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Oh g is folks, it's showtime. People say good mighty to see this movie. When they go out to a theater. They want clothed, sodas, hot popcorn in.
No monsters in the Projection Booth. Everyone for tend podcasting isn't boring.
Cut it off.
One of the ten best films of the year. It starts over the top, then blasts through the roof. It takes your breath away.
The damnedest thing I have seen in years.
Guarantee to tingle the most jaded moviegoer's palette. A film concocted with nitroglycerin, the combined energy of the road Warrior, RoboCop and the Terminator, the Ultimate Cop.
Versus the Ultimate hit Man. This looks for you. Welcome to the Projection Booth. I'm your host, Mike White. Joining me once again is Ms. Carol Borden.
Hi.
Everybody, Also back in the booth after Far Too Long is Jackie Stargrove?
How's it going, Dumbo?
We are back taking a dip into a familiar pool by revisiting a movie we discussed on the podcast way back in the first year of the show, twenty eleven, John Woo's The Killer. Back then, we discussed the influences of things like this Gun for Hire, le Samurai and Moore. We also had a pretty well, actually it wasn't that he did discussion around home eroticism presented in the heroic
bloodshed genre of action films. This time around, we're going to go back to nineteen eighty nine's John Woolffilm, but also discuss the twenty twenty four John woolfilm and stop by the nineteen ninety four film Hum hayin Bemesal. Along the way, The Killer tells the tale of a contract hit man named Jeff in some versions, I'll call him Jeff for the most part, Cheliu Fat who accidentally blinds
a shantuse named Jenny played by Sally Yeah. Meanwhile, he's being hunted by hot headed super cop Lee played by Danny Lee. It's an ultra violent treatuse on loyalty friendship and honor set against the underworld of Hong Kong. We will be spoiling this film as well as its remake and the Indian film it inspired, say as we go along. So if you don't want anything ruined, please go ahead, turn off the podcast and come back after you've seen
them all. We will still be here. So, Carol, I'm so curious, when was the first time you saw The Killer? And what did you think?
I actually have an answer for this question because you always asked me that, and I'm like, I don't remember when I saw this movie, but the first time I saw this movie was Alin Gaddis's Golden Classic Cinemas on Spadina in Toronto. Oh Wow, four ninety five. I had seen no John Wu. I had seen no Chilian Fought, and it was part of a week dedicated to Chilian Fought.
Quote the God of Cool. And after seeing the movie, I totally understood why Colin was advertising him as the God of cool, like I had not seen anything like it, and I loved it right away, and it led to a lifelong love of Chailean thought and John Wu and Jackie.
How about yourself?
I was in high school. I think at the time summer of two thousand and three, so it would have been going from like my freshmen to sophomore year, and I remember watching it specifically over that summer, and I'd heard about it for years because it's one of those movies that you know, especially in the earlier Internet for years, where people talk about movies a lot, but they're not as super easy to get ahold of as you'd like, especially when that Criterion version of it was already going
for crazy prices and our local Hollywood video had a copy of it, and I was like, well, that's it, I'm doing this. I had grown up with a lot of Wu's American stuff. I'm sure at some point where we'll get into my apologies for his American filmography, because I love most of it. Still, I knew that, like the Hong Kong stuff, was where it was, that was
what you had to see. And so even in this weird I think it was the company was Fox Laber that put out that old DVD that it almost felt like I was watching something that I still wasn't supposed to get a hold of. I wasn't one hundred percent sure that it was like a legit DVD I'd never heard of this company. It was just sitting there on the shelf. They had that and Hard Boiled, but I only got The Killer the first time around, and yeah,
it just blew me away. It was everything everyone made it out to me, and I've never been able to let it go.
I don't think there's any reason to apologize for his American filmography. I love Hard Target, I love Face Off. I'm not as hot on things like Broken Arrow or Payback, and then I still God, I did this episode twenty eleven. I still haven't seen Wing Talkers all the way through or Redcliff and I'm a man oh man, But yeah, some of those movies are fucking fantastic.
We're all bad centophiles here.
I remember liking wind Talkers, but I haven't seen it since it was brand new.
I wish that he had had more power, and this film, The Killer comes at an interesting time in his career where he was I know Better Tomorrow was a huge hit for him. He had already been directing for twenty some years at this point, and no Better Tomorrow comes along really helps redefine the action genre. Reie, in my mind, kicks off the horroic bloodshed drama, which is a mix of action and melodrama, real Douglas Cercian type melodrama, and some people that's a dirty word melodrama is, but not
for me. I love it, and I love just how emotionally in that film is and this film as well, things like the little flashbacks that we have, the things that just happened a few minutes ago in order to put you inside of the character's head, and just that overwrought emotion that everybody is showing. I think it's freaking fantastic, and that, just for me helps when it comes to the poetics of the ballet of violence that happens throughout so much of this movie.
It feels very operatic, and that extends to the emotions as well. When you're doing operatic, you go big all the way, and this movie goes big on every level. It would feel like something was missing if any of those pieces weren't present.
It's very cool. It was very cool of its time. It was very influential and subsequent action in movies and in certain ideas even about what's cool in cinema and to an extent, what's cool in life. Not to the extent that a Better Tomorrow was where people are walking around sound dressed like Mark with the toothpicks in their mouth and wearing the trench coat. But it's also interesting that it's unashamed of its sentiment, like it's very your
face with its sentiment. It fills up the screen with the faces of the actors having strong emotional reactions to each other, into their situations in their eyes, like there's time where Italian fought almost looks like he's going to cry, Like a lot of other action cinemas that are about masculinity and male friendships and are also homo erotic try to be like no, no, being a man is not feeling things deeply, Like being a man is like the samurai,
like he's aloof he's almost detached from everything. But and that's an influence on this. But it's like you say, it's it's almost Circian. I hadn't considered that before. But that's a really good point.
The emotions are so there and so present, and also it's so much about this inner turmoil that you're talking about and the idea of I barely touched on it the very first time we talked about this. I barely touched on Sergio Leone, and I really feel that there's a sense in this of once upon a time in the West, with the whole idea of the things that
were are no longer going to be. The people like Cheyenne and Harmonica, these almost gods of the old West are being driven out by that railroad coming in and this one coming in nineteen eighty nine. We're still just what six seven, eight years from the handover of Hong Kong to China, and this kind of feels like it's really setting the stage and saying like the old ways are not the ways that they used to be because we have basically three generations of people in this movie.
We've got Sydney and Chang, and I love this whole. I believe kind of hall gribes it as an h figure where you've got on one side, you've got Sidney and Jeff. On the other side, you've got Chang and Lee, and I find it's interesting that both of those are very Americanized names in one area, and then more of the traditional Chinese names on the other side, with Jenny
in the middle. But the area that I really want to look at too, is that new generation and the idea of Shing fu On hiring Jeff to kill his uncle, and Qing Kuan has no honor, he has no code, and he is to me representing this new generation that's coming in. And so you've got Sidney, who's this classic I will call him a knight because he is so chivalrous.
Him and Chang are the older generation. You've got Jeff and Lee as this kind of they've taken those things from the past they but yet they have to live in this new, more violent world of Hong Kong. And then you've got Shing Fuana's Wang Hoi, the nephew who just doesn't give a shit about anything, will kill anyone that gets in his way, including his own freaking family.
One thing that I noticed more this time than and I've watched this movie like you guys a lot of times, but I was thinking a lot about Chang ChEI and how John Wu worked with Chang che And part of the reason that this film was so remarkable is that he took those one armed swordsman. He took those old
wushia well. Chan Chey came in in his time with a new whushia that had like male leads, not female leads, and focused on masculinity and male friendships and honor and terrible choices, and usually, as in The Killer, the two sworn brothers die in the end in some terrible way for their honor and their friendship over everything else, to uphold how things should be, how human relationships should be.
And it's it's interesting that John Wut not only takes that and puts it in a like a then contemporary action movie with the shootouts and chases and stuff like that, but then, like you say, the handover is coming, and so it just emphasizes and has a very specific not nostalgia but almost a nostalgic pain for something that's about
to pass. That something isn't the process of passing. That isn't exactly in Chang che either, because he's making his movies in the sixties and seventies, so they're like, oh, new things are coming, but it's not maybe the end of the way things are done.
And I want to say Chang Chi also set a lot of his things in older periods, whereas Lou's very contemporary. This feels nineteen eighty nine all the way through.
It's so intangible, but like you just when you get that feeling in the your stomach that like the glory days are just about to pass something else, some new generation is coming through and we might not get this feeling ever again. And it very much folds through another one I was thinking, I'm mentioning Once upon a Time
in the West. I also think at the Wild Bunch is another one that there's no way WU didn't see that with all the NonStop squibs, But the end of that movie is another one where just a whole generation of those old Western fellows is just wiped out and they're done, their days are over.
And that coming what right at the end of the sixties as well, just felt like such a turning point, especially as New Hollywood is coming to four and heck and Paul being I mean, he's a little bit of an older fellow coming in here, but just that felt like such a turning point in his career as well.
