Burning Paradise — Burning Paradise(Blu Ray)

From director Ringo Lam (City of Fire, Maximum Risk) comes the 1994 wuxia martial arts extravaganza Burning Paradise. After the Shoalin monastery which has been his home for many years is destroyed by the army of the Qing Dynasty, Fong Sai Yuk (Willie Chi) must team up with prostitute  Tou-Tou (Carman Lee) in order to invade capture. Unfortunately, the army capture them and bring them before the tyrannical Elder Kung (Kam-Kong Wong) at the Red Lotus Temple. Yuk is made a slave and Tou-Tou a concubine, but a revolution is brewing and the mad Kung can’t hold on to his throne forever.

Now I’ll be upfront and say I have a limited knowledge of the Hong-Kong action genre. I’ve seen the heavy hitters like Enter the Dragon, Hard Boiled and A Better Tomorrow but I can’t say my knowledge extends much further than those. I love those three films so I really should widen my repertoire, Burning Paradise was exactly the right film to make me want to seek out more of Ringo Lam’s Hong-Kong action work, and more stuff in the wuxia subgenre specifically. Burning Paradise really captures the folk-story inspiration behind its narrative, Lam and his art team create an atmosphere that feels epic despite being set in one location. There’s a sense that something fantastical could happen at any time, perhaps this is best epitomised by the Elder Kung and his fighting style feeling almost magical. There’s a point where he wraps a concubine in a linen sheet before flipping and decapitating here, later he fights using paint and razor sharp parchment.

The film has some surprisingly effective moments of horror throughout, as well as comedy. The horrific comes through best in the corpse pit scene after Yuk’s defeat near the end of the first act. Those corpse props look truly disgusting, and the less decayed ones have excellent make-up as well so everything has a twinge of griminess. Wong’s performance as Kung is so terrifying at points, going from this very calm and collected leader before going into a huge unhinged monologue about how he is a god while doing a proper evil cackle. However the film is equal parts comedic, from Yuk falling through a bridge, which is both tense and funny really, to Yuk telling a fighter to rest before they suddenly charge in to battle much to his confusion. The funniest moment comes near the end when some monks effortlessly open a gate and Yuk basically looks at the camera and says ‘why was it so easy for them?’

Of course with an action film like this, you will all be asking ‘are the fights worth the £18.99 admission price?’ My answer is a resounding yes.

Stunt co-ordinator Kim-Sang Lee and his team create exceptionally good fight scenes. The opening fight in the desert between Yuk and the forces of the Qing Army is an early highlight of the film, with low angles to truly sell the vastness of the army’s might but a level of extreme gymnastic skill from Willie Chi that keeps the pace moving so well. There’s a short sequence where Yuk bounces off a sword he has embedded in a wall to dodge some soldiers and it just so smooth that I immediately knew all the action was going to spectacular. The following bridge duel with Brooke (Chun Lam) is perhaps my favourite fight scene in the whole movie. With a tense start of seeing how brutally Kung has booby trapped the bridge as Yuk’s fellow monk is impaled and then burnt alive, the rest of the fight keeps the tension flowing with the bridge falling apart and Yuk having to stay alive and break out of his shackles. The image I’ll always remember of this fight is Yuk being impaled through the leg by a metal spike and just hanging, defeated and fatigued, upside down in a moment of vulnerability. The final fight is perhaps the most creative with the way that it uses paint and parchment as a core part of the villain’s skill set, its great stuff from Lam.

If I really had to find some points to criticise then firstly the plot, light as it is, does often stray into being convoluted with poorly laid out love triangles and a generally poor pace to the bits in between the action and horror sequences. A lot of Hong-Kong films run into this problem from what I am aware, and I distinctively remember Hard Boiled’s plot being very simple but never dull or poorly paced. Secondly, Tou-Tou gets nothing to do other than be a damsel in distress. This a shame since we have Chun Lam giving a really strong performance as Brooke so why couldn’t Carman Lee be given the same treatment?

Lets talk about the special feature of Eureka’s new limited edition Blu-ray of Burning Paradise. Ironically they are rather limited in terms of what you actually get on disc. If you bought If any collectors out there own the 2010 DVD release of the film then you will find the same special features; a short but engaging interview with producer Tsui Hark about how Ringo Lam was brought on to direct and the film’s theatrical trailer. The one new on disc special feature is a newly recorded audio commentary track from Asian cinema aficionado Frank Djeng. The main selling point of this release is having Burning Paradise in very crisp 2K with a newly translated English subtitle track. The 2K restoration here looks outstanding, it really makes the work of the film’s art department (Ranxin Qu, Chi-Hung Lee, K K Wong and Choi Woo) come alive as the colours and lighting of the sinister Red Lotus Temple look irresistible. This is a rare case where the Eureka release has let itself down a bit since they are normally so good at loading even the most obscure films with a solid library of supplementary material. 

If we are reviewing this release purely on the basis of how much fun the actual film is with its boundless creativity and ability to weave mythology with complex action choreography then I would be seeing this release in a more favorable light,  but the lack of special features on the disc does bring that score down a lot. There isn’t really a reason to get this outside of the quality of the image, which is good but hardly a major selling point. A great film hampered by a slightly disappointing release.