THE UNTOLD STORY (1993)
Directed by: Herman Yau
Starring: Anthony Wong! Danny Lee! Emily Kwan! Julie Lee!
Are you ready for pee-drinking, child murder, chopstick rape, mass butchery, cannibalism, wrist-slitting, garbage eating, and a spike through the eye? What about decapitation, blood-spurting, projectile vomiting, more cannibalism, police torture, rotting corpses, bleach injections, and mahjong players set on fire? If that sounds like your idea of a fun day at the beach then come on down to THE UNTOLD STORY, or as its literal title puts it, THE UNTOLD STORY: EIGHT IMMORTALS RESTAURANT HUMAN MEAT ROAST PORK BUNS.
The pinnacle (or nadir) of Category III Hong Kong shockers, this truecrime bloodbath won star Anthony Wong a Best Actor Award at the otherwise civilized Hong Kong Film Awards. It's loosely based on the true story of Wong Chi-hang who fled to Macau in 1973 after trying to murder someone in Hong Kong, where he killed 10 people in 1985 and, as urban legend has it, disposed of their corpses by baking them into delicious steamed buns that he served at his restaurant. Rock n'roll loving director, Herman Yau, takes great, gratuitous delight in kicking out the jams and serves up this steaming pile of grue in extra-large family-sized portions.
It’s a movie with a split personality. One side follows Inspector Lee (played by eternal cop, Danny Lee - THE KILLER, DR. LAMB) and his gang of bumbling Macanese detectives as they trip, fumble, falter and fall through the clues and blunder towards solving the case. Played for laughs, it's the Keystone Kops live and in color, speaking Cantonese. Rumor has it that Danny Lee, who actually believes he is a cop since he's played them onscreen in what must be hundreds of movies, was worried about denigrating the image of the Hong Kong police force by showing them to be a pack of clumsy dorks. It was only when the director explained to him that it was okay since it wasn't Hong Kong's, but Macau's, police force that was being held up to ridicule, that Lee agreed to do the part.
The other side of the film centers on Anthony Wong's pathetic, scarifying, sweaty, and human portrait of a guy who'll light you on fire to win a mahjong game. Bloody, dark, unrelenting and impossible to stop watching, this is the side of the movie that earned the Best Actor Award. The two halves sit next to each other uncomfortably, jostling shoulders and getting irritated until the climax where the movie unexpectedly becomes a screed against police brutality (rare in the "by any means necessary" world of the Hong Kong cop movie) and Anthony Wong's psychopath is elevated to become a kind of scruffy, unpleasant, yet iconic folk hero.
The two diametrically opposed sides of this movie (goofy cop laff-riot; black as night character study) come together to make one high-impact whole that's greater than the sum of its parts. Kind of like the way the family that is the focus of the film comes apart into pieces that are somehow more delicious than the sum of their whole. And higher in protein, too.