Lam Moon Wah: A Career in Crime
by Blake Matthews
The crime drama has long been a fixture of cinema. It has taken many forms, from the silent Fantomas films coming out of France to the American film noir and Italian poliziesco. Movies have been made in numerous countries glorifying and mythifying organized crime, while others have deconstructed the genre and sought to show us the squalor and sleaze behind the racketeering. Many a classic has sought to show us the world criminals live in. Hollywood has given us everything from Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather series to Brian De Palma's The Untouchables and Michael Mann's Heat. From Japan we've seen the stylish action outings of Takeshi Kitano, like Hana-Bi and Sonatine, to the Kinji Fukasaku's not-so-glamorous Battles Without Honor and Humanity films.
The Jade Screen has never been far behind in the crime film. After all, China has been home to the Tongs and the Triads. Funny about the latter, huh? What started out as underground patriot organizations hellbent on kicking the ruling Manchurians out of power and restoring Chinese rule to the Chinese themselves has now become one of the more famous collective groups of organized crime.
The 1980s saw the growth of the Triad and crime drama, much the way it saw the growth of the stunt-driven action film and the FX-heavy fantasy film. There have been a number of hallmark crime films made in Hong Kong, especially in the 1980s. The Long Arm of the Law told the story of Mainland crooks trying to pull off a job in Hong Kong, only for their plans to go wrong at every turn. John Woo built his own Triad world in the hugely popular and iconic A Better Tomorrow, in which Triads were honorable guys in trenchcoats and sunglasses who used guns against the more dishonorable members of their kind. But the first important Triad film of the era was the 1981 film The Club.
The story is extremely simple. A Triad running a popular club is looking to expand his repertoire into the field of real estate. When he refuses to sell his joint to some rivals (including old school kung fu star Philip Ko Fei), they have him brutally murdered instead. Unfortunately for them, their attempts to kill his lead enforcer, played by real-life Triad Michael Chan Wai-Man, are less successful.
What sets this movie apart from the others is the action and the approach to it. Lam Moon-Wah and Michael Chan seek to bring a sense of realism to the action that is often overlooked and ignored by filmmakers in exchange for sizzle and style. The movie opens with a series of monochrome scenes in which Michael Chan, Norman Tsui and Fong Yau fight their way to the top of the local Triad territory. Instead of lengthy gunfights in warehouses and piers performed by Asian men in suits, we have guys in regular clothes getting in violent knife fights on basketball courts and inside cramped apartments. People are tackled, kicks rarely go above belt level, and punches are not crisp demonstrations of martial handwork, but Mississippi haymakers thrown with manic intensity. Michael Chan was not only a trained martial artist, but he'd had experience as a boxer (presumably a kickboxer) and had gotten involved in many Triad melees over the years. So even if the moves on display aren't as well-executed and flowery as one might see in a Sammo Hung or Jackie Chan movie, they give a better idea of what it would have like to participate in a Triad brawl circa 1981.
The action calms down after the opening series of brawls, only to start up again after the 50-minute mark. That leads us to the finale, which was once chosen by the now-defunct website Wasted Life as being one of the 100 greatest fight scenes of all time. In a sequence reminiscent of Japanese chambara films (and would be redone to much bloodier effect in Wang Lung-Wei's Hong Kong Godfather), Michael Chan storms the rival Triad's club armed with a long tanto dagger and proceeds to hack every single thug present to ribbons. He is soon joined by Norman Tsui, who would also like to settle the score for the death of his former Triad brother. The two punch, kick, slash and stab their way through everybody present until there's nobody left. Lam Moon-Wah avoids unnecessary stylishness for the most part, save a few nimble jump moves from Michael Chan. The flowery and balletic exchanges we have become accustomed to seeing in Chinese swordplay films is ditched in favor of a more direct and violent approach: the faster you are, the more likely you'll be able to slash the guy in front of you before he does the same. If you fall on the ground, chances are someone will tackle you and plunge a knife in your chest before you get a chance to get up. Unlike many of the Triad brawls that Lam would direct in his career, this sequence benefits from revolving entirely around two people. The choreography is thus less chaotic and more focused. This goes up there with the finale to Vengeance!, the finale to Sword of Swords and the Donnie Yen/Wu Jing showdown in SPL as one of the great knife fights in cinematic history.
The Club was Lam Moon-Wah's fourth film as action director, having only worked on three traditional kung fu movies before. His work on Killer of Snake, Fox of Shaolin was boring and lamentable, giving us one of the more lackluster displays of Carter Wong's skills. Lam had fared much better in Kung Fu Master Called Drunk Cat, where, working as assistant action director, he helped milk John Chang and Sharon Yeung Pan-Pan's skills for all they were worth. He also did a more-than respectable job on Story of the Drunken Master, although the uninterested direction and badly-writen script cast a negative shadow on the more-than-competent choreography. With The Club, Lam Moon-Wah reached an early peak in his work, which he would spend the rest of his career trying to live up to, but without much success. Lam was often the victim of low budgets, hurried shooting schedules, inept scripts, bland direction and what we might infer as being an inability to lift the material around him up to his level.
