General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

We're Going to Eat You

We're Going to Eat You (Diyu wu men) is a 1980 Hong Kong horror comedy directed by Tsui Hark, in which a secret agent investigating a remote island village populated by cannibals fights his way out with martial arts, slapstick, and gore.¹^•² It was Tsui's second feature, made immediately after his 1979 debut The Butterfly Murders, and it stands among the early works of the Hong Kong New Wave.³

Key fact	Detail
Director / year	Tsui Hark, 1980; his second feature after The Butterfly Murders (1979)³
Original title	Diyu wu men; also released as Kung Fu Cannibals, No Door to Hell, and Hell Has No Gates⁴
Production	Seasonal Film Corporation; producers Richard Cheung Kuen and Ng See-yuen; screenwriter Roy Szeto (Szeto Cheuk-hon)²
Lead cast	Norman Chu as Agent 999, Eddy Ko as the Chief, Melvin Wong as Rolex²
Action	Fight choreography and stunts by Corey Yuen Kwai⁵
Format	Cantonese-language, color, mono sound, about 90 minutes (IMDb lists 1h 30m; Rotten Tomatoes 1h 32m)¹^•²
Hong Kong release	April 2, 1980¹

Spoilers

Plot

Set at some point in old China, the plot opens with Agent 999 (Norman Tsui Siu-keung), a operative of China's Central Surveillance Agency whose real name is never given, arriving in a cannibal-inhabited town while hunting a criminal who goes by Rolex. Much of the story involves him trying to avoid being eaten.³ In the fuller account, the island is ruled with an iron fist by a power-mad Chief (Eddy Ko) who hoards the human meat of unsuspecting travelers for himself and his soldiers while the villagers starve. Agent 999 discovers that the repentant criminal Rolex (Melvin Wong) has become the Chief's aide in order to expose the island's evils to the mainland authorities without returning to jail; when Rolex's plans fail, Agent 999 teams up with a goofy thief (Hon Kwok-Choi) to fight off the cannibals, save his newfound love, and escape the island.⁶

The film opens with masked cannibals capturing and dismembering two victims, establishing the premise before shifting into kung fu comedy.⁷ Old-school kung fu fights break out roughly every ten minutes, and the horror sits beside gross-out comedy involving a lascivious giantess and a thief who keeps a razor blade under his tongue.⁵

Production background

Tsui Hark's 1979 debut, The Butterfly Murders, was an innovative take on the martial arts genre that failed at the box office. Producer Ng See-yuen, who had made a small fortune producing the Jackie Chan hit Drunken Master, decided he could afford to give Tsui another shot. Ng had formed Seasonal Films as an independent alternative to the two big studios, Golden Harvest and Shaw Brothers, and took a hands-off approach to the films he produced, so as his second film for Seasonal, Tsui was allowed to make the bizarre horror comedy We're Going to Eat You.³

The Subway Cinema retrospective account suggests Tsui, stung that The Butterfly Murders had been accused of being overly intellectual, swung the other way and made We're Going to Eat You overly visceral: a film written on the fly and shot on the cheap, set on one of Hong Kong's outlying islands.⁵

Style and themes

The film is a genre hybrid combining horror, comedy, and martial arts, with jarring shifts in tone that became a staple of 1980s Hong Kong cinema.⁶ David Bordwell, the film scholar formerly of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, writes that We're Going to Eat You brought something of the wildness of 1970s American exploitation to a tale of cannibalism.⁸ An academic survey of Tsui's career notes that the film featured zombies and graphic violence which Hark used to enhance the local factor in the film, citing the scholar Stephen Teo.⁹

Political reading. The South China Morning Post describes the film as voiced as a political satire about the evils of authoritarian regimes, while judging its comedy too broad and basic to provide anything other than a hearty chuckle.³ A long-standing reading defended by some viewers sees the cannibal island as an allegory of the Red Guards who ran China during the Cultural Revolution, enforcing Byzantine laws as the nation starved; Subway Cinema treats this as one possibility among others.⁵ The Hong Kong Film Archive's filmography foreword groups the film with Dangerous Encounter – 1st Kind (1980) as Tsui works that portray a society rife with violence and insanity.¹⁰

Borrowed music and title. The soundtrack borrows Goblin's score for the Italian release version of Dario Argento's Suspiria, and the English title echoes the tagline of Lucio Fulci's Zombie.⁵^•¹¹ IMDb's soundtrack listing confirms the track "Witch," taken from the Suspiria soundtrack.¹

Reception and place in Tsui Hark's career

The film has acquired something of a cult classic status due to its raw energy, gory subject matter, directorial pedigree, and anti-communist political themes, according to one retrospective review, which also notes its unpolished production values compared with Tsui's later films such as Peking Opera Blues (1986) and Once Upon a Time in China (1991).⁶ On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a Tomatometer of 61% from one review and more than 100 audience ratings; critic Scott Weinberg of DVDTalk called it "a kung fu party, a loopy comedy, a gore flick, and a slap-your-forehead acid trip at the same time."² IMDb users give it 6.4/10 from about 1,200 ratings.¹

Bordwell places the film among Tsui's flamboyant genre revisions, closer to the mainstream than the more veristic exercises of fellow New Wave directors Allen Fong and Ann Hui.⁸ The film was certified in Spain on July 4, 1982, according to the Spanish film archive ICAA.¹² A Media Blasters DVD released in the United States on November 21, 2006 presented the film in anamorphic widescreen with Dolby Digital 2.0 Cantonese audio and English subtitles.⁴

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026