Hong Kong Cinema

[Finch]

Screen Daily says Twilight of the Warriors will get a 60s set prequel and a 1993 set sequel. The UK rights for the current film are with CineAsia.

[Mr Sausage]

King Boxer (Chung Chang-Wha, 1972)

I first saw this years ago under the title Five Fingers of Death. It’s supposedly the film that kicked off the kung fu craze in the West, and it’s not hard to believe: the movie is effective pulp entertainment, a simple story with classical themes made with colour, verve, and a certain amount of schlock. It’s weird the movie works as well as it does, because it’s not exceptional. There isn’t King Hu’s artistry, Chang Cheh’s grim violence and soaring martial valour, Lau Kar-Leung’s humour and humanity, or Bruce Lee’s prowess. The fights are ably but not impressively choreographed, and the story of rival schools fighting for supremacy was a long-standing convention even at the time. Yet it’s not merely nostalgia glasses propping up the movie’s reputation. Even amidst all the other kung fu films from the era I’ve been watching, the movie stands out. It just works—it’s such a solid, skillful execution of the usual material, and sometimes that’s enough to make a masterpiece even when the elements in themselves are unexceptional. King Boxer is even now a great crowd pleaser. Also, I love how in Chinese medicine the cure for multiple fractures of the metacarpals is a dried herb mixture followed by a light bandaging, mostly to cover the herbs.

(As an aside: what an odd choice of leading man Lo Lieh is, with that odd, bug-eyed face of his and unimpressive physique. He has charisma, especially when it comes to projecting intensity, but it’s the charisma of a character actor rather than a leading man. This is not a criticism; he’s good in this and every other role I’ve seen him in. His gritty looks and particular intensity work for this kind of movie. It’s just so out of step with the usual leading man of the era, eg. Ti Lung, Philip Kwok, or Bruce Lee.)


The Boxer From Shantung (Chang Cheh & Hsueh-Li Pao, 1972)

A gangster melodrama, unexpectedly enough, but a flabby one. It’s not the kind of flabbiness that's easily cut down, either, as it comes less from extraneous scenes than scenes being longer than they need to be: dialogue scenes are full of multiple unnecessary pauses and back-and-forth reaction shots, or multiple back-and-forth shots of people laughing or grimacing at each other. So many scenes are dragged out. Take the scene with the Russian wrestler, which makes its point that the Russian is a gigantic and formidable opponent within 30 seconds, yet still goes on show him fight an additional two guys before the hero takes up the challenge, meaning we watch him fight four separate people one after another, with three of them ending the exact same way. The result is a sludgy, overlong movie in no hurry to advance its meagre material: a poor boy’s rise to power and inevitable fall among gangsters in Shanghai. But it does have a number of things going for it: while its gangster story is conventional, there’s some novelty of seeing it in a kung fu setting normally dominated by stories of revenge, rival schools, or political squabbles. The sets, costumes, and photography are all first rate in Shaw’s usual manner. And the fights are frequent, bloody, and full of exciting choreography (there is more emphasis on swiftness and brutality than contrasting styles and artful posing). There are stretches where this is a fun movie. If it had been pacier, thirty minutes shorter, and with fewer pretensions to importance, this would’ve been a terrific Shaw actioner. Basically, this Kung Fu Scarface ought’ve been more like Hawks and less like De Palma, ie. fleet, efficient, and brutal, instead of over-styled, endless, and exhausting, with an outrageously violent finale to cap all its excesses.


Chinatown Kid (Chang Cheh, 1977)

A rare contemporary set film for Chang. A more rough and ready one, too, with its hand-held cameras and location shooting--at least in the Hong Kong sections. Once we move to San Francisco, the movie becomes more set-bound and the camera locked down in the usual Shaw way. The fights are composed more like Boxer From Shantung, or indeed Bruce Lee’s work, with quick brutal movements, and no style contrasts or dance like exchanges of attacks and parries. There isn’t much of a story, just a series of run-ins between Alexander Fu Sheng’s country boy and gangsters on both sides of the Pacific. Like The Boxer From Shantung, this is a more character focused, less fight-heavy film, but one with a better sense of pace and momentum. I’ve never paid Alexander Fu Sheng much attention, but he shines as this bumbling, kinda dim country bumpkin who’s impulsive, quick to anger, but decent. I can almost see why he became a popular star. A pre-Venoms Philip Kwok and Lo Meng show up as the heavies, and it’s weird to see them in bell bottoms, turtle necks and platform shoes. Chang’s usual themes of brotherhood, loyalty, idealism, and a fascination with bodily mortification that slips into the erotic, are largely absent. Materialism and the ravages of capitalism, especially how it affects disadvantaged populations, is the main theme. Chang handles the melodrama well, and shows his usual interest in male camaraderie, here between the country boy and a Taiwanese international student struggling to balance the demands of work and school. Their early interactions while enduring their mutual poverty are highlights. Both men are eventually corrupted in their own ways, despite their better intentions, and it’s their failures as reflected in each other’s eyes that jars them into a better sense of how far they’ve strayed. Even with its imperfections, this is one of Chang’s better films.

[Maltic]

I appreciate these (extended) capsule reviews, Sausage.

effective pulp entertainment, a simple story with classical themes made with colour, verve, and a certain amount of schlock. It’s weird the movie works as well as it does, because it’s not exceptional.

So one might say King Boxer is Hong Kong's Casablanca.

[Mr Sausage]

Lau Kar-Leung

Of the three big Kung Fu directors of the era, King Hu, Chang Cheh, and Lau Kar-Leung, Lau is the most likeable. For Lau, martial arts are not just a form of action and excitement, nor a proving ground for martial values, but an ethics, a philosophy, and a way of life. He is the most humane of the three, a man who despairs of violence and death, and who feels in his bones that the martial arts provide discipline and wisdom rather than effective forms of asserting power. He is gentle and caring towards his characters, and while he can work in a tragic, even apocalyptic mode as in the brilliant 8 Diagram Pole Fighter, he prefers a nurturing and sympathetic mode of action filmaking where bloodshed is minimal and what people learn mostly is how to be decent. While he doesn't aspire to King Hu's type of artistry, his best films stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the best of Hu. Chang Cheh (tho' I'm far from seeing all his stuff) at least on the basis of his most well regarded work hasn't made a single film to rival either Hu or Lau. Chang's achievement is more in the aggregate, the total form of his ouvre, and that allows him to stand with the other two. But Lau's best films are astonishing indeed. And of the three directors, he has the best choreography, is indeed a master of fight design. He finds clarity and comprehensibility in the wildest bawling. On the other hand, he's a more tendentious filmmaker than either Chang or Hu. His films are full of lessons. What saves them from a tedious stuffiness is his grace and humour. He wears his lessons lightly, and uses that light comic touch to avoid beating the viewer about the head with his lessons. Lau may be my favourite director of old school kung fu. It's hard to emphasize what a delight it was to watch all these for the first time.


Challenge of the Masters (1976)

More focused on character development and martial philosophy than either Chang or Hu. Like 36th Chamber of Shaolin, this is in effect a buildungsroman, where a young man’s passion and anger is transfigured through martial arts into constructive, controlled emotions. It traces his path to maturity using that most male of tropes, the mentor figure whose kindliness is hidden behind a tough exterior. That focus on martial arts as emotional and spiritual development means this movie is far less about fighting. Fighting forms a part of it, and there are fight scenes sprinkled throughout; but the fights are brief and serve a purely character purpose. The movie’s philosophy boils down to a maxim: “More forgiveness, less aggression”. Wong Fei-Hung learns mercy and compassion, to defeat people through the strength of his character rather than his fury. This is a far more idealistic movie, and makes a nice contrast to Chang’s bloodthirstiness and Hu’s webs of deception and betrayal.


Executioners from Shaolin (1977)

Tackles the same historical situation as Chang’s Five Shaolin Masters: the burning of the Shaolin Temple by the Qings (here led by the villainous Pai Mei), and the scattering of the disciples across China, where they form cells intent on rebellion. The films open in the same manner, too, with the disciples in mid-escape as the temple burns. Lau’s version is less tragic and hopeless, showing far more humour and hijinks and a less despairing situation. There’s plenty of time for love stories and comic relief, while the opening diaspora has more heroism and less slaughter. Lau also narrows his focus to one disciple and the family life he builds while pursuing revenge—a stark contrast to Chang’s focus on a whole group of disciples, none of whom had time for anything beyond training and revenge. Lau’s film has a lot more room for life, making it a charming experience. I liked the family dynamics of the middle where we get all sorts of domestic martial arts: laundry fu, dinner fu, and a peculiar training method involving a copper statue of a man with rivets down which run large ball bearings. And I’m enjoying Lau’s stylistic trait of putting the opening credits over fights in abstract spaces, like this one set in a completely scarlet non-space.


