The Head Hunter (1982) Review

“The Head Hunter” Theatrical Poster

Director: Lau Shing-hon
Cast: Chow Yun Fat, Rosamund Kwan, Philip Chan Yan Kin, Flora Cheung Tien Oy, O Chun Hung, Tang Ching, Wan Chi Keung, Melvin Wong Gam San, Lo Wai
Running Time: 98 min.

By Paul Bramhall

The early 80’s was an exciting time for Hong Kong cinema, as the collective new blood of directorial talent began to reshape the cinematic landscape, and would produce a number of movies that would come to be known as part of the HK New Wave. This new wave saw a move away from the more traditional kung fu movies and dramas that still dominated the HK box office, and move towards more gritty and realistic crime flicks that dealt with a disenchanted youth and those struggling on the bottom rungs of society. Titles like Alex Cheung’s Cops and Robbers from 1979 (an influence on Police Story) and Tsui Hark’s Dangerous Encounter – 1st Kind from 1980 showed a different, more grounded approach to genre filmmaking, while still being distinctly Hong Kong in their look and feel.

Another director was Lau Shing-hon, who after debuting with the 1980 adult drama House of the Lute, followed up with his sophomore feature The Head Hunter in 1982. Shing-hon is one of those directors with a mysteriously sporadic career. After The Head Hunter he’d go onto direct Heroes Three the following year, and then would disappear completely, with the exception of helming a segment in the little-seen 2002 released omnibus film The Final Night of the Royal Hong Kong Police. While obscure may be the best word to describe his time in the film industry, in The Head Hunter the talent in front of the camera are anything but.

For Hong Kong cinema fans, the production is notable for being the only time Chow Yun Fat and Rosamund Kwan have shared the screen together. In 1982 Chow was still 4 years (and 10+ titles) away from his iconic role in A Better Tomorrow, which would cement his screen persona for years to come, so it’s always interesting to see his work in those years immediately preceding his partnership with John Woo. This would be one of two titles he’d feature in during ’82, the other being The Postman Strikes Back, and in it he plays a Vietnam refugee living in Hong Kong. While on paper the role may seem similar to his turn in Ann Hui’s The Story of Woo Viet from a year prior, onscreen the role couldn’t be more different.

Preceding the likes of 1991’s The Roar of the Vietnamese and Woo’s own Bullet in the Head which would come in the next decade, in The Head Hunter Chow plays a Vietnam veteran suffering from PTSD, who’s employed the only skills he has in Hong Kong to become an assassin for hire. His ambition is to save up enough money to bring the rest of his family to Hong Kong, but it’s a dream that seems like it’s a long way away. To make ends meet, Chow also works as an explosives expert and action director in the film industry, because it turns out the skills needed to kill someone are the same ones that can help craft an effective action sequence. Not going to argue with that, and I’m not sure Chan Wai-Man would either.

The crux of the plot involves a local reporter, played by a fresh faced Rosamund Kwan here making her acting debut, who’s investigating why the staff and kids at a primary school became ill suddenly. It turns out a factory is manufacturing sarin, a toxic nerve agent, and the government is keen to cover up the leak that led to the gas infiltrating the school. Kwan’s tenacious reporter ultimately follows a trail which leads her to a production company, one that’s being used to secretly import the sarin, and it’s here that she meets sometime explosive expert sometime assassin Chow onset. The pair strike up a conversation, and it’s clear that there’s (pardon the pun) chemistry between them, but both are on dangerous ground. Will Kwan get too close to the truth to remain safe, and can Chow keep his job as an assassin under wraps?

Like many of the new wave productions, there’s a sense of impending doom that runs throughout The Head Hunter, and occasionally Shing-hon shows a flair for visuals. The opening credits play over Chow being hunted through the Vietnamese jungle by a madman, brandishing a machete in one hand and a severed head in the other, before we learn its one of the many nightmares that he suffers from since arriving in Hong Kong. However the tension built up in these scenes can’t be maintained, and it soon becomes clear why Shing-hon fizzled out while directors like Tsui Hark went from strength to strength. Beyond the brief bursts of violence and the (admittedly subdued) charisma of its leads, The Head Hunter is a painfully pedestrian affair, with an almost workman like approach to direction which soon makes it a chore to sit through.

Instead its left to some of the more oddball moments to keep our attention. In one early scene we witness Chow sitting in the middle of a club with the weight of the world on his shoulders, but this doesn’t stop him from hooking up with Flora Cheung (Mrs Russel Wong). I’m not sure if they go back to her place or a hotel, but the subsequent sex scene plays out with them both standing up and humping against a giant wall sized poster of the 1973 French movie Salut l’artiste. It’s surreal, and you’re never really sure if it’s going to turn out to be another of Chow’s nightmares. In another Chow is rigging a hut that’s going to explode when a car hits it for a movie he’s working on, but the hut is sabotaged and he’s unable to get out, leading him to be both run over and blown to pieces. However somehow he miraclously survives this double dose of death, with the only downside being he spends the next few scenes covered from head to toe in bandages.

The haphazard nature of these scenes only prove that Shing-hon was a director out of his depth. He also wrote The Head Hunter, and there’s an inescapable feeling that there’s a good movie in there somewhere, one which could have been extracted by a more talented director like a Tsui Hark or a Ringo Lam. Chow wouldn’t take on many of these darker roles during his career, with perhaps the closest being in Ringo Lam’s Prison on Fire 5 years later, but by that time he’d mastered the art of being able to exude his charisma off the screen. In that sense, it’s interesting to see him play a character which is very much the antithesis of his role as the suave gun for hire in The Killer which would close out the decade. Here we’re a world away from heroic bloodshed, with any romance or chivarly associated to the act of killing stripped away to its vicious core.

The intermittent bursts of action are handled by Tino Wong, a performer who’s more well known for his work in front of the camera than behind it. For me he’ll always be the guy who replaced Don Wong Tao for the sequel to The Secret Rivals, however in the early 80’s he very briefly tried his hand at action directing. The Head Hunter would be his first time at action directing solo, having debuted alongside Kwan Yung-Moon and Wong Shu-Tong on 1980’s Young Hero. The only other time he’d take on action direction duties alone would be on Shing-hon’s follow-up to The Head Hunter, 1983’s Heroes Three. Here he really doesn’t have much to do, with a brief skirmish between Chow and an assailant in a hotel being the highlight, which ends with Chow finishing things by repeatedly slaming his attackers head between a door. Keeping with the realistic aesthetic, its a messy and desperate scuffle, and it works within context.

The other main action sequence is the finale which sees Rosamund Kwan marked for death and being hunted through an abandoned building by a machete wielding Philip Chan, as a pistol wielding Chow attempts to save her. Watching Chow run around with gun in hand almost feels like we’re watching an early prototype of the image he’d perfect just a few years later, and it’s a sequence which at least provides an effectively tense ending to the underwhelming nature of everything that’s come before. While Shing-ho may have faded into obscurity, thankfully both Chow and Kwan would go onto bigger and better things, ultimately making The Head Hunter a curious footnote from the early stages in both of their careers. 

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 4/10