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Monday, September 29, 2008The Black Rose Release Year: 1965Country: Hong Kong Starring: Nam Hung, Connie Chan Po-Chu, Partick Tse Yin, Lee Pang-Fei, Yeung Yip-Wang, Chow Gat, Lai Man, Fing Ging-Man, Sze-Ma Wah-Lung, Liu Chia-Liang, Tong Gai Writer: Hoh Bik-Gin Director: Chor Yuen (aka Chu Yuan) Cinematographer: Chan Kon Music: Yue Lun Producer: Nam Hung The director Chor Yuen is probably today best known for the sumptuous fantasy wuxia films he crafted while under contract to Hong Kong's Shaw Brothers studio during the seventies and early eighties. Indeed, titles like Killer Clans, The Magic Blade and Clans of Intrigue, marked as they are by Chor's unique ability to meld gauzy, haunted romanticism and state-of-the-art martial arts action within an immediately recognizable and alluringly narcotic visual style, present themselves as signature works, the result of a perfect marriage of director and genre. This makes it all the more surprising that these films were, to some extent, a lucrative tangent occurring well into a long directorial career stretching back to the late fifties--one encompassing equally prolific and accomplished work in the areas of social realism and romantic drama. Still, a look at one standout example of the director's early ventures into action cinema, 1965's The Black Rose, reveals an imprint that is just as clearly recognizable in his later, beloved work for the Shaws. For even at this relatively youthful stage in his career, working within the tight budgetary constraints of the Cantonese language film industry of the sixties, Chor demonstrates a sensitive stylistic touch that suffuses this irresistible pulp confection with a palpable sense of elegance, glamour and romance.     With The Black Rose, Chor performed an innovative trick of genre alchemy, taking the female-centric swashbuckling of early wuxia cinema and the populist heroics of Chinese folklore and placing them in a contemporary urban setting. Perhaps inescapably, the film also pays service to the then pervasive influence of the Bond films, as well as to the campy pop art aesthetic that would find its most visible expression a year later with the Batman TV series in the US. Appropriate to its tale of daring masked avengers, The Black Rose also seems to owe a debt to the Republic serials of the forties--not to mention other American studio product of that time. Made in 1965, it has the look of a Hollywood film from twenty--even thirty--years previous. And this is to its distinct advantage. Being the product of a Cantonese film industry geared toward turning out product quickly and cheaply (locked, as it was, in competition with the increasingly dominant--and considerably more lavishly funded--Mandarin language studios) The Black Rose is to some extent restricted to the limited, minimally dressed sets typical of Cantonese films at the time. Though these lack the lush, finicky detail found in those of his Shaw Brothers films, Chor does manage some expressive design flourishes--the gigantic abstract painting that covers an entire wall of one set, a particularly oppressive looking grandfather clock, and the sleek and up-to-the-minute mod furniture favored by the films protagonists among them--that contribute to The Black Rose having a far more stylized look than might be expected. And what the film lacks in art direction, Chor more than compensates for with a surfeit of old school Hollywood style. There is a rich, beckoning depth to his tight black and white compositions, and, when he is filming his attractive stars, he renders them so luminous that all incidental detail becomes irrelevant. One need only look at some of the other, comparatively slap-dash products of the industry at the time to see why The Black Rose--with it's lustrous, handsome and meticulously crafted look--was a solid stand-out, as well as a big box office hit.     The Black Rose opens with a costume party hosted at the home of a wealthy and beautiful Hong Kong socialite, Chan Mei-yu. The film's lines of combat are drawn immediately--and none too subtly--by the device of having the revelers, all members of the moneyed elite, cavorting about in an assortment of grotesque children's Halloween masks (in lieu of the frilly period costumes and domino masks you'd typically see in one of these "fancy dress ball" scenes). Suddenly the room erupts in panic as a black clad, hooded female figure makes a dramatic appearance on the landing above the dance floor. It's The Black Rose, a Robin Hood-like cat burglar who preys on the rich for the benefit of the city's poor and downtrodden. As a handy squad of police officers swarm to apprehend her, the mystery woman laughs and cheerfully removes her mask. Much to the relief of the assembled fat cats, it's the lovely hostess herself, simply sporting a topical costume for the occasion. The joke here, of course, is that, while her well-heeled guests play at dress-up, the true nature of Chan Mei-yu's masquerade is that she is posing as one of them--for in reality she actually is The Black Rose, a sworn enemy to everything they stand for. Or, rather, Chan Mei-yu is half of The Black Rose. Because, unknown to the public at large, The Black Rose is actually two people. Chan Mei-yu's younger sister, Chan Mei-ling, also wears the Rose's black suit and hood, and alternates between going solo (and thus providing her sister with an alibi should anyone suspect her) and working in tandem with Chan Mie-yu under that guise. By means of this ruse the both of them manage not only to avoid detection, but to also on occasion overwhelm some chosen mark by appearing to come at him from both sides at once. Out of costume, the two gamely play at being a sort of swinging sixties Chinese version of the Hilton sisters. By all appearances the subjects of a pampered and frivolous existence, they spend their downtime cheerfully separating the gang of horny old saps who court them from their cash, giving nothing more than a wink in return.     One thing that is obvious from all of Chor Yuen's work is that he was a director who was very good at--and who clearly enjoyed--working with actresses. Well drawn and powerful female characters were a staple of his films, and he clearly knew how to feature and photograph the women who played them to best advantage. The Black Rose provides an ideal showcase for this particular strength, as the director here works with a pair of especially talented and charismatic female stars in the lead roles. Playing Chan Mei-yu is the radiant Nam Hung, an actress who had already worked in front of the camera for Chor on several occasions, and who, in addition to starring here, also acted as co-producer with him on The Black Rose. (She would also soon afterwards become his wife.) Here she does a winning job of personifying the film's winking sense of fun, while at the same time conveying the gravitas appropriate to a woman whose past has driven her to follow such an extraordinary calling. In the role of Chan Mei-ling is teen star Connie Chan, an actress who, having spent her childhood working in Cantonese Opera, would go on to become the biggest star of 1960s Cantonese cinema. Though Chan's singing abilities don't get a showcase here (The Black Rose is the first film of hers I've seen in which she doesn't bust out with some Chinese language version of an American pop hit), her considerable athletic and martial arts abilities are shown off to fine effect. Chan, who often played male roles in her films, brings a scrappy, tomboy energy to the part which nicely embodies the thrill-seeking, mischievous side of the Black Rose persona. As such, she provides a complimentary contrast to the womanly sensuality of Nam Hung--and to the conflicted and longing side that becomes increasingly apparent in the character Nam Hung portrays.     Rounding out the lead cast of The Black Rose is Patrick Tse, an actor whose prettiness threatens to eclipse that of even Nam Hung and Connie Chan (an attribute not lost on Chor Yuen, who seems to pause the action for a swooning take on Tse's delicate features whenever he shows up on screen). Tse plays Cheung Mun-fu, an insurance investigator who comes on the scene when a precious jewel belonging to one of Chan Mei-yu's wealthy party guests turns up missing. The jewel's owner has named The Black Rose as the culprit, but the truth is that he himself had secreted the jewel away with the intent of fraudulently claiming the insurance money. However, the Chan sisters, taking umbrage at this attempted frame-up, decided to make him good on his word and took the jewel outright. Cheung Mun-fu soon comes to suspect Chan Mei-yu of being The Black Rose, but this may in reality be just an excuse to stay close, as his obsessive nocturnal tailing of her soon takes on a distinctly erotic cast. The attraction is mutual, it turns out, and the tentative romantic dodge and feint between the two comes to be a central part of The Black Rose's second half. Here the tone of The Black Rose is most recognizably similar to that of many of Chor Yuen's wuxia films, its atmosphere permeated by an over-bleed of stunted romantic desire as its protagonists' deeper longings run up against their sense of an honor bound, solitary personal destiny. When Chan Mei-yu lures Tse into a chaste, isolated tryst within the gothic ruin of a deserted old house, its the type of moment--pregnant with a woozy, unfulfilled yearning--that the director has made a hallmark of his style. Mei-yu finally surrenders to her feelings, revealing her identity to the investigator, and it's a move which ends up putting him in mortal danger, and he is soon at the mercy of a gang of the Rose's enemies. This leads to a climax that features the helpless Tse in the type of kinky bondage tableau Western-made films of the time usually reserved for their heroines--as, meanwhile, the two fearless female heroes race to effect his rescue.     The impact that The Black Rose had on Hong Kong cinema can be traced through the numerous knock-offs, re-imaginings and homages to the film that have sprung up in its wake over the intervening years. In addition to The Spy With My Face, a direct sequel which Chor Yuen shot with the same cast the following year, the film's success inspired the Shaw Brothers studio to produce a virtual remake--though in period drag--in the form of 1968's The Black Butterfly (which was itself remade by Pearl Chang Ling as Dark Lady of Kung Fu). The 1990s saw the release of a series of successful features spoofing the film, which in turn inspired the 2004 Twins vehicle Protege de la Rose Noire. Strangely, however, while most of the aforementioned titles are readily available on DVD or VCD, The Black Rose itself--along with its sequel--remains M.I.A. It may just be that there is little interest in Hong Kong films of this vintage among today's film consumers, but the availability of a number of Connie Chan's other 1960s films on disc would suggest otherwise. Hopefully the growing interest in Chor Yuen's work in the West, stoked by Celestial's release on DVD of his Shaw Brothers work, will ultimately lead to it getting the reverential, extra-laden DVD treatment it so deserves. For it to be otherwise would be a true shame, because the film is a true classic of Asian genre cinema--a tightly crafted package of wit, charm, excitement and romance wrapped in a swath of sophisticated sixties style and delivered with the distinctive touch of a true master. Labels: Country: Hong Kong, Director: Chu Yuan, Stars: Connie Chan, Year: 1965 posted by Todd at 10:05 AM | 0 Comments Wednesday, July 02, 2008Murder Plot Release Year: 1979Country: Hong Kong Starring: David Chiang Da-Wei, Ching Li, Wong Chung, Chen Ping, Danny Lee Sau-Yin, Candice Yu On-On, Lo Lieh, Cheng Miu, Ngaai Fei, Lam Fai-Wong, Goo Goon-Chung, Lau Wai-Ling, Wai Wang, Johnny Wang Lung-Wei, Teresa Ha Ping, Yeung Chi-Hing, Chiang Nan Writers: Chor Yuen, Ku Long Director: Chor Yuen Cinematographer: Wong Chit Action Director: Tong Gai Music: Frankie Chan Fan-Kei Producer: Runme Shaw If memory serves, the thing that first brought me to Teleport City was a Google search I did for the Hong Kong director Chor Yuen. At the time I was in the early stages of a now full-blown obsession with Chor, specifically with the adaptations of Ku Long's wuxia novels that he filmed for Shaw Brothers during the late seventies and early eighties. Given that obsession, you might think -- now that I'm living the dream and actually writing for Teleport City -- I would have gotten around to covering one of those films. But, the truth is that I've been a little intimidated by the prospect. You see, I enjoy those films on such a pre-verbal level that I fear words will fail me in communicating just what it is that I love about them so much. Fortunately, Keith has already done a lot of the heavy lifting for me by covering some of Chor's better known, more revered films like Clans of Intrigue and The Magic Blade, which affords me the opportunity to turn my attention to one of the lesser-known, perhaps not quite as accomplished, but none-the-less thoroughly enjoyable films from this chapter in his career. You see? Baby steps. Chor Yuen came to Shaw Brothers with deep roots in the Cantonese language cinema of Hong Kong. His father, Cheung Wood-Yau, had been a popular actor in Cantonese film, which makes it no surprise that Chor, as a young student, turned to performing in films himself when he needed to make ends meet. Being a quick learner, and well aware that he lacked the qualifications of a successful leading man, Chor turned his attention to work behind the camera, and soon went from being an assistant director to directing his own films. During this period in his career, while working for the studio Kong Ngee Co. -- as well as through an independent company that he established with his wife, the actress Nam Hung -- Chor specialized in social realist dramas and romances, mostly small-scale films that focused on characters and relationships rather than action. But he also broke new ground with his 1965 hit The Black Rose, one of Hong Kong's first contemporary action films to incorporate modish elements inspired by the Bond films and TV series like The Avengers.     As the sixties neared their close, the Cantonese language film industry was in steep decline. Given that its product was mostly limited to a local audience, it simply couldn't compete with the comparatively lush production values seen in the Mandarin productions coming out of Cathay and Shaw. In addition to that, the new style of action films being created over at Shaw -- specifically the violent, fast-paced and decidedly male-driven films of Chang Cheh -- had come to be favored by audiences who'd grown weary of the strictly female-centered films that had previously dominated Hong Kong's screens, and which were the bread and butter of the Cantonese industry. Given that the figure of the female warrior is even today still something of a kinky novelty in Western pop culture, this is something that's hard for me to get my head around, but it seems that HK audiences of the sixties were basically saying, "Aw Jeez, not another heroic female swordsman, for Christ's sake! How about a guy for a change?" And so, out went the chaste and chivalrous ladies of the sword played by Connie Chan Po Chu and Josephine Siao, and in came the shirtless, glistening torsos of Wang Yu, Ti Lung and David Chiang, all ready to display their gory contents in response to an opponent's sufficiently savage blows. Chor, rightly or wrongly, always considered himself above all a commercial director, one who survived by following the prevailing trends. And so, despite having a no doubt deep affection for the industry that raised him, he read the writing on the wall and headed over to the Mandarin language studios. His first stop was Cathay, where, in 1970, he would make his first swordplay film, Cold Blade. Then, later that same year, he went on to begin his long and prolific relationship with the Shaws. His first effort for that studio, Duel For Gold, was another swordplay drama, but one that made a distinctly gritty departure from the displays of honor and nobility that had characterized wuxia cinema up to that point, possessed instead of a cynical, morally ambiguous tone that was more in keeping with the new cinema being made in the States by the young mavericks of the new Hollywood. The film impressed Shaw Brothers boss Run Run Shaw -- as it also did, reportedly, Chang Cheh -- and went on to modest box office success. After next ushering Cantonese film superstar Connie Chan Po Chu both into Mandarin cinema and out of her film career with The Lizard, Chor delivered a more resounding hit with his Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan, a film very much in the vein of the "one part art, one part exploitation" type of female-driven period revenge films that were coming out of Japan at the time.     Despite having tasted some success with his early forays into Mandarin cinema, Chor had not forgotten his roots, and when it came time, in 1973, to adapt the popular stage play The House of 72 Tenants for the screen, he insisted, over Run Run Shaw's objections, that it be shot in its original Cantonese. The film went on to become one of the years' biggest hits in Hong Kong, out-grossing Enter The Dragon, and in the process performed the seemingly impossible task of reviving Cantonese cinema at a time when no production in the language had been made for over a year. Now an acclaimed director with a major hit on his hands, Chor was in a position to do whatever he wanted. And what he wanted to do, apparently, was spend the next two years filming a series of tearjerkers adapted from popular television dramas that would all prove to be miserable failures at the box office. After capping off this string of duds with nine months of inactivity, Chor was desperate to get his career back on track again. Deciding to try his hand at swordplay films again, he began work on a series of screenplays based on the popular wuxia novels of Ku Long. Ku Long, like Chor, was known for spicing up his works within the traditional genre by incorporating contemporary elements, and so his tales of swordsman heroes in the vaguely medieval setting of the mythical Martial World were marked by James Bond-inspired gimmickry and noirish notes derived from contemporary detective thrillers. He was also very prolific, churning out more than sixty novels before drinking himself to death at the age of 48, which gave Chor plenty to work with. Despite this, however, Run Run Shaw was unimpressed with Chor's efforts. Fortunately, an even more prolific scribe, Shaw Brothers' screenwriting dynamo Ni Kuang, steered Chor toward a more recent book of Ku Long's, the 1974 novel Meteor, Butterfly and Sword, which the author had based on The Godfather. Chor turned the novel into Killer Clans, a massive hit that resulted in Shaw Brothers putting him on permanent Ku Long duty for the next several years.     By the time of making Murder Plot -- the film I'm addressing here -- in 1979, Chor Yuen had already filmed a full thirteen adaptations of Ku Long's novels. As a result, his approach to these films had become what some might uncharitably describe as "formulaic" (Chor himself has as much as said so, saying in an interview that "Without the maple leaves and dry ice, I'd be lost"). To me, however, that phrase is misleading, because it suggests something routine -- and Chor's approach, while consistent from film to film, is something uniquely his own, utterly distinct from what anyone -- apart from his imitators -- was doing at the time. So let's just settle for saying that Chor's style -- at least in terms of his wuxia films -- had "crystallized" by this point, which indeed it had. At the same time, Chor had yet to weary of his subject matter to the point that he would by the early eighties, at which point some signs of laxness began to creep into the work, along with some grasping attempts to mix things up with new gimmicks (for instance, an increased -- and overmatched -- reliance on special effects in response to the success of Tsui Hark's Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain), a trend which wasn't helped by the reduced budgets he had to work with as a result of the Shaw studio's declining fortunes during that decade. All of these factors, then, make Murder Plot an excellent example of that style at its peak, when it was at its most refined and time-tested. Trends being what they are, audience interest in Chang Cheh's testosterone-fueled punch-fests had begun to wane by the late seventies, and, as such, Chor Yuen, through his Ku Long films, came to emerge as sort of an anti-Chang Cheh. Where Chang's films could be technically sloppy and homely in appearance, Chor's were meticulous, even fussy in their detail, and exhibited an unerring dedication to the presentation of visual beauty in every shot. Where Chang's action highlighted power, speed and violence, Chor's, while equally frenetic, showed an emphasis on elegance and grace that blended suitably within the dreamlike settings he created. Chor, perhaps in allegiance to his background in Canto cinema, also to some extent reasserted the primacy of the female in his films by having richly drawn female characters fight against and alongside his male heroes on equal footing - an aspect of HK film that Chang had effectively tried to banish via his arguably misogynist filmmaking ethos. In fact, the mere presence of dimensional characters -- as well as the aspiration to emotional resonance beyond simply the clanging reverberations of vengeance and bloodlust -- put Chor's martial arts films at odds with most of Chang's work, and would be a hallmark of his style throughout the Ku Long films.     Another aspect of Chor's style in regard to these films is a result of the source material, as well as the manner in which that material collided with the restrictions that Chor had to work within. Among the defining characteristics of Ku Long's wuxia novels are that they are generally lengthy (The Untold History of the Fighting World, the 1965 book on which Murder Plot is based, comprises 44 chapters), dense with back-story, filled with an astonishing number of characters, and feature plots rich in complex intrigues, frequent switching back-and-forth of allegiances, and layered identities. To a film, each of Chor's adaptations shows the strain of having to compress these narratives to fit within the standard Shaw ninety minute format -- while, of course, at the same time having to include the requisite heavy amount of martial arts action, which in Murder Plot's case translates into a rollicking, intricately-staged swordfight at least every five minutes. As a result, these films -- despite the languid exterior that Chor's fog-drenched, and unnaturally-lit art direction presents -- appear to be flying by in fast motion, with the actors spitting huge chunks of expository dialog at each other with tongue twisting alacrity, and scenes careening into one another as if in a rush to the finish line. In the case of Murder Plot, I was taken by surprise when it became clear that the film's events were meant to be taking place over the course of several months, because their presentation made it seem as if they could just as likely have taken place in an afternoon. While such hurried pacing provides the films with a crackling energy, it also in some instances makes it tempting to throw up your hands and give up on following their plots altogether. It's even advisable in some cases, given that some necessary connective tissue was occasionally stripped away in the course of the narrative downsizing. And even so, these films still offer more than enough to enjoy. With their beautiful sets, intoxicating atmospherics, engaging characters, eccentric gimmickry, and exquisitely staged action set pieces, they are a standout example of the type of cinema that one can immerse oneself in without having to resort to the brute mechanics of comprehension. That said, in the case of Murder Plot, the effort is worth making, because among Chor's wuxia films it is actually one of the more linear and transparent in terms of story -- a fact that, once you've watched it, might scare you off of ever dipping into any of the others.     As I alluded to earlier, Chor liked to infuse his wuxia films -- just as Ku Long did with his novels -- with elements gleaned from contemporary pop culture, and among the sources that he drew from on more than one occasion were the Spaghetti Westerns. The Magic Blade in particular owes a special debt to Sergio Leone's Dollar films, in that it presented Ti Lung as basically a Martial World incarnation of The Man With No Name, replicated right down to his ragged poncho. Murder Plot's opening pays tribute to this source in equal measure, showing us a shadowy, black clad figure, hat brim pulled low over his face, leading his horse into a seemingly deserted town under the cover of night, a corpse draped across the animal's back. As he nears a large manor, the figure stops at a wall on which a number of wanted posters are displayed, tearing down the one that pertains to his recent prey. Soon we will learn that this man is the hero Shen Lang, and the fact that he is portrayed by Shaw superstar David Chiang sets Murder Plot apart from all other of Chor's wuxia films. Of course, Chiang had an at least tangential connection to the other films, thanks to Ti Lung, his frequent co-star in Chang Cheh's films, and his younger half-brother Derek Yee both being frequently cast as their leads, but Murder Plot was to be the only one that he starred in himself. Having had the requisite brief scuffle with the guards outside Man Yi Mansion (judging from these movies, the Martial World custom is for everyone, upon first meeting, to immediately engage in a sword fight, often for no apparent reason and regardless of the parties' allegiances), Shen Lang is ushered inside, where we learn that he has been summoned, along with the six top heroes of the province's main schools, by the master Li Chang Chun. Li Chang Chun addresses the group, speaking of a battle that occurred fifteen years previous in which 900 of the Martial World's top heroes died fighting for possession of an apocryphal manual containing the secrets to an allegedly invincible fighting style. The rumor of that manual, it turns out, was spread with the very intention of provoking such a battle (a battle that, by the way, is described in the novel in harrowing detail, but here dispensed with in a couple of rushed lines of dialog), and as a result, the perpetrator, through eliminating a large number of his competitors in one go, has come that much closer to dominance over the territory. That perpetrator, according to Li Chang Chun, appears to be a mysterious figure known as The Happy King, who, in the years since the battle, has displayed knowledge of secret techniques previously known only to certain of the battle's vanquished combatants.     Soon after this revelation is presented, a young woman barges into the meeting and, as is the custom, engages in a brief sword fight with all present except Shen Lang. It turns out that she is Shen Lang's fiancé, Zhu Qi Qi, the daughter of a wealthy tycoon. Shen Lang, we learn, at some earlier point left Zhu Qi Qi behind, saying only that he had to go on a mission to "find someone" and that he would be gone for several years, and Zhu Qi Qi, having grown impatient for his return, decided to come after him. Shen Lang will later, with an amusing combination of weariness and resignation, describe Zhu Qi Qi by saying that she is "unruly, headstrong, and likes to create trouble". But in addition to conforming in some respects to the stereotype of the pampered, tantrum-prone rich girl, Zhu Qi Qi is also a brave and accomplished sword-wielding hero in her own right. As portrayed by Chor's favorite leading lady, Ching Li, she is also Murder Plot's most endearing character. You get the sense that she's exactly the kind of woman that a guy like Shen Lang, who comes off as a bit smug and humorless, needs in his life, and you can't help liking and respecting him all the more for loving her. Their relationship, despite a lot of playful bickering, is clearly one of mutual respect, and with the two of them sharing equally in pursuing the mystery at the film's center, Murder Plot ends up playing out as sort of a martial arts version of The Thin Man, a conceit which ends up being one of the films most appealing aspects. It's true that many of Chor's wuxia films are infused with a sense of melancholy, a reflection of the tragic web that the Martial World's heroes, honor bound to an eternal struggle for dominance, find themselves trapped in. Probably the most stark examples of this are the Sentimental Swordsman films, in which Ti Lung portrays a consumptive, alcoholic hero unable to escape his gloomy past. On the other end of the spectrum are films like Clans of Intrigue and Legend of the Bat, which feature the worldly, swashbuckling hero Chu Liu-hsiang -- also played by Ti Lung -- that, despite having some dark, supernatural undercurrents, play out more as rollicking adventures yarns. Murder Plot fits in comfortably alongside these last mentioned films, and serves as a fine example of this strain in Chor's work. While other of his attempts to meld elements of detective story and swordplay drama were less successful, here he does so to great effect, while at the same time providing an enveloping atmosphere of mystery and romance for those elements to play out in. From interviews with Chor you get the clear impression that he never considered himself anything more than an entertainer, and -- whether you agree with that or not -- in that sense he is here at the top of his game.     Having introduced its main characters and central conflict in record time, Murder Plot proceeds to really kick its action into gear when Shen Lang, Zhu Qi Qi, the master Li Chang Chun and the six heroes travel to Yi City. They have heard reports that the Happy King's ill-gotten treasure is stashed there, and upon arriving are shocked to find the streets clogged with a procession of coffins. They are told that a rumor had spread of a fabulous treasure housed in a nearby tomb, and that the many swordsmen who rushed to plunder it were killed by way of poison painted on the tomb's door. Shen Lang, Zhu Qi Qi, and the six heroes go to the tomb and, immediately upon entering, see a number of their entourage killed by a series of booby traps hidden within. Shen Lang pushes further into the crypt, where he encounters and fights with Jin Wu Wang (Wong Chung), who is the Happy King's treasurer by title, but, of course, also a master swordsman. Though they are apparently on opposite sides, the two express a mutual respect, and forge a temporary truce when they find themselves, along with Zhu Qi Qi, momentarily trapped inside the crypt. Upon emerging they find that the six heroes are nowhere to be seen and, since they were the only ones known to be in the tomb with them at the time, are accused of foul play by Li Chang Chun. Shen Lang asks that Li Chang Chun grant him a month's time to prove his innocence, and the master agrees. Later that night, Zhu Qi Qi trails a procession of ghostly, white-garbed women to the cavernous lair of the mysterious Madam Wang, where she finds the six heroes suspended in some kind of comatose state. This is the result of the exotic secret weapon -- and every one of these movies has at least one -- wielded by Madam Wang's son Lian Hua, the "Enticing Ice Arrow", which is a finger-sized shard of ice that Lian Hua tosses like a dart. (Alert viewers will note that Goo Goon-Chung, the actor playing Lian Hua, looks to be about the same age as Chen Ping, the actress playing his mom, the result of Shaw Brothers apparently not having any actresses over thirty-five contracted to them.) After briefly mixing it up with Lian Hua, Zhu Qi Qi escapes without having found out exactly why Madam Wang wanted to kidnap the six heroes in the first place. Shortly thereafter, she comes upon an old crone (played again by an actress obviously still in her prime) who, for reasons I was never really able to sort out, drugs her with poisoned smoke, ties her up, and throws her into a coffin with another bound young women named Bai Fei Fei (played by Chor regular, Candice Yu On-On, who is simultaneously super cute and kind of weird looking). Luckily, Zhu Qi Qi has around this same time had a chance encounter with Panda, the sooty, rag-wearing chief of the Beggars Clan (as played by Danny Lee, forever beloved by Teleport City readers for his starring roles in such singular Shaw Brothers ventures as Inframan, The Mighty Peking Man and The Oily Maniac). Panda took the opportunity to nick Zhu Qi Qi's family pendant -- sort of a Martial World ATM card enabling him access to her family's wealth -- and when, later, Shen Lang and Jin Wu Wang catch him with it, he leads them to where Zhu Qi Qi is imprisoned.     After yet another frenetic scuffle, Panda, Shen Lang and Jin Wu Wang make peace and cooperate to free Zhu Qi Qi and Bai Fei Fei. Bai Fei Fei tells them that she was sold to the old woman after being taken from outside the territory, and that she is now far from home as a result. Shen Lang tells her that they will escort her back, as they are going that way in their pursuit of the Happy King, a pledge which leaves the jealous Zhu Qi Qi audibly displeased. Panda, having become immediately smitten with Bai Fei Fei, also offers to come along. And at this point, with Shen Lang and Zhu Qi Qi traveling the road on the way to meet with a yet unseen ruler of mythical power, gathering up forces from among a ragtag band of characters with disparate motives within a phantasmagorical setting, Murder Plot really started to remind me of The Wizard of Oz. Danny Li, in particular, with his combination of bravery, affable goofiness and canine loyalty struck me as an all-in-one stand-in for all three of Dorothy's companions. And while Zhu Qi Qi is definitely no Dorothy, Bai Fei Fei, as a wide eyed innocent trying to find her way back to a home that circumstances beyond her control have taken her away from, fits the bill quite well. After Jin Wu Wang takes his leave of the crew -- giving Shen Lang the standard "next time we meet, it may not be as friends" speech -- Zhu Qi Qi leads the rest to Madame Wang's lair, where another fast-paced fight is engaged with Madame Wang and Lian Hua. Madame Wang remains mysterious about her motives, but does allow that she kidnapped the heroes in order to draw Shen Lang to her, though without saying for what purpose. Before being routed, Lian Hua manages to make off with Zhu Qi Qi's family pendant and, after freeing the heroes, the group heads off toward Fen Yan City, the home of Zhu Qi Qi's family, to intercept him before he can drain her family's fortune. Once there, Zhu Qi Qi, acting on her own, tracks down Lian Hua and, after a furious fight, manages to temporarily paralyze him by striking one of his "pressure points" (another practice that you will get very used to seeing after watching a few of these movies). Despite this, Zhu Qi Qi gets a dressing down from Shen Lang, because he had asked her to stay with Bai Fei Fei at the family mansion and protect her. In a fit of jealous pique, Zhu Qi Qi takes off on her own with the frozen Lian Hua in tow, telling her brother in law that she is doing this so that Shen Lang will "know he should have me in his heart". This leaves Shen Lang, Panda and Bai Fei Fei to trail after her, trying to guess at her ultimate destination.     After a roadside ambush by the Happy King's wine master and his acrobatic, jug-balancing bodyguards, a scene follows in which Bai Fei Fei, apparently feeling responsible for driving a wedge between Shen Lang and Zhu Qi Qi, tells a stricken Panda that she will be following her own course from this point on. By this time, Chor was shooting his films exclusively on interior sets, even going to the extreme of sometimes using miniatures for establishing shots to avoid the chance of anything conspicuously natural interfering with the fully enclosed world that he was creating. It was in this manner that he provided an environment in which the dream-like logic of his stories could play out unconstrained by any reference points to the "real world". It also allowed him to, in painterly fashion, use his settings to express mood - a practice of which Bai Fei Fei's farewell scene is a stirring example. The scene plays out more as one idealized in memory than an actual occurrence, with the impossibly deep autumnal hues of the rural surroundings rendered gilt-edged by the dying light bleeding through the gauzy veil of mist above. It would be incredibly sad even if Danny Lee and Candice Yu-On On were to do absolutely nothing, because the landscape they inhabit itself is an expression of heartbreak. After Bai Fei Fei's departure, Shen Lang and Panda finally catch up with Zhu Qi Qi at Shanghai Gate. Unfortunately, once they have reunited, Lian Hua -- who has been subjected to the humiliation of being dressed up as Zhu Qi Qi's old granny -- escapes from his paralysis and overpowers the three. Upon finding themselves back at Madam Wang's lair, they are finally filled in on the Madam's true motives. It seems she is the Happy King's ex-wife, and that she wants Shen Lang to protect the king from the other Martial Heroes who are after his head, so that she alone can enjoy revenge against him for some unspecified wrong. To insure Shen Lang's compliance, Lian Hua renders Panda and Zhu Qi Qi comatose with his Enticing Ice Arrows, saying that he will not provide the antidote until Shen Lang has completed his mission. Having no other choice, and at Madam Wang's direction, Shen Lang tracks the Happy King to a gambling house called the Happy Forest -- and he's Lo Lieh! A very James Bond-inspired scene follows in which Shen Lang and the King size one another up over the gaming table, after which David Chiang gets to show off his empty-handed kung fu skills in a sequence where Shen Lang defends the King against a gang of attackers who storm the casino.     After this, Shen Lang makes the case for the King to hire him on as a bodyguard, and soon finds himself within the walls of the palace. There he is surprised to find that the concubine the King is on the eve of marrying is none other than Bai Fei Fei. Bai Fei Fei will then be the first of many of Murder Plot's characters to reveal that she is not what she had previously represented herself to be. In fact, the final fifteen minutes of the movie -- in classic Chor Yuen/Ku Long fashion --render false much of what I've recounted so far. But for me to reveal more than that would spoil the fun -- or the frustration, depending on how you tend to react to having a laboriously-woven narrative rug pulled out from under you at the last moment. In either case, what really matters is that Murder Plot puts paid to its real obligations by seeing out it's final moments with a lavish sword and kung fu battle -- choreographed by Chor's regular collaborator, the great Tong Gai -- that sees all of the characters whirling and flipping across the screen at a pace that makes the rest of the movie seem stately by comparison. If you have lost the thread of the plot by this point, chances are that you won't end up caring. And if you do, a painless remedy is at hand, because Murder Plot is so crammed with nuance and detail that a second viewing can only yield further enjoyment. I imagine that it's pretty obvious that I love Murder Plot. It looks beautiful, the actors and the characters that they play are incredibly appealing, the action is wonderfully staged and literally non-stop, and the atmosphere is so rich with romance and intrigue that it's enough to send you into a ninety minute swoon. Still, it's far from my favorite of Chor Yuen's wuxia films, which should give you some idea of just how deep the damage goes with me when it comes to these movies. The world that Chor creates in them is, simply put, one that I never tire of visiting, and I'm happy that his prolific output has provided me with ample opportunities to do so. So, upon consideration, maybe I do agree that, with time, Chor Yuen's Ku Long films became somewhat routine and predictable. And by that I mean that they are routinely awesome and predictably rewarding, much like a visit to a beloved old friend - which, last I checked, was not a bad thing at all. Labels: Country: Hong Kong, Director: Chu Yuan, Martial Arts: Wu Xia, Stars: Lo Lieh, Studio: Shaw Bros, Year: 1979 posted by Todd at 11:25 PM | 10 Comments Saturday, May 10, 2008The Seventh Curse Release Year: 1986Country: Hong Kong Starring: Siu-Hou Chin, Maggie Cheung, Dick Wei, Sau-Lai Tsui, Chow Yun Fat, Elvis Tsui, Ken Boyle, Yuen Chor. Writer: Daniel Ullman Director: Lam Ngai Kai Cinematographer: Chiu-Lam Ko Music: Gam Wing Shing Producer: Raymond Chow, Leonard Ho, Jing Wong Original Title: Yuan Zhen-Xia yu Wei Si-Li Alternate Title: Dr. Yuen and Wisely Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us Suit work! It's the two words that all young aspiring actors dread, but hey, when the rent is due and the cupboard's bare, a person's gotta do, what a person's gotta do, right? But where do you draw the line? Is appearing at your local metropolitan shopping centre as a Mighty Morphin Power Ranger acceptable? How about a cartoon character at a Hollywood theme park? Sure it's all show business, but walking around all day with a giant fibreglass cat's head on your shoulders can hardly be called acting. But I guess nobody can see the actor's face -- they get paid for the gig -- and they can keep auditioning for the big role that one day will make them a star. Then there's maybe the one or two actors who enjoy the anonymity of suit work. They enjoy being a part of the creative process, giving a performance, and at the end of the day, going home to their family without the pressures of celebrity. At this stage I feel an urge to talk about Barney The Dinosaur, but I will refrain at this stage.
But suit work doesn't belong solely to the world of children's entertainment. Where would we be without David Prowse, Peter Mayhew and Anthony Daniels all kitted out in the Star Wars movies? ...hang on, maybe they are kids films too! How about the guys who played aliens in Alien and Predator? And who can forget King Kong and Godzilla. Finally, where would Hong Kong cinema be without the guy who played the Ancient Ancestor in The Seventh Curse? Oh, you're not too familiar with that one...allow me to elaborate. Welcome to weird eighties Hong Kong horror. Pardon my French, ladies and gentlemen, but The Seventh Curse is one fucked up movie. Oh man, this film is all over the place, but at the same time, it is an incredibly enjoyable movie experience, one that I couldn't take my eyes off. I had no idea where the story was going and what was going to happen next. By the 22 minute mark, when the first of the many truly 'What the fffff...' moments occur, this film has you totally within it's long, spidery, and sometimes slimy grasp. The film opens at an elaborate cocktail party, with famous novelist, Mr. Yi being asked where he gets all the ideas for his fantastical stories. He says at parties like this. He says a good story starts with a good wine, and then begins to tell the story of Dr Yuan and Dr Wei -- both of whom happen to be at the party. The film then jumps to a siege situation. Police have surrounded a building, which houses six armed bandits and a group of hostages. One of these bandits is a sharpshooter and he shoots the negotiating police officer with the megaphone. This results in all police officers opening up on the building with a variety of weapons. In the firefight, the police accidentally shoot one of the hostages. The bullet doesn't kill him, but he has a heart attack. The bandits call for a cease fire, and ask that a doctor be sent in. The police call for the courageous Dr. Yuan (Siu-Hou Chin). The police ask Yuan, once inside, to plant a smoke bomb for them, so they can storm the building and save the day. Yuan agrees, and to assist him, a policewoman is to accompany him, posing as a nurse. Nosey reporter Tsai Hung (Maggie Chung), sees an opportunity for a scoop, and clocks the policewoman on the head with a brick and then assumes her nurses apparel and follows Dr. Yuan into the building. Of course Tsai Hung's meddling causes complication, but ultimately the smoke bomb goes off -- the police storm the building and kick the shit out of the bad guys. For his part Yuan is a hero, and now Tsai Hung wants to do a story on him. He is not interested and heads home. At home he has two surprises in store for him. The first is that there is a naked woman in his bathroom. And second, and not quite so welcome is a mysterious, black clad kung-fu guy named Heh Lung (Dick Wei). Heh Lung kicks Yuan's ass all around his home, destroying glass tables, bookshelfs, statues...everything and anything. But despite Heh Lung's aggressive and destructive demeanour, he is actually a friend and there to help Yuan. He says that Yuan has a 'blood spell' upon him, and will relapse soon. Yuan must go to Thailand. And he mentions that the girl has a 'ghost spell' on her. What girl? Yuan, at this stage, doesn't seem to comprehend what his ass-kicking friend is saying -- and we viewers are equally in the dark at this stage. Before leaving, Heh Lung also warns Yuan about having sex. This will only bring on the relapse of the 'blood curse' quicker.
