Bullet for Hire - Simon Yam (1991) - Lei King Wan Estate, Shau Kei Wan

We are back in the vicinity of the earlier killing of the Interpol peeps as we are given an establishing shot of where Ngok supposedly lives. This is a view of Site A of the Lei King Wan development along Tai Hong Street. Han goes here because he has a hunch that his buddy is still alive. They go to talk on the roof, but as you'll see in the next post, this was filmed at a separate location.

The lower image shows Han and Ngok's daughter escaping from the gunmen, but this scene was actually filmed on another part of the estate, next to Tower 15 on what is called Site D. You can tell it was here by the diagonal plane of the block in the back left of the image.

Bullet for Hire - Simon Yam (1991) - Quarry Bay Park

The Elaine manages to throw herself out of the car and runs to a nearby construction site to hide from the gunmen. This is just off Lei King Road and is now the easternmost section of Quarry Bay Park. The building on the opposite side of the road in the top image is Kwun Hoi Mansion - part of the Lei King Wan development.

Bullet for Hire - Simon Yam (1991) - Tai Hong Street, Shau Kei Wan

After Lei King Street, the car - driven by the female Interpol agent Elaine (Elaine Lui) - turns onto Tai Hong Street to try and escape the assassins. The yellow bridge like road in the background was the old vehicular access ramp for the ferry pier. That particular ferry structure has since been taken over by the Marine Police and both piers here now contain their operations. One contains the Harbour Division  HQ (also seen in Black Mask a while back and can be seen in the distance of the top image) and the other (seen on the left of the lower image) is now the Regional HQ.

Bullet for Hire - Simon Yam (1991) - Lei King Road, Shau Kei Wan

This next location feels quite appropriate for this blog because it is in Lei King Road in Shau Kei Wan. The area where the police outrider falls off his bike thanks to a pedestrian in a wheel chair was filmed right next to where the Hong Kong Film Archive was later constructed. In fact in the second image below, the plot of land on the right (then a carpark) was exactly where the HKFA was constructed. The Towngas installation seen in the background is still there.

The end of this altercation actually finishes more or less back at the same spot we see here as the killers chuck a grenade into the car to finish off the foreign Interpol agent. The scenes below were filmed a hundred or so metres back up the road.

Crossing Hennessy - Jacky Cheung (2010) - Eastern Law Courts, Shau Kei Wan

Oi Lin goes to court to see how Xu's hearing goes, and Loy heads there to pay the fine for being late with the business registration he forgot about. So the pair bump into each other again. The first image shows the front entrance of the courts on Tai On Street, but as Oi Lin turns the corner to try and see Xu's prison transport as it pulls away, we are looking at the side entrance on another section of Tai On Street (perpendicular to the first bit) with the view looking down towards Oi Kan Road.

Black Mask - Jet Li (1996) - Marine Police Harbour Division Headquarters

The police station where Inspector Shek (Sean Lau) is based is actually the Marine Police Harbour HQ, located on the waterfront in Shau Kei Wan. It's basically like a beefed-up version of the standard ferry piers.

Les Tribulations d'un Chinois en Chine - Jean-Paul Belmondo (1965) - Museum of Coastal Defence, Shau Kei Wan

This post has been several years in the making. Back in 2016, I was doing a deep dive into the filming locations for the 1965 Jean-Paul Belmondo classic, Les Tribulations d'un Chinois en Chine (aka Up to his Ears), and hit upon a place that I was finding it difficult to identify - so I put a picture upon my (now defunct) "help me"page. The location in question appears during the Lai Chi Kok prison sequence (see here) and is supposed to be the interior of the prison/police station.

Common sense told me that the prison interiors were probbaly not the real interiors because the prison was in full-time use at the time, so I wondered where these interior shots might have been filmed. A regular reader at the time, Arthur Yau, suggested that the interiors might be at the old Lei Yue Mun Fort - now more commonly known as the Museum of Coastal Defence in Shau Kei Wan. This made sense given the amount of filming that took place at the nearby former battery.

Here are the screen captures of the interior shots.

Anyway, lots has happened since then. I was fully intending to go and checkout Arthur's hunch and was just mustering the motivation to go when the museum closed for refurbishment (in fact a complete re-fit) late in 2018. Of course then Covid came along and everything in Hong Kong was shut down (you name it - restaurants, malls, sports centres and even peoples' common sense). I also got stranded in the UK (twice) and couldn't get back anyway even if it had reopened.

