The Category III Hong Kong Canon

Category III is a rating, and the rating is the entire story. In November 1988 the Hong Kong government replaced an informal, largely political censorship arrangement with a statutory three-tier classification system. Category III meant no admission under eighteen. It carried no cuts, no conditions and no content ceiling beyond the criminal law, and it was enforced at the box office by cinema staff who had other things to do.

Hong Kong’s producers understood immediately what they had been handed. Within four years a nominally adults-only certificate accounted for something close to half the local features being made, and the territory produced a run of films that remain, in a fairly literal sense, unmatched — because no other developed film industry has ever combined this much technical craft with this little supervision. The window ran roughly from 1990 to 1997, and it closed when the money left for Hollywood and the handover concentrated everyone’s minds.

Ten films. A genuine warning attaches to about half of them: the sexual violence in this cycle is extensive, sustained, and frequently the point rather than the context. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling.

The two that made it respectable

The Untold Story (Herman Yau, 1993). The cycle’s masterpiece and its most indefensible film simultaneously. Anthony Wong plays Wong Chi-hang, a Macau restaurateur who murdered a family and — the film asserts, following a real 1985 case and its lurid press coverage — served them to his customers in pork buns. Wong won Best Actor at the Hong Kong Film Awards for it, which remains astonishing: a mainstream industry giving its top acting prize to a performance in a film with a fifteen-minute torture sequence.

He earned it. Wong plays the man as a shrieking, self-pitying coward who is genuinely funny for long stretches, and Yau structures the film around a comic police squad whose incompetence provides relief — and then uses that relief as a trap, so the atrocities land on an audience that has just been laughing. The film’s real subject is a legal system that cannot convict without a confession and therefore beats one out, and the last act indicts the police as thoroughly as the killer. Yau has spent thirty years being a much better director than his filmography suggests.

Dr. Lamb (1992). A year earlier, and the template. Danny Lee — who produced, co-directed and had played the cop in The Killer — casts himself as the detective and gives the film to Simon Yam, who plays a taxi driver photographing and dismembering his victims. It is loosely based on the Lam Kor-wan case of 1982, Hong Kong’s first widely reported serial murders. Yam’s performance is the reason to watch: quiet, wounded, ordinary, a man who is exactly as unremarkable as the neighbours always say. The interrogation scenes are the cycle’s most honest depiction of what Hong Kong policing actually looked like.

The gleefully unhinged

Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky (1991). Lam Nai-choi adapts a Japanese manga into a prison film in which every human body is a water balloon full of offal. Fan Siu-wong punches through a man’s stomach, ties his own severed tendons back together, and fights a warden who becomes a monster. It is a cartoon, played dead straight, with practical effects of astonishing crudity and invention. Nothing in it is remotely frightening, which is why it became the cycle’s gateway drug in the West.

Naked Killer (1992). Clarence Fok directs, Wong Jing produces and writes, and the result is the cycle’s most stylish film — a glossy thriller about a school of female assassins that plays like a perfume advertisement having a breakdown. Chingmy Yau and Simon Yam are extremely good; the film has a genuine sense of humour about itself; and its politics are irretrievable in a way that a lot of critical writing since has tried to redeem and cannot. Watch it for the craft and stop reaching for the thesis.

Sex and Zen (1991). Michael Mak adapts Li Yu’s seventeenth-century novel The Carnal Prayer Mat, a genuine classic of Chinese literature, into a period comedy about a scholar who has himself surgically improved by a horse. It was one of the highest-grossing films of its year in Hong Kong. It is broad, silly, gorgeously mounted, and it is the cycle’s proof that Category III’s biggest hits were frequently comedies rather than atrocities.

The mean ones

Ebola Syndrome (1996). Yau and Wong again, and the film they made when they had nothing left to protect. Wong plays a fugitive who contracts Ebola in South Africa, discovers he is an asymptomatic carrier, and returns to Hong Kong to weaponise himself against a city that has never given him anything. It is repulsive, and it is also the single funniest film in the cycle — Wong plays the whole thing as a man who cannot believe his luck. Beneath the offal there is a real argument about class contempt and what an underclass owes a society that treats it as disposable. Yau meant it.

Run and Kill (1993). Billy Tang’s film, and the cycle’s most upsetting. A fat, harmless, cuckolded man drunkenly hires a killer to murder his wife, sobers up, tries to cancel the contract, and cannot. Simon Yam plays the killer as a Vietnam-scarred psychotic. What follows is ninety minutes of an ordinary idiot being destroyed for one stupid evening, and Tang refuses him every escape the genre normally provides. The sequence involving a child is the point where a lot of viewers stop, reasonably.