After Heh Lung has left, Yuan ignores all warnings and engages in a bit of 'rumpy-pumpy' with his beautiful house guest. During their sexual encounter, strange things begin to happen to Yuan's leg. It is almost as if something is alive beneath the skin. Then all the veins begin to bulge, and then finally one of the veins erupts. Alarmed, Yuan seeks the advice of his rather comfortably dressed colleague Dr. Wei (Chow Yun Fan). Wei asks about the 'blood curse', and Yuan relates a story from one year ago... Yuan was part of a medical expedition to North Thailand, where they were searching for herbs that would benefit in the treatment of AIDS. The leader of the expedition, Professor (Ken Boyle) warms all members that they shouldn't wander off too far from the camp, because in a nearby camp is the Yunnan Maio Tribe. The Yunnan Maio are a worm tribe that specialises in witchcraft. So what does Yuan do? He wanders off from the camp. And at a rockpool, sees a beautiful tribeswoman, Ba Chu (Sau-Lai Tsui) swimming all but naked. Well the dialogue call her Ba Chu, but the subtitles call her 'Betsy'. Yuan is instantly smitten. He goes back to his camp and gathers a few friends, and they foolishly decide to pay a visit to the worm tribe's village. Every year, the worm tribe's ancient ancestor is awoken from his slumber, and is offered two people as a sacrifice. Overseeing the ritual is the Shaman, Aquala (Elvis Tsui). Aquala wants Ba Chu to be his mistress. When she refuses, he arranges for her to be one of the sacrificial victims. As Ba Chu is the daughter of the previous leader of the Yunnan Maio people, one tribesman speaks out against Aquala. However, the tribesman's act of dissent is short lived, as Aquala has a blood ghost hiding beneath his cloak. The blood ghost is a vicious worm muppet with sharp teeth. The muppet, er...blood ghost flies through the air onto the tribesman, and begins to chew on the guy's face and neck. Then the little blighter burrows into the guy's body and bursts out of the tribesman's chest. The scene is obviously inspired by Alien. Having successfully mutilated the objector, the blood ghost returns to Aquala and tucks itself, once again, behind his cape. After this spectacle, the rest of the Yunnan Maio people have no objections to Ba Chu's sacrifice. Yuan and the other men from the medical research team have been watching the ritual, and are a little shocked. Yuan decides to rescue Ba Chu, and he sends his colleagues back to camp to get weapons. Ba Chu and the other victim have been taken inside an underground temple. Before them, is a giant stone tomb. Aquala pours some blood on the lid of the tomb and then leaves the chamber. The stone lid flies off, and from a screen of smoke emerges the Ancient Ancestor. And I've got to admit, that Ancient Ancestor look exactly like you'd expect him to. He's a skeleton...albeit, a skeleton with glowing eyes. He rattles his way out of his crypt and makes his way towards Ba Chu. Just as it looks light it is curtains for Ba Chu, Yuan steps into the fray and engages in a kung-fu showdown with the ancient bag of bones. Yuan doesn't exactly win the fight, but somehow he manages to hold his own and free Ba Chu. Then both of them flee. Yuan drags Ba Chu back to the medical research expedition campsite, chased by legions of Yunnan Maio warriors. The tribesmen make short work of the medicos, leaving only the Professor and Yuan alive (and Ba Chu of course -- she is one of their own). The Professor and Yuan are dragged back to the temple, and are brought before Aquala, who plans amusing deaths for both men...amusing if you are a sick, twisted Shaman type, which Aquala is. For us normal people, it's all kinda icky. Firstly Aquala pours something on the Professors head. It acts instantly, and in seconds the Professor is screaming and ripping off his face, and if that isn't enough, then he rips open his stomach and a whole lot of worms wriggle out. I hope you're not reading this over dinner! Mmmm Mmmm.
Then Aquala turns his attention to Yuan. First he walks over to the body of a dead tribesman, burrows in and pulls something out -- I am not sure what it is -- but it can't be good. The Shaman then returns to Yuan and forces the objects down his throat. Immediately, the evil magic begins to work. Yuan begins to convulse and then blood blisters erupt all of his body. Aquala then leaves Yuan to die. This is the second time, that Aquala has just left people to die, without watching and checking to make sure. He is a lazy villain. As Yuan is left alone with no guards to watch him, he manages to escape, all the while; the giant blood blisters continue to burst. He makes his way to the rockpool where he first encountered Ba Chu and collapses. Ba Chu finds him. To revive him, she disrobes, produces a knife and cuts out a section of her left breast and feeds it to Yuan. Yuan passes out...and this is the end of the flashback sequence. We are back in Dr, Wei's office. Dr Wei tells Yuan what we already know -- he has a blood curse. As they sit in the office, Yuan experiences another rupture; his second. Wei tells him that he will suffer one blood curse a day, until the seventh day, when the curse will explode in his heart and he will die. As Yuan has already used up two days, he has five days to save himself. He immediately makes plans to go to Thailand and meet Heh Lung. It's now that Tsai Hung enters the room. She is Dr. Wei's cousin. Ever the persistent journalist, she is still after an interview with Yuan, and now insists upon going with Yuan to Thailand. Naturally both Yuan and Wei advise against it. But, you know, she's a reporter and heads along anyway. Now in Thailand the story rapidly moves along. I won't outline it all, or there will be no surprises left for those who choose to see this film, but needless to say Yuan soon teams up with Heh Lung and they start working out a way to cure Yuan's Blood Curse, and Ba Chu's Ghost Curse. And, luckily for them, there is a way. In a sacred temple, hidden in the eyes of a giant stone Buddha are two eggs filled with magic grain. Here the story moves into Indiana Jones territory, and as our two intrepid heroes start to climb the Bhudda, lot's of sharp pointing objects pop out. Not only do they have to contend with the booby traps, but also protecting the Buddha and the magic eggs is a team of butt-kicking monks. After a fast and furious battle on the statue, Yuan and Heh Lung retrieve the eggs. Yuan gobbles down the grain inside one, just in time as his seventh blood curse in about to erupt. So now Yuan is good. But you're probably wondering where the girls are during all this? Well they have got themselves captured by Aquala and now need rescuing. Aquala, the FIEND, has Tsai Hung and Ba Chu tied up, ready to be sacrificed to Ancient Ancestor. But in the nick of time, Yuan and Heh Lung arrive on the scene. Heh Lung knocks Aquala back onto the lid of Ancient Ancestor's tomb. Suddenly Ancient Ancestor's arm reaches out, grabs Aquala and drags him into the tomb, and no doubt carries out some nasty medical experiments on his body. Tsai Hung and Ba Chu are freed and the four of them make a run for it before Ancient Ancestor can climb out of the crypt once again. Strangely, and I never really got this, the large concrete tomb structure chases them. I mean it kinda drives down one of the passageways after them. Our four mortals are chased into a giant chamber, and the stone coffin races in after them. It crashes into a wall, the stone lid flies off and out creaks the skeletal form of Ancient Ancestor. But then strange things begin happening to Ancient Ancestor's bony structure. He starts to swell and mutate into another creature. This slimy full-bodied creature looks remarkably similar to the beasties in Alien, but I am sure no intentional plagiarism was meant -- just like the chest bursting scene earlier on -- it's just a lucky coincidence! At that moment, reinforcements sent by Dr. Wei arrive. They bring semi-automatic weapons and plenty of people for Ancient Ancestor to kill. This new incarnation of Ancient Ancestor is a lot more dexterous than the kung-fu skeleton. This bad boy can fly and has pointy claws to grab, slash and mutilate the disposable underlings in the chamber. Which he does, very effectively. I ask you, is there anything more threatening in filmdom than a 'man in a monster suit'? Yep! A 'man in a monster suit on wires'! This motherfucker just won't stand still and be killed like any normal monster. No, he has to jump and fly about the chamber. He's not one to give our heroes a sporting chance.
Now I don't want to give everything away, but of course this film has a slam bang ending which features the slimy rubber Ancient Ancestor, the killer muppet, and Chow Yun Fat. Yep, Dr. Wei finally does something. One of the running jokes throughout the movie, is that Dr. Wei never gets involved in the action. He continually says 'you go ahead, I'll join you later!' Well this is 'later', and Dr. Wei turns up carrying a bloody great rocket launcher. Here I have outlined large portions of the plot for you, but words cannot do the visuals justice. This is one film that has to be seen to be believed -- whether it be kung-fu skeletons, flying killer muppets, or the 'man in a monster suit on wires' -- this film has some crazy scenes. As you may have ascertained from the plot description, this film features quite a bit of gore. Those of you who have read any of my other reviews will know that I'm a squeamish kind of guy. But in this film, everything is so stylised and jaw-droppingly out there, I didn't feel put-off by the more bloody aspects of this film. There is a truly weird psychosexual undercurrent to The Seventh Curse, which cannot be ignored. If you think about it too much, you may find it a tad unsettling...then again, it may excite you and add to your viewing experience. In no particular order, here are some of the twisted sexual imagery that The Seventh Curse showcases. Firstly, when we first witness Yuan's blood curse, as I mentioned earlier, it arrives mid coitus. It manifests itself with Yuan's veins in his legs bulging, and ends with an orgasmic eruption over his partners face. It may be a mild horror moment, but it owes more to John Stagliano than John Carpenter. The next strange sequence involves Ba Chu's revival of Yuan, after the Shaman initially infects him with the blood curse. Ba Chu revives him by cutting out a section of her breast and feeding it to Yuan. I suppose in a clumsy symbolic way, a breast gives life by providing nutrition for babies, so eating a piece of a life giving breast, will er,...give life. But I don't think this film works on that level. I get the feeling, that the film-makers asked the question 'What will freak out the audience the most?' Then we come to Aquala, The Shaman of the Worm Tribe. The fact that they are a 'worm tribe' should tell you something? When we first meet Aquala he kills a tribesman by releasing the Blood Ghost upon him. They may calls this creature a Blood Ghost (well in the subtitles anyway), but the mini-beast looks like a cross between a penis and a tadpole. Aquala fires off this creature to do his killing for him. It almost a symbol of his extreme male potency -- all this from a character who has a squeaky effeminate voice. I could go on, but I don't really know what all this means. I am not a psychologist or a sex therapist, but it's all kinda creepy. It probably just means I have a diseased mind, but then again, I didn't make a film about a flying 'dick with teeth'. Well I have dragged this review into the gutter for long enough. It's time to climb out into the light and talk about the stunts. Those of you who have seen the film know what I am going to say, don't you! There's this scene where Yuan and Heh Lung drive their four-wheel-drive into the Worm Tribe Village. As the vehicle crashes through the huts and clotheslines, all the tribe members go scurrying for their lives. Unfortunately one of the 'scurryees' did not scurry quite quickly enough and is collected quite solidly by the four-wheel-drive. I don't know what the aftermath of this stunt was, but it can't be good.
If you'll pardon my very clumsy analogy, The Seventh Curse is a bit like the blood curse in the movie. Once you have seen this film, it slowly infects your whole body, and while your veins don't explode, there is a certain amount of 'verbal' eruption. I have told so many people about this film since I have seen it. I just want to infect everyone with it's dynamic exuberance. And I hope by reading this review, that some of that 'infection' has rubbed off on you. If you haven't seen The Seventh Curse, track down a copy, switch on your lava lamp, pull up your candy coloured beanbag, pour yourself a decent measure of Scotch (you're gonna need it) and prepare to be thoroughly entertained! Before signing off on this review, it's best that I go back to 'suit work' and 'men in monster suits', where we started. In a film like The Seventh Curse, you cannot hire any hack actor to jump into the monster suit, especially with the wire-work and stunts featured in the film. You need someone tall, strong and acrobatic. And you need them to be acrobatic while wearing a giant rubber suit. Whoever the guy is in The Seventh Curse, my hat comes off to him. He is a master of his profession. Sure he could have eked out a living playing a jolly green dinosaur at a local shopping centre, but instead chose to push the boundaries of suit work. His spinning, twisting, aerial display sets a standard that other men in monster suits can only help to emulate.  Labels: B-Masters Roundtable, Country: Hong Kong, Horror: Just Plain Weird, Year: 1986 posted by David at 6:26 PM | 3 Comments Friday, April 11, 2008The Dark Heroine Muk Lan-fa Also reviewed: The Dark Heroine Muk Lan-fa Shattered the Black Dragon Gang (1966),Lady in Black Cracks the Gate of Hell (1967) Release Year: 1966 Country: Hong Kong Starring: Suet Nei, Law Oi-Seung, Kenneth Tsang Kong, Roy Chiao Hung, David Chow Wing-Kwong, Sek Kin Director: Law Chi Writer: Lau Ling-Fung, Ni Kuang Cinematographer: Chan Kon Producer: Hoh Lai-Lai Availability: But it from YesAsia. Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us In the mid sixties, Hong Kong's Cantonese language film industry, faced with the emerging dominance of the considerably more well-funded and increasingly action-oriented Mandarin language Shaw Brothers Studio--as well as changing audience tastes in a rapidly modernizing society--found itself in need of retooling its output. Melodramas, romances and period martial arts films featuring heroic female swordsmen had been staples of the industry, but it now appeared that films reflecting the cosmopolitan tastes and hyperbolic pace of a more technologically driven age were in order. Of course, nothing celebrated speed, style and technology like the James Bond films, so it only made sense for Cantonese filmmakers to adapt the conventions of those films to their audience and capabilities. Furthermore, since Cantonese cinema was at the time largely driven by female stars--and appealed to a largely female audience--it also made sense that these culturally specific re-imaginings of the Bond film should feature young women as their protagonists. The resulting flood of films, made mostly between 1965 and 1968, left enough of a mark on their country's cinematic landscape to deserve a genre moniker all their own, and have since been retroactively dubbed the "Jane Bond" films by HK film critic Sam Ho. As anyone familiar with the names Cathy Gale or Emma Peel knows, the Jane Bond films didn't invent the idea of the high-kicking contemporary female action hero. Nor did they mark the beginning and end of such figures in Hong Kong cinema. In fact, these films can be seen as a clear precursor to the "Girls With Guns" genre that would become popular in HK during the late eighties and early nineties. But what makes them distinctive both from what came before and what followed is the fact that they were geared toward a predominately female audience and, as a result, presented their female protagonists more as role models than as repositories for male sexual fantasies. For proof of this, one need only compare the relatively chaste and buttoned-down heroine of the typical Jane Bond film to what's on view in the Shaw Brothers' anarchic Temptress of a Thousand Faces, a contemporary film that shares enough of those films' elements to seem like a pointed satire, but whose bawdy masculine sensibility plays out like a prolonged peek up Jane Bond's skirt.     Scenes from The Dark Heroine Muk Lan-fa (1966) One of the earliest examples of the Jane Bond film was Chor Yuen's immensely popular The Black Rose. That 1965 film starred Connie Chan Po-Chu, a young Cantonese Opera-trained actress who would soon become the biggest star in Cantonese cinema. It would follow that Chan would go on to star in a large number of the subsequent Jane Bond films (virtually claiming the fledgling genre as her own with the film Lady Bond), with the slack taken up by Josephine Siao, the star whose popularity most closely approached Chan's. One notable exception to this pattern was a series of films based on the Dark Heroine Muk Lan-fa pulp novels by author and prolific Shaw Brothers screenwriter Ni Kuang, which featured as their lead another young star of Cantonese cinema, Suet Nei. While still a star in her own right, Suet Nei was not the object of the type of mania that both Chan and Siao inspired (she was not, for instance, counted among the "Seven Cantonese Princesses", the official pantheon of Cantonese feminine screen royalty of which Chan and Siao were the primary members). She worked primarily in the wuxia genre, and on those occasions when she co-starred in such films with Connie Chan--such as in 1968's Dragon Fortress--she provided an effective counterpoint, projecting a grim, single-minded severity that starkly offset Chan's open-faced, swordsgirl-next-door persona. Though perhaps not quite as agile as some of her peers, her unsmiling intensity gave her a commanding physical presence that belied both her youth and diminutive stature. As such, there's a ruthlessness boiling just beneath the surface of her portrayal of the woman warrior that serves the Muk Lan-fa films well--especially as the series progressed and the producers figured out how to use her to best advantage.     Scenes from The Dark Heroine Muk Lan-fa (1966) Suet Nei's intensity gives the Muk Lan-fa films a drive and consistency that, more than any other element, distinguishes them in a genre that, while prolific, is pretty rigid in its conventions. The Jane Bond films of Connie Chan and Josephine Siao, for instance, are above all else Connie Chan and Josephine Siao films, and as such place those stars' likeability above considerations of narrative or consistent tone--a fact well illustrated by Chan and Siao's readiness to break into a Cantonese version of some American pop hit to a crowd of frugging teens at whatever regular intervals commerce decreed necessary, regardless of the picture's overall mood. In contrast, you will not see Suet Nei singing "Wooly Bully"--or anything else--in any one of the three Muk Lan-fa films. By way of compensation, however, you will get, in place of such jaunty musical interludes, much more of Suet Nei doing what she clearly excels at: scowling and shooting people. This palpable mean streak serves the series well, as the Muk Lan-fa films, especially after the first entry, prove to be among the most ordnance-heavy and prone to wholesale violence of all the Jane Bond films. When I reflect upon these movies, the image that will undoubtedly most frequently come to mind is that of the petite Suet Nei casually grabbing a bazooka from a nearby soldier and summarily dispatching a fleeing evildoer in a hail of flaming shrapnel. The first film in the series, The Dark Heroine Muk Lan-fa, establishes its hero as one based very closely on the template set by The Black Rose. Like the titular heroine of The Black Rose, Muk Lan-fa is a black-clad cat burglar who, with the help of her younger sister (played by Law Oi-Seung), steals from the corrupt rich to give to the poor. The film even goes so far as to have Muk Lan-fa, in a visual echo of The Black Rose's signature rose, leave an orchid ("lan") shaped dart at the scene of her crimes. However, once the police ask Muk Lan-fa to assist them in foiling some criminal interests intent on obtaining a powerful death ray watch, this Robin Hood aspect of her character promptly disappears, never to resurface again in the course of the three films. What emerges--in the case of this first effort--is a sort of a blood-and-guts take on the girl detective story. Both Muk Lan-fa and her sister, Muk Sau-jan, live at home with their mom, a circumstance which, combined with the girlish picture presented by the sisters' prim skirts and matching hair bands, contributes to the initial impression of Muk Lan-fa as either a more two-fisted version of Nancy Drew or one half of a well-armed, distaff Hardy Boys. This attempt to present the heroine as at once a wholesome teen, dutiful daughter and crime fighting badass may have been another attempt to follow the outline of Connie Chan's films--as, apparently, is a scene in which Suet Nei affects some pretty unconvincing male drag.     Scenes from The Dark Heroine Muk Lan-fa Shattered the Black Dragon Gang (1966) The Jane Bond films, in most cases, were cheap, hastily-made affairs, and The Dark Heroine Muk Lan-fa is no exception. With its monochrome photography and Spartan sets, the film bears as much similarity to the Republic serials of the forties as it does to the spy films of its era, and while watching it, there are times when it's easy to forget that you're watching a film made in the mid sixties. This, happily, is remedied by the periodic appearance of odd pop art touches, like the comic book-inspired starburst wipes that take us from one scene to the next, and the cropping up here and there of unmistakably mod pieces of fashion and furniture. Another element that anchors The Dark Heroine Muk Lan-fa firmly in the 1960s is its soundtrack, which is almost entirely pilfered from John Barry's James Bond film scores (mostly Goldfinger, as far as I can tell). Of course, this was a pretty common practice in the Hong Kong film industry at the time--as it was in the film industries of many countries with lax enforcement of international copyrights, for that matter (Turkey and India are offenders who immediately come to mind)--for Barry's themes were such an immediately identifiable shorthand for the Bond franchise's presumed glamour, excitement and sophisticated modernity that appropriating them was an irresistible means for producers of low-budget action films to cost-efficiently hitch their rickety cinematic wagons to 007's supercharged engine. Because of this, not only the Cantonese Jane Bond films of Connie Chan and Josephine Siao, but also many of the Shaw Studios' Mandarin language spy efforts from the time are peppered with stolen pieces of Barry's instrumentals. Still, of all of these films that I've seen, The Dark Heroine Muk Lan-fa makes by far the most profligate use of this music--and most eagerly courts the comparisons that doing so invites, going as far as to use the iconic James Bond theme itself to announce its heroine's entrances and exits. Though a bit rough and undeveloped in comparison to the films that would follow, The Dark Heroine Muk Lan-fa at least serves to introduce us to the players--both behind and in front of the camera--who will be with us throughout the series. In the director's chair is Law Chi--aka Joe Law--who is probably best known to Hong Kong action fans for the 1979 kung fu oddity The Crippled Masters, which went Chang Cheh's The Crippled Avengers one better by featuring actors who were actually missing limbs in the starring roles. More impressive are the names behind Dark Heroine's fight scenes: Liu Chia-Liang and Tong Gai were two of the most innovative forces in Hong Kong action choreography during the sixties and seventies, and here--as in all three Muk Lan-fa films--do double duty, both directing the kinetic girl-on-guy beat downs from behind the camera and being on their receiving end in front of it in the roles of various criminal henchmen (a circumstance that was apparently conducive to romance, since Tong Gai would soon after become Suet Nei's husband). Lastly, in addition to series co-star Law Oi-Seung, Dark Heroine introduces us to police detective Ko Cheung, played in each film by Kenneth Tsang Kong, who in any other of the Jane Bond films would be the heroine's love interest, but who here gets left out in the cold due to the fact that Muk Lan-fa's single-minded pursuit of enemy blood never really allows for any such sparks to catch fire.     Scenes from The Dark Heroine Muk Lan-fa Shattered the Black Dragon Gang (1966) One actor who did not appear in the following two Muk Lan-fa films, but who deserves mention none-the-less, is Sek Kin. Much like Bollywood's Amrish Puri, who, despite having appeared in hundreds of films in his native India, would be absolutely unknown to Western audiences if not for his appearance as Mola Ram in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Sek Kin's Western Q factor depends entirely on one iconic villain role, that of Han in Enter The Dragon. Much like Puri, Sek-kin built up a mammoth filmography while serving as a sort of in-house Simon Legree for his local film industry, menacing Connie Chan, Josephine Siao and a host of other righteous young heroines in film after film after film. That he was chosen to leer and snigger at Suet Nei in her initial outing as a Jane Bond heroine almost seems like a sort of right of passage for the actress, and the veteran, as usual, does not disappoint. Again like Puri, when Sek Kin is in a picture, there's no risk of you ever losing track of who the bad guy is; all you have to do is follow the twitching pencil mustache. Though The Dark Heroine Muk Lan-fa and its sequels were clearly made on a very tight schedule (all three were released within a few months of each other, between March of 1966 and March of 1967), this did not prevent the films' producers from making some obvious changes and refinements to the elements of the series as it progressed. In the second film, The Dark Heroine Muk Lan-fa Shattered the Black Dragon Gang, mom is out of the picture, and the Muk sisters are now on their own, living in a palatial home with all the most stylish modern appointments. In addition to this, Law Oi-Seung's Muk Sau-jan is placed in a somewhat less active role, making Muk Lan-fa more of a lone wolf figure. Both of these changes bring the character of Muk Lan-fa much closer to the rootless and personally unconnected model of the Western espionage hero, whose actions are untethered by deep bonds of family and community, and as such render her considerably more free to explore heightened levels of risk, ruthlessness and mayhem. The filmmakers make the most of this character makeover by infusing Black Dragon Gang with an exponentially increased level of violence, as well as a conspicuous inflation of both the number and size of the armaments on display. While there is always a lot of gun waving going on in the Jane Bond films, when it comes down to settling things, the violence is more often than not in the form of hand-to-hand combat; in this instance, however--despite both the fight choreography talent on hand and the star's obvious gameness and physical ability--it's the automatic weapons (and the bazookas), rather than the fists, that do most of the talking. In this way, Black Dragon Gang, more than any other Jane Bond film that I've seen, places a hard wall between itself and the traditions of honor and chivalry played out in the stately wuxia films from which the genre's stars emerged.     Scenes from Lady in Black Cracks the Gate of Hell (1967) In addition to this turn toward amoral bloodletting, The Dark Heroine Muk Lan-fa Shattered the Black Dragon Gang abounds with visual evidence of the series' head first dive into the late 20th century. This includes not just the Muk sisters' aforementioned mod inflected digs, but also the distinctly Carnaby Street turn of their wardrobes, exemplified by the subtle substitution of slit-eyed, plastic wrap-around sunglasses for the matching hair bands they wore in the first picture. And the villains themselves, The Black Dragon Gang, are--especially in contrast to the more traditional, suit-wearing goons of the first movie--a walking, breathing embodiment of self consciously campy sixties excess: an army of pompadoured, scooter riding foot soldiers in matching metallic sport coats whose leader is distinguished mainly by the enormous size of his shoulder pads (think David Byrne's giant suit in Stop Making Sense and you'll pretty much get the picture). We meet that leader in classic over-the-top comic book fashion, as he throws darts into a life-sized portrait of Muk Lan-fa, while squirreled away in a space age super villain lair with all the trimmings, including dozens of superfluous control panels with flashing lights, two-way TV screens, secret corridors, hidden sliding doors and high tech booby traps. (Of course, not all of the film's attempts to bring us into the space age are as spirited; witness, for instance, the half-hearted pass at updating the police captain's office by placing a child's toy rocket on his desk.) With its confident direction, brisk pacing, and a performance by Suet Nei that makes the most of her steely-eyed mean girl persona, The Dark Heroine Muk Lan-fa Shattered the Black Dragon Gang shows all the signs of the Muk Lan-fa series coming into its own--and, as if in self-congratulatory acknowledgment of that, the film's soundtrack is almost completely free of stolen 007 music. There is also evidence of a somewhat more generous budget this time around, as the climactic battle at the Black Dragon Gang's HQ, stocked with a large number of high-flying and acrobatically dying extras, is pretty spectacular by Cantonese cinema standards. And while it's true that, in turning its back somewhat on the traditional values that inform other films from its genre, it loses some of the charm that still makes many of those films endearing, it can't be denied that it's a cracking entertainment, and comes closest of any Cantonese film I've seen to the more free-wheeling brand of excitement that was increasingly being peddled in the Mandarin language output from the Shaw Brothers' Movie Town.     Scenes from Lady in Black Cracks the Gate of Hell (1967) The third and final film in the Muk Lan-fa series, Lady in Black Cracks the Gate of Hell, doesn't make any essential changes to the formula established in the previous film, but does change the focus somewhat. It seems that there was a decision to feature Law Oi-Seung more prominently, and so we get to see Muk Sau-jan strike out on her own, conducting her own black-clad prowlings and even, at one point, rescuing the captive Muk Lan-fa and Ko Cheung from the villain's clutches. Despite her heroism, Muk Sau-jan is presented as a bit of a comic bumbler, and her prominence here seems to give rise to some whimsical touches, such as a last minute escape from a high-rise using an umbrella as a parachute and a cliffhanger in the office of an evil, eye-patch wearing dentist. Law Oi-Seung is a plenty appealing actress in her own right, with her own arsenal of distinctive quirks, so none of this takes away from the film's entertainment value--but coming to this film from The Dark Heroine Muk Lan-fa Shattered the Black Dragon Gang, it's hard not to feel the comparative lack of Suet Nei's commanding presence. Also contributing to Gate of Hell being a slightly less satisfying watch than its predecessor is the fact that the villains here are considerably less colorful than those in Black Dragon Gang (In fact, once the minions are dispatched, all we're left with is a fleeing fat guy in Bermuda shorts). Nonetheless, Gate of Hell fully delivers on the violent action, offering up a climax that's something of a flea market Thunderball, with Muk Lan-fa, Muk Sau-jan and Ko Cheung donning scuba gear to make an aquatic assault on the island on which the baddies are converging. When all is accounted for, the film maintains enough of a level of consistency with Black Dragon Gang to make you wonder what a fourth--or even a fifth--Muk Lan-fa film might have had to offer. Unfortunately, at the time of Lady in Black Cracks the Gate of Hell's release in 1967, the clock was ticking for the Cantonese film industry, and by 1970 it would cease to exist as a distinct entity within the larger context of HK cinema, succumbing to the pressures of competition with the Shaw Brothers juggernaut. With the industry's demise, some of its stars also decided to bow out, including Suet Nei, who retired from film at the rheumy old age of 22. One player who did remain on the public stage, however, is the Dark Heroine herself, thanks to the continued output of dozens of Muk Lan-fa novels, as well as a television series in the eighties. Of course, that Muk Lan-fa would persevere is not surprising; as Sam Ho points out, her name is derived from that of Hua Mulan, who, despite her cuddly treatment at the hands of Disney, was most likely the archetype for all the high-flying female badasses who would follow her in both Chinese folklore and Hong Kong cinema. It takes a lot more than a one armed swordsman to take out a lady warrior with a pedigree like that. Labels: Country: Hong Kong, Espionage, Year: 1966 posted by Todd at 4:35 PM | 2 Comments Saturday, February 16, 2008Asia-Pol Release Year: 1967Country: Hong Kong/Japan Starring: Jimmy Wang Yu, Joe Shishido, Fang Ying, Wang Hsieh, Ruriko Asaoka, Cheung Pooi-Saan, Yuen Sam. Writer: Gan Yamazaki Director: Akinori Matsuo Cinematographer: Kazumi Iwasa Music: Toshiro Mayuzumi Producer: Run Run Shaw Original Title: Ajia Himitsu Keisatsu Availability: Buy it from Yes Asia. It was not an unusual practice for Hong Kong's powerhouse Shaw Brothers studio to participate in international co-productions during its heyday, and the result of that practice was often some fairly unique screen pairings. For instance, there was British horror icon Peter Cushing teaming up with kung fu badass David Chiang in The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires, and the Sentimental Swordsman himself, Ti Lung, trading lines with American TV movie staple and Night of the Lepus star Stuart Whitman in Shatter. But the 1967 spy thriller Asia-Pol stands out in particular for being a potential wet dream for fans of 1960s Asian action cinema. This participation between Shaw and Japan's Nikkatsu - the studio that trademarked its own distinctive brand of hardboiled action cinema during the late fifties and sixties - boasts two stars who have, respectively, come to represent more than any others the identity of each of those studios at that moment in their histories. The mid sixties was, financially speaking, a dark time for the Japanese film industry, with television's negative impact on the big studios' coffers reaching critical mass. This situation created two conditions that were to prove advantageous to the then peaking Shaw Brothers operation; namely, a large number of newly unemployed Japanese film technicians--many accomplished directors and cinematographers among them--and an increased openness on the part of the major studios to cash infusions from foreign film companies. Shaw Brothers head Run Run Shaw, always seeking ways to increase his company's efficiency and productivity--as well as its scope and influence--had made a policy of participation and talent exchange with the Japanese film industry, based on the idea that exposure to its rigorous standard of craftsmanship could only stand to improve that of his own homegrown talent pool.     Asia-Pol in many ways fits in with the spate of James Bond knock-offs--such as Angel with the Iron Fists, Summons to Death and The Golden Buddha--that Shaw turned out between 1966 and 1968, but also exhibits some significant differences that can most likely be chalked up to its Nikkatsu pedigree. For one, while the action of those aforementioned films was largely limited to what could be shot on the sound stages and back lots of Shaw's Movie Town facility, Asia-Pol is distinguished by a great deal of location shooting set on the streets of Japan, Hong Kong and Macao. This is a style of shooting that the Japanese crew, accustomed to the gritty, street-bound look of Nikkatsu's violent yakuza thrillers, would have been considerably more at ease with than would the Shaw's technicians. Likewise, Asia-Pol's script, written by veteran Nikkatsu scribe Gan Yamazaki (who also wrote Nikkatsu's sole entry in the kaiju eiga genre, Gappa, the Triphibean Monster, as well as the colorfully titled Seijun Suzuki picture Detective Bureau 23: Go To Hell Bastards) gives us an espionage yarn that's considerably more down-to-Earth than the campy nonsense that Shaw would typically serve up, entirely free of hooded super villains and sci-fi inspired underwater lairs.     This is not to say, of course, that Asia-Pol lacks that one far-fetched element key to all 1960s spy films: the suave and limitlessly masterful super agent. And here that super agent is played by Jimmy Wang Yu, a young Chinese actor who, at the time of filming Asia-Pol, was on the cusp of becoming one of Shaw Brothers' biggest stars. Of course, the phenomenal success of The One Armed Swordsman, released that same year, would not only change the career course of Wang Yu, its star, but also of Shaw Brothers itself, steering the studio's martial arts output away from the mannered female swordsman films of the early sixties and toward the violent and hyper-masculine, kung fu driven films that its director, Chang Cheh, would come to specialize in. For Wang Yu's part, it was just the beginning of a series of films that would make him one of the most recognizable faces in sixties martial arts cinema. In Asia-Pol, Wang Yu plays Yang Ming Xuan, a top agent in the Japanese branch of Asia-Pol, a fictional pan-Asian Pacific police organization so secret that's it's doings are apparently unknown even to the governments and law enforcement of the countries in which they operate. (Yang is a resident Japanese of Chinese descent, thanks to him being adopted by a Japanese couple after being apparently orphaned in Hong Kong during the war.) As the film opens, Asia-Pol is in the process of trying to shut down a criminal organization that is smuggling large quantities of gold into Japan by refining it into phonograph components. Yang Ming Xuan succeeds in intercepting the latest truckload of contraband, but the criminals stage a brazen helicopter attack, ruthlessly eliminating their own operatives and destroying most of the shipment before it can be confiscated. In the process, Ming Xuan's partner is killed, and the young agent is brought to the unwelcome attention of the leader of the smuggling operation, a suave and psychotic operative known (in the subtitles, at least) simply as George.     Playing George is Japanese actor Shishido Jo, aka Joe Shishido. Shishido, a Nikkatsu contract player, began his career with the studio as a romantic lead, but soon found himself lost in an over-crowded field. Wanting to give himself a distinctive edge, he went under the surgeon's knife, emerging with moviedom's most exaggerated pair of cheek bones this side of Chip and Dale. This transformation had the intended effect, leading to a successful rebirth as a screen tough guy--and, by the mid sixties, he was one of Nikkatsu's biggest stars, portraying an assortment of stylish assassins in a series of tailor-made screen vehicles. Shishido's bizarre appearance and unhinged intensity would make him a natural favorite for maverick director Seijun Suzuki and, by the time of making Asia-Pol, he had already starred in two of Suzuki's standout films, Youth of the Beast and Gate of Flesh. That same year, 1967, would see him star in Suzuki's most infamous work, the hallucinatory Branded to Kill, a film that would simultaneously cement Suzuki's reputation while destroying his career as a director. Anyone who has seen that film knows that it is memorable as much for Shishido's ferocious performance as for its director's audacious style. Shortly after Ming Xuan's foiling of their latest smuggling attempt, George's gang assassinates a man known as Yang Zhang Qing, who is suspected of being the leader of the criminal organization's Hong Kong operation. Upon being informed of this by his superiors, Ming Xuan volunteers that he believes Yang Zhang Qing may be his real father and that, if so, could not have been a witting participant in the organization's criminal activity. With this revelation, Asia-Pol introduces a sub-plot involving long lost siblings and vengeance of family honor that seems more like something out of an Indian masala film than a pan-Asian action thriller. After Ming Xuan is sent to Hong Kong to locate the gang's refining operation, he encounters a young woman, Ming Hua, who turns out to be a sister he never knew he had, and together the two set out to bring down George and clear their late father's name. Meanwhile, we learn that George is something of a loose cannon within his organization, a circumstance which leads to some violent internecine squabbles. From this point on, the film's action ping pongs back and forth between Hong Kong and Macao (the location of a gang-owned casino that is the front for its refining operation), with Ming Xuan and George likewise switching back and forth between predator and prey, all leading up to an abrupt conclusion aboard a Japan-bound freighter.     With its cinematography by Nikkatsu regular Kazumi Iwasa, Asia-Pol is, above all else, a gorgeously shot motion picture. Its abundance of imaginatively lensed location footage makes it an alluring moving postcard of 1960s era Hong Kong and Macao, if nothing else. But watching it, you get the sense that its makers were content to have the picture coast on its good looks alone, as the film's dramatic and action set pieces, while always adequate, never seem to aspire to anything beyond that. Nowhere do you get the sense of a real desire to thrill that you do with, say, some of the better Eurospy films of the era, loaded as those are with outrageous situations and colorful gimmicks. Furthermore, those spy movie tropes that Asia-Pol does pay service to seem to be, while still fun to watch, somewhat rote and obligatory (the gimmick of Asia-Pol's Japanese HQ being entered through the fitting room of a tailor's shop, for instance, is lifted of a piece from the TV series The Man From U.N.C.L.E.). Still, to be fair, it should be noted that this comparatively unadorned narrative approach is in service of a plot considerably more complex than that of the typical secret agent potboiler of the era--even if that plot is diluted somewhat by the Bollywood-style family drama subplot referred to earlier. But Asia-Pol's weakest point has to be Jimmy Wang Yu himself. Slight, boyish, and with a tendency to pout, Wang Yu is simply too lightweight to hold the film's center--or to stand up to the inevitable comparisons that the role he's been given invites. It's hard to imagine that any of Shaw's other 007 surrogates--such as The Golden Buddha's Paul Chang or Summons to Death's Tang Ching--wouldn't have been able to do a better job of commanding the screen. (Given Wang Yu's career defining roles in the One Armed Swordsman and One Armed Boxer films, I've got to wonder if he might have held more interest here if he'd been missing a limb.) The script, furthermore, does Wang Yu no favors, as the elements of family drama he's forced to play out simply serve to highlight his somewhat juvenile emotional range.     Shishido Jo, on the other hand, effortlessly exudes a very adult sense of authority and menace, which, as a result, makes those scenes in which he and Wang Yu face off come off like a disciplinary session between an exceptionally hip and borderline-maniacal parent and a petulant teenager. Whether it is because of this under-matched casting or simply the difficulties of working outside of his comfort zone, Shishido seems to be a little toned down here. Still, "toned down", in comparison to Shishido's performances in Gate of Flesh and Branded to Kill, leaves quite a wide margin for inspired, idiosyncratic villainy, and Shishido still delivers enough of his trademark combination of cool and crazy to easily walk away with the show. Despite not being all that it could have been, Asia-Pol is nonetheless enjoyable. It has a budgetary sheen well beyond that of the typical releases from either studio at the time and, as a result, still has the feel of being something of an event picture. Furthermore, while it never threatens to overwhelm you with excitement, it moves along at a brisk, tightly edited pace, and is never less than engaging. Helping considerably to drive it along is a brassy original score by Toshiro Mayuzumi, which further sets the film apart from Shaw's typical spy output, given the latter's tendency to simply pilfer musical cues from You Only Live Twice. Still, being uniquely the product of, not just one, but two distinct cinematic golden ages, it cannot help but leave one with a sense of missed potential.     Within just a few years of Asia-Pol's release, Nikkatsu hit financial rock bottom and was forced to retool itself from being a purveyor of action films to the stylish kink of the more lucrative Roman Porno films it became known for in the seventies. Shaw Brothers, on the other hand, would remain a dominant force in the world of martial arts cinema for most of the next decade, though advances in the state of the art and competition from emerging studios would force them out of the game by the mid-eighties. Though one couldn't reasonably expect a hybrid product like Asia-Pol to provide a real taste of what distinguished each of these studios during those respective lost eras, it is a film worth seeing for its novelty value, as well as one that is solidly entertaining when taken on its own terms. In other words, it's a footnote, but a highly enjoyable one as footnotes go. Labels: Country: Hong Kong, Espionage, stars: Jimmy Wang Yu, Studio: Nikkatsu, Studio: Shaw Bros, Year: 1967 posted by Todd at 11:49 AM | 0 Comments Friday, April 27, 2007Enter the Eagles
1998, Hong Kong. Starring Shannon Lee, Michael Wong, Anita Yuen, Jordan Chan, Benny Urquidez, J.J. Perry. Directed by Cory Yuen Kwai.
