New York Chinatown (spelled "China Town" in the subtitles) is a Hong Kong production shot in New York City about rival triads vying for control. One group is led by our hero, played by Alan Tang, and the group they are battling against just happen to have a young NYPD detective in their pocket, DTVC Hall of Famer Don "The Dragon" Wilson. When Tang is framed for beating up a guy under the boardwalk on Coney Island, he goes to jail, while the syndicate working with Wilson starts to take over. That's when some others in the NYPD decide the best bet to stop all of this is to let Tang out of jail and have him and the remainder of his gang fight the other gang off. It'll be a bloodbath.
This movie's not the best, but it does stand out 30 years later as Wilson's first role, which I really enjoyed. I think that elevates it beyond your standard Hong Kong flick from this period. Beyond that, the action is good, it's a nice compact 90 minutes, there are some fun characters, plus you have the cool scenery of early 80s New York City as your backdrop. I don't know how I would have felt about this film if I had seen it in 1982 (when I was 3?), but it definitely is one that feels more fun today than it might have then. The subtitles are a bit all over the place, and the JCT version is a lower-quality VHS rip, but overall this was fun for me.
The standard knock on Wilson is his wooden acting, and I don't know that I haven't been above making a crack about that myself, but what was fascinating here, especially for Wilson's first film, is how good I thought he was. He plays a great baddie! I was trying to remember if I'd seen him play a baddie in the 33 movies of his we'd done before this, and I couldn't think of any. He has one fight scene in this, fighting against a local martial arts master, and you can see where that electric stuff we recognized from all the films he did 10 or so years later came from, and in that sense I wanted more. Now that we've done almost all of his recent starring films--I think we have a couple left to cover--I'm going to try to go back and get a lot of these 80s ones he did, especially since a lot are on YouTube.
The real star of this was Alan Tang, and he definitely has that movie star presence that you'd want in a lead like this. He's cooler than the other side of the pillow, burns his share of heaters, and he gets stuff done. In some of the scenes he did with Wilson, Wilson was great at being the heel to Tang's hero. I was trying to see if I'd seen Lang in other stuff before, but on his IMDb bio a lot of the titles are in Chinese, so it's hard to know. He passed away in 2011 at only 65, but he hadn't done a film since 1993 anyway. I imagine that Hong Kong meat grinder takes it out of you, though this film didn't look as bad as a lot of them are--there weren't a lot of stunts here or dangerous scenes.
I should point out that I've never been to Chinatown in New York City before. I've been to the ones in London, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Las Vegas, and Philadelphia. I've heard that it's shrinking and the one in Queens is growing. Either way, I'd love to get up there and see it, especially after seeing it used in this film. Beyond that, as I mentioned above, the 1982 NYC backdrop really enhanced the film, and they didn't just shoot in Chinatown. We don't get many films here at the DTVC that are actually shot in New York, most are shot in a Canadian city and passed off to us as New York, so when we do, I always make a point of taking it in. It's a city, more than any in the US I think, that is itself a character in the story, and that was definitely true here.
I talked above about Wilson's early career, and I feel like when I first started the blog, a lot of these early movies weren't even listed on his IMDb bio. Then I come back from hiatus and suddenly they all were added. It might be because he was "Don Wilson" in those. I know Letteboxd had trouble distinguishing between "Don Wilson" and "The Dragon". Think of it like his pre-Bloodfist days, it's an interesting way to keep adding to his tags and reviews on the site. I count 13 of these we could do after this--and that doesn't count new ones like The Hitman Agency that I also need to see. Considering this is movie number 34 for him, does that mean the 50 Club is in sight down the road?
Before we get too carried away, let's wrap this up. The fact that you can get this free on YouTube through JCT, and it's Wilson's first feature, it's worth checking out. I enjoyed myself on those elements alone, but then you have Alan Tang, some other great supporting characters, and the 1982 NYC backdrop. Again, it's not the best movie, but it's an enjoyable one.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1385947
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