1998, Hong Kong. Starring Ekin Cheng, Aaron Kwok, Sonny Chiba, Roy Cheung, Hsu Chi, Christine Ng, Anthony Wong. Directed by Andrew Lau. Available on DVD (HKFlix).

It's no big secret these days that Hong Kong movies suck, that whatever energy once exemplified the city-state's cinematic industry through the 60s, 70s, and 80s is dead, or at least dormant. What we're left with in the wake of the Hong Kong new wave's passing is little more than a pathetic collection of softcore porn (better than Shannon Tweed stuff, but still...), worthless brain-dead action films, grating romantic comedies that make you want to go out and kill kill kill, and general no-budget, no-talent crap so abysmal that it almost undoes all the great things that used to come out of Hong Kong.

You know you're in trouble when people are desperate enough to adopt Donnie Yen -- the Mario Van Peebles of the Hong Kong film industry -- as the most promising young talent. Look, Donnie Yen has "been showing a lot of potential to be good" for something like twenty years now. If he hasn't done anything yet, then maybe it's time to admit the guy is, in fact, a worthless hack.

Hong Kong is a polluted sea churning with slap-dash nonsense, undercranked and ridiculous looking wire-fu debacles, and films whose scripts seem to have been assembled at random by a small inbred family of chimps with wild Charles Manson hair. There was a time when Hong Kong filmmakers actually put some small degree of effort into the script, but round about the mid 1990s they realized they could squeeze out any incoherent piece of tripe and people would eat it up no matter how poorly made and vile it was. They were, of course, wrong, and the total disregard for quality that blossomed in the mid-90s helped destroy the once mighty Hong Kong film industry.

Even once-great directors like Tsui Hark seem incapable these days of making anything that might rank higher than, say, being stricken with a sudden and intense case of diarrhea when you are miles away from the nearest toilet. His latest big idea after cranking out some truly worthless Jean-Claude Van Damme films is to remake the John Woo classic A Better Tomorrow, only with an all-female main cast. This guy used to have great ideas, or at least managed to have two great ideas for every three bad ones (like that notion he had to make the musical live-action version of Mai, the Psychic Girl starring Winona Ryder. Probably just a rumor, but it still makes me laugh).

The entire situation is made all the more tragic by how great Hong Kong movies once were. Starting with the Shaw Brothers swordsman epics of the 1960s, continuing on through the golden age of kungfu films in the 1970s, the kungfu revolution of Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung in the 1980s, and the invention of the Hong Kong new wave by guys like Ringo Lam, Tsui Hark, and John Woo, for three decades Hong Kong film making was a dynasty.

Then, in the 1990s, round about the time American fans started greedily devouring anything at all from Hong Kong and celebrating it as high art despite the "make a quick buck" mentality that dominated the industry, something started to go terribly wrong. The films were becoming increasingly cheap and haphazard looking, as if the men and women behind them were so high on their own success that they felt they could shit out a film and people would love it. Scripts looked like they were thrown together by mental patients, and due to injury, retirement, or immigration to other countries, much of the old talent disappeared and was replaced by the new school who lacked any real skill in anything at all, be it acting, directing, or doing kungfu.

Criminal triads bled the industry dry, milking it for every last penny they could steal and then leaving a shriveled, dried-up corpse not unlike that space vampire woman in Lifeforce, only unlike Mathilda May, these gangsters were not stunningly beautiful and naked throughout the entire film. And given that most gangsters, despite the glamorous images of themselves they helped put on screen, are out-of-shape thugs with dripping, oily jeury curl haircuts, you probably wouldn't want them strutting about in the nude anyway.

Persistent injuries to big-name stars like Jackie Chan, Michelle Yeoh, and Jet Li meant they were relying increasingly on stunt doubles, camera tricks, and wires to do what they used to do on their own. Old age, frustration, the lure of Hollywood, and the desire to get out from under the thumbs of the gangsters who controlled the industry lead many actors and directors to America, Japan, and The Philippines. Uncertainty over what would happen after the 1997 hand-over of the island to Communist China chased away a lot of other people, or at least started them thinking about things other than movies.

Lump on top of all this the truly monumental pirate VCD market in Asia. Movies started coming out on VCD before they were in theaters, and people were much happier picking up these ultra-cheap discs than going to the theater, especially since the movies were starting to suck. It's a catch-22 there, or a chicken and egg conundrum trying to figure out whether people bought VCDs because they didn't want to pay to see a shitty movie, or whether the movies started getting shitty because so much money was being lost to the pirate market. Either way, it's one of the few markets where video piracy actually did help destroy the industry, though frankly, it had become so big and bloated that it was bound to pop at some point.

