Killer Angels - Moon Lee (1989) - #4740 Tai Po Road, Tai Po Kau

This property has appeared before on the blog. Here is the reminder: Bruce Lee in G.O.D. In this film, it is the safe house where the informer is taken by the Blue Angels.

It's been a while since I was up this way (at least 10 years) and I notice from recent images that the whole area where the house was located has been razed. No doubt the various detached properties here were bought up by a single developer and we will see a small gated townhouse development appear sometime in the future. I'm not sure of the state of this particular property but the whole area has disappeared from local maps and in the most recent Streetview the main gate was already sealed with wire fencing. So I assume it has already been demolished.

This film shows a bit more of the property including the interior and adjacent pool area.

Whicker's Orient - Alan Whicker (1972) - Tai Po Kau Marine Police Base

The Marine Policeman being interview on Tung Ping Chau mentions that anyone intercepted in this area is taken back to the Marine Police Base at Tai Po Kau. Prior to the development of the new towns of Shatin and Tai Po in the 1980s, this base was located on the pier next to Tai Po Kau railway station. Much of the original pier, including the Marine Police base, was destroyed to make way for the Tolo Highway, but the pier that stands there today is basically an extension of that same pier.

The Marine Police were later moved to the old Tai Po Police Station (now the "Green Hub") before moving to a larger purpose-built base in Shatin, close to University station.

Whicker's Orient - Alan Whicker (1972) - Tolo Harbour, Tai Po

During the initial segment of the film, despite most of it going on in Aberdeen, there is a brief moment where the editors have inserted some footage from another location. This is as Whicker goes on to interview a boatman but the guy is a bit shy about revealing his face and keeps it covered with his hat. If you look in the background you can see that this takes place off the coast in Tai Po because Pat Sin Leng can be seen in one image (top) and in the second image you can see the north slope of Ma On Shan (bottom). It was most likely filmed near to the Tai Po Kau pier given the angle on the hills in the middle image.

The Killer - Chow Yun Fat (1989) - Villa Costa, Tai Po Kau

For the final post from this film, I've left the best until last. Possibly one of the best-remembered scenes from The Killer is when Ah Jong and Danny Lee's policeman end up sprawled on the floor with their guns pointing at each others faces. This takes place in the home of Ah Jong's double-crossing agent, Sidney, where Ah Jong and Jennie have gone into hiding. Yet another example of John Woo's favourite pastime: finding a building about to be demolished and then blowing the sh*t out of it.

Yes, as you may have guessed the house is no longer around. It was located in Tai Po Kau, just off Lookout Link. It and its neighbour were both demolished not long after this film was made and the whole site was replaced into a townhouse development called Villa Costa at #18 Lookout Link. The part of this development that corresponds where the old house and its garden were located, coincides with today's house numbers 10, 11, 12 and 15 (there's no #13 or #14 because...superstitious claptrap). I have no idea if this house had a name, nor who the owners were (although I am sure someone can pay for the land deeds if they are really interested) but given that a variety of Colonial Administration employees used to live around this area, it wouldn't surprise me if this was also given over to a senior officer in the then Govt.

I did notice that whoever wrote the wikipage for the film has stated this property was located in Stanley, but that's patently wrong. So, another falsehood busted.

Please feel free to comment if you have any information you can share about the place. I already posted an image on Gwulo and so far the only comment was to tell me it was the house from The Killer (yes, this despite me already mentioning it in my post there). On an aside, the house next door (whose garden/front hedgerow can be seen in image 1) which also succumbed under the same development project, was called "Hei Yuen" on the 1970 Govt maps. Villa Costa was completed and occupied in 1994, so I imagine the house was demolished within a couple of years of the film being made there.

Looking out across Tolo Harbour

Back garden and terrace

They'll never get the stains off the rug, but I guess they didn't have to

The Killer - Chow Yun Fat (1989) - Lookout Link, Tai Po Kau

After pursuing the bad guys, Sgt Tsang, badly wounded, crashes into the side of the road. In the film it's called Horizon Drive, but in actual fact it's the junction between Lookout Link and Yau King Lane in Tai Po Kau.

An Orphan's Tragedy - Bruce Lee (1955) - Tai Po KCR Station, Tai Po Kau

Continuing with some local films, here is one I actually posted about many years ago but removed when I decided to concentrate of foreign productions. Anyway, here it is again.

This is one of Bruce Lee's childhood movies (he was 14 when it was made) loosely based on Dickens' Great Expectations. Lee plays the childhood version of the main characters, whose father has been framed and wrongly convicted of a crime but escapes and then helps his son study to become a doctor. Apart from a rather anonymous hilltop where the young Frank (Bruce Lee) runs into his (unbeknownst to him) biological father - an impossible place to find even for me - there are two scenes filmed on location at the old Tai Po KCR station at Tai Po Kau. The first scene is when Frank (Bruce) departs to go to study medicine. The second scene is when Frank returns after his studies and has morphed into the rather drastically much older, Cheung Wood-yau (father of Chor Yuen in case you didn't know).

Yes, prior to electrification in 1983, there used to be two Tai Po KCR stations. One of them, Tai Po Market station, was decommissioned in 1983 and subsequently became the Hong Kong Railway Museum*. The other was originally called Tai Po station and was located next to the ferry pier at Tai Po Kau. This station was also decommisoned in 1983, but was also subsequently demolished and redeveloped into a KCR staff quarters called Trackside Villas.

The name of this latter station appears to have caused some confusion when it operated, and so the name of the station was later changed to Tai Po Kau to reflect the fact that it wasn't really in Tai Po town. The station was really located here because it was a dropping off point for the nearby ferry pier that provided ferry services all over Tolo Harbour - once a very convenient way for outlying villagers to access the market at Tai Po.

Anyway, in 1955, as you can see from the screen caps below, the station was still called just "Tai Po".

Train approaching from Shatin direction

The view towards the north/Tai Po proper

The little girl is a 7 year old Josephine Siao

*It was at the museum that I first discovered this film because a short clip from it - showing the two scenes I have mentioned - is included in a visual display inside the old station building. For those interested, I did actually venture over that way once and took some photos of where the station used to be. Click here.

Bruce Lee in G.O.D: Shibôteki yûgi - David Lee (2000) - #4740 Tai Po Road, Tai Po Kau

Lee's residence in the film is a rather grand looking place with a big garden and large front gate. There are lots of these types of houses around in Hong Kong if you have deep enough pockets (sadly, I don't). The one used in this film is actually way up in the hills in Tai Po Kau, along the very scenic Tai Po Road around where Tai Po and Shatin Districts meet.

Sadly, there's no Streetview access up to the house because it's a private road (shared by several rather ostentatious village houses) so I have no idea if there has been any redevelopment since 2000. Here is the front entrance. 

The view from the garden terrace is quite impressive. The view here is looking south east towards Ma On Shan in the background. The high rises are actually all on the opposite side of Tolo Harbour but the buildings scattered along the nearer hillside - including the funny shaped tower at the top right of the second picture - are all part of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

This view below looking north(ish) shows the nearby towers of Deerhill Bay on the opposite side of Tai Po Road.