The Twins Effect (2003)

The Twins Effect (2003)
Aka: The Vampire Effect
Chinese Title: 千機變
Translation: Thousand Machine Change

Starring: Charlene Choi, Gillian Chung, Ekin Cheng, Anthony Wong, Edison Chan, Jackie Chan, Karen Mok, Josie Ho, Mickey Hardt
Director: Dante Lam
Action Director: Donnie Yen

 

The movie begins the way every self-respecting film should begin: a kung-fu fight against vampires. Director Dante Lam, best known for his gritty crime thrillers, actually shoots this scene with quite a bit of skill. Picture an empty subway station at night, two people are observing the scene from above. Those two are Reeve (Ekin Cheng, The Storm Riders and Divergence) and his partner Lily (Josie Ho, Purple Storm and Dream Home), members of an anti-vampire league. Suddenly a pack of bats flock out of one of the tunnels followed by an empty subway train. Reeve enters one of the cars, but it’s suspiciously empty. As they walk from one car to another, they began to have flashbacks of the vampire attack that occurred earlier. Then, a lone, pale figure—one of the victims—appears in the doorway of the car. Suddenly, all of the dead bodies of the vampires’ victims appear all at once in the car. Then, a big kung fu fight breaks out.

It’s a great way to begin a film, mixing elements of suspense, horror, and kung fu elements in that multi-genre juggling way that Hong Kong directors are so well-known for doing. In the end, Reeve and Lily take on the Duke (Swiss martial artist Mickey Hardt) and Lily is killed in the scuffle. Sometime later, a new partner is assigned to Reeve: the extremely peppy Gypsy (Gillian Chung, House of Fury).

Meanwhile, a group of vampires moves into an abandoned church. The group is led by Kazaf (Edison Chen), one of the five main vampire princes. Kazaf is accompanied by two female European vampires and his assistant, Prada (Anthony Wong, The Mission and The Untold Story). Kazaf and his bunch are supposedly “good” vampires in that they don’t actively kill their victims. They get their blood in wine bottles sent by Kazaf’s father. Unfortunately, Kazaf and his family are being hunted by The Duke, as their essence is needed to open the “Vampire Bible” and give the vampire the ability to walk around during daylight.

One evening, Kazaf and Prada are having a drink at a local restaurant when they witness a spectacle going on between a couple and the man’s ex-girlfriend, Helen (Charlene Choi, New Police Story and The Butterfly Lovers). Apparently, the guy left Helen for a girl with more curves and Helen is justifiably not happy about it. Oh, and Helen just happens to be Reeve’s little sister. After the scuffle has ended and the couple has fled to eat somewhere more peaceful, Helen stops by Kazaf’s table and grabs his glass of wine (actually blood) and drinks it. I’m pretty sure there’s a difference in taste between the iron-y taste of blood and wine, but Helen apparently doesn’t notice. Anyways, Kazaf becomes smitten with her and she gives him her phone number.

After a random fight breaks out between Helen and Gypsy back home because Reeve gave the latter his sister’s bed, much to her dismay, the movie breaks off in two different films, only to merge at the climax. In one plot thread, we have Reeve and Gypsy tracking down a vampire in Hong Kong, leading to a frenetic fight in an alleyway followed by prolonged comic sequence in which Reeve almost becomes a full-fledged vampire after Gypsy mistakes the antidote for his become-a-temporary-vampire serum, which is disguised as banana extract, for her own banana-scented perfume or something.

In the second plot thread, which takes up the greater part of the film’s second act, we have Kazaf and Helen falling in love with each other and whatnot. On their first date, they gate crash a wedding between an ambulance driver named Jackie (played by-you’re never gonna guess—Jackie Chan!) and a hard-drinking woman (Karen Mok, Black Mask and God of Cookery). On their second date, Kazaf is already being to starve to death since his father has already been killed and nobody has sent him his bottled blood to drink, and he’s gone so long without sucking somebody’s blood that he really doesn’t know how to anymore.

Helen, finding out that he’s a vampire but loving him anyways, takes him to a hospital to get some nourishment for him, but before they can do anything, one of The Duke’s minions shows up at the hospital. This eventually leads to a comic action set-piece in an ambulance coincidentally driven by Jackie. Jackie holds off a vampire in his usual acrobatic, comic way (not bad for a 48-year-old man) while Helen shows that her brother has taught her more than a few tricks.

