Sunny Gets Blue/Blowback: Love & Death (1993)
Review by Doc Ezra
Film:
DVD:

Written by Toshimichi Ohkawa
Directed by Toshimichi Ohkawa
Starring Natsume Nanase, Keishi Hunt, Takashi Matsuyama, Riki Takeuchi, and Mie Yoshida

Features:

• None

Rating: R

Anamorphic: No

My advice: Skip ‘em both

Hong Kong action cinema, while often superior to American action films, still has its clunkers. In part, this is due to the sheer volume of such films produced in a year. Cameras roll nearly non-stop for every studio in that industry, and a cadre of actors run from one action set to another, often reproducing entire casts in consecutively-filmed (but unrelated) features. Both of the films on this “double feature” DVD are of the “mass production” variety, lacking in story, action, and pretty much everything else.

Neither film has anything more than a token plot, with Sunny Gets Blue revolving around a girl caught in the middle of a bunch of gun-toting thugs, and Blowback: Love and Death being a fairly simplistic revenge tale with a protagonist that was left for dead. In both cases, the plot is thrown out to the viewer early, and largely ignored for the rest of the feature. Some might say, “hey, it’s an action flick – it doesn’t need a plot,” but this is where filmmakers make their first mistake with the genre.

Coupled with this fundamental weakness is the fact that, for reasons unknown to me (perhaps budget, perhaps sheer laziness), there are great swaths of both films that are taken up with useless street scenes, with a camera plunked down in the middle of a sidewalk filming random people walking by, or drive-by filming of storefronts and restaurant exteriors. With a movie whose total running time is short to begin with (at 80 minutes average), eating up 20+ minutes with montage scenery is useless and counterproductive.

Then there’s the action – arguably the most important facet of an action film, no? Surprisingly, there’s really not that much action to be had in either film. A couple of shoot-outs do not an action film make, I’m afraid. On top of their relative scarcity, there’s the simple problem that they’re not particularly exciting. Having come to the Hong Kong action genre on a steady diet of John Woo, I was waiting for the lead to really start flying, with bloody mobster hangouts full of bodies and bullet holes. I was sorely disappointed. I don’t know if stage blood and blanks are that expensive for most Hong Kong film companies, or if these two films are simply, as I suspect, the dregs of the genre.

The DVD has issues of its own, with a shaky transfer and fuzzy sound. On top of this, the film is presented with compulsory Korean (I think it’s Korean, anyway) subtitles that come and go from scene to scene. Additional subtitles or an English dub can be added, but the Korean doesn’t go away – the other subtitles just appear over top of them on screen. This makes the subs hard to read (unless you read Korean), and is just generally annoying. There are no features on the disc to speak of except the double feature itself.

Except for Hong Kong completists, I can’t imagine anybody even wanting to rent this one, and even the hardcore won’t want to throw this one into their collection. You’d be better off picking up something involving either John Woo, Chow Yun-Fat, or preferably both.