The first thing the intrepid pair do once Van Clief meets up with his Vietnam buddy, Charles Bonet, is head to the house where Bruce supposedly died. Of course, in real life we know this to be the apartment of Betty Ting Pei at "Beverly Heights" on Beacon Hill Road. However, in this movie the location is a large property owned by film star, "Miss Tang". Although the property is supposed to be located in Kowloon Tong, as you will see in a later post, the actual location used is called Dragon Villa, located over on the NT coast at a place called Tsing Lung Tau. Not to be confused with
Dragon Garden which is not that far away from this location and has a property inside that I have, in the past, referred to as Dragon Villa. To avoid confusion, I have added the label "
Dragon Villa 旭龍" which contains the Chinese characters for the property (pronounced
yuk lung in Cantonese).
The property hasn't actually changed very much since this movie was made, with the exception of some extra tree growth and the widening of Castle Peak Road (the same widening project that made the aforementioned Dragon Garden lose its original front wall and entrance gateway).
Anyway, I digress. The property is featured extensively in the film and is also the location of the final fight so we are given a fair amount of different camera angles that reveal bits of the property as the action moves around the garden.
View to Dragon Villa from across Castle Peak Road
I am 100% convinced this interior is real and not a studio set
If you look on GoogleEarth you can see that the pagoda in the bottom image is still in the garden of the property.
13 comments:
Is the garage of this property shown in the film? I am searching for a house that I've seen in a few TV series and films from the 1970/80s and assumed it is/was in the Castle Peak Road area, though it could be Sai Kung.
I recently saw some of the splendid 1986 Sylvia Chang, George Lam, Cora Miao film Passion. Lam runs out of his living room to wash his Jaguar and the stone garage is well below the main house, so Miao walked down several steps to reach him. It might even be this same house someone has asked about at (gwulo.com/node/7859). The house in the YouTube music video in the Gwulo comments does also look familiar, but I have not seen the TVB series in question. I always assumed many old TVB series simply used Sir Run Run's Shaw Villa at Movietown until I saw your site and found out what that house really looked like.
Rodney
Rodney
Hi Rodney, I don't think there is a garage, I think (at the time) it was just the carport that can be seen in image 1&3. It's the low structure with the large arched entrance located immediately behind the main gate. My success with finding specific houses is a bit hit and miss - I've located quite a few difficult ones over the past few years but there is a long list of ones I am still searching for. It takes a lot of squinting and painstaking analysis of aerial photography as well as the usual guesswork. Feel free to send me a screen cap to have a quick look. If it's one I have already found I can tell you straight away. Phil
Phil, please have a look the house in www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqerR_7igLE
My relative tells me the house in the video was used in the TVB series of the same name (Giants). I haven't seen Giants, but I recognize the property from other TV and film productions from the 1970s, possibly the 1986 film Passion I noted in the previous comment. Would you say that house is Sai Kung?
My grandfather was offered an old house with its furnishings on Castle Peak Road at some point in the 1970s. The carport looked very similar to the house in the video, but that was a very common design for houses back then.
Rodney
Thank Rodney. It's not somewhere I have found yet, but there are some clues in there that I can look into. One thing I do think is that I doubt it is still around...all that space must have been turned into several billion dollar villas by now!
Thanks, Phil. The grounds of that Giants/Passion property are impressive. I also read through the episode synopsis of Giants and it sounds like the house was a lot of screentime in the series. I think the series is available through the TVB mytvsuper thing, so I will try to take a look. However, like you said, the house would likely have been demolished long ago.
Rodney
It seems this house was not only used in films because I saw it in an old (1980, I think) Rediffusion TV series titled 'Jaws'. The interior in the series was most definitely a studio set and so far I have only seen one exterior shot that was almost exactly like your first screencap. It was the home of an smarmy, lecherous, old businessman sporting a crew cut and his smoking hot, much younger wife, who he still cheats on with a still younger woman.
Hey Rodney, you can only own one of these properties if you are smarmy and lecherous, I'm sure that is the HK law...haha. Anyway, happy xmas and new year.Phil
Phil, you can revise your 100% estimate that the interior in this film was that of the real house (at the time). I'd say you can raise it to the famous 110% because I saw another episode of 'Jaws' and the interior use was certainly a set that was mocked up to look like the real thing. It was a different orientation to your second screencap, but had that archway and the porthole in the dividing wall.
Yes, far too elaborate to be a set on a cheap HK movie. I'd bet good money that porthole is still there...
The late Kenneth Tsang had a part in 'Jaws' and in one episode drives right up to the gate of this house at night. It seems by '80, the metal arch in front of the gate that Ronnie VC would have passed in '77 had been taken out. The gate itself looked the same, maybe shinier after a polish.
In Jaws, No. 98 was painted in black on the left side of the wall, but almost entirely faded. I don't know that it was there in your screencap because it would be hidden by the metal arch and the tall, curved shrubbery. There was also a plaque mounted next to it that read ' Dragon Villa' and underneath 'No. 96'. Actually, only the 'Villa' and the number were visible because it was too dark and the letters to close together to see 'Dragon'.
By the way, really looking forward to the rest of Yellow Emanuelle. I must have seen it once with all the other Emanuelles ...
Yellow Emanuelle is turning out to be a goldmine for locales. Still afew I haven't been abletoID though, sadly. Good old Kenneth Tsang. If there was one exampleof how screwed up the COVID rules were here, it's his sad and completely avoidable death at the Kowloon Hotel. R.I.P
my space bar is broken btw
Kenneth Tsang visited the house again in another episode of Jaws. I missed the part why his arm was in a sling and he escaped to loiter outside this house in his hospital garb. Anyway, by the time the series was filmed in 1979, the house name 旭龍 was written on the right side of the archway (your first screencap above the straight shrubbery) in raised, black characters.
The turret tower seems to have been deliberately blurred in the scene. I thought it was just the quality of the footage, but even in the closer shots of the gate and archway, the tower behind is blurry.
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