Anyway, I finally made it there this month (August 2023). It's been open now for nearly a year and the refurb looks pretty good (although in one of the displays there is a rather dubious claim that implies China single-handedly defeated Japan in World War 2 - but this might just be a poor English translation).

One of the best displays (for me at least) is an array of before/after images that show various parts of the complex before and after the initial creation of the museum. One of the images is below and it basically helped me to confirm Arthur's rather astute guess.

In case you can't see it, this corner of the redoubt - now the main section of the museum - was the same one seen in the screen shots above. The police office is the room on the left with the two small rectangular windows (in the top part of the comparison) and to the right is the arched casemate entrance where Belmondo and co and being kept behind bars.They are then ushered through the small arched doorway between those two places. My own photo below shows how they look now with galleries inside the rooms. The small rectangular windows on the left have been covered up and these rooms now contain galleries dedicated to the East River Column and the Japanese invasion.

Anyway, it's only taken me nearly 6 years but it's nice to have another location finally identified, and a big thanks to Arthur. Feel free to visit the museum, it's free of charge but is closed on Thursdays.

Tokyo Gang vs Hong Kong Gang - Ken Takakura (1964) - 32 Factory Street, Shau Kei Wan

After leaving Chang with the car, Kitahara goes to hand the drugs to Lee Shuka (Yoshiko Mita) a local Cantonese opera star who for some reason has links to the gang (I haven't sussed it out yet - please feel free to comment if you know the plot). He then leaves and crawls out onto the street to die. The location is the end of Factory Street in Shau kei Wan. That's quite an impressive bit of walking with a gunshot wound to the stomach considering he left the car back in Shek Tong Tsui.

The building partially seen in frame is #32. It's one of the area's more aesthetically pleasing buildings due to its age. Most likely a 1950s or earlier build. In general if the build date isn't available (for this one it isn't) then it's a good bet that it's actually pre-war. The occupying Japanese destroyed much of the Colony's paperwork at that time.  The most interesting thing for me from this scene is that it shows where the old waterfront came to because I believe all those stilt houses were constructed on the mud banks of the harbourfront.

Anyway, this is the last Hong Kong location in this film. Although I still have a few Macau locations to post before I'm completely finished with it.

I did actually take a picture of this very building several years ago, but from the road looking up - not quite the angle required to match the film. But anyway, here how it was looking in 2016.

Something Good - Luca Barbareschi (2013) - Lei Yue Mun Park and Holiday Village (former barracks), Shau Kei Wan

We were here not so long ago for the Police training scenes in Infernal Affairs and the former barracks at Lei Yue Mun is again featured as a police station in this film. It's the station where Michael Wong's detective works and where Jiazhen is taken for questioning when suspicion falls on Matteo. The presence of the trimmed bushes in the background which spell out the park name in Chinese characters, mean that we know the block they used for these shots is Block 18. It's the same block that can be seen in the background of this shot.

Infernal Affairs - Andy Lau (2002) - Lei Yue Mun Park and Holiday Village (former barracks), Shau Kei Wan

When it's not being used as a quarantine camp for the various outbreaks of contagions that seem to have hit Hong Kong over the years the Lei Yue Mun Park and Holiday Camp is a rather well maintained peek back in time at a former army barracks used by the British Garrison. It is chock full of old colonial style barrack buildings that were common in all of the army bases in Hong Kong (Victoria Barracks, now HK Park still has a few though most have been demolished, ditto for the former Whitfield Barracks that is now Kowloon Park).

Anyway, I was lucky enough to go and visit a few years back with David Bellis from Gwulo (you can read about it here) and our impromptu guide, Mr Chan, snuck us in the side entrance into the park. Sadly, Infernal Affairs filming locations weren't on my agenda that day (I was more interested in this place instead) otherwise I would have tried to get some movie-matching images of my own. For the record, this is the same place used for the barrack scenes in Project A Part 2.

Anyway, in the film it stands in for the Police Training School where the younger versions of our two protagonists, played by Edison Chen and Shawn Yue, undergo their cadet training. 

Hong Kong (series) - Rod Taylor (1960) - Shau Kei Wan, Hong Kong

It seems that the producers were quite keen to use up as much of their Hong Kong location footage as possible because the final episode has quite a few never-seen-before clips including this one of Rod Taylor driving his little white sports car along the waterfront at Shau Kei Wan. You can see Devil's Peak poking up in the background of the second image which means this is pretty much the same location as can be seen here.

