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Sunday, November 11, 2007

Katilon Ke Kaatil

Release Year: 1981
Country: India
Starring: Dharmendra, Rishi Kapoor, Zeenat Aman, Tina Munim, Amjad Khan, Nirupa Roy, Shakti Kapoor.
Writer: Anil and Arjun Hingorani
Director: Anil and Arjun Hingorani
Producer: Arjun Hingorani
Music: Anandji Veerji Shah and Kalyanji Veerji Shah
Availability: Buy it from India Weekly

Try to imagine that, like me, your life has become a steady parade of disappointments and squandered potential, but then one day, the following happens: having recently been enlightened as to the existence of a Bollywood ninja movie -- a rip-off of American Ninja from the same cast and crew that brought the world Disco Dancer, no less -- you go to your little website forum and theorize that, given the popularity of kungfu films in India and the proliferation of Bruce Lee imitators and crappy "Bruceploitation" films during the 1970s, there was no way Bollywood didn't produce at least one film cashing in on the death and popularity of Bruce Lee.

After proffering this notion, however, subsequent searches for Indian Bruce Lee exploitation films yield no results. This does not sway you from your belief, of course, and given how poor the quality and variety of coverage for Indian cult films is, it hardly surprises you. But it does cause you to put your search for such a film on the back burner in favor of tracking down the remaining Kommissar X films or finding a copy of Agente Logan: Missione Ypotron. And then, one day you are emailing back and forth at work with your friend Beth about Mithun Chakraborty's film Dance Dance. You search for, find, and play a clip from the film on YouTube, and then, out of the corner of your eye after the clip has finished and YouTube is displaying those "if you liked this, check this one out" recommendations, you see something titled "Dharmendra vs Bruce Li."

Still your heart young movie fan, you tell yourself as you struggle to click on the clip before it vanishes and is replaced by another recommended clip. But alas! You are too slow, and the clip vanishes. No worries, though. As your trembling fingers fumble at the keyboard, you manage to type "Dharmendra vs Bruce Li" into the search box. Careful, lad! Don't let your giddy excitement get the better of you. This could be nothing more than some lame DJ splicing together disparate clips of the world's premiere Bruce Lee imitator with scenes of Indian action star Dharmendra, all set to some generic techno or hip hop beat out of the German underground. Feeling both fear and elation, you play the clip.

And there it is! Dharmendra, with what appears to be a picnic table cloth wrapped around his neck, locked in mortal combat with...no! Not Bruce Li! Not Bruce Li at all! Why that's...no it isn't possible. And yet...yes! Yes it is! That's Dharmendra locked in mortal combat with Bruce Le -- the world's premiere Bruce Li imitator! Finally! After years of disappointment and failure, after watching your dreams crumble and become so many ashes, the world is new and young again, and there is hope yet, you tell yourself. A quick scan of the comments turns up the title of the movie -- Katilon Ke Kaatil, though no one seems able to agree on the number of the letter "a" that goes into each word. Apprehensive, you sneak on over to India Weekly to do a title search, and...argh! No luck! But wait! What if I alter the configuration of a's in the words -- success! And a mere $6.99 and four days later, it is yours.

And then you discover not only does it star Dharmendra -- 70s/80s action icon and father of 80s/90s action Icon Sonny Deol -- it also stars your favorite Bombay bombshell baby, Zeenat Aman. How could this deal get any better, you ask yourself as tears of joy stream from your eyes.

And then Dharmendra fights Bigfoot.

I've complained, most recently and verbosely in my review of the 1967 espionage film Farz, about the lack of quality information regarding Bollywood films, especially the crazier and older ones. Let me now shift gears and offer up a bit of celebration. I knew nothing about Katilon Ke Kaatil. I had never heard of it, and I had no reason to ever think that I needed to hear of it, let alone see it. And then I found out this Katilon Ke Kaatil featured Bruce Le, apparently getting his ass handed to him by Dharmendra, and I was excited. There were no reviews online anywhere, and as usual, all links led to about a thousand identical webpages that did nothing but list the top two or three actors and the musical composer, surrounded by lots of Flash and Google ads. But no worries. I didn't need to know anything about the film other than Bruce Le was in it, along with Dharmendra. That was more than enough for me.

And then I'm sitting there watching the movie and goddamned General Ursus from Planet of the Apes shows up!

That's why I enjoy doing this. After all these years, and after Teleport City has failed to amount to anything other than a tiny niche site that gets no attention from people looking for someone to write liner notes or a book or join their circle of occult-obsessed jaded rich people who retire to country manors for weekend binges of Bacchanalian debauchery and excess, there remains the simple thrill of stumbling across an unbelievably ludicrous movie like Katilon Ke Kaatil.

Like many masala films, a simple description of the basic plot hardly does justice to the madness that whirls about it like a raging tornado. If I told you this is a movie about two thieves who pose as the long lost sons of a wealthy woman so they can get their hands on her loot, you'd probably shrug and think to yourself, "Yeah, seen it." And if you know a thing or two about Bollywood films, you'll probably even think, "And I bet in the end, they are redeemed and turn to good when they find out they really are her long lost sons." A plot summary like that hardly leaves room for Dharmendra to fight Bigfoot or punch Bruce Le through a brick wall. But then, if you really know two or three things about Bollywood, you know that they require a simple plot wrapped in fantastically convoluted and outrageous incidents that detour the movie into truly warped territory.

As summarized above, Dharmendra and Rishi Kapoor star as Ajit and Munna, the two sons of a wealthy family in possession of a sacred, jewel-encrusted gold chariot. Evil bearded villain Black Cobra (Amjad Khan -- Qurbani, Jani Dost, Bombay 405 Miles) takes time out from shooting his own men and obsessively stroking his Blofeld brand evil cat in order to attempt to steal the chariot, a plot which involves him dressing up like a police inspector then berating other police inspectors for not questioning his identity thoroughly enough. As part of the demonstration of how crappy the police are, Black Cobra tells them how easy it would be for Black Cobra to waltz in, steal a cop's gun, and hold everyone hostage. Then he does just that, which is pretty cool as far as super villain bravado goes. In the ensuing fracas, however, Cobra and his men are unable to pull off the heist, so they return later than night to pick up where they left off. You'd think if the most notorious criminal in India was after your jewel-encrusted golden chariot, you'd up the security or something. Now this fracas eventually results in young Ajit and Munna getting separated from their family. Munna is discovered, crying on the road, by...oh no! It's that wacky eyebrow guy who annoyed us so in Farz. Over a decade later, he still annoys. Luckily, the movie doesn't let him delve too deeply into his Shemp-quality shenanigans. While Munna is rescued by an aging odious comic relief actor, Ajit has it slightly worse -- but just slightly -- when he witnesses Black Cobra beating his father to death with a studded leather strap. In an attempt to avenge the murder, Ajit winds up falling off a cliff and into a passing train full of hay, where he lands right next to a slumbering woman who thanks the gods for delivering this child to her. This is going to be the least of the movie's improbably events.

Meanwhile, Black Cobra's right hand man, Michael...all right! It's Shakti Kapoor! We last saw him as the evil military commander in Commando. He's still trying to get that damn chariot, because despite all the killing and the whipping and the falling off of cliffs into trains full of hay, Black Cobra still didn't manage to get the chariot. And they still don't get it! Geez! I think even I could have stolen it at this point. Michael, on the other hand, gets blown up in a helicopter explosion.

Ajit is afflicted with plot-convenient amnesia, and is raised by the woman as Badshah, a local thug and all-around bully. Munna grows up to become a hustler and con artist. Good thing these guys always grow up to be cops or criminals. What would Bollywood do if the story was, "Two brothers separated at birth. One grows up to be a helpdesk operator at Dell's call center; the other becomes assistant manager at a record store." Hmm, that sounds like a Bollywood vehicle for John Cusack. Anyway, the movie settles in to an incredibly long and often boring middle section here in which Badshah woos a singer named Jamila (Zeenat Aman -- Don, Shalimar, Qurbani) while Munna plays cat and mouse with another charming thief (Tina Munim). The bad news is that the musical numbers are pretty boring, the comedy is unfunny, and the drama is tepid at best. There is no chemistry at all between Zeenat and Dharmendra, and their entire relationship comes out of nowhere. Rishi and Tina fare slightly better, thanks in part to Rishi being the impish one and Tina having a monkey in sultan pants as a criminal accomplice. But still, this lengthy second act is a chore to get through.

It's punctuated by a completely out-of-the-blue showdown between Dharmendra in his hot pink kerchief (somehow, he makes it work!) and Bruce Le. In the years immediately following the death of Bruce Lee, sleazy film producers rushed to crank out an endless series of ultra low-budget kungfu crap that featured a guy who looked marginally like Bruce Lee, or had Bruce Lee's haircut, or thumbed his nose like Bruce Lee, or whatever they could think of to trick people who didn't know better into watching what they thought was a Bruce Lee film. The best-known of the Bruce Lee imitators was a Taiwanese actor named Ho Chung Tao. Ho was nothing special and had no notable career to speak of until producers tapped him to be the stand-in for Bruce Lee as they struggled to piece together a finished film from the footage the real Bruce Lee had shot for Game of Death. Ho declined, but shortly after that he hooked up with producer Jimmy Shaw, who came up with the Bruce Li name and kicked off Li's career as Bruce Lee lite. Li starred in a string of Bruce Lee biopics, films in which he was passed off as a true student of Bruce Lee, or as the official successor appointed by Bruce Lee in unofficial sequels to Bruce Lee movies, or as Bruce Lee himself.

Li's success as Lee meant that other producers were looking for their own Bruce Lee, or their own Bruce Li. Among these was Wong Kin Lung, an actor at the Shaw Brothers film studio in Hong Kong. Wong had starred in, among other things, the Shaw Brothers outrageous sci-fi kungfu epic Inframan alongside Danny Lee (best known for his roll in John Woo's The Killer, but also the star of a couple early Bruce Lee exploitation films, one of which -- Bruce Lee I Love You -- starred Bruce's real-life mistress, Betty Ting Pei, and was based on her version of what happened between her and Bruce). Like Bruce Li, Wong was adopted by another studio and redubbed as Bruce Le in order to cash in on his passing resemblance to Bruce Lee. Le never achieved the acclaim of Li, as ridiculous as all this may sound, but he did have a knack for showing up in films from other countries, often with absolutely no connection whatsoever to the plot. This happened in the ridiculous time travel film Future Hunters, where star Robert Patrick is looking for the Spear of Longinus and thinks this monk might have some clues as to its whereabouts. Exactly why a Buddhist monk would have info on a Christian relic I don't know, but whatever. Anyway, he goes to the temple, fights Bruce Le for no reason, and then goes, "Well, they didn't known anything," and that's the last of it.

Le's appearance in Katilon Ke Kaatil is no less bizarre. Dharmendra has attempted to win Jamila's heart by pretending to hang himself out of heartache and disguising himself as a famous singer. When both deceptions fail to convince Jamila that Badshah is the man for her, she wanders off into a garden and walks by a table where Bruce Le is sitting. He jumps up to menace her, and Dhamrnedra shows up to fight Bruce Le, and that's the first and last we see of Bruce Le. He's not a henchman of Black Cobra. He has co connection at all to the movie. He just happens to be sitting there for one scene. That said, even though Bruce Le gets little respect for his accomplishments in shoddy Hong Kong productions, his fight with Dharmendra -- or with an anonymous stunt man (probably from Hong Kong) in a Dharmendra wig -- showcases just how advanced even mediocre Hong Kong fight choreography was when compared to choreography from anywhere else in the world. Bollywood has no shortage of kungfu fights, but while they are often energetic and outrageous, they are also terrible. Even the best of them is pretty bad when held up in comparison to the fights in a similarly budgeted Hong Kong movie. This isn't to sling mud at Bollywood -- Hong Kong in the 80s blew everyone away. But that's really made obvious when Bruce Le shows up to thumb his nose and allow Indian film distributors to sell this as a Bruce Lee versus Dharmendra movie. See India's number one action star beat the tar out of the world's number one martial arts legend! Never mind that Bruce had been dead for over a decade. He was the Tupac of kungfu films, making new movies long after his death. Too bad no one ever tried to hire a rapper who looked a lot like Tupac and have him release new albums under the name Tupak Shakir or something.

Although it has nothing to do with the movie in which it is nestled, the Bruce Le scene is pretty great. The fight choreography is suddenly infinitely better as two seasoned vets of the Hong Kong film industry (again, assuming the anonymous Dharmendra stand-in was Chinese) go head to head, with occasional shots of Dharmendra staggering backward or flying through a wall. Katilon Ke Kaatil has its share of problems, but a lack of people flying through walls is not among them.

Then we return to the movie itself, which drags on for a while as we maneuver Munna and Badshah/Ajit into meeting one another and ending up both trying to con their actual mother -- who they do not realize is their mother. We also learn than Michael is still alive, having faked his own death to escape the wrath of Black Cobra (who in twenty years has not aged at all) over failing to get that chariot. And even twenty years later, Cobra is still talking about that goddamned chariot. Surely he could have come up with some other scheme by now. Or at least succeeded in stealing a golden chariot from a solitary woman who is still collapsing with grief over the loss of her sons like it happened yesterday. When Black Cobra discovers Michael is still alive (by happening to pull into the one gas station in all of India where Michael happens to work), he sicks Recha on the poor bastard. And that's where Katilon Ke Kaatil really starts to get weird.

Recha is described by Black Cobra as being the hellish offspring of a woman raped by a bear, but for all intents and purposes, he is a gorilla from Planet of the Apes. He's also bullet proof. While people are scared of him based on his size alone, no one seems all that amazed by the fact that this giant, fur-covered sasquatch of a beast exists. Maybe India is crawling with sasquatch men, or maybe the countryside is full of leather-clad gorillas on horseback catching unlucky humans in their nets. Recha manages to shatter Michael's leg and kill Michael's beloved wife, meaning we now have our villain who can be redeemed by teaming up with the good guys.

His interest in the chariot revived, Black Cobra devises a plot that relies heavily on the sort of contrivances and coincidences that only happen in a Bollywood film, where the improbability of anything can easily be explained away with a dismissive wave of the hand and a statement about events being guided by the hand of the gods. Black Cobra's plot hinges on the mother randomly wandering up to a temple to pray for the return of her sons, and this temple will just happen to be the one where Black Cobra and his gang have disguised themselves as priests. Predicting that she will know her youngest son by the trident pendant he wears, he then gives one of the henchmen a trident pendant and sends him off to randomly run into the woman. Naturally, after a bit of wackiness, Munna ends up with the pendant.

It all goes on for a while, until Munna and Ajit have their big revelation and team up to kick Black Cobra's ass. If the middle portion of the movie has been somewhat a chore to get through, at least the investment is paid off for in the finale, in which our heroes, teamed up with Michael, battle Recha in a lengthy and hilariously awesome showdown that culminates in them blowing up a huge vat labeled "Highly Inflammable." They then infiltrate Black Cobra's inner sanctum by disguising themselves as members of a dance troupe Black Cobra has hired to entertain his men and celebrate the successful theft of the chariot, which by this point, is an operation that probably cost him more than the actual value of the chariot.

This represents...what? Like the ten millionth time the good guys have infiltrated the bad guy's lair via a troupe of dancers? Why do these bad guys keep hiring dance troupes to come in and perform for them in their secret lair? Doesn't bussing in a bunch of dancers sort of spoil the whole "secret" part of the secret lair idea? And, of course, Jamila and whatever Munna's thief girlfriend's name is are part of the troupe, even though neither has ever been associated with the troupe before and Tina (because I don't know if she's ever given a name in this movie) has never been established as a singer or dancer.

Making matters sillier, Black Cobra sits the chariot out in the middle of his throne room/dance hall, and the disguised heroes come out and sing a song that is basically a summary of everything Black Cobra has done to their family. I guess this is a variation of Hamlet, where they stage a play that recreates a murder Hamlet thinks has happened, but it doesn't seem like the best way to maintain your cover. Oh well, it all leads to our heroes killing about fifty million guys Arnold Schwarzenegger style, so that's OK.

Katilon Ke Kaatil has its share of awesome action sequences, but ultimately, they are too scarce to make up for the rest of the film, which rarely rises above the point of being mildly interesting and often sinks below the point that things become tedious. The Bruce Le fight is great, as is Dharmendra's showdown with some Steve Reeves looking bodybuilder in hot pants, and of course the finale is wonderful, but there's an awful long road in between these morsels. Dharmendra doesn't exude much charisma in this film, and at times I'm not even sure he's aware of the fact that he's being filmed. Rishi is more energetic, but really, he's often upstaged by the monkey in shiny sultan pants. The biggest disappointment of all, however, is Zeenat Aman, who here contributes absolutely nothing to the movie. For a woman who built her career on challenging the conventional "damsel in distress" uselessness of a woman in Bollywood films, to see her as a conventional damsel in distress who is completely incapable of doing anything is a major let-down. She doesn't whip out any kungfu, she doesn't use her brains to outwit -- she doesn't do anything but stand there. You could have hired any woman to fill this role? Why cast Zeenat Aman unless you want Zeenat Aman? And having Zeenat means she's gonna kick some ass, one way or another. Not so, here.

Rishi Kapoor is better in his role, but like everything in this film, he's underdeveloped. Rishi is part of the Kapoor dynasty that seems inescapable in Bollywood. Raj Kapoor is his dad. Rajiv is his brother. Shashi and Shammi are his uncles. Babita was his sister-in-law. Kareena and Karisma are his nieces. It may be physically impossible at this point to watch a Bollywood film that doesn't star one of the Kapoor clan. Katilon Ke Kaatil represents the first time I've seen Rishi in action, and he wasn't half bad. He's not much of an action star, playing second fiddle to an occasionally bored and/or confused looking Dharmendra in much the same way Shashi played second banana to Amitabh in Shaan. The big difference is that, while Amitabh could make an average film above-average, Dharmendra cannot.

Dharmendra -- who we first met in the excellent swingin' 60s espionage adventure Aankhen -- is best known to modern fans for being the father of 90s action superstar Sonny Deol, though when you see Dharmendra in action here, you might wonder if Sonny isn't his son after all, but in fact a clone. Dharmendra was a big deal with a lot of great films under his belt, but Katilon Ke Kaatil isn't one of them. By the 1980s, it looks like he was floundering a bit and trying to find his way in a cinematic landscape that had been changed considerably by the arrival of Amitabh Bachchan. However, even in his mid-forties, he looks convincing in action and makes a credible tough guy, even if whupping Bruce Le is a bit of a stretch (seriously, compare those physiques and the speed of motion -- and dig Dharmendra's numchuck skills). As with his son, the trouble begins when Dharmendra has to do something other than kick someone's ass. While he doesn't do that nearly enough in this movie, when he does, it's pretty great. I think I failed to mention the part where he fights a guy in blackface. And I mean, literally. The guy's make-up is soot black.

Shakti Kapoor is his usual self, always dependable. Black Cobra certainly looks imposing, but Amjad Khan could have played him way more over the top, and that would have made this film better. Rounding out the main cast, Tina Munim has a little more to do than Zeenat, owing primarily to the fact that she has a monkey thief for a sidekick. It's bad news when Zeenat isn't the most memorable woman in your movie, but such is the case here. Tina's performance is by no means stand-out, but she and Rishi show all the charisma and chemistry that Dharmendra and Zeenat lack. She started her career as a pet project of Dev Anand's, and the chemistry she shows here with Rishi must have reached beyond this single film, because they were frequently paired together. Still, her career never really took off, and she eventually left India to attend college in America, returning to marry an industrialist and become a charity events coordinator. Also, the woman is seriously cute.

The musical numbers are also pretty dull. Although you get a couple glittery nightclub scenes, they don't make up for the endless scenes of a holy man wandering into the camera to sing summaries of the plot up to that point. And even the nightclub scenes succeed on the merits of psychedelic set design rather than the merits of the singing, dancing, or even the costumes. We do have the scene where Dharmendra and Zeenat get drunk and dance around Mumbai, playing on teeter totters and then, for no reason other than Benny Hill level comedy, dress Dharmendra up in drag, but even this goes on a little too long, and you'll start thinking to yourself, "Man, I wonder what that monkey in the genie pants is up to."

As much as I love the outlandish bits, Katilon Ke Kaatil is ultimately kind of a let-down. There is too much uninteresting filler, and Zeenat is completely wasted in a do-nothing role that is beneath her talents. I have plenty of tolerance for slapdash Bollywood action films, but even I was toying with the fast forward button for part of this. And while there are plenty of films of somewhat questionable taste I may foist upon people, often starring Mithun Chakraborty, I can't see myself doing the same with the whole of Katilon Ke Kaatil, though I will absolutely make everyone watch the Bruce Le stuff and the fight scenes with Bigfoot...err, Recha. Those are why I watched this movie, and they were worth the effort even if the rest of it really wasn't.

Next quest: I know Bollywood must have ripped off Santo movies at some point...

Labels: Action, Bollywood, Martial Arts: Kungfu, Stars: Dharmendra, Stars: Zeenat Aman, Year: 1981

posted by Keith at 4:30 PM | 5 Comments

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

DOA: Dead or Alive

DIGG THIS ARTICLE. 2006, United States. Starring Jaime Pressly, Holly Valance, Sarah Carter, Devon Aoki, Natassia Malthe, Eric Roberts, Matthew Marsden, Kevin Nash, Collin Chou, Kane Kosugi, Steve Howey. Written by J.F. Lawton, Adam Gross, and Seth Gross. Directed by Corey Yuen Kwai.

I don't really play video games. I mean, back in the 1980s, I would pump a few quarters into TRON or that Buck Rogers game, and I had fun enough with the Atari 2600 and, later, the Nintendo Entertainment System, especially Kid Icarus and Metroid. Since then, I have played Resident Evil and Resident Evil II, and that's it. Oh, no, wait. At a party last week, I herded some sheep in a Nintendo Wii game. Something about Apes Gone Wild? I can't remember. I have no idea why, in a monkey-themed collection of games, I was a dog herding sheep. I guess the monkeys owned the farm, so it was sort of a whole horrible Planet of the Apes scenario.

Point is, I don't know a lot about video games. It's just not a medium that I have ever gotten into. So I can't comment very authoritatively on anything that was made after, say, Crazy Climber, but I have never the less seen a lot of video game related movies. In fact, I've seen just about all of them. And while some video games really do have a rich enough mythology or back story to serve as a decent foundation for a movie (Resident Evil, Silent Hill -- even if you don't think the movies were good, the games at least provided enough meat for the framework), many others do not. Of course, that doesn't stop them from being made into movies anyway.

Such is the case with DOA. As best I can gather, DOA started life as a beach volleyball video game, with the hook that all the characters were hot cartoon chicks with tiny bikinis and huge tits, and you could somehow set the jiggle rate on their boobs. Then somehow the DOA games became fighting games, with the attraction being the same. The approach was twofold in its success. First, it was simple, sleazy titillation. I mean, hot chicks with bouncy boobs in tiny bikinis, engaging in lots of activities that require their jiggly parts to jiggle? What's not to like? Secondly, the games tap into the fundamental desire of just about all guys to, at least for a while, be a really hot chick. I'm pretty firm in my belief that most men harbor this fantasy, and I think nowhere is it more obvious than in the tendency of men to always play the hot chick character in a video game. Chun Li is nothing if not a symbol of ten million wanna-be gender-benders.

You can support or detract from my theory all you want, but what's most notable about DOA is that "hot chicks play volleyball and fight" as a plot is pretty much the single greatest plot ever invented and the sole reason the technology of cinema and video games was invented. Thousands of years of intellectual evolution and technological innovation has finally resulted in my ability to watch a movie with the plot, "hot chicks play volleyball and fight."

DOA the movie was directed by Hong Kong action director Cory Yuen, who has a track record that boasts more high points than low and who specializes in turning attractive women into on-screen kungfu bad-asses. Under his tutelage, Cynthia Rothrock, Joyce Godenzi, Michelle Yeoh, and Shannon Lee were all transformed into believable martial arts powerhouses (OK, Rothrock was already a kungfu powerhouse; he just figured out how best to choreograph her). And while Hsu Chi, Karen Mok, and Vicky Zhao may not have been 100% believable as ass-kicking superwomen, that doesn't change the fact that Yuen's So Close was completely awesome. Yuen is also one of the few Hong Kong directors to have a big hit as a director in the United States, that hit being the Luc Besson-produced The Transporter starring Jason Statham.

When news that there was going to be a DOA movie produced first hit cult film fandom, there was a lot of eye-rolling and "yeah, whatever, man" reaction. But when it was further revealed that Cory Yuen would be director, ears (among other things) pricked up and a lot of action film fans were suddenly a lot more willing to give the film a try, even if the inevitable PG-13 rating meant it would be all tease. If anyone was going to be able to direct a dumb fun "hot chicks play volleyball and fight" movie, it would be Cory Yuen.

