Hong Kong. Starring Tung Wai, Shut Chung Tin, Man Kong Lung, Dean Shek Tien, Sze Ma Lung. Directed by Joe Cheung. Available on DVD (HKFlix).

The kungfu comedy subgenre operates on a single, basic premise: that people beating the crap out of each other is funny. Or more specifically, that people making goofy faces while beating the crap out of each other is funny. For the most part the assumption regarding the hilarity of violence has been a sound one. Kungfu comedies have flourished, and the stars and directors who made them often went on to become some of the most popular people in the industry. Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, Liu Chia-liang, and Ng See-yuen all helped carve out the kungfu comedy niche, and in turn their careers skyrocketed.

It wasn't always like that, though. Most of the elements in these martial arts films that we take for granted - the cranky teacher, the sassy student, the goofy kungfu style - are all rooted in ancient literature and performance but are relatively new to film, or as new as anything born in the 1970s can be. The martial arts have a long tradition of comedic elements being woven into stories about them, and most of this stems from the popularity of the Monkey King, Sun Wu-kong, whose immortal hijinks and kungfu clowning have pleased audiences for generations. Born in the epic 16th century mythology novel Journey to the West by Wu Cheng-en, the character of the Monkey King was a wise-cracking rebel with little regard for the politics and protocols of Heaven. Put him in charge of a sacred garden full of peaches of immortality, and all he's gonna do is get drunk, eat all the peaches, and stumble on over to Lao Tzu's place for more hijinks. Monkey was rude, disrespectful, and impish. For that, he became one of the most beloved literary figures of all time.

Peking Opera troupes frequently did performances revolving around some prank or other that Monkey was involved in and audiences ate it up with the same voracious appetite Monkey himself displayed when he took care of that holy peach garden. Stories about Monkey allowed the performers to incorporate a variety of acrobatic stunts and hijinks that, in turn, delighted audiences. Plus, it was a nice break from all the serious romantic tragedies people usually had to endure.

Inspired by the success of the Monkey King on page and stage, street performers also started working comedy into their routines. After all, watching some serious guy stand on the corner and twirl his sword might be interesting for a little bit, but after a while you're going to tire of the scowl and wander off to check out the guys who are shouting, doing flips, and generally turning their acrobatic martial arts displays into a block party. It simply made for better theater.

When motion picture creation rolled around in the early years of the 20th century, Hong Kong's first films were little more than stage plays on camera. Drama progressed, but martial arts films remained fairly theatrical in their presentation until men like Kwan Tak-hing revolutionized the way people thought about making kungfu films. When the modern era of martial arts filmmaking began in the 1960s with the Shaw Brothers wu xia (swordsman) films, whatever sense of humor the Monkey King had instilled in the martial arts was drained entirely. The Shaw Brothers films were blood-soaked tragedies full of feudal honor and revenge. Things rarely worked out well for the characters, and while many of the films were exceptional, no one is going to sit around and tell you that Trail of the Broken Blade is a raucous comedy.

When martial arts movies started making the transition from swordsmen films to kungfu films in the 1970s, the grim tone was carried over. Jimmy Wang Yu and Lo Lieh, two of the biggest star of the wu xia era, were also two of the first men to start making kungfu films. Jimmy Wang Yu made Chinese Boxer and Lo Lieh was hot on his heels with Five Fingers of Death. Although the focus shifted from knights in white tunics to gritty hand-to-hand combatants, the somber tone and tragic elements were still prevalent. It wasn't until Bruce Lee came on the scene that people started thinking about adding some laughs to the mix to lighten things up.

It's interesting that one of the criticisms of Lee by people who are generally unfamiliar with his work was that he had an imposing screen presence but was weak when it came to lightness and comedy. Nothing could be further from the truth. Not only did Bruce Lee completely change the way kungfu films were choreographed by introducing technique when previously most films just had their combatants waving their arms at each other, but he also helped alter the overall tone of the kungfu film. He alerted people to the fact that even I a relatively serious film, you could still get some belly-laughs. Nowhere was this more evident than in the movie he wrote, directed, and starred in, Way of the Dragon.

