"This Man is Dangerous" (1985) d/Wang Lung Wei

Who's that heavily armed thug in a ski mask, mugging for the release poster for tonight's review, a 1985 HK crime drama of grim and bloody proportions, you ask? As if the mustache of ultimate villainy wasn't a dead giveaway. This Man is Dangerous aka/ Shandong Madman is the second Shaw Brothers feature directed by Wang Lung Wei, starring Chin Siu Ho and Fu Sheng's pipsqueak sibling, Chang Chan Peng, as well as a beardless Beardy (Liang Chia Jen), and a cameo from a very eighties-looking Lo Mang, of Venom Mob fame. There's plenty of execution-style murders, maggot-ridden corpses, Herpes jokes, dated eighties wear, and there's even an obligatory Western extra with zero screen presence, thrown in, for realism's sake, of course. Buckle up, me hearties, it's gonna be another wild one...
 

"Fingerprint this?? Bullshit, Mr Han(dless) man!", exclaims Wei (Chang Chan Peng).
Hao and Wei (Chin Siu Ho, Chang Chan Peng) are roommates who aspire to be undercover policemen in Hong Kong, when Hao isn't undermining Wei's every secret desire, stealing his meticulously maintained roses and giving them to Zhi (Lai Yin Shan), a local girl that Wei fancies, but is either too shy or too short to make a move for. Hao even kicks him out of the apartment while convincing her to sleep with him. With friends like that, you almost don't even need Ku Lung (Wang Lung Wei), a ruthless bastard from the mainland who robs armored vehicles in broad daylight and stomps call girls in the labonza just for kicks. On the job, Wei and Hao are forced to pull fingerprints from a rotting, maggot-infested cadaver in a coffin at a morgue whose floor is nearly untraversable, thanks to a floor littered with sheet-covered bodies. They also roll, ridiculously garbed,  into a gay disco, while hunting for a marijuana dealer named Pink Lady (Elvis Tsui), a randy leatherman who digs Hao's Double Dragon-inspired disguise. Cue: obligatory fight scene.


"Go take a shower, bitch...here's your l-OOFAHH!"
While Hao further strains his friendship with Wei by ducking out on a pregnant Zhi, Ku Lung is busy beating on drunken cops, stealing their service revolvers, and using them in a bullet-ridden bloodbath against a rival gang of Vietnamese, as a favor to Chin Lao Pa (Chang Chuang), a brothel owner and fellow evildoer. When he rubs out Sgt Chen (Phillip Ko Fei) and his favorite prostitute one afternoon, and demands that Chin support him in some upcoming major bank robberies, Chin then sells him out to Beast, the young men's immediate superior, earning himself a brass knuckle beatdown at Ku's ruthless hands,  in one of his own sauna rooms. With the cops, led by Officer Leung (Liang Chia Jen) and Police Chief Luo (Lo Mang), closing in, Ku's brother Biao gets picked off by Hao while trying to dog paddle to freedom in a pond near the gang hideout, and that's something that Ku takes very, very personally, judging by the Uzi he's got stashed away, for just such an occasion. All Hell then breaks the fuck loose, right up to the signature Shaw Brothers final freeze frame.


Looks like The Toad isn't impervious to half-off sales at Chess King, either.
"The Mayor" himself, Johnny Wang, who wrote, directed, starred in, and choreographed fights for tonight's feature, would go on to direct The Innocent Interloper for Shaw Brothers the following year. You've probably caught Chin Siu Ho in things like Ten Tigers of Kwantung (1979), Masked Avengers (1981), and House of Traps (1982), though he's appeared in over a hundred films by now. Less prolific, by far, is Chang Chan Peng, who made his final film appearance here, after roles in Eight Diagram Pole Fighter (1984), Treasure Hunters (1981), and Wits of the Brats (1984), before retiring from acting altogether. Wang may have caught some slack for his downbeat endings and brutal portrayals of violence as a director over the years, but Dangerous did Top Ten business at the HK box office in 1985, and I was well entertained throughout, as always, by Asian cinema's greatest bad guy of all-time. Perhaps he could have changed out some of the weird comedy for longer, more elaborate fight scenes (the choreography tends to favor Wei's love of kickboxing over a traditional style here), but overall, I'd have to lay three Wops on it, regardless. Seek it out, at once.


