July 8, 2008
Devil's Disciples
So, that soap with people shooting lightning and shit, Devil's Disciples, was really good. Well, the effects were pretty rubbish, actually, somewhat reminscent of the Commodore 64 effects they used to do on 3:45: Live! when I were an early teenager. Well, okay, they weren't that bad, and if they had been, it would have been better, like Picasso running Weta Digital, or something.
This is the imposing poster for Devil's Disciples. The young hunk on the left is not-so-young 36-year old Kevin Cheng, the stoic loner from the soap The Seventh Day (mentioned in the last post). How he defies the aging process is not known.
Here's Sally's swoonful love, Bosco, picking flowers with his in-show amore, played by Bernice Liu. Looks innocent enough, but wouldn't you know it, her ruthless father is head of the principle bad mutha kung fu clan, and killed off his parents when he was a baby?
Hong Kong fantasy soaps have their own strange conventions. One is that no matter how dramatic things are getting, there is are always a few mechanicals on hand to provide light (if slightly jarring) relief. Also, whenever anyone gets hit with a blow, it's obligatory for actors and actresses to chew on blood capsules and spit out the resulting plasma. In Western cinema, of course, blood spitting is a sure sign of imminent demise. However, in Chinese film it merely signifies that whatever blow was received really hurt.
It's hard to take a soap seriously, and it seemed that even the show's writers had given up trying when, in the final episode's climactic confrontation, there was a bizarre foray into advertisement parody, and even a song and dance number. It was sort of like the Marx Brothers hijacking the end of Braveheart. But it was all in good fun, and justice won the day. And the bad guy exploded. Unconvincingly.
While this may sound a bit like I'm taking the piss, these soaps are pretty tongue in cheek and no one in Hong Kong takes them seriously. And it goes on in the West, too. Watching an old episode of Battlestar Galactica the other night with Andy and Eileen, I realised for the first time that that show wasn't merely terrible, they'd actually meant for it to be that silly. Overly blonded aryan kids pranced around on horses with unicorn horns glued to their heads, and I realised with some surprise that at last I'd found something that made The Phantom Menace seem like Shakespeare.
Posted by stuart at July 8, 2008 11:00 PM