Day of the Panther - Eddie Stazak (1988) - King Yin Lei, Wanchai

My quick foray into Day of the Panther ends with a bit of a surprise - for me at least. Jason Blade (Stazak) is inducted into his secret kung fu society at a temple. The interior is what can only be best described as low-budget, and the building used to portray the temple was none other than King Yin Lei up on Stubbs Road.

The angle is a bit odd because we are looking from the west, so I can only assume the camera was placed further along Stubbs Road where it bends sharply northwards around the hillside. Anyway, this view will soon be gone as the developer responsible for trying to demolish the place several years ago (he's called Cheung Chung-kiu and was just in the news again today) was given the adjacent land in compensation and he's building a massive development right there between the camera position and King Yin Lei.

Day of the Panther - Eddie Stazak (1988) - Central Harbourfront, Hong Kong

This is the clip that confirms that Trenchard-Smith cheated a bit on the HK footage. The film was made in 1988, but the following screencaps show us this footage was made several years previously.

We have the usual suspects to look at including the Furama Hotel, City Hall, the Mandarin Oriental, Jardine (then Connaught) House. But look closely and you can see some stuff that really shouldn't have been there in 1988. The most obvious is the old HSBC Building (see second pic above the "Exe" of "Executive Producers". This building was demolished in 1984 and replaced by the current Foster designed iconic (but ugly) structure. But actually, there is a building that was demolished even earlier, it's the Hong Kong Club - you can just see it on the far left of the second picture. This place was demolished in 1981. Sadly, my knowledge can't place it any earlier than that, but feel free to comment if you can see a building in there that was knocked down even earlier.

So, I wonder if this was footage that Trenchard-Smith still had from his earlier forays into filming in Hong Kong? It certainly wasn't filmed for the purpose of this movie.

Day of the Panther - Eddie Stazak (1988) - Mount Austin Road, The Peak

Day of the Panther was an attempt to launch the career of Aussie kickmeister, Eddie Stazak, but fell into trouble almost immediately calling for the original director to be replaced by Brian Trenchard-Smith (of Kung Fu Killers and The Man from Hong Kong fame - both featured on here courtesy of AP). To be fair, I should state that none of this film was actually made in HK, however, there are a couple of shots during the opening sequence that feature a couple of locations so I figured it was worthy of inclusion.

Here is the first location - what appears to be a sweeping helicopter shot of the Peak area including Mount Austin Road.

The building on the hillside in the top picture is called the "Haystack" (Gwulo has an entry for it here) and is currently used as the residence for the Japanese Consul. Mount Austin Road can be seen on the right hand side with Mount Austin Mansions to the right of it (since redeveloped).