Gong Tau
Director: Herman Yau
Year: 2007
Rating: 6.5
Gong Tau is the Chinese term for South-East Asian
Black Magic. It literally translates to "tame head", though perhaps "flying
head" would be more apt. Once again Thailand is the bad guy in this supernatural
film from Herman Yau. The director returns back to his own roots in horror
as well as a long history of Hong Kongers getting in trouble going to Thailand
and frolicking. Yau was behind Ebola Syndrom, The Untold Storye and the first
six in the Troublesome Night series, so horror was nothing new to him. This
is like a longer and gorier segment of one of those Troublesome Night films
which usually end with a quick twist and a quicker fade-out.
Black Magic isn't really native to Hong
Kong which prefers ghosts, hopping vampires and possession, but step outside
of Hong Kong into SE Asia and danger often in the form of a woman is waiting
for you. This theme goes back to the Shaw Brothers but also with later films
like Devil's Curse, Ghostly Vixen, Bloody Sorcery, Curse of the Zombi, Holy
Virgin vs the Evil Dead, The Eternal Evil of Asia and Centipede Horror. Times
have changed a bit though. In Centipede Horror they vomited real centipedes
while here they are CGI. Which is a disappointment, but I imagine Maggie
Siu was grateful for that when she vomits a river of them.
There are a lot of nasty moments in this.
Ones that made me glad I didn't watch this right after dinner. An autopsy
that brought out more organs than I knew we had, a hand shot to pieces like
raw meat, a baby in which horrible things happen to and other uncomfortable
scenes. Yau seems to be enjoying pushing the envelope on this one. His TN
films were gentler and often funny. Not here. Humor is kept at a safe distance
as if it has rabies. From the opening scene of a man sneaking into a home
where a wife and baby are sleeping and snipping their hair it is fraught
with tension and shocks. The wonderful thing about Yau is he can do everything
well - action, comedy, gentle dramas, horror, social critiques - but I can't
think of any of his films (well, maybe Ebola?) that feel as gratuitous in
splashing the audience with blood and nudity. Not that this is necessarily
a bad thing but it felt un-Yau like to me. The real problem in this is that
none of the characters are particularly likeable. The cops are brutal, the
wife does little more than screech (for good reason admittedly) and the villains
have not a speck of humanity about them.
After the snipping of the hair, the wife
Karpi (Maggie Siu) begins to feel enormous pain as we see needles stuck into
a voodoo doll and worse things happen to her baby. Her husband is Rockman
(Mark Cheng) who is a tough and dedicated cop. When he and his partner Sum
(Lam Suet) begin to realize that black magic is at work – Gong Tau – they
suspect a man that Rockman shot in the head and who is now out of jail. And
can feel no pain now as he laughs when he is beaten to a pulp. But Rockman
has a secret that slowly seeps out. A few years back he was in Thailand (oh,oh)
for work and visited a bar where he met the lovely dancer Elli. She is played
by Teng Tzu-hsuan in her only film appearance. She is stunning and always
naked. Fully. And did I say stunning. Well, he plays house with her for a
few days and promises to return. He doesn’t. The ending goes bat-shit crazy
and in its weird way delightful. And awful. But it is all spectacle – I didn’t
really care what happened to any of the characters or how it ends. Maybe
just as well considering.
