Full Contact - Chow Yun Fat (1992) - Fleming Road, Wanchai

A final brief glimpse of Hong Kong's coolest modern film star driving his car south along Fleming Road with the Renaissance Harbour View Hotel in the background.

Full Contact - Chow Yun Fat (1992) - Hing Wai Ice and Cold Storage, Aberdeen

The ice factory where the guns are supposedly being stored is the Hing Wai Ice & Cold Storage facility in Aberdeen. As far as I am aware it's still there, right next to Aberdeen Harbour. It turns out the arms are in fact stored on a boat berthed right on the harbourside and so Jeff and Sam jump down and hijack it.

Full Contact - Chow Yun Fat (1992) - Harbour Drive, Wanchai

Following the shootout in the club with Judge (the famous one with the bullets striking in mid-air), Jeff, Sam and Mona escape in Jeff's car and drive down Harbour Drive from the direction of Gloucester Road.

The car is then also seen driving west along Harbour Road, right next to the junction with Harbour Drive.

Full Contact - Chow Yun Fat (1992) - Hart Avenue, Tsim Sha Tsui

Next up is one of Ringo Lam's most famous films, Full Contact, released in 1992 and starring Chow Yun Fat as (in some dubs) "Goofy". In the YT version I watched, he is called Jeff in the subs and "Gou Fei" in the dialogue.

Jeff is a gangster based in Bangkok and along with his friends, Chung (Chris Lee), Sam (Anthony Wong) and Mona (Anne Bridgewater) he involves himself in various lucrative plots. Sam gets in trouble with a loanshark - he borrowed money to pay for Jeff's mum's funeral - and Jeff has to free him but as a result makes an enemy of the loan shark. Sam's cousin, Judge (Simon Yam) is a ruthless, murderous gangster, but Sam suggests their gangs team up to do a heist that will earn them all big money. The heist is a disaster and unbeknownst to Jeff and his gang, the loan shark has asked Judge to kill Jeff afterwards. This all goes off in the first 37 minutes of the film and culminates with Jeff supposedly being killed by Sam on Judge's orders. The plot then moves to Hong Kong where Judge and his gang carry on their ruthless business.

Sadly, I haven't been able to get many locations out of this film largely due to most of the scenes being interiors - this means very few clues for me to work with beyond what appears in the film's credits. Nevertheless, there are a couple in here that are quite interesting including the very first HK scene, filmed at a real life bar in Tsim Sha Tsui.

The setting is "The Jouster 2" pub on Hart Avenue as the gang burst in and get the whereabouts of an arms shipment from another local gangster. They kill a few people before grenading the place and heading off to get the goods.

The scene starts with Judge sitting in a car scoping out the pub. As you can see the pub was located on the first couple of floor of Hart Avenue Court. The residential block is still there but the pub has long gone. There is currently a sports bar called AT-LUX occupying the same space.

I believe the railings were over the pub's "moat"

Faux stone interior, made to look like a real castle

This last images shows the opposite block with the Waltzing Matilda Arms

Baraka - Ron Fricke (1992) - Tung Tau Estate, Kowloon

Adjacent to Kowloon Walled City was the former Tung Tau Estate. You can see some of the original resettlement estate buildings in this post, however, by the 1980s much of the original housing stock had been replaced by the buildings still standing today. The two exceptions are blocks 22 and 23 which appear in the image below.

This image basically shows the view looking up Lok Sin Road. Block 23 can be seen on the right with Block 22 on the left. Block 23 was demolished in 2003 and Block 22 in 2014. Both were turned into two parts of a smaller separate estate called the Tung Wui Estate.

Block 22 was the last block of the old estate to be demolished (it was built in 1965) and can still be seen (cleaned up) in historical Streetview imagery between 2009 - 2011 (Streetview took a long break between 2011 - 2016).  The lower image shows a close up of the front of Block 22.

