RIP Alan Tang

Got word via facebook today that Alan Tang had passed away. Never a superstar or really a big face, at least in the West, I know Alan Tang best for his gangster movies of the late 1980s.

He starred in both Taiwan and Hong Kong movies from the mid 60s to the early 90s, his bread and butter was a mixture of dramas, romance, some kung fu and later crime roles.

He also had his own production company In Gear, personally producing Hong Kong gems of the 1980s like Haunted Cop Shop, Vampire Buster and was an early supporter of Wong Kar Wai. They met, I believe, whilst working on Flaming Brothers which Wong Kaw Wai assisted to write. Alan Tang then helped to finance his early films once As Tears Go By had become a hit.

It is Flaming Brothers I'll remember him best for, Chow Yun Fat takes a back seat to Alan Tang in an excessive gangster drama. Alan Tang swaggers through the movie with the cool of Roger Moore in full swing, but with the macho of Bunta Sugawara. Other two great roles are the action film Yellow Peril and the silly but fun Return Engagement.

Tang starred in two classic turkeys also, the baffling Black Panther Warriors and the garish Gun N' Rose, made by most of the team of Return Engagement but manages to be utterly awful.

Alan Tang packed cinema in around 1994 to concentate on business and is quoted as late as 2005 as saying he would never return to movies.

Not much of an obiturary but it's my little piece on an actor that starred in one of my fav movies from Hong Kong.

Adios Alan!

The Imp (Hong Kong - 1996)

City Girl (can't remember her name) has psychic connection to twin sister, or something. One day her brain gets frazzled and she knows shit when down. Her sister was in the backwoods of China, or someplace and she hops from the towers of Hong Kong into the green inferno of ruralness to find out what went down.

Getting hooked up with some film makers there to capture some ancient ceremony, City Girl and her new pals book into a creepy hotel run by a creepy sister and her mentally challenged brother. When faced with the prospect of playing someone with a disability, the actor in question merely sticks his tongue into the side of his mouth and goes "Buuuuuuuurgh!". Thankfully he's not around much.

Most of the film is taken up with soft core sex with the odd mild bondage theme, along with some vague stabs at atmospheric mystery and some odd moments of horror. The sex can get dull but at least there are no players with too much body hair, giant moles or strange scars that you get in some Category III movies.

With a stylistic bent that is the flavour of Dr Lamb but stir fried in giallo juice, with even some nods to the Shining, the Imp is a slightly above average entry in the Category III genre. I dug it for the most part, it has a nice slow but never dull burn and the final twenty minutes are effective in getting some actual nastiness into the movie.

Some tits, blood and bondage then, all shot in that cool red and blue Hong Kong flavour.

Predator 2

Box office sensation Danny Glover follows on from Arnie, fighting the Predator on the drug war ravaged streets of a near future Los Angeles in this 1990 action flick. So future set is this film, that the future seems to merely equal having space age sights on their otherwise conventional guns.

All this movie represents is the origonal movie spliced into a 1980s cop action film. It bears all the hallmarks of the era, an angry Dirty Harry hero and his buddies caught between their bosses and their own idea of justice. With the usual drug gangs, hammered in is the title character, the nameless alien hunter, striving for trophies for his wall.

All this film really is various scenes of people blasting away at an invisible alien in settings as varied as dark train and dark warehouse, then getting gutted. Danny Glover then promptly swears, sweats and gnashes his teeth before mumbling his way after the alien. In between he faces his fear of heights and pisses off Robert Davi.

Loud and dumb, Predator 2 at least gives Gary Busey and Bill Paxton a chance to eat some scenery.

Bill Paxton is really annoying in this movie.