But I don't know. I don't know. It's hard to say what I will say is they did such an amazing job because it's like idiosyncratic. It's not what you would normally think of. There's not like great closeups or anything like that. It's like a one shot deal and it's messy and weird and all that stuff.

I mean, there's stuff to shock you all the way through and it's not just visual shocks. The atrocities are also behaviors. We get to see the madness of the guy who's running this laboratory and he's like wanting to spread disease through these weird ceramic plates. He's throwing them in the air and the dust is blowing over all of his soldiers and stuff. You feel this idea that they're spinning out of control.

It's like some of the movies that I saw for like Nazi exploitation, some of the better ones where they're looking at the decadence that's happening as part of the psychosis of the war. Like they know they're losing the war, right? By the time they're doing this stuff, they realize things aren't going well. And so they start just creating atrocities.

Is that seen in like Schindler's list where there's all the bodies on fire and the guy's just shooting the German soldier, the shooting his Mauser into the pile and screaming? Like he's doing nothing but he's just so insane from the madness of war and the fact that there's defeat. And I really feel that there's that kind of intensity in men behind the sun. And it's interesting too that how much do you know about what TF Moo was all about? He was like he wanted to be a politician.

You know, he started working for Shobrothers back in the day and sort of had a controversy at Shobrothers too. It was one of those films that I mentioned earlier, Lost Souls. It's a very political type film. He was kind of sneaky. He basically knew that if he didn't have a script that nobody would come check the script and he basically just told the woman who was overseeing it that I know everything I'm just going to keep going. So they had no script to check.

Finally, I think it was Run Run Shaw. He wanted to see the movie. So he watched it and literally went to the woman and said, how could you let him make this movie? So the sky was no stranger to like controversy. He didn't do much else for them. After that, he went and did other films. I think probably after that probably started working on men behind the sun. Honestly. Yeah, he's a shockmeister. I mean, it's funny because he had all these aspirations and it is a propaganda film.

And the only one if I remember correctly, it's the only one that was never edited by the Chinese government. They're like, oh, no, that's fine. Everything that's in there is perfectly good. Yup, because it's the Japanese doing it. So they showed it fully uncut. And that's one of the reasons that I'm not so sure about the cadaver thing, not to cause it's a controversy for anybody else. But I mean, he also said that they didn't kill the cat. And they throw a cat into a pile of rats.

And he says, all we put strawberry jam on it and they're just licking the strawberry jam off. And I'm like, how stupid do you think I am? Well, and then he said that they gave the cat two fishes a treat after it was done. And I just said, I honestly just don't believe him. Yeah. It's hard to believe a guy.

Because that is, I mean, anybody that has a problem with the Italian cannibal movies, for the animal violence, things like that, they're going to have a major problem with that scene with the rats and the cat. So we're going to move on to the next movie, another heavy hitter. You got all the great ones here. And we're going to go to 1993. And it's a director that we're going to hear about again and again, one of the legends, Herman Yao is directing this one. It's the untold story.

Now before we go too deep into the untold story, I just wanted to talk about, there's two directors we're going to hear over and over again in this. Herman Yao and bloody Billy Tang. And they're both highly regarded in the cat three system. But another director that was in there was like John Wu, I think bullet in the head was considered a cat three film. But he got out and I guess he found respectability. But what was the careers of Herman Yao and Billy Tang like before they did cat three?

Was that the thing that really just catapulted them? Herman certainly, and Billy, this certain extent as well, I would say. I mean, that seems to be what they're known for. Even though there's more to them than just those category three films, it certainly gave them a reputation. That's for sure. But Herman Yao, he studied at Hong Kong Baptist University. He started as a cameraman and 87, he directed his first film, Adrama called No Regret. And then he did some comedy and action films.

Full Me in 1991, Best of the Best, 92, No More Love, No More Death in 93. And then after that is when he did the Untold Story. Yeah. And the Untold Story is one of those movies that if anybody's ever slightly interested, this is where I tend to get them to go because they can hang with it for a while. And then at a certain point, things start getting a little bit crazy. But this is Anthony Wong stars in this Danny Lee, Emily Kwan. These are names that we're going to hear again and again.

It's kind of reminiscent of early studio system stuff where you would have a director who just had a crowd of guys and women that he would work with again and again because they just played off of each other really well. So the Untold Story is also known as the Eight Immortals Restaurant. This is one of the most notorious ones. And I mean, it starts with a bang, right? Well, actually, it starts with a beating that then has a man being set on fire. And that's before the opening credits end.

So you want to talk a little bit about this one? Yeah. So this is actually Dr. Lam came maybe like five or six months before this. But those were the two films. This Dr. Lam and Untold Story were the two films that sort of kick started the based on a real case sort of category three film. And they're kind of the templates for these types of films where it's part really nasty, horror, part police procedural and part comedy. The real sort of genre blenders.

I mean, I think people from the outside may think, oh my God, it's just like, I can't watch all these horror films. But there's so much more to these films than just those horrific scenes, I would say. Oh my God. And this is where I was introduced to the kind of contempt. I mean, there's a great social commentary and satire going on in this because the police are just horrible. I mean, they're just, they're seemingly not very good at their job.

The police chief has a prostitute on and sometimes an American prostitute on his arm. Usually Tommy walks into the station. They all slough all their work off on somebody else and they kind of stumble upon an answer. And then when they do have to try and get some kind of response from the bad guy, they beat the living crap out of them in such a way. So explicitly and for such a long period of time that you're kind of like on who am I supposed to even root for here? Yeah. It's something else.

One of the things I'd like to point out because you mentioned Danny Lee coming in with the prostitutes on his arm. I can't prove this story, but back in the day, there was a rumor that about Danny Lee's sexuality. And rumor has it that he insisted that Angle be played up with him with all these women on each arm in every scene. I don't know if that's true or not, but I always found that really interesting whenever I see those scenes, if he really did set that up like that.

Herman Yao, he went to Macow to research this story. He went to the prison and said, oh, it was really easy. If you have money to bribe the guards, so he was able to talk to somebody who was a roommate of this killer. And this was after the guy had suicide. And so he never actually talked to him. So he did go down there to research this. I find that really interesting that he went the extra mile to go down there and check it out.

Apparently, the way that we're seeing the police portrayed in this, Danny Lee, I guess, had and does have lots of friends in the police in Hong Kong. And he did not like to portray the police in a negative fashion. So Herman basically had to convince him, oh, these are Macow. This is Macow. Macow police. And Danny was like, OK, that's OK. Yeah, right. So yeah, I mean, this story takes place in Macow, but it starts. Does it start in mainland China?

Yeah, I think it's, yeah, I want to say Hong Kong. OK, that you're saying that I'm blanking. Yeah, I'm not sure either. I can't remember. We follow criminal and he's based on a real life person, as you've mentioned. And he ends up getting into a fight over money and gambling as tends to happen in these movies. And he beats the guy that he's having a beef with to death, sets him on fire, essentially, and then leaves and goes to Macow. And he's now owning a restaurant.