Baraka - Ron Fricke (1992) - Kowloon Walled City

Shot in 1992, this film was able to capture some shots of the (in)famous Kowloon Walled City just prior to its demolition. This was the south facing side of the "city" with the flats here overlooking Carpenter Road bicycle track (itself due to be demolished to make way for a market building...because who really needs all those pesky leisure facilities getting in the way of redevelopment?).

Baraka - Ron Fricke (1992) - Kowloon City

Much in the same vein as Powaqqatsi, Baraka is a "non-narrative" documentary that combines a vast amount of footage shot around the world with small vignettes of many different places combined with music. Not surprisngly, Ron Fricke, the director, worked directly with Powaqqatsi director, Godfrey Reggio on an earlier film called Koyaanisqatsi.

The film credits only give us "Kowloon" as the filming location for this part, but it seems that a few places were included. The first appears early in the film and shows an upward angle of a plane flying over Kowloon City towards Kai Tak. The only clue to the whereabouts is the neon sign covered in scaffolding. I haven't been able to pinpoint this one yet, so please feel free to comment if you know.

The lower images are the last bits of footage featuring Hong Kong and show a plane landing from a different angle. This footage was filmed from the east side of South Wall Road. The building with the dirty yellow external decor is part of South Wall Mansion and the northern end of the street. It's a bit cleaner these days.

Hard Boiled - Chow Yun Fat (1992) - Chelsea Court, Tsuen Wan

Finally, the location you've all (well, some of you) have been waiting for - the location of the "Maple Group Hospital".

I found lots of information online about the fact that Woo and his crew were able to take over a former Coca-Cola bottling plant from Swire (Swire owns the license for all Coca-Cola company drinks in Asia) prior to it being demolished. The problem was knowing which one, because apparently there were three: one in Lai Chi Kok, one in Tsuen wan and one in Quarry Bay. Additionally, I had no idea where any of them were in their respective locales anyway - there's scant information even on the Swire website. Anyway, sometime in the early 1990s, Swire constructed a massive new factory in Shatin and moved all bottling activity to there, freeing up the former sites for sale and redevelopment.

Well, after several hours of combing aerial images, I was able to nail down the location of the factory to Tsuen Wan and can confirm that the site used was on Fui Yiu Kok Street and is now occupied by a huge high rise residential block called "Chelsea Court". If you go to the wiki page for that development, it also mentions that it was constructed on the site of an old bottling factory. Bingo!

Looking at the historical imagery, it appears that, like the old teahouse, the factory was also pending demolition when the film crew took it over for production. Although I'm not certain when it was demolished, I can confirm that the site had been cleared by 1994 and was just being used as a temporary storage/car park area and it looks to have stayed that way for the next 10 years until it was redeveloped into "Chelsea Court" (completed 2005).

The odd shape of the site though (a sort of shallow dog leg) meant that the new development forms a similar shape/footprint to the old factory, with a kink in the middle, which makes it easier to imagine where the factory was in comparison to the current development. If you use Google Chrome you can click here for a current view. Interestingly, the circular roundabout in the new development seems to more or less coincide with the one seen in the film below (although the new one is much larger).

Hard Boiled - Chow Yun Fat (1992) - Lung King Street, Wanchai

The waterfront location where Little Ko is outed as a mole and is dealt with by Tony is no longer a waterfront. The area in front of the street where Ko (Stephen Tung Wai) falls into water has since been reclaimed so that the Central-Wanchai Bypass could be constructed - this is the same project that saw the end of the old Star Ferry Pier, Queen's Pier and the reclamation of another 200 metres of Victoria Harbour. We've seen this area previously on the blog, in a scene from Man of Tai Chi back in 2013.

Hard Boiled - Chow Yun Fat (1992) - World Trade Centre, Causeway Bay

The Police Chief (Philip Chan) goes to meet his undercover operative (Tony Leung) on a rooftop overlooking Causeway Bay Typhoon Shelter. The roof top is the World Trade Centre, we know this becaue as Tony leaves the meeting, the camera follows him to the right and you can just see the curved front of the (recently demolished) Excelsior Hotel at the side of the screen (see last image).