Daughter of Darkness (1993). Ivan Lam’s, with Anthony Wong as a police inspector investigating a family’s murder and Lily Chung as the daughter. The film’s structure is the cycle’s defining move: an obnoxious comic register for the first act, and then the flashback arrives and reveals what the comedy has been sitting on. It is a film about incest and it is not, in the end, exploitative about it, which is a sentence I have checked twice before writing.

The bookends

Organized Crime & Triad Bureau (1994). Kirk Wong’s police thriller, Category III for violence and language alone, and the demonstration that the rating did serious work outside exploitation. Danny Lee’s cop pursues Anthony Wong’s gangster through a Hong Kong shot with a handheld urgency that Michael Mann would recognise. The rating simply let Wong shoot the police doing what the police did. The territory’s crime cinema went on to conquer the world, and the road runs through Infernal Affairs, the original Scorsese remade.

Dream Home (Pang Ho-cheung, 2010). The revival, thirteen years after the window closed, and the smartest film here. A young woman is priced out of a harbour-view flat by Hong Kong’s property market and responds by murdering the residents of the block to drive the price down. Pang cuts between the killings and her working life — call centre, two jobs, a bank refusing her — so the film’s arithmetic is explicit: each atrocity is costed. It is a Category III film with a spreadsheet, and it is the only one that made the genre’s implicit class rage into its actual text.

The part of the cycle the canon skips

A ten-film list flatters Category III badly, and the flattery should be named. The overwhelming majority of the roughly four hundred films that took the rating between 1990 and 1997 were softcore, shot in a week, and forgotten inside a month. Erotic Ghost Story (1990) and its sequels, the Chinese Torture Chamber Story run, the endless Sex and Zen imitators — these are the cycle’s actual centre of mass, and they are dull in a way the notorious titles never are. A canon that presents Category III as a decade of dangerous masterpieces is describing perhaps three percent of it.

The atrocity end has its own filler. Billy Tang made Red to Kill (1994) the year after Run and Kill, and where the earlier film had a real thesis about how quickly an ordinary life comes apart, the later one has a rape sequence and a running time. The distinction matters, and it is the distinction the whole cycle turns on: a few directors used the licence to say something the mainstream would not let them say, and a great many used it because a certificate that permitted anything was a cheap way to fill ninety minutes.

There is also the question of what the audience was doing there. The standard critical reading treats Category III as displaced handover anxiety — a territory with a deadline processing its dread as body horror — and there is something in it, particularly in Dream Home, where the monster is the property market. That reading works better on the films made after 1993 than on the ones that started the boom, and it has a habit of arriving to dignify material that was made for money by people who would have made anything.

What the craft was, and where it went

The reason this cycle survives is that Hong Kong in 1992 had the deepest production talent pool on earth outside Los Angeles. These films were shot by people who worked on Tsui Hark and John Woo productions the same month. The camera operators could handhold a fight. The effects teams had a decade of wire work and squib experience. The Untold Story is edited with a precision that would flatter a thriller, because the man cutting it had cut thrillers all year.

That is the thing Western exploitation could rarely offer. A grindhouse picture in New York in 1975 was made by people with no access to craft, a comparison drawn out in grindhouse double bills and the death of 42nd Street. A Category III picture in Kowloon in 1992 was made by the A-team on a Tuesday. The transgression arrives fully professional, which is precisely what makes it hard to laugh off.

Where it went is a matter of record. The industry’s output collapsed from over two hundred films a year to under a hundred across the nineties, as Hollywood hired the talent and VCD piracy destroyed the domestic market. The 1997 handover brought self-censorship in advance of any actual censorship, then mainland co-production money arrived with rules attached, and the rating survives while the films it enabled do not get made. The studio tradition that fed it is in the Shaw Brothers horror canon, and the friendlier local horror the same audiences grew up on is in Mr. Vampire.

Start with The Untold Story if you trust me, Riki-Oh if you do not, and Dream Home if you want the argument without the endurance test. Unearthed, Vinegar Syndrome and Eureka have brought most of the essential titles into decent editions. Check which cut you have; several of these exist in three lengths, and the censors’ habit of making things more notorious by cutting them is its own story, told in the censor’s scissors.