subway cinema | we're going to eat you (1980)

	ONCE UPON A TIME IN HONG KONG: A TSUI HARK RETROSPECTIVE May 25-28, 2001 at the Anthology Film Archives
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WE'RE GOING TO EAT YOU (1980)

Directed by: Tsui Hark
Action choreography by: Corey Yuen (the X-MEN!)
Music by: stolen from Dario Argento's SUSPIRIA
Title by: stolen from the tag line of Lucio Fulci's ZOMBIE
Starring: Norman Tsui, Eddy Ko, Melvin Wong

90 minutes, 35mm
in Cantonese with English subtitles

Like an AIP slasher, Tsui Hark's homage to Roger Corman starts in the countryside, on one of Hong Kong's outlying islands, where no one can hear you scream, and location fees are cheap. Fishing buddies come out for the sport, and are rudely transformed into blue plate specials by a horde of masked killers wielding cleavers as long as your arm. Norman Tsui (cast against type as a good guy) sashays onto the scene as Secret Agent 999, hot on the trail of the thief, Rolex. He stumbles into the sleepy little village tucked away on this island hell and quickly discovers that this village is starving...starving for the taste of human flesh! Eddy Ko (of LETHAL WEAPON 4 and THE MISSION) plays the sadistic despot who runs the local police/meat force, strutting about with the swagger of a banana republic despot.

Perhaps stung that his first film, THE BUTTERFLY MURDERS, had been overly-intellectual, Tsui Hark swung the other way, making WE'RE GOING TO EAT YOU overly-visceral. A gutcruncher grotesquerie, it's an enormous joke: there's the scent of a political subtext to get intellectuals to take a closer look, but when they do they get a squirt of blood in the eye. A fast and grotty roughie written on the fly and shot on the cheap, in this movie blood flows like rain as heads are cleaved and bodies are sawed in two. Jarringly, for Western audiences, the horror sits side-by-side with gross-out comedy involving a lascivious giantess, a wacko-wigged thief who keeps a razor blade under his tongue a la Foxy Brown, and starving villagers who aren't immune to the occasional, absent-minded gnaw on one anothers' calves. Add to this the numerous Old School kung fu fights that break out roughly every ten minutes and you've got THE CHINESE FEAST's evil twin: a schizophrenic food movie with multiple personality disorder and a case of the screaming mimis.

The camera runs, dodges and whirls as disoriented and frantic as the raw ingredients (characters) who scramble and scrabble to escape the slashing choppers of the cannibalistic, humanoid, proto-communist island-dwellers. There's always been a peanut gallery that defends the movie as a deft political allegory: sending up the Red Guards that once ran China and who allocated out the wealth and enforced Byzantine laws as the nation starved to death. That's a possibility, but they probably made it up to explain why they like such an unwholesome movie. In a world where movies struggle to be tasteful models of decorum, WE'RE GOING TO EAT YOU is a breath of fetid air. A gore-gore masterpiece, filling out the bottom slot of a 42nd street grindhouse double bill, and filmed in grunge-shock carnage-vision the aesthetic model for this movie is the Coney Island sideshow: crude, tacky, in bad taste, and more fun than a barrel of (carnivorous) monkeys.

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