I know he made a few other good films after that, but then you get into things like, I know, some people really love The Killer Lead and some of these others, but I'm just like, yeah, Ostra Weekend, it's such weak
sauce compared to what he was doing before. And yeah, the whole idea of especially the editing, the editing of The Wild Bunch, the whole idea of expanding time through slow motion and constantly cutting back to an a action that is happening in slow motion, back to other action scenes that are taking place in regular motion, just showing like all of these things are happening at the same time, and just by extending out the timeline of that person
that's maybe falling or getting shot. And the use of slow mo in this film as well, Oh God, is just so beautiful. The opening. I don't know how many times I can. I've watched the opening Massacre at the Club. I have seen it so many times, just studied every single shot in here. I love the things like the rack focus, or when he's out of bullets, Jeff's out of bullets and sees the gun and he kicks that table and the gun comes up again in slow motion,
and the way he grabs it multiple times. I love that multiple camera angles that Wou's doing and the repeated action that happens like you were seeing, Carol. This just was such a revolution when it came to how films are being shown and processed. And it's ironic because this is so new for at least my eyes as a Western viewer, but that he is taking so many of these other little pieces, Like you said, Chung Che is
definitely more homegrown. But then things like The Wild Bunch and Sergio Leone and I'd love whenever I talked about spaghetti westerns, it's how are the Italians for reflecting back American culture to us? And this feels like taking all of these things and saying, no, this is Chinese, now, this is my thing, and this is how I'm going to shoot action, which becomes such a I don't want to say it's a cliche because it's not a cliche at this point. This is such a breath of fresh air.
Yeah, he took all the things that he loved from film, and you can see it in this film how much he loves film, and he processed them and then gave us this film of I don't want to use digested, but I can't think of another word like he's taken in cinema. He's digested in it and he is giving us something new and something how he wants to see this kind of story and it's still so fresh. That was the thing for me.
Watching it again, that perfect combination of influences yet where you can see obviously like their contemporary local influence, but mixed with especially Western cinema Like this time going back, I was like, these are guys wearing like pinstripe suits and stuff. I can't think of a movie from that region in that era where anyone was dressed like that beforehand. That was not a popular thing, and he brought it over and made it cool in a whole different way.
So one of the things that was really interesting to me even the first time I watched it, but like over the years, was how the suits indicate the moral positioning, particularly of Danny Lee and Sidney Fong, and in a slightly different way with Chilian fot because Italian Fox Jeff's suit is largely this olive green and then he has
this really cool olive leopard print tie. But Sidney Fong, when he comes in as someone who is very following the procedures of the triad, he's in very rules based, very focused on the tradition, and so is honorable in that sense, like he follows the code of his triad. He wears a black suit with white pin stripes. Danny Lee comes in and he's undercover, and he's totally different.
He's wearing a white suit with black pinstripes and a black shirt, which is revealing that he's not quite the good guy that he thinks he is or that people want him to be. And of course by the end, he's wearing a black suit with a white shirt. Chilian thought is wearing a white suit. That's both showing his virtue but also tying back to the old Chang ChEI films where the heroes wore white because white is also associated with deaf and you can see all their bloodstains
when they have their big climactic battle. And Sidney Fung in the end is wearing a gray suit with black pin stripes. And so here's where I went pooky, because like for years, I'm like, I feel like there has to be a transitional suit between where Sidney Fung has ultimately chosen his side on Jeff and he's still a bad guy. He still has his little black stripes, but he's moved into the morally gray world of gray pin
straight suits. And when I saw the extended version from Taiwan, Allen showed that I think at the Blue Theater there's an intermediary intermediate suit, and I felt so validated that yes, these suits are significant, that he is using them like they used to use cat hats in cowboys for cowboys in westerns, and Sidney Funk has his charcoal suit with his white stripes as he's begging for Jeff's money back from Shinkoi on. So that is my long tangent and thank you for your patients.
No, no, I remember I was talking about the suits in the very first time I talked about this movie, and just yeah, how he changes, how they both changed throughout this entire film. So yeah, you said it much more elegant than me. And plus I really wasn't looking at Sydney. I was looking at just Jeff and Lee.
So having that idea of where Sydney's loyalties lay, because Sidney is such a fascinating character to me, especially that he's damaged that the one hand doesn't work, but that he makes a point when he can't catch that beer, but then he makes the point of well it still works for the gun though. I'm like, oh, yeah, that's nice.
Yeah, he's been saving that up and not doing it because it would be against what you do in the triad. Until everything is off for him anymore.
That longer cut is really fascinating. If memory serves, this is the one that has the two attacks of Jenny, so you get that mirroring of Lee and Jeff even more as far as the repeated actions, because I know Jeff for sure in the regular version that everybody sees saves Jenny when she's coming out of the club one night after she's been blinded by his muzzle flash, and I want to say that if it's not in the
hi Wan version, it's definitely in the deleted scenes. There's also an attack that happens to Jenny where Lee saves her, and that it's Jeff saving her, and I'm just like, I'm glad that's not in the regular version, just because all right, that she always just need to be saved.
This is probably a really bad betrayal of a female character, but at the same time, Sally Yev just pulls it off as Jenny so well, and I just love her as a character, even though she is pretty weak and obviously gets fooled very easily as a blind person, especially in that incredible scene with Jeff and Lee pointing the guns at each other and really meeting for the first time, and that's when they start. The whole nickname thing that goes on that scene is just so delightful for me.
Yeah, the nickname thing in particular has always tickled me. This time I went, I watched that new four K restoration that just came out, and half of my curiosity was like, what are the names going to be? And in this one they went with the classic Mickey Mouse and Dumbo, which I've never understood because I don't associate those characters as knowing each other. But I would put like Mickey Mouse with Donald Duck. That almost makes it funnier to me.
Yeah, I remember, there's butt head, there's shrimp head. Shrimp Head seems like it would definitely be more of a of a Hong Kong insult to me, But yeah, over Dumbo and Mickey Mouse. But yeah, whatever, float your boat.
Apparently there's a there's a numbnuts version of what I remember.
It was right around the time of Vivis and butt Head on MTV, So when they start calling each other butt head, I was like, Okay, yeah, that hits a little different now than it would have just even a few years prior.
I had heard and I have no idea how true this is And it wasn't something I looked up when we were talking about doing this, but like years and years ago, I had heard that one of the names in Cantonese for Danny Lee was Danny Lee's nickname. I don't know if that's true, but like you say, shrimp head sounds like a very Cantonese Hong Kong nickname, because like Shing Foyan's was like what big Ugly had.
I love that his nickname in Return of the Demon was fierce or that was his character's name, And I'm just like, if anybody portrays the word fierce, it's Shingfalon just because of that that resting bitch face that he has. And it wasn't it it was him versus chill Yan Fat and tigrind Beat, the first Tigrin Beat. I think, Yeah, they had that incredible chainsaw fight man that movie wow. I mean that was the thing about The Killer was it just opened up this whole world of other Hong
Kong films for me. And this was such a great introduction. Not everything looked like this, not everything felt like this. There was some that had some elements of it, but just this open up that door to this wide world of what at that point, I want to say it was the third largest cinema production area in the entire world.
I want to say it was either the US and then Bollywood, or it could have been vice versa and then Hong Kong at this point in time was just cranking out product and so many amazing films.
You were talking about Sally Yer, though, and I think you're right, Like she has it's almost consciously flat characterization, Like she does a really good job making Jenny a real person, but she's so clearly not plot development. She's there to be in danger, she's there for Jeff to feel guilty about. She's there for Inspector Lee to start to see Jeff as more of a person. And she still pulls it out like she doesn't have a lot
to work with. She has a very thin character, and she makes you care about her and believe that she's been fooled when she's bringing them to you while they're having a showdown.
She allows it to transcend the fact that, as far as the script goes, she's just a plot device. She really just exists for things to move ahead and get more complicated. But yeah, she's so convincing and a lot of her innocence that you buy into it every step of the way.
Yeah, And of course she provides the song that's so important for the emotional center of the movie in a lot of ways, like that's Celie herself singing.
The music in this movie is so incredible, and I love tracking down where it comes from because so many Hong Kong films they will recycle things from other films, and so finally tracking down the soundtracks for No Mercy, the Richard Gear film, I think with him Passenger is in that, and then I knew about the hero and the Terror and I went back through Amazon and I was like, oh, I bought this all the way back in twenty eleven. And then what was the other one that that?
Oh?
Red Heat, the Walter Hill film.
I remember having the moment where I was finally getting around to watching Red Heat and that music iked and I went, wait a minute.
I've heard that before. And then there's its own original music in here as well. But it all just blends so perfectly, and I just love how they will recycle things from other action films and again showing Wu's influences as far as what he's enjoying. And I know there was a policea from Oh Gosh, what is the early seventies that lends a lot of its elements, a lot of its musical elements, I should say, to A Better Tomorrow, And then of course A Better Tomorrow's got that incredible
theme song as well. But I love how much music plays such a big part in WUS films.
I've always had this weird feeling with Wu and he may have even said before that I felt like there was always a musical hiding within him that he's never quite brought to the surface, And even to this day, I'd still like to see because action choreography is just one step away from dance anyway, So I would love to see him go down that road because I think, yeah, there's such a beautiful musical quality to the way he films things that in the way he does use music
that I would love to see something like that. I've always that's always been in the back of my mind with him.
I had read an interview with him somewhere, and if I had been thinking, I would have gotten it out. But I believe he's interested in doing a musical. But of course he was making movies in the eighties and he's still making movies and he probably has a better chance of doing a musical now, but like I can see him being like, how could I do a musical action choreography.