As if all this wasn't enough, the Asian economic recession of the 1990s put the final nail in the coffin of Hong Kong's domestic product. Where Hong Kong was once fiercely loyal to its own industry, the flood has slowed to a trickle, and people turn out to see big budget American films while eschewing the local stuff. Which is odd, because as bad as Hong Kong cinema may be, it's no worse than, say Battlefield Earth or Wild Wild West. Hong Kong is an easy target because of the trendiness, albeit waning, of the films, but you can't really help but notice that we're in a global recession when it comes to quality movies, and Hong Kong films are no worse than the crap coming out of America and Japan these days. Weirdly enough, India seems to have picked up the ball in terms of making amazing, complex, and elegant action films, but a lack of distribution and translations keep Hindi films, however great and action-packed they may be, relatively inaccessible to the greater American cult film audience. And the musical numbers simply scare a lot of people away.

But it's not like Hong Kong didn't earn the break from making good films. They've given us thirty years of great material to work with. And as bad as things may be these days, we can enjoy the past while we search the dreck for a glimmer of hope in the future.

And in this environment, when a glimmer does appear, however faint, it is blinding in its brilliance, simply because that which surrounds it so dim. The most promising film to come out of Hong Kong in the past several years is Andrew Lau's (Lau Wai-keung, not the famous bad actor and worse singer Andy Lau Tak-wah) special effects fantasy extravaganza Storm Riders. Ahh, you were wondering if I was ever going to get to the movie review, weren't you?

Touted by many as sort of a next generation Zu, this film actually holds up pretty well to the comparison by being a rather inventive, action-packed, highly stylized spectacle of no-holds-barred film making. What makes it different from most all other Hong Kong films these days is that it's actually fun, and they put a ton of time, money, and effort into it. In fact, it became the most expensive Hong Kong film ever made, a title previously held by films like Jackie Chan's globe-hopping adventure film Armor of God II: Operation Condor. As a quick aside, since Armor of God II was released in America as Operation Condor before the first film, when they finally released the first film, they called it Operation Condor II: Armor of God. Not quite as silly as the infamous mistitling of Bruce Lee films, but still amusing.

Back to Storm Riders, since that's the film I'm reviewing and I generally like to stay on topic. Fading teen heart-throb Aaron Kwok, who has not aged a day in fifteen years, stars with current teen heart-throb Ekin Cheng, who rose to fame with his role in those annoying Young and Dangerous films. Aaron's film career always seemed to show promise, as he is good looking and physically talented. But every time it seemed to be getting on track, it would falter, probably because he's a pretty lame actor. Luckily that doesn't matter anymore, and what's important is that he has good hair and is willing to wear a cape. You know, I seem to recall an unusually high number of films in which Aaron dons a cape. Both he and Ekin Cheng have amazing hair talent that allows them to have the sort of hair usually only found on an anime cartoon character. As Storm Riders is an adaptation of a comic book, this ability to have flowing cartoon hair that is perpetually waving in the breeze is important, and let it never be said that the hairdos of Ekin and Aaron don't rise to the occasion.

Anyway, not to be undone in the wooden acting department, Ekin Cheng excels at bad acting and is every bit Aaron Kwok's equal in this department. Unlike a lot of Ekin bashers, and they are legion, I actually admit that there is quite a bit of talent somewhere inside Ekin that goes beyond his amazing hair. He has a glimmer of talent and charisma, and with the right director, he could probably become a decent actor. Unfortunately, I don't think anyone is interested in good acting anymore, and unless he develops a massive "I'm an artist" ego like Tom Cruise, it's unlikely Ekin will feel driven to hone his craft. But there's some hope. After all, Leslie Cheung was a pretty worthless actor at first, but over the years has become better and better.

None of this really matters, though, as both guys are here to play one-dimensional comic book characters, and they certainly have the talent to pull that off. They star as orphans named Wind and Cloud who are being raised by a bad-ass warlord who happens to be the guy who orphaned them in the first place by killing their respective parents. The warlord, who doesn't fuck around and simply names himself Conqueror, is played by none other than the mainstay of 1970s action and sci-fi programming in Japan, Sonny "The Streetfighter" Chiba, who seems to be turning into Toshiro Mifune in his old age. That's not bad. You can do a lot worse than start to look like Toshiro Mifune, one of the grand masters of bad-assness. For instance, you could start looking like Don Rickels or Phyllis Diller, or even worse, like a combination of Don Rickels and Phyllis Diller. Then you'd have no friends, and you'd die a lonely, bitter old mutant.