 Ku Lung (Johnny Wang) never met someone he couldn't call a "dirty scumbag".

"Hong Kong Godfather" (1985) d/ Wang Lung Wei

Holy shit. If there was a sudden shortage of crimson paint in Hong Kong in 1985, tonight's focus ( a modern era Shaw Brothers crime drama with elements of the Johnny Wang Yu heroic bloodshed pictures the studio churned out in the early seventies) as directed by none other than villainy king, Johnny Wang Lung Wei himself, is probably the culprit, by the Gods. If you've only seen the depths of Wang's cinematic treachery as an actor and you dig the color red a lot, you really owe it to yourself to bear witness to the uberviolent bloodbath he dreams up as a screenwriter/director/fight choreographer, it may be the craziest action experience this side of John Woo. Playing out Wang's blood-soaked triad tale are the always dynamic Liang Chia-Jen ('Beardy'), Norman Chu ( who's rocking a perm and a rat tail, mind you ), and Shu Yuan-Hsu. It should also be noted that the previous generation's apex baddie, Enter the Dragon's "Mr. Han", Shih Kien is along for the ride here, even demonstrating a brief form during his lens time. Onwards!


Bad news sometimes comes in sunglasses and an ugly blazer. And so what.
After treating some Chinatown rivals to some hearty machine gun fu for which he's given a life sentence, Hei (Wong Chun) uses his Triad connections to get pardoned and return to Hong Kong, where he plans to rise to the top of the Asian underworld with the cooperation of  Brother Han (Shih Kien), the crime boss with a heart of gold. Han has been seeing to "Mad" Wei (Liang Chia-Jen), a former associate-turned-florist(!), and setting up the transfer of his operations to 'Playboy" Lung (Norman Chu), his head bodyguard with a fucked up haircut, much to the dismay of the scheming, aptly nicked "Rotten" Chi (Sam Wai), who's epic backstabbery results in Lung getting laid up in a hospital bed with a hundred machete stitches, and then Han,  his family, and most of his  henchmen being wiped out in a choppingly good mob hit where even his young grandson gets an ethno-backbreaker and chucked out a window like a half full trashbag by one of Hei's hitmen in one of the film's many multiple exclamation point moments. We're introduced to various lowlifes and thugs through lengthy dialog exchanges, but the choppers come out and the screen is drenched in arterial spray before the action can grind to a halt.


"Pass me that Chinese kid, I'm open for three!"
Hei's blade-wielding powerplay (Isn't this a modern era flick? Where are all the damned guns?) leaves only Mad Wei, Playboy Lung, and Sargeant-on-the-take, Man (Richard Cheung Kuen) alive to exact bloody retribution for Han's violent slaying, and after Wei's daughter is abruptly abducted and slutted up by their unscrupulous rivals, the three descend upon Hei's building (the same indoor mall Jackie Chan used in his Police Story the same year) with various bladed objects, and chop, hack, and slash their way to the final square off versus Hei, Rotten Chi, and all of their bodyguards, Wang Lung Wei included. If you've made it this far, you're about to be rewarded with a visceral orgy of martial violence of truly epic proportions. This is one you're gonna wanna see for yourselves.


"How many strawberry preserves jokes can this B.W. guy make already!!!"
Previously only available in edited bootlegs and a region three disc, the folks at Funimation have done us all proper, in releasing a beautiful uncut print of this Peckinpah-esque gangster epic for old fans to revisit in it's full glory and for new fans to discover for the first time. Johnny Wang would return to the director's chair the following year with The Innocent Interloper, then twice again in 1988 with Fury and City Warriors, all of which will eventually find their way to this very review site, I guarantee you that. Though the story isn't anything discernibly different from the genre norm, it's the batshit crazy action-packed finale that lifts this effort above the usual fare, and the dated, laugh-worthy eighties fashions of the day on all involved here don't hurt, either. Recommended. Three Wops.


"If you dont run the Swiffer, you'll make me lose face, you bastard!"