The Man From Hong Kong(1975)was one of the Aussie first movies I sought out when I first became interested in the Ozploitation genre. If I remember correctly, It was the trailer for Not Quite Hollywood that sparked my interest even though it would take me a couple years to see the documentary. I figured it was a good starter movie to immerse myself into the genre, since I was already a seasoned professional with Kung-Fu love. I looked at it as a winning situation in screening. How bad can a movie be starring Jimmy Wang Yu, former Shawscope star and international dickhead extraordinaire? The answer was NO WAY IN HELL could it ever be considered anything but a classic to those of us who are fans of genre cinema. Not only are the martial arts scenes primo, which was my initial draw, but the action was non-fucking-stop and I couldn't keep my eyes off the damn screen. Fights, car chases, and explosions up the wazoo.....The Man From Hong Kong met every expectation I had and then some. I find it to be one of those action movies that I have based all others on since I first watched it a couple years back.
And now you New Yorkers who have never seen it can experience the same enjoyment I have, because it's screening at Spectacle Theater tomorrow at Midnite.
IMDB says - "It's 1975. A time of funky pants. Muscle cars. Ridiculous sideburns. Porn-star moustaches. Bruce Lee still rules the world of action movies (despite being dead), and I haven't even been BORN yet.
Sydney. Jack Wilton (The Laze) is a bad-ass crime lord with a penchant for cravats, orange velvet sofas and all things Oriental. Under the cover of his legitimate import/export business, he runs an international drug-smuggling outfit with connections in Hong Kong. Two federal narcotics cops, Grosse (Hugh Keays-Byrne, Toecutter from Mad Max) and Taylor (Roger Ward, Fifi from - er - Mad Max) manage to catch Win Chan (Sammo Hung), a member of this Hong Kong connection, following a well-staged--yet amusingly pointless--fight sequence atop Uluru (sorry, Ayers Rock). Chan is to be extradited, as soon as he testifies against Wilton. But the Aussie cops hadn't counted on the extradition officer being a certain Inspector Fang Sing-Ling (Jimmy Wang Yu), of Hong Kong Special Branch ("What's so special about Special Branch?" you ask? Watch the movie and find out!). Fang is a loose cannon, to say the least, and is intent on bringing down Wilton's entire operation himself, no matter how much of Sydney he has to destroy in the process."
Did you know (thanks to IMDB)....According to the DVD Audio Commentary and the documentary Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! (2008), the fight scene atop of the elevator between Wang Yu and Brian Trenchard-Smith allegedly involved real fisticuffs, the punches thrown at the latter allegedly being real punches. Reportedly, the two had a strained relationship during the shoot. As Wang Yu is credited as a co-director in some prints, as such, this movie represents an instance where a film's rival two directors have literary fought it out on the set.
Saturday June 18th at Midnight @ Spectacle 124 S. 3rd St., (at Bedford Ave.)Williamsburg, Brooklyn
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