Wong playing the old cop here, like Simon Yam in a similar role in Milkyway’s Eye in the Sky, makes me feel ancient. With lots of screeching rubber and engine revs, though with a neat twist that the car chases aren’t about speed and crashes so much as stealth and maneuverability, raising the suspense level while keeping the budget down.
#DEMON DRIVERS CAPSULE MOVIE#
I suspect this is the Milkyway Image version of the Fast and the Furious movies, but I haven’t actually seen any of those yet so I can’t be sure¹. It is a movie with Anthony Wong playing the veteran cop a few days from retirement trying to corral his hotheaded young partner as they track down a notorious getaway driver. This Raymond Wong is much younger, seen mostly in smaller roles in Milkyway films.
Another is Raymond Wong Ho-yin, who is not the producer/writer/actor Raymond Wong who starred in three of Johnnie To’s early films, that’s Raymond Wong Pak-ming, nor is it the Raymond Wong who’s composed many a Johnnie To and Stephen Chow score, among dozens of other Hong Kong films, that’s Raymond Wong Ying-wah. One of their friends is a cop, played by Carl Ng, son of comedian and 80s icon Richard Ng. It’s most reminiscent of some other attempts at fusing Hong Kong crime and romantic melodrama, like As Tears Go By or The Odd Ones Dies, but it isn’t as cool as the first nor as gloriously weird as the latter.Įason Chan plays the lead, and Niki Chow is his girlfriend. Cheang piles flashbacks and side characters one on top of the other but always returns us to those first idyllic moments in the Chinese countryside. It’s not as slickly composed as Cheang’s Milkyway films ( Accident and Motorway), and it’s much more hectic in pace (both those later films are very much about trying to slow down the chaos of Hong Kong’s criminal life, or at least its crime genre films). The desolation of a breakup, and the desperate drive to get back together after realizing your mistake, is externalized as a bloody Hong Kong crime saga. It seems their car was stolen by a gang of criminals, and when the man (professionally an ER nurse) randomly encounters them, he’s taken hostage and dragged through the city as they attempt to make their murderous way to safety. Director Soi Cheang freezes the frame ever so slightly at this moment: what had been the story of a relationship on fast-forward is about to become something else entirely.
When they discover their minivan has been stolen, the ensuing fight breaks them up instead. One day, several years later, they’re about to go on vacation to Europe. We see their life together unfold in quick edits and voiceovers, not always in an immediately intelligible order. Love Battlefield - October 19, 2014Ī man and a woman meet and fall in love on vacation.
The Death Curse - October 24, 2014įor the most part a rather underwhelming haunted house film (father invites his seven (eight? I forget) estranged children to visit him, then dies, mysterious things ensue) almost totally redeemed by an intricately constructed finale that points the way forward to the ingenious devices director Soi Cheang would later employ in Accident. Like an extremely fucked up remix of Rouge.Īside from the obvious craft, this may be most interesting as a kind of dark foreshadowing of director Soi Cheang’s SPL2, both revolving around donation (blood, organs) as a literal connective tissue between otherwise isolated and lonely people, disrupted and twisted into evil by a lack of consent on the part of the donator ( SPL2) or the donee ( New Blood). Extremely spooky low-budget ghost story about one half of a double suicide haunting the three people who donated blood and thus saved the life of the other half.
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