Tsui Hark's second movie as director is a Kung Fu Horror movie, laced with black humour and gleeful splatterhouse gore. Norman Chu plays a kung fu cop on the trail of a bandit called "Rolex", who finds that the trail leads him to a village where the locals have unusual eating habits.

I know that Tsui Hark's early movies are considered to be quite groundbreaking work, early contributors to the "new wave". I'm not really familiar enough with the wave before the new one to say what is especially groundbreaking about his second movie. Maybe the dark humour, or maybe the trademark lapses into slapstick that are here quite unwelcome intrusions. Probably it was mostly the camerawork that broke new ground, but with the horribly cropped VCD it's hard to really appreciate it.

The movie is an ok piece of not-quite old-school, though it would have been a much better experience without some of the lame humour attempts. There's some decent humour in there too though, and a fair amount of very good action. Norman Chu is pretty good as officer 999, but Eddie Ko has more screen presence as the sinister village chief.

The VCD is nearly unwatchable, sadly - at least if you need subtitles, since they're right at the bottom of the image, where they will be invisible on most tvs. Thanks to Malata's XY scaling I was able to shrink the image to the point where they're on screen, though that leaves them small and difficult to read. If you've got the facilities to do something like this then the VCD isn't a bad purchase, but I wouldn't stress too much about it if you don't get to see it.