So people waited. Trailers played, and the reaction was tentatively positive after the initial negative reaction. Sure, the movie looked colossally goofy, but it also looked like it would sport high energy and be a lot of fun. And then the release date came and went, and there was no movie. DOA vanished, bumped from the release schedule and shelved for any number of reasons, the most likely of which was probably, "Wow, this movie is awful." Which is a shame. I mean, how bad could the film possibly be? They released Norbit, for crying out loud, and Epic Movie. And those had to be worse than DOA which, if nothing else, at least would feature hot chicks playing volleyball and fighting.

DOA eventually began to trickle out to theaters in other countries, though it still remained absent from American theaters, and fans of Cory Yuen, action movies, video games, and hot chicks in bikinis started looking to foreign DVD releases to see the movie.

Was it worth the wait? Or the trouble to see it? Yes and no. DOA is pretty much exactly what you would expect it to be from the elements listed above. It is dumb. Extremely dumb. It is full of cheap titillation and gratuitous bikini ass shots, which always gets the Teleport City seal of approval. The script is paper thin, and what little story there is makes no sense anyway. Most of the cast doesn't even seem to realize they are supposed to be acting in a movie. The fight choreography, involving almost no trained martial artists, is heavy on editing, camera trickery, and computer manipulation.

And yeah, it's all a whole lot of gloriously stupid fun.

The plot revolves around a group of women invited to compete in a semi-secret martial arts tournament where, of course, shady shenanigans are being engaged in behind the scenes. Enter the Dragon's plot has proved useful so many times, the writers of this film decided there was no reason not to dust it off one more time. We first meet Katsumi, head of a ninja clan with a massive temple complex you would think someone in modern-day Japan would notice. Katsumi's brother disappeared during the last tournament, presumed dead, and she is determined to uncover the truth behind his disappearance, even if it means violating the laws of her clan. She leaves for the tournament with two more ninjas in hot pursuit: the noble Hayabusa, who has a thing for Katsumi, and the vengeful Ayane, herself the former lover of Katsumi's brother.

Katsumi is played by the indescribable Devon Aoki, whose continued presence in the world of cinema is one of the great mysteries of the entertainment world. She's a horrible, horrible actress, completely incapable of anything beyond a single blank expression and a single, monotone style of dialog delivery. On top of that, she's pretty weird looking. How she ever got a part in a movie is beyond me, but how she continues to get parts, however small they may be and however bad the movies they are in may be, I simply can't explain.

Accompanying her, Hayabusa is played by none other than Kane Kosugi, son of the legendary (to me, anyway) Sho Kosugi, who starred in many of the best ninja exploitation films of the 1980s and then went on to host Ninja Theater and release a ninja exercise video in which he was accompanied by the scantily clad Ninjettes. One gets the feeling that Sho probably appreciates DOA. Kane started his acting career alongside his dad, always playing the son of whatever ninja guy Sho was playing at the time. Kane never developed much in the way of an American acting career, but he clicked in Japan and managed to forge a pretty consistent string of jobs, including a role in a Japanese sentai television series (those superhero shows that get turned into the Power Rangers in the United states), a role in one of those crappy new Ultraman shows, and most recently one of the leads in Godzilla: Final Wars (even though the lead role should have gone to Godzilla). He isn't really that great of an actor, but he's no worse than his dad (although his dad also wasn't a native English speaker), and he does handle action scenes well, which is generally all he's expected to do. As he gets older, he is looking a lot like his father, so much so that I'm beginning to wonder if Kane isn't Sho Kosugi, his revitalized youth the result of some esoteric ninja ritual or something. Oh sure, you say, but what about all those times Sho and Kane appeared alongside one another? Well, yeah. Maybe -- or maybe they just told us that was Kane Kosugi. Honestly, they could have hired any kid.

Anyway, Hayabusa is along for the ride, trying to convince Katsumi that she should return home while also helping her out with her investigation. Ayane is a little more hostile. Despite her love for Katsumi's missing brother, Ayane holds clan law more important, and clan law dictates that when Katsumi abandoned her post as leader, she was marked for death. Ayane is played by Natassia Malthe, who has a string of cult film credits to her name but is probably most recognizable, to people who might recognize such an actress, for her role as Typhoid in Elektra or for her upcoming title role in the sequel to video game based movie Bloodrayne. I may be one of the few people in the world who would think, "Elektra and Bloodrayne II? Sounds good to me!"

Second on the list of DOA combatants is Tina Armstrong, played by Jamie Pressly of My Name is Earl fame. Pressly is pretty much the only person who showed up to this film with the intention of acting, and she steals the movie as a pro wrestler looking for the opportunity to prove she's a genuine fighter. The film introduces us to her as she reclines aboard her yacht while wearing an American flag motif bikini, stirred out of her sunbathing just long enough to beat the snot out of a bunch of pirates (lead by none other than Robin Shou, former star of such movies as Mortal Kombat, and, umm, well, just that and Mortal Kombat II, really). When our founding fathers first set forth the basic premise of this great land of ours, I'm sure that they could conjure up no greater symbol of American awesomeness than a hot chick in an American flag motif bikini beating up pirates. OK, maybe Thomas Jefferson would disagree. But whatever. Fuckin' Jefferson. Ask Ben Franklin. He'd be on board.

Tina's pro-wrestling dad is also in the tournament, play by real-life pro wrestler (there's something...ironic? about the phrase "real-life pro wrestler") Kevin "Big Daddy Cool Diesel" Nash, who is dressed up more or less like Hulk Hogan in a somewhat lame gag I'm sure Nash found amusing. Since Kevin Nash's job in this movie is to drink beer and go, "That's my little girl!" he turns in the second best acting job after Pressly.

Finally there's Holly Valance as Christie Allen, a posh thief who shows up to the tournament while on the run from the Hong Kong police. Or someone like that. Valance is definitely no actress. I think she was some sort of mid-level Aussie pop star before this movie, and it's unlikely much will change after this movie. She's hot, though, and just bad enough an actress to still be somewhat acceptable in a movie of this nature. And she does the thing where she throws a gun and a bra up into the air, then sticks her arm up so that her bra goes magically on just as she catches the gun and whups the butt of the world's most incompetent bunch of cops. I mean, really, when a kungfu chick, however hot she may be, asks you to hand her a bra, do you really offer it to her as it dangles from the barrel of your gun? And I don't mean that figurative gun. I mean the actual gun, the one she can now kick out of your hands.

Along with a bunch of other fighters you will never care about (and most of whom just disappear at random throughout the movie with no explanation presented anywhere other than deleted scenes), the three ladies head to the island fortress lorded over by brilliant mastermind and DOA tournament manager Eric Roberts. Yes, folks, Eric Roberts, looking like a dude who would hang around the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame a lot, telling young kids about what a genius Jimmy Page was. In a feat of casting not rivaled since the days when Black Belt Jones cast Scatman Crothers as a karate master, crummy movie mainstay Eric Roberts is the lord of DOA, and with the help of his nerdy assistant Weatherby, Roberts aims to use the DOA tournament as a way to inject the world's best fighters with nanotech robots that will harvest their genetic information and make it downloadable to a pair of sunglasses which will then instill the wearer with nigh invincible kungfu prowess.

Seriously, man, that's the plot. All Eric Roberts needs to do for his nefarious scheme to work is, 1) capture each of the best fighters in the DOA tournament, 2) strap them into his gigantic info downloading machine, and 3) manage to keep a clunky pair of sunglasses on his face while fighting. And the end result is that you will be a slightly better fighter than most other people. On the grand scale of nefarious schemes, this one ranks pretty close to the "moronic" end of the bell curve. I mean, how is being a marginally better kungfu guy than most other kungfu guys going prove profitable to anyone other than, say, a guy in the Ultimate Fighting Championship? And then, you have to get the ref to allow you to wear sunglasses while you're fighting. And it's not like Eric Roberts put a sports band or anything on those glasses, so they will eventually just fall off. But it doesn't matter, because we're a few centuries away from the era when being good at kungfu guaranteed global supremacy. You remember when the world was ruled by kungfu guys, right?

Complicating Roberts' already goofy plan is the fact that the original DOA founder's daughter, Helena, is an aspiring DOA combatant herself and is beginning to suspect Roberts is up to something her father wouldn't have approved of. Oh, and there's Katsumi's missing brother. In between that nonsense and all the awful dialog are a whole bunch of choppy fights of varying quality, a game of volleyball, and well, that's pretty much it. DOA has absolutely no surprises to offer even the most easily surprised viewer. But does that mean this movie is as awful as it sounds? Of course. And does that mean that it's as great as it is awful? You betcha.

The script, such as it is, comes to us courtesy of a trio of writers who actually have, if not a respectable track record writing good action films, then at least a modest record writing halfways decent action films. J.F. Lawton scripted two of the better Steven Seagal films (as odd as that statement may seem to some), Under Seige and Under Seige II, as well as the cult film spoof Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death. His big gig, however (besides writing Pretty Woman, but what does that have to do with us?), was as a regular writer for the goofy television series VIP, in which a group of hot chicks run a private investigation service. And when you realize that was one of Lawton's former jobs, the entire look and feel of DOA makes perfect, predictable sense. with a few tweaks here and there, this really could pass as a VIP movie, right down to the three-letter title. Lawton worked on more serious action films like The Hunted starring Joan Chen and Christopher Lambert fighting ninjas, and he worked on goofier action movies, like the Damon Wayans superhero spoof misfire Blankman. So you can pretty much see where the script for DOA came from.

Script contributors Seth and Adam Gross were writers for Bill Nye, the Science Guy. I guess they came up with Eric Roberts' crazy science scheme, although i think the sheer goofiness of it all makes it more of a Beakman thing, really.

Cory Yuen's direction is a little uninspired compared to other efforts, though he puts his craft to good use in filming the ladies (Yuen has previous experience with cheesecake kungfu thanks to his turn in the director's seat of Women on the Run, which features some rather interesting, um, kung-nude). DOA lacks the slick polish of So Close, though Yuen is still adept at making cheap films look flashy. But even though the cinematography may be lacking, he misses no opportunity to randomly cut to a shot of someone's ass or cleavage, so he's not totally off his game here. And while Yuen is used to making non martial artists look like martial artists, he really has his work cut out for him in this movie. Aoki and Valance seem to possess almost no athletic ability whatsoever, and so to pass them off as fighters, Yuen relies on gravity-defying wirework and jumpy editing, as well as a dollop of CGI. He does the most he can with what little he has, but no one is going to be mistaking these gals for legitimate fighters. Even Hsu Chi was more believable. Jamie Pressly fares better largely because she has a pretty awesomely athletic build and looks like she really could deliver some punches and kicks and make you feel them. There's a reason why she's the one out of all these women who went on to have the biggest career. She's adept at both the job of acting and the job of looking good in the fight scenes. Sho Kosugi, errr, Kane Kosugi gets to have one fight scene all to himself, which ends up being the only fight scene that looks anything like vintage Cory Yuen, since this is a guy who knows martial arts fighting a bunch of stuntmen. But even though this fight is pretty good, the award for best fight scene has to go to the one between Valance and Sarah Carter, who plays Helena. And that's because that fight is between two sexy chicks in bikinis. On the beach. In the rain. In slow motion.

Yuen manages to wring a few other choice action sequences from a game but largely incapable cast. His skill alone is what elevates this film above the level of, say, an Andy Sidaris action film. Aoki and purple-wig wearing Malthe have a decent wirefu match-up in a bamboo forest, which many people have pegged as a cheap knock-off of the bamboo forest fight in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, even though it has more in common with the same type of scene as presented in Andrew Lau's Stormriders. The finale against a super-powered Eric Roberts (who's acting suggests that if you asked him today, he might not even be aware of the fact that he ever even appeared in this film) isn't exactly solid fight choreography, but it's still funny and exciting because, well hell, it's Eric Roberts. What the hell is even going on? And by this point, Yuen has resorted to his trademark jettisoning of any and all semblances of logic or reality, and believe me when I say that semblances of logic and reality are the last thing a movie like this needs.

Labels: Director: Cory Yuen Kwai, Martial Arts: Kungfu, Martial Arts: Ninjas, Stars: Kane Kosugi, Year: 2006

posted by Keith at 2:31 PM | 17 Comments

Friday, April 27, 2007

Enter 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

Sunday, June 18, 2006

House of Fury

2005, Hong Kong. Starring Anthony Wong, Wu Ma, Stephen Fung, Gillian Chung, Daniel Wu, Michael Wong, Jake Strickland, Charlene Choi, Yukari Oshima. Directed by Stephen Fung. Written by Stephen Fung. Buy it now on Amazon.com.

Above and beyond all else, kungfu films have always existed so that they can teach to us valuable life lessons. At their best, they are practically training manuals for how to live a healthy, productive, and socially relevant life. For instance, if your pupils are killed by a one-armed kungfu master, then you as a blind master of the flying guillotine should go about avenging their deaths by killing every one-armed man in the province. Far more potent than the moral litmus test, "What would Jesus do?" in the daily life of the average person is the question, "What would the blind master of the flying guillotine do?" And you know what he would do? Jump through a roof, throw the flying guillotine, and send a severed head rolling across the floor. Not surprisingly, this is often what Jesus would do as well, as far as I can reckon.

Kungfu films also serve as a road map for building rewarding, emotionally rich familial relationships, teaching us the most productive way (snake fist) to deal with conflicts within the family structure. The landscape of kungfu films is littered with films in which a son and a father, or a daughter and father, or two siblings, must struggle both against one another as well as together against a greater outside threat. This often manifests itself as some wholesome bonding activity, such as jumping from pole to pole over a field of knives, or trying to grab the chicken bits out of each other's rice bowls. Visit any modern family or marital therapist, and you find that, nine times out of ten, they employ the same -- or at least very similar -- methods for working through the issues that complicate interpersonal relationships.

House of Fury is a more modern look at the nuclear kungfu family, and while its look and style have been updated for modern sensibilities, the core message at the center of the film remains consistent with the many that came before it: the family that trains in kungfu together will deal out swift kungfu vengeance together.

Anthony Wong stars as Yu Siu-bo, a somewhat boring practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine and physical therapy. He delights in spinning outrageous yarns about his past adventures fighting ninjas and assorted supervillains, a practice which embarrasses his two teenage children, college-age slacker Nicky (Stephen Fung, Avenging Fist, Gen-X Cops, Gen-Y Cops) and high schooler Natalie (Gillian Chung, one-half of the Hong Kong pop superduo Twins and star of The Twins Effect), both of whom assume their dad is just a world-class bullshitter. At least, they assume that right up until a wheelchair bound psycho named Rocco (your buddy and mine, Michael Wong) shows up hoping to drag the identity of a retired secret agent out of Siu-bo. Suddenly, the two siblings realize everything their father has ever told them has more or less been true, and now they're caught right in the middle of a frenzied kungfu battle between their father and Rocco's thugs. Luckily, this being a kungfu film, dad trained his kids well.

House of Fury is a family film in more ways than simply being about the evolution of the relationship between two children and their father (involving the "tall tale" characteristic that allows me to actually compare the themes of a film full of crazy flying ninjas and kungfu and Tim Burton's Big Fish). For starters, the number of familiar old faces on parade is more than enough to counterbalance the presence of shining new stars like Gillian Chung and Stephen Fung. Anthony Wong is a welcome addition to any cast, and when he's interested in his role, there are few actors in this world that are finer at their craft. He's top notch as the good-hearted but drab Siu-bo, padding about the place, weaving spectacularly crazy adventure tales, and talking to a photo of his dead wife. He's both comical and poignant without ever being overly saccharine. He plays the comedy and action as well as he does the loneliness of the character. Inhabited by Anthony Wong, Siu-bo simply feels like a real guy. When his secret comes out and he jumps into action, he's just as much fun. His best friend and patient is the aging Uncle Chu, played by Hong Kong movie stalwart Wu Ma. We've seen Wu Ma for decades, and watching him in action) even if it's heavily aided by wires and CGI) is great fun. He and Wong represent the older generations perfectly.

Additionally, one of Rocco's henchmen is played by Japanese actress Yukari Oshima. Fans who were around in the 1990s will remember Oshima as on of the "girls with guns" superstars that dominated the first half of that decade with hard-hitting kungfu and gunplay action. Although most of the movies from that era remain MIA in DVD or have been released only in cheap dubbed, pan-and-scan quickies, fans of the films and the women who made them remain devoted to the genre and the actresses who defined it -- Moon Lee, Cynthia Khan, Yukari Oshima, American Cynthia Rothrock, and of course, Michelle Yeoh. Oshima, who got her start as part of Sonny Chiba's Japan Action Club and appeared in the sentai series Bioman before making the jump to feature films and super-stardom in Hong Kong in the early 1990s, was always my favorite. Like many of the stars of girls with guns action films, Oshima made the move to Filipino-produced imitations of the genre when it died out in the late 1990s, then seemed to drop off the radar entirely along with everyone else except Michelle Yeoh, who managed to parlay her girls with guns street cred and friendship with then-darling of Hollywood Jackie Chan into a role in the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies then into a plum role in Ang Lee's wuxia crossover film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the fame and money from which she used to produce and star in two abysmal adventure films, The Touch and Silverhawk in which, if nothing else, her acquaintance with Jackie Chan has rubbed off on her the tendency to cast herself as characters half her actual age.

It would seem that Yeoh pulled a Harrison Ford -- sucking up all the fame that could have been distributed amongst her co-stars, leaving the likes of Moon Lee and Yukari Oshima in her dust, all but forgotten save by a few die-hards still clutching old VHS copies of the Angel Terminators films or Kickboxer's Tears.

Seeing Yukari Oshima pop up again, looking as gorgeous and deadly as ever, was a real treat for me, and honestly, the main reason I even rented House of Fury. I'd heard good things about the movie, but most of those were from Jackie Chan, and since I believe he played the role of executive producer, I didn't consider his opinion entirely unbiased. But any role, even a small one, for my favorite girl with the thunderbolt kick, was enough to snare my attention.

On the other end of the scale are Stephen Fung and Gillian Chung (and to a lesser extend, Gillian's fellow Twins member and Twins Effect co-star Charlene Choi). Fung, like a seeming endless parade of pretty young faces that started way back with Aaron Kwok and continued through Ekin Cheng and on to Fung, has been regarded as the "hot new thing" that is finally going to salvage Hong Kong cinema from the doldrums in which it's drifted for years, revitalizing the industry and returning to it the spark and magic that made the 70s, 80s, and first half of the 90s so memorable and beloved. He hasn't fulfilled that expectation, but then, it's not really fair to expect it of him. Of the host of hot guys who emerged at the turn of the century to become the somewhat unmemorable and interchangeable faces of the next Hong Kong new wave (which has also yet to really materialize), Fung was a fair enough performer, but he was always a little hollow and cardboard and unspectacular. It was hard, especially for fans who weren't screaming teenage girls, to tell one hot new thing from the next, even when they were all collected together in movies like Gen-X Cops. Thus, when a director wanted to make a "real" film, they still went to the last men standing from the 80s and 90s -- Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Andy Lau, Simon Yam, and of course, Anthony Wong (Stephen Chow doesn't make the list, simply because he's always been sort of a whole film industry unto himself). Thus, especially for me, guys like Fung, Edison Chen, and Nick Tse continue to fail to make the same impression as the guys from whom they were supposed to inherit the mantle.

What Stephen Fung is to the men, Gillian Chung is to the women. As one-half of the pop megastar duo Twins, producers hoped she would carry the name recognition to become a movie superstar where so many other hopeful starlets have simply been swallowed whole, unable to become the next Brigette Lin or Maggie Cheung or, quite frankly, even the next Hsu Chi, or even the next Joey Wong Tsu-hsien. Funny, isn't it? Back in the 80s and 90s, Maggie Cheung was most often described as "irritating" or "insipid," known as she was for little more than being the squealing, whining girlfriend in Jackie Chan's Police Story films. And Hsu Chi? She was just some softcore porn nobody. And now? They're two of the biggest, best respected actresses on the international scene. Who would have guessed it, watching Police Story or whichever the hell The Fruit is Swelling film it is that stars Hsu Chi?

While Gillian is no Hsu Chi, and she's certainly no Maggie Cheung, she's still a pretty solid performer with a lot of charisma. Handled properly, and should there ever be more than one good script every other year coming out of Hong Kong, she does indeed show the potential to become something more than a cute face that will disappear in a couple years. Stephen Fung -- I don't know. He's still kind of a bore, and he still doesn't exude much charisma. I have hope for him, but not nearly as much as I do for Gillian Chung.

As for Chung's Twins partner, Charlene Choi, there's really not much that can be said about her in this film. She has a very small role that doesn't really give her much to do beyond tease Stephen Fung's Nicky for a couple scenes.

I would be remiss, however, if I left my review of the cast at the above. That's a lot of good actors doing good work up there. How can I celebrate them without screwing up my courage and looking at the performances of American-born actors Michael Wong and Daniel "Michael Wong for the next generation" Wu. Wu I first encountered in Gen-X Cops, and I was awed by how spectacularly awful he was. Daniel Wu originally went to Hong Kong simply to "get in touch with his roots," get the feel of the place from which his parents came. An extended stay lead to some modeling work, and from there he found his way into film. He seems like a decent guy in interviews, but that doesn't change the fact that he was really unbelievably horrible in Gen-X Cops. However, each subsequent movie in which he's appeared has seen him improve in tiny increments, so that by the time we've gotten to House of Fury, he is merely bad. And if nothing else, Daniel Wu rolled naked on the beach with Maggie Q where as I simply watched him roll naked on the beach with Maggie Q. Wu was never sold as the next Andy Lau, Tony Leung, or Jackie Chan, but if he keeps working at his craft, he could, at the very least, be the next Aaron Kwok or Leon Lai.

The same can't be said for Wu's countryman, Michael Wong, though Wong did have Ellen Chung naked and grinding away on him in one movie, so that caveat about our relative accomplishments still stands. Michael Wong has been plying his acting craft for a couple decades now, and in every film in which I've seen him, he has wowed me with his ability to never get any better no matter how much experience he has. It's amazing just how consistent he's been over the past many years. It's a sustained level of badness of which Keanu Reeves could only dream. It's absolutely astounding. He never gets better, but he never gets worse. Michael Wong is superhuman in his ability to sound like every role is his first role. And despite being surrounded by world-class veterans and promising young upstarts, Michael Wong manages to deliver the exact same bad level of performance he's always delivered, doggedly refusing to let the presence of Anthony Wong cause him to accidentally step up his game.

I have no idea how Michael Wong has sustained his career for this long. He's good looking, but not that good looking. He's fit, but he's not any good at kungfu and only marginally passable at performing other forms of action choreography. In all aspects of his acting career he is merely below average -- so much so that he's not even bad to the point of being funny. Well, no, sometimes he's funny-bad (witness his anguished plea, "You've gone over to the dark side!" in The First Option), but mostly he's just bad. And yet, the man has never gone wanted for roles. Usually they're in B-team movies, but from time to time he manages to sneak into an honest-to-goodness movie like House of Fury. He must totally baffle his brother Russell (New Jack City and Joy Luck Club, plus a bunch of his own movies, as well as some television work). As for me, I embrace Michael Wong. I don't really like calling anyone "the Ed Wood of…" but if ever there was an Ed Wood of acting, it has to be Michael Wong, and I love him for it.

Of course, all my love can't make anyone think that Michael Wong is any good in House of Fury. He's awful. He's so bad he makes Daniel Wu look good, though he doesn't make Daniel Wu in Gen-X Cops look good. You might think that Wong is trying to play Rocco as a cool, calculating, emotionless man consumed by vengeance and just failing at the characterization, but anyone who has seen Michael Wong in any movie before will simply say, "No, that's just Michael Wong. He can't act." His soft-spoken monotone is made even worse by the fact that he's surrounded by performers the caliber of Anthony Wong and Wu Ma, and even young Gillian Chung. Heck, even charisma-vacuum Stephen Fung seems positively animated and warm next to Michael Wong's utterly bizarre performance as the wheelchair-bound Rocco. And in case you think that strapping Wong with a wheelchair means he's not going to have a bad action scene, think again. Action choreographer Yuen Wo-ping (he of too many decades and too many credits to list) figured that the best way to get a decent action scene out of Wong was simply to film him in fast speed rolling around in his wheelchair. Sadly, director Stephen Fung (more on that in a moment) resists the natural urge to set the entire scene to "Yakkety Sax."

