Daddy Cool - Mammootty (2009) - Park Lane Shopper Boulevard, Tsim Sha Tsui

Every tourist to Hong Kong comes here at some point - the Park Lane Shoppers Boulevard. It's well past its sell-by-date if you ask me, but almost unavoidable if you are in this part of TST. I'm surprised I haven't really featured it that much on the blog. It was seen in The Dragon from Russia though.

Daddy Cool - Mammootty (2009) - Avenue of Stars

A significant proportion of the musical set piece was filmed along the (old) Avenue of Stars along the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront in Kowloon. For those who never got the chance to experience the original AoS, you didn't miss much. It was a bit of poorly-managed tourist tat, full of spelling mistakes and overpriced film memorabilia. It underwent a renovation a few years back when New World Development (the owners of the land) decided to knock down the New World Centre and rebuild it into the current K11 Atelier monstrosity. When reopened, the "new" Avenue was just as disappointing as the old one, and the old centrepiece - a life size bronze sculpture of Bruce Lee in a fighting stance, paid for and provided by fans - was relegated to one side as some sort of coffee shop ornament for the local Starbucks.

The Taxi Driver - David Chiang (1975) - Kowloon Park

After being accused of being one of the bank robbers, Chen decides to go into hiding an waits for his friend at one of the old barrack buildings in Kowloon Park. This building is still around and now forms part of the Heritage Discovery Centre along with the other block. The area between the two blocks is now a landscaped garden and an additional building has been constructed that joins the two blocks at the other end. It's well worth a visit if you get the chance.

The Taxi Driver - David Chiang (1975) - Peking Road, Tsim Sha Tsui

To Fat picks up a dirty old fella and his young girlfriend on Peking Road. The HK Old Mary sign you can see in the first image related to a famous shop. You can read more about it here. The Mary Building, where it was located, is still around though (71-77 Peking Road). Look carefully and you can see an advert for "Club Tasogare" (the white signboard) located in the basement (today's Delaney's).

The Taxi Driver - David Chiang (1975) - Observatory Road, Tsim Sha Tsui

The bad guy's girlfriend (played by Terry Lau) lives in an apartment on Observatory Road. There are very few roads in Kowloon that are this steep so narrowing down the location was a bit more straightforward (I had no clue where this was 10+ years ago when I first covered the film).

The ornate looking building on the corner was the Luna Building. It has previously been featured, very briefly, in The Peking Medallion.

The Taxi Driver - David Chiang (1975) - Hyatt Regency Hotel

To Fat's obnoxious foreign passenger is dropped off at the old Hyatt Regency (formerly The President) Hotel on the Lock Road side where the vehicular ramp was located. This has since been replaced by iSore...sorry, I mean iSquare - a vapid, glass mall whose only attraction to me at the moment (until it closes) is a branch of Marugame Seimen. I'll be back to update this post after its inevitable closure (because...Hong Kong) to say that there is no longer anything in the mall worth visiting.

Hong Kong 73 - Yueh Hua (1974) - Carnarvon Road, Tsim Sha Tsui

A general shot from the film (I don't remember the context) that shows a very famous junction between Carnarvon Road and Granville Road in Tsim Sha Tsui. The Kaiser Restaurant was a long standing eatery here (between 1955 - 1977) on the NE corner of the junction. The building it was on was demolished soon after and replaced by the current Taurus Buildingh. However, on the oppiste corner, containing "Heung Bun" (on the right) is one of the buildings still around. Granville Road itself has one of the greatest concentrations of 50s era tenements along both sides of the road. However, they arec all slowly being replaced one by one. 

Hong Kong 73 - Yueh Hua (1974) - Star Ferry Pier, Tsim Sha Tsui

Following on from his huge success with The House of 72 Tenants, Chor Yuen (perhaps known better to people who come here as the head bad guy in Police Story), Hong Kong 73 was a follow up that includes one of the biggest ensemble cast I have ever seen in a movie. The roll call is so large the film is still introducing them (via on screen titles of their names) right up until the end. The film is a satire  and the plot follows a closeknit group of residents along "Hong Kong Street" and sees them dealing with a variety of issues in Hong Kong at the time: gambling, the stock market, poverty, success, hospital queues, poor housing, suicide, typhoons etc. As a current Hong Kong resident, a lot of these problems resonate with modern Hong Kong as well, so they are not really things that have ever gone away. A film like this could never be made today. If it was the cast would be blacklisted, the director would be tried for endangering National Security and the film would never get through the current censorship regime.  

Yueh Hua and Ching Li star as the main characters. A couple who work as a security guard and high school teacher respectively, and the story revolves around them and their various family members and acquaintances. The film starts off with some nice views of the Kowloon Star Ferry pier in Tsim Sha Tsui as seen from the rooftop carpark of Ocean Terminal.

The Brain Stealers - Lily Ho Li-li (1968) - Shui Hing House/Prestige Tower

Another Inoue Umetsugu film here in the shape of The Brain Stealers, one of the many spy-oriented movies that Shaws produced in the 1960s. This one stars Lily Ho as a judo expert, Li Chiu-lan, daughter of a famous scientist who has just invented a process to boost plant growth and yield to help solve food shortages in the light of the earth's ever increasing population. The problem is there is a nefarious megalomanic called Dr Zero who want the obtain the secrets so he can use it on humans and create superhumans to help hm rule the world. Dr Zero has been kidnapping scientists from around the world and forced them to invent a machine that can swap peoples' minds (hence "Brain Stealers"), and he uses the machine on Chiu-lan's brother to swap his mind with one of his henchmen.

