Gonna Get You
Director: Kang Wei
Rating: 5.0
Year: 1976
You have to remember when watching this that the
Wynners main appeal was to female teens. In the scenes where they perform
in concert the audience is about 99% screaming females. So this is more just
a curious visit into the past but you certainly don't want to stay longer
than you have. The Wynners were at the top of the pops for only a few years
in the mid 1970's but they are still loved today by the audiences of yesterday.
We are all like that to some degree. That is why Oldie Tours do so well.
They still reunite every five years or so for sold-out concerts or perform
for charities. All of them stayed in the public eye to differing degrees
after the band members went their separate ways in 1978 - without acrimony
- just was time to do their own thing. You can only be what was in a sense
a Boy's Band for so long until something cuter and younger comes along. They
got out before that happened.
This film and their next one, Making It, were produced by Golden Harvest
(their first film Let's Rock by Bo Ding) and Cantonese was the language of
choice. Which makes sense in that all five of them were born and brought
up in Hong Kong and they sang in Cantonese. But if you compare these films
with what was going on across the language barrier - i.e.in Mandarin at Shaw
Brothers - there is a world of difference in production quality and budget.
These films are made on the cheap. But they were meant for teens so it didn't
really matter. They just wanted to see their favorite on the screen.
They play in a band called the . . . Wynners. So not a great stretch
of acting and with five of them given an equal amount of dialogue no one
has to do a lot of speaking. Just as well. You would never guess from this
that Alan Tam and Kenny Bee would go on to successful acting careers. They
all live together in a nice spacious house with their own bedroom and décor.
Kenny is into Sherlock Holmes, Alan whose father was on the 1936 National
China Football team is a football fanatic, Bennett Pang is married and likes
his wife to sleep in her mermaid costume, Danny Yip keeps animals everywhere
and usually has mice up his sleeve and Anthony Chan just likes to sleep.
They are going on tour to America and a drug dealer decides the way to smuggle
out heroin is to plant it in the Wynners guitars. He is a comic villain in
his lair with a plethora of harem women all dressed like Roman serving girls.
He does the switch but then the trip is called off and the rest of the film
is him trying to get those guitars back. Very mildly amusing at times but
mainly just silly nonsense that wears on you a bit. Still, I think they perform
4 to 5 songs and that was enough to make their fans happy.