The final piece of the main cast is this kid named Jake Strickland. I have no idea who this kid is (this is his first and currently only listed film credit), but I assume Yuen Wo-ping discovered him on some youth martial arts circuit and couldn't resist throwing him into the film as Rocco's son. As an actor, he's not much, but then, what do you expect from a fourteen-year-old American making a foreign language film. He's still better than Michael Wong (both he and Wong deliver their lines in English). The kid is really just here to twirl a staff and kick some ass, and in that sense, he's surprisingly good. Hong Kong films have always had better luck with martial arts kids than American films -- just compare any of the Three Ninjas to that little kid with the perfectly spherical head kicking ass alongside Jet Li in New Legend of Shaolin and My Father is a Hero. It seems that being a decent kiddie kungfu performer doesn't really have much to do with race (obviously), but instead has to do with whether your action director is Yuen Wo-ping or John Turteltaub. Jake Strickland looks fantastic in action, and his fight with Anthony Wong is priceless. Wong is torn between the fact that he doesn't want to beat up a fourteen-year-old kid and the fact that this fourteen-year-old kid is kicking his ass and flipping around with a staff and running up walls, and it makes for a great fight scene. I don't know if we'll ever see Jake Strickland again, but he does a fine job here -- and he has a great name for being either an action star or Hank Hill's boss at the propane shop.

The rest of the action is a pretty good mix between old style kungfu, wire-fu, and a little CGI enhancement here and there. Stephen Fung and Gillian Chung are not accomplished martial artists, and from time to time you can tell that, but most of the time, Yuen Wo-ping poses them and flings them about pretty well. Their fight with Yukari Oshima and the rest of Michael Wong's thugs is a stand-out moment, as is the finale (in which, among other things, Stephen Fung also faces off with Jake Strickland). Anthony Wong, of course, is no martial artist either, but the man has been around long enough to have picked up the tricks of the trade, and he looks good in his few action scenes. Even elderly Wu Ma gets in on the fun. For years, I railed against the tendency to cast non-martial artists as kungfu masters, then mask their lack of skill with wire tricks and flashy editing -- a trend that was largely championed by Yuen Wo-ping (with plenty of help from Ching Siu-tung and Tsui Hark). In my old age, I'm getting soft, or simply accepting that the days of Sammo Hung, Jackie Chan, and Yuen Biao are over -- even for Sammo, Jackie, and Biao. House of Fury delivers fantasy kungfu but it does it well, and from time to time, it allows itself to be a throwback, if not to the glory days of Sammo Hung choreography, at least to the solid, no-wires choreography that made Yukari Oshima and the girls with guns genre so much fun.

Now comes the funny part. Although I continue to be unimpressed by Stephen Fung as an actor (calling him a hot young thing really isn't fair -- he's only a year or two younger than me), I was surprised to see that as a writer and director, he's surprisingly accomplished. I have no idea hos much of House of Fury was directed by Fung, and how much was the work of his mentors Yuen Wo-ping and Jackie Chan, but the fact is that Stephen, for whatever amount he directed, showcases a steady hand and the ability to let the film's story speak for itself, rather than piling on lots of irritating flashy editing and intrusive directorial tricks. Surrounded by such talent (as well as Willie Chan, another producer on this film and cohort of Jackie Chan), Stephen Fung may not emerge as the next Jackie Chan in front of the camera, but he has an excellent chance to emerge as the next Jackie Chan behind the camera. There are definitely some signs of the old Jackie and Sammo directorial styles, which were also influenced by the directorial work of Lo Wei (who directed Wu Ma, among others like Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee) and Bruce Lee himself. Although House of Fury boasts the wirework and CGI that seems to be part and parcel of modern kungfu films, the direction itself is surprisingly down to earth and reminiscent of the good ol' days.

Fung also co-wrote the script, along with Yiu Fai-lo (previously the screenwriter for the dreadful Jackie Chan flop Gorgeous and the even more dreadful Andrew Lai horror disaster The Park). Given how dreadful Yiu's previous scripts are, I have no problem attributing the bulk of the work on the script for House of Fury to Stephen Fung. As a guy in his early thirties who no doubt grew up a fan of everyone from Bruce Lee to Jackie Chan, this is exactly the sort of movie you'd expect him to write. However, we've seen thanks to countless gigabytes of fanfic that being a fan of something doesn't mean you're going to write a good story about it. Fung's script, on the other hand, is well-written, well-paced, and surprisingly…I don't want to say complex, really. Touching? Maybe that's it. Let's just say it's good. The homage to Bruce Lee exists in the title and in some of Anthony Wong's fight choreography, but other than that, it doesn't play much of a role in the story. At this point, though, fans of Hong Kong cinema should be used to gratuitous Bruce Lee gags and imitations. It's almost as if Stephen Fung wanted to make an 80s style Hong Kong action film and knew that he couldn't do that without throwing in some random Bruce Lee allusions.

Bruce Lee nonsense aside, what Fung has done is write a very good modern-day reinvention of all those old "quarrelling kungfu family" movies that were made in the 1970s -- right down to a "sitting at the table" kungfu fight over bits of chicken. Although being a fan doesn't make you a good writer, a good writer who is fan enough to throw in obscure homages like that makes for a real treat. The relationship between the family is also well-written. The whole "discovering the secret past" thing isn't anything new, but Fung executes the story well. The central theme seems to be that the older generation shouldn't be dismissed, that they have plenty to teach us, and sometimes their rambling stories are true, or at least interesting. As an avid listener to my grandfathers' stories about World War II -- many of which seem as embellished as Siu-bo's stories about fighting ninjas that can vanish into thin air -- I understand and fully appreciate the message at the heart of Fung's cracking good kungfu movie. It seems especially apropos in a film that owes so much and pays such close attention to the films of the generation before. In fact, to stick with the analogy about my grandfathers and World War II stories, it's easy to see the films of the 70s and 80s as "the greatest generation." Whenever anyone talks about the Golden Age, they inevitably point to these films. The next Jackie Chan, we say. The next Tsui Hark (if only Tsui Hark could be the next Tsui Hark). The next Chinese Ghost Story or A Better Tomorrow. And amid all that are the new films and new actors, largely dismissed, often disdained, living in the shadow of the greatest generation, looking at them with a mix of awe, contempt, and envy and the knowledge that they will never live up to but will always be compared to those films.

Also central to the plot are the two fathers, Siu-bo and Rocco, and different ways in which they have raised children adept at kungfu. Siu-bo trained his children hard, but there's a tenderness to his training as well. He does it because he knows one day someone might come for him, and by default them, and they'll be better off if they can defend themselves. For the most part, however, they are allowed to be regular young adults who regard their father as a bit of an oaf. Similarly, Rocco has trained his son in the martial arts, but in his case, it's to use him as an instrument of attack. And Rocco's son is an interesting juxtaposition to Nicky and Natalie. Where as both Nicky and Natalie are involved in active social lives (he works at a marine park, she is involved in school plays), Rocco's son is a shut-in who knows little beyond his PSP and staff fighting in the basement. He's like one of those anime otaku who collect martial arts weapons, except that he can actually use his.

Something that makes the script more complex than it might otherwise be, however, is the relationship between Rocco and his son. Rocco isn't necessarily a heartless villain. He's in a wheelchair because he was a special ops sniper assigned to assassinate some terrorist leader. However, an agent for the Hong Kong secret service needed said terrorist alive for a different assignment, and in order to prevent Rocco from killing the man (Rocco was working for the United States), he attacked and crippled him. Now all Rocco wants is revenge on the man who paralyzed him -- and Siu-bo happens to know who that agent is. So it's not like Rocco is simply evil -- and we see this when, after he's nearly killed in the final showdown, his son drops his staff and runs to protect and plead for his father's life. Obviously, Rocco isn't a complete dick, and the scene is nice even if Jake Strickland and Michael Wong are both bad actors.

House of Fury finds a way to embrace that as it reconcile its young protagonists with their father. With new and old talent both in front of and behind the camera, House of Fury is more than just a lot of fun (though it is certainly that); it's the closest we're going to get, in my opinion, to mixing the past with the present. It's not a ground-breaking film, but it's plenty enjoyable in the same gee-whiz way that the films of the 80s were., with al the same ham-handed goofiness and melodrama that people seem to forget was so omnipresent in those films. Sure, it doesn't best the best of the 1980s. It's not Dragons Forever or Project A. But if more new films were more like House of Fury -- fast-paced, action-packed, a blend of legit kungfu choreography and special effects, but also full of good humor and heart -- then maybe we wouldn't miss the past and bemoan the future quite so much.

Labels: B-Masters Roundtable, Martial Arts: Kungfu, Year: 2005

posted by Keith at 11:24 PM | 7 Comments

Friday, September 23, 2005

Lethal Force

2001, United States. Starring Frank Prather, Cash Flagg Jr., Patricia Williams, Andrew Hewitt, Patrick Collins. Directed by Alvin Ecarma.

The world of low-to-no budget features is like a vast desert full of saber-wielding whirling dervishes who will capture you, slice your tendons, then stake you down in the sand, leaving you to die of thirst, bake in the heat of the sun, or freeze in the dead of night. Sometimes, however, the whole desert torture thing may actually be slightly more bearable than another frame of someone's homebrewed video concoction.

And yet, like the desert, if you spend enough time dwelling within the wasteland, you cannot help but develop a respect - albeit a grudging one at times - for the madmen who inhabit it. After all, you've learned from experience what a harsh environment it can be. Rewarding, yes, but also punishing. Like one of those cigarette-smoking, beret-sporting, World War II French resistance guys with the pencil-thin mustache and goatee, sometimes all you can do is heave a world-weary sigh and mumble, "Well, you disgusting bastard, we meet again," as you toss a bottle of liquor across the room and raise a small glass to bid "salut" to suffering.

Exactly why a World War II French resistance fighter would be in the deep desert with a bunch of dervishes is a question best left to History's Mysteries.

Point is, as awful as these films can be, once you've lived among them, it's hard to come down hard on any but the very worst and most lazily made of the population. As I've stated numerous times, I think we're pretty fair to these films, and a lot easier on them than most critics would be. We've made some of our own, and now that we've watched so many, it's a simple matter for us to adjust our perception and not judge these films by the same criteria we would judge big budget studio productions, or even low budget studio productions. We may not always be kind, but I do believe we're always fair.

I'm always pleased when a small film comes our way that makes the job easy by not requiring us to explain away all the bad points with verbose rambling about the woes of archaic analog video editing equipment and whatnot. Most recently, The Adventures of El Frenetico and Go Girl delighted us to no end by being a shot-on-video film with no budget but plenty of energy and skill behind it that made it a lot of fun. Our winning streak continued when we took a look at Lethal Force, a tremendously well-done action spoof/homage that serves up tons of violence, fighting, wit, and style -- all done in a tongue-in-cheek fashion which, unlike a lot of so-called parodies and tongue-in-cheek films, works well because the attitude is there to augment the film, not cover up the flaws.

Pulling source material from black action films, gritty 1970s action, slick 1980s Hong Kong productions, and even Spaghetti Westerns, Lethal Force is the straight-forward tale of a super bad-ass hitman who gets double-crossed by his best friend and spends a lot of time beating the unholy hell out of people, or getting said unholy hell beaten out of himself. Looking like a more attractive version of Don "The Dragon" Wilson, star Cash Flagg Jr. (A tribute to one of the great patron saints of no-budget indy filmmaking, Ray Dennis Steckler, who always billed himself as "Cash Flagg" in his films) kicks, punches, shoots, and grimaces his way through one action piece after another, with nary a moment spent or wasted on exposition. The movie operates on the assumption that you are familiar with the sources and don't need the conventions and cliches explained to you.

Flagg plays Savitch, a cold-as-ice, hard-as-steel hitman who will kill anyone for the right price - men, women, kids, nuns, whoever. He's certainly not one of those "heroic bloodshed" type hitmen with a heart of gold. When Savitch's best buddy, a gangster named Jack, finds his wife and son have been kidnapped by crime lord Mal, who looks like a cross between Peter Fonda and wheelchair-bound Nazi scientist Dr. Strangelove, he calls upon his gun-toting best friend to lend him a hand. It's a set-up, of course, as Jack is being blackmailed by Mal, who wants Savitch dead in retaliation for the time Savitch once annoyed Mal by hiding in a mailbox and doing that comedy bit where every time Mal put a letter in the box, Savitch popped it back out. Oh yeah, Savitch also shot the guy. In one of the script's funnier spoofs on bad action film writing (I give them the benefit of the doubt), Jack taunts Mal with the line, "You should have died when he killed you!"

In an ode to the old manga series Crying Freeman, all of Mal's thugs where sharp black suits and masks, providing us with the first of what will be many dissections of how things that look unspeakably cool in some movies and comic books just look goofy in real life. Being shot with very low (but well-handled) production values, Lethal Force works as sort of an experiment of taking cool, stylish things out of the glitz of well-produced 35mm feature films and recreating them in a way that, because of the video medium, looks far more "realistic." The result is that you get to see just how fruity some ideas are. For instance, the guys in masks. Okay, they look quite cool, but Lethal Force makes you think about them in the context of real life, and then you suddenly realize just how silly it all is to have well-dressed men in opera masks running around modern-day cities doing your killing for you. They're not exactly inconspicuous, and opera masks aren't exactly a boon to things assassins probably need, like ease of breathing and peripheral vision. That's why all those Mafia hitmen to their job while wearing jogging suits instead of getting all spiffed out like the Phantom of the Opera.

During a fight between Jack and another one of those bad guys who only exists in action films (the dude with the receding hairline, sharp suit, overcoat, bowtie, and sunglasses - you know the one), we also get to see just how silly over-choreographed kungfu fights are. Sure, they look good in Hong Kong films, but stripped of a little surface polish, and grown men doing backflips in suburban homes and striking cool action poses becomes pretty funny. Try watching a movie like Jet Li's Bodyguard from Beijing, which isn't a very good movie to begin with. There are scenes where Jet Li has to check out a noise or something, so rather than walking over to where he needs to be, he insists on flipping over couches and cartwheeling over coffee tables to get to the other side of the living room. He just looks goofy, and any prospective burglar or killer is probably happy that this guy insists on flying all around the living room like an out of control june bug, thus alerting everyone to his presence.

That the movie makes these sort of otherwise cool, stylized action bits seem goofy isn't to say that the action in Lethal Force is poorly choreographed or shot. Quite the contrary. While there are no Jet Li's, and really not even any Mark Dacasco's in the cast, each scene is shot well, highlighting the strengths of each individual cast member while covering up their weaknesses. None of the fights are all that intricate, but they're tightly edited and paced, making them seem a lot more complex than they actually are. From time to time, you notice the relative sluggishness of some of the fighters, but the camera never stays static long enough for you to dwell on it. Some fight scenes opt for cleverness rather than competence, and works out pretty well.

For instance, one scene has Savitch surrounded on all sides by mask-wearing thugs. All we see is everyone's feet. We see Savitch's feet leave the ground, followed by fifteen seconds or so of dubbed in impact sounds, then we see Savitch's feet landing again as all his assailants collapse. It's a witty, enjoyable way to work around some short-comings, and much better than approaches I've seen in the past, the worst of which was in the otherwise cool little film Kungfu Rascals. In that one, our heroes are cornered by some bad guys, smile about the ass kicking they're going to do, and then the next scene is them in some inn talking about the ass kicking they just did. You know, sort of like how Rudy Ray Moore and his cronies teleported to Los Angeles in Human Tornado.

When Savitch finds out his best friend has sold him out, he shows little sympathy for his former partner in crime, although the movie does take time out for an amusing John Woo style flashback scene (complete with music stolen from A Better Tomorrow!) to all the fun the two had mowing down hundreds of people in "the war." They even spoof the famous "Chow Yun-fat lights his cigarette with a burning counterfeit hundred dollar bill" scene from A Better Tomorrow.

The remainder of the film is basically people trying to kill Savitch as he battles his way through kungfu strippers, a giggling woman in a fez, dozens of mask-wearing henchmen, and a tough female ex-cop working undercover to wipe out Savitch, Mal, and any other criminal who gets in her way. Savitch gets thrown down seven stories or so, and staggers off with only minor disorientation. When the bad guys catch him, drive steel blades through his hands, and drill holes in his skull for torture, it pisses him off, and he leaps into action, using the blades upon which his hands are impaled as weapons! The finale sees Savitch challenge Jack's ten year old son to a Sergio Leone-style showdown! Truly, Savitch is a hero for the new age!

This movie has a lot going for it. First off, it's well-written. Scripts are always the bane of no-budget video films, and most people mean well but deliver mythically inane scripts. While the dialogue here is minimal and meant to conform to all the expectations of overblown action film prose (you know, from those movies where the bad guys always have to quote Shakespeare and Milton), the lampoon nature of it is handled well, something even most big-budget scriptwriters can't seem to handle. They're idea of clever parody pretty much boils down to, "Wait, what if we spoof that slow-motion time-stopping effect from The Matrix! I bet no one has done that!"

Lethal Force showcases a pretty intense knowledge of the world of action cinema, especially from the 1970s (when action cinema was at its best). It's pretty pedestrian to spoof blockbusters, so Lethal Force sticks to far more entertaining (at least to me) spoofs of drive-in, low budget, and foreign action films. Sometimes, they'll throw a forgotten big budget film into the mix. I'm still chuckling about the inclusion in the Lethal Force trailer of a reference to The Man Who Would be King, one of my all-time faves. That they are so familiar with the ins and outs of obscure (in the US, at least) action cinema from across continents and decades means the satire here is a lot smarter than most action satire, not to mention a lot funnier for us fans of the source material. A Matrix spoof may not be funny to me, but I'll crack every time I watch the scene between Savitch and Jack where they stare with great emotion into each other's eyes, and all of a sudden, the A Better Tomorrow harmonica music kicks in.

On top of writing that, if not sparkling, at least doesn't make you ashamed for the entire race of man, the movie is tightly put together, avoiding most of the sloppy pitfalls common in these sorts of movies. Most of the time, bad lighting, camerawork, editing, and sound are the direct result of a couple things: lack of experience and lack of money, which also means lack of good equipment. As I've covered in past reviews of homemade films, bad editing runs rampant in them, and while lack of skill at a job as surprisingly difficult as editing is certainly a major contributor, the lack of decent editing equipment has also been a bugbear to the would-be independent filmmaker. Lethal Force is one of the growing number of films to benefit from the drop in cost surrounding newer desktop editing systems. For an initial investment of a couple thousand dollars, tops, you can get yourself a decent video editing system. You'll spend even less if you already have a good computer and a friend from whom you can borrow a copy of Adobe Premiere or Final Cut Pro. You know, for evaluation purposes.

While editing on one of these non-linear systems is by no means a laugh-a-second day at the nude beach, it's a hell of a lot better than the old days, and a film poorly edited on a non-linear system will almost always look better than a film poorly edited in some analog fashion, simply because it's easier to make cuts and arrange things. Granted, if you really suck at editing, a non-linear system can't fix that for you, but it can facilitate you learning the tricks of the trade faster and being able to do them with less frustration and less of the, "Fuck it, we'll just leave it in!" attitude that invariable bubbles to the surface after you and your friend have spent three hours trying to edit something on crappy old analog equipment.

Luckily for us viewers, the people behind Lethal Force had access to good equipment and good eyes for editing. Although actors and, to a lesser degree, directors get all the credit for making a film good, all it takes is one badly edited film for you to see just how important a good editor is to the process (to say nothing of a good cinematographer). The only justice for editors rarely getting any credit for making a movie good is found in the fact that a poorly cut film is often blamed on the director as well. So let us not make the same mistake. Good job, Ronald Edwin Hunkler.

Bad editing in a homemade movie is usually far worse than bad editing in a bigger budget film. The most common offense is the ol' shot of someone standing around listlessly while they wait for a cue or an effect to occur. I'm also a fan of the one where someone is supposed to interrupt someone else, but when the first person reaches the point at which they're supposed to be interrupted, the second person is a second or two slow with their cue. So you basically end up with someone abruptly halting their sentence for no reason, a second long pause, then the interruption. How often do you stop speaking the very millisecond someone interrupts you, let alone in anticipation a few second or two before?

Granted, that has more to do with bad timing on the actors part, but I felt like bring it up anyway.

Editing is especially crucial in an action film, and astoundingly important in a martial arts film. Forget the skill of the actors and the choreographer. Editing is what can make or break a kungfu fight regardless of who's involved. As important as it is in a martial arts fight, it's even more important when you're staging a martial arts fight between actors who aren't very good at martial arts. Ching Siu-tung and Yuen Wo-ping may be able to employ thousands of dollars of wire tricks and pulley mechanisms to hoist actors around, but most films have to rely on the editing to pick up the pace when the actors can't. As I said earlier, the editing and camera placement in Lethal Force does a spectacular job of covering the deficiencies in the fights. It keeps things moving fast even when they're actually moving slow, and it makes the fights seem intricate when it's really people doing the most basic of exchanges.

Not that everyone is bad, mind you. Star Cash Flagg Jr. is actually quite adept at the kicking of ass, kungfu-style. With some more money and more polished choreography behind the scenes, this guy could shine. He's already more fun to watch than Don Wilson or Olivier Gruner, and with some practice, he could be on par with Mark Dacascos, the best b-movie fighter on the American scene right now. It'll definitely be interesting to see what sort of success he's able to attain in the future.

Attached to the well-done (despite their limitations) fights is a staggering amount of violence, much of it quite grisly. Since these guys are pulling off spoofs and drawing influence from Hong Kong's heroic bloodshed to gritty Italian cop films to splatter, there's a truly epic amount of violence on the screen. Some of it's bloody, some of it's brutal, and some, of course, is just plain silly (like when the female cop bites a guy's tongue out and spits it at him). Although not a horror film, Lethal Force certainly has enough gleeful gore to keep the horror-hounds howling. Savitch crushes skulls with his kicks, causing blood to gush out of eyeholes. After he is angered by his own experiences with trepanation and crucifixion, he slashes his way through an army of thugs, resulting in geysers of blood no doubt inspired by the old Lone Wolf and Cub films of the late 1970s. People are shot, crushed, beheaded, tortured, stabbed, and toward the very end there's even some head exploding action that would make Gianetti di Rossi proud. All things considered, Lethal Force, despite the many comedic elements, is one of the most violent action films around.

Not to say that's it's gruesome, although you can't really say that a movie featuring trepanation and explosing heads isn't at least a little gruesome. Like Peter Jackson's early work in films such as Bad Taste, the gore and violence is so over-the-top and delirious that it never comes across as hard-hitting or grim. It's purposely undercut by the humor, and it's so insane and exxagerated that you can't really consider it shocking. It's a rolicking good time that just happens to feature crushed skulls and drills to the skull.

Speaking of all that, I should also mention that the effects are pretty damn good. I've seen much worse in multi-million dollar productions. The blood flows freely, and not once did the special effects strike me as poorly done. Hey, they even invested in a dummy to throw down seven stories that doesn't do the thing where one of the legs flops backwards. Everything else is top notch, and not just for a film with a very low budget.

Having pulled off a lot of good stuff, the movie stumbles predictably when it comes to the quality of acting. To be fair, it's better than you'll see in a lot of bigger, studio-produced action films, and even the most average actor hear could still teach a lot about the craft to Liv Tyler. No one here is going to win an award for their acting, unless that award has been inspired by the collected performances of Michael Wong. Cash Flagg Jr. mumbles all his line in steely-eyed Clint Eastwood fashion, which is okay. Jack sounds not unlike a whiney relative complaining to you about something a co-worker did to him. The female cop and Mal are both competent, though the former does go through some rough deliveries. Then, she also gets to bite a guy's tongue out, so who's complaining? Since everyone is basically a broadly drawn caricature, the acting is secondary to how well they fulfill the various action film stereotypes, and at that they are all aces.

As the credits role after a truly twisted and glorious finale involving exploding heads, stolen Ennio Morricone music, and Savitch forcing Jack's ten-year-old son into a shoot-out (even John Woo didn't do that - although he did once make a kid chew the torture stitches out of his own father's eyelids), I'm left with the conclusion that Lethal Force is definitely one of the best, if not the best homebrewed movie I've ever seen. It's cleverly written and brilliantly executed. Because the writer(s) know a lot about the genres they're spoofing, and because they obviously love them, the satire works well rather than being a crutch upon which they can rely if things come out weak. I know the makers of the film have really been pushing it hard, and they deserve whatever good attention they draw. Hopefully, someone will give them some money to make a sequel or redo this one with more lavish production values.