Yeah, that's one genre that I've never seen in Hong Kong was a musical. There of course, musical breaks and song watifsa come back very frequently, but I've never seen a full fledged musical coming out of Hong Kong, at least during this period of time, and definitely not a heroic bloodshed musical. But yeah, I'm game for it.
Yeah, that would be great.
And so many of the stars in Hong Kong were also musical stars as well as actors. Sallyer, I believe her primary thing was music. I know, like Chaalian Fats had albums, Jackie Chan's had albums. But I don't know if Danny Lee's out there singing away or not.
But probably because there was like a time when the Hong Kong star had to sing, which is why they are Italian Fat albums, because he's not considered a very good singer. But if you're a star in Hong Kong, you got to have an album. Chang Pei Pei was in musicals in the sixties at the same time that she was like the queen of Wushia films. But you could go see a double feature with her and a musical and then go see her and come drink with me or whatever.
We were talking about the whole idea of Lee and Chang having more traditional Chinese names and Sydney and Jeff with more of the Western names. And also when you think about where they work out of that Jeff and Sydney, they initially are seen in that church and you've got the Virgin Mary statue, which of course gets exploded literally in the the film. But then when you see Lee at work, it's the statue of General Kwan, so like
the god of the police force kind of thing. So that's like the first time you see him before he's about to get reamed out by his boss. So this idea of the Western versus Eastern stuff as well, and I wonder that's got to be a conflict for people in Hong Kong, just because it is a at this point a protectorate of the British Empire and how western are you going to go? And of course in Hard
Boiled that's a Goodbye note to Hong Kong. This whole idea of the birds flying and being turned loose, and that's the last time that Wu actually shoot something in Hong Kong for a lot of years.
There's that conflict with that identity, and there's the conflict about the handover, because on one hand, people are nervous about what they're going to lose, but at the same time they've been colonized and the British are in charge
of everything, including the film industry. But I also think that there's a pride in the cosmopolitanism of Hong Kong, and you see it both in the film with the characters having all these things using westernized names as well as their Chinese names, having General Khan and the Virgin Mary, having the missionary brother who's in the church helping them all out. But also you can see it with what we've been talking about, where John Wu has all these influences.
He has them from Melville to Sergio Leoni, to Chiang Chi to whoever. And that for him is this is Hong Kong film. All these things also belong to us and we can participate in the world of these things.
Yeah, for me, the best thing about Hong Kong being a British protectorate at this time, was the rule around having to have English subtitles on their films. That's a great thing for us as Westerners, being basically almost guaranteed that we're seeing stuff with subtitles. Obviously, it is such a hard time. We're going to talk a little bit later about Comhai Bemasol and just the still the lack of easily accessible English subtitles for Indian films as a
real struggle. Sometimes you want to watch these movies and you just can't do it. Meanwhile, in all these Hong Kong films, they're not the best subtitles. They call them English for a reason. A lot of times it's very questionable some of these translations, and from what I understand it was the translations or the subtitles were done in the script phase, so sometimes they don't match up to what's actually happening on screen. But it's almost a fascinating look at what was at one point.
It allowed Hong Kong films not only to make it into the West, but it's part of why it became such a big film industry because like you can show them in India because people in India are also English speakers. There's a lot of English speakers in India and other regional languages that don't have that requirement don't blow up like these Cantonese movies, which is hardly a huge language overall in China.
Yeah, that was really weird watching that Taiwanese version because now after learning a little bit, like a smattering of Mandarin and hearing things like oh, how to, like when the little girls gotten shot and they're in the hospital and the nurses like how to, and I was like, oh, okay, I know what that means. I know what some of these phrases are. Yeah, it's weird though to hear some of the phrases that you're used to when it comes to watching the Cantonese version hundreds of times or however
many times I've seen this movie. But yeah, and I was before we started recording that this movie is just such a warm blanket to me, like it has become a comfort film to me just over all of these years, and it's just such a familiar movie to me now, Like rewatching it for this podcast was such a pleasure just because I get to revisit these characters after a
few years. I haven't seen this for probably a decade, probably since we did that episode on it, and going back to this after all this time, seeing these shots, seeing these images that I'm so familiar with, the whole dragon boat festival, and the way that Chow is there with his fake mustache, and I love when when he lines up the shot and he does that whole thing with the rifle like two or three times again, that repeated motion. I'm just like, oh, this is so great
to see, and just it never lets up. There's no real boring parts of this movie whatsoever. And you can watch a lot of action movies and think, okay, yeah, all right, we've got our action set pieces and then we relax. But during the scenes of relaxing, there's tension ratcheting up every single time, where you're getting here's the
next job, here's Lee investigating Jeff. You go back and forth between these two characters, so well of them, Lee hunting Jeff, Jeff not even knowing about Lee but caring about Jenny. And then once he finds out about Lee, then it becomes a real struggle going back and forth with those guys. And God again, just to throw at
another scene that I absolutely love. It's when we have Lee in that same chair that Jeff is sitting in and just sitting there, and that wonderful camera move across and cutting on those cross beams of the window just to go from one person to the next, seeing them sit in exactly the same position, and then seeing Lee reenact what Jeff had done before with the gun. Oh my god, that was such a mind blowing thing of having this character just relates so much to this killer
that he actually does the exact same actions. It was just such a chef's kiss of a moment for me.
Yeah, it's it's so beautifully like visually told entirely the movie. I let you come to the conclusion on your own. It feels like it expects you to realize, like, these two guys are are more similar than they are different. And I'm sure we'll get into later that some movies are a little less subtle with doing that.
Yeah, it expects you to know what they're feeling without you telling or without them telling you. And you do they know what they're feeling. You identify with both of them. You feel what they're feeling, You feel what poor Sidney Fung is feeling. You do your and then not as much with what Jenny is saying, but when she's singing, you know what she's feeling.
There are whole swaths of this film that are completely dialogue free, like that assassination of the uncle at the dragon boat festival, just the whole thing of the boat chase that happens afterwards. When Jeff shows up on the beach and there's a little girl playing, there's no dialogue
being exchanged. There's no dialogue when he sees when she looks and frowns because she sees the glint off of the gun sight and he catches on to that, and he also then sees the gun sight but through the reflection into sunglasses, and yeah, not a word is spoken for probably a good ten minutes of this, and that for me again goes back to that Leone thing where you can watch so many Search of Leone films with no dialogue whatsoever. He was such a silent filmmaker who
just added in the right amount of dialogue. And I feel that Wu was doing the exact same thing here.
That very much feels almost like him laying tracks for an idea he clearly had of making something universal, but a lot of people don't talk about it, but I think like the twenty twenty three he had that movie Silent Night that came out, which it was an action revenge Christmas movie, but it had no dialogue whatsoever, and his I believe his specific intent was to make a movie that no matter where you showed it, people would know what was happening. And it's not the Killer, but
it is. It's a pretty strong success in making an experiment that I felt worked pretty well and it really is.
So accessible one I like that movie, and one of the things I liked about it is both that it worked with that silence, but that the guy who's gone on his revenge bender has a wife. And even though like in other movies or television shows where you have a man who's anchor and getting revenge, somehow they can't help portray the wife as a nag. And we hear some of the things she said, or we see some
of the things she says because she's texting it. But Jodwood does such a good job of conveying her as a person that you're like, she is far more emotionally healthy in dealing with the situation than her husband, and we barely see her. We see her less than we see Celia and the Killer, And once again, she manages to be a person, even though she's supposed to be the thing. That's. No, you shouldn't go off and do revenge. You should stay home and deal with your trauma responsibly.
And I'm just I'm so impressed that he was able to do that with a character that gotten prestige. Cable is oh Skyler White such a bitch ure Rita won't leave Dexter alone, just let him go kill people.
I'm clearly too worped because I've seen to many Charles Bronson movies. Because when you said the wife being a you said a nag. I was going dead. That's the other direction.
Well, that's so much the Yeah, let's get rid of the wife as soon as we can, or it's the john Wick of it. All right, the wife has died, But really I think it's a dog dying that sets John Wick on his whole crusade.
Totally. The dog.
Yeah, that's that's his last attachment to the humanity that he built up.
I don't think you understand these boys killed my dog.
One bridge too far, thank you very much. Yeah, and just again, like going back to the metal drama of it all, and just the tragedy of this film that we are taking everything up to this new friendship between Lee and Jeff and then having to break it down and break it apart and just have this massacre at the end. There is no happy ending to this movie, and I love it for that, the tragedy of Jeff's character, the tragedy of Lee's character, the tragedy of Jenny will
be going blind, if not dying from wounds. Who knows how many times she's gotten shot at the end of this thing. But my god, I just appreciate the downer ending.
I appreciated it so much more after we watched the other two movies too, because while you're in it, you're like, I don't want this to be happening. Why can't they all be happy? Why can't Jenny receive his corne as if he has to die? And I see the other movies, they just make me angry about that.
Yeah, God forbid anyone ever tried to make this movie with a happy ending. And yeah, I was definitely blindsided because, like I said, I saw this pretty much after his main run of doing film in America was over, so I hadn't seen him get even though learning in retrospect that he wanted to end most of his movies the dying and Hollywood wouldn't let him. Yeah, there was no preparation for the fact that after all this and you get so much, so many heroic moments, they get so
many cool moments. The shot of them right as they're about to walk out of the church together and it slows down tearing the brief it's like the two coolest guys in the world. They're unstoppable, except for about ten minutes later when they're entirely stopped.
