The Beast Stalker: Ultimate Collector's Edition

Introduction

It's nice to have a speciality. Hong Kong cinema's speciality once upon a time, used to be the kung fu movie. An unlikely student would join a school of kung fu, and somehow find the wherewithal to excel at his chosen discipline. Then a rival school would appear, villainous and materialistic, as opposed to the pious and virtuous school of our hero. The villains would in some way slight our hero, whether by besmirching a reputation, or attacking his master, and the hero would go on a quest for righteous vengeance. The only real difference between the movies would be the style of kung fu used. Today, Hong Kong cinema's speciality is the hard-bitten, gritty, urban cop thriller. Fortunately, there is an infinitely greater variety in the stories that can be told in the confines of this genre. To kick off 2010, Cine Asia bring the latest in hard-bitten, gritty cop thrillers, The Beast Stalker, and they do so in 2-disc Collector's Edition form. Let us partake…


Cheung Yat-tung is a notorious underworld figure, who only now has been brought to face justice in front of the courts. Except justice is unlikely when the head prosecutor Ann Gao's daughter has been kidnapped, and that the only way she'll see her alive again is if she 'disappears' some crucial evidence. Of course, the last thing she must do is involve the police. Except that a cop named Sergeant Tong witnessed the kidnapping, and despite Ann's wishes, he's hot on the trail of the kidnapper. Now here's the thing. Tong was the man who caught Cheung in the first place, but it was an arrest that went horribly wrong when Ann Gao happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the mayhem and trying to stop Cheung, Tong shot and killed Ann's eldest daughter by accident. Since then, Tong has been trying to expiate his guilt, and spending time with Ann's surviving daughter. And now that she has been taken, he's compelled to save her. Tong's guilt may be blinding his judgement, and time's running out.

Picture

Cine Asia give us their typical NTSC-PAL standards conversion, overly sharp and a tad too bright, to compensate for the innate softness and ghosting of the transfer. It doesn't quite work as always. I'm used to standards conversions for anime, but that is a television source. Film is another matter, and it really should go directly to PAL. I always get the feeling that Cine Asia skimp on this, as they invariably release a Blu-ray version of the film as well. However in this case, I can find no mention of a Blu-ray release of The Beast Stalker, which makes this twice a disappointment.

Nevertheless, the image will get you by; it's clear and vibrant for the most part, if overly sharp as already mentioned. The action is clear when needs to be, and there's plenty of shaky cam verité to make the action scenes seem even more dynamic. There's plenty of action to be had here as well, with an awesome car chase sequence, a thrilling chase on foot, and gunplay and fistfights to boot. This is heart-pounding, edge of the seat stuff, and once again, it's a shame that the transfer doesn't live up to it.

Sound

You have a choice between DD 2.0 and 5.1 Cantonese, and there is also a DD 5.1 English dub to ignore. It's a fairly workmanlike surround track, certainly lively during the action sequences, but The Beast Stalker isn't heavy on the incidental music, and I did find that dialogue levels were variable for the first twenty-odd minutes of the film, before settling down into something quite acceptable. Of course, English subtitles are provided, if like me your Cantonese isn't too hot.

Extras

Both discs get animated menus (which as usual tend to concentrate on the film's more memorable, and spoilery moments), and for once this two-disc edition has extras distributed across both discs.

Disc 1

Here you get the trailer for the film, as well as trailers for 12 other Cine Asia releases.

You will also find eight alternate/deleted scenes for the film, running to a total of 22 minutes.


Disc 2

Three sections here; the first offers Behind The Scenes looks, four of them, The Car Chases, Scaling The Sign, The Street Chase, and Little Actors. This is mostly b-roll footage, without voiceover context, running to a total of 25 minutes.

The Making Of is just that, standard EPK bumf, interviews with the cast and the crew, lots of movie clips and short and sweet at just 14 minutes.

You can see more of those interviews in detail in the Interview Gallery. Here, actors Nicholas Tze, Jingdu Zhang and Nick Cheung, as well as director Dante Lam are interviewed. All in all, the four interviews run to a total of a smidge under an hour.