He's like a prior restaurant. And he serves all this wonderful food, which we'll talk about. Barbecue pork and stuff a little bit later. And he claims to have bought this property from the family that was involved. It was like a family restaurant. And nobody knows where that family went. They left to go to the mainland or something like that. He has some really bad answer for it. And the movie is essentially how this facade slowly starts to break apart.

And the people who are stupid enough to cross this guy and notice that he cheats, you know, something as simple as, hey, he cheats at Mojong. He can get someone turned into a fucking dumpling. That's how this movie goes. So you want to talk a little bit about that? He is such a grim character. Yeah. You know, he's so sensitive to any sort of criticism, you know, in this film. And it seems like almost anything sets him off. And he is a real shit where he's, you know, he's cheating at Majesang.

But oh, don't you dare call him out for that. Yeah. And it's just wrong. And the owner of the restaurant ends up owing him all this money, but refuses to pay it. And that's what starts everything in motion. Yeah. Yeah. And that gets us to where, you know, obviously spoiler alert, you can take a moment to go watch the movie if you like. Dada, da, da, da. But there are some nasty stuff that happens to a lot of people who are key players and key parts of the plot to this movie.

I was really taken aback by the early on in the movie when you see him Anthony butchering an animal with the noises, the crunching and all that stuff. And you can see him butchering this pig. And then later on, as he's turning people into the Shasu Bao, the barbecue pork buns, it's the same thing. You're hearing the same noises, but it's a person this time. And I found that so disturbing, that sort of foreshadowing to something that was going to happen later.

And it starts as if it's going to be just this police procedural and they're going to take this guy in and all that. And you know, if you're watching most movies, the thing is the chase, right? It's the hunt that takes up most of the movie. Well, this they catch them reasonably soon in the movie. They just don't get a confession for a while. And then even if they get a confession, you think this movie is over. Oh, it's not over. There is prison life to be had.

And I think what was really amazing is how far this guy goes. So Anthony Wong does an amazing job in this as the killer, as the psychopath in this movie. At first, it seems like, okay, I see where he's going. It's going to be a little bit one note and stuff. He actually keeps this thing afloat by changing the intensity a ton of times. He makes me almost feel bad for the guy at certain points.

And then as soon as I think I think something of this guy does something terrible, but it's a dynamic performance. It is. I mean, it's still amazing to me that they gave him the best actor in 1993 for this film. And it's just something, like I said before, it's just something we wouldn't see here. We would see somebody getting an award for playing a role like this. I think he's just as stunned as we are. I think he was surprised. It's got a really strong cast anyway.

The cast of police are really good. Danny Lee, the muscle bound guy, Eric Kai Kafat is really good, Emily Kwan, the lone female in the group who has to endure her coworkers through the whole film. And then Lam King Kong, which is really fun to say. And you're going to see some of these people in a bunch of these category three films multiple times. And I think they, some of them play the same character in different movies.

I won't say that it's an actual name character, but they play like Danny Lee. He's like the chief inspector, like a couple of the movies. And he does a manful job in doing that. But it's also kind of funny. I think the thing that really hit me in this was, yeah, you know the bad guy is going to be violent. It's going to get grotesque. But you don't expect the police to be shown as they are. We wouldn't show the police here.

I mean, there was like a big shock back in 71 when the French connection showed police like they were and colors and stuff like that. There's every so often a movie that shows a police in a dark light that goes pretty far. But this is way beyond anything that I've seen. I mean, it's diabolical how dark they are. And there is no rest for the wicked for Anthony Wong in this movie. He gets once he's in custody. He gets beaten by the cops.

And then they put him in a cell block with a relative who is played by Xing Fui on. If you've not heard of him before, check out his his filmography. It's astonishing how many films the guy's in. He's really good. And he, they beat the crap out of him in the jail cell. So he is just relentlessly pounded during the, you know, the last third of this movie, I would say, until we finally get him to confess.

Oh my God. Yeah. I mean, this, this movie, the brutality of it's even it teaches you something. I now found out that stop internal bleeding. You can drink urine. Yeah. No, I had no idea that would work. Yup. You're in Kieres, inner injuries. Yeah. And I was like, oh, all right, we are in some deep, deep shit in this movie. So we're going to talk a little bit. You mentioned Dr. Lam earlier and we're going to get to that one, but we're going to go to 1993 Hermanyao again.

And this is taxi hunter, which is probably one of the big surprises for me. I did not expect this movie. And it's one of those that people who listen to my show hear me talk about a horror movie universe. And it's usually something like falling down and death wish and dirty Harry. You have to have a world where nothing works. And if everything is insane, if no system works, then the guy is justified to do whatever he's going to do.

And so taxi hunter follows that kind of wonderful tradition in revenge movies. So this is Anthony Wong one more time and a whole bunch of other folks that are in this as well. And he's kind of riding on the success of Untold Story, but he comes back in a completely different kind of role. So you want to talk about that a little bit? Yeah, that's what really surprised me back in the day when I picked it up because, you know, Hermanyao, Anthony Wong, category three, I wasn't sure.

You know, I kind of figured it would be along the same lines as Dr. Lam, Untold Story, but it's a much, much different film. This speaks to the, you know, the versatility of Anthony Wong, where this is a completely different role where you do have sympathy for his character. And he just happens to have extremely bad luck with taxi drivers. Everybody essentially Hong Kong has the triads and right beneath the triads are the taxi drivers is the most dangerous people that are in the city.

I don't know what they're supposed to stand for, but essentially in this movie, every taxi driver is mean, not only mean like brutal. And they, they like, it's like a crazy union or something where they refuse to do their work and they own the streets. And people are essentially begging to get rides. It's like, please, let me have a ride. And you have, it's interesting because Anthony Wong plays a real passive, passive guys, really kind of meek.

And he's an architect and these annoying taxi drivers, one finally screws up too much and starts this vigilantism against taxi drivers, not the kind of thing I would have expected. Yeah. But, you know, with a purpose, you know, he has to, right at the beginning of the movies, got the taxi driver that stops suddenly in front of him and he rear ends the guy and, you know, but the guy calls all of his taxi driver friends and they basically, hey, let's get the money out of this guy.

So they basically swindle him out of money and then drive off and it's done. And then we have the incident with his pregnant wife. And she's in gone into labor and the car is being repaired so he doesn't have a car. So he has to call a taxi driver and a taxi driver refuses to take them and unfortunately her dress sort of gets caught up in the back door of the taxi cab and it leads to her and the unborn child's death and, you know, he loses his mind after that.

But he's still, he will only mess with taxi drivers that are bad. He's kind of got like a screening process where he was. But then he wants to kill him all. But he certainly realizes he's hilarious actually because he's such a strangely self-absorbed character that he says he says things like, you're a really good whore to some woman who gives him a moment of kindness and with a taxi driver, he gets into a taxi and this is his screening thing.