Oh it's so good. That moment where they both freeze. You get those incredible Martin scorts as he freeze frames and just that little like how they like will nod into one or smile into the other one, and you just like, this is it.
They're synchronized. Now, they are together in on this until the end. They just hope the end probably would be a little better than what it is for them.
It's just it's remarkably effective if you think about it, because like I think he's also influenced by Little Caesar and stuff like the hat like older gangster movie, not just with the pinstripe suits. And I think he's not necessarily telling us that crime doesn't pay. But a recurring theme through his films, as violent as they are, is that violence is destructive and there's no good that can
come of this. Not even Jeff's corneas can be translated into too Jenny to fix what he's done, because what he's done is unfixable, and what these people are all doing is just unfixable. And instead of having memoralizing ending where someone comes out and says and crime doesn't pay, we feel it. We feel the whole weight of this terrible thing that's happened, and that has been very cool
and beautiful and amazing and emotional the whole time. But in the end, it's like there is no other way for it to end.
Yeah, right down to the choice of it all ending at the most holy of places at church, Like we mentioned the whole like the Virgin Mary statue to exploding. It literally feels like they're at a point where nothing is sacred anymore. There's no going back, truly.
Yeah, it's almost like it's a deconsecrated church.
Yeah, yeah, Well we were all, oh, yeah, I see, I almost held back on that, but yeah, yeah.
Yeah, well, and he's not a believer too, like he just finds it peaceful.
But and I've also always thought that was the other interesting thing about the movie is that that is probably the most Western influence there is that his continued return to a Christian church, which I don't know what kind of hold they have over over the region there compared to the rest of the world, but from what I understand,
it's not nearly as strong. So it's Yeah, it's a very interesting visual thing, and especially hearing about some of the scripts that didn't get made where they were going to have it in the West and him going to like Buddhist churches and stuff apparently to switch around and wouldn't feel the same.
The thing is is the church is important to John Wu. He's a Christian. He was raped, and so part of the reason we feel that is he felt it. And if you just decide to switch something else in and it doesn't mean anything to you, what does the audience get from that?
Yeah, again, a very Martin scor says a thing because says he was torn between the church and filmmaking, and I think we're better off for him choosing the filmmaking route. All right, let's go ahead and take a break and we'll be right back after these brief messages. Looking for something superior to streaming a place with more than five times the selection available on all streaming services combined. Check
out Scarecrow Videos rent by mail service. Select from an unparalleled collection of over one hundred and fifty thousand films and get Blu rays, four k's and DVDs delivered directly to your door. Get in on it now at scarecrow dot com and rediscover the wonders of physical media. Edison Boys to do in this children?
Some of the boys think you are legends.
What did they say?
They say the Queen of the dead.
Why did you save the girl?
Easy question, not so easy answer.
I've been on a round town based in The contract was clear you should be dead.
You just betrayed the most dangerous man in Paris dreams.
So the girl the witness.
I've been having a living.
If you want to live, come with me.
Swings.
So you're a good cot, then.
Then you are an assassin?
Are you trying to do something good for a change?
How many times to play? Don't I'm always good at what I do.
Give up the group sand every killer in the city after you, We're all up on CP time. How many times?
Never sa boys to do his job?
As the story.
I know from s.
Why don't you drop it?
I'm not the one out of But its all right.
We're back and we're talking about the Killer, all things the Killer. And yeah we were talking right before the break, the whole idea of the church in the Killer, that kind of nice cyclical thing we started the church. We in at the church. Very odd that hom high bemicel. The Indian film also starts at a church, a Christian church. I had forgotten about that. I will admit I had forgotten that I had seen this film when I went
back and listened. By the way, one of the most mortifying things that you can do as a podcaster is go back seven hundred and twenty some weeks and listen to work that you did way back then. Oh my god. But yeah, I'm glad that we're back here talking about this, and I'm especially glad that I'm talking with an audience that can actually see the homo eroticism in heroic bloodshed films without having to like go crazy about that and talk about how Charlian Fat does want to fuck Danny Lee.
It's like, yeah, no, it's calmed down, It's really okay. There is there's a lot of home eroticism inside of heroic bloodshed films. Just watch Who is the One with Simon m And and shli On Fat. Oh gosh what it's the Ringo Lamb movie.
Yeah, Contact, Full Contact, watchful Contact if you want to real Yeah, Full Contact is Simon M's gay in that, he's just straight up gay in that.
And there's homeroticism in The Killer. And that doesn't mean that anybody wants to fuck anybody. That just means there's homoroticism in The Killer.
As there is a lot of action felms and hard boiled yes.
Especially hard boiled Yeah, the genre in general. When you've got two guys posturing against each other and the world at the same time, it's gonna happen. It's just gonna happen.
I feel like even getting into homoroticism as only sexual desire, because I feel like they can have love feelings for each other, and they clearly love each other, and you can define it any way you want. But there's a lot of love in The Killer and there's a lot of love in.
Hard Boil, and they both start with these characters not loving each other. It's very much it's a love story between Jeff and Jenny, and it's a love story with Lee and Jeff. I think there might be a little love between Lee and Jenny as well, but it's not really a love triangle.
And Sydney is like the ex, like we went out a long time ago and now we're just really good friends and you know each other so well.
They still get along, but obviously those days are past well.
And yeah, both Chang and Sydney making these ultimate sacrifices for their tutelagees Sidney doing his best to get back that money and also get back his self respect. That's the whole thing. When he fixes his time and he says, I'm not a dog, I'm just like, oh my god, what a moment.
I also think there's parallels between Chang and Jenny, that they're both like the wounded partners, that they're both being avenged, or like both Jeff and Lee are upset about what's happened to Jenny and Chang and blame each other. Although I guess everybody blames Jeff about Jenny, but.
Though not necessarily Jenny, because I don't know. I guess did she ever find out that he's the one she has.
To I think she knows. I think when she finds out what he does, she and his focus on getting her from Corneas. I feel like she has to know, and in so many things in this movie, she doesn't say anything about it, because what is there to say?
These poor people trying to remain hopeful despite the absolute worst things in the world coming their way one after another until literally it couldn't possibly go any worse.
So, Carol, you have definitely seen way more Indian films set I have, and I'm so curious what your take on Amhi Bamasala is.
If you had not told me that it was a renake of The Killer, I would think that it was a very standard nineteen nineties Hindi action movie that had references to The Killer in it, and I would only really have noticed the boat scene where he does the rifle assassination account like very like Jeff and possibly the
Blinded Singer. But the rest of it seems like of all the movies we watched, these remakes seem like they're fixing the Killer for different cultural contexts to me, and I'm most forgiving of this Hindi one because I've seen so many Hindi movies where people are, well, why do
they know each other? What's really going on? Well, twenty years ago, their fathers knew each other and something bad happen, and now twenty years from now, they have to resolve the situation by teaming up and discovering that they are either actually brothers or they might as well be brothers because they share the same father figure, and they will get revenge for their fathers and themselves against the real evil.
And I would have watched it like that if I had not known that it was a remake, and unfortunately, knowing it was a remake made me feel much more unfairly towards it. I made sure to watch it first so that I wasn't watching any of these right after watching The Killer, because I too haven't seen it in five or ten years. But I know how I feel about it, and I could only be unfair, and I'm still not sure that I'm not being unfair.
I love what you just said, because that whole idea of the thirty years ago thing. I just went to see the new Rashna Khan film coolly, and it literally does a thirty years ago right in the middle of the film, so we get to see a lot more like, oh, how do these two characters know each other? Why are
they saying this thing? What is happening with this? You get that so much in these movies, and like I said, I've only seen I would consider it a handful, maybe a dozen, two dozen at the most Indian films from both North and South India. And I'm doing my best to not ever call these Bollywood movies again because they're
Indian films. They're not Bollywood films. And yeah, that whole idea of the things in the past that motivate you to the future, it's funny because we're going to get a lot more of that in the remake of The Killer that we're going to talk about in a few minutes. The whole idea of flashbacks and flashbacks within flashbacks, it
gets to be a little much. But yeah, with the hemline benasl it really isn't until about what fifty five minutes into the movie where you get the blinding of the woman, you get the bullets being removed from the back in the church. This is within the first ten minutes of The Killer, and then it's almost an hour in until you get the first glimpse of oh, there's job will influences on this.
I had the same where I was watching it, and I think I clocked that it was about fifteen minutes in before the actual the Killer part of the movie started. Everything else was just backstory leading up to it, and then there was and I probably would have clocked it just because they started doing like those exact shots of him sitting in the church with the camera moving around. I'm like, now it looks familiar. And then she's blind somehow, and then and then it sprinkles in set pieces here
and there. I remember they end up in a parking garage at some point they do the big hit on somebody, Like all all that stuff is there. But it feels the best way I can describe it is it almost reminds me of someone's like fan fiction. They're like, I love the movie The Killers so much, but I need to know how do all these people know each other? How far back do they go? Did someone give someone water in prison? Maybe and that's why they're still friends today?
All the lore what if the villain had a parrot that made his decisions for him.
I love that. That's a classic candy.