Les Anges Gardiens - Gerard Depardieu (1995) - Shau Kei Wan, Hong Kong

Here's one I forgot to post before I disappeared to Taipei for three weeks last month. It's from Les Anges Gardiens and was fom the mid-film boat chase. The scene where the bad guys disembark their boat was shot in Shaukeiwan typhoon shelter, in almost the exact same position that I was looking at a few months before for Supermen Against the Orient.

Supermen Against the Orient - Robert Malcolm (1973) - Shau Kei Wan, Hong Kong

Although most of this film appears to have been filmed on studio sets, there are the odd moments when the crew ventured out to capture the real Hong Kong. This scene was taken at the eastern side of Shaukeiwan typhoon shelter.

The pointy hill at the back of the fourth screen grab is Devil's Peak. The buildings at the back are in the Cha Kwo Ling/Kwun Tong areas. You can still get to this spot today but you have to get to it through the (excellent) Museum of Coastal Defence. This section of the typhoon shelter is where the (supposed but probably not) old HMS Tamar anchor is sited. GoogleEarth has a fairly decent match - albeit greener and more built up.

Shadow of China - John Lone (1989) - Aldrich Bay Typhoon Shelter, Shau Kei Wan

One of the last locations on this film for us is this quick trip over to Shau Kewi Wan and the typhoon shelter in Aldrich Bay. This is a good way to illustrate the colour difference between the laserdisc and VHS versions of the film.

The building under construction at the back is "Felicity Garden" opened in 1990. The big space on the right with the wooden hoarding in the lower picture is the future site of the Eastern Magistracy. The section of water you can see was also eventually reclaimed and now has The HK island branch of Munsang College and a new development called "Les Saisons".

Les Tribulations d'un Chinois en Chine - Jean-Paul Belmondo (1965) - Return to Sai Wan Fort, Shau Kei Wan

After posting about Jean-Paul Belmondo's and Ursula Andress' trip to Sai Wan Fort for Les Tribulations d'un Chinois en Chine I mentioned I would try and get up there to take some comparison pictures. Well, today was the day and here are some of the results.

The first picture shows the slope going up to the top of the fort structure. The slope is still there but it now has a set of steps cut into the middle and as you can see the external slope has been shored up by riprap.

At the top of the slope, the view is changed mainly due to the amount of tree growth that has occurred. As a result the lower area seen on the centre left of the next picture is no longer visible from the same place. The structures seen in the film are still fairly intact, the one exception is the large building seen in the top picture: it has been knocked down at some point and replaced by a small rest garden and a rain shelter (the structure with the orange roof in the lowest picture below.

The next picture is the view looking over towards the island formerly known as Fat Tong Chau. It's still called that but has been reclaimed and is now part of the Clearwater Bay peninsula. Both pictures (the film  grab and my own) were taken from the very top of the slope. Actually, if you look closely at the wall in the film grab you can see a circular dent in the cement on the right - you should be able to spot the same dent in my picture.

 For the next picture we move around to the east facing side of the fort. The top of the fort has since been turned into a radio transmission station and the top is completely fenced off. This section of the fort is also marked as prohibited to enter but we (I was doing my exploring with David Bellis from Gwulo.com) were being given an impromptu guided tour by a local hiker and he said everyone wanders all over the place so not to worry. The section that juts out now has a radio mast fitted to the top and it looks like some concrete reinforcement work has gone on for that purpose because the top now has a lip. The bit on the wall is the fenced-off section I mentioned.

Next we move over to the opposite side of the fort and what is the west facing wall. This is the wall that is scaled by all the assassins in the film and to get there we had to skirt the fence and push through some trees. As you can see from my comparison shots, this side is also completely overgrown. The second of my two pictures was taken about half way along the wall. In the film you can see the development going on in distant Chai Wan but it's a view that can't bee seen from this spot anymore.

And finally there is the final part of our trip to the fort that involves Belmondo et al dropping into what appears to be some tunnels via a ground level hatch. The personal visit showed us that the hatch has now gone - it's been sealed with concrete - and it doesn't lead to tunnels but was actually an access hatch for a water reservoir. You can see some of the pipework in my first comparison picture. The section of the wall we were just looking at previously is hidden behind all that tree growth.

Anyway, it was an enjoyable little excursion and I have to thank David for coming along (he will do a more detailed write up of all the other non-film related places we visited) and for Mr Chan - the local hiker who we disturbed from his morning newspaper perusal and who then proceeded to take us - not just around the fort but also - down into the nearby former barracks at Lei Yue Mun Holiday Camp.