Wong Jing, Teresa Mak and "Love Me, Love My Money"

Wong Jing has been successful and controversial for decades. One of the most prolific filmmakers in Hong Kong in the 1980s and 1990s when movies came out faster than the distributors could get them on the screen. Strongly rumored underworld ties in a business that is rife with them; master of the casting couch in an industry that features unbalanced power relationships, unbridled concupiscence and ready availability of targets; schlock auteur when schock was king.

He is a very skillful director, something that can be overwhelmed by the baggage that he has accumulated over his career or simply overlooked because so many of the movies with his name on them seem shoddy and slapdash. What you think of Wong Jing depends on what you best remember of his work--and anyone who is a fan of Hong Kong movies has seen a good deal of it. He has also, to those for whom such things are important, introduced and featured a lot of beautiful and often talented actresses to the jade screen.

The ongoing discussion/dispute of his place in the art and commerce of film was continued on a couple of blogs recently although the post in question in neither blog concern Wong Jing. YTSL reviewed Future X-Cops while Glenn, kenixfan did Girl With the Diamond Slipper. Commentors (including me) were more interested in discussing Wong Jing than the movies at hand.

The reviews by YTSL are yet another reason to visit her blog--as if any more were necessary--something I should have remarked on before (or may have already). She is a terrific observer if film (and much else) and probably couldn't write a bad sentence if she tried.

I have agreed wholeheartedly with the last several of Glenn's reviews but the real gems of his blog are the essays and photos on his recent trips to Hong Kong. Glenn is an intrepid traveler--after wondering about Hong Kong for years he simply got on a plane and got off 16 hours later, ready to see, hear, smell and taste the place. He writes very well about his experiences and does so without the commercial sheen that "travel" writing always has.

Getting back to Wong Jing, while not a fan of his as such--I won't be standing in line when the 250 DVD set of his definitive works is available--I think that his best movies compare with those done by some of the venerated high priests of the art. A case in point is Love Me, Love My Money which is close to being a perfect romantic comedy and comparable to the best work of Frank Capra or George Cukor.

In Love Me, Love My Money tables are turned, the mighty are brought low and money is shown not to buy happiness. The social order is unthreatened--the banks re-open on Monday morning and the unlovable billionaire who has become a homeless beggar is restored to his billions. The wealthy but insensitve Richard Ma has learned his lesson--which seems to be that if you look like Tony Leung Chiu-Wai and act helpless women, after some hesitation, will line up to help you.

Shu Qi is the chief foil. She plays Choi, a hardworking stockbroker who spends her days pounding the phones along with thousands like her:

Teresa Mak plays Fong her best friend--the buddy role:

Together they are quite a pair:

Other women in Richard Ma's life include Cho Chun who plays Helena the loyal secretary who hasn't had a day off for five years:

Dr. Lam his psychiatrist who would rather get on the couch with him than listen to his problems is played by Angie Cheung Wai-Yee:

Ultimately the woman whose bond with Richard Ma tells the audience that he is not (or not only) a dull boor is Vennessa who who agrees to help him unlike every other former girlfriend Richard Ma contacts. Down to his last few coins he calls Venessa and she arrives in a cab from some far reach of the city, leading a young child and heavily pregnant with another. Vanessa has come across town in the middle of her day in order to give him money—money which she takes from her housekeeping and will have to explain where it went to her husband.

She isn’t surprised that Richard is broke, even saying that he doesn’t look like he has been robbed (the story he gave her on the phone) but that he has gone bankrupt. Vanessa obviously still thinks very well of Richard and while it is clear there is no sexual spark anymore, she is doing a good deed for someone who she knew in the past and who she remembers fondly--Richard must have been a different person at some point.