It's rare that I enjoy a homemade movie as much as I enjoyed this one. Usually,these types of things are only entertaining to the people who made them, and to weirdos like me who delight in just about anything. Not to be a jerk about it, but Lethal Force truly outclasses the pack by distances unmeasurable. It's hard now to look at a sloppy, poorly-thrown-together mess like any of those Alternative Cinema stinkers (which, although bad, at least compensate for it with high levels of Misty Mundae nudity) or any of the ten thousand crappy horror films and list them as classmates of Lethal Force. They can't even come close. That's not meant as an insult to them - it's meant as another of my many compliments to Lethal Force.

In fact, with a buget closer to $20,000 than the $20 I think goes into most of those productions, it's not even fair to compare them. Money can't buy you a good movie though (case in pointL the collected works of Michael Bay), but being willing to spend so much on such a weird, over-the-top wonder is proof that the people behind it were really willing to sacrifice everything to get the movie made. Lethal Force exists closer to the realm of all those direct-to-video action films, and you know what? Even at a fraction of the cost, it still manages to kick their asses without breaking a sweat. With this movie, Ecarma and his crew have set the bar for low-budget movies very high indeed. If any one film can be half as much fun and exhibit half as much skill and cleverness as Lethal Force, then we're in for a gaggle of treats. If not, oh well. I can always watch Lethal Force again

Labels: Action, Martial Arts: Kungfu, Microbudget, Year: 2001

posted by Keith at 11:59 AM | 0 Comments

Thursday, May 13, 2004

Way 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

Friday, October 03, 2003

Moonlight Sword and Jade Lion

1979, Taiwan. Starring Angela Mao Ying, Don Wong Tao, Man Kong Lung, Doris Lung, So Chan Ping, Kwong Ming, Tong Lik, Leung Kar Yan, Cheung Fong Ha, Show Lo Fai, Yuen Sum, Man Cheung San, Ho Kong, Jo Pu Lam, Mao Tak San, New Mei Mei, Ha Hau Chin. Directed by New Kwong Lam. Available on DVD (HKFlix).

When all is said and done, the plot of just about any movie can usually be summed up in one sentence. In a good movie, reducing the plot to a single-sentence synopsis, while possible, results in the potential viewer missing out on what actually makes the movie great. For example, you can strip Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest down to "A man is mistaken for another man and soon finds himself fighting for his life against mysterious agents." While accurate, the sentence hardly begins to encompass the various nuances and twists that make North by Northwest one of the best action-thrillers out there.

Although most plots can be similarly boiled down to their base element, few are the movies that actually outline the entire plot with the first two lines of dialogue. Fewer still are the movies where reducing the plot to a single sentence doesn't result in you missing out on at least something. But such is the case with Moonlight Sword and Jade Lion, a movie that lays out it's entire story when, in the first scene, an old kungfu master tells his young female student to go find the master's brother. That's it. What's truly astounding, however, is how a movie with such a simple plot can boast such convoluted storytelling. By the end of this whole martial arts mess, your head will be spinning with a whole lot of nothing, leaving you frustrated and more than just a bit disappointed.

A big part of what makes Moonlight Sword and Jade Lion so disappointing, besides the fact that it's more or less a study in never-ending tedium, is that it stars Angela Mao Ying, one of the all-time greats and one of the top five ass-kickingest female movie stars of all time (she sits atop the pile alongside Pam Grier, Claudia Jennings, Zeenat Aman, and Etsuko Shiomi). Along with women like Polly Shang Kuan, Mao was one of the first women to make a name for herself as a kungfu star after women like Cheng Pei-pei and Lily Li blazed the path in early swordsman films. Working frequently with Sammo Hung as a stunt and fight choreographer, Mao clawed her way tot eh top during the early 1970s with her combination of fists, feet, swords, and grace. She was none too hard on the eyes, either.

Angela Mao got her start in martial arts when she began training as a member of a Peking Opera troupe in 1958 after having already spent time training in ballet. That's a lot to do by the time your eight. By the time I was eight, I think I could ride a bike and melt an army man with a magnifying glass, but none of that was going to help me become a kungfu star. Also in the troupe was a young actor named James Tien, who should be a recognizable name and face to any old school kungfu film fan. Tien starred in hundreds of martial arts films, including Bruce Lee's Big Boss and Fist of Fury.

Mao got her first role in 1967, when Huang Feng cast her in his upcoming film Angry River. Huang Feng is also the guy who would give Sammo Hung and Carter Wong their big breaks, and the same magic worked with Angela. After a few movies, most notably The Fate of Lee Kahn directed by Taiwan's legendary King Hu, Mao caught the eye of some guy named Bruce Lee, who got her a short but memorable part as his character's sister in Enter the Dragon. Although she doesn't last long in that movie, seeing a woman on screen kicking some ass kungfu style was more than enough to get people interested in her.

She made a series of films alongside Carter Wong, a kungfu workhorse who has never gotten he credit he deserves (even after puffing himself up all big in Big Trouble in Little China, the best of which was When Taekwando Strikes, which also starred Korean martial arts master Jhoon Rhee. While working on the film Hapkido, she also developed a partnership with Sammo Hung, who would go on to choreograph several more of Mao's best films. With movies like Enter the Dragon, When Taekwando Strikes, the British-Hong Kong co-production Stoner (with George Lazenby!), and the brutally violent Broken Oath under her black belt, Angela Mao carved a place for herself in the kungfu star hall of fame.

But it's safe to bet that Moonlight Sword and Jade Lion didn't do much for building her reputation. It's not a good film, especially compared to some her other work. It has all the right elements: cool and esoteric kungfu styles, old masters, intrigue and treachery, Angela Mao and Don Wong Dao. Nothing comes together though, and the end result is a tiresome train wreck of a film that stretches ten minutes of story into a feature length film.

Mao stars as a young swordswoman who, as we now know, has to go find her master's brother, who has mysteriously disappeared. What follows is a full film's worth of Angela wandering around aimlessly in a village looking for this guy, while various kungfu factions attack her for no real reason. Don Wong Dao shows up from time to time to fight, and later assist Mao in her bland quest. Characters and factions are introduced with absolutely no development whatsoever. A character whose identity is obscured throughout the whole film is eventually revealed to be exactly who you think he is. People who act nice but seem like they might be hiding evil sides are indeed hiding evil sides. This movie is full of shady characters and mysteries, yet not a single one of them is in the least bit interesting.

As someone who considers himself not without a small degree of expertise regarding old kungfu films, I'm used to convoluted plots and films that throw so many characters at you that you need a flow chart and an Oracle database to keep track of them. Traditional Chinese storytelling has always been fond of tossing characters at you left and right, often with little explanation of where they came from and little explanation of where they go. Heck, the classic martial arts epic Water Margin has what? Well over a hundred main characters? The fact that people come and go with suddenness mimics real life well, but it also makes for some confusing storytelling. You get used to it after a while though, and with a little work and concentration, keeping most of the players straight and sorting out the threads of plot is not that difficult.

A story has to at least make you want to sort everything out, though. The Shaw Brothers classic Brave Archer has tons of characters and a story resembling a bowl of spaghetti, but the movie is so good that it's worth the effort to get it all straight. Moonlight Sword and Jade Lion instills in its sundry characters not a single interesting trait, making the job of sorting them out unrewarding, and ultimately darn near impossible since most of the characters exhibit no characteristic that sets them apart from any other character. It's just an assortment of guys in wigs stroking their fake goatees as Angela Mao walks from building to building. Although character development has made good kungfu films great (witness just about any Liu Chia-liang film), it's never been a necessity for making a good kungfu film good. You can get by without it so long as your movie delivers something interesting. Even static, one-dimensional characters can be interesting. No one watches Kungfu Zombie to see the dynamic evolution of Billy Chong's character. But Moonlight Sword and Jade Lion really pushes things too far. Not only are the characters bland to the point of insulting the adjective "bland," but the film doesn't give you anything else to make up for it.

You know when someone is trying to tell you a very simple joke or a story, and they keep pausing, having to retell one part, stammering, messing up, and generally aggravating you to the point where you want to throttle them and just scream, "Spit it out, man!" - that's what this movie is like. What should be a minute-long anecdote becomes twenty minutes of mind-numbing boredom that almost makes you break down and cry. Likewise, what should be a short film with a simple plot becomes stretched past the breaking point. An endless procession of dull scenes involve Angela Mao walking into someone's compound and asking them if they know where her teacher's brother is. They all say no, and as she walks away, the camera zooms in on whoever she was talking to, who will then stroke his goatee in a devious manner. It's about as subtle as a moustache-twirling villain in a black coat and top hat tying maidens to the train tracks.

And why do we care anyway? All we know is that some guy is missing. We don't know anything about him. Why would someone kidnap him? Why should we even care? When Angela Mao finally finds the old coot, the revelations about who is evil and why he's been kidnapped are hardly worth the pain the rest of the film has caused. The reasons for the kidnapping are events that don't even have anything else to do with the entire film! Geez, by this point I would have taken a revelation like, "Evil Ma killed your father!" even if no character named Evil Ma had been in the film up to that point, and then Evil Ma shows up out of nowhere for the final duel. But we don't even get anything like that. The rescue of the old man is sort of like getting all worked up about one of those firecracker champagne bottles only to pull the string and, instead of a pop and shower of confetti, the cardboard bottom just tears off and a wad of paper falls to the ground.

From time to time, a fight scene interrupts Mao's random questioning of beard-stroking guys. Often times, the fight breaks out because Angela just waltzes into a courtyard unannounced and starts swinging her sword at people until someone asks her to explain, then everything is okay. Maybe if she would announce her intentions before barging in and sticking blades in people, these fights wouldn't break out. Normally, you would want a fight to break out in a kungfu film. After all, that's what makes them kungfu films. But when you see the fights here, you'll realize with no small amount of anger that they are about as interesting and energetic as the scenes in which Angela Mao walks down the street to her next destination.

And just when you think things can't drag any more, the movie takes a break for a five-minute long fan dance sequence that boasts are the energy of an old man pouring molasses on a cold Dakota morning. The intricacies of the dance seem to hit their zenith when a woman at one end of a row walks slowly to the other end of the row and the evil master, obscured behind a curtain for no good reason since it's not like we give a rat's ass who he is, gets to laugh and stroke his goatee. This entire sequence drags so bad that time will actually reverse while you are watching it. Normally, the ability to reverse time is a good thing, but unfortunately it will only reverse time to a point earlier in the film, and you'll have to watch it all over again.

Mao is not a bad martial artist, but she needs a good choreographer. With one in place, the girl can shine like the sun, but without one, you'll wonder why she became such a star. Let's just say there was no Sammo Hung working on this film. The kungfu fights are just painful to watch, and not in a good way. People seem to move at half speed. Everything consists of "flail arms, tumble forward" type of choreography -- the sort of stuff that makes a Jimmy Wang Yu fight look complex. When things threaten to get halfway interesting, such as when Mao faces off with a female fighter and her exploding lotus-wielding minions, the sluggish, clumsy nature of the fights more than negates to esoteric novelty of a bunch of guys who, for some reason, have their screams dubbed by women (they don't scream like women - women are actually doing the screaming) as they hurl exploding plastic lotus blossoms at our heroine. Whoa re these people? Well, they're allied with one of the beard-strokers, but if anyone bothered to write out exactly what the alliances are in this film, they forgot to actually shoot those scenes.

The movie flirts with being almost watchable in a scene where Mao must negotiate a house of traps type fortress that is full of hidden swordsmen, balls of fire, flying saw blades, and stone lion statues that spit acid. Even with all that cool stuff, Moonlight Sword and Jade Lion still manages to be dull. Even Treasure of the Four Crowns showed more energy. The final fight scene is just as awful as everything else that came before it. The combatants move as if they are in slow motion. What the hell? Is everyone doing tai chi in this movie?

There's really nothing worth watching here. Angela Mao fans, of which I am a big one, will only mourn her participation in such a dreadfully uninspired and uninteresting movie. Likewise, people who are wondering what Angela Mao is all about certainly aren't going to be convinced of her greatness by Moonlight Sword and Jade Lion. If you are a student of taking one simple plot and stretching it out seventy minutes past its breaking point while, at the same time, trying to recount even the simplest fact in the most convoluted fashion imaginable, then maybe this movie is worth your while. For everyone else, this thing is just a failure on every level you can think of, and maybe even a few new ones that didn't occur to you until you had to do something like sit through that fan dance sequence. If anyone can drum even the slightest interest in anything that happens in this film, they are certainly more determined and forgiving than I am. I hate to write bad reviews, or at least to write bad reviews without finding something of value amid the garbage, but this movie just leaves me speechless when I try to dream up any redeeming quality. Angela had a couple nice outfits. I'm afraid that's the best I can do.

In Enter the Dragon, Angela Mao guts herself with a jagged shard of glass rather than suffer the villainy of her attackers when they corner her in an old dockside warehouse. I felt like doing the same thing to myself in order to escape this movie.

Labels: Martial Arts: Kungfu, Year: 1979

posted by Keith at 5:38 PM | 0 Comments

Sunday, July 20, 2003

The Touch

2002, Hong Kong. Starring Michelle Yeoh, Ben Chaplin, Richard Roxburgh, Brandon Chang, Dane Cook, Winston Chao, Gabriel Harrison, Emmanuel Lanzi, Sihung Lung, Kenneth Tsang, Margaret Wang. Directed by Peter Pau.

I love a good adventure film. In fact, I love an average adventure film, and when it comes right down to it, I'm not all that opposed to even a crummy adventure film. As long as people are hacking through the jungle with a machete or struggling to solve the riddles of an ancient booby trapped temple, I'm probably going to be, at the very least, mildly satisfied. Something about even the most ham-fisted adventure yarns makes me happy, and my tolerance for their peculiarities and short-comings is pretty high. I am, after all, the guy who thought Tomb Raider was a decent amount of fun and even enjoyed myself during Cannon Films fodder like King Solomon's Mines and Treasure of the Four Crowns. It takes a mighty effort like Dark Mission or The Tomb to challenge my ability to enjoy even the lamest adventure film.

It's most likely because those films, even the ones lurking right down there near the bottom of the barrel, appeal to that part of me that always assumed he would be doing much the same thing as Indiana Jones. Swinging on vines while being pursued by angry natives, decoding secret messages hidden in ancient tomes, and of course, wooing some beautiful librarian or professor type as we board the night train to Turkistan or some such exotic locale where men in tight suits and fezzes would attempt to assassinate me in order to protect some terrible secret that has been savagely guarded for a thousand years. It was a given that this would be my life, just as it was a given that those assassins would never actually succeed. After all, no one wants to dream of the day they are successfully murdered by a guy sunglasses and a fez. There was no question that I would never end up as some goofball sitting in front of a computer monitor all day syncing up graphs and slides to droning streaming video about mutual fund management.

And even as I sit here, fund management videos close at hand, I've never fully given up on the hope that one day I'll lead a life of adventure, romance, and intrigue, or at least mild excitement. Call me a dreamer, an eternal optimist, or just pathetic. No matter the mounting evidence to the contrary, I refuse to believe that all my life has in store for me is video editing and the consumption of Hot Pockets. Come hell or high water, I will live the sort of life that allows me to regale bored friends and acquaintances with tales of the time I visited the far reaches of the globe, even if I wasn't raiding tombs for priceless artifacts or battling secret sects while riding the Orient Express.

Of course, such dreams also require me to ignore the fact that the world is a far less exotic and mysterious place than it was seventy years ago. The Orient Express is no more, and even the far reaches of the globe tend to afford one easy access to Kentucky Fried Chicken. Not that I think the rest of the world should continue to exist as it did in the 19th century purely to provide me with an exotic playground, but there's still a sense of loss anytime you travel thousands of miles and multiple continents only to end up watching Tango and Cash on television.

Much like me, there are filmmakers out there who defy the reality of our world and still crank out the occasional adventure film. Emboldened by her newfound position as the most recognizable female action star in the entire world, Michelle Yeoh (Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Yes Madam, Tomorrow Never Dies) decided to become such a person by bankrolling her own big-budget adventure film. Michelle Yeoh took her earnings, invested them in establishing her own production company, and set out to realize what must be one of no more than a few remaining unfulfilled dreams: to make her own movie, at least as producer.

The ingredients she lined up on her counter were impressive. She would star, of course, because she's Michelle Yeoh, and she's cool (my words, not hers). Acclaimed cinematographer Peter Pau (The Killer, Bride With White Hair, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Swordsman) would give it a whirl as director. And her cast would be international, but not with a bunch of nobodies, as is usually the case when Hong Kong films sign up Caucasian actors. No, she'd get some recognizable faces. Maybe not A-List Hollywood actors, but The Truth About Cats and Dogs' Ben Chaplin is at least somebody, and he's certainly proven he's possessed of some skill when it comes to his chosen profession. Richard Roxburgh as the villain would lend additional credibility to the Caucasian cast, having as he does under his filmographic belt hits like Mission Impossible II and Moulin Rouge.

Finally, taking a note no doubt from many of Jackie Chan's more recent productions (including Who Am I and Mr. Nice Guy), and a lot of recent Hong Kong films in general, the movie would be made in English with an eye on overseas success. Filming in English seems more and more popular these days in Hong Kong, perhaps because their films are far more popular with overseas cult crowds than they are with the local folks. Just when we thought the Hong Kong film industry could get no sicker, 2002 handed them one of their worst years ever. The film Psychedelic Cop was supposed to be a big deal. It was pulled from theaters after one week when no more than ten people went to see it - and that's ten as in ten, not as in I'm exaggerating to make a point. With so little interest on the home turf, it's no big surprise that a lot of people making Hong Kong films are banking on overseas distribution and putting success in the US DVD market above the seemingly hopeless scenario presented at home.

Anyone who has struggled through Gen Y Cops or China Strike Force will tell you that Hong Kong films shot with primarily English dialogue can be a nightmarish affair. The dialogue, for one, is often painfully awkward and obviously written by someone who doesn't speak English as a first language. Often times, despite the presence of English words, the sentences still sound like a foreign language. Why the native English speakers mouthing some of the dialogue don't correct it on the fly I do not know, but the end result is sometimes amusing, usually stupefying. The second problem is that many of the actors speaking the words are, to put it lightly, pathetic. In the case of Chinese stars struggling with English dialogue, we can forgive them. For all those native Americans and Canadians, on the other hand (and this includes the Asian ones), there's no excuse for some of those readings. Daniel Wu, I'm looking in your direction.

The Touch avoids the problem of misunderstanding its English by being written by - or at least corrected by -- people who have it as their primary tongue. The scriptwriting duo of Julien Carbon and Laurent Courtiaud (who also collaborated on the superb Running Out of Time and the, shall we say less than superb, Black Mask II) hail from France, but they at least have English language actors who bother to make sure the dialogue doesn't come out sounding like some bizarre moonman language. This is Michelle Yeoh's film, after all. She's proven herself not just fluent in English, but also able to act quite well in the language. And the white actors are real actors, not some Caucasians they picked up off the street on the way to the shoot. Chaplin and Roxburgh and most of the supporting cast can do the job. Unfortunately, there's also Brandon Chang. When looking for the most laughably awful actor in both Cantonese and English, people often cite poor old Michael Wong. Well, Daniel Wu makes Michael Wong seem like Daniel Day Lewis. Brandon Chan, then, makes Daniel Wu seem like, well, Michael Wong I guess. They get more painful with each step down the ladder.

There is one unfortunate side effect to Michelle surrounding herself with competent Caucasian actors -- her own acting comes across as fairly wooden. When she's in action, she's fine, but when she's dealing with the dialogue, she invests very little emotion into most of it -- which is especially painful during her soul-searching romantic scenes. But we'll come to the romance soon enough.

Making the film seem more like a sure thing, at least as Saturday matinee fun fare, is the fact that Michelle decided to go with a rousing Indiana Jones style adventure full of sweeping locales, hair-raising action, and a hint of mysticism. She'd done this once, early in her career with Magnificent Warriors. Though uneven thanks to some ill advised drama and some even worse comedy, Magnificent Warriors delivered Michelle in top form as a swashbuckling kungfu heroine. If it wasn't Raiders of the Lost Ark, it was at least better than High Road to China.

Sadly, if Magnificent Warriors was on the level of High Road to China, The Touch, at it's best, is a good episode of Relic Hunter.

Now I confess that I actually enjoy many episodes of Relic Hunter, if for no other reason than Tia Carerre in her bust-enhancing adventure woman outfit can brighten even the grayest of Saturday afternoons. But I would never put even the best episode of Relic Hunter on the list of things that need to be made into sweeping full-feature adventure films. They work because they remain on the small screen. The Touch takes the same short-comings and silliness present in Relic Hunter, then magnifies them tenfold by sticking them on the big screen.

Michelle Yeoh stars as Yin, an accomplished circus performer who's ex (Ben Chaplin) dabbles in tomb raiding, if you will. A series of events lead her and Chaplin on a quest to recover a sacred treasure before it falls into the hands of the evil Karl. Richard Roxburgh plays Karl, and while he chews all the scenery required to turn in the standard satisfying over-the-top villain, I can think of a lot better names for your main villain than Karl. Nothing against the Karls of the world. I know quite a few, and all of them have been pretty nice guys. But Karl sounds more like a guy who will come over and help you fix a tire on your car than it sounds like the name of someone bent on wielding magic power beyond the comprehension of mere mortals such as we.

Maybe I'm wrong, and the Karls al have a secret plan to one day rule us all, but in the end I'm much more apprehensive about your Fritzes and your Napoleans and any of those guys who have names that resemble something menacing, like Victor von Doom or Sidney Scythe or anyone called Damien. You know guys with names like that are just itching to accidentally get super powers and then lust after domination of the entire planet. They never seem to realize that ruling the planet isn't all jewels and harem girls. They're also going to have to deal with trade disputes and coming up with a workable prescription drug plans for the seniors of the globe. Just once I'd like to see Doctor Doom have to delay his plans to build a universe-warping death ray because he has to attend a meeting with the head of the Department of Sanitation.

Karl seems at least partially aware of the fact that his name isn't entirely menacing, so he makes sure to spell it with a "K." That increases the menace somewhat, but with his distinct lack of a goatee, Karl is still not all that imposing.

Karl, despite his friendly working-class name, is one of those grade-A prick type of villains who always yells at his henchmen and calls them idiots in front of the other henchmen. I never understood how these guys get ahead in the villain world. For starters, they always seem to hire incompetent boobs. Maybe these villains wouldn't have to shriek at their underlings so much if they were able to pick decent underlings in the first place. It's your own fault for hiring idiots. But even if you're saddled with a bunch of bumblers, how does it advance your chances of success to constantly remind them of what losers they are? It's not like any of these criminal masterminds do it in a way that translates into "tough love" or would inspire their minions to try a little harder next time. No, they just yell, "Pathetic fool!" in their shrillest Cobra Commander voice. I'm surprised more of these guys don't find themselves with a bullet in the back of their head.

At least some of Karl's men are adept at the job of being evil, and the ones who aren't are actually somewhat funny. Of course, competent or not, they all get their asses handed to them by Michelle as she and Karl race one another to an ancient hidden temple full of booby traps. Complicating matters is the fact that Karl has taken Yin's astoundingly dense little brother as a hostage. And they get his girlfriend as an added bonus.

So okay, nothing terribly original in the plot department, but I've forgiven that countless times and am always willing to do it again. A story can be old and formulaic as long as it's told with a dash of style. The Touch doesn't entirely succeed in that aspect. Peter Pau, who remains a cinematographer at heart, captures some gorgeous scenery, but I'm always hesitant to compliment the cinematography of a film set in places like the Gobi Desert or the plains of wild Africa. I mean, it doesn't take a maestro to set a camera up on an epic vista and capture images of an epic vista. Instead of praising people who let the scenery do all the work for them, I think we should give out an award for cinematographers and directors who shoot in dramatic places but manage to really screw it up.

No, the film's dramatic scenery certainly doesn't let it down. Nor does the cast. The problem is all in the script, which is tired and predictable and not entirely thought out. No, let me backtrack. The problem is mostly the script. The eye-poppingly awful CGI effects during the finale also contribute a hearty portion of laughable badness to an otherwise average adventure film. The main aspect people look for in a Michelle Yeoh film is fun action and fighting. There's a decent amount of fighting here, some of it pretty good and some of it leaving a little to be desired. Michelle we can all buy as a kungfu bad-ass who can sail through the air, but poor Ben Chaplin looks out of place as an ass-kicker. Sometimes an action film is full of people who struggle through dramatic scenes in anticipation of their next action sequence. Ben is the opposite. With each awkward punch, he looks like he's just biding his time until he can toss out another impish quip. He's a good actor, and he acquits himself fine in the acting department in this film, but the man is no action star.