He goes, take me to and I guess wherever it's supposed to be as far away and the guy goes, okay, starts driving and then he gets maybe a few blocks and goes, I've changed my mind. Take me to and you get the idea that's in the opposite direction and the guy's size and goes, all right, Jesus. He goes, you're going to do it? He's like, yeah, this is my job, man. I'm going to take you wherever you need to go and he goes, I don't need to go anywhere. You're a good taxi driver and he leaves.

It's like the guy has no idea that he's about to be killed and I think he got a gun from a gangster who's a friend of his. Is that what it was? I think so. It's very much in ways. It's very much like death wish. He's an architect who has his family destroyed and somebody gives him a gift as that's a gun and he goes on this thing. But this is played for like mad cap. There's humor in it and there's just crazy satire and there's wild stunts.

There's some crazy stunts that are going on in this movie. I love how bad these taxi drivers are at one point. I think it's his wife, right? His wife is starting to go into or she's really in labor and bleeding and he's like, get out of the car. You know, I'm not going to take you with all the bleeding and she's starting the screen and he goes, don't throw up and foul up my car. I'll make you lick my car clean. I'm like, wow. And here's where I know it's satire.

Like I don't know what the taxi drivers did. It's that caused this social commentary, but they're going at him hard. So one of them tries to rape a woman and Anthony Wong grabs a guy and he's ready to kill him. He goes, will you rape again? The guy looks up at him and goes, I don't know. It's hard to say. Oh, you got to go. Yeah, you got to go.

And in the end, I think there's a familial thing, something that you see at times in police procedures or thrillers where one of the family members is a police officer and he starts to realize, oh, no, someone that I know is probably going to be this killer. And at one point, he's confronted, we're in this huge stunt laden finale. And at one point, our main character goes, I only killed a few taxi drivers that had no professional ethics. Put this man in Congress. That's good.

Yeah. And if the blu-ray of this that was put out by, I think it was 88 films, the commentary on there is by Frank Scheng. And he talks about what Dix, the Hong Kong taxi drivers and has a story about it too. So if you pick up that release, definitely listen to that. Get a little insight on to maybe why they thought this of taxi drivers from Hong Kong. Thanks for saying where people can pick this up. By the way, we'll go back to the others as well.

For untold story, do you have a recommendation where people could find it? On Earth Films has a really good version out. Very nice. Good commentary, too, by Bruce Olichek and Art Edinger. Really good. And then men behind the sun just came out from Massacre, a blu-ray. There's a name from the past Massacre video. Wow, that's such a great thing to hear. You also mentioned 88 films and I think there's another one, Air 4444. Yep. So these are names you'll probably hear.

Anybody who's listening, you can jot those guys down. We'll be going back and forth with them often. So we're back in Herman Yao territory. These are the hits that keep on coming. We're going to have just as many for our next director as well. But we're going to stay with Herman with a movie that, okay, if you haven't been offended by anything that's been talked about yet. If it doesn't seem as if these movies have been too extreme yet, boy, we got a movie for you. This is a bolus syndrome.

Once again, Anthony Wong and several other amazing actors. Who else is in this that's in other films? Well, one of the people that I like so much that's in it is Lomang, who a lot of people would recognize from the Venom mob films, five deadly Venoms. I mean, he's still known as Golden Arms in Hong Kong to this day because he was in the kid with the Golden Arms. So he is tremendous in this really, really funny scenes that he does in this movie.

It's the fellow, the relative of the fellow in Untold Story that was beating Anthony Wong in prison, Xing Fuyang. We get to see him here at the beginning of the movie where Anthony, I guess sort of turns the tables from Untold Story role in this one. This is another one that don't go for popcorn. People go to the bathroom before the movie starts because you might miss at the very beginning of this movie is a scene.

I think a lot of these movies do this where they have a showstopper in the very beginning. Then there's some crazy stuff that's going on about midway. You have a, I can't believe this is happening moment. And then towards the end, you get another one of the holy shit. Here we go. We've gone out of our minds. So to talk about this one, I'm just going to go back to the essential Hong Kong guide one more time. How do they mention this movie?

Well, they go where to begin with this cat three sleaze fest. Well, let's start with the opening scene, which you would just mention, which Kai, our main character, is caught having sex with his boss's wife. He's beaten up by the angry husband and his goon is urinated on by the wife and his threatened with castration. Kai retaliates using pruning shears and a folding table to attack his abusers. And this is one of the goryous table deaths I've ever seen.

I don't know how he did it with this float folding table. And it's also the scene getting very bloody as he smashes his boss to a pulp and cuts out his wife's tongue. Just when you think this introductory scene can't get any nastier, Kai spots the young daughter cowering in a corner and pours gasoline on her. Fortunately for her, Kai has to escape the apartment before he can emulate her. That is the first two minutes, three minutes of this movie.

I was going to say about Herman Yao for this film in an interview. He said he wanted to create a world losing control. I feel that he really accomplished that. Oh my god, yeah. And I mean, losing control and losing hope. And I mean, this is one of those movies where you go, what will hold the fate of the world? How is the world going to stay together? Who do we have to hope is going to do the right thing? And it's like one of the biggest morons in history. That's who?

The guy who's in this, none too smart, over-sexed, kind of foul and spiteful in every possible way. And that's going to be our patient zero, folks. That just might take this world apart. So this guy kills his boss. It's another one of these movies where the guy flees, right? He goes, he has this thing, he gets caught. He runs off to Johannesburg. So instead of it being in Macau, we're now in Johannesburg. And things get weird. He's once again a cook.

He's like another motif is feeding people people. And it seems to be a big thing that happens. Here he's making hamburgers, right? He's making Johannes hamburgers or something you call them? Africa chasu bao. He calls them. And apparently according to Herman Yao, he said that the, that was almost a must to secure the investment for the film was to sort of follow up from the barbecue pork buns we had in the untold story with these Africa buns. Essentially.

That's got to be like, is that based on some urban legend or something? It's such a random thing, pork buns that pork buns are now like, does anybody even eat pork buns in Hong Kong? There's so many movies about people being ground into pork buns. I would, I would think that people still eat them. My wife is Chinese and we do have them with their family, but every time we do, it's like, I can't help but think. You never know what's in those books.

Right. I mean, I think an untold story, there's a moment where the, well, this would be a spoiler Lord, but one person, the police chief realize is about to eat some pork buns and he goes, no, I'm not going to eat those. You never know what's in there. He was absolutely correct about that one. So there's this, there's a lot of craziness in this. I mean, we're talking about something that sounds like a police procedural again. You've got this crime guy. They're trying to find out what's going on.

He seems to have murdered people. He's staying in a restaurant and he's hiding out there and he's still killing people, but it's called Ebola syndrome. So suddenly there's going to be some Ebola in this. You want to talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I mean, it was sort of people were talking about that because we had heard of these Ebola outbreaks. So they, I think they kind of capitalized and used it for this film.