Dirty Ho (1979)

I expected to enjoy his fight scenes, but what’s surprising is how much I’m enjoying Lau’s comedy. He has a gentle, good natured style of comedy, light on mugging and shouting, that’s pleasant to watch. Normally I groan inwardly when I see the movie is really a kung fu comedy, but not with Lau—with Lau, I grin. I’m so used to Gordon Liu being serious and stoic that there was an added pleasure to see him so cheeky and prankish. And each fight plays out an intricate comic scenario that transforms it into something novel, a small comedic story full of ideas and movements unavailable to regular fights. My favourite is the wine tasting that’s also a secret kung fu battle, with the three opponents trying hard to look like they’re serving and drinking rather than fighting. Dirty Ho is wonderful, the best old school kung fu film I’ve seen since the masterpieces of King Hu.


Heroes of the East (1978)

A cross cultural kung fu romantic comedy. Gordon Liu has an arranged marriage to a Japanese martial arts fanatic. Their refusal to understand or respect each other’s traditions ruptures the marriage, sending Liu on a quest to defeat Japanese masters to get her back. The story is a showcase for Lau’s genial comedy, sense of humanity, choreographical prowess, and a level of cultural respect rare for a Hong Kong movie. A story about how ego and arrogance gets in the way of cultural exchange. Lau does tend to give Chinese martial arts the home field advantage.


8 Diagram Pole Fighter (1984)

A grimmer, more tragic, but thunderously alive martial arts film from Lau. It’s invigorating to see Lau working in a high style, where the passions are elevated and the style and themes lofty. This is an exciting political and spiritual drama about the fall of a great house, and a survivor’s attempt to grapple with his grief and regain some kind of balance. Lau does not attempt his usual spiritual idealism; his hero is forced to confront the absence of Buddhism in his heart, the impossibility of ever finding balance and absence in a monastery, because the world of strife and change is his proper place. This is a more violent, blood soaked film for Lau, but not as in Chang Cheh where the violence is transformative and holy, a martyrdom of the physical self on the altar of an ideal. Also unlike Chang, who kept the same pace and style of choreography well into the 80s, Lau responded to the HK New Wave with a more frenetic, breathlessly paced, yet still identifiably Lau style of choreography. For example, it has Lau’s usual symbolic, semi-abstract fight scene over the credits, but rather than a pseudo-demonstration between two fighters, it’s an extensive battle full of such wild intensity that it outdoes most climaxes. For sheer excitement and emotional fervour, this is one of the greatest martial arts movies ever made.


Legendary Weapons of China (1982)

Lau working in a fantastical vein. There’s a lot more mugging and wacky humour than 70s works like Dirty Ho and Heroes of the East. Some of the comic bits worked in their sheer creativity, but others, like Alexander Fu Shung’s clowning, had my attention flagging. Maybe it was the effect of just having seen the brilliant 8 Diagram Pole Fighter, but I wasn’t as in to this one. It was more inconsistent, alternating creativity and excitement (the attic and alley fights) with tedium (the street performance and outhouse fight). And the plot was a haphazard mishmash loosely structured around a guy various people want to kill. And I think I liked this concept more in Heroes of the East. Incredible fights, though.


Mad Monkey Kung Fu (1979)

Lau mixes his comedy with much darker material as a nobleman tricks a beautiful Peking opera performer into being his concubine and cripples her brother’s hands so he can’t use his kung fu, forcing him to become a street performer to stay alive. Lau combines a revenge plot with his customary training-of-the-apprentice plot, as the brother trains a young, energetic thief and conman in the art of monkey kung fu to help carry out his revenge (a plot reminiscent of Dirty Ho). There is still plenty of broad comedy, especially given the training involves teaching the thief to act like a monkey; but the undercurrent is tortured, with the crippled man plainly suffering from PTSD, and his sister in sex slavery. Pretty odd for this to be the structure on which a slapstick kung fu comedy is built, but so goes Hong Kong. I thought Dirty Ho was basically a perfect kung fu film, so a longer, sillier, more fraught elaboration isn’t an improvement. As likeable and entertaining as the movie is, it’s unlikely to become a favourite.


My Young Auntie (1981)

A charming screwball musical comedy heist film with a surprisingly complicated set of themes involving generational and cultural clashes. There’s a lot of ingenuity, with Lau treating every scenario as a space in which to play. First, this is basically a musical, with the intricate choreography of HK fight scenes growing out of, or serving the same function as, traditional song-and-dance numbers. This is a conventional observation of HK martial arts films, but it’s deliberate in Lau’s case, especially in how he’ll include musical numbers that will shift organically into fights without losing the same frothy, high spirited tone; or his use of western style dress and iconography, especially during the big dance party, to bring to mind old Hollywood. When Kara Wai turns up at the end sporting blonde curls, a sequined dress with ruffles, and a yellow parasol, it’s not only part of the East vs West theme. She also looks like she walked right out of a Hollywood musical. While the final 30 minutes become a more conventional, albeit incredible, martial arts film, this is explained by Kara Hui getting appendicitis, forcing the film to sideline both her and the musical comedy. Up till then, tho’, this is a parade of music, comedy, and action all mixed together. A highlight: Kara Wai’s country bumpkin succumbing to curiosity and adopting modern dress, only to find herself having to fight in high heals and an even higher cut cheongsam, each kick not only tottering but increasingly immodest. But the show stopper is the mid-film costume party, where everyone sings western songs and does western dances, all got up like Robin Hood (Errol Flynn version naturally), the Three Musketeers, and Juliet (no Romeos that I could see), only for some ruffians also dressed like Musketeers, albeit with real swords, to crash the party and turn the dancing into comedic fights of intricate invention and dance-like grace (my favourite bit involves a set of banisters hopped around and then slid down). It’s such a marvellous film, a real showcase for Lau’s humane sense of comedy and action and his knack for creative staging and direction. The polar opposite of his masterpiece 8 Diagram Pole Fighter and, I would say, a masterpiece to equal it. An overlooked gem in Lau’s filmography.


Martial Club (1981)

A story of warring martial arts schools, but an offbeat one in how far it pushes not at righteous battles between good and evil, but the necessity of fairness, respect, and humility. However exciting, every fight in this movie is a failure and a teaching moment, not a righteous outcome. So while there’s one bad clan led by a petty man, the movie is novel in placing an outsider and new recruit within the school to act as the bad school’s conscience, as it were, while still possessing skills enough to be an authority. It also makes the antics of Gordon Liu, Kara Wai, and Mai Te-Lo responsible for some of the enmity through their egos and immaturity. The movie is a lesson in martial ethics rather than martial valour, done with Lau’s usual humour and grace, plus his dense fight choreography that prefer skill to violence. Lau’s ethics have to carry the movie, tho’, as there isn’t any plot, just a series of occurances, some comic and some serious, arising from the basic situation. This also has two of the greatest fight scenes in kung fu history: the opera house brawl (how can something so chaotic be so coherent?) and the alley way fight, where the alley gets narrower and narrower as the fighters become more brick busting in their movements.


Return to the 36th Chamber (1980)

Here’s a surprise: the film starts as a left-wing critique of capitalist labour practises, with an exploited work force whom the bosses conspire against to lower their wages, and then use strike breakers to violently suppress the workers’ attempt to strike. Gordon Liu plays a new character, a grifter pretending to be a shaolin monk who finds he has to learn from the real thing in order to deal with these labour disputes. Oddly, another actor plays the character Liu played in the original, with Liu’s character at one point impersonating the character Liu’d previously portrayed. This is a very childish comedy in a way usual for HK (if you love characters mugging with ludicrous fake teeth, this’ll be a treat), but not for Lau, whose comedy is rarely this broad. But then he must’ve had this side to him, because the later Martial Arts of Shaolin and Tiger on Beat were stuffed with unbelievably crass broad comedy. The movie essentially burlesques the first one, with a bumbling Gordon Liu scamming and tricking his way through the 36 chambers of the original while suffering endless punishments and comedic set backs. There’s some novelty in how Gordon Liu finds work-arounds for all the training and techniques he isn’t able to do, and the leftist in me was tickled by the labour dispute plot; but this is mostly a weird, unsatisfying sequel.


