Pembunuhan Pursuit
Chow Yun-Fat
a whole bunch of other people, including maybe George Lam
IMDb link: none at present
other links:
Version reviewed: VHS
Ratings:
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VHS Audio: 3 of 10
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VHS Video: 3 of 10
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Subtitles: n/a
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Story: 1 of 10
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Performances: 2 of 10
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CYF: 2 of 10
Giving new meaning to the term "low budget", Pembunuhan Pursuit
is one of those films which people make when they'll take any role
just to be able to work. The equivalent of posing for Hustler while
you're waiting to land that cover of Vogue magazine, this film is
interesting only because you get to see CYF as a very young man. You
don't get to hear him, because his voice has been dubbed by
someone else with a dreadful nasal squeak of a voice, but you do get
to see the chiseled features of the young man who would later become
one of the major boxoffice draws of Asia.
I have no idea when this was made; the version I have begins and
ends abruptly and I can't seem to find any copyright information
on it at all. Judging by CYF's looks, I'd say 1978 or so. While
there is no real polish to his performance, there's not much here
to work with; maniacal killers usually tend to be of a certain
stripe, and not a very wide or deep one.
Another thing about this version (the only one I have ever been able
to find, available from World Video - see their entry in the
resources listing)
is that there is one (1) sentence subtitled - someone says "don't!".
Judging from that it may have been subbed at one point or another and after
being transferred from one master to another to another all of the
subtitling was lost. That's really not that much of a problem even if
you can't understand one word of Chinese, because the plot is incredibly
simple (not to mention silly).
In many HK police/killer flicks there is a fair dose of humor injected
into the drama, no matter how intense and bloody. This movie goes
beyond that into downright schizophrenia - one minute it is a low-brow
sex comedy, the other it's of someone being shot, or stabbed, or
poisoned. Imagine if someone had spliced bits of Texas Chainsaw
Massacre into The Owl and The Pussycat. Bearing that in
mind, the plot goes like this: a pretty but insufferably dumb opera singer
escapes the clutches of a bumbling casting agent with a penchant for
inflatable sex partners. While crawling along the side of his apartment
building during her escape, she witnesses a murder. Said murder
is committed as part of a killing-for-hire business by CYF, who employs
methods which seemingly include very sharp No. 2 pencils as well as
more traditional weapons such as switchblades and various flavors of
bludgeon. The singer goes to her agent/boyfriend for help, and after
notifying the police of her predicament she gets into various scrapes
while trying to land a job with her fingernails-on-a-blackboard voice,
as well as being tailed by CYF's psycho and a duo of very stupid
cops. (The literal translation of the Chinese title of this film
is "Dumb Guy, Big Thief, Stupid Detective" and there you have it in
a nutshell.)
As it turns out, the agent/boyfriend is in cahoots with CYF's boss in
the killing business, but all is well after CYF is set on fire and
falls off a building, because at this point the cops finally catch
up and save the opera singer to shatter glass bathroom windows
another day. (Which is how she escapes from one particular predicament,
after of course she spits out the pink toilet paper her kidnapper had
stuffed in her mouth - which really wasn't such a bad idea.)
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