Welcome to The Queue — your daily distraction of curated video content sourced from across the web. Today, we’re watching a video essay that explores the gloriously sleazy cinematic output of Hong Kong.
How do you measure the output of a movie industry? By the amount of money its blockbusters make? By the number of international awards it garners? What about by (hear me out) the sleaziness of its … scuzzier offerings?
If we’re going by the latter, then the cinematic output of Hong Kong through the 1980s and 1990s is absolutely unparalleled. During this time, the Hong Kong film industry was fuelled by a three-pronged mantra: make it fast, make it cheap, and make it disposable. The results were, and I think this is a formal term: absolutely bananapants.
The Clones of Bruce Lee (1980) is exactly what it sounds like. Vampire vs Vampire (1989) is a hilarious showdown between the “hopping” Chinese jiangshi and an unearthed European vampire. Category III films (Hong Kong cinema’s version of NC-17), courted taboo with the likes of Sex and Zen (1991), Naked Killer (1992), and A Chinese Torture Chamber Story (1994).
The video essay below features a drive-by of all the giddily garish, ghoulish, and ghastly cinematic delights that late-20th century Hong Kong had to offer, from Brucesploitation to trend-chasing, to endless serialization, to eroticism, to horror comedies. A competitive market produced a seemingly neverending string of titillating premises with an experimental bent. They weren’t just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what stuck, they were having an all-out food fight.
Watch “Sleazy Movies Made in Hong Kong“:
Who made this?
This video on sleazy Hong Kong movies was created by Accented Cinema, a Canadian-based YouTube video essay series with a focus on foreign cinema. You can subscribe to Accented Cinema for bi-weekly uploads here. You can follow them on Twitter here.
More Videos Like This
- For another example of Accented Cinema’s work, here’s a look at why no one takes a punch like Jackie Chan.
- And another sample: what Princess Mononoke can teach us about Hayao Miyazaki‘s thematic focus as a director.
- And another: what the ninth installment of the Crayon Shin-chan series can teach us about the pitfalls and limitations of nostalgia.
- Here’s their impassioned plea for why you should shake things up and check out the wonderful and terrifying world of Thai horror films.
- Here’s their detailed (and very funny) breakdown of four different common approaches to translating movie titles for international audiences.
- And finally here’s how Whisper of the Heart captures the rhythms of being an artist.
Related Topics: Foreign Film, Horror, The Queue