The humor wasn't exactly high-brow. It was bathroom humor - literally. But respectable or not, it was something new. You wouldn't catch Jimmy Wang Yu putting squat toilet sight gags in one of his films. Unfortunately, Lee's career was cut tragically short, so we'll never know exactly where he might have taken the genre, but the seeds he planted forever changed things. After Lee's passing, a new generation of actors and directors were set to take over the scene, and they brought with them a sense of humor that was in sharp contrast to the brutal, romantic films of the first half of the 1970s.

Chief among the new stars was a rotund fella by the name of Sammo Hung. Hung had cut his teeth as a member of a Peking Opera troupe alongside other rising stars like Yuen Biao, Yuen Wah, and some guy named Jackie Chan. Where as the previous generation of martial arts stars, those who came before Bruce Lee, had generally been classically trained actors with little prior knowledge regarding the martial arts, Sammo represented the new breed whose doors had been opened by Bruce. Sure, he was trained as an actor and acrobat, but like many members of the Peking Opera school, Sammo supplemented his theatrical training with hardcore martial arts training. By the time he left the school to pursue a film career, Sammo was an accomplished fighter, choreographer, stunt man, writer, and even director.

Perhaps even more than Bruce Lee, Sammo Hung possessed a natural understanding of what making a kungfu film meant. He understood the difference between what worked in a real fight and what looked good on screen. He understood how to make moves and styles that were too outrageous to work in real life seem completely believable in the context of a film. Given his background as a performer and martial artist, it's no surprise that he also brought with him a Monkey King like sense of warped humor. Although his early jobs as a stuntman and fight choreographer earned him a reputation as one of the best in the business, it wasn't until he wielded enough power to really shape a film in his image that the revolution began. 1977's Iron-Fisted Monk, the first film directed by Sammo, set a new standard for fight choreography, revealing to people that Sammo's talent as both a fighter and a choreographer had only been hinted at in his previous films.

At the same time, Sammo's classmate Jackie Chan was wandering down the same road toward kungfu hijinks. Chan starred in a series of go-nowhere kungfu films under the directorial lead of Lo Wei, but in 1976 the duo collaborated on a screwball kungfu film called Half a Loaf of Kungfu, and suddenly things were looking up. Instead of trying to pass Chan off as a serious presence, the movie allowed him to ham it up in a variety of silly situations. Chan was able to tap into his inner Monkey King, and the results, while not entirely classic, were certainly worth noting. 1977's Spiritual Kungfu followed the same basic formula.

In 1978, though, it all boiled over.

In that year, Jackie Chan starred in Drunken Master, directed by Yuen Wo-ping, and Sammo Hung directed and starred in Warriors Two. Kungfu films had been incorporating more and more comedic elements into their goings-on, but these two movies more than anything pushed the whole thing over the edge and gave official birth to the kungfu comedy as we know it today. Drunken Master laid out the formula that would become far and away the most used plot in the subgenre, that of the curmudgeonly old master, the lazy disrespectful student, and their eventual need to work together to defeat some seeming insurmountable evil.

While the plot of Drunken Master may serve as the basis for nearly every kungfu comedy that would follow, it was the mental state of Sammo Hung that would provide the genre with it's dominant tone. Sammo's films have always been possessed of a certain degree of schizophrenia. On more than one occasion, a scene that starts out as a study in slapstick physical comedy will suddenly turn deadly serious and tragic without any warning. I don't pretend to know what goes on in the mind of Sammo Hung, but at least a portion of it is prone to sudden turns of dark moodiness. This split personality approach to a film would become the prevailing mood of most kungfu comedies. In one scene, the madcap hijinks are flying left and right, and in the next scene, with no transition or warning, things become heavy.

