THE UNTOLD STORY [1993]

The Untold Story (1993)
Directed by: Herman Yau
Written by: Law Kam-fai, Sammy Lau
Starring: Anthony Wong, Danny Lee, Emily Kwan, Julie Lee

AKA BUN MAN: THE UNTOLD STORY, THE EIGHT IMMORTALS RESTUARANT: THE UNTOLD STORY, BAT SIN FAN DIM: YAN YUK CHA SUI BAU

HONG KONG

AVAILABLE ON BLU-RAY, DVD AND DIGITAL 

RUNNING TIME: 96 mins

REVIEWED BY: Dr Lenera

Hong Kong 1976: an argument over money results in Wong Chi Hang committing murder, then fleeing, burning his ID and changing his name. Macau 1976: Wong is in charge of the Eight Immortals Restaurant, but it’s still owned by a Cheng Lam and Wong is unable to procure it officially without the signature of the former, who’s mysteriously absent. When human remains wash up on a beach, forensics identifies an arm as that of Chan Lao Chun, Cheng Lam’s mother in law. Inspector Lee and his team’s investigation leads to the Eight Immortals Restaurant, where Wong seems happy to kill anyone who bothers him, but it’s hard to obtain evidence when he chops up and makes pork buns out of his victims….

Seeing as we live in a time where the BBFC are more lenient than they’ve ever been in terms of movies being legally available for public viewing [though they’re becoming stricter on older movies in terms of ratings age and bizarrely prudish about sex], it’s probably hard for much younger readers to imagine a time when so many films that a lot of us wanted to see weren’t actually legally available for viewing in the UK – though of course we could usually still import them if we were feeling brave [I read reports of customs seizing banned videos and DVDs but all of my stuff got through]. The Untold Story was never banned in Blighty, but was one of those films about which people said “the BBFC would never pass this uncut”; fortunately nobody attempted to release a diluted version, which would have really wound up those of us who detest censorship. Another movie which people said the same about was The House On The Edge Of The Park, which actually was once banned as a Video Nasty and then released heavily censored until recently; I might also review that from the newest Blu-ray release soon as I obtained that too. But for now we have The Untold Story, from 88 Films, and this is one film I never got to see back in the day. Based on true events, it’s an uneven melding of brutality and supposed comedy where the comedy just isn’t funny – and I’m someone who ‘s chuckled at a lot of Hong Kong humour. The film mostly works when it focuses on its killer rather than its cops, with a chilling performance from Anthony Wong and the raising of certain moral issues regarding subjects such as police brutality, while the attempted chuckled do lessen. It’s very violent throughout, but only one scene can probably be said to be properly nasty until a flashback at the end which is genuinely harrowing, and which no, the BBFC would definitely not have passed at all once upon a time.

Director Herman Lau and actor Anthony Wong made several Category 3 [the “adults only” rating introduced in 1988] films, including The Ebola Syndrome and Taxi Hunter. The Untold Story was their first collaboration, though it was initiated by Danny Lee who was turning producer. Screenwriters Law Kam-fai and Sammy Lau’s script stuck close to the facts of the case. On 4 August 1985, gambler Wong Chi Hang murdered a family of ten in the Eight Immortals Restaurant in Macau before dismembering their bodies and disposing of their remains in the ocean and dumpsters. He purportedly did this because a man named Cheng Lam owed him a gambling debt of 600,000 patacas. He’d previous murdered a man over a debt at his home in Hong Kong and fled to Macau, where he encountered Cheng. Because Cheng was unable to pay back his debt, a verbal agreement was made that he would cede his restaurant’s mortgage to Wong if it wasn’t repaid within one year. However, Cheng wouldn’t repay him and continued to lose money in further bets. Ironically it was never properly proven that Wong was the killer. Apart from an extra murder, the only major changes the writers made were Cheng’s brother being in the prison Wong is put in and the police getting him to confess, whereas in reality he only confessed to another inmate. Lau staged the police capture of Wong at an airport entirely improvised, and wanted to see how far he could push the Category 3 rating, which ended up being too far; four minutes had to be cut, with most shots of severed limbs plus such some details in the murders like a chopstick in the crotch being shortened or removed. It was still a hit and Wong won Best Actor at the Hong Kong Film Awards for that year. Sadly copycat crimes took place in South Korea and Japan. The lady playing the waitress victim, Julie Lee, wanted Wong to be the male lead in Trilogy Of Lust, a hardcore porno movie in which he’d be able to have sex with her but he turned her down.

A disorientating shot where the camera looks up at some buildings and spins around opens the film, which then cuts to a big row inside. “Hey, “dog shit Keung”, lend me $20 000, will you”? “I won’t lend you two f******” bucks”! Shots of Mahjong pieces being put away and frantic arms suggest a frantic filming style, though it then goes away. Eventually one of the arguing men tells the other to leave, which be begins to do before turning round, whacking him on the head with a chair, bashing his head on the wall repeatedly before pouring petrol all over him and setting him on fire, some of this shot with a Wong Kai-Wai-style juddering effect. The credits feature a closeup of an ID card being set alight before we move forward to ten years later, in Macau. Three kids are playing on a beach and find two severed arms washed up. When the police show up, we immediately get a sense of the dimension that exists involving the four main plain-clothed aides of Inspector Lee – Bull, Robert, King Kong, and Bo. Bo, the only female, who’s mocked by the others, often in a sexist and sometimes even in a sexual way. Now, veteran readers of my ramblings may well have picked up on the fact that I don’t much time for political correctness, and one gets used to the way that comedy in Hong Kong can sometimes have a misogynistic feel, but I can’t say that I much enjoyed the lame attempts at laughs that we get here which become tiresome. The other three mock Bo for things like her small breasts, though she still has to fight off the physical attentions of Bulldog. She actually really likes Lee, but he keeps bringing prostitutes in to the police station and even on to crime scenes. So Bo decides to glam up but to the others now looks like – a prostitute. Ho ho ho, and this crap really jars with the serious elements, especially as the film keeps cutting frequently back and forth between the police investigation and our killer.

