Tsui Hark's DANGEROUS ENCOUNTERS - FIRST KIND: DIRECTOR'S CUT Review

Screening as part of Le French May's film programme "NOIR - A Film Noir Retrospective Bridging France and Hong Kong", this marks the first time Tsui Hark's controversial film from 1980 has screened in its entirety on home turf. An unflinching, nihilistic examination of juvenile delinquency in an unstable political climate, DANGEROUS ENCOUNTERS - FIRST KIND still holds up more than three decades on, both as a piece of entertainment and as a cautionary tale about the dangers of a disenfranchised young generation.

The story follows three high school friends, Ko (Che Biu Law), Lung (Lung Tin Sang) and Paul (Albert Au), who detonate a homemade grenade in a local cinema for kicks, only to be recognized by Wan Chu (Lin Chen Chi), a teenage girl who is arguably an even greater menace to society. The younger sister of a police detective, she spends her days torturing animals, fantasizing about killing her neighbours, and starting fights at work. Recently fired and desperate to find friends with a like-minded agenda for mayhem, Wan Chu threatens to report the boys to the police if they don't let her join their gang.

Together they embark on a bombing campaign that quickly incrues a body count, while whipping up a city-wide media frenzy in the process. Sure enough, Wan Chu's older brother, Detective Tan (Lo Lieh) is put on the case but if that wasn't enough, the delinquents cross paths with a crazy US Vietnam Veteran and end up with a suitcase full of Japanese bank orders worth millions of dollars. While they look for a way to cash the cheques, they have now been targeted by a particularly nasty bunch of war-crazed trigger-happy mercenaries looking to get their money back by any means necessary.

DE1K could so easily have been a straight-forward tale of meddlesome inner-city kids getting in over their heads, but at every turn the young, angry Tsui Hark takes his story into increasingly dark and uncomfortable territory. At the centre of all this is Wan Chu, a teenage orphan living with an irresponsible older brother in a poverty-stricken neighbourhood. With no positive influence in her life and no one interested in helping her out, she is quickly spiraling out of control. In her first few scenes we see her being sexually harassed by a gang of local punks only to fend them off by throwing a lit cigarette down a guy's pants; we see her drive nails into her pet mice for fun, impale a stray gate on a fencepost and point a loaded gun at her neighbours. From the outset there's little hope Wan Chu will be able to salvage a normal life for herself.

The boys, on the other hand, seem to have a choice. They are all from relatively normal families, and Paul's parents appear to be pretty wealthy. They still attend school - at least intermittently - and are pretty resourceful when it comes to building home-made weapons or dealing with gangsters. They may be naïve, clueless and a danger to themselves and others, but you suspect that they require little more than a firm hand and increased discipline to set them straight. All that changes, however, when they steal from the gweilos.

While the young actors do a great job in their roles, the film's weakest element is its portrayal of the Americans - veterans of the Vietnam War who have now become international mercenaries and arms dealers. As is often the case in Hong Kong films, these performances are terrible, the accents all over the place and their dialogue laughably inauthentic. They also show the customary lack of respect for the locals, the authorities and everything regarding their current surroundings, serving only as cartoonish villains who may yet prove more than a match for a bunch of misguided, opportunistic school kids.

What was most interesting about this particular screening of the film was the opportunity to see what was removed by the censorship board ahead of its original domestic release. You didn't need to have any preexisting knowledge of the film as the excised scenes had been reintegrated into the film from an inferior VHS source that was instantly recognizable compared to the rather beautiful looking digital presentation of the rest of the feature. While it did mean that the AV quality at the screening fluctuated it was the perfect signposting to consider each censored moment as it played out.

Unsurprisingly, the majority of the censored sequences detailed Ko, Lung and Paul building incendiary devices - which is shown in surprising, almost instructional detail, as well as showing them actually planting and detonating the devices in public places. There was never any question in the previous version of the film that the kids were responsible for the bombing campaign, only that we did not see them carry out their crimes onscreen before now. Other notable additions included Wan Chu's cruelty to animals, a sequence in which one of the boys is accused of being an illegal immigrant from the mainland and details of the mercenaries' illegal operations throughout South East Asia.

The film still carries the notorious Category III rating, and rightly so, due to its graphic violence and rather explicit depictions of bomb-making but it was a welcome treat to see the film in its entirety and up on the big screen. Hopefully a better source can be found and a proper restoration and re-release will now be considered, although as Tsui Hark explained in the Q&A session he gave afterwards, there is nothing currently in the works.

Speaking of the Q&A, I was able to record this fascinating hour-long session on my phone and am in the process of preparing it to be posted up to accompany this review. It's well worth a watch and covers a wealth of historical information regarding the making of the film and Tsui's motivations for doing so. Watch this space.