Four friends stumble upon a submerged gold cache, and it’s not long till sadistic gangsters, then eventually a slasher-y hitman, are hunting the group down. Kuei Chih-Hung’s guerrilla-shot urban grime (harkening back to his early films like The Delinquent) and horror-tinged neo-noir-ish atmosphere elevate the chaotic action of The Gold Connection. I’d even say there are proto-Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind vibes all over this; despite being a 1979 release, it might as well have been beamed directly from the mid-‘80s.

Turns out this was my first Bruce Li/Ho Chung-tao film too, and that man sure has some screen-fighting presence to say the least, especially during his kick-flurry apartment-wrecking finale slugfest with Phillip Ko’s menacing assassin. But before Ko…