Choreography comes courtesy of Phillip Kwok, aka Kuo Chui of Five Deadly Venoms fame. He seems to be building a solid career as a guy who can make white people look good in martial arts action (working recently on Brotherhood of the Wolf). And I suppose technically he succeeds here. It's not that Ben Chaplin looks terrible when he breaks out the martial arts. It's just that he looks like, well, Ben Chaplin. He's too recognizable as "the nice guy" to be believable as a fighter, and the script isn't meaty enough to make the casting work. It is, however, smart enough to let Michelle handle most of the foot-to-ass action, and she looks good as always. She certainly doesn't show her age, and the wires only interfere with the action from time to time. Most of the action is martial arts based. There are no car chases or anything like that, and contrary to nearly every other "exotic locales" type of adventure film, no one knocks over a street vendor's fruit cart.

Comedian Dane Cook is the real surprise in the film as Karl's bumbling brother. It's a stock character, and one that generally proves more painful than funny, but Cook performs well and gets quite a few chuckles even with slightly tired material. The rest of the cast has to look wise and troubled or evil and angry. Chaplin and Yeoh are both charming performers, but while they have ample "buddy film" chemistry, they have zero romantic chemistry. Their tired role as "former lovers thrust together for a wild adventure" feels as unrealistic as it is painfully overused in films. Why is it that folks in film can't go ten minutes without finding themselves reunited with a former flame in order to conquer some zany obstacle? They're simply not believable as star-crossed lovers brought together once again by a fabulous adventure, and as much as I hate to say it, most of the blame lies on Michelle. Even though we've all seen her flex considerable dramatic muscle, she looks much more comfortable jumping off a trailer to kick some guy in the head than she does in her supposedly tender scenes with Chaplin.

The music was composed by none other than Basil Pouledouris, best known for his incredible Conan the Barbarian score. It's good stuff, but hardly as memorable as his classic barbarian brass.

One of the things that really serves to undermine the film's effectiveness is the atrocious CGI during the finale. Bad special effects are fine and all, but these are really bad, and not even in a fun way. The film's international release was pushed back because distributors didn't want to release a movie with computer effects that would make people long for the realism of The Last Starfighter. It doesn't help that the entire finale is devoid of any emotional impact at all. Bad effects can be saved by a fun yarn, after all. A lack of any emotional impact means that there's very little around to redeem the awful effects, which look like something you might be able to produce after half-assing your way through the beginner's tutorial on whatever CGI effects program they used. The story meanders on with such thinness that it becomes impossible to feel engaged by any of the characters. The film's finale drums this in as what should have been a major dramatic twist elicits nary more than a second of "Nooo!" style screaming before everyone seems to forget about it entirely. If the characters don't care about the characters, why should we?

And that's what really keeps the film from being the adventure romp it was meant to be. There is no emotional engagement. The characters are not unlikeable, but they're pretty bland. There's no lovable rogue like Indiana Jones nor tough woman like Marion. Heck, there's not even anyone as compelling as that bald Nazi with the mustache who got chopped up by the plane propeller. Aside from all that, your heroes and villains need to dress cool. Most of the people here look like they just stepped out of a J Crew catalog, and while J Crew clothes may be fine for yachting and reading GQ, they're not suitable attire for globe-trotting adventure. Michelle gets it right once they get to the desert, but everyone else still looks like they just got off their job as a waiter at some hipster restaurant in the East Village. The Touch, for a lot of reasons other than garb, never becomes more than another in the long line of films that imitate Raiders of the Lost Ark without understanding how to work with the elements that made that film such a fantastic and enduring adventure.

The pacing is wildly uneven. It takes a while to get things going, and once they are in motion, they sort of sputter along like the jalopy Michelle and Ben attempt to drive across the desert. The big budget bloats the film, but the script can't keep up with the size. Thunderball was a bloated action-adventure film, but it still kept a brisk pace and wry wit that helped it avoid being crushed by its own weight. Not so, here. The Touch can never rise above its own contrivances. I understand it was a labor of love for Michelle. All I can do is say that it was a nice effort, and I wish her better luck next time. She knew how to collect all the pieces. Now she has to learn how to make them work together.

Ultimately, The Touch as a whole never lives up to its individual parts. So many wonderful ingredients went into the film, but the end result was more of a mess than a grand confection. The film just feels flat and uninspired despite the charm of the cast and the beauty of Pau's camerawork. The end result of The Touch is a movie that should have been great, and instead is just sort of okay. I certainly didn't regret watching it, and it has some decent moments. In a movie like this, though, the flashes of fun only serve to make the lackluster quality of the rest of the film all the more evident. It's definitely not going to be the international hit they were probably hoping for. Instead, it's a mildly entertaining adventure film that stumbles over it's own weak story and doesn't offer up enough high-energy elements to make you forget that what you're watching isn't very good. It's not Raiders of the Lost Ark, that's for sure, but at least it isn't Treasure of the Four Crowns.

Labels: Action: Adventure, Martial Arts: Kungfu, Year: 2002

posted by Keith at 1:31 PM | 0 Comments

Tuesday, March 18, 2003

Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park

1978, United States. Starring Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Peter Criss, Ace Frehley, Anthony Zerbe, Carmine Caridi, Deborah Ryan, John Dennis Johnston, John Lisbon Wood, Lisa Jane Persky, John Chappell, Terry Lester, Richard Hein, Brion James. Directed by Gordon Hessler.

Band movies rarely stray very far from the tried and true "band movie" formula that consists of an entire film built around the band trying to get to a concert amid an onslaught of wacky hijinks, and very often, meddling censorship board type people. This plot has worked for everyone from The Beatles to The Spice Girls. Hell even the Atari 2600 video game "Journey" revolved around the player guiding Steve Perry, or a crudely rendered rectangular likeness thereof, through a variety of pitfalls en route to what was sure to be a rockin' stage show.

So when KISS decided to expand their mass marketing onslaught beyond the world of dollies and pinball machines and into movies (or at least into made for TV movies), it's no surprise that the plot was about KISS trying to get to a concert amid a series of pitfalls and shenanigans. However, KISS is probably the only band that took the age-old storyline but weren't afraid to tweak it a bit by casting themselves not just as mere mortals playing rock and roll in goofy stage costumes, but also as intergalactic deities with magical powers and sacred talismans (talismen?).

To be frank, I'm pretty sick of talismans. Every fantasy movie ever made seems to involve a sacred talisman or a chosen one. Man, screw The Chosen One. There's so many goddamned "The Chosen Ones" running around in the woods that it's a miracle those dark lords and prophets can keep track of things. I'll be happy if I never again see a movie featuring a sacred talisman, amulet, or "The Chosen One." How many more The Chosen Ones do we need? It's like, eventually everyone gets to be The Chosen One. I mean, when they start dragging Keaneu Reeves out as a The Chosen One, you know they're running out of candidates. Who's the next The Chosen One? Arnold Stang? Patrick Swayze? Wait, I think he might have The Chosen One of which the Prophecy spoke in Steele Dawn. So maybe C. Thomas Howell will be the next The Chosen One. Or Fred Savage.

All things considered, I'm sure you noticed that The Chosen One is almost always a total loser dweeb kid. We as a society should take a more responsible role in choosing our chosen ones. When we start ending up with Eddie Deezen as The Chosen One, it's not much further until we're electing Bill Clinton. Teleport City will be the first to launch the hip new Prophecy awareness campaign, "Rock the Chosen One."

KISS has a history with The Chosen One. You know KISS as the ass-kicking metal band who banged out teen anthems like "Rock and Roll All Night," and songs stoners use to woo their girls, like "Beth." Few people pay attention to that phase KISS went through I like to refer to as "disco metal." It eventually evolved into that sort of metal where they sing in a falsetto voice about dwarves and Balrogs and shit. Black Sabbath was probably the band that laid the groundwork for role playing metal, but KISS really brought it into its own with the oft ignored album The Elder.

The Elder went a long way in breaking the band up. Ace and Peter wanted to return to the band's hard rock roots while Paul and Gene were deeply involved in putting together this medieval fantasy disco metal album. Frehley washed his hands of the whole project and actually plays on only one song, coincidentally enough the one song with a substantial guitar solo. The idea behind The Elder was to put together a "rock opera" about a young "The Chosen One," who is battling wizards and demons and apparently doing a lot of sailing. The particulars are unclear to me. After the album was complete, the whole thing would be made into a movie a la The Who's Quadrophenia or Tommy, with 1970s lovable loser mainstay Chris Makepeace cast as "The Chosen One."

The most positive thing you can say about the whole thing is that Chris is a decent "The Chosen One." This guy built a career on being the lovable loser who saves the day and finds the magic within in such 1970s teen hits as Meatballs and the superb My Bodyguard. Based on the KISS album, he would play the usual reluctant loser who can't possibly become a great savior despite some old fart telling him he is The Chosen One. In the end, of course, his bravery awakens and he saves us all from the forces of darkness. I have to base my plot summary on the music because the movie never actually got made.

The Elder was universally panned by critics and KISS fans alike. Ace left the band, as did Peter Criss. It sold about ten copies, one of which was to me, and one to my old roommate Pat. When I tried to buy the album in CD, the hippie at the record store in Gainesville didn't want to sell it to me. He pleaded with me not to buy the album because it was the worst piece of shit ever recorded. I persisted, and of course, he was right. It is awful, but that's exactly what I expected, and I was actually overjoyed by just how bad it truly was. I mean, when someone tells you that KISS has teamed up with underground music icon Lou Reed to record a song, you expect something cool. Instead, you get some rock ballad about knights and legions and shit.

Anyway, this whole digression was basically meant to say I generally hate any movies featuring "The Chosen One," and the illustrate that despite the blood spitting, KISS are the cheesiest motherfuckers around.

Anyway, getting back to the movie, KISS refrained from putting any "The Chosen Ones" in this film, though there is a sort of evil wizard guy. And like I said, the members of KISS are all space gods with the ability to fly and shoot animation out of their eyes. The action takes place entirely at an amusement park where KISS will be doing a big concert. The first half hour of the film follows the "funny" exploits of a band of "hooligans" who do holligany things like walk on the benches and mess around with ice cream. They are pretty typical 1970s TV movie hooligans, complete with the guy in one of those British guy knit golfer caps and official 1970s TV movie hooligan names: Sneed, Slime, Chopper, and of course the gal of the bunch, Dirty Dee.

We also get introduced to some tinkerer who is pissed that KISS is the star attraction of the park instead of his piece of shit animatronics that do high-tech things like, you know, wave and lean back and forth. These are supposedly some sort of technological marvels, much akin to what you will find in a parking lot carnival. The tinkerer, however, is also insane, because all scientists are, and unbeknownst to his employers at the park, he has been building an army of robots that move and look exactly like real humans. Now if he had been showing these as examples of his work instead of animatronic gorillas who turn their heads, maybe the owners might like him more. Oh yeah, he has a lair beneath the park, thus making him the phantom referred to in the title.

He starts kidnapping people, including the hooligans, and turning them into robots. Yes, he is making an army of robot zombies out of a cast who basically act that way to begin with. He also kidnaps the boyfriend of "the good girl," and in true 1970s TV movie form, she sets about solving the mystery of her boyfriend's disappearance.

Now you may be wondering certain things about KISS, like where the hell are they? I started wondering that myself, and after what seemed like an eternity, the night of the big concert finally comes and KISS flies down out the heavens (I swear) in full superimposed glory to play "Rock and Roll All Night." Afterwards, the good girl spies her boyfriend's robotic double in the backstage area working as a security guard. She tries to get to him, but security won't let her pass without being on "the list." I thought any woman could be on KISS's list, but oh well.

Luckily, KISS happens by and sees her struggling. Gene Simmons yells "STAR CHILD!" in a weird echo voice, which causes Paul Stanley to shoot magic beams out his eyes that allow him to read the girl's mind. I swear to God this is all in the movie. You don't think I'm insane and creative enough to come up with this shit, do you?

At least from this point on, KISS is actually in the movie. The evil tinkerer makes some KISS robots and sends the Gene Simmons robot out to smash things up. Naturally, the real Gene Simmons gets blamed, but the others are quick to point out that Gene has been with them all day, sitting by the pool in full KISS regalia and sparkling robes. Paul Stanley begins to suspect something evil is afoot, and Ace continuously croaks, "Aawwwkkk!" for no real reason other than to annoy everyone. They all get together to sing "Beth" to the good girl who is not named Beth, then bring her into their secret chamber where they keep the magic KISS talismans that give them their special powers. This leads to one of the best bits of dialogue in the whole movie:

Paul (say in high voice with little emotion): "If they were to fall into the wrong hands..."

Gene (in magic echo demon voice): "There are no right hands but ours!!!"

They tend to just leave this shit lying around on a bean bag chair, but they are confident that the magic force-field that surrounds them will keep everything safe. Still, the tinkerer can't help but send robots to try and steal the KISS amulets. KISS themselves have many kungfu battles with, umm, with ... werewolves? I don't really know. Werewolves in metallic silver bodysuits. KISS not only does kungfu in their big-ass clunky boots, but they can also fly. Gene can blow fire and Paul can shoot laser beams from his eyes. Ace can do backflips and Peter can, umm, I don't know. He has all the powers of a cat, so I guess he curls up on the werewolf's newspaper while it is trying to read.

KISS have another mystical kungfu battle in a house of horrors type thing. It's not quite on par with Jackie Chan's funhouse fight in My Lucky Stars, but Jackie was only wearing a goofy mascot outfit, not platformed dragon boots. Unfortunately for KISS, the tinkerer uses a magic space ray to shatter the force field around their talismans and steal them. Thus KISS lose all their special powers and get captured.

The tinkerer gives them a tour of his secret lair, explains his entire diabolical plan to use his robots to incite riots or something, shows them the KISS robots that will turn the concert into a bloodbath, sits the mystic talismans on the coffee table next to KISS's cage, then leaves. This guy must have gone to the "Batman Villain School of Planning." The KISS robots go to the concert and whip the crowd into a frenzy by playing "Rip and Destroy" while using hypnosis that makes the crowd rip and destroy. Who will save us? Will KISS be able to unite their psychic powers to get the talismans left lying about a foot away from them? Tune in next time, same bat-time, same bat-channel!

Of course KISS gets the talismans back! They fly to the concert like a bunch of gaudy Supermen just in time to save the day with more silly kungfu and magic eye laser beams. Then, after having destroyed the evil robots, releasing all the kidnapped people, and vanquished their foes, they take the stage to play "Rock and Roll All Night" one more time as the credits roll.

This movie is not quite as bad as The Elder, but it's also not as funny. Once KISS finally shows up, things start to move along, but that first half hour is just painful. I like that KISS had no trouble casting themselves as mythic gods of the space ways and masters of kungfu. And I like that, in a movie about KISS, the soundtrack is comprised almost entirely of bad (and I mean bad) disco action music and wah-wah stuff (or as someone referred to it, "walk a chicken walk a chicken" music). Fast forward past the first third of the movie to the part where KISS actually arrives, and you have a decent, thoroughly silly movie in which rock stars in platformed boots shoot magic beams and fly and fight werewolf-monkey looking things with kungfu.

KISS's acting ranges from passable (Gene) to abysmal (Paul) to utterly puzzling (why does Ace keep yelling "Awwwkkk!???"). Everyone else is pretty wooden, which is typical of television movies, and of most movies I suppose. However, most movies don't have KISS flying around in them and breathing fire. You can also catch late, great B-movie mainstay Brion James in a bit part as a guard who gets his ass handed to him by the rampaging Gene Simmons robot.

Director Gordon Hessler directed all sorts of shitty TV shows in the 1970s, including episodes of CHiPs, Wonder Woman, Kolchak: the Night Stalker, and Kungfu. His best movie is definitely the spectacular Ray Harryhausen powered fantasy The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, but of course we love him most for being the director of the last of the 1980s ninja craze movies, the Sho Kosugi last hurrah Pray for Death.

It's not good. But it's bad, and that's good. It's certainly a lot more fun to watch than that last KISS movie, Detroit Rock City which didn't feature any kungfu werewolf monkeys, robots, or Ace Frehley screaming, "Awwwkkk!" This is probably the best made for TV movie around, but that's not saying much, and like all TV movies of the 1970s, it has a message for us, a lesson the teach. That message is that if a mad scientists starts unleashing robot armies of the damned, just kungfu their asses back into the stone age. And fly. And yell, "STAR CHILD!!" at inopportune moments and as often as you possibly can. If you have a friend who can then shoot mind reading laser beams out his eyes that go "Pew pew pew pew," then so much the better.

This is the kind of movie Yngwei Malmsteen fans would write. Frankly, I'm glad they made this instead of The Elder, but I wish they'd made The Elder instead of Detroit Rock City.

Labels: Fantasy, Martial Arts: Kungfu, Rock and Roll, Year: 1978

posted by Keith at 4:18 PM | 0 Comments

Sunday, October 20, 2002

Eighteen 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, 2002

Chinese 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, February 22, 2002

Bandits, Prostitutes, and Silver

1978, Hong Kong. Starring Don Wong Dao, Angela Mao Ying, Lo Lieh, Tao Wong.

Well, sooner or later we were going to have to address this, so it might as well be now. Arena Video, or maybe you know them as Xenon. Whatever the name may be, you certainly know their trailer for Black Spring Break. Since groups like the Wutang Clan revitalized the popularity of old school kungfu films among fans of hip hop, Xenon was quick to cash in on the trend. They grabbed every old kungfu film they could get their grubby mitts on, made ultra-shitty EP speed dupes of them, changed the names to something stupid, and dumped them on the market knowing suckers like me who knew better would still shell out a few bucks here and there for certain titles.

Xenon is a rotten company, make no doubt about it. Not as rotten as Tai Seng video, but still plenty sleazy. Just about every movie they got -- and I doubt they have the rights to most of them, since a good lot of their releases are nothing more than third or fourth generation dupes of the old Ocean Shores dubbed video cassettes -- they changed the title to have something to do with the Wutang Clan. Previously, they retitled everything to have something to do with Shaolin, and before that, I bet they were the ones going around adding "Ninja" to the title of every kungfu film back in the early 1980s. The implication is twofold: 1) black folks love kungfu movies, and 2) black folks are too stupid to realize this movie has nothing to do with hip hop music.

Assumption number one I can't contest. A healthy love of kungfu films is a requirement, in my opinion, so anyone displaying such a love gets points in my book. As for point number two, well that's obviously a load of nonsense. I doubt anyone but the dimmest kid, regardless of color, actually believes a movie was ever made with the title Wutang Hos, Thugs, and Scrillah, but they called a movie by that title anyway. This is to say nothing of the seemingly endless number of films they bought and called Rumble in Hong Kong or Chow Yun-fat's Hardboiled Killer. When it comes to insulting blacks and attempting to dupe people new to the world of Asian films, Xenon/Arena has absolutely no shame. Sammo Hung was never the Phat Dragon, and there was never a movie called Wutang Matrix. That last one is one of my favorites. I mean, what the hell? Did they honestly think someone was going to believe it was related in some way to the over-rated Keaneu Reeves sci-fi film? Geez, they have nothing but utter contempt for their target audience.

Frankly, I can live with insulting and stupid retitling if it means I'm able to get nice looking copies of movies I love. Despite the absurd titles, a lot of the films are actually top notch kungfu fare. Unfortunately, as I mentioned before, most of the releases are nothing more than cheap-ass bootlegs. In fact, calling them bootlegs is an insult to bootleggers. A couple tapes are nice quality, but the fast majority of them are third generation dupes, often with chewed up pictures, constant tracking problems, EP speed, and other signs of quality and care. Just more evidence of how much Xenon hates you. I even got one where they neglected to even edit out the blue screen and "play" display when they started recording the tape. The artwork on the covers is often from entirely different movies as well. The only saving grace of these pieces of garbage is that the films are generally good even if the tape isn't, and you can pick them up for ultra cheap. It's worth the gamble in hopes that you score one of the rare decent prints or at least a movie that is so good you can live with the myriad technical glitches of the cassette.

Bandits, Prostitutes, and Silver has always been one of my favorite kungfu films, if for no other reason than because it's so relentlessly depressing. Xenon has decided to retitle it Wutang Thugs, Hos, and Scrillah, which I guess is at least an accurate translation into "insulting street lingo," though I won't pretend to know what the hell "scrillah" is. I guess it's silver, but I've never heard anyone use the term. I may a dumb scrawny cracker, but I still live in New York. I can't even think of a situation in which some street thug would be talking about scrillah. Money, sure. Gold? You bet. But silver doesn't seem to be a high priority with today's up and coming street kids. Oh well, if there is ever an urban rush on the silver market, at least Xenon has the word ready for us. Scrillah aside, this movie has absolutely nothing to do with Wutang, which is par for the course in 99% of the Xenon tapes with "Wutang" in the title. I'm waiting for them to release Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as Wutang Matrix Killah and The Hardboiled Wutang Bitch.

One thing I can definitely say about this film is that it's aptly named. The movie is primarily about bandits, prostitutes, and silver. So right away you know what you are getting into. Fabulous fighter Don Wong Dao stars as a down on his luck cart driver whose one true love has been sold into prostitution to pay off her parents' debts. Wong dreams of the day he has enough money to buy her freedom, and they can forget all the nastiness in the world. Unfortunately, he seems to earn about ten silver pieces a year. With the going price for his lover's freedom being 180 silver pieces, he's not exactly making a lot of headway. Part of the problem could be his chosen profession. Cart driver? He proves early on he's a master of kungfu, so why not get a job as a bodyguard or an escort? Why not open a kungfu school? Geez, why not stand on the street and beg? You'd probably be doing better than what this chump is making.

He might also be doing better if he would quit paying to spend the night with his girl. I know he loves her and all, but shelling out your hard earned cash you're supposed to be saving to free her just seems counter-productive, especially when all they do is stand around and say, "I'm saving money to set you free." She knows that, asshole, and you just spent half of it to tell her.

As is required for a kungfu film, Wong crosses the local rich bastard, who then makes it his personal quest to humiliate Wong by sleeping with Wong's gal every chance he gets. He even goes so far as to threaten to buy her before Wong is able to do so, which at the rate Wong was going, would leave a cushy ten thousand year window of opportunity. Frustrated by his lack of progress, heart broken as he watches his girl service his arch-nemesis, and just generally pissed off at how the world seems constructed to keep the little guy down, Wong befriends a famous bandit named Sparrow. You may laugh at a guy named Sparrow, but then you'll have to explain to your friends how a guy named Sparrow kicked your ass and stole all your scrillah.

Sparrow offers Wong a chance to make more money in one afternoon than he would make in a lifetime, or once again, at the rate Wong was saving money, in ten million lifetimes. All Wong has to do is drive the cart in one of Sparrow's heists. Ahh yes, the getaway car driver. Is there any less fortunate character in all of action cinema? Set it in modern day American cities or ancient China, and the result is always the same. Getaway drivers have nothing but bad luck. Wong is hesitant. He's always been a straight arrow. But a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, and the kungfu film thrives on the character of a good man gone bad or a peaceful man pushed to the brink of violence. Personally, I make it a rule in my life to never ever piss off a guy who struggles to maintain a peaceful nonviolent lifestyle despite being a whirlwind of kungfu power. It's just one of those things I figure I'm better off not doing, like heroin or robbing the Mafia.

Nothing is ever as simple as just stealing a huge shipment of scrillah, though. Lo Lieh runs an escort service hired to protect the silver. Unfortunately for the guy who hired him, Lo's true agenda is to work with the famed Three Scars Gang to steal the silver for himself. He'll dole out some to the gang, some for himself, and then triumphantly return the rest to its rightful owner, who will be thankful and give him a big reward. Personally, I'd kick the guy in the shins for letting my silver... err, scrillah... get stolen. Actually, no. Add to my list of things not to do "kick Lo Lieh in the shins."

Lo Lieh, of course, is a kungfu film institution. He was a staple of the wonderful 1960s Shaw Brothers swordsman films alongside Jimmy Wang Yu and Cheng Pei-pei. He usually played a good-hearted but somewhat dim-witted guy, and there was always a good chance for a romantic triangle involving he, Jimmy, and Pei-pei. If you only know Cheng Pei-pei as the leathery, truly frightening Jade Fox in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, then man alive are you in for a shock when you see how astoundingly beautiful she was in the 1960s. Lo Lieh's transition to kungfu films went much better than Jimmy's. While Jimmy faltered and never really hit a stride in kungfu films, Lo Lieh flourished, though not in the role we knew him for. After starring as a hero in the amazingly brutal kungfu classic Five Fingers of Death, Lo caught a bad case of the uglies. His mustache went from debonair to mangy, and he always seemed to be sweating a lot. It was only natural, then, to cast him as a bad guy, a role he played in scores of films. Whether or not he was evil more times than Wang Lung-wei is a counting job best left to today's fastest super-computers.