The first offender was Lam's immediate follow-up to The Club, the 1983 period piece/Triad/comedy caper, The Pier. In it, Philip Ko Fei and genre veteran Tien Feng play rival Triads involved in human trafficking, with Leung Kar-Yan as a bumbling cop trying to bring them down. Norman Tsui shows up as a good-for-nothing Casanova who comes into possession of a tape detailing one of the Triad's plans. The film spends most of its running time going absolutely nowhere and once the action does get started, it's too generic to leave anything resembling an impression. Norman Tsui gets to show off his athleticism for a few unremarkable fight scenes. The final Triad brawl is chaotic, with dozens of people swinging choppers and sticks at each other at the same time. There is some decent stuntwork in the form of people getting thrown through furniture, but let's face it: Jackie and Sammo did the same thing with a lot more spectacular results in Winners and Sinners and Project A, made the same year.
Just as bad, if only a little better, was the 1989 Chow Yun-Fat film Triads: The Inside Story. Despite the title and Chow Yun-Fat's fame for his bullet ballet films like the A Better Tomorrow films and Flaming Brothers, there's no two-fisted gunplay and heroic bloodshed to be seen here. That shouldn't be a problem in itself, but HK cinephiles expecting to see Chow do anything interesting at all will be sorely disappointed. The only action Chow sees is crashing a truck into a car at the very end. The rest of the action is made up of group battles involving choppers and blunt objects like hammers and metal bars, with the most impressive performance going to Michael Chan. There are some decent stunts, like Chan jumping from a window and onto a scaffolding, and then off the scaffolding to tackle an opponent. Also, there are at least two scenes in which someone running is broadsided by a moving car, which has got to hurt. Unfortunately, a dead script and the lack of a good climax, plus Chow Yun-Fat being removed from the action, just kills the film dead.
Much better was the following year's Unmatchable Match [1], starring a pre-fame Stephen Chow and once again, the always-dependable Michael Chan. Chow is an undercover cop who is thrown in the same jail cell as Chan, who's a suspect in a big diamond heist that was actually committed by Shing Fui-On (who also had a meaty role in Triads: The Inside Story). The escape and form an uneasy alliance, after which they become real friends. Lam Moon-Wah went the John Woo route for this movie, going more for the gunplay then the choppers this time around. There's a fight about midway through where Michael Chan fends off a number of thugs armed with choppers and wrenches at a car garage, so people wanting their fix of seeing stuntmen getting punched and kicked and thrown into car windows can look forward to that. The gunfights themselves never reach the level of a John Woo movie, but are fun enough. There's a tense chase sequence early on with Chow and Chan fleeing from Shing and his men through the narrow hallways of a building. In a touch of black humor, when the actors reach the roof, there are two other Triad gangs carrying out a drug deal. It ends in a gunfight that leaves everybody dead. The movie ends with a tense and well-mounted gunfight inside an abandoned building, with the heroes depending more on strategy and their surroundings rather than pumping countless rounds at their enemies.
Lam Moon-Wah reached the critical apex of his career the following year when working on Ringo Lam's Prison on Fire 2, which brought Lam his first and only Hong Kong Film Award nomination for Best Action Design. He would lose to Yuen Cheung-Yan, Yuen Shun-Yee and Lau Kar-Wing for their on Tsui Hark's epic Once Upon a Time in China, which really kicked off the wire-fu boom and helped turn Jet Li into an international action star. The ironic thing about this Chow Yun-Fat prison drama is that the action was rather generic. There are few fisticuff exchanges and scenes where people get stabbed with shanks made from toothbrushes, but nothing that Lam hadn't done better before or after and failed to get recognition for. The film is more an actor's movie, with Chow Yun-Fat and Elvis Tsui Kam-Kong putting in winning performances.
Don't Fool Me, a Triad comedy made the same year, could have been a good opportunity for Lam to lampoon the sort choreography that he had been doing since 1981. The story follows a Triad negotiator (Andy Lau), who switches places with an insurance salesman (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai), after the latter finds out that he has a brain tumor. Fight action is relegated to a single scene early on where Lau gets the trash kicked out of him by Anthony Wong's bodyguard, played by Mainland wushu stylist Yau Gin-Gwok (South Shaolin Master). There's also a game of chicken played with cars between Tony Leung and Bruce Law, who would later go on to be the go-to guy for vehicular mayhem in Hong Kong cinema. In the end, it's a pleasant, but instantly forgettable timewaster. The most memorable scene is a jarringly violent scene where Tony Leung imagines his pregnant girlfriend getting her hands smashed at a casino, which doesn't belong at all in an otherwise goofy comedy.