The scenes where they go out into the field to get basically cheap pork because they're having issues buying the pork where they go out into the villages. One thing I would like to say is before I get into that would be that Herman Yau said that he wanted to have class resentment in both untold story and Ebola syndrome. And we see that as themes throughout both of these movies. And this one, especially where Chinese aren't getting along with the Africans in the movie.

The white people don't like the Chinese people in this movie. The Chinese people or Taiwanese people don't like black people. And it's, it's really crazy like that. But that scene where we go out there and see them contract this virus is unbelievable to me. You know, I always found this movie so blackly humorous. Oh, God, yeah. But you know, it's one of those things where Herman Yau says any humor would have been unintentional and I don't know how that's possible.

I honestly, I totally agree with you. I was just like, how is that? I don't know. I mean, one of the characters has sex with a steak, right? And then feeds it to somebody. Oh, my God. And the way that this all starts, well, not how it all starts, but you mentioned they go out to this tribe to get cheap meat. And they're having an Ebola outbreak there. And they're like doing, I guess, some kind of rituals around that. And they're like spraying blood of chickens all over each other.

And it's getting on our main characters and they're freaking out. But they go to get the meat and there's like dead bodies on the porch. And the guy goes up to the guy on the porch and says, where's the meat? And he goes, oh, he points like over the corpses. Like underneath a blanket next to the corpses is where all the steaks are. They've come for the cheap beef. And they're like, oh, trying to grab it. How can that not be considered funny? I don't know. I have no idea.

Another thing I'd like to point out about this movie is Sam Deegan, who I don't know at all, but she does really good work behind the scenes on these films. And she does the commentary for the vinegar syndrome for a 4K of Ebola, which is just astonishing to me that we're at this point in history. We're seeing 4Ks of these things. But one of the things she said about this movie that I really liked her description of it. It fits it to a tee.

And it's something that I never thought of as she called this a wet movie. Oh my God. And if there's a movie that is better description for a wet movie than Ebola syndrome, because we're seeing every form of bodily fluid in this film. It's it's it's wetter than dead alive. It's wetter than brain dead. And I thought that that was the wettest movie I ever saw. But that's that's only the last 30 minutes. This movie is like every but and and they play with it so well, right?

Not only do they have them like picking his nose and you know, there's like you said every bodily fluid is floating around. At one point they have like an animated mouth. And he's like talking to people. So our main character, no stunner here. It's called Ebola syndrome folks. He got he gets Ebola. How he gets it. I'll let you watch that. I will say it may trigger some of you. But it is astonishingly disgusting and funny at the same time. They play this for some of the darkest comedy possible.

But anyway, they have this character who has contracted Ebola walking around and you see from inside of his mouth like the cameras in the back of his head. And you just see all these little microbes and spores like floating and shooting out into people's faces and up their noses. And you're like ready to get and just looking at that. It's like outbreak, some of those scenes in there.

And Anthony, oh my God. I mean, you know, his character kind of reminds me of Joe Spinell and maniac where I'm just like, you need a shower, bro. Oh man. He is so greasy in this movie. I just, I can't believe it. He looks sickly and it's funny because they play with the idea of Ebola, like our real fears of it. And they talk about some of the scientific sides of it. Like some people can become supercarries. It doesn't kill them. They just have a really, really, really bad reaction.

They get the chills and everything. But then they even out. And now they can spread it to anybody. And this is where it becomes like a harm movie. We see all these people eating at his place. We see all these little moments where he touches people or he has sex with people. He like steals some money and he's like, this is how dumb this guy is. He's dying, right? He hasn't go to a hospital or anything.

He just goes like his version of Vegas and screws a bunch of hookers in this big hotel in the penthouse. And we see one after another, these people falling in the streets, wriggling, spitting up blood, you know, dying right there. And so we're laughing. And then there's these scenes where it's like holy shit. We're watching people dying in the streets of Ebola. How are we, how are we supposed to react to this?

I remember when I first got this movie, we're getting the Tyson catalogs and you know, the title Ebola, how are we going to pass that up? Category three. And I was just like, we ordered it and watched it. And I'm still amazed by this movie to this day. I've seen it so many times. And I've probably watched it three times since I got this 4K. It just looks so stink and good. I can't stop myself. And I wanted to rewatch it again before we did this podcast too. It was a hell of a watch. I loved it.

But it is not for everybody to say the least because he's a foul, foul character in many different ways. He's unsympathetic. I think it kind of, and you mentioned the class warfare, which is interesting. That also plays into the story. So it's not just like, oh, let's make fun of racism. There's a moment where it could have stopped earlier, like they could have figured out that it was Ebola earlier. But people who were in charge didn't watch white people news.

If they watched white people news, they had gotten the stuff that they were watching the wrong news at the time. And I think in a way, it kind of feels like a monster movie in the end. Like it's the villagers chasing the monster. He's running around with a girl that he's, oh, man, the girl. I just remember what happens to the girl. So yeah, he has a hostage and he's running.

And it's like the end of so many monster movies where the angry villagers are coming after him with a torch and he's running up into the castle. And it's a hell of a crazy movie. He revels in it too, especially once he finds out, I mean, he's already horrible. But once he finds out that he's a carrier and he's got Ebola, I mean, he's spitting the people. He slashes his own arm so he can start spitting blood at people. And he's just screaming Ebola running around. You know, stay away.

And he just, he won't die. You know, at the end of that movie, it just that scene kind of goes on for a while where they're chasing him down. What a thing to see. Yeah. Another great movie. I was glad that we put that one on the list. And that is a little bit of a taste of Herman Yow folks. Those movies right there are a pretty good indication of the kind of crazy that you're going to get into. Now we've talked about crazy, Herman Yow crazy.

Now we're about to go into some bloody Billy Tang crazy. And I think this was mentioned as being directed by both Billy Tang and actor Danny Lee. But I'm not sure if that's true. Dr. Lam from 1992. Well, in an interview with Billy Tang, Billy claims that because he was so new, Danny thought he should put his name on it as well. But Billy swears that he directed this not and not Danny Lee in any way. He was, he was working on a few films sort of like this earlier on in his career too.

It's like Billy co-directed or assistant directed vengeance his mind from 88, which is like a rape revenge film. And then he went and did like Ninja evil strike in 89. And his first like directorial film was Dragon fight, which actually has jet Lee in it. So that I find that interesting too. And he worked with jet early on. And he states that he worked as an assistant director for four years and in six years as a TV director before he finally started getting some of these solo directorial gigs.

So was this kind of his coming out, Dr. Lam? Oh, I would say so definitely. This is a huge coming out. And we've got a couple of names that we're going to see a couple, a couple of actors coming in that we're going to see in different movies. This is Danny Lee as mentioned before, but Simon Yam and Ket Chang. And those two, I think we can talk about a little bit. So Simon Yam is going to play our protagonist here. Yeah. And he, this is a really over the top performance by Simon.