That was so really yeah yeah, Like there are so many weird touches that like, I can't hate it, but I'm so baffled. But that's just that it's such a completely different culture. This is It's not the first time I've had that experience. I watched Mahakal as well the Indian Nightmare on Elm Street, and it's the same thing where I think it starts off maybe with a nightmare sequence, and then fifty minutes of the movie passes before the Nightmare on Olme Street, stuff starts happening, and it just
they want to lay out their world. They want to give you their probably highly paid comedy characters who exist in scenes that are unrelated to anything else in the movie. They throw in several musical scene sequences, and then those things that you recognize also start popping up along the way.
Well taught me a new word, Carol. What is the thing when you sing like a doughray me song?
Oh that's not that's French, that's sofage, sofage.
Okay.
I had some voice like friends who are singer friend like in classical voice training and so that is sofage And it was like, according, I've seen it myself, and Beth Watkins was telling me that it was really popular for a period in Hindi films in particular, and yet has one.
Yeah, I never heard that term before. Oh yeah, it sure does have one in space.
Did not expect it.
Yeah, there's a lot of this movie I didn't expect. And I will say that I feel compared to fourteen years ago, where I probably was making fun of this movie, I actually had a pretty good time watching this. I don't think it was the best Indian film that I've ever seen in my life, but I had some good times during it and it was just fascinating to see. Okay, here's this scene from The Killer. Twenty minutes later, here's another scene from The Killer. Twenty minutes after that, Here's
another scene from The Killer. But it definitely takes a different path.
I think if I had watched it on my own, I would be like, Okay, this is a very Hindi action movie. It has our Dads thirty years ago, it has oh look, it's veteran beloved actor Prawn as the secret father of the two guys it has a secret father, and then I'd be like, oh, that's a cute little reference to the Killer. Oh that's a cute little reference
to the Killer. And the rest is like just set up for melodramatic scenes about like really he's a good person, and action set pieces and comedy set pieces and they're all and musical numbers and so it's like basically an action Masala film where it has a little bit of everything for everybody, but a lot of action. And if I watch it as a Killer remake, then I yeah, I would be waiting fifty five minutes for the Killer remake instead of being like, I'm watching an Indian action movie.
This is what I'm doing with three hours of my tonight.
The amount of verbal justification their version of Jeffrey gives himself, like the amount of open conflict he discusses morally within himself and in his irredeemability or want for redemption or whatever it might be at the moment, all the things that Shalian Fat says by looking at the camera for a second.
Yeah, well, like the censorship board in India is still very strong, and so you get a lot more of really, I'm a good guy and like a lot of bad guys can't win, and so I think it affects the form a lot too. And it's ironic because Hong Kong also had a film censorship board in nineteen eighty nine. I don't know was the killer category three. I can't imagine it was not.
I don't remember seeing that on anything. For me. Category three usually has boobs, Yeah, he usually has boobs. Yeah, usually that was the magic formula there. So all the Amy Yip films I remember, but then you would get some of those extreme violence things too. Wasn't like a bull of syndrome and yeah, like those fit into the category three.
Stuff too, the Indian one, like you probably saw. When you watch it, there's always a certificate at the beginning of the film saying it's okay to watch. And I wonder how much that it's beyond people's really liking nice speeches and people trying to decide what the right thing to do is and justifying to other people how in this one he's I would be you if I had a different circumstance, and you would be me and the police officers. No, I wouldn't.
I made you made me first.
I mean I was a kid, I killed your parents. I mean I say I made you know you're going to say made me. How child is he get? I wouldn't get a guy would last. So much moralizing and
so much monologuing. But yeah, it did make me think of just even like old American films from like the Hayes era, where you'll go through the whole movie, at the end of it it's going to take a sharp turn where something is going to happen that was forced on them, and you can tell it doesn't fit the rest of the movie quite the same way.
Yeah, and there might even be someone saying, well, he was a good kid who went wrong or something like that.
Well, the weirdest thing about it, I think, though, with all the visual elements that it borrows, the one thing it doesn't really try to do like The Killer is the action. There's a lot of hand to hand stuff. The scene when he saves not Jenny from being harassed is like a full on like fight in a park instead of him just beating some dudes up and throwing a trash can at him. The action it did not it specifically, the most iconic thing did not borrow, like
the Kimbo pistols. It's usually one at a time, which admittedly is more accurate to use one gun at a time, but yeah, the action is entirely different. And I feel like if you're ripping off a John Woo movie, usually that's the thing people rip off the most.
When I saw Demolition Man for the first time and what was that ninety three when you get that slow most shot of Sylvester Stallone with two pistols shooting at Wesley Snipes, I'm just like, well, Okay, Hong Kong has arrived. We are now seeing the influence on American films.
I was wondering when I was watching it, like I've seen other Hindi movies where they have a lot of faux kung fu, like better or worse fake kung fu. But I'm like, if in ninety four what they were really going for was Jackie Kan, that they had been watching a lot of Jackie Chan and they were like, you know what, we'll do this movie and we'll have the stuff. Would be really great is to p see Saniel Shatty doing hand to hand combat and doing roundhouse and stuff in some kind of warehouse area.
Well, I know, Ras kicks a lot of ass and coolly like I was talking about, whenever he punches anybody, they literally fly across the room. It's amazing to see the force of his punches and just thinking about, Okay, where are they are they digitally removing the wires here because all of those seemed like yank shots.
Did you see the Tamil Singham where he's just picking up late posts and whacken people and.
They go play, Oh, that's I was going to say. Singlem is probably my favorite. Singham is a movie where that man is doing everything that we were choking about Chuck Morris doing twenty years ago.
And then if you watch the Hindi Group version, that is the most homooerotic film I have real hit. Shetty is absolutely in love with his action hero Jay Devkin in it.
Yeah that's the version I've seen.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's the Handy one.
All three main ones, and apparently there's a bunch of spin offs that I had no idea about.
The original one is Tamil movie. It's a South Indian movie, so the action is even more insane and extreme and the dancing is better.
I just love some of these extreme action films. And then you watch how the Americans were trying to ape it, and just so many of them were failing so hard. That little nod to Chilean Fat and King and everyone and says, low down, dirty shame.
I'm chill, young fat. Do you know what that means?
Yeah, you come with a egg roll and me so soup. You are not, buddy, or you get all those Chilean fat movies here in America that were just not good, not good at all. Replacement killers or bulletproof Monk.
I've heard that they actually made him burn his hands on the gun and replacement killers because he fired so much the gun got hot.
You've got to treat that man with some respect, these god amongst men.
And what a trooper he was to do it.
Anyway, The Killer obviously it opened up in Hong Kong in nineteen eighty nine. It would play a very fateful screening at the Toronto International Film Festival also in nineteen eighty nine. I just had to go back and double check that that was when it was playing. And yeah, it had such a big influence on so many things and just became not necessarily mainstream hit, more of an underground hit for a lot of folks. But It was one of those have you seen this movie? You have
to check this out. The LaserDisc that came out on Criterion was a huge release for a lot of people, and that was the way to see it for a long time, and it really just made such an impact that, of course a remake was inevitable, but thank god. Back in nineteen ninety two, Walter Hill and David Giler wrote
a screenplay for tri Star. The screenplay I have is dated April sixth, nineteen ninety two, and it's been a while since I've read it, and I just remember how off base it was through the whole thing, and just how everything that felt Asian had to be switched to American and everything that was more Western had to be switched to Asian. So rather than meeting in a church, they meet at a Buddhist monastery and I'm like, what the fuck are you doing? Not good whatsoever.
There's a line when he goes into that temple and they go do you believe in the Eightfold Path? And I'm like, oh my god.
Originally supposed to be Richard Gear and Denzel Washington, and then apparently there were concerns over get this homo erotic subtext between the two characters, So Terence Chang suggested that they go with Michelle Yo instead. I think that would have been right around the time she was coming to more American screens or world screens, I should say, with things like the World is Not Enough. Was that the James Bond one that she was in.
Yeah, that was about ninety eight.
Yeah, that was ninety eight. Oh, this is ninety two, Okay, so this is still yeah, because this was even before super Cop, right, yeah, a super cop I think we got was it ninety five?
Yeah?
I think you're right. Wow, So that would have been really unusual to have her in that. I have to see what the source is for that, because I can't see Michelle Yo.
I can see Terrence Cheng though, being like Michelle Yo is bad.
You know a legend when you see one.
And then in ninety three or was it ninety four, there was the Jim Cash and Jack Apps junior version, and that was a Caucasian hitman in Hong Kong. That one's a little bit better. The Hill and Giler one is just exorable. I just really if it had not been a PDF, I would have thrown it across the room when I was done with it.
That's a bummer because I generally like Walter Hill. But yeah, there's a reason not every project makes it to film.
Well, this is right around the time of Alien three, and I I know I have nothing good to say about him and how he treated Fincher in Alien three. Ironic that Fincher. Every time I look up The Killer, his movie The Killer comes up, I will.
Give the Walter Like I looked at the scripts today and I will give the Walter Hill one that he mostly just copies what goes on with the original movie, and like you say, then he's oh, this needs more orientalism. And I understand why he was making things more American, because I'm sure he wanted to get this movie made and they were like, we can't have a Chinese hero and doing that thing where they're like, it's not us,
it's American audiences. We're not racist. He made Jenny even more of a plot device, like Jenny is much worse a character, and everything is more explicit and as a little bit of pettiness. There's a part where in the nineteen eighty nine one where Jeff walks her home and then he's just going to leave because he's not a creepy weirdo, even though he's a killer. And a cat knocks over her lamp and he goes into check because something has happened in her apartment to make her scared.
