The Man From Hong Kong/Review

From The Grindhouse Cinema Database

< The Man From Hong Kong

The Ozploitation era brought audiences fresh, exciting, and awesome movies from Down Under. There are two Ozploitation films that I love so much. First, there's Mad Max (I'll tell you about that later) and the next one is an Australian-Hong Kong action movie called "The Man From Hong Kong". To be fair, I have only heard Jigsaw's "Sky High" on the radio and back then I thought "This song is kick ass! It should have appeared in a 70's Bond flick!". And yes, this awesome song actually appeared in a film that has more action scenes than Bond, is cooler than Bullitt and is more exciting than Shaft! (OK, that's a reference to the memorable slogan in the Shaft trailer).

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The plot concerns Inspector Fang Sing-Ling (Jimmy Wang Yu) who has to go to Australia to interview a Hong Kong drug courier named Win Chan (Sammo Hung), since Win is reluctant to give any information to the Australian cops. Fang uses Dirty Harry style tactics to get information, but then Win gets killed. Later, he finds out about an Australian crime boss named Jack Wilton (George Lazenby) and he has to fight against criminals, gets in a car chase, and has to hunt down Jack.

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To me, this film is a combination between Dirty Harry, the Bond films and Kung Fu movies. In fact, even the director (Brian Trenchard-Smith) says that Fang is the "Chinese Dirty Harry". It has cool fighting choreography, super car chases (it's got one of the most awesome chases I've seen actually) and an exciting climactic fight scene. There are however a few problems here, Jimmy Wang Yu can't act at all! He's got awesome fighting skills but is terrible with dialogue.

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And speaking of actors we have George Lazenby in this film. It's hard to believe that this James Bond star had to be a B-Movie actor. In an interview George says that one of the reasons he agreed to appear in this low-budget film is that he needed some money. By the way, he gives a pretty decent performance as the villain Jack.

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In conclusion, this is an Aussie action movie that you've been waiting for. There's car chases, Kung Fu and even goofy one liners ("What do you expect, acupuncture?"). Strongly recommended!


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Nuttawut Permpithak hails from Thailand. He spends his free time watching exploitation films (or any films from the past) writing articles, taking photos and reviewing films for GCDb.

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