He’s first seen again chopping up meat carcasses with relish; a man comes in and quickly gets a job after showing Wong how he can chop for five seconds, while Wong tears up a letter meant for Cheng Lam, the former owner of the restaurant. He then visits an attorney, and it seems that the place is still in Cheng Lam’s ownership and Wong is unable to officially take over it with the former’s signature, who’s mysteriously [well, not really] absent. King Kong and Bo take one of the arms to a forensics analyst who identifies it as belonging to Chan Lai Chun, Cheng Lam’s mother in law. Robert also receives a letter from Cheng Lam’s older brother addressed to the Macau police department, saying that Cheng Lam has mysteriously disappeared. The new waiter tells him that he knows he cheated at Mahjong, so he does what anybody would do; stab him in the eye with a reception check spindle and beat him to death with a large soup spoon before dismembering his corpse and turning it into pork buns. He then disposes of the bones by putting them in the dumpster. Inspector Lee orders the other cops to investigate the restaurant after reading the letter. When interviewed, Wong tells Bull and Robert that Cheng Lam has gone away and sold the shop to him while waitress Pearl tells Bo of the letters from the mainland the restaurant has received. Wong shoos the cops away after giving them free pork buns, and we know that Pearl is now for it too. Inspector Lee and his team later visit the restaurant, whereupon Wong acts suspiciously when questioned by Lee who then places 24 hour surveillance on him. Wong is caught trying to dispose of evidence linking him to Cheng Lam by Robert and Bo and then detained while trying to cross the border to China.

It’s weird how we can be disappointed when a scene isn’t as gruesome as we have come to expect. After the killing of the waiter, we’re taken through the process of how exactly a dead human body is turned into buns, but I expected something more graphic than I got, the camera actually cutting away from some of the most explicit detail or assuming a position where we can’t see everything. I was still watching a pretty gruesome sequence, yet felt let down. Wong pissing on bis hands to wash away the blood is a nice touch. My feelings were corrected by the rape and murder of Pearl, which, while the actual intercourse [if one can call the forced variety that] is very quick, is quite grueling, what with the way he brutalises her beforehand, such as dragging her across a room by her hair, though a particularly vicious use of a chopstick is perhaps mercifully not properly seen. What’s most interesting is that, after seeing him commit these two murders [and a rape], for the majority of the rest of the film we’re watching the captive Wong being at the receiving end of all kinds of vicious treatment himself because Lee wants him to confess, and in one telling line, “I need to avenge the victims”. I kinda enjoyed seeing this evil man being repeatedly brutalised, but started to dislike Lee’s team who, along with others, dish it out. It takes a certain kind of person to do this kind of thing. In an unsophisticated way, Kam-fai and Lau seem to be asking on how far police brutality ought to go, and questioning how folk can do this for a considerable length of time. And then the movie plays its trump card as it flashes back to – well, you might know. The fear of the tied-up children as they see their parents killed is probably worse than their actual deaths which are slightly held back on in terms of explicit detail, but it’s all truly disturbing, partly of course because this kind of human evil can happen.

You’d think that any humour in s film containing such material would seem very wrong, and I’ve already said how most of the so-called comedy is weak and uncomfortable, yet some chuckles regarding Wong’s “pork buns” work surprisingly well.  Customers are shown loving them, as are the police when they get a load free from Wong who’s trying to appease them; we can’t help but laugh when the cops finally realise what they’ve been eating. Yet the pork buns actually made from human flesh probably didn’t actually exist, being simply a rumour. The script refuses to give Wong any depth, even though he had much more of a background then the film tells us; he even had a wife at one point and a son. Wong’s performance is required to do much of the work, and he does do very well, with several freaky “looks” which he employs for certain moments, though a lot of the effectiveness of his performance simply relies on the fact that the simple wearing of glasses can hide so much and make someone’s face look different. He never tries for our sympathy in the second half which a lot of actors would have attempted to do; he remains resolutely evil. Lee does a slightly more flamboyant variations on his cop routine; we get a slight sense that he enjoys ordering torture, but only slight. Yau generally adopts a realistic approach, the film bordering on looking ugly at times – yet you can’t say that this is isn’t appropriate for the subject matter. The Untold Story probably deserves its reputation due to its climactic sequence which I reckon will get to even the most hardened watcher of violent movies, but elsewhere it doesn’t seem fully achieved, even if you put to one side the fraternistic, misogynistic humour which, to be fair, disappears around half way through. It’s still quite compelling, but among other things I think it could have tried to delve into the psyche of Wong a bit.

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