RIP Roy

On October 12, 2021, Roy Horan died while hiking in the hills near his home in Los Angeles. An important Western figure in Hong Kong film, Horan got tangled up in the film business through his friendship with Korean superkicker, Hwang Jang-Lee, and the first two movies he appeared in featured Hwang (the Bruceploitation flick The Story of the Dragon and the John Liu/Hwang Jang-Lee showcase The Snuff Bottle Connection). Horan would go on to play the killer Russian priest in Jackie Chan’s breakthrough film Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow (1978) which is the role he’s best known for in the West.

But Horan’s part in Hong Kong film history had a lot more to do with what he did behind the scenes than in front of the camera. Speaking fluent Chinese (we’re not sure if it was Mandarin, Cantonese, or both) he became friends with super-producer Ng See-yuen. At the time, foreign markets weren’t regarded as a huge part of the Hong Kong film business outside of Taiwan, Malaysia, Thailand, and maybe Japan. Horan decided to try to sell Seasonal’s films to Western territories almost as a dare, and learned to do it as he went along, asking for higher and higher fees to figure out where the ceiling was for their movies.

Thanks to his hard-charging expansion West, Seasonal took Jackie Chan’s Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow around the world (asking for an exorbitant $300,000 for US rights, Horan discovered that was beyond the ceiling and settled for a much lower figure from Serafim Karalexis) and later opened US offices, the first Hong Kong company besides Golden Harvest to do so. In that Seasonal ad above, Horan is one of the guys on the sofa with the sword in his face. Horan also helped produce what became the No Retreat, No Surrender trilogy of movies that put Hong Kong and Western talent on the same screen, gave Jean-Claude Van Damme his first major role, became huge hits in theaters and especially on home video, and discovered Loren Avedon.

If you want to slice off a fine hunk of Horan, check out his performance in Tower of Death (aka Game of Death II) a Bruceploitation picture directed by Ng See-yuen and starring pretty much every stuntman in Hong Kong. Weirdly enough, it’s part of the Criterion Collection’s Bruce Lee box set, and that’s the best way to see it. A way cheaper and much weirder remake of Enter the Dragon, Horan has the Mr. Han role as Lewis, who struts around in a track suit with a baby monkey on his shoulder, eating raw venison for breakfast and chasing it down with a big glass of blood. Attacking the role like a hunk of bloody deer meat, Horan feeds his opponents to lions and even has an army of trained peacocks.

“Look over there,” he tells Tong Lung as Bruce Lee’s brother. “I keep a lot of specially trained peacocks. They obey my every command.”

“That’s remarkable.”

“Exactly.”

That’s how we feel. Roy Horan was remarkable.

Exactly.