Dangerous Encounter - 1st Kind (1980)
Reviewed by: spinali on 1999-12-08
Summary: NULL
In this concerto of controlled mayhem, Lin Chen-Chi (a more frightening Anita Yuen) likes to stick pins into the brains of mice, drop troublesome cats onto barbed wire, and make bombs out of heavy-duty firecrackers. By chance one evening, she witnesses three high-school kids run over a night-worker by accident. As she's a trouble-maker of the 1st kind, she finds out their school and blackmails them into even more sadism. One misfired prank against a mean-looking white motorist manages to put a boxful of Japanese bank drafts into their paws -- money that otherwise would have gone overseas to buy arms. These kids aren't cruel by nature, but it's an easy habit to learn, especially now that the mob is after them. The baddies (nasty Caucasians, in an unsettling reversal of all those U.S. films using Chinese villains) don't play with tack-guns and fire crackers like the kids; these guys have AK-47s, and their leader has a messy habit of eviscerating his enemies. You can imagine the mess in the HK backstreets. Eventually, they employ triads to help to round up our four protagonists. Director Tsui Hark, HK's best, uses widescreen, presumably to pack as much red latex blood and body parts in every scene as possible. Low-budget, high-effect testicle-shrinkers like these constitute the minor evidence of how superior Hark is to John Woo, Ringo Lam, and the roll-call of trendies set to emigrate to the United States. Gunfights in graveyards are an HK cent a dozen, easy irony. This one has teenage kids, kids you've grown to like, shooting it out with seasoned contract killers, blood flowing down rain-gutters. The innocent are killed with the guilty, and it's all minus Woo's male-bonding, duke 'em out formula. This quartet of kids will kill to survive; but at heart they're just cowardly teenagers. The animal torture sequences, albeit short, will send animal rights workers into shock (you won't see SPCA disclaimers in any HK movie), but they're certainly effective. When you have real violence in a movie like this, the line between reality and fiction becomes blurred, until you don't know what to expect. But it's exciting, and disturbing, and even has a backbone of humor to keep us from falling too far into the gloom.

(4/4)



[Reviewed by Steve Spinali]
Reviewer Score: 10