The Three Scars gang is lead by the delightful Angela Mao Ying, one of the true greats of kungfu films. I'm at a bit of a loss as to why you would cast Angela Mao in your film and then proceed to not have her fight, but whatever. She's cute, but cute is for wimpy girls who aren't powered by the fury of kungfu. Angela Mao should be cute and kick some serious ass. Anything else is just a waste of her talents. The Scars aren't all that happy with the deal, but like everyone else they have to make a living. They think it's unfair that they do all the work but Lo takes the lion share of the loot. When they find out Sparrow is also after the silver, they're even less enthused, because he's damn good.

Wong agrees to drive the cart, and he and Sparrow are the first to get to the shipment of silver. When Sparrow demands that Wong kill the driver of the other cart, Wong refuses. He won't commit murder, and besides, that's a fellow cart driver there just trying to earn a living. Sparrow gets right pissed and attacks Wong, but after a rather great fight and a rather goofy "rolling shenanigans," Wong proves the better fighter. Sparrow is accidentally stabbed by his own knives and has to give the dying, "I knew I would die one day, but I never thought... it would be... like this!" after which one must spit up a lot of blood then fall over. The spitting up of blood is crucial. Any seasoned kungfu film fan will tell you that if you're gonna die, you have to spit up blood, preferably while making the "sour" face and reaching out with one arm while the other holds the knife in your belly.

Wong is terrified and takes off in the getaway cart, forgetting that the chests of silver are in the back. Meanwhile, the Three Scars gang is looking like a bunch of chumps hiding behind a tree a little ways up the road, wondering what the hell is taking so long. Wong stops to collect himself in the woods and realizes then that he has a shitload of scrillah with him. He does the "laugh and let the money fall through your fingertips into a big pile" thing, which I usually do, only with pennies. I don't know if there is a slang word for pennies that is comparable to scrillah. Let's call them nuchwaezchers. He starts daydreaming of proudly walking up to the whorehouse and demanding the release of his love. Then he falls asleep, which is generally a bad thing to do just a few minutes after killing a famous bandit and hightailing through the woods with a fortune in stolen silver.

When he wakes up, he's staring at the feet of a very annoyed Three Scars gang. There's a tussle in which Wong once again emerges victorious until Angela Mao steps up and shows us her secret weapon -- spinning razor blades hidden in her shoes! That can't be comfortable to walk on. She reveals that while she is indeed the leader of a ruthless gang of bandits, she's not totally devoid of compassion. She offers Wong a cut of the silver and a position in the gang, recounting to him how he reminds her of her husband when he was young and driven instead of laying on the ground after just getting his ass kicked by Don Wong Dao. Wong however maintains that despite the day's tragic turn of events, he'll only take enough money to free his girlfriend. He has no desire to enter a life of crime. Angela sighs and tells him it's too late; a life of crime has already entered him.

Back in town, word of Wong's sudden skill in the art of committing crimes spreads quickly. His girl can hardly believe that he'd do such a thing, while Lo Lieh is convinced that Wong's in cahoots with the Three Scars Gang to rip him off. When he confronts them using kungfu and a head-slicing steel whip, we finally get to see some ass-kicking action courtesy of Angela Mao. It's a great fight, like just about all the fights in this film. I only wish they'd done more with someone as capable as Angela in the film. Despite her secret weapon, neither she nor her husband are good enough to beat Lo. That task can only be completed by one man, and he's heading right into a trap at the brothel.

Wong knows they'll set a trap for him there, but he has no choice. What he doesn't expect, and frankly I don't know why he didn't, was that they'd have his girl tied up in the head slicing thing as a hostage. The good thing about a kungfu movie is that even with a predictable, run of the mill plot there is still a lot of tension generated because anyone could die at any moment. It doesn't matter who they are, how heroic or innocent they've been, or how important they've been to the story up until that point. Everyone is fair game. In an American film, there'd be no tension because you'd know the girl was not going to get decapitated. In an old school Hong Kong kungfu film, you don't have that promise. It's just as likely, perhaps even more likely, that heads will roll.

The final fight is fierce and suitably tragic. The hero doesn't get the girl, but he does get a noose around the neck. In one of the most powerful finales to a kungfu fight, Wong is tied to one end of a rope while Lo is on the other. Using an archway, he hangs himself in order to hang Lo. The final shot of Wong's limp feet hanging a foot above the ground while the stolen silver pours out of his torn pocket is a heavy-handed but effective visual, and it puts the entire moral point of the movie right there in front of you. It's that moral that lifts this movie above the usual "guy out for revenge" film.

Bandits, Prostitutes, and Silver is simply a fabulous film. The acting is great, and the characters manage to avoid most of the cliches. Well, except for the villains. They laugh and stroke their beards and kill everyone they can. But the good guys are an interesting lot. Wong's character is great, noble without being overbearing. He's flawed. When he's faced with a chest full of silver, he becomes greedy. He gets confused. Frustrated. He struggles to be good, but he's also corruptible. In short, he's a fairly believable human character. Likewise, Angela Mao and her husband are interesting. They're not good guys. They're not even bad guys with hearts of gold. For the most part, they are pretty ruthless, but the back story of how they became bandits and why they show compassion for Wong makes them interesting.

Since this is a kungfu film, let's talk about the fights. Don Wong Dao is spectacular. His name may not be as familiar to people as Jackie Chan or any of the Shaw Brothers stars, but he's a tremendous fighter. Fast, powerful, and graceful. He carries the action scenes remarkably, and he's helped by a stellar supporting cast. Angela Mao and Lo Lieh are, of course, acclaimed veterans, but even the extras put up great fights. Quantity is one thing, quality another. Luckily, this movie features both, and that makes it one hell of a ride toward a thoroughly depressing ending. It's the sort of thing only a kungfu film, or possibly a spaghetti western, would ever dare to try.

Everyone is doomed and depressed. Mao and her husband miss their simple life. Wong has the whole girlfriend forced into prostitution thing as well as having to deal with the fact that once you take a step down the path of violence, it's very difficult to turn back. Greed and anger spawned from his frustration with seeing how goodness doesn't seem to accomplish anything in a world this evil eventually ruin his life despite how valiantly he struggles to avoid them. The depression adds an added degree of ferocity to the kungfu, which was already pretty fast-paced and impressive to begin with. Kungfu films are always great for morality plays because, and you'll have to excuse the pun, they pull no punches. The tragedy playing itself out in Bandits, Prostitutes, and Silver is every bit as poignant -- and violent -- as a Shakespearean drama. I know ol' William's melodramatic works are on a pedestal these days, looked at as high art. But in their own day, they were seen as worthless, violent crap. Lowest common denominator trash full of greed, lust, and perversion. Maybe someday hundreds of years from now, people will regard kungfu films with the same degree of reverence. Ha, yeah sure. Pro wrestling, too.

The Xenon tape of this movie is awful, and not just because of the stupid new title they slapped on it. The tracking is off through the whole thing, so the picture is jittery. It's fuzzed out from being several generations down, and as if to cement it's place in the world of crappy bootlegs, they don't even bother to edit out the Ocean Shores copyright message at the end of the film. With that said, if you can't find the film anywhere else, you might as well fork over your eight bucks and deal with the shitty quality because the high quality of the film far outweighs the low quality of the transfer. I wish someone out there would spend a little more scrillah on these films and give fans a product worth buying. Movies as phenomenal as Bandits, Prostitutes, and Silver deserve better treatment than this.

Labels: Martial Arts: Kungfu, Stars: Angela Mao, Stars: Don Wong Dao, Stars: Lo Lieh, Year: 1978

posted by Keith at 11:52 PM | 0 Comments

Thursday, December 20, 2001

Eight Diagram Pole Fighter

1983, Hong Kong. Starring Liu Chia-hui, Kara Hui Ying-hung, Alexander Fu Sheng, Liu Chia-liang, Young Wang Yu, Hsiao Ho, Liu Chia-yung, Wang Lung-wei, Kao Fei, Li Li-li. Directed by Liu Chia-liang. A Shaw Brothers presentation. Available on DVD (HKFlix).

I turned the television off and sat in quiet admiration, realizing that I had just watched the greatest kungfu film I'd ever seen. Liu Chia-liang's bleak, violent masterpiece left a burn mark on my brain and remains, ten years after I first saw it, my favorite kungfu film of all time. It's uncharacteristically savage and brutal. Liu was known for making films tempered with wisdom and pacifism -- he directed more than a few kungfu films in which no one even dies, something very rare for the genre.

The number one source for the anger fuelling the film was the untimely death of the Shaw Studio's brightest star, Alexander Fu Sheng. Barely into his 20s, Fu Sheng had become the James Dean of the Hong Kong action scene, known for his love of fast cars, high rolling, and romancing women, one of whom was a budding pop star who grew up in Canada named Sally Yeh. Fu Sheng often played a hot-head with a heart of gold, and he carried that role beyond the screen.

There was no doubt that under the wing of phenomenal director Liu Chia-liang, Fu Sheng's star was back on the rise after a devastating accident left him with two broken legs. He stood to be as popular as Jackie Chan, who had really hit the big time in the 1980s and achieved a level of success hitherto unobtained by Shaw Brothers stars, most of whom had disappeared, defected to other studios, or were working with Liu. Alexander Fu Sheng was, in many ways, the studio's best hope to prosper in the changing times.

It all came crashing to a halt, however, when Alexander's penchant for fast driving finally caught up with him. He died in a car wreck -- living like James Dean, dying like James Dean. His passing, which occurred during the filming of Eight Diagram Pole Fighter, cast a dark shadow over the studio, which was dying a slow death of its own as Raymond Chow's Golden Harvest studio became the reigning king of Hong Kong cinema. With Alexander's death, the Shaw Brothers Studio watched any hope it had to compete with the new school disappear.

Fu Sheng was well-liked, and his death put everyone in a bad mood. It is this mood that colors the landscape of the film, which is relentless and oppressive. It opens on a battlefield, where the noble Yang family is ambushed and slaughtered. Before the credits are over, nearly everyone is slain. Only two Yang brothers survive -- Liu Chia-hui and Alexander Fu Sheng. Fu Sheng has gone insane after witnessing the murder of his brothers and father. Chia-hui is on the run.

Alexander returns home to his mother and sisters to deliver the bad news. Meanwhile, Liu Chia-hui seeks refuge at a Buddhist temple. He, too, is quite mad, driven by an uncontrollable rage and bloodlust. His demeanor doesn't exactly mesh well with the pacifist nature of the monks, but they take pity on him and humor his desire to become a monk.

The abbot of the temple visits the family to let them know their son is still alive, and his sister, played by the always wonderful Hui Ying-hung, sets out to bring him home. At the temple, Chia-hui practices pole fighting with a ferocity that upsets the monks, who explain to him that they learn to fight only to defend themselves from marauding wolves. Even then, they find only to defang the wolves, not kill them.

Of course, a toothless wolf would die a far more agonizing, drawn out death than one simply killed outright, but the movie doesn't bother with that.

When the men who ambushed the Yang family gang up and capture the valiant Hui Ying-hung, Liu Chia-hui leaves the temple to rescue her. The ensuing battle amid a pyramid of coffins is astounding. It has some wire work, but it's used fairly subtlely and not to achieve superhuman feats. The kungfu is fast and brutal, and just as the two Yangs seem beaten, Chia-hui's brothers from the temple show up to "defang the wolves." What follows is a chilling sequence in which the monks rip out whole sets of villain teeth.

The entire film runs at near breakneck speed, with the anger building and building until the stunning and cathartic finale. In the end, Liu Chia-hui is left wandering between two worlds, too violent to be a monk, yet too alienated to return to the troubled world. It's very much like the situation facing the studio and its stars. An uncertain future, unable to exist via the old ways, unable to fully grasp the new ways.

It's an explosion of emotion -- anger, frustration, madness, disappointment, confusion, and maybe a little hope. The humor Liu Chia-liang so often used is non-existent. The compassion is lost in the madness of the situation as the characters are swept up in the uncontrollable firestorm of rage. It is bleak, depressing, and ultimately open-ended. Liu Chia-hui's only revelation is that he is a beast unfit for life as a man or monk.

It's also one of the most effective, moving, and exciting kungfu films ever made. Everyone was on top of their game for this one, putting an extra effort into it to ensure that Alexander Fu Sheng's final film would be memorable. Indeed it is, even though his role in it is minimal because of his death. Eight diagram Pole Fighter is effective in every way -- as a parable about the fragile state of man, about the fragile state of the studio that produced it. Films would come and go, the Shaw Brothers studio would fade, but Eight Diagram Pole Fighter remains at the very top of my list.

Labels: Martial Arts: Kungfu, Studio: Shaw Bros, Year: 1983

posted by Keith at 11:58 AM | 0 Comments

Tuesday, December 18, 2001

Kungfu 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

Wednesday, December 12, 2001

The Adventures of El Frenetico and Go Girl

1993, United States. Starring Frances Lee, Charles Pelligrino, Soomi Kim, Madoka Raine, Louise Millman, Jon Sanborne, Clark Donnelly. Directed by Pat Bishow.

When asked by a hairy guy what was good in life, the solemn Conan replied with a short list that would become one of the most famous lines in genre movie history. Well, crushing enemies and hearing lamentations may be okay if you are a big, long-haired barbarian, but I am a little, short-haired barbarian and I can think of things much better in life than crushing and lamentations. If asked the same question, I would come up with a slightly different list, which would not include the lamentations of the women but would include women in superhero outfits. It would not include seeing my enemies driven before me and crushed, but it would include masked Mexican wrestlers who crush their opponents with piledrivers. If this makes me a wuss and draws the ire of Vikings and barbarians, so be it. I'll have a masked Mexican wrestler and cute female superhero as friends, so bring it on, Kull.

Luckily for Conan, there seem to be a lot of people who delight in crushing enemies and causing people to cry. Luckily for me, there's at least one bunch of people out there who share my more relaxed, entertaining vision of what is good. And best of all, they brought video cameras!

We've dipped our toes into the shot on video home production before, possibly even jumped in off the high dive. While many of these films fall short of achieving adjectives with a positive slant, we've always appreciated the effort and done our best to communicate to people how much energy and work go into these labors of love, even stinkers like Redneck Revenge. That we've been involved and continue to be involved in the production of no-budget independent films makes us, I feel, not only more sympathetic to the cause and eventual outcome, but also makes it possible for us to provide a little more insight into the process of making and critiquing these films beyond the feeble scope of, "Dude, this movie sucks. It was nothing like The Matrix." While the reviews may not always be good, I feel we are at least fair, and even people involved in movies we've completely trashed (most notably Redneck Revenge), seem to agree. Not that I'm tooting my own horn or anything, but the way we handle other's film and video babies is far more delicate than the way we'd probably handle their actual babies if they have them.

So it is all that much more of a treat when a shot on video production comes our way that manages to be good enough to get a positive review without me having to throw in lots of, "but let me tell you how hard these movies are to make" justifications to soften my negative comments. Drawing influences it seems from the old Batman series starring Adam West, Pat Bishow's Adventures of El Frenetico and Go-Girl is a perfect example of how much fun a shot on video film can be not just for the makers and their friends, but for other people as well. It is a perfect example of what happens when a little effort is put into a movie rather than it being the product of one of those drunken nights full of "You know what would be a really funny movie? If we stole that chicken nugget outfit from work and made a movie about a vengeful chicken nugget!" proceeded immediately by you doing just that without any planning, script, actors, or anything other than your inebriated visions of how funny a chicken nugget is. Not that there's anything wrong with those types of movies - they can certainly be amusing - but it's also fun to see a movie that has a lot of love and effort put into it.

It also helps that the movie is about a drunken past-his-prime masked Mexican wrestler-superhero and his cute kungfu bad-ass of a female sidekick who, in true sidekick form, actually does most of the work.

There are three episodes to this feature, and each one improves upon the last. Part one pits the duo against the villainous snack cake king Heinrich Syphon, who wants to inject a chemical into his popular food items that will turn people into wax dummies! Unfortunately for him, his zombified henchman, and his stern assistant Hilda (a precursor to that uptight screaming lady from the Austin Powers movies), the ever-spunky Go Girl catches wind of his dastardly scheme and enlists the aid of her old partner and former idol, El Frenetico.

El Frenetico, however, has fallen on hard times and is more likely to be chugging liquor than fighting crime. El Frenetico is also dubbed in the same style as the classics of Mexican wrestling science fiction. He's El Santo on hard times, which probably would have been more interesting to see than all those later Santo movies where they ran out of outlandish villains for him to fight and so had movies full of filler scenes like, "Santo investigates CD rates at the local bank" or "Santo peruses the newspaper for a good restaurant." If nothing else, those movies gave us a lot of the scenes I love of Santo in a three-piece-suit while still adorned in hi trademark silver wrestling mask, but even I can stomach only so many scenes of Santo taking care of daily chores before I'm screaming out for some vampire women or ninjas to jump him while he's in line at the ATM machine.

Go Girl manages to snap her old chum out his stupor in enough time for them to stick it to Syphon. The fights in this -- and subsequent -- episodes are handled primarily by Go Girl (Frances Lee), and she performs remarkably well. Trust me when I say I know more than a thing or two about just how profoundly awful kungfu in a shot on video homebrew movie can be. Sure, some people think Don "The Dragon" Wilson is bad, but there is stuff out there that will make you marvel at the Yuen Biao-like adroitness of Don Knotts in The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, let alone a competent but unspectacular performer like Don. Frances, however, is several notches above the shot on video standard. She moves well, looks convincing, and obviously knows a thing or two about kicking some ass. It helps that she's not one of those rail-thin types who we're supposed to believe are powerhouses even though a light breeze could snap them in half. With a professional choreographer, Frances could easily make an impact (but thankfully not a Double Impact) as a martial arts star.

But even more important, at least in the realm of action cinema, is the fact that the director and cameraman know where to point the camera. Lots of low budget - and even quite a few big budget - films have this problem of not knowing that they should position a camera so that you can't see kicks and punches not landing. Unless you're part of the Sammo Hung philosophy of actually making hard contact then settling up the medical bills when the day's shooting wraps, you're not actually beating the living hell out of your actors. In the absence of George Lucas style special effects computers that can make people and punches appear closer to their target than they were in real life, this means you have to fake it by coming as close as you can without actually making contact, or that you know how to edit a blow so that you see contact that is actually faked after the blow has already been shot.

More times than not, this results in you and me watching Jim Kelly throw a punch that stops a foot from his foe's face yet still manages to knock them back ten feet through a window. A simple repositioning of the camera at a different angle would often alleviate this problem, but it seems few low and no budget filmmakers have thought of that because El Frenetico and Go Girl is one of the few movies that pulls it off, resulting in fight scenes that may not be straight out of Sammo Hung's Magnificent Butcher, but are heads better than most of the action committed to and on video, which is often more like committing a small crime.

The acting is also above what one expects from these sorts of productions. Most of the time, you just cast your friends, their friends, and who ever else you can convince to work for beer and nachos. If Pat did just draw from a pool of pals and acquaintances, then he at least knows some talented people. Frances is not just a solid action performer, she's also a solid actress and delivers her lines with just enough camp to be amusing and fitting for the subject matter, but not so much that she just sounds silly, or like the WWF's Hurricane Helms. El Frenetico is dubbed with intentionally flat sounding dialogue, so he doesn't count. Charles Pelligrino, the man behind the mask, does mimic the stilted movements and mannerisms of your finer Mexican wrestlers with amusing accuracy. He may not be Santo, but he's pretty close to Mil Mascaras or Blue Demon.

Jon Sandborne as Syphon performs with all the cartoonish glee of Caesar Romero, though to be honest, I'd be far more afraid of Caesar Romero kicking my ass (in or out of Joker make-up) than Jon. Not that I want to fight anyone. There's just a lot of people I'd rather have to fight than Caesar Romero, even if he's old or dead. Well, whatever, there are worse things than having said to you, "You remind me of Caesar Romero." Granted Sandborne gets to ham it up as the over-the-top snack cake mogul bent on world - or at least town - domination, and being hammy is always more fun than being serious, but even hams, and probably even Ham the chimp who was the first American in outer space, can deliver lines flatly. Sandborne doesn't. He mugs beautifully and even manages to deliver his straight lines well.

The supporting cast, including the angry Hilda and a panicky scientist, do well up until the point we meet the panicky scientist's father, who delivers his few lines with all the feeling and skill of your finer elementary school students doing the first read-through of the school play, or me and my friends Rob and Roman when we decided to annoy our third grade teacher by reading everything in class with a monotone robot voice. Granted finding older actors willing to play a part in a video production is difficult, which is why you see so many twenty year olds with long hair playing Nobel Award winning scientists from World War II. That they even bothered to find a guy who actually looks his age is a testament to dedication, and it's not like he's constantly onscreen or anything. Ultimately, he's more amusing than he is "bad." And who am I to judge? Brilliant scientists are a weird lot.

Sets and locations are always another big problem when you have no money, which is probably why so many shot on video features are about people awakening ancient evils in their own home or in the nearby woods. A couple things you can almost always tell from one of these movies are where the director and their friends live and where they work. And where they go to school if they're still in. Curiously, every movie I was involved with from 1986-1990 revolved around my high school or my friend Dave's basement. From 1991-1995, everything suddenly revolved around the University of Florida campus and the parking garage across the street from where a bunch of my friends lived. Coincidence?

El Frenetico and Go Girl handles this limitation well. I don't know what the factory of a snack cake king would look like, but I do live a stone's throw away from a Domino Sugar plant along the East River, and it's not that nice, especially when striking workers rent the giant inflatable rat and sit it so that it's peering into the bosses third floor window. I don't know if this is the practice everywhere, but here in New York City the big inflatable rat (and his smaller brother) gets a lot of business. Whoever rents it out must be making a killing, because every picket line I see these days has the big inflatable rat.

Syphon's lair looks about what I imagine the layer of the Domino Sugar guy looks like, if he has a lair - and I'm sure the people on strike would say he does. At least Syphon doesn't have to deal with the big rat. The rest of the movie is sensibly set in a series of warehouses, crowded industrial offices, and little convention center type places, thus avoiding the need to pass off a card table set up in front of your video collection in your living room as the headquarters of the NSA.

There are only a few special effects, and while we ain't talking Ray Harryhausen or ILM, did you really expect that? In one scene, Go Girl is foiled by a big sticky trap, then menaced by a couple paper mache spider monsters. The whole thing is shot in an off-kilter fashion and set to weird music, and it ends up feeling like you've suddenly stumbled into a music video by The Residents or Renaldo and the Loaf. They also spit that neon goo you get out of coin machines at Toys-R-Us, which Frances dutifully has flung in her face. Bleah!

The second episode improves upon the first in that the supporting cast has no noticeable weak spots and the fight choreography is even better. This time around, Go Girl's best friend and her supermodel cousin Bonnie are kidnapped by a villain known as The Fop, who can best be described as Paul Reubens starring as Parry Farrell of Jane's Addiction fame, or I guess as Parry Farrell starring in the Paul Reubens story. One got caught stealin', and the other got caught feelin'! Thanks you. You've been a great audience. Try the clam dip, folks. I'm here all week.

Just feel lucky that you got that one and not my joke about how now that Buffy has gotten it on with Angel and Spike, they should change the series name to Buffy the Vampire Layer.

The Fop wants to force the town's models into a fashion show highlighting his entire line of crappy designs. Turns out that as a young, up and coming designer, he was snubbed by teachers and the fashion establishment, and now he's seeking revenge.or is he just trying to get them to give him a little respect. El Frenetico, meanwhile, squares off against The Fop's main henchman, a ghost from El Frenetico's past by the name of El Fuerte. Also packing a surprise is Bonnie, who proves that while she may be a model, she has all the ass-kicking kungfu power of her superhero cousin.

The big addition to the cast here is Soomi Kim as Bonnie, who later adopts the superhero persona of Runway. She's a good actress and a great martial artist, or at least very good. The scenes involving her and Go Girl kicking ass are great. They outshine even most of what you find in bigger budget (though still low budget) direct to video martial arts films starring way more experienced actresses like Cynthia Rothrock, and hell, they're even better than most of what passed for martial arts in most big budget films before Jackie Chan and Yuen Wo-ping made everyone realize Jean-Claude Van Damme wasn't actually as good as everyone thought.

Not that I'm saying Soomi or Frances could whup Cynthia's ass. We all know Rothrock is a legitimate bad-ass, and while both Soomi Kim and Frances Lee could probably kick my ass (but then, who couldn't?), I'd still have to put my money on the five time forms champion and star of Righting Wrongs. My point is that once Cynthia Rothrock left Hong Kong and stopped getting directed by Sammo Hung and Yuen Kwai, she started making some really crappy films with some really weak looking martial arts choreography. I'd much rather watch the work in El Frenetico and Go Girl than what I saw in China O'Brien II.