In 1979, director Joe Cheung tried his hand at the kungfu comedy with the film Incredible Kungfu Master, starring a well-respected but not well-known martial arts actor by the name of Tung Wei. When last we saw Tung Wei, he was getting slapped on the head by Bruce Lee and lectured about not staring at the finger when you should be marveling at all the heavenly glory. The movie was a bug success, thanks in no small part to the fact that it starred Sammo Hung, who was one of the two hottest properties in the business at the time, possibly the hottest since he was the total package where Jackie Chan was still considered primarily just an actor. Hot on the heels of their success, the Tung Wei - Joe Cheung tried it again with 18 Fatal Strikes, a less successful but still enjoyable entry into the kungfu comedy genre which unfortunately got lost in the shuffle that year since there were roughly ninety-three thousand similar movies made at the same time. Still, the fact that it was a relatively low-key affair adds to its charms, and it stands up well as an example of everything that is good and bad about the genre as a whole.

The story is a study in the kungfu comedy formula. Tung Wei stars as Shou Tung, a lazy bumpkin who whiles away the hours on what appears to be a twig farm with his brother Tai Pei. Tai is played by none other than Shih Tien, whose name may not be familiar but whose face certainly is. The guy was a fixture in damn near every kungfu comedy that got made, usually as some sniveling conniver who taunts the hero endlessly. He is in a slightly different role here, but he still manages to whine a lot. One day while the brothers (or half-brothers, I guess - they have different mothers) are out collecting twigs, or rather while Tai Pei is collecting twigs and Shou Tung is sleeping, they happen across a badly wounded monk who, as we learn in the film's opening scene, is one of the great leaders of the rebellion against the Ch'ing dynasty.

The monk Wang apparently got on the wrong side of Ch'ing heavy Wong Wu Ti, whose utterly bizarre "Shaking Eagle" fist is well nigh invincible, not to mention incredibly annoying. Any time he busts out the style, Wong Wu Ti prefaces it by shaking around like a Bollywood dancer and making a sound not unlike what you hear if you dump a bag full of broken glass on a concrete floor. This in itself isn't so bad, but whoever did the dubbing for this movie makes Wong Wu Ti emit the most grating, ludicrous "whooo hoo wooo aahhh" noises I've ever heard. Kungfu film fans expect goofy noises from dubs, and heck, often from the originals, but I'm hard-pressed to think of a more ludicrous sounding cacophony that what Wong Wu Ti rattles off. I'm guessing that his style is so effective because, upon seeing some dude with long white hair bust out the "shaking my tits with arms wide open" move you expect from your more mundane strippers while he hoots like a total buffoon, even the best trained martial artist doubles over with laughter, thus leaving himself open to a fatal blow from the man acting like a chicken. His style makes the technique and gibberish of Rudy Ray Moore seem subtle and refined by comparison.

Shou Tung takes the monk home while Tai Pei delays searching soldiers. Back in their hovel, Shou Tung engages in a variety of hilarious exchanges in which he looks at the monk, and the monk grimaces and spits blood in his face. Oh, the wackiness! Nothing is funnier than having a dying monk spit blood in your face. What's really odd is that it never occurs to Shou Tung that wiping the blood off might be a good thing. Perhaps he knows that monk is just going to execute the gag again, so there's no real point. This does, however, illustrate one of the key elements in kungfu comedy - that being that the comedy is rarely all that funny. A monk spitting up blood isn't normally considered a source of amusement outside of a Gwar concert, and likewise, many of the situations played for comedic effect in kungfu comedies aren't especially funny. Some of them are downright serious. The comedy doesn't come from the situation, but rather it comes from the reaction. Okay, so a monk spits up blood on someone. Not a big deal. But when that someone reacts by making a silly face while "wah wah wahhhhh" music plays, we're clued in to the fact that this is all supposed to be a reason to chuckle, so chuckle we do.

