Tag Archives: Hong Kong

Films & Television

The Storm Warriors

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First off, don’t watch this. It’s terrible and you’d only be wasting your money. That said, I expected it before I went in and still dragged my wife into the cinema with me. This is because the original film The Storm Riders from 1998 is a huge guilty pleasure for me. This old review from LoveHKFilm.com (who still haven’t posted their review of the sequel yet!) put it best by calling it the Hong Kong version of Star Wars. As the reviewer Kozo noted, the original film, for all its cheap CGI effects, poor acting and hackneyed plot, successfully transported the viewer into a fantasy version of a mythical China that never actually existed but is clearly drawn from and inspired by Chinese themes and legends.

For my part, I immediately recognized The Storm Riders when I first watched it as the Chinese analogue of the many Western fantasy worlds I knew so much, Tolkien’s Middle Earth being the most iconic example. Of course, it wasn’t the only Chinese fantasy world. The version of China that Louis Cha’s novels are set in is unarguably more famous and celebrated, but it didn’t really feel fantastical enough for me. Come on, The Storm Riders even has a freaking dragon in it! Considering The Journey to the West as being fantasy is a bit unfair too. It would be like calling The Bible a fantasy novel.

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Personal Life

Holiday in Hong Kong

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In retrospect, scheduling a holiday to Hong Kong at this time was probably not the smartest decision possible. Between the H1N1 fears and the bad weather, our experience left much to be desired, but we still managed to have an enjoyable time overall and got to know Hong Kong more. Part of this was because it was a last minute arrangement and we were originally supposed to go with a tour group including older family members to Taiwan, but it was cancelled and my wife and I had to decide where to go on our own during our scheduled holiday time. And so to Hong Kong it was, including a day trip to Macau as pictured above.

What I mostly learned about Hong Kong is that it’s one huge contiguous crowd of people! Having never been to HK or even any part of China before, the sheer number of people was staggering to me. And all of them constantly walking briskly and purposefully from one place to another too. Indeed, one evening spent in Causeway Way on the day before the Rice Dumpling Festival was nearly standing room only on the streets. We met up with a couple of friends from high school who showed us the ins and outs of living in HK. To get a restaurant table, we had to get waiting tickets from four or five different restaurants and see which queue was the shortest. At the longest queue, the number currently being served was 61 while the ticket we had was 161. Between this sort of thing and the need to constantly walk between bus and MTR stations since hardly anyone actually drives in HK, I see that Hong Kongers get much more exercise than Malaysians.

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Films & Television

Gong Tau

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Apologies for the poor quality of the screenshot. I had to disable hardware video acceleration to take it. It’s from a recent Hong Kong movie that my wife and I just watched, called Gong Tau in Cantonese, and badly translated as Oriental Black Magic in English. Check out LoveHKFilm.com (which happens to be my favourite site for reviews of Asian cinema) for a full review.

By any reasonable standard, this is one terrible film. It has bad acting (Mark Cheng is impossibly stone-faced no matter what kind of crazy shit is happening while Maggie Siu is a hopeless mess of hysterics in just about every scene), a perfectly predictable by-the-numbers plot hurried along by wildly implausible yet convenient events, sometimes extremely fake-looking CGI, and absolutely zero sense of actual horror due to the lack of any tension or dread. What is amazing about this film however, is its sheer excess that as LoveHKFilm points out, has not been from Hong Kong in a while.

Full frontal nudity, both male and female? Check. Mutilated baby? Check. Gross autopsies and vivisections? Check. Animals shredded into stringy bits? Check. It’s like the film makers held a round table to brainstorm ideas for the most shocking and disgusting scenes possible and high-fived each other over every sick suggestion. You know how in some games when characters get blown up and you end up with gory bits of blood-drenched remains scattered all over the place that are now known as gibs? Well, if you ever wanted to see what gibs might look like in a movie, Gong Tau is the film to watch.

Even the ridiculousness of the Asian curses aspect of the movie pales before the excessive gore, but they still deserve some mocking. I mean, flying heads? Mind control? Black market magicians selling each other corpse oil? I don’t really need to reiterate my longstanding disdain of superstitious nonsense here, but I have to say that sometimes the best way to show how stupid something is, is to take it to its extremes. If stuff like this really works in real life, why are we still using bullets and bombs?

Anyway, check out this movie if you have a fetish for disgusting gore, or I suppose if you want to see pretty new actress Teng Tzu-Hsuan fully nude, but there’s really no other reason to put up with this pile of crap.