Is Edison Chen still a vampire?
- "Dog Bite Dog is a bitter sweet action drama that touched on many emotional levels, but it is not for everyone." - G4s Asian Underground
Dog Bite Dog is a 2006 crime drama directed by Cheang Pou-soi, starring Edison Chen.
Pang (Chen), a Cambodian pit fighter forced to accept a killing assignment in Hong Kong, ends up lost in the big city where he is completely unfamiliar with its language and surroundings, pursued by hot-headed cop Inspector Ti Wai, his only refuge is in the landfill in downtown Hong Kong, where he meets fellow Cambodian girl Yu, who lives with her abusive single father after fleeing her country. Pang and Yu decides to go on the run and try to return to their home in Cambodia...
This film provides examples of:
- Abusive Parents: Basically, every father character in the movie are complete scumbags.
- Inspector Ti Wai's father neglects and berates him as a child, and when he writes an essay saying he wants to be a cop when he grows up like his father, his father tears his essay into shreds.
- Yu's father is a pervert and drunkard who blames Yu for bunking with him after her mother and his wife had died. Considering his own daughter to be a jinx, he uses her as a punching bag, verbally assaults her, and tries to molest her more than once causing her to become a complete, emotional mess of a person. He's the easiest character to despise in the movie, and the last time audiences sees him, he gets stabbed by Pang before getting taken away by the police.
- When Pang returns home to Cambodia, his father disowns him because Pang is a wanted man for being spotted during his assasination. And when Pang goes back to his father begging for one last job, to fund the operation for his pregnant wife, Pang's father deliberately sets him on a Suicide Mission to get rid of him.
- Agony of the Feet: Yu, while running through a landfill with Pang, ends up stepping on a nail, several inches long, that goes through her sandals and right into her heel. The second half of the film turns into an Injured Limb Episode for her.
- Anti-Hero: Inspector Ti Wai, a policeman who wants to arrest Pang and will stop at nothing, even if it means breaking the law or abusing his authority.
- Became Their Own Antithesis: Ti Wai’s father is a corrupt cop who desperately doesn’t want his son to grow up into becoming a police officer. Ti Wai does indeed become a police officer, only to become an even worse cop who indulges in police brutality after being disowned by his father.
- Chained by Fashion: Pang, after his escape from the police car, spends much of the second act with a pair of cuffs dangling to his left wrist.
- Conspicuously Public Assassination: Pang’s first onscreen kill takes place in a crowded Chinese restaurant, in front of maybe fifty people, all whom saw him killing. Unperturbed, Pang simply strides his way out, grabbing a handful of dumplings and shoving them into his mouth as he leaves.
- Death by Childbirth: Not so much Death by Childbirth, but rather Receiving a Mortal Injury Before Childbirth, but Yu’s eventual fate is to bleed out sustaining multiple injuries while having pregnancy complications...
- Dirty Cop: Ti Wai’s father turns out to be an informant for drug dealers, which Ti Wai discover during a stakeout which he’s NOT supposed to cross paths with his father.
- Down in the Dumps: Pang meets Yu in a landfill in downtown Hong Kong, which is the place she lives after moving over from Cambodia to Hong Kong, but failing to find her mother in time.
- Downer Ending: Yu and Pang both dies alongside each other, although Pang managed to rip his unborn child out of Yu’s belly before he expires.
- Fight Clubbing: Pang, upon returning back to Cambodia with Yu, now pregnant with his child, is forced to take part in illegal underground fight clubs to raise money for his would-be child.
- Fish out of Water: Pang, a cage fighter and hired killer from Cambodia who ends up alone in the streets of Hong Kong after an assassination going awry.
- Gorn: Some really disturbing examples.
- Yu, after stepping on a long nail that goes through her heel, with disturbingly gory results. The subsequent scene of Pang pulling the nail out is shown in full detail as well.
- Pang stabbing Yu's father through the palm.
- Throats and necks being graphically sliced and stabbed.
- Whenever characters are subjected to No-Holds-Barred Beatdown (happens more than once), expect the film to show its results onscreen.
- Impaled Palm: Yu’s father gets a pair of scissors shoved through his palm by Pang, when trying to rape his own daughter. He later gets arrested by the police, and as he raises his hands, the scissors are still stuck in his palm where it was…
- Impromptu Tracheotomy: Pang favors using this method to kill his victims. Such as Inspector Fatty Lam. What’s even worse is that the blade he uses seems pretty blunt.
- Lodged-Blade Recycling: Pang and his final opponent manage to stab each other using their respective weapons, being a short blade and a miniature kukri. But both of them being Made of Iron, they survived and swaps weapons.
- Jabba Table Manners: Pang gobbles his food and gorges himself whenever he sees a delicious meal. Justified though, he's a pit fighter whom the movie describes as being "brought up like a dog".
- Man Bites Man: Pang frequently bites his opponents, including on Inspector Ti Wai during their big fight. On the neck. See the poster above.
- A possible Actor Allusion, since Edison Chen’s earlier movie, The Twins Effect, have him playing a vampire hunter.
- Neck Snap: Pang’s final opponent, an unnamed killer, is introduced in an underground fighting ring executing his opponent by twisting his neck using both arms.
- No Name Given: Pang’s final target and opponent, a pit fighter and killer which is never identified by name for some reason, who only exists for Pang to have one last (extremely difficult) fight.
- Not the Fall That Kills You…: Pang in his last scene escapes from a killer after him by jumping out a tall window into the back of his lorry, which is carrying enough hay to cushion his fall. Unfortunately, his pursuer does the same, landing on his lorry just as Pang is about to drive off.
- Outside Ride: The final scene, with Pang and Yu driving away in a lorry, and an enemy killer clinging to his lorry trying to hack him apart.
- Police Brutality: Inspector Ti Wai indulges in this, from beating up a restaurant waiter whom he assumed to be a suspect in the restaurant assassination, kicking a man he arrested whom have already given himself in and is lying on the ground, and forcing a doctor to reject giving medical treatment to Yu, whose leg injury is developing gangrene, just because he wants to use her to lure Pang out of hiding.
- Shear Menace: Pang stabs Yu's father (who is trying to rape her) through the palm with a pair of scissors.
- Slipped the Ropes: Pang, after being arrested by Ti Wai in their first confrontation scene, managed to slip one of his hands out of his handcuffs before attempting a violent getaway. But still his right hand ends up becoming extremely bloody from struggling out of the cuffs.
- Soundtrack Dissonance: The film ends with Pang and Yu dying side-by-side, with their baby subject to an ambiguous fate…while Johnny Cash’s You Are My Sunshine plays in the background.
- Star-Crossed Lovers: Pang and Yu. It doesn’t end well.
- Together in Death: Yu and Pang. And possibly their newborn child, because they succumbed to their wounds in the middle of nowhere, with not a single passerby in sight who may find the baby, and one can only question how long a newborn baby can survive from being left on its own without any medical attention or incubation.
- Traumatic C-Section: Pang is forced to perform an impromptu C-section on Yu as she is bleeding to death, in a last-ditch attempt to save his unborn baby.
