City on Fire (1987)

Chow Yun-fat plays Ko Chow, an undercover cop in a violent Hong Kong setting. He's tired of the work and wants to retire, but his superior, inspector Lau (Sun Yueh), wants one last job from him: infiltrate and help bring down a gang of jewellery thieves, one of whom killed a fellow cop.
Ko is, it must be said, a bit of an ass-hole who's difficult to sympathise with, despite much of the running time given over to characterisation. But he gets a little less unlikable as the story progresses.
The closing act is fantastic — it also happens to be the part that QT ripped off for Reservoir Dogs (1992) — but overall the film is too uneven for my tastes.

2½ bleeding heads out of 5

Infra-Man (1975)

aka The Super Inframan

Shaw Brothers Studio wanted a piece of the sweet profit that imported Japanese tokusatsu movies were generating in their native China, so they produced their own movie and filled it with their well-established form of SB Chinese style martial arts. The result is a dynamically engaging slice of madness that feels familiar but different at the same time.
To become the hero, Lei Ma undergoes a dangerous surgical procedure involving super-human DNA (that just happened to be lying around). The self-sacrifice turns him into the agile Infra-man. Hooray!
The studio didn't half-ass it when it came to the sets either; the lair of the campy villainess Demon Princess Elzebub is amazing.

3 pointy metal titties out of 5

The Killer (1989)

Chow plays a skilled assassin with a level of morality that the current Triad leadership deems outdated. When an attack of conscience weighs heavily on the killer's sense of right and wrong he quickly becomes a liability for the organisation and much bloodshed follows.
The typically black and white nature of cop and criminal is shaken up and given a new lease of life; it's bold but still within the realms of believability.
Parts of the story go directly for the heart strings with a sentimental song and subtly stirring themes but it never once compromises on the stylish, violent and balletic gunplay that Woo is famous for.

4 bullet discrepancies out of 5