If you're wondering why almost all the action talk revolves around Go Girl, that's no accident. It's tradition that the sidekick ends up doing most of the work. Sherlock Holmes had Dr. Watson doing most the work. Birdman had Avenger, and now the hard-drinking El Frenetico has Go Girl to solve most of the mysteries, do most of the thinking, and even handle most of the fighting. When El Frenetico comes out of his drunken coma long enough to fight, he clobbers everyone in true wrestler fashion. His "rematch" with his old in-ring nemesis is the most action he ever sees. Considering just how good Frances and Soomi perform, that's not a bad thing.

The second big addition to the cast is Clark Donnelly as The Fop. Once again, both the plot and the villain seem to have stepped right out of the old Batman show. In such a setting, Donnelly is free to go way over the top without it seeming out of place, and he just that while, at the same time, playing a villain that actually isn't nearly as villainous as he initially seems to be. The script also avoids gay jokes and other lowbrow nonsense. The Fop probably isn't even gay. He's just a, you know, fop. Whatever he may be, Donnelly turns in a credible performance that is about as far from flat as you can get.

Part three sees the dramatic return of Syphon and Hilda, only all is not well in the land of the super villainous snack cake king. He and his assistant are sprung from jail, or from a factory, by the mysterious Shade, a beautiful but dangerous secret agent who in generally offended by the male dominated world that allows incompetent boobs like Syphon and El Frenetico to be criminal masterminds and superheroes while intelligent, competent women like Hilda and Go Girl do all the work. When Go Girl shows up to foil the jail break, we also learn that she and Shade already know each other. The ol' "We trained with each other" deal. Hey, just like Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow! Shade urges Go Girl to join her and drop that load named El Frenetico, but Go Girl refuses. A quick shot of sleeping gas later, and the trio of villains have escaped.

Shade's assertions are made all the more convincing by the fact that El Frenetico is too drunk to help Go Girl and, left on his own without the input of Hilda, the best plan Syphon can come up with is to randomly hire some ninjas for no real reason. In one of the funnier scenes, the ninjas arrive to unload some boxes for Syphon and one of the ninjas simply stands off to the side swinging his nunchuka around wildly and with no purpose.

When Shade and Go Girl meet up again, Go Girl agrees to join Shade and Hilda in the plot to ditch the men and kick some ass, girl style. When Go Girl's bluff is called, it all comes down to a rooftop fight between her and Shade. El Frenetico, meanwhile, gets up long enough to track down Syphon, who he finds tied up in the closet with no idea what the evil plan is since he never did much of the thinking in the first place.

The only disappointing thing about this chapter is the absence of Runway. She makes a cameo in the Tick-like superhero bar where all the super types hang out, but she's otherwise absent from the action, which is a shame given how good Soomi Kim is in action and how well it would have played into the plot about the women being so much better at their jobs than the men who are in charge. But I guess you can't have everything.

Making her debut here is Madoka Raine as Shade. She's cute and looks great in her evil 1960s villainess black costume with white go-go boots, as seems par for the course for the starring gals, but she's a weaker on-screen fighter than Frances Lee and Soomi Kim. Not bad, mind you, and certainly better still than most of the would-be martial arts stars flailing about in SOV productions. Once again, however, the folks behind the camera know where to point it in order to cover fighting and choreography shortcomings. The final fight between Go Girl and Shade reminded me of the similar rooftop fight between Sho Kosugi and his ninja opponent in Revenge of the Ninja, except that I think I enjoyed the showdown between Shade and Go Girl more. Maybe if Sho Kosugi had donned a red cape and tights -- and been Frances Lee.

Acting-wise, Raine is as solid as the rest of the main cast. A bit flat from time to time, but not bad all things considered. And since she plays a greater role this time around than she did in the first episode, it's worth mentioning Louise Millman as Hilda. While she doesn't speak much, she maintains that classic "stern German matron" type of sour scowl perfectly, right out of any of your finer Nazi exploitation films.

There are a bundle of limitations to making a no budget, shot on video movie. Ask anyone who has made one, and they can spend days rattling off all the hassles they endure in the name of love, art, and mild (or raging) insanity. First and foremost there is the cheap equipment, and even cheap equipment can be hard to come by, especially when you discover that just because a piece of equipment may have been made cheaply and performs cheaply doesn't mean it can be rented or purchased cheaply. Then there's the fact that you can't afford to hire people most of the time, and thus are limited to the talent pool of people who will work for free or for some chips or to get into a convention for free later on down the road. Then there's the editing process, which is far more difficult and time-consuming than even dedicated people are often willing to endure, resulting in shoddy, poorly paced final cuts on account of a lack of patience or proper editing equipment. In previous reviews of shot on video films like Goblin and Twisted Issues, I've already gone on about what a pain in the ass analog editing systems are for VHS. You better like picture quality degradation and machines that go "ka-chunk" a lot.

The true test of one of these films and of the talent of the people behind them is in how they manage to work around their limitations. Are they smart enough to figure it out? To write scripts that don't demand more than production can deliver? To be aware ahead of time of the problems they'll face? Will they be clever enough to solve them in ways that don't require money and teamsters? The answer is almost always a resounding "no." Very few people realize how much is involved in making a movie that exists in a realm beyond those that can only be shown to close friends. Well, okay, amateur porn is easy, but even then you gotta know enough to do something with the camera, even if it's just shoving it in your partner's crotch. And sure, acting in amateur porn is easy once you get used to it (not necessarily speaking from experience here), but you still have to make yourself or your subject last more than five minutes, and that's something fewer guys than will admit to themselves can muster.

But we're not talking about amateur porn here. We're talking about an action film with a script, fight choreography, and people with lines more complex than, "Oh yeah, right there, baby! Make me yodel like that little cardboard hiker on The Price is Right!" I'm pretty sure that's an actual line from a porn film. If it isn't it will be as soon as I make my own porno film. Going beyond that is a trial, to say the least, and if more people knew how difficult it was, you'd have a lot less people making their own movies and a lot more critics understanding better how much effort went into the piece they are viewing. Not that it would make a bad movie any better, but it does give you a better perspective. Like I said once before somewhere else, you don't have to make a movie to be a valid critic, but you should try anyway.

The remarkable thing about The Adventures of El Frenetico and Go Girl is how well it hides the short-comings inherent in the medium. Granted no one is going to mistake this for a million dollar movie, and granted it isn't perfect. The sound recording in particular could use some work, but that's also one of the most difficult things to get done properly when you have no money. The acting is good. The editing and pacing are shockingly tight for home video. My biggest complaint about most SOV films is that the directors don't know when to stop and they don't know what to cut out. This results in scenes that are overlong and dull, or those shots that begin with someone standing around in awkward silence for a few seconds before saying their line or doing what it is they're supposed to do. A little editing can eliminate that, and any good editor will tell you what you cut out of a movie has as much to do with making it good as what you leave in.

The Adventures of El Frenetico and Go Girl violates the norm in that it is, for the most part, well edited and thus moves along quickly. I've already gone into the surprisingly high quality of the fight scenes, and that's thanks in part to the ability of the editor to know when to go to the next shot rather than to linger on someone waiting dumbly for their cue. It's not 100% polished, but it's definitely one of the most smartly edited amateur films I've seen, and I've seen a lot of them.

Writing is another typical pitfall of the no-budget film. Usually, people who can't write very well throw together dumbed down rip-offs of their favorite movies. There must be a million lame Evil Dead and Night of the Living Dead copies out there, each one as abysmal as the next. The scripts here, however, actually have some wit and intelligence behind them. We're not in James Joyce territory, but then, James Joyce never had enough sense to pepper his work with cute women in superhero outfits either, so it's a give and take. At least no one trots out the tired old "This is like a bad horror movie!" joke. The plots are straight-forward, but the writing has a charm to it that shows they actually bothered to put some thought, and some decently smart thought at that, into the words. They even write some decent sympathetic villains with more to them than just "they're evil." Making it better is that since they wrote passable and witty scripts, they don't have to rely on gore. Just about every shot on video movie I've seen relies on gore, primarily because the people making them wanted to make cheap gore effects, not an actual movie. Scripts and other considerations were simply a means to showcase gobs of red-dyed Karo syrup. El Frenetico and Go Girl is one of the few shot on video productions that doesn't have to (or want to) rely on cut-rate splatter effects. You could actually sit your whole family down for the show, if you wanted to. It's better than the Power Rangers, after all. While I don't demand that any movie be family entertainment, it's nice to see something that is, while remaining loads of fun no matter how depraved you might be in the darkest recesses of your evil little soul.

After editing, writing, and acting, the two biggest pitfalls for a film like this are lighting and sound, also two of the most difficult to master and hardest to understand elements of making a movie. In pro productions, entire teams of people are in charge of nothing but recording the sound or setting up the lights. Sound is a given, but you'd be amazed at just how important lighting is for a scene. It's part science, part art, and it's amazingly hard to do well. Most no-budget movies cannot afford to rent most of the proper lights for a movie, let alone afford some union type well-trained in what to do with them. And lighting video, which is by nature rather flat and cold compared to film, is even more of a hassle. About the best you can hope for is that the people making the movie had enough sense to at least light the set so that you could see everything you were supposed to. Once again, this being done properly is the exception more than it is the rule, and you are then stuck with one movie after another that defeats itself by having long stretches in which you cannot see a damn thing.

The crew behind The Adventures of El Frenetico and Go Girl succeeds in making sure you can see the action, and they even through a little flare in now and then to show that, while they may not have an expert or expert equipment, they at least understand the basic concepts and can use them to alter and enhance the mood of a scene. It's not Dario Argento, mind you, but he maybe goes a bit overboard anyway.

The sound recording is the film's major technical flaw. It can be hard to hear what's being said sometimes, and once again that's probably more a reflection of the limitations of the equipment available than it is a reflection of the skills of the people making the movie. Given that they nailed the editing and acting, and at least didn't blow the lighting, I find it hard to believe they neglected the sound. The basic problem is that recording sound well is hard. Built-in mics on the camera are practically useless, and even cheap remote boom and directional mics pick up as much ambient noise and atmospheric hiss as they do whatever sound it is you are actually trying to capture. A decent sound engineer can fix this in post-production, but again, most no budget films hardly have the means to finance sound engineering or buy all the equipment one needs to do it. Added to the equation is the fact that VHS is a lame medium to begin with, and audio quality is one of the many elements that suffers every time you reproduce your work and move generations away from the original.

I've yet to encounter a single no-budget shot on video film (and even some low budget shot on film productions have the same problem), that didn't have at least some spotty audio trouble, and at least in this The Adventures of El Frenetico and Go Girl has its one noticeable flaw. It doesn't happen nearly as much as it does in other similar films, though, and to their credit it's almost as if they knew certain scenes would sound bad and so limited the amount of dialogue in them. Actually, that probably just happened naturally since the bad audio comes primarily in the fight scenes shot in wide-open spaces, so there isn't much dialogue to begin with. Wide-open interiors and windy exteriors are the most problematic to shoot in. Cheap mics love echos.

But come one. If infrequent audio troubles are the biggest complaint about a shot on video film made with no money and no professionals, then that's quite an accomplishment. Shot on video movies, even the ones I enjoy, are often a chore, and I sit through them purely out of stubbornness or because I have to in order to write a proper review. So it is with no small degree of joy that I received this movie, one that actually made me want to keep watching because I was having fun, as were the people making it, no doubt. Their enjoyment and energy shines through, and that probably helps the film out quite a bit in ways mere competence cannot. You know, like those surfers who spout off all that stoned surfer Zen philosophy. Sure, they may not technically be as adept at the sport as their sponsored contemporaries, but then they don't see it as a sport - or a business - in the first place, and probably get a lot more out of it. Just look at Patrick Swayze in Point Break! He loved surfing, man!

I'm not going to say that director Pat Bishow is the Patrick Swayze from Point Break of shot-on-video movie directors, mainly because I'm not 100% certain that's a compliment, and given how much I enjoyed The Adventures of El Frenetico and Go Girl, I wouldn't want to insult the guy.

Labels: Action: Luchadores, Action: Superheroes, Martial Arts: Kungfu, Microbudget, Year: 1993

posted by Keith at 10:39 PM | 0 Comments

Tuesday, November 20, 2001

Fantasy 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, 2001

China 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, 2001

The Accidental Spy

Release Year: 2001
Country: 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, 2001

Dragon 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

Monday, June 04, 2001

The Stranger and the Gunfighter

1974, Italy/Hong Kong. Starring Lo Lieh, Lee Van Cleef, Femi Benussi, Erika Blanc, Ricardo Palacios, Goyo Peralta, Georges Rigaud, Patty Shepard, Al Tung, Julian Ugarte, Karen Yeh. Directed by Antonio Margheriti

Now how do you come up with this one? I really don't know, though I'm glad they did. The plot to this East Meets Wild West kungfu spaghetti Western is only the beginning of the delirium that it assaults us with. Things just keep getting stranger and more over-the-top, and I have a feeling a goodly amount of hashish was available to those dreaming up this absolutely ludicrous and thoroughly enjoyable romp.

For about one week, Lo Lieh was the biggest thing in martial arts films. When Five Fingers of Death opened in America, it was a smash hit, and the sour-looking hero was an overnight sensation. Then Bruce Lee came along, and Americans realized you could have a kungfu hero who was bad-ass and beautiful, so Lo Lieh's five seconds in the limelight were over.

Luckily, the Italians didn't forget about the Shaw Brothers martial arts superstar. They called upon his skill as an actor and all-around bad-ass for this film, co-starring alongside the baddest man to ever stroll through the Western genre, Lee Van Cleef. This website digs Lee Van Cleef. Even though he made that Master Ninja crap alongside such big-time martial artists as Timothy Van Patton, Demi Moore, and Crystal Bernard, no one here holds that against him because he is just so god-damned cool.

When I first saw The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly it was Van Cleef's sadistic character, Angel Eyes, that was my favorite. He was so subtle and so evil without even seeming like it. Westerns starring Lee are always my favorites, and I regularly devour such gems as Sabata, For a Few Dollars More, and Death Rides a Horse.

Here, he plays his usually character, which is a sly and charismatic gambler/gunslinger. His first moment in this film is utterly priceless, as he does the classic "disappearing in the steam" exit to befuddle some railroad lackey. From there, he promptly sets out to rob the bank.

Also in town is a diminutive Chinese man who seems to have sexy mistresses scattered all over America. Each woman gets to show off her healthy, 1970s unscrawny booty during this whole opening montage. Ahhh, those were the days. Back when a woman had a little meat on her and no one was all upset about it. This age of heroin-overdose looking supermodels must end. Give me some back any day over those flat non-rumps people seem to dig.

Anyway, the Chinese guy catches on that Van Cleef is about to rob the bank, and runs over there to keep him away from some valuable stuff. Unfortunately, he runs in right when Lee's dynamite goes off. Then, The Law shows up, and Van Cleef is charged with murder when all he really wanted to do was rob the bank. And the kicker -- all that was in the vault was a fortune cookie and pictures of the guy's naked mistresses.

Meanwhile, over in China, we find out that this old Chinese guy was a relative of Lo Lieh's. The Chinese government (which was actually Manchurian at the time) is pissed that old Wang died without telling them what he did with all the money he took with him to America. The send Lo Lieh to find it so he can repay the government. If within one year, he isn't back with the loot, his family will be killed.

Back to America we go, where Lee Van Cleef is about to be hanged for murder. Lo Lieh shows up, finds out he was the last one to see his uncle alive, and saves him. Together they ride off to solve the mystery of the missing treasure.

And here's where the plot really kicks in. Old Wang tattooed clues to finding the treasure on the butts of each of his mistresses. Yes, to find the booty, you must find the booty. And that, my friends, is the plot of this film. Lo Lieh and Lee Van Cleef ride around looking at women's asses. Nice work if you can get it.

Of course, it's not all fun and games. They are pursued by a crazy religious fanatic who has a mobile church tied to a team of horses! And he has one of those standard issue sidekicks: the giant super-strong native American dude. The black-clad Deacon wants the treasure so he can build a real church and expand his heretic-murdering business.

All sorts of wild stuff ensues, peppered by healthy doses of comedy. The soundtrack is lame, and every time Lo Lieh jumps, he makes a sound exactly someone messing around on a slide whistle. I guess that's one of them Shaolin powers we hear so much about, the ability to go, "Whooolooloolooloo!" when you jump. He should team up with David Chiang and his "Chooka chooka choo!" sound effect from Seven Blows of the Dragon. That would sound nice.

The dippy soundtrack is my only complaint about this film. Everything else rocks me like a hurricane. Most of the action consists of Lo Lieh beating up unsuspecting whities. He espouses a little Confucian wisdom and knows acupuncture, which is more or less par for the course. Lee Van Cleef mostly sits back and enjoys the show, occasionally shooting someone. I guess he has this job where he gets to ride around with a seemingly indestructible kungfu dynamo, looking at women's asses, and collecting treasure at the end. What's not to enjoy? I wish I was Lee Van Cleef, only still alive.

There are no great kungfu battles, since no one else Lo Lieh beats up knows kungfu, but there is plenty of action culminating in a totally wild finale in which Lo Lieh's new love (a Chinese woman, formerly one of the ass women) is suspended above a raging fire while Lo Lieh fights the big native American guy and Lee Van Cleef rides around with a Gatling gun shooting up everything in sight!

A lot less grim than the violent Fighting Fists of Shanghai Joe, and more along the lines of the wacky Joe sequel, Return of Shanghai Joe, this is one hell of a film. Plenty of kungfu action, bad funk music, naked asses galore (yay!), shootin', punchin', kickin', drinkin', gamblin', and everything else that makes life -- and this film -- great!

Labels: Martial Arts: Kungfu, Spaghetti Westerns, Stars: Lo Lieh, Year: 1974

posted by Keith at 5:44 PM | 1 Comments

Sunday, June 03, 2001

Gen X Cops

1999, Hong Kong. Starring Nicholas Tse, Stephen Fung, Sam Lee, Grace Yip, Eric Tsang, Daniel Wu, Toru Nakamura, Terence Yin, Francis Ng, Jaymee Ong, Moses Chan. Directed by Benny Chan. Available on DVD (HKFlix).

If you've read any of the reviews of Hong Kong movies we've posted in the past year or two, then you've no doubt picked up that we've been pretty down on the whole industry since round about the mid 1990s. I've gone into a great deal of detail as to exactly why the industry in Hong Kong collapsed after achieving such monumental heights, so I'm not going to reiterate here, especially since this review is an excellent way to stop writing about the recent failures of Hong Kong action cinema and shift instead to more optimistic writing about future success.

I think we're finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. The past few years have seen a number of fresh new faces finally emerging from the ashes, and it looks like things in Hong Kong are starting to finally get interesting again after we've endured years of cut-rate Wong Jing stinkers and wire-laden "kungfu" films that didn't seem to ever have any actual kungfu. Pieces are finally in place for Hong Kong to reclaim the action cinema throne it toppled off of (and subsequently left vacant since everyone else was sucking just as bad) sometime in the mid 1990s, and after years of hibernating in my little "golden age of kungfu" shell, I'm finally poking my head out and seeing what all this rumbling is about -- not to mention finally seeing the few good films from the latter half of the 1990s that I missed during my Hong Kong action film sabbatical.

Some of the people making folks stand up and take notice again are familiar faces who have finally paid their dues or are coming into their own, ready to shine now that the old guard is more or less retired or relocated. I'm thinking specifically here of guys like director Johnny To and stars Aaron Kwok, Jordan Chan, and Lau Ching-wan. Lau's already achieved a degree of fan and critical acclaim, and he seems to have all the right stuff to become the big dog in action cinema. He's got the look that is scruffy yet dignified, he's got emotional depth, and he's got a lot of great films under his belt. Jordan Chan, of all the new batch of Hong Kong young-bloods, is my favorite. He's engaging, and unlike Ekin Cheng, he can actually act. Aaron Kwok has been around for a long time now, and he's finally getting old enough to shake the "pretty boy" image that held him back throughout most of the 1990s. A few more years and a few more pounds, and he should be set to shine.

On the directorial front, guys like Johnny To, Benny Chan, Teddy Chan, Dante Lam, and Wilson Yip may not be the John Woo, Tsui Hark, or Sammo Hung of the new millennium, but then none of those guys got famous by being the next Chang Cheh or Liu Chia-liang either. They blazed new paths, took chances, and recreated the game with a new set of rules. After several years in the abyss, with people wallowing in the styles and retreaded visuals of the past, we finally have a new crop of directors who are once again challenging convention, shaking things up, and quite possibly lying the foundation for the next Hong Kong new wave. It's an uncertain but exciting time, and I feel myself finally getting back that sense of anticipation and excitement I had in the early 1980s when I watched Aces Go Places for the first time. After so long with nothing to get anxious over, Hong Kong is finally a place I want to start paying attention to again.

The real trick to revitalizing a movie industry is in finding new talent and new directions that appeal to both past and future fans. You have to find young actors who don't seem absurd in their roles (Ben Affleck as an ex FBI agent? Denise Richards as a brilliant nuclear physicist? Who the hell is casting people in Hollywood???) but still appeal to kids. And you have to find young actors who aren't so insipid and annoying that they turn away older viewers in droves.

Director Benny Chan (Who Am I, Big Bullet) seems to have hit the right combination of youth and tradition with Gen-X Cops. It's not that big of a surprise, I suppose. Benny Chan has already given us one of the most even and consistent Jackie Chan films in years (Who Am I), as well as 1996's Big Bullet, easily one of the best action films around and a real gem in the Hong Kong action film crown. Throw Jackie Chan and Eric Tsang in as the behind-the-scenes mentor and producer, and you have what should be a recipe for success.

Gen-X Cops begins on the right foot -- by bothering to explain why we will be seeing such brash youngsters in important investigative positions. Hollywood, of course, worships youth, but when they cast a 22-year-old as a veteran cop or something, they just expect you to roll with it and not question how the hell this kid got where he was. Gen-X Cops, however, shows us a little more consideration by providing a simple but adequate explanation for why everyone is so young: the criminals are young, too. Hong Kong street gangs. The new generation of criminals finally coming out of high school and into the big leagues. You can't infiltrate a violent youth gang with a fifty year old cop. They tend to stand out. Eric Tsang, as the pariah police inspector Chan, figures that to combat this new generation of criminals, you're going to need a new generation of cops.

The primarily stumbling block for Inspector Chan is that everyone thinks he is a moron because he had mental problems in the past and still has a pronounced nervous twitch when he gets upset. Rival inspector To (Moses Chan), who looks eerily like Nick Cave (as if there is an un-eerie way to look like Nick Cave), constantly berates Chan in front of the rest of the force, and no one seems all that interested in standing up for the little guy. When a gangland execution results in the death of an undercover cop, the police assign Chan to assemble "an elite unit" to take care of things, hoping that recruiting will keep him out of the way so Inspector To can work on the case without interruption.

Chan is determined to prove his worth, however, not to mention prove his intuition is correct when he thinks the younger brother (Daniel Wu as, umm, Daniel) of one of the murdered gangsters may be the very one who pulled the trigger, and may be the one who can lead them to big-time crime boss Akatora. Chan heads out to the police academy looking to recruit some fresh faces who will able to infiltrate Daniel's gang of obnoxious young killers. Unfortunately, everyone Chan sees is a total square, my favorite being the guy who tries out for the special unit by simply standing in the room and flexing his massive muscles. Things seem hopeless until Chan stumbles across three recruits who are in the process of being expelled for a variety of reasons, all of which boil down to "being uppity" and "exposing the idiocy of your elders." Needless to say, these three misfits are exactly what Chan has been looking for.

Nicholas Tse, Sam Lee, and Stephen Fung star as Jack, Alien, and Match respectively. All three are decent enough actors, though the roles they play here are about as thick as a page out of a comic book. Since this movie never aspires to be anything more than stupid fun, I can live with one-dimensional characters -- which describes just about everyone in this film with the possible exception of Inspector Chan, and that may only be because Eric Tsang is such a veteran at bringing life to absurd characters. Besides him you've got the three cops -- the goofball, the slick guy, and the moody guy. You've got the obnoxious police inspector who wears the same coat as those creepy bald guys from Dark City. You've got the honorable old gangster and the scumbag selfish young gangster. You've got the computer hacker girl and the sassy club girl with a British accent. No one is winning any awards for innovation, but as long as the movie keeps everyone moving around enough not to notice, that's fine by me. And the movie does achieve that very thing.

