Mad Mission 3: Our Man from Bond Street - Sam Hui (1984) - Pearl Court, Beacon Hill

And so, onto the next movie. This time I am, once again, looking at a Tsui Hark movie as part of my current side project. Mad Mission 3 (a.k.a Aces Go Places 3) concerns Sam Hui's jewel thief character, King Kong, becoming embroiled in a plot to steal the crown jewels. It's basically a big huge James Bond parody and even includes a shady British agent of the same name (played by Connery-era lookalike, Jean Mersant).

Kong is in Paris for a heist but is waylayed and eventually kidnapped by said agent who asks him to help get the Crown Jewels back from Hong Kong on behalf of the Queen (played by the same French actress, Huguette Funfrock, who played her in Bons Baisers de Hongkong).

In reality he's being duped to do the thievery on behalf of Bond who is, in fact, an international jewel thief and is trying to sell the crown jewels to an Arab Sheik. Cue lots of really naff humour, some quite laugh-out-loud slapstick and lots of truly poor special effects. Apparently, when Tsui saw the finished product he was truly miffed at how crap it looked but it still went on to be the top earning film of 1984 and broke the HK box office record that year.

Anyway, once the story moves back to Hong Kong, the first thing we see is Karl Maka's Police character returning home.The home in question is not far from me in fact. It's Pearl Court, on Rhondda Road in the Beacon Hill area of Kowloon Tong. It's next door to Beverly Heights, which is famous for being the place where Bruce Lee died.

Sunset - Paul Chin Pei (1971) - Lung Cheung Road, Kowloon

It's been several years since I covered the locations for this film and it was also done while I was still living in Taipo. Now I've been in Kowloon for the past four years it's a good time to go back and 1. update the screen grabs and 2. suss out some of the locations I couldn't get the first time round. You can see the newly updated (screen grabs from a DVD rather than the VCD version I initially used) posts here.

Here's a great example of a missed location. It's the section of Lung Cheung Road that runs past the north end of Kowloon Tong.

This part of Kowloon hasn't really changed at all and all the buildings you can see on screen are still there and fairly unchanged. The main building in the top picture, alongside the road, is Pearl Court. Built around 1966 it's one of the older buildings in this area but not by much as most of this estate was completed by around 1970. Compared to today's shoebox flats these older buildings had much higher ceilings and more space and tend to still go for a tidy sum.

Far right of picture two is the edge of Beverly Heights, a name that should be familiar with Bruce Lee fans because it's where he died about 2 years after this film was made. The yellow podium next to it belongs to Chermain Heights which sits on the opposite side of Beacon Hill Road.

The playground (called Lung Cheung Playground) is also still there but now the view is interrupted by sound barriers and tree growth.