Benny Urquidez vs. Shannon Lee? Sign me up! This is one of those DVDs that has been sitting around on my shelves for years, and it's always on that list of "things I should just sit down and watch this week but then they never get watched." Well, now that I've finally gotten around to it, my initial impression is that I shouldn't have let it sit around for so long, but in a way I'm glad I did. I shouldn't have let it sit around for so long because it was pretty fun; and I'm glad I let it sit around for so long, because watching it now, so long after the fact, it was like a visit from an old friend, provided that friend is "the way they used to make Hong Kong action films in the 80s and early 90s." No CGI (well, no CGI fights), minimal wirework, actors who are better fighters than they are actors -- man, I miss this stuff. Oh yeah, and Shannon Lee fights Benny Urquidez. In an exploding blimp.
But let's begin at the beginning, or at least what will pass as the beginning for our purposes here. First of all, this movie has a pretty impressive Hong Kong action pedigree. Director Cory Yuen was one of the "Seven Little Fortunes," the group of Peking Opera students that included, among others, Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao, and Yuen Wah. I'm going to assume that readers of Teleport City know who these guys are. If you don't know, then you best turn your computer off and go watch Project A, Dragons Forever, Young Master, Prodigal Boxer, and Eastern Condors. We'll still be here when you get back. Cory Yuen proved himself an able enough actor in supporting roles, but it was behind the camera, as director, that Yuen really found his calling. Although he doesn't have what you might call a recognizable style of direction, what he does do is put the camera in the right place and let the actors do their thing. Few directors were able to shoot the breakneck style of 80s action they way Cory Yuen could. His first martial arts directing job in 1982 with Tower of the Death, retitled Game of Death II and turned into an even more outrageously shameless Bruce Lee exploitation film than the first Game of Death. What gets lost beneath all the Bruce Lee exploitation, however, is the fact that Tower of Death is actually pretty damn good. If you disconnect it from the clones of Bruce Lee movies that plagued the 70s and 80s, then you can appreciate the film for its own merits, which are considerable. From there, Yuen went on to direct a string of what are considered some of the very best and defining Hong Kong action films of the 1980s, including Ninja in the Dragon's Den, Yes Madam, Righting Wrongs, Dragons Forever, Blonde Fury, and She Shoots Straight. From the very first, Yuen's talent really seemed to be for bringing out the very best in female fighters. Michelle Yeoh, Cynthia Rothrock, and Joyce Godenzi were all at the very top of their game under Yuen's solid guidance. At the same time, he became one of the very first of the big names to attempt with some success to cross over into the American market. No Retreat, No Surrender may not be a great film, but it was a well-known movie that pretty much everyone rented at some point. It's most notable, of course, for introducing the world to Jean Claude Van Damme. I know, I know...his big screen debut was actually as the knee-squeezing gay kickboxer with a keen sportscar in Forever Monaco, or as the dayglo spandex wearing dancer on the beach in Breakin', but No Retreat No Surrender is the first time Van Damme got to sell himself as some sort of a martial arts bad-ass, albeit a Russian one.
In the 1990s, Yuen made the switch from straight-forward action to the wire-laden fantasy kungfu that became so popular during that decade, and while many fans lamented the passing of the 80s style of stunt-heavy, wire-free insanity, Yuen never the less continued to crank out a string of mega-hits, starting with the two Savior of the Soul films but really kicking into high gear once he teamed with the 1990s ruler of the martial world, Jet Li. Cory Yuen directed Li in a slew of fan favorites, including two Fong Sai-yuk films, Bodyguard from Beijing (which I thought was awful), New Legend of Shaolin (Jet Li does a kungfu version of Lone Wolf and Cub), and My Father is a Hero (featuring the infamous "tie my kid to a rope and use him like a kungfu yo-yo" scene). It was round about that time, unfortunately, that the bottom fell out of the Hong Kong movie industry. Action films were hit especially hard. They quickly fell out of style, and most of the beloved stars of the 80s and 90s were too old or just too beat up to sustain that style of film making. In addition, a number of the most beloved female stars of the action genre either retired or left Hong Kong to pursue film making elsewhere. And suddenly Hong Kong realized that there were no new Jackie Chans or Michelle Yeohs waiting in the wings, no matter how hard they tried to convince us that Stephen Fung and Nicolas Tse were awesome. Things just weren't the same. But Yuen soldiered on, and the less he could depend on his actors for solid martial arts action, the more he depended on special effects. 1998's Enter the Eagles would be the last film he'd make (for a while, anyway) featuring a cast of able fighters relying on their own skills and the time-tested 80s style of action filmmaking. A couple years later, he would make the special effects laden flop Avenging Fist, originally meant to be a Tekken (some fighting video game) film until someone realized they forgot to actually buy the rights to make a Tekken film. After that, Yuen once again found cross-over success in America with The Transporter, starring Jason Statham, then returned to Hong Kong to resurrect the moribund "Girls with Guns" genre so popular in the 90s. The result was So Close, and while it's hardly Yes Madam or Righting Wrongs in terms of the quality of legitimate kungfu choreography, it's still a damn fun film.
And since he apparently learned nothing from Avenging Fist, Yuen tried his hand a video-game adaptation movie again in 2006, this time with the American film DOA. But we'll talk about that one soon enough. If Enter the Eagles is Yuen's old school swan song (and that's only if you consider the 1990s old school, which they really aren't), then at least he aligned a proper set of players for the going away party. Anita Yuen was one of the most ubiquitous faces in 1990s Hong Kong cinema, though that industry's flavor of the week attitude with many of its female stars meant that she went from A-list megastar to B-list mainstay pretty quickly. But she cut her teeth in dramas like Cie La Vie, Mon Cherie, and comedies like Tsui Hark's Chinese Feast and Stephen Chow's Bond film send-up From Beijing with Love, as well as showing up to do nothing in the Jackie Chan film Thunderbolt. By 1998, she wasn't exactly in demand, but western fans of HK films still adored her, and I was certainly happy to see her back in action, even if she's not exactly believable as an action star (she looks to weigh all of 80 pounds). What she lacks in action cred, though, she certainly makes up for in genuine acting ability.
And then there is Jordan Chan, one of the most promising young stars of the latter half of the 1990s, part of what I like to call the Hong Kong Triad Brat Pack -- that group of young actors who all made names for themselves starring in Young and Dangerous movies. Those films were the bane of my existence when they first came out, largely because it seems like a new one came out every other week, and all of a sudden all anyone was making was "young triad dude" movies. I actually quite like most of them now, and even when I didn't, I liked Jordan Chan. He was a good actor and he had genuine charisma, unlike Triad Brat Pack compatriot Ekin Cheng, who had great hair but not much else. I don't think Chan's ever gotten material that was up to his ability, but I've never the less enjoyed a lot of his movies, including several that no one else seems to enjoy (like Downtown Torpedoes, which is marginally less plausible a story than Enter the Eagles). Both Yuen and Chan deliver pretty much all their dialog in Cantonese, allowing for them to escape the awkwardness of having to perform in a language they don't understand. Of course, this means that people speak Cantonese to English speakers, and vice versa, without any indication that they are speaking different languages. Sort of like how Han Solo can understand Wookie, and Chewbacca can understand English, but you never hear Han speaking Wookie or Chewbacca speaking English.
But Anita and Jordan are only the supporting players here. It became increasingly popular through the late 1990s to "internationalize" Hong Kong action films, most likely because the market for action films was so awful in Hong Kong, but interest in the films was still on the rise in the United States as guys like John Woo and Yuen Wo-ping (no relation to either Cory Yuen or Anita Yuen, who also are not related to one another. Cory Yuen's real last name isn't even Yuen) crossed over into quasi-mainstream recognition (meaning that anyone who paid close attention to movies knew about them, as opposed to just anyone who paid close attention to Hong Kong movies). Unfortunately for Hong Kong, their attempts to internationalize their action films involved two steps: 1) hire a guy who speaks some English to write a bunch of English dialog for the movie, and 2) hire some no-name Caucasian actors to deliver the dialog, or make your Hong Kong cast do phonetic memorization. The end results are, at their best, laughable. The bad writing and amateurish delivery actually did more to keep films from achieving cross-over success. The Caucasian actors were really bad, and many times what passes for understandable sounding English dialog from and to non-English speakers is nearly unintelligible to native English speakers. Ringo Lam's Undeclared War was one of the very early efforts using this model, but that was too early. The first real international efforts came in the form of films all having to do with Jackie Chan: Rumble in the Bronx, Who Am I (both starring Chan), First Strike, Mr. Nice Guy, and the Chan produced Gen-Y Cops. Rumble achieved a decent degree of success, thanks to a domestic theatrical release and some good stunt work, but the film was never taken seriously (and doesn't really deserve to be) thanks to the horrible acting from the Caucasian cast, the completely ludicrous portrayal of Bronx street gangs (they are multi-racial, ride around in dune buggies covered with Christmas lights, and live in giant warehouses filled with pinball machines and refrigerators), and the fact that they try to pass Vancouver off as New York City, even though you can see the Rocky Mountains int he background. It was good enough for other markets, but the film's targeted American audience just didn't buy it.
Similarly, First Strike and subsequent stabs by Chan at Hong Kong produced international hits, like Mr. Nice Guy and Who Am I, failed to garner much of an audience (though I personally like them a lot) because the English dialog and English acting is so bad. when a non-native speaker like Jackie Chan is still your best English-language actor in a film, you're chances of being anything but smirked at by English-speaking audiences is pretty small. Chan wouldn't really achieve American super-stardom until he stopped trying to make cross-over films and just made American films like Rush Hour and Shanghai Noon. The results of Hong Kong attempts to internationalize through sticking more English in their films were, as stated, as bad as you would expect. In the case of the writers, none of them were native English speakers, and their command of the nuances of language one needs to write a script in that language was simply not up to the task. Thus you get a lot of really weird, awkward dialog that uses English words and approximates English without actually being English. People say really stupid things in ways no actual English speaker would say them. Making matters worse was the fact that the Caucasian actors the film hired were, by and large, dreadful. From time to time, they would score an actual B-movie actor (Mark Dacascos, Coolio), but their delivery of the awkward dialog is just as bad. I often wondered why these native English speakers, even if they were bad actors, didn't correct the dialog as they went, but I've since learned that many of them tried, only to draw the ire of writers and directors insisting that they quit deviating from the way things had been written.
Similarly, Hong Kong started turning to the increasing number of foreign-born Chinese actors looking to make it in the Hong Kong film industry (Daniel Wu, Maggie Q, et cetera). Some of them were awful actors, and some of them were good, and some of them started out bad and got better (like Wu). Most had the benefit of being able to deliver dialog in either Cantonese or English with ease, but that still didn't help the scripts any, and the result was that even the good films weren't taken seriously as they undercut themselves with such weird, artificial dialog. But there were still a lot of them being made in this fashion, and if you can roll with the short-comings of the scripts, a lot of the films are pretty good, or if not good, at least enjoyable,a dnt hat's always been far more important to me. Enter the Eagles, for examples, suffers all these woes, but the movie itself remains stupidly enjoyable. In this case, the Caucasian actors include a bunch of stuntmen who are really awful actors, Shannon Lee (daughter of Bruce), Benny Urquidez, and Michael Wong.
Now Shannon Lee is the film's main attraction, but in discussing the cast I'm going to start with Michael Wong. I love Michael Wong. I think I may have said it somewhere else before, but if any actor in the world was going to be the spokesmen for and embodiment of Teleport City, it's Michael Wong. This guy has been making movies -- lots of movies -- for decades now. And he is still an awful actor, as bad as he was the first time he ever appeared on screen. He works hard at his craft; he just doesn't get any better. Which is sort of how Teleport City is. We work hard, we really do put some effort into this thing, but after nearly a decade of doing it, I'm not really any better at it than I was when I first started, and despite how many people may read this site, we remain relatively respect-free. We rarely get screeners or comp review copies (in fact, in almost ten years, we've gotten four, two of which were awful "day in the life of a serial killer" shot on video stinkers); we don't get invited to attend or speak at premieres, festivals, or conventions; we don't get book deals; we don't get quoted on DVD covers or asked to write liner notes. We remain and probably always will be the Michael Wong of movie websites. But then, Michael Wong got to have a naked Ellen Chan grinding up and down on him, and we've yet to achieve that, so we're actually one below Michael Wong. Suffice it to say that I think hanging out with Michael Wong would be cool. He probably has a ton of great stories, and even though I have repeatedly said he's not a very good actor, I still like him and I like a lot of the movies he's done. If I could hang out with any veteran of the Hong Kong movie scene, it would be Michael Wong. You might assume it would be Maggie Cheung, but as much as I might crush on her, it'd be way too nerve-wracking. With Michael, I could just sit back, drink some beers, smoke a cigar, and let him tell stories about all the crazy shit he's seen and endured over his years making movies. And while Wong isn't who you think of when you think of Hong Kong veterans, he still is a Hong Kong veteran and an early pioneer at speaking English when everyone expects the cast to be speaking Chinese. Accompanying Wong and lending even more old-school cred to the movie is Benny "The Jet" Urquidez, a welcome face from the glory days of Hong Kong action cinema. Urquidez, who was famous for being an incredible fighter and being one of the creepiest looking gwailo in Hong Kong films (often described as a horrifying amalgamation of Ozzy Osbourne and Christian Slater), was recruited to match up with Jackie Chan in two of the best action films of the 80s -- Dragons Forever and Wheels on Meals (another early attempt from jackie Chan to internationalize his films), both also starring Yuen Biao and Sammo Hung. The fights in these two movies between Chan and Urquidez are often named by fight film aficionados as two of the best scenes ever filmed.
Like many of the Western fighters who made names for themselves in Hong Kong -- Richard Norton and Cynthia Rothrock being the two most notable -- Urquidez was never able to extend his career to much success in the West, where the directors just didn't know how to direct him the way Sammo Hung or Cory Yuen did. He found pretty steady work as a choreographer, though. It's been years since I last saw Urquidez in front of the camera, and having him pop up in Enter the Eagles as the main heavy is a welcome return for an old, scary face. And finally there's Shannon Lee. Her film career, spotty and minimal though it may be, became the source of a fair amount of controversy among people prone to generating controversy over Shannon Lee, with many claiming that she only got parts because she was Bruce Lee's daughter. I'm sure being the daughter of the Dragon and the sister of Bandon helped open doors, as did the fact that she's pretty cute, but once she was through the door, it was up to her to live or die by her own merits. Criticism that she didn't have any real fighting skill is patently ridiculous. Neither did many of the people who became kungfu stars. Michelle Yeoh was a dancer, for instance, and Joyce Godenzi was a beauty queen. What matters -- all that matters -- is what Shannon Lee did once she got the part, and what she did was try really damn hard. Although the era of "no stunt doubles" was a thing of the past by the 1990s, Lee still did most of her own fighting and stuntwork, being doubled only for the especially acrobatic and flip-heavy shots. She worked out extensively with Urquidez, and busted her ass to learn the moves she'd need to appear as a credible force on-screen. And she does well. She looks natural and comfortable in the action scenes and moves fast and gracefully while never lackign the illusion of power behind her punches and kicks. She is helped along both by her training with Uriquidez and by Cory Yuen's panache for shooting and editing non-fighters to look like believable on-screen bad-asses (and somehow make fights comprised mostly of posing still seem fast-paced and action-packed). Her acting is stilted, thanks in equal parts to inexperience and bad dialog, but she has a natural on-screen charisma that is far more reminiscent of her dad than any of the half-witted calls for her to actually mimic her dad (which include making "Bruce Lee face" while ripping a guy's hair out and blowing it in his face). I was able to buy her immediately as a smirking, kungfu powered assassin.
The rest of the Caucasian cast is comprised of guys whose names you won't know unless you know a lot of stuntmen and fight choreographers. Thisis because most of them are stuntmen and fight choreographers, and while that means they know how to handle themselves in the action scenes, the film is perhaps ill advised to have given them so much dialog. Somewhere amid all this is a plot, though to be honest, the less attention you pay to that plot, the more you will enjoy this movie. What we have here is a heist film in which two groups of thieves -- Michael Wong's highly trained group, and the rag-tag duo of Jordan Chan and Anita Yuen -- are after the same diamond. Wong wants to sell it to Urquidez, who in turn will fence it to a really white looking sheik in a fake mustache and goatee. Chan and Yuen want to steal it to show up Wong, who snubbed them when they somehow magically figured out what Wong was planning and how they could find him. Obviously, things go horribly awry, allowing for the film to dispense with plot and go hog wild with outrageous action scenes.
To say the film isn't entirely believable is a gross understatement. Nothing presented in this movie is the least bit plausible, from the ridiculous schemes to steal the diamond to the extended shoot-out and rescue set in a police station (where, among other things, Michael Wong stymies an entire platoon of well-armed riot cops by throwing a potted plant at them), to the finale in an out-of-control luxury blimp (!), but then, Cory Yuen and Hong Kong action films have never been the place to go for solid scripting and plausible events. The heist in particular seems ridiculously easy, and I wish that action films all over the world featuring a heist would stop relying on the hoary old cliche of having the security be a bunch of goof-offs who fall asleep or get distracted by soccer games on television, or just don't make the most basic and obvious of logical connections. For instance, if you are guarding the world's most expensive diamond, and the alarm starts going haywire at the exact same moment there's a mysterious car wreck outside, with a couple of doctors appearing out of nowhere, the most obvious course of action is probably not to disable all the alarms around the diamond then have everyone run outside to stand around. One would also think that, if a thief is caught in the diamond enclosure during the heist, then his claim that "those other people took the diamond" wouldn't be accepted at face value, and that you might, at the very least, search him. But then, you'd also think there's not many places you can hide a giant diamond when you're wearing a skintight cat burglar outfit. Or that the police, upon arresting you, might make you put on different clothes and thus find the diamond even if they didn't bother to search you for it. But none of that happens here, allowing the film to segue into a completely outrageous and even less believable rescue from the police department, which begins with no one noticing an unauthorized helicopter landing on the roof of the police station and disgorging a lot of heavily armed people in tough looking black combat gear. Unfettered by the mooring lines of logic, Yuen allows Enter the Eagles to soar like the out-of-control luxury blimp that will serve as the location for the finale. Shannon Lee gets to beat the crap out of a lot of people and pose with guns (sometimes, unfortunately, held sideways, because that's what people did in the 90s), and there are tons of shoot-outs, including the aforementioned police station setpiece, which ends up being a near thirty-minute long over-the-top action blow-out that includes tons of shooting, kungfu, car chases, people being dragged around on metal ladders dangling from helicopters, and lots of stuff blowing up before our heroes finally make their escape on, of all things, a slow-moving public trolley, where no one seems concerned about the group of heavily armed and bleeding people who just clambered on then got off a stop later without the cops noticing they're carrying guns and wearing body armor. But whatever, the whole sequence is pretty great, and I've certainly enjoyed even less plausible scenarios. The movie attempts to outdo itself during the finale in the blimp, in which Shannon Lee and Benny Urquidez get to shine and steal the show as they engage in a lengthy fight throughout the blimp as it explodes and falls apart around them. It's not Jackie Chan vs. Urquidez, but it's a damn good fight scene. Somewhere in the maelstrom, Michael Wong smokes cigars and punches people, and Anita Yuen hangs upside down and shoots machine guns. She's not the least bit believable as someone who could beat someone else up, but Yuen seems to recognize this, and so instead has the scrawny gal just blow the crap out of anything that moves. When she does engage in fisticuffs, it's with an opponent she obviously couldn't beat, and so after having her thrown around a little, the movie just sort of wanders off and pretends the whole thing isn't happening, returning to it every now and then to show her still going toe-to-toe with the guy despite the fact that there's no way it could have lasted that long.
The final result is a pretty fun action film, even if it's a "bad" film. The dialog is silly and poorly delivered by just about everyone, and people trade lines in Cantonese and English as if they were the same language. But Anita Yuen and Jordan Chan are both good actors (although Jordan is underused here), and Wong and Lee are bad actors with a lot of charisma that compensates for their short-comings. And Benny the Jet is Benny the Jet, looking creepy as ever but obviously having a lot of fun with one of the meatier villain roles he's ever gotten (previously, he never had more than a line or two of dialog). Cory Yuen's direction is crisp and keeps the movie moving along at a fast pace, which makes the obvious weakness of the script easier to ignore. Shot in and around Prague, the film manages to achieve that international feel location-wise, and Yuen never misses an opportunity to indulge in a little sight-seeing. Although the film is shot on the typical cheap Hong Kong budget, it achieves the look and feel of a much more expensive film. The action is largely CGI-free, though the movie does throw in some pretty lame looking CGI explosions. The fights belong to Shannon and Benny, with Michael standing on the sidelines waiting to cold-cock someone if they need it. He's never been a kungfu star, so his action is largely relegated to shoot-outs and a couple straight-up fist fights, which he has always handled well. I think Shannon Lee proves she has the stuff it takes to be a legitimate action star. She can always improve her acting (unless Michael Wong is her teacher, I guess). With the right director and an on-set mentor like Urquidez, she easily rises to the level of many of the best fighting femmes. I'd love to see more of her in films like this. So yeah -- Enter the Eagles. There are no eagles in it, and the acting and writing are nothing to highlight in your acting or writing class, but the cast is fun, the action is plentiful, and everything moves along nicely. I had a lot of fun watching it, and in the end, that's really all that ever matters to me. Labels: Action, Country: Hong Kong, Director: Cory Yuen Kwai, Martial Arts: Kungfu, Stars: Anita Yuen, Stars: Benny Urquidez, Stars: Jordan Chan, Stars: Michael Wong, Stars: Shannon Lee, Year: 1998 posted by Keith at 12:55 AM | 14 Comments Thursday, August 12, 2004Air Hostess
1959, Hong Kong. Starring Grace Chang, Julie Yeh Feng, Roy Chiao, So Fung. Directed by Evan Yang. DVD (HKFlix).
"Come fly with me!" The invitation used to be one of the most glamorous opportunities a person could receive, but air travel feels me with a sense of dread these days. Not because I fear flying. That particular aspect of the experience is one with which I am at ease. And it's not even the fear of terrorism. Despite all that has happened, that remains for me less of a concern that the plane simply malfunctioning. No, it's everything surrounding the actual act of flying that deflates my enthusiasm. Ticket counter attendants who apparently studied rudeness at the university level; belching, gas-passing, inconsiderate passengers who see pajamas and a pair of flip flops as proper attire for flying; flight attendants clad in nothing fancier than a golf shirt and a pair of those elastic-waistband casual jeans that are all the rage among the homosexual community's butcher lesbians. In short, it's the complete lack of sophistication or class, all of which has been stripped away from an experience it once defined. I don't intend to sound elitist or bemoan the accessibility of air travel by the common man. Being a common man myself, I appreciate that it is no longer the exclusive property of comtesses and Rockefellers. What I mourn, rather, is that we in the middle of society have gained affordable access to the air and, rather than using it as a chance to create a working class jet set, we've turned the entire experience into a cramped Wal-Mart in the sky. Rather than taking the sophistication and class that once surrounded those who traveled by air and showing we could behave just as properly on a much more modest budget, we instead dragged everything down to the basest level, creating an atmosphere where it was perfectly acceptable to travel in the same clothes you might wear to cut grass, gorging ourselves on KFC, pestering the attendants, and generally behaving like a pack of louts who are offended by the very notion that there's not a single thing in the entire universe that requires anything more than ultra-casual dress and a complete lack of couth. At this rate, we're lucky people aren't attempting to board planes wearing nothing but threadbare boxer shorts and a sweat-and-beer-stained tank top. Nearly everything that used to be a grand event has been reduced to the laid-back casualness of a backyard bar-b-que, and while backyard bar-b-ques are enjoyable, they belong in the back yard. As I see it, surrounding certain events with a degree of pageantry isn't meant to exclude anyone nor make anyone feel inferior. It's simply a way to make something that would otherwise be mundane into something that feels special. It makes an event an event rather than merely something that must be done, and as a result it's more enjoyable if only on a superficial level. Unfortunately, we seem to have built for ourselves a society where exerting effort to do anything is frowned upon. If it cannot be done while wearing sweatpants and a basketball jersey, then it's not worth doing.
And so the experience of flying gets dragged down into the mud because rather than rise to an occasion, people would rather pull it down to the lowest level. There is nothing written that relegates sophistication and courtesy to the ranks of the wealthy, and as such there's no reason that air travel could not become affordable for those of us not possessed of a baron's bank account yet still remain refined and elegant. Unfortunately, that wasn't the route we chose, and as the efforts and behavior of passengers devolved, so too did those of the airlines. Why dress your attendants in smart outfits if the guests they're serving are wearing cut-off jeans and upside down tennis visors? Why maintain a beautiful, refined waiting area at the gate when your passengers are just going to leave KFC chicken bones and dirty diapers lying about? And why practice courtesy and charm when people are simply going to be bullish and inconsiderate? Obnoxious guests make for obnoxious staff, which in turn makes for obnoxious guests. It's a vicious circle that has delivered to us the sorry state of modern air travel. Of course, the rampant, ethics-free corruption and greed of airline executives has added more than a little to the overall decline. It wasn't always like this. It wasn't so long ago (back when men were aware of the proper times to remove their hat) that air travel was a grand event, both for the passengers and the crew. There was no more romantic a job (other than, perhaps, movie star) than airline pilot or air hostess. On a Pan Am clipper to Hong Kong or Paris, the mysteries of the world were laid out before you, and experiences most people only dreamed about opened themselves up to you every day. For the passenger, the experience was just as grand. For many people, it was a once in a lifetime adventure, and they celebrated it as such, dressed to the nines and ready to put their best foot forward from the moment they left home until the moment they returned. People wore their fanciest duds and trotted out their best manners. And the airlines reciprocated in both behavior and style. The era of jet set design was a definite high point and unfortunately, like everything else associated with air travel, the fashion and graphic design has declined dramatically since the 1970s. But there for a while, from the 1940s until sometime in the early 1970s, we were in a golden age of flight with skies populated by smartly dressed crews shuttling smartly dressed passengers between smartly designed airports decorated with smartly designed ads. Recent movies revolving around the world of air travel in the 1960s have sparked in certain people a desire to make that world something more than just a nostalgia trip along "what once was" avenue. With films like Catch Me If You Can serving as inspiration, British Airways is returning in late 2003 to a more retro, jet set style and hoping that passengers will follow the crew's lead. While Catch Me If You Can was remarkable in its recreation of that wonderful era before nylon jogging suits ruled the world, we can turn to movies from the era itself to get an even better glimpse at air travel when it was still glamorous and romantic. You'd be hard-pressed to find a better example of this than Air Hostess, Cathay Studio's (aka MP & GI) 1959 color-saturated ode to the jet set era and those who manned it. It was, in fact, the first color film for the studio, and they certainly picked a gem of a movie to make that special splash of vibrancy with. From the jet set décor and fashion to the lush tropical scenery (not to mention the film's two leading ladies), Air Hostess is a tremendous feast for the eyes and a glorious celebration of a time we're not likely to return to despite the nostalgia of some old fogies like myself. Of course a lot has changed since then. The concept of manners has been all but abandoned and anyone who attempts to show the least bit of courtesy is viewed in society as a square who doesn't know how to "keep it real," keeping it real apparently meaning to keep it as loud and inconsiderate as possible. "Casualness" has been taken to the extreme in both dress and behavior, and the notion of observing social pleasantries has been dismissed as being too "phony." Today, we much prefer people who burp in our faces, interrupt people and cut them off when speaking, and leave chunks of sandwich dripping with mayonnaise lying on the seat of the train. I'm not a culture freak, but I am a Southerner and I was raised to behave with some degree of respect for those around me. I've found that life is generally much more enjoyable if you treat others with simple consideration and observe at least the basic tenants of polite human interaction. But perhaps I'm simply a throwback to a "phonier" time. Air travel has also become far more common as a part of work, not just a function of leisure. A business person who flies frequently as part of the job is unlikely to treat every flight as a special event. I'll grant them that. It comes with the territory. But on any given flight, there are just as many if not more pleasure passengers, and they're frequently the ones in muu-muus and flip flops while the business travelers at least continue the tradition of dressing well, or at least wearing something other than what you slept in the night before.
Ultimately, if we demand more of ourselves, we can demand more of our airlines. As long as we treat everything with the same level of effort we might exhibit in popping out to the store to pick up some aspirin in the middle of the night, we can't expect the atmosphere of air travel to improve. It's a horrible experience now, and the fact that we're all having a horrible experience makes us create an environment that only fosters further decline. What goes on in the executive meeting rooms is beyond our control to a large degree. What goes on at the check-in counter, at the gate, and on the plane is something on which we can have a direct effect. I am not a man who insists on formality in all instances. In fact, I appreciate a relaxed spirit as much as the next chap. But I also appreciate the simple pleasure of treating certain things as being a little different, a little special, and worthy of a little extra effort on my part. It's fun for me, and if other people put forth the same effort to act with a little class and politeness, it'd be a damn sight more fun for a lot more people. Grace Chang and Julie Yeh Feng - arguably the top two leading ladies in the history of Cathay Studios - could certainly make flying more enjoyable. In Air Hostess, they star as two women seeking positions as what was at the time the most romantic and sought-after career a woman could have - stewardess. Joining them are a host of other hopefuls, including Grace's well-meaning but shy friend. This movie is, in many ways, the 36th Chamber of Shaolin for stewardess movies. While stewardess movies are not a rare thing, most of the ones anyone is familiar with involve sexual hijinks and X-ratings, and if you're lucky, 3D effects on the boobs. Air Hostess is a slightly more down-to-earth look at life up in the sky, and the first half of the film is consumed with kungfu film-like training scenes as our gals strive to attain the highest level of skill at become true air hostesses. Like students at Shaolin Temple, the young women are put through a gamut of training exercises, including learning the proper way to attend to passengers, dealing with unruly patrons (back in the days when people just complained and shouted instead of trying to kill other people), and more curious things like walking with books on their heads and turning around in circles on one foot. Naturally, Grace is the one who's good at everything. Heart-warmingly polite, charming, and accomplished. Julie Yeh Feng is the sexy one who must learn not to swing her hips so seductively while serving coffee in the airplane. There's also the shy girl, the stern but caring senior hostess, and the handsome young pilot (Roy Chiao) who takes his job so seriously that he becomes a real jerk in the air. Grace has the most back story of all the characters. Her mother wants her to give up these dreams of a career and marry the nice but dull guy who comes around all the time looking to make Grace into a well-treated stay-at-home wife. Grace, of course, doesn't want to be confined to a home. She has a sharp mind and independent spirit and wants to succeed on her own while seeing the world. Plus, she's developing a thing for the pilot despite the fact that he always chastises her and criticizes her work even when she's the highest rated new employee. Because this is at heart a romantic comedy, they will get mad at each other, make pouty faces, then discover their true love for one another before the final flight rolls onto the tarmac. After all, he's only a jerk in the air because he doesn't want to ever fail in his duties as a pilot, since that would mean death for a lot of people. Although the human drama is the focus of the plot, and there's a subplot about a smooth talker trying to use the air hostesses to smuggle fake gems in and out of Thailand, it never comes before the celebration of the glamour of air travel at the midpoint of the 20th century. Air Hostess never wallows in romantic comedy clichés. Although there are the inevitable misunderstandings and conflicts, they're wrapped up pretty quickly instead of dragged out endlessly like they are in many romantic comedies. Air Hostess always maintains a subtle, sophisticated tone and never succumbs to the shrill screaming and slapstick running about that plagues many comedies. It maintains its dignity and presents characters who are realistic and behave in ways that actual people in the real world might behave - which is, again, something very few romantic comedies bother to attempt. Like a well-trained air hostess, it keeps its cool no matter what. Although most romantic comedies of the time are dismissed as shallow flights of fancy (something that's actually much truer in today's soulless and irksome films), they almost always contained a fair bit of social commentary, often about class or the changing role of women in society. They were usually much more progressive and subversive than people give them credit for. Air Hostess tackles the problem of discrimination against women from a couple different directions. First and most obvious is Grace's conflict with her mother and suitor, both of whom can't understand why she would want anything other than an easy life with her every need provided for her by her man. What they fail to comprehend is that the one need he can't provide for her, the most important need, is the need to be independent and free to chart her own course in life instead of surrendering it to man and tradition. Grace's character is smart and full of life, and to sequester her spirit to a home, however nice, is to kill off a vital part of her. At the same time, both her mother and suitor argue the point that being an air hostess, despite the glamour surrounding such a position, is nothing more than being a waitress in the sky. You're still fulfilling a female stereotype, still serving coffee and fielding complaints about peanuts. What the movie does, albeit with a fine degree of subtlety, is show that Grace and her fellow air hostesses are far more independent than the job description makes them out to be. For starters, they're traveling the world. They're seeing things every day that most people will never see in a lifetime. And they're facing a certain degree of danger every time they take to the skies. Plus, all work is serving someone. You can serve coffee on a plane, or you can sit in a cubicle debugging software. You're still a servant. It's just that one servant gets to fly all over the world and go sightseeing to snappy music while the other turns gray and pallid in an office complex. So while the stereotype is that being a flight attendant is just another typical female role, the fact of the matter is that it's not different in theory than what any man does, and in fact is a hell of a lot better than sitting at home or wasting away in an office. Augmenting the notion that air hostessing is something more than just being a waitress in the sky is the fact that none of the women bow down to the men. Grace has a moment of weakness when she thinks about giving it all up, but then she's shown how important she is to her friends at work. Although she has a thing for the dashing young pilot, she never defers to his bouts of moodiness and eventually stands up and challenges him. Plus, you get a cool uniform and get to hang around on airport terraces sipping cocktails. All I get to do is sit at gate 23 scarfing down a Pizza Hut personal pan and a Sprite. I need to join that Admiral's Club.
So you have charming characters and a social commentary that is more complex than usual. The real star, however, is the setting. Fans of mid-century air travel design will be in heaven. Classic stewardess outfits, smartly dressed pilots, elegant airports and tarmacs, and plenty of layovers in exotic locales provide a never-ending parade of eye candy. Although people are cynical about the wonders of the world these days, I still get a kick out of that wide-eyed childlike innocence that reflected the way people were just beginning to discover the world in the days after World War II. Thus, the film's stretches of sight-seeing travelogue footage from places like Thailand and Singapore circa 1959 were still wondrous and welcome to me. That sort of sweeping travel brochure style appeals to the adventurer in me who wishes the world still retained that sense of mystery and exoticism. I enjoy the scenes of people wandering from one famous Thai landmark to another while breezy 101 Strings or Les Baxter-esque music plays. I'd like to imagine myself there some day soon, hopefully with the same music. Of course, what's the point of having Grace Chang in your film if you don't let her smile her trademark smile and break into song every now and again? She does a couple numbers here, but they're pretty grounded in reality (mostly her being egged on to perform at parties), and Grace's singing is always a treat. I've never been to one of these parties full of cool cats where someone is asked to stand up and sing, but I have been to parties where someone got drunk and started to sing when everyone pleaded with them to stop. I imagine it's more or less the same thing. Air Hostess has quickly become one of my favorite films, and not just because it appeals so strongly to my love of a certain era and style. It's just a fun, light-hearted film that manages to challenge some social standards (that women should stay at home and be docile housewives), serve us up plenty of beautiful scenery, and give us a plot that remains engaging without becoming melodramatic or annoying. The cast lead by Grace and Julie is superb. Grace radiates warmth and charm that is impossible to resist. If there's a more charismatic female in film, I've yet to find her. Grace's smile and energy is infectious, and you can't help but feel good while you're watching her sing and stroll about Thailand and Singapore. Roy Chiao makes an excellent stiff who must learn to loosen his collar just a little (at least while he's on the ground) if he doesn't want to alienate the free-spirited Grace the way that drip back home did. And Julie Yeh Feng -- I first saw her alongside Grace Chang in the Cathay epic Sun, Moon and Star and found her positively captivating. If Grace was the cute and warm girl next door, Julie was the studio's bombshell. High cheekbones, long legs, and a sultry glance make her hard to forget. Her character here is not nearly as memorable as her strong revolutionary fighter in Sun, Moon and Star, but considering that was such a powerful role, it's no fault of hers that her air hostess with a kinky streak isn't quite as impressive. She's still in top form here, and although her character is the type that makes you think she'll stab the others in the back, the friendship and sisterhood of air hostesses keeps everyone bound together. Hey, there's another rarity -- a romantic comedy where the relationships between women are strong, and no one ever degrades themselves or their sex with cattiness and backstabbing. If you're looking to delve into Cathay's catalog, or just into Golden Age romance, then this is a fine place to start. It lacks both the overwrought drama and loud-mouth shenanigans that befoul many films from the same era. And if you're a person with a terminal bite from the travel bug, or anyone nostalgic for look and attitude of the early 1960s when we were just beginning to combat the repression of the 1950s but still hadn't abandoned manners and standards in life, then Air Hostess is a must-see. I'd fly with Grace Chang any day. Labels: Country: Hong Kong, Musicals, Stars: Grace Chang, Stars: Julie Yeh Feng, Stars: Roy Chiao, Studio: Cathay, Year: 1959 posted by Keith at 10:53 PM | 2 Comments Thursday, May 13, 2004Way of the Dragon
1972, Hong Kong. Starring Bruce Lee, Nora Mao, John Benn, Bob Wall, Chuck Norris. Directed by Bruce Lee. Available on DVD (HKFlix).