And someone that I had just seen earlier and fell in love with his acting when I saw him in bulletin head. As he is so charismatic, I just was just like, oh, wow, this guy is really something else. And this movie where he plays this, it's based on a really famous, maybe the most famous Hong Kong serial killer, Lam Gorwan. Some people's always overacting, but oh my God, he needed to do that for this film because the guy legit was that shit crazy like that from everything that I've read.

So what you had mentioned that there are recurring themes. And this is one that has a couple that you mentioned before, which is overcrowding the idea that people are living on top of each other, police corruption brutality and a weird sense of humor mixed with the grotesque. And this one really goes there. Oh, without a doubt. So I'm seeing another just like amazing cast in this movie too.

You know, you got Lam King Kong, Emily Kwan, who we remember and Danny Lee that we also signed on told story. So here's a this predated on told story by maybe five or six months. So it did kind of come out just a little bit sooner, but it's a really, really dark movie. I think it's really well shot. I love the soundtrack to this film too. And it's pretty close to the real case. That completely blows me away because the so you can look this case up without without any issues.

So we're not saying anything. And really the essence of the movie is what you know from if you read the article, but that's not the extent to the movie. So it's based on a Hong Kong taxi driver who when he was working at nights, he would cruise the streets and he'd find young girls, not everybody that got into his cab was going to have an issue. But he like have notes on his driving log. And every swaff and he would decide to kill a girl. He'd murder him.

He'd take photographs of their mutilated bodies. He'd do crazy things like put him on like strings and moving around and unrope and even weirder he's doing this stuff in an overcrowded house where he has like three people living in his bedroom, but they all work different shifts. So he's killing people on his off time when nobody's in the room doing these shifts. And he gets caught because here's a brain surgeon for you. He decides to go to the photo merge and get this stuff developed.

And the people at the photo store go this looks kind of real and they go to the police about it and the next thing you know, it doesn't take long for them to find Dr. Lam. And that's just really the starting point of this movie. It gets really crazy and it goes deeper into this as the movie goes on. Now Dr. Lam's not his real name. Where did they get the name Dr. Lam? The real killer's name was Lam Gorwan. And actually the case actually happened in 1983.

That is true that he was in a tiny apartment and shared this little room with his brother and was doing this unbeknownst to the family as when they would go out for the day and that's when he would take his victim out that he had carried in and have his way with them. And it's pretty graphic. The movie is very graphic. It earns its stripes and it's a lot like some of the other movies that we've talked about where you have flashbacks.

You see all the police procedural stuff and then it's coercing all the information out of this guy. And this one is particularly perverse. Like the police are really brutal. Like in a very realistic brutal way. And they're idiots. They're even more buffoons than I think they were an untold story. There's like there's one character who all of the police admire him because he does no work. But unless he does, the more happy they are to see him.

And he like dresses in all these American football jerseys and stuff and he walks around like he's some kind of guy from the early 90s like 21 Jump Street. All of the police officers are really just not likeable. And then they get really unlikable. It seems like first they're just incompetent. But then they're not just incompetent. They're violent. So they have this guy and they know they need to get him to confess. So this is very much like untold story in that way.

Except Dr. Lam goes way further. And the character, the main character is can you be even more like bulletproof than the guy from untold story? Well perhaps this guy takes so much violence that it's really, really uncomfortable. They spent a lot of time beating this guy up. A lot. And you know, that part of the story mirrors the real life case too where they weren't able to extract a confession from the real life guy until they had the family members come in.

Now, in the real case, it was just the brother that they had come in. Oh my God. You need to beat him and cause the confession, but in this one, it's more like the whole family is in on it. It's madness. It's a battle royale. Essentially the police say that police chief goes, our hands are tied. You know, we want to see that you guys are innocent, but we we're going to just have to book all of you for the murders because he can't confess. We can't get him to confess.

It's like, so you're all going to go to jail and like, give us a minute with him. And they go in. Like mom, everybody's like kicking the shit out of this guy. And I'm like going, am I supposed to laugh or am I supposed to be like completely outraged? And I think we're supposed to be both. Yeah, I think you're right. I think some of the flashback scenes with him, the guy was really torn up by the loss of his real mother when he was growing up in the film.

There's a little bit of sympathy there for him. Other than that, I'm not sure it's hard to have sympathy for him. Oh my God. Other than that because of how bad he is in this movie. Yeah. This is a no hope film too. I mean, there's there's a sense that no matter what, you're on your own in this world folks because there's a girl who is being chased by Dr. Lam gets out, escapes him and runs to a neighborhood police station to find out the neighborhood police station. There's nobody in it.

It's just facade. It's like those cars that you see in parking lots. So there's no police and it's just a police car and occasionally you come back and the car's just going because everybody realizes it's just a police car laid there. And there's a seriously nasty commentary going on around overpopulation and police brutality and corruption and the madness of people when they're like on top of each other. And just there's really no hope.

And that is the theme that is a running theme through all four of these Billy Tang movies that we'll talk about. He grew up, I believe it was, I want to say it was like eight people in a tiny place like that. So he was familiar with it. He grew up in it. I also like to point out that Herman Yao interestingly did not purposely include elements like this in his films, especially pertaining to like the handover and things like that. So they kind of had an opposite approach like that.

If you can believe it was set in an interview with Herman saying, you know, I don't really purposely put that kind of things in my films where Billy was just like, oh yeah, we're talking about the handover, we're talking about all these, you know, sort of uncomfortable feelings and things that we're going on in Hong Kong at that time.

Yeah, I think that's a great point to bring up because it's like there's conscious and unconscious social commentary, you know, just the idea that you're making a movie like this, you man consciously put in this stuff and we'll be able to see it later, makes it no less obvious. If you put these two directors movies together, you can't tell where the social commentary begins and where it ends. Yes, I agree.

Yeah, but I felt that I needed to mention that just because it just sounded so completely opposite approach sort of thing. Well, I think sometimes these guys say these things. It's like I think Herman Yow probably said like Anthony Wong. I've seen interviews with them and I'm like, man, this guy just doesn't like these movies that he was in. He's like, I don't even understand why these movies are big. You Westerners are crazy.

And he's like always like seemingly poo-pooing movies that he's in to a point where I think it's an act possibly. Yeah. If you see some of the older releases and up to the current releases that have extras with Anthony, there's one that's an I think it might be the older release of Ebola and it's him and Herman Yow and they can't get Anthony to say more than yes. No, I don't know what that why that is. I don't I don't get it either, man. It's like he needed the money.

He became an Ica cultural icon because he needed the money, you know, that happens. But you mentioned we're going to see the same themes through all of the Bloody Billy Tang movies. So we'll move on to the next one. And this is a really interesting one for me. I really, really like this one. Oh, shit. I like all of them. But there's some that really impacted me more. And I think part of it is because Kent Chang is in it.

