Auspicious Objects

In a film industry as prolific and fast-moving as Hong Kong’s, some films are bound to get lost in time and ultimately are forgotten. This series (of sorts) attempts to profile lesser-known or little-remembered titles from Hong Kong’s past, whether they are good in terms of quality or not.

Anthony Wong and Herman Yau, the dream team behind such exploitation classics as Ebola Syndrome and The Untold Story, teamed up before both of those movies to make Taxi Hunter. While one could still file “Taxi Hunter” under the exploitation label, it’s not nearly as tasteless and grotesque as Wong and Yau’s later efforts.

Wong plays an average insurance salesman who seems to be living a great life: He is moving up the corporate ladder in his career and also has a good wife who is soon to give birth to his child. Things aren’t bad. That is, unless there is a taxi around. Evidentially, Wong’s picture perfect life frequently gets disrupted by Hong Kong taxi drivers, who are apparently the scum of the earth. One such driver swerves in front of Wong and abruptly breaks to pick up some passengers. Wong rear-ends the taxi, and the driver promptly bullies him (with help from other taxi drivers) into paying a large sum of money for pettily damages.

However, this isn’t enough to upset Wong, so he shrugs it off and goes home. After his wife goes into labor, he calls a cab, which promptly ditches him in favor of a higher fare. Wong stops the next taxi, but that driver too refuses to take his wife, as he doesn’t want blood all over the seats. Unfortunately, this driver closes the rear passenger door with part of Wong’s wife’s dress caught in it, so she gets dragged down the street and eventually dies because of this.

Since Wong is an average white collar guy, he copes with his grief by crying and getting an extended vacation from work. While eating outside, Wong notices a taxi driver attempting to extort extra money from a passenger. Upset, he walks across the street and, in what is perhaps the film’s funniest moment, impulsively punches the taxi driver in the face, prompting applause from the surrounding crowd. Later that evening, Wong gets drunk with his brother-in-law (who happens to be a cop) and takes a taxi home alone. Wong is harassed by the driver, who he eventually strangles with a seatbelt buckle. Thus begins a murderous rampage on taxis and the people who drive them.

While the premise sounds rather nihilistic, the film shies away from violence in all but a few scenes, which may put off fans of Wong and Yau’s later collaborations. The film’s exposition takes up the first forty minutes of the running time, during which little happens (apart from an opening action sequence). Not to say Taxi Hunter is a bad film; it’s decent entertainment, just don’t expect a bloodbath. The only complaint I have is that Man Tat Ng (sans Stephen Chow) plays a cop, and it’s quite obvious that the film tries to play him for laughs. The juxtaposition between his bumbling character and the grave seriousness of the rest of the film doesn’t quite work out, which ruins the atmosphere at points. Still, Taxi Hunter is an above-average offering from the exploitation genre, which may be well-suited for those who couldn’t stomach The Untold Story or Ebola Syndrome.

David Films hong kong, movies, movies that hong kong forgot