And then there's that really charming scene where Chalian Fat where jeff'sy's a cat, and then we get to see Chalian fat mew and a cat, which I love. Walter Hill eliminated that, and he's just would you like to check me to check your apartment for you? And she's yes, I've been very scared ever since the thing happened. I'm sorry to bring it back.
Oh see, I was somehow I was expecting that to just turn into a full on sex scene. So it's so not sad. Never mind, Okay, we got there eventually, but the American way, if he ain't a man, if he ain't he had a plow, you're.
Doing this to Chalian fots memory, Sir, He's not even dead and you're doing it to his memory.
Yeah, then they both have happy endings, right. I think the second one, I think that was October eighteenth, nineteen ninety four. I was seeing ninety three before, but the ninety four to one they don't even I think have the showdown and a monastery. I want to say it takes place at a train yard.
I think it does. Yeah. And there's a Russian that the FBIBI agent who's come to Hong Kong because Tony Wang was an important politician in the United States and not just a Hong Kong big, big drug trafficker. And he shoots the Russian assassin in the face and then tells everybody that's Jeff and lets them go. And I think Jeff just leaves. He just gives the money to Jenny and takes off.
You know what I really want from a killer film is a very happy ending. That's what I would like. So I'm in Luck twenty twenty four, The Killer, John Wu returning to his old stomping grounds. Should he have even called this movie the Killer? I think Hamhin Benisol has more to do with the Killer than this film does.
The skeleton is there, but everything else is weird. It feels like something that went through a bunch of weird filters. And when you find out the person responsible is the person who gave you the original, all you have leftter questions.
Questions were answered by It's based on his film, and he didn't write it, so he directed it instead.
You've got what Brian Helgalin's name is attached to this, and Heglin's an interesting dude. I found out a lot more about him than I wanted to know when I was doing research about ninety seven six Evil Too, and just that he was a most dimension hinged when it came to that. Yeah, and so it's yeah, it's him, it's Josh Campbell and Matt's Duckin' I believe is how you pronounced his name. And then it's also Aaron Creevy, so Aaron Creevy has a writer credit, and then Helgeal
and Campbell and Stuck and have a screenplay. And of course there's an and, and there's an ampersand in there. So yeah, it does definitely feel like this went through a lot of hands as I was watching it, and I guess maybe it was the presence of Checki Cairo
in here too. I just kept thinking of a Luke Bassan film like I was thinking too, thinking some lafem Nakita, some Colombiana, just this whole idea of this female assassin in Paris, and I was seeing so much more Bason than I was seeing Wu in a Wu film, which is just a strange thing to say because for me Basan it was a lot of his career too, John Woo.
And more specifically for me, I wasn't thinking of Basan in particular, but a lot of the movies that he produced, Oh yeah, especially the mid early two thousands from like that like that Transporter District thirty era, where he was producing a lot of movies that involved brants but were clearly being made for the West. But yeah, the Kids of the Dragon of Jetley was probably one of the
better ones, but yeah, several. It fit more in with those, in particular with despite the fact that we're dealing with somebody who's generally considered a master filmmaker here, it doesn't quite feel right, and a lot of those movies, depending on who was directing them, never quite felt right either.
If I had seen this as a response to Bisons m. Nikita, I would feel I would really like it because I would feel like it fixed a lot of things that I found personally upsetting and lafem Nikita in terms of that whole thing of she's been crapped and she's been basically forced to become a killer. This would have been the movie that I would have wanted back when Lethum Nikita came out, and not the movie that I got that felt very much like a fantasy that I did
not enjoy watching. I know a lot of people love that movie, and please go ahead and enjoy it.
I rewatched it for this episode, and I remember liking it a lot, but I think I really only like the movie once Jean Renaud shows up, and I just love He's charming. He's very charming. He's dressed like Jeff Costello from Le Samurai again, so you have that nod in there, but him just as this unstoppable killer who has no qualms about murdering anybody. The way he's pouring acid over the body and the body starts kicking, and he's just like, oh, you fools, you didn't kill this
guy properly. I love it. I thought that every single scene he's in, which is unfortunately what the last ten minutes of the movie. Maybe it's weird for me to say this, but I really like Point to New Return better than the fam Nakita.
I've never seen all a point in a Return, and I keep meaning to I've got a complicated relationship with the son anyway, just because I've learned way too much about his personal life and can't can't go back to leon at all.
Oh no, thank you. I couldn't even handle that the first time I saw it all the way back then, I could.
Handle it only because of Jean Renau, because he made anything that felt like it could have been weird feel like it wasn't. But now, knowing who Bassan really is, I'm like, oh shit, not anymore, buddy. Sorry.
Yeah. And I was young at the time too when I saw that, so I like, Gean Renau is always amazing. He was clearly being fatherly and I was young, so I wasn't like Now, I would watch these movies and I'm like, your sketchy feelings about women really come through in your films. And I'm glad that John Wu is here to make this movie about a female killer that I wished I had seen.
Before, and this version of the killer talking about La fam Nikita. I don't know if you guys have ever seen the film Black at from I want to say ninety one. It's very to me, that's very much the Hong Kong repeating back Lafam Nikita, though not very good. I don't remember really liking that movie very much. I think The Killer twenty twenty four it's an interesting thing. It's always interesting to me when a filmmaker goes back
to something that they've done before. There is that select club of filmmakers who remake their own work, like Alfred Hitchcock or Panickey or I can't remember the name of the gentleman that did the Vanishing. But that's always an interesting thing to see what new things a filmmaker brings to his stuff. I don't expect Sam Worthington to be part of that new thing because as soon as Sam Worthington shows up on screen, I almost immediately check out
of a movie. So this was a little difficult for me for him to be playing this kind of Sydney role. But when I talk about how noble and just Sydney is, Worthington is his character, not the man himself, is completely the opposite, especially that he ends up spoilers for The Killer twenty twenty four. I'm glad I said that at the beginning, he ends up being the big betrayer of the whole thing, and he's the villain of the piece.
You spot it right out. If anybody needed a spoiler warning on that, I'm sorry. It's insanely evident from the second he opens his mouth.
I don't mind the woman that plays the Jeff character. I think she's actually really charming. Natalie Manuel, who plays z Zee, I really like Omar Sai as ci or say.
Yeah, he's easily the best part of the movie for me. He's so good.
I completely agree. Every time he's on screen, I'm like, yes, yes, this is good. And there are some scenes in here where I'm like, oh, well, this is interesting. The whole idea of the big murder that happens at the club and that she's got a samurai sword and that it's hidden in her clothes. Though, this whole idea of the tailor that Checkie Cairo plays so reminds me of John Wick getting a suit or even Eggsy and the Kingsman.
Yeah, there's a lot that's I feel like is the main difference is that there's so much John Wick influence in there, and I feel like I love John Wu and I love John Wick. That's close for very different reasons, Like they're they're in a similar they're both traveling along the same path, but I don't like them for being like the other thing. So like John Wick, as fantastical as it is, feels like it takes place in something more of a heightened version of reality where John Wu
at his best, like I said, is operatic. It feels fully out there. And yeah, there's there's definitely a lot of that John Wick. We've got the techno and the lights everywhere, and there's just there's so much more of that influence here. There's so much more hand the hand combat again starting with the samurai sort.
Yeah, it goes back to the Walter Hill because he was having like a lot of sliding between Chinese and Japanese things. What I think with this one, aside from if I watch it like I see it more yes in line with Lake French cinema, then John wos wants a thief? I say it. And I watched this movie and I'd tried to figure out how unfair I was being to it and how I would feel about it if I hadn't watched The Killer and if it wasn't The Killer. But I feel like the best things about
this movie for me are the John Wu parts. It's him directing Omar Sai. It's his bringing on his team for doing the editing and everything I don't like about this movie is the screenplay. And it's hard to separate though when you're watching the movie right. I don't think he's responsible for the screenwriters loving John Wick so much, but it just makes it more apparent how well he filtered his influences to make one of his own masterpieces.
And they tried to do the same thing. And we're like finding chunks of John Wick and chunks of other filmmakers and other films in it instead of being like it's a complete whole thing on its own.
What's weird to me that John Wick the last one? And I said, Jean Jean Wick, Jean.
Wick, thats fine?
Well, yeah, that was the thing is that the last one the big I can't call it an action step piece because it's almost like the Sissaphian challenge that he has trying to get up those steps at Momart.
Yeah.
The climax, Yah, it's fantastic. I love that he's trying to get up those stairs and he has to go up multiple times, and just that it's set at montmart where that for me is bob La Flambert and is just such a iconic thing. So when she looks out of her window here in The Killer twenty twenty four and she sees the Eiffel Tower, I'm like, why is
she not living in Malmar? Why is she not where Bob Laflambert was like to me, that's where John wu would set a remake of The Killer and instead, Yeah, just okay, it's a Parisian suburb kind of thing, even like the cover version of Live for Today that's going on through the movie, which ties the that kind of James Marston looking motherfucker at the beginning, or maybe more like Dave Franco at the beginning, to what happens later on at the club with said and I'm not going
to try to pronounce his last name, and I love again another actor who is in John Wick. Yeah, it just was so strange that john Wick four felt closer to Melville than this film did.