Disciples of the 36th Chamber (1985)

Gordon Liu returns to his breakout role after playing someone else in the last one, but he’s a supporting character to Hsiao Ho’s Fong Sai-Yuk, a semi-historical folk hero; and because it’s Hsiao Ho playing him, the film is crammed with the same manic comedy that plagued Return and Mad Monkey Kung Fu. I quickly tired of Fong Sai-Yuk’s antics. He’s such a selfish, self-righteous, irresponsible prick, but the movie loves him so much it holds back on forcing him to learn any lessons. A weak film for Lau, with one great brawl at the end being its sole bright spot.


The Lady is the Boss (1983)

This is Lau’s contemporary set re-do of My Young Auntie with a plot straight out of a sitcom: the old kung fu school is being demolished to build a highway, and the new school needs the old master, now living in America, to come and break the seals before opening. Who turns up but master’s loud, Americanized daughter. This is a very 80s comedy, from the spandex, to the upbeat synths, to the pervy attitudes and uncomfortable jokes. Sample humour: out to promote their school, the group comes across a fatal traffic accident in which the bodies are being pulled from the wreckage, and tells the onsite news reporter that, hey, if the drivers’ had learned kung fu, maybe they’d’ve had better reflexes! All jauntily edited to an upbeat score like these are just whimsical pranks. Or how all the new women students turn out to be local prostitutes who use their newfound skills to beat up their johns (this is followed by a scene where they try it on their pimp and get the shit kicked out of them in a moment of straight up brutality). The fights are often lighthearted and full of 80s iconography, like the dance club fight, the BMX fight, the disco strobe light ambush, or the gym brawl with those tiny shorts. Despite all the crassness and boundary-pushing, this is a still a conservative comedy about the value of tradition and the need for the old ways. With more boobs and fewer Chinese, this could’ve been one of Svet’s favourite films! The movie’s actually kind of amusing, but inadvertently amusing; it’s not the jokes that make you laugh, it’s the unadulterated cliches and the fact that kung fu legends like Kara Wai, Gordon Liu, and Lau Kar-Leung are doing them. There are some throwbacks to other Lau films, with Gordon Liu becoming his character from The 36th Chamber of Shaolin and Hsiao Ho doing some Monkey kung fu, but all it did was put me in mind of better films. This is a lame movie from Lau and several steps down from the wonderful My Young Auntie.


Tiger on Beat 2 (1990)

Another HK “sequel” that is really just another movie in the same vein. Conan Lee is back, but as a completely different character, named “Buffalo” for some reason; Danny Lee takes the Chow Yun-Fat role, and Gordon Liu returns as the villain. The rest is the same: Conan Lee is wild and always fighting, Lee is straight-laced and trying to keep up. The action isn’t quite as good as the original, but neither is the humour quite as tedious. Mostly it's dull for long stretches while little happens. If this film is remembered at all, it’s for a stunt gone wrong that sent Conan Lee to the hospital for weeks after he failed to grab hold of the lamp post after leaping towards it from an overpass, leading him to plummet straight to the concrete. The movie not only keeps in the failed stunt, but shows it twice, once in slow motion. It’s crazy indeed.

[Mr Sausage]

Chor Yuen

Chor Yuen is an interesting talent. He has a particular style, one dreamier, more gothic, and more carnal than his peers, with greater emphasis on atmosphere, costuming, and set design. He's able to conjure an atmosphere of delirium, where seemingly anything could happen, and just as easily produce schlock and sleaze when he wants to. The style is particular enough that I can imagine it grating after a while. But so far I've found him a refreshing voice.



Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan (1971)

Sometimes an elegant costume drama, sometimes a murder mystery, sometimes a trashy exploitation flick, sometimes a good old wuxia. The music has a similar heterogeneity: traditional Chinese strings abut wailing guitars and lurid jazz saxophones. I loved the delicacy and beauty of Yuen’s direction, the wonderful colours, tender close ups, and all the flowers, silks, screens, and jewelry--and I was amused at how it sat right next to torrid sleaze and dated stereotypes (the sadistic lesbian madam, the black widow courtesan, the ineffectual white knight hero). This is a gorgeous piece of nonsense. But there’s also a psychedelic element that comes out from time to time, with this dreamy or even funky score, repeated crash zooms, and heady atmosphere that suggests a kind of wildness or instability. But what’s striking about the film isn’t really the style or violence, but its lesbian romance. In terms of the story and many of the details, it’s your usual exploitation, with the madam being a sadistic exploiter of the girls in her charge. But the sheer passion and emotional intensity Chor Yuen imbues the central romance with is so strong you come to forget how the romance started and even where it’s so obviously going. I even started rooting for the couple in spite of things; there’s something so persuasive about the love story that isn’t there in the early sleaze, and that definitely isn’t there between Lily Ho and her erstwhile pursuer/saviour, Yueh Hua. No sparks fly at all in the heterosexual pairing, but Lily Ho and Betty Pei Ti light up the screen. It’s surprising how much more explicit and open homosexual content can be in movies from societies that are ostensibly more conservative. There’s a lot going on in this movie, and nearly all of it’s successful.


Killer Clans (1976)

Tho’ the set up is simple, two rival clans warring for supremacy, the plot moves at a blistering pace, with a large number of characters and a seemingly endless series of plots, counter plots, betrayals, and secrets. I didn’t always know who was doing what and why, but the excitement of all those plots and reversals was a constant. I enjoyed its vision of power struggle as an insanity of paranoia, unstable realities, and endless strife. That said, the film’s conception of loyalty is completely insane, as if to counter the endless backstabbing the filmmakers have conceived a devotion that amounts to slavery in its total self-abnegation.


The Magic Blade (1976)

Yuen imbues the story with the atmosphere of a horror film: gothic and ominious, with a touch of delirium where reality seems at a slant. The film is never explicitly supernatural, but conjures an otherworldly, mystical feeling that often leaves you unprepared for what’s going to happen. There are a number of visually striking set pieces, such as the opening night-time fight bathed in red, underworld meetings set in a kind of abstract other place, all black and hung with veils, and a restaurant of unnatural stillness that’s revealed to be populated by corpses. I get the impression Chor Yuen had been watching Mario Bava (and Sergio Leone, apparently, given Ti Lung’s poncho and quick draw sword). This particular sense of style does so much to elevate material that any other director would’ve played straight, turning out a competent, anonymous Shaw actioner in place of Yuen’s feverish, gothic nightmare. A fun, offbeat experience.


Web of Death (1976)

If The Magic Blade showed the influence of Bava, this one resembles Roger Corman, especially its opening clan meeting in a mullti-level gothic dungeon, all stone, lit with greens, reds, and purples and dominated by huge fake spiders with jeweled eyes. Plus the fact that the titular web of death is a glowing tarantula that trumpets like an elephant and shoots multi-coloured lazers at people, leaving them burnt and covered with webs. There are a lot of fantastical elements: the lady who rides across a lake on a tree branch she guides with her flute, a mystical crypt full of Indiana Jones style traps, staff rocket launchers, sorcerers who shoot lightning from their hands. This is on the wilder end of kung fu, and all the better for it as the characters and basic plot (a bunch of clans trying to get an ultimate weapon) aren’t very interesting. So fights full of lazers, poison bombs, and acid vats were welcome given how much of the movie involves endless coincidences and those contrived misunderstandings that could be cleared up in seconds if characters explained themselves instead of endlessly repeating “you have to listen to me!” or some variation.


Full Moon Scimitar (1979)

A gaudy folk tale. A rising swordsman, tricked into sullying his family name, is drawn into the underworld of ghosts and spirits, where he romances a fox spirit and learns the skills to reclaim his family honour. There’s more focus on Chinese culture, folklore and poetry especially, than most kung fu movies from the era. Even for Shaw Brothers, Chor Yuen’s set designs are uncommonly gorgeous. This charming fantasy makes a good pairing with Legend of the Mountain and A Chinese Ghost Story.

[andyli]

Chor Yuen, not Yeun.

[Mr Sausage]

Hmm. Don't know what happened there. I spelt his name correctly all through the reviews themselves. Anyway, fixed.