When she first emerges from the cab the audience thinks this will be a further humiliation for Richard but Wong Jing turns it into a lovely scene that validates Richard as something other than a wealthy jerk. And in some very economical filmmaking, he uses the end of the scene make Choi and Fong think that Richard is taking money from and living off of women, giving them another reason to think he is a cad and a criminal. Venessa is played by Prudence Kao Bao-Yun in this small but crucial scene:

Teresa Mak in "The Peeping"

“The Peeping” is a political thriller uneasily mixed with softcore pornography, essentially a mystery with a twist ending interrupted by scenes of extremely attractive people simulating sex often but not always in very dark sets that kept the naughty bits properly obscured. Teresa Mak and Grace Lam were in two other films together, “Electrical Girl” and “Tortured Sex Goddesses of the Ming Dynasty” in which they were the actresses who kept their clothes on. Here they eagerly throw off their clothes and jump into bed while being watched on the cameras of surveillance expert Daniel Wu. There are plenty of twists and turns in the plot, some which make more sense than others.

Grace Lam shows up in Daniel Wu's seedy Hong Kong private detective office with an offer that is so good he almost has to refuse it--one million (Hong Kong) dollars to place audio and video devices in the apartment of a Taiwanese councilor played by Teresa Mak, record everything that happens and get the original tape with no copies made to Grace. This is an easy job for someone of Wu's skill so most of the fee must be for something besides bugging the apartment.

We are never far from the next torrid encounter between Teresa and Grace or Teresa and Daniel or even a (clothed) breast size comparison between Teresa and Daniel's girlfriend played by Yum Kong-Sau. Both lead actresses look their most erotically enchanting though when simply looking at us through the camera:

Things don't improve from here, though. The seduction/sex scene between Teresa and Grace starts out clumsily and is shot and edited more to keep everyone's breasts covered than for an erotic punch so (astounded as I am to be writing this) it simply drags to an ending.

Here Teresa might be about to tell Grace to stop standing on her toe:

Since both are experienced and talented actresses the scene gets a bit steamier as it progresses:

There a some odd scenes that seem to be thrown in to insure both an adequate running time and the requisite amount of female flesh including this one in which Daniel's girlfriend, played by Yum Kong-Sau, who is jealous of the time Daniel spends mooning over the feed from the apartment, confronts Teresa in a restroom using what she thinks is her best weapon--her breast size. Teresa wins this round although it is hard to tell why since both women are wearing lingerie that could serve as a breastplate for Queen Boadiciea:

Things go seriously awry late in the film when the characters played by Teresa Mak and Grace Lam double cross each other. One result is shown here--Daniel Wu is in the background wondering why he passed up his chance to go to law school while Grace Lam wonders why the duct tape confining her is so loose.

Finally Teresa decides she has had enough and it is time to clean up--or the filmmakers, realizing that the had allowed the story to wander into yet another dead end, figure the best thing to do is to get Teresa behind a semi-opaque shower door:

"The Peeping" is a low grade erotic thriller made with talented and very attractive actors that, like everything else in life, could have been better.

Teresa Mak in Troublesome Night 11.

"Troublesome Night 11" might have been forgotten about by those who made it as soon as it wrapped. It looks like a project in which the actors showed up, did their parts, got paid and looked for the next job. The only "names" in the cast were Teresa Mak, playing a ghost, and Helena Law who is first her nemesis, then her ally and who casts spells on people by spitting milk on them.

Teresa's character, Lan, is dead before the opening credits role, murdered by a foul beast of a boyfriend who leaves her body where it falls on the beach. Her spirit is very much present and is restless, demanding revenge on him.

She appears to some young women who are volunteer workers cleaning up the beach and who are accompanied by young men who are more interested in them than in saving the environment. While working they discover her body although in keeping with the conventions of this kind of film it is no longer there when they return with the police. Her after death demeanor makes it difficult for the spirit to convince anyone of anything, other than they should run like hell, since she is green and bleeding from a huge gash in her head.


After fighting it out with old supernatural hand Helena Law (here Mrs. Bud Long, matriarch and chief spell-caster of the group who discovers her body, Lan is convinced to work with them. She tells her story of being seduced

(you want me to do what with that?)

making a loan to her lover of all the money she has and then abandoned.