I think the thing about john Wick, even though there's a million of them, is they have a clear vision
of what they want to do with movies. They have their own rules now, but they were like ignoring a lot of the rules about filmmaking, like but the first one, especially ignoring a lot of the received wisdom about how you structuring pace a film, and this one feels like the screenwriters are very embedded in Hollywood idea, very current Hollywood ideas of how you write a film, how you reveal character down to it's she has to have several little character works and character growth art, and she has
to ask if everybody deserves it, very literally, and she has to have her crossword puzzle, and then the crossword puzzle has to be where she could never do the last clue and get the last word, and so at the end showing her growth, we discovered that the last clue of the last crossword puzzle is reborn and that just made me so mad.
Yeah, it's it's just it's heavy handed to say the least. I mean, again, going back to what I was alluding to way earlier, the fact that they had a conversation where they where the two characters are having a conversation and one of them says, in a different world, I would be you and you would be an me. We would be doing what the other one is to if
you spell it out for me. Okay, I'm stupid, that's fine, but yeah, and it really does go to give credit to especially like people don't give enough credit to that first John Wick movie and how intelligent it was in Geeze by peace letting you into that world and letting you get to know the characters and how things worked without spelling it out for you, and still giving you a hell of a ride along.
The way, and even things like the length of the cuts that they were willing to do in the fight at a time when everything was choppy to be They're like, no, we're going to let you see these people who do things do their things.
And that is why stuntman should direct more action movies. Though I have to say John Wick two, three four, somebody once said, I've never seen a movie franchise climb up its own ass so quickly.
Yes, I do not need the laurd.
Oh my god. The lore is just oh fuck you and your high table.
As long as they keep throwing dunes down escalators, like, I'll put up with the bullshit, It's fine.
I was going to say. My version of that is, I am so happy to see all these martial artists from all over the world get to do their set pieces. And I forgave so much of was it three where he went to Algeria.
I think it was Yeah, with the halle Berry and the dogs.
It wasn't bad. It just felt too long for me. But I forgave that film right at the end when it gave me Laurence Fishburn as a beggar king, and I'm like, I want to see this beggar king movie. Give me the ticket to the next movie right now.
Well, me seeing Donnie Yen as the Blind Swordsman that was so amazing.
I was like stealing the whole movie.
Oh yeah, Donnie Yen, is that Oichi? Please thank you?
And not just in the action, like he gets all the best line deliveries in that movie. He steals every second he's on screen.
Mark to Cascos as his fanboy.
Oh wow, yes, that was great. We're just gonna have to switch to the John wickcast.
Well, I feel that we're at least demonstrating that we can love in perfect movie.
The flashbacks in The Killer twenty twenty four start around eleven minutes in and they just carry on from there. And they have the style of these flashbacks. I'm just not a fan of these little half the screen and third of the screen cord of the screen where we get introduced to these flashbacks, the way things are sliding around and stuff. It just felt, I don't know, like they were bored or something, and I was getting bored watch some of these flashbacks.
And for me, it's just what I like about the original movie that neither of those the unofficial nor official remake does, is that I like that we don't need this the entire history of our killer. We don't need the entire history of anybody. We just get to pick up and run. I don't and especially with this one, because I appreciate that it's a female lead, I'm all for that. Why does her history have to be that she was picked up by a pimp and had to kill him. Come on, just let her also work her
way up the chain and be a bad ass. That can happen. Well.
The way they talk about her that she's the queen of Death and she's been murdering all these people, it sounds like for so long, And I'm like, she's not very old. Yeah, she's a pretty young lady here. I didn't even recognize her as being the same woman from Megalopolis, which we're going to be talking about later on this year as well.
Still still haven't taken a trip yet I think she was in I think she was in some of the Fast and Furious movies. I think that's where I first really was.
Yeah, she's one. I think she's one of the hackers.
I think you're right, yeah.
Crazy, because I've seen all of them, but I don't remember.
I mean the reality with those movies.
Talk about another franchise that went way up its own ass.
If they give me the rock kicking a torpedo, I feel like The Killer twenty twenty four doesn't understand how easy I am to please.
Yeah, just give me something so astoundingly stupid that I can't help but love it, and we're good.
I will say I was. There was a part where I literally gasped, and I'm like, it's been so long since I've seen a stunt performer set on fire.
Oh, I love the guy in the motorcycles almost sliding under that red car.
Give me some practical stunts, so I'm there for it.
When it comes to a awful relationship between two hardened killers, give me fucking Hobson shaw Man, I'll take it.
Yeah.
Yeah, And then you've got freaking Idris Elba as the Black Superman. The way that Jen not Jenny, the way that Jen loses her eyesight by just cocking herself on the back of the head in the club scene, and that she just miraculously gets her eyesight back at the end of the film, I guess because she's in the church. I'm like, what is going on here?
It almost felt like parody at that point that her eyesight came back at the end of the climactic action scene, like it is, oh, maybe a stretch here, but I'm remembering Bad Lieutenant Portocal, New Orleans, where the whole movie he's juggling all this horrible shit, and then the end of it just like everybody just starts washing away his troubles one after another, like hey, everything's fine, buddy, We're good.
And in there it was like clear, like humorous, satirical. Yeah, you can keep being a piece of shit, it's fine. But like here, it literally just felt, oh no, no, the bad stuff is over. Now she can see again. It's okay.
Yeah. I felt like they had to fill in everything, including that. I actually felt like she was more of a cipher than Sally yan Yay was as Jenny and the original and it's more upsetting to me because they were trying so hard. They're like, Oh, we'll make her. She'll be complicated too and have a growth arc. So she was implicated in the bad stuff, but now she's
been redeemed along with the killer person. But it also felt like one of those things where, well, we have one woman who's a complicated character, so we don't need to do it with the other one. And I'm like, Sally Yay is more complicated and she's not implicated in any drug running or getting herself into trouble before Jeff by having a bad boyfriend or any of that. And it's no shade on the actor who plays Jen in
the movie. She just doesn't have a lot to do and John will Films or like, look at how special and wonderful she is, but the script doesn't support it.
Yeah, it helps that the original Jenny, like, the whole point is that she is to me at least, is that she is something pure. She's not mixed up in any of this. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and she didn't do anything wrong. Once you start to complicate that backstory, it complicates everything else, especially when you're also completely removing the element of a love story. From this, which I feel.
Oh, yeah, well you have to you have to. You can't have lesbianism in this movie, god forbid.
Yeah, like the one major thing I was hoping they'd have the balls to do, but I knew it wasn't gonna happen. And at the same time, like, it's good that they didn't set up a romance with her and the cop because that would have also that would have been way too hacky. But come on, girls can love girls. It's fine. I've seen it happen.
I don't know the history of these scripts, so maybe you can lucidate, Mike, but I'm very suspicious about the gender swapping. After you were talking about Michelle Yo, they were like, maybe you can have Michelle Yo do it, and then it won't there won't be homo eroticism. And I'm like, Michelle Yo and Sally Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I know. For a while with this one, Lapitan Yongo was supposed to be cast in here. I know there was also talk. Sorry to go back to the original timeline that I put together, So nineteen ninety four we're talking about that. Two thousand and seven, there was supposed to be a version that John H. Lee was
supposed to do. That was going to be set in Koreatown, kinda town in south central and let's say Jong Wu Song was cast as the lead and they're planning on shooting in three D. Sarah Lee was cast as the blind singer, and John Wu was the producer. Then in twenty fifteen, Wu confirmed that John Lee's verse installed. He said that after filming Manhunt in twenty seventeen, he was
going to do a new American adaptation. That was twenty fifteen when he was talking about that, and then twenty eighteen the Universal stepped in and started to put this thing together. And that's when all of these writers got involved. I imagine it was probably, he said, script by Aaron Creevy based on drefts by Josh Campbell and Martin mart stuck In with contributions from Brian Helgalin. And that's when Nipeter Leongo was cast as the lead in a gender
and race swapped role. Let's see twenty nineteen Wu Tel's deadline that Jongo exits due to scheduling conflicts after a script rewrite, so maybe she didn't like the script. Twenty twenty two Universal confirms that was directing and then it's going to be released on Peacock. August O Marci's cast as the cop character. Twenty twenty three March Dead League Manuel is cast as the lead, and then filming starts
in Paris. That is halted mid year by the SEG after strike, and then finally in August twenty third, twenty twenty four, it gets dumped on Mean released to Peacock.
Do you think the same people have been holding on their rights since nineteen ninety two?
Thinks so, yeah, Peacock is Universal and when he even when Wu came to the US, his first movie was Hard Target with Universal, So there is very much a possibility, which also, you know, I think a lot about how like the stories about how on Hard Target Sam Raimi produced and the studio wanted Rainy on the back back burner just in case they thought this crazy Hong Kong guy couldn't control the set and let you know, Rainy
take over. And I can't help but think that if anyone was going to remake this, and maybe it wouldn't be terrible, Rainy might have been a good one to do it.
You look at the original ending of or Sorry, the new ending of Army of Darkness, with the whole smart stuff that is so.
Woo mm hmm. There's stuff in even like the way he shoots, even Western stuff and the Quick and the Dead. It's there, just a crazy action in Dark Man Like I for a guy who doesn't do like straight action movies very much, I think you do an incredible one.
