Sinister Buns (Call of Cthulhu, Hong Kong Cinema)

I held off getting a blu-ray player for a long time. 

I didn’t see the need. Drives are dead. DVDs are yesterday’s tech. Physical is so last century.  

Then those wicked pork buns drew me back in. 

See, physical is still the best way to get hold of anything that isn’t Main Street USA. If I want Hollywood, if I want anything North American really, it is easily had. There are any number (God, oh God, so many) ways to get that content. Streaming options beyond the dreams of avarice. 

But. 

If I want, say, The Untold Story, how do I get that? If I want any kind of non-English language media, how the hell do I get it? There must be Spanish, German, Italian streaming services, and I shall want a VPN at the very least to access them, never mind a working knowledge of the language to understand the menu options. Netflix is a gateway but it offers only a glimpse; besides, damned if I’m paying $22/month for yet another streaming service. 

No, if I wanted my pork buns – hot from Terracotta in the UK – I’d have to get an external blu ray drive for my PC. Which is exactly what I did. 

The Untold Story is a retelling of the infamous Eight Immortals killings in Macau. Two high stakes gamblers, one a restaurant owner with a family of ten, argued over debts. The restaurant owner Zheng Lin refused to pay Huang Zhiheng so Huang, in a fit of rage, tried to force Zheng to pay up. That went badly wrong and Huang killed Zheng’s whole family, thus becoming the owner of the Eight Immortals restaurant. Briefly.  

How do you get rid of all those bodies? 

Well, there’s a perfectly good restaurant in need of meat for its famous pork buns … or so the story goes. That part may be apocryphal, but it became part of the narrative.  

The 1993 film version won awards and made a ton of money at the box office, but due to its graphic scenes of rape and murder – plus, of course, those buns – it was age restricted to 18 and up. It’s mildly notorious as a slasher, but difficult to get hold of. Unless you buy from an outlet like the folks at Terracotta.  

Having seen it, my review: 

It’s an odd little duck. The killing scenes are about as bloody and nasty as anything you’re going to see on screen and Anthony Wong Chau-sang as killer Wong Chi-hang is a standout. The comedy cops in hot pursuit are an incompetent bunch of bozos; they’re all stereotypes of one kind or other, led by their fearless Lieutenant Lee, and there’s a peculiar running gag where Lee parades around with a host of prostitutes on his arm much to the disgust of his only female subordinate Bo (Emily Kwan) who wants Lee all to herself. It doesn’t pair all that well with the main plot. That said, it does end in a stunning moment when all those same comedy cops realize that the pork buns they’ve been chowing down on free of charge came with a hidden cost. 

Cheap, nasty, entertaining. It may be the unrelenting realism of the gore scenes (a stark contrast with modern cinema) but it really does stick in your mind in a way that few other films can. 

If you want a good retelling of the pork buns saga I recommend Kento Bento’s version, which I believe is on Nebula; not sure as it’s been a while since I watched Nebula. 

From a gaming POV there have been plenty of examples of suspicious meat on the menu. Sweeny Todd, Telltale’s Walking Dead (the comic too, for that matter, in a different plotline), Fritz Haarmann the Vampire of Hanover, who allegedly sold the meat of his victims on the black market – take your pick, really. 

There haven’t been as many haunted restaurants. 

There is a starting Call of Cthulhu scenario in the main book, The Haunting. It’s been around for donkey’s years. You can find it in the free-to-play Quick Start rules. In that scenario the investigators are called in to investigate a haunted house. So far, so normal – at least, normal in a Cthulhu-esque way. 

What if it wasn’t a haunted house? What if it was a haunted restaurant? What would need to change? 

Not much, really. The Keeper would need to change some of the details of the ground floor plan. But the plot would tick on regardless, and you’d have some interesting horror options – particularly in the kitchen. The family would live above the restaurant, so you wouldn’t have to change much about the upper floors. 

The Macario family would be the ones running the restaurant of course; a nice little red-sauce-spaghetti joint. Until Mr. Macario decided to add a little extra to the Bolognese. Then there’s a discreet pause while the place is shut up for … let’s call it redecoration.  At that point Mr. Knott, the building’s owner, calls in the investigators. He wants to rent the place out to new tenants but the restaurant’s reputation frightens off any interested parties. If they could just give the place the all-clear, he could rent the place out. 

A potential plot change: as written Vittorio Macario, the former restauranteur, is locked up in the asylum. His only plot function is to hint at a way of defeating the evil. 

Suppose he has a secondary function. Suppose he escapes from the asylum with one thought on his mind: a grand reopening of Macario’s Restaurant.  

He’ll need meat for the Bolognese, of course … 

That’s it for this week. Enjoy!