Rich and Famous - Chow Yun Fat (1987) - Nai Chung, Ma On Shan

Following their near death experience in Macau, the pair take a day to chill out with the family with a picnic. This is the once open, flat piece of land that fronted the Tolo Channel at Nai Chung. We were here not so long ago on a much brighter day (reminder: Story of Ricky), but it's gone a bit wild since then and the foliage here means you probably couldn't drive a car here anymore.

There's a general mist, as is common in Hong Kong around spring time (so this must have been filmed circa March/April 1986 at a guess), obscuring the distant hills of Tai Po north, but the snippets we can see are of the various closer ridgelines that form the southwestern sections of the Plover Cove Reservoir and the hills around Three Fathoms Cove (last image).

Story of Ricky - Louis Fan Siu-wong (1991) - Nai Chung, Ma On Shan

The flashback sequence as Ricky is flying model aircraft with his girlfriend was filmed along the grassy shoreline at Nai Chung. The same area where Kickboxer, Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story and Les Anges Gardiens were filmed.

Les Anges Gardiens - Gerard Depardieu (1995) - Nai Chung, Ma On Shan

The community work the church is doing looks like it is at a refugee camp over near Nai Chung. Now, I know there used to be a Vietnamese Refugee Camp not far away at Whitehead Point, but I'm not aware of any at this particular strip of land (it's been used for filming a couple of times before here and here) so I can only assume this was built for the purpose of this film or borrowed from another.

The land at the moment is empty so expect a massive residential development to go up there at some point as the villagers illegally sell their land to developers for mega bucks (welcome to HK!).

Little known fact: despite me listing this place as part of Ma On Shan, it's actually administratively part of Tai Po District despite being physically closer to Sai Kung. In fact, the whole of northern Sai Kung falls under the remit of Tai Po District - hence why there is a Sai Kung Rural Committee building in the centre of Tai Po!).

Kickboxer - Jean Claude Van Damme (1989) - Nai Chung, Ma On Shan

I guess this are should be considered as Sai Kung district rather than Ma On Shan, but seeing as the latter is the closer town I shall leave it for the time being. Besides, a few years later the very same spot (almost) was used in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story. Coincidentally, in both films the area is supposed to be in Thailand. In Dragon, it was the substitute for Pak Chong and in Kickboxer it is the Thai village that Van Damme is sent to for groceries by Dennis Chan (Chan is by far the best thing in this film).

I think the production team behind Kickboxer did a better job at hiding the nearby village compared to when Dragon was filmed here. The open ground where this was filmed appears to still be there.

Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story - Jason Scott Lee (1993) - Nai Chung, Ma On Shan

Off we go to Thailand to catch up with the filming of The Big Boss (that's Fists of Fury if you are from the US). Except that we don't travel to Thailand but just head out into the New Territories to a place called Nai Chung. We've visited here before, sometime ago now, with Shaw's Shaolin Temple but this time we are a few yards back from the mudflat and on an area of land next to Nai Chung village. The hills in the back are the same ones we can see at the end of The Prodigal Son (and a host of other films according to Andi's Hong Kong Movie Tours blog).

We can almost exactly see where we are because the top screencap shows that the camera accidentally caught a village house in the bottom right part of the picture. This house is actually No.22 Nai Chung village and still looks the same today (although I don't have a picture of it).

Anyway, I'm sure that this isn't the first time this area has stood-in for Thailand and I think we may see it in a later blog whenever I get around to looking at Jean-Claude Van Damme's original outing as Kickboxer.