Now Kent Chang has been in a couple of the movies that we've already discussed. He's always the fat guy. And he's and they just there's no, I mean, talk about body shaming. There's like they just he's eating all the time. People are calling him fat. He's he fails because he's fat. That's what you see in these other movies. So what happens? He's the lead in this next movie that's directed by Billy Tang run and kill from 1993.

Once again, starring Simon Yem but Kent Chang, Danny Lee, Esther Kwan, Melvin Wong. And this is a really interesting one. You want to talk about this? Yeah. I'm trying to always figure out I can't hardly choose between which is my favorite Billy Tang movie. On one hand, I want to say Dr. Lam, but on the other hand, this movie is so good. And it's a completely different sort of thing where you've got Kent Chang, family man, business man, really loving to his daughter.

It's got a wife that's not so nice and is cheating on him. And he basically like, you know, don't go do it in the bed. You know, he doesn't want to be embarrassed and basically goes to the bar and gets drunk his hell and meets up with this girl and he's saying he wants his wife dead. And she basically takes that to mean I want you to set up a hit for my wife. And then the guy comes over and they set up a hit on the wife.

And then after they leave is when Kent Chang finally stutters out, I want her dead drunk. So he didn't want her dead at all. But unfortunately, it's been set in motion now. Yeah. It is a rub Goldberg device this movie. It starts at this really simple thing of this milk toast guy who can't, he can't react, right? He has no ability to let his emotions out. And his wife takes advantage of him. His friends take advantage of him.

All this stuff, he's just this businessman who propane and propanic accessories. I believe he is some kind of thing like that. And it's such a weird movie and it's absolutely amazing. And I love it because it's so batched crazy. It goes from this little story of this guy and his wife not getting along to, he makes this mistake with a killer. And so it's a little bit like strangers on a train. Alpha Hitchcock strangers on a train. Yeah, you kill my wife. I'll kill your wife.

And then it goes into this whole thing of like, oh, no, that's not big enough. He's now in trouble with this guy. And then there's going to be these other gangs and then it's going to be running to another country. And then there's going to be like a crazed Rambo, a Vietnam version of Rambo coming into it. It just never stops.

This is like the closest I can come with this movie is a John Landis movie that not too many people know of called Into the Night with Jeff Goldblum where he's this mild managed software developer in LA and he can't sleep. So at night he goes out and he finds Michelle Fyfer and he gets kind of excited by her. And in a comedy of errors just by hanging out with her because she has nasty friends. He finds himself being chased by the CIA three or four different killers, the Iranians, the Iraqis.

Everybody's come out of this guy just because he couldn't sleep at night. And run and kill is way crazier than that. This one is just so nightmarish. It's not even funny where it ends up going. Yeah. And Kent Chang actually had a fair amount to do with some of the storyline in this film according to Tang. I've never seen an interview with Kent about it.

But you know, the scenes at the beginning with him and the daughter, this is a pretty obscure film, but it kind of reminded took me back to this movie called The Accident, which also has another name, which is cooler called Blood of the Black Dodd. And in this movie, Kent Chang be friends this young girl who mother, I believe, has cancer in his sick. And so there's a lot of like sort of like heartwarming scenes of them playing together, having a good time together.

So the scene at the beginning of this movie really took me back to that movie. And it's like it's pretty early for Kent. It's 1980. But it's worth tracking down if you can see it. And you know, that scene at the beginning sets up a scene at the end that is so horrific. That's like probably the show stopper of the film. Yeah. And it's not the end. No, you have to survive that sequence. And then continue on for even more madness, it's in it. Yeah, this movie is crazy because it's so complicated.

That's why I call it a Roob Goldberg device. It's like it sounds like it's going to be a simple idea. But then all of a sudden it's like, oh, no, wait, there's an, he has to escape and he goes into another country. And when he goes there, he has land there. And not only does he have land there, but there's another gang that's like squatting in there. He doesn't know how deep that gang goes into all this different stuff.

And then there's beach rails and then there's brothers dying and starting a death pack. And you know, I'm just like going, oh my God, this poor guy. Oh my God, he gets himself into such a bad time in this movie. You know, and then Simon Yam and Kent Chang and the girl that was involved, they're just sitting there and Simon is just like, well, you know what, my brother dies. I'm going to kill your whole fucking family. And unfortunately the brother dies.

So yeah, you think that this movie's going to be like, oh, they're going to get rescued. But that's just the beginning. It's like, oh, wow. So our, just when you thought that the bad guys were bad already, like sick and bamboon people's femoral arteries and stuff like that, no, there's another character who at first seems like he's going to be maybe the savior. He's, he's your Rambo type character from Vietnam. They have like Vietnam flashbacks of another brother being killed and stuff.

I mean, it really gets complicated. But you think this guy is going to be helpful until one of the brothers dies. And it's like, he has no context. It's no idea. It doesn't care. He's like, I'm just going to kill anybody who was involved in this. And so you have this black humor in this extreme violence and crossing every possible line. You know, this is one of those movies where you get to see things through a sympathetic performance. And then they just break your heart.

They tear the heart right out of you by having this guy have to endure like some of the most unspeakable stuff. I mean, the anytime in a movie where someone goes after a family, you're already angry. But this movie, I consider this like it has a terminator moment. I love how there's a scene where Simon is takes the family hostage, the mother and the daughter. And he has them in this building. You have one guy and an entire police department. You've got swat.

You've got snipers all around this building. You got a police going up inside and he's not nervous at all. And it's so much like a police station scene in the original terminator. Don't worry, ma'am, he can't get to you here. There's a million cops in this thing. You're safe tonight. You're safe in here. And the dread of what's going on inside there. He's got this mother held hostage and he's got the daughter.

And what he decides to do to get out of that building and he does is kind of jaw dropping. And that's just the beginning of the jaw dropping because we're going to see towards the end of this movie, a sequence, which is definitely the moment where you go, oh, well, you know, they're not going to go there. And I don't even know how we can talk about this move out of bringing up what it is because it's like, I don't know if people can understand the extent of just how nasty this sequence is.

But there is a moment where our main character has to experience the worst possible thing that a parent can have. This scene, Kent and the daughter are facing each other tied up. And Simon Yam's character decides to light the little girl on fire in front of Kent, which, and it took this long for him to finally snap. That's what made him snap understandably. But this movie, you know, it's not just enough to do that.

And Yam character practices so much overkill in this movie where people are already clearly dead. But, you know what, let me just pump a few more machine gun bullets into you while you're laying there dead. It's just, that's, it just, it's just relentless. And you know, you mentioned the Terminator, you know, for the longest time in this movie, Simon Yam seems unkillable. Yeah. He just keeps coming and coming and he's going to do what he's going to do.

Yeah. And it's not just, you know, relentless in the violence. It's, it's relentless in the sadism. Like you said, oh, and he, and he sets her on fire. It's not just he sets her on fire. He ties them up and chairs looking at each other like suspended off the ground so they can't even use their body weight to do anything.

