4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A beautifully macabre fantasy gets an overdue deluxe release.., July 11, 2010
This review is from: Burning Paradise (Widescreen Edition) (DVD)
For a brief period in the late 80's and early 90's, Ringo Lam was one of the key HK directors to watch. He made the original CITY ON FIRE (a stylish Chow Yun-Fat crime flick that influenced one later US crime film in both story and imagery) and later directed FULL CONTACT, another great movie. Lam more recently made MAXIMUM RISK, an average Van Damme flick, and has reportedly had variable success since then, but his earlier work is still vital and enthralling. BURNING PARADISE is my pick as his best film, a vicious gothic fantasy made with a sizeable budget during the peak years of the HK film boom, apparently created with little outside interference to prevent Lam from exploring some seriously dark and grim territory. It's a powerful film, loaded with enthralling set pieces, that mixes the martial arts, horror and fantasy genres in an angry, perhaps almost visionary manner. There are few other films quite like it.
Beginning as a balls-to-the-wall martial arts epic with a likeable band of heroes (one being Fong Sai-Yuk, a character portrayed elsewhere by Jet Li), BURNING PARADISE soon sends the leads on a mission through a giant, darkly lit, Temple-of-Doom style building full of vicious hidden traps. The frequent dangers the group encounters are both harrowing and horrible, and their slow, desperate navigation through the title locale - a tense, unsettling journey full of gory moments and formidable enemies intent on stopping them dead in their tracks - makes up much of the rest of the movie. The temple is a tour-de-force, a lavishly designed expression of menace and horror decorated with grotesque art direction, and loaded with hidden dangers throughout its grim interior. The temple is full of sliding partitions, trap doors, spiked walls, fire obstacles, guns hidden in statues and other nasty secrets. Within the hellish interior cavern, torches burn above swirling pits of fire as groups of robed monks scuttle across chain bridges. Skeletons and corpses mark the walls between cells of screaming prisoners, and there seem to be countless ways for the innocent to die. An evil, sadistic wizard lies deep within the vast underground complex, and the final, desperate survivors will find him to be the most dangerous enemy of all.
BURNING PARADISE had a bigger budget than other HK films from the same period, and it has terrific stuntwork, set design and camerawork throughout. (I've screened the movie for different groups, including various friends and family members who aren't that familiar with cult films, and in each instance everyone was quickly sucked in to the movie, settling down to watch it in its entirety). Craig Ledbetter, the onetime editor of EUROPEAN TRASH CINEMA and ASIAN TRASH CINEMA (before that latter fanzine morphed into Tom Weisser's ASIAN CULT CINEMA) was asked by Cult Movies magazine to nominate his favorite films of the year shortly after its release, and he gave Lam his best director award for it. I agreed with his decision, and my respect for the film, and Lam's formidable achievement, has only grown since then.
BURNING PARADISE has been long overdue for a decent DVD release, with various substandard (i.e non-remastered and generally ugly looking) editions popping up in different locales through recent years. This new Discotek release happily blows them all away, featuring much better picture quality and a clean, sharp and uncut 16x9 enhanced print. (The film really needed this new remaster as the various dimly lit scenes within the dungeon pretty much all turned to murk on those earlier DVD's). There are some trailers as extras, along with an interview with producer Tsui Hark, but the key attraction here is this beautifully restored print of a classic action fantasy, perfect viewing for cult film fans with the stomach for its often dark subject matter.
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