We're Going to Eat You (1980)

 

Director: Tsui Hawk

Screenplay: Roy Szeto and Hark Tsui

Cast: Norman Chu as Agent 999; Eddy Ko as the Chief; Melvin Wong as Rolex; Michelle Yim as Ah Lin; Mo-lin Cheung as Lin

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #160.

 

Don't tell me you've got to piss again.

Most horror films do not break out into martial arts fights continually. This is why Hong Kong cinema is awesome, and here in particular you have a martial arts comedy film which does not tone down the horror either - someone is sawn in half to establish the premise. This is also of note as this is a very early film by Tsui Hawk, once a Vietnam born young man who, from here, would eventually become a legendary director and producer in Chinese cinema. This is before he started playing with camera angles, editing and aesthetic style normally avoided in the martial arts genre, back when he here keeps the camera back in his fights. The premise is simple, whilst establishing though that Hawk's very idiosyncratic nature was still here however despite a drastically different tone in how is was made, where on Cannibal Island an agent is chasing after the criminal "Rolex", only to meet a community that lives off human meat picked off from outsiders.

Even the cannibals themselves are suffering inequality, as the security force lead by their leader demands more portions over the populous of half crazed people, said leader the kind with a mistress demanding not his heart but an actual one. It is a lurid spectacle, entirely a fun horror ride due to there being so many fake outs, including a trick of a cut-off hand (by tilt upwards of the camera) revealing it was an already severed one, that becomes part of the joy of how broad and over-the-top the production is. It does already show Hawk's competency in skill of Hong Kong cinema, and beside, unless you scrap the barrel, by this point you have enough people behind the camera of these Hong Kong films that it was possible to deliver a quality film even for a lurid pot-boiler.

The only detail which does jar is a questionable joke character, a very tall and broad shouldered male actor in female drag, a traditional Chinese red dress, excessive makeup and hair up. His character is viewed as a woman, rather than gay or trans or a cross dresser, but I do wander whether the joke is as much meta textual that a male actor is playing broadly effeminate or not. Thankfully, with an incredibly black sense of humour, everything else is We're Going to Eat You is great.

It is a broad premise to set up fight choreography, but this feels effortless without losing creativity. It is not remotely the most extreme Hong Kong film, as the Category III films would push barriers, but it is a fascinating hybrid found common from the region. All of it interconnects well too - the horror wraps around the action, as you have to fight off cannibals, as does the comedy which is mainly physical, and the horror is still bloody, even inventively gristly such as a self inflicted wig splitting. Even a lesser know film like this can pull out incredibly amounts of gymnastics, the hero escaping a trap which dangles him between trees with hands and feet tied a good early example, and they are as mentioned creativity, such as when roller-skates suddenly get introduced in the end weaving between the final boss fight that is also taking place in the same area.

Even the music is exceptional - a scene involving a blind man, trying to catch a character, a thief who eventually starts running around like a mischievous monkey and crawling up walls to survive, has percussion chime in at precise comic timing. I caught on, though, pieces was "borrowed" from Dario Argento's Suspiria (1977), which is not a bad thing.

Tsui Hawk would go on, becoming a veteran who influenced Hong Kong cinema even when he was the producer, and it is good to see one of his earliest projects, whilst lacking his later flair, still possessing his idiosyncratic nature. In fact, that sense of creativity even for a project like this likely helped him, cutting his teeth on a project like this where the tone itself can juggle so many pieces without collapsing. It would allow him to adapt to any production, which would benefit him in larger budget efforts and even working with Jean-Claude Van Damme, and the result here long before then also happens to be a unique horror film too.