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Run and Kill (1993)

Dir: ‘Billy’ Tang

‘Fatty’ Cheung (Kent Cheng, “Sex and Zen“) is a devoted Father to his Daughter ‘Pinky’ and tries his best to be a good Husband to his Wife (Li Li, “The Young Master“) while running a gas/petrol store.
Things start to go wrong though when Cheung catches his Wife screwing another man and goes out to get drunk . In the bar he drunkenly tells a girl, Fanny (Esther Wing Ho Kwan) about his Wife and how he wants to punish her.
Fanny, for a fee, brings over a mysterious guy who says he will arrange to kill Cheung’s Wife and her lover for him. So drunk he does not know what he is doing Cheung agrees and the guy takes all his money as a deposit.

Next morning, as Cheung returns home to find his Wife at it again, two Vietnamese men burst into the apartment and kill the Wife and lover in front of Cheung’s shocked and confused eyes.
He tells the Police, led by Inspector Man (Danny Lee, “The Killer”), what happened and he is released but placed under watch.
Things get even worse when Cheung cannot afford to pay the gang the rest of the money, resulting in his store being burnt down and a flight to the Chinese mainland where he seeks help from a friend who just happens to be in a criminal gang and has a very protective, psychotic ex-Army older Brother named Fung (Simon Yam, “A Bullet in the Head”).
Cheung’s friend agrees to help get the Vietnamese but things do not go according to plan and soon Cheung’s problems escalate to horrific proportions….

 

“Run and Kill” has an infamous place in the dank history of Hong Kong CAT III exploitation films because of one sequence. A sequence that, even in the ultra-extreme content of CAT III movies, pushes the level of sadism and horror to breaking point and remains perhaps the benchmark for everything that puts Hong Kong exploitation in a truly sick world of it’s own.
But is there more to the film than just this sequence? The answer is yes, but sadly not that much.

The opening, where Cheung is shown waking up ‘Pinky’ (“Dreaming of Andy Lau again”?) and getting her ready for school, is backed with jaunty comedic music and Cheung is generally portrayed as a bumbling, sweet, but weak guy.
Tang (as is the curse of many CAT III films) fills the first half hour of the film with dubious humour which actually waters down the emotional power of the movie. Even Cheung’s discovery of his Wife having sex with another man is mostly played badly for (equally bad) laughs and if anything the viewer is made to feel annoyance towards Cheung rather than any sympathy as he’s so weak and generally useless. For example, just before they are murdered, his Wife and her lover openly flaunt the fact they have just been having sex and even blow kisses at each other in front of him while he sits there looking stupid.
This humour (the vaguely successful and the bad) is thankfully lost later on as events escalate out of control and the movie is better for it. It’s obvious that Tang wanted to use the comedy to make the darkness more of a shock, but it’s a cheap and easy way of doing it and hurts the film. The scenes with Cheung and ‘Pinky’ are effective at doing what he wanted but the rest is just annoying and slows the film down.

But at least Danny Lee as the lead Cop plays it straight, unlike his (and the other Police's) awful comic turn in "The Untold Story", which nearly sank that otherwise brutal film.

Once Cheung gets to China the film starts to edge closer to it’s reputation for the extreme (although the murder of Cheung’s wife was pretty explicit) as Tang brings in the utterly ruthless and deranged Fung.
Simon Yam is obviously enjoying himself as the mentally (and physically) scarred veteran and for most of the film he carefully keeps his character the right side of believability no matter how bonkers he gets (a sequence where he unloads a machine gun into a room full of guys is wonderfully chaotic and raging) and only during the finale does he slip into ham mode.

But it’s not just Fung who delivers the nastiness as a few mass fights give us close-ups of various sharp implements being thrust into bodies. resulting in spurting blood effects. and there is a very nasty sequence when the Vietnamese gang tie up a man, ram a small bamboo tube into his thigh , and leave him to slowly bleed to death as the blood dribbles along the tube into a plastic container. They even take turns to drink from the crimson dripping bamboo!
The main exploitation ingredient missing from “Run and Kill” though is nudity and sex, two things that CAT III films normally revel in, here underwear ripping is as far as it goes.
The finale smack down (something of a favourite idea for Tang who would have brutal one-on-one fight to end his “Brother of Darkness” as well as a truly superb concluding confrontation in “Red to Kill”) is mostly effective although the metamorphosis of Fung to a rather silly ‘superman’ means that genuine emotion is neglected for trashy thrills.

But the real dollop of unpleasantness comes in the form of the infamous sequence mentioned above. Unlike almost every other review of “Run and Kill” which givesthe entire thing away I shall not mention any real details of this scene, so avoid basically any other reviews of this before you see the film (that’s not ego, it’s good advice).
After witnessing rapes, tortures, mutilations and blood curdling murders in other CAT III films I thought that this sequence would not have the impact the hype would suggest…I was wrong.
Almost all exploitation scenes contain totally needless (away from exploitation itself) moments where they go just that bit further purely because they can. But this sequence, carried out by Fung, wallows in the fact it goes to levels that there was no real need to go to.
Never has CAT III been so utterly heartless and sadistic as we truly witness something that is utterly alien to any films made outside of Hong Kong (with, perhaps, Japan being the exception) and something that breaks all the rules.
The build up is uncomfortable enough, heartbreaking enough, and even though this is CAT III territory the situation surely means that the act we are being teased with won’t reaaly happen. But it does. And for the first time ever in viewing Hong Kong exploitation I actually felt truly shocked and sickened as director Tang himself becomes as ruthless as his character Fung as he makes the choice to show and do what he does.
But even when this act of utterly cold hearted horror is done, ‘Billy’ Tang goes up one more astonishing level as he thrusts the aftermath of the act in the viewer's face (the sheer awfulness of it all intensified by Fung's now infamous and completely warped vocal taunt) and as you watch you can be under no illusions that you are now a long, long way away from Hollywood., in fact from almost any movie making conventions anywhere in the world.
It’s a totally evil act by Fung and a totally gratuitous choice in how it is shown by Tang. The act had to be extreme for it to have the effect it was meant to have on the plot, but did it really have to be this way, shown in this fashion? Perhaps, perhaps not. But it’s done now and rightly or wrongly it becomes the searing heart of the film and makes sure that the legend of “Run and Kill” (though most other parts of the film simply don‘t justify it) stays alive and screaming no matter how many other CAT III movies have come since.

To sum up “Run and Kill” is a movie saved not only by the two lead performances (Kent Cheng is effective, even if his character is not) as well as some sparodic but well done violence but also by the fact it dares to do the unthinkable. And perhaps that alone justifies the unthinkable.