Hong Kong cinema entered the American mainstream when the cultural phenom Enter the Dragon added a dose of 007 DNA. However, it was Australia that best ran with Golden Harvest’s formula, producing the Ozploitation classic The Man from Hong Kong. To underline the Bond-ness of it all, they give it a catchy theme song in Jigsaw’s “Sky High” and even cast one-and-done 007 George Lazenby as the villain.
Hong Kong Special Branch Inspector Fang Sing Leng (Jimmy Wang Yu, Master of the Flying Guillotine) travels Down Under to extradite a scar-faced drug dealer (Sammo Hung, Eastern Condors). Crossbow-savvy crime lord Jack Wilton (Lazenby, Death Dimension) makes Fang’s assignment most difficult, if not downright impossible.
Another influence of Ian Fleming’s most famous creation? Putting Fang horizontal with beautiful women he’s just met. Chief among them is a journalist (Ros Spiers, Stone) who literally swoops into their first meeting on a hang glider; “Your kite is confiscated,” he says, ever the smooth-talker. His next conquest is a college student (Rebecca Gilling, Spiers’ fellow Stoner); “You’re my first Chinese,” she says, ever the statistician. (Let’s try to ignore how she then pulls her eyes back to slits, shall we?) In his sex scenes with both, Fang exhibits an interesting lovers’ technique: dragging his tongue across their face. Whatever works!
The first feature for Turkey Shoot director Brian Trenchard-Smith, The Man from Hong Kong contains some incredible action sequences. Aside from the hand-to-hand-to-foot combat on display, audiences get a couple of high-speed chases, a man on fire, a leap from a tall building and, yep, more hang gliding. One could draw a direct line from this ball-kicking bone-crusher to the groundbreaking work of Jackie Chan in the ’80s with Police Story, Armour of God and the like, so much so that a line of Wilton’s can be thrown back at the film: “Thank you for coming. You’ve been very entertaining.” —Rod Lott