Dangerous Encounter - 1st Kind

Tsui Hark's film from 1980 remains a high water mark of the Hong Kong New Wave, an extraordinary action thriller so unruly and anarchic that Hark was forced by the British Colonial Government to revise the film, diluting some of it's political subtext. For many years this original version was thought lost, but in 2004 the film was remastered for a French DVD release with the censored material imported from a poor quality VHS source - this is the version under review.

Japanese VHS sleeve featuring the international title Don't Play With Fire

In the film, three high school boys with a taste for making mischief using homemade explosives forge an uneasy alliance with a teenage girl who harbors a death wish and gets her kicks from torturing small animals. After catching the boys rigging a bomb in a cinema, she blackmails the amateur terrorists into taking part in increasingly crazed pranks. But trouble looms when the gang of four steal a package of Japanese bank bonds from some US arms dealers - and they mean to get them back...

Dangerous Encounter - 1st Kind with its brutal nihilistic violence, teenage angst, caustic political commentary and whiplash action is so volatile a mix, the celluloid itself seems in danger of catching fire as it runs through the projector gate. Hark's vision of Hong Kong is relentlessly grim and unglamourous - an overcrowded society driven by money and inflamed by triad violence. His view of foreigners is especially abrasive and Hong Kong is seemingly infiltrated with them at every level, from the chief of police to the US mercenaries doing business with the Japanese on Chinese soil, and even some Americans spreading the Mormon message.

Feeding off all this are Hong Kong's sociopathic youth. For the 3 high schoolers, their interest in urban guerrilla warfare seems little more than thrill seeking but Pearl, the gang's de facto female leader and self-destructing dark star at the heart of the film, is clearly unhinged, seen torturing mice by sticking pins through their brains for a slow agonizing death, and throwing a cat out of a window to land tangled up on a barbed wire fence. She's a formidable presence in the film, taking on the triads and the mercenaries with ruthless determination. Her awkward relationship with the three boys, the shrinking violets of the story, remains one of the most interesting aspects of the film.

Dangerous Encounter - 1st Kind is made with such verve and energy it could fuel a dozen films, and Hark manages to balance the socio-political concerns of the story with a distinct atmosphere of unreality, similar in feel to A Clockwork Orange or Jean-Jacques Beineix's Diva. One can imagine the film leaving a deep impression on Takashi Miike. There's also the wonderful hit and run soundtrack, which samples some of Goblin's music from Dawn of the Dead, and featuring entirely unexpected appearances from Jean-Michel Jarre's Oxygène, and the opening submarine pings from Pink Floyd's long form epic Echoes.

The French DVD of Dangerous Encounter - 1st Kind is available in a 3-film Tsui Hark boxset that sadly contains no English subtitles - luckily the copy I have was tweaked to include some English-language fansubs. The transfer of the film is generally excellent, the 2.35 image looks fresh, vibrant and sharp. The scenes culled from the VHS source - see below, are very tatty - but watchable and not extensive, and worth remembering that this may be the only way to see the film as originally planned...