Film Illiterate, wherein the proprietor records movies seen, and sporadic progress through assorted lists of the "best". Originally started after regretfully renting something forgettable for the third time. I've forgotten what, but never again! A tedious endeavour since 2005. Hello. 🙂
"Tsui Hark" is synonymous in my mind with second-rate Hong Kong film-making -- a wide-ranging oeuvre of gangster films done worse than Johnnie To, martial arts worse than Yuen-woo Ping and so on.
But Dangerous Encounters, a very early film with strong exploitation influences, is interesting. Three young men, like Hong Kong's answer to Leopold and Loeb, amuse themselves by setting off a bomb in a crowded theatre. They're seen by a young woman who, luckily for them, doesn't call the police. Unluckily, she's a textbook animal-torturing psychopath who wants to be "friends". She blackmails them into further crimes, until all four discover the hazards of messing with the wrong sort of people.
The key scene in this film is one which features none of the main characters at all: it's an establishing shot of an asphalt basketball court, where a young boy lies curled in the foetal position while a circle of other children kick him and call him names. It's a movie about beating, robbing, killing and torturing just because you can. It ends on the same sort of nihilistic note -- violence, it's all there is.