The Blue Jean Monster — The Blue Jean Monster (Blu Ray)
The Blue Jean Monster is a wonderfully wacky, at points bad taste humour-lined Hong Kong-produced send-up of US buddy cop films of the 1990s. The Category III film blends action, horror, and fantasy elements- for a crazed romp of a film, that seemingly gets more demented & deranged as it unfolds. Here from 88 Films is a region-free release of the film- taking in a ltd slip, and a few extras.
The Blue Jean Monster ( aka Jeuk Ngau Jai Foo Dik Jung Kwai) is from the year 1991. It was directed by Hong Kong-born Kai-Ming Lai- who has a good grounding in Category III films ( over 18 only pictures with a higher level of sex and violence). Between the late 80’s and early 2000’s he has eighteen credits to his name- Erotic Ghost Story III (1992), Ancient Chinese Whorehouse(1994), A Fake Pretty Woman(1996), Troublesome Night 9 (2001).
The film opens at a temple where we find heavily set & wall-like cop Tsu Hsiang(Fui-On Shing) with his pregnant wife- they are asking one of the gods for a good & positive birth. He drops & breaks a charm connected to this god- which is seen as highly bad luck. The pair head back to look for their car & it’s disappeared- suddenly it races up, and out drops his younger inconsiderate/ self-focused partner Power Steering (Wai-Kit Tse). He mentions there have been rumours of a bank robbery- so Tsu heads out to see if it’s for real.
We then switch to a group of teens led up by the outspoken Gucci ( Gloria Yip) meeting up in a burger joint. One of their number had her breasts fondled the night before, and they think it was by one of the teen workers at the burger place who did it. So in a wonderful bizarre scene, they get the three workers to fondle burger baps in the way they touch breasts!. Right next door to the burger joint is the bank that is getting robbed- so just as the gang are finishing off they bump into the bank robbers, with Tsu being kidnapped by the robbers.
We get a chase to a building site- where somehow or another Gucci gets hold of the bag of swag, and falls down a tube away from the robbers. Meanwhile, Tsu turns up at the building site- a shoot-out starts, but the robbers do the dirty by dropping a load of steel rods on the cop- shooting him up close, before getting away. He’s seemingly still alive- but can’t move- a cat appears and glows red on top of his body, then lighting strikes him- and he’s somehow alive again- though can’t feel any pain & is seemingly dead, but alive. He gets a steel tube pushed through his chest- this he pulls out and carries on as ‘normal’ though the 'hole' won’t close up.
As the film unfolds Tsu tries to come to terms with his situation- trying to stay alive/dead until his child is born- by powering himself up to the mains. We get things coming out of his 'hole'/ covering his 'hole' that are amusingly consumed by mistake by Power Steering. There are awkward sexualized & at points rather shocking homophobic quips. And a general blend of action, slapstick humour, and moments of bizarreness- for example, Tsu gets given a huge fabric web of women’s bras as his birthday present.
The film's one hour and thirty-four minutes rushes by in a wonderful wacky manner. The horror/ gore elements aren’t as extreme as you’d expect- so I’d say if you're watching this purely for that side of things you may feel somewhat underwhelmed. And some of the homophobic humour may offend some. But I found The Blue Jean Monster a wonderful wacky ride of a film- which had me chuckling, gripped by the action, and at points satisfyingly puzzled.
This Blu-Ray takes in a nice and clean new 2k scan of the film, which makes it look like it could have been made recently- not thirty-three years ago. On the extras side, we get Man Made Monster ( 20.27)- which is an interview with assistant director Sam Leong. He moves from talking about how he got into filmmaking, moving on to talk about working with director Kai-Ming Lai on the film to hand. He talks about how the idea for The Blue Jean Monster came about, how Fui-On Shing was selected for the lead, and more. Otherwise, we get an original trailer for the film.
The Blue Jean Monster is most certainly an entertaining & often awkwardly amusing ride of a film- really sending up the buddy cop movie genre well. With this 88 Films release featuring a great scan, and a worthwhile interview. I’d be most interested in seeing some more of Kai-Ming Lai Cat III films