After watching auteur Ringo Lam's magnificent curtain call to the Heroic Bloodshed genre with Full Contact, (1992-also reviewed) I afterwards listened to the Bey Logan commentary and noted down titles mentioned with the beautiful Ann Bridgewater. Unable after many attempts to find the movie on DVD,I was happy to stumble upon it online recently, which led to me plating up some curry and pepper.

View on the film:

Playing the straight woman to the mad-cap antics, cute Ann Bridgewater gives a very good performance as Law, whose eager attitude to capture the cops protecting the streets is captured with a breeziness by Bridgewater. The second flick they would do together after Faithfully Yours (1988), Jacky Cheung and Stephen Chow already display a yin/yang ease in their buddy act, via Chow supplying the frantic physical slap-stick as Pepper, while Jacky Cheung has Curry target punch-lines with a funny nervousness.

Sending the duo off with reporter Law for the first half, director Blackie Shou Liang Ko & cinematographer Wai-Keung Lau hold the broad punch-lines and funny stumbling physical gags together on the foundation of Law filming all the antics, and the terrific brooding synch score from Richard Lo. Once the doc filming is wrapped, Ko and the screenplay by James Yuen become hazy in connecting all that took place in the first half with what unfolds in the second, as the duo take on a gang which is poorly forced into linking with Law's doc filming. Whilst the road to it is shaky, Ko cooks up a winning final with a pitch-perfect spoofing of the Heroic Bloodshed genre,complete with ultra-stylised tracking shots smashing against blown out windows and icy freeze frames for the most over the top action kicks cooked up by Curry and Pepper.

When I sat down here in 2023 to watch the 1990 Hong Kong action comedy "Ga Lei Lat Jiu" (aka "Curry and Pepper"), it was actually my first time to watch the movie. In fact, it was actually also the very first time I had heard about it as well.

Writer James Yuen put together a fair good script for the movie, and it combines action and comedy in an enjoyable and entertaining manner. So director Blackie Shou-Liang Ko had good material to bring to the screen.

Aside from a good script and storyline, then the movie also had some good performances. And you know you are in good company with the likes of Stephen Chow, Jacky Cheung and Eric Tsang.

I was genuinely entertained by "Ga Lei Lat Jiu". And if you enjoy the 1990s Hong Kong action comedies, then this is definitely a movie well-worth checking out.

My rating of "Ga Lei Lat Jiu" lands on a six out of ten stars.

It is truly amazing what one finds on SBS let alone on ones video tapes. I taped this movie a couple of weeks ago and didn't actually realise that it was on there, but now that I have I am glad that I did. Curry and Pepper is nothing more than a plot less Hong Kong action/comedy movie. There is very little in the way of a plot and it is mostly focused on two parters who are best friends and are torn apart by a girl they call soccerballs (I won't say why). As is typical the comedy is quite clever and the movie still delivers quite a lot of laughs even though it has been translated.

There are a few incidents that hold this movie together, such as a couple of American counterfeiters, a pimp named Ten, Soccerballs, and a gun deal. It is the gun deal that takes out the end of the movie because Soccerballs disappears entirely when Curry realises that they are from different social classes and there is no way they can make a relationship work. The counterfeiters are met twice and then taken away but the rest of the movie is tied up with the gun runners. What we finish up with is a tough assassin chasing Curry and Pepper around and a huge gunfight on a ship. The gunfight isn't as spectacular as a John Woo film (such as Hard Boiled) but it is enough to make this movie go off. As I said to my friend afterwards: a typical Hongkong action movie with no plot whatsoever, that is why I liked it.