[Mr Sausage]

Ringo Lam


City on Fire (1987)

A blistering portrait of Hong Kong in all its dirty splendour. The bars, clubs, and cafes are conventional to urban crime thrillers, but Hong Kong is especially suited to them, and Lam makes the most of his extensive location shooting to show a crowded, rushing urban life full of grime and neon. You feel Chow Yun-Fat’s sweaty desperation as he rushes about Hong Kong trying to keep his precarious life from spiraling out altogether. This is not a blood soaked, bullet ballet heroic bloodshed film, this is a nervy crime thriller, and most of the action is tense or brutal, without any chance for heroics. The people here are just trying to keep one step ahead of disaster. Given all the discourse these days about copaganda, it’s interesting how often Hong Kong movies refuse to valourize the police. Here, they’re squabbling and incommunicative, frequently powerless, ready to commit human rights abuses, and more concerned about their petty fiefdoms than upholding justice. Tho’ Chow Yun-Fat plays an undercover detective, it’s his fellow officers rather than the gang of thieves who are the bad guys. If the film has a flaw, it’s that its jittery narrative doesn’t give enough time to developing Chow Yun-Fat and Danny Lee’s relationship, instead trying to shove a movie’s worth of developing camaraderie into the final thirty minutes. I liked the movie when I saw it back in high school, but I was watching it under the shadow of John Woo, and part of me was disappointed it wasn’t a heroic bloodshed tale full of intense shootouts. Now I’m able to see Lam’s film without that baggage, on its own terms, and I loved it. It’s an exhilarating movie.


Replicant (2001)

The plot is phenomenally stupid: Jean-Claude Van Damme is a serial killer, and in order to catch him the government clones him and pairs the clone, who’s mildly psychic, with Michael Rooker’s cop in the hopes that this will somehow let them catch the killer. Yes, this is the third time in his career Van Damme is playing twins (the fourth if you count Timecop). I like Van Damme’s films with Tsui and Woo, but his work with Lam has never been that interesting. You can’t even tell Lam did those movies; his style and themes are nowhere to be found. The filmmaking here is better than usual for a DTV action film, but not enough for me to guess that Ringo Lam had anything to do with it. Seems Lam was more JCVD’s director for hire than the driving force on set.


In Hell (2003)

Van Damme is not a forward looking action star. He’s been trying to return to his glory days since at least the mid 90s. There have been his various attempts to redo Bloodsport (eg. The Quest), his three Universal Soldier sequels, his recent Kickboxer reboot series, his three identical twin movies--and this, his second attempt at Death Warrant. Van Damme is sent to a Russian prison after murdering the man who’d killed his wife. While this kind of bleak look at failed institutions is solidly in Ringo Lam’s wheelhouse—indeed he did a prison movie himself, the enjoyable Prison on Fire--he blunts his message by setting it in Russia, othering the institution and playing into western expectations rather than holding them up for examination. In Hell may be considerably more brutal and hopeless than Prison on Fire, but it’s less disturbing. There was a lot of humanity in Prison on Fire for the systemic failures to crush, and a lot of pretense to humaneness when the system is anything but. Here, as expected, the system has no failings; it’s doing what it was designed to do: brutalize people openly and capriciously. But there’s also a streak of sentimentality Lam’s earlier film did not have. So for all its brutality and callousness, this is a less despairing movie than Lam’s ...On Fire series. This is also a Bloodsport redo, as the prison has an underground fighting ring. Don’t be fooled like I was into expecting that Van Damme means a fun, exciting DTV martial arts prison film like the Undisputed franchise. No, this is a dour, unenjoyable movie with little in the way of martial arts. Yep, they made Van Damme your average blue collar guy without much fight training. This has none of the energy and excitement of Lam’s Hong Kong work. Undisputed 2 is pretty much the exact same movie and it’s way more entertaining (and has Scott Adkins in his prime). Watch that instead.


Full Alert (1997)

One of Lam’s grimmer movies, full of people trapped in their own anger and trauma, with Hong Kong as a maze that cannot be escaped. Despite the conventional violence of its action plot, the movie is skeptical of the worth of violent action. While it’s conventional for the good and bad guy to share an odd bond despite their opposition, here their bond is founded on mutual trauma, with both men hagridden by the guilt and shame at having killed another human being. Murder is another trap in this movie, whatever side of the law it’s done on. Each murder in the film takes on a fatalistic importance, dooming characters to further unwanted violence even as they are wracked and haunted by their actions. You see the characters compelled by circumstance and poor choices to sink into their worser selves, consumed by fear, anger, desperation, and hopelessness. The finale, a horrorshow of people casting off every humane impulse that had held their flaws in check, is the angriest I’ve ever seen Lam, the most fatalistic and even nihilistic. I’m wary of reducing the subtext of every Hong Kong film to the handover, but it’s impossible not to read Lam’s film as a final disgusted look at Hong Kong as an angry, violent place of dirt, venality, and crime where institutions are collapsing and escape is finally impossible. Whatever fleeting hope there might have been that Hong Kong could somehow avert, circumvent, or wriggle out of its fate is gone forever. Bleak and unpleasant as the movie is, tho', it’s also exciting and energetic, with Lam’s customary excellence at capturing the gritty essence of the city of Hong Kong. Frankly Lam is at his best in films like these: angry, vulgar, roughly made stories of trapped, desperate people. He had a feeling for that material that filled his movies with excitement. In style and tone, this is a really a Milky Way movie before Milky Way had even got going. Johnnie To could’ve easily directed (or ghost directed) this movie at the time, tho’ he no doubt would’ve made something less bleak and more prankish. But Lam managed to capture the essence of what Milky Way would make their house style during the late 90s. Lam in many ways set the tenor for HK crime films in the post handover period.


Undeclared War (1990)

An international political thriller starring Olivia Hussey and Vernon Wells, alongside Lam regulars Danny Lee and Rosamund Kwan. In style and tone, the film resembles cold war thrillers of the time, except for a tell-tale rhythm and gusto to the action that signals a Hong Kong director. Indeed, the opening church shootout is brilliant, a familiar mixture of explosive momentum, perfect timing, and ridiculousness. The plot itself is a riff on Nighthawks, with Vernon Wells in the Rutger Hauer role (complete with a platinum blonde dye job), Peter Liapis in the Sylvester Stallone role as a CIA agent on the trail of terrorists in Hong Kong, and Danny Lee as a Hong Kong police inspector forced to deal with all the gweilo bullshit. The movie is inconsistent and often clumsy. It has trouble keeping track of its characters—Hussey, Wells, and Kwan disappear for long stretches—and the thriller plot spins in circles for much of the movie, with its villains having unclear plans and motivations. Indeed, both Kwan and Hussey’s characters are superfluous to the story. The film needed a tighter script and fewer action cliches. Yet, for all that, the movie’s terrifically entertaining, bristling with energy, and showing Lam’s talent for buddy dynamics and impeccable eye for location filming. I had more fun watching this than a lot of more solidly constructed thrillers. The pacing is relentless. And the movie has maybe the best boat chase I’ve ever seen, all down to stunt work so dangerous that it barely counts as stunts, they’re literally just slamming actual boats into each other at top speed while the guys on board try to avoid being crushed to death.


Prison on Fire 2 (1991)

It’s odd to find a movie both very entertaining and pointless. There’s plenty of charm and energy, but it’s in service of very little. Most of the movie replays the first, with Chow Yun-Fat’s increasingly fraught interactions with a shit heel guard (played by a glowering Elvis Tsui this time) bringing things to a head. The rest is a prison break movie, tho’ a prison break movie uninterested in the most interesting part: the planning and execution stages. The focus is directed at the portion where they’re on the lam, which is excitingly shot and edited, but relies too often on the convention where throwing a bucket slows down, like, four guys at a time. But for all the redundancy and indifference to genre mechanics, this is still great fun. Chow has never been more charming and intense, and Lam again shows expert pacing, knowing how to carry you from incident to incident without getting bogged down, but also without moving too quickly to be satisfying. For an unnecessary grab at past glory, this is a much better film than it ought to be.


Burning Paradise (1994)

Lam’s first and only wuxia, made for Tsui Hark and his studio. Another in a long tradition of kung fu stories about the burning of the shaolin temple by the Quin dynasty: Chinese folk hero Fong Sai-Yuk is captured by the Manchus as he flees the temple’s destruction and is made a slave of the Red Lotus Temple, where he and other captured monks work in a Temple of Doom inspired underground mine. Corey Yuen had scored a pair of hits with his Jet Li starring Fong Sai Yuk films the year prior, so it’s hard not to see this as Tsui’s attempt to cash in. I’m not sure Lam’s talents were suited to wuxia. This is pretty good--it’s often exciting, and the photography in the deserts of northern China is terrific--but aside from a few conceits here and there and a trap-filled finale, it lacks the wildness of Swordsman II or Butterfly and Sword, and it’s a much stiffer, drearier film than Corey Yuen’s Fong Sai Yuk films or Yuen Woo-Ping’s mid-90s work like Iron Monkey and Tai Chi Master. Tsui himself would overgo it with his own apocalyptic wuxia, The Blade, the following year. There were a lot of these kinds of movies at the time, and Lam’s go at it doesn’t stand out amongst the competition. This isn’t the forgotten masterpiece Vinegar Syndrome are claiming, but it is a competent, sometimes imaginative movie, with some fun set pieces and gothic set design.


