Census Bloodbath: Police Horror Story

Year:
1981
Director:
To-Bong Law
Cast:
Bruce Le, Carter Wong, Wai-Man Chan
Run Time:
1 hour 28 minutes

Plot: Cold-Blooded Murder (also known as The Mad Cold-Blooded Murder and, originally, Yuan yin) follows a white-gloved killer (Wai-Man Chan of Dress Off for Life) stalking sex workers in Hong Kong. The unnamed killer's identity and backstory are revealed early on for some reason: he's a man whose wife Hai-Yen (Lily Chan) turned to sex work in order to keep their young family afloat. In the process, she takes up with the wealthy Carl (Johnny Ngan) and demands that he hire some muscle to allow her to get her infant son from her husband. In the process, the baby is crushed by a cabinet. Oops. 

Anyway, the killer's reign of terror (which is mainly limited to a nine-minute montage at the beginning of the movie) makes him a huge bee in the bonnet of the police force. Inspector Robert Wang (Carter Wong) and D.I. Stephen Leung (Lun Chia) are on the case, and they are infrequently helped by Bruce (Bruce Le of Pieces), who is otherwise busy fighting a drug ring in what feels like and in fact may be footage spliced in from a different movie.

Analysis: The most exciting thing about Cold-Blooded Murder is that it is the first (and, to my knowledge, only) time that the slasher genre crossed streams with the Bruceploitation genre. In the wake of the death of Bruce Lee in 1973, filmmakers across East Asia rushed to take advantage of the void in the market, casting Lee lookalikes in a variety of martial arts mockbusters and giving them names like Bruce Li, Lee Bruce, Brute Lee, Bruce Lie, Bruce Lai, Bruce Ly, and Dragon Lee. 

The particular dupe Bruce we're dealing with here is Bruce Le, who was born Wong Kin-lung and starred in at least half a dozen major Bruce mockbusters, including 1978's Enter the Game of Death and 1980's The Clones of Bruce Lee. The trend had more or less wound down by the early 1980s, but without Bruceploitation, there is no Cold-Blooded Murder.

So that's one thing to blame Bruceploitation for. You see, this 1981 Hong Kong movie (which in typical HK style drags in elements from a grab bag of genres including police procedurals, kung fu movies, and Italian gialli) is an absolute mess. While many movies from this place and time manage their tonal shifts with aplomb, this one feels like it's being torn apart from the inside out.

The only unifying theme in any of the three distinct movies making up Cold-Blooded Murder is misogyny. Even more so than Dress Off for Life (which I just covered, and which randomly also stars Wai-Man Chan as the killer, making for a superb double feature), this is a relentless slog. It trudges dolefully between scenes of one-dimensional women being offed, scenes of attempted assault, and jokes about those scenes of attempted assault.

And thanks to those drug dealer scenes having less than nothing to do with the other material, the plot is really confusing and slippery. So there's really not much to cling to other than tedium and misery.

That said, its qualities as a cheesy kung fu movie sometimes provide a light in the dark. It's a cheap, aesthetically uninteresting motion picture for the most part, but the martial arts sequences get better and better as the story goes along, which provides the only sense of momentum that the movie has. I particularly like the one that involves a bucket and the fight that takes place in the crook of a tree.

Its slasher elements fare much worse. There is a full hour or so where it completely forgets that it's a giallo-influenced serial killer thriller, and the meat platter of deaths that opens the movie is bloodless (I'm pretty sure one is literally accompanied by a spray of water), shallow, and perfunctory. I will commend the movie for having the killer use a variety of weapons, but when the kills in which they are implemented are framed offscreen or immediately cut away from, it makes the whole enterprise feel pretty pointless.

There is only one scene that rises above the rest and, thankfully, it's a doozy. We follow Inspector Wang's girlfriend Ann being stalked through the parking garage of her apartment, threatened inside an elevator (where she uses her hairpin to stab the killer's hand), race up and down several stories while trying to outpace the killer (who is using the next elevator over), and finally engaging in a cat-and-mouse game once she gets inside her apartment.

This is the most engaging sequence visually (I'm partial to the recurring shot of the side-by-side elevator panels showing what floor each character is on), and it's the only part where the movie remembers that building and sustaining tension is usually a good thing in a horror movie. Or, rather, a horror scene in a kung fu movie.

So I guess I might lump this in with early '80s titles like The Demon and Lady Stay Dead, which are pretty atrocious but feature awesome third-act chase sequences. It's not exactly good company to be in, but trust me, it could still be a lot worse.

Killer: The Killer (Wai-Man Chan)

Final Girl: Bruce (Bruce Le)

Best Kill: I can't just leave this blank, so I'll choose Ann's strangulation. If only becomes it comes at the end of the one proper slasher chase in the movie.

Sign of the Times: One of the crime scenes involves a blood-splattered Coke bottle with that beautiful 1980s design.

Scariest Moment: Ann's apartment chase is also the only thing that comes even close to evoking the horror genre.

Weirdest Moment: During the final rooftop confrontation with the killer, Bruce is wearing a Playboy T-shirt.

Champion Dialogue: “That madman's really driving us crazy."

Body Count: 10; not including eight additional murders that are mentioned during the police investigation but are not shown.

1. Woman is stabbed with a hook.
2. Shower Woman is garroted.
3. Bed Lady is stabbed with a squarish metal pole thing.
4. Frilly Nightgown Lady is killed offscreen.
5. Baby is crushed by a cabinet.
6. Drug Dealer is shot by the cops.
7. Ann is strangled.
8. Carl is thrown off a roof and falls to his death.
9. Hai-Yen falls with Carl.
10. Killer is impaled with a pole and kicked off a roof.

TL;DR: Cold-Blooded Murder is a cheap, misogynistic, and scatterbrained Hong Kong slasher.

Rating: 3/10