I know a lot of people weren't into that multiverse of badness just because the script was so weak, But some of the action, some of the special effects. Gosh, when you've got all those demons making Doctor Strange's cloak and everything, I'm like, Yes, this is the Raimi that I was looking for.
Yeah, there's some fun stuff in there.
You got pizza Papa Baby.
No.
I bet there was a lot of notes involved in the whole process.
I don't know if there ever was, because we've talked a lot about the gender swapping, the race swapping, the ethnicity swapping. I don't know if there ever was a because you can't have and I'm saying this as a Hollywood producer, you can't have this relationship between these two women. Oh my god, we cannot allow that at all. And even it probably was fear of missagenation, probably fear of Oh my god, you can't have you can't have a white guy with an Asian woman. You can't have a
black man with an Asian woman. None of this stuff is going to fly.
It.
It's so rare, even now in twenty twenty five, first to have mixed race couples on screen. It's fucking crazy.
And there's so many mixed race couples in America. But you probably already know the pain of having these people use people in the flyover in the Midwest as like their excuse to do continue doing this even though we're right here being like we want these things.
Heaven forbid, I'm just going to start clutching at my pearls if I start thinking about, oh my gosh, this black frenchman, this American woman, and then this white woman singer. Oh my god, I can never this is impossible.
Yeah, what if they all ran off together? Oh, I know, you become a thruple at the end. That would solve so many problems in so many movies. We wouldn't have wrong comblems anymore.
Well, and what I like is in the first one, if you're feeling homoerotic, that solves their problem. And they seem to be okay with that. It's just that shing foy On is not okay with anything because he's an angry hot head.
He has one of the great cinema faces.
I just love his traumatic head injury bandage in the final.
Even in the final fight that takes place at the church, which we get back to the church and everything here. But it has to be a woman that she's fighting. She can't fight them man through this, I'm like, what are you doing that?
I was pissed off about that too.
And this is after Atomic Blonde.
And this was after, of course, as we joked earlier, they had to make sure you knew that the church was deconsecrated, so that there are any fucking stakes at all.
Arted to feel really bad for the writers, like what an impossible task.
The climax of the original being so iconic. I was like, I watched when I rewatched it, I watched it with a partner who had never seen it before, and she was picking up on stuff like, oh, like the ending of Cowboy Bebop, like that takes place in a church and it's a more heightened version of very similar, and that it's so iconic. But the main thing is that there are. It feels like a thousand guys pouring into
that church, one after another. And this half of it takes place outside in the in the graveyard area, which kind of reminded me a hard target, which I love. And then the other half of it is them like hand to hand fighting people in the building for the most part. And it just that's not that, ain't it. Maybe that's not what I wanted.
Her running across the backs of the views and I'm just like talking about wirework earlier. I'm just like, Okay, I can basically see the wires here. They're painted out. You know what's not painted out are all the security cameras in the church. There are security cameras everywhere. And I'm just like, Okay, this doesn't look like it's an abandoned church. It looks like it's very still active. With all of the security stuff going on here.
It looks like perhaps it's a historic church that they're like, you can't put squibs all over the church or in the historic grave yard.
Oh, I guess we'll have to fight hand to hand and I'll crack this girl's neck with the white girl druads.
I think for me, that's just the hardest part though, is that what I think Wu was best at visually wasn't here. I think it may just be the use of digital cameras when most of his classic work was done on film. But it just it doesn't look right. It feels weird. The slow mo even looks messy.
Well, tell me how cool is it in the original when they're going up against Jinfuan at that church and he's got that gun against Jenny's head and the way he's like moving with the guns and everything, and Danny Lee says to Charlie on fat You'll always have a friend to back you up, and then you see that he's got a gun taped in the in the back of his pants and you're just like yes, Like that is one of the coolest things ever, as opposed to what size shoes do you wear?
Well, and it has the friendship squishes too, your like oh.
And that going going into we didn't really get it the idea that everything has to have a backstory, there has to be history, and for those who didn't watch it, like the shoe thing is referencing that there was a completely unrelated incident where our heroes met before but didn't know it, and he was. The cop was about to die, and he distracted the killer, the person who was going to kill him, not the killer, by saying asking what
size shoes you wear? And then some mysterious angel killed the guy and he got away and we find out, Oh it was Natalie Z. That's her name. It was Z the whole time, and oh they go all the way back and he wouldn't be here if it wasn't for her. And now they have to love each other, okay.
Yeah, And it also felt like they were making this big point where it's not that they're affectionate towards each other, it's that they're they're both like Sherlock Holmes, and they're really good at thinking like each other.
Yeah, they've come to an understanding and I enjoy.
That in Cozy Mysteries, although sorry, Holmes and Watson got their home roticism too.
But now you're talking about the John C. O'Reilly and Will Ferrell version.
Now I had to wash my hair that day. I missed it.
No, for sure, Downy and Law had that going on in spades, and then they kind of ruined it with the whole wedding in the second one. I'm like why just leave these guys bachelors.
I bet it's the same damn executive confirmed bachelors.
Just talking about investigative skills did what I do a lot lately and made me think of what if Colombo got involved somehow? But that's my own problem.
I could see him having those little looks with any of.
Them, and he'd never have to fire a show.
When Colombo would respect.
The Killer, they really did come to a mutual almost a friendship a lot of the time. That those are my favorite episodes. Sometimes the first Shatner episode is like that. The one with the pleasance is.
Like that, them sharing a bottle of wine at the end.
That is my favorite period. It's so good.
I just got goosebumps.
Those were so wonderful that when he actively loathed one of the killers and he revealed that, it was like, oh my god, he hates Leonard Nimoy.
And even then he's so pleasant of me. No, sirh I don't like you very much at all, Like, oh shit, that's the most heartbreaking thing anyone could say.
They have to be like, I don't think very much of you well at all. Oh my god. He said he didn't think very much of me.
Well, you should do a podcast about Colombo sometime.
I could call it The Shabby Detective.
Eh, that's a thought.
All right, guys, let's call this tonight. I want to thank my co hosts, Carol and Jackie for joining me on this trip back to the Killer. So, Carol, what is the latest with you, ma'am?
Everybody can find me at the Culturalgutter dot com, where a website dedicated to thoughtful writing about disreputable art. And we're on blue Sky and Facebook as Cultural Cutter and Jackie.
How about yourself, I'm all over the place. Usually I have nothing to talk about. And this year has been the year.
Of the Summer of Stargrove.
That's got the alliteration too. There we go. But that summer started much earlier this year when somebody allowed me to write a piece on their website. As I recall, I feel like I may have submitted something to the Cultural Cutter that was very well received at a time when I really needed something cool to happen. But yeah, ever since then the year has been just slam packed with opportunities. I besides my usual work hawking tickets at
the draft House and the local comedy Club. I've been working with a local I guess microcinema in Austin here called the Hyperreal Film Club or I've been doing copywriting for their website as well as hosting stuff. And they even let me program one of our past episodes which I plugged.
Uh.
They let me program Never Too Young to Die last week, which considering that our the local showings that night elsewhere were a screening of Caught Stealing? Is it Caught Stealings?
The new one with Aeronofski? Yeah, Aeronofski was there, Austin Butler was there, and Matthew McConaughey was moderating the Q and A. So half of the audience was probably at that, and then the other half we're over at the Austin Film Society because they were showing Welcome to the Dollhouse and Crybaby, and I'm like, oh, John Waters, that would have been my crowd. So that's fine. But yeah, I'm just great stuff there, anyone in the Austin area, if you ever got a chance. It is just a wonderful
little piece of cinema magic. I love it so much. I also have a friend of mine works for a newspaper in California the Hanford Sentinel, and he has given me a monthly column there just entertainment stuff whatever kind of wets my whistle. The first one it being right around the fourth of July, I went over a lot of the more beloved Jaws, the movies that were seen as knockoffs at the time, even though I think they're
all great on their own. This past month I covered a lot of the very surprisingly famous people that started with Trouma Nobe. I think is aware that my neighbor Totoro's first American release came through Trauma because nobody else would release it without shredding it and editing it to bits. And Lloyd Coffin when all the ups and downs that he may have had professionally, like, he saw the art in that and he just let it go and I love that. But yeah, so just cool stuff that has
been happening all over the place. I'm also part of a band called Air forty seven. We're going to be at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo in October and doing a show of our own, sort of off site. But I should also be moderating a panel regarding old FMV games, like the old Live Action stuff from the nineties and some of the current stuff that's happening as well. So I'll be working that's the biggest thing I'll be doing
that people might actually be able to see on the internet. Otherwise, if for any reason anybody wants to reach out to me at Jackie Stargrove atgmail dot com. Is wide open and I'm I'm pretty much all over whatever social media because I am poor that way, and I don't mind it.
It's so nice hearing all of these updates when normally it was oh, follow me on letterbox, here's my name, yep. This is so great. I'm so happy for coming together. Yeah, well, thank you so much folks for being on the show. Thanks to everybody for listening. If you want to hear more of me shooting off my mouth, check out some of the other shows that I work on. They are all available at weirdingweymedia dot com. Thanks especially to our Patreon community. If you want to join the community, visit
patreon dot com slash Projection Booth. Every donation we get helps the Projection Booth take over the world.
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