The Adventurers (1995)

I had a tough time getting past how stupid this movie is. Andy Lau’s family is murdered by the Khmer Rouge when he’s a kid. When he grows up, he joins the air force, becomes an ace fighter pilot, seeks revenge on the guy who betrayed his father, fails, and then is recruited by the CIA to go to America to become a gang leader in Chinatown so he can eventually kill his family’s murderer whom the CIA also want dead, a plan that involves him kidnapping and then marrying his target’s daughter. Figure that mess out. There were some faces here I was glad to see, like Victor Wong, whom I’d never seen outside of American films before, and David Chiang. Not so much Andy Lau, one of my least favourite performers from the era. Rosamund Kwan’s also here, wasted in another thankless role even the movie often forgets about. And then there’s Jacky Wu, whose fun, spunky performance is the best part of the movie, so of course she’s written out of the third act. Lam does a reliable job lending it all style and energy, but not enough to paper over the complete shambles that is this movie’s story (I’m pretty sure they made it up as they went along).


Sky on Fire (2016)

In the 80s, Lam forged his reputation on a series of biting indictments of modern Hong Kong institutions, all titled ...On Fire. To my mind, the best of them is the bleak School on Fire, but City on Fire and Prison on Fire are masterpieces in their own right. The last was 1991’s Prison on Fire 2, until 15 years later Lam revived the series with Sky on Fire. The titular “sky” is a gigantic skyscraper that houses a biotech firm. If you squint, you might be able to see this entry as an indictment of big pharma, but it would require a lot of interpretive creativity. Lam seems only to be trading on past glory here, as there is no social or institutional subject under scrutiny. Mostly this is a bland thriller, with the biotech company merely a stand-in for any big organization that could have secrets, plots, and such, and with the Stem cell research driving the plot being only a MacGuffin standing in for any vague research that either saves lives or becomes the ultimate weapon familiar from a million thrillers of this kind. It’s pretty non-specific, with none of Lam’s former interest how systems interact with everyday lives, nor even much interest in everyday people except as opportunities for melodrama. There are plenty of shots of well-groomed people in fancy apartments, but little of the grit and authenticity that quickened the other films. Lam’s visual style seems to’ve left him, too, as the film has only overlit, textureless digital photography, reams of bad CGI for everything from backgrounds, to skylines, to rotorblades, to fires, to explosions, to water from hoses, and otherwise no visual signature that would suggest a long-time auteur. The photography is just so...pristine, the interiors clean and uncluttered, and the colours neutral and inoffensive. It’s a shock if you remember the bustling, crowded, grimy locations that characterized Lam’s work of the 80s and 90s. This one has the slick, manicured look of modern Chinese cinema. The polish is a poor substitute for the jerky wildness of Lam’s heyday. The actors are similarly bland, all pretty and anonymous, without distinctive or interesting qualities. Hong Kong directors often struggled with coherence, but not Lam, his films were always clear and effectively told, no matter how complicated the material. This one is a mess, though, with plenty of confusing flashbacks and characters either without established motivation or who change allegiances without set up or explanation. If you want a perfect summation of how lame the film is: it ends with everything literally on fire. That said, the action scenes are excellent. Very much not the action style of the golden age of HK cinema—in fact it shows the influence of John Wick, so Hong Kong cannibalizing itself at one remove—but exciting and effectively shot and choreographed all the same. A disappointing final feature for Lam.


Esprit D’amour (1983)

Lam’s first film, a supernatural romance for Cinema City where a young insurance investigator is haunted by the ghost of a pretty girl whose death he’s investigating. It’s fluff, silly and inconsequential, with that vulgar style of overdone humour Hong Kong loved so much. What makes the film worth watching is Lam’s youthful energy. He fills the thing with enough moody style, creative transitions, and expressive compositions for a few movies, and unecessarily, since a romantic comedy like this doesn’t demand it. You feel a young director brimming with ideas and creativity, looking for any excuse to show off. The movie looks great, showing even here Lam’s sense for location work and feel for the expressive qualities of Hong Kong’s streets, back alleys, and night life. An early ouija session cross cut with the woman’s death is a highlight, finding ever more energetic ways to transition between scenes, and using a mobile camera to bring us in and out of the ouija circle as the seance progresses. It’s hard to make a bunch of people sitting around a table interesting to look at, and Lam’s done it. But the movie’s best scene outdoes it at the same game, cross cutting an interpretive dance performance that seems to comment directly on the action with an intense exorcism, so that between them we see what’s happening on both physical and spiritual planes. The movie doesn’t sustain this visual energy, often flagging into pedestrian filmmaking in the middle half, when the plot really takes over. One third of the film was shot by another director, Leong Po-Chih, who was replaced by Lam after arguments with the producer. I can’t know for sure, but it feels like the middle section, with its often prosaic blocking and camera sets ups, were shot by Leong, with Lam handling the more stylish and inventive first and third sections plus the more moody stuff in between (eg. the morgue, the newspaper alley, the second rooftop scene, the first haunting). They really do feel like different movies. Lam’s clearly making a more emotionally intense romantic drama, while Leong was going for light comedy. There’s some severe whiplash when the movie goes from silly hijinks to blood and thunder exorcisms, or when it ends with in a fury of passion, loss, and melancholy when the whole relationship we watched develop was merely cute. It’s a fascinating experience, even if the movie isn’t ultimately satisfying as a story in itself. Tsui Hark had just founded Hong Kong’s first SFX department at Cinema City while doing Zu: Warriors From the Magic Mountain that same year, and Lam makes use of it for some primitive special effects involving double exposure and super impositions. The movie’s not funny, but I did laugh at one moment where the investigator is making out with the ghost, and his girlfriend walks in to see him rolling around on the couch by himself. It’s stupid, but it worked.


Aces Go Places 4 (1986)

An important film for Ringo Lam. Tho’ nothing more than another entry in a long-running series of manic action comedies, its success at the Hong Kong box office gave Lam the chance to finally do a personal project after years of being a director for hire on romantic comedies for Cinema City. The result was City on Fire the next year, the film that launched his career. There’s more of a focus on action in this entry than the other two I’ve seen. There’s a hockey game (hockey in Hong Kong?!) between the Hong Kong police and Interpol, in which the two teams are inexplicably wearing the uniforms of the Boston Bruins and the Montreal Canadians. Neither Karl Maka or Sam Hui look particularly comfortable skating. I’m not the biggest fan of the Aces Go Places style of comedy, but some of the action and physical comedy in here is astounding, including a locker room fight with a breathless series of painful looking gags in which people are knocked over, through, and into seemingly every object in the room. There’re also way too many scenes of Sally Yeh and Sylvia Chang being brutally beaten by large men, and too much humour involving child endangerment (maybe the stricter gun laws in Hong Kong allowed them them to find more humour in the idea of a toddler playing around with a loaded handgun?). There is one insane stunt here that takes the old action stand-by of crashing a car into a room, shot in slow motion from inside, and ups it by having there be stunt actors inside at the same time, all of whom have to jump out of the way to avoid being creamed by the car. You can tell one guy misjudged how quickly the car would be coming, because he nearly doesn’t make it. And there’s one bit where a prop plane has to land on a road and ends up leapfrogging a series of cars, something I’d never seen done before. More hair raising examples of Hong Kong’s reckless commitment to stunt work.

[Mr Sausage]

Femmes with Firearms


Mission of Justice (Chun-Ku Lu, 1992)

Something about special agents out to crack a drug ring working out of the Golden Triangle, ie. by-the-numbers low-budget action bullshit. This is a low-tier Moon Lee/Yukari Oshima vehicle, where the plot is an undisgested jumble, characterization is absent, and the action is often pretty bad. There are exactly two good things about this movie, Moon and Oshima, and wouldn’t you know it, they disappear half way through. Instead, we spend the rest of the movie entirely with the villains, because somehow grimy three-way rape scenes are more interesting than Moon/Oshima action. Moon and Oshima only show up again for the final ten minutes, so the literal main characters of the movie are absent for a solid 30 minutes of run time in an 84 minute movie. Incredible. It was especially disappointing because Oshima seemed to have a larger role, not only playing Moon’s partner for once, but giving this spunky, girlish performance different from her usual tomboy roles—and then the movie cuts her and Moon from the plot almost immediately. When they do show up for the finale, the fight scenes are shown in janky post-production slow-mo, so the choreography and slick moves are lost in jittery sludge (Oshima does this wicked jumping double kick and you can’t even appreciate it). Emblematic choice: the final chase happens in chest high water. It might actually count as the slowest chase scene in movie history. Just four people thrashing about while they go almost nowhere.


