Tuesday, January 15, 2019

Energetic 21 (1982)

Leslie Cheung is a street racer who drives a Porsche 911. In the first part of the film you see how he and his buddies hang out and basically do very little. There are a couple of strange tangents (well it is a HK film after all) including a faked demonic possession that ends up in a fat girl getting pregnant. No really. I'm not making that up.

Rowena Cortes, who plays the sister of one of Leslie's friends, also gets into some scrapes including fighting girls over a dress and accidentally getting her boyfriend beaten up on his driving test. Leslie's mum brings a Westerner home but Leslie doesn't like it as its filthy apparently...

Then in the second half of the film things really get going. Another Westerner is accidentally killed in a fight and the guys suddenly start acting incredibly stupidly (or more than they were already). They begin running around like headless chickens and even turn on each other as the Police close in. In the end they are holed up in a supermarket, the Police have them surrounded. So how did it all go wrong? It is a HK film about young people, it always goes wrong.

So what is this film really about? It's an entertaining romp with some good car stunts thrown in, especially a cool stunt-a-rama with some go-karts. The main problem with the film is that the guys' characters seem to change utterly after they kill the guy. They turn from being some layabout losers into psychotic madman...

So it doesn't really make any sense but it's a decent slab of early 80s HK idol cinema if you like that sort of thing. It has it all all : young beautiful people, hot 80s sports cars, cheesy nightclubs and HK 80s cool. Fantastic basically. Just don't expect much coherence.