On ropes that are covered slowly and lovingly by this guy with rags and then slowly and lovingly pouring gasoline all over the rags on the ground and then on the girl and on, on Kent Chang. So we don't know is everybody going to go up? We have no clue. And we're sitting there going, this is taking so long, there must be police coming up the steps. Somebody's going to come in. There's going to save this, this girl. And then he sets her on fire. And it's not just he sets her on fire.

We watch her burn. We watch Kent Chang going crazy, like going inward, just crushing. And then we watch the corpse burn. And then if that's not enough, we have the ashes like the burnt charred body. Simon Yang picks him up, picks her up and carries her over and like goes, Gucci, Gucci with, I mean, I was like, this is the most disturbing thing I've seen in a long time. And then they played for comedy later, which is just absolutely insane. The thing I love is Kent Chang in this.

I love that this is finally a movie that says, oh, by the way, you know, he, yeah, he's a fat guy and all this. But if he goes into a rage, that's 350 pounds smashing you right through a wall. And so when he goes crazy, when he gets angry, he certainly play, you know, he's hitting above his weight, but he, the fight is brutal. And the fight goes on. And this is the terminator thing for sure. It's like how much can these guys endure one of them finally dies?

Apparently Billy Tang attributes the scene of the child burning to Kent Chang. Wow. That he said that that was his idea to do that scene in that movie. Wow. Watch out for comedians, man. They got some dark minds. So where can people find run to kill? That one is one of the error 444 releases and then going back to the, to the doctor lamb that we talked about. That's another one by honor films. The blue ray of that is out. So we're seeing super clean versions of these. They look great.

Both have commentaries by Bruce Hala check and Art and Juregan who have, they do such a good job doing these category threes. And I really appreciate the fact that they're guys that were there watching these movies back in the day too. Yeah. They experienced them way back in the day. So I love that. Yeah. But I know that Art and Jure completely talks you that you're the reason that he has the knowledge that he has. He goes, I know my stuff.

He goes, Ryan on the other hand, that's a whole different level. This way too flattering. That's very nice that he says that. So we're going to go on to another two kill movie, another Billy Tang. We had run to kill. And this one, okay, if we thought we hadn't offended anybody yet, we are on our way now, folks. This may be the epitome of wrong headed, read to kill. Now they don't even talk about it in the book. You know, in the Hong Kong book that I've been reading out of.

So I had to look up a little bit about it, but watching this movie, Billy Tang, I swear he's out of his mind because this movie is just insane. This is Lily Chung and a bunch of people who are, let's put it this way. The beginning of this movie, there's a blurb, you know, a title comes up and it says, this film hopes to draw closer attention to people with mental conditions.

I'm like, well, you did, but not in the way that people normally would say would do holy shit, a mentally challenged nightmare movie. I'm assuming that there's a stigma in Hong Kong and in China about people who have mental conditions because this movie is pretty brutal. Yeah, the interview that I was talking about with Billy, he actually mentions that he swears that it has gotten better after this film.

But man, I'm telling you, there's not much more you could do to make this the most tasteless like set up of any of these category three movies. Yeah, this is really, this is beyond the pale. I mean, the very opening sequence. So the idea is that there is a apartment building and this houses the mentally challenged and there's a school for the mentally challenged there. And in the very beginning of the, and there's a rapist, there's some killer rapist that's going on around there as well.

So the very opening sequence, we have two crazy things happening at the same time. So one is where we meet one of our main characters who's the social worker. So one of the people is a social worker for the mentally challenged folk in the area and the police bring her in to a hostage situation.

So we see this woman who is at her wits end because she has a mentally challenged kid that she's adopted, she's up on the balcony, she's got the kid and the kids driving her crazy because it wants to go outside all the time. It gives her no moments of peace. And she's saying, the father hates him and I hate him. And this is my life is ruined because of this kid. At the same time, this hostage negotiation is going on in the building somewhere is a woman who's walking, she's wearing a red dress.

And suddenly this guy comes running out and kill a taxer, doesn't just a attacker. He has to rape her, but before he rapes her, he has to kill her. And he kills her with like some kind of weird toy. And then how does one say this? It's some of the best camera work of how the editing is between these two scenes and how it looks. It's really beautiful in the horrible, beautiful way because we're essentially seeing necrophilic rape happening.

And at the same time, we go back to the hostage negotiation and the little kid looks up at the mother and goes, I want to go out. She's like, oh, you want to go out to you. And she bolts out the window. It takes the kid and both of them plummet to their death and land on top of a car and die. That's the first couple minutes of this movie, a rape and a suicide murder of people who are mentally challenged. So yeah, if you don't feel this is tasteless yet, listen in.

Yeah, I mean, the rapist in this film, I mean, if you were to look up flared nostrils in the dictionary, that's this guy. He's got like, I don't know, those spandex sort of workout pants on. And he's like bulging, sweating. And he's just hyperventilating and drooling at this. He is so disgusting in this movie. But it's really, you know, it kind of made me think of just a little bit of Simon Yamms like over the topness when he's with his victims.

But this is just crazy the way that they have this character do these rape scenes in this movie. And they play it rather well. They actually kind of fooled me. Now, there was a good acting job and a good costuming job because when we see this rapist, we don't see the face. But his body, he's like a homunculus. He's this insanely muscular, ripped guy. And you would think that he could not hide in a crowd. Let's just put it that way. And you know, he's got this crazy body.

But there is a, you know, a twist that comes in later on in the movie. The only thing about this movie, Red to Kill, is that it's like a lot of the cat three movies. They're like certain genres. And sometimes the genres are kind of like Colesum in their own way, except when it's put in the cat three spell.

So like this one, you know, with a mentally challenged people and all this stuff and the woman who's going to come in and work with them as a social worker and the talented student who is loved by everybody that's there, it feels almost like children of a lesser god, except that that was deaf people. And the thing is it's still not at all going to be like that because there's a lot of rapes that are going on.

But not only that, it's, I think one of the weirdest things in there is that there's not a mentally challenged person in the movie. It's a bunch of actors pretending to be mentally challenged. And some of the background actors are really trying to be the most mentally challenged possible. And so it really hits you as like what the hell is happening here? And it's like this weird sexualization of some of them like the girl who's the lead. I forget her name. Do you remember her name?

Ming, Ming. Ming, Ming, that's it. Yes. So Ming, Ming, you know, the person plays Ming, Ming is beautiful. And there is just a little bit of sexualization that's going on there, which feels really weird when she's supposed to be mentally challenged. But of course we've got this crazy rapist. Now it's not that he's a rapist who likes mentally challenged people. He has this thing where if he sees red, he's got a rapist. So you want to talk a little bit about that? That is like the trigger.

It just sets him into a frenzy. And even when he's without given spoilers, even when he's supposed to be, you know, working and doing his job, just the mere sight of a woman wearing red will set him off. And his facial expressions sell it so well in this movie. This actor is so good at playing the frenzied rapist. But then some of the faces where he is trying to control what's inside of him, but his failing are quite amazing, I find.