There are a few things, few key things, that embody the bad-ass cinema Teleport City likes to call it stomping ground. Maurizio Merli's mustache is one. Pam Grier pulling guns and knives out of her afro is another. Rudy Ray Moore's butt naked dive down the steep hillside while wearing only his floppy blue pimp hat. And of course, there's Tomas Milian and his little red bikini underwear. But there is one man above all others, above even Maurizio Merli himself, who truly encompasses everything in this world that is bad-ass. One man whose every action, every look, every sound exudes cool toughness. One man, above all others, who has transcended all cultural barriers and become far more than a movie superstar; one man who has become a cultural icon, a piece of modern mythology. That man is Bruce Lee. You can't overstate the impact Bruce has had on modern pop culture. Stars have come and gone, names like Jackie Chan, Clint Eastwood, and Jet Li are all familiar marquee names, but Bruce exists above all of them. Take a walk down any street in New York and you will see half a dozen shops with some sort of Bruce Lee merchandise. T-shirts, posters, scrolls, black velvet paintings, statues, action figures, movies -- pretty much anything. I even saw one of those blacklight posters featuring the "holy trinity" of Bruce Lee, Jimi Hendrix, and Bob Marley. And these aren't just kungfu film specialty stores or Chinatown curiosity shops. Blacks, Puerto Ricans, whites, Dominicans, Chinese, Vietnamese, you name it and their culture has embraced The Dragon. No other action film star occupies the spot Bruce has obtained in our society. He is a modern day Greek hero, a Jason or Perseus, a man whose legend has grown to epic proportions. So, the obvious question from many people is "Why Bruce Lee?" What was it about this brash, good-looking young guy that made him such a phenomenon? Why Lee and not Ti Lung? Why Lee and not anyone else in the world? The answer is equal parts timing, skill, charm, and mystery. Bruce hit the scene at a time when a lot of people in both Hong Kong and the United States were desperate for an underdog hero, especially one who wasn't white. The world was gorged on James Bond rip-offs and sanitized Westerns full of chiseled white guy good looks. The Vietnam War, Civil Rights movement, the Native American awareness movements that became things like the Wounded Knee siege -- all these cultural elements were combining in an explosive wave of disillusionment with the way things used to be. The urban communities in America, who were hit especially hard by both the Vietnam War (since so many soldiers were minorities) and the frustration faced by the Civil Rights movement. With real-life heroes like Martin Luther King Jr. being gunned down, people were looking for heroes somewhere. Up until then Hollywood hadn't been providing them with anything. Then came Bruce Lee. It's no coincidence that Lee hit the scene around the same time that black action stars like Fred Williamson, Richard Roundtree, and Pam Grier were starting to make a big impact on the scene. People were fed up with Bond and John Wayne. They wanted someone more modern, more bad-ass, and most importantly, they wanted someone to whom they could relate. Bruce wasn't white. He wasn't big. His characters were not rich or influential or successful. He was an everyman for all other men who could not see themselves in the previous set of American heroes. He was different, and he was the underdog. In each of Lee's characters, there was plenty for the disillusioned to identify with. The condescension and racism hurled at him in Fist of Fury, having to take shit from a corrupt boss in Big Boss -- there were things people recognized, and things people loved seeing Lee overcome. His biggest film in the United States, Enter the Dragon was a wild James Bond type action-adventure film where the Asian was the hero rather than a silly sidekick or devious villain. It was also a movie where the black character (Jim Kelly) is a noble and heroic man of principle, while the white guy (John Saxon) is a sleaze. A lovable sleaze, but a sleaze never the less. Bruce Lee gave people hope, goofy as that might sound, that they too could overcome the odds facing them in everyday life. They could rise above the poverty and hopelessness of their situation. When Lee died under mysterious circumstances, it cemented his place not just as a star, but as a legend. His mark on society, from his face on a t-shirt to the popularity of martial arts training as a way to cope with growing up in the inner city, will remain in place long after the names of hundreds of other stars have been forgotten. So which of these films should be the first Bruce Lee film we review? His biggest, Enter the Dragon? How about his first, Big Boss? Or the one most everybody considers his best, Fist of Fury (aka Chinese Connection). I think we've explained the whole Big Boss, Fist of Fury, Chinese Connection thing, but just in case you forgot, here's the deal: when Bruce Lee's Hong Kong films were brought over to the US to capitalize on the success of Enter the Dragon, someone screwed up and got the titles confused. Big Boss, Lee's first film, was mislabeled Fist of Fury. Realizing the blunder too late to fix it, distributors took the actual Fist of Fury (Lee's second, and many say best) and retitled it Chinese Connection, probably to capitalize on the success of French Connection as well as Lee. Since they were on a roll, they decided to also retitle Way of the Dragon, calling it Return of the Dragon and marketing it as a sequel to Enter the Dragon despite the fact that it was made before that film. But that brings us to where we want to be, which is the movie we've chosen to be the first Bruce Lee film we review. We chose it because it seems to slip through the cracks a lot, and because it's the only complete film that was written, directed, and choreographed by Lee himself. It's an excellent movie that allows Lee to showcase not just his incredible martial arts skill, but also his ability as an actor. Most people like to write Lee off as a one-trick pony, perhaps the best martial artist to ever live but a pretty rigid actor. Those people obviously go along with hearsay rather than actually investigating the matter themselves. People who claim Lee could only act enraged and couldn't handle comedy should pay closer attention to this film, in which Lee gets to shine as a comedian as well as an all-around kungfu bad-ass. Bruce even gets to do stuff that results in that "wah wah waaaahhhh" comedy music! We begin at an airport in beautiful Roma -- that's Rome to you non-cosmopolitan types out there. Bruce, playing Tang Long, is something of a country bumpkin from the rural land outside Hong Kong. Right away, Lee is great at invoking a sense of sympathy for his character. I mean, we all know Lee is the baddest man to ever walk the planet, but he plays his scenes here so realistically awkward and embarrassed that you feel bad yet amused for his fish-out-of-water character. He goes to an airport lounge and, not being able to read the menu, end sup ordering about six bowls of soup. Of course, he is still Bruce Lee, so he saves face by finishing them all, which allows him to launch a series of "must go to the toilet" jokes that will be a sure-fire comedy hit with the kids for years to come. Face it, you can be some Ivy League blue-blood in a long raccoon coat, carrying a pennant that says "Rah, Harvard!" or whatever, but you will think farts are funny. Go on. Admit it. You'll feel better. I don't really know why farts are funny. I mean, we've been doing it for thousands upon thousands of years. You'd think we'd be over it by now. Sad as this sounds, I have spent many an hour late at night amusing myself by imagining a bunch of homo robustus types gathered around the campfire and bursting out into prehistoric prehysterics when one of them lets it rip. I think there were a lot of jokes in Caveman featuring Ringo Starr, so you know where I'm coming from with this one. I know they are base and disgusting, low-brow joke material fit for a Chris Farley movie. But think about it. Fart humor transcends race and culture. Everyone the world over thinks farts are funny. Even high brow films like Scent of Green Papaya had fart jokes in it. Maybe it's because they are a great equalizer. Everyone has to do it sometime. Maybe it just feels good to do something that primal and animalistic. That's why we laugh, even at our own farts, and even harder when we see other animals do it. Nothing's funnier than a farting dog or howler monkey. When my parents' dog farts, it gets all freaked out, jumps up, and starts hunting furiously for the fart. I'm going to start doing the same thing, I think. I know it's gross, but come on -- if Bruce Lee thinks farts are funny, then you can, too! Lee also mines comedy gold in the "goofy effeminate guy with bad toupee" department. Bruce was, in fact, a huge fan of the Dean Martin - Jerry Lewis comedy team and the many films they did together. While Bruce's sense of humor is not quite as slapstick (and far less annoying) than Jerry Lewis, you can still see the influence it had on him. The main difference here is that Bruce is both the goofy, out-of-place Jerry Lewis and the suave, competent Dean Martin, depending on what the situation called for. Bruce definitely had a lot more depth than people gave him credit for. After the soup skit, Bruce meets up with his cousin, played by the lovely Nora Mao (Fist of Fury, Big Boss), his frequent co-star. Nora had written her uncle back in Hong Kong to explain that they were having a lot of trouble with thugs at the restaurant in Rome. She expected him to send a lawyer, and instead he sent Tang Long, which Nora isn't exactly happy about as Tang is ignorant of big city culture, especially in the West. Tang Long explains that, while he may be a bit dim, he can help out in other ways. He gets to show everyone his "other ways" when the thugs show up at the restaurant to smash things up and convince the Chinese to sell their land. It's always something like that, isn't it? The Man and The Mob are always trying to build malls on land owned by kungfu schools, community centers, and restaurants. It's a tried and true film formula, but it's also a comment on gentrification. In my old neighborhood, you could make a movie about The Gap trying to buy up land belonging to community gardens and outreach centers. Same shit, different era. I think The Gap stuck mostly to financial strong-arming, though, rather than sending thugs to beat up a guy named Pops. Realizing that the thugs, one of whom I swear is Oliver Platt, won't listen to words, Bruce decides to speak with kungfu. He thrashes them soundly in a great sequence. Great not just because Lee is so fast and crisp with his art, but also because Lee's character undergoes a wonderful transformation. When dealing with the restaurant and the city of Rome, Tang Long is lost and vulnerable. But when he steps into the back alley to beat the shit out of the no-goodniks, he immediately becomes confident and in control. Ass kicking is a universal language, after all. In between visits by the thugs, who keep arming themselves heavier and heavier only to still get the shit kicked out of them by Bruce, the film takes full advantage of its Rome locations. Hong Kong movies that filmed outside of Hong Kong were still very rare in the 1970s, so Lee takes in as much of Rome as can be crammed into a few "travelin' all around" montages. Then it's back to the alley behind the restaurant to kick ass on some more thugs. This is a pretty weak-ass mafia, I must say. But I guess they're not the big-time guys we see in films like The Godfather. After all, those guys are controlling international drug trafficking, arms smuggling, and resort casinos. These guys are trying to muscle out a restaurant. It's sort of like how most leprechauns get to guard gold and countless treasures, but Lucky the Leprechaun has to guard a bowl of Lucky Charms cereal. In a theme that is present in all of Lee's Hong Kong films, he teaches other Chinese -- other minorities -- not to be ashamed of themselves or their heritage. When he arrives in Rome, the staff at the restaurant is practicing Japanese karate because they feel Chinese martial arts are weak and embarrassing. Once they see Lee in action, however, it fills them with pride and reinvigorates their interest in their own culture. This was an important theme for a film in 1972, and it's a large part of why Bruce Lee became so popular. He fights for the right not to be ashamed of the color of your skin, and he shows that minorities can survive the pressures put on them by the established white majority. They can rise above racism by learning, relying upon, and believing in themselves. Once the boss finally catches on that his thugs are a bunch of fat-ass losers, he hires some karateka bad-asses in the form of Bob Wall and Ing Sik-wang (Stoner, When Tae Kwan Do Strikes, Young Master). Wall is best known for his role as the right evil O'Hara in Enter the Dragon. After a while, Bruce gets sick of beating up the thugs, who just never seem to learn their lesson. So he goes to their headquarters, beats them up there, then does a very impressive kick in which he leaps up into the air and smashes an overhead lamp, completely without the use of tricks or wires. To accomplish the same simple but impressive kick these days would require Yeun Wo-ping to use ten miles of wires, pulleys, and CGI effects. Pissed off about their light, the thugs hire their own kungfu bad-ass in the form of Chuck Norris. I know, I know. You guys here Chuck's name and it makes you grimace and roll your eyes. Great. Now we gotta watch Lone Wolf McQuade. But take heart, li'l buckaroos. There is a vast difference between Chuck Norris the Bruce Lee opponent and Chuck Norris the Texas Ranger. For one, bash him all you want, but Chuck Norris was an amazing martial artist at his peak (which is when this movie was made, and why Bruce chose Norris). Legit martial artists and kungfu fighters all recognized Norris as possessing one of the fastest, deadliest spinning back kicks in the world. Judging Chuck's abilities based on his American films is like, well, judging Cynthia Rothrock by her American films or Sammo Hung by his work on Martial Law. The finale sees Lee face off against Norris in the maze-like arches of the Roman Coliseum, invoking the not-so-subtle image of modern-day gladiators. The ensuing battle is one of the best kungfu one-on-ones ever filmed, with the Benny Urquidez - Jackie Chan fight in Wheels On Meals being a distant second. Part of why the fight between Norris and Lee is so great is because it hurts. In 1972, kungfu film choreography was still pretty basic outside of Lee's films, and a lot of the over-choreographed fights, while looking spectacular, lacked any sense of injury or power, especially when the guys would hit each other over and over with no real sign of damage. When Lee and Norris hit each other, you can feel it. Their blows carry weight, and the weight shows. It's obviously a result of two legitimate martial arts bad-asses being involved rather than two guys trained in Peking Opera, dance, or stage fighting. Of course, despite all the flesh-pounding-flesh action, the most painful scene comes when Lee uses Norris' thick, Piltdown Man-esque coating of body hair (it's possible he was one of the cavemen laughing at farts I talked about earlier) as a weapon, ripping out a big chunk of chest hair (he could have used a little off the back as well). Of course, ripping out a man's chest hair makes you bad, but then proceeding to blow it into the man's face makes you bad-ass. It's the little things, you see. There's some end-of-the film shenanigans after the fight before Lee wraps everything up and heads back to Hong Kong. The film is absolutely superb. Lee shines as both an actor and a fighter, and his skill and charm should be more than enough to win over pretty much anyone. Watching this movie, you'll have little question left in your mind why Lee has become to celebrated by so many different types of people. One could even take the Civil rights slogan "We Shall Overcome," and apply it to the work of Bruce Lee. Bruce's direction is good. Nothing overly inventive or unique, but more than competent for a first-time director. It's a bit raw at times, though he really shines at filming the fight scenes, which probably shouldn't come as much of a surprise. Sammo Hung, in many ways a student and master of Bruce Lee's, would be the one director more than any of the others who would realize Lee's ambitions in filming and directing kungfu films. What Lee began in Way of the Dragon and never finished in Game of Death, Sammo would carry to fruition in films like Knockabouts, Prodigal Son, and Project A. Makes you wonder what the "Three Brothers" of Sammo, Yuen Biao, and Jackie Chan would have been like if it had been four brothers, and one of them was Bruce Lee. Way of the Dragon, aside from being some of Lee's finest stuff, is notable for launching the film career of Chick Norris as well. I don't actually know if this is a good thing, but I guess it was good for Chuck. He went on after this film to play a bigger role in another Hong Kong actioner, Slaughter in San Francisco, aka Yellow-Faced Tiger. That movie gave him ample opportunity to throw back his head and laugh in an evil fashion while he stood with arms akimbo. He also got to kick people. From there, it was the big-time, as he went on to play heroes in one crappy film after another, thus endearing him to the American public. If you have to watch any Chuck Norris film besides Way of the Dragon, make sure it's The Octagon, because that at least has some ninjas in it. Chuck Norris and Bob Wall would reunite many years later to make the film Hero and the Terror, and even later to appear as themselves in Sidekicks, a film best left undiscussed. Bruce, of course, went on to make Enter the Dragon, the film that would become his ladder to the realm of modern-day legend and launch the kungfu craze in America. Lee's contributions to the genre are sundry. He gave it it's banner star. He gave it the refinement of fight choreography, which up until Lee had been stiff and stage-like. He gave it comedy and heart. He gave it international appeal. He gave it Bruce Lee. A man full of anxieties, flaws, genius, ambition, fear, and fearlessness. A man whose name and face would become ubiquitous. So if you want to see Lee's biggest film, see Enter the Dragon. If you want to see his first film, see The Big Boss. If you want to see his best film, see Fist of Fury. But if you want to see the one film out of all of them that shows Bruce Lee at his finest in all ways, the one film that has the most Bruce Lee in its heart, the one film that, more than any of the others and despite its rough edges, defines where Bruce wanted to take the genre, then you have to see Way of the Dragon. Labels: Country: Hong Kong, Martial Arts: Kungfu, Stars: Bruce Lee, Stars: Chuck Norris, Year: 1972 posted by Keith at 5:20 PM | 0 Comments Monday, May 10, 2004A Wicked Ghost
1999, Hong Kong. Starring Gabriel Harrison, Francis Ng, Gigi Lai, Mok Ga-yiu, Cecilia Sze. Directed by Tony Leung Hung-wah. Available on DVD (HKFlix).
Well, fans of horror, I have good news, and I have bad news. The good news is that director Tony Leung seems committed to single-handedly keeping the Hong Kong horror film alive. The bad news is that Tony Leung isn't a very good filmmaker. Now before you fire off an angry email telling me how great Tony Leung is, keep in mind that I am not referring to the Tony Leung who starred in Ashes of Time. Nor am I referring to the Tony Leung who starred in Tom, Dick, and Hairy. No, feeling that the Hong Kong film industry wasn't complete with just two guys calling themselves Tony Leung, writer-director Leung Hung-wah decided that he too would become Tony Leung, joining an ever-growing cast of characters favoring that particular name combination. Leung Hung-wah got his start in the early 1980s as an actor in a few films not many people remember. In 1986, he penned his first screenplay, Ghost Snatchers, which starred Michael Wong and Sammo Hung's knock-out (in more ways than one) wife Joyce Godenzi. When Leung crossed over into directing, his interest in low-budget horror films became apparent. Mystery Files was his first directorial effort, and in 1999 he followed it up with A Wicked Ghost, an obvious though not entirely dismissible attempt to cash in on the popularity of the Japanese horror film Ring.
As anyone who has tested the waters of the world of Hong Kong horror well knows, it's a strange place even in the world of horror. Action, kungfu, melodrama, slapstick comedy, and chills are often thrown together in a mish-mash of styles that rarely work well together, giving one the impression of watching several different movies at once, sort of like those Thomas Tang/Godfrey Ho ninja movies. Although there are several good Hong Kong horror films - most notably Chinese Ghost Story and Mr. Vampire -- even those are difficult to accept as pure "horror" within the boundaries set by Western expectations. Chinese Ghost Story is more a fantasy film, and Mr. Vampire is as much a kungfu comedy as it is any sort of horror film. Part of this vast difference in approaches can simply be attributed to the fact that tastes around the world vary. Chinese audiences have different expectations of what a horror film should be like, and since they have a wealth of local mythology from which to draw, there's no real need to plumb the depths of Western genre traditions for ideas. Hopping vampires may not be scary to Western audiences, but how scary is some old count in an opera cape to your average cranky old Chinese guy? For every werewolf there is a Fox spirit; for every zombie there is, well, a kungfu zombie. For every Medusa there is a witch whose head comes off and flies around the room screaming at you. On the opposite side of the coin is Japan, a country which embraced Western definitions of horror and ran with them so successfully that, in the view of many people, Japan has become the preeminent producer of the world's finer horror films now that the Americans and Italians have run out of ideas. Japan and the West have always had closer relations than China and the West (that whole World War II incident not withstanding). It hasn't always been a smooth relationship, but it's always been a relationship. Western film had a big influence on Japanese films, and Japanese films, in turn, ended up having just as big an influence on The West. Throw a rock in a video store, and there's a good chance you'll knock over two Don "The Dragon" Wilson movies and at least one film that steals plot points from an Akira Kurosawa film.
Japan's approach to horror was to take Western influences and put a decidedly Japanese spin on them. Nobuo Nakagawa revolutionized the genre with films like Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan and Jigoku, one of the world's first "splatter" films. They are distinctly Japanese, but they're also familiar to fans of classic horror films. Hell, a good ghost story is a good ghost story regardless of whether the people in it are wearing kimonos or overcoats. Japan continued to play with classical notions of horror, tweaking them enough so that they were unique and fresh while still not being completely alien to foreign viewers in the way many Hong Kong productions were. In 1999, the film The Ring hit the screens and threw gasoline onto a smoldering fire that had been started by films like Wizard of Darkness, Birth of the Wizard, and by the horror comics of HP Lovecraft-influenced Junji Ito. Japanese film and manga makers discovered that Japanese girls have a voracious appetite for tales of horror, especially when the protagonists are people they can relate to - namely, other girls. That this whole batch of books, comics, and movies gets dubbed 'schoolgirl horror" is somewhat misleading, conjuring up as it does images of tales roughly on the level of an RL Stine book. On the contrary, many of the films are quite good, quite scary, and surprisingly gory. They are a natural progression from the fact that horror has often favored female protagonists. The big difference is that the gals in these films were less likely to do incredibly stupid things thanks to the fact that the writers creating them were far better than your average slasher script penman. In the wake of The Ring's success, the whole genre acquired mainstream appeal, and "Ring" movies themselves became something of a cottage industry. A sequel to the original was put into production under the name Raisen or Spiral (not to be confused with another schoolgirl horror film, Uzumaki, which can be translated as meaning "Spiral"). Ring director Hideo Nakata, who was not involved in the sequel, didn't like the way it carried on the vision of his film, and so he set out to make his own official sequel, simply known as Ring 2. There was a television series, a third "prequel" called Ring 0: Birthday, and a Korean adaptation of the same original novel called Ring Virus. Somewhere amid all the noise was Tony Leung with his Wicked Ghost film. Along with Bio-Zombie, it's one of the few Hong Kong horror films to bear a resemblance to the style preferred by the Japanese and Western horror films, though there's enough esoteric Chinese superstition in it for it to maintain its own cultural identity. While not exactly a rip-off of The Ring, A Wicked Ghost certainly steals willy-nilly from the superior Japanese film as it weaves its own mythology of an angry ghost lashing out from beyond the grave. The most obvious example is the appearance of the ghost itself, which manifests as a pale white woman with long, ragged black hair hanging in front of her face. Similarities to Sadako from Ring are unavoidable. She even has the same weird herky-jerky way of walking. The plot steals the same basic structure as well, though to its credit, it does change it enough so as not to be a complete act of plagiarism. Trouble begins immediately when a group of friends are playing one of those "let's summon up some ghosts" type games at a party. The game requires them to each slit their finger, drip blood into a bowl of water then take turns drinking it. You know, I played my share of supernatural ghost-summoning games when I was younger, and I have to say that I draw the line at any game that involves slicing my finger and drinking the blood of my pals. Most people I know are hesitant to even drink from the same cup as one of their friends, let alone gleefully consume a mixture of their precious bodily fluids. When you add to it the fact that you have to mix in "some oil from a dead body," it really just becomes time to call it a night. It's not even that it has anything to do with being afraid of ghosts; there just have to be better games you can play with your friends than ones involving you drinking dead body oil and blood. One of the friends, Ming, seems to agree with me, and he'll have none of this drinking of bloody water and corpse oil. His friends go ahead with the fun, and before too long, ghostly wind blows through the apartment and one of the friends, a guy named Rubbish, has died of extreme fright after seeing a ghost. His face is frozen in an expression meant to convey either "I am terrified beyond the comprehension of mortals" or "I'm hungry." Just as the impetus for the action - a group of friends who invoke an otherworldly force and are then mysteriously killed off - mimics the same basic plot from Ring about a group of friends summoning a similar force after watching a cursed videotape, so too is the horrified expression a somewhat less effective imitation of the look of fear all the victims in Ring take with them to the grave. Continuing to pull wildly from Ring the movie introduces Ming's reporter sister, Cissy (Gigi Lai), and her (seemingly) ex-boyfriend, Mo, a teacher who seems to possess psychic powers and an uncanny though very handy knowledge of all things supernatural. Similarities between them and female reporter Reiko and her ex-husband and resident psychic teacher and expert on the paranormal, Ryuji, is purely coincidental. Mo is played by one of the better actors to never really hit the big-time, Francis Ng. He's got talent enough to lend an air of credibility to an otherwise outlandish film, although his effectiveness here was somewhat undermined by the fact that the film did not shoot with synch sound (as was common in Hong Kong up until a year or so ago) and the original actors did not do their own dubbing in post-production. So instead of Francis Ng, you get someone doing a weird soft-spoken Francis Ng impersonation.
At one point, the film even shows a second-long clip of the disturbing Sadako video from Ring, though it has nothing to do with the actual plot. There's also the old man who is the key to figuring out much of the mystery, a body that needs to be properly laid to rest in order to end the curse, and the revelation at some point that what they thought was the answer was, in fact, wrong. For people who have seen Ring, the greater plot is very familiar indeed, and that hurts the film. It hurts mainly because this movie is no Ring, and having so many images and elements lifted from the superior film means you're going to sit there for much of the film thinking about how much better Ring was. Ming and Mo figure out that the spirit-raising game has summoned an angry ghost who is tricking everyone into killing themselves. Efforts to figure out a way to stop the ghost are confused when people with no connection t the game start dying as well. And why is it that Ming, who didn't take part in the game, can see the ghost? As in Ring, it becomes a race against the clock to solve the mystery before it claims the lives of more people. Although built in pretty much the same fashion as the plot from Ring the writing here is not entirely derivative. There are some fairly unique twists and surprises that keep the movie from being a complete joke. Although undermined by the huge amount of cribbing of images and scenes the film does, somewhere beneath the Ring-exploitation was a halfway decent story that never got a fair chance. Mo's weird little crackpot theories about the transference of emotion are actually somewhat interesting within the context of the film, though I always wonder why every professor in every horror or sci-fi film is always featured in a lecture scene during which they're espousing some half-baked pet hypothesis. I had my fair share of crackpot professors, but none of them spent the entire class period rambling on about the "the lost amulet of Nagath-nor" or anything like that. Yet film professors are always on about something similar. Mo's lecture is about how emotion can become a sort of energy that can be transferred from one source to another. That's why we feel sad when we watch a sad movie or feel angry when we watch Saving Silverman. As far as crackpot theories go, it's not a bad one, and it ties in well with the plot of the movie revolving around a murder victim (who was an actress, just to keep the theme going) who transfers her rage in the form of a ghost. The most notable different between the films is in the female reporter. While Reiko was the driving force behind the action in The Ring, Cissy's role here is more or less disposable. She's there to shout at her brother for hanging out with people who summon demons, and she's there to be a convenient link between Ming and Mo. The love triangle between her, Mo, and her fiancee Jack attempts to give her character some reason for being in the film, but it's never really developed to the point that it matters much. When Mo accepts the ghost's curse alongside Cissy in the end so he can help her survive the attack, it could just have easily happened without the underdeveloped subplot involving Jack. The subplot doesn't hurt the film; it just doesn't add much to it. With Cissy relegated to the ranks of screaming woman, her brother Ming, who works closely with Mo to unravel the mystery surrounding just what ghost it is they've awakened, picks up the action. Although he's on screen a lot, Ming fails to develop into an interesting character. When the plot throws us one it's many somewhat successful curveballs toward the end, the fact that it involves a character as bland as Ming saps it of some of the power. Additionally, the fact that almost no character other than Mo generates any sort of sympathy means that the movie fails to create any sense of urgency or tension. With Ring, a mounting sense of hysteria grew from the fact that we actually liked Ryuji and Reiko, and we even liked their weird little son. We didn't want to see them succumb to the curse. We wanted to see them succeed, and we wanted that because the film took time to establish positive character traits for them. With Wicked Ghost, we meet most of the cast during the seance, and their next scene is the one in which they die. In between, there is nothing to make us feel like we should care one way or the other. Even with all his screen time, Ming doesn't fare much better. Part of the problem again is the dub job. Dubbing Hong Kong movies was pretty much the way things were done, and still are for most low-budget productions. It was a practical decision more than anything. Shooting synched sound is expensive, for one. Since Hong Kong films were seen by as many Mandarin speakers as they were Cantonese speakers, and since the differences between the two dialects make them more or less different languages, the films would be dubbed anyway for the Mandarin speakers. Not shooting with sound also meant that multiple productions could occupy the same limited real estate in Hong Kong for location work. Most of the time, the actors would come in and do their own voices, and the end effect was such that you could hardly tell. Sometimes, certain actors would even dub their own Mandarin tracks as well. And of course, Jet Li was almost always dubbed by someone else regardless of the language, because he has a chipmunk voice. Why they went with entirely different actors to do the dubbing in Wicked Ghost is beyond me. How expensive can Gigi Lai and Gabriel Harrison (Ming) be? A good actor can survive a bad dub job, which is why Francis Ng emerges in fair condition, but Gabriel Harrison is pretty green, and his facial expressions and body language are not effective enough to compensate for the lackluster dubbing. In one scene, as he watches his girlfriend become possessed by the ghost and attempt to kill herself by eating a party mix of pills, the general idea is that he's too paralyzed by fear to simply rush over and stop her. The weak voice work combined with Gabriel's pouty expression make it come across as if he's simply too lazy or unconcerned to walk across the room and deal with the problem. The viewers have to keep reminding themselves that there's a ghost in the room, because the movie itself fails to communicate that. Looking scared is harder than you might think. Your average terrified person doesn't stop to make a mental note of how their face contorts when they're seized by terror. The common manifestation is to simply scream and scrunch your nose up. If you've ever been really scared, and I mean really really scared, you know that screaming is one of the least likely reactions to the situation. It's actually a lot subtler, and Gabriel Harrison hasn't got it down yet. Hiroyuki Sanada has a wonderful look of terror at the end of Ring when he has his revelation about the ghost. It's a face twitch and a look of bewildered horror that is beautifully communicated. When you see it, you can nod and go, "Yep, that's the look of a terrified man." Although it's an unlikely source, another of film's greatest looks of terror comes in the beginning of Ghostbusters. When Dan Akroyd and Harold Ramis are running out of the library after being frightened by a ghost, the "I'm about to puke" look of panic on Akroyd's face is priceless, and even though it's a comedy, it's a perfect glimpse of a genuinely scared person. Harrison's best offering is to look vaguely confused. It doesn't do the trick, and especially in the scene where his possessed girlfriend is gobbling prescription drugs, it works against his character. As Cissy's fiancee Jack, Mok Ga-yiu is somewhat successful. He plays one of those guys who is sort of a dick, but not in a way where you can really just hate him. He doesn't actually do anything bad; he just seems like he might. Gigi Lai is an experienced actress, but she's given so little to do here that it really doesn't matter one way or the other. Technically the film is somewhat awkward. Hong Kong horror has always favored weird point-of-view zooms and Hitchcockian weird angles and camera tricks. There's nothing in Leung's direction that is so bad you could brand it an outright fault, but the movie does possess the look of what it is: someone's second film. There's an inexperience to the proceedings, and that results in tension lost. Leung hasn't really got down how to build anxiety or deliver a sufficient pay-off. Most of the films attempts at scares consist of something popping into view along with a blast of "fright" music. Unfortunately, it telegraphs just about all these instances, so you don't even get the cheap jump. Although the plot manages to rise above what you might expect, the actual composition of the film never escapes predictability. With a few exceptions, you know when the scare attempts are coming, and you know what they're going to look like. It's a marked difference between this movie and Ring, which I found to be one of the most successfully and genuinely scary horror films I'd seen in a long time. A Wicked Ghost isn't totally without chills, though, and from time to time you can catch a glimpse of potential in Leung's work. The trappings of Chinese superstition always lend an air of eeriness to things, but Leung's most successful segments come when the investigation into the origins of the ghost lead Ming to an abandoned village that was the scene of a mass murder/suicide spree in which sixty-six people were killed in a span of three days. The setting itself is creepy by default, even in broad daylight, but when Ming wanders into a decrepit temple, Leung has one of his best moments. The camera pans around in point-of-view style, taking in all the decay, but when it comes back in the direction from which it came, we begin to catch glimpses of hunched over figures kneeling in the rubble. It's the film's most effective moment, although the shot in which Ming sees the ghost clinging to the back of one of his friend's is pretty good as well. Likewise little images here and there, like the long-haired ghost sinking slowly into a pond or a scene in a washroom where the ghost of an old guy just wanders in to freak people out. There's also a decent scene in which a character morphs into the ghost. Sure, the movie fails more than it succeeds, but the successes are actually pretty creepy. Leung manages to subvert the familiar world by placing these otherworldly apparitions in very run-of-the-mill settings with nothing special about them. Traditionally in Hong Kong horror, supernatural shenanigans are accompanied by someone shining green spotlights all over the place, green being the color of all things ghostly in Chinese mythology. Leung avoids the obvious in this respect, opting instead (possibly because of budgetary constraints) to play the scenes straight. For me, seeing some creepy ghost limp around an otherwise normal apartment is scarier than if that apartment was suddenly bathed in a green glow. One of the most effective ways to unnerve people is to warp what they think they know. And then there's the ghost, Mei. Yes indeed she's 100% a rip-off of Sadako from Ring. But you know what? Even in light of that, she's still a little spooky. Sadako had one of the most effective, creepy appearances of any creature in any horror film. Just imagine glancing out the window to see her standing on the corner of the street, slowly coming toward you. Sadako's look was a stroke of horror genius, and any movie that rips that look off is going to reap a little residual chill from it. Original? Not in the least, but it still works. Flashes of good filmmaking are part of what make this movie frustrating. It's not without its merits. Although shamelessly distilled from The Ring, the story is not bad. Revelations about the fate of the woman who would become the vengeful ghost result in a sympathy for her that is, unfortunately, somewhat bungled in the finale. There are enough twists to keep the story interesting, and if more thought had been put into the characters, the movie might have survived being a Ring knock-off and acquired more of an audience. It's a fairly accessible mix of Chinese myth and good ol' fashioned ghost story that translates into any culture, but the slapdash nature of the characters is shallow even for a horror film.
The final scene is something of a flawed gem as well. There is no real resolution to the problem of Mei slinking around and killing people. Sure, Mo and Cissy manage to break the curse on them, but what about all the other people? In a nice bit of writing, the woman who had a husband who was willing to kill her in order to save himself is moved by Mo, who in contrast to Mei's husband is willing to sacrifice himself in order to save Cissy. It wuold seem at first that this act has quelled Mei's murderous rage, but then Jack goes and attracts her attention, and we see that it's really only Mo and Cissy who have been saved. What becomes of Mei and of the other innocent people who were unwittingly cursed remains unknown. A Wicked Ghost is more ambitious than it is successful, but even ambition is an admirable trait in a movie that could have just been a rip-off with no attempt to do anything different. From his filmography as writer and director, one has to assume that Tony Leung loves horror films, and as I said in the beginning, I appreciate his attempts to keep horror in Hong Kong alive. As flawed as A Wicked Ghost is, there is effort put into it. Tony Leung isn't just some Wong Jing type who will dash any old crap off to make a fast buck off a trend. No, Leung may have been hoping to cash in on Ring's success, but he was also looking to make a good film. There's effort behind the direction, effort behind the writing, and there's effort behind the acting. That the effort is never fully realized or that it is undercut by bad dubbing doesn't change the fact that the attempt alone is worth at least one viewing. Within the realm of Hong Kong horror, A Wicked Ghost looks better despite it's sundry flaws. It avoids entirely the tendency toward sophomoric slapstick comedy that so many other Hong Kong horror films can't help but indulge. It plays itself straight and with more respect for classical horror than you usually see from Hong Kong. It also manages to be more than just a series of shots in which five people scream and run from one room to another, which is a description that fits more than a few Hong Kong chillers. The fact that it steals fromRing means that it also attempts to be as good. It isn't, but it's better for having tried. Characters are bland, but they're not annoying. Well, Jack is sort of annoying, but we can forgive him. There is a lot that isn't good about this film, but there's a lot that is could, or could have been could with just a little more tweaking. One thing that keeps the movie slightly alien to non-Chinese viewers would be the rather blase and at times downright callous attitudes toward death some of the characters exhibit. Part of this can be attributed to the bad voice acting, but part of it just grows from a culture where the dead are dealt with in a different fashion, like constant companions hopping around the netherworld. My favorite example of this is in a scene where an older guy is on an elevator and is suddenly approached by the ghost of a dead loved one. Perhaps you would react with fright, or maybe you'd just go into shock. His reaction is simply to make a sort of annoyed face and go, "Leave me alone. You're already dead." Within the framework of Hong Kong horror films, people don't react especially strongly to death because the assumption is that ghosts exist, and that is that. There's very little skepticism presented. In light of that, it's not so difficult to understand why people aren't more upset by death. They know whoever has died is still lurking around somewhere; they're just in a different form.
To say A Wicked Ghost is one the better straight horror films in Hong Kong isn't saying much. For one, there just aren't that many films like it that play it straight with the horror instead of resorting to slapstick antics, softcore porn, or kungfu - or all of the above. Hong Kong has never been shy about mixing genres, after all. What does exist really isn't very good. Biozombie is a decent measuring stick since both are from around the same time, and both are more in line with American and Japanese horror films than is usual for Hong Kong fare. Biozombie is a better-looking movie, with a bigger budget and better acting. A Wicked Ghost is the more enjoyable film, in my opinion, because the characters aren't nearly as shrill and the plot endeavors to be more than just run-of-the-mill video game mentality nonsense. It tries to be somewhat intelligent, somewhat peculiar. I'd watch it again, where as I'm a lot less likely to ever want to endure all the shrieking and idiotic comedy of Biozombie. It isn't entirely successful, but truth be told, I enjoyed A Wicked Ghost. It's an underdog of a film. Sort of sloppy. Not fully realized. Full of problems, not the least of which being the fact that it steals en masse from Ring, sometimes just for the hell of it. But by God, despite all that, the movie tries hard. Tony Leung puts his heart into writing a script that strives to be more than a collection of scenes in which people run around screaming. He summons up the spirit of a good horror film, and although it doesn't quite materialize, the end result is still interesting and, at least for me, fairly enjoyable once I got over the Ring rips. I appreciate that it sticks to horror convention and doesn't wander all over the place in an attempt to be all things to all audiences. No kungfu, no wacky hijinks, no lame comic relief characters. Just straight-up horror. It's still a rarity in Hong Kong, and that makes this film something special. Far from a perfect film, but not a bad film, A Wicked Ghost deserves a look if for no other reason than it tried to be something a little more than the usual fare. If you're a fan of Ring and all the associated works that came with it, then you should check out this movie, even if it's just as a curiosity piece. If you're just looking for some interesting horror, you could do worse than A Wicked Ghost. If the future of horror in Hong Kong rests in the hands of Tony Leung, we won't be getting any high works of art, just like he won't be getting any big budgets. But we've got a guy over there who seems to genuinely likes horror and who seems to want to experiment with it a little. We've got a guy who might do something pretty good in the future, and who will at least be interesting to watch progress. Labels: Country: Hong Kong, Horror: Ghosts, Series: Ring, Year: 1999 posted by Keith at 5:15 PM | 0 Comments Wednesday, March 03, 2004Mambo Girl
1957, Hong Kong. Starring Grace Chang, Peter Chen Ho, Kitty Ting Hao, Liu Enjia, Tong Yeuk Jing, Mona Fong (Yat Wa), Sam Wan, Wu Jiaxiang. Directed by Evan Yang. Available on DVD (HKFlix).