Despite the fact that the greater portion of Sonny's work sucks, I love him. Or maybe I love him because of the fact that a lot of his films suck. But still, there's no denying the man's importance in action cinema. His Street Fighter movies revolutionized karate films by turning low budget into stylized art and teaching us that as violent and brutal as you thought films already were, he could make them meaner. Plus, the formation of Chiba's Japan Action Club helped train some of the best and brightest action, martial arts, and sci-fi stars of the 70s and 80s.

The movie begins with a sleepy monk throwing out your typical esoteric Yoda prophecies. The subtitles on my copy were flea-sized, so it looked at times like the guy was named either Mad Buddha or Mud Buddha. Whatever the case, his name wasn't Larry. The monk makes a prediction that Conqueror will rise to rule the martial world. Yep, it's the martial world again. This isn't really that great a prediction. I mean, the guy can fly and he's named Conqueror. If you are named Conqueror it pretty much guarantees that you will kick some serious ass, sort of like how if you are named Tiny you will be really huge. But a warlord named Tiny isn't very imposing, so he went with Lord Conqueror.

Unfortunately, the prophecy isn't all wine and roses. Mud Buddha also predicts that Lord Conqueror will be toppled "when wind and cloud combine." Down south, we used to call those tornadoes, and rest assured that they can indeed do some real property damage, even if you are named Lord Conqueror. Upset by this prophecy, Conqueror goes out to collect all the kids born under a certain star and named Cloud or Wind. One of them is the son of one of those dirty ol' beggar looking swordsmen who has a beef against Conqueror anyway. Seems Conqueror is a big fan of collecting rare and powerful swords, and this guy has one. See, this was back before eBay, so back then if you wanted some weird little antique, you had to search for it at flea markets or challenge people to duels. Years ago, the two dueled in one of the film's most beautiful sequences, a fight amid a lush green forest of bamboo. This entire sequence, though by no means a display of any real martial arts, is positively stunning.

The swordsman loses the duel, and Conqueror makes off with the guy's sexy wife, vowing that they will meet again to fight for ownership of the magic sword. It was cool because something like that happened to me a couple months ago. When the two warriors meet again, they duel on, above, and all around a giant cliff carved into the shape of a towering stone Buddha. This fight is pretty cool as well, with the guys zipping all over the sky much like the fighters in the superb old Ching Siu-tung fantasy film Duel to Death. Only this time, instead of wires, it's cgi. Normally, I'm not a huge fan of cgi and other computer animation effects, mainly because I think they look awful. Even supposedly good ones look awful to me, but then, who the hell am I to judge? I still think Ray Harryhausen stop-motion looks cool.

Storm Riders manages to use cgi the way it should be used, however, which is to create a very vivid fantasy world that is only slightly related to reality. It looks great, on par with and quite possibly better than anything done even in big budget American films. There are only a few instances where it looks awkward. For the most part, I thought it was pretty spectacular, and they actually seem to have put a lot of thought into making the effects lush and interesting. Plus, they don't have cgi characters, only backgrounds, landscapes, and of course flying stuff.

The second boy Conqueror goes after is the son of a swordsmith. The fight here isn't nearly as slick, but it's still good, and reminded a lot of the fights in Tsui Hark's last good film, The Blade, but that may only be because those guys were all shirtless swordsmiths as well.

Conqueror raises Cloud and Wind as his own sons, with the basic plan being keep your friends close and your enemies closer, I guess. Both of them grow up to be bad-ass super fighters in sexy leather outfits. Aaron, whose character Cloud is the angrier, brooding member of the duo, also adds some flare with the aforementioned cape and blue highlights to his anime hair. Both of them fall in love with Conqueror's daughter, and hey, you would too. She's cute, but there's nothing quite as unnerving as having your girlfriend say, "I want you to come home to meet my father, Lord Conqueror, ruler of the martial world."