The plot is hilarious but good fun and although supposedly shot in Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan and Thailand (according to the excellent HKMDB) it is mainly a studio-based film with the odd location thrown in here and there.

The film opens with a panning shot of the harbour from Tsim Sha Tsui as the camera moves towards a judo class taking place on a nearby rooftop. This is where we first see Chiu-lan's prowess at chucking people around. The building they are training on is what is now called Prestige Tower but back in the 1960s was Shui Hing House. It's a nice view though because we also get to see the upper floors of the former Peninsula Court/Marco Polo hotel, the "Rolex" sign on top of Hotel Merlin and the brand spanking new Hankow Centre in the background (completed 1968 - it's the very clean building in the abckground of the third image).

The Peninsula Court Hotel rooftop (behind the titles)

The sign says (r-l) 香港大川柔道學院 (Hong Kong Great River Judo College)

The Lady Professional - Lily Ho Li-li (1971) - Kowloon Wharves

The contract to kill Shi is subcontracted out to the boss of the guy who is blackmailing Tian-li. They are based in a warehouse at some wharves somewhere. The establishing shot shows us the Kowloon Wharves but in the close ups of the warehouses/godowns, it looks like that was filmed elsewhere (possibly even Movietown). This image is a stitch from a panning shot of the area. This area is now all part of the Harbour City mall complex.

Tragic Hero - Chow Yun Fat (1987) - Nathan Road, Tsim Sha Tsui

Following his return from Malacca, Chai makes a call to Inspector Cheung (Danny Lee) telling him his plan to take out Yung so that Cheung can take all the credit. He makes his call from a phone box located on Nathan Road opposite the Peninsula Hotel. It looks to me like a prop because in one shot the phone box is facing the hotel on the other side of the road, and then in the next it has turned at an angle so that we can see the end of the hotel building facing Salisbury Road.

Notice in the top image how the left arched window aperture is missing the molding from its keystone? That has since been replaced and the rectangular hole next to it has been filled in. As you can see, most of the things I notice in these images are of no interest to anyone...

No doubt the Google location marker will have jumped to a nearby building, but to be clear, this is on the south east corner of the Nathan/Middle Road junction.

Tragic Hero - Chow Yun Fat (1987) - Silvercord Centre, Canton Road

A-lok (Shing Fui-on) decides to take matters into his own hands and plots to assassinate Yung by pretending to be a window washer. He takes the gondola down to Yung's office floor but someone has already ratted him out and he is shot to death through the window. This scene was shot dangling from Tower 1 of the Silvercord Centre on Canton Road with the Wharf T&T Centre directly behind.

Full Contact - Chow Yun Fat (1992) - Hart Avenue, Tsim Sha Tsui

Next up is one of Ringo Lam's most famous films, Full Contact, released in 1992 and starring Chow Yun Fat as (in some dubs) "Goofy". In the YT version I watched, he is called Jeff in the subs and "Gou Fei" in the dialogue.

Jeff is a gangster based in Bangkok and along with his friends, Chung (Chris Lee), Sam (Anthony Wong) and Mona (Anne Bridgewater) he involves himself in various lucrative plots. Sam gets in trouble with a loanshark - he borrowed money to pay for Jeff's mum's funeral - and Jeff has to free him but as a result makes an enemy of the loan shark. Sam's cousin, Judge (Simon Yam) is a ruthless, murderous gangster, but Sam suggests their gangs team up to do a heist that will earn them all big money. The heist is a disaster and unbeknownst to Jeff and his gang, the loan shark has asked Judge to kill Jeff afterwards. This all goes off in the first 37 minutes of the film and culminates with Jeff supposedly being killed by Sam on Judge's orders. The plot then moves to Hong Kong where Judge and his gang carry on their ruthless business.

Sadly, I haven't been able to get many locations out of this film largely due to most of the scenes being interiors - this means very few clues for me to work with beyond what appears in the film's credits. Nevertheless, there are a couple in here that are quite interesting including the very first HK scene, filmed at a real life bar in Tsim Sha Tsui.

The setting is "The Jouster 2" pub on Hart Avenue as the gang burst in and get the whereabouts of an arms shipment from another local gangster. They kill a few people before grenading the place and heading off to get the goods.

The scene starts with Judge sitting in a car scoping out the pub. As you can see the pub was located on the first couple of floor of Hart Avenue Court. The residential block is still there but the pub has long gone. There is currently a sports bar called AT-LUX occupying the same space.

I believe the railings were over the pub's "moat"

Faux stone interior, made to look like a real castle

This last images shows the opposite block with the Waltzing Matilda Arms

Benson - Robert Guillaume (1984) - Regent Hotel, Tsim Sha Tsui

The group are staying at the Regent Hotel. Later it became the Intercontinental and has now been renamed back to The Regent. It's probably one of the most-featured hotels on my blog (alongside the Peninsula).

Summons to Death - Tang Ching (1967) - Hotel Merlin, Middle Road

A fourth pirate brother, Cheung Biu (Huang Tsung-hsun), is responsible for killing all of his fellow pirates for the treasure map and, in a bit of pre-Mission Impossible face swapping, Tang Lui creates a mask of him so he can access his hotel room in town. The hotel in question was the Hotel Merlin located on the corner of Hankow and Middle Roads. This is where the Kowloon Hotel now stands although the Kowloon Hotel takes up the space once occupied by both the Hotel Merlin and the Peninsula Court Hotel. The hotel has appeared briefly on the blog before, although in name only, see the bottom images on this post.

I do remember Chaplin Chang telling me many years ago that Hotel Merlin was where the production offices were based for the filming of Lord Jim whilst the crew were in town for the HK-based scenes.