This classic from the vaults of Hong Kong's illustrious Cathay Studios begins with a shot of Golden Age screen icon Grace Chang shaking her bon-bon to a Latin-flavored mambo number while wearing cute, checkered capri pants. It's already one of the best movies ever made in my book, as anything that gives us Grace Chang in classic 1950s form-fitting fashion is an ace. Not that I'm one to judge a movie solely on the merits of its leading lady's rump nor on its inclusion of what is still, in my opinion, the paramount of women's pant technology. You know me. I'm a classic guy with classic tastes, and while booty shorts and flares may be alright for some of you, I'll take the more demure and alluring look of capri pants, a nice cocktail dress, or one of those cheongsam dresses any day over the vulgar obviousness or careless sloppiness of today's fashion. But that's just me, and like I said, you can't judge a movie purely on it's willingness to cater to my retro taste in both male and female fashion or my longing for a return to the days when we wore clothing that actually fit us. Luckily, the film that follows the rump-shaking opening is a wonderful, breezy affair from the heyday of Hong Kong cinema. It was a time when the silver screen was ruled by the likes of Linda Lin Dai and the subject of this particular movie, Grace Chang. Grace was the reigning queen of Cathay Studios, one of the greatest and most respected studios in the history of Asian film. Few and far between were the films that didn't feature Grace singing, dancing, and flashing her million dollar smile at the camera. She was the total package - a wonderful singer, a unique beauty, and an utterly captivating actress. Unfortunately, the bulk of her work - and indeed the bulk of Cathay's films in general - were unknown outside of Asia. They disappeared after their initial theatrical runs, and only a few ever showed up on any home video format. When the rare film did make it to video or DVD, it was almost always without subtitles. Thus, some of the most important films and names in Hong Kong's impressive cinematic history remained virtually unknown to new viewers. In 2003, however, fortune smiled on fans of classic cinema from around the globe when Panorama Entertainment inked a deal to release a slew of old Cathay films on DVD complete with English subtitles. Though the deal was less trumpeted than Celestial's similar deal to tap the hitherto hidden history of the Shaw Bros. Studio for home consumption, it was certainly no less historic or important. And while the fact that most of the Cathay films are dramas, musicals, and comedies in black and white means that western Hong Kong film fans (traditionally very action film oriented) will be paying less attention to them than to the Shaw Bros. releases, any film buff worth his or her salt knows that just because a film isn't in color and doesn't feature a shirtless Ti Lung getting stabbed in the belly doesn't mean it isn't worth watching. For fans of filmmaking from the glorious decades of the 1950s and 1960s, the tapping of the Cathay well is a glorious event. It's fitting that Panorama's Cathay releases are hitting the shelves the same time as the Shaw Bros. releases. They were, of course, the primary competition for the Shaws (and both studios shared some major stars, including the impish Peter Chan Ho and the regal Linda Lin Dai), and their history is similar to that of the Shaw Bros. Like Shaw, Cathay had its roots in Southeast Asia. Studio founder Loke Wan Tho began making films in the late 1930's when his family began establishing theaters in Singapore. As was often the case at the time, companies who made movies usually also owned their own theater chains (a practice that is coming somewhat back into vogue with the establishment of UA theaters in America. It never really went out of vogue in Asia). Loke's theaters were state-of -the-art, and after the close of World War II he cemented a deal to distribute British Rank films in South Asia. In the 1950's, Loke moved the business to Hong Kong, purchased a studio lot, and formed MP & GI, which would later change its name to Cathay. As with the Shaw Studios, Cathay was keen on seeking out and developing new talent, then signing them to exclusive contracts. While the Shaws initially had a good balance of male and female superstars that, during the 1970s, eventually became primarily male-dominated thanks to the popularity of Shaw kungfu films, Cathay was always a woman's world that was known for a stunning array of actresses who easily overshadowed their male counterparts at nearly every moment. Cathay built its success around a core group of female stars that included Linda Lin Dai, Jeanette Lin, Julie Yeh Feng, Lucilla You, Betty Loh Ti, Li Mei, and of course Grace Chang, among others. Cathay films and stars were highly regarded by critics and fans alike, and the studio exhibited a consistently high quality in the vast majority of what it produced. But, as we all know, nothing gold can stay, especially eras. By the mid-60's the studio began to decline. Loke died in a plane crash in 1964, and the Shaw Brothers productions began to eclipse those of Cathay. The Shaws simply had more money to throw into their projects, and they lured away a number of Cathay's biggest stars, chief among them Linda Lin Dai. By the end of the decade, the Cathay Studio had lost nearly all direction. Whimsical romantic comedies and dramas, especially in black and white, were no longer as popular as they had once been. Cathay was sold to a young upstart studio that would eventually do to the Shaw Bros. what the Shaws ultimately did to Cathay - drive it out of business. That upstart studio was Golden Harvest, the eventual home of everyone from Bruce Lee to Jackie Chan. But there for a while, no one could match Cathay in terms of star power and picture quality. And if your studio has to have a poster girl, you can sure do a heck of a lot worse than Grace Chang. It doesn't take long to immediately fall in love with her and start putting her name atop your list of favorite actresses. There's something special about her, something unique. She's not a classic beauty, but that makes her beauty all the more memorable. Her popularity is, instead, driven by her undeniable charisma and overpowering charm. Where Hollywood (and indeed Hong Kong) was full of sultry sirens and bombshells, Grace Chang was the woman you could always trust to be your friend, to be dependable and friendly and down to earth. You could also count on her to sing you a song. Unlike many actresses who were featured prominently in Hong Kong musicals, Grace could belt out her own tunes. Grace was born in 1934 in Nanjing but grew up in Shanghai. It was there, in what was far and away the mainland's most cosmopolitan and swinging city, that she trained in Peking Opera. After the tumult of World War II and the Chinese Civil War, Grace and her family moved to Hong Kong in 1949. She made her film debut in Seven Sisters (1953) and joined MP & GI in 1955. Her film and singing careers soared after that, and she quickly became one of the top stars of stage and screen. Her singing talent even garnered her an appearance on America's Dinah Shore Show. She married in 1964, and like most Hong Kong actresses, her marriage heralded her virtual retirement from show business. She still makes occasional appearances though, and she's left us a tremendous film legacy that new fans are only just now beginning to discover. Mambo Girl, the first of Panorama's Cathay DVD releases (and chronologically, the earliest film), is an excellent way to get to know the work of both the studio and Grace Chang. Although for the most part it's a breezy musical comedy, unlike most films from that particularly light-hearted genre, it has a darker, more serious current running through it that allows it to make a social comment without seeming too heavy-handed. As the story of the making of the film goes, Grace was performing for troops in Taiwan and had them so enthralled with her mambo dancing that they started calling her Mambo Girl. Scriptwriter Yi Wen was then inspired by her popularity to write a quick little film around the name. Another story, as told by Grace herself, maintains that the idea for the film came during an evening at a nightclub where Cathay founder Loke was so impresses with her dancing and singing that he decided a movie should be made. Whichever version of the story is true, the fact remains that someone somewhere saw Grace singing and dancing and simply had to make a movie for her where she could do the same. Grace stars as Li Kia-ling, the celebrated Mambo Girl as she is known on campus. She's the all-American (or All-Hong Kong, I suppose) gal who gets good grades, always treats her fellow students with equality and respect, and is a vastly talented singer and dancer. I guess they don't have students like this anymore. They've sort of gone the way of those 1950s scientists who knew everything about history, geology, astronomy, physics, and handling various handguns and rifles. I suppose its students like Grace Change who grow up to be those professional know-it-alls like John Agar, though I have a hard time imagining John Agar busting out the mambo moves. Kia-ling's life is pretty good. Aside from being the sweetheart of the campus, she has a cool little sister and a father who owns a toy store and, when neighbors come by to ask them to turn down the mambo music, tells the neighbors to take a hike. Rather than being the movie parent who attempts to crush the musical dreams of his child, he encourages her at every step and is just about the coolest movie dad you could hope for. Her father is played by Liu Enjia, probably one of the best male leads at Cathay and one of their only men to not be overshadowed by the ladies. He's a big, fat jolly guy, after all, and it's hard to overshadow big, fat jolly guys. He was Cathay's go-to man whenever they needed a solid father figure, and he's best known for his roles here and in the successful cross-cultural comedy The Greatest Civil War on Earth. All the boys at school fawn over Kia-ling, chief among them Peter Chan Ho. If you watch enough musicals and comedies from either Cathay or the Shaw Bros., you better get used to Peter Chan Ho. He seems to star in dang near every one of them, and for a relatively average looking guy, he's managed to romance everyone from Grace Chang to Linda Lin Dai to Cheng Pei-pei. I really wish I had this guy's agent. Peter's a ubiquitous fixture in the musical films of the 60s and 70s, and he's a pretty likable guy who emanates an everyman kind of charm. He's not always believable in his roles, especially when he plays a lady killer kind of character, but he has a certain underdog charisma about him that, while not nearly as magical as Grace's, makes you root for the guy. When Peter and the boys aren't studying, and they rarely seem to study, they're following Kia-ling around and urging her to sing and dance. You know the scene. It's been in countless musicals, and in the background is always a guy I simply know as Tennis Racket Lad. If you ever seen a musical comedy set at the beach, a college campus, or a summer resort, then you've probably spied the Tennis Racket Lad. He's the guy in the chorus of nameless friends who, when song and dance breaks out, always has a tennis racket which he pretends to strum like a guitar. I've seen Tennis Racket lad in at least a dozen films, and I'm sure he shows up in a dozen more. Kia-ling's life is turned upside down when her little sister discovers the older sibling she idolizes is in fact adopted. When she confesses this to her best friend, who also happens to be incredibly jealous of Kia-ling's popularity with the boys, the girls, the teachers, the janitors, and everyone else in Hong Kong, word gets around to Kia-ling's friends, and eventually to Kia-ling herself. Although her rival tries to make it a point to insult our darling Mambo Girl, none of her friend seem to care. She's much too charming, and her adopted parents are so cool anyway. Kia-ling, however, is upset by the revelation and wants to seek out her real mother. Along the way, she will discover the true meaning of family, and there will be many musical numbers. Running just under the surface is a message about the many Chinese people finding themselves in Hong Kong, especially after the revolution and Mao's increasingly totalitarian (and deadly) handling of the country. Multitudes of Mainlanders suddenly found themselves separated from their motherland and seeking shelter in the arms of Hong Kong. Seeing parallel between Kia-ling and the Mainland immigrants, between her choice of biological mother or adopted parents versus mother China or the adopted homeland of Hong Kong, doesn't take a genius. But it does, as I said, lend the film a deeper quality than one usually finds in these sorts of films. Let's face it though, no one is going to seek out a musical comedy called Mambo Girl in hopes of gleaning insight into the mental state of Chinese people seeking to make new lives for themselves in Hong Kong. For a movie like this, what it has on the surface is just as important, if not more so, than what lies beneath. And the surface of Mambo Girl is a pure delight. Grace's performance is wonderful, and the music is catchy and enjoyable. As one would guess from the title, much of the music is infused with a Latin vibe, something that was very popular with lots of pop music from the era. Grace's mambo numbers swing, though the lyrics are just about the squarest things imaginable. I doubt Yma Sumac or other mambo legends belted out words like, "You're a lucky girl. We call you the Mambo Girl. You are the sweetheart in your family. You are the queen in the school." Not exactly lyrical spiciness to go with the beat, but the infectious tunes will stick with you regardless of how corny the words may be. The musical numbers are nothing lavish. They're fairly well grounded in reality and most take place in nightclubs, sporting fields, or people's living rooms. The dances aren't extravagant either, but instead look like something an actual person might do. Well, make that an actual person who knows how to mambo and cha-cha. If I was the "actual" person, it'd look less like a dance and more like some old man having a seizure. The fact that movie embraces these modern dances and modern modes of dress so energetically is also a mark of distinction. Many films of the era reflect old fashioned mores regarding singing and dancing, especially as a way of life. How many movies are there where a woman falls upon hard times and is forced to eek out an existence as a nightclub singer, a profession that garners her much attention but no respect? Kia-ling's parents, on the other hand, break from tradition by enthusiastically supporting their daughter's talents and preaching the benefits to mind and body of having some good, clean fun. It is another way in which her adopted parents symbolize the new, modern Hong Kong and new, modern ideas. By contrast, Kia-ling's real mother is the type of lonely torch-singing forlorn woman we see in so many other movies. A product, if you will, of outdated thinking and ideals. The supporting cast does their best to keep pace with the leading lady. Liu Enjia is wonderful as her father, Peter Chan Ho is likable as her boyfriend, and Kia-ling's real mother is suitably tragic in true melodrama form. For an interesting Shaw Bros connection, future Shaw empress Mona Fong (who was one of the major players as a producer at Shaw Bros, and quite possibly as powerful - if not more powerful - than the brothers who lent the studio their name) makes an appearance as a singer in a nightclub Kia-ling visits in search of her real mother. The real shining star among the supporting cast is Kitty Ting Hao as Kia-ling's younger sister. She's cute and energetic, and her performance is superb. Tragically, she was one among many of the Cathay stars who had a rocky life and ended it via suicide. She died in Los Angeles in 1967 at the age of twenty-seven. Similar sad stories seem to plague far too many of the Cathay women. Despite that somber footnote, Mambo Girl is an energetic, fun, pluck-at-your-heartstrings musical that will win you over solely with the charm of its leading lady. It's a refreshing change of pace for people who know Hong Kong cinema primarily through kungfu films and more modern actioners. Mambo Girl takes the conventions of the Hollywood musical and integrates them seamlessly with Hong Kong sensibilities. Ultimately, you can't feel sad watching the movie, especially when the time rolls around for the big musical mambo finale. Relatively low-key in comparison to other musicals, even other black and white ones, it's a quality, retro romp that just might have you reaching for the nearest tennis racket. Labels: Country: Hong Kong, Musicals, Year: 1957 posted by Keith at 5:34 PM | 0 Comments Saturday, January 03, 2004The Golden Buddha
1966, Hong Kong. Starring Paul Chang Chung, Jeanette Lin Tsui, Fanny Fan Lai, Lo Wei, Wo Ma. Directed by Lo Wei. Available on DVD (HKFlix).
When one thinks of the myriad espionage exploitation films that flickered across movie screens in the wake of James Bond's unprecedented success as a film franchise, one generally thinks of the countless cheap though often entertaining Eurospy entries into the genre. After all, there were scores of them, and a lot of them weren't half bad. The ones that were half bad were at least halfway enjoyable. The ones that weren't even halfway enjoyable were called Agent for H.A.R.M. The desire to mimic James Bond and, in doing so, perhaps mimic a little of the success, was hardly the sole property of America and Europe, however. Bond was as big in Asia as he was everywhere else in the world, and Asian film industries were just as quick to cash in on the trend with their own particular twist on the superspy genre. As with their European counterparts, a good many of these films are impressive and fun despite having smaller budgets than Bond. The Asian spy films were able to compensate for the financial difference the same way European movies did, exploiting the one thing American films of the same nature did not have: location. Eurospy films could "trot the globe" for peanuts considering how easy it is to go to a different country in Europe. Since many of the films were often co-productions between two or more nations, even a modestly bankrolled Eurospy actioner could find itself in Paris, Rome, Venice, Milan, London, Berlin, Madrid, or any number of lavish locales in between. In Asia, it was much the same, and a production from Japan or Hong Kong could actually save money in many cases by trotting down south and shooting the exotic scenery of Thailand or Indonesia. Both continents had built-in globe-trotting at their disposal. Cheap American spy films, on the other hand, were stranded. Where were they going to go? New York, Los Angeles, and Vegas may seem exotic in an international context, but there was nothing in any of those cities Americans hadn't seen a million times before. Sure we had Hawaii, but shoestring budget exploitation films couldn't afford to fly there any more than they could fly to Tokyo or Copenhagen. Unlike Asian and European exploitation film crews, American crews were pretty much stuck, which is why so many of the American offerings in the genre are so dull, trying to pass California suburbs off as Prague or St. Petersburg. No one wants to watch a spy jet set off to Iowa or Toronto. Of the Asian countries who got in on the spy craze, Japan had the best-known films outside of their own market. The Japanese films tended to seize upon the most eye-catching pop-art aspects of the genre and blow them up tenfold into something that resembled a sumptuous blend of James Bond, Modesty Blaise, Alfred Hitchcock's many espionage thrillers, and Barbarella. Although less well-known than their Japanese brethren, and often slightly less polished, Hong Kong's entries into 1960s spymania are nothing to sneeze at, and some of them take the pop-art psychedelia even further than it was taken in Japan. Unfortunately, where finding old Japanese spy films can be difficult but eventually rewarding, digging up Hong Kong spy films was a study in unending frustration. The films simply weren't in circulation anymore - at least until recently. When the Shaw Brothers studio finally sold its vast film library for distribution on DVD, it meant that along with all the kungfu adventures for which the Shaws were best known in the West, we'd also be seeing some of their forays into espionage films, and if we were seeing what the Shaws had to offer, then we were doubtless seeing some of the best, or at least most expensive, examples of what Hong Kong had to offer. One of the first of the Shaw Brothers spy films to find its way back into the light is not exactly a spy film, but neither were a lot of the European films that became part of the genre. As long as someone was wearing a smart suit and being shot at by guys in sunglasses, then we can call it a spy film. Golden Buddha has more than enough of that to keep fans of cloak and dagger doings happy, not to mention the fact that it has sexy ladies, hidden treasure, exotic locales, and a fat guy in a gold lame super-villain outfit. And I haven't even begun to describe the lair. Golden Buddha begins with our dashing man Paul Chang Chung as Paul, which is convenient. Chang is a top notch "dashing" lead, certainly better than contemporary Peter Chan Ho, who was plenty likable but rarely believable as the suave ladies' man he often played. Chang is another one of those men they just don't seem to make anymore. He's not quite a Cary Grant, but he reminds me a lot of Toho Studio's number one super-suave leading man from the same era, Akira Takarada. What all three of those gents have in common (and what would later be embodied by men like Chow Yun-fat and...well, just Chow Yun-fat, I guess) is the ability to lend an everyman quality to sheer elegance, or maybe it's adding a touch of sheer elegance to an everyman character. As James Bond, Sean Connery had class to spare, but existed at an unobtainable level. No one could be James Bond. He never had to deal with the mundane aspects of life, like doing laundry or going grocery shopping. The elegant everyman, as defined by Cary Grant, was clever and sophisticated and charming, but he was also real, or at least more real than James Bond. Grant may still be jetting around fighting international villains, but you also see him staying in crummy hotel rooms, struggling to cook himself some dinner, going to a regular job, things of that nature. They were real-life flares that made Cary Grant's persona seem almost obtainable, because we saw him dealing with the normal stuff. The same goes for Akira Takarada and Paul Chang Chung. The characters they played were always smartly dressed and one step ahead of the game, but they also had everyman qualities and problems that made them seem more believable. James Bond created a myth, something one could aspire to but never hope to actually achieve. The elegant Everyman, on the other hand, was something that you could hope to one day become if you could just turn off the GameCube and stop scratching your ass while making lunch long enough to learn a little something about presenting yourself with a degree of class and respectability. Paul Chang Chung's Paul is a businessman on his way to Singapore to seal some manner of deal. On the flight, he meets and old friend from the judo club who is on his way to Bangkok to attend to some sort of family business. Both men carry the same briefcase. Can you guess what happens? When Paul is forced by inclement weather to stay an extra day in Bangkok, he discovers the mistaken briefcase identities and decides to use his time in Thailand to get the proper case back. Well, first he gets sidetracked to a massage parlor full of willing girls, then he goes to get the case back. I mean, a man's got to have his priorities straight, doesn't he? The problem with getting back his own briefcase gets complicated when he discovers his old friend with a rather large stiletto knife stuck in his chest. Paul isn't too terribly upset. I guess they weren't close friends, just old friends. He grabs the contents of his briefcase, shovels them into his friend's briefcase, and heads home intent to not get tangled up in the whole affair. That would be fine if it weren't for the fact that assassins and thugs are suddenly coming out of the woodwork and chasing after Paul, demanding that he turn over to them the secret of the Golden Buddha - a small statuette he discovered in his friend's briefcase. Before too long, Paul is on the run and trying to figure out the riddle that will, with aide from his friend's beautiful sister and portly brother, unlock a fortune in buried treasure. The key to the whole affair lies inside the Buddha, and inside the two Buddha's possessed by the victim's brother and sister. In a refreshing twist, the police are involved but Paul is not on the run from them or mistaken as his friend's killer or anything like that. The cops just sort of like to hang around and pretend they are reading papers. The premise is simple enough, but the thrill is always in the execution, and director Lo Wei delivers a tightly paced adventure film that never feels especially serious but also never veers into total comedy. In retrospect, it's tempting to apply the term "camp" to a film of this nature, but camp implies a certain degree of intention on behalf of the filmmaker to spoof a certain genre or turn the wackiness way up a la the old Batman television series. There's nothing in Golden Buddha to make one think they weren't taking the film seriously. It's outlandish, yes, and certainly garish and over the top, but it lacks the wink - and, thankfully, the smarminess - of most films that put themselves forward as camp. It doesn't matter, really, I suppose. Campy or not, all that counts is whether the film is enjoyable, and Golden Buddha definitely delivers the goods. Being able to make a film fast-paced but coherent, quick moving but not hyperactive and short of thought, seems to be a lost art form. Many contemporary films feel they must either be slow and ponderous or edited so choppily in that MTV style so as to cause seizures in a good many viewers, primarily because these films rely entirely on action scenes to propel the movie forward and provide the sense of pace. A film like Golden Buddha, or a James Bond film, knows that there are other ways to keep the plot feeling fast without relying on explosions and jump cuts set to blaring techno music. And of course few were better than Hitchcock at being able to inject non-action scenes with a sense of urgency and tension. Films from the 1960s in particular, knew how to use characters and dialogue to keep your interest. That's just what Golden Buddha does. There is plenty of action, most of it in the form of energetic but dreadfully choreographed fist fights, but the film doesn't rely solely on those scenes - which, given the quality of the fights, is probably wise. The character of Paul is, like many of the characters in this and similar films, one dimensional. But it's a good dimension, and the script makes the most of it. He's a good guy, handy with a gun or a judo throw, not above bedding a beautiful dame in the name of, well, bedding beautiful dames. He is, in a word, likable. He's charismatic, and that makes him interesting even he's not a deep and complex study of the human psyche. When you have interesting characters, it goes along way to giving you an interesting film, a film where you don't have to rely on special effects and explosions to keep the viewer's attention. The other characters are predictable, but that's not a negative. After all, spy films became popular because they followed a formula and found ways to tweak and alter the formula while still staying true to it, like how I started adding a dash of molasses to my recipe for Kentucky Derby Pie. Paul finds himself with two women in his life, as the hero in spy films often did - and remember, I realize this isn't a spy film per se, but it has enough of the genre clichés to keep it in the company of your finer Eurospy films. One woman is noble and good, the other is sinister and evil. Both are sexy. We start out with Fanny Fan, who is an absolute drop-dead bombshell of a vixen with sex appeal in spades. She starred in at least one other Lo Wei-directed spy caper for the Shaw's, 1967's wonderful Angel With Iron Fists. If she didn't make a lot more movies than I've turned up, then it's a real shame because she has a beauty and a body that will turn your head and keep it in that position. She's wonderful as the femme fatale of the piece, an operative of the mysterious Skeleton Gang who is out to steal the secret of the Golden Buddha before Paul and his allies can solve it. And she shows off her derrieres. That may sound base and piggish, but it's also worth noting since this film was made in 1966, a time when bare bottoms were still rare in anything but b-grade exploitation and those nudie cuties about Florida nudist colonies being menaced by a gorilla. Our introduction to Fanny's fanny while fully clothed in a tight mod dress and swaying provocatively back and forth as she sashays down the hallway is plenty good, to boot, or should I say to booty? Oh, that was just awful. Okay, enough about naked behinds. I can try and pass it off as my professional interest in Hong Kong cinema's willingness to pursue nudity in a mainstream film while the supposedly more liberated West was still playing things coy, but in the end - so to speak - you know the basic fact behind the matter is that I simply appreciate nudity. I appreciate Fanny Fan Lai. Put the two together, and well, you can figure it out. Our more modest heroine is Jeanette Lin Tsui as the sister of Paul's murdered friend and possessor of one third of the Golden Buddha's secret (her older brother has the other third). What Jeanette lacks in terms of Fanny Fan's bombshell appeal she more than makes up for with an enchanting beauty, graceful demeanor, and plenty of elegant 1960s dresses. For the most part, she's not nearly as actively involved in things as your better Bond girls from the same time. By 1966, we'd seen Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore doling out judo throws (Goldfinger) and Claudine Auger as Domino doling out harpoon guns to the chest (Thunderball). Jeanette's damsel-in-distress is less interesting for her lack of ability, but she's not entirely useless. She at least cracks a vase over a guy's head and, as far as I remember, never trips and falls while running away from the bad guys. That's got to count for something. The supporting cast rounds things out nicely. A young Wo Ma (or younger, anyway) plays one of the cops, who as I mentioned earlier, made me happy by being ineffectual (as always) for most of the film but not resorting to the tired old "mistaking the hero for the killer" routine. People know Wo Ma best for his parts later in life, such as the Taoist ghost slayer in Chinese Ghost Story. He spends most of his time here reading papers on the street corner. Director Lo Wei himself makes an appearance as the villain of the piece, and I have to say this is one of the greatest screen villains of all time, not so much for his character, which is typical and somewhat uninspired, but for his fashion sense, which would send even 1970s-style David Bowie or Elton John into a fit. The man wears amber sunglasses, a shiny gold foil suit (with standard "evil villain" high collar), black knee-high boots, and a cape with a giant pointy collar. Now that, my friends, is a quality megalomaniac villain's wardrobe. While Pierce Brosnan may have brought back the era of a hero with keen fashion sense, the villains of today are woefully inadequate when it comes to selecting the proper attire for trying to throttle the world with your iron grip. These days, they're all in dull brown military uniforms and business casual from J. Crew. Hardly any villains these days wear capes, let alone a gold foil Nehru jacket. Where's the style? Where's the flamboyant flare that lets the world know you are not a man to be trifled with? The leader of Golden Buddha's ruthless Skeleton Gang - now there is a man who knows how to dress the part. That, in fact, leads to what may very well be my favorite part in the entire film. I'm not going to spoil anything when I tell you Paul manages to foil the evil plans of the Skeleton Gang, which were pretty small considering what a lavish lair they have. For an organization with tentacles in all parts of the world, with a vast space age underground lair and hundreds of henchmen and attractive female agents, you'd think they'd set their heights a little higher than recovering a small chest of jewelry. I'm sure it was valuable stuff, but I bet the Skeleton Gang spent twice as much as it was worth just trying to get the thing, which is especially silly when you realize after the not entirely shocking twist that they could have basically had the thing for free with almost no effort. Anyway, once Paul foils their plans we get a lovely shot of the gang and their leader being hauled off like common crooks by the cops - still decked out in all his outrageous supervillain gear. I bet he'll be especially popular wearing that in some dark, dirty Bangkok jail cell. The leader's fabulous outfit is simply one part of the overall beautiful look of the film. The budget may have been smaller than a Bond budget, but it seems to have been larger than the budget for your average Eurospy film, or at least better utilized. The film looks grand, full of eye-popping color and space-age décor. The Skeleton Gang's lair is a thing of beauty. Ken Adam himself, the set designer for the Bond films, would be impressed by what Lo Wei and crew managed to pull of with much more limited resources. The thing is an amalgamation of every swanky space station, secret lair, and bachelor pad ever seen on the screen. When the film isn't traipsing about the labyrinthine corridors of the evil lair, it's reclining in an exotic lounge, parading around a series of gorgeous Thai travelogue footage, and otherwise taking advantage of the fact that Shaw Bros. productions threw together some of the most beautiful sets ever. Of course, not everything is perfect with Golden Buddha. The plot does have at least one major hole, which I mentioned above. Absolutely nothing in the movie was necessary. The Skeleton Gang could have recovered the treasure of the Golden Buddhas with almost no effort, but they chose instead to go running about shooting at things, getting into judo fights, and ruining a variety of lattice work. Luckily, the film is enough fun for you not to really care, and given the clothes the leader of the gang favors, it's possible he's simply not all there and the easy route never occurred to him. Of course, the easy route rarely makes for an interesting film, either. The other strike against the film is the abysmal fight choreography. There are a few shootouts, but most of the action comes via fisticuffs, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a worse example of how to stage fights. Even the fight scenes in those Frankie Avalon beach parties were better than the ones here. It's not that they aren't energetic - every time there is a fight, Paul Chang Chung and his opponents go at it with gusto, flinging each other across the room, through the windows, bouncing across the bed, things of that nature. The problem lies in the fact that not a single punch lands anywhere near its target, and everyone does that jerky "turn my head to the left, then to the right, then up, then down" movement when they're being hit. The film fares better when Paul breaks out his judo moves, and one fight scene between him and another judo master after Fanny Fan is drugged by her own treachery is actually decent. But most of the fights are straight-up fisticuffs, and they look really awful. It can't be excused by the film's date, either. By 1966, we'd seen plenty of superb fight scenes, many of them in other films from the Shaw Bros. studios. Golden Buddha loves a fight scene, but it can't execute one very well. Still, the energy and the fact that the film is basically one wild, outlandish ride make the awful fight choreography enjoyable despite itself. Finally, while the acting is relatively solid throughout, one has to question the matter-of-fact nonchalantness with which Paul handles the mysterious murder of his friend. We can assume at first that he simply wasn't all that close to the guy, and that would be understandable. But then he goes through all this crazy mess with the Golden Buddha statues, risks his life, and when asked why explains that it's because the dead guy was his friend, and he owes him. Ah well, nothing to get annoyed over. After all, do we want to watch Paul Chang Chung bed Fanny Fan, judo chop everyone in sight, and run around in a space-age secret lair, or do we want to watch him cry and question how life could be so cruel? Golden Buddha is tremendous fun and a real treat for fans of 1960s spy films despite there being no actual spies in the film. It's still got plenty of intrigue and sneaking about, and the production is sumptuous. Fans of zany 1960s art direction will be in heaven. The plot won't keep you guessing from beginning to end, and it does have that one giant hole, but otherwise it's fairly serviceable and keeps things moving at a brisk but not thoughtless pace. Best of all, the mysterious treasure turns out to be actual treasure, and not some note that says, "Peace on Earth" or something. Labels: Country: Hong Kong, Espionage, Studio: Shaw Bros, Year: 1966 posted by Keith at 3:34 PM | 0 Comments Friday, January 03, 2003Green Snake
1993, Hong Kong. Starring Maggie Cheung, Joey Wong, Zhao Wen-zhou, Wu Hsing-Guo, Ma Cheng Miu. Directed by Tsui Hark. Available on DVD (HKFlix).
