{"id":10071,"date":"2025-11-09T08:51:31","date_gmt":"2025-11-09T00:51:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/?p=10071"},"modified":"2025-11-09T08:51:31","modified_gmt":"2025-11-09T00:51:31","slug":"revisiting-1985-horror-gem-the-island-hong-kong-cinemas-attempt-at-a-rural-gorefest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/?p=10071","title":{"rendered":"Revisiting 1985 horror gem The Island, Hong Kong cinema\u2019s attempt at a rural gorefest"},"content":{"rendered":"


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American-style gorefests like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre<\/em> were glaringly absent from 1980s Hong Kong cinema, which is why The Island<\/em> (1985) was such a brutal outlier.<\/p>\n

Directed by Leong Po-chih (Hong Kong 1941<\/em><\/span>), the film sees a teacher (played by John Sham Kin-fun<\/span>) take a group of students on a field trip to a deserted island \u2013 in reality, Tung Ping Chau \u2013 where they are hunted by three crazed brothers.<\/div>\n

With the film now getting a new Blu-ray release from Eureka Entertainment, we spoke to film historian Frank Djeng, who provided the commentary, about this unique slasher.<\/p>\n

The Island<\/em><\/strong> unspools like an American slasher film<\/strong> \u2013 Hong Kong directors rarely worked in that genre, did they?<\/strong><\/p>\n

No, Hong Kong was not known for producing slasher-style horrors back then. There were a few films like that \u2013 Tsui Hark<\/span>\u2019s early We\u2019re Going to Eat You<\/em><\/span> and [Dennis Yu Wan-kwong\u2019s] revenge film The Beasts<\/em> (both 1980),<\/em> but not many.<\/div>\n

Also, this is a kind of horror with folk-style touches, and that\u2019s not something that you ever see much of in Hong Kong. It\u2019s a rare type of movie.<\/p>\n

Category III films, which appeared a few years later, always mixed genres, combining porny sex with horror, for instance. But this is a straightforward slasher film.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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American-style gorefests like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre were glaringly absent from 1980s Hong Kong cinema, which is why The Island (1985) was such a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1864,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[2513,8715,4878,8717,3569,2424,5067,5231,8714,8716],"class_list":["post-10071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bored-interesting","tag-attempt","tag-cinemas","tag-gem","tag-gorefest","tag-hong","tag-horror","tag-island","tag-kong","tag-revisiting","tag-rural","wpcat-33-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10071"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10071\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}