Most kungfu comedies rely on the mugging of the star and generic comedy music to relay the fact that something funny is going on. Jackie Chan became a true master of mugging for the camera - to the point where it almost became the only thing he was able to do. Plentiful are the scene sin which something would be relatively straight-forward and serious if the star didn't follow it up by making the funny "it's a living!" face while someone dubs in a rim shot or something. 18 Fatal Strikes is no different. Almost all of the comedy is derived not from a funny instance, but from a funny face following an otherwise normal occurrence. Thus, a monk with severe internal bleeding becomes the source of much frivolity.

Another aspect of the comedy in kungfu comedies is that jokes often get driven into the ground. No sooner do we think the whole blood-spitting monk thing has been played out than Tai Pei comes home so he, too, can have blood spit in his face.

Shou Tung and Tai Pei also fulfill the requirements of a hero in a kungfu comedy. Both are interested in the martial arts, but neither is very good. They're too lazy to practice, and as a result, their kungfu is about on par with that of David Carradine. Few and far between are the kungfu comedies devoid of the bumpkin hero, and that's because people like bumpkin heroes. We can laugh at them, but we can also cheer for them. Heck, Shou Tung is basically a farm boy who dreams of fighting in the rebellion and one days meets a wise old master who serves as his teacher. Just call him Luke Skywalker, probably the most famous of all bumpkin heroes. Luke even whines like the bumpkin hero of a kungfu comedy. He wants to go to the Tashi Station to pick up some power converters; Shou Tung wants to go into town to buy some steam buns.

Shou Tung and Tai Pei fancy themselves kungfu masters, but most of their moves remind me a little of myself in that they really aren't very good. Their best stance seems to be rolling around on the ground and going, "unnggh!" Abbot Wang agrees to teach them Shaolin styles, and they fulfill the "odd couple" relationship with their master. Where as the classic films of the 1960s and early 1970s relied on a feudal sense of honor and reverence toward the master on behalf of the student, the students in the comedies of the late 1970s were often far more Monkey King-esque in their relationship with their master. They lie, cheat, and try to scheme their way out of hard training. The master, in return, generally pronounces them as being "goddamned useless!" Heck, the Monkey King even ate his master once! Instead of the traditional code of loyalty, the kungfu comedy takes the hustling capitalist approach to martial arts training. The student will do anything it takes to get ahead.

Such a drastic change in attitude was brought about partly because of the change in the economic situation of real-life martial artists during the 1960s. At the end of the decade, as the wu xia genre waned and the kungfu film had yet to be fully born, a lot of professional martial artists suddenly found themselves falling upon hard times. Interest in the arts waned amongst the public, and what had once been a decent job as a teacher or as an actor suddenly fell apart. Kungfu masters had to adapt, and many of them did so by falling in with triads, by doing what it took for them to survive with the skills they had. It's one of the many factors that contributed to the rise of gangland involvement in the Hong Kong film industry.

When the brothers discover that their favorite lady at the local restaurant is also part of the rebellion, they themselves find their roles becoming increasingly entangled with the political players. This means they suffer some mighty beatings at the hands of Wong Wu Ti's henchmen. Abbot Wang aggress to teach the brothers the eighteen secret styles of the Lo Han fist, Shaolin's greatest fighting technique, although he himself only knows a few of them. I guess they'll just wing the others. Unfortunately, the use of the Lo Han form tips off the bad guys that Shou Tung and Tai Pei are hanging out with the monk. In order to convince them to turn over the rebel leader, Wong Wu Ti's cronies murder Tai Pei's one true love, and then fulfill the "Sammo schizophrenia" even further by murdering Tai Pei himself!

Quite a twist, but it wasn't entirely unexpected. After all, if we continue to look at 18 Fatal Strikes as an example of all the conventions of the kungfu comedy, Shou Tung has to experience a tragic loss that causes him to find the determination to become a great kungfu master in order to seek revenge. Kungfu comedy heroes generally find themselves caught up in situations where they have very little at stake personally. Before meeting the monk, the duo is simply living in their own carefree little world. Sure they know about the ongoing rebellion against the Ch'ing dynasty, but it's not exactly something that affects their lives any more than the Ch'ing dynasty itself affects their lives. Even after meeting Abbot Wang, their relation to the greater forces at work is tangential. It is only when a tragedy befalls one of the characters that resolve is discovered. At that point, however, it is still a personal matter far more than it is a political one. Shou Tung doesn't fight Wong Wu Ti in the name of revolution. He does so out of a desire for personal revenge.