Conclusion

I wasn't in the mood for a cop thriller last night. Gritty urban realism was the last thing on my mind as I eagerly embraced the festive period. In fact, I approached this DVD as something of a chore, as a final wearisome duty to perform before I dove headfirst into the EU mince pie mountain. So you can understand how half-heartedly I began watching this film, with one eye on the screen, the other on the clock, and a third eye on a plateful of snacks. Given that I only have the two eyes, four if you're being mean about my glasses, then you can understand that I had already crafted a noncommittal wafer thin review in my head, something to quickly stick on the site to keep things ticking over while I unwrapped my shiny, shiny presents. Twenty minutes in, I erased that mental review, thirty minutes in, I was glued to the screen, and by the time the film ended, I was certain that I had just watched one of the best urban, gritty cop thrillers that I had seen in ages. The Beast Stalker is brilliant, adrenaline fuelled, edge of the seat stuff, action packed and fast paced, but with fascinating characters, and an emotional core that is even more gripping than the electrifying mayhem.


The action is top notch most certainly, brilliantly directed and staged, and thrilling to behold. It also is a timely reminder that not everything has to be CGI on an epic scale. You can get even more thrills when it's up close and personal, and an unexpected jolt can be more shocking than a megaton explosion. What make The Beast Stalker stand out more than the action however are the characterisations. These are interesting, rounded and well-written characters. Sergeant Tong most evidently, as he is the driven and committed cop, who blunders down a dark dead end to his career, when he accidentally kills the daughter of prosecutor Ann Gao. He's quite naturally overwhelmed by grief and guilt at his actions, but how he deals with it is unexpected, spending most of his time with the dead child's surviving sister. He happens to be there when she is kidnapped, and he immediately becomes obsessed with rescuing her for quite obvious reasons. It's an astounding performance from Nicholas Tze that carries the film, and elevates this from just another thriller to something quite unmissable.


Ann Gao is a complex character as well, a driven career woman who is understandably grief stricken at the loss of her daughter, and desperate to get her surviving child back, while at the same time wanting nothing to do with Sergeant Tong, even though he may be the only chance of retrieving her daughter. But as we get to know her, he character becomes greyer in motivation. Despite the loss of her daughter, she's torn between acquiescing to the kidnappers' demands, and doing her job as a public prosecutor, we learn that her own life is far from perfect, that she is estranged from her husband, and that estrangement and her actions at the time does mean that she has her own guilt to bear over the loss of her elder daughter.


Then there is the villain of the piece Hung, as reprehensible a character as you are likely to meet, scarred, blind in one eye, cold and methodical. When we first meet him, he casually disposes of one hostage that is no longer of value, then goes off to kidnap Gao's daughter. He brings her back in a bag, nonchalantly carrying it through his apartment building, blindfolds and ties the young girl to a chair in an isolated room, and then goes to another room where a woman lies restrained in a bed, unable to speak or even move, drugs being pumped into her. Except it's his wife, whom he tenderly ministers to, takes care of her every need, as she is paralysed and unable to do the slightest thing for herself. He's gradually going blind, yet she needs constant care, which is why he is taking these gruesome and violent jobs to make money. You certainly don't expect to feel sympathy for the bad guy in films like this, and as he gets to know the little girl that he kidnapped, the sympathies of the audience begin to waver even more. It's so that at the end of the film, you have no idea which way the character will turn, and it's certainly an interesting question to ponder as the end credits roll.


It's the story that is both the film's strong point and weak point. It all slots together like an intricate model, a narrative jigsaw that rewards the viewer the further into the film they go. It has a Tarantino-esque synchronicity, which all these years after Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, still feels a fresh and exciting storytelling technique. However, it does mean that there has to be a bit of contrivance to get all the pieces to fit together. The Beast Stalker just isn't the ideal jigsaw, and you may be left asking questions as to why. I was wondering just why after being responsible for the death of a child, Sergeant Tong was able to spend so much time with the surviving sister, apparently without even the knowledge of the mother. These are trivial but annoying niggles that get in the way of whole-heartedly enjoying the film, but they are no reason to knock the film down either. It's a rare film that entertains you even if you aren't in the mood for it. As such, The Beast Stalker will be a great way to kick off 2010.