Bullet in the Head (traditional Chinese: 喋血街頭; simplified Chinese: 喋血街头) is a 1990 Hong Kong action film written, produced, edited and directed by John Woo, and starring Tony Leung, Jacky Cheung, Waise Lee and Simon Yam.

Ben, Paul, and Frank get a load of contraband goods from a Hong Kong smuggler and agree to take them to a Vietnamese gangster named Leong.

The three friends leave and reach Saigon by boat, only to have a Vietcong suicide bomber destroy all of their goods in an attempt on an officer of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.

The Vietcong take the gold, and find intelligence documents in the box that Leong was going to sell to the North Vietnamese.

When he is told to kill Frank he turns on their captors and they escape, aided by the arrival of a squad of Americans led by Luke.

Ben is saved by some monks, and eventually makes his way back to Saigon, where a badly disfigured Luke tells him that Frank is still alive, but that his head injury has changed him; he is now addicted to heroin and works as a contract killer.

They crash their cars, and continue to fight: Paul is ultimately killed, and Ben limps away from the scene.

Bullet in the Head was originally planned to be a prequel to A Better Tomorrow but a falling out between Woo and producer Tsui Hark prevented this from happening.

Woo reworked the script into what it is today, and Tsui made his own prequel, A Better Tomorrow III: Love & Death in Saigon.

After the breakup with his partnership with Tsui, Woo was having trouble finding backing for his films; stories have circulated that Tsui (one of the most powerful men in Hong Kong cinema) said Woo was hard to work with, and this led to his virtual blacklisting.

Woo has described this project as his equivalent of Apocalypse Now, as it had the same exhausting and draining effect on him as that film had on Francis Ford Coppola.

During the filming of some of the riot sequences, things got so chaotic on the set that John Woo panicked and ran into several shots.

[2] John Woo is quoted in Jeff Yang's book Once Upon a Time in China as saying that Tsui Hark's A Better Tomorrow III: Love & Death in Saigon was rushed into theatres to beat Bullet in the Head at the box office.

[5] On 5 July 2004, a DVD was released on a two-disc platinum edition by Hong Kong Legends in the United Kingdom in Region 2.

One year later, The John Woo Collection DVD was released on 5 September 2005, as a four-disc set including two Chow Yun-fat films: The Killer and Once a Thief.