Oh my God. It's funny in the way that I mean, there's a surprise. It's in there. Spoiler alert. I'm not going to say what that spoiler is, but yeah, there's something that we may suggest around it. And I hopefully won't give anything away. But there's the rapist ends up being intagally connected to the building in one way. And we'll get to see him trying to be good at certain points. But at other times, we see him like practicing rape on a mannequin. So he's definitely unhinged.

There's a really funny bit in there too about how I mean, it's tasteless as hell, but it is a bit where how much people hate the mentally challenged in that area. They're like saying, you know, one guy smiled stupidly at me. So I hit him with an old shoe. You're like, that's kind of weird. But then there's a moment where the mentally challenged, save someone who's about to be raped. It's not our rapist. Oh, what a surprise.

But there's somebody who's trying to rape a girl and the mentally challenged stop him. And now they're heroes, right? So this woman goes without you, my daughter would be hurt. At first, I didn't like these idiots, but they're all good people. They're a bit soft in the head, but the good people. That's heartwarming. But the whole thing about red, I just saw something. It was a Chinese mini series called the Three Body Problem. And it's a science fiction thing.

But at one point, they were talking about the color red. And they said that anytime you see red, that's representing China. So do you think that that has anything to do with why he goes crazy for red? I would think so. Just considering Billy Tang likes to include these sorts of things in his films. So I think that's a student that you would say that. And I agree with you. I think that does play a part of it. It definitely puts something there that makes it a little bit less just tasteless.

Although that's not much more taste. But it is a weird movie because in a way it talks about the plate of the mental health system where a guy in charge is essentially kind of an abusive person. I mean, when we first meet him, there's some guy who's screaming all the time and they put him in a box. It's a box that's like a casket and only his head is sticking out. And he's like, well, if you keep yelling, we're just going to have to keep you in there.

And then he pets them on top of the head like he's an animal. And I'm like, going, Jesus, this movie is trying to say something, but it's also maybe the most wrong headed way that could ever be said. That's true. I have such, you have to have such absolute sympathy for Ming Ming's character in this film. I mean, she, yes, she's mentally challenged, but oh my God, it's like she literally has a heart of gold. And things end up in the worst way possible for her with her father passing away.

She sent to this place and it just continually gets worse and worse for her. And I have a huge amount of sympathy for her character in this movie. And I think Lily Chung does a really good job in this movie. You know, maybe some of these actresses that are in these character, you know, doing these types of category through movies might not get the credit that they would deserve for being decent actresses. But I think she pulls it off pretty well.

Yeah. And there's a lot that goes on in this movie. It seems rather simplistic, the idea that's behind it. And the general idea is pretty simplistic, but then it gets really weird and twisted, like it's not weird and twisted already. Towards the end where it's almost like there's a weird like family being built here, like the killer rapist decides not to kill this time. This is great. But there's also this weird connection between Mingming and the social worker and this rapist killer.

And there's this huge protracted crazy fight that goes on. And this movie, by the way, I mentioned it before that Billy Tang is really knows how to make his movies look good. And this movie has some really amazing visuals in it. A lot of geometric shapes that are being used as repeating motifs. He also has this motif. I think in every one of his movies, somebody has glass sticking out of their face. They get smashed into something glass. And there's like glass sticking out of their face.

But this movie gets really crazy towards the end. And the fight sequences are pretty, pretty hardcore. Yeah, I would say so too. It's when we get to that final confrontation between three people, basically, he is really tough to take out. They're doing their best to stop him. And it's amazing how they eventually do take him out in this movie. It's really dark.

Another interesting thing about this movie is unlike some of the other ones we're seeing instead of the police in this movie a lot, we're seeing these court proceedings. But yeah, the court proceedings are kind of strange too. It's like this weird, the action's flying and then all of a sudden it kind of slows down because we have these procedures that are going on. But I think you hit on something really interesting about how dark this movie is.

And it's something that I think I'm trying to think is there a happy ending in any of these movies? I mean, they end abruptly. It's like, and now everybody's dead. And you're like, what the fuck? And when he's over. And this one ends particularly dark where in an American film, how would I say this? First off, I think not only is it dark, but it's what happens to people is kind of amazing. It's like French extremism.

It's like the French extreme of the 2000s where yeah, your characters might survive, but what's left of them? They just like hacked the pieces and stuff. They're wounded terribly. And this is one where I mean a giant man, like a giant muscular man is just beating the crap out of two women. And you feel every punch and every hit that's happening in this, every gash that they're getting. The thing I will say is that they would have been nice if they had some women stunt people.

I mean, it's like every time they throw the women, they gain like 40 pounds and they get shoulders as they're flying through the air. But other than that, it's pretty amazing, but it ends really, really dark. And do you have any, what are your thoughts on why these movies end so darkly? I don't know. It's just especially for the Billy Tang ones in particular, I mean, I think he really kind of played like the general feeling of sort of a hopelessness that was in Hong Kong in some of these areas.

And these dark endings really sort of he emphasized those endings. Yeah, I would say. I mean, this is one where you have a character who goes through all of this stuff and you would think that in a Hollywood movie, especially even an American independent film, they're going to be rewarded with at least limping away. But that's not how this movie goes. This movie says, you know what, the world is a dark, dark place.

And if you're listening, when you hear the line, remember, you're competing in Belgium. You'll know that something terrible is about to happen. But anyway, where does run to kill or read to kill? Where's read to kill going to be seen? People find it. Well, there is an error 44, 44 or error 44, 44, 44. I'm not sure how they pronounce it. Released that is upcoming. But prior to that, there was a really good Hong Kong release that was uncut.

And then, but the really nice one to get back in the day was the French release because it was anamorphic white screen. So and that's what I gave you. The original one that came out had no subtitles on it, no so. Oh, wow. You know, I have a guy and we got the subtitles on the film. So and they're pretty good. Really, I would say. Yeah. I'm stunned. I would have never known that.

Yeah. And that was a release that I was shocked by the quality of those French category three releases because for, well, like I said, for one, they're anamorphic. So you know, a lot of these earlier Hong Kong DVD releases were were meant for four by three TVs with a wide screen image. Now we're watching these DVDs on a 16 by nine screen where their letter box image is now window boxed on your screen. You can use the zoom and make it bigger.

But the French ones, I don't know where they got the prints or whatever, but oh my god, they look so good. And they did quite a number of the category three movies back in the day. Now we've been talking for quite a while on these cat three movies, folks, and I hope you're enjoying it. Tune in for part two. And we'll talk a little bit more about cat three with my guest, Ryan Smith. And thanks for listening to the show.

Hellbent for Har was written and broadcast by me, essay Bradley, and produced by me and Lisa Gorsky. You can find more on our website, hellbentforhar.com. And I'm also on Facebook at facebook.com forward slash hellbent for Har. And my Twitter handle is hellbenthar. Please hit that subscribe button to get H4H hot off the press. And if you can do a review on iTunes or whatever app you listen to us on, that really helps people get to find us.

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