Woo's films began the genre known as 'heroic bloodshed,' a term first used, according to Logan, by Rick Baker and his staff as a film category in the British Hong Kong fanzine Eastern Heroes. With A Better Tomorrow Woo reinvented the gangster film and was commercially successful. Others took the opportunity to explore the genre, like Ringo Lam with his 1987 City on Fire, released six months after A Better Tomorrow. Lam, after leaving Hong Kong disappointed with the television industry, studied film at Toronto's York University and established Canadian citizenship. He returned to Hong Kong in 1981 to make movies. He made four comedies, all based on scripts written by others and successful at the box office. But Lam, who generally dislikes comedies, wasn't happy. When Karl Maka gave him the chance to make whatever he wanted, Lam wrote the script and developed the first On Fire film. Lam selects the English titles for his movies, and chose 'On Fire,' he says, to give them 'a sense of energy, of action.' Unlike Woo's romanticized protagonists and dream-like settings, Lam's 'On Fire' films, including City on Fire (1987), Prison on Fire 1 & 2 (1987, 1991), and School on Fire (1988), present conflicted characters and hard-hitting urban realism dominates. Lam provides a social critique of controversial issues most want to ignore-- street violence and abuses in the police, prison and school systems. If Woo films his dreams, Lam shoots his nightmares.

 

[Image: Ringo Lam's City on Fire; courtesy/permission of Media Asia, copyright Star Filmed Entertainment]

Chapter 5