The Island
 
      
Director: Leung Po-chi
Year: 1985
Rating: 6.0

It is summer break at college and Teacher Cheung has decided that taking six of his students on an excursion to an almost deserted island for some nature and fun is a good idea. Three boys and three girls. Even if there were not maniacs on the island that sounds like a really bad idea. Yes, three inbred brothers and a ferocious loving mother seem to be the only other people on the island. Let's get together and have a barbecue, be friends and try to kill each other. This is what college is really all about. Experiences. Like running for your life. Like surviving. Like fighting to the death. Your "What Did I Do Last Summer" essay will be great.



This is directed by Leung Po-chi who was one of the pre-cursors to the New Wave with his film Jumping Ash in 1976. A terrific crime film with jittery hand held camera and a raw feel to it. He also directed the suspenseful serial killer flick, He Lives By Night, the peculiar sci-fi film Welcome with Sally Yeh in which she comes back from the future to kill someone and Hong Kong 1941 during the Japanese invasion. This is an interesting choice with a small budget and a fairly unknown cast except for the lead. It has echoes of Tsui Hark's We're Going to Eat You from 1980 but on an even smaller scale. Leung though decides to pull his punches for too long - a sense of danger and creepiness is a constant right from the start - but all the fireworks are saved for the last 30-minutes.



Brother Sam-Fat (Billy Ching) is looking for a wife. A virgin the mother insists. They have captured a woman who swam from the Mainland and have her chained up waiting for the wedding night. She is to be a beautiful bride. But mom checks for her pureness and freaks out when she doesn't find it. Billy is a literal idiot clearly produced from inbreeding. The other two brothers are not much better - Yee Fat (Chan Ging) is mean and rapacious and the older brother Tai Fat (Peter Chan Lung) is just your common brute with an axe. When our group shows up, they pick out one of them to be Sam-fat's bride - like it or not.



The head of this group is played by John Shum - again an interesting choice because he was known for often playing cowardly whiny characters in comedies. Now he has to keep the group alive. Two days till the boat comes back to get them. Two days to stay alive. Leung could have really gone with a lot more graphic exploitation but there is a solid amount of blood-letting and horror. Of the six students only two are likely known to many - Ronald Wong who usually was to play these low-life creepy-meepy characters like the follower of Jacky Cheung in As Tears Go By - and Amy Kwok who didn't make many films but did marry Lau Ching-wan. It is enjoyable and tense - you keep waiting for the axe to literally fall and that last 30 minutes is crazy and frantic. But I think a weakness is that none of the students stood out or were likable enough for me to really care if they lived or died. In a sense they were just strawmen and women waiting for their time to come. And it does.