DR. LAMB (Hong Kong, 1992)



Directed by: Danny Lee and Billy Tang
Starring: Simon Yam, Danny Lee, Kent Cheng, Emily Kwan
89 minutes, 35mm, in Cantonese with English subtitles

Maybe he was having a nervous breakdown, otherwise how do you explain it? Starting as a competent yet hardly exciting director, Billy Tang Hin-sing appeared out of nowhere to direct a trilogy of pure urban terror unrivalled in its apocalyptic ferocity, and then went back to journeyman directing, seemingly with no regrets. His eight movies in the last four years show not the slightest hint of the gleeful perversity or rigidly deployed stylistics of his earlier work. His urban trilogy happened at a time of seeming political stasis in the HKSAR. People who could secure foreign passports had done so, and the rest had adopted a "wait and see" attitude towards the future. Unemployment was down, the economy was good, and Billy Tang was the black lizard at the base of the brain whispering, "Maybe this won't work out, after all".

The first in the impromptu trilogy, DR. LAMB was the ON THE WATERFRONT of HKSAR Category III films; RUN AND KILL was a scorched earth capitalist nightmare of urban living gone amuck; and RED TO KILL, was a cinematic translation of the apocalypse with the HKSAR's urban landscape standing in for the mind of a maniac. Billy Tang came from nowhere and went back to nowhere when he was done. These three movies are his living legacy: movies no one else could have made in any other country, at any other time.

In August, 1983 a photo lab technician complained to his manager about disturbing photos of a mutilated female body on a customer's roll of film. This was the second time the manager had noticed this particular customer's unusual photos and this time he called the police. The photo was of a severed human breast. This was approximately the 700th such photo his store had processed for this customer. The cops took the customer, Lam Go-wan, into custody, and after sweating him for two days he confessed to murdering the woman in the photographs. Then he kept on confessing...

In 1992, Danny Lee and Kent Cheng Jat-si teamed up to film the true crime biopic of Lam Go-wan, Hong Kong's first, and maybe only, serial killer. This was the first film for Kent Cheng's new film production company, a company that went south three films later, sending Cheng into an economic hole that took him years to crawl out of. But that's in the future. In 1992, Lee and Cheung brought on Billy Tang, with one failed film on his résumé, as co-director (with Danny Lee) of their sleazy cheapie, and Category III history was made.

It's not the mutilations inflicted on his victims, or the depredations of the main character (a beautifully out-of-control Simon Yam) that shock the Western viewer, as much as the fact that Lam Go-wan was butchering prostitutes in a tiny three room apartment he shared with his entire extended family and everyone was so desperate not to ask questions that they never even noticed. The physical closeness of the Lam family was in direct contrast to the enormous emotional gulf that existed between them.

Shattering nighttime Hong Kong into a thousand watery neon shards and shuffling them into a nightmare kaleidoscope, cinematographer Tony Miu turns the former colony into a hothouse jungle that grows corporate advertising and bars like kudzu. In DR. LAMB, Hong Kong is a machine that removes souls and manufactures consumers. It's a city of quiet monsters.

An endless freefall into moral limbo, DR. LAMB erodes decency and kindness, leaving the viewer with nothing to hold onto, just the feeling of falling endlessly and the sick knowledge that eventually, traumatically, we'll hit
bottom. Possessing the stylistic swagger of the true original, DR. LAMB holds up today as fresh as bread from the bakery, leavened with blood. It throws Danny Lee's "Tuff Cop" movie style at Billy Tang's wildly cynical vision of the world and films the carnage that ensues. Standing in direct contrast to Wong Kar-wai's cozy "We are Family" IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE that celebrates the closeness and social co-dependency of 1960's Hong Kong, DR. LAMB points out the blind spots in Wong's nostalgia. The 60's were a wonderful time for normal folks, but for those who were a little off there was no choice but to be pushed out of the social circle, further and further until they were so isolated that they must have seemed completely alone - they must have seemed to themselves like the only person in the world.

Dr. L's wild variations in tone are par for the course in HKSAR movies: slapstick comedy, police procedural, gory Shaw Brothers shocker. But like tuning into a distant radio station, we reach a dark place, way down the dial, (especially in some of Simon Yam's bravura solo setpieces) that is more Billy Tang's world than co-director Lee's. The cop squad slapstick, the brutal interrogations, the shifting time frame - these tropes are all revisited in Danny Lee's later works. Lee, quite clearly, left the rough stuff up to Bloody Billy. These two director's dueling visions - one a conflicted but dedicated believer in an ordered universe represented through dogged police work, the other a nihilist just beginning to entertain his fascination with the violation of the human spirit - are locked into a directly oppositional relationship throughout the film. And the final scene with Lee and Yam makes it clear who wins: Danny Lee gazes into the abyss, only to find that the abyss is out at a discotheque. All a believer like Lee can do is walk away in disgusted defeat while Yam gibbers in his cell.