THE UNTOLD STORY (Hong Kong, 1993)



Directed by: Herman Yau
Starring: Anthony Wong! Danny Lee! Emily Kwan! Julie Lee!
96 minutes, 35mm, in Cantonese with English subtitles

Are you ready for pee-drinking, child murder, chopstick rape, mass butchery, cannibalism, wrist-slitting, garbage eating, and a spike through the eye? What about decapitation, blood-spurting, projectile vomiting, more cannibalism, police torture, rotting corpses, bleach injections, and mahjong players set on fire? If that sounds like a fun day at the beach to you then come on down to THE UNTOLD STORY, or as its directly translated title puts it, THE UNTOLD STORY: EIGHT IMMORTALS RESTAURANT HUMAN MEAT ROAST PORK BUNS.

The pinnacle (or the nadir) of Category III Hong Kong shockers, this true crime bloodbath won star Anthony Wong a Best Actor Award at the otherwise civilized Hong Kong Film Awards. It's supposedly based on the true story of a psychopathic restaurant worker in Macau who butchered a family of eight and disposed of their bodies by baking them into delicious steamed buns that he served at the restaurant. Rock n'roll loving director, Herman Yau, takes great, gratuitous delight in kicking out the jams and serves up this steaming pile of grue in extra-large family-sized portions.

Like a schizophrenic, the film splits into two parts. One half follows Inspector Lee (played by eternal cop, Danny Lee - THE KILLER, DR. LAMB) and his gang of bumbling Macanese detectives as they trip, fumble, falter and fall through the clues and blunder towards solving the case. Played for laughs, it's the Keystone Kops live and in color, speaking Cantonese. Rumor has it that Danny Lee, who actually believes he is a cop since he's played them onscreen in what must be hundreds of movies, was worried about denigrating the image of the Hong Kong police force by showing them to be a pack of clumsy oafs. It was only when the director explained to him that it was okay since it wasn't Hong Kong's, but Macau's, police force that was being held up to ridicule, that Lee agreed to do the part.

The other side of the film centers on Anthony Wong's pathetic, scarifying, sweaty and human portrait of a guy who'll light you on fire to win a mahjong game. Bloody, dark, unrelenting and impossible to stop watching, this is the side of the movie that earned the Best Actor Award. The two halves sit next to each other uncomfortably, jostling shoulders and getting irritated until the climax where the movie unexpectedly becomes a screed against police brutality (rare in the "by any means necessary" world of the Hong Kong justice system) and Anthony Wong's psychopath is elevated to become a kind of scruffy, unpleasant, yet iconic folk hero.

The two diametrically opposed sides of this movie (goofy cop laff-riot; black as night character study) come together to make one high-impact whole that's greater than the sum of its parts. Kind of like the way the family that is the focus of the film comes apart into pieces that are somehow more delicious than the sum of its whole. And higher in protein, too.