One of Lam Moon-Wah's most successful movies, financially speaking, was 1992's Prince of Temple Street. Andy Lau plays a low-level Triad working on Temple Street, a collection of stalls and shops (with a few brothels and opium dens hidden from public view). When an old rival is released from jail, he finds his territory under attack. There are several chopper brawls to be seen here, one of which features a nice "oh cool!" moment where a motorcycle is broadsided by a car, which sends the driver flying, whom is then cut down mid-air by the main villain, played by Chin Ho. The second-to-last set piece features a lot of vehicular mayhem and random explosions, but little in the way of actual physical combat. That's reserved for the end, where Andy Lau infiltrates the Chin Ho's hideout and goes all out with the machete and drop-kicking moves. He then has a vicious one-on-one with Chin Ho, complete with throws, punches, take-downs, and surprisingly enough, some wire-assisted jump kicks, too. All of this inside a building that is already on fire! It's a shame that the movie waits so long to get moving. And much like The Club, the decision to focus the finale on just one person makes the action more satisfying the previous brawls, which don't stand out because so much is happening at once.
While certainly not the worst of Lam's choreography jobs (although he makes a lot of bad decisions here), the 1993 girls n' guns stinker Lady Super Cop is widely regarded as being among the worst of its ilk, which is saying A LOT. Carina Lau plays a career-oriented policewoman whose new team includes her cousin, played by Teresa Mo. Mo's character is a veteran cop who's more worried about selling gadgets to members of the force than catching crooks. That all changes when the boyfriend of one of Mo's informants is brutally murdered by a psychopath involved with some bank robbers. The main problem here is that Lau's character is pretty incompetent and unthreatening. I mean, the woman is incapable of chasing down a guy who's just gotten broadsided by a van (a recurring theme in Lam Moon-Wah's works)! To be honest, the police in the film are largely useless and spend more time getting fired on and beaten up than anything else. Early on there's a martial arts sequence between Teresa Mo and Lam regular Michael Chan, who plays Mo's mechanic neighbor. Both are dressed in kung fu student clothes and are wielding weapons. But instead of fighting, the camera just switches between the two in different poses like an anime fight. It's really stupid. The big set pieces occur in the last act, beginning with a violent gun battle at the girls' apartment. Watch for a game of Wack-a-Mole played with a pistol and some brief fight action from Michael Chan, who steals the scene. The finale is a big fight between Teresa Mo, Carina Lau and the main villain in which the women let themselves get whooped. I mean, what kind of girls n' guns film allows the female characters to get beaten down like that? The idea of the women dishing out the hardcore martial punishment is why HK cinephiles love the sub-genre to begin with! Bad move, guys.
Like any third-string choreography, Lam Moon-Wah found himself having to pay the bills with a myriad of mercenary projects. One of them was the softcore sex comedy Girls Unbutton (1994). In a completely random scene, actress Loletta Lee goes on a date with local extortion gang leader Elvis Tsui Kam Kong. While they are dining, some rivals arrive and start cutting up his men. After an improptu round of alleyway sex, Tsui takes on the rivals. The choreography, like The Club, is very chambara in its presentation, with single slashes and speed being the rule of the duel. The scene lasts about a minute and is promptly forgotten about for the rest of the film.
We end this article with the 1994 crime drama Gambling Baron. This is actually a decent movie about low-level Triads, played by Roy Cheung and Max Mok, running the local racket, only to run afoul of a rival, played by old school kung fu actor Jimmy Lee. The fight scenes aren't bad and Max Mok has enough action experience to sell himself as one of the more powerful and intimidating fighters in the territory. The highlight is a fight in a narrow construction area between Roy, Max, kickboxer Billy Chow and a bunch of stuntmen armed with metal bars and choppers. Billy Chow gets in the best moves with his high kicks. Roy, in all of his action sequences, looks gangly and uncoordinated, convincing only when he has a gun in his hand. This fight, surprisingly enough, ends with the heroes getting broadsided by a moving van! Who would have thought? The movie mainly falters in the finale, which tries to tie up all the loose ends in about 8 minutes. I'm guessing the filmmakers simply ran out of money by this point. Thus, instead of a big set piece where Max Mok dishes out the justice only a sharpened machete can, we have him standing still firing an AK-47 until everybody is dead. It's an unsatisfying way to end an otherwise satisfying crime flick.
So despite having reached dizzying heights of action direction accomplishment with The Club, none of Lam Moon Wah's later movies were quite able to reach that height. Some came close, others even received official recognition for whatever merits they possessed. But none them made the mark in Hong Kong cinema like that film did. That isn't to say that Lam never again worked on a great movie. His work on the Mainland kung fu film Young Hero of Shaolin 2 is one of the hallmarks of Mainland Wushu on film, sitting comfortably next to the likes of the Shaolin Temple films. He also directed the fight scenes to the underrated gem Hero of Swallow, one of the last wire-fu films of the 1990s and one of Yuen Biao's last great kung fu performances. Lam has since become inactive in the Hong Kong film industry, having worked on nothing since 2004. He may not have ever reached the heights of Sammo, Corey and the Yuens, but at least he can say that he did something important for Hong Kong cinephiles to remember him by. Lam Moon-Wah, we salute you!
[1] - This article was written in March of 2015. At the time, the HKMDB listed Lam Moon-Wah and Samo Wong as the action directors of Unmatchable Match. Sometime around 2020 and 2021, the page was altered and Lam Moon-Wah's name was removed from the HKMDB credits for that film..
