In its decade-long prime (mid-80s to mid-90s), Hong Kong’s pop cinema prized energy over subtlety. Movies were fast, bold and crazy; that’s how they became cult items for Western fanboys. Hong Kong’s Category III (adults-only) movies had a vigorous, rigorous notion of violence: if a man is to be bad, make him unspeakably, all-but-unwatchably baaaad. That surely applies to the killer in director Herman Yau’s rancid, notorious melodrama, supposedly based on fact. The English title means nothing; the original, which translates as “The Eight Immortals Restaurant Barbecue: Human Pork Buns,” gives some flavor of the savor. Wong plays a psycho who has come to Macao, killed a local restaurateur and his family, and garnishes his cuisine with their severed body parts. This explicitly grotesque movie is not to be seen on a full stomach — maybe not to be seen at all — but it’s the most forthright depiction I know of the soullessness of sadism; there’s nothing romantic or Lecter-like about this cannibal. The loopiest thing about Wong’s dead-eyed performance is that its daring was recognized by the colony’s film establishment; Wong won the Hong Kong Film Award for best actor of 1993.
