Review: The Man From Hong Kong

The Man from Hong Kong
Dir. Brian Trenchard-Smith & Jimmy Wang Yu
Year: 1975
Aus Rating: R18+ (DVD: MA15+)
Running Time: 111mins

The Man from Hong Kong begins with a fist fight on top of Uluru and ends with George Lazenby being - very literally - set on fire. In between there are explosions, kung fu, abseiling, hang gliding, sword fights, grenades, sniper rifles, Chinese food, cars flying through weatherboard houses, nudity, party crashers, assassins, slapstick comedy plus "Sky High" by 1970s one-hit wonders Jigsaw as the movie's theme song! Does this not amaze you?

The plot, what litter there is to be attained in between fight sequences, is this: Some Chinese dude must come to Australia to take a drug dealer back to Hong Kong, but he then becomes involved in some sort of mission to bring down Sydney's biggest drug kingpin. Or something to that effect. It really doesn't matter, does it?

The action scenes, courtesy mostly of Jimmy Wang Yu, are what anybody watching this movie in this day and age is after and they don't disappoint. Apart from the opening scene at Uluru, there is the famous stunt wherein Yu kicks a man off of a moving motorbike and - my favourite - the knife fight in the Chinese restaurant, there are battles with a pack of kung fu experts, a car chase along a cliff and a moment that would cause PC cops today to shudder at the media attention it would receive. While making former "James Bond" George Lazenby look like a profession martial arts expert is a challenge, there are moments when the action is full on. You can tell it's real when the dirty footprints are left on the shirt of a man who has just been kicked in the gut by an agile kung fu master.


In other regards the film is not so much of a success. Acting is generally quite woeful with Yu being the worst offender and his occasional love interests - Rebecca Gilling predominantly - all register nil on a score of ten. At least George Lazenby is having fun! Or was he? At least the cinematography by future Oscar-winner Russell Boyd is lively and the score by Noel Quinlan is energetic and exciting like many scores from this period of Australian cinema. I'm surprised Quentin Tarantino hasn't used bits of the score in his films! Actually, the entire car chase that happens towards the end of the film was, surely, the inspiration for the near-identical scene that Tarantino featured in Death Proof.

One of the film's guiltiest pleasures is watching in shock and awe at how incredibly racist the film is. And while it is the Asian race that bares the brunt of it, the white people are presented as such moronic doofuses on many occasions that I can't help but feel writer/director Brian Trenchard-Smith was an equal opportunist in this department! How does one explain the scene in which Yu is kissing a girl and she mentions her surprise at how good it it, to which he responds with a joke about acupuncture! And just moments earlier the woman was making slanty-eye jokes! Or when asked "do you normally sleep with white women" he replies "Only on Tuesdays and Thursdays." I am not making this up! And then there's the barrage of comments from the white police officers such as "I find Chinese make the best servants" and "I never met a Chinese yet that didn't have a yellow streak." My personal favourite, if you can call it that, was "This is Australia, not 55 Days at Peking!" Er, if you say so, but I was sure I saw Charlton Heston sulking around in the background at one point!

Having seen Mark Hartley's Not Quite Hollywood helps, as witnessing the moments discussed in that award-winning documentary is something to behold. Watch as a car door flies perilously close to the camera after an explosion with the knowledge that it actually was that close! Watch as stunt men (or, usually, just regular actors being paid a pittance) get flung about onto cars and into rivers. Watch as George Lazenby accidentally gets set on fire, resulting in Lazenby being sent to hospital, and watch how Yu interacts with the white women in the cast, knowing now as we do that he actually despised white women and would eat bugs before having to kiss one. He was such a lovely man, I'm sure.


Truly a time capsule worth cherishing for ways that, perhaps, aren't the purest, The Man from Hong Kong is a blast of energy that is sorely lacking within the Australian film industry right now. The size and scope of the entire film is impressive - especially since it was Trenchard-Smith's first feature - and it remains mind-boggling that they were able to get away with half of this. People aren't even allowed to walk up Uluru anymore, let alone stage and elaborate fight sequence! It's a hoot and I don't care what you say! B

MIFF Review: Not Quite Hollywood

Some of the adjectives you're sure to read in relation to Mark Hartley's new documentary about the Australian film industry of the 1970s and '80s are "raucous!", "rip snorting!", "crass!" and "hilarious!", which seem quite apt considering they're same terms you would use to describe the films Not Quite Hollywood documents. Taking a fast-paced and visually inventive look at the "ozploitation" films of years past, the film is filled with male and female nudity, absurd violence, foul language and everything else that the sex and gore-filled films of my country's past pride themselves by revelling in.