The finale is also a perfect example of what makes the kungfu comedy tick. Up to this point, we've seen very little of Wong Wu Ti other than in the beginning and at a point here and there throughout the film, often doing nothing more than sitting in his fancy throne. Who sells these evil kungfu masters their thrones, anyway? They all seem to have one. In a kungfu comedy, the villain is usually outlandish and, after the student and the teacher, is the most important character despite the fact that he generally has very little screen time. This is done in order to preserve the mystique of the character, to avoid overexposing him to the audience. Wong Wu Ti is much cooler when there is an air of menace and mystery about him. When we do see him, he has a tendency to constantly leave his victims for dead when, in fact, they were just playing possum. How many times is this guy going to fall for that trick?

To draw another parallel to Star Wars, take a look at Boba Fett. That guy does next to nothing in the entire movie, until a blind guy bumps into him and he gets eaten by an immobile hole in the sand. The very fact that he has next to no screen time is what allows the character to maintain the air of being a total bad-ass. The only different is that in kungfu comedies, the villain eventually leaps up in the final scene to prove how tough he is. Boba Fett just screamed like a little girl and fell in a hole. The less we see of Boba Fett, the better off his character is.

The finale also reiterates the "whatever it takes to succeed" attitude of the films. The heroes of kungfu comedies rarely beat the villain in a fair fight. Instead they rely on dirty tricks or the simple ability to endure punishment. No one exemplifies the tolerance for punishment approach quite like Jackie Chan in films like Drunken Master, Young Master, and Dragon Lord. Like many heroes in similar films, Chan's kungfu skills in the finale are about on par, maybe slightly below, those of the bad guy. At best, a fair fight would be a stalemate. Chan's edge comes in the form of his ability to endure more abuse. He simply gets the crap kicked out of him until his opponent is too tired to keep going, which is when Chan counter-attacks. 18 Fatal Strikes demonstrates the second finale type, that which relies on dirty tricks. Again, we see a hero whose kungfu is slightly less powerful than his adversary. In a straight-up duel, Shou Tou would eventually lose. But honorable one on one fisticuffs are not what's important here. What is important is winning, and Shou Tou will do whatever it takes, which includes digging a variety of traps and placing pungee sticks in strategic locations.

More times than not, the master is just as fond of these dirty tricks. And more times than not, the master's involvement begins with fending off some henchmen, then showing up to call out various stances and styles to his pupil as the pupil faces off against the primary villain. Finally, the master will join in for a two-on-one that hardly seems fair (except that the villain probably initially went in with twenty more men, which means the whole two-on-one thing is mild by comparison). But like I said, fair isn't what counts. Much of the time, even this tandem attack by master and pupil isn't enough to defeat the villain, and so they must still rely on dirty tricks to turn the tide in their favor.

Kungfu comedies exist in a time vacuum. From the first time we meet Wong Wu Ti, to the final frame of the film, we're given no indication about how much time passes. Once the plot is established, everything remains static. The world does not change. By all accounts, the series of events in the film should take years, but it could just as easily take place in a matter of days or weeks. Time is irrelevant. Wong Wu Ti sits in the same garishly lit throne room until it's time for him to go out and die in the final fight scene.

This warp happens partly because of limited budgets. Kungfu comedies are largely character driven, even if those characters are broad clichés, because the limited time, money, and locations available to the average Hong Kong film production were severely limited. You can't track the progress of a countrywide revolution on the back lots of a studio. 18 Fatal Strikes was a decent enough production, thanks no doubt to the success of Incredible Kungfu Master, that they could afford some location shooting for some scenes, but for the most part it was limited in scope. In these circumstances, the characters drive the story, and all other considerations, including historical accuracy or the passage of time, become irrelevant. That's why you can have so many films set during the Ch'ing dynasty but completely devoid of the baldhead and pigtail haircut that was required by law. Some films at least paid lip service to the historical facts by pasting a pigtail onto the end of the star's regular hair, but simply figured that historical details like that were less important than having the actor available to shoot another film a week later that was set in modern times.