Outlaw Brothers (Frankie Chan, 1990)

Max Mok and director Frankie Chan are car thieves who accidentally steal from the yakuza, led by Michiko Nishiwaki. I’m just here for Yukari Oshima and her eyebrows, here playing against type as a police officer named Tequila who’s after the pair of thieves, but slowly realizes she needs to work with them to take down the real bad guys, while also falling for the less attractive brother. It’s the usual thing: the humour is crude and unfunny (strictly for people who like jokes about AIDS, spousal abuse, and rape), the action and stunts remarkable (none other than Jackie Chan was stunt coordinator, and you can feel it in the quality of the action--EDIT: according to an interview with Oshima, Chan only stopped by the set one day and made a suggestion or two). I appreciated that Oshima gets a more significant role and is allowed to show more range. Also, this is now the third film I’ve seen from 1990 where Jonathan Isgar and Steve Tartalia play a pair of baddies, after Once Upon a Time in China and Undeclared War. Wonder why they were always being paired up.


In the Line of Duty 5: Middle Man (Cha Cheun-Yee, 1990)

A sequel to 3 and 4, with Cynthia Khan reprising her police detective role (1 and 2 are unrelated Michelle Yeoh movies). It’s a real come down, having neither the emotional intensity of 3 nor the brilliant action of 4. This is another incomprehensible mishmash of plot situations, full of ‘Who’s (s)he again?” characters and espionage way too complicated for the storytelling abilities of the filmmakers. It’s sometimes exciting, sometimes boring, and mostly inoffensive. Guess who shows up again: Jonathan Isgar and Steve Tartalia as heavies, tho’ this time not partners.


Yes Madam ‘92: a Serious Shock (Albert Lai, 1993)

Worth it just to see Moon Lee, that smiling sweetheart, play a psychotic villain. And anything starring Moon Lee, Yukari Oshima, and Cynthia Khan is unmissable. While the thing isn’t particularly good, and is too sparing with the action, it’s still a lot more interesting than the other movies in this post just for how emotionally fraught it is, and how the plot isn’t just the usual cop/robbers thing. There’s this horrible, drawn out scene of violent emotional outbursts and impulsive cruelty whose ratcheting hysteria is set against an uncomfortably loud tea kettle whistling away, and is capped with atmospheric shots of Moon Lee by the side of the road, backlit and surrounded by swirling mist, screaming into the night like some savage banshee. The whole scene is over the top and way too much, yet it achieves a strange effectiveness in its extremity that its blander cousins never approach. There’s intensity and style here, and that’s enough to distinguish it from all the other cheap girls with guns flicks. But there are some truly bizarre scenes. Like a flashback you assume is supposed to explain why the car thief has a secret child, but it just shows her heavily pregnant and in labour stumbling through a junkyard at night trying to make it to a hospital. Ok, a little odd, but so far so understandable. But when she happens across a couple having sex in the junk yard, she does what I guess is the thing to do in Hong Kong when you’re lost, scared, and pregnant: pick up a machete and hack them to death with it. The police show up to arrest her while she’s still hacking away, somehow magically knowing when random murders in isolated places are happening, and the character is led away. But here’s the thing: her son is 8 or something when the movie takes place, so she only got, like, what, a maximum 8 years for a double homicide? Actually it’s gotta be a lot less than that, she’s plainly made a life for herself and forged a close-knit social network and everything. Then again the cops literally catch her stealing a policewoman’s car and nearly get run over by her twice and just let her go, so the Hong Kong police kinda don’t give a fuck. Oh, and you want to know how the villain dies? The heroes don’t kill her. No, it’s the aforementioned 8 year old. He guns her down. Seriously. Someone sat down and thought, hey, the kid’s not doing anything now that the bomb strapped to him has been defused, why not have him come in clutch? This movie’s wild. An over-the-top, barely comprehensible, kinda psychotic mess of a film that I had such a fun time watching.


Princess Madam (Godfrey Ho, 1989)

I’m not a so-bad-it’s-good film viewer, so I’ve largely avoided Godfrey Ho. But I’d heard this was a comparatively normal movie for him, and Moon Lee’s in it, so here we go. This is some high octane cartoonishness. A pair of detectives, Moon Lee and Sharon Yeung, have to protect a witness whose testimony will put away a crime boss. That’s about it, only there are endless complications, like one assassin whose plan involves seducing Moon Lee’s husband, and Yeung’s businessman father being revealed not only as an old partner of the crime boss, but one of the men tasked with eliminating the witness. While most of the movie is an upbeat action film, it pivots hard in the third act, embracing this dark, fatalistic heroic bloodshed theme. There are some real surprises waiting here. And while the action isn’t spectacular, it’s fast, frequent, and ridiculous enough to pull you into its energy. Go figure, Godfrey Ho made an above-average GwG flick, probably the second best on this list of B-sides.


The Avenging Quartet (Stanley Siu-Wing, 1993)

What is even going on in this movie? Moon Lee and Cynthia Khan are having a slumber party one minute, then the next Moon is fighting some people on a boat for some reason, and then the next they’re both(!) in witness protection, and still sleeping in the same bed like the slumber party hasn’t ended. This has nothing to do with anything—the nominal plot involves a Japanese painting everyone’s looking for, everyone except Moon and Cynthia, ie. the people with all the screen time. Then there's Waise Lee, who's erotically entangled with three of the four actresses here, somehow. There isn’t even a quartet, just four actresses who sometimes share scenes together. The action scenes are shot so poorly and confusingly, with a lot of the movements and bits obscured. The only thing the movie does like to show is people running up stairs. There are no joke two separate chases up stairwells where we follow the runners up every single flight in what seems like real time. They even get exhausted and have to rest for a full minute before carrying on. How do you pack a movie with action queens like Moon Lee, Cynthia Khan, Yukari Oshima, and Michiko Nishiwaki, and produce something so stupid and boring, where no one’s talents get to shine? Why are there so few fight scenes? Why are there so many horrible torture and rape scenes? Fucking shambles over here. If there's one plus, the cinematography is oddly good, with interesting colour arrangements and light placements.

[Mr Sausage]

Early Jackie Chan

As I mentioned over here, these films mostly do a poor job of showing off Chan's skills, but they are a fascinating watch for how they clarify those skills by negating them. I appreciate Chan a lot more as a performer and filmmaker after watching Shout's first Chan volume. It made me realize that, having seen him almost exclusively at the height of his skills, I'd taken him for granted.


The Killer Meteors (1976, Lo Wei)

I think this is the first Lo Wei film I’ve seen outside of his two Bruce Lees. I didn’t think much of his work there; it felt cheap and corny. Fist of Fury in particular alternated between an odd hysteria on the one end, and dryness and tedium on the other (Bruce Lee fans seem to rate it highly, but it has always been my least favourite). It’s Bruce Lee’s gifts as a performer that make those first two films worth watching. This Wang Yu vanity project hasn’t nudged my opinion: the movie’s clumsy and stiff. And it’s so talky. Part of the plot involves Wang Yu taking on three infamous body guards, all with unique powers, which you’d think would form a set of stages for him to progress through before meeting the final boss, as it were. Except so much time is spent on talky scenes that, in the end, the film just has Wang Yu meet them all at once in a restaurant before dispatching them with ease, their powers useless, as tho’ they were no more than random thugs. Tho’ Wang Yu is meant to be the ultimate badass, the film has trouble hiding that he cannot fight. The lame choreography and slow, telegraphed movements reveal Wang Yu’s limitations. Only Jackie Chan as the villain comes off well. Lo Wei is not an exciting filmmaker. He was just lucky enough to work with some amazing talents at the beginning of their careers.