Spread across Not Quite Hollywood's 98 minute running time - it feels much longer, but in a good way - are clips from so many movies that I lost count after the first five minutes. Some of the movies discussed are good (Brian Trenchard-Smith's Dead End Drive-In, Richard Franklin's Patrick and some are most definitely not (Phillipe Mora's Howling III: The Marsupials, Simon Wincer's Harlequin), but they're all fascinating to watch and experience how they work into the fabric of not only Australia's film industry, but also our identity as a whole.

It's a testament though to Hartley's direction and, especially, the editing by Hartley, Sarah Edwards and Aussie genre director Jamie Blanks, that even the bad movies provide just entertaining fodder. When there are hundreds of movies to choose from and to condense it down to a core group and then represent those by a mere scene or quick grab is quite a task and they carry it off with aplomb. Others have said the film drags, particularly towards the end, but I really could have kept watching it all night long.

The names that Hartley has assembled is mightily impressive. It's fascinating to hear unabashed ozploitation fan Quentin Tarantino wax lyrical on the films of cult director Brian Trenchard-Smith, listen to Dennis Hopper tell of how he had no idea what he was doing on the Australian set of Mad Dog Morgan, Barry Humphries crack wise about Picnic at Hanging Rock and Jamie Lee Curtis being confused as to why she was being asked to star in an Australian movie with, of all people, Stacy Keach. And that's barely scraping the surface of the names involved, which stretches back into the annals of Australian film both known and obscure. It really is marvelous to watch.

In fact, it really is hard to dig very deep at all in a review such as this because Not Quite Hollywood is just overflowing with trivia, tidbits, history and memories. Granted, the film will have a special place for those who grew up watching these films (or, like me, have started to delve into the genre in recent times thanks to DVD), but I also think the film will work well for those who were completely oblivious to it as well.

Unless you're Bob Ellis, and anyone who has seen this exceptionally crafted and wildly entertaining film will know why. B+

Black + White Friday: Dead End Drive-In

At my screening of Mark Hartley's ace documentary Not Quite Hollywood it seemed the audience had quite a laugh-filled reaction to the brief segment reserved for this absolutely terrible horror comedy flick, Howling III: The Marsupials. I doubt many, if any at all, had actually seen it. I know if I hadn't already I would want to see it prono after watching it be discussed in the documentary as it appears to be a riot! Alas, it is not. It's awful. Absolutely awful. And I just so happen to own it on DVD (it came free with a magazine, you see). So, in honour of Not Quite Hollywood and all the ridiculous excessive silliness that it embraces, I decided to use it as this week's black and white specimen.

...unfortunately it's still really shit. That and, this I had forgotten, the quality is really bad. Like, below usual public domain standards. So, to keep the theme, I decided to use a much more normal movie - the excellent (you've heard me harp on and on about it lately) Dead End Drive-In, which just so happens to be Quentin Tarantino's favourite film of the "ozploitation" genre. The film is beautiful to look at in colour, so let's see if it's A-grade B thrillers still work on black and white.


One of my favourite moments in Dead End Drive-In is this quick joke that in the near future there will have been eight Rambo films. We did get to four with Rambo IV releases earlier this year, so they were close!


I like how director Brian Trenchard-Smith routinely puts the STAR DRIVE-IN sign throughout the movie, whether it be front and centre of just in the background. Constantly reminding that they're trapped inside such an un-hostile environment.


You can make anything related to a drive in black and white and it just looks so 1950s. Even if it includes panel vans!


I chose this shot because if you showed someone this picture they wouldn't have any reason to suspect it was from a 1985 Aussie flick about racist gangs trapped inside a post-apocalyptic drive-in. or would they? teehee.


One of the funniest parts of Not Quite Hollywood is when Quentin Tarantino jokes about how every Australian movie of this sort has a gang of youths in it. No matter where it's set, youth gangs will be there! It's funny 'cause it's true. Others things that will always be: the mix between old (jukeboxes) and new (graffiti) along with punk clothes and makeup. Always.


I just like this shot. Not sure why. Doesn't even look like it's from the same movie, actually.


That computer is an important plot point. It makes me giggle. My Commodore64 was more advanced.


I love any shot that has a drive-in movie screen in the background. It has some sort of calming effect on me. Even though what's happening around it is far from comforting.


The movie's most famous (which, considering the film's level of fame, means it's really not famous at all) moment is this record-breaking shot (or so Trenchard-Smith tells us in the audio commentary on the DVD) of a police car crashing through the neon sign seen in image #3. Looks better in colour.


What's kind of creepy is how this doesn't even look real. The early and final scene of Dead End Drive-In have a creepy look to them with it's deep red skies. They sort of look like painted backdrops (the specific name for them escapes me at the moment, ugh). This shot almost looks like it belongs to a computer game. Otherworldly.