Thanks to the British Film Institute, there’s a list of films that played Scala. To celebrate the release of Severin’s new documentary, I’ll share a few of these movies every day. You can see the whole list on Letterboxd.

I can honestly say that this movie changed my life and the way that I experience film. I found it at Something Weird Video, a Pittsburgh store that had many movies that did the same for many people. My brother and I must have watched this every night for months, obsessing over the gunplay and the honor-bound Ah Jong (Chow Yun-Fat), who must do one last kill to save the sight of a woman he blinded, Jennie (Sally Yeh). It was unlike anything we’d ever seen, nearly an Italian Western in Hong Kong, a place where cops like Detective Li Ying (Danny Lee) can discover that he has as much in common with a criminal than his fellow police officers.

In The Killer, man’s laws don’t matter. What does is the brotherhood that can be built between two men. What matters is the fact that you are responsible for your mistakes, that a child’s life is worth nearly being killed or arrested, that you can show people mercy even after they’ve tried to have you murdered. Movies would change after this, as Hong Kong started making more ballet-like gun violence films, a style that made its way here before director John Woo followed, starting with the JCVD movie Hard Target before making blockbusters like Mission: Impossible 2.

The first time I saw a church filled with broken plaster and bullet casings and doves flying all around, I had one of those moments where I knew that I would never have this experience again. It was like trying a drug for the first time, the rush of a first kiss, holding someone’s hand. My heart started to race and I knew that I had to keep chasing this feeling.

Producer Tsui Hark was extremely unhappy with this film and planned on recutting it, making Li Ying the hero instead of Ah Jong. The schedule to make this was tight and Woo and editor David Wu never were going to make these cuts. Hark didn’t have time and it was such a big success that it enraged Hark, who is said to have starting tossing things out of his office window when he found out.

Woo had a higher aim than most Hong Kong action movies, which are often content to rip off American movies. This was dedicated to Martin Scorsese and inspired by Mean Streets. There’s also a lot of Leone and the movie Le Samouraï in The Killer.

Yet when this first played in the U.S., it was badly subtitled and sold as an action comedy.