Shaolin Wooden Men (Chen Chi-Hwa, 1976)

The version I saw lists the director as Lo Wei and the Excutive(sic) Director, whatever that is, as Chen Chi-Hwa. IMDB lists only the latter. This was for Lo Wei’s studio, so did he get the credit solely from seniority, while the other guy did the actual duties? Either way, the sole interest in a movie like this is to see Jackie Chan before he figured out how to be Jackie Chan. It’s weird to see that usually mobile face so still and unreactive as he tries to play a serious character. When a comic scene arrives, Chan’s face comes alive and you see a glimpse of the future. This is a better movie than The Killer Meteors, less talky, and unencumbered by Wang Yu’s vanity and ineffectiveness as a hero. It’s a shaolin training movie, with Chan as a mute, traumatized young monk eagre to learn kung fu, who ends up with two secret teachers functioning as ying/yang complements: a prisoner who teaches him to be vicious but effective, and a female monk who instructs him in martial virtue and spirituality. The novel (read: batshit) training methods of the first half are fun, especially Jackie fighting a host of wooden fighting men manipulated by chains, and give you martial arts action without the stiff, slow choreography that dogs the rest of the movie and, apparently, Lo Wei’s studio generally. But the movie works, and I think the reason it does is that it stumbles backwards into Chan's particular charisma, his beleaguered everyman persona who has to struggle against the odds to attain success. Unlike the other Lo Wei films in the set, Chan is not a godlike wuxia hero, and that makes a real difference. This is probably the best of the Lo Wei movies here.


To Kill with Intrigue (Lo Wei, 1977)

Lo Wei handles this one pretty well. Maybe he had more of a feel for romance than action. The movie’s biggest flaw, aside from the usual Lo Wei ridiculousness, is that Chan’s hard to buy as either a romantic lead or a tragic hero, and the movie has him do both. It’s that face of his—as with Jacky Cheung, it’s hard to take seriously. Just seeing Jackie in a period wuxia is strange. Again, his skills as a physical performer greatly enliven the unimpressive choreography, even if he can’t act. The romance here is torrid and uncomfortable, with Hsu Feng murdering Jackie’s family in a decades long revenge plot, only to fall for him after he assaults her in a moment of psychosis, thinking she’s his pregnant girlfriend who, unbeknownst to him, has run off with his best friend. So Jackie spends the movie chasing her down while Hsu Feng pursues him. There’s this whole subplot involving Jackie’s friend and multiple hidden identities that doesn’t make any sense, but offers the film more opportunities for action. I was surprised to see the movie was written by Gu Long, the novelist whose work formed the basis of most of Chor Yuen’s output. Also surprising to see a professional novelist write something so incoherent. Like the films above, the successes here are modest. But it does have Hsu Feng, who’s always good, and a terrific final fight (I’m not familiar with Jackie’s opponent, Shin Il-Ryong, but he’s a marvellous kicker).


Snake and Crane Arts of Shaolin (Chen Chi-Hwa, 1978)

Rips off Lau Kar-Leung immediately by borrowing his habit of starting a movie with a martial arts demonstration in a monochromatic non-space. Jackie’s the fight director here, so the fight choreography is noticeably quicker and more intricate, with greater emphasis on Jackie’s athleticism. I was actually enjoying the fights here. But the improved fighting reinforced the strangeness of seeing Jackie Chan outside of the Jackie persona: he’s a total badass here who rarely gets hit or injured and who lords it over others with that particular condescension Hong Kongers loved in their heroes. While the movies have been getting better, and this is no exception, the plot for this one’s meandering: Jackie has an important book, so he stays at an inn while people come either to attack him, or to invite him to meet various women who do a less convincing job of fighting him while Jackie makes sexist comments. There’s some mystery and tension underneath, but mostly the film idles in place. I enjoyed this one up to a point, but increasingly grew bored as the film showed no signs of going anywhere.


Dragon Fist (Lo Wei, 1979)

Filmed before Jackie’s two early masterpieces for Yuen Woo-Ping, Drunken Master and Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow, but released after. Child murder, suicide, self mutilation--this is a grim story. Chan's reason for even being in the story disappears a third of the way in, so the movie has to rely on contrivances to keep him in this story of rival schools to which he is otherwise superfluous. The movie would’ve been more focused if Jackie’s role were eliminated and he played James Tien’s character instead. The film gestures at a morality play, but the lessons are trite and lightly held. Jackie is again the choreographer, so while the fights aren’t plentiful, they are ably done. Once again we have invincible Jackie, which is so much less interesting than what he would do for the bulk of his career.


Battle Creek Brawl (Robert Clouse, 1980)

Jackie's first American film. Hoping to reproduce Bruce Lee’s crossover success, the same producers, director, and scorer from Enter the Dragon were brought on for this, and the plot similarly involves a fighting tournament. It's made by Americans, but on the evidence of the movie you'd think they'd never been to America. Nothing feels authentic. For starters, this is meant to be set in mob era Chicago, with zoot suits and the like, but it feels like someone from a foreign country giving their impression of Hollywood gangster movies they saw in their youth. On top of that, the film has roller derbys and jive talking black men with afros. Two thirds in, the movie moves to Texas, and the whole gangster thing disappears for corny redneck nonsense. The film has an odd relationship to racism as well: the mobsters will sometimes toss out a casual racial slur, but at the same time, Chan's in an interracial relationship and no one comments on it, reacts to it, or treats it differently than any other relationship. It’s not chaste, either—they are clearly lovers. The movie just treats an interracial relationship as nothing remarkable, which is quite nice actually. And there's the black roller derby team whose race is somehow a non-issue as they interact with all the white people on an equal basis. These are not criticisms, but the above does help this American-made film seem very non-American. As for Chan, you can see he's started to develop his comic persona, and while that leads to plenty of unfunny American comedy, it was a welcome reprieve from Jackie in serious mode throughout the previous decade. He’s also starting to figure out his acrobatic, prop heavy manner of fight scenes where the space itself plays a large part in the action. It’s not fully there yet, and Chan has to work around the limits of American stunt actors, but it’d only be three years until Project A, where Chan has fully worked out both the Jackie persona and his particular brand of action. This movie at least understands Jackie’s appeal lies in comedy and stunts, even if it doesn’t know how best to show them off. This is a weirdass movie, tho'. The big villain of the tournament is named Billy Kiss because his trade mark move is to tongue kiss his opponents mid-fight. And not even in a comic way, he straight up makes out with them after trapping them in a bear hug. And there’s this whole subplot about Mako’s preference for large women that’s just, like...why? Even weirder is a subplot about the mob kidnapping Jackie’s brother’s mail order bride, forcing Jackie to have to pass off a prostitute as the fiancee. But the subplot is just dropped the moment the brother meets his "fiancee", so I guess he spends his life with the prostitute? Like the rest of the movies in Shout’s set, this is interesting for historical reasons but not all that good.


Dragon Lord (Jackie Chan, 1982)

I watched the extended cut. This is the first real Jackie Chan film of the set. Jackie is writer, director, and star. Something these early Chans have shown me is that Chan’s a decent director. He’s not a stylist or anything, but immediately this film is livelier and pacier than the Lo Wei productions, with more efficient story telling. The humour, while often not my kind of thing, is creative, energetic, and done with proper timing. Even in only his third feature, Chan shows himself to be a confident filmmaker. There’s an elasticity in his filmmaking that Lo Wei and co. didn’t have. This isn’t one of Chan’s best movies—it’s sparing in the action, and its plotting is haphazard—but it gains a lot in the context. Even in this minor film, you feel Chan’s talents in a way you rarely do in the Lo Weis.

[knives]

Wonderful appreciations. Makes me exhausted to get to Dragon Fist and Brawl though even if they are the last two early Chans I have left to see.

I think another thing essential to the Chan star is how modern he feels. In these early period pieces, even the great ones, he comes across as an anachronism at best. Placing him in the modern world and he is able to succeed dramatically as well as with comedy.

[therewillbeblus]

He's a very expressive actor, and tuned into both the timeless mannerisms of people as well as perhaps ones that will appeal to modern sensibilities, but definitely filtered through modern active engagement with stimuli

[knives]

The first Project A is probably my favourite Chan. It's right at his peak in terms of stunt work and fight choreography, and it's a more consistently exciting movie than either Police Story or Armour of God, both of which are pretty dull outside of their openings and climaxes.

Man, you couldn’t be more right about Armour of God. There’s some good there, but a lot of it is dull exposition that doesn’t really take advantage of its premise. I think by this point Chan had developed into such a dramatic persona in comedic situations that he kind of doesn’t work without a great script supporting him.

[The Elegant Dandy Fop]

I believe part of the major failure of Armour of God is from the fact the film halted production after Chan seriously injured himself and Eric Tsang exited as director. I believe the film was rewritten to accommodate Chan post-accident and you feel it even in the action scenes that miss the genuine moments of jaw dropping physicality the way Police Story and Project A often have.

