RED TO KILL (1994)
Directed by: Billy Tang
Starring: Lily Chung, Money Lo, Ben Ng, Bobby Yip
In 1994, Billy Tang directed BROTHER OF DARKNESS, a restrained castration-anxiety flick that seemed to be a respite from the blood-slimed shockers he had dished up in previous years (DR. LAMB, RUN AND KILL) Dealing with his relatively normal theme of stress impacting a family both from within and without, BROTHER OF DARKNESS was little more than a gulp of fresh air before, nine months later, RED TO KILL was ripped dripping from his brain. A traumatic story of the life of the developmentally disabled in the HKSAR, R2K is celluloid shock treatment. A high-impact collision of fancy ideas and viscera.
Derek Yee ground this territory through his camera in his first film, THE LUNATICS, in 1986. THE LUNATICS was a case of a socially engaged, concerned mind examining the fears of people living close to the mentally ill, the lack of money and understanding among higher-ups in the Welfare Department, the thankless churn of social work, and the often tortured lives of the mentally ill themselves. Yee ended his movie with a note of hope, a recognition that concerned individuals will always step forward to fill the gap. Eight years later the situation had hardly improved: the stigma of mental illness kept the mentally ill from being recognized and treated as human beings by society, and the system was doing a worse job handling a heavier case load. In 1986 audiences got the concerned social activist. In 1994, when the colony was prosperous and secure, they got the fevered, unhinged mind of Bloody Billy Tang. His is an intellect with teeth, and rather than addressing collective fears, he exploited them.
In R2K the HKSAR's urban crudscape is kaleidoscopically refracted through cinematographer Tony Miu's camera lens into a Caligari nightmare of square-cut corridors teeming with the uncared for dregs of the HKSAR's mental health system. Undiagnosed schizophrenics, the paranoid working class, and the developmentally disabled are all warehoused in hulking concrete monoliths, their caretakers overloaded, underpaid and more marginalized than their charges.
The first ten minutes serve as a billboard that you're now leaving moral territory, a double-barreled blast of moviemaking brio and twitchy homicidal impulse that no written description can ever really prepare you for. In one corner is a mother, eyes slit tight with paranoia, clutching her developmentally disabled kid and threatening to jump. In the other corner, in the same building, a woman in red is stalked by a jerking, sweating psychopath. With muscles ripped and rope-sized veins athrob with venom he captures, kills and rapes her in that order with the assistance of a squeaky toy. The music — Tangerine Dream synths, deep water sonar pings, raspy breathing — and the variable camera speeds clue us in early: we're in mental territory now. From here on in it's a psychological free-for-all.
Billy Tang's sickest and most subtle jokes are in this movie, as well as his most impressive cinematography. His brilliant mise en scene, sick joke shock edits, and precise geometric framing are all deployed to full effect. During a court scene, the passing of hours is depicted by two graceful blinks of the accused's eyes. The plot often becomes secondary to the style, with the prowling camera and wide angle lenses taking in the triangulations of violated flesh in shockingly abstract arrangements that serve as their own statements. Humanity becomes a debatable point in this movie as the actors and the scenery serve the same agenda with much the same effect.
The plot involves a socially isolated social worker, Cheung Ka-lok (Money Lo), who takes responsibility for a developmentally disabled young woman, Ming Ming (Lily Chung), placing her in the Social Welfare Department Sheltered Workshop and Hostel, a light industry factory and dormitory located in a crumbling housing block. The first half of the movie is "Lean On Me" inspired silliness as Director Chan (Ben Ng), and Cheung help Ming Ming adjust to her new life in the hostel. She makes friends, learns to dance, jumps up and down, etc. But at night, the halls of the complex belong to the bogeyman, who whimpers and stumbles from floor to floor, dragging his over-muscled bulk behind him, searching for women dressed in red on which to vent his endless supply of homicidal energy. The other residents have formed a vigilante group to patrol their halls and they are starting to blame the “retarded” residents for the crimes. As tensions build, humans arguing over their living arrangements and flinging groundless accusations back and forth, the bogeyman snuffles around just outside the light, picking off anyone stupid enough to stray from the pack.
Cheung and Ming Ming become sisters, Cheung seeing something of her younger self in Ming Ming, and then the trap snaps shut. Ming Ming keeps blithely putting herself in the path of danger, and when it finally catches up with her there's a nauseating inevitability to it. From there, it's a bloody battle between Cheung and the rapist over Ming Ming's heart. The rapist claims he wants to start a family with Ming Ming and marry her. Cheung knows Ming Ming can't cope with this and she fights tooth and claw to keep it from happening. In the process, the line between sex and mutilation is blurred so often that any distinction between the two becomes meaningless.
Adding further complications to this bloody triangle (Rapist-Cheung-Ming Ming) is Billy Tang's portrayal of mental illness. He acknowledges the generally unacknowledged sexuality of those who suffer from mental illness and, in particular, the developmentally disabled — most of them are physically adults, after all. Few movies give the sexuality, self-mutilation, pain, horror, and genuine humiliation that go along with mental illness such centerstage attention. The welfare system is portrayed as being in a neverending state of flux: room mates are missing, the dead are carted about, people leave and never come back home, living situations are constantly adjusted and readjusted. Ming Ming is an adult in this film, and when the transient, joyless world of the welfare system is her only other option it makes the siren call of her tormentor that much more seductive. Cheung's motives are made just as suspect as the rapist's. Does she really care about Ming Ming or is she looking for a human-sized pet on which to vent her mothering urges? Cheung's and the rapist's oppositional, yet equally violent, natures are placed on opposite ends of the same continuum in the final showdown: the rapist wading through soccer balls wearing a lycra Olympic outfit, swinging a sledgehammer, Cheung coming at him with an iron and fake flowers. It's like watching a mother fight with a suitor over her daughter's heart. Unfortunately, a translation problem in the subtitles has Cheung called a "bastard" over and over when in fact she's being called a "bitch", the traditional name for an older woman who just won't let a man have his way.
As for the actors, they launch into their deranged characterizations with adrenalized gusto. The rapist's body turns out to be the movie's greatest special effect as he jerkily transforms himself into a blood-streaked killing machine. And Lily Chung turns in the performance of a lifetime. In terms of self-directed loathing, Ming Ming makes Carrie look restrained. By the time she takes a razor to herself the line between acting and being is crossed and she doesn't look back once, lost in a land of mondo brutality.
R2K is the movie that may have burned out its director. If ever a film plumbed the depths of darkness and horror and actually hit bottom, R2K is it. This is a movie that spirals down and down until it passes the point of no return. And then it doesn't. The characters end up spinning out of control, dead or locked in their own painful private worlds without comfort or healing. Bloody Billy went on to direct a lot of workmanlike programmers, never again to reach the heights (or depths) of his urban trilogy during the course of which he mapped out the dark heart of the HKSAR. His later horror films like HAUNTED KARAOKE are fun, but his attitude towards horror is now distinctly slapstick and shows no sign of returning to darker waters. It's too bad really. The world has lost a seriously disturbed director with a singular vision. Billy Tang Hin-sing crafted a world where personal relations are automatically suspect, where families are more likely to do harm than anything else, where all distinctions between sex and violence have been lost, and where his characters, traumatized by their very existence, run around sweating and crying out their pain, looking for all the world like candles melting down to a wick of pure hurt and hatred. We may have lost Bloody Billy, but RED TO KILL lives on, and it's just as upsetting to watch now as it ever was.