Director: Tung Cho “Joe” Cheung
Writers: Tung Cho “Joe” Cheung, Yun-Sheng Pan, Hung Wai Tan, Wei-Hung Teng, and Wei Tung
From: Cult Cinema
Watch: archive.org
A hotheaded new recruit and a bitter detective team up to try to take down the local crime boss.
The movie opens with the title card for a good 20-30 seconds while the audio runs underneath. We hear people talking about the detective and how he’s been demoted to cemetery duty for offending Master Mang. When we finally cut to the movie, the same men are talking to the detective. He’s just captured someone stealing gold from corpses teeth and is hoping to regain the chief’s favor by turning him in. Naturally, the men talking to him try to help the criminal escape, but he comes back because he’s never seen what a jail is like and wants to experience it for himself.
Thus the first question of the movie: is this a comedy? Everything that plays out here—the detective, the new partner, their walking the beat—is constantly played for laughs until an hour into the movie when the tone suddenly shifts and it’s a serious piece about taking down this crime lord.
The detective returns home to his young wife who has a gambling problem and has put them back into debt. Meanwhile, the hothead has just arrived in town and is getting dinner at a gambling den. The detective shows up, pretends to shake down a man who’s secretly his informant, but the hothead gets involved and actually chases the informant down. The next day, the detective learns that the hothead is the chief’s nephew and that the detective will have to train him.
Then the next hour is spent with the hothead getting involved in fights, largely off-screen, because he doesn’t know how to work with the corruption of the town the way the detective does. The turn comes when the hothead decides to take down Master Mang, the big bad, and a killer dressed all in white starts murdering Mang’s associates.
Hothead keeps walking into situations where he’s blamed for the killing and the detective hides him while they keep trying to find out who the real killer is. This is where things get complicated and it’s introduced with less than half-an-hour left in the movie.
The White Hunter is a brilliant cop who’s been on the hunt for the Fox, a devious criminal who’s a master of disguise. The Hunter has tracked the Fox’s trail to the town where the movie is happening and will be arriving the next morning by train. Fox is actually Mang who’s been disguising himself as the White Hunter to kill underlings that have failed him and to lure hothead into a showdown with the real White Hunter so that the two will kill each other.
So. Mang shows up at the detective’s house while the detective is learning all this and attacks the wife. Hothead chases him and the wife tells the detective, with her dying breath, what just happened. Hothead chases Mang to the spot where the White Hunter has arrived and hothead and the Hunter fight. The Hunter uses a handcuff-based weapon and entangles hothead, but falls and knocks himself out. Which is when Mang murders him. Mang and hothead fight for a bit, but the detective arrives and gets killed instead. Hothead degloves himself to get out of the Hutner’s weapon and fights Mang, eventually getting the upper hand through an accidental nut shot, and then cuts Mang to ribbons with a sword. FREEZE FRAME. THE END.
I have to make note of one thing before I begin: no ninjas! A definite fail for Ninja-vember and a disappointment considering the title. In fact, a distressing number of the movies I’m watching for Ninja-vember, despite having “Ninja” in the title, do not, in fact, have ninjas. Shameful.
I don’t know what to make of this movie. The plot eluded me most of the time and I’m not sure what the tone was supposed to be. This was either supposed to be a semi-serious story about a jaded and crooked cop turning his life around because of his new partner or goofy send-up of these cop dramas where everything was supposed to be played broadly and for maximum yuks.
For example, there’s a scene where a guy is robbing a bank while a man on the street starts threatening people with a knife. Our cops arrive when the knife-wielding guy gets locked in the bank with the robber. Hothead goes in alone, we hear all sorts of noises, and see the detective reacting as though he’s gone too far in bullying his new partner. Then the hothead walks out unscathed with both criminals tied up, tossing in a clever quip for good measure.
Is this a turning point? A gag? A character moment showing how capable hothead is? It’s not clear and it doesn’t come up again. Plus, if you’re thinking about this as a martial arts movie, why don’t we see that fight? Most of the fights happen off-screen or are played up as gags emphasizing what we’re not seeing. Then we close with a massive battle sequence where three people die. What was the movie aiming for?
The movie appears to be in the public domain and I’ve uploaded a copy to archive.org here. I wouldn’t discourage anyone from watching it, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to recommend it either. As with so many of these movies, its moments of unintentional comedy work well, but the intentional comedy falls flat. If you want to goof with some friends, it’s a passable flick, but it’s also something you can easily allow to pass by.
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