Jack, Alien, and Match are given new, hipper identities after indulging in a little gratuitous skydiving, which had to be done for two main reasons. First, you can't have a Gen-X movie without some extreme sport, and second, you have to establish that they know how to skydive so that can be used later in the film. They go undercover to follow Chan's hunch that Daniel is the trigger man behind the recent murders, and that he is in league with Japanese yakuza who is pulling the strings. Daniel is played by American-born Daniel Wu, who went to Hong Kong on a holiday after graduating from college and ended up making movies there. Just goes to show you kids -- if you put off real life and goof off a little more, you just might make it.

Wu is a decent enough actor, but like everyone else, he plays pretty much a one-note character. His job is to primarily walk around making "angry man" faces while wearing a jacket with no shirt on. You can always recognize a slick up and coming gangster by the fact that he'll be wearing a jacket with no shirt. Be glad those guys in The Sopranos don't do the same. Why is it that all those Hong Kong gangsters are always walking around in million dollar designer clothes, while Mafia guys walk around in cheap track suits? Well, I guess comfort is a big consideration for them. And who the hell is going to walk up to Paulie Walnuts and tell him he should dress a little hipper?

Match gets on Daniel's good side by hitting on his girl, Jayme, who it turns out was also Match's girlfriend back in Canada. That whole thing was pretty damn stupid and pointless, but whatever. As is usually the case, Daniel is going to kill our three heroes but is eventually impressed by their bickering and in-fighting, which is what we call "pluckiness" when we are being polite. He gives them a job -- go kill rival crime boss Lok, played wonderfully by Francis Ng. Of course, the job go haywire. For one, the boys realize that Lok is actually a pretty cool and honorable guy, and no one wants to kill him. When Daniel and his thugs show up, however, all hell breaks loose, and it gets even looser when some of Daniel's men defect and try to turn him over to Lok. Because duty calls for it, Match, Jack, and Alien end up rescuing Daniel instead of siding with Lok or the firestorm of cops who descend upon the place once all the shooting and exploding starts.

When one of the nameless, faceless cops is killed, Inspector To blames Chan and his band of misfits. Indeed, the entire police force seems indifferent-to-annoyed by Chan's inability to get the message that no one wants him actually working on the case. Chan has a breakdown and since they are not officially cops anymore, To succeeds in having Match, Jack, and Alien declared fugitives and suspected murderers. So now they got Japanese gangsters, Hong kong gangsters, and their own police force after them.

To make matters worse, Match and Jack get in an argument over Match's continued flirtiness with Jayme, causing Match, Jayme, and Alien to split ways with Daniel and Jack. It's all a ruse of course, so that Alien and Match can secretly back Jack up as he and Daniel meet with the dreaded Akatora. It culminates in a big display of exploding stuff and shooting at the quaint villa belonging to Akatora. The Gen-X cops discover that he's planning to blow up a convention center in order to kill some famous visiting Japanese politician who used to be a criminal and betrayed Akatora's dad. Convoluted? No doubt, but at this point you really can't care too much.

They attempt to stop Akatora from getting hold of the super-duper explosives he intends to use, which leads to a big fight in a mall where there happens to be a store in the very tall building that sells skydiving equipment. You figure out if this is where we learn the value of their skydiving skills. All things considered, it's far less groan-inducing than when that girl in Jurassic Park II had to use her amazing gymnastic skills as established earlier in the film to evade some raptors.

It all boils down to our lads and lass (computer hacker Y2K) facing off with Akatora in the bowels of the convention center while Inspector To's men run around and get shot. You know, one day I'm going to make a movie where the maverick cop fucks things up royally and the straight-laced, by the book partner ends up saving the day by sticking to regulations. Anyway, there is a cool part where Akatora taunts them with the detonator and says "If you can take this from me, you can stop the explosion." After a prolonged fight, the detonator gets dropped and everyone freaks out until Akatora says, "That's okay, I started it before I even told you you could stop me by taking it." That alone makes Akatora among the smarter criminals out there. Now if only he'd thought of just shooting his target instead of orchestrating a massively complex plan to blow up the entire building.

Will the young cops stop the crazy criminal? Will they manage to keep from getting shot by Inspector To and his men? Will they redeem the lost honor of Inspector Chan by proving him right? Will there be a big-ass fight and explosion at the end of the film? Well, what do you think?

In every sense of the phrase, this movie is "stupid fun," and it's easy to pick apart. There's an attempt to add an element of hipness to the events by mixing in English, but the English lines are so pitifully goofy and delivered with such awkwardness that they would have been much more effective had they simply not been used. It's really awful, and this is coming from someone who counts among his favorite film lines of all time the white guy from Once Upon a Time in China snarling "Who is this Wong Fei-hong? The Devil???" The story is needlessly roundabout.

What was the point of Match and Jayme having known each other in Canada? Just to explain why they fall in love so suddenly after he gives one of those "How could I take care of you when I couldn't even take care of myself?" speeches? It would have been more believable to just not worry about it and have them be two sexy young things who dig each other.

The film also spends all this time on Daniel's character only to have the actual villain be some other guy entirely. That's like writing a mystery novel where you get everyone to wonder "whodunit," then make the culprit someone who is only introduced in the final five pages -- or like making an entire slasher film then having the killer be someone's mom who isn't introduced until the final scene. It's cheap at worst, and in the case of Gen-X Cops, it's just pointless.

Need I even mention the disturbingly high number of "hold my gun sideways" moments there are. What the hell is with this? Who holds their gun like that? Some dumb-ass who has never fired a real weapon before and learned all his stuff from Mario Van Peebles, that's who! Still, I grit my teeth and just accept that for some bizarre reason, film makers continue to think this is cool. At least it's less ridiculous than the "cross my arms and shoot the guys on the left with my right hand, and vice versa." I guess if you are looking to be unable to aim your weapon and are hoping that it will jam up after squeezing off a few rounds, holding your gun sideways is a good thing.

With all that going wrong, and with the fact that the cast is basically the Hong Kong equivalent of a teenie bopper boy band (with Nick Cave lurking on the fringes scaring everyone), I fully expected to hate this movie. I was surprised when, not only did I not hate it, I actually had a lot of fun watching it. Dumb? You betcha. Style over substance? Completely superficial? Yesiree. Wouldn't argue with that. Sexy young cast? Sure, but at least the movie gave them a reason for being sexy and young instead of making us accept their youth at face value. With all those things wrong with the movie, it still managed to be thoroughly entertaining for a couple reasons.

For one, Benny Chan is a talented director, and he's an ace at finding the right pace for a movie and keeping things energetic even when nothing much is happening. he did it well in Who Am I, and he proved in Big Bullet that he has the skills to be a major force in the history of Hong Kong action cinema. He's got enough talent to elevate the film above the hackneyed, contrived, and completely predictable plot and turn it into something that is still exciting and energetic despite its massive number of short-comings.

The action is plentiful and is a decent mix of guns, explosions, hijinks, and fighting. No one is going to think these kungfu fights are going to revolutionize the industry, but they are fun and manage to compensate for the lack of real fighting skill in the cast without looking obvious.

The cast itself ranges from good to harmless. Moses Chan, Eric Tsang, and Francis Ng may all be playing one-note characters, but they still lend some sense of depth to them. It's no coincidence that these are also the most experienced actors in the film. Moses Chan as Inspector To is so thoroughly a complete and utter asshole that you can't help but like him. Eric Tsang manages to play slightly over the top without going to far, and Francis Ng is at his subtle best within the confines of his "honorable thief" character.

The young guys -- the cops, the girls, and Daniel Wu, are harmless. Sam Lee as Alien tends to be annoying, as all comic relief characters tend to be. Why is it that the comic relief guy is always the least funny of the bunch? But he's easy to discount since his character really does nothing other than stand to the side and shout in fear. Nick Tse and Stephen Fung are grade-A pretty boys -- the Aaron Kwoks of a new generation. I have not seen that many movies starring these two, but at least here they have the good sense to remain within whatever the limits of their skills may be by playing very familiar caricatures, which is not always a bad thing. It allows you to get to know an actor without immediately starting to hate them. Remember, we all though Keaneu Reeves was hilarious and talented until he tried to play characters outside his "Bill and Ted" range.

Daniel Wu is the most promising of the bunch. He's good looking and managed to bring a fair amount of intensity to his character. Granted, that probably wasn't that difficult but there's something to be said for knowing your role and shutting the hell up, as they say. I don't like any of these guys as much as slightly more seasoned young actors like Jordan Chan and Takeshi Kaneshiro, but none of these guys have been in the caliber of films that those two have been in. Gen-X Cops is, after all, no Fallen Angels or Downtown Torpedoes. But I also remember how much I hated Jordan Chan when all I'd seen him in were those annoying Young and Dangerous movies. I don't suspect I'll ever grow to like Sam Lee very much, though I can see myself referring to him as the "Jerry Lewis of Hong Kong youth" in the near future.

I don't think any of these guys will become the man around whom to rebuild the industry -- I think that's something I reserve for Lau Ching-wan and, to a lesser extend, Jordan Chan -- but you have all the makings for a decent bunch of b-team stars once they get a little older and a little better. Despite the pretty boy appeal that no doubt went into their casting, if you look hard enough, there is some actual talent on display. Granted most of it belongs to the director and the old guys, but Daniel Wu, Nick Tse, and Stephen Fung are still easier to watch than Ben Affleck. Maybe that's just because I don't have to hear about them all the time.

As far as the gals go, there's no denying that both Jayme Ong (as Match's girl) and Grace Yip (as computer hacker Y2K) are knock-outs. Grace Yip has a couple more films under her belt than Jayme (who I think makes her debut here), and it shows. Jayme's lines, all of which are in English, are often flat and awkward. I don't know how much of this is her lack of acting talent and now mush of it is simply the fact that the English language dialogue sounds like it was written by middle schoolers lacking a firm grasp of grammar and other finer points. Lucky for her the bulk of her lines are delivered during nightclub scenes where the blaring music obscures the fact that she's not a very good actress. Grace is much more engaging, but her character also has more to do than stand around being pretty.

And then there's the cranky fisherman who makes a cameo at the end of the film and dispenses some, "In my day, I was twice as lethal" wisdom. I'll just leave it at the fact that this guy has made cameo appearances before, but this is by far his funniest.

Gen-X Cops is the sort of movie you watch and are fully aware of the fact that it's completely ludicrous and not all that great, but at the same time it keeps you smiling and laughing. The action is decent, the cast operates within their boundaries, and the direction is great. Like I said, I went in fully expecting to hate this movie and pump out a scathing review about how much I hate snotty fashion-conscious kids these days -- and I do hate snotty, fashion-conscious kids there days -- but instead I found it was very easy to overlook the youth market "Gen-X" approach and just enjoy this as a brain dead but amusing action extravaganza.

Labels: Country: Hong Kong, Martial Arts: Kungfu, Stars: Jackie Chan, Year: 1999

posted by Keith at 2:34 AM | 0 Comments

Saturday, May 12, 2001

Storm Riders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

posted by Keith at 5:39 PM | 0 Comments

Wednesday, April 11, 2001

Stoner

1972, Hong Kong/England. Starring George Lazenby, Angela Mao Ying, Betty Ting Pei, Wang Ing-Sik, Sammo Hung. Directed by Feng Huang.

I had to watch this movie more than once to verify that George Lazenby actually has more dialog than just, "Hmm? Hmmmmm," mumbled with that smug chin-in-tha-air look as if to say he has discovered something important and must now jut forth his chin and stroke it slyly. Who the hell does he think he is? Mr. Bean? He does have a few other lines, but for the most part, he just hums through the whole movie. I know this isn't the best way to kick off a review, but come on! Speak, damn you! This isn't Quest for Fire.

Okay. I had to get that off my chest. Now we can proceed. I originally rented Stoner because, well, it was called Stoner. How many kungfu movies do you find with a title like that? I knew there probably weren't any stoners in the movie, but the joke was still funny. Upon getting home and watching it, I was overjoyed to discover that there are in fact quite a few stoners in the movie, as well as the main guy, Stoner. Stoner is not a stoner, but he is fighting many of the main evil stoners while trying to save some of the other stoners who were just looking for a good time.

Besides Stoner and the stoners, this movie has the wonderful Angela Mao Ying in it, who doesn't really do much other than show up randomly to kick someone's ass, but that's why we love her so. I apologize that, with so many great films starring Angela, this is the first of her films that we've reviewed. It's not exactly the most wonderful example of what she can do. She is not a stoner in this film, but she does team up with Stoner.

Stoner is played by George Lazenby, known by, well, not many people as the guy who was only in one James Bond film, the one everyone pretends never got made. I don't understand why. On Her Majesty's Secret Service is among the coolest of the Bond flicks, and it's certainly heads better than much of the crap that starred Roger Moore. I mean, at least it doesn't have a scene of evil Nazi-Communist millionaire (!) Christopher Walken sneaking up on dumb as toast Tanya "Sheena" Roberts in a goddamned blimp! It's a blimp, for Christ's sake!!! You can't sneak up on people in a blimp! Yet that movie (A View to a Kill) gets to be part of the Bond collection, while Lazenby's swank little run as the super secret agent gets ignored by the masses.

Lazenby's film was actually pretty cool despite the bum rap it gets from most people. Telly Savalas was the bad guy and Diana Rigg was the Bond girl, so right there you know there's something yummy on your plate for the evening. It has some in-jokes that reminded me of the big Bond send-up, Casino Royale, and while it's not as cool as From Russia With Love, it's still better than most any other Bond films, though I also like You Only Live Twice since it had ninjas in it. Watching Bond films is what really made me want to have some dangerous affair with a female operative from Russia.

Say what you will, but I really miss the Cold War. Times were simpler then. The bad guy was clear cut, and the hate was so overblown and hyperbolic that you couldn't really take it seriously. I mean, did people really believe that the Soviet Union was the most evil force in the galaxy? Please, Reagan. That's like the Muslims calling the US the Great Satan, and we get all pissed about that. The Cold War era produced plenty of movies featuring American and Russian agents in cat-and-mouse games, sort of like friendly rivalries. And there was always a romance between the top US agent and some Russian female spy in a furry hat. She would almost certainly try to kill him later on, or perhaps take a bullet for him. For more on my Cold War espionage fetish, please refer to the review of the soundtrack 100% Cotton.

Cold War espionage romance fantasies. Does anyone else out there have fantasies like this? I mean, it could have been "I dream about making it with three women at the same time," or the standard issue, "i dreamed about making it with a woman wearing that Princess Leia metal bikini," but no. I get "I dreamed about making it with a beautiful Russian spy in a safehouse on the Czech border. Later, she tried to kill me in this whole deal that involved skis and motorcycles. Also, we were both wearing those furry caps."

Anyway, where the hell was I? Oh yeah. Stoner. George Lazenby is Stoner, man of action. I noticed that, during key action points in the film, it's not as effective to yell, "Stoner!" as it is to yell "Manix!" or "Mitchell!" but it's still pretty amusing. Stoner is hot on the trail of some goofy drug dealer whose new product tends to make people go severely orgiastic, and then die. Nothing's perfect, I suppose. So there. You have Stoner fighting stoners, and there some cheesecake nudity thrown in to boot.

Some of the nudity involves actress Betty Ting Pei, the most hated woman in Hong Kong. Well, how can people hate an attractive woman who just can't seem to keep her clothes on? I myself wondered the same thing, but keep in mind that Betty Ting Pei was Bruce Lee's mistress, and she was with him during those final fateful hours of his life. Plenty of people theorize that Betty was in on a plot to kill Lee, working perhaps with vengeful film director and known thug about town, Lo Wei. Could Betty Ting Pei have been the one to poison Lee, or let hit men in to beat him to death while he was enjoying some hash brownies?

We'll never know, though you can get her side of the story in the sleazy Bruce Lee "biopic," known as Bruce Lee, His Last Days and Nights, in which she stars as her frequently nude self and Bruce Lee is played by a young Danny Lee Hsiu-hsien, also known as the star of Inframan and "that cop from The Killer." Lee has gone on to make all sorts of creepy, brutal crime films that seem to glorify the torture and rape of suspects by the police force. Frankly, that guy freaks me out.

As for what happened to Betty Ting Pei after her brief stint as a B movie exploitation star, I don't know. She was pretty much run out of Hong Kong after Lee's death, but obviously, she eventually returned to get naked again.

It's too bad the plot of Stoner isn't as wild as the Bruce Lee conspiracy. Maybe Oliver Stone (quite a well known stoner) should sink his teeth into that one next. Anyway, I digress yet again. Stoner. Stoner is a man with a mission, and that mission is to wear flared slacks and wave his arms wildly at his opponents. I guess this is supposed to be kungfu, though I have seen orangutans do something similar. I've also seen Jimmy Wang Yu do it, but he is the master of waving his arms angrily in the face of his opponent. Stoner gets to hand out beat-downs like the star of an Italian cop film. All in all, Lazenby is believable enough as a tough guy. He has a tough guy mustache (on loan from Maurizio Merli), so that makes him believable, though not in the same league as other masters of mustache toughness (the two biggest masters being Merli and Franco Nero).

Lazenby, of course, is no stranger to ass whuppin' Asian style. A slightly more out of shape Lazenby would later co-star with Lee Van Cleef, who was even more out of shape than Lazenby, in an episode of the critically acclaimed (I'm pretty sure, but not entirely certain about that acclaim) television series Master Ninja. I think Lazenby might have climbed a wall or something in that episode. Luckily, he's a lot more active here, strolling around and casually beating up people who deserve to get beaten up.

Angela Mao gets involved in things as a mysterious agent working to crack the same case as Stoner. She gets to show off some quality Angela Mao kungfu ass-kicking but is really just a supporting cast member. Still, any chance to see Ms. Mao in action is a treat. But Lazenby is the star here, even though he doesn't speak the language. I spent half this movie trying to figure out if it was a Hong Kong or British production, and in the end I decided it was both. It was England's way of repaying Hong Kong for loaning them Ti Lung to appear in Shatter.

This movie has everything you expect from a 1970s goofball action film. The bad guys live in a Holiday Inn or something, complete with lots of mirrors, thrones, revolving platforms, and secret doors. Who do you get to build these things? Is there a special super villain contractor that specializes in secret caves and futuristic fortresses? Everyone is dressed gaudily. The bad guys are really bad, and the good guys are tough as nails. I will have to watch it again to check, but I think the movie does lack a midget henchman, which is surprising. Maybe there was one in there. I will have to watch again to see.

As if all that isn't enough to send you searching for this doggie treat of a film, Sammo Hung stars as a character who was probably called "Thug Number Two" in the credits.

Quite honestly, I dig Stoner. It's a totally ridiculous, goofy movie. The fashion is bad. There's trippy drug scenes and go-go dancing hippies and Betty Ting Pei in a see-through nighty. There's George Lazenby muttering and going "Hmmm? Mmmm." over and over. There's Angela Mao showing up every twenty minutes to kick everyone's ass. All the sets look like airport lounges. Since I'm a mark for both Mao and Lazenby, it was great to see them fighting evil together.

I mean, we're not talking masterpiece here, people, but in the right frame of mind, Stoner is one of the most enjoyable action flicks you can see. It's definitely become one of my favorites, and everyone I've made watch it with me has walked away a smiling fan afterwards. Stoner. Remember his name. When you smash through a window, think of Stoner. When you dole out two-fisted beat-downs to a gang of dope peddling thugs, think of Stoner. When you get a smug look, stroke your chin, and go, "Hmmm? Hmmmm. Mmm," think of Stoner.

Labels: Country: Hong Kong, Martial Arts: Kungfu, Year: 1972

posted by Keith at 5:31 PM | 0 Comments

Wednesday, January 03, 2001

Gymkata

1985, United States. Starring Kurt Thomas, Tetchie Agbayani, Richard Norton, Edward Bell, John Barrett, Conan Lee, Bob Schott, Buck Kartalian, Eric Lawson, Sonny Barnes, Tadashi Yamashita. Directed by Robert Clouse. Buy it from Amazon.

Lately, I've been curating (at least in my own mind), a retrospective film series entitled "The Most Important Films of the Reagan Era." This ongoing series, which is currently in regular rotation in my living room and not really anywhere else (museums and arthouse theaters -- call me) eschews the predictable mainstream Oscar winners of the decade and focuses instead on forgotten, obscure, and misunderstood, preferably ones in which ninjas spit spikey jacks into gangsters' faces. The series includes most of the films that I feel defined the decade, or at least defined me during that decade. Streets of Fire, Conan the Barbarian, Red Dawn, Flash Gordon, Commando, Howling II, Breakin', Krull -- the roster is deep, to say the least, and even the bench warmers could be starters on any other team.

If you are familiar either with me or with my work on this site, it probably comes as no shock that I rank Gymkata as one of the most valuable players on this amazing and occasionally sparkly team. I've been pushing this movie on people for decades, armed at first with little more than my cherished VHS copy in it's oversized gray MGM/UA box. Since then, and much to my delight, Gymkata has become a touchstone of pop culture references. People know it, even if they haven't seen it, and knowing, as you know, is half the battle. And while some people get irritated when something they've been name-dropping for years suddenly gets embraced by the larger mainstream non-mainstream society (Chuck Norris karate jeans being the most recent example), I bear no ill will toward those who are late in coming to Gymkata. Lord knows there are plenty of things for which I showed up late. I don't consider it to be some secret to be guarded jealously and to the death by fanatic soldiers armed with weird masks, AK-47s, and scimitars. As far as I'm concerned, the more people who have the word "gymkata" on their lips, the better.

I saw Gymkata when it first made the rounds on cable television, a glorious belle epoque during which you could expect to see Beastmaster, Revenge of the Ninja, and Sword and the Sorcerer on an almost daily basis -- and in fact, you would even enjoy watching them on a daily basis. I didn't know a whole lot about the sort of films I would one day grow to obsess about -- or at least, I didn't know about them as a viable academic field of study where one could obtain a PhD from a number of unaccredited but well-respected institutions of higher learning located in the various former Soviet republics. I knew it was something special then, and even when I went through that phase where I was discovering Hong Kong action films and thus turning my nose up at anything from the United States, Gymkata remained entirely free from criticism. The world of American-made martial arts films has never been a bastion of quality filmmaking or fight choreography. And yet, I am mysteriously drawn to them. Like bloody scenes of carnage as I pass by a car wreck on the interstate, no matter how hard I try, I cannot avert my eyes from films like Marked for Death or any of the eleven thousand Bolo Yeung films that were made during the 1980s. I could seek counseling, try to find help for this problem I have, for my vast knowledge of Dale "Apollo" Cook films or ability to recount the plots, however thin, of Don "The Dragon" Wilson's five hundred or so Bloodfist films. I can't remember which Friday the 13th is which after part three, yet I can tell you all about Bloodfist IV: Die Trying.

But in the end, no counseling need be sought. These days, I have made my peace with American martial arts films, accepting that I like them just because I like them, and not trying to justify in any ironic "so bad they're good" way. At the end of the day, even though the acting is terrible and the martial arts are often worse, I just like them. And I think I first contracted this affliction in the mid 1980s after watching Gymkata, even if it remained in a dormant state throughout the early half of the 1990s when I was busy getting hip to Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung. Gymkata absolutely enthralled me. I mean, here was a movie that was bad. Really bad. No one else in the world but me liked it, let alone continued to watch it and recommend it to people, who invariably come back to me with looks of anger permanently etched upon their faces. Doubters to a man, and who was proven right in the end? Now, in the era of DVD and throw-away pop culture references, we have become legion enough that, during a public vote held through Amazon, MGM found themselves compelled by the voices of freedom, democracy, and anyone who likes pommel horse fight scenes to put Gymkata out on DVD. Now, instead of being met with curious glances and mutters of, “He seemed like such a nice boy,” when I profess my love for Gymkata, people instead rally round me, and clad in Haggar comfort-fit slacks and nylon windbreakers, we run through the streets in victory, stopping only when we see a set of parallel bars on which we need to swing and twirl about.

The action of Gymkata revolves around 1984 Olympic Gold Medal Gymnast Kurt Thomas -- or so we assumed him to be. Honestly, I can't remember if Kurt ever won gold, but we always assumed he did and thus referred to him as such. In retrospect, he might not have even been on the 1984 Olympic gymnastics team. Does it really matter, I mean to anyone except people who are interested in the basic concepts of factual accuracy and journalistic fundamentals? In Gymkata, he plays a gymnast (wow!), in much the same way that 1984 Olympic Gold Medal Gymnast Mitch Gaylord (now I'm pretty sure he did win gold in 1984 -- but mostly I'm just sure that for months after that, it was common to homophobically insult someone by calling them a "Mitch Gay-lord") played a gymnast in his one and only film (that I know of), American Anthem. Now if you want to see a bad gymnastics movie, there's your movie for the night.

The government recruits 1984 Olympic Gold Medal Gymnast Kurt Thomas to compete in a deadly