Hard Boiled - Chow Yun Fat (1992) - Causeway Bay Typhoon Shelter

Tequila meets with Little Ko on the breakwater in Causeway Bay Typhoon Shelter in order to pay Ko his informant money. This is actually the central breakwater that forms the main wall of the shelter - it's not connected to land at either end so the actors (and crew) would have need to take a quick boat road to reach it.

Hard Boiled - Chow Yun Fat (1992) - Yau Yat Chuen Garden City Club, Yau Yat Chuen

The scene where Tequila pastes newspapers all over Johnny Wong's car was filmed outside the Yau Yat Chuen Garden City Club on Cassia Road. The venue is a private members club (there's loads of these in Hong Kong) and the gang have been having a meeting inside before leaving via the main entrance.

Hard Boiled - Chow Yun Fat (1992) - Clearwater Bay Marina

This is the marina where Tony keeps his boat and the scene of carnage later on in the film when his old gang try to kill him for his duplicity. It's private property so unless you are a member of the Clearwater Bay Country Club, or own a boat berthed here there's no chance of getting in.

Hard Boiled - Chow Yun Fat (1992) - Connaught Road, Central

As Tony (Tong Leung) makes his way to the library to carry out a hit, we see him driving along Connaught Road in his little red coupe. Various parts of the sequence show him passing between the Rumsey Street carpark and Wing On centre (top image), then by the Hang Seng HQ and its pedestrian bridges followed by a little further along approaching the Central walkways, and then passing the Admiralty Centre and Far East Finance Centre. He then appears to get a bit lost, or more likely given the state of Hong Kong roads, he took a wrong lane somewhere and had to take a huge detour to get back to the library because the bottom image shows him driving in the oppoisite direction - back towards Central - along the Fenwick Pier Street flyover.

Hard Boiled - Chow Yun Fat (1992) - China Hong Kong City Tower 3, Tsim Sha Tsui

The location of the office where Tequila and his fellow policeman are based is revealed in a shot through his girlfriend's (Teresa Mo) office window. The view shows us the Ferry Point Estate in the distance, and in the foreground is the Fire Services Department Kowloon South Divisional HQ on Canton Road. This view is only possible from Tower 3 of the China Hong Kong City Mall on Canton Road.

Hard Boiled - Chow Yun Fat (1992) - Stanley Military Cemetery, Stanley

The cemetery where Ah Lung (Bowie Lam) gets buried after being killed during the tea house shootout is actually the Military Cemtery at the Stanley peninsula.

Hard Boiled - Chow Yun Fat (1992) - Wan Loi Tea House, Mongkok

Actually, I'm not sure if this place had an 'official' English name, but the Chinese is 雲來大茶樓. This is the traditional style teahouse (with overhead poles for hanging your pet bird cage) where the shootout takes place at the beginning of the film.

There's a locations feature uploaded onto Youtube (from an old Dragon Dynasty release) which places the restaurant where the Langham Office Tower is today, but this is incorrect (one of several fudges on that short feature). The restaurant was in Mongkok but was located one block to the south, at the junction of Shanghai Street and Soy Street. The Sun Ming Building now stands on the site.

Sun Ming was completed in 1993, and wikipedia notes that the location was chosen because it was about to be demolished. They should have just let John Woo shoot for an extra few days and I am sure most of the demolition work would have already been completed. I would have loved to visit it when it was open because Hong Kong really doesn't have any teahouses like this anymore. Sadly, even on my first trip in 1995, I was already two years late.

If you want to know how to get there, Sean Tierney has put together a rather amusing little video for his (sadly on hiatus) "Silver Spleen" Youtube channel. Link here: https://youtu.be/kSExMu0MDg4