Despite her please on the beach she is murdered, not only for the money but because he likes killing people.

And is now interested only in avenging her murder and counts on rallying Helena's family to help her.

Although there are always a few things to work out when the newly dead try to work closely with the living world, even with the intervention of someone with a foot in both camps:

Another hitch comes up when the worse of the two loutish cousins decides to make a play for Lan before realizing that she is not exactly what she seems:



His most outrageous fantasies have been fulfilled! He meets an attractive woman, asks her out and has her volunteering to jump into bed with him.

But there is a problem. There is always a problem. In this case it is that she is dead. Big problem.

Which puts a merciful end to that bit of almost funny comic relief. Everything is fine by the end of the movie, though, as the murderous boyfriend tastes his own medicine--in this case an extremely unscary skeleton that looks like it was rented from ACME Medical Supply.

Infernal Mission

No one ever sets out to make a bad movie although in hindsight one can see that the combination of creative people assembled for a project seems to doom if from the beginning. Sometimes, though, a movie turns out better than anyone might think it could. Infernal Mission is such a film.

Infernal Mission has many of the elements of a dull timewaster: an inexperienced writer and director; generic, barely dressed sets; by the numbers cinematography and a script that seems to be a cheap copy of a much better movie. It is visually uninteresting and dramatically dull. However the sum is greater than its generally ordinary parts or perhaps some of the parts shine are much brighter than one would expect. Even though the war room for the elite anti-drug squad looks like the word processing pool of a small accounting office, the gun fights are (with a couple of notable exceptions) perfunctory and the plot is pushed forward by people finding clues lying around on desks, it is still an effective police drama with decently developed characters, believable conflict and hidden agendas that are hinted at and only slowly revealed.

Teresa Mak plays Mak Ka Mei, the police cadet recruited to be a mole in the organization of a drug kingpin. She is beautiful as always, playing very tough when she needs to be, tender when necessary and makes it clear that she is always looking over her shoulder. The difficulties her character encounters, a female spy in the heart of a criminal organization are only hinted at—her main tool for getting information on drug deal is sex, since she had to hide her skills gunplay and strong arm tactics . Her status as both an insider, being present when huge deals are made, and as an outsider, never completely trusted are clear from the beginning and serve as one of the hinges for conflict. The audience likes her and wants her to succeed.

Infernal Mission is the only film credit for director Chan Man-Leun and screenwriter Chung Bond. However Cha Cheun Lee, its producer, has directed eighteen Hong Kong films, most of them romantic comedies or Category III not terribly hard-core pornography. He has been an actor, producer and writer--typical (or at least not untypical) for someone far below the top rank of Hong Kong film who wants to work in the business. I assume, based on nothing other than Cha Cheun-Lee's experience and the almost invisible status of the director and writer that he was more respoonsible than anyone for what showed up onscreen.

In addition to Teresa Mak the cast features Ruby Wong Cheuk-Ling, Lam Suet and Tony Ho Wah-Chiu. Ruby Wong, the mole in the police department, is a very attractive and talented actress who has done comedy for Ringo Lam and police dramas for Johnny To. She had a terrible hairdo/wig which actually distracted the audience from her performance, with them wondering why her hair was covering her face instead of the qualities she brought to her character. Tony Ho played the violent and erratic crime boss. His character was over the top for most of the movie and he brought it off with well. With 48 movies in 10 years--a lot for an actor in the post-handover world--he is a talented young pro. Lam Suet, as the police commander behind Teresa Mak's undercover operation, has always been perfect for any cop or hoodlum role.

The ensemble portrays the constant anxiety of both working undercover and being responsible for the operation. The script, which is based on, borrowed from or in homage to Infernal Affairs, keeps things hurtling along--no subplots, comic relief or stopping to think slow down the rush to the inevitable bloody showdown.