We've documented in previous reviews how the Hong Kong film industry began to collapse in the mid 1990s. Although disappointing, it shouldn't have really come as a big surprise. Hong Kong had been cranking out astounding films for three decades, starting with the old Shaw Brothers swordsman films of the 1960s and ending with the Hong Kong New Wave in the 1980s. That's a long time to sustain such a high level of entertainment. Preoccupation with the 1997 hand-over to China, video piracy, and the fact that the triads basically bled the industry dry left the once thriving Hong Kong film empire little more than a shell. The talent that had generated all the buzz was getting older, and the new generation of stars simply wasn't up to the task of filling in their shoes. The exploding VCD piracy market and triad greed caused budgets to shrink to a minuscule level, and with dwindling profits came dwindling quality. A few brave souls remained to weather the storm, or at least did double duty in Hong Kong and the United States. Director and producer Tsui Hark was perhaps the man most responsible for what we call the Hong Kong New Wave. Films like Zu revolutionized movie making in the small island nation, and Tsui's knack for discovering new talent remains unparalleled to this day. As we've gone over before, his list of contributions to the world of film making are staggering. John Woo was laboring away in sub-par comedies and ultra-cheap action films before Tsui Hark fronted him the cash to make a little film called A Better Tomorrow. Tsui Hark's filmography as director and producer is more or less the same thing as a list of the most important, influential films in Hong Kong history. Chinese Ghost Story, Once Upon a Time in China, The Killer, Swordsman, Peking Opera Blues -- this is the man who basically made big-time action stars out of Chow Yun-fat, Brigette Lin, Jet Li, and countless others. While you can't overstate Tsui Hark's contribution to the history of film, not everyone was happy about it. A lot of kungfu film purists disliked Tsui's reliance on slick editing and wires to augment his performer's talents, or in some cases cover up their lack of talent. Additionally, Tsui was notoriously difficult to work with in many instances. He would often bully his way out of the role of producer and into the role of director. You have to admire his conviction and passion, but if you're a director trying to work with him, it becomes frustrating to say the least. As many people as Tsui Hark "made" he alienated. John Woo and Ching Siu-tung are two among many who eventually had their fill of Tsui Hark's overbearing artistic passion. However, most great directors shared these traits. It was Akira Kurosawa who demanded the entire lavish set for Seven Samurai be destroyed and rebuilt because a close inspection of the construction revealed nail holes in buildings that would not have been built using nails in the time Seven Samurai was set. Kurosawa also freaked out on the set of Tora Tora Tora because the paint on the battleships was a shade off the authentic historical color of paint used on Japanese ships during World War II. Obsession runs deep in people that committed to their craft, and it can definitely try the patience of those around them. When Tsui Hark felt Hong Kong films had become too much about making money and not enough about artistry and innovation, he and a few friends started their own production company, Cinema Workshop, to cultivate film-makers who wanted to break out and try something different. When few Hong Kong film-makers would dare make films with overt political or social commentary in them, Tsui Hark made the fiercely political and downbeat Don't Play With Fire. Love him or hate him, there's no denying that Tsui Hark is one of the most important figures in Hong Kong film-making history. But nothing gold can last, Pony Boy. As the industry fell apart, Tsui Hark was among the many directors who decided to try their luck in America. It was no surprise, really. Hark and friends like John Shum (the frizzy haired comedic actor was also a major figure in the freedom demonstrations that lead to the dramatic and tragic events at Tienamen Square) were outspoken opponents of Communism, and it seemed only logical that they would bid farewell to their home before China took over. Unfortunately, Hark's career in America was short-lived. Like John Woo and Ringo Lam before him, Hark was saddled with directorial duties on a Jean-Claude Van Damme film, only it was much worse because the movie also starred annoying basketball marketing scam Dennis Rodman. As if that wasn't bad enough, Hark immediately got stuck with another Van Damme clunker, this time bearing the burden of the Belgian bumbler and some intensely irksome comedian named Rob Schneider, who was nothing like the handyman Schneider from One Day At a Time. After those two films, Communism suddenly didn't seem so bad. I think anyone who sat through either of those films would agree that maybe a little totalitarian censorship can be a good thing when it comes to Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dennis Rodman. Hark's career leading up to his departure from Hong Kong was faltering. The comedy Chinese Feast and the romantic tragedy The Lovers both scored big with critics and fans alike, but from there Hark hit a series of stumbling blocks. His stylish and darkly violent retelling of the One-Armed Swordsman, entitled The Blade came and went with nary a peep. Likewise, his cynical, downbeat fantasy film Green Snake attracted little attention upon its initial release. People simply weren't that interested in depressing, angry films at the time. Since their initial failure, however, both films have acquired fairly large fanbases among aficionados of the genres. Certainly both films deserved far more attention and praise than they actually received, but at the time folks in Hong Kong just didn't want to hear the lunatic ravings of Tsui Hark. Green Snake is set in a world between myth and reality. Zhao Wen-zhou stars as a young monk who spends his days hunting down demons and spirits who have crossed over from their own realm into the realm of mortals. Some of them come with malicious intent, but many of them seem only to want to run wild and free in the physical world for a brief time. The monk operates under the notion that the two worlds simply cannot cross paths, harmless intentions or not. The opening scene of the monk chasing an old wiseman who is actually a spider demon through a field as they both run through mid-air sets a beautiful but disturbing tone for the film. It's incredibly lush and over-saturated with dreamlike color. The hallucinatory beauty seems eerie, however, not at all peaceful, sort of like those old fairy tales where things are actually creepy and sinister instead of all bright and Disneyfied. Monk Fahai is also immediately established as a complex character who is unsure of his Buddhist vows. He is determined to fight against the world of demons (keep in mind that in Chinese mythology, a demon is not necessarily an evil being), yet he also seems to find something fascinating about their realm. Likewise, he wrestles with physical temptations from his own world. On a rainy night, he witnesses a peasant woman giving birth to a child in the woods and finds it difficult to avert his eyes from the spectacle. He also notices that the woman is being protected from the rain, and quickly spies to giant snakes in the trees, serving as umbrellas. His initial response is to dispatch them quickly to the nether-realm, but he soon has second thoughts and decides that since they were helping the woman out, he'll let them slide by this time. The two snakes are played in human form by the devastatingly beautiful Joey Wong and Maggie Cheung. They are two sister snake spirits who have decided they prefer the human world to their own, and so are doing their best to maintain human form and pass as mortals. Causing them untold amounts of grief is a blind Taoist ghost hunter and his assistants. Unlike Fahai, the priest has no doubts about his holy crusade to rid the world of demons and spirits. He goes about his quest with an unfaltering, blind conviction. Luckily for the sisters, he's about as good at his vocation as the Three Stooges were at their jobs as exterminators or movers or guys who carried around those big blocks of ice. He's a minor annoyance to them, but not a real threat. Hmm, two snake spirit sisters just trying to make it in this crazy world -- how come Lifetime can't play movies like that instead of those "woman is stalked by her crazy ex-husband while trying to get back the baby she gave up for adoption years ago" movies? Rounding out the bizarre cast of characters is a young scholar named Hsui Xien who would much rather be drinking wine and writing love poetry than learning the ins and outs of Confucian philosophy. He's the classic "dreamer" character. You admire his idealism, but sometimes you just want him to shut up with his "my heart's so full of dreams" nonsense. And could someone tell me what the hell is the deal with the head rolling? As the scholars regurgitate the Confucian wisdom, they all roll their heads back and forth. I've seen monks and other assorted wisemen doing the same thing in various movies. Now I'm no Confucian gentleman. I've always been more along the lines of one of those drunken Taoists who lives in a cave and gets in arguments with the moon. So I guess the rule was you had to loll your head about while reciting your lessons, but you know if I tried that in school the teachers would tell me to quit nodding off, not unlike how they made me quit reading in "the robot voice" when I was in second grade. Seriously though, if someone can tell me exactly why they made scholars roll their heads around like that, I'd appreciate it. I'm not above learning some new bit of history. On a warm summer night, the two sisters sneak into town. Maggie Cheung breaks hearts by dropping in, nude and covered in rain, on a lavish party being thrown by some vaguely Indian guy. She proceeds to stomp mercilessly on said broken hearts with her suggestive semi-lesbian dance involving one of the female Indian dancers. I don't know of anyone, male or female, who's forgotten that scene. Joey, in the meantime, slips into the river and catches a glimpse of the young scholar. She's instantly taken with him. Did I mention Maggie's suggestive dance? Things get complicated quickly. Although Sou Ching (Joey Wong) and Hsui Xien hit it off well, there's this whole issue of her being a giant snake. Maggie also attracts the attention of Monk Fahai, who is torn between his sworn duty to combat the spirits and send them packing and his feeling that they are benevolent creatures doing far more to help their "fellow" humans than most of the actual humans are doing. Plus, he finds himself seized by a strong attraction to her, which shouldn't really surprise anyone. Fahai's confusion mounts as he witnesses people wallowing in filth and greed, far more destructive and nasty than any demon he ever vanquished. You could probably havea pretty good fire and brimstone movie featuring Monk Fahai and Robert Duvall's character from The Apostle, but you'd have an even better movie it was Monk Fahai and Robert Duvall's character from Apocalypse Now. Monk Fahai considers the romance a blasphemy. Humans and spirits simply should not interact, plain and simple. He vows to put a stop to the relationship. Obviously, he's focusing his anger on the two lovers in an attempt to compensate for his own feelings of temptation and doubt. It's no surprise to anyone that the most wild-eyed, fire-and-brimstone preachers are often the ones with the most to hide. Nothing fuels a little righteous indignation quite like wishing you yourself could indulge once in a while. Fahai deals with his own guilt by projecting it on others and attempting to interfere in their lives despite the fact that they have no affect on him at all. Like most religious zealots, his divine call is pretty much what the rest of call "dickishness." Face it: it's pretty difficult to get behind a guy who's goal in life is to rid the world of Joey Wong and Maggie Cheung. The blind priest, on the other hand, is a different type of corrupt religious leader. To him, battling "sin" is just a way to garner more attention and power for himself. It's not about righteousness; it's about career advancement. It's about the rush he gets by forcing his will onto others. Tsui's criticism of religion in these two characters is harsh but certainly not without sound foundation. Whether its nature is of a political or religious nature (if indeed there is any difference between the two), intolerance is, well, intolerable. It leads ultimately to destruction, alienation, and disaster. Things get bad when Green (Maggie Cheung) starts getting jealous of her sister's romance. Green was already a bit jealous of the success her sister had in adopting human form. Sou Ching pretty much has it down, while Green still has trouble walking and maintaining her human form. She begins doing little things to sabotage the relationship, culminating in Hsiu Xien discovering Sou Ching is a snake spirit. The shock of the revelation sends him into a coma which only a magic herb can cure. Sou Ching is emotionally destroyed, vowing to do everything she can to shed her spirit self and become a real human. Green, in turn, realizes how her pettiness has potentially destroyed two people, and agrees to seek out the magic herb. Unfortunately for the two sister, Fahai is waiting to trap them and send them back to their own realm. The whole ordeal is further complicated when the battle between Green and Fahai results in severe flooding. The entire village will be destroyed. Using their combined powers, Green and Monk Fahai could potentially stem the rising tide, but they are too caught up in their own vain battle with one another. By the time they realize the error of their ways, it's far too late, and their efforts to prevent the flood are a failure. The town has been destroyed. Hundreds have died in the flood waters, among them Hsiu Xien and Sou Ching. The final scene of Fahai and Green finally reaching a state of revelation as the world around them is washed away is powerful in the extreme. It's like a punch to the gut, and where most film makers would attempt to tie things up with some glimmer of hope, Tsui Hark just leaves it as it is. In a theme similar to Zu, the central characters discover their inability to compromise, work together, and put aside their own petty differences and jealousies has resulted in them losing everything they ever cherished. Parallels to Hong Kong's situation going into 1997 are not difficult to make, of course. This movie seems like Tsui Hark attempting to come to terms with his own feelings toward Mainland China, a country to which he actually has very few ties (Tsui Hark is Vietnamese). His final resolution is bittersweet, to say the least. China has problems. The blind Taoist priest could easily be seen as the embodiment of China's contemptible past of intolerance and political persecution. If the reasonable people from both sides work together, however, perhaps progress can be made in healing China's ills. It's a message of hope, though Tsui's prognosis for whether or not it will actually happen seems doubtful, at best. He is, after all, a notorious pessimist when it comes to human character. The acting ain't bad. Though Zhao tends to overdo stoic a bit, Maggie shines. And while she's outclassed by her "sister," Joey Wong manages to hold her own as the coy, innocent Sou Ching. It's a shame she disappeared from the scene soon after making this movie. Along with her role in Chinese Ghost Story, Joey Wong seems to be unmatched in making people wish they could just meet a nice ghost and settle down in some haunted temple or something. The most subversive thing Tsui Hark pulls with this film is wrapping such a bitter pill in such a sumptuous package. Although a few of the wildly ambitious effects fall flat, Green Snake is a stylistic triumph. The beauty of every shot, the care that went into making every scene seem like a vibrant technicolor dream, is staggering. Few films are as overwhelmingly gorgeous as Green Snake. On that note, you'd be hard pressed to assemble a cast more entrancing and beautiful than Joey Wong, Zhao Wen-zhou, and Maggie Cheung. There's something unusual about all three of them. They're not just physically attractive. Something about each of the actors, even outside their roles here, is engrossing. Constant shots of flowing waters, billowing silks, mists, and swaying blossoms make the film unspeakably exquisite. Likewise, the scenes of magic and sorcery are breath-taking. There are no martial arts, but there's plenty of flying and summoning of natural elements. As with most Tsui Hark films, it's possible to overlook the political and social commentary and simply let the grace and beauty flow over you, but you'd be missing out on what makes this far more than just a lovely little tragic fantasy film. If you go into it wanting tons of action and excitement, you're going to be disappointed. After providing us with some of the most wildly over-the-top fantasy action films in Zu and Swordsman, Tsui seems to be looking for a middle ground here between his early martial arts fantasy films and his later romantic tragedies like The Lovers. He hits the nail on the head. With the exception of a few weak visual effects, he creates the perfect fairytale mood: lush, haunting, dreamlike, and ultimately foreboding. The failure of this film followed by the failure of The Blade was a good part of what lead Tsui Hark to seek success in America. Of course, that didn't work out either. He's been relatively quiet since returning to Hong Kong, though there are several projects in the works. Joey Wong went into semi-retirement, shifting her base of operations from Hong Kong to Japan. Zhao Wen-zhou should have been a huge star, but fantasy/martial arts films went out of style, and he found himself stuck is some astoundingly abysmal action cheapies that have done little to establish him as the future of Hong Kong action cinema, which is the title he seemed perfectly capable of inheriting. Maggie Cheung, of course, went on to become an international flavor of the month after some French guy got obsessed with her and developed an entire film called Irma Vep just so he could meet her. It worked. The film sucked (unless you really like watching French people talk about making movies as they chain smoke), but the director ended up marrying Maggie, so you can't fault the guy. He accomplished what he set out to do. And Green Snake accomplishes what it sets out to do, which is to pull people into its rapturous beauty then leave them confused and depressed at the tragedy of human stubbornness and greed. As a tragic love story, it operates well. As a indictment of political and religious intolerance and persecution, it works even better. Too bad it wasn't as successful at the box office as it should have been, but then, no one wants an unhappy ending. Tsui Hark was hoping that an unhappy ending in the film would make a real-life happy ending a little more feasible. Whether or not that's the case remains to be seen, but no amount of politics can change the fact that Green Snake is a profoundly affecting, ambitious, heart-breaking story. Even a hardened old curmudgeon like myself has a soft spot for terribly tragic romance, especially if it's between snake demons and flying monks and lazy scholars. Taken as Hong Kong fantasy spectacle or political allegory, Green Snake is one hell of a film, and it's the perfect final note for the Hong Kong New Wave to end on. It's only fitting that the man who started it with Zu would also signal its closing with this film so similar in theme and (lack of) resolution. Ironic that the entire New Wave cycle would end up so closely reflecting the events in Zu. There was lots of flash, lots of innovation. There was a noise that, for a spell, shook the world and attracted everyone's attention. But at the end of the day, everything closed on the same note of doubt on which it opened. We were right back where we'd always been. With any luck, the seeds of dissent and dissatisfaction continue to burn in Tsui Hark, and he'll surprise us yet again. Labels: B-Masters Roundtable, Country: Hong Kong, Director: Tsui Hark, Fantasy, Year: 1993 posted by Keith at 4:12 PM | 0 Comments Sunday, October 20, 2002Eighteen Fatal Strikes
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 posted by Keith at 12:05 PM | 0 Comments Wednesday, September 18, 2002Chinese Gods
1980, Hong Kong. Directed by Chik Hoi Chang.
You don't see very much animation coming out of Hong Kong, and I've never really understood why. You know, when you think about it, Hong Kong seems like a pretty boring place. Where are the cartoons? Where are the punk bands? The pro wrestling? The cool toys? It's like Japan hogged the entire cool allotment for the continent of Asia, and although Hong Kong got kungfu and gangster movies, that's about it. And as far as I know, Mexican food has practically no presence in any of the Asian countries, which is a crime. Maybe someday I will move to Osaka and open a taco stand. Anyway, we're not here to talk about tacos. We were talking about how you can count the number of Hong Kong cartoons on one hand, even if that hand was mauled in an industrial accident. In fact, I've only found two cartoon movies from Hong Kong, though I think they have some television series about a flying pig or something. My excuse for Hong Kong having pretty much nothing fun going for it has always been that the island is too small and concentrated. There's really no room for punk clubs and independent films and zines and whatever. So everyone is stuck with nothing but crappy, mass produced pop entertainment. But with animation, I just don't know. Can't they just send it all to Korea like we in the United States do? Chinese Gods was the first Hong Kong cartoon I ever saw, and quite frankly, I've yet to fully recover. Someone took a lot of that brown acid they had at Woodstock, then dove too deep and got a nitrogen high, then sat down and made this utterly dumbfounding, totally amazing gem of a movie. I don't even know where to begin with this one, as the size of this film's weirdness makes it nearly impossible to get a hold of. Should I start with ancient Chinese gods and their motorcycle clouds? Or the frequent dismemberment, charring, and other acts of insane violence? How about the fact that, when all else fails, the ancient gods of China have to call on the ultimate supernatural guardian of China, Bruce Lee (sporting a cool third eye in the center of his forehead)? Well, let's start with the technical aspects of this. The artwork is pretty good, a nice mix of traditional Chinese styles with 1970s style Japanese cartoon aesthetic. The animation, however, looks about on par with what kids doing an animation project in their middle school class would come up with. It's really bad and reminds me of those crappy Christian religious cartoons they sometimes play on cable. If you have ever seen one, you know what I'm talking about. The Lord may have filled his flock with righteous condescension but he left out little things like artistic ability. That includes artistic musical talent. What the hell is the deal with Christian rock? Is there a worse sounding abomination anywhere in the universe? Okay, where were we? Let's move on to the plot of this cartoon. There is an evil warlord who is oppressing the people of his province. His wife is a fox spirit, and although they are sexy, fox spirits are always deceitful and naughty. Disgusted by the ruler's evil deeds, the gods, one of whom can make his eyes extend way far out of his head, send a wise demigod type fellow down to Earth to talk sense to the despot. In accordance with the behavior you would expect from a ruler who murders his most loyal advisors and burns lots of people alive for the hell of it, he doesn't really see the error of his ways. Angered and frustrated, the demigod whips up a tornado that carries many of the peasants to a neighboring province, where the ruler is benevolent and honest. Obviously, this is a fantasy film. The evil ruler decides to declare war on the good leader, but when his assassins fail to carry out their job, the fox spirit suggests that the evil ruler enlist the aid of the dark forces, who are pretty good at such things. In turn, the wise demigod enlists the aid of his pals up in the heavens and all out supernatural war ensues. Evil Taoist priests, monsters and demons of every possible shape and size, and god riding around on clouds that make motorcycle noises are all part of the fun. When the forces of evil send in the Three Kings of Hell as their coup de gras, the good gods summon up Bruce Lee. Yep. When God himself can't solve a problem, he calls on Bruce Lee. Wouldn't you? Bruce Lee, complete with his official silly fighting noises, materializes to kick some King of Hell ass. Bruce can do kungfu and shape shift, among other powers he never used in his other movies but we always suspected he had. I've really only scratched the surface of how insane this cartoon gets. I mean, if you thought The Wall was weird, you ain't seen nothing yet. This movie has more craziness packed into each of it's poorly animated cels than most any other film around. Was this for kids? Surely not. It shows people being chopped in half and burned at the stake, flailing and shrieking as the melt. It has demons ripping people apart and eating their limbs. I mean, sure it's the kind of movie I watched as a kid, but these kids these days are goofier. Oh well, who cares whether or not your kids can watch it, if you have kids. What I'm more interested in is my own personal enjoyment of the film, and I have to say it's really one of the most unbelievably fun and inexplicable things I've ever seen. It makes me feel a bit light-headed. It was another favorite of my stoner friend Ken Volkman, along with Young Taoism Fighter. And hey, if a stoner thinks it's weird, you know you can trust them. The animation is not great, as I said, and a lot of people will snub the film simply on that. But you have to overlook the cheap animation and enjoy the delirium of the story. And you can also admire the artwork, if not the outcome of trying to make it move. It's so cheesy to say that a film looks like someone's bad acid trip, but man alive does that ever fit the bill here. I'm not sure exactly how accurate the mythology on display is. As best I can tell, the reason Bruce Lee is no longer with us is because he had to travel back in time to like the Han Dynasty or something in order to assume his role as the ultimate god of China. He brought with him his knowledge of motorcycles and applied to it some clouds for his buddies. Well, he's a better folk hero than Buffalo Bill, anyway. Chinese Gods got a domestic video release and tends to turn up on video shelves from time to time, so keep your eyes open. When I am rich, which should happen any day now, I plan on re-releasing this film, unleashing unto this Earth some animated madness the likes of which God himself has never before witnessed. You think you know weird, but if you haven't seen this movie, your education is incomplete. Luckily, I'm here to teach you in your times of need. Labels: Anime and Animation, Country: Hong Kong, Fantasy, Martial Arts: Kungfu, Stars: Bruce Lee, Year: 1980 posted by Keith at 4:43 PM | 0 Comments Friday, June 21, 2002The Blade
1995, Hong Kong. Starring Zhao Wen-zhuo, Moses Chan, Man Cheuk Chiu, Valerie Chow, Collin Chou, Jason Chu, Michael Tse, Chi Fai Chan, Ray Chang, Ricky Ho. Written by Koan Hui and Tsui Hark. Directed by Tsui Hark.
Vietnamese born, American trained, and Hong Kong famed director/producer Tsui Hark is a curious fellow. One of a handful of film makers in Hong Kong who seem genuinely interested in the art instead of the just the business, Hark revolutionized Hong Kong films with the release of his fantasy epic Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain. He went on to direct many of the best films of the Hong Kong new wave, including Once Upon a Time in China, the film that made a major star out of Jet Li. His role as director is dwarfed only by his role as producer. Under Hark's guidance, films like A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, Chinese Ghost Story, and the Swordsman saga all made tremendous impact on the film scene and made megastars of guys like John Woo, Ching Siu-tung, and Chow Yun-fat. After teaming with dean Shek to create Film Workshop, Tsui Hark solidified his position as one of the most important people int he history of Hong Kong cinema. It's no surprise then that Hark is characterized by the fiery temper and personality that marks many of the world's great artists. No man is perfect, after all, and Hark's often overbearing personality cause his professional break-up with men like Jet Li, John Woo, and Ching Siu-tung. Hark could create stars, but he couldn't keep them. Strangely enough, each man would go on to great stardom in their post-Hark career, but few would make films as great as the ones made while they worked with Tsui Hark. Tsui Hark's personality and politics have always been at the forefront of his films. He is a man with great need to express political and social discontent working in an industry that places little or no value on such lofty things. In Hong Kong film, just as in Hong Kong music, it's about entertainment and profit, and there is no independent film circuit like there is in Europe, Japan, or the United states. Thus, Hark's most ambitious films like the scathing downer Don't Play With Fire met with less than negative criticism. They met with total disregard, as if they'd never been made. It's a trend that would no doubt frustrate Hark throughout his career, which would be peppered by box office hits and punctuated with a daring and meaningful total flop. In the latter half of the 1990s, with the Hong Kong film market in a severe rut and most of the established talent heading for the greener pastures of Hollywood int he face of Communist reunification, the ardently anti-Communist Hark chose to remain behind in Hong Kong, directing a series of films that, for various reasons, didn't do much of anything. His comedy Chinese Feast was a tremendous hit both in Hong Kong and the US, no doubt as much because it starred current flavor of the month Anita Yuen as it was simply a great little film. On the flip side, Hark's decidedly darker romantic tragedy, The Lovers, met with slightly less success than the peppy Chinese Feast despite starring up and coming talent Charlie Yeung and teen heart-throb Nicky Wu. No one wanted to see them suffer and die. Tsui Hark's return to fantasy, Green Snake was a flop, but not so great a flop as his return to the world of martial arts. THE BLADE did so poorly in Hong Kong that many Chinatown theaters here int he United States didn't even bother to release it. Kungfu was no longer in style, and the best days of the martial arts epic were long forgotten in favor of Category III sleaze and Young and Dangerous clones. A case of bad timing for all involved, since the tremendous failure of The Blade is by no means an accurate gauge by which to measure the quality of the film, which is, I think, one of the greatest martial arts films of all time, and one of the most impressive accomplishments of Tsui Hark's amazing career. The failure of The Blade was partially a result of the unpopularity of kungfu films when it came out. It was also partially due to the fact that the film is one of Hark's most savage, bleak, and violent films to date, an angry scream at a time when people only wanted lustful moans or wacky laughing. Anxiety over the 1997 reunification meant people didn't want to receive more anxiety from a film. The Blade is a remake of the Shaw Brothers classic One-Armed Swordsman, which was, in it's day, one of the most violent and shocking martial arts dramas ever made. It made a star of young Jimmy Wang Yu, who built a career on playing one-armed guys. It was a beautifully filmed, tragically moving testament to how good a martial arts film can be. I don't need to tell those of you reading this review that martial arts films are almost always dismissed as utter crap by a population who can't separate a good film from a bad one or recognize that poorly dubbed cheapies on late night television do not speak for the whole genre. Not that we have anything against poorly dubbed late-night cheapies. I just think it's a shame that kungfu films never got the proper respect lavished on other martial arts films, primarily the samurai film. Plenty of shitty samurai films got cranked out, especially during the 1970s, but no one lets that drag down brilliant work like Hidden Fortress or the Samurai trilogy. for some reason, though, kungfu never got the same acceptance, not even by it's own makers. It's too bad that Hong Kong film studios don't have the same respect for their product as Japanese and American film makers. Hundreds of classic Hong Kong films are rotting away in warehouses, disregarded by an industry that has no interest in the old or int he value of the films as a work of art. Too bad for all of us. Zhao Wen-zhuo assumes the title role of On, an orphan who is adopted by a master swordmaker and blacksmith. Zhao Wen-zhuo is best known as Jet Li's "replacement" in the role of Wong Fei-hong in Once Upon a Time in China parts four and five. The timing of his career is nearly as tragic as the downfall of Tsui Hark. Zhao is a tremendous talent. He's in great shape, possessed of amazing martial arts ability, and is an incredibly sexy, attractive man on top of all that. every woman I know who has seen him in a movie swooned, and more than a few guys found themselves possessed of mysterious "urges" as well. Whether you are hetero or homo, there's no denying that Zhao Wen-zhuo is an amazing person to behold. He's a good actor as well, possessing charisma and presence. Unfortunately, he was making a name for himself in the martial arts genre, which was a dying genre. when your star rises in a falling sky, there's not much you can do. Thus, Zhao will probably be relegated to the back pages of popularity, a side note when he should have been a whole chapter. On and his best friend Iron Head spend the day stripped down and sweating in the forge. Just as Hark's previous film, Green Snake explored the sexual energy between two women (Joey Wang and Maggie Cheung), The Blade repays the female favor with tons of male-male sexual tension. There are plenty of naked male asses and bare, muscular chests on display for all to behold. Ling, the daughter of the forgemaster falls in love with both the reserved On and the fiery but good natured Iron Head. She's a tragic young woman who has grown up without any friends, moving from town to town, slowly growing to hate humanity, desperately seeking companionship while at the same time utterly despising it. She is, as the film reveals, a victim of the grandiose delusions of heroism that fuel the men around her. She decides to amuse herself by pitting both On and Iron Head against one another in a battle for her affections. Unfortunately, the bond between the two men is strong, and her manipulation is overshadowed by the fact that On is named as the new head of the foundry. This creates tension among the workers, many of whom see him as a charity case and not deserving of the post. While in town one day, On and Iron Head witness a heroic monk beating the asses of a gang of thugs. When the monk is later ambushed and murdered by the gang, Iron Head flies into a fit of uncontrollable rage and challenges the thugs to a fight with the men at the foundry. On also discovers that his father was murdered by a bald, tattooed assassin with the ability to fly, or so they say. The broken blade that serves as the symbol of peace and prosperity for the foundry is the blade of his slain father, who fought the villain alongside the foundry master. He is overcome with rage confounded by the fact that he wants to prove himself to the other workers. He decides to ride out and confront the gang on his own. Ling tries to stop him but is captured by the gang. On fights valiantly, dispatching dozens of baddies before his arm is caught in the signature weapon of the gang -- a steel bear trap attached to a chain. His arm is severed at the elbow and he is knocked off a cliff just as his brothers from the factory arrive to finish the fight. A wounded On is discovered by a freaky sidekick, a girl I think, but you can't be too sure. She looks sort of like that freaky Rust character from Tetsuo. But take note here. If you ever intend on becoming a vengeance-seeking stranger, you need to have a freaky teenage sidekick or, like Chow Yun-fat in Full Contact, a really ugly little dog. The girl (I think) lives in the ruins of her family farm. Like On, she is an orphan. On decides to forsake vengeance and help the girl on her farm, living as a recluse. Ling goes even more insane than she was to begin with, and she and Iron Head set out to find the missing On. Nothing goes very well for any of them. Iron Head keeps picking fights with thugs and being seduced by malicious women who hate the men around them. For good reasons, mind you, as most of the men are scum. Ling refuses to accept Iron Head but hates him for eying other women. In the meantime, On and Black Head, the name he gives his often dirt-covered new friend, find their home is in the migratory path of some spooky bandits in Arabic garb. They burn the house down, beat up Black Head, and try to flay On alive. On is frustrated by his lack of an arm until he discovers a charred martial arts manual depicting a unique "short sword" style. He takes up his father's broken blade and begins developing a new style based on the manual. The next time the bandits ride by, On is ready for them and dispatches them all with bloody skill. The leader of the brigands hires the bald, tattooed assassin to take out On and settle a score with the men at the sword foundry. Iron Head and his men fight valiantly but are no match for the bandits. Only On can stand up to them and, in the process, avenge his father's death. The final scene is a poignant exploration of Ling's deteriorating mental state as she, now an old woman, indulges her self in the delusion that Iron Head and On often come to visit her, and that despite all that has happened, they laugh and remain good friends. In reality, of course, she is as lonely an old woman as she was a young one. The film is quite bloody and savage. Hark's diretcion is superb, perfectly capturing the scenes of intensity and rage and capturing every emotion on camera. It makes for a breath-taking, dark, mentally exhausting film. He also manages to capture some moments of real beauty. The whole cast is great, but Zhao really shines as the humble man wrestling with his newfound rage. The martial arts are pretty good. Hark makes use of some camera tricks and wire work, but none of it is gratuitous or obvious. For the most part, he uses technique to augment the action, to make it even more unnerving and brutal. At no point does the film degenerate into the "human yoyo" style of martial arts filmmaking in which actors are just hoisted all over the place and look plain goofy. The choreography fits the bleak mood of the film perfectly. i liken it in many ways, both the action and the overall mood, to the equally furious Liu Chia-liang film Eight Diagram Pole Fighter, another film that sort of served as the end point of an era. I'm pleased to see that despite being a financial and critical flop, a lot of fans are embracing and celebrating this film as a monumental acheivement in the genre. It certainly deserves the praise. The second half of the 1990s have been a sad time for Hong Kong films, and especially for martial arts films. With absolute dreck like Donnie Yen's Legend of the Wolf pretending to speak for the current state of the genre, it's refreshing to find something like The Blade that features great acting, compelling writing, relentless action, and Tsui Hark's signature cynicism and bleak outlook on human nature. Labels: Country: Hong Kong, Director: Tsui Hark, Martial Arts: Wu Xia, Year: 1995 posted by Keith at 12:17 AM | 0 Comments Monday, May 27, 2002Bio Zombie
1998, Hong Kong. Starring Jordan Chan, Lee Chan-sam, Lok Dat-dut, Lai Suk-yin. Directed by Sip Wai-san. Available on DVD (HKFlix).
The world of Hong Kong horror films is a strange one, indeed. Even within the horror genre, which can be pretty damn weird much of the time, Hong Kong manages to make films that will cause even seasoned horror fans to scratch their head and proclaim it "some fucked up shit." Though they are never as extreme as, say, Ruggero Deodato films, Hong Kong films take the cake for the greatest degree of creativity with their tastelessness. This is the industry that gave us such genre classics as Untold Story, AKA Human Pork Buns, and the intense graphic, hard to stomach atrocity exhibition Men Behind the Sun. It's also the industry that gave us horror-fantasy wonders like Chinese Ghost Story, kungfu cannibal films like We Are Going to Eat You, and more hopping vampire films than you can shake a lucky Buddhist charm at. The sheer diversity of Hong Kong horror makes it a somewhat overwhelming, but endlessly exciting world to explore. It's not horror like we've come to know in the West. Though a foppish looking Dracula may swoop down from time to time in old kungfu horror films, Hong Kong tends to rely much more on an indigenous cast of ghouls. Hopping vampires are sort of the banner carriers of the genre, and no creature is more uniquely identified with Chinese horror than these bouncing demons. Comprising the rest of the parade are a curious cast of witches, devils, sexy ghosts, fetus eating freaks, and countless possessed people with eerie green lights shining on them. Conventional Western monsters are few and far between. Werewolves and Frankenstein monsters may have defined the genre in the 1930s, but you'd be hard pressed to find them in Hong Kong. And when you have the rich folk horror tradition of China and surrounding countries like Thailand from which to draw, why would you waste time ripping off wolfmen and vampires who wear frilly Renaissance garb even though it's 1999? The composition of Hong Kong horror is also unique. The films are almost always bizarre, often uneven blends of horror and gore, slapstick comedy, and much of the time, kungfu or sleazy softcore sex. All good stuff, obviously, but the Hong Kong films that actually make all the elements work together are rare. Your average Hong Kong horror film has a lot of "roll your eyes in boredom" sequences of people just sort of shouting and falling down. That's fine and all, but I can get it for free on Galavision. Of course, most American horror films are the same way. The real short-coming of Hong Kong's prolific but not entirely impressive horror industry is that horror simply works best outside the mainstream. Hong Kong has no independent cinema or music scene, so getting anything but big studio crap is more or less impossible. The films may be influenced by Evil Dead, but it will never make a movie like Evil Dead. Which is too bad, because the whacked creativity and willingness to skip happily down even the most tasteless of paths is present in spades. If someone in Hong Kong actually had the ability to work outside the studio system, the potential for an insanely great, totally wild horror film is staggering. Unfortunately, that's not happening any time soon. But then again, it's probably having to dance around studio censors and government madmen that has resulted in Hong Kong horror making up for outright gore with totally mind blowing weirdness. In the end, I eat my own words and go, "Why should Hong Kong horror be anything like Western horror? Western horror is already like Western horror." Thus, Hong Kong has a whole new batch of stuff ready to offer up people who have already seen all the Fulci and Deodato there is. I can count the number of Night of the Living Dead type zombie films from Hong Kong on, well, one finger. The United States, Japan, and especially Italy embraced the shuffling flesh-eaters, but even in Hong Kong films that make use of the term "zombie," one rarely encounters anything resembling the ghouls that have been more or less defined by George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. Bio-Zombie is the one of the only Romero-style zombie flicks to come from Hong Kong. The result is curious, to say the least. For the most part, it's uneven but definitely enjoyable. Although, predictably enough, it fails to effectively blend its horror with its slapstick comedy, the overall result is an energetic, bloody zombie romp that should satisfy fans of the genre. The goofy, charismatic Jordan Chan, who made a name for himself in the popular Young And Dangerous movies I love to make fun of (mainly because they were the catalyst for the whole annoying "young triad guy" movie trend), stars as a wannabe street tough named Woody Invincible, which is also a pretty good porno name. My friend Stacey tells me you can derive your porno name by taking the name of your last pet and the name of the street you grew up on. Her name was "Galaxy Green," which pretty much rocks. Mine, on the other hand, was "Stumpy Meadows." No one but me would ever rent a porno movie starring Stumpy Meadows. I wish my name had been Woody Invincible instead. Woody Invincible and his pal, Bee, work at a video game store in a mall that looks exactly like this mall down in Chinatown, only bigger. They spend their days goofing off, crossing the security guard, and flirting with a duo of mind blowingly cute flirty girls. Sometimes, they take time off from this busy schedule to bug the older wannabe gangster guy and his attractive wife. And there's also a nerdy guy who works in a sushi restaurant and lusts after one of the girls, which you can't blame him for. A botched underworld transfer results in an experimental virus leaking out and turning people into gooey, flesh-craving zombies. The zombie make-up is simple but effective. It's higher class than painting people blue a la Dawn of the Dead but is nowhere close to the master zombie make-up of films like Zombie and Day of the Dead. Still, it's not bad stuff for their first time out. In a turn of events that reflects a definite Dawn of the Dead influence without any of the harsh social commentary, the zombies start wandering around the mall looking for victims. Woody Invincible and his small band of cohorts are the only ones who can combat the growing legions of the living dead. Why? Because they are the main characters. When the zombies show up the action is fast and bloody, with all the requisite flesh eating you expect from a zombie movie. We're not talking Lucio Fulci buckets of blood here, but heads do roll and necks are chomped. Woody Invincible and a girl named Ruby face off with the living dead in the parking garage as they attempt to escape, only to discover that things are a lot worse than they thought. The final scene of the two battered youths pulling into a deserted gas station and seeing emergency bulletins on the television is superbly apocalyptic, and a fitting end to any type of zombie movie. We can't win, after all. Have the humans ever won in a zombie movie? And who would want them to? Bio-Zombie has youth, good looks, fast pacing, and inventive direction on its side. It's slick looking and technically well made, playing itself out like a Resident Evil video game. Unfortunately, nothing is perfect. The movie's first forty minutes lag as we are subjected to a long string of shouting and slapstick that isn't very engaging. Still, it's a lot less boring than Fulci's boring moments. At least something is going on. That's really the only major drawback. More zombie action sooner would have made this good movie great, but as it is, I'm hard pressed to complain about what I got. Ultimately, the weird humor of the film makes the bleak ending that much more effective. And some of the moments are pretty interesting, if not out of place. When Woody Invincible braves the hordes of zombies to try and reach a telephone, the movie goes into full Resident Evil mode, with little flashing icons and "Reload!" messages popping up on the screen. Like I said, sort of out of place, but interesting. John Woo did the same thing in his one foray into horror-comedy, To Hell with the Devil, in which a battle between heroes and demons takes on the scoreboard of an Atari game. And that video game was probably the biggest influence on this film. Once the zombies start showing up, it really gets to be a lot of fun. No heavy political messages or anything a la George Romero, but plenty of quality zombie action. Jordan Chan would seem an unlikely lead character, but once the shit hits the fan, he starts looking cooler and cooler. As an aside, this is probably the only zombie movie where you'll see a group of soccer playing zombies demand human sushi from a zombie suchi chef. So Hong Kong's first real attempt at "classic" zombie films is not perfect, but it's still quite a bit of fun. I hope they give it another shot sometime soon, as a sequel to this movie could be really cool. Jordan Chan and sexy sidekick wandering through a degenerating Hong Kong that is filling up with mindless zombies. Hmmm. Seems like there might be more to the social commentary side of this movie than I first thought. Labels: Country: Hong Kong, Horror: Zombies, Stars: Jordan Chan, Year: 1998 posted by Keith at 12:14 AM | 0 Comments Tuesday, December 18, 2001Kungfu Zombie
1982, Hong Kong. Starring Billy Chong, Kwan Young Moon, Chaing Tao, Cheng Kay Ying, Chan Lau, Pak Sha Lik, Shum Yan Chi. Directed by Hwa I Hung.
