Last Updated on January 23, 2021 by rob
Just for fun three bespectacled geeks set off a small bomb in a crowded cinema. Rumbled by a psychotic female teen named Pearl (Chen Chi Lin) the lads find themselves blackmailed into helping the girl pull off a series of audacious robberies while Pearl’s estranged father (Lieh Lo) turns out to be the detective investigating the bombing. When the boys inadvertently make off with a box containing high value cheques from an American they soon have Lo’s cop, the local Triads and a trio of fantastically ruthless Vietnam vets on their trail and things get very bloody indeed.
Marvellously gritty, sweaty, scummy, no-holds-barred crime melodrama which ran into all sorts of local censorship difficulties at the time and was drastically re-edited in order to tone down its scenes of rebellious youth. Opening with a mouse having a pin stuck through its head (later on a cat is all too convincingly flung off a roof to end up impaled on the spikes of an iron fence) Hark’s debut as director has a compulsive intensity that stems from its gonzo unpredictability. For the first two-thirds it’s simply impossible to tell where this story is going. Is it about three nice kids looking for thrills who get more than they bargained for when a seeming sociopath enters their world and begins to take it over? Well up to a point, yes, but it’s also a portrait of disaffected youth whose behaviour, it is implied, has been caused, at least in part, by the emotionally distant – and sometimes very violent actions – of their parents.
And its portrait of four teens pulled into a spiral of murder and madness is neither cynical nor mean-spirited. For example, the character of Pearl ends up as an unexpectedly sympathetic figure far removed from our initial impressions. If the bracing unpredictability of Dangerous Encounters slackens off in the final third that’s only because the compelling struggle for dominance between Pearl and the lads gives way to a more familiar generic climax in which the lads, along with Lo Lieh’s cop, must face off against the bad guys in a massive cemetery almost as big as the one at the end of Leone’s The Good, The Bad And The Ugly. That said, it’s still a really strong climax and it’s weird that the HK censors took such exception to the film’s alleged anti-social sentiments since its penultimate image – of one of the few survivors firing his weapon wildly around the cemetery after having gone completely mad – is about as potent a warning against getting mixed up with bombs and guns as you could wish for.
For movie buffs the film has other attractions too. In common with so much of HK genre cinema the music is comprised of either library tracks – in this case it’s a real pleasure to hear many of the best cues familiar from Romero’s Dawn of the Dead – or simply lifted from other movies. So we also get The Baseball Furies track from Hill’s The Warriors, a snatch of Goldsmith’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture score and I’m pretty sure there are some James Bond cues in there too. After a run of failures its director ultimately reinvented himself as a Hong Kong super-producer of crowd-pleasing Kung-fu action movies, often with a historical/fantasy bent, e.g; Once Upon A Time In China, A Chinese Ghost Story, Dragon Inn, etc.
That’s nice and all but hopefully this startling movie won’t be forgotten either. Incidentally, the censored version – which I gather rejigs the opening to make it look as though the lads run over a pedestrian rather than bomb a cinema(!) – apparently flopped in HK cinemas. The animal cruelty scenes likely still wouldn’t pass muster at the BBFC (even if the cat scene does cleverly foreshadow the fate of one of its principal characters) but it’s to be hoped that at some point maybe a distributor can pick up the rights and get the original version out there. It’s a movie that, seen as its director intended, packs an uncompromising punch.