Timewise, all that is important to a kungfu comedy are the three stages of the plot. Those stages are the only real way in which the passage of time is handled. Stage one revolves around introducing and establishing the character of the carefree protagonist. Stage two contains a steady build-up of action that builds up the conflict between the hero and the villain. The third stage sees the conflict resolved as it should be: through kungfu fightin'. As long as the film progresses through these stages, the actual duration of events is inconsequential. This is why so many kungfu comedies, 18 Fatal Strikes among them, end almost the very second the hero lands the fatal blow on the villain. That blow was the goal of the entire film, and once it is over, the universe in which the film exists ceases to be.

18 Fatal Strikes is a good example of the kungfu comedy genre because it fulfills all the requirements, showcases the strengths of the formula, and also spotlights the weaknesses. The strengths come primarily from the characters and the action. Tung Wei and Shih Tien are both fabulous in their roles as wisecracking hillbillies thrust into a national political struggle. Although few people seem to talk about him nowadays, Tung Wei was a decent actor and a great martial artist. He's easy to identify with because he's not that big and not that handsome. He's a regular Joe, physically built sort of like me except that where he had six smaller, harder muscles in his abdominal region, I have one larger, softer pillow. He's also an accomplished choreographer, and the fights here are superb. While they may not be up to the lofty standards of Sammo Hung at his best in films like Warriors Two or Prodigal Son, Tung Wei and crew throw together some impressive, fast-paced, hard-hitting action. Except for the whole "Shaking Eagle" style, most of what we get is a fairly straightforward variation of authentic Shaolin forms. That in itself sets 18 Fatal Strikes apart from the larger pack of kungfu comedies, which are full of "Rubbish Fist" and "Happy Style."

Another thing that makes 18 Fatal Strikes a little different is the inclusion of Ms. Sheng, a virtuous and accomplished female fighter. Kungfu comedies are notoriously misogynistic, and women in the films are generally given nothing more than to do than shriek like harpies or be kind and demure up to the time when they get murdered. 18 Fatal Strikes does have the demure girl who gets murdered, but it also has a woman who can hold her own in a fight. While we get to see similar characters in movies like Half a Loaf of Kungfu and the films of Liu Chia-liang, it was still a rarity that a movie was made in the mold that didn't feature a shrew as the lead female.

Aside from that, though, 18 Fatal Strikes is formula kungfu comedy through and through. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, mind you. After all, something becomes a formula because it generally works well. And 18 Fatal Strikes may be flawed, but it's also satisfying and entertaining. It's biggest weakness is indicative of the biggest weakness in all kungfu comedies - the inability to make the comedy work with the seriousness. At his best, Sammo Hung was able to make the two work, even if their coexistence was an often jarring affair. Most directors, however, ended up with an awkward mix of slapstick hijinks and tragic seriousness. 18 Fatal Strikes certainly suffers from this, but not so much that it proves fatal to the film. It's still a problem, though, and in fact it's a problem that continues to plague Hong Kong films to this day. The humor of the film is undercut by the tragic deaths of Tai Pei and his girlfriend, and the emotional impact of such sad events is similarly subverted by all the mugging and hamming that's been going on. The end result simply doesn't mesh together.

Still, you come to expect that from most kungfu comedies, and you can overlook it so long as the movie delivers the goods on other levels. 18 Fatal Strikes does just that. A simple but effective story and top-notch kungfu choreography more than make up for the clumsy handling of humor and tragedy. It's not a classic of the genre, but it's a good workhorse example of what it has to offer. The Monkey King would probably enjoy it.

Labels: Country: Hong Kong, Martial Arts: Kungfu, Year: 1981