Although I grew up on a steady diet of kungfu, Ultraman, and Godzilla (among other things) throughout most of my life, it wasn't until the late 1980s that I threw on a dapper looking fedora and headed out in search of material beyond that which was served up to me on Saturday afternoon via various themed "theaters" on television. It was a difficult road to travel at the time. These days, you can go pretty much anywhere and find a slew of cheap kungfu films for sale. But not so long ago, getting even the lamest fare from across the Pacific required months of searching and dealing with shady tape traders who kept asking about rape and bondage videos when all you wanted was a copy of the latest Jackie Chan film. When I moved down to Florida, I met a guy named Pat who shared my love for all things kungfu, both old and new. It was he who took me to what was, at the time, the holy grail of kungfu movie stores, a place on the outskirts of Gainesville that stocked shelves upon shelves of old school kungfu films, not to mention weird horror and black action films. It was one of those moments where your eyes fill with tears, and you simply want to fall to your knees and mutter "Amitabah!" as you gaze upon the glory. A couple years later, I would meet a girl (coincidentally named Patty) who worked at this same store. I'd like to think that she was impressed by the ferocity with which I devoured their entire stock of kungfu films that first brought us together, but I can't be entirely certain. Ours would be a wild and fun romance culminating in a disastrous move to Charlotte, North Carolina, which in turn lead to my moving to New York to chase fortune and glory. Truly great is the power of kungfu. In those first few carefree years in Florida, back before another particularly stormy relationship crushed much of my spirit for the bulk of a couple years, few things could bring a glow to my face quite like the nights Pat, myself, our friend Todd, and assorted others would gather around my massive 10-inch television, pop in the latest rental from the video store, and smile as we heard those familiar notes accompanying an animated seahorse flying through space while an announcer shouted "THIS is an Ocean Shores VIDEO presentation!" Ahh, yes my brothers and sisters, those were, as we say in the old country, the good ol' days. I had a tiny apartment with a worthless air conditioner, good friends, a video store full of dollar rental kungfu films, and a crush on the girl at the counter. That entire period in my life was overflowing with good friends and plenty of fun. We'd stay up til the wee small hours, packed ten in a small room, laughing, drinking, eating, and watching kungfu films. It's hard to separate this film from the circumstances under which I first watched Kungfu Zombie, but that doesn't matter since any way you slice it, this is damn good filmmaking. Kungfu Zombie was among our favorite rentals, along with War on Shaolin Temple, Young Taoism Fighter, and Jackie Chan's Police Story. Whenever it was our turn to entertain the troops, one of those movies would invariably find its way into the VCR, even if it had to chase away the copy of Black Devil Doll From Hell everyone wanted to see as well. Tons of top-notch kungfu action, comedy, ghosts and goblins, and pretty much everything in the world that I would want to see thrown together in one film is launched at me from the madness that is Kungfu Zombie. The only thing that could possibly make it better would have been if it was in 3D. Not that it's a flawless film by any stretch of the imagination. The writing leaves a considerable amount to be desired, and none of the characters are very likable people. You certainly wouldn't want any of them for friends, except perhaps the wizard who can resurrect you if you need such services. At the same time, it's not like people are renting a movie called Kungfu Zombie in hopes of seeing rapier-sharp wit and clever writing. More than likely, they are renting such a movie in hopes of watching some living kungfu people fighting some non-living kungfu people, and the movie certainly delivers that in spades. In a way, the movie is perfect despite its flaws, perhaps even because of them. The under-rated, should-have-been superstar, Billy Chong, stars as a snotty, rebellious kungfu student who constantly fights with his ailing dad. Well, he pretty much just constantly fights, period, and runs really fast. But those are things you can do when you learn kungfu. He's pretty much a jerk, which is something kungfu comedies love to do. They make the hero a total asshole. Sometimes, in the end, he has learned a valuable lesson about the value of humility and respect. More times than not, however, he would beat people up then fart, and that would be the end of the movie. While Billy doesn't do much farting in this, he does get to remain a jerk through the whole movie. Character-wise, there isn't much about the guy for which you can root. But he does kick a lot of ass, and he looks great doing it, so that makes him the hero. A gang of cut-throats have taken a disliking to the lad and his sidekick, who is named Hamster (he would be good friends with Young Rudy from Wolf Devil Woman). They employ the services of a black magic priest to resurrect some corpses to fight Chong. Granted, it seems a rather complex plan. Employ a priest to resurrect zombies that will, once given the cue, fly through the air and push Chong into a pit filled with spikes. A spike-filled pit seems a rather conventional culmination for a plan that involves resurrecting the dead, but then I'm not really a martial arts bandit, so I guess it's not my place to question their machinations. When your plan is so intricate that it requires a large number of flow charts, Vinn diagrams, and a priest who can summon the dead, things are bound to go awry. What the bad guys didn't figure on is that after making a rather impressive flying leap from a coffin, a moldy, crumbling corpse is a rather ineffective fighter. Chong dispatches them without much difficulty, not to mention the fact that he's rather unimpressed by the fact that he's being attacked by the living dead. I've watched a lot of zombie films, and a lot of things involving corpses, and despite the fact that I consider myself more or less desensitized to their appearance in movies, I'd probably still be taken aback a tad by the appearance of one in real life, especially if it was flying through the air and trying to punch me. For Chong, however, a gang of zombies is no different than any other gang. The evil leader guy, who sports a pair of rather sloppy muttonchop burns, accidentally gets pushed into the pit of spikes during the ensuing melee, being justly undone by his own treachery. Satisfied that the night of being attacked by creatures of the night returned from the grave for bloody revenge has ended, Chong heads off for the local tavern to make merry. Things don't go as well for the wizard, who is soon plagued by Muttonchop's ghost demanding resurrection services. Complications arise due to the fact that Muttonchop's body is badly mutilated after taking the tumble into the spike-filled pit. Let that be a lesson to you. If you are a treacherous villain bent on killing someone who tends to walk through the woods at night, don't employ a wizard to raise the dead in an attempt to push your mark into a spike-filled grave. Instead, just hide behind a bush and shoot him with an arrow or something as he saunters by. It's a lot less complicated, and you have a much slimmer chance of you yourself falling into the spikes. Just because you can summon the dead doesn't mean every plot you hatch has to involve the summoning of the dead. While Billy Chong may not be an ugly ghost adorned with mangy muttonchops, his life still isn't perfect, either. His family-which consists only of his father and the mysterious Hamster - is dysfunctional, and when a family is dysfunctional in a kungfu film that means all hey do is yell and try to kick each other. Just about every interaction between Billy and his dad consists of the following exchange: Father: "Ungrateful bastard!" Billy: "Go to hell, old man!" Which is then followed up by a few minutes of fighting that culminates in the father nearly dying of heart failure, muttering "You're killing me, you ungrateful son of a bitch!" which elicits a smirk from Billy, who will wave bye-bye and go out on the town with Hamster. As one may guess, there isn't a whole lot to like about either Billy or his father. They're both assholes. Even when the father isn't scolding Billy, he still talks to him in an angry, condescending manner. Billy responds by goading his father into having another heart attack, which is the source of much hilarity around their household. The mother probably died just to get some peace and quiet. The father soon reveals to Billy that he has been yelling at him so much because they come from a family of constables, and even as they speak, a blood enemy of the family is coming to seek revenge. It doesn't matter if he kills the father or Billy, so long as he kills someone. Billy sees this as little more than his father using his own son as protection against a bad guy, and the father pretty much responds with, "Yeah, so what? And you're a no-good little bastard, too." Then I think they fight, the dad has a heart attack, and Billy goes out gambling with Hamster. Meanwhile, Muttonchops is busy haunting the priest, and in his spare time, feeling up sexy ladies. Hey, if you were invisible, don't pretend like you wouldn't at least be tempted to cop a cheap feel off the local harlot. The priest eventually agrees, as the nightmarish haunting takes the form of things like the ghost pulling the priest's seat out from under him, constantly moving his wine out of reach, and other dastardly spooktacular shenanigans. Down at the local morgue, they find the freshly dead body of a powerful kungfu fighter who is obviously evil on account of his long hair and black cape. When the gang leader tries to inhabit the corpse of the super-baddie, they discover that the guy is, in fact, not quite dead. I guess he just likes sleeping in a coffin down at the local morgue. Awakened from his slumber, the villain makes a beeline toward Billy's home to extract a little revenge. The two fight for hours, and Hamster whiles away the time by constantly dumping buckets of water on Billy for no real reason other than it makes Billy's muscle glisten a bit more. It's all the reason you need, I guess. I know if I had muscles in place of the puny sticks occupying the position of arms on my body, I'd always have a guy named Hamster around to dump water on me. I'd also probably do that thing where when someone asks you the time, you check your watch and flex your bicep at the same time. Then I'd go down to the beach and kick sand in my former self's face. Chong is eventually victorious, killing the bad guy and collecting a sizable reward, which his father promptly takes for himself. Why does Billy even live with this guy? You know, filial piety only needs to goes so far. The wizard-priest and Muttonchops figure they can try to use the bad guy's body again for another resurrection attempt. Since they only get three tries before Muttonchops is condemned to roam the earth as an incorporeal spirit, 'Chops inspires confidence in the wizard by using the old encouragement tactic of slapping the wizard in the head and yelling, "You better get it right this time, you stupid bastard!" The wizard, who commands the all the vast powers of darkness, takes this abuse for some reason. I guess he and Billy are kindred spirits in a way, despite being on opposite sides of the law. But since the film isn't really interested in this as a plot device as much as it is interested in scenes of guys engaged in Moe-Larry type relationships, let's just drop the whole thing. They mess up again, discovering this time that the bad guy is simply too evil to be killed by normal means such as breaking his neck. The failed possession attempt also transforms the baddie into a super-invincible mega-bad zombie. He's not one of those slow Night of the Living Dead zombies either. He hauls ass and has invincible kungfu. We Westerners think that when the zombies come (and they will come), they will be slow and rotten and easy to kill simply by shooting them in the head or hitting them with a pipe. We're not ready for the eventuality that they might all be a bunch of buff, invincible masters of the martial arts. The zombie guy immediately sets out to kill Billy Chong. And meanwhile, the bumbling gang guy half-possesses Billy's dad, resulting in some weird behavior as the two fight for control of the body. Eventually, Chong has to face off against his possessed dad and the super invincible zombie guy. Luckily, a monk shows up out of nowhere to lend him some advice and holy relics just before the zombie's hands burst into fists of flame! Things just get wilder from there on out. On the surface of things, this is a pretty straightforward movie. When you dig a level deeper, however, what you discover is that there isn't a deeper level, and you should have stayed up on the surface level instead of ruining the floor by digging around. But not every movie has to be a deep reflection on the dark heart of man. Sometimes, a movie can just be about a loudmouth braggart kicking a zombie's ass, and that's the road Kungfu Zombie chooses for itself. The writing has just enough effort put into it to propel it from one supernatural fight scene to the next, and that's all it really needs. The fight scenes come fast and furious, and though some undercranking is obvious in spots, it doesn't detract from the overall quality of the kungfu. Billy Chong is a superb looking fighter, carrying himself with a lethal combination of grace, speed, and power. It's a wonder he didn't become a bigger star than he did, but from what I hear, he's quite the attraction these days down on Malaysian television. You can't complain about steady work, I guess. I'd certainly trade in my job to be a big star on Malaysian television. The final fight between Chong and his supernatural-powered nemesis is one of the top old-school fights out there, and while it doesn't come close to the pure frenetic genius of the Sammo Hung/Yuen Biao fight scenes contained in films like Prodigal Son, Magnificent Butcher, or Sammo's own supernatural kungfu farce Encounter of the Spooky Kind, it's still great stuff. The fights before that are all short but sweet as well, and while I would have preferred a few more minutes of kungfu in place of more malicious comedy, there's really no good reason to complain about a film with this much action in it. The comedy is hit or miss, and while it misses more than it hits, it doesn't miss in a way that would turn you off to the film. I'm guessing the relationship between Billy and his dad is played mostly for laughs, but after a while, it's not funny so much as it is like one of those times when you were a little kid over at a friend's house while the friends was getting yelled at by his parents. You just sort of sit there sheepishly and awkward, trying to pretend you don't notice your friend is getting spanked right in front of you. Looking back, at least you can be thankful that your friend and their parents were not kungfu aces who settled all their arguments by yelling "Bastard!" and proceeding to kungfu the crap out of one another for the next five minutes. On the plus side of the comedy is the guy who plays the wizard. He's superb as the not-entirely-evil priest who can't seem to catch a break, especially when he has to walk around town wearing a giant leaf hat in order to avoid the angry ghost whose resurrection he botched three times. A combination of wonderful facial expressions and perfect timing make him the standout performer in the film even up against Chong's impressive kungfu skill. The rest of the cast performs dutifully but without anything really spectacular to make them memorable. Muttonchops is just there to bellow and make the "angry surprised" face a lot. His accomplices fulfill the standard old school kungfu roles of "goofy fat guy" and "goofy skinny guy." If you are wondering about the inclusion of the giant fake wart with the single piece of super-thick hair coming out of it, don't worry. Hong Kong filmgoers seem to find that sight gag endlessly hilarious, and this movie isn't about to let them down. The guy who plays the actual kungfu zombie is pretty damn good in his role as well. Though the white trousers and cape with no shirt look probably doesn't work for everyone (I've tried it several times), he manages to pull it off. I guess it helps that he is one of the living dead, well nigh indestructible, and can make his feet and fists burst into flames of fury. That's not the sort of guy you generally go up to and sneer, "Nice outfit, buddy." Kungfu Zombie isn't an expensive film, and it does its best to cover the lack of funds by not aiming too high in the special effects department. Some eerie colored lighting, a few good and gross corpses, and a fog machine are all it needs to successfully create an inexpensive but interesting otherworldly feel. Since the movie is primarily about kungfu and secondarily about laughs, getting a good scare out of people isn't one of the top priorities. Still, the director manages some eerie shots, even if their eeriness is undercut by all the wacky goings-on. The movie is certainly put together a lot better than many of its contemporaries operating on a similar budget. Kungfu Zombie is probably a better film for seasoned old school vets or people just looking for a severely twisted and delightful little mindwarp of a film. In the greater scheme of things, Encounter of the Spooky Kind is a better movie all the way around, and if you are looking for an introduction into the wild world of supernatural kungfu hijinks, you'll be better served by either Spooky Kind or Mr. Vampire, both of which are more successful in their comedy and chills, have better performances from actors and fighters, and simply had more money and talent behind them. Not that it's an insult to say something isn't as good as one of those two films. Spooky Kind was directed by and starred Sammo Hung, and Mr. Vampire had the benefit of Hung as a producer. In the late 1970s, early 1980s, no one -- and I mean no one -- was better than Sammo Hung. He completely revolutionized the kungfu film, delivering a level of energy and action that had never been seen and has never been matched since then. So it's not so bad for Kungfu Zombie to be seen as sort of the plucky little brother of Sammo's better supernatural kungfu comedies. This movie was one of the defining elements of my journey toward being a kungfu film nutcase. It's crude and cheap, but it also has great energy behind it, not to mention some spectacular kungfu and a few creepy seconds scattered throughout the madcap zaniness. Although not the best example of the genre, Kungfu Zombie is a film I have a lot of fond memories of and still watch from time to time. Despite the loud performances and unlikable characters, the movie has charm and charisma. Watching it is like hanging out with old friends, even if you and your friends weren't the type to be resurrecting kungfu powered zombies to do your bidding. Labels: Country: Hong Kong, Horror: Ghosts, Horror: Zombies, Martial Arts: Kungfu, Year: 1982 posted by Keith at 4:24 PM | 1 Comments Tuesday, November 20, 2001Fantasy Mission Force
1985, Hong Kong. Starring Jimmy Wang Yu, Jackie Chan, Pearl Cheung, Brigette Lin Ching-hsia, Adam Cheng, Chang Ling. Directed by Chu Yin-Ping.
I don't know if any of you out there have ever actually felt your brain melt, but if you have, you know what it's like to experience the acid trip that is Fantasy Mission Force. Jimmy was definitely on that brown acid when he dreamed up this crackpot film, and thank god for whatever drugs the man was doing. I love this film! Some people can't seem to get it through their little pea brains that it is a slapstick comedy, and they laugh at how the film-makers thought they were making a serious action-adventure film. But it has flying Amazons, vampires, and Abraham Lincoln in it! Anyway, almost as wacky and convoluted as the film itself is the story of how up and coming martial arts star Jackie Chan came to be in the film. Keep in mind that much of this is conjecture, wild accusation, conspiracy theory, and half-truth. It sure is interesting though. Back in the day, Jackie was working for Seasonal Entertainment and director Lo Wei. Lo Wei was the guy who directed Bruce Lee's three films before Enter the Dragon. Wild rumor had it that Lo Wei, a notorious thug and triad member, was furious that Lee dissed him to go to America and make Enter the Dragon. Thus more than a few people believe that Lee was murdered and Wei's goons were responsible. So fast forward a few years. Jackie Chan is saddled with the task of being "the next Bruce Lee," despite the fact that lee and he are totally different types of fighters making totally different types of movies. But they both worked for Lo Wei. Chan was getting sick of toiling away in Seasonal flops like To Kill With Intrigue, though he did make some great films at the time. Lo Wei's vehicles simply were not taking the young star where he wanted to go. When Chan was approached by a Taiwanese company with the chance to work with Yuen Wo-ping on Snake in the Eagle's Shadow and Drunken Master, he jumped at it, and jumped ship. Once again, Lo Wei's star had ditched him for greener pastures, and once again, Lo Wei was fuming. Again, speculation claims that Lo Wei sent thugs to Hong Kong to kill Jackie Chan, but Jackie was protected by the local movie star triad thug of Taiwan, Jimmy Wang Yu. Yep, they claim that the ol' one-armed swordsman, who of course has two arms, fought off a whole bunch of Lo Wei's men. Chan now owed his life to Wang Yu, and Jimmy took it out in trade, calling on Jackie's growing name to inflate interest in some of Jimmy Wang Yu's own films. Jimmy's star was well down the path toward waning, so adding Jackie to the list of cast members was a sure-fire way to guarantee the aging Jimmy Wang Yu a decent return on his films. Thus, you get Jackie showing up in Wang Yu films like this and Island of Fire. Like I said, take that shit with however many gains of salt you devote to the tabloids. One thing is for certain, and that's that Chan must have owed something pretty heavy to Jimmy Wang Yu to show up in some of those films. Fantasy Mission Force is the best of the bunch, and definitely the weirdest damn thing Chan has ever done. He's not exactly a member of the main cast, but he keeps popping up, along with Cheung Ling, as a whimsical con-man. He shows up in the end to have a grand duel with Jimmy Wang Yu and his army of Chevy-driving neo-Nazi Chinese skinheads. That right there should clue you in on what sort of movie this is. Plot? Jimmy Wang Yu is a super soldier who assembles a team of misfits and renegades for a suicide mission. Yeah, familiar plot. Their mission is to rescue the leaders of the Allied Powers during World War II, all of whom have been captured by Nazis. One of the leaders is Abraham Lincoln. They are being held in Luxemborg, Canada. Jimmy Wang Yu has to go because Rambo, Snake Plisskin, and Baldy (Karl Maka's character from the Aces Go Places films) were all busy. Jimmy soon fakes his death and is revealed to secretly be the leader of the Nazis, all of whom drive long pimpmobile Caddies or something with swastikas spray-painted all over them. Curiously enough, Chinese nazi skinheads also figure prominently into the plot of Flash Future Kungfu. I don't know if that's a whole subgenre, but you can bet your ass I will investigate further. Along the way to saving the leaders, the ragtag band (one of whom is a young Brigette Lin Ching-hsia) encounters flying Amazons with magic powers, vampires and ghosts, and other things you would typically think of when you think about World War II films. There are frequent battles, Jackie Chan shows up to do some kungfu, and in the end he and Cheung Ling drive some bulldozers around. By the time this film was over, I was weeping sweet tears of joy. I mean, someone thought of this. Even in the dead of summer in Florida, living in a squalid apartment on the edge of a swamp with no air conditioning, my nightmarish heat hallucinations never even came close to the level of pure nirvana this film helps me attain. Screw drugs. All you need is Fantasy Mission Force. Were you thinking of piercing your nipples with buffalo bones, taking peyote, and seeing visions in the sweat lodge? Why bother when you can watch Fantasy Mission Force? I've seen a lot of shit. I've seen movies featuring muppets doing hardcore sex scenes and cumshots. I've seen movies where an evil dwarf kidnaps young virgins and chains them in his attic while his mom belts out old cabaret tunes. I've seen movies where the romantic triangle is between a man, a woman, and a corpse. I've seen damn close to everything this crazy world has to offer, but Fantasy Mission Force still makes me scratch my head. If I watch it along with Young Taoism Fighter, I can actually travel through time and Sun Ra begins to make sense. Fantasy Mission Force is a source of great and dangerous power. You will either learn to wield it and thus experience all the earthly delights, or it will kill you. Possibly both. Labels: Country: Hong Kong, Martial Arts: Kungfu, Stars: Jackie Chan, stars: Jimmy Wang Yu, Year: 1985 posted by Keith at 12:50 PM | 2 Comments Sunday, November 18, 2001China Strike Force
2000, Hong Kong. Starring Aaron Kwok, Norika Fujiwara, Mark Dacascos, Lee-Hom Wang, Coolio, Ruby Lin, Ken Lo Directed by Stanley Tong. Available on DVD (HKFlix).
Stanley Tong sucks. I don't make such sophisticated statements without some degree of deliberation and thought, and after years of giving him the benefit of the doubt, I'm left with no alternative than to pass judgement on this Hong Kong director, and my judgement is that I could never see another Stanley Tong film in my life, and I wouldn't be all that upset. Any number of things about his work annoy me, but first and foremost is his ability to make even the most dynamic stars completely uninteresting and dull. I mean, this is the guy who had Jackie Chan, Michelle Yeoh, Ken Lo, and Yuen Wah together in the same film (Police Story III: Supercop) and made them all incredibly disappointing. Oh sure, Michelle did the stunt where she jumped the motorcycle onto the moving train, and that was cool and all, but ten seconds out of a ninety minute film hardly justifies the tedium. What kind of fool puts Jackie Chan and Yuen Wah in the same film and doesn't think to stage a fight scene? Or Jackie Chan and Ken Lo? Or Jackie Chan and anybody? He might as well not have even been in that movie. Tong went on to make Rumble in the Bronx, one of the most ludicrous of all Jackie's films, and redeemed himself slightly with the above-average Police Story IV: First Strike. But then he made Mr. Magoo, and it was all over. China Strike Force was supposed to be his big comeback film, his grand return to Hong Kong, and at least financially, he was successful. The movie made a lot of cash at a time when Hong Kong films are still recovering from an industry collapse that sent everyone reeling for a couple years. China Strike Force had a lot going for it. First, there was Aaron Kwok. For years, Kwok was plagued by his pretty-boy teen idol image. It held him back and kept him from ever being taken seriously as a legitimate action star. Now he's a few years older, the wrinkles are starting to show here and there, and while he may still be a handsome young lad, he starting to get the age and character that will enable him to finally break through. A few more pounds and a few more scars and he'll be set to join the Hong Kong action set without looking out of place among the traditionally grizzled veterans. And then there's Norika Fujiwara. You'd have to try real hard to find more of a knock-out than this woman. She is something else, to be sure. She was a model and a television actress in Japan before getting her big break in this film, and in getting her break, we've all received a break as well because she's drop dead gorgeous and not nearly as untalented as most other models-turned-actress. Throw in direct-to-video American action star Mark Dacascos, and you have one of the best-looking casts around. I've always thought Dacascos deserved to be a bigger star than he was. Why is a guy who moves this well, who can act at least halfway decent, and who is a striking guy to boot, going direct to video while guys like Seagal still plague our nation's theaters? It's unlikely at this point he'll ever catch his break. Instead he'll be doomed to a life not unlike Don "The Dragon" Wilson, which is at least a good doom. I wish I could be doomed to be pretty damn rich after making an endless string of low-budget action films. Maybe Dacascos will catch on overseas, but it seems unlikely. The movie itself has a pretty typical plot. Dacascos plays your run-of-the-mill young gangster guy who is intent on taking over the business, does not care for the tradition of honor, etc etc etc. These guys have been in about every gangster movie ever made in any country, but some old fart always trusts them, only to get shot in the back when the time is right. Aaron Kwok plays Darren, a hotshot cop who is always annoying his superiors. He has a partner who barely does enough memorable stuff to result in anyone remembering his name. He's only there to die, as in one of the most contrived scenes ever, even for an action film, the movie takes a break from all sorts of shooting and jumping about to feature a scene where Darren and his partner go out for dinner, and Darren asks his partner "So your wedding is soon?" They might as well flash up a big red "This guy is going to die!!!" subtitle. Everyone should know by now that in a cop film, the cop who is retiring, getting married, about to have a baby, or just bought a boat is always going to get wasted. It's a time-honored tradition. Handled properly, it can be kind of funny. Handled without any finesse whatsoever, as it is here, it's just plain annoying. As if that wasn't predictable enough, he's also marrying the chief's daughter. While the cops pal around, we learn that Dacascos plans to increase his underworld power by selling drugs. As is par for the course in this type of movie, the aging gangster who took Dacascos under his wing hates drugs and vows that his organization will never be a party to the selling of such foul goods. Extortion, murder, prostitution, slavery, gun smuggling -- these are all noble ventures, but drug peddling is right out. This news irks Dacascos' partner in America, played by hip hop star Coolio, who is apparently not a fan of Weird Al Yankovich. Coolio plays your very stereotypical jive-talkin', cigar-smokin' hustler who's only task in this movie is to say "Holy shit!" and "Cuz" or however you spell the slang for "cousin." He's pretty good at doing that, and luckily nothing else is demanded of him. To no one's surprise but the old guy, Dacascos plots with Coolio, who's character is actually named Coolio, to off the old man and take the business over. Also thrown into the mix is Norika, who is an undercover Interpol agent trying to get info on the old man's operation. Of course, no one knows she works for Interpol, as that is the general idea behind being undercover, but even someone who is still surprised by the plot twists in a Girls Gone Wild video can tell from her first scene that she's an undercover cop. One thing I like about a film like China Strike Force is that I don't have to worry about spoiling it for anyone. It's all so plodding and obvious that it's impossible to ruin any surprises. An underworld assassination at a big fashion show gives the film an excuse for two important things: a lot of sexy women parading about in skimpy panties, and the film's first action sequence, in which Aaron Kwok chases the assassin through the streets of Hong Kong using a variety of vehicles. At one point, Stanley Tong even has the gall to completely rip off the "moving motorcycle" stunt from Supercop, though he manages to screw it up more this time around by using a lot of wires to make the whole think look goofy instead of cool. The first action scene sets the stage for what you can expect from the rest of the movie: something just isn't right about it. Sure, there is a lot going on, but it just doesn't click. The wires are employed so they can go "over the top," but it winds up looking silly. In a fantasy film I don't mind wires and flying. In a reality-based action film, I think they look out of place but can still be used with great effect. In this, however, they are used very clumsily, and they detract greatly from the potential impact of what could have been cool fights and action sequences. Actually, now that I rewatch it, the first action sequence is the best one in the movie. It almost, but not quite, achieves a flow and, if nothing else is kind of cool because the assassin guy gets run over, hit by cars, punched, kicked, thrown off moving trucks, and even jumps off a giant bridge -- yet he still shows up later in the movie only to get killed in the most boring, mundane ways. Way to give us a potentially cool character then treat him like an afterthought. Thanks, Stanley. But far more than wires and missed character opportunities is the glaring problem that has plagued Stanley Tong's films since he first stepped behind the camera. He has no sense of pacing or rhythm. Tong started his career as a stuntman, and while we all know he can dream up and even perform some cool stunts, being able to properly film them is something else entirely. Tong's action sequences never find a groove. They always feel disjointed and, as a result, awkward and sloppy. Part of the problem here is that he's trying to make a kungfu action film with a cast that doesn't have much kungfu skill, but even that can't wash away Tong's own lack of directorial skill since he brought the same plodding sense of confusion to action scenes involving Jackie Chan and Michelle Yeoh, both proven commodities. What it boils down to, then, is that Stanley Tong just isn't a very good director. Or rather, he's an astoundingly mediocre director who makes astoundingly mediocre movies. Anyway, lots of action film cliches follow. Rather than pay the assassin, who seems damn near indestructible and would seem to be a worthwhile investment, Coolio just kills the guy. Mark Dacascos does indeed kill the old guy and start selling drugs. Aaron Kwok's partner does indeed die tragically. Aaron falls for Norika and, in an attempt to give us more T&A, has a pointless, out-of-place daydream about massaging her thigh. I'm all for T&A, male and female, but come on. Put a little effort into working it into the film. I mean, they had the T&A scene where Norika infiltrates Dacascos' and Coolio's gang by showing up in a tiny string bikini then stripping down to nothing to prove she isn't wearing any wires or anything. That was an okay excuse for some T&A. Eventually, Aaron and Norika close in on Coolio and Dacascos so they can have the big action blow-out. Just as Stanley Tong can't direct an action scene, so too does he always blow the finale of his films. Supercop has both Yuen Wah and Ken Lo for Jackie and/or Michelle to fight, so they knock off both those guys in about one second in very offhand manners, and leave Jackie to face... an old guy. Police Story IV gives us an underwater fight scene -- funny but fairly disappointing - before having Jackie slip around with a fake shark. Then of course Rumble in the Bronx completely forgot to even have a finale, so we just get Jackie Chan driving a hovercraft to a final showdown with... another old guy. This is worse than when the big final scene in Game of Death ended up being Bruce Lee versus... Gig Young. At least Gig Young was middle aged. This time around, Tong tries to deliver an action-packed finale, but once again his own lack of skill as a director trips him and everyone else up. Mark Dacascos is a genuine martial arts bad-ass, or at least he can pull it off wonderfully on screen. So God forbid we include him in the final fight scene. No, let's kill him off in the usual goofy, offhand manner. Let's crush him with a purple pimp car dangling from a helicopter. Then let's have a huge kungfu fight between the three people with the least amount of kungfu skill. Aaron Kwok versus Mark Dacascos could have been pulled off, and with a different director, it might have even looked good. Coolio versus Aaron Kwok is about the stupidest damn fight scene I've seen in a long time, and that includes the fight scene in The Matrix where that woman jumps up in the air and strikes the most absurd looking "pouncing chicken" stance I've ever seen while she hovers and the camera pans around her. Since Coolio and Norika are no martial artists, and Aaron Kwok is a passable on-screen kungfu star at best, that means we have to have a big gimmick to make up for the lack of interesting fight choreography. Tong's answer? Have the whole fight scene take place on a teetering pane of glass dangling from a crane hundreds of feet up in the air. It might sound exciting at first, but think about it, and let me use this pro wrestling analogy. Many years ago, WCW had a pay-per-view match between the dull Dustin Rhodes and the even duller Blacktop Bully. The gimmick of the match was that the whole thing was going to take place on the trailer of a moving truck. It might have sounded cool at first, but the end result was two guys moving very, very slowly while trying to keep their balance as the truck barrelled down various lonely highways at speeds in excess of ten miles an hour. This finale is that wrestling match. Norika, Coolio, and Aaron all scoot about very gingerly while trying not to fall off the glass. From time to time, one person or another will dangle off the edge or try to kick someone. And then Coolio finally falls, but only after one false change of heart. You know, where the villain is about to die, begs the hero to save him, and once being saved, immediately reverts back to his dastardly ways. Heroes always fall for that shit. I mean, before you flew around with the purple pimpmobile dangling from a helicopter, he was selling crack to nine-year-old kids. Now all of a sudden he's maybe not that bad a guy? They only do this so the hero can kill the villain without looking like a murderer. How many action movies end with the hero refusing to kill the villain, only to have the villain suddenly produce some weapon, thus justifying the hero turning around and offing the guy? It's a weak-ass cop-out. People want their bloodlust satisfied, but you also can't just have a hero who hauls off and shoots people after beating their ass. In the end, Coolio falls off the thing and Norika and Aaron fall in love for no real reason. They were only together about two days, and most of that time was spent being hoisted around on wires and pretending Coolio knew kungfu. The big problem with China Strike Force is how amazingly average it is. It's impossible to completely blast it and say it's awful, because it's not. At the same time, it sure as hell ain't a good movie. It's just... bland. Poorly directed. Awkwardly paced. Horribly choreographed. Completely cliche. In the hands of Gordon Chan or Teddy Chan, this could have been a good movie. In the hands of someone as over-rated and incompetent as Stanley Tong, the movie never manages to rise above a mundane level. It takes a talented director to elevate poorly written action film nonsense into something memorable, and Tong does not have the tools for the task. As such, China Strike Force remains an unsatisfying, though not completely unentertaining, failure. Given the uninspired direction, the film's sundry flaws become impossible to ignore. The English language dialogue, of which there is quite a lot, is completely ludicrous. Who wrote this crap? I mean, it's English. I recognize the words, but it doesn't make any sense. It sounds like English that was spit out of one of those online translation things, that can get the vocabulary but fails utterly to comprehend nuances and grammatical rules. It also doesn't help that the dialogue was recorded at a level barely audible to dogs and mice, let alone humans. Whenever a piece of shit hip hop song plays -- and they play often -- suddenly it's like you have the volume on eleven, but when they go back to speaking, everything is silent again. Thus watching this movie is a constant battle with the volume control. I feel bad for people who don't have a remote control, because they're going to be running over to the television every ten seconds to readjust. I guess they mixed the dialogue so low because they knew what crap it was. Speaking of English, what the hell is up with Mark Dacascos' character? How are you going to become the lord of a vast Chinese criminal underworld if you don't speak a lick of Chinese? Even people of Chinese ancestry I know who grew up in America know at least a few words in their grandparents' tongue, but this guy doesn't know a single phrase. Surely the Chinese triads would not be overly accommodating of a new boss who murders other bosses, can't speak any Chinese, and brings Coolio along for the ride. The film's other big short-coming is, of course, the pacing. Stanley Tong can do no right when it comes to figuring out how to pace and stage an action sequence. He cuts when he should stay still, he shoots in close all the time so we can't see anything. He never finds a rhythm or a flow for the action. He loves to go over the top, but only in ways that are ludicrous rather than breathtaking. The many action scenes in this film range from pedestrian to lumbering. You spend the whole scene waiting for something to be done well, then all of a sudden it's over, leaving you with an empty feeling and no sense of satisfaction. And then sometimes it's all too ludicrous, even for a Hong Kong action film. When Dacascos and Coolio are down at the docks watching the boys unpack a Ferarri or one of them other fancy-ass sports cars, Aaron shows up and spoils the fun, leading to a completely unbelievable scene where Dacascos takes off in the sportscar and Aaron luckily happens upon a passing truck full of forumla one racecars which, despite the highly explosive nature, apparently ship fully gassed and ready to go. Of course, this all happens after the part in that first fight/chase scene where he rides a motorcycle up the flat vertical surface of a delivery truck's rear door. I think he repeats that nifty trick at the end of the movie as well. The finale, which is by and large a ripoff of the helicopter finale from Tong's earlier Supercop, is hardly the pay-off I was hoping for. It's not cool or original. It's just, well, stupid. From the whole "car dangling from the helicopter" bit, to Mark Dacascos being killed without ever facing off against the heroes, to the completely disjointed and uninteresting "fight" between Norika, Aaron, and Coolio, Tong certainly tries a lot of stuff, but none of it works. To add insult to injury, Tong's reliance on the most obvious and awkward of wire stunts makes it impossible to enjoy even on a visceral level. On the plus side, however, Norika looks great in her leathery fightin' outfit. The acting is passable, but the roles aren't very demanding. Aaron Kwok is coming along, and as I said before, in a few more years I think he'll be ready to shine, but right now he's not quite there physically or in his acting skill. Norika is basically there to look good and kick some ass, and she is great at both. When she has to act, it's only the shallowest of deals. Even a paperdoll could pull it off, so no complaints. Dacascos is alright, but if he's going to be a Chinese gangster, even one from America, he should have learned to fake his way through some Cantonese. Coolio is playing a stereotype, and you have to be really untalented not to pull that off. Everyone else is pretty forgettable. Aaron's partner is so bland that when he dies, you hardly notice. His fiance is every bit his match in blandness, so that even though she loses her future husband and her father, it really doesn't matter all that much. The movie punctuates this by completely blowing her off at the end in exchange for a kissing scene between Norika and Aaron, which of course comes out of nowhere. The only thing memorable about this film is how good it might have been if someone else had directed. As has always been the case, Stanley Tong was given all the pieces for a great film and just couldn't make them fit together. I should have come away beaming and saying "That was great!!!" Instead, I walked away slowly thinking, "Well, that was alright... I guess." Awkward drama, awkward comedy, and awkward action sequences are tenuously strung together in what proves to be a very average film. Sure, it's better than watching a Mario Van Peebles film, but with guys like Teddy Chan and Johnny To raising the bar and giving us enjoyable, well-made action films, Stanley Tong's lack of skill becomes even more glaring. He has no style, and he has no substance. In the end, China Strike Force, like most of his movies, is a bland and somewhat tedious exercise in paint-by-numbers film-making on the level of some of your better direct-to-video action films. I don't hate it, but I don't think I'll ever feel the need to watch it again. Labels: Action, Country: Hong Kong, Director: Stanley Tong, Martial Arts: Kungfu, Stars: Aaron Kwok, Stars: Mark Dacascos, Year: 2000 posted by Keith at 4:38 PM | 0 Comments Thursday, October 11, 2001The Accidental Spy Release Year: 2001Country: Hong Kong Starring: Jackie Chan, Vivian Hsu, Min Jeong Kim, Alfred Cheung, Eric Tsang, Tat-Ming Cheung, Hsing-kuo Wu, Scott Adkins, Bradley James Allan, Anthony Jones. Writer: Ivy Ho Director: Teddy Chan Cinematographer: Wing-Hung Wong Music: Peter Kam Producer: Jackie Chan and Raymond Chow Original Title: Dak Miu Mai Shing Availability: Buy it from Amazon  The slower Jackie Chan gets in his old age, the more he surrounds himself with gorgeous women. Let's look at his track record for the past ten or fifteen years. You have Police Story, arguably one of the greatest action and stunt films ever made, in which Jackie gets to pal around with both Maggie Cheung and Brigette Lin. Not bad. Part two only has Maggie Cheung, but saying something "only has Maggie Cheung" is sort of like saying you "only won fifteen million dollars." For part three, Maggie is back in a limited role, but you get to throw Michelle Yeoh into the mix. City Hunter may have been a stinker of a film, but it was made easy to watch by the inclusion of the dreamy Joey Wong, the stunning Chingmy Yau, and the right cute Kumiko Goto. Operation Condor gives us Dodo Cheng, Eva Cobo de Garcia, and Shoko Ikeda. Rumble in the Bronx? Francoise Yip. Shanghai Noon? How about Lucy Liu and Brandon Merrill? Thunderbolt had Anita Yuen. Who Am I paired the aging action hero with Mirai Yamamoto and Michelle Ferre. Hell, Gorgeous was a rotten film, but it starred Hsu Chi. You might see what I'm getting at. Can you blame the guy? He's given everything for his art, everything to his fans. He's broken down, beat up, and will be lucky if he can remember his own name or walk in another ten years. Chan has sacrificed himself, his now former family, and just about everything else. You can play armchair psychologist if you'd like, analyzing how the fact that he was abandoned by his parents (who sold him to a Peking Opera school, where he met Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao, Yuen Wah, and Yuen Kwai, among others) has driven this insatiable need on his part to be loved and accepted by fans while crippling him when it comes to close personal relationships (his marriage was a total sham and his flings with sexy female starlets have become constant fodder for Hong Kong gossip rags). He's cocky and egotistical (though honestly, wouldn't you be the same way if you were him), but he's also very nervous and humble around certain reporters and throngs of fans. Having grown up in what's tantamount to a school of performing arts for orphans, surrounded almost entirely by other boys and with very little exposure to women (including his own mother), Jackie's not exactly competent with the ladies. He knows how to get them, but he doesn't know how to treat them afterward -- an affliction that's seen him roasted (arguably rightly so) in tabloids and despised by more than a few former female co-stars. It's also seen him abandon one marriage and child and father another child which he then tried to pretend didn't happen. Emotionally, he'll always be a child, and while there's no excusing his behavior in these instances, it's also not that hard to comprehend why it happens. It's probably easier for me to forgive his transgressions, not having ever had to bear the consequences of them, and the fact that I put forward a psychological theory to explain his bad behavior is in no ways meant to construe approval. Jackie's a complex guy, one full of personal problems and accomplishments, failures and successes. In short, he's a human, and that's why I defend him, especially now that's