By Peter Nicks

SAN FRANCISCO – It's Wednesday at the Great Star Theater in Chinatown and a sparse audience settles into red velvet seats to savor the latest Cantonese-language action film offering, "Faces of Horror."

Inside, a cold smell reminiscent of a public bathroom wafts through the air. A noisy soundtrack is pumped into the cavernous theater by two large speakers set at the front as English subtitles roll across the lower edge of the screen.

"Is it a dream? Or is it reality?" asks one of the subtitles.

Here at the Great Star, one of only two cinemas in the United States left which shows only Hong Kong films, it's a little bit of both.

The Great Star is owned by the Shaw Brothers, who came from Singapore in the 1960s via Hong Kong and almost single-handedly gave birth to Hong Kong cinema in the United States. But over the last 60 years, the once glittering theater scene around the country has dimmed almost to extinction. And the decline is most evident in what used to be the most fertile ground for Hong Kong cinema in the United States: San Francisco's Chinatown.

There is now little evidence of the past in the one-time movie district here on Jackson Street, where the Great Star offers 2-for-1 weekday specials. The street is now full of restaurants featuring "Hong Kong-style" dim sum, flower shops and a storefront advertising acupuncture and herbal medicine. A plaque embossed with the yellowed numbers "1925" sits high on the cinema's facade. Beneath the marquee, low-wattage lights flicker beside burned out bulbs.

There were once four theaters in Chinatown that specialized in Cantonese language film. But by 1996 there were only two. One local movie producer, Wade Lai, predicted several years ago that Cantonese movie houses would bounce back. But they haven't and now the Great Star is the lone Hong Kong movie house in the city.

One of the problems is the virtual collapse of the film industry in Hong Kong as a result of the financial crisis in Asia. Only 60 films were made there in 1998,

READ ON: The fall of Hong Kong's film industry impacts San Francisco's Cantonese theaters