There weren't a lot of stunts--this is a buttoned up, low budget police drama--and the most dangerous thing that any of the actors did was smoke cigarettes. Teresa Mak had a quite a few scenes in which she smoked. She may not have had a nicotine habit when filming started but she must have before it finished.

Ruby Wong

Tony Ho and Lam Suet

Infernal Mission is available at a few online stores incuding HKFlix and YesAsia

The Hong Kong Movie Database page (registration may be required) is here HKMDB

Teresa Mak in "Love is a Many Stupid Thing"

There are a number of things you can count on in a Wong Jing comedy including plenty of attractive actresses, generally dressed (or undressed) to hightlight their beauty. A movie from the Wong Jing cinema factory in the 1980s and 1990s might look as if it were slapped together in a few weeks--because they often were. Confused plots and semi-improvised dialog were either part of the charm or real annoyances to his audiences. But Wong always knew how to get a movie cast, shot, edited and to the distributor on time and under budget.

A typical example of this is "Love is a Many Stupid Thing" which features Teresa Mok as a tough Hong Kong police sergeant leading a squad of lovely police constables. She falls in love with the wrong guy, a handsome cop who is actually a mole from one of the Triads sent to infiltrate and spy on the police. Her moods go from coy to friendly to bloodthristy--in one scene she storms into a conference room and stomps the suspect then flirts with the officer who was questioning him. This is a movie in which Teresa Mak is one of an ensemble--probably the lead co-star if such a thing exists. It is a guy's movie with Eric Tsang and Chapman To keeping the slapstick humor going. Here are some pictures from "Love is a Many Stupid Thing".

The first two show her in uniform. Many actresses look great in police uniforms--Cynthia Khan, for example, clocked a lot of time as a Hong Kong policewoman--and Teresa looks quite fetching here as Sergeant Cool Lady:



Cool Lady (I am not making this up although it probably made a lot more sense when said in either Mandarin or Cantonese) attempts to involve herself in the conversation Watson (Raymond Wong Ho-Yin) is having with another cop on how to approach the suspect played by Tony Ho Wah-Chiu and who is described in the credits as "insane sex offender". She is already getting a bit wild-eyed since she has a crush on Watson.



Things develop poorly during the questioning to the mounting concern of Cool Lady and her squad who are watching through the two way mirror.

Here she tries to act demure and girlish toward Watson who she just rescued from the suspect who was smashing Watson's genitals under the table in the interrogation room. After kicking the bad guy in the head she simpers at the object of her affection:

One of the trademarks of Wong's work is actresses in their underwear. Watson and Cool Lady are staking out the bad guys from a rooftop. They fall off but each are able to grab a string of lights to slow thier fall. Cool Lady's dress gets ripped off leaving her on the ground in the rain in her not very revealing lingerie.
It isn't necessary to have the actress wet and partially undressed, of course. A simple snap front blouse that just barely closes over Cool Lady's breasts with the snaps pulling but not quite gaping is a slightly more understated look although still very effective:
Looking shocked, amazed, horrified or just plain angry is the stock in trade of any professional actress. Here Cool Lady has discovered that not only is Watson an underworld informant and is planning to kill her but that he never planned on marrying her.

"Love is a Many Stupid Thing" is not a bad movie for fans of Teresa Mak Ga-Kei. While she doesn't have much screen time she does pop up throughout the film and is often featured in the scenes she is in. The movie itself is funny in parts, dreadful in parts and occasionally confusing--in other words what one expects from Wong Jing.

Teresa Mak "To Seduce an Enemy"

"To Seduce an Enemy" is a terrible movie by any standards. It fails even as a Category III exploitation slime-fest. I would have thought it was impossible to film and edit a scene in which Teresa Mak's character shows another woman how to be sexy by seducing her and make it boring. I would have been wrong. I had been warned how bad it was and watched it only in the interest of seeing as much of Teresa Mak's screen work as possible. Absent that kind of reason there is no reason to waste a moment with this deplorable film. It yielded a few screencaps. The other actress shown here is Winnie Leung Man-Yee.