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Incredibly Strange Video
Pittsburgh's B-Movie Podcast!
Film lovers Ryan and Cassie take a critical look at films that are often only laughed at, lovingly dissecting b-movies, cult cinema, and "so bad it's good" flicks to gain a new appreciation for unusual cinema.
Incredibly Strange Video
Ep. 37: [DOUBLE FEATURE!] Run and Kill + Fatal Termination
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It's the first ever ISV Double Feature! When two movies gel together so very well, we're going to stuff them both into one episode for an XL discussion of their joint insanity. Case in point, Run and Kill and Fatal Termination, two essential Hong Kong CAT III films from the early 90's.
Run and Kill follows Fat Cheung, a man who gets perilously drunk one night and accidentally orders a hit on his wife. What begins as a somewhat dark comedy of errors quickly spirals into one of the bleakest films we've ever seen. And Fatal Termination is a police procedural about some Lebanese terrorists trying to move some guns, and the fearsome customs agent hellbent on screwing them over.
And just what is a CAT III film from Hong Kong in the early 90's? CAT III was a rating that was introduced in 1988 and was akin to the modern NC-17 MPAA rating. Crazy thing is, though, unlike the NC-17 rating being a death sentence to American films, Hong Kong filmmakers actually strived to make CAT III movies in the 90's and a surprisingly huge percentage of the films released in HK down that stretch were CAT III. HK audiences yearned for the most extreme cinema imaginable, and lots of filmmakers were more than happy to oblige them with some of the most ludicrous stuff ever captured on celluloid.
Nowadays, CAT III has become a retroactive genre of its own that encompasses the nastiest of the nasty HK cinema had to offer in the 90's, and so this week we're talking about two of the most notorious films from that period. Run and Kill features one of the most disturbing scenes in cinema history, and Fatal Termination boasts perhaps the most outrageous stunt sequence ever committed to film. A bold claim? Just wait and see. It's truly unbelievable.
In addition to taking a very, very deep dive into the history of CAT III cinema and the philosophical/political elements surrounding it, we also take a personal deep dive into just why we enjoy watching extreme/disturbing cinema, using psychological research to better understand ourselves and the mindset of anyone who's obsessed with incredibly strange cinema.
And we eventually find time to break down the actual films themselves and their visual language. It's a HUGE episode, so what are you waiting for? Let's get exceptionally weird with the world of HK CAT III cinema!
(Also, in the episode we both take the "Zuckerman-Kuhlman Personality Questionnaire" to determine our level of Sensation-Seeking personality. If you, too, would like to play along at home and take the questionnaire, you can do so here: https://www.psytoolkit.org/survey-library/zkpq-50-cc.html)
Run and Kill
Directed by Billy Tang
1993, Hong Kong
Fatal Termination
Directed by Andrew Kam Yueng-Wah
1990, Hong Kong
Incredibly Strange Video is produced and edited by Ryan Quinn and Cassie Kay. Follow us on Bluesky @isvpodcast.bsky.social for updates on the newest episodes!
Theme music:
The End by EVA
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0
All excerpts from the films discussed are used for educational and critical purposes only.
No generative AI is used in the production of this show. Keep the world human.