Reeve eventually finds out that his sister is dating a vampire and, although he doesn’t go after Kazaf immediately, he does take Gypsy with him to storm the church where Kazaf lives. Unfortuantely, the Duke has already taken control of the church and soon Gypsy will have to get some reinforcements in the form of Helen and Kazaf. But when they go back to the church to confront the Duke, they’ll all have some difficult decisions to make.

Watching it for the first time in seven years, I was surprised at how much I liked it than I did back then. There are still some pacing problems during the second act, but I guess I was ready for that so it didn’t seem to drag as much as I had before. Dante Lam directs this film in such a way that it comes across as a mixture between a Hollywood blockbuster (more specifically, the Blade franchise) and those goofy Hong Kong comedies that us westerners either love or hate. There’s a little something for everyone here, be it romance, cute girls, melodrama, or high-octane kung fu action courtesy of Donnie Yen. And, because this is a Hong Kong film, anybody can die at any time around here.

I guess what struck me the most when I watched it the second time is how much the film comes across as a transition between the Blade series of action-horror films and the now-popular Twilight Saga. The former connection shouldn’t be too surprising, considering that Donnie Yen had worked on Blade II the previous year, and the vampires in this film die in a CGI effect reminiscent of Wesley Snipe’s franchise. But we also have a made-for-teeny-bopper romance between a human girl and a “cute” vampire. The romance is played more for comedy, though and I’ll take Charlene Choi’s pouty-but-kung-fu-proficient Helen over Bella any day. Edison Chen doesn’t register very much as Kazaf, especially since he’s left completely out of the final showdown.

The film’s action was critically acclaimed to the point that Donnie Yen won no less than two prestigious awards for his work here, those being the Hong Kong Film Award for Best Action Design and a Taiwanese Golden Horse Award in the same category. Indeed, Donnie had spent the last few years before this working outside of Hong Kong in projects like Highlander: Endgame, Blade II, and the Japanese film The Princess Blade. This film would mark the point that he would finally be taken seriously as an action director and really pave the way for him to put Hong Kong action cinema back on the road to former glory with films like SPL and Flash Point.

There are five action sequences in this film, three of them really worth mentioning. I don’t have a lot to say about the fight between Charlene Choi and Gillian Chung, except that they look a lot more proficient in the finale than they do in that first fight. Some critics say that the opening action sequence is good enough that it could be the climax of another movie. I tend to agree, although I think it used a bit too much slow motion and it didn’t convince me that Josie Ho’s Lily got hurt enough to die by the fight’s end. I was impressed with the fight in the alleyway, especially with Ekin Cheng’s speed with the sword (he really got good after working on The Storm Riders and A Man Called Hero) and prowess with the rope-dart (unless it was a double doing all that twisting).

The finale, at least the first half of it, is a lot like any big set piece from a Blade film, with the two heroines hacking dozens of vampires apart with swords and kung fu. Like the first fight, there’s a surprising amount of ground fighting in the climax, which shows that Donnie Yen was, as early as 2003, trying to revolutionize Hong Kong choreography by incorporating MMA into his action sequences. The fact that he’s working with non-martial artists makes it a little rough around the edges, but it still looks quite good. Gillian Chung looks especially good in hand-to-hand combat, something that would apparently get better in House of Fury and Twins Mission. And by 2003, you really took whatever you could when it came to Hong Kong cinema.

Despite being about vampires and getting a Hong Kong IIB rating, the film is a LOT less gory than the Blade films or 30 Days of Night. Most of the violence is CGI-based and there’s only some blood present in a brief flashback on the subway and another brief scene at a club early on (the part with Jackie Chan is played for laughs and thus isn’t really offensive).

All things considered, The Twins Effect is the best overall of the Twins films and a pretty good film on its own merits. It’s no HK classic, but there’s enough quality action and (if you like them) cute girls for the film to justify its existence. I don’t think the action is quite as good as what Benz Kong did in Twins Mission, but it’s really good by the standards of Hong Kong cinema for the first half of the last decade. I wonder what Twi-hards would think if they watched this film.