Each of the boys is given a task. Wind (Ekin Cheng) is sent out with his other adopted brother, Frost, to capture the legendary Fire Monkey, which you have to find if you want to earn an audience with ol' Mud Buddha. Cloud, who as we said, is a lot more pissed off, is sent on a secret mission to slaughter the members of another powerful martial arts family. Lord Conqueror is on a real slaughter kick these days. But I guess if you are named Conqueror you really do have to get out and, you know, conquer and stuff. It's sort of in the name. You can't be named Lord Conqueror and work a desk job.

Conqueror wants to talk to Mud Buddha about a puzzle box he got many years ago that supposedly contains the last portion of Mud Buddha's prophecy. As he gets older and Wind and Cloud become stronger, Conqueror is starting to go a bit insane with paranoia and wants to make sure he can alter his own Destiny by either controlling or destroying his two star disciples. Plus he's got the survivors of the recently slaughtered clan out for revenge and enlisting the help of an ancient super sword hero played by Anthony Wong in a Gandalf outfit. Everyone figures if anyone can beat Conqueror, it's this guy. So you see, being ruler of the martial world isn't all fun and games. It's sort of like being the mayor of New York, and when you see how much you have to deal with, you kinda have to wonder why you'd want the job. In fact, now that I think about it, I'd like to see an American version of this movie, with Rudy Guiliani starring as Lord Conqueror.

As if all that wasn't enough, you have this whole thing where Wind and Conqueror's daughter, Charity, are engaged, which pisses off Cloud, who was all moody anyway and walking around like some weird blend of Henry Rollins and Morrissey. I guess you could say he has a dark cloud hanging over him, but if you did say that, I'd kick you in the shins. While Charity likes Wind well enough, she's just as attracted to the dark and mysterious Cloud. This whole love thing sort of drives Cloud batty, and during the wedding he causes a ruckus that eventually leads to Conqueror accidentally killing his own daughter. It's sort of like those America's Funniest Home Video things where the groom's pants fall down of the bride slips and lands on her ass, only this time it's the bride's well nigh all-powerful supernatural father accidentally exploding her with magic energy bolts shot from his hands.

All jokes aside, the emotion of this whole sequence is actually pretty moving, and Aaron rises above his usual limitations as an actor and creates a very memorable, sad scene. The woman's death drives both he and Conqueror even more insane than they already are. Wind goes to reclaim his dead father's magic sword and get some sacred fruit, which is hidden inside the giant stone Buddha cave and guarded by a cool fire monster thing. When both Wind and Cloud learn that Conqueror himself murdered their families, it's time to bring the prophecy to fruition in a jaw-dropping special effects battle that reminded me a lot of the final fight between the duo of Yuen Biao and Meng Hoi against the insanely evil Adam Cheng in Zu.

And much like Zu, I've managed to account for about 30% of the action that takes place in this wild madcap ride. The rest is left for you, yes you, to discover on your own, because action and adventure and seeking thrills is what this website is all about. Those things, and Hot Pockets.

Storm Riders is not a kungfu film. It's a fantasy film, and as such, it works wonderfully. It is full of action, drama, and insanely wild, cool looking special effects. Most special effects movies tend to forget the human aspect of their story, but Storm Riders remembers to make the humans the central players amid the onslaught of slick special effects. The result is delirious, breathtaking, and the most fun film to come out of Hong Kong in a very long time. It's a shame that in the wake of the film's monumental success, rather than follow it up with an equally well-crafted film, the director chose to go for a series of quickie look-alike films of varying quality.

But none of that matters here, and what we're left with is the fact that Storm Riders is a tremendously enjoyable, energetic film with an amazing look to it. People who are fond of praising derivative junk like The Matrix for it's supposed visual style should check this film out to really have their tiny minds blown. It manages to be beautiful, colorful, alien, and sweeping while remaining recognizable. I guess it's what the martial world looks like. But the aspect of the film that really shines is Sonny Chiba, bellowing and laughing in all his evil glory in what is a truly epic comeback film. He looks better than he has in decades, but since he spent much of the last decade making direct-to-video films with Rowdy Roddy Piper, he doesn't have much competition from himself. I was overjoyed to see Sonny in action, even if it's all special effects, and kicking ass for a whole new generation.

I have never read the comic, so I can't comment on how it compares to that, but as a film, Storm Riders is totally satisfying to me. In the years to come, as it betters with age, Storm Riders will become one of my all time favorite fantasy/mythology films.

Labels: Martial Arts: Kungfu, Martial Arts: Wu Xia, Year: 1998