Foxbat - Henry Silva (1977) - Magazine Gap, The Peak

About a year ago I put up this post for Black Cobra Woman and it was an establishing shot used in the film for the residence of Jack Palance and his brother (played by Gabriele Tinti). The bluray version of Foxbat has scene that I don't recall from the dvd release. It's a quick shot from almost the same angle/position as the Black Cobra Woman one as Henry Silva's car drives down Peak Road towards Magazine Gap Road.

The large property on the corner is/was #40 Peak Road and as the camera pans to the right towards the harbour we can also see Katoomba in the last three screencaps.

Black Cobra Woman - Laura Gemser (1976) - Magazine Gap, Wanchai

Jack Palance's character in this film, Judas, is supposedly immensely wealthy and one of the establishing shots used to show where he lives is a pan of the area in the vicinity of Magazine Gap. We start with a view across to Central before panning left, past Katoomba (image two) before finally settling on a building that no longer exists but stands at what would have been today's 40 Peak Road.

Katoomba on the left

40 Peak Road

Foxbat - Henry Silva (1977) - View from The Peak, Hong Kong

Foxbat is an English language Hong Kong film made in 1977. I've known about this film for a while because Jon Benn plays a small role as some sort of head honcho at the CIA but have had a hard time tracking down a copy until I found a company that had a DVD release. This was great for a first look at the film but some of the locations needed a higher resolution to pinpoint, so I have returned to the film a few years later with a Bluray version and managed to squeeze some extra locations out of it. However, the increase in picture quality has come at the cost of a more restricted aspect ratio so some of the height available on the DVD has been lost from both the top and bottom of the Bluray. I'll show an example in a later post.

The film starts off with a Russian jet fighter (the "Foxbat") being flown into Hokkaido in northern Japan and all the countries around the world are scrambling over themselves to get hold of its technology. The action soon moves over to Hong Kong as the various interests all meet up to strike a deal. So here is our first look at Hong Kong as the camera focuses on a bird flying around i the thermals above Hk Island.

(Edit 2020: I'm still trying to figure out which house is in the foreground. I initially thought it may be Katoomba but that building shows up in a later post and isn't a match. I'll update once I have figured it out.)

Noble House (Mini series) - Pierce Brosnan (1988) - 22 Magazine Gap Road, Hong Kong

An early scene in the show has Dunross driving around in his big clunky Merc, passing lots of local places of interest etc. Here is one grab which features a house called "Katoomba" at #22 Magazine Gap Road. It was up in scaffolding when the filming was done but just for a renovation rather than redevelopment.

Incidentally, the road that Dunross drives down (top picture, bottom left) is actually the driveway leading to #26, and not a public road as the sequence seems to indicate.