[Orlac]

Early Jackie Chan



Dragon Fist (Lo Wei, 1979)

Filmed before Jackie’s two early masterpieces for Yuen Woo-Ping, Drunken Master and Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow, but released after. C

This is a myth that seems to have been started by Jackie's ghost-written autobiography. In fact, this was made following those Seasonal hits...which is weird, as it's very much a return to Lo trying to turn Jackie into Bruce Lee, to the extent that the Korean version has a title that is meant to make you think of The Big Boss!

[Mr Sausage]

Here's the Hong Kong stuff I saw at the 2024 Fantasia Film Festival:

A Chinese Ghost Story 2 (Ching Siu-Tung, 1990)

As with last year's screening of the original, this was shown in an unrestored 35MM print. As with the first, I'd seen it years ago. At the time I slightly preferred the sequel because it chose to focus more on the creature feature stuff than the romance, but these days I prefer balance of the original. There is still much here to like, with its janky but creative special effects and restless energy. It was great to see it with a packed, receptive audience so I could appreciate the crowd-pleasing humour a lot more. Many of the extended humorous conceits which originally had me acknowledging they were comic more than actually laughing were now producing smiles and a sense of shared enjoyment. Especially good was the long sequence involving the marauding beast and the freezing spell, with Jacky Cheung's smiling but frozen mug and panicked eyes producing fits of laughter. The climax atop the giant centipede monster was less crazy than I remembered, with the limitations in special effects making it slower and less breathlessly bizarre than the underworld climax of the original. But mostly the first two films are of a piece. The only one not worth watching is the third, which couldn't hide its lack of inspiration. I hope this is the last Chinese Ghost Story of the festival.


The Avenging Eagle (Sun Chung, 1978)

A projection of Arrow's recent restoration. It looked just beautiful projected, and you should've heard the cheers when the Shaw Brothers logo hit the screen. There was a lot of cheering, actually, whenever a new style, weapon, or method of dispatching someone was revealed. It gave me a sense of what it was like to watch these films on release. The movie itself was pretty good. Nothing special, but plenty of ably choreographed fights, and lots of intense melodrama that gave all the breathless action a welcome gravity. Ti Lung, a former child soldier being hunted by his former clan mates, joins forces with a mysterious stranger played by Alexander Fu Sheng in a decent performance for him. The film holds few surprises, and barely even conceals the mystery at its heart, but everything works like a well oiled machine, and there was always some new, crazy bit of weaponry or violence to liven things.


Killer Constable (Kuei Chih-Hung, 1980)

Another Arrow restoration that looked gorgeous. Before the film was a short speech from the director's son recorded just for this screening. He told some nice stories, including how hurt his dad was by the film's failure and how he continued to think highly of his work here, even preserving a copy of the poster that he would display behind the counter of his L.A. pizza shop long after he'd retired from filmmaking. His son said something interesting, too, about how this film is indebted to noir cinema as much as wuxia, and I can see what he's talking about. This is a grim, fatalistic detective story full of violence haunted people who are pawns in a corrupt, unjust system. It's striking how savage and dark the movie becomes, and what weird and haunting images it conjures. There is much to like here--this is the closest I've seen a Shaw production come to being New Wave. It stands comparison I think to New Wave wuxias like Tam's The Sword and Tsui's The Butterfly Murders. A strong effort.


100 Yards (Xu Haofeng & Xu Junfeng, 2023)

An old fashioned martial school, brother-against-brother kung fu flick that is visually quite impressive. It uses a Terence Malick-esque floating camera to rove around scenes and among its characters in complex moving camera shots that are probably more impressive than even the fight choreography. The plot and characters are just opaque enough for the movie to be kinda incoherent and uninvolving emotionally. The story is standard, the old master dies and the favoured pupil wars with the first-born son. There's something about martial arts schools extending their influence and protection for 100 yards around them, and a whole historical angle involving westerners and kung fu that's interesting and enlivening without being particularly well explored or even used. But for a movie that could've just been all about the fights and still worked, it was a real pleasure for it to place such emphasis on a vibrant, complex, yet controlled visual style. There are some fights at the end atop dyed-red sand that are impressive and cool. This was the last film I saw for the festival and a very enjoyable way to round out these two-ish weeks.

[feihong]

I'm jealous, you got to see 100 Yards! I've been waiting to see this––or any new Xu Haofeng film––for years now.

[Mr Sausage]

I nearly didn't see it! It wasn't on my radar because I'm usually not interested in modern Chinese cinema, and then at the last minute I thought, fuck it, I'll see a good old kung fu flick. Glad I did! It's very stylish. Also glad I skipped Stanley Tong and Jackie Chan's new movie, an SFX historical blockbuster that sounds pretty naff.

[Finch]

Is The Butterfly Murders part of the Golden Princess catalogue that the current licensors only want to license to foreign labels in its entirety for an unreasonable sum? Aren't the Chinese Ghost Stories and all classic Woo films affected too?

[feihong]

I nearly didn't see it! It wasn't on my radar because I'm usually not interested in modern Chinese cinema, and then at the last minute I thought, fuck it, I'll see a good old kung fu flick. Glad I did! It's very stylish. Also glad I skipped Stanley Tong and Jackie Chan's new movie, an SFX historical blockbuster that sounds pretty naff.

Ever since I saw The Final Master, Xu Haofeng has been on my radar. The earlier films are interesting, but The Final Master, to my mind, puts it all together, a kung fu film that uses thorny local politics to complexify the kung fu formula, and a film which ends with a martial triumph rendered meaningless by guilt and shame. A really unprecedented picture, to my eyes. But Xu Haofeng's film's since have been incredibly hard to see. The Hidden Sword was one of the early victims of the new Chinese film censorship. Xu's film with star Zhou Xun, The Weary Poet, seems never to be finished. 100 Yards has been touring festivals for a while now. I guess it screened in San Diego last year, but that would be an insane drive for me just to see a movie. And there's a new movie, Decent Things, amartial arts movie about the heist of a painting, which sounds awesome. Apparently Well Go has the rights to The Hidden Sword and 100 Yards (they did a good blu ray of The Final Master), but I haven't seen any release plans from them. But I'm excited to see these films, someday. Great to hear from you about the film; sounds like it's worth seeing, even if it isn't quite the movie that The Final Master is.

[Mr Sausage]

Seems like a lot of the things you liked about The Final Master are true of 100 Yards. There is a Once Upon a Time In China-esque use of foreigners and guns to add complexity to the historical setting; and there are a number of complications at the end that undermine the typical martial world formula. The ending is mature and equivocal, complicated by guilt, loss, shame, and the passage of time. I don't think I've seen a martial arts film end quite like this one. The whole thing is well done, even if I don't think it quite ends up being a masterpiece. But I get the feeling reading your posts that this one might grow in my estimation after watching more of Xu's films and getting a better sense of what he's about.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

Apparently Well Go has the rights to The Hidden Sword and 100 Yards (they did a good blu ray of The Final Master), but I haven't seen any release plans from them.

Well Go can't do anything with them yet due to a recent rule that Chinese films can't commercially open outside of China before they get a domestic release. 100 Yards premiered at last year's Shanghai Film Festival but still doesn't have a release date set. The Hidden Sword was said to have run into issues over its depiction of the war with Japan, but there was also a public dispute with the producer over the final cut that ended with Xu taking his name off the film, which may have played into its disappearance. I'm not convinced I'll ever see The Hidden Sword, but I'm on tenterhooks waiting to re-watch 100 Yards, which is a natural follow-up to The Final Master and the best showcase so far for Xu's offbeat humor and strange-but-true historical details (e.g. post offices doubling as de facto law enforcement).

Apropos of this, The Sword Identity just got a Blu release from Diskino, which from the screenshots I've seen is a marked improvement over the very rough (and non-English-friendly) German BD from some years back.

[Orlac]

Is The Butterfly Murders part of the Golden Princess catalogue that the current licensors only want to license to foreign labels in its entirety for an unreasonable sum? Aren't the Chinese Ghost Stories and all classic Woo films affected too?

Butterfly Murders is owned by Seasonal. They don't seem to have had any of their titles restored recently, barring the two Jackie Chan films licensed by Sony. The DVD of Butterfly Murders used a rather dammaged and truncated print.

[Finch]

thanks Orlac, appreciate it

[yoloswegmaster]

Is The Butterfly Murders part of the Golden Princess catalogue that the current licensors only want to license to foreign labels in its entirety for an unreasonable sum? Aren't the Chinese Ghost Stories and all classic Woo films affected too?

Butterfly Murders is owned by Seasonal. They don't seem to have had any of their titles restored recently, barring the two Jackie Chan films licensed by Sony. The DVD of Butterfly Murders used a rather dammaged and truncated print.

It was recently restored and screened in Hong Kong a couple of months ago