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A BETTER YESTERDAY – EP 5: THE KILLER’S CURSE
The conversation series about the origins and evolution of Hong Kong action cinema culture continues! In this episode, Ross O’Brien sits down again with the Chronicler of Kung Fu Cinema Bey Logan in his Lantau lair to trace how Hong Kong’s post-kung fu boom birthed a new genre: heroic bloodshed.
Picking up from the Jackie Chan era, Ross and Bey move into the mid‑1980s and the arrival of John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow — the film that swapped swords for pistols, clans for triads, and turned balletic gunplay into a worldwide cinematic language. Bey unpacks how a Woo comedy and kung fu director found his true calling in stylized gangster drama, and how Cinema City gambled on a remake of an old black‑and‑white social drama, The Story of a Discharged Prisoner, and on (yet another!) actor the industry had written off as “box office poison”: Chow Yun‑Fat.
From there they dive deep into the brotherhood codes carried over from Shaw Brothers swordplay, the moral universe of the wuguan transposed onto modern Hong Kong, and why Mark ‘Gor’ Lee (avec trench coat, sunglasses, toothpick and potplant handguns) became an instant archetype. They talk about how A Better Tomorrow reshaped HK film financing, how triad money came to define the industry, as underworld figures bankrolled their own on‑screen myths.
Ross and Bey then follow the genre’s branching paths: Ringo Lam’s bleak realism in City on Fire, Johnnie To’s cool Hong Kong noir, and John Woo’s own escalation from A Better Tomorrow through The Killer and Hard Boiled to the war‑torn epic Bullet in the Head. Along the way, they wrestle with the afterlife of the genre, from A Better Tomorrow II and III’s prequel pivots to Woo’s ill‑fated Hollywood remake of The Killer. Ross can’t help but ask the existential question of whether this period in Hong Kong’s film history sparked the global glut of “lone hitman who wants out” stories.
Join the pair for a rambly, affectionate, and occasionally critical tour of heroic bloodshed: a genre born from real streets and real gangsters, obsessed with loyalty and betrayal, and still echoing through everything from Reservoir Dogs to Netflix’s latest assassin movies.
Films discussed:
A Better Tomorrow (1986)
The Story of a Discharged Prisoner (1967)
City on Fire (1987)
The Killer (1989)
Hard Boiled (1992)
Bullet in the Head (1990)
A Better Tomorrow II (1987)
A Better Tomorrow III (1989)
Hero of Tomorrow (1988)
Related touchstones: Le Samouraï (1967), Reservoir Dogs (1992), Leon: The Professional (1994), Purple Storm (1999)
This episode was recorded in Bey’s dojo / contemplation studio above Silvermine Bay in Mui Wo, Lantau Island — with the usual background ambience of Hong Kong life — and was produced by Mark Haskins of Post‑Op Media.
YOUR HOSTS
Bey Logan (A Better Yesterday)
Bey Logan is a Hong Kong-based screenwriter, producer and martial arts film historian. His films include Jackie Chan’s ‘The Medallion’ and ‘The Twins Effect’, Sammo Hung’s ‘Dragon Squad’ and ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny’, which starred Donnie Yen and Michelle Yeoh. He has produced documentaries about Bruce Lee, as well as a book entitled ‘Bruce Lee and I’. Bey’s recent publications include the two-volume ‘36 Chambers of Kung Fu Cinema’.
Ross O’Brien (A Better Yesterday)
Ross O’Brien writes about technology and economics in Asia from a fishing village on Hong Kong’s Lantau Island. Most evenings he stares out at the South China Sea, fretting about what the salt air is doing to his comic books and Del Rey paperbacks. He has no film credits to speak of, unless you count the voice-overs he did for Vidal Sassoon shampoo commercials when he was hard up in Singapore in the 1990s.
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