DOG BITE DOG (Hong Kong, 2006)
Directed by: Soi Cheang
Starring: Edison Chen, Sam Lee, Lam Suet
“...one of Hong Kong’s most fascinating talents...the director remains little known outside specialized events...Not long ago, Cheang would have turned up in the now legendary Midnight Movie section of the Berlin Film Festival...”
                                                                                   - Olaf Moller, Film Comment

Spanning one brutal day and night, Soi Cheang’s DOG BITE DOG is a punch in the mouth that drags audiences over the finish line panting, sweaty, exhilarated and desperate to take a shower. It’s not just the rotting clothes and layers of grime that cover its two leads – indie icon Sam Lee and pop star Edison Chen (The Grudge 2) – that make you feel filthy, it’s the in-your-face de-evolutionary display of human beings reduced to screaming, snarling animals slaughtering each other in their struggle to survive that makes you want to take steel wool to your soul and scrub and scrub and scrub until this bleak, black action flick feels like a distant nightmare.

Intense to the point of insanity, DOG BITE DOG kicks off with a filthy, Cambodian hitman (Edison Chen, channeling Quasimodo) crawling off a leaky fishing scow and into a Hong Kong restaurant where he pumps bullets through the brains of a lawyer, stuffs his face with the leftover food on her plate, and runs. Rage junkie cop, Sam Lee, shows up and he tracks down the pre-verbal hitman to a seething landfill where he’s taken refuge with a simple minded young woman who’s either his partner or his hostage. From there on it’s a trauma-inducing gallery of brutality as they go at each other like pit bulls in a dogfight. Hong Kong director Soi Cheang has been mapping the ugly side of life for years now and in DOG BITE DOG he introduces audiences to the universe of pain inside his head. Children destroy their parents, the strong destroy the weak and cops and criminals sink their teeth into each others’ throats and go down fighting in a endless, bloody battle for survival. Scrape away the niceties of civilization and you’re left with DOG BITE DOG, the action movie as nature film.