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In the West (and indeed by me), Ringo Lam is perhaps best known as the director of Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicles like Maximum Risk and the underrated In Hell, but like most of the Hong Kong filmmakers who started doing English language work in the ’90s and ’00s, he had a long history in action movies in his home country. He directed many contemporary action films, notably City on Fire, which Quentin Tarantino took liberal inspiration from for parts of Reservoir Dogs.

Burning Paradise, made in 1994, is Lam’s sole wuxia film. A remake of 1965’s Temple of the Red Lotus, starring the legendary Jimmy Wang Yu, it follows Fong Sai-yuk (Willie Chi Tian-Sheng), a survivor of the sacking of Shaolin Temple by the Manchu army. However, he is captured, along with a young girl, Dau Dau (Carman Lee Yeuk-Tung), who helped him and his master hide from the Manchu.

During the early 1990’s there was an incredible array of outstanding films to emerge from the final embers of the Hong Kong New Wave. So much so, that inevitably some would get lost and become fragmented memories waiting to be rediscovered. “Burning Paradise” in my home country of England received a video release from the “Made in Hong Kong Label” that was responsible for converting many like myself to this incredible cinematic world. After that, nothing. Whilst Ringo Lam would forever be remembered for his contribution to Heroic Bloodshed with “City on Fire” and “Full Contact”, this, his sole attempt at the period action genre, has largely been ignored. A gothic horror infused martial arts epic with its canvas seeped in blood and arguably his finest achievement.

After the destruction of the Shaolin Temple, Fong Sai Yuk (Willie Chi) and a monk are chased into the desert.

One of the year’s most anticipated films opened this week in a handful of theatres across North America: Hong Kong director Ringo Lam’s Sky on Fire. After his promisingly solid return to directing after more than a decade in retirement with last year’s Wild City, hopes were high for the new film, if only because it shares the title formulation of some of his greatest works: City on Fire, School on Fire and the two Prison on Fire films. With Daniel Wu starring in a story of greed and corruption in the medical industry, it promised to be a worthy addition to the career of one of Hong Kong’s most distinguished directors, a man whose bleak tales of institutional collapse provided some of the most viscerally kinetic and apocalyptic visions of the colony in the years between the 1984 Joint Declaration and the 1997 Handover. Instead, it’s a mess,...