he's probably in his twilight years. It's weird, but in more ways than he might care to admit Jackie really has become "the next Bruce Lee" as he was billed back in the mid 1970s. It's pretty common knowledge that Bruce was seeing Betty Ting Pei on the sly when he was in Hong Kong. Had he lived longer, I have no doubt that there would have plenty more incidents. It just happens when you are in a setting as twisted and concentrated as the making of a film. Your emotions do not work the way they do in a more stable setting. It's no justification for cheating -- just an explanation of why it happens in these particular cases. I also have no doubt that the Hong Kong press would have eventually turned on Bruce the same way they have turned on Jackie. Both of them were perceived as "traitors" because they went to America to make films instead of concentrating only on the Hong Kong product. Bruce died early, and like JFK, before his wild ways could come back and bite him in the ass. Jackie stuck around, and now he's paying the price. Like Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan is a human being. He'll fuck up. He'll do things some people don't like. So it goes. At a loss for how to relate to fellow humans in a normal capacity, he communicates in the only way he understands: film, and more specifically, taking the risks and sustaining the injuries he knows fans want to see. Jackie's list of injuries is both frightening and amusing, but it should never be forgotten that he got each and every one of them trying to make us happy. There are very few, if any, film stars who have given as much to their fans as Jackie has. For that, we should be forever grateful. Hell, if he decided tomorrow that from now on he was only doing Merchant Ivory movies about snotty people in riding coats or big frilly dresses sitting in the garden drinking tea and saying "pray tell," we should still never forget how much he's given to us (if only he'd done a "pray tell" movie instead of The Tuxedo). The man is, without a doubt, one of a kind, and there will never be another like him. So as far as I'm concerned, I'm happy to see Jackie going in the direction he's heading. As a fan of his since his old kungfu films from the 1970s, I'm satisfied to see him taking it easy, slowing things down a bit, and not mercilessly abusing himself the way he did in the 1980s. Sure, I miss mind-blowing sequences like the shopping mall finale from Police Story, but that was a long time ago. In 1985, I could run five miles without losing my breath. I could play a hard-fought ninety minute soccer game without a break. Nowadays, I can run from the front of my apartment to the curb with maybe nothing more serious than a severe cramp in my calf muscle. Hell, if I can hardly get up four flights of stairs without having to set aside an hour for recuperation, then I shouldn't expect Jackie to still be falling head first off clock towers. A lot of people have been up in arms about Jackie's films during the 1990s. I agree that some of them were pretty bad. City Hunter was awful, Rumble in the Bronx was just plain silly (a multi-ethnic, neon-dune-buggy-driving gang from the Bronx? Someone watched too much Warriors). Police Story III was dull as dishwater thanks to a shoddy directing job by Stanley Tong, who for some reason could never figure out the proper way to film Jackie or pace a movie despite having so many resources thrown his way. Gorgeous, despite featuring the unspeakably sexy Hsu Chi and the equally sexy Tony Leung Chi-wai, was excruciating, and not because I "didn't get what I expected." I knew it was a romantic comedy, and I actually have a pretty high tolerance for such films, owing to my slightly unhealthy appreciation of old Doris Day "bedroom comedies." Even that didn't prepare me for such a bland and irritating film. It was insipid, annoying, and the people in it were so monumentally grating and stupid that I literally wanted to reach into the television and throttle them. Not having strange videodrome powers, however, I did the next best thing and just stopped watching. Other than those few exceptions, and maybe that movie where he plays an evil melting king, I think Jackie's films have at their worst been amusing, and at their best they've been astounding. People were pretty hard on films like First Strike, but I thought it was a lot of fun. Same with Mr. Nice Guy. Shanghai Noon was tremendous fun. In this day and age where everyone tries to be edgy, it was great to simply sit back and enjoy an old fashion action-comedy where the stars actually seemed to have some chemistry together. Who Am I was also a great deal of fun for me, and it was pleasing to see Jackie return to the final fight scene climax after shying away from it for so long. Yeah, they had their weaknesses, but I still had a good time. So Jackie wasn't delivering the next Project A -- big deal. Cut the guy some slack. For all intents and purposes, he should be dead. If you're a fan of Jackie, then you shouldn't be pulling for him to kill himself trying to pull off some stunt. He did that. Hell, he actually did kill himself when he cracked his skull open during a botched stunt in Armor of God. It's time to adjust your perception of Jackie. He's not the machine he once was. If you keep that in mind and you still can't stand his more recent movies, well there you go. Nothing wrong with that. There's this stuff called taste, and everyone's is slightly different. If, however, you do adjust your thinking, you might find that his newer films are still worthwhile, even if they are not the classics he was making in the 1980s. So in short, if Jackie wants to relax and pal around with ultra-sexy women half his age, that's his right. I, for one, thank him for that almost as much as I thank him for Drunken Master II and Dragons Forever. A man who parades Hsu Chi, Vivian Hsu, and Michelle Ferre across the screen is still doing us all a great service even if he can't deliver the kungfu and stunts like he used to. The Accidental Spy, pairs him up with Vivian Hsu. I should point out that in this movie, Jackie Chan attempts to outdo is formerly frequently nude female co-star by featuring prolonged exposure of his own bare ass. Longtime fans of Jackie Chan films are, of course, already acquainted with his bare ass, which if I recall correctly made its film debut in Project A. I think this might be its longest appearance yet, and also its first action scene. For some of you, extended scenes featuring Jackie Chan's bare bottom may be enough to scare you away. For others, it may get you even more fired up about seeing the film. For me, as a seasoned veteran of movies that feature Jackie Chan and movies that feature naked rumps, I simply nodded at Jackie's naked butt and said, "Hey man, long time no see." I always look forward to a new Jackie Chan film regardless of bare ass content. It's always something fun and exciting, which is cool since very few movies get me fired up these days. What makes me sad is that I really miss seeing them debut on the big screen. I'm not talking about dubbed, edited, and re-scored bastardizations from Dimension, the people who brought you gangsta rap in Police Story III. We used to always time trips to New York City to coincide with Chinese New Year, which in turn meant the debut at the Music Palace of a new Jackie Chan film. Rumble in the Bronx didn't seem nearly as stupid sitting in the balcony of the theater alongside hundreds of cheering, shouting, rowdy Chan fans. Seeing the premiere of Drunken Master II was positively electric. The theater was a complete nuthouse. People went insane. It was far and away the most fun I've had attending a film that was not at a drive-in movie theater. I moved to New York when the Music Palace was in its decline. The collapse of the Hong Kong film market hit the theater hard. No one wanted to go see Wong Jing's latest piece of shit, which would no doubt have a title like Naked Killer VIII: All Whore Bitch Slut Women Rape Rape Rape yet would still manage to feature very little nekkidness while, at the same time, being non-stop hateful, misogynistic, and god-awful boring. Annual Jackie Chan films became a thing of the past as American studios nabbed the rights to his films. The Music Palace countered this downturn in business by trotting out classic Hong Kong films, which again is something I was incredibly fond of. For a couple years, I could amuse myself on a Saturday afternoon with a six dollar double feature on the big screen of films like Zu, Dragons Forever, and Swordsman. The theater wasn't nearly as packed, but there was always a decent sized crew there. As I did for every movie I ever saw at that run-down, wonderful place, I sat in the front row of the balcony. No matter when I went, no matter what movie I went to see, I seemed to always sit in front of the eight-hundred year old guy who would chain smoke and erupt into nerve-shattering fits of phlegm-choked coughing. The beauty of the Music Palace was also its ugliness. As long as you didn't bring a forty-ouncer of Colt 45 in with you, you could do pretty much anything you wanted. You want to bring in snacks? Hell, the Music Palace would let you walk across the street and bring back a whole roast pig if you weren't enticed by their concession stand selection of M&M's, gummies, and dried cuttle fish niblets (not all mixed together). If you wanted to stay all day and watch the same two movies over and over, they were cool so long as it wasn't overly crowded. Thus, it became a refuge for homeless guys who needed a couple hours out of the cold or old Chinese dudes with nothing better to do than sit back, smoke, and watch some kungfu. The audiences were always fun as well. This was no hush-hush affair. People were loud and vociferous. They cheered, clapped, hooted, hollered, and if the movie stank, they booed and heckled the images on the screen with a smattering of barbs and jabs in English, Cantonese, Vietnamese, or Spanish. It was always a mixed ethnic crowd. The movies may have been from Hong Kong and the theater may have been in Chinatown, but the people who came did so simply because they loved the films. Everyone left with smiles on their faces, either because they'd enjoyed the film and the experience, or because they'd enjoyed ripping on the film or groping their date when the lights went down. I admit that I'm lowbrow. It doesn't bug me. For me, movie theaters are at their finest when you're seeing a wild film with an equally wild audience. You want to annoy me? Put me in an arthouse theater full of wannabe film students who nod constantly in "comprehension" and feel the need to laugh quietly at strange points just to prove they get something you totally missed. No, I did my time in the arthouse world. I read the books, studied the techniques, learned the theories. I tried to fool myself into thinking I was part of that world, but in the end, when it came down to French existentialism or Foxy Brown, the choice was clear. Likewise, I like my movie-going experience suitably rowdy. If I was seeing a serious film with lots of drama, then sure, the gab would be out of place and downright annoying. But hell, when I'm watching things blow up or people jumping off a building and kick someone in the head, then I think cheering, booing, eating, and back row sex are all essential parts of the overall experience. Unfortunately, the Music Palace could only sustain itself so long on the memories and nostalgia. In 2000, it finally shut its doors for good while all around it new DVD stores sprung up. It was a great loss. New York has very few offbeat theaters full of that much character and energy left. Where we were once unique, now we're just another collection of AMC and Lowes' cineplexes. The old Chinatown movie theater on the corner of Bowery and Canal that showed Category III pornos all day is now a big Buddhist temple, and the Music Palace sits a little ways down the block, vacant and still echoing with boisterous laughter and yelling. New Jackie Chan movies are still fun, but man alive do I miss the experience of seeing them on the big screen with hundreds of other rabid fans on opening night. Going to Lai Ying Music on the Bowery and finding the movie on DVD is cool, but it can't hold a candle to the days when I could see it on the giant screen at the movie theater right next door. So, in the most roundabout way ever, it all finally brings us to the movie at hand, Jackie Chan's big Hong Kong film for 2001. Like I said, I enjoyed most of his recent films even if they were flawed, and I really enjoyed Who Am I, which this film is very similar to. One thing's for certain: as much as Jackie exploits his ability to hire cute female co-stars, so too does he still flex his considerable muscle to score all sorts of exotic location work no other Hong Kong film maker could ever dream of getting. Accidental Spy bounces from Hong Kong to Turkey, giving the film a real international, James Bond type feel, which is fine by me. Most of his films since Armour of God have featured a fair amount of globe hopping, and while some people have complained about the "international spy" feel of the films, I dig it, what with me being a fan of spy films and all. The action begins in Turkey with a bunch of villagers and tourists getting mowed down by masked men wielding machine guns. Nothing like a little mass slaughter to get things going. Obviously, that'll all come into play later, but the film quickly jumps to Jackie, who for the first time since I can't remember when, does not play a guy named Jackie. This time he's Buck Yuen, acclaimed salesman of all things gymnasium related. The bit with an over-zealous Jackie trying to sell a rich couple on fancy exercise equipment is pretty funny. He resorts to doing flips on the trampoline and bouncing around on the exercise ball (the one piece of equipment he has ever been able to actually sell). This being a Jackie Chan film, none of this has much to do with anything, and of course Jackie is still an ex-cop. Jackie's been a cop or an ex-cop in pretty much 98% of the films he's made in the last twenty years. While on his lunch break in the mall, Jackie foils a bank robbery. Of course, where some people would just punch someone or trip someone up, Jackie's attempts to foil the robbery result in a giant crane smashing through a glass building while Jackie dangles from the arm. And you thought you were daring on your lunch break because you took an extra fifteen minutes. Jackie becomes a big celebrity as a result of costing ten times as much in damages as he probably saved by foiling the robbery. His fifteen minutes of fame bring him into contact with a disheveled private eye played by the always (well, often, or at least sometimes) delightful Eric Tsang (is every private eye in the world named Manny). You might know him as Blockhead from the old Lucky Stars movies, or you might know him as the host of a long-running Hong Kong variety television show. Or maybe you know this silly little guy as what he actually turned out to be: one of the most influential and powerful men in the Hong Kong entertainment world. Go figure. Eric Tsang is a powerful producer and his fellow Lucky Star and goofball slapstick comedian John Shum is one of the most important pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong. What a weird world. Together they are the equivalent of Bud Abbot and Larry Fine wielding great business and political sway. I suppose you really can't judge a book by its cover. Any day now, someone will discover that in America, Don Knotts has been calling the shots all along. Tsang is seeking out male orphans born in 1958, which Jackie, err Buck, happens to be. I guess since he took the time not to call himself Jackie in this movie, I shouldn't call him Jackie in this review. I guess his reasoning for always naming himself Jackie makes perfect sense. When you look up at the screen, you don't see Buck Yuen or anyone else. You just see Jackie Chan, playing essentially the same everyman (albeit an everyman with incredible kungfu skills) Jackie Chan character he's always been. Tsang has been hired by a dying Korean man who is seeking his long lost son, who ended up in an orphanage in Hong Kong. With the promise of an all expenses paid trip to Korea, Buck agrees to at least go meet the guy. No sooner does Buck get to Korea than he is confronted by an American-Korean reporter named Carmen (Min Jeong Kim in what looks to be a debut). She is working on a story about the man who might be Buck's father, Mr. Park. Turns out he was once an infamous North Korean spy who defected to the South while in Turkey. Jackie seems mildly interested in all this, but since he doesn't even know if the guy is actually his father, he doesn't have much to say. Park meets with Buck and challenges him to a little game of hide and seek. He has something of great value hidden, and Buck needs to find it. Unfortunately, the guy won't say what, though it soon becomes apparent that others want it, whatever it might be. When Buck goes to visit Park one evening, he finds a load of hitmen in the room. Jackie deals with them through creative use of kungfu and a defibrillator. Something to note right away: one of the things people complained about most in regards to Who Am I (and I do not share their outlook) was that there wasn't enough action, or at least not enough kungfu action. Who Am I basically had three extended fight scenes, but Accidental Spy opts instead to deliver a lot of shorter but more frequent action sequences. It's a similar formula to Jackie's 1980s films, and I think it works brilliantly. It keeps the film from ever slowing down. It's also worth noting that for the first time in forever, some of the action scenes are not based around Jackie running away from people. Jackie's run away from more adversaries than I can remember. Some of his best fight scenes came as a result of trying to get the hell out of town. Accidental Spy finally strikes a balance between "I'm going to run away and hit you with random things" and "I'm going to just stand here and hit you with random things." Buck Yuen ponders the small number of clues left by Park, and eventually discovers a coded series of digits that winds up being the telephone number for a bank in Istanbul. Some of Buck's detective work comes to him pretty easily, and Jackie communicates hard thinking by furrowing his brow. The narrative explains it all away by pointing out that he's very intuitive about a lot of things. Hell, I've let worse things slide. With the $10,000 left to him by Park, Buck hops the next plane to Turkey, which is not unlike hopping on the last train to Clarkesville, except that it takes you to Turkey, where if you are lucky you can catch a revival showing of The Man Who Saved the World. In Turkey, Buck finds a safe deposit box stuffed full of cash, which makes him mighty happy, at least up until the point where the same guys who attacked him back at the hospital in Korea show up again. More fighting and flying in and out of car windows ensues as Buck fights to protect his life and his new suitcase full of wealth. Turns out the assailants weren't all that interested in the money, though. When the cops arrive, they split, leaving the whole pile of cash untouched. Jackie checks into a posh hotel that was once a famous hang-out for spies, and he soon meets Yong (Vivian Hsu), the associate of a Japanese gangster named Mr. Zen (Wu Hsing-kuo of Green Snake fame). Jackie, being a sucker for a purty girl, arranges a dinner date with her, then promptly gets attacked by those guys again in a Turkish bath in one of the film's funnier sequences. Jackie and his opponents slip and slide all over the place before Jackie escapes the building, losing his towel in the process. What follows is the copious amount of bare Jackie butt I alluded to earlier. The fight scene is pretty funny, not to mention more than a bit remarkable. If you thought it was clever how Mike Meyers strategically covered his privates in Austin Powers, you should see it done while the guy is back-flipping and kicking and jumping over tables. I'm guessing there were some pretty good bloopers from this scene, although they were left out of the end credit blooper reel we've come to know and love. Jackie makes it to his meeting only to get attacked again by those guys demanding "the thing." They might get farther in life if they were a bit more specific. The thing? What do they want? The guy from the Fantastic Four? Mothra's egg? That disembodied hand from The Addams Family? The head with spider legs from John Carpenter's The Thing? I mean, history is not short on things. Maybe these guys would be better off if they clued everyone in on exactly what thing they were looking for. I'm guessing they saw Jackie's thing during that last action sequence, but apparently that wasn't good enough for them. Buck and Yong are captured and taken to a seaside village where they beat Jackie up more and demand the thing. To be honest, at this point it's beginning to all sound a bit silly. Maybe there is a cooler vague word in Chinese, but since all of this dialogue is in English, they go with the thing, which just starts to sound funny, like one of those old jokes that takes twenty minutes to tell and then ends with a really stupid punchline like, "and then he was hit by a car." While getting beat up, Jackie manages to at least figure out that the thing is a new strain of Anthrax, which would be slightly less fatal than a new album by Anthrax. Turns out Park was supposed to sell the virus to Mr. Zen but decided against unleashing such death upon the world. Now Zen wants it because, you know, he's evil, and these angry Turkish guys want it because it was tested in their village -- thus that opening scene of mayhem! See, it's all coming together. The beating of Jackie is interrupted when the same masked men from the beginning of the film show up and start killing everyone. Buck and Yong make their escape after managing to destroy the entire town. This is Jackie Chan, after all. Or rather, it's Buck Yuen. While afloat in a little makeshift boat, Jackie notices track marks on Yong's arm. Mr. Zen keeps her under his control by addicting her to heroin. It's a really weird and tragic little subplot that seems out of place in a Jackie Chan film, to be honest. There's really no point to it. It's not like we needed more reasons to hate a guy who slaughters whole villages and wants to terrorize the world with biological weapons. That he addicted a perfectly nice young girl to heroin is just sort of icing on the cake. Jackie, of course, wants to help her because he knows she is an innocent caught up in things bigger than herself, and she is an orphan like him. As fate would have it, just as she is about to freak out from withdrawal, along comes Zen in a lush yacht. Incidentally, "along comes Zen in a lush yacht" is probably one of the most un-Zen things anyone could say. After plucking Buck and Yong out of the drink, he makes Jackie an offer: turn over the anthrax, and he'll let Jackie keep the money (which it turns out was payment from Zen to Park for the virus) and take Yong away. The one hitch is that Jackie still doesn't know where the virus is even hidden. Of course, he eventually figures it out, and in what has to be a cinematic first, the evil villain does not get the merchandise then try to kill the hero. In fact, he takes the virus then lets Jackie leave with Yong just as he promised. Hey, he may force cute women to shoot up, and he may want to control the world's supply of anthrax, but at least he is a man of his word. Carmen eventually resurfaces and reveals she is actually a CIA agent, exactly like the girl from Who Am I. No one seems all that surprised, though they do consider the whole trading anthrax for a girl thing to have been rather stupid, especially when it turns out Yong was injected with the anthrax. Advice: don't do things that will result in Jackie Chan seeking revenge on you. The finale is another in the long line of big stunt pieces that rely on smashing up vehicles more than smashing up people, as Buck, Zen, assorted thugs, and a truck driving family all find themselves speeding down the highway in a variety of vehicles, including posh sedans, goofy looking motorbikes, and a burning petrol tanker. You may think it's zany, but it's just another daily commute for a guy like Jackie Chan. The finale is pretty fun even if it isn't kungfu. I figured we'd gotten our fair share of kicks throughout the film, so a big exploding gas truck flying off a bridge was perfectly in order. Ever notice how all these out of control heavy vehicles always get out of control near highway construction and half finished bridges? Just once, I'd like to see someone have to drive a hundred miles before they are able to jump out and drive the truck off a half-finished bridge or something. After that, the movie ends about five times in the course of a couple minutes. There's the epilogue involving Buck and Eric Tsang's character, who is of course revealed to be more than he initially let on. This also fulfills Jackie's requirement to end some of his films with a really tasteless disease joke. In Drunken Master II we had to endure the stupid "blind retard" ending to what was an otherwise amazing film. This time it's a joke about snorting the ashes of a man who died of cancer. Ha ha. Those Hong Kong people! What cards! But the movie doesn't end there. Oh sure, the credits role, and we get the prerequisite bloopers, but then the movie starts back up again with Jackie getting offered a spy job, traveling to Italy, and riding around while wearing a fake "mama mia that's a spicy meatball!" mustache. So I guess he didn't take his old job at the fitness store back. Anyway, if this is his way of saying, "If this movie does well, I'll make a sequel," then that's cool with me. Like I said at some point way up there, a lot of people have been lukewarm or downright negative about this film, but I thought it was pretty good. The film's main drawback is the Sammo Hung-esque schizophrenia in its tone. I mean, for a good hour we're treated to very typical and enjoyable action-comedy, and then all of a sudden there's this whole depressing heroin subplot out of nowhere. The movie turns deadly grim for a while, then decides to get all slapstick again for the final scene. The hell? It reminded me of Pedicab Driver directed by and starring Sammo Hung (who was famous for changing the mood of his films in the blink of an eye). Like Accidental Spy, that movie starts out as a slapstick action comedy, then turns into a fairly devastating, dark, and angry tragedy. It's cool to keep people off balance, but it doesn't entirely work in Accidental Spy. Instead of raising the intensity, it just detracts from the overall enjoyment. It's almost like it was just some sort of an afterthought. Additionally, it's somewhat disappointing to see the main villain, especially one as vile as Zen, get dealt with in such an offhand manner. His handling during the finale is an anticlimatic let-down, though it beats the finale of Thunderbolt where Jackie bravely teaches the Julian Sands-esque villain a lesson by causing him to get his fancy pants race car stuck in some gravel. Other than that -- and I can live with it -- I thought the movie was fun. It's got plenty of action, and just about all of it is great. The script is harmless, which is about the best we can expect from a Jackie Chan film. It doesn't try to be too clever, and that's good. The location work is great, and the movie's budget is on the screen. It's almost like Jackie intentionally set out to reclaim his spot as Hong Kong's most expensive film maker -- a title he has held on and off ever since the globe-trotting shenanigans of Operation Condor. You didn't think Jackie was going to sit back and let Storm Riders keep that honor, did you? The acting is passable to good, with Min Jeong Kim's Carmen being the one big exception. It looks like this was her first role, so I'll cut her some slack, but she was pretty bad. I know traditionally the English language acting in Hong Kong productions has not been very important, but when over half the movie is actually done in English, you need to pay closer attention to who is doing the talking. Min Jeong Kim sounds like she's reading her lines for the first time in several scenes. The other people who do their acting in English are okay, but that's because they are either Jackie Chan, angry young Turks, or the black CIA guy whose only job is to grimace and say, "You really screwed things up!" Vivian Hsu does alright. I didn't expect much of her, but she actually made me care to some degree about her character, though she could use some work on conveying certain emotions. She accomplishes her withdrawal scenes by sniffling a lot. Maybe she should have watched Gene Hackman freak out and scream about the Lakers during his detox scenes in French Connection II. Hell, I'd pay good money to see cute, sad looking little Vivian Hsu screaming incoherently about basketball while she rolls around on the floor. I will say this about both Min Jeong Kim and Vivian Hsu -- they manage to be a whole hell of a lot less annoying than those women from Mr. Nice Guy, who I was actually hoping might get killed at some point just so they'd shut the hell up. Min Jeong Kim is a bad actress, and Vivian Hsu is just sort of there, but at least neither of them grated and annoyed. When it comes to female sidekicks in a Jackie Chan film, about the best you can hope for is that they won't drive you insane, and neither of the gals here ever got that bad and whiny. The director of the film, Teddy Chan, is someone I expect great things from. He's one of the big names behind what I hope will prove to be the rebirth of the Hong Kong film industry. With films like Purple Storm and Downtown Torpedoes under his belt -- both of which I thought were solid efforts -- he seems heading down the right path. In Accidental Spy he shows the most skill at figuring out how to direct Jackie since Sammo Hung or Jackie himself. Stanley Tong was amazing at making Jackie seem dull and lackluster, which must take a lot of work. Benny Chan did pretty good with Who Am I, which I've already pointed out is very similar to this film. Teddy Chan seems to click best out of any of the new guys working with Chan. The film has good pacing, and Teddy knows when to lay off the "directing" and just let Jackie do his stuff. He manages to use the camera to augment Jackie's skills while covering up the fact that the guy is slowing down and can't perform like he used to. Also of note is the script writer, Ivy Ho -- hey, a woman! While I'll never forgive her for the insipid hack writing job that was Gorgeous, she proves herself here, just as she did with the highly acclaimed 1996 Maggie Cheung vehicle Comrades, Almost a Love Story. It's obvious that unlike a lot of Hong Kong writers in the past, she's actually putting effort into developing a reasonably deep story and characters -- which probably explains the whole heroin subplot. It may not have worked, but it was at least an attempt to lend depth and sympathy to a character. The gals in Jackie Chan films are almost always completely goofy, paper-thin shrieking machines who serve no purpose other than to purty things up and get kidnapped. While the handling Vivian Hsu's character here may have been a bit heavy handed, it's still an admirable attempt to do something a little more complex with the women in a Jackie Chan film. Ivy Ho doesn't always succeed, but given how one-dimensional most action film characters tend to be, and how completely absurd or non-existent most Hong Kong action film plots tend to be, it's good to at least see her trying something unique. Plus, let's face it. It's just cool to see the ladies getting involved behind the scenes as something more than make-up women and set decorators. What we need now are some boss female directors to really shake things up. It's popular to bash Jackie. I'm not one of the people who thinks it's fun, especially given how much this guy has given to us. I think some of the reviews of Accidental Spy are heavily influenced by the trendiness of smacking Jackie around (as if he doesn't smack himself around enough as it is). Sure, plenty of people have valid reasons for disliking the film. That's a matter of taste, and you can't argue that. Or rather, you can argue it all day, but in the end it boils down to subjectivity. And in my subjective opinion, Accidental Spy was a great deal of fun. Perfect? No way, not by a long shot. Like Bruce Lee, like Jackie Chan, the film has its flaws. It aims for something a little higher than it ever attains, but what the hell? Accidental Spy is a damn good film to give a fair shake to. Look at Jackie not through the eyes of someone who judges him against the skills he had sixteen years ago, but as someone who, at nearly fifty years old, is still managing to do things no other human would ever even attempt. Labels: Country: Hong Kong, Espionage, Martial Arts: Kungfu, Stars: Jackie Chan, Year: 2001 posted by Keith at 10:31 PM | 0 Comments Monday, August 13, 2001Dragon from Russia
1990, Hong Kong. Starring Sam Hui, Maggie Cheung, Nina Li Chih, Carrie Ng, Lee Lai-chun, Pai Ying, Yuen Tak. Directed by Clarence Ford with "input" from Dean Shek and Tsui Hark. Available on DVD (HKFlix).
Ahh, 1990. It was a very good year. I successfully finished my high school career, packed my bags, and headed due south to Florida to seek fame and fortune. Hong Kong was in the throws of what seemed to be an unstoppable Golden Era, the popularity of which was so vast that Hong Kong film makers previously unknown in the west were becoming household names, at least in the households that revolved around cult and obscure films, as mine did. The Hong Kong New Wave sort of kicked itself off in the beginning of the 1980s with two big events. The first was the teaming up of Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, and Yuen Biao in the film Project A, which pretty much forever changed the way martial arts in particular and action in general would be staged. The second event was the release of Tsui Hark's special effects blow-out Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain. Zu was the first film to make use of "Star Wars like" special effects, and with its completion, Tsui Hark had forever changed the fantasy film in the same way Jackie, Sammo, and Biao changed more conventional action films. In 1986, marginal director John Woo, who was best known for a series of rather unfunny comedy films during the 1970s, completed the revolution when he tried his hand at gangster films in the form of A Better Tomorrow. Although Woo's highly stylized, melodramatic gangster epics were the last innovation of the New Wave, the tsunami carried Hong Kong through most of the 1980s and well into the 1990s. It finally sputtered and died around 1996 or so, when with the exception of Wong Kar-wai and Christopher Doyle films, everything seemed to become as awful as they had previously been great. The Golden Era was over, and fans were forced to settle for a nauseating stream of erotic thrillers and copycat "young triad guy" movies. Fans of martial arts films were basically left watching Donnie Yen speed himself up to about 1000 miles an hour in some of the worst films of all time. Things seem to be turning around, albeit very slowly, with the release of entertaining and inventive films like Storm Riders and Chinese Ghost Story: The Animation. But for the most part, fans of Hong Kong cinema who aren't interested in the latest Wong Jing film with a title like Rape Squad or Rapist Union, or Rape Rape Rape Rape Rape and Tits have to look to the past to find quality work. One of the overlooked films of the good ol' days is this live-action adaptation of the violent Japanese comic book, Crying Freeman. Director Clarence Ford opts to remove most, but not all, of the sex and nudity that populated the comic book, and replace it with more action and kungfu. Ford also worked closely with Film Workshop masters Dean Shek and Tsui Hark, and Hark's stylistic touch is all over the film like incriminating fingerprints. But hey, that's okay with me, because I generally like Hark's work. Sam Hui, best known as a member of the successful comedy troupe that included his two brothers, Michael and Ricky, became a big-time film star via the action-packed slapstick spy caper series, Aces Go Places. Hui is a likable guy who some people mistake for Jackie Chan, probably because they have the same nose. Not literally the same nose of course, but similar looking noses. Hui was also popular as a pop star during the 1970s, and from what I've heard of his stuff, he specialized in sappy ballads and acoustic songs. For some reason, his star seemed to falter after this movie, which is too bad because he really shines. Hui plays a man visiting Russia with his girlfriend, former action/comedy star turned respectable arthouse name, Maggie Cheung. Aside from witnessing a brutal fight between two guys in a subway, the trip seems to go quite well until Hui becomes the target of a mysterious man with a fucked-up croaky voice. The man is the trainer for the 800 Dragons, a secret society of assassins. Hmm, I guess all assassin societies have to be secret. You wouldn't get very far in the field if you were a very open and obvious society of assassins. It would be like being a ninja, but wearing a headband that says "Ninja" on it in big red letters. Hui is captured and has his memory erased. During his training, be is befriended by the master's assistant, a cute and wily young woman named Pearl who has the ability to fly, more or less, or at least jump in really cool ways. And she is really good with her feet, to say the least. Hui doesn't really take any of it seriously, opting instead to be the archetypal "naughty kungfu student" despite his obvious potential. It's only when his pal, Pearl, is killed during a fight with rival assassins that Hui starts to take things more seriously. He gets the back tattoo, the mask, and the attitude that makes him the Crying Freeman, so named because he sheds a tear after each assassination. His career as a secret super assassin is filled with cool fight sequences. Purists will be put off by some of the wire work, but it's integrated well and doesn't look goofy, at least not to me. The fights are fast paced, full of acrobatics, and just plain slick. During a mission in Hong Kong, however, his old flame Maggie catches a glimpse of him, and although he is wearing the mask, she thinks she recognizes him. He pays her a visit and recreates one of the most famous scenes from the comic book, in which he assumes the framed pose of a painting his girlfriend was making. The reunion is quickly broken up when vengeful thugs crash in on them. Maggie is shot by Freeman's own assistant, who wants to protect the secret of his identity and eliminate any chance of him regaining his memory. Either that, or he had to sit through Irma Vep. One of the movies best scenes, and it has several, is when Freeman and his associates seek revenge on the renegade assassins who killed Pearl. The fight takes place in a church, and as if the sight of Nina Li Chih, who plays Freeman's partner, dressed as a gun-toting nun isn't enough reason to justify the movie, then I don't know what is. Anyway, you have to see the thing for full effect, but the shots of masked assassins perched atop cathedral steeples and crosses are a fantastic visual. The movie follows it up with another short but cool scene in which Freeman battles Nina Li Chih in a shower. She is not happy with Maggie still being alive and posing a threat to Freeman's identity. Thus, Freeman himself becomes a rogue. For Maggie Cheung, I'm sure any man, and probably most women, would gladly suffer the ire of an ancient secret society of assassins and be happy about it - as long as she promised to never make a movie like Irma Vep again. While Nina and the assistant decide to help Freeman out, the rest of the society, including the old master, are not as forgiving. The finale sees Freeman face off with his teacher in a truly spectacular fight sequence that still wows me nearly nine years after I first saw it. I absolutely love this movie. It has a good story, and perhaps best of all, is jam-packed with creativity and wild action. I know some Crying Freeman fans were put off by the amount of comedy in the film's first half, but I think it helps make everyone more human and believable, even when they are flying over churches and engaging in insane kungfu fights. It also helps the film's finale pack more of an impact. The best thing about this movie is the visual style. The masks and set-pieces are very nice, and the action sequences are stylish and unique. It's too bad they don't make them like this one anymore. But at least they made it once. Labels: Anime and Animation, Country: Hong Kong, Director: Tsui Hark, Espionage, Martial Arts: Kungfu, Year: 1990 posted by Keith at 2:21 AM | 0 Comments Sunday, July 01, 2001Downtown Torpedoes
1997, Hong Kong. Starring Takeshi Kaneshiro, Jordan Chan, Charlie Yeung, Theresa Lee, Ken Wong, Alex Fong. Directed by Teddy Chan. Available on DVD (HKFlix). I suppose the big stumbling block on my way to becoming an ultra-cool international spy and man of mystery is that I'm not very cool. I may be "ultra" many things, but cool would not be among them. That and the fact that I don't have millions upon millions of dollars at my disposal and I have never met, let alone romanced a baroness. Hell, I don't even know how you get to be a baroness. Oh sure, you marry a baron, but what the hell? What do these guys do? I mean, the Red Baron was a World War One flying ace and famed pizza chef, but I think today's generation of barons spend less time in biplane dogfights over No Man's Land than they did back in 1915. I guess barons and baronesses these days just while away the hours speeding around Monaco in wee little convertible sports cars. Still, I've always dreamed of that daring life, though I've also dreamed of being a fireman, an astronaut, and a guy with the power to decide who lives and who dies. If I can't be a spy, then I'll do the next best thing, which is sit around in my underwear eating Bagel Bites and watching spy movies. It's probably no shock to anyone that I consider the spy films of the 1960s to be vastly superior to the big budget special effects blockbusters that litter the genre these days. Though often quite absurd, the spy films of the 1960s placed a great deal of value on cool characters, even if they were one-dimensional, and cool situations. There was an obvious swankness about everything that could never be recaptured these days, especially since the focus is on computer generated special effects far more than it is on characters and sassiness. I try and try to get excited, but nothing about Tom Cruise goofing off in front a blue screen interests me. I like my spy films to look real despite their more fantastic elements, and I also like them to have at least one assassin who wears a fez and sunglasses. It's the attitude, I suppose, that really sets the films apart. The spy films of the 1960s wanted to be action packed, but they also wanted to be fun. There were very few spy films that took themselves too seriously. Even the big-budget Bond films always maintained a sense of humor. As the spy film moved into the nineties and now the naughties, not only did the focus shift from cool characters and situations to big computer effects, but the sense of fun fell by the wayside. You watch those Mission: Impossible movies, and they are so grim. Everyone takes themselves so seriously as if they are creating some earth-shattering work of art or a cure for cancer. Those guys from the 1960s may have been one-dimensional, but at least they had that one dimension and it was somewhat engaging. The guys now are so dull and frowny. Even James Bond has become little more than a dry prop wandering from one special effects scene to the next. Where's the warmth? Where's the soul? When Hong Kong decided to get in on the neo spy bandwagon, I figured if nothing else they would return some of the over-the-top fun and action to the genre since they wouldn't be able to afford to rely on expensive and uninteresting computer effects like most of their American counterparts. And hell, Downtown Torpedoes also had a good director in Teddy Chan (Purple Storm, Accidental Spy), and a great ensemble cast featuring three of my favorites -- Jordan Chan (Biozombie), Takeshi Kaneshiro (Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express and Fallen Angels), and the always enchanting Charlie Yeung (Fallen Angels and Tsui Hark's The Lovers). After all was said and done, I was left with a big ol' satisfied smile on my face. Cash (Jordan Chan), Jackal (Takeshi Kaneshiro) and Ken Wong (Titan) are three members of a slick industrial espionage team specializing in breaking into high-security complexes to swipe important plans, documents, and sensitive information. The opening scene will fulfill your expectations for such a set-up: they go about everything in a really slick and needlessly complex fashion. It makes for good cinema if nothing else. Since real industrial espionage is mostly guys with fake IDs scamming their way into dingy little rooms crammed with wires and computers or rooting through the dumpster outside AT&T in hopes of stumbling across some secret document that was accidentally tossed into the trash, I suppose I'll go for watching sexy young lads repel down glass buildings and make by the seat of the pants escapes involving tethers and crossbows and things like that. The team is commanded by the enigmatic Sam, who they have never met. After pulling off a wild heist to open the film, the three filed operatives are approached by Stanley (Alex Fong of the Angel films starring Moon Lee and Lifeline directed by Johnny To), a member of Hong Kong's secret service. He's not only uncovered proof of their various crimes, he's also uncovered the identity of Sam (Charlie Yeung) and unites them all while making a proposition. Seems a rogue British MI5 agent plans to steal some perfect counterfeiting plates and use them to either flood the market with phony British currency or simply sell them off to the highest bidder. The big problem is that while the Hong Kong police know everything, they can prove nothing, and no one in the British government seems to be taking them very seriously. Stanley wants the crew to break into MI5's headquarters in Hong Kong, steal the plates, and turn them over to the Hong Kong government before the rogue agent can smuggle them out of the building himself. Since no one else believes the story, it's likely the full force of MI5 (for the record, that's the British secret service, of which James Bond was, of course, a member) will come down on them during their attempt. Obviously, no one is very interested in taking such a seemingly hopeless job, but Stanley offers them further encouragement by freezing all their assets and assuring them poverty and homelessness awaits them even if a life sentence in prison is somehow avoided. Having no other choice, they take the job. Cash reckons they'll need extra help if they are going to break into MI5's headquarters, so he contacts his closest friend, deaf and deft young computer hacker Phoenix (Theresa Lee). The computer hacking is pretty silly, though no worse than what passes for computer hacking in most movies. I mean, it's hard to write a good hacking scene, because hacking consists of some out-of-shape computer nerd sitting in their attic downing Mountain Dew and Doritos. Not exactly scintillating to watch unless you are some weird fetishist. So movies usually go way over the top and throw in all sorts of whirling computer animation and techno music to fool us into thinking it's all very exciting. At least there are no 3D animated mazes and flaming skulls and stuff like that in this movie. It's not the presentation of the hacking that is the problem, it's just the way they go about it. For instance, Phoenix sets her computer up to "hack into MI5," and then just leaves it running. After a while they've hacked into MI5. The hell? Is that a function on that Microsoft Office I've been hearing so much about? The scheme they concoct is suitably ludicrous and involves repelling, hang-gliding, jet skis, mini-subs, and boats. Probably motorcycles too at some point. It's so wildly over-the-top that I lost track of things. They manage to pull the heist off, but not without paying a high price. After exchanging the plates for all the evidence against them, Cash, Jackal, and crew find themselves the victims of a double cross. Turns out Stanley was crooked all along, and what they just did was rob perfectly loyal, straight-laced MI5 agents. Oopsie! To make matters worse, The suitcase that supposedly contained the evidence actually contained a bomb. Cash catches on just in the nick of time, and they all manage to leap to safety -- almost. Phoenix catches the full concussion of the blast. To make matters even more complicated, since when it rains it pours, they find out that Sam is not even actually Sam. She's an undercover agent who was working with Stanley